Blessed Odoric of Pordenone

Odoric of Pordenone (c. 1280 – 14 January 1331) was a Franciscan friar and missionary explorer from Friuli in northeast Italy. He journeyed through India, Sumatra, Java, and China, where he spent three years in the imperial capital of Khanbaliq (now Beijing). After more than ten years of travel, he returned home and dictated a narrative of his experiences and observations called the Relatio, highlighting various cultural, religious, and social peculiarities he encountered in Asia. His manuscript was copied multiple times and distributed widely across Europe, both in the original Latin and several vernacular translations including Italian, French, and German. The Relatio was an important contribution to Europe's growing awareness of the Far East. Odoric's account was a primary source for the account of Mandeville's Travels. Many of the incredible reports about Asia in Mandeville have proven to be versions of Odoric's eyewitness descriptions. After his death, Odoric became an object of popular devotion and was beatified in 1755. Little is known about the life of Odoric and many details are confused by the mythology that evolved after his death. He was born at Villanova, a hamlet now belonging to the town of Pordenone in Friuli. One tradition says that he was the son of a soldier fighting for Ottokar II of Bohemia, who seized control of Pordenone in the early 1270s. For this reason he has sometimes been called "the Bohemian". Another tradition says that Odoric was the son of a prominent local family but recent historians tend to discount this version. Estimates of his birth year have ranged from 1265 to 1285 but a forensic examination of his partially mummified body in 2002 showed he was about 50 when he died in 1331, indicating that he was born around 1280. His 14th-century ecclesiastical biographers said that he took the vows of the Franciscan order at a very young age.