INTRODUCTION
Many have wondered about the apparent inconsistency of Japan's military rulers of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who officially prohibited Christianity (from 1587) for its subversive influence on Japan's social hierarchy yet silently, until 1614, supported a modest presence of Roman Catholic missionaries in the country, especially in Nagasaki. A close look at the players involved in the equation, namely the Portuguese traders, the missionaries, and the merchants of Nagasaki, however, will resolve any doubts about the solid rationality of this seeming contradiction. Although this article mainly focuses on the first of these three groups, a short introduction to the other two will elucidate the situation in Japan.
The city of Nagasaki was founded in 1571 so that the trade brought by the Portuguese could better serve the purposes of the Jesuit mission in the country.Footnote 1 What has not received much attention thus far is the reason why the Jesuits were able to direct this trade in such a manner as to steer most of the profits on the Japanese side, over time, into the hands of a small and closely-knit group of Christian merchants who lived in Nagasaki. The profits on the Portuguese side, it goes without saying, went to those who were willing to follow the lead of the Jesuits. This realization immediately helps us understand the position of the Jesuit missionaries: they were able to occupy a pivotal position in the trade because they came to play a crucial and indispensable role in it, that of intermediaries between the Portuguese and the Japanese merchants, the former as ignorant of the latter as the latter were of the former.
In other words, the Jesuit success in Japan was based on their ability to function, in Philip Curtin's words, as “cross-cultural brokers.”Footnote 2 Curtin's analysis is all the more relevant for the Japanese case because his generalization that the cultural brokers of the “trade diasporas tend to work themselves out of business” is also applicable here. Such trade diasporas begin, Curtin argues, because cultural differences cause a need for mediation. The longer the mediation lasts, however, the less important these cultural differences become, and the easier it is to dispense with the intermediaries. Thus, for the purpose of trying to understand the interaction between the Portuguese and Japanese traders (and thus the early history of the city of Nagasaki), it becomes imperative to analyze what these cultural differences were that made the trade between Portuguese and Japanese so difficult as to need the Jesuits as intermediaries.
Here, I will not approach this problem through an analysis of what made the Japanese so different. This has, from Fróis to Boxer, been the dominant approach by Western historians, and usually implies that the Portuguese are somehow more “understandable” or “rational” to us who are trying to grasp this interaction.Footnote 3 Instead, I will try and investigate here what kind of mindset the sixteenth-century Portuguese brought to Japan, for I believe that this will give us a different perspective on the problem. Mindsets are tricky, and historiographical booby traps are plentiful in this territory, so we have to outline our trajectory carefully. First of all, it should be admitted that we have only the scantiest evidence for the vast majority of the Portuguese who came to Japan. Usually, we get nothing but a glimpse: a description of merchandise,Footnote 4 a list of names,Footnote 5 the record of an inquest held,Footnote 6 or the account of an incident.
Maybe that is the place to start: an incident recounted by a contemporary outsider, such as the Italian slave trader Francesco Carletti, who came to Nagasaki from the Philippines in 1597. In his famous memoir, My Voyage Around the World, he tells the story of what happened on a soma, the Chinese-style vessel he boarded when he left Nagasaki bound for Macao in 1598. The ship was owned and commanded by Francesco Gouvea, one of the very first native sons of Nagasaki, born shortly after its founding to a Portuguese resident and a Japanese Christian mother:Footnote 7
Apart from us [Carletti and his father], there were a number of members of the Society of Jesus on board as well as several Portuguese merchants and other passengers.Footnote 8 A strange and violent quarrel occurred between these merchants and the Japanese sailors to whose hands the care for the ship was entrusted, which could easily have become fatal for everyone on board.
One of the Portuguese was a quarrelsome fellow who probably was completely ignorant of the character of the Japanese and did not know that even the smallest insult can lead to dangerous fights. He got involved in a word fight with a sailor and followed it up with a kick to the man's behind. That, however, is also among the Japanese a serious insult. Although the sailor immediately turned around and gave his adversary a blow to his head, he did not think that he had obtained in this way a satisfactory payback for the kick he had received. He withdrew among his comrades and discussed with them what they were to do to obtain revenge for the insult all the Japanese sailors felt to have received. They demanded that the Portuguese would be handed over to them so that he could be punished in their manner. That, however, seemed to us all as unfair as it was outrageous.
The result was a fight between the two parties; and in the end everyone – sailors, passengers, and merchants – had weapons in their hands. Two groups formed, one on the poop deck and one in the prow in front, which both counted about sixty fighting men. We on the poop almost started shooting with our arquebuses and they on the prow with their arrows. They could have easily cut us all to pieces with their single-edged sabers and we them with our swords.
The Japanese wanted the Portuguese, while we demanded of the captain to punish the Japanese sailor for his actual counterattack against the Portuguese and his guilt in starting the whole tumult against us all. A number of the Japanese sailors were Christians and others were heathens, but they all were firmly decided to fight the Portuguese with their arms (possibly to have an excuse to mutiny and plunder the ship if they came out on top). Anyway, they were prepared to die rather than hand over their Japanese fellow sailor.
The affair would have turned from bad to worse, if Providence had not sent those members of the Society of Jesus on board our ship. In their usual slick manner they talked to the Christian sailors among our adversaries and told them that they would be the cause of the perdition and death of everyone, including themselves. The loss of the ship would be their fault as well, for no one cared any longer to man the rudder and care for the sails.
Great confusion, discord, and a terrible tumult reigned for longer than an hour. One can imagine what it means when a ship is sailing the high seas and a state of war breaks out between two parties of equal strength, because that was approximately our situation. What was all the more scary was that one of these parties consisted of such fearless and barbaric people, many of whom denied the immortality of the soul. They act without regard for their own body, which they often destroy with a small sword, either out of their vocation or because of any other worldly honor. … But God allowed that a peaceful solution was found through the mediation of the clergymen. In this manner we continued our trip while the wind and sea became rougher and rougher so that our ship was exposed to yet another danger.Footnote 9
What is most puzzling here is the arrogant attitude of the Portuguese merchant who started the whole business by kicking the Japanese sailor. What made him think that he, so far from home, could get away with this kind of behavior? Was it, possibly, because he had gotten away with it many times before? Was it normal, then, for Portuguese to behave like that in Asia? Such questions we will have to consider when we analyze the mindset of the Portuguese merchants.
THE KING'S FAVORITES
There is one group of men who have left traces in the archives in Lisbon. These are the fidalgos, men who received, because of their service to the crown and often just because of their birth, “mercies” from the Portuguese kings.Footnote 10 The record of these “mercies” is a mother lode of information on the men who left their home country to seek their fortune overseas. In the knowledge that they represent only a small fraction of those who came to Japan, this is the first lead to follow. On the other hand, it should also be admitted that they are an extremely important minority.
