1. Introduction

By the mid-sixteenth century, the Iberian Crowns had established overseas empires of colossal dimensions.¹ European trade in Asia created a network of “articulated” circuits that played an important role in the growing Atlantic trading system.² Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Roman Catholic missions and missionaries were key propagators of European “civilization” and its systems of generating knowledge.³ As a matter of principle, religious diversity was not tolerated, as the Catholic faith was a binding social, cultural, and political force for Spanish and Portuguese rulers. Its universalistic vocation tied the historical and moral unity of humanity with the Iberian rulers’ version of the true religion “while perhaps also indirectly supporting an imperialist agenda.”⁴ Not surprisingly, the Christian-Muslim contact in the Portuguese territories of the Estado da Índia and the Spanish Philippines, despite existing trade and diplomatic relations, reproduced in many ways “the traditionally rejected Muslim Other.”⁵

2. The Portuguese Estado da Índia

Regarded as a potential threat due to their affinities with hostile Islamic powers like Bijapur and the Ottoman Empire, the Portuguese authorities targeted the Muslim communities of Goa, reducing their agency and ultimately encouraging their expulsion. Immediately after the conquest of Goa in 1510, all mosques were destroyed, and most Muslims were forced to abandon the city. Indeed, Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515) promoted the confiscation of the land belonging to Muslims to promote the establishment of Portuguese settlers.⁶ These repressive measures contributed to the existence of a precarious and tiny Muslim community formed by those who were not able to leave Goa, as well as by highly mobile individuals such as sailors and merchants “from all the coasts of India, as from Gujarat, Persia, and elsewhere.”⁷

As a minority in a territory with a large Hindu population, the Muslims of Goa are often overshadowed in the historiography of the Portuguese and Jesuit presence in South Asia. Although part of the proselytizing work of the Jesuit missionaries in the Goan mission, the conversion of Muslims relied more on the impact of the aggressive and discriminatory policies against the Muslim minority of Goa than on any meticulous or well-planned conversion strategy.

Hormuz constitutes, perhaps, an exception. A protectorate of the Portuguese crown since 1515, the Kingdom of Hormuz was located at a strategic point that allowed the Portuguese to control the Strait of Hormuz and, thus, the only sea passage that connects the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean. The strategic position of Hormuz attracted the attention of Francis Xavier, who regarded the port city as an important mission field that could be used as a platform to launch other missions in the Arabian Peninsula, and Safavid Persia. In 1549, Xavier appointed Gaspar Barzeus (also known as Kaspar Berzé (Barzäus or Berse [1515–53]) to set up a mission in the Portuguese enclave in the Persian Gulf. However, the Hormuz mission would become one of the first Jesuit fiascos in Asia. The ambivalent political arrangements behind establishing the Portuguese protectorate in the Kingdom of Hormuz led the Estado da Índia to adopt a more careful attitude toward converting the local population. While Barzaeus and his successors sought to replicate the aggressive policies of Christianization implemented in Goa, the Portuguese authorities preferred a more careful approach, fearing that antagonizing a predominantly Muslim population would incite the local rulers to reject the protectorate. Aware of the reticence of the Portuguese crown to enforce the conversion of local Muslims, the Jesuits would gradually lose their interest in Hormuz. The recurrent health problems afflicting the missionaries stationed in this strategic enclave, the lack of conversions, and apathetic support from the Portuguese colonial apparatus encouraged the Jesuit hierarchy in Goa to openly discuss the possibility of closing the mission in 1565.⁸ Three years later, the mission was finally closed.

Although Hormuz would be the first Jesuit mission in a predominantly Islamic milieu, the exploits of Barzeus and his successors in Hormuz have rarely been the focus of historical attention. In his analysis of Barzeus’s career, Eduardo Javier Alonso Romo dedicates a handful of pages to the Hormuz mission.⁹ Enrique García Hernán also briefly examined the Jesuit exploits in Hormuz as part of the Iberian efforts to establish regular diplomatic exchanges with Safavid Persia.¹⁰

3. The Sultanate of Bijapur

Another early Jesuit experience with an Islamic world, were the exploits of Gonçalo Rodrigues (1523–61) at the court of the Sultan Ali Adil Shah I of Bijapur (d.1579; 1558–79) around 1561. To normalize relations between the Estado da Índia and the Sultanate of Bijapur, the sultan made a series of overtures to form a Luso-Bijapur alliance against the Ottoman Empire. One of his preferred interlocutors in the Estado da Índia was the archbishop of Goa, D. Gaspar Jorge de Leão Pereira (d.1576; in office 1560–67), with whom the new sultan established regular correspondence while Gaspar Jorge served as interim governor. The archbishop suggested that the diplomatic correspondence between Goa and Bijapur would benefit from establishing a Jesuit mission at the sultan’s court.

In 1561, Ali Adil Shah sent to Goa an embassy requesting “to send two or three well-learned [doutos]” to participate in the religious debates organized by the sultan.¹¹ The archbishop arranged an embassy to Bijapur headed by Francisco Lopes, a merchant with good connections in Bijapur, who would be accompanied, as requested by Ali Adil Shah, by three clergymen: the Franciscan António Pegado, the Jesuit Gonçalo Rodrigues (1523–61), and an unnamed Dominican friar. The embassy also included a group of Portuguese individuals who traveled from Goa to Bijapur, possibly motivated by commercial interests in the Sultanate.

The first audience with the sultan was disappointing for the Catholic priests. The sultan delayed the meeting and forced the Portuguese legation to wait the following day. Rodrigues could only speak with Ali Adil Shah during the second audience, which, once again, the sultan delayed for some hours. Rodrigues and his companions offered a Bible “bound in golden velvet” and one edition of St. Thomas Aquinas’s (1224/25–74) Summa contra Gentiles. Pegado made a brief commentary on the two books and “a humble and benevolent discourse” on the reasons for the presence of Catholic priests. However, the main topic of conversation between the sultan and the priests was the possibility of a Luso-Bijapur alliance against the Ottoman Empire, as Ali Adil Shah was willing to help the Estado da Índia’s efforts against the Great Turk in the Indian Ocean.

Besides alluding to the formation of a Luso-Bijapur entente, Ali Adil Shah asked three questions about Christianity, which, in Rodrigues’s words, were “base” (baixas) and “fatuous” (fatuas). Instead of inquiring about theological issues, the sultan wanted to know if Jesus Christ established clothing rules, forbade the consumption of wine and elephant meat, and, finally, if it was sinful for Christians to drink urine. After the priests replied to the three questions, the sultan gave them robes of honor.

After this audience, Rodrigues and the other embassy members left Bijapur. The hope of establishing a Jesuit mission in the sultanate was immediately abandoned. Following the 1561 embassy, Ali Adil Shah I directed his foreign policy toward allying with other Decanni sultanates against the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara, an ally of the Estado da Índia. The collapse of Vijayanagara encouraged Ali Adil Shah to invade the Estado da Índia in 1570, besieging Goa for almost one year.

Without any significant outcome, the first Jesuit experiences at the Bijapuri court were not exploited by the Society’s propaganda and is subsequently one of the primary reasons for the lack of studies on this initial episode between the Jesuits and the Islamic polities of South Asia. The only exceptions are a brief and mostly descriptive article by the Catalan-born Jesuit Henry Heras on the Jesuit dealings at the courts of Ali Adil Shah I, and John Correia-Afonso’s succinct analysis of Rodrigues’s correspondence.¹² Departing from the hagiographical and descriptive perspective provided by Heras and Correia-Afonso, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has analyzed the ethnographic information provided by Gonçalo Rodrigues’s letters noting its importance for the geopolitical interests of the Estado da Índia.¹³ In a joint article with Muzaffar Alam on the Jesuit mission at the Mughal court, Subrahmanyam reassessed Rodrigues’s experiences at Bijapur and pointed out that the Jesuit missionary and his companions failed to comprehend that the questions posed by Ali Adil Shah sought to inquire about the sophistication of Christian doctrine and its normative standards.¹⁴

In 1654, Sultan Muhammad Adil Shah (r.1627–56) invited the Society of Jesus to send a mission to Bijapur. In 1561, the sultan wanted to use the presence of missionaries to facilitate diplomatic exchanges with the Estado da Índia. The Portuguese authorities and the Jesuit hierarchy in Goa duly accepted the request. The mission would be initially formed by the Portuguese António Botelho (1600–70?), who had previously worked at the Mughal court. He would later be joined by Gonçalo Martins (1599–1669). The diplomatic and religious mission of Botelho and Martins in Bijapur also sought to thwart the activities of Matheus de Castro (1594–1677), the Goan Brahmin who established the first Propaganda diocese in Bijapur.

Muhammad Adil Shah’s death in 1656 would halt the new impetus on Luso-Bijapur diplomatic exchanges and the Jesuit prospects of establishing a stable presence in the Sultanate. The sultan’s death prompted a long period of social and political unrest marked by the Mughal invasion of 1657 and the Maratha insurgency. The increasing instability of the sultanate made Bijapur an unattractive mission field. In 1686, the sultanate was finally incorporated into the Mughal Empire.

As in the case of the 1561 embassy, there is a considerable lack of studies on the second Jesuit mission to Bijapur. Apart from a descriptive article by Henry Heras on the chronological evolution of the mission, the Jesuit presence in Bijapur between 1654 and 1656 has been largely overlooked.¹⁵ Nonetheless, recent historiography on Goan Catholic Brahmin elites has explored the clash between the Jesuit missionaries and Matheus de Castro, highlighting how the two were manipulated by the Bijapuri authorities to pressure the Estado da Índia.¹⁶

4. The Mughal Empire

In 1579, following a similar approach to the one employed by Sultan Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur, the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605, r.1556–1605) sent an embassy to Goa requesting that the Portuguese viceroy and the Society of Jesus send “two learned priests” to the Mughal court, as well as “the principal books of the Law and the Gospel,” to teach and discuss Christianity at the Mughal court.¹⁷ Akbar’s request intensified the rumors circulating in Goa that the emperor was devoted to the Virgin Mary, fond of European garments and that he encouraged his female and male courtiers to dress as Europeans.¹⁸ These accounts suggested that Akbar was somehow, to paraphrase Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a Prester John in the making, an Asian ruler ready to embrace Christianity and join the Portuguese efforts to reduce the Islamic presence in the subcontinent.¹⁹

The first Jesuit mission to the Mughal court was the consequence of a specific moment in Indian history which provoked a drastic change in the local geopolitical scenario: the Mughal conquest of Gujarat (1572–73) and Bengal (1574–76). Incorporating these territories offered access to the maritime routes of the Western Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal to what was originally a landlocked empire. This new maritime dimension altered the geopolitical concerns of the Mughal Empire. Overseas trade became an important source of revenue for the imperial treasury and a channel to acquire exotic or rare commodities, stimulating the involvement of the imperial family and the Mughal elites in commercial and shipping ventures. The incorporation of Gujarat and Bengal also prompted Akbar to develop an imperial ideology based on notions of universal rule and divinely sanctioned kingship – a project continued by his successors, Jahangir (“the World Seizer”) and Shahjahan (“the Lord of the World”).²⁰ However, the Portuguese Estado da Índia constituted an obstacle to Mughal maritime ambitions. The intrusive and violent nature of the cartazes, the naval passports imposed by the Estado da Índia, which supported the Portuguese claims to a monopoly over the “Seas of India” were regarded by the Mughals as a serious obstacle to the development of a maritime policy and an attack to the image of Akbar as the lord of Hindustan.²¹ The Jesuit mission to Mogor was thus, according to Alan Strathern, an example of “theological diplomacy,” where non-European and non-Christian rulers invited the Portuguese authorities to dispatch Catholic missionaries as a pretext to establish a channel of communication or stimulate trade.²²

Besides his wish to understand the interests and nature of the Portuguese presence in India, Akbar also had a specific political and religious agenda in which the Estado da Índia had an important role. Throughout the 1570s, Akbar implemented a series of reforms that sought to affirm the emperor’s authority and centralize power by restructuring the ruling elites, harmonizing the administrative apparatus, and expanding the fiscal system.²³ The annexation of Gujarat and Bengal also coincided with the intensification of Akbar’s efforts to affirm imperial authority also involved the development of an ideological project based on notions of universal rule and divinely sanctioned kingship.²⁴ The need to secure stability in an ethnically and religiously diverse empire encouraged Akbar to conciliate his centralizing policy with a new religious movement, the Divine Faith (Din-i-Ilahi), which mixed elements from Hinduism, Islam, Jainism or Zoroastrianism. The existence of a new religious element in India, represented by the Catholic Estado da Índia, was regarded by the Mughal emperor as an interesting opportunity to reinforce his ideological and religious projects by exploring Christian elements that could be related to Islam and used to promote his syncretic experiments.

Initially, the members of the first Jesuit mission participated only in the religious debates organized by Akbar due to the language barrier and their lack of knowledge of the social and religious subtleties of the Mughal Empire. However, the discussions with Muslim, Hindu, and Jains theologians gradually introduced the missionaries to the complex political and religious scenario of the Akbari reign. The letters of Antoni de Montserrat and Rodolfo Acquaviva reveal the increasing antagonism between the emperor and the Sunni orthodox mullahs, and the existence of an influential group of heterodox courtiers led by Abu’l Fazl that was close to Akbar and sympathetic to the Jesuits.²⁵

Despite the problems posed by the language barrier and the complex Mughal political scenario, Akbar made the Jesuits a part of a select group of courtiers who had the notable function of reading works on religion and history to the emperor – an important part of the daily life of the Mughal court. Besides reading these works, the missionaries were often charged by the emperor with drafting letters destined for Goa, as well as reading the correspondence from the Estado da Índia. The proximity to Akbar’s inner circle allowed the Jesuits to contact a range of relevant courtiers and officials, exploring other opportunities to use their faculties in the service of the Mughal elite. Indeed, the Jesuit missionaries could be easily integrated into the group of the “elite sayyids, great shaikhs, eminent scholars, eminent scholars, ingenuous doctors, and agreeable courtiers of various classes,” intellectuals who came from “the various communities of Hindustan, from among the masters of excellence and perfection, and men of the sword and the pen.”²⁶

The meetings between Akbar and the Jesuits were not exclusively dedicated to religious matters. The missionaries were asked to talk about Portuguese and European history or explain the imagery and themes of art they brought from Goa. Among the books, engravings, and printing carried by the missionaries were works by Philippe Galle, an engraving of Dürer’s Small Passion and Virgin and Child, an altarpiece of Our Lady, a copy of Saint Luke Madonna, a copy of Abraham Ortelius’s atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and a first edition of the Polyglot Bible by Pieter van der Bocht. The images of the title pages of the latter volume included two allegorical compositions evoking Philip II as a personification of Pietas Regia and Pietatis Concordiae. These allegories exalted the Iberian Habsburg monarch as a pious universal ruler who sought the union of different peoples and offered new possibilities to enhance the iconographical and allegorical repertoire associated with Mughal imperial authority to Akbar and his successors. European Christian art recurred to Biblical metaphors and symbols that were easily recognizable to an educated Islamicate audience, and very similar to the allegorical motifs explored by Mughal imperial art.²⁷ The links between Catholic iconography and Indo-Persian Islamicate symbols of power suited the efforts made by Akbar and his successors-in particular emperors Jahangir (1569–1627, r.1605–27) and Shah Jahan I (1592–1666, r.1628–58)-to govern an empire based on ideas of universal rule and divinely sanctioned kingship.²⁸ Besides, as Ebba Koch and Gauvin Bailey have noted, European Christian art also provided a neutral medium that allowed the mobilization of Hindu and Muslim artistic traditions to develop a new heterogenous visual language that could be attractive to different sections of the Mughal population.²⁹

Although the reports sent by the three missionaries suggested that Akbar could be converted, the mission failed to convert a single individual. The absence of palpable results and the increasing tensions between the Estado da India and the Mughal Empire regarding the Portuguese presence in Gujarat forced the Jesuit hierarchy to cancel the first mission in 1582.

Albeit the lack of progress at the Mughal court, the activities of the mission were often exploited by Jesuit chroniclers and propagandists such as Giovanni Battista Peruschi (1525–98), Luis de Guzmán (1544–1605), Fernão Guerreiro (1550–1617), Pierre du Jarric (1566–1617), Daniello Bartoli (1608–85), Cornelius Hazart (1617–90) or Francisco de Sousa (1628–1713).³⁰ Apart from providing important knowledge on the geography and socio-political realities of Northern India, these authors adapted the contents of the letters and accounts produced by the missionaries to integrate the Mughal mission into a coherent narrative of a global triumph of the Society of Jesus across the America, Africa, and Asia.

While the Jesuit mission at the Mughal court generated an important number of texts, the documentation related to the mission and its circulation in Europe has not been studied with the same level of detail as other regions such as South India, China, or Japan. As Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam noted, the frustration caused by the Mughal mission contrasted with the more successful Jesuit exploits in China and Japan.³¹

The rediscovery of Antoni de Montserrat’s accounts by the Belgian Jesuit Henri Hosten in the early 1910s contributed greatly to the scholarly interest in Jesuit activities in Mughal India. In 1912, Hosten published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal a bilingual Portuguese–English edition of one copy of the Relação do Equebar, Reys do Mogores.³² This bilingual edition would pave the way to the publication, in 1914, of an annotated edition of Antoni de Montserrat’s original Latin text of the Mongolicae Legationis Commentarius in the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Still, the standard edition of Montserrat’s magnum opus, Hosten’s careful annotations, and detailed reconstruction of the composition of the text has? had a significant impact. Between 1920 and 1921, the Catholic Herald of India published an English translation of the Commentarius by Hosten and his Jesuit colleague, J. H. Gense. In 1922, another English translation by John S. Hoyland with historical annotations by S. N. Banerjee was published by Oxford University Press. Due to the difficulties in accessing the original Latin manuscript and the Latin and English editions organized by Hosten, Hoyland’s translation became the standard version used by most scholars since 1922. In 2002 and 2006, Josep Lluís Alay edited, respectively Catalan and Spanish translations of the Commentarius mostly based on Hosten’s contributions.³³ More recently, a new English translation by Lena Wahlgren-Smith in a critical edition of Montserrat’s writings edited and annotated by João Vicente Melo reassesses the Commentarius by exploring the political implications of the mission, and the mechanisms of cross-cultural interaction developed both by Jesuits and Mughals.³⁴

Besides the rediscovery of Montserrat’s writings, the publication in the late 1940s of critical editions of Jesuit primary sources such as the eighteen-volume Documenta Indica, edited by Josef Wicki (1904–93) and published between 1948 and 1988,³⁵ and the twelve volumes edited by António da Silva Rego (1905–86) of the Documentação para a história das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, published throughout 1947 and 1958,³⁶ paved the way to a renewed interest on Jesuit documents and archives from non-Jesuit scholars. These critical editions made available most of the documentation related to the Jesuit mission at the Mughal court between 1580 and 1597. The endeavors of Wicki and Silva Rêgo also coincided with the emergence of what Ines Zupanov termed as an “Indianized” perspective on Indian Jesuit historiography.³⁷ In 1955 the Goan-born Jesuit scholar John Correia-Afonso, in his Jesuit Letters and Indian History, a work heavily influenced not only by the contributions made by Wicki and Silva Rêgo but also by the works of Heras and Hosten, stressed the relevance of the Jesuit textual production to analyze South Asian historical processes.³⁸ Following this line of research, in 1980, Correia-Afonso published Letters from the Mughal Court, a critical edition of the correspondence of the first Jesuit mission to Akbar’s court (1580–83).³⁹

These critical editions made documentation related to the first Jesuit mission more accessible to non-Jesuit scholars. Indeed, the vast number of sources related to the first mission to the Mughals have caught, since the late 1990s, the attention of scholars interested in intercultural diplomacy and processes of cross-cultural exchange. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, for example, used Jesuit sources in his studies on Mughal political culture, foreign policy, and expansionist projects as part of a complex analysis of multilateral discourses. By contrasting Jesuit and Mughal sources on diplomatic exchanges and theological debates, often through the framework of “connected histories,” Subrahmanyam analyzed the Jesuit interactions with the Mughal polity as an example of the intense circulation of mercantile, scholarly, military, religious, and political elites across different Eurasian courts. In his works on the interactions between the Portuguese Estado da Índia and the Mughal authorities, Jorge Flores has also explored Jesuit sources, highlighting the role of the missionaries as privileged informers and mediators for both sides who contributed to maintaining a permanent flow of communication between both sides.⁴⁰ Hasan Bashir has also studied the perceptions of Antoni de Montserrat on the Mughal religious and political contexts through the framework of comparative political theory.⁴¹

In 1591, after another request from Akbar, which included a substantial gift of money to the Jesuit College of Goa and the provincial,⁴² a second mission was formed by Duarte Leitão (d.1592), Cristóbal de Vega (1561–99), and Estevão Ribeiro (d.1611) was dispatched to Lahore. The three missionaries arrived at the Mughal court when the Akbari imperial ideology and its ritual apparatus matured. The early 1590s were the years when the production of imperial chronicles, such as the Akbarnama cemented the figure of the padshah as a universal ruler. Leitão, Ribeiro, and De la Vega were thus privileged-and bewildered-eyewitnesses of the affirmation of a distinctive Mughal imperial power and political identity. Troubled by the opposition of Muslim orthodox sectors and Akbar’s attempts to adopt a messianic and semi-divine image⁴³, the missionaries decided to leave abruptly after some months. Once again, the second mission was a revealing episode of frustrated expectations. While the Jesuits believed that their presence would stimulate Akbar’s immediate conversion and the Christianization of his empire, the Mughal emperor expected the missionaries to contribute to developing his ideological project.

The brief exploits of the second mission have usually been dismissed as ineffective or insignificant due to its abrupt end. Edward Maclagan, for instance, in his The Jesuits and the Great Mogul, only dedicates to the second mission a laconic chapter of just three pages stating that the mission came “to an abrupt conclusion for reasons which have not come down to us.” However, Arnulf Camps’ brief study on the correspondence of Cristóbal de la Vega, in particular of his description of Akbar’s efforts to act as “prophet and a legislator,” contributed to reassessing the activities of the members of the second mission vis-à-vis the evolution of Akbar’s ideological and religious projects.⁴⁴

After the abrupt end of the second mission, Akbar wrote again to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque (1547–1609, r.1591–97) requesting learned men able to explain Christian doctrine and scriptures to him and his courtiers. Confronted with the lack of enthusiasm of Francisco Cabral, the Jesuit provincial, the viceroy threatened to send a mission from another religious order.⁴⁵ The pressure from the viceroy resulted. On 3 December 1594, Cabral dispatched the Jerónimo Xavier (1549–1617), the grand-nephew of St. Francis Xavier; the Azores-born Manoel Pinheiro (1556–1619); and Bento de Góis (1562–1607), a thirty-two-year-old Portuguese who would pioneer the Jesuit exploits in Tibet. The third mission would last until the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773. The original members of the third mission would play an important role in the diplomatic exchanges between the Portuguese Estado da Índia and the Mughal polity, not to mention their efforts as “passeurs culturels,” especially during the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir.

Like the members of the first mission, Akbar made Xavier, Pinheiro, and Góis part of a select group of courtiers who had the important function of reading works on religion, philosophy, and history to the emperor. Besides reading these works, the emperors often charged the missionaries with writing letters destined for Goa, reading and translating the correspondence from the Estado da Índia, and writing religious or philosophical treatises in Persian.

Akbar’s decision to transfer the court from Lahore to Agra in 1598 forced the Jesuits to reorganize the mission. To avoid hampering the limited but encouraging progress made in the city, Pinheiro remained in Lahore while Xavier and Góis followed Akbar to Agra. Without the presence of the emperor and his court, Pinheiro focused his attention on plebeian targets, in particular low caste Hindus, and cultivated close relations with local officials to guarantee the necessary political protection for his proselytizing activities.⁴⁶ Pinheiro’s investment in a popular mission was not merely a consequence of Akbar’s decision to move the court to Agra. The failure of the two previous missions to produce converts was seen by the Jesuit hierarchy as an indicator that Mughal India was far from being a promising mission field. Pinheiro’s strategy reveals a perception that targeting  the Persianized elites exclusively neglected most of the population of the Mughal Empire formed by non-Muslim and Hindustani-speaking subjects.⁴⁷ This perception, as Arnulf Camps has observed, would prompt Heinrich Roth (1620–68), the Swabian Jesuit stationed in the Mughal mission between 1654 and 1668, to invest in the composition of grammar and the translation of Sanskrit texts. The goal was to go beyond the lower-caste gentiles targeted by Pinheiro’s popularity and target Brahmins and other upper castes by engaging with Hindustani high culture.⁴⁸

Although the Jesuits recognized that Christianity generated an intellectual curiosity at the Mughal court, the reports sent from Fatehpur Sikri, Lahore, and Agra complained of the difficulties that many Muslims had with understanding concepts such as the Holy Trinity.⁴⁹ This initial perception of failure would encourage Xavier to successfully promote Indo-Persian Christian literature to present Christian doctrine in an accessible and familiar way to Mughal courtiers and literati.

Jerónimo Xavier’s efforts to develop Catholic literature in Persian have often caught the attention of Jesuit and non-Jesuit scholars. The studies of the Jesuit scholar Henry Hosten on Jerónimo Xavier and his literary production paved the way for a gradual interest in the Navarrese missionary’s Persian works. Drawing upon Hosten’s works, Edward Maclagan dedicated an entire chapter to Xavier’s textual production in his The Jesuits and the Great Mogul. In the mid-1950s, the Dutch Franciscan scholar Arnulf Camps dedicated the first monograph to Jerónimo Xavier’s proselytizing and literary activities. Around the same time, the Spanish Jesuit Ángel Santos Hernández published a brief study on Xavier’s literary production and a biography of the Navarrese missionary. However, these were works framed by a hagiographical viewpoint or, as in the case of Santos Hernández, by nationalist inclinations. In the late 1990s, reflecting the interest of non-Jesuit scholars in the role of missions as laboratories of cultural translation, Xavier’s textual production generated a renewed interest. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam examined the collaboration between Xavier and the Mughal scholar Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri, highlighting the Jesuits’ dependence on local collaborators. Drawing upon Arnulf Camps’ studies on Jerónimo Xavier, Hugues Didier explored the dialogic strategies adopted by the Navarrese missionary.⁵⁰ The political treatises produced by Xavier have been analyzed by Adel Sidarus, who explored the different European and Islamic sources in the ‘Adab al-saltanat, the mirror of princes destined to Jahangir written by Xavier around 1609.⁵¹ Following their previous work on the collaboration between Xavier and Abdus Sattar, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam examined how the ‘Adab al-saltanat contained elements of Machiavellian political thought which were presented through the tropes of Indo-Persian philosophical traditions.⁵² The connected histories of Xavier’s political treatise have also been recently explored by Uroš Zver.⁵³

Critical editions of Jerónimo Xavier’s Persian works have also been published since the late 2000s. In 2007, Hugues Didier, together with Ignacio Cacho Nazábal and José Luís Orella Unzué, edited in Spanish Xavier’s Fuente de vida (Fountain of Life). In 2012, Pedro Moura de Carvalho edited an English translation by Wheeler M. Thackston of the Mirʾāt al-quds (Mirror of Holiness), which included a study on the geopolitical and religious context behind the production and circulation of this treatise. More recently, Jorge Flores edited and translated into English the Tratado da Corte e Caza de Iamguir Pachá Rey dos Mogores, a survey of Jahangir’s imperial court and household whose authorship is usually attributed to Jerónimo Xavier. Flores provides an extensive introduction that situates the treatise in the early modern European literature on Mughal India and highlights the conditions of production and reception of the Tratado based on a brief, but rather complete, survey of the evolution of Luso-Mughal relations up to 1615.

The first years of the third mission were shaped by a tension between two antagonistic visions of suitable proselytizing strategies to guide the Mughal mission. Pinheiro’s investment in a popular mission in Lahore focused on the lower strata of Mughal society often faced the opposition of Jerónimo Xavier, who favored the traditional Jesuit top-down approach, conceiving the emperor and the court as the only real targets of the mission. Indeed, Xavier feared that Pinheiro’s ‘popular mission’ in Lahore, despite its encouraging numbers of converts among low-caste Hindus, could reduce the attractiveness of Catholicism in the eyes of the Mughal elites.⁵⁴

Albeit these tensions, both Xavier and Pinheiro were aware that the emperor’s conversion was not certain and that his interest in Christianity derived from his diplomatic and ideological agenda. As the studies of Adel Sidarus and Uroš Zver have noted, Xavier’s scholarly endeavors were related to Akbar’s and Jahangir’s ideological projects. In the case of Manuel Pinheiro, his popular mission and his recurrent employment as an intermediary between the Portuguese and Mughal authorities cemented the position of the Jesuit missionaries as useful diplomatic brokers.⁵⁵

Indeed, most of the successes achieved by the third mission occurred during intense Luso-Mughal diplomatic exchanges between 1608 and 1612. Among these achievements was the secret conversion of the mutassadi (governor) of Khambhat, Muqarrab Khan, to Catholicism in 1611, and the baptism of Jahangir’s nephews, the three sons of Prince Daniyal (1572–1605)-Thamuras, Baysunghar, and Hoshang (1604–28). For the Jesuit missionaries, the conversion and baptism of three members of the Mughal royal family represented a coup that equated their mission in Agra to the more successful Jesuit exploits in China, Japan, and Ethiopia. It was a much-welcomed achievement that ensured the continuity of a mission deemed as “fruitless” and enhanced the triumphal narrative of Catholic global expansion promoted by the Jesuit propaganda.⁵⁶ However, the conversion of Jahangir’s nephews was probably one of the greatest Jesuit fiascos at the Mughal court. Christened as Carlos, Henrique, and Filipe-the names of the previous and current monarchs of Portugal and Spain-the baptism of the three Mughal princes was conceived by Jahangir as a symbolic overture towards the Portuguese authorities, which had the advantage of disqualifying three potential rivals to the Mughal throne.⁵⁷ Indeed, the deterioration of Luso-Mughal relations between 1613 and 1615 would prompt Jahangir to order his nephews to revert to Islam.⁵⁸

The growing tensions between the Estado da Índia and Jahangir due to the arrest of Mughal ships by Portuguese fleets would cause significant damage to the position of the Jesuit missionaries. In retaliation to the seizure of the Rahīmī, a ship owned by Maryam-uz-Zamānī, the Mughal “Queen-Mother,” prompted an immediate reaction from Jahangir. One of the emperor’s targets was the Jesuit missionaries.⁵⁹ On July 8, 1614, Jahangir ordered the closure of the Jesuit churches of Agra and Lahore and canceled the financial support granted by the Mughal treasury to the Jesuit mission.⁶⁰

Thanks to their involvement in the negotiations that put an end to the conflict between Jahangir and the Estado da Índia, the Jesuit missionaries were able to reopen their churches and recover the imperial patronage of their activities. However, the events of 1612–15 marked a change in Luso-Mughal relations as well as in the status of the Jesuit missionaries at the Mughal court. The clashes between Jahangir and the Estado da Índia, together with the inability of the Portuguese authorities to thwart Dutch and English activities in South Asia, reduced the prestige of the Jesuit mission. Due to their status as informal representatives of the Portuguese crown, the fortunes of the Jesuit missionaries became increasingly dependent on the ups and downs of Luso-Mughal exchanges.

The ascension of Shahjahan (1592–1666; r.1628–58) in 1628 would further aggravate the fragility of the Jesuit position. The new emperor legislated against the conversion of Muslims to another religion. Besides being uninterested in Christianity, Shahjahan’s reign was marked by several clashes with the Estado da Índia, which culminated with the occupation of Hughli, the main informal Portuguese settlement in Bengal, in 1632.⁶¹ Shahjahan’s orders against the conversion of Muslims were confirmed by his successor, Aurangzeb (c.1618–1707, r.1658–1707). Described by the Jesuit Inácio Gomes (d.1696) as the “finest henchman of Muhammad” (o mais fino sequaz de Mafoma),⁶² Aurangzeb’s issued edicts preventing the conversion of non-Muslims to other non-Muslim religions, a measure that posed a serious risk to the continuity of the mission. The emperor’s decision in 1679 to reintroduce the jizya, the tax targeting non-Muslims, was another setback-although, thanks to Portuguese diplomatic initiatives, the Jesuit missionaries and the Christian community of Agra would be later exempt.⁶³

The hostility toward or lack of interest in Christianity of Jahangir’s successors, together with the waning influence of the Estado da Índia in South Asia, made the Jesuit presence at the Mughal court increasingly precarious. At the same time, the Jesuit hierarchy’s perception that the mission at Mogor was an unsuccessful venture also contributed to a lack of investment in the human resources allocated to the mission. The constant disinvestment in the mission and the shift in the religious policies of the Mughal authorities also contributed to the abandonment of the Jesuit engagement with Islamic or Hindustani literary and intellectual traditions.

Despite the challenges posed by the reigns of Shahjahan and Aurangzeb, the Mughals and Portuguese continued to use the Jesuit mission as a channel of communication. Aurangzeb and Shah Allam (1643–1712; r.1707–12), for example, appreciated the intermediary role of missionaries such as António Magalhães (d.1702), José da Costa (d.1685), and João de Abreu (1669–1721?). In fact, the diplomatic dimension of the Jesuit mission at the Mughal court would be determinant for its survival during the turbulent years that paved the way to the collapse of the Mughal Empire after Shah Allam’s death in 1712. Between the 1690s and 1730s, the Jesuit missionaries enjoyed the benefits of the patronage of the influential Indo-Portuguese Mughal courtier Juliana Dias da Costa.⁶⁴ Like the Jesuits, Bibi Juliana, as she was known by the Mughals, also served as a privileged intermediary between the Estado da Índia and the Mughal polity between the reigns of Shah Allam and Muhammad Shah (1702–48; r.1719–48), articulating her actions with the padres. As a member of the imperial household, Juliana Dias da Costa was often able to lobby their interests, although, as Taymiya Zaman has noted, the extension of her influence at the Mughal court seemed to have been exaggerated by Jesuit sources.⁶⁵

Besides Juliana Dias da Costa, the Jesuits also sought the patronage of other prominent elements of the Mughal polity. During the late 1720s and early 1730s, Manuel de Figueiredo (d.1753) cultivated the support of Raja Jai Singh of Jaipur, serving as an intermediary between the raja and the Estado da Índia. In 1729, Figueiredo would lead a joint Jaipur–Mughal embassy to Lisbon with the purpose of obtaining well-trained astronomers for the raja’s new observatory.⁶⁶

As the Mughal Empire deteriorated, especially after the invasion of Nadir Shah (1688–1747; r.1736–47) in 1739, and the Estado da Índia faced a process of reconfiguration after the loss of the Província do Norte to the Marathas also in 1739, the Jesuit mission became almost irrelevant for the foreign policy of the two declining powers. Without solid political and financial support, the Jesuit missionaries explored other potential mission fields in regions such as East Bengal, Jaipur, and Narwar, albeit with little success.⁶⁷ When the Marquis of Pombal issued in 1759 the edict expelling the Society of Jesus from the Portuguese realm and its overseas possessions, the Mughal mission was already in dire straits. After Nadir Shah’s invasion, the mission lost the crucial financial support of the Mughal polity. When, on July 21, 1773, Pope Clement XIV promulgated the brief Dominus ac Redemptor (Lord and Redeemer) decreeing the suppression of the Society of Jesus, the Mughal mission was formed by the wandering Joseph Tieffenthaler (d.1785) and Francis Xavier Wendel (d.1803).⁶⁸ Both missionaries were initially stationed at Jaipur. After the death of Jai Singh in 1743, Tieffenthaler and Wendel seemed to have initiated peripatetic missionary careers across North India and Bengal. Between 1763 and 1773, Wendel was the superior of the mission and sought to obtain firmans restoring the privileges previously granted to the Mughal mission.⁶⁹ While there is a complete absence of studies on the last stages of the Jesuit activities in Mughal India, Jean Deloche published two critical editions of the “memoir” written by Wendel to the English Brigadier Richard Smith containing information on the Jats, Sikhs and Pathans.⁷⁰ Tieffenthaler’s work as an astronomer and a geographer has also been recently reassessed by Michael Sievernich.⁷¹

The difficulties and fiascos faced by the Jesuit mission have been interpreted by historians such as Audrey Truschke indicating that the padres “persistently failed” to assess the complex socio-political and religious realities of Mughal India.⁷² This interpretation, however, seems to result from an analysis of Jesuit sources influenced by a long historiographical production produced by members of the Society of Jesus, who usually framed their analysis through a hagiographical viewpoint based on the propagandistic line of the Jesuit textual production on Mughal India. In fact, the historiography of the Jesuit activities in Mughal India had been, till the late 1990s, shaped by the works produced by religious scholars such as the Jesuits Eric Heras (also known by the Anglicized name of Henry Heras; 1888–1955)⁷³ and Henry Hosten,⁷⁴ or Father Felix, O.C.⁷⁵ Albeit their works tended to be descriptive and rarely contradicted the hagiographical narrative established by Jesuit chroniclers like Fernão Guerreiro or Pierre du Jarric, they often highlighted the importance of the documents produced by the Jesuit missionaries to understand the history of the Mughal Empire and the European presence in South Asia.

Although the works of Heras, Hosten, and Felix would gain visibility for being the main sources for Edward Maclagan’s The Jesuits and the Great Mogul (1932), still today the most comprehensive study on the Mughal mission.⁷⁶ The fact that these contributions were published in historical journals published in British India such as the Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Journal of the Punjab Historical Society or the Catholic Herald of India made their contributions relatively unknown outside Jesuit and British orientalist circles. This situation largely contributed to the slow evolution of the historiographical production on the Jesuit activities in Mughal India. Indeed, between the 1940s and late 1990s it was a sort of niche field of studies dominated by religious scholars framed by the contributions of Hosten, Heras or Maclagan. This is the case, for example, of the work of António da Silva Rêgo on the first Mughal mission or the studies of Arnulf Camps on the second and third missions.⁷⁷ The fact that Maclagan’s The Jesuits and the Great Mogul,⁷⁸ a work published in 1932, remains the most comprehensive study on the Mughal mission, or that Correia-Afonso’s Letters from the Mughal Court (1980) is still the standard history of the first mission are elucidative examples of the somewhat slow renovation of the historiography on the Mughal mission compared to other Jesuit mission fields.

Since the early 2000s, however, the historiography on the Mughal mission has been gradually renewed by the historiographical turns towards a cultural and social history based on interdisciplinary approaches inspired by anthropology and literary studies. This renovation has been largely promoted by non-Jesuit scholars interested in intercultural diplomacy and processes of cross-cultural exchange. Although not exclusively concerned with the Jesuit mission at the Mughal and their proselytizing activities, the influential studies of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Jorge Flores, and Corinne Lefèvre have explored Jesuit sources, together with extensive research of Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English documents, highlighted the role played by Jesuit missionaries in the interconnected political, economic, and cultural interests between the European powers and Mughal India.⁷⁹

These works have also contributed to a more nuanced analysis of the Jesuit presence at the Mughal court. Far from exposing the supposed inability of the padres to grasp Mughal sociopolitical realities, recent historiography has noted that the Jesuit missionaries were able to identify the ideological projects of Akbar and Jahangir, as well as they were often conscious that they were being exploited to support Mughal ideological and diplomatic initiatives.⁸⁰ Azfal Moin, in his work on Mughal millennialism, has pointed out that the Jesuit correspondence reveals that the missionaries were often conscious of that they had “to embody and perform their faith” according to the ideological projects of Akbar and Jahangir.⁸¹ In her analysis of Rodolfo Acquaviva’s missionary career, Ines Županov noted that the members of the first mission were engaged in a relationship of “courtly vassalage” with Akbar, acting at the Mughal court according to the emperor’s ideological and religious projects.⁸² The works of Jorge Flores have also stressed that the Jesuit missionaries were very distant from the image of naïve observers of the Mughal world obsessed by the imminent conversion of the emperor, being often sensible observers and analysts of Mughal political culture, as well as of imperial geopolitical concerns and courtly machinations.⁸³ João Vicente Melo’s works on the triangular political negotiations between Jesuits, English, and Mughals have also noted that the Jesuits, albeit their proselytizing lenses, tended to report lucidly on Akbar’s and Jahangir’s geopolitical concerns and ideological projects.⁸⁴

Nonetheless, there is still a lack of studies concerned with how the Jesuit missions in Mughal India operated as a laboratory of cultural translation and social engineering following the footsteps of the cases of the Jesuit missions in Goa and South India, where the works of Ângela Barreto Xavier, Ines Zupanov, Ananya Chakravarti, and Margherita Trento have contributed to renewing this field of studies by developing approaches focused on the role of Jesuit missions as loci of epistemological experiments and cultural exchanges.⁸⁵

5. Safavid Persia and the Chinese Experience

The Jesuits were latecomers in early modern Iran. Under the framework of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), a Vatican congregation founded in 1622 to spread the Gospel, Jesuit activities in Safavid Persia were articulated with French and Polish diplomatic maneuvers and initially faced the competition of the Augustinian missions sponsored by the Portuguese Padroado Real.⁸⁶ The first attempt to establish a mission in Safavid Persia dated from 1646 when François Rigordi (1609–79) briefly visited Isfahan as an emissary of the Polish ambassador Jerzy Ilicz.⁸⁷ After a one-year sojourn in India, Rigordi returned to Persia in 1647 and obtained permission to set up a mission in exchange for French military support and commercial benefits. After obtaining this privilege, Rigardi traveled to Europe to obtain diplomatic and financial support from Rome and Paris. In 1652, Rigardi, accompanied by Aimé Chézaud (1604–64), was again in Isfahan with letters of recommendations from the French authorities and reports of an imminent conflict between France and the Ottoman Empire, which encouraged Shah ‘Abbas II to grant permission for the Jesuits to operate in New Julfa, Tabriz, and Shiraz.⁸⁸ In 1656, the experienced French Jesuit Alexander de Rhodes (1591–1660) arrived in Isfahan with the task of supervising and consolidating the mission. However, the new superior arrived without much of the promises of French support given by Rigardi, prompting the Safavid authorities to halt much of the privileges conceded to the Jesuits.⁸⁹

After de Rhodes’s death in 1660, Chézaud became the superior of the mission. During his tenure, the Jesuits opened a residence in New Julfa which would become the main platform for their activities in Iran, mostly concerned with targeting the Armenian communities. From the New Julfa residence, the mission would expand to Yerevan, Shemakha, and Ganja throughout the 1680s and 1690s.⁹⁰ During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Persian mission would be associated with the activities of Polish Jesuits connected with Poland’s diplomatic exchanges with Safavid Persia, such as the case of Ignatius Franciscus Zapolski (1645–1703).⁹¹ With the fall of the Safavids the Jesuit presence became increasingly precarious. By the 1760s, Jesuit missionaries were no longer in Iran.

The Jesuit mission in Persia has not generated a long historiographical production compared with the Mughal mission. In 1925, Arnold Wilson published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies a now classic study on the evolution of the Jesuit mission since the days of Alexander de Rhodes.⁹² Most of the first studies on the Persian mission were focused on biographical essays on relevant missionaries, such as Martial Pradel de Lamase’s study on Jean-Baptiste de La Maze (1624–1709)⁹³ or Joseph Krzyszkowski’s assessment of Ignatius Franciscus Zapolski’s career.⁹⁴ Following the lines of the abovementioned works, Bruno Zimmel assessed the first years of the Jesuit mission in Isfahan and the exploits of Aimée Chezaud and Bernard Diestel (1623–60).⁹⁵ More recently, the Persian works written by Aimé Chezaud and his involvement in religious controversies with Safavid theologians have been studied by Francis Richard.⁹⁶ Thi Kieu Ly Pham has analyzed the proselytizing strategies developed by Alexandre Rhodes in early modern Cochinchina and Safavid Persia.⁹⁷ Rudi Mathee’s overviews of the Jesuit missions in Persia are also two recent important contributions to this field.⁹⁸

The often-overlooked exchanges between Jesuit missionaries and the Muslim communities of China have been recently studied by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite. Following a research line initially identified by the studies of Peter Ivanovich Kafarov and Kuwata Rokurō, Benite examined Jesuit attitudes towards Chinese Muslims, also exploring the links between Jesuit and Islamic texts produced in China between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁹⁹

6. The Philippines and the Moluccas

The scholarship of John Villiers (1981; 1986; 1988), director of the British Institute in South-East Asia,¹⁰⁰ Jean-Noël Sánchez (2008; 2012),¹⁰¹ and most recently, Antonio Carlos Campo López (2021),¹⁰² revealed to what extent the Society of Jesus was involved militarily, economically, and spiritually in the project of conquering the Moluccas (mainly the islands of Ternate, Tidore, Ambon, Halmahera, and Morotai). In 1546 Francis Xavier visited the so-called Spices Islands and reported optimistically that the native inhabitants shared a kind of primitive natural religion, which meant that the archipelago could be an important mission field for the Jesuits.¹⁰³ Xavier’s initial enthusiasm, however, would rapidly turn into frustration. In 1575 the Portuguese were driven out of Ternate, one of the five clove-producing islands of the Moluccas, by the Muslim ruler, Sultan Baab Ullah (1528–83, r.1570–83), being forced to retreat to the island of Tidore.¹⁰⁴ The Jesuit mission of the Padroado Real was in such a state of disrepair that Hubert Jacobs, SJ, the reputed editor of the Documenta Malucensia (Rome: 1974–84), defined it as “the history of a protracted agony.”¹⁰⁵ As a result, the Portuguese Jesuits radically changed their initial perspective regarding the Spanish presence in Asia. The solution to their problems would come more easily from the Philippines than from Malacca or Goa.¹⁰⁶

On the arrival of the explorer Don Miguel López de Legazpi (1503–72) at the Spanish East Indies (“Islas del Poniente”) in 1565, Islamic penetration had already reached its northeastern limit at the southern Philippines, especially in the Sulu archipelago, the southern coast of the island of Mindanao, and the island of Palawan (or Paragua).¹⁰⁷ However, in the northern Philippines, native people exemplified practices that Spaniards vaguely recognized as Islamic in nature. In 1572, the Adelantado assured that “the natives of this island of Luzon, which we commonly call the Spanish Moors, are not, because in truth they do not know the law of Mohammed, nor do they understand it.” ¹⁰⁸ Under Rajah Sulayman III’s rule (in office 1558–1575), conversion resulted from trade relations with the Arab-Malay sultanates of Brunei in Borneo, Maguindanao in Mindanao, and Malacca. As a result, the peoples of northern Philippines were not considered moros (“Moors,” a term used by the Spanish to refer to those who adhered to the Muslim faith),¹⁰⁹ but as gentiles.¹¹⁰ The absence of a pervasive and formalized Islamism (dar-al-Islam) among the natives led the Jesuits to gather the scattered barangays into towns, as well as to participate in the Spanish campaigns to conquer the island of Mindanao, where missionaries encountered greatest resistance from the Muslims.¹¹¹

Contemporary historiography agrees that the coastal populations of Panganisan and Luzon were already connected with diverse ethnicities and nations (Chinese, Japanese, Burneyes) through different external mercantile networks.¹¹² Reciprocal mobilities were, therefore, essential to forging trade relations in a Pacific world where the Iberian powers still played a marginal role.¹¹³ During the following years, Chinese commodities were incorporated into Western-dominated long-distance commerce, turning Manila (called Intramuros, the walled city) into one of the major Chinese cities of Southeast Asia.¹¹⁴

In this context of creating new imperial circuits and networks, the Society of Jesus became actively involved in the cultural and religious assimilation of the Iberian Eastern realms-both Spanish and Portuguese.¹¹⁵ The Jesuits arrived at the Philippines on 1581 from New Spain, shortly after the first Augustinians (1565) and the Franciscans (1578), respectively, in response to a plea addressed to the Spanish crown by the treasurer Guido de Lavezaris (in office 1572–75) to spread the Christian faith and defend Spanish imperial interests in the remote East Indies.¹¹⁶ As is well known, the lion’s share went to Franciscans and the Augustinians, while the Jesuits received the poorest and least populated areas of the Visayas – the islands of Samar and Leyte.¹¹⁷

Soon after, a “Pacific world” of great diversity and territorial dispersion became part of what Fernand Braudel (1902–85) defined as “world economies” (économies-mondes).¹¹⁸ Silver-laden galleons made their way across the mare clausum of the Pacific Ocean almost annually, which turned them into the most important source of revenues for the Spanish elites of the cosmopolitan city of Manila.¹¹⁹ In this mercantilist context of consolidation of what Serge Gruzinski (2004) denominated “the first globalization” (or désenclavement planétaire),¹²⁰ the Society of Jesus led the cultural and religious assimilation of the Spanish and Portuguese eastern kingdoms, helping to eradicate Mohammedanism from Luzon, the Visayas, the northern and eastern coast of Mindanao.¹²¹

In his influential Labor Evangélica. Primera Parte (Madrid, 1663), Francisco Colin, S.J., located the Philippines “extra Gangem,” that is, beyond the Ganges, hence in the extreme boundary of the empire.¹²² There is no doubt that this Asian-Pacific region was at the margins of the Spanish empire, but in relation to the southern islands of Mindanao, Sulu, Mindoro, and later on, the archipelagos of the Marianas, the Caroline Islands, and Palau (the present Western Carolinas), the city of Manila, in the island of Luzon, constituted the political, economic, and intellectual center of Spanish Asia-Pacific.¹²³ As Alberto Marcos Martín pointed out, Madrid or Mexico City were political centers, but other “centers” were endowed with their own political complexity.¹²⁴ Manila became the capital of the Spanish Asian empire for two fundamental reasons. The first had to do with the “internal frontiers” established in Luzon itself, where the Spanish separated the subjected Malays from those yet unconquered peoples; and the second, with the “external frontiers” situated down south, where the Muslim sultanates of Mindanao, Sulu, and northern Borneo obstinately resisted the presence of Jesuit missionaries.¹²⁵

The war against the Muslims in fifteenth-century Spain-the so-called Reconquest-was somehow replicated in the Philippines, where the Spanish seemed to have reencountered its old archenemy.¹²⁶ As a tragic opera in six acts, Cesar Adib Majul canonized the “Moro Wars” as a response to Spanish colonialism, imperialism, and Christian evangelization from the arrival of López de Legazpi in 1565 to the Spanish withdrawal from the Philippines in 1898.¹²⁷ Undoubtedly, the Moro participation in maritime slave raiding¹²⁸ and European rivals’ quest for colonial domination in the Asian Pacific¹²⁹ was often a pretext for waging war against Spain’s enemies. From a Muslim-centric perspective, Majul pointed out that the sultans frequently did not authorize their vassals to engage in slaving razzias-or raids-on the Visayas.  Still, they occurred, especially when the Dutch Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, or United East Indian Company)’s rising demand for plantation labor stimulated it at the end of the seventeenth century. Nor is it true that the governors general of Manila did authorize slave-trade along the Philippine coast, although at certain periods, fortress garrisons enslaved Muslims captured in war campaigns or in the form of corso under the auspices of the Spanish authorities.¹³⁰

Unlike the Spanish rulers of Manila, who were part of a highly centralized empire, the Islamic sultanates and smaller political entities in the southern Philippines and the adjacent islands were highly fragmented. This division of the Malaysian world, contrary to what Majul asserted, was not attributable to Western intrusion.¹³¹ Nonetheless, it conditioned the Society’s different strategies of evangelization, which took unexpected turns because of local/global particularities, namely, the eradication of Muslim piratical raids against Spanish vessels and settlements; the defense of sedentary Christian converts under the tutelage of missionaries and fighting for them; and finally the strength of diplomatic actions with Mindanao’s and Sulu’s sultanates. These clashes of early modern globalization demand a careful analysis of inter-regional connections and interdependencies across Pacific islands to ascertain how Jesuits forged a religious vision of global empires.¹³²

There is much consensus among scholars about the “multilayered connectivity” between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans.¹³³ Although it is true that this globalized world was more a vision than a reality, we want to bring religious connectivity to the foreground, thereby revealing the transpacific axis not only as a new commercial network between the Philippines and the southeast and western Mexican seaboards but also as a missionary and geo-political framework.¹³⁴ While most pioneering scholars of Iberian colonialism and “soft globalization” focused upon economic and cultural interactions within trading networks among Western Europe, West Africa, Asia, and the American territories,¹³⁵ we argue that global consciousness of spreading Roman Catholicism-ius predicandi-in the Philippines revolved around accepted boundaries of religious hierarchy and emplacement of the Asian-Pacific territories that initially were part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.¹³⁶

From the seventeenth century onward, the Catholic monarchy contemplated the Philippines islands as possessions of great strategic value in the Manila-Acapulco galleon route. This placed them within a global framework of colonial expansion and overgrowth. In this peculiar form of religious-colonial expansionism, the East Indies represented a significant space for what Manfred Kossok (1930–93) termed as a “missionary frontier” where other political and military powers disputed control of the native people and the territory.¹³⁷

In 1605, the Society of Jesus’s vice-province in the Philippines was granted independence from the province of New Spain. Immediately after, the first provincial (in office 1605–14), Father Gregorio López (1561–1614), expressed his deep discontentment to Superior General Acquaviva with the high cost of maintaining the conservation of the Moluccas.¹³⁸ As Sánchez-Pons pointed out, the Moluccas was not the priority of the missionary projects of the Philippines.¹³⁹ Instead, the policy of the Society of Jesus in the southern islands was to repel the attacks of the Muslims, consolidate Christianity in the Visayas, and initiate a slow but decisive penetration into the Islamic sultanates of Mindanao and Sulu.¹⁴⁰ Nonetheless, Catholic missions should not be understood simply as a compliment of Western imperialism, but rather as places where complex intercultural encounters with several logics were taking place.¹⁴¹

Following the contributions of Kossok himself, but also Herbert E. Bolton (1870–1953), and Owen Lattimore (1900–89), among others, historian Eberhard Crailsheim has studied the Philippines as a frontier region of an empire that stretched halfway across the world.¹⁴² These borderlands of the Eastern Spanish empire are not rigid lines that separate groups of culturally distinct peoples but ambivalent spaces, fraught with contradictions, where active agents played a fundamental role in transforming cultures. In short, frontiers are not fixed but rather dynamic and influenced by two-way relations, namely, a barrier containment and a contact zone.¹⁴³

However, it should come as no surprise that Jesuit official historiography, from Fathers Pedro Chirino (1558–1635) to Pedro Murillo Velarde (1696–1753), emphasized the notion of the frontier as a barrier containment rather than as a cultural zone, paying special attention to how Muslim sultanates from the southern islands of Mindanao and Sulu persisted in their trading-raiding system on the provinces of the Visayan islands while other state-sponsored Western empires (mainly Dutch competitors) began to encroach on the so-called “Spanish Lake” (1513–1607).¹⁴⁴

6.1       Trade, War, and Violence

In his 2009 article, Calvin Kendall underlined that “violence is the persistent subtext of the conversion of peoples to Christianity.”¹⁴⁵ However, as Ruurdje Laarhoven (1986, 1987, 1989), and more recently, Crailshem (2020) further highlighted, Spanish colonizers and Muslims were not exclusively driven by war.¹⁴⁶ Although antagonism and violence did exist, there were plenty of instances of cooperation and accommodation that led to the foundation of Christian missions. From the end of the sixteenth century, the island of Mindanao had been known for its natural resources, including wax, algalia (civet musk, an oily fluid of pungent odor), beeswax, gold, and, especially, cinnamon (caiu mana, or sweet wood stick).¹⁴⁷ Islam had been infiltrating the southern Philippines not by force of arms but through Muslim merchants transiting from Borneo along cross-cultural trade routes.¹⁴⁸ To counter this process of Islamization, the renowned Captain Esteban Rodríguez de Figueroa (1529/40–1597), one of Legazpi’s veterans, obtained a royal license in 1595 to conquer the Pulangi River Delta (or Río Grande) in Cotabato, the center of political power in Mindanao.¹⁴⁹ Accompanied by Captain Juan de la Jara, the Jesuit Father Juan del Campo (1563–97), and the Jesuit coadjutor Gaspar Gómez (1552–1622), the adelantado left Iloilo in February of 1596 with fifty vessels, 214 Spanish soldiers, and fifteen hundred native allies.¹⁵⁰ As Mallari already remarked, Figueroa’s expedition failed with dire consequences. The Maguindanaos, motivated by a desire for revenge, built stronger defenses and more ships to protect their independence.¹⁵¹

From then on began what Majul defined as the second stage of the “Moro wars."¹⁵² In the first years of the Spanish Philippines, Moro raiders established their strongholds on the island of Mindoro (Venduro, Bindoro, Mindora, or Minoro, as the name has at times been spelled), from where they launched attacks on Luzon and the neighboring Bisayan islands.¹⁵³ The “bloody sect of Mohammed,” in Chirino’s own words, was a strong competitor to the Spanish attempts to settle and evangelize the southern islands.¹⁵⁴ Incorporation into a supranational religion involved at least a nominal adherence to Islam. However, it was not so much ideological antagonism as a commercial rivalry that ultimately led to a military confrontation in the Visayan Islands.¹⁵⁵

From their arrival, the Jesuits enthusiastically participated in the commercial and evangelizing dynamics of the southern Philippines and reaching out to the Moluccas, especially after 1605, when the archipelago had been granted independence from the Vice-Province of Malabar, with headquarters in Cochim, appointing Father Alberto Laerzio (1557–1630) as the first Provincial.¹⁵⁶ Very often, this “cross business”-negotium crucis-concealed the pre-existing trade networks and the exchange of consumer goods between the Christian and Islamic worlds.¹⁵⁷

Historians Bunes Ibarra (1989) and Martín Corrales (2001) had already drawn attention to the construction of a single, stereotyped and negative image of monolithic blocks confronting each other in the early modern Mediterranean, emphasizing an antagonism between Christians and Muslims that veiled the commercial exchanges between Spanish ports and those of the various Muslim powers (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Tripoli, and the Ottoman Empire).¹⁵⁸ Contrary to James Warren, whose path-breaking study of The Sulu Zone denied that there had been a regular commercial interaction between the Spanish Philippines and the Muslim sultanates of Sulu, Maguindanao, and Brunei in the seventeenth century,¹⁵⁹ the truth is that trade and war coexisted in a heterogeneous set of societies of diverse political and religious backgrounds in the so-called “Asiatic Mediterranean.”¹⁶⁰

Horacio de la Costa, S.J. (1916–77), The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768 (1961), is still the most comprehensive study on the activities of the Society of Jesus in the Philippine Islands.¹⁶¹ However, Costa’s classic monograph focused mainly on missionary activities of the order, containing very few references to Jesuits’ collaboration with the civil authorities, especially during the military campaigns against the sultanates of the Moluccas, Mindanao, and Sulu.¹⁶² In theory, Jesuits tended to reach their goals: natives were evangelized and transformed into Christians by means of missionary activity. But in practice, Jesuits’ involvement in politics occurred, for example, at various levels, participating in occasional expeditions sent from the northern islands against the Moros.

Yet, although in his book Horacio de la Costa referred to how brother Gaspar Gómez, and Fathers Marcello Francisco Mastrilli (1603–37), Melchor de Vera (1585–1646), and Juan de Barrios (dates unknown), among others, participated either as diplomatic agents or as military chaplains in the armed expeditions led by the governor and president of the Audiencia de Manila, Don Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera (in office 1635–44), against the Muslim rulers of Maguindanao and Sulu (1637-38), the Jesuit Fathers looked more part of the backstage crew than the subjects of the play.¹⁶³ In this sense, Jesuit missionaries were not simply religious priests following a missionary plan within the framework of the Catholic Reformation but political agents endowed with extraordinary influence and decision-making power. Their direct involvement in power politics, not exempt from the principles of Tacitism as a moral and political discourse, turned them into key actors of decision-making structures in the Philippines.¹⁶⁴

6.2       Jesuit Diplomacy and Martyrdom

Given the complex interconnections between commercial, political, and religious aims in the Philippines, one aspect to be emphasized in Jesuit-Islam interaction is not simply war but diplomacy. A revisionist historiography of the Society’s interaction with the Muslim world has emphasized how Jesuit missionaries worked closely with Spanish governors general as informants and privileged political interlocutors in the courts of sultans of Ternate, Maguindanao, and Sulu.¹⁶⁵ One clear example is Governor-General Don Pedro Bravo de Acuña (in office 1602–6), who was about to organize one of the largest expeditions in 1606 consisting of some 36 ships, 1.423 Spanish troops, 59 Portuguese soldiers, and 1.613 native auxiliaries to reconquer the island of Ternate from the Dutch (heretics and intruders in Spanish eyes).¹⁶⁶ Undaunted by Spain’s previous setbacks, Acuña benefitted from coadjutor brother Gaspar Gómez’s information about the military strength of the sultanates of Ternate and Tidore, while Father Melchor Hurtado (1571–1607) and brother Diego Rodríguez (1559–1631) attempted to broker a peace treaty with Rajah Silongan from Buhayen (or Buayan) and Sultan Laut Buisan (in office 1597–1619) from Maguindanao.¹⁶⁷ Acuña’s well-armed expedition won over the forces of Sultan Din Burkat (also known in some accounts as Sultan Zaide), who, together with his son, was sent off to Manila in shackles as prisoners of war. The governor ordered to set up a garrison in Ternate while the Spanish Jesuits oversaw the spiritual needs of the Moluccan fortress and the native population.¹⁶⁸

Two examples of Jesuit involvement in diplomatic activities are the Mexican Pedro Gutiérrez (1593–1651) and the Aragonese Father Francisco Combés (1620–65). The first one, analyzed by O’Shaughnessy (1956), de la Costa (1961), and more recently, Crailsheim (2021), was rector of the residence of Zamboanga and acted as a mediator to various Muslim rulers of Mindanao and Sulu. He participated in the liberation of Recollect and Jesuit captives from the Joloan Moros.¹⁶⁹

The second one, well studied by Jean-Noël Sánchez, Alexandre Coello, and Jorge Mojarro in a forthcoming edition (Madrid, 2024), was a very capable Jesuit who arrived on July 7, 1643, to Manila.¹⁷⁰ After some time, he was sent to the missions at the westernmost part of the island of Mindanao, in Zamboanga, where he learned Cebuano and worked closely with Father Alejandro López. A year earlier, in 1646, Combés had been appointed chaplain of the fleet led by General Juan de Chávez to bring the economic socorro (mainly provisions, goods, and money) to the island of Ternate in the Moluccas, which allowed him to familiarize himself with the state of the Spanish forces in the distant Spice Islands. Adding this eyewitness experience to the continuous interactions he had with the officers of the Spanish forces in the fortress Real Fuerza de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza, in Zamboanga, Combés participated in 1648 in the expedition of Captain Pedro Durán de Monforte against Paguían Salikala, an unruly member of the Joloan aristocracy who was endangering the 1646 peace agreement with Muwallil Wasit, better known as Rajah Bongsu (or Bongso, c.1610–50).

In the same year, Father Francisco de la Roa (1592–1660), Provincial of the Philippines, expressly charged Father Combés, who was still serving as chaplain of the fleet, with the task of evangelizing the Subanos (Subanon) from the town of La Caldera, at the tip of the Zamboanga peninsula, to the coast of the town of Siocon, replacing the late Fathers Francesco Palliola (1610–48) and Juan del Campo (1620–50), martyred in Dapitan, northwest of Mindanao. The work of Combés was intense, managing to collect “the unburied bones of the latter’s companions.”¹⁷¹

In 1651, he visited the island of Pangutaran, northwest of the island of Sulu, where he was entertained by the natives, mainly Lutaos. He then took charge of the mission of Dapitan, replacing the reputed Pedro Gutierrez (1593–1651) as rector in residence (1652–55). In June of 1635, the interim Governor-General Juan Cerezo de Salamanca (in office 1633–35) sent Melchor Vera and Gutiérrez as chaplains to build a the new fort, the Real Fuerza de San José, is at the tip of Mindanao's Zamboanga peninsula. The latter’s reputation grew when he put their feet in Mindanao. As Crailsheim pointed out, Gutiérrez’s diplomatic skills allowed him to be on good terms with the Muslim rulers of Mindanao and Sulu.¹⁷² Furthermore, his connectedness with the Suban natives was so close to the point they even wrote to the governor of the Philippines pleading that he should never leave them.¹⁷³

Another case in point is Father Alejandro López (1604–55), the two-time rector of the residence of Zamboanga since 1643, who, on June 24, 1645, signed a valuable peace treaty with Muhammad Dipatwān Qudrāt (or Kudarat, better known in Spanish sources as Cachil Corralat [1581–1671]), son of Sultan Buisan and seventh sultan of Maguindanao (in office 1619–71) and other leaders of the Great River Delta in central Mindanao. Governor-General Don Diego Fajardo Chacón (d.1658; in office 1644–53), had sent the Jesuit priest together with Don Francisco de Atienza Ibáñez, the new governor of Zamboanga, at the court in Simuay, where the Muslim confederation was gathered, to keep a peace agreement with the Spanish.¹⁷⁴

The Jesuit was so much respected that Governor-General Sabiniano Manrique de Lara (1609–71, in office 1653–63) requested in 1655 López’s services again as an intermediary and chief negotiator. This time things did not turn out as planned. On December 13, 1655, Rajah Balatamay, the ruler of Buayan in upriver Cotabato, acted on behalf of his uncle, Kudarat, and ordered the brutal execution of Fathers López and Juan de Montiel (1632–55).¹⁷⁵ To restore justice and peace, Governor Manrique de Lara would be authorized to wage a “just war” against Kudarat as a response to a previous unjust action, namely, the martyrdom of Jesuit ambassadors.¹⁷⁶

In this regard, Eberhard Crailsheim argues that López’s insistence on the construction of that church and the establishment of a mission at the court in Simuay, together with the high-ranking chieftains (datus) and theologians (panditas)’s displeasure for the Jesuit priest’s proselytization, led to his death.¹⁷⁷ On the contrary, Majul takes a different view that blames the Spanish side. During the negotiations, Aragonese Father Combés also took on the role of translator into Cebuano of the governor-general’s letter that provoked Kudarat’s anger. Presumably, Combés was not able “to navigate the social codes of the host society,” to borrow Rubiés’s words,¹⁷⁸ but led to the Jesuits’ execution and to a new war against the Spanish authorities.¹⁷⁹

Be that as it may, after the massacre of the Spanish embassy, Kudarat called his neighboring sultanates of Ternate, Tidore, Makassar, and Sulu to arms in a jihad against the Spaniards.¹⁸⁰ In a context of internecine conflict, the Jesuits extolled their salient missionary efforts through martyrological narratives, hagiographies, eulogies, and engravings that circulated rapidly, playing a major role in the consolidation of a stereotyped and Manichean image of Islam as opposed to Christianity. Hagiographically transmuted into “Roman” tyrants, Balatamay and Kudarat represented the quintessence of evil in the Philippines. To borrow Clossey’s words, the Jesuit martyrs became a strong element of cohesion and identity that fueled a “sacred economy” of the global apostolic vocation of the Ignatian order.¹⁸¹

In the middle of the seventeenth century, powerful Muslim datus signed peace agreements with the Spanish through the mediating role of the Jesuits missionaries, provided that the preaching of Christianity was tolerated. At the same time, other chiefs carried on what Montero y Vidal coined as piratical Moro raids.¹⁸² These slave-raiding expeditions intensified after the Manila government decided to abandon the military posts in the Moluccas and the Jesuit missions of Ternate. Much more serious, however, was to dismantle the strongholds of the provinces of Calamianes and Mindanao (Tandang, on the eastern coast; Iligan, in the north; and, most importantly, Zamboanga, in the southwest) in 1662 and 1663.¹⁸³ As Jean-Noël Sánchez pointed out, the decision to abandon Zamboanga “was the straw that broke the camel’s back and the summary chapter of a century-long book about a globally useless struggle against multiple threats.”¹⁸⁴

The governor-general justified that “pitiful abandonment,” as Combés put it,¹⁸⁵ by arguing that the Philippines were under threat of imminent invasion by a Chinese corsair named Zheng Chenggong (in office 1661–62, also known in the Spanish sources as Cogseng, Pumpuan, and Koxinga, or Kue-Sing), which ultimately never occurred because of Zheng’s unexpected death on June 23, 1662.¹⁸⁶

This decision, which sent the Jesuit missionaries and the loyal Christianized Mardicas back to Manila, created a great deal of controversy in civil and religious circles.¹⁸⁷ The definitive retreat from the southern presidios put an end to the golden age of Jesuit missionary labor with the Muslims, giving rise to an increase in the corsair activities of the Malay Muslims that generated further instability in the region.¹⁸⁸ The Jesuits lamented the governor-general’s decision and voiced the protest to the Society’s superior general, Gian Paolo Oliva (in office 1661–81), insisting on waging a “just war” to protect the region’s innocents and recovering and fortifying the Zamboanga presidio to prevent the spread of Islam in the Philippines.

In 1665, after Lent, Father Combés left for Europe to negotiate these and other matters in Madrid and Rome.¹⁸⁹ For the bibliophile Wenceslao E. Retana y Gamboa (1862–1924), the objective of his Historia de Mindanao y Joló (posthumously published in Madrid in 1667) consisted of an apologetic and propagandistic device that denounced the abandonment of the fortresses of southern Mindanao and made known “how much the domination of Mindanao was important to Spain."¹⁹⁰ As Calderón de la Barca did in his sacramental ordinances, the Historia simplified the Islamic dogma and thus justified the (re)conquest of the southern Philippines.¹⁹¹ Father Combés elaborated an unrealistic image consisting of representing “Moros” as atheists or second-class Muslims and, therefore, potential Christians in the near future.¹⁹² As in North Africa, the Spanish entry into Mindanao was particularly limited and concentrated on the coastlines, marginalizing the island’s interior, which was never entirely colonized nor evangelized.¹⁹³ The Spaniards claimed dominion over these territories de iure, but not de facto. For this reason, Combés projected a mythologized image of a reality that, as Rodríguez reminded us, never took place.¹⁹⁴

In a system of territorial frontier occupation, recent publications have emphasized some aspects related to the martyrial phenomenon of Jesuit and Recollect missionaries at the hands of Muslim executioners (Coello, 2020; Rodríguez-Rodríguez, 2021).¹⁹⁵ An important set of studies have emphasized that Catholic enthusiasm for martyrdom (sanguine laureatus) and holiness grew as soon as the Catholics of Britain and the overseas missionaries began to die for their faith.¹⁹⁶ Rhetorically represented as victims of cruel and barbarous peoples of the New World rather than as invaders, martyrs were indispensable tools for missionary promotion and territorial aggrandizement of the Catholic monarchy.¹⁹⁷ However, rather than approach colonialism’s politics of representation as a unitary totality that simply masked, mystified, or served to rationalize forms of Iberian domination, “religious idealism kept the problematic Asian empire of Castile-New Spain, and in particular, the Spanish Philippines, alive."¹⁹⁸ In effect, we argue that the triumph of martyrdom meant to consolidate Catholic identity in a political context marked by harsh confrontations with the Dutch VOC and the Moros, who threatened the Spanish hegemony in the Asian-Pacific archipelagos.

It should not surprise us, then, that the Jesuit hagiographers and historians who narrated these events, such as Alonso de Andrade (1590–1672), Francisco Combés (1620–65), and Mathias Tanner (1630–92), projected in their eulogies a “theatrical” or “dramatic” dimension of the ideal of sacrificial death that turned the world into a battlefield.¹⁹⁹ The divine agency is explained by a cosmic war where Jesuit missionaries martyred in odium fidei demanded, in return, not only the confirmation of their heroic deeds but the declaration of a “just war” against the enemies of the faith.²⁰⁰

Concerning this cosmic battle, Ana Mª Rodríguez has recently analyzed the representation of the Navarrese St. Francis Xavier (1506–52) in Spanish texts. As she points out, his figure was used as an instrument to increase the prestige and dissemination of colonial endeavors.²⁰¹ In her book, Ulrike Strasser recovered a 2015 article to show how mimesis of the missionary spirit of Francis Xavier played itself out in the lives of two Jesuit missionaries in the Mariana Islands, who sought to emulate the ‘Apostle of the Indies’ long after his death and canonization.²⁰² She compellingly argues that “they were ‘virtual copies’ of Francis Xavier with a twist: while the original Xavier longed for martyrdom in vain, San Vitores and Strobach were able to shed blood for the faith."²⁰³ Ana Mª Rodriguez has applied this new line of inquiry to the Philippines, where a Constantinian discourse of conversion appeared as a point of union between governors, military, religious and Filipino natives.²⁰⁴ A guide of passion and violence that brought together its protagonists in a kind of mystical communion with a common goal: to reestablish the church of Christ in a land ravaged by destruction, looting, and death.²⁰⁵

Edification, (anti-Islamic) rhetoric, and Catholic propaganda were the subtext of Philippine martyrologies.²⁰⁶ The Ignatian compositio loci (composition of place) elevated Jesuit martyrs to the category of “moral heroes,” becoming symbols, models of spiritual mediation, and self-sacrifice for their Jesuit confreres in the spiritual conquest of the southern Philippines.²⁰⁷ Their lives, recorded by their hagiographers, brought together all the elements-chastity, courage, dedication, charity, prodigies, and glorious death-valued by the Baroque culture, allowing the Jesuits to crown themselves as exemplary missionaries of a triumphant and universal Catholicism. Their deaths were used firstly to demand the reopening of the presidio of Zamboanga, which according to the Jesuits, was essential to protect the Philippines from the continuous assaults of the Moros; secondly, to promote their beatification and subsequent canonization; and finally, to inspire others and foster missionary vocations, thereby contributing to a slow but decisive penetration of the Islamic sultanates of Mindanao and Sulu.

7. The Spanish–Moro Wars

The period between 1662 and 1718, which is not reflected in the six stages of Majul’s classification, combined slave raids with periods of relative peace.²⁰⁸ However, in 1718, Governor-General don Fernando Manuel de Bustillo Bustamante y Rueda (in office 1717–19) ordered the reestablishment of the presidio of Zamboanga after an intense lobbying on the part of the Jesuits that displeased the Recollects, afraid of the former’s increase in missionary territory, and Manila’s powerful factions.²⁰⁹ In his 2019 article, Coello studied the details of the dispute between the missionary orders within the framework of geo-strategic and missionary policies.²¹⁰ In 1718, Badar ud-Din (in office 1718–32), the seventeenth Sultan of Sulu, had granted a part of the territory he owned at its southern tip on the island of Palawan, where the fort of Labo was built, near the town of Balaba (or Balabac), to better control the rebellious Terongs-also called Tirones, Tiranuns, or Tiruns-from Eastern Borneo (nominally under Sulu rule).²¹¹ However, in 1720, during the interim governorship of Archbishop Fray Francisco de la Cuesta (1658–1724, r.1719–21), a Junta General de Guerra y Hacienda was convened to decide whether to leave it or not, concentrating its forces in the island of Zamboanga. It was the right decision. A year later, a combined Maguindanao-Sulu armada of 104 vessels and about 3,000 men besieged the presidio, but they were repulsed.²¹² Finally, the Spanish decided to abandon the military post of Labo. Shortly after, however, Fray Benito de San Pablo, the vicar provincial of the Recollects, regretted that as a result of this decision, the province of Calamianes fell into the hands of the Joloan pirates.²¹³

These ongoing attacks bring us squarely into what Majul defined as the fifth stage of the Spanish-Moro confrontation, that is, an Islamic holy war in the form of continuous wars and assaults against the Catholic imperialist Manila.²¹⁴ On December 2, 1720, the datu Balasi attacked the fort of Iligan with a large army of 3,000 Maranaos, Tirones, Camucones, and Buayanes.²¹⁵ During the following years, Moro slave raids increased because of British demand for south-east Asian slaves, which hampered the restoration of peace in the region.²¹⁶

Several historians have underlined the difficulties and adaptations that the presidio of Zamboanga entailed. In his remarkable book, Barrio Muñoz (2012) tackles the figure of governor-general don Fernando Valdés Tamón (1681–1742, r.1729–39) on the escalation of the fierce Moro raids in the 1730s, which led to open conflicts and confrontations on the Sultanate’s entrepot, at Sulu.²¹⁷ As a response to the spiraling violence in the region, Valdés Tamón organized several naval expeditions promptly dispatched to punish them, with no satisfactory results. For this reason, he reluctantly accepted to maintain the presidio while showing off his discomfort to increase the number of Jesuits in Mindanao.²¹⁸ Unlike Governor-General Hurtado de Corcuera, who unconditionally supported the Society of Jesus, Governor-General Valdés Tamón was in line with the Recollects. He never intended to colonize Mindanao nor to establish military bases or presidios in the region, but rather to (re)establish a fixed navy in the Visayas (the so-called “Armada de Pintados”), encouraging the local population to defend themselves against uncontrollable slave raids.²¹⁹

7.1       Ambivalent Identities: The Case of Sultan Mohammed Azim ud-Din I (1735–64)

In several works, Crailsheim has critically assessed that trade and diplomatic relations between Spanish and some of the Muslim factions did not cease entirely.²²⁰ In 1735, when Datu Lagasan, the son of Sultan Badar ud-Din Awwal I (r.1718–32), assumed the throne of Sulu, he became Sultan Mohammed Azim ud-Din I (better known in Spanish sources as Alimuddin (1764–74, r.1735–48) and succeeded his aged father.²²¹ As the candidate of the pro-Spanish party, he expressed his desire to send an embassy to negotiate peace with the Spaniards.²²² On February 1, 1737, a peace treaty was signed between the Sulu representatives and the Spanish authorities in Manila.²²³ Both sides promised to return all prisoners of war and respect trade. Imperial Manila offered military support in case of attack by a third party. But far from diminishing, hostilities increased.²²⁴ According to Retana, those expeditions sent to the southern Philippines costed “rivers of blood and silver."²²⁵

However, high-level diplomatic and military alliances prevailed. Azim ud-Din fought alongside the Spanish against the Tirones, rebel vassals of Sulu.²²⁶ The Dominican interim governor-general Juan Arechederra y Tobar (1681–1751, r.1745–51), and bishop of Nueva Segovia, demanded a public demonstration of his unquestioning loyalty to the King of Spain.²²⁷ On January 20, 1749, the governor-general welcomed Azim ud-Din to Manila. On December 1, 1749, the sultan was so impressed by the warm reception to declare his desire to become a Christian. Although Fathers Juan Anglés (b.1699) and Patricio del Barrio (1718–52), the Jesuit instructors in charge of the sultan’s catechesis and preparation, had openly distrusted his untoward intentions, the governor-general pushed hard to convert the sultan to Christianity.²²⁸

Indeed, Azim ud-Din’s baptism on April 29, 1750, was seen as a victory for the Catholic Church.²²⁹ In his 2013 article, Crailsheim analyzed the sultan’s baptism as a way to strengthen Spanish authority in the Philippines. Fifteen days of parades, music, and open-air celebrations, including “three days of masquerades, three days of bullfights, four nights of fireworks, and three nights of comedies,” were set up to commemorate the sultan’s new status.²³⁰ However, in spite of the one-sided nature of the Spanish sources, we can follow the movements of the sultan of Sulu to conclude that he was not a passive subject dominated by circumstances beyond his control, but a real actor playing on the local stage.

Crailshem offers a one-sided, unidirectional story of the conversion that does not consider the logic of cross-cultural mobility among Spanish and Malay Muslims in Luzon.²³¹ The truth is that the very act of traveling from Sulu to Manila did not seem to have transformed the sultan’s identity. The real intentions of the newborn Christian Fernando I remained hidden. In May 1751, the next Governor-General, Francisco José de Ovando (1693–1755, r.1750–54), decided to send him back to Sulu to resume his sultanate as a loyal ally of the Spanish king Ferdinand VI (1746–59) and the Catholic Church. However, while the deposed sultan was on his way to Sulu, the governor of the fortress of Zamboanga, Pedro Zacarías Villarreal, double-checked two contradictory and ambiguous letters from Azim ud-Din to the sultan of Maguindanao (or Tamontaca), Amir ud-Din Hamza (also called Muhammad Khair ud-Din, in office 1734–55), openly admitting that he had been forced to convert to Christianity.²³² As a result of the former’s disloyalty, governor Zacarías ordered to send him back to Manila in shackles.²³³

While De la Costa (1964) and Crailsheim (2013) offered a comprehensive description of Sultan Azim ud-Din,²³⁴ more work still needs to be done to grasp his political agency. To what extent he was motivated by a Qur’anic dissimulation or denial of religious belief and practice is difficult to ascertain. In Islam, Taqiya or taqiyya (literally “prudence, fear”) was a strategy by which Sunni Muslims and the Moriscos in sixteenth-century Spain, with Qur’anic sanction, could defend themselves from the Christian threat.²³⁵ As Crailsheim reminds us, Azim ud-Din “was a widely traveled man and well versed in theology.”²³⁶ However, while it is risky to say whether Azim ud-Din was following the same dissimulation approach or not, his maneuvering appeared to be part of an orchestrated plan to acquire military equipment with which to attack the Spaniards. As a result of his apostasy, he remained in prison while his younger brother Bantilan, now called Sultan Muizz ud-Din (in office 1748-63), unleashed maritime incursions and raids against various coastal settlements in the islands of Mindoro, Calamian, and Batangas.²³⁷

From 1752 to 1773, Sulu, Camucon, Maranao, Tirun, Iranun, and Maguindanao attacks multiplied in the next two decades. As Mallari pointed out, local defenses were largely neglected by the Manila government, particularly in the Bicol region (the so-called Bicolandia), stretching down the southeastern extremity of the island of Luzon, where Moro marauders shifted their target from naval shipyards to coastal communities.²³⁸ But it was in 1754 that these raids in pursuit of captives reached their peak.²³⁹ The new governor-general of the Philippine Islands, Don Pedro Manuel de Arandía y Santisteban (1699–1759, r.1754–59), placed a Jesuit missionary, “father-commander” José Ducós (1724–60), stationed in the residence of Iligan, at the head of the Spanish squadron known as the Iligan fleet. As Crailsheim points out, Ducós was a vivid example of how Jesuits participated actively in defensive and offensive military tasks. Between June and August of 1754, Father Ducós participated in several skirmishes against the Maranao warriors. In 1755, the central government of Manila authorized the construction of the Misamis fort and placed it under the direction of Father Ducós. As Bernard pointed out, the fort was strategically located: it was built upon a tongue of land commanding the entrance to the Panguil River, from where the Maranaos ravaged the Christian villages and enslaved the population of the islands.²⁴⁰ Spanish missionaries and officials worked in tandem to punish the Sulu, Tirun, and Maranao raiders who plundered the Philippine coastline. Ducós’ military deeds run parallel to those of Jesuit missionaries in the Paraguayan reducciones, where Jesuit-Guarani troops proved to be indispensable to stop Paulist raids in the borderlands of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.²⁴¹ Crailsheim notices that the “propagandistic machinery” was put in motion in the context of anti-Jesuitism. In 1754 and 1755, two Jesuit booklets were printed to emphasize the military value of the Society of Jesus, thereby demonstrating their unquestionable loyalty to the Spanish crown.²⁴²

Peace agreements were also given a chance in the decades leading up to the Jesuits’ dramatic expulsion from Spain and its overseas territories in 1767. In 1755, trade was reestablished between both sides, but the pressure of many anti-Spanish datus ended up breaking it.²⁴³ Compared with the previous decade, the following years were a haven of peace and calm in the middle of the storm. However, things got considerably worse on September 24, 1762, when Manila was occupied by the British army under the command of General William Draper (1721–87) in the context of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63).²⁴⁴ Taking advantage of British presence and friendship, Muslim raids and encounters increased exponentially.²⁴⁵

The formally repented Azim ud-Dim, who had taken communion on March 17, 1755, and married his former concubine following the death of his first wife, showed once again his ambivalent face. As the British occupation progressed, he was placed as commander of an important part of the Spanish fortifications. At the first opportunity, the sultan surrendered himself and his post to the enemy, and an English officer gave him a ship with which he reached his native Sulu, turned into a rising “port-polity,” to reclaim the throne from his nephew Bantilan, who stepped aside without a fight.²⁴⁶ Finally, the Jesuits’ mistrust was well-founded. Azim ud-Dim expressed his gratitude to the British, sending them letters that granted them the northern coast of Borneo and the islands of Tulayan and Balambangan, which were under Sulu sovereignty.²⁴⁷ The sultan was escorted back to Sulu, where he was formally reinstalled in June of 1764 after returning to Islam. He ruled until 1774 when his son Muhammad Israel I (in office 1778–91) took over.²⁴⁸

A further point that should be made is that the sultan was not punished because of his apostasy. As Crailsheim acutely notes, although abandonment of Islam was severely punishable, it seemed not to have particularly mattered.²⁴⁹ If Muslim sultanates were not a centralized power but highly fragmented, to what extent did the three-century Spanish-Moro conflict nurture an Islamic consciousness that sustained their wars and raids throughout the centuries? External threats had the potential to impact the internal cohesion of communities and strengthen a self-conscious oppositional identity-a sense of “Morohood," in McKenna’s words-against Western colonialism, whether Spanish, Dutch, or British.

To conclude, excellent scholarship on the Jesuit history of the eighteenth-century Philippines has been done. Still, little work has been undertaken on the relations between Jesuit missionaries and some of the Maguindanao datus, which were not completely hostile. Tamontaca was a center of considerable interaction between Muslims and Christians. Despite evident prejudices and open antagonism of Jesuits like Fathers Juan Anglés and Patricio del Barrio, some others, like Father José Villielmi (Josef Wilhelm [1710–48]), were highly esteemed by Azim ud-Dim for his knowledge of the Arabic language.²⁵⁰ Missionaries were not simply agents of an imperialist program but also ethnographers in the cultural dialogue.²⁵¹ Learning about Islam culture, traditions, and language brought enemies closer together. Further research should explore how Jesuits adapted their religious and political principles to local particularities in constructing imperial hegemonies in such intercultural contexts as the Philippines.

8. Conclusion

The present study contributes to understanding Jesuit-Islam interaction in Asian-Pacific territories and the origins of modern globalization in Iberian colonial empires from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. One of the primary tasks in writing about the global consciousness of the Jesuit’s enterprise is evaluating the limits of the “cultural dialogue” established between moral universalism, on the one hand, and local contextualities centered on natural and cultural diversity, on the other. As a matter of principle, Christianity was intolerant of religious diversity, precisely because Christian universalism asserted the historical and moral unity of humankind in religious terms. The Jesuit innovation lay in creating a new sort of “Christian empire” based on inclining, not forcing, human wills.²⁵² In the Moluccas and the Philippines, military confrontation against the Muslim sultanates was a recurring theme that overlooked other aspects, such as the circulation of knowledge, diplomacy, and commercial exchanges. Therefore, if Malay Muslims were not passive but responded to Western incursions and initiatives, a less empire-focused, Eurocentric, perspective is necessary when analyzing the dynamics of imperial boundaries.²⁵³

While initially, the scholarship on the Jesuit interactions with Islam in the Persian Gulf and South Asia had been conditioned by propagandistic narratives or coeval perceptions of the missions sent to Mughal India, Bijapur or Safavid Persia as fiascos, the contributions of early twentieth-century erudite Jesuit scholars, often missionaries stationed in India, who had privileged access to sources (including some which are now lost) and whose analysis tended to depart from religious apologetics, gradually paved the way to a reassessment of these mission fields. Building upon these works, during the last three decades, several non-Jesuit scholars explored these missions to assess their connections to local or global social, political, and cultural processes. This historiographical turn, which reflects the emergence of a New Imperial History and New Cultural History informed by anthropological and sociological frameworks, has reviewed the Jesuit experiences with different Islamic polities and societies by focusing on their implications to cross-cultural interactions, especially as laboratories of cultural transformation or as platforms for intercultural diplomacy.