The Martyrdom of the Franciscans - University of Pennsylvania Press

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

The MARTYRDOM of the FRANCISCANS Islam, the Papacy, and an Order in Conflict

Christopher MacEvitt

u n i v e r si t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr ess ph i l a de l ph i a

................. 19361$

$$FM

07-22-19 12:52:30

PS

PAGE iii

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

contents

Note on Names

ix 1

Introduction Chapter 1. “I Acquired the Martyrs”: Bishops, Kings, and the Victory of the Martyrs

25

Chapter 2. “Do Not Fear Those Who Kill the Body”: The Desire for Martyrdom in the Thirteenth Century

46

Chapter 3. “To Sustain the Frail”: Franciscan Evangelization in the Thirteenth Century

69

Chapter 4. “Their Blood Has Been Spilled Everywhere”: Evangelization, Martyrdom, and Christian Triumphalism in the Early Fourteenth Century

93

Chapter 5. “The Infidels Learned Nothing”: Poverty, Rejection of the World, and the Creation of the Franciscan Passio

126

Chapter 6. “For the Damnation of Infidels”: Martyrdom and History in the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General

150

Epilogue. The Afterlife of the Martyrs

181

................. 19361$

CNTS

07-22-19 12:52:34

PS

PAGE vii

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

viii

Contents

Notes

195

Bibliography

247

Index

273

Acknowledgments

000

................. 19361$

CNTS

07-22-19 12:52:34

PS

PAGE viii

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

Introduction

For a man notorious for nepotism, Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) spent a surprising amount of time thinking about selflessness and sacrifice. They were the premier virtues of the martyr, and Sixtus thought more about martyrs than any of his papal predecessors had for two hundred and twenty years. Sixtus canonized a group of five Franciscan martyrs in 1481, and considered canonizing another martyr in 1479; the last time a pope had recognized a martyr as a saint was in 1253. The five friars—Berardo, Pietro, Otto, Accursio, and Adiuto—had died in 1220 in Marrakesh, executed by the Almohad caliph for insulting Islam. Not only were the “Morocco Five” the first Franciscan martyrs to be so honored, but they were also the first Christians to be papally recognized for dying at the hands of “Saracens,” as medieval texts called the followers of Islam. Considered for canonization but passed over by Sixtus was Simon of Trent, a two-year-old boy found dead on Easter Sunday (March 26) in 1475. The prince-bishop of Trent, Johannes Hinderbach, accused the Jewish community of torturing and killing Simon in order to use his blood to make matzoh for Passover. He arrested all the adult men of the small community, and executed seventeen of them; two more died in prison and only one adult man survived the tragedy. Such blood libel accusations had been leveled at Jewish communities as early as the twelfth century, and they grew more common in the early modern period.1 Aided by mendicant preachers and humanists, Hinderbach promoted Simon as a martyr and petitioned the pope for his canonization. Sixtus sent Battista de’ Giudici, the Dominican bishop of Ventimiglia, as an apostolic commissioner to investigate the trial of the Jews in Trent. The commissioner came away disturbed by the treatment of the Jews and the excesses of the case. Sixtus summoned a commission to examine the affair; the appointed cardinals decided that the trial of the Jews was legitimate but conversely upheld the centuries-old ban on blood libel trials, preventing Simon’s promotion to sainthood.2 The little martyr was eventually beatified in 1588 by Sixtus V (another Franciscan

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:41

PS

PAGE 1

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

2

Introduction

pope)—but his cult was suppressed in 1965 in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The would-be saints shared little in common other than their appearance at the court of Sixtus IV, separated as they were by centuries, geography, and their ages at the time of their deaths. What their stories did have in common was the potent appeal of a non-Christian persecutor. Though Christians often conflated Jews and Muslims (along with heretics) as fundamental threats to Christians, the Jewish and Muslim protagonists of the would-be martyrs’ stories were portrayed very differently and provoked surprisingly different responses from the pope, the public, and from the Franciscans. The appeal of the martyr sprang from the flexibility inherent in their stories. The martyr could be a surrogate for any Christian, and the persecutor could similarly represent anyone who oppressed or attacked the virtuous. Each martyrdom was in some way a reenactment of the first martyrdom, the passion of Jesus Christ. But it would be a mistake to see all martyrdoms as endless iterations of the same story; in each, the persons, their manner of dying, and their persecutors are shaped to address contemporary concerns. The account of the martyrs of Morocco was used to address Christian anxieties about Islamic victories over Christians, and also to address concerns more particular to the Franciscan order—the contentious place poverty occupied as a sign of Franciscan piety but increasingly also as a sign of Franciscan heresy. The story of Simon spoke to Christian anxieties about the intermingling of Christians and non-Christians in the domestic and civic spaces of Christian-ruled cities, and their anxieties over economic changes, for which Jews were a convenient scapegoat.

Reactions to Simon and the martyrs of Morocco were decidedly different, in large part due to the perception of their persecutors. Enthusiasm for the child-martyr spread quickly from Trent, driven by the archbishop’s eagerness for a new saint and the widespread anti-Semitism to which the story appealed. Just three weeks after Simon’s death, news of the happenings in Trent had been noted in the diary of Corradino Palazzo, who lived more than eighty miles away in Brescia.3 Within months, a variety of texts—often published by newly established print shops eager to produce quick-selling materials—were circulating in northern Italy and Germany. Poems, miracle stories, and woodcut images were swiftly produced, including a full passio composed a startling three weeks after the child’s death.4 By the end of the century, there were more than thirty separate accounts.5 The army of texts rode on the back of a widespread and rabid hatred of the Jews. The blood

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:41

PS

PAGE 2

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

3

Introduction

libel accusation itself trafficked in assumptions about Jewish bloodlust for innocent Christians, and the many texts written to promote the little “saint” were vituperative; the Venetian humanist and poet laurate Raffaele Zonvenzoni called upon bishops and princes to “unsheathe your flashing swords; wipe out the nefarious name of the Jews, and drive them out of the whole earth!”6 The pope, in contrast, reacted with considerable suspicion to both the accusations against the Jewish community of Trent and the authenticity of Simon as a martyr. Both Sixtus and Sigismund, the archduke of Tirol and the secular overlord of the prince-bishop of Trent, suspended the interrogation and torture of the Trentine Jews for a time, and Venice forbade preaching about Simon or attacking Jewish communities in their territory; violence seemed to be an understood result of such preaching. Furthermore, Sixtus forbade the production of images of Simon; nevertheless, we have several woodcuts from the period that depict Simon’s torture and murder. His apostolic commissioner, though known beforehand to be no friend of the Jews, was appalled at the treatment of the Jewish community, and communicated that directly to Sixtus.7 He wrote a detailed response to Hinderbach’s presentation to the commission of cardinals, detailing his objections to the trial.8 The martyrs of Morocco inspired no such enthusiasm. The first passio describing their execution was not written until more than one hundred years after their deaths; miracle stories appeared another fifty years after that. It is a sharp contrast to the mere weeks it took for a narrative to be produced for Simon. And while the Jews were imagined to have sought Christian blood to enact nefarious rituals, the caliph who executed the Franciscans acted in a straightforward manner. Insulting the prophet Muhammad and Islam were forbidden by law, and when the friars broke that law, they were punished.

