By the late sixteenth century, a long process of empire building had taken form in the Portuguese East Indies. From Vasco de Gama's 1498 encounter with the Indian population at Calicut to the 1571 establishment of trading posts in Nagasaki, the Portuguese had established colonial outposts along both coasts of Africa and the Indian Ocean through a combination of trickery, tributes, and military coercion. While bouillon and bullets were instrumental in establishing the Portuguese trading empire, the most urgent need was the quick and frequent acquisition of reliable information. The Portuguese cooperated with state-sponsored mercenaries, merchant networks, and indigenous populations to follow the news about the Indies from their home in Iberia. Some of the more influential information brokers to Europe writ-large were missionaries. Portuguese imperialists relied heavily on religious organisations such as the Franciscans, and, especially by the late sixteenth century, the emerging Society of Jesus.Footnote 1
European imperial and mercantile interests in the Indies were joined by crusading zeal and genuine curiosity about foreign cultures, particularly the Chinese. Throughout the sixteenth century, Iberian authors produced bestselling books about China, relying either on their own observations or hearsay. Some of the more important works in this tradition, such as Gaspar da Cruz's Tractado em que se cõtam muito por estẽso as cousas da China and Bernardino de Escalante's Discurso de la navegación de los portugueses, were well read among scholarly circles in the Hispanic empire, but had little impact outside of Iberia.Footnote 2 The most popular work, Juan González de Mendoza's Historia del Gran Reino de China, was translated into English, thus increasing the scope of its influence.Footnote 3 Mendoza's book was by far the most heavily cited work on China among Europeans until it was superseded by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci's memoires, published in Augsburg in 1615 under the title De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas.Footnote 4
De Christiana Expeditione had been translated from Ricci's native Italian into Latin by one of Ricci's successors in the Chinese mission, Nicolas Trigault. The book spread quickly. It was reprinted in Lyon in 1616, Cologne in 1617, and Lisbon in 1623, with a second run in Augsburg the same year. A French translation was created alongside the Latin in Lyon, with other French editions appearing both to the north, in Lille, and to the south, in Paris, in 1617. The first German translation arrived relatively early in Cologne in 1617, but official Spanish and Italian versions were not made until 1621 in Seville and 1623 in Naples respectively.Footnote 5 The Anglican travel writer Samuel Purchas reprinted large portions of the text in his English work, Hakluyut's Posthumous, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, in London in 1625. The first full, officially imprimatured English translation had to wait until Louis Gallagher's 1953 edition, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci.Footnote 6 Nonetheless, within the first decade of its publication, the book had been translated into all of the major Western European languages, and had received multiple printing runs at almost all of the printing centres in Europe. De Christiana Expeditione's appeal can be explained by its originality. It was the first time the Kingdom of China had been proven to be the same as Marco Polo's mystical Cathay, as well as the first book to discuss in detail the inner workings of Chinese culture and religion, especially the teachings of Confucius.Footnote 7
One of the more interesting aspects of De Christiana Expeditione is that it is not, strictly speaking, Matteo Ricci's own text. Ricci's translator, Nicolas Trigault, took a number of liberties in rendering the work into Latin, including adding his own insights into Chinese culture, simplifying complex Confucian concepts, and modifying or outright deleting potentially controversial details from Ricci's narrative. Trigault did this not only to make the content more palatable to a European audience, but also to influence Catholic princes, dignitaries, and superiors to invest in the Jesuit China mission. From 1612 to 1618, the Superior of the Chinese mission, and Ricci's direct successor, sent Trigault back to Europe as procurator, an office described by historian Dauril Alden as “part-treasurer, part-fundraiser, and part-ambassador.”Footnote 8 Trigault's goal as procurator was to secure funds, books, and recruits for the mission, as well as secure papal approval to formally separate the China mission from the Japanese province. His translation of Ricci's memoirs served as the most important literary accomplishment of his European tour.Footnote 9
Trigault's procuratorship had mixed success, but his translation became so ubiquitous as the main Jesuit text about China that it was not until the twentieth century that Ricci's original manuscript was recovered in the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus (ARSI). The Italian Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi first published the manuscript alongside Ricci's letters in his Opere Storiche del P. Matteo Ricci, SJ, in 1911.Footnote 10 Venturi's work was reassembled into a critical edition by his later confrere, Pasquale D'Elia, in the 1940s, as part of the larger Fonti Ricciane.Footnote 11 Ricci's original manuscript has not been published in any language outside of Italian since.Footnote 12
When previous historians have approached De Christiana Expeditione, their focus has primarily been in comparing Trigault's translation with Ricci's manuscript. Most of the scholarly treatment has been negative: what did Trigault obscure or injure in Ricci's original manuscript? Trigault, as a rookie member of the China mission, could not have had information as detailed or accurate as Ricci, who spent twenty-eight years in China before his death in 1610. Thus, according to this presumption, any deviations by Trigault amounted to hiding or distorting Ricci's intentions. Others have made comparisons to examine Trigault's rhetorical choices, but nonetheless assume that as actual evidence of the Jesuit interactions with Ming China, it is an inferior work. No scholars have examined Trigault's work separately from Ricci's manuscript, or within the context of knowledge-brokering by missionaries or other agents of early modern empire building.
