Riccoldo da Monte di Croce

Also known as Riccoldo Pennini, Ricoldo of Montecroce

Florentine Dominican missionary and traveller whose Liber Peregrinationis records his long journey through the Holy Land, Mesopotamia, and Mongol-ruled Baghdad in the years on either side of the fall of Acre.

Riccoldo was a Tuscan Dominican from a family with property at Monte di Croce outside Florence. He entered the order at Santa Maria Novella in 1267 and was sent east in 1288 as part of the Dominican mission to convert the Muslims of the Mamluk and Ilkhanid worlds. He spent more than a decade in the East — much of it in Baghdad, by then a Mongol Ilkhanid city — and returned to Florence in about 1300.

His Liber Peregrinationis is the chief result of that journey. It records his pilgrimage through Acre, Galilee, the Templar fortresses of the coast, and the holy sites of Jerusalem before the city's loss in 1291; his ride through the Jazira to Mosul, Tabriz, and Baghdad; the cataclysmic news of the fall of Acre, which reached him in Mosul; and his sustained and unusually careful eyewitness study of contemporary Islamic religious practice. His later treatise Contra legem Sarracenorum — the most influential western refutation of Islam written in the high Middle Ages — was the direct fruit of those years.

Riccoldo is therefore a hinge figure: the last western pilgrim of any consequence to walk the Frankish kingdom before its end, and the principal European authority on Mamluk Islam for the generation that came after.

Read more on Wikipedia: English article