The motivation of the Almohad ruler was consonant with historical understanding; Christians were indeed executed for such insults. Why was little Simon (and the fantasy of Jewish bloodlust) so much more popular than the Morocco Five and their persecutor? And given this contrast, why were the Franciscans canonized but the sacrificed child was not? Sixtus’s own status as a Franciscan very likely played some role in this decision; he also canonized the order’s former minister-general Bonaventure, in 1482.9 In the other direction, the pope’s distaste for the treatment of the Jewish community in Trent by the prince-bishop against his expressed prohibition undermined the petition to recognize Simon’s death, as did the extremes of devotion that Simon’s supporters were expressing about him. De’ Giudici reported that the people

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:41

PS

PAGE 3

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

4

Introduction

of Trent “adored their blessed one as a second Christ and as a second Messiah.”10 But perhaps what tipped Sixtus’s hand was what was happening at the other end of the Italian peninsula from Trent: the conquest of the Apulian town of Otranto by the Ottomans on 11 August 1480.

From Morocco to Otranto, 1220–1481 The conquest of Otranto came as a shock to Italy. While the capture of Constantinople (1453), Venetian-ruled Negroponte (1470),11 and other cities of Greece had made the military aggressiveness and expansion of the Ottomans painfully apparent, the siege of Otranto put Ottoman troops on Italian soil, on land the papacy claimed as its patrimony. Furthermore, the conquest of Otranto indicated the direction the Ottomans were expanding: having captured New Rome (Constantinople), Mehmet the Conqueror had set his sights on Old Rome. The horror of the situation was heightened by the reported brutality of the Ottoman troops; rumors circulated describing the murder of the bishop in his cathedral, and the massacre of some of the town’s citizens outside the city walls.12 The papacy responded in a panic. Sixtus IV quickly negotiated an end to the ongoing war among the Italian city-states that had followed the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici in Florence,13 and turned his attention toward uniting Christendom against the Turks. Divine aid was marshaled alongside the military forces of Italy and beyond; Sixtus issued a call for crusade, and a Mass was composed, which Penny Cole has called “a moving and poignant cry to God to assist his beleaguered faithful to victory over the Turks.”14 The liturgy evoked the dead of Otranto: “Avenge the blood of your faithful servants which has been shed.”15 The Turkish occupation of Otranto lasted a year. Mehmet II, the terror of the Christian world, died on 3 May 1481, just as the countersiege of Otranto began, led by Neapolitan forces with aid from the Hungarians. A negotiated surrender returned the city to the control of the Kingdom of Naples at the end of the summer (10 September), and the bodies of the murdered citizens of the city were discovered outside the city walls, still unburied.16 The canonization of the martyrs of Morocco was a defiant response to the Ottoman conquest of Otranto. Martyrdom at its heart is about resistance; the acclamation of a martyr is an audacious shout declaiming that torture and death do not stop the righteous; indeed, it only makes them stronger.

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:41

PS

PAGE 4

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

5

Introduction

Yet a close reading of the passio of the Moroccan martyrs reveals a set of contrasts between the Islamic and Christian realms which contradicted the triumph that Sixtus’s crusade hoped for.17 The martyrs, of course, were not warriors; they did not defeat Islam through earthly triumph. But in this case, they offered few other forms of victory. The five martyrs converted no Muslims in the course of their time in al-Andalus and Morocco, though several Muslims expressed sympathy for them; one of the caliph’s princes even “loved Christians.”18 Nor did the martyrs display the awesome power of the divine as was common in other martyr accounts from the fourth century onward.

Such displays made clear to the audience both within the narrative and to those reading it that behind the seemingly defenseless Christians loomed the awesome power of an almighty God. But the friars, living or dead, performed few miracles in Muslim lands. Their relics only began to heal once they were returned to Christian territory.

Curiously, the one miracle that the martyrs did perform in front of Muslims only served to strengthen the sultan’s military power.19 The martyrs had accompanied the Almohad army under the command of a Christian mercenary on an attack on a rebellious Muslim lord, and on their return to Marrakesh, the army was stranded in the desert without sufficient water. One of the friars miraculously provided a spring to assuage the thirst of the soldiers and their beasts of burden, saving the caliph’s army from a painful death.

This could hardly be what Sixtus was hoping for in the case of the Ottomans.

Perhaps the pope could take solace from the divine punishment meted out to the caliph after the death of the martyrs: he was struck with partial paralysis, and his land suffered a three-year drought.20 The caliph nevertheless recovered, and the drought ended—hardly the sort of victory that God had marshaled for his people in the past.21 What the martyrs were effective in achieving was the separation of Muslim from Christian. A central figure in the story was the infante Pedro, brother of Afonso II of Portugal. Pedro was living in exile at the caliph’s court, and was given the responsibility of minding the friars; hence they accompanied him and the sultan’s army on campaign. A key part of the narrative was the return of Pedro to Portugal; just like the martyrs’ own bodies, the infante could not be left in Muslim hands. What the passio offered was not triumph over Islam, but separation from it—and perhaps the reality of Ottoman troops on Italian soil made that appealing enough.22 The story of the martyrs of Morocco was convenient to the pope in another way: not only could the Almohad caliph be read as the Ottoman

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:41

PS

PAGE 5

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

6

Introduction

sultan (who was also a caliph), but the martyrs themselves were proxies for another group of martyred dead—the massacred citizens of Otranto (including six Franciscans). They shared much in common. Both groups died at the hands of Muslims, who were seen from the twelfth century on as western Christendom’s greatest rival and a threat to its very existence. While both groups of martyrs were eventually canonized, each had to wait hundreds of years for recognition.23 The Morocco Five may have been canonized in part to avoid acknowledging those killed by the Ottomans in Otranto.24 The cult of the Otrantines was not authorized until their beatification in 1771, and they achieved full sainthood only on 12 May 2013—their ascension to glory was overshadowed by Benedict XVI’s simultaneous announcement that he would resign as pope, only the second in history to do so.25 If we return again to the court of Sixtus IV, we find that in reality he had three groups of potential martyrs, not just two: the Morocco Five, the citizens of Otranto, and little Simon of Trent. But not all martyrs are equal.

