In 1276, under the patronage of King Jaume II, Ramon Llull founded a missionary school in the monastery of Miramar.
The monastery of Miramar
Was founded by me to trained friars
To preach to Saracens.
Amongst the vines and fennel
Love took hold of me, making me love God,
living amongst sighs and tears.
God the Father, Son, and God the Spirit,
The Holy Trinity
I worshipped as I should.
God the Son, come down from Heaven,
Is born of a Virgin,
God and man, named Christ.
Cant de Ramon (Song of Ramon), 1300
Translated by Richard Mansell. Performed by Enric Garcia.
(1232 - 1316). Born in Mallorca shortly after the island’s Christian conquest by King Jaime I of Aragon, Ramon Llull served as seneschal to the king and received an education in keeping with his status. He married, had two children and led a dissolute courtly life. According to his chronicles, at the age of thirty, he had up to five visions of Christ, which radically changed his life. He left his family and life of comfort to devote himself to God’s service. Llull demonstrated a keen interest in converting infidels to Christianity and he called for reforms to the Christian Church. He decided to embark on a period of self-education, first at La Real Monastery and then by retreating to Mount Randa, where he drafted a pedagogical system named L’Art. He went on to create Miramar School in order to train missionaries in his method of converting infidels to Christianity. He made long trips to Spain, France, Italy and North Africa in order to involve the Church authorities in his initiatives. He is the author of an extensive collection of works in Catalan, Latin and Arabic, amounting to some 265 works on different subjects that include science, theology, poetry, literature and philosophical treatises. Llull was the first writer to put the Catalan language to literary use.
Cant de Ramon (Song of Ramon) is a short, highly personal work. The verses reflect his disillusionment with the limited success of his endeavours, and he asks for God’s assistance in granting him good companions able to help him in his initiatives.
One of the most emblematic places in the Tramuntana mountains is the Miramar estate and its surroundings, caught between seas and peaks, which Ramon Llull established 700 years ago. The estate dates back to Moorish times and after the Christian conquest of the island it became a monastery for Cistercian monks. Under the protection of Jaume II, Ramon Llull created a school for missionaries at Miramar, where they would learn Arabic and Llull’s Art, to preach in distant lands.
Centuries passed and the estate was occupied by several religious orders, until the Miramar estate was acquired by Archduke Ludwig Salvator in 1872. Over the years when the Archduke lived on the island, Miramar regained its lustre and many well-known figures stayed there. Amongst them is the great poet of the Catalan “Renaixença”, Jacint Verdaguer: invited by the Archduke, he spent two weeks there, on a visit that allowed him to get to know Llull’s work and led to his book Perles (Pearls), a prose adaptation of Llull’s Llibre d’amic e amat.
