It is time now to turn away from products, crops and politics, and look at people moving over the ocean for religious reasons. We will look at conversions, at the travels of religious exemplars keen to fortify the faith of their followers, and at pilgrimage in the context of widespread travels over the ocean. These three matters are very intricately mixed, but for heuristic reasons we will separate them to an extent. For that matter, there also are important links and connections with all of the preceding discussion: for example, the Portuguese opposed the Muslim pilgrimage, arguably the activities of their fleets hindered their own conversion drive, and most pilgrims chaffered their way to their destination, thus engaging in trade.
Conversion is a rather nebulous term. It is best to see it as a long process, taking perhaps several generations. There are entry points to be sure. For Muslims, to pronounce the profession of faith – 'There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet' – is a start. For Christians it would begin with baptism. However, for the exemplars of both of these religions the task then was to consolidate and improve. A whole world of social habits, customs, beliefs had to be set aside. The aim was not additive change, where a new superstructure was imposed on a bedrock of existing believe, but rather substitutive change, where a totally new world view was imposed. This is where people I refer to as rectifiers were important; these men strove to improve the quality of religious practice of people who were already, ostensibly, members of their faith. For these people the term missionary would be inappropriate, for missionaries try to spread, not improve, the faith. We will begin with conversions.
The two main drives were those led by Muslims and Christians. However, it was only the Catholics who spent much effort on this: the Protestant Dutch and English provided spiritual counsel for their own people, but made no effort to convert anyone else. There are many similarities, and many contrasts. The Muslim effort was much more inchoate than the Christian one, which was directed from Europe – from Lisbon and from Rome. Christian missionaries were supported by the political authorities, Muslim ones much less so. Christian missionaries were foreign, Muslim ones rather less so. On the other hand, both frequently relied on the time-honoured 'trickle down from the top' technique, whereby great effort was put into converting a king or other political figure, with the expectation that his subjects would then follow suit.
Muslims obviously had a head start over the Christians in their race to convert people. We described some aspects of their conversion efforts in an earlier chapter (see pages 76–80). Accounts, or more correctly complaints, by Christian missionaries give us good information on how Islam was spread. As a Jesuit lamented from Goa in 1560, what was most disturbing and lamentable was 'to see how the cacizes [Muslim divines] of the accursed and abominable sect of Muhammad confound us, because they come from Mecca and from Persia and from many other places to infect and corrupt the poor Hindus who are almost tabula rasa', and their message had a very great appeal indeed. Often they won by default; what was needed was more Christian missionaries to counter these overly successful Muslims. The same Jesuit added that
the partisans of Muhammad don't sleep, rather their cacizes make themselves into seamen, and thus can go around preaching their accursed sect; and they have done so well that it seems incredible the number of gentiles that in a few years have here submitted to this evil sect, and I believe that here they have a great advantage over us.
Another Jesuit at the same time expanded on this Muslim conversion technique, describing again how they travel as 'lascars, which is the same as sailors', on Portuguese boats even, and sowed their 'evil seed' wherever the boat called, even as far as China, Siam and Java.
The main arena in our period was southeast Asia. Western Indonesia was converted before the Portuguese and Spanish arrived, mostly by new Muslims from India, especially from Gujarat and other coastal areas. It is a matter of missionary activity undertaken by people themselves relatively new converts, and again the mechanism was trade and the use of the sea as a highway for the spread of Islam. It is debatable whether Muslims who were responsible for converting large numbers of people in southeast Asia can be described precisely as 'missionaries'. Few Muslims who spread their faith in the area were religious specialists engaged in fulltime proselytisation, in the way the members of the Christian orders were. Most conversions to Islam apparently were made by people who were traders or travellers, pious no doubt but engaged in worldly activities also. Many traders were members of Sufi orders, and indeed it is a matter of degree, for while most were primarily traders, a few were religious guides for their fellow Muslims and also people interested in spreading the faith.