Simon was presented as another Christ child: his death came at the same time of the year as did Christ’s (Passover), and his murder was understood to be an expression of the same age-old hatred of what was virtuous and good that drove the Jews of Jerusalem to murder Christ centuries before. The association with Passover connected Simon to the sacrificial lamb, implicitly linking his death to the forgiveness of sins. Simon thus embodied an image of Christians as innocent victims of the hatred of others, hatred that simmered within the boundaries of Christendom itself.

From the papal perspective, Simon was no martyr at all. Even putting aside Sixtus’s doubts about whether Simon had actually been killed by a cabal of Jews thirsting for Christian blood, the pope and others at his court believed that one must willingly accept death to be a martyr—and being only two years old, Simon could not have known what that choice was.26 While the Moroccan martyrs also died at the hands of a group who were believed to hate Christians (Muslims), they died outside the boundaries of Christendom, and went willingly to their deaths, imitating Christ in a different manner than Simon the boy. And why did the dead of Otranto go ignored? The bodies of the dead Otrantines were not recovered until a month after Sixtus canonized the Morocco martyrs; the pope may not have been certain that they were willing to die.27 Some accounts related that the citizens were offered the choice to convert or die, and that the archbishop had miraculously remained on his feet after his beheading, toppling over only after the last of the Otrantines had been executed. The earliest accounts, however, suggested that an indeterminate number of people had been killed as part of the sack

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:42

PS PAGE 6

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

7

Introduction

of the city, not for failing to convert, and that the archbishop had died of fear and was not killed by the Turks.28 The pope’s own Franciscan background, when added to the well-established story of their martyrdom, may have led him to choose the “Morocco Five” rather than wait to establish the sanctity of the victims of the Turks. In the years that followed, Sixtus and his successors also may have feared that promoting the Otrantines would accrue more glory to the rulers of Naples than to the papacy.

It is perhaps not surprising to find that the rhetoric of martyrdom still wielded such power amid the struggles for power in Quattrocento Italy, centuries after the putative “age of martyrdom” had ended. What is surprising is the refusal of various groups to acknowledge where that power lay. Stories about Muslim persecutors of innocent Christians turned out not to be very popular in the medieval period. With the exception of a localized cult in Coimbra, none of the dozens of friars in the Franciscan order claimed as martyrs developed a cult in the medieval period. The relics of the martyrs of Otranto received a little more attention; they were installed at Otranto as well as in Naples, and gradually spread out to other southern Italian churches.

By the eighteenth century, the martyrs were even credited with converting their Muslim executioner.29 By far the most popular of the three was Simon of Trent. The rapid spread of his cult and the number of sermons, pamphlets, and shrines dedicated to him in just a few years far exceeded anything produced for the martyrs of Morocco over more than two centuries. Of course, Simon had the advantage of dying during the early age of print, and the new technology helped swiftly spread his story. But even more important is the ugly truth that lay behind Simon’s cult: many Christians believed that a fictional conspiracy of their Jewish neighbors to torture and kill a Christian boy for nefarious rituals was a greater threat than that of a caliph killing friars in lands across the sea. Yet Franciscan sources never featured a Jew killing a friar, though the story of Simon demonstrates how easy such a story was to manufacture. The contrast also points out the gap between papal notions of martyrdom and popular ones. Simon of Trent exemplified the “innocent attacked” that generated popular enthusiasm. The papacy instead was keen to promote martyrs of just the opposite character, preferring obedient sons of the church who died in her service.30

Thinking with Saracens Yet the Franciscans clung to narratives about friars dying at the hands of Muslims; indeed, in Franciscan discourse, “death by Saracen” came to rival

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:42

PS PAGE 7

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

8

Introduction

or even surpass other definitions of what made a martyr. Of the roughly fifty martyrs commemorated in the late fourteenth-century Franciscan account of the order, the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Franciscan Order (Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum), two-thirds of them were killed by Muslims. The centrality of Islam to Franciscan conceptions of martyrdom becomes even more apparent when we realize that many of the martyr narratives were largely invented; Franciscan authors were free to choose the antagonist they wanted—and Franciscans almost always chose Muslims.

Franciscans recounted stories of their martyred dead for a variety of reasons, but the effect of their narratives has been threefold: to further push apart Muslims and Christians by promoting narratives that essentialized Christian salvation and Muslim damnation; to articulate a new Franciscan piety built on the humility of the martyr rather than the poverty of the friar; and to recast Christian understanding of martyrdom, taking what had been primarily understood as a conduit of divine blessing and power to the human world, and making it instead a gesture that offered little hope of divine intervention. These three effects were linked; in denying the possibility of the salvation of Muslims and downplaying the role of miracles in martyrdoms at their hands, Franciscans aligned Islam with the world of suffering and desire, and Christianity (particularly as expressed through Franciscan virtue) with the divine realm of salvation.

This, of course, was an ancient dichotomy, fundamental to Christian cosmology and essential to the monastic and ascetic values that underpinned the Franciscan enterprise. But it was also a rebuttal of an enduring belief in Christian triumphalism, which allowed Christians to believe that God— through the martyrs, saints, and the Virgin Mary—protected God’s adopted children, cured them of illnesses, defended their homes from attack, and smote their enemies on the battlefield. Martyrdom as told by the Franciscans stood in implicit contrast to crusade and its central hope: that Christians might be worthy of victory in a holy war against Islam and recapture Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The logic of Franciscan martyrdom in effect responded to that endeavor: Christians should seek their true homeland in heaven, not an earthly city where the temporal power of Islam appropriately dominated. Partes infidelium, as late medieval sources frequently called Islamic lands, would remain separated from partes fidelium until the Final Judgment. Franciscans nevertheless were eager partisans of crusading endeavors, serving as preachers, collectors of funds, and authors of proposals for new

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:42

PS

PAGE 8

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

9

Introduction

crusades. The contrast makes the Franciscan martyrdoms all the more startling: Why deny in one context what you are fighting vigorously for in another?

But the greatest significance of the martyrdoms was for the friars themselves. The Franciscans are often presented in both popular and scholarly imagination as intrepid evangelists, venturing beyond the boundaries of the known world to preach the word of God. But the martyr narratives did little to bolster this image; the martyr-friars preached, to be sure, but they generally failed to convert anyone. Instead, the narratives served to reassure friars anxious in an age when the order faced challenges on many sides: accusations that they failed to follow Francis’s vision of evangelical poverty faithfully, or conversely, that some followed it so assiduously that it led them into heresy.

