[1]

The Franciscan presence in the Holy Land began, formally, in 1217, when, at the first general chapter of the Friars Minor, held at the Porziuncola, the first eleven Franciscan provinces were established, among them that of the Holy Land, also called the province of Syria, of Romania, or Ultramarine. This province was the largest of all, and comprised the Byzantine territories, Greece with the islands of the Aegean, Cyprus, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the whole of the Levant. The Province of the Holy Land, both for the vastness of its territory and for the presence of the Holy Places, was always held in special regard. From the very outset it was considered the most important province of the Order. For this reason, perhaps, it was entrusted to the care of Brother Elias, an eminent figure in the nascent fraternity, both for his organisational talent and for his wide learning.
Two years later, and thus in 1219, Francis of Assisi himself went to Egypt, and from there visited at least a part of the Province of the Holy Land; well known are his passage through Damietta and his meeting with the sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil, nephew of Saladin[2]. Concerning this journey, famous is the testimony of Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre, who wrote:

The master of these friars, that is, the founder of this Order, is named Brother Francis: a man so lovable that he is venerated by all; having come to our army, ablaze with zeal for the faith, he had no fear of making his way into the midst of the army of our enemies, and for many days he preached the word of God to the Saracens, though with little fruit[3].

In those years, however, the Franciscan presence in the Holy Land began to take firm root. The pontiff Gregory IX, with the letter Si Ordinis Fratrum Minorum of 1 February 1230[4], urged the patriarchs of Antioch and of Jerusalem, the legates of the Apostolic See, the archbishops, the bishops, and all the ecclesiastics of those territories to receive the Friars Minor kindly and to allow them to build their own oratories and to preach in their dioceses and parishes; in 1263, under the generalate of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, the general chapter of Pisa restricted the Ultramarine Province to Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine and divided it into custodies, among them that of the Holy Land proper, which comprised the friaries of Acre, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Sidon, Tripoli, and Antioch. In the second half of the thirteenth century, then, the Friars Minor were well present and rooted in the Holy Land, even if intermingled with the rest of the secular and regular Catholic clergy and without any specific mandate concerning the custody of the holy places.
Everything changed with 1291 and the fall of Saint John of Acre, the last Crusader stronghold in the East. From that moment, the holy places of Christendom passed under full Muslim control. Within a few years, however, with the diplomatic and economic help of certain Christian nations, it would be the Franciscans themselves who became the protagonists of the gradual – and this time peaceful – recovery of the places bound up with the life and preaching of Christ. Indeed, already in the first years of the fourteenth century the Minors were once more present in the Holy Land. We find them documented in 1309 in a decree of the sultan of Egypt al-Muzaffar, in which they are for the first time called ‘friars of the cord’, a name that would later spread throughout the whole Middle East to denote the Franciscans[5].
A little later, in the course of the 1320s, James II of Aragon undertook negotiations with the sultan al-Nāsir Muhammad to bring in Aragonese religious to guard the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, obtaining, in the end, that the presence there of a few Franciscan friars be tolerated. It was, however, through the negotiations of the royal couple of Naples, Robert of Anjou and Sancia of Majorca, with the collaboration of Fr. Roger Garin of the Province of Aquitaine, that there was obtained from the same sultan, probably in 1333, the conclusion of a treaty by which the Friars Minor were authorised to reside permanently in the holy city of Jerusalem[6]. This treaty was solemnly ratified by the Apostolic See on 21 November 1342, through the bulls of Clement VI Gratias agimus[7] and Nuper carissimae, by which the Custody of the Holy Land was juridically established[8]. From that date, then, began the historical trajectory of the Custody, officially recognised by the Apostolic See, by the Western monarchies, and, what counted most in loco, by the sultans of Egypt. The central seat of the Custody was placed in the friary that the royal couple of Naples had had built on the site of the Cenacle, on Mount Zion, but the friars also resided at the Holy Sepulchre and at the basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and they officiated, moreover, at the tomb of the Virgin.
In 1375, from the friary of Bethlehem, the Franciscans went on to serve the so-called Milk Grotto as well, situated in the vicinity of that of the Nativity of the Lord. In 1392 they obtained the right to officiate at the Grotto of Gethsemane, set in the Valley of Josaphat, a few metres from the tomb of Our Lady, and in 1485 they readapted for worship the Grotto of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist at Ain Karem.
As for the institutional structure of the Custody, Clement VI, in the aforementioned bull Gratias agimus, had laid down that the religious assigned to the Holy Land should have as their regular superior the guardian of the friary of Mount Zion, and then the provincial minister of the Holy Land resident in Cyprus; already the custodial statutes of 1377, however, withdrew from the Cypriot provincial minister any authority over the Custody[9]. Along these same lines the general chapter of Lausanne of 1414 continued to move, granting the Custody further and ample autonomy. Its regular superior, that is, the guardian of Mount Zion or custos of the Holy Land, was from 1414 elected for a three-year term directly by the general chapter[10].