Once the Portuguese arrived they engaged in vigorous competition with their Muslim rivals. The situation in Siam in the middle of the sixteenth century was well described in a letter by the adventurer-turned-religious Fernão Mendes Pinto. He told his Jesuit fellows that there were various religious beliefs followed in Siam, but the Muslims were doing very well. Already in the capital there were seven mosques, with foreign cacizes, and 30,000 hearths of Muslims. Proselytisation proceeded apace. The king, however, maintained a hands-off attitude to the whole matter: 'The king lets everyone do what they want; they can be Muslim or gentile, for he says he is king of nothing more than their bodies.'
The Christian missionaries tried to work from the top. This worked well in Japan, but not so much elsewhere. In India the Jesuits hoped to convert the Mughal emperor Akbar, after which the rest of India would follow. Hence the ecstatic claims from time to time that the Great Mughal was listening to them, was favourably inclined to them, was now no longer a Muslim, and indeed on occasion that his conversion was imminent. Alas, the hopes were all ill-founded, showing no doubt a Counter-Reformation failure to understand how Akbar could find some merit in all the great religious traditions. As was ruefully noted, he remained as Muslim as he had ever been. So also at a more humble level in Goa, where they encouraged the elite to convert, offering them jobs and other favours in return. In 1548 Lakshman decided to convert. He was a great catch. The bishop performed the ceremony, the governor stood as his godfather, and, now called Luquas de Sá, he was given an important government post.
Letters home to Europe from the religious often complain of the lack of support they received from the secular authorities. Most Spanish and Portuguese governors and captains put political, and especially economic, matters before conversions. Indeed, the efforts of the missionaries were often hindered and obstructed, rather than facilitated, by their fellow Christians. In many areas of seaborne Asia the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had unenviable reputations. This was both at an official and individual level. The Portuguese tried forcibly to monopolise trade in spices and some other products, and direct other Asian trade, forcing all sea trade to pay customs duties to them at their forts. Most sea trade in the Arabian Sea, and increasingly also in island southeast Asia, was handled by Muslims; this political and economic conflict spilt over into religious hostility, indeed the two were symbiotic and fed on each other.
Nor was it only the official policies of the Portuguese state which contributed to their unsavoury reputation. The conduct of private Portuguese traders also at times lowered the reputation of them all. It is true that these private traders simply operated in Indian Ocean waters on a basis of equality with any other petty traders, but even so their moral reputation seems to have been a low one; again this must have exacerbated the difficulties of their compatriots who were trying to make conversions, and must have made the task of the competition, the cacizes, that much easier. A longish account, admittedly by a hostile Spanish priest, makes clear precisely this problem. Writing in the later seventeenth century about Cochinchina, he said that
The Women there being too free and immodest, as soon as any Ship arrives, they presently go aboard to invite the Men; nay, they even make it an Article of Marriage with their own Countrymen, that when Ships come in, they shall be left to their own Will, and have l
iberty to do what they please.... A Vessel from Macao came to that Kingdom, and during its stay there, the Portugueses had so openly to do with those Infidel Harlots, that when they were ready to sail, the Women complained to the King, that they did not pay them what they owed them for the use of their Bodys. So the King ordered the Vessel should not stir till that debt was paid. A rare Example given by Christians, and a great help to the conversion of those Infidels! Another time they were so lewd in that Kingdom, that one about the King said to him, 'Sir, we know not how to deal with these people, the Dutch are satisfied with one Woman, but the People of [Portuguese] Macao are not satisfied with many.'
