A Local Translation in a Global World: Odoric of Pordenone, William of Solagna, and a Giant Tortoise in Fourteenth-Century Padua

This article revisits one of the texts associated with the fourteenth-century spread of Franciscan mission across Eurasia, the account of the travels of Odoric of Pordenone (d.1331). Odoric's text is often mined for what it might reveal about Latin Christian perceptions of East Asia. This article argues that the local rather than the global aspects of the text should be given prominence in our assessment of his work, and greater attention paid to the process of composition and likely audience. Odoric worked with a co-author and addressed a specifically Franciscan audience in the early fourteenth-century Veneto. The central priority of the text was to convey the 'reality' of a distant martyrdom, in Tana, India, in the absence of tangible relics to demonstrate the truth of that martyrdom. The account highlights some of the intellectual tensions produced as a narrative of universal mission – and martyrdom – became increasingly central to Franciscan identity.