In 1517, following the division of the Franciscan Order into the two distinct orders of the Conventuals and the Observants, brought about by Leo X with the bull Ite vos, the Custody of the Holy Land came to form part of the Order of Friars Minor simpliciter dicti, that is, of the Observants, and was formally and fully placed on a par with the other provinces of the Order, while retaining the designation of Custody[11]: “a statute of 1526 recognised in the Guardian of Mount Zion, wholly and in every respect, the authority of Provincial Minister in the rule and governance of the Convents of the Holy Land”[12], extending its authority to the religious houses of Beirut and Cyprus. In the new configuration of the Order, then, the Custody had by now taken on the role of the province of the same name from the Crusader age, and extended, at least formally, its jurisdiction over the whole eastern basin of the Mediterranean.
The custos, who was also guardian of the friary of Mount Zion, presided over the custodial Discretorium, a governing body equivalent to the Definitorium of the other Minorite provinces, to which he was bound to turn for the examination of all matters of greater moment[13]. The Discretorium was composed of the custos, the vicar, the procurator general, and three other religious. The governing structure of the Custody was, however, radically reorganised by the constitutions promulgated by the pontiff Benedict XIV with the brief In supremo of 7 January 1746[14]. This, in brief, is the governing structure defined in that year. The custos, appointed by the general Definitorium of the Order and confirmed by the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide, remained in office for three years and held the twofold rank of regular superior and of prefect of the missions of the Near East; his task was to visit the hospices and the friaries, and together with the Discretorium he appointed the guardians, the presidents, the parish priests, and the vice-procurators[15]. His term passed from 3 to 6 years with the brief of Gregory XVI In supremo episcopatus of 1841[16]. The custos, by ancient tradition, always had to be Italian. The prestige of the custos of the Holy Land was always considerable, both in the West and – perhaps to an even greater degree – in the Ottoman world. While due account must be taken of the grandiloquence proper to Eastern bureaucratic practice, it is certainly striking to read how, in Turkish documents, the custos of the Holy Land is designated as “the splendour of the nation of Jesus, the superior of the people of the religion of the Cross”, the “glory of his nation and (the glory) of the people of his religion”[17].
The second authority of the Custody was the vicar, who had to be of French nationality, though his prerogatives of governance were in fact rather limited, since in the event of the custos's absence his place was taken not by the vicar but by a custodial president elected by the Discretorium[18]. The third office of the Custody, but in fact so weighty as to become almost a rival to the custos himself, was the procurator general, always of Spanish nationality, whose task it was to administer the finances[19].
The custos, the vicar, and the procurator general formed part of the Discretorium, completed by four other religious: an Italian and a German, appointed by the custos; a Frenchman appointed by the vicar; and a Spaniard appointed by the procurator[20]. The Discretorium remained in office for three years, renewable only once, and ordinarily met on a weekly basis[21].
As is quite evident, the constitutions of Benedict XIV of 1746 sought to strike a careful balance among the various nations that together sustained the Custody of the Holy Land, and the resort to establishing national privileges was extended also to the governance of certain religious houses:
The Italians, French, and Spanish were granted the privilege of the superiorships, in turn, of the Holy Sepulchre and of Bethlehem.
To the Spanish were assigned, exclusively, the superiorships of the friaries of Saint John at Ain Karem, Saint Peter at Jaffa, Saint Nicodemus at Ramleh, Bab Tuma in Damascus, Holy Cross in Nicosia, and of the Hospice of Constantinople[22].
The constitutions of Benedict XIV, with the most modest of updates, remained in force until the 1970s[23], regulating the life of the Custody in its phase of greatest expansion. This institution, exceedingly modest in its origins – the 1377 constitutions allotted it a maximum of 20 friars[24] –, had in fact soon taken root and had gradually acquired an absolutely fundamental role in relations between East and West. Deeply respected by the authorities, first Egyptian and then Ottoman, the Custody of the Holy Land represented, until the nineteenth century, the sole Western institution permanently present in Palestine, a tenacious and solicitous guardian of the holy places and a precious and inescapable point of reference for Western pilgrims and travellers in the Middle East. To grasp fully the prestige that the Custody came to enjoy with the Ottoman authorities during the early modern age, we may turn to the citations gathered on the subject by Mario Sinopoli, an attentive scholar of the institutional history of the Custody:
Thus De Gubernatis, speaking of this age-old institution, called it a State; Paujaulat called it a religious dynasty; Guérin admired the “peaceful and heroic legion of humble but valiant religious who founded in Palestine a kingdom more lasting than that of Godfrey of Bouillon”. More recent authors too regarded it as a veritable State within the state (Jemolo), a true power (Giannini), which enjoyed autonomy and extraterritoriality (Jannaccone). And Baldi: “The Franciscan friary of Jerusalem is truly the capital of a State, as Michaud rightly said”[25].

