Jordan (Italian Giordano) was born around 1255 at Rivalto near Pisa. He entered the Dominican Order at Pisa around 1275 and studied at the Dominican studia at Pisa, Bologna, and Paris.
In 1303, Jordan was assigned to the Dominican Basilica of Santa Maria Novella at Florence — undertaking the ministry of vernacular preaching in the Florentine Tuscan dialect (the language of Dante Alighieri, who was then composing the Divina Commedia in the same Florentine Tuscan).
Jordan's Florentine vernacular sermon-cycle of 1303–1306 — hundreds of sermons preached at the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella and at other Florentine Dominican foundations — instituted the Italian vernacular preaching tradition. The contribution of Jordan was the systematic application of the scholastic-theological method (developed at the Universities of Paris and Bologna) to the Italian vernacular pastoral preaching — producing the characteristic Italian Catholic-vernacular sermon that would extend through the late-medieval and early-modern Italian Catholic preaching tradition (Sts. Bernardino of Siena, Vincent Ferrer, Antoninus of Florence, John of Capistrano, and the Italian Dominican-Franciscan vernacular preachers).
Jordan's sermons survive in multiple manuscript collections (over 700 documented sermons) and are one of the principal early Italian vernacular literary corpora — an institutional witness to the contemporary emergence of the Italian vernacular literary culture that would produce Dante's Divina Commedia (1308–1320) and Petrarch's vernacular Rime.
Called by his superiors in 1311 to teach at the University of Paris — the principal Dominican academic centre — Jordan undertook the journey north from Florence but died en route at Piacenza on March 6, 1311.