Saint Francis Xavier Inspiring Portuguese Troops Against the Acehnese Pirates by André Reinoso (1619) - (Church of São Roque - Wiki)
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Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
App, Urs. “St. Francis Xavier’s Discovery of Japanese Buddhism: A Chapter in the European Discovery of Buddhism (Part 1: Before the Arrival in Japan, 1547-1549).” The Eastern Buddhist 30, no. 1 (1997).
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “Real and Imaginary Dialogues in the Jesuit Mission of Sixteenth-Century Japan.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2/3 (2012).
Willis, Clive. “Captain Jorge Álvares and Father Luís Fróis S.J.: Two Early Portuguese Descriptions of Japan and the Japanese.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22, no. 2 (2012).
Script:
From our last stop on the Ryukyu Islands, Pinto’s story took him all the way back to Portuguese Malacca, and he had not been there in quite a while. Not since he’d set out on that ill-fated voyage in search of vengeance, if that could be satisfactorily come by, and as much loot as possible along the way. The vengeance part would indeed be theirs, eventually, but the loot would come and go, piling up in one seized ship after another and then lost, those ships sunk or else taken, riches flowing easily in and out of their hands. There’d been other misadventures after that, an abundance of them.
It had been a long time, but like a film’s hero returning to their old hometown, he found someone he knew there in the person of Pero de Faria, not to be confused with one of those other de Farias. He was still in place as captain, still very willing to give his old friend a mission and send him back out on the waves. It was to Myanmar, this time, that Pinto went, and naturally he would not know peace. There’d be betrayal, cruel executions, the sacking of a city, and what Rebecca Catz termed “an impassioned condemnation of war, tyranny, and [humanity’s] capacity for brutality.”
Business as usual, one might say to that, and then one would need to say it again as Pinto was captured and had to make his escape, eventually making his way to Goa. From there in western India, he could surely have travelled still farther west and eventually have come to Portugal, from which he had been absent so long, but that was not what he did. De Faria, now former Captain of Malacca, was in Goa, and he sent Pinto out once more.
This time, he was headed to Java on a simple pepper-buying mission, but the Portuguese merchants would get themselves caught up in war again, in war gone wrong—he truly knew no other kind, if indeed there was one. They would scuttle off for China with their pepper, but they’d be attacked by pirates. They’d be shipwrecked and find themselves lost on an Indonesian coast, forced first to cannibalism and then to subject themselves slavery. Pinto would be sold and then sold again before being released.
He’d find himself in Siam, the place he and the others had so often claimed to be from when in China. He would find himself caught up there in usurpation and murder, intrigue and unrest, and would write of Burmese politics that no one else in Europe was covering at the time. He would, eventually, find himself returning to Japan.
It’s that last part which we’ll talk about today.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that does very much what the subtitle says. And it is a podcast with a Patreon, which you may tire of being told about, but do humour me for a moment here. It is a podcast with a Patreon where you can listen early, to ad-free episodes, and you can season those full-lengths with a smattering of bonus listening, the last example of which touched on the Japanese schools of gunnery, and their books of secrets. You can do so at patreon.com/humancircus, for as little as a dollar a month or as much as makes sense for you. And whatever that number is, I really do appreciate it.
That said, let’s get back to the story, back to the Pinto story.
Pinto had been in those Ryukyu Islands, which he had written of in a letter, saying, quote:
“…a hundred leagues before arriving in Japan, are the Ryukyu Islands, where some Portuguese were shipwrecked. The King of the Ryukyus gave them a ship and everything else they needed, but he refused to see them, saying that it would not please God for him to see with his own eyes, people who were in the habit of stealing from others. He said that because of the lands conquered by the Portuguese in India. I mention this, dear brothers, to show you the kindness of these people who have no knowledge of their Creator.”
It sounds very much like he’d borrowed that story of those “some Portuguese” and put himself in a starring role within it.
He had been in Japan, among the first three Europeans to do so, if you believed his words. His active role in those events has certainly been questioned, but his actual presence in Japan has not.
