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Global Reformations
Global Reformations offers a sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of religious transformations in the early modern world. The volume explores global developments and tracks the many ways in which Reformation movements shaped relations of Christians with other Christians, and also with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and aboriginal groups in the Americas. Contributions explore the negotiations, tensions, and contacts that developed across social, gender, and religious lines in different parts of the globe, focusing on how different convictions about religious reform and approaches to it shaped social action and cross-confessional encounters. The essays explore the convergence of religious reform, global expansion, and governmental consolidation in the early modern world and examine the Reformation as a global phenomenon; the authors ask how a global frame complicates our understanding of what the Reformation itself was and offer a unique and up-to-date examination of the Reformation that broadens readers’ understanding in creative and useful ways. Demonstrating new research and innovative approaches in the study of cross-cultural contact during the early modern period, this volume is ideal for advanced undergraduates and graduates of early modern history, religious history, women’s & gender studies, and global history. Nicholas Terpstra teaches early modern history at the University of Toronto, Canada, working at the intersections of gender, politics, charity, and religion. Recent publications include Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (2016) and Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities (2013).
Global Reformations
Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures
Edited by Nicholas Terpstra
First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Nicholas Terpstra; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nicholas Terpstra to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Terpstra, Nicholas, editor. Title: Global reformations: transforming early modern religions, societies, and cultures / edited by Nicholas Terpstra. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2019. | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019004172 (print) | LCCN 2019011030 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429399152 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780367025120 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780367025137 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429399152 (ebk.) Subjects: LCSH: Reformation. | Religions—History—16th century. | Religions—History—17th century. Classification: LCC BR305.3 (ebook) | LCC BR305.3 .G56 2019 (print) | DDC 270.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004172 ISBN: 978-0-367-02512-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-02513-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-39915-2 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by codeMantra
Contents
List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: global reformations: reframing early modern Christianity
viii ix xiii
1
N icholas T erpstra
2 Religious expansion in Islam, Catholicism, and Buddhism
13
L u k e C lossey
Part 1
Conversion, co-existence, and identity
31
3 Translating Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan in the early modern Jesuit mission
33
H aru k o N awata Ward
4 Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome
52
G iorgio C aravale
5 “Turning Turke” the Anabaptist way: Muslims, Jews, Christian Spiritualists, and polemical discourse in the Dutch Republic, c. 1570–c. 1630 G ary K . Waite
73
vi Contents Part 2
Spatial and social disciplines
95
6 Before the Ghetto: spatial logics, ritual humiliation, and Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Florence
97
J ustine Walden
7 To be a foreigner in early modern Italy. Were there ghettos for non-Catholic Christians?
115
S tefano V illani
8 Maintaining colonial order: institutional enclosure in Spanish Manila, 1590–1790
134
A llison G raham
Part 3
Cultural and religious politics
151
9 The Renaissance papacy and Catholicization of the “Manichean Heretics”: rethinking the 1459 purge of the Bosnian kingdom
153
L u k a Š poljari ć
10 Creole conquests: reformation, representation, and return in early colonial New Spain
176
L indsay C . S idders
11 An Embattled Catholic Archbishop between Latins and Greeks in the Ottoman Aegean
195
A ndre w P. M c C ormic k
Part 4
Life across boundaries
211
12 Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico, or, did Mexican women really have a counter-reformation?
213
J ac queline Holler
Contents vii
13 The Venetian Jewish household as a multireligious community in early modern Italy
231
F ederica F rancesconi
14 Exile identity and the Pietist reform movement: constructing the Georgia Salzburgers from Alpine Crypto-Protestants
249
C hristine M arie Koch
Index
267
Figures
6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 9.1
Jewish Residences in Florence, 1567 Jewish Cemeteries in Florence, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries Jewish Residences by Population Size in Florence, 1567 Residences of Jews and Prostitutes in Florence, 1561–1567 Slaughterhouses and Animal Stalls in Florence, 1561 Jews, Prostitutes, and Butchers in Fifteenth-Century Florence The Adriatic in 1460
99 100 101 102 104 106 158
Contributors
Giorgio Caravale is a Professor of early modern European history at the University of Roma Tre. He is co-editor of the Catholic Christendom 1300–1700 series published by Brill. He has been a fellow in the School of H istorical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2013–2014), and Lauro De Bosis Lecturer in the History of the Italian Civilization at Harvard University (2010–2011). He is the author of Forbidden Prayer. Church Censorship and Devotional Literature in Renaissance Italy (2011); George L. Mosse’s Italy: Interpretation, Reception, and Intellectual Heritage (ed. with L. B enadusi, 2014); The Italian Reformation outside Italy: Francesco Pucci’s Heresy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (2015); Preaching and Inquisition in Renaissance Italy: Words on Trial (2016); Beyond the Inquisition: Ambrogio Catarino Politi and the Origins of the Counter- Reformation (2017); and Censorship and Heresy in Revolutionary England and Counter-Reformation Rome: Story of a Dangerous Book (2017). Luke Clossey is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches religion and globalization. His Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (2008) won the Canadian Historical Association’s Wallace Ferguson prize for non-Canadian history. With other officers of the Institut für die Späte Altzeit, he contributed to the “Unbelieved and Historians” essay series in History Compass (2016–2017). He is now writing up a study of the cult of Jesus in the early modern world, and beginning research on the global spread of Thai Forest Buddhism. Federica Francesconi is an Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research and publications address the social, religious, and cultural aspects of the early modern history of Jews in Italy, focussing on the multifaceted politics and dynamics of ghetto life. Her forthcoming monograph, Invisible Enlighteners: Modenese Jewry from Renaissance to Emancipation, tells the unknown stories of Jewish merchants and their interconnected families from Modena who were deeply involved in their community and the vast changes of the times over more than two centuries. Francesconi recently co-edited From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardic Orbit from Medieval to Modern
x Contributors Times (2018). Her new research project focusses on Jews’ interaction with Christians, Muslims, and Blacks in Jewish houses, confraternities, and shops in early modern Venice and Livorno. Francesconi is also Associate Editor and Book Review Editor of the journal Jewish History. Allison Graham is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Toronto. Her research focusses on the history of urban space, institutions, and colonialism in Spanish Manila during the early modern period. Her current project explores how institutionally enclosed spaces, including from religious houses, colegios, and hospitals, constructed and enforced categories of caste and models of gender in Manila to create an orderly urban centre in the Philippines. Jacqueline Holler is an Associate Professor of History and Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Northern British C olumbia in Prince George, Canada. She is author of Escogidas Plantas: Nuns and B eatas in Mexico City, 1531–1601, co-author of texts in Latin American history and gender studies, and author of articles and book chapters on early colonial Mexican history. Her most recent chapters (2014–2018) are on various aspects of the cultural and emotional history of early New Spain, studying happiness and sadness; demonic sex and the unnatural; emotions and girlhood; and midwifery and childbirth. Her current projects include a book-length study of the Cortés Conspiracy of 1566 and a large-scale study of emotion, embodiment, and feminine cultures of healing in early colonial New Spain. Christine Marie Koch is a doctoral candidate and stipend recipient of the University of Paderborn, Germany. Previous grants include the Dr. Liselotte-Kirchner research stipend from the Francke Foundations and funding as a junior scholar from The Halle Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. She has taught extensively at American and German universities, including early modern history, German as a foreign language and British and American literatures. Chapters from her upcoming dissertation on “Salzburger Migrants and Communal Memory in Georgia” have been presented at various international and interdisciplinary conferences. Her most recent publication is “German Heritage in Georgia” in KSU UPB Maymester 2016, Georgia With the Germans (2017), edited by Christoph Ehland and Sabine Smith. Andrew P. McCormick completed his dissertation on Renaissance Italian history at Duke University under Ronald Witt. He followed this with a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1982–1985). During this period, he co-authored Tuscany and the Low Countries (1985). Over the course of the following 20 years in Amsterdam he became a noted translator of Dutch scholarship, especially in the field of art history. In 2004 he moved to Paris, where he studied early modern Greek history at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO). Through the lens of the Congrégation de la Mission, his thesis described the rivalry between the Kingdom of France and the Holy See in Ottoman Greece between
Contributors xi 1780 and 1840. After completing his doctorat in 2012, he returned to Rome where he discovered a cache of unknown documentation about Naxos, at which point the book he had in mind took a very different direction. Lindsay C. Sidders is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines the early colonial construction of criollismo and its relationship with the production of meaning and knowledge in New Spain through the lens of Fernando Ortíz’s theory of transculturation. Sidders is a Fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria University and has organized and participated in methodological and pedagogical seminars on issues such as activism in the academy and teaching historical sexual violence in undergraduate classrooms. Luka Špoljarić teaches medieval history at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, the Warburg Institute, and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti). His work explores political and intellectual dynamics in the world of the Renaissance Adriatic. His current project, a biography of Nicholas bishop of Modruš (ca. 1425–1480), the leading figure of Rome’s Croatian-Illyrian community during the 1460s and 1470s, explores the role that Croatian churchmen and their ideas of the nation played in the Adriatic politics. He is preparing an edition and English translation of Nicholas’ seminar work, De bellis Gothorum, for The I Tatti Renaissance Library series. Nicholas Terpstra is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto, working at the intersections of gender, politics, charity, and religion. His recent publications include Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (2015), and Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (2013), which won the Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association, and the Ruth Goodhart Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America. He has also co-edited Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modern City with Colin Rose (2016). Stefano Villani is an Associate Professor in Early Modern European History at the University of Maryland, College Park, a post he took up after teaching at the University of Pisa until 2010. He has worked on the Quaker missions in the Mediterranean and published numerous articles and books in this area: Tremolanti e papisti (1996); Il calzolaio quacchero e il finto cadì (2001); A True Account of the Great Tryals and Cruel S ufferings Undergone by Those Two Faithful Servants of God, Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers (2003). He has worked on the religious history of the English community in Livorno and on Italian translations of the Book of Common Prayer, and published an intellectual biography of one of the N ineteenth-Century t ranslators: George Frederick Nott (1768–1841). Un ecclesiastico anglicano tra teologia, l etteratura, arte, archeologia, bibliofilia e collezionismo (2012). He has co-edited with Alison Yarrington and Julia
xii Contributors Kelly the Proceedings of the conference ‘In Medias Res: British-Italian Cultural Transactions’ – British Academy Colloquium 3: Travels and Translations (2013). Gary K. Waite is a Professor of early modern European history at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. Author and editor of eight books and dozens of articles and chapters, he has published widely on a number of aspects of religion and culture in the Low Countries and Europe. These include studies of: Dutch Anabaptism and spiritualism, in particular on the unconventional Anabaptist prophet and Spiritualist David Joris; Dutch drama guilds and the Reformation (Reformers on Stage, 2000), the Reformation and the witch-hunts (Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, 2003; Eradicating the Devil’s Minions, 2007); and seventeenth-century Dutch views of Jews and Muslims. This last project has resulted in a new monograph: Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse: From Religious Enemies to Allies and Friends (2018). He is now working on a funded research project on seventeenth-century radical religious nonconformists and the early Enlightenment. Justine Walden is a social, cultural, and religious historian of early modern Europe with a particular focus on Italy. Her work has examined religious deviance and Catholic orthodoxy, manuscript and printing history, and European constructions of Jews and Muslims. After earning her doctorate in History and Renaissance Studies at Yale University, she served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto for Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive (DECIMA), an early modern social history and digital mapping project. Her work has appeared in R enaissance Quarterly and Shaping the Bible in the Reformation: Books, Scholars, and Their Readers in the Sixteenth Century (2012). A forthcoming monograph, The Hanged Ass: Exorcism and Religious Politics in Fifteenth-Century Florence, examines the complex world of religion, politics, and interorder rivalry in Laurentian Florence through the lens of exorcisms conducted by the struggling religious order of the Vallombrosans. Haruko Nawata Ward is a Professor of Church History at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, USA. She is interested in exploring the intersections of gender, theology, religions, and cultures in Reformations, early modern European missions, and local responses in Japan and East Asia. She is the author of Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650 (2009). Her recent contributions include “Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549–1650” in Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, ed. Alison Weber (2016); and “Kirishitan Veneration of the Saints: Jesuits and Dutch Witnesses” in Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas, eds Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Robert A Maryks, and R. Po-chia Hsia (2018). She is currently working on projects on women and martyrdom in the Jesuit mission in Japan.
Acknowledgements
Most of the papers in this volume were first presented at the conference on Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures held at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies at Victoria College in the University of Toronto on 27–30 September 2017. Apart from a truly stellar group of presenters, the conference brought together many participants from across the university community and beyond in a planning committee too large to name. Most of the nuts-and-bolts work of getting the conference from concept to reality was undertaken by an incredibly efficient and wonderfully collegial executive organizing committee led by the exceptional Natalie Oeltjen, and including Samantha Chang, Jessica Farrell-Jobst, Alison Grossman, Alexandra Guerson, Joanna Ludwikoska, and Michael O’Connor. The conference and the publications stemming from it gained substantial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and from Victoria College, the University of St. Michael’s College, Knox College, many departments and centres in the University of Toronto, the Canada Research Chair in South Asian Studies, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Royal Ontario Museum. Without the editorial work of Sienna Lee-Coughlin and Spirit Waite, this volume might not have seen the light of day till 2117. Many thanks to both for expertise, commitment, and perhaps above all, patience. At Routledge, Laura Pilsworth got the ball rolling, Lydia de Cruz directed it to the goal, and Morwenna Scott ensured completion. My thanks to all for believing in and enthusiastically supporting this project.
1 Introduction Global reformations: reframing early modern Christianity Nicholas Terpstra
What is Reformation, and when and where? Who did it affect, and how? Scholars once confidently framed the Reformation as a sixteenth-century European Protestant phenomenon, and then from the later nineteenth century began to look more expansively across Europe’s different confessions, time periods, and geographical areas. Some insisted on adjectives to identify geographical areas, or debated whether particular Reformations were Late (Medieval) or Early (Modern), Clerical, Civic, or Communal, and above all whether that other one was Counter or just Catholic. These same historians had more commonly agreed that the real subject was ideas and men, before realizing that thought and experience seldom lined up quite as smoothly as they’d assumed, or that men’s and women’s experience and thinking on religion, spirituality and reform might diverge quite widely. Some of these historiographical movements were glacial, and some revolutionary. But all changed the landscape. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it was impossible to think of the Reformation in the parochial, gendered, and nationalist terms that historians had taken for granted 100 or 200 years before. And then came 2017. Scholars might rework the terrain of Reformation with the tools of anthropology and sociology, and with questions about gender, class, ritual, or emotion, but publics often inhabit a different landscape. In a host of exhibitions and events aimed at broad audiences, the traditional contours, paths, and boundaries of a very German and indeed a very Hegelian Reformation reasserted themselves. State agencies and private foundations across G ermany proclaimed the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and their birthday celebrations took some surprising forms. The refurbishing of the doors of the W ittenburg castle church had the sobriety if not the scale of the large architectural monuments erected in 1817 and 1917. Church and State seemed sometimes to be singing out of each other’s hymn books as they celebrated the country’s early modern moment in the world historical spotlight. The German government internationally distributed a high-quality detailed poster exhibition on the causes and progress of the religious reformation triggered by a German monk. Church celebrations marked the emergence of the individual conscience and will. Even toy companies celebrated the birth of the individual and the modern age. Playmobil Luther underscored the reality that this celebration was as much
2 Nicholas Terpstra a commercial as a religious and cultural celebration. Holding pen and Bible, and pictured before that resonant castle church door, Playmobil Luther was a figure Hegel might not have anticipated, but one he certainly prepared the way for. This was not the stern and imperative maker of a church and nation perhaps, but the charismatic and sympathetic maker of a modern cultural public, not least because he was an individual who bucked authority, followed his conscience, and found his bliss. Martin Luther as token and talisman fits well with the idea of Reformation as a datable event. It’s no great surprise that the necessities of commercial culture, political opportunism, and invented traditions would converge to create the kinds of popular celebrations and touristic events held around Germany and elsewhere in 2017. Some found this a comforting reaffirmation of traditional character and values, while for others it was the ghostly echo of a distant past. Yet others were troubled about the implicit messages conveyed by the celebrations about Germany as a distinctly Christian nation, and what that meant for who was and who was not part of that nation in the twenty-first century. The fact that different people and groups both in Germany and around the globe could give this individual and “event” widely varying religious, national, and racial shadings and inflections shows just how fluid and contested Reform and Reformation remain. Few historians now would venture to date the start of a movement as diffuse as the Reformation, or to frame it around a single confession, nation, or individual. Yet many took advantage of the public interest generated around the anniversary of Luther’s public challenge to a sale of indulgences in order to hold conferences and publish works that re-examined religious reform and Reformation in light of current methods, understandings, and preoccupations. And so, while there were certainly some conferences that examined Luther’s biography and theology, there were many more that explored the broader social contacts for Reformation, and that set movements for the reform to Christianity into the contexts of relations with other religious communities in Europe and beyond, above all Jews and Muslims. This collection emerges out of that broader research effort. The authors move outside of Germany and the northern European sphere generally in order to trace global developments and track some of the ways in which Reformation movements, broadly conceived, shaped relations of Christians with other Christians, and also with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and aboriginal groups in the Americas. Their essays explore the various intersections, entanglements, negotiations, and tensions that developed across social, gender, and religious lines in the A mericas, Asia, the Aegean, and other parts of the globe. In these different settings, they pursue the common question of how convictions about religious reform and varied approaches to it shaped both social action and cross-confessional encounters. Religious reformers of all confessions emphasized the implications of their ideas about religion for all areas of life. Reform was never limited to issues of theology, liturgy, or church order, but was assumed to have a profound impact on how people lived, worked, and worshipped in civil society. The definition of
Introduction 3 civil society, and the boundaries of it, were expanding rapidly in the early modern period. Within continental Europe, forces of purification and exclusion led to mass expulsion or ghettoization of religious aliens from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, turning this into the period when the religious refugee emerged as a mass phenomenon. These were also the centuries when European powers colonized and missionized large parts of the globe. In some areas, they worked to impose very particular forms of a reformed Christian civil society on indigenous populations. In others, they aimed to segregate enclosed enclaves of either Christians or non-Christians, and in this way protect Christian society from contamination by religiously distinct groups and cultures. Conversion became both a highly sought-after goal, and a deeply disturbing threat, as Europeans fretted over who they could trust – and how they could tell. The early modern world saw a great increase in contacts between religious traditions and their believers. Many meetings were fraught with the tensions of alterity. All contacts generated new forms of accommodation, exclusion, communication, exchange, and transformation. The essays here explore contacts that emerged in the context of religious reform movements from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries – a long Reformation indeed. Yet the fifteenth- century developments sketched here demonstrate concerns and approaches that would continue to develop more fully in sixteenth-century Reformation movements, and the eighteenth-century examples quite consciously related back to the Reformation as a historical period and identity, or to specific Protestant or Tridentine objectives. The essays all deal with the transmission and translation of material, textual, and cultural practices in contexts that were animated by the effort to reform, purify, or convert others. All probe the inter-actions that developed across confessional lines, and the unanticipated consequences that rippled out across the globe from the religious schisms in Europe. Many of these interfaith contacts were driven by dynamics arising directly from the religious reform movements that emerged in the fifteenth century and that historians have long associated with the Reformation. One way to approach these global dynamics is to look not just beyond G ermany, but beyond Christianity itself, and to ask to what extent religious reform and expansion was an early modern phenomenon more generally around the world. Luke Clossey opens the collection by comparing how Islam, Buddhism, and Catholicism each experienced deliberate movements of reform and expansion in the early modern period. Clossey sets the context for the entire volume by comparing some models for that expansion that have emerged in recent scholarship, and then working out some of the historiographical issues that they have in common. Words fail us, as he points out wryly, or at least they betray us when we use terms like “transmission” or “conversion” in thoughtlessly anachronistic ways that impose linearity and a movement from A to B. Our m etaphors – whether of fire or of water – can also force us into interpretations that emphasize spread, flow, consumption, and erasure. Clossey looks in the broadest cross-cultural context at how historians have worked to explain the dynamics of religious expansion
4 Nicholas Terpstra within different religious communities, and invites us to reframe our language as we aim to express religions’ meaning and dynamics at those places where they meet and meld. From this expansive, comparative, and challenging view, the collection then divides into four parts, the first dealing with questions of conversion, coexistence, and identity in religious reform, the second with spatial and social disciplines of religious reform, the third with cultural politics and religious identity, and the fourth with how various households of different confessions managed life across boundaries. The first set of essays offer three examples of cross-cultural transmission and exchange, which highlight the complexities of conversion and identity in contexts where coexistence is fraught or forbidden. We see here not just the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion or the interweaving of tolerance and intolerance, but more generally how knowledge of other religious traditions and communities spreads, how communities shape identities with the materials of different traditions, and how the presence of diasporic groups can shape and reshape host societies. In these instances, Reformation involves an ongoing revision of traditional views by and with those on the margins or under persecution, who aim to push the horizons of expectations steadily further without undermining or rejecting the traditions themselves. Japanese Kirishitan (Christian) authors charged with producing saints’ lives for popular devotion rewrote martyrdom into their own social context in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Haruko Nawata Ward shows how in the process they transformed medieval Catholic sources and devised new models for sanctity and vocation, particularly women’s vocation, which challenged both Buddhist and Catholic models. Japanese authorities had not used executions to enforce religious unorthodoxy before the later sixteenth century, but this began to change as a result of political turmoil and growing concern over European intrusions. Ward considers how these pressures influenced the creation of a new genre of Kirishitan literature produced by teams of European-born and Japanese-born Jesuits, and female and male translators. Writing in a context of expanding persecution that forced Catholics into hiding, they depicted medieval European female saints’ lives through the lens of their own experience in Japan. These new martyrologies were not simply sociocultural hybrids, adaptations, or accommodations to local circumstance. They portrayed the female saints as Kirishitan women who were resisting Japanese authorities’ efforts to impose a state Buddhism. Yet they also portrayed them as women who were taking on leadership in Kirishitan communities in defiance of Tridentine efforts to restrict and limit the role of women in the Catholic Church. These martyrologies remained in secret circulation until the nineteenth century, and Ward argues that in making Kirishitan women exemplary, they helped women, in particular, cultivate religious vocations that expressed resistance as much to Catholic authorities as to Japanese ones. The Romani, then known as ‘gypsies’, evoked similarly tough responses in early modern Italy. Giorgio Caravale shows how the ambition to convert
Introduction 5 and reform them shaped Catholic treatment of the community, particularly in Rome itself. Roma, or gypsies, emerged as an identifiable group in European historical records in the fifteenth century, although what that identity was could still be puzzling: contemporaries used concepts of nation and people to categorize them, but a range of different communities would fall under the generic term. Seen initially as refugees from Ottoman expansion, who wished only to practise the Catholic faith in peace, they enjoyed a degree of toleration and coexistence until the early sixteenth century. By that point, they were more broadly stigmatized and marginalized as fraudulent, predatious, and a socio-economic menace, which ought to be disciplined or expelled as a threat to public order. Caravale shows that Catholic authorities in Rome aimed to take a longer view, and that some gypsies’ apparent embrace of Catholicism caused them to be seen as a group ready for conversion and assimilation – a local victory that would prove a universal truth. In most cases, these authorities were less clear on what the gypsies were than on what they were not – that is, they were not Jews or Muslims who professed a non-Christian faith. They were therefore ripe for conversion, and this ambition made Catholic authorities in Rome less punitive or violent in their efforts to forcibly assimilate gypsies. Outsider groups clearly had an impact on dominant ones, and the gypsies’ experience of troubled coexistence was not rare. Early sixteenth-century authorities applied the term “Anabaptist” as an insult to wide and heterogeneous groups, particularly when identifying them as a threat to be suppressed. Initially, these radical reformers were not particularly tolerant of others, but Gary K Waite looks at how their views of conversion, coexistence, and toleration gradually changed as they began examining other religions through the lens of their own persecution. Dutch Anabaptists had been persecuted intensely in the early sixteenth century as heretics, Turks, and atheists, in part since they deliberately positioned themselves outside the formal political regime and its concerns about public order. Yet this position allowed them to promote forms of toleration that went beyond grudging, strategic, or self-benefitting coexistence. By the seventeenth century, their various spiritual descendants like Mennonites and Spiritualists were considered fully part of the Dutch Republic’s civic community, and poster children for its promotion of religious toleration. This put them in a better position than most to probe and push the limits of cross-cultural religious coexistence. Could their emphasis on inner religious spirituality over doctrine allow these Dutch thinkers to promote a fuller civic embrace of those outside the Christian community, and particularly of Jews and Muslims? Waite argues that it did, and offers case studies of some key individuals whose capacious theologies allowed them to think more positively about Islam and Judaism, and whose reputations in diplomacy, learning, commerce, and politics allowed them to become public advocates for a broader civil toleration. The second set of essays deals with the spatial dimensions of reform, considering how sites of encounter, exchange, and enclosure emerged and functioned, and looking at how segregated zones developed and were marked off. The early
6 Nicholas Terpstra modern reforming impulse often looked at segregation as the best context for protection and disciplined spiritual and moral formation. Walls only occasionally marked the boundaries of enclosures, and whether physical or not, they raised questions of who was being protected, how, and against what? Venice was the first Italian city to force Jews into a segregated ghetto in 1516. Rome, Bologna, and Ancona followed in 1555–1556, and Florence and Siena did the same in 1571–1573. Justine Walden looks at how and where Jews lived in Florence in the centuries before that physical enclosure, and particularly in the decade or two before the ghetto opened. These spaces had evolved with the city and with changing views about how Christians and non-Christians should coexist. Medieval legislators had kept Jews beyond the city walls as a religiously polluting presence. The new circuits of walls that Florence built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries enclosed the extramural zones once reserved for the living and dead of the Jewish community. Yet these newly enveloping walls offered no embrace. Spatial exclusion revived as part of the politics of Reformation and social discipline. Before the ghetto, fewer than a hundred Jews had lived in different parts of the city according to will, work, and income. In a short time, four to five times that number were forced into a single small area where prostitutes called, thieves picked pockets, and butchers made the streets flow with blood. This revived the medieval practice of viewing the Jews as an abject and polluting population, tolerated out of economic necessity, but not accepted on their own terms and certainly not free to choose the spaces where they lived. The ghetto became a common Italian answer to the question of how to handle religious diversity in a period when many Catholics saw diversity precisely as a threat to reform. They were most anxious about diversity if it was a recent development within Christianity itself. Stefano Villani considers the fate of Protestants in particular, and explores whether ghettos were ever an option for them. Briefly, no. Catholic authorities in practice could negotiate with those they considered to have been deviants of long standing with some connection to Italian society, like the Orthodox, the Waldensians, and even the Jews and Muslims. Yet they were adamant about rejecting Protestantism as a foreign novelty, and the very caution that many Italian governments exercised with regard to these groups shows how intensely political this rejection was. De facto toleration sometimes existed locally, but usually under the guise of mercantile privileges, and with the demands for invisibility and silence. It was only in the eighteenth century that this crack in the wall expanded thanks to the growing global influence of the British, and their determination to flex their imperial muscles as a distinctly Protestant power that would be seen and heard. Italian governments continued resisting more open recognition of public Protestant worship till the nineteenth century, and the radical change in state policy to allow religious toleration did not come until the Risorgimento, when an Italian government roundly rejected by the Papacy had to seek its friends where it could find them. Many reformers saw enclosure as a critical vehicle for marginalized populations to learn and exercise a religious life in peace and security. This drew as
Introduction 7 much out of humanist as of clerical models, and reformers of all stripes moved quickly to protect and reform wards they had once simply sheltered. European authorities took enclosures overseas to colonial settlements as key tools of social and spatial discipline, and Allison Graham explores the results when the Spanish entered Manila in 1571. Graham sees religious institutional enclosure as a critical dimension of Spanish colonization efforts generally. Spanish colonial administrators often depicted the areas outside the walls as ungovernable and chaotic, so they built in Manila, as in many other colonial cities, an additional inner walled district (the Intramuros) to separate Spanish from Philippino residents. They saw institutional enclosures as part of the strategy of creating a colonial ruling class that was disciplined and Catholic. They were also betting that Spanish males would be more likely to come to Manila if they knew that there were Spanish women there that they could marry and Spanish enclosures that could be safe places to send their daughters for education and possibly vocation. Manila’s walled Intramuros included within it many additional enclosures for juvenile women, yet Graham shows that it proved easier to enclose women than to control them. The wards had their own agendas and desires which challenged or at least personalized the colonialist project, frustrating the authorities and throwing many enclosures into disorder. Enclosures gave physical definition to the disciplinary impulse in both its protective and punitive forms. Yet reformers everywhere knew that walls and boundaries could only work if animated by will, and, in particular, the will of determined rulers and clergy. Cross-cultural dynamics made clergy all the more critical as agents who negotiated differences. What they thought and how they acted demonstrated the entangled nature of culture, politics, and religious identity when these were complicated by fear, domination, and race. Our third section looks at three very distinct cases of efforts by higher clergy to impose reforms in cross-cultural environments marked by power dynamics and persecution. In each case, these clergy encountered the resilience of different boundaries based in cultural patterns and political realities. While they used reforming language to erode those boundaries, the laity they dealt with were seldom persuaded, and geopolitical realities more often set the agendas. European Catholics in the fifteenth century considered Ottoman expansion to be one of their greatest existential threats. Religious reform could unite all Christians under a single church which would facilitate the crusade that would save Constantinople and drive the Turks from Europe. The Council of Florence achieved at least formal union in 1439, but battlefield defeats continued, and in the attention turned to the frontier state of Bosnia, which had its own Church of Krstjani that had separated from Rome centuries earlier. Luka Špoljarić painstakingly recreates a critical stage in the little-known history of how Popes worked with Franciscan Observants, the Bosnian King, and other high nobles from 1443–1463 to Catholicize the Krstjani, whom they dismissed as “Manicheans” rather than genuine Christians. A critical step in this process was a forced conversion campaign, or purge of 12,000 Krstjani in 1459, pushed by the reforming humanist Pope Pius II and comparable to the forced baptisms of Iberian Jews
8 Nicholas Terpstra and Muslims in the 1490s and 1500s. This suggests that the forced conversions in Spain and Portugal were not some kind of Iberian exceptionalism, but took root and energy from broader reform movements. Fifteenth-century Bosnia offers one example of Catholicization in which reform language is used to embroider forced conversion and conquest; sixteenthand seventeenth-century New Spain offers another. While distinct in time and colonialist setting, the Spanish Americas demonstrate similar power dynamics animating the relationships between the social and cultural groups involved, and shaping how the higher clergy in particular act. Lindsay Sidders looks at the work of the first-generation Hispanic-descended creole (criollo) Bishop Alonso de la Mota y Escobar to show the contexts and complexities around religious encounter and expression in the Spanish Americas in the early seventeenth century. Bishop Mota y Escobar was at once a product of European trans-Atlantic imperial expansion and reformation, and also a subject and an agent of it. Religious reformers around the globe saw their work as a civilizing process, and the Bishop was an evangelist for these cultural politics of religious identity. The background to these criollos’ emergence as a group was inevitably one of violence, and that continued to frame the evolution of religious reformation across the Americas. Sidders looks through Mota y Escobar’s writings and activities to set out his understanding of the relationship between colony and metropole. While remaining fixed on the truth of a universal religious and cultural vision that used discipline to erode difference, he also aimed for a more ample view of what that reformed Catholicism could look like in Spanish America. The eastern Mediterranean offered an even more complex borderland thanks to the layering of different religious and political cultures. Andrew McCormick picks apart these layers on the Aegean island of Naxos where a Greek Orthodox population lived in servitude to a Venetian Catholic elite that was itself subject to Ottoman overlords. This frontier between Christian and Muslim worlds was further complicated by religious politics which had the French and the Papacy contending as defenders of the Catholic community. Each group was territorial in its own way, and on Naxos there was not much territory to go around. A variety of practical compromises had extended ties across at least some confessional boundaries, blurring identities to the dismay of those clerics who liked their religion neat. One such was Bishop Pietro Martire de Stefani, who arrived in 1750 intending to straighten some rather convoluted relations and who was virtually forced into exile when his reforms triggered disputes that led to his being charged with the murder of a leading lay opponent. While supposedly having a common enemy in the Ottomans, Christians saw far more opponents among their coreligionists, and de Stefani’s efforts to use reform disciplines to frame a religious solution resulted in his own expulsion. The final group of essays turns from issues around definition and discipline and into the daily lived experience of groups located in the social and physical borderlands where cultures met. Households were often the site of these exchanges, and the quotidian needs of these households set the stage for
Introduction 9 unexpected collaborations and compromise that could be complicated by the intersections of gender, class, and race. Each essay here explores how human relations in domestic settings stretched the limits of religious difference, eroding or reinforcing them depending on the setting. These limits were further tested by the reality that while few in the household were truly free, only some were in the position of being enslaved. Birthing was one of the most critical actions that forced all those within a household to collaborate. Jacqueline Holler uses the birth process, and in particular the work of Mexican midwives to ask the resonant question “Did Mexican Women Really Have a Counter-Reformation?” She extends Lindsay Sidders’ probing of indigenous and creole Christianity by intersecting it with gender, and uses some Inquisitorial cases as her source. Inquisitors probed very deeply into household practices when seeking those customs of diet, naming, festivity, or bathing which might betray a convert family’s continuing close attachment with family faith traditions. They knew quite well that among forced converts, and within refugee, exile, and diasporic families in particular, women could be the key liturgical agents for continuing faith traditions in the virtual absence of recognized and ordained clergy. This makes it ambiguous at best what it might mean for a Catholic woman to “have a Counter Reformation.” Yet Holler finds that birthing doesn’t follow the prescripts. Inquisitors in Spanish America remained zealous reformers of religion, and loyal enforcers of Trent, but in this area of practice they seem to have let demography trump doctrine. Holler follows a series of investigations from the second half of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, and finds that Inquisitors treated Spanish, African, and mixed-race midwives more leniently than we might expect. Given what they did to other women, we know that this was not simply some male clerics’ reserve about female biology. Holler suggests that Inquisitors’ lack of interest in investigating the birthing chamber itself has implications for how we think about the effects of the Counter-Reformation in the everyday lives of women. Recent literature on European witch prosecutions has similarly found that, notwithstanding the Malleus Maleficarum’s screed against midwives, they were not the particular target of prosecution that many once assumed. The intersections of reform and household dynamics in the spaces of the Venetian ghetto, particularly the domestic ones, open up the ways that different groups with different inner and outer limitations on their agency negotiated their relations together. Federica Francesconi notes that Jewish households were bounded by the ghetto’s spatial, temporal, and legal restrictions, yet many included within them servants and slaves of different religions who had different sets of restrictions. The result was one of the most fluid spaces in a city where fluidity was not only the dominant physical reality, but also the most common metaphor and social descriptor. In this complex dynamic of overlapping and even competing restrictions, how did human relations unfold? Both the Jewish and Catholic traditions articulated firm stances on purity and exchange that engaged gender and class as much as religion, and both had
10 Nicholas Terpstra religious and communal authorities ready to police these. Francesconi guides us through some of their complicated intersections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing the various ways in which women within these households sometimes observed and sometimes ignored the rules on religious separation. Emotion, affection, and social relations always did more to shape relations than the rules did, but realities of power, sexual exchange, and sexual abuse remained. Most of the global thrust of reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was Catholic, but this expanded significantly in the eighteenth century. Protestants may have been late to the game, but their missionaries, refugees, and settlers moved rapidly to make up for lost time, facilitated by the imperial reach of the British and characterized by appeals to the Reformation as a common international heritage. In 1732–1733, the Archbishop of Salzburg exiled from the rural and mountain parishes around Salzburg a few thousand people who had over the centuries developed a form of Christianity rooted in A ustrian Lutheranism, but inflected by some Tridentine Catholic rituals and forms. Their expulsion became an international Protestant cause célèbre, and while most ended up moving to Prussia, a small number emigrated over the Atlantic to the newly established British colony of Georgia. Christine Koch considers how these “crypto-protestants’” identity was refashioned in part by these circumstances, in part by their American location, and in part by the work of a community of conservative German pietists from Halle who were determined to cast them as heirs and transmitters of sixteenth-century Reformation. Their community in Georgia offered a ghetto-like isolation – not walls, but a remote location and their disparaging attitude to their neighbours formed the boundaries of their enclosure. Yet their Halle promoters cast them very consciously as Protestant warriors in the Global Reformation struggle, portraying their industriousness and piety as a bulwark against the Catholic Spanish, a mission to indigenous peoples and black African enslaved peoples, and a promise of a New Jerusalem. Such, at least, were the messages that the community’s pastors sent back to G erman pietist benefactors by means of frequent letters, reports, and published diaries that evoked models of simple vocational living very consciously rooted in Reformation spirituality. The realities were certainly more complex, as relations with both indigenous peoples and black African enslaved peoples would demonstrate by the later eighteenth century. After a few decades of resisting slavery on religious grounds, the Georgia Salzburgers turned around to embrace and practise it, ending the isolation of their virtual Reformation enclosure and reframing themselves as Americans. Earlier approaches to the Reformation were often too nationalist, gendered, and parochial. Is a Global Reformation too diffuse? If a volume like this can evoke the Reformation without discussing Luther, Calvin, the Church of England, or the Dutch Revolt, can it legitimately bear the title? Our aim here is not to correct or replace earlier interpretations, but to extend them. Historical terms and concepts have continuing meaning to the extent that they can address fruitfully the new questions we bring to them. In this instance, we are
Introduction 11 aiming to show that “Reformation” and “The Reformation” provide a critical way of making sense of how religion functioned in the early modern world, and in cross-cultural relations in particular. These studies explore the convergence of religious reform, global expansion, and governmental consolidation in the early modern world. In taking the Reformation as a global phenomenon, they ask how a global frame may complicate and also enrich our understanding of what the Reformation itself was, both in Europe and in other parts of the early modern world. The first challenge is to demonstrate that religion was, for early modern Christians, more than a peripheral or epiphenomenal pursuit. It was a fundamental frame of reference, and a language both of change and of resistance to it. In this way, reverting to a notion of “Western Civilization” to describe the operative Christian view, as Clossey suggests, is too narrow and two-d imensional. We need to embrace paradox here. Even in its pursuit of transcendence, Christianity was mundane in the most literal sense – mundus, mundanus, and mondain. Being “of the world” meant, in this instance, that it was a necessary frame for understanding societies and cultures, above all in periods of transition. Certainly early moderns themselves would have assumed as much. Almost as certainly, most early moderns thought that the institutions and the personnel who structured that frame, and the belief and worship that animated it, had to be held to the highest standards – higher than most were, in fact, managing to achieve. In that sense, “reformation” was uncontroversially self-evident, even if “Reformations” were as self-evidently torn through with controversies in their forms and effects. A global approach to reformation and Reformations inevitably draws in the Catholic Church more fully, since it was, as Simon Ditchfield has noted, the first truly global corporation and it was forming the first world religion. Catholicism’s global push came very much out of reformation impulses, among missionary orders in particular, even if colonizing and imperial powers like Spain, Portugal, and France provided the efficient cause of that expansion. Global Protestantism was not absent or invisible, but it had a lower profile through its first century because the political powers behind it operated on a smaller scale and in fewer parts of the world until the seventeenth century. As these essays demonstrate, when they expanded their colonial thrust, they drew deliberately on a Protestant identity; the intersections and entanglements multiplied accordingly. A number of authors here demonstrate that sixteenth-century European Christian reformers had to compromise, adapt, and improvise. What developed globally was a reformation shaped in significant part by local realities. Europeans were less malleable by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more committed to their traditions (whether real or invented), and less likely to let local realities shape agendas. This, in turn, accentuated the more Eurocentric quality of much of Global Reformation Protestantism. This collection foregrounds interfaith difference and the drive for reform in many religious communities as key determinants to understanding more fully the religio-political changes that were sweeping rapidly across Europe and beyond from the fifteenth into the eighteenth centuries. In expanding the horizons
12 Nicholas Terpstra of the Reformation, it aims to underscore how deliberately European Christians pursued significant religious reform at the time when their own social, political, economic, and cultural horizons were expanding around the globe. This expansion was bringing them into contact with a far wider range of religious practices, and that contact was intensifying their sense of what it meant to be communities under God. Studies like the ones brought together here can help us work towards a language to describe adequately what they thought and why they responded as they did.
2 Religious expansion in Islam, Catholicism, and Buddhism Luke Clossey
Historians of the expansion of Christianity tend not to read historians of the expansion of other traditions; the reverse is almost equally true. Why should they? Absent personal conversion or unexpected teaching requirements, there is no impetus. The wise historian of Christian expansion in some time and place might sooner look to any number of areas – general studies of that time and place for background information, or theoretically innovative work on the Christian expansion in other times and places. The way teaching duties and professional affiliations are organized discourages us as well from skipping the bounds of Christianity. More subtly, sober history may find in the details reminders of something that Religious Studies can overlook: religions can be very different sorts of things, grouped together as religions as a matter of academic or imperial convenience. Regardless of historiography, our period’s globalizing history itself encourages a broad approach. Consider a single, complex, example: in Bengali tradition, Jesus has a friend named Manik-pir.1 He is keen to join Jesus in his preaching career, but Jesus doubts his potential disciple’s healing ability. Manik-pir prays for an opportunity to prove his worth to Jesus, and so God strikes down Jesus with a fatal illness. Manik-pir seizes his chance, and eventually saves Jesus’ life by resorting to a cure involving the liver of a boy whom he finds after travelling across the Islamicate world. Manik-pir is a shadowy figure, but his father, Pir Badar, is famous in Bengali tradition even if he remains shadowy himself. Father and son find a place as saintly figures in local Islamic tradition, Buddhist tradition, the tradition of the Chinese diaspora, and indigenous Bengali tradition. Pir Badar is, moreover, sometimes a Portuguese sailor, and so also finds a place in Christianity. Similarly, the travels of the Boddhisatva Guanyin across religious, and gender, boundaries defy her own traditional historical categories, as do the seventeenth-century apocalyptic networks that stretch via Muslim, Jewish, and Christian connections from Mecca to Massachusetts.2 Our professional historiographical habits are more separate than the history allows.3 This essay gives an overview of history of religious expansion in our period, before turning to an investigation of the relevant scholarship. Elaborating on the excellent study of expansion models in the first chapter of Jason Neelis’ monograph on the ancient transmission of Buddhism, we look at some common
14 Luke Clossey historiographical issues, mostly in Anglophone scholarship, before examining a variety of ways historians have explained religious transmission.4 By taking this broad panoramic approach, we hope this will prove useful to historians of each of these transmissions, as well as to new students of the expansion of religion.
Historical background One of the most distinctive characteristics of early modern, or late traditional, Europe is the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.5 One of the most distinctive characteristics of the early modern world is the development of global communication networks. At least since the research of Joseph Fletcher, scholars have recognized that religious reformation and geographical expansion are interrelated.6 In Christianity, the fifteenth-century Bohemian Reformation sent out emergency search teams to find churches founded on apostolic successions still uncorrupted. The Protestant Reformation created losses for the Catholics (who then sought to recoup souls through global missions), triggered religious crises that scattered refugees abroad, and eventually inspired evangelical missionaries of its own.7 In Buddhism, a reassessment of the Tibetan canon coincided with an expansion through the Mongol lands even into easternmost Europe. In Islam, the Wahabbi (muwahhidun) movement sought a stricter interpretation of the Qur’an, and, by the end of our period, had a network of enthusiasts reaching from west Africa, to the Caucuses, to the East Indies. Our period’s most impressive religious expansions are the Catholic colonies and missions in the Americas and in parts of Asia and Africa, alongside the R ussian Orthodox march across the continent to the Pacific and, motivated by Peter the Great’s jealousy of Jesuit prestige, into China. Even after a slow process of accepting the existence of a wider world – on biblical grounds – the Protestants largely remained unmoved. The proposal from Lutheran layman J ustinian Welz (1621–1668) for a Protestant overseas missionary society brought him grief and accusations of heresy. Only with the Anglican Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1699) and the efforts of Count Zinzendorf’s ( 1700–1760) Moravians did the Protestants mount missions of comparable ambition. Less familiar are the stories of the spread of Buddhism and of Islam in this period so associated with European expansion. Both traditions had already reached the lands most associated with them today. Islam, for example, had already spread thoroughly through the greater Middle East, had beachheads in Asia and Africa, and in our period found virgin territory mostly in the Balkans. Important changes were happening nonetheless: our few sources suggest a deepening of I slam in the Volga watershed, a haphazard expansion down the African savannah, new types of communities in China, and (most important if we consider future demography) piecemeal expansion through the islands of what will become Indonesia, which today may have more Muslims than any country.8 Buddhism, too, sees an expansion in this period that is not as heroic as Christianity’s, but equally interesting historiographically. The retreat of the Mongols from China proper in the fourteenth century signalled the beginning of what
Religious expansion 15 was, perhaps, a dark age for a people already significantly Buddhist. Expansion occurred in three branches, all of which were reinforcing a pre-existing Buddhism brought in earlier centuries. That is, the period sees reintroductions of Buddhism, rather than sweeping new frontiers. This is not unusual in the longer history of Buddhism: even Bodhidharma, perhaps its most famous missionary, came to China in the late fifth century, where Buddhism was already thriving. The first two branches of Buddhist expansion stretched from China into Japan and into Southeast Asia, respectively, in a parallel manner. Chinese merchants living abroad partnered with Chinese monks, typically a main monk travelling with disciples who might subsequently relocate. The idea was to have a clergy to maintain the merchants’ patron-deity cults, but the monks took advantage of their situation by making use of Buddhism’s prestige and flexibility to expand beyond the expatriate community. The result was cross-Asia networks of a Chan/Zen Buddhism that was essentially Chinese, with other Daoist and Confucianist elements travelling along with it, and often specifically Fujianese in its music and liturgy.9 For the third, more famous, branch, we must travel far inland; this is the reintroduction of Buddhism from Tibet into the Mongol lands. In 1578, the expansionist Altan Khan of the Tümed Mongols invited Sonam Gyatso (1543–1588), head of the relatively new Gelugpa order, to a summit at Č abčiyal, in what is now China’s Qinghai province. The monk reinforced the khan’s authority in both Buddhist and Mongol terms, calling him cakravartin (wheelturner) and se čen (wise or faithful), the latter an epithet of Qubilai Khan. The khan, in turn, gave the monk the title “dalai lama,” and awarded his two predecessors the same designation posthumously. The khan could use his new title to reinforce his position against rival Mongol princes; the monk could use his new title to reinforce his position against rival Tibetan abbots. Rare is such a perfect coincidence of benefit to both missionary and missionized, and the result was a very rapid Buddhisation of the Mongols – so rapid that historians have argued that some earlier wave of Buddhisation must have left an enduring foundation for this new, third Dalai Lama’s efforts. If this was not building on well-established foundations, it would be one of the most efficient transpositions of religion in world history.10 Sonam Gyatso and Jose de Acosta (1539/1540–1600), an influential Catholic missionary in the Americas, were close contemporaries. They inhabit wildly different historiographical worlds; this is perhaps the first time they find themselves together in a historian’s sentence. Their historical worlds saw a variety of odd convergences and divergences. The vernacular was equally important in both their traditions, and its usage and importance saw a peak here in Mongolian Buddhism, as key religious texts have become less vernacular since then. Like the Spanish, Sonam Gyatso travelled giving religious instruction and establishing schools. Perhaps most intriguingly, Sonam Gyatso died with the determination to be reborn on the frontier; that is, the new Dalai Lama became a Mongol. Popes and Jesuit generals hope to be routed forward upon death, but, if they were to be reborn, few would likely hope to do so in the New World.
16 Luke Clossey
Historiographical issues Two key historiographical issues colour these histories. The first is sources, which are fewer and more precious in Buddhism and Islam than among the hyper-textual contemporary Christians. Scholars of Islam often complain about the effects of time on any source not written on wood and metal, and they have to rely more on inscriptions, architectural remains, and oral and literary traditions. They blame the tropical climates, enemies to paper, but also at play are fundamental differences in attitudes towards record-keeping. The second, and much the more important, of the historiographical issues is the question of equivalence of concepts. How well does “mission” and “frontier” work outside of Christianity? “Mission” is particularly tricky. Its origins are profoundly Christian, and it has been uprooted and applied to other religions. Certainly, each of these three traditions has a missionary impulse, but each understands expansion differently. The Christian Jesus’s Great Commission to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19) began a tradition of mission that is unique for its centrality, importance, and ubiquity. A similar passage in the Pali Canon is sometimes called Buddha’s Great Commission: Walk, monks, on tour [c ārika ṃ] for the blessing of the manyfolk, for the happiness of the manyfolk out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, the blessing, the happiness of devas and men. Let not two (of you) go by one (way). Monks, teach dhamma which is lovely at the beginning, lovely in the middle, lovely at the ending.11 The word c ārika ṃ, literally meaning a “walkabout,” is often translated as “mission,” an odd, and probably late, foreign import into Buddhism.12 Early Buddhist rules even discouraged preaching to audiences thought in any way disrespectful, such as to people holding umbrellas.13 “Mission” is no less problematic in Islam. The usual translation is da’wa دعوة, which is literally an invitation to come in. A form appears as an imperative verb in the great-commission counterpart in the Qur’an, “Call [people] to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good teaching. Argue with them in the most courteous way” (16:125), but wedding guests also receive a da’wa and Gabriel gives a da’wa to the dead to rise at judgement (e.g. 30:25).14 Da’wa and mission are not exact matches: da’wa can mean other things, while not all missionary expansion was or is understood as da’wa. Our period represents a low point in the frequency and importance of da’wa in the sources, perhaps because the early modern expansion of Islam was tied up with legal formalities. Only later, under the influence of Westernization, does da’wa become “mission” – and even “ecumenical dialogue” (an invitation to talk, rather than to convert). A gift to English from French, with cousins in the various Romance languages, “frontier” has front as its basic meaning. It was applied traditionally to the front line of an army, and by easy hermeneutic extension, to the front line
Religious expansion 17 of a state (i.e. that thing supported by the army). The Oxford English Dictionary has examples of its metaphorical extension to refer to the edge of a settled, agrarian civilization (“the frontiers of al our Plantations” against the American Indigenous) and the edge of a confessional region (“the Frontire of Popery”). Each first appears in the 1670s. Note the hostility implicit in each instance. No love appears in the Oxford examples until the middle of the nineteenth century when Henry David Thoreau (1854) recommends a life “primitive and frontier.”15 Sixteen years after that Ralph Waldo Emerson marvels at how quickly pianos appear there, and only 24 years later, Frederick Jackson Turner shows up with his thesis, making the frontier the darling of historians ever since.16 What connotations come with the frontiers used by historians: hostile military garrison networks, romantic primitive non-civilizational life, or simple lines with no intended colour? Buddhism has been, perhaps, more cognisant of its frontiers than Christianity or Islam. One of the Buddha’s disciples, Mahā kacc ā na, was from and returned to distant Avanti, and so Buddha defined a frontier and gave allowances to monks living beyond it – permission to wear thick sandals, or to bathe more frequently (not because the foreigners were filthy, but because the Avanti people stressed frequently bathing). The general sense is positive, and indeed some of the earliest wilderness poetry comes from the Pali canon.17 For reasons to be discussed below, the frontier does not play a major role in Buddhist historiography. In Islamic historiography, the frontier has been much more visible. The title of one recent book refers to an Indonesian Frontier, and the entire island of Sumatra has been called a frontier.18 Its most important role is in Richard Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760.19 The profound Islamization of Bengal is a puzzle. The conversion-by-the-sword explanation fares poorly because (apart from a lack of evidence) the more Islamic, eastern Bengal was less subject to conquest. The imperialist explanation linking conversion to the benefits from the Muslim Mughal state fares poorly because peripheral Bengal is more thoroughly converted than the imperial core regions. The explanation of Islam as an egalitarian alternative to Brahmanical hierarchy fares poorly because that hierarchy was relatively weak in Bengal. In the end, the frontier is not merely the subject of Eaton’s book, but its solution. Bengal’s conversion process is explained by multiple frontiers. As nature moves the river delta east, the religious-confessional frontier moves east in concert with political, civilization, and economic-agricultural frontiers. Before we get too excited about the potential for “frontier” as a conceptual tool that transcends religious boundaries, it is important to ask, “frontier of what?” That is, what is the entity the leading edge of which we understand as a frontier? Although monographs on a specific example of missionary activity in Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity may look essentially the same, when we pan back, each reveals itself to be part of a very different bigger picture. When these monographs are used for synthetic histories, what are they histories of? There are two synthetic works on the expansion of Islam celebrated to the extent that each
18 Luke Clossey is known by its author’s surname: Hodgson and Lapidus.20 Neither is precisely about Islam as a religion. Rather they concern the “Islamicate world” (a term Hodgson coined), those regions where Islam is culturally dominant. There is no corresponding “Christianate world.” There’s the older term Christendom, but few write histories of that anymore (excepting Warren H. and Anne Carroll’s History of Christendom six-volume series, which is a pointedly Christian take on the history of Western Civilization).21 Instead we do have the religion Christianity, but I would argue that our monographs on Christian missions are less a part of the history of Christianity (doctrine, church history) than of another historiographical tradition – that of Western Civilization. Western Civilization is not the Christian world: the Nestorians, the Russians, and once even the Persians have been Christian but not obviously “Western.” Spanish South America, an interesting test case, is often not a part of Western Civilization; the Americas are split at the Rio Grande – is this division ethnic, confessional, or a back-projection of twentieth-century wealth? The frontier of the Islamicate world is deeply Islam. The frontier of the Western Civilization is deeply European, or white, but not especially Christian. Turning to our third tradition, at the big-picture level, instead of “Christianity” or “Western Civilization,” or the “Islamicate world,” we see a “Buddhism,” a word lightly draped over a dozen regional incarnations each emphasized in the scholarship as different and unique. In part, this reflects the late conceptualization: although the historical Buddha preached a half millennium before Jesus and thus has chronological priority, for a long time no universal was seen and understood as a single “Buddhism.” Over a millennium after the birth of Islam, British Christian missionaries roving across Asia came across these regional incarnations and linked them into a single Buddhism – thus either showing a deep insight or constructing an artificiality where none existed in reality. (Appropriately, the religion that argues against independent enduring realities did not easily recognize an independent enduring thing called “Buddhism.”)
The classical model: diffusion and conquest We might call “conquest” and “diffusion” the classic ways to model the expansion of a religion. I use “classic” to refer to a model that is outdated enough for us to attack mercilessly, but not so outdated that we look ridiculous in taking it seriously enough to attack. Most famous to historians of Catholicism is perhaps Robert Ricard’s La “conquête spirituelle” du Mexique (1933), which remains a favourite punching bag for young Latin Americanists on the job market. We see a parallel in Erik Zürcher’s Buddhist Conquest of China (1959), which has been spared similar attacks by young Buddhologists because Zürcher himself, as we shall see, beat them to the punch. If “conquest” is the striking word that dominates these two books’ titles, the actual process involved is more often described in terms of diffusion, or in Zürcher’s own term, “contact expansion.” Here we see a roughly constant rate of expansion, from one place already established in the religion to the
Religious expansion 19 next – typically along trade routes, from a centre understood in positive terms to a not-too-distant periphery often understood in negative terms. Essentially, this movement is steady, contiguous, proximal, and downhill. This allows for regular, reliable, potentially reciprocal communication, and for the movement of complex institutional and textual traditions.22 Variations of the conquest/diffusion model dominate in the history of Islam. We might look first at Hodgson’s Venture of Islam, mentioned earlier. Hodgson, in particular, finds explanations of conversion through marriage and sword insufficient, as they are not peculiar to his subject: as they do not inherently favour Islam, how can they account for the expansion of Islam? Therefore, he writes, We are forced to look to the general attractiveness of the Islamicate culture, which seems to have been decisive; not so much its highest cultural qualities, not usually very visible on the frontier, as the overall social role it filled. Hodgson continues, proposing a “cultural gradient,” which he describes as a sort of universal: “Elements of culture tended to move from the most cosmopolitan centres to the most isolated.” This is a cultural analogue to the Boyle’s Law of chemistry. “In this connection,” Hodgson explains, “‘cosmopolitan’ centres will be those that had the most active relations, commercial or cultural, with a reas the most distant; and where simultaneously wealth and power are most concentrated.” That is, wealth can concentrate long distant contacts, or vice versa: The innovations that resulted were clothed with maximum prestige…. the culture of the more cosmopolitan centres tended to be adopted in those slightly less cosmopolitan centres in most immediate and active contact with them, if they were possessed of sufficient wealth to allow such innovation. … From these centres, in turn, the cultural elements radiated into the smaller towns about, and finally in the countryside and even into the remotest regions, ever carried by the prestige of wealth and power generally, as well as by any inherent qualities…23 In his history, Hodgson refers to self-contained local-cadres (merchants, warriors, missionaries, ulama, qadis, scholars), but his real model is culture diffusing or radiating from centres of greater cosmopolitan pressure to a periphery, a process driven by cultural or material prestige. Despite its size and age and learnedness, Hodgson still sometimes appears as a textbook in introductory courses on Islamicate history, as it does at my university, to the misery or indifference of many students, and profound delight of a few. Now more common as a textbook is Lapidus’s History of Islamic Societies. (That the textbook perceived as more student-friendly is still massive and dense gives some sense of the seriousness of the field, and perhaps of its orientalist origins. Both of these have fewer glossy pictures and more untranslated words than the typical survey of European or American history.)
20 Luke Clossey For Lapidus, Islam also diffuses from a centre to a periphery. Instead of this diffusion being driven by cultural prestige and cosmopolitanism, á là Hodgson, the process takes Islam from areas of social cohesion (evidenced by “religious fellowship, larger-order communities, and states”) to areas of social fragmentation. In its origins, Islam saw this social cohesion form in the Middle East, which then, Lapidus explains, creates a paradigm “built around three different types of collectivities: parochial groups, religious associations, and state regimes.” That paradigm, then, can be replicated as Islam is introduced to new areas. To be fair, I should point out that Lapidus stresses that this replication could be only partial, depending on the identity of the personal agents and the circumstances of the new location: “In all instances…the diffusion of Islam released tremendous artistic and cultural forces as each new Islamic state and society attempted to work out its own synthesis of Middle Eastern Islamic institutions and local traditions.”24 At work in each of these cases is a vision that is quasi-scientific, or social scientific, that understands a sort of natural law that governs the expansion of Islam. An extreme case comes from Richard Bulliet, whose 1979 Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History was widely appreciated as untried but innovative. Bulliet appeals to physics as an explanatory metaphor: In solid-state physics, various compounds and alloys are analysed at the molecular and atomic levels. Some substances are arrayed in regular crystalline structures; others are irregular. Depending upon such structural arrays, some transmit light or electricity, and others do not; some are stable, and others are not. What characterizes this scientific approach is the focus upon understanding the properties of the actual complex substance, as opposed to purifying its separate components to discover their elemental properties. He returns to history, but his tentative conclusions remain near the scientific: relying in part on changes in the history of naming practices, he argues that conversion may follow a bell-shaped curve, from a few early adopters, to a crowded middle of converts, and then finally the last few hold-outs. Bulliet’s work remains one of the most respected in the scholarship on the expansion of Islam.25 The diffusion-conquest model has often been found wanting, sometimes unfairly. Certainly, it focusses attention on the centre and the centre’s agents of expansion, but this may be a consequence less of earlier scholars’ bigoted indifference to local peoples and more of a recognition that the sources representing local perspectives tend to be fewer and more difficult. Certainly, a typical atlas of the history of Islam, or of Christianity, paints a false picture in drawing hard borders with a solid colour on the religious side, but even these conquest-model historians do not really consider expansion an all-or-nothing issue, and even the most statistical, even those without any explicit model, can appreciate this. One such study of the Islamization of Trabizond looks at fiscal registers (tahrir defters) to show that, around 1486, there was one priest for every 40 Christian households (hanes), while, in 1553, only one for every 130, a clear decline in ecclesiastical presence, suggesting a decline in Christianity in a city formally Muslim.26
Religious expansion 21
New models Before moving on to consider more recent models of religious expansion, let us pause to ask what historians want in such a model, so we can have a set of criteria for evaluation. The book reviews and inter-article criticisms of the last couple of decades suggest a surprising uniformity in what we think a model of religious expansion should do. The emphasis is on the transformation that comes with expansion, with an eye to understanding who drives the transformation, and how much changes. That is, the key concepts are agency and diversity. Today, we like to maximize the agency of humans (which makes scientific-law metaphors unattractive) and especially the agency of local peoples (which makes conquest metaphors unattractive). We like to maximize the transformative potentials inherent in expansion (the influence of that agency, and local circumstances), and the diversity (or the hybridity) of the resultant. Sometimes, seeing the diversity of the resultant reminds us of the possible diversity of the original or originals. How well do the newer models of religious expansion take agency and diversity into account? The dominate model today is one of transformation, and takes up a fistful of words beginning with the prefix “trans-” that acknowledge the idea of distance inherent in expansion, and the consequence of that distance. One of the more explicit modifiers of Zürcher’s “contact-expansion” conquest/diffusionist model has been Zürcher himself, who distinguished a later phase of Buddhism coming to China through a process of “long-distance transmission”; communication and travel was less convenient than we had thought, and the geographical spread is less continuous than we had thought, which circumstances between them create the possibility of hybridity. Thus, for the later Zürcher, “Chinese Buddhism became a melting pot of different types of Buddhism, a mass of scriptural, disciplinary and scholastic traditions of various provenance that not seldom contradicted each other” because the multiple inputs (personal, textual, visual, ritual) arrived via multiple routes.27 Transformative transmissions have a special purchase in the historiography of Buddhist expansion, perhaps because of the history of Western perceptions of Buddhism. Only in the nineteenth century did Western agents of missionary and imperial expansion come to appreciate (or to create the fiction) that what they saw in Sri Lanka, and in Tibet, and in Japan, were all one “religion.” Scholarship today still reflects this late and superficial arrival of a single “Buddhism,” and historians regularly present in practice, if not in name, a collection of Buddhisms. Robinson, Johnson, and Thanissaro’s Buddhist Religions and Andrew Skilton’s A Concise History of Buddhism both exemplify the standard approach: half a book chronologically covering Buddhist India, and followed by a chapter for each new region. A generation of specialists emphasized the break with the centre (perhaps easier when the original centre is no longer itself Buddhist), and a tradition radically transformed by each new home. Even Zürcher’s early Buddhist Conquest of China, which echoes the bulldozer of Ricard’s title, has a more revealing subtitle: The Spread and Adaptation of
22 Luke Clossey Buddhism in Early Modern China. It is now difficult to find a history of B uddhist expansion that omits “transformation” and its alliterative cousins: Kenneth K.S. Ch‘en’s The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism, Richard Gombrich and G ananath Obeyesekere’s Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka, or James William Coleman’s The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition. A recent edited volume has a title representing the apogee of this trend: TransBuddhism: Transmission, Translation, and Transformation. We see little like this in the historiography of Islam. For Christianity, the situation is a little more complex. We might conduct an informal survey of the titles listed in the Oxford Bibliographies Online article on Missions for our period. 28 By far the dominant concept words in titles are “mission” and “conversion” – maintaining the old concepts, specific to Christianity. Beneath them, for the most part, scholars seem to look more at transformation than at conquest. The few titular words indicative of the older model (“implantation,” “conquest,” and perhaps “contest”) are lost in the crowd of terms indicative of the more complex transmission-transformation model (“hybrid,” “convergence,” “accommodation,” “interweaving,” “exchange,” “dialogue”). This middle ground houses a variety of other models, less comprehensive, less powerful, and therefore, less fatalistic than the ones we have considered so far. One species of these tends towards complexity and abstraction. Clossey’s book on the Jesuits, and the Marriott dissertation cited earlier, both talk of networks. The social scientists understand networks as things that “facilitate” movement of religious stuff via “conduits” linking nodes and hubs, and rightly complain that such a beast is overly functional, reductionist, and deterministic, limiting the role of intention and agency. In fact, few historians of networks ever use them to do this much work; that is, historians’ networks tend to be more descriptive than explanatory.29 Other scholars make use of the idea of a “religious market,” which makes the point that religious actors behave a great deal like economic actors.30 This has advantages for us in that it suggests religion, like a luxury good, has value that makes it attractive to converts, but we know so little about humans as economic actors that this gives us little new insight.31 While such models ultimately merely translate one abstraction (religious expansion) to new abstractions (networks, markets), we also make use of more concrete and simple metaphors, typically too plain and every day to count as “theory,” and therefore, perhaps, less reflected upon and more revealing. Water is everywhere; beliefs are “fluid,” and boundaries of belief systems are “porous.” In his Crossings and Dwellings, Thomas Tweed uses water metaphors to explain religions’ “flow” (expansion), but takes this further by using the metaphor to explain not just the expansion of religion, but religion itself. Religions, he proposes, are “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.” Forced to define “religion,” one could do much worse, and Tweed goes even further in defining everything – economy, society, and politics – as other types of “transfluvial currents.”32
Religious expansion 23 T. Griffith Foulk similarly looks towards the simple, by taking up the idea of the “spread of religion” and probing its implicit metaphor. Does religion spread like water, as suggested by Tweed’s musings? Does religion spread like fire, influenced by the local fuels for combustion in different places? Flood and fire each suggest a natural process, perhaps harking back to the conquest-diffusion model, and individual agency may drown in the flood metaphor. Perhaps religion is less the subject than the object of the verb “spread?” Spreading religion is like spreading butter, or spreading fertilizer, each suggestive of purposeful human intention. Foulk makes the strongest case for religion spreading like a disease: it arises in one place, spreading as it infects some new people, while skipping others in populations that are, for whatever reason, less susceptible, and religion can coexist happily with other pathogens.33
Traditional models Of course, disease as a metaphor for religion is not something missionaries would take kindly. In recent publications, I have been asserting the epistemological advantages of historians using concepts and language that their subjects could find interesting or at least meaningful.34 It may be epistemologically sound, and at least good manners, to see how they understood transformation. In closing, then, I would like to take up suggestions for modelling the expansion of religion from religious traditions themselves. Often the other, losing, side of the religious expansion is less bogged down by textual traditions and has the greater poets. One Oyrat/Qalmaq khan, upon discovering that his son Almambet had converted to Islam, said – or has been made to say – that the apostate is a “spent arrow” and a “hard excreted turd” – these from a Kyrgyz epic collected by Wilhelm Radloff in the 1860s, but reflecting a long oral tradition.35 Less sorrowful is the celebrated anecdote from Diego Durán’s Historia de las Indias (ca. 1581). An indigenous youth advises the friar “Father, do not be frightened because we are still nepantla.” That friar recognizes the Nahuatl word for “being in the middle,” but to get a better understanding of the metaphor insisted that he tell me in what middle it was in which they found themselves. He told me that since they were still not well rooted in the faith, I should not be surprised that they were still neutral, that they neither answered to one faith nor the other or, better said, that they believed in God and at the same time kept their ancient customs and demonic rites. And this is what he meant by his abominable excuse that they still remained in the middle and were neutral.36 Let me take one final example each from each of Islam and Buddhism. Earlier I suggested that the nearest Islamic equivalent to mission is a poor equivalent: da’wa, with its connotation of invitation or summons. Islamic science has a second concept that may prove more useful. Unlike the formal, intellectual
24 Luke Clossey da’wa, tawba denotes repentance and conversion, in a sense more personal and profound. The expansion of Islam might be best understood as existing between the two. In particular, this may help us understand the frequency, indeed normativity, of communal conversion in the history of Islam. Community identity has a strong religious dimension; religious identity has a strong communal dimension. This correspondence stretches back to the beginning of Islam and has consequences for expansion. In the Islamic perspective, there is no merely formal adoption of Islam. Conversion is not the story of the Qur’an’s appeal, as few infidels would be allowed to paw it. As Hodgson observes, it was only in more informal preaching sessions … where the concern was not the public order and dignity of Islam but the welfare of the individual soul, that the inquiring infidel could begin to participate enough in Islam to be moved to commit himself to it.37 A community that responds to the da’wa invitation has created a context for divine grace to facilitate what we might think of as a better (personal, emotional) tawba conversion. In the sociological perspective, peer pressure might play the role of divine grace, but the same distinction between da’wa and tawba could apply. The importance of the heartfelt, personal conversion in Islam is largely foreign, an import from Western scholars’ Christian cultural background. The importance of the heartfelt, personal conversion in Christianity is foreign to much of our period. Perhaps it develops in our period, coming out of evangelical or mystical strands of Christianity, but the personal and emotional conversions of Paul, Augustine, and Anselm are not typical of the early sources. The personal conversion may exist for Buddhist monks, but seems again foreign to the experience of the laity, especially under polytropic circumstances where living within, and using, multiple traditions is the norm.38 Perhaps the most sophisticated discussion of religious expansion came from the Chan/Zen practitioners in Song-dynasty China looking back on their own heritage. The debate, to the extent sources allow us to follow, was polemical, sectarian, and deeply delighting in the edifying paradox. Can we get a sense of what they considered important (their equivalent to our love of agency and diversity) from their own metaphors and models? Three themes recur. First, transmission was unmediated and natural: ganying 感應 (stimulus and response, vibrations in one object provoking sympathetic vibrations in the next), yixin-chuanxin 以心傳心 (using mind to transmit mind), and buli-wenzi 不立文字 (not depending on texts). The second theme is authenticity. Although not dependent on texts (and jiaowai-biezhuan 教外別傳 a separate transmission outside of the teachings), a premium was placed on reliability and authenticity: Foxinyin 佛心印 seal of the Buddha mind, xiangqi 相契 comparing tallies. The third theme is a consequence of the first two, for what could be more natural or authentic than genealogy? Thus, the lineage (宗 zong), by which already in the previous Tang dynasty there had been understood to be a chain of 28 chan patriarchs in India connected to
Religious expansion 25 six more in China, had become fundamentally important. The usual translation “patriarch” aptly reflects this, as its two zushi 祖師 Chinese characters literally mean “ancestral teacher.” Tree metaphors (e.g. the main “branch” of a lineage benzong 本宗) or the idea of the passing on of a lamp-flame chuandeng 傳燈 also resonate with this idea of genealogy. While historians now are interested in diversity, Song-dynasty Buddhists were interested in authenticity; this is essentially the same issue, but we come at it with different priorities, from different directions, with opposite protagonists. Certainly, these medieval ideas have informed today’s Buddhology – and Japanese Buddhologists still explicitly talk of the transmission of the lamp-flame – but these concerns are now submerged between interest in agency and diversity. Is genealogy something we should remind ourselves of?39 It resonates with the Islamic tradition in the isnad, the chain of transmission accompanying hadith. It resonates with Catholic tradition too, although mission history seems not to have much time for discussions of apostolic succession – perhaps it was a non-issue given the relative ecclesiastical/doctrinal stability in the world of the Catholic Reformation. Reflecting on our models of mission has been useful for me, who cringed reading a first draft of this and saw careless and unconsidered references to “beachheads” and “virgin territory,” before deciding to leave them to mark my shame and as a warning to others. The variety of approaches surveyed here makes me optimistic about the future. The default approach now is to maximum diversity, with everyone having tremendous agency, and every step of advancement in every direction creating a (potentially very) new version of the old religion. Is this a passing historiographical fashion, or have we somehow located the historical reality? Today researchers’ “discovery” of great diversity and agency has become commonplace. Innovative historians might look to find patterns within the diversity, and ways to simplify those patterns, conducing cost-benefit analysis of value of the simplification for understanding relative to the cost in precision and detail – simplification without oversimplification. Open minds may be more useful to historians than the current ritual acknowledgement of diversity. In practice, to make a narrative that can be understood, we lump particularities into generalizations, and we highlight one actor’s agency (or star or dramatic power) over another’s. Probably not all expansions are the same. Some expansions may be more conquest than others, some converts or holdouts may have less agency than others, and some new growths may resemble the old faith more or less than others.
Notes 1 For the cult of Manik-pir, see A. Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 241–248; and P.K. Maity, Human Fertility Cults and Rituals of Bengal: A Comparative Study, New Delhi: Abhinav, 1989, pp. 117–123. 2 B. Marriott, Transnational Networks and Cross-Religious Exchange in the SeventeenthCentury Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds: Sabbatai Sevi and the Last Tribes of
26 Luke Clossey Israel, London: Routledge, 2016; E. Zhang, “Kannon – Guanyin – Virgin Mary: Early Modern Discourses on Alterity, Religion and Images,” in C. Brosius and R. Wenzlhuemer (eds) Transcultural Turbulences: Towards a Multi-Sited Reading of Image, Berlin: Springer, 2011, pp. 171–189; X. Lin, “The Virgin Mary in a Chinese Lady’s Inner Chamber,” in K.M. Comerford and H. Pabel (eds) Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, pp. 201–202; R. Taylor, “Spirits of the Penumbra: Deities Worshipped in More than One Chinese Pantheon,” in J.D. Tracy and M. Ragnow (eds.) Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 142–146 and 152–153. 3 For an overview of recent scholarship on the tradition-crossing religious history, see K. Vélez, S.R. Prange, and L. Clossey, “Religious Ideas in Motion,” in D. Northrop (ed.) A Companion to World History, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2012, pp. 352–364. For a comparative look at the expansion of Buddhism and Islam in an earlier period see X. Liu, “A Silk Road Legacy: The Spread of Buddhism and Islam,” Journal of World History 22, 2011, 55–81. 4 J. Neelis, Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks Mobility and Exchange within and Beyond the Northwestern Borderlands of South Asia, Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 1–63. 5 On “Late Traditional” as an alternative framework to “Early Modern,” see L. Clossey, “The Geographies and Methodologies of Religion in the Journal of Early Modern History,” Journal of Early Modern History 20, 2016, 545–558. 6 J. Fletcher, Jr., “Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800,” Journal of Turkish Studies 9, 1985, 37–57 [reprinted in B.F. Manz (ed.) Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, Aldershot: Variorum, 1995]. 7 Wright speaks of the “counter-productive” Counter-Reformation. A.D. Wright, The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World, Abingdon: Ashgate, 2005, p. 131. 8 M.C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries, Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge, 2006. 9 C. Wheeler, “Buddhism in the Re-ordering of an Early Modern World: Chinese Missions to Cochinchina in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Global History 2, 2007, 303–324. 10 D. Dumas, “The Mongols and Buddhism in 1368–1578: Facts – Stereotypes – Prejudices,” Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher 19, 2005, 167–221; J. Elverskog, The Jewel Translucent Sūtra: Altan Khan and the Mongols in the Sixteenth Century, Leiden: Brill, 2003; K. Kollmar-Paulenz, Erdeni Tunumal Neretü Sudur: die Biographie des Altan qaγan der Tümed-Mongolen: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der religionspolitischen Beziehungen zwischen der Mongolei und Tibet im ausgehenden 16. Jahrhundert, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001; K. Sagaster, “The History of Buddhism among the Mongols,” in A. Heirman and S.P. Bumbacher (eds) The Spread of Buddhism, Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 379–432. 11 “Caratha, bhikkhave, c ā rika ṃ bahujanahit āya bahujanasukhāya lok ā nukampāya atthāya hit āya sukhāya devamanussā na ṃ. M ā ekena dve agamittha. Desetha, bhikkhave, dhamma ṃ ādikalyāṇa ṃ majjhekalyāṇa ṃ pariyosā nakalyāṇa ṃ sāttha ṃ sabyañjana ṃ kevalaparipu ṇṇa ṃ parisuddha ṃ brahmacariya ṃ pak ā setha.” Khandhaka (Mahāvagga), 1. Going forth (Pabbajjā) (https://suttacentral.net/pi/pi-tv-kd1). English translation at https://suttacentral.net/en/pi-tv-kd1 (accessed 16 April 2018). 12 For one example, see A.W.P. Guruge, Humanistic Buddhism for Social Well-being: An Overview of Grand Master Hsing Yun’s Interpretation in Theory and Practice, Los Angeles, CA: Buddha’s Light, 2002, p. 18; J.S. Walters, “Rethinking Buddhist Missions,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1992, argues that pre-modern Buddhist texts cannot refer to “missions.” 13 Ṭhā nissaro Bhikkhu, The Buddhist Monastic Code, 3rd edn, vol. 1, p. 558.
Religious expansion 27 14 Translation is by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 174. 15 H.D. Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, New York: Signet, 1980, p. 12. 16 R.W. Emerson, “Civilization,” in The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3 [of 3], Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood, and Company, 1880, p. 14; F.J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin [41st annual meeting], 1893, pp. 79–112. 17 For example, “these rocks delight me” (“…te sel ā ramayanti ma ṃ”) from the Theragāthā , 1068–1071, https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sltp/Th_utf8. html#v.1051 (accessed 16 April 2018). 18 A. Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra, Leiden: KITLV Press, 2005. 19 R. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 20 M.G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974; I. M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [1st edn 1988]. 21 W.H. and A. Carroll, History of Christendom, Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 1985–2013, in six volumes. 22 E. Zürcher, “Han Buddhism and the Western Region,” in W.L. Idema and E. Zürcher (eds) Thought and Law in Qin and Han China: Studies Dedicated to Anthony Hulsewe on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, Leiden: Brill, 1990, pp. 169–171 and 181–182. See also his Bouddhisme, christianisme et société chinoise, Paris: Julliard, 1990, pp. 11–42. 23 Hodgson, Venture, vol. 2, pp. 539–540. 24 Lapidus, History, pp. 205–206 and 276. 25 R.W. Bulliet, “Process and Status in Conversion and Continuity,” in M. Gervers and R.J. Bikhazi (eds) Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990, p. 7. 26 H.W. Lowry, The Islamization & Turkification of the City of Trabzon (Trebizond), 1461–1583, Istanbul: Isis Press, 2009, p. 115. 27 E. Zürcher, Buddhism across Boundaries: The Foreign Input, Taipei: Foguang C ultural Enterprise Co., Ltd., 1999, p. 16. See Neelis, Early, pp. 4–7. 28 L. Clossey, “Mission,” Oxford Bibliographies Online, Oxford University Press, 2012. www.oxfordbibliographies.com (accessed 16 April 2018). 29 On networks see Neelis, Early, pp. 10–12. 30 For example, R.S. Warner, “More Progress on the New Paradigm,” in T.G. Jelen (ed.) Sacred Markets, Sacred Canopies: Essays on Religious Markets and Religious Pluralism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, pp. 1–30. 31 On the “marketplace” model, see Neelis, Early, pp. 16–17. 32 T.A. Tweed, Crossings and Dwellings: A Theory of Religion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 54, 167. On aquatic metaphors, see Neelis, Early, pp. 7–10. 33 T.G. Foulk, “The Spread of Chan (Zen) Buddhism,” in A. Heirman and S.P. Bumbacher (eds) The Spread of Buddhism, Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 433–456. 34 L. Clossey, “Asia-Centred Approaches to the History of the Early Modern World: A Methodological Romp,” in D. Porter (ed.) Comparative Early Modernities: 1100–1800, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 73–96; L. Clossey, K. Jackson, B. Marriott, A. Redden, and K. Vélez, “The Unbelieved and Historians, Part I: A Challenge,” History Compass, 14, 2016, 594–602. 35 A.T. Hatto, The Manas of Wilhelm Radloff, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990, p. 21. 36 D. de Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España y islas de Tierra Firme, México: 1867–1880, vol. 2, p. 268. Translation from M. León-Portilla, Endangered Cultures,
28 Luke Clossey trans. J. Goodson-Lawes, Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990, pp. 71–72. 37 Hodgson, Venture, vol. 2, p. 536. 38 “Polytropic” is from M. Carrithers, “On Polytropy: Or the Natural Condition of Spiritual Cosmopolitanism in India: The Digambar Jain Case,” Modern Asian Studies 34, 2000, 834. For an excellent example see N. Standaert, The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. 39 R. Starn, “Who’s Afraid of the Renaissance?” in J. van Engen (ed.) The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994, pp. 129–147.
Bibliography Published primary sources Emerson, R.W., “Civilization,” in The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3 [of 3], Boston, MA: 1880, pp. 13–21. Khandhaka (Mahāvagga), https://suttacentral.net/pi/pi-tv-kd1 (accessed 16 April 2018). Durán, D. de, Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España y islas de Tierra Firme, México: Impr. de J.M. Andrade y F. Escalante, 1867–1880. Ṭhā nissaro Bhikkhu, The Buddhist Monastic Code, 3rd edn., Valley Centre, CA: Metta Forest Monastery, 2013. Theragāthā , www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sltp/Th_utf8.html#v.1051 (accessed 16 April 2018).
Secondary sources Abdel Haleem, M.A.S., The Qur’an, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Bulliet, R.W., “Process and Status in Conversion and Continuity,” in M. Gervers and R.J. Bikhazi (eds) Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990, pp. 1–12. Carrithers, M., “On Polytropy: Or the Natural Condition of Spiritual Cosmopolitanism in India: The Digambar Jain Case,” Modern Asian Studies 34, 2000, 831–861. Carroll, W.H. and A. Carroll, History of Christendom, Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 1985–2013, in six volumes. Clossey, L., “Asia-Centred Approaches to the History of the Early Modern World: A Methodological Romp,” in D. Porter (ed.) Comparative Early Modernities: 1100–1800, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 73–96. ———, “Mission,” Oxford Bibliographies Online, Oxford University Press, 2012. www. oxfordbibliographies.com (accessed 16 April 2018). ———, “The Geographies and Methodologies of Religion in the Journal of Early Modern History,” Journal of Early Modern History 20, 2016, 545–558. ———, K. Jackson, B. Marriott, A. Redden, and K. Vélez, “The Unbelieved and Historians, Part I: A Challenge,” History Compass 14, 2016, 594–602. rejudices,” Dumas, D., “The Mongols and Buddhism in 1368–1578: Facts – Stereotypes – P Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher 19, 2005, 167–221. Eaton, R., The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Religious expansion 29 Elverskog, J., The Jewel Translucent Sūtra: Altan Khan and the Mongols in the Sixteenth Century, Leiden: Brill, 2003. Fletcher, J., Jr., “Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800,” Journal of Turkish Studies 9, 1985, 37–57 [reprinted in B.F. Manz (ed.) Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 1995]. Foulk, T.G., “The Spread of Chan (Zen) Buddhism,” in A. Heirman and S.P. Bumbacher (eds) The Spread of Buddhism, Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 433–456. Guruge, A.W.P., Humanistic Buddhism for Social Well-being: An Overview of Grand Master Hsing Yun’s Interpretation in Theory and Practice, Los Angeles, CA: Buddha’s Light, 2002. Hatto, A.T., The Manas of Wilhelm Radloff, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990. Hodgson, M.G.S., The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Kollmar-Paulenz, K., Erdeni Tunumal Neretü Sudur: die Biographie des Altan qaγan der Tümed-Mongolen: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der religionspolitischen Beziehungen zwischen der Mongolei und Tibet im ausgehenden 16. Jahrhundert, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001. Lapidus, I.M., A History of Islamic Societies, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [1st edn 1988]. León-Portilla, M., Endangered Cultures, trans. Julie Goodson-Lawes, Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990. Lin, X., “The Virgin Mary in a Chinese Lady’s Inner Chamber,” in K.M. Comerford and H. Pabel (eds) Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, pp. 183–210. Liu, X., “A Silk Road Legacy: The Spread of Buddhism and Islam,” Journal of World History 22, 2011, 55–81. Lowry, H.W., The Islamization & Turkification of the City of Trabzon (Trebizond), 1461–1583, Istanbul: Isis Press, 2009. Maity, P.K., Human Fertility Cults and Rituals of Bengal: A Comparative Study, New Delhi: Abhinav, 1989. Marriott, B., Transnational Networks and Cross-Religious Exchange in the SeventeenthCentury Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds: Sabbatai Sevi and the Last Tribes of Israel, London: Routledge, 2016. Neelis, J., Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks Mobility and Exchange within and Beyond the Northwestern Borderlands of South Asia, Leiden: Brill, 2010. Reid, A., An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra, Leiden: KITLV Press, 2005. Ricklefs, M.C., Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries, Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge, 2006. Roy, A., The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Sagaster, K., “The History of Buddhism among the Mongols,” in A. Heirman and S.P. Bumbacher (eds) The Spread of Buddhism, Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 379–432. Standaert, N., The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Starn, R., “Who’s Afraid of the Renaissance?” in J. van Engen (ed.) The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994, pp. 129–147.
30 Luke Clossey Taylor, R., “Spirits of the Penumbra: Deities Worshipped in More than One Chinese Pantheon,” in J.D. Tracy and M. Ragnow (eds) Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 121–153. Thoreau, H.D., Walden and Civil Disobedience, New York: Signet, 1980. Turner, F.J., “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin [41st annual meeting], 1893, pp. 79–112. Tweed, T.A., Crossings and Dwellings: A Theory of Religion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Vélez, K., S.R. Prange, and L. Clossey, “Religious Ideas in Motion,” in D. Northrop (ed.) A Companion to World History, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2012, pp. 352–364. Walters, J.S., “Rethinking Buddhist Missions,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1992. Warner, R.S., “More Progress on the New Paradigm,” in T.G. Jelen (ed.) Sacred Markets, Sacred Canopies: Essays on Religious Markets and Religious Pluralism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, pp. 1–30. Wheeler, C., “Buddhism in the Re-ordering of an Early Modern World: Chinese Missions to Cochinchina in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Global History 2, 2007, 303–324. Wright, A.D., The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World, Abingdon: Ashgate, 2005. Zhang, E., “Kannon – Guanyin – Virgin Mary: Early Modern Discourses on Alterity, Religion and Images,” in C. Brosius and R. Wenzlhuemer (eds) Transcultural Turbulences: Towards a Multi-Sited Reading of Image, Berlin: Springer, 2011, pp. 171–189. Zürcher, E., Bouddhisme, christianisme et société chinoise, Paris: Julliard, 1990. ———, “Han Buddhism and the Western Region,” in W.L. Idema and E. Zürcher (eds) Thought and Law in Qin and Han China: Studies Dedicated to Anthony Hulsewe on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, Leiden: Brill, 1990, pp. 158–182. ———, Buddhism across Boundaries: The Foreign Input, Taipei: Foguang Cultural Enterprise Co., Ltd., 1999.
Part 1
Conversion, co-existence, and identity
3 Translating Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan in the early modern Jesuit mission Haruko Nawata Ward
This article explores the theme of religious intersections as these can be seen developing in the translation of texts, and the formation of cross-cultural identities during the period of the early modern Jesuit mission in Japan. The m issionaries were animated by the Catholic Reformation drive to reform, purify, and convert. As they encountered and worked with their Japanese converts and associates, all of whom were former Buddhists, a new Kirishitan religion emerged. More specifically, this article analyses the construction of this new Kirishitan religious and theological identity through the lens of gender, focussing on how it is represented in Kirishitan translations of stories of the female martyr saints. Translations of stories of early church female martyrs in the J esuit Japan mission challenged prevailing Buddhist and Catholic views on women’s sanctity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan. Former Buddhist converts found the theological notion of Christian martyrdom unfamiliar, and this sparked the imagination of the translators, who were experiencing persecution at the very time that they were translating the martyrologies. These translators formed networks consisting of European-born and Japanese-born Jesuits, and Kirishitans, that is, laywomen and laymen converts.1 Their creative experiments led to the publication of Kirishitanban (Christian edition) hagiographies. Close examination of some popular texts of female martyr saints reveals that the act of translation went beyond the sociocultural, religious, and theological accommodation of a missionary Christianity to the context of Japan. The translators rewrote the stories as though they were contemporary accounts. By rendering early church female martyr saints as symbolic Kirishitan women who publicly contested Japanese authorities’ imposition of state-Buddhism, these translators demonstrated their own resistance to such religious coercion. Through the mouths of these female saints, the translators criticized the oppressive treatment of women in Buddhist teachings and rituals. Moreover, they also addressed the subjugation of women in Catholicism, which did not regard women as equally capable as men of exercising religious leadership. By presenting literary images of these Kirishitan female martyr saints, who defy the barring of women from the Catholic priesthood and take up leadership of Kirishitan communities, the translators paved the way for actual Kirishitan women to create
34 Haruko Nawata Ward venues of ministry alongside the Jesuits. During the harsher period of persecution, many Kirishitan women sought martyrdom in defiance of the authorities and in tandem with male clergy.
The Jesuit mission and persecution against Kirishitans in early modern Japan The ideal of martyrdom first arrived in Japan with the Jesuits, who may not have expected to witness the mass martyrdoms of their members and converts 50 years after their arrival. The Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) in Rome in 1540 sent its first missionary to Japan within a decade: Francis Xavier (1506–1552), one of Loyola’s first companions, and a few Portuguese missionary companions started the first Christian mission in Japan in 1549. The Jesuits arrived in Japan during a period of intense civil wars. Beginning in 1467, warrior rulers (daimyō) of 66 fiefs challenged the authority of the central Ashikaga military government. After the fall of the Ashikaga shogunate in 1573, three strongmen, Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), rose as unifiers. All three unifiers reorganized religious institutions under their control, including dominant Buddhism, which had great influence not only over private lives, but also public and political spheres. They initially favoured trade with the West, and gave limited favour to the Jesuit mission. During the so-called “Christian Century” (1549–1650), the Kirishitan religion gained many adherents from different social classes, who came to bear a distinct religious and cultural identity. Conversions were clustered initially along the commercial routes connecting the major cities in Kyushu and Kyoto, but they also happened in isolated regions in the North, especially during the persecution. ortuguese At first, the Jesuits enjoyed a monopoly of Catholic mission under a P padroado real (royal patronage) agreement (1493) and a papal bull (1585), which only allowed these “Portuguese” Jesuits to labour in Japan. The Catholic diocese of Funai was established in 1588. Competing mendicant missionaries under Spanish patronage began arriving from Manila in the late 1590s, securing their own papal bull, which legitimized their missions in 1608. The Jesuits gained the support of several warrior lords, and the number of baptized Kirishitans reached 40,000 in 1599. Despite – or perhaps because of – this success, local persecutions were a constant reality. As the nation became more unified, the association of Kirishitans with the missionaries and the Iberian nations, which were expanding their colonial posts in Asia, caused alarm. In 1587, Hideyoshi issued the Edict of Expulsion of the Padres and declared the first nationwide ban of Kirishitan religion. Yet he did not execute anyone in public and ignored the Jesuits, who quietly continued their work. Ten years later in 1597, he ordered the execution of 23 Franciscans and three Jesuits in Nagasaki. In 1603, Ieyasu became shogun and established the Tokugawa government; he began to restructure Japan along Confucian principles. The Jesuit mission
Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan 35 continued to grow despite several Kirishitan martyrdoms. By 1612, when the Kirishitan population had risen to 600,000, the Second Shogun Hidetada (1605–1623) reissued the ban of Christianity and began systematic arrests, inquisitions, expulsions, and executions of missionaries and Kirishitans. Most of the Jesuits and mendicant missionaries, along with major male and female Kirishitan leaders, were deported from Japan in 1614. The shogunate set up numerous institutions, laws, and tools for the extermination of Kirishitans and the destruction of Kirishitan sites, sacred objects, and books. It squashed the armed insurrection of 30,000 mostly Kirishitan peasants in the Amakusa-Shimabara Rebellion in 1637–1638, and severed all ties with European nations in 1641. The shogunate allowed only a few merchants of the Dutch East India Company to remain on the secluded Deshima island off Nagasaki. Between 1612 and 1660, the authorities executed about 4,000 Kirishitans, including about 200 women. Many Kirishitans apostatized, while others in remote places continued to secretly practise their Kirishitan religion, often under the guise of Buddhism. The Tokugawa government thoroughly suppressed the Kirishitan religion for the next two centuries. The Meiji Imperial Restoration government, established in 1868, still persecuted large numbers of Kirishitans who resurfaced in Nagasaki in 1865. The ban of the Kirishitan religion was finally lifted in 1873. Newly arrived missionaries of the Missions Étrangère de Paris, as well as some Japanese religious scholars, recovered many fragments of Kirishitan literature, which h idden Kirishitan communities had both orally transmitted and written down during the years of suppression.
Kirishitanban and reformation literature in vernacular translation Kirishitanban refers to the literature published by the Jesuit’s Japanese press between 1590 and 1614. It exemplifies the European Reformations’ impact upon global missions in two aspects: first, the urgency of vernacular translation of sacred texts; and second, the high regard for early church martyrs. Many of the Kirishitanban works were translations from Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin into the early modern Japanese vernacular. Such vernacular translation efforts were rooted in late medieval Renaissance humanism, with its emphasis across all confessions on vernacular translations of the Bible and other ancient texts. Their writings were also quickly translated into various languages in Europe and beyond.2 Jesuit schools in Europe incorporated humanist education, emphasizing the importance of language and translation studies.3 Because of this formation and orientation, Jesuits in Asian and American mission fields produced dictionaries and grammars in local languages as prerequisite for their ministry of preaching, praying, and teaching.4 They then translated what they considered foundational literature for Catholic formation, such as catechisms, into these local languages. As a result, vernacular translations became a major task in early Jesuit missionary acculturation. The missionaries also quickly recognized the prominent
36 Haruko Nawata Ward book culture in Japan and their need to join in it. Having no prior knowledge of the language, culture, history, and religions, the missionaries recruited their K irishitan converts as cultural interpreters and teachers. Soon the male-only Society of Jesus admitted Japanese brothers and coadjutors (d ōjucus) as members.5 Jesuit college and seminaries in Japan trained both European-born and Asianborn Jesuits in humanist education.6 Jesuit reports often mention several Japanese brothers as excellent translators and writers of literature. They also note some women’s contributions to the making of the Kirishitan literature, although in print their names did not appear among the chief translators as was the case with their contemporary European women translators.7 Teams of translators and writers made up of European missionaries, Japanese Jesuits, coadjutors, and women collaborated to produce many manuscripts. By 1590, these were ready to be published using the newly imported movable-type printing press.8 The Jesuit Japan Press (JJP in the following) printed about 60 titles from 1590 to 1614. Copies or fragments of about 41 of these titles survived the fires of persecution and are preserved mostly in European archives. The genres of K irishitanban included the translation of devotional books.9 These devotional texts, especially stories of the saints, provide good examples of vernacular- cultural translation and creative transformation. Recent translation studies have presented diverse understandings of translation beyond the modern obsession with accuracy in linguistic transfer from source text to target language. Rebekah Clements’ study of early modern translation in Japan does not focus on Kirishitanban translations because she sees that “they were by no means mainstream.”10 Yet her exploration of what translation meant in early modern Japanese culture and society sheds important light. Referring to the translators of Dutch and Chinese texts and of classical Japanese texts into the vernacular of the Tokugawa era, she states that these early modern translators did not think in terms of “dichotomies between ‘word for word’ and ‘sense for sense’ or ‘faithful’ versus ‘unfaithful’” translations.11 Instead, they “unashamedly omitted, and in places embellished, their source texts.”12 Thus, translation connotes transculturation and rewriting. I would suggest that a comparison between the European source texts and the Kirishitan translated texts must not only seek to prove translators’ accuracy, but should also decipher “what content made it into” the final work and “what the concerns and methods of the translators were.”13 The methods of the JJP translators’ vernacularization were many. The translators invented the Romaji typesets to transcribe Japanese phonetics in alphabets and also used typesets in Chinese and Japanese characters, constantly improving technology to produce more sophisticated forms.14 They liberally adopted familiar Buddhist terms to express Christian concepts.15 They retained transliterated Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin words, which they regarded as theologically important but without any Japanese equivalents. They also coined many neologisms for other important religious words. They took gender-differentiated Japanese vocabulary into account, and applied appropriate female words and speech patterns into their translations. These vernacularizing efforts made the
Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan 37 literature accessible to a wider readership, including women. Clements cites and modifies Indra Levy’s theories on translation, and, employing their terms, we can describe the Kirishitan translations as being in a “tertiary language, one that is not entirely ‘foreign’ or ‘domestic’, but that clearly meditates between the two [and] may have a transformative effect on the target culture,” perhaps trying to transform the state-imposed Buddhist and Confucian culture in which Kirishitans lived.16
Kirishitanban and the revival of martyrdom in the reformation Kirishitanban translations were also good examples of translators’ political act of resistance to the target culture. This aspect appears especially in translators’ treatment of the concept of Christian martyrdom. In Europe, as Brad Gregory’s Salvation at Stake shows, the Reformers among all religious factions re-examined the earliest Christian texts, especially New Testament and Patristic literature, and reinvigorated the ideal of Christian martyrdom in the early church. They compared Roman persecutions to those in their contemporary geopolitical contexts, in which Christian (secular but not pagan) authorities executed C hristians of rival confessions as “heretics,” while the “true” Christians resisted these oppressive “tyrants.” Each Reformation group produced new martyrologies to celebrate and memorialize their own contemporary martyrs and insert them into a genealogy or history of martyrs that stretched back to the early Christian era. This revival of martyr theology for Catholics was bolstered by their new martyrs in England, the Netherlands, and overseas missions with the prospect for their sainthood. While the Catholic Church authenticated the legitimate martyrs in the Roman Martyrology (1584), numerous volumes on Japanese martyrs were also published in European languages.17 When the Jesuits introduced this interest in European Catholic martyrologies to Japan, the Japanese religious traditions did not have any notion of religious martyrdom. Until that time, there had been no state executions for one’s religious convictions, so the concept itself was unfamiliar. Having no equivalent Japanese words, the Jesuits used the Portuguese transliteration martyrio (マルチリオ) for martyrdom and martyr (マルチル) for martyr. Kirishitanban devotional works, and especially stories of the saints, frequently treat topics on martyrio with numerous examples of martyres, and the Kirishitan readers readily took up this new idea of martyrdom. As Kirishitans faced daimyō’s and shogunal authorities’ prohibition of their religion (go fatto 御法度), they expressed dissent and their willingness for martyrdom. Translating European martyrologies into Japanese became an act of resistance in an increasingly anti-Kirishitan environment. The estimated 40,000 martyrdoms during the Christian Century in Japan far exceeded the number of martyrdoms in any of the Reformation confessions or state churches in Europe or in the Catholic world generally. The number of women martyrs was noticeably high in Japan. Since translation of early Christian martyrologies and the recording of accounts of actual martyrdoms in Japan
38 Haruko Nawata Ward occurred almost simultaneously, it may be the case that there was some d egree of emulation, with Kirishitanban stories of female saints inspiring female Kirishitan leaders to see and perhaps even seek their own martyrdoms in that same frame; Gregory notes this happening among early Reformation martyrs in Europe. On the other hand, the translators may have incorporated the spirit of these Kirishitan women, already confronting go fatto, in their translations. Readers of Kirishitanban hagiography might have recognized the images of actual K irishitan women “rebels” from their communities in these texts. Regardless, Japanese authorities soon became alarmed by Kirishitan martyrdom as a strange and dangerous phenomenon, posing a serious threat to their hegemony. They began to take extreme measures to burn both Kirishitan women and men, and also Kirishitanban literature, to ashes. However, as stated earlier, the underground communities managed to preserve Kirishitanban literature, and these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts would later be recovered in the nineteenth century. Among these were stories of the female saints.
Kirishitanban stories of virgin martyr saints Stories of the saints proved to be the most widely read genre of Kirishitanban literature and were also the major source of Kirishitan knowledge on the Christian tradition of martyrdom. The mission began translations of stories of the saints as early as the 1560s.18 Three collections of saints’ stories survive. The first is Sanctos no gosagvueo no vchi nvqigaqi (excerpts from the Acts of the Saints) (hereafter designated as SGN) published by JJP in 1591.19 The second is the so-called Barreto copy, which dates from around 1591 and bears many similarities to SGN.20 The third is Martyrio no cagami (Mirror of Martyrdom), which circulated among the members of the underground church and was confiscated by the government around 1800.21 Unlike the others, it consists of only three stories of female saints: Anastasia, Catherine, and Marina. St Catherine’s story appears in all three collections, and St Eugenia’s in two. Thus, St Catherine’s and St Eugenia’s stories may represent a significant source of the Kirishitans’ understanding of martyrdom. SGN is unique among all Kirishitanban literature because two Japanese Jesuit brothers, who were also father and son, are clearly stated as its chief translators. Yōfō Paulo (1508–1595), the father, translated four stories of the saints, including that of St Eugenia. Vicente Tōin (c. 1540–1609) translated the remaining 29 stories including that of St Catherine. Both Vicente Tōin and Yōfō Paulo were aware of the limits of literal translation. At the end of the second volume, they provide a glossary of Japanese words, entitled “Cotoba no yauarague.” This title is a neologism derived from a verb “yauaragu” or “to soften,” and means “softening of hard words into more palatable expressions.”22 Although Vicente Tōin and Yōfō Paulo reveal their source texts as a part of their chapter headings, they take great liberties in localizing the stories, to the extent that the original sources are unidentifiable.23 The translators keep the basic storylines. However, they diverge greatly in their abundant use of Buddhist terms and Japanese gender concepts. They make the point that both St Catherine
Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan 39 and St Eugenia attained martyrdom by the hands of Buddhist emperors in their Kirishitan female bodies. St Catherine and St Eugenia shared similar characteristics as virgin martyrs in the hagiographic tradition, to which SGN added Japanese embellishments.24 Both are portrayed as princesses and daughters of Roman prefects in Alexandria, which the translators dub as Miyaco or Kyoto. Both are highly educated in Latin liberal arts and letters, philosophies, Kirishitan scriptures, and in Buddhist teachings. Being excellent orators, both also convert many Buddhist women and men to the Kirishitan religion and both have many followers. Both are beautiful but refuse marriage for the sake of ixxõ fubon, or perpetual chastity. Both are subjected to brutal physical and sexualized tortures, but miraculously do not suffer because of divine intervention. Both are imprisoned without food, but then Christ appears to them in prison, feeds them, and gives assurance of their martyrdom in a dialogue which resembles an exchange of wedding vows. This Eucharistic symbol of virgin martyrs in mystical marriage is strongly emphasized in both accounts. Catherine sheds a milk-like white blood from her beheaded body, while Eugenia’s farewell speech to her community portrays her as a Christ-figure. She is fashioned as the vine, while the members of her community are then portrayed as grapes in clear reference to John 15:5. In Vicente’s translation, Catherine is emphatically a Kirishitan resisting the Roman emperor Maxentius, who imposes a Buddhist memorial ceremony (f ōji) of his idols (idolos). Vicente calls these idols also Buddha (fotoque), and says that the emperor punishes those who refuse the worship of Buddha as Butteqi (enemies of Buddha) and Ch ōteqi (enemies of the empire). Catherine wins the debate with 50 imperial scholars thanks to her knowledge of philosophers and Kirishitan theology, and all 50 become Kirishitans and die as martyrs themselves. Vicente uses the term nhonin (woman) to underscore that Catherine is a mere woman, yet he also portrays her as one who has amazing abilities as an orator and scholar above all scholars. By his adaptation of these terms, Vicente criticizes the Japanese unifiers, who used Buddhism and Confucian principles as tools to persecute Kirishitans and to prevent women from gaining higher learning and public speech.25 Thus, Catherine’s martyrdom becomes an image or representation of contemporary Kirishitan women’s death for religious freedom in resistance to the looming suppression of women. Yōfō Paulo’s translation of the story of St Eugenia, a “transvestite virgin,” required complex layers of cultural rewriting. Because, unlike China and other parts of the ancient world, Japanese courts did not have the custom of kangan (eunuchs), he inserts a lengthy explanation on what eunuchs are as he introduces Protho and Iacinto, Eugenia’s two servants, who would accompany her in her pursuit of monastic life and later martyrdom. He says, These eunuchs are …not usual men…When they are very young, they give them near fatal wounds but they do not die and their wounds heal. When they become adults, they have lost the way of male-female spousal r elationship… So, the court employs them to serve in the empress’s quarter.26
40 Haruko Nawata Ward This involuntary transgendering of these eunuchs contrasts with Eugenia, who disguises herself as a man in order first to participate in the Bishop’s ceremony (f ōji) at the Kirishitan temple (tera), and then to join the male monastic order. Later in the story, Eugenia, who is disguised as a monk Eugenio, is accused of adultery by Melanthia, a noblewoman. When “he” rejects her advances, Melanthia appeals to the perfect’s court. Eugenio/a first performs acts of repentance for this false accusation saying that the innocent Christ also suffered for the sins of humanity. But when the whole monastery is accused of sexual misconduct, Eugenia removes her clothing in front of the authorities and reveals her female breasts. This episode has attracted broader scholarly attention. Art historian Pamela Loos-Noji analyses a sculpted capital in the Church of St Mary Magdalen in Vézlay, dating from the twelfth century, and argues that Eugenia’s cross-d ressing served to cover the inherent sinfulness of the body of the female as tempting, and Eugenia’s undressing is a metaphor of a woman “transformed from temptress to vehicle of salvation” of the men in the monastic community at Cluny.27 Tracing the medieval development of stories of a group of cross-dressed female saints, historian John Anson analyses the Patrologia Latina text of St Eugenia and her speeches, and notes a similar patristic misogyny. Her first speech similarly takes place at the scene of the revelation of her breasts, and she begins with a reference to Galatians 3:28: “either sex [cannot] claim a superiority in faith, since the blessed Apostle Paul, the instructor for all Christians [says] that in the Lord there exists no distinction between male and female, for we are all one in Christ.” But she goes on to deny her sex: [O]ut of the faith I have in Christ, not wishing to be a woman but to preserve an immaculate virginity, I have steadfastly acted as a man. For I have not simply put on a meaningless appearance of honor, such that while seeming a man I might play the part of a woman, but rather, although a woman, I have acted a part of a man by behaving with manliness, by boldly embracing the chastity, which is alone in Christ.28 In this discourse, one understands that manliness is fundamentally superior to womanhood. Anson concludes that while hagiographers show that faith empowers these transvestite virgins to adopt their manliness, readers feel a strong sense of the alienation of women because of their gender.29 Yōfō Paulo elaborates this traditional Catholic notion of women’s alienation in the Kirishitan context. Like Vicente Tōin, who uses the word nhonin to constantly remind the reader of St Catherine’s impediment as a mere woman, Yōfō Paulo uses such phrases as “although being in the woman’s body” (go’nhotai nite maximasedomo), “because of the existence as a woman” (vonna no mi), and “having a woman’s body” (nhotai narucoto) in order to ensure that the physicality of Eugenia’s womanhood remains apparent.30 Moreover, he explicitly uses Buddhist terms of women’s ritual exclusion. He states that the Bishop’s temple allows no entry to women, as it is nhonin qeccai (女人結界).31 This exclusion of
Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan 41 women from sacred ritual space because of the belief that women’s blood is impure had a long history in Japan, and was still present in the sixteenth century.32 Curiously, before disguised Eugenia/o approaches the Bishop, God reveals to him in a dream that a woman would be serving in his monastery. The Bishop overrules nhonin qeccai and allows the three brothers, that is, Eugenia as monk Eugenio and her two eunuch servants, Protho and Iacinto, to join the monastery. Yōfō Paulo further criticizes Buddhist sexism when he says that Eugenia remains in the male monastery by shaving her hair (cami uo sori) and adopting or literally turning into the body of a man (nantai ni fenjite). While medieval European accounts associated shaving a woman’s head with repentance and abandonment of her sexuality, shaving one’s hair in Japan meant the act of renouncing the world for both Buddhist men and women.33 Yōfō Paulo’s translation of Eugenia’s putting on the tunic as nantai ni fenjite shows his understanding of this act as her existential transformation into a nantai, or body of a man, connecting it to the Buddhist precept of fenjō nanxi (turning into a man). This teaching, typically shown in the Lotus Sutra, regards a woman as not being able to attain Enlightenment or salvation in the afterlife unless she is changed into a man. In discussing Eugenia’s changed status as monk Eugenio, Yōfō Paulo consistently uses the variants of fenj ō nanxi. For example, the monk Eugenio pretends totally to be a man (nanxini nari sumaxi). When the monk Eugenio, accused by Melanthia, is taken to the judge, s/he finally decides to reveal her/ his real sex. Yōfō Paulo’s translation of this dramatic scene emphasizes that “The Lord Deus who plans everything gives the woman the power of her man.”34 As soon as she has said this, “intending to reveal that she has a woman’s body (nhotai), she rips open her clothing; and what a wonder, for in an instant, such an apparently valiant, energetic and strong man turns into a woman (nhotai).”35 This act is a complete reversal of the precept of fenj ō nanxi, in that it is the man who turns into a woman. And this woman would be the holy Kirishitan martyr. Yōfō Paulo’s criticism of Buddhism’s misogyny is compounded by his disapproval of the imposition of the imperial religion. After leaving the male monastery, Eugenia returns to the house of her father Philip, the prefect of Alexandria, and persuades Philip, Claudia, her mother, and her two brothers to become Kirishitans. After Philip is elected as bishop and is assassinated, the family goes back to Rome. Eugenia becomes the pastor of the community of Kirishitan virgins, and Claudia, of widows. Working with Pope Cornelius, Protho, and Iachinto, Eugenia also guides a royal woman, Basilla, to Kirishitan faith and trains her as the head of the virgin’s community. This flourishing Kirishitan clan becomes a target of persecution by Emperor Valerian. Yōfō Paulo’s version of the emperor’s charge against Kirishitans predicts the impending persecution in Japan. It says that the Kirishitans “rebel against the regulations (go fatto) of the imperial government (c ōgui); despising the reign of the imperial house (ch ōca) advancing over generations, they shame the true god (fonzon), and leave the way of husband and wife.”36 The choice of the term go fatto for the regulations signals the Tokugawa’s use of their own regulations based on Confucian ideology of filial piety.37 These go fatto regulations first
42 Haruko Nawata Ward demanded obedience of all Japanese citizens to the power of the shogun as fonzon, true deity, and condemned Kirishitans for refusing to worship him. Second, the go fatto absolutized the authority of the patriarchal heads of the families and the duty of women to produce sons. Kirishitan women pursuing perpetual chastity threatened such a system. In the context of the authorities’ increasing subjugation of all citizens under this state religion into one national family with the shogun as the ultimate patriarch, Kirishitan St Catherine and St Eugenia exemplified resistance to politico-religious persecution and gender oppression in their acts of martyrdom. Thus, in these translations, Vicente Tōin and Yōfō Paulo localized and vernacularized the theology of martyrdom, which was a universal tradition in Christianity, and participated in the Catholic Reformation’s saint-making by means of their own resistance to Japanese religious and political institutions.
Sanctity of Kirishitan women These literary Kirishitanban female saints may have mirrored some saintly images of Kirishitan women, such as Hibiya Monica, whom Brother Luís de Almeida (c. 1524–1583) compared to Saints Agnes and Catherine of A lexandria.38 As stated earlier, JJP translators worked in teams with women such as Hibiya Monica, in whose house the early Jesuits translated stories of the saints. It is certainly conceivable that former Buddhist Kirishitan women helped male translators such as Vicente Tōin and Yōfō Paulo inject strong rejections of Buddhist misogyny including nhonin qeccai and fenj ō nanxi into Kirishitanban literature, since women directly experienced such religious restrictions. Both Buddhism and Catholicism restricted women’s full participation and leadership. The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus does not allow women to be members, and the Jesuits in Japan did not create a women’s branch.39 But Kirishitan women overcame Jesuit rejection of women ministers. Around 1600, Naitō Julia (c. 1566–1627), a former abbess of a Buddhist monastery, founded a society of Kirishitan women catechists, known as Miyaco no bicuni, or Nuns of Kyoto, under the supervision of Fathers Gnecchi Soldo-Organtino (1532–1609) and Pedro Morejón (1562–1639).40 Adopting the Jesuit active apostolate, Julia and her bicunis preached, baptized, taught Kirishitan literature, and openly debated with Buddhist scholars, very much like the Kirishitanban St Catherine. With the help of Julia’s society, the Jesuit order of all nanxi (men) reformed its own practice of nhonin qeccai, albeit briefly, in Japan. These bicunis and many other women practised their embodied public witness as nyonin (women) just as Kirishitanban St Eugenia did after she broke the taboo of fenj ō nanxi. The Miyaco no bicuni converted about 6,000 men and women in a dozen years. In 1612, the authorities arrested and publicly tortured them. In 1614, they expelled Julia and her women along with Jesuit priests, brothers, and d ōjucus from Japan. The Jesuit accounts of Julia’s resettled community near Manila, Philippines, depicted these confessors as “saints” even though the church has never recognized their sanctity officially.41
Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan 43 Many other Kirishitan women became martyrs, refusing to obey the go fatto. The Jesuits, who remained underground under the protection of Kirishitan hosts, left numerous accounts of cruel inquisition, torture, and execution of Kirishitan women, in whom they recognized signs of their saintliness.42 Like the Kirishitanban female martyr saints, these women expressed their determination to resist systems of repression, sought open freedom in claiming their identity as Kirishitans, and believed in attaining divine liberation as women at the cost of violent state execution. Among these, the Catholic Church has canonized two women as saints, and beatified 175. Closer examination of the acts of each woman martyr and their canonization process in the modern period is beyond the scope of this study. During the years of suppression, lasting until 1873, when the hidden Kirishitan communities pretended to be Buddhists for survival, martyrio become ever more deeply rooted in Kirishitan religiosity as believers secretly read stories of female martyr saints.
Notes 1 The term Kirishitan derives from Portuguese cristão, which the sixteenth-century Japanese pronounced as Kirishitan, and applied to persons and things of Catholic religion. 2 On Renaissance humanist theories of vernacular translation, see such works as A nthony Grafton, “The Availability of Ancient Works,” in C.B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (ed.) The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 767–791; and E. Rummel, Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. On the impact of biblical humanist translation movement and Protestant circulation of the Reformers’ works in translation, see, for example, B. Moeller, “Luther in Europe: His Works in Translation, 1517–1546,” in E.I. Kouri and T. Scott (eds) Politics and Society in Reformation Europe: Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 235–251. On Catholic Reformation translations of religious texts from Latin to European vernacular, see P. Burke, “The Jesuits and the Art of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in J. O’Malley et al. (eds) The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. 24–33. Essays in P. Burke and R.P. Hsia (eds) Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 provide a good overview of translation as trans-cultural movement in Europe and beyond. A number of Kirishitanban publications were translations of devotional writings of Spanish Catholic reformers such as Frey Luis of Granada (1504–1588), whose works were translated in Peru, Philippines, Goa, China, and Japan within his life time. See T.J. Dadson, Libros, Lectores Y Lecturas: Estudios Sobre Bibliotecas Particulares Españolas Del Siglo De Oro, Instrumenta bibliológica, Madrid: Arco/Libros, 1998. 3 On humanist pedagogy, translation, and male gender, see W.J. Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in Philology 56, 1959, 103–124. On humanist pedagogical programs in Jesuit schools, see Chapter 6 of J.W.O’Malley, The First Jesuits, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993; C. Casalini and C.N. Pavur (eds) Jesuit Pedagogy, 1540–1616: A Reader, Sources for the History of Jesuit Pedagogy, no. 1, Chestnut Hill, PA: Institute of Jesuit Sources, Boston College, 2016; J.W. O’Malley, “Jesuit Schools of Humanities: Yesterday and Today,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 47, no. 1, spring 2015, St. Louis, MO: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 2015; and J.M. Boryczka and E.A Petrino (eds) Jesuit and Feminist
44 Haruko Nawata Ward Education: Intersections in Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 4 In surveying the relatively new field of missionary linguistics, one notes the older postcolonial scholarship underscoring missionary translation as the means of imposing colonists’ languages on the colonized populations as an important tool of suppressing their voices. See articles in O. Zwartjes, and E. Hovdhaugen (eds) Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística Misionera: Selected Papers from the First International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13–16 March 2003, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub, 2004. Recent analyses of Jesuit missions in early modern Americas and Asia take a more nuanced approach to the subversive use of colonizers’ languages by the “native” translators. See A. Brickhouse, “Mistranslation, Unsettlement, La Navidad,” PMLA 128, no. 4, 2013, 938–946; R.P. Hsia, “The Catholic Mission and Translations in China, 1583–1700,” in Cultural Translation, pp. 39–51; and I. Županov, “Twisting a Pagan Tongue: Portuguese and Tamil in 16th-Century Jesuit Translations,” in K. Mills and A. Grafton (eds) Conversions: Old Worlds and New, Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2003, pp. 109–139. 5 See J.F. Schütte (ed.) Monumenta Historica Japoniae I: Textus Catalogorum Japoniae aliaeque de Personis Domibusque S.J. in Japonia, Informationes et Relationes, 1549–1654, Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1975 (MHJ in the following), p. 64: by 1560s, there were “many Japanese brothers” and several dōjucus, although these remained as unofficial status. Their official catalogue of 1584 lists 26 Japanese brothers, and nearly 100 seminarians and dōjucus. 15 Japanese Brothers “had been in the Society since the early times and taken the vows” (MHJ, p. 180). 6 On Jesuit school curriculums in Japan around 1595, see P. Gómez, Compendium Catholicae Veritatis (ed.) Jōchi Daigaku, Kirishitan Bunko, 3 vols, Tokyo: Ōzorasha, 1997; and C. Kataoka, Hachirao no seminario, Kirishitan bunka kenky ū shirizu 3, Tokyo: Kirishitan bunka kenky ū kai, 1970. 7 See H.N. Ward, “Women and Kirishitanban Literature: Translation, Gender and Theology in Early Modern Japan,” Early Modern Women: an Interdisciplinary Journal 7, 2012, 271–281, on Kirishitan women writers and translators. Translation and trans-cultural literary productions were one of the few accessible vehicles for women also in Europe and the Atlantic worlds to engage in otherwise male-dominated religious and theological discourse. See essays in M. Belle (ed.) Special Issue: Women’s Translations in Early Modern England and France, Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réforme 35, no. 4, 2012; and in H.B. Hackel and C. Kelly (eds) Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 8 On Alessandro Valignano, importation of the movable type, foundation of the Jesuit Press in Japan, and the subsequent publication of Kirishitanban, see W.J. Farge, The Japanese Translations of the Jesuit Mission Press, 1590–1614: De imitatione Christi and Guía de pecadores, Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 2003. Also see J.F. Schütte, Valignano’s Mission Principles for Japan, trans. J.J. Coyne, 2 vols, St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1980, 1985; M.A.J. Üçerler, “The Jesuit Enterprise in Japan (1573–1580),” in T.M. McCoog (ed.) The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture, 1573–1580, St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004, pp. 831–865; and M.A.J. Üçerler, “The Jesuit Enterprise in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan,” in T. Worcester (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 153–168; and also J.F. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth-Century Japan, London: Routledge, 1993. 9 On Kirishitanban literature, see E.M. Satow, The Jesuit Mission Press in Japan, 1591–1610, Tokyo: private, 1888; and J. Laures, Kirishitan Bunko; a Manual of Books and Documents on the Early Christian Mission in Japan. With Special Reference to the Principal Libraries in Japan and More Particularly to the Collection at Sophia University, Tokyo. With an Appendix of Ancient Maps of the Far East, Especially Japan,
Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan 45
10 11 12 13 14
15
16 17 18
19
20
Monumenta Nipponica Monographs 5, 3rd. rev., Tokyo: Sophia University, 1957; its updates on Sophia University Laures Kirishitan Bunko Database at http://d igitalarchives.sophia.ac.jp/laures-kirishitan-bunko/ (accessed 13 August 2018); and M. Toyoshima (ed.) Kirishitan to shuppan, Tokyo: Yagi shoten, 2013. The genres include language tools such as dictionaries, grammar and Racuy ōx ū [collection of kanji] (published in Nagasaki?, 1598); doctrinal textbooks such as Doctrina Cristão (Kazusa?, 1592); liturgical manuals such as Bautismo no sazukeyō [How to baptize] (Amacusa?, 1593); Japanese poems and abridged Japanese classics such as Rōeizappitsu (Nagasaki?, 1600), Taiheiki (1611), and Feiqe [Heike] (Amakusa, 1592); and translated devotional volumes such as Fides no d ōxi (Amakusa, 1592) and Guia do picador (Nagasaki, 1599). R. Clements, A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 7. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 13. On Kirishitanban in the history of Japanese book print industry, see P. Kornicki, Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century, Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2016, pp. 125–127. See also H.D. Smith, II, “The History of the Book in Edo and Paris,” in J.L. McClain, J.M. Merriman, and K. Ugawa (eds) Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1994, pp. 332–352. On the markings of Buddhist, biblical, dialect, class-specific, and female-specific vocabulary in the Kirishitanban dictionaries and grammar books, see T. Maruyama, “Linguistic Studies by Portuguese Jesuits in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Japan,” in Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística Misionera, pp. 140–160, especially pp. 143–144 on the “help of a considerable number of Japanese collaborators” in supplying female words to the Jesuits. I. Levy, “Introduction: Modern Japan and the Trialectics of Translation,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 20, December 2008, as cited in Clements, A Cultural History of Translation, p. 3, note 15. See B.S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe, Harvard Historical Studies 134, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 290. During the 1560s missionaries such as Luís Fróis (1532–1597) and Gaspar Vilela (1527–1572), Japanese dōjucus such as Lourenço (1526–1592) and Damian (n.d.), and laywomen such as Hibiya Monica (c. 1549–1577) collaborated on translating stories of the saints, orally delivering them, giving and receiving feedback, and revising and circulating the manuscript in different regions. On the production process of Kirishitanban hagiographic literature, see H.N. Ward, “Images of the Incarnation in the Jesuit Japan Mission’s Kirishitanban Story of Virgin Martyr St. Catherine of Alexandria,” in W.S. Melion and L.P. Wandel (eds) Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 489–509. Only two copies of Sanctos no gosagvueo no vchi nvqigaqi (Kazusa: Jesuit Press, 1591) survive. One copy is in Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Italy; and the other in Bodleian Library, Oxford University. The facsimile of the Marciana copy is published as T. Koso (ed.), Sanctos no gosagvueo no vchi nvqigaqi, Kirishitanban seisen, Tokyo: Yūshodo, 2006. This manuscript codex, popularly called Barreto copy due to its amanuensis E mmanuel Barreto (1564–1620), survives in the Apostolic Library in the Vatican (Codices Reginenses Latini 459). The collection bears the Portuguese title Vidas gloriosas de alg ũns Sanctos e Sanctas (Glorious Lives of Some Male and Female Saints), but its content is in Japanese in Romaji. See J.F. Schütte, “Christliche Japanische Literatur, Bilder Und Druckblätter in Einem Unbekannten Vatikanischen Codex Aus Dem Jahre 1591,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 9, 1940, 226–280.
46 Haruko Nawata Ward 21 A manuscript of Martyrio no cagami (Mirror of martyrdom) was found among the materials known as Yasoky ō s ōsho (Christian writings), which the Nagasaki Inquisitional Office confiscated during the First Uragami Crackdown of hidden Kirishitans between 1789 and 1800. These materials are thought to have been first written down ca. 1596–1614. In 1896, a historian, Murakami Naojirō, made copies of the Yasoky ō s ōsho. In 1930, another historian, Anesaki Masaharu, published a critical edition of Murakami copies and titled it as Martyrio no shiori (Guidebook for martyrdom) in three parts: (1) Martyrio no susume (Exhortation of martyrdom); (2) Martyrio no cocoroye (Preparation of martyrdom); and (3) Martyrio no cagami (Mirror of martyrdom). See M. Anesaki, Kirishitan shūmon no hakugai to senpuku, Tokyo: Dōbunsha, 1930, pp. 131–239. The originals eventually were lost, and only some Murakami copies survive in the Kirishitan Bunko Library in Sophia University, Tokyo. Revised critical edition of Anesaki’s is published in S. Obara (ed.), Kirishitan no junky ō to senpuku, Kirishitan kenkyū 43, Tokyo: Kyōbunkan, 2006. A critical edition from another copy is published as H. Cieslik (ed.), Maruchiru no michi in Kirishitansho haiyasho, Nihon shisōshi taikei 25, Tokyo: Iwanami, 1970, pp. 323–360. 22 Clements translates yauarague (using modern spelling, yawarage) as translation/simplification in contrast to the common noun hon’yaku, which was used mostly for translation of Chinese sutras into Japanese (Clements, A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan, p. 11). 23 St Catherine’s chapter in SGN is entitled, “On the Martyrdom of the Glorious V irgin Saint Catherine, which appears in the record of a person named Simeon Metaphrastes. November 25” (Gloriosa Virgem Sancta Catherina no Martyrio no Yodai. Core Simeon Metaphrastes to yv fito no qirocvni miyetari. Novemb. 25.). See the parallel texts of Metaphrastes (in Greek) and Surius (in Latin) in J.P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca 116, Paris, 1864, cols. 275–302. St Eugenia’s chapter is entitled, “The Acts and Martyrdom of Saint Eugenia Virgin and her servants Protho and Iacinto. According to Vitae Patrum, edited by Saint Jeronimo and [part 1?] of the writings of S. Antonino. December 25” (Sancta Eugenia Virgen to vonajicu sono goquenin naru Protho, mata Iacinto no gosaguio narabini Martirio no yodai. Core S. Hieronimo no asobasaretaru Vitae Patrum to S. Antonino no caqitamo joguan ni arauaruru mono nari. Decemb. 25). See J.P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina LXXIII, (Paris, 1844, cols. 605–623. Vidas gloriosas do not reveal these source texts for these chapters. 24 On the prototypical virgin martyrs, see K.A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 25 On the imposed Confucian ideologies and restriction of women’s education and public speech in the seventeenth century, see O. Endo, A Cultural History of Japanese Women’s Language, Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2006, esp. pp. 40–56. 26 SGN, 2:112. 27 P. Loos-Noji, “Temptation and Redemption: A Monastic Life in Stone,” in J.B. Holloway, C.S. Wright, and J. Bechtold (eds) Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, New York: P. Lang, 1990, pp. 220–232, citation p. 227. 28 Anson’s translation of PL73:614, found in J. Anson, “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and the Development of a Motif,” Viator 5, 1974, 23. 29 Ibid., p. 31. 30 The Yavarague (glossary) of SGN explains nhotai as vonna no catachi, or the form of a woman, but gives only molher (woman) as its Portuguese translation. Nhoxi (girl child) and nhox ō (women’s nature) are also translated simply as molher. 31 SGN, 2:118. The Yavarague does not give nhonin qeccai as one phrase, but gives Japanese explanation for qeccai as isaguiyoi imaxime (clear precept) and cousa prohibita (forbidden thing) for Portuguese translation.
Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan 47 32 See some Jesuit observations of Japanese views of women’s impure blood in Cartas que os Padres e Irmãos da Companhia de Jesus escreverão dos Reynos de Iapão e China aos da mesma Companhia da India e Europa, desdo anno de 1549 ate o de 1580, Evora, 1598, Classica japonica: facsimile series, section 2 Kirishitan materials 1, 2 vols, Nara: Tenri Central library, 1992, 2:162–162v (Luís Fróis’ letter, dated 1 October 1585); and L. Fróis, Historia de Japam, J. Wicki (ed.), 5 vols, Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, 1976–1984, 4:559. For an overview of scholarly opinions about the roots of nyonin kekkai (modern spelling for nhonin qeccai) and related term nyonin kinsei, see L.E. DeWitt, A Mountain Set Apart: Female Exclusion, Buddhism, and Tradition at Modern Ōminesan, Japan, unpublished thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015, pp. 11–18. Also see S. Matisoff, “Barred from Paradise? Mount K ōya and the Karukaya Legend,” in B. Ruch (ed.) Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan, Ann Arbor: University of M ichigan, 2002, pp. 463–500. 33 See Fróis’ explanation in Fróis, História, 2:36. 34 SGN, 2:128: “nanigoto mofacarai tam ō võaruji De9 võna nimo votto no chicara uo ataye tam ō.” 35 SGN, 2:129: “von yx ŏ uo fiqisaqi tamai, nhotai nite maximasu coto uo arauasan to voboximexeba, fuxiguinaru cana imamadeua samo guiri ŏ ni xite, caigai xiqu icaniimo tçyoqi nanxi no yofouoi uo von tachidocoro ni fiqicayerare, tachimachi nhotai ni cayer[u].” This speech omits Galatians 3:28, prominent in PL’s expression, and changes the phrase “even women who stand in fear of it [God’s name] achieve the dignity of men” into a statement about a woman receiving the power of votto from God. This term votto, which I translate as husband, is ambiguous, as it can be interpreted as simply a man, or a husband, or even a heavenly spouse. 36 The Yavarague gives Idolos for the translation of fonzon. 37 On the development of various fatto (hatto in modern spelling) codes in the Tokugawa Buke shohatto (Codes for Military Clans), including the ban of Kirishitan religion between 1611 and 1663, see T. Gonoi, Tokugawas shoki Kirishitanshi kenkyū, 2nd ed., Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1992; H. Yamamoto, Kan’ei jidai, Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1989; and S. Murai, Kirishitan kinsei no chiikiteki tenkai, Tokyo: Iwata shoin, 2007. 38 See Cartas que los Padres y Hermanos de la Compañia de Iesus, que andan en los Reynos de Iapon …, Alcala: J.I. de Lequerica, 1575, p. 189. 39 See Saint Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. G.E. Ganss, St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970, pp. 262–263. 4 0 On Naitō Julia and other women catechists, see H.N. Ward, Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, see especially pp. 61–104, 221–244; and H.N. Ward, “Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549–1650,” in Alison Weber (ed.) Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016, pp. 312–330. 41 For the examples of hagiographic treatment of “Saint” Julia’s “holy” congregation in Manila, see F. Colín, Labor Evangélica, ministerios apostolicos de los obreros de la Compañía de Jesús, fundacion, y progressos de su providencia en las Islas Filipinas, 3 vols, Madrid, 1663; repr. P. Pastells, Barcelona: Henrich, 1900–1992, 3:524; and J. de Salazar, annual letter 1634–1635, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus), Philippinarum 7I, 200v–202v. In 2017, the church beatified Takayama Ukon Justo (1552–1615), a Kirishitan layman, who was exiled to Manila on the same boat with Julia and Miyaco no bicuni. 4 2 Fort a catalogue of martyrs and their primary sources, see J.G. Ruiz de Medina, El Martirologio del Japón 1558–1873, Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2000.
48 Haruko Nawata Ward
Bibliography Primary sources Anesaki, M. (ed.), Kirishitan shūmon no hakugai to senpuku, Tokyo: Dōbunsha, 1930. Cartas que los Padres y Hermanos de la Compañia de Iesus, que andan en los Reynos de Iapon escrivieron a los de la misma Compañia, desde el año de mil y quinientos y quarenta y nueve, hasta el de mil y quinientos y setenta y uno, Alcala: J. I. de Lequerica, 1575. Cartas que os Padres e Irmãos da Companhia de Jesus escreverão dos Reynos de Iapão e China aos da mesma Companhia da India e Europa, desdo anno de 1549 ate o de 1580 (Evora, 1598), Classica japonica: facsimile series, section 2 Kirishitan materials 1, 2 vols, Nara: Tenri Central library, 1992. Cieslik, H. (ed.), Maruchiru no michi in Kirishitansho haiyasho, Nihon shisōshi taikei 25, Tokyo: Iwanami, 1970. Colín, F., Labor Evangélica, ministerios apostolicos de los obreros de la Compañía de Jesús, fundacion, y progressos de su providencia en las Islas Filipinas, 3 vols, Madrid, 1663; repr. P. Pastells, Barcelona: Henrich, 1900–1992. de Salazar, J., annual letter 1634–1635, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Philippinarum 7I, 181–394v. Fróis, L., Historia de Japam, ed. J. Wicki, 5 vols, Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, 1976–1984. Gómez, P., Compendium Catholicae Veritatis, ed. J. Daigaku, Kirishitan Bunko, 3 vols, Tokyo: Ōzorasha, 1997. Koso, T. (ed.), Sanctos no gosagvueo no vchi nvqigaqi, Kirishitanban seisen, Tokyo: Yūshodo, 2006. Migne, J.P. (ed.), Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina LXXIII, Paris: Excudebat Migne, 1844, cols 605–623. ———, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca 116, Paris: Excudebat Migne, 1864, cols 275–302. Obara, S. (ed.), Kirishitan no junky ō to senpuku, Kirishitan kenkyū 43, Tokyo: K yōbunkan, 2006. Ruiz de Medina, J.G., El Martirologio del Japón 1558–1873, Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2000. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. G.E. Ganss, St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970. Schütte, J.F. (ed.), Monumenta Historica Japoniae I: Textus Catalogorum Japoniae aliaeque de Personis Domibusque S.J. in Japonia, Informationes et Relationes, 1549–1654, Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1975. Sophia University, Laures Kirishitan Bunko Database. Online. Available HTTP: http:// digital-archives.sophia.ac.jp/laures-kirishitan-bunko/> (accessed 13 August 2018). Vidas gloriosas de alg ũns Sanctos e Sanctas, Apostolic Library in the Vatican, Codices Reginenses Latini 459.
Secondary sources Anson, J., “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and the Development of a Motif,” Viator 5, 1974, 1–32. Belle, M. (ed.), Special Issue: Women’s Translations in Early Modern England and France, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 35, no. 4, 2012. Boryczka, J.M. and E.A. Petrino (eds), Jesuit and Feminist Education: Intersections in Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan 49 Brickhouse, A., “Mistranslation, Unsettlement, La Navidad,” PMLA 128, no. 4, 2013, 938–946. Burke, P., “The Jesuits and the Art of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in J. O’Malley et al. (eds) The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. 24–33. Burke, P. and R.P. Hsia (eds), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Casalini, C. and C.N. Pavur (eds), Jesuit Pedagogy, 1540–1616: A Reader, Sources for the History of Jesuit Pedagogy, no. 1, Chestnut Hill, PA: Institute of Jesuit Sources, Boston College, 2016. Clements, R., Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Dadson, T.J., Libros, Lectores Y Lecturas: Estudios Sobre Bibliotecas Particulares Españolas Del Siglo De Oro, Instrumenta bibliológica, Madrid: Arco/Libros, 1998. DeWitt, L.E., A Mountain Set Apart: Female Exclusion, Buddhism, and Tradition at Modern Ōminesan, Japan, unpublished thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015. Endo, O., A Cultural History of Japanese Women’s Language, Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2006. Farge, W.J., The Japanese Translations of the Jesuit Mission Press, 1590–1614: De imitatione Christi and Guía de pecadores, Lewiston, ME: E. Mellen Press, 2003. Gonoi, T., Tokugawas shoki Kirishitanshi kenkyū, 2nd edn, Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1992. Grafton, A., “The Availability of Ancient Works,” in C.B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds) The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 767–791. Gregory, B.S., Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe, Harvard Historical Studies 134, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Hackel, H.B. and C. Kelly (eds), Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Hsia, R.P., “The Catholic Mission and Translations in China, 1583–1700,” in P. Burke and R.P. Hsia (eds) Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 39–51. Kataoka, C. Hachirao no seminario, Kirishitan bunka kenky ū shirizu 3, Tokyo: Kirishitan bunka kenky ū kai, 1970. Kornicki, P., Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century, Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2016. Laures J., Kirishitan Bunko; a Manual of Books and Documents on the Early Christian Mission in Japan. With Special Reference to the Principal Libraries in Japan and More Particularly to the Collection at Sophia University, Tokyo. With an Appendix of Ancient Maps of the Far East, Especially Japan, Monumenta Nipponica Monographs 5, 3rd. rev., Tokyo: Sophia University, 1957. Levy, I., “Introduction: Modern Japan and the Trialectics of Translation,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 20, December 2008, 1–14. Loos-Noji, P., “Temptation and Redemption: A Monastic Life in Stone,” in J.B. Holloway, C.S. Wright, and J. Bechtold (eds) Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, New York: P. Lang, 1990, pp. 220–232. Maruyama, T. “Linguistic Studies by Portuguese Jesuits in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Japan,” in O. Zwartjes and E. Hovdhaugen (eds) Missionary Linguistics/
50 Haruko Nawata Ward Lingüística Misionera: Selected Papers from the First International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13–16 March 2003, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub, 2004, pp. 140–160. Matisoff, S., “Barred from Paradise? Mount K ōya and the Karukaya Legend,” in B. Ruch (ed.) Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002, pp. 463–500. Moeller, B., “Luther in Europe: His Works in Translation, 1517–1546,” in E.I. Kouri and T. Scott (eds) Politics and Society in Reformation Europe: Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 235–251. Moran, J.F., The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth-Century Japan, London: Routledge, 1993. Murai, S., Kirishitan kinsei no chiikiteki tenkai, Tokyo: Iwata shoin, 2007. O’Malley, J.W., The First Jesuits, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———, “Jesuit Schools of Humanities: Yesterday and Today,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 47, no. 1, spring 2015, St. Louis, MO: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 2015. Ong, W.J., “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Studies in Philology 56, 1959, 103–124. Rummel, E. Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Satow, E.M., The Jesuit Mission Press in Japan, 1591–1610, Tokyo: private, 1888. Schütte, J.F., “Christliche Japanische Literatur, Bilder Und Druckblätter in Einem Unbekannten Vatikanischen Codex Aus Dem Jahre 1591,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 9, 1940, 226–280. Schütte, J.F., Valignano’s Mission Principles for Japan, trans. J.J. Coyne, 2 vols, St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1980, 1985. Smith, H.D. II, “The History of the Book in Edo and Paris,” in J.L. McClain, J.M. Merriman, and K. Ugawa (eds) Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era, Ithaca: Cornell University, 1994, pp. 332–352. Toyoshima, M. (ed.), Kirishitan to shuppan, Tokyo: Yagi shoten, 2013. Üçerler, M.A.J., “The Jesuit Enterprise in Japan (1573–1580), in T.M. McCoog (ed.) The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture, 1573–1580, St. Louis, MO: (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004), pp. 831–865. ———, “The Jesuit Enterprise in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan,” in T. Worcester (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 153–168. Ward, H.N., “Images of the Incarnation in the Jesuit Japan Mission’s Kirishitanban Story of Story of Virgin Martyr St. Catherine of Alexandria,” in W.S. Melion and L.P. Wandel (eds) Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 489–509. ———, “Women and Kirishitanban Literature: Translation, Gender and Theology in Early Modern Japan,” Early Modern Women: an Interdisciplinary Journal 7, 2012, 271–281. ———, “Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549–1650,” in Alison Weber (ed.) Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016, pp. 312–330. ———, Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Winstead, K.A., Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Yamamoto, H., Kan’ei jidai, Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1989.
Christian martyrdom in Buddhist Japan 51 Županov, I., “Twisting a Pagan Tongue: Portuguese and Tamil in 16th-Century J esuit Translations,” in K. Mills and A. Grafton (eds) Conversions: Old Worlds and New, Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2003, pp. 109–139. Zwartjes, O. and E. Hovdhaugen (eds), Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística Misionera: Selected Papers from the First International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13–16 March 2003, Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Pub, 2004.
4 Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome Giorgio Caravale
Historical studies on gypsies in early modern Europe carried out in the past few decades have followed either an approach based on ethnic identity or a socio-economic strategy. Influenced by sociological studies, the former focussed on gypsies’ supposed common identity and ethnic origin, claiming that they must be seen as a people with Indian roots who managed to keep their ethnicity intact when they left their country of origin.1 The latter approach concentrated more on the social position of gypsies than on their economic status, comparing them to the groups of poor marginalized criminals that populated the cities and countryside in the Old Regime, and reconstructing their story in tandem with these social outcasts.2 Miriam Eliav-Feldon has outlined both approaches and discussed which had the greater influence on the prevailing attitude towards gypsies.3 She stresses that the early modern period was characterized by an obsession with purity and contagion that took shape in the idea that men and women born into certain groups could contaminate the social fabric of their places of residence regardless of their faith or culture.4 This attitude fuelled the Spanish ideology of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the action taken by the Spanish Inquisition against converted Jews also extended to gypsies. The idea that some ethnic groups were recognizable in the light of certain characteristics deemed “inseparable from their existence” was applied to gypsies, who were often identified as “thieves by nature.” On the basis of analysis of literary texts of the time, the author even equates the burgeoning “racist” attitude towards gypsies displayed by some authors to certain traits of anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 However, this daring juxtaposition is then played down by the observation that neither inquisitorial authorities nor Protestant consistories were ever interested in gypsies.6 Unlike Jews and Moors, gypsies were not affiliated with a religion that they had been forced to abandon and which they could return to. Instead, they showed readiness to adapt to the religious customs of the countries that welcomed them. Gypsies were depicted as groups with a high degree of religious flexibility in all contemporary descriptions, ready to shape their beliefs and rituals around those in their place of residence. In this way, they became C hristians in Christian states, Muslims in Muslim countries, and so on.7 Therefore, after initially adopting the ethnic identity interpretation, Eliav-Feldon seems inclined to support
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 53 the idea that gypsies were perceived more as a social or socio-economic problem than an ethnic group or religious minority and ultimately embraces the second of the two traditional approaches. With regard to these two traditional historiographical approaches, some recent studies have suggested shifting the focus onto the fundamental role played by the authorities in identifying and stigmatizing gypsies, underlining, for example, that the term gypsies was used at various times to refer to other itinerant groups who duly embodied the associated image. In other words, historians are advised to concentrate on the process by which these groups were socially constructed, a procedure triggered by the stigmatization and labelling mechanisms implemented by the authorities.8 In particular, they should focus on how gypsies were perceived and treated by society and the way in which government policies influenced the social and economic position of gypsies and other itinerant groups at different times.9 This perspective has been enhanced by recent studies on immigration in the early modern period, and more generally by the phenomenon of individual mobility and the related issue of personal identification. Freedom of movement in early modern Europe was accompanied by rules that required individuals to integrate into a community (in some cases becoming “naturalized” or even citizens) and that frequently penalized those who failed to do so. These regulations sometimes included legislation forcing people who practised a nomadic lifestyle to settle in a fixed abode; from the late fifteenth century onwards, gypsies were identified as unrepentant vagabonds who could only be redeemed by choosing a permanent place of residence.10 There was a tendency to marginalize any groups that did not submit to these rules because of their mobility rather than their poverty. Although communities allowed immigration and promoted it to a certain extent, they saw themselves as associations of people whose purpose was to create long-term ties based on mutual trust and reliance.11 One of the results of this process was a proliferation of passports and other documents in order to guarantee to the competent authorities that the mobility of individuals or groups was justified by good reason. A typical eighteenth-century passport certified the names of its bearer and their parents, along with place of birth, occupation, age, and a physical description, stating the reasons for travelling and certifying their legitimacy and validity.12 The first regular references to identification documents are passports or safe conducts carried by gypsies in Europe. However, the imperial German Reichspolizeiordnung of 1551 and a long subsequent series of ordinances instructed the authorities to confiscate and destroy any identity papers shown by gypsies on the basis of the assumption that they were false; it seems that individuals or groups whose status was illegitimate could not by definition possess legal documents.13 Although none of the recent studies on migration in early modern Europe systematically focus on gypsies, many highlight mobility as the most characteristic identity trait of groups referred to as gypsies.14 In dealings with the competent authorities, they themselves presented their mobility as an essential element of their identity: “I’m a Gypsy and I go a-wandering.”15 However, the distinctive feature that they proudly claimed in order to define their
54 Giorgio Caravale community of origin was often perceived as a social danger by those in power. In a social and economic context where the drive for mobility was offset by the civil and religious authorities’ insistence on identification, sedentarization, assimilation, and sometimes integration, gypsies were seen as a potentially dangerous group as they were not subject to such dynamics. The most recent and innovative studies on the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in Old Regime communities – in particular regarding the condition of “extraneousness” – help to focus on new questions about the presence of gypsies in early modern European cities. The point is no longer only whether (and how much) gypsies supported themselves through illegal behaviour such as stealing (thereby triggering repressive reactions from the civil and religious authorities), but rather whether these itinerant groups complied with the integration and assimilation policies implemented by the same bodies. The condition of extraneousness or foreignness was not necessarily linked to the origins of the individuals in question; it could be experienced by anyone at any stage of life regardless of their background. It was a condition related to the uncertainty of being, which could lead anyone to be perceived as a foreigner at a given moment in their life. The antidote to this state of extraneousness involved factors such as the individual’s local affiliation, public recognition by the community, the construction of a local reputation and a bond of trust often earned through having a fixed abode, paying taxes, and participating in everyday life.16 Historians analysing these social groups now need to ask to what extent gypsies were prepared to meet these conditions and how much acceptance risked compromising their individual and group identity, so closely linked to the concept of mobility. This article will address these questions by focussing on gypsies in Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is clearly a context in which tension over the assimilation and integration of “foreigners” can be seen within the framework of a broader project of spiritual conquest or reconquest that led Rome to develop spiritual strategies of varying sophistication in the early modern age to (re)conquer the hearts and souls of those who had deserted or never approached Catholicism. Furthermore, this assimilation strategy sometimes lacked the repressive characteristics commonly found in Spain, states in the Italian peninsula, and elsewhere in Europe.17 While other European countries saw gypsies purely as a public order problem, Rome also regarded them as a group of souls to conquer or “lost sheep” to be led back to the fold. It is certainly true that unlike many of the heretics and pagans that Rome wanted to reconquer by force or persuasion, gypsies did not belong to any distinct religious confession and therefore had no religion to abjure or a past to forswear. However, it must be stressed that the context of this spiritual reconquest project tended to make the Roman authorities’ policy of forcibly assimilating gypsies less violent. It should be clarified from the beginning that the assimilation stage in the seventeenth century was only reached after the relationship between gypsies and the Roman authorities had experienced various vicissitudes, which can be schematically divided into three phases. The first of these – from the fifteenth
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 55 century to the early decades of the sixteenth century – is characterized by the benevolent and sympathetic attitude of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities towards peoples who presented themselves in the same way as travelling pilgrims. The second phase – up to the beginning of the seventeenth century – is marked by an angry reaction from the governing authorities and a series of sometimes systematic repressive measures. Finally, the third phase, which largely coincides with the seventeenth century, is characterized by what was essentially an attempt at forced assimilation. This is what we will focus on in this article. After coming to the peninsula, gypsies hid or in any case denied their nomadic nature, as they were probably aware that this aspect would not have been favourably regarded by their future hosts. Instead, they relied on a tale that highlighted their sedentary origins and the provisional and expiatory nature of their roaming, with the certainty that they would thereby benefit from greater understanding.18 This account of an expiatory pilgrimage was intended to appeal to long-standing deeply rooted religious feelings, an innate sense of charity that the inhabitants of Italian cities were steeped in. The fact that gypsies often took advantage of the naivety and compassion of local people was a determining factor in triggering a change in attitude among the elite and ruling classes in the long term.19 However, the early stages of their stay in the Papal States were definitely characterized by a benevolent welcome. In more general terms, the medieval predisposition to benevolence towards the poor – and by extension social marginality – was still very strong at the beginning of the fifteenth century. These cultural conditions thus allowed the first groups of gypsies in Italy to benefit from the benevolence and charity of those prepared to believe their penitential story and marvel at the supposed prophetic gifts of their womenfolk (such as Lord Andreas’ wife in Rome in the early 1420s). The first concrete signs of growing suspicion did not appear until the 1520s and 1530s, soon translating into repressive regulations and bandi (proclamations) in the middle decades of the century. For example, the local authorities in Modena asked for gypsies to be expelled from their territory in April 1524 and started to prosecute those that had committed theft three years later.20 In 1535, an edict was issued in Jesi in the Papal States imposing a maximum stay in the territory of three days for gypsies, on pain of a ten-ducat fine. As such legislation gradually assumed a repressive character, fines were gradually replaced by corporal punishment, and a 1551 edict issued in Jesi featured stricter clauses. The first official proclamation on gypsies was issued on 4 January 1552 in Rome by Governor Gerolamo de Rossi, under Pope Julius III (Giovanni Maria Del Monte). It made explicit reference to the link between gypsies and criminality for the first time and maintained the same kind of penalties.21 In 1553, Cardinal Legate Sabelli extended these measures to cover the entire territory under his jurisdiction. From Macerata, he ordered his vice-legate to publish a very similar bando on 30 July.22 On 17 July 1555, the Governor of Rome, Monsignor Scipione Rebiba, issued a proclamation ordering gypsies to leave the territory of Rome within a day, while on 24 March 1556, his successor Governor
56 Giorgio Caravale Monsignor Cesare Brancazi published a fresh bando ordering gypsies to leave the city and its surrounding territory within three days.23 Just a few months later, on 10 October 1556, the new Governor, Francesco Bandini Piccolomini, once again ordered gypsies to depart from Roman territory immediately.24 Finally, the Prefect of the Provisions (“Prefetto dell’Annona”), Monsignor Bartolomeo Benevento, reiterated the same ordinance in December 1557 with a deadline of two days, on pain of prison for men and whipping for women.25 In the previous year, 1556, Camillo Mentuato, the Bishop of Satriano and Governor of the Marches of Ancona, had also forced gypsies to leave the territory within three days of the publication of the proclamation, on pain of three strappado hoists and imprisonment for men and fifty lashes for women and children.26 Gypsies were totally identified with vagabonds, loafers, and foreigners of any kind. In 1561, Pius IV issued a Bando sopra la provisione dei poveri mendicanti (Proclamation on the provision for poor mendicants), establishing that the needy be confined to special areas or shelters on pain of banishment or imprisonment. Three years later, Pius V published a papal bull prohibiting the poor from entering churches to beg during services, while in 1569 he planned to confine all poor people to four areas and provide for their needs there. The period between these last two measures featured one of the harshest proclamations against gypsy peoples. With the approval of Bolognese authorities, Cardinal Crasso issued a bando on 12 May 1565 ordering all gypsies to leave the territory within eight days on pain of flogging and imprisonment. All previously issued permits were revoked, and anyone could send gypsies away from the fields and roads towards the boundaries of the territory. Their belongings could even be seized after the eight days had elapsed; they were thus treated in the same way as bandits. The edict also ordered that no consideration be given to the fact that some of them owned a house and no longer dressed as gypsies. The repressive focus of the bando was therefore a policy of segregation that rejected all assimilation and any attempts at sedentarization made by some gypsy families. 27 In this way, the Papal States were still acting perfectly in line with the repressive policies of public control implemented by the secular authorities in other Italian states. For instance, a 1587 edict in the Duchy of Milan prescribed capital punishment for gypsies who decided to abandon their distinctive signs and dress as non-gypsies. According to this de facto segregation, clothing was a stronger distinguishing feature than clear ethnic traits like skin colour or language.28 In July 1566, Cardinal Vitellozzo Vitelli, Chamberlain to Pope Pius V, extended the existing ban on entry and residence to the whole of the Papal States (therefore, no longer just applying to the city of Rome), with punishments to be imposed “irremissibly.”29 The harsh repressive stance taken by Pius V, which was first legally encoded in the 1566 bando, also influenced the resolutions made by the provincial council of Ravenna convened by the Pope in 1568. With regard to gypsies, the section De Cinganis in Chapter II describes them as a “race of wandering people steeped in every impiety” and stated that “if they do not live in a Christian way and do not abstain from their superstitions and reprehensible rites of life,
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 57 bishops must take steps to expel them from their dioceses and send them as far away as possible.”30 In this way, the recurrent threat of banishment was now accompanied for the first time by a fresh element, a possible alternative offered by the ecclesiastical authorities to those who did not wish to go into exile. The phrase “if they do not live in a Christian way” suggested that gypsies had the opportunity to integrate into local communities by renouncing all of their distinctive features and above all by relinquishing their ways of life to embrace the Christian life. This was a major transformation compared to the Bolognese proclamation issued just three years previously (1565): the policy of segregation was now moving in the opposite direction towards what has been defined as a “policy of forced assimilation.” Indeed, there was a significant drop in the number of bandi at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century.31 The provincial councils now took charge of the new legislation regarding gypsies: the Provincial Council of Naples in 1576, the councils of Trani (1589) and Bari (1628), those of Santa Severina (1592) and Cosenza (1596) and the synods of the bishops of Capaccio in Cilento all firmly stressed the prospect of banishment in the event of non-alignment with the practices of Christian life.32 This policy of assimilating gypsies into a Christian way of life was definitively formalized a few decades later by an edict issued on 24 September 1631 by Cardinal Francesco Barberini, Superintendent General of the Papal States, and expressly requested by Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini), significantly entitled Sopra la reduttione de’ zingari e zingare al bene vivere (On the transformation of gypsies to good living).33 What was meant by the term “good living” soon became clear: the explicit intention was to “transform Gypsies from their usual wandering around the countryside to civil living and hard work in the city, doing commendable work to support themselves and their families in an honourable way.” To this end, “all Gypsies were ordered […] to appear before the Governor of the city where they are now or will be in the future” to provide “their names, surnames, fathers […] clearly to be written in the book that the clerk [the Governor’s criminal clerk] will have to keep for this purpose.” The aim was to make them publicly undertake to “apply themselves to commendable work in that city.” If this failed to happen within the deadline of ten days granted by the Governor, they “will leave the Papal States, on pain of imprisonment for ten years if they are fit for such a punishment, otherwise public whipping and permanent exile.” All those who went to the Governor’s office to display their good will within the established deadline would be given a printed document (bollettino stampato) and anyone caught wandering without it, after the deadline had expired, would incur severe punishments: Gypsies that are found in any place after the aforementioned deadline around the countryside without the above-mentioned documents will be arrested. And if they put up strong resistance with weapons and injure any of those who are there to arrest them, they will incur the death penalty for any injury with blood and life imprisonment for injury without blood.
58 Giorgio Caravale The assimilation process included the material abandonment of gypsy clothes, above all by women, who wore particularly ostentatious garments with unmistakable distinctive features: Female Gypsies […] must lay down their Gypsy dress, or rather destroy it so that it is no longer suitable for such use, on pain of public whipping and permanent exile. This penalty will be applied to any person found with any Gypsy clothing, whether it is his or whether it came into his hands. At this point, duly repentant and stripped of their distinctive features, ex-gypsies were ready to be welcomed by the Christian population. The edict ordered that Gypsies who adapt to the city and behave in a Christian way be treated well by everyone, as if they had never been Gypsies for any length of time, so that they are rehabilitated and taken for men of that city, as if they had been born and raised there. The aim was therefore to eliminate any trace of the past and turn every gypsy into a good Christian. Anyone who went against this legislation by continuing to use terms and epithets that recalled their forbidden past would be punished; the order was for “everyone not to insult them with the name Gypsy on pain of three strappado hoists for common people, and a hundred golden scudoes for civil people at the will of the Governor of Rome.”34 In order to lose their status as foreigners, gypsies therefore had to go through a process of sedentarization and insertion into the social structure of the city, which culminated in the construction of a local reputation.35 Gypsies were asked not only to forswear their eternal wandering in order to find a job and a fixed abode, but also to become active members of the Christian communities that welcomed them by trusting them and, in turn, earning the trust of the good Christians in the community. The model applied was a concept of Christian citizenship with the objectively determinable basis of the idea of “irreproachability seen as the variable sum total of reputation, membership of a solid set of families, religious faith, legal status and economic and civic reliability.”36 One fundamental step in this process was the need to renounce their traditional “Gypsy clothes,” a contrast to previously implemented policies in Rome and Milan that forced them to retain their distinctive signs. Indeed, until a few decades before, “Gypsy dress” had been cited as a clear sign that reassured the civil and religious authorities, who often had to deal with attempts at disguise and different forms of pretence.37 Gypsies had to be clearly recognizable and the treatment meted out to them was closely linked to their discernible status as outsiders in the local community. The end of the heretical threat, the religious and political stabilization of many ancient Italian states and the spiritual reconquest strategy implemented by the Roman authorities all contributed to the establishment of a different attitude in the early seventeenth century. As this aimed to integrate groups of gypsies by stripping them off their old identity so that they could sport a new one, the forced renunciation of traditional
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 59 clothes can be seen as a metaphor for a new policy aimed at assimilating foreigners. In the Papal States and countries where the Church authorities exerted influence, this policy inevitably took on spiritual – perhaps even missionary – overtones.38 We can only understand the full scope of the 1631 edict if we contextualize it within the more general social policy on gypsies adopted by the Church authorities in the first few decades of the seventeenth century. The policy of assimilation dates back to 16 August 1600, when the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine commissioned Giuseppe Calasanzio “to negotiate with the Gypsies and establish the most convenient time for them to teach them the doctrine.”39 In other words, gypsies had become an object of special interest for the ecclesiastical hierarchy; ripe for spiritual conquest, they were presented as “new Indians” to be indoctrinated. After having expunged the Protestant threat from their territories, the upper echelons of the Catholic hierarchy were now focussing on winning back souls, and Jews, Moriscos, and peoples of the Otras Indias (“Other Indies”) became terrain for spiritual reconquest in the eyes of Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Unlike Jews and Moriscos, however, gypsies did not have a religion to be kept away from or a creed to repudiate. In fact, they had always declared themselves good Christians and had always shown a remarkable ability to adapt to the habits and customs of the place where they were living, which made them an even more desirable prey for the advocates of post-Tridentine recatholicization. The picture created was delightfully pastoral, with special missions to catholicize gypsies organized alongside the popular missions to win back the masses of illiterate country folk. In Naples, for example, Cardinal Francesco Buoncompagni was the first to take such measures, appointing the Jesuit Francesco Brancaccio to undertake a mission among the gypsies who had taken up residence in the city. Having cared for the souls of the poor and the destitute at the church of Carminiello al Mercato since 1610, Brancaccio also focussed on the religious acculturation of the Gitano community camped outside Porta Capuana from 1627 onwards. A Jesuit historian later wrote: “they had recently arrived in Naples and they led their lives almost like ethnic people with superstition, impiety and lasciviousness, adding to their other wickedness even incestuous marriages and lack of restraint in public.”40 Father Brancaccio achieved the expected results by using ordinary pastoral means: preaching, catechesis, an introduction to sacramental practice and assistance. He gathered them together in a congregation dedicated to Christ’s coming to Egypt because of their supposed Egyptian origins and much more besides: “He gave them laws to live civilly and as men. He divided families with different surnames which, so that they were easier to remember, he took at random from the names of the tools of their professions, such as hammer, pincers, and other similar implements and in so doing prevented future marriages invalidated by the laws of the Holy Canons. Therefore, through the Father’s work, the gypsies became very different from what they were before.”41 Indoctrination and being educated to live like a Christian were the other side of the coin. Without this positive action to provide gypsies with the tools to transform their lives effectively, repressive measures such as the 1631 decree were
60 Giorgio Caravale destined to failure. Gypsies were offered something much further-reaching than a lifestyle adjustment – a radical change of identity. Their resulting dilemma was lucidly grasped by Rinaldo di Paolin cingano, a gypsy tried in Veneto at the end of the sixteenth century: it was a straight choice between being a Gypsy and living the Christian way, between spurning, expunging, and forgetting their original identity and adopting a new Christian identity with no half measures. Gypsies were expected to have their souls totally purified and be dispossessed of their identities as an essential precondition for donning the new habit tailor-made for them by the Church authorities. Rinaldo and several others tried to escape this identity assimilation by reformulating the distinction made by the governing authorities (both semantically and otherwise). Instead of a Christian identity contrasted with a gypsy identity (living the Christian way against being Gypsies), living the Christian way was seen as an alternative to roaming with Gypsies, where Christian living was a new way of life radically different from gypsy habits and customs rather than a new identity to be worn. Replying to his inquisitors about the reasons for his presence in Montagnana, where he had lived for a year with his sister-in-law and children, he stated: “I left the company of Gypsies to live the Christian way and as a good man, going to work in the country and toiling to earn bread for my poor children.” In an even clearer way, in response to the rector’s question about the ban imposed “on all you other Gypsies” on “living and working in any place in this State,” Rinaldo said: “I am a baptized Christian and I no longer want to roam with Gypsies, as I want to live the Christian way, given that even some Jews and Turks are admitted to the faith and become Christians.” Rinaldo di Paolin said that he was prepared to give up his “Gypsy lifestyle,” stating that he had done so some time ago, but insisted on defining himself as stateless and a gypsy. In other words, he was not willing to renounce or abjure an identity that he still felt closely bound to. In an attempt to support and strengthen his client’s defence strategy, his defence lawyer formulated an additional semantic distinction: in his words, roaming with gypsies (the way of life that Rinaldo had abandoned some time ago) became practising as a gypsy, as if to underline even further that his client was prepared to repudiate a way of life rather than a moral habit or a guise. The lawyer reminded Rinaldo’s accusers that after moving “to live in this land he stopped practising as a Gypsy and started working, as labourers do in the country […], to support himself and all of his poor family, as every good man does.”42 However, the stakes were too high for the authorities to renounce their objective: the church and secular authorities constantly reiterated that being a gypsy was incompatible with living the Christian way and the statements like that made by Rinaldo di Paolino were not going to sway them. The officer who had arrested Rinaldo and his companion stated: It is extremely clear that these detainees deserve to be punished and castigated, as they have been found to be gypsies, vagabonds and thieves, who come to this area every day and commit horse theft or other crimes, as is well known.
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 61 The offenders therefore deserved to be convicted because they were gypsies, almost regardless of the outcome of the court proceedings.43 In the absence of any in-depth studies, the final outcome of this identity battle is unclear; it is currently difficult to assess the effectiveness of the assimilation programme and understand the nature of any resistance, the scope of any success or the consequences of possible failure. It can be said, however, that the project was not designed systematically or carried out uniformly. Also, the results achieved were inevitably only partial, since so much resistance and so many difficulties were encountered along the way. A first pointer in this respect – although more with regard to sedentarization than identity assimilation – comes from analysing a series of trials brought against gypsy men and women by the Criminal Tribunal of the Governor of Rome between the 1580s and the mid-seventeenth century. The testimonies of the defendants reveal a sedentarization process that was well underway, but that was full of uncertainties and compromises, starting with the court itself. In a context such as Rome, where the prevailing feature was coexistence and conflict between jurisdictions that were often at variance, the Tribunal of the Governor had acquired undisputed supremacy during the sixteenth century.44 Indeed, it was only restricted by the presence of the Tribunal of the Inquisition, although there was also close collaboration between the two for signalling cases of suspected heresy.45 It has been described as “the most important Roman court,” which “represented, in the city, the District, and often in the rest of the state, the pope’s own authority” and which from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards operated an extensive repressive strategy targeting “not only morally deviant behaviour, crimes of blood, and verbal offenses, but also transgressions that smacked of heresy” and hand them over to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.46 The desired synergy and collaboration between the Tribunal of the Governor and the Holy Office soon became evident, above all in relation to crimes of lèse-majesté.47 The first available trial of gypsies dates back to 1581 and provides an account of a sedentarization process that was still far from being achieved. The image created by the defendant’s words portrays a gypsy world fragmented into small groups, with small extended families scattered around the countryside in caves and abandoned houses: in this case, the head of the gypsy family “mastro Antonio Fabro zencaro” was accompanied by his relatives “Gioanni de Marco Antonio and my mother Lucia, my mother-in-law and my wife, Gioanni’s wife, mastro Antonio’s wife, another poor widow known as the brunette with one of her children and another little brother of mine called Antonio.”48 He soon went on to explain how they made their living and spent their days: “We’ve been on Roman soil for around a year. We’ve worked […] in Monteleone and for the castles. We work with iron and when we can’t find anything to do, we work the land and we do anything else.”49 They lacked both a steady job and a fixed abode: I have no fixed place and I move around all the time, but if I can escape from this prison I want to stay in some other land, above all in the Marches, where I was born and raised. I want to live and die there with my wife, my mother and my family.50
62 Giorgio Caravale The way that the defendant ended by expressing a wish to settle “in the Marches” seemed more like an attempt to beguile his interrogators than a reflection of his real intentions, as gypsies were fully aware of the fact that the nomadic aspect of their lifestyle (with all of its associated drawbacks) gave the governing authorities most cause for concern. However, they were far from being able or even wanting to indulge their interrogators’ desires, as nomadism was practically a structural feature of being a gypsy. This made gypsies excellent recruits for bandits in the Roman countryside, which was the case with Graziano, an inhabitant of Roviano on the land belonging to Oddo Colonna. When pressed by his accusers, this “22 or 23-year-old” gypsy smith (“my business is working any kind of iron because I’m a Gypsy and when I work, I stay on the land, as is the custom of Gypsies”) admitted having been part of the group of bandits led by the redoubtable Marco di Sciarra, who he had been introduced to by one of his “blood brothers called Domenico.”51 This was by no means an isolated case of banditry and a few years after Graziano joined Sciarra in the early 1590s, many others placed themselves under the command of Muzio Malatesta. For example, Francesco di Antonio zingaro admitted to his judges: “I knocked around with Malatesta before he escaped from the Court of Rome,” before adding that “all Gypsies hang around him, so I did too.”52 Being employed by a bandit was a natural choice for those used to subsisting on ruses and petty theft, and the pairing of nomadism and banditry seems to have strengthened over the years. A few years after the trial of Francesco di A ntonio, another group of gypsies were arrested for collaborating in horse theft with Malatesta: “I usually stay all the time in the caves in Campagnano, as is our wont” confessed the defendant somewhat candidly, confirming that gypsy habits died hard: “there are no other Gypsies as permanent residents in Campagnano, but other Gypsies come there, stay for three or four days and then move on.”53 Gypsy and Christian identities were still perceived in clearly distinct ways; when Antonio Costanzi was asked about “his work and profession” at the end of the sixteenth century, he replied: “As I’m a Gypsy, I have always been playing the Caricola’s game.”54 When he told his judges the reason why he had killed his first wife, he did not hesitate to tell them that on several occasions he had caught “both Christians and Gypsies screwing Agostina, my former wife.”55 The informed reader will notice the clear distinctions in the use of “noi” (we), “voi” (you), and “loro” (they, namely the others, or Christians). Gypsy ranks did not only consist of nomads and bandits though. Since several generations had passed since the first arrivals on the Italian peninsula, gypsy identity had been supplemented for many by a feeling of belonging to their land of birth or residence. When referring to two gypsy friends, Antonio di Camillo and Orlando, who had encouraged him to remarry after the murder of his first wife, Antonio Costanzi added that “they are Florentine and Sienese, going by what they tell me.”56 Gypsies were therefore starting to define their identities in relation to the cities where they lived, a sign of a sedentarization process in progress. When we read that a certain Antonio zingaro was arrested in 1623 “in a little square in Trastevere” for having stolen a small copper jug from the house of his
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 63 mother-in-law, there is a definite sense that gypsy habits were changing.57 Instead of theft in the countryside and near castles, or stealing horses and animals of any kind from their lawful owners, regardless of their wealth, they now committed petty thefts of items from houses in Rome, even stealing from family members. The data in Roman parish records in the mid-seventeenth century show that a growing number of families settled in the city, above all in the Monti quarter, which became increasingly characterized by the presence of gypsies in the parishes of Santi Sergio e Bacco (later S. Francesco di Paola) and San M artino.58 That said, the sedentarization process was long and painful, featuring a s ettling-in phase and undoubted adaptation difficulties experienced both by gypsy families and the Roman families they had contact with. A case in point is the account given at the trial of Francesca Canale, a gypsy, in the 1620s. Francesca shared her flat with a Neapolitan washerwoman called Vittoria, each with their own room. However, rather than leading to a happy ending, the decision to share a house soon led to a striking explosion of tension. Vittoria appeared before the judges to report what had happened, recounting that she had been brutally woken up the night before by two men accompanied by Francesca; after kicking in the locked door to her bedroom, they entered and used violence against her. When Giovanni Maria, a carpenter from next door, and another female neighbour heard her cries for help and came running, they were threatened with a sword. Francesca’s two friends then threw Vittoria down the stairs and locked the door behind them. The spoils of the assault were 25 scudos, which the washerwoman had gradually saved up, and four rings.59 A slightly later document shows that the same type of problem also occurred on a wider scale, this time involving a group of gypsies and an entire village. Shortly before the episode in question, the Governor himself had issued the order that the gypsies of Pediluco could remain where they were, as their work as smiths was useful to the whole community: With a number of Gypsies having set up house in this area, whose work as smiths was needed on a daily basis, he ordered that they should not be sent away, despite the order that they all had to leave.60 Although this seemed a perfect example of peaceful social integration, after a few months the Governor received a petition from the Prior of Pediluco explaining why the experiment was doomed to failure: many Gypsies can be seen around today that are good at their craft, not only on this land and in this territory, but also in the surrounding area. Causing excessive harm, they have damaged houses, stolen livestock, taken wheat from the harvest and other serious things. And today someone was injured with a firearm, which was the result of thefts that they had committed. This has all happened despite the fact that we have received many requests to beseech Your Excellency to order that these Gypsies be evicted from this place, given that this is the nest of all Gypsies that commit theft in the area.61
64 Giorgio Caravale Despite episodes like this that reveal the difficulties of proper urban integration and the resistance to attempts at assimilation that gypsies themselves were capable of putting up, there is no doubt that the general trend within city walls during the seventeenth century was one of gradual but irreversible sedentarization. This is also shown by numerous letters of entreaty sent to the Governor by gypsy men and women who had been sentenced to exile for various reasons.62 Among these was “Graziano, a Roman Gypsy,” who described how he was arrested “at an inn in Capo le Case while playing the cithara together with some of his night-time companions.” As the accusation of being a person waiting for a prostitute was serious enough to earn banishment, he beseeched the Governor for a pardon, not only because his wife was pregnant and because he had an old father and mother and needed to attend to his craft as a smith, but above all because “as he is a Roman Gypsy, he does not know where to go.”63 In a similar situation, Laura, the wife of Marco zingaro, “did not know where to go;” as she was poor and lame and had an infirm husband, she implored the Governor for clemency.64 Although the reliability of the excuses adopted by Graziano and Laura is open to debate, there is no doubt that they strongly desired to maintain their connections with a territory and a stability they perceived as theirs, which they were loath to renounce. There was a very different situation in the Roman countryside. Outside the framework of codified relations in the city, daily life remained faithful to the traditional patterns of interpretation for a long time, with gypsies resistant to any form of stabilization and often involved in everyday reports of theft. This is shown by the story of three gypsy brothers killed by the Governor’s squadron after resisting arrest. A witness interrogated by the judges recounted: I’ve known the Gypsies Andrea, Alessandro and Antonio, brothers and sons of a certain Domenico for about three years, since they lived near here on the border of Strettura in the Villa dei Colli at the abbey of Ferentillo. Antonio and Alessandro recently came to live in a place known as the palace outside Strettura Castle with another brother of theirs called Iaco, but after they were found to be street thieves that robbed the mendicants of Storsia, the three of them always went around the countryside together and everyone generally considered them to be common street thieves and murderers.65 According to the account given by this witness, the three brothers had tried to settle in a fixed abode but had resumed their usual lifestyle of wandering, theft, and banditry after a short time. Gypsies still aroused fear outside the city walls in the Roman countryside, which was a kind of no man’s land. When Corporal Massimiliano Contini decided to stop at an inn in Magliano with his men, he was besieged by a horde of incensed farmers and other customers who reported a long series of thefts of livestock and other items, which they thought had been committed by one or more groups of gypsies. In the end, Contini was forced to cut short his break, so that he could set off in pursuit of the suspected thieves.66 After the gypsies had been tracked down and arrested with the stolen
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 65 goods in a local cave, they told the judges a familiar-sounding story. The first interrogee said: After I took a wife and married her, as I said I’ve always wandered around here and there, working iron for the castles that we went to, always living in the countryside and in caves. I went around in the company of another Gypsy called Antonio di Giovanni. Actually I’ve never been around with others.67 The second to speak had a very similar story: “Sir, I have never been before a Governor or official in any place or received a document from anyone in order to be able to stay in the Papal States.”68 Finally, the third man simply stated: “I am a Gypsy and I go around wandering here and there.”69 Therefore, in the mid-seventeenth-century countryside, there was a very different climate from the widespread desire for sedentarization in the city, and the policy of assimilation forcefully promoted by the Roman secular and ecclesiastical authorities was still a distant chimera. Although the process of assimilating and sedentarizing gypsy groups was not effective to the same degree in urban centres and rural areas, it does not mean that the associated identity conflict was ever definitively resolved in cities; the tension between “being Gypsies” and “living as Christians” was never completely dissolved. For the Catholic authorities, as this article has shown, “living the Christian way” was totally incompatible with “being a Gypsy.” However, gypsies were willing to forswear their habits and customs – even their w andering – as well as their traditions and clothes. In other words, they were prepared to stop “acting like Gypsies” but would not renounce their identity and stop “being a Gypsy.” It is not clear what “being a Gypsy” actually consisted of, as their concept of identity took shape very differently from the ideas developed by the converted Jews, for whom it was intrinsically linked to religion, and the Moriscos, converted Moors, who were prepared to abandon their religion but not their clothes or rituals, perceived as cornerstones of their identity.70 What might make the gypsy concept of identity even more elusive is the fact that it lacks any religious, ritual, or linguistic connotations. Lucette Valensi’s statement that every process of integration requires breaking with the past and with part of the collective identity undoubtedly also applies to gypsies.71 The homes that many of them set up in their host regions, often accompanied by the acquisition of goods and property, implied that they renounced part of their identity, thereby facilitating the process of integration and in some cases even naturalization. Nevertheless, it was only a partial relinquishment. One of the ways in which their frequent resistance towards the civil and religious a uthorities – the stubborn desire to continue “being Gypsies” despite everything – manifested itself was their persistence in practising endogamous marriage and their attachment to their extended family (or “nation”). This all resulted in their privileges being negotiated with the political and religious authorities in their areas of residence on a daily basis. The legal status acquired by many through the
66 Giorgio Caravale naturalization process meant that they were perceived and treated as residents by the relevant authorities and were thereby spared the repressive repercussions of the anti-gypsy legislation in force. However, it would be difficult to define the naturalization process as accomplished.72 Although they became natives to all intents and purposes, they were destined to remain – almost always by their own volition – indigenous gypsies and were never perceived as fully fledged subjects of the Papal States or the other countries where they settled.73 The legal and material uncertainty that inevitably resulted from this desire was easily transformed into a fresh opportunity for marginalization during the eighteenth century with the worsening economic and social crises and the re-emergence of hostile feelings among the population and governing authorities. Gypsies were thus forced to assume their guise of unwelcome foreigners once again.74
Notes 1 Among historians, Angus Fraser can be seen as the leading proponent of this interpretation, which is still popular in the field of sociological studies; cfr. A. Fraser, The Gypsies, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 2 B. Geremek, “L’arrivé des tsiganes en Italie: de l”assistance à la répression,” in G. Politi, M. Rosa, and F. Della Peruta (eds) Timore e carità. I poveri nell’Italia moderna, Milan, 1980, now in B. Geremek, Uomini senza padrone. Poveri e marginali tra medioevo ed età moderna, Turin: Einaudi, 1992, pp. 151–172. 3 M. Eliav-Feldon, “Vagrants or Vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies in Early Modern Europe,” in M. Eliav-Feldon, B. Isaac, and J. Ziegler (eds) The Origins of Racism in the West, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 276–291. 4 These traits are also underlined in the recent volume by N. Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 5 She coins the noun “verminization” to describe the hostility shown towards gypsies; Eliav-Feldon, “Vagrants or Vermin,” pp. 289–291. 6 She stresses that the latter were not affected by the paranoia of dissimulation and false conversions that Jews and Muslims in Spain experienced; Eliav-Feldon, “Vagrants or vermin,” pp. 278–279. 7 See, for example, Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb, Dissertation on the Gipsies, Being an Historical Enquiry, Concerning the Manner of Life, Oeconomy, Customs and Conditions of these People in Europe, and their Origin, Printed for the editor, by G. Bigg, London, 1787, pp. 4–5. A very similar description of the gypsies is provided by the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi in the 1660s; cf. V. Friedman and R. Dankoff, “The Earliest Text in Balkan (Rumelian) Romani: A Passage from Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (Fifth Series) 1, no. 1, 1991, 156–157. 8 These elements are underlined in the introduction by L. Lucassen, W. Willems, and A. Cottaar (eds) Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-Historical Approach, Basingstoke: Macmillan-St. Martin’s Press, 1998, p. 10. Cf. also the essay in the same volume by L. Lucassen, “Eternal Vagrants? State Formation, Migration and Travelling Groups in Western Europe, 1350–1914,” pp. 55–93. For a similar approach, see more recently, R.J. Pym, The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425–1783, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 9 Lucassen, Willems, and Cottaar, “Introduction,” p. 6. 10 T. Herzog, “Naming, Identifying and Authorizing Movement in Spain and Spanish America (17–18th centuries),” in K. Breckenridge and S. Szreter (eds) Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, Oxford: Oxford
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 67
11 12
13 14
15 16
17
18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
University Press, 2012, p. 193. Cfr. also T. Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America, New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 128–133. Herzog, “Naming, Identifying and Authorizing Movement,” p. 194. This type of documentation was usually signed by local or royal authorities or military officials; cf. V. Groebner, “Describing the Person, Reading the Signs in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Identity Papers, Vested Figures, and the Limits of Identification, 1400–1600,” in J. Caplan and J. Torpey (eds) Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 15–27; and J. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Groebner, “Describing the Person,” p. 19. M. García-Arenal recently focussed on the limits of the concept of collective or group identity, claiming that, with regard to Conversos, it is difficult to speak of a collective identity that united them in the same way of perceiving and interpreting religion, society, and politics. In her opinion, it is more respectful of individual reactions and transformations to speak of individual identities, to the extent that each person reacted to the trauma of conversion with different nuances and results, facing the drama of exile or hiding their personal beliefs with their own cultural, religious, and psychological knowledge; Mercedes García-Arenal, “Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as Historiographical Problems,” Bullettin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 381, 2013, 1–19. Cfr. infra. S. Cerutti, Êtrangeres. Étude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime, La Rochelle, 2012. Some of these points are focussed on in relation to gypsies by E. Novi Chavarria, “Pluralità di appartenenze. Gruppi e individui “di nazione zingara” nel Mezzogiorno Spagnolo,” Quaderni storici 146, 2014, 383–406. Following Philip IV’s 1633 Pragmática in Spain, the new trend was for forced assimilation rather than expulsion – these repressive measures made gypsies settle and eradicated all of the traits and habits that lent substance to their unique nature; M.H. Sanchez Ortega, “La minoría gitana en el siglo XVII: Represión, discriminacion legal y intentos de asentiamento y integración,” Anales de Historia Contemporànea 25, 2009, 75–90; by the same author, see above all H. Sánchez Ortega, La Inquisición y los gitanos, Madrid: Taurus, 1988. Geremek, “L’arrivé des tsiganes,” p. 30. Ibid., p. 32. The same type of decree was also issued in other countries, above all in Germany; Geremek, “L’arrivé des tsiganes,” p. 36. ASR (Rome, Archivio di Stato), Bandi, Governo di Roma, a. 1529–1733, doc. 9. A. Campigotto, “Bandi bolognesi contro gli Zingari (sec. XVI–XVII),” Lacio Drom, 1987, n. 4, 2–27; M. Karpati, “Gli zingari nello Stato della Chiesa,” in La Chiesa cattolica e gli zingari: storia di un difficile rapporto, Paris: Centre de recherches tsiganes; Rome: Centro studi zingari, 2000, pp. 125–126. ASR, Bandi, Governo di Roma, a. 1529–1733, doc. 21, pp. 4 and 14. Ibid., p. 22. ASR, Bandi, b. 2 (1551–1562), cc. nn. A. Colocci, Zingari. Storia di un popolo errante, Turin: Loescher, 1889, 82 note 1; Karpati, “Gli zingari,” p. 126. Geremek, “L’arrivé des tsiganes,” p. 40. Ibid., p. 38; M.G. Tumminelli, “The Anti-Gypsy Legislation of the Duchy of Milan in the Early Modern Age,” in H. Kyuchukov, E. Marushiakova, and V. Popov (eds) Roma: Past, Present, Future, München: Lincom GmbH, 2016. ASR, Bandi, b. 3 (1563–1566), cc. nn.; cf. also Karpati, “Gli zingari,” p. 128.