Martyrdom stories thus functioned primarily to supplant poverty as the emblem of Franciscan piety. The values the martyrs represented were uncontroversial, and could appeal to different factions within the order, namely the rigorists, who advocated for the centrality of poverty to Franciscan practice, and conventuals, who argued that the friars ought to be bound primarily by their vow of obedience. The rigorists (also called spirituals) could see in the martyrs those who died out of their commitment to poverty, and for the conventuals the same martyrs could represent devoted obedience to God. Franciscans were associated with martyrdom from the foundation of the order. The desire for martyrdom was one of the characteristics which made it evident to readers of Francis of Assisi’s hagiography that he was indeed a saint. By the fourteenth century, one Franciscan bishop could boast “There is no kingdom, no language, no nation where the Friars Minor are not, or have not been, preaching the faith of Holy Mother Church. And their blood has been spilled everywhere, beginning in Morocco all the way to India.”31 The Franciscan order emerged in the early thirteenth century as part of a burst of new religious communities in an era of religious, cultural, economic, and political expansion. The order began as a small informal community of men gathered around Giovanni di Bernadone, the son of a cloth merchant in Assisi, who earned the nickname of Francesco as a result of his father’s business trips to France. Francis and his followers were mendicants, vowed to individual poverty like generations of ascetics before them, but also distinctively vowed to communal poverty. They aspired to the austere life that Christ and his apostles had lived, carrying “on their journey neither purse nor pouch nor bread, nor money in their belts” (Luke 9:3). After meeting Francis and his followers, Jacques de Vitry rejoiced that in addition to

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:42

PS

PAGE 9

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

10

Introduction

monks, hermits, and canons, “the Lord in these days has added a fourth form of religious life, the embellishment of a new order, and the holiness of a new rule”—the friars.32 Praising their simplicity, love of poverty, and contempt of worldly vanity, Jacques expressed his delight that “even the Saracens and people in the darkness [of unbelief] admire their humility and virtue.”33 Like monks, the friars made vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, but unlike monks, they did not live in cloisters, but roved from place to place, urging penitence in vivid sermons, first in Umbria, but then spreading throughout western Christendom and beyond.34 There were two distinct Francises of Assisi, and each shaped a part of the order in his image. One Francis was the itinerant preacher, who (again in the words of Jacques de Vitry) “has not so much added a new way of living as renewed an old one, the form and condition of the primitive Church.”35 Following the model of the early apostles, this Francis aspired to bring sinning Christians back to the warm embrace of a forgiving God by preaching in Italian churches and piazzas. This Francis was of great use to the institutional church; Pope Innocent III quickly gave him permission to form a new community when Francis visited Rome with his eleven early companions in 1209. According to Francis’s hagiographer Thomas of Celano (writing at the end of the 1240s), Innocent had a dream the night before he met Francis, in which he saw “a small, scorned man” holding on his back the crumbling basilica of S. Giovanni in Laterano, the cathedral church of Rome and the seat of the papacy.36 And indeed, the Franciscans proved immensely useful to the popes. In addition to encouraging pious behavior among the laity, Franciscans soon took on the role of confessors in many regions, as well as preachers of crusades, ambassadors, and even bishops and cardinals. The Franciscans who followed in the footsteps of this Francis helped support and expand the power of the church, and consequently came to have the wealth and prestige of the institution behind them. For these friars, poverty was a malleable quality that distinguished the order generally, but should not impede its ability to engage with the world.

The other Francis was not one of Jacques’s dynamic new apostles; he was a hermit. This was how Francis began his saintly life, and how he ended it. Once the order had been established and grew beyond a small fraternity of brothers who all knew each other, Francis preferred to live in quiet retreat in places like La Verna, a hermitage in the mountains north of Arezzo. This Francis avoided crowds and attention, and sought to separate himself from the material world of ambition, desire, and distraction so that he could focus

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:42

PS

PAGE 10

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

11

Introduction

on imitating Christ in all aspects of his life. Francis even wrote a rule for hermitages, and many of his earliest disciples followed him in living a greater part of their lives in seclusion. For Franciscans who followed this life, poverty was the primary virtue on which all others relied. But, of course, there were not two Francises, but one who seamlessly melded the two roles: as his hagiographer Thomas of Celano recalled, “It was his custom to divide the time given him to merit grace and, as seemed best, to spend some of it to benefit his neighbors and use the rest in the blessed solitude of contemplation.”37 It was not easy for his friars to do the same, and few Franciscans beyond the first generation ever managed to combine both roles successfully.

Martyrdom was one of the strands of piety that both versions of Francis drew upon, and it was woven throughout the early history of the order. Francis the preacher desired to evangelize among the infidels, and made three trips to Muslim lands in an attempt to fulfill that desire. The stories of his journeys, and particularly of his visit to Egypt in the midst of the Fifth Crusade and his subsequent meeting with the Ayyubid sultan al-Kāmil, have become a central part of Francis’s image, re-created in frescoes and cited even today by popes as a model of interreligious dialogue. But his journeys, according to Thomas of Celano, were also driven by the desire for martyrdom.

However, Francis did not die under an infidel sword. Instead, he died years later at one of his beloved hermitages, surrounded by his “little brothers.” In his final years, he had been afflicted with painful illnesses, and his hagiographers believed he suffered from the added extra agony of the mystically induced stigmata, the wounds that Christ himself suffered at the Crucifixion. Thomas of Celano suggested that the stigmata were a superior form of martyrdom; instead of dying as Christ died, Francis was called to suffer as Christ suffered. If the preacher desired martyrdom, it was the hermit who received it (mystically). But it was more than the model of Francis (or of the five martyrs of Morocco) that made martyrdom so important to Franciscans; the values of martyrdom were woven into the fabric of the order. Above all else, the friar was to be humble, forswearing anything that might lead him to focus on the self. He was called to sacrifice his ambition, his desires, his physical comfort, and even his life out of love for God. Martyrs were the very first saints of the Christian tradition, and the fount from which the cult of the saints and their relics first emerged. The martyrs and their stories suffused western Christian culture and values; people were named after them, their deaths were commemorated daily, their aid cured the sick and gained forgiveness for the sinner. The Franciscans were therefore tapping into a set of

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:43

PS

PAGE 11

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

12

Introduction

cultural values and stories that resonated throughout institutions, communities, and families.

Franciscan chronicles recounted the stories of dozens of friars who had died in Islamic lands. Guilelmo de Castromaris, for example, died in the city of Gaza, in 1354. About him we know little else; how he came to be in Gaza, how old he was, whether tall or short, round as we imagine jolly friars in the style of Friar Tuck, or thin and spare like a tree branch. His name survives for one reason only: he died a martyr. Only one account preserves his name, written some twenty years after his death; it informs the reader that the friar was “preaching the faith of Christ and denouncing the law of Machomet”— Islam, which was the faith of most of the citizens of Gaza. An unnamed king took offense, and, alternating threats and bribes, urged Guilelmo to deny his faith and become a Muslim. Guilelmo resisted, and the king had him executed.38 Guilelmo’s attack on Islam earned him this brief citation in a chronicle written in France some twenty years later, but little more.39 As far as we know, Christians did not call upon him to intercede for them in heaven; no relics were preserved to foster his memory in Gaza or in Castromaris, a small town near Naples where Guilelmo was from; nor was he ever inscribed officially as a martyr recognized by the church. Those rolls were already full. Christian martyrs by the fourteenth century numbered in the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands; Jacques de Voragine claimed that there were five thousand saints for every day of the year (except, for some reason, January).40 Remove his name, the date, and the place of his death, and Guilelmo’s story is interchangeable with many of the other Franciscan martyrs.

