Iberian missionaries in God’s vineyard: Enlarging humankind and encompassing the globe in the Renaissance

Abstract

During the century of colonial expansion by the Iberian monarchies, the presence of the Church alongside the colonizers was not just a logical continuation of the medieval idea of the good prince who was advised and accompanied by men of faith. It also underlined the political dimension of the ‘spiritual conquest’ and the equally political dimension of the cultural practices accompanying it. There are numerous works that have emphasized this with regard to the American continents in particular, where the connection between the forces present, which quickly led to the destruction and subjugation of the local populations, brought about Spanish colonial domination over large swathes of the ‘West Indies’. Those scholars who have concentrated on the ‘East Indies’, and China in particular, have emphasized acculturation or accommodation, highlighting the cultural rather than the political dimension of contact. This article explores the significant asymmetries in the understanding of humankind developed by the missionaries in their analyses of the Americas and the East Indies. These asymmetries stemmed largely from their distinct roles and functions in the process of colonial or imperial contact. I argue that these asymmetries obscure our understanding of what missionaries contributed to the global circulation of knowledge of lands and peoples new to Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, in part by defining ‘savagery’ and locating it mostly in the ‘West Indies’.

Keywords

global knowledge history writing Iberian missionaries natural history Renaissance

Many scholars have pointed out that the colonial expansion of the Iberian monarchies in the 16th and 17th centuries evinced a close cooperation between Church and crown (Agnolin et al., 2011; De Castelnau-L’Estoile et al., 2011; Coello de la Rosa, Burrieza and Moreno, 2012; Estenssoro Fuchs, 2003; Estenssoro Fuchs and Itier, 2015; Wilde, 2009, 2012). There was a political dimension to the ‘spiritual conquest’ or ‘conversion’ that went hand in hand with colonization, just as there were political consequences to the cultural practices that accompanied it (Palomo, 2014, 2016; Romano, 2016a). Those scholars (including Dunne, 1962; Mungello, 1985; Standaert, 2000, 2002) who have concentrated on the ‘East Indies’, and China in particular, have usually emphasized acculturation or accommodation, highlighting the cultural rather than the political dimension of contact. This distinction is crucial, I argue, to understanding why it was that missionaries produced different kinds of knowledge, as well as different perceptions of the interlocutors among whom they circulated. In this article, I will analyse the roles and functions of missionaries in the Americas and in Asia in order to explore the implications of the significant asymmetries they built into the understanding of humankind.

Evangelization of conquered territories was deeply embedded in Spanish and Portuguese empire-building in the wake of the Christian reconquest (Reconquista), which began in the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands and led to the expulsion and forced conversion of Jews and Muslims. Expansion towards the East Indies as well as the ‘discovery’ of the West Indies were also negotiated, from a religious point of view, with the papacy in Rome. The Roman Catholic Church was itself intent on reformulating its power in both temporal and spiritual domains at a time marked by a fracturing of Christianity, a fact symbolized by the Council of Trent (1545–63). As the ‘New World’ appeared on the Church’s global horizon, before the religious fracture at the very beginning of the 16th century, the need to settle the question of the political control of territories in order that the task of evangelization could be undertaken assumed a new urgency (Visceglia, 2013). Written by two Venetian Camaldolese monks, Paolo Giustiniani (1476–1528) and Vincenzo Quirini (1479–1514), in 1513 the Libellus ad Leonem X was aimed precisely at attracting the attention of the newly elected pontiff to this urgent global challenge.

As the 16th century dawned, Rome, Madrid, and Lisbon redefined their political and spiritual relations as Europeans grappled with emerging knowledge of the extent of human habitation across the globe. A new legal arrangement, known as padroado in Portugal and patronato in Spain, was established with the Papacy. Both placed the religious agents of their respective expansions under the umbrella of their emerging empires. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, updated by that of Saragossa in 1524, determined the global reach not only for empire, but for evangelization in both of these maritime powers.

