The Catholic Church developed an understanding of its universality over the course of two millennia, but some centuries, or even decades, were critical turning points. In these moments, Catholics realized the scope of bringing the Gospel to all nations and came to terms with the need to make the Faith more understandable to non-European cultures. One such crucial moment came in the 16th century, in the aftermath of the age of discoveries. However, a whole 250 years earlier, the Church had already gone through a period of intense, albeit short-lived, contact with mysterious lands and previously unknown peoples.
Initially, the 13th-century Mongol expansion across Eurasia caused panic in Christendom. Mongol armies attacked Eastern Europe, crushing Hungarian and Polish defenses, massacring civilians, and threatening an invasion of Italy. But from the 1240s, the popes began sending missions to the East, taking advantage of the possibility to travel through Mongol territories and all the way to East Asia. It was the age of Marco Polo and other long-distance merchants, but also of curious and adventurous Catholic churchmen. This first age of global mission came to an end relatively soon, with the collapse of the Mongol order between the 1330s and the 1350s. But the Franciscan and Dominican friars who visited Eastern lands during this century had to make sense of the great variety of landscapes and human geographies that they encountered. At the same time, they had to come up quite independently with new evangelization strategies, since reliable and prompt communications with Europe were impossible. One of these missionaries was Giovanni da Montecorvino (1247-1328), who became the first Archbishop of Khān bālīq (Beijing).
In response to a mission coming from Mongol-ruled Yuan China, in 1289, Pope Nicholas IV decided to send to the East the Franciscan friar Giovanni, together with a Dominican companion named Niccolò da Pistoia. After a long and difficult journey, which brought him to Persia and then to Southern India, Giovanni reached China in 1293. He was given a seat at the imperial court and allowed to build a church in the capital. We know of the progress and setbacks of his mission from two letters that he wrote in 1305 and 1306. Giovanni reflected for the very first time on how to apply the universality of the Gospel in a context that was not only non-European but also incredibly distant from Rome. He had to take decisions autonomously and experiment with evangelization strategies that would render the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church attractive and comprehensible for the Chinese, the Mongols, and the many other nations living at court and in the busy streets of Beijing.
I cannot give a comprehensive summary and commentary of Giovanni’s life and work, but a few highlights can reveal a very interesting early episode in the globalization of Catholicism. First of all, Giovanni studied some of the local languages, and in particular the “Tartar” language, mastering it so well that he translated the New Testament and the Psalms. In addition, the Franciscan ordered the production of six carved images representing key moments in the history of salvation, taken from both the Old Testament and the New Testament and with explanations in several languages. Giovanni therefore juxtaposed preaching and the administration of the sacraments with the adaptation of biblical and theological terms to the linguistic and philosophical traditions of the many Asian peoples visiting the Mongol court, while deploying the communicative power of visual, artistic tools.
This means that as early as the 14th century the Catholic Church entered East Asia through the mission of its most recent religious orders. In particular, several followers of St. Francis of Assisi reached central Asian and East Asian cities such as Almalyq (near today’s Yining) and Zayton (Quanzhou). Inspired by a new attitude towards the needs of the poor and the urban masses in Europe, the friar minors were able to reflect intelligently on the specific challenges of missions across Eurasia, anticipating some of the experiments later associated with the Jesuit missions to Japan and Ming China.
After receiving the letters penned by Giovanni, Pope Clement V praised his missionary efforts and elevated him to the role of Archbishop. Surely, there are elements of this mission that sound bizarre to our ears, but that are nonetheless worth briefly mentioning. Finding himself alone, after the death of his companion Niccolò in India, Giovanni decided to gradually buy about 150 children (most likely from poor local Chinese families). Over the course of several years, the Franciscan not only baptized these young boys, but he also taught them how to read and write, how to sing hymns, as well as Latin and Greek.
Another intriguing aspect of Giovanni’s mission is that he became aware of the spatial and musical dimensions of his spiritual work. Although he had a very difficult relation with “Nestorian” Christians at court, who allegedly obstructed him by spreading lies on his identity, the Franciscan recalls that he baptized more than 5,000 people and was able to build a second church, complete with enclosure walls, dormitories, and offices.
But how exactly did Giovanni attract East Asian converts to the Faith? According to his letters, many Chinese people, and the emperor himself, were attracted simply by the physical presence of the Catholic church, with its large red cross and beautiful courts, and by the sacred music and chants that filtered through its windows and doors.
The story of Montecorvino, who dedicated so many years of his life to the establishment of a Catholic community in China, is a reminder that the Church has always paid attention to its mission to bring the Gospel to all nations. Before 20th-century missionary networks—and even before the Jesuits’ early modern missions, built by taking advantage of Iberian empire-building and trade—medieval Catholic friars had already faced the problems of language barriers and distance, and they had already responded inventively to specific historical and cultural circumstances at the frontiers of the known world.
Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash
