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Introduction: Accounting Practices in Missionary Territories (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2026

Felicita Tramontana ,
Hélène Vu Thanh Open the ORCID record for Hélène Vu Thanh [Opens in a new window]  and
Christian Windler Open the ORCID record for Christian Windler [Opens in a new window]
Felicita Tramontana*
Affiliation:
Roma Tre University, Italy
Hélène Vu Thanh
Affiliation:
Université Bretagne Sud, France
Christian Windler
Affiliation:
Historisches Institut, Universität Bern, Switzerland
*
Corresponding author: Felicita Tramontana; Email: felicita.tramontana@uniroma3.it
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Abstract

This article situates the contributions to the special issue in the context of the history of missionary economies and accounting practices. Instead of focusing on economic efficiency, new approaches in accounting history have been considering other dimensions, such as the disciplinary potential of accounting and its use as an instrument for enacting specific forms of governance. The article then presents the normative frameworks of Catholic missionary economies, which were defined both by the religious orders and the Roman Curia. The fragmentation of the surviving accounting documentation reflects the composite and layered structures of early modern global Catholicism. The article finally shows that mission financing depended on the interactions in the globalising contexts of the early modern period. The missionaries and their principals used global trade and financial networks, often in cooperation with non-European actors, while the missionaries simultaneously adapted to local economic conditions.

Keywords

MissionariesAccounting DocumentsEarly GlobalizationReligious OrdersMissionary Finances

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Itinerario , First View , pp. 1 - 15
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Leiden Institute for History.

Introduction

Early modern overseas missions developed in a context of closer connections between different parts of the world, and recent studies have highlighted the significance of missionary involvement in commercial activities both at the global and local levels.Footnote 1 This special issue builds on this novel historiography by focusing on a specific type of source, namely missionary accounting documents. The goal is to put the spotlight on material that is rarely studied for its own sake,Footnote 2 to reconstruct its normative framework, and more generally, to explore missionary accounting practices. How specific were these practices which were in the hands of regular clerics who were supposed to be devoted to a life of poverty? How did they differ from the practices of other economic agents such as merchants?Footnote 3

Focusing on the historicity of the accounting documents themselves, our aim is to show how the missionaries’ accounting practices were conditioned by specific normative systems, how the account-keepers imagined their place in society through their recording practices, and how accounting documents may nevertheless be used as sources for the social and economic history of those who produced them and to study broader phenomena, such as early modern globalisation, the globalisation of Catholicism, and commodification.

By looking beyond the sole economic efficiency of bookkeeping, the purpose of this special issue is to understand missionaries’ – and especially Catholic missionaries’ –perceptions of economic questions and to contribute to the discussion about how to integrate religious and economic history. In the wake of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the relation between religious confession and economy became an important topic in the historiography of Protestantism. Conversely, research on early modern Catholic societies has long been much less invested in these questions. Some historians of Catholicism (in particular Peter Hersche) have adopted Weber’s famous thesis and tried to reconstruct a specifically Catholic ethic of “leisure and lavishness,” in contrast to investments in productive activities which would have allowed the accumulation of capital and economic growth.Footnote 4 Others, in particular Giacomo Todeschini and Charly Coleman, have postulated that Catholic theology contributed in its own distinct ways to the growth and development of capitalism.Footnote 5 Yet so far, the economic practices of Catholic orders in the early modern period have seldom been included in this debate. This special issue addresses this challenge, by focusing on religious orders in missionary contexts in Asia and the Middle East and offering comparative outlooks on both a religious order in Central Europe and on the practices of Protestant missionaries.

Catholic and Protestant Missions

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, missions all over the world became one of the pillars of the identity of the papacy, religious orders, and secular Catholic rulers.Footnote 6 In the Americas, Catholic missions became associated with conquest and colonialization. The pope’s concession of the patronage over the new churches to the kings of Castile closely linked these missions with secular Spanish rule over the newly conquered territories. Spanish colonial authorities relied on Franciscans and Dominicans, followed by Augustinians and Jesuits, to secure long-term obedience from their new subjects after the military conquest.

The Catholic missions in Asia and the Middle East, which are the focus of this special issue, differed sharply from those in the Americas. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portuguese and later Dutch, English, and French power and influence in Asia were largely limited to maritime spaces.Footnote 7 Before the mid-eighteenth century, Europeans mostly interacted with local authorities from subordinate positions. Along the coasts of Asia, in the fortified ports under its rule, the Portuguese crown, endowed with rights of patronage by the pope, established a church hierarchy with the archbishop of Goa at the top.Footnote 8 Beyond these few fortified places, however, Catholic missionaries under Portuguese Padroado depended on cooperation with local, non-Christian authorities. They also depended on the financial and logistical support of the Portuguese merchants, which highlights the Estado da Índia’s intertwined commercial and religious goals.Footnote 9 The adaptation to local circumstances sparked controversies among the missionaries themselves and in their relations with superiors.Footnote 10

These controversies were fuelled over the seventeenth century by the arrival of missionaries from rival orders and different origins who did not submit to the Portuguese Padroado. In East Asia, mendicant friars under Spanish royal patronage competed with the Padroado missionaries. They radiated from the town of Manila which became a crucial node for both the galleon trade and evangelization (Juan José Rivas Moreno). In 1604, Pope Clement VIII sent Discalced Carmelites to Persia, which marked the beginning of missionary activities in Asia under the direct authority of the papacy.Footnote 11 Unlike the missions under Spanish and Portuguese patronage, papal missions were not associated with any commercial or political endeavour and thus heavily relied on improvisation on the ground for funding, ship travel, and correspondence. Starting with the reign of Louis XIII, missions were established in Iran and other parts of Asia under the “protection” of the French crown. These missions were intended to strengthen the prestige and power of the French crown and became associated with the Compagnie des Indes orientales, founded in 1664.Footnote 12

In the Syro-Palestinian region, missionaries arrived in the 1620s. As the Holy Land became a missionary territory, the older Catholic institutional presence in the Ottoman Empire was transformed. Following the fall of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land became the only remaining Catholic institution in Palestine. Recognized by Pope Clement VI in 1342, the Custody was entrusted with caring for the Holy Places and hosting pilgrims. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Franciscans of the Holy Land began documenting some conversions to Catholicism. Starting in the 1620s, missionary activity became one of the Franciscans’ main tasks, and Propaganda Fide began treating the Custody as a mission (Felicita Tramontana).Footnote 13

In contrast to the development of worldwide Catholic missionary activities since the sixteenth century, Protestant churches did not dispatch significant numbers of missionaries overseas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite recent calls to reevaluate Protestant missionary efforts,Footnote 14 the scope of Dutch and English missions remained limited. This changed only in the eighteenth century with the activities of new Protestant groups, in particular the Halle Pietists, who focused on “world reform” through a combination of individual spiritual renewal and practical social action. Another Protestant group that developed missionary activities on a larger scale in the eighteenth century was the small Church of the Moravian Brethren. With its focus on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the contribution by Jessica Cronshagen on the Moravian missions under Dutch rule in Suriname, included at the end, expands the temporal scope of this special issue and opens a window towards missionary activities under colonial rule in the Americas. The accounting documents produced by Moravian missionaries may also serve as a meaningful point of comparison between the attitudes of Catholic regular clerics and those of Protestant missionaries towards commercial investments and profits.

The Variety of Accounting Documents

The point of departure of this special issue is represented by the accounting documents themselves and their production. The special issue takes a broad view of accounting documents, expanding beyond comprehensive records of financial transactions, as found in ledgers, to include summary extracts prepared for auditing purposes, lists of expenditures, and sometimes parts of personal notes. Our definition of “accounting practices” encompasses a variety of activities, including listing expenditures as part of larger narratives, auditing and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, not just preparing financial statements. The variety of sources studied in this special issue reflects both these broader definitions and the hazard of preservation.

It is important to remember that, along with other documentation that must have once existed in the local archives of Catholic missions in Asia, most account books have been lost. In only very few cases has institutional continuity ensured the preservation of this documentation. Other documents were sent to the missionaries’ superiors who had them archived; some survived among missionaries’ personal papers.

The accounting documents which have survived illustrate the variety of recording practices, authors, readerships, and aims. Some of the documents are just lists of expenses or personal notes, like some of those analysed by Frederik Vermote. Other documents, in contrast, were more elaborate, serving the local community (Christian Windler) or ready to be submitted to external institutions or to the generals of the orders for audit purposes, such as those which the Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land (Felicita Tramontana) and the Propaganda Fide procurators in China (Eugenio Menegon) aimed at the Propaganda Fide, or the catalogi of the Jesuit mission in Japan addressed to the superiors of the order (Hélène Vu Thanh). One of the most important questions addressed by the contributions to this special issue concerns precisely the aims of the accounting documents and their intended recipients. The fact that the documents were issued for audit purposes or aimed at the superiors, for example, might explain the form of the information as well as some omissions.

A growing body of research in the field of accounting history has been concerned with the formal characteristics of early modern accounting and the accounting systems employed.Footnote 15 Inspired by this scholarship, our approach focuses on the recording practices, the accounting systems that were chosen, and the information that was disclosed or omitted. These practices were shaped by the normative frameworks in which the missionaries’ activities evolved. The Moravian account books studied by Jessica Cronshagen were organised according to the rules of double-entry bookkeeping, with their highly structured nature possibly corresponding to a specifically Protestant relation to economic success and profit. In the case of the Franciscans’ Custody of the Holy Land (Felicita Tramontana) and of Franciscan missionaries (Juan José Rivas Moreno) and Propaganda Fide procurators (Eugenio Menegon) in China, the use of a simplified charge and discharge system of accounting reflects the missionaries’ priority to report on the employment of specific incomes and/or to their benefactor, rather than providing a complete overview of the mission’s economy. The cash receipts and disbursements method used by the Discalced Carmelites in Basra, which did not provide evidence of the assets, can be related to the mendicant ideal of an economy that should be free of the accumulation of debts and profits. For similar reasons, the Discalced Carmelites tended to conceal revenue from commerce (Christian Windler), while the accounting documents sent by the Custody of the Holy Land to the Propaganda Fide focused on the alms administration at the expense of local income (Felicita Tramontana). Together with the fragmented preservation of the documentation, the omissions of certain revenues in the few surviving account books limit the possibility of reconstructing missionary economies and hinder any systematic approach to financial dynamics over time. Consequently, accounting documents may reveal more about the specific normative framework of Catholic religious orders than they do about the magnitude of economic and financial dynamics.

Accounting Documents of Religious Orders: New Approaches

Accounting documents of premodern ecclesiastic institutions have long been used mostly as sources for quantitative analysis, while the historicity of the bookkeeping practices themselves attracted little attention from early modern historians. In contrast, medieval historians have used the account-keeping practices of religious orders as a point of entry for a novel history of the relations between economy and religion. As Giacomo Todeschini and Valentina Toneatto have stressed, starting with the earliest monastic rules, account-keeping has always been a key element of monastic discipline, associating the spiritual accountability before God with the duty to carefully administrate the monasteries’ material goods.Footnote 16 This renewal of the perspectives on ecclesiastic account-keeping has been inspired by a strand of research which highlights the connections between mendicant friars and merchants in the late Middle Ages.Footnote 17 Mendicants played an important role in the establishment of a practice of “accounting for the afterlife” in societies marked by an accounting rationale of commerce.Footnote 18 In places like Florence, new techniques of account-keeping circulated from merchants and financiers to the clergy, where they became part of a practice of observance claimed by late medieval reform movements.Footnote 19

According to Clément Lenoble, the account-keeping mendicant friars and those who revised the accounts proposed examples of observance to their confrères. Lenoble has further argued against the focus on double-entry account-keeping of those interested in tracking the origins of economic “modernity,” and has instead stressed the influence of mendicant recording practices beyond the context of the mendicant orders. According to Lenoble, these account-keeping practices were “a technique of asceticism and governance” that inspired in late medieval merchants “an ascetic view of their own accounting practice […] and profession.” This intraworldly practice of asceticism reflected an economy of salvation that culminated in the account rendered to God at the Last Judgment. Mercantile account-keeping practices, including double-entry recording, were thus not developed to legitimate the practices of merchants condemned by the Church, but rather in the interplay of an idea of spiritual accountability and the administration of worldly goods.Footnote 20

In the early modern history of religious orders, this focus on the performative and disciplinary nature of accounting has a counterpart in the work of Paolo Quattrone on the relations between Jesuit spirituality – in particular the practice of “accounting for sins” in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercices – and financial accounting and recordkeeping in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote 21 However, such perspectives have not yet been adopted by historians working on early modern missions. In missionary contexts, the necessity to survive within normative frameworks developed in Western Europe singularly complicates the picture, as will be demonstrated in the next section.

The Normative Frameworks of Catholic Missionary Economies

From the point of view of the different religious orders and the Roman Curia, the missionaries were not to interfere in the business of lay people and were to refrain from participating in commercial and financial transactions. Some orders were much stricter than others on that point, as the contributions of this special issue on mendicants friars (Franciscans, Capuchins, and Discalced Carmelites), beside the better-known Jesuits, illustrate (Felicita Tramontana, Juan José Rivas Moreno, Nicolas Rogger, and Christian Windler). The missions around the world ran utterly counter to the Catholic Reformation’s efforts to create clear distinctions between the ways of life of clerics and the laity.

The mendicant orders, in particular the Franciscans, were founded on the premises of a strict individual and collective obligation to poverty. Secular procurators were meant to help the early Franciscans to reconcile poverty with the practical needs of daily life.Footnote 22 Devotion to a life of poverty became even more problematic in the early modern missions overseas, where the subsidies arriving from Europe had to be complemented by income generated locally. In the Americas, the Franciscans, in addition to the money arriving from Spain, appropriated Indigenous people’s labour and resources, which they described as “alms” in accordance with the mendicant vocabulary.Footnote 23 Papal privileges and exemptions facilitated adaptations to the requirements of missionary life. In the case of the Custody of the Holy Land, the friars became entitled to own and administer properties and cash, which allowed them to integrate into the local economy (Felicita Tramontana).Footnote 24

In contrast, the sixteenth-century reforms of mendicant orders claimed to reinstate the strict regulations of their early days. According to the practice developed in the beginnings of the order of St. Francis, the Capuchins again delegated the administration of economic assets to the care of secular procurators – the so-called “spiritual fathers.” Focusing on the Swiss Province of the Capuchins, Nicolas Rogger explains how these practices of delegation were established in Europe. Yet taking them as a rule in the Capuchin missions in South Asia, as the Roman Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith decreed, proved impossible, because the friars were often unable to find trusted Catholic laymen. The reform of the Carmelites by Theresa of Ávila and John of the Cross did not go as far as to ban the friars themselves from the administration of their convent’s revenues. However, as a consequence of the radical renunciation of the “world,” the Discalced Carmelite friars were to keep strictly away from “the business of the laity.”Footnote 25 In Basra, the friars generally created the appearance of compliance with this strict normative framework in their account books. They only momentarily shifted to a numerically more precise practice (Christian Windler).

The Society of Jesus put less restrictions on worldly economic activities. In Asia as well as in the Americas, there is no lack of examples attesting to the Jesuits’ involvement in commerce, and, more broadly, to their proximity with the merchant world.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, the legitimacy of the missionaries’ involvement in commercial activities, and the forms that they could take, remained debated in the Society of Jesus well into the eighteenth century. The commercial business of the Jesuits in Asia was often used as an argument against the order by its enemies.Footnote 27 Thus, it is not surprising that the catalogi addressed to the orders’ superiors omitted any income from commerce (Hélène Vu Thanh).

The missionaries’ involvement in worldly business also came under attack from the papal curia: In 1633, Urban VIII prohibited the regular clergy working in Asia from taking part, directly or indirectly, in commercial or financial transactions intended to generate profit, under threat of excommunication and other penalties.Footnote 28 In 1669, Pope Clement IX declared in the constitution Sollicitudo pastoralis officii that the material plight of the missions was no reason to disregard this prohibition. Not only should the offending missionaries themselves be excommunicated, but also the superiors who failed to prosecute the offenders.Footnote 29 In conclusion, both the religious orders and the Roman Curia imposed far-reaching restrictions on secular business. Independently from the membership in a specific order, the necessity to survive in places where the missionaries had to stand on their own, without the protection of rich and powerful patrons, made compliance with these regulations difficult.Footnote 30

The contradictions between the Roman and order-specific normative frameworks on the one hand and the contingencies of life in mission territories on the other had a strong impact on the account-keeping practices and the preservation of financial documentation. While some of the available documents allow us to trace the missionaries’ participation in secular business, others dissimulate or completely omit such categories of income (Felicita Tramontana, Hélène Vu Thanh, and Christian Windler).

Missionary Economies, Accounting Documents and the Composite Structure of Global Catholicism

The analysis of the accounting documents that have survived enriches our understanding of the globalisation of Catholicism in more than one way. It sheds light on the (in)capacity of missionary institutions in Europe (in particular the Propaganda Fide, secular patrons, and the religious orders) to fund their grandiloquent projects. A close look at the limited financial resources put at the disposal of the missionaries by the Propaganda Fide allows us to deconstruct the baroque façade of papal universalism, with 40 to 50% of the expenditures of the Propaganda Fide being made in Rome. A comparison of the finances of the Propaganda Fide with those of Scipione Borghese, cardinal-nephew of Paul V, shows that the revenues and expenditures of the cardinal-nephew from a family rising into the ranks of the Roman aristocracy vastly exceeded those of this curial congregation.Footnote 31 It confirms the assertion by Volker Reinhardt that “private interests and undertakings intended to promote the family of the pontiff, its status and elevation,” took precedence over “efforts directed at the overall spiritual and political duties of the papacy.”Footnote 32 It was wealthy kin groups rather than the emerging institutions that set the financial tone in papal Rome. The focus on missionaries’ accounting documents opens up new perspectives on the consequences such power structures had for the funding of papal missions and thus for the global affirmation of papal universalism. The Propaganda Fide procurators in China desperately repeated their claims for more abundant funding from Rome (Eugenio Menegon). Because subsidies were insufficient and arrived irregularly and incompletely, missionaries sent out from Rome had to rely mostly on local funding and, with this aim in mind, seek cooperations beyond the small Catholic communities, as Christian Windler shows in his article on the Discalced Carmelites in Basra.

Several of the contributions to this special issue provide insights into the extent and limitations of the Roman Curia’s efforts at administrative centralisation and standardisation, which in the missionary field were embodied by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), founded in 1622. With the foundation of this congregation, Pope Gregory XV Ludovisi challenged the claims of secular rulers (in particular the kings of Castile and Portugal) to the patronage over the missions, trying to establish the missions all over the world as an enterprise led by the Roman Curia.Footnote 33 This was a manifestation of the papal claim to plenitudo potestatis that was based on salvation history and divine and natural law. In practice, the impact of this papal policy, which according to Paolo Prodi became a model for secular princes claiming absolute power,Footnote 34 was limited not only by material constraints, but also by the resilience of privileged actors within the composite and polycentric structures of early modern Catholicism. While they recognised the pope as head of the Church, multiple actors opposed their own rights to papal plenitudo potestatis. Beyond the borders of the Papal States, the papacy’s claim to absoluteness came up against limits that remained largely insurmountable in the early modern period. Secular rulers, such as the kings of France, Spain, and Portugal, considerably extended their rights over the churches of their territories between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 35

Global Catholicism, in particular, was fashioned by the composite and polycentric structures of the Church. Most relevant in this context were the rights of patronage which the papacy had bestowed upon the kings of Castile and Portugal. While the royal patrons had to disseminate the Christian faith and build churches, they could present the pope with candidates for the new archiepiscopal and episcopal sees and control the access of missionaries. Based on the “Gallican liberties,” the king of France claimed to “protect” the Catholic missions under his authority; although this “protection” was not legally formalised as a right of patronage, it also gave the French Crown considerable influence over “its” missions (not only the Missions étrangères de Paris, but also missions that depended on the French provinces of their orders, for example Jesuits and Capuchins). Rights of patronage and “protection” were not limited to the territories under the effective dominion of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Crown, but extended to vast areas where the influence of different European rulers might intersect, giving rise to conflicts between missionaries with different allegiances. As a consequence, the authority of the Propaganda Fide procurators in China was in practice limited to those missionaries who had been sent out by the papal Congregation and did not extend to the Jesuits under Portuguese patronage (Eugenio Menegon).

Beside the royal patrons and “protectors,” the religious orders equally asserted their autonomy in front of the papal congregations. While they claimed to be the most loyal servants of the papacy, Jesuits avoided submitting to the Propaganda Fide, whenever this was possible. The general of the order reserved the right to send, transfer, and recall missionaries independent of the Propaganda Fide.Footnote 36 The Society of Jesus itself (like the other orders) was not homogeneous but crisscrossed by allegiances based on geographical origin.Footnote 37

Finances were one of the battlefields of the opposing claims to control the Catholic churches outside Europe. In her contribution to this issue, Felicita Tramontana shows how the Propaganda Fide, in the decades following its establishment, tried to control the finances of the Franciscans of the Holy Land, but failed in this intent due to the resistance of the Franciscans and the Spanish Crown, who even managed to assert a formal right of patronage.

The Franciscans also resisted the Propaganda Fide’s attempts to standardise procedures of information gathering in the financial domain, which is particularly meaningful in the light of the centrality of information management in the expansion of global networks in general and of the Propaganda Fide’s networks in particular. While Jesuit missionaries avoided contact with the Propaganda Fide as much as they could, they had to answer to the bureaucratising procedures of their own order. The catalogi, which included an overview of the finances according to standardised questionnaires, were to serve the centralised government of the Society of Jesus. In practice, these intents to systematise the information management provided limited insights, as the analysis of the financial information contained in the catalogi of the Japan province by Hélène Vu Thanh shows; in particular, the catalogi do not mention the Macao–Nagasaki trade, whose importance for the Jesuits is well known from other sources.Footnote 38

The multiple dependencies of the missionaries also conditioned the fragmentation of accounting into several separate accounts, which each recorded only part of the revenues and expenses of a mission. The documentation of the Obras pías of Manila offers only information on this specific source of income of the missions to China (Juan José Rivas Moreno). In addition to the moneys of the confraternities, Franciscan friars of Spanish origin in China received funding from the Spanish Crown and from the Franciscan province of Manila, which they accounted for separately.Footnote 39 The books of the Franciscans of the Holy Land rendered account of the alms which they received from Europe, but did not include most of the local revenues (Felicita Tramontana). The curia of the Italian congregation of the Discalced Carmelites and the Propaganda Fide could have an eye on the accounts of the mission seminary of San Pancrazio in Rome or on those of the bequest of a Neapolitan nobleman which recorded the subsidy payments to the missionaries; yet these funds made up only a small part of the missions’ funding (Christian Windler).Footnote 40 While the fragmentation of accounting makes the assessment of the economic situation of the missions very difficult, it can itself be considered characteristic of the composite and layered nature of early modern secular and ecclesiastic power structures.

Missions and Early Modern Globalisation

This special issue is also born out of the conviction that a focus on the finances of missions offers new insights into questions which, beyond the history of global Catholicism, more generally concern the history of interactions in the globalising contexts of the early modern period. Research on the relationship between globalisation and missions has focused mainly on logistic aspects and, more specifically, on how trade and imperial infrastructures facilitated the spread and survival of overseas missions.Footnote 41 A less studied aspect of this relationship is the growing globalisation of finance, and its bearing on the ways missionaries funded their enterprises. Analysing the account books of the Obras pías of Manila, Rivas Moreno contributes to filling this gap, showing how missionaries took advantage of the capital market of the city of Manila and its connections to the Americas and East Asia to mobilise resources to finance their enterprises.

While the success of this endeavour depended on the strategic position of Manila within the global silver trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the articles by Hélène Vu Thanh, Frederik Vermote, and Christian Windler shed light, instead, on the limits of this increasing interconnectedness and on the “glocal” character of missionary economies. The insufficient funds that reached the missions in East Asia and in the Middle East from Europe obliged the missionaries to finance themselves through participation in the local economies. While the numbers varied from mission to mission and over time, the limits to the circulation of money and resources between Europe and Asia had two important consequences. On the one hand, these limits meant that without a strong local economic embedment, early modern Catholic missions had no chance of survival in the long run. On the other hand, this local embedment relied on the autonomous insertion of missionaries in networks which went well beyond the local contexts where they were living. For example, the French Jesuits in Beijing and the Discalced Carmelites in Basra connected locally with the East India companies, irrespective of the denominational differences (Frederik Vermote; Christian Windler). Missionaries also associated with non-European actors of the early modern globalisation processes. The Jesuits of the Japanese province participated in trade between the Chinese coast and Japan. Although they relied mostly on Portuguese merchants for conducting their financial operations in Macao and China, they were also in business with Japanese merchants for the sales of silk in Japan.Footnote 42 Jesuits and Discalced Carmelites in Persia made use of the financial services of Muslim and “pagan” Indian banyans, whose importance in the commercial and financial networks linking Safavid Persia with South Asia has long been neglected.Footnote 43 In Basra, Eastern Christians active in the commerce between South Asia, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean were far more important for the finances of the Discalced Carmelites than Europeans linked with the different East India Companies (Christian Windler).Footnote 44 By reflecting on the local agency of missionaries and their relations with other actors in early modern globalisation processes and bringing together case studies grounded in Asia and Europe, the contributions in this special issue shed light on important aspects of a global history in the making that deserve further scrutiny.

Another noteworthy aspect is the religious orders’ varying capacity to adapt their financial and administrative organisation to meet the challenges of deploying across the globe, and more generally of the issue of distance. The cases of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land (Felicita Tramontana) and of the Jesuit missions to Japan (Hélène Vu Thanh) and China are in that respect exemplary. Since its establishment, the survival of the Custody depended on the arrival of resources from the other provinces. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the Order began to establish a network of commissaries and commissariats in major cities and ports in Europe to this end. Their primary function was to collect alms and organize their transport to Jerusalem. In practice they functioned as a network that facilitated the movement of friars, information, money and goods across Franciscan provinces, as well as the delivery of supplies to the Custody. Similar aims were pursued by the Jesuit missions, when they established “chains of procurators” stretching over different continents. The establishment of offices in Madrid, Lisbon, Goa, and Macao was meant to secure the collection and transfer of financial resources destined to the Indian Jesuit province, and more particularly to the Japan mission.Footnote 45 The origin of these resources could lie in such different locations as Spain, India, or Malacca. These “chains of procurators” were gradually constituted as the Society grew and expanded its presence in Asia, in the hope of facilitating the financial management of the missions under the Portuguese Padroado as a whole, while protecting the interests of individual missions. This system, however, had many limitations. These had as much to do with the practice of appointing men often inexperienced in accounting and finance for what turned out to be highly demanding roles, as with the technical impossibility, for the Society of Jesus, of mastering the global context as far as the transfer of resources and the management of such an immense province as India was concerned.

Despite these limitations, the structures established by the Society of Jesus were more complex and efficient than those of the Roman Curia. The papal Congregation of the Propaganda Fide (Eugenio Menegon) did not establish a “chain of procurators.” Its procurators in China faced the hostility of the Jesuits, and for the transfer of money and the transportation of letters, they had to rely on the services of secular actors, particularly the East India Companies as well as private merchants. The Discalced Carmelites (Christian Windler) did not even have a procurator in the Middle East. Instead, they relied on improvisation to deliver money and letters to their destination. As these examples show once again, global missionary networks were heavily marked by the composite structure of early modern Catholicism. These structures resulted in several missionary networks competing with each other. Each network was entangled with different jurisdictions, trading channels, and imperial circuits, which limited their efficiency and often let the missionaries to their own sake.

Protestant Missionaries’ Economy and Accounting Practices: An Outlook

Included at the end of this special issue, Jessica Cronshagen contribution opens a window to realities which strongly differed from those discussed in the other articles focusing on Catholic missionaries in Middle Eastern and Asian settings. While Catholic missionaries in Japan, China, or the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries interacted with locals from a subordinate position, the mission of the Moravian brethren in Suriname accompanied a Dutch colonial venture, which established European domination over the Indigenous Arawak people and enslaved and free people of African descent. Cronshagen explores how the goods mentioned in the account books were an expression of a globalised economy in which colonial resources and European industrial goods crossed the Atlantic. Her article sheds light on the relationship between account books and major themes in the history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, such as the commodification of local resources, and the emergence of capitalism and colonisation. With regard to the latter, the study of the account books of the Moravian brethren, while contributing to the study of interactions, also depicts bookkeeping as a practice of colonial self-fashioning as “European.”

Cronshagen’s contribution also puts in evidence a different approach to commercial investments and profits. While the Pietist Moravians’ economic success in the second half of the eighteenth century was tied to the strict observance of Christian norms which made them especially trustworthy among possible clients, this Protestant setting did not command the sort of dissimulation of profit-making which can be observed in the accounting practices of Catholic religious orders. While in the case of the Discalced Carmelites in Basra, income “ex industria” remained highly controversial as part of the missionaries’ practice of accommodation in the merchant society of the port town, “industriousness” became a key value of well-ordered Moravian communities.Footnote 46

Conclusions

Accounting documents are essential for tracing and making sense of the complex relationship between missionaries and laymen, commercial and missionary networks, the financial investments made by missionaries, and, more generally, their place in the social and economic order, both globally and locally. This source type may allow us to dive into the material day-to-day life of the missions and study their integration into regional and local economic networks, to assess the role played by the global circulation of objects and money in ensuring the missions’ economic viability, and to understand the missionaries’ abilities to secure funding in both global and local contexts. However, as this special issue illustrates, this optimistic picture is limited by two factors: the rarity of the surviving accounting documents and their more or less evident normative nature.

The rarity of the surviving documentation is striking in comparison with the rich archives of families engaged in commerce and finance. In the Tuscan “civilisation of accountants,” for example, accounting documents became an important symbolic marker of the social status of merchants and bankers who took great care to preserve them over generations as part of the memoria of their families.Footnote 47 This was clearly not the case for Catholic missionaries. Beyond the lack of institutional continuity on the local level, the contradictions between economic practices and the norms underlying the way of life of the members of religious orders may also have contributed to the loss of most of the accounting documents of the early modern Catholic missions.

From different perspectives, the contributions to this special issue demonstrate that account books cannot be reduced to the seemingly objective content of their numbers. Accounting documents had a more or less pronounced normative character, as shown by the study of the Jesuit “catalogues” (Hélène Vu Thanh) or of the accounts of the Discalced Carmelites in Basra (Christian Windler). Whether in the case of mendicant friars or members of other orders, the annotations on revenues and expenses were never neutral descriptions of economic activities but rather interpretations formulated in the light of the specific normative systems of the communities to which the account-keepers belonged.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to the editorial board of Itinerario, in particular Cátia Antunes, and to the anonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments and help. The texts have been edited by Allison Silver Adelman.

Funding statement

This special issue is the output of a project (HOLYLAB) that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 101001857. It arises from the conference “Accounting Practices and Religious Orders in Missionary Territories” held in Rome (24–25 January 2024), which was financed by the ERC, project HOLYLAB (grant agreement No. 101001857), the Istituto Svizzero, and the Chair of Early Modern History of the University of Bern.

References

1 See the contributions in Hélène Vu Thanh and Ines G. Županov, eds., Trade and Finance in Global Missions (16th–18th Centuries), Studies in Christian Mission 57 (Leiden: Brill, 2021). For a review of the literature thus far on the finances of the Society of Jesus, see Frederik Vermote, “Finances of the Missions,” in A Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions, ed. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 367–400. Among the older work on Jesuit missionary economies, Dauril Alden’s deserves a special mention, although his view of the order as an integrated enterprise has been revised: Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), in particular 319–567. On the Macao–Nagasaki trade, see Charles R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan trade, 1555–1640 (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Historicos Ultra-marinos, 1959); and, more recently, Mihoko Oka, The Namban Trade: Merchants and Missionaries in 16th- and 17th-Century Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2021). On Goa: Charles J. Borges, The Economics of the Goa Jesuits, 1542–1759 (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1994). The existing literature has disproportionally been concerned with the Jesuits. However, on the economy of the missions to Persia, in particular the Discalced Carmelites, see Christian Windler, Missionaries in Persia: Cultural Diversity and Competing Norms in Global Catholicism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2024), 235–51. The economic history of the religious orders in the American territories under Spanish or Portuguese dominion is better known. See, for example, Herman W. Konrad, A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucia, 1576–1767 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980); Nicholas Cushner, Jesuit Ranches and the Agrarian Development of Colonial Argentina, 1650–1767 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983) and Nicholas Cushner, Farm and Factory: The Jesuits and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Colonial Quito, 1600–1767 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982); Julia J. S. Sarreal, The Guaraní and their Missions: A Socioeconomic History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), in particular 65–92; Aliocha Maldavsky, “Finances missionnaires et salut des laïcs: La donation de Juan Clemente de Fuentes, marchand des Andes, à la Compagnie de Jésus au milieu du XVIIe siècle,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 191 (2020), 21–43.

2 Noël Golvers. François de Rougemont S. J., Missionary in Ch’ang-Shu (Chiang-Nan): A Study of the Account Book (1674–1676) and the Eulogium (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1999).

3 See, for example, Richard A. Goldthwaite, “The Practice and Culture of Accounting in Renaissance Florence,” Enterprise & Society 16 (2015), 611–47; Richard A. Goldthwaite, “Florentine Household Accounts, Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries,” Renaissance Studies 32 (2018), 219–35; Heinrich Lang, “Das Subjekt der Buchführung: Ökonomische Subjektwerdung in der Mensch-Maschine-Beziehung von Buchhalter und Rechnungsbüchern in der frühneuzeitlichen Wirtschaftsordnung,” in Der Mensch in Gesellschaft: Zur Vorgeschichte des modernen Subjekts in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Hohlstein, Rudolf Schlögl, and Isabelle Schürch (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019), 19–47; Cristina Mantegna and Olivier Poncet, eds., Les documents du commerce et des marchands entre Moyen Âge et époque moderne (XIIe–XVIIe siècle) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2018); Sergio Tognetti, “Imprese ospedaliere e imprese private. Sistemi contabili e amministrativi a confronto,” in Alle origini del welfare: Radici medievali e moderne della cultura europea dell’assistenza, ed. Gabriella Piccinni (Rome: Viella, 2020), 277–305; Sergio Tognetti, “Una civiltà di ragionieri. Archivi aziendali e distinzione sociale nella Firenze basso medievale e rinascimentale,” Reti medievali 21 (2020), 221–50; Florence Weber, François Menant, and Natacha Coquery, eds., Écrire, compter, mesurer: Du Moyen Âge aux bouleversements actuels (Paris: Rue d’Ulm, 2023).

4 Peter Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung: Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter. 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2006).

5 Charly Coleman, The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021); Giacomo Todeschini, I mercanti e il tempio: La società e il circolo virtuoso della ricchezza fra Medioevo ed Età Moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002); and Giacomo Todeschini, Ricchezza Francescana: Dalla povertà volontaria alla società di mercato (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004).

6 For a useful recent overview on the history of early modern Catholic missions, see Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, ed., A Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

7 See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Pieter C. Emmer and Jos. J. L. Gommans, The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 245–399; Marie Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes, 1664–1704: Apprentissages, échecs et héritage (Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016); Philippe Haudrère, La Compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle (1719–1795), 4 vols. (Paris: Librairie de l’Inde éditeur, 1989); David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

8 Charles Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1440-1770 (London/Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978). On Goa, see Catarina Madeira Santos, Goa é a chave de toda a Índia: Perfil político da capital do Estado da Índia (1505-1570) (Lisbon: Comissão nacional para as comemorações dos descobrimentos portugueses, 1999); Ângela Barreto Xavier, A invenção de Goa: poder imperial e conversões cuturais nos séculos xvi e xvii (Lisbon: ICS, 2008).

9 Giuseppe Marcocci, A consciência de um império: Portugal e o seu mundo (sécs. xv-xvii) (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2012).

10 On the so-called Chinese and Malabar rites controversies, see Ines G. Županov and Pierre Antoine Fabre, eds., The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

11 See Windler, Missionaries in Persia.

12 Tara Alberts, Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Henri Chappoulie, Aux origines d’une Église: Rome et les missions d’Indochine au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1943).

13 On Eastern Christians and the post-Tridentine Catholic missions to the Middle East, see Bernard Heyberger, Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique (Syrie, Liban, Palestine, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1994).

14 See Ulinka Rublack, Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Cf. Jos Gommans and Ineke Loots, “Arguing with the Heathens: The Further Reformation and the Ethnohistory of Johannes Hoornbeeck (1617–1666),” Itinerario 39 (2015), 45–68; and Gabriel Glickman, “The Politics of Protestant Missions in the English Overseas Territories, 1660–1700),” Journal of Early Modern History 28 (2024), 92–117. On early English missionary activities among the Eastern Christians, see, most recently, Simon Mills, A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 203–76.

