Jordanus of Séverac

1290-1354

French Missionary

A Dominican missionary to India, Jordanus of Séverac was the first European to visit that region since Giovanni da Montecorvino (1246-1328) landed on the subcontinent some 30 years before. He produced an account of his experiences in the East,Mirabilia descripta, (Description of marvels), which discusses Armenia, Persia, and India, as well as lands Jordanus himself had not actually visited. He was the first writer to identify Prester John as the emperor of Ethiopia, thus adding a key aspect to a legend that fascinated Europe—and drove much of Europeans' exploration efforts—from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.

It appears that Jordanus spent the early part of his career serving as a Dominican missionary in Persia; then in 1320 or 1321, he and a group of four others set out by boat for China. They intended to join the Catholic mission established years earlier by John of Montecorvino, and India was to be only a stopover along the way. Events took a different turn when they reached the sub-continent, however.

The first change of plans came when they were forced to land at Thana near present-day Mumbai or Bombay. They had hoped to land further south on the Malabar or western coast of India, to visit the home of Christians whose ancestors had supposedly been converted by the disciple Thomas. Storms, however, drove them to Thana, where they were met by a group of Nestorians, eastern Christians whose sect had broken with the mainstream church nine centuries before. Because Jordanus spoke Farsi or Persian, then an important trade language in the region, the Nestorians asked him to come with them to the city of Broach as an interpreter. So he did, and while he was away, a group of Muslim zealots attacked and killed the other four missionaries.

Alone now, Jordanus went to Surat, where the putative first Christian missionary to India, St. Thomas, had allegedly landed many centuries earlier. In the months and years that followed, Jordanus wrote two of the three important documents (the third being the Mirabilia descripta itself) to emerge from his time in India. These were two letters to the Dominican missionaries in Persia, the first dated October 12, 1321, and the second January 24, 1323. They are painful accounts of a lonely man, stranded in an alien country and forced to make the best of a situation in which he could never be entirely certain who his friends were.

Jordanus spent more than a decade in India, and in 1330 the pope declared him bishop of Columbum, or Kulam, on the southern tip of the subcontinent. During the early 1330s, he returned to Europe, where he wrote the Mirabilia descripta. The book, though it is not lengthy, offers detailed recollections of the lands he had visited, accounts that include the first written descriptions of numerous plant and animal species.

Other aspects of Jordanus's narrative are less reliable. This is particularly the case in those sections where he discussed areas he never actually visited, such as the East Indies and Indochina. He did, however, go to great pains to remind readers that the information he provided was the product of hearsay and not direct experience.

From European merchants he had met in India, Jordanus heard accounts of what geographers of the time commonly referred to as a distant part of India itself: Ethiopia. Though the two regions are in fact thousands of miles apart, the warm climates and the dark skin of the inhabitants convinced Europeans that they were somehow connected, and thus Jordanus referred to Ethiopia, where he said he hoped to one day go on a missionary journey, as "the Third India."

In his discussion of "the Third India," Jordanus identified the emperor of the Ethiopians with Prester John. The latter was a mythical Christian king whose alleged existence had first been rumored in the mid-twelfth century. For some time thereafter, Europeans believed that Prester John's wealthy kingdom, a land full of bizarre plants, animals, and minerals, was in central Asia. Jordanus was the first to direct the quest for Prester John to Africa, opening a new chapter in the saga. Many years later, when Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) inaugurated the Renaissance era of exploration by sending Portuguese mariners southward to Africa, he would be driven in part by a desire to find the lands of Prester John.

JUDSON KNIGHT