This article will make two interventions. First, it will compare the two texts without the assumption of distortion. While Trigault does indeed deviate substantially from Ricci's manuscript, this does not preclude the value of his translation as documentary evidence. On the surface level, Trigault does flatten and misinterpret certain aspects of Confucianism and Chinese society at various points. If one digs deeper, however, one can find among the rhetoric details about not only Chinese or European, but global institutions that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in this case, Jesuit involvement in the Portuguese slave trade. Second, this article will separate De Christiana Expeditione from Matteo Ricci entirely. In doing so, it will reveal how Trigault's adaptation worked in conjunction with his mission as procurator to inspire a change in the missionary vocations of European Jesuits. This transformation turned the minds of European missionaries to the world outside of their borders, going hand in hand with the seventeenth-century trend of “decentering” early modern Catholicism.Footnote 13
Trigault and His Critics
Scholarship on De Christiana Expeditione can be divided into two strains. The first scrutinises the work as a piece of documentary evidence. This tradition is almost contemporaneous with the original publication: Trigault's first and most vocal critic first published in 1663. The Italian Jesuit Daniele Bartoli had just completed the third volume of his larger history of the Society of Jesus, focusing on the Asian missions. Over the course of his narrative, Bartoli's attitude to Trigault's role in the China mission is generally severe. He refers to Trigault's procuratorship as a failure, and accuses him of working to bolster his own reputation rather than the well-being of the mission.Footnote 14 Historian Pasquale D'Elia, writing from the 1940s, speculates on Bartoli's distaste. D'Elia argues that Bartoli took umbrage with Trigault's claim to sole authorship of De Christiana. Indeed, in the full title of the work, Ricci's name is only mentioned as the person from whose commentaries Trigault wrote. The author credited is “P. Nicolao Trigaultio, Belgae ex eadem Societate.”Footnote 15 Though Trigault may not have had editorial authority for his first edition, the later Cologne edition indicates that the publisher had been given guidance from “the same author.”Footnote 16 While Trigault does lay out clearly that Ricci was the original author in his address to the reader, D'Elia suggests that this information was only found in a short part of the book that no one would read.Footnote 17 The fact that Trigault had been such a novice member of the mission, and had been given such an important task with such a minimal understanding of Chinese, also seems to have rankled Bartoli. This reading is supported by the fact that Bartoli himself had petitioned to be sent to China on five occasions, and had been denied all five times.Footnote 18 Seeing an immature and undeserving missionary mishandle such a delicate text understandably raised Bartoli's ire. D'Elia sympathised, although he thought Bartoli's accusation that Trigault had died “in madness” was tasteless and overemotional.Footnote 19
The twentieth-century Jesuit historian and sinologist Paul Rule was slightly less caustic. Writing about Jesuit interpretations of Confucianism, Rule paid special attention to Ricci's observations, and how they were, in his words, distorted by Trigault. Rule took umbrage with Trigault's simplification of Ricci's text, particularly as it related to the Chinese worship of Confucius. Whereas Ricci allows that Confucius was in some respects a divine figure, Trigault writes that the Chinese only venerated Confucius as one would their own ancestors.Footnote 20 The difference in these interpretations had concrete consequences. Ricci relates that he attended a certain Confucian ceremony, and Trigault adds that he attended after being assured there would be no sacrifices.Footnote 21 Rule points out that Ricci did not think it was necessary to clarify. Rule's appraisal of Trigault's translation is that it “at times amounts to cumulative fraud.”Footnote 22 Indeed, as a result, “[De Christiana] is not reliable as evidence for Ricci's own view.”Footnote 23
The first to compare Trigault's original Latin to Ricci's Italian in a substantial manner was historian Theodore Foss.Footnote 24 In a published symposium contribution, Foss goes into more depth about the changes Trigault made in his translation. He lists four overarching types of alterations: additions meant to highlight the success of the mission, censorship of scandalous Chinese practices (most notably pederasty), reconfigurations of chapters about Jewish and Muslim communities in China, and mistakes in orthography.Footnote 25 Foss contributes a line-by-line comparison of book 1Footnote 26, chapter 2 of Ricci and Trigault, showing the often subtle but meaningful changes made in translation.Footnote 27 Much like Rule, Foss concludes with a negative impression of Trigault's contribution. He argues that Trigault's role was more like a “compiler” than a contributor; none of his additions seem to be his original work, but rather given to him by Portuguese speaking Jesuits in Macao.Footnote 28 Foss further agrees with Rule about the deleterious effects of Trigault's “propaganda purposes,” writing, “Trigault's rendering of the manuscript was motivated by a propagandistic zeal and the accuracy and exactness has suffered for it. . . . Trigault therefore cannot be considered in any substantive sense the author; however, he is shown to be an editor with an imprecise and prejudiced hand.”Footnote 29
Other historians have left fewer negative impressions. Although Pasquale D'Elia agreed in principle with Bartoli's criticisms, both he and Pietro Tacchi Venturi regard Trigault with ambivalence in their introductions to the Fonti Ricciane and the Opera Storiche. Venturi notes that Trigault had made substantial changes to Ricci's work, especially in whitewashing the “evils” of Confucian thought, but makes no judgements about said changes.Footnote 30 Historian and sinologist Jacques Gernet approaches De Christiana from an obverse position from Rule and Foss. Rather than argue against Trigault's translation, he argues in favour of historians approaching Ricci's original on its own terms. Gernet notes that Ricci's manuscript still holds a tremendous amount of documentary value that historians have overlooked. Part of the reason is, no doubt, because Ricci's original has yet to be translated out of Italian.Footnote 31 Gernet cites Trigault's vague handling of the Ming emperor's education and the noted Confucian scholar Li Zhi's suicide as other points of contrast that no doubt worked into Trigault's propagandist mission, but his evaluation of Trigault himself is far more indifferent.
