Bernardo Font

Bernardo Font was a friar of the Carmelite Order about whom almost no personal details survive: neither his birthplace nor his year of birth is recorded in the sources, and all that is known of his death is that it occurred after 1354, with no known date or place. His historical importance rests entirely on a papal decision: on 7 November 1351, Pope Clement VI issued the bull Coelestis rex regum, erecting the bishopric of the Islas Afortunadas and appointing Font as its first bishop. The text of the bull is preserved in the Bullarium Carmelitanum (vol. III, 1768, pp. 71-72). His appointment belonged to the same papal initiative of 1351 that, months earlier, had authorised the Mallorcan merchants Joan Doria and Jaume Segarra to travel to Canaria to instruct its inhabitants in the Catholic faith, by the bull Dum diligenter of 15 May of that year.

The new bishopric was of a decidedly missionary character: it had no effective seat, no established clergy and no diocesan organisation in the islands, and its name referred to the venerable classical and medieval designation of Islas Afortunadas by which the archipelago was known. The see precedes by more than half a century the Canariense-Rubicense diocese that the Crown of Castile would establish at San Marcial del Rubicón, in Lanzarote, in 1404, which places Bernardo Font as the first known bishop destined specifically for the Canaries, more than a century before the Castilian conquest and in the midst of the debate over the rights that Luis de la Cerda, Count of Medinaceli, claimed over the islands.

It is unclear whether Bernardo Font ever set foot in the archipelago. The episcopal lists record the see as vacant between 1354 and 1361, after his departure, which suggests that his episcopate unfolded far from the Canaries. On 27 June 1354 he was transferred to the see of Santa Giusta, in Sardinia, a date that modern episcopologies record on the basis of Balbino Velasco Bayón's study, El carmelita Fray Bernardo Font, primer obispo de Canarias (Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos, 30, 1984, pp. 377-382), and of Konrad Eubel's Hierarchia Catholica Medii Aevi (vol. I, 1913), the standard general episcopology for the period. The Carmelite Order itself preserves his memory as Bishop Emeritus of Santa Giusta, confirming the final stage of his ecclesiastical career.

Canarian historiography has recognised in this man of meagre biography a true institutional landmark: his appointment represents the first known ecclesiastical institutionalisation specifically destined for the Canaries. Although his episcopate left no demonstrable evangelising work in the islands, it documents the interest of the Avignon papal court in the archipelago in the 1350s and anticipates the succession of missionary sees —that of Telde, with Bonanat Tarí and Jaime Olzina— that would keep the ecclesiastical presence in the Canary Islands alive, at least on paper, until well into the fifteenth century.