Brother Jordan of Severac

HE late Monsieur Henri Cordier’s parting gift to students of the East was his edition of the M irahilia of the

Dominican Brother Jordan of Severac. This was nothing less than a complete facsimile of the unique manuscript of the M irahilia which is now in the British Museum. The facsimile is accompanied with an Introduction, a French translation and notes, and a transcript of the Latin text.1 The transcript is little more than a copy of that of 1839,2 and students will be wise to read the Latin text from the facsimile. But it is not my purpose here to review or criticize the book. Cordier, like Yule before him, thought it worth while to print in addition to the M irahilia such other fragments of Jordan’s writing as survive. Yule published versions of two letters by Jordan in Cathay and the W ay Thither, 1866, and Cordier prints the Latin text of these same letters (one of them twice over) in his Notes Preliminaires and adds to them two texts of another letter which is attributed first to Bartholomew, Custos of Tauris, and secondly to Francis of Pisa. All these texts are taken at second-hand from the Biblioteca Biobibliografica della Terra Santa by G. Golubovich, O.S.F. These four letters, which may in fact be reduced to two and

part of a third, are concerned with the martyrdom of four Franciscan Brothers at Tana near Bombay in April, 1321. This martyrdom seems to have roused extraordinary interest at the time. It is described at length by Odoric, who passed Tana shortly afterwards and carried some of the bones of the Martyrs to Ch'iian-chou in China for burial. There is a long account (attributed to Odoric) in the unpublished Chronicle from which the letters of John of Monte Corvino are taken; a short and seemingly independent account is to be found in the Chronicle of Paulinus of Venice. The earliest account to reach the West was that given by Bartholomew, who enclosed a copy of Jordan’s first letter and reported the story as told him by Jordan’s messenger, a young Genoese merchant. Finally the longest account of all is in an appendix to the Chronica Generalium Ministrorum Ordinis Fratrum Minorum, and of this account nearly half consists of extracts from letters of “ Brother Jordan the Preacher ’ ’J These extracts reached the compiler of the

Chronicles in a letter from Francis of Pisa, as will be seen below, but there seems to be no reason to doubt that they are genuine extracts from letters written by Jordan from India, and they are transcribed here from photographs of the Assisi MS. 329 which I owe to the kindness of the Franciscan Fathers M. Bihl of Quaracchi and E. Tannitto of Assisi.