Their family backgrounds tended to be similar, the majority being second, third, or bastard sons of medium-ranked nobility. First sons of these families would stay at home to inherit the family title and property, just as happened in warrior families in Japan. Vitor Rodrigues has asserted that the Captains Major of Japan most often came from the Tejo valley towns of Santarem, Abrantes, Mafra, Azambuja, Alenquer, Lisbon etc., while the second most productive areas for their recruitment were the southern regions of Alentejo and Algarve. This, he explains, was the result of the patterns of land ownership in Portugal, where land was owned in the north and center by noble families, which were thus better equipped to resist the monarchy, while in the south it was the military orders that were the great landowners, thus weakening the local nobility and making them more willing to follow the lead of the crown.Footnote 11
These men are known in Portuguese as the capitães mores, which Charles Boxer has translated as “Captains Major, the leaders of the Portuguese in Asia.”Footnote 12 Although often difficult to document in detail individually, there are enough sources left to paint a group portrait of them.Footnote 13 The common denominator that brings these men together in the sources is a royal letter of appointment, the alvará.Footnote 14 To be more precise, the captains of the Japan voyage constitute a sub-group of a larger group of capitães mores, who held royal appointments as outbound or inbound commanders of Portuguese fleets, overseas settlements, and other trade routes in Asia. It is impossible to study the captains of the Japan voyage apart from this larger group, for the appointment to the lucrative Japan voyage was usually the result of years of service in the other capacities.
This is not to say that all or even most captains of the Japan voyage had distinguished themselves in the service of the Portuguese kings. This may sound contradictory until one realizes that the alvará issued by the Royal Chancellery in Portugal was a negotiable instrument, that is, it could be bought and sold. I have tracked and analyzed in what used to be the royal archives of Lisbon a group of thirty-seven captains,Footnote 15 who came to Japan in the half century between 1550 and 1598, the period that encompasses the formative years of the city of Nagasaki.Footnote 16
Of these thirty-seven captains, the vast majority (32) came to Japan on their own account, while five did so as representatives of other (more powerful) principals.Footnote 17 Of these thirty-seven captains, however, I found that only a third (12) held an alvará registered in their own name. This, however, may not quite reflect the reality on the scene. I found, for example, alvará registered in the names of two of the five Portuguese who sent others with the title of Captain Major as their representatives. Moreover, the first to arrive in Japan with an alvará that is still traceable today was Leonel de Sousa (in 1558).Footnote 18 There may have been others issued before his (or even after) that for some reason were not properly registered.
Still, alvará falling by the wayside in the Royal Chancellery would have been the exception rather than the rule. It may, therefore, be safe to say that about half of the captains of the Japan voyage in this period held an alvará issued in their own or their employer's name. Consequently, we have to conclude that the other half, or around eighteen or nineteen captains, must have held an alvará issued in someone else's name. The royal patent was, to be sure, the one indispensable mark of authority without which no captain could expect to be obeyed by all the Portuguese he encountered on his way. In the words of virtually every such document: “He [the beneficiary] will make this voyage with the title of Captain Major, which I the King grant him so that he may command whatever ship or vessel that accompanies him or that he encounters in Macao or in China, or any other place that he finds himself.”Footnote 19
To arrive as Captain Major in Japan, then, was not simply a matter of holding an alvará in one's own name. It was the result of a long, competitive race that started in Lisbon, but involved a lengthy row of hurdles all the way to the other end of the world. Upon arrival in Goa, the holder of an alvará had to register his document with the Casa da India in its Livro dos Registos.Footnote 20 If the holder of the alvará did not know it yet, then he would find out there that he might have royal permission to make the China–Japan voyage, but that it would be extremely difficult and time consuming to actually do so.
The alvará usually stated that the voyage was to be made in a ship belonging to the recipient himself.Footnote 21 That ruled out anyone who lacked sufficient money to invest in the purchase or the building and equipping of a large nao in India.Footnote 22 It goes without saying that the monthly wages for the crew were to be paid out of the captain's own pocket as well. Sailing around Asia presupposed a number of skills, of which navigation was probably the least difficult to acquire (this was the domain of highly paid specialist pilots). Keeping the crew in line, victualing along the way, and arriving without too many losses at one's destination in general was an art in itself.
Even if all these conditions were met, the holders of these patents had to contend with a large number of competitors. In the first place, the Portuguese kings were in the habit of rewarding far more fidalgos with alvará for this voyage than, with only one trip permitted per year, could possibly be accommodated. Typically, the alvará would state that its recipient was free to make the voyage as Captain Major:
provided only he [the recipient] does not encounter in the said ports [between Malacca and Japan] any other person also carrying my license of Captain Major which antedates his own. For in case two Captains Major happen to be in the same place or port, the one whose license antedates that of the other shall take precedence and perform the function of Captain Major just as it is stated in his license, for in this way We will be served best. This voyage the said [name of recipient] will make when it will be his turn among those who have received [this license] by Our provisions before [date], on which day We granted him this bounty.Footnote 23
In other words, one would be placed on a waiting list. As the sixteenth century crept on, this waiting list became longer and longer, so that in 1591 João Cayado de Gamboa already protested that it would take seventy years before he would be able to make his voyage.Footnote 24 He proved this allegation by presenting the Royal Chancellery, along with his letter of protest, the long list of names of those who were on the books as having precedence over him.Footnote 25
However, even if one were granted permission to leave Goa to sail east as Captain Major of the China voyage, there was no guarantee that one could continue one's voyage past Malacca, for its captain represented another bottleneck. This official was, for the three years he was in office, in charge of the easternmost third of Portugal's thalassocracy in Asia, which by virtue of the great distances involved made him a more or less independent ruler over all the Portuguese east of Ceylon. No ship was allowed to sail past Malacca without entering its port, and no ship could leave this port without the permission of its captain.
How this permission was to be obtained depended on the people involved, but we find Malacca's captains often directly involved in the China trade.Footnote 26 If held back by a particular captain because he was favoring others, there was nothing one could do but wait until he was relieved after his term was over, and hope the new captain would be a family member or another kind of ally. The official power of the captain of Malacca is described in the Livro das Cidades e Fortalezas, a document originally compiled to inform Philip II of the extent of his new possessions in Asia:
When they arrive at our stronghold of Malacca, they pay eight percent tax on all freight they carry, but when they leave they do not pay anything else. But because they are not allowed to take from there any medicinal drugs, spices, or any other merchandise in order not to cut into the trade reserved for the Captains of that city by the Viceroys of India (about which more ahead), they often come to an understanding with the said Captains and buy their China voyage so that they can transport drugs and spices, for these are the most important and valuable merchandise available in Malacca.Footnote 27
HOMINES HABILES
Getting past Malacca, then, represented a major and often insurmountable hurdle. It is therefore not surprising that alvará would often go on sale there. Those buying the alvará (for prices upwards from 20,000 cruzados),Footnote 28 the other 50 percent of the Captains Major that we have identified above, were the homines habiles of the area,Footnote 29 who knew the route from Malacca, via Macao, to Nagasaki like their back pocket. They were the ones most familiar with the players in the high-stakes game of the China–Japan voyage: the captains of Malacca, of course, who sometimes sent their own representatives to Japan;Footnote 30 but also its main investors, the casados or married Portuguese settlers of Macao;Footnote 31 and the main purveyors, the Chinese merchants of Canton, who supplied virtually all the merchandise for the Japan market. As we can see from their numbers, these men were extremely successful in taking away the lucrative Japan voyage from the fidalgos actually rewarded by the king.Footnote 32
This is not to say that there were no exceptions to this general trend of having to wait a decade or two before one could make use of one's permission to make the China–Japan voyage. The numbers of those who made it to Japan with their own alvará do not tell the whole story, for I found that, on the whole, their waiting period was often surprisingly short. Connections, of course, were everything. Simão de Mendonça, for example, brother of the Viceroy João de Mendonça, came to Japan in 1566 without any alvará having been registered in the Royal Chancellery. He came again to Japan in 1574 with a permit that was only six years old.Footnote 33
The alvará of Manoel Travassos was issued on 20 January 1564, while the recipient himself was in India, in itself a sign of very good connections at court.Footnote 34 This document must have been sent with the outbound fleet leaving Lisbon on 19 March of that year,Footnote 35 so he may have received it early the following year. He managed to come to Japan four years later, in 1569, and again in 1570, even though he had not received permission to make two Japan voyages. Either he was lucky (the next designated Captain Major may have been delayed or lost at sea,Footnote 36) or he disposed of powerful, secret instructions.Footnote 37 On the whole, however, the pool of alvará holders without such sterling connections was vast.Footnote 38 The majority of them must have given up and sold or traded their alvará.