Guilelmo, his fellow friar-martyrs and the stories about them are a puzzle to us. Did Guilelmo even exist? Did he actually die in Gaza? Did anyone notice? Did he choose to die, and if so, why? We have no answers to these questions; Guilelmo and his brothers in martyrdom are fictional characters, even the few whom we can prove actually existed. In martyrdom it is the story that matters, not its historicity—the author, not the subject. Who cares enough to tell the story? And what need does the story fill? We do not even have access to the experience of the Franciscan martyrs for whom we have reliable historical evidence. A few letters survive from friars, but they were written before they knew they were going to die, and cast little light on whether they chose martyrdom, or why. No prison diary à la Perpetua has survived to tell us how the friars themselves understood their deaths. Furthermore, the history of martyrdom and martyrology has remained curiously

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:43

PS

PAGE 12

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

13

Introduction

unwritten for the high Middle Ages, so our understanding of the significance of martyrdom in this period is limited. Although the association between Franciscans and martyrdom is long-standing, it has not been the subject of a monograph; this book is the first to address it. It is also the first to take martyrdom in the late Middle Ages as its primary subject.

Stories recounted about martyrs not only give meaning to death suffered through religious persecution, but also give meaning to the world around the martyrs—that is, for the community who preserved their memory. The acts of testifying, suffering, and dying become a passio (a narrative account of the martyrdom) only through a series of interpretive choices by a narrator, who casts the actors, constructs the scenery, and provides a script.41 Franciscans wrote that script in a number of ways, but generally they chose one that was at odds with the dominant narrative in medieval martyr-writing. Since the fourth century, Christians had depicted the martyr in death as a victor who demonstrated the superiority of heaven over earth, Christians over infidels, and virtue over vice. Furthermore, that victory was made manifest on earth by the conversion of onlookers, by the spectacular miracles that accompanied the martyr’s death and appeared at the tomb afterward, and by the flocks of the faithful expressing their devotion there.

Franciscan stories of martyrdom defied that tradition in a number of ways, as we have already seen in the passio of the Moroccan martyrs. The martyrs generally failed to convert anyone, either through their teaching or through the example of their patient suffering. While some miracles accompanied the friars’ suffering and death, they were the kind that indicated divine approbation for their sacrifice. Miracles which demonstrated that the martyrs were conduits of divine power—healing miracles, miracles of punishment— were few and far between. Their martyrdoms failed to have the transformative effects that make martyrdoms more than just executions. Hagiography has been described as “a narrative linguistic practice that recounts the lives of the saints so that the reader or hearer can experience their imperative power.”42 But the Franciscan martyrs displayed few of the miracles or healing power that Christians expected of their saints. Rather than being a tool of conversion, Franciscan martyrdom, at least in the narratives preserved within the order, achieved the opposite—it emphasized the separation of Christian from Muslim, rejected the possibility of transforming one into other, and presented Islam and its political authority as a permanent feature of the present world. The notable exception was the four Franciscans martyred in Tana, India, in 1321: but as Chapter 4 illustrates, their depiction was shaped by the

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:43

PS

PAGE 13

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

14

Introduction

perception of India as a “pagan” land, not a “Saracen” one—despite the fact that the friars were killed by the Muslim rulers of the city.

The Franciscan passiones are preserved in a number of different sources.

Some are anonymous accounts, and others were written by fellow friars who traveled through the area where the martyrs died. None were eyewitnesses.

The Dominican Jordan Catala de Sévérac traveled to India with the Franciscans who died in 1321 in Tana, but he was in a different region when his companions were beheaded. An anonymous account in a manuscript in the British Library claimed to written by a companion of the martyrs of Morocco of 1220, but the account as it now exists betrays too many fourteenth-century characteristics to be contemporary with the martyrs. Another letter purports to have been written by a martyr awaiting death in Ceuta in 1227, but the letter and the martyr-author seem to have been a creation of a late fourteenthcentury Franciscan.43 Most of the martyr accounts were preserved in brief narratives within Franciscan chronicles, particularly the late fourteenthcentury Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Minorite Order.

None of the passiones give voice to the dominant trends in piety of the fourteenth century. Although imitatio Christi had been understood as fundamental to Francis’s spirituality by his hagiographers and by the order at large, and although the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a marked increase in texts that directed readers to meditate on the wounds of Christ and those of the martyrs, the Franciscan accounts evinced no such interest in doing the same with the martyrs of their own order.44 Francis’s life was believed to have conformed to Christ’s, though he did not die a violent death—but those of the friars who did suffer bloody deaths were not accorded the same status.

The stories of Guilelmo and his brothers were not just stories of martyrs; they were also the stories of missionaries, or perhaps better called evangelists.

“Mission” and martyrdom were part of the bedrock of Franciscan values. The friars were above all else preachers, whose role was to call the world—both Christian and infidel—to penitence and faith in Christ. While Guilelmo (if he existed at all) may have died as a result of preaching in Gaza, the author of his brief passio did not bother to record the message he preached or whether he had any success as a preacher. Missionaries were just as much a literary creation of communities as martyrs were. They figured most prominently as founders, convenient explanations for how a community became Christian, transmuting the messy and generations-long process of conversion into a rapid, decisive transformation orchestrated by a single charismatic figure. The story of evangelization had been entwined with martyrdom since

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:43

PS

PAGE 14

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

15

Introduction

the early Middle Ages, but until the thirteenth century, that had been a story of success. The stories of earlier missionaries had sometimes described them as dying as a consequence of their preaching, but nevertheless they converted whole nations. Franciscans, in contrast, had little interest in their brethren who labored in Muslim communities. This may be in part because (papal rhetoric notwithstanding) friars who spent time in Islamic lands rarely focused on converting Muslims. Instead, most of their efforts were devoted to ministering to Latin Christians—merchants, mercenaries, captives—and in some areas, bringing eastern Christians into submission to papal authority.

