Table of Contents
Bartholomew was writing and teaching in the 1220s and ’30s, only a few years after the death of St Francis. As a Franciscan lector, he had the task of transmitting an ideal of homeless mendicancy in town and countryside without appearing to challenge the orthodox ideal of a religious life. Before this, the Benedictine ideal of separation from the world through monastic enclosure had underpinned religious life for five centuries. Although the Minorites shared vows and preaching objectives with their colleagues in the Benedictine and Cistercian Orders, the early years of Francis’ Order were nevertheless politically precarious as factions differed in the interpretation of Franciscan poverty and their involvement with laity aroused disapproval. Because Francis had shunned the security of religious enclosure, his ministry appeared to some to be an unseemly immersion in the secular world and its temptations.[2]
This chapter looks at how Bartholomew weaves into his work a persistent strand of encouragement and information about physical travel across land and sea among alien races, and about spiritual pilgrimage through worldly life, through the subtle use of stories and images taken from both Christian and pagan sources. In this capacity, Bartholomew’s work can be seen as being closely allied to contemporary graphic compilations or mappaemundi. Like the maps, ‘Properties’ testifies to contemporary interest in the extent of Christendom and the known pagan lands, the perceived limits of the physical world, and in rumoured places and peoples existing beyond them, perhaps awaiting salvation. Both kinds of text enabled the preacher or reader to travel in spirit to both centre and rim of Christendom.
The Fourth Crusade (1204) to the Seventh (1270) took place during Bartholomew’s lifetime. The actuality of the Holy Land inspired people to travel towards the centre of Christendom as crusaders or pilgrims; either literally, or vicariously by means of devotional texts. In addition, known pagan lands beyond the borders of Christendom were the focus of crusade and mission, inspiring movement in a direction away from the Mediterranean centres.[3] This chapter examines ‘Properties’ as a guide and textual map to peoples and places and to survival in the world. It looks at how Bartholomew builds upon the eschatological theme of journeying and labour in ‘Properties’, discussed in the previous chapter, to create a densely illustrated image of the world in senses described by Meier: as source of information, site of world history and course of preparation for Judgement.
The first task, though, is to summarise the context of expansion and mission in which Bartholomew was working. The historical record of mission, pilgrimage and crusade shows that in Bartholomew's time certain kinds of travel were a legitimate part of the religious life.[4] The record shows a double focus on Christendom: at its heart in Jerusalem and Rome, sites of crusade, pilgrimage and political struggle; and at its fringes where expansion and control were issues for the church. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, at which Innocent III authorised the Order of Preachers under Dominic and the Minorites under Francis, had demonstrated papal commitment to action against heretics in Europe and infidels abroad. The church was supporting the forceful conversion of Cathar heretics in southern France (initially by Cistercians) as well as a crusade against the Moslem presence in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The church was also becoming aware that the Mongol empire was expanding westward.[5] At the Franciscan General Chapter of 1219, groups of friars had assembled to travel to Germany and eastern Europe, Spain and north Africa.[6] In the 1220s, Francis and Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre, hoped to undertake conversion of the Moslem world and in 1223 Pope Gregory IX had sent Franciscan envoys to meet both Moslem and Mongol rulers.[7]
Crusades against the Cathars and Slavs would take preachers into barely penetrated regions in the mountain areas of Europe as well as to the fringes of the unknown lands to the east. The steppes of Russia, the Crimean peninsula, Armenia and the Caucasus were all zones of missionary activity by the mid 1240s.[8] Dominic’s main concern became the Cathars in southern France, but Dominican preachers were also involved, from before 1221, in converting the Prussians, Hungarians and Russians. While the Dominicans were trained clerics who met the Cathars with their own weapons of scholarship and reasoned argument, the Franciscans were strongly associated with the laity and the towns, and used affective, dramatic methods and the example of their own poverty to teach the Gospel.[9]
The figure of Francis himself provided followers with the ideal of an evangelist who confronted the dangers of seas and mountains in a physically frail body and received divine confirmation of Christ-like power. In 1219-20 Francis, sick and nearly blind, had made an arduous journey across the Mediterranean on a mission to convert the Moslem Sultan, travelling to Ancona, Crete, Cyprus and Egypt.[10] He died in 1226, and his supposed feats immediately became part of the body of legend that attached to his sanctified image. The belief persisted that he had achieved a light-filled apotheosis attended by Seraphim, and received miraculous stigmata, on Monte Verna in Italy.[11]
John of Plano Carpini, an early associate of Francis of Assisi who had taken a leading part in the establishment of the Order, became Guardian of the new province of Saxony in 1222. Later, according to his companion and chronicler Giordino of Giano, he sent friars all over northern and eastern Europe, to Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Denmark and Norway. With his companion, Lawrence of Portugal, Carpini himself left Lyons in April 1245 as envoy of the Apostolic See to the Tartars and other nations of the east. He returned to Lyons in November 1248 and shortly afterwards began writing his Historia Mongolorum.[12] Louis IX sent two more Franciscans, William of Rubruck and Bartholomew of Cremona, from Acre to Mongolia in 1253 in the hope of gaining Mongol conversions and support against the Moslem world.[13] Although Carpini and Rubruck were travelling eastwards close to the time when Bartholomew was compiling ‘Properties’, their travel accounts did not circulate until after the middle of the century and would not have been available in time for inclusion. For us today, they form a background to the life of Bartholomew and of those for whom he wrote; they also testify to an increasing attention to the fringes as well as the heart of Christendom during those years.
The belief that Christians lived in the fourth or last age of the world, and that the age would soon end as prophesied, added an additional sense of urgency to the idea of global conversion. While missions endorsed by the pope may have been politically motivated they could be justified in scriptural terms as helping to fulfil the prophecy of St John in Revelation: ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.’ Meanwhile, the properties of earth, water and weather in the existing sinful world were realities with which the missionary preacher might have to contend.