In today’s episode, we return there, with Pinto and with the Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier.
“But now,” wrote Pinto, “I want to get back to the main purpose of my story from which I strayed quite some time ago.” It was not the sort of transition you’d get away with these days.
“All 160 of us Portuguese embarked [from Myanmar] on five [ships] that were then in [port],” he wrote. “...On those ships we spread out, like the wanderers we [were], in all different directions, wherever each of us thought it would profit him most.”
In his case, that meant first Malacca, and then Japan for trade in the company of a Jorge Alvarez, writer of one of the first reports on the place to be written by a European. They went in a ship owned by Captain de Feria’s Malaccan replacement, and, astonishingly, they went without anything untoward happening to them at all. No storms to speak of, no wild battles with pirates at sea, no shipwrecks, or starvation, or cannibalism, no stumbling into disastrous outbursts of local politics. They arrived in Bungo, in eastern Kyūshū, with everything having gone refreshingly smoothly. Alarmingly so. You had to imagine that a bit of violent unrest was just around the corner, a palace coup or similar that would spill over to encompass the Portuguese traders. Was there to be slaughter, you might wonder. Would there be the sacking of a city or perhaps the murder of a royal?
Be assured that there would be, for when it came to such things, Pinto was not one to let you down.
What he described in this case began optimistically enough, both for the Portuguese and for the affairs of the region. The local ruler, who had received them generously, was petitioned by one of his people. There was a prince in exile whose good fortune had recently cleared the way for his return to take power. One of the local ruler’s vassals, a powerful man from a powerful family, thought it might go very well for his family if his daughter were to marry that noble.
Hearing his request, the ruler quickly arranged for it to be so, and the marriage plans were soon celebrated as a wonderful thing for all involved, absolutely everyone, with the unfortunate exception of the bride-to-be herself. She had not approved of the match, and quickly made her own arrangements, sending a message to the man she actually loved and having herself secreted away in the night and hidden away. Much bloodshed then followed, surprising amounts of it, one has to say.
In his anger, her father killed all who he thought might have aided her, and then went looking for more, spreading chaos into the surrounding region. A bloody search quickly turned into widening unrest, which became an uprising, one that the local ruler soon lost all capacity to control.
By the end of Pinto’s telling, that ruler had been killed along with his family. The powerful vassal who had so wanted his daughter married was also dead, having been lanced in the throat. Tens of thousands of others were dead too, accompanied by the burning of a city and mayhem in the countryside. All of that before the ruler’s son gathered an army, doing so through a conch-shell alert system, and arrived to reestablish control. Curiously, there appears to be no mention in all of this as to the woman who’d escaped impending marriage with her lover, only that she hid for nine days with no one knowing where she was. Nothing offered as to what became of her when they did know where she was.
As for Pinto and his fellow Portuguese, there were some who were sucked into the chaos, drowning in it along with the rest, while he and some 16 more made it back to the ship. “Out of,” quote, “concern for [their] safety and the dearth of buyers for [their] merchandise,” they set sail for another port.
That violence behind them, there were business interests to be considered, and initially, they were not profitable. There were too many ships, that season, that had made the trip from China, and their goods were going for well below cost in every Japanese port. The supply and demand of it all was just wildly unfavourable. However, as Pinto put it, “God, with his mysterious judgements, quietly ordains all things in ways that surpass our understanding.”
Pinto’s quote/unquote good fortune came in the form of a horrific storm, not what you’d usually look to for luck. All those ships which gathered on Japan’s coast, with merchants struggling to find buyers, now found themselves struggling against the elements, battered against that coast in improbable quantities, a highly specific 1,972 of them lost along with their crews and contents. All that wealth, and all of those lives, by Pinto’s questionable accounting, some 160,000 of them.
