Bonanat Tarí

Bonanat Tarí —also cited in the sources as Bonanat Terini or Tarín— was a Franciscan friar from Menorca who won the confidence of the court of the Crown of Aragon as confessor to King Peter IV. Neither his exact birthplace nor his year of birth is known. His figure is central to understanding the so-called bishopric of Telde, the fourteenth-century Canarian missionary see, and the religious contacts between Mallorca and the Indigenous population of Gran Canaria in the decades before the Castilian conquest.

On 2 July 1369, Pope Urban V appointed him bishop of the Canarian diocese by a papal letter of appointment. In that same year, the see created in 1351 under the name of Islas Afortunadas adopted the designation of Telde, the city on the eastern coast of Gran Canaria that the medieval tradition identified with one of the archipelago's main centres. The appointment of a Minorcan Franciscan linked to the Aragonese court shows the interest of the Crown and of the Church of Avignon in consolidating a Christian missionary presence on the island decades before the conquest. Modern episcopologies confirm the date of the appointment and record his episcopal ordination in the cathedral of Avignon.

His episcopate, however, unfolded far from the Canaries. Bonanat Tarí is documented in Mallorca in 1370, 1373, 1382 and 1384, which indicates that his effective residence was the Balearic island rather than the see of Telde. Canarian scholarship has devoted specific studies to him: Antonio Rumeu de Armas analysed the crosier, the episcopal staff attributed to the bishop of Telde (Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos, 23, 1977, pp. 409-420), and Francisco García Santos reconstructed the papal letters of his appointment in his study of the Lullian evangelisation and the bishopric of Telde (Almogaren, 1992).

The date of his death shows a discrepancy between the sources. Catholic-Hierarchy places it in 1390, with the month uncertain, while some episcopal lists, following Eubel's Hierarchia Catholica, bring it closer to 1392. The appointment of his successor, Jaime Olzina, on 31 January 1392, in any case sets the latest possible limit for his death, so this profile adopts the approximate date of c. 1390 and warns of the 1390-1392 margin. His legacy is twofold: he perpetuated the see of Telde for more than two decades and personified the Mallorcan line of the Canarian missionary enterprise that, since 1351, had tried to build religious bridges between the Christianity of the Crown of Aragon and the Indigenous inhabitants of Gran Canaria.