Until the age of seven he was instructed by Father Bencivegni in reading, writing and Latin. In 1559 his tutor joined the Society of Jesus and when two years later thirteen Jesuits arrived to found a school his mother enrolled Matthew as one of their first pupils. The college gained a reputation and in 1565 moved from its original house outside the walls to a new building and church in the centre of the town. Here Matthew perfected his Latin and learned Greek, not by rote but according to the imaginative methods his masters took such pains to devise.
As he grew up he looked beyond the walls of Macerata and learned something of the age he lived in. Two series of changes dominated Europe. The first derived from the fact that the Church, having failed in large measure to remain holy, had continued to demand the privileges accorded to sanctity. The vigorous north had rebelled and Christendom was now divided against itself. This earthquake in the old world coincided with the second important process, intervention from the depths of new and greater continents. Their chief colonisers, the peoples of the Iberian peninsula, had provided what they hoped was an answer to this dual challenge. The flower of Europe and all the resources of the new humanism had been mobilised by the Society of Jesus in an intellectual and spiritual crusade. Distinguished men of every nation had enlisted, at home to renew fervour, to teach and form a well-educated laity, abroad to circle the globe with missionaries. The Council of Trent and the triumphs of Francis Xavier already stood as the measure of their zeal.
As leaders of this enterprise, Italy partnered Portugal and Spain, whose troops occupied her northern provinces. Just as Columbus the Genoese had led a Spanish expedition, Italian philosophers and preachers now added glory to the Order founded by a Spaniard. The highest civilisation of Europe consolidated and refined the gains of the greatest military powers.
Revival was rendered doubly urgent by the aggressive hordes of the Ottoman Empire across the Adriatic. Athens had been repeatedly assailed by the Persians; the Roman Empire by their successors; now a militant religion and accumulated treasure greatly increased an age-old danger. On his accession as Pope in 1566, Pius V called for help against the Turk. Macerata, loyal and gallant, provided thirty-seven oarsmen for the pontifical galleys and a contingent of two hundred and fifty soldiers, two for every hundred of the population. Europe, unless she rallied to all that was best in her heritage, might suffer worse than religious schism.
In such a world Matthew grew up and sought his place. The early imitative wish to become a priest was ripening into a desire to serve his Creator. His father took it for granted that he would follow in his footsteps, but the boy felt drawn to meet the essential challenge of an age when God, it seemed, had such need of dedicated men. He asked that he might unmistakably be called, and his petition was not refused. After the first weeks of mingled joy and trepidation he was faced with a dilemma which prayer alone could not resolve. In what Order could he render most service? Instinctively he thought of the Franciscans. St. Francis had been born nearby, over the hills; the brown-cowled, sandalled friars whom he had seen in Macerata drew him by their humility and total abnegation. On the other hand, his first teacher, whom he loved and admired as a second father, had joined the Jesuits; several of his friends intended to enter the Society, he himself admired his present masters, so learned but always in an interesting way. He had listened to stories of their brethren abroad, in the wilds of America, Africa and India—stories which brought to life those rare alluring substances, alligator, spotted lizard, mercury and guiac, electuaries and syrups of hellebore and radix chinae in the two-handled jars of the apothecary shop, possessing more powerful properties the remoter their origin.
Very intelligent but also very affectionate: so he appeared to his masters at Macerata. First in his class yet favourite, too, with the other boys. At the age of sixteen a strongly-built youth, his well-proportioned, finely moulded head crowned by thick black hair and distinguished by searching blue eyes, he completed his course at the Jesuit college. Macerata possessed its own small university, with a law faculty, but his father decided that Matthew should study at Rome. He dismissed all talk of the priesthood. As the eldest son, it was Matthew’s duty to succeed to the family honours and a magistracy at Macerata. His Jesuit masters counselled the boy to obey: he was young and had still to make choice of an Order.
The journey across the Apennines to Rome—a mere hundred miles in space and two days in time—produced the effect of reincarnation: from a provincial town to the centre of Christendom, the capital city of the world, the Rome of Virgil and Horace, of the early martyrs and first churches. He stepped from a small closed society to the pontifical court, where men of all nations congregated, where their spiritual destinies were decided. His father had many influential friends in the Cardinals’ retinue, and his masters supplied him with introductions to their brethren, so that he entered at once the cosmopolitan city. He visited the Jesuit college and joined the sodality of Mary attached to it, a congregation whose lay members received frequent communion and attended discourses. While his studies were secular, he remained true to his vocation.
At the great university, in the faculty of law which had originated and reached its culminating point in the city, he became aware of how little he knew and of the fields of learning still to be conquered. He bought the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, a guide-book compiled in the Middle Ages which placed the monuments of Rome in the framework of Livy and Tacitus, adding many quaint legends. This in hand he visited the ruined arches and splintered shafts, among which new churches in a restrained classical style were everywhere rising. St. Peter’s was well advanced, but no one had yet dared to vault the dome, so that its uncrowned Greek columns in the form of a cross stood now as the symbol of those Tridentine reforms which Pius V was putting into execution with such zeal.
Florus, the second-century panegyrist of the Roman people, was Matthew’s other cicerone. He relived Rome’s ancient shame and glory and found in every sentence a prophecy for the Christian capital. “Wealth spoiled the morals of the age and ruined the State, which was engulfed in its own vices as in a common sewer,” while in another sense it was true now as then that “Not a single place in the whole world was left unassailed by the arms of Rome.” The book happened to contain a rare reference to those merchants who, by camel and yak, once shuttled silk across half the world to the imperial city, where it commanded its weight in gold: “Among the numerous missions from remote lands that sought the footstool of Augustus were envoys from the Seres.”
The capital decided his choice of religious Order. The parable of the talents assumed new force in this city of learning. If he had been endowed with a good intelligence, that gift must be used in the service of God; and the Order which above all others directed human learning to spiritual ends was the Society of Jesus. Father Bencivegni had led the way; his schooling, his mother’s particular affection for the Jesuits, all confirmed his judgment. On the feast of the Assumption, 1571, three years after his arrival from Macerata, he put aside Justinian and Gaius’s Institutes, knocked at the door of the Roman College and formally asked to be admitted to the Society of Jesus. A tall, imposing priest, Alessandro Valignano, who was deputising as master of novices, received Ricci and in a Neapolitan accent questioned him about his education and family ties. Then Ricci made the solemn promise to renounce the world, all possessions, all hope of temporal goods, and to live in any country where his superior might think him most useful to the glory of God and the good of souls.
Next day he entered the house of S. Andrea at the Quirinal, opened as a novitiate four years previously. In addition to the clothes he wore, now exchanged for a black clerical habit, his worldly possessions consisted of a threadbare coat, four shirts, some handkerchiefs and a towel, as well as three books: a Latin grammar, the Mirabilia and Florus.
That same day Matthew wrote to his father, making known his step and explaining that he could not deny his vocation. Presently he received an answer which confirmed him in his decision. When his
son’s letter had arrived, Giovan Battista Ricci had at once set out for Rome, determined to remove Matthew from the college. The first evening, on his arrival at Tolentino, he had been struck down by a fever which prevented him from continuing his journey. The illness was as violent as it was unforeseen: the angry father recognised in it the anger of God. He wrote to say he was returning to Macerata and would try to accept his loss.
During his first year at the house of S. Andrea Ricci lived as far as he could away from the world. The hawk was hooded and disciplined before being trained to serve its master. Learning was set aside and the novices alternated between prayer and menial household tasks, designed to foster obedience and humility. Nothing was permitted to interrupt that colloquy between the soul and God, foundation of a dedicated life.
The following May, convinced of his vocation and strengthened in his love, he consecrated his body, mind and will in the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In the late summer he was sent for a short while to teach at Florence, returning in September to resume his course of rhetoric at the Roman College, learning during these first two years the method which would permit him to profit from more advanced studies: the marriage of word and thought, the art of speaking and writing in the manner of Cicero, the sharpening of apprehension through clear expression. An exceptionally retentive memory helped him to excel as a scholar: after reading any page of a book only once, he could recite it without a single mistake.
He came to know the length and breadth of Europe in the person of his friends. They ranged in age from fifteen to forty, and came from Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, Flanders, Poland, England and Spain. The foreign students became his particular favourites: men of different language and customs, history and values, yet linked to him by a common overriding belief symbolised in Latin, the language in which they prayed and spoke to each other. They had come to Rome less for book learning than for orthodoxy, which one day they would take back to their own countries, many heretical. Those from France and Germany had suffered much already and by returning would put their lives in peril. His sympathy and open manner won their friendship, which he valued more than anything else at the Roman College. He was happier than he had ever been.
In 1575 Ricci entered on a new phase of his studies: philosophy and mathematics, Aristotle and Euclid. The more advanced course was taught by a young German, Christopher Clavius, the most brilliant mathematician of his day. From plane geometry Ricci progressed to astronomy and the movement of the stars, still taught according to the Ptolemaic system, and thence to the construction of sundials, clocks, spheres and astrolabes. He showed special aptitude for this course, winning notice as a mathematician of promise.
Out of school, he tried to foresee the life for which these studies were merely the preparation. During his novitiate, the victory of Lepanto had saved Europe from the immediate threat of Eastern conquest. The two great enterprises of his age remained: consolidation of Catholicism in Europe and its propagation abroad. As an Italian, should he choose the first course, his life was predictable. Not for him the heroic sufferings and martyrdom facing his brethren in other countries of Europe, but the tame routine of preaching or teaching, the handing on, with renewed fervour, of an untainted faith, later perhaps a professorship at the Roman College. A good life: even the best, were there not, for him, so clearly a better, a life combining action and intellectual pursuits, for both of which he felt himself equipped. Already in the person of the foreign students he had felt attracted by the challenge implicit in man’s diversity. He had been stirred by first-hand reports from missionaries in India, Japan and South America, amplifying the facts and denying the more frequent fictions of contemporary travel books; above all by the apostolic life of Francis Xavier. Conversion of the world’s new-found peoples, doing for Christ what He had done on earth: to that ideal he could give himself body and soul. Again the way had been pointed. Valignano, the Neapolitan who had received him as a novice, after a year as rector of the college at Macerata, had asked leave to proceed abroad as a simple missionary. The General nominated so gifted a man Visitor, with plenipotentiary powers, for the whole of India, and gave him picked fellow labourers. In September 1573 he had left Rome for the East. There were other signs, faint in themselves, but all concurring. Had not the apostle Matthew, at the customs house, worked among foreigners and later suffered martyrdom in central Asia? And, as though the baton had been handed on, he himself had been born in the very year when Francis Xavier died, gazing across at the coast of China.
To volunteer for the foreign missions was one thing; to be chosen and sent another. Intense competition meant that only men of outstanding spiritual, intellectual and physical stamina were selected. Ricci pressed his case over a period of years. At first his voice was drowned by others with more influence. He persevered steadily but unsuccessfully until the end of 1576, when the procurator of the Indian province returned to Rome to report and to select new missionaries. Ricci petitioned with renewed insistence and, to his great joy, was finally approved. In the spring of the following year the General of the Society formally assigned him to the Indian province.
In May together with other prospective missionaries he was ushered in to the customary papal audience. At the far end of a high pillared hall sat a man of middle height dressed in a long white cloth mantle, a fine rochet and a red pontifical mantellina down to the waist. His face, with blue eyes, aquiline nose and long white beard, wore an expression of dejected majesty. Silent by nature and rendered still more silent by the burden of his seventy-five years, Gregory XIII nodded to the young members of his favourite order, destined for those missions which he had supported and helped in every possible way. He spoke a few words, drily but affably, to each of them, warning them of the hardships which lay ahead, bidding them God-speed, and raised his hand in blessing. Behind the tired terse salutation Ricci seemed to hear another voice, another text: “Go out all over the world, and preach the gospel to the whole of creation.”
The way to India lay westwards. Not only did the Turks block the direct overland route, but the eastern Indies as far as the Philippines had been assigned by papal decree to their discoverers, the Portuguese. Missionaries in that area owed allegiance to the King of Portugal and, if they were not Portuguese by birth, had to submit formally to the civil authority at Lisbon. Moreover, they were obliged to sail from the Tagus in Portuguese carracks, the only ships plying a regular route to India.
In May 1577 Ricci set out by road for Genoa, and thence by sea to Portugal. Reaching Lisbon in midsummer, he was obliged to wait until the following spring before continuing his journey, the annual departure of carracks being timed to catch the monsoon in the Indian Ocean. He spent the intervening nine months at the great university of Coimbra. He lived at the Jesuit college, virtually a seminary for the foreign missions, growing familiar with a country, little more than a million strong, which was now tottering under a top-heavy, worldwide empire; quickly mastering Portuguese and reading theology in preparation for the four-year course he would have to complete in India. Here, as in Rome, he won friends easily: among masters by his intelligence, among students by his affectionate manner.
On March 24th, after a farewell audience with the young King of Portugal, Ricci and thirteen other Jesuit missionaries were accompanied by processions to the same harbour from which Vasco da Gama had set sail. While hymns were sung and prayers recited against the dangerous voyage, the party was divided between the three ships of the fleet, Ricci travelling on the São Luiz with Michele Ruggieri, a Southern Italian aged thirty-five who had obtained a doctorate in law at Naples University before entering religion. The São Luiz was a large two-masted four-decked carrack, with towering poop and prow, a clumsy transport vessel of some nine hundred tons. She carried fifty thousand crowns in silver, part to pay for the cost of government and garrisons in the East, part to be traded, as well as a cargo of woollens, scarlet cloth, crystal and glass ware, Flemish clocks and Portuguese wines. The human
cargo, soldiers, merchants and adventurers five hundred strong, were packed as densely and with less care in the interstices of the ship.
To the sound of cheering patriots and wailing wives, of trumpets and gunfire, the fleet cast off and set sail down the slate-grey waters of the Tagus. Five days out, on a southern course, they passed a French corsair off Madeira, but without being intercepted. For the first month, until they crossed the equator, the almost coffined confinement proved the worst of their discomforts. Ricci lived on deck, by day observing the Guinea coast, outline of an almost unknown continent; by night the new southern stars, disorderly chalkmarks on a blackboard, not yet metamorphosed into animal groups.
They drifted into the doldrums, where the stifling, unfanned heat melted the pitch between the pine planks and even the tallow candles on board. Putrid water and lack of food accelerated the outbreak of disease, turning the carrack into a hospital ship without doctors or medicine. The master’s whistle, blown to ask prayers for a new victim, became too frequent for notice. Mass which could have given their suffering point was forbidden in such infernal conditions by canon law. For the first time glib words like pain and self-sacrifice uncoiled themselves and struck.
In June, hugging the coast, they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and at the end of the month cast anchor, in the cool season, off the island of Mozambique, where a fortress, pitched among dunes, swamps and coral reefs, asserted Portuguese power. Here six weeks were spent, taking on water and provisions and a cargo of African slaves, big-lipped giants, their black bodies figured like raised silk by searing irons.
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