Mark of Lisbon

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Mark of Lisbon (d. 1591), properly Marcos da Silva, was a Portuguese Franciscan, historian, and the Bishop of Porto.

While visiting the main convents of the Franciscan Order in Spain, Italy, and France, Mark collected a number of original documents about the order's history at the instance of the minister general, Fr. Andrea Alvarez. Earlier, in 1532, the minister general, Father Paul Pisotti, had instructed all the provincials of the order to collect all documents they could find pertaining to the fifteenth century, to continue the Conformities of Bartholomew of Pisa. When these documents were gathered together, it was given to Mark, who compiled them together with information he himself had gathered, as well as that from the Chronicle of Marianus of Florence, into his Portuguese language work Chronicle of the Friars Minor. This was published in Lisbon from 1557 to 1568.

The work is made up almost entirely of biographies of illustrious men of the order, which makes the title somewhat misleading. It is of great historical value, especially since the original sources to which the author had access, have entirely disappeared. Mark of Lisbon is also responsible for the first edition of a grammar of the Bicol language of the Philippines.

This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.