Blessed Jordan of Pisa (c. 1255–1311)
Also known as: Jordan de Rivalto
Priest • Dominican Friar • Theologian • Father of the Italian Language
Feast Day: August 19 (Dominican Calendar); March 6 (some calendars)
A Preacher Who Built a Language
Most of the Dominicans in this series are remembered for what they did for souls — for the confessors they converted, the Orders they founded, the martyrdoms they endured. Blessed Jordan of Pisa is remembered for all of that — and for something no other saint in this series can claim: he helped build the language that a nation speaks to this day.
Jordan of Pisa was a Dominican Friar, Theologian, Professor, renowned Preacher, Founder of the Confraternity of the Holy Redeemer at Pisa, Visionary, and Marian devotee — a promoter and daring innovator of the vernacular Italian language as a ‘church’ language and a tool for evangelization. That is not a footnote in his biography. It is a summary of a mission that changed Western civilization.
Origins: Pisa, Paris, and the Habit
Blessed Jordan was born in Pisa around 1255 (although some sources say 1260) and entered the Dominican Order there. His path to the Order ran first through Paris.
Jordan attended the University of Paris where he first encountered the Dominican friars in 1276. Four years later, probably after obtaining his degrees, he returned to Italy and took the habit. He began a long teaching career there as soon as he was qualified to do so.
Here is the pattern visible in this series: Paris, the intellectual capital of the medieval world, encounters a brilliant young mind — and the Dominicans are there to claim it. Reginald of Orléans came through Paris. John of Salerno came through Bologna. Jordan went to Paris, was caught by the fire of the Order, returned to Italy clothed in white and black, and spent the rest of his life setting Tuscany ablaze.
The Preacher of Five Sermons a Day
He served as a lector in several houses of the Order and was known for his eloquent preaching throughout the region of Pisa and Florence.
Because of the excellence of his preaching in Florence, Jordan was appointed first lector there in 1305.
The numbers attached to his preaching are staggering by any standard. At Florence he would reportedly preach five times a day, walking about, both indoors and out, followed by a crowd of listeners as he developed his topic.
Five sermons a day. Not five in a week. Five in a single day. Walking. Moving. Taking the Gospel into the streets, the courtyards, the public squares — wherever the people were. This is the Dominican genius: the mendicant preacher is not confined to the pulpit; the whole world is his pulpit. Jordan embodied this with a physical restlessness that matched his intellectual energy.
The Scientific Study of Preaching
What separates Jordan of Pisa from many gifted preachers is his reflexive, analytical intelligence. He did not simply preach — he studied preaching as a discipline.
He seems to have been fascinated with the whole question of preaching as an apostolic tool, and to have been one of the first to make a scientific study of it. He pointed out that the Greek church was “invaded by a multitude of errors” because the Greeks had no preachers; he could never say enough in praise of Saint Dominic’s farsightedness in founding an Order specifically devoted to preaching as the primary weapon against error.
That insight is as urgent today as it was in 1300. Error does not retreat before silence. It retreats before confident, clear, beautiful proclamation of truth. Jordan saw this — and spent his life proving it.
The Man Who Helped Build the Italian Language
Here the story of Blessed Jordan opens onto something enormous. Medieval Europe conducted its intellectual and ecclesiastical life in Latin. Latin was the language of scholarship, of theology, of the Church’s liturgy and correspondence. The vernacular tongues were considered crude, unstable, unsuitable for serious thought.
Jordan disagreed — and acted on that disagreement in a way that reshaped Italian civilization.
He pioneered the use of the Tuscan language for preaching and lecturing, which helped establish it as the foremost among the vernaculars of Italy. His Tuscan was reputedly versatile and musical but never elaborate or ornate.
At a time when scholars believed that no colloquial tongue could ever replace Latin as a ‘gentleman’s’ language, Jordan worked to make Italian the beautiful tongue that it is today.
This was not a political project. It was an apostolic one. Jordan wanted to reach the people — the merchants, the craftsmen, the women in the piazza, the students who had not mastered Latin — and he understood that reaching them required speaking their language. The Dominican commitment to preaching drove him to innovate. The love of souls made him a linguist.
His surviving sermons are among the earliest and most important documents in the history of written Italian. Every Italian who speaks their mother tongue today is, in a small but real sense, indebted to a Dominican friar who wanted to make sure the Gospel was understood.
A Memory Worthy of a Church Doctor
Jordan knew the breviary, missal, most of the Bible (with commentary), and the second part of the Summa Theologica by heart. He was quick to state that learning alone can never make a preacher; it needed a holiness of life.
That last sentence is the hinge on which all of Jordan’s intellectual achievement turns. He was not an academic who happened to preach. He was a holy man whose holiness made his learning fruitful. The Summa Theologica memorized does not save souls — but the Summa Theologica memorized by a man who loves God, prays, mortifies himself, and burns with apostolic fire? That changes cities.
Jordan was not only known for his remarkable intellectual abilities but also for his strong devotion to Our Lady and Saint Dominic de Guzman. These two devotions are the roots from which his entire apostolic life grew. Our Lady — to whom the Dominican charism is consecrated since the founding of the Order. And Dominic himself — the model and source of every Dominican preacher who came after him.
Blessed Jordan is the founder of the Confraternity of the Holy Redeemer, whose constitution survives to this day. Even his organizational work bore fruit across the centuries.
His Death: Dying on the Way to Teach
There is something fitting — and heartbreaking — about how Jordan of Pisa died.
In 1311, the Master General of the Dominican Order, Aymericus Giliani, appointed Jordan as a professor of theology at the friary of Saint James in Paris, where he was to lecture on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and pursue a master’s degree. This appointment recognized his scholarly achievements and preaching prowess. However, tragedy struck during his journey to Paris, as Jordan fell ill and died on August 19, 1311, in Piacenza, Italy, likely from natural causes.
He died on the way to teach. He had been assigned the greatest academic appointment of his career — and he never arrived. The road took him instead to God.
His body was returned from Piacenza, where death overtook him, to rest in the church of Santa Caterina in Pisa. The city that had formed him received him back, this time in the silence of death.
His Beatification
His cultus was confirmed by Pope Gregory XVI on August 23, 1833, and he was beatified in 1838. His relics are venerated at the church of Saint Catalina in Pisa, Italy.
The Dominican Calendar lists him as Jordan de Rivalto of Pisa, friar and priest — his full name a reminder that he was a man of a particular place, a particular people, a particular moment in history, whom God used to change that moment permanently.
The Thread Running Through This Series
Return once more to the great arc. Dominic sends Reginald to Bologna; Reginald’s fire lights Diana d’Andalo and John of Salerno; Jordan of Saxony succeeds Dominic; Sadoc carries the charism to Poland; Aimo Tapparelli defends it through a century of life; Jean-Georges Rehm dies for it on a prison hulk.
And in the middle of all of that — preaching five times a day in the piazzas of Florence, walking and talking and singing the Gospel into the ears of Tuscany in their own tongue — stands Jordan of Pisa. He did not die a martyr’s death. He did not found a great monastery. He did not receive visions of Our Lady. He simply preached. He preached every day. He preached in the language people could understand. He preached until they came to hear him in crowds. And then he died on a road, going to teach once more.
Jordan’s legacy endures through his preserved sermons, which offer insight into medieval preaching and the development of the Italian language. The sermons outlasted the preacher. The words spoken in Tuscan piazzas in 1305 are still being studied seven centuries later. This is the fruit of a life poured out in faithful, daily, unglamorous apostolic labor.
Blessed Jordan of Pisa, pray for us.