In the aftermath, Pinto and the other survivors offloaded their goods at whatever price they cared to ask, happily profiting from the catastrophic mass death, but also, quote, “feel[ing] quite sad to think that it had happened at the cost of so many lives and so much property, both of our own people as well as of the foreigners.” It had indeed been a high price paid for them to find a favourable deal for their wares, but I doubt it kept them sad for very long. They, after all, had not needed to pay it.
They also, in the Pinto tradition, were pretty quickly kept busy with new concerns. Their first attempt at departure was immediately curtailed by a mishap that had them looking for repairs, and bribing the port captain to have them done. Their second involved taking aboard two Japanese men, desperate to leave and, as it turned out, pursued by horsemen who threatened Pinto and the others from the shore, warning that “a thousand other heads like [theirs would] roll,” if they took the two men with them. But they did take them with them, all the way back to Malacca.
One of those two men, the one who was, in particular, hunted by those ashore, was named Anjirō, and he was not just making a passing appearance in this story, nor was he being chased without reason. He was apparently wanted for murder, and having been, in Pinto’s depiction, on the very cusp of being caught, he was now departing on the kind of life-adventure he could hardly have expected for himself pre-murder, or at any other time of life really.
There are differing versions of how exactly it would go, but all of them took Anjirō to Malacca and to a meeting with the Jesuit future-saint, Francis Xavier. It was a meeting of consequence, for both of those individuals and also for many beyond them.
Anjirō reached Malacca in late 1547 and would convert to Christianity, taking the name of Paul, or Paulo de Santa Fé. From Malacca, he would travel to Goa, studying both Portuguese and Christianity. He would actually return to Japan a few years later, working as an interpreter for Xavier, for what he had to say of that country had very much interested Xavier in all of its possibilities. It’s a pretty compelling drama in itself, the future saint and former killer combined in their purpose. Before we get to all of that, though, we should say a little more as to Pinto’s writing about the saint himself.
At the point when Anjirō and Xavier were brought together in Malacca, the Jesuit was not freshly arrived from Europe. He had come to India in 1542 and had since then been preaching and teaching in India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, including over a year in the Maluku Islands.
The short version of Xavier’s life is generally a story of his missionary work, of his efforts at conversion from India to Japan, but Pinto’s telling does not begin with that. It leads with a kind of military-themed miracle, performed during Sunday mass.
The context for this was an against-all-odds naval mission dispatched to combat an overwhelming Achinese force. It was a mission which Xavier seems to have had some role in bringing about, and for which he was, by some, blamed, and by others mocked. He had, while the small Portuguese fleet was away, been concluding his sermons for some time with calls for prayer for their victory, calls which were enthusiastically answered, then humoured, and finally, as time went on and it became increasingly felt that defeat had already occurred, responded to with derision.
Such was the situation when on this one particular Sunday in December, as he neared the end of his sermon, he suddenly turned toward the crucifix and with tears in his eyes started doing something else entirely and, quote, “left his listeners gasping with amazement.”
It was as if the battle was being revealed to him as it happened, and, as he watched it play out, he showed his audience what was happening, moving and miming with his arms and hands in the air. It was an admittedly rather difficult connection to confirm after the fact. ”Did a boat do something like this?” you might ask, gesturing forcefully beside your head. But such matters did not concern those who were there.
They watched, astonished and in awe, as the battle carried on in front of them, there at the front of the church, Xavier periodically clenching his fists and calling on God not to forsake him. “He said many things which I cannot quite recall,” Pinto wrote, and so it went on, until at last he slumped forward over the pulpit in exhaustion, and then, raising his head with the bright and cheery expression common to Pinto’s characterization of him, he announced that the Portuguese had been victorious. Within the week, a ship had arrived to confirm the news.
It was one of a few such miracles where Xavier was credited with having some distant events revealed to him, but it was certainly the most scaled-up and impressive version of the feat. That aspect of the saint’s character now established, Pinto sent him on his way to Japan and Anjirō with him.
But before we get to that journey, we should have a quick break.
…
Anjirō was not alone in piquing Xavier’s curiosity about Japan, exciting his desire to go there and optimism that it was a land in which Christianity could grow. There was also that captain, Jorge Alvarez, who, as I said, left a report about Japan, and he had a great many practical observations to pass along to an interested Xavier.
There was information as to a number of ports which he’d visited or heard about, as to the cultivated land on the coast, the crops that were grown there and the wild game. The people, Alvarez reported, were sturdy, white, and well featured, and he wrote about the way they cut their hair, how they wore their shirts and shoes, and a little about their character, obviously making some pretty substantial generalizations about them along the way.
He was very positive about those people, saying they were not given to greed or jealousy. Rather, they were friendly, hospitable, and curious, with no tolerance for theft or gambling. He had quite a bit to say about their religion, their temples, the devoutness of their prayer and practice, the manner of those who entered monastic orders, the appearance of their idols, all of it very interesting to Xavier I’m sure, enough clearly, to convince him to go.
There were some difficulties initially with getting there, though not of a particularly dramatic sort. The arrangements for their passage, Pinto says, had not been well made, and a ship, at first, could not be found to take them. Eventually, they went aboard a small ship captained by a man whose name Pinto had as Necodá Ladrão, apparently a Chinese merchant or possibly a pirate. That first name was simply a Malay word for a ship’s captain or owner, the last name, a Portuguese nickname referring to a thief or robber. In this “Captain Thief’s” care, they sailed through a “great deal of hardship,” which Pinto found unnecessary to detail.
Landing in Kagoshima, they were hospitably received by all, or at least most. The “king,” as Pinto would term him, made them very welcome, the clergy, outraged by Xavier’s work in their land, rather less so, and they bitterly complained at his presence. There is talk that they referred to him as a “foul-smelling dog,” the “lice-infested one,” that they spread stories of how he ate bedbugs and the rotting corpses which he dug up at night.
As for his work, Pinto puts his conversions there at 800, a fairly sizeable little community which he then left as he travelled on to Hirado and then Kyoto, to Osaka and Yamaguchi, trying to figure out where he might most effectively engage in the expansion of Christianity, aiming to do so here among the nobility rather than the common folk, a noteworthy departure from his methods in India.
There were hardships for Xavier in Pinto’s telling. Rough terrain to be travelled during the winter season, and a lack of resources to handle either it or the tolls and charges that were required. A frustrating lack of success in “harvesting fruit,” as Pinto termed his conversion efforts, and the pain of headaches and swollen feet. Pinto writes of riding to meet Xavier on the road and feeling embarrassed to come before him in fine clothes and on a good horse, while the Jesuit went on his own feet with the necessities for mass carried on his back. He writes of a Portuguese ship greeting Xavier’s arrival on the coast with such a cacophonous eruption of artillery that the local ruler reacted in alarm, promising help against the fleet of pirates he assumed they were fending off. Most notably, Pinto also recorded Xavier’s encounters with Ōtomo Sōrin, also known as Ōtomo Yoshishige, the daimyo, or ruler, of Bungo.
As Joan-Pau Rubiés has written, Christianity’s entry into Japan was quite unlike those examples where “the cross often followed the sword.” Instead, it was an exercise in what he terms “cultural seduction,” unsupported by the kind of imminent availability of violence that elsewhere underpinned conversion efforts.
In Pinto’s depiction, the efforts at seduction brought Xavier before the daimyo having been convinced that his display of pious poverty was failing to have the desired effect and that he should instead look to impress and to counter the slander of the local monks. To that end, he went draped with a green velvet stole, the ship’s captain advancing with him, staff in hand, five others, the richest and most honourable among them, carrying certain objects as if they were Xavier’s servants. “One was carrying a book in a white satin pouch; another, a Bengal cane with a gold knob; another, [an image] of our Lady in a purple damask wrapper; another, a parasol with a short handle.”
