MONTE
CORVINO, GIOVANNIDI (c. 1247 1328), Franciscan missionary, traveller
and statesman, founder of the earliest Roman Catholic missions in India
and China, and archbishop of Peking. In 1272 he was commissioned by the
emperor Michael Palaeologus, to Pope Gregory X., to negotiate for the reunion
of Greek and Latin churches. From 1275 to 1289 he laboured incessantly
as a missionary in the Nearer and Middle East. In 1289 he revisited the
Papal Court, and was sent out as Roman legate to the Great Khan, the Ilkhan
of Persia, and other leading personages of the Mongol world, as well as
to theTabriz, then the chief city of Mongol Persia, and indeed of all Western
Asia, Monte Corvino moved down to India to the Madras region or " Country
of St Thomas, from which he wrote home, in December 1291 (or 1292), the
earliest noteworthy account of the Coromandel coast furnished by any Western
European. He next appears in "Cambaliech or Peking, and wrote letters
(of Jan. 8, 1305, and Feb. 13, 1306), describing the progress of the Roman
mission in the Far East, in spite of Nestorian
opposition; alluding to the Roman Catholic community he had founded
in India, and to an appeal he had received to preach in "Ethiopia and
dealing with overland and oversea routes to "Cathay, from the Black Sea
and the Persian Gulf respectively. In 1303 he received his first colleague,
the Franciscan Arnold of Cologne; in 1307 Pope Clement V. created him archbishop
of Peking, and despatched seven bishops to consecrate and assist him; three
only of these arrived (1308). Three more suffragans were sent out in 1312,
of whom one at least reached East Asia. A Franciscan tradition maintains
that about 1310 Monte Corvino converted the Great Khan (i.e. Khaishan Kuluk,
third of the Yuen dynasty; 1307-1311): this has been disputed, but he unquestionably
won remarkable successes in North and East China. Besides three mission
stations in Peking, he established one near the present Amoy harbour, opposite
Formosa. At his death, about 1328, heathen vied with Christian in honouring
him. He was apparently the only effective European bishop in the Peking
of the middle ages.
The MSS. of Monte Corvino's Letters exist in the
Laurentian Library, Florence (for the Indian Epistle) and in the National
Library Paris 5006 Lat. viz. the Liber de aetatibus fols. 170,
v.-172, r. (for the Chinese). They are printed in Wadding, Annals
minorum (A.D. 1305 and 1306) vi. 69-72, 91 92 (ed. of 1733, &c.),
and in the Münchner gelehrte Anzeigen (1855), No. 22, part
iii. pp. 171 175. English translations, with valuable comments, are in
Sir H. Yule's Cathay, i. 197 221. See also Wadding, Annals,
v. 195-198, 199-203, vi. 93 &c., 147 &c, 176) &c.,
467, &c.; C. R. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, iii.
162 178, 206 210; Sir H. Yule, Cathay, i. 165 173.
(C. R. B.)
Charles
R. Beazley
Eleventh edition