The Franciscan “state” in the Holy Land, however, has constantly lived in a broadly hostile environment. The difficulties, in particular, increased in 1516, when in Palestine the rule of the Egyptian Mamluks was followed by that of the Turkish sultans based in Constantinople. The Orthodox communities of Greece, being made up of subjects of the Empire, were able to flow freely into the Holy Land and undertook a determined effort to present the Franciscans as foreign usurpers hostile to the empire. The most humiliating and burdensome outcome of this situation was the expulsion from the Holy Cenacle, which took place in 1552. The blow was hard, for the friary of Mount Zion had been for over 200 years the driving centre of Franciscan activity in the Holy Land.
From then on, for three centuries, the history of the legal possession of the Holy Places saw an alternation of losses and partial recoveries. If not everything was lost in the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre and in that of Bethlehem, this was owed to the arduous work carried out by those in charge of the Custody, who prevailed upon the Catholic powers to bring diplomatic pressure to bear on the sultans of Constantinople in defence of Catholic rights. While in the basilicas of the Holy Sepulchre, of Bethlehem, and in that of the tomb of the Virgin in the Valley of Josaphat rights were being lost, the Franciscans were nonetheless acquiring new ones elsewhere. In 1620 they took definitive possession of the site of the Annunciation at Nazareth, and Mount Tabor was granted to them. In 1684 the area of Gethsemane was acquired, and in 1679 that of the sanctuary of Saint John at Ain-Karem. In 1754 the sanctuary of the Nutrition at Nazareth was acquired, and in 1836 that of the Flagellation in Jerusalem. In all the contested places, the situation was crystallised in 1852 by the sultanic firman that established the well-known and still-current principle of the status quo.
Just as the religious and diplomatic contacts of the Custody have been international, so too has been, and continues to be, the origin of its members. Some nations, however, have marked the historical course of the Custody more than others: above all Italy, then Spain and France. Besides the custos, then, the majority of the religious too have always been of Italian origin, and this has deeply marked the character of the Custody. Thus, again, Mario Sinopoli has written:

The Custody (…) is, in its governance, international or cosmopolitan, but of Italian stamp, just as its foundation was Italian: international in the elements that constitute it and in the aims it sets itself to achieve, but Italian in its language and in its prevailing customs[26].

The predominant language, indeed, was always and still is Italian; almost all the religious know this language, which was also spoken, especially in the past, by many of the Custody's employees and collaborators. Italian was also introduced by the religious into their parish schools among the subjects of instruction, and the results were remarkable, to the point that the custos Giacomo da Lucca, in 1727, could write to the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide: “the pilgrims who come from Europe are not a little surprised to see here in the Levant a youth so well instructed in the Italian language”[27]. This statement tallies with what was affirmed by Joan van Kootwijk of Utrecht, who as early as 1598, having gone on pilgrimage to Palestine, wrote:

Christiani (Bethlehem) Grecum observant ritum, pauci Latinum: omnes tamen Italicam callent linguam, quam Francam appellant, et a pueris ediscunt. Seniores Minoritis et peregrinis occidentalibus interpretum loco serviunt: filios idcirco Italica lingua a Minoritis studiose curant, ne umquam deficiant, qui monasterij negotiis inserviant: cui equidem (ut a monachis accepimus) diligentem et fidelem hactenus navarunt operam et studium[28].