Regardless of tone, the above scholars all agree that Trigault's translation is at times a substantially different book than Ricci's manuscript, and not an accurate representation of Ricci's more nuanced understanding of Chinese culture. This line of thinking differs from a second historiographical strain that focuses on the consequences of Trigault's deviations. In other words, how did Trigault's translation strategy impact the way his information was received in Europe? Historian Adam Bohnet notes the influence Trigault had on European perceptions of China well into the Enlightenment. Citing philosophes like David Hume, who understood China as a society essentially run by Confucian deists, Bohnet points out that this misconception of Confucianism as a non-dogmatic religion began with Trigault's simplification of Confucian thought.Footnote 32
While Bohnet contextualises Trigault in terms of his propaganda mission, historian Luca Fezzi broadens the picture by situating De Christiana Expeditione in a larger publishing tradition—starting with Spanish and Portuguese travel writers in the sixteenth century—of portraying Asia in idealised terms. Generally, this overly positive view of China was compared to Europe, following an impulse to use images of China to reflect the author's own criticisms of European society.Footnote 33 Fezzi also remarks that few historians have studied the methods and purposes of Trigault's translation of Ricci, stopping at calling it “propaganda.” Fezzi observes that Trigault's depictions of the Confucian class, the emperor, and the Jesuits’ own evangelisation strategy were preemptive justifications of Ricci's missionary activities to his European audience. Adapting catechisms and vocabularies into Chinese and sharing scientific discoveries with the Ming court bred controversy among the Jesuits’ various rivals. If Trigault's depictions of Chinese culture and religion were more sanitised or cautious than Ricci's, it is because he was writing for a larger, potentially hostile, readership.Footnote 34
Evidence and Rhetoric
Neither of these historiographical traditions disputes the historical facts: Trigault's translation of Ricci often simplifies the complexity of Confucian beliefs in order to present an idealised version of Chinese culture fit for consumption by Catholic Europeans. They simply differ in their focus: one treats De Christiana Expeditione as a potential piece of documentary evidence, while the other treats it as a rhetorical instrument with the intention of navigating the precarious intellectual currents of Reformation Europe. Trigault's translation thus comes off as either an unscrupulous distortion of historical data, or a completely separate work that reveals Jesuit rhetorical strategies, with little historical reality.
The remainder of this article will mostly proceed in the second tradition, however, it is worth looking at what De Christiana Expeditione actually documents to question some of the assumptions of the first. There is an implicit argument that, because Trigault deviates from Ricci's notes, his text is merely a rhetorical “construction” of reality, rather than an accurate representation thereof. There is some justification for this assumption: Ricci spent twenty-eight years between arriving in Macao and his death in Nanking (Nanjing), while Trigault had spent only two years in China before being sent back to Europe. Trigault had a fledgling's understanding of Chinese, while Ricci was famous for his memorisation of Chinese script.Footnote 35 Ricci's memory of events is not always perfectly accurate, but whenever Trigault is faced with an error, he tends to avoid details rather than correct Ricci.Footnote 36 There are obvious historical additions in De Christiana Expeditione that are not present in Ricci; Ricci, for example, could not have written about his own funeral. The precise authorship of these passages, however, is nebulous, hence Foss's assertion that Trigault was more of a compiler than an author.Footnote 37 If one wanted a more accurate depiction of Ming culture, Ricci's manuscript is the better option.
If we turn our gaze to the missionaries and their audiences, however, Trigault's deviations provide ample information not found in Ricci.Footnote 38 Ricci wrote for a private audience of Jesuits headed for China; they had some background knowledge of China, they only needed to know the facts “on the ground” for fieldwork, and they did not need to be convinced about the importance of the mission. Trigault's audience of European Catholics were potentially ignorant of China, had no use for simple logistics, and probably required some prodding to care. Trigault certainly curated facts and anecdotes to “create” a China that was conducive to his procuratorial mission, but his curation reveals what details Trigault felt would be necessary to communicate the importance of the China mission.
