Introduction
In his lifetime, the opportunistic Swiss mercenary and merchant César Falliet almost circumnavigated the globe. Born in Neuchâtel at the turn of the eighteenth century, he enlisted in the Prussian army even before his seventeenth birthday, soon ending up in Naples as a Spanish prisoner of war and converting from Calvinism to Catholicism to secure his liberty. Falliet's pursuit of profits and prestige took him from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean worlds. He travelled to French Mauritius, Portuguese Macao and cities ruled by the British and Dutch East India Companies. By 1736, he set up a home in Manila – the bustling port city and capital of Spain's Asian empire – and made the cosmopolis the headquarters of his inter-Asian trade in slaves and other commodities. Falliet was a globetrotter with an impressive ability to adapt to the urban creole communities that he bounced between.Footnote 1 His contemporaries regarded him as a chameleon: as the Manileño Esteban de Acuña observed, ‘among Spaniards he was Spanish, and among the English he was English’.Footnote 2 Falliet's mastery of multiple languages, the logic of markets, the science of navigation and his social networks that spanned imperial frontiers facilitated his mobility. Yet assimilation had its limits. Inquisition officials arrested Falliet in Manila in 1751. They confiscated all of his worldly possessions, imprisoned him in the fort connected to the city walls and forced him to make the long and dangerous voyage to Mexico City to be tried by the Tribunal of the Inquisition. Falliet regained his freedom in 1753 having survived eight months in the Inquisition's secret gaol and a sentence of three months of prayer and religious education as punishment for his crimes.
This article explores why Falliet proved so resilient to the vindictive plans of Manila's most senior Inquisition official, the Dominican friar Juan Álvarez, who wanted to have him convicted for being a secret Protestant with a pornographic art collection and a fondness for prostitutes.Footnote 3 Álvarez rallied support from his elite Spanish network who also sought to punish Falliet for his affronts to good Catholic morals. Falliet marshalled his own wandering allies to his defence, and on the strength of the testimony of his Asian slave, he was set free. He returned to the Philippines in time to lead a Spanish raiding campaign against Islamic pirates in Mindanao.
Falliet's uneasy path to belonging in Manila is revealing of what really mattered to Manileño secular and mercantile elites. This was a city made by piracy. The foreigner gained prestige in the cosmopolis for going to Macao to rescue and repatriate the men and women taken captive by the British pirate George Anson when he famously seized a galleon ship, a feat made possible by Falliet's experience in trafficking people. A decade later, Falliet's reintegration into Manila's social world following his encounter with the Inquisition was premised on his ability to rescue Christian captives and enslave moro (Muslim) pirates in the Philippines’ watery southern borderlands. Manileños prized Falliet's expertise and transoceanic networks above his piety. Falliet was a typical cultural shape-shifter in this maritime world of raiding, smuggling and fierce inter-imperial rivalry. He threw his support behind the British when they invaded and occupied Manila in 1762, and when they were defeated by Hispano-Filipino forces, Falliet had no choice but to flee with the withdrawing troops to Madras. He lived out his last days in poverty in India.
Thomas Hillerkuss analysed Falliet's encounter with the Inquisition to explore the ‘enlightened’, ‘tolerant’ and ‘pragmatic’ character of this institution in the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote 4 This study is more interested in what Falliet's trans-imperial biography, reconstructed through Inquisition records, reveals about Manila's social fabric and the city's connections to other urban centres in maritime Asia and the larger Iberian world. To be successful in Manila, Falliet had to prove that he was Catholic, loyal to the king of Spain and useful to his global empire. This article shows that the battle over Falliet's belonging in Manila was not restricted to the confines of this city alone. His faith, fidelity and utility were tested in five theatres: in Manila, Batavia, India, the Americas and the Sulu Zone. In doing so, it illuminates Manila's historical inter-Asia ties which remain obscured in galleon-centric histories of this city. This study also engages with ongoing debates about belonging in the Spanish empire, and suggests that the mechanisms of social integration into urban colonial communities varied more across time and space than scholars have recognized. Historians emphasize that limpieza de sangre (‘clean’ blood that was free of the ‘stain’ of Jewish, Muslim or heretic ancestors) determined what opportunities were available to urban subjects in colonial Latin America, including who they could marry, and whether they could study at university or enter certain professions. This led people to invent elaborate ‘genealogical fictions’ to prove limpieza, and even petition the crown to purchase this status.Footnote 5 Falliet's experience suggests that in Manila, genealogy mattered less than being a Hispanic patriot. As Fabio López Lázaro explains, this ‘was not limited to a “European” identity or even a European American one, but rather a global identity co-terminal with the boundaries of the monarchy. Pirates and heretics were its antithetical “other”.’Footnote 6 Looking beyond the Iberian world, this article warns historians against overstating the ease with which globetrotters like Falliet crossed imperial borders and assimilated into their adopted neighbourhoods: even on the periphery of empires, colonial governments and communities acted as gatekeepers and exercised their authority to discipline foreigners. In a moment in which the world's most cosmopolitan cities are shutting down their borders, it is useful to reflect on how itinerant subjects used their social networks to defy the forces that attempted to anchor or exile them.
Manila: the colonial cosmopolis
Manila was not only a global city, some scholars have argued that it was also the birthplace of globalization.Footnote 7 The settlement that the Spanish constructed above the ruins of the conquered kingdom of Maynilad in the late sixteenth century rapidly transformed into a commercial hub that opened up direct and sustained transpacific trade between Asia and the Americas for the first time in human history. From 1571 to 1810, huge galleon ships made the almost-annual voyage from Manila to Acapulco loaded with luxury Asian merchandise including fine silks, porcelains and spices such as cinnamon and cloves. These boats returned from Mexico to the Philippines each year full of friars, soldiers and a vast quantity of silver that supported the expansion of Spain's Asian empire.Footnote 8
An obsession with the history of the transpacific galleon trade, reflected in historiography as well as last year's opening of the Manila museum dedicated to the great ship, has obscured the great extent to which Manila was entangled in regional commercial networks.Footnote 9 Recent scholarship reveals that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries itinerant merchants supplied Manila with slaves, provisions such as wheat and military resources like saltpetre procured from port cities across the Western Indian Ocean world and Southeast Asia. There are several studies of the Armenian families who forged long-distance trading networks in this region.Footnote 10 Tremml-Werner's research shows that merchants from ‘minor trading nations’ such as Bantam and Makassar, as well as Danes, Frenchmen and Irishmen, or men like César Falliet, were also heavily involved in this business.Footnote 11 As this non-luxury trade expanded in the eighteenth century, Manila's ties to Asian cities deepened.
Flows of goods in and out of Manila were accompanied by a human traffic that made Manila one of the early modern world's most diverse cities. In 1749, the Jesuit priest and scholar Pedro Murillo Velarde described Manila as ‘a universal mission, equal to all the missions in the world, for gathered here are people from all of the universe’.Footnote 12 The city was home to men and women ‘from all the kingdoms of Spain, and all of America’, and ‘people from all the nations of Europe’. The population of Manila and its hinterland reached approximately 150,000 by the late eighteenth century.Footnote 13 The number of Spaniards living in the city never exceeded 4,000 in this era. The small Spanish community was dwarfed by the large Chinese diaspora and indigenous Filipinos from across the archipelago.Footnote 14 Immigrants from Southeast Asia, ‘blacks’ from Africa and India and a multitude of mestizos also inhabited the cosmopolis.Footnote 15
Early modern Manila was also a colonial city. Its function as a stronghold of Spanish cultural identity and centre of imperial power was encoded in the cityscape. Intramuros, the walled Spanish quarter in the heart of the city, was the seat of the colonial government. Philippines governors resided in the palace that faced the plaza mayor beside the grand buildings that housed the real audiencia (royal council) and Manila's cabildo (city council). Manila was a garrison town. The imposing Fort Santiago standing on Manila Bay at the mouth of the Pasig river defended the Spanish colony against two threats: enemies who might attack from the sea, and the local Chinese who might rise up in rebellion in the Parián, the city's Chinatown. Thousands of armed soldiers and militiamen would march through the city during major public festivals in unsubtle displays of the government's authority.Footnote 16 Manila was also the headquarters of the missionary orders working to spread Catholicism throughout the Philippines. All of the religious orders that were present in the archipelago erected stone churches and convents within the walled city, which Velarde described as ‘the most sumptuous buildings’ in Intramuros.Footnote 17
The city's political economy absolutely depended on extranjeros (foreigners) as trading partners and workers. This broad category of ‘others’ encompassed people who were neither Spaniards nor indios (indigenous Filipinos). The Chinese were the largest group of foreigners in Manila: between 6,000 and 7,000 Chinese were living in the city and its hinterland in the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote 18 The colonial government regarded this group as a serious threat to Spanish sovereignty. Foreign sojourners and settlers’ loyalties to Spanish monarchy were uncertain. In addition to the threat of a general revolt, there was a risk that these strangers were spies for rival imperial powers, and they could not be depended on to defend the government in a crisis like a foreign invasion. Foreigners were also dangerous because they threatened to spread heresies or religious doctrines contrary to Catholicism which had the potential to erode the common religion that constituted the ideological glue that held the Spanish empire together. These anxieties led the colonial government to implement a range of policies that attempted to control foreigners in the city.
In Falliet's time, a sophisticated segregation system operated in Manila to control the city's population in general and foreigners in particular. The Chinese were banned from entering Intramuros after nightfall. Non-baptized Chinese and Armenians alike were required to live in the Parián.Footnote 19 Chinese merchants and migrants were also required to buy licences, which, like a modern visa, allowed them to legally enter and remain in Manila for specified lengths of time. Laws imposed limits on the duration of foreigners’ visits to the city. A Royal Order issued in 1744, for example, instructed ‘Armenians, foreigners, and infidels (non-Christians)’ who came to Manila to trade to leave as soon as they completed their business.Footnote 20 Segregation was supplemented by other government strategies of social control. Vagrants and criminals of all races were routinely rounded up and transported to remote presidios throughout the Philippine islands to rid the city of troublesome men.Footnote 21 The church also played its part disciplining the urban population: ecclesiastical courts placed men and women accused of moral or religious crimes, often of a sexual nature, in the city's ecclesiastical prisons.Footnote 22
The Inquisition too policed non-Spanish newcomers in Manila.Footnote 23 Men and women had to obtain the Inquisition's permission to convert to Catholicism from Protestant or Eastern Rite religions, which was a prerequisite for enjoying the rights and privileges of vecinos (local permanent residents).Footnote 24 Inquisition officials also used their mandate to investigate and punish heresy and a range of other crimes and lesser infractions to control foreigners. It exiled foreign Southeast Asian men accused of being crypto-Muslims, and targeted Irishmen, Englishmen and Dutchmen who were accused of possessing banned books and being freemasons.Footnote 25
Urban communities themselves functioned as gatekeepers in Manila, influencing who could enter the city, who could stay and under what terms. Because of the Inquisition's reliance on denunciations and witness testimonies, Manileños could use this institution to try to expel their enemies from the city.Footnote 26 At the same time, being part of a tight-knit social group could sometimes offer protection from becoming the subject of an Inquisition inquiry, or could save someone already under investigation from persecution and punishment. In Inquisition trials, the accused's fate was determined by evidence that officials gathered from their social networks, including family members, domestic servants, employers, co-workers, neighbours and parish priests. Criminal courts across the Spanish empire shared the Inquisition's dependence on testimonies, leading some historians to assert that community networks mattered more in the lives of men and women than the church or the colonial government.Footnote 27 The ‘transformation of ordinary citizens into monitors, surveillors, and adjuncts to law enforcement’ engaged in the policing of migrants, which sociologists have observed in twenty-first-century global cities, is not a recent phenomenon.Footnote 28
Belonging in Manila
César Falliet's biography demonstrates that some outsiders became insiders in Manila despite the city's hostility to foreigners. In the 1740s, Falliet lived with his daughter Vizenta and their slaves and servants in the house that he owned in Binondo, the suburb that hugged the north bank of the Pasig river across from Intramuros.Footnote 29 This address suggests that Falliet enjoyed a degree of economic success in the city. Spaniards had spilt out into the suburbs beyond the walls in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Binondo, like the neighbouring north river districts of Santa Cruz and Tondo, was home to relatively wealthy Spaniards and Chinese mestizos by the mid-eighteenth century. Impoverished Spaniards and indigenous Filipinos clustered in Bagumbayan, the suburb that unfurled from southern city walls along Manila Bay.Footnote 30 Falliet's wealth came from inter-Asia commerce, including the region's little-studied slave trade. He brought slaves to Manila from Batavia; one of the largest slave markets in maritime Asia. He also participated in the transpacific slave trade, loading human chattels aboard the Acapulco-bound galleon to fetch a profit in Mexico.Footnote 31
The foreigner's enthusiastic participation in Manila's religious sphere indicates a degree of social assimilation. Manileños participated in the life of the church through the city's many confraternities or brotherhoods. These organizations of laypeople were generally dedicated to a popular saint whom members honoured by co-ordinating religious celebrations and carrying out charitable works in their names.Footnote 32 Falliet was never selected to join the prestigious Hermandad de la Misericordia (the Merciful Brotherhood), whose 250 members were chosen from long-established elite Spanish families in Manila who monopolized the galleon trade. By the mid-1740s, however, he belonged to the confraternity connected to the Augustinian Recollects’ San Sebastian church and convent in Tondo. Falliet must have wanted to advertise his ties to this organization, as Manileños watched him go about the city with the key to this church proudly swinging around his neck.Footnote 33 Locals also spotted Falliet carrying the banner of Nuestra Señora de Guia (Our Lady of Guidance), one of Manila's most venerated sacred images, in the noisy religious processions that wound through Extramuros and Intramuros on Catholic feast days and celebrations of royal births, deaths, coronations and marriages.Footnote 34
In addition to being European, Catholic and moneyed, his commitment to combating pirates far beyond Manila influenced Falliet's acceptance by the local community. It was well known in the city that Falliet had sailed to Macao in 1743 to rescue and repatriate the 500 people taken captive by the English pirate George Anson when he captured a silver-laden galleon in Philippine waters that year.Footnote 35 No doubt, Falliet's experience in moving slaves between Asian port cities helped him to manage this mission. Falliet did a stint as a corsair shortly after this feat, hunting and attacking English vessels in the seas surrounding the archipelago. In 1745, he sunk one English ship and took another as a prize off the coast of Malacca. These exploits earned Falliet some good-will among Manileños, but fell short of protecting him from being investigated by the Inquisition.Footnote 36
The Dominican friar Juan Álvarez used his authority as commissioner of the Inquisition in Manila to initiate a formal investigation of Falliet in 1746. This was a legal and bureaucratic process that the friar anticipated would eventually result in the foreigner's banishment from the city. Using the testimonies that he collected from his peers, Álvarez compiled a report for the Tribunal of the Inquisition in Mexico City that documented Falliet's alleged heretical words and actions. This report convinced the Tribunal to order Falliet's arrest and transportation to Mexico City where officials would finalize the investigation.
Álvarez emerges from the colonial archive as a more reluctant world-rover than Falliet. The friar left his native Spain rather late in life, arriving in the Philippines in 1718 when he was already 42 years old. He spent much of the 1720s in indigenous parishes in Luzon's Pangasinan province, and came to Manila in the 1730s to take up a position in the University of Santo Tomás.Footnote 37 In public, Álvarez carried out his duties as scholar and university administrator. In private, he continued the secret work of a commissioner of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Falliet was slow to realize that this made Álvarez a dangerous enemy. The friar officially opened the investigation against Falliet because the foreigner ‘never missed an opportunity to share or spread his heretical views’.Footnote 38 It was true that Falliet enjoyed vibrant discussions about religion. Witnesses said that in Manila Falliet debated matters of faith with Catholic priests, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Frenchmen and the Igorots alike.Footnote 39 However, the simmering personal conflict between the Falliet and the friar was the true cause for the investigation. Álvarez and Falliet bickered and argued out in the open. Álvarez would barrage Falliet with questions intended to insult Calvinists: ‘do the Calvinists use wine at baptisms? Don't they get drunk when they take communion?’Footnote 40 Falliet rebuked Álvarez by posing his own questions in Latin in front of other Spaniards which the friar ‘hated’ because his Latin was not as polished as the educated foreigner's.Footnote 41 Falliet probably perceived this playful banter as harmless fun, but for Álvarez it was insolent and humiliating. While the friar was ‘highly regarded in the Republic’ of Manila, according to the Augustinian missionary Joseph de la Soledad, he also had ‘an irritable disposition, and is quick to anger’.Footnote 42
The Inquisition's investigation of Falliet was essentially a contest between the foreigner and the friar and their respective networks over Falliet's belonging in Manila, and this city was one sphere in which this competition played out. Álvarez's associates in the cosmopolis – older male Spanish emigres who were merchants or officials in the colonial government – readily denounced Falliet's public heretical speech. The 49-year-old Vizcayan Sargent Major Gaspar de Matanza, who was employed as a scribe in the colonial treasury, recalled an irritating and incriminating encounter with Falliet on the city's streets. Matanza had been crossing the Puente Grande (Big Bridge) across the Pasig river with a group of Spaniards and foreigners who were discussing a recent storm in Bengal that had destroyed ‘more than one hundred ships’. The men marvelled at how only one single boat miraculously survived this disaster after its Catholic captain called upon a saint to come to his rescue. Falliet had rudely interjected that ‘neither saints nor the Holy Virgin could make miracles; only God himself had this power’.Footnote 43 This was one of the many examples Álvarez collected of the formal heresy that flowed freely from Falliet's lips.
Álvarez's friends also denounced Falliet's private behaviour. Rumours of the secret pornographic art collection that he had amassed in defiance of laws that prohibited ownership of erotic objects spread like wildfire through Manila.Footnote 44 The 50-year-old Burgos-native and merchant Esteban Garcia de los Rios had heard whispers about a jar decorated with a picture of a woman wearing nothing but furs that Falliet kept locked up in a desk in his house. Garcia's sister-in-law told him that Falliet possessed a magic glass mirror that he used to peer through women's clothes. His friend, Joseph Martin de Llañez, relayed that the foreigner also had a painting of a naked, bathing woman hidden at the foot of his bed.Footnote 45 Another Manileño suggested that Falliet was actually in the business of importing these illicit objects to Manila, bringing 16 jars decorated with ‘not very decent’ paintings back from Malacca.Footnote 46
Several of Álvarez's allies referenced Falliet's involvement in the slave trade in their testimonies. The fact of that Falliet trafficked enslaved women was not in and of itself something that Manileños were opposed to; like other urban centres in the Iberian world, Manila was a slave society. What alarmed them was Falliet's conspicuous sexual liaisons with slaves. The Manila-born naval officer Juan de Morales happened to travel aboard Falliet's ship from Batavia to the Philippines on private business. He informed the Inquisition that on this particular voyage Falliet transported five female slaves, all ‘Malayan infidels’. Some of these women were Falliet's property, while others were cargo owned by other entrepreneurs. Falliet created a scandal at sea when he brought all of the women into his cabin where Morales presumed ‘he treated them illicitly’.Footnote 47 Falliet admitted to taking the women to his private quarters, but he insisted that this was only to protect them from the rough and lusty men on board. This controversy shifted from ship to shore at the end of the voyage when Falliet installed three of the slaves in his Binondo house. Colonial officials eventually removed the women, perhaps installing them in the casas de recogimiento where the city's ‘vulnerable’ and dishonourable women were locked up.Footnote 48
What motivated the 44-year-old Morales to support Álvarez's campaign against Falliet? Morales strikes us as a man who was thirsty for honour. He built a relatively successful career loyally serving the Spanish in Asia, and rose from the rank of junior officer to that of ship's captain. Morales’ rewards for decades of service to the empire were appointments to the prestigious posts of captain of one of Manila's Spanish infantry companies, as well as captain of one of the city's militias.Footnote 49 His ambition and the politics of patronage might have persuaded him to contribute to Álvarez's mounting case against Falliet. It is also possible that Morales was simply offended by Falliet's behaviour. As Governor Arechederra suggested, Falliet's dealings with women earned him many enemies.
Inquisition rules permitted the accused to nominate character witnesses who they expected would speak favourably of them. Falliet's nominations reveal his mobile and multi-ethnic social network. Falliet relied on his 28-year-old ‘Malay’ slave Luis Andado to defend him.Footnote 50 Andado had been born a slave in Batavia, a city in which slaves constituted roughly 60 per cent of the urban population. Like the majority of enslaved people in Batavia, Andado's parents were most likely from Bali, Sulawesi or other eastern Indonesian islands.Footnote 51 Andado had been by Falliet's side since the foreigner purchased him in Batavia in 1742. He resided with Falliet in his Binondo house and accompanied him on various overseas expeditions, including Falliet's voyage to Mexico as a prisoner of the Inquisition. Andado proved to be one of Falliet's greatest allies. He testified that he was baptized and married to his Malay wife who was also one of Falliet's slaves, which showed that Falliet had met his obligations as a slave-owner under Spanish colonial law and custom to baptize his slaves and allow them to marry.Footnote 52 Moreover, Andado swore that in Manila he had witnessed Falliet ‘carry out works of charity, give alms to the poor, and attend mass every day’. He had seen his master make the sign of the cross over himself within the privacy of his own home, as well as when he entered churches. We cannot be certain about the slave's reasons for supporting Falliet. It is possible that he truly cared for the foreigner whom he described as his padrino (godfather) rather than his amo (master). Yet before we romanticize their friendship, we must acknowledge that Falliet was Andado's ticket ‘home’ to Manila and his family. As Andado was Falliet's property, he stood to be seized and sold into slavery in Mexico if the Inquisition ruled to confiscate Falliet's estate as punishment for his crimes.
Falliet's other important allies were roaming non-elite men. His 32-year-old cook, Blas Chobaque, testified that he had seen Falliet in his bedroom kneeling before a painting of the Virgin Mary and praying the rosary. The French artilleryman Lorenzo Mundotegui declared that he too had seen the sacred images that adorned the walls of Falliet's Binondo home.Footnote 53 Notably, both of these men travelled to Mexico aboard the galleon that transported the prisoner Falliet to trial. These portraits of a pious Falliet in the inner sanctum of his home seem ‘ritualized and stereotyped’, yet they offered the Tribunal an alternative to the slanderous picture that Álvarez and his co-conspirators had painted of the foreigner in Manila.Footnote 54
Colonies of Protestants? Falliet in Madras and Batavia
It can be challenging to wrap our modern minds around the fact that early modern world travellers could have been subject to community surveillance in one city that would impact their lives in urban centres thousands of miles away, yet this was Falliet's reality. The foreigner and his enemies alike used his activities in Madras and Batavia to make arguments about Falliet's incorporation into Manila's social world.
Falliet travelled from Mauritius to India aboard an English ship in 1727 and chose Madras to be his base for most of the following decade. The Madras that he encountered was a large city of 100,000 inhabitants.Footnote 55 It was a busy centre of textile production and maritime trade, and a hub in the East India Company's expanding commercial empire, being the seat of the Company's Presidency that ruled over all English settlements in the Coromandel coast and Bengal. The streets were dominated by symbols of the Company's authority. At the centre of the city stood Fort St George, the cannon-lined citadel that housed the governor and garrisons of soldiers. The Company made Madras a segregated city, constructing the enclosed European ‘White Town’ around the base of the citadel, apart from ‘Black Town’, the district that was home to ‘Portuguese, Indians, Armenians, and a great variety of people’ and was surrounded by a five-metre-high wall.Footnote 56 Weavers, fishermen and boatmen lived in the sprawling suburbs that stretched from the port into the hinterland.
The smallness of the Madras European community may have made it easier for Falliet to be invited to join White Town's punch house games of billiards and backgammon and gain this community's friendship and trust.Footnote 57 Excluding soldiers, there were only about 150 Europeans in the city in 1736.Footnote 58 Falliet quickly found work with the East India Company as a supercargo and purser. He was the commanding officer of a 70-gun ship that made various voyages through maritime Southeast Asia and one to England trading merchandise on the Company's behalf in the ceaseless search for profits.Footnote 59
Álvarez and his co-conspirators tried to use Falliet's India connections to condemn him, implying that the foreigner's mere presence in ‘Protestant colonies’ cast doubt on his religious identity and political allegiances, and hence his right to continue to reside in Manila.Footnote 60 Before the Inquisition, Falliet cleverly constructed an alternative spiritual geography of Madras as a Catholic city. He accurately reported that 16,000 Catholics resided in Madras. Falliet worshipped in White Town's Capuchin convent that was dedicated to Saint Andrew, a parish dominated by Armenians and the Luso-South Asians who migrated to Madras from the old Portuguese settlement of São Tomé only three miles away.Footnote 61 The 53-year-old pilot Simon Bulet substantiated this narrative. He testified that Falliet routinely resided in the Capuchin convent in Madras ‘when he could have lived in a palace’.Footnote 62 Falliet's decision to stay in a house of prayer was offered as weighty proof of his sincere Catholic faith, in addition to his acceptance as a Catholic by this overseas religious community. Bulet's mobility makes him a difficult figure to trace in Spanish archives. He lived in Madras from 1730 to 1739, and like Falliet, he resettled in Manila in the 1740s. In 1751, he was commissioned as the second pilot aboard the galleon ship that transported the enchained Falliet to Acapulco.Footnote 63 Fortunately for the prisoner, this twist of fate meant that Bulet was available to be questioned by Inquisition officials in Mexico as they continued their investigation.
Batavia was the nerve centre of the Dutch empire in Asia: a rendezvous point for the Dutch East India Company's ships and an emporium of trade for merchants of all nations.Footnote 64 A 1739 census counted 18,000 people living within the heavily fortified walled quarter in the city centre, and almost 70,000 in the surrounding hinterland.Footnote 65 By this time, the walled city's famous canals that attempted to recreate Amsterdam had silted up and filled the district with a horrible stink. Although important civic buildings such as the town hall, courts and hospitals remained within the walled city, wealthy Europeans had begun an exodus to the healthier suburbs beyond the walls.
Falliet's long relationship with Batavia was underpinned by family ties. He started visiting the city while he was based in Madras and continued to do so after he had settled in Manila, and he stayed in the home of his brother Francisco when he was in town, including during an extended visit in 1742. Francisco was also involved in inter-Asia commerce, travelling to Manila at least twice as a supercargo on Dutch ships in the early 1740s.Footnote 66 Historians have shown that family ties underpinned long-distance trade in many parts of the early modern world. Family members were important sources of credit and information about markets and prices, and they facilitated entry into the close-knit urban communities of different port towns sought by travellers like Falliet.Footnote 67
Álvarez, of course, attempted to turn Falliet's experiences in the Dutch colonial city against him. Like an octopus with tentacles that stretched across oceans, the Manileño rumour mill brought the friar news of Falliet's alleged crimes against religion in Batavia. Francisco Ignacio Gutierrez de Mantilla, a Burgos-born Manila merchant, testified that in Batavia he had seen Falliet in possession of a powder pot that was decorated with a painting of two men and two women engaged in an ‘extremely dishonest and indecent act’.Footnote 68 Gutierrez added that the ever-flirtatious Falliet had gifted this pot to the wife of the Dutch governor in an effort to seduce her. Juan Morales and other Manileños denounced Falliet for entering a Protestant church in Batavia, probably one of the three that lined the banks of the Ci Luwung river that flowed into the heart of the city. This was a serious accusation because it could be interpreted as evidence that Falliet was a crypto-Protestant; a convert to Catholicism who was secretly practising the Calvinism that he had been born into.
In contrast, Falliet's account of his Batavian escapades emphasized his Catholic identity. He ceded that he had visited a Protestant church in the company of other Spaniards, but only because he was curious, and he had not lingered there. His curiosity is understandable given how markedly different these modest Dutch houses of worship were from Manila's baroque churches. In addition, Falliet claimed that he had maintained a Catholic chaplain in his Batavia lodgings, which was a fair explanation for his noted absence from the city's Catholic churches. Moreover, he swore that he had provided crucial assistance to a Catholic bishop and other ‘men of distinction’ from the Portuguese colony of Timor when they covertly called into Batavia en route from Malacca. Falliet smuggled the disguised bishop and his party to his house and supported them there until they resolved whatever sensitive business they had in the port.Footnote 69 Demonstrating his dedication and usefulness to the Spanish empire, Falliet also argued that the main purpose of his 1742 visit to Batavia was the ‘difficult and dangerous’ mission to purchase ‘military supplies’ for the Spanish government in Manila. Juan Morales confirmed that this was true.Footnote 70
Mexico City: viceregal capital
Cities were the vehicle-of-choice for joining the dots in the Spanish empire. It is not surprising that Falliet's belonging in Manila was also tested in Mexico City. From his palace in the plaza mayor, the viceroy of New Spain ruled over Mexico, much of the Caribbean and the distant Philippines. The Mexican Tribunal of the Inquisition's jurisdiction extended into all corners of this vast territory. Falliet was lucky to survive the long journey to Mexico City, which involved a six-month transpacific voyage aboard a galleon ship to Acapulco followed by a 450 kilometre overland trek in a mule train to the viceregal capital. He might have had the chance to glimpse the palace and the cathedral that towered over the central plaza as he passed through the heart of the city on his way to the secret cells in the damp, dark basement of the Tribunal of the Inquisition that stood only a few blocks away.Footnote 71
The Tribunal took eight months to rule on Falliet's case. During this time, officials reviewed transcripts of the denunciations Álvarez had collected in the Philippines and gathered new testimonies about Falliet's conduct from the seven men who knew him and happened to be present in Mexico. Among those men were Simon Bulet and Luis Andado, and other merchants and missionaries who had travelled to Acapulco on the same galleon as Falliet. The allegiances of these witnesses were divided. The Dominican Friar Francisco Pallar sided with Álvarez and repudiated Falliet ‘the known Calvinist’ for failing to attend shipboard mass or make confession during the Pacific crossing.Footnote 72 But the Augustinian Recollect friar Joseph de la Soledad defended the foreigner, noting that he had seen him at church and participating in religious festivals in Manila. In addition, Soledad praised Falliet for his heroic rescue of Anson's captives from Macao.Footnote 73 Mexico's Inquisition officials considered the foreigner too sick and weak to be tortured, but they ensured that he was interrogated multiple times about his biography and lapses in his faith. Falliet was eventually given a chance to respond formally to the crimes of which he had been accused.Footnote 74 Falliet was as co-operative as possible: he admitted that he had said things that were heretical, but blamed this on ignorance, and his having been denied the chance to learn Catholic doctrine correctly.Footnote 75 This was a smart choice. Inquisition scholar Irene Silverblatt notes that ‘it was to the prisoner's great advantage to admit heresy: the defendant's chances for benign treatment…improved dramatically with confession’.Footnote 76
Falliet's social network was victorious in Mexico. The trial concluded in August 1752, when the Tribunal found the foreigner guilty of heresy and sentenced him to abjure de levi with three months of religious education and prayer in the Jesuit College of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. This relatively light sentence was the best possible outcome Falliet could have hoped for.Footnote 77 It is clear that the Tribunal valued the foreigner's service to the Spanish crown fighting its pirate enemies which they regarded as proof of the sincerity of his Catholic faith, and ultimately of his usefulness to the empire. The Tribunal removed the embargo on Falliet's property and granted him a licence to return to Manila in 1753.Footnote 78 The most senior Inquisition officials in the viceroyalty's decision to trust a motley group of foreigners over a friar and return Falliet to the Philippines reveals this institution's underlying desire to protect networks of agents of empire who ultimately tightened the links between Spanish cities across the Pacific.