We must be cautious when speaking of missions. The word “mission” is a modern term; the concept itself is also modern. Medievalists often speak plainly about missions, as if the category needed no discussion or historical contextualization. This is most clear in the division modern historians make between mendicant efforts among less-than-pious Christians and heretics, generally referred to as preaching, and preaching to non-Christians, usually called a mission, a distinction medieval authors did not make.45 In Late Antiquity, the word “mission” was commonly used to describe the sending of Christ and the Holy Spirit into the world. In medieval European vernacular languages, the term missio was first used in secular contexts, meaning a delegation or an expedition.46 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars have taken for granted that a “Franciscan concept of mission” existed, rooted in the medieval origins of the order but flowering most fully in the early modern era. Bert Roest has exposed the ahistorical claims of this teleological and theological construct.47 In fact, medieval Franciscans had neither the concept of the “missionary” nor an interest in the activities of such persons; their chronicles were mostly silent on the subject, particularly when it came to friars evangelizing in Islamic lands (see Chapter 3).48

Christian Confrontation with Islam In stories about death, killers loom large. Martyrdom accounts are no different. Popular medieval martyrdom accounts present three primary persecutors: Muslims, Jews, and heretics (tyrants of all backgrounds are given special prominence). The three were frequently conflated with each other, and were seen as determinedly hostile to Christendom, seeking to undermine it and destroy it in whatever way possible. Franciscan martyr accounts prominently feature Muslims, while a few identified heretics as persecutors. None that I

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:43

PS

PAGE 15

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

16

Introduction

am aware of mentions Jews, although the order enthusiastically spread the cult of Simon of Trent.49 Why do Franciscan martyrdoms focus so unrelentingly on Islam? The papacy was clearly far more interested in martyrs killed by heretics, and contemporaries seemed more interested in figures who died at the hands of Jews than of Muslims. Even stories of martyrs murdered by pagans would at least have had the possibility of demonstrating success in evangelization, as the example of the martyrs of Tana make clear (see Chapter 4). Muslims were seen as a great threat to Christendom, and thus the stories of the martyrs were part of an arsenal with which Christianity confronted Islam. While stories of Christians killed by Muslims were not widely popular outside the Franciscan order, the image of the Saracen as persecutor was. In many late medieval depictions of early Christian martyrdom, the persecutors of the Christians were transformed from pagan Romans to Saracens: see, for example, the late twelfth-century reliquary of Saint Valerie from Limoges, or the miniature of the martyrdom of Saint Vincent in a late thirteenth-century book of devotions.50 But the figure of the Muslim appealed to the Franciscans for reasons particular to the order as well. From its earliest days, the fraternity of the lesser brothers with their devotion to absolute poverty was set in contrast to the wealthy and venal clerics who were seen to have corrupted the purity of Mother Church. Jacques de Vitry made this comparison explicit, complaining after a visit to Rome, “They [the Papal Curia] were so occupied with worldly affairs, with rulers and kingdoms, with lawsuits and litigation, that they hardly let anyone speak of spiritual things.” His one consolation was meeting the Franciscans.51 In the “Sacred Exchange between Saint Francis and Lady Poverty,” a thirteenth-century Franciscan allegory, Lady Poverty and Lady Persecution were separated by the Constantinian peace of the church; Christians as a result began to make war on each other and to compete in accumulating wealth. At the meager feast that Francis and his friars set before her, Lady Poverty marvels, “Who has seen in past generations such things as these?”52 The implication was that Franciscan devotion to Lady Poverty returned the church to the purity of her apostolic roots, which had been betrayed by the accumulation of wealth by popes, bishops, and ecclesiastical institutions.

The problem with this opposition is clear: in contrasting themselves to a hierarchy corrupted by wealth, the Franciscans were following in the footsteps of many other reformers in criticizing the financial endowment of the institutions of the church. Such critiques generally led to accusations of heresy and persecution. Yet the Franciscan focus on poverty made such contrasts

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:44

PS

PAGE 16

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

17

Introduction

inevitable, even if the friars did not directly criticize ecclesiastical wealth.53 Islam became a useful replacement for the institutional church. It could represent the most important quality the Franciscans defined themselves against: that of a wealthy and powerful institution whose values were focused on the things of this world, rather than on God. This reflected medieval attitudes toward Islam as a religion, as well as caricatures of the prophet Muhammad.54 Thus, the denunciations that the friars leveled against Muhammad and Islam during the course of their martyrdoms were intended to show that the friars stood in opposition to what the pseudo-prophet and his religion stood for in the Christian imagination—the indulgence of the senses most broadly, but also a relentless focus on cupidity. To Christians, Islam represented the earthy pleasures of this world: sexuality, food, and even the more refined pleasures of wealth—silks, sumptuous furnishings, and baths. It was both Christianity’s demonic doppelgänger and what Elaine Pagels might call its “intimate enemy.”55 Islam could even represent the preaching orders themselves. The thirteenth-century “Romance of Muhammad” describes the story of the birth of Islam in a setting of meadows and castles reminiscent of the French countryside, and features a Muhammad who is crafty, intelligent, and moneyobsessed—just the sort of accusations that aggrieved nobles and clergy launched in the thirteenth century against the friars (and, of course, also against Jews).56 In some senses, Islam became the mirror that allowed the order to confront its own worldly aspect and desires.

Military and religious conflict also played a part in the appeal of martyrdom as a form of victory over Islam. “Islamdom” was distinct from other primordial threats that western Christendom perceived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Muslims were every bit as dedicated to the overthrow of all things virtuous and true and therefore Christian as Jews, heretics, and the ultimate assailant, Satan. But unlike those other enemies, Muslims lived in particular places, whose boundaries could with some imagination be delineated, placed in particular geographic spaces separate from Christians, and the martyrological drama could be imagined acted out in that space. Jews and heretics, in contrast, had no space that properly pertained to them alone.

The stories of the suffering and deaths of the martyrs were a way for Franciscans to negotiate their complex attitudes toward Muslims and all they represented, reconciling their continuing existence with Franciscan concepts of evangelization and conversion.

Islam was Christendom’s great rival for domination of the Mediterranean and control of the Holy Land. The Franciscan polymath Roger Bacon,

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:44

PS

PAGE 17

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

18

Introduction

for example, thought that Christendom confronted four great issues in the thirteenth century, two of which related to Muslims—the conversion of nonChristians and the defense of Christendom against those who could not be converted.57 Martyrdom solved both. According to the traditional logic of martyrdom, death was most meaningful as a sacrifice that brought salvation to infidel onlookers. For the thirteenth century, that meant Muslims. Likewise, martyrdom was an expression of victory—but on what terms?

Thirteenth-century Latin Christendom directed enormous resources toward crusades against Muslims. At least four major crusades were launched against Islamic powers over the course of nearly seventy years: the Fourth Crusade (1202–4), which was intended to attack Egypt but conquered Constantinople instead; the Fifth Crusade (1217–21), which did attack Egypt unsuccessfully; the Seventh Crusade (1248–52), during which Louis IX mounted a second attack on Egypt and was captured; and the Eighth Crusade, Louis’s last crusade to Tunis (1270); as well as a number of smaller campaigns. None of them succeeded militarily against their Muslim enemies.