The regular and secular clergy who accompanied this deployment therefore played a major role in the process of knowledge production that resulted from imperial expansion. In the first instance, this was very patchy knowledge conveyed within a theological intellectual tradition that had long formed the epistemological foundation for European understanding of the natural world and of human societies. However, this knowledge was also characterized by an individual agency reflecting the diversity of traditions among the various religious orders, and their translation to local circumstances far from the control of the distant religious centre of power. Moreover, the key religious players within the Iberian empires relied on the development of commercial and other networks to send people, equipment, and information to all parts of the world (Harris, 1996). Scholars’ often unspecified use of the concept of a ‘network’, especially in the context of the Society of Jesus, has not always enabled a precise analysis of how information was gathered, transformed into knowledge, negotiated at different levels, and communicated between them. The fact remains, however, that Catholic missionaries became active agents in the formation of these expanding interconnections between different parts of the world, a process often described as the ‘first period of globalization’ (Gruzinski, 2004).

For at least two decades, a growing body of research has sought to decentre the geographical and intellectual focus on Europe in the making of ‘modern science’, using approaches based on imperial and Atlantic history (Bleichmar et al ., 2009; Cañizares-Esguerra, 2006; Cook, 2007; Romano, 2008; Smith and Findlen, 2002; Van Damme, 2012) and methodologies aimed at stressing connections or entanglements. This scholarship has contributed to the radical questioning of the high-flown rhetoric of the Scientific Revolution and European modernity (Cohen, 1994; Shapin, 1998; Romano, 2015). In this context, a focus on missionaries offers opportunities for reconsidering relations between Europe, Africa, Asia, and America, between science and religion, knowledge and belief, in part by showing how missionaries interacted with other stakeholders – colonial administrators, travellers, scholars, seafarers, and slaves – in diverse global settings.

Knowledge of the lands and people subjected to colonial domination constituted one of the main demands for knowledge of the world; demands that came as much from secular princes as from Rome. These requests placed the Iberian world at the centre of the production of a new understanding of the world as a whole, in the first instance through maps. The first world map to show Europe, Africa, Asia, and America together was that of Waldseemüller in his Universalis Cosmographia of 1507 (based on Amerigo Vespucci’s travels on behalf of the Portuguese Crown in competition with those of Columbus conducted for the Spanish). The Portuguese and Spanish monarchies were thus able to produce and disseminate, directly or indirectly, global knowledge about medicine, plants, animals, people’s clothing and languages, their beliefs, and their material life (Boxer, 1963; Fontes da Costa, 2015; Günergun and Raina, 2011; Saraiva and Jami, 2008; Slater, López-Terrada and Pardo-Tomás, 2014; Wendt, 2016).

The role that missionaries played in the development of European knowledge of humanity is the central focus of this article (a focus echoed in the articles by Van Gent, Fur and Irving-Stonebreaker in this issue). Analysing the epistemological profiles of knowledge composed by the missionary enterprise distinguishes it from parallel and complementary or competing enterprises. One of its key features was its efforts to render both human unity and diversity comprehensible, in part by reference to ‘savagery’ – a term essential to the formation of knowledge of the ‘four parts of the earth’, to use Giovanni Botero’s (1544–1617) expression from the end of the 16th century (Descendre, 2009).¹

The Iberian century of mendicant orders: The Portuguese East Indies and the Spanish West Indies

The Portuguese occupied the Indian Ocean during the reign of Manuel I (1469–1521) at dazzling speed. At the beginning of this period, Pedro Álvares Cabral was sent towards the east in 1500 with a view to organizing trade with Indian princes. Portuguese ships then arrived in China in 1513, followed by the first Portuguese embassy of Tomé Pirès in China during the Ming dynasty (Louriero, 1996, 2004). This incredibly rapid establishment of a State of India was quickly set down on paper, as evidenced by the swift appearance of the History of the Discovery and Conquest of India by the Portuguese (Historia, 1551–61) by Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (1500–59). With the subsequent publication of Decades of Asia (Décadas, 1552–63) by Joao de Barros (1496–1570), the Titus Livius of his time, the Portugal of the 1550s made its mark as the great architect of the intersection of worlds (Boxer, 1981 ). Its cartographers, historians, chroniclers, poets, and historians were often great travellers in the service of the crown, and from them came a new respect for experience and novelty in Iberian humanist culture (Aubin, 1996–2000).

