The following has been adapted from Year by Year with the Early Jesuits: Selections from the Chronicon of Juan de Polanco, S.J., ed. John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004), ix–xix.
The Chronicon is a year-by-year chronicle of the early history of the Society of Jesus, covering the years 1537 to 1556. It is an extensive and vitally important source. From early 1573 to February 1575, Fr. Juan Alfonso de Polanco (1517–76)—who served as a secretary for the first three superior generals of the Society—dictated it to an unknown amanuensis in Rome, with the main intention that, in his own words, it would serve as “a summary of our [the Society’s] history” and would provide “a universal and truly chronological history of the things worthy of remembrance.”[1. Chronicon 1:7] The work thus contains accounts of the activities of the early Jesuits, in Europe and beyond, as they labored to act in service of the greater glory of God.
Polanco’s role as secretary of the Society made him well-suited for this task. As secretary to the superior generals for 26 years (1547–73), Polanco knew the correspondence coming into and out of the Society’s headquarters in Rome better than anyone else, and he himself wrote much of the outgoing correspondence from Rome. He also had access to many of these written sources when he was writing the Chronicon, as he had diligently gathered and organized them over the years. He supervised both the distribution of reports on the activities of the Society worldwide to Jesuits throughout Europe and the creation of what would today be promotional brochures for benefactors of the Society. In composing the Chronicon, he was able to draw on his privileged knowledge of the early years of the Society as well as his experience in summarizing that knowledge.
In terms of the organization of the work, Polanco generally records the material for each year in a systematic fashion, dividing up entries by geographic locations. He begins each year by talking about the Society in Rome, then in the rest of Italy, then in Sicily, then Germany and the Netherlands, followed by France, Spain, and Portugal; lastly, he chronicles missionary activity outside of Europe. A few brief references are also made to Poland, England, and Scandinavia throughout the volumes. In discussing each country, Polanco goes from city to city and community to community, explaining what was done in each particular place. At times, he focuses on describing the special work of notable Jesuits, such as Nadal’s promulgation of the Constitutions and Borgia’s efforts as commissary of Spain.
The attention that Polanco gives to each year generally expands as the Chronicon progresses. For instance, Polanco writes only 128 pages on the years of 1537 to 1547, but volume 5, which covers only 1555, spans 731 pages, and volume 6, which only covers 1556, spans 839 pages. The amount of numbered sections in each volume also tends to increase, with the first volume, for example, containing only 551 sections, while the sixth volume contains 3,581 sections. There are two main reasons that explain why the amount of material devoted to each year greatly expands after 1547: first, Polanco gained much more detailed knowledge of the Society’s history once he began serving as secretary in 1547; and second, the Society began to grow rapidly during the years of 1547 to 1556, meaning that there was more for activity Polanco to record.
Polanco had intended to continue the Chronicon beyond the year of 1556, but his assignment in 1575 to be a visitor to the Sicilian province, and his death shortly thereafter in 1576, cut this plan short. The Chronicon itself remained unpublished until the 1890s, when it was made available in volumes 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesus (MHSI) series. The online translation available on this website is based on the text found in the MHSI volumes. Unless noted otherwise, the footnotes found there have been made by the editors of those volumes.