The Roman Catholic Church aspired to be the Ecclesia triumphans, “Church Triumphant,” when it convened the Council of Trent from 1545 to 1563 and launched the Counter-Reformation. Some seventy-five years later, in 1622, Gregory XV (1554–1623) established the Propaganda Fide to spread the faith and ensure doctrinal conformity but also to amass power for the papacy relative to the Iberian kings, who had controlled missions to the Americas. Christian Windler takes this story of Catholic resurgence to Persia (Iran) and Isfahan, capital of the Safavid Empire (1501–1736), where five Catholic orders led missions between roughly 1600 and 1750. These were the Augustinians, Capuchins, Jesuits, Dominicans, and Discalced Carmelites, the last expected to walk shoeless or “discalced” as a sign of their poverty. They all started as the Safavid shahs were pursuing their own sectarian mission: to advance Shi’a Islam at the expense of Sunnism, which their Ottoman archrivals espoused.

Deep, solid, and intricate, Missionaries in Persia is an English translation of a German work published in 2018. Windler uses a stunning array of sources. These include manuscripts from Italy, Switzerland, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and India (Goa), and printed works like the multi-volume memoir of the French Protestant jeweler and traveler, Jean Chardin (1643–1713).

Until now, historians have written little about the Catholics in Persia, Winder suggests, because their efforts proved “quite unsuccessful” (p. 283), even a “failure” (p. 6), as measured in converts. Compounding their obscurity, their papers are scattered; Windler visited twenty-six archives and libraries to find them. Then, too, while the Safavid shahs occasionally humiliated the missionaries in minor ways, they did not persecute them. Thus “spared martyrdom” (p. 283), they garnered no glory – and little attention – in the Catholic historical record.

The missionaries hoped to convert Muslims but found that the Safavids, like the Ottomans, prohibited it. The shahs required them to settle with other Christians, mostly Armenian Orthodox traders, in New Julfa on Isfahan’s fringes. The Safavids interpreted Islamic inheritance laws to mean that if one member of a Christian family embraced Islam, then the new Muslim, on the death of a Christian relative, would inherit the whole fortune. This zero-sum game, which left many Armenians resisting any defection, partly explains resentments that seethed when the rich Sceriman family turned Catholic. Adding to “confessional polarization” (p. 154) among Armenians was the perception that converts to Catholicism were sell-outs who took the Church’s offer of a trade deal with the Papal States in return for “enter[ing] a union with Rome” (p. 151).

Windler shares fascinating details about the missionaries’ correspondence with Rome. Over the years, they sought advice from the Propaganda Fide about proper conduct amid ethically and socially ambiguous conditions. Authorities accepted these queries, called dubia, literally, “doubts,” as good-faith efforts for rectification. But this system was “dysfunctional” (p. 35). It took six months for letters to travel one way between Isfahan and Rome, and many went astray. Many questions had no good answers, leading the Propaganda Fide to practice “decision avoidance” by sending back letters that stated, “nihil esse respondendum” – Latin for “no response” (pp. 275, 277).

What seeded doubt? Missionaries hesitated about handling mixed marriages among Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians, and child marriages among Armenian Catholics, who numbered perhaps 300 in 1670 (p. 164). Discalced Carmelites asked about footwear: locals found it disgusting when they entered houses and churches with dirty feet and walked across nice carpets. Could they wear sandals or slippers outside and remove them upon going inside? What about when the shah invited them to the palace and sent a horse as a sign of respect? Could they put their vow of poverty on hold and ride rather than walk, so as not to offend him? The last question may have been easy to concede because the popes used the Discalced Carmelites as diplomatic proxies. One can only imagine what Propaganda Fide authorities thought when they received the letter from the Discalced Carmelite, Cornelio di San Giuseppe, around 1745, asking, “Could a missionary “baptize a ‘heathen’ enslaved woman who lived in concubinage with her Protestant master?” (p. 169).

At a time when the Church in Rome was persecuting Protestants and trying to keep Catholics apart, Papal authorities may have liked to think that relations between European Catholics and Protestants in Persia were perfunctory and purely transactional. In fact, they got along happily; it probably helped that their numbers were small. In 1636, about twenty-six “Frank” merchants and artisans lived in New Julfa: ten English, ten Dutch, four or five French, and one Italian, with only a handful of Catholics among them (see p. 170). The “French” included Swiss Protestants like Jacques Rousseau (1683–1753), a watchmaker from Geneva, and uncle of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Protestant merchants lent the missionaries money when they ran short; the missionaries housed Protestant travelers. In 1701, a Frenchman described convivial evenings when all of them shared food and wine. Dutch and English merchants, lacking Protestant clergy, asked the Catholics to perform sacraments.

By pursuing scholarship, missionaries also befriended Muslims and Jews. Around 1610, the Discalced Capuchin Juan Thadeo de San Eliseo (1574–1633) “relied on the help of three mullahs and a rabbi” to produce a Persian text about the Bible and Christian doctrine (p. 89).

Twice, in 1691 and 1697, Catholic priests embraced Islam. One, the Augustinian António de Jesus (d. circa 1722), changed his name to ‘Ali-Quli Jadid al-Islam, married a Muslim woman, and became the shah’s interpreter and an anti-Christian polemicist. Muslim adults did not convert to Christianity, although Muslim, and occasionally Jewish and Zoroastrian, parents often turned in desperation to the missionaries when children fell sick, seeking medical help or just blessings and prayers. In the mid-seventeenth century, missionaries reported baptizing thousands of children as they lay dying. A Discalced Carmelite submitted doubts to the Propaganda Fide, “troubled not by the lack of parental consent but … by the small number of christened children who unexpectedly survived and, despite baptism, were not raised Catholics” (p. 114).

Windler says little about how and why the missionaries dwindled, until by 1769, only one, a Dominican, lingered. He refers simply to the anarchy that followed the Afghan invasion of 1722 and the fall of the Safavid dynasty, as missionaries fled amid “violent attacks and plunder” (see pp. 70, 153). More information on this process would have been helpful.

In sum, historians of early modern Catholicism, Safavid Iran, and European trade in Asia will value this sophisticated, original book. Inspired by Bernard Heyberger, the historian of Catholicism in Syria whom he frequently cites, Windler considers the entanglements that bound missionaries to Muslims, fractious Christians, and others even as he remains conscious of human foibles. He sets out to show how the history of the missionaries in Persia demonstrates the “composite, polycentric character” of the early modern Catholic Church and its “inner diversity” with “competing jurisdictions as well as systems of values and norms” (pp. 2, 13, 57). Windler far exceeds his goal with this brilliant and lively book.