Giovanni de Marignolli
Giovanni de Marignolli , also Johannes von Marignola (* around 1290 in Florence , Italy , † after 1357), was an Italian Franciscan , Asia missionary , papal legate and bishop .
Live and act
Nothing is known about Marignolli's early life. In the monastery of Santa Croce in Florence he received the habit of the Franciscans and later worked as a lecturer for theology at the Franciscan Studies in Bologna .
Pope Benedict XII. appointed him papal legate and in 1338, after a Chinese delegation appeared in Avignon, sent him with other Franciscans to the court of the Emperor of China. Giovanni de Marignolli left Avignon in December 1338 and arrived in Naples on February 10, 1339 . From there he sailed eastwards and met on May 1st at the court of the Eastern Roman emperor Andronikos III. a. Here he negotiated on a papal mandate for a church union with the West. Then he traveled through the Crimea to the country of Uzbek , where he wrote Uzbek Khan († 1342) apostolic letters from Pope Benedict XII. delivered. In 1340 the Franciscan, led by an escort from the Khan, went to Armalek in the Afghan province of Herat , where he arrived in the winter of the year. At the end of 1341 he crossed the Gobi desert and went to Beijing, to the imperial court; here Toghan Timur received him with great honor.
After 3 years in Beijing , Marignolli drove partly overland, partly by sea, to southern India, to the Malabar coast , where he arrived in the city of Kollam (Quilon) on Palm Sunday 1348 . Here he found a Latin Christian community, which he looked after for a year and four months and whose church he decorated with paintings before he traveled on. In addition, to commemorate his stay there, he erected a marble column crowned by a cross with Indian and Latin inscriptions, as well as the papal and his own coat of arms, which is attested by the Dutch clergyman Philipp Baldaeus in 1662, at that time - more than 200 years after its construction - but was attributed to St. Thomas by the local believers.
He traveled from Quilon to Ceylon and even seems to have been to Java and Sumatra before returning to the Indian Coromandel coast , returning by sea to Quilon and embarking west. The Franciscan's path led back over the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf to Syria, Palestine and Egypt, from where he headed for Naples again and arrived there in 1353. From there he went to his hometown of Florence and finally traveled to the papal court of Avignon to report and deliver a letter to Uzbek Khan.
In March 1354 Pope Innocent VI appointed the religious to the bishop of Bisignano in Calabria. Apparently he never took up this office, but rather Emperor Charles IV chose him in the same year, during a stay in Italy, as his court chaplain and took him with him to Prague . 1357 Giovanni Marignolli is mentioned as a historian in the service of the ruler. Before 1359 he wrote the work "Chronicon Bohemorum" (History of Bohemia) on his behalf , which also contains many interwoven memories of his own mission to Asia and is therefore of great value in terms of culture and church history. The Marignollis script was completely forgotten, was only rediscovered in the 18th century and first published by Father Gelasius Dobner in his “Monumenta Bohemiae nusquam” (1768).
The time and place of death of Giovanni Marignolli are not known.
literature
- Girolamo Golubovich: Article Giovanni de Marignolli , in: The Catholic Encyclopedia , Volume 16 (Index), New York, 1914; Complete scan of the lexicon entry
- Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken : The universal historical ideas of Johann von Marignola OFM. The only medieval world chronicler with knowledge of the Far East. In: Archive for Cultural History , ed. by Fritz Wagner, Arno Borst and Herbert Grundmann, Volume 49, Böhlau-Verlag Cologne and Graz, 1967, pp. 297–339.
- Igor de Rachewiltz: Papal envoys to the great khans , Stanford University Press, 1971, ISBN 0-8047-0770-7 ; Excerpts from the missionary trip of Giovanni de Marignolli
- Ingrid Baumgärtner : Marignolli, Giovanni de (Article in: Lexikon des Mittelalters. VI: Lukasbilder bis Plantagenêt , JB Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung and Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag GmbH, Stuttgart 1993 [Licensed edition for Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, no year, ISBN 978-3- 534-22804-1 , column 292])
- Claudia von Collani: Giovanni de Marignolli. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 3, Bautz, Herzberg 1992, ISBN 3-88309-035-2 , Sp. 479-480.
- Paolo Evangelisti: Marignolli, Giovanni de '(Giovanni di Marignola, Giovanni da Firenze, Giovanni di S. Lorenzo). In: Mario Caravale (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 70: Marcora – Marsilio. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 2007, pp. 363-365.
Web links
- Giovanni de Marignolli in the repertory "Historical Sources of the German Middle Ages"
- Publications on Giovanni de 'Marignolli in the Opac of the Regesta Imperii
- Website about the travel reports of Giovanni de Marignolli (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ On Armalek in Afghanistan
- ↑ Report of the missionary Giovanni de Marignolli about his visit to Quilon in 1348
- ↑ Short biography of Philipp Baldaeus ( Memento from September 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ On the memorial column of the papal legate Giovanni de Marignolli, from 1348
- ↑ The Dutch Baldaeus attests to the column in 1662 (footnote at the bottom of the page)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Giovanni de Marignolli |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | John of Marignolli; Giovanni di Marignola; Giovanni da Firenze; Giovanni di S. Lorenzo |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian Franciscan Bishop, Papal Legate, Imperial Chancellor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1290 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Florence |
| DATE OF DEATH | after 1357 |