Like many ethnographers before him, Trigault used natural philosophy and material culture to emphasise commonalities between Europe and China. Trigault frequently describes China in comparison to Europe. In chapter 3 of book 1, regarding China's material wealth, Trigault intersperses common types of trees in both Europe and China, such as cedar, at the same time as he describes a very foreign type of iron-hard reed, “which the Portuguese call bamboo.”Footnote 39 He then goes on to make a specific reference for his intended northern European audience: Alongside wood, coal, reeds, and straw, the Chinese also lit their furnaces using mui, “a type of pitch, such as that found in Belgium, mostly in the diocese of Liege.”Footnote 40 Trigault makes similar comparisons between Chinese dress and Venetian fabrics,Footnote 41 as well as the temperate climes found in both China and Rome, none of which are found in Ricci's manuscript.Footnote 42
Trigault's translation can also lend insight into the developing cult of Francis Xavier. Though not canonised until 1622, Xavier had developed a heroic following among Catholics in Europe by the late sixteenth century. This is especially true among his fellow Jesuits, whom Trigault was interested in recruiting for the Chinese mission. Appealing to the Xavier cult explains the addition of a chapter at the beginning of the second book of De Christiana Expeditione, describing Xavier's attempts and failures to set up a mission in China. In terms of textual additions, this chapter is probably the portion that came most directly from Trigault, who claims to have drawn from a recently published history of the Society.Footnote 43 Another original contribution by Trigault, the frontispiece, would also have likely caught the eye of a potential book buyer. The main focus of the image are two pillars, one on the left holding Francis Xavier, and one on the right holding Matteo Ricci in his literati attire. In the background is a temple, with the phrase “ut portent nomen meum coram gentibus et regibus,” a reference to Acts 9:15, adorning the top lip.Footnote 44 A map of China, ostensibly Ricci's, takes the bottom centre.Footnote 45
Both the added chapter and the frontispieces are masterful works of rhetoric. With these supplements, Trigault presents a link between the contemporary China mission and the works of a soon-to-be-saint, as well as to the early evangelism of the apostles. By having Ricci and Xavier at the same height, he is also drawing an equivalence; Ricci is of Xavier's stature, both are equally important in the conversion of “Gentiles.” Moreover, by presenting Ricci in his Chinese dress, Trigault is making another preemptive argument against potential critics of Ricci's accommodation method. Trigault embodied this example himself while in Belgium by sitting for a portrait by Peter Paul Rubens in his own literati robes.Footnote 46 That Trigault added Xavier as a figure in the history of the China mission, when Ricci had not felt the need to, speaks to the creation of Xavier as the model missionary Jesuit. By placing Ricci on his level, the frontispiece and new chapter are the first attempt to valorise Ricci to Europeans. Given the emphasis in scholarship on Trigault's deviations as a tool of rhetoric for propaganda purposes, it is surprising that no one has as yet analysed these additions in depth.Footnote 47
There is at least one topic where Trigault's translation more accurately documents the state of the China mission than Ricci's original does: the use of enslaved labour by the Jesuits in Asia. Historians have long recognised the Jesuits’ reliance on unfree labour in the Americas, whether through the Spanish and Portuguese plantation systems or the Jesuit-directed reduction communities in Paraguay.Footnote 48 The slave trade also supported the Society's earliest expansions into Asia. As early as 1552, Francis Xavier, as Superior of the India mission, wrote a letter to one of his subordinates that, “With respect to the services in the house, be careful to see if it would be better to acquire or buy some negroes for these services rather than to make use of the services of many who wish to enter into the Society.”Footnote 49 In the Far Eastern missions, Jesuit slaveholding was thought to be minimised by the weakness of Portuguese imperial authority, their settlements being circumscribed to colonial outposts like Macao and Nagasaki. In order to continue the lucrative trade with China and Japan, local councils, and even the Portuguese Crown, outlawed the trafficking of indigenous peoples. These bans were protested, and rarely followed, by those on the ground.Footnote 50 That the Jesuits in Asia at times denounced both the cruelty of the Portuguese slave trade and the kidnapping of Asians to use as enslaved labour makes their involvement harder to ascertain. Nonetheless, it can be safely said that wherever in Asia the Portuguese were involved, Jesuits often worked as middlemen and beneficiaries in the trafficking of human beings. Most scholarship has covered the extent of Jesuit slaveholding in Japan, although more recent works have included the Chinese mission, at least as far inland as Canton (Guangzhou).Footnote 51
Ricci only mentions slavery in the context of the Chinese. He writes that enslavement in China is the result of men not being able to afford a wife, and thereby selling themselves into servitude, or otherwise buying a wife. If a couple has too many children, they might also sell them into perpetual slavery for a cheap price.Footnote 52 Most troubling for Ricci is that all of the enslaved in China are indigenous. Rather than pressing people into servitude as captives in a just war, or traded by foreigners, the Chinese enslave members of their own community.Footnote 53 While Chinese were also kidnapped and forced into slavery by the Spanish and “other Christians,” Ricci notes, at least they might be converted, and thus escape the slavery of worshipping false idols.Footnote 54 Nonetheless, Ricci acknowledges that selling children has the benefit of reducing the financial strain of the impoverished in raising them.
Trigault's translation adds some subtle but significant changes. The first is that Trigault specifically lists the “other Christians” who kidnap Chinese as the Portuguese. It is unclear if this was Ricci's intention, or if he meant imperial rivals like the Dutch. More significant, however, is Trigault's added qualification: “The manner of slavery itself is entirely gentler and more tolerable among the Chinese than any other nation, because anyone can redeem himself for the price he sold himself, whenever he has the opportunity.”Footnote 55 This addition is entirely Trigault's doing. His quotation could be another example of idealising Chinese culture: even in terms of enslavement, China was more civilised than Europe. Combined with specifically naming the Portuguese as enslavers, however, it could also be read as a criticism of the Portuguese slave trade. Trigault, having catechised both natives and Portuguese in Mozambique and Goa, had concrete experiences working among the Portuguese's bondspeople.Footnote 56
Both Ricci and Trigault lived alongside bondsmen while in China, and both works document, albeit in passing, the lives of servants in Jesuit houses. Ricci relied heavily on unfree labourers for a number of functions. Indigenous servants were useful as translators, interpreters, and messengers. Particularly in this last function, bondsmen were given a remarkable amount of freedom of movement. In 1590, after Ricci had fallen out of favour with the mandarins in Canton, the Jesuits at Macao sent a servant into the province to find out what had become of the fathers, since they had not yet returned to Macao. The unnamed messenger, having worked previously with the fathers in Zhaoqing, travelled throughout Canton, and, finding nothing of note, returned to Macao on his own. A second messenger had to be dispatched, and eventually reported back that Ricci had been allowed back into his residence in Canton.Footnote 57 Better-educated bondspeople might also serve as tutors for newly arrived Jesuits. Ricci relates that after entertaining a group of eunuchs he had been travelling with, one of them gave Ricci a young boy whom he had bought in Nanking. The eunuch claimed that the boy had such a distinguished manner of speaking that he could teach the novice father, Diego de Pantoja, the Nankingense dialect.Footnote 58
The Jesuits’ bondsmen would have also taken care of household tasks alongside their indigenous lay brothers. Early in Ricci's tenure, 1584, the mission had run out of funds to continue building the Jesuit residence in Zhaoqing. Ricci, noting the lack of finances from Macao, reported that the fathers were so far in debt that they could no longer pay for interpreters or buy domestic servants.Footnote 59 Their servants seem to have borne the brunt of protecting the houses as well. Chinese villagers frequently attacked the Jesuits, typically by throwing stones at their houses. In each occasion, Ricci reports that the servants responded either by fighting back against the mobs, or in at least once instance, apprehending the perpetrator.Footnote 60 As a result, the bondsmen were frequently injured by violent mobs and intruders. In one instance, after fighting back against intruders, the servants were brought before the local court and tried for assault. When an indigenous lay brother, Sebastian Fernandes, interceded for them, he was also beaten.Footnote 61
While most of the events that Trigault records are also found in Ricci, Trigault deviates again from Ricci in his description of enslaved members of the mission. One of the most crucial aspects is, of course, language. In Ricci's native Italian there are a number of different ways to indicate servitude. Alongside cognates such as “servitori,” Ricci also refers to bondsmen as “la gente in casa,” “piglioni,” and “putto.” These terms have distinct parallels in the terminology used by Portuguese traders to refer to their enslaved, particularly the vacuous “moço,” commensurate to Ricci's “putto,” or simply, “boy.”Footnote 62 Trigault conversely uses one term to describe the bondsmen: “domesticus famulus.” Some form of this phrase, meaning “domestic servant,” appears any time a labourer happens to come up in the narrative.Footnote 63 In one sense, it flattens the nuances between different classes of enslaved labour commonly found in East Asia, and thereby simplifies the institution of slavery among Jesuits.Footnote 64 In another sense, it gets rid of any euphemisms or obscurant language. Given that Trigault's audience was literate Europeans, unaware of the coded language of the Asian slave trade, his translation clearly signposts what the role of these servants was: indigenous unfree labour.
Trigault also provides insight into the origins of the Jesuits’ enslaved labour. Reading Ricci by himself, one gets the impression that the China Jesuits only used Chinese and Indian labourers, obtained through a voluntary sale of a bona fide slave. In fact, the legal and moral standing of Jesuits’ Asian slaveowning required that this be the case.Footnote 65 The China Jesuits were in possession of at least one African labourer, however. In 1588, as a mob of angry Chinese began to storm the residence at Zhaoqing, one of the Jesuits’ servants, a “caffre, black and valiant,” came to meet the invaders. Upon seeing the “caffre,” the Chinese immediately retreated, with Ricci noting that the fathers could have repelled the mob by force, given that most of their “gentes che avevano in casa,” “the people who we had in the house,” were black Indians, and the Chinese were afraid of them.Footnote 66 Using the term “caffre” in the seventeenth century was a vague description, and the editor of the most up-to-date edition of Della entrata indicates that Ricci meant a “black Indian” by this phrase.Footnote 67 Trigault's translation makes the identity of the enslaved guard clearer. Trigault writes that the guard was an “Ethiopian, the type of which one meets on their way from Europe passing the Cape of Good Hope, whom the Portuguese call ‘Cafres.’”Footnote 68 Trigault also chides the Chinese on their fear of Africans, seeing their dark skin as demonic. To make the distinction more readily, Trigault also notes that “most of our domestic servants were from India, and almost as dark as the Ethiopian.”Footnote 69 There is no reason to suspect that Trigault is mistaken in making this distinction. When Trigault is uncertain of a particular detail, he writes more abstractly, not more specifically. Furthermore, Trigault's work among the natives of Mozambique would have made him clearly acquainted with the different demographics of dark-skinned labourers in the Portuguese Empire. He had also lived in both Macao and China for two years at that point, and was well aware of the types of labourers that the Jesuits employed.
Trigault also provides a number of more minor details about the lives of the enslaved. Trigault's use of “domesticus famulus” may simplify the different categories of servitude, but it also clearly distinguishes between unfree labourers and indigenous members of the church. Ricci's more ambiguous terminology, on the other hand, may confuse bondsmen with Chinese lay brothers and novices, who also performed physical labour necessary to support the mission. Book 5 contains the most deviation from Ricci's original text, at certain points covering completely different topics. Trigault, and the uncited fathers who may have helped him, provide more detailed information about the number of houses and state of the church than Ricci could have, which includes the work of the enslaved. For example, Trigault begins chapter 6 of book 5 by indicating that in Nanking, “there were four priests and one brother, as well as a number of students and servants, making a more numerous community than usual.”Footnote 70 Likewise, the number of labourers at the Peking (Beijing) house contributed to the growing pains of the mission, and the fathers had to lease another property just to fit their students, novices, priests, and servants.Footnote 71
Of particular interest to historians of Jesuit–Chinese book translation is that the Jesuit printing presses were operated by unfree labour. Trigault seems to have taken a special interest in the mechanics of Chinese woodblock printing, which predates the European movable-type press by six centuries.Footnote 72 As a result, his description of the process, its benefits, and its simplicity is far more detailed than Ricci's. According to Trigault, as the Jesuits began translating books, they made great use of this process. In particular, “in our houses, we composed books of our religious and European scientific topics, having been published by us into Chinese, through the work of our domestic servants.”Footnote 73 Given how labour-intensive Chinese printing was, and the fact that indigenous labourers were the best-equipped linguistically to handle the prodigious Chinese syllabary, this should not come as a surprise. However, since the early China mission depended on the exchange of scientific works and instruments between the Jesuits and the literati, the involvement of unfree labourers as translators, interpreters, and even printers is an aspect that has been gravely overlooked. This link is present in De Christiana but lacking in Della entrata, and its inclusion is predicated upon Trigault's personal involvement in its translation.