It is difficult to quantify the relative successes of these two protagonists, or antagonists. On the Muslim side, leaving aside the totally Muslim Middle East, we can remember a strong Islamic presence on the East African coast – indeed one way to define the Swahili is to note that they are Muslims, unlike most of their fellow Africans. In South Asia as a whole, including Pakistan and Bangladesh with India, the total Muslim population today is something under 400 million. The Malay world is solidly Muslim, excluding Chinese migrants brought in by Europeans in the nineteenth century. On the Christian side, their share of the populations of the first and third of these areas is minuscule. We have some indications of how they fared in India in this period. It has been estimated that by the end of the sixteenth century there may have been 175,000 Christian converts in all of India, most of them poor fisher folk. Descendants of these converts are to be found all over India, and Asia, today. No doubt this is a substantial achievement, yet there are some hesitations to be expressed also. First, India had a population in this century of about 140 million, so from this perspective the missionary success was rather limited. The greatest success was obviously in the city of Goa itself, where at this time about two-thirds of the population were Christian. However, in the whole territory of Goa, the Old Conquests, Christians at most made up one-quarter of the total. In contrast, a very rough estimate of the Muslim population of South Asia in around 1600 would find perhaps 15,000,000 people.
Once people converted they often undertook pilgrimages to religiously significant places. From the Christian side, a visit to the two most obvious sites of the Holy Land and Rome was hardly possible, except for a handful of priests to Rome. Certainly there were minor pilgrimages to the tombs of holy men. St Francis Xavier, the Apostle of the East, is the best known of these, and even today his birthday is celebrated in Old Goa with great eclat. The regular expositions of his miraculously preserved body also encouraged this cult. Parts of it were even abstracted, either openly or surreptitiously, so that a lucky few had their own personal relics of the saint. Yet surely it is significant that the crowd at his birthday celebrations includes many Hindus, and indeed some of no particular religion at all. He has become in effect a generic holy man. In many other areas also Indian Ocean Christianity, despite the intolerance of Counter-Reformation Catholicism as seen especially in the work of the Inquisition, in many areas continued to include pre-Christian customs and beliefs. Conversion was a two-way process, with much retained from previous religious practice. In many social areas Hindus who had converted to Christianity retained their old customs. Various food prohibitions and notions of pollution continued to be influential. Sometimes Indian Christians seem almost to merge in with Hindus, in an eminently tolerant way. The best example, and the most studied, is the continuance of caste notions in families who have been Christian for centuries. Christianity in India, then, owed as much to its local environment as it did to the norms of Rome.
Hindu pilgrimage certainly occurred, but exclusively by land, so that we will pass this by except to point out that their places of pilgrimage are usually aquatic, being located on the sea shore or rivers. Buddhist pilgrims from East Asia mostly travelled by sea to visit the holy sites in north India associated with the Buddha. We have no hard evidence of Japanese Buddhists reaching India in this period, and indeed the journey would have been an arduous one. One pious Japanese Buddhist worked out, presumably to explain why he never went, that to travel from Japan to India would take 1,000 days at eight miles a day, or 1,600 at five miles a day. He had to make do with a stone that he found on the coast of Japan: 'Thinking that the water poured upon the sacred remains of Buddha flows into the ocean, I feel especially familiar with this stone found on the seashore.'27 We can assume that some followers of the path in Burma and Sri Lanka made visits to north India. Certainly there was travel for religious reasons between these two Buddhist countries. It has been claimed that when Buddhism in Sri Lanka was under attack from the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Arakan played a vital role in preserving Theravada Buddhism until tolerance returned to Sri Lanka.28
By default, then, the greatest pilgrimage in our period was that of Muslims to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina; indeed to do this is to fulfil one of the central requirement of Islam. In the early modern period some 15,000 from India undertook this pious obligation each year, out of a total of up to 200,000.29
The hajj had a multitude of significances. First of all, it was a pious obligation. However, small-scale economic activity was generated by the peddling of the pilgrims as they made their way to the Red Sea. Most of them supported themselves by trading, using their goods as needed to buy passage, food and accommodation, in a way analogous to the modern travellers' cheque. At the actual time of the hajj, a period of a few days in Mecca, the town was host to a massive market in a great variety of goods. Many were secular, but some were infused with religious significance. Burial shrouds soaked in water from the sacred well of Zamzam, bits from the brooms used to sweep out the Kaba, pieces of the ornate cloth covering of the Kaba, these and many other items found a ready market.
There was also a political dimension to the hajj. Control of the Holy Cities passed in the sixteenth century from the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt, which had only a vestigial control over the hereditary sheikhs of the cities, to the Ottoman Empire. The sultans took very seriously their role as Guardians of the Holy Places, did public works in the two cities, provided food to the inhabitants, and financed the vast pilgrim caravans from Cairo and Damascus to the Hijaz. Muslim Indian rulers similarly patronised those wanting to go on hajj.
We have no good data on numbers of pilgrims from East Africa, nor from southeast Asia. But we do have evidence of quite extensive contact with Mecca in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and indeed with other centres of Islamic power. The sultanate of Banten maintained important links with Mecca. These were for religious guidance and patronage. In 1638 the Meccan authorities bestowed the title of sultan on the ruler of Banten, and his son twice made the hajj.30 In 1581 the Portuguese saw a ship, which apart from a very rich cargo had on board 150 women, these being among the most noble of the kingdom of Pegu, who were going with very rich presents to offer them to, as they put it, 'their false prophet and legislator Muhammad'.
The effects of a visit to Mecca could be various indeed. Regrettably, it sometimes led to an increase in intolerance. In the 1630s Lobo travelled by sea from Suakin, on the west coast of the Red Sea, to Diu:
The ship carried many people, most of them pilgrims to their accursed, detestable house, by which I mean that of Meca, where Mafoma [Muhammad] is buried [sic]. Once these people have visited it, they receive from the Xarifes there an indisputable pass to Heaven; and when they leave Meca in this sanctified state, nothing is more loathsome to them than to meet with Christians, for they believe themselves contaminated if they see or have any dealings with us, so pure in body and soul do they consider themselves when they leave that place. For this reason they very much begrudged our being on that ship, imagining that their purity would be spoiled by our presence there, for they avoided all communication or conversation with us, so that when they arose in the morning and their eyes were unavoidably struck by the sight of us . . . they would immediately spit in the other direction as if they had seen the vilest thing in the world....31
/> Those who returned home from the pilgrimage had acquired very considerable prestige. In part they were considered to be daring people indeed for having undertaken the long and dangerous sea voyage across the Arabian Sea. They also were now able to stand forth in their home communities as exemplars of Islam: here is how they do it in Mecca; people in Mecca say this and that, and do this. In the Maldive Islands in the early seventeenth century those who had been on hajj were allowed to wear their beards in a distinctive style.
Those who have been to Arabia, and have visited the sepulchre of Mahomet at Mecca [sic], are held in high respect by all the world, whatever be their rank, and whether they be poor or rich; and, indeed, a great number of the poor have been there. These have peculiar privileges: they are called Agy [hajji, one who has done the hajj]; and in order to be recognised and remarked among the others, they all wear very white cotton frocks, and on their heads little round bonnets, also white, and carry beads in their hands without crosses; and when they have not the means to maintain themselves in this attire, the king or the nobles supply them, and fail not to do so.32
These people were engaged, in a modest way, in trying to 'purify' the religion, to root out customs and behaviour which they claimed had no place in 'pure' Islam. In this they had a Christian parallel in the activities of the Inquisitors in Goa, and priests sent out from Rome to rid Indian Catholicism of its deviations and errors. The much-feared Holy Office of the Inquisition was the supreme example of intolerant Counter Reformation Catholicism. Xavier was scandalised by what he saw in Goa, considering many local converts and also Portuguese to have strayed far from the faith. He recommended that an Inquisition be established, though this was achieved only eight years after his death, in 1560. However, even before this heresy did not go unpunished. In 1543 a New Christian physician, that is a Jew converted to Christianity, was convicted by the ecclesiastical court of relapsing to Judaism. He was sentenced to be burnt, but this sentence was reduced after he confessed and apologised. He was strangled before he was burnt.
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