Global Reformations Sourcebook: Convergence, Conversion, and Conflict in Early Modern Religious Encounters 2020054525, 9780367133955, 9780367133986, 9781003137795

This volume of primary sources brings together letters, memoirs, petitions, tracts, and stories related to religion and

466 39 2MB

English Pages [311] Year 2021

Report DMCA / Copyright

DOWNLOAD FILE

Polecaj historie

Global Reformations Sourcebook: Convergence, Conversion, and Conflict in Early Modern Religious Encounters
 2020054525, 9780367133955, 9780367133986, 9781003137795

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
PART 1 How to use this sourcebook
Reform, Reformation, and Global Reformations
How this reader came about
Suggestions for further reading
PART 2 Sources
1 Joining the Church: translating rituals of initiation
1.1 The clarity arid certainty of the Word of God (1522)
1.2 Debating the key rituals of Christian faith: Luther on the sacraments (1520)
1.3 The debate over when and how to enter the community of the Church: as infants or as adults (1525)
1.4 Baptism and marriage: Catholic sacraments in a Japanese Kirishitan catechism (1591)
1.5 Baptism and preparation for death in a Japanese Kirishitan Catechism (1593)
1.6 Curbing baptisms of the enslaved in Africa (1627)
1.7 Protecting body and soul: persuading Indigenous people of the power of baptism (1632-3)
2 Purifying the community: purging the alien
2.1 Expelling Jews from Spain: the Alhambra Decree (1492)
2.2 An Italian Jew describes the expulsion from Spain (1495)
2.3 A Portuguese Jew describes the expulsion from Portugal (n.d.)
2.4 The 1506 massacre of the New Christians in Lisbon: a Catholic bishop's account (1581)
2.5 Making a martyr: the 1572 St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1609)
2.6 The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain (1609)
2.7 Ming officials push for the expulsion of Christian missionaries (1616-18)
3 Evaluating others: cross-cultural assessments
3.1 Can Christians, Jews, and Muslims learn anything from each other? (1560)
3.2 A convert reconsiders: a Japanese Buddhist's critique of Christianity (1620)
3.3 A rabbi compares Christianity and Judaism (1641)
3.4 Ming and Qing scholars respond to Christian missions (1601, 1739)
3.5 Wendat encounters with Christianity (1632)
3.6 The Wendat evaluate Christianity: a nun and a priest give differing accounts of a Wendat assembly (1640)
4 The politics of conversion - early and late 'Reformation'
4.1 Portfolio: Reformation and regime change: Catholicizing the Bosnian kingdom (1459-63)
4.2 Portfolio: conversion and colonization: Reformation on the margins (1730s-40s)
5 Living together: co-existence, conversion, convergence
5.1 The spaces of religion and race in Kongo (1591)
5.2 The unlikely friendship of a Muslim and an Iberian friar (1533)
5.3 A criollo bishop reviews religious life in a Mexican city (1614)
5.4 Catholic, Protestant, and Jew: the many lives of Manuel Cardoso de Macedo (1620s)
5.5 Indigenous teachers in early Indigenous missions - the experience in New Spain (1664)
5.6 Toleration, coexistence, and reform: Dutch radicals argue against forced conversion arid for freedom of religious expression (1539; 1609)
5.7 An English radical advocates for the return of Jews to England - on condition (1621)
5.8 Can an Indigenous woman become a nun? (1723)
6 Ordering faith, ordering society
6.1 Creating new communities of believers (1527)
6.2 Manifesto for a radically Christian community (1534)
6.3 State and church: a Catholic view (1530)
6.4 State and church: a Protestant view (1559)
6.5 Building the Kongo church with - and in spite of - Christian traders and missionaries (1526; 1539)
6.6 A Japanese emperor's views on religion, rural order, and commerce (1587)
6.7 The limits of toleration for Protestants in Italy (1561)
6.8 Centralizing saint-making in a globalizing Catholic church (1601)
6.9 A Dutch radical proposes religious coexistence and toleration (1620s)
6.10 A rabbi compares diasporic experiences (1627)
6.11 Investigating a miracle in the Italian countryside (1674)
7 Performing the faith: the art of religious identity and difference
7.1 Singing the word: songs of faith and belonging (1560; 1635)
7.2 Singing the catechism: songs of instruction (1529; 1854)
7.3 Singing the colonial relation: from 'Jesous Ahatonnia' to 'The Huron Carol' (1642-43; 1899; 1927)
7.4 A Jewish life of Christ - the Toledot Yeshu
7.5 Miracle tales for a global gospel: Black and Indigenous believers in God's family (1627)
7.6 Religious plays for Nahuatl audiences
7.7 Why do bad things happen to good people? Staging a Christian and Indigenous encounter (1740)
7.8 The kitchen of opinions: peace urges the churches to tolerate each other
8 Exploiting faith: conversion, capitalism, colonialism
8.1 The destruction of the Indies: colonial patterns of merging religion and development (1555)
8.2 Indigenous responses to the arrival of the Spanish in Cuba (1555)
8.3 English colonialism and the Black Legend of Spain (1656)
8.4 Seeking gender parity in Río de la Plata region (1556)
8.5 Navigating religious, racial, and political divisions in the Yucatán peninsula (1567)
8.6 Baptism as a tool in European enslavement of Africans (1627)
8.7 Work and religion in the colonial setting: Dutch Amboina (1692)
9 Going underground - negotiating difference
9.1 The legal status of Muslims and Jews in medieval Castile - the Siete Partidas (1252-65)
9.2 Living as a Muslim in Spain (1462)
9.3 Negotiating Muslim life under Christian rule in Iberia: after the fall of Granada (1491)
9.4 Iberian Muslims appeal to the Ottoman Sultan for relief (c. 1502)
9.5 Practicing Islam as a Catholic: the Oran Fatwa (1504)
9.6 The alien advantage: German Protestants worshipping in Catholic Venice (c. 1580)
9.7 Protesting the prohibition of Christianity in Japan (1614)
9.8 Saving an illegitimate Jewish baby from Christian authorities (1691)
10 Living the traditions: the religious politics of daily life
10.1 In questions of faith, you are what you wear: Algerian women's fashion (1612)
10.2 Assimilating Roma in early modem Italy (1583; 1631)
10.3 A Morisco under suspicion in Valencia (1556-67)
10.4 The Inquisition investigates a Morisca bride in sixteenth-century Spain (1575)
10.5 Marking time - a Jewish calendar (5354 or 1593/94 CE)
10.6 Ten commandments for the Jewish wife (before 1620)
10.7 Of powders and pregnancy: the Mexican Inquisition takes on a midwife (1652)
10.8 Separating sheep and goats in the early modem Aegean (1757)
11 Finding self and others
11.1 Reforming an unruly priest in New Spain (1545-9)
11.2 Investigating an unusual 'convent' (1687-8)
11.3 A Jewish servant and her ghetto network (1664)
11.4 An abbess and convent in exile (1642)
11.5 Spiritual friendships and alliances: a queen and English convents in exile (1687-8)
11.6 Irish nuns in exile and in poverty (1740)
11.7 The devil in the body of a man: a nun's temptations (1723)
11.8 Scandal in the enclosure: a Manila woman seeks another life (1754)
Index

Citation preview

Global Reformations Sourcebook

This volume of primary sources brings together letters, memoirs, petitions, tracts, and stories related to religion and reform around the globe from the ffteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The common subject of the sources is the Reformation, and these texts demonstrate the themes and impacts of religious reform in Europe and around the globe. Scholars once framed the Reformation as a sixteenthcentury European dispute between Protestant and Catholic churches and states, but now look expansively at connections and entanglements between different confessions, faiths, time periods, and geographical areas. The Reformation coincided with Europeans’ expanding reach across the globe as traders, settlers, and colonists, but the role that religion played in this drive has yet to be fully explored. These readings highlight these reformers’ engagements with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Indigenous spirituality, and the entanglement of Christian reform with colonialism, trade, enslavement, and racism. Offering a sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of religious transformations in the early modern world, this collection of primary sources is invaluable to both undergraduate and postgraduate students working on theology, the Reformation, and early modern society. Nicholas Terpstra is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He works at the intersections of gender, politics, charity, and religion in early modern Italy, focusing on civil and uncivil society, religious refugees, and the digital mapping of early modern social realities and relations.

9

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com

Global Reformations Sourcebook Convergence, Conversion, and Confict in Early Modern Religious Encounters Edited by Nicholas Terpstra

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Nicholas Terpstra The right of Nicholas Terpstra to be identifed as the author of the editorial material has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Terpstra, Nicholas, editor. Title: Global reformations sourcebook : convergence, conversion, and confict in early modern religious encounters / edited by Nicholas Terpstra. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020054525 | ISBN 9780367133955 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367133986 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003137795 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Reformation—Sources. | Church history— 17th century—Sources. | Church history—18th century—Sources. Classifcation: LCC BR301 .G545 2021 | DDC 270.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054525 ISBN: 978-0-367-13395-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-13398-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13779-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of fgures Acknowledgements

x xi

PART 1

How to use this sourcebook Reform, Reformation, and Global Reformations

1 3

How this reader came about 18 Suggestions for further reading 20 PART 2

Sources

25

1

27

Joining the Church: translating rituals of initiation 1.1 The clarity and certainty of the Word of God (1522) 27 1.2 Debating the key rituals of Christian faith: Luther on the sacraments (1520) 29 1.3 The debate over when and how to enter the community of the Church: as infants or as adults (1525) 31 1.4 Baptism and marriage: Catholic sacraments in a Japanese Kirishitan catechism (1591) 34 1.5 Baptism and preparation for death in a Japanese Kirishitan Catechism (1593) 37 1.6 Curbing baptisms of the enslaved in Africa (1627) 43 1.7 Protecting body and soul: persuading Indigenous people of the power of baptism (1632–3) 45

vi

Contents

2

Purifying the community: purging the alien

48

2.1 Expelling Jews from Spain: the Alhambra Decree (1492) 48 2.2 An Italian Jew describes the expulsion from Spain (1495) 50 2.3 A Portuguese Jew describes the expulsion from Portugal (n.d.) 52 2.4 The 1506 massacre of the New Christians in Lisbon: a Catholic bishop’s account (1581) 55 2.5 Making a martyr: the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1609) 58 2.6 The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain (1609) 60 2.7 Ming offcials push for the expulsion of Christian missionaries (1616–18) 63

3

Evaluating others: cross-cultural assessments

67

3.1 Can Christians, Jews, and Muslims learn anything from each other? (1560) 67 3.2 A convert reconsiders: a Japanese Buddhist’s critique of Christianity (1620) 71 3.3 A rabbi compares Christianity and Judaism (1641) 76 3.4 Ming and Qing scholars respond to Christian missions (1601, 1739) 77 3.5 Wendat encounters with Christianity (1632) 81 3.6 The Wendat evaluate Christianity: a nun and a priest give differing accounts of a Wendat assembly (1640) 84

4

The politics of conversion – early and late ‘Reformation’

88

4.1 Portfolio: Reformation and regime change: Catholicizing the Bosnian kingdom (1459–63) 88 4.2 Portfolio: conversion and colonization: Reformation on the margins (1730s–40s) 98

5

Living together: co-existence, conversion, convergence 5.1 The spaces of religion and race in Kongo (1591) 111 5.2 The unlikely friendship of a Muslim and an Iberian friar (1533) 112 5.3 A criollo bishop reviews religious life in a Mexican city (1614) 113

111

vii

Contents 5.4 Catholic, Protestant, and Jew: the many lives of Manuel Cardoso de Macedo (1620s) 115 5.5 Indigenous teachers in early Indigenous missions – the experience in New Spain (1664) 119 5.6 Toleration, coexistence, and reform: Dutch radicals argue against forced conversion and for freedom of religious expression (1539; 1609) 122 5.7 An English radical advocates for the return of Jews to England – on condition (1621) 124 5.8 Can an Indigenous woman become a nun? (1723) 127

6

Ordering faith, ordering society

132

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Creating new communities of believers (1527) 132 Manifesto for a radically Christian community (1534) 135 State and church: a Catholic view (1530) 137 State and church: a Protestant view (1559) 138 Building the Kongo church with – and in spite of – Christian traders and missionaries (1526; 1539) 140 6.6 A Japanese emperor’s views on religion, rural order, and commerce (1587) 143 6.7 The limits of toleration for Protestants in Italy (1561) 145 6.8 Centralizing saint-making in a globalizing Catholic church (1601) 149 6.9 A Dutch radical proposes religious coexistence and toleration (1620s) 151 6.10 A rabbi compares diasporic experiences (1627) 153 6.11 Investigating a miracle in the Italian countryside (1674) 155

7

Performing the faith: the art of religious identity and difference 7.1 Singing the word: songs of faith and belonging (1560; 1635) 160 7.2 Singing the catechism: songs of instruction (1529; 1854) 161 7.3 Singing the colonial relation: from ‘Jesous Ahatonnia’ to ‘The Huron Carol’ (1642–43; 1899; 1927) 163 7.4 A Jewish life of Christ – the Toledot Yeshu 165 7.5 Miracle tales for a global gospel: Black and Indigenous believers in God’s family (1627) 170 7.6 Religious plays for Nahuatl audiences 172

160

viii

Contents 7.7 Why do bad things happen to good people? Staging a Christian and Indigenous encounter (1740) 182 7.8 The kitchen of opinions: peace urges the churches to tolerate each other 186

8 Exploiting faith: conversion, capitalism, colonialism

190

8.1 The destruction of the Indies: colonial patterns of merging religion and development (1555) 190 8.2 Indigenous responses to the arrival of the Spanish in Cuba (1555) 192 8.3 English colonialism and the Black Legend of Spain (1656) 195 8.4 Seeking gender parity in Río de la Plata region (1556) 197 8.5 Navigating religious, racial, and political divisions in the Yucatán peninsula (1567) 199 8.6 Baptism as a tool in European enslavement of Africans (1627) 203 8.7 Work and religion in the colonial setting: Dutch Amboina (1692) 206

9 Going underground – negotiating difference

208

9.1 The legal status of Muslims and Jews in medieval Castile – the Siete Partidas (1252–65) 208 9.2 Living as a Muslim in Spain (1462) 210 9.3 Negotiating Muslim life under Christian rule in Iberia: after the fall of Granada (1491) 212 9.4 Iberian Muslims appeal to the Ottoman Sultan for relief (c. 1502) 216 9.5 Practicing Islam as a Catholic: the Oran Fatwa (1504) 222 9.6 The alien advantage: German Protestants worshipping in Catholic Venice (c. 1580) 224 9.7 Protesting the prohibition of Christianity in Japan (1614) 226 9.8 Saving an illegitimate Jewish baby from Christian authorities (1691) 227

10 Living the traditions: the religious politics of daily life 10.1 In questions of faith, you are what you wear: Algerian women’s fashion (1612) 234 10.2 Assimilating Roma in early modern Italy (1583; 1631) 237 10.3 A Morisco under suspicion in Valencia (1556–67) 241 10.4 The Inquisition investigates a Morisca bride in sixteenth-century Spain (1575) 244

234

ix

Contents 10.5 Marking time – a Jewish calendar (5354 or 1593/94 CE) 245 10.6 Ten commandments for the Jewish wife (before 1620) 249 10.7 Of powders and pregnancy: the Mexican Inquisition takes on a midwife (1652) 250 10.8 Separating sheep and goats in the early modern Aegean (1757) 252

11 Finding self and others

256

11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5

Reforming an unruly priest in New Spain (1545–9) 256 Investigating an unusual ‘convent’ (1687–8) 259 A Jewish servant and her ghetto network (1664) 264 An abbess and convent in exile (1642) 266 Spiritual friendships and alliances: a queen and English convents in exile (1687–8) 267 11.6 Irish nuns in exile and in poverty (1740) 270 11.7 The devil in the body of a man: a nun’s temptations (1723) 272 11.8 Scandal in the enclosure: a Manila woman seeks another life (1754) 276 Index

280

Figures

7.1

Anonymous, Peace Urging the Churches to be Tolerant, 1600–1624

186

Acknowledgements

As noted elsewhere, this collection represents the collaboration of more than two dozen students and scholars from a wide range of institutions around the globe. The 2017 interdisciplinary conference that frst brought the group together was organized by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and sponsored by many departments, divisions, and colleges of the University of Toronto. Particular thanks are due to the Department of History, Victoria College, St Michael’s College, Knox College, the Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Canada Research Chair in South Asian Studies. Major external funding and support were provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Royal Ontario Museum. The team most active in the opening stages of bringing these sources together consisted of Tyentyen Chen, Natalie Majda, Zahireen Tarefdar, Julia Wong, and Sienna Asselin (née Lee-Coughlin). The group most engaged at its conclusion were the senior students in the History 443 seminar, who embraced the project with a passion undimmed by the intrusion of that other global reality, COVID-19. Sienna Asselin has been involved from the beginning as a research assistant, a contributor, and an editorial assistant, and she has been instrumental in bringing both the two essay collections and this sourcebook to a successful conclusion. Some of the editorial work was carried out in the marvellous communities of the American Academy in Rome and the Amsterdam Centre for the History and Heritage of Protestantism (ACHHP), funded by the Dutch National Organization for Scientifc Research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; my thanks to Mirjam van Veen and Jesse Spohnholz for their warm welcome and support. Warm thanks to Rachel F Stapleton for indexing and helping copyedit the volume. We are grateful to all those who have granted us permission to reproduce the extracts included. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge ownership of copyright material used in this volume, but please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.

9

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com

Part 1

How to use this sourcebook

9

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com

Reform, Reformation, and Global Reformations

The idea of “Global Reformations” would once have seemed impossible, and even a contradiction in terms. That we can think of it now and explore the meaning and reach of the term demonstrates our expanding appreciation of the dynamics around religion, politics, and social change in the early modern period. The period when Europeans were moving out across the globe as traders, soldiers, colonists, and missionaries was the same period when they were re-examining their relation with God and reconsidering how that relation should affect their relations with each other. These reexaminations and reconsiderations intersected in all parts and at all levels of their lives. Religion was never contained to a single part of life – they were convinced that it had to shape every aspect. Life would never be the same, either for themselves or those they came in contact with. The term “Reformation” originally applied in a very limited sense to the events of the sixteenth century that split the Catholic Church apart and then expanded as those who had left the so-called “Church Universal” fractured into an ever-increasing number of Protestant churches and into looser religious communities that preferred not to be known as “churches.” This narrow reading of Reformation focused on Northern Europe in the frst half of the sixteenth century, and particularly on the Holy Roman Empire (modernday Germany), Switzerland, England, and the Netherlands. Figures such as Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, David Joris, and Henry VIII were the actors in these histories, and even the generic term “Protestant” came out of the religious and political manoeuvres within the Holy Roman Empire. It wouldn’t be until the late sixteenth century that English people would start to apply the term to themselves and their own separation of the Church of England from the Church of Rome. By that point, we were what in what some called the “Second Reformation.” Expanding the term to take in the later sixteenth century allowed it to include second- and third-generation religious reformers such as Jean Calvin of Geneva and Queen Elizabeth I of England. These reformers faced a more charged political and religious landscape where the reactions of Catholic rulers and institutions limited and sometimes reversed the radical reworkings of earlier decades. Defenders of Catholic tradition such as Ignatius of Loyola, Mary Ward, Carlo Borromeo,

4

How to use this sourcebook

and King Philip II of Spain initially gained the label of “Counter Reformers,” and their actions to roll back Protestantism were termed a “CounterReformation.” But some Catholics had been advocating for change long before Luther, or believed that breaking up the Church Universal was too high a price to pay, or worked on spiritual reform without much attention to what Protestants were doing. Describing their work as only defensive or reactionary hardly did justice to their motives or initiatives, which could better be described as a “Catholic Reformation.” But isn’t “Catholic Reformation” another contradiction in terms? It really depends on what you need those terms to do. By the late twentieth century, when more historians began using this term, they had already been experimenting with others. And “Reformation” proved to be a very plastic concept indeed. It applied to a wide range of movements or movers who were promoting religious change in the sixteenth century. The “Magisterial Reformation” described the work of civic magistrates who used their legal authority to order new forms of preaching or legislate an end to masses. The “Radical Reformation” described those seeking complete change from the roots up (Latin = radix), some embracing government powers and others avoiding them like the plague. The “Printers’ Reformation” acknowledged the impact of pamphlets, tracts, woodcuts, and treatises as early modern forms of social media that spread polemics and propaganda more quickly, with often infammatory impact. But why limit the plasticity of the term to the sixteenth century? “Pre-Reformation” described early ffteenth-century movements around John Huss in Prague or John Wycliffe in Oxford. Both emphasized reading the Bible in the language of common people, reducing the privileged role of the clergy, and making sacraments such as Communion more widely available, anticipating themes that would re-emerge in sixteenth-century disputes. “Reformation scholasticism” described the encyclopedic theologies, often written in Latin, coming out of seventeenth-century Protestant seminaries. It was an ironic reversal of the early sixteenth-century call for a simple faith based on Bibles translated into ordinary everyday language and readable by farmers and shoemakers. “Late Reformation,” or even “Post Reformation,” was harder to pin down, but perhaps the Thirty Years War, from 1618 to 1648, where religion defned the rhetoric if not always the alliances, was as good a place as any to pin the marker. Whatever the particular dates, by the early twenty-frst century, most historians believed that what Europe experienced in the early modern centuries was defnitely a “Long Reformation.” These disputes about terminology all came out of later issues. Many sixteenth-century religious fgures thought of themselves as reformers, but no-one had a sense of the Reformation. Periods and terms always come later, as historians begin to note parallels, trace and impose patterns, and assign meaning. The periods and terms can be purely practical pegs on which to hang clusters of ideas or events. Or they can be ideological assertions that work to highlight – or obscure – certain developments and set these into

How to use this sourcebook

5

larger explanatory frameworks or narratives. This certainly happened with the Reformation, where, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was increasing consciousness of it being a historical period with a meaning and signifcance that went beyond church history alone. By this point, it was possible to start talking about “Reformation revivals” or “NeoReformation” movements. The perceived gaps between Protestant and Catholic deepened in these revivals. Protestant religious reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew a direct line between their actions and those of their sixteenth-century forbears, publishing biographies, editions, and histories to underscore the link. Some refracted their sectarianism through a very nationalist lens. Others evoked a loose North European pannational Protestant community that they contrasted to Southern European Catholicism and used to increase the following of political movements. Stereotypes fourished and sometimes gained the credibility of academic treatments, as when the German sociologist Max Weber sketched sharp cultural, sociological, and economic distinctions in his infuential 1905 work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Outside the academy, Protestant religious leaders popularized the Reformation as a time of heroic stands for truth, conscience, and freedom against Catholic authoritarianism. They drew heavily on sixteenth-century events when inventing traditions. Popular revivals accelerated around the anniversaries of key sixteenth-century events such as Martin Luther’s 1517 academic protest (The 95 Theses) against the Catholic practice of selling “indulgences,” which allowed believers to substitute donations in place of the charitable actions or prayers they were supposed to perform in order to show that they were sorry for the wrongs they had committed. Even more important for some was his declaration in 1521, before the highest political assembly of the Holy Roman Empire, that he would not withdraw or repudiate the books he had written after 1517 expanding on the implications of his initial protest. A handful of Germans marked the anniversary of 1621 and a few more those of 1717 and 1721. Commemorations spread to other parts of Europe in 1817 and 1821 and were complicated by the First World War a century later. By 2017, the anniversary of Luther’s protest against indulgences had become the trigger for a host of international commemorations, conferences, and publications that extended far beyond those who had any particular interest in religion or its history. Luther was feted as a cultural warrior for conscience in ways that would have puzzled, amused, and likely scandalized him. So, the term “Reformation” is fexible and has been adapted to many different contexts and forms of religious reform, from the ffteenth century to the present. Yet it has always been used to describe a historical movement in Europe. What happens when we follow the global turn in historical scholarship and look beyond that continent? A global focus involves decentring Europe and examining the various intersecting forces, reciprocal infuences, and parallel developments that are entangled or connected in the modern

6

How to use this sourcebook

world. These global connections exploded in the early modern centuries – from the ffteenth to eighteenth centuries – but most studies of global early modernity focus on trade, politics, demography, or colonization. How might we begin to explore a “Global Reformation?” One approach is to seek out particular examples of sixteenth-century European reformers of the Christian church who found their way overseas, usually to escape persecution in Europe. French Huguenots attempted to establish a colony for themselves in Brazil, and some also moved to New France. The French government responded with a ban out of fear that they could form an overseas resistance to the French Catholic Church. Some of the English colonies in North America also began as places of religious refuge organized by colonizing companies in London: Maryland aimed to attract Catholics, and Pennsylvania recruited Quakers and Mennonites, whereas Rhode Island and Carolina rejected a formal religious establishment (which was, in fact, the position of many Calvinists and Radicals). In a few cases, a declared religious purpose clearly shaped early immigration and governance. In early years, settlers from the favoured religious groups had preference and quickly predominated in government. In Massachusetts, early Puritans mounted an active persecution of rival religious groups such as the Quakers that extended to prison and execution before the London government intervened and forced change. The key issues of Reformation religious debates – around scripture, sacraments, salvation, and above all the role of clergy – most quickly and clearly translated into these contexts. And, in many cases, the theologians contributing to these debates with their treatises and tracts actually paid little attention to their immediate/global locality. Focusing their attention on and directing their pens to Rome, London, or Paris, they continued to take European centres of debate as their forum and point of reference, at least well into the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Many saw their period in America as temporary, and perhaps a third of early Puritan migrants to Massachusetts returned to England within a few decades, once the government had changed and they no longer feared persecution. It is easier to fnd immediate Reformation resonances outside Europe when moving from theological treatises to the practical outworking of a reformed religion. The self-consciously religious reformers and societies also moved quickly to establish the churches, schools, and orphanages that were the institutional form of religious charity and that had emerged quickly in Europe as some of the frst expressions of reform. The Catholic nun Marie de l’Incarnation made schooling the starting point of her missionary activity in New France in the 1620s, and the Calvinists behind the Dutch East India Company set up schools for the youths they had working on their clove plantations in Ambon in modern Indonesia. The Czech Protestant religious reformer Jan Comenius (1592–1670) declined an offer to lead Harvard College but did infuence both its curriculum and schools in England, Poland, Sweden, and Amsterdam. Mexican bishop Vasca de Quiroga (c.1478–1565)

How to use this sourcebook

7

constructed two communities in central Mexico for Nahua converts based explicitly on Thomas More’s Utopia, with provisions for health care, schooling, and poor relief included in the plan. Many reformers followed Bishop de Quiroga’s example and saw themselves as building a new and more overtly Christian society away from the temptations and compromises of Europe. This was the goal of some Swiss reformers and of the radical revolutionaries who, in 1535–6, made the north German town of Münster the destination for those seeking to build a new society. After violent suppressions, many of these radicals moved out of towns and cities and into more remote rural areas of central Europe such as Moravia, where some nobles tolerated their efforts to build new closed communities from the ground up. When forced out by a new wave of expulsions in the early eighteenth century, these groups drew on their refugee histories to fashion a new role and home for themselves. The biblical rhetoric of a New Jerusalem shaped what their religious leaders wrote even as late as the 1730s when groups of Protestants expelled from Moravia and Austria moved to Georgia, which various English sponsors were promoting as a destination for religious refugees. English and Dutch sponsors of the Austrian refugees cast them as descendants of Martin Luther. Some even put Luther’s books in the trunks they shipped to their new colony of Ebenezer, upriver from the coastal port of Savannah and close to the Spanish frontier. Here, they had pledged to build a new colonial society as selfsuffcient farmers who rejected slavery and would work as missionaries to convert indigenous peoples. But their radical religious communalism proved hard to maintain. Like many other colonists, these Austrian refugees came to assume that their best chance for survival lay in collaborating with other Europeans rather than with indigenous peoples. And that it lay in adopting some of the forms of domination, such as slavery and indentured labour, that had created the kinds of authoritarian and oppressive societies that they had rejected and fed from in Europe. In the negotiations of the frontier, the idealistic Christian character of their communities steadily shrank till it was little more than high-fown rhetoric expressing a low-grade parochialism. The Georgian Salzburgers would begin bringing enslaved Africans into their settlements within two decades. A second approach to fnding Reformation motifs on a global canvas is to take a step back from particular theologies and church disputes and explore the deeper drives that religious reformers of Europe’s many different confessions held in common. At the beginning of our period, many felt that the theology and institutional structures of late medieval Catholicism no longer allowed individuals and communities to fully express their spiritual convictions. They didn’t necessarily aim to break up the Catholic Church, but wanted to reform it from the inside. They held themselves and others to high standards – true faith had to start in the heart, radically redirect the will, and then shape how societies and individuals cared for each other, held each other to account, and lived in the presence of God. The roots of

8

How to use this sourcebook

these reformers’ convictions went deep into the Bible and into Catholic religious traditions. By the time of the Renaissance in the ffteenth century, their activities were branching out into a host of new forms and initiatives such as lay confraternities, religious theatre, penitential rituals, mystical movements, charitable institutions, and more. True believers were looking for purity, and their common drive towards purifcation generated a multiplying host of targets in need of reform. Many were Christian targets: religious orders that needed to return to observing their founder’s ideals, ordinary lay men and women who needed to structure their daily lives around penitential prayer and charity, or civic and national rulers who needed a commitment to see consciously Christian models when they looked into the mirror of their souls. Religious reform moved in many different directions, and sometimes very small differences could cause very profound disagreements and divisions. Some of this lies within what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.” But, that said, there were many points on which religious reformers broadly agreed. Faith itself should be simple, direct, and sincere, even if theologies and rituals were more complicated. It should be held individually, but exercised communally. Believers should demonstrate consistency between their inner spirit and outer life, ideally through concrete acts of piety and charity. Lay people and clergy should be disciplined and accountable. Almost all held to the model of the early church as a guide for local communities, if not for ecclesiastical structures. Catholics, Radicals, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans could all endorse these common and peaceable aspirations, even if they differed in how they ought to be implemented. But these aspirations implied that contemporaries fell far short of these values; reformation always meant a prior deformation. When Christians had fallen, and how, and why – here the greater differences came in. As we will see more below, aspirations to religious peace, harmony, and purity often coexisted with very harsh methods of eliminating impurities or purging the impure. A third approach to understanding a Global Reformation is to seek out implications, intersections, and reactions as these aspirations and methods converged, and in particular to see how religion enabled and shaped particular actions as Europeans moved overseas as traders and colonists. The push for religious reforms coincided almost exactly with that push overseas, and it expanded just as Europeans were changing their approaches to interactions with other religious groups in Europe itself. Religion had for centuries been a central factor in how European states identifed their ambitions and in how they justifed, legitimated, fnanced, and organized their activities. This had been a constant since Constantine extended toleration to Christianity in 313; by the end of that century, it was the offcial religion of the Roman Empire. The model of state and church working together would animate the later Holy Roman Empire from the tenth century. What would this look like when the governments that were reshaping themselves

How to use this sourcebook

9

as self-consciously religious institutions – now in absolutist terms – sent their subjects overseas? There was no possibility that religion would not be involved as European states supported the global expeditions of traders, soldiers, and colonists. Our challenge is to identify what role religion may have played in some of the most characteristic elements of it – particularly the idea that a renewed or reformed religion would guide Europeans in what they took to be a new world. How did reformed and reforming churches, both Catholic and Protestant, adapt and facilitate the global push? As we follow their actions, we see a series of linking realities that bring the issues of religious reform deep into the colonial enterprise, where it inevitably intersected with other social realities around slavery, exploitation, and environmental degradation. This leads us to frst look beyond the interactions of Catholics, Protestants, and Radicals, to the earlier interactions of Christians with Jews and Muslims. Intercommunal conficts led to forced conversions, which in turn generated forms of surveillance and control that drove whole communities underground and led individuals to dissimulate. These dynamics carried on overseas, though always with variations. As they encountered others in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, Europeans sometimes negotiated, sometimes dominated, and sometimes moved from one to the other. Their evolving commercial, diplomatic, and religious relations with others almost always shaped evolving racial consciousness as well, and we can see that long-standing forms of ethnocentrism gradually took on the vocabularies of race and of nation, always strongly reinforced by religious convictions about individual and collective destiny, mission, duty, and legitimacy. By the time that Europeans were moving out into the world, their religious ethos had been shaped by decades of intensifying competition between religious others, both inside and outside “Christendom.” Reformers in particular naturally adopt the antagonistic language of confict, warfare, victory, and defeat – we must fght the devil, fght our own weakness, fght the enemy within the town or over the border. Nothing unites people quite like a common enemy. Some of the targets of these Renaissance reformers were outside what they considered “Christendom” and described metaphorically as the Body of Christ. These were usually Jews, Muslims, or heretics. There was nothing particularly new about considering these as alien, as the ideological lines had been drawn between them for centuries. Around the Mediterranean and across Europe, the followers of the three religions that all traced their lineage back to the Semitic nomad Abraham had repeatedly to work out their radical differences. This involved conquest, crusade, and pogrom from at least the eighth century, with more serious conficts in the eleventh and twelfth. As Saracen armies pushed the Christian crusader states out of Palestine over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, religious reformers were directing their own drives for purity and purgation inwards against Jewish and Islamic communities within Europe with whom they had coexisted

10

How to use this sourcebook

for centuries. The harsh rhetoric of purgation often cloaked complicated realities of coexistence, as seen in documents such as the Siete Partidas of Castile. The European crusades had always been about far more than religious purity, no matter where or against whom they developed. Yet the stakes got higher through the ffteenth century, marked by campaigns of forced conversion in Iberia from 1391 and ever-widening expulsions of Jews from Spanish, German, French, and Italian towns from the 1420s to 1450s and 1480s to 1550s. The ones who advocated most vociferously for this policy were friars of the Observant branches of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. These religious reformers, who were capable of profoundly pastoral actions and spiritual encouragement towards other Christians, cast Jews and Muslims as aliens whose very presence prevented Christians from fully realizing their own pure religious society. They spoke not only of difference but of contagion, and from there it was a short step towards purgation. The presence of religious others was an existential danger and an offence to a God who, in reformers’ sermons, treatises, and public rituals, demanded uniformity of belief and practice. The centuries-long effort of Iberian Christians to reconquer the Muslim states on the peninsula, called the reconquista, culminated in 1492 with the fall of Granada. Within 3 months of having suppressed this last Islamic state at the southern end of the peninsula, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, encouraged by their Observant Franciscan counsellor Ximenes de Cisneros, ordered the Jews to baptize or leave. Within a decade, they extended this demand to Muslims. A century later, even those converted Muslims, the moriscos, were ordered to leave. The period of the religious refugee as a mass phenomenon had begun. The main drivers were governments – cities, territories, and states. The motives included economic advantage, political rivalry, racial hatreds, and social tensions. Yet the legitimating rhetoric was always religious. Religious Others must be removed if Christian society was to develop along the lines of reformed religion. The offcial documents of expulsion as we have them here demonstrate both religious clarity and a black and white administrative simplicity. The memoirs of expulsions, massacres, and fight show only bloody chaos. These were the sharp and brutal actions of a majority culture against its racial and religious minorities. Iberians took that same religious drive overseas to the Caribbean and the Americas, where the realities of contagion were anything but metaphorical. French, Dutch, and English authorities had already moved down this same road – the English king expelling all Jews in 1290 – and each would continue to act on the terms of contagion, segregation, and domination as they occupied territories and worked to build Christian settlements in Africa and the Americas. Even as indigenous populations collapsed under the twin pressures of disease and exploitation, Europeans were never anything but a minority demographically. Yet they had the confdence, power, and determination of a majority, and here,

How to use this sourcebook

11

again, religion – and the drive of reformed religion – was absolutely vital to how European Christians justifed their actions. Looking to the Reformation as a global phenomenon means incorporating two phenomena in particular: missions and colonization. These were inseparably linked among all European states that moved overseas, and it was in them that issues around race, economic exploitation and enslavement, and environmental degradation intersected most powerfully. None of these issues had a necessary link to religion. Yet religion became critical to European legitimations of their actions, and, in this way, Christianity was pulled directly into the service of racism, enslavement, and environmental and economic domination in unprecedented ways. Missions are critical to the Global Reformation as reformers of all stripes believed strongly in an obligation to spread the gospel, even if they differed in their strategies. Missions were at the nexus of a host of questions and issues. How would missionaries be involved in the overseas drive? In some cases, and particularly in Ming China, they were among the earliest arrivals of the early modern wave of European migrants. How would they interact with local rulers? How would they collaborate with European traders and soldiers? Missions opened up a host of issues around conversion, and in their various global missions Europeans demonstrated most fully their racially driven ambivalence about conversion. What was it really? Individual assent to a doctrine? Communal submission to a creed? European missionaries devised new forms of drama, music, and storytelling in order to leap linguistic barriers and then reinforced these with teaching tools such as catechisms and schools. We can see their efforts to translate Christian ideas and institutions into Kongolese, Japanese, Wendat, or Mandarin. Yet we also see the ambivalence, which erupted in a host of doubts and questions that had frst emerged after the baptisms forced, a century or more earlier, on Iberian Jews and Muslims. Did those accepting baptism have the opportunity to understand it and assent? Who could be “trusted” to convert? Were they superstitious, opportunistic, or devious? Would the ideas that converts accepted and the rituals they followed be a hybrid or synthesis with Christianity? Was change generational? Some Christians justifed their ambivalence with reference to blood and cultural hierarchies that they adapted from ancient Greek and Roman texts. They then moved to hedge the inner authority structures of the church with biological boundaries, as a step towards the genetically framed racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Colonization was clearly a parallel reality, and many of these documents show how activities or social structures rooted in reformers’ religious drives intersected immediately with political, military, and economic realities and forced reconsiderations. Here again, baptism provides the most revealing lens through which to view the range of Christian responses and steady

12

How to use this sourcebook

adaptations. From the forced baptisms of Jews and Muslims in Iberia, it was a short step to the mass baptisms of slaves on the West African coast or the strategic baptisms of indigenous peoples around the North American Great Lakes and of Kirishitani in Japan. At each step, the sacrament was instrumentalized differently. In Asian missions where colonization was not a factor, it remained an individualized sacrament of initiation. In Africa and the Americas, it was often also bent to serve broader interests around enslavement, alliance building, and economic exploitation. Mass baptisms brought large groups into the church at one time, often to the disgust of religious reformers such as Bartolomé de las Casas and Alfonso Sandoval, who fought the practice. And ambivalence remained. Converts might outwardly comply in colonial settings because they feared discipline from their Christian masters. What was going on inside their homes? Or their hearts and minds? These three approaches to understanding how we might consider the concept of a Global Reformation are not mutually exclusive. Searching out the activities of individual reformers and groups outside Europe leads us naturally into tracing the common aspirations around spirituality and the deeper drives around purity, contagion, and purgation as reformers pursued them inside and outside Europe. We then cannot avoid seeking out implications, intersections, and reactions as these aspirations and drives converged in early modern European efforts to trade, missionize, and colonize in different parts of the globe. The approach is a cumulative one, with religious reform as an enabling, contributing, and exacerbating factor in Europe’s evolving role in the global order, from the ffteenth through the early eighteenth centuries. A global approach that addresses missions and colonization as central Reformation activities moves Catholic reform into the foreground. Catholicism simply had an earlier and more profound effect overseas than Protestantism. Of the traders, armies, and missionaries active around the globe, most came from Catholic states. Moreover, they penetrated a broader range of territories. Catholicism was, as Simon Ditchfeld has asserted, the frst truly global religion, and its spread was directly linked to reform movements. So, when we look at a global frame, the conventional dynamic around the European Reformation is reversed – Protestants and Northern European generally are less powerful drivers of reformed religion until at least the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when their empires expand and their encounters multiply. As we analyse the role of reformed religion in Europe’s global push, we fnd that it is not always a causal factor, but it often provides a key incentive. Europeans certainly draw on it to legitimate their actions. It is perhaps too easily summoned as the rhetoric that justifes forms of exploitation and domination. We also fnd that the narrative of religious reform through the early modern period is not one of linear progress towards ideological toleration, social progress, and political responsibility, as some nineteenth- and

How to use this sourcebook

13

twentieth-century historians argued when looking only at change within Europe. In the global frame, there is no clear drive towards toleration, although forms of coexistence do re-emerge, sometimes out of conviction and sometimes out of realization of failure or because communities did not fully follow or accept the reform/Reformation-driven legitimating narrative. Coexistence is almost always practical rather than ideological. Local conditions and necessities do more to shape those practicalities than any abstract conviction that religion should be a matter of personal choice rather than state decree. Ideological factors do enter in, but not around toleration. Instead, reformed religion is implicated in the steadily worsening racism that leaves European-descended Christians believing themselves to be supreme, privileged, and entitled by Divine destiny to dominate the globe and its peoples. The eleven sections of this book aim to explore these realities thematically, drawing on diverse voices as these are expressed in a wide range of letters, tracts, songs, treatises, stories, and plays. Although there may be no clear linear narrative to the Global Reformation, there is a loose progression in the way these themes are explored. We begin by looking at “Joining the Church” and, in particular, some of the controversies around the sacrament of baptism. All Christians took it as an initiation into formal membership of the Christian Church, but agreement ended there. We fnd here some early polemical statements on baptism’s meaning by Luther and radical reformers, and then discussions of its meaning for Catholics that are taken from two Japanese Kirishitan catechisms. We then see some of the controversies attending the mass baptisms of African slaves and the strategic baptisms of North American indigenous peoples. But what was the Christian Church that the newly baptized were joining? This raises questions around concerns that many reformers had about “Purifying the Community,” in particular through the elimination of alien presences. These might be Jews or Muslims; they might even be Christians of another confession who were labelled as heretics. There was nothing particularly Eurocentric about this drive to purify communities around a single religion, as we see here from the arguments raised by Ming and Qing scholars who were seeking to have Christian missionaries expelled from China. Was there nothing to be learned from other religious groups? This wasn’t only a matter for Christians to work out. A series of documents on “Evaluating Others” opens with the opinion of a French polymath who believed that each religion had something to offer, even if Christianity remained the supreme expression of truth. The readings that follow come from a Japanese convert who returned to Buddhism and mounted a sharp, informed, and satirical take-down of Christianity; a Jewish rabbi who found Christianity derivative; Ming and Qing scholars who found it puzzlingly barbarian; and Wendat communities, who found it suspicious, superstitious, and dangerous.

14

How to use this sourcebook

At the middle point of the collection two portfolios of documents review the “Politics of Conversion,” both “before” and “after” the traditional sixteenth-century dates of the Reformation. We see frst how the ffteenthcentury humanist Pope Pius II bemoaned the divisions within the Church and saw unity as a key goal of reform. But, to Pius, unity meant submission. As pope, he worked for the forced conversion of the Balkan kingdom of Bosnia, which was then facing immediate threat of invasion from the Ottoman Turks. Pius leveraged the promise of support into a means of forcing the conversion and formal submission of the Bosnian Church – which, over the previous centuries, had evolved a theology and rituals that mixed Greek Orthodoxy and Catholicism – to Rome. Yet it was an empty victory. The Bosnian kingdom was overtaken by the Turks within a few years, and many of its nobles and subjects did convert, although to Islam. Almost three centuries later, a reforming Catholic archbishop of Salzburg sent Jesuits to convert the mountain areas around the city where the descendants of sixteenth-century Protestants had evolved a set of religious beliefs and practices that mixed elements of Lutheranism and Catholicism. Those who resisted were expelled. Although most of these refugees moved to Prussia, a small group were lionized by Northern European evangelical Protestants as Luther’s heirs and were supported fnancially in their efforts to emigrate and establish a new – and short-lived – colony in Georgia, where they would transplant the Reformation and convert Jews, indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans. Was there no means then of simply “Living Together”? The next set of documents reviews a range of experiences, including the personal friendship of a Muslim and a Catholic friar; an individual who converts from Catholicism to Calvinism to Judaism; the assertions of some Dutch spiritualists that toleration was the only viable position for governments to take; and an Englishman who argued for tolerating Jews in England as a means of winning their conversion. Other voices speak more directly to the ambivalence and expanding negativity around race, from the segregation of the Portuguese within the capital of the kingdom of Kongo (Mbanza/São Salvador); to the activities of indigenous converts as teachers and clergy within the New Spanish missions; to the belief on the part of some colonial administrators that indigenous believers – women in particular – were emotionally and intellectually incapable of being fully Christian. The question of toleration or coexistence inevitably moved beyond beliefs and rituals and involved governments, as “Ordering Faith” was critical to “Ordering Society.” Here, we fnd two early statements from religious radicals of the early sixteenth century arguing for new communities that would either reject or employ government powers to achieve that ordered faith and society. There follow offcial statements by two of the sixteenth century’s most infuential monarchs, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and English Queen Elizabeth I, on the proper relation of Church and state, and the roughly comparable views of the contemporary King of Kongo

How to use this sourcebook

15

Afonso I and Japanese Emperor Toyotomi Hideyoshi. All believed that the expression of religion must be ordered and controlled from above. The Duke of Savoy agreed when limiting the liberties of “heretical” groups of Waldensians in the Alps who were moving closer to the Calvinists of Geneva. And the papacy, for its part, aimed to control the process of declaring saints, concerned that long-standing communal processes needed to come under tighter papal control as the Catholic communities spread across the globe. It also expanded its tools for reviewing local shrines and their cults and shutting them down if it seemed that corruption and superstition were more powerful drivers behind them than spirituality. In societies where literacy was hardly a given, reformers had to fnd ways of “Performing the Faith” in order to ensure that laypeople in particular would identify with it and understand both what they were supposed to believe and what they were supposed to reject. We open with three examples of how music was used to spread Christian teachings in Europe and North America and then pivot to a Jewish Life of Christ that similarly aimed to train young Jews in the “true” story of this religious fgure that they would hear so much about outside their own community. Stories and plays were powerful ways to dramatize the Christian message, and the dialogic model carried on to examples of how to spread the mission gospel to indigenous peoples. Reformers had long used visual imagery to drive home satirical messages, and, although these could often be polemical, here we fnd one arguing that difference might not be so threatening after all. Within the global context, these songs, stories, plays, and images were often particularly useful to missionaries who were reaching out to indigenous peoples. Colonizers might or might not be Christians, but many became expert at “Exploiting Faith” to realize their territorial and economic ambitions. We see here how some early Iberian colonizers used religious structures and language to justify and even demand control over indigenous groups through a royal grant known as an encomienda, while other Iberians fought this instrumentalization of religious sacraments or education. We move to a case where Mayan indigenous nobles used these colonialist structures and language as they drew missionaries into their longer-standing mutual disputes over territories and resources in Yucatán communities. Finally, two cases show how Portuguese traders used baptisms to control enslaved Africans, and Dutch plantation bosses used religious education to control the youths who worked their felds. Using religious tools for social control was hardly new, but, in the context of forced conversion, it became more fraught, and some of those who were thus marginalized responded by “Going Underground.” Muslims were a majority in some parts of Iberia, and medieval Christian conquests had included some provision for coexistence. Yet, in the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries, these protections steadily eroded, and Christian authorities demanded more insistently that they convert. Some appealed for help to the Ottoman sultan, and others responded with forms of dissimulation that

16

How to use this sourcebook

some Islamic religious authorities recognized as a legitimate and immediate practical solution. In the case of smaller communities such as the Kirishitani in Japan and the Protestants in Venice, the presence of segregated communities could allow a degree of religious agency, but this too was always in danger of erosion or reversal by authorities who looked on alien religion as a contagious virus. Some authorities advocated enclosure, expulsion, and even the kidnapping of children as means of controlling this contagion. Some forced converts responded to these pressures by attempting to balance two religions in the spaces between their public lives and households. Even those who did not were often suspected of not being genuine converts. “Living the Traditions” meant keeping up distinct forms of clothing, diets, names, washing habits, and neighbours. Religious authorities often scrutinized these closely if they suspected that a convert was not truly Christian. Converts used a range of material goods to maintain cultural traditions, and we see here how small items of daily life such as food, dresses, calendars, and verses could be used to maintain these. We also see that authorities might look the other way when the one violating the codes was a valued medical professional such as a midwife. In some cases, as in the Aegean, communities quite naturally lived together and participated in each other’s life-cycle rituals, to the despair of religious authorities who aimed to remind them of the differences between religions. Finally, religious reformers often aimed to separate out target groups, isolate them in some form of geographical, architectural, or social enclosure, and then employ various exercises and disciplines to educate and “purify” them. These enclosures could be either protective or punitive, or both together, as we can see when tracing the line that runs from humanist boarding schools for elites to the colonial residential schools that aimed to refashion indigenous youths into Christians by purging their native languages and customs and replacing them with European ones. The ones most often moved into these protective/punitive enclosures were women, and so the fnal group of documents, which describe “Finding Self and Others,” focus deliberately on the experiences of women into the eighteenth century. Male clergy guarded the entrances to these enclosures and sometimes used this privilege for personal beneft. But the enclosure was not just about walls, nor was it irreversible. We see an example where a Jewish servant builds a network of supporters within the ghetto and recognizes these as she distributes her few goods in her fnal will. We then fnd how enclosures on the European continent gave English and Irish Catholic women the spaces in which to exercise their faith, and how ongoing political and economic challenges rooted directly in Reformation politics continued to have an impact on them into the eighteenth century. Finally, we compare the intense impact of enclosure on two young women and their very distinct responses to life in a convent. One, in Puebla, south east of Mexico City, sublimates the sexual tensions of adolescence into a titanic and ultimately successful fght against the devil and a host of demons, which she describes in intensely racialized

How to use this sourcebook

17

and sexualized detail in a spiritual autobiography; she later goes on to found a convent. The other, in Manila, fghts for years against the limits of the enclosure and the men and women policing it, exercising various forms of protest and resistance until she fnally makes her way out, marries the man she had loved for years, and disappears with him into the broader Spanish empire. Looking at the Reformation as a global phenomenon means looking at some things differently. It moves us beyond the intense theological and ecclesiological disputes that gripped some regions of Northern Europe for a few decades in the early sixteenth century. We have to look beyond the Reformation as a purely internal dispute within Christianity between Catholics and Protestants, or among the many subgroups within them. A Global Reformation is a decidedly Long Reformation, covering much of the early modern period from the ffteenth into the eighteenth centuries. Catholicism plays a larger and more creative role in it, and not only as a reactive force trying to hold back change. The intersections of religion and politics, long critical to Reformation histories, become complicated as they extend out into the world through the trading and colonizing initiatives that states authorized and facilitated. Yet some things remain sharply in focus: the quest for spiritual purifcation; the use of tradition as a form of reform; the emphasis on charity, on education, and on discipline as necessary for personal and collective reform; and the raised expectations around piety and spiritual integrity for clergy and laity alike. Religious reformers have aimed for these values regardless of time and place. But context is everything, and, in the early modern period, the intersection or convergence of these values with the realities of global commercial and colonial expansion turned religion – and specifcally reformed religion – into a critical tool for European domination. Historians have often credited religious reform movements of the period with expanding schools, extending political freedoms, institutionalizing charity, and seeding toleration, and these are certainly real. We see some of this when we shift our gaze to a global frame, but we also see more sobering realities, and in particular the use of reformed religion to facilitate enslavement, to legitimate environmental degradation, and to give a distinct and compelling language to racism. Our challenge is to assess and weigh these effects and to integrate them into our broader understanding of what the Reformation was and what impact it had.

How this reader came about

This book has emerged out of the generous collaboration of more than two dozen students, faculty, research assistants, and independent scholars who have searched for, edited, and translated documents relevant to the international spread and impact of the Reformation. The Global Reformations Project at the University of Toronto began with a conference on the theme of “Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures” (2017). Many of those presenting papers there responded to our call to translate and share some of the manuscripts and early printed sources that were driving their fndings. As this is still a very new feld of study, we wanted to make more primary sources available to students who might be interested in pursuing its themes and issues further. Our invitation at the conference brought us never-before-translated sources from archives in Manila, Mexico City, Venice, and Bosnia. Other collaborators alerted us to early modern published books and also, where necessary, translated passages from Latin, Dutch, French, Italian, Bosnian, Greek, and Hebrew. Research assistants and students in a senior history seminar at the University of Toronto continued the search to fnd voices otherwise unheard, and through this we were able to include translations of Japanese, Chinese, Kongolese, Nahuatl, and Wendat documents. Some of the scholars and graduate students involved in the Global Reformations Project also contributed articles to two essay collections that emerged from the 2017 Toronto conference. The frst bears the title of the conference itself, Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), and explores subjects around the world. The second, on Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: CRRS, 2020), focuses more on the dynamics within Europe itself. The essays in these two collections provide the best context for the readings gathered here, and so the endnotes in this reader identify the corresponding articles from these collections and, in some cases, also give additional background material. The names of those who translated the documents drawn out of archives around the world are given in these notes. The work of those who found, edited, and contextualized the readings is given after

How to use this sourcebook

19

each passage by means of their initials – see the table below. These included both senior scholars and graduate and undergraduate students. The reader would not have been possible without the generous engagement of each of them. Students were closely involved in the Global Reformations Project from the beginning, and their framing of questions helped steer the selection and editing of documents. AG

Allison Graham

AM

Andrew McCormick

AS

Azaria August Stephenson

CC

Caitlyn Collins

CM

Celeste McNamara

CP

Charles Parker

CT

Carla Tronu

GC

Giorgio Caravale

GW

Gary Waite

FF

Federica Francesconi

HB

Hannah Becker

HS

Heather Smith

JB

Jacob Brozyna

JD

Jason Dyck

JH

Jacqueline Holler

JW

Julia Wong

LS

Lindsay Sidders

LSp

Luka Spoljaric

LYS

Ling Yuan Sun

NM

Naomi Makowska

NaM

Natalie Majda

NT

Nicholas Terpstra

RP

Ronnie Perelis

SA

Sienna Asselin

SMC

Stephanie Cavanaugh

SV

Stefano Villani

TC

Tyentyen Chen

YP

Yvonne Petry

ZT

Zahireen Tarefdar

Suggestions for further reading

There is a very large literature covering diverse aspects of Global Reformations, although most of it deals with local or regional phenomena. There are many essay collections that are starting to explore the feld, though as yet there are few, if any, synthetic works. Here are some works that have informed this reader and that will be helpful to those seeking to develop their understanding of particular aspects of the feld. The endnotes in each chapter also offer additional articles and books relevant to particular readings.

General Reference Bamji, A., Janssen, G.H. and Laven, M. (2013) The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter Reformation, Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Burkhart, L.M. and Sell, B.D. (eds) (2004) Nahuatl Theater 4 Volumes, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Garrard-Burnett, V., Freston, P. and Dove, S.C. (eds) (2016) The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, New York: Cambridge University Press. MacCulloch, D. (2003) Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, London: Allen Lane. Roth, J. and Stayer, J. (2007) A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, Leiden: Brill. Scott, H. (ed) (2015) The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750. Volume I: Peoples and Places. Volume II: Cultures and Powers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Standaert, N. (2019) A Handbook of Christianity in China, Leiden: Brill.

Research Works and Essay Collections Arnade, P. (2008) Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bisaha, N. (2004) Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boornazian Diel, L. (2018) The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain, Austin: University of Texas Press.

How to use this sourcebook

21

Boyarin, J. (2009) The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Brinkman, I. (2016) “Kongo Interpreters, Traveling Priests, and Political Leaders in the Kongo Kingdom (15th to 19th Century),” International Journal of African Historical Studies 49/2: 255–76. Brockey, L. (2008) Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brook, T. (2008) Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, New York: Bloomsbury. Burkhart, L.M. (1989) The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth Century Mexico, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Canizares-Esguerra, J. (2007) Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Catto M. and Prosperi, A. (2017) Trent and Beyond: The Council, Other Powers, Other Cultures, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Cervantes, F. and Redden, A. (eds) (2013) Angels, Demons and the New World, New York: Cambridge University Press. Chappelle Wojciehowski, H. (2011) Group Identity in the Renaissance World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clossey, L. (2008) Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleman, D. (2003) Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old World Frontier City (1492–1600), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Corens, L. (2019) Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in CounterReformation Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, N.Z. (2007) Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim Between Worlds, New York: Hill & Wang. Davies, S. (2016) Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ditchfeld, S. and Smith, H. (eds) (2017) Conversions: Gender and Religious Change in Early Modern Europe, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Ditchfeld, S., Methuen, C. and Spicer, A. (eds) (2017) Translating Christianity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dubois, L. and Turits, R.L. (2019) Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Edmonds, E.B. and Gonzalez, M.A (2010) Caribbean Religious History: An Introduction, New York: New York University Press. Eletti, M. degli (2001) The Conversion of a Jew to Christianity, trans D. Chambers, J. Fletcher, and B. Pullan, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Elison, G. (1988) Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fehler, T., Kroeker, G.G., Parker, C.H. and Ray, J. (eds) (2014) Religious Diaspora in Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge. Fromont, C. (2014) The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fuchs, B. (2009) Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

22

How to use this sourcebook

García-Arenal, M. and Wiegers, G. (2003) A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gitlitz, M. (1996) Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews, Philadelphia, PA, and Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society. Grazibord, D.L. (2004) Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580––1700, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Greer, A. (2009) Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grieve, P.E. (2009) The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Confict, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hall, R.L. (1997) An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Harper, J.G. (2011) The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750. Visual Imagery before Orientalism, Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Harris, A.K. (2007) From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, L.P. (2005) Muslims in Spain, 1500–1614, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. He, X. (2019) “The Transnational Interpretation of Matteo Ricci’s Idea of the Lord of Heaven,” Journal of Religious Studies 240–6. Hendricks, M. (2005) Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, London: Routledge. Herzig, T. (2019) A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howard, T.A. (2016) Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Isom-Verhaaren, C. and Schull, K.F. (eds) (2016) Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Janssen, G. (2015) The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile in Reformation Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kagan, R.L. and Dyer, A. (2004) Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kaplan, B. (2007) Divided by Faith: Religious Confict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaplan, D. (2011) Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians, and Reformation Strasbourg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kaplan, Y. (ed) (2017) Early Modern Ethnic and Religious Communities in Exile, Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Koch, P. (2018) “Marketing Missions: Material Culture, Theological Convictions, and Empire in 18th Century Christian Philanthropy,” Religions 9.2017: 1–17. Krstic, T. (2011) Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Ottoman Empire, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Malek, R. (ed) (2017) Rooted in Hope: China, Religion, Christianity, New York: Routledge. Marshall, P. (2017) 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Masters, B. (2001) Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

How to use this sourcebook

23

Matar, N. (1998) Islam in Britain, 1558–1685, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milner, M. (2016) The Senses and the English Reformation, London: Taylor & Francis. Moore, R.I. (1987) The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mulloy, C.A. (2001) Joseph Chihwatenha: The Forgotten Martyr, Fayetteville, AR: Author. Newitt, M.D.D. (2010) The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oettinger, R.W. (2001) Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation, London: Routledge. Parker, C.H. (2010) Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, G. (2013) Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Perelis, R. (2016) Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016) Pirillo, D. (2018) The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England, and the Reformation, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ray, J. (2013) After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry, New York: New York University Press. Ricci, M. and Trigault, N. (1953) China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583–1610, New York: Random House. Rublack, U. (2020) Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruderman, D. (2011) Early Modern Jewry: A Cultural History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schorsch, J. (2004) Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwartz, S. (2008) All Can Be Saved: Religious Toleration and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shagan, E. (2011) The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smithers, G.D. and Newman, B.N. (2014) Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Spence, J.D. (1984) The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, New York: Viking Penguin. Spohnholz, J. and Waite, G. (2014) Exile and Religious Identity, 1500–1800, London: Pickering & Chatto. Stow, K. (2016) Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Subrahmanyam, S. (2019) Empires between Islam and Christianity, New York: New York University Press. Subrahmanyam, S. (2011) Three Ways to be Alien: Travels and Encounter in the Early Modern World, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Tarantino, G. and Zika, G. (2019) Feeling Exclusion: Religious Confict, Exile, and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge. Teller, A. (2020) Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

24

How to use this sourcebook

Terpstra, N. (2015) Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Terpstra, N. (ed.) (2019) Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Terpstra, N. (ed.) (2020) Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe, Toronto: CRRS. Van der Linden, D. (2015) Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680–1700, Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Van Horn Melton, J. (2015) Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vitkus, D.J. (2003) Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Waite, G. (2007) Eradicating the Devil’s Minions: Anabaptists and Witches in Reformation Europe, 1535–1600, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Walker, M. (1992) The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in 18th C Germany, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Walsham, A. (2006) Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Wiesner-Hanks, M.E. (2010) Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Zhang, X. (2020) “The Diffculties of Matteo Ricci’s View of Confucianism,” Journal of Beijing Administrative College, 119–28.

Part 2

Sources

9

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfra ncis.com

1

Joining the church Translating rituals of initiation

1.1 The clarity and certainty of the Word of God (1522) The idea that God’s own words, found in the Bible, should be the key standard and test of faith was one that many ffteenth-century reformers could endorse. It was not much different from the idea of seeking out an authoritative ancient Roman treatise on rhetoric, like Cicero’s The Orator (55 BCE), and using that as the guide for how to write and speak persuasively. There was a simple elegance in going directly to the source, and a real scholarly incentive to fnd the most accurate version. Some religious reformers took this drive “to the sources” (ad fontes) a step further and argued that the Bible as God’s Word should be the only standard and test of faith, bypassing centuries of theological refection and ecclesiastical rule making. The principle of “Scripture Alone” is credited to Martin Luther, but here his Swiss contemporary Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) articulates the same position. Both rejected large parts of Catholic theology and tradition on the basis of this principle, which became a key point of identity for many Protestants. While Luther and Zwingli both held that Scripture was clear and transparent, they argued bitterly over how to interpret Christ’s words on the meaning of the Eucharist, or communion.1 Source: Ulrich Zwingli, On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God (1522) The Word of God is so vital, strong and powerful that all things must necessarily obey it, and that fully and at such time as God himself appoints . . . The whole evangelical doctrine is nothing but a sure guarantee that what God has promised will certainly be performed. For the gospel is now nothing other than a present fulfllment. For he who was promised to our forefathers and to the whole human race has been brought to us and with him all our hopes turned to certainty, as Simeon said in Luke, chapter 2 . . . Those who defend the doctrines of men say: it is true that above all other teaching we ought to esteem the teaching of the gospel which is inspired

28 Joining the Church and taught by God more highly than any other – but we understand gospel differently. If there is a confict between your and my understanding, there must be someone to decide between us and to be able to silence the one who is wrong. This they all say so as to subordinate the understanding of God’s Word to men. Thus anyone who preaches the gospel can be taken and brought before Caiaphus and Annas. And in direct opposition to what Paul says, that all knowledge, thought, and ability depend upon the will and service to God, they want to subject God’s doctrine to the judgment of men . . . By the gospel we do not mean only the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but . . . all that God has revealed to man in order that he may instruct him and give him a sure knowledge of his will . . . Even if you hear the gospel of Jesus Christ from an apostle, you will not follow it unless the heavenly Father teaches and draws you by his Spirit. The words are clear: God’s teaching clearly enlightens, teaches, and gives certainty without any intervention on the part of human knowledge. If people are taught by God, they are well taught with clarity and conviction. If they had frst to be taught and assured by men, they would be more correctly described as men-taught rather than taught by God. You must be theodidacti, that is, taught of God, not of men: that is what truth itself said [John 6:45], and it cannot lie. If you do not believe, and believe frmly, leaving the vanities of men and submitting yourselves solely to God’s teaching, you have no true faith . . . I know for certain that God teaches me, for I know this by experience. In order that you may not misrepresent my meaning, let me tell you how I know that God teaches me. In my youth I devoted myself as much to human learning as did others of my age. Then, some seven or eight years ago, I undertook to devoting myself entirely to the Scriptures, and the conficting philosophy and theology of the schoolmen constantly presented diffculties. But eventually I came to a conclusion – led thereto by the Scriptures and the Word of God – and decided, “You must drop all that and learn God’s will directly from His own word.” . . . Finally, here is the answer to any opposition. It is my conviction that the Word of God must be held by us in the highest esteem (the Word of God being that alone which comes from God’s Spirit), and no such credence is to be given to any other word. It is certain and cannot fail us; it is clear and does not let us wander in darkness. It teaches itself, it explains itself, and it brings the light of full salvation and grace to the human soul. . . . In these it has its being; through these it strives, rejecting all human consolation, relying on God alone for comfort and confdence. Without God there is no rest, for repose is with him alone. Yes, salvation comes to us here and now, not in any material form but in the certainty of consolation and hope. May God increase this in us and may it never be lacking. Amen. [JW]

Joining the Church

29

1.2 Debating the key rituals of Christian faith: Luther on the sacraments (1520) Sacraments were the key rituals that served as the framework of the Christian faith, signs of the intimate relation between God and believers. Catholics believed that seven sacraments marked the passages of life as opportunities to demonstrate faith in God and secure His grace: Baptism (a rite of initiation for infants), Confrmation (individual acceptance of faith), Penance (seeking forgiveness for sins), Communion (union with Christ), Marriage (a late addition), Ordination (becoming a priest or nun), Last Rites (a believer’s fnal confession). Protestant reformers like Martin Luther (1483–1546) reduced the number to what they could fnd Christ practicing in the gospels. In this polemical pamphlet of 1520, Luther argues that the Catholic Church used the sacraments to hold believers hostage, since it held that in most instances only priests could perform them.2 Source: Martin Luther, Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) I must deny that there are seven Sacraments, and must lay it down, for the time being, that there are only three, baptism, penance and the bread [i.e., communion], and that by the court of Rome all these have been brought into miserable bondage, and the Church despoiled of all her liberty. And yet, if I were to speak according to the usage of scripture, I should hold that there was only one Sacrament, and three Sacramental signs. I shall speak on this point more at length at the proper time; but now I speak of the Sacrament of the bread, the frst of all . . . Formerly, when I was imbibing the scholastic theology, my lord the Cardinal of Cambray gave me occasion for refection by arguing most acutely, in the fourth book of the Sentences, that it would be much more probable, and that fewer superfuous miracles would have to be introduced, if real bread and real wine, and not only their accidents, were understood to be upon the altar, unless the Church had determined the contrary. [. . .] I now at length established my conscience in the former opinion, namely, that there is real bread and real wine, in which is the real fesh and real blood of Christ, in no other manner and in no less degree than the other party asserts them to be under the accidents . . . I quite consent, then, that whoever chooses to hold either opinion should do so. My only object now is to remove the scruples of conscience, so that no man may fear being guilty of heresy if he believes that real bread and real wine are present on the altar . . . But why should not Christ be able to include His body within the substance of bread, as well as within the accidents? Fire and iron, two different substances, are so mingled in red-hot iron that every part of it is both fre and iron. Why may not the glorious body of Christ much more be in every part the substance of the bread? . . .

30 Joining the Church The third bondage of this same Sacrament is that abuse of it – and by far the most impious – by which it has come about that at this day there is no belief in the Church more generally received or more frmly held than that the mass is a good work and a sacrifce. This abuse has brought in an infnite food of other abuses, until faith in the Sacrament is a mere subject of traffc, huckstering, and money-getting contracts . . . CONCERNING THE SACRAMENT OF BAPTISM . . . This doctrine ought to have been studiously inculcated upon the people by preaching; this promise ought to have been perpetually reiterated; men ought to have been constantly reminded of their baptism; faith ought to have been called forth and nourished. When this divine promise has been once conferred upon us, its truth continues even to the hour of our death; and thus our faith in it ought never to be relaxed, but ought to be nourished and strengthened, even till we die, by perpetual recollection of the promise made to us in baptism . . . From what has been said we may clearly distinguish between man, the Minister, and God, the Author, of baptism. Man baptizes, and does not baptize: he baptizes, because he performs the work of dipping the baptized person; he does not baptize, because in this work he does not act upon his own authority, but in the place of God. Hence, we ought to receive baptism from the hand of man just as if Christ himself, nay, God himself, were baptizing us with his own hands. For it is not a men’s baptism, but that of Christ and God, though we receive it by the hand of a man . . . Baptism then signifes two things: death and resurrection; that is, full and complete justifcation. When the minister dips the child into the water, this signifes death; when he draws him out again, this signifes life. CONCERNING THE SACRAMENT OF PENANCE . . . When Christ says, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind’, etc., he means to call forth the faith of the penitent man, so that, on the strength of this work of promise, he may be sure that, if he believes and is absolved, he will be truly absolved in heaven. Evidently nothing is said here of power, but it is the ministry of absolution which is spoken of. It is strange enough that these blind and arrogant men have not arrogated to themselves some tyrannical power from the terms of the baptismal promise. If not, why have they presumed to do so from the promise connected with penitence? In both cases there is an equal ministry, a like promise, and the same character in the Sacrament; and it cannot be denied that, if we do not owe baptism to Peter alone, it is a piece of impious tyranny to claim the power of the keys from the Pope alone . . .

Joining the Church

31

OF CONFIRMATION It is surprising how it should have entered anyone’s mind to make a Sacrament of confrmation out of that laying on of hands which Christ applied to little children, and by which the Apostles bestowed the Holy Spirit, ordained presbyters, and healed the sick, as the Apostle writes to Timothy, ‘Lay hands suddenly on no man’ . . . I do not say this because I condemn the seven Sacraments but because I deny that they can be proven from the scriptures . . . OF MATRIMONY It is not only without any warrant of scripture that matrimony is considered a Sacrament, but it has been turned into a mere mockery by the very same traditions which vaunt it as a Sacrament . . . OF ORDERS Of this Sacrament the Church of Christ knows nothing: it was invented by the Church of the Pope. It not only has no promise of grace, anywhere declared, but not a word is said about it in the whole of the New Testament. Now it is ridiculous to set up as a Sacrament of God that which can nowhere be proved to have been instituted by God. Not that I consider that a ride practised for so many ages is to be condemned; but I would not have human invention established in sacred things, nor should it be allowed to bring in anything as divinely ordained which has not been divinely ordained, lest we should be objects of ridicule to our adversaries . . . [NT]

1.3 The debate over when and how to enter the community of the Church: as infants or as adults (1525) The ritual or sacrament that brought an individual into the church was called Baptism, and in the late medieval church it was almost universally performed on newborn infants. Early radicals believed that baptism should only be performed on adults who knew the signifcance of the choice they were making. Catholics and leading reformers like Luther and Zwingli thought that this was both heretical and dangerous, and they ruthlessly persecuted the radicals. Here an early Radical, George Blaurock, explains how the movement began in Switzerland.3 Source: George Blaurock, Hutterite Chronicle (1525) [Luther and Zwingli] let go of the true baptism of Christ, who most certainly brings the cross with him, [and] followed instead the pope with infant baptism. . . . But the pope did not derive infant baptism from Holy Scripture

32

Joining the Church

any more than purgatory, the Mass, prayer to the saints, letters of indulgence, and all the rest. Luther and Zwingli defended with the sword this false teaching which they really learned from the father and head of Antichrist . . . Faith is not like that, a matter of coercion, but rather a gift of God. And Christ speaks to his disciples [Matt. 16:24]: If anyone will follow me – notice, if anyone wishes or has a desire – let him deny himself and take his cross upon him. He does not say the sword, for this has no place beside the cross. They stand together like Christ and Pilate; they are to be compared to each other as a wolf and a sheep in the same fold. BUT BECAUSE GOD WISHED TO HAVE HIS OWN PEOPLE, separated from all peoples, he willed for this purpose to bring in the right true morning star of his truth to shine in fullness in the fnal age of this world, especially in the German nation and lands, the same to strike home with his Word and to reveal the ground of divine truth. In order that his holy work might be made known and revealed before everyman, there developed frst in Switzerland an extraordinary awakening and preparation by God as follows: It came to pass that Ulrich Zwingli and Conrad Grebel, one of the aristocracy, and Felix Mantz – all three much experienced and men learned in the German, Latin, Greek, and also the Hebrew, languages – came together and began to talk through matters of belief among themselves and recognized that infant baptism is unnecessary and recognized further that it is in fact no baptism. Two, however, Conrad and Felix, recognized in the Lord and believed [further] that one must and should be correctly baptized according to the Christian ordinance and institution of the Lord, since Christ himself says that whoever believes and is baptized will be saved. Ulrich Zwingli, who shuddered before Christ’s cross, shame, and persecution, did not wish this and asserted that an uprising would break out. The other two, however, Conrad and Felix, declared that God’s clear commandment and institution could not for that reason be allowed to lapse. At this point it came to pass that a person from Chur came to them, namely, a cleric named George of the House of Jacob, commonly called “Bluecoat” (Blaurock) because one time when they were having a discussion of matters of belief in a meeting this George Cajacob presented his view also. . . . in matters of faith and in divine zeal, which had been given him out of God’s grace, he acted wonderfully and valiantly in the cause of truth. He frst came to Zwingli and discussed matters of belief with him at length, but accomplished nothing. Then he was told that there were other men more zealous than Zwingli. These men he inquired for diligently and found them, namely, Conrad Grebel and Felix Mantz. With them he spoke and talked through matters of faith. They came to one mind in these things, and in the pure fear of God they recognized that a person must learn from the divine Word and preaching a true faith which manifests itself in love, and receive the true Christian baptism on the basis of the recognized and confessed

Joining the Church

33

faith, in the union with God of a good conscience, [prepared] henceforth to serve God in a holy Christian life with all godliness, also to be steadfast to the end in tribulation. And it came to pass that they were together until fear (angst) began to come over them, yea, they were pressed (gedrungen) in their hearts. Thereupon, they began to bow their knees to the Most High God in heaven and called upon him as the Knower of hearts, implored him to enable them to do his divine will and to manifest his mercy toward them. For fesh and blood and human forwardness did not drive them, since they well knew what they would have to bear and suffer on account of it. After the prayer, George Cajacob arose and asked Conrad to baptize him, for the sake of God, with the true Christian baptism upon his faith and knowledge. And when he knelt down with that request and desire, Conrad baptized him, since at that time there was no ordained deacon (diener) to perform such work. After that was done the others similarly desired George to baptize them, which he also did upon their request. Thus they together gave themselves to the name of the Lord in the high fear of God. Each confrmed (bestatet) the other in the service of the gospel, and they began to teach and keep the faith. Therewith began the separation from the world and its evil works. Soon thereafter several others made their way to them, for example, Balthasar Hubmaier of Friedberg, Louis Haetzer, and still other men well instructed in the German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages, very well versed in Scripture, some preachers and other persons, who were soon to have testifed with their blood. The above-mentioned Felix Mantz they drowned at Zurich because of this true belief and true baptism, who thus witnessed steadfastly with his body and life to this truth. Afterward Wolfgang Ullmann, whom they burned with fre and put to death in Waltzra, also in Switzerland, himself the eleventh, his brethren and associates witnessing in a valorous and knightly manner with their bodies and their lives unto death that their faith and baptism were grounded in the divine truth . . . Thus did it [the movement] spread through persecution and much tribulation. The church (gemeinde) increased daily, and the Lord’s people grew in numbers. This the enemy of the divine truth could not endure. He used Zwingli as an instrument, who thereupon began to write diligently and to preach from the pulpit that the baptism of believers and adults was not right and should not be tolerated – contrary to his own confession which he had previously written and taught, namely, that infant baptism cannot be demonstrated or proved with a single clear word from God. But now, since he wished rather to please men than God, he contended against the true Christian baptism. He also stirred up the magistracy to act on imperial authorization and behead as Anabaptists those who had properly given themselves to God, and with a good understanding had made covenant of a good conscience with God.

34

Joining the Church

Finally, it reached the point that over twenty men, widows, pregnant wives, and maidens were cast miserably into dark towers, sentenced never again to see either sun or moon as long as they lived, to end their days on bread and water, and thus in the dark towers to remain together, the living and the dead, until none remained alive – there to die, to stink, and to rot. Some among them did not eat a mouthful of bread in three days, just so that others might have to eat. Soon also there was issued a stern mandate at the instigation of Zwingli that if any more people in the canton of Zurich should be rebaptized, they should immediately, without further trial, hearing, or sentence, be cast into the water and drowned. Herein one sees which spirit’s child Zwingli was, and those of his party still are. However, since the work fostered by God cannot be changed and God’s counsel lies in the power of no man, the aforementioned men went forth, through divine prompting, to proclaim and preach the evangelical word and the ground of truth. George Cajacob or Blaurock went into the county of Tyrol. In the meantime, Balthasar Hubmaier came to Nicolsburg in Moravia, began to teach and preach. The people, however, accepted the teaching and many people were baptized in a short time. [NM]

1.4 Baptism and marriage: Catholic sacraments in a Japanese Kirishitan catechism (1591) Catholic missionaries to Asia and the Americas worked quickly to produce liturgical and devotional literature to aid new believers in the faith. Much of the material used in the Chinese and Japanese missions was printed at a Jesuit press in Manila. This 1591 catechism for Japanese Kirishitani discusses doctrine in the Q&A format commonly used in all catechisms to facilitate memorization and quizzing. The sections on the sacraments of Baptism and Marriage are given below.4 Source: Dochiriina Kirishitan (Kazusa: 1591) [The Seven Sacraments] Is salvation in the afterlife possible only by the three articles [virtues] of conduct, to have faith, to have hope, and to practice living a good life? M: No, it is not. Graça [i.e., grace] of Deus [i.e., God] is essential to actually observing and practicing them. D: How does Deus provide Graça? M: There are the sacramentos of our Mother Santa Ecclesia [i.e., Holy Church]. It is important to receive the sacramentos [sic] with good preparations. D: How many sacramentos are there? D:

Joining the Church

35

There are seven. First, Bautismo, second, Confrmaçao, third, Eucharistia, fourth, Penitencia, ffth, Extrema Unçao, sixth, Ordem, and seventh, Matrimonio [i.e., Baptism, Confrmation, Communion, Confession, Extreme Unction, Holy Orders, Marriage]. D: Who settled the seven sacramento? M: The Lord Jesus Christo settled them to give us his own Graça and the meritorious power (go-kuriki) of his Passion. D: How should we receive the sacramentos? M: The one who will receive the sacramento of Eucharistia must make one’s confssão in order to regret mortal sins, if any. Those who will receive the rest [of the sacramento] must at least make their contriçao prior to receiving them. It is even better, however, to make their confssão. M:

[The Sacrament of Baptism] What is the frst of the seven sacramento? The frst of all is the sacramento of Bautismo. This sacramento is the basis for one’s becoming Kirishitan and for receiving the other sacramento. D: What is Bautismo? M: Bautismo is the sacramento for one’s becoming Kirishitan. By this sacramento one receives Fides and Graça and has one’s original sin and the sins one has committed theretofore forgiven. This must be received in the right way. D: With what preparations should one receive the sacramento? M: If one is [at the age] of discretion, one must frst wish to become Kirishitan, be sorry about one’s sins in the past, and receive the sacramento with resolution to observe thereafter the laws of the Lord Jesus Christo. D: How do you administer the sacramento? M: You pour water on the head or at least on the body of the recipient, chanting the following words: (calling the Kirishitan name of the recipient such as Petro or Paulo,) “Soregashi Deusu Pa¯dore, Hirio, Supiritsu Santo no mina o motte nanji o araitatematsuru nari. Amen.” In the words of the su¯tra, you say, “Ego, te, bauchiizo, in noumine, pa¯chirisu, etsu, hiirii, etu, supiritu sanchi, amen.” (Ego te baptizo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.) D: What if one pours water without chanting those words, or if one pours water while saying only the half of the words or missing a word in the phase, or if one chants the words before or after pouring water? M: Unless you chant the words as you pour water, it will not do as Bautismo. Also the words must be chanted completely. Bautismo is completed even if you miss the word “Soregashi (I),” “Amen,” or the [Kirishitan) name of the recipient of Bautismo. Except for these three, no words may be missed for Bautismo to be completed. D: Are there other ways for salvation if I do not receive Bautismo? D: M:

36

Joining the Church

Since it is the way indispensable to salvation in the afterlife, you must receive it no matter what. It may happen that although you wish to receive Bautismo, you are unable to do so and die. Even if you do not receive the Bautismo of water, you will still be saved as long as your conduct was truly correct. This is due to your [virtue of] deep wish for Bautismo. Be that as it may, sorrow of sins you committed is the most essential, as I have said above. D: Who administers Bautismo? M: Formally, it is a role of the padre to administer Bautismo. Since this sacramento is indispensable to salvation in the afterlife, however, the Lord Jesus Christo has permitted the sacramento to be administered by anyone, male or female, where no padres are available. This is as long as [he or she] keeps the important points [of the administration of Bautismo] so that [catechumens] can receive it as taught by the Lord Jesus Christo. Since this grant (sazuke) is frequently requested where no padres are available, it is important that every Kirishitan learns how to administer Bautismo. M.

[The Sacrament of Marriage] What is the seventh sacramento? It is the sacramento of Matrimonio. This sacramento is to have a spouse as determined by the Ecclesia. By this sacramento you receive Graça so as to have a peaceful long [marriage] and the prosperity of offspring. D: Are there, then, pledges that the husband and the wife must make? M: It is a natural question. There are three strict promises that they must make between them. One is that after they have been married, they, either male or female, are unable to divorce the other, and unable to have relations with other people. This is because the promise of Matrimonio is the frm pledge that they will never become separate. D: That law is too strict because it teaches that we are unable to separate even when we cannot get along with each other. M: It may seem most diffcult to observe. But when you have the engagement of Matrimonio, you will receive great power of Graça from Deus with which you can have deep mutual love and fulfll your marriage to the end. There is clear evidence of this. By receiving the sacramento, every Kirishitan has a peaceful relationship [with his or her spouse] and they keep their marriage until their death. Is not this due to the power [of the sacramento]? D: Why did Deus decide that we cannot be separate once we are engaged? M: The reason Deus decided this rests on the same point. It is because [Deus wishes that] you and your spouse live without sins, prosper with offspring, and observe the rules so that you and your children will be saved in the afterlife, and so that you unite your hearts as if you were one and D. M:

Joining the Church

37

join your efforts when necessary. You cannot accomplish these things if [your relationship] is temporary. You, therefore, cannot but have a long engagement. Should divorce be possible at will, a man’s heart might become distant and so might a woman’s; there will be no ease between the husband and the wife – only uncomfortable concerns. Besides, they will be unable to rely upon each other when something happens, especially in case of illness or hardship; and they will have nowhere to turn for help. Furthermore, there would arise various complaints in raising their children. If they should be able to divorce as they like when they do not get along with each other, boys would go with their father to live with a stepmother and have a sad experience, while girls would follow their mother to live with a stepfather and live an uncontrollable life. Without forever-lasting [marital] engagement, people cannot avoid these unwanted situations, and neither will they be able to raise their children happily with true and deep love. If you further ponder this, you will understand that nothing is more reasonable in the world than this teaching of [Matrimonio]. If people cancel for a trivial reason the relationship between the husband and the wife who have been engaged with each other daily, or if they break the relationship [with their spouse] by having affairs with another man or woman, can you regard it as reasonable? This is the worst case of leaving the path. After all, you may think you cannot maintain the marital relationship any further, that you cannot get along with your spouse well, considering the harm coming out [of the unhappy marriage]. But consider harms caused by divorce, which include that the relatives of both sides may bear grudges against each other; that some may go so far as to murder the opponent to clear the grudge; that one family’s side may sever their connection to the other family’s side and they may become evil enemies; or that there may be orphans left in the family. There are these examples taken from non-Kirishitan families. [NT]

1.5 Baptism and preparation for death in a Japanese Kirishitan Catechism (1593) The volume in which this discussion of baptism and death appears lacks title, date, or place of publication. The frst heading of the book reads in Latin transcription: ‘Bauchizumo no sazukeyo¯ to byo¯ja ni penitenshiya wo susumuru kyo¯ke no koto’ ばうちずも の 授け やう と びやうじや に へ にてんしや を すすむる けうけ の 事 (Salutary advice on the method of administering Baptism and exhorting the sick to receive the Sacrament of Penance). This indicates the main argument of the book. It aims to teach lay people how to administer Baptism if a person is at the point of death and there is no priest within reach. It also shows Christians how they may help

38

Joining the Church

the sick to prepare themselves for death, emphasizing that they ought to persuade non-Christians to receive Baptism and persuade Christians to confess their sins. This passage has been translated as literally as possible in order to convey more of the tone of the original Japanese text and the language in which theological concepts were expressed.5 Source: On Baptism and Preparation for Death (Amakusa, Jesuit Japan Press, 1593)

On Penitensha [Penance]: the second way to be saved (the frst way being Bauchizumo [baptism]) How to prepare the foundation of conchirisan [contrition], which is essential to be ready for the last moments The frst piece of advice is to seek the sick person’s favour in order to distinguish between beginners and those who are virtuous in the capacity for wisdom from birth, and in the understanding of Kirishitan [Christian] teachings, so that you can admonish him/her accordingly. Second, in order to receive the sick one easily, talk and listen lightly to make him happy. Taking into account his situation at that time, say or read the following admonitions. Articles that must be said or read: In the case of the Kirishitan [Christians] who disobey Deus [God] and fall under a deep sin, that can be called morutaru [mortal] sin. In order to be forgiven those sins, it is necessary to do penitencia [penance]. That penitencia is to say konfsan [confession]. If it is impossible to say confession because it is impossible to meet a bateren [priest], or because he does not have the strength to talk, it will not be considered a fault. When possible, the dying one must receive the forgiveness of sins through repentance and genuine regret. To be ready for konchirisan [contrition], there are two conditions: 1. They must believe completely the fdes [faith] indicated by Our Mother Santa Ekereja [Holy Church], as it is taught, and to stay in the fdes until death, and to believe that the way of the kami (Shinto deities) and the hotoke (Buddhas and Buddhist deities) constructed by several other religions, are a lie. 2. It is always very important to beg Deusu for forgiveness. But when the last moments are close, it is particularly important to know that, if you beg deeply to Zezu Kirisuto [Jesus Christ] and you repent as described above, then everything, including any deep sin that you committed or even if you once lost your faith, will be forgiven. This is because of the promise that any time sinful ones beg for forgiveness of the sins of the body through God’s Love, which we must consider very

Joining the Church

39

important, and through the gokuriki [merit] of the death on the cross for us, we will be forgiven. Moreover, because Zezu [Jesus] sits as the Lord of Gurauriya [glory], then in order to receive His glory, gokuriki [merit] is not necessary. This is because of the law that His merit is given to all sinners, and He offers it to Deusu Paatere [God the Father], and in exchange begs for the forgiveness of our sins. All that He gave – the blows that the Son Zezu Kirisuto [Christ] received, the blood that He shed, and the Kurusu [Cross] on which He was hanged – all of these He offered to Deusu Paatere in exchange for our sins. How then could our sins not be forgiven? If you think that you will go to hell because of your sins, and you are not a Kirishitan, you will be left as a zenchio [gentile (here meaning a non-believer)]. However, since we were made Kirishitan, our sins will be forgiven, and we will certainly be saved. Yet in order to receive this forgiveness, it is essential to prepare repentance and regret. On the obstacles that must be removed in order to be able to seek konchirisan [contrition] The period called the “last moments (rinju¯ 臨終)” is an important time to recover [a lost or weakened Faith]. If you doubt whether you should either help people through their last moments so that they will have a good death, or if you should let them have a bad end through endless suffering, then be assured that to admonish the sick person so that his/her last moments are good is certainly the best support you can provide. Above all, if there is not a paatere [father] to listen to the konhisan [confession], the following admonitions must be given: Articles that must be read or said: •

The life and death of humans are in God’s hand and do not depend on the good or bad deeds of our personal effort (jiriki 自力). Starting with life, anything that we have is not ours. Since we have simply borrowed it all from God, then when the time comes, He takes it all away. To open well the eyes of the anima [soul] is the most important thing that must be understood at this time. This is because just as a tree will fall in the direction towards which it was leaning and stay there, so also the anima [soul] will rest in the direction towards which it is leaning on this occasion., Therefore, whether one will be saved or not lies in the preparation [for death] at this time. For that reason, our anima must lean towards God through love, and we must offer our body, which is subjected to His will, to the Creator. The death of a good kirishitan [Christian] is not to be called death, but simply the beginning of life. This is because, through death, one leaves this body, which is a prison, and goes to the happiness of gurauriya [Glory].

40 Joining the Church The person who admonishes the sick person must read or say the following questions and admonitions. He or she must know that this will not be a full-fedged konfsan [confession] because only a saserudoute [priest] can administer that. The things that will be asked now are to help him/her make konchirisan [contrition] in order to let go of any matters that weigh in his/ her konshienshiya [conscience]. Is there any sin in your heart? If he or she replies ‘yes’, you must tell him/her that in order for God to forgive all the sins that they committed, starting with this sin, you strongly recommend true konchirisan [contrition]. If you took any property from another, or there is something you have not returned without having a good reason, you must give it back. Not just once, but as many times as necessary. When you do not have the strength to do this, it is very painful not to give it back. If it is a person with power, one must change their mind and tell or ask them to write a document or a last will, so that in the occasion of their funeral, good will is expressed and merciful deeds are done for the poor. Do you keep a grudge towards people, or have bad relationship with them? If he or she replies ‘yes’, you must advise them to forgive from their heart any wrong that others did to them, and to ask for forgiveness of their own wrongs, if there are any. Do you keep a mistress who is the basis of sin? If he replies ‘yes’, you must order him strongly to separate from her or to abandon her. What is konchirisan [contrition] and how to make konchirisan happen Konchirisan is to feel great sadness about having disobeyed Deus through the [sins] you have committed, and to determine that from now on you will not commit any more sins. Even if you say that you are sad about the fact that you must fall into inheruno [hell] because of your sins, and cannot go to paraizo [paradise], this is not real konchirisan. Konchirisan is to regret that you have disobeyed Deus, our Lord who you must love. Therefore, there are two sides: 1. You must regret and fear the pains in inheruno that you will receive because of your sins. 2. You must regret that you have disobeyed Deus.

Joining the Church

41

These are the two sides [of contrition]. First, Our Lord Zezu Kirisuto is our true Father and true Lord. That He is Our Father means that He wants to save all of us humans, and He determines the laws that are the way to ascend to heaven, and preserves them and offers them to us. That He is Our Lord means that He is our judge, so that in the very moment of death, He will inquire if you kept the laws. If you did not, He will judge you. Therefore, it is essential that all people who have committed sins understand that His judgment and punishment are severe, that they fear it profoundly, beg humbly, and repent. Therefore, think how pitiful they are, for without sharing the mercy that He gave to them, then as punishment for their disobedience, He will let them fall in Inheruno. This is why you must repent. If those who broke the rules of this world fear committing a sin, then how much more should those who broke the prohibitions given to us by Deus, Lord of Heaven and Earth, fear the sufferings of hell and eternal punishment? How the sick who approach the last moment must express and declare that they embrace and believe in the teachings of the ekereja [Church] and hold back the tentasan [temptations] that come to them When the last moments are close, you must strengthen your fidesu [Faith] and lay in front of your eyes an Image (miei 御影) of the [Christ] hanging on the kurusu [Cross], or an Image of Santa Mariya [Holy Mary], or any another [Christian] Image that you may have. And if you cannot say it in words then say as follows in your mind: Oh Lord Zezu Kirisuto [Jesus Christ], I am sorry that until now I have not been truly strong in the fidesu [Faith] in You. Now I believe again in all that You have taught me, like your beatos [blessed] did. I believe as the truth that Deusu Paatere [God the Father], the Fiirio [Son], and the Supiritsu Santo [Holy Ghost], the three perusona [Persons], are one, and I am determined that the several kami (Shinto deities 神) and hotoke (buddhas 仏) are a lie. Also, I believe as truth that Jesus Christ the Son became a true man, and in order that our sins would be forgiven, He was hanged on the Cross and died. Also, in order to set free again we who are slaves of sin, blood and water fow from the wounds of His side. Also, in order to pay for the sins that we committed by our hands, His arms were nailed to the Cross; and in order to pay for the sins that we committed in our hearts, His side was pierced with a spear. As atonement for the sins that we committed by word, when He was on the Cross, He was made to taste the bitterness of vinegar. I believe without any doubt that through this immense blessing He gives us infnite Glory. For instance, if I became ill or I was threatened by

42

Joining the Church the tengu [Devil],6 and doubted the faith in my mind or said something that grieved Him, that was not my true intention. Now that I am in my full senses, I determine not to separate from Him even a little bit, and I resolve that I must gain that through the faith that says that I truly believe in Him. Because He is already our Creator, Lord, and Father, His immense Virtue will not be made vain by just one man like me. I beg the Mother Virgin Mary, and I beg the nine degrees of angels, the several apostles, the martyrs, and the other holy men: Please make possible the forgiveness of my sins. Especially, oh angels who protect me, please do not leave me, but protect me so that my last moments are in the truth. I truly beg you not to leave me until my soul is called to leave this body, in front of the Lord, who is three perusona [Persons] in one. Amen.

Recommendations for those who help a sick person during his/her last moments During the last moments, the Devil will tempt the dying person through several ways. Sometimes, he will try to make hearts full of confdence go astray. On these occasions, you must read to them the admonitions from the third article above which advise them to have confdence. On other occasions, he will make hearts over-confdent. Since this is also an obstacle for contrition, in order to guard against this, you must tell the dying person to fear God’s Justice and the fact that His will is diffcult to measure. Point to the need to constrain their heart. Especially, at this time, if there are things that obstruct their faith, you must read or say the following admonitions: Inquire and investigate about the essence of the commandments of the faith, and do not argue with the Devil at all. Just be determined to receive the faith, as Holy Mary did. All things that the Holy Church received directly from God, and the doctrine that was expressed by the Holy Scriptures and the Prophets, are nothing like our wisdom because these are built on a high light. Therefore, it is a great mistake to try to understand these completely through our smaller wisdom. Since all the generations of good men, great wise men, and doctors, have offered their lives through the happiness of this Faith, when you have doubts, you must suppress them in your heart. Since the distant past, this Faith has not been equalled by the power of men or by the power of the devil, and it has been proven through unlimited miracles (kidoku 奇特). I do not know how many martyrs have died as a witness of this Faith.

Joining the Church

43

Also, even if the sufferings that hindered the good men of the Holy Church are diffcult to refer to in words, in the end, this Teaching won and illuminated the obscurity of error through its Light. Therefore, even if the Devil creates many obstacles, he will not be able to make much of it because you have unlimited supporters (mikata 見方). As long as you have faith, there is no doubt that you will defeat him. [CT]

1.6 Curbing baptisms of the enslaved in Africa (1627) By a curious logic, some Christians believed that baptism into the Christian faith was a gift to the enslaved, because if the conditions of slavery killed them, they would at least go to heaven. Alonso de Sandoval and colleagues convinced the Archbishop of Seville to tighten the conditions under which these baptisms were administered, so that only genuine converts and true believers would receive it. De Sandoval excerpted in his own Treatise on Slavery (1627) the Archbishop’s edict “Regarding the value of the baptisms of the blacks, in order to assure their salvation as much as possible.”7 Neither challenged slavery itself. Source: Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery (1627) The following document strongly supports my arguments in this book, so I will include all of it here. The Most Illustrious Lord Don Pedro Castro y Quiñones, Archbishop of Seville, gave these instructions to his entire archdiocese, and everyone must observe these pious, serious, and wise instructions. The fathers of the Company of Jesus of the city of Cartagena told the archbishop about the conditions on the slave ships and the inadequate baptisms that slaves receive. The archbishop issued this edict to improve the way in which baptism, the route to eternal life is administered . . . The Edict Is as Follows: I, the Licentiate Don Gonzalo de Campo, Archdeacon of Niebla, Provisor Canon, offcial and General Vicar of Seville and its archdiocese, speaking for the Most Illustrious Lordship Don Pedro de Castro y Quiñones, Archbishop of Seville, on the Council of His Majesty, etc. I command the priests in cities, villas, and towns to fnd the black slaves in your districts so that they will be baptized according to these instructions. Publish an edict commanding all the masters to send their black slaves to the church so that all of them will learn the Christian doctrine, according to their capacity. The slaves must be examined. If necessary, they must be baptized according to the rules set down in this instruction. You [the priests] must prevent their masters from interfering in the examination of their black slaves. You must not let the slaves fear this matter. Question them alone, with only the examiner and examinee present. You must even question those who say they were baptized in Spain. Ask them if water was

44 Joining the Church poured on them, because some have only received the ceremonial side of baptism or were baptized invalidly in their own land. You must carry this out. I decree a punishment of excommunication against anyone who disobeys. I command all clerics, notaries, and sacristans to be notifed of this edict. Signed in Seville, on February 20, 1614, by the Licentiate D. Gonzalo de Campo, in the presence of Pedro Heriega de Valdez. In order to execute this edict so that what his Lordship commanded will be put into practice with the most prudent and suitable methods, the archbishop gives the priests the following instruction: Instruction to help ensure that the blacks who come from Guinea, Angola, and other provinces of that coast of Africa have been baptized. This important matter requires an effective remedy. Direct and trustworthy information proves that many blacks from various nations of Africa are not baptized, and many others are baptized invalidly. This causes two fundamental problems, along with many other lesser concerns. First, many souls lack salvation, because they do not receive the most basic preparation for the attrition of sins, even if they do not need contrition. They are denied the divine help and goodness that come from sacred baptism. Second, later on, these people receive the other sacraments even though they are completely incapable of receiving them. This is sacrilege. It cannot be excused by ignorance. There are so many blacks, and, by virtue of divine grace, they are so well disposed to the faith, that it is a great shame that they die without the sacrament of baptism even when they live among an abundance of priests who frequently perform the sacraments. CENSUS 1. All priests must take a census or make a list of all the black men and women, free or enslaved, in their parishes. They must note down their names and note if they are free or enslaved and, if they are slaves, the names of their masters. Most importantly, the priest must record if the slave was baptized in Spain or not, and if he is married. Note: indicate if the slave is bozal or ladino. If someone is well educated with a very good knowledge of some language of his nation, he can serve as an interpreter for the bozales of his language. Note what languages they speak. 2. Add a marginal note to this list, indicating the black men or women who are sick, so that one can more easily tell which individuals more urgently need immediate spiritual help. The priest must go quickly to the sick and help them receive baptism preceded by catechism as is described below. [NT]

Joining the Church

45

1.7 Protecting body and soul: persuading Indigenous people of the power of baptism (1632–3) Many Christians believed that baptism would protect infants from sickness, particularly those illnesses believed to be rooted in the malice of the devil. French Jesuit missionaries realized that this belief could also be persuasive for Wendat parents. While their own baptismal theology rejected this common belief as superstitious, the Jesuit missionaries relied on this transactional relation, and took it a step further: if the sick child they had baptized subsequently recovered, the child ought to be dedicated to God and brought to the mission in order to be educated in Christian doctrine. In this way they aimed to recruit and train a group of Indigenous people who could expand the mission as intermediaries and interpreters.8 Source: The Jesuit Relations (1632–3) On the 10th, toward evening, we received news that a little native [lit. sauvage] was sick unto death. It was a good half league from our house to his Cabin. Night was approaching; the death of the last Frenchman had caused some fear in the minds of the others, so much so that we were on our guard. Notwithstanding that, I could not suffer this poor little one to be abandoned. I wished to go and baptize it myself; but, being indisposed, and having felt for some time a slight attack of fever, our Fathers thought it best that Father Brébeuf should go. So he started off with Father de Noue in a canoe. They encountered a Frenchman near the Cabins, who said that these natives did not want to show their child to the French. That did not stop them. They entered the Cabin, and Father Brébeuf, who can jargon as well as I can in the native language, made them understand as best he could the cause of his visit. Father de Noue ran hurriedly to the Interpreter, to beg him to come and do a service for the sick. As he was a very honest and worthy man, he left his supper and joined the Fathers, who besought him to inform the natives why they had come so late; that it was because they loved that little child, and that if it died without baptism it would not go to Heaven; on the contrary, if it were baptized it would be forever happy. They asked also if its parents would not be very glad to have it baptized. The mother answered that for her part she would be very well pleased, but that her husband was drunk, and asleep in another Cabin. The Father continued, and asked, if the child should die, if they would not bring it to our house and bury it in our Cemetery; and, if it were restored to health, if they would not give it to us to be educated. She answered that her son was dead; but that if he revived, as soon as he should be able to walk (for he was only about six months old) she would bring him to us. A native, who heard this ran to the father of the child and aroused him; having reported to him all that the Fathers had said, he answered: “Though I am drunk, I understand very well all that

46

Joining the Church

thou sayest; go and bid those Fathers baptize my son; I know very well that they will do him no harm; if he dies, it is because he is mortal; if he recovers, I shall give him to them to be educated.” The messenger brought the news, while Father de Noue and the Interpreter knelt down, reciting the hymn Veni Creator; and Father Brébeuf baptized this poor little one, giving him the name of François, in honour of St François Xavier, telling the parents that they must hereafter call him François, and that if he died he would go straight to Heaven, where he would be forever blest. These poor people gave evidence of their great happiness, often repeating the name “François, François” and showing that they had taken a great deal of pleasure in what we had done. . . . the Fathers returned home at ten o’clock at night very happy; and when I asked Father Brébeuf if he were not glad to have ended the day so well: “Ah!” said he, “I would come expressly from France, and cross the great Ocean, to reclaim one little soul for Our Lord.” He added that the Father of the child was called “la Grenouille” (the Frog). Then I knew him very well, as a captain of the Algonquins. He had been to see us, and I had spoken to him sometimes of God. I have mentioned him above. It was he who asked me how many children I wanted, and who was astonished when I replied that we wanted twenty, and many more when we should be able to feed them.

Notes 1 U. Zwingli, On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God, 1522. Online. Available: www.uniontheology.org/resources/historical/the-clarity-and-certaintyof-the-word-of-god (accessed 1 July 2020). © G.W. Bromiley 1953. Published by SCM Press. Used by permission. [email protected] 2 M. Luther, Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 1520. Online. Available: www.lutherdansk.dk/Web-babylonian%20Captivitate/Martin%20Luther.htm (accessed 1 July 2020). Open access. 3 “The Beginnings of the Anabaptist Reformation Reminiscences of George Blaurock: An Excerpt from the Hutterite Chronicle 1525,” in A.J.F. Zieglschmid, Die älteste Chronik der Hutterischen Brüder, Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1943, pp. 44–9. 4 Dochiriina Kirishitan, Kazusa (1591), in Ikou Higashibaba, Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 165–7; pp. 172–4. © 2001 Brill. Republished with permission of Brill; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 5 On Baptism and Preparation for Death, Amakusa: Jesuit Japan Press, 1593. Laures Database. Online. Available: https://digital-archives.sophia.ac.jp/laureskirishitan-bunko/view/kirishitan_bunko/JL-1593-KB12-12-8 (accessed 21 July 2019). Translated by Carla Tronu. 6 According to Japanese popular belief, tengu are creatures considered as deities or ghosts, who dress in yamabushi (the attire of Japanese mountain ascetics) and have a red face with a long nose. They also have wings and can fy. They are commonly believed to be goblins who lead people astray to the path of heresy and are outside the law. Jesuits used ‘tengu’ to refer to the devil.

Joining the Church

47

7 A. de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instauranda Aethiopum salute (ed. & trans. N. von Germeten, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2008, pp. 160–1. © 2008 Hackett Publishing Company Inc. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 8 R.G. Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791 Volume 5, New York: Pageant Book Co, 1959, pp. 252–6 [or 227–9]. The translation has been updated.

2

Purifying the community Purging the alien

2.1 Expelling Jews from Spain: the Alhambra Decree (1492) Jews had a long history of living between the Muslim and Catholic communities in Iberia, alternately protected and persecuted by both. Efforts at forcibly converting them to Christianity increased from the late fourteenth century, but conversion never ended suspicions, and in 1478 the Spanish Inquisition began as a body aimed at tracking down ‘false’ converts who continued practicing the Jewish religion in secret. Weeks after the Treaty of Granada, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella adopted what some considered the ‘fnal solution’ of expelling all the Jews from Spain, as they had earlier been expelled from England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire. Their decree excerpted below was declared in the former palace of the Muslim ruler of Al-Andalus, underlining the monarchs’ intent to refashion Spain as a reformed and purely Christian nation.1 Source: Alhambra Decree – Edict of Expulsion (1492) You know well or ought to know, that . . . there were some wicked Christians who Judaized and apostatized from our holy Catholic faith, the great cause of which was interaction between the Jews and these Christians, and [so] . . . we ordered the separation of the said Jews in all the cities, towns and villages of our kingdoms and lordships and [commanded] that they be given Jewish quarters and separate places where they should live, hoping that by their separation the situation would remedy itself. We are informed by the inquisitors . . . that great injury has resulted and still results, since . . . they have had means and ways to subvert and to steal faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith and to separate them from it . . . instructing them in the ceremonies and observances of their law, holding meetings at which they read and teach that which people must hold and believe according to their law . . . indicating to them the festivals, advising them of what in them they are to hold and observe . . . giving to them from their houses unleavened bread and meats ritually slaughtered, instructing them about the things from which they must refrain, as much in eating as in other things in order to observe their law, and persuading them as much as

Purifying the community: purging the alien

49

they can observe the law of Moses, convincing them that there is no other law or truth except for that one . . . Notwithstanding that we . . . knew that the true remedy for all these injuries and inconveniences was to prohibit all interactions between the said Jews and Christians and banish them from our all our kingdoms, we desired to content ourselves by commanding them to leave all cities, towns, and villages of Andalusia where it appears that they have done the greatest injury. . . . [Yet] we are informed that neither that step nor the passing of sentence [of condemnation] against the said Jews who have been most guilty of the said crimes and delicts against our holy Catholic faith has been suffcient to correct so great an offense to the faith and the Christian religion [. . .] Therefore, we . . . resolve to order the said Jews and Jewesses of our kingdoms to depart and never to return or come back to them or to any of them . . . by the end of the month of July next of the present year, they [must] depart from all these said realms and lordships, along with their sons and daughters, menservants and maidservants, Jewish familiars, those who are great as well as the lesser folk, of whatever age they may be, and they shall not dare to return to those places, nor to reside in them, nor to live in any part of them . . . [under] penalty of death and the confscation all their possessions by our Chamber of Finance, incurring these penalties by the act itself, without further trial, sentence, or declaration. [. . .] And so that the said Jews and Jewesses . . .until the end of the said month of July may be better able to dispose of themselves, and their possession, and their estates . . . we secure to them . . . that for the duration of the said time . . . they may travel and be safe, they may enter, sell, trade, and alienate all their movable and rooted possessions and dispose of them freely and at their will, and that during the said time, no one shall harm them, nor injure them, no wrong shall be done to them against justice, in their persons or in their possessions . . . And we give license and faculty to those said Jews and Jewesses that they be able to export their goods in estates out of these our said kingdoms and lordships by sea or land as long as they do not export gold or silver or coined money or other things prohibited by the laws of our kingdoms. [. . .] So that no one may pretend ignorance, we command that this our charter be posted in the customary plazas and places of the said city and of the

50

Purifying the community: purging the alien

principal cities, towns, and villages of its bishopric as an announcement and as a public document. And no one shall do any damage to it in any manner under penalty of . . . deprivation of their offces and the confscation of their possessions, which will happen to each one who might do this . . . Given in our city of Granada, the XXXI day of the month of March, the year of the birth of our lord Jesus Christ one thousand four hundred and ninety-two years. [TC]

2.2 An Italian Jew describes the expulsion from Spain (1495) Jews expelled from Spain moved overland to Portugal or France or across the Mediterranean to Italy, the North African coast, or modern-day Greece and Turkey. This account by an anonymous Italian Jew describes how the expulsion came about and what its effect was on those who came to be known as Sephardim (from Sephar, the Jewish term for Spain). Historians differ widely in estimating the number who left Iberia. While some destinations proved more welcoming than others, there is little question of the diffculties and exploitation that Jews suffered in their sudden forced departure, in their travels, and in the areas that they moved to.2 Source: Anon correspondence (1495) And in the year 5252 [1492], in the days of King Ferdinand, the Lord visited the remnant of his people a second time [the frst Spanish expulsion was in 1391], and exiled them. After the King had captured the city of Granada from the Moors . . . he ordered the expulsion of all the Jews in all parts of his kingdom – in the kingdoms of Castile, Catalonia, Aragon, Galicia, Majorca, Minorca, the Basque provinces, the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, and the kingdom of Valencia. Even before that the Queen had expelled them from the kingdom of Andalusia [1483]. The King gave them three months’ time in which to leave. It was announced in public in every city on the frst of May, which happened to be the 19th day of the Omer, and the term ended on the day before the 9th of Ab. [August 1] About their number there is no agreement, but, after many inquiries, I found that the most generally accepted estimate is 50,000 families, or, as others say, 53,000. [This would be almost 250,000 persons. Modern historians estimate 30–40,000 people.] They had houses, felds, vineyard, and cattle, and most of them were artisans. At that time there existed many [Talmudic] academies in Spain . . . in Salamanca . . . there was a great expert in mathematics, and whenever there was any doubt on mathematical questions in the Christian academy of that city they referred them to him. His name was Abraham Zacuto.

Purifying the community: purging the alien

51

In the course of the three months’ respite granted them they endeavored to effect an arrangement permitting them to stay on in the country, and they felt confdent of success. Their representatives were the rabbi, Don Abraham Seneor, the leader of the Spanish congregations, who was attended by a retinue on thirty mules, and Rabbi Meïr Melamed, who was secretary to the King, and Don Isaac Abravanel [1437–1508], who had fed to Castile from the King of Portugal, and then occupied an equally prominent position at the Spanish royal court. He, too, was later expelled, went to Naples, and was highly esteemed by the King of Naples . . . Don Abraham . . . was converted to Christianity at the age of eighty, he and all his family, and Rabbi Meïr Melamed with him. Don Abraham had arranged the nuptials between the King and the Queen. . . . On account of this, Don Abraham was appointed leader of the Jews, but not with their consent. The agreement permitting them to remain in the country on the payment of a large sum of money was almost completed when it was frustrated by the interference of a prior who was called the Prior of Santa Cruz [Thomas de Torquemada]. . . . Then they saw that there was evil determined against them by the King, and they gave up the hope of remaining. But the time had become short, and they had to hasten their exodus from Spain. They sold their houses, their landed estates, and their cattle for very small prices, to save themselves. The King did not allow them to carry silver and gold out of his country, so that they were compelled to exchange their silver and gold for merchandise of cloths and skins and other things. One hundred and twenty thousand of them went to Portugal, according to a compact which a prominent man, Don Vidal bar Benveniste del Cavalleria, had made with the King of Portugal [King John, 1481–95], and they paid one ducat for every soul, and the fourth part of all the merchandise they had carried thither. And he allowed them to stay in his country six months. This King acted much worse toward them than the King of Spain, and after the six months had elapsed he made slaves of all those that remained in his country, and banished seven hundred children to a remote island [St Thomas] to settle it, and all of them died. Some say that there were double as many. . . . He also ordered the congregation of Lisbon, his capital, not to raise their voice in their prayers, that the Lord might not hear their complaining about the violence that was done unto them. Many of the exiled Spaniards went to Mohammedan countries, to Fez, Tlemçen, and the Berber provinces, under the King of Tunis. On account of their large numbers the Moors did not allow them into their cities, and many of them died in the felds from hunger, thirst, and lack of everything. The lions and bears, which are numerous in this country, killed some of them while they lay starving outside of the cities. A Jew in the kingdom of Tlemçen, named Abraham, the viceroy who ruled the kingdom, made part of them come to this kingdom, and he spent a large amount of money to help them. The Jews of Northern Africa were very charitable toward them. A part of those who went to Northern Africa, as they found no rest and

52 Purifying the community: purging the alien no place that would receive them, returned to Spain, and became converts, and through them the prophecy of Jeremiah was fulflled [Lamentations 1:13]: “He hath spread a net for my feet, he hath turned me back.” For, originally, they had all fed for the sake of the unity of God; only a very few had become converts throughout all the boundaries of Spain; they did not spare their fortunes; yea, parents escaped without having regard to their children. When the edict of expulsion became known in other countries, vessels came from Genoa to the Spanish harbors to carry away the Jews. The crews of these vessels, too, acted maliciously and meanly toward the Jews, robbed them, and delivered some of them to the famous pirate of that time who was called the Corsair of Genoa. To those who escaped and arrived in Genoa the people of the city showed themselves merciless, and oppressed and robbed them, and the cruelty of their wicked hearts went so far that they took the infants from the mothers’ breasts. Many ships with Jews, especially from Sicily, went to the city of Naples on the coast. The King of this country was friendly to the Jews, received them all, and was merciful towards them, and helped them with money. The Jews that were at Naples supplied them with food as much as they could, and sent around to the other parts of Italy to collect money to sustain them. The Marranos in the city lent them money on pledges without interest; even the Dominican Brotherhood acted mercifully toward them. On account of their very large number, all this was not enough. Some of them died by famine, others sold their children to Christians to sustain their life. Finally, a plague broke out among them, spread to Naples, and very many of them died, so that the living wearied of burying the dead. Part of the exiled Spaniards went over sea to Turkey. Some of them were thrown into the sea and drowned, but those who arrived there the King of Turkey received kindly, as they were artisans. He lent them money and settled many of them on an island, and gave them felds and estates. A few of the exiles were dispersed in the countries of Italy, in the city of Ferrara, in the [papal] countries of Romagna, the March, and the Patrimonium, and in Rome . . . He who said unto His world, Enough, may He also say Enough unto our sufferings, and may He look down upon our impotence. May He turn again, and have compassion upon us, and hasten out salvation. Thus may it be Thy will! [TC]

2.3 A Portuguese Jew describes the expulsion from Portugal (n.d.) This sixteenth-century history of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 underscores what we know of the experiences of those who fed to Portugal. Initially given refuge by King João II, they were forcibly

Purifying the community: purging the alien

53

expelled by his successor Manoel I when many left the Iberian Peninsula. Joseph Hacohen (1496–1577) describes how some children were shipped as settlers to an island in the Atlantic while other Jews were sent to North Africa or the eastern Mediterranean; others killed themselves rather than submit to forced conversion. Like the account of the 1506 Lisbon massacre by Bishop Jéronymo Ororio below, this is written by a man born when the events frst took place, who was determined to ensure that they were not forgotten.3 Source: Joseph Hacohen, The Vale of Tears (sixteenth century) The exile from France and the above named fatal and terrible banishment have prompted me to compose this book so that later generations of Israel may know how we have been afficted in these countries and places. For, behold! new days have arrived! About six hundred family fathers migrated, in the Year of Exile, from Castile to Portugal with the consent of King João II, who had made a pact with them in consideration of a head tax of two guilders to be paid to him. He also promised to deliver ships to those who did not wish to remain in his country. With the aid of the ships, these Jews were to be allowed to go to whatever places their hearts desired. However, the plague reigned in that year in Portugal, and it had also begun in Italy, where many died. After a short while, many expressed the desire to emigrate to the land of the Moslems and Turkey. These demanded ships from the King, but he procrastinated with much double-talk. But when they remained persistent, he gave them ships and they began their voyage without harm and went on their way. En route, however, the mariners rose against them, tied them up with ropes, raped their wives before their eyes, and nobody came to their aid. Thereafter they brought them to Africa, and then ejected them on a barren, empty, and unfertile land which seemed uninhabited. Their children asked for bread, but no one could give them anything, and their mothers lifted up their eyes toward Heaven in this fateful time. Those who dug the graves cried out to the mountains, “Oh Cover us!” for many sank faint to the ground like dead; and they wished to forfeit their lives because of the heat of hunger. But as they lifted up their eyes toward Heaven, some Arabs came up on them and stopped and waited to see if those people would face up to them. When they did, the Arabs reproached them and talked to them harshly because the Jews had come into their land without making a covenant with them beforehand. Then they made them into slaves and dragged them along behind. But these poor ones, eaten up by hunger, regarded this as fortunate and they praised God. Then the Jewish inhabitants of the country brought them out of bondage and presented them with clothing, food and drink out of pity. May God remember them forever. After this became known in Portugal, the remaining Jews there became flled with fear and did not dare to emigrate. And in the second year after

54

Purifying the community: purging the alien

the Israelites had moved away from Castile, the King of Portugal inquired if more than the original six hundred family-fathers, with whom he had made his pact, had entered his country. When it was found that, in the haste, more than that number had come in, he had the excess arrested, declared them to be his slaves, and refused to accept ransom. Then was their life truly embittered. His servants who plowed the sea with his ships, discovered an island which they named São Tomé. Not only can large fsh, called lagartos, be found there, but also snakes, toads, and basilisks. The King used to send common criminals there, and those who had been sentenced to death. There he sent the poor Jews, together with the criminals, and no one came to their aid. The mothers rose their voices with weeping when these barbarians tore the children from their laps, and the men tore out their beards because of their souls’ grief in this time of terror. Many prostrated themselves before the King, saying, “Please, let us go into exile with them,” but, like a deaf viper, he refused to listen and ignored them completely. One woman, who clutched her child to her bosom, plunged into the sea because of her grief, and thus found their death. See and witness, if such a thing has ever occurred before! When they were on São Tomé, some of them were swallowed up by the lagartos, others died of deprivation of all necessities. Only a handful were able to save themselves, and their parents for a long time. The oldest son of King João, Don Alfonso, married the daughter of the Spanish King, Ferdinand, and he loved her much. But when he rode on his feet-footed horse on that day of his rejoicing, God punished him, and he fell to the ground and died on the following day. His father mourned him. After a short while, King João also passed away, for he had been poisoned. And he left no heir for his kingdom. He was followed by Manoel who had been hostile toward him and had planned his perdition. After the course of fve years, from the time that Israelites had emigrated from Castile, Manoel let it be known publicly in Lisbon and all the other cities of his realm that those who bore the name of Israelite, had either to leave the country or to accept a new religion; and any other Jew was found there later on was to be killed. Through this decree the Jewish community in Lisbon was destroyed. In their great travail, the Jews decided to emigrate to serve their Lord, the God of their forefathers. But when the King heard that, he ordered them to come to Lisbon, promising to provide ships for their departure. When they got there, they were cast into prison and were told, “Choose another religion and become like us, and if not, it will be done by force.” But they did not listen to the King’s voice, and when he saw that he had no effect on them, he ordered all the young Jewish men up to twenty-fve years of age out from the circle of their parents. When they were surrounded, a loud and mournful cry went up; and, in the king’s name, spurious promises were made to them, and they were asked to leave the Holy One of Israel.

Purifying the community: purging the alien

55

But when they paid no attention to him nor lent an ear to his impressive entreaties, they were grabbed by the arm or the hair of their beards or the curls of their heads, and then dragged to the church where they were sprinkled with baptismal water, given different names and handed over to the authority of the country’s populace. Thus they became converted. Thereafter, one of the King’s servants went to the aged and said to them, “Your youngsters and sons have already accepted a new religion: do as they have done so that ye may live.” However, as they refused to listen to him, the King commanded that they be given neither bread nor water, and when, after three days of fasting, they still refused to listen to him, they were dragged to the church, mercilessly beaten – not even the faces of the very aged were spared – and then, forcibly baptized. Many refused even then and preferred to be killed. One man wrapped his son in a prayer-shawl and exhorted them to sanctify the name of the Holy One of Israel, whereupon one died after the other, and he himself after them. Another man killed his dear wife, and then plunged the sword into his body so that he died. Those who wished to bury the dead, were murdered by the Christians with pikes. Many plunged themselves into graves just to remain faithful, and many jumped through fences and out of windows, and their corpses were thrown into the sea by the Christians in the presence of all the other Israelites. This was done to intimidate their hearts so that they would no longer persist in their obstinacy. Later on they were continuously defamed, ridiculed and daily falsehoods were testifed against them in order to destroy them and to usurp their possessions. And they became weary of living. The monks also conceived evil things against them and created a bad name for them in the eyes of a populace, saying, “When pestilence, war and famine come to your land, it will happen slowly because of the greed of those who cling in their hearts to Judaism.” [TC]

2.4 The 1506 massacre of the New Christians in Lisbon: a Catholic bishop’s account (1581) In 1497, the Portuguese king Manoel I ordered the Jews to convert, setting the scene for a repeat of what had happened in Spain fve years before. Jews who converted were vulnerable to attacks across the country over the coming decades, with the worst episode in Holy Week 1506. These days, marking the commemoration of Christ’s return to Jerusalem and his betrayal and crucifxion, was always the most dangerous time the year for Jews. In April 1506 it was made even more tense by drought, plague, and food shortages. Moreover, some Catholics became enraged when they heard that a group of Jewish conversos imprisoned for having celebrated Passover had been released by King Manoel I. About two thousand conversos were killed in these Holy Week riots. Like the Jewish author Joseph Hacohen above, a Catholic bishop Jerónymo Osório (1506–80) who had

56 Purifying the community: purging the alien been born in the year when these events took place later wrote an account of it in a history of the kingdom.4 Source: Jerónymo Osório, The Works of King Emanuel (1581) About the same time there happened a great tumult at Lisbon, raised by the fury and madness of the rabble; in this almost all the Jews, who, as we before observed, had been converted to Christianity, were cruelly massacred. The affair was as follows: The greatest part of the citizens had left the town because of the plague, and many French, Belgian, and German ships arrived there at this time. On the 19th of April [Sunday afternoon about 3 o’clock] many of those who remain in the city went to St Dominic’s church to attend divine service. On the left side of this church is Jesus Chapel, much frequented by people at their devotion. Above the altar is placed a representation of Jesus on the cross, and the hole, representing the wound in our Savior’s side, had a glass cover. When many people had fxed their eyes and attention on that wound, a lucid brightness shone from it. On this appearance many said it was a miracle and that the divinity testifed his presence by a wonderful sign. One of the Jews, who not long before had taken upon himself the profession of Christianity, with a loud voice denied it to be a miracle, adding that it was very unlikely that a piece of dry wood should show forth a miracle. Many indeed doubted the truth thereof, yet considering the time, place, and congregation, it was highly imprudent for any one, especially a Jew, to endeavor to convince people of a mistake, when they were frmly persuaded the thing was true. The populace, naturally headstrong, inconsiderate, and apt to be struck with anything that appears marvelous, upon hearing that a Jew derogated from the credit of the miracle, began to make an uproar. They called him a perfdious, wicked betrayer of religion and an outrageous and malicious enemy of Christ, and declared him worthy of torture and death. Nay, their fury at last to such a degree, that falling on this unhappy wretch, they dragged him by his hair into the market place before the church, where they tore him to pieces, and making a fre, threw his body into it. All the common people focked to this tumult, and a certain monk made a speech too well adapted to their humor at the time. In this he excited them with great vehemence to revenge the impiety of the Jew. The mob too apt of their own accord to be outrageous, by this means became the more transported with fury. Two other monks, at the same time holding forth a crucifx, loudly excited the people to slaughter, at every other word calling out: “Heresy, heresy! Avenge the heresy, and extinguish the wicked race!” The French and German [sailors] quickly came ashore, and having joined the Portuguese, they committed great havoc. This cruel massacre was begun by fve hundred, who were at last joined by several others. Transported with madness and boiling with rage, they fell upon the wretched Jews, of whom

Purifying the community: purging the alien

57

they killed great numbers, and threw many half alive into the fames. By this time several fres were kindled near the place where the frst offender had been burnt. . . . The shrieks and outcries of the women, together with the piteous supplications of the men, might, one would think, have softened the most savage hearts into pity, but the actors in this horrid scene were so divested of humanity that they spared neither sex nor age, but wreaked their fury on all without distinction so that above fve hundred Jews were either killed or burnt that day. The news of this massacre having reached the country, next day [Monday, the 20th of April] above a thousand men from the villages focked into the city and joined the murderers, and the slaughter was renewed. The Jews, being under the greatest terror, concealed themselves in their houses; but the blood-thirsty rabble broke open the doors, rushed in upon them and butchered men, women, and children in a most barbarous manner; they dashed the infants against the walls, and, dragging all out of doors by the feet, threw them into the fre, some quite dead, and others yet breathing life. Such an insensibility overwhelmed this wretched people that they were scarce able to lament their ruin or deplore their . . .[?], those who lay concealed, though they beheld their parents . . .[?] children dragged away to torture and death, durst not even [utter?] mournful groan, for fear of being discovered. In short they became so stupefed with terror that there was little difference betwixt the living and the dead. Their houses were plundered, and the bloody rioters carried off great quantities of gold and silver and several other things of value. The French put their booty aboard their ships, and had it not been for the desire of plunder, many more would have been murdered that day. Several of the Jews, both young and old, fed to the altars for refuge, and taking hold of crosses and the images of saints, in a most suppliant manner implored the divine protection; but the fury of this abandoned rabble proceeded to such a length that without any regard to religion, they broke into the churches, and dragging the Jews from thence, either cruelly butchered or threw them live into the fre. Several who had any resemblance of this people . . . were in great danger and some were actually killed on that suspicion and others received many wounds and blows on the same accounts. Some persons took this opportunity to vent their malice upon those against whom they had [vengeance] by asserting they were Jews, and before the falsity could be confuted, satiated their revenge by their blood. The magistrates [did little] to oppose the fury of the multitude; however, many worthy [persons] preserved, with the greatest fdelity, such of the Jews as fed to them for shelter and concealed them in places of safety. Yet about a thousand were massacred this day. The third day [Tuesday, the 21st of April] those inhuman barbarians returned again to the slaughter; but they scarcely found any to murder, for most of the Jews who survived had either saved themselves by fight or lay

58

Purifying the community: purging the alien

safely concealed; yet some slaughter was committed. On these three days above two thousand of the Jewish race were murdered. In the evening Ayres de Sylva [chief justice] and Álvaro de Castro [governor of the civil court], men of the frst distinction, who presided in the courts of judicature came with guards into the city; their arrival put a stop to the fury of the mob. The French and Germans repaired to their ships with a considerable booty and set sail with all possible expedition. [King] Manoel having got account of this massacre, immediately dispatched Diogo de Almeida and Diogo Lobo to Lisbon with full power to punish the perpetrators of this horrid villainy. Many now suffered for their madness and cruelty. The monks who had stirred up the people to slaughter, being frst in a solemn manner degraded from the priestly offce and dignity, were afterwards strangled and burnt. Those who appeared remiss in restraining the popular fury were partly stripped of their honors, and partly fned; and the city was deprived of several privileges. [TC]

2.5 Making a martyr: the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1609) Religious differences clearly could erupt in violence and sometimes death. Communities struggled to deal with the violence they experienced, and sometimes the violence they caused, and one of the frst challenges was the meaning they imposed when they recorded and remembered it. The murders of Protestant leaders gathered in Paris on the eve of the wedding between their leader Henri de Navarre and a princess of the Catholic royal family triggered further murders and executions across the country. Protestants came to know it as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Huguenot historian Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553–1617) here recounts the political assassination of Gaspard de Coligny, a military leader of the French Protestant Huguenots, which triggered further violence. His account echoes early martyrs’ tales in emphasizing the contrast between Coligny’s calm and heroic acceptance of death and the irrational bloodlust of his Catholic murderers.5 Source: Jacques Auguste de Thou, History of His Times (1609) So it was determined to exterminate all the Protestants, and the plan was approved by the queen. They discussed for some time whether they should make an exception of the king of Navarre and the prince of Condé. All agreed that the king of Navarre should be spared by reason of the royal dignity and the new alliance. The duke of Guise, who was put in full command of the enterprise, summoned by night several captains of the Catholic Swiss mercenaries from the fve little cantons, and some commanders of French companies, and told them that it was the will of the king that, according to God’s will, they should take vengeance on the band of rebels while they

Purifying the community: purging the alien

59

had the beasts in the toils. Victory was easy and the booty great and to be obtained without danger. The signal to commence the massacre should be given by the bell of the palace, and the marks by which they should recognize each other in the darkness were a bit of white linen tied around the left arm and a white cross on the hat. Meanwhile Coligny awoke and recognized from the noise that a riot was taking place. Nevertheless he remained assured of the king’s good will, being persuaded thereof either by his credulity or by Téligny, his son-in-law: he believed the populace had been stirred up by the Guises, and that quiet would be restored as soon as it was seen that soldiers of the guard, under the command of Cosseins, had been detailed to protect him and guard his property. But when he perceived that the noise increased and that some one had fred an arquebus in the courtyard of his dwelling, then at length, conjecturing what it might be, but too late, he arose from his bed and having put on his dressing gown he said his prayers, leaning against the wall. Labonne held the key of the house, and when Cosseins commanded him, in the king’s name, to open the door he obeyed at once without fear and apprehending nothing. But scarcely had Cosseins entered when Labonne, who stood in his way, was killed with a dagger thrust. The Swiss who were in the courtyard, when they saw this, fed into the house and closed the door, piling against it tables and all the furniture they could fnd. It was in the frst scrimmage that a Swiss was killed with a ball from an arquebus fred by one of Cosseins’ people. But fnally the conspirators broke through the door and mounted the stairway, Cosseins, Attin, Corberan de Cordillac, Seigneur de Sarlabous, frst captains of the regiment of the guards, Achilles Petrucci of Siena, all armed with cuirasses, and Besme the German, who had been brought up as a page in the house of Guise; for the duke of Guise was lodged at court, together with the great nobles and others who accompanied him. After Coligny had said his prayers with Merlin the minister, he said, without any appearance of alarm, to those who were present (and almost all were surgeons, for few of them were of his retinue): “I see clearly that which they seek, and I am ready steadfastly to suffer that death which I have never feared and which for a long time past I have pictured to myself. I consider myself happy in feeling the approach of death and in being ready to die in God, by whose grace I hope for the life everlasting. I have no further need of human succor. Go then from this place, my friends, as quickly as you may, for fear lest you shall be involved in my misfortune, and that some day your wives shall curse me as the author of your loss. For me it is enough that God is here, to whose goodness I commend my soul, which is so soon to issue from my body.” After these words they ascended to an upper room, whence they sought safety in fight here and there over the roofs. Meanwhile the conspirators, having burst through the door of the chamber, entered, and when Besme, sword in hand, had demanded of Coligny, who stood near the door, “Are you Coligny?” Coligny replied, “Yes, I am

60

Purifying the community: purging the alien

he,” with fearless countenance. “But you, young man, respect these white hairs. What is it you would do? You cannot shorten by many days this life of mine.” As he spoke, Besme gave him a sword thrust through the body, and having withdrawn his sword, another thrust in the mouth, by which his face was disfgured. So Coligny fell, killed with many thrusts. Others have written that Coligny in dying pronounced as though in anger these words: “Would that I might at least die at the hands of a soldier and not of a valet.” But Attin, one of the murderers, has reported as I have written, and added that he never saw any one less afraid in so great a peril, nor die more steadfastly. Then the duke of Guise inquired of Besme from the courtyard if the thing were done, and when Besme answered him that it was, the duke replied that the Chevalier d’Angouleme was unable to believe it unless he saw it; and at the same time that he made the inquiry they threw the body through the window into the courtyard, disfgured as it was with blood. When the Chevalier d’Angoulême, who could scarcely believe his eyes, had wiped away with a cloth the blood which overran the face and fnally had recognized him, some say that he spurned the body with his foot. However this may be, when he left the house with his followers he said: “Cheer up, my friends! Let us do thoroughly that which we have begun. The king commands it.” He frequently repeated these words, and as soon as they had caused the bell of the palace clock to ring, on every side arose the cry, “To arms!” and the people ran to the house of Coligny. After his body had been treated to all sorts of insults, they threw it into a neighboring stable, and fnally cut off his head, which they sent to Rome. They also shamefully mutilated him, and dragged his body through the streets to the bank of the Seine, a thing which he had formerly almost prophesied, although he did not think of anything like this. As some children were in the act of throwing the body into the river, it was dragged out and placed upon the gibbet of Montfaucon, where it hung by the feet in chains of iron; and then they built a fre beneath, by which he was burned without being consumed; so that he was, so to speak, tortured with all the elements, since he was killed upon the earth, thrown into the water, placed upon the fre, and fnally put to hang in the air. After he had served for several days as a spectacle to gratify the hate of many and arouse the just indignation of many others, who reckoned that this fury of the people would cost the king and France many a sorrowful day, François de Montmorency, who was nearly related to the dead man, and still more his friend, and who moreover had escaped the danger in time, had him taken by night from the gibbet by trusty men and carried to Chantilly, where he was buried in the chapel. [NM]

2.6 The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain (1609) While the terms of the peace that ended the Kingdom of Granada in 1492 were supposed to preserve Muslim religion, law, and culture, Catholic and

Purifying the community: purging the alien

61

Crown authorities were pushing actively for conversion and assimilation within a decade. Converts were known as moriscos, and the suspicions that had hung over Jewish conversos also shadowed them. A series of serious revolts (1490s, 1520s, 1570s) increased calls for their expulsion, and with the support of those who aimed to take over morisco properties, King Philip III passed the decree on 22 September 1609. At least 600,000 Muslims and moriscos left Spain in the fve years that followed.6 Source: Philip III, Decree of the Expulsion of the Moriscos (1609) You are all aware of what I have through such long efforts tried to do toward the conversion of the Moriscos of this kingdom . . . and the edicts of grace that have been granted to them and the attempts that have been made to instruct them in our holy faith, and the little that has been accomplished, for we have not seen any of them convert, and they have instead merely increased their stubbornness . . . A few days ago many learned and holy men addressed me, urging me to take swift measures that good conscience requires to placate our Lord, who is so offended by these people, assuring me that one could without any scruples punish them in their lives and property, for the continuation of their crimes convict them of heresy, apostasy, and actions of divine and human treason. And though one could justly proceed against them with all the strictness of their faults deserve, nonetheless, wishing to reduce them by soft and gentle measures, I ordered the junta . . . [in] which you, the patriarch, and other prelates and learned persons participate, to meet to see if there was some way to avoid removing them from these kingdoms. But realizing that those of this kingdom [Valencia] and of that of Castile were continuing in their harmful intentions, and given that I have heard on sound and true advice that they were persisting in their apostasy and perdition and were seeking to harm and subvert people of our kingdoms through their envoys in other ways, and wishing to fulfll my obligations to assure the preservation and security particularly of that Kingdom of Valencia and of its good and faithful subjects, given that its dangers are more evident, and wishing for the heresy and apostasy to cease, and having had entrusted to our Lord, and trusting in his divine favour concerning matters related to his honor and glory, I have resolved that all of the Moriscos of that kingdom be expelled and sent to the land of the Berbers. And in order to assure the execution and completion of that which His Majesty commands, we have published the following decree: 1. First, that all the Moriscos of this kingdom, men and woman, with their children, within three days of the publication of this decree in the places where they live and have their houses, must leave, going to the place to which the authorities . . . order them . . . They will take with them that movable property that they can carry on their persons in the galleys and ships that have been prepared to take them to the land of the Berbers, where they will disembark, without having been mistreated

62

2.

3.

4.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

Purifying the community: purging the alien or personally abused . . . They will be provided with the necessary provisions for their sustenance during the voyage, and they may also take what they can with them. And he who does not comply and violates any point of what this decree states will incur the death penalty, which will be carried out immediately. If, at the end of three days after the publication of this decree, any of the said Moriscos are found out of custody and outside of their proper place, along the roads or in other places . . . then any person can, without incurring any penalty, arrest them and seize their goods, turning them over to the offcials and the nearest place, and if they resist, they may kill them. Under the same penalty, no Moriscos, once this decree has been published . . . may leave their place of residence to go to another, but must remain there until the offcials who are to escort them to the point of departure arrive for them. Should any of the said Moriscos hide or bury any of the property they have out of not being able to take it with them, or should they set fre to their houses, felds, gardens, or groves, they will incur the said penalty of death at the hands of the inhabitants of the place where it happens. And we order that this be executed because His Majesty has seen ft to grant the use of this real estate, foundations, and movable property that they cannot take with them for the lords whose vassals they were . . . No old Christian or soldier, whether a native of this kingdom or not, may dare to mistreat, either by deed or by word, any of the said Moriscos or their wives, children, or any of them. The same may not hide them in their houses, conceal them, or give them any assistance . . . under penalty of six years and galleys without parole, as well as other [penalties] we reserve for our prerogative. And so that the Moriscos may understand that his Majesty’s intention is merely to expel them from his kingdom, and that they should not be harassed during their voyage but rather deposited on the coast of the land of the Berbers, we will allow ten of the said Moriscos who embark on the frst voyage to return to get word of it to the rest, and the same may be done on each voyage. The boys and girls under four years of age who wish to stay, and their parents and guardians (if they be orphans), may do so and will not be expelled. Boys and girls under six years of age who happen to be children of old Christians must stay, along with their mothers, even if they be Moriscos; but if the father happens to be a Morisco and the wife is an old Christian, he shall be expelled, and the children under six years of age will stay with the mother. The same shall hold for those who for quite some time, for example two years, have lived among Christians without attending the counsel of the aljama [community].

Purifying the community: purging the alien

63

12. The same shall hold for those who receive the Holy Sacrament with the permission of their prelates, as attested to by the rectors of the places where they live. 13. His Majesty sees ft and considers it proper if some of the said Moriscos wish to go to other kingdoms, and can do so without passing through any other of the kingdoms of Spain, leaving for them from their places of residence within the allotted time. Such is the royal and determined will of His Majesty, and also that the penalties specifed in this decree be executed without fail . . . Valencia, September 22, 1609 [ZT]

2.7 Ming offcials push for the expulsion of Christian missionaries (1616–18) Various Chinese offcials expounded on the dangers of allowing missionaries to spread Christianity among the people at large. They warned of missionaries colluding with dangerous elements, not conforming to orthodox teachings, and disturbing the eternal slumber of the frst Ming emperor. Most of these documents are part of a larger collection of court memorandums and appeals which set off the frst Great Persecution of Christians in China. They were gathered into a compendium known as Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty 《明实录》, which documented events through court diaries, daily administrative records, and local reports.7 The missionaries’ Chinese names Wang Feng-Su (Alfonso Vagnoni), Yang MaN’uo (Manuel Dias), Li Ma-Dou (Matteo Ricci), and Pang Di-Wo (Diego de Pantoja) were phonetic adaptations of their European names (‘Feng-Su’ for ‘fonso, ‘Ma-N’uo’ for Manuel, ‘Ma-Dou’ for Matteo). The fnal passage is a self-defence by the missionaries threatened with expulsion. They skillfully fashioned their identities as foreigners who had come from afar to admire the greatness of the Middle Kingdom, demonstrating how wellversed these missionaries had become in Chinese culture by this point. Ming offcials noted that Catholics adopted the Buddhist Daoist custom of marking the frst and ffteenth of each lunar month as holy days for prayer, devotion, and fasting. Source: Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty (1616–18) 1. The 20th day of the 7th month, autumn, in the 44th year of the reign of Emperor Wan-Li [31 August 1616] The supervising secretary of the Offce of Scrutiny for Rites, Yu MaoTsz petitioned the throne to eradicate deviant religions and to tighten the sea ban.8 In summary, his petition read: “Ever since Li Ma-Dou of the Western Ocean came bringing tribute, the cult of the Lord of Heaven has been in China.9 In our southern capital Nanjing, Wang Feng-Su and Yang

64

Purifying the community: purging the alien

Ma-Nu’o, along with others, have zealously worked to incite radical beliefs, deluding no less than ten thousand of our people. On the frst and ffteenth of each month, they congregate in the thousands to worship and pray. There are laws banning people from consorting with foreign barbarians, and laws banning the belief in strange and corrupting doctrines as well. If we allow people in our southern capital to publicly assemble at night and disperse at dawn, following in the footsteps of the ‘White Lotus’ and ‘Do-Nothing’ sects, how shall we ever eradicate all such dangerous cults? Moreover, if we allowed these people to constantly consort and plot with the foreign barbarians who are in Hao-Jing, Zhe-Jiang, and Fu-Jian, of what effect is the Imperial prohibitory law? And so, we must disband these cults, disperse their followers, and tighten our borders and custom posts, the better to nip in the bud any potential troubles.” There was no answer to this. (From The Veritable Records of the Emperor ShenZong, scroll 547) The 22nd day of the 12th month, in the 44th year of the reign of Emperor Wan-Li [28 January 1617] The Emperor ordered the foreign barbarians Wang Feng-Su and company to be sent under guard to Guang-Dong, allowing them to return to their own country from there. Previously, the foreign barbarian Li MaDou brought his disciple Pang Di-Wo with him to Beijing. The Emperor awarded him a pension in consideration of the devoutness he showed in learning and submitting himself to our culture and rule. After he did, the Emperor graciously granted him grounds for burial. Now, his disciples are growing in numbers every day, and their conduct grow increasingly strange and secretive. At the southern capital, Wang Feng-Su and company incited radical beliefs among simple, easily deluded people, amassing great multitudes of followers. They have gone so far as to build houses on Hong-Wu Mountain, and to plant a garden in front of the Xiao-Ling mausoleum. The Nanjing Ministry of Rites fled a complaint against them, as did the entire Nanjing government collectively, as did the offcials of the Beijing Offces collectively. The now deceased Nanjing offcial Yan Wen-Hui asked that the throne enact swift punishment upon them. Di-Wo and company also published works in their defence. Such attacks and defences few swiftly across great distances. In addition, people were beginning to suspect that Feng-Su and company were in truth nationals of Portugal. In an addendum supporting Wen-Hui’s request for swift punishment, the Ministry of Rites wrote: “These missionaries lead the masses to believe in strange and corrupt doctrines using nothing but their bells and music. They are propagating their foreign and barbaric ways in the Middle Kingdom. They are what the Book of Documents described as barbarians who seek to upset proper Chinese rituals and practices. They target people’s thoughts and minds, slowly poisoning and corrupting our society. They entrench themselves in each province, coming and going like shadows in the dark, passing information about China across the seas, like the stealing and raping criminals described in the

Purifying the community: purging the alien

65

Book. They are a pestilence of the highest degree, a hidden yet great threat to our fundamental order.” The grand secretaries also spoke forcefully on the subject. The Emperor commanded: “Wang Feng-Su and company set up a cult to corrupt the masses, to nefarious purpose. They can be sent to Guang-Dong, where the regional inspector shall ensure they leave for the west. As for Pang Di-Wo and company, the Ministry of Rites once said that they understood the rules of astronomy, and petitioned that they be allowed to participate in the reformation of our calendar, especially considering that they had come to our land out of love for our expansive culture and gracious rule. He is also ordered to return to his country of origin.” (From The Veritable Records of the Emperor ShenZong, scroll 552) The 2nd day of the 6th month, in the 45th year of the reign of Emperor Wan-Li [4 July 1617] The Nanjing Ministry of Rites sent a memorandum to the throne: “As per imperial orders, we have sent the foreign barbarian Wang Feng-Su and company to Guang-Dong and placed them under the authority of the regional inspector, who shall ensure they return to their own countries.” (From The Veritable Records of the Emperor ShenZong, scroll 558) The 20th day of the 10th month, winter, in the 46th year of the reign of Emperor Wan-Li [6 December 1618] The vassals from the Western Ocean, Pang Di-Wo et al. petitioned the throne: “We, your humble vassals, with the now deceased Li Ma-Dou, in all over ten men, braved 90,000 li of ocean for the privilege of seeing the glory of this exalted country, and have gratefully received the Emperor’s bountiful generosity for the past ten and seven years. Recently, the offcials of both capitals have repeatedly fled complaints against us and pushed for our expulsion. Would your majesty consider that we are devout followers walking a narrow path hoping to reach the pure land, and have done little more than serve the Lord of Heaven with great reverence. We would never condescend to plotting wickedness, and thus risk falling into Hell.10 We beg that your Majesty pity us, and allow us to await a more favourable wind before setting forth for our own country. Being compelled to remove to the islands would only serve to increase suspicions against us. We beg that your Majesty also grant a period of grace towards your foreign vassals in and around Nanjing, as a last boon from this exalted country which has been so gracious towards us thus far.” (From The Veritable Records of the Emperor ShenZong, scroll 575) [LYS]

Notes 1 E. Peters, “Jewish History and Gentile Memory: The Expulsion of 1492,” Jewish History 9, 1995, 23–28.

66

Purifying the community: purging the alien

2 J. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791, Cincinnati, OH: Sinai Press, 1938, pp. 51–5. 3 “The Vale of Tears (Emek Habacha) by Joseph Hacohen,” in D. Raphael (ed.) The Expulsion 1492 Chronicles: An Anthology of Medieval Chronicles Relating to the Expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal, Ann Arbor, MI, Carmi House Press, 1992, pp. 108–10. © 1971 Martinus Nijhoff. Republished with permission of Springer; permission conveyed through RightsLink/Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 4 J. Osório, “History of the Portuguese During the Reign of King Emanuel (De rebus Emmanuelis regis Lusitaniae)” ed. and trans. J. Gibbs, London: 1752, in J. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791, Cincinnati, OH: Sinai Press, 1938, pp. 56–60. 5 J.H. Robinson, Readings in European History, 2 vols, Boston, MA: Ginn, 1906, vol. 2, pp. 180–3. 6 Philip III, “Decree of the Expulsion of the Moriscos (1609),” in J. Cowans (ed.) Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, pp. 145–8. © 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. 7 Li Guoxiang 李国祥, Yang Chang 杨昶, and Wang Yude 王玉德, eds., Ming Shi Lu Lei Zuan, She Wai Shi Liao Juan 《明实录纂·涉外史料卷》 (Wuhan Publishing House 武汉出版社, 1991), 1102–1103. This book is a compilation of all sections of the Veritable Records which pertain to foreign affairs and foreign peoples. Translated Ling Yuan Sun. See also: E.L. Farmer, R. Taylor, and A.B. Waltner, Ming History: An Introductory Guide to Research = Ming Shi Yan Jiu Zhi Nan, Minneapolis: Ming Studies, History Department, University of Minnesota, 1994, p. 81. T.E. Kelly, The Anti-Christian Persecution of 1616–1617 in Nanking, Ann Arbor, MI: University Microflms International, 1984. 8 The word used here to describe Christianity is “yi jiao” (异教), translated as “deviant religions.” In modern English to Chinese translations, “yi jiao” is the phrase used to mean “heretical religions/movements,” and “yi jiao tu (异教徒),” or a member of an “yi jiao,” is the Chinese for the English word “heretic.” In modern Chinese, these two phrases have fallen out of common usage and come to be used almost exclusively for translations. Although it could be translated as “heretical religions,” “yi jiao” did not carry the loaded meaning of “heretic” in Ming Chinese usage. 9 Translated literally, the Chinese term for Catholicism (天主教) means “the religion/cult of the Lord of Heaven.” 10 The Hell here mentioned is a borrowed word from the Buddhist conception of Hell, “e’ye 恶业.”

3

Evaluating others Cross-cultural assessments

3.1 Can Christians, Jews, and Muslims learn anything from each other? (1560) Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all looked to Abraham as the founder of their faith, the one with whom God made a bond or covenant. Muslims considered themselves children of Abraham’s covenant as it passed through his son Ishmael, born to his servant Hagar, while Jews and Christians traced the covenant through a younger son Isaac, born to his wife Sarah. But what did this common origin mean when these three Abrahamic faiths were competing and fghting with each other? The French writer and traveller Guillaume Postel (1510–81) believed in the superiority of Christianity but also believed that each Abrahamic faith inherited a role and played a part in God’s plan for the world. Here, he describes God’s plan for Muslims (whom he calls ‘Ishmaelites,’ or descendants of Abraham’s eldest son Ishmael), and tries to explain to Christians why they had so quickly conquered large parts of Christendom.1 Source: Guillaume Postel, History and Consideration of the Origin, Law and Customs of the Tartars, Persians, Arabs, Turks, and all other Ishmaelites, called by us Mohammedans or Saracens (1560) Whether there is any common truth in the world and what value there is in the doctrine of the Qur’an of the Ishmaelites It is certain that God and Nature do nothing without cause and that God never permits evil to enter the world unless from it there will arise an infnitely greater good. . . . Discipline, chastisement, vexation or torment lead to understanding through suffering (as is apparent in chastising children, correcting apprentices and belittling the proud). It is certain that the affiction that God has permitted Christians to suffer with the Qur’an has been infnitely more useful for them than has been the long abuse of the law of Jesus Christ. . . . Since [Christian leaders] had stopped doing their work, God gave both place and prosperity to the illegitimate line of Abraham. Although [Islam] has

68 Evaluating others not achieved a work of perfection, nevertheless it has in the frst place abolished and curbed the power and religion of the pagan laws and peoples in the world. God instituted and favoured it for this work of destruction, just as He also instituted the Christian and Jewish religion, each in its own time. . . . The Ishmaelites leave Christians and Jews to live each according to his law and ceremonies . . . while they make war against all the idolaters . . . over which they have power, and in no manner do they pardon them. And this is the principal reason why God has given them the crown of spiritual power, and that of temporal power [over] the Christians and Jews. It is to this end: that even if they cannot ensure that the whole world does good, they do at least restrain the world from doing evil. The greatest evil in the world is to not know God, and to revere and worship idols and works made by men in his place. In this therefore Ishmael, Mohammed and all of the sect who believe in the Qur’an are truly the legitimate eldest offspring of Abraham, even if their mother Hagar was not legitimate . . . The Jewish or Christian law never had a greater enemy than the Canaanites, pagans and gentiles . . . Since there was no greater evil brought into the world than what the Greeks introduced by their worldly pride and stories, it is necessary to conclude that the good which Muslims achieved in destroying idolatry is infnitely greater than the evil they introduced into the world through the error of their false religion. . . . by destroying idolatry, [Muslims] ensured that [even] the least in all the world is persuaded that the world was created by one God, that there was a universal Flood, and that the house of Noah alone gave birth or rebirth to the whole world, and that Abraham is the head of the true religion, and that Moses was given the law from heaven, and that the prophets, among which David is prince, were inspired by God and that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and prince promised to the Jews, and that he is the Word, Spirit and Mind of God, formed and moulded, fountain and head of all men, conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, author of infnite miracles, including reviving the dead; that he is elevated in heaven in body and spirit and higher than all rational creatures, and that his gospel is the doctrine and perfection of all religion and truth, which he alone with his disciples will be the judge of the world, and that there is Hell and Paradise, and innumerable other true sentences, although misunderstood by them. In truth, today this would all be lost, principally in Asia and the greatest part of Africa, if God had not kept and continued the memory of it through them. . . . As in a republic it is better to have a bad, imperfect, or tyrannical leader than to have none at all . . . so in the same way, it is more useful to the world to have retained an imperfect understanding of the eternal truth and religion than not to have received any knowledge of it at all. . . . The condition of the world . . . where the Ishmaelites grow and how they do so out of necessity . . . The falsity of the illegitimate doctrine of the Ishmaelites has given birth to great ruin and waste in the world, as much with respect to customs

Evaluating others

69

and letters as with religion. Nevertheless, the good that they have done in curbing the pride of the Christians, Jews and pagans, in destroying idolatry, and in maintaining the fragrance and remembrance of histories and sacred doctrines, is infnitely greater than the evil brought by their law. . . . And because they are very jealous of what they think belongs to divine honour, there are even some among them who would die to sustain the truth of Christ, as they know it through their Qur’an. . . . This is the sovereign good that one is able to show for the love of God. Seeing how they would die for an imperfect and shadowy knowledge of the truth, can we imagine what they will do when like us they have perfect knowledge? . . . And so it must be that even the most wicked of the Mahomedans or Ishmaelites are, due to their ignorance, lesser sinners against God than Christians who offend more because of their greater knowledge and grace. [These latter] are willing to lose all to gain temporal goods of body and soul, that is to say goods of earthly and not eternal glory – for these earthly things we see today the greatest part of Christians renouncing truth. The changes in the world, principally since the beginning of the illegitimate doctrine of the Ishmaelites, and why it was that these things occurred As those who read the Greek and Latin histories know, the peoples subject to the Roman Empire possessed the greatest of all human accomplishments desirable in the world. This included principally the arts and knowledge of arms and power and also the riches, delights, and temporal pleasures which beneft soul, body, and fortune. This same Roman Empire was further fortifed by way of the religion of Jesus Christ, expanding to the East, South and North as much in civil as in religious power. Hence from the time of Constantine [r. 306–337] to Emperor Phocas [r. 602–610] our entire hemisphere shared common cause and accord and was furnished with power, with knowledge, and with goods. It is the most remarkable thing in the world how all this changed. In less than a hundred years, a people who up to that point had been destitute of power, knowledge and goods and whose name was almost unknown, attained all the power, goods and Christian knowledge in all Africa and Asia. Christian and Roman power had been as one, and it could be said that the Christian liberty of many countries and all the happiness of the world was lost from the time that this sect began. It was a miraculous development that was clearly ordained by God in order to avenge human ingratitude for his providence. Knowledge and letters, which are the greatest and most enriching goods in the world and by which others are made immortal in human memory, died almost in a fash. This was not only in Africa and Asia, which the Romans had quickly conquered, but even in Greece, and in Rome, Italy, France, Spain, where this pestilence was slower to arrive. The [Roman Empire] entered into a silence and ignorance so great that it is necessary to conclude that God in his anger and indignation was now casting light where it had not earlier arrived and where people had never earlier

70

Evaluating others

lived. . . . But why? One can say nothing other than that it pleased God to punish us most bitterly in the world. . . . Thus at the same time the said Ishmaelites began to have very excellent writers in all the true and demonstrative disciplines. This lasted for almost as much time as our [dominance] had, to show us clearly that the predestined authority of the Ishmaelites . . . had to be realized before it could be confuted and abolished by those with superior authority and reason. If it had been defeated and abolished from its very beginning, then the omnipotence of God would not have been seen. God in this way prepares the wicked for their bad day, as he prepares the good for their good day. And that is not done by forcing or constraining some particular thing for being wicked, but by guiding the body and the great company of good or wicked to the end that has been predestined. . . . Also, it is fnally necessary that the body of the Ishmaelite republic be pursued by the authority of the Church and be by natural reason confuted . . . Today we see clearly a sudden expansion of Greek, Latin and Hebrew letters, with all the divine and human doctrines. It seems now much more clear that these letters have been revealed and understood far more in the last ffty years than they ever were in the thousand years before. The Ishmaelites today no longer have letters nor disciplines and in truth it is necessary to conclude that the advantage has returned to us, to confute with authority and reason all the said power and doctrine. And greater change and marvel we see is when we consider that in ten years and almost by the sole power of sailors and merchants, a new world bigger than ours was not only discovered and conquered, but also converted to the Christian religion, under the power of Spain . . . and the navigation of the Portuguese . . . I leave apart the arts of printing and artillery found among Latin Christians, one to realize wisdom in the world and the other to accomplish its power, and both restored by providence alone to Christians. By this they see that it is God alone who died and lives again. What the legitimate and illegitimate can or cannot inherit: the children of Ishmael, the children of Isaac, and Christians Thus we see by experience how the Ishmaelites have a better, greater, and more peaceful possession and domain in the world than the Jews ever had, and not only in Syria and the holy land . . . They believe, even if imperfectly, that Jesus as received by Christians is the true messiah and Christ, promised to Abraham and the subsequent prophets, which the Jews deny. Because of this it cannot be the inheritance which is the question. Their part, even if it is imperfect, is much better than the Jews. It is therefore necessary that the inheritance, which is for the child of the maid rather than for the child of the mistress, must be something different . . . and not the temporal or spiritual inheritance of the Jews, because the Ishmaelites have had in one and another greater perfection than the Jews.

Evaluating others

71

It is necessarily the case that the inheritance which Ishmael lost to his brother Isaac must be something distinct and nevertheless be something worthy of God and of Moses his scribe and prophet. The inheritance destined for us is that which is the noblest part of ourselves and through which we gain the greatest perfection, that is, the spirit or intellect. The greatest perfection of the soul, spirit or understanding, otherwise called intellect or mind, is not only that it believes or knows, but that through reason it knows all things. Because thus man knows not only the cause of things, which is the common end of man, but by this cause and by the love of this cause . . . he holds the true end and inheritance given to a man in this world. God created the world for love of man. . . . The divine providence allowed the Ishmaelites to grow up to the very summit of knowledge and power allotted to such people. Through authority, force and human reason their illegitimate inheritance grew. We see this in Algazali, Avicenna and others who have rendered the natural reason of the Alcoranic law, seeing in natural reason the legitimate Christian religion that developed in the tradition of Isaac . . . [YP]

3.2 A convert reconsiders: a Japanese Buddhist’s critique of Christianity (1620) Fucansai (Fabian Fucan 1565–1621) was a Japanese Catholic convert and Jesuit who, after returning to Buddhism, mounted a sustained critique of the religion of those known as the Kirishitani. In Deus Destroyed, he takes care frst to present the views of the Kirishitani, which are fundamentally those of the catechism in Chapter One, and then his criticism. His descriptions of the Christian faith are generally fair and accurate, and his critique is harsh and often satirical. He argues that what is positive in the Christian message is also found in Buddhism, but adds that there is also much in Christianity that undermines respect for ancestors and authorities, and so violates Japanese customs and traditions.2 Source: Fabian Fucan, Deus Destroyed (1620) SIXTH STEP The adherents of Deus claim: The above-mentioned entry of D [i.e., Deus, or the Christian God] into this world occurred after some fve thousand years had passed from the time when heaven and earth were opened up. His birth took place during the reign of an emperor named Caesar, in a village called Belem, in the country of Judea. His mother’s name was Santa Maria, and Joseph was the name of his father. But both Santa Maria and Joseph were virgem, by which is meant to say that throughout their lives they did not have marital relations; and in these circumstances he was conceived and born.

72

Evaluating others

But how did all this come about? How are we to understand this entry of D into the world? Well, frst of all, this Santa Maria not only possessed the virtue of lifelong chastity but also, because she was endowed with the various good qualities and all the virtuous accomplishments, she paid zealous attention to devotional pursuits and to the recitation of prayers. One day at dusk, as she had composed her mind toward the open window of spiritual contemplation, an anjo [angel] suddenly appeared before her. And he knelt down, his hands upraised and joined, and uttered: Ave, gratia plena. Dominus tecum. The meaning of these words is: “Hail Maria, full of D’s grace. The Lord is with you.” And from that moment she conceived and after the ten months were fulflled she gave birth in the aforesaid Belem, at deepest midnight, in a stable. And angels descended from the heavens, playing music, and a wonderful fragrance pervaded the four directions. And marvellous signs were seen at this time, to testify that D had entered this world. Now the name of the Lord who was thus born is Jesus Christus. For thirty-three years he remained on this earth, to teach the way of goodness to all sentient beings. But because he claimed that he was D a group of people called Jews on hearing this said it was deviltry. And, swaying their judges, they heaped blows and tortures upon him, and then they suspended him upon a stake known as the cruz. And thus he crushed sin and gave effect to good for mankind, and by this merit he accomplished atonement for the sin of Adam and Eve. And thus in his thirty-third year he summoned forth death. But on the third day he rose again from the dead, and after forty days he ascended into Heaven. Some one thousand and six hundred years have passed since. To counter, I reply: So it took all of fve thousand years after heaven and earth were opened up for D to enter this world! Was the atonement so late in coming because heaven and earth are so far apart? Were so many years expended along the way on this distant route? Or were all those years spent on fuss and preparation for the journey? Since atonement was not accomplished for fve thousand years all the human beings in the world had to fall into hell – a measureless, countless number! All those people falling down to hell! Really, it must have been like a torrent of rain. And him who watched this and did not even feel sad, who for fve thousand years was not disposed to fnd a way to redeem sentient beings – are we to call him the all-merciful, all compassionate Lord? One simple look at this will make it clear that all the teachings of the adherents of Deus are fraud. And what they say about the total number of years is also extremely dubious. Five thousand years from the opening up of heaven and earth until the coming of Jesus Christus added to the one thousand and six hundred years since his coming make a sum of six thousand and six hundred years. In balancing this number of years against that recorded in the Japanese and Chinese histories one fnds the number exceedingly short. But perhaps

Evaluating others

73

the heaven and earth of the adherents of Deus are somewhere outside this heaven and this earth, and came into existence at a later date. Perhaps there is yet another, a separate heaven and earth. Dubious, dubious! So Jesus Christus was born with lifelong virgins, the virtuous Joseph and Santa Maria, as father and mother. What sort of ideal virtue is this? “Man and wife have separate functions.” The universal norm of moral law is that one and all shall enter into marital relations. Actually, to counter the universal norm is evil; and evil may be defned as the departure from the Way. If marital relations were not completely the standard of moral law in the world, then what else could we expect but the extinction of the human seed in every province and district, down into the last village! So it is obvious now that the standard Way is virtuous and all outside it not virtuous. So Jesus Christus assumed the name of Lord of Heaven and Earth and because of this the group of Jews, saying that this was deviltry, sued him before their judges, suspended him upon a stake, and took his life. Now this, to be sure, is both plausible and proper! The Odes say: To hack an axe-haft an axe hacks; the pattern’s near. And now, before our very eyes here in Japan, you adherents of Deus are preaching a doctrine wicked and contrary to the Way of the Sages; and therefore the wise ruler has decided to stamp out your doctrine, and the people also hate it and inform on it and denounce its followers, so that they are beheaded or crucifed or burnt at the stake. The methods of government of the wise men of former and of latter days agree perfectly, like the halves of a tally joined. But the doctrine you adherents of Deus preach is a perverse faith; I shall unmask it later, point by point. Well, then: What you say about the resurrection and ascent to Heaven sounds quite splendid; but in a faith perverse from its very roots everything must be devilish illusion, magical trickery. The right and wrong of enlightenment, right or wrong, is all resolved as right. The right and wrong of delusion, right or wrong, is all resolved as wrong. The right and wrong of true doctrine, right or wrong, is all resolved as truth. The right and wrong of deviltry, right or wrong, is all resolved as devilish. There is no ground for indecision about this! SEVENTH STEP The adherents of Deus claim: The above six Steps contain the outstanding and necessary teachings of our faith. Those who can fnd assent to these Steps will accept our doctrine;

74

Evaluating others

but after embracing our doctrine they must by all means observe ten statutes known as the Ten Mandamentos. The frst of these is: “You shall hold the one D dear above all things and him shall you worship.” The second: “You shall not invoke the holy name of D in baseless oaths.” The third: “You shall endeavor to keep every seventh day as your domingo.” The fourth: “You shall observe flial piety to your father and your mother.” The ffth: “You shall not kill human beings.” The sixth: “You shall not commit adultery.” The seventh: “You shall not steal.” The eighth: “You shall not make false charges against others.” The ninth: “You shall not lust for the spouse of another.” The tenth: “You shall not have wicked desires for the property of another. These are the commandments. And of these the First Mandamento – ”You shall hold D dear above all things and him shall you worship” – means that one should esteem this D even above one’s ruler, more even than one’s father and mother. Refuse to follow the orders of ruler or parent if compliance would mean the denial of D’s will! Do not grudge your life in such a situation! And not to mention all else that this Mandamento implies! One is given a name at the time of entry into our faith. The names of virtuous men and virtuous women, those who in times past fulflled D’s will, are now used for everybody, so that everybody may turn to these virtuous personages for mediation in the Holy Presence. One is also given a taste of salt. As salt is a thing which adds taste to something without taste, so does this signify: “I now give you a taste of the life to come.” And one has a taper placed in the hand, to signify: “You have found the True Light.” Ego Te baptizo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti – these required words are intoned and water is sprinkled upon the forehead. The meaning of these words is: “I cleanse you in the name of the D the Father, and D the Son, and their Reciprocal Love.” At this time the merit of the blood which Jesus Christus shed on the cross commingles with the water, to wash away all stain of sin. And after this, if a man die without committing sins of his own, there is no doubt that the gain of Heaven is his. But if a man receive not this blessing of baptismo, though he be righteous there is for him no salvation. To counter, I reply: So you propound a ten-point statute called mandamentos. But aside from the frst of the ten points nothing here exceeds the scope of the Five Commandments which prohibit killing, theft, adultery, falsehood, and drunkenness. . . . The frst mandamento urges disobedience to the orders of sovereign or father if compliance would mean denial of D’s will; it entreats one to hold life itself cheap in such a situation. In this precept lurks the intention to subvert and usurp the country, to extinguish Buddha’s Law and Royal Sway. Quick, quick! Put this gang in stocks and shackles. ...

Evaluating others

75

The expression “denial of D’s will” means, frst and foremost, to abandon D and adhere to the Buddhas and the gods. And therefore, no matter how grave be the ruler’s command to convert from the cult of Deus and adhere to the Buddhas and the gods, the adherents of Deus do not grudge their lives and would rather court chastisement under the Five Penalties, and would delight in it. Look, look! They value above the ruler’s command the orders of the Bateren [priest]. For Bateren preachments they feel more debt of gratitude than for their own parents’ benefcence. Japan is the Land of the Gods. The generations of our rulers have received ¯ mikami, through U-gaya-fukithe Imperial Dignity from Amaterasu O awasezu no Mikoto and his August Child Jimmu Tenno¯, who became the progenitor of our Hundred Kings. The Three Divine Regalia became the protectors of the Empire, so that among all the customs of our land there is not one which depends not on the Way of the Gods. ... And this, this the adherents of Deus plan to subvert! They bide their time with the intent to make all of Japan into their own sectarians, to destroy the Law of Buddha and the Way of the Gods are planted here, the Royal Sway also fourishes; and since the Royal Sway is established here the glory of the Buddhas and the gods does grow. And therefore the adherents of Deus have no recourse but to subvert the Royal Sway, overthrow the Buddhas and the gods, eliminate the customs of Japan, and then import the customs of their own countries; only thus will they advance the plot they have concocted to usurp the country themselves. They have dispatched troops and usurped such countries as Luzon and Nova Hispania, lands of barbarians with nature close to animal. But our land by far surpasses others in ferce bravery; and therefore the ambition to diffuse their faith in every quarter and thus to usurp the country, even if it take a thousand years, has penetrated down to the very marrow of their bones. Ah! – but what a gloomy prospect awaits them! For the sake of their faith they value their lives less than trash, than garbage. Martyr, they call this. When a wise sovereign rules the Empire, good is promoted and evil chastised. Rewards promote good and punishments chastise evil. There is no greater punishment than to take away life; but the adherents of Deus, without even fearing that their lives be cut, will not change their religion. How horrible, how awful it is! And whence did this fagrant wickedness arise? One look will show that its origin is in the frst mandamento: “You shall hold D dear above all things and him shall you worship.” The spread of such a cursed doctrine is completely the working of the devil. . . . Wild beasts and fooding waters are enemies harmful to the body. This gang, however, would subvert the truth; these are enemies of the Buddhas and of all Law. And, worst of all, this is a perfdious band which plots to usurp the country. Who is there that would not hate them?

76 Evaluating others Well, to continue: It is scarcely worthwhile to discuss the right or wrong of the part about the bestowal of a name, the taste of salt, and the taper in the hand. So D will not save men who have not received the blessing of this baptismo, though they be righteous men! This is completely unheard-of. A man may not have received the blessing, but if he is righteous what reason could there be to condemn him? The Great Brilliance keeps no light to itself; the Great Benevolence keeps no love to itself. In contrast, listen to D talk! “This is mine, all mine!” “This does come up to my expectations!” This is a D with an ego, fraught with human caprice. . . . [NT]

3.3 A rabbi compares Christianity and Judaism (1641) While Rabbi Morteira wanted to remind his Jewish hearers that they enjoyed more privileges in Amsterdam than elsewhere, he also emphasized that many of Christianity’s key doctrines and rituals were perversions of Jewish practice, and that its claims to have superseded Judaism were false. The message was all the more important as it was addressed to Jews who, in some instances, had lived publicly as Christians for generations after the forcible conversions in Iberia. Some aimed to continue a mix of Jewish and Christian practices, to the frustration of Jewish and Christian religious authorities alike. Rabbi Morteira here calls Christians “not-the-people” in order to contrast them to God’s Chosen People, the Jews. He tells his hearers not to be jealous of Christian privileges, which are simply a test of their faith, and reminds them that God punishes his People with adversity when they fail to honour, thank, and worship Him.3 Source: Saul Levi Morteira, “Sermon for the Sabbath of Repentance” (1641) God punished them measure for measure: I’ll provoke their jealousy with not-the-people. This means, I will arrange it so that a people that is not Mine will arouse their jealousy in that they will attribute to themselves all the benefcent acts and the virtues that I have bestowed upon Israel. They will claim that I have bestowed this upon them, that I have chosen them. For this is an important matter, worthy of pondering, when we see that in our exile it would have been possible to be among a people that, in its religion and its characteristics was very, very different from us, since God handed us over into its power. For behold, they have divided the categories within the [Christian] nation as we do into priests and Levites with rights to tithes and a king of High Priest patterned after us. They have invented a congregation of seventy-one, a kind of Sanhedrin. Look at the holy days of the year: they have, like us, a kind of Sabbath and Pesach and Shavuot. They have invented a “jubilee” year. The structure of their communion is patterned

Evaluating others

77

after our prayer of sanctifcation (Qiddush) and blessing over bread (Motsi). The text of their liturgy is derived from our prophets. The “miracles” they placed in their books are precisely those that are written in our Sacred Scriptures – there is nothing else, as we have discussed at length in its proper place, showing one by one what corresponds to everything of theirs. Their baptism they took from our immersion of the ritually impure. And so with many of the things they boast were given them by God. Why all this? In order to provoke us with jealousy when, in return for our extending the honour due to God to the false gods, which are not divine, they claim the honours which are really ours, though they are not God’s people. I’ll provoke their jealousy with not-the-people. This is what the Poet spoke of in Psalm 74: Your foes roar inside Your meeting-place; they take their signs for true signs. Till when, O God, will the foe blaspheme, will the enemy forever revile Your name? (Ps. 74:4, 10). This means that they call themselves by Your name, and though they are not-the-people, they claim to be Your people, which is a reviling of Your name. Despite it all, God is silent and consents to punish Israel with a measure of their own making. This is the meaning of Why do You hold back Your hand, Your right hand? Draw it out of Your bosom! (Ps. 74:11) – like a man who acquiesces and does not act, who stands by watching and does not protest, until the sin is recognized and the punishment is accepted. There is a second meaning to the phrase They provoked My jealousy with “not God,” this too relating to the rebellion of a wife against her husband, who gives her all that she needs – food and drink and clothing, everything that she needs – yet she does not recognize any of this. [NM]

3.4 Ming and Qing scholars respond to Christian missions (1601, 1739) Chinese scholars were skeptical about the claims that Christian missionaries made on entering China. The following passages are taken from Ming dynasty chronicles known as The Veritable Records. It is the only record dealing with a European country, and it deals primarily with the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and other missionaries. The excerpts show the rather low opinion that Ming offcials had of Europeans. They considered Christian doctrines irrational and implausible, and were skeptical about the existence of many of the lands depicted on a map that the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci gave to the emperor in 1602. The frst missionaries entering China had attempted to gain acceptance by shaving their heads and wearing the robes of Buddhist monks, but Ricci emulated Confucian scholars instead, growing out his hair, wearing Confucian robes, taking the Chinese name Li Ma-Dou (利玛窦). Ricci arrived in China in 1582 and attempted unsuccessfully to

78

Evaluating others

gain entrance to the imperial court in 1598. In 1601, 20 years after arriving in China, he was fnally allowed to stay in the new capital of Beijing, where he would live the rest of his life until his death in 1610.4 Source: The Veritable Records (1601) and The History of Ming (1739) From The Veritable Records The 5th day of the 12th month in the 28th year of the reign of the Emperor Wan-Li [8 January 1601] The tax-collector of Tianjin, Ma Tang reported: “The barbarian-foreigner from far away, Li Ma-Dou’s tributary gifts and other luggage have been translated and inspected, and are now packed, sealed, and awaiting further orders. The Emperor has ordered these to be dispatched to court accompanied by the aforementioned Ma-Dou, with all inspections and translations continued to be provided by your humble subordinate, here reporting.” (From The Veritable Records of the Emperor ShenZong, scroll 354) The 1st day of the 2nd month in the 29th year of the reign of Emperor Wan-Li [5 March 1601] The junior director of the Palace Carpentry Directorate, Ma Tang brought to court the tributary gifts and luggage of Li Ma-Dou, a man from the Great Western Ocean. The Ministry of Rites sent a memorandum to the throne on this matter: “This man styles himself as a man of the Great Western Ocean, but our Collected Records only contains records of a country named Soli-inthe-Western-Ocean, with no mention of a Great Western Ocean. Thus we cannot verify the truth of his identity. There is also the problem that this man has already lived in our country for 20 years, and only recently came forward with his tribute. Thus he is not to be considered the same as those who, pining for our great virtue and uprightness, make their ways from faraway lands exclusively to present their treasures to the throne. Moreover, the pictures he brought of The Lord of Heaven and The Lord of Heaven’s Mother show content which confict with what is written in the Classics.5 As to the miraculous bones of gods and immortals, and other such items he brought with him – Do not gods and immortals ascend bodily into heaven? How then could there be any bones left? These bones are what Tang Yu of the Tang dynasty called dangerously corrupting infuences that ought not be allowed into the forbidden palace. The dangers are all the greater in this case since these objects were never brought to our Ministry for inspection, but instead given directly to the throne. This is both a serious blunder on the part of the palace eunuchs for not checking that which they brought before your majesty, and an inexcusable dereliction of duty for us at the Ministry of Rites. After receiving Your Majesty’s command to appear before this Ministry for inspection, still he did not come, but instead secreted himself in a monastery.

Evaluating others

79

We, your ministers, cannot tell his purpose for such behaviour. Nevertheless, according to procedure, tribute-bringing emissaries are granted feasts and offered gifts to bring back to their tributary state. As a foreigner who has resided many years in this country, Li Ma-Dou offered tribute of his own accord, not representing any foreign country. There is no precedent for this, but considering the labour of his long travels to bring humble gifts in tribute, it is ftting for the throne to reward a traveler who has journeyed far from home. We ask that he be rewarded according to the precedent set by what was awarded to the Siamese residents of Guangdong who offered tribute in the past. After measuring the worth of his tributes and gifts, Li Ma-Dou should be rewarded according to precedent and sent back whence he came from. He ought not be allowed to live covertly in the two capitals, consorting with court eunuchs, as that could lead to unknown troubles in future.” (From The Veritable Records of the Emperor ShenZong, scroll 356) The 11th day of the 7th month in the 29th year of the reign of Emperor Wan-Li [8 August 1601] The Ministry of Rites sends another memo to the throne: “Li Ma-Dou came a long way to present his treasures, out of a humble wish to pay tribute to the throne. We, your ministers, had discussed and drafted tentative plans for him to be rewarded for paying tribute, reimbursed for the monetary value of his tributary gifts, given the customary hat and girdle, and sent home. However, we can only ever suggest and discuss, and all fnal decision must ultimately be your majesty’s purview. The foreigner has been waiting for a decision for fve entire months now. It is no wonder that he is worried sick and thinking of leaving. We have seen that he is earnest in his words when he says he does not wish for any reward from the throne for his tribute, and only wishes to be allowed to live among the mountains in the countryside. He is like the birds and deer which, being kept long penned, increasingly miss the tall forests and long grass. We recommend that his request be granted, and that he be sent back to Jiang-Xi or other such places he has resided in previously, to be allowed to spend his old age amidst the distant mountains and deep valleys. This would keep him away from other people, and also exemplify your majesty’s grace towards distant nations.” There is no answer to this memorandum. (From The Veritable Records of the Emperor ShenZong, scroll 361) The 27th day of the 4th month, summer, in the 38th year of the reign of Emperor Wan-Li [18 June 1601] Granting to the deceased vassal Li Ma-Dou of the Western Ocean a spare and empty plot of land for burial. (From The Veritable Records of the Emperor ShenZong, scroll 470)

80

Evaluating others

From The History of Ming The Ming chronicles became one of the bases for the offcial dynastic history that was published over a century later under the Qing dynasty. It quotes, editorializes, and embellishes the earlier chronicles, and frames them with a description of Europe at the opening, and a more sympathetic picture of Li Ma-Dou/Matteo Ricci at the close. Italia is located in Europa, and since ancient times, has never been connected with China.6 In the reign of the Emperor Wan-Li, the Italian Li Ma-Dou came to Beijing. He crafted a Complete Map of Ten-Thousand Countries, and claimed: “In this world, there are fve continents. The frst, Asia, contains more than 100 countries, of which China is one. The second, Europa, contains more than 70 countries, of which Italia is one. The third, Livia, also contains more than 100 countries, and the fourth, America, the greatest in size, is split into two contiguous continents, north and south. The ffth and last continent is named Magallanica.7 All land under heaven is encompassed in these fve continents.” These claims are absurd and impossible to verify. However, since Europeans can be found across our country, their continent is certain to exist. The majority of European countries believe in the religion of the Lord of Heaven. The God they worship, the Lord on high, Jesus, was born in Judea, an Asian country. He spread his faith west, until it reached Europa. He was born in the 2nd year of the Yuan-Shou period under the rule of the Han Emperor Ai. In the 9th year in the reign of the Emperor Wan-Li, one thousand, fve hundred, and eighty-one years since the birth of his God, Li Ma-Dou set sail across the oceans, traversing ninety thousand li, and reached the Bay of Xiang-Shan in Guang-Zhou, bringing the religion of the Lord of Heaven into China.8 In the 29th year under the reign of Emperor Wan-Li, Li Ma-Dou entered Beijing. The court eunuch Ma Tang presented his tributary gifts to the emperor. Li Ma-Dou claimed to be a man of the Great Western Ocean. The Ministry of Rites sent a memorandum to the throne saying: “The Collected Records of the Ming Dynasty only contains records of a country named Soli-in-the-Western-Ocean, with no mention of a Great Western Ocean. Thus we cannot verify the truth of his identity. There is also the problem that this man has already lived in our country for 20 years, and only recently came forward with his tribute. Thus he is not to be considered the same as those who, pining for our great virtue and uprightness, make their ways from faraway lands exclusively to present their treasures to the throne. Moreover, the pictures he brought of The Lord of Heaven and The Lord of Heaven’s Mother show content which confict with what is written in the Classics. As to the miraculous bones of gods and immortals, and other such items he brought with him – Do not gods and immortals ascend bodily into heaven? How then could there be any bones left? These bones are what Tang Yu of the Tang dynasty called dangerously corrupting

Evaluating others

81

infuences that ought not be allowed into the forbidden palace. The dangers are all the greater in this case since these objects were never brought to our Ministry for inspection, but instead given directly to the throne. This is both a serious blunder on the part of the palace eunuchs for not checking that which they brought before your majesty, and an inexcusable dereliction of duty for us at the Ministry of Rites. After receiving Your Majesty’s command to appear before this Ministry for inspection, still he did not come, but instead secreted himself in a monastery. We, your ministers, cannot tell his purpose for such behaviour. Nevertheless, according to procedure, tribute-bringing emissaries are granted feasts and offered gifts to bring back to their tributary state. We ask that he be given the customary hat and girdle and sent back to his own country. He ought not be allowed to live covertly in the two capitals, consorting with Chinese people, as that could lead to unknown troubles in future.” There is no answer to this memorandum. In the eighth month of the same year, the Ministry of Rites spoke again thus: “We, your offcials at the Ministry of Rites, considered ordering Li Ma-Dou to return to his own country, since he has been waiting for an answer from the throne for fve months now. It is no wonder that he is worried sick and thinking of leaving. We have seen that he is earnest in his words when he says he does not wish for any reward from the throne for his tribute, and only wishes to be allowed to live among the mountains in the countryside. He is like the birds and deer which, being kept long penned, increasingly miss the tall forests and long grass. We recommend that his request be granted, and that he be sent back to Jiang-Xi or other such places he has resided in previously, to be allowed to spend his old age amidst the distant mountains and deep valleys.” This memorandum was also not answered. After this, the emperor, feeling pleased that Li Ma-Dou had come from far away, granted him a house in Beijing, and a place from which to teach, and also rewarded him most handsomely. Because of this, all the mid and low-ranking offcials made much of him, and paid him friendly visits. Li Ma-Dou was now well-contented in Beijing, and did not speak of leaving again. In the 4th month of the 38th year, he died in Beijing, and was granted a burial-place outside the western city walls. [LYS]

3.5 Wendat encounters with Christianity (1632) Among one of the frst missionaries to New France, Gabriel Sagard is renowned for his dictionary of the Wendat (also known to Europeans as ‘Huron’) language and his accounts of Wendat beliefs and creation stories. He consistently relates these to Christianity, in an effort to fnd common ground on which to build a relationship. While Sagard claims that Wendat religion is largely animistic devil worship focused on sorcery and witchcraft, yet he describes beliefs in immortality, responsibility, and spiritual agency

82

Evaluating others

which would not have been uncommon in contemporary Europe. The Wendat were by turns puzzled, intrigued, and repelled by Christian concepts, particularly as these related to sin and hell. While the Wendat were apprehensive and suspicious, Sagard notes that they respected the time he spent in prayer, welcomed his prayers in sickness, and paid close attention to the cadence and the tone of voice while he prayed. While he still aimed to convert them, he also respected their ceremonies and would remain apart while they chanted over a sick person.9 Source: Gabriel Sagard, The Long Journey to the Country of the Huron (1632) Now it must be noted that when one begins to gainsay or dispute with them on these matters some make the excuse of ignorance, others desist for shame, and others who think of maintaining their position get confused immediately, and there is no consistency or likelihood in their assertions, as we have often seen and known by experience. This actually reveals that they do not really know and adore any divinity or God, of whom they could give some account and whom we could recognize; for though many speak in praise of their Yoscaha, we have heard others speak of him scornfully and irreverently. They have, however, some respect for those spirits which they call Oki; but this word Oki means a great devil just as much as a great angel, a raging devilish disposition as well as a great, wise, understanding, or effcient intelligence, which does and knows something out of the ordinary. Thus they used often to call us so, because we knew and taught them things which were above their intelligence, according to their own words. They also give the name Oki to their medicine-men and magicians, indeed even to persons who are mad, infuriated, and possessed of the devil. Our Canadians and Montagnais call theirs Pirotois and Manitous, which mean the same thing as Oki does in the Huron tongue. They believe also that there are certain spirits which bear rule over one place, and others over another, some over rivers, others over journeying, trading, warfare, feasts and diseases, and many other matters. Sometimes they offer them tobacco and make some kind of prayer and ritual observance to obtain from them what they desire. They also showed me many mighty rocks on the way to Quebec, in which they believed a spirit lived and ruled, and among others they showed me one, a hundred and ffty leagues from there which had something like a head and two upraised arms, and in the belly or middle of this mighty rock there was a deep cavern very diffcult to approach. They tried to persuade me and make me believe absolutely, as they did, that this rock had been a mortal man like ourselves and that while lifting up his arms and hands he had been transformed into this stone, and in course of time had become a mighty rock, to which they pay respect and offer tobacco when passing it in their canoes, not always, but when they are in doubt of a successful issue to their journey. And as they offer the tobacco, which they throw into the

Evaluating others

83

water against the rock itself, they say to it, “Here, take courage, and let us have a good journey,” together with some other speech that I did not understand. The interpreter whom we mentioned in the preceding chapter assured us that he had once made a similar offering with them (for which we rebuked him sharply) and that that journey brought him more proft than any other he had ever made in those parts. Thus it is that the devil plays with them and holds them fast in his snares and subject to strange superstitions, lending them assistance and favour according to the faith they have in him in this particular, as in the other ceremonies and magic rites which their Oki performs and makes them perform for healing their diseases and for other needs. Nevertheless they make no prayer nor offering to their Yoscaha, at least not to our knowledge, but only to these special spirits I have just described, on suitable occasions. They believe that souls are immortal, and that when they leave the body they go at once to dance and rejoice in the presence of Yoscaha and his grandmother Ataensiq, taking the route and way of the stars, which they call Atiskein andahatey, the path of souls, and which we call the Milky Way or the Starry Scarf, and simple folk the Road of St James. They say that the souls of dogs go there also by the way of certain stars which are near neighbours of the soul’s path, and which they call Gagnenon andahatey, that is to say, the path of the dogs. And they told us that these souls, though immortal, have still in the next life the same need of drinking and eating, of clothing themselves and tilling the ground, which they had while still clothed with their mortal bodies. This is why with the bodies of the dead they bury or enclose bread, oil, skins, tomahawks, kettles, and other utensils, in order that the souls of their relatives may not remain poor and needy in the other life for lack of such implements. For they imagine and believe that the souls of these kettles, tomahawks, knives, and every-thing they dedicate to them, especially at the great festival of the dead, depart to the next life to serve the souls of their dead, although the bodies of these skins, tomahawks, kettles, and everything else dedicated and offered remain behind and stay in the graves and coffns along with the bones of the deceased. This was their usual reply when we told them that mice ate the oil and bread, and rust and decay destroyed the skins, tomahawks, and other tools, which they buried and placed beside the bodies of their relations and friends in the tomb. Among the matters which excited the greatest wonder of the Hurons, in our instruction of them, was the existence of a Paradise above us where all the blessed would be with God, and a Hell beneath where all the souls of the wicked and those of their deceased relations and friends, together with those of their enemies, would be in torment along with the devils in an abyss of fre, for not having known or worshipped God our Creator, and for having led so evil a life and lived in such profigacy and vice. They were also flled with wonder at writing, by means of which one can be understood though absent wherever one wishes; and they liked to hold our books, and after

84

Evaluating others

having contemplated them and admired the pictures and the letters they would amuse themselves by counting the pages. These poor folk repeatedly made trial of the succour and assistance we promised them from God when they should live like virtuous people and in the way we prescribed. They often put our prayers into requisition either for the sick or for assaults of the weather, and they freely admitted that these were more effcacious than their own ceremonies and incantations and all the uproar of their medicine-men, and they delighted in hearing us chanting hymns and psalms for their beneft, during which, if they were present, they kept strict silence and paid attention at least to the tones of the voices, which pleased them greatly. If they came to the door of our lodge after our prayers had begun they were patient or they went away quietly, already aware that we ought not to be distracted from so excellent an occupation, and that to insist on entering was accounted uncivil even among themselves, and a hindrance to the good effects of prayer; so they gave us time to pray to God and to attend in peace to our religious services. In this matter we had the support of their custom of admitting no one into their lodges when they are chanting over a sick person or when the words inaugurating a feast have been uttered. [CC]

3.6 The Wendat evaluate Christianity: a nun and a priest give differing accounts of a Wendat assembly (1640) The Wendat people were approached from an early point by the French to consider an alliance, and they debated among themselves the mixed impact of the French in trade, military collaboration, and missions. Many thought that the costs outweighed any benefts, and since our only contemporary reports come from clergy, we know a good deal about Wendat suspicions about Catholicism and Catholic missionaries. The reports below show that the French were equally divided. Marie Guyart (1599–1672; known today as Marie de l’Incarnation) was an Ursuline nun who arrived in New France in August 1639 and soon established a school for Indigenous girls to learn about and convert to Christianity. She was known to be particularly sensitive towards women, writing primarily about the females in the Indigenous groups she encountered as well as the girls in her school. Here she describes a debate in a Wendat assembly about the “black robes” (i.e., the Jesuits). Guyart quoted at length the views of “one of the most oldest and prominent woman of this nation” who was “haranguing the assembly,” and her account showed that relations between the Wendat and the French were not as harmonious as many French believed on the basis of reports from the Jesuits. The second document below gives the Jesuit account of the same assembly. It completely eliminates the identity of the person giving the

Evaluating others

85

speech, and thus changes the interpretation of the event, giving the impression that only Wendat men were at the assembly, and that there was much less Indigenous resistance to the Jesuits’ actions.10 Source: Marie de l’Incarnation, “Letter 9: Trials Among the Hurons,” and The Jesuit Relations

Marie de l’Incarnation’s Account The demons have conspired to destroy the Huron mission if they can and arrange that all the calumnies brought against the missionaries seem to be truths. Great assemblies have been held with the purpose of exterminating the Reverend Fathers but, far from being afraid, they waited for death with marvellous constancy and even hastened to the places where the conspiracy was most heated. One of the oldest and most prominent women of this nation harangued an assembly in this way: ‘It is the Black Robes that make us die by their spells. Harken to me. I am proving it by arguments you will know to be true. They lodged in a certain village where everyone was well. As soon as they were established there, everyone was dead except for three or four persons. They went elsewhere and the same thing happened. They visited the cabins in other villages and only those they did not enter were free of mortality and sickness. Do you not see that when they move their lips – what they call prayers – those are spells that come from their mouths? It is the same way when they read in their books. Besides, in their cabins they have big pieces of wood (those are guns) with which they make a great noise and spread their magic everywhere. If they are not promptly put to death, they will fnally ruin the country so that neither small nor great will remain.’ When the woman had fnished speaking, all concluded that what she said was true and that so great an evil would have to be remedied. What made matters even worse was that while one of the Indigenous [lit. sauvages] was walking he met a stranger, who frightened him very much. The spectre said to him, ‘Harken to me. I am the one that the Black Robes wrongly call Jesus but I am not responsible for their deception.’ This demon that feigned to be Jesus added a thousand imprecations against prayer and the doctrines the Fathers preached, which greatly increased the hatred in which they were already held. As a result some were beaten, others wounded and others driven from the cabins and villages. Meanwhile, although death caused great ravages everywhere, the Fathers did not cease throwing themselves fearlessly into perils so that they could baptize the children and those they found ft therefor. The good Joseph [Chihwatenha] who accompanies them everywhere, flling the offce of apostle, is becoming the opprobrium of his nation for the name of Jesus Christ. The more evil is done to them, the more courageous they are.

86

Evaluating others

The Jesuit Account The best way to exorcise this storm would be to preach, – there being a great assembly there. It pleased God by the force of his remarks, to abase that haughty spirit, which then spoke no more; and the Father, after having done what he was intending to do in this cabin, went on to fnish the rest of his visits, wherein he was everywhere received with wonder because he was still alive, – the rumour having circulated that it was all over with him, and that they had burned the black gown and split his head. No doubt we have every reason, in the midst of these barbarous peoples, to sing, – but with an accent flled with joy, – that Psalm of the Prophet: Quare fremuerunt gentes, et populi meditati sunt inania; for God scatters their efforts, and continues to mock their counsels, and cast confusion upon them, when they most strongly resolve upon our ruin. Only two months ago, they held a general council of the country, at the same village of saint Louys; our lives were vigorously tossed about there, for the space of a whole night (for this is the time of their councils, – is it a wonder that the spirits of darkness preside there?): most of them resolved upon death, “And the more promptly,” they said, “the better it will be.” A single nation resisted, showing the consequences of this resolution, which tended to the ruin of the country. Minds rebel against this opposition: those who were on our side, seeing themselves the weaker, say, “Let us then put the French to death, since you wish it; but let those who so eagerly prosecute this affair, themselves begin the execution thereof: we can well clear ourselves from it.” Thereupon they all send back the ball to one another, pretending that it is not for them to begin: whole hours elapse in this debate. An elder who is favourable to us begins to speak, after having long been silent. “As for me,” he said, “I am of the opinion that we begin with ourselves; we are assured that there are a great many sorcerers among us, those would continue to cause us to die, even though we should have massacred all the black robes. Let us make a strict investigation of those wretches who bewitch us; then, when they shall have been put to death, if at that time the course of the disease does not cease, we will have reason to kill the French, and to prove whether their massacre will stop the trouble.” This thought for the time stopped the execution of their evil purpose. The devil intrudes very far in these proceedings, since it is he who loses most in them. [CC]

Notes 1 G. Postel, History and Consideration of the Origin, Law and Customs of the Tartars, Persians, Arabs, Turks, and all other Ishmaelites, called by us Mohammedans or Saracens, Poitiers: Enguilbert de Marnef, 1560, pp. 44–57. Translated by Yvonne Petry. See also: Y. Petry, “The Peregrinations of Guillaume Postel: Journey, Religious Syncretism, and Prophecy,” in N. Terpstra (ed.) Reframing

Evaluating others

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10

87

Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe, Toronto: CRRS, 2020, pp. 261–80. F. Fucan, “Ha Daiusu” (“Deus Destroyed”), in G. Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan, Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies Harvard University, 1988, pp. 280–4. © The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1988. Reprinted by permission of the Harvard University Asia Center. S.L. Morteira, “They Provoked My Jealousy with a Non-God,” Budapest Rabbinical Seminary MS 12, vol. 3, folios 309–314v. Sermon for the Sabbath of Repentance, 1641. M. Saperstein, Exile in Amsterdam: Saul Levi Morteira’s Sermons to a Congregation of “New Jews,” Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2005, p. 496. © 2005 Hebrew Union College Press. Republished with permission of Hebrew Union College Press; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Li Guoxiang 李国祥, Yang Chang 杨昶, and Wang Yude 王玉德, eds., Ming Shi Lu Lei Zuan, She Wai Shi Liao Juan 《明实录纂·涉外史料卷》 (Wuhan Publishing House 武汉出版社, 1991), 1102–1103. This book is a compilation of all sections of the Veritable Records which pertain to foreign affairs and foreign peoples. Selections translated by Ling Yuan Sun. In using this term, the “Lord of Heaven.” (天主) for Jesus, Matteo Ricci borrowed from Chinese religious traditions that referred to the all-powerful overlord who ruled over all other gods in the heavens, the earthly world, and the underworld of the dead. The emperor was considered the Son of the Lord of Heaven. Ideology and rituals surrounding the Lord of Heaven were codifed in the Classics, a collection of nine books forming the doctrine and creed of Confucianism which aspiring offcials were tested on in imperial civil service examinations. Ming Shi 《明史》, vol. 8, 8 vols. Beijing 北京: Wu ying dian 武英殿, 1739. One of the 24 offcial histories of the Chinese dynasties, this one was written, compiled, and edited by the Qing government after it settled in Beijing. Translated by Ling Yuan Sun. “Livia” was the term used on Ricci’s map for the continent of Africa and is a transliteration of the Chinese “利未亚,” pronounced “li wei ya.” Ricci used a Chinese transliteration of the word “Magallanica” to denote the as large but as yet undiscovered southern lands at the bottom of his map, in honour of Magellan. A “li” is a Chinese measure of distance. 1 kilometer is approximately 2 “li.” G. Sagard, The Long Journey to the Country of the Huron, Toronto: The Chaplain Society, 2013, pp. 170–4. Reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press (https://utpjournals.press). “Letter 9: Trials Among the Hurons,” in Word from New France: The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 82–3. R.G. Thwaites (ed.) The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791 Volume 19, New York: Pageant Book Co, 1959, p. 176–9.

4

The politics of conversion Early and late ‘Reformation’

4.1 Portfolio: Reformation and regime change: Catholicizing the Bosnian kingdom (1459–63) In the ffteenth century, popes sought to restore their authority in Christendom by organizing military campaigns against the Ottomans and by securing church unions with various eastern Christian peoples endangered by the Ottoman advance. One place where the popes sought to enforce their religious and political authority was the Balkan kingdom of Bosnia, situated in the contact zone between Catholic and Orthodox Slavdom. Here, a semi-autonomous Bosnian Church followed doctrines that both Catholic and Orthodox authorities found suspect. Yet the Bosnian Church was powerful in the court, and so any effort to control the Kingdom had to involve this Church – and vice versa. Although the members of this church called themselves Krstjani (Christians), successive popes saw them as dualist heretics (‘Patarenes’ or ‘Manicheans’) and sought to destroy them totally. Two decades of papal pressures bore fruit during the pontifcate of Pope Paul II (r. 1458–64), when in 1459 the Bosnian King Stjepan Tomaš (r. 1443–61) fnally sanctioned the forced conversions and expulsions of the Krstjani. The purge continued, under the supervision of papal envoys known as legates and nuncios – Natale Zorzi (1460–2), Luka Tolentic´ (1462), and Nicholas of Modruš (1463) – into the reign of Tomaš’s son and successor Stjepan Tomaševic´ (r. 1461–3). It ended only with the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia in 1463. Over the following centuries, many Bosnians converted to Islam, and the Ottomans moved Orthodox Serbs into border areas, making Bosnia one of the most mixed states religiously in Europe. Almost everything that is known about the beliefs and practices of the Bosnian Church and about this purge comes from sources in the Roman Curia.1 A. Can Christendom survive? A Humanist’s Bleak Assessment In the 1430s, the Italian humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405–64) was a sharp critic of the state of the Catholic Church, and worked actively to reform both its administration and its spiritual life (known as Reform in Head and Members), initially by promoting collective action in the form of church councils. Over the course of two decades he moved from being a

The politics of conversion

89

conciliarist outsider to becoming an authoritarian pope in 1458. Here, four years before being elected pope as Pius II, he writes despairingly about the need to overcome divisions in Christendom in order to halt the advance of Islam and to reform life in the Church.2 Source: Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Opera Omnia (Basel, 1571) You have written that many were summoned from Italy to the Congress at Regensburg [April–May, 1454], and you thought it would be like the Council of Constance, not to mention that of Basel, which lasted for twenty years. But our meeting ended within a month. Another has been announced, to be held at Frankfurt [Autumn, 1454], to which the King of Aragon, the Venetians, the Genoese, the Florentines, the Sienese, and the Luccans are called again from Italy. Although Count Franceso Sforza has not yet been invested with the duchy of Milan, he has also been summoned, and the Duke of Modena and the Marquesses of Mantua, Montferrat, and Saluzzo. We shall see how great the fervor of our Italians will be. Letters have gone also to the kings of France, England, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Scotland, inviting them to the meeting. The princes of Germany have been ordered to be present, and the counts to send envoys. If it is a long congress, there is high hope of accomplishing matters successfully; if only a few should come, you may say that it is because of inertia. How do you feel? What do you think will happen? I prefer to say nothing, and I would rather be considered a false prophet than a true one. Yet I must say that I am full of foreboding. I do not expect that what I desire will happen; I cannot persuade myself that there is anything good in prospect. You will ask why, and I answer: “Why should I hope for anything better?” Christendom has no head whom all will obey – neither the pope nor the emperor receives his due. For there is no reverence and no obedience. We regard “pope” and “emperor” only as empty titles and fgure-heads. Every city has its own king, and there are as many princes as there are households. How can you persuade the many rulers of the Christian world to take up arms under a single standard? And if you gave the word and all the kings assembled in arms, to whom would you entrust the leadership? What kind of order would there be in such an army? What military discipline? What obedience? Who would be the shepherd of such a mixed fock? Who could command their diverse languages? Who would be able to regulate their varied customs? Who will make the English love the French? Who will unite the Genoese and the Aragonese? Who will reconcile the Germans with the Hungarians and Bohemians? If you lead a small army against the Turks, you will easily be overcome; if a large one, it will soon fall into confusion. Everywhere there are diffculties. You have only to survey the state of Christendom. Italy, you say, is at peace, and with affairs quiet at home she will readily take up arms against

90

The politics of conversion

the foreigners. But I do not know how peaceful she is. There are still vestiges of war between the Genoese and the Aragonese. And one cannot believe that these Genoese, who are said to pay tribute to the Turks, are ready to go to war against them. The Venetians have made a treaty with the Turks, and yet they say they will take up arms for our faith, if other Christians will go to war against the Turks. Who will fulfll this condition? It will be necessary now to ask, to beg, and to arouse the Venetians, who may imitate the others, if there is no peace between them and the Turks. What can you do with the Italians when the two naval powers, and indeed the greater states, fail in their duty? Although the King of Aragon is very powerful, and zealous for the common good, he will hardly undertake alone a naval war against the Turks. You are aware how large a feet the pope has! We lack, therefore, one major arm of warfare. For since the proposal is to attack the Turks on land and sea, it is to be hoped that the Italians would lack nothing necessary for maritime warfare. The Hellespont will lie open before the Asiatics, and if war is waged on land, the Turks will bring an infnite number of troops into Greece from Asia. You know how many kings there are in Spain, and how unequal they are in power, government, will, and judgment. And those lying in the extreme west are not drawn to the north. Then there is the question of what they would do with the people of Granada at home. If the King of France has driven out the enemy from his whole kingdom, his shores are still subject to attack, and he will not dare to send an army outside his kingdom while he fears the renewed attacks of English feets. The English have nothing in mind but to avenge their expulsion from France. The Scots, the Danes, the Swedes, and the Norwegians are situated on the most remote shores of the world, and there is nothing they can do outside their homelands. The Germans, divided among themselves, fnd no center of unity anywhere. The cities quarrel with the princes, and the princes themselves are not joined by any bond of concord. The Swiss maintain their ancient hatred of the dukes of Austria. The Count Palatine has been attacked by the Archbishop of Mainz. The possession of the duchy of Luxembourg is in dispute with the King of Bohemia; they refused to do homage to him, they refused, unless the king should come to them. The Prussians, who were ruled by the Teutonic Order, have thrown off the authority of the prior and gone over the King of Poland. And now, having entered this region, King Casimir and his wife have received their oaths of fealty. The people of Liegnitz, which King Ladislas turned over to the governor of Bohemia, George Podiebrad, refuse to surrender . . . In Austria nothing is peaceful. [. . .] In Vienna fres are frequently set, and nobody knows who starts them. [. . .] You see now what may be expected or feared in so great a variety of affairs. Observe the habits of men and look at the actions of our princes, behold the huge and yawning maw of avarice, see how much inertia and how much greed there are. No one is devoted to letters or to the studies of the good arts. And do you think that an army of Turks could be destroyed by men of such morals? I could wish that you would turn out to be right and

The politics of conversion

91

I wrong. However things go, I shall be at Frankfurt on the day which has been set, and if I do not advance the cause of the Christian commonwealth, I shall in any case torment myself, and as a punishment for my sins I shall be miserable in body and mind. If anything results for the common good I shall welcome it the more gladly, the more it exceeds my expectation. B. Defending Christendom by Force: The Humanist in Control Within a year of becoming pope, Pius II began a campaign against the Bosnian Church, in which for centuries the Krstjani had followed a form of Christianity distinct from both Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy. Pius justifed his actions with the claim that they followed the ancient heresy of Manicheanism, and so were a threat to true Christianity. In his autobiography called The Commentaries, Pius II briefy describes the forced conversion of the Krstjani initiated by Bosnian King Stjepan Tomaš in 1459, and the public ceremony in Rome in 1461, where three of their leaders formally recanted their earlier beliefs and accepted the spiritual authority of the Roman Catholic Church.3 Source: Pius II, Commentaries (1548–64) About the same time, the king of Bosnia, wanting to atone for surrendering Smederevo to the Turks and to offer proof of his faith (or, as many thought, to cloak his avarice), decreed that the large population of Manicheans in his kingdom must either be baptized or emigrate and leave their property behind them. About twelve thousand were baptized; slightly over forty people persisted in their heresy and fed to their comrade in error, Duke Stjepan of Bosnia. The bishop of Nin brought the three of the leading heretics in chains to the pope. All three were prominent fgures at the royal court. Pius placed them in various monasteries and arranged to have them taught Christian doctrine. They were brought before Juan [de Torquemada], cardinal of St Sixtus, on several occasions; he instructed them and fnally persuaded them to renounce their errors and accept the teachings of the Roman Church, which neither deceives nor is deceived. He then sent them back reconciled to the king. Two remained steadfast in their faith; the other, like a dog returning to its vomit, escaped during the journey home and fed to Duke Stjepan. On 28 December 1460, more than a year after King Stjepan Tomaš started persecuting the Krstjani, Pope Pius sent his papal envoy Bishop Natale Zorzi back to Bosnia. The bull gives a brief description of the state of the kingdom and extends Zorzi’s powers as legate to combat the Manichean heresy, which the pope asserts is undermining the struggle against the Turks.4 Source: Pius II, Bull commissioning Natale Zorzi – from the Vatican Archive (1460) Pius etc. sends greetings in the Lord to the venerable brother Natale, bishop of Nin, the legate of the Apostolic See in the Kingdom of Bosnia.

92

The politics of conversion

When We direct our caring gaze to separate regions devoted to God and the Apostolic See, We clearly see those provinces in particular, in which the enemy of the human race, the disturber of peace, and disseminator of discord has caused confusion and strife. We take great concern to root out and utterly extinguish all heresy from these provinces, so that they, and the people who live and dwell in them, can rest in sincere faith and soothing peace and quiet. However, because We are torn by a number of various concerns, and human nature prevents us from attending to each on our own, We – like He who, though is whole everywhere and governs all things according to His will, sent disciples whom He elected in His inscrutable wisdom across the entire world – on occasion impart apostolic responsibility upon those, who, by having full knowledge of spiritual and temporal matters, can bring fruits of salvation in the Lord’s feld. Our attention is now drawn to the countless dangers to the souls which all the Christians should bewail: the misfortune of people, the loss of property, and the numerous attacks that the citizens and inhabitants of the Kingdom of Bosnia, which has bordered the treacherous and savage Turks for many years now, are suffering due to the heresy which sprouted there and, alas, in part still thrives today. We should resist those who are rising against the Catholic faith and are trying to extinguish Christian religion with such virtue and such tenacity that faithful to Christ remain steadfast and sincere in Catholic faith in the face of the perfdious heretics and Patarenes, confused in their wicked opinions. Since We have seen you have proven yourself worthy in both word and deed in great and diffcult tasks and by your sincere faith, and since the highest God has granted you the gift of graces, great knowledge, mature counsel, pleasant character, and signs of other great virtues, We have determined, with the counsel of our brethren, to send you to the said kingdom as the angel of peace and preacher of the crusade with full power of the legate de latere, to act as a plowman of heresy and sower of Catholic faith as it were. In this kingdom you are to tear, destroy, disperse, raze, build and sow, reform the deformed, erect what needs to be erected, correct what needs to be corrected, set up and arrange, as guided by heavenly grace and your foresight. By this letter We give you the full and free power to correct, set up, provide, arrange, instruct, administer and carry out, dispose and execute all and sundry what you would fnd necessary or in any way useful to the honor of God, restoration of ecclesiastical liberty, extirpation of heresy and schism, salvation of souls, and strengthening of the said kingdom; also, to suppress all opponents and rebels, of whichever dignity (even the episcopal one), station, position, order or rank, whichever ecclesiastical or secular offce they may hold, without giving them any right of appeal; and whenever, God forfend, the Turks, the bitterest enemies of the Christian name, should attempt to invade the kingdom or any of its parts, or the news should arise of imminent danger of such invasion, and not on any other occasion, to preach and

The politics of conversion

93

organize the preaching of the crusade in public before the people in the said kingdom and parts of Croatia. Thus, our brother, We entrust and command you by this apostolic letter to assume the offce of this legation in respect to Us and the Apostolic See. You are to conduct yourself and perform this offce with such care, discretion, and prudence, so that, aside from the glory of human praise and glory of eternal life, which is promised to those devoted to doing good, you earn our profuse thanks and the thanks of the said see, and that by divine mercy your achievements produce the desired fruits. Given in Rome, in the year etc. 1460, on the ffth day before the Kalends of January, in the third year of our pontifcate. C. Forcing Conversion Cardinal Juan de Torquemada dedicates his book The Outline of the Truths of the Faith Which Were Collected for Instructing the Manicheans to Pope Pius II to serve in the public abjuration of errors of the three leading Krstjani who were brought to Rome. He opens by citing Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580–662), a monk and theologian and one of the doctors of the Church.5 Source: Juan de Torquemada, The Outline of the Truths of the Faith Which Were Collected for Instructing the Manicheans (1460) Maximus says in his letter to the peoples of the East that all parts of the world which have sincerely accepted Christ and all places where Catholics profess true faith, look at the power of the Roman popes as at the sun, and from that light receive the truth of the Catholic and Apostolic faith. Knowing this well and demonstrating such devotion to your Holiness, the pious and illustrious King of Bosnia sent before Your Beatitude’s throne – which has always kept the Christian faith pure and clean – three men blinded by Manichean error who were held in great esteem among the people of his kingdom. He hoped that by the radiant light of your doctrine they will banish the darkness of errors, embrace the true faith and return to unity with the Catholic Church; or, should they stubbornly persist with resolute frmness in their poisonous errors, that they would, per Your judgment, be punished with ftting sentence. Seeing that such matters should not be left unhandled, Your Beatitude entrusted these men to three most reverend lord cardinals, so that by suitable teachings and encouragements they may be led to the path of truth. After the lord cardinals have conducted many sessions of honorable encouragements and wholesome instructions, the almighty God, the one who enlightens human minds, decided that the three heretics would be illuminated by the light from above. Recognizing that the see of St Peter is the teacher of faith from whom all Christians should ask and receive answers on what to believe or profess, they reached the conclusion that

94 The politics of conversion they want to submit to the teachings of the Apostolic See and accept the faith of the Roman Church. Having learned of their excellent and pious wish, Your Beatitude charged me with the task of putting together a brief account of what should be put before them to make them understand the truth of the Catholic faith and overcome their errors. The greatness of this task made me wish it had been given to someone of better health and more talent and learning. Nonetheless, because of the devotion I feel toward Your Holiness, and because it is mandated by divine law to heed Your orders, I have done my job as earnestly as I was able to. Since I am worn by many inconveniences and weaknesses of old age, and because of the short deadline, I was not able to do justice to such matter as would be proper. I have collected in this short treatise, among other important teachings of the faith that the Holy Roman Church teaches the faithful should believe, the ffty truths by which as brightest lights I took care to dispel immediately the ffty darknesses of contrary errors, which, as I have seen from the reports of some friars from the Kingdom of Bosnia, engulf and deprave the community of these Manicheans. I wanted to demonstrate very clearly that their sect is profoundly corrupt and that it strayed from the light of truth of the Apostolic See and teachings of the Roman Church, so that they might renounce their errors quickly and, by recognizing the purity of the true Catholic faith, join us, of their own free will, in ecclesiastical union. However, since I fear that I have included things that are less learned or not as appropriate, I want it to be corrected by You, who, aside from holding the seat and faith of Peter, excel in mind and wisdom. After you have corrected it, should there be any need of correcting, it will be the duty of Your Holiness, who is the teacher of the whole world, to present it to the said men. From this work, this mirror of apostolic teaching of sorts, they will understand what they should believe in, so that they would deserve to be incorporated into the mystical body of Christ and joined in communion with the Apostolic See. Amen. Rome, Basilica of St Peter, 14 May 1461: In a public ceremony before Pope Pius II, the three leading Krstjani who had been leaders of the Bosnian Church and its resistance to Rome formally repent of their Manichean errors and accept the theology of the Roman Church and the authority of its earthly head, the pope.6 Source: Juan de Torquemada, The Outline of the Truths of the Faith Which Were Collected for Instructing the Manicheans (1460) Having seen the divine light, we, Juraj Kucˇinic´, Stojsav Tvrtkovic´, and Radmil Vucˇinic´, from the Kingdom of Bosnia, recognize that the errors of the Manicheans, which engulfed us since birth as it were, are poisonous and

The politics of conversion

95

damned, inasmuch as they are contrary to Catholic faith. After deliberating much on this issue and having been moved by your concern for the salvation of our souls, we accept and frmly believe, of our own free will, whatever the Roman Church, which is the mother and teacher of all the faithful, believes and holds, and teaches and mandates to be believed. Above all we accept the ffty truths on the doctrine of the Roman Church collected to counter the ffty errors of the Manicheans, which were presented to us and faithfully explained and expounded by the translator, the venerable lord Luka Tolentic´. We believe and hold that these truths are correct and Catholic, and we curse the teachings contrary to them, for which we were accused as Manicheans. We consider them to be wrong and heretical and we consider their teachers and followers worthy of eternal curse. Lest, however, anyone would think that we have returned to the faith of, and unity with, the Roman Church insincerely, or that we have fctively rejected the errors of the Manicheans, we solemnly promise that, by no man’s urgings or by any other means, we shall never stray away, nor say or do anything against the teachings of the Roman Church; and that we will not in any way urge others to contradict or and resist her. We swear and vow this, under the penalty of excommunication, to You, the most caring father, Pope Pius II, whom we frmly consider and regard as the true vicar of Jesus Christ and successor of St Peter, as well as to your successors. Finally, we promise, in the same form, that we shall call and bring back, as far as we will be able to, all other Bosnians whom we know to have been blinded by Manichean errors to the faith and teaching of the Roman Church, just as grace was given to us from up high. We therefore swear by the almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the one true God, creator of all things visible and invisible, and we promise by these four holy Gospels in our hands that, as said before, we shall forever remain frmly bound by the teachings of, and to the unity with, the Roman Church, to which we now, with Christ as our leader, have returned. Should it, God forbid, happen for some reason that we stray away from the holy teachings and unity with the Catholic Church, by thinking or preaching contrary beliefs, let us be found guilty of perjury and anathematized – bound not only to eternal punishment, but also liable to punishments for perjury as is usual with those who relapse into heresy. We hand over this document of our confession and promise, signed in our own hands, to You, our lord Pope Pius II, in the presence of all these reverend and most reverend fathers for a permanent record of the matter. We humbly ask that you receive us, your sheep that strayed from the path of truth out of simplicity rather than malice, with fatherly love and order and that you order that we are treated with mercy. Amen. Done in Rome, in the Church of St Peter, on May 14, in the year of the Lord 1461.

96

The politics of conversion

D. Forcing the Faith: Winning Battles and Losing Wars In April 1462, Pope Pius II sends Luka Tolentic´ as his envoy to Bosnia, giving him a detailed set of instructions on how to proceed with Catholicization of the kingdom. These included launching an Inquisition, building churches and monasteries, appointing new priests and higher clergy, forcing nobles to promote Catholic obedience, and threatening excommunication against any who resisted.7 Source: Pius II, Bull Commissioning Luka Tolentic´ – Vatican Archive (1462) Pius etc. sends greetings to the beloved son, Luka Tolentic´, archdeacon of Korcˇula. As We think over in the depths of the mind your diligence, mature counsel, and profound foresight and sharp thinking in action – which We, as experience of great matters taught us, see thriving in you – as well as the sincere devotion you exhibit towards Us and the Roman Church, We consider it a truly worthy gift to burden you with duties which lead to the spread of Christian religion, the growth of faith, and the salvation of souls. Since our wish is that true faith and religion – which brings honor to God, salvation of the people, and the spread of orthodoxy – reign in the Kingdom and Duchy of Bosnia just as in other places of Christendom, We have decided to send you to the dearest son in Christ, Stjepan King of Bosnia, and to the beloved son, the noble Stjepan Duke in Bosnia. By the authority of this letter, therefore, We task you to, as soon as you had reached the kingdom and the duchy, make all those who have converted from the Manichean dark into the wonderful light of truth, by renouncing their errors and professing Christian religion, frmly promise to follow the Holy Catholic Church and observe and abide by her mandates. They should also promise to make an effort to bring others across Bosnia who similarly err back to the Catholic faith. And so that you can confrm the converts and would-be converts in their faith, and instruct and guide them, We want you to absolve those whom you fnd to be truly repentant of all their crimes, transgressions, and sins (even of those for which usually the Apostolic See would have to be consulted) and to give them holy penance, as well as to grant full absolution to those in the hour of death. You are to present them on our behalf with the collected truths of Christian faith and their errors. Should you deem it useful or necessary, appoint a suitable secular or religious priest to perform these tasks also. If you happen to fnd in that land a suitable person of the church, task him with the inquisition of heresy, with all the faculties pertaining to the inquisitorial offce. Finally, assemble the converts, as well as relapsed and still-existing heretics who dwell in the kingdom or in the duchy of beloved son Duke Stjepan, and persuade them, according to your possibility, to recognize the Holy Roman Church as the head of the Christian faith and the Roman pontiff as the true successor of

The politics of conversion

97

St Peter, and to abide by them. Offer them safe passage to come, stay, and return freely to their lands. Furthermore, We wish, and task you by the authority of this letter, that you carefully inform yourself about the construction of churches that are supposed to be built in the kingdom, both the cathedral and parish ones. Make sure that this is done appropriately to the honor of the Bosnian Church. By the authority of this letter We also give you the power to appoint secular priests in the places where you will fnd it most necessary. By this letter you can also give license to all the people of the said kingdom who wish to have secular chaplains and construct oratories or chapels for their worship, that they can receive for any of the two purposes one priest or more for their needs, as long as they petition for a formal license. In order that per our heart’s wishes the said instructions achieve the desired effect and the converts can more fervently persist in faith and draw others to it, We wish and task you by this letter to ask and induce the said king to promise to erect, construct, and build the churches in the necessary villages and places. He is also to promise to establish and set up monasteries or churches in the places in which the converts used to have their gatherings and in which they congregated as heretics, and to place and assign there friars and instructors of true faith who have the knowledge, the will, and the ability to bring back those who have relapsed from the word of God and confrm the converts in their faith. The king and the duke are to force all in the kingdom and the duchy who live in this or some other heresy, depravity, and error, to profess Christian religion and venerate the Holy Mother Church, or to have them sent to the Apostolic See, so that through discussions on true faith they are brought back to light. They are to offer ftting help, counsel, and support to you in every single matter necessary to achieve this and to make others do the same. Should, Heaven forfend, any lord or someone else, contrary to our wish, refuse to implement these requests, We want you to pressure them in our name and in the name of the Roman Church, and to explain to them, according to circumstances, that aside from the divine vengeance, which they can certainly expect for such actions, the Apostolic See will make sure to persist in pursuing indemnities for the expenses, damages, and loans which She has suffered and suffers as a result, and We shall proceed to issue an ecclesiastical censure against him or them. Should this person, as a true Christian and son of the Holy Mother Church take care to implement these requests, he shall have, aside from eternal rewards which he can undoubtedly hope for, our blessing and thanks and the blessing and thanks of the said see, and he shall always fnd Us inclined and well-disposed. You, therefore, make sure to carry out, treat, and execute everything with prudence, care, and diligence, so that your deeds bring forth bountiful fruits and our love for you grows so much that it rightfully urges us to honor and reward you.

98

The politics of conversion

Given in Rome, in St Peter’s, in the year etc. 1462, on the sixth day before the Ides of April, in the fourth year of our pontifcate. Bosnia fell to Ottoman armies one year later, in 1463. Pope Pius II died a year after that in Ancona, while preparing to launch a crusading feet against the Turks. Nicholas, Bishop of Modruš, the last papal envoy in Bosnia, shared his own views on the fall of the kingdom to the Ottomans 16 years later in his book Defense of Ecclesiastical Liberty.8 Source: Nicholas Mahin, Bishop of Modruš, Defense of Ecclesiastical Liberty (1480) After Calixtus had passed away, Pius came in his place. As soon as he had sat on Peter’s throne, he turned his sights to the Turks. He traveled to Mantua and by the example of the old pontiffs called on all the Christian princes so that by common forces they would attack the common enemy. This expedition was stopped only because of some Italians, and though they would prefer to keep quiet about it, the whole world shall not. While this was going on, the leaders of the Manichean sect called on the Turks. The king of Bosnia had earlier baptized them against their will and, wishing to win them over to his side with favours and honors, entrusted them with the most fortifed castles of the kingdom. Through their treachery the Turks got their hands on all of Illyria (which is now called Bosnia). King Stjepan was captured and executed, while his kingdom suffered great ruin and bloodshed. I myself, sent there by the pope, suffered a lot as well. I lost nineteen of my men and I escaped the greatest perils and unbelievable hardships thanks more to divine than human help. [LSp]

4.2 Portfolio: conversion and colonization: Reformation on the margins (1730s–40s) Protestants moved more slowly into global missions than Catholics had, but their initiatives were marked by the same mix of Christian utopianism, colonialist ambitions, and capitalist development. Sixteenth-century Reformation rivalries remained strong two centuries later, and were often reinforced by politics and nationalism. In the 1730s, British evangelical Christians promoted a new colony in Georgia that would build a new society of small landholders drawn from needy European populations, including Protestant religious refugees being expelled from France, Germany, and Austria by Catholic authorities. These latter refugees’ Reformation pedigree and Protestant commitment was emphasized in order to gain charitable and political support in Britain. They were cast as followers of Luther, victims of the Inquisition, and eager missionaries with a burning desire to convert both Jews and Indigenous peoples. Their British sponsors believed that they could also provide a colonial bulwark against

The politics of conversion

99

Spanish Catholicism in Florida. This portfolio gives examples of the letters used to promote the refugees’ claims, some early newsletters sent from their Georgia settlement back to England, and a dialogue imagining an exchange between one of the missionaries and an Indigenous man, written by an Anglican bishop who was a member of the association that sponsored them. These texts and others formed part of a propaganda campaign that identifed the Salzburg refugee-settler-missionaries as Reformationstyle heroes in order to build support in Britain. A. Unfnished Business: Clearing Protestants out of Catholic Austria (1732) The expulsion of 30,000 Protestants by the Archbishop of Salzburg from the mountain areas around the city was one of the last formal expulsions of a large Christian religious community in Europe. Most moved to Prussia, though a few also went to America. The purge was a cause célèbre among Protestants in England, Germany, and the Netherlands, particularly thanks to wide circulation of vivid accounts like the one below, translated into English for wide distribution in England. This account emphasizes the connection between these expelled believers and the Reformation, noting how much Reformation literature they had hidden in their house, and how determined Catholic offcials were to burn it.9 Source: Letter of S. Urslperger to Mr. Newman, Augsburg, 19 February 1733 Dear Sir: The following particulars I have only to communicate to you at present; as for the rest I refer you to my former Letters, and desiring you to give my most humble Respects to the Honourable Society. I am Yours S. Urslperger An Account of a Man and his Family that left Carinthia for Religion’s Sake as it was given by them at Augsburg 15 January 1732/3. John Gruber . . . in the Principality of Carinthia, Husbandman, 39 years of Age with his wife Magdalen Pucklerin, likewise 39 years of age, and seven Children, Viz. Mary 18, Apollonia 15, Ulrick 12, Matthew 10, George 7 & ½, Margaret 3 & ½ and Helena 2 Years old, appeared the day of the month abovementioned and produced their Letters of Admission, as also a Pass-port from a Bailiff in Carinthia called Lorentz Sholler, bearing date 27 September 1732. He left the Country on account of the Protestant Religion which he and his Family profess and related. That because he publickly declared himself a Protestant, he underwent a hard persecution, and had to struggle with great diffculties which were laid in his way. The Bailiff [wished to] keep back (from him) his wife and Children, and all that he had but was at last prevailed on by his continued prayers and repeated instances to grant him his request since he could be persuaded by no means to return to the Roman Catholick Religion, but

100

The politics of conversion

before he set out on his journey, the parish priest named de Esoh [Esch?], who is also the Bishop’s Confessionary together with the said Bailiff Sholler came to his house and renewing their remonstrances to him, to continue a Roman Catholick assured him, whether he persisted in his resolution to adopt a Blind Heretick Faith and forsake the true Roman Catholick one, by which only Salvation was to be had and obtained. Whereupon the Deponent answered that he was surely convinced in his conscience that in the Protestant Religion where the word of God and Christ was taught pure and uncorrupted he should be eternally saved, and that he would live and die therein. Seeing therefore that nothing was to be done with him but that all their labour would be lost whatever way they went to work, they cursed him, saying that now he was sure to go to the Devil, and would be eternally damned . . . [They searched] in his house and having discovered the Protestant Books which he had concealed under the Bed, being Spangenberger’s and Luther’s Postil or Collection of Sermons to be read and used in Families; Aviller’s Art to Die Well and Happy, a Book of Hymns printed at Zittau, Religious Dialogues (or a Book called a Conference upon matters of Religion), the Holy Bible, and some others, the Constable put’em all together into one Bag. But the Priest looked again under the Bed himself to see whether there were any more Books concealed under it, and insisted that he must have Schaitberger’s Heretick Book also, and would have the Deponent deliver it to him, and though the said Book, together with Martin Lodinger’s Writings (of comfort) and Letters, and Martin Luther’s large Catechism lay under the Bed as well as the others beforementioned, yet these Inquisitors did not see’em, whereupon the Priest and the Bailiff grew so angry, that they turned their Canes upon him, and placing themselves on each side they begun to beat him most severely . . . They went afterwards with the Books to the Bailiffs’ House, where they . . . should all be burned, for which purpose necessary preparations were accordingly made in an adjacent Garden, whither they went together . . . the Bishop all the while looked out at Window of the Cloyster to be himself a Spectator of the Burning of the Books. The Priest and Bailiff pressed very hard upon the Deponent and would [have wished to] force him to throw the Heretick Books into the fre himself, which he refused to do saying though you burn my Books, yet all that is contained therein will remain and be left impressed in my Soul, and be preserved in my mind and I know most part of the Prayers and Hymns which stand in these Books by heart, whereof I could say above an hundred to you which you will never be able to rob me of. The Archer then threw all the Books into the fre, one after another and they did not part ’till all were burnt to ashes: when they came to the Bible which was left last of all, the Priest turning to the Deponent said that this he thought he could throw into the Fire with a safe Conscience, but he shewing little inclination to join with him in that; answered That he should be guilty of the greatest sin if he had the wickedness to burn that Book which contained what Christ had preached and taught with his holy mouth, as it is related in the Holy Gospel

The politics of conversion

101

which also says that these his words shall be preserved for ever, though even Heaven and Earth should pass away and be no more, therefore they themselves might burn it, if they could take it upon their Conscience. The Priest took the Bible along with him and did not deliver it up to the fames. The Deponent added that before the burning of the Books the Priest asked him, How many Sacraments he thought there was, and he answering he believed in two Viz. the holy Baptism, and the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The Priest replied that is even downright Lutheran Heretick Doctrine. The Bailiff put a question to him also, to which he desired an answer. Viz. Which of the two he believed to be true, That Luther is in Heaven or in Hell? the Deponent’s answer was Judge not and you shall not be judged, condemn not and you shall not be condemned. He certainly believed that the beloved and dear man of God Martin Luther is in Heaven, since all his writings are founded on the word of God, and because he seeing that the Traditions of men had got the uppermost in the Church of Rome, and that on the contrary the Gospel of Christ was laid aside, he endeavoured to root out the Tares that were sprung up in the said Church. Upon the Deponent’s expressing himself in this manner, both the Priest and Bailiff fell into a rage, damning his Soul and Body. The Deponent having in haste sold what goods he could amounting to the value of Seventy Florins ready money and taken whatever came frst to his hands, retired out of the Country, and came hither with his Family. He is a very sensible man, and extraordinarily devout, the like I scarce have met with in any other, he can say whole prayers by heart word for word; upon his being asked whether they who profess the protestant religion in his Country are not threatened with being put into prison, and used in the same manner with those in the Arch-Bishoprick of Saltzburg, he answered: that as yet they had not proceeded so far against many of them, and had not much made use of such measures: as for him he had not been at all afraid of being imprisoned and the like; he was ready for Christ’s sake to suffer imprisonment and any torments whatsoever. B. A Chosen People in a Promised Land: Salzburgers in Georgia (1734) While most of the Protestants expelled from the archdiocese of Salzburg moved north to Prussia, a few sailed across the Atlantic in order to set up a separate community in the new colony of Georgia. English Protestants supported them with food, funds, books, and other supplies, and in return their pastors like Johann Martin Boltzius wrote letters to describe the experiences of the settlers on their Atlantic voyage and in their settlement called “Ebenezer.” They aimed to create a purely Christian community through charity, worship, and self-suffcient agriculture, and to convert Indigenous peoples, Blacks, and Jews both by direct missions and holy example. Note how their language evolves, particularly in describing Indigenous people frst as “Indians” and then as “heathens.”10 Source: Johann Martin Boltzius, Letters to various correspondents (1734–8)

102 The politics of conversion From Johann Martin Boltzius in Savannah to Gotthilf August Francke, in which he informs him of his arrival in Savannah, reports concerning the good condition of his congregation, and undertakes refection on mission to the Jews and the Indians. March 23, 1734 II Corinthians 1:10–11 Very dear Herr Professor in our merciful God, Your Reverence will, it is hoped, have duly received the letters from the 6th of January . . . in which we conferred news concerning our condition and departure from Dover. May the dear Father in heaven be humbly praised that He has made us worthy to report something of our arrival in America, in keeping with our desire and obligation . . . Since it has now been 20 weeks since we journeyed from Halle, God has let the words from Isaiah 49:10 thoroughly penetrate our mind, “Your merciful God will lead you.” And we can call, as it were, in full voice from America to those we left behind in Europe, “Our merciful God has led us and also made our heart full of faith and confdence.” He will indeed lead us yet farther, also in the foreign land among Christians and heathen . . . . . . we are not capable of expressing the melancholy character of our heart over the miserable condition of so many wretched Christians and heathens in these regions. May He give us the power, the wisdom, and the opportunity to contribute something toward their salvation and grant us more and more sympathy and longing for the salvation of them all. And since our merciful God already has planted in us the longing for the salvation of other men, therefore especially of the poor Indian so that if we could carry him with our own hands into His bosom it would be our greatest desire, we therefore frmly hope that He will help us overcome all diffculties in learning the Indian language, (for which our longing is utterly indescribable). We are now staying in the newly founded city of Savannah in Georgia, along with our congregation and do not yet know for certain how many or which Indians we will have as our nearest neighbors. So far, though, we know from the mouth of Herr Oglethorpe that almost countless Indians live in the lands under the rule of the English crown and that something could be accomplished among many of them. May God help and lead us! Our community is very small, and praise God! in a very fne condition. And therefore may the Father also give us through it, as it were, a sign into how we may best use the remaining time that we cannot spend on them; that is, how to increase his white European fock with a few feeble Indians who nonetheless have been washed in the blood of Christ, and to carefully prepare ourselves in spirit and in body for this most important matter . . . It seems completely impossible to learn the language from the Indians. But we have learned that a few Christians in this region have married Indian

The politics of conversion

103

women and learned their language from them and through their acquaintances. Through such men perhaps the goal could be achieved. We leave it to the care of the Father to whom all souls belong who will indeed make it so that we will be able to thank Him. What happened to us underway and how we fnd it here Your Reverence will see in detail, in part from our journal that we sent in haste to London around the beginning of March, and in part from the one that now accompanies . . . It would please us if we could receive . . . a few Jewish German books. There are Jews here who do not govern themselves according to the Jewish requirements in eating, Sabbath observances, etc. There are also several thoroughly fne souls among them. . . . most obligingly yours in prayer and service, Johann Martin Boltzius Savannah in Georgia January 1, 1738 In the community we have full time work with children and adults so that we therefore have no time for learning the Indian languages that are different for the different nations. The degenerate Christians in this land would have as great a need as the heathen that they come to know the way to their eternal salvation. Their uncommonly great insolence and manifest godless character is the greatest obstacle for Jews and heathens in this dark land. Therefore even the English missionary, who was sent here particularly for the conversion of the heathen and gave every effort as a God-fearing man, returned again to London without success. In our place we have infrequent contact with these heathen, and when they come to us they commonly cause only trouble since they are already accustomed from the English and the French, as well as from several Germans, to every disorder, especially to drinking. Several indeed are learning something of the English language, which is the main language of this land, but this to their detriment since they learn with it the horrible curses, swearing, slanders, etc. that they have heard mostly in the drinking fellowship of the godless rabble and therefore have noticed it the fastest. Everywhere things are very pitiful, for which may the Lord have pity! The Salzburgers have established a town that is rather far away from the heathen and from the unchristian Christians. It lies by a river called Savannah and has, as you already know, received the name Ebenezer. It is orderly arranged and built, has main and side streets. In the town there are various large market squares where also to be built in time are a church, school, and parsonages. Now we are still living in huts of long, split, thin boards, and in just such, though rather large huts, we hold church and school. If God blesses our very hard-working people this year, as it appears, with a good harvest, since in the past year throughout the whole land there was a very bad harvest, they will soon regain their strength and by the sweet gospel of

104 The politics of conversion Christ, which they heartily love, lead a content and peaceful life. The Word of God is their best nourishment that daily they so diligently observe that we have reason to praise the dear God for it. We come together every evening after eating and shortly before going to sleep for singing, praying, and observance of the divine Word . . . The dear God has also given us so much means in our hands that we have been able to erect an orphanage for our orphans, of whom there are 12, as well as for other poor children of this land and in which also poor widows and other needy persons without means fnd their support and under divine blessing will fnd it. Since there is little to accomplish with the old in this land we want to begin it in the name of the Lord with the young folk. Perhaps the Lord will let us succeed and also give into our arms several heathen children, which well should be our greatest joy. . . . In the orphanage we have a Salzburger as housekeeper and manager who, along with his wife, works with the children with such faithfulness that I might wish such upright in heart, capable, and selfess people for all good institutions. . . . [as we] come to a proper accommodation, we will, under the protection and blessing of the Most High, without a doubt enjoy many material and spiritual advantages ahead of other people in Europe. Our hearers enjoy every freedom in spiritual and worldly things for which a Christian may only wish, and they have no foreign authority but let themselves be ruled through God’s Word, and for the management of external things several God-fearing men standing in authority have been appointed from their midst, and we lend a hand out of love for God and our little sheep when it is needed. In church discipline we are in no way limited, which for the promotion of an external good order has an uncommon infuence. Also no one may cause disturbance in the school or prescribe for us rules of church discipline, and God accompanies our simple work with His blessing. In the dear Herr Gronau I have such a dear colleague of whom I regard myself as completely not worthy but for which I all the more adore [God’s] fatherly care. He loves Jesus with his whole heart, works with the community and, especially for the little lambs in the school, in uncommon faithfulness; he loves me more than a brother. May God be praised for such an inexpressible blessing . . . . . . the faithful God has so far awakened many benefactors in England and Germany who let fow to us and to our dear community many charitable gifts that have proved very useful to us in various trials. . . . I wish for you the complete fullness of blessing and remain, Your Reverence, most obligingly, Johann Martin Boltzius Ebenezer in America The 1st of January 1738.

The politics of conversion

105

From Johann Martin Boltzius in Ebenezer to Johann Andreas Manitius regarding the Jews and Indians in Georgia. February 22, 1738 Very worthy friend and brother in the Lord Jesus, You have already now for the third time delighted us by giving some news of what the Lord is doing through your service among the poor Jewish folk . . . There are also Jews in this colony with whom something good might be presumed to be accomplished through the small books printed in the best interest of this folk, but so far it has been to poor effect since they are completely blasphemous and have hardened themselves even more against us. They are very malicious and hate and persecute each other. Recently one from Savannah lamented to me that the Spanish and Portuguese Jews greatly persecute the German Jews in Savannah in a way that no Christian could persecute another and asked of me that I might put in a good word with the authorities in favour of the German Jews. . . . . . . the Jews did not say much but promised to relate to me some time the whole affair that had so embittered them among themselves. They would like to build a synagogue, and the Spanish and German Jews cannot come to agreement about it. The particular circumstances are unknown to me. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews are not as scrupulous as the others in their eating. They eat, for example, the beef that is usually given out of the storehouse in Savannah or is otherwise sold. But the Germans would rather suffer want before eating something other than what was slaughtered by them. They have in Savannah every freedom that any other Englander has. They keep the watch as the others and train as do others in defense in the manner of soldiers. They work at no other profession except they, in part, cultivate the feld, and, in part, devote themselves to trade in trifes, the latter of which suits them better than the former. There is also a doctor among them who even has been retained by the Lord Trustees to treat the people in Savannah who are treated at their expense. In their worship, which they now hold in an old, wretched hut in which also the men and women are completely separated, they use exactly such ceremonies as I have seen in Berlin. A boy who understands well a variety of languages and Hebrew is their lector and is paid by them. No more than 2 families can speak German-Jewish. Whether they will receive freedom from the Lord Trustees to have a synagogue built they do not yet know themselves; at least it may be deferred yet awhile since, as mentioned before, the Spanish and the Portuguese are against the German Jews and protest vehemently against one another also in regard to the petition for the construction of the synagogue. The Jews here would like to get along well with us and our dear Salzburgers and have even done for us far many favours in external things, but in their doctrine they remain stiff-necked, and little has been accomplished to date.

106

The politics of conversion

There is also only some measure of infuence on the poor heathen, which before now has been almost nothing more than pure impossibility in that even good examples make no impression on them. They have seen for many years nothing other than the evil example of the white people, and because such a life agrees with the impulse of their likewise perverted carnal heart, they have only become much more mischievous than they may have been previously and consider as the proper life only the godless life of the people and would regard as no friend but as an enemy and treat harshly anyone who would want to advise them otherwise. They are incapable of making a distinction between good and evil and consider as good the evil that the depraved feshly sense does well, in which they also are confrmed through the life of the white people who live among them because of trade and who are true scoundrels. They cannot be brought to any external order and submission and also have no commander among them as at time of war, since indeed no one has absolute authority but everything must go through council. So that they remain friends with the English one must go the gentlest way with them and show them leniency in all things. May God have mercy on these and other folk and increase His company in east and west and in all places. . . . I remain respectfully, my very worthy friend and brother in the Lord, yours, Johann Martin Boltzius Ebenezer The 22nd of February old style 1738. C. Imagining the Missionary Encounter in Georgia: A Protestant Vision [1740] The following dialogue was written by Anglican bishop Thomas Wilson who was one of the trustees of the Georgia Colony effort, and whose writings emphasized both the eagerness of the refugees to preach and the openness of “Indians” to convert. Wilson never visited Georgia, and his text ventriloquizing “Indian” views of the Christian gospel should not be taken as a summary of Indigenous views, but rather of Protestant hopes that their Reformation slant would make the gospel more palatable to Indigenous Americans than Iberian Catholicism was. Here, a missionary begins his dialogue with a native leader.11 Source: Thomas Wilson, An Essay Towards an Instruction for Indians (London: 1740) PART I: Which is in order to Christian Baptism. DIALOGUE I. INDIAN Why MISSIONARY.

are you so earnest to persuade me to become a Christian? Because I know for certain, that if you live and die without becoming a Christian, you will deprive yourself of the greatest

The politics of conversion

107

Happiness which the Heart of Man can desire; besides this, you will be in danger of being more miserable than at present you are aware of. IND. I will be very thankful if you will be so kind as to explain to me what you say concerns me so very much. MISS. That I will do most willingly; for, to tell you the Truth, by instructing You, I myself shall be a very great Gainer. IND. I do not understand what you mean by that. MISS. I will tell you then. The Great God, whom we Christians worship, he who made the World and all things in it, and in whose Hands our Breath and Life is [Daniel 5: 23], and who would have all his Creatures to be happy, He has promised an exceeding great Reward to all such as shall endeavour to make Him, and His glorious Perfections, and His most gracious Purposes, known unto Men, especially to such unhappy People as you, who know not for what End you were made, and send into this World; you know not what Duties you owe to your Maker, nor on what Conditions he will keep you from making yourselves miserable, or for ever happy when you die. IND. Indeed, Sir, these are such things as I must beg of you to give me some Account of; especially what you know more than we do, concerning the God you worship; for we know and believe, that there must be some great Power above us, who made us, and does govern all things here below. MISS. But we Christians know a great deal more of that Great Power above, than you can know at present. We were indeed once as ignorant of Him, and of our most unhappy Condition on that account, as you now are; but He has been so good as to make himself and his Will known to us, to our very great Comfort and Happiness; and we cannot but desire that every one may be as happy as all true Christians are in knowing their Maker’s Will, and honouring him, as reasonable Creatures ought to do. IND. May I ask you one thing – Why did not that good Being, whom you call your God, make all this known to us as well as to you? MISS. I must tell you once for all, that we poor Creatures ought not to expect that the great God should give us an Account of everything he has thought ft to do. It is enough for us to know for certain, that he is good and just in every thing he does, or permits to be done [Job 33:13] And what if your Forefathers did wilfully forsake the true God, and lost the Knowledge of him and his Will, and fell into all manner of wickedness? will you think it hard or unjust in him to leave them and their Posterity that follow their Examples, to themselves and their own wicked Choices; and to deny them the Favours he grants to others? IND. We must not say or think so. – God is just, and we are his Creatures as well as you. – We must therefore have deserv’d to be depriv’d of that Blessing which you say that you do enjoy, of knowing him and his Will. And this is what I now intreat you will instruct me in.

108

The politics of conversion That I will most gladly do; for the Knowledge and Belief of God, this is to be the Foundation of all true Religion, and of the Happiness of Men:

MISS.

First then, we know and believe the God we serve to be the most perfect of all Beings; and there is no other God besides or above him, to be feared, or loved, or worshipped. That it is he who made the World; and that he preserves, and governs, and orders all things by his wonderful Wisdom and Power. That amongst other Creatures he made Man to be Partaker of his Maker’s Happiness; and in order to this, he gave him Reason, that he might Understand, and Adore, and Glorify his Maker. And to this end we Christians might know him more perfectly, and love and fear him, he has given us an Account of his Government of this World ever since he made it. – By which Account it appears, – That he is Almighty, – i.e., he can do, and has done, whatever he thinks ft to do. – That he is exceeding Just, and Wise, and Good; and can commend nothing but what he knows will be for the Good of his Creatures; and will most surely reward such as strive to please him. – At the same time, we know, by what he has done, that he is most Holy, and has ever been displeased with evil Men, and their evil Deeds, and has punished them. – And yet he is most kind and compassionate to such as have offended him, and being truly sorry for it, do return to their Duty. – We know also, and are assured, from what he has done and made known to us, – That he sees and knows all the Actions of Men, whether good or bad; even our very Thoughts are known to him. – That he not only knows the things that are past and present, but even all things that shall ever happen hereafter. – Lastly, That he is most faithful to his Word, so that whatever he has promis’d he will most surely make good; and whatever he has threatned, will as surely come to pass. This Account of the great God is most agreeable to Reason; especially now you have put me upon considering it so particularly. MISS. But there are other Truths of the greatest Moment, which God has made known to Us, and which our Reason could never had discovered; such as these that follow: – That there will be another Life after this; – and that the true Happiness or Misery of Men will not be known till after they are dead. IND. Till after they are dead, Sir! – Why do you Christians really know what shall become of Men after they are dead? MISS. Yes, we do, and that most certainly. – We know that this short Life is only a Life or State of Trial, in order to mend our corrupt Nature, that we may be ft for a much better World when we die; and be for ever happy, if we behave ourselves as we should do, while we live here. – For our God has made known to us, That after Death the Souls of all good People do go to a Place of Rest, and Peace and Happiness; – and the IND.

The politics of conversion

109

Souls of wicked people to a Place of Sorrow and Misery, there to remain till the End of this World, and the Day of Judgment. IND. Pray, what do you mean by the End of the World, and by the Day of Judgment? MISS. Why God has made known to us, that this World will have an End; – that then there will be a Resurrection of the Dead, both of the Just and Unjust [Acts 24:15], both of good and bad Men; all that ever have lived shall then be raised to Life, and must give an Account for whatever they have done in this World, whether Good or Evil. – And that such as have done Good shall be made happy for ever; – and such as have done Evil, have led wicked Lives, and have not repented in due time, shall be for ever miserable. IND. These indeed are Truths which we know nothing of; and if they are really true, it certainly concerns me, and every Man living, to think of them in good earnest, and to order his Life accordingly. – But let me ask you, – Do all you Christians know these things, and believe them to be true? MISS. It is at the Peril of their Souls if they do not. – But I know why you ask that Question, and I promise to answer and satisfy you upon that Head hereafter. – In the mean time, it will be your best and wisest Way to take care of One, that is, for yourself; and not to neglect this Opportunity, which God of his Mercy and Goodness offers you by me, of coming to the Knowledge of your Maker, and of the Duties you owe to him, to yourself, and to all others, lest they be for ever hid from you, and you suffer for it eternally. IND. I hope I shall take your Advice. But in the mean time will you give me Leave to ask you, – How did God make these things known unto you Christians? MISS. That you shall know in due time; for you cannot know all things at once. – And these few Truths only I have told you, at this time, that you may know and consider what you have to do; – that you may in good earnest desire to be further taught, and told how you may be for ever happy, if it is not your own Fault; and how you may avoid the Danger and Misery you and all Men are expos’d to, that are not very seriously concerned for their own Safety. – For once and again I must assure you, as sure as there is a God, – that you and every Man living will be happy or miserable when they die, as sure as they now live. – We therefore, knowing the Terror of the Lord, – And that we must all appear before the Judgment-seat of God, and receive a Sentence according to what we have done in the Body, whether it be good or bad [II Corinthians 5:2] We knowing these things, endeavour to persuade Men to be afraid for themselves, and to live so as to escape being miserable. What therefore I would recommend to you at present, for I would not overburthen your memory at once, is this, – That you would pray

110

The politics of conversion

to God to give you an Heart disposed to hearken to the Truth; – For unless God gives you a Heart to perceive, and Ears to hear, and Eyes to see [Deuteronomy 29:4], all that I can say to you will signify nothing towards your Conversion. IND. I hope I shall follow your Advice; and I believe I shall hardly forget the things you have told me. MISS. Farewell for the present; and may God keep you in this good Disposition, and give you a teachable Temper. [NT]

Notes 1 L. Spoljaric, “The Renaissance Papacy and Catholicization of the ‘Manichean Heretics’: rethinking the 1459 purge of the Bosnian Kingdom,” in N. Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 153–75. 2 A.S. Piccolomini, Opera Omnia, Basel, 1571, translated Mary Martin McLaughlin, in J.B. Ross and M.M. McLaughlin (eds) The Portable Renaissance Reader, New York: Random House, 1977, pp. 64–9. © 1953, 1968, renewed © 1981 by Viking Penguin Inc. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 3 Pius II, Commentaries, vol. 3, ed. & trans. Margaret Meserve, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, p. 55. 4 Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Reg. Vat. 478, fols 305r–306v. Translated by Luka Spoljaric. 5 Juan de Torquemada, Symbolum pro informatione Manichaeorum (El bogomolismo en Bosnia), eds N. Lopez Martinez and V. Proaño Gil, Burgos: [s.n.], 1958, pp. 37–9. Translated by Luka Spoljaric. 6 Torquemada, Symbolum pro informatione Manichaeorum, pp. 131–2. Translated by Luka Spoljaric. 7 Vatican City, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Reg. Vat. 518, fols 79r–80r. Translated by Luka Spoljaric. 8 Original published in S. Džaja, “Ideološki i politološki aspekti propasti Bosanskog Kraljevstva 1463.godine” [The Ideological and Political Aspects of the Fall of the Bosnian Kingdom in 1463], Croatica Christiana periodica, 18, 1986, 213–14. Translated by Luka Spoljaric. 9 H. Newman, Salzburger Letterbooks, transcribed and edited by G.F. Jones, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966, pp. 288–91. © 1966 University of Georgia Press. Reprinted by permission of the University of Georgia. 10 J.M. Boltzius, The Letters of Johann Martin Boltzius, Lutheran Pastor in Ebenezer, Georgia. German Pietism in Colonial America, 1733–1765. Book 1, ed. and trans. R.C. Kleckley, Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009, pp. 66–9. Reprinted by permission of The Edwin Mellen Press. See also: C.M. Koch, “Exile Identity and the Pietist Reform movement: Constructing the Georgia Salzburgers from Alpine Crypto-Protestants,” in Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations, pp. 249–66. 11 T. Wilson, An Essay Towards an Instruction for Indians, London: 1740. This edition is from The Works of the Right Reverend Father in God Thomas Wilson D.D., Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man, Oxford: John Henry Parker, vol. 4, 1851, pp. 149–53.