Stirring Missionary Vocation
There are many ways to determine the impact of a book. The sales and number of printing runs provides an obvious qualitative method. In this metric, De Christiana Expeditione was a runaway hit. One might also point to the number of translations to demonstrate the breadth of its influence. By this approach, the book also had quite an impressive success. Dangerously so, even, as Superior General Mutio Vitelleschi wrote to the superior of the Gallo-Belgian province, worrying that the rapid translation and dissemination of Trigault's work, which freely discussed the controversial accommodation method, would open the Society to mass criticism, endangering the foreign missions.Footnote 74 For scholarly works, which De Christiana Expeditione, being written in Latin, qualifies as, the number of citations and “impact factor” of the work might be used. Though direct citations are sometimes difficult to come by for the early modern intellectual scene——plagiarism was the expectation, not an aberration——later seventeenth-century writers, Jesuit or otherwise, frequently quote Trigault. The Jesuit author António de Gouvea more or less copied verbatim Trigault and Ricci's description of Chinese slavery in his Asia Extrema.Footnote 75 The famed German Jesuit sinologist, Athanasius Kircher, also borrowed heavily from Trigault in his China Illustrata. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kircher was erudite enough to cite his source.Footnote 76 From a purely intellectual standpoint, then, Trigault's translation certainly accomplished much.
Trigault's task, however, was not to produce a bestseller, nor a globally appreciated account of the China mission. De Christiana Expeditione was meant to be an appeal to Jesuits and Catholic princes in Europe to provide either their labour or funds to support the mission. Whether Trigault succeeded is a matter of perspective. Edmund Lamalle argues that based on the number of recruits, monetary donations, books, and instruments that he carried back to China, Trigault's procuratorship was an undivided success.Footnote 77 On the other hand, given that the ultimate goal for the trip was that the China mission would be financially self-sustainable, historian Frederick Vermote notes that Trigault was only partially successful. The dangers of the voyage home, as well as jurisdictional disputes with Philip III, limited the concrete resources that Trigault actually brought back to China. As a result of these financial limiting factors, the China mission was endangered following the death of the Wanli Emperor in 1620 and the Qing invasions of the mid-seventeenth century.Footnote 78
Both of these perspectives are insightful, but they tend to focus on material, quantitative, and external forms of influence. What is left out of the narrative is the emotional, qualitative, and internal impact that such a work could have on its readership, given the obvious difficulty of finding sources capable of granting insight into interior transformations. In recent years, with the development of the history of emotions as a methodology, this type of analysis has become more common for medieval and early modern studies. Historians such as Barbara Rosenwein and Susan Broomhall have encouraged scholars to find “dossiers” of sources that not only reflect individual emotional communities, but also compare them to other texts that have a normative value within a community.Footnote 79 For example, Jesuits as an emotional community used the Spiritual Exercises as a primary text. The Exercises emphasise meditation, and through this meditation, a series of affective responses — joy, grief, suffering — to their instruction. Nonetheless, as part of their liberal education, Jesuits also encountered Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which stresses a stoic mediation of passions.Footnote 80 Caught between these two norms of emotion, the affective nature of Jesuit letters, biographies, and histories is often conflicting.
One set of letters provides a relevant “dossier.” Indipetae are letters from individual Jesuits seeking permission from the Superior General to be assigned to a mission “to the Indies.” While the Society had already established a reputation for extensive missionary work, the actual process of sending missionaries to foreign lands was rife with jurisdictional problems: not only did individual superiors not want to lose precious human resources, but the logistics of going abroad meant cooperating with Spanish royal authorities, who were suspicious of any “foreigners” going to their imperial territories.Footnote 81 As a result, these letters began to appear in the late sixteenth century, mostly in the Italian provinces, as direct appeals to the Superior General, who could ostensibly overcome any administrative obstacles.Footnote 82 Petitioners had to make their case strongly to the General. In doing so, they often emphasised not only their practical abilities, but also their “desire” and inflamed passions that led them towards a vocation in the Indies. Rejected petitions, or repeated petitions with no follow-up, sometimes led to informal and often emotional epistolary dialogues between the indipetus and the General.Footnote 83
Trigault himself did not write an indipeta, but he is nonetheless linked to an increase in petitions in the early seventeenth century. At the General Congregation of 1615 in Rome, one of the major topics of discussion was the need for more missionaries, particularly as a result of setbacks in Japan. Trigault's procuratorship aided in this call, as his recruitment programme simultaneously took on missionaries for his own expedition and incited a surge of petitions, especially from the German and Belgian provinces. The Jesuit Curia created separate archives for Austrian petitioners in 1614, Belgians in 1615, and Frenchmen in 1623.Footnote 84 Trigault's influence reached even the Italian province, whose first indipetae date to the 1570s. A Neapolitan Jesuit, Gregorius Porta, remarks in his petition that his desire to go to the Indies was inspired on a certain occasion by “Fr. Trigault, whom God himself fortunately presented to me.”Footnote 85
Trigault thus did not need to create a missionary desire, but rather redirect it. In Asia, Japan had attracted the most attention from potential missionaries. The Japanese mission had been founded by Francis Xavier himself in the 1540s, and until the seventeenth century was one of the most successful, with over two hundred churches established in 1583, and ten indigenous clerics ordained by 1609.Footnote 86 The globally publicised execution of the now-canonised Twenty-Six Martyrs in 1597 also provoked an ardent response from Jesuits wishing to spill their blood for the propagation of the faith. While petitioners for foreign missions often avoided specifying their desired field, instead referring to a generic “Indias” in their letters, when they did ask for specifics, Japan was the most frequently sought location.
