Once past Madeira and the Canary Islands, the carracks were threateningly accompanied for a short distance by two French ships, which then sailed away without taking hostile action as they headed for the Brazilian coast to take advantage of the favorable winds. They crossed the equator after a month of sailing and steered southeast toward the Cape of Good Hope.
When on deck, observing the sky by day and contemplating the stars by night, Ricci thought over what he had learned in the astronomy course at the Roman College. It was generally accepted that the earth was round at the end of the sixteenth century, and the Jesuit had the opportunity to see the proof—something which was self-evident to seafarers—for himself. A note in the margin of one of the maps drawn in China referred to his observation during the voyage that the north and south pole stars were the same height above the horizon.8
Leaving the islands of Cape Verde behind them, the ships arrived in June at the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost tip of the African continent, lashed by gales and high seas. Bartolomeu Dias, the first to sail those perilous waters in 1488, called it Cabo Tormentoso, the Stormy Cape, a name that the king chose to change on his return to Portugal into Cabo da Boa Esperança, a reference to his hopes of discovering the long-sought sea route to India.
Having rounded the cape, the carracks entered the Indian Ocean and stopped for a stay of six weeks at Mozambique, where the Portuguese had a trading outpost, on the mainland facing the island of Madagascar. The sailors replenished the stores of food and water, and the merchants loaded a few hundred slaves for sale on the Eastern markets. The small fleet resumed its voyage in August, sailing around the Horn of Africa to head across the Indian Ocean for Goa. While the ship faced the last stretch of open sea, Ricci was unaware that Chinese navigators had made the same trip various times starting from the opposite direction nearly two centuries before on junks far more imposing than the Portuguese ships. By order of Yongle, the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, who reigned from 1403 to 1424, six voyages of exploration led by Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch remembered as the greatest admiral in Chinese history, arrived as far as the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the coasts of Kenya. A seventh expedition was organized to the same lands during the reign of Xuande and was completed in 1433. The sailors caught zebras, leopards, and giraffes in Africa and brought them back to the court as weird and wonderful trophies, an event recorded in the dynastic chronicles. According to historical reconstructions, the Chinese fleets of the time were of a size inconceivable for Westerners and presented technical characteristics clearly superior to those of any other country. The expeditions commanded by Zheng He were in fact made up of hundreds of vessels and carried between twenty and thirty thousand passengers, including mounted troops, interpreters, government officials, and physicians. The ships were already fitted with watertight compartments and carried all possible provisions as well as fresh water in special tanks. The junks on which the dignitaries traveled were gigantic. While the length of one hundred meters suggested by some scholars has been challenged as excessive, it can reasonably be asserted that the largest vessels reached up to sixty meters and were equipped with three decks and four or five masts.9 Even on the most conservative estimates, they were far more impressive than any Portuguese carrack or galleon of the late sixteenth century.10 Moreover, the Chinese ships were also equipped with a rudimentary compass consisting of a magnetic needle on a floating support in a container filled with water, an instrument whose invention is regarded by many historians as yet another instance of Chinese superiority over Europe. The first description of the magnetic needle as an aid for navigation is in fact to be found in a Chinese document of the twelfth century, and even though this period coincides more or less with the first appearance of the device on ships in the West, its use on Chinese junks appears to have begun long before. One established fact is that the Chinese had known the properties of magnetite, the material used to make the compass needle, since the earliest times, as there are records of spoon-shaped instruments on bronze supports very similar to primitive compasses used by geomancers in magical and divinatory practices long before the Christian era.
Despite their considerable advantage over the West in the nautical field, the Chinese lost their maritime supremacy immediately after the last expedition and the death of Zheng He, when the emperor decided to dismantle the fleet and put an end to the great voyages of exploration. The serious threat of the Mongols from the North, which necessitated the mobilization of ever-greater military and economic resources while the imperial coffers were increasingly impoverished, and competition from private expeditions, which had taken control of the most lucrative branches of trade, had made maritime undertakings on such a scale unfeasible. No imperial fleet had since sailed west across the seas, and a century later it was Portuguese ships that set sail for the East in search of new markets.
In India
After the last month of uninterrupted sailing, the Portuguese carracks arrived on the western coasts of India to the great rejoicing of many passengers exhausted by their long voyage.11 Ricci disembarked in Goa on September 13, 1578.
Standing on a site separated from the mainland by a series of lagoons, the city was the first outpost of Portugal’s dominions in the East, conquered in 1510 by the Portuguese navigator and military leader Afonso de Albuquerque, one of the major architects of imperial expansion, who wrested it from the sultan of Bijapur after massacring nearly all of the native population. The hinterland was still under the control of the Muslim ruler, who mounted an unsuccessful siege to regain the city just a few years before Ricci’s arrival.
Before creating the outpost of Goa, Albuquerque had occupied the island of Socotra in the Gulf of Aden in 1506, Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf the following year, and Malacca, a tributary of China now belonging to Malaysia, in 1511, after being appointed viceroy of the Indies in 1508. Despite their rapid expansion, the Portuguese did not seek to conquer territories in the interior of the countries reached by sea but only to control coastal cities serving as stopping points for their trading routes. Other Portuguese commanders built harbors and fortresses in Ceylon, Sumatra, and Japan, and first arrived in China in 1515, later establishing a permanent settlement at Macao near Canton.
From the East, merchants imported goods for which there was great demand in the West. Eagerly sought after to preserve and flavor food, spices such as pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger were considered as precious as gold and silver. Then there were all the other exotic goods like rhubarb, ginseng, scented wood, pearls, jade and turquoise, tea, hides, and typical Chinese products, above all the porcelain, lacquer, and silk famed in the West since the time of the Roman Empire. Even though the secret of silk manufacturing had been prized out of the Chinese as early as the fifth century ad and silk was now produced by other Middle Eastern and European countries, the Chinese variety was the most coveted, especially if worked or embroidered.
Goa was a typical trading city, bustling and cosmopolitan, inhabited by three to four thousand Portuguese; merchants of various nationalities including Persians, Arabs, Turks, and some Venetians; and Jesuit, Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian missionaries, who arrived directly from Europe or from other places in the East. The local population, of the Muslim or Hindu persuasion, was over twice the size of the foreign contingent.
Alongside the markets—where goods of every kind from every part of India and the other Portuguese possessions were sold, including African slaves—stood numerous monasteries and fifty churches. The first was built by the order of Albuquerque and was dedicated to Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of the city.
Goa was governed by a viceroy appointed in Lisbon with a mandate for the Portuguese dominions in India, and by a council of Portuguese nobles and heads of the trading companies. Watch was kept over religious orthodoxy by the local tribunal of the Inquisition under the intransigent guidance of Bartolomeu da Fonseca, who boasted of having filled the soi
l with the bones of heretics. The year of Ricci’s arrival alone saw seventeen burned at the stake after being forced to parade through the streets in macabre processions clad in tunics impregnated with sulfur. Many were “New Christians,” members of Jewish families who were forced to embrace Christianity after the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal in 1497.12
Ricci was received into the Jesuit College of Saint Paul, founded forty years earlier by Saint Francis Xavier, whose remains lay in the adjoining church. He resumed his theological studies and taught Greek and Latin to the older pupils at the mission school, attended by over four hundred local children and adolescents. Many of these were orphans, entrusted to the Jesuits in accordance with customary practice and inculcated by them with Christian values.
Living in Goa, Ricci realized that the Hindu and Muslim populations were being forcibly coerced into conversion. The city’s Hindu temples had been destroyed by the Portuguese soldiers in 1540, and a law prohibited Christians from having “infidel” servants, thus obliging whoever needed to work with the Portuguese to become Catholic. Moreover, all converts were required to abandon their caste and customs, take a Portuguese name, and adopt Western dress. The situation in which Ricci found himself in that world of blurred boundaries between the sacred and the secular, where religion was mixed up with trafficking, war, coercion, and death, was a far cry from any idea of a mission he may have formed during his years at the Roman College. The harrowing experience of having to adapt to such an extreme reality, as well as to the torrid climate, something still harder to bear for a physique already sorely tried by a long voyage, weakened him to the point where he fell seriously ill. In order to hasten his recovery, the Jesuit authorities transferred him to the town of Cochin on the Indian coast south of Goa, where he stayed for nearly a year, continuing to study theology and to teach Latin and Greek to pupils of the local Jesuit school. It was in Cochin that Ricci was ordained into the priesthood three months before his twenty-eighth birthday and celebrated his first mass on July 26, 1580, as he related in a letter to Ludovico Maselli a few months later: “And on the feast of Saint Ann I sang a solemn mass to the great rejoicing of the fathers and my pupils.”13
In the same letter, written three years after his departure from Italy, Ricci spoke to the superior, whom he recalled with filial affection, of his nostalgia for the time he had spent in Rome:
I cannot say what things I imagine at times and how they arouse in me a certain sort of melancholy . . . thinking that the fathers and brothers I loved and love so much at the college, where I was born and raised, might forget me while I hold them all so fresh in my memory. And so one of the good prayers I say with many tears in my misery is to remember you, Most Reverend Father, and the other fathers and brethren at the college.14
Ricci returned to Goa at the end of 1580 in order to attend the second- and third-year courses in theology while waiting to be assigned to a mission. Many changes had taken place in the meantime. In 1578, two years earlier, Sebastian I had been killed in the battle of Alcázarquivir against the Turks, and Portugal too had come under the rule of Philip II of Spain while Ricci was in Cochin. This dynastic change was to have no effect on trade or the life of the missions in the East, as it had been decided that the division into areas of Spanish and Portuguese influence would remain in force in accordance with prior agreements.
Ricci was also informed about the fate of the companions who had already left the college in Goa. The previous year, after a few months on the coast of Malabar, Michele Ruggieri had received orders to go to Macao and await a favorable opportunity to gain entry into China. Rodolfo Acquaviva was on a mission with two companions at the court of Akbar, the Muslim ruler of the immense Mughal empire15 in the northern part of India, where he was to stay for three years in an attempt to open the way for Christianity. On his return, when Ricci had already left, the young Acquaviva, now head of the mission at Salcette near Goa, was to be killed, together with four other Jesuits, by natives. According to historical reconstructions of the event which took place in 1583, the cause of the attack was a hatred for priests due to the destruction of hundreds of Hindu temples by Portuguese soldiers and to ill-considered manifestations of contempt for the local religion on the part of one of the missionaries.16
“Chinese in China”:
Valignano’s Policy of Cultural Accommodation
Ricci felt useless in Goa and longed for nothing more than to begin his missionary work. Despite the commitment he put into his work, he derived no satisfaction from the teaching of Latin and Greek grammar, a task that he could not get out of17 and which he performed solely through a “spirit of obedience,” as he confessed in a letter of November 25, 1581, to Claudio Acquaviva,18 who had been appointed Superior General of the Company of Jesus just a few months earlier.19 Writing to superiors was one of the duties that missionaries were required to perform on a regular basis in order to provide information about the countries in which they lived and to report on their activities, as well as to express doubts or ask for support. Of the fifty-four letters that have survived out of the unquestionably much larger number sent to Europe by Ricci, twelve are addressed to Superior General Acquaviva and cover the entire period of his mission. In the first letter from Goa, Ricci not only congratulated his superior on his recent appointment but also took the opportunity to express some views about a recent decision taken by his superiors with which he disagreed, a somewhat courageous step for a member of an order insisting on absolute and unquestioning obedience.
The Jesuit authorities had forbidden Indians who were studying for the priesthood from attending the courses on philosophy and theology so as to avoid them becoming “overly proud of their learning” and refusing to work among the poorer sections of the indigenous population. Ricci explained the grounds for his dissent in a number of points. If the reason given for denying access to the advanced courses were valid, he argued, then it would hold also for the novices educated in Europe, to whom the entire syllabus was instead open. Moreover, as he bluntly asserted, not all of the European brethren who had studied philosophy and theology put their knowledge to the best use. A staunch defender of the role of culture in the process of evangelization, Ricci maintained that the restrictions imposed on Indians would have the sole effect of “fostering ignorance in the ministers of the Church in a place where knowledge is so necessary.” As he pointed out, the Indian novices were “in any case to become priests and to have souls in their keeping, and it hardly seems appropriate, among so many sorts of unbelievers, for priests to be so ignorant that they are unable to answer an argument or to put one forward in order to confirm themselves and others in our faith, unless we wish to hope for miracles where none are necessary.” He concluded his plea with the point closest to his heart, namely that preventing the locals from studying “letters” lest they should become “swellheaded” only brought the risk of incurring hatred and obtaining insincere and short-lived conversions.20
These frankly expressed observations highlight the principles upon which Ricci intended to base his missionary work. His convictions with regard to the importance of “knowledge” formed during his years at the Roman College were certainly strengthened in Goa, where he saw for himself how the methods used by the Portuguese soldiers to conquer markets and the coercion imposed on the population to convert them caused distrust, fear, and hatred. The young Jesuit meant to adopt a different method of proselytism, one that would follow the guidelines laid down by the Visitor Alessandro Valignano after his arrival in the Far East. While Clavius had been the point of reference for Ricci’s mathematical studies in Rome, Valignano was to become his mentor for his missionary work in China.
Born in Chieti in 1539, Alessandro Valignano graduated in law in Padua at the age of eighteen and entered the Society of Jesus at twenty-seven, four years after being imprisoned for wounding a courtier. Having held important posts such as rector of the College of Macerata, he assumed responsibility for the missions
in the East at the age of thirty-four. Of imposing physique and feared for his fiery temper, he was a man of acknowledged ability and charisma. Valignano arrived in Goa four years before Ricci and traveled a great deal through India. He reached Macao in August 1578 and stayed there for nearly a year. It was on the basis of his appraisal of the situation in the East that the Visitor devised a long-term strategy to increase the number of conversions. He was convinced that the missionaries should learn the language of the country in which they were to work, study its way of life, adapt to the local customs, and respect the local traditions unless they proved repugnant to Christian morality. Generally referred to as cultural accommodation, this missionary policy was considered innovative at the time. The Jesuit sinologist Pasquale D’Elia describes it as follows:
It was certainly not his intention to “Europeanize” the peoples of the Far East. What he wanted, and very strongly, was instead that in all things compatible with dogma and evangelical morality the missionaries should become Indian in India, Chinese in China, and Japanese in Japan. This held for food, clothing, and social customs; in short, for everything that was not sinful.21
During Valignano’s stay in Macao, his attention focused on China, the empire impervious to all foreign penetration that had already closed its doors on Francis Xavier and to all the Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican missionaries seeking entry after him. Anecdotal evidence of how much China occupied the Visitor’s thoughts is provided by the Jesuit historian and missionary Alvaro Semedo, who describes him as gazing from a window of the Macao College one day in the direction of the Chinese empire and murmuring, “Fortress, O Fortress, when will you finally open your gates?”22
Valignano knew that past failures had convinced most priests that the project of evangelizing China was impracticable, and that the bishop of Manila had reported to the Portuguese sovereign and the pope that only a miracle would make conversion of the Chinese possible.23 Even though he was the only one to think otherwise, Valignano was determined to attempt the undertaking once again, not least because he was convinced on the basis of evidence gathered over a long period that China was “a great and noble” country inhabited by “people of lively intellect given to study” and governed “with peace and prudence.”24 If it was to be won over to the Christian faith, it would be necessary to find missionaries prepared to adapt to the local culture and become “Chinese in China.”
Matteo Ricci Page 4