The fleet weighed anchor in August and followed the eastern seaboard as far as the vast mountain stronghold of Abyssinia, alone in northern Africa to resist the advance of Islam, where Jesuit missionaries had recently been sent by Ignatius de Loyola to search for Prester John and to reunite the local Church with Rome. Thence across the Indian Ocean, along the course which for centuries had supplied the wealth of Mohammedan power, to Goa, almost central in the western coast of India.
Here Ricci and Ruggieri landed on September 13th. They joined two other Italian missionaries, who made port at the same time in another ship: Rodolfo Acquaviva, son of the Duke of Atri, one of the most brilliant and distinguished noblemen of his day, and Francesco Pasio, a close friend of Ricci’s at the Roman College. Before entering the town, they walked out among the island’s palm trees, exultant at their release from six months’ imprisonment. Choosing a glade, they stretched out on the grass and began excitedly to discuss what might happen to them, for Goa was not the end of their journey but merely the base from which missionaries were sent to the other coastal regions of India, Ceylon, the Moluccas, Japan. Pasio turned to Ruggieri, the eldest, and laughingly designated him Superior: he must assign them their roles. Ruggieri caught the spirit and after a moment’s consideration said, “I predict that all four of us will work together, Rudolf as theologian, Francis as philosopher, you Matthew—when you’ve been ordained—as mathematician and myself as lawyer.”
“Excellent,” Pasio and Ricci cried, “but where?”
“Why, nowhere else but in China,” said Ruggieri, and burst out laughing, for he knew that China was the one country which refused to admit missionaries, and that their superiors had no intention of sending them there. Only the intense, dutiful Rudolf remained serious.
“Don’t laugh, Father Michael. The future will turn out just as you predict.”
Later they walked across the mountainous sandy-soiled island of Goa to the town, which stood on rising hills at the northern tip. Its walls lacked strength, for two encircling rivers and a harbour bar afforded adequate protection. By the southern gate they entered the Orient. Turbaned Moslems and Hindus, Kaffirs from Africa and squat-faced, ochre-skinned merchants from Indonesia moved in a pageant of dress and babel of tongues. Every street had its market, the colony appeared a single bazaar, as merchandise from East and West, gold chains, pearls, rings, spices, gums, coverlets changed hands at the cross-roads of the world. Yet the atmosphere of the town was as Portuguese as its architecture. No square, street or crossing was without its church or monastery: on all sides were pasted placards announcing religious ceremonies and processions. Dominicans, Franciscans and Jesuits hurried through the dusty streets, centre of an archdiocese which extended from Mozambique to Japan. With Rudolf’s prophecy ringing in their ears, they walked up to the church of the Jesuit college of St. Paul to venerate the body of Francis Xavier, whose footsteps had marked out the boundary of that archdiocese. From Goa he had set out on his final journey, taking with him a rich cloak to wear at his interview with the Emperor of China; to Goa his uncorrupt body, clothed in that same garment, had been transported a year and a half after his death.
In the college of St. Paul, which Xavier himself had acquired from the Franciscans, Ricci began his first year of theology, and from new acquaintances discovered, with a shock, the dichotomy between his own ideas of conversion and missionary reality. Closing the Summa after his day’s reading, he would walk through the town, finding it no longer a promised destination, a haven from the sea. Close to the cathedral and opposite the viceroy’s palace was held the slave market, where boys and girls of two continents were sold for a trifle to the common soldiery. Every Portuguese possessed a servile retinue, administering orders in the form of blows along the lines set by Albuquerque who, capturing Goa in 1510, had massacred the entire Mohammedan population. No law curbed their cruelty. The viceroy, all-powerful representative of the King, was appointed for three years only, all too short a time to amass a fortune unless he permitted judges to be bribed, heinous offences to be condoned, offices to be privately bought and sold. More detrimental still, the fidalgos, resplendent in taffeta and satin, who paraded like conquerors under tasselled parasols, were wholly enslaved to the calculating, full-lipped half-caste women, occasionally to be glimpsed behind the verandahs and shutters of the two-storeyed whitewashed houses, fluttering a fan or strumming a guitar. No Portuguese woman of self-respect, except an occasional governor’s wife, privileged and protected by servants, would face the long voyage, and the men, fired by tropical heat and easy wealth, had for the first time crossed black with white. The mestiços, heirs to the worst vices of both, took revenge for cruel humiliation, past and present, inflicted by the Portuguese. Like the luxuriant jungle vegetation across the hills, they were prying apart and overthrowing the intruder’s fortress stone by stone.