Although crusades in Spain were generally more successful, by 1238, Christian Spain and the last remaining Muslim kingdom on the peninsula, Granada, had settled into an uneasy coexistence with little territorial gain on either side.

Alongside enthusiasm for crusading, and often linked to it, was the hope that the conversion of large numbers of Muslims to Christianity was imminent.58 A number of different sources fed this expectation. One source was the writings of Joachim of Fiore, an abbot and biblical exegete in southern Italy whose interpretation of providential history suggested that the Jews, pagans, and Muslims would soon convert as the world entered a new “era of the Spirit.” In the crisis that would mark the transition from one status to another, Christendom would come under attack. Victory would come, not through force of arms, but through the spiritual triumph of successful preaching particularly led by new ‘spiritual men’ who would be leaders of a revitalized church. The emergence of the two mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who took as their principal task preaching the Word of God and by the 1240s were sometimes identified as the viri spirituales of Joachite prophecy, further raised hopes that a new age was about to begin.59 Even the papacy hinted at an impending apocalypse: Gregory IX issued a papal bull in 1235 calling for renewed efforts at converting the infidels. The opening line of the bull by which it is known (Cum undecima hora, “in the eleventh hour”), evoked a powerful sense of apocalyptic urgency.

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:44

PS

PAGE 18

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

19

Introduction

Was it possible that Christians might overcome Islam through conversion? Louis IX’s crusade to Egypt in 1248 inspired one poet to proclaim that the king “will be able to conquer Romania easily, baptize the sultan of Turkey, and thereby free the world.”60 Raymond of Penyafort, the Dominican master-general (1238–40), wrote to his successor, John of Wildeshausen (1241–52) concerning the conversion of Muslims in Spain that “at the time of the present writing the gate is now open to nearly inestimable fruits, provided the harvesters do not abandon their task; and even now many of them, especially in Murcia, have been converted to the faith both secretly and openly.”61 Louis IX’s crusade to Tunis in 1270 was in part motivated by the hope of converting the sultan and the city’s population to Christianity.62 Although the conversion of Muslims had become central both to the ideology of crusading and to the mendicant orders, very little was done to pursue it on a practical level. Robin Vose found little evidence of such activities among the Dominicans in the Crown of Aragon in the thirteenth century, despite the fact that large populations of both Jews and Muslims had come under Christian domination at that time, giving the mendicants ample opportunity to preach to captive populations. Instead, Vose found that “when they took notice of local non-Christians at all, it was because they were concerned that fluidity of religious identity and experience should be more strictly limited and controlled.”63 The story of the Franciscans is similar; little attention and few resources were given to evangelization of Muslims, and stories about Franciscans and the Muslim world were more focused on marking out the difference between Christian and Muslim than on crossing those boundaries.

By the end of the thirteenth century, the dream of the rapid conversion of Muslims was beginning to fade.64 Humbert of Romans, another mastergeneral of the Dominican order (1254–63), was unusual in placing conversion of Muslims at the forefront of his order’s mission when he first began his generalate.65 But by the time he wrote his Opus tripartitum for the Council of Lyons (1274), he was far more pessimistic about the possibility of conversion. He noted that Muslims did not in fact seem at all interested in converting to Christianity; rather, conversion generally went in the other direction.66 Crusading and evangelizing, however, continued to appeal to western Europeans, and expeditions of both sorts were often planned and sometimes even carried out. Even in the later thirteenth century, there were those who believed passionately that the total collapse of Islam, religiously and politically, could happen at any moment. William of Tripoli, a Dominican

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:44

PS

PAGE 19

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

20

Introduction

preacher in the Latin East writing a treatise on Islam, the Notitia de Machometo (c. 1271), believed that after a victory over the Franks, the Muslims themselves would be wiped out by the Christians. This victory would mark the end of the “age of the Saracens,” a third of all Muslims would become Christian, and the remainder would die in the battle or subsequently in the desert.67 His work inspired a successor, often identified with William himself, who wrote a treatise on Islamic history, the De statu Saracenorum, which described the religion in surprisingly positive terms. Yet, he too indicated that it was doomed to extinction soon. Although he repeated William’s prediction about the extirpation of Muslims at Christian hands militarily, he emphasized how willing Muslims were to become Christian even in his own day; he boasted that he himself had converted over a thousand.68 The Mamluk conquest of Acre in 1291 destroyed many of these hopes; the Dominican Riccoldo da Montecroce, who was in Baghdad when the city fell and saw the city’s slave markets flooded with Acre’s residents, wrote angry letters to God, bitterly noting that neither the saints Francis or Dominic, nor Louis IX of France and all the crusaders had been able to destroy “the beast,” as he called Islam.69 Likewise, Thadeus of Naples, writing just months after the city’s conquest in Messina, mourned that Palestine under Islamic rule had become a cruel stepmother to her Christian offspring.70 Both the Notitia de Machometo of William of Tripoli and the De statu Saracenorum of his successor were read and copied in fourteenth-century Europe; four manuscripts of the Notitia survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and ten manuscripts of the De statu from the same time.

Christians in the fourteenth century thus had a number of different texts to consult on Islam. Alongside the earlier accounts that defamed Muhammad and Islam or suggested that Muslims were idolaters, there were now a number of accounts that made it clear that Muslims were monotheists, and often implied that in one way or another Muslims were part of divine providence, and that their defeat and conversion would come only at a vital moment in the unfolding of God’s plan for the world. They were not simply God’s means of punishing errant Christians, but a far more significant group, like the Jews in their apocalyptic significance. Islam had become like sin itself: impure and corrupting, yet inescapably a part of the fallen temporal world. Franciscan martyrdom accounts led to the same conclusion; evangelization among the Muslims was doomed to fail until the moment God appointed. Martyrdom thus became war by other means, as Sixtus IV hoped to exploit in 1481.

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:45

PS

PAGE 20

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

21

Introduction

Alongside many other treatises, chronicles, and theological works, the narratives of Franciscan martyrdom in the fourteenth century provided western Europeans with a new script for understanding the place that Saracens and the partes infidelium (as the sources often called Muslim territories) occupied in their world. In this sense, the stories of Franciscan martyrs fulfilled the same role that early Christian martyr stories played: to create a sense of Christian identity in contradistinction to a created pagan, Roman one.71 But the new passiones differed from early Christian examples in that they downplayed the possibility of conversion and worldly triumph. The martyrdom accounts reflect a particular interest in the response of resident Christians to the martyrs, but ignore the reaction of Muslims, whose conversions were the ostensible goal of the Franciscans.

