Domenico Gangala was born in the small town of Monteprandone in the Marche of Ancona, was educated at Ascoli Piceno and at the University of Perugia (where he took degrees in canon and civil law), and entered the Observant Franciscans at the Portiuncula in Assisi in 1416. He took the name Giacomo (James) della Marca — 'James of the Marches' — after his native region.
He was sent in 1430 to preach in the Hungarian and Slavonian frontier lands. For most of the next forty-six years he laboured in Bosnia, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, and Poland — preaching against the Hussite movement (which the Council of Basel had largely failed to dissolve), restoring Catholic life in regions devastated by the Hussite wars, and engaging in lengthy theological debates with Hussite preachers. Together with John Capistrano he was one of the two great Italian Franciscan apostles of the late-medieval Balkans.
He returned to Italy in old age and died at Naples on November 28, 1476. Like his colleagues Bernardine of Siena and Capistrano he promoted the Monte di Pietà — the small-loan credit institution founded by Franciscan Observants from the 1460s onward (the first was at Perugia in 1462) — that became the principal Catholic alternative to private money-lending across early modern Italy. Canonized 1726.