Portuguese possessions, strung up and down the coast but never extending further inland than a day’s march from their boats, had been wrested with unforgettable outrage from Hindu and Moslem, who now, millions strong, awaited an opportunity to drive out the imperialists. Half in terror, half in application of the principle, cuius regio, eius religio, accepted everywhere in Europe, the authorities tried to force on the native population the faith they professed but did not practise. In 1540 all Hindu temples in the island of Goa had been destroyed; in 1567 a law was passed forbidding a Christian to keep infidel servants in his house, with the result that thousands were obliged to adopt a religion they neither believed nor understood in order to retain their daily bread. Ricci understood now why Xavier “fled,” as he himself put it, from the Portuguese sphere to Japan, where the ruthlessness of European officials could not undo his work.
Conversion meant largely conformity to Portuguese habits. Neophytes were forced to abandon caste, usages and distinctive signs, and adopt the clothes, languages and names of their new masters. Those who could not be bribed were coerced. Nominal rolls of all Hindus were made, a hundred on each list being compelled on alternate Sundays to hear sermons on the benefits of Christianity, sermons delivered through interpreters (to learn the native dialects would have been proof of weakness, an admission of equality between infidel and Christian), the garbled translation rendering Spiritus sanctus as spiritus mundi. These laws were rigorously enforced by the Inquisition. If an Indian dissuaded another from becoming a Christian, he was liable to death. Denounced by a child, he might spend two or three years in prison without knowing the cause, before being sentenced and taken, on a great feast day, to execution. Prisoners were paraded through the torrid streets in shirts steeped in sulphur and painted in lurid colours with flames of fire, pointing upwards in the case of those to be burned at the stake.
From such scenes Ricci would return to the Summa, where St. Thomas urged a far different course: “Inducendus est infidelis ad fidem non coactione sed persuasione.” The voice of Christian reason jarred with history. Were not the Crusades the traditional means of dealing with infidel peoples? For centuries Portugal had fought a death-struggle with the Moors, and in Goa considered her present tactics a continuation of that other holy war.
Ricci did not indulge in profitless indignation, for he discovered within his own Order, largely independent of civil and ecclesiastical authority at Goa, another kind of apostolate embodying his ideals. In 1575 Valignano, on his way through India, had directed that conversion must follow upon charity, not force. But charity presupposed understanding, and understanding a knowledge of the native tongue. Missionaries therefore must learn the dialect of their diocese well enough to confess and preach. As a corollary, increased importance was attached to the education of local children at the college of St. Paul. To this work, his first year of theology completed, Ricci was himself applied, being given the unusually arduous task of teaching both Latin and Greek to the more advanced pupils.
Disappointed that he had come so far and with such high hopes merely to teach school, he appealed unsuccessfully for some more activ
e work such as was beginning to engage his friends. Valignano, continuing his tour of the vast Indian province, had spent ten months in Macao, a Portuguese enclave on the China coast, studying Chinese customs and law. He had decided to apply a new technique of evangelisation and called for a missionary to learn Chinese in Macao preparatory to entering the country. Ruggieri, chosen by the Indian provincial, had already sailed and arrived there. One of Ricci’s compatriots from Macerata was in Japan, where in the single year 1577 twelve thousand were baptised. Rudolf Acquaviva was preparing to leave at the end of the year as superior of an embassy of three Jesuits to the court of the Mohammedan Mogul Akbar, greatest ruler in India, lord of seventy kingdoms, commander-in-chief of 300,000 cavalry and twenty thousand elephants. The Mogul himself had requested the embassy: he was believed to look favourably on the Christian religion: at Goa the well-informed hoped for nothing less than the conversion of all India.
While great events were being shaped, he alone remained behind, teaching Demosthenes’ First Philippic to ebony-headed schoolboys. Final humiliation, even this proved too much for him. Still not fully acclimatised, after a month he fell severely ill and, in the hope that better air might restore his health, in November 1579 he was sent four hundred miles down coast to Cochin, cradle of Christianity in India. Here, beside lagoons fringed with coconut and pepper plantations, he felt remoter than ever from Europe, missing most of all his friends at the Roman College and Coimbra. After a short rest he continued to teach at the Jesuit college, where four hundred natives were given an education not greatly inferior to that which he himself had received at Macerata.
The call he had first heeded as a schoolboy was that summer inscribed beyond defacement, when the Bishop of Cochin, on the feast of St. James, laid hands in silence on his tonsured head, vested him with stole and chasuble, anointed his palms with holy oil and bound them together with linen. Later, receiving bread and wine at the Bishop’s side, he participated in the moment of consecration. To the boys at the college, when lessons were resumed, he was now Father Matthew, with power to celebrate Mass and forgive sins.
He had spent a year in Cochin when a letter recalled him to Goa to complete his four-year course of theology. Halfway through his third year, in April 1582, he received the marching orders for which he had been praying so long. His friend Michael Ruggieri, almost broken in spirit by the difficulty of the language he was trying to learn and the discouragement of the older priests in Macao, had insistently asked his superior, Valignano, to send him Ricci as a companion for the proposed Chinese mission. The Visitor, already impressed by his virtue and learning at the Roman college, ordered Ricci, in company with Francis Pasio, to take the next boat for Macao. It seemed that the prophecy of Rudolf Acquaviva would yet be fulfilled.
Eleven days after receiving the order, Ricci and Pasio sailed from Goa on one of the carracks which set out annually for Malacca, Macao and Japan. Since the Chinese for almost a century had been forbidden by their own laws to exchange goods directly with Japan, the Portuguese acted as middlemen, gaining more profit from this carrying trade than from any other Eastern source. A month out they skirted the Andaman Group, where the cannibal islanders traded nuts and the lime called Adam’s apple for calico goods. Two weeks later they sailed into the port of equatorial Malacca, on the south-west coast of the Malay peninsula, most abominable and dissolute of all Oriental emporia. Here European curios, Indian chintzes and cotton piece goods were bartered for aromatic timber: sandal, eagle and aloes wood; for sharkskins and deer-hides from Siam; and above all for cloves and nutmeg to season the vapid salted meat served throughout winter on European tables. In July they again set sail, across the typhonic China Sea. On this final lap of his ocean voyage Ricci succumbed to the intense heat and bestial conditions. In his cupboard-like bunk, narrow as a grave, he lay seriously ill for five weeks, until sailing past the temple of Ama, goddess of sailors, who gave her garbled name to the town, the carrack anchored at temperate Macao.
The enclave marked the success and failure of European relations with China. Almost seventy years before, the first Portuguese ship, commanded by an Italian, had entered the Pearl River and berthed at Canton. On their arrival the newcomers were accorded the same trading rights as Arabs and Malays had long enjoyed, and which the Chinese themselves received in ports as far as Sumatra, limit of their western voyages. The Portuguese, however, accustomed to treat all foreigners as enemies to be plundered or conquered, soon resorted to piracy and violence. Terrified by European seventy-pounders, more formidable than any weapon even the Japanese corsairs could boast, the Chinese forcibly expelled the traders from Canton. Later, learning that Malacca, which recognised Chinese sovereignty, had been seized, they forbade the Portuguese to touch at Chinese ports. But trade entailed such wealth for both nations that soon a compromise was reached. In 1557 the Portuguese were permitted to take possession of Macao, a small peninsula in the Canton estuary. The Chinese walled it off on the landward side and guarded the barrier with strong forces. Twice a year the Portuguese were allowed to sail up to Canton for two or three months under rigorous safeguards. Here they bartered Japanese silver for silk, gold, musk, pearls and porcelain: in January for the Indian and European markets, in June to form next year’s cargo for Japan. Since Chinese silk was highly prized in Japan, and silver far more valuable on the continent than in the island kingdom, this trade had fattened a generation of fidalgos.