This was the case with Castanheda, who, after having been educated by the Dominicans, left Portugal in 1528 for Goa, where his father had been sent as a servant of the crown. On his return in 1538, he was first appointed as beadle of the College of Arts, then, in 1545, as guardian of the scriptorium and library of Coimbra, one of the largest and most prestigious universities of the Portuguese-speaking world whose theologians rivalled those of Paris. It was at this time that Castanheda finished the Historia, the first volume of which appeared in 1551. By the time he died, eight volumes had already seen the light of day, though printing of the final volumes was then stopped. Translations into the main vernacular languages of the time ensured that the work was distributed throughout Europe, feeding a fascination for and fantasizing about Asia.²

His compatriot, Barros, presented a near identical profile. A scholar involved in the expansion of the Empire, raised at the court of Manuel I, Barros was subsequently sent to Mina in Africa as Treasurer of the Casa da India (House of India), then ‘Factor of the House of India and Mina’. He later involved himself in the conquest of Maranhão in Brazil by financing (though not joining) an expedition there. The failure of the expedition marked a turning point in his career. He resumed his writing, of which the Décadas, printed in three volumes between 1552 and 1563, was his crowning achievement. Barros put a vast amount of information into circulation. While justifying the Portuguese imperial undertaking, he also conveyed his personal reflections on missions and on Asian ‘religions’ (Buddhism in particular), together with personal impressions of the countries and people he described.³

The rapid expansion of the Portuguese Empire thus brought the East Indies into Europe’s field of view (Alegria et al., 2007; Safier and Mendes dos Santos, 2007). This was not an integrated global vision, but a rendering familiar of select distant regions, connecting them with more familiar places in Europe or Africa. This knowledge created a fragile chain of rapprochement between the world of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (Lombard, 1990), in which the absence of sustained colonization in most of the Far East shaped the nature of the contact. Although it obtained a foothold in the Philippines, Spain’s attention was focussed on the distant West Indies.

The enormous expansion of printing in Europe from the middle of the 16th century was fuelled in part by compilations of voyages and discoveries, a significant number of which were authored by missionaries accompanying these diverse undertakings. Following the authorization of a Portuguese concession in Macao in 1557, China came increasingly to be seen as a domain tied to the political and economic interests of Portugal and Spain. Missionaries were once again at the forefront of this representation. It was the Portuguese Dominican missionary Gaspar da Cruz (died 1570) who authored the first publication in Europe of a text completely and exclusively devoted to China, the Treatise of the Affairs of China, which appeared in Evora in 1570 (Barreto, 2009; Barreto and Zhiliang, 2016; Da Cruz, 1997).

The product of extensive travels in India and China over the preceding 21 years, the text was dedicated to the King of Portugal. Gaspar da Cruz hardly had time to see the edited version of his text before he died of the plague then ravaging Lisbon, on 5 February 1570. Fernão Mendes Pinto (1509–83) re-edited the text for the fourth volume of his Peregrinacãos (Pilgrimages) (Loureiro, 2000: 647–73). Da Cruz’s text marked the beginning of a long-lived textual tradition devoted to China, while also reflecting the relative fragility of the European presence in the region, which would persist over the centuries to come. In addressing this second point, da Cruz’s lucid prologue assessed the advance of Catholicism in Asia. In these few pages, written in a very simple style, he advocated the gathering of facts from the oriental territories divided between the various religious orders. At the end of his account, he clarified that ‘the Portuguese do not have any power either in Bengal, Pegu (Bago), Java or China, any more than they have their own territory. And among all this there are no religious establishments for making Christians either’ (Da Cruz, 1997: 65). Imperial expansion and Christian evangelization were represented here together, a pairing that da Cruz (ibid.: 66) exploited by representing China as a vast storehouse of potential wealth and future converts:

And because the Chinese surpass all these peoples I have mentioned in terms of number of inhabitants, kingdom size, excellence in policy and government, and abundance of goods and riches – in both precious goods, such as gold and (precious) stones, and wealth, capacities and farms which mainly serve human needs –, and because these people have many things worthy of being known, I have decided to give general information about its things…

While it is possible to read the Dominican missionary’s fascination with the exotic wealth of China literally, it must not be forgotten that the stable installation of the Portuguese in Macao in 1557 transformed the geopolitics of this part of Asia. The growing interest in the establishment of the Portuguese in the Chinese Empire was also reflected in the renewed circulation of Marco Polo’s narrative.

Following Gaspar da Cruz’s report on China, the archives of Seville began noting the arrival of new maps of China in the files of the Casa de Contratación [House of Trade].⁴ Information brought to Spain, and to New Spain and Peru through Manilla, suggested the existence of new trans-Pacific Spanish routes to China (Iwasaki Cauti, 2005; Nogueira Roque de Oliveira, 2003; Ollé, 2002). Similarly, Portuguese information on Brazil accumulated in Lisbon, along with that emanating from the Dutch and the French. We can therefore begin to speak of an ‘englobement of the world’ by the Iberians in the second half of the 16th century. This phenomenon was to transform Europeans’ understanding of global space, their concept of an ecumenical world, and of its cartographical and visual representation (Besse, 2003; Harley and Woodward, 1994; Padrón, 2004; Ramada Curto, Cattaneo and Ferrand Almeida, 2003; Romano, 2016a). This was a transformation that imposed a different way of looking at plants, animals, and minerals, as well as humans.

Although not yet clearly defined as a distinct discipline (Grafton, 2007), the historical genre was the main framework through which the Spanish compiled knowledge of nature and of human societies in the New World by narrating and ordering it chronologically. The novelty of the New World presented a profound challenge to European bodies of knowledge. A transformation of legal and theological knowledge was prompted by the debate at Valladolid, in which the missionary and theologian Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) played a significant part (De Las Casas, 2002; Pagden, 1986: 119–45). Both the debate and the knowledge integral to it were shaped by a colonial operation of vast extent involving settlement and forced occupation under institutions of empire different from those of Portugal. In Spain’s Empire, the missionary presence was not only more systematic, but also conceived as an integral part of the colonial undertaking. This centred on the conversion of Indians as one activity within a multilayered process of control of this part of the world, a process that also included the salvation of European colonists. It is in this sense that the information and intellectual tools required for the mission’s work took a specific form. The task of describing nature and reporting on the history of this new world was given mainly to specific figures in the colonial administration: the crown’s cronista (chronicler) or the royal cosmographer (Carrillo Castillo, 2004; Coello de la Rosa, 2012; Portuondo, 2009; Sanchez, 2013). The missionaries’ intellectual work was complementary and decisive: whether it was the Dominican Las Casas and his History of the Indies, or the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún (1500–90) and his General History of Things in New Spain (Leon Portilla, 2002; Reinhard, 1992), the scholarly contribution of the mendicant orders accelerated the European process of ‘appropriating’ the world (Certeau, 1975: 5; Pardo Tomas, 2014; Romano, 2014b).

‘Over there’ and the ‘others’: Missionaries in the Indies

Knowledge of distant locations was a requirement for governing the inhabitants. The need for this knowledge was shared by the prince as well as the evangelizer, as the work of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, founded in 1622 to organize missionary activities urbi et orbi, volubly attests (Friedrich, 2008; Pizzorusso, 2000). At this time, the Jesuits were the driving force behind the evangelism of the Church, providing a political and organizational structure for the global expansion of missions and the accumulation of knowledge (De Boer et al., 2014; Fabre and Vincent, 2007; Maldavsky, 2015). As François de Dainville (1940: 114) emphasized as early as 1940, ‘thousands of investigations were carried out, very often with an intelligent perspicacity, in the East, Asia, Africa and the Americas, everywhere that the disciples of Ignatius worked’, De Dainville also noting that ‘the example of the Jesuits was not followed by the other orders’. The rich, complex nature of these materials, the abundance of which explains in part the creation of an archive by the Society in the wake of its foundation (1540), has not escaped the attention of historians of science (Millones Figueroa and Ledezma, 2005). Members of the Society of Jesus formed a production chain of knowledge linking Europe to the Indies, binding together the global collectors, organizers, and redistributors of knowledge.