Álvarez's network had failed. The friar's campaign to exile Falliet was not only defeated, it also resulted in his permanent demotion. The Tribunal faulted Álvarez for not following the Inquisition's strict rules: he had neglected to interview Falliet's nominated character witnesses in Manila, including his ‘very good friend…Juan de Labat, of the French nation’, or Falliet's allies Bulet and Andado who were not questioned until they arrived in Mexico.Footnote 79 Álvarez's decision to submit notarized copies instead of original transcripts of witness testimonies also frustrated the Tribunal. There were other cases, too, in which Álvarez had overstepped his authority. In 1750, the friar confiscated and burned a book of Tagalog prayers that allegedly contained ‘bad doctrine’ without first obtaining the necessary authorization from the Mexican Tribunal.Footnote 80 These actions caused the Mexican officials ‘to fear [Álvarez's] misconduct will produce in these islands a hardening, even a hatred of the smooth and important yoke of the Inquisition’. They concluded that Álvarez's errors were caused by his ‘advanced age and weakness of memory’, and ordered him to retire from his position as commissioner.Footnote 81
The Sulu Zone
Falliet's transoceanic saga of belonging did not end in Mexico. The Inquisition effectively granted Falliet permission to reintegrate into the social world of Manila so long as he met his religious obligations to confess his sins to a priest and receive Holy Communion at least once each year in his Binondo parish.Footnote 82 But there was no guarantee that Manila's colonial communities would accept him back as a neighbour or business partner. Falliet arrived in Manila only to find that to reintegrate into the city, he needed to leave it once again.
The foreigner's return to the Philippines coincided with the escalation of the Spanish empire's war against the Islamic maritime states in the southern Philippines archipelago, or the Sulu Zone.Footnote 83 The rapid intensification of moro (Muslim) slave raiding attacks throughout the islands in the mid-eighteenth century made the new Philippines Governor Ovando determined to vanquish the enemies his predecessors had never been able to subdue.Footnote 84 This war became another theatre in which Falliet's right to belong in Manila was tested. Ovando made Falliet commander and chief of the large naval fleet that he dispatched to the Sulu Zone to rescue and repatriate Christian slaves, destroy the enemy's pueblos and boats and attempt the conquest of the large island of Mindanao. The armada comprised 19 boats and 320 men from Manila, and was augmented by a semi-autonomous indigenous Filipino fleet from the Visayas mobilized by local datus (chiefs) and Jesuit missionaries.Footnote 85 Ovando gave Falliet this enormous responsibility because he valued his military experience in Europe and Southeast Asia, and he had an inherent bias towards Europeans. We observe this bias in Ovando's complaints to the king about the ‘inexpert [and] pusillanimous’ mestizo soldiers at his disposal.Footnote 86 The governor petitioned Spain to remit at least 1,000 European veteran soldiers to fight against the moros because he considered them superior to Filipino fighting men. When the desired soldiers were not forthcoming, Ovando had to make do with a man like Falliet who was not only a foreigner but also a penitent of the Inquisition. Ann Twinam has shown that shortages of capable white men in colonial Latin American cities in this period created opportunities for men with African ancestry to take up skilled employment in the colonial bureaucracy. Pardos and morenos became notaries in Panama, and engineers in Guatemala after an earthquake destroyed the city and there were not enough Spaniards on the ground to meet the demand for skilled workers in rebuilding efforts.Footnote 87 Manila was another city where a small European population apparently made it easier for non-Spaniards, or men with ‘stained’ blood, to belong.
