Giovanni de' Marignolli
Giovanni de Marignolli, John de Marignolli or John of Marignola (* 1290 in Florence, Italy, † after 1357 ) was an Italian Franciscan, Asia missionary, Pontifical Legate and Bishop.
Life and work
About Marignollis early life nothing is known. In the monastery of Santa Croce in Florence, he received the habit of the Franciscans and later had a professor a professor of theology at the University of Bologna.
Pope Benedict XII. appointed him papal legates, and sent him in 1338, after the release of a Chinese delegation in Avignon, with other Franciscans to the court of the Emperor of China. Apparently, he got before the start of this mission already a bishop. In December 1338 Giovanni de Marignolli Avignon left and arrived in Naples on February 10, 1339 at. From there he sailed eastward and met on May 1 at the court of the Eastern Roman Emperor Andronikos III. one. Here he negotiated in papal order for a church union with the West. He then traveled through the Crimea to the land Uzbek, where he Uzbek Khan († 1342 ) apostolic epistles Pope Benedict XII. brought. 1340 went to the Franciscans, led by an escort of the Khan, after Armalek in the Afghan province of Herat, where he arrived in the winter of the year. 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 went partly over land and partly by sea, to South India, on the Malabar coast, where he arrived on Palm Sunday 1348 in the town of Kollam ( Quilon). There he found a Latin Christian community, which he supervised a year and four months and whose church he embellished with paintings before he traveled. He also erected to commemorate his stay there one of a cross crowned marble column with Indian and Latin inscription, and the papal and his own coat of arms, which is attested even in 1662 by the Dutch clergyman Philip Baldaeus, at that time - over 200 years after its construction - but was attributed by the local believers to St. Thomas.
He traveled from Quilon out to Ceylon and even seems to have been before he went back to the Indian Coromandel Coast, went by sea back to Quilon and embarked to the West in Java and Sumatra. About the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the path of the Franciscan led back to Syria, Palestine and Egypt, from where he was heading back Naples and arrived there in 1353. From there he went to his hometown of Florence and eventually traveled to the papal court of Avignon to report to report and hand over a letter Uzbek Khan.
In March 1354, Pope Innocent VI. the religious Bishop of Bisignano in Calabria. Apparently, he never came to this office, but Emperor Charles IV chose him in the same year with a stay in Italy, to his chaplain, and took him with him to Prague. 1357 Giovanni Marignolli is named as chancellor and historian in the service of the ruler. Around 1360, he wrote on his behalf in the work " Chronicon Bohemiae " ( history of Bohemia ), which also contains many interwoven memories of his own mission Asia and therefore cultural and church history is of great value. The font Marignollis was completely forgotten, was rediscovered only in the 18th century and re-released for the first time by Father Gelasius Dobner in his " Monumenta Bohemiae nusquam " ( 1768).
Time of death and place of Giovanni Marignolli are not known.