15 For recent overviews, see Pierre Gervais, “Comptabilité et profit: comment saisir les pratiques comptables de l’époque moderne,” Comptabilités 14 (2021), published 27 December 2021, accessed 8 August 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/comptabilites/5549; Inmaculada Llibrer Escrig and Susana Villaluenga de Gracia, “Learning from History: Deconstructing the Charge-and-Discharge System within an Accountability Context,” Accounting History Review 33 (2023), 1–27.

16 Todeschini, I mercanti e il tempio, 28–34; Valentina Toneatto, Les Banquiers du Seigneur: évêques et moines face à la richesse (IVe–IXe siècles) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012). On the regulation of bookkeeping in ecclesiastic institutions, cf., among others, Alisdair Dobie, “The Role of the General and Provincial Chapters in Improving and Enforcing Accounting, Financial and Management Controls in Benedictine Monasteries in England 1215–1444,” The British Accounting Review 47:2 (2015), 142–58; Reinhard Schneider, Vom Klosterhaushalt zum Stadt- und Staatshaushalt: Der zisterzienische Beitrag (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1994); Stefan Weiss, Rechnungswesen und Buchhaltung des Avignoneser Papsttums (1316–1378): Eine Quellenkunde (Hannover: Harrassowitz, 2003); special issue “L’institution de pratiques comptables normalisées et stables dans les milieux ecclésiastiques européens à la fin du Moyen Âge (XIIIe–XVIe siècles): une assimilation des cultures de l’écrit au service d’enjeux administratifs,” Comptabilités 10 (2019), https://journals.openedition.org/comptabilites/2477, accessed 14 August 2024.

17 See, in particular, the thought-provoking work of Todeschini, I mercanti e il tempio and Giacomo Todeschini, Il prezzo della salvezza: Lessici medievali del pensiero economico (Rome: Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1994). Cf. Paul Bertrand, Commerce avec Dame Pauvreté: Structures et fonctions des couvents mendiants à Liège (XIIIe–XIVe s.) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2004). On mendicants in Basel and London, see Bernhard Neidiger, Mendikanten zwischen Ordensideal und städtischer Realität: Untersuchungen zum wirtschaftlichen Verhalten der Bettelorden in Basel (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1981), 183–7; Jens Röhrkasten, The Mendicant Houses of Medieval London 1221–1539 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004). On the relations between the practice of confession and account-keeping, see James Aho, Confession and Bookkeeping: The Religious, Moral and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005).

18 Cf. Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1320–vers 1480) (Rome: École française de Rome, 1980).

19 Sergio Tognetti, Osservanza e partita doppia: La contabilità della Badia fiorentina nel primo Rinascimento (Florence: Edifir Edizioni, 2023). Cf. Sergio Tognetti, “Dall’inventario al libro mastro: evoluzione della contabilità negli enti religiosi fiorentini tra la metà del XIV secolo e l’inizio del XVI,” in Ordine, calcolo e “ragione” nell’Italia tardo medievale, vol. 1: Economia, giustizia e formazione, ed. Elena Maccioni and Sergio Tognetti (Rome: Viella, 2025), 133–176.

20 Clément Lenoble, “Avant l’ascèse intramondaine. Comptabilités ecclésiastiques, gouvernement et rationalité économique (XIIIe–XVe siècles),” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 195 (July–Sept. 2021), 51–81. Cf. Clément Lenoble, L’exercice de la pauvreté: Économie et religion au couvent des franciscains d’Avignon (XIIIe–XVe siècles) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013).

21 Paolo Quattrone, “Accounting for God: Accounting and Accountability Practices in the Society of Jesus (Italy, XVI–XVII Centuries),” Accounting, Organization and Society 29 (2004), 647–83; Paolo Quattrone, “Books to be Practiced: Memory, the Power of the Visual, and the Success of Accounting,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009), 85–118; Paolo Quattrone, “The Jesuit Ordering: In Between the Imaginative Force of the Art of Memory and the Organizational Power of Accounting Practices,” in Devising Order: Socio-religious Models, Rituals, and the Performativity of Practice, ed. Bruno Boute and Thomas Småberg (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 243–64; Paolo Quattrone, “Governing Social Orders, Unfolding Rationality, and Jesuit Accounting Practices: A Procedural Approach to Institutional Logics,” Administrative Science Quarterly 60:3 (Sept. 2015), 411–45.

22 In 1230, with the bull Quo elongati, Gregory IX allowed intermediaries to carry funds on the Franciscans’ behalf. See Julia McClure, “The Globalisation of Franciscan Poverty,” Journal of World History 30 (2019), 335–62.

23 McClure, “The Globalisation,” 353; Robert A. Matter, “Economic Basis of the Seventeenth-Century Florida Missions,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 52 (1973), 18–38; The economic entanglements of religious missions in colonial Spanish America involved complex interactions between Indigenous labour, alms, and missionary practices.

24 Paolo Evangelisti, “Strategie insediative e di consolidamento della presenza francescana nei primi tre secoli di vita della Custodia (1333–1628),” in La Custodia di Terra Santa e l’Europa nei secc. XIV – XV: Atti dell’Incontro di Studio, Napoli, 19–20 Luglio 2019 (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2020), 1–44, 6–7.

25 Archivum Generale Ordinis Carmelitarum Discalceatorum, Rome [hereafter AGOCD], 289/e/1, Instruttione per gli nostri padri della missione de Persia et Oriente che si manda d’ordine del definitorio generale del 1630 a 6 di Jenaro, signed by Fernando de Santa María, praepositus generalis OCD; AGOCD, Acta Definitorii Generalis ab anno 1676 usque ad annum 1687, vol. 6: 243, 250, Instructiones pro missionibus orientalibus, 1683.

26 On the Macao–Nagasaki trade, see Boxer, The Great Ship; Mihoko Oka, The Namban Trade. For American examples, see Konrad, A Jesuit Hacienda; Cushner, Jesuit Ranches and Farm and Factory. On Africa: William Francis Rea, The Economics of the Zambezi Missions, 1580–1759 (Rome: IHSI, 1976).