The Friars Minor, then, contributed significantly to the spread of Italian in the Holy Land, but in this work they found fertile ground and the way largely smoothed by a tradition of predominantly mercantile and maritime character that had already chosen Italian as the lingua franca along the entire arc of the eastern Mediterranean. In confirmation of this, I cite two literary testimonies, relating to the nineteenth century, from cultural milieus wholly foreign to that of the Custody. The first is drawn from the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who recalls how “in 1852, a hundred years before my birth, in the streets of Istanbul Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French, and English were spoken all at once[29]”. Pamuk places the languages in order of importance, and Italian stands first among the Western ones. The second testimony is instead that of Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who, after recounting how, little more than an adolescent – that is, in the last years of the nineteenth century –, in Jerusalem he had earned his living working as a guide for European travellers, and Russians in particular, recalls: “as soon as I arrived in Egypt, I decided to take up the same trade. I spoke Greek and Arabic very well, as also Italian, at that time indispensable for every European”[30]. And again, having met near the great pyramids the Russian prince Yuri Lyubovedsky, he recalls how the latter, “not knowing that I too spoke Russian, would address me with his four words of Italian”[31].
This situation changed profoundly and abruptly at the end of the First World War. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of the British and French mandatory governments, English became the prevailing language in Palestine and Egypt, and French in Syria and Lebanon, in both cases to the detriment of Italian.

Notes

[1] The present contribution constitutes a synthesis of what I have already dealt with in the introduction to L’Archivio storico della Custodia di Terra Santa (1230-1970), 3 vols., edited by A. Maiarelli, Milan, Edizioni Terra Santa, 2012 [Biblioteca bio-bibliografica della Terra Santa e dell’Oriente francescano, fifth series, nos. 30-32].

[2] The bibliography on the subject is abundant, nor is this the fitting place to list it; we indicate only the synthesis provided in I. Mancini, Cenni storici sulla Custodia di Terra Santa, in La Custodia di Terra Santa e l’Europa: i rapporti politici e l’attività culturale dei francescani in Medio Oriente, edited by M. Piccirillo, Rome, Il Veltro, 1983, pp. 15-26, at pp. 16-17, with an eye to the history of the Custody of the Holy Land. On the documentation concerning the journey to the East of Francis of Assisi, we refer to G. Golubovich, Biblioteca bio-bibliografica della Terra Santa e dell’oriente francescano, vol. I, Quaracchi near Florence, Tipografia del Collegio di S. Bonaventura, 1906, pp. 1-104.

[3] Fonti francescane. Scritti e biografie di san Francesco d’Assisi. Cronache e altre testimonianze del primo secolo francescano. Scritti e biografie di santa Chiara d’Assisi, Assisi, Editrici Messaggero Padova, 1980, no. 2212.

[4] Jerusalem, Historical Archive of the Custody of the Holy Land (hereafter ASCTS), Custodial Curia (hereafter CC), Diplomatico, 1.

[5] E. Tonini, La Custodia di Terra Santa “perla” delle missioni francescane, Florence, Provincia Toscana di S. Francesco Stimmatizzato dei Frati Minori, n.d. [2005], p. 16.

[6] The document, which must be regarded as lost, according to the testimony of a German Minorite travelling to Jerusalem in 1427 was at that time still kept in the archive of Mount Zion. Cf. M. Sinopoli, L’opera di Terra Santa. Contributo storico-giuridico, Part I^a, Natura istituzionale e rilevanza internazionale, Rome, Delegazione di Terra Santa, 1950, pp. 11, 29-30.

[7] ASCTS, CC, Diplomatico, 7.

[8] A careful analysis of the two documents can be read in Sinopoli, L’opera di Terra Santa, pp. 37-47; see also P. Pieraccini, Il ristabilimento del Patriarcato latino di Gerusalemme e la Custodia di Terra Santa. La dialettica istituzionale al tempo del primo patriarca mons. Giuseppe Valerga (1847-1872), Cairo – Jerusalem, The Franciscan Centre of Christian Oriental Studies, Co-Editor Franciscan Printing Press, 2006 [Studia orientalia christiana, Monographiae, 15], pp. 46-47, and G. F. D'Andrea, Il Regno di Napoli e la Custodia di Terra Santa, in La Custodia di Terra Santa e l’Europa, pp. 37-70, at p. 38.

[9] «Guardianus Montis Sion esto reliquorum Terrae Sanctae locorum Praefectis superior; ejus praecepto Fratres omnes obediunto». L. Wadding (et alii), Annales Minorum, vol. VIII, Ad Claras Aquas, prope Florentiam, 1932, p. 392. The constitutions are commented on and translated into Italian in M. da Civezza, Storia universale delle missioni francescane, vol. IV, Rome, Tipografia Tiberina, 1860, pp. 294-296.