The task Trigault faced in Europe was how to turn this missionary zeal for Japan towards China, which did not have a permanent mission until Ricci's generation. The answer he came to was Francis Xavier. Xavier's nascent cult had rapidly expanded by the 1610s to the point that his 1622 canonisation was an inevitability. Among Jesuits, Xavier was the model missionary. Jesuits in Europe would read aloud letters they had received from abroad, sharing stories of triumphs and setbacks experienced in distant lands. Xavier's letters were popular enough to be a genre in and of themselves.Footnote 87 Many petitioners specifically cited Xavier as having aroused their vocation. One petitioner, Wenceslaus Pantaleon Kirwitzer, asking to be sent to either Japan or Brazil, wrote that “I am envious of the life of our Holy Father Xavier, whom I have never seen, nor read, though by whom scarcely a soul has not been set aflame.”Footnote 88 Trigault's problem was that there was no direct link between Xavier and China the way there was with Japan. Trigault's frontispiece, drawing a parallel from Xavier to Ricci, as well as his additional chapter on Xavier's involvement in China, were intended to establish this link. Reintroducing China as a land of Xavier did more to attract missionaries than any discussion of Confucius.
There is an issue in distinguishing De Christiana Expeditione's impact from Trigault's overall procuratorship. The case could be made that Trigault's own charisma and interpersonal skills had greater effect.Footnote 89 Whenever Trigault is mentioned in indipetae, however, the authors leave little detail about how he came into the picture. The only way to be certain is to find missionaries who never had the chance to meet Trigault face-to-face. Thus, their knowledge of both Trigault and China is based either on De Christiana Expeditione or the annual letters that Trigault used to supplement it. This is difficult, since Trigault's procuratorship took him to practically all of the major cities in Europe. Trigault spent time in Spain, Italy, the German heartlands, his home provinces in Belgium, and important French centres like Paris and Lyons, all before departing from Lisbon, having travelled along the Spanish Road through Madrid.Footnote 90 The only European Jesuit province that Trigault spent no time in is Austria. The growing Austrian mission, particularly the residences in Graz and Vienna, ministered to local Catholics, Protestant centres in the former Habsburg territories, and Hungarian and Bohemian refugees coming in from the expanding Ottoman Empire. The presence of these “Indies” on their own frontiers dissuaded and prevented German and Austrian Jesuits from seeking their vocations abroad.Footnote 91
Nonetheless, the Jesuit Curia began archiving Austrian indipetae starting in 1614. As can be expected, the first wave of petitions in 1614 cited either Japan, Brazil, or “India” as their preferred destinations. At the very beginning of 1615, however, petitioners started shifting their expectations. Maria Nocölius, from Graz, asked to minister to the Chinese, Indians, or “other uncivilized and barbarous peoples” in January. Nocölius does show preference for the “Chinese kingdom, whose walls created Tartary,” and knowledge of which had yet to enter the Saxon lands. Where did Nocölius get this information? From letters received by the Provincial Alberti, from the “Chinese procurator, Fr. Nicolas Trigault,” to whom he also addressed his letter.Footnote 92
Two of Nocölius's confreres in Graz also turned their attention to China. Wenceslas Panteleon Kirwitzer, previously only interested in Brazil and Japan, in October 1615 included China in his list. However, his preference becomes clear throughout his letter, as he claims that Francis Xavier himself advocated for the Superior to send him to bend the minds of Chinese Indians.Footnote 93 Kirwitzer made one other petition in March 1616.Footnote 94 The content of Kirwitzer's indipetae is diverse; he wrote much longer letters than did most petitioners, and followed a less formulaic structure. A couple of themes prevail, however. Kirwitzer frequently invokes Xavier, whose idyllic model represented a glorious example for both him and his presumptive converts. He also describes his willingness to spill his own blood in the Indies, conjuring up images of the crucifixion, a common icon from the Spiritual Exercises. Kirwitzer was accepted for Trigault's mission to China, appearing as a mathematical tutor at the Jesuit college in Coimbra in late 1616. His background in math seems to have been the main reason, and he provided ample support for the mission until his death in Macao in 1626.Footnote 95
Less successful was Joannes Gans, who resided at Graz at the same time as Kirwitzer. Gans’ first letter in 1614 invoked the “love of Frs. Ignatius and Xavier, that speak and attest to their zeal of souls,” asking that the Superior send him to “Japan, or any of the other entwined Indian provinces.”Footnote 96 Between October 1615 and April 1618, Gans wrote seven additional indipetae. At one point, Gans was accepted for Trigault's mission, or at least was under such an impression. In one letter he asks the new General Mutio Vitelleschi to confirm promises made by Aquaviva two years prior. Gans nonetheless repeats that he is healthy, and willing to offer his body and soul for the salvation of the “Indians.”Footnote 97
Vitelleschi either responded negatively or not at all, as Gans continued writing to him, noting with apprehension that the time of departure was drawing near: “I felt such great pain, when I saw that no letters summoning me to the Indies (as had been promised) had passed by, not at all mitigated by recent letters sent to our Fr. Rector from Your Reverence notifying him of Fr. Pantaleon's absence, while myself and Fr. Maria Nocölius are abandoned.”Footnote 98 His anxiety only increased with the news that Trigault was expected to leave for China soon. “In the end, nothing else is left of Fr. Claudio [Acquaviva], of pious memory, and Your Reverence's promise, and I ask and I desire he sends me nevertheless with Fr. Trigault to the Indies.”Footnote 99 Even if he never heard back from Vitelleschi, Gans kept in touch with Kirwitzer, who told him that his mathematical skills were needed in China. Gans later wrote again to Vitelleschi, first emphasising his own ability in mathematics, and then arguing that the Chinese mission needed his own strengths in philosophy and theology to reap the most fruit.Footnote 100
