Character

The son of a family from Barcelona who settled in Mallorca after the Christian conquest, he was born in around 1232. He was the preceptor of the future king of Mallorca Jaume II, and he married and had two children. But at the age of thirty he had a spiritual crisis that let him to become “God’s troubadour”, abandon his family and embark on a new era as a writer, philosopher, preacher and missionary.

He learned Arabic from a Saracen slave and defined his life goals – to preach to the infidels, write a book against the errors of the infidels and create schools in which to teach languages to missionaries. In 1274 he retired to the mountain of Randa, where the so-called Lullian Art, a philosophical system for finding the truth, was revealed to him.

In 1276 he founded the monastery of Miramar to train monks devoted to learning Arabic and the Lullian Art. He wrote numerous works in Catalan, Latin and Arabic, one of the most outstanding of which is the novel Blanquerna, which contains a mystic jewel, the Llibre d'Amic e Amat. His tomb lies in the basilica of Sant Francesc in Palma.

Dates
Mallorca, 1232 – Tunisia or Mallorca, 1316