27 See, for example, the controversy between the Jesuits and the Missions étrangères de Paris about the involvement of missionaries in commercial activities in Southeast Asia in Henri Chappoulie, Une controverse entre missionnaires à Siam au XVIIe siècle: Le Religiosus negotiator du jésuite français J. Tissanier (Paris: s. n, 1943); and Tara Alberts, “Missionaries as Merchants and Mercenaries: Religious Controversies over Commerce in Southeast Asia,” in Trade and Finance, ed. Vu Thanh and Županov, 237–68.

28 Bull Ex debito pastoralis officii of Urban VIIII, 22 February 1633, edited in: Collectanea S. Congregationis de Propaganda fide seu decreta instructiones rescripta pro apostolicis missionibus. Vol. 1: Ann. 1622–1866 (Rome: Ex typographia polyglotta S.C. de Propaganda fide, 1907), 18–9.

29 Constitution Sollicitudo pastoralis officii of Clement IX, 17 June 1669, edited in: Collectanea S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 57–59.

30 See, for example, the contradictions between the rules of strict observance and the requirements of the missionary setting faced by the Discalced Carmelites in Safavid Persia: Windler, Missionaries in Persia, 219–55.

31 The quantitative analysis puts in evidence the limited resources attributed to the missions. See Windler, Missionaries in Persia, 16–8. On the finances of the Propaganda Fide, cf. Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Lo ‘Stato temporale’ della Congregazione ‘de Propaganda Fide’ nel Seicento,” in Ad ultimos usque terrarum terminos in fide propaganda: Roma fra promozione e difesa della fede in età moderna, ed. Massimiliano Ghilardi, Gaetano Sabatini, Matteo Sanfilippo, and Donatella Strangio (Viterbo: Edizioni Sette Città, 2014), 51–66.

32 Volker Reinhardt, Kardinal Scipione Borghese (1605–1633): Vermögen, Finanzen und sozialer Aufstieg eines Papstnepoten (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984), 549.

33 Giovanni Pizzorusso, Governare le missioni, conoscere il mondo nel XVII secolo: la congregazione pontificia de Propaganda Fide (Viterbo: Sette Città, 2018); Giovanni Pizzorusso, Propaganda fide. Vol. I: La congregazione pontificia e la giurisdizione sulle missioni (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2022).

34 Paolo Prodi, Il sovrano pontefice: Un corpo e due anime; La monarchia papale nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982).

35 On the limits of the jurisdiction of the papal congregations: Antonio Menniti Ippolito, 1664. Un anno della Chiesa universale: Saggio sull’italianità del papato in età moderna (Rome: Viella, 2011). On “polycentricity,” see Birgit Emich, “Uniformity and Polycentricity: The Early Modern Papacy between Promoting Unity and Handling Diversity,” in Pathways Through Early Modern Christianities, ed. Andreea Badea, Bruno Boute, and Birgit Emich (Cologne: Böhlau, 2023), 33–53; for the concept of “composite Catholicism,” see Christian Windler, “Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective: Catholic Missionaries and the English East India Company,” in ibid., 57–85. Cf. on the composite character of the Church from the point of view of its finances: Laurence Croq and Antoine Roullet, “Introduction: L’argent des fidèles,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 191 (July–Sept. 2020), 9–20, 10–1.

36 Giovanni Pizzorusso, “La Congregazione ‘de Propaganda Fide’ e gli ordini religiosi: conflittualità nel mondo delle missioni del XVII secolo,” Cheiron 43–4 (2005), 197–240; Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Le pape rouge et le pape noir: Aux origines des conflits entre la Congrégation ‘de Propaganda fide’ et la Compagnie de Jésus au XVIIe siècle,” in Les antijésuites: Discours, figures et lieux de l’antijésuitisme à l’époque moderne, ed. Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Catherine Maire (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 539–61.

37 Michela Catto, La Compagnia divisa: Il dissenso nell’ordine gesuitico tra ‘500 e ‘600 (Brescia: Editrice Morcelliana, 2009); Markus Friedrich, Der lange Arm Roms? Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im Jesuitenorden 1540–1773 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2011); Jean-Pascal Gay, Jesuit Civil Wars: Theology, Politics and Government under Tirso González (1687–1705) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

38 Boxer, The Great Ship; Oka, The Namban Trade.

39 Cf. Ye Yunyang and Manel Ollé, “The Economy of the Spanish Franciscan Mission in China during the 17th Century: The Funding Sources, Expenditures, Loans and Deficits,” Hispania Sacra 73 (2021), 469–81.

40 Some of the accounts of the seminar of San Pancrazio and of the bequest of the Baron of Cacurri have been included in the holdings of the archive of the Curia generalizia of the Discalced Carmelites: AGOCD, 225/e, 280/a and b, 281/a to d.

41 Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

42 Mihoko Oka, “A Memorandum by Tçuzu Rodrigues: The Office of Procurador and Trade by the Jesuits in Japan,” Bulletin of Portuguese/Japanese Studies 13 (2006), 81–102.

43 See Windler, Missionaries in Persia, 246–7, 249.

44 These findings align with research on Armenian kin-based commercial networks between the Mediterranean and South Asia. See Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

45 On the finances of the Jesuit mission in Japan and its commercial activities in a global context, see Hélène Vu Thanh, La Soie et la Croix: Commerce, missions et rivalités ibériques au Japon (XVIe–XVIIe siècle) (Paris: Hémisphères/Maisonneuve et Larose, 2026). On the Jesuit procurators, see Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, Fabian Fechner, eds., Political Agents and Cultural Mediators: Jesuit Procurators in a Globalizing World (16th–18th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2025).

46 Cf. Thomas Dorfner, “Profit Due to Christian Behaviour: The Moral Economy of the Moravian Church in the Eighteenth Century,” in Reassessing the Moral Economy: Religion and Economic Ethics from Ancient Greece to the 20th Century, ed. Tanja Skambraks and Martin Lutz (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 173–92. On the Moravian brethren’s attitudes towards profit-making, see Katherine C. Engel, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Christina Petterson, “From Communal Economy to Economic Community: Changes in Moravian Entrepreneurial Activities in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal for the History of the Reformed Pietism 3 (2017), 25–48.

47 Tognetti, “Una civiltà di ragionieri.” Cf. Goldthwaite, “The Practice and Culture.”