Gans’ final indipeta, written after Trigault's departure, makes his grief clear: “My mind is subjected to such melancholy and tears when I see the mission I expected and was promised having been impeded so many times. I doubt not that even Your Reverence may see in his certain prudence, if he would be able to anoint me, in order to not destroy me completely.”Footnote 101 Gans suggests that there may be another ship to the Indies the following year that he might go on, once again offering his own abilities and zeal, quoting others to testify on it. Gans concluded by saying that he expected a response from the General.Footnote 102 If he got one, it was not in his favour. Gans spent the rest of his life in Austria. He held many positions within the Society, the most notable being confessor to Emperor Ferdinand III.Footnote 103
Among the potential missionaries in Austria, interest in China quickly faded. A few other Jesuits expressed interest in the Chinese missions throughout the 1620s, but generally in addition to Japan or the Eastern Mediterranean. By the mid-1620s, most Austrian indipetae either ask to go into Syria, the Slavonic tribes, or Africa, or otherwise list any missionary field they can name in the east or west Indies. Japan and Ethiopia are the most common specifically named destinations, though they are often named alongside “domestic” missions, such as England, Silesia, Bohemia, and Serbia. The contents of Austrian indipetae seem to reflect a German “turning inward” during the Thirty Years War.Footnote 104 Gans, however, maintained an interest in foreign affairs. From the early 1640s to his death in 1662, Gans frequently communicated with the Jesuit scientist, historian, and sinologist Athanasius Kircher. Through their correspondence, Gans requested Kircher's inventions on behalf of the Emperor, offered advice on the dedication of Kircher's Oedipus Aegypticus, sought information about recent events in the Philippines, and possibly saw an unpublished copy of Kircher's China Illustrata.Footnote 105
The call of China came and went relatively quickly, and for most of the Society in Austria, the Jesuits were preoccupied with their own Indies. For the few whose attention was stoked by the “letters of Fr. Trigault,” however, the impact his writings made was anything but minor. Whether their petitions succeeded or failed, any indipetus that undertook the years-long process of applying for China did so with the intention of following in the footsteps of Francis Xavier and giving their life to convert “Indians” thousands of miles from home. Those who were denied the chance to do so, like Joannes Gans, expressed sorrow and anxiety, and even bitterness at the Superior General who impeded them. Even if they had opportunities at home, they nonetheless looked beyond their borders for their spiritual mission. This outward-orientation was transformative and incited by missionary scholars like Ricci and Trigault. The global calling of the Church is one of the defining facets of early modern Catholicism, and one of the most enduring features of the Catholic Reformation.
Conclusion
Much like Escalante and Mendoza before him, Trigault's De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas was eventually supplanted by more up-to-date works, namely fellow Jesuits Martino Martinez's De Bello Tartarico in 1654, Daniele Bartoli's La Cina in 1659, and Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata in 1667. Trigault would have found a kindred spirit in Martinez, as both were procurators for the Chinese mission who published mission histories to attract favour and potential donors. Kircher may have felt more kinship with Daniele Bartoli, as both were prospective missionaries to China whose applications were rejected. All four demonstrate a significant moment in the history of Catholicism, in which Europeans grew ever more fascinated by the world beyond their borders and expressed not only a scholarly interest, but an impassioned and urgent desire to be sent to “the Indies.” This vocation spurred them into an active life of “propaganda,” in all senses of the word,Footnote 106 that acted in concert with Portuguese, German, and later, French, imperial interests.
By approaching De Christiana Expeditione as an artefact of globalisation rather than a work whose information and even purported authorship were not to be trusted, scholars can gain insight into a turning point in the history of the Catholic Church and imperial knowledge networks. Trigault's adaptation brought home information about China to insatiable Europeans, despite having to navigate the controversies of post-Tridentine Catholic Europe, while also providing “inside” information on the workings of the Portuguese Empire, and how intelligence, curated by intermediaries, was acted upon by receptive Europeans. De Christiana also speaks, however, to the development of Sino-European interactions broadly speaking. Scholarly conversations about the incipient relationship between China and the west have been dominated by discussions about Matteo Ricci. One cannot fully appreciate the fruits of Ricci's labour, however, without understanding how his work was publicised and introduced to Europe.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Forum for Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions for providing the opportunity to present an early draft of this article at their 2020 symposium, and the anonymous reviewers who have given feedback since. He would further like to thank Nicolas Standaert and Simon Ditchfield for their recommendations and assistance in finding articles and books central to this article. Liam Brockey and Rômulo de Silva Ehalt likewise generously shared their own research prior to publication. Finally, he would like to give special thanks to his late mentor, Philip Gavitt, whose vast knowledge of Italian helped render some of the more difficult passages, and whose kindness and erudition continues to serve as an example for all of his students and colleagues.