[10] A careful examination of a historical-juridical character concerning the office of the custos of the Holy Land is carried out in C. Brlek, De Custodia Terrae Sanctae in legislatione Ordinis Fratrum Minorum (Studium historico-iuridicum), Hierosolymis, Ex Typis PP. Franciscalium, 1958.

[11] G. M. Faccio, Lettera circolare in occasione del VI centenario della Costituzione giuridica della Custodia di Terra Santa, in Custodia di Terra Santa. 1342-1942, Jerusalem, Tipografia dei Padri Francescani, 1951, pp. 9-18, p. 13.

[12] G. Golubovich, Serie cronologica dei reverendissimi Superiori di Terra Santa, ossia dei Provinciali custodi e presidenti della medesima (…), Jerusalem, Tipografia del convento di S. Salvatore, 1898, p. XXIII, in which a passage of the said statute is also cited: “Primo, quod Guardianus Montis Sion utatur in omnibus et per omnia auctoritate Ministri Provincialis in regimine et cura locorum Terræ Sanctæ, computando locum Baruti et locum Cypri”.

[13] Cf. Brlek, De Custodia Terrae Sanctae, pp. 28-30.

[14] Edition in Statuta et decreta quibus Terrae Sanctae Custodia regitur, edited by A. Briante, Hierosolymis, Typis Franciscalibus, 1895. Examination of the statutes of Benedict XIV in Pieraccini, Il ristabilimento, pp. 65-68, and L’aggiornamento della legislazione della Custodia di Terra Santa, in La Custodia di Terra Santa e l’Europa, pp. 27-36, at pp. 28-30.

[15] Constitutions of 1746, chap. I, in Statuta et decreta quibus Terrae Sanctae Custodia regitur, pp. 7-15.

[16] Cf. Pieraccini, Il ristabilimento, pp. 66, 148-149 n. 109.

[17] Citations in Sinopoli, L’opera di Terra Santa, p. 144.

[18] Constitutions of 1746, chap. II, in Statuta et decreta quibus Terrae Sanctae Custodia regitur, pp. 15-17.

[19] Constitutions of 1746, chap. III, in Statuta et decreta quibus Terrae Sanctae Custodia regitur, pp. 17-24.

[20] For a long period in the course of the nineteenth century, however, the absence in the Custody of French and German religious meant that the Discretorium was composed of Italians and Spaniards alone; cf. A. Arce, El discretorio custodial de Tierra Santa de 1796 a 1865, in “Archivo ibero-americano”, 7 (1947), pp. 98-101.

[21] Constitutions of 1746, chap. IV, in Statuta et decreta quibus Terrae Sanctae Custodia regitur, pp. 24-26.

[22] L’aggiornamento della legislazione, pp. 28-29.

[23] On the moving beyond the legislation of Benedict XIV, see what is written in L’aggiornamento della legislazione; this process may be said to have been completed with the promulgation of the statutes of 1983; Statuti della Custodia di Terra Santa e Regolamenti particolari, supplement to “Acta Custodiae Terrae Sanctae”, 28/2 (1983).

[24] Annales Minorum, vol. VIII, p. 392.

[25] Sinopoli, L’opera di Terra Santa, pp. 143-144.

[26] Sinopoli, L’opera di Terra Santa, p. 98.

[27] Cited in Sinopoli, L’opera di Terra Santa, p. 14.

[28] G. Incelli, Le scuole di Terra Santa, in Custodia di Terra Santa. 1342-1942, Jerusalem, Tipografia dei Padri Francescani, 1951, pp. 153-176, at p. 155.

[29] O. Pamuk, Istanbul. I ricordi e la citta, translated by Şemsa Gezgin, Turin, Einaudi, 2010, pp. 235-236.

[30] G. I. Gurdjieff, Incontri con uomini straordinari, translated by G. Bartoli, Milan, Adelphi, 2011, pp. 172-173.

[31] Gurdjieff, Incontri con uomini straordinari, p. 173.

Andrea Maiarelli teaches Church history and Latin at the Institute of Religious Sciences of Assisi, affiliated with the Pontifical Lateran University, and directs the A. Dominicini Library and the Chapter Archive of the cathedral of Perugia. He also works in the field of archival science, and with regard to this article it may be recalled that in the years 2009-2013 he directed the project for the reordering and inventorying of the Historical Archive of the Custody of the Holy Land in Jerusalem.