This production chain was not always centred in Rome. There were numerous investigations undertaken on an individual basis, which sometimes remained in the form of manuscripts in local colonial archives (Baldini and Brizzi, 2010; Sebastiani, 2012). Nevertheless, under the auspices of the Society, an immense pool of information was gathered and published. This constituted a new direct source of knowledge, which tremendously enriched earlier information gathered by colonial questionnaires. Viewing this structure of knowledge formation critically complicates the received narrative of Europe’s ‘Scientific Revolution’. In particular, it demands a more nuanced appreciation of the formation of ‘scientific’ knowledge in the interplay between missionaries, their global interlocutors, and European ‘men of science’. By the end of the 16th century, the compilation and wide circulation of natural histories, based on the classification of new objects of knowledge, provided a vast tide of new information to be assimilated into natural philosophy. This requires us to locate the development of European ‘science’ firmly in a global context (Romano, 2015). As the articles by Buchan and Andersson Burnett, Hodacs and Persson, and Sebastiani in this issue attest, natural history would become the primary genre of scientific information in the centuries to follow.

Less than 20 years after the founding of the Society in 1540, the first publications of missionaries’ letters coming from Asia constituted one of the main sources of information on this part of the world. The Jesuits’ letters were often printed cheaply on small sheets of paper, and therefore likely to attract an urban readership linking the cities of Europe in the circulation of knowledge. For the Society and its volumes, Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands was the gateway to the United Provinces and England. Venice opened the way to the German-speaking world and the Ottoman Empire. Rome, through its cosmopolitan horizons, linked diverse parts of Europe, Eurasia, and the rest of the world (Lettere, 1575; Quinlan-McGrath, 1997; Romano, 2016b). The Society’s letters circulated via translations from one vernacular language to another, forming source material for the development of rewriting practices whereby the original manuscript sources were continuously re-rendered. They thus point to the capillary action of these texts in European written culture, made possible by men who left to spread the gospel to all corners of the globe.

These publications were often contained in collections of global information, such as: Copies of Several Letters From Some Fathers and Brothers of the Society of Jesus…Of the Great Marvels That God Our Lord Has Done to Enhance the Holy Catholic Faith, in the Indies of the King of Portugal, and in the Kingdom of Japan, and in the Land of Brazil. With the Description of Many Laws and Customs of the People of the Great Kingdom of China and Other Lands Recently Discovered (1556); Specific Advice on the Indies of Portugal…With the Description and Costumes of the People of the Kingdom of China, and Other Unknown Countries Newly Discovered (1556); and History of Facts of Ethiopia…Now Newly Translated From Portuguese Into Spanish by Father Friar Thomas de Padilla (1557).⁵ These three examples illustrate the way in which a new and growing readership, reaching beyond Europe’s elites, became familiar with far-off lands linked to the Old World by trade in objects, foodstuffs, or animals that were entering into people’s everyday lives (Aram and Yun Casalilla, 2014; Bedini, 1997; DaCosta Kaufmann and North, 2014; Jordan Gschwend and Lowe, 2015; Laborie and Lima, 1998). The physical history of such publications is quite distinct from that of treatises on natural history, or indeed of maps. Although they do not strictly correspond to ‘natural histories’, these materials made significant contributions to the presence of the ‘natural world’ in European culture.

Publication of the Society’s letters conveyed information about the world in the context of promoting the success of the missions. Other Society publications, however, reflected another level of production: that of scholarship. To take one representative example of this latter form, consider The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, by José de Acosta (1540–1600). Having entered the Society at the age of twelve, Acosta was educated entirely under its roof, from his novitiate to his attendance at university. He followed a career path consisting of impressive missionary undertakings combined with top-ranking diplomatic activities. After setting sail for Peru in 1572, he worked as a visitor of the province for the Society, as well as a theologian involved with the Third Council of Lima (5 August 1582–18 October 1583). On the basis of his Peruvian and Mexican experience (Borges, 1992; Del Pino Díaz, 1978, 1985, 1992; MacCormack, 1991; Tineo, 1990), he consolidated his authority as a specialist on the Spanish West Indies on his return to Spain in 1587, during his visit to Rome the following year, and on the occasion of his participation in the Fifth General Congregation of the Society in 1593–94 (Lopetegui, 1942). His authority was not limited to the Society of Jesus, since he also acted as theologian to Philip II. His analysis and activities were therefore based on direct experience of the Americas and a dialogue with the two main centres of Catholicism, Rome and Madrid, and their highest authority figures. As a historian and theologian working in the field, and as an armchair scholar, he presented the Society, then under the active and outward-looking leadership of Claudio Acquaviva (Broggio et al ., 2007), with a system of knowledge anchored in the unfolding global relations of the modern world. He integrated America into the Christian world, making it one of its ‘four parts’, in an effort to realize the formulation of Francesco Ingoli, the first secretary of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

In doing so, Acosta adopted a comparative approach encompassing all the peoples of the world, including those inhabiting the New World. The major challenge he faced was to account for the very significant differences between human groups that he perceived, based on his own experience and on sources provided to him by missionaries working in other parts of the world. Acosta accomplished this by distinguishing between the diverse social structures these peoples exemplified. According to Acosta (2002[1590]: 345–6) for instance, ‘barbarian peoples show their barbarity most clearly in their government and manner of ruling’:

For the more closely men approach to reason the more humane and less arrogant is their government, and those who are kings and nobles conform and accommodate themselves to their vassals, acknowledging that they are equal by nature and inferior only in the sense that they have less obligation to care for the public good. But among barbarians the case is opposite, for their government is tyrannical and they treat their subjects like beasts while they themselves desire to be treated like gods.

The significance of Acosta’s contribution has been widely recognized as a crucial step in the development of European interest in comparative ethnography (Del Pino Díaz, 1978; Muldoon, 1994: 66–71; Pagden, 1982: 198). Its importance hinged on his consideration that all peoples were part of humanity, but that their humanity could be variously expressed based on the different circumstances of their location.

For all the recognition it has received, however, interpretation of the Natural and Moral History of the West Indies is still too often removed from the context of its production. The work was the result of Acosta’s navigation of the precarious routes between the geographic triad of Lima, Madrid, and Rome, but also of the political interests of the Papacy and the crown and, of course, the imperatives of the sacred and the secular domains. Acosta’s multiple areas of operation and his varied personal and public roles characterized the work. The influential classification of peoples that he implemented was the product not only of his interaction with the peoples of America, but also of his collection of information on the peoples of China and Japan. As a member of the Society, he was uniquely placed to benefit from the network of information gathering and knowledge production. Faith, politics, and power were all interwoven with the information he systematized and conveyed. As a Jesuit, he wrote about the world based on the parts of it he had seen, but also on those he had only read about in the work of his fellow Jesuits, whose writings could be taken on trust.

Acosta’s epistemological model was therefore shaped by his position within the Jesuit Order. His frequent mentions of China alongside his interpretation of the peoples of America attest to the global reach of both his intellectual ambition and the Order to which he belonged. Even the ‘natural/moral’ binomial in the title suggests that Acosta’s ambition was nothing less than a universal view of both nature and human society across the globe, based on a comparative methodology (Romano, 2014a). Despite its influence, Acosta’s was not the only framework of analysis available to European missionaries attempting to understand and communicate knowledge of the world. The proposal developed by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún in his General History of Things in New Spain exemplified a very different form of communication (Leon Portilla, 2002).

Sahagún’s General History, published only comparatively recently, was produced as a report on the production of knowledge based on a different premise from that of Acosta. Sahagún wrote about a specific geographical region at a specific time: the period following the conquest of the Mexica by Hernán Cortés. The work was primarily intended to collect the testimony of the local peoples. Sahagún relied on representatives of the local elites, the caciques (chiefs), and the students of the ‘indigenous’ college of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, a few kilometres outside the city of Tenochtitlan/Mexico City (Pardo Tomas, 2013, 2016). Information was gathered from these sources by means of questionnaires devised by Sahagún in order to advance ‘spiritual conquest’. Responses, written in traditional pictographic form, were collected by the Indian college students, who had themselves been through a process of conversion to Christianity. The ‘translation’ of these pictograms was complicated. The pictograms were first rendered into the local language of Nahuatl by means of a phonetic transcription, and then re-translated into Spanish and Latin. The translation of Nahuatl to Spanish and Latin was carried out by Sahagún, who devoted 30 years of his life to the task. This manuscript, composed of 2468 illustrations, was taken to Spain by Friar Rodrigo de Sequera, General Commissioner of the Franciscans, where, in manuscript form, it became part of the Medicean Library in Florence, hence the title by which it came to be known: the ‘Florentine Codex’. The complicated, collective creation of this ‘general history’ reinforces the ‘situatedness’ of the linguistic, but also the cultural problem of ‘translation’.

Acosta and Sahagún’s divergent approaches to ethnographic knowledge are exemplified in their respective titles and methods. Sahagún’s approach was to report on the ‘things’ of New Spain – a novelty based on the effort involved in rendering local forms of knowledge not only comprehensible to Europeans, but also reliable: to make ‘indigenous’ people the source of their own history. Acosta’s approach, by contrast, was explicitly comparative in nature and global in scope. His was a history of peoples, not of a place. In both cases, we can see how missionaries constructed European knowledge of the world. This knowledge was not simply formed ab initio, but corresponded to the pre-existing theological and political imperatives that brought the missionaries into contact with new peoples and places to begin with. Finally, this new knowledge was above all ‘ethnographic’ in the sense that human societies and their differences from one another were at the heart of these investigations.

Mapping others

Missionaries and missions within the Iberian empires in the 16th and 17th centuries were vital contributors to an emergent field of knowledge: the delineation ‘humanity’. The challenge was tremendous, if we take into account the unexpected expansion of the world’s horizons in the space of less than a century. It was exacerbated by the hundreds of new languages to be mastered, and the thousands of places to be connected by far-flung lines of communication.

Language was at the heart of their endeavour for a simple practical reason; namely, successful conversion required mastery of languages. In both Indies, conversion meant translation. One could also add, however, that translation itself was a deep process of conversion in its assigning of meaning to words or images from the religious tradition of another. In both Indies, despite the different political contexts, this issue was central for Europeans. America was, without any doubt, one of the preferred lands for linguistic experimentation, with a host of indigenous grammars and catechisms appearing on the European and American book markets from the middle of the 16th century (Adorno, 1994; Girard, 2015; Metzler, 1967–68; Pizzorusso, 2000, 2018). In both China and India, too, the linguistic investment of the missionaries was vital from the very first years of their presence in Asia (Witeck and Sebes, 2002: 245). During those early years of contact, recourse to interpreters hampered the search for accurate information on China (ibid.: 302). Only after the Portuguese gained a foothold in Macau did their long-term presence allow for comprehensive linguistic mastery. Without rehearsing the early history of the Jesuits in China here (Peixoto de Araujo, 2000; Po-Chia Hsia, 2010: 51–77; Romano 2013), the significant contribution of two Jesuits of Italian origin present in Macao during the 1580s, Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1612), should be mentioned (Standaert, 2000). Their work was conducted in the face of uncertainty among their fellow missionaries about the value of learning local languages, but they were supported by Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), who oversaw the implementation of a local language policy. As far as Valignano was concerned, if there was not a nucleus of men in a position to master Mandarin, it would be impossible commence convers(at)ion in China (D’Elia, 1942: 89).

Ricci applied himself to the task. He shared the same problems as Ruggieri in developing a method with their language teachers (a fragmentary description of which was provided by Ruggieri) (D’Elia, 1942: 99). Their work was a product of the decision taken by the Order to have the language learned in situ. Ruggieri and Ricci quickly understood they could not rely on interpreters and, from October 1585, the latter was able to boast that he was the only one who knew how to read and write in Mandarin, albeit in a mediocre manner (ibid.: 103).

The difficulty of linguistic mastery made those who achieved it top-level intermediaries. Not only did they become interpreters; they also acted as conduits for the passage of European texts to the Chinese, and of Chinese texts to Europeans. Far more than learning the language, their new role put them in the position of translating one culture to another. This is where the Europeans’ linguistic commitment in China led to their playing such a different role than the one they played in the Americas, where, Acosta argued, the scarcity of ‘written languages’ and ‘writings’ was interpreted as a crucial element of ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ inferiority. Understanding Chinese astronomy, for example, was not simply a matter of swapping one astronomical system for another, but of comprehending an entirely different view of the world and the heavens through which nature could convey truths necessary for the government of men. In cartography and in the measurement of time, too, Ricci found that translation was a task not limited merely to a knowledge of grammar (Burke and Po-Chia Hsia, 2007; Schaffer et al., 2009). While China was neither ‘barbarous’ nor ‘savage’, assimilating its literate traditions of knowledge presented a different order of problem for European missionaries.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, China was practically a closed space, visited by a very limited number of European observers, most of them missionaries. Linguistic skills were therefore vital if outsiders were to navigate this society, which revered the written language of the mandarins and demonstrated this in its system of examinations (Elman, 2006). Language and cartography were closely connected. Extending European cartographical knowledge was dependent on European mastery of languages in order to make known the peoples of China. This was not simply a political form of knowledge. In order to tend and increase the Lord’s vineyards, missionaries had need of cartography, as Matteo Ricci explained:

With [the maps] and other similar resources, we have managed to gain credit, while waiting for God to open the way for us with a view to doing more important activities, even if, in these things, we have introduced numerous things which concern God and our Holy Law.⁶

‘Ruggieri’s atlas’, which probably reached Rome with the missionary during his stay in Europe in 1588, is interesting in this respect. The atlas reveals a type of basic cartographical work, recorded in a non-erudite manner and representative of daily annotation. It is a remarkably different kind of work from Ricci’s more celebrated atlas (Lo Sardo, 1993). Yet Ruggieri’s maps are a vital clue in helping us to understand the genealogy of European cartographical and spatial knowledge of China. They contextualize Ricci’s work, and indicate the significance of the missionaries’ efforts to learn and adapt Chinese cartographical expertise.

Conclusion

More than geography and even language, history was the preeminent domain of the missionaries’ endeavours to represent the peoples of Asia and America to Europe. History, as Acosta defined it, was a relation of places, peoples, events, and facts that explained the world by narrating it, placing it in an order or sequence of knowledge. This helped to establish a new genre that became part of Christian epistemology until the boom in natural histories during the Enlightenment. These later natural histories were composed according to a new lineal paradigm on the principle of the classification of species and the integration of humans into the animal kingdom. The knowledge produced and brokered by the Iberian missionaries of the 16th and 17th centuries, however, originated in the cosmopolitan and imperial designs of Rome, Madrid, and Lisbon. As such, the missionaries did not seek to classify these new others, but to order them. This ordering was accomplished through the inclusion of all the new peoples within an authoritative narrative of history that located the present in relation to the past. It was by means of history that Acosta was able to make the inhabitants of the Americas comprehensible to Europeans by presenting them as ‘savage’ and ‘barbarous’ peoples among a vast array of different, newly encountered peoples. The cosmopolitan and imperial frameworks within which the missionaries worked ensured that Acosta’s history had a global imprint. History was not simply unfolding in widely dispersed locales; it was unfolding across the globe. As a result, history itself would have to become global.

The Iberian missionaries became the lynchpins in new chains for producing and dispatching knowledge and information. They were agents who kept knowledge and information in circulation from the colonies and other global locations to Europe and back again, between the colonies themselves, and between empires. The missions themselves became vital centres – links in the chains of knowledge. Missions were above all sites for experimentation, as missionaries sought new linguistic, cartographical, medicinal, and cultural knowledge. The asymmetry of power relations within the missions and among the different fields cannot be ignored, as it comprehensively shaped the kind of knowledge produced by the missionaries, determining the way they appropriated or discarded local and vernacular knowledge in mapping both nature and humanity. While missions enabled experimentation with local and indigenous expertise in language and a range of other areas, the missionaries fell back on a pervasive contrast that animated their work: the contrast between their science and the others’ superstition. From their positions as cartographers, astronomers, or ethnologists, the missionaries all had recourse to their primary imperative to convert. As a result, inscribed in this early circulation of knowledge was a profound dichotomy established by the missionaries that would recur in the following centuries. Early modern scholars, missionaries, and others assimilated new knowledge by rendering its original producers the subjects of superstition, and themselves as the bearers of scientific truth: not only in the ‘savage’ West Indies, but also in ‘literate’ China. The asymmetry between the missionaries’ experiences in China and in the Americas reinforced their sense of their own uniqueness, expressed in the confidence with which they professed their ability to know and to describe humanity in its entirety.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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