Wherever he went in Portuguese India, the Captain Major paid anchorage fees. In Goa, he (as did all Portuguese) paid 8.5 percent of the value of his cargo, on entering as well as on leaving the port. In Ceylon, he paid two and sometimes three thousand cruzados for the maintenance of the garrison there, and
for this purpose two or three fustas and galiots leave from there to pull the nao, however heavy she may be, into port, from where she is not allowed to leave until she has paid the tax. The reason the Captain of this fortress gives for this is that the Viceroy of Goa will deduct this tax from the taxes owed there. He does the same to the naos that come from Bengal and other parts that are forced to go here on their way to Goa, for this is the island of cinnamon.Footnote 39
In Malacca, going to and returning from China, the Captain Major paid a tax of 7 percent on all the goods even if he did not sell or unload anything.Footnote 40 In Macao, he paid according to the width and length of his nao or her loading space:
measuring the length from the mizzen mast up to the poop mast, and the width from board to board, paying more or less according to the size of the nao. The measuring unit is one arm's length, and each arm's length is paid so that a nao of 300 tons pays between 3000 and 4000 taels of silver. The Portuguese used to pay this anchorage fee in Brazil wood and other merchandise they had brought, but since two or three years ago they make them pay the fee in silver, which is not nearly as advantageous for them. And if perchance the naos should be forced to stay over the winter, they have to pay without fail, even if they might be owned by their own neighbors in Macao.Footnote 41
What were precisely the advantages of being a Captain Major of the Japan voyage? Obviously the monetary reward of the voyage between China and Japan alone was considerable, allegedly rising from 100,000 cruzados in the 1560s to 200,000 cruzados in the 1580s.Footnote 42 As we have seen, a number of those who held the alvará chose to remain in Macao for the term of their office and sent someone else to Japan in their name. The Captain Major was Portugal's chief official in Macao, albeit only for the limited time of his stay. He must also have been paid, among other things, for exercising his judicial powers there, deciding cases that could not be resolved by the litigants themselves. Even if he did not go to Japan, he was handsomely remunerated for the cargo his ship took on in Macao:
The Captain is paid ten percent of the [yield of the] cargo, so that he often collects between forty and fifty thousand Scudos,Footnote 43 without running any other risk than the sailing of his own ship, which brings the merchandise to Japan in twenty to twenty-five days. It is true that he sees his ship only eight months later, because it leaves China in June and returns to Macao in March of the next year. Often, however, he already receives a part of his money in October of the same year, for ships are sent from Japan to bring merchandise to the Canton fair of that month.Footnote 44
Luis Filipe Thomaz has looked for other advantages enjoyed by the larger category of Portuguese Captains Major in Asia, of which, as we have seen, those with the right to make the China–Japan voyage form a sub-group. He concluded that he was unable to find them in their alvará or any other documentation:
Apparently, they [the advantages] were rather vague, leaving much room for discretionary measures. Of these we get some idea from the decrees condemning them issued by the first Provincial Council of Goa: prioritizing their own merchandise in loading their ships, arbitrary pricing of freight rates, prohibiting merchants from buying or selling as long as their own merchandise had not been sold, holding up ships in ports, prohibiting ships from being freighted freely according to market prices, withholding permission to travel to those who do not lend money to the Captain, forcing loans, confiscation of victuals and other goods by force or at prices far below market value, refusing to transport people who are dependent on him to return home, declaring war on places inhabited by non-believers without the authority or license of the Viceroy (in order to give a semblance of legality to seizures in their own interest), forcing people to buy goods as a way to make them pay local taxes.Footnote 45
We may safely assume that if these were the things taken up by the authorities in Goa, the behavior of the Captains Major in East Asia, where the power of the Viceroy was extremely weak, may have been even more arbitrary. It is likely that we get a glimpse here of nothing less than the proverbial tip of an iceberg of habitual, exploitative practices. In this connection, it should also be mentioned that the alvará issued by the Royal Chancellery in Lisbon routinely coupled the function of Captain Major to that of provedor dos defuntos or ‘custodian of the property’ of the dead:Footnote 46
We [the King] also hold it to be good and just that [the said recipient] will serve as the manager of the property of those who die during this voyage, outward bound, during the return voyage, as well as during the time he will be in the various ports [east of Malacca]. As such he will serve as the manager of the estates of those who die on his ships or in the ports he visits and have not provided in their last wills for arrangements that empower others to dispose of their estates, for in such cases these persons so empowered and present on the ship or living in such ports the ship is visiting will receive authority over the estates, and what the deceased has determined in his testament will be carried out without the said [name of recipient] being able to interfere in any way. [Furthermore,] he will only carry out this duty of Purveyor of the Deceased if there is no one else with a royal license to perform this function antedating his own.Footnote 47
Clearly, it was advisable, for any Portuguese in East Asia, to have a will and to appoint some close friend as its executor, for otherwise, after death, one's property would become very difficult to distinguish from that of the Captain Major.Footnote 48 Also, we see here the potential for conflicts of interest between the Captains Major of Macao and Nagasaki and the resident Jesuits of these cities, who might be named as either beneficiaries or executors of the wills of local Portuguese residents. As we shall see, such conflicts of interest between the two parties, completely dependent on each other in Japan, had several other aspects as well, which are rarely referred to in the Jesuit letters.
As a rule, however, the Captains Major who came to Japan generally cooperated well with the Superior of the Jesuits there. Since the time of an armed conflict in Hirado between Portuguese traders and Japanese samurai in 1561,Footnote 49 the Captains generally no longer questioned Jesuit directions about which port to enter. Manoel Travassos, who came in 1569 to Fukuda and in 1570 to Shiki on Amakusa, bent over backwards to accommodate the Jesuits and changed ports twice, going from Shiki to Fukuda, and just before leaving for Macao he was the first Captain to take a large Portuguese vessel into Nagasaki Bay. This was not a simple matter, especially from Fukuda, for the entrance to Nagasaki Bay is narrow and blocked by several islands.
