Italian missionary Odoric of Pordenone, a member…

Italian missionary Odoric of Pordenone, a member of the Franciscan order for more than a decade, was born at Villanova, a hamlet now belonging to the town of Pordenone in Friuli (Italy), in or about 1286.

He comes from a Czech family named Mattiussi.

According to the ecclesiastical biographers, in early years he took the vows of the Franciscan order and joined their convent at Udine, the capital of Friuli.

In 1296 Odoric went as a missionary to the Balkans, and then to the Mongols in southern Russia.

Dispatched to the East in April 1318, Friar Odoric started from Padua, had gone to Constantinople via Venice, then crossed the Black Sea to Trebizond.

From there he had traveled and preached in Armenia, Media, and Persia, all countries in which the Franciscans had founded mission centers.

From Sultanieh he proceeded by Kashan and Yazd, and turning thence followed a somewhat indirect route by Persepolis and the Shiraz and Baghdad regions, to the Persian Gulf.

With an Irish confrere, Friar James, he sailed from Ormus to India, landing at Thana, near Bombay.

At this city four brethren of his order, three of them Italians and the fourth a Georgian, had shortly before suffered martyrdom at the hands of the Muslim governor.

The bones of the martyred friars had been collected by Friar Jordanus Catalani, a Dominican (first bishop in India, Diocese of Quilon) who carried them to Supera—the Suppara of the ancient geographers, near the modern Vasai, about twenty-six miles north of Bombay, and buried them there.

Odoric tells that he disinterred these relics and carried them with him on his further travels.

He also visited Puri, giving one of the earliest accounts of the Chariot Festival of the Hindu God Jagannath to the western world.

In his own account of 1321, Odoric reports how the people put the "idols" on chariots, and the King and Queen and all the people drew them from the "church" with song and music.