John de Marignolli

Following news the death of John de Montecorvino as Archbishop of Cambalec (Beijing) in 1328, Pope John appointed a successor, one Friar Nicholas, and dispatched a party of friars to accompany him on his journey to China. This party reached no further than Armalec (Almaliq), and were never heard from again, with the Bishopric of Cambalec thus expiring. ^[1] However, in response to the arrival of Mongol emissaries to Avignon in 1338, bearing letters from the Khan himself, Pope Benedict XII was compelled to send a reply, and dispatch a second successor mission to Montecorvini in order to deliver it.^[2]

Another Franciscan friar from Florence, one John de Marignolli, was chosen for the task. Departing Avignon in 1338 and arriving in Beijing four years later, Marignolli's mission was a success. Following his audience with the Khan, however, Marignolli's return journey took a wild and meandering path across south Asia and the Middle East for over a decade, and he did not arrive back in Avignon until 1353.

The original account of Marignolli's fantastical travels is found, very fragmentarily, in his Bohemian Chronicle, a historical anthology commissioned by Charles IV, which was compiled by Marignolli two years after his return to France. Scattered throughout his long-winded attempts at chronicling the history of the world from the Biblical creation through the present day, he makes several irregular mentions of his own personal travel experiences, although scarcely in the form of an actual narrative: "Marignolli’s notices of his travels have no proper claim to the title of a narrative, and indeed the construction of a narrative out of them is a task something like that of raising a geological theory out of piecemeal observations of strata and the study of scattered organic remains."^[4] The general incoherence and haziness of the entire tale may be attributed to his advanced age at the time of writing, and the result is that Marignolli's travels went undected by scholars until 1768, when the Chronicle was reprinted by Dobner^[5], and they have been translated into English only once, by Yule in 1866, who took great pains to parse out Marignolli's actual itenerary.

Departing Avignon in December of 1338, Marignolli's traveling party stopped in Naples the following February to meet up with the visiting "Tartar" (Mongol) emissaries, and sailed thence to Constantinople, for a brief meeting with the Byzantine Emperor. By June, the party continued across the Black Sea to Caffa, a port in Crimea, and there began their overland journey across the Silk Road. Their first stop in the Mongol world was the court of Özbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde, in Sarai. The following spring, in 1340, Özbeg sent them onward to Armalec (Almaliq), capital of the Chagatai Khanate. Having constructed a church here and spread the word of Christianity for about a year, Marignolli and his party crossed the Gobi Desert en route to Cambalec (Khanbaliq, modern Beijing), by way of Kamil (Hami), of which he offers no description. In the summer of 1342, Marignolli was received by the court of Toghon Temür, last Khan of the Yuan dynasty, and his arrival is verified by the Chinese Annals, which curiously make no mention of him by name, instead focusing on the magnificent horses his party had brought.

After several years' stay with the Khan, Marignolli evidently resolved to continue looking for other Christian communities in Asia instead of returning promptly to the Pope. He departed Cambalec in 1347, passing southward through the heartland of China and sailing out for India from the port city of Zayton (near modern Quanzhou)^[6]. He arrived at Columbum, on the Malabar coast along the southwestern tip of India, around Easter of 1348, and here encountered an existing Catholic church of St. George, with which he stayed for several months. He then makes a brief visit to the Cathedral of St. Thomas near Madras, of which he offers an extensive description of the pepper trade there, and then sets sail again, aiming towards Ceylon. It is at this point that his account becomes very difficult to match up to reality.

Having been caught in a great storm, lost and adrift on the Indian Ocean, Marignolli eventually winds up in a place he calls "Saba", which, being ruled at that time by a queen, he associates with the Biblical domain of the Queen of Sheba. Various scholars have thrown their most valiant efforts at disentangling his fragmentary descriptions of this "Saba", which chiefly appear throughout a lengthy section of quasi-Biblical history, and the most readily accepted conclusion is that he had somehow ended up on the island of Java.^[7][8]

Quitting the mystical land of Saba, Marignolli ultimately arrives in Ceylon at Pervilis in May of 1349, where he and his party were promptly detained, defrauded and robbed by a local ruler, "Coja Jaan" (Khoja Jahan). It is here that Marignolli ultimately departs from reality altogether: after a description of local Buddhist practices and sites on the mountain of "Zindan Baba" (Adam's Peak), which he claims to have visited but likely did not actually climb, he launches into a lengthy description of what he believes to be the literal Biblical Paradise, located approximately 40 miles further inland from said mountain. Regrettably, he was not able to access this area in person.

Marignolli provides no further information whatsoever on how he managed to return to Europe from Ceylon, and the points indicated on the map below as comprising his return through the Middle East are based only on a single-sentence note by Yule, attributed therein only to "very slight and incidental notices".^[9] After returning to Avignon in 1353 via stopovers in Rome and possibly Naples and Florence, Marignolli finally delivered unto the current Pope his decade-old replies from the Khan, whose control over China had already begun to falter by that time. The rest of his life was spent as the Bishop of Bisignano, acting as a Papal envoy around Europe and as the historian of Emperor Charles IV; his date of death is unknown.

John de Marignolli is not to be confused with the later traveller John de Marginolli, whose account is only marginally relevant to the study of the Silk Road.

Map of Marignolli's Route