Odoric of Pordenone

Odoric of Pordenone, known in Italian as Odorico da Pordenone and sometimes called Odoric of Friuli, was a Franciscan missionary and traveler whose narrative of Asia became a principal medieval European source on India, Southeast Asia, and China. He was born in the late thirteenth century at Villanova, near Pordenone in Friuli, a region then subject to the Patriarchate of Aquileia. Later tradition gives his family the surname Mattiussi. He entered the Order of Friars Minor at Udine in his youth and lived for a time as a hermit and preacher in northern Italy, acquiring a reputation for severe asceticism before being sent abroad.

His eastern journey, begun in the 1310s, followed routes already used by Franciscan and Dominican missionaries under Mongol rule. From the Black Sea he crossed Armenia and Persia, sojourning at Franciscan houses such as that at Tabriz, and reached the Persian Gulf. Sailing from Hormuz, he came to western India and landed at Thane, where in 1321 four Franciscans, including Thomas of Tolentino, had been put to death. Odoric collected their relics and continued down the Indian coast to Malabar and to Ceylon, then through the island world of Sumatra and Java and along the mainland of Champa, before entering China at the port of Canton. He proceeded by inland stages to the Yuan capital, Khanbaliq, the present Beijing.

There he remained for about three years in the Franciscan community that had grown up around John of Montecorvino, whom the papacy had named archbishop of Khanbaliq. Odoric’s later account describes the imperial court, the organization of the Mongol postal system, Chinese cities, customs, and religions, and the presence of Nestorian Christians and other communities. Returning westward, he traveled through the interior of Asia and included in his narrative a description of Tibet and of a great city generally identified as Lhasa, a notice that has led many historians to treat him as one of the earliest European visitors to report that region. He arrived back in Italy about 1330.

In May 1330, at the Franciscan house in Padua, he dictated his recollections to the friar William of Solagna. The resulting Relatio, also called the Itinerarium, was soon copied widely in Latin and translated into French, Italian, and other languages; it was among the works later excerpted and recast in the popular Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Odoric set out for the papal court at Avignon, apparently to report on the missions, but he fell ill and died at Udine on 14 January 1331. He was buried in the Franciscan church of Udine, where a cult formed around his tomb amid reports of miracles. Pope Benedict XIV confirmed that cult in 1755. Odoric is venerated as Blessed, with liturgical commemoration on 14 January, and is especially associated with Pordenone and with the medieval Franciscan missions to Asia.