68 Giorgio Caravale 30 V. Martelli, “La povertà tra il Medioevo e l’inizio dell’età moderna: marginalità, inclusione ed esclusione,” Rivista della scuola superiore di economia e finanze, 2009, p. 14; V. Martelli, “Roma tollerante? Gli zingari a Roma tra XVI e XVII secolo,” in Roma moderna e contemporanea 3, no. 2, 1995, 485–509. 31 The only bando registered in the Papal States in the last few decades of the sixteenth century was issued on 28 October 1590 by the Governor of Rome Mons. Girolamo Matteucci, which ordered vagabonds, “ruffians” (“sgherri”), “rogues” (“bravi”), and gypsies to leave the city within three days, Rome, presso Paolo Blado stampatore camerale, ASV (Archivio Segreto vaticano), Misc. arm. IV, t. 80, p. 210. 32 E. Novi Chavarria, “Gli zingari in età moderna,” in L. Barletta (ed.) Integrazione ed emarginazione. Circuiti e modelli: Italia e Spagna nei secoli XV–XVIII, Naples: Cuen, 2002, p. 306; E. Novi Chavarria, Sulle tracce degli zingari. Il popolo rom nel Regno di Napoli secoli XV-XVIII, Guida: Naples, 2007, pp. 134–135. 33 ASV, Misc. arm. IV, t. 66, p. 176; and ibid., t. 80, p. 167. 34 ASV, Misc. arm. IV, t. 80, c. 167; cf. also Karpati, “Gli zingari,” pp. 129–130. In an extremely similar way, a decree was promulgated in 1619 in Spain which ordered all gypsies to leave the kingdom and never return on pain of the death penalty, but also stated that they could stay if they had become settled and abandoned their clothes, names, and Gitane language in such a way that they would soon be forgotten; Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 161. 35 Besides the cited work by S. Cerutti, regarding Rome more specifically cfr. E. Canepari, “Who is not Welcome? Reception and Rejection of Migrants in Early Modern Italian Cities,” in B. De Munck and A. Winter (eds) Gated Communities? Regulating migration in Early Modern Cities, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 114–115. 36 G. Todeschini, Visibilmente crudeli. Malviventi, persone sospette e gente qualunque dal Medioevo all’età moderna, Bologna: il Mulino, 2007, p. 59. 37 If anything, the contrary was true in the case of gypsies: there were vagabonds who pretended to be gypsies; Eliav-Feldon, “Vagrants or vermin,” pp. 279–280. 38 More generally on this subject cfr. I. Fosi, Convertire lo straniero: Forestieri e Inquisizione a Roma in età moderna, Rome: Viella, 2011. 39 Karpati, “Gli zingari,” p. 136. 40 S. Santagata, Istoria della Compagnia di Gesù appartenente al Regno di Napoli, V, Napoli: Stamperia di Vincenzo Mazzola, 1767, p. 302. 41 Ibid.; cf. also Novi Chavarria, “Gli zingari,” p. 307; Novi Chavarria, Sulle tracce degli zingari, p. 140. 4 2 B. Fassanelli, “‘Andar con cingani’ o ‘viver christianamente.’ Tipi, icone e visioni del mondo attraverso un costituto cinquecentesco,” in Alle radici dell’Europa: mori, giudei e zingari del Mediterraneo occidentale, vol. 1, Florence: Seid, 2008, p. 85. See also by the same author “‘Considerata la mala qualita delli cingani errant.’ I rom nella Repubblica di Venezia: retoriche e stereotipi,” Acta Histriae 15, no. 1, 2007, pp. 139–154; and now B. Fassanelli, Vite al bando. Storie di cingari nella terraferma veneta alla fine del Cinquecento, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011. 43 Fassanelli, “‘Andar con cingani’ o ‘viver christianamente,’” p. 86. 4 4 I. Fosi, Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State 1500–1750, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011, p. 28. 45 Ibid., pp. 47 et seq. 46 Ibid., p. 53. On the Tribunal of the Governor, see also M. Di Sivo, “Il tribunale criminale capitolino nei secoli XVI–XVII: note da un lavoro in corso,” Roma moderna e contemporanea 3, 1995, 201–216. 47 Fosi, Papal Justice, p. 54. 48 ASR, Tribunale Criminale del Governatore, Processi, b. 173 (anno 1581), fasc. 18, cc. 16r-v. 49 Ibid., c. 14v.
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 69 50 Ibid., c. 19r. 51 ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Processi, b. 246 (anno 1591), fasc. 4, c. 109r. 52 Ibid.; ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Processi, b. 115, anno 1613, c. 1r–38r, in partic. c. 24v. The essential work on banditry in the Papal States is I. Fosi, La società violenta. Il banditismo nello Stato pontificio nella seconda metà del Cinquecento, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1985. 53 ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Processi, b. 136, anno 1617, fasc. 19, cc. 680 et seq., quotation on c. 683v. 54 ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Processi, b. 299, anno 1596, fasc. 9, c. 167r. 55 Ibid., c. 166r. 56 Ibid., c. 165v. 57 ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Processi, b. 184, anno 1623, fasc. 42, cc. 796r. 58 Martelli, “Roma tollerante?” pp. 497 et seq. 59 ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Processi, b. 194 (anno 1624), fasc. 34, c. 1599 et seq. 60 ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Atti di Cancelleria, b. 7 (Curiosità criminali), fasc. 9 (zingari), n. 1. 61 Petition from the Prior of Pediluco, 20 July 1631; ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Atti di Cancelleria, b. 7 (Curiosità criminali), fasc. 9 (zingari), n. 1. In some cases, the request to take disciplinary action against their excesses even provided further ammunition for the Holy Office. In 1621, the Bishop of Lacedonia Giovanni Geronimo Campanile denounced the repeated abuse of marriage by gypsies resident in his diocese to the Roman Congregation of the Inquisition. The reply from Rome told him to monitor any repetition of such disorder, not before, however, taking a number of these gypsies to the episcopal prisons in order to intimidate the whole community; Novi Chavarria, “Gli zingari in età moderna,” p. 306; Novi Chavarria, Sulle tracce degli zingari, pp. 137–138. 62 As Irene Fosi wrote, Papal justice continued to make unsparing use of banishment and exile, the separation of the suspect from his family. The custom expressed and symbolized justice, but was a major reason why banditry persisted. The punishment was a subject of constant negotiation. The verdict could be remitted, and commuted to three years in the galleys, or, more and more often, to a fine. Fosi, Papal Justice, p. 103 63 ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Atti di Cancelleria, b. 7 (Curiosità criminali), fasc. 9 (zingari), n. 8. 6 4 Ibid., c. 12r. “Banishment pardoned” (“Si rimetta l’esilio”) is written under the letter heading. 65 ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Processi b. 357, anno 1640, fasc. 56, cc. 1713 et seq., c. 1716r. 66 ASR, Tribunale del Governatore, Processi b. 375, anno 1642, fasc. 11, cc. 195 et seq. 67 Ibid., c. 199v. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., c. 201v. 70 Philip II’s Pragmática in 1567, which obliged the Moors of Granada not to dress or attend baths “in a Moorish way,” led to one of the most heated revolts tackled by the Catholic monarch in his kingdom; on the Rebellion of the Alpujarras (1568–1571), cfr. Francisco Núnez Muley, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada, ed. and trans. V. Barletta, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007. 71 L. Valensi, Ces étrangers familiers: Musulmans en Europe (XVI–XVII siècles), Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2012. 72 The fact that the Collateral Council, the highest jurisdictional body in the Kingdom of Naples, granted “licenses” to captains of gypsies illustrates the ambiguous status
70 Giorgio Caravale of gypsies, trapped on the border between membership of the “gypsy nation” and the desire to acquire citizenship rights; Novi Chavarria, “Pluralità di appartenenze,” pp. 383–406. 73 Similar observations are made by M.G. Tumminelli in reference to the case of the Sforza brothers in the Duchy of Milan in the 1570; cf. Tumminelli, “The Anti-Gypsy Legislation of the Duchy of Milan in the Early Modern Age,” pp. 21. 74 On foreigner status in the early modern period, cf. supra.
Bibliography Printed Primary Sources Núnez Muley, F., A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada, ed. and trans. V. Barletta, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007.
Secondary sources Campigotto, A., “Bandi bolognesi contro gli Zingari (sec. XVI–XVII),” Lacio Drom 23, 1987, 2–27. Cerutti, S., Êtrangeres: Étude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime, Montrouge: Bayard, 2012. Canepari, E., “Who is not Welcome? Reception and Rejection of Migrants in Early Modern Italian Cities,” in B. De Munck and A. Winter (eds) Gated Communities? Regulating migration in Early Modern Cities, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 101–115. Colocci, A., Zingari. Storia di un popolo errante, Turin: Loescher, 1889. Di Sivo, M., “Il tribunale criminale capitolino nei secoli XVI–XVII: note da un lavoro in corso,” Roma moderna e contemporanea 3, 1995, 201–216. Eliav-Feldon, M., “Vagrants or Verrnin? Attitudes towards Gypsies in Early Modern Europe,” in M. Eliav-Feldon, B. Isaac, and J. Ziegler (eds) The Origins of Racism in the West, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 276–291. Fassanelli, B., “‘Andar con cingani’ o ‘viver christianamente’. Tipi, icone e visioni del mondo attraverso un costituto cinquecentesco,” in F. Gambin (ed.), Alle radici dell’Europa. Mori, giudei e zingari del Mediterraneo occidentale, vol. 1, Florence: Seid, 2008, pp. 79–92. ———, “‘Considerata la mala qualita delli cingani erranti’. I rom nella Repubblica di Venezia: retoriche e stereotipi,” Acta Histriae 15, 2007, 139–154. ———, Vite al bando. Storie di cingari nella terraferma veneta alla fine del Cinquecento, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011. Fosi, I., Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State 1500–1750, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011. ———, La società violenta: Il banditismo nello Stato pontificio nella seconda metà del Cinquecento, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1985. ———, Convertire lo straniero: Forestieri e Inquisizione a Roma in età moderna, Rome: Viella, 2011. Fraser, A., The Gypsies, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Friedman, V. and R. Dankoff, “The Earliest Text in Balkan (Rumelian) Romani: A Passage from Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (Fifth Series) 1, no. 1, 1991, 156–157.
Gypsies in counter-reformation Rome 71 García-Arenal, M., “Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as Historiographical Problems,” Bullettin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 381, 2013, 1–19. Geremek, B., “L’arrivé des tsiganes en Italie,” in G. Politi, M. Rosa, and F. Della Peruta (eds) Timore e carità: I poveri nell’Italia moderna, Cremona: Libreria del Convegno Editrice, 1982, pp. 27–44. ———, Uomini senza padrone. Poveri e marginali tra Medioevo e età moderna, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Gottlieb, H.M., Dissertation on the Gipsies, Being an Historical Enquiry, Concerning the Manner of Life, Oeconomy, Customs and Conditions of these People in Europe, and their Origin, Printed for the editor, by G. Bigg, London 1787. Groebner, V., “Describing the Person, Reading the Signs in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Identity Papers, Vested Figures, and the Limits of Identification, 1400–1600,” in J. Caplan and J. Torpey (eds) Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 15–27. Herzog, T., Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. ———, “Naming, Identifying and Authorizing Movement in Spain and Spanish America (17–18th centuries),” in K. Breckenridge and S. Szreter (eds) Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 191–209. Karpati, M., “Gli zingari nello Stato della Chiesa, in La Chiesa cattolica e gli zingari: storia di un difficile rapporto,” prefazione del cardinale R. Etchegaray e dell’arcivescovo S. Fumio Hamao, presentazione di G. De Rosa, Paris: Centre de recherches tsiganes; Rome: Centro studi zingari, Anicia, 2000, pp. 121–137. Lucassen, L., “Eternal Vagrants? State Formation, Migration and Travelling Groups in Western Europe, 1350–1914,” in L. Lucassen, W. Willems, and A. Cottaar (eds) Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-historical Approach, Basingstoke: Macmillan-St. Martin’s Press, 1998, pp. 55–93. Lucassen, L., W. Willems, and A. Cottaar, Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Sociohistorical Approach, Basingstoke: Macmillan-St. Martin’s Press, 1998 Martelli, V., “La povertà tra il Medioevo e l’inizio dell’età moderna: marginalità, inclusione ed esclusione,” Rivista della scuola superiore di economia e finanze, 2009 (pp. 1–18 of the online offprint). ———, “Roma tollerante? Gli zingari a Roma tra XVI e XVII secolo,” Roma moderna e contemporanea 3, no. 2, 1995, 485–509. Mayall, D., Gypsy Identities, 1500–2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-Men to the Ethnic Romany, London: Routledge, 2004. Novi Chavarria, E., “Gli zingari in età moderna,” in L. Barletta (ed.) Integrazione ed emarginazione. Circuiti e modelli: Italia e Spagna nei secoli XV–XVIII, Naples: Cuen, 2002, pp. 287–308. ———, Sulle tracce degli zingari. Il popolo rom nel Regno di Napoli secoli XV–XVIII, Naples: Guida, 2007. ———, “Pluralità di appartenenze. Gruppi e individui ‘di nazione zingara’ nel Mezzogiorno spagnolo,” Quaderni storici 146, 2014, pp. 383–406. Pym, R.J., The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425–1783, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Sánchez Ortega, M.H., La Inquisición y los gitanos, Madrid: Taurus, 1988.
72 Giorgio Caravale ———, “La minoría gitana en el siglo XVII: Represión, discriminacion legal y intentos de asentiamento y integración,” Anales de Historia Contemporànea 25, 2009, 75–90. Santagata, S., Istoria della Compagnia di Gesù appartenente al Regno di Napoli, V, Naples: Stamperia di Vincenzo Mazzola, 1767. Terpstra, N., Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Todeschini, G., Visibilmente crudeli. Malviventi, persone sospette e gente qualunque dal Medioevo all’età moderna, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007. Torpey, J., The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Tumminelli, M.G., “The Anti-Gypsy Legislation of the Duchy of Milan in the Early Modern Age,” in H. Kyuchukov, E. Marushiakova, and V. Popov (eds) Roma: Past, Present, Future, München: Lincom Academic Publisher, 2016, pp. 6–23. Valensi, L. Ces étrangers familiers: Musulmans en Europe (XVI–XVII siècles), Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2012.
5 “Turning Turke” the Anabaptist way Muslims, Jews, Christian Spiritualists, and polemical discourse in the Dutch Republic, c. 1570–c. 1630 Gary K. Waite Anabaptists and Spiritualists on Jews and Muslims In 1642, an English publisher produced a translation of a treatise by the prominent French Cardinal Jacques Davy du Perron (1556–1618).1 Entitled Luthers Alcoran, the work attacks the French Huguenots and Protestantism in general, damning them by association with heresy and Islam. Du Perron argues that the most notorious heretics of the sixteenth century were merely the natural result of Protestantism: extreme individualism and atheism. One of his examples was the notorious Anabaptist/Spiritualist David Joris (c. 1501–1556), who, he reports, “being a man of God, vsed the publike Ministery at Basill. Now I say, this Dauid George became a most blasphemous Turke, or Iew, as the Deuine themselues of Basill haue published, and recorded.”2 Is there any truth to this allegation? Of course not. Joris remained a Christian, albeit a deeply idiosyncratic one, until his death in 1556. Yet his theological position that none of the externals of religion were of any consequence when it came to salvation often led to charges of atheism. Seventeenth-century English polemicists added the charge of “turning Turke,” an extremely popular theme in that country’s literature and drama as well.3 Dutch polemicists with better knowledge of Joris and other aspects of his theology and reputation attacked his depreciation of scripture and his unusual demonology (no devil but the one in each person).4 That said, many polemicists across the continent identified Islam as originally a Christian heresy, leading them to link Muhammad with various sixteenth-century nonconformists, including Joris.5 Such propagandistic distortions aside, there was a correlation between Dutch nonconformists and Islam in positive directions. This extended back to the 1520s and 1530s, when many Anabaptists, led by Melchior Hoffman, saw the Turk as God’s apocalyptical whip to punish Europe for persecuting them; they, therefore, refused to fight against the sultan’s forces.6 Joris, a former follower of Hoffman, looked positively at the Ottoman religious polity, which tolerated both Jews and several sects of Christians. It was a powerful critique against the ruling orthodoxy that political stability required confessional unity. Later heirs of spiritualistic Anabaptism, the liberal Dutch Mennonites, or Doopsgezinden,
74 Gary K. Waite became critical agents assisting the Dutch government to negotiate with Muslim principalities early in the seventeenth century. In 1610, for example, one of the Moroccan king’s visiting emissaries, ‘Abd al-‘Azīz b. Muhammad al-Taghlibī, befriended the Doopsgezind innkeeper Jan Theunisz.7 For four months, the two worked on Theunisz’s Arabic (he was already an accomplished Hebraist). In his subsequent translation efforts, some of which were commissioned by the States-General, Theunisz worked collaboratively with Jews, both Sephardic and Ottoman, and Muslims. While he continued to believe in the necessity of faith in Christ, he behaved as if the religious differences among Christians, Jews, and Muslims were of little import. Such attitudes were shaped within the Anabaptist tradition, especially its spiritualistic streams. Many Christian scholars similarly ignored religious antipathy in order to complete scholarly translations, but their polemics still tended towards stereotyping of religious others and insisting on conversion.8 Finding a Reformed scholar who would work equally well with Christian nonconformists is another matter. Unlike their fellow Mennonites and contemporary Reformed who fought hard to maintain clear denominational lines between Christian groups, Theunisz’s fellow Doopsgezinden focussed instead on piety and reducing confessions to the bare minimum so as to be as inclusive as possible. They tried to unite with other Mennonite groups, joined forces with the English Brownists, and held discussions with Remonstrants and Socinians, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. From 1620 on, Doopsgezinden were major figures in the nonconfessional meetings of the Collegiants, whose informal worship and discussion meetings met without clerical leadership, and who were critical agents in the development of new ideas about religion and philosophy in the Dutch cities.9 In other words, the Doopsgezinden followed a spiritualistic approach to religious identity that intentionally avoided precise doctrinal definitions that led to religious conflict. They held that only one’s inner religious identity mattered. During the early decades of the Dutch Reformation (c. 1535–1570), some Spiritualists practised Nicodemism, pretending to be orthodox to avoid persecution, a practice made largely unnecessary once the northern Dutch provinces gave up heresy prosecution c. 1570. Leading this school of thought in the first half of the sixteenth century were David Joris and Hendrik Niclaes (c. 1501–1580); later in the century, Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert (1522–1590) became an influential proponent. Such spiritualism paralleled the developments among those Iberian Conversos who kept a form of Judaism alive in private and domestically while conforming outwardly to Catholicism.10 These Conversos and the Spiritualists together contributed to new sensibilities towards religion by considering “religious truth as residing in the depth of the mind rather than in outer acts and behaviour.”11 Their approach to religious identity contributed to long-term intellectual trends leading to the innovative ideas of René Descartes, Balthasar Bekker, and B aruch Spinoza, among others.12 While almost all Christian Spiritualists required some confession of Jesus as saviour, their internal logic kept pushing them to explore ways to include others. If a way could be found to bring in Jews as members of the broader spiritual community, then why not Muslims, especially
“Turning Turke” 75 in the Dutch Republic, which needed reinforcement against the ambitions of the Habsburgs? This article will focus on just a few examples: David Joris; the Doopsgezinden, including Theunisz; a conservative Mennonite, Pieter Jansz Twisck; the unconventional spiritualistic mathematicians Robbert Robbertsz le Canu and Jan Hendrick Jarichs van der Ley; and the English nonconformists Leonard Busher and Henry Finch. While the most intense version of Christian– Jewish dialogue took place in the middle of the seventeenth century in the circle of English and Dutch nonconformists who were working with the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, they were simply building on the foundation laid by their unconventional forebears. Inspired by such spiritualism, the Doopsgezinden placed so little emphasis on the divinity of Jesus that they were often accused of anti-Trinitarianism or Socinianism. This reached a peak in the theology of the Amsterdam Flemish Mennonite preacher Galenus Abrahamsz de Haan (1622–1706) who did little to dispute the suspicion that he had turned his back on the divine Jesus and his redemptive work. For Abrahamsz, Jesus was a perfect teacher and role model, not a divine being whose physical sacrifice paid off a debt to God. While he may have been influenced in this by his discussions with Socinians, he was also merely following the path of spiritualism that was at the core of the liberal Mennonite worldview.13 Like many of his congregants who were also members of the Collegiants, and who frequented worship services at the Amsterdam synagogue, Abrahamsz was seeking ways to bring the Jews into the salvific fold that were less painful than the older efforts at exclusion and conversion.14 This desire to draw the Jews back into the fold of the children of God compelled many Spiritualists to reshape their own Christian theology, and in the process, to give Islam a closer look.
Joris, Jews, and Muslims The initial problem faced by Anabaptists after the defeat of the Anabaptist k ingdom of Münster in 1535 was reputational. Since it had been designed by Jan van Leiden as a replication of the Old Testament Israelite kingdom, including justification of both the sword and polygamy, it drew polemical comparisons with Islam.15 After Münster fell, Joris thought that he could bring religious peace among Christians and with Jews, believing that his prophetic authority and ability to interpret scripture in new ways provided the solution to Christian– Jewish relations. In 1538, he composed a letter addressed to Strasbourg’s Jews, but the local Jews found it too obscure to comprehend.16 Like Martin Luther in his early tract That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, Joris argued that Jews were ready to convert to his form of Christianity, and would be more likely to do so if Christians would treat them fairly.17 However, while Joris nowhere suggests that Jews and Muslims should receive full toleration per se – something he was frequently accused of saying – he did point to the Islamic world as an example of how a state could prosper while allowing other sects and religions, including Judaism and Christianity, to continue.18 Joris believed that tolerance of religious diversity did not necessarily weaken allegiance to the state, as was generally
76 Gary K. Waite believed, and his example of the Turks would be used by later proponents of religious diversity in the Netherlands. Orthodox writers decried this posture as heresy, exaggerating Joris’ position and claiming that he held “that one should tolerate all citizens whether Jew, Turk, or Catholic.”19 Joris’ spiritualism was also seen as comparable to the alleged Muslim notion that all people could be saved in their own law. It is no wonder, then, that Joris was accused of both atheism and of “turning Turke.”20 Joris was not a Judeophile like his fellow French Spiritualists Jean Bodin or Guillaume Postel.21 Yet he so greatly diminished dogma and confessions of faith that people of any denomination could adopt his approach to spiritual perfection without altering their external religious identity. In his early writings, he insisted that supporters acknowledge his prophetic leadership, but this virtually disappears from his later publications, which instead promote love of neighbour, spiritual development, and an end to religious persecution.22 His deeply unorthodox belief, never explicit in his published works, was that he was the third David who would complete the work left unfinished by the second David, Jesus Christ. This obviously left the impression that he was not terribly strong on the divinity of Christ, and that he was an anti-Trinitarian.23 This became a stock charge of Protestant polemicists, who applied it to all other Spiritualists, such as Hendrik Niclaes, and his Family of Love. Since they believed that they too could be “godded with god,” Christ’s divinity was not unique.24 The truth about Joris’ doctrinal stance is much more complex. Certainly his desire to bring the Jews into his prophetic fold led him to emphasize the oneness of God.25 Yet he was intentionally obscure on the subject of the Trinity, knowing that it was a divisive subject. When, in 1551, he composed a new chapter on the subject for the second edition of his magnum opus, the large and expensively produced Wonder Book, he kept his language on the Trinity intentionally obscure. This was a point made by his learned lieutenant and son-in-law Nicholas Meyndertsz van Blesdijk, who, in the summary of Joris’ life and teaching that he composed after leaving the movement, complained that Joris’ position on the Trinity was “very evasive and confused.” Joris had clearly been discussing the topic with his learned humanist friends in Basel, for he refers to Athanasius, the Council of Nicea, and St Augustine. At one point in this text, Joris seems to be denying the Trinity. Yet he then affirms it, vaguely, thanks to his division of history into three ages, and his affirmation that since Adam was made in God’s image, and Adam was triune (body, spirit, and soul), then it must be possible to describe God as triune. Yet he concluded that the doctrine is not essential to the faith, which he boiled down to “the righteous shall live in his faith,” rather than clinging to precise dogmatic formulae; for Joris, believers could maintain the doctrine of the Trinity or not. It was not for Joris a dogma worth fighting and dividing over.26 When, two years later, he took up the cause of the Spanish physician and antiTrinitarian Michael Servetus, pleading to Geneva’s magistrates to spare his life, Joris did not mention Servetus’ anti-Trinitarianism. Yet decades later, English Protestant (Anglican and Puritan) polemicists who were fighting against the
“Turning Turke” 77 spiritualistic threat of the Family of Love and conversions of English seamen to Islam would cast Joris as one of the founders of modern anti-Trinitarianism. They hoped that his bad reputation as a failed prophet would discredit the Familists, Baptists, and Socinians, all of whom they associated with anti-Trinitarianism. Most called Joris an atheist, and some accused him of turning Turk.27 Unlike Dutch Protestants who actually read Joris’ works, early English polemicists relied heavily on one pamphlet produced by the City of Basel in 1559 (English translation in 1560) that described Joris’ post-mortem trial and core beliefs as extracted from his family and friends.28 On the basis of this source, Thomas Rogers, for example, wrote that Joris “affirmed himselfe to be greater for power then euer Christ was,” who in oppugning the deitie of our Sauiour with these heretikes ioyne the Iewes, and turkes, which say that Christ was a good man: such as Moses and Mahomet were, but not God. Hence Amurrath the great Turke in his letters vnto the Emp. Rodolph the second, an 1593 tearmed our Sauiour in derision, The crucified God, vnto whom may be added the Familie of Loue.29 For the orthodox, even Joris’ obscure depreciation of the doctrine of the Trinity led directly to turning Turke. Neither Joris nor Niclaes, of course, did any such thing. Yet by implying that such traditional teachings were of little consequence to the faith, they opened a rhetorical path to allow Jews and Muslims to maintain their external religious identity while adopting a Spiritualist’s inner identity. Joris’ interpretation of scripture denigrated the literal meaning, allowing for an incredible degree of creativity and flexibility that he hoped would draw the Jews to his side.30 He may have still required that Jews and Muslims acknowledge allegiance to “the true Christ, a son of the Holy Spirit” – an oblique reference to his role as the third David – yet late in his career he redefined this figure as the Holy Spirit within all.31 Once Joris was dead, his readers could detach his narcissistic claims from his more attractive spiritualistic ideas, using his arguments to buttress their calls for religious toleration.32 It is no wonder that orthodox critics and polemicists went to the extreme of associating Joris’ spiritualism with Islam in order to try and stop its spread.
