1693: The Priest Who Counted His Dead, Then Left His Post

Jerusalem, spring 1693. Friar Franciscus Jordanus, parish priest of St Saviour’s, has been signing entries in this parish since 1690. On 18 March, he opens a new heading.

George is the first name on the list. He will not be the last. Week after week, the same hand comes back to record a death: a Maronite in his own house, a young man whose name still resists reading, then, on 29 March, a brother and a sister taken the same day.

The register does not linger on the bride’s age. It writes it down, as it writes down everything else, and moves to the next name.

The living who nurse, the living who die

In early April, the epidemic reaches St Saviour’s convent itself. On the 5th, a professed friar dies the same day as a young man from outside. On 20 April, a second friar dies, after weeks spent alone assisting the priest among the sick.

The dead man was a friar of twenty-nine. His first name reads Didacus in the body of the entry, while the margin carries a different one; his surname, cut by the fold of the binding, is unresolved: the transcription keeps "[Monarres ?]," the corpus translation writes "[Monarelli ?]," and other readings remain on the table. We do not know his name. The priest, for his part, does not sign this eulogy with a detached hand: it is the only passage in the whole series where he steps outside the formula and speaks of "my" help, of "me" being assisted. That same day, he also buries Abdo, parish priest of Jerusalem’s Nestorian community, in union with Rome, in the presence of every monk of his convent. On the 24th, a lay friar from the Province of Florence. On the 26th, a three-year-old girl.

From mid-March to the end of April, the priest recorded twenty-four deaths under this heading, five of them clergy or religious. Towards the end his order breaks down: the last entries on the page no longer follow the dates, and 29 April is written before 20 April. Then, across the foot of his column, he draws one last line.

The Italian sentence closes the Latin list, as if the priest, at the end, could no longer write in the register’s own language. "In my time": twenty-four names, six weeks, a charge that stops there. The corpus does not say why. It does not say that Franciscus Jordanus died: it is his own hand that closes the series, so he is alive to write it. It says only that, at this exact point, his charge as parish priest comes to an end.

A different hand takes over, without a word of the epidemic

On 1 May, five days later, a different hand opens the next entry, more cursive, the formula shorter.

Friar Dionysius now signs the register. He goes on burying parishioners, but he never again names the plague: not one word, in the entries that follow, echoes his predecessor’s vocabulary.

The other priest, the same week

At Bethlehem, another register holds another loss, almost the same week. On 13 April 1693, in the middle of the very series Franciscus Jordanus is counting in Jerusalem, the parish priest of Bethlehem himself dies of the same disease.

Two parishes, two registers, the same week of April: at Bethlehem, the priest dies of the plague and another friar at once picks up the pen. At Jerusalem, the priest survives long enough to count his dead to the end, before closing his own register himself.

What the corpus keeps of Franciscus Jordanus is not a reason, nor a farewell. It is a count, kept day after day while the world around him narrowed, and a closing line unlike any other in his register. What became of him afterward, no one has written down yet.