5

Living together Co-existence, conversion, convergence

5.1 The spaces of religion and race in Kongo (1591) Kongo’s King Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga renamed his capital of Mbanza as São Salvador in honour of Christ. Portuguese priests, traders, soldiers, and diplomats became infuential in Kongo society, yet they remained deeply unpopular. They lived in a walled enclosure within the capital which symbolically and physically separated them from Kongolese society. The Italian traveller Filippo Pigafetta (1533–1604) wrote a description of the capital in his Relatione del reame del Congo (1591), which conveyed information he had drawn out of the reports of the Portuguese Duarte Lopez. The Portuguese walled enclosure refected a common practice for regulating contacts with local residents that we can fnd in medieval trading cities and later in colonial centres. The Kongolese king and nobility also lived in separate walled compounds within the city, and the Catholic Church quite literally occupied a middle ground, facing a large square ringed with the Kongolese and Portuguese compounds.1 Source: Filippo Pigafetta, Report on the Kingdom of Kongo (1591) Although the capital of the kingdom of Kongo is, to some extent, included in the region of Mpemba, since its government and that of its surrounding territory, which extends for about twenty miles, belongs to the king himself, let us treat it separately. This city is called São Salvador, and was formerly known as Mbanza in the language of the country, which generally means the Court where the king or governor resides. It is situated 150 miles from the sea, on a large and high mountain, almost entirely of rock with seams of ironstone, out of which the houses are built. This mountain has on its summit a plateau, which is all cultivated and has houses and villages extending for about ten miles around, where more than 100,000 people live. The land is fruitful and the air healthy, fresh and pure, and there are springs of water good to drink which never at any time harm the body. Here also are many animals of every description. The summit of the mountain is separate and distinct from

112

Living together

everything around it, and for this reason the Portuguese call it Outeiro, that is to say the lookout point. It is particularly high, and the whole country round about can be seen from it. It is true that only towards the east and the river it is steep and very craggy. The frst lords of the country placed this town on this summit for two reasons: First, because it lies almost in the very middle of the kingdom, so that help can quickly be sent to every part; and, next, because the natural elevation of the site gives it good air and a secure position which cannot be taken by force. By the royal road which comes from the direction of the sea, which is 150 miles away, as has been said, the summit is reached by a walk of fve miles along a winding, broad and well-made path. On the east side a river runs along the base of the mountain, to which women descend by a path a mile long to wash their clothes. In some parts there are valleys which are planted and cultivated, nor is any region left uncultivated, as this is the country where the Court resides. The city is placed in a corner or angle on the south side of the summit of that mountain, and was enclosed with walls by Dom Afonso, the frst Christian king, who gave the Portuguese their own separate part, shut off with a wall. A large space was left between these two enclosures, where the principal Church was built, in front of which was a square, and the gates of the houses of the nobles and of the Portuguese were built so as to face the said Church. At the entrance to the square live certain great nobles of the Court, and behind the Church the square ends in a narrow street, which has its own gate, outside which are several houses facing to the east. Beyond these walls, in which the royal residences and the city of the Portuguese are enclosed, there are several buildings belonging to different nobles, each one occupying in a disorderly fashion the site most agreeable to him in order to be near the Court. It is impossible to determine the size of this city, since the whole country beyond the boundaries of the two walls is covered with country houses and palaces, and each noble has his houses and lands enclosed like a town. The wall around the Portuguese settlement is nearly a mile long, and the palaces of the king as much again. The walls are of great thickness, but the gates are not shut at night, and are not even guarded. There is no lack of abundant water on this high plain, but the Court and the Portuguese drink from a spring that rises on the north side and fows continuously. To this they have to descend a musket-shot distance down the hill and then carry the water into the city on the backs of slaves in vessels of wood and clay, and also in gourds. [AS]

5.2 The unlikely friendship of a Muslim and an Iberian friar (1533) Movements of religious reform intersected with economic and political motivations to generate tensions and expulsions, but some Iberians remained on

Living together

113

good terms with those of other faiths. In this text, the forcibly-converted morisco Reminyˆo describes the anguished reaction of his friend, a Carmelite friar Estabán Martel. Fra Martel saw the forced conversions as a perversion of Christianity engineered by French cardinals around the pope, and not approved by the pope himself. He fought the decrees until his death a couple of months later.2 Source: Reminyˆo, A Portrait of an Unlikely Friendship (1533) I recall that in the year of our conversion a very good and upright friend of mine, with whom I had a great friendship, and who was a friar of the Carmelites, who was called Fray Esteban Martel, a good friend of the Moors of this kingdom more than of other parts, and as he had discovered that we had been sentenced to be made Christians by force, sent for me by a servant to where I lived, in the aljama’a of Kaderete [sic] in those days, that I should come to him at his father’s house. I then did what I must, and going to his house, where he was waiting for me, the minute he saw me, he gave me a great greeting, and set to weeping, his face half-covered, and would have me sit at his table, for it was the hour for eating, . . . and he gave me . . . roasted meat, though he did not eat it, for that day was a Sunday of the Passion . . . [W]ith tears he said to me: What do you think of this, señior Baray, this ill deed [?] and ill Christianity that they have done with you people? For my part, I tell you, and with sadness in my heart and in my soul, that they have done a senseless thing with you. I replied that I was amazed that his holiness had consented to and decreed such a thing, and he replied that the Pope had not consented to it, but rather that by decree from Mantua we had been sentenced, and that his holiness was tricked by certain French cardinals who had conspired against our people into signing the sentence . . . and he told me: more knowingly than I had thought, saying that we were not in times of grace, but of tears. And this friend had such compassion with us, that he never stopped arguing before the clerics and at meetings and inveighing against all those who consented to this thing, and called a convocation with many others in which to make common cause, and to argue against his majesty and his assistants, and he would have done this, except that he died two months later, and he bade me to make obsequies to him when he died, and to visit him in his sickness and I wept for his death, for he was a very faithful friend. [TC]

5.3 A criollo bishop reviews religious life in a Mexican city (1614) On 24 March 1614, criollo Bishop Mota y Escobar paid a formal visit to Tlaxcala. His report demonstrates his distinct creole worldview. He emphasizes how important his work, presence, and example are for the morally

114

Living together

and spiritually degenerating city of Tlaxcala. He is anxious that his metropolitan audience not see his actions as exploitative of the Indigenous population and inappropriate for a colonial ecclesiastic authority. And he distances himself from the “Spaniards” of Tlaxcala while painting a complicated and ambivalent picture of the state of hispanicization. His highly critical assessments of colonial corruption and abuse and Spanish toleration and participation in them are physically struck out of the record.3 Source: Bishop Mota y Escobar, Report on Obispo de Tlaxcala – National Library of Spain (1614) On 24 March [1614], I left [Puebla] for this city of Tlaxcala, where I arrived to eat [and settle in] at the royal house, where I ate at my cost, without permitting anything be asked of the indigenous people of this pueblo [where they speak Nahuatl], mixed with some Otomí and, although the reputation of [the Tlaxcalans] is very great in all the world, their poverty is today the main [attribute] that is known [of them because] of the bad government of the Principales naturales, by their little capacity for understanding, honour and talents, [and] their continual inebriation. The mortality rate of [the indigenous people] has been very [high]; and, so, today commoners and vassals [maceguales] govern and, [as a result] the earthly state of the indigenous population is notably diminished. And, I judge that the spiritual is [needed] more than ever, because the ancient ministers are fnished and the moderns, I understand, lack the spirit of the ancestors; and, so, they govern and administer justice with the spirit of children or juveniles [mozos]. The greed is more alive than in the Florentines, the excess punished little by their superiors, whose mouths close with gifts of money, a thing highly monstrous and what is worse is that neither there [,in Europe,] nor here, is there hope of a remedy. I found great vice in the sensual [excesses] of the Spaniards [here and] there is no Spaniard in this place that is not cohabitating and, all are so united, that there is no witness that wants to say so. The [Spanish] people are poor, lazy, and immoral; and they [possess] as many indigenous people as they want, they come to live with [the Spaniards] and, [the Spaniards] have no secular justice with whom to fear, no less is there ecclesiastic justice, they live as gentiles . . . I consecrated the oil in the chapel and gave communion to a good abundance of Spaniards. But the quantity of indigenous people was greater – numbering more than 1,000. I washed the feet of 12 [poor indigenous people] and gave them food frst in my home, serving them in memory of the example of Christ, Our Señor. I was determined to preach here on Easter, but I had awful infammation, that endured for 8 days, and I was not able to speak either; I don’t know what the cause of the impediment was, because I wanted [to preach

Living together

115

and speak] very much. Neither did I preach to the indigenous population, for the same reason . . . But the things of episcopal power are in [the hands of friars], in a way that it is necessary to plead to God a lot, [for him] to put his miraculous hand in [this situation] because the Pope is far away and the King [is] badly informed. And, to clarify here, I do not go to the doctrinas of the friars with the spirit to remedy anything, because I have no power to do so; and I have given news to Your Majesty of the inconveniences and I have not had an order to remedy it. I enter only with the spirit to confrm those that have not received this Sacrament . . . the friars could deliver [the Sacrament] to me so that I would be saved from going to their houses. Easter occupied me in confrming the indigenous population and I confrmed 2,405 young people [criaturas]. Although some of them were Spaniards, of all of those [people] I did not receive a single maravedí of money, only [the people] gave me little candles [worth] a half a real, they were not remuneration. I settled in the royal house, ate at my cost, without permitting that my table ask anything of the people. They only gave me grasses and herbs [zacate] and some frewood. I met here, through the governor, a very virtuous gentleman, modest and honourable, Don García López del Espinar, of whom I had very good communication. He was my guest continually, in him I received very great honour. Finished with this pueblo, I left for Topoyanco, on 3 April 1614. [LS]

5.4 Catholic, Protestant, and Jew: the many lives of Manuel Cardoso de Macedo (1620s) Manuel Cardoso de Macedo (1585–1652) began his life as an Azorean Old Christian. In 1599, Cardoso was sent by his father to England as a teenager to learn the language and deepen his trade contacts in the dye and textile business. While in England, he embraced Calvinism after reading Scripture and being exposed to the religious ferment of Elizabethan England. News of his apostasy made it to the Bishop of the Azores, who had Cardoso arrested and interrogated during one of his visits back home. After openly declaring his Calvinism, he was sent in shackles to the Lisbon Inquisition (1608), where he encountered a New Christian who was accused of observing the Law of Moses. Hearing of this Judaizer’s faithful observance of the laws recorded in Scripture jolted Cardoso once again and he eventually found his way to Judaism, taking the name Abraham Pelengrino, and living out his years within the Sephardic community of Amsterdam, where he composed his spiritual autobiography.4 Source: Abraham Pelengrino, The Life of the Blessed Abrahamo Pelengrino (nd)

116

Living together

I arrived on August 25th of that year [1599] to a town named Exeter, where I stayed two years learning the language, going to school and seeing its rhythms and ceremonies. I encountered Scripture, which was the frst thing they put in my hand after learning the A, B, C’s; later I came to see the sect of my Parents as not good. Seeing the variety of religions which existed, I resolved to not choose any of them until I had more information and see which one most pleased me. And thus, I went to London where I bought seven books of seven religions. So that you should know – they were: Calvin, Anabaptist, Brownism, Unitarianism, Lutherism, Puritanism, Arianism. I read, and I began to see the differences that existed between them. I arrived at the conclusion that Calvin was best because it was the one that most accorded with reason. As I began to follow Calvinism, the residents of the town increasingly appreciated the fact that I attended their services so faithfully and proved so dedicated to their religion. Thus I gained favour with them; I always got the best spot and they appreciated interacting with me, and in that way I gained access to the home of a distinguished nobleman, who, according to the custom of English gentlemen, lived in a country house a half mile out of town. There I found myself at home, and I treated his children as if they were my own brothers and sisters. This very infuential gentleman was Sir George Smith. At that time, an Earl named Sir Thomas Lee died in Ireland, and as he had no descendants, his possessions were lost to the Queen according to legal custom. My friend the nobleman went to Court and managed to get the Queen to grant me a stipend from these funds in order to make me even closer to their religion, and in her piety she decided to award me a hundred pounds sterling annually. From that amount, and from what I got from my father, I could live as a nobleman, and it would be absurd to condemn it as materialistic, for better than that one could not wish for in those circumstances. The stipend that Cardoso receives from the Queen as a reward for embracing Protestantism was awarded at a court ceremony. While at court, he had a tense encounter with the Spanish ambassador. And thus the Spanish ambassador was there, and seeing me there he recognized me as Portuguese and that I entered into the churches [cerchas], and that I did not go to mass at his home like the other Portuguese and Spanish who were there [in England], whom I always stayed away from. . . . He [the ambassador] asked me why, being Portuguese I didn’t come to mass? I responded saying: Your Excellency should keep track of his own subjects and not me. This led directly to his arrest on a return trip home to the Azores. On interrogation by the local bishop, he asserted:

Living together

117

A Calvinist [I am], and a Calvinist I will die, unless you can convince me with reasons that accord with my understanding. Cardoso ended up in prison. After many months of maintaining his commitment to Calvinism, he was moved into the cell of a New Christian, Dias Milão, who was accused of Judaizing. While the old man denied having practiced any of the remnants of his ancestral faith, Cardoso was deeply shaken by hearing that there were people who still kept the Laws of the Old Testament. After reading the long list of Judaic practices that he was accused of keeping, Cardoso asked him: are there really people who observe that religion, because everything that was in that book was in accord with Scripture . . .? The good elderly gentleman responded, ‘Son, I don’t know anything about it; I know that I am imprisoned unfairly. Please let me be’ . . . I, seeing in my imagination this and many other concepts that would come to me, like the nature of the trinity, I felt myself so oppressed by these thoughts that I arose at 2 past midnight, unable to sleep, I sat on the foot of the bed and raised my eyes to heaven through a small opening and I said: Lord, help me, because I have lost my Salvation. And I awoke without any form of religion, erasing/rejecting all of the Scriptures and not believing in anything contained in them, taking it all as a fable. In the end I was made into a libertine. With his Calvinism in disarray, Cardoso decides to save his skin by pleading for mercy and claiming a temporary/youthful insanity. He is welcomed back to the Catholic faith by the Inquisitors, but he has already resolved to learn more about Judaism, and he eventually converts to that faith. Many years later on the streets of Amsterdam, he encounters an old English friend, with whom he has a debate regarding the immutability of the Divine law and its implication for belief in Judaism versus Christianity. The encounter with this old friend is highly charged, and the account is both stylized (the friend’s name is ‘Christopher’ or Christ-lover) and obviously incomplete. Moreover, Cardoso is a very different man compared to when he was a young Calvinist in England. He made a radical religious choice in converting frst to Catholicism and then to Judaism. While he was once young, rich, and successful, now he is poor, alone and his body is broken by the travails of his wanderings: Going to the Bourse I had an encounter well outside of what I expected to fnd there. I met an Englishman, a native of Topsham . . . Seeing him I vaguely recognized him and I diverted my path from his. He also vaguely recognized me, and he approached me, eyeing me [intently] as if putting his face into mine. I saw that he was following me from one part to another, and every time I walked my leg, which is weak from the sufferings I have

118

Living together

received, would go more lame. He was confused to not be recognizing me because of the “geito della,” still he became sure from the appearance of my face, and approaching me he said to me in English: “Do you recognize me?” and I responded to him in Dutch: “I don’t understand”. Taking into account more my tone of speaking [than the actual words] he said: “I know you well Manoel. What is with your foot?” I, seeing that I was in a free country and that it mattered little if I was recognized, said to him: “The state of poverty that I fnd myself in makes me want to avoid you, now that this is how it is, how are you and what brings you here, Christopher?” I came with my brother to Middelburg in Zeeland on business, and since I had heard a lot about the splendour of this city I wanted to come here to have a look around. Now that I have found you here, I’m even happier that I came, because everyone in England, your friends, your acquaintances and other people are worried that they don’t hear from you anymore. They knew that you were arrested, and we haven’t heard from you since. And that’s why I was glad to see you again, but I am concerned about the state of poverty in which you say you are. Why didn’t you return to where you have so many friends who all long to see you again? They will treat you just like in the old days. ABRAHAM: I will tell you what has happened. I was very pleased to meet you because we were acquaintances, so to speak, and I regret that I was unable to receive you properly. As to your question of why I did not return to England where I have so many friends, that is because I am in a different situation and wearing a different habit than I used to do there. That’s why I cannot show myself there anymore – because of what the English and other peoples hate. CHRISTOPHER: What kind of habit do you mean? Do you profess a different religion than ours? The one that you adhered to so fervently at the time? ABRAHAM: I became a Jew and that is why I now live a hard but happy life. God has given me the grace to lead me to this faith, which is the path that leads to the real salvation of the soul, which is only obtained through the Law of Moses, given by Him on Mount Sinai, as it is written in the Holy Scriptures, and so I was circumcised and called Abraham. CHRISTOPHER: I am amazed at what I hear from You. Is it really true what You say? Then I am thankful to God for bringing me here, to free you from that blind fallacy. Surely some Jew has tricked you with his false words, and has taken away the true insight in order to destroy you. ABRAHAM: No one has deceived me. It was by my own free will that I frst joined Your erroneous doctrine, but now I have left the darkness behind. CHRISTOPHER:

Living together

119

If the Bible speaks the truth – which is true and is not contested by anyone – then Messiah has not yet come, nor can the God-given Law ever change. For if He did, it would be because He himself was imperfect. The work to be corrected by its maker is imperfect, and if the Law were to be changed, then the One who Issues that law would be changeable, and in Our Lord there is no changeability. He is always the same, as He reveals in Exodus 3:14 “I AM WHO I AM” . . . These texts are suffcient, but there are many more that you can easily fnd in the Law, which He constantly speaks about forever. I advise you to check that. And if all that is so now, how would the Maker of this Law who is everlasting, issue one who is not eternal? . . . There has only been one, eternally, forever and without end, and since it was not given to you, you will not understand the secrets either. You mock it, and in that you fulfll the words of Moses from Deuteronomy 28, 37: “And you shall become a horror, a proverb, and a mockery among all the nations where the Lord will lead you.” [RP, NT]

5.5 Indigenous teachers in early Indigenous missions – the experience in New Spain (1664) To encourage and mentor their members, Jesuits wrote sacred biographies of their missionaries in frontier regions across the Spanish empire. While these texts emphasize the evangelical work of creoles and Europeans, at times native neophytes emerge in the background in missionary roles. Alonso Bonifacio’s 1664 biography of Pedro Juan Castini provides a glimpse of how Jesuits used the sons of Indigenous leaders (caciques) to teach Catholic doctrine and to spread Christianity. Castini established mission communities (known as reducciones or ‘reductions’) among various native groups in northwestern New Spain (Mexico) between 1616 and 1641, but the following excerpt demonstrates he would have been unable to do so without the help of native catechists and preachers.5 Source: Alonso Bonifacio, The Death, Virtues, and Ministry of Pedro Juan Castini (1664) In less than a year he baptized the entire Sinaloa nation, totalling roughly one thousand families, which were later reduced into three pueblos, eight leagues apart from each other. In continuous movement, like a new sun, the Padre Pedro Juan Castini visited them all, instructing, baptizing, marrying, and confrming the mysteries of our holy faith and Christian doctrine to these recent converts to Christ . . . Among those he reduced, through the effcacy of his words and doctrine, was a miserable Indian who was possessed by the devil for more than twenty years . . . [Another] was an Indian cacique highly esteemed by his

120

Living together

nation, but extremely rebellious and stubborn to convert. He was always in hiding, well-fortifed in the mountains, which is why, for fear of the damage that could arise from a revolt, the Spanish captain [Diego Martínez de Hurdaide] wanted him in his hands; but God’s [hands] are so agile and effcacious that He placed him in Padre Castini’s [hands] so that he, in turn, could transfer him into those of the angels in heaven. This cacique had a son who was already a Christian, so Padre [Castini] asked – both affectionately and with gifts – for as much help as he could to fnd out where his fugitive father was hiding. He revealed the place to [Castini], but he also told him that [his father] was very sick, and that if he wanted to go, he would accompany him. Padre [Castini], who had no desire for anything else, went with him right away to search for this blind gentile, fearing that he was already eternally lost. When he found him, his appearance was hideous, but he was apparently still of sound mind, although by now extremely worn out. [Castini] worked tirelessly to reduce him so that he would listen to [Christian] doctrine and receive the waters of baptism; but God, who makes reservoirs of water out of stone and perennial streams out of rock, touched the heart of this stubborn barbarian so powerfully that he converted him . . . Three days later he died . . . [Castini] also returned to work among the Zoes, both politically and spiritually, but since what happened to them is very similar to the Sinaloans, I will not make any special reference to their conversions, baptisms, and [spiritual] exercises during holy weeks. I will not refrain, however, from mentioning and admiring how, in one small corner of Sinaloa, more than one thousand fve hundred souls were baptized, who live by the doctrine of Padre Castini and display great signs of Christianity. Well into the present day, large amounts of fruit are still being harvested from that frst planting of the gospel. The Huite nation . . . lived among the highest crags and the most inaccessible cliffs, places where only birds and deer can infltrate . . . Here up to three hundred families lived like savages, and although they were only seven leagues away from the Sinaloa nation, it was as if it was a chaos separated by an almost infnite distance. These people ate human fesh when they captured their enemies; they were like a central plaza of idolatry, decorated in ignorance and savagery. It was here that Padre Castini went in search of the faith of Christ, with the help of a Huite boy the Sinaloans had captured and offered to him to nurture, teach, and instruct in the mysteries of the faith. By this means (like David and the Egyptian slave) he stripped the devil of his prey, who for so many centuries had tyrannized these crags. He sent some Sinaloans with a few small gifts, things of value for the Indians. God moved the souls of these wild people so effectively that they received the Huites in peace and with love, those who only a short time before had rejected them with arrowheads and blows from their clubs. Not only this, but they turned over their children to the Sinaloans so that they would rear and instruct them in the law of the Christians. This change truly came about by the hand

Living together

121

of the Most High [because] these people were the cruelest enemies. After their sons, the fathers entered into the salubrious waters of baptism, which Padre Castini administered to them, totalling almost three hundred adults. They celebrated the Christianity of the Huites, the Sinaloans with rejoicing and festivities and the Spanish soldiers with salutes from their harquebuses; it continued to grow every day, thanks to the love and care with which Padre [Castini] treated them. But Padre Pedro Juan Castini’s true conquest of valour, zeal, and skill was his entrada and reduction of the Chinipas, a nation three days’ journey further into the mountains and [mission] district of the Huites. His superiors entrusted them to him as the best minister for the beneft of their souls, for he went about gathering many recently baptized children for heaven, the frst fruits of an abundant harvest. Padre [Castini] was received with great acts of reverence and love by up to one hundred of the most important Indians. He found roughly fve hundred families distributed among fve settlements, which were later reduced to one. He also found a church made of wood, and in order to take possession with the utmost solemnity, he entered in with his priestly garments, giving the order to baptize the children, of which they gathered together up to four hundred from ages seven and under. Since Padre [Castini] was unable to live among this nation, given his obligation to his own [mission] district, he asked the Chinipas to choose some young boys and children. They were to be reared and instructed in the mysteries of the faith among those who were already Christian; they were also to learn how to read, write, and speak. After their training, they would serve as catechists to their own nation, instructing and preparing them to receive holy baptism. The Chinipas . . . gathered together several young boys and children so that Padre [Castini] could choose those whom he believed were the best suited. He picked twenty-four of them, some of whom were the sons of caciques; how gladly and cheerfully they were to go with Padre [Castini], renouncing the loving care of their own. His [mission] district had already arranged for the return of Padre Castini, happy with the good start he had made with this reduction, when without a doubt he was inspired by a sovereign impulse during the hour of prayer in the morning (a rule in the Society of Jesus and one that Padre [Castini] inviolably observed, even in the midst of his greatest occupations). He had an extraordinary desire not to leave Chinipa until he had established peace among this nation and those in the mountains eight leagues away, who were the Guazapare and the Themoris, mortal enemies of the Chinipas. With reverent affection he asked the guardian angels of these poor souls to favour him by intervening with their assistance in this endeavour . . . [to] join them together in an inviolable confederation, these nations that were such ferce enemies. Padre [Castini] returned to his [mission] district, extremely delighted with the fortunate results of his journey, not to mention utterly consoled by the early foundations he had laid in this new Christianity. With fervour like never

122

Living together

seen before, noting that their Padre was now gone because his Sinaloans and Zoes were in need, the Chinipa, Themoris, and Guazapare nations made the decision to leave their homelands and walked to the Villa [of Sinaloa], the head of the missions in the [province] of Sinaloa, which is more than eighty leagues away from their territories. They asked the captain of the presidio [Diego Martínez de Hurdaide], and the Padre Visitor [inspecting] these missions, for a priest who would live among them, instruct them in matters of the faith, and administer the holy sacrament of baptism. With renewed strength Padre [Castini] got to work, and with no fewer triumphs over idolatry, which at this point appeared to be almost completely destroyed thanks to the valour of this zealous caudillo. He arrived in Chinipa and was well received with great applause and rejoicing, as they have done since his frst entrada. Gathering all of the children born that year, together with everyone else who remained to be baptized, not to mention other elderly men and women in [eternal] danger because of their advanced age, he instructed them in the teachings of the faith and solemnly baptized them. But he still felt that it was not yet time to do so for the rest of the adults, for he believed that they needed more time for further instruction and because his help was needed in his own [mission] districts. Thanks to his ingenuity, he was able to fnd a way to deal with his absence, commending to this new Christian community an Indian Christian he had brought along with him. He was very prudent and knowledgeable when it came to the catechism and doctrinal matters of our faith. He also knew how to read and write, which served him well as a teacher and, if it was necessary, to administer the holy sacrament of baptism. To better gain the confdence of this strange people, who only a short time before were enemies, he married a morally upright Chinipa maiden. Now that he was related to this people he not only taught them as if they were his own, but he also made entradas among the Guazapare and the Themoris, maintaining the promised peace and catechizing them in preparation for the holy baptism they desired, as they later received to the great beneft of their souls and perseverance in the faith when they had their own priest, who succeeded Padre Castini. This is all that can be ascertained about the illustrious work of Padre Pedro Juan Castini during his time in the apostolic ministry as a missionary. More could have been known, and more things written about him, had it not been for his great humility and his lack of interest for all human praise . . . [JD]

5.6 Toleration, coexistence, and reform: Dutch radicals argue against forced conversion and for freedom of religious expression (1539; 1609) Spiritualist authors tended to place less emphasis on creeds, rules, and formal structures of the faith, whether these were written, architectural, or

Living together

123

institutional. As a result, they had fewer things to defend or fght for, and so could afford to be more open in what they shared with others about religious belief and practice. Some were known as Radicals, since they were prepared to work for reform of the church from the roots (in latin, radix). Others were known as ‘Anabaptists,’ from their custom of rebaptizing as adults those believers who had frst been baptized as infants by their parents – they believed that the choice to believe should be marked by self-conscious adults rather than by hopeful parents. Above all they believed that in matters of the spirit, the conscience should be free, and the state should not impose any particular forms of creed, catechism, or worship. Source: David Joris, Letter to the Court of Holland (1539); Pieter Jansz Twisck, Religion’s Freedom (1609) The Anabaptist leader David Joris (1501–56), in a letter written in 1539 to the Court of Holland at The Hague, pleads with its members to stop persecuting his followers and all religious dissenters.6 For the evil shall maintain the upper hand until the end . . ., all of which is signifed for as long as it shall endure. So always work (if you have any affection for the understanding of the fear of God) and do so much for this until there is quiet and peace in the earth under you for us, and grant our poor ones of this world bread and water, that we had previously had freedom in. Yes, we would prefer to live on the felds as the outcasts, so that we grow up as children in stillness and peace and might live our faith in Christ Jesus, until perhaps over time we die and perish, if it is so ordained. Thus allow or permit us little ones to be just like the dogs that wander among the people and give us a sign on our cloak, that people could know us thereby and speak to us to inspect our doctrine, so that you will have no concern over this, since holiness is so easy to have. The Jews and heathens have their free places or dwellings among the peoples. Turks, Saracens and other horrible folk are allowed in these lands, as well as our people among them, in their land, so that, contrary to here, anyone can live there, as each is allowed their own faith. It would be good were it so in these lands, but you cannot seem to understand this as good, this I know well. Though I leave this here. In 1609, the Dutch reformer Pieter Jansz Twisck published a history of religious freedom from the time of Christ to the present in order to argue against all efforts to force conversion or belief. As was common at the time, the book’s lengthy title gave a summary of its contents.7 Titlepage: Religion’s Freedom. A Short Chronicle description of the Freedom of Religion against the forcing of Consciences, collected out of many different books, from Christ’s time until the Year 1609. From which people can see clearly as in a mirror the counsel, teaching, work, and insight of many emperors, kings, lords, princes, dukes, noble persons, old and new teachers, learned as well as common, and well-respected men (of diverse inclinations), on how to deal with heretics. That the steel sword of the secular authority does not extend to forcing belief of the conscience; that

124

Living together

the heretics and misbelievers must not be won over by their force but with God’s word. That different religions do not bring ruin or unrest into a land or city. That the kingdom of Christ is not of this world: and that the Gospel does not need to be defended with the sword, with many more other noteworthy pieces of history and teaching, very valuable and proftable for all rulers, both ecclesiastical and secular. Twisck quoted other radicals and religious refugees in his account of religious freedom. He conveys Sebastian Castellio’s description of the Turkish sultan’s response to efforts to convert him. The Turkish emperor gave in response to the Pope’s efforts to compel him to the Christian faith, this reply: “I believe that Christ was a great and famous Prophet, but he never commanded . . . that people should be compelled with force and weapons, to accept his law, and that indeed, he would also not compel anyone to believe in Mohammed; Christ did not wish that his gospel should be taught with force of weapons, but with preaching and teaching.” Twisck also cited the Silesian Spiritualist Caspar Schwenckfeld: I maintain for certain that the worldly governments . . . if they were like Christians, have no power, force, nor right in matters of the Christian faith, concerning the business of the New Testament, to master or to impose on anyone commandments and prohibitions in the kingdom of Christ . . . to compel anyone to the faith . . . So that Christendom in the letters [of scripture], in outward righteousness or worship and as recorded in the above written laws (as some believe), so perhaps the government were like the Turks and heathens, and were in harmony with the Jewish world, ordering their power as if they had the authority to punish souls with the sword in matters of religion. But since this relates to spiritual matters of the faith, and exists in the righteousness of the hearts, in the true good blessedness in the spirit in the power of God and in the freedom of the conscience, so the government cannot ordain, or command, or forbid, but it must only be ruled by the Lord Jesus (who is the head of the church) with his word . . . [GW]

5.7 An English radical advocates for the return of Jews to England – on condition (1621) Jews were formally expelled from England in 1290. While a small number lived there in the sixteenth century, they could not practice their religion openly. Henry Finch (c. 1558–1625) was a radical English Protestant lawyer and parliamentarian who, in 1621, published The World’s Great Restauration, or, The Calling of the Jewes, published by the London Puritan preacher William Gouge. Both men were briefy imprisoned by King James I for producing this controversial work. A six-page summary of Finch’s 200page text was published in Dutch as A lovely Prophesy, of the Great Restoration of the World in 1623. Finch did not advocate toleration of the Jewish

Living together

125

religion. If Jews returned to England, it was to be as converts to Christianity which, he argues, has superseded Judaism. The distance between this call for coexistence and the forced baptisms in Iberia is not that great after all.8 Source: Henry Finch, The World’s Great Restauration. Or The Calling of the Jewes (London, 1621) The Calling of the Jewes. A Present to Judah and the Children of Israel that joyned with him, and to Joseph (the valiant tribe of Ephraim) and all the house of Israel that joyned with him. The Lord give them grace, that they may returne and seek Jehovah their God, and David their King, in these latter dayes. There is prefxed an Epistle unto them, written for their sake in the Hebrue tongue, and translated into English. To the Reader: Though we being in time passed, Gentiles in the fesh, were without Christ, being aliens from the Common-wealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenant of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world [Eph. 2:12], yet because God had said to Abraham, In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed [Gen. 12:3], the faithfull Jewes from time to time enquired, and diligently searched after that fulnesse of time, and instantly without ceasing prayed for the accomplishment of that promise. Now seeing the state of the world is cleane alterd, and that for these many hundred yeares past the natural branches have bin broken off, and branches of the wild Olive tree graft in for them, yet (though blindnesse in part be fallen on them till the fulnes of the Gentiles be come in) [Rom.11:25] they having a promise to be grafted in againe, ought not we in gratefull recompence to pray for the accomplishment of that promise? To all the Seed of Jacob, Farre and Wide Dispersed. Peace and Truth be multiplied unto you. Daughter of Zion by feshly generation: Jerusalem which stickest close to carnall rites & ordinances, & to the legall worship: To you I bring this present, where ever you be dispersed. . . . Concerning thy repayre, and the receiving of thee into a glorious and excellent estate: purchased for thee by Immanuel thy Messias; If so be of Jerusalem according to the fesh, thou mayest be perswaded to become a member of the new Jerusalem, which is from above, the mother of true beleevers. For thee hath God honoured above all the people of the world, and given the praerogative frst and last of all his holy promises. Onely unto those out of whose loynes thou doest come, was the promise of that seede in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed. To thee alone were committed the Oracles of God, for some thousand yeares together. So as light shone in thy dwelling, when darkenes covered the whole face of the earth beside. Of thee were the Fathers, and they from whom Christ came as touching the fesh, who is God over all, blessed for ever, Amen. By the ministery also of those whom he did send, the Law came out of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem to all the ends of the earth. So great was the worth of thy Nation.

126

Living together

But him the Prince of life hast thou slaine, and nayled upon the Crosse, delivered into thy hands by the foreknowledge and determinate counsell of God. Whom God raysed up, loosing the sorrowes of death, because it was impossible he should be maistred of it; for this thine offence, and to make a way for the calling of us Gentiles, wrath is come upon thee now sixteene generations. No sorrow like to the sorrow that all this while hath befallen thee. No people so dispersed, without government, without Religion, without forme, eyther of Church or Common-wealth. No nation so contemptible & abhorred in the sight of God and Men. And that worthily; for in thee is found a sinne of all that ever were in the world the shamefullest. To murder him that created thee; that by his word and works did magnife thee, and make thee so famous, that came in his owne person to save thee: the Lord himselfe from Heaven. But the dayes of this thy sinfulnesse, God winking at, doth now every where, and by all meanes in hope of repentance. Out of all the places of thy dispersion, East, West, North, and South, his purpose is to bring thee home againe, & to marry thee to himselfe by faith for evermore. In stead that thou wast desolate and forsaken, and sattest as a widow, thou shalt fourish as in the dayes of thy youth. Nay, above and beyond thy youth. To be the joy of the earth, the most noble Church that ever eye did see. [he then describes the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple] All the Kings of the Gentiles shall bring their glory into thy citie, and fall downe before thee. . . . Blessed shall they be that blesse thee, & cursed shall they be that curse thee. When the Lord shall raise thy dead carkases, by the ministrie of the Gospell, and say, Awake ye that have slept so long in the dust of the earth. And because God wil do these great things for thee, doe thou prepare thy selfe to meete thy God. Words faile me for to set an edge, and to put some spirituall life into thee. But my hart shall never faile to pray for thy prosperitie all my dayes. Bowing my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of glorie, that he would hasten that which he hath spoken concerning thee by the Prophets of old, and by the Apostles send by his sonne. Whose counsels are without repentance, his love never changeth: he will not forget his promises to thy Fathers: but will graft thee in by faith into that natural Olive tree, from the which, thorough infdelity thou art hitherto broken off. The root is holy and so it shall be manifest that thou (the branches) art, when Gog and Magog [i.e., the Turkish empire] following before thee (which dayes are even now at hand) that shalt sit as a Lady in the mount of comelinesse, that hill of beautie, the true Zion, and heavenly Jerusalem, to the worldes admiration. The frst converted shall be out of the North and the East quarters . . . And that about the time when the Turkish tyrannie shall have lasted 350 yeares . . . They shall repaire towards their owne country . . . In the way, Euphrates shall be laid dry for them to passe, as once the Red Sea was. . . . This tidings of this shall shake and affright the Turkish power. . . . A marveilous confict shall they have with Gog and Magog, that is to say, the Turke. . . . And shall

Living together

127

be in sore distresse. . . . This confict shall be in their owne country, the land of Judea . . . A noble victorie they shall obtaine. God from heaven miraculously fghting for them. . . . It seemeth the maine blow where the Grand Signior himselfe must fall, shall be at, or neere Jerusalem. . . . This conquest of Gog and Magog commeth 45 yeares after their frst conversion, which is the 395 yeare [p.4] and last period of the Ottoman Empire. [GW]

5.8 Can an Indigenous woman become a nun? (1723) Colonization, religious reform, conversion, and race all conditioned each other in the hardening attitudes that Europeans had towards themselves and others. Here, a Spanish colonial offcial responds to the question as to whether noble Indigenous women ought to be able to found their own convent. European convents had for centuries been class-based enclosures where wealthy families lodged the daughters who they could or would not marry, and there were numerous examples of this same practice in colonial settings. This offcial articulates the stiffening resistance that characterized white supremacy: he argues that native women by nature lacked the will, intellect, emotional stability, spiritual maturity, and moral restraint required of nuns. Baptism might make an Indigenous woman a Christian, but in the view of this Spanish colonial offcial, it was her race that made her constitutionally incapable of ever becoming a nun.9 Source: Alejandro Romano, Correspondence with superiors (1723) Your Highness, through your Royal Act, ordered that I should give my opinion about the foundation of a convent for noble Indian women that is planned in this imperial city of Mexico, and obeying this command as I must, I saw that I fnd nothing that predisposes Indian women to become nuns. On the contrary, I fnd them positively unft for the following reasons: Nuns are Christian ladies who, wishing to achieve perfection in all the virtues, profess that they will live in a community and perpetually encloistered under the obedience of a prioress who will oblige them to keep the three vows common to all religious, and other rules and statutes that are deemed effective means of achieving this end. I see nothing predisposing Indian women to any of this. First, they do not have the right nature to live in communities, as is apparent from their ancient and present manner of life, for before the coming of our Holy Faith to these lands (not counting those who lived in the company of their little kings), the rest lived in the mountains and in small farms. And the gentiles continue like this, even though after Holy Baptism and thanks to the enormous hard work of their ministers, they may have begun to conform to living in towns. For the most part, they maintain their natural proclivity for asocial and uncivilized life. For each one builds his house very far away from any others. For this there may be one of two reasons; either they

128

Living together

have no patience or faith in being able to suffer and pass over any irritation from their neighbor, or they do not want their behavior to be observed – one or the other, whichever is truer. And if the nature of the Indians is such that one cannot bear to live next to the other, how will Indian women get used to living together in a house where each one is exposed to everyone’s gaze, and where all their actions will be observed so that the prioress can discipline them, and where they will be obliged to accept and suffer all the vexations of the other women? Generally speaking, constancy of spirit in their good intentions is also lacking in Indians, as experience teaches us. And even if this were lacking, reason cannot compensate for it as the facility to change one’s mind and wishes comes, as St Thomas taught, from the imperfect understanding of things. For this reason angels know things clearly and perfectly and are very certain in their judgments and feelings. For the same reason, we see that those men who lack understanding are also more likely to change their minds and wishes. As the Indian’s grave lack of understanding is well known to all, it naturally follows that they will also be inconstant. Who cannot fail to see that the noble Indian women are unft for profession, which requires that very arduous virtues, alien to human nature, be exercised constantly? This argument is supported by experience, for there is no doubt that it is easier and less alien for weak human nature to fulfll the obligations of a married person than those of a religious. Despite this, it is almost impossible to fnd a married Indian woman who does not repent being so, and many of them repent so sincerely that they leave their husbands forever. Due to this, I cannot see how prudence will allow that such inconstant women profess as religious and vow eternal cloister, things that require great constancy of spirit and no little strength – something that is also generally lacking in Indian women. For this reason, they are unft for the religious estate, as this requires the mortifcation of all passions and the continual desire to abnegate one’s self-will. This cannot be achieved without great strength of spirit, something that is in large part a consequence of understanding, for understanding reveals to self-will the value of virtues that are hidden from the senses, and so encourages and urges self-will to mortify its disorderly appetites. For this reason, all priests and spiritual directors strongly recommend that those in their care meditate on the external truths, for without this meditation there can be no strength in the soul, without strength there can be no mortifcation, and without mortifcation it is madness to pretend to reach any virtue at all. It being well known that the understanding of Indian women is very limited, it is also manifest that they are incapable of meditating upon themselves on the eternal verities; consequently, they lack the strength of spirit so necessary for the mortifcation of passions and for carrying not only the cross that Our Lord commanded all Christians to carry as a necessary means of reaching heaven, but also the most heavy and most diffcult cross to bear, the cross borne by religious (who in order to please Our Lord promise solemnly many hard and diffcult things) which

Living together

129

Our Lord did not wish to make obligatory but discretionary. Thirty years’ experience of dealing with them has shown me that Indian women have such little understanding that they are unable to meditate or reason thoughtfully on the verities of our Faith. Every effort I have made to teach them meditation has been in vain and without success. The Doctors of the Church doubt whether a vow of chastity made by a person extremely inclined to incontinence is valid and many of them, all very grave, affrm that it is not, basing (their judgment) on the fact that such a vow, in relation to such a person non est de meliori bono and cannot be a pleasing offering to Our Lord because it lacks seasoning [lit.: the salt of] with prudence. I do not wish that these reasons be used to prove that Indian women are incapable of becoming nuns because of the extreme diffculty that they will fnd in trying to fulfll all the obligations of that estate, but who will deny that these reasons at the very least convince one that they should not be allowed to profess, for it will certainly rather be the occasion of spiritual misadventure than beneft? It is not enough to say that it is Divine Grace and not the light of our reason that reigns and subjects our passions. For Grace does not only work within us but also with us, and usually it molds itself to Nature, as the Doctors of the Church teach us, also affrming that of the natural talents that God has given a certain person, choosing how one is destined to serve in His Church is one. The little understanding that Indian women can have of the honest virtues appropriate to religious persons is evident to us, so we should not hope that the Lord will compensate for their natural lack with extraordinary light; instead, we should interpret that He does not mean them for this estate given that He denied them the talent of understanding and reason usually so necessary for achieving religious virtues according to the systems of His ordinary providence. But above all, I do not see in the Indian women any sign of that great prudence and rationality that is needed from a mother superior in order to govern a community of incapable women and that is in turn needed from these women then under the authority of a similarly incapable mother superior. In order to govern incapable people well, the person governing must know the inclination and disposition of each of her subjects thoroughly and must have much discretion, patience, and skill, leading each one in the most appropriate path and suffering many injuries without sacrifcing the common weal. These qualities are not to be hoped for, except perhaps miraculously, from an Indian mother superior of little understanding, and even less can it be hoped for from her nuns, incapable as they are of that heroic humility, patience, and blind obedience which is required to suffer an ignorant and consequently indiscreet mother superior. This then, most powerful Sir, is my opinion with regard to the new foundation that is planned, and I believe that every superior of every religious order that has ever existed in this immense kingdom has been and is of my opinion. Although Indian men are capable of becoming religious (being

130

Living together

naturally humble), despite this, no superior had wanted to admit them or wants to admit them – not even as lay brethren of their orders, principally because of their great incapacity, inconstancy, and weakness of spirit; all of which reasons should bear more weight in relation to Indian women, they being of a less perfect sex. I also judge this opinion to be in accordance with the verdict passed by the supreme governors of this people over them, both ecclesiastic and secular, for considering their (the Indians’) great weakness in overcoming their passions (this being the fruit of their lack of understanding), they have exempted them from the need to keep certain ecclesiastical laws that bind all Christians, and for this same reason, judging them to be youths and minors, they consider as null any contracts they make without the consent of the person who acts as their tutor. Alejandro Romano Mexico, 20th of May, 1723 [NT]

Notes 1 F. Pigafetta, Relatione del Reame di Congo et delli circonvicine contrade tratta dalli scritti & ragionamenti di Odoardo Lopez Portoghese, Grassi, Rome, 1591. M. Hutchinson, trans. and ed., A Report of the Kingdom of Congo and of the Surrounding Countries, London, 1881, pp. 65–7. See also: “People and Places: São Salvador, Capital of the Kingdom of Kongo,” in M. Newitt (ed.) The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 209–11. 2 Reminyˆo, “A Portrait of an Unlikely Friendship,” 1533, cited in L. Lópex-Baralet, Islam in Spanish Literature: From the Middle Ages to the Present, pp. 196. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992. © 1992 Brill. Republished with permission of Brill; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 3 Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), Mss. 6877/ Mss.Micro 8698 (Aquí se halla en este libro luz y razón), 69v–71v (imagen 73vr–74v) http://bdh-rd.bne.es/ viewer.vm?id=0000039751&page=1 (accessed 26 March 2019). Translated by Lindsay Sidders. These lines are crossed out in the original but were transcribed by Federico Gómez de Orozco and Alba González Jácome in their publications of the visita records. It is not clear when these lines were crossed out. Federico Gómez de Orozco, “Memoriales del Obispo de Tlaxcala Fray Alonso de la Mota y Escobar,” in Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, tomo I (1939–1940: Sexta época (1939–1966)), pp. 279–81. Online. Available: https://revistas.inah. gob.mx/index.php/anales/article/view/7042 (accessed 26 March 2019). See also: L.C. Sidders, “Creole Conquests: Reformation, Representation, and Return in Early Colonial New Spain,” in N. Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 175–94. 4 The text which dates to around the 1620s has survived in a beautifully copied 1769 manuscript in Portuguese found in the collection of the Ets Haim Library in Amsterdam (EH_49_A_15; http://etshaimmanuscripts.nl/eh_49_a_15/). A Dutch translation can be found in B. Teensma, “Manuel Cardozo de Macedo, ‘La Vida

Living together

5

6

7

8 9

131

del buenaventurado Abraham Pelengrino,’” Studia Rosenthaliana 10, 1976, 1–36. Translated by Ronnie Perelis and Nicholas Terpstra. A. Bonifacio, Carta del padre Alonso Bonifacio, rector del colegio de la Compañía de Jesús de México. A los superiores y religiosos de esta provincia de Nueva España: acerca de la muerte, virtudes y ministerios del padre Pedro Juan Castini, Mexico City: Por la viuda de Bernardo Calderón, 1664. Translated by Jason Dyck. See also: J. Dyck, “Native Evangelists in Northwestern New Spain,” in N. Terpstra (ed.) Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe, Toronto: CRRS, 2020, pp. 215–34. Original Dutch text in S. Zijlstra, ed., “De Brief van David Joris aan het Hof van Holland, 1539,” Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 23, 1997, 133–49, here, p. 147. Translated by Gary Waite. See also: G. Waite, “‘Turning Turk’ the Anabaptist Way: Muslims, Jews, Christian Spiritualists, and Polemical Discourse in the Dutch Republic, c.1570–c.1630,” in Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations, pp. 73–94. P.J. Twisck, Religions vryheyt. Een korte Cronijcsche beschryvinghe van de Vryheyt der Religien/ tegen die dwang der Conscientien/ ghetrocken wt veel verscheyden Boecken/ van Christus tijt af/ tot den Jare 1609. . . . (n.p., 1609), pp. 12–13. Translated by Gary Waite. Henry Finch, The Worlds Great Restauration. Or The Calling of the Iewes . . . London, 1621; Een schoone Prophecye, Van de Groote weder-oprichtijnghe der Weireldts (n.p., 1623). Edited by Gary Waite. V. Sampson and E. Tudela, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico 1580–1750. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. © 2000. By permission of the University of Texas Press.

6

Ordering faith, ordering society

6.1 Creating new communities of believers (1527) Radical reformers were suspicious of formal statements of doctrine, which they often found to be rigid, abstract, and human constructs that were too distant from the direct inspiration which they believed God used to show his followers how to respond in the moment. They did share some convictions, however, and one of the earliest statements of these was adopted by Swiss anabaptists in 1527. While we cannot lose sight of the fact that individual groups could vary signifcantly in their views, this shows their common goal of building and disciplining communities of informed and committed believers who were willing to separate themselves from others in order to practice religious purity without the formal institutional structures of church or state.1 Source: The Schleitheim Confession (1527) Brotherly Union of a Number of Children of God concerning Seven Articles The articles which we discussed and on which we were of one mind are these: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Baptism; The Ban (Excommunication); Breaking of Bread; Separation from the Abomination; Pastors in the Church; The Sword; The Oath.

I. Observe concerning baptism: Baptism shall be given to all those who have learned repentance and amendment of life, and who believe truly that their sins are taken away by Christ, and to all those who walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and wish to be buried with Him in death, so that they may be resurrected with Him and to all those who with this signifcance request it [baptism] of us and demand it for themselves. This excludes all infant baptism, the highest

Ordering faith, ordering society

133

and chief abomination of the Pope. In this you have the foundation and testimony of the apostles. Matt. 28, Mark 16, Acts 2, 8, 16, 19. This we wish to hold simply, yet frmly and with assurance. II. We are agreed as follows on the ban: The ban shall be employed with all those who have given themselves to the Lord, to walk in His commandments, and with all those who are baptized into the one body of Christ and who are called brethren or sisters, and yet who slip sometimes and fall into error and sin, being inadvertently overtaken. The same shall be admonished twice in secret and the third time openly disciplined or banned according to the command of Christ. Matt. 18. But this shall be done according to the regulation of the Spirit (Matt. 5) before the breaking of bread, so that we may break and eat one bread, with one mind and in one love, and may drink of one cup. III. In the breaking of bread we are of one mind and are agreed (as follows): All those who wish to break one bread in remembrance of the broken body of Christ, and all who wish to drink of one drink as a remembrance of the shed blood of Christ, shall be united beforehand by baptism in one body of Christ which is the church of God and whose Head is Christ. For as Paul points out, we cannot at the same time drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the devil. That is . . . All who lie in evil have no part in the good . . . IV. We are agreed (as follows) on separation: A separation shall be made from the evil and from the wickedness which the devil planted in the world; in this manner, simply that we shall not have fellowship with them [the wicked] and not run with them in the multitude of their abominations. This is the way it is: Since all who do not walk in the obedience of faith, and have not united themselves with God so that they wish to do His will, are a great abomination before God, it is not possible for anything to grow or issue from them except abominable things. For truly all creatures are in but two classes, good and bad, believing and unbelieving, darkness and light, the world and those who [have come] out of the world, God’s temple and idols, Christ and Belial; and none can have part with the other. To us then the command of the Lord is clear when He calls upon us to be separate from the evil and thus He will be our God and we shall be His sons and daughters. . . . From this we should learn that everything which is not united with our God and Christ cannot be other than an abomination which we should shun and fee from. By this is meant all works and church services, meetings and church attendance, drinking houses, civic affairs, the oaths sworn in unbelief and other things of that kind, which are highly regarded by the world and yet are carried on in fat contradiction to the command of God . . . From all these things we shall be separated and have no part with them for they

134

Ordering faith, ordering society

are nothing but an abomination, and they are the cause of our being hated before our Christ Jesus . . . V. We are agreed as follows on pastors in the church of God: The pastor in the church of God shall, as Paul has prescribed, be one who out-and-out has a good report of those who are outside the faith. This offce shall be to read, to admonish and teach, to warn, to discipline, to ban in the church, to lead out in prayer for the advancement of all the brethren and sisters, to lift up the bread when it is to be broken, and in all things to see to the care of the body of Christ, in order that it may be built up and developed, and the mouth of the slanderer be stopped. . . . VI. We are agreed as follows concerning the sword: The sword is ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and puts to death the wicked, and guards and protects the good . . . In the perfection of Christ, however, only the ban is used for a warning and for the excommunication of the one who has sinned, without putting the fesh to death – simply the warning and the command to sin no more . . . Christ says to the heathenish woman who was taken in adultery, not that one should stone her according to the Law of His Father (and yet He says, As the Father has commanded me, thus I do), but in mercy and forgiveness and warning, to sin no more. Such [a belief] we also ought to take completely according to the rule of the ban . . . VII. We are agreed as follows concerning the oath: The oath is a confrmation among those who are quarreling or making promises. In the Law it is commanded to be performed in God’s Name, but only in truth, not falsely. Christ, who teaches the perfection of the Law, prohibits all swearing to His [followers] . . . we cannot fulfll that which we promise when we swear, for we cannot change (even) the very least thing on us. Now there are some who do not give credence to the simple command of God, but object with this question: Well now, did not God swear to Abraham by Himself (since He was God) when He promised him that He would be with him and that He would be his God if he would keep His commandments, – why then should I not also swear when I promise to someone? Answer: . . . What God forbids you to do, He has power to do, for everything is possible for Him. God swore an oath to Abraham, says the Scripture, so that He might show that His counsel is immutable. That is, no one can withstand nor thwart His will; therefore He can keep His oath. But we can do nothing, as is said above by Christ, to keep or perform [our oaths]: therefore we shall not swear at all (nichts schweren) . . . Christ also taught us along the same line when He said, Let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. He

Ordering faith, ordering society

135

says, Your speech or word shall be yea and nay. . . . Christ is simply Yea and Nay, and all those who seek Him simply will understand His Word. Amen. The Seven Articles of Schleitheim Canton Schaffhausen, Switzerland, February 24, 1527 [NT/JW]

6.2 Manifesto for a radically Christian community (1534) While some Radicals believed in creating new communities of believers free of government and church, others used civic powers to institute far-reaching reforms. This included a group that took over the German city of Münster from February 1534 to January 1536, and proclaimed it as the “New Jerusalem,” the capital of the Biblically prophesized Messianic Kingdom. Pastor Bernard Rothmann (1495–1535), converted from Catholicism to Evangelical Lutheranism to Radicalism in the short span of two years, from 1531 to 1533. He was re-baptized as a Radical the month before the city was taken over and became the leading theological voice of the new Radical regime. Polygamy was legalized in Münster, a practice Rothmann initially did not endorse, but justifes here with reference to Old Testament living and the purpose of procreation. Remnants of the siege of Münster can be seen today; replicas of the cages that contained rebellion leaders’ bodies still hang from the steeple of St Lambert’s Church.2 Source: Bernard Rothmann, A Restitution of Christian Teaching (1534) From the history of the people of God we learn that God brings about a restitution after each fall. . . . God the Almighty rightly began the restitution when he awakened Martin Luther. When Luther, however, would not further God’s grace, but remained lying in his own pride and flth, then the Antichrist became evident, and the true gospel began to appear. But the fullness of truth was magnifcently introduced in Melchior Hofmann, John Matthys, and here in our brother, John of Leiden. Thus the kingdom of Christ has begun in Münster. What has been restored by God in the New Zion will now be shown, point by point. 1. God has again restored the Scripture through us. He has abundantly made his will known to us. And as we earnestly put into practice what we understand, God teaches us further every day. 2. The Münsterites hold to the true understanding of Scripture. . . . Everything is portrayed previously in the Old Testament before it is dealt with in the New Testament. Much more, everything which we await in the New Testament has been openly anticipated in the Old Testament. . . .

136

Ordering faith, ordering society

6. Baptism is here restored. The Antichrist began child-washing, and made an idol out of water, with his magic. True baptism belongs only to those who understand and believe in Christ. 7. Through God’s grace, the true church has been restored to Münster. For 1400 years, the truth has been falsifed and repressed. . . . The true, holy church cannot be found either among Catholics or Evangelicals. The latter would have better remained papists, than to have taught halftruths, for a half-truth is no truth. . . . 10. The living communion of saints has been restored, which provides the basis for community of goods among us. . . . And accordingly everything which has served the purposes of self-seeking and private property, such as buying and selling, working for money, taking interest and practicing usury – even at the expense of unbelievers – or eating and drinking the sweat of the poor (that is, making one’s own people and fellow-creatures work so that one can grow fat) and indeed everything which offends against love – all such things are abolished amongst us by the power of love and community. . . . 11. We have again been given a sound understanding of the Lord’s Supper. . . . The Antichrist teaches that he can make a god out of bread. . . . Rather, the Lord’s Supper is a remembrance of the Lord. . . . 12. God has restored the true practice of holy matrimony amongst us. Marriage is the union of man and wife – “one” has now been removed – for the honor of God and to fulfll his will, so that children might be brought up in the fear of God. . . . Freedom in marriage for the man consists in the possibility for him to have more than one wife. . . . This was true of the biblical fathers until the time of the Apostles, nor has polygamy been forbidden by God. . . . But the husband should assume lordship over the wife with manly feeling and keep his marriage pure. Too often wives are the lords, leading their husbands like bears, and all the world is in adultery, impurity, and whoredom. Nowadays, too many women seem to wear the trousers. The husband is the head of the wife, and as the husband is obedient to Christ, so also should the wife be obedient to her husband, without murmuring and contradiction. . . . 13. Previously, there has been no true understanding of the glory of the kingdom of Christ on earth. . . . We know, however, that this kingdom must be fulflled during our generation, and that the scriptural reference to the kingdom of Christ must be awaited here on earth. . . . With his well-armed servants, Christ will defeat the devil and all unrighteousness, and then he will enter into his kingdom, in full justice and peace. . . . In sum, the people of Christ must inherit the earth. The prophets and the psalmist, together with Christ’s parables and the Apocalypse, undeniably give proof of this. . . . [JW]

Ordering faith, ordering society

137

6.3 State and church: a Catholic view (1530) The Confutatio Pontifcia was a statement of how Holy Roman Emperor Charles V saw the relation of state and church. It responds to the 1530 Augsburg Confession, which had set out the views of those rulers, territories, and cities in the Empire that were coming to gain the name “Protestant” from their rejection of the Empire’s efforts to limit their religious autonomy. The Confutatio Pontifcia was written by a group of theologians including Luther’s early adversary Johann Eck (1486–1543) and outlined Catholic principles and beliefs in a moderate fashion aimed at winning back Protestants. This portion of the longer document deals with the independent powers that religious authorities have within the Empire, a reaction to the emerging Protestant practice of giving secular and state authorities greater oversight over religious doctrines and practices.3 Source: Confutatio Pontifcia (1530) Of Ecclesiastical Power Although many things are introduced here in the topic of Ecclesiastical Power, with greater bitterness than is just, yet it must be declared that to most reverend bishops and priests, and to the entire clergy, all ecclesiastical power is freely conceded that belongs to them by law or custom. Besides, it is proper to preserve for them all immunities, privileges, preferments and prerogatives granted them by Roman emperors and kings. Nor can those things that have been granted ecclesiastics by imperial munifcence or gift be allowed to be infringed by any princes or any other subject of the Roman Empire. For it is most abundantly proved that ecclesiastical power in spiritual things has been founded upon divine right, of which St Paul indeed says: “For though I should boast somewhat more of our authority which the Lord hath given us for edifcation, and not for your destruction,” 2 Cor. 10:8, and afterwards: “Therefore I write these things being absent, lest being present I should use sharpness, according to the power which the Lord hath given me to edifcation, and not to destruction,” 2 Cor. 13:10. Paul also displays his coercitive disposition when he says: “What will ye? Shall I come unto you with a rod, or in love and in the spirit of meekness?” 1 Cor. 4:21. And of judicial matters he writes to Timothy: “Against an elder receive not an accusation but before two or three witnesses,” 1 Tim. 5:19. From these passages it is very clearly discerned that bishops have the power not only of the ministry of the Word of God, but also of ruling and coercive correction in order to direct subjects to the goal of eternal blessedness. But for the power of ruling there is required the power to judge, to defne, to discriminate and to decide what is expedient or conducive to the aforesaid goal. In vain, therefore, and futile is all that is inserted in the present article in opposition to the immunity of churches and schools. . . . Nor does Christian

138

Ordering faith, ordering society

liberty, which they bring forth as an argument, avail them, since this is not liberty, but prodigious license, which, inculcated on the people, excites them to fatal and most dangerous sedition. For Christian liberty is not opposed to ecclesiastical usages since they promote what is good, but it is opposed to the servitude of the Mosaic law and the servitude of sin. “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin,” says Christ, John 8:34. Hence their breaking fasts, their free partaking of meats, their neglect of canonical hours, their omission of confession – viz. at Easter – and their commission and omission of similar things, are not a use of liberty, but an abuse thereof, contrary to the warnings of St Paul, who earnestly warned them, saying: “Brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the fesh, but by love serve one another.” Gal. 5:13. Hence no one ought to conceal his crimes under the pretext of Gospel liberty, which St Peter also forbade: “As free, and not using your liberty for an cloak of maliciousness, but as the servant of God,” 1 Pet. 2:16. As to what they have added concerning abuses, all the princes and estates of the Empire undoubtedly . . . desire to strive with a common purpose and agreement, in order that, the abuses being removed and reformed, the excesses of both estates may be either utterly abolished or reformed for the better, and that the ecclesiastical estate, which has been weakened in many ways, and the Christian religion, which has grown cold and relaxed in some, may be restored and renewed to its pristine glory and distinction. To this, as is evident to all, His Imperial Majesty has thus far devoted the greatest care and labor, and kindly promises in the future to employ for this cause all his means and zeal. [NT]

6.4 State and church: a Protestant view (1559) Do monarchs care what their subjects believe, or just how they act? Elizabeth I became queen of a deeply Catholic nation in November 1558, and initially aimed only to restore the church structure that her half-brother Edward VI had adopted at the beginning of that decade. This meant English bishops answering to an English monarch and English Christians worshipping with English rituals. Her Act of Uniformity in April 1559 was more about order than belief, though of course these two could not easily be separated. It established by Parliamentary law that English religion would be an English matter, and therefore gave legal expression to what contemporary Catholic monarchs assumed in practice. Elizabeth followed her father Henry VIII in merging heresy and treason for reasons of order and control: England under Elizabeth was barely, if at all, a “Protestant” nation. Yet later generations would build on this legal foundation a more nationalist and exclusive ideology that merged Englishness and Protestantism and kept

Ordering faith, ordering society

139

Catholics, Jews, and Muslims outside of the English body politic and, for a long time, outside England’s borders.4 Source: Elizabeth I, Act of Uniformity (1 Elizabeth 1 c. 2 – April, 1559) Where at the death of our late sovereign lord King Edward the Sixth, there remained one uniform order of common service and prayer and of the administration of sacraments, rites, and ceremonies in the Church of England, which was set forth in one book entitled the Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of Sacraments, and Other Rites and Ceremonies in the Church of England, authorized by Act of Parliament holden in the ffth and sixth years of our said late sovereign lord King Edward the Sixth, entitled: An Act for the Uniformity of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, the which was repealed and taken away by Act of Parliament in the frst year of the reign of our late sovereign lady Queen Mary, to the great decay of the due honor of God, and discomfort to the professors of the truth of Christ’s religion: Be it therefore enacted by the authority of this present Parliament, that the said Statute of Repeal, and everything therein contained, only concerning the said book and service, administration of sacraments, rites, and ceremonies contained or appointed in or by the said book, shall be void and of none effect from and after the feast of the Nativity of St John Baptist next coming (24 June 1559), and that the said book, with the order of service and of the administration of sacraments, rites, and ceremonies, with the alterations and additions therein added and appointed by this statute, shall stand and be from and after the said feast of the Nativity of St John Baptist in full force and effect according to the tenor and effect of this statute, anything in the aforesaid statute of repeal to the contrary notwithstanding. And further be it enacted by the Queen’s Highness with the assent of the Lords and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by authority of the same, that all and singular ministers in any cathedral or parish church or other place within this realm of England, Wales, and the marches of the same or other the Queen’s dominions, shall from and after the feast of the nativity of St John Baptist next coming (24 June 1559), be bound to say and use the Matins, Evensong, celebration of the Lord’s Supper and administration of each of the sacraments, and all their common and open prayer, in such order and form as is mentioned in the said book so authorized by Parliament in the said ffth and sixth years of the reign of King Edward the Sixth, with one alteration or addition of certain lessons to be used on every Sunday in the year, and the form of the litany altered and corrected, and two sentences only added in the delivery of the sacrament to the communicants, and none other or otherwise; and that if any manner of parson, vicar, or other whatsoever minister, [refuses] to use the said common prayers, or to minister the sacraments

140

Ordering faith, ordering society

in such cathedral or parish church or other places . . . in such order and form as they be mentioned and set forth in the said book; or shall willfully or obstinately standing in the same, use any other rite, ceremony, order, form or manner of mass openly or privately, or Matins, Evensong, administration of the sacraments, or other open prayer than is mentioned and set forth in the said book, . . . or shall preach, declare, or speak anything in the derogation or depraving of the said book, or anything therein contained, or of any part thereof, and shall be thereof lawfully convicted, according to the laws of this realm, by verdict of twelve men, or by his own confession, or by the notorious evidence of the fact, shall lose and forfeit to the queen’s Highness, her heirs and successors, for his frst offence, the proft of all his spiritual benefces or promotions . . . in one whole year next after his conviction; and also that the person so convicted shall for the same offence suffer imprisonment by the space of six months, without bail or mainprise; and if any such person once convicted of any offence concerning the premises, shall after his frst conviction eftsones [i.e., again] offend, and be thereof in form aforesaid, lawfully convicted, that then the same person shall for his second offence suffer imprisonment by the space of one whole year, and also shall therefore be deprived ipso facto of all his spiritual promotions; and that it shall be lawful to all patrons, donors, and grantees of all and singular the same spiritual promotions to present to the same and other able clerk, in like manner and form as though the part so offending were dead; and that if any such person or persons . . . shall offend against any of the premises the third time shall be deprived ipso facto of all his spiritual promotions and also shall suffer imprisonment during his life; and if the person that shall offend or be convicted in form aforesaid, concerning any of the premises, shall not be benefced nor have any spiritual promotion, that then the same person so offending and convicted shall for the frst offence suffer imprisonment during one whole year next after his said conviction without bail or mainprise; and that if any such person, not having any spiritual promotion, after his frst conviction shall eftsones offend in anything concerning the premises, and shall in form aforesaid be lawfully convicted, that then the same person shall for his second offence suffer imprisonment during his life . . . [NT]

6.5 Building the Kongo church with – and in spite of – Christian traders and missionaries (1526; 1539) Kongo and Portugal entered an alliance with the conversion of King Nzinga a Nkuwu (baptized as João I in 1491). As Kongo adopted Christianity, the two kingdoms developed a partnership in which the Portuguese shared

Ordering faith, ordering society

141

military and technological resources in return for trade, which was mostly in slaves. Afonso I, king of Kongo from 1506–43 sought to expand connections but was cautious of Portugal’s colonialist reach. In 1526, he wrote twice to King João III of Portugal complaining that Portuguese merchants in Kongo were thieves and slave traders. In 1539, he complained of the poor treatment of Kongolese noble youths in Portugal itself. Afonso I had created a Kongolese Christian church with an educational network that trained local noble youths in Christian theology and liturgy (in Kongo, Lisbon, and Rome) and then sent them across the country. Portuguese Jesuit missionaries played a relatively small role in missions and focused on administering the sacraments. Afonso I wished to end this dependence on foreign clergy, and Rome cooperated with him by appointing his son Henrique as Bishop of Utica. The Kongolese youths mistreated in 1539 may have been from the 12 kanda, matrilineal descent groups which constituted the Mwissikongo aristocracy from whom the kings were selected. Some of the Mwissikongo nobles adopted Portuguese names like Castro and Menses. The problem of racial discrimination would lead Afonso I to work on developing an Indigenous Kongolese church with its own distinctive character in the decades before his reign ended.5 Source: Letters of King Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga of Kongo to King João III of Portugal (1526; 1539) July 15266 Your Highness should know how our Kingdom is being lost in so many ways that it is convenient to provide for the necessary remedy, since this is caused by the excessive freedom given by your agents and offcials to the men and merchants who are allowed to come to this Kingdom to set up shops with goods . . . . . . the mentioned merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives, because the thieves and men of bad conscience grab them wishing to have the things and wares of this Kingdom which they are ambitious of; they grab them and get them to be sold; and so great, Sir, is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated, and Your Highness should not agree with this nor accept it as in your service. And to avoid it we need from those (your) Kingdoms no more than some priests and a few people to teach in schools, and no other goods except wine and four for the holy sacrament. That is why we beg of Your Highness to help and assist us in this matter, commanding your factors that they should not send here either merchants or wares, because it is our will that in these Kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them. Concerning what is referred [to] above, again we beg of Your Highness to agree with it, since otherwise we cannot remedy such an obvious damage. Pray Our Lord in His mercy to have Your Highness under His guard and let you do forever the things of His service. . . .

142

Ordering faith, ordering society

October 1526 Moreover, Sir, in our Kingdoms there is another great inconvenience which is of little service to God, and this is that many of our people, keenly desirous as they are of the wares and things of your Kingdoms, which are brought here by your people, and in order to satisfy their voracious appetite, seize many of our people, freed and exempt men, and very often it happens that they kidnap even noblemen and the sons of noblemen, and our relatives, and take them to be sold to the white men who are in our Kingdoms; and for this purpose they have concealed them; and others are brought during the night so that they might not be recognized. And as soon as they are taken by the white men they are immediately ironed and branded with fre, and when they are carried to be embarked, if they are caught by our guards’ men the whites allege that they have bought them but they cannot say from whom, so that it is our duty to do justice and to restore to the freemen their freedom, but it cannot be done if your subjects feel offended, as they claim to be. And to avoid such a great evil we passed a law so that any white man living in our Kingdoms and wanting to purchase goods in any way should frst inform three of our noblemen and offcials of our court whom we rely upon in this matter, and these are Dom Pedro Manipanza and Dom Manuel Manissaba, our chief usher, and Gonçalo Pires our chief freighter, who should investigate if the mentioned goods are captives or free men, and if cleared by them there will be no further doubt nor embargo for them to be taken and embarked. But if the white men do not comply with it they will lose the aforementioned goods. And if we do them this favor and concession it is for the part Your Highness has in it, since we know that it is in your service too that these goods are taken from our Kingdom, otherwise we should not consent to this . . . March 15397 Six of our relatives go in the company of Dom Manuel, our brother whom we now send to Rome to offer our obedience (as we have written to Your Highness through him). Because Your Highness knows their rank, we write to you so that in this way they may be shown favour and orders be given for their maintenance. [They are] Dom Manuel our grandson, son of our daughter, a nobleman with lands and vassals and of the twelve of our Court; and Dom Pedro de Castro who is our nephew on both sides [of the family], son of a cousin and cousin of a sister, a person who has already been to that kingdom with the bishop, Dom Henrique, our son, who is in holy glory. These two men go in order to remain in the kingdom, where they will learn to read and write and [to understand] things [necessary] for God’s service. Dom Mateus and Dom Henrique are also our nephews. These two are ordered to accompany our said brother and ambassador on the journey to Rome, so that they can bear witness to the good and holy things which they will see there; and they will learn about them and speak of them to those

Ordering faith, ordering society

143

who have not seen them. Dom Gonçalo and Dom Francisco de Meneses, also our nephews and intimates, who from their extreme youth have been brought up in the Church and in our chapel, go to receive minor orders, and they will learn and in due time be able to teach others. We request Your Highness’s favour to order them to be made welcome, provided for and treated as our relatives and members of our lineage, which they are. And we remind you of this and request your favour for them, so that they can fulfl the orders with which we have sent them from this kingdom. For during the lifetime of the king, your father (whom God has in his glory), and at his orders, we sent from this kingdom to Portugal, through a certain António Vieira, twenty or more boys, grandsons, nephews and relatives of ours, who were among the most intelligent, to learn about the service of God, for such was the said king’s intention and desire. António Vieira left some of the said boys in the land of Pangu a Lungu, our enemy, and these we were later only able to recover with much diffculty. Others whom he left in the island of São Tomé came back to us. He took only ten boys to that kingdom [of Portugal], and to this day we do not know whether they are alive or dead, or what has become of them or what explanation to give to their parents. We presume that, as it was not known that they were our relatives, and no one reminded Your Highness of them, they perished and died in destitution. However, we are hopeful that for these youths there will be a different remedy, and favour will be shown [to them] by the grace of Your Highness, whose life and royal estate the Lord God has always in his keeping and whom he preserves for His holy service. [AS, HB]

6.6 A Japanese emperor’s views on religion, rural order, and commerce (1587) The frst Catholic missionary arrived in Japan in February 1582. Alessandro Valignano was an Italian Jesuit who later wrote on Emperor Hideyoshi’s response and on his policies towards both local Buddhist religious traditions and institutions and Christian missions. While the Jesuit wrote optimistically of the Japanese response to Christianity, two edicts imposed by Hideyoshi in 1587 illustrate a very different picture. The Limitation on the Propagation of Christianity and Expulsion of Missionaries imposed strict regulations on the transmission of Christianity and ordered the expulsion of all foreign missionaries, here also called padres, within 20 days. Yet Valignano remained and other missionaries continued arriving, showing that Hideyoshi’s edicts were not strictly enforced. Hideyoshi was concerned about economic and commercial loss that would occur with the total expulsion of the Jesuits, who were overseeing the lucrative silk and silver trade that was active from Macao to Nagasaki. Thus, Hideyoshi periodically ordered local offcials to curb Jesuit missionary activity, though without damaging Japan’s commercial benefts. While the edict was not enforced

144

Ordering faith, ordering society

with vigour, the European missionaries were still subjected to persecution by the Japanese authorities and the occasional destruction of their houses and churches.8 Source: Two Edicts of Japanese Emperor Toyotomi Hideyoshi Excerpts from Limitation on the Propagation of Christianity, 1587 1. Whether one desires to become a follower of the padre is up to that person’s own conscience. 2. If one receives a province, a district, or a village as his fef, and forces farmers in his domain who are properly registered under certain temples to become followers of the padre against their wishes, then he has committed a most unreasonable illegal act. 3. When a vassal (kyu¯nin) receives a grant of a province or a district, he must consider it as property entrusted to him on a temporary basis. A vassal may be moved from one place to another, but farmers remain in the same place. Thus if an unreasonable illegal act is committed [as described above], the vassal will be called upon to account for his culpable offense. The intent of this provision must be observed. 4. Anyone whose fef is over 200 cho¯ and who can expect two to three thousand kan of rice harvest each year must receive permission from the authorities before becoming a follower of the padre. 5. Anyone whose fef is smaller than the one described above may, as his conscience dictates, select for himself from between eight or nine religions. ... 8. If a daimyo¯ who has a fef over a province, a district, or a village, forces his retainers to become followers of the padre, he is committing a crime worse than the followers of Honganji who assembled in their temple [to engage in the Ikko¯ riot]. This will have an adverse effect on [the welfare of] the nation. Anyone who cannot use good judgment in this matter will be punished. . . . Excerpts from Expulsion of Missionaries, 1587 1. Japan is the country of gods, but has been receiving false teachings from Christian countries. This cannot be tolerated any further. 2. The [missionaries] approach people in provinces and districts to make them their followers, and let them destroy shrines and temples. This is an unheard of outrage. When a vassal receives a province, a district, a village, or another form of a fef, he must consider it as a property entrusted to him on a temporary basis. He must follow the laws of this country, and abide by their intent. However, some vassals illegally [commend part of their fefs to the church]. This is a culpable offense.

Ordering faith, ordering society

145

3. The padres, by their special knowledge [in the sciences and medicine], feel that they can at will entice people to become their believers. In doing so they commit the illegal act of destroying the teachings of Buddha prevailing in Japan. These padres cannot be permitted to remain in Japan. They must prepare to leave the country within twenty days of the issuance of this notice. 4. The black [Portuguese and Spanish] ships come to Japan to engage in trade. Thus the matter is a separate one. They can continue to engage in trade. 5. Hereafter, anyone who does not hinder the teachings of the Buddha, whether he be a merchant or not, may come and go freely from Christian countries to Japan. [HB]

6.7 The limits of toleration for Protestants in Italy (1561) Non-Catholic Christians known as Waldensians lived in the alpine valleys between modern day France and Italy, an area then known as the Duchy of Savoy. Long considered heretical, they became even more so when they allied with emerging Protestant groups. The Dukes of Savoy feared that persecution would drive them to support France, and so granted very limited toleration in 1561: some freedom of movement, public preaching and charity in sharply-delineated areas, a limited number of ministers allowed to practice in certain areas and times, continuation of earlier privileges, freedom to avoid Catholic mass, release of prisoners, and freedom from attack by others. Waldensian leaders had to pledge adherence, while the Duke left himself free to revoke any provisions if reason of state required it.9 Source: An Edict of the Duke of Savoy (5 June 1561) In the Name of God. His Highness issueth out his Letters Patents, by which it may appear, in what manner his Highness grants an Indemnity to the people of the Valleys of Angrognia, Bobio, Villaro, Valguicchiardo, Rora, Tagliaretto, and La Rica di Boneti at the end of La Torre, S. Martino, Perosa, Roccapiatta, and S. Bartholemo, and every one of these, as also to all such as shall be found to have assisted them, for all offences by them committed, whether they be damages, deaths, ruines, or fnes; as well in particular, as in general, either against his Highness, their mediate Lords, or other particular persons within his Highness Dominions, restoring them into his favour as if they had never acted any thing against his Highness; and upon this account, receiving them into his safeguard and protection. 1. It shall be permitted to those in Angrogna, Bobio, Villaro, Valguicchiardo, and Rora, being members of the Valley of Lucerna and likewise to those of Pralibece, Roderet, Masel, Maneglia, and Salea, Members

146 Ordering faith, ordering society

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

of the Valley of S. Martino, to have preaching Assemblies, and other Ministerial offces, according to their Religion, in their wonted places. It shall be permitted them to have the same at Villaro, which is part of the Valley of Lucerna; And this shall be until such time as his Highness shall make a Fort in the said place; for after such a Fort is erected, it shall not be permitted to the people of the said place to have preaching, or Congregations within the bounds of the said place. But it shall be lawfull for them to erect a place convenient for such like services, in some adjacent place towards Bobio, as they shall fnd most convenient. Nevertheless it shall be permitted to the Ministers to come within the said bounds, to visit the sick, and perform other necessary duties of their Religion, provided that they neither preach, nor gather together any suspected Congregation. At Togliaretto and Rua de Boneti, which are the Confnes of their Lands, it shall be permitted them to have preaching, and Congregations in the wonted places; provided that they do not enter into the other confnes of their Lands to do the like. It shall not be permitted to the above-mentioned members of the Valley of Lucerna, and S. Martino above-said, to come within the other bounds of the said Valley, or the rest of his Highness’s Dominions, passing the bounds of their prescribed limits there, to have preaching Congregations, or Disputations, having only permission to do this within their own bounds. And if by chance they shall be demanded any thing as touching their faith, it shall be lawfull for them to make answer, without incurring thereby any punishment, either real, or personal. It shall be permitted to those of the Parish which is on the other side of Perosa, who are at present Fugitives for the sake of the said Religion, and were wont to have preaching, and Congregations, as also other Ministerial offces, according to their said Religion, onely in the place nominated, and not in any other place within the bounds of the said Parish. It shall be permitted to those of the Parish of Pinachia, in the Valley of Perosa, and to those of Roccapiatto, who are at present Fugitives for the cause of their said Religion, and do adhere to it, to have one Minister onely, which shall have liberty one day to administer and preach in the place of S. Germano called Adurmignolo, and the other day at Roccapiatta, only in the place of the said Goadini, and not in any part else of the said place, to perform all other Offces of their Religion. It shall be permitted to all persons of the Lands of the said Valley, who are at present Fugitives, and do adhere to their said Religion (notwithstanding any promise or abjuration made against their Religion before this War) to return and live in their houses with their families, according to their Religion, and to go to, and return from the Sermons and Congregations which shall be made in the said places, and other administrations of their Religion; provided, that they observe all which the above-mentioned promise to observe. And forasmuch as

Ordering faith, ordering society

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

147

many of the abovesaid will be found in the Lands of the said Valley at a great distance from such places, and will thereby necessarily stand in need of visitations, and other Ministerial functions, according to their Religion; it shall be permitted to their Ministers (such as dwell within their limits, without any prejudice to such limits) to visit and perform other Ministerial duties, according as they shall have occasion; only they shall not have publick preaching, or such as may give the least suspicion. To all the Inhabitants of the said Valleys abovementioned, and to all the forenamed Fugitives, and these who persist in their Religion, as well those of the Territories of the said Valleys, as those of Roccapiacta, S. Bartelomeo, and Miana, their goods that have been confscated shall be restored to them; provided, they be not confscated for any other cause than that of Religion, and the present or past War. It shall be permitted to all the forenamed, to recover by course of Justice, their movables and their cattel, whereof they have been robbed, and which shall be found to have been sold by their neighbours, provided they be not Souldiers; and the like is permitted to their neighbours again the abovementioned. All the Freedomes, Immunities, and Priviledges, (as well general as particular) which have been granted either by his Highness most illustrious Predecessors, his Highness himself, or other mediate Lords, shall be confrmed to the forenamed; provided, they evidence the truth thereof by Authentick Acts, and Instruments. Those of the said Valleys shall be obliged to write down the names and sirnames of all such as belong to the Territories of the foresaid Valleys, who are led by reason of the persecution of their Religion, as well such as have abjured, as others who have remained with their goods and families, that so they may enjoy the favours and benefts that their Prince and Lord shall please to bestow upon them. Because it is lawfull for a Prince in his own Countrey to cause Forts to be made, according to his pleasure, without being controlled or opposed by any of his Vassals, or Subjects, To remove any cause of suspicion which might be entertained in the minds of the forenamed of the said Valleys, it is declared, That from this time forward within some few days, his Highness may per adventure cause a Fort to be made in the place of Villaro; nevertheless it shall be without any cost of those of the Valley, except in what it shall seem good to them to contribute lovingly to their Prince. Which being done, by God’s permission, it shall be provided with a Governour, and a Captain, such as shall attend onely for the service of his Highness: Nevertheless, this shall be without the least prejudice to any mans Conscience, or his Goods. It shall be lawfull for the forenamed, before the Ministers be dismissed (whom it shall please his Highness to order to be sent away) to have others in their places; provided, they do not retain Master Martino of

148

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Ordering faith, ordering society Pragella; nor may they change or shift their abodes from one place to another of the said Valleys, otherwise then it shall be permitted to them. In the Parishes of the said Valleys, where preaching is used, and Congregations are instituted, or the Ministeries of the said Valley exercised, Mass shall be celebrated, and other offces according to the custome of Rome; but the forenamed shall not be constrained to go thereunto, or to give any help or assistance to any that offciate in that kind; and if any shall be pleased to go thither, no disturbance shall be given him by the forenamed. His Highness shall make a free gift, and irrevocable remission of all the expences which he hath been at in this War, and of the 8000 Crowns which the forenamed did owe unto his Highness, upon account of 16000 Crowns accorded in the former Warr, commanding that they be as non-subscribed in reference to this Accompt. All the prisoners which are found in the Souldiers hands, shall be restored and set at liberty, provided they pay a reasonable tax, according to their faculties, leaving the judgement and tax to discretion of the Lord de Raconigi, and to the Lord della Trinite: And all those whom the said Lords shall judge to be no lawfull prisoners, shall be released without any tax, causing like manner to be released without any payment, all those of the said Valleys who shall be found in the Galleys for cause of their Religion, and not for any other offence. Finally, His Highness shall permit all the foresaid of the said valleys, and the afore said of Miana, Roccapiatta, and S. Bartholomeo, of what state and condition soever they be (provided they be not Ministers) to be included in the common society and conversation with his other subjects, to stay, go, and come, in all places and Countreys of his Highness Territories; is likewise to buy, sell, and traffque in all sorts of Merchandizes, provided they refrain from preaching, from drawing together Assemblies, or to raise disputings, as is abovesaid: And those that are in the limits, who have not a settled residence without their own limits, nor any within the Territory of the said Valleys, without their own Territory, and the confnes thereof, and those of Miana, Roccapiatta, S. Bartholomeo, shall not usurp beyond their own confnes. And these things being punctually observed on their parts, no disturbance or molestation (whether real, or personal) shall be offered unto them, but they shall remain under the protection and safe-guard of his Highness, Moreover, Orders shall be issued out by his Highness, wherein there shall be suffcient provisions made against all disturbances, inconveniences, or plots of malignant spirits, to the end that the abovenamed may peaceably and quietly enjoy their own Religion. For the observance of all the premises, and that no inconvenience may arise about the performance and execution of the above written Articles, Georgio Monestieri of Angrogna, sent by the said Valleys, and Sindicus of S. Constance, and of Ateszani; and Rambaudo Sindicus of

Ordering faith, ordering society

149

Bobio Michele Raymondetti, sent by the Communally of Tagliaret, and a Rua di Bonecti unto La Torre; Giovanni Mala-notte, sent particularly by those of S. Jovanni Pietro Pasquale, sent by the Commonalty of the Valley of S. Martino; Thomasso Romano, of S.Germano, sent by the said Commonalty, and the whole Valley of Perosa, do promise for their Commonalties respectively, that the contents of the above-said Articles shall be inviolably observed; and in case of non-observance, they do submit to such punishment as it shall please his Highness to infict on them, promising in like manner to cause this their Engagement to be approved and confrmed (per capita Domorum) by their said Commonalties. 19. The most illustrious Lord of Raconigi doth premise that his Highness shall ratife and approve the abovewritten Articles to the underwritten, in particular, and in general, granted by the intercession of the most serene Madama, as a pure act of her special grace: In witness whereof the foresaid Lord hath subscribed these presents with his own hand; and the Ministers in the name of all the aforesaid Commonalties, have underwritten their names in quor. fd., this Fifth of June, 1561. Phillippo di Savoya. Francisco Valle, Minister of Villaro in Lucerna. Claudius Bergio, Minister of Tagliarecto. Georgio Monestierii of Angrogna. Michele Raymondetti of Tagliaretto. [SV]

6.8 Centralizing saint-making in a globalizing Catholic church (1601) The medieval process for recognizing saints placed great emphasis on local communities recognizing an individual’s sanctity with popular piety, devotions, and miracles. This resulted in some questionable cases of saint-making, including one in the south of France where the individual, St Guinefort, turned out on closer examination to be a dog. Catholic reformers argued that without tightening up procedures, saints themselves would fall into disrepute. The theology professor and cleric Angelo Rocca Camerte (1545– 1620) was a critical proponent of making the pope the key gatekeeper for canonization. His 1601 Commentary on the Canonization of the Saints was the frst treatise to claim that the pope exercised infallible judgement in this area. Camerte’s text was a strategic assertion of Rome’s central authority at a time when the Catholic Church was expanding rapidly the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and there were concerns in Rome about the individuals whom local believers might consider saints. Camerte here distinguishes three kinds of saints: those found in the Bible, those long recognized by Catholic authorities and tradition, and those recognized and promoted by local

150

Ordering faith, ordering society

communities. It is over this third group that the pope exercises his judgement infallibly as the supreme guardian of the faith and the only legitimate authority who can declare the sainthood of a servant of God.10 Source: Angelo Rocca Camerte, Commentary on the Canonization of the Saints (Rome: 1601) The Order of the Saints. I. Johannes Driedo, in his fourth book on the different dogmas and the apocryphal writings, lists three groups of saints. In the frst of these groups are listed the saints both of the Ancient and New Testament, i.e., Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and many other patriarchs and prophets: John the Baptist, Stephen, the twelve apostles and also the thief who died on the cross and to whom Christ said: “Today you will be with Me in Paradise” [Luke 23:42]; also Paul and many others who already went to the heavens and that the Holy Scripture mentioned. Driedo says that we must believe that the saints of this group live and reign in heaven, employing the same faith according to which we believe in the other articles of faith expressed in the Holy Scripture. Hence, if someone would not believe that these saints live in heaven, or would doubt it, certainly he would be counted as heretic, because he would be doubting the authority of the Canonical Scriptures, and he would think that we can be mistaken in that. This is always heresy. The Order of the Saints. II. Driedo says that in the second group of saints there are those saints whose praiseworthy life and glorious death gave glory to the universal Church in the whole world. Among their number, as I argue, and as it is summed up by Driedo, there can be those whose memory occurs in the holy canon of the mass and others according to the ordinance. Nobody can rationally or without the fault of temerity and impiety deny or put in doubt the canon of the mass with regard to the crowd of those who are saints. In fact, if someone, whoever he might be, denies the actions or stories of the Kings, the Generals or Princes or Philosophers, who are known throughout the world, he would be rightly judged as stupid and reckless. And how much more reckless and impious, as Driedo says, is someone who denies the judgment of the universal Church, made durable by the consensus of all the bishops, all the doctors, and all the men in the succession of authority? Therefore, it is necessary to believe about them that they are saints, but not – Driedo says – according to the above-mentioned revelation in the holy Scripture, as for those who are listed in the frst group. The Order of the Saints. III. In the third group of the saints there are those who were famous in different reigns and provinces because of the admirable sainthood of their life, and who through their praiseworthy life and glorious death shone forth and became known across a whole realm or province. In fact, the holy Church

Ordering faith, ordering society

151

was accustomed to apply control over canonization through the depositions of devout men or other proofs in order to recognize the true sanctity of these people. Driedo says that even if it is not mandatory for us to believe in their sainthood with the strong and unchanging faith with which we believe in the sainthood of those mentioned in the canonical Scriptures, their sanctity cannot be denied without a rashness that displays dullness and madness. But Driedo says that this dull and mad judgement would not be judged heretical. [. . .] Even if you can say that the Roman Pontiff can make mistakes in those matters which are facts, or in those proofs which pertain to particular facts, yet his judgement concerning the canonization of a certain saint is not the judgement of the kind made by a private individual; it concerns the universal status of the Church, since the relation among the saints, as we have said more than once, is a sort of profession or declaration of that faith with which we believe and proclaim the glory and the eternal life of the saints. [RS]

6.9 A Dutch radical proposes religious coexistence and toleration (1620s) In 1620, the Dutch radical Pieter Jansz Twisck published a lengthy twovolume account of religious persecution. He recorded an account of the forced baptism of a Jew in the German lands under the future Holy Roman Emperor Albert II in 1433, and noted how these forced baptisms in the Holy Roman Empire were part of a larger pattern across the Empire that took its most extreme form in Iberia when any Jews refusing baptism were expelled. Twisck noted the claims of some Christians that Jews ought to be expelled from Christian lands because it was thought that they mocked Christian rituals and desecrated sacred objects, but was very sceptical that there was any substance to them, and thought that it was the tragic consequence of having a superstitious view of the sacrament of communion. He emphasized that it was up to rulers to set the example of toleration and to ensure that different groups in their territories could live together peacefully, and offered examples of this from the Netherlands, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire.11 Source: Pieter Jansz Twisck, Chronicles of the Tyrants Downfall (1620) [a] An emergency for the Jews on account of baptism, and of one of their martyrs. Duke Albert, before he was chosen as [Holy] Roman Emperor, commanded that all the Jews in his territory be slain who would not convert to Christ, the only true God. So this led many Jews to be baptized out of fear. Duke Frederick of Austria, before he became the Roman king, took one of

152

Ordering faith, ordering society

these same Jews to his court, and kept him in his bed chamber so that he could call upon him whenever he needed him. After some years he fell into sorrow, and spoke freely about what was concerning him, that he wanted to return to the Jewish faith. And although Frederick had given him the right to leave his way of life, nevertheless he would not allow the Jew to convert again. He called the teachers of the Holy Scripture at Vienna to him. But the state only became worse. The Jew would not allow himself to be dissuaded from his purpose by prayers, promises, nor pressure. Finally Frederick grabbed him, and since he had pledged to do his all to help him, so he let them take him away. But when the Jew was unbound (as he had desired) and sentenced to death, he went forth, and seeing the fre, he began to sing a Hebrew song, and leapt joyfully into the midst of the fames unafraid. [b] Jews had been allowed to live in Spain without having to change their religion since the destruction of Jerusalem. They were [now] plundered, sold, and 30,000 of the Jews died of the plague on the journey. . . . [The Spaniards] believed that those who had been baptized were merely feigning that they had left their religion, and had [been baptized] merely to maintain control of their property, rather than becoming sincere Christians. So for this reason the Inquisition was frst established. . . . The poor people were led to this chair [of the Inquisition], and were treated with blows and canes, in great portions and amends and again . . . placed on the true path. Those among these New Christians who confessed to having held or maintained merely one ceremony of Judaism or Islam [Mahometschap], as soon as this was made known to the good Fathers, this was reason enough to bring these [victims] to torture, hurt, and oppression, yes, to the fnal punishment of death. [c] In Sternberg in Mecklenburg a Jew named Eleazar along with his relatives stabbed the holy Sacrament (obtained from a priest in small and large Hosts), from which instantly the blood supposedly ran out, and made a white linen cloth into a penitential. Thus the Jews were burned as despisers of the divine majesty, with Peter the priest. They also allegedly found the scar in the Sacrament also bloody. Whoever wants to believe this may, or they can regard this as a devil’s spookery in the Sacrament. [d: 1617] There are some Portuguese [i.e., New Christian members of the Portuguese Nation], living at Amsterdam who were taken prisoners by the Governor of Dieppe, holding them for a large ransom on the basis of the authority of the rigorous edict of the king against those of the Hebrew profession. The Lord of Asperen, Ambassador of the Gentlemen of the States of these United lands, expended great effort to win their release, though nothing came of this apart from the disgust over how the Governor treated them, when it was made known at the Court. [e: 1619] Sigismund III King of Poland is very Roman Catholic, but yet, thanks to the unrestricted freedom of the nobles, his realm contains a great number of different religions, such as Jews, Turks, Arians, Ebionites, Hussites, Roman-minded, Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites, and many other

Ordering faith, ordering society

153

sects, most of which, especially in the countryside, are allowed the free practice of their faith or region. [f: 1619] Sultan Osman, the present day Turkish emperor, is a young and brave lord whose kingdom and power is feared by all in this world. This kingdom and his laws are bound with Mahomet, made up out of Jews, heathens, and Christians, and still presently divided up into different sects. The one interprets the Alcoran thusly, the other this way, just as happens among the Christians with the scriptures. And although the Turks (similar to how it is done in popedom) seek to plant their laws with sword and fre, and to punish with death those who apostacize from their law or Alcoran, yet they nevertheless allow all sects to live with them upon [payment] of a certain tribute, and to freely practice their religion in which they hope to be saved. . . . In the land of Judea live all manner of nations, which are named Armenians, Turks, Jews, Christians, Arabs, Abyssinians, Indians, Greeks, Egyptians and others, each of which live by their manners, customs or religion. The Turks or Mahometans inhabit most of these lands, as well as (among many other sects) especially many Jews, Roman and Greek Christians. [GW]

6.10 A rabbi compares diasporic experiences (1627) Jews encountered very different conditions in the cities that they settled in around the Mediterranean and across Europe, and frequently shared and compared their experiences. In this 1627 sermon, Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira addresses Amsterdam’s uniqueness in comparison to other centres of the Jewish diaspora while also revealing rising and existing tensions between Jewish and Christian populations in Europe. Morteira was born and raised in an Ashkenazic German family in the Venetian ghetto but later moved to Amsterdam, where he delivered hundreds of sermons to large Jewish congregations until his death in 1660. Most of his sermons were delivered a generation after the Jews were given consent to worship openly in the city in 1612. The descendants of forcibly-converted Iberian Jews felt suffciently safe in Amsterdam that they began returning to Judaism. However, rabbis like Morteira believed it was necessary to educate these “New Jews” and keep them from returning to the countries and cities that suppressed Jewish practices. His mode and technique of delivery were compelling. Morteira spoke of Christian and Islamic anti-Semitic actions in a series of rhetorical questions intended to encourage refection on the events surrounding Jewish persecution, modulating his voice, and likely pausing long enough after each question to allow a mental picture to form in the minds of his audience.12 Source: Saul Levi Morteira, “The Land Shudders” (1627) Still we have not learned! Even today, we are worse that our ancestors. Did we not see during the good days that confronted us in this city how many

154

Ordering faith, ordering society

conficts occurred and how many bans were enacted, until war and loss of money and pestilence came, Heaven protect us! And so in Jerusalem, the holy city, may it be quickly rebuilt: for the past three years there was peace and tranquility in the land. But we knew the bewildering and chaotic conficts among the Jews, until the anger of Satan boiled over against them and destroyed them, as our eyes see this very day. Truly, experience teaches the truthfulness of the rabbinic statement, “misery is ftting for Israel like a red rose upon a white horse.” Even a minor sin committed in that land is much greater than in another place, for it is done in God’s presence. We see this in the verse, The people who provoke My anger continually, in My very presence [Isa. 65:3], and in the verse, My eyes and My heart will be there always [1 Kings 9:3]. How much greater is the transgression committed in the king’s palace, in the king’s very presence, than that committed in one’s own house! Why then are we irresolute in our actions? Why do we undermine our preparations to accept all God’s kindness, while we provoke Him over the good things He gives us? I Lavished silver on her, and gold, which they used for Baal (Hos. 2:10). Indeed, how great is the obligation of the leaders of these congregations to bestir themselves to improve our way of serving God, in that He has favoured us more than any other Jews in the Diaspora. (Here this matter should be discussed at length.) Where here are the taxes of Venice? The censorship of books that is all over Italy? The seizing of children for forced conversions? The sign of the [Jewish] hat that is there? The Ghettos? The need to receive permission [to remain] every so often? Being shut in at the evil time [Holy Week]? Where is the derision shown toward the Jews of Rome, [forced to] go out naked on their holidays, forced to attend their services, forced to bow down to the Pope? Where are the blood libels of Poland? Where are the humiliations of Germany? Where are the hours when they prevent us from attending [commercial] fairs? The entrances we cannot walk through, the wells we cannot drink from? Where is the harsh oppression of Turkey? The poll tax that is levied there? The cruelty of the gentiles? The fre thrown into houses? The deadly tortures connected with the manufacturing of their clothes? Where is the degradation of Barbary? Where is the youngster who will strike an old man? Where are the animal carcasses which they compel us to remove from their paths? And much more of the like, that our brothers, the entire house of Israel, suffer throughout their dispersion in exile. But God has brought us out from there. Why then are we ungrateful? Why do we not wake up and open our eyes, [to see] just as God has favoured us more than all our brothers, so should we surpass them all in our conduct, serving as an example, a model of goodness and decency, especially by helping the Holy City at a time like this? [NM]

Ordering faith, ordering society

155

6.11 Investigating a miracle in the Italian countryside (1674) Religious reformers were cautious about reports of miracles, fearing that they might arise from superstition or fraud rather than faith or divine intervention. When a shrine on the Venetian mainland began producing miracles that included an image of the Madonna which sweated and a baby boy brought back to life, the number of devotees and donations skyrocketed. The Bishop of Padua sent an offcial to investigate, and the result was an interrogation of locals that was not unlike what we read in the records of criminal courts or the Inquisition. Testing miracles was serious business. The Bishop determined that the miracles were not genuine and ordered that the shrine be dismantled, and the donations be distributed among local charitable confraternities or brotherhoods that promoted charity, devotion, and schooling in Christian doctrine.13 The local priest continued to bend the rules, as we see in reading 11.2 below. Source: Apostolic Visitations of the Diocese of Padua (1674) On 18 October 1674 in the town of Alano in the presence of the Reverend Lord Giovanni Chiericato auditor for his eminence, etc. Matteo Caberlon son of the late Andrea was examined as a pre-chosen witness, having been warned, cited, and sworn. He was interrogated and he responded as below. ASKED: What do you know of the miracles of the shrine at Masil? RESPONDED: I have seen that image sweat in August eight or ten days,

and the Madonna’s right hand, the one that holds the baby, sweated and so did her chest, and on her veil, and the baby’s back and feet sweated. I also saw the Madonna’s face change, being now red, now white, changing from one form to the other. ASKED: Who was with you? RESPONDED: There was a great crowd and among them were Mattio Vedette, Zuanne Capodiferro, who works here in the choir, and others. ASKED: In what form was this sweat? RESPONDED: It was in drops. ASKED: How big were these drops? RESPONDED: Some were the size of the head of a pin, and others were smaller. ASKED: How did you see such small things? RESPONDED: In the evenings there were candles, and in the day they can be seen by the light of the sun. ASKED: What was done with these drops? RESPONDED: Some of them dried in their places, and remained there shining like silver, and more are on the prayer book that the baby has in his hand. ASKED: If anyone touched the drops. RESPONDED: Signore no, I forbade it by order of the parish priest, and the priest touched it with rosary beads.

156

Ordering faith, ordering society

ASKED: If the said rosary beads were then wet. RESPONDED: I did not see. ASKED: What other miracles have you seen? RESPONDED: I saw baby boy who was brought

dead and resuscitated long enough to be baptized. ASKED: He is told to tell all that he saw of this miracle. RESPONDED: I was called in the middle of the night by Bernardo Spada. I was sleeping and he said to me that I should go to the shrine where our priest was with two women, Bernardo’s wife Maria and Francesca da Segusino, and others. He wanted to baptize that baby, who was brought there dead. So I went with the said Bernardo bringing a tunic and stole and the holy oil and the ritual book, and when I went to the shrine I saw the baby boy in a box, and it was a little nude body wrapped in white cloth, born before nine months. The said Maria held the box in her hands, and I saw that the baby raised his right eyelid, and had a drop of blood under his eye that appeared to boil, and having a little hand huddled up he extended a fnger, it was the index fnger, and appeared to point at the Madonna. Thus the priest baptized him with all the ritual ceremonies and he was held by the said Maria. ASKED: If the said infant moved his eye and hand. RESPONDED: Not only did this absolutely appear, but his right leg also trembled. ASKED: If he ever whimpered or cried. RESPONDED: Signore no. ASKED: When the priest put the salt in his mouth, if the child received it and moved his mouth. RESPONDED: Signore no. ASKED: How could he be baptized while in a box? RESPONDED: The woman lifted him out of the box when he baptized him, and then when he touched him on the back with saliva as is done. ASKED: If the boy moved when the baptism was done. RESPONDED: Signore no, but the spot of blood under his eye went away. ASKED: What was done with that boy? RESPONDED: I believe that the parish priest brought him to the sacristy. ASKED: If after the boy was seen to die. RESPONDED: Signore no, nothing else was seen, but that he opened his eye at the beginning of the baptism, and while he was baptized his entire body sweated and it continued to sweat for two or three days. ASKED: Whose son was this child? RESPONDED: Antonio Nani and Armelina his wife. ASKED: If alms are brought to this shrine and who has records and the keys. RESPONDED: Many alms are made. I have the key to the chapel and the book in which the parish priest notes each time how much he takes out, that currently is about one hundred ducats of coins and many other fne things of silver and gold, all of which is noted in the book.

Ordering faith, ordering society

157

ASKED: How has the priest spent this money? RESPONDED: I believe that he has spent it on the building of the choir. ASKED: What other miracles do you know about? RESPONDED: Some have said they were crippled and then gone to the shrine

and been healed, but I don’t know any of them. This witness is forty years old, has confessed and communicated at the required times, and not knowing how to write makes the sign of the cross. The eminent and reverend lord Cardinal interrogated many other selected men of this community about the contents above in the explanation of the parish priest, and found nothing relevant, nothing to conclude certainty of miracles, but only rumors, and he judged the tumult to be rather on account of the simplicity of the people and the credulity of the same priest, who seems to be of a good life. On 19 October 1674 Before departing from the visitation of the church of Alano his eminence issued the following decree and deliberation about the image of Mary mother of God in the shrine at Masil in the form of an Italian sermon, so that it may be understood by the people here present in great number, who were paternally exhorted to give proftable devotion to the omnipotent God, the mother of God always a Virgin, and the other saints in the parish church and make their alms there, and beware of the errors and frauds that are always in new things. The decree: We, Gregorio Cardinal Barbarigo, bishop of Padua etc. Having seen the shrine in the countryside, in the place called Masil in this parish of Alano, and having had suffcient information, etc, we declare that there is no miracle whatsoever in the same shrine, and therefore we command that the improvements made to the said shrine, including the lamps, the votives, and the alms box be removed, that the shrine remain as it was before the said rumors of miracles. About the contributions of the people it is ordered that all the alms received and anything else recovered in the said shrine will be faithfully conserved and kept by the leaders of the confraternities of the Most Holy Sacrament, of the Rosary, of the Conception, and of Saint Anthony of the parish church of Alano, keeping distinct records conforming to the orders that we give. For just causes our soul is moved to prohibit Reverend Pietro Zanone rector of Alano to interfere in the management of the said alms. He is expressly forbidden to encourage or exhort the people to congregate at the shrine, and to make alms there under the penalty of suspension from divine service and other penalties at our discretion. Instead the people are exhorted to exercise their devotion to the most blessed Virgin Mary mother of God before her altars erected in the parish chuch of Alano. The parish priest is obligated to present by hand all the alms, both money and objects which he has collected at the shrine to the aforesaid confraternity leaders immediately, which will be conserved by them as described above. [CM]

158

Ordering faith, ordering society

Notes 1 The Schleitheim Confession. Online. Available: www.anabaptists.org/history/ the-schleitheim-confession.html 2 B. Rothmann, Münster Ordinances from A Restitution of Christian Teaching (1534), in L.H. Zuck (ed.) Christianity and Revolution: Radical Christian Testimonies, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1975, pp. 98–101. 3 J.M. Reu, The Augsburg Confession, A Collection of Sources, Chicago, IL: Wartburg Press, 1930. Online. Available: www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/ wittenberg/concord/web/conf-28.html (accessed 1 July 2020). Open access. 4 “Elizabeth I’s Act of Uniformity,” in H. Gee and W.J. Hardy (eds) Documents Illustrative of English Church History, New York: Macmillan, 1896, pp. 458–67. 5 “Christianity in the Kongo: Noble Kongolese Youths Are Sent to Portugal and Rome to be Educated (1539)” in M. Newitt (ed.) The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 218–25. See also: J. Thornton, “Early Kongo–Portuguese Relations: A New Interpretation,” History in Africa 8, 1981, 183–204, 183. J.K. Thornton, “Conquest and Theology: The Jesuits in Angola, 1548–1650,” Journal of Jesuit Studies I, 2014, 245–59, 247. 6 Afonso I, “Letters from Afonso I to King John III of Portugal, 1526,” in A.D. Evans, J. Ruff, W.B. Wheeler, and M.E. Wiesner-Hanks (eds) Discovering the Western Past, Volume II: Since 1500, Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015, pp 38–9. © 2000. By permission of the University of Texas Press. 7 Letter of Dom Afonso I, king of Kongo to Dom João III, 25 March 1539. António Brásio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, Lisbon, 1952, 2, pp. 73–5. Original letter in Arquivo Nacional de Torre de Tombo, Corpo Cronológico I-64–71. Translated by Malyn Newitt. © Malyn Newitt 2010. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear. 8 “The Edicts of Toyotomi Hideyoshi,” in D.J. Lu (ed.) Japan: A Documentary History: The Dawn of History to the Late Tokugawa Period, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997, pp. 196–7. J.F. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 63. 9 An Edict of the Duke of Savoy (5 June 1561) in S. Morland, The History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piemont, London: 1658, p. 237. See also: S. Villani, “To Be a Foreigner in Early Modern Italy: Were There Ghettos for Non-Catholic Christians?” in N. Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 115–33. 10 A. Rocca Camerte, De canonizatione Sanctorum commentarii, Roma, apud Guillelum Faciottum 1601, pp. 98–100 and 103. Translated by Riccardo Saccenti. See also: R. Saccenti, “Reforming Canonization after the Council of Trent: Saints and Martyrs as Models of a Pure Christian Life,” in N. Terpstra (ed.) Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe, Toronto: CRRS, 2020, pp. 51–68. 11 P.J. Twisck (1565–1636), Chronijck vanden onderganc der tijrannen ofte Jaerlycklche Geschiedenissen in Werltlycke ende Kercklijke saecken. Van Christi geboorte af tot desen tyt toe, Hoorn, Netherlands: Isaac Willemssz, 1620, 2 volumes, I: beginning to 1500; vol. II, 1500 to present. This quotation: Chronijck I, pp. 798, 899, 901; Chronijck II, pp. 173, 1849, 1851–52. Translated by Gary Waite. 12 S.L. Morteira, “The Land Shudders,” Budapest Seminary MS 12, vol. 3, folios 91r–92v. Mishpatim, 1627, in Marc Saperstein, Exile in Amsterdam: Saul Levi Morteira’s Sermons to a Congregation of “New Jews,” Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew

Ordering faith, ordering society

159

Union College Press, 2005, p. 136. © 2005 Hebrew Union College Press. Republished with permission of Hebrew Union College Press; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. See also: Portuguese, Jews, New Christians and ‘New Jews:’ The Iberian Religious Views, ed. Claude B. Stuczynski, Leiden: Brill, 2018. 13 Archivio della Curia Vescovile di Padova, Visitationes 43, fols. 370r–371v. Translated by Celeste McNamara.

7

Performing the faith The art of religious identity and difference

7.1 Singing the word: songs of faith and belonging (1560; 1635) Christian laity had long emphasized singing in worship, and some Italian confraternities were even known as “praise groups” (laudesi) because they sang vernacular praise songs (laudi). As Catholic and Protestant worship practices diverged from the sixteenth century, it was the latter who most identifed vernacular song as a fundamental part of worship, particularly when the texts were drawn from the Bible. Singing the texts aided memory and built biblical literacy. Here, we fnd the text of Psalm 100 from the Geneva Bible, which was the English translation favoured by the more frmly Protestant believers within the Church of England, together with its versifcation from a 1635 Scottish psalter. When paired with a tune by the French Huguenot composer Louis Bourgeois, this was among the most popular hymns found among Protestant refugee communities.1 Source: Ps. 99:1–5 (Geneva Bible, 1560). William Kethe, “All People that on Earth Do Dwell” in The Scottish metrical psalter (1635) Psalm 100 – The Geneva Bible

All People That On Earth Do Dwell

1. A Psalme of Praise Sing ye loude unto the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness: come before him with ioyfulnes.

1 All people that on earth do dwell, Sing to the Lord with chearefull voice: Him serve with feare, his praise foorth tell, Come ye before him and rejoice.

2. Knowe ye that even the Lord is God; hee hath made vs, and not we our selves: we are his people, and the sheepe of his pasture

2 The Lord yee know is God indeed, Without our aid hee did us make: Wee are his fock, hee doth us feed, And for his sheep, hee doth us take.

3. Enter into his gates with prayse, 3 O enter then his gates with praise, and into his courts with rejoicing: Approach with joy his courts unto: Praise, laud, & blesse his Name alwaies, prayse him and blesse his Name For it is seemly so to do.

Performing the faith

161

4. For the Lord is good: his mer- 4 For why? the Lord our God is good, cie is everlasting, and his trueth His mercie is for ever sure: is from generation to generation. His truth at all times frmly stood, And shall from age to age endure. [JB]

7.2 Singing the catechism: songs of instruction (1529; 1854) While some Calvinists preferred to sing texts that closely paralleled psalms in the Bible, Martin Luther believed strongly in also using hymns to reinforce doctrines laid out formally in his Larger and Smaller Catechisms of 1529. Baptism was the ritual or sacrament that brought an individual into the Church, and Catholics and reformers argued bitterly over its forms, meanings, and uses. We have already seen Luther’s views on Catholic baptism in his 1520 polemical work, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church [1.2 above]. The left column below gives Luther’s teaching on Baptism from the Smaller Catechism (for teaching children in particular) and the right gives a translation of his rendering of the same ideas in the 1541 hymn “Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam” or “To Jordan Came our Lord, the Christ.”2 Source: Martin Luther, Smaller Catechism (1529); Richard Massie “To Jordan Came Our Lord, The Christ” (1854) IV. The Sacrament of Holy Baptism To Jordan Came Our Lord, the Christ As the head of the family should teach 1 TO Jordan came our Lord, the Christ, it in a simple way to his household. To do God’s pleasure willing, First. And there was by St John baptized, All righteousness fulflling; What is Baptism? There did He consecrate a bath Baptism is not simple water only, To wash away transgression, but it is the water comprehended And quench the bitterness of death in God’s command and connected By His own blood and passion, with God’s Word. He would a new life give us. Which is that word of God? 2 So hear ye all, and well perceive Christ, our Lord, says in the last What God doth call a Baptism, chapter of Matthew: Go ye into And what a Christian should believe all the world and teach all nations, Who error shuns and schism: baptizing them in the name of the That we should water use, the Lord Father, and of the Son, and of the Declareth it His pleasure, Not simple water, but the Word Holy Ghost.

162

Performing the faith

Secondly. What does Baptism give or proft? It works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this, as the words and promises of God declare.

And Spirit without measure;– He is the true Baptizer.

3 To show us this, He hath His word With signs and symbols given; On Jordan’s banks was plainly heard Which are such words and promises The Father’s voice from heaven: “This is My well-beloved Son, of God? In whom My soul delighteth; Christ, our Lord, says in the last Hear Him!” Yea, hear Him, every chapter of Mark: He that believeth one, and is baptized shall be saved; When He Himself inviteth; but he that believeth not shall be Hear and obey His teaching! damned. 4 In tender manhood God the Son Thirdly. In Jordan’s water standeth; How can water do such great things? The Holy Ghost from heaven’s throne It is not the water indeed that does In dove-like form descendeth; them, but the word of God which That thus the truth be not denied, is in and with the water, and faith, Nor should our faith e’er waver, which trusts such word of God in the That the Three Persons all preside water. For without the word of God At Baptism’s holy laver, the water is simple water and no And dwell with the believer. baptism. But with the word of God it is a baptism, that is, a gracious 5 Thus Jesus His disciples sent water of life and a washing of regen- Go, teach ye every nation, eration in the Holy Ghost, as St Paul That, lost in sin, they must repent, says, Titus Ch 3: “By the washing And fee from condemnation; of regeneration and renewing of the He that believes and is baptized Holy Ghost, which He shed on us Shall thereby have salvation, abundantly through Jesus Christ, A new-born man he is in Christ, our Savior, that, being justifed by From death free and damnation, His grace, we should be made heirs He shall inherit heaven. according to the hope of eternal life. 6 Who in this mercy hath not faith This is a faithful saying.” Nor aught therein discerneth, Fourthly. Is yet in sin, condemned to death And fre that ever burneth; What does such baptizing with water His holiness avails him not, signify? Nor aught which he is doing; It signifes that the old Adam in His inborn sin brings all to naught, us should, by daily contrition and And maketh sure his ruin; repentance, be drowned and die with Himself he cannot succor.

Performing the faith

163

all sins and evil lusts, and, again, a new man daily come forth and arise; who shall live before God in righteousness and purity forever.

7 The eye of sense alone is dim, And nothing sees but water; Faith sees Christ Jesus, and in Him The Lamb ordained for slaughter; It sees the cleansing fountain, red Where is this written? With the dear blood of Jesus, St Paul says in Romans Ch. 6: We Which from the sins, inherited are buried with Christ by Baptism From fallen Adam, frees us, into death, that, like as He was And from our own misdoings. raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. [JB]

7.3 Singing the colonial relation: from ‘Jesous Ahatonnia’ to ‘The Huron Carol’ (1642–43; 1899; 1927) The frst Christmas carol written in Canada was Jesous Ahatonnia (Jesus, he is born) written by the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf in 1642 or 1643. Brébeuf drew on a rich Wendat musical tradition, and adapted the tune of a French folk song “Une Jeune Pucelle” (“A Young Maid”) for use with Wendat futes. The song circulated orally for over a century before a version was written by the last Jesuit missionary to the Wendat, Etienne Thomas Girault de Villeneuve (1718–94); this translation by John Steckley reconstructs Brébeuf’s close adaptation of Wendat spirituality. A later Wendat author Paul Tsa8enhohi Picard (1845–1905) prepared a new version in the late nineteenth century which was more overtly Catholic. The Canadian Methodist poet Jesse Edgar Middleton then appropriated the French and Wendat concepts in a romanticized version still popular today as The Huron Carol, which introduces Ojibwe terminology and is quite far from the seventeenth-century text that Middleton claimed to have translated.3 a.

Jesous Ahatonnia (ca. 1642–3 – Jean de Brébeuf) Have courage, you who are humans; Jesus, he is born Behold, the spirit who had us as prisoners, domestic animals, has fed Do not listen to it, as it corrupts our minds, the spirit of our thoughts They are spirits, coming with a message for us, the sky people They are coming to say, “Be on top of life, rejoice!” “Mary has just given birth, come on, rejoice!” “Three have left for such a place; they are Elders” A star that has just risen, appeared over the horizon leads them there. He will seize the path, lead the way, a star that leads them there

164

Performing the faith

As they arrived there, where he was born, Jesus The star was at the point of stopping, he was not far past it Having found someone for them, he says, “Come here!” Behold, they have arrived there and have seen Jesus, They praised a name many times, saying “Hurray, he is good in nature” They greeted him with respect, greasing his scalp many times, saying “Hurray” “We will give him praise, honour for his name, Let us show reverence for him as he comes to be compassionate with us. It is providential that you love us and think ‘I should make them part of my family’” (Translation of John Steckley/Teondecheron) b. Men, Take Courage, Jesus Is born (ca. 1899 – Paul Tsa8enhohi Picard) Men, take courage, Jesus is born Now that the reign of the devil is destroyed Do not listen any longer to what he says to your spirits Listen to the angels of heaven Do not reject now what they have said to you Mary has conceived by the Holy Spirit, as they said to you Three chiefs took counsel On seeing a star in the frmament And they agreed to follow the star Then Jesus suggested to them the idea of coming to see Him And he thought that the star would guide them towards Him And they said to themselves that they would go towards the star These chiefs made offerings on seeing Jesus They were happy, and told Him great things They greeted him and spoke sincerely to Him Now come all and pray to Him Adore Him. He has heard our prayers Listen to Him. He wishes you to be saints. (Translation of Kathleen O’Donnell) c.

The Huron Carol (1927 – Jesse Edgar Middleton) Twas in the moon of wintertime when all the birds had fed That mighty Gitchi Manitou sent angel choirs instead Before their light the stars grew dim

Performing the faith

165

And wandering hunters heard the hymn, Jesus your King is born Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria. Within a lodge of broken bark the tender babe was found A ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapped his beauty round But as the hunter braves drew nigh The angel song rang loud and high Jesus your King is born Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria. The earliest moon of wintertime is not so round and fair As was the ring of glory on the helpless infant there The chiefs from far before him knelt With gifts of fox and beaver pelt Jesus your King is born Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria. O children of the forest free, O sons of Manitou The Holy Child of earth and heaven is born today for you. Come kneel before the radiant boy Who brings you beauty peace and joy Jesus your King is born Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria. [NT]

7.4 A Jewish life of Christ – the Toledot Yeshu Living in the midst of Christian communities which took the Jewish Torah and prophetic books into their own scriptures as the Old Testament, and which claimed Jesus to be the fulfllment of Jewish Messianic prophecies, Jews had to have their own narrative of the life of Jesus. Different versions began emerging around the Mediterranean by the sixth century, but the earliest indirect reference comes from the ninth, and the earliest manuscripts from the eleventh. Details differed from one version to another, but they typically describe Jesus, or Yeshu, as an illegitimate child conceived through the rape of a menstruating mother, who grew up as a wily, headstrong, and disrespectful youth. He gained magical powers by stealing Kabbalistic secrets from the Temple in Jerusalem that allowed him to heal the sick, raise the dead, and fy. He proclaimed himself the Messiah and gathered a mob of followers but was exposed by the actions of Jewish religious leaders and executed. His followers – here called Nazarenes – fraudulently claimed Yeshu had risen from the dead, and a religious leader sent to suppress them instead joined them and, taking the name Paul, revised Jewish doctrines,

166

Performing the faith

feasts, and rituals to create a new and distinct religion that separated the sect of Christians from their Jewish traditions. The various texts of the Toledot Yeshu were never considered canonical, yet in the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries, some Christian polemicists cited them as examples of Jewish defamation of and hostility to the Christian gospel and argued for forced conversion or expulsion of Jewish communities from European cities.4 Source: Mid-twentieth century compilation of various accounts of the Toledot Yeshu In the year 3671 [90 bce] in the days of King Jannaeus [r. 103–76 bce], a great misfortune befell Israel, when there arose a certain disreputable man of the tribe of Judah, whose name was Joseph Pandera. He lived at Bethlehem, in Judah. Near his house dwelt a widow and her lovely and chaste daughter named Miriam. Miriam was betrothed to Yohanan, of the royal house of David, a man learned in the Torah and God-fearing. At the close of a certain Sabbath, Joseph Pandera, attractive and like a warrior in appearance, having gazed lustfully upon Miriam, knocked upon the door of her room and betrayed her by pretending that he was her betrothed husband, Yohanan. Even so, she was amazed at this improper conduct and submitted only against her will. Thereafter, when Yohanan came to her, Miriam expressed astonishment at behavior so foreign to his character. It was thus that they both came to know the crime of Joseph Pandera and the terrible mistake on the part of Miriam. Whereupon Yohanan went to Rabban Shimeon ben Shetah and related to him the tragic seduction. Lacking witnesses required for the punishment of Joseph Pandera, and Miriam being with child, Yohanan left for Babylonia. Miriam gave birth to a son and named him Yehoshua, after her brother. This name later deteriorated to Yeshu. On the eighth day he was circumcised. When he was old enough the lad was taken by Miriam to the house of study to be instructed in the Jewish tradition. One day Yeshu walked in front of the Sages with his head uncovered, showing shameful disrespect. At this, the discussion arose as to whether this behavior did not truly indicate that Yeshu was an illegitimate child and the son of a niddah [i.e., a child conceived while the mother was menstruating]. Moreover, the story tells that while the rabbis were discussing the Tractate Nezikin, he gave his own impudent interpretation of the law and in an ensuing debate he held that Moses could not be the greatest of the prophets if he had to receive counsel from Jethro. This led to further inquiry as to the antecedents of Yeshu, and it was discovered through Rabban Shimeon ben Shetah that he was the illegitimate son of Joseph Pandera. Miriam admitted it. After this became known, it was necessary for Yeshu to fee to Upper Galilee.

Performing the faith

167

After King Jannaeus, his wife Helene ruled over all Israel. In the Temple was to be found the Foundation Stone on which were engraved the letters of God’s Ineffable Name. Whoever learned the secret of the Name and its use would be able to do whatever he wished. Therefore, the Sages took measures so that no one should gain this knowledge. Lions of brass were bound to two iron pillars at the gate of the place of burnt offerings. Should anyone enter and learn the Name, when he left the lions would roar at him and immediately the valuable secret would be forgotten. Yeshu came and learned the letters of the Name; he wrote them upon the parchment which he placed in an open cut on his thigh and then drew the fesh over the parchment. As he left, the lions roared and he forgot the secret. But when he came to his house he reopened the cut in his fesh with a knife and lifted out the writing. Then he remembered and obtained the use of the letters. He gathered about himself three hundred and ten young men of Israel and accused those who spoke ill of his birth of being people who desired greatness and power for themselves. Yeshu proclaimed, “I am the Messiah; and concerning me Isaiah prophesied and said, ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’” He quoted other messianic texts, insisting, “David my ancestor prophesied concerning me: ‘The Lord said to me, thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.’” The insurgents with him replied that if Yeshu was the Messiah he should give them a convincing sign. They therefore, brought to him a lame man, who had never walked. Yeshu spoke over the man the letters of the Ineffable Name, and the leper was healed. Thereupon, they worshipped him as the Messiah, Son of the Highest. When word of these happenings came to Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin decided to bring about the capture of Yeshu. They sent messengers, Annanui and Ahaziah, who, pretending to be his disciples, said that they brought him an invitation from the leaders of Jerusalem to visit them. Yeshu consented on condition the members of the Sanhedrin receive him as a lord. He started out toward Jerusalem and, arriving at Knob, acquired an ass on which he rode into Jerusalem, as a fulfllment of the prophecy of Zechariah. The Sages bound him and led him before Queen Helene, with the accusation: “This man is a sorcerer and entices everyone.” Yeshu replied, “The prophets long ago prophesied my coming: ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse,’ and I am he; but as for them, Scripture says ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.’” Queen Helene asked the Sages: “What he says, is it in your Torah?” They replied: “It is in our Torah, but it is not applicable to him, for it is in Scripture: ‘And that prophet which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak or that shall speak in the name

168 Performing the faith of other gods, even that prophet shall die.’ He has not fulflled the signs and conditions of the Messiah.” Yeshu spoke up: “Madam, I am the Messiah and I revive the dead.” A dead body was brought in; he pronounced the letters of the Ineffable Name and the corpse came to life. The Queen was greatly moved and said: “This is a true sign.” She reprimanded the Sages and sent them humiliated from her presence. Yeshu’s dissident followers increased and there was controversy in Israel. Yeshu went to Upper Galilee. The Sages came before the Queen, complaining that Yeshu practiced sorcery and was leading everyone astray. Therefore she sent Annanui and Ahaziah to fetch him. They found him in Upper Galilee, proclaiming himself the Son of God. When they tried to take him there was a struggle, but Yeshu said to the men of Upper Galilee: “Wage no battle.” He would prove himself by the power which came to him from his Father in heaven. He spoke the Ineffable Name over the birds of clay and they few into the air. He spoke the same letters over a millstone that had been placed upon the waters. He sat in it and it foated like a boat. When they saw this the people marveled. At the behest of Yeshu, the emissaries departed and reported these wonders to the Queen. She trembled with astonishment. Then the Sages selected a man named Judah Iskarioto and brought him to the Sanctuary where he learned the letters of the Ineffable Name as Yeshu had done. When Yeshu was summoned before the queen, this time there were present also the Sages and Judah Iskarioto. Yeshu said: “It is spoken of me, ‘I will ascend into heaven.’” He lifted his arms like the wings of an eagle and he few between heaven and earth, to the amazement of everyone. The elders asked Iskarioto to do likewise. He did, and few toward heaven. Iskarioto attempted to force Yeshu down to earth but neither one of the two could prevail against the other for both had the use of the Ineffable Name. However, Iskarioto defled Yeshu, so that they both lost their power and fell down to the earth, and in their condition of deflement the letters of the Ineffable Name escaped from them. Because of this deed of Judah they weep on the eve of the birth of Yeshu. Yeshu was seized. His head was covered with a garment and he was smitten with pomegranate staves; but he could do nothing, for he no longer had the Ineffable Name. Yeshu was taken prisoner to the synagogue of Tiberias, and they bound him to a pillar. To allay his thirst they gave him vinegar to drink. On his head they set a crown of thorns. There was strife and wrangling between the elders and the unrestrained followers of Yeshu, as a result of which the followers escaped with Yeshu to the region of Antioch; there Yeshu remained until the eve of the Passover. Yeshu then resolved to go the Temple to acquire again the secret of the Name. That year the Passover came on a Sabbath day. On the eve of the Passover, Yeshu, accompanied by his disciples, came to Jerusalem riding

Performing the faith

169

upon an ass. Many bowed down before him. He entered the Temple with his three hundred and ten followers. One of them, Judah Iskarioto apprised the Sages that Yeshu was to be found in the Temple, that the disciples had taken a vow by the Ten Commandments not to reveal his identity but that he would point him out by bowing to him. So it was done and Yeshu was seized. Asked his name, he replied to the question by several times giving the names Mattai, Nakki, Buni, Netzer, each time with a verse quoted by him and a counter-verse by the Sages. Yeshu was put to death on the sixth hour on the eve of the Passover and of the Sabbath. When they tried to hang him on a tree it broke, for when he had possessed the power he had pronounced by the Ineffable Name that no tree should hold him. He had failed to pronounce the prohibition over the carob-stalk [or cabbage stalk], for it was a plant more than a tree, and on it he was hanged until the hour for afternoon prayer, for it is written in Scripture, “His body shall not remain all night upon the tree.” They buried him outside the city. On the frst day of the week his bold followers came to Queen Helene with the report that he who was slain was truly the Messiah and that he was not in his grave; he had ascended to heaven as he prophesied. Diligent search was made and he was not found in the grave where he had been buried. A gardener had taken him from the grave and had brought him into his garden and buried him in the sand over which the waters fowed into the garden. Queen Helene demanded, on threat of a severe penalty, that the body of Yeshu be shown to her within a period of three days. There was a great distress. When the keeper of the garden saw Rabbi Tanhuma walking in the feld and lamenting over the ultimatum of the Queen, the gardener related what he had done, in order that Yeshu’s followers should not steal the body and then claim that he had ascended into heaven. The Sages removed the body, tied it to the tail of a horse and transported it to the Queen, with the words, “This is Yeshu who is said to have ascended to heaven.” Realizing that Yeshu was a false prophet who enticed the people and led them astray, she mocked the followers but praised the Sages. The disciples went out among the nations – three went to the mountains of Ararat, three to Armenia, three to Rome and three to the kingdoms by the sea, They deluded the people, but ultimately they were slain. The erring followers amongst Israel said: “You have slain the Messiah of the Lord.” The Israelites answered: “You have believed in a false prophet.” There was endless strife and discord for thirty years. The Sages desired to separate from Israel those who continued to claim Yeshu as the Messiah, and they called upon a greatly learned man, Simeon Kepha, for help. Simeon went to Antioch, main city of the Nazarenes [i.e., followers of Yeshu, or Christians] and proclaimed to them: “I am the disciple of Yeshu. He has sent me to show you the way. I will give you a sign as Yeshu has done.”

170

Performing the faith

Simeon (or Paul, as he was known to the Nazarenes), having gained the secret of the Ineffable Name, healed a leper and a lame man by means of it and thus found acceptance as a true disciple. He told them that Yeshu was in heaven, at the right hand of his Father, in fulfllment of Psalm 110:1. He added that Yeshu desired that they separate themselves from the Jews and no longer follow their practices, as Isaiah had said, “Your new moons and your feasts my soul abhorreth.” They were now to observe the frst day of the week instead of the seventh, the Resurrection instead of the Passover, the Ascension into Heaven instead of the Feast of Weeks, the fnding of the Cross instead of the New Year, the Feast of the Circumcision instead of the Day of Atonement, the New Year instead of Chanukah; they were to be indifferent with regard to circumcision and the dietary laws. Also they were to follow the teaching of turning the right if smitten on the left and the meek acceptance of suffering. All these new ordinances which Simeon Kepha taught them were really meant to separate these Nazarenes from the people of Israel and to bring the internal strife to an end. [NT]

7.5 Miracle tales for a global gospel: Black and Indigenous believers in God’s family (1627) Writing to fellow European Christians who had diffculty absorbing even the fact that Jesus was a Jew, the Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval aimed to prove through miracle stories that other non-Europeans were also loved by God and so should be considered part of the broader family of God. The patronizing approach underscores how reluctant many Europeans were to extend the circle of the Church, and we should remember that for Sandoval and his fellow Europeans, bringing Black and Indigenous believers into the Church did not free them from exploitation and slavery.5 Source: Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery (1627) Chapter 7: A recent strange event confrms God’s love for this ministry The story of the life of Father José de Ancheta, a Jesuit in Brazil, tells of an Indian called Diego who died in Bahía de Todos os Santos. Diego was known to be a baptized Christian who died in his Portuguese master’s house. After he died, he was covered in a shroud and put in a coffn. But then the mistress of the house reported that she saw the body move. The Indian, who had seemed dead a moment before, asked why he was in a burial shroud. He said he would explain what happened to him only to Father José de Ancheta. When the father arrived from the Jesuit college, the Indian asked to see a reliquary that he had seen before when they were walking together. When the father took out the reliquary, the Indian was very happy to see it and paid his respects to it, and then he wanted to tell the story of how he had died. He said that as he entered the next life, he left the road leading to

Performing the faith

171

heaven because he had not been baptized, and this fact made him come back to life. The Indian confessed that he had not been baptized during his lifetime but had just been given the Christian name Diego by the Spaniard who captured him. However, he had always been very careful to follow God’s commands, so everyone thought he was a Christian. But now Father José had to baptize him, because he knew he would die again soon. Father José refreshed his memory of the Christian doctrine and quickly catechized and baptized him. The priest felt that he had achieved something that made his time in Brazil worthwhile, because he had helped at least one soul go to heaven. Diego was now ready to die happily. He asked that his simple possessions be given to some poor person and requested that two masses be said for his soul. He held a candle and asked Father José to remain with him until he passed away. Soon after this, surrounded by prayers, this happy soul abandoned its body and joined its maker. God showed great mercy in allowing Diego’s soul to be reunited with his body so that he would be baptized and then go on to eternal life. Diego’s story and the information I have received from both Jesuits and Dominicans working here proves that Indians were baptized just as carelessly as the black slaves are baptized now. . . . Diego’s miraculous story shows us that the Lord supports the ministry to the Indians and that we should be inspired to overcome all of the challenges in order to convert them and help them go to heaven. Thus, for the sake of the Church, we must also examine and question the baptisms of bozal blacks as well as ladino blacks and Indians. Every day we discover more people who have not been baptized or who have been baptized very carelessly. Chapter 8. The most holy Virgin Our Lady’s great esteem for the black nation. The most holy Virgin, Mother of God and Our Lady, clearly loves the black nation, because certainly her Son Jesus Christ loves it, and she loves everything that He loves. But beyond this, I can prove the Virgin’s love in two more ways. First, she is known to love the color black. Many of the oldest and most miraculous images of the Virgin are colored black. Black Virgins include the great image of Our Lady in the main church of Lisbon [Portugal], which is called la Candelaria [candle mass]; an image of the Virgin on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands; the Virgin of Guadalupe [Spain]; the Virgin of Montserrat [Spain]; the Virgin of the Pillar of Zaragoza [Spain], and the Virgin of Loreto [Spain]. We think that these last two images were made while the most holy Virgin was still alive. Because she wanted to be shown as black, she showed how much she loved the black nation. Black people feel a great love for these images. Also, the Virgin often wore a black robe and veil. The Virgin also loves the black nation because a black king came to worship her only Son, not long after his birth. She must have spoken to this king and promised that she would help his nation in whose name he came. Because her child showed great

172 Performing the faith mercy to this nation, she became its protector. First loves always have frst place in the soul, and the Virgin felt love for these kings who were the frst to visit her Son and the frst to recognize her as the Mother of God even though she sat in the hay, surrounded by mangers and animals. It is said that the frst church that the Abyssinians built in Ethiopia was dedicated to the most holy Virgin. This church was called Holy Mary of Mount Zion, and it was built while this sovereign Lady still lived. I know a strange and entertaining story about how the Virgin works to convert the Ethiopians and how God chose her to do his work. Not long ago, I knew a very devout black woman who was a member of the black brotherhood dedicated to honoring the image of Holy Mary the Great, founded in the Jesuit college in Santa Fe de Bogotá. One day this woman was walking alone on a narrow mountain pass. Suddenly she saw two terrible and ferocious bulls racing out of the brush to charge her. She prayed for the help of the most holy Virgin and the Christ child. Just as the bulls were approaching, she hid in the bushes. Then she saw a vision of the child, similar to the one honored by her brotherhood. This vision was so beautiful and lovely that it stole her heart, and she no longer felt afraid. Her heart was consoled and flled with joy, and then somehow the deadly bulls disappeared. Thus the bulls, threatened by that great child, fed, leaving the black woman with a vision of the Son of God and the knowledge that the Virgin helped her. This strengthened her faith a great deal. [NT]

7.6 Religious plays for Nahuatl audiences After some local resistance to traditional instructive forms of evangelization, friars quickly discovered that one of the most effective forms of converting and educating Nahua communities in Christian doctrine was to appeal to their pre-contact (i.e., Aztec) ritual behaviour. Christian song and religious theatre, written in the local Nahuatl language with the assistance of literate Nahua translators, was considered powerfully effective at converting the Nahua en masse. Nahuatl religious theatre attracted thousands of participants and became a signifcant part of Nahua community identity and faith. Although the plays were intended to educate the Nahua in Christian teachings, the Nahua developed complex layered understandings of Christianity that located Christine doctrine within the framework of Aztec worldviews. Furthermore, Indigenous contributions to the creation, translation, and performance of Christian teachings allowed the Nahua to directly transform those teachings – creating Nahua-Christianities that varied according to the individual and community.6 A. The Star Sign Plays that dramatized the birth of Christ and the arrival of the three wise men to honour him were widely performed from the mid-sixteenth century. This recently discovered copy bears the dates 1717–24, though

Performing the faith

173

it was performed as early as 1540 in a Nahua community not far from Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City). No author is named, though it was likely the work of missionaries assisted by Nahuatl translators, as was customary during the time.7 Emperor King will come forth, preceded by the Kings’ Captain and two vassals. Then he will sit on his throne. Wind instruments will be played. Then he will tell them to go keep watch on top of the big mountain. Please come, you lords and honored ones of mine. You are already well aware, you already know how your great-grandfather, the prophet Balaam, left it said, left it told, how a star sign would appear by which we would know that he who will save the people of the world has been born. Go right away. Keep watch on top of the big mountain. . . .

EMPEROR KING:

Then the star will appear. Oh! O our lord, O God, what is happening to us? Is this God the father’s new star sign? It is very fne indeed. Its beams shine more brightly than all the stars. KINGS’ CAPTAIN: . . . Don’t you see that nothing so very fne and wondrous has ever appeared in the sky? Let’s go right away before the great ruler, the emperor king, like we said. SECOND VASSAL:

Then Emperor King will come forth. [6v] Then [Kings’ Captain and Vassals?] will go to approach him. Know, O master, O ruler, that when we arrived where you sent us, we knelt and prayed to God the father right away. Then we rested there for a little while. And afterwards the star appeared, very fne indeed. You have never seen anything like it in the sky, the way its beams shine brightly over all the world. . . . EMPEROR KING: That is good! God the father has shown us favour. We’ve been waiting for it for a long time. And now, let us praise God very much for it. And let the three rulers know it and hear about it. Summon them. Let them come here. Let them travel here quickly so that they come to hear the words. . . . KINGS’ CAPTAIN:

Then the kings will go off. Two or three times they will [circle around?] on the stage. Wind instruments will be played . . . SAINT BALTHASAR: Please look! We’ve reached where the SAINT MELCHIOR: It’s true! That’s right! It seems it’s just

which the star is visible. Indeed, do look!

star is. a little shack over

174

Performing the faith O my beloved younger brothers, there’s a supremely good maiden over there. She is just holding her beloved and revered only child in her arms. Let us each make a greeting right away. We’ll kneel to give him our gifts, one by one . . .

SAINT CASPAR:

Then they will approach. Saint Caspar will kneel. He will say an oration. You have endured fatigue, you have become weary, you beloved child, you jade. You have been born here in the middle of the plain, in a little shack, you jewel, you quetzal feather. You are not just anyone. You are the ruler of the world! Here I kiss your hands and your feet. And the words of your great-grandfathers the prophets have come true. They foretold that you would be born here in the middle of the plain, where the cold rises, where the cattle and horses eat, where the winds rise up. That is where you have come onto the earth. You will become the light, the torch, of the people of the world . . . OUR LADY: You have been generous, O Caspar, in that you all have come to greet my beloved child. It is true and correct that he will be the ruler of the world. The prophets and patriarchs left it said that he who will become the torch, the light, of the sinners of the world would be born . . . Likewise it is correct that they [the holy Trinity] left him the carrying frame, the instrument of bearing, the sins of the world, which are heavy, which cannot be lifted, which are unbearable. It is he who will bear on his back that which will relieve the sins of the sinners in the world. And you, poor thing, exert all your effort! SAINT CASPAR:

...

B. The Final Judgment This is the earliest known Nahuatl religious play, dating to 1531 or 1533; this copy was made around 1678. It depicts the fnal judgment at the end of time, when God sends human souls to heaven or hell depending on how well they have followed Christian beliefs and behaviours. The play emphasizes resisting carnal lust (which the friars contended was one of the Nahuas’ greatest sins) and using the Christian sacraments. Although there is no identifable author, the play was likely written by a Christian missionary and Nahuatl translator with the intent of evangelizing lay Nahuatl audiences during public religious festivals. It demonstrates how these plays fostered a hybrid Nahua-Christianity by employing pre-contact forms of devotion, such as fasting, ritual dancing (seen in frequent stage directions), and gift exchanges with the divinity. It sends a message that the Nahua could express Christian devotion whilst honouring and maintaining preconquest Aztec rituals and practices, transforming their understanding of Christianity in the process.8

Performing the faith

175

(Open with singing of Christus factus est. Heaven opens. Christ enters bearing a cross and accompanied by St Michael, carrying scales. They stand at the edge of heaven. And the Antichrist rushes in. There are explosions) Come, my war leader, St Michael . . . It is called Final Judgment, the day of judging people. As I set down in my sacred commands, I will sweep things, I will purify heaven and earth. The people of earth, the living and the dead, have greatly dirtied things because of their bad lives. And now, awaken them, the living and the dead, the good and the bad. And to the good ones I will give their heavenly fowery riches, heavenly jades and garments, heavenly palm fronds. But as for the bad, may they be certain that the house of the place of the dead and the sufferings of the place of the dead will become their possessions, because they were not able to keep my sacred commands . . . Come, you heavenly pearl, Saint Michael the Archangel! Summon the living and those who were dead. Let them gather together here before me so that I will make an accounting of them, of when they still lived on earth. ST MICHAEL: May it so be done, O my beloved teacher. Let me cry out to them. CHRIST:

(St Michael plays a wind instrument. The dead come before Christ, who sits down while St Michael weighs things on a scale. The frst Dead Person kneels.) Come, you! Did you carry out my commands while you were still living on earth, you were fitting about? Speak. Answer me, the way that you used to speak on earth. Speak in the same way now. FIRST DEAD PERSON: O my deity, O my ruler, I carried out, I worked at, I fulflled your sacred commands. I carried out your orders. Ask my [guardian] angel, O my beloved teacher. CHRIST: Thank you. In heaven you will be utterly happy, you will prosper. Your joyfulness will never be fnished or come to an end. CHRIST:

(He blesses him. St Michael pushes him to Christ’s right-hand side.) . . . Come, you who are a living person! Did you carry out my sacred commands, the ten of them? Did you love your neighbors, and your father and your mother? SECOND LIVING PERSON, LUCÍA: Yes. It is you, my deity, my ruler, whom I loved frst, afterwards my father and my mother. CHRIST: If it is true that I am your deity and you loved me frst and afterward your father and your mother. Did you carry out my commands, and the command of my beloved honored mother, in the seventh sacrament, marrying in a sacred way? Did you guard CHRIST:

176

Performing the faith

yourself in a sacred way when you lived on earth? What have you accomplished? LUCÍA: No. I did not work for you and I did not recognize your beloved mother. Pardon me, O my deity, O my ruler! CHRIST: Now, truly your heart never spoke to us on earth. It was only your lustful living that you used to work at. Go, do it. Perhaps you are forgetting something else of your lustful living. Work at it. Be certain that you may hope for nothing in heaven. How unfortunate you are now, that you never wanted to get married on earth. You have won the house of the place of the dead. You have merited it. Go! See those whom you served. I do not know you. (He pushes her toward the demons) . . . Come, you residents of the place of the dead. Take your servants to the depths of the place of the dead. And the wicked woman, take her into the sweat-bath of fre. Torment her miserably there! . . . O my servants, come on up! Come and take what I am keeping for you, your riches which will never be fnished, which will never come to an end!

CHRIST:

(Wind instruments are played. The angels, Christ and the good ones ascend. Then they bring out Lucía. Fire butterfies are her earrings, a snake her necklace, and they tie one around her waist. She comes crying out.) . . . Get moving, O wicked one! Not until now do you remember that you should have gotten married? How is it that you did not remember it while you were still living on earth? But now you will make restitution for all your wicked-ness. Run along! Get moving!

SATAN:

(They beat her and make her go in. There are explosions. The demons play wind instruments. Then Priest enters.) O my beloved children, O Christians, O creations of God! Now you have seen an ominous marvel! It is correct. It is written in the sacred book. Be prudent! Rouse yourselves, look at yourselves in the mirror, the way that it happened to your neighbor. And may it not happen to you the same way. It is a model, a measuring stick, which our lord God gives us. Tomorrow or the next day the day of judgment is going to happen. Just pray to our lord, Jesus Christ, and to the noblewoman, St Mary that she pray to her beloved honored child, Jesus Christ, so that afterward you will merit and obtain joyfulness in heaven, glory. May it so be done. Ave Maria. PRIEST:

Performing the faith

177

C. Aztec and Catholic Religion Meet and Engage: Staging Conversion The criollo nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote this piece in 1688 as a short allegorical mystery play that would preface the major themes and subject of a larger play. Six speaking characters touch on the themes of Aztec worship, religious doctrine, colonization, salvation, conversion, and more. Unlike the other examples of New Mexican religious theatre here, this was not written by male Catholic missionaries with the intent of evangelizing the lay Nahua public. Sor Juana wrote for a Christian Spanish elite audience defending the Aztec potential for salvation, laying out the means to achieve Aztec conversion. Its publication represents ecclesiastical approval of her writing. She presents Aztec life and ritual before the conquest, and then Spain’s spiritual and military conquest, showing both the Christian rationale for conversion, and the Nahua response to Christianity. Sor Juana’s play illustrates how Aztec culture was portrayed, and how religious theatre could be used beyond ritual festivities.9 SCENE 1 (Enter Occident, a gallant-looking Aztec, wearing a crown. By his side is America, an Aztec woman of poised self-possession. They are dressed in the mantas and huipiles worn for singing a tocotín. They seat themselves on two chairs. On each side, Aztec men and women dance with feathers and rattles in their hands, as is customary for those doing this dance. While they dance, Music sings.) O, Noble Mexicans, whose ancient ancestry comes forth from the clear light and brilliance of the Sun, since this, of all the year, is your most happy feast in which you venerate your greatest deity, come and adorn yourselves with vestments of your rank; let your holy fervor be made one with jubilation; and celebrate in festive pomp the great God of the Seeds! MUSIC: Since the abundance of our native felds and farms is owed to him alone who gives fertility, then offer him your thanks . . . From your own veins, draw out and give, without reserve; the best blood, mixed with seed, so that his cult be served, and celebrate in festive pomp, the great God of the Seeds! MUSIC:

(Occident and America sit, and Music ceases.) Of all the deities to whom our rites demand I bend my knee – among two thousand gods or more dwell within this royal city and who require the sacrifce of human victims still entreating for life until their blood is drawn and gushes forth from hearts still beating and bowels still pulsing – I declare, among all these, (it bears repeating),

OCCIDENT:

178

Performing the faith

whose ceremonies we observe, the greatest is, surpassing all this pantheon’s immensity the great God of the Seeds. AMERICA: And you are right, since he alone daily sustains our monarchy because our lives depend on his providing crops abundantly; and since he gives us graciously the gift from which all gifts proceed, our felds rich with golden maize, the source of life through daily bread, we render him our highest praise. . . . Indeed, he feeds us with his very fesh (frst purifed of every stain). We eat his body, drink his blood, and by this sacred meal are freed and cleansed from all that is profane, and thus, he purifes our soul. And now, attentive to his rites, together let us all proclaim: THEY [OCCIDENT, AMERICA, DANCERS] AND MUSIC: we celebrate in festive pomp, the great God of the Seeds! SCENE 2 (They exit dancing. Enter Christian Religion as a Spanish lady, Zeal as a Captain General in armor, and Spanish soldiers.) How, being Zeal, can you suppress the fames of righteous Christian wrath when here before your very eyes idolatry, so blind with pride, adores, with superstitious rites an idol, leaving your own bride, the holy faith of Christ disgraced? . . .

RELIGION:

(Enter Occident and America dancing, and accompanied by Music, who enters from the other side.) ZEAL: Here they come! I will confront them. RELIGION: And I, in peace, will also go (before

your fury lays them low) for justice must with mercy kiss; I shall invite them to arise from superstitious depths to faith. . . .

(Zeal and Religion cross the stage.) Great Occident, most powerful; America, so beautiful and rich; . . . Abandon this irreverent cult with which the demon has waylaid you. Open your eyes! Follow the path that leads straightforwardly to truth, to which my love yearns to persuade you. OCCIDENT: Who are these unknown people, so intrusive in my sight, who dare to stop us in our ecstasy? Heaven forbid such infamy! AMERICA: Who are these nations, never seen, that wish, by force, to pit themselves against my ancient power supreme? . . . RELIGION: Christian Religion is my name, and I intend that all this realm will make obeisance unto me . . . AMERICA: Pay no attention; she is mad! Let us go on with our procession. RELIGION:

Performing the faith

179

Music and all [Aztecs on stage] And celebrate in festive pomp, the great God of the Seeds! . . . Take heed! For when your excesses bring disgrace to fair Religion, then will Zeal arise to vengeance; for insolence I will chastise you. I am the minister of God, [who] growing weary with the sight of overreaching tyrannies so sinful that they reach the height of error, practiced many years, has sent me forth to penalize you . . . OCCIDENT: What god? What sin? What tyranny? What punishment do you foresee? Your reasons make no sense to me, nor can I make the slightest guess who you might be with your insistence on tolerating no resistance, impeding us with rash persistence from lawful worship as we sing. . . . AMERICA: Madman, blind, and barbarous, with mystifying messages you try to mar our calm and peace, destroying the tranquility that we enjoy . . . ZEAL: Since our initial offering of peaceful terms, you held so cheap, the dire alternative of war, I guarantee you’ll count more dear. Take up your arms! To war! To war! ZEAL:

(Drums and trumpets sound.) (within) To arms! To arms! War! War! ([Drums and trumpets] sound.) Long life to Spain! Long live her king! (The battle begins. Indians enter through one door and fee through another with the Spanish pursuing at their heels. From backstage, Occident backs away from Religion and America retreats before Zeal’s onslaught.) SCENE 3 ... America has been subdued because your valor won the strife, but now my mercy intervenes in order to preserve her life. It was your part to conquer her by force with military might; mine is to gently make her yield, persuading her by reason’s light. . . .I want them to convert and live. AMERICA: If your petition for my life and show of Christian charity are motivated by the hope that you, at last, will conquer me, defeating my integrity with verbal steel where bullets failed, then you are sadly self-deceived. A weeping captive, I may mourn for liberty, yet my will, grows beyond these bonds; my heart is free, and I will worship my own gods! . . . RELIGION:

180

Performing the faith SCENE 4

Wait! What you perceive as force is not coercion, but affection. What god is this that you adore? OCCIDENT: The great God of the Seeds who causes felds to bring forth fruit. To him the lofty heavens bow; to him the rains obedience give; and when, at last, he cleanses us from stains of sin, then he invites us to the meal that he prepares . . . RELIGION: In doctrinal disputes, I hold with the apostle Paul, for when he preached to the Athenians and . . .had noticed they were free to worship at a certain shrine, an altar to “the Unknown God,” he said to them, “This Lord of mine is no new god, but one unknown that you have worshipped in this place, and it is He, my voice proclaims.” And thus I – RELIGION:

[Occident and America whisper to each other.] Listen, Occident! and hear me, blind Idolatry! . . .These portents you exaggerate, attributing to your false gods effects that you insinuate, but wrongly so, for all these works proceed from our true God alone, and of His Wisdom come to birth. Then if the soil richly yields, and if the felds bud and bloom, if fruits increase and multiply, if seeds mature in earth’s dark womb, if rains pour forth from leaden sky, all is the work of His right hand; for neither the arm that tills the soil nor rains that fertilize the land nor warmth that calls life from the tomb of winter’s death can make plants grow; for they lack reproductive power if Providence does not concur, by breathing into each of them a vegetative soul. AMERICA: That might be so; then tell me, is this God so kind – this deity whom you describe – that I might touch Him with my hands, these very hands that carefully create the idol, here before you, an image made from seeds of earth and innocent, pure human blood shed only for this sacred rite? . . . OCCIDENT: . . . Is yours a God composed of human blood, an offering of sacrifce, and in Himself does He combine with bloody death the lifesustaining seeds of earth? RELIGION: . . . His boundless Majesty is insubstantial, but in the Holy Sacrifce His blessed body is placed unbloody under the appearances of bread; which comes from seeds of wheat and is transformed into His Body and His Blood. AMERICA: Such miracles, unknown to us, make me desire to believe; but would the God that you reveal offer Himself so lovingly transformed for me into a meal as does the god that I adore? RELIGION: In truth, He does. For this alone His Wisdom came upon the earth to dwell among all humankind. RELIGION:

Performing the faith

181

AMERICA: And so that I can be convinced, may I not see this Deity? OCCIDENT: And so that I can be made free of old beliefs that shackle me? RELIGION: Yes, you will see when you are bathed in crystal waters from the

font of baptism . . . Because you deluge my poor mind with concepts of theology, I’ve just begun to understand; there is much more I want to see, and my desire to know is now by holy inspiration led . . . RELIGION: Then come along with me, and I shall make for you a metaphor, a concept clothed in rhetoric so colorful that what I show to you, your eyes will clearly see; for now I know that you require objects of sight instead of words, by which faith whispers in your ears too deaf to hear; I understand, for you necessity demands that through the eyes, faith fnd her way to her reception in your hearts. AMERICA:

SCENE 5 Religion, answer me: what metaphor will you employ to represent these mysteries? RELIGION: An auto [demonstration, or play] will make visible through allegory images of what America must learn and Occident implores to know about the questions that now burn within him so. ZEAL: What will you call this play in allegory cast? RELIGION: Divine Narcissus . . . ZEAL: Where will your drama be performed? RELIGION: In the crown city of Madrid, which is the center of the Faith, the seat of Catholic majesty, to whom the Indies owe their best benefcence, the blessed gift of Holy Writ, the Gospel light illuminating all the West. ZEAL: Then answer me, Religion, how (before you leave the matter now), will you respond when you are chid for loading the whole Indies on a stage to transport to Madrid? RELIGION: The purpose of my play can be none other than to glorify the Eucharistic Mystery; and since the cast of characters are no more than abstractions which depict the theme with clarity, then surely no one should object if they are taken to Madrid . . . OCCIDENT: Let’s go, for anxiously I long to see exactly how this God of yours will give Himself as food to me. (AMERICA, OCCIDENT, AND ZEAL SING:) The Indies know and do concede who is the true God of the Seeds. In loving tears which joy prolongs we gladly sing our happy songs. ALL: Blest be the day when I could see and worship the great God of Seeds. ZEAL:

(They all exit, dancing and singing) [NaM]

182

Performing the faith

7.7 Why do bad things happen to good people? Staging a Christian and Indigenous encounter (1740) The goal of eighteenth-century missionaries to use the conceptions, views, and traditions of the Protestant Reformation to spread the evangelical message of law and gospel to Indigenous groups in Georgia meant one necessary frst step: planting an awareness of sin and creating anxiety about it. European Christians frequently complained that Indigenous peoples balked at the concept of sin. Here, Bishop Thomas Wilson tackles the challenge in his fctional dialogue of an “Indian” and a missionary, appealing to Reason, Nature, and awareness of imperfection and corruption. When the missionary’s Indigenous interlocutor asks how a good God can continue to tolerate sin and evil in his world, it proves an opening for a discussion of Evil Spirits, temptation, and the ultimate choice: you must serve either God or Devil.10 Source: Thomas Wilson, An Essay Towards an Instruction for Indians (London: 1740) DIALOGUE II Of the Corruption of our Nature. I am come again, kind Sir, for your further Instruction; your last Words have made me very thoughtful and uneasy, when you told me with so much Earnestness, – That Happiness or Misery, one of the two, will be the certain Portion of every one after Death. MISS. I told you nothing but the Truth; and I am not sorry for your Uneasiness; – for that may prove the greatest Blessing of your Life. IND. I do not understand how that can be. MISS. But this you can easily understand, – That they are whole, and who think themselves in no Danger, will not look out for Help; but they that are sick, and ill at Ease, will be glad of Advice, and will be apt to follow it [Matthew: 12]. – When once you are sensible, that of yourself you are a poor, blind, helpless, sinful Creature [Revelation 3:17], one whom a holy God cannot take Delight in; you will then be glad to know how you may be restored to, and preserved in his Favour, and by him be made happy. Besides, I must tell you another Truth, – That the more you are afraid of yourself, the more will the great God pity you, and deliver you from the Danger you are justly afraid of [Isaiah 66:2]; and will have more Reason to be so, when once you know the End for which you were made, and sent into this World; and the great Happiness you will lose, if you do not answer that End. IND. Will you be pleased to let me know what the End is for which God made us, and sent us into the World. MISS. God made Man, that he might have a Creature upon Earth endued with Reason, and capable of adoring his Maker, and to whom he might INDIAN.

Performing the faith

183

communicate his own most glorious Perfections; and lastly, that he might be an Honour to his Creator, and partake of his Bounty and Happiness. IND. Pray, what is that Happiness you speak of, which we are in danger of losing? MISS. I can only tell you what God himself has told us, That Eye hath not seen, nor Ear heard, nor hath it entred into the Heart of Man, the things which he hath prepared for them that love him [I Corinthians 2:19]. IND. You will be so good as to let me know how Men come to deprive themselves of this Happiness? MISS. They do it by being guilty of Sin; that is, – by transgressing the Law which God has given them. IND. Has God given Us any Law? MISS. Yes surely. – He has given you and all Men Reason, which is instead of a Law or Rule, by which You ought to live, and may, in some measure, know what is good, and what is evil; – what will please, and what must needs displease an holy, just and good God. IND. But it is too plain, that People do not always observe this Rule or Law. MISS. It is so, and that is their Sin, by which they displease God, and deprive themselves of his greater Favours, and are in danger of being miserable, even beyond what they can imagine. IND. But is not this the Case of many of you Christians, as well as of Us? MISS. It is surely so, – and they must dearly pay for it; – God having given them other and plainer Rules, and greater Helps, to overcome and cure that CORRUPTION OF NATURE, which is One great Occasion of all the Wickedness which we see in the World. IND. Pray what do you mean by THE CORRUPTION OF OUR NATURE? MISS. That I will tell you; – and what your own Reason and Experience must own to be true. – By the Corruption of Nature we mean, a strong Inclination to Evil, which we not only see and blame in other People, but what we very sensibly feel in ourselves; that is, – something within us, which opposeth our Reason (and the other Laws which God has given us); so that the Good which we would do, and which our Reason approves of, That we do not do; And the Evil which we would not do, and which our Reason and the Law of God condemns, That we too often do [Romans 7:19]. IND. This, indeed, is too plainly the Case. – Men follow not their Reason, but their Passions, their Inclinations, and their own Wills; and which too often they have reason to repent of. MISS. And you cannot but have observed, that this Inclination to Evil is often so violent, that Men commit all Iniquity with Greediness; and that this is the Occasion of all the Wickedness which we see and hear of; – All the Cruelty, the Oppression, the Pride, the Injustice, the Malice, the Covetousness, the Lewdness, the Impurity, Murders, Drunkenness, by which Men dishonour their Maker and themselves, and

184

Performing the faith

are a Plague to others; insomuch that it is found necessary to have severe Laws made, even by Men, to hinder wicked people from hurting one another; – of which Laws there would be no Occasion, if Reason would have been suffcient to govern Men; which sad Experience shews it is not; – there being too many upon whom no Reason, no Advice, no Prospect of Danger, no Hopes of Happiness can keep from ruining themselves and others. IND. I confess there is Truth in what you say. – But sure this is not the Case of all People. MISS. I must tell you, – that the Wickedness of others shews us plainly what all Men are by Nature. – All Men have the Seeds of Evil within themselves, which would spring up and appear upon every Temptation, if not hindred by something more than their own Reason; and they that are not so wicked as others, may be thankful to a Power above, who hinders them. – And your own Heart and Experience must tell you, that such as are not so wicked as these we have been seen speaking of, are forced to strive hard against the Temptations they meet with, before they can follow what their Reason tells them they ought to do or avoid; – that they are but too often unwilling to follow the LIGHT or REASON which God has given them; and too-too often make use of it only to hurt or over-read one another. – All this shews, that our Nature is strangely corrupt; so that no Man can say he is free from Sin, or not guilty before God. IND. I must confess, indeed, that, according to my best Sense, there is Truth in every thing you have told me. MISS. Well then, let this Truth sink deep into your Heart; for without the Knowledge and Belief of this, you will never have any true Knowledge or Sense of the Goodness, Justice, or Mercy of God to Men; nor will you ever truly know the Value of Christianity. IND. But how Man, the Creature of so holy and good a God, should come to have a Nature so corrupt and disordered, and prone to Evil, – This, indeed, surprizes me. MISS. Far be it from any Man to imagine, that a good and holy God, and one who hateth Sin, that He should be the Cause of this Corruption of our Nature, and of the Sin it occasions. – No, – he made Man at frst upright, holy, just and good, and capable to do every thing that became a reasonably Creature; but how he fell into this wretched and distempered Condition, you shall know in due time. IND. But since Sin and Wickedness are displeasing to God, why does he suffer Sin and Sinners to be in the World? MISS. You do not consider, that all Men being Sinners, God must either suffer Sin to be in the World, or destroy the Sinners; that is, all the Race of Men. – But when you come to know the Christian Religion, and what God has done to cure this great Disorder of our Nature, you will fnd that God can make the Sins of Men to turn to his own Glory, and their

Performing the faith

185

Happiness, if it is not their own Fault; – and you will have Reason to admire and adore his wonderful Wisdom, and Mercy, and Goodness to all such as shall embrace and lay hold on his Offers of Grace, – as well as his just Displeasure against such as despise his Mercy. And this is the Reason that I have taken so much Pains to convince you of the CORRUPTION OF OUR NATURE, and of the Danger we are in on that Account, that you may have no Ease in your Mind, until you know how to be delivered from so sad a Bondage, and the Fears that ought to attend it. There is another Danger which we are all exposed to, and which you ought to know, which I will just mention to you at this time; – and that is, the Power and Malice of evil Spirits. IND. What do you mean by evil Spirits? MISS. God has made known to us, that there are Creatures, both good and bad, which we call Angels or Spirits, and which are ever about us, tho’ we do not see them, they having no such Bodies as we have. – Such of these that are good are appointed, by God to take care of his Servants; – and they that are evil are such as have rebelled against their Maker, and having utterly lost his Favour, they strive to tempt Men to all manner of Wickedness, that they may be as miserable as themselves. – And so great is their Malice and Power over such as take themselves from under God’s Protection, – that God was provoked at one time to drown all the People of the Earth, except one good Man and his Household, with the Flood of Waters; – and at another time, to destroy several great towns with Fire from Heaven, for the Wickedness of them that dwelt in them. IND. These, indeed, are sure Proofs of the Power of evil Spirits over wicked men, and of the Corruption of our Nature, and of God’s Purpose to punish Sin and Sinners, of which we indeed have no manner of Knowledge. MISS. But it is necessary that you should know these things; for whoever is not a Worshipper of the only true God, whom Christians serve; is a Slave to these evil Spirits, and too often are Worshippers of them, tho’ they do not know it. – When you consider these things, you will have Reason to be concerned and afraid of yourself. IND. And so indeed I shall be, if this is our Case. MISS. This is, in truth, the Case of every one that is ignorant of the True God, and of the Way by which he has decreed to save his unhappy Creatures from ruining themselves, and losing that Happiness which he has provided for such as love and obey him. IND. I do most earnestly intreat you, that at your Leisure you would give me an Account of the Christian Religion, which you say is the Way that God has decreed to save all Men from Ruin. MISS. That I will do, thro’ the Favour of God, the next time we meet: In the mean while remember – what I assure you of, – that this Life is

186

Performing the faith the Time, in which you are to chuse whether you are to be happy or miserable for ever; and that your Happiness or Misery will depend upon your embracing or neglecting the Offer now made by you, by the great God, of becoming a Christian. You ought therefore to pray to the great God, not to let you lose this Opportunity of being happy. And I will not forget to pray for you, that God may enlighten your Mind with saving Truth. [NT]

7.8 The kitchen of opinions: peace urges the churches to tolerate each other This painting offers satirical commentary on the interrelationships between the main church groups in the Dutch Republic: Reformed, Catholics, Lutherans, and Anabaptists. The intent is not to criticize a single group, but to warn against religious discord itself. The captions, costumes, symbols, and puns distinguish between the fgures and make the argument for toleration.

Figure 7.1 Anonymous, Peace Urging the Churches to be Tolerant, 1600–1624, oil on canvas, h 131.5cm × w 162.5cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (on loan from the Catherijneconvent, Utrecht): SK-A-4152. Public Domain.

Performing the faith

187

Calvin sits at the left of the table drizzling orange sap over roasted calf, punning on his name and highlighting the House of Orange’s support for Dutch Calvinists. Next to him sits the pope with a bowl of porridge (the Dutch word “pap” applied to both), complaining that his cats will not lick it because of its orange favouring. Luther plays the lute [literally Lut teer aen] but complains that in the Dutch Republic no one listens to his music, while the Anabaptist [the Dutch “herdoper” combining “baptiser” (doper) and “hearth” (herd)] lies low because he knows the others could pitch him in the fre if they chose. Peace runs into the kitchen from the left waving an olive branch, the symbol of peace, and points to messages of toleration, urging those present not to persecute one another, as this creates opportunities for foreign enemies – most immediately, the Spanish Hapsburg armies. The painting was based on a popular engraving that circulated widely from the 1560s with German, French, and Dutch texts.11 [PEACE:]

Welcome, friends gathered here together Take peace in hand And do not oppress anyone Lest the villain come into your land Of the hundred who read this Perhaps ten will understand Let it remain as it is now, without passing judgment In order that this peace may stay standing [CALVIN:]

This Calf is fnely (Calf fjn = Calvin) favoured with this juice from oranges That I have never better prepared But I must wait upon discord Or else the land would [still] need to be cleared. [THE POPE/CATHOLIC CHURCH:]

Oh, this porridge is made bitter with orange peels Therefore my Cats do not lick [Catte lecken = Catholics] as they please But if my old cook comes back from Spain [The cats] should like to chase away those gathered here. [LUTHER:]

I play the Lute tenderly (Luijt teer aen = Lutheran) And I would like to hold a good rhythm

188

Performing the faith

But no one wishes to listen to my playing So it is best that I leave it. [ANABAPTIST:]

I rebaptiz(er) [herdoper = rebaptizer/Anabaptist] my bread, free, without hiding And I pay no heed to those here with me Because if they had the power they desired, I would have to creep about Or be thrown into the fre. [CHARITY (PAINTING AT THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE ROOM):]

Where love is in the heart Then I do not have to stand on the dresser [NS]

Notes 1 Ps. 99:1–5 (Geneva Bible, 1560). W. Kethe, “All People that on Earth Do Dwell,” in The Scottish metrical psalter of A.D. 1635: reprinted in full from the original work; the additional matter and various readings found in the editions of 1565, &c. being appended, and the whole ill. by dissertations, notes, & facsimiles, Glasgow: MacClure and MacDonald, 1864, p. 138. 2 M. Luther, Smaller Catechism, IV: The Sacrament of Holy Baptism. Online. Available: http://bookofconcord.org/smallcatechism.php (accessed 1 July 2020). Open access. The hymn’s German title is “Christ unser Herr zum Jordan Kam” given here in an 1854 translation “To Jordan Came Our Lord, The Christ” by Richard Massie (1800–87) found in the hymnal of the Evangelical Lutheran Joint Synod of Ohio, Evangelical Lutheran Hymnal, Columbus, OH: Ohio Synodical Printing House, 1880, pp. 197–8. 3 J. Steckley, “The Huron Carol: A Canadian Cultural Chameleon,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 27/1, 2014, 63–8 [54–74]. Copyright to the lyrics of “The Huron Carol” was held by The Frederick Harris Music Co., Limited, but entered the public domain in 2011. 4 M. Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition, New York: Macmillan, 1950, pp. 148–54. See also: M. Meerson and P. Schäfer, Toledot Yeshu: The Life Story of Jesus, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, Tubinger: Mohr Siebeck, 2014, p. 159. Vol.1, Introduction and translation; Vol.2, Critical edition; Supplementary material. Database of all Tolodot Yeshu manuscripts: www.toledot-yeshu.net 5 Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instauranda Aethiopum salute, ed. and trans. N. von Germeten, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008. © 2008 Hackett Publishing Company Inc. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 6 L.M. Burkhart, “Pious Performances: Christian Pageantry and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico,” in E.H. Boone and T. Cummins (eds) Native Traditions in the Postconquest World, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998, pp. 366–7. C. Swift, “The Sacred Performative: Holy Wednesday and Colonial Ritual/Theatre,” The Journal of Religion and Theatre 5.2, 2006, 146–8.

Performing the faith

189

7 In Citlalmachiyotl. The Star Sign: A Colonial Nahua Drama of the Three Kings, eds. Justyna Olko and John Sullivan, Warsaw: University of Warsaw, 2017, pp. 71–4, 83–5, and 93. © Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw & Authors. Reprinted by permission. 8 L.M. Burkhart, “Satan Is My Nickname: Demonic and Angelic Interventions in Colonial Nahuatl Theatre,” in F. Cervantes and A. Redden (eds) Angels, Demons and the New World, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 101. B.D. Sell, “Nahuatl Plays in Context,” in L.M. Burkhart and B.D. Sell (eds) Nahuatl Theater, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004, x, 9. The play: “Final Judgment,” in L.M. Burkhart and B.D. Sell (eds), Nahuatl Theater, Volume 4: Nahua Christianity in Performance, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004, pp. 190–210. Reprinted by permission of the University of Oklahoma Press. 9 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “The Loa for the Auto Sacramental of The Divine Narcissus, an Allegory,” manuscript 1688, in P.A.Peters and R. Domeier, The Divine Narcissus – El Divino Narciso, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998, pp. 3–15. © 1998 University of New Mexico Press. Reprinted by permission. 10 T. Wilson, An Essay Towards an Instruction for Indians, London: 1740. This edition is from The Works of the Right Reverend Father in God Thomas Wilson D.D., Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man, Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1851, vol. 4, pp. 153–8. 11 Anonymous, Peace Urging the Churches to be Tolerant, 1600–1624, oil on canvas, h 131.5cm × w 162.5cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (on loan from the Catherijneconvent, Utrecht): SK-A-4152. Captions translated by Nina Schroeder. See also: N. Schroeder, “Illustrations of Adult Baptism and the Anabaptist-Mennonite Tradition: An Evolving Motif in Visual Culture of the Dutch Republic and Early Modern Europe,” in Nicholas Terpstra (ed.) Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe, Toronto: CRRS, 2020, pp. 113–65.

8

Exploiting faith Conversion, capitalism, colonialism

8.1 The destruction of the Indies: colonial patterns of merging religion and development (1555) Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) was among the early Spanish settlers in Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic), holding a license (encomienda) from the Spanish crown that granted him control over land and people. Those holding such licenses, called encomenderos, frequently abused and worked Indigenous people to death as slaves. De las Casas renounced his encomienda in 1515, and his lobbying helped secure an end to the system in 1542, though other forms of forced labour remained and De las Casas himself for a time supported the African slave trade as an alternative. He joined the Dominican Order in 1523 and was appointed frst Bishop of Chiapas in 1545, but opposition from Spanish colonists forced his return to Spain, where he remained an active and prominent opponent of Spain’s violent colonization practices until his death. De las Casas’ savage critique of Spain’s religio-economic colonialism, The Destruction of the Indies (1555), remains a key source for understanding early colonialism, with parallels that extend far beyond the Spanish example.1 Source: [Bartolomé de las Casas] The Tears of the Indians: Being An Historical and true Account Of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above Twenty Millions of innocent People (1555; 1656) The Tears of the Indians: Being An Historical and true Account Of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above Twenty Millions of innocent People . . . Committed by the Spaniards In the Islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, &c. . . . Written in Spanish by Casaus, an Eye-witness of those things; And made English by J. P. (London: J.C. for Nath. Brook, 1656). Pp. 26–30. Modernized spelling and diction. Tears of the Indies, or Inquisition for Blood: being the Relation of the Spanish Massacre There In 1492. the West-Indies were discovered and the following year they were inhabited by the Spaniards. . . . The frst place they came to was Hispaniola,

Exploiting faith

191

a most fertile Island, and famously very big. Around it lay an innumerable group of Islands, so full of Inhabitants that there is not a greater density of people anywhere else in the world. The continent about two hundred miles away and stretches over ten thousand miles long. . . . These countries are inhabited by such a great number of people, it is as if God had assembled and called together to this place the greatest part of Mankind. This infnite multitude of people was so created by God, that they were without fraud, without deviance or malice, and to their natural governors they were faithful and obedient. Toward the Spaniards whom they serve, they are patient, meek and peaceful. Laying all contentious and tumultuous thoughts aside, they live without any hatred or desire of revenge as a people most delicate and tender. They have weak bodies that do not permit them to endure hard labour, so that the children of princes and great persons are not more nice and delicate than the children of the lowest peasant. The nation is very poor and indigent, possessing little, and they do not seek material goods. They are neither proud nor ambitious. Their diet is such that the most holy hermit could not eat more meagrely in the wilderness. They go around naked, only hiding their privates, and a poor cloak is their warmest covering. Most sleep on mats, and only those who have larger fortunes, lie on a kind of net tied at the four corners and fasten’d to the roof, which the Indians in their natural language call hamocks. They are cautious and capable of all good learning, and very ready to receive our Religion; when they have but once tasted it, they wish ardently to make a further progress in it. I have heard various Spaniards admit that the Indians had nothing to hinder them from enjoying heaven but their ignorance of the true God. To these quiet lambs, imbued with such blessed qualities, the Spaniards came like most cruel tigers, wolves, and lions, possessed with a sharp hunger. For the past forty years, thinking of nothing but the slaughter of these unfortunate wretches, with the kinds of tortures never seen or heard of before, they have cruelly and inhumanely butchered the three millions of people of Hispaniola, leaving scarcely three hundred persons alive. As for the Island of Cuba, which is as long as the distance from Valladolid to Rome; it lies wholly deserted, uncultivated, and ruined. The Islands of St John and Jamaica lie waste and desolate. The Lucayan Islands north of Cuba and Hispaniola . . . are now totally unpopulated and destroyed. The inhabitants, over 500,000 souls, were either killed or transported to work in other places, so . . . no more than eleven men remain. Other Islands near the island of St John more than thirty in number, were turned into desert. . . . Coming to the continent . . . there were ten Kingdoms as large as the Kingdom of Spain together with both Arragon, and Portugal, containing above a thousand miles every one of them around, which the unhuman and abominable villanies of the Spaniards have made a wilderness of, being stripped of all their people, and made bare of all their inhabitants, even though it was once a place inhabited by vast and infnite numbers of men.

192

Exploiting faith

We can say with confdence that over these past forty years when the Spaniards exercised their abominable cruelties and detestable tyrannies, over twelve million innocent souls have died. If we included women and children in this sad and fatal list, the number consumed in this massacre would reach over ffty million. As for those that came out of Spain, boasting that they were Christians, they took two ways to wipe this Nation from the face of the Earth. The frst was a bloody, unjust, and cruel war which they launched on them. The second was by eliminating all those who aimed to recover their liberty, as some of the stronger men did. As for the women and children that were left alive, the Spanish laid so heavy and hard a yoke of servitude on them that even the condition of animals was much more tolerable. . . . What led the Spaniards to these unsanctifed impieties was their desire for gold, the opportunity to make themselves suddenly rich, and the acquisition of dignities & honours which they did not deserve. In a word, their covetousness and their ambition were greater than that of any other people under heaven, while the wealth of the country and the patience of the people gave occasion to their devilish barbarism. For the Spaniards so condemned them (I speak now of what I have seen without a word of a lie) that they didn’t even use them like beasts – for that would have been tolerable – but they looked on them as if they had been but the human waste and flth of the earth. They had so little regard for the health of their souls, that they allowed this great multitude to die without the least light of Religion. And no less true is what I have said before, which those tyrants and hangmen themselves dare not deny without telling a lie, that the Indians never gave them the least cause to treat them violently. They received them as Angels sent from heaven until the excessive cruelties and the torments and slaughters that the Spaniards laid against their countrymen moved them to take up arms. [AS]

8.2 Indigenous responses to the arrival of the Spanish in Cuba (1555) Word of Spanish practices spread quickly among Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean. Here, Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) describes how various groups responded when the Spanish arrived in Cuba in 1511. The local lord Hathvey (or Hatuey) leads a resistance but is captured and executed. When given the opportunity to convert before his death, he refused because he was unwilling to encounter Christians in the afterlife. De las Casas emphasized the contrast between peaceful Indigenous peoples and rapacious Spanish settlers whose obsession with wealth led them to enslave and work locals to death. As we saw above, he emphasized how peaceful and open Indigenous societies were being devastated by the Spanish through practices that violated every Christian norm and practice, leading Indigenous people

Exploiting faith

193

to reject the Christian gospel entirely or to feign acceptance while secretly practicing their own religion.2 Source: [Bartolomé de las Casas] The Tears of the Indians: Being An Historical and true Account Of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above Twenty Millions of innocent People (1555; 1656) Of Hispaniola IN the Island of Hispaniola, to which the Spaniards came frst, these slaughters and ruins of mankind took their beginning. They took away their women and children to serve them, though the reward which they gave them was a sad and fatal one. The Spaniards consumed the food they had raised with great pain and dropping sweat, and were not content with what the poor Indians gave them freely despite their own want. One Spaniard consumed in one day as much as would suffce for three families, every one of them containing ten persons. Being thus broken with so many evils, afficted with so many torments, and handled so ignominiously, they began at length to believe that the Spaniards were not sent from Heaven. And therefore some of them hid their Children, others their Wives, others their Victuals in obscure and secret places. Others not being able to endure a Nation that conversed among them with such a boisterous impiety sought for shelter in the most inaccessible mountains. For the Spaniards, while they were among them, did not only treat them cruelly, beating them with their fsts and with their staves, but presumed also to lay violent hands upon the Rulers and Magistrates of their Cities. They were so impudent and bold, that a certain private Captain did not hesitate to force himself on the Wife of the most potent King among them. From which time forward the Indians began to think of how they might expel the Spaniards out of their Country. But good God! The arms they had to attack or defend were no better than bulrushes. When the Spaniards saw this, they came with their Horsemen well armed with swords and lances and made cruel slaughters among them. Overrunning cities and villages, they spared no sex nor age, nor did they pity pregnant women, whose bellies they would rip open, taking out the infant to hack it in pieces. They would often lay wagers who could kill most effciently, either cutting a man in the middle, or with one blow cut off his head. The children they would take by the feet and dash their innocent heads against the rocks, and when they had fallen into the water, with a strange and cruel derision the Spaniards would encourage them to swim. Sometimes with their lances they would run through both a mother and the baby in her belly with one thrust. They erected certain gallows that were broad but so low, that the tormented Indians still touched the ground with their feet. On every one of these they would hang thirteen persons, blasphemously affrming that they did it in honour of Christ and his Apostles, and then lighting fre under them, they burnt the poor wretches alive. Those whom their pity

194

Exploiting faith

did think ft to spare, they would send away with their hands half cut off, and hanging by the skin. They sent these as messengers, saying Go carry messages to those who are hidden in the mountains and have fed from us. This Death they also visited on the Lords and Nobles of the Land. They stuck forked sticks in the ground and then laid platforms on them, and laying these men on those platforms, they put a slow fre underneath, causing the fre to melt them away by degrees, to their unspeakable torment. At one of the worst instances of this, I saw four of the Nobles laid on these platforms. Their clamours and cries were so troublesome to the Captain, gave the order that they should be hanged. The Executioner whose name I know, and whose parents are not unknown, prevented this quick conclusion and instead flled their mouths so that their cries could not be heard and they would not disturb the Captain. He then laid on more wood so that they burned up as he wanted, and gave up the ghost. Of these and other innumerable things I have been an eye-witness. There were some Indians that fed the cruelty of a Nation so inhumane and so empty of piety and love of mankind. Some of these fed to the mountains, and therefore the Spanish hunted them with their hounds, whom they had bred and trained to pull down and tear the Indians like beasts. These dogs shed much human blood. Because the Indians did now and then kill a Spaniard, when they could take him at an advantage, as justly they might, therefore the Spaniards made a law among themselves, that for every one Spaniard killed in this way, they would kill a hundred Indians. Of the Island of Cuba In 1511 they went over into the Island of Cuba, which is as long as the distance from Valladolid to Rome, and in which there were many fair provinces, inhabited with an infnite number of people. Here the Spaniards acted with as little humanity and clemency as elsewhere, and with greater cruelty and rage. . . . A certain Lord named Hathvey who had fed over to Cuba, to avoid either death or perpetual captivity, hearing that the Spaniards had come into this Island, assembled the Indians together and spoke to them: Countrymen and Friends, we understand that the Spaniards have come among us. I am not now going to tell you how they have used the inhabitants of Hapti (which is what they call Hispaniola, in the Indian language) for you know it by a sad experience: nor can we hope to fnd them more merciful than they did. Countrymen do you know the goal which brings them here? They replied that they did not, and that they well understood the cruel nature of the Spaniards. Hathvey then said, I’ll tell you why they have come. They worship some covetous and unsatisfed Deity, and in worship of that greedy Celestial Power they require many things from us, doing all they can to murder and enslave us. After saying this he took a little chest flled with gold and carried on with these words: Behold here the God of the Spaniards. Therefore if you think

Exploiting faith

195

it ftting, let us dance and sing before this their God, for perhaps we may thereby appease his rage, and he well then command the Spaniards to leave us alone: They all answered together shouting Well said, well said and then they began dancing around this box, not ceasing until they had tired themselves out. Then the Lord Hathvey carried on with his speech, If we keep this God until he is taken from us, we will certainly be killed. Therefore I think would be best for us to cast it into the River. So following his advice, the Chest was cast into the River. When the Spaniards landed on this Island, this noble man who had experienced their earlier actions avoided them as much as he could, feeing from them and defending himself by arms when he could. But fnally they captured him, for no other reason, but because he had fed from those who sought his life, and defended himself so that he would not be tortured to death. And for this he was burned alive by the Spaniards. While he was tied to the stake a monk of the Order of St Francis came to talk to him of God and of the Articles of our Faith, telling him that the brief pause in proceeding made by the Executioner was in order to give him an opportunity to ensure his salvation if he believed. Hearing this, Hathvey paused a little while and then asked the Monk if the door of heaven was open to the Spaniards. The monk answered, Yes, to the good Spaniards. Then Hathvey replied, “Then let me go to Hell so that I do not come to where they are.” [AS]

8.3 English colonialism and the Black Legend of Spain (1656) The two passages above come from an English translation prepared by John Phillips, a nephew of English poet John Milton, a century after Bartolomé de las Casas’ text was frst published in Spain. While de las Casas aimed to move the Spanish monarchs to reverse colonial exploitation in favour of an approach that was more Christian, civil, and moral, Phillips was deliberately contributing to a “Black Legend” of Iberian and Catholic cruelty that all of Spain’s Protestant enemies cultivated for political and religious purposes. Phillips gave the author’s name as “Casaus,” and dedicated his translation to the puritan Oliver Cromwell, who was Lord Protector of England after the execution of King Charles I, and commander of a bloody military operation to suppress a Catholic revolt in Ireland from 1649–53. Phillips clearly had no doubts that Cromwell’s campaign was a righteous fght of Protestant truth against Catholic tyranny, nor any reservations about the campaign’s violence. He compares Cromwell directly to military heroes of the Bible who with God’s help secured the Promised Land of Israel for God’s Chosen People. We now see the Irish campaign as the frst stage of England’s colonial expansion, and a sign of how ruthlessly it would suppress opposition and seize control of lands and peoples. While the spelling

196

Exploiting faith

and diction of the passages above have been modernized, the title page and dedication here are given as originally published.3 Source: [Bartolomé de las Casas] The Tears of the Indians: Being An Historical and true Account Of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above Twenty Millions of innocent People (1555; 1656). The Tears of the Indians: BEING An Historical and true Account Of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above Twenty Millions of innocent People; Committed by the Spaniards In the Islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, &c. As also, in the Continent of Mexico, Peru, & other Places of the WestIndies, To the total destruction of those Countries. Written in Spanish by Casaus, an Eye-witness of those things; And made English by J. P. Deut. 29. 15. Therefore thine eye shall have no compassion; but life for life, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. January 9. LONDON, Printed by J. C. for Nath. Brook, at the Angel in Cornhil. 1656. Dedication To His Highness, OLIVER, Lord PROTECTOR of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland & Ireland, With the Dominions thereto belonging. May it please your Highness, I Have here laid prostrate before the Throne of Your Justice, above Twenty Millions of the Souls of the slaughter’d Indians; whose forc’d departure from their Bodies, Cruelty it self compassionates. Yet me-thinks I hear a sudden stillness among them; the cry of Blood ceasing at the noise of Your great transactions, while You arm for their Revenge. By which it is apparent, how well your Highness doth observe the will of the most High, using Your vast Power and Dignity onely to the advancement of his Glory among the Nations: while the Divine Deitie bequeathes You back again immediate Recompences; crowning You, like his holy Warriour, David, with the highest degree of earthly Fame. Therefore hath he inspired your Highness with a Prowess like that of Joshua, to lead his Armies forth to Battel; and a Zeal more devoutly servent than that of Jehu, to cut off the Idolater from the earth. Which Divine vertues appear so eminent in You, that there is no man, who opposes not himself against Heaven, but doth extol Your just Anger against the Bloudy and Popish Nation of the Spaniards, whose Superstitions have exceeded those of Canaan, and whose Abominations have excell’d those of Ahab, who spilt the Blood of innocent Naboth, to obtain his Vineyard. And now, may it please your Highness, God having given You a full Victory over Your Enemies in this Land, and a fx’d Establishment, by the

Exploiting faith

197

prosperous and total quelling of those pertinacious Spirits; certainly there is no true English-man who doth not lift up his eyes to heaven with Thanks to Almighty God, that You have made the Land so happie, as to be the Admiration of other Nations, who have laid themselvs at Your feet for Alliances, as knowing Your wonderful Successes both by Sea and Land. Pardon me, Great Sir, if next my zeal to Heaven, the loud Cry of so many bloudy Massacres, far surpassing the Popish Cruelties in Ireland, the Honour of my Country, of which You are as tender as of the Apple of Your own eye, hath induced me, out of a constant Affection to your Highness Service, to publish this Relation of the Spanish Cruelties; whereby all good men may see and applaud the Justness of Your Proceedings: Being confdent that God, who hath put this Great Designe into Your Hands, will also be pleased to give it a signal Blessing; which is the Prayer of Your Highnesses’ most faithful, and most obedient Servant, J. Phillips. [NT]

8.4 Seeking gender parity in Río de la Plata region (1556) Military and colonial conquerors often had a mixed view of whether religion should be a tool in their activities. The Spanish adopted the practice of the encomienda, whereby a settler gained control over an area and its people in return for agreeing to support efforts to convert them to Christianity. This account overturns our expectations of the conquistador narratives, and particularly the role of women in colonial development. Ysabel de Guevara writes to Princess Juana, wife of a Spanish governor, Phillip II’s sister and regent, to protest that while she and other women fought and worked to develop a settlement in the Río de la Plata region, between modern day Uruguay and Argentina, they had received no reward. She seeks not only recognition, but a return on investment, that is, her share in “the distribution of Indians” as a recognized encomendera.4 Source: Ysabel de Guevara, Appeal to Princess Juana, Regent of Spain (1556) Most High and Powerful Lady, To this province of the Río de la Plata, a certain group of women came along with its frst governor, Don Pedro de Mendoza, and fate would have it that I was among these women. And when the feet arrived in the port of Buenos Aires with one thousand fve hundred men, and food was soon lacking, the hunger was so great that within three months one thousand died. This hunger was so great that not even that of Jerusalem could equal it, nor can any other be compared to it. The men were so weak that the poor women had to do all the work, including washing the clothing,

198

Exploiting faith

tending to the sick, preparing what little food they had, cleaning them, standing guard, tending to the fres, arming the crossbows when the Indians sometimes came to attack, even lighting the fuses for the small artillery, rallying the soldiers who were capable of fghting, . . . giving them directions and keeping them in order. For at this time, although we women were sustaining ourselves on little food we had not become as weak as the men. Your Highness must believe that the women did so much to take care of everyone that if it were not for them, all would have perished. And were it not for the honor of the men, many other things could truly be written, attested to by witnesses. I believe that others will write to you at greater length, and so I will stop here. Having gone through such a dangerous ordeal, they decided to head upriver despite being so weak and despite winter approaching, with the few still alive leaving in two small sailboats, and the exhausted women took care of them and watched over them and prepared their food, hauling frewood on their backs from outside the boat, and encouraging them with manly words not to let themselves die, saying that they would soon come to lands where there was food, carrying them on their backs and placing them in the boats, doing so with as much love as if they were their own children. We then came upon a group of Indians . . . who had a great deal of fsh, and we once again served [the men], looking for various ways of cooking the fsh, . . . for they had to eat it without bread, and they were very weak. Then they all decided to head up the Paraná River in search of provisions, a voyage in which the unfortunate women expended such effort that it was only by a miracle of God that they survived. For the women carried out all of the work with great concern, each one not wishing to suffer the shame of doing less than any other, and they worked the sails, did the navigation, sounded the depths of the waters, took over the oars from the soldiers who could not row, bailed water from the boat, and tried to keep the soldiers from losing heart at seeing the women do their work. The truth is that the women were not pressured into doing these things, nor did they do them out of any obligation, doing so only out of a sense of charity. And so they arrived in the city of Asunción [in Paraguay], which, though now very fertile in provisions, was at that time so lacking in them that the women had to resume their labours working with their own hands, watering the felds, weeding, and sowing and harvesting the crops without anyone’s help until the soldiers recovered from their weakened state and began to take control over the land, getting Indian men and women to serve them, until fnally they got the land into the state it is now in. I have wanted to write about this and bring this to Your Highness’s attention to let you know of the ingratitude I have faced in this land, for the distribution of Indians has now been carried out among those who are here, among both those who have been here for a long time and those who have not, without anyone thinking of me or my service, and I have been left out, having been given no Indians or any other kind of servant. I very

Exploiting faith

199

much wish I were free to present myself before Your Highness, [to describe] the services I have rendered for His Majesty and the offenses that are now being done to me. But this is out of my hands, for I am married to a nobleman from Seville, named Pedro de Esquivel . . . What I ask now is that you order that my fair share [of Indians] be given to me in perpetuity, and that in recompense for my services you order that my husband be given some position suitable to a person of his status; for he, for his part, has earned this through his services. May our Lord grant your royal life many long years. From this city of Asunción, July 2, 1556. This humble servant of Your Highness kisses your royal hands. Doña Ysabel de Guevara [TC]

8.5 Navigating religious, racial, and political divisions in the Yucatán peninsula (1567) In 1562, the Franciscans organized a violent campaign of the Inquisition in Yucatan that resulted in the torture of thousands of Mayas and the deaths of hundreds. Yet fve years later, 26 Mayan town governors (called batabob) petitioned Spanish King Philip II to dismiss the secular priests who later arrived to organize parishes, and to instead send more Franciscans to guide religious life. The episode reveals the ongoing divisions between Maya communities (called cahob or cah), since those most affected by the earlier Inquisitorial campaign wrote to oppose the return of the Franciscans, who seem to have deliberately favoured some communities over others. The petition reveals that many of the secular clergy now in the Yucatán were intent on advancing their economic interests, failing to learn the Mayan language, exploiting local people and resources, and ignoring the local Mayan nobles who governed under Spanish oversight. These priests might have argued that they were following Catholic custom in depending on their parishioners for housing, food, and subsistence, yet the Mayan governors claimed that in their exploitation of locals, their fxation on trade, and their failure to provide adequate religious services, they did not deserve to be called clergy. The petitioners’ claims of ignorance, poverty, and submission are standard tropes of the rhetoric used to address political superiors. These important Maya nobles wrote directly to the King of Spain because they clearly expected their concerns and their local authority to be treated seriously.5 Source: Maya Rulers of the Pech and Merida Region, Letter to the King of Spain on the Subject of Spanish Priests (1567) Because we who are gathered together, we common men, understand our Lord God, and you who are the great lord ruler, we wish you to implement

200

Exploiting faith

something that is necessary, for you too. For truly we are humbled, all of us, beneath your foot, beneath your hand, however many of us there are – we batabob and our principal men who are here in this province of Yucatán. For here in our land, this is where we have our homes. We wish to recount some-thing in your ear, you, O ruler, so that you may take the necessary means. Here then we speak. There is truly a great need here in the province of Yucatán for Franciscan padres for us, so that they might tell us the word of God, which is the Christian doctrine, as it is called, and so that they might say mass for us to watch, and so they might preach to us in the language of here the word of our creator, which is the gospel, as the Spaniards call it. Because it is truly necessary that they come into our districts, for it happened that since the arrival of the bishop whom you sent, named fray Francisco Toral, he brought and distributed black[-robed] padres; they are falsely named clergymen. He then appointed them to take care of the towns within our district, that they might speak the word of God to us, and also so that they might say mass for us to watch. Meanwhile, they preach to us through interpreters because they do not know this language here. There are really no Franciscan padres for us, because they have gone far away; they have scattered. Thus it is truly necessary for us – it really is necessary – that they truly settle here among us. For a very long time ago there came here those who knew our Maya language really well; at that time they preached to us – they were wise men too. Therefore nowadays, many times each day, we remember them. And although, because we are just commoners, we did not really understand the nature of their thinking and were driven out of our minds in the past by the Franciscan padres, they nevertheless verifed their words to all us common people; they appointed themselves to be judges of the cah, so as to put a lid on our wickedness. For previously we were truly suffocating under the pressures of the devil; for many times we traveled along the ancient path of our ancestors, which is our path too. We shall never learn our lesson while we speak with the devil, while we go along absorbed in the devils – which are common clay pots worshipped by us in our imaginations, while we make use of balche (native wine). For there is no life in our heart when the forest people do not once see those padres. Truly did they soon give life to our hearts and also gave us the love of their preaching to us to prevent sin. Thus today we frequently remember them. For those clergymen never have anything to say; but the Franciscan padres speak well to us, truly and clearly preaching to us, and that is what we now wish for today. For many times they expressed a wish to learn our language here. Now they also baptize our children and baptize us too. Thus those ones that travel to us are really good, for they wish to join us to the son of God and also deliver us from guilt and from living in carnal sin. . . . Now too are these clergymen seen; their doctrine has the same meaning as that of the Franciscan padres, yet – and we are not insulting them – they do

Exploiting faith

201

not love us nor are we in their hearts. Furthermore, we are not accustomed to being among them; we have spoken to them only a few times, to see this or say that. Neither do they know our language here, nor do we know their Castilian language. Nor do they really devote themselves to us, although we need them; thus do we engage them in vain. So now we are acquiring an understanding of the ways of the black padres. They often do not know how to trade, as they have their commerce with the Spaniards there; they will have no commerce with us. There are men with goods to sell, who have gone before a judge so as to be given a license in order to trade with whomever they meet. [But the clergy] don’t take them; they travel a great deal, and so they are not able to; they really do not want different goods, because they would thus pile up every day too many things. Whereas the Franciscan padres are not used to doing that kind of thing; nor does anything arrest their hearts. But these oppressive clergymen get really angry at us while forcing us to work in their homes, [doing] whatever they tell us to. For those black men [the secular clergy] have their own homes and servants, and their own horses and rabbits. Furthermore, as they have settled in our cahob, we are providing them with food and household goods; they have neither paid a thing, nor do we ask them to. For they are ashamed of us and afraid of us, too, although they are the cah guardians and are given the responsibility, and are asked, to go to each cah. And as they are not paid by the bishop’s cah [Merida], the burden of it is given to us; but there is no salary. So now we give them much food, and they do not pay us. We now pay them, well and fully, to be guardians of many cahob. Meanwhile, may you reimburse us, you, great reigning ruler, with whatever the bishop that is here in the province of Yucatan orders. May you, the governor, don Luis Céspedes de Oviedo, see that we do not have many things, for we are always being robbed. This is the very reason why there is discord with the bishop that is here in this province and discord with all the black padres. Thus we are unhappy and tortured by them; and we are locked up in jail just for not going along with the authority created by your magistrates, so we may be charged whatever money we have in our hands. This is the price we pay for our own homes. We do not know any reason for us to be tortured and damned by your magistrates and the other Spaniards, which we have lamented from the depths of our hearts. Thus what we have in our hands is not much, only our burial [clothes] and our tribute [goods]; we have now told of it all. We people that are here in this province, therefore, do not have the word; we truly need the doctrine, for we do not have it. For it to be born in our hearts, there must be Franciscan padres [here], for they all truly love us. They do not torture, but do good deeds; may they travel, then, to us today. For there are magistrates of good appearance; should they travel here, whatever tortures we may lament, there will be magistrates to help us. For whatever may be needed, these ministers of our Lord God – and they are your ministers too, you, our great reigning ruler – would be truly good, if you sent them, you, our Lord.

202

Exploiting faith

May you allow the condemnation of that which we lament, the frequent sight of discord among them, so they may help us. This is truly very necessary, therefore, that you, chief ruler that is here, bring them too; it would be good for you to give them your license to really help us. And our cah cries out to you to order Franciscan padres to be sent to us, so that they may come and fnish guiding the doctrine that they wished for us. For they do it really well; truly and consistently do they do it well; their walk is really good. Having said this, we are recounting their ways because we really want to go there to Heaven, from the depths of our hearts. This then is the reason why we now wish for them to be fathers to us, for they truly love us, and we love them too. This is the reason why we wish there to be many of them. It would be good for you to order their elders, the provincial [head of the Franciscans], to send them a second time. These ones should be those who go, because they really know us, they who were here previously; and they really had just taken to speaking Maya; and because they know what we need in order to be worthy before God. And it would be good for the rest of them to come too, to be distributed among us. So who will now be given to us, who truly wishes to teach in our language here? Because they should come every day, it would not be good for them to desire money. It should not be the black-clothed padres; they really take money; they really ask and ask for a great deal of money; they drive us mad over money. Therefore, these words that we say to you, they are not lies; for this is really the truth. We will now prove it. For there were many black padres, twenty-one, that came with the Spaniards, and not one of them knew our language here; only one of them did, but that padre that entered did not teach. For at that time there were no elders, really just boys; they traded in the other cahob. Moreover, they wished to say little, the black padres; those black ones, they hated us. We are now recounting their ways to you, for every time they piled up a lot of money, much cloth, and household goods which God understands belong to us. For all these reasons, he truly understands that one Franciscan padre is better than many black padres. He does not speak, but nevertheless he understands us. The way of fray Francisco de la Torre, Provincial here today, is very good; he knows the language here; we truly love him, and he preaches to us often. When he was taken ill with no small [attack of] consumption, our hearts were saddened. And he has no substitute. It is now six years since he traveled the road, since the oidor Loaysa came to count us here (take a census); very many of our people had died, and he really understood that you, don Luis, gave your license today so that he counts us. It is really a mercy given by God that he counted us a second time, for those from the cahob have brought themselves before the chief ruler so that he would be merciful and lighten their tribute. Now he makes use of your license so that we shall truly be given mercy; it is for this reason that we now jointly present

Exploiting faith

203

ourselves to you, so that you give us mercy regarding this our tribute to those lords and what we give to you. The striped walls, really the sticks, is all we have. And now there are coming those who are not accustomed to us. Truly we are afficted. We have no property. Therefore you, the governor that is here, truly do not make blind the way forward here in the cah by placing the affairs of your cah subjects in the care of those who do not wish to walk to the cah. . . . We ask you, chief ruler, for [someone] who truly wishes us good; who truly loves us; who truly will bring us happiness to the bottom of our hearts; who is from God and from you, O ruler; who understands that we are not accustomed to having what we have turned upside down, that our hearts are truly good; who we may truly love, because he loves us. Here then is our statement. We wish for our protectors, those defenders, to give their signatures, so that you may know that truly, coming from our hearts, do we petition you and the governor; so that he may understand that which will truly help us; so that you may know of the anxiety in our cah, you, great reigning ruler. This is the end. Here in the city of Mérida, Yucatán, on the 19th day of the month of March of the year 1567. May God truly guard you for many years in your kingdom. This is our statement, all of us batabob. Your humble subjects and servants kiss your blessed hands, you, O ruler. Don Juan Pech; don Francisco Ucan; Francisco Chel; Francisco Chel; Pedro Ek; don Pedro Canche; don Andres Uitz; Diego Balam; Juan Euan; Juan Tun; Andres Chel; Pedro Che; Juan Pool; Pedro Tzul; Juan Ake; Luis Pech; Pedro Cauich; Francisco Pech; Francisco Mutul; Juan Chim; Francisco Ucan; Juan Maçun; Pedro Huchim; Juan Mutul; Pedro Poot; Francisco Uicab. [AS]

8.6 Baptism as a tool in European enslavement of Africans (1627) While the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval believed that Black African believers should be welcomed in the Christian Church, he objected strenuously to any easing of the requirements around baptism, the sacramental ritual of initiation that was usually practiced on infants. An improper baptism brought no access to the Church or to saving grace, and so was worse than useless. De Sandoval is more concerned with the ritual conditions under which baptism is administered on slave ships than with the physical conditions on those ships themselves, or indeed with the act of enslavement itself. While de Sandoval does not question slavery as an institution, like Bartolomé de las Casas, his pastoral assessment of why Black Africans resist baptism is predicated on a sharp critique of the exploitation characterizing all those conditions.6 Source: Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery (1627)

204

Exploiting faith

The value of these baptisms This chapter will present the most important topic of this entire book. . . . The baptisms that black slaves receive in Guinea and in other lands and ports, when they are done in the way that I describe in the last chapter, are usually null and invalid. If nothing else, the validity of these baptisms is in doubt. The reasons why I believe this come from the works of the most important theologians. I can sum up all of their opinions in one statement: all Christian laws, Church councils, and Christian scholars and authorities agree that when adults are baptized, they must willingly and knowingly agree to being baptised. . . . There is a difference between adult and infant baptism. Infants do not have to understand or consent to baptism, but adults do, because they are free men and they must consciously accept it. This is their entrance to the Christian church, and by entering and surrendering to Christ, they must willingly agree to follow Christian laws, and they must exercise their free will. Theologians argue that if you baptize someone who is sleeping this is not a valid baptism because the person has not given free consent. A baptism is valid only if a person willingly agrees to it, and the same applies to black slaves. Their baptisms are invalid if they have not freely consented to them. The next section will show how the black slaves do not give their free consent to baptism. The frst issue is teaching each person about baptism. All must be instructed before they can be baptized. Baptismal water is just water on the body, providing no spiritual beneft if the soul has not received the faith. How can we decide how much the black slaves need to know before they are baptized, and how do we know if they understand what we have taught them? They can agree that they want to receive the water that the Christians receive, but they still do not know what this water means. Every day I talk to many black slaves who know that pouring water on a person’s head is something the whites (this is what they call Christians) do, but they do not know, nor does anyone tell them, what the purpose of this water is or why Christians or whites pour it on themselves. They think that the water is for bathing or washing, just like any other time when they wash themselves. They must understand that baptism is a ceremony connected to religion and a belief in God and that it makes them friends or sons of God, takes away their sins, and helps them go to heaven. They must at least realize that it has something to do with the Christian religion. They cannot only say that it is something Christian, Portuguese, or white, without knowing what the word “Christian” means, other than that it refers to a person who has taken away their liberty. This is not enough information! So if these points represent the absolute minimum level of understanding in order to say that baptism is valid, do the black slaves reach this level of understanding when they are baptized on ships, in port, and in other places? The eye-witness testimony I gave in the last chapter, where people swore that nothing is said to the slaves on the ships about baptism nor do the slaves give their free consent, indicates that these baptisms are

Exploiting faith

205

invalid. People say that the priests only go to the slave ships out of courtesy or personal interest, so the slaves receive no catechism, faith, hope, or penitence. The priests disregard everything and commit sacrilege in doing these invalid baptisms. Even if the priests made an effort, circumstances and diffculties make valid baptisms impossible. Remember, on each ship there are more than six hundred blacks from many different backgrounds, without anyone understanding the differences between them. They do not understand if someone catechizes them in only one of their languages, such as Bran, Mandingo, Fula, or Biojo. People who speak other languages will neither understand nor have any concept of what has been said to them, and in consequence, they will not be baptized. Everyone is rushing to have the ship leave; they have no time to show if they understand the catechism. Even if someone explains the catechism to them in their own language, how do we know if they listen willingly or understand well enough to retain the information, and if they will continue to live a Christian life? Even Spaniards can listen to a sermon and remain utterly ignorant of what they have just heard. How many do not understand just because the ship is so noisy? Or maybe they are too far away from the priest to be able to hear. They might be distracted, melancholy, and sad, as they sit thinking of their captivity and how they have been imprisoned for no reason. They might miss their native lands and what they have left behind: father, mother, wife, children, and the friends that they love with all their heart. Many of them, especially the boys, will be sleeping or playing. We know that boys will not listen quietly to sermons until they are grown up. The mothers are probably distracted by their children’s anxious cries, so they cannot hear or understand. Even if all the other conditions are perfect, I know from long experience baptizing black slaves here in Cartagena that we must be very careful to ensure that they understand what is said and taught to them. This requires much exhausting work, effort, and sweat. You have to battle with them for a long time, trying to enlighten them on the concepts of faith, hope, pain, and charity. This is very diffcult for people unaccustomed to paying attention or memorizing things that they have never heard before. I work with each person individually, so in this case they are not afraid and know that what I am doing will not hurt them. When so many disturbed and frightened people are packed together in cruel captivity, crushed against their worst enemies, determined to return to their homes (all common conditions on the slave ships), how can we believe that they understand enough to be baptized, especially so quickly? I do not believe that it is possible that the black slaves generally understand enough to know that this is a ceremony of the cult of God, for the good of their souls. I also do not believe that they give their consent to be baptized, and I see much proof that they do not willingly receive baptism or understand that this water is a holy thing. They are not explicitly asked for their consent. If someone asks them if they want to have this water poured on them so

206

Exploiting faith

they can be like whites, and so on, I am certain that they not only reject this but detest this water and all other things connected to the whites from the bottom of their hearts. Whites are their worst enemies: they take the slaves from their home lands, separate them from their parents and siblings, take away their liberty, put them in chain gangs, shackles, and prisons, and then confne them in a ship to take them to distant lands, without hope of returning to their own. They are badly fed and treated and threatened with poor examples. . . . [NT]

8.7 Work and religion in the colonial setting: Dutch Amboina (1692) Dutch missionary Francois Valentijn is frustrated at the lack of progress in the spread of the Reformed faith in Amboina (in modern-day Indonesia) and blames it on the attitudes of the Indigenous teachers and students. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) had violently seized Amboina and made it the centre of world clove production, and relied heavily on Indigenous teachers to teach doctrine to the young people who worked the plantations. Valentijn believes that the students do not take their work or studies seriously and need more compulsion in the form of fnes. The lessons are rote and the students show little interest or understanding; they have to work too long and too hard during the day to give attention to school, and they would rather fsh than read.7 Source: Francois Valentijn, Short Account of the State of the Churches in Amboina (1692) Regarding the instruments and people whom we utilize here, we will describe the manner and labor of the native. He is responsible to spreading knowledge of the faith and bearing fruit, though he has little understanding of the issues himself. We can provide various reasons for that. We previously relied on fnes, rather than counting on their own industry in conducting prayers and catechism lessons. But that’s now forbidden [by the VOC], so all fear of compulsion is gone and the teacher now appears for his work when he thinks best. Admonitions from the [Dutch] ministers no longer work and the local elders [native chiefs] see them very little, so instructors regard their work as a form of court service or work for wages, which I judge as one of the foremost reasons for their ignorance (people do not wish to come to hear them to learn God’s Word and the catechism). . . . The second reason that ignorance emerges out of the natives is the poor state in which the schools are maintained. Because there are no longer any fnes, boys and girls come to school infrequently and do not take their lessons seriously because they have no reason to fear. The complaints by the ministers on this and on the lack of fnes need to be heard. . . . The third reason, from which the frst two arise, is that they are so occupied with their daily labor that they are ignorant in matters of religion. They

Exploiting faith

207

judge it more important to labor for bodily gain, so it becomes diffcult to cultivate religion. If they work all day, they fnd it more useful to go fshing in the evenings and on Sundays [rather than go to school or church]. Their labor throughout the day becomes a burden and obstacle. . . . The fourth reason is the poor knowledge of the teachers [masters], who stick with old formulas and do not expand beyond simple questions and answers in the catechism to the end that students are not overloaded [perhaps meaning is challenged or engaged]. One wishes that they would pour out many explanations, so that when a native is asked a question on a variety of things outside the ordinary questions, they stand there stupidly. . . . The Fifth reason is that too many churches have too few ministers. In the fatherland, a minister might have charge over two villages, but here it’s 25 villages. Scarcity of books and materials. One witnesses at the communion service those natives who are unprepared but they are not prevented from taking communion. They only repeat what the minister says. [CP]

Notes 1 [Bartolomé de las Casas], The Tears of the Indians: Being An Historical and true Account Of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of above Twenty Millions of innocent People . . . Committed by the Spaniards In the Islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, &c. . . . Written in Spanish by Casaus, an Eye-witness of those things; And made English by J. P. (London: J.C. for Nath. Brook, 1656). Pp. 26–30. Modernized spelling and diction. 2 [De las Casas], Tears of the Indians, pp. 32–34, 46–47. 3 [De las Casas], Tears of the Indians, pp. 1–6. 4 “Ysabel de Guevara, Hardships in the Río de la Plata Region (1556),” in J. Cowans (ed.) Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, pp. 83–5. © 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. 5 “Letter to the King of Spain from Maya Rulers of the Pech and Other Rulers in the Merida Region on the Subject of Spanish Priests, 1567,” in M. Restall, L. Sousa and K. Terraciano (eds) Mesoamerican Voices: Native Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Yucatan, and Guatemala, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 174–201. © Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa, and Kevin Terraciano 2005. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear. See also: G.D. Smithers and B.N. Newman, Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 6 Alonso de Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instauranda Aethiopum salute. (Book 3, Chapter 5), ed. and trans. N. von Germeten, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008, pp. 117–19. © 2008 Hackett Publishing Company Inc. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 7 F. Valentijn, “Kort Ontwerp van de Staat der Kerken in Amboina door Ds. Francois Valentijn,” Ambon: 1692, pp. 29–34. Translated by Charles Parker.

9

Going underground – negotiating difference

9.1 The legal status of Muslims and Jews in medieval Castile – the Siete Partidas (1252–65) The Castilian legal code called the Siete Partidas, compiled during the reign of King Alfonso X (1252–84), allowed Muslims to continue to practice their religion while transferring their mosques to the Crown. The code encourages Christians to convert Moors with kind words and actions but prohibits abuses or insults. It also prohibits Christian conversion to Islam and forbids sexual relations between Christians and Muslims, particularly with Christian virgin or married women; there were parallel rules on Jewish–Christian relations. The law code demonstrates the efforts made to ensure that frm legal, social, and cultural boundaries kept religious communities separate in medieval Castile. Its provisions later carried over into the early modern Spanish Empire and were particularly infuential in New Spain.1 Source: The Seven Part Code (Siete Partidas: 1252–65) Concerning the Moors We decree that Moors shall live among Christians in the same way that we mentioned in the preceding Title that Jews shall do, by observing their own law and not insulting ours. Moors, however, shall not have mosques in Christian towns, or make their sacrifces publicly in the presence of men. The mosques which they formerly possessed shall belong to the king; and he can give them to whomever he wishes. Although the Moors do not acknowledge a good religion, so long as they live among Christians with their assurance of security, their property shall not be stolen from them or taken by force; and we order that whoever violates this law shall pay a sum equal to double the value of what he took. Christians Should Convert the Moors by Kind Words, and Not by Compulsion Christians should endeavour to convert the Moors by causing them to believe in our religion, and bring them into it by kind words and suitable discourses, and not by violence or compulsion; for if it should be the will of Our Lord to bring them into it and to make them believe by force, He

Going underground – negotiating difference

209

can use compulsion against them if He so desires, since He has full power to do so; but He is not pleased with the service which men perform through fear, but with that which they do voluntarily and without coercion, and as He does not wish to restrain them or to employ violence, we forbid anyone to do so for this purpose; and if the wish to become Christians should arise among them, we forbid anyone to refuse assent to it, or oppose it in anyway whatsoever. Whoever violates this law shall receive the penalty we mentioned in the preceding title, which treats of how Jews who interfere with, or kill those belonging to the religion who afterwards become Christians, shall be punished. What Punishment Those Deserve Who Insult Converts Many men live and die in strange beliefs, who would love to be Christians if it were not for the vilifcation and dishonor which they see others who become converted endure by being called turncoats, and calumniated and insulted in many evil ways; and we hold that those who do this wickedly offend, and that they should honor persons of this kind for many reasons, and not show them disrespect. One of these is because they were announced the religion in which they and their families were born; and another is because, after they have understanding, they acknowledge the superiority of our religion and accept it, separating from their parents and their relatives, and abandoning the life which they have been accustomed to live, and all other things from which they derive pleasure. There are some of them who, on account of the dishonor inficted upon them after they have adopted our faith, and become Christians, repent and desert it, closing their hearts against it on account of the insults and reproaches to which they are subjected; and for this reason we order all Christians, of both sexes, in our dominions to show honor and kindness, in every way they can, to persons of other or strange beliefs, who embrace our religion; . . . and we forbid anyone to dishonor them by word or deed, or do them any wrong, injury, or harm in any way whatever. If anyone violates this law we order that he be punished for it, as seems best to the judges of the district; and that the punishment be more severe than if the injury had been committed against another man or woman whose entire line of ancestors had been Christians. What Punishment a Christian Deserves Who Becomes a Moor Men sometimes become insane and lose their prudence and understanding . . . and become Moors; and there are some of them who are induced to do this through the desire to live according to their customs, or on account of the loss of relatives who have been killed or died; or because they have lost their property and become poor; or because of unlawful acts which they commit, dreading the punishment which they deserve on account of them; and when they are induced to do a thing of this kind for any of the reasons aforesaid, or others similar to them, they are guilty of very great wickedness

210

Going underground – negotiating difference

and treason, for on account of no loss or affiction which may come upon them, nor for any proft, riches, good fortune, or pleasure which they may expect to obtain in this world, should they renounce the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ by which they will be saved and have everlasting life. Wherefore we order that all those who are guilty of this wickedness shall lose all their possessions, and have no right to any portion of them, but that all shall belong to their children (if they have any) who remain steadfast in our Faith and do not renounce it; and if they have no children, their property shall belong to their nearest relatives within the tenth degree, who remain steadfast in their belief of the Christians; and if they have neither children nor relatives, all their possessions shall be forfeited to the royal treasury; and, in addition to this, we order that if any person who has committed such an offence shall be found in any part of our dominions he shall be put to death. What Penalty a Moor and a Christian Woman Deserve Who Have Intercourse with One Another If a Moor has sexual intercourse with a Christian virgin, we order that he shall be stoned, and that she, for the frst offense, shall lose half of her property, and that her father, mother, or grandfather shall have it, and if she has no such relatives, that it shall belong to the king. For the second offense, she shall lose all her property, and the heirs aforesaid, if she has any, shall obtain it, and if she has none, the king shall be entitled to it, and she shall be put to death. We decree and order that the same rule shall apply to a widow who commits this crime. If a Moor has sexual intercourse with a Christian married woman, he shall be stoned to death, and she shall be placed in the power of her husband who may burn her to death, or release her, or do what he pleases with her. If a Moor has intercourse with a common woman who abandons herself to everyone, for the frst offense, they shall be scourged together through the town, and for the second, they shall be put to death. [NM]

9.2 Living as a Muslim in Spain (1462) Catholic reformers of the ffteenth century worked hard to convert and impose Christian beliefs on the Muslims (known as mudéjars) in Castile and Aragon. Mudéjars resisted, as they had been guaranteed permission to retain their culture and religion as long as they remained loyal to the Christian King. In this document, the Sunni Breviary (Brevario Sunni), the Muslim scholar and judge Ice de Gebir gives a set of guidelines for mudejars setting out how they should practice Islam under the pressure to convert and assimilate.2 Source: Içe de Gebir, A Mudéjar Summary of Islamic Law: Principal commandments and prohibitions (1462)

Going underground – negotiating difference

211

Worship the creator alone, attributing to him neither image nor likeness, and honoring his chosen and blessed Muhammad. Desire for your neighbour [proximo] that good which you desire for yourself. Keep constantly pure by means of the minor and major ritual ablutions, and the fve prayers. Be obedient to your father and your mother, even though they be unbelievers. Do not swear in the name of the Creator in vain. Do not kill, do not steal, do not commit fornication with any creature. Pay the canonical alms [azaque, i.e., zaka¯t]. Fast during the month of Ramadan. Make the Pilgrimage [hajj]. Do not sleep with your wife unless both you and she are in a state of ritual purity. Honor the day of Assembly [i.e., Friday], above all during the holy times, with all purity and with devout prayers, and with visits to the holy man of the law and to the poor. Honor the scholars [of the law]. Serve in defense of the law both with your goods and with your person. Honor your neighbor [vecino], whether he be a stranger or a relative or an unbeliever. Give lodging willingly to the wayfarer and to the poor man. Do not break your word, your oath, your bond, or your guarantee, unless it be something which be contrary to the law, and when you must make an act off expiation. Be faithful, do not trade in goods which you know to be stolen. Do not cause sin or consent to sin, for if you do you participate in it. Do not falsify weights and measures, not be guilty of deceit or treachery, do not engage in usury. Do not drink wine or any other intoxicating thing. Do not eat pork, nor any carrion fesh, nor blood, nor any suspect thing, nor anything which has not been properly slaughtered, nor anything offered on an alter or to a creature [i.e., any sacrifce to a divinity other than God]. When you meet a Muslim, greet him with your sala¯ms, and assist him in whatever is to God’s service, and visit him when he is sick, and carry out his interment should he die. Oppose any Muslim who transgresses the law or the sunna in any way. Let anyone who speaks, speak well or keep silent, and let him not speak evil, even if it be the truth. When you sit in judgement, be a faithful judge; do not take usury; abstain from covetousness; be faithful to your lord, even though he is not a Muslim, because he will become your heir should you have nobody else to inherit from you; pay him his due; honor the rich and do not despise the poor; beware of envy and wrath; be patient; do not follow enchanters not fortune tellers, nor those who interpret omens, nor astrologers, nor those who cast lots, but your Lord alone.

212

Going underground – negotiating difference

Do not live in the land of the unbelievers, nor in any land without justice, nor among evil neighbors, nor should you keep company with bad Muslims. Live among good men, and spend up to a third of your wealth, and more if you can do so without harm, and so long as you have no cause to regret it. Do not play at draughts [checkers] or any other idle pastime. Do not take pleasure in what is forbidden, and do not hanker in your heart after that which is not yours. Beware of the Enemy: forgive him who leads you astray, and ask forgiveness of him who you lead astray, and avoid overweening pride. Obey those who are older than you, be merciful on those who are younger, and be the brother of those who are the same age as yourself. Do not be two-faced; be a peace-maker between people; put those who have gone astray back on the right path; calm down those who are angry, and please Allah. Set the captive free with your wealth; bring aid to the orphan and to the widow, and you will be a neighbour to your Lord. Learn the law, and teach it to everyone, for on Judgment Day you will be called to account for it, and sent to heaven or the fames of hell. Stand in the way of those who are disobeying the law or sunna, because those who commit the sin and those who stand by and do nothing are equal in sin; strive in this respect, and you will please Allah. If you are truly repentant, you will deserve everlasting praise. Hold this world in contempt, and have worthy hope for the future, and you will receive everlasting life and blessings. Do not employ the practices, uses, and customs of the Christians, nor dress like them, nor should you have their images, nor those of the sinners, and you will be free from infernal sins. [. . .] You are able to carry out and to preserve the sayings, uses, customs, habits, and the way of dress that excellent and blessed one, Muhammad, on whom be benediction and peace, and those of his Companions, on whom Providence bestowed such grace, and on Judgement Day you will be one of those who enter paradise without being subjected to the test. [ZT]

9.3 Negotiating Muslim life under Christian rule in Iberia: after the fall of Granada (1491) The Muslim Umayyads invaded and conquered Iberia in the eighth century, and over the following centuries various Catholic rulers fought to expel them, with growing success from the thirteenth century. The end came in the 1490s when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella besieged Granada, capital of the last remaining Muslim kingdom in Iberia. They exploited rivalries in the ruling family between Boabdil (also known as King Abi Abdilehi) and his uncle El Zegal, and negotiated with Boabdil to surrender, vacate the fortresses, and leave Granada in 1492. Muslims wanting to leave could do

Going underground – negotiating difference

213

so safely, and others would be integrated into the Spanish tax systems and would retain their religion, justice system, customs, estates, and holy sites. These were common terms in the case of surrenders, but within a decade they would be violated as Ferdinand and Isabella embarked on a policy of “Catholicization.”3 Source: Surrender Treaty of the Kingdom of Granada (1491) First, that the Moorish king and the military chiefs, jurists, judges, religious advisors, governors, learned men, and all of the commanders and men of substance and all of the commoners of the city of Granada, including the Albacín and its surrounding areas, shall, with love, peace and goodwill . . . within the next forty days turn over to Their Highnesses or to their agent the fortress of the Alhambra and the Alhizan, with all their towers and gates, and all the other fortresses, towers, and gates of the city of Granada and of the Albacín and the surrounding areas extending out into the countryside, so that they may occupy them in their name with their people and at their will . . . At the end of the forty days, all the Moors shall surrender to Their Highnesses freely and without coercion, and they shall do what good and loyal vassals are obliged to do for their kings and natural lords. And to assure secure conditions during this surrender, one day ahead of surrendering the fortresses, they shall offer as hostages the minister Jucef Aben Comixa, with fve hundred persons, children and siblings of the leading citizens of the city and of the Albacín and its surrounding areas, so that they may remain under the power of Their Highnesses for ten days, while the fortresses are surrendered and secured, placing people and supplies in them, and during all of this time they shall be given everything they need for their sustenance; and once all is surrendered, they will be freed. Once the fortresses are surrendered, Their Highnesses and the prince, Don Juan, their son, shall, for themselves and for the monarchs who succeed them, receive as their vassals and natural subjects the King Abi Abdilehi [Boabdil] and the military governors, judges, jurists, and all the greater and lesser common people, including men and women, inhabitants of Granada and the Albacín and its surrounding areas and its fortresses, villages and other places. And also of the Alpujarras [region] and of other places that shall fall under this accord and treaty in any way, and they shall be allowed to stay in their houses, estates, and inherited properties at that time and forever, and they will not allow any harm or damage to be done to them without intervening . . . Nor shall their goods or their estates be taken away from them, nor even any part of them; but rather they will be revered, honored, and respected by their subjects and vassals, as are all of those who live under their government and rule . . . On the day when King Abi Abdilehi shall surrender the fortresses and their towers, Their Highnesses shall order that his son shall be returned

214

Going underground – negotiating difference

to him, along with all the hostages, and their wives and children, with the exception of those who have converted to Christianity. Their Highnesses and their successors forever shall let King Abi Abdilehi and his military chiefs, judges, religions advisers, governors, commanders, and other men of substance and all of the greater and lesser commoners live under their own law, and they shall not allow anyone to take away their mosques or minarets or muezzins, nor shall they take away the endowed properties of their mosques and the rents they receive, nor shall they interfere with their ways and customs. The Moors shall be judged under their own laws and courts by the Islamic law they are accustomed to observing, under the authority of their judges. Neither at this time nor at any future time shall [Their Highnesses] take their arms and horses away, or allow these to be taken away, except for their large and small artillery, which they must promptly turn over to agents sent by Their Highnesses. All of the Moors, great and small, men and women, from Granada and its lands as well as from Alpujarras and all its places, who shall want to go live in the Berber lands or any other place they wish may sell their estates, furniture, and goods in any way they wish and to whomever they wish, and neither Their Highnesses nor their successors shall ever take away or permit to take away these things from those who purchased them . . . Their Highnesses shall give free and safe passage to those Moors who may wish to go to the Berber lands or other places, along with their families, movable goods, merchandise, jewels, gold, silver, and all types of weapons except for artillery. And for those who may wish to go, they shall provide ten large ships that will take them where they want to go for seventy days, leaving them free and safe in the ports of the Berber lands where Christian merchant ships are accustomed to going to trade. Moreover, all those who shall wish to go within three years may do so, and Their Highness shall send ships wherever they ask to go, giving them safe passage, as long as they are requested ffty days in advance . . . Once these three years are up, they may still go to the Berber lands whenever they wish, and they shall be allowed to do so upon payment of one ducado per person plus the cost of the passage in the ships in which they travel . . . Neither Their Highness nor their son, the prince don Juan, nor those who succeed them shall ever order the Moors who are their vassals to wear signs on their clothing, as the Jews wear. Neither King Abdilehi nor the other Moors of the city of Granada or of the Albacín and its surrounding areas shall pay the taxes that are levied on houses and possessions for the next three years, and they shall only pay the harvest tax of one-tenth in August and autumn, and the one-tenth on cattle they had . . . as Christians are accustomed to paying. At the time of the surrender of the city and its areas, the Moors are obliged to turn over to Their Highnesses all of the Christian captives, male

Going underground – negotiating difference

215

and female, so that they may be freed without any kind of ransom being asked or given . . . Their Highnesses shall order that at no time shall either beasts of burden or servants be taken from King Abdilehi, the military governors, judges [and others] for any reason without their approval and without their being compensated fairly. They shall not allow any Christians to enter in the mosques of the Moors where they pray, without the consent of their offcials, and anyone who enters otherwise shall be punished for it. Their Highness shall not permit Jews to have any power of authority over Moors, nor shall they be allowed to collect any kind of rent from them. King Abdilehi and his military chiefs, judges, jurists, religions advisers, governors, learned men, commanders and squires, and all the common people of the city of Granada and of the Albacín and its surrounding areas and of the Alpujarras region and other places shall be respected and treated well by Their Highnesses and their ministers, and their views shall be heard and their customs and rites guaranteed, and all the offcials shall be allowed to charge their rents and enjoy the privileges and liberties to which they are accustomed, and it is just that these things be maintained. Their Highnesses shall order that they shall not be forced to take in boarders, nor shall any clothing, birds, animals, or supplies of any kind be taken from the Moors without their consent. Legal disputes that arise among Moors shall be judged by their Islamic law . . . and by their judges and jurists, as is their custom, and if a dispute shall arise between a Christian and Moor, judgement shall be made by one Christian and Moorish offcial, so that neither party can complain about the sentence . . . The Moors shall not give or pay to Their Highnesses more tribute than they are accustomed to paying to the Moorish kings . . . It shall not be allowed for any person to mistreat, by deed or by word, any Christian man or woman who, previous to this treaty, has converted to Islam; and if any Moor has a wife who is a renegade [a Christian who converted to Islam], that person shall not be forced to become Christian against her will, and she shall be interviewed in the presence of Christians and Moors, and her will shall be followed; and the same will be done with the boys and girls born to a Christian woman and a Moorish man. No Moor shall be forced to become a Christian against his will. And if a woman in love, wither married or a widow, should wish to become Christian, she shall be allowed to convert until she is interviewed . . . Neither Their Highnesses nor their successors shall ever ask King Abdilehi or those from Granada and its lands, nor the others who enter into this agreement, to give back horses, property, cattle, gold silver, jewels, nor any other thing that was won in any way during the war and rebellion, either from Christians or from Moors . . .

216

Going underground – negotiating difference

If any Moor has injured or killed a Christian man or woman who was his captive, he will not be held accountable for it. Once the three years are up, the Moors shall not pay any greater amount in rent for estates and lands than it shall appear fair for them to pay in light of the value and quality. The judges, offcials, and governors Their Highnesses shall appoint in the city of Granada and its surrounding areas shall be persons who will honor the Moors and treat them affectionately, and shall observe this treaty; if anyone should do anything improper, Their Highnesses shall order them to be replaced and punished. Their Highnesses and their successors shall not ask or inquire of King Abdilehi or any other person covered by this agreement about anything they have done, no matter what it is, previous to the day of the surrender of this city and its fortresses. No military governor, squire, or servant of King [El] Zagal shall have any position or authority at any time over the kings of Granada. The Moors shall not be compelled or forced into any kind of military service against their will, and if Their Highnesses shall wish to recruit any horsemen, summoning them to any place in Andalusia, they shall order them to be paid from the day they leave until their return to their homes. Their Highnesses shall order the maintenance of the existing irrigation channels, ditches, and fountains that go into Granada, and they shall neither alter them nor take any part of them; and should anyone do so or should anyone throw any dirty thing into them, they shall be punished for it . . . Any contractual and written debts that exist among the Moors must be paid . . . Christian slaughterhouses shall be kept separate from those of the Moors, and the supplies from one shall not be mixed together with those of the other . . . The Jews who are natives of Granada and the Albacín and its surrounding areas and all the other places covered by this agreement shall beneft from its contents, provided that those who do not convert to Christianity must leave for the Berber lands within three years, starting from December 8 of this year. Their Highnesses shall order that all that is contained in this treaty be observed starting from the day when the fortresses of the city of Granada are surrendered . . . [ZT]

9.4 Iberian Muslims appeal to the Ottoman Sultan for relief (c. 1502) The Treaty of Granada secured signifcant rights to Iberian Muslims and mudéjars. Yet Catholic clergy and nobles goaded them into revolt by the turn of the century, knowing that this would suspend the Treaty itself, and

Going underground – negotiating difference

217

allow them to force Muslims to convert or leave. With their own army disbanded, Iberian Muslims looked to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II to come to their aid. In this appeal for aid, an anonymous poet emphasizes the series of violations to Muslim spaces, ceremonies, and people that triggered the revolt, and the worsening situation that has followed.4 Source: Anon, “Appeal to Sultan Bayezid II” (c. 1502) A noble, enduring, ever-renewed peace do I attribute exclusively to his highness, the best of Caliphs. Peace be upon his highness, the possessor of glory and lofty stature, who has clothed the infdel in a robe of humility; Peace be upon him whose kingship God has expanded, supporting him with victory in every region; Peace be upon his majesty, the capital of whose realm is Constantinople. What a noble city it is! Peace be upon him whose kingdom God adorned with armies and subject populations of Turks; Peace be upon you. May God exalt your rank and may He also make you a king over every nation. Peace be upon the judge and upon whomsoever of the noble, exalted men of learning resembled him; Peace be upon the men of religion and piety and upon whomsoever among the counselors is gifted with sound judgment. Peace be upon you on behalf of some slaves who have remained in a land of exile, in Andalus in the west, Whom the swelling sea of Rum as well as a deep, gloomy, and fathomless ocean encompasses. Peace be upon you on behalf of some slaves smitten by a dire misfortune. What a misfortune it was! Peace be upon you on behalf of some old men whose white hair has come to be torn from [much] plucking, after [they have enjoyed a life of] glory; Peace be upon you on behalf of some faces that have been bared to the company of non-Arabs after having been veiled; Peace be upon you on behalf of some young girls whom the priest drives by force to a bed of shame; Peace be upon you on behalf of some old women who have been compelled to eat pork and fesh not killed according to ritual prescriptions. We all kiss the ground of your royal court and we call down blessings upon you at all moments. May the Lord cause your royal power and life to endure, and may He preserve you from every trial and misfortune; May He strengthen you with support and victory over the enemy, and lodge you in the abode of [His] pleasure and regard [for you]. We have complained to you, your majesty, of the harm, the misfortune and the enormous calamity that has afficted us.

218

Going underground – negotiating difference

We have been betrayed and converted to Christianity; our religion has been exchanged for another; we have been oppressed and treated in every shameful way. Yet under the Prophet Muhammad’s religion we used to oppose the agents of the Cross with our inner intentions, Facing grave dangers in Holy War because of killing and capturing, hunger and dearth. [death?] But the Christians attacked us from all sides in a vast torrent, company after company Smiting us with zeal and resolution like locusts in the multitude of their cavalry and weapons. Nevertheless, for a long time we withstood their armies and killed group after group of them, Although their horsemen increased every moment, whereas ours were in a state of diminution and scarcity, Hence, when we became weak, they camped in our territory and smote us, town after town, Bringing many large cannons that demolished the impregnable walls of the towns, Attacking them energetically during the siege for many months and days with zeal and determination. So when our cavalry and foot soldiers had perished and we observed that no rescue was forthcoming from our brethren, And when our victuals had diminished and our lot had become hard indeed we complied, against our will, with their demands, out of fear of disgrace, And fearing our sons and daughters, lest they be taken captive or cruelly slaughtered, On the condition that we were to remain like the Mudejars before us, namely the inhabitants of the old territory, And that we were to be allowed to remain in enjoyment [of the right] to call to prayer and [to celebrate] our ritual oration, while we were not [to be required] to abandon any of the prescriptions of the Shari’a [Religious Law]; And that whosoever among us desired [to cross] the sea was to [be allowed to] do so in safety, to the land on the [African] coast with all the property he wished [to take], As well as many other stipulations, surpassing ffty by the number of fve. Then their Sultan and grandee said to us: “what you have stipulated is granted to you in more than its entirety,” Showing us documents containing a pact and a treaty, saying to us: “This is my amnesty and my protection [over you]. So remain in enjoyment of your possessions and homes as you were before, unharmed.”

Going underground – negotiating difference

219

Yet when we came under their treaty of protection, their treachery toward us became apparent for [he] broke the agreement. He broke the compacts he had deceived us with and converted us to Christianity by force, with harshness and severity, Burning the books we had and mixing them with dung as with flth, Though each book was on the subject of our religion. Yet they were cast into the fre with scorn and derision, Nor did they spare a single volume belonging to any Muslim, or any tome which one could read in solitude Whosoever fasted or prayed and his state came to be known, was in every instance cast into the fre, And whosoever of us failed to go to their place of unbelief, him did the priest severely punish, Slapping him on both cheeks, confscating his property, and imprisoning him in a wretched state. Moreover, during Ramadan, they spoiled our fast time after time with food and drink. And they ordered us to curse our Prophet, and to refrain from invoking him in times of ease and hardship. They even overheard a group chanting his name, and the latter suffered a grievous injury at their hands, For their judges and governors punished them with beatings, fnes, imprisonment, and humiliation. Whosoever lay dying, and did not have in attendance one who could preach [their religion to him], in their deceit, they would refuse to bury him, Instead, he was left lying prostrate on a dung heap like a dead donkey or [some other] animal. [They committed] many other similar, shameful deeds, as well as numerous wicked acts. Our names were changed and given a new form with neither our consent nor our desire. Therefore, alas for the exchanging of Muhammad’s religion for that of the Christian dogs, the worst of creatures! Alas for our names when they were exchanged for those ignorant non-Arabs! Alas for our sons and daughters who go off every morning to a priest Who teaches them unbelief, idolatry, and falsehood while they are entirely unable to circumvent [the Christians] by any trick! Alas for those mosques that have been walled up to become dung heaps for the infdel after having enjoyed ritual purity! Also for those minarets in which the bells [of the Christians] have been hung in the place of the Muslim declaration of faith [being announced from them]!

220

Going underground – negotiating difference

Alas for those towns and their beauty! Through unbelief they have grown very dark! They have become strongholds for the worshipers of the Cross, and in them the latter safe against the occurring of raids. We have become slaves; not captives who may be ransomed, nor even Muslims who pronounce their declaration of faith! Hence, were your eyes to see what has become of our lot, they would overfow with abundant tears. So alas! Alas for us! Alas for the misfortune that struck us, namely harm, sorrow, and the robe of oppression! We besought you, our majesty, by the Lord our God, and by the chosen, the elect, the best of Creatures And by those goodly lords, the family of Muhammad, and his companionsWhat noble companions are they!– And by the lord Al-Abbas, our Prophet’s paternal uncle, by his white hair, the most excellent white hair, By those upright ones who grant recognition to their Lord, and by every excellent saint endowed with nobility. Perchance you will look upon us and what has smitten us; The God of the Throne will bring mercy, For your speech is hearkened to and your order is effective, while everything you command is swiftly executed. As for the Christian faith, its [place of] origin is ruled by your authority, and it was from there that it spread to them in every region. So, by God, your highness, be pleased to favour us with some advice or some words or protest, For you possess excellence, glory, rank, and [the power] to rescue God’s worshipers from all evil Therefore ask their Pope, that is to say, the ruler of Rome, why they permitted treason after having [granted] amnesty, And why they harmed us with their betrayal with no wrong or crime on our part? When their people who had been conquered [by us] were under the safeguard or our religion and the protection of [our] glorious kings who fulflled their promises, Neither were they converted from their faith, nor expelled from their homes, nor did they suffer betrayal or dishonor. As for him who grants a treaty and then betrays it, that is a deed forbidden by every faith, Especially on the part of kings, for it is a disgraceful, infamous deed; unlawful everywhere. Your letter to them arrived, yet they did not heed one single word of it all;

Going underground – negotiating difference

221

It only increased their enmity and boldness against us as well as their perseverance in all kinds of wicked deeds. The envoys of Egypt reached them and they were not treated with treachery or dishonour, Yet [the Christians] informed those envoys on our behalf, that we had voluntarily accepted the religion of unbelief, And they brought out some [token] conversations to idolatry, of those who had submitted to them; yet, by God, we will never accept that declaration of faith! They have lied about us with the greatest of falsehood in their words and arguments in saying that. Rather, it was the fear of death and of burning that caused us to convert. We speak just as they spoke [to us]. It happened contrary to our intention, While the faith of God’s Prophet has not been extinguished among us, since in every glance our recognition of god’s monotheism can be observed. Moreover, by God, we accept neither our change of our religion nor what they say on the subject of Trinity. And if they claim that we have accepted their religion unharmed by them, Then ask Huejar about its inhabitants: how they became captives and slaughterlings under [the burden] of humiliation and misfortune, And ask Belfque what was the outcome of their affair: they were cut to pieces by the sword after undergoing anxiety. As for Munyafa, its inhabitants were sundered by the sword. The same was done to the people of Alpujarras. As for Andarax, its people were consumed by fre. It was in their mosque that they all became like charcoal. Lo, your majesty, we complain to you, what we have encountered is the worst form of estrangement. Could our religion not be left to us as well as our ritual prayer, as they swore to do before the agreement was broken? If not let them allow us to emigrate from their land to North Africa, the homeland of our dear ones, with our belongings. For expulsion is better for us than remaining in unbelief, enjoying power but having no religion. This is what we hope for from the glory of your rank. May every need of ours be satisfed with you! From you do we hope for an end to your anxieties and to the evil low and humiliation that have overcome us, For you, praise be to God, are the best of our kings while our glory rises above all other glories. Therefore we ask our Lord to prolong your life in kingship and glory, in joy and prosperity;

222

Going underground – negotiating difference

And [to grant you] peace in your realms, victory over your enemies, abundant troops, wealth, and magnifcence, Finally, may God’s Peace, followed by His Mercy, be ever upon you for the duration of time!

[NT]

9.5 Practicing Islam as a Catholic: the Oran Fatwa (1504) Muslims faced with forced conversion and baptism had to determine how they might continue to practice Islam privately when their new public status as Catholics would make such practice a crime of apostasy punishable by death. The Islamic scholar Ahmad ibn Abi Jum’ah (d. 1511), who was active in Algiers and Morocco, is credited with issuing this fatwa named for an Algerian coastal town in order to guide Iberian Muslims. A fatwa is a ruling on Islamic law issued by an individual with authority, and this one builds on the Islamic concept of good intention, or niyaah, distinguishing between outer actions and inner motivations. Muslims could attend Catholic mass, drink wine, and eat pork – all forbidden in Islam – if forced to by Catholic authorities, as long as they resisted in their hearts and kept their mind on Allah at all times. They could even marry Christians under the same terms. At the same time, they must seek to perform as many of the obligations of Islam as possible, making these out to be ordinary everyday actions.5 Source: Ahmad ibn Abi Jum’ah, Oran Fatwa (1504) Know that idols are carved wood and hard stone which can cause you no harm and can do you no good, it is to Allah that the kingdom belongs. Allah did not take to Himself a son, and alongside Him there is no other god, so he is the one you must worship, and you must displace perseverance in your adoration of him. So [you must carry out] ritual prayer (salat), even though only by making some slight movement. And [you must contribute] ritual alms (zakat), even though as if apparently it is some hypocritical show of generosity to a beggar (for Allah does not look at your face, but into your heart), And perform ritual ablutions (gusl) after major pollution, even though by plunging into the sea. If you are prevented from praying, then you should make up at night-time what you have had to omit during the day; and when ritually pure water is for practical purposes lacking, then you must wipe yourself clean [in the ritually approved fashion – tayammum], even if it is just by rubbing your hands clean on a wall. If that is not possible the general held view is that the prayer and its execution are not required in the absence of water or clean stone, although you should make some slight pointing motion with your

Going underground – negotiating difference

223

hands or face toward clean earth or stone or a tree such as would have been ritually acceptable for that purpose [. . .]. If, at the hour of prayer, they force you to prostate yourself before their idols, or make you attend their prayers, maintain it as your frm intention to consider what they do as forbidden, and have it as your desire to carry out the prayer specifed in Islamic law, bow down to whatever idols they are bowing to, but turn your intention toward Allah. Even if the direction is not that of Mecca, the requirement may be disregarded, as it is in the case of prayer when in danger on the battlefeld. If they oblige you to drink wine, you may do so, but let it not be your intention to make use of it. If they force pork on you, eat it, but in your heart reject it, and hold frm to the belief that it is forbidden. In the same way, if they force you to do anything which is forbidden. If they would have you marry their daughters, that is permissible, for they are people with a scripture [i.e., People of the Book], and if they oblige you to give your daughters in marriage to them, then you should cleave frmly to the belief that it is forbidden, were you not under duress, and abhor it in your hearts, so that you would do otherwise, if you were able. In the same way, if they force upon you the taking of usury, or some other unlawful thing, do it, but reject it in your heart, and only keep back for yourself the original sum invested, and if you repent, then give the rest away as charity. If they oblige you to pronounce words of blasphemy, do what they ask, but employ whatever stratagems of equivocation you can, and if you do pronounce the words they require, continue to put your trust in the faith. If they say to you: “Curse Muhammad,” then, bearing in mind they pronounce it as “Mamad,” curse “Mamad,” and signify thereby the Devil, or else the Jewish Mamad [a synagogue council], since it is a common name among them. If they say, “Jesus is the son of God,” say that if they force you to, but let it be your intention to say it without the words in the possessive case, in the same way one can say “the house of God,” without meaning that God actually resides there. If they give you the order, “Say Mary is His wife,” then say that, but intend the possessive pronoun to refer to her cousin, who married her in the time of the Israelites, and then separated from her before the birth [. . .], or else mean that God out of his might and power brought about her marriage. If they say Jesus died on the cross, mean by that that he perfected thereby the mortifcation of the fesh, his suffering, and the publishing of his praise among mankind, and that Allah brought this about when he raised him to heaven. Anything which presents diffculties to you should be sent to me, and God willing, we will set you aright in the light of what you write.

224

Going underground – negotiating difference

I pray that Allah may so bring it about that Islam may be worshipped openly without ordeals, tribulation or fear, thanks to the success of the attack of the noble Turks. We assure you before Allah that you have served him, and done his command. You must reply. Greetings to you all. Dated at the close of rajab 910 [a.d. 1504]. To be sent to the guraba [stranger, outsider]. [NM/TC/ZT]

9.6 The alien advantage: German Protestants worshipping in Catholic Venice (c. 1580) International merchants were often obliged to live in separate compounds so that authorities could oversee and control their movements more readily. Venice had both a Fondaco dei Tedeschi for Germans and a Fondaco dei Turchi for Ottomans, adapting the Arabic term for market (funduq) to describe these hostel-warehouses. They were extra-territorial refuges that allowed German Protestants and Ottoman Muslims to hold their own religious services without fear of prosecution. Here the pope’s ambassador Alberto Bolognetti reports on what he sees as the excessive tolerance for German heresy in Venice, both inside and outside what he calls the exchange house (i.e., the Fondaco dei Tedeschi). His complaint underscores how different religious and cultural groups lived together and interacted with each other in port cities; this was a more common global phenomenon, found also in China, Japan, and Kongo, where authorities seeking an increase in trade would allow merchants to practice their own religions privately in separate residential compounds. The presence of alien traders allowed for cross cultural encounters in many ports. Traders were not infrequently from religious minorities, since their governments often found it easier to tolerate their activities overseas than at home, so in some cases this alien advantage allowed them to occupy more than one middle space.6 Source: Alberto Bolognetti, Report of papal nuncio in Venice (1580) [Father Jacob the Jesuit] told me that there were in all some 900 Germans living in Venice, including those in the exchange house, and that in his opinion all were heretics, with scarcely 200 exceptions. The Germans may be divided into three categories. Some are servants in private houses, and to outward appearances they live as they ought to do, but it is hard to make any judgment about their private lives, because in view of the perpetual toing and fro-ing of peoples which one sees in Venice it must happen that they come both from Catholic and from heretical regions. Some are artifcers, bakers, goldsmiths, tailors and the like, and they, being intent on earning a living, seldom discuss matters of faith. But they do live very loosely, and, although there are some who confess and communicate at Easter, most of

Going underground – negotiating difference

225

them are heretics who either omit to do so or else go to the German border in Holy Week to sup and receive their Communion in the manner of the heretics. The remainder are merchants, richer and more prosperous folk, or their agents and correspondents, and there are not many of them. Apart from those who have wives, most of them dwell in the exchange house. There were more before the plague, but when that broke out many directed their trade elsewhere, left Venice and have never returned. So scarcely more than 100 remain, although, if you count offcials and servants as well, there are nearly 200 living in that great building. They live as in a college, having everything in common, and they eat in the same place at a set hour, which proves very convenient for their business. I used to hear that they lived in a more disreputable fashion than any of the others, for they kept heretical books, ate meat and other foods of every kind at will on forbidden days, and conversed as they pleased of matters of the faith. And, if anyone arrived who showed by his diet or speech or in any other way that he clung to the rites of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, he would be scorned and ridiculed by the others. Although Father Jacob would often go among the lowly craftsmen and do some good among them, exhorting them to prayers and other sound practices, it was in vain that he tried to do the same for the inhabitants of the exchange house. Several times did he go to expound the Gospel to them while they sat at table, on account of the friendship he at frst had with some of them; but in the end they forbade him to return, for they would not submit to the authority of an outsider, and knew very well how to read the Gospel by themselves. I hear, too, that they lived with the same license in two Venetian inns, the Black Eagle at San Bartolomeo and the White Lion, where it once happened that, when a German Catholic from Vienna was praising the Emperor for expelling that heretical preacher, many at once contradicted him in an insulting manner. Hence that German complained and said he found it strange that in the Catholic city of Venice he could not safely mention what the Emperor in Germany was doing to assist the Catholics . . . Would that these improper occurrences were confned to the inns and the exchange house, for there were tales of still more outrageous things happening in public places. Hence the Venetian government ought to realize that to allow so much freedom to Germans in the middle of the city is to nurture a viper in their own bosom. I thought it a very serious matter when I was told that in the church of San Bartolomeo, where they preach in German, it was customary to preach heretical doctrine in public, and that a preacher had caused songs abusing the Catholic faith (which they call ‘popery’ [fede papistical]) to be sung publicly in church, while he himself acted the drunkard in the pulpit to the laughter of the people. In my time there occurred a scandal of no less gravity, and this . . . was that in the church of the Carmini in Venice they posted up a number of propositions which were not merely heretical but truly monstrous and horrendous, in that they denied Purgatory, Hell, the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, and in short went so far

226 Going underground – negotiating difference beyond impiety as to verge upon atheism; and the author included in his writings a number of arguments in support of his opinions, and challenged the preacher to reply from the pulpit the following Sunday. [NT]

9.7 Protesting the prohibition of Christianity in Japan (1614) The Spanish layman Bernardino de Ávila Girón wrote an eyewitness account of the religious atmosphere in the port city of Nagasaki shortly after the prohibition of Christianity in March 1614. Here, he describes a series of processions that were organized in Nagasaki in May 1614 to encourage local Christians to hold onto their faith in an act of resistance against the Japanese central government. His detailed account does not make explicit the rivalry between religious orders that led to the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and some mendicants organizing separate and sometimes competing public events. Here, Girón describes the last of 12 processions, held to mark Corpus Christi. It was organized by the Jesuits at their main church and cathedral of St Paul in Nagasaki, with a follow-up private event for two lay confraternities that they had founded: the Misericordia and the Confraternity of the Apostle St James.7 Source: Bernardino de Ávila Girón, A Relation of the Kingdom of Nippon (c. 1610s) Thursday 29 May 1614: On the occasion of the holiday of Corpus Christi, there was a solemn procession by the Society of Jesus, and of much authority for Japan, since many people participated. First, 50 Japanese boys richly attired, with wax candles in their hands, followed 216 brothers dojukus (those who are studying to become priests) with their candles in hand and with their surplices. After them, four little angels followed, very beautiful and richly dressed, and after them a golden portable frame, hung from many chains, with amber pomanders, reliquaries and other jewels, and holding a baby Jesus who was very beautiful and cute. In front of this they carried eight large and lit wax candles and after Jesus came a choir of singers. Then followed more than 50 fathers of the Society, all of them wearing surplice and stole, and 20 of them also wearing capes. Then came a large banner or standard, showing a chalice and a holy Host on one side, and on the other a venerable Abraham with a cutlass sword over a humble Isaac lying on frewood on the altar stone. A Portuguese noble, dressed in a long crimson damask robe carried this banner. After him, four more angels with candles in their hands followed, and after these, another choir of singers. After that, twelve boys dressed in crimson carried each one large crimson wax candle. The candleholders were varnished in red, with a beautiful brass rose as bobeche [a brass collar to catch the dripping wax] and on the shaft, just a hand span below the rose, was

Going underground – negotiating difference

227

an image of Jesus in gold. After these came the Holy Sacrament, carried in a large and richly decorated pyx made of gold. The Provincial Father Valentín Carvallo was carrying it on a small wooden base upholstered with damask, and a deacon and the sub-deacon attended him one in each side, so that they could walk comfortably and decently. The Holy Sacrament was covered by a rich and costly canopy of embroidered velvet, carried with eight poles by the main men in the village [sic], who were also dressed in crimson long robes. The route of the procession was short, because the village councilors [sic] had begged the fathers not to lead the procession out to the streets, so as no increase the anger of their diabolical enemy, who was expected to arrive at any time to expel them from that land [Japan]. This is why the procession only went around the veranda of the church. There were so many participants that it was impossible to enter into the church, or its surroundings, or the patios, or the veranda, and the three streets that provide access to the compound and church were all full of people. After the procession ended the Lord was on display for three days [on the high altar of St Paul], after which the confraternal brothers of the Misericordia and those of the Apostle James gathered together and went in solemn procession to St Paul to worship the Lord, who as I said was on display. They were there for a whole hour in prayer, then departed in a very orderly manner. The Christians of this village did not stop their secret devotions, public fasting, and penance. Apart from Sunday, there were many fagellants gathering every day with great fervor in order to give thanks to Our Lord, congregating and uniting to suffer willingly for the love of God. All through this period they did not cease the Forty Hour prayer [a communal spiritual exercise in which a series of participants pray continually before the Host for 40 hours]. There was no day in which they did not do it with deep devotion and silence, in many particular houses of the village [sic]. Neighbours on the street took turns so that people were never lacking in the abovementioned prayer. They assembled their altars in a very orderly manner in secret places kept clean and honest. This was to our confusion, since we have relaxed so much that we hardly attend Mass once a week, and we think we are doing very well if we attend Mass on holy days of obligation. We search for the so-called “hunter’s masses” [misa de los cazadores or misa del alba were masses celebrated at sunrise], and hope the priest does not remain there afterwards so as to avoid him. [CT]

9.8 Saving an illegitimate Jewish baby from Christian authorities (1691) Laws prohibiting sex between Christians and Jews remained in force even as the two communities came to mix more often. Marriage was impossible,

228 Going underground – negotiating difference fnes were charged against rule-breakers, and if authorities suspected that an illegitimate infant came from mixed parents, they would seize and baptize it, and raise it in an orphanage as a Christian. Jewish authorities in Venice here appeal one such case, giving evidence that an infant recently abandoned in the ghetto and seized by authorities must have actually had both a Jewish mother and father. They fatter Venice’s pride in its justice and charity, appeal to reason, give arguments from scripture, and cite the opinion of scholastic theologians against involuntary baptism, all in order to secure the return of a baby they wish to raise as a Jew.8 Source: Appeal of the Jewish Council (Università) of Venice (1691) Most serene Republic, favoured by the Divine Majesty for its eternal duration from its birth to this day with a true freedom that has never been interrupted and given by the Divine Majesty for its eternal duration thorough to the present; for which it [the Venetian Republic] has become famous and illustrious amid all the dominions of the universe and agreed to distribute with rational balance this precious gift to its vassals, because of which the famous city of Venice has become the only sanctuary temple of freedom for all humanity. Most Illustrious and excellent Cattaveri, the Hebrew Nation, most humble servant of Your Excellencies . . . has dwelled for many centuries under this most-merciful government with the freedom to live according to their customs and rites. And with the free control of their children and holiest laws of this most serene Homeland, they should moderate the senses and their lust so that the Jew, being satisfed in the matters of Aphrodite with pleasures both honest and permitted by her rules, should give birth only to legitimate children, in which case there would be no need to bother Your Excellencies. But given that 3,000 souls of every age and sex [live in this ghetto], it is impossible to avoid cases of illegitimate births, and in those circumstances reputation obliges that they be hidden. . . . Nor does the goodness of the Prince refuse the Jew a very opportune solution to his/ her vicissitudes and for the safety of innocent children, one that keeps the cries of the children from being the trumpets of the shame of their parents. In this situation, the charity of the leaders of the ghetto has always been of help because, exposed [i.e., abandoned] outside of their houses or near them, the very same babies were welcomed and fed, thanks to resources provided by the Jewish Community (Università [ebraica]). Currently many illegitimate men who do not know their fathers live in the ghetto, raised by the charity of the leaders. There have always been and today there still are many of them for whom the lifting of this refuge would lead to a worse situation. Mothers could strangle children, throw them into the wells; a girl raped or seduced [stuprata] or a woman committing adultery could kill herself rather than being exposed to public shame. Excellent Signori

Going underground – negotiating difference

229

for the sake of charity, you think it right to deny her this solution. And if Piety does not convince you [otherwise], Your Excellencies should imagine [the case of] a Jewess who committed an error, what more could she do in order to hide her shame and save the son of the Religion, for herself and for the Father than what this one has done, for whom we supplicate You with bent knee. She put the child into a bag, at night, when the ghetto is closed, at the bottom or at the top of a stairway in the ghetto, close to the headquarter of the two leaders; she attached to it a paper called a mezuzah with a Jewish devotional prayer around it; she wrote there a report in Hebrew amid the binders that says that this baby was born on the 7th of the month of Tammuz and this in regard to the circumcision. A woman is found ready to keep and welcome him, and will there be any doubt that the child is Jewish? Illustrious Excellencies, would you really be inclined to separate him from his parents and send him to the Piety? [lit. “alla Pietà,” a Christian orphanage called the Pietà on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in Venice]. To the Hospital? And if the father is wealthy and several years from now would want to welcome him, Your Excellencies would not wish to have him lose his patrimony so that he would remain miserable; or if the mother is currently committing adultery or if it is not safe for her life to declare herself publicly as the mother of this baby, once the situation changes, she would not be able to help him, and what is the fault of this creature to be so deprived? The uncontaminated justice of Your Excellencies must be convinced that this baby is Jewish, as much from his father as from his mother. And if the father were Christian she would have taken him to the Piety [lit. Pietà] freely; she would not have attached that paper, nor the Jewish prayer. Indeed what would have been the point to leave in the ghetto, in awful conditions, a child who instead [as a Christian] could be sent to a comfortable place and favourable to his religion? Therefore the father is certainly Jewish. If also the mother, there is no doubt. A Christian [mother] and a Jewish father? Most Excellent Fathers, how could she come to the ghetto? In this case, the mother would either keep him or send [him] to the Hospital. But could Your Excellencies imagine the Jew committing a worse crime than the former? To expose himself to the disgrace a Christian woman leading a wicked life? [A woman] who could at any moment lay claim to the baby and make him [the seducer] guilty of a capital crime, this is not thinkable, nor is it something that can be conceived by the sublime minds of Your Excellencies. But if this were the case, the scandal of this affair would already be in the open, and the Tribunal of Your Excellencies would already have heard the complaint of the mother. Excellent signori, you should know that since the Jew is tenacious in the observance of his religion, he has no custom of proselytism. Rather, Ruth from Moab is convinced by her mother-in-law to return to her people, to

230

Going underground – negotiating difference

the observance of her customs “Behold thy kinswoman is returned to her people, and to her gods, go thou with her [Ruth 1:15].” Therefore, a Jew would not be trapped by this deception to bring to the ghetto a child born outside the ghetto. Even less if the mother were Christian, in spite of the father being Jewish, the child would not be in the condition to be received among the Jews, and this resolves the controversial question and removes any doubt that this child might have been born even far away and then carried into the ghetto, rather than having been born in the Ghetto itself. In fact, according to our rites, a child born to a foreign woman is excluded from our religion and remains in that of the mother. . . . When, with the permission of Cyrus of Persia, our ancestors returned from the Babylonian Captivity to Jerusalem under the guidance of Ezra himself, they were accused of admitting during the captivity some foreign women and generating many impure children. . . . [I]t was decided with unanimous acclamation to remedy the situation by sending into perennial exile the women with their children and to exclude them [the women] from the Nation. And [the people said] . . . “We have sinned against our God, and have taken strange wives of the people of the land: and now if there be repentance in Israel concerning this, Let us make a covenant with the Lord our God, to put away all the wives, and such as are born of them, according to the will of the Lord, and of them that fear the commandment of the Lord our God: let it be done according to the law” [Ezra 10:1–3]. So it was done and all the impure children born to foreigner women were excluded from all the families. Thus there is no way that this child could be born to another mother than to a Jewish woman. Your Excellencies are required to administer justice. This child belongs to the ghetto. That woman received him from the mother. She keeps silent in order to not betray her; it is unlikely she can be convinced otherwise. The favour in which you hold your religion should not change the noble and righteous souls of Your Excellencies; Christian piety has always been built on the crucial tenet of diffusing its faith to other nations and yet many illustrious popes and all the theologians forbade and rule that “Jews’ and other infdels’ children should not be baptized without “the consent of their parents,” and Thomas Aquinas rules, “Nobody should commit an injury, indeed it would be an injury if Jews’ children were baptized without their [parents’] consent.” If therefore many holy fathers put respect for justice before that of religion, Your Excellencies should follow this example. Because as Saint Thomas [Aquinas] himself declares, “Hence it would be contrary to natural justice, if a child, before coming to the use of reason, were to be taken from its parents’ custody, or anything done to it against its parents’ wish. [. . .] and then it should be induced not by compulsion but by persuasion [Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II, 2, article 12].” This is surely a Jew, for all these circumstances: a Jewish baby, exposed in

Going underground – negotiating difference

231

the ghetto during the night. With a devotional paper in Hebrew, written on parchment, with many ceremonies and a bulletin in the Hebrew language, specifying the place of the birth in the binders; found by a Jewish woman [who] offered him to the leaders, and presented under the refection of Yours Excellencies; Jewish because of she who found him, and Jewish because of the place, time, and all the circumstances have been proven since the beginning of the trial. We therefore hope that the Justice will consider it so until there should appear proof to the contrary that moreover is declared by sworn witnesses that before being in the ghetto the baby was outside, or that it was moved to some place, or that these objects were provided deceitfully and this has to be proved with clarity in order to move Justice and the uncontaminated soul of the judge to remove the infant from the context in which he is being decided according to canon laws in C. Si expositus 87 dicet our precise case, “If [an infant] exposed in front of a church and found and welcomed by someone because of piety, it should be necessary to obtain a conclusive proof: and if the infant who has been welcomed will not be requested and recognized by ten days, the infant surely will belong to whom who had welcomed [him].” Therefore, if no contrary evidence during the investigation emerges, it should be left to the peaceful process of the leaders of the Ghetto who in this case are his fathers (as states the Law Textu[s] in Pari de Regulis in 6° [Liber Sextus decretarlium, lib. V, tit. 12, De Regulis Iuris Canonici, vol. 2, Reg. 65, col. 1124], “Because in equal fault, better is the condition of the possessor.” This [baby] is Jewish for certain, and as such and under any circumstances we hope that justice will consider [him]. This Our fathers were slaves in Egypt. The princess daughter of Pharaoh saw a baby, abandoned on the Nile, and because he was unexpectedly alive against the regal edict. . . . In front of the circumstances she supposed that the child was Jewish, then the sister came, and proposed her a Jewish nurse. She received. “And Pharao’s daughter said to her: Take this child, and nurse him for me: I will give thee thy wages [Exodus 2:9].” . . . Why the princess did not doubt that this be right and in order to disseminate [her] religion does not keep him? . . . That baby did not have a devotional paper, typical custom of Jews, still “this is one of the children of the Hebrews.” He was neither in the Ghetto during the night, nor in a public canal; and “when she saw the basket in the sedges she sent one of her maids for it [Exodus 2:5],” yet “this is one of the children of the Hebrews.” The young princess had mercy toward the child . . . But her compassion did not force her to change his status from slave to prince because this act would have been against justice, which requires that everyone receives his own. “This is one of the children of the Hebrews.” She paid a nurse and she wanted a Jewish nurse, because every thought brought to the conclusion that “this is one of the children of the Hebrews.” [Exodus 2:8]

232

Going underground – negotiating difference

You are Augusti Principes. Excellent Cattaveri, who, delegated by the Excellent Senate to our government, assist us with much charity and with that exemplary justice, inherited from your glorious ancestors. When the consciousness is persuaded under any circumstance that “this is one of the children of the Hebrews,” you should not be moved by religious zeal to have him fed by other milk than his, but rather allow to be summoned “a Hebrew woman, to nurse the babe [Exodus 2:7],” to be fed by his own milk by birth. This is because the diffusion of the Christian faith is made broader by the example of absolute freedom, with a spontaneous conversion rather than an imprisonment during childhood, when [someone] is incapable of independent thought, and which once in adulthood they will repent of, against the scandal of each one. But a threat of excommunication has been published [in the ghetto] and the truth has not yet emerged? “Then he is not Jewish,” someone may sustain. Where there is matter of declaring herself adulterous and infamous, a woman cannot be convinced by whatever excommunication. . . . Once Princess Tamar, daughter of King David, was raped by the incontinence of her brother Amnon, who then, horrifed by his own excess, could not tolerate the presence of the poor raped sister anymore and he converted love in hatred, and could not anymore tolerate her at his presence, thus drove her away, “so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her before. And Ammon said to her: Arise, and get thee gone.” [Samuel 2, 13:15]. But she replied: “There is no reason to drive me away like this, which this is even worse than the other crime you perpetrated on me.” She answered him: “The evil which now thou dost against me [Samuel 2, 13:16].” The poor princess considered more serious the fact that the offense would be publicly known than the offense in itself. That girl raped incestuously remained quiet, expelled and ashamed. [She] was not capable to understand by herself, but lacerated herself and was exclaimed as possessed by the demons, “Then his servant thrust her out: and shut the door after her. And she put ashes on her head, and rent her long robe and laid her hands upon her head, and went on crying.” [Samuel 2, 13:18–19]. This explains why the threat of excommunication and a thousand other scruples are much less persuasive than public knowledge of the crime. Indeed, it will be an act of [your] uncorrupted knowledge to not oblige the parents of this miserable child to ruin their name, . . . when they believe they have covered themselves [by exercised] . . . the common and practiced solution [i.e., of anonymous abandonment]. This will be an effect of exemplary justice toward the baby and mercy toward the parents. Gratie. Today 8 July 1691. Presented by the General Leaders of the Jews of this city. [FF]

Going underground – negotiating difference

233

Notes 1 “The Legal Status of Jews and Muslims in Castile,” in O.R. Constable (ed.) Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, pp. 269–75. 2 Içe De Gebir, “A Mudéjar Summary of Islamic Law (1462),” in Constable (ed.) Medieval Iberia, 327–29. 3 “Surrender Treaty of the Kingdom of Granada (1491),” in J. Cowans (ed.) Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, pp. 15–19. 4 Constable (ed.) Medieval Iberia. Translated from Arabic by James T. Monroe. Reprinted by permission of Gorgias Press. 5 “The Oran Fatwa of 1504,” in L.P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 60–3. © 1990 by The University of Chicago. Republished with permission of the University of Chicago Press; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 6 From the report of Alberto Bolognetti, papal nuncio in Venice, 1578–81, in D. Chambers, J. Fletcher and B. Pullan (eds) Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, pp. 330–1. Reprinted by permission of The Renaissance Society of America. 7 Bernardino de Ávila Girón, Relación del Reino Nipón que llama corruptamente Japón, ed. Noemi Martín Santos, Madrid: Clásicos Hispánicos, 2019, pp. 569–610. Translated by Carla Tronu. See also: H.N. Ward, “Translating Christian Martyrdom in Buddhist Japan in the Early Modern Jesuit Mission,” in N. Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 33–51. 8 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Fondo Inquisitorato sopra l’Università degli Ebrei, busta n. 40, 5 luglio, 1691, Fogli 148–151. Translated by Federica Francesconi. See also F. Francesconi, “The Venetian Jewish Household as a Multi-religious Community in Early Modern Italy,” in Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations, pp. 231–48.

10 Living the traditions The religious politics of daily life

10.1 In questions of faith, you are what you wear: Algerian women’s fashion (1612) The Portuguese priest, Antonio de Sosa, here describes the different types of clothing that Algerian women wore, whether it was for every day, formal, or house wear. He compares the dress of Arabic, Turkish, and convert (i.e., renegades) women to their Christian and Jewish counterparts, and notes how wealth and status were indicated by the quality and colors of their fabrics and ornaments. Information like this was important to Inquisitors in Iberia, who saw clothes as a critical marker of religion. If forcibly converted Jews (conversos) or Muslims (moriscos) continued to dress in the ways of their ancestral religion, then had they really converted? These suspicions extended to what converts ate, the names they gave their children, and even how they washed themselves and their clothes.1 Source: Antonio de Sosa, Topography of Algiers (1612) The dress of women in Algiers is not entirely uniform, because Moorish (not to speak of the Kabyles) and Berber women (of whom we spoke earlier when discussing their husbands) tend to dress primarily in very thin white linen tunics, with no collar whatsoever, a characteristic of every type of dress. These have plunging necklines, are foor-length and as wide as two shirts for men. Over these tunics they wear one of three things: either a very large and wide shirt, of fne white fabric, as we said earlier, similar to what their husbands the Baldis, or citizens, wear, which they call a durra’a. Or the women will wear a milhafa, or mlahfa, which is a kind of sheet, save that it is square and some three or three-and a-half elbows wide and eight or nine long, which they wrap around the body on top of the tunic. Or over the cloth shirt many wear another of silk, sendal (sheer silk or linen fabric), or very fne colored taffeta which reaches to their feet. If it is very cold, the women wear a smock of wool or quilting, as do their husbands, which they call gonela and others call goneyla. Women who are Turks or renegades tend to wear smocks over their tunics (which come

Living the traditions

235

down to their feet, are very wide, and are embroidered with colored silk on the throat, cuffs, and chest openings). These smocks – either of some fne woolen cloth from Valencia or of colored satin, velvet, or damask – fall to the shins in length. The neck is very plunging, leaving it very open up to the bosom. The Moorish women call this smock – which has some large and nicely worked gold or silver buttons – a gonela. Algerian women are not accustomed to wearing doublets of silk, or of Holland or other flmy linen. But this smock, or gonela, serves them for one and the other, and also as a skirt or shirttails. And if they feel great cold (which rarely happens since Algiers is a temperate climate), either they put on two of these smocks, or under one they wear a cloth vest, which is almost like a doublet. They cinch this smock in the same manner as do their men, with a belt, or kursiyya, made of veils, or sendals, of some fne colored silk. And because the sleeves of the said smock or ghlila reach only to the elbows (as we said of the taffetas and clothing of the Turks and Moors) – in order that women could also wash up to their elbows whenever necessity or the ceremonies or washings of the Qur’an dictate, as when they make the salat – they also tend, in the style of their husbands, to wear some sleeves of silk, velvet, or satin, which cover their arms from the wrist to the elbow. Because these sleeves are as long as the entire arm, they ft over the lower arm with many pleats and wrinkles. During the summer (in order to avoid clothing of heavy silk or wool) some women tend, for fashion’s sake, to wear over their smock or camisole a kind of cape, large and wide and very white, either of cloth or colored silk, of the kind used by non-Moorish women when they are sometimes pleased to dress a la morisca. All these women (Moors, Turks, and renegades) tend to wear something over their heads: primarily something like a cap into which they gather their hair, called in Arabic lartia or banika. This is made either of cloth embroidered in colored silk, or of thin green or yellow or red silk over which, all around the head, they wear one of three things: a Turkish plait of very fne material (like a shawl, four or more fngers wide, and eight or ten handspans long) on which ends are fxed some gold fringes, which they call ’asaba or qaffali. And tying this braid over and around the head with a knot at the base of the skull, they allow the points to fall beneath the waist. Or they wear another Moorish braid of very subtle thin silk in colors, which they tie (like the braid) around the head, and its points hang behind their backs to their waists. They call this headdress a nkab. For their festas or weddings, the wealthier women tend to wear on their heads a round birretta of brocade or of satin or damask richly embroidered with gold thread, which they call shashiyya or shash. Many women fashion these, as best they can with countless seed pearls and gemstones, and they put a lining inside to make the birettas stiff.

236

Living the traditions

All the women, be they Moor, Turks or renegades, ordinarily tend to walk around their homes barefoot, although sometimes they wear some slippers of gilt leather on their feet, with open toes and some fringes or tassels of silk, not very high and always very elegant and well designed. Other women, the poorer sort, wear some well-made Turkish shoes in different colors, and some of them (largely Moorish women) wear some light shoes with thin soles a la morisca, of some highly polished colored leather that they call sherbil or serbil. All of them generally tend to shave with a razor everything beneath the nape of the neck where the albanega, or hairnet, does not reach, and to cut off some part of the hair from the forehead, so that to one and the other side will hang some tufts of hair, very well combed, which fall over their temples. They call these tufts soualef. Unlike the women in Christian lands who prize their hair and try to make it blonde and golden, here on the contrary all the women – Moors, Turks, and renegades – try to make their hair as black as possible for which they use certain products, largely oils with a good scent that the merchants of Valencia tend to bring. Their makeup is different from that used by Christian women, because they use a great deal of bleaching agents and even more rouge. And they also use a very black product made from certain materials to paint designs on their cheeks, chin, and forehead, such as marks, cloves, and rosettes. And these women make their brows very arched, in such a way that they reach even the hanks of hair that hang over their temples. And beyond this, they very much enjoy having the palms of their hands and their nails blackened, and their feet up to the insteps the same way, so that it would appear to whoever looks their way that they are wearing black slippers. They like to blacken their arms even up to their elbows, as we said new brides do. And they consider all of this to be high fashion and gentility. In truth, this habit turns those who are beautiful quite ugly, and the ugly women, to a great degree, even uglier. Their principal jewels and ornaments are great quantities of pearls and seed-pearls, in chokers and earrings, which they favour in huge sizes, almost touching the shoulders, and so heavy that they stretch the ears low, because they weigh around a pound or more. They also wear earrings with dangling geegaws, gold earrings (like Christian women, although not of icons), and many rings on their fngers. On their arms they wear bracelets of silver and fne gold, although these are generally made of low-grade gold with alloy, the same materials with which they work their cianis, the coin of the realm about which I spoke earlier. Many women wear gold chains, and on them amber knobs that hang down to their breasts. And generally they are great friends of scents and of orange blossom, rose, or other waters, which the merchants of Valencia bring to sell in Algiers. Many women (largely Moors, Turks, or daughters of renegades) tend to wear something like well-worked gold or silver ankle bracelets on their legs,

Living the traditions

237

close to their ankles, although these are not entirely round but half round and the other half squared, tall and four or fve fngers wide, something also used by the prettiest and richest Jewish women. When these women step outside their houses, they all wear very clean and white linen bloomers that reach down to their ankles. And instead of any slippers, they wear shoes of black leather with soles. So as not to be seen when they leave their houses, they tend to cover their faces with a thin white veil, tied with a knot at the nape of the neck, leaving their eyes and forehead exposed. They also wear white capes of very thin fne wool, or of woven wool and silk, which they whiten with much soap, aromatic smoke of sulfur, and other things: and they call these capes ha’ik. These wraps are like the milhafa we mentioned earlier, or like a piece of cloth some thirty handspans long and some fourteen or ffteen wide. They are square, so that they can be wrapped about the body. After tying one point on the breast with certain large clasps or pins of gilded silver, they can then throw the body of the wrap over their shoulders and head and take the other endpoint under the right arm. In this way, the women remain so well wrapped that nothing is left save a small space to look out of, in the manner of the Burgundian helmet of an armed man. When the leading Algerian ladies go out, they take their slaves with them, Black ones (of whom they have many, buying them for twenty, twenty-fve, or thirty escudos each) as well as white Christian ones, who are also very available. The number of slaves they take with them is not fxed, but every woman, depending on her status and wealth, goes accompanied. Some take eight or ten, others two, four, or six. But ordinarily they take no more than one or two slaves, who wear the same mantles (although not as pretty as those of their mistresses) or a piece of a sheet or cloth with blue stripes on the head, which cover them up to their waists. All the other slaves walk about uncovered, unless there be one who presumes to higher status. The rest of the women who own no slaves, and even some who do, walk about the city alone and at their pleasure. Jewish women dress in the same manner, save that instead of shoes they wear slippers of black leather. They go about neither covered with wraps nor accompanied by Christian slaves. Black women who are Muslims cannot become the slaves of Jewish women. [TC]

10.2 Assimilating Roma in early modern Italy (1583; 1631) These sources document hardening attitudes and policies towards the Roma that were adopted by religious and civil authorities from the mid-sixteenth century, with a growing emphasis on assimilation. Thought to be a nomadic people who had originated in Egypt, they were initially welcomed as refugees from Ottoman expansion. Authorities were both welcoming and threatening, while the Roma themselves alternated between willingness to assimilate

238

Living the traditions

and identity-based resistance. The results of this process were ambiguous and incomplete. The Roma acquired legal status through assimilation and naturalization but were never perceived as fully-fedged subjects and were again marginalized when economic and social crises recurred in the eighteenth century. In the documents below, the term “gypsies” is used to convey the sense of the Italian slang terms “cingane” or “zingare” that were used to refer to Roma. Source: Various offcial court and church records (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) In July 1566, a church Council in Ravenna banned Roma from entering or residing in the Papal State. They were expected to integrate into local communities by renouncing all of their distinctive features and ways of being in order to embrace the Christian life, which was essentially a policy of forced assimilation. The Council declared:2 Gypsies are a race of wandering people steeped in every impiety; if they do not live in a Christian way and do not abstain from their superstitions and reprehensible rites of life, bishops must take steps to expel them from their dioceses and send them as far away as possible. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, Roma were offered a straight choice between retaining their traditions or living the Christian way. This would mean spurning, expunging, and forgetting their original identity and adopting a new Christian identity with no half measures. In 1583, Rinaldo di Paolin declared in a Venetian trial that he was prepared to give up his “Gypsy lifestyle,” stating that he had done so some time ago. Yet he insisted on defning himself as stateless and a gypsy and was not willing to renounce or abjure an identity that he still felt closely bound to. For Catholic authorities, “living the Christian way” was totally incompatible with “being a Gypsy.” Many Roma were willing to abandon some habits, traditions, and clothes and stop “acting like Gypsies.” Yet they would not renounce their identity and stop “being a Gypsy.” It is not clear what “being a Gypsy” actually meant. In this case, Rinaldo was convicted, but then released on appeal: the criminal court judged the original sentence to be “poorly worded and unduly long” (“male et indebite lata”) and revoked the penalties imposed on Rinaldo. The deposition ordered Rinaldo to justify his presence in the lands of Montagnana (in Venetian territory) and defend himself against an accusation of theft: When asked about his name, surname and homeland, he said: My name is Rinaldo de Paulin Cingano; I have no homeland but I am a Gypsy. [. . .] I am here in Montagnana with a permit from the former Most Eminent Rector, and this is because one of my brothers was killed

Living the traditions

239

one night and I was here to bring proceedings against my enemies; and I got out of the company of Gypsies to live in the Christian way and as a decent man and to go and work in the felds and toil to earn the daily bread for my poor children. [. . .] I have been in this area for more or less a year, your Most Eminent Lordship, you can ask anyone here and you will fnd that I have never committed any theft or done anything wrong. [. . .] I am a baptised Christian and I no longer wish to go around with Gypsies. I want to live in the Christian way – even Jews and Turks are allowed to come to the faith and become Christians. [. . .] When I was with the Gypsies I lived on horse trading and playing corizuola3 and since I left the company of Gypsies I have lived off working in the country and labouring, and my wife goes around asking for bread for the love of God. Rinaldo’s defence: After moving to live in this land, he stopped practising as a Gypsy and started working, as labourers do in the country, also working in places where hemp and rope was spun, which is done every year in this land for the beneft of His Serenity, to support himself and all of his poor family, as every good man does. The judge’s sentence punishing Rinaldo for his claim of “cinganità” (Gypsyness) stereotyped “their custom,” according to which all “cingani” (Gypsies) are inevitably thieves and criminals. It is extremely clear that for the laws and parties recorded in the process, given their content, these detainees deserve to be punished and castigated, as they have been found to be Gypsies, vagabonds and thieves who come to this area every day and commit horse theft and other crimes, as is well known. [. . .] They were heard and found walking openly around this land and region together with other Gypsies armed with knives and daggers to commit thievery and wrongdoing, as is their custom. An edict of 1631 ordered by Pope Urban VIII “On the transformation of gypsies to good living” laid out a blueprint for assimilation. It banned wearing traditional Roma clothing, above all by women, in order to eliminate any trace of the past and turn every “gypsy” into a good Christian. It also banned others from using slurs that recalled their forbidden past, prohibiting “everyone from insulting them with the name Gypsy.” In order to lose their status as foreigners, Roma had to renounce their eternal wandering in order to fnd a job and a fxed abode, and also become active members of the Christian communities they lived in.4

240

Living the traditions

It is desired by the Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lord Cardinal Francesco Barberini, Superintendent of the Papal States, that due piety and vigilance are adopted to transform Gypsies from their usual wandering around the countryside to civil living and hard work in the city, doing commendable work to support themselves and their families in an honourable way. With the present public edict, expressly inspired by the Holiness of Our Lord, His Eminence hereby orders and commands every single Gypsy, who is currently or will be anywhere in the Papal States, directly or indirectly subject to the latter, that within three days of the publication in some cities directly subject to the Papal States and within 24 hours in the Papal States, to appear before the Governor of the city where they are now or will be in the future, which is nearest and in a dominant position with regard to the land, castles, valleys and places where they are currently or will come to in the future to give the Governor’s criminal clerk their names, surnames, fathers [. . .] to be written clearly in the book that the clerk will have to keep for this purpose. And moreover they must commit through a deed of the aforementioned clerk to apply themselves to commendable work in that city within a deadline of a further three days or longer at the Governor’s discretion, as long as the deadline granted or extended does not exceed ten days. Otherwise, if they have not applied themselves when the aforementioned deadline has passed, they will leave the Papal States, on pain of imprisonment for ten years if they are ft for such a punishment, otherwise public whipping and permanent exile to be carried out also in the event of a frst offence. The clerk shall give every individual obliged to present himself a seal of public faith in a printed document with the signature of His Eminence and of the city [civil authorities]. [. . .] In order to facilitate the observance of this edict, His Eminence orders that Gypsies that are found in any place after the aforementioned deadline around the countryside without the above-mentioned documents will be arrested. And if they put up strong resistance with weapons and injure any of those who are there to arrest them, they will incur the death penalty for any injury with blood and life imprisonment for injury without blood. Furthermore, if they are injured or killed while resisting or escaping by policemen, soldiers or any other person with the escape or resistance confrmed by a witness who saw and heard that those warned to stop in the name of the court to account for themselves by showing the papers that they should carry with them resisted using any arms or escaped, it is commanded by order of His Beatitude that the offenders or killers are not harassed in any way for this reason by the court. It is further ordered that female Gypsies, including those currently living in Rome or other cities in the State, must lay down their Gypsy dress, or rather destroy it so that it is no longer suitable for such use by the aforementioned deadline, on pain of public whipping and permanent exile. This penalty will be applied to any person found with any Gypsy clothing, whether it is his or whether it came into his hands under any pretext with the application of the aforementioned penalties for the sole possession of this clothing. Male and

Living the traditions

241

female Gypsies alike must not think that they can reside in or escape into the domains of the feudal barons of the Holy Church, because His Eminence commands that measures are taken against them indifferently and that they are subject to the aforementioned penalties even if this edict were not published in the given places, as in this case the publication in Rome in the usual places will suffce. Indeed, it is expressly commanded by order of His Holiness that every single baron, lord and son of noblemen in the State of the Holy Church does not permit Gypsies of either sex to reside or take refuge in their cities, land, castles, villas and other places, on pain of a thousand golden scudoes and corporal punishment at the discretion of His Beatitude. In any case of violation, penalties will be incurred by the aforementioned barons, lords and sons of noblemen who provide opposition themselves or through others, offering any hindrance to the court, or to soldiers or others attempting to capture Gypsies living in or feeing to these places. These penalties must remain in force even if the aforementioned cases of opposition or hindrance are not included in the frst bull issued by Sixtus V, published in Rome on 5 July 1585 in the bandi generali of the government of Rome and its district, and of the Papal States; no permit, order or privilege even from the Apostolic Chamber will be granted against the orders of this edict to any Gypsy under any pretext, which His Eminence, by order of Our Lord, revokes and declares null and void. It is further expressly ordered that Gypsies who adapt to the city and behave in a Christian way be treated well by everyone, as if they had never been Gypsies for any length of time, so that they are rehabilitated and taken for men of that city, as if they had been born and raised there; forbidding everyone to insult them with the name Gypsy on pain of three strappado hoists for common people, and a hundred golden scudos for civil people at the will of the Governor of Rome. [GC]

10.3 A Morisco under suspicion in Valencia (1556–67) The Oran Fatwah offered advice on how to continue living secretly as a Muslim after a forced conversion to Christianity. We have no way of knowing whether the Morisco Don Cosme Abenamir was indeed a practicing Muslim, but many of his neighbours certainly thought so. Eleven witnesses shared their suspicions over 11 years based on what he ate, or refused to eat, how he washed his person and clothing, and who he associated with. Valencia’s Inquisitors believed the accusations. Don Cosme was fned two thousand ducats and imprisoned for an indefnite period. Eleven years later, in 1578, he was released and pardoned, though not without having to pay another fne.5 Source: Witness testimony in Valencian Inquisitorial examination of Don Cosme Abenamir (1550s–70s) 1st: A sworn witness deposed on the 10 of March of 1556 and stated: That having been in certain houses of [the towns of] Benaguacil and Segorbe,

242

Living the traditions

in [the district of] Benaguacil for a period of three years, in said houses he fasted the month of Ramadan with certain persons whom he named, and did not eat all day until the night, and saw how they celebrated the Feast Days of the Muslims, wearing the best garments they had; which ceremonies they undertook thinking that they would be saved according to the sect of Muhammad; and among those persons was Don Cosme Abenamir. 2nd: Another sworn witness, who deposed in April of 1560, stated that a certain person, having a certain position in the town of Benaguacil for more than twenty years, heard and saw during all of said period that the Moriscos of that region are not Christians, nor do they live like Christians, but rather always act and live as Muslims; and now in these times are manifestly worse than ever. The only thing left for them to do would be to blow a bugle as they used to do to call the inhabitants to prayer, because they do business on Sundays and Holy Days. 3rd: Another sworn and confrmed witness, who deposed in the month of May of 1565, stated that Don Cosme and other persons whom he named are the pillars of Islam in this Province because, although they show on the exterior that they are good Christians, in their interior they are as Muslim as Muhammad. Thus, one day, said Don Cosme and said persons, in Benaguacil in about the year 1560, said to a certain person that they were amazed that he was not a Muslim, given that he knew the Truth; and said person answered them with certain arguments, informing that their law was bad, and that Muhammad was like Martin Luther; and the above-mentioned persons disputed with him, claiming that their sect of Muhammad was better than that of Christians. This same man knows that the above-mentioned men have sent their sons to la Alfandiguilla so that they might learn to read and write in Arabic from a certain alfaqui [Muslim jurist or scholar] whom they named. The local Muslims hold in high regard the above-mentioned men, who are themselves Muslims, according to what is well known among the Moriscos. They told the witness that he should be a Muslim, and they were shocked that he, knowing so much, was not a Muslim. In the opinion of the witness, Don Cosme and the others have titles of brotherhood and are delegates of the Holy Offce [the Inquisition] more to make fun of the institution than for any other good intention or purpose. 4th: Another sworn witness, who deposed on a day in February of 1567, stated that he had seen that, in a certain village, Don Cosme and certain persons who had converted from Islam are held in high regard, and carry on a great deal of business with the Moriscos, who greet them in the grandiose fashion of the Muslims. They have Muslim names, and it is public knowledge that they live according to the sect of Muhammad and cause scandal by bearing arms. 5th: Another sworn witness, who deposed on a day in June of 1567, stated that a certain person, passing through Benaguacil and being in the street, seated on a bench, witnessed a man (Don Cosme) passing by, who took a seat by his side and asked this witness where he was from, whether

Living the traditions

243

his land was good, and what lands he had visited. This witness answered, to Don Cosme Abenamir, that he had been in certain regions of Barbary, where there was very good land which gave abundant fruit in summer and winter. Don Cosme also asked this witness whether he knew the Qur’an, and he answered affrmatively, reciting to him some of the things which this book contains, and Don Cosme observed that they were good. 6th: Another sworn witness, who deposed on a day of June in 1567, stated that he recalls that in Benaguacil Don Cosme and certain other persons live as Muslims and that he has seen them fast during Ramadan and perform the prayer, and that they advised this witness that he should be a good Muslim and not be a Christian; and that Don Cosme had a sorceress named Nadarae come from Val de Elda and kept her in his house in order to fnd treasure and retrieve it from underground; and that the same Don Cosme was a renowned Muslim and had relations with persons of the sect of Muhammad, whose Qur’an he used to read in front of other persons, telling them that that book was good and wonderful, written by Muhammad and worthy of their belief. 7th: Another sworn witness, who deposed on a day in June of 1567, stated that he has seen publicly that Don Cosme and other persons live as Muslims, keep the Feast Days of the Muslims, eat meat facing the qibla [direction of Mecca], and have Muslim names. The Muslims hold them in high regard. The witness suspects that certain persons came to the Holy Offce coerced or instructed not to say anything that would incriminate them. 8th: Another sworn witness, who deposed on a day in May of 1561, stated that a certain person had fasted in Ramadan in the company of Don Cosme and other persons, that they are Muslims, and that the local Muslims hold said persons in great esteem, and favour them a great deal, and that he has seen them keep Feast Days of the Muslims on the dates when they fall, slaughter animals to celebrate Feast Days, and recite their prayers. . . . This witness recalls having seen Don Cosme read in a copy of the Qur’an and in other Muslim books, and try to convince certain persons that they should be Muslims; and that when he used to read the Qur’an it was in front of certain other persons who listened to him; and Don Cosme and the said persons are those who do great damage to the Moriscos, because the common people hold them to be gentlemen and men of understanding and counsel, who are obeyed in all that they command to be done. They deceive the Christians, and if they are friends of the Holy Offce, it is only in order to preserve what they have. 9th: Another sworn witness, who deposed on a day in June of 1567, stated that he knows Don Cosme and other persons in Benaguacil who live as Muslims, neither more nor less that the other local Moriscos, and they even encourage the Moriscos to be Muslims, according to what is said there publicly. This witness has heard that when the father of Don Cosme died, they sent for a Muslim jurist to divide the inheritance for them. The division was carried out according to the law of the Muslims. The jurist was

244 Living the traditions going to take one tenth of the money to distribute between the ransom of Muslim slaves and alms for poor Moriscos, but the heirs did not consent to this because they did not want the great amount of money that had to be revealed, lest His Majesty take possession of it. Therefore, the jurist took for himself a certain quantity of money. 10th: Another sworn witness, who deposed on a day in July of 1567, stated that Don Cosme and another person were in Ribarrojas, adjacent to Benaguacil. When a certain other person went to live there, they threw him out, and said to him that they were throwing him out because a certain other person had said something against them in the Inquisition tribunal. Don Cosme and his brothers are Muslims and live as such, and the other Muslims hold them in great esteem. 11th: Another sworn witness, who deposed on a day in August of 1567, stated that he knows and has heard say by many people that Don Cosme of Benamire has fed from the Holy Offce and is avoiding it, since they have arrested one of his servants. [TC/JW]

10.4 The Inquisition investigates a Morisca bride in sixteenth-century Spain (1575) After Muslims living in Castile had been forced to choose between baptism and exile in 1502, Catholic religious authorities often suspected moriscos of continuing to secretly practice Islam. Yet they did not always understand the nature of the Muslim ceremonies they sought to uproot. Each of the Spanish Inquisition’s regional tribunals reported regularly to the General Council of the Inquisition in Madrid. The letter here from Inquisitors in Valladolid, a city in northwestern Castile, shows that they suspected a morisca woman, Leonor Hernández, of practicing Muslim ceremonies on her wedding day. Yet the Inquisitors in Valladolid had no access to alfaquis, or Muslim experts in Islamic law. Instead, they issued a public warning in an “Edict of Faith,” as seen in the testimony of the inquisitorial secretary this letter.6 Source: Inquisitorial examination of Leonor Hernández (1575) 1575, Valladolid. The Inquisitors on the eighth of October, on the matter of Leonor Hernández, Morisca. . . . To the very Illustrious Gentlemen of the Council of His Majesty and of the General Inquisition, Madrid. Most Illustrious Sirs, We received your letters from the 1st and 5th of October with the trial records of Leonor Hernández, Morisca [and others] . . . and regarding what your holiness ordered be clarifed about the trial of the said Leonor Hernández – if, on the day of her wedding, being sat above

Living the traditions

245

the other women, and having her face covered, and not speaking nor eating, if these are Muslim ceremonies (çeremonias de moros) – it is determined that these are Muslim ceremonies, and for this reason they are included in the General Edict, of which we send a certifed copy with this letter. As it is so, and although here we want to do further diligence in determining this, there is no alfaqui in this city, nor other Muslims (moros) from whom we can inform, nor do we trust that they would tell us the truth. May Your Honor order how we may serve you in this matter. . . . [Signed] in Valladolid on October 8th, 1575, We kiss the hands of Your Honor, El Licenciado Diego [and] El Licenciado Andres de Alaba. Received in Madrid on October 12th, 1575 [Attached page] I, Alonso Osorio, notary of the trial-chamber (secreto) of the Holy Offce of the Inquisition of Valladolid, attest that among other things recited in the General Edict, these words were spoken: ‘Or, that in weddings and betrothals they have performed the ceremonies that used to be, [with] the bride wearing a veil on her face, while she was on high, as on a bench or a platform, saying certain Arabic words to her.’ And these words were said in reference to the Muslims and their ceremonies. I give this testimony by order of the Señores Inquisidores in Valladolid on October 8th, 1575, and I sign it, Alonso Osorio. [SMC]

10.5 Marking time – A Jewish Calendar (5354 or 1593/94 CE) Jewish broadside calendars were written in Hebrew and most often posted in public places like synagogues and in common areas in people’s homes. They show how Jewish history was encoded into the way people measured time, and vividly illustrate negotiations of Jewish identity around the framework of the Christian liturgical calendar, ensuring that Jews would know which feast days their Christian neighbours celebrated. Hebrew calendars measured years from the creation of the world, while Christian calendars measured them from the birth of Christ. Jewish and Christian feast days are both noted, and beside each Christian holiday is the conversion of the date into Hebrew days and months. The calendar leaves a blank space where Jesus’ name would ordinarily be. The calendar also offers a chronicle of communal history, counting the years that had passed since events both in the Jewish Bible (e.g., the Flood, the birth of Abraham, the crowning of King David) and in more recent European Jewish history, like the expulsions from France, Spain, and Portugal. This Wall Calendar for 5354 (1593–4)

246 Living the traditions was published for the Jewish community in Mantua 20 years before papal pressure forced the Jews in this city into a ghetto (1612).7 This translation follows the three divisions of the broadsheet. The upper section of History and the lower section of Dedication frame a middle section that notes the major Christian religious holidays and saints days and gives their calendrical equivalents for the Hebrew year 5354. Source: Wall Calendar for 5354 (1593–4) printed in Mantua (Italy) [Upper Section – History] Rejoice ye [numerical value: 5354] with Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all ye that love her [Isa. 66:10] [surrounding] He made the moon to mark the time; the sun knows its setting [Ps. 104:19] The year 5354 since the Creation of the World: 15 years into the two hundred eighty-second [19-year] small [lunar] cycle; 6 years into the one hundred ninety-second [2-year] large [solar] cycle; 3,698 years since the Deluge; 3,358 years since the Dispersion; 3,406 years since the birth of our Patriarch Abraham; 3,306 years since the birth of Isaac; 3,245 years since the birth of Jacob; 3,116 years since the descent of our forefathers into Egypt; 2,986 years since the birth of our Teacher Moses, peace be upon him; 2,906 years since the Exodus from Egypt and the Giving of the Torah; 2,866 years since entering into the Land of Israel; 2,468 years since the shooting up of a horn unto David [the start of the Davidic monarchy]; 2,425 years since the construction of the First Temple; 2,130 years since the exile of the Ten Tribes; 2015 years since the destruction of the First Temple; 1,965 years since the beginning of the empire of Media and Persia; 1,945 years since the construction of the Second Temple; 1,911 years since the beginning of the empire of Greece; 1,906 years since the beginning of the minyan shetarot [Seleucid Era, which started in 312 bce] and the end of the prophetic period; 1,731 years since the beginning of the Hasmonean dynasty; 1,593 year [a blank space follows, indicating Jewish reluctance to write out “since the birth of Jesus”] ...

Living the traditions

247

199 years since the expulsion from France; 102 years since the expulsion from Spain; 94 years since the expulsion from Portugal ... And let us appeal to God that He restore the Diaspora of Ariel [Jerusalem] and gather in the dispersed of Israel, and may we merit to see the rebuilding of Ariel, and let Him gather us in from the four corners of the earth, amen, so may it be [His] will. [leftmost column] In this year, may there be no eclipses, and for all of lsrael may there be light in their dwellings [Ex. 10:23]. [Middle section – Months] September starts on Wednesday, 4 Elul, and lasts 30 days. Saints days: Mary (The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin] –Wednesday, the eighth of the month, 11 Elul; Nicholas [of Tolentino ] – Friday, the tenth of the month, 13 Elul; Cross (The Exaltation of the Holy Cross] – Tuesday, the fourteenth of the month, 17 Elul; Matthew – Tuesday, the twenty-frst of the month, 24 Elul; Michael – Wednesday, the twenty-ninth of the month, 3 Tishrei; Jerome – Thursday, the thirtieth of the month, 4 Tishrei [. . .] December starts on Wednesday, 7 Kislev, and lasts 31 days. Saints days: Barbara – Saturday, the fourth of the month, IO Kislev; Nicholas [of Bari] – Monday, the sixth of the month, 12 Kislev; Woman [The Feast of the Immaculate Conception] – Wednesday, the eighth of the month, 14 Kislev; Lucy – Monday, the thirteenth of the month, 19 Kislev; Thomas – Tuesday, the twenty-frst of the month, 27 Kislev; Christmas – Saturday, the twenty-ffth of the month, 2 Tevet; John [the Evangelist] – Monday, the twenty-seventh of the month, 4 Tevet; Thomas [of Canterbury] – Wednesday, the twenty-ninth of the month, 6 Tevet; New Year’s Eve – Friday, the thirty-frst of the month, 8 Tevet [. . .] February starts on Tuesday, II Shevat, and lasts 28 days. Saints days: Candelora [Candlemas Day] – Wednesday, the second of the month, 12 Shevat; Blaise – Thursday, the third of the month, l3 Shevat;

248

Living the traditions Agatha – Friday, the ffth of the month, 16 Shevat; Matthias – Thursday, the twenty-fourth of the month, 4 Adar [. . .]

May starts on Sunday, 11 Iyyar, and last 31 days. Saints days: Philip – Sunday, the frst, on that very day; Cross [Discovery of the Holy Cross] – Tuesday, the third of the month, 13 Iyyar: Bernardine [of Siena] – Friday, the twentieth of the month, 1 Sivan; Urban – Wednesday, the twenty-ffth of the month, 6 Sivan [. . .] September starts on Thursday, 16 Elul, and lasts 30 days. Saints days: Woman – Thursday, the eighth of the month, 23 Elul; Nicholas – Saturday, the tenth of the month, 25 Elul; Cross – Wednesday, the fourteenth of the month, 29 Elul; Matthew – Wednesday, the twenty-frst of the month, 7 Tishrei; Michael – Thursday, the twenty-ninth of the month, 15 Tishrei; Jerome – Friday, the thirtieth of the month, r6 Tishrei. Carnival – Tuesday, February 22, 2 Adar Affictions [Lent] – Wednesday, February 23, 3 Adar Halfway through Lent – Friday, March 18, 26 Adar Easter – Sunday, April 10, 20 Nisan Ascension Day – Thursday, May 19, 29 Iyyar Red Easter [Pentecost] – Sunday, May 29, 10 Sivan The Day of the Body [Corpus Christi] – Thursday June 9, 21 Sivan [Lower Section – Dedication] Our Father, our King, renew for us a good year, To return us to Jerusalem in joy, Our Father, our King, inscribe us in the Book of Life. [bottom right] Printed here, in Mantua, under our master, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, may his majesty be exalted. In the name of the youth Solomon, son of Rabbi Samuel Norzi, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, based on the letters from the scribe Rabbi Meir and from Rabbi Ephraim, his relative, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing. [bottom center] Next year in Jerusalem! [HS]

Living the traditions

249

10.6 Ten commandments for the Jewish wife (before 1620) Women were indispensable transmitters of religious tradition within Jewish families, as the ones most responsible for implementing norms on diet, hygiene, and domestic ritual observances. In this highly popular Yiddish work, the Polish Jew Isaac ben Eliakim of Posen sets out the rules a woman should follow in order to be a good wife. Notably, he adopts the voice of a woman, in particular a queen who is instructing her daughter before she leaves to marry a foreign king. The household ethic is deeply patriarchal, with more than one reference to how best to handle a husband’s anger, violence, and jealousy. The advice that the wife must subsume her own identity into that of her husband, adopting his interests, priorities, values, and friends, is virtually identical to the advice given to Christian and Muslim brides, though notably there is no direct reference to religious observance. Most contemporary Christian texts emphasized father and mother working collaboratively to create a Holy Household where children would be trained in the faith.8 Source: Isaac ben Eliakim, A Good Heart (Leb Tor – pre 1620) This is the story of a queen who gave her daughter in marriage to a young king and then gave her the following instructions. . . . Since she was sending the daughter away for her marriage she said to her: “My dear child, I am giving you away and am turning you over to a stranger, and I don’t know what sort of a person he is, so I am going to instruct you and give you ten rules. If you keep my instruction everything will be well with you, but if you don’t heed my advice, things won’t go right with you. Therefore take these ten rules to heart and think them day and night, early and late, and if you do this your husband will love you as he does the heart in his body. The frst, my dear daughter, is to be aware of his anger, lest you enrage him. When he is cross, don’t you be jolly; and when he is jolly, dear, don’t you be cross; and when he is angry, smile at him and answer him with kind, soft words and speak pleasantly to him. Thus you will still his anger. . . . The second, my dear daughter, concerns his eating and drinking. Search and consider and refect about his food, about that which he likes to eat, and let these be your words: ‘My lord, wouldn’t you rather have something else to eat?’ . . . Try to have his meals ready at the proper time, for hunger does nobody any good. When he comes home and doesn’t fnd his meal ready at the proper time, he’ll get angry. Should he have gotten drunk, don’t tell him what he did, or what he said in his drunkenness; and if he tells you to drink, you drink, but don’t drink yourself drunk, lest he should see you in such a state and learn to hate you. . . . The seventh, my dear daughter. Don’t be contrary with him. Do everything he tells you. . . . Don’t say to him: ‘You haven’t said the right thing,’ or ‘My advice is better than your advice.’

250

Living the traditions

The eighth, my dear daughter. Don’t expect of him anything that he considers diffcult. He may take a dislike to you because you expect something of him which he believes is too hard. The ninth, my dear daughter. Heed the requests which he may make of you, awaiting in turn that he will love you if you do so, and will be your slave and will serve you with joy. The tenth, my dear daughter. Be very careful to guard against jealousy. Don’t make him jealous in any way. Don’t say anything that might hurt him and let him have his own way in everything. Make an effort in all things to do what pleases him and don’t what he doesn’t like. If you treat him like a king then he, in turn, will treat you like a queen. Now, my dear daughter, take these ten rules of instruction with you as your provision and let them be as a reminder to you through-out all your life.” [TC]

10.7 Of powders and pregnancy: the Mexican Inquisition takes on a midwife (1652) This remarkable fle documents the accusation, trial, and exoneration of the mixed-race midwife Isabel Hernández, accused of superstitious practices and transported to Mexico City for trial in 1652. The excerpt covers Isabel’s detailed description of her entire toolkit (sequestered by the Holy Offce) as part of her interrogation. Her item-by-item description reveals the medicomagical quality of popular midwifery and healing practices. The document also highlights the particular challenges of imposing Tridentine orthodoxy on a multiethnic colonial population that relied on a similarly complex colonial web of healers and healing traditions. Some of these traditions were clearly and unproblematically Christian, while others were rooted in nonChristian traditions or even challenged Christian orthodoxy. In Hernández’s testimony, Christian magic and prayer meld seamlessly with Central Mexican Indigenous medicine and marvelous remedies drawn from real and mythical animal bodies. Ultimately, Isabel was released, and her belongings returned to her, despite her ownership of questionable items and her admissions regarding many unusual practices, including the removal of teeth from the corpse of a newly deceased woman she regarded as a folk saint.9 Source: Inquisitorial Investigation of Midwife Isabel Hernández (1652) She said that they should put the items before her so that she might declare the truth, and having unwrapped in her presence a cloth, in it was found an animal tail that she said was tlacuache [possum], and that she had it to give it to women who were giving birth, and to those sick with urinary illness, powdered in hot pulque and onion, and mixed with almond oil.

Living the traditions

251

Idem. She was shown another paper wrapped in a cloth, in which she said there was a root called chichilpatle [chichilpatli – used for digestive problems], which she gives to babies when they are colicky. Idem. She was shown another cloth in which was wrapped some coloured pieces which she said were axí [either chile or the excretion of an insect], to give to women who are stunned after birth mixed with ule [a rubber tree sap], and that the Indians do this with some grubs. Idem. She was shown another cloth in which there were some herbs which she said were suapatle [cihuaptli – a powerful labour stimulant and abortifacient] to give to birthing women to drink. Idem. She was shown another little cloth in which was wrapped a crushed rock which she said was a bezoar stone [a calcifcation from a ruminant’s digestive system, useful as an anti-venom], and that she had taken it for such. Idem. Another little cloth was opened, in which was a root that she said was contrayerba [an antidote or a South American plant with various medicinal uses], a tonic. Idem. She was shown a paper with some white powders that she said she made to wash the faces of women. Idem. She was shown another little paper with some Venetian glass, which she said served her to make facial waters with limes. Idem. She was shown another cloth in which there were some white powders, and she said they were eggshells from Ascension eggs used to make facial waters. Idem. A little blue cloth in which there was a little dark ball that she said was a coíol [palm nut] that the children eat. Idem. She was shown a paper wrapped in a cloth with some coloured powders that she said were of ilacastli [possibly a root to cure fevers], which the Indians sell, good for bathing women who are stunned. Idem. She was shown a little bar of chocolate in which there was a seed, which she said she didn’t recognize but that it was something that the boys played with. Idem. She was shown a little idol of stone, which she said was something that the boys played with. Idem. She was shown a hand which appeared to be of a little monkey, and she said that a grandson of hers called Juan found it in the plaza, and that she told Father Antonio González about it when they arrested her, because she does not collect any such thing. Idem. She was shown a very small paper with two coloured feathers, which she said she did not know from what they came, whether from a pito real [Eurasian green woodpecker] or some parakeet. Idem. She was shown a cloth, and wrapped in it some white powders, that she said were canina de perro [dog teeth], to give to children who are colicky.

252 Living the traditions Idem. She was shown a white tusk hanging from a cord, which she said was from the pez mulier [a mythical Pacifc sea creature similar to a mermaid] for rheumatism, and which a son of hers gave her. And that which appears to be meat is not, but rather coloured ají, which is that which at the beginning she recognized. Idem. She was shown another very little paper in which there were some things like white scrapings, which she said were for a medicine that Macote, a herbalist in Tlaxcala, gave her for a woman who was vomiting. Idem, there was found a paper with badly written letters on which there was a charm, which she said her deceased comadre Doña Juana de Auriaga gave her so that she could learn it as a spell, but that as she doesn’t know how to read, she didn’t learn it. To the tenth chapter [of the accusation] she said that she has told the truth, and has not committed any of these things. To the end of the accusation, she said that she has not done any of what was said against her, nor does she know of any person who has done it or she would have confessed it, and in her interviews she has told the truth, and that in Tlaxcala they hate her because of the good skills that she has shown in her births, and because of this they have fomented these testimonies against her. And that if she is tortured, she will die in it, since she has nothing to add, and that may God condemn her if it is not all a lie, and that this is the truth according to the oath that she has sworn. [JH]

10.8 Separating sheep and goats in the early modern Aegean (1757) On Aegean islands like Naxos, believers of different faiths lived together in ways that defed political boundaries and disturbed religious authorities. Ottoman offcials controlled the island politically but allowed Christian churches to continue. When reforming Catholic Archbishop Pietro Martire Stefani came to the island, he was determined to educate Catholics in the exclusivity and superiority of their faith, ensure that they observed all the sacraments, and stop Catholic and Orthodox believers from visiting each other’s churches and participating in each other’s rituals. The list of actions that he forbids shows how much the communities shared when it came to religious rituals and practice. While he argues here for strict separation, in the end, it was Stefani himself who was voted off the island.10 Source: Pietro Martire Stefani, report to Propaganda Fidei (Rome: 1757) We, Fra Pietro Martire de Stefani, by the grace of God and of the Apostolic See Archbishop of Naxos and Paros:

Living the traditions

253

It has come to our attention that many of the Latins in our diocese, to the disgrace of the Catholic faith, attend mass in churches offciated by priests who have thrown off the yoke of obedience to the Holy See, and that such Latins not only make vows and leave pious bequests to these churches, but even ask the priests to bless their houses, pray for their sick and say mass. Considering that these actions are indications of unsound faith or at least an ignorance unworthy of a Catholic, and that anyone who lacks the true religion should have no reason to be proud of or persist in their errors, we consider it necessary to rectify such scandals, and to redress not only the loss of souls but also the humiliation of the Catholic faith. Therefore, with the power vested in us by Our Lord and the authority of our offce, we command all licensed confessors in this diocese strictly to obey the following instructions and to take responsibility for the fawed adherence to the following points: 1° Before hearing confessions, ask penitents about the articles of the faith and, above all, what they are expected to know. Do not absolve their sins if they do not know half of what is required, or if they do not solemnly promise to learn the necessary precepts, if the confessor himself is unable to instruct them. 2° Ask penitents (especially non-Latins) whether they frmly believe there is only one Holy Catholic Faith, without which there is no salvation. 3° Penitents (especially if they are of another rite) must know what the Catholic Church is. They must believe absolutely that the Catholic Church recognizes the Roman pontiff as its head and obeys him. Every believer, above all those of a different rite, must explicitly believe what the theologians teach. Indeed, if nature gives newborns the instinct to recognize their mother and to attach themselves to her breasts, whence they derive the nourishment they need, how much more must the true religion give its children a way to recognize their mother? Otherwise how could they know who will give them the sacraments, or who will teach them what to believe and do in order to save themselves? If it were suffcient to believe in confusion that there is one Catholic Church without knowing which it is, how many errors would every penitent be exposed to and how many dangers, especially in these parts? Every heretical assembly that pretended to be Catholic (and which would not?) would be taken for the true church. Every error would be taken for sound dogma. Every priest, however ignorant and heretical, would be chosen as a director of conscience. And so penitents, forever wavering in their beliefs and actions, would drift from one error to another, from one rite to another, from a Catholic confessor to a heretic. Whenever they found it more convenient they would succumb to the direction of a heretic, and then for the rest of their lives receive invalid absolutions, to the eternal detriment of their souls. That is why it is essential for

254

Living the traditions confessors to open the eyes of penitents. They must be able to discern the path that leads to perdition, to know whom to heed like a mother, and whom to follow in their beliefs and actions.

If, however, the prudent confessor foresees that the penitent is not going to accept the article concerning the pope, he can postpone instruction on this matter until it is more opportune. But if, following instruction, the penitent still refuses to believe, then the confessor shall treat him or her thenceforth as a recalcitrant heretic. 4° Confessors shall forbid Latins to frequent non-Latin churches for devotional purposes, to hear mass, to make or renounce vows, or to leave pious bequests. They shall also forbid them to ask non-Latin priests to bless their houses and so forth, to pray for their sick, to celebrate mass, etc. Whoever is warned but does not obey shall be denied absolution. Finally, we ask confessors to interrogate Latin penitents about all of this, without waiting for them to accuse themselves. These instructions should be preserved but in secret, without revealing that they are from us, so as not to give rise to misconduct. [AM]

Notes 1 An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers (1612), ed. M.A. Garces and trans. Diana de Armas Wilson, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011, pp. 198–202. © 2011 University of Notre Dame Press. Reprinted by permission. 2 Decrees of the Provincial Council of Ravenna; Provincialis Synodus Ravennatensis (1568), § De Cinganis, in J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, XXXV, col. 643. Translated by Giorgio Caravale. See also: G. Caravale, “Gypsies in Counter-Reformation Rome,” in N. Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 52–72. 3 ASV (Venezia, Archivio di Stato), Avogaria di comun, P. 210/10, cc. 13r–18r; 19r–31v; 32v–34r; Processo criminale contro Rinaldo e Marc’Antonio cingani. Translated by Giorgio Caravale. 4 ASV (Città del Vaticano, Archivio Segreto Vaticano), Miscellanea, Arm. IV, t. 80, p. 167. Edict issued on 24 September 1631 by Cardinal Francesco Barberini, Superintendent General of the Papal States, entitled On the transformation of gypsies to good living (Sopra la reduttione de’ zingari e zingare al bene vivere). Translated by Giorgio Caravale. 5 L.P. Harvey, “Crypto-Islam in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Actas: Primer congreso de estudios arabes e islamicos, Madrid, 1964, pp. 163–83. 6 Archivo Histórico Nacional, Sección Inquisición, legajo 3192, expediente 170 (8 October 1575). Translated by Stephanie M. Cavanaugh. 7 “Wall Calendar for 5354 (1593–1594), Mantua (Italy), CAT. 486 [VAL B30],” in S. Lieberman-Mintz, S. Seidler-Feller and D. Watchel (eds) The Writing on the Wall: A Catalogue of Judaica Broadsides from the ValMadonna Trust Library, trans. I. Yudlow, London: Valmadonna Trust Library, 2015, p. 85. 8 J. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791, Cincinnati, OH: Sinai Press, 1938, 443–6.

Living the traditions

255

9 Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico), Inquisición 561, exp. 6, ff. 525–568 (1652). Contra Isabel Hernández (ff. 566–567). Translated by Jacqueline Holler. See also J. Holler, “Reforming Birth in Early Colonial Mexico, or, Did Mexican Women Really Have a Counter-Reformation?” in Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations, pp. 213–30. 10 Archivio Propaganda Fidei (Rome), Congregazioni Particolari 121, Arcipelago (1757), ff. 258r–259v. Translated by Andrew McCormick. See also A. McCormick, “An Embattled Catholic Archbishop between Latins and Greeks in the Ottoman Aegean,” in Terpstra (ed) Global Reformations, pp. 195–211.

11 Finding self and others

11.1 Reforming an unruly priest in New Spain (1545–9) Unruly clergy who used their position to gain sexual and other favours were an ongoing problem for church authorities everywhere. Here we see a series of efforts by an ascetic Franciscan archbishop to control an unruly archdeacon. These documents demonstrate two key themes: frst, the strong current of Catholic reform present in the colony of New Spain well before the receipt of the decrees of the Council of Trent, often found in religious orders above all; and second, the diffculty of reforming clerics who were well aware that they were a scarce group of trained professionals in high demand. These documents also highlight the often-fraught relations among colonial churchmen and the rancour that could accompany attempts to reform the behaviour of clergy. The cleric in question was Juan Negrete who, with graduate degrees from the Universities of Paris and of Mexico, was well-educated and extremely well-connected. As archdeacon, he ranked second only to the archbishop, who he clearly viewed as inadequate. Negrete seems to have escaped many attempts to discipline him, and in fact was elected rector of the University of Mexico on 22 July 1553, and retained his cathedral offce until his death in 1555. In the frst excerpt, Negrete writes a complaint to the archbishop; in the second, a fellow cleric paints a picture of him as an intemperate and quarrelsome clergyman. In the third excerpt, a 30-year-old woman describes her relations with the archdeacon, giving a convincing portrayal of his immorality. In the fourth excerpt, fellow clerics from the cathedral chapter paint a picture of a shorttempered and haughty clergyman. In the fnal excerpt, the archdeacon defends himself by asserting not his innocence, but his learning and service to the colonial church. a) In this extraordinary letter, Negrete levies a number of charges against the Franciscan bishop, from mishandling of funds to personality faws. He also raises questions about whether all clerics should be held to the same standards, and whether “small things” should be queried. The letter led to an investigation and eventual ruling by Viceroy Antonio de

Finding self and others

257

Mendoza, who cleared the bishop of all charges and recommended discipline for the archdeacon.1 Source: Letter of archdeacon Juan Negrete, General Archive of the Indies – Mexico (1549) Your Grace is well noted as pusillanimous for sometimes making a fuss about small things, and for forming scruples about trivial matters, such as a cleric’s going to visit a woman. And in such cases it is well to note that not all are friars, nor of one estate, nor of one credit, nor of one condition; nor can it be that all can raise themselves to the perfection of the angels; nor would that be right, because of the variety that is suitable in the universe. And in that which is suitable to the dignity and estate of Your Grace there is also pusillanimity: in making yourself common, and in going unaccompanied, and granting whatever requests, and in ordering uselessly, as when preaching in a private home. And in my opinion Your Grace should make a difference between friar and bishop despite being both . . . In the declaration of this proposition there is no need of more diversity or particularities, except that as Your Grace knows very well, not all mortal sin is in the matters of the fesh, nor are those sins the most grave; and if your Grace is so zealous and suspicious in that sin as he is, and has so little confdence in himself, that he not touch women nor admit them to talks, groups, or experiments. b) In this testimony gathered by the archbishop, witness Canon Juan Suárez, was ordered to declare what he knew of the “life, customs, acts, and conversations” of Juan Negrete.2 He said that what he knows is that he takes the archdeacon for a man who is immoderate in words, because many times this witness has seen him in the choir mixing with other clerics and talking immoderately and with evil excess; and the beadle Pedro Jiménez said to this witness that a woman entered his [the archdeacon’s] house in the early evening and left at dawn, and she was seen by two men. Another day the clergyman Arevalo complained to this witness that [the archdeacon] had said bad words to him, calling him “Catalina” and other indigestible words. And it was because he lost himself and became impudent . . . and many times this witness has seen the archdeacon getting into quarrels with other clerics, with many injurious words . . . ordinarily there are upsets in the choir and maltreatments of the choirboys . . . he always enters the choir angry and out of sorts. c) A further lengthy investigation looked into numerous complaints against the “incorrigible” Negrete, including dereliction of duty and physical abuse of choirboys. The passage here relates to numerous accusations of sexual impropriety with, and harassment of, local women. The witness, Francisca

258

Finding self and others

de Ribera, was a thirty-year-old married woman whose testimony was recorded on 13 April 1547.3 . . . She said that she has known the Lord Bishop of Mexico for about ten years, and the said archdeacon don Juan Negrete since he came from Castile, which must be more or less fve years ago . . . this witness believes the archdeacon don Juan Negrete is a dishonest man because she has seen him committing many dishonesties, which for her modesty she hid . . . this witness wrote the letter [mentioned in the accusation] to the archdeacon, and she said in the letter that he was a scoundrel, dishonest, and a ruffan; she said this because the archdeacon told her that he had “had to do” with a married woman three times in one night on a carpet; and because the archdeacon also told this witness that another married woman of this city (whom he named) showed him her legs and her whole body, completely nude, and that she lifted her skirts and showed him her sex. And another time, when this witness was a widow and permitted him to enter her house as a compadre, he tried many times to have his will with, dishonor, and have to do with her, even though she was his comadre.4 And as he tried to put his hands under her skirts, this witness defended herself, because as much as she saw his dishonesties, that much more was she forced to defend herself, as she did. And as the said archdeacon was unable to put his evil intent into practice, he polluted himself, and spilled his semen on the hands and skirts of his witness. After this, when this witness went to church one day to confess, the archdeacon said to her, “How’s my little pussy5 [coñito]?” And this witness replied to him that “this was nice talk for here in the church” (because she had entered it). And this witness was very scandalized by the archdeacon, asking him why, as a man of letters, he had no fear of God, to try such dishonesty with his comadre . . . d) In this declaration, four members of the cathedral chapter were examined in relation to an incident that occurred in the choir. The testimony is defnitely suggestive of Negrete’s personality – not to mention his opinion of the archbishop. The witness quoted below was the maestrescuela of the cathedral chapter, the cleric in charge of all schools in the diocese.6 What he knows is that about twenty days ago he was in the choir of this church of Mexico, seated with the archdeacon don Juan Negrete. This witness saw Pedro de Logroño, who serves as sub-chanter of the said church, who brought to this witness and the said archdeacon certain youths to serve as choirboys, that they should be received as such. And the archdeacon called to Pedro de Logroño and told him “take them to the lord Bishop so he can caress them and put his hands on their cocks,” and when he said this the archdeacon put his own hands on their cocks. And at the time this didn’t appear bad to this witness, since he believed that the archdeacon did not say it in malice; but then later, remembering a certain letter that the archdeacon

Finding self and others

259

had given to His Grace in which he said that he used boys, what the archdeacon said didn’t appear good to this witness. And this witness knows, and it is true, that because the archdeacon verbally mistreated two racioneros (who are Arevalo and Hernán Gómez), they say that they no longer want to serve in this church; and the chanter has said in the chapter and outside of it that because of the archdeacon he will leave for the kingdom of Castile. e) In this brief letter, rather than refute the allegations against him, Negrete focuses on his long and reluctant service in Mexico and his desire to return to Spain. He also makes clear his feelings about the late archbishop, raising a question for the reader: how were zealous reformers regarded by those around them?7 The cathedral chapter of this church of Mexico City received a cédula from the Prince our lord and Royal Council of the Indies, and it ordered that Don Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of this New Spain, give favour to the Archbishop of Mexico in things necessary for the correction of the archdeacon and other clerics. I beg Your Honour and Your Graces that I not be treated in this way, because Licenciado Tello de Sandoval knew me, and neither he nor anyone else truthfully has anything prejudicial to say about me. The Royal Council of the Indies compelled me and persuaded me with great promises to come to the Indies, of which I had no need; and I believe that I have done well in that for which I came and for which I was ordered to come, which was to teach [read] theology and serve in my church. And the Royal Council not only has not fulflled what I was promised, but put me at risk. . . . I do not want to lose another 23 or 24 years of humanistic study [estudio en buenas letras], and I want to come back to Old Spain, where I will not fail to fnd a way to better serve His Majesty, Your Honour, and Your Graces. I beg you, be served to order me and send licence for this. And because the Archbishop of Mexico, at whose request the cédula against me was given, is now dead, I have not said anything particular against him nor in my defence, except one: in my opinion [he was the] man of the most dangerous conscience, and most dangerous to others, that I have ever known or that I believe to have come to these parts. [JH]

11.2 Investigating an unusual “convent” (1687–8) Beyond the problem of fraudulent saints and shrines, Catholic authorities also worried about priests who used their spiritual role to gain sexual favours from women. In this case, Bishop Gregorio Barbarigo returns to the small town of Alano and the priest Pietro Zanone who had been a driving force behind the shrine at Masil that was shut down in 1674 [see 6.11 above]. A dozen years later, Barbarigo returns to fnd that Zanone now has an unlicensed live-in housekeeper, and next to the parish residence he has

260

Finding self and others

built a shelter for fve women to which he has private access. Zanone and the women claim it is a convent, though they can produce no rule or permit. As it happens, Zanone’s own offcial papers (i.e., “the bull of his benefce”) are not in order either. Barbarigo suspends the offcial visit and mounts a closer investigation the following year, documented here in the interrogations, statements, proclamations, and letters by which Zanone’s private convent was exposed and shut down.8 Source: Apostolic Visitation in the Diocese of Padua (1687–8) The bishop visited the whole grounds of the church and discovered in the Choir or the major chapel that there were windows looking in on the laity made against the constitutions of the synods. In this unconsecrated structure were living certain women without order, rule, or permission who made loud noises in the church and disturbed the parish functions. Next he visited the building next to the church, the parish house. It was found suffciently comfortable, and the parish priest lived with a female servant for whom he could not present a license. There was also a certain living space which the rector had built opening into the church in which the aforesaid women communicated daily in an indiscriminate and familiar manner. The rector of this church is D. Pietro Zanone of the diocese of Feltre, and he did not present the bull of his benefce. He presented the relation of the status of his church, but it was found to be impertinent and minimally conforming to the formula he was ordered to follow. ... Interrogation of a witness: On 30 September 1687 Andrea Giovanni Maria Puzzo of Irceri, about twenty-two years old, was examined by me the chancellor Costerso, having been sworn to tell the truth. If you know or can imagine the cause of your citation and present examination. ReSPONDeD: I do not know, but I can imagine something. ASkeD. What do you imagine? ReSPONDeD: The thing that I imagine is that it is for the Reverend parish priest of Alano together with four of those nuns who are in Alano, who went to San Vittore in Feltre and to make this journey had to fnd themselves a coach to Feltre. I don’t know how it came about, but when my father ran into the same priest he requested a favour from him, that he take the priest and all the aforesaid nuns in his coach to the place they were going for a price. My father said yes and to that affect on the Ave Maria on the 24th they left two hours before daybreak. ASkeD: If he knows what type of carriage it was. ReSPONDeD: It was an ordinary carriage, which cannot be covered with a sheet as might be done in bad weather. ASkeD:

Finding self and others

261

ASkeD: If he ReSPONDeD:

knows the ages of the nuns. There were two old broken-down women, one of whom was fat, two pleasantly pretty ones, and a young one. ASkeD: If he remembers when this trip happened. ReSPONDeD: It was at the beginning of last May. ASkeD: If he knows if only the priest was in attendance of the women, and if other men were found inside the carriage other than the priest. ReSPONDeD: Signore yes I was also there, but inside the carriage there was no one other than the priest, whose name I cannot remember. ASkeD: If he remembers where the said priest with the said nuns refreshed themselves while they were at San Vittore. ReSPONDeD: At the Osteria della Chiesa. (Tavern of the Church) ASkeD: If he and his father brought the said nuns back to Alano, and if he remembers in what form and when. ReSPONDeD: Signore no, we did not bring them back, but all of them returned in another coach during the day. ASkeD: If he knows how many days they spent in San Vittore. ReSPONDeD: I don’t remember exactly, but it seems that it was four or fve days. ASkeD: If he knows if they were always accompanied by the said priest. ReSPONDeD: I don’t know, because when they returned I could not see them because they were inside a coach that was covered with a sheet. ASkeD: If he knows of any other times when the priest was in a coach together with those or any of the other nuns. ReSPONDeD: Signore no. Having been sworn, he was dismissed, and not knowing how to write, made the sign of the cross. Testimony of Fra Giovanni Cabarlon, Augustinian Hermit If you know, or can imagine the cause of your citation and present exam. ReSPONDeD: Not only do I not know, I cannot imagine. ASkeD: If you give your assistance, serve at the parish of Alano, and if you go to Christian Doctrine as you are obligated. ReSPONDeD: I go to Doctrine, I serve at the church of Alano, and I can give a detailed account of the same for its practice. I am not there all the time, since I am a hermit, but I was also born in this town. ASkeD: If you know if the parish church is well provided, and particularly if the sacristy has all the furnishings it needs. ReSPONDeD: It’s so-so for a country church. There are plates, missals, and three chalices. One chalice was stolen a while ago when the priest was building the house for the young women; the theft was discovered one evening when I was in the canonry. ASkeD:

262

Finding self and others

If you know how many doors there are in that retreat or house and where the women are. ReSPONDeD: There are two different ones that correspond to the canonry through which it is possible to enter the house of those girls anytime and at any hour. ASkeD: If you know who goes and practices in the said house where the girls are. ReSPONDeD: The priest goes freely and the women also go into his house. Also outsiders who come are introduced by the priest; I have seen it many times. ASkeD: If you know what sort of outsiders come to Alano, where they stay, and for what business. ReSPONDeD: There are many different types, and they often stay with the priest, but I do not know why they come to Alano. ASkeD: If you know how the girls who live in the structure built by the priest spend their time. ReSPONDeD: Some of them work and others, the Venetians, sing and play music. ASkeD: If you know or have heard it said that the same [women] have at any time sung and played in other places outside of Alano. ReSPONDeD: They went to sing at San Vittore in the territory of Feltre, where I also was, and I heard them play and sing. ASkeD:

From the Venetian Dominion: With the information extended by you about the application presented in the name of the Commune of Alano, we are aware of the bold operation of Rev. Pietro Zanone parish priest of that town, instituting without public permission a refuge for certain young women in the mode that you described, connected to the parish church in the guise of a convent. We should not let run any longer such a pernicious offense contrary to the law, with rumors and sentiments of the same we resolve to expressly charge you to order immediately the dissolution of this union, to put into practice this our resolute will. You will see that the women living there in good faith will be sent back to their homes, or provided for in another manner believed appropriate. Because of the licentious operation of the said priest Zanone he does not remain exempt from correction. Make him aware that as a penalty for our indignation he must come before us within eight days to bring the news of the public presentation by you of our orders. Given in the ducal palace of Venice November 1688. Sent to the Podestà of Treviso. Condemnation by the Bishop: On October 3, 1687 in the town of Alano In the presence of the most eminent and Reverend Lord Gregorio Cardinal Barbarigo bishop of Padua and Count of Piove di Sacco currently in Alano on visitation of his Paduan diocese. Having been called, Rev. Pietro Zanone,

Finding self and others

263

rector of the parish church of Saint Peter Apostle and Antonio Abbate of the said town of Alano appeared, was examined by his eminence, and then the following was read to him face to face in the vernacular language for his greater understanding. Having seen with prejudice the extravagance of the addition built on the parish church of St Antonio Abbate and the Parish of Alano, under pain of suspension from divine service incurred automatically without any other declaration, you, Pietro Zanone parish priest of Alano, are prohibited from building or destroying anything inside, outside, and around the choir and the church, either on your behalf or for any others, nor may you open the windows or the other openings closed during our visit, or to make any new ones. Under the same penalty, you are prohibited from introducing and admitting into your parish house the women living in that structure next to the church built by you, as it is forbidden for all decency for you to go into their habitation. Furthermore, under the penalty as above, you are prohibited from administering the sacraments in private to the same women except in cases of necessity; otherwise you must administer them in the public church without any distinction. Letter from one of the “nuns” Only God knows how many sins and hatreds the masquerade of your visit has caused, and the satirical supplication (as they say) made by your excellence – which has turned our place upside down and taken away our and our companions’ honor, a thing known to so many who know us in Alano – strains the most patient hearts. Genufecting, we beg your eminence to let us live according to God in this place and to better inform yourself of our customs, because certainly it is not your fault and if it were, we are prepared to live the way we are supposed to, and with that I rest satisfed before any justice. The decrees you made, not having heard the whole story, have opened a thousand mouths to rumors; the hermit of S. Lorenzo can say how we have offended him. We beg you to think of a remedy, to restore all of us to live with Christ. You know that what we desire most (other than that you leave this place) is a command that we will be served; we hope for only good things from such a shepherd, not a ruined reputation. We are fve country folk, two who are thirty-fve, two who are twenty-seven, and one who is twelve, plus the poor Fontana orphans, students with their widowed mother. Therefore you are the helper of orphans. Go, your eminence, if you please, and do not take up the cause of a widow for them. Think of what San Giacomo says: The religion of the world before God the father is to visit orphans and widows in their troubles and to save them from this world. If you desire to be chosen yourself for absolution, do not be weighed down by external things. It is worthwhile to read the 28th of June in the Roman Martyrology, the patience of St Potamiana, and the 31st of June,

264 Finding self and others the merits that San Basilide acquired defending his honor while going to his death, then you will see the great evil that it is to persecute innocent virgins. Therefore the pastor of peace brings a civil war of souls! Rightly it is said of your excellency’s curia that neither in Bergamo, nor in Padua do they know the way of peace. Therefore let there be peace in the virtue of God. Our reverend pastor will write the carte blanche and will return uninterested in every way and there will not be anything that he will not do to serve your excellence. There are seven instruments that your excellence has not seen and two other public conventions. The goodness of your eminence has let you be deceived and you have examined all your enemies: whence you were certainly deceived; if we are guilty, in the end we want to suffer and be found innocent by the justice. Therefore for the love of Christ, yours and our judge, we pray that you turn yourself toward us, as we are always turned to God, and to your excellency, as our pastoral leader to God, from whom we are wishing and praying every good, genufecting we kiss your holy purples as does our reverend curate. We remain most humbly devoted and obliged to your most reverend excellence. [signed] Antonia Fontana with her daughters and all the others Bishop Barbarigo’s response to Signora Antonia: I received your letter in Venice, and your request to remain in that place, but as I told you in my visit, neither the place nor the time nor the people are appropriate for instituting such a congregation of women. In no place would the church approve it, but even less where there will always be a scarcity of confessors and spiritual comforts. In este there was built another with good structures, money, furnishings, and holy direction and still the Senate had not wanted it and ordered that it be disbanded, and it was done in only one day. Considering your status and my pastoral obligation to not let abuses run, think of what you could hope on this matter. May God bless you. Venice 29 March 1688. At your pleasure, Gregorio Cardinal Barbarigo [CM]

11.3 A Jewish servant and her ghetto network (1664) When Venice created the ghetto in 1516 as an enclosure that would separate Jews from Christian society, it drew on the models provided by other enclosures in the city, like convents and the quarantine islands it had established in the previous century (the Lazzaretto Vecchio in 1423 and the Lazzaretto Nuovo in 1468; the latter incorporating an abandoned monastery). The Venetian ghetto drew in so many merchants, artisans, and craftsmen from across Europe and around the Mediterranean that it had to be expanded twice. Those living and working in the ghetto’s many households participated in a variety of international networks. Servant woman

Finding self and others

265

Pacientia Mora is a Jew from the eastern Mediterranean, but her name suggests that she may have been an Iberian of Black or Arabic origin; one of her closest friends is another Black house servant called Simcha. Bedridden and perhaps close to death, Pacientia dictates her last will to a Venetian notary. She distributes some goods to the synagogue, some to Simcha and her family, and some to her mistress Rachel Aboaf, who will fulfll other obligations not mentioned here. These gifts trace the lines of Pacientia’s network, and in the absence of any immediate relatives, they suggest that she may have been a convert who made her family within a ghetto which was clearly a transnational space.9 Source: Will of Pacientia Mora (1664) From the incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1664. Third indiction, ninth day Tuesday, month of September . . . Pacientia Mora, a Levantine Jewess, servant in the house of the Mistress Rachel Aboaf, a Jewess [who resides] in ghetto vecchio over the ladder of the oven. . . . [W]hile for grace of our Lord I am healthy in mind, senses, and intellect even if immobilized in my bed, I called him [the notary] to the house in order to dispose of my things. Regarding those obligations that the aforementioned Mistress Rachel will incur, the abovementioned mister Andrea Calzavara, Venetian notary, whom I have prayed to write my will ex ultima voluntate, will take care so that once my death occurs, that will be when God wishes, this should be published and recorded according to the laws of this city. And frstly I recommend my soul to our only one God, creator . . . a blanket of canvas for the bed . . . I leave to . . . Mistress Rachel, and one bolt of white canvas [I leave] also to her; another canvas [I leave] to a companion of mine, a black servant [named as Simcha below] at Mugnon Tomas’s and also a skirt; and another skirt [I leave] to the mother of the very same Mistress Rachel, and four shirts in damask to my companion and three aprons to Mistress Rachel, my pair of gold manin that go for my funeral that are worth thirty ducats; of my chain [of the manin] worth sixty [ducats], half goes for my soul and half for our Spanish synagogue; one fork in silver I leave to a son of my companion [Simcha], the string of buttons in silver to put on the neck I leave to the aforementioned Simcha, my companion, and also a scissor and that it is because I do not have other [goods] . . . two blouses that now are being washed . . . I leave to Clara, a servant who has an unstable job; another blouse I leave to the mother of the aforementioned Rachel . . . I don’t remember other things, but I have one polacheta [a short dress for women] that I leave to my companion [Simcha], another to the Mistress Rachel, and another to her mother. I, Zovane of the late Francesco Scolari Zoli Muzer, was present as witness, pray and swear. I, Zorsi Vane Filigrani Murer, was present as witness, pray and swear. [FF]

266

Finding self and others

11.4 An abbess and convent in exile (1642) After King Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the English convents and monasteries in the 1530s, many English women fed their homes to form expatriate convents on the continent. Over the next two centuries, approximately 4,000 exiled nuns joined the exodus and worked for the re-conversion of their nation to Catholicism, or at the very least, for toleration for Catholic worship and communal life. The frst Reformation convent created on the continent specifcally for Catholic Englishwomen was founded in 1599 by Lady Mary Percy, the daughter of prominent Catholic nobleman Sir Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland, who was executed for treason in 1572. This obituary, recorded by the nuns of her convent after her death in 1642, provides a brief overview of Percy’s life, sketching her family of origin, her tutelage under the leading underground English Jesuit Fr. Gerard, the foundation of the Brussels Benedictine convent, and her work as Abbess.10 Source: Obituaries from the Benedictine Convent in Brussels Lady Mary Percy In the year of Our Lord 1642 Sepber 13th in our Monastery of the Glorious Assumption of the most Blessed Mother of God at Brussels, happily deceased our most dear Lady in Christ, Lady Mary Percy, Foundress of this Monastery, in the 74th year of her age, and the 42nd of her Religious profession. Lady Mary Percy was the 2nd Abbess succeeding Lady Joanna Berkeley in 1616, and she governed the Monastery 26 years. She was moreover the Foundress of the english Benedictine Monastery in Brussels, jointly with Dames Dorothy and Gertrude Arundell in 1599 – After the execution of her Father, the earl of Northumberland, who refused to purchase his life at the sacrifce of his religion, and the death of her mother in 1596, she fell under the direction of Father Gerard S.J. who was the frst to instruct her in the practice of mental prayer and the exercises of piety; he writes of her as follows: ‘She was chosen by God for Himself. I found her unmarried, humble and modest. Gradually she was ftted for something higher, she learnt the practice of meditation, and profted so well thereby, that the world grew vile in her eyes, and heaven seemed the only worthy object of her love. I afterwards sent her to Father Holt in Belgium, he wrote to me on one occasion in these terms – “Never has there come into these parts a country woman of ours that has given such good example, or done such honour to our nation.” Finding the bent of her mind was towards the Religious life, Father Gerard sent her to Father Holt in Brussels, there being no possibility of carrying out her vocation in england. After mature deliberation, it was decided by Father Holt, and her other advisers that Lady Mary should found a Convent

Finding self and others

267

in Brussels of the english Benedictines, the preference being given to this Order, both because england was indebted to it for the Faith, and because it had fourished there beyond all others until the late sad apostacy, and because it was hoped that when england returned to the Church, the Benedictine Order would be the frst she should welcome back to her shores. While waiting for the accomplishment of her design, Lady Mary spent the chief part of her time in prayer to obtain the divine light and favour on her undertaking. She made frequent pilgrimages, and so great was her fervour, that she sometimes went barefoot to visit the Blessed sacrament of Miracles of St Gudule, and when visiting the Sepulchre on Maundy Thursday. So soon as Dame Dorothy and Gertrude Arundell had determined to join her in her holy undertaking by Father Holt’s advice Lady Mary wrote to the Abbess of the Benedictine Monastery at Rheims, to petition for Dame Joanna Berkeley to be sent to Brussels, to take upon her the governance of the new Monastery. On her arrival Lady Mary was the frst to make her promise of obedience to the future Abbess, and after the purchase of the house had been concluded, and Lady Joanna Berkeley was blessed and installed as Abbess, Lady Mary and her companions by this time amounting to eight in number, received with great solemnity the religious Habit in 1599 and were professed Novbr 21st 1600. At the death of Lady Joanna Berkeley, Lady Mary was chosen Abbess, and blessed Augst 23rd. Two years later 1618 she had the satisfaction of seeing the church completed and consecrated. In 1623 the Benedictine Monks petitioned for some Religious from the Mother House to help in founding a Monastery at Cambray which was to be under their jurisdiction, Lady Mary sent three Religious to this work. – In 1624 she sent out another Filiation consisting of four Choir Nuns and two Novices to found a monastery in Ghent. It was at this date also that the monastery received the precious relic of the piece of the true cross, secretly abstracted from among Queen elizabeth’s treasures by Sir Roger Manners who bequeathed it to Mr William Vavasour, who sent one half of it to his daughter Dame Mary Vavasour, then a nun at Brussels monastery. Lady Mary professed 24 Choir Nuns and 11 Lay Sisters. [SA]

11.5 Spiritual friendships and alliances: a queen and English convents in exile (1687–8) Far from being isolated fgures, the exiled English nuns were involved in contemporary dynastic politics, religious affairs, and cultural patronage. The enclosed nuns did not see their political involvement and alliances as contradictory to their contemplative vocations, but as a way of fulflling missionary endeavours from within their enclosures. Throughout the seventeenth century, they built strong alliances with the Catholic women who

268 Finding self and others served as queen consorts to the Stuart kings. The relationship with Queen Mary Beatrice d’Este of Modena, the wife of James II, was particularly strong. Throughout her time in England, and during her exile in France after her husband lost his throne in the 1688 upheaval that later historians termed the “Glorious Revolution,” Queen Mary supported the exiled nuns as an important patron, and they in turn supported her. These three letters sent to Queen Mary provide a glimpse into her relationship with these convents. Source: Letters to Queen Mary of Modena (1687–8) – British Library a) The frst letter, written by Mary Knatchbull, Abbess of the English Benedictine convent in Ghent, dated 1 January 1687, is a friendly missive wishing the queen a happy New Year. In it, she promises the constant prayers of her convent on behalf of the royal family. The dedicated prayers of a religious community were seen to hold great value in the early modern period.11 May it please your Sacred Majesty This New Years Day 1687 All though I need no incouragement to this duty besides yor Majesty’s singular meritt and soveraigne power over yor loyall subjects, yett I cannot approach your Majesty with the duty of this address containing our Annuall tribute of prayers till frst I have recorded my harty and gratfull thanks for the honor of your Majesty’s most obliging letter. A favour highly valued by us as witnessing a kind acceptance of our harty affection prayers and zeale for the prosperity of your Majesty and the Royall Family, principles I hope Inherent to this Community, from which and from my self with hartiest wishes of a happy new year and of many succeeding happy yeares, wee present yor Majesty as a poore New Yeares Guift with two thousand communions, Masses, paires of Beads and acts of penance. May Heaven render our prayers and wishes as succesfull as they are offered to God and yor Majesty with harty affection and zeale of yor happiness by Your Majesty’s Most faithful and obedient servent Mary knatchbull b) The second letter, from a Carmelite in Antwerp named Mary Wigmore, is dated 23 May 1688. In support of Queen Mary during her pregnancy, the nun offers her a Teresian relic as a gift to wear during her labour, as it is known to work miracles in childbirth. For the exiled nuns, their hope for a return home rested in the hands of James and Mary and they prayed for the birth of a Catholic heir.12 Madame The Divine Spirit whose fruites and Gifts adornes soe much your Royall Persone, I beseech to live [for]ever and animate the hart and Soule of your Sacred Majesty, whose example and Illustrious vertues are suffcient

Finding self and others

269

to reduce to the waie of truth & Sanctity the whole Nation; The petitions of this Comunity of your Majesties humble faithfull subjects are incessantly presented to the Throne of mercy beseeching the preservation of Both your Royall persons with the Benediction of the soe much wished & prayed for gift of heaven, a Prince to Inherit your Crownes and vertues, to which end Madame your Singular devotion to the great zelatrice of the glory of God & Salvation of Soules our seraphique Mother St Teresa, will undoubtably contribute much, whose Relique a peece of her fesh I presume to present, beseeching your Majesty to weare it in your labour, it working daylie in effect miracles giving happy [deliverences – Walker has deliveries] & preservation of the mother & Child in like cases. The holy Ghost compleate the Benediction whose emblem of our work [smudged] to honour with acceptance from hir who is with all humility prostrate at your Royall feet Madame From your Majesties Convent of english Teresians in Antwerp The 23 of May 1688 Your Majesties most obedient most humble most faithfull subject and servant Marie Wigmore, Carmelite c) The third letter, again from Knatchbull, dated 24 June 1688, congratulates the queen on the birth of the long-awaited Prince of Wales and informs her that their community celebrated with the singing of a Te Deum. To the sorrow of nuns like Knatchbull and Wigmore, it was the birth of this Catholic heir to England, Scotland, and Ireland that sparked the “Glorious Revolution.” The royal family lost the throne and fed to France later that year, and the exiled nuns became passionate Jacobites, as supporters of the exiled monarchs were called.13 May it please your Majesty This 24th of June 1688 The share we have in all blessings conferred on yor Sacred Majesty makes us now completely blest and happy in yor Majestys safe delivery of so [brave?] a prince of Wales for which with heart and voice having Sung our Te deum and with the whole quir of Heaven presented our gratfull thankes to the Blessed Trinity for this Saving Gift to the 3 Nations imparted by yor Majesty, with whom prostrate at your Sacred feet I crave leave to congratulate, and to assure you of the largest share in all our prayers and best actions that God may continue his blessings to you in the preservation of our Sacred prince with the speedy addition of a Duke of York as is most confdently hoped and prayed for by Your Sacred Majestys Most obedient loyall Subject and Servent Mary knatchbull [SA]

270

Finding self and others

11.6 Irish nuns in exile and in poverty (1740) The economic diffculties that all exiled convents faced became steadily worse after 1688. English pressure on Stuart loyalists intensifed, and as hopes for a restoration faded, so too did the resources that Catholic families could send to the English and Irish convents in exile. James II had invited the Benedictine nuns of the convent of Irish Dames in Ypres to return to Dublin in 1687, but their return was short lived. After James II’s failed attempt to regain the throne in 1689 with an invasion from Ireland, their convent was sacked by English troops, forcing the nuns to fee again to Ypres in 1690. Royal support declined after Queen Mary died in 1719. Writing two decades later, their abbess describes their destitution to the Private Secretary of James II’s son, James III (also known as the Old Pretender), asking that the exiled king support their appeal to the pope for aid. Abandoned by their families and shunned by their local hosts, these nuns have a meagre life within their enclosures and pin their hopes on a Restoration of Catholicism in the British Isles that will allow them to return home. This legacy of Reformation division in the United Kingdom would last many more decades, with some easing of restrictions on Catholics in 1778 but no full toleration until 1829.14 Source: A Letter from Margaret X. Arthur, Abbess of the Irish Dames of Ypres to James edgar, Private Secretary to king James Francis edward Stuart (21 September 1740) ’Tis with sensible confusion that I take the liberty to trouble you with this at present to expose mine and Community’s extreme indigence, which we suffered in silence these many years past, always hoping that the Almighty would at last inspire some pious souls to relieve us, but his divine Goodness permits for our trial that no one thinks of us, and thus we are forgotten by all. exiled amongst strangers, destitute of all human help and friends except one only worthy family viz. Monsr. L.’ Arche Prêtre de Code who out of pure compassion is pleased to allow us in alms about 160 Florins per annum, being the only benevolence we receive from anywhere, for all their zeal and charity here is employed to help and advance the convents of their own nation, and we are the only poor strangers rejected and abandoned by all. Remote from our parents and friends, and now reduced to the greatest of misery by the universal scarcity of all kinds of nourishment, in so much that our omnia will scarce suffce for bread alone. I know not where to address for succour, but to prostrate myself and poor Community at the feet of his Holiness, our common Father, hoping to fnd in his sacred person so paternal a heart as to be easily moved at the misery of his poor afficted children. [. . .] We have all just reason with weeping eyes and sorrowful hearts to lament the death of our Royal Foundress and Dearest Mother, which irreparable

Finding self and others

271

loss, together with our great losses on the town-house of Paris, has reduced this poor community to the last degree of misery. What we have suffered since her Majesty’s death is truly inexpressible. Having been obliged several years ago to retrench suppers from this poor Community, [I] must confess ’tis very affictive to me to see these spouses of Christ spent and exhausted all day with choir, prayer and other religious duties, austerities, labours etc, and many of them very weak, sickly and tender, and not be able to afford ’em a supper at night. Sweet Jesus give us the grace of a perfect conformity to his holy will, which is equally to be adored in prosperity and adversity. This exposition is very humbling but necessity has no law. If this retrenchment was necessary so many years ago when food was plentiful and sold at a reasonable rate, his Holiness may easily judge to what an inexpressible degree of misery we are now reduced by the general want of all necessaries for life, being also plunged in debt, for we owe above three hundred pounds sterling, creditors daily tormenting us and we have not wherewith to live much less to pay ’em, and if they refuse us credit, we may starve. In short the tears, misery and wants of my poor Community penetrates my heart to such a degree that, though it does not diminish my confdence in God, it does however diminish (in some measure) the sensible shame and confusion I should otherwise feel in addressing this humble petition to his Holiness. If he could possibly be spectator of our misery, he’d not be surprised at any effort I should make to seek relief in our present calamity and distress. I hope he’ll have the goodness to pardon the liberty I take, for to be sincere I know not where to have recourse, and if he does not judge us objects worthy of his pity and charity we can have no human appearance of relief from any other hand. I only expose our misery in the briefest manner, shall leave the success entirely to God, who only knows what we suffer, and will, I’m confdent, bring all our affictions to a happy period. He has given us a large share of his cross in making us feel the effects of our vow of poverty; I hope he’ll give us a large share of his crown in Heaven. I beseech his divine goodness to conserve us from that misery, of all miseries the greatest in this life viz. the dismal separation of this poor community; if it be His Divine Will we should perish within these walls by hunger or famine, we shall be truly happy to die as we have lived in perfect union and charity together. I pray God that nothing but death may ever separate us. This is a disagreeable, tedious, but may be truly styled a brief narration of the many miseries we have so long suffered and concealed till now. Sinking and starving, we humbly beg relief, and in order to convince his Holiness how real our misery is, I have obtained on 8th instant our Bishop’s attestation, which I send herewith enclosed. Now, Sir, [I] must assure you that I really designed to get this petition translated into Latin and addressed directly to his Holiness, not having had suffcient courage nor presumption to beg our king’s protection, being truly ashamed of all the trouble I have so often given his Majesty by my importuning letters etc in favour of myself and others, but was informed

272

Finding self and others

by better judges that no petition from any of his Majesty’s subjects would prove effectual without his royal approbation and protection. I was also advised to address to my worthy, valuable friend, Mr edgar, assuring me that you took so great a share in all that regarded this poor community that you would omit nothing in your power to render my petition effcacious. Animated by this and by the many convincing proofs I have experienced of your charity and goodness in my regard, I take the liberty to address to you as a [one word illegible] and sincere friend in this my miserable situation. ’Tis no small comfort to me to fnd that by your means I can have so easy an access to our king. Be pleased to assure his Majesty of mine and poor community’s most humble, affectionate duty and profound respects. I have scarce courage to mention what I humbly beg of his Majesty, which is that he’ll be graciously pleased by his royal protection and mediation to render my poor petition effcacious with his Holiness. God only knows our misery, and He’ll relieve us when He pleases, His Holy Name be praised. I hope his Majesty will easily pardon this presumption of his most affectionate, flial and afficted subjects [. . .] Be pleased to assure their Royal Highnesses, the Prince of Wales and Duke of York of mine and poor Community’s most humble and profound respects and that our daily, affectionate and most ardent prayers attend our king and Royal Family for their spiritual and temporal happiness and speedy Restoration. Have the goodness, Sir, to excuse the disorder, mistakes and want of connection in this tedious narration, and be persuaded that I am and shall ever remain with all possible gratitude, sincere esteem and due respect, Sir, etc. [SA]

11.7 The devil in the body of a man: a nun’s temptations (1723) Many reformers believed that sexual desire was the way that the Devil aimed to draw believers away from pious obedience to God. The spirit might be willing, but the body was easily tempted, and so the Devil sent demons to prey on that weak spot. Maria de San José (1656–1719), from a large Mexican landholding family in decline, became an Augustinian Recollect nun in Puebla, founded an Augustinian convent in Oaxaca, and was promoted for beatifcation after her death. She wrote a spiritual autobiography of over 2000 pages following the models of St Augustine and Teresa of Ávila, excerpts of which were published in 1723. Here she records the erotic dreams she experienced for over a decade. The accounts of naked and clothed men of different races and physiques flling her imagination for hours on end highlight the negative intersection of race, gender, and piety in much of the spiritual literature of the time.15 Source: Memoirs of Sor Maria de San José (1723)

Finding self and others

273

Certain cases have come back to my mind, which befell me during those nine or ten years when I had the three demons attending on me. Yet what I am going to tell here happened not with any of those three well-known ones, but rather with the numberless throng that tormented me fercely. Father Barros (who was then my Confessor) never wanted me to write down the very strange cases that befell me during that time, and he had given me the order that I was not to write about certain cases that befell me with the enemies. Regarding such things, I know that I should not write it, only speak of it in the confessional – which was easier for me and less work. And there is just one case that befell me that I wish to set down here. One day, when I had fnished eating, as soon as we have thanks as is our custom, I went straight to my cell. And before I went in, the clock struck twelve, and as soon as I heard that I entered the cell. And as it is always our custom when we enter to put a hand back to shut the door, when I performed this action I saw the enemy, in human form, enter next to me. The door to the cell swung shut, with myself and him inside. I saw him in human form, a man of tall stature, his hair very curly like a mulatto’s. The frst thing he did was throw his arms around me, giving me a thousand caresses and endearments. As soon as I felt him on my neck, I fell like a dead woman to the foor, and he with me, without letting go of me; and though I lost my senses, it was not so that I failed to hear or pay heed to what he was doing and saying, with the sense of hearing very vivid. This lasted two whole hours, from twelve midday until two in the afternoon, the hour for Vespers. All that time I struggled with this infernal dragon; I could almost see his false face right next to mine. And although he undertook to force me, the Lord like a father restrained him, and was most willing that he should employ all possible means of mistreating me and breaking me into little pieces, as long as this was only in my body and he did not touch my interior. I can fnd no expressions to tell what enormous torment and martyrdom I suffered in hearing and feeling the endearments he spoke and how he held me so tightly pressed between his infernal arms. He allowed me no movement whatsoever to be able to call a nun to defend me. It pleased God that the hour when they ring for Vespers arrived, and as soon as I heard the bells, I began to force my way to break loose from his hands; and I did all I could to stand up. And he let me go, because he can do no more than what the Lord permits. And as soon as I found myself free, I opened the door of the cell and went out, which was a manifest miracle, to be able to stand on my own two feet with my body so badly hurt and tormented. For from my head to my feet, all my bones were crippled; and so rattled was I, that I could do nothing right. And here, in this case, while it can be seen how horrible and frightful it was, I received a great consolation, which was that I saw this enemy dressed in men’s clothing; because ordinarily it has always been that I see them in human form, as men, but naked in the raw fesh. This has been one of the great torments I have suffered, always seeing them naked; that is, the great

274

Finding self and others

number of them, apart from the three who attended me for nine or ten long years while they tormented me ceaselessly at all hours of the day and night. In all that time I never knew what it was to sleep. I have already told about those three demons, how two of them were in human form like men; the other was not, but rather in the form of a wolf or a black dog. That one had his waist cinched in, in the middle of his body, in such a way that his feet reached to my right side, for they reached my stomach and part of my abdomen; and his hands and his head came to my other side, the left. For there was very little in between, to separate the feet from the head of this ferce animal. But it was in such a way that the part that covers the stomach always stayed free on me. And the way I saw them was not to be watching them constantly, but only from time to time. My feeling their torments, however, was indeed constant. To go back to the case I have related here: other cases have befallen me, regarding the same thing I have said; but they were more dangerous. It is well known that the demons have no bodies, because they are evil spirits. The forms they take are all fantastic and only appear to be their own. Well, as the enemy saw that he was not getting anywhere in the case already reported, he made another scheme which only his cunning could devise. The scheme he made was this: while I was in my cell, with the door closed, again in the hour of the siesta – during which I never slept; I was sewing – and suddenly the enemy appeared before me, as I have said, in the form of a naked man in his raw fesh. The moment I saw him I paid no attention, nor did I show that I knew what was before me, which is how I have always defended myself from him. I remained entirely absorbed in what I was sewing and with my heart calling out to the Lord; but when I saw and understood what schemes and instruments he brought to provoke me into consenting to offend God against purity: this critical moment was indeed a narrow strait, and the danger greater and more evident than in the other case related above. And although he did not manage to touch me, he tormented me doubly by seeing what he was doing in my presence, with the instruments and schemes his wickedness invented. Now it may well be understood what a wonder it is that they did not manage to touch me, as in the case related above when the enemy managed to struggle with me. But on these other occasions I had with them, which I am telling here, well, as I was about to say, they adopted a diabolical scheme, as they do, of some instruments something like arrows – for I can think of no other term by which to make myself understood – and as soon as I felt these arrows it was like being set on fre, because I burned and was consumed in a fame of lewd and abominable temptations. This was every day and every night; they never tired. They had no set times for this, but rather any time at all. And after these had calmed and quieted down – so stormy and most bitter to my conscience – then not one, and not two, but a whole multitude of them would come. The cell was so full that there would not be room to set down a pin; all of them in the form of naked men, with not a stitch of clothing. And only

Finding self and others

275

at the place where there was a little mat, which we all have in our cells as a place to sit down, that was line which the Lord had drawn for them, beyond which they could not pass – except for those three that attended on me, for they did not leave my side one instant. Well, as I was saying, this multitude would come, and all of them together would begin to shout at me and mock me, taking great leaps and giving guffaws of pleasure and glee that now they had won their victory, that I had already consented to the temptations that he had brought me earlier against my chastity. They said this in such a way and with such effcacy that it seemed to me it was true, just as they assured me it was. And at the same time they did such indecent things with each other that they cannot be set down here. Now it may be understood how terrible and horrifying this suffering was. I cannot fnd expressions to do it justice. Only deep consideration can appreciate the terror and fearfulness of this suffering. I would have taken it as a great consolation to my soul, and raised my hands to heaven, if these martyrdoms I have suffered with regard to this temptation against purity had been suffered only in my body, and could have been constantly making a martyr of me and breaking me into tiny pieces; and this not just for the space of one day, nor just two or three, but for the entire time this temptation lasted, which was for sixteen years, as I shall tell later on. I got back now to what I already related of the struggle I had with that frst one who as I said came dressed in men’s clothing, with a long cape that went all the way down to his feet. I struggled with him hand to hand, and he strove to force me, although not with threats and rages but with fattery and caresses. And here, instead of the fesh becoming agitated – inclined as it is to such things – it was not that way but quite the opposite, because I felt no impure movement of any kind; what I did feel was a terrible horror and fear. That is how I remember it; which I cannot say or be sure of in that other scheme they devised. Because no sooner did they come with that most diabolical temptation, and I saw and felt the arrows that they shot at me, than it was like setting me on fre in a fame of such impure temptations, I did not know how to help myself. This most diabolical scheme devised by the enemies lasted for a stretch of time; then they grew tired and stopped, leaving off this stratagem they invented of the arrows they shot at me to provoke my fesh to consent to impure temptation. Well, as I say, this scheme lasted a little while and never returned, but with regard to the temptation against purity, it was constant, by day and by night without growing tired. It was in such a way that I was not mistress of putting my hands together one with the other, or of performing any other movement or natural action whatsoever, but it would be a gust to fan the fame and make it burn and blaze in this lewd and impure temptation. Now it may be seen what a very great trial I must have had in this; an I never paid any heed either to the trial or the suffering, but only to the danger and risk I was in that the enemy should be taking such strange measures to rob me and take from me a jewel of such great value as is that of purity and chastity.

276

Finding self and others

The way I have behaved both in this temptation and in various others with which the demons have persisted in tearing me down, as I have said elsewhere, is to pay no heed to the things with which they tempt me, trying with great effort not to pay any attention nor give ear to what the enemy says; and to intend, if not to manage, to put all my attention on something that is of God, such as thinking of the purity of Our Lady the Most Blessed Mary; or of the pains of hell – always of that – which will never have any end. The enemy feels deeply this means of resistance to his schemes; for as arrogant as he is, he feels it deeply when anyone slights him and pays him no heed. At that, he stamps his feet and becomes full of rage and anger. This has been the way in which I have behaved with this most diabolical temptation; with all my will always frm that I would sooner lose a thousand lives than to have to offend Our Lord God. But as this temptation against chastity is so adapted to our nature, great fears and doubts always remain as to whether I did what God commands me to do or did not do what I should have done. This is so even when a person is very alert and forewarned so as to do and carry out everything that God commands, so that His Divine Majesty may not be displeased, even in the slightest thing; notwithstanding all that, there is always a great deal left to battle and dispute. God alone can know what I have suffered in confessing these things. And this is so even having the favour the Lord has always granted me, which is a great freedom in telling my Confessor everything that troubles my conscience, even when they are very small things or very diffcult to say without searching for expressions; rather, just as things are, I tell them, and I write in the same way. This is a great beneft the Lord grants me simply by His infnite mercy. It is necessary to set down a certain circumstances here, which is that I have always said that all the things I see and that the lord shows me, I see with the interior vision of my soul; except for thus business of seeing the demons. For I have very deliberately examined this point, and it seems to me that it is not only a matter of seeing them with the eyes of my soul but at the same time of seeing them with the eyes of my body, going by the cases I have related here, in particular when I struggled with that demon who was alone. I saw that one differently and clearly with my corporeal eyes. And it has been the same in everything else with regard to this business of seeing the enemies; it has always seemed to me that I do not see them only with the eyes of my soul but also with the eyes of my body. [JH]

11.8 Scandal in the enclosure: a Manila woman seeks another life (1754) Third Order convents in the colonies typically housed poorer Spanish women or the illegitimate mixed-race daughters of colonial offcials. Cecilia de Ita y Salazar entered Manila’s Dominican Third Order convent (beaterio) of Santa Catalina as a young girl in 1719 and professed as a beata 10 years

Finding self and others

277

later. In 1746, she wanted to leave in order to marry her lover Don Francisco Antonio de Figueroa, but the Dominicans refused to release Cecilia from the enclosure. Cecilia took her case to the archbishop, arguing that she had professed under coercion and was mistreated by the Dominicans and other beatas. Moreover, since she had not taken solemn or perpetual vows as a nun, the Dominicans could not force her to remain in the beaterio. The other 31 beatas were interviewed by local head of the Dominicans, and in their testimony here they tell a different story of a rude and restless Cecilia, who broke the rules repeatedly and brought her lover into the convent itself. Cecilia was eventually released from her vows, married Don Francisco, and went with him to Mexico.16 Source: Depositions from S. Catalina Beaterio in Archdiocesan investigation of appeal of Cecilia de Ita y Salazar (1754) 1. Whether you know Madre Sor Cecilia of the Circumcision, and for how long, and if you have always recognized her as a beata (literally religiosa profesa) of our Third Order as practiced in our beaterio? To this frst question of the interrogation, they said unanimously and answered that they knew and had known this Sor Cecilia, some more, others fewer years, according to the seniority of each, and that the said Sor Cecilia had lived in the beaterio some twenty-fve years, of which ffteen she had already professed, and the rest had been as a secular girl, and they all said in the same way that they had always had her without any doubt as a Beata Religiosa Profesa of the third order . . . 3. If you know that at some time she [Cecilia] was unjustly mortifed by a Prelate of Our Order, or mistreated and persecuted by the other Religiosas? To this third question all the declarants answered that they never saw that Sister Cecilia was unjustly bothered or mistreated by a Prelate, or of any Religiosa of the Beaterio, the majority of them saying that she was and always had been the one who had mortifed . . . the [male and female] prelates with her bad manners and bad words if they corrected her, or they did not give her pleasure in what she wanted; and this was in such a way that they often refrained from correcting her, and tried to please her in many things for keeping the peace, and [tried] not to hear what she was shouting with her bad language . . . especially to the servant nuns [literally Religiosas legas 17] and secular girls, whom she called bitches, negras,18 devils, and other dictates that came to her mouth. 6. If you know that she [Cecilia] has had an intimate friendship with some secular and who was it? 7. If you know that she has introduced into our Beaterio some secular man?

278

Finding self and others

8. If you know who has helped her? This sixth, seventh, and eighth question for being about the same subject have been compiled under one, and in the interrogation, each one was made by itself . . . In the sixth question to which thirteen Religiosas said they did not become aware of the contents of this question . . . for being withdrawn in their activities, and came to know of the relationship and familiarity and friendship with a secular named Don Francisco Figueroa when the said Sister Cecilia left the beaterio because then everything was said, and it became public. But nine Religiosas of the declarants say they were knowledgeable and they knew of this friendship with the secular for seeing their mutual correspondence continued in papers, gifts, conversations in the parlour [the locutorio or reja where nuns could meet guests] and in a passageway in front of the house where the said secular [Don Francisco] lived, for which it was necessary that the Religiosas pass to go to the choir; there, their gestures, laughing, and other actions were very continuous and not very decent. Another [beata] says that with this secular [there] was much frequent conversation during the day in the parlour, and at night by the windows, and even going up at night . . . with a ladder to talk through the window of her cell; and that many times he sent gifts, and even [sent] cooked food and refreshments in the afternoons. Another [beata] says throughout this intimate familiarity and correspondence, the said secular caused enough uneasiness and scandal in the Beaterio, but she does not know, nor believe, that the said secular had entered inside; only once she observed that the said Sor Cecilia went down at night to a low fence to speak with more urgency with the said secular . . . Another [beata], who was called an escucha [a listener in the locutorio] says she attended the parlour with her [Cecilia] when the said secular came to visit . . . She also says that she heard from a Religiosa, with whom Sister Cecilia communicated, that the secular had climbed the Beaterio by the wall of the orchard, but she does not know how, when, or with what friends, or how many times, and she heard from the same Religiosa that the said secular had entered the cell of Sor Cecilia at night. [AG]

Notes 1 Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain), México 336A (1545). Transcript of a letter of the archdeacon Juan Negrete. Translated by Jacqueline Holler. 2 Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain), México 280 (1546). evidence concerning certain clerics, sent by the Archbishop of Mexico, don Fray Juan de Zumárraga. Translated by Jacqueline Holler. 3 Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain), Mexico 204, N. 25 (1547). evidence: Juán de Zumárraga. Translated by Jacqueline Holler.

Finding self and others

279

4 Because the archdeacon had baptized her daughter. 5 Note that in Spanish, unlike in english, there is no double-entendre or ambiguity in this term. 6 Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain), México 280 (1548). evidence concerning Juan Negrete. Translated by Jacqueline Holler. 7 Archivo General de Indias, México 280 (1549). To the Council of the Indies from Juan de Negrete. Translated by Jacqueline Holler. 8 Archivio della Curia Vescovile di Padova, Visitationes 54, 465v–466r, Visitationes 55. Translated by Celeste McNamara. 9 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Fondo Notarile, Testamenti, busta n. 260, Notaio Andrea Calzavara, pratica n. 739, 9 of September 1664, Testamento di Pacientia Mora hebrea levantina. Translated by Federica Francesconi. See also F. Francesconi, “The Venetian Jewish Household as a Multireligious Community in early Modern Italy,” in N. Terpstra (ed.) Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 231–48. 10 C. Bowden and N. Hallett (eds) English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Volume 3. Life Writing I, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012, pp. 228–30. 11 British Library [BL], Additional MSS 28225, fol. 126. Letters of Royal and Other Persons to Mary, Queen of James II, 1685–88. Mary knatchbull, Abbess of the english Benedictines at Ghent: Letter to Qu. Mary of Modena, 1 January 1687. 12 BL, Add. MSS 28225, fols 276–7. Mary Wigmore, Carmelite of St Teresa at Antwerp: Letter to Qu. Mary of Modena, 23 May 1688. 13 BL, Add. MSS 28225, fol. 293, Mary knatchbull, Abbess of the english Benedictines at Ghent to Mary of Modena, 24 June 1688. 14 Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, State Papers Main/226 ff.105-105c, Margaret X. Arthur, Abbess, Irish Dames of Ypres, to James edgar, 21 September 1740. State Papers Online, The Stuart and the Cumberland Papers from the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2018. Manuscript Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen elizabeth II 2020. 15 k. Myers and A. Powell (ed/trans.), A Wild Country out in the Garden, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. © 1999 by kathleen A. Myers and Amanda Powell. Republished with permission of the Indiana University Press; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 16 University of Santo Tomas Archives (UST – Manila), Tomo 7, Roll 36, 1754, f.43r–49r. Translated by Allison Graham. See also A. Graham, “Maintaining Colonial Order: Institutional enclosure in Spanish Manila, 1590–1790,” in Terpstra (ed) Global Reformations, pp. 134–50. 17 Often translated to mean “laywomen,” the term in Santa Catalina connoted lower-status or second-tier sisters who completed more menial work in the beaterio. These women tended to be of indigenous descent, while the beatas of the choir (like Cecilia) were typically supposed to be Spanish. 18 Black women, likely meaning enslaved women of African descent.

Index

A Abel (biblical fgure), 150 Abenamir, Cosme (morisco), 241–44 Abi Abdilehi (Boabdil) (sultan of Granada), 212–16 Abi Jum’ah, Ahmad ibn (Muslim scholar): Oran Fatwa (1504), 222–24 ablutions, ritual: in Islam, 211, 222–23, 235 Aboaf, Rachel (Venetian Jew), 265 Abraham (patriarch), 67, 70, 134, 150, 245–46; representations of, 226 Abrahamic religions, 9; common elements, 67–71 Abram. See Abraham Abravenel, Isaac (Jewish scholar), 51 absolution, 30, 40, 96, 253–54, 263 Adam (biblical fgure), 72, 162–63 Afonso I Mvemba of Kongo, 14–15, 111–12, 141–43 Ahmed I (sultan of the Ottoman empire), 124 Alaba, Andrés de (Spanish inquisitor), 245 Al-Abbas (companion of Muhammad), 220 Albert II (Holy Roman emperor), 151 Alcoran. See Qur’an Alexander Jannaeus (king of Judah), 166–67 Alfonso V of Aragon, 89–90 Alfonso X of Castile, 208–10 Al-Ghazali (Algazali) (Muslim scholar), 71 Algonquins (Indigenous people), 46. See Wendat Alhambra decree. See under expulsion of Jews

Almeida, Diogo de (Portuguese courtier), 58 alms: distribution of, 157; in Islam, 222, 244; receiving, 270 amnesty. See also treaty of Granada: breaking of, 220; for Waldensians in Savoy, 145 Amnon (biblical fgure), 232 Anabaptists. See Radical Christianity Ancheta, José de (Jesuit missionary), 170 angels (Christian), 42, 72, 82, 92, 120–21, 128, 164–65, 175, 185, 192, 226, 257 Anglican Church. See Church of England Anthony the great (saint), 263 anti-Semitism. See under Jews; persecution of Jews Antonio Abbate. See Anthony the great apocalypse, 109, 136 apostasy, 61, 116–17, 153, 209, 222 apostles, 28, 150, 193. See also under individual names Appeal of the Jewish Council (Università) of Venice (1691), 227–32 Appeal to Sultan Bayazid II (c. 1502), 216–22 Arevalo, father (Catholic priest), 257, 259 Arianism, 116 Arthur, Margaret X. (Catholic abbess): correspondence, 270–72 Arundell, Dorothy (Benedictine nun), 266–67 Arundell, Gertrude (Benedictine nun), 266–67

Index assimilation, 61. See also under Roma atheism, 226 Augsburg Confession (1530), 137 Augustine (saint), 272 Auriaga, Juana de (Mexican midwife), 252 Ávila Girón, Bernardino de (Spanish travel writer): Relation of the Kingdom of Nippon, 226–28 Aztec (Indigenous people), 173–78 B Babylonian captivity, 230. See also under Luther, Martin Balthazar (magi), 171, 173 baptism: of enslaved peoples, 203–6 baptism (sacrament), 29–30; attitudes on: Anglican, 106–7; Catholic, 34–36; Lutheran, 161–63; Radical, 31–34, 132–33, 136; of children, 121–22; and colonization, 11–12, 43–44; and consent, 11, 16, 45–46, 204–6, 230; debates on, 13, 43–44; of enslaved people, 13, 15, 43–44; as entrance into faith community, 34–36; improper, 43–44, 203–6; as inadequate for full Christianity, 127–30; of Indigenous peoples, 13, 45–46, 127–30, 200; of infants, 31–34, 133, 136, 156, 203–4; Jewish origins of, 77; preparation for, 43–44, 122, 204; as proof of Christianity, 239; and salvation, 46, 74, 76, 170–71, 181; as tool of oppression, 203–6 (see also under slavery) baptismal names. See renaming Barbarigo, Gregorio (Catholic bishop of Padua), 155–57, 259, 262 Barberini, Francisco (Catholic cardinal), 240 Barros, father (Catholic priest), 273 Basilide (saint, martyr), 264 Bayazid II (sultan of the Ottoman empire), 216–22 beatas. See under religious (members of religious orders) Benedict XIV (pope), 271 Benveniste de la Cavalleria, Vidal bar (Jewish scholar), 51 Berbers. See Muslims, in North Africa Bergio, Claudio (Savoyard minister), 149

281

Berkeley, Joanna (Catholic abbess), 266–67 Besme the German (Charles Danowitz) (assassin of Coligny), 59 Bethlehem (Belém): as birthplace of Christ, 71–72, 166 Bible, 181. See also books of the Bible; as gospel, 42; and literacy, 160; restoration of, 135; roots of reformation, 8; translations of, 4; Geneva bible, 160; as truth, 27–28; as word of God, 27–28 biographies: sacred, 119–22; spiritual autobiography, 115–19, 272–76 biography and aubiography, 10 biography and autobiography: martyrology, 58, 263–64 Black Africans: bozal (unhispanicized African), 44, 171; as Christians, 203; ladino (hispanicized African), 44, 171; racist stereotypes of, 205 black legend (la leyenda negra), 195 Black people: enslavement of, 170; as slaves, 237 blasphemy, 77, 105, 193; exceptions, 223 Blaurock, George “Cajacob” (Radical reformer). See also under baptism: Hutterite Chronicle (1525), 31–34 Boabdil. See Abi Abdilehi Bolognetti, Alberto (papal envoy): Report (1580), 224–26 Boltzius, Johann Martin (Lutheran minister), 101–6 Bonifacio, Alonso (Jesuit): The Death, Virtues, and Ministry of Pedro Juan Castini (1664), 119–22 books: burning of, 99–101, 219; censorship of, 154; heretical, 225 books of the New Testament: 1 Corinthians, 137, 183; 1 Peter, 138; 1 Timothy, 31, 137; 2 Corinthians, 102, 109, 137; Acts, 109, 133; Ephesians, 125; Galatians, 138; John, 28, 138; Luke, 27–28, 150; Mark, 28, 133; Matthew, 28, 32, 133, 182; Revelations, 182; Romans, 125, 163, 183; Titus, 162 books of the Old Testament and Torah: 1 Kings, 154; Daniel, 107; Deuteronomy, 110, 119, 196; Exodus, 119, 231–32, 247; Ezra, 230; Genesis, 125; Hosea, 154; Isaiah, 102, 154, 246; Job, 107;

282

Index

Lamentations, 52; Psalms, 77, 86, 160, 170, 246; Ruth, 229–30; Samuel, 232 Borromeo, Carlo (Catholic reformer), 3 Bosnia: Catholicization of, 96–98; church in, 14, 88–98; Ottoman invasion of, 98 Bourgeois, Louis (Huguenot composer), 160 Brébeuf, Jean de (Jesuit missionary), 45–46; “Jesous Ahatonnia,” 163–65 Brownism (Protestant dissenters), 116 Buddhism: deities of: bodhisattvas, 75; hotoke, 41 C Caberlon, Matteo (witness), 155 calendars, 245–48. See also history and periodization Calixtus III (pope), 98 Calvin, Jean (John) (Protestant reformer), 3; in art, 187 Calvinism, 115–17, 206 Calvinists. See under individual names Calzavara, Andrea (Venetian notary), 265 Campo, Gonzalo de (Catholic archdeacon of Niebla), 43–44 Canaanites, 68 Canadians (Indigenous people), 82 canonization, 15; see also saints, 149–151 capitalism. See also property: development of, 98 Capodiferro, Zuanne (witness), 155 Carbalon, Giovanni (hermit, witness), 261–62 carnal lust. See under sex and sexuality Carvallo, Valentín (Jesuit missionary), 227 Casimir VI of Poland, 89–90 Caspar (magi), 174 Castellio, Sebastian (Protestant theologian), 124 Castini, Juan (Jesuit missionary), 119–22 Castro, Álvaro de (Portuguese magistrate), 58 Castro, Pedro de (Kongolese royal), 142

Castro de Quiñones, Pedro (Catholic archbishop of Seville), 43 Catholic church, 3, 88–98, 149; councils of, 89, 238; Trent, 250, 256; doctrine of (see doctrine (Catholic)); reform of (see Catholic reformation) Catholicism: as apostolic faith, 93; as global religion, 12; medieval, 7; and missions, 12; Protestant views on, 196–97, 225; rejection of, 116; in southern Europe, 5; traditions, 8 Catholic monarchs (los reyes católicos). See Ferdinand II of Aragon; Isabella I of Castile Catholic Reformation, 4, 7, 12–17, 137–38, 256 Catholic reformers, 149, 210, 259. See also under individual names Catholics. See persecution of Catholics Catholic views: on ecclesiastical power, 137–38 Cattaveri (magistracy of Venice), 228–32 Cecilia of the Circumcision (beata). See Ita y Salazar, Cecilia de census: of Black people in Spain, 44; of minorities, 147, 240 Céspedes de Oviedo, Luis (governor of Mexico), 201–3 charitable institutions, 8. See also confraternities charity, 145, 179; and community, 101–6; in Judaism, 228, 229, 232; reformation focus on, 17; as virtue, 8, 198 Charity (personifcation): in art, 187 Charles I of England, 195 Charles IX of France, 58–60 Charles VIII of Sweden, 89 Charles VII of France, 89–90 Charles V of Spain (Holy Roman emperor), 14, 137–38 chastity. See also sex and sexuality: critiques of, 73; and virginity, 71; vows of, 129 Chiericato, Giovanni (Catholic priest), 155 Chihwatenha (Joseph) (Wendat convert to Christianity), 85 childbirth, 250–52; and relics, 268–69 children: abandonment of, 227–32; kidnapping of, 16 (see also Appeal

Index of the Jewish Council); protection of religious rights of, 227–32 China: Ming dynasty, 11, 63–65; The Veritable Records (1601), 77–79; Qing dynasty: The History of Ming (1739), 80–81; views on Christianity, 13, 63–65, 77–81 Chinipas (Indigenous people), 121–22 Christ: resurrection of, 19, 72, 125, 163, 170 Christendom, 9, 89, 124 Christian church (early): as model for reform, 8 Christian doctrine, 200, 261; as based in Jewish practice, 76–77; dramatization of, 177–82; examination in, 43, 171; translated in Indigenous languages (see under individual groups) Christian holidays, 245–48. See also calendar; Holy Week, 225, 248 (see also massacres; persecution of Jews; persecution of Muslims) Christian I of Denmark and Norway, 89 Christianity: and biology, 11; Buddhist views on, 13, 71–76, 143, 145; converts to: Indigenous people, 14; as teachers and lay clergy, 14; as corrupting infuence, 64–65, 78, 80, 144; Indigenous views on, 84–85, 172, 174; Japanese views on, 73, 143–45, 226–28; Jewish views on, 13; Ming views on, 63–65, 77–81; models of, 8; Muslim views on, 222–24; Nahua views on, 177; and pilgrimage, 267; prayer in, 109–10; Ave Maria, 72; dedication of, 268–69; last rites, 41–42; prohibitions on, 226–28; Qing views on, 77–81; spread of, 80; as true religion, 107; Wendat views on, 13, 81–86 church and state, 14–15; Anglican views on, 138–40; Catholic views on, 137–38; Japanese views of, 144–45 churches: consecration of, 121; construction of, 97; destruction of, 144 Church of England, 138–40, 160; Book of Common Prayer, 139

283

Cicero, Marcus Tullius (Roman scholar and politician): The Orator, 27 circumcision, 118, 170 Clara (servant), 265 clergy: abuses of power, 257–64; secular clergy, 199–203; critiques of, 8, 199–203; role of, 253–54, 256–62; Anglican views on, 139–40; Catholic views on, 137–38; debates on, 4, 6; Radical views on, 134 clothing. See also sumptuary laws: head coverings, 235; outer garments, 234–37; women’s, 234–37 coexistence, 9–10, 13–15, 67–71, 122–24; in the Aegean, 16, 252–54; and international trade, 224–26; limited, 125 (see also freedom of religion); in the Netherlands, 151, 153; in the Ottoman empire, 151, 153; in Poland, 151–53; Radical views on, 151–53; and taxation, 214; in visual art, 186–88 colonies: corruption in, 113–15 colonization, 3, 10; in the Americas, 190–99; as Christian endeavour, 70; creole (criollo) views on, 113–15; dramatization of, 177–82; and exploitation, 190–97, 199–203; and Indigenous peoples, 114, 180 (see also under Indigenous peoples); Indigenous responses to, 192–95; justifcations of, 11, 13; motivations for, 11–12; and racism, 102, 127; and religion, 12, 179; as unchristian, 192; as utopian endeavour, 98 (see also utopianism); and violence (see under violence) colonizers: and disease, 193–95; and evangelism, 119–22; and exploitation, 15, 193–95, 199–203; and racism, 201; rewards to, 198–99; and trade, 201 (see also global trade; merchants) comadre (midwife). See Auriaga; Hernández Comenius, Jan (Protestant reformer), 6 Comixa, Jucef Aben (Nasrid offcial), 213 communion (sacrament), 4, 29–30, 114. See also under sacraments; Easter, 224–25; Radical views on, 133, 136, 151

284

Index

communities (Indigenous). See under Maya; Wendat communities (religious), 3, 7, 119–22; creation of, 132; as New Jerusalem, 135; participation in, 238–40; Protestant, 3; segregation of, 16, 122; sponsorship of, 7; utopian, 6–7 Company of Jesus. See Jesuits confession, 38, 224, 253; Catholic views on, 138; hearing of, 39–40; as suffering, 276 confessions (faith communities): common beliefs, 7; conficting beliefs, 8 confrmation (sacrament), 29, 31; and Indigenous peoples, 115 confict: between Christian nations, 89–90; intercommunal, 9; sectarian, 105 confraternities (lay brotherhoods), 8, 155, 157, 160; in Japan, 226 Confutatio Pontifcia (1530), 137–38 Congress of Regensburg. See under Catholic Church, councils of Constantine I “the great” (Roman emperor), 69 contagion (health), 10. See also disease contagion (religious), 12, 16; anxieties around, 10, 64 contrition, 38–42, 44 convents, 16, 266–67; Augustinian, 272; Benedictine, 266–68, 270; as enclosures, 267; founding of, 127–30; separation of, 271; Third Order (beaterio), 276–78; unauthorized, 259–64 conversion. See also forced conversion; missionaries; proselytism: anxieties around, 12; attitudes towards, 13; of Black people, 101; as Christian duty, 208–10; and consent, 232 (see also under baptism); deathbed, 120 (see also last rites); dramatization of (see under drama); of enslaved peoples, 171; as escape from sin, 126; of Indigenous peoples, 103, 106, 171, 197 (see also under labour, forced); of Jews: in the Americas, 101, 103, 105–6; and language: Hebrew, 125; prohibitions on, 208–9; and racism, 11; reliance

on local translators, 44; and salvation, 109; and skepticism, 118; as spreading peace, 120; through interreligious relationships, 102–3; as treason, 209–10 conversos (Iberian Jewish converts to Christianity), 55–58, 61, 234; anxieties around, 152; returning to Judaism, 153 converts to Buddhism. See Fucansai converts to Christianity: to Calvinism (see Pelengrino); distrust of, 11, 61 (see also conversos; moriscos); examination of, 16 converts to Islam: Bosnian, 88; protections for, 215 converts to Judaism. See Pelengrino convivencia. See under coexistence; Iberia corporal punishment, 210 cosmetics, 236 Cosseins (captain of the Swiss guard), 59–60 Council of Basel. See under Catholic Church, councils of Council of Constance. See under Catholic Church, councils of Council of Frankfurt. See under Catholic Church, councils of Counter-Reformation. See Catholic Reformation Count of Piove di Sacco (Italian offcial), 262 Cromwell, Oliver (Puritan leader), 195–96 crucifxion (Christ), 41, 72–73, 125, 223 crusades (European), 9–10 crypto-Christianity: in Japan, 226–27 crypto-Islam: in Iberia, 222–24; and Moriscos, 241–45 crypto-Judaism, 76; in England, 124–27 crypto-religion: anxieties around, 48–50; and clothing (see clothing); and conversion, 12 (see also conversion); and equivocation of faith, 15–16; penalties for, 241; practices, 16; as resistance, 9 cultural assimilation. See assimilation Cyrus II of Persia (“the great”), 230

Index D d’Ailly, Pierre (Catholic cardinal of Cambrai): Sentences, 29 damnation, 83; in Christianity: and judgment, 175–76; threat of, 100; in Islam, 212 “dark ages,” 69–70 da Segusino, Francesca (witness), 156 David (king of Israel), 68, 167, 196, 232, 245–46; and the Egyptian slave, 120 day of judgment (Christianity), 109, 174–76; and the resurrection of the dead, 126, 175 day of judgment (Islam), 212 de Cardaillac Sarlabous, Corberan (French soldier), 59 de Coligny, Gaspard (Huguenot leader), 58–60 de Gebir, Içe (Muslim scholar): A Mudejar Summary of Islamic Law (1462), 210–12 deities: demonization of: Christian, 85, 194–95; non-Christian, 41, 82 de la Mota y Escobar, Alfonso (Catholic bishop of Tlaxcala), 113–15 de las Casas, Bartolomé (Catholic bishop), 12, 203; The Tears of the Indians . . . (1555), 190–192, 192–95 de la Torre, Francisco (Franciscan missionary), 202 demons: and temptation, 273 (see also under sex and sexuality) de Montmorency, François (French soldier), 60 desecration of the dead, 55, 60, 219 de Sosa, Antonio (Catholic priest), 234–37 de Téligny, Charles (French soldier), 59 de Thou, Jacques Auguste (French historian): History of His Times (1609), 58–60 devil (Christianity), 42–43, 86, 92, 272; and deception, 273; driving out, 120; Radical views on, 133–34; in superstitions, 83 devil (Islam), 212 Dias, Manuel (Yang Ma-N’uo) (Jesuit missionary), 63–64 Diego (Indigenous convert in Brazil), 170–71 Diego (Spanish inquisitor), 245

285

dietary laws, 16; halal, 211, 216–17, 223, 243; and alcohol, 223; kosher, 48–49, 103, 105, 170; women as supervisors, 249 Diet of Worms (1521). See under Luther, Martin di Paolin, Rinaldo (Roma individual), 238–39 diplomatic relations: Europe and Africa, 140–43 disease: blamed on religious minorities, 53, 55–56; quarantine islands, 264; and religious minorities, 154 dissenters, 123 dissolution of the monasteries. See under monasteries Ditchfeld, Simon, 12 divorce, 37; see also matrimony doctrine (Catholic), 94–96; examination in, 253 doctrine (Protestant), 107–10 domination: forms of, 7 domingo. See sabbath (Christian) Dominican order, 52, 59, 171, 276; as reformers, 10 drama, 8; as allegory, 177–82; and conversion, 177–82; as missionary tool, 11, 15, 172–76 duchy of Savoy, 145–49 duke of Modena, 89 duke of Savoy, 15 duke of York (younger son of the English monarch), 269 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 206–7; and schools, 6 (see also education) E Eastern Orthodox Christianity, 91 Eastern Orthodox church, 14, 252–54 Eck, Johann (Catholic theologian), 137 economic equality: for religious minorities, 214 (see also Muslims, in Iberia) economic exploitation: justifcations for, 11; of religious minorities, 154; and sanctions, 210; seizure of property, 62; restitution for, 147; as tool of oppression, 55 economics: and exploitation, 201 Edgar, James (English courtier), 270–72

286

Index

Edict of the Duke of Savoy (peace of Cavour) (1561), 145–49 education: catechism, 206 (see also Luther); Kirishitani (see under Kirishitani); as Christian endeavour, 206–7; and missions (see under missionaries); reformation focus on, 17; as social control, 15, 206–7; of women and girls, 84 Edward VI of England, 138–39 Eleazar (Jew), 152 Elizabeth I of England, 3, 14, 116, 267; Act of Uniformity (1559), 138–40 el Zegal (emir of Granada), 212 emigration. See migration Emmanuel Philibert (duke of Savoy), 145–49 enclosure, 16. See also convents; segregation (cultural); segregation (religious) encomienda system, 15, 190–92, 197–99. See also under labour England: Catholicism, 267–70; Catholics in: and the Jacobites, 269–72; civil war, 195; the “Glorious Revolution” (1688), 268, 270; persecution of religious minorities, 138–39; in Ireland, 195; reformation in, 3, 270 enslaved peoples. See also under Indigenous peoples; Jews; Muslims: and baptism (see under baptism); ransom of, 244; trade in, 190; in Kongo, 141–43; White women, 237 enslavement: interreligious limits on, 237 environmental exploitation, 199; by colonizers, 193–95; justifcations for, 11 Ephraim (rabbi), 248 Esquivel, Pedro de (Spanish colonizer), 199 Ethiopian church, 172 eucharist. See holy sacrament Europe. See also under global reformation: and Eurocentrism, 9, 13; decentring of, 5–6 Europe and eurocentrism: and global reformation, 17 evangelism, 230. See also under colonizers; missionaries; proselytism

Eve (biblical fgure), 72 excommunication: Radical views on, 133; threats of, 232 execution: by burning, 33, 56–57, 152, 193–94, 210, 221; by drowning, 33; by hanging, 194; by stoning, 210 exile. See also under expulsions: and starvation, 270–71 exodus, 51–52 expulsion of Christians: from Japan, 227 (see also expulsion of missionaries) expulsion of Jews, 9–10, 245; from England, 10, 48, 124–27; from France, 10, 48, 247; from Germany, 10; from Holy Roman empire, 48; from Iberia (Spain and Portugal), 10, 50–55, 76, 152, 216, 247; the Alhambra decree (1492), 48–50; from Italy, 10; Radical views on, 151–52 expulsion of krstjani: from Bosnia, 88, 91 expulsion of missionaries: from China, 13, 63–65, 79, 81; from Japan, 143–45 expulsion of Muslims, 9–10; from Iberia (Spain and Portugal), 10 expulsion of Protestants: from Austria (Salzburg), 14, 98–101; from France, 98 (see also Huguenots); from Germany, 98; from Moravia, 7 expulsion of religious minorities, 16. See also under individual groups; penalties for resisting, 49, 62; as purge, 99 expulsion of the moriscos: from Spain, 10, 60–63 F face coverings, 237, 245. See also clothing faith: ideals of, 8; loss of, 117 fasting: in Christianity, 227; in Islam, 211, 219, 243 (see also Muslim holidays) Father Gerard (Jesuit priest), 266–67 Father Jacob (Jesuit priest), 224 Ferdinand II of Aragon, 10, 48–51, 54, 212–16 Ferdinand I of Naples, 51–52

Index Figueroa, Francisco Antonio de (Spanish layman), 277–78 Filigrani Murer, Zorsi Vane (witness), 265 Finch, Henry (Radical reformer): The World’s Great Restauration (1621), 124–27 food (universal), 68, 185, 245 folk magic. See folk religion folk religion: and superstition, 238, 250–52; as threat to church authority, 149–50 Fontana, Antonia (nun), 264 food: and religion (see dietary laws) forced assimilation. See assimilation; forced conversion forced conversion, 9, 15, see also under individual groups; anxieties/ suspicions about, 16, 48–49; and baptism, 222, 228; Christian critiques of, 113; protections against, 215; Radical views on, 151–52; resistance to (see crypto-Islam; crypto-religion) forced conversion of enslaved peoples, 12 forced conversion of Indigenous peoples, 12; in the Caribbean, 193–95 forced conversion of Jews, 11–12, 48–50, 55–58, 76, 125, 150–51, 234; in Iberia (Spain and Portugal), 10, 54–55; and return to England, 124–27 forced conversion of krstjani, 14, 88, 91, 93, 96–98 forced conversion of Muslims, 11–12, 61, 113, 234. See also moriscos; in Iberia (Spain and Portugal), 216, 218–19, 222–24 forced labour. See under labour Franciscan order, 10, 199–200; in Mexico, 202 Francis Xavier (Jesuit missionary), 46 Francke, Gotthilf August (Protestant theologian), 102–3 Frederick III (Holy Roman emperor), 89, 151 freedom of conscience, 122–24, 145–47 freedom of movement, 145–46 freedom of religion, 104–5, 118, 122–24, 145–46, 153, 208–10, 220; dangers of, 225–26; in Iberia

287

(Spain and Portugal), 208–12; and preaching, 145–46 free will. See under baptism; conversion Freud, Sigmund, 8 frontiers: negotiations of, 7, 88, 92 Fucansai (Fabian Fucan) (Japanese Jesuit and Buddhist convert): Deus Destroyed (1620), 71–76 G Gabriel (archangel), 72 gender: and race (see under race); and sexuality (see under sex and sexuality) Geneva Bible. See under Bible genocide, 16. See also colonization; of Indigenous peoples, 191 gentiles, 120, 127; as non-believers, 39, 68 (see also heretics); as non-Jews, 125–26; as oppressors of Jews, 154 ghettos, 48–49, 153–54. See also segregation (religious); in Mantua, 246; as transnational spaces, 265; in Venice, 227–32, 264–65 Girault de Villeneuve, Étienne Thomas (Jesuit missionary), 163 Global Reformation: approaches to, 3–17; and colonization, 12; and missions (see missionaries) global trade, 12, 141–42. See also colonization; economic exploitation; enslaved peoples; merchants and traders; missionaries “Glorious Revolution” (1688). See under England Gómez, Hernán (witness), 259 Gonzaga, Vincenzo (duke of Mantua), 248 González, Antonio (Mexican inquisitor), 251 Gouge, William (Puritan minister), 124 Granada (Nasrid kingdom of), 60, 90; Alhambra, 213; fall of, 10, 48, 50, 212–13 (see also treaty of Granada) Grebel, Conrad (Protestant reformer): on baptism, 32–33 Greek Orthodox Church. See Eastern Orthodox Church Gronau, Herr (Protestant refugee), 104 Gruber, John (Protestant refugee), 99–100 Guazapare (Indigenous people), 121

288

Index

Gudule (saint), 267 Guevara, Ysabel de: correspondence, 197–99 Guinefort (saint, dog), 149 Guise (house of), 59 gypsy (perjorative). See Roma H Hacohen, Joseph (Jewish historian): The Vale of Tears (16th c.), 52–55 Haetzer, Louis (Ludwig) (Radical reformer), 33 Hagar (biblical fgure), 67–68 Hai (Han emperor of China), 80 halal. See under dietary laws hate crimes. See under persecutions Hathvey (Hatuey) (Indigenous leader in Cuba), 192, 194–95 heathens, 122 heaven (Christian), 40, 46, 68, 72, 83 hell (Christian), 40–41, 65, 68, 72, 83, 109 Henri, chevalier d’Angoulême, 60 Henri de Navarre. See Henri IV of France Henri I, duke of Guise, 58–60 Henri I de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, 58 Henri IV of France, 58–60 Henrique of Kongo (Catholic bishop of Utica), 141–42 Henry VIII of England, 3, 266; and Church of England, 138 Henry VI of England, 89 heresy: accusations of, 56, 61; Manichean: and krstjani, 88, 91–98; repentance of, 94–95; Waldensian, 145–49 heretics, 92; Protestants as, 224–26; punishment of, 123–24 (see also execution) Heriega de Valdez, Pedro (witness), 44 Hernández, Isabel (Mexican midwife), 250–52 Hernández, Leonor (Morisca), 244–45 history and periodization, 245–48; as ideological, 4–5; scale of history, 72–73 Hofmann, Melchior (Radical prophet), 135 Holt, William (Jesuit priest), 266 Holy Roman empire, 3, 5

holy sacrament (host), 29, 180. See also communion; procession of, 227 hostages. See treaty of Granada Hubmaier, Balthasar (Radical reformer), 33–34 Huguenots. See under massacres: in the Americas, 6 Huite (Indigenous people in Mexico), 120–21 Huron (Indigenous people). See Wendat Huss, John (Jan Hus) (theologian): as reformer, 4 hybrid Christianity. See Christianity, Indigenous adaptations of hymns. See music I Iberia (Spain and Portugal): Andalusia (Al-Andalus), 48–49; Christian conquest of, 10, 212–16 (see also Granada (Nasrid kingdom of); treaty of Granada); and Catholicization, 213; coexistence in, 48, 208–10, 212–16; under Muslim rule, 221; Muslim conquest of, 212 Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (Muslim scholar), 71 idolatry and idols, 178, 180, 211; and Christianity, 133, 221; in Indigenous religions, 120, 122; and Islam, 68–69, 223 Ignatius of Loyola (Jesuit missionary), 3 illiteracy, 252 indentured labour. See labour, indentured Indigenous languages. See under individual languages: and colonizers, 202; and missionaries, 200–201 Indigenous peoples. See under individual groups, tribes, nations: alliances with European colonizers, 84; baptism of, 102; and colonization, 199 (see under colonization; genocide; residential schools); resistance against, 195; and conversion, 12, 101, 106, 171 (see also forced conversion); resistance against, 86; as converts to Christianity (see under Christianity, converts to); dehumanization of, 192–94; enslavement of, 114, 190, 192–95 (see also labour, indentured); and European diseases, 10;

Index exploitation of, 10, 113–15, 170 (see under colonization); and law as tool of oppression, 201; and missionaries, 84–86; collaboration with, 120–22, 206–7; pre-contact populations of, 194; racist stereotypes of, 114, 127–30, 177–78, 191, 206; cannibalism, 120; limited intellectual abilities, 127–28; as “savages,” 45, 85; as uncivilized, 103, 120, 127–28; as weak-willed, carnal, 106; religions of, 81–84; resettlement of, 119, 121; violence against, 201 (see under massacres) Indigenous religions: and animism, 81–82; as superstitious cults, 178 Indigenous women: European views on, 127–30; inability to lead, 129 indulgences: sale of, 5 infanticide, 57; and unwanted pregnancy, 228 infrastructure: maintenance of, 216 Innu (Indigenous people), 82 inquisitions (Catholic), 155; in Bosnia, 96–98; and clothing, 234–37; in Mexico, 199, 250–52; in Portugal: Lisbon, 115, 117; in Spain, 48;, 152 (see also individual inquisitors); Valencia, 241–44; Valladolid, 244–45; victims of, 98 (see also refugees) interreligious contact: anxieties around, 252–54; banning of, 49 interreligious relationships: anxieties around, 210; children of, 62, 215; as contagion (see contagion (religious)); and crypto-religion, 223; friendship, 112–13, 117–19; marriage, 102–3; as tool for conversion, 122; prohibitions against, 208–10, 227–32 interreligious worship, 253 Isaac (biblical fgure), 67, 71, 150, 246; representations of, 226 Isaac ben Eliakem (Jewish philosopher): Leb Tob, 249–50 Isabella I of Castile, 10, 48–51, 212–16 Isaiah (biblical fgure), 170 Ishmael (biblical fgure), 67, 71 Ishmaelites. See Islam; Muslims Islam, 124. See also Muslims; and clothing (see under clothing); and conversion, 14; expansion of, 67–69; in Iberia (Spain and Portugal), 60–63;

289

and idolatry (see idolatry and idols); intellectual developments, literature, etc., 70; military dominance of, 69–70; pilgrimage (hajj), 211; and prayer, 243; prayer in, 222–23; the Sunni Breviary (Brevario Sunni), 210 Islamic holidays: Ramadan, 242–43 Islamic law: fatwa, 222–24; halal (see under dietary laws); in Iberia (Spain and Portugal), 214–15, 218, 243; and alfaqui, 242, 244–45; Oran Fatwa, 241 Israelites. See Jews Ita y Salazar, Cecilia de (Spanish beata), 276–78 J Jacob (biblical fgure), 150, 246 Jacobites. See under England James II of England, 268 James II of Scotland, 89 James I of England (VI of Scotland), 124 James the Just (saint), 263 Jesuit missionaries, 14. See also missionaries; in Japan, 75, 143–45; persecution of (see under persecution); in Kongo, 141; in Latin America, 119–22; in North America, 45–46 Jesuits, 43, 121; on baptism, 45–46; in Japan, 226–28; The Jesuit Relations (1632–3), 45–46; and printing presses, 34, 37–38 Jesus Christ (biblical fgure). See also Joseph; Mary: the ascension of, 170; death of (see crucifxion); in Islam, 70, 124; Jewish narratives on (see Toledot Yeshu); as judge, 175–76; as messiah and saviour, 41, 68, 70, 125, 162, 165; the nativity of, 72, 163–65, 172–74, 246–47 jewelry, 236–37 Jewis Diaspora. See under Jews Jewish holidays, 170, 245–48; Passover (Pesach), 55, 76, 168–69; Shavuot, 76 Jewish law, 117; in Venice, 228–33 Jewish scriptures. See Torah Jews, 68, 70, 76, 122–24, 136; antiSemitic stereotypes of: blood libel, 154 (see also persecution of Jews); host desecration, 152; as murderers of Christ, 125; Ashkenazim (German

290

Index

Jews), 105; in diaspora, 126, 153–54, 247; communities: Amsterdam, 115; enslavement of, 51, 53–54; as exiles, 51–52; and negotiation of identity, 245; as religious Other, 10; Sephardim (Spanish and Portuguese), 52, 76, 105 Jiménez, Pedro (beadle), 257 João (John) III of Portugal, 141 João (John) II of Portugal, 51–53 João (John) I (Nzinga a Nkuwu) of Kongo, 140 John, Prince of Asturias, 213–14 John of Leiden (Radical leader), 135 John the baptist (biblical fgure), 150, 161–63 Joris, David (Radical reformer), 3, 123 Joseph (biblical fgure), 71 Juana Inés de la Cruz (nun and mystic), 177–82 Juana of Austria (regent of Spain), 197, 199 Judaism: and clothing (see under clothing); conversion to, 117–19; history, 245–48; as law of Moses, 48–49, 118; and matrilineal descent, 228–33; and mysticism (see kabbalah); prayers in, 76–77; views on Christianity (see under Christianity) Judas Iscariot (Judah Iskarioto): in the Toledot Yeshu, 168–69 K kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), 165, 167–70 Kethe, William (translator): The Scottish Metrical Psalter (1635), 160–61 Kirishitani (Japanese Christians), 12; On Baptism and Preparation for Death (1593), 37–43; critiques of (see Fucansai); Dochirrina Kirishitan (1591), 34–37 Knatchbull, Mary (Catholic abbess), 268–69 Kongo (kingdom of), 11, 14, 111–12; Catholic church in, 140–43; indigenous church in, 141–43; Portuguese colonizers in, 111–12; slavery in, 112

kosher. See under dietary laws Krstjani (Bosnian Christians). See Bosnia; persecutions Kucˇinic´, Juraj (Bosnian krstjan), 94–95 L Labonne (attendant of Coligny), 59 labour, 239; exploitation of Indigenous, 206–7; forced, 190, 192–95, 201; plantations, 15; gendered divisions of, 198; indentured, 7 Ladislas the Posthumous of Bohemia and Hungary, 89–90 last rites (sacrament), 29; lay administration of, 39–42 late reformation, 4 Law of Moses. See under Judaism lay brotherhoods. See confraternities Lee, Sir Thomas (English soldier), 116 liturgical calendar. See Christian holidays Loaysa, Francisco García (Spanish offcial), 202 Lobo, Diogo (Portuguese courtier), 58 Lodinger, Martin (Protestant theologian), 100 Logroño, Pedro de (witness), 258 Lopes, Duarte (Portuguese explorer), 111 López del Espinar, García (Spanish offcial in Mexico), 115 Lord della Trinite (Savoyard noble), 148 lust. See under sex and sexuality Luther, Martin (Protestant reformer), 3–4, 101, 135, 137, 242; The 95 Theses (1517), 5; in art, 187; Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), 29, 31; on baptism, 13, 31–32, 161–63; Diet of Worms (1521), 5; and Salzburg refugees, 7, 14; scripture alone, 27; Smaller Catechism (1529) (see under music); works by, 100 Lutheranism, 116; as heresy, 101 M Madonna (representations of Mary), 155–57; black, 171–72; miracles, 172 magisterial reformation, 4 Mahomedans. See under Islam; Muslims

Index makeup. See cosmetics Mala-notte, Giovanni (Waldensian), 149 Manichean heresy. See under heresy Manipanza, Pedro (Kongolese offcial), 142 Manissaba, Manuel (Kongolese offcial), 142 Manitius, Johann Andreas (Protestant theologian), 105–6 Manners, Roger (English courtier), 267 Manoel I of Portugal, 55–58; attitudes towards Jews, 52–55 Mantz, Felix (Protestant reformer): on baptism, 32–33 Margaret of Valois (queen of France), 58 Maria (wife of Bernardo Spada), 156 María de San José (nun): memoirs (1723), 272–76 Marie de l’Incarnation (Catholic missionary), 6, 84–85 marriage. See also matrimony: polygamy, 135–36; role of a wife, 249–50 Martel, Estebán (Catholic priest), 113 Martínez de Hurdaide, Diego (Spanish colonizer), 120, 122 Martino of Pragella (Waldensian leader), 147–48 martyrdom: as Christian ideal, 75; Huguenots (see under massacres) martyrology. See biographies martyrs (Christian), 42; accounts of the lives of (see under biography and autobiography) Mary (biblical fgure), 72, 78, 80, 157, 174. See also Madonna; as chaste, 276; as intercessor, 41–42, 172, 176; love for people of colour, 171; as mother of Jesus, 68, 71 Mary I of England, 139 Mary of Modena (queen of England), 268–71 massacres. See also colonization; genocide; persecutions; violence: of Huguenots: St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572), 58–60; of Indigenous peoples, 193, 196–97; in the Caribbean, 190–92; of Jews, 55–58; of missionaries, 86

291

mass baptism. See under baptism Massie, Richard (translator): “To Jordan Came our Lord, The Christ” (1854), 161–63 Ma Tang (Ming offcial), 78–80 Mateus (Kongolese royal), 142 matrimony (sacrament), 29, 31; Catholic catechism on, 34, 36–37; indissolubility of (see divorce); Radical views on, 136; see also polygamy Matthys, John (Radical leader), 135 Maximus the confessor (doctor of the Christian church), 93 Maya (Indigenous people): cah (community), 199–203; and conversion, 199–203; elders (list of), 203; use of colonizers in traditional disputes, 15 medicine: and folk religion (see childbirth) Meir (rabbi and scribe), 248 Melamed, Meïr (Spanish rabbi), 51 Melchior (magi), 173 Mendoza, Antonio de (viceroy of Mexico), 256–57, 259 Mendoza, Pedro de (Spanish colonizer), 197 Menese, Francisco de (Kongolese offcial), 143 merchants and traders, 15; exploitation in Kongo, 140–43 (see also under enslaved people); and segregated communities, 224–26 Merlin (minister of Coligny), 59 messianic prophecy, 165 Michael (archangel), 175 Middleton, Jesse Edgar (Methodist poet), 163–65 migration: and persecution of minorities, 6, 99–101 Milão, Dias (Portuguese new Christian), 117 Milton, John (Protestant poet), 195 Ming dynasty. See under China minorities (cultural). See Roma minorities (religious): oppression of, 9; protection from persecution, 148–49; as refugees (see refugees); suppression of, 91–92; tolerance of, 124 minority religions: as magic, 243 miracles, 77, 273; as articles of faith, 56–57; of healing, 156; investigations

292

Index

of, 155–57; as missionary tool, 170–72; of resurrection, 68, 155–56; in the Toledot Yeshu, 167 Miriam (mother of Yeshu in the Toledot Yeshu). See also Mary miscegenation. See under interreligious relationships missionaries: in Asia: Japan, 34–43, 71–76, 143–44, 226–28; Amboina (Indonesia), 206–7; China, 63–65, 77–81; and colonization, 11–12, 14; and conversion (see conversion); and education, 6, 11, 84 (see also drama; education; music; residential schools); and global trade, 143, 145, 199; and Indigenous peoples, 7, 98; Jesuit (see under Jesuits); and Jews, 98; and local customs, 62, 77, 144–45, 174; and local languages, 103, 199–200, 204–5; use of interpreters, 45–46, 83; in Mexico, 119–22; as religious contagion, 63; suspicions about, 75; as translators, 11, 174 monasteries: dissolution of (England), 266; establishment of, 97 Monestieri, Georgio (Waldensian), 148–49 Montagnais. See Innu Moors. See Muslims, in Iberia Mora, Pacientia (Jewish servant), 265 More, Thomas (Catholic philosopher): Utopia, 7 moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity), 152, 234, 241–45 Morteira, Saul Levi (rabbi), 153–54; Sermon for the Sabbath of Repentance (1641), 76–77 Moses (biblical fgure), 68, 71, 119, 231, 246 mosques: destruction of, 221; protection of, 214; seizure of, 208 mudéjars (Iberian Muslims under Christian rule): resistance to conversion, 210–12 Muhammad (prophet), 68, 211–12, 218, 220, 242–43. See also Islam; Muslims music, 174–75; and catechism, 161–63; Christmas carol, 163–65; as missionary tool, 15; sexualization of (see under women); vernacular, 160 Muslim holidays: Ramadan, 219

Muslims, 123–24; as descendants of Ishmael, 68, 70–71; in Iberia, 208–10, 212–16 (see also treaty of Granada); appeals to Ottoman empire, 15–16; assimilation, 213–16; enslavement of, 217, 220, 221; safe passage (see treaty of Granada); in North Africa, 234–37; as religious Other, 10 Mwissikongo (Indigenous group in Kongo), 141 N Nahua (Indigenous people), 6–7; drama, 173–78; Nahuatl (language), 114, 172; religion, 177–82 names. See also renaming: as evidence of crypto-religion, 242–43 Nani, Antonio and Armelina (witnesses), 156 nationalism, 5, 9 nativity. See under Jesus Christ Nazarenes: as followers of Christ, 165–70 Negrete, Juan de (archdeacon of Mexico), 256–59 Neo-Reformation, 4–5 new Christians, 117, 152. See also conversos new Jews, 153–54 New Zion. See under communities; settlements Nicholas of Modruš (papal envoy), 88; Defense of Ecclesiastical Liberty (1480), 98 Noah (biblical fgure), 68, 150 non-Christian beliefs: as superstitious, 45–46 nonconformity: punishment for, 140 Norzi, Samuel (rabbi), 248 Noue, Anne de (Jesuit missionary), 45–46 nudity. See under sex and sexuality O oaths: breaking of, 220–21; Radical views on, 134 obedience: to God, 212; lack of, 277–78; to parents, 211; vows of, 267, 271–72 Oglethorpe, James (English colonizer), 102 Ojibwe (Indigenous people), 163

Index old Christians, 62 oppression: forms of (see persecution) ordination (sacrament), 29, 31; and consent, 277–78; unftness for, 127–30 original sin. See under sin orphans. See also children: care for, 263; in Judaism, 229–32; and orphanages, 104 Osman II (sultan of the Ottoman empire), 153 Osorio, Alonso (Spanish inquisitor), 245 Osório, Jéronymo (Catholic bishop), 53; The Works of King Emanuel (1581), 55–58 Other (religious), 9, 13. See also minorities (religious); as scapegoats, 10; as superstitious, 196 Ottoman empire, 126–27; in the Aegean, 252; conquest of Bosnia, 14, 88; diplomatic relations, 221 Ottoman Turks, 9, 90, 92, 217, 224 P Pandera, Joseph (father of Jesus in Toledot Yeshu), 166 Pantoja, Diego de (Pang Di-Wo) (Jesuit missionary), 63–65 papacy: and consolidation of authority, 88; global infuence of, 15; and infallibility, 149, 151; Muslim views on, 220; Radical views on, 133 paradise. See heaven Patarene heresy. See under heresy, Manichean Paul (apostle), 28, 31, 133–34, 137–38, 150, 162–63; in the Toledot Yeshu, 165–66, 170 Paul II (pope), 88 Peace (personifcation): in art, 187 Peace Urging the Churches to be Tolerant (1600–1624), 186–88 pedophilia. See under sexual abuse Pelengrino, Abraham (Manuel Cardoso de Macedo) (Portuguese convert to Calvinism and Judaism), 115–19 penance and penitence, 29–30; acts of, 268; in Christianity, 227; and salvation, 38–39, 96 penitential rituals. See under rituals penitent thief (biblical fgure), 150 Percy, Mary (Catholic abbess), 266–67

293

Percy, Thomas, Earl of Northumberland, 266 persecution. See also forced conversion: equivocation as resistance to, 222–24 persecution of Catholics: in England, 270; exodus from, 195, 266 persecution of Jews, 151–54; antiSemitism, 118, 153–54; curfews, 154; piracy, 52; violence, 55–58; see also under massacres persecution of Krstjani, 91–98 persecution of missionaries: in Japan, 144 persecution of Muslims: in Iberia, 216–22; forced to blaspheme, 219 persecution of Protestants, 58; in Venice, 224–26 persecution of Quakers, 6 persecution of radicals, 33–34 persecution of religious minorities, 6, 123; accounts of, 151; pogroms, 9 persecution of the Roma. See Roma Peter (apostle), 30, 94–95, 97, 138, 263; as Simeon Kepha, 169 Petrucci, Achilles (Italian soldier), 59 Philip III of Spain: Decree of the Expulsion of the Moriscos (1609), 61–63 Philip II of Spain, 4, 199 Philip of Raconigi (Savoyard noble), 148–49 Phillips, John (Protestant translator): The Tears of the Indians . . . (1656), 195–97 (see also de las Casas) Phocas, Flavius (emperor of Byzantium), 69 Picard, Paul Tsa8enhohi (Wendat author), 163–64 Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius (Italian humanist). See also Pius II (pope): Opera Omnia (1571), 88–91 piety, 272; as virtue, 8 Pigafetta, Filippo (Italian explorer): Kingdom of Kongo (1591), 111–12 pilgrimage. See under Christianity; Islam Pires, Gonçalo (Kongolese offcial), 142–43 Pius II (pope), 95; and the Bosnian church, 14; Bull (1460), 91–92; Bull (1462), 96–98; Commentaries (1548–64), 91

294

Index

plague. See disease Podiebrad, George (Hussite leader), 90 polygamy. See marriage pope: in art, 187 popular piety: Catholic attempts to limit, 149; as threat, 155–57 Postel, Guillaume (French scholar): History and Consideration of the Origin . . . (1560), 67–71 Potamiana (saint, martyr), 263 poverty: a cost of faith, 118; and exile, 270 (see also expulsions; Jews, in diaspora) preaching. See also freedom of religion; proselytism: and heresy, 225; and rhetoric, 153–54; in the vernacular, 225 pre-Reformation, 4 prince of Wales (heir to English throne), 269 printers’ reformation, 4 printing presses, 70. See also under Jesuits; dissemination of religious thought, 64 processions: as act of resistance, 226–28 profession of faith (taking orders). See ordination (sacrament) property: Indigenous views on, 191; Radical views on, 136; seizure of, 208–10 proselytism: and Christianity (see under evangelism); and Judaism, 229; anxieties about, 48–49, 117; and Muslims, 243 Protestantism: Catholic views on, 100, 224–26; and missions, 12 Protestant missionaries: and Indigenous peoples, 93–104, 106–10, 182–86 (see also under Indigenous peoples) Protestants, 3; as colonizers, 98–99; and conversion, 101–6; as refugees, 98 (see also under Luther, Martin); Salzburgers, 7, 98–101 Pucklerin, Magdalen (Protestant refugee), 99–100 purges, 10. See also contagion; expulsions; persecution; drives towards, 12; of Jews, 9–10; of Muslims, 9–10; and violent language, 10

Puritanism, 116 purity and purifcation (religious), 211, 274–75. See also ablutions; chastity; anxieties around, 8, 13; blood (limpieza de sangre), 11; and colonization, 10; desecration of, 219; drives towards, 8, 12; in Islam, 223; and reform, 9–10; and the religious Other, 13 Puzzo, Andrea Giovanni Maria (witness), 260–61 Q Qing dynasty. See under China Quiroga, Vasca de (Catholic bishop), 6–7 Qur’an, 67–71, 153, 235, 243 R race, 11; constructions of, 9; and sexuality and gender, 272–76 racism: anti-Semitic, 154; and discrimination, 141–43; and language, 277; and reformed religion, 13; religion as justifcation for, 11, 17 Radical Christianity, 116; and rebaptism, 34, 135 Radical reformation, 4 Radical reformers, 122–24. See also under individual reformers; in art, 187; martyrdom, 33; Swiss, 132–35 rape. See under sexual assault Raymondetti, Michele (Waldensian), 149 recantation: of beliefs, 91, 93–94; refusal, 99–100 reconquest of Iberia (la reconquista). See under Iberia reformation: 15th c. (see preReformation); 18th and 19th c. (see neo-reformation); and Catholicism, 3–17, 137–38, 256; and colonization, 10–11, 17; as global phenomenon (see global reformation); and global trade, 17 (see also global trade); Long Reformation, 4–17; and missions (see missionaries); and periodization (see history and periodization); and politics, 16; religious debates on, 6; on clergy (see under clergy); on sacraments (see under sacraments);

Index on salvation (see under salvation); on scripture (see under scripture); as restoration, 136; as schism, 92 Reformation (Christian schism), 3–5; as concept/category, 4–5; as ecclesiological dispute, 17 reformation revivals. See neoreformation reformation scholasticism, 4 reformed religion: and colonization, 17 (see also colonization) reformers, 4–5, 7–8, 12, 17. See also under individual names; on the Bible, 27; and migration, 6; Renaissance, 9; and violent language, 9 refugees: memoirs of (see biography and autobiography); and Ottoman expansion, 237; safe passage of, 61–62; and starvation, 53 relics, 170–71, 269; views on, 78–80 religious (members of religious orders). See under individual names: beatas, 276–78; exiled: Irish, 270–72; friars, 10, 52, 59, 171, 199–200, 202, 276; monks, tbd; nuns, 260–61, 263–64, 266–67 (see under religious); as brides of Christ, 271; enclosure and missionary endeavours, 267; exiled, 266–69; and political infuence, 267–69 religious communities. See communities religious minorities: faith as act of resistance, 225–26 religious orders: reform of, 8, 260 (see also individual orders by name) religious practice: enforced by laws, 138–40 religious settlements. See settlements (religious) religious toleration. See coexistence Reminyˆo (Spanish morisco), 112–13 Renaissance, 8–9 renaming, 35, 46, 118, 170–71; as violent act, 55, 219 repentance, 41, 109, 212 residential schools, 16 resurrection. See under day of judgment; Jesus Christ; miracles Ribera, Francisca de (witness), 257–58 Ricci, Matteo (Li Ma-Dou) (Jesuit missionary), 63–65, 77–81

295

riots. See under violence rituals: penitential, 8 Rocca Camerte, Angelo (Catholic theologian): On the Canonization of the Saints (1601), 149–51 Roma (people), 237–41; assimilation of, 237–41; penalties for resisting, 240–41; racist stereotypes of, 238–39 Roman empire, 137; and dissemination of knowledge, 69; the fall of, 69–70 Romano, Alejandro (Spanish colonial offcial): Correspondence, 127–30 Romano, Thomasso (Waldensian), 149 rosary, 155–56, 268 Rothmann, Bernard (Radical minister): A Restitution of Christian Teaching (1534), 135–36 Ruth (biblical fgure), 229–30 S sabbath (Christian), 242 sabbath (Jewish), 76, 103 sacraments. See also baptism; communion; confrmation; last rites; marriage; ordination; penance: Anglican views on, 139; the availability of, 4; Catholic Japanese views on, 34–35; debates on, 6, 101; and Indigenous peoples, 119–22; Luther’s views on, 29–31; Radicals’ views on, 34, 135; receiving of, 44 sacrifce: human, 177–78, 180 Sagard, Gabriel (Catholic missionary): The Long Journey to the Country of the Huron (1632), 81–84 saints (Christian), 247–48; categories of, 150–51 salvation, 102, 108, 117, 204. See also absolution; contrition; heaven; repentance; and baptism, 161–63; as Christian duty, 103; debates on, 6, 72; dramatization of, 177–82; and repentence, 95 Sandoval, Alonso de (Jesuit missionary), 12; Treatise on Slavery (1627), 43–44, 170–72, 203–6 San Giacomo. See James the just Sanhedrin (Jewish council), 76, 167

296

Index

São Tomé (St. Thomas), 51, 143; as prison, 53–55 Saracens. See Ottoman Turks Sarah (biblical fgure), 67 Satan, 154, 176. See also devil Savoy, duchy of. See duchy of Savoy Scheitberger, Joseph, 100 Schwenckfeld, Caspar (Protestant reformer), 124 scripture, 77. See also the Bible; the Qur’an; the Torah; debates on, 6 seduction. See under sex and sexuality segregation (cultural). See also merchants and traders: in Kongo, 14, 111–12 (see also Kongo (kingdom of)) segregation (religious), 10, 16. See also convents; and interreligious contamination, 48–49, 64; of Jews (see ghettos); of Kirishitani (see Kirishitani); of Protestants (see Protestants) Seneor (Senior), Abraham (Spanish rabbi), 51 Sephardim. See Jews settlements (religious), 7, 14. See also colonization; communities; in Africa, 10; in the Americas, 6–7, 10; Savannah, Georgia, 102–3; evangelical Christian, 98; in Germany (Münster), 135–36 sex and sexuality: and consent, 274; desire, 174; demonization of, 272–76; and lack of control, 257, 275; repression of, 273; and desire, 16–17; ejaculation, non-procreative, 258; and gender, 272–76 sexual abuse and exploitation, 257–58, 277–78; of children, 258 (see also clergy); by clergy, 256–59 sexual assault, 217, 228, 258; by colonizers, 193; rape, 232; of refugees, 53 sexual relationships. See interreligious relationships Shimeon be Shetah (rabbi in the Toledot Yeshu), 166 Shintoism: deities (kami), 41, 75 Sholler, Lorentz (bailiff), 99–101 Siete Partidas (1252–1265), 208–10 Sigismund III of Poland, 152 Simcha (Black servant), 265

sin: carnal, 200; construction of, 182–86; Indigenous views on, 82; missionary teaching, 204; mortal, 38 (see also sex and sexuality); original sin, 183–85; punishment for, 41, 185 Sinaloa (Indigenous people in Mexico), 119–22 Sindicus, Rambaudo (Waldensian), 148–49 Sindicus of S. Constance (Waldensian), 148 Sixtus V (pope), 241 slavery. See also enslaved peoples: and baptism (see under baptism); European views on, 11, 203–6 (see also de las Casas; Sandoval); and reformed religion, 7 slave trade. See under enslaved peoples Smith, Sir George (English politician), 116 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Solomon (son of Samuel Norzi), 248 soul. See also salvation: anima, 39; immortality of, 83; torment of (see damnation) Spada, Bernardo (witness), 156 Spanish empire, 119–22 Spanish inquisition. See under inquisitions St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572). See under massacres Stefani, Pietro Martire (Catholic archbishop): report on the Aegean (1757), 252–54 Stephen (saint), 150 Stephen I (elector of Palatine), 90 Stjepan II Tomaševic´ of Bosnia, 88, 96 Stjepan Tomaš of Bosnia, 88, 90–98 Stuart, James Francis Edward (James III, the “old pretender”), 270, 272 Suárez, Juan (Catholic canon), 257 suicide: as escape from persecution, 54–55; and unwanted pregnancy, 228 sumptuary laws, 16; and identifers of faith, 123; exemptions from, 214; and Islam, 212; and the Roma, 239–41 Sunday. See sabbath (Christian) Swiss guard (France), 58–60 Sylva, Ayres de (Portuguese magistrate), 58

Index T Tamar (biblical fgure), 232 Tang Yu (Tang dynasty offcial), 78 taxation. See coexistence Tello de Sandoval, Francisco (Spanish offcial), 259 temptation, 272–76. See also the devil; and chastity (see under sex and sexuality); as choice, 182–86 Ten Commandments (Christian), 74–75 Teresa (of Àvila?) (saint), 269 Teresa of Àvila (saint), 272 The 95 Theses (1517). See under Luther, Martin The Huron Carol. See under Brébeuf, Jean de Themoris (Indigenous people), 121–22 The Schleitheim Confession (1527), 132–35 Third Order convents. See under convents Thomas Aquinas (Christian philosopher), 128; Summa Theologica, 230 Tiberius Caesar (Roman emperor), 71 time. See history and periodization Toledot Yeshu (Jewish narrative of the life of Christ), 165–70 Tolentic´, Luka (papal envoy), 88, 95–98 toleration. See coexistence Torah, 165 Toral, Francisco (Spanish bishop of Yucatán), 200 Torquemada, Juan de (Catholic cardinal), 91; The Outline of the Truths . . . (1460), 93–95 Torquemada, Tomás de (Spanish inquisitor), 51 torture. See under violence Toyotomi Hideyoshi (emperor of Japan), 15; Expulsion of Missionaries (1587), 144–45; Limits on the Propagation of Christianity (1587), 144 translations of the Bible. See under Bible transubstantiation. See holy sacrament treaty of Granada, 48, 216–22; protections for Muslims, 60–61; release of captives, 214–15; Treaty

297

of the Kingdom of Granada (1491), 212–16 trinity (Christian doctrine), 41–42, 162, 221, 269. See also Unitarianism Turks. See Ottoman Turks Tvrtkovic´, Stojsav (Bosnian krstjan), 94–95 Twisck, Pieter Jansz (Radical reformer): Chronicles of the Tyrants Downfall (1620), 151–53; Religion’s Freedom (1609), 123 U Ullman, Wolfgang (Radical reformer), 33 Unitarianism, 116 Urbal VIII (pope), 239–41 Urslperger, Samuel (Protestant theologian), 99–101 usury: prohibitions against, 211, 223 utopianism: Christian, 6–7, 98 (see also communities; settlements) V Vagnoni, Alfonso (Wang Feng-Su) (Jesuit missionary), 63–65 Valentijn, François (Protestant missionary), 206–7 Valignano, Alessandro (Jesuit missionary), 143 Valle, Francisco (Savoyard minister), 149 Vavasour, Mary (English nun), 267 Vavasour, William (English Catholic), 267 Vedette, Mattio (witness), 155 Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty (1616–18), 63–65 Vieira, António (Jesuit diplomat), 143 violence, 194; anti-Semitic, 55–58; and colonization, 190–95, 198; and language (see preaching; purges); against Protestants, 59–60; Radical views on, 135; and religious minorities, 58–60 (see also expulsions; massacres) visual arts: as missionary tool, 15 von Erback, Dietrich Schenk (Catholic archbishop of Mainz), 90 von Firmian, Leopold Anton (Catholic archbishop of Salzburg), 14 Vucˇinic´, Radmil (Bosnian krstjan), 94–95

298

Index

W Waldensians (proto-Protestant reformers): persecution of, 145–49 Wan-Li (emperor of China), 63–65, 77–81 Ward, Mary (Catholic reformer), 3 Weber, Max,: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), 5 Wendat (Indigenous people): baptism of, 45–46; deities: Ataensiq, 83; Yoscaha, 82–83; language, 11, 81; and music, 163; spirituality, 163; views on Jesuits, 84–86 white supremacy, 13, 127. See also under racism widows: obligation to care for, 263 Wigmore, Mary (Carmelite nun), 268–69 Wilson, Thomas (Anglican bishop): An Essay Towards an Instruction for Indians (1740), 106–10, 182–86 women and girls: and advice, 266; advice/limits on behaviour, 249–50; in Algeria, 234–37; and clothing, 240–41, 265 (see under clothing); and colonization, 197–99; congregations of, 264 (see also convents); education of (see education); enclosure of, 16 (see also convents; ghettos); as oppression, 17; as imperfect men, 130; and labour, 264–65; and

medicine (see childbirth); and music, 262; networks of, 263–65; and property, 265; and religious tradition, 249; sexuality (see sex and sexuality); interreligious (see interreligious relationships) Wycliffe, John (English theologian), 4 X Ximenes de Cisneros, Francisco (Catholic archbishop), 10 Y Yan Wen-Hui (Ming offcial), 64 Year of Exile (1492). See under expulsion of Jews Yu Mao-Tsz (Ming offcial), 63 Z Zacuto, Abraham (Jewish scholar), 50–51 Zanone, Pietro (Catholic priest), 157, 259–64. See also under miracles, investigations of Zoes (Indigenous people), 120 Zorzi, Natale (papal envoy), 88, 91 Zumárraga, Juan de (Catholic archbishop of Mexico), 256–59 Zwingli, Ulrich (Protestant reformer), 3; on baptism, 31–34; Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God (1522), 27–28