From Genova to Yangzhou? Funerary Monuments for Europeans in Yuan China and their Paleographic Analysis

Abstract

This article scrutinizes two extraordinary funerary monuments to members of the Ilioni family from Genoa through paleographical methods. Erected in 1342 and 1344 respectively, they commemorate Caterina and Antonio, two children of an Italian merchant that died as members of the small Catholic community in the central Chinese trade hub of Yangzhou. Although well known in recent debates on the history of medieval travel and occasionally discussed in an art-historical context, they have not yet received an in-depth epigraphic analysis. In doing so for the first time, the article argues for the importance of such material, as processes of acculturation can be traced in the development of the scripts themselves. The epigraphy of these monuments is both in line with contemporary letter styles from northern Italy and, at the same time, epigraphic observations show how the influences of Chinese characters were slowly included in the Latin text. In sum, the authors argue that it is most likely that a Franciscan missionary gifted with some craftmanship as a stonemason generated this part of the two funerary slabs, and that this in turn forces us to think about late medieval practices of epigraphic production in Europe at the time, too. What seemed at first an exotic case of "global epigraphy" reveals itself on second glance as an example that teaches a valuable lesson about the role of friars in the epigraphy of Latin Europe more widely.