In that depiction, Xavier went before the daimyo and engaged in a spirited debate with the local Buddhist monks over spiritual matters, that daimyo sitting in consideration as to the winning arguments. A series of debates really, with the monks bringing in a renowned and learned man for the second, and 3,000 monks showing up in support for the third, with others challenging Xavier for days after that. But the general tone carries throughout, with a succession of monks going on the attack, attempting to unsettle and discredit Xavier before the daimyo.
The monks stray quickly into belligerence, including with the daimyo himself, one actually calling him a “blind, eyeless sinner,” while Xavier refutes their points with a calm rationality that is mirrored in the daimyo’s judgement, in the words of a 7-year-old innocent, and, Pinto would reiterate, in the Japanese people more generally. It was just their monks, he would write, who were, quote, “very proud and conceited about knowing more than the others, consider it a matter of honour not to retract anything they have once said, nor yield a point in any argument touching upon their credibility, even though they might be risking their lives a thousand times because of it.”
It’s worth noting that in one of Xavier’s own letters he writes with much admiration of one particular monk with whom he shared dialogue, but in Pinto’s account, there is little in the way of such positivity.
What there is, is discussion of reincarnation framed as the transmigration of souls, of the age of the Earth and that of a populated Japan. Of Buddhist deities and what the word ought to mean, of the nature of the afterlife and how one’s fate there was decided, of whether or not God was hostile to the poor, of the source of perfection in the world, of how an all-knowing and omnibenevolent God could not have foreseen or forestalled the acts of Lucifer and all that had followed after. And so on.
As for Xavier’s actual arguments in these encounters, Pinto often doesn’t provide them. Instead, as Joan-Pau Rubiés puts it, he “retreats into a confession of intellectual ineptitude.” “I realize,” he will say, that “I am not competent to handle matters of this nature.” “They are not within the grasp of my poor wits.” As Rubiés notes, in a, quote, “Counter- Reformation culture marked by the fear of Christian heresy it was easier for Mendes Pinto to mock openly the false [or misrepresentative] philosophy of the Buddhists than to get entangled in the true arguments of the Christian theologian.” Many of Xavier’s successes thus happen off-screen. They happen, but Pinto doesn’t put their words in the Jesuit’s mouth.
It’s a pretty interesting scene, taken as a scene, and it’s clearly fictionalized, though, as is often the case with our Pinto, not entirely. While Xavier’s correspondence makes no mention of his having taken part in such a dispute in Bungo, there were debates in Yamaguchi a few weeks earlier that are mentioned in Jesuit records, as are later disputes there which took place in Xavier’s absence. By the time Pinto was actually writing about all of this, the Yamaguchi mission, which had once seemed so promising, had been abandoned, while there remained a great deal of optimism around Bungo, where the daimyo would actually convert to Christianity in 1578. Bungo, then, made much more sense for a setting.
By that time of the daimyo’s conversion, Anjirō/Paul was long gone, his death recorded in Pinto’s book with these words.
Quote:
“Paul of the Holy Faith, … continued to indoctrinate [the community Xavier had established] for five more months that he remained there with them, but at the end of that time, because he had been offended by the [monks], he embarked for China, where he was killed by some pirates who were ravaging the kingdom of Ningbo.”
It’s sometimes supposed that he was actually one of those pirates engaging in said ravaging when he died.
By the time of that conversion, Xavier was dead also. Having worked in Japan for two years and achieved some modest success, he had left for India. He would return to the region a few years later, but in 1552, he would die on Shangchuan Island, having failed to reach the Chinese mainland. His body would be buried there on the island before being transported first to Malacca and then to Goa where he was buried for a third and final time.
His legacy in Japan was what you might term a Jesuit foothold to be followed up on there by his successors, the conversion of a number of the elite and their people. But not too long after that daimyo’s 1578 conversion came the 1587 edicts, banning Christian missionaries and their work, with persecution of Christians in Japan to follow in the decades, and century, to come.
As for Mendes Pinto, his story was not quite yet finished, but next time we will bring it to a conclusion, and I’ll talk to you then.