Going to war in the Sulu Zone helped Falliet to reintegrate into Manila's social world in several ways. Although the campaign to conquer Mindanao failed, it likely allowed Falliet to recover some of the wealth that he had lost during his lengthy imprisonment. Ovando issued patents authorizing military officials to seize ‘gold, pearls, and silver’ from moro enemies and ‘enslave any men, women, and children of that nation’ that they captured in battles or raids.Footnote 88 As commander, Falliet would have had the right to a substantial share of this loot. Moreover, joining this crusade allowed Falliet to reassert his Catholic and loyal identity and regain standing among Manila elites because this conflict was popularly imagined in Manila as a Holy War; part of a larger, global struggle between the Catholic and Islamic worlds. Elite Manileños linked Spain's medieval reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula to the early modern spiritual conquest of Asia. Manila's Archbishop Martínez de Arizala explicitly made this connection in his 1754 essay advocating for the subjugation of Mindanao. He argued that Spain's ‘experience in Asia, Europe, and almost everywhere’ had proven that Muslims could not be trusted, and that war was the only way to deal with the ‘sworn and irreconcilable enemy of Christians’.Footnote 89 Other foreigners who wanted to prove their Hispanic patriotism contributed to the war as well. In 1753, the Chinese of the Parián, for example, collectively donated more than 10,000 pesos for ‘wars and expeditions against the moros…and other Mohometanos, our enemies’.Footnote 90
Fighting pirates was a strategy that worked for Falliet in Manila until late 1762, when the British invaded the city with a combined Royal Navy and East India Company fleet dispatched from Madras.Footnote 91 What was the chameleon to do when these empires clashed on his home turf? Initially, Falliet rushed to defend the Spanish, taking command of a unit of Hispano-Filipino troops that attacked the British while they laid siege to the walled city, but his loyalties shifted once Intramuros fell to the invaders.Footnote 92 He befriended and became a trusted advisor to Dawsonne Drake, the British governor of Manila, and he assisted the invading force in as many ways as he could. Falliet helped the British to found cannon and shot, and to secure guides that helped their army navigate the roads and rivers that ran through the unfamiliar country.Footnote 93 He was also happy to act as a treasure map leading the British to the city's hidden riches. Rumours circulated that Falliet helped the invaders to sack the Augustinian convent where he even opened graves to take gold and jewels from the dead. He kept his share of the stolen church silver on display in a cabinet in his home where ‘you could see them when you entered and exited’ the building. To cement this new alliance, Falliet's daughter Vizenta married the Gibraltar-born British soldier Don Pedro Pouvre.Footnote 94 Falliet's decision to serve the British reflects that his underlying loyalty lay with the city of Manila. Perhaps he also desired revenge for his imprisonment; Falliet was said to have played a part in the British army's destruction of Manila's Inquisition archive.Footnote 95
The Spanish and their indigenous allies defeated the invaders and regained control of Manila and its hinterland by mid-1764. This turn of events gave Falliet little choice but to retreat to Madras with the British. His pivot across the Indian Ocean did not prevent the Inquisition from opening another investigation into Falliet in absentia for the crime of apostasy, or of abandoning the Catholic religion. In their hunt for information, Inquisition officials in Manila interrogated mobile missionaries and merchants who might have encountered Falliet in India in the aftermath of the war, or at least heard news about his activities during their travels. The testimonies of traders like the Armenian Abraham Amiryan and the Vigan-born mestizo Juan de Verrosa revealed that Falliet was ‘crestfallen and poor’, and surviving on the charity of his son-in-law in Madras. He was ostracized from the city's English community who ‘hated him’ and regarded him as ‘a vile man’, and ‘called him a traitor to the Spanish crown’. The community apparently held Falliet and Drake responsible for the failure of the British campaign in Manila.Footnote 96 Falliet was alive, but hardly triumphant.
Conclusion
Simon Bulet once asked César Falliet what he would do if he wound up in hell, that great city of tortured souls buried deep in the hot earth. Falliet nonchalantly answered that ‘he would observe what the other condemned were doing, and follow their lead’.Footnote 97 This strategy of mimicry and assimilation clearly worked for Falliet in the multiple urban centres in the IndoPacific world where he resided for extended periods of time.
The Manila that Falliet encountered was surrounded by a sea of piracy, and anti-piracy was a pathway to social integration in the city. By liberating Manileño captives who had been seized by British pirates in Macao, attacking British pirates near Malacca, and then waging war against Southeast Asian pirates in the Sulu Zone before 1762, Falliet proved that he was a loyal servant of both majesties – the pope and the king of Spain – and that he was valuable to the Spanish empire. These expressions of Hispanic patriotism were valued by Manila's colonial government and colonial communities, yet they did not protect him from an Inquisition process that forced him to cross the Pacific as a prisoner and spend months in gaols on both sides of this vast ocean.
Falliet habitually crisscrossed multiple imperial boundaries in his travels across maritime Asia, confirming Alison Games’ characterization of early borders as ‘porous, contested, and shifting’.Footnote 98 Yet the fact that he could easily travel between cities did not necessarily translate into belonging to their urban communities. Falliet's experience illustrates that even in the early modern world's most cosmopolitan and connected cities, colonial governments and communities could be effective gatekeepers against globetrotters; they possessed the power to arrest, punish and exile unwanted outsiders. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam observed, historians cannot assume early moderns ‘made a smooth and rapid transformation from being merely rooted…inhabitants of Bijapur, Sussex, or Venice, to being cosmopolitans, and thus citizens of the world’.Footnote 99
