MARIGNOLLI, Giovanni de’, a notable traveller to the far East of the 14th century, born probably prior to 1290, and sprung from a noble family in Florence. The family is long extinct, but a street near the cathedral (Via de’ Cerretani) formerly bore the name of the Marignolli.
In vol. V. pp. 628-29 some account has been given of the extraordinary episode of intercourse between Europe and China in the first half of the 14th century. In 1338 there arrived at Avignon, where Benedict XII. held his court, an embassy from the great khan of Cathay, bearing letters to the pontiff from the khan himself, and from certain Christian nobles of the Alan race in his service. These latter represented that they had been eight years without a spiritual guide, and earnestly desired one. The pope replied to the letters, and appointed four ecclesiastics as his legates to the khan’s court. The name of Marignolli, a Franciscan of some repute for learning, appears, as John of Florence, third on the letters of commission. We know not what became of his colleagues; he was the chief if not the sole envoy who actually went....
The mission left Avignon in December 1338, picked up the Tartar envoys at Naples, and sailed across the Black Sea to Caffa, whence they travelled to the court of Mohammed Uzbek, khan of the Golden Horde, at Sarai on the Volga. The khan entertained them hospitably during the winter of 1339-40, and then sent them across the steppes to Armalec or Almaligh, the northern seat of the house of Chaghatai, in what is now the province of Hi. “There,” says Marignolli, “we built a church, bought a piece of ground .... sung masses, and baptized several persons, notwithstanding that only the year before the bishop and six other minor friars had there undergone glorious martyrdom for Christ’s salvation.” Quitting Almaligh in 1341, they seem to have reached Peking (by way of Kamil or Hand) in May or June 1342. They were well received by the reigning khan, the last of the Mongol dynasty in China.
“The grand kaam, when he beheld the great horses (dextrarios) and the pope’s presents, with his letter, and that of King Robert (of Naples) too, with their golden seals, and when he saw us also, rejoiced greatly, being delighted, yea exceedingly delighted with everything. . . . And when I entered the kaam’s presence, it was in full festival vestments, with a very fine cross carried before me, and candles and incense, whilst Credo in mum Deuιn was chaunted, in that glorious palace where he dwells. And when the clιaunt was ended I bestowed a full benediction, which he received with all humility.”
An entry in the Chinese annals fixes the year of Marignolli’s presentation by its mention of the arrival of the great horses from the kingdom of Fulang (Farang or Europe), one of which was 11 feet 6 inches in length, and 6 feet 8 inches high, and black all over!
Marignolli stayed at Peking or Cambalec three or four years, after which he travelled through eastern China to Zayton or Chinchew (7.v.), quitting China apparently in December 1347, and reaching Columbum (Kaulam or Quilon in Malabar) in Easter week of 1348. At this place he found a church of the Latin communion, probably founded by Jordanus of Séverac, who had been consecrated bishop of Columbum by Pope John XXII. in 1328. Here Marignolli remained sixteen months, after which he proceeded on what seems a most devious voyage. First he visited the shrine of St Thomas near the modern Madras, and then proceeded to what he calls the kingdom of Saba, and identifies with the Sheba of Scripture, but which seems from various particulars to have been Java. Taking ship again for Malabar on his way to Europe, he encountered great storms, of which he gives an imaginative account :—
. . . . “The sea as if in flames, and fire-spitting dragons flying by, which, as they passed, slew persons on board the other junks, whilst ours remained untouched, by God’s grace, and by virtue of the Body of Christ which I carried with me, and through the merits of the glorious Virgin and of St Clare.”
They found shelter in the little port of Pervilis (Beru-wala or Berberyn) in the south-west of Ceylon; but here the legate fell into the hands of “a certain tyrant Coya Jan (Khoja Jahân), an eunuch and an accursed Saracen,” who professed to treat him with all deference, but detained him four months, and plundered all the gifts and Eastern rarities that he was carrying home. This detention in “Seyllan” enables Marignolli to give a variety of curious particulars regarding Adam’s Peak and other marvels. After this we have only fragmentary notices, showing that his route to Europe lay by Ormuz, the ruins of Babel, Baghdad, Mosul, Aleppo (“where there were many Christians who dressed after the Latin fashion, and spoke a language very near the French; at any rate like the French of Cyprus ”), and thence to Damascus and Jerusalem. In 1353 he arrived at Avignon, and delivered a letter from the great khan to Pope Innocent VI. In the following year the emperor Charles IV., on a visit to Italy, made Marignolli one of his chaplains. Soon after, the pope made him bishop of Bisignano; but he seems to have been in no hurry to reside there. He appears to have accompanied the emperor to Prague; in 1356 he is found acting as envoy to the pope from Florence; and in 1357 he is at Bologna. We know not when he died. The last trace of Marignolli is a letter addressed to him, which was found last century among the records in the Chapter Library at Prague. The writer is an unnamed bishop of Armagh, easily identified with Richard Fitz Ralph, a strenuous foe of the Franciscans, who had broken lances in controversy with Ockham and Burley. The letter implies that some intention had been intimated from Avignon of sending Marignolli to Ireland in connexion with matters then in debate. The wrath of Fitz Ralph is sorely stirred at this, and he brandishes the shillelah in a style of energetic metaphor very like what we have been used to from like quarters in later days.
Fitz Ralph’s contemptuous language had probably a good deal of foundation. The fragmentary notes of Marignolli’s Eastern travels often contain most vivid remembrance and graphic description, but combined with an incontinent vanity, and an incoherent lapse from one thing to another, matched by nothing in literature but the conversation of Mrs Nickleby. They have no claim to be called a narrative, and it is with no small pains that anything like a narrative can be pieced out of them. Indeed the mode in which they were elicited curiously illustrates how little mediaeval travellers thought of publication. The emperor Charles, instead of urging his chaplain to write a history of his vast journeys, set him to the repugnant task of recasting the annals of Bohemia; and he consoled himself by salting the insipid stuff by interpolations, à propos de bottes, of his recollections of Asiatic travel.
Nobody seems to have noticed the work till 1768, when the chronicle was published in vol. ii. of the Monumenta Hist. Bohemias nusquam antehac edita by Father Gelasius Dobner. But, though Marignolli was thus at last in type, no one seems to have read him till 1820, when an interesting paper on his travels was published by J. G. Meinert. The late Professor Kunstmann of Μunich also devoted to the subject one of a series of very intelligent papers on the ecclesiastical travellers of the Middle Ages. And the whole of the passages bearing on the journey were excerpted, translated, and commented on by Col. H. Yule in a collection printed in 1866.
Monumenta Historica, <fcc., collegit, <fcc., P. Gelasius Dobner a S. Catherin», tom. ii., Prague, 1768; Meinert, in Abhandl. der K. Böhm. Gesellsch. der Wîss«m- schaften, vii.; Kunstmann, in Historische Politische Blättern von Phillips und Görres, Bd. xxxviii. pp. 7θi,793, Munich, 1859; Wadding, Annales Minorum, vii.; Sbaralea, Supplent. et Castigatio ad Scriptores Trium Ordd. S. Francisci a Waddingo, Rome, 1806; Cathay and the Way Thither, Hak. Soc., 1866.
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