Early Mendicant Mission in the New World: Discourses, Experiments, Realities

This contribution starts out with discussing some of the preconditions that set the stage for thinking about New World mission and the role of the mendicant orders in it, which was partially self-assigned and partially expected. Among other things, these preconditions include the impact of mendicant master narratives of conversion and mission to the infidel from the later medieval period, the experiences with reconquista, and the confrontations with Muslims and Jews in newly conquered territories in Spain and North Africa. Against this background, this contribution provides a preliminary sketch of the nature of early mendicant missions in the New World, and their transformation under influence of local circumstances and the legacy of the Observant pastoral revolution. The chronological hinge point in this narrative is the papacy of Leo X, during which (partly inspired by the Libellus ad Leonem and the decrees of the Fifth Lateran Council) solutions that freed much needed pastoral and missionary energy were enforced on vying factions within the Franciscan order.¹

Preconditions

A good starting point for our evaluation is the late medieval hagiographical missionary discourse prevalent in texts associated with the mendicant orders. On the one hand, this discourse emphasized the efficacy of mendicant missionary endeavors – be it the supposed conversion of the Egyptian sultan by Francis of Assisi himself, or the mass baptisms mentioned in the context of mendicant mission among the Mongols – and on the other, the heroics of missionary martyrdom. Ironically, the latter was more concerned with the vilification and damnation of the non-Christian other than with a missionary engagement with an aim of conversion. Much has been made of Francis’s so-called ecumenical encounter with the sultan at Damietta in 1221, and the proverbial peaceful character of Franciscan mission, which found its most influential “maximalist” historical representation in the work of Randolph Daniel and a number of modern Franciscan scholars.²

This prominent scholarly approach is more indicative of a desire to find historical precedents for current concerns about interreligious dialogue than a serious impartial scholarly engagement with the sources and the master narratives of conversion and mission promoted in them. It is highly doubtful that Francis and the early Franciscans had a significant missionary impact on the Muslims in Northwestern Africa and Egypt. A close examination of the mendicant missions in Central and East Asia in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as the late medieval and early modern missions in Egypt and Palestine during the Ottoman period shows that – a few exceptions along the Hungarian frontier (Cumans), among the Golden Horde, in China and in later fifteenth century Congo notwithstanding – the mendicant missionaries outside Europe focused predominantly on Christians: either Catholic merchants, soldiers and slaves living and working in Muslim lands, or minority non-Catholic Christian groups (Greek Orthodox Christians, Nestorians, Jacobites, Egyptian Copts etc.) rather than Muslims or other non-Christians. Contrary to the accepted scholarly narrative, which hails the missionary successes among the infidel, we are dealing with missionary efforts among groups that by and large were already acquainted with central tenets of the Christian faith.³

Turning to the Iberian peninsula, we can see that indepth missionary engagement with Muslims and Jews was also much more limited and less efficacious than is suggested by surviving mendicant hagiographic texts and claimed by a number of modern scholars. Even when these “infidels” came under political control of Christian monarchs, which would ensure the safety of missionaries who might try to convert them, there was no persistent mendicant missionary effort to reach out to them. At times, there was a huge polemic engagement with Judaism and Islam but, as Robin Vose has pointed out quite nicely in his book on Dominican mission and apostolate in the medieval crown of Aragon, this was primarily geared towards strengthening the doctrinal purity of Christians living in close proximity to Muslims and Jews, rather than towards a genuine missionary interaction with Muslim and Jewish populations. In fact, for a very long time there was very little attempt to convert the non-Christian population. The mendicants were largely convinced of...