Martyrdom and Poverty For many in fourteenth-century western Europe, the Franciscan martyrs embodied a variety of sometimes contradictory values. The friars’ heroic resistance to Muslims dramatized widespread feelings of anxiety about Islam as both a military and religious threat. Yet using martyrdom as emblematic of Franciscan virtue was tricky. Not all Franciscan martyrs who died for their faith suffered at the hands of the infidels. In 1318 four Franciscans were burned at the stake by their own leaders for heresy; the executed friars and others like them, known as spirituals, believed that the institutional order was no longer faithful to the Rule of Saint Francis, particularly concerning issues of poverty, and that to fail to honor the precepts of the rule placed their own souls in mortal sin. They preferred to die poor than live in sinful plenty. Other Franciscans and beguines considered the four to be martyrs and saints, and inquisitions that followed treated belief in those Franciscans as martyrs as a sign of heresy. A divided Franciscan order began to develop rival lists of martyrs, each embodying what they believed to be the essence of Francis’s teachings.

Further controversy erupted when Pope John XXII subsequently declared that belief in the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles was heresy; the foundation of Franciscan piety was thus entirely undermined. No longer able to distinguish themselves on the basis of poverty, martyrdom became the sign of Franciscan zeal. The signification of martyrdom thus became unstable; the persecuting Saracen qādı̄ (judge) could easily be read as

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:45

PS

PAGE 21

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

22

Introduction

the persecuting pope. Angelo Clareno, one of the leading spirituals, made this connection clear in his chronicle: when another Franciscan opposed the imprisonment of Tommaso di Tolentino in Italy, the protesting Franciscan was punished with “Saracen-like cruelty,” “detained in accordance with that law that so resembled an Mahometan law.”72 This fluidity of martyrdom was in part why the papacy canonized no martyrs between 1253 and 1481; martyrial defiance of authority was not the model of sanctity the papacy sought to promote. Pious obedience was a far more appealing virtue. The popes, it turned out, only liked martyrs who died defending the institutional church, such as the Dominican inquisitor Peter Martyr (d. 1232), the last martyr to be canonized before the martyrs of Morocco. He achieved saintly status in 1253, a record 337 days after his death. But that flexibility is also what made the martyrs so useful to Franciscans in the fourteenth century. Conventuals and spirituals alike could admire them.

Martyrdom is always a claim of authority, usually by someone who does not have any. The appeal of the martyr’s story is that it offers a language of power in a situation when one feels stripped of it. For Franciscans, the sense of powerlessness came from a number of different sources. The first was the crisis over poverty within the Franciscan community, and the second was the larger crisis that Christians felt in the face of a militarily powerful and resurgent Islam. Yet, at the same time, the Franciscans were a well-connected religious order, with convents throughout the Christian world, whose friars regularly served as ambassadors, inquisitors, bishops, and cardinals. It is perhaps not a great surprise to find that their martyrs were not widely recognized as representing the powerless. Yet the stories of the Franciscan friars fascinate us for a number of reasons: they both reinforced and challenged the ideology of the crusades, were competitors in a Christian debate over the possibilities of spiritual achievement, fulfilled and denied apocalyptic prophecies, and represented and defied essential Franciscan values. It was a heavy burden for those who Francis called upon to be “miserable servants.”

Structure of the Book Chapter 1 offers an overview of Christian martyrdom from its origins to the High Middle Ages, examining the ways in which passiones and acta (the sufferings and deeds) of the martyrs served different functions as Christian communities grew from small groups on the margins of Roman society to

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:45

PS

PAGE 22

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

23

Introduction

being intimately linked to political power, first of the Roman emperors and then of medieval kings. The martyr stories with which thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christians were most familiar had their roots in accounts written in service to bishops, emperors, and kings, creating a triumphalist rhetoric of martyrial victory on earth and in heaven. Chapter 2 explores the desire for martyrdom, which was prominent in texts about Franciscan saints in the thirteenth century, most notably Francis himself. In contrast to earlier eras, however, Francis’s desire for martyrdom was not a direct reflection of his sanctity; there was in it an element of self-will that contradicted the values of Franciscan humility. The emphasis on the desire also shifted attention away from the stories of Franciscans who died in the thirteenth century; no passio of the martyrs of Morocco was written to commemorate them in the century following their death. In Chapter 3, I turn to the evidence of Franciscans who worked among Islamic populations; like the martyrs, they received little attention in the thirteenth century. Despite the ideological importance of preaching to infidels for Franciscans—it was written into the official rule of the order—the order did not demonstrate much interest in converting Muslims. The primary efforts of friars in Muslim lands were devoted to Latin Christians living there: mercenaries, merchants, and captives.

Franciscan attitudes toward martyrs changed dramatically in the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the first complete Franciscan passiones were written. Chapter 4 examines the context of the first such martyrdom, that of four Franciscans who died in Tana, India in 1321. The speed with which accounts of their death spread was a result of the crisis the order was experiencing over poverty; Pope John XXII had declared that the Franciscan belief in the complete poverty of Christ and his apostles was a heresy in 1323, just as the story of the martyrs reached Europe. Part of the appeal of this story arose from the fact that one of the martyrs, Tommaso di Tolentino, was a spiritual, and the account could be read as a criticism of John XXII. The appearance of the Tana martyrdom and the controversy over poverty led to the composition of more Franciscan passiones in the 1320s and 1330s, including the first complete account of the martyrs of Morocco, explored in Chapter 5. Not all martyrdom narratives addressed poverty, as the different versions of the Tana martyrdom show.

The largest collection of Franciscan martyrdoms is preserved in the late fourteenth-century Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Minorite Order, written as the order once again faced fracture over how Franciscans should practice poverty, the subject of Chapter 6. The chronicle

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:45

PS

PAGE 23

UNCORRECTED—not for citation

24

Introduction

offered martyrs and mystics as the models that could draw together the opposing factions. The popularity of the chronicle ensured that martyrdom remained central in Franciscan identity in the following centuries; it remains the source for most accounts of medieval Franciscan martyrs to this day.

It is a truism of the study of ancient martyrdom that the rigor of the martyr permits the laxity of the church as a whole.73 For Franciscans, martyrdom became a substitute for the rigorous pursuit of poverty, which had become perilous when John XXII declared belief in Christ’s poverty heretical, and which had become inconvenient in an order firmly enmeshed in a world of property and politics. The martyrs knitted together a fractured order and provided a demonstration of piety that could replace the strict practice of poverty. And they succeeded in articulating a mode of symbolically overcoming Islam that both denied Muslims the solace of conversion and accepted the reality of their temporary power and presence.

................. 19361$

INTR

07-22-19 12:52:45

PS

PAGE 24