Riccoldo da Monte Croce’s Mission towards the Nestorians and the Jacobites (1288–c. 1300)

Abstract

In 1288 the Dominican Riccoldo da Monte Croce headed to the East, where Pope Nicolas iv and the Master General of his order had sent him on a mission to the Nestorians and Jacobites. For this mission he stayed about ten years with Nestorians, Jacobites and other Eastern Christians. The account of his sojourn in the East, entitled Liber peregrinationis, and the theoretical analysis he derived from it—his Libellus ad nationes orientales—allow us to understand how a thirteenth-century Roman Catholic missionary perceived the relationships between the Catholic Church and Oriental, non-Chalcedonian Churches, in the time of the Second Council of Lyon and shortly after the definitive loss of the Crusader states. Riccoldo’s rhetoric is influenced by several elements—the pontifical definition of Christianity, Dominican missionary theories and the experience of his stay among the Nestorians and the Jacobites in Niniveh and Baghdad. Riccoldo da Monte Croce learned Arabic and Chaldean during his long residence as a Roman Catholic missionary in the East, where he gained a deep knowledge of Eastern Christians. Never did he lose or downplay, however, his identity as a mendicant friar and an apostolic missionary. In the life and the works of Riccoldo da Monte Croce, we witness the confrontation of a convinced Dominican missionary with Eastern Christians, which leads us to rethink the definition of Christianity grounded in the notions of unitas and uniformitas.