When Ricci landed, Macao held a population of ten thousand, the bulk Chinese, with a scattering of Malays, Indonesians, Africans and Indians. The Portuguese, all men and many married to Chinese wives, numbered no more than a thousand. To serve their needs and those of their convert slaves, the Jesuits had founded a residence for five priests and the first of the half-dozen churches of the enclave.
Michael Ruggieri, after an affectionate welcome, led Ricci up to the residence of St. Martin to meet Valignano, who had recently returned from Japan and was now waiting to leave for Goa. Novice and novice-master now met on the other side of the world as missionary and organiser of the missions. Valignano then stood at the height of his powers, a very tall figure with foreseeing eyes and forceful jaw, a natural leader of immense presence and authority. Born in Chieti in 1539, after taking his doctorate of law at Padua he went to Rome, hoping for preferment from Pope Paul IV, who during his long term of office as Archbishop of Chieti had become a close friend of his father. He served as auditor to Cardinal Sittich d’Altemps, but soon returned to Padua. Here, at the age of twenty-three, he wounded a courtesan, was brought to justice and banished from the republic. Four years later, a man of exceptional talents who knew the world, he entered the Society of Jesus, where he was presently appointed to high office. Already, during his eight years in the East, he had proved himself the ideal successor to Francis Xavier, everywhere winning the affection and respect of his subordinates, organising dioceses, building churches and colleges along the trail which Francis had blazed. Their gifts and methods were complementary. As a Spaniard, Francis had preached in the agonising belief that all who were not baptised would suffer damnation; he scorned and made little attempt to understand the pagan beliefs he encountered; without time to master local languages, he had converted largely by his miracles, his holy presence and heroic acts of charity; alone in Asia, he had felt obliged to travel quickly from country to country, leaving his neophytes behind with little surveillance. His Italian successor, on the other hand, looked no less to the future than to the present. He believed that lasting conversion would result only from patient understanding of Eastern civilisations. He saw Portuguese and Spanish traders not as privileged imperialists, but as out-numbered intruders who would be expelled when no longer useful. Missionaries, if they hoped to remain, must win the people’s affection by adapting themselves as far as possible to local habits and indigenous beliefs. Humility and respect must replace the traditional attitude of righteousness and pride. Above all, Christianity must be presented in a way which Eastern peoples could un
derstand and appreciate.
Arriving in Macao in 1578 he had spent eleven months studying the government, laws and religion of China, as well as past missionary failures. Since the death of Francis Xavier numerous attempts had been made, chiefly by Jesuits and Franciscans, to obtain a footing, all without success, for the Chinese, cut off for centuries from the outside world, mindful of the recent Tartar invasions and terrified by the aggressive acts of Portuguese merchants, viewed all foreigners as enemies or evil spirits. But with Valignano past failures weighed less than the prospect of converting what he now learnt to be the most populous, fertile and wealthy kingdom of the world, its people industrious and peaceful, its government in the hands of philosophers whose learning, order and prudence won his admiration. After a detailed, empirical study of the difficulties involved, he decided to attempt to realise Francis Xavier’s dream along entirely new lines. Missionaries in the past had been arrested as spies preparing another Portuguese attack and, unable to explain themselves, sent back to Macao. Valignano believed China, which practised religious toleration and admired learning, would be naturally well disposed to Christian ideals. These, so far, had been overshadowed by piracy and aggression. Missionaries therefore must achieve an almost impossible feat, which no Westerner had ever before attempted: they must learn to read, write and speak the Chinese language. Only in this way could they explain their doctrine and good intentions, prove themselves men of learning and overcome the xenophobia aroused by the swashbuckling methods of early Portuguese traders.
Having found in Macao neither support for so revolutionary a method nor suitable missionaries, he had written to India for an Italian priest and left detailed written instructions as to his training. He then sailed for Japan, most encouraging of all mission fields. The island kingdom, thirty years after Xavier’s landing, boasted 150,000 Christian converts, most of exemplary standard, and Valignano believed they would grow to form the best and largest Christian community in the world, provided Rome would sanction admission of natives to the Society as priests and lay-brothers. After spending two and a half years in the island, the same length of time as Xavier, Valignano had now returned to Macao with valuable new experience.
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