Towards a Global History of the Early Franciscan Sequence

Now housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, the 14th-century manuscript bearing the shelf mark Lat. Z. 549 reveals one singular particularity. This is not the musical notation attached to the text of a liturgical chant found in chant books from medieval Europe. It is that the text is in Cuman-Qipchak, a language spoken across vast swathes of medieval Eurasia under Mongol rule. Recent research dates the manuscript to around 1350 and suggests the Black Sea, and particularly the medieval trading posts on the Crimean peninsula, as a possible provenance for the manuscript. The purpose of the research project is to draw up the untold backstory to this phenomenon. Its first focus is on the type of liturgical chant that was so successfully disseminated: the sequence. A genre of liturgical chant of formal ambition sung after the Alleluia of the Mass, it flourished from the 9th century onwards right across the Latin West. In this sense, it was a decidedly European phenomenon. As a poetic addition to the Mass, the sequence afforded considerable space for creativity on the part of religious communities, cantors, and composers. Yet it was precisely this creative space that was contested time and again in medieval Europe: the transmission of the liturgical sequence was by no means a given. This leads on to the second focus, namely, the mechanism of dissemination. In the case of the sequence in Cuman-Qipchak, this has been linked by recent research to the missionary activities of the Franciscan Order in medieval Eurasia which began in the later 13th century. There is at present no detailed study on the extent and scope of the Franciscan cultivation of the sequence which is of particular relevance given the traditional attribution of certain, widespread sequences to Franciscan authors, such as Thomas of Celano. Moreover, song - in Latin and the vernacular - formed an intrinsic part of Franciscan spiritual practices, not least the importance of rhetoric in preaching. Finally, scholarly research on liturgical chant in the last decades has expended considerable energy on the dissemination of Gregorian or Roman-Frankish chant under the Carolingians in the eighth and ninth centuries; in particular the beginnings of musical notation in the Latin West and the role of liturgy in the construction of identity across an empire stretching over one million square kilometres. This relied, arguably, on romanitas or the parallels drawn by Carolingian rulers, administrators, and poets to the Roman empire. Indeed, this Roman-ness, with its twin heritage of Christian practices and secular political organisation, has been viewed by some scholars as part of a European identity. Adopting an approach from Global History for the medieval dissemination of chant in the High Middle Ages ultimately means re-assessing processes of romanisation - or re-romanisation? - within a shift from a European to a Eurasian perspective.

13th-century Europe witnessed what has been termed an 'expansion' driven, in part, by the establishment of the new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans. Latin missions from the West reached further afield than ever before and obtained a global dimension: from the Golden Horde north of the Black Sea to India and China. Music historiography, however, has tended to focus in the 13th century on the role of urban Paris as the centre of new forms of poetry, composition and thought. The purpose of the research project was to radically expand this historiography by exploring Franciscan mobility and networks; to seek to further integrate musicology into broader research in the Humanities on the Global Middle Ages. Focusing on the sequence as the genre of liturgical song to be investigated was particularly fitting as the genre could be modified in numerous ways in the 13th and 14th centuries. This plasticity allowed for the genre to adapt to different circumstances - culturally, institutionally and aesthetically - and it thus becomes a useful tool for probing the use of song in the new missionary contexts of 13th-century Eurasia. The principal challenge of the research project concerned the lack of digitised sources. This meant inspecting around 30 manuscripts in situ: fourteen libraries were visited in Rome, Todi, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Washington DC and Jerusalem. Thanks to this research, the narrative arc of the early history of the Franciscan sequence can be set out for the first time. In an initial phase, the sole sequence transmitted in early Franciscan manuscripts (and rubricked as such) is the Notkerian composition, Sancti spiritus assit nobis gratia for Pentecost and each day of the Octave; this was part of the liturgy of the Papal curia in Rome, explicitly taken over by the Franciscans. A further impulse to sequence composition was provided by St Francis' canonisation in 1228 which involved the poetic endeavours of members of the curia. These sequences could be performed in multiple ways, e.g. with regular rhythmic patterns (mensurated), in a freer rhythmic style (fractus); with additional second voices in simple polyphony; and with the organ. They were even performed in missionary contexts in front of Mongol dignitaries, as reported in the travelogue by the 13th-century Franciscan writer, William of Rubruck. Fluidity in performance mirrors fluidity in genre, with connections to the hymn (as both a song and pedagogical tool for learning) as well as the conductus (a sung, poetic composition flourishing in the 13th century). And, ultimately, this fluidity allowed for translation in missionary contexts, such as under Mongol rule in the Golden Horde, which thus opens up a more global dimension in medieval musicology: a European transmission now becomes Eurasian.