Jews and Muslims in the Dutch Republic David Joris likely had very little contact with Jews, and certainly none that we know of with Muslims. In fact, until about 1600, the only Jews that most Netherlanders would have known were Converso members of the Portuguese Nation. When the Conversos of Antwerp fled to Amsterdam in the 1580s, they did a remarkable thing: seeing that the Republic had a very different religious climate from the Spanish-controlled southern Provinces, they began reverting to Judaism. In most European polities, conversion from Christianity to Judaism was a capital crime. In Protestant lands, however, a Catholic identity was hardly better than a Jewish one, and most Protestants simply regarded Conversos as
78 Gary K. Waite insincere Catholics or erstwhile Jews.33 With a long history of forced dissimulation, Conversos, like Spiritualists, had internalized religious identity. While in Spain, many Conversos and Moriscos had argued that it was possible for members of any of the three laws to achieve spiritual salvation, opening the way to an incipient religious universalism.34 By 1602, the Amsterdam Conversos who had begun returning to Judaism had established a Sephardic synagogue in a private space, keeping within the informal system of accommodating religious diversity that the Dutch Regents followed in the case of Mennonites and Catholics. This was the schuilkerk, or hidden church.35 The magistrates of Amsterdam would have preferred to treat the Portuguese Conversos as Christians, making them pledge that “they are Christian people and that they will live here honestly as good burghers” who would attend the public Reformed Church, and no other.36 When news broke in 1603 – despite the efforts of the mayor to hush it up – that these Conversos had instead reverted to Judaism, the magistrates arrested some of the suspected Judaizers. Yet they released them all when Haarlem began to woo them.37 Some Reformed preachers complained, mostly in the privacy of their Reformed synods. In 1608, the preacher Abraham Costerus published a protest, but it seems to have had little impact.38 Even conservative Mennonites such as Twisck expressed an impressive breadth of sympathy for others being persecuted for their faith.39 At times the Arminian Remonstrants protested that Jews had greater rights than they did, but no group actively promoted persecution or expulsion of the Jews.
Jan Theunisz While Mennonites had in the sixteenth century engaged in public and often heated debates with their Reformed opponents, the liberal Doopsgezinden took a different approach to inter-confessional interaction. Jan Theunisz’s congregation included Hans de Ries, who as a Spiritualist emphasized the inner work of the Holy Spirit for interpreting the Word and experiencing Christ and the sacraments. While Theunisz thought his elder was going too far in his emphasis on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Theunisz remained a member of the de Ries congregation. Theunisz certainly had no trouble associating with Muslims and Jews. In 1612, he convinced the regents of the University of Leiden to provide him with a probationary lectureship in Arabic, until the younger Calvinist scholar Thomas Erpenius alerted them to Theunisz’s religious identity as “a Holland Anabaptist,” at which point the professorship was handed to Erpenius.40 Erpenius befriended Muslims and Jews in his scholarly endeavours, yet his tolerance of religious diversity ended at non-Reformed Christian sects. Fortunately, Theunisz was able to teach Hebrew at the Amsterdam Academy. He became a key member of an intriguing network of English and Dutch scholars interested in matters Arabic and Hebrew, beginning with his first teacher of Arabic, the Polish converso Philippus Ferdinandus, who died in 1599 shortly after accepting the post of Professor of Arabic at the University of Leiden. Theunisz also befriended
“Turning Turke” 79 the English rector of the Latin School in Amsterdam, Mattheus Saldus, and the English Presbyterian preacher of Amsterdam, John Paget, and became acquainted with the English Puritan Hugh Broughton, who came to Amsterdam to dispute with Jews and who had at least one of his works translated from Hebrew and printed by Theunisz.41 Theunisz hosted meetings with these nonconformists at his home, and collaborative work sometimes resulted. One of these was a polemical treatise on the nature of Christ that Theunisz composed with ‘Abd al-‘Azīz; Theunisz used it to convince the States-General that he was worthy of the Arabic teaching position.42 It appears that this Doopsgezind layman had the rare talent of being able to work with people across the religious spectrum. Theunisz’s skills in both translation and multicultural collaboration were quickly appreciated by the stadholder and the States-General, which commissioned him to translate a letter sent from the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–1617) to the Dutch government. Theunisz succeeded in this task only thanks to the multicultural network he had established.43 In the foreword to his version of the letter, Theunisz explains to the Regents the process of translation that was required, since he knew Arabic but not Turkish. Thanks to a “Hebrew…coming here [to Theunisz’s home] each day,” the Turkish original was transliterated into Hebrew letters, but keeping the Arabic vocabulary. The “Hebrew” knew how to read and pronounce this well. H.F. Wijnman identifies this Jew as the Venetian merchant Joseph Pardo of Salonica, who just happened to be visiting the city.44 Once converted into the blend of Hebrew and Arabic, the letter’s contents were translated into Spanish and interpreted by Samuel Pallache, the Jewish agent of Morocco who was highly respected by the stadholder, and who was likely the contact between Pardo and Theunisz. It was then delivered to the States-General, but was printed, it seems, without the permission of either party. At this critical juncture in relations between the Dutch Republic and Muslim principalities, the Regents clearly benefitted from their policy of religious toleration. It permitted previously persecuted religious groups, in this case A nabaptists and Jews, to work together on government-sponsored projects. While not quite the convivencia of medieval Spain (itself often romanticized), it is hard to imagine any other locale in Northern Europe where such open collaboration could have been possible in the early seventeenth century. In this moment, the Doopsgezind Jan Theunisz was at the centre of Muslim and Jewish activities in Amsterdam, and he undoubtedly helped both Levantine and Sephardic Jews to feel at home in the city. In his preface, Theunisz presents details regarding the involvement of Jews in the translation without any hint of concern, nor does he seek to cover up their religious identity. If not intended for publication, then his editorial comments were meant solely for the Regents who had come to respect and rely heavily on Pallache for their relations with Muslim rulers, both Moroccan and Ottoman.45 In Theunisz’s case, interpersonal contact and discussion helped undercut some of the older stereotypes that impeded dialogue with non-Christians and made alliances with them against a common enemy more conceivable.
80 Gary K. Waite
Robbert Robbertsz le Canu Two contemporaries of Theunisz, both specialists in mathematics and navigation, became even more pronounced Spiritualists: the Amsterdamer Robbert Robbertsz le Canu (1563–1630) and the Receiver-General of the Frisian Admiralty Jan Hendrick Jarichs van der Ley (1565–1639). The former came through the Doopsgezind stream, the latter through the Rosicrucian. Robbertsz was famed as a mathematician and expert on navigation, yet saw his religious mission as far more important, and reaction against his controversial ideas forced him out of his teaching post in Amsterdam to the quieter confines of Hoorn. He criticized all denominations, including the Reformed and Mennonite, for pretending to possess religious truth, when all churches were merely doors into the one true church. For this reason, Robbertsz called himself a neutralist, a natural outgrowth of the spiritualistic Doopsgezind experience. One suspects that had Theunisz been honest with himself, he would have used a similar term to describe himself. Robbertsz’s attitude towards contemporary Jews and Muslims remains unknown, yet in his most famous work, Short Introduction to the Festivals of Israel (1593), he interprets scriptural prophecy in a deeply allegorical fashion.46 For example, Robbertsz interprets the passage of Revelation 11:7 in which the beast arises from the abyss to destroy the two witnesses as the current tendency to drive “the spirit of life” and the “spirit of wisdom” out of the two Testaments. These are the two witnesses whose bodies are the “dead letters without life or spirit” that have dominated religion since. The Devil, the prince of darkness, has been imprisoned so that his demons “or Lucifer’s angels” can cause disputation, fighting, and division over the city of Christ. They ban, judge, and damn each other, which itself is evidence that their kingdom will soon fall. Robbertsz elsewhere portrays the Devil’s greatest work to be the strict censorship of the press, and he praises the Dutch Regents for permitting the publication of works such as his own.47 He defines the Antichrist as all things that are against Jesus Christ and his teaching, and he adds that the Devil was the father of the “unbelieving Jews” at the time of Christ, but only after also affirming that he is the “father of the unbelieving Christians.” The implication is clear: for Robbertsz, demons are metaphors for censorship, judgemental attitudes, and divisiveness among Christians.48 His allegorical and eschatological reading of scripture led him to a stance in which Jews and Christians both could be unbelievers and be under the Devil’s sway. Those who, like de Ries and Robbertsz, and later Abrahamsz, the Collegiants, and the Quakers, strongly emphasized the Holy Spirit and personal piety as the core of religious identity should not be surprised when their perspective was taken to mean that a redemptive sacrifice of Jesus was no longer necessary and that the Jews could be readily included. If them, why not Muslims?
Jan Hendrick Jarichs van der Ley A more explicit effort from a Spiritualist’s perspective to find a way to bring Jews and even Muslims into the house of God came in the pamphlets of Jan Hendrick
“Turning Turke” 81 Jarichs van der Ley. He was deeply influenced by the Rosicrucian prophet Philipp Ziegler who visited the Netherlands in 1624.49 One of the Rosicrucian pamphlets, the Fama Fraternitatis (The Fame of the Brotherhood), printed in 1614, recounts how the German Rosenkreuz, a resident of the Middle East, was taught secrets by Arabic wise men and then further enriched his knowledge and honed his skills in Fez, Morocco, through its renowned experts in mathematics, medicine, and magic.50 Rosenkreuz’s knowledge of the secrets of the cosmos and his skill in the occult arts, including the Kabbalah, were unrivalled, and he soon sought to correct the errors of the scholars he encountered in Spain. Frustrated by resistance, he turned instead to establishing a new religious order in Germany in which he could train willing adepts in the sciences who would then spread a “reformation” of humankind. Not surprisingly, this reformation, based on the esoteric occult sciences, would unite all monotheisms in a new religious order. Ziegler called himself the “king of Jerusalem.”51 Van der Ley agreed, publishing four pamphlets promoting the construction of “the Temple of Peace” that would unite Christians, Jews, and Muslims.52 In one of these he refers to a “certain writing” by an unknown author that had come to hand. All sects – “papists, Calvinists, Mennonites, Schwenckfeldians, Lutherans, Muhammadans, and Jews” – would see the true Christ revealed to them, while the Jews would be delivered from their perpetual wandering. Apart from his efforts to impress upon the Jewish leaders his awareness of some Hebrew terms, it is unlikely that such a pamphlet would have had any positive effect. Van der Ley’s “harmonizing” of religions was really just another proselytizing effort to convert non-Christians to a millenarian form of Christianity. It was, in fact, not nearly as revolutionary in its potential to spark dialogue as the spiritualistic works of Joris or Robbertsz. Even so, van der Ley’s stated goal was to bring harmony among the heathens, Jews, and Muslims through the correct use of the “key of David,” and unite them with the Christians.53
Pieter Jansz Twisck Even though he was theologically conservative and ostensibly resisted the spiritualizing tendencies of the more liberal Doopsgezinden, Pieter Jansz Twisck wrote chronicles and other publications intended for a wider audience that evidenced some influence from spiritualistic sources, especially since he so heavily utilized the more famous Chronicle of the German Spiritualist Sebastian Franck. I have shown elsewhere that his arguments in favour of religious diversity were shaped also by Joris, Coornhert, Sebastian Castellio, and Emmery de Lyere, William of Orange’s equerry and the governor of Willemstad; de Lyere was also a son of one of Joris’ noble patrons from Antwerp, Cornelis van Lier.54 Twisck was an astute observer of contemporary events as well as a diligent recorder and interpreter of Christian history, yet within his own religious community he emphasized a traditional Mennonite interpretation of the written scriptures, strict communal discipline, and faithfulness to the original teachings of Menno Simons, resisting efforts to unite with either the liberal Doopsgezinden of Amsterdam or the
82 Gary K. Waite Flemish Mennonites. Very different were his books intended for a wider audience on the subject of freedom of conscience and religious tyranny: Religion’s Freedom of 1609 and the Chronicle of the Decline of Tyranny published in 1620.55 In Religion’s Freedom – one of the earliest histories “of sentiments favoring toleration” – Twisck cites from a wide array of authors to declare that no authority should interfere in matters of faith.56 He praises the Dutch Regents’ support for freedom of conscience, extending this principle to Catholics as well as Protestant minorities.57 In these chronicles, Twisck had absorbed a broadly defined spiritualistic ethos. This was not reflected in his many publications intended for his own Mennonite fellowship. For Twisck, the Habsburgs’ heresy placards and the Spanish Inquisition were the true Antichrist, while he praises princes who do not coerce their people in matters of faith or who provide refuge for the oppressed, including Muslim sultans and Eastern European Catholic kings. He includes incidents of tolerance towards Jews, Muslims, Conversos, and Moriscos in a positive light, concluding Religion’s Freedom by calling on all religious groups – Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans, and Mennonites – to avoid using slander or pressure when seeking to convince others of errors in their religion.58 Twisck’s Religion’s Freedom was read by others, including English separatists such as Pilgrims John Robinson and John Murton, who established English Baptist congregations in America.59 In his depiction of Jews and Muslims, Twisck begins promisingly enough by blaming the execution of Jesus on the political tyrants Herod and Pontius Pilate. Yet he later describes the Jews as “deceived by a False Prophet,” a comment undoubtedly intended to warn his Mennonite readers away from heeding any of their more ecstatic or prophetic brethren.60 In seeking to explain destruction of Jerusalem, Twisck returns to the old stereotype, saying that from that moment began “God’s righteous judgment and punishment over the tyrannical cruelty and intransigence [hartneckigheyt] of the Jews towards Christ and the Christians,” which the reader will observe well enough “here and there in different places” in his chronicle.61 Whenever Twisck records incidents of Jewish suffering later in his volumes, he refers back to this explanation that the Jews had brought it upon themselves for their “tyrannical” opposition to Jesus and their later maltreatment of Christians.62 As we will see, this Christian commonplace was occasionally tempered by a real sympathy for the plight of the Jews. In general terms, Twisck places primary blame on the emperors and their agents, who sometimes persecuted Christians along with the Jews. He condemns the unusual cruelty that emperors such as Titus displayed towards the Jews, such as the hundreds that he crucified and “so miserably tortured [ghemarteliseert – or martyred]” once he had conquered the city. He also empathizes with the Jews when they resisted the erection of images of emperors in their temple.63 He aims for a balanced approach, condemning both Jewish complicity in the Muslim conquest of Spain, and censuring the anti-Semitic violence of the crusaders who were ordered by popes to convert pagans by the sword. This approach to proselytism was anathema to all Mennonites. For Twisck, it was bad enough that the crusaders had aimed their violence
“Turning Turke” 83 against the Turks, but on the way they plundered and slaughtered the Jews of Europe. Jews should be converted with teaching, and not by the sword.64 While affirming that Jews needed to convert to Christianity, Twisck quite vigorously rejected the medieval Catholic approach of religious warfare.65 Twisck levelled his greatest criticism against the Spanish, who horribly maltreated the indigenous peoples of the New World and persecuted others through the Spanish Inquisition.66 Spanish Catholics proved themselves to be cruel and misguided, thinking that they could “make Christians” through sword and slavery. Those Jews expelled from Spain were horribly plundered or enslaved as they sought refuge, and some 30,000 died of disease. The Spaniards, moreover, doubted the sincerity of the Jews who had converted, suspecting that they had undergone baptism only to save their lives and property, and left them to the mercy of the Inquisition. “Those among these New Christians who confessed to having held or maintained merely one ceremony of Judaism or Islam [Mahometschap],” were tortured and executed.67 Twisck’s condemnation of the Spanish practice of persecuting New Christians merely for maintaining a few of their old religious rituals implies that he would tolerate such behaviour on the part of Conversos, although perhaps not if the conversions had been to the Mennonite faith. However, his critique of the persecution of the Moriscos of Valencia in 1609 by Philip III is on the same plane as his condemnation of the Spanish Catholic oppression of his coreligionists.68 He thus praises those lands that, in sharp contrast to the Spain of Philip III, have learned to tolerate Mennonites, including Poland, a Catholic realm which also tolerated “Jews, Turks, Arians, Ebionites, Hussites,…Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites and many other sects. All of these, especially in the countryside…were allowed to ‘practice their Faith or Religion freely.’”69 Like David Joris before him, Twisck was convinced that a realm can have a diverse religious make up without any loss of civic loyalty, and he devoted his earlier volume on Religion’s Freedom to proving this point. He noted that under Roman rule, the Jews had freedom of religion, jurisdiction over lower courts, and were divided into a variety of sects, but they did not kill each other over their religious differences.70 He cites the Turkish sultan Mehmet II, conqueror of Constantinople, who told the pope that I believe that Christ had been a great and famous Prophet, but he never commanded…that people should be compelled with force and weapons, to accept his law, and that indeed, he would also not compel anyone to believe in Mohammed; Christ did not wish that his gospel should be taught with force of weapons, but with preaching and teaching.71 To use a Muslim ruler to criticize the persecutory zeal of the Catholic pope was a powerful rhetorical strategy that nicely illustrated Twisck’s central point that a nation that offers freedom of religion, regardless of the faith of its ruler, is superior to an exclusionary Christian realm. Spain’s rulers went wrong, Twisck asserts, when they turned to forcing Jews to convert and then established its
84 Gary K. Waite infamous Inquisition to make these new Christians sincerer, a task, he believes, that was doomed to failure.72 To kill a heretic is the same as the Jews demanding that Jesus be crucified, he concludes. Twisck’s last points bring us back to Joris, for he relies on several of Joris’ pro-tolerance works without naming him.73 By the seventeenth century, it had become possible for a conservative Dutch Mennonite to advance the notion of this sixteenth-century Spiritualist that the survival of a state did not hinge on a unitary religious structure, pointing to the Muslim Turks as an example to prove this point.
Leonard Busher The remarkable relationship between Dutch Doopsgezinden and English nonconformists meant that unconventional attitudes and ideas readily crossed the English Channel. The English Baptist Leonard Busher is a case in point. In 1611, he moved to the Netherlands where, like his better known coreligionists John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, he associated with the Doopsgezinden. Although he never officially joined the fellowship, they financially supported him. In 1614, an Amsterdam printer produced Busher’s Religion’s Peace: or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience addressed to King James I and Parliament, encouraging them to follow the Dutch in promoting freedom of conscience for all who are peaceable, including all types of Christians, Jews, Turks, and even pagans.74 Those who persecute religious dissenters are the Antichrists, agents of Satan whose persecution of Christian dissenters merely offends the Jews and gives a bad example to the Turks, papists, and pagans. According to William H. Brackney, Busher still required the conversion of the Jews, but his eschatological focus on a new apostolic age with a repaired spiritual temple, combined with his unequivocal call for the English crown to allow Jews back in England, was unconventional.75 There are several spots in Religion’s Peace that are strongly reminiscent of Twisck’s 1609 Religion’s Freedom. For example, Busher comments that he had read that a “bishop of Rome” had tried to force a “Turkish emperor” to convert to Christianity, and the sultan replied that, to his understanding, Christ had never commanded to constrain people to “believe his law,” just as he, the sultan, forced no one to Islam.76 Busher’s account is nearly word for word that of Twisck’s story we described above, providing further proof of the impact of this Dutch work in promoting freedom of conscience among English nonconformists.77 Like Twisck, Busher suggested that since the Turks permit Christians and Jews to live at peace in the Ottoman Empire, Christian rules should follow suit. This was an argument with a lineage that we have traced back to Joris within the Spiritualist stream.78
Henry Finch Other English nonconformists took these positive attitudes towards religious alterity to greater extremes. One was the radical Puritan lawyer Sir Henry Finch (c. 1558–1625), a Cambridge graduate skilled in Hebrew whose most
“Turning Turke” 85 controversial work was The World’s Great Restauration, or, the Calling of the Jewes, printed in 1621.79 Both Finch and his printer, William Gouge, were briefly imprisoned by James I for this publication.80 Interestingly, two years later a Dutch printer produced a greatly condensed version of only six pages, from the original of over 200. Finch’s tome was composed as a prophecy of the impending return of the 12 tribes of Israel to the Holy Land, which would herald “the establishment of Judaeo–Christian empire as a glorious end in itself,” rather than as a sign of the return of Christ.81 Finch intended his book as a gift to the Jews, announcing that their time of desolation was soon at an end, and that they would be restored as the children of God, joining with the righteous gentiles in the New Jerusalem by faith. Their blindness to their messiah, whom they had crucified, had been mandated by God so that the gentiles could have their time to be grafted onto the olive branch. The Jews of Christ’s time had thus been merely fulfilling God’s plan for salvation. There is no accusation per se of deicide, or that the Jews were entirely responsible for their manifold sorrows, which would soon end after 16 generations.82 The Turkish tyranny would end by 1650, by which time the Jews would have converted en masse, witnessing the rise of the new kingdom of Jerusalem, to which all gentile kings would bow. The Jewish force heading to the Holy Land would terrify the Turks, and God would give the victory to the Jews as the “Grand Signior himself must fall” near Jerusalem.83 Then the Jewish kingdom would be restored, purified of profanity, and filled with spiritual grace, while “the chiefe sway and soveraignty remaining still with the Iewes.”84 Unlike so many other Protestant preachers, Finch clarifies that these prophecies were not for the spiritual Israel, i.e. the Christian church, but for the physical descendants of Jacob, “really and literally of the Iewes.”85 And while God would convert them miraculously, the Jews would rule over the new kingdom of God as the masters. A greatly abbreviated Dutch version of 1623 turned this book filled with detailed analyses of scripture passages into a short if dense pamphlet by concentrating on the first ten or so pages of Finch’s original. It maintains the general sense of Finch’s original book but emphasizes the impending fall of the Turkish Empire, which is the enemy of the Jews, while at the same time translating Finch’s “Turkish tyranny” in a less hostile fashion as “Turkish monarchy.”86 The Dutch editor thus plays down Finch’s emphasis on the tyrannical nature of the Ottoman Empire, not surprising, since the Dutch were now on good terms with the sultan.
Conclusion Perhaps the most obvious example of attitudinal differences towards Islam between nonconformists and the orthodox can be seen in translations of the Qur’an around the middle of the seventeenth century. In 1647, the French gentleman Andrew du Ryer (c. 1580–1660) translated the Qur’an into French, and this moderately critical edition formed the base for English and Dutch editions.87 The English publication of 1649 was undertaken by the high church Anglican
86 Gary K. Waite and royalist Alexander Ross, who hoped to use Islam as a foil to c ondemn the Cromwellian Commonwealth and its proliferation of sects and heresies. In other works, he finds commonalities among the worst characteristics of Judaism, Islam, and Anabaptism; his treatment of Joris goes well over the top in rhetorical fancy.88 His edition of the Qur’an is similarly polemical, as can be seen in his preliminary biography of the Prophet repeating the worst rumours circulating about him.89 The Dutch edition, rendered by the Doopsgezind translator Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker (c. 1619–1682) and printed in 1657 by his coreligionist publisher Jan Rieuwertsz (1617–1685), also includes a number of works on Islam. Yet instead of Ross’ harsh polemics, two of Glazemaker’s inclusions are positively inclined towards the Prophet. These spiritualistic “Anabaptists,” members of Galenus Abrahamsz’s very liberal Flemish Mennonite congregation, were able to rise above such negative stereotyping of non-Christian belief systems because they had long learned to depreciate external religious forms and orthodox readings of the scriptures and instead emphasized love of neighbour. For Theunisz and for Glazemaker, this clearly meant working with, and respecting, Jewish and Muslim individuals and their beliefs. Reporting from the Dutch Republic in 1673, the French Protestant Jean- Baptiste Stouppe asked, “is this really a Protestant country that we have occupied?” What particularly concerned him was the “unlimited freedom to all sorts of religions, which are completely at liberty to celebrate their mysteries and to serve God as they wish.” For him, the worst examples were the Socinians; the English Quakers and other “Libertines;” and “Jews, Turks and Persians.” 90 While Benjamin Kaplan cautions that such references to the toleration of Islam were largely rhetorical exaggeration, they do reflect the opinions of orthodox Christians fearful that such religious accommodation would contribute to the growing conversions to Islam.91 Certainly the Dutch toleration of Jews and the establishment of diplomatic relations with Muslim territories altered how many Dutch Christians viewed Jews and Muslims. In particular, since the Dutch government did not suppress the opinions of their many Christian nonconformists who were actively reimagining non-Christian faiths, their ideas helped shape broader attitudes.92 The English, on the other hand, refused to accommodate the Jews until after the middle of the seventeenth century; hence, the English populace had no lived experience with Judaism. They in fact had more interaction with Muslim traders, sailors, prisoners, and ambassadors, leading Nabil Matar to remark, “Renaissance Britons were far more likely to meet or to have met a Muslim than a Jew or an Indian.” 93 Yet, as far as can be determined, these Muslims were not allowed legally to practice their faith. In the Dutch Republic, however, the magistrates quickly adapted to the presence of Jewish communities and synagogues and may have allowed some Moriscos, fleeing the Spanish expulsion decrees in 1609–1610, to set up an informal mosque in Amsterdam until they could be transported to the Ottoman Empire, where they assisted the Dutch ambassador, Cornelis Haga, in his negotiations with The Porte.94 Their lived experience with Jews and their accommodations to various Christian sects allowed the Dutch rulers a level of flexibility unusual for its day.
“Turning Turke” 87 That said, this normalization of religious alterity did not mean that early modern Muslims moved to the Netherlands in great numbers, as did the Jews. Instead, the first official record of Muslims living in the Netherlands is not until the late nineteenth century, when a few dozen immigrants from the Dutch East Indies were recorded as living in The Hague, while public mosques were built only starting in the 1950s; Amsterdam’s first opened only in 1977.95 While in real terms the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic did not encourage Muslim immigration, this did not stop foreign observers from asserting that the realm’s toleration of various heretical Christian sects, Jews, and Muslims would lead others to follow the supposed lead of David Joris and “turn Turke,” since atheism, they believed, was the end result of both.
Notes 1 For more detail, see G.K. Waite, Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse: From Religious Enemies to Allies and Friends, London: Routledge Press, 2018 and “Menno and Muhammad: Anabaptists and Mennonites Reconsider Islam, 1525–1650,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 41, 2010, 995–1016. 2 J.D. du Perron, Luthers Alcoran …, London, 1642, p. 105. 3 D. Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003; M. Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 4 G.K. Waite, “Knowing the Spirit(s) in the Dutch Radical Reformation: From Physical Perception to Rational Doubt, 1536–1690,” in M.D. Brock, R. Raiswell, and D.R. Winter (eds) Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (ca. 1400–1750), Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018, p. 23–54. 5 C. van Sichem, Grouwelen der voornaemster Hooft-Ketteren…, Leyden, 1623. The first Dutch edition appeared in 1607, as did a Latin edition; an English translation appeared in 1655. 6 This was the position of Melchior Hoffman; see K. Deppermann and B. Drewery, Melchior Hoffman: Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of Reformation, Edinburgh: Bloomsbury, 1987. 7 G.K. Waite, “The Drama of the Two Word Debate among Liberal Dutch Mennonites, c. 1620–1660: Preparing the Way for Baruch Spinoza?” in B. Heal and A. Kremers (eds) Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017, pp. 118–136. 8 S.G. Burnett, “Philosemitism and Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1620),” Faculty Publications, Classics and Religious Studies Department 113, 2009, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/classicsfacpub/113 (accessed 27 July 2018); D.S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; and S.M. Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago University Press, 2003. 9 A. Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991; F. Quatrini, “Adam Boreel (1602–1665): His Life and Thought,” unpublished thesis, Università degli Studi di Macerata, 2017. 10 G.K. Waite, “Conversos and Spiritualists in Spain and the Netherlands: The Experience of Inner Exile, c. 1540–1620,” in J. Spohnholz and G.K. Waite (eds) Exile and Religious Identities, 1500–1800, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014, pp. 157–170. 11 Y. Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 88.
88 Gary K. Waite 12 On Spinoza, see J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 13 Waite, “The Drama of the Two Word Debate.” 14 H.W. Meihuizen, Galenus Abrahamsz 1622–1706: strijder voor een onbeperkte verdraagzaamheid en verdediger van het doperse spiritualisme, Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1954. 15 For example, Van Sichem, Grouwelen der voornaemster Hooft-Ketteren. 16 G.K. Waite (ed.), The Anabaptist Writings of David Joris, 1535–1543, Waterloo and Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1994, pp. 72–73. 17 On Luther, see M.U. Edwards, Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics, 1531–46, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983, pp. 115–142. 18 S. Zijlstra, “De brief van David Joris aan het Hof van Holland, 1539,” Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 23, 1997, 133–149, here 147. 19 M. Lienhard, S.F. Nelson, and H.G. Rott (eds), Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer, vol.16, Elsass IV, Stadt Straßburg 1543–1552, Gutersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1988, pp. 119–121. 20 Du Perron, Luthers Alcoran, p. 105. 21 On Postell, see Y. Petry, Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation: The Mystical Theology of Guillaume Postel, 1510–1581, Leiden: Brill, 2004. On Joris and Postell, see R. Bainton, “Wylliam Postell and the Netherlands,” Nederlandsch Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 24, 1931, 161–172; and now G.K. Waite, “Martyrs and Nicodemites Both? Spiritualistic and Rationalistic Currents within the Dutch Anabaptist Tradition – David Joris, Sebastian Castellio, and Pieter Jansz Twisck 1535–1648,” in B. Mahlman-Bauer (ed.) Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563) – Dissidenz Und Toleranz: Beitrage Zu Einer Internationalen Tagung Auf Dem Monte Verita in Ascona 2015, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018, pp. 423–457. For Bodin, see P.L. Rose, Bodin and the Great God of Nature: the Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser, Geