Introduction
At the end of his visitation to the missions in Japan, Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) was alarmed by the scale of the expenses incurred in evangelising Japan. In his report to the Curia in 1583, he warned his superiors in Rome that the mission’s future was in doubt unless a solution could quickly be found.Footnote 1 The visitor’s warning was meant to justify not only the demands for subsidies from Europe but also local economic practices which were not compatible with a strict interpretation of the order’s constitutive norms. In this text, I will look at the accounting documents as part of the communication processes which unfolded in this context between the Jesuits in Japan and their superiors in Rome.
The Jesuit mission in Japan had been founded in 1549 by Francis Xavier (1506–1552). It truly began to expand in the 1580s under the impetus of Valignano, who, noting the readiness of the Japanese to receive the gospel, decided to open schools in the south of the country. At its peak at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the mission counted around a hundred ordained Jesuits, both Europeans and Japanese, as well as several hundred catechists (dōjuku). The converts numbered as many as 300,000, mainly located on the southern island of Kyūshū, where some domains had entirely converted to Christianity.Footnote 2 It was therefore a “great machine,” to use one of the visitor’s expressions, the running of which required substantial funds. While the Japan mission was considered one of the most prestigious overseas, it was also presented as one of the richest, thanks to its investments in the silk and silver trade with China.Footnote 3 This image and reputation contrast with the accounting documents sent to the order’s Roman Curia, which paint a picture of a precarious financial equilibrium. This article sets out to make sense of this contradiction by demonstrating that the Japanese mission’s accounting documents were first and foremost conceived as essential instruments in the dialogue with its superiors on its financial management. This dialogue took place within the normative administrative and financial framework of the Society of Jesus, in which each of its provinces was, in principle, financially independent. As a result, the Japanese mission had to justify not only its incessant demands for money from Europe, but also its highly controversial involvement in commercial activities in the South China Sea. From the 1550s onwards, the Jesuits in Japan chose to invest regularly in the Portuguese ship (Nau do trato) that sailed every year between China and Japan. The Portuguese enjoyed a de facto monopoly on the supply of Chinese silk to Japan, as the Ming government had banned its subjects from maritime trade in an effort to combat Japanese piracy (wakō). Portuguese merchants served as economic intermediaries between the two countries. Japan and China thus continued to exchange silver, which newly opened Japanese mines were producing in vast amounts, for Chinese silk, prized for its fineness. Jesuit investments in the Macau ship were made possible by their close relationship with the merchant community in the Portuguese concession.
Few studies have been devoted to the accounting records of missionary orders in general, or of the Society of Jesus in particular, although in recent years several publications have addressed the financial and commercial activities of several mission fields.Footnote 4 This lack of studies is due as much to the sources’ scarcity (it is rare for a mission to have preserved its entire accounting archives) as to the relative difficulty of exploiting them. Accounting sources indeed need to be analysed with regard to both the institutional and socioeconomic contexts in which they were produced. Such proper contextualisation makes it possible to reconstitute the underlying administrative and financial rules specific to each religious order, but also to shed light on the exchanges and circulation of money and goods that the accounts underpin. The study of accounting documents allows us to delve into the daily lives of the missionaries, as well as the exchanges they maintained with Europe and other missionary lands, whose financial support was often substantial. In the case of the Society of Jesus, Paolo Quattrone has examined the development of Jesuit accounting practices in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, emphasising that accounts were not only instruments for measuring and allocating financial resources, but also a reflection of the ideas promoted by the Counter-Reformation, which the Society was meant to spearhead.Footnote 5 A few studies have analysed accounting practices within the Paraguay and China missions, but only during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from which more documents have been preserved.Footnote 6 In the case of the Japan mission, analyses have mainly focused on the financing of Jesuit activities via their investments in the silk trade.Footnote 7 However, they have rarely featured an analysis of the Society’s accounting documents themselves, nor have they examined these investments within the overall framework of mission financing between Europe and Asia, a point which seems essential here.Footnote 8
This contribution offers a detailed analysis of the catalogues, a type of source specific to the Society of Jesus. The catalogues were sent every three years to the Roman Curia and were an essential tool of the order’s human resource management. But the catalogues also featured a section dedicated to accounts, which this text will analyse in the specific context of the Japanese mission. This article postulates that the catalogues’ accounting documents were written by the Jesuits in Japan as a negotiation tool with the order’s Curia. By constructing its precarious dependence on its two main European patrons – the pope and the kings of Portugal and Spain – and omitting its local resources, especially income from the notorious silk trade, the mission was lobbying for a more lenient understanding of its funding strategy. I thus do not take for granted that the accounting documents necessarily reflected the true state of the mission’s finances but instead analyse their content within the context of the information networks where they circulated.
One particularity of the Japanese mission is that its sources of income were widely dispersed between Europe, India, Malacca, and Macau, while its expenses, too, were incurred between Europe and Japan. These resources needed to be articulated on different scales and disbursed at different times, so that the mission could both locally deploy the material and spiritual means for evangelising Japan and secure its position within a global space. While the historiography devoted to the first globalisation has rightly emphasised the multiplication of long-distance connections and the decompartmentalisation of the world, the catalogues’ analysis highlights the complexity of these connections through their breaks, delays, and maladjustments, which resulted more often than not in financial loss for the Japan mission.Footnote 9 This brings to light the limits of the first globalisation in its most concrete aspects and opens a window onto the material life of missionaries – and more particularly onto the pivotal role played by the Jesuit procurators, in charge of financial and material matters.Footnote 10 Finally, the study of catalogues reveals the difficulties which the mission faced in managing its finances between Europe and Asia. This raises the question of whether a religious order could devise and implement an administrative and institutional framework adapted to the specificities of missions operating on a global scale.Footnote 11 This contribution therefore highlights the limitations of the Society’s regulatory framework, which was resolutely Curia-centred. On the contrary, the picture that emerges from the analysis of accounting documents is one of missions left largely autonomous, at least at the local level.
The Catalogues of the Society of Jesus: Studying a Normative Accounting Source Essential to Missionary Action
The Society of Jesus is often presented as a “missionary bureaucracy,” owing to its orderly and systematic production of documents and its regular exchange of information between the missions and the Roman centre.Footnote 12 This normative framework was gradually put in place with the drafting of the Constitutions by the order’s founder, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), and their integration into the Institutum Societatis Iesu, the compendium of the Society’s internal rules, published in 1635 and revised several times over the following centuries.Footnote 13 Since the order’s founding, this undertaking has fuelled the image – positive or negative, depending on one’s perspective – of a highly hierarchical, perfectly coordinated order, capable of deploying its resources on a global scale. Today, however, this assertion is nuanced by a historiography that also highlights the limits of this centralisation by the order’s Roman Curia.Footnote 14 While studies have focused mainly on the administrative aspects of the Society’s internal regulations, this remark can also be applied to the financial sphere. There was indeed a measure of centralisation, insofar as administrative and financial reports from the various mission fields converged in Rome, but this went hand in hand with a great deal of autonomy for the stations established by the Society, a point that is not addressed at length in Dauril Alden’s seminal work on the finances of the Society of Jesus.Footnote 15 Each college was expected to be financially autonomous. It managed its own affairs, secured its own resources, and could not be forced to support less-endowed establishments, except in the case of explicitly dependent residences and houses.Footnote 16 This principle of autonomy, first conceived at the local level, was subsequently replicated at the mission level. Each mission was financially independent, and, in theory, no money could be transferred between them. There was therefore no overall financial integration within the Society of Jesus, no central financial administration in Rome that could have reallocated resources between the missions or steered their financial and economic activities.Footnote 17 On the contrary, the choice was made to decentralise such powers to regional and local levels, leaving much leeway for the missions and their establishments in handling financial matters, and conversely curtailing the superiors’ ability to intervene in that area. Missions had considerable latitude in the investments they could make and were responsible only for their own affairs. Local (rectors of residences or superiors) or regional authorities (provincials) made all the decisions, from spending to investment in local economic activities, which constituted a major source of income for the missions. While the general of the order had to be informed of the choices made and could express reservations, his opinions were not always heeded in the field.
Of course, this does not mean that the financial and accounting practices of missions and institutions were unconstrained by rules. As the Society decided to expand from its missionary vocation into an educational one, it faced the need to acquire a large amount of property to support its schools and colleges. This led the order to devise accounting standards which, mostly inspired by existing practices, were primarily intended to facilitate the administration of these properties.Footnote 18 The rules for procurators (the financial managers within each establishment and mission) contained in the Institutum Societatis Iesu enumerate the tasks they were in charge of, such as keeping different journals for money, goods, expenses, and receipts. They also emphasise the keeping of archives, to ensure the tracking of expenses and receipts over time, as well as the safekeeping of the establishment’s title deeds, to protect its rights in the event of legal action. These details testify to a persistent concern on behalf of the order with keeping its administrative records up to date, even if no details are provided on the method of doing so.Footnote 19 Normative Jesuit texts on this subject indeed did not appear until the first half of the seventeenth century, with Ludovico Flori’s 1636 accounting treatise, Trattato del modo di tenere il libro dopio domestico col suo esemplare. In this textbook intended for colleges, the procurator of the Sicilian province offers a rationalised double-entry system with a hierarchical set of accounts categorised according to their use and function; these were intended to be progressively aggregated to calculate the college’s profit or loss, while allowing for a fine analysis of its economic model.Footnote 20 It is not known whether Flori’s model was applied outside the province of Sicily before 1636. His accounting model was supplemented by administrative practices designed to add safeguards at both college and provincial levels with regards to expenditures. At the college level, no spending was to be made without the approval of both the procurator and the rector, assuring the alignment of the college’s material and spiritual interests. Control was next exerted at the provincial level, where the transactions and demands of the colleges were to be arbitrated together. This in turn ensured that the college’s interests could be coordinated with the Society’s overarching interests.Footnote 21 The order went on to adopt auditing and control practices. Periodic inspections of every college in the province were carried out in several provinces by the second half of the seventeenth century.Footnote 22 The province, meanwhile, was a financial entity distinct from its colleges and residences from the outset. As such, it had its own sources of income and managed its own expenditure. Its accounting records were therefore strictly separate from those of the establishments that made up the province.
Some of the province’s accounting documents were intended for transmission to Rome, primarily for information purposes. It was not the general’s intention to carry out a precise verification of income and expenditure, which would serve little purpose given the time elapsed between the drafting of the accounts and their reception in Rome – up to several years for the most remote provinces, such as that of Japan. In this respect, like the annual letters, the accounts formed part of the flow of information that the provinces were required to send to the order’s Curia, which was always eager to have precise, up-to-date information on local situations.Footnote 23 Accounting documents were therefore included in the catalogues. While the annual catalogues simply listed the Jesuit staff in each house or college with the occupations they held,Footnote 24 the triennial catalogues carried more information and were arranged in three distinct parts. The catalogus primus contained the names and biographical details of the Jesuits in the province, which were repeated in the catalogus secundus in anonymised form. Finally, the catalogus tertius or rerum reported on the legal and financial situation of the province. It was this last subcatalogue that contained the information needed for an overview of the mission’s financial situation at a given date. The catalogues were normally written by the mission superior or the visitor, but there was no standardised presentation of the catalogues, except for the catalogus primus, whose information was normally laid out in a table.
In the case of Japan, the catalogi tertii preserved in the Roman archives are our main source of information on the mission’s (not the establishments) finances, even if they were conceived first and foremost as an instrument for the dialogue between the order’s Curia and the Japan mission. Likewise, the catalogi primi and secondi were not designed to provide the Curia with personal details of the mission’s staff. The catalogues were meant to allow the Curia to assess the strengths – and weaknesses – of the mission, with regards to its staffing and finances. In contrast, the establishments’ accounts, which bear witness to day-to-day activity, have not survived, having likely been lost during the persecutions of the early seventeenth century – although in this respect, Japan is no exception, as local archives have also disappeared in other mission lands such as Brazil.Footnote 25 The information contained in the catalogues should be treated with caution, however, due to the very nature of the source. Written for the central authorities, the catalogi tertii did not record the actual income of provincial institutions, nor were they compiled to present a true balance of income and expenditure.Footnote 26 Their purpose was to help calculate the income normally due to the colleges (what they should receive in theory) and to provide a very general assessment of their ordinary expenses (which translates into round figures). Based on these expected revenues, the provincial could determine how many men his province would be able to support. The financial report in the catalogus tertius was therefore primarily intended to manage the order’s personnel, not its finances. From the perspective of the order’s Curia, the regularity of the information transmitted allowed for more efficient decision-making and better reactivity to the realities on the ground. From the provinces’ point of view, the transmission of accounts was an opportunity to inform Rome of their needs and difficulties, and to press for the assignment of more personnel and the search for new patrons.
In the case of the Japan mission, the preserved catalogi tertii cover a period from 1571 to 1654.Footnote 27 In this article, I will study the catalogues produced before the proscription of Christianity, i.e., from 1571 to 1614. The first three (1571, 1575, and 1580) take the form of lists of establishments and rents based in the province of India and they were therefore probably drawn up in the subcontinent by the procurator, provincial, or, in the case of the 1580 catalogue, the visitor.Footnote 28 Another catalogue for the province of India, dating from 1589, gives only summary information for Japan.Footnote 29 The first catalogue to deal solely with the Japan mission is that of 1582, compiled by the visitor, Valignano. The following catalogue (1586) includes information on the province of India. These two documents provide the most detailed information, at a time when the Japan mission was being promoted to vice-province and needed to demonstrate its ability to be less financially dependent on its Indian guardianship.Footnote 30 A summary list of the mission’s revenues, drawn up in Europe, was then produced between 1602 and 1605. This was supplemented by a Narração breve drafted in 1609 by the procurator of Japan, João Coelho, which provided more detail on the vice-province’s financial state at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This is the last known accounting document produced before the expulsion of the Jesuits from Japan. Whether in the standardised catalogues or in ad hoc reports, the accounting documents provide the same type of information. On the one hand, they list the mission’s revenues, i.e., annuities, income from land or from the letting of houses owned by the Society, and on the other, expenses, which include both the mission’s own expenses and those of each of its establishments. The accounts may also include an estimate of extraordinary expenses, i.e., those arising from unpredictable events such as fires or wars, both relatively common in the Japanese context. A balance of the income and expenditure was drawn up, allowing for the assessment of whether the province had sufficient resources for its operations. In the case of the Japan mission, the catalogues clearly show a mission with a precarious financial balance and a heavy dependence on external subsidies. They also reflect the dramatic expansion of the mission in the 1580s, with schools multiplying in the south of the country, at a considerable cost.
Between the Global and the Local: The Spatial Dispersion of Income and Expenditure
Mostly written by Valignano or under his direction, the catalogues were part of the visitor’s strategy to champion the East Asian missions in Rome. They were backed up by intense correspondence between Valignano and General Acquaviva, in which the visitor constantly referred to the Japan mission’s considerable financial needs and stressed the necessity of finding solutions in Europe.Footnote 31 The concise overview provided by the catalogues allowed the general to grasp these issues from the outset. Furthermore, they also highlight two characteristics of the Japan mission’s theoretical income and expenditure: the great diversity of their nature and their wide dispersion between Europe and Asia, which made the mission dependent on multiple intermediaries at various scales. The catalogues thus testify to the Japan mission’s integration into the economic and financial circuits set up by the Portuguese in Asia, on which it was forced to rely to ensure money transfers across the globe.
In the case of income, the catalogues first enumerate the annuities granted by the pope and the king of Portugal, each of a different nature and place of origin. They are listed first not only owing to their dominant share in the mission’s income. Indeed, they also ostensibly reflect the mission’s prestigious support from both the Portuguese Crown – under the patronage system, which associated imperial and religious interests even in the case of a land outside Portuguese control – and the pope. In the early 1580s, Pope Gregory XIII (r. 1572–1585) granted the Japan mission an annual annuity of 4,000 cruzados, deducted from bishoprics in Spain.Footnote 32 His successor, Sixtus V (r. 1585–1590), increased this to 6,000 cruzados early in his pontificate.Footnote 33 Papal donations constituted the mission’s largest resource, accounting for between one-third and two-thirds of its total income. They were presented by the visitor as fundamental to the survival of the Society of Jesus in Japan.Footnote 34 The second source of funding came from donations granted by the Portuguese Crown. The first donation came in 1554 under John III (r. 1521–1557), who offered an annuity of five hundred cruzados deducted annually from Malacca’s customs revenues.Footnote 35 In 1574, King Sebastian (r. 1557–1578) increased the amount to 1,000 cruzados.Footnote 36 Cardinal Henry (r. 1578–1580) in 1580, followed by Philip II (r. 1580–1598) in 1585 and Philip III (r. 1598–1621) at the beginning of the seventeenth century, made further donations, deducted from the revenues of his Indian estates and, starting in 1616, from the Malacca customs.Footnote 37
To supplement these donations, which were still insufficient to ensure the mission’s operation, Visitor Valignano decided to invest in land and houses in Macau and India, providing the mission with regular income from farming and rent. Such income was then either transferred to Japan or used locally to purchase products not available in the island country, such as wine, oil, religious objects, or books. The Jesuits in Japan invested mainly in properties in the Bassein (Vasai) region of India, conquered by the Portuguese in 1534 for its strategic position and highly fertile lands.Footnote 38 The order took an active part in the colonisation of India in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, a policy that was encouraged by Jesuit leaders to finance their stations not only in India, but also in the province’s overseas fields, starting with Japan. As early as 1574, Valignano mentioned the purchase of land in Caranjá (Karanja), on behalf of the Japanese mission, which yielded six hundred pardaus (540 cruzados) in annual rent.Footnote 39 Other lands (Ponvem and Condotim) were purchased at the same time, still in the Bassein region.Footnote 40 Finally, the last land purchase (Mulgão) took place in 1584 thanks to a donation from the pope.Footnote 41 In 1584, Valignano estimated that these various rents combined brought in almost 2,000 cruzados a year for the Japan mission.Footnote 42 Finally, starting in the 1580s, the order also rented out houses and stores in Macau donated by the Jesuit bishop of Macau, Belchior Carneiro (1516–1583), bringing in around two hundred cruzados.Footnote 43 In 1617, the Jesuits owned five houses and thirty-four stores in Macau, which yielded 772 taels, reflecting growing investment in the Portuguese concession.Footnote 44 If the catalogues are to be believed, almost all of the Japanese mission’s revenues were thus collected outside the country. They had to be transferred physically by sea to Japan, the system of bills of exchange being considered too risky.Footnote 45 The only income the Jesuits declared to have received locally was from the Macau ship’s anchorage fees in the port of Nagasaki, transferred by the daimyō (lord) of Ōmura in 1580 and valued at 1,000 cruzados a year.Footnote 46
Conversely, the catalogues highlight the weight of local expenditure by listing the sum required by each establishment (college, seminary, probation house, and residence) for its annual operation. This sum was not calculated on the basis of their observed expenditures. It was always an estimate, based primarily on the number of Jesuits assigned to the establishment and of their assistants (dōjuku and servants), whose subsistence (food and clothing) had to be ensured.Footnote 47 According to Valignano, the Company spent approximately 20 cruzados per year per person on fathers and friars; for every dōjuku, the Company spent 8 cruzados, and for every servant, 4.5 cruzados. The sums were intended to cover food and clothing expenses, without further details. However, they could be drastically reduced in times of financial troubles, especially on years the Macau ship was lost at sea (Valignano then mentions the sum of 4 cruzados per person, regardless of rank).Footnote 48 But the funds allocated to each establishment also took into account other types of expenses, such as alms to be distributed to Christians, purchases of various supplies, or those incurred during the missionaries’ numerous trips to isolated Christian communities. In 1582, expenditure for the establishments amounted to 10,420 ducats, rising to a total of 15,685 cruzados by the beginning of the seventeenth century, an increase that went hand in hand with the growth of the mission, which then numbered almost a hundred members, not counting the catechists.Footnote 49
On top of these regular expenses came numerous extraordinary expenses. Owing to the country’s political instability, establishments and churches were regularly burned down and had to be rebuilt. Relief for the people left destitute by war also had to be provided for.Footnote 50 The country had had no central political authority for nearly a century at the time of Xavier’s arrival – the emperor in Kyoto had long held only symbolic power, and the shogunate itself had become politically irrelevant – and wars intensified as the stronger daimyos managed to expand rapidly. A dominant central power only emerged in the 1580s and it was not until the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603 that Japan fully recovered its political unity.Footnote 51 More positively, investment of capital was also required to keep pace with the steady growth of Christianity in Japan, as evidenced by the construction of new churches. The lack of precise evaluation for these extraordinary expenses, together with the absence of separation between capital expenditure and other types of extraordinary expenses, underline the difficulty of planning the development of a mission at the mercy of highly unstable local politics. The 1609 document states that 7,000 cruzados were spent on the construction of a new church in Nagasaki, 5,000 on another in Arima, and 3,500 on those in Hakata and Kokura.Footnote 52 In addition to these one-off estimates, the 1609 accounts state that 1,500 pardaos were needed to build new establishments each year, and these are listed in the annual expenditure.Footnote 53 The local level thus accounted for the largest share of the mission’s total expenditure (from 70% to 87%, depending on the catalogue year). The catalogues thus reveal the fragility of the Japanese mission’s finances, subject to unpredictable financial emergencies owing to the difficult political conditions. But other costs, outside Japan, also added to the already precarious financial situation.
The catalogues indeed show that a significant proportion of expenses were incurred in Europe and India. In the 1580s, the Japanese mission spent five hundred ducats in Portugal on the purchase of various products (books, fabrics, etc.), 925 ducats in India (payment for supplies of oil, wine, ornaments for the churches, and for the administration of the Bassein lands), and 360 ducats in customs duties in Goa and Malacca on products shipped from India. Other lists, drawn up by Visitor Valignano, complete the picture – numerous spiritual books, spices (cinnamon, pepper, cloves, sandalwood), and various cotton and silk fabrics were to be shipped to the country each year – without, however, giving any details of the cost of these purchases.Footnote 54 According to the accounting documents, these out-of-Japan expenses account for almost 14% of the mission’s total expenditure, underlining the mission’s dependence on India as a hub for the distribution of goods and people from Europe to East Asia.
The catalogues thus draw a complex picture of the Japan mission for the Roman centre. It appears to have been structurally underfunded, a situation that worsened in the early seventeenth century. The silk trade’s income, presented as indispensable by Valignano in his correspondence, rarely features in the accounts – which may be justified on the grounds of its volatility and intermittence, as the Macau ship was lost on quite a few occasions. On the other hand, the catalogues paint a picture of a mission which was financially detached from its local environment and could only survive on external funding.Footnote 55 Indeed, the documents never mention the rents granted to the mission by Japanese lords, with the already mentioned exception of revenues from the port of Nagasaki.Footnote 56
The catalogues thus highlight a paradox specific to the Japanese mission. Expenses were mainly incurred in Japan, but income was mainly based in Europe or India, making the mission dependent on these territories for the collection and transfer of its income, as well as for the purchase and shipping of the various supplies and goods it needed. In addition, the catalogues provide a theoretical overview of the mission’s finances over the course of a year, anticipating the actual receipt of funds in Japan. At the same time, however, the geographic dispersion of income sources they highlight raises the question of how these different locations, agents, and temporalities could be efficiently articulated – in other words, the question of what kind of overall administrative framework was devised to manage the finances of the East Asian missions on so many scales, and to ensure that they received the resources they needed to continue their evangelising work.
Articulating Finance at Different Scales, or the Limits of Jesuit Missionary Bureaucracy
Upon reading the catalogues, one might conclude that the Japanese mission was managing financially, however precariously. But this would assume that all revenues listed in the catalogues were collected and transferred as needed, and that no unforeseen expenses arose either in Europe or in Asia. On this point, the catalogues are usefully supplemented by the correspondence of the visitor to the East Indies. In his letters, the visitor indeed discussed the difficulties involved in coordinating the resources and expenses of the Japanese mission at different scales. This required the coordination of various actors in Europe and Asia according to a rigidly constrained schedule, failing which the Japanese mission would fail to receive its funds and goods in time. A cross analysis of correspondence and accounting documents thus highlights the difficulties faced by the Society of Jesus in coming to terms with the global framework within which the missions operated, and in setting up an efficient administrative organisation to meet its financial needs.
The Japan mission indeed had to rely on multiple intermediaries to collect and manage its funds, which were scattered between Europe and Asia. In the case of royal donations, the money had to be collected from the Crown’s officers in Goa and Malacca before being transferred to Japan. This meant that the missionaries had to be on good terms with the various officials involved, whether they were the captain of the fortress where the taxes were levied, the stewards (feitores), or the officers overseeing the treasury (vedor da fazenda).Footnote 57 The extensive corruption within the Estado da Índia and the challenges encountered by tax-collecting agents are other factors that explain why the Jesuits in Japan did not always succeed in getting their due. Collecting the sums promised by the papacy was no easier.Footnote 58 On the contrary, the difficulties were indicative of the problems of managing missionary funds within the Portuguese Assistancy, which brought together the missions of Brazil and Asia. The official in charge of collecting and sending money to the overseas mission lands was the missions procurator, who resided in Lisbon. In the case of Japan, the missions procurator collected the papal donation from the court procurator in Madrid, since the money was raised from Spanish bishoprics. The office was also responsible for making various purchases for the missions (books and devotional objects, mass wine, etc.) and for organising the travel of new recruits to Asia or Brazil. Everything had to be arranged in time so that the required men, funds, and goods could be loaded onto the Carreira da Índia, the fleet that left the Portuguese capital around March and usually reached Goa by September.Footnote 59 Failing that, the transfers would have to wait another year. The timing of the collection and dispatch of funds was not easy to synchronise, so that the Japan mission rarely, if ever, received the annuities promised to it on an annual basis. What’s more, the voyage between Lisbon and Japan took an average of two years and four months, interspersed with stops that could prolong the crossing.Footnote 60 Shipwrecks were also not uncommon, and regularly deprived the Japanese mission of its European and Asian income. The shipwreck of the Santiago in 1585, off the coast of Mozambique, resulted in a loss of 3,000 cruzados for Japan.Footnote 61 Relations between Jesuit missions could also be a hurdle. The Japan mission found it often difficult to reclaim the money it was owed in India, where it had to rely on the goodwill of the Indian provincial procurator responsible for transferring funds. Despite the meticulous labelling instructions issued to ensure the proper tracking of the shipped money, it would sometimes go unaccounted for – when it was not simply seized by the provincial procurator to the benefit of the Indian missions.Footnote 62 Jesuit institutions in India faced their own financial difficulties and were indeed heavily in debt. The Japan mission thus found that its funds had been borrowed without its consent by its Indian counterparts on more than one occasion. Debt was thus created between mission fields, but the catalogues did not keep track of this.
While the Japan mission had limited control over its revenues from Europe or India, the same could be said of the expenses frequently incurred in its name overseas. The financing of the travels of Jesuits assigned to Japan is emblematic of these difficulties. The costs incurred by Jesuits chosen to go to Asia were charged to the Indian province’s account from the outset – including those incurred in Europe before they embarked.Footnote 63 The king of Portugal only paid a lump sum of 110 ducats per Jesuit to finance their crossing to India, but this proved vastly insufficient.Footnote 64 Expenses during the sea voyage were indeed considerable, if we refer to the lists of goods provided to each missionary for the crossing.Footnote 65 In addition to clothing, the Jesuits had to be supplied with sufficient food for several months.Footnote 66 These included fresh water, canned goods, smoked pork, biscuits, and live chickens (around a hundred per missionary).Footnote 67 Finally, the ships were often forced to winter in India or Malacca. The Jesuits would then stay in the local college until the next departure for East Asia, at a cost to the Japanese mission.Footnote 68 Indeed, it was a governing principle of the Society that “no free meals” were to be provided to a Jesuit.Footnote 69 The Jesuit’s college, to which he was administratively attached according to the catalogues, was charged for living expenses by the college in which he had temporarily resided.Footnote 70 All these elements justify the sums devoted to travel expenses in the accounts of 1586 (nine hundred cruzados) and 1609 (seven hundred pardaos), although the proportion devoted to them decreased between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, from 6.4% of total expenses down to 2.7%. These expenses were difficult for the Jesuits in Japan to control, since purchases and other expenses were made in their name without prior approval. They only received notification of them several years later, once the accounting documents had circulated between Lisbon, Goa, and Nagasaki. In the case of errors, recovering the sums wrongly deducted was bound to be a difficult endeavour.
The Japan mission had few means of verifying financial operations carried out on its behalf in Europe or India. In theory, its accounts kept in Lisbon, Goa, or Macau were supposed to circulate all the way to Japan just like the funds themselves, so that they could be checked by the mission’s procurator there and by his colleagues along the way. However, such circulation was obviously impeded by the slow and difficult crossings between Europe and Asia. The transfer of funds do not appear to have followed a specific schedule, if we refer solely to the papal annuity, which was not paid at regular intervals (and not always in a single instalment). It may be that each of these payments came with a certificate to be delivered to Japan as proof, but there is no mention of such document in the sources. In any case, verifications could only be carried out several years after the fact. In this context, disputing transactions, and tracking money borrowed or unaccounted for, were necessarily challenging.Footnote 71 At most, the Jesuits in Japan could lodge a protest a posteriori against the management and use of their funds. It frequently happened that the missions procurator in Lisbon used money from the Japan mission to make purchases on behalf of the Brazilian mission. The missions procurator could also make logistical mistakes, for instance sending devotional objects intended for the Indian province to Brazil.Footnote 72 This was a chronic problem, all the more so as the missions procurators do not seem to have received any training relevant to their office – some of them even confessed, as Jerónimo Cardoso did, to lacking any understanding of bookkeeping.Footnote 73 It often happened, for example, that the missions procurator failed to specify in his books either the quantities or the prices of the items he bought and sent to Asia. Such administrative failings had serious consequences for Japan’s finances. Its debts owed in Europe and India climbed sharply starting at the end of the sixteenth century, with the mission having hardly any say over the management of its overseas accounts.Footnote 74
Faced with these difficulties and with its order’s inability to set up an effective global framework for the management of missionary finances, the Japan mission resorted to two solutions. The first was to send or appoint its own procurators in Lisbon, Goa, or Malacca, to oversee the management of its affairs in coordination with the various procurators. Valignano thus created the post of procurator for the Japan mission in Goa, reporting directly to the vice-provincial.Footnote 75 The first mention of the procurator of Japan in Goa is found in the 1603 catalogue (the incumbent is Francisco Lameira), but it is likely that the post was created as early as the late 1590s.Footnote 76 Valignano was inspired by the Lisbon-based office of the missions procurator. The aim was to replicate this model on a regional scale. The Japanese procurator in Goa was assigned three tasks. First, he managed the Japanese mission’s funds in India. As such, he was responsible for collecting and sending the money owed to Japan, whether it came from Europe or had been collected locally from the mission’s Indian palm groves or as royal donations. He also checked the charges collected by the province of India. In addition, the procurator arranged the travel of missionaries sent to East Asia, as well as the shipment of supplies purchased in India. Last, he was responsible for relaying correspondence from Europe to Japan and vice versa, and for drawing up the accounts to be forwarded to the mission’s procurator in Japan. This organisation initiative was intended to compensate for the poor management of Japanese affairs by the order in India, but creating such an office came at a cost, especially for a mission chronically short of missionary personnel.
The second solution was to rely as much as possible on local sources of funding, whether in the form of donations from Japanese Christians or investments in the Macau trade. Both were rarely mentioned in the catalogues sent to the Roman Curia, when not completely absent. This does not mean that the mission was trying to conceal them, however, as its heads frequently mentioned the two sources of income in their letters to Rome. It is likely that donations to local establishments were duly reported in their accounts, which do not seem to have been preserved. Donations of this kind were most likely one-offs and therefore difficult to predict from one year to the next; this may explain why they were not mentioned in the catalogues. The lack of any mention of donations from Christian daimyō in Kyūshū is harder to account for. Daimyō had transferred part of their domain’s income rights to the Society as early as the 1550s, and some donations were still effective in the beginning of the seventeenth century.Footnote 77 With them came other benefits such as the right to extract corvée labour, which contributed to turning the Jesuits into a prominent sociopolitical group in the fully Christianised fiefs of Arima and Ōmura. This oversight is probably best understood against the backdrop of the debates running through the mission in the 1580s about its ambitions and its means of achieving them. The mission’s superior, Francisco Cabral (1529–1609), considered the daimyō’s donations to be very significant and argued that, along with the resources granted by the pope or the crown, they ought to be sufficient to run the mission.Footnote 78 Cabral in fact aimed to undermine the ambitious expansion plan that Valignano was elaborating at the time. He intended to establish a large number of new institutions, which were to be funded largely by investing in the silk trade. Such missionary involvement in commercial activities, which had been met with at best grudging support from the Society’s generals, was denounced by Cabral, although he himself had relied on it during his supervisorship (1570–1581), albeit on a more modest scale.Footnote 79 By omitting the daimyō’s donations in the accounting documents, Valignano also avoided drawing attention to what could be construed as an ideal local alternative to profit from the silk trade by the silk trade’s detractors.Footnote 80
Yet the silk trade income does not feature in the catalogues either. While this income had its own share of unpredictability, as discussed above, its omission probably reflected a different concern. By leaving it out, the catalogues maintained the fiction of a mission whose survival depended on Europe and India, while it had in fact become a financial lifeline in the eye of the Japan mission. Thanks to the sale of approximately 100 piculs of raw silk (out of the 1,600 piculs transported by the Macau ship), not counting that of miudezas (taffeta, satin, damask), the Society of Jesus in Japan could expect revenues of between 4,000 and 6,000 ducats per year, an amount equivalent to the papal annuity, officially considered their main source of revenue.Footnote 81 This fiction was widely disseminated in Europe through the embassy led by four young samurai and arranged by Valignano, the Tenshō embassy of 1582–1590. While its stated purpose was for Japanese Christianity to pay homage to the pope, the embassy was conceived as a public relations operation to promote the East Asian missions and attract new patrons in Europe.Footnote 82 Yet while the samurai were touring Southern Europe, Valignano was signing a contract (armação) with the Macau Senate formalising and regularising the Society of Jesus’s annual investment in the Macau ship. Omitting the income from the silk trade was a way for Valignano to elude a controversial topic at a time when the Japan mission was facing mounting accusations of self-enrichment from outside the Society’s ranks. The charge would nonetheless be relentlessly levied by the Franciscans, who established themselves in Japan from the Philippines in 1584, openly challenging the papal-sanctioned monopoly the Jesuits had enjoyed on the evangelisation of the country.Footnote 83
The order’s failure to establish a sufficiently effective global financial framework for its overseas missions, and the countless difficulties experienced by the Japan mission in the management of its finances in Europe and India, led it to focus on the development of autonomous local resources. In the context of Japan, a country outside Iberian political control and with a small and poor Christian community, this meant betting on the silk trade between Macau and Nagasaki, in close collaboration with Portuguese merchants – a disreputable means justified by the ends of evangelisation. This singular case underlines the great latitude missionaries effectively had in managing their finances at the local level, despite potential censure from Rome. The catalogues, as tools enforcing the order’s global framework, tend to obfuscate this fact.
Conclusions
Catalogues were accounting documents not intended to reflect the day-to-day transactions or the financial situation of a mission at a given moment: As this text has shown, the catalogues were first and foremost used as a medium for dialogue between the Roman centre and the mission fields. For the Jesuit Curia, they were a tool which allowed for a rational allocation of personnel on a global scale. To the missions, they were a means of making their financial and human needs known and understood. The catalogues therefore offer only a partial picture of a mission’s financial situation, to some extent its self-construction. In the case of Japan, the construction was that of a mission with a precarious financial balance, highly dependent on the fragile global networks established by the Portuguese from Europe to Asia, the Carreira da Índia system, and Estado da Índia officials. This dependence was explained in detail by the correspondence which accompanied the catalogues and was intended to make their message clearer. Visitor Valignano’s letters thus supplemented the catalogues’ data and shed light not only on the limits of the circulation of money between Europe and East Asia, but also on those of the Jesuit bureaucracy, which was unable to manage the missions’ financial affairs on a global scale. The frequent losses or delays in the transfer of funds and the inability to synchronise the mission’s accounts across the world seriously hurt the Japanese mission’s interests. Faced with these difficulties, the Society of Jesus proved unable to rethink its financial framework, or to devise new financial standards and tools adapted to the constraints of operating on a global scale, such as money transfers between provinces. Its inefficient organisation appears in the catalogues through the balance of income and expenditure that clearly demonstrated to the order’s Curia that the Japan mission could not survive without some form of local money-making investment – the question was what kind of investment. In fact, missions were commonly forced to transgress the Society’s financial rules, in particular through loans between provinces, missions, and establishments. In the case of the Japanese mission, these difficulties were reflected in significant indebtedness generated in Europe and India, over which it had little control. Faced with these limitations, the Japan mission attempted to devise its own solutions, by appointing a procurator in Goa to protect its interests and, more importantly, by turning increasingly to local sources of funding. Far removed from the centres of European Christianity and in dire need of a reliable annual income, the Jesuits in Japan indeed resorted to local financial solutions, chiefly their growing investment in the silk trade, which was made possible by their insertion in Japanese and Portuguese societies around the South China Sea. By erasing all mentions in the catalogues of the income provided by the silk trade, the Jesuits in Japan attempted to skirt the controversy about their commercial investments and maintained the fiction of a mission highly dependent on European donations. After the proscription of Christianity and the Jesuits’ expulsion from Japan in 1614, the catalogues continued to maintain another fiction, that of a mission still operating in Japan, but its funds were now diverted to other missionary fields in Asia, mainly China.
Open access