It is possible that, with the right wind, Travassos and his pilot managed to enter and leave the bay under their own sail,Footnote 50 but in later years it was usual to tow the nao in and out of the bay with a large number of small Japanese craft.Footnote 51 During the 1580s the task of pulling the large Portuguese ships had fallen to the fusta, the warship commanded by the Jesuit brother Ambrosio Fernandes. After Hideyoshi's 1587 takeover of the city, however, the fusta had to go. It is unclear when it left Nagasaki Bay for the last time, or whether it was scuttled. In 1596, Valignano wrote: “Now they very much miss her and we have had many scary moments, especially last year, when the nao was in the gravest danger of being lost while leaving the bay for lack of our fusta, which has not been available now for several years.”Footnote 52
Eleven Captains Major visited Nagasaki during the city's formative years between 1571 and 1585, making a total of fourteen voyages, but because of the shipwreck of one, produced only thirteen trading seasons.Footnote 53 Of these eleven captains, six appear in the archives of Lisbon or Goa as recipients of alvará for the China voyage in their own name.Footnote 54 What is more, we know in the case of eight how much time had elapsed between the date of issue of their alvará and their arrival in Japan. Thus, we can calculate the average amount of time (more than eight years) these eight captains had had to wait before being able to make their voyage.Footnote 55 Of these eight men, two men were exceptionally fast: Dom João de Almeida (1572) and Leonel de Brito (1579), who both arrived in Japan only four years after their alvará had been issued. In Leonel de Brito's case, however, his alvará was the result of a previous one issued, in 1570, to his father, and it was with the express stipulation to indemnify his father that he was allowed to make the voyage.Footnote 56 For this reason, his voyage cannot be counted as a particularly fast one, such as the one that Dom João de Almeida made.Footnote 57
On the other hand, three of the eleven captains, who did not hold any alvará in their own names, Vasco Pereira (1575), Domingos Monteiro (1576, 1577, 1578), and Ayres de Miranda (1583, 1584) were responsible for six out of the fourteen voyages and almost half of the thirteen trading seasons. These men, then, belong to the group of self-made homines habiles roaming East of Malacca, who came to Japan with alvará that had been issued to others. Whatever the source of their alvará, however, according to the language of the document itself, the power of the Captain Major in Nagasaki was formally the same. In reality, of course, there were differences. We see Domingos Monteiro, for example, extremely eager to please the Jesuits by transporting large numbers of them without charge and donating funds to the mission on his first three voyages to Japan when he was but a representative of others.Footnote 58 He refused, however, to obey clear Jesuit orders to come to Nagasaki when he finally came on his own account in 1586.Footnote 59
Upon arrival in Japan, all the Captains Major held a festive procession, accompanied by music. First, mass was celebrated at Morisaki, and this was “followed by a procession in which Portuguese and Japanese participated. Portuguese and Japanese musicians took the lead. They played flutes, shawms, viols, ‘dancing with joy’.”Footnote 60 As many as five hundred and more people may have participated in such parades, for all the Portuguese merchants as well as the seamen, servants and slaves – everyone carried by the nao from China to Japan – would take part to express their gratitude for having arrived safely in Japan.
The Captain Major himself would be the centerpiece of the parade, the only one with the right to be followed by a slave holding a huge, brocade umbrella over his head.Footnote 61 It goes without saying that the whole town, in the 1580s between two and three thousand people, would turn out to watch.Footnote 62 The arrival of the Portuguese was, after all, Nagasaki's lifeline, the reason for its existence. The parade of the Portuguese is one of the recurring themes of the nanban byōbu, the colorful genre of Japanese painted screens that took Nagasaki as its subject matter, and were produced in Japan roughly between 1590 and 1620.Footnote 63
The Captain Major's accommodations on the nao being comfortable enough, it is not likely that all or even most of them would have chosen to stay on shore. The merchants from Macao, however, were always in a hurry to get off the nao and rent rooms in those streets of uchimachi that specialized in receiving the Portuguese, namely Yokoseura and Hirado-machi. These were the only street blocks in early Nagasaki with houses on one side of the road only, allowing an unobstructed view of the anchorage of the nao in front of the mouth of the Urakami River. One of the first Dutchmen to visit Nagasaki, Jacques Specx, wrote in 1610, half-disapprovingly and half-enviously, about Portuguese spending habits:
When a ship arrives from Macao, there are some two hundred or more merchants who immediately go ashore where they rent houses for themselves, their servants, and their slaves and do not care what they spend on food or drink. Sometimes, in the seven or eight months that they stay in Nagasaki, they may spend together between 250 and 300,000 taels, which means great profits for the whole town and is one of the principal reasons why the Japanese still reserve most of their affection for the Portuguese.Footnote 64
THE CAREER OF DOM JOÃO PEREIRA
To illustrate the general findings of the survey of the Captains Major making the Japan journey in the sixteenth century presented in the previous section, I will now describe the career of one of these, a man who generally may be considered typical of the group of early Captains Major coming to Japan. When we check the background of Dom João Pereira, we find that he was one of the few captains who came from northern Portugal. He was born the second of fifteen children that the third Count of Feira, Dom Manuel Pereira, sired with three different women.Footnote 65 The Count of Feira was the head of one of Portugal's great families, owning the famous castle of Santa Maria da Feira, just south of Porto, which was an ancient stronghold of the battle against the Moors dating from before the time that Portugal had a royal family.
Diogo do Couto (1542–1616), the contemporary historian of Portugal's thalassocracy in Asia, mentions Dom João Pereira several times. The first time is when he, on 7 April 1541, initially sailed for the Indies, in the company of his younger brother Duarte, on the fleet carrying the new Governor Martim Afonso de Sousa.Footnote 66 The next time he is mentioned is on 12 August 1543, when he commanded a galley, one in a fleet of twelve galleys, eight galliots, three caravels, and thirteen foists organized by the governor to rob the temple of “Tremel” on the coast of St. Thomé of its gold.Footnote 67 In March of the next year, Dom João commanded one of six galleys and other lighter craft organized by the same governor to extort a payment of 400,000 cruzados from the ruler of Cannanore.Footnote 68 Later in the same year, he commanded one of seven caravels taken by the governor to Bassein.Footnote 69
Next, there is a gap in Couto's reporting about his career, for we do not hear of Dom João again until 1556. It is likely that he returned to Portugal with the governor at whose command we have seen him participate in so many robberies. Martim Afonso de Sousa may have recommended him for the captaincy of Malacca, for which he was given an alvará on 10 March 1546.Footnote 70 As another reward for his heroics in the service of the king, he was admitted into the Order of Christ, on 18 January 1547.Footnote 71
So far, then, Dom João's career seems to have gone smoothly. He may have thought of Malacca as the appropriate stepping stone towards a governorship of India for himself. In March of 1556, Governor Francisco Barreto, a fellow member of the Order of Christ,Footnote 72 finally sent him to Malacca to replace Antonio de Noronha, who had died.Footnote 73 The captaincy of Malacca was a real test of a person's abilities, and it is likely that Pereira failed here, for he never finished the three-year period allotted to him, but was replaced after one year by João de Mendonça.Footnote 74
It is unclear what happened. Diogo do Couto must have known, but he does not tell us. At any rate, Dom João continued to be protected by Francisco Barreto with whom he returned to Portugal, leaving Goa on 20 December 1560 on the governor's nao S. Gião.Footnote 75 They arrived in Lisbon on 13 June 1561.Footnote 76 He must have gone to India a third time, with the next fleet leaving Lisbon on 15 March 1562, for he commanded a ship in the great armada prepared by the Viceroy Dom Francisco Coutinho, another member in the Order of Christ, in December of 1562. Dom Leoniz Pereira, Dom João's illegitimate but more capable younger brother, and Diogo de Menezes, with whom he would later visit Japan, are also mentioned by Couto as commanders of this fleet.Footnote 77
The next thing we know of Dom João's career is a short and incomplete description given by the Jesuit Antonio Franco in his Imagem da Virtude (1719) of a dispute involving several Portuguese leaders in Macao in 1564:
During this time, Luiz de Mello came from Sunda to Macau and João Pereira from Malacca. Both were rich merchants, and both had a license from the King to sail for Japan, with the proviso that as long as they were waiting in Macao for the monsoon they would be in charge of its inhabitants. And because each one of them wanted to take charge, things almost exploded into bloody discord. Father Francisco Pires and the Vicar of Macao did their best to resolve the dispute, and the captaincy was given to João Pereira, a solution which Diogo Pereira, who was a man always thinking of the common good rather than his own advantage, later did not contest.Footnote 78
The problem with this passage is that there should not have been any dispute if matters had been settled according to the dates of issue of the alvarás that each of the pretenders had brought to Macao. The fact that there was a dispute suggests that the dates of issue were disregarded. And that would indicate that Dom João Pereira had an alvará of more recent date.Footnote 79 He may have had other forceful support, however, from the Viceroy of this time, Dom Antonio de Noronha, a fellow member in the Order of ChristFootnote 80 and, on top of that, Dom João's brother-in-law,Footnote 81 as well as from the present Captain of Malacca Diogo de Menezes, who would join him shortly for the voyage to Japan, if he had not already done so.Footnote 82 Diogo Pereira (from Faiçal on the Azores, no relative of Dom João) would arrive later in Macao, having been charged with the task of organizing an embassy to the Ming court. As the King's ambassador to China, he could also have claimed the captaincy of Macao that year.
These were Macao's first years when the general area on the South China coast was still suffering from the effects of wako piracy. The war with the Japanese had just been concluded with a contingent of two thousand Chinese soldiers, who had unwisely been left unpaid. These men had rebelled and were now laying waste to the area around Canton, in full view of the mandarins of its surroundings, who had no manpower to contain them. Next, the rebels occupied a stronghold at a distance of one day's travel from Canton and equipped nine junks to be used for piracy on the Pearl River, which they succeeded in making unsafe to reach Canton. When the Portuguese later pursued the pirates, they did so in two squadrons, one headed by Diogo Pereira and the other by Luis de Mello.Footnote 83 Thus, we conclude that Dom João preferred to sulk:
At this moment, Diogo Pereira saw a chance to obtain Chinese cooperation for his embassy if the Portuguese could take care of this menace. He sent a man to Canton to promise help defeating the pirates. When the man came back with a positive answer from the authorities, he was so excited that he revealed the secret. “Hearing this, Captain João Pereira took great offense that Diogo Pereira had offered the support of their common forces without consulting him.”Footnote 84
Next follows, in Dom João's career, an episode at Fukuda near the entrance of Nagasaki Bay. Here, in the fall of 1565, Portuguese traders and Japanese samurai from Hirado again came to blows. Fróis' description of the battle once more shows Dom João in a rather unheroic light. After describing how Dom João had ignored several warnings provided to him by the Jesuits and others about an imminent attack from Hirado, Fróis continues:
The battle lasted for almost two hours. Both sides fought with a strange fierceness, the Portuguese to defend themselves and the Japanese in order to carry away in their claws their victory and prize. They shot with a powerful musket at the Captain Major Dom João Pereira and hit him in the head, but as he was wearing a demonstration helmet, it did nothing but make a dent in it. When the battle was at its most fierce on the deck and along the railing of the nao, the Japanese with their usual audacity and courage were entering the vessel through the open passageways of the poop until they entered the cabin of the Captain Major, where they held him and took his writing desk. Quickly, those who were defending the quarterdeck came to the rescue and killed some of these men on the spot, while others fell into the sea.Footnote 85
Dom João's mistakes, as listed by Fróis, were as follows. He refused to heed the good advice of the Jesuits and their Japanese allies. When he was anywhere near the battle, it was only to get shot in the helmet, and then to be carried away, presumably to his cabin, not dead, it is true, but at least with a violent headache. All of this only to be taken by surprise a second time, when bold Japanese warriors penetrated the poop deck of the nao, ended up in his cabin and, en passant, took him hostage. In the end, he needed to be rescued a second time, probably only surviving because nobody in the melée was paying him any attention.
By now, however, we have come to know the Captain Major as a typically arrogant Portuguese nobleman and member of the Order of Christ, whose career was built on connections but whose abilities did not live up to the challenges of East Asia. What happened in Fukuda nicely fits into this pattern, except for the fact that he survived the engagement. He does not seem to have learnt much from his close brush with death. The next time Diogo do Couto mentions him again it is in an incident even more foolish than the arrogance he displayed in Macao and Fukuda. The new Viceroy, Dom Luís de Ataíde, had arrived in 1568 with orders from the newly enthroned King Dom Sebastian that he should increase the distance between himself and his subordinates in India:
And among the orders that he had brought was that he should give the fidalgos stools where before they had been given chairs, and that the fidalgos should only talk to him after having taken off their hats: and the first fidalgo for whom he ordered a stool was Dom João Pereira, the twin brother of Count Diogo Pereira, sons of the second count of Feira, Dom Manoel Pereira.Footnote 86 This Dom João Pereira was an old fidalgo, who had been Captain of Malacca. And when the stool was brought for him, he said that he would state his business quickly while standing up. The Viceroy saw that he was embarrassed about the stool, and told him to sit down, for it was the King himself who had ordered it for him and for other fidalgos like him. Even so, he continued to talk standing up and did not want to sit down. When he later told his brother-in-law, Antonio de Noronha, about this incident, the latter told him that not to accept the stool would not go over well, in as much as it had been the King himself who had ordered it.Footnote 87
Most interesting here is the detail, which we have not come across before, that Dom João was the younger of twin brothers. Thus, he must always have stood in the shadow of his few minutes' elder brother, who had from infancy been groomed to be the next Count of Feira.
The last entry, in which Diogo do Couto mentions Dom João, shows that the historian knew the Captain Major in person. In Chapter 28 of the Eighth Decade of his famous work, he gives a list of men embarking, on 2 February 1569, with the ex-Governor Antonio de Noronha to accompany him home to Lisbon:
D. João Pereira, his brother-in-law and the ex-Captain of Malacca, D. Pedro da Guerra, Ayres de Souza de Santarem, Manoel de Mello, son of Ruy de Mello of Mina, Heitor da Silva a.k.a. the Dragon, Gaspar de Brito do Rio, Fernão Gomes da Grã, who later became chief warden of the royal shipyard, Lourenço Vas Pegado, and other honorable gentlemen, among which I was myself. We all dined at the Viceroy's table, which was in my experience always generously supplied.Footnote 88
I have found one more document related to Dom João's career, an alvará awarding him the captaincy of Hurmuz dated 7 July 1579. Hurmuz, a Portuguese fortress on an island in the mouth of the Persian Gulf, was one of the three most important posts of Portugal's thalassocracy. At this time, Portugal was in the midst of the final death throes of the Avis dynasty, Dom Sebastian just having been slain, twenty-three years old, on the battlefield of Al-Ksar al-Kabir, on 4 August 1578. He was succeeded on the throne by his uncle Cardinal Henrique, himself in the last years of his life. Philip II of Spain was already preparing his take-over of the Portuguese Crown.
In such times when the monarchy was in disarray, the Order of Christ would reassert its powers,Footnote 89 and this likely is the reason that such a lightweight as Dom João could be given this important as well as lucrative charge.Footnote 90 As described in the document, Dom João received the permit on the basis of the services rendered to the crown by his father's younger brother, Dom Nuno Alvares Pereira.Footnote 91 I have found no record of Dom João actually having taken up the post.
Such are the details left of Dom João's career. Although he was exceptional in being the most exalted Captain Major ever to reach Japan (he was both high nobility and a professed Knight of Christ), his career in Asia in general is pretty typical in showing the importance of connections both in obtaining royal permits as well as in actually being appointed and sent to one's post by the Viceroy. Connections were important on all levels, even historiographically. We have seen Diogo do Couto relating the innocent incident of the stool, but keeping silent about the more serious failure in Malacca.
Even Fróis, who must have known about Dom João's uncooperative behavior in Macao in 1564 and possibly also of his failure in Malacca, never made any allusion to it in his account of his poor showing in Fukuda of 1565.Footnote 92 And even the punch of that account was pulled by the omission of the date on which the incident had taken place, making it – for all practical purposes – essentially a non-event. In our context here, the account of Dom João's character and career serves to establish some parameters for Portuguese arrogance, greed, and punctiliousness. Not all Captains Major coming to Japan were as close to the caricature of the Portuguese fidalgo that Dom João represents, but they all shared some of his characteristics.
THE SPIRIT OF THE HOLY GHOST
The Captains Major were the kings' personal followers,Footnote 93 and as such constituted the vanguard of Portugal's rapacious thrust across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. There clearly was a connection between being of illustrious descent, namely holding the title Dom, and being able to come to Japan, for nine men out of the group of thirty-seven Captains Major investigated here (or almost 25 percent) held this title. Even more striking is the fact that sixteen of these thirty-seven men can be shown to have had a close connection to the Order of Christ.Footnote 94 Although of these sixteen men only two, Dom João Pereira and Manuel Travassos, undoubtedly were professed knights of Christ at the time of their arrival in Japan,Footnote 95 two others may have been as well.Footnote 96 Seven more were awarded membership in this exclusive order at a later date,Footnote 97 while at least five others had close family members (a father, a brother, a son-in-law), who were professed knights.Footnote 98 Because of the incompleteness of our sources that list such knights, all these figures may, in reality, have been higher than given here.Footnote 99
For our immediate purposes, it will suffice to conclude that about 45 percent of all Captains Major who came to Japan before 1600 show a strong connection with the Order of Christ. When we keep in mind that membership in the Order of Christ represented the highest distinction any sixteenth-century Portuguese in Asia could hope for, we start to see the significance of this figure. It points us in the direction of a common ideology for this group of men. It has long been known that the Portuguese kings consciously used the medieval tradition of crusader-knights to further and consolidate their overseas empire. Of the three main military orders it was especially the Order of Christ that was singled out for this purpose. It was the first military order completely dominated by the royal house of Avis, Portugal's second dynasty that built its thalassocracy, even though the dynasty itself took its name from and had originated in the military Order of Avis.Footnote 100
In the fifteenth century, however, Prince Henry, the “Navigator,” was Master of the Order of Christ at the same time that he was implementing the Crown's project to explore and exploit the African coast. He was in the habit of sending off his ships with the characteristic crosses of the order on all the main sails. At the end of the century, while also Master of the same order, King Dom Manoel, the Fortunate, unexpectedly came to the throne. Upon becoming king, he refused to relinquish his mestrado, since he was planning to use the wealth and power of the order to build up Portugal's thalassocracy in Asia. Since his time, the headship of the Order of Christ was the prerogative of the Portuguese kings. His son and successor, King Dom João III, finally managed, in 1550, to add the headship of the orders of Avis and Santiago as well.Footnote 101
Thus it was probably through this particular chain of events, rather than by conscious design, that membership in the Order of Christ became the most desired distinction that Portugal's heroes in Africa, Brazil, and Asia could hope for,Footnote 102 whereas the orders of Avis and Santiago remained limited to the upper echelons of the Portuguese nobility and always counted fewer members than the Order of Christ. Until the take-over of the Portuguese crown by Philip II of Spain,Footnote 103 these military orders mostly remained the exclusive haunts of Portugal's fighting men, craving religious sanction for their violent behavior and anxious to secure the virtually supra-legal position that membership in a military order guaranteed in Portuguese society.
To be a member of the Order of Christ was gratifying on many different levels.Footnote 104 First there was the financial aspect of the royal stipend, or tença, one received. Second, there was, on the judicial level, the immunity from ordinary prosecution that membership bestowed. Third, on the social level, there was the immense prestige that membership conferred. Even more important, possibly, was what we would today call the networking aspect: membership meant entering a brotherhood of the most powerful and often the richest members of Portuguese society. Finally, there were the moral and spiritual rewards, for the Order of Christ provided a fully developed ideology for the expansion of Portuguese power. It is likely that spreading this ideology among the Portuguese leaving for India was the most important function of the order, for even those who could never hope to become a member could not fail to be influenced by its ideology, and, to a certain extent, regulate their behavior accordingly.Footnote 105
We should, therefore, try and retrieve some of this ideology in order to understand the mindset of the leaders of the Portuguese in Asia. Its origins seem to go back to the late thirteenth century when King Dom Dinis, through his queen, the Aragonese princess (and later Saint) Isabel, was influenced by and later largely adopted the teachings of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202). He was an Italian mystic and Cistercian abbot, whose most famous follower was the poet Dante (in his Divine Comedy).Footnote 106
In his own writings, Joachim of Fiore developed his theory or vision of The Three Ages, based on the doctrine of the Trinity.Footnote 107 The First Age, represented by the Old Testament, was that of the Father, whose strict laws “had enslaved” the Jewish people. The second was the Age of the Son, whose coming had opened the door to true freedom. This age was represented by the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church and based on the New Testament. It was also still the age of Joachim of Fiore himself. He, however, foresaw the coming of a new age, the Third Age of the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost [Espirito Santo].Footnote 108 It was only during this age that the world would see complete freedom and true spirituality.
If the first two ages were each represented by a scripture, it follows that the third would be described in a new Gospel, the Fifth, detailing a world dominated by the Holy Ghost. Who would write the Fifth Gospel remained unclear,Footnote 109 but the ideas of Joachim of Fiore had been inspired by the Fourth Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles, in which the coming of this new spirit had already been announced:
When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they [the apostles] were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.Footnote 110
In a world dominated by the Holy Spirit, people would be completely dedicated to a life of piety, asceticism, and charity, and would no longer need the Laws of the Father and the Son, as described in the Old and New Testaments. They would realize the ideal of universal brotherhood, because they understood each other perfectly (“speak with other tongues”). An abundance of material wealth would erase the differences between rich and poor. People would receive God's divine grace directly from His Third Person. This, the Holy Spirit, had already been active before the birth of Christ, for it was the Holy Spirit that had originally impregnated Mary. When, after the crucifixion and the resurrection, Christ with His Ascension returned to his Father, he left the Holy Spirit behind to take his place in this world. In a world ruled by the Holy Spirit, it does not matter who will rule for all are equally fit to do so. An ordinary man, a sailor or a fisherman, may become emperor.
The Church, such as it existed in those days, and the Papacy itself were, in the eyes of Joachim of Fiore, institutions of the Second Age, and therefore were destined to disappear in the Third Age, when they would be replaced by the universal Church of the Holy Spirit. Also, with the Holy Spirit entering mankind, preaching, philosophy, theology, and even the sacraments would become superfluous, because men would have learned to know God personally through direct contemplation. Joachim of Fiore's ideas were never condemned by the Church during his lifetime, the more so, however, after his death. They were later taken up most seriously by the Franciscans,Footnote 111 an order about which it was sometimes hard to decide whether it was inside or outside the Church. The “spiritual faction” among the Franciscans wanted to “transform the church into a community of the Holy Spirit, without hierarchy, without a pope, and without scriptures.”Footnote 112 Before the Third Age could begin, however, a terrible battle would need to be fought, pitting the forces of evil led by the Antichrist against the representatives of the future spiritual order of the world.Footnote 113
On the one hand, these ideas may be seen as a reaction to or recognition of the fact that, during the High Middle Ages, when the Church reigned supreme in Europe, the ideals of the New Testament were still very far from being realized. Since the crucifixion and the founding of the Church, the rise of the Islamic competitor, the schisms, the crusades, and the struggle between emperor and pope, had all been signs that the Christian ideal and the real world still were two very different spheres, and that in order to save the ideal it may have been considered necessary to divorce it from the present and place its true realization in the future. On the other hand, it is also clear how convenient and attractive these ideas must have been for a royal house, such as that of Portugal under Dom Dinis, in search of an ideology that would consolidate its anti-Islam foundation as well as inspire others to help expand its power.
This is not the place to trace the adoption and distribution of Joachim's ideas through three or more centuries of Portuguese history. Several indispensable points need to be made, however. In the first place, it was under Dom Dinis that Pope Clemens V disbanded, in 1312, the order of the Templars, originally established to protect and defend unarmed pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. In contrast to their fate in other European countries (especially France where they were persecuted), Dom Dinis protected the Templars. What is more, he allowed them, in 1319, to reorganize into a new order, now nationalized, which took the name of the Order of Christ. This new order was allowed to retain all territorial grants on Portuguese soil that had previously been made to the Templars.Footnote 114
That the Order of Christ was grateful for this treatment and ready to defend Portugal's monarchy is only too understandable. But Dom Dinis's influence went further than that, for the order came to subscribe to the idea that Portugal would be the instrument for the establishment of the Third Age. The Empire of the Holy Spirit, the Universal Empire of the World, would start from Portugal, and it became the task of the Order of Christ to be in the vanguard of this movement carrying a messianic banner.Footnote 115 It was this banner that, two centuries later, the Portuguese would carry into Asia.
It is, therefore, worthwhile to quickly explore its heraldic significance here (see Figure 1 (a)–(d)). It is unclear when the characteristic emblem of the Order of Christ – the double cross with its red outer legs, ending in triangles and containing a simple white inner cross – was first designed.Footnote 116 The first examples resembling this cross that I have been able to find are on fourteenth-century coins (called, of course, cruzados).Footnote 117 It was only later that the whole cross acquired its generally square shape, famous from the sails of the Portuguese ships.Footnote 118
(a) Scutum Fidei (public domain image from Wikipedia, no original source specified); (b) the Trinity Cross (image courtesy of London Bay Stationery, Austin, Texas); (c) the Cross of the Order of Christ (public domain image from Wikipedia, originally uploaded by en:User: CristianChirita); (d) a Manoelene golden cruzado coin (image courtesy of Goldberg Coins and Collectibles). A color version of images (c) and (d) is available at journals.cambridge.org/ASI.
The triangles at the end of the red outer legs clearly symbolize the Trinity, as in the Shield of the Trinity or scutum fidei, a medieval diagram explaining the nature of that great Catholic Mystery, in which the Father is located on the left end of the “base” of an upside down triangle, the Son on the right end, and the Holy Spirit on the bottom. God Himself is located in the middle and connected by labels saying Est (= ‘equals’) to all three points, which in their turn are also connected to each other by labels saying Non Est (= ‘does not equal’).Footnote 119
The subtle difference of the triangles on the cross of the Order of Christ with that of the Scutum Fidei (as well as with the cross of the Order of the Trinity, another Portuguese order),Footnote 120 is that the lower point representing the Holy Spirit falls into and merges with the white inner cross. This feature makes the whole emblem into a symbol of the Holy Spirit par excellence, because, as the Trinity is represented four times, on each leg once, the Holy Spirit merges each time into the white inner cross, which in this way is charged or infused, as it were, with the Holy Spirit. In other words, it is the Holy Spirit that especially emanates and irradiates from the cross of the Order of Christ.
This was the order of which Henry the Navigator was the Master. And it may well have been Henry, the mystic, the hermit of windswept Sagres himself, who decided that it would be this symbol of a royal Portuguese tradition, by his time already more than a century old, that Portuguese ships would carry on their sails all over the world.Footnote 121 To make the Portuguese intentions perfectly clear (for those able to read Latin), these enormous logos on the sails were often accompanied by the embroidered words of the dream of the Emperor Constantine: In Hoc Signo Vinces, “Under This Sign You Will Conquer.” This same phrase is also often found draped around the cross of the cruzado coins.
In battles the Portuguese fought on land in Asia, too, they would do so under a banner with the same cross and slogan.Footnote 122 When, for example, Governor Martim Affonso de Sousa (1542–1545), himself a Knight of Christ, was ambushed and had to try and save his skin, he fled toward the front of his column, where he reached “the banner of Christ,” presumably the safest spot in his force.Footnote 123
As we have seen above, three elements appear in the Ur-text for the Holy Spirit (in Acts of the Apostles): it came at Pentecost, and it manifested itself through wind and fire. All these three elements we find, over and over again, among the traditions of Portugal's thalassocracy. The crosses on the sails of the Portuguese ships would acquire their full impact only when these ships would be sailing before the wind, when, in other words, they would be propelled across the oceans by the Holy Spirit itself.
The knowledge of the tricky patterns of the winds and currents of the South Atlantic was, of course, a sine qua non for establishing an empire of the sea in Africa, America, and Asia. Such knowledge may well have been, to contemporary minds, proof of a special insight received from the Holy Spirit, signifying a special mission for the Portuguese people. Duarte Galvão (1438–1517), for example, secretary to three Portuguese kings and a close associate of the empire builder Afonso de Albuquerque, may be considered representative of the thinking at the court of Dom Manoel (1495–1521) on these matters.
In the first letter sent in Dom Manoel's name to an Asian ruler, the Samorin of Calicut, Galvão had written: “In his great and infinite power, God has ordered many things [to be revealed] for the benefit of mankind for the times to come, inspired by the Holy Spirit into the hearts of men, that were to be operable and manifest at the very moment, no sooner and no later, fixed by Him as appropriate.”Footnote 124 And, further on in the same document, he specifies: “God our Lord did not order this wonderful skill of ours, the art of navigation, [to be revealed] only to serve in worldly affairs and profits.”Footnote 125 The signs are clear, therefore, and God's will is manifest, and for those who do not want to listen, Galvão has an ominous warning: “It is our firm intention to follow the will of God rather than that of men and not to abandon this enterprise for any obstacle.”Footnote 126 With “this enterprise,” of course, he is referring to the establishment of the Empire of the Holy Spirit.
Some Portuguese, then, including Dom Manoel himself, firmly believed that the long-awaited new Age of the Holy Spirit had finally arrived, and that Portugal was to be its herald.Footnote 127 As soon as it became known to the Portuguese that Islam had spread to the other side of Africa, Arabia, Persia, India, and even Southeast Asia, it was confirmed that the Antichrist standing in the way of the Holy Spirit had always been correctly identified. It is not to be wondered, then, that this nautical knowledge, “this other mystery,”Footnote 128 as well as the roteiros or rutters composed by Portuguese mariners, was considered top-secret information.Footnote 129 It had come, via the Holy Spirit, from God Himself and was to be used to defeat the Antichrist!
Pentecost became an especially important holiday for the Portuguese during the time of their overseas expansion. Here, we come upon a feature of Portugal's ideology that would, at times, pit traditionally minded Portuguese sailors against Jesuit missionaries bent on enforcing the dictates of the Council of Trent. On land as well as at sea, Pentecost used to be celebrated with a ceremony that included the play-acting of the coronation of an ordinary man, or even a child, as emperor of the Third Age.
Already by the end of the fifteenth century, there were in Portugal, by Jaime Cortesão's count, “seventy-five cities, towns, or villages with their main churches dedicated to the Holy Spirit, around eighty hospitals and shelters for the poor, and almost one thousand other religious establishments, mostly hermitages, chapels and convents with the same patron. Almost all of these had Brotherhoods of the Holy Spirit that celebrated festivals with processions alluding to the Empire and the Coronation of the Emperor.”Footnote 130
Today, after more than four hundred years of Tridentine reforms, most of these festivals have disappeared from Portugal, although they are preserved in some outlying areas, and interestingly, in somewhat diluted form, in the stronghold of the Order of Christ itself, the town of Tomar.Footnote 131 By the end of the sixteenth century, however, an Italian Jesuit who had traveled from Lisbon to Goa could still express his surprise at what he had seen on board the Portuguese vessel:
The Portuguese are in the habit of choosing an emperor to celebrate Pentecost, and this happened also on the nao on which I sailed. As a matter of fact, on the eve before the holiday they chose with great pomp a boy to be emperor. After that they dressed him in rich attire and put an imperial crown on his head. They also chose fidalgos as his servants and officials according to their rank, so that the Captain was appointed majordomo of his household, another fidalgo was named his cupbearer, and everyone, even the officials of the nao, the master and the pilot, participated and played a role serving the emperor.
Next, on the day of Pentecost (also known as Easter of the Holy Spirit), with everybody spruced up in their best clothes, they made an altar in the prow of the nao, because there was more space there, with precious fabrics and silverware. Then by the festive sound of music and drums they brought the emperor to hear mass, and he was seated there on a chair with velvet cushions, with the crown on his head and a scepter in his hand, surrounded by all of his courtiers. Meanwhile, during the mass, several salvos of the artillery could be heard. Next followed a banquet at which the fidalgos served the emperor, even though, in reality, he did not belong to the nobility. The cupbearer and the meat carver performed their traditional roles. The courtiers ate after the emperor; and at last everyone on board, more than three hundred people, all ate their share.Footnote 132
The following elements should be noted in this description. Everyone on board participated. The election of the “emperor,” although not stated in so many words, is likely to have been held on the principle of “one man, one vote” (or “let the Holy Spirit decide”). The reason for the choice to crown a child emperor, rather than a grown-up man, is of course because the greater one's innocence, the closer one is to the Holy Spirit. Here the person called the Captain is not the man responsible for the actual sailing from Lisbon to Goa (he is called the mestre or master), but the nobleman who was appointed by the king to be in charge of the ship on this voyage. On the day of Pentecost, an elaborate charade was performed, during which mass was heard, cannon were fired, and everyone participated in a sumptuous banquet symbolic of the abundance of the Third Age.
* * *
Thus, the ideology of the future Empire of the Holy Spirit came to be coupled to Portugal's ancient battle against Islam. Into this already heady potion was mixed, by the end of the fifteenth century, the awareness of having achieved an unusual understanding of the sea that had been acquired over the previous two or three generations, as well as the fortune amassed from the exploitation of the coast of Africa. This, in turn, allowed the Portuguese kings to hire the best gun-founders from Flanders and Germany and arm their ships in unprecedented fashion. The result was, as is well known, Vasco da Gama's successful discovery of the route to India and Afonso de Albuquerque's subsequent establishment of Portugal's thalassocracy in Asia, both achieved during the reign of Dom Manoel.
It is not difficult to imagine the arrogance that was born from the potent mix of ideology, nautical knowledge, military power, and wealth available to the Portuguese at the beginning of the sixteenth century.Footnote 133 The very breath of the Holy Spirit blew their ships across the globe, its fire spewing from their cannon. For a while, none of their adversaries was able to resist them. They were masters of the universe.Footnote 134 Their arrogance was not limited to the capitaes mores only. As we have seen at the beginning of this essay in the story told by the Florentine Francesco Carletti, the rank and file of the Portuguese sailing from Lisbon were known for it as well.Footnote 135
Other contemporary Europeans also remarked on this trait. The Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, for example, who after living in Goa for many years was intimately familiar with the Portuguese, mentioned in his Itinerario their “great haughtiness and puffed-up-ness,” their “filthy pride,” and “conceit.”Footnote 136 The Venetian Cesare Federici, observing the behavior of Portuguese mercenaries in Pegu, “thought it a strange thing to see the Portugales use such insolencie in anothermans Citie.”Footnote 137 And these were men who were supposed to be on the side of the Portuguese, from whom they made their living. One can imagine what the Asians must have felt or thought who were on the receiving end of Portuguese brutality.
Almost immediately after the thalassocracy had been established, however, with the accession of Dom João III (1521–1557) things began to change. The messianic aspect of the Portuguese expansion was pushed onto the back burner, and making money became the professed goal of both the new king and most of his servants in Asia. Most importantly, at court, Franciscans were exchanged for Jesuits. In this, Dom João may just have been led by his dislike of his father, Dom Manoel, whose alliance with the mendicant order had been one of the cornerstones of his messianic policy. Still, the choice of the Jesuits to replace the Franciscans may almost be considered visionary, for the king invited the first Jesuits to his court even before their order had been formally recognized by the Pope himself.Footnote 138
Rather than the grocer-kings themselves, it was the Order of Christ that continued to think in terms of the ideology of the Holy Spirit. That is why I stressed the importance of the fact that so many of the leading figures of the Portuguese expansion during the sixteenth century continued to be members of this order.Footnote 139 And that is also why it is important to know that almost half the capitães mores who came to Japan had a close connection to the Order. Of these, we are justified in suspecting that their relationship with the Japanese was especially problematic. We do not need to detail examples of Japanese prideful arrogance and haughtiness here. Suffice it to say that the ideology of the Portuguese predisposed them to behavior particularly galling and offensive to Japanese samurai. This is where, between roughly 1550 and 1610, the Jesuits came in to perform their task of mediation.Footnote 140
It was only when a sufficient number of native Japanese had acquired familiarity with both the Portuguese and Spanish languages and customs through extended stays in Macao and Manila that the disadvantages of having the Jesuits around in Japan started to outweigh the advantages. That point was reached in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Thus, the presence of the Jesuits in Nagasaki was doomed, for they had finally worked themselves out of business. The Captains Major, however, on the whole remained mired in their late medieval mindset. Not being able to adapt to the changed situation, they continued to support the missionaries in hiding, a habit that was ultimately to spell doom for their trade when, for this very reason, the Portuguese were expelled from Japan in 1639.
APPENDIX
The Capitães Mores of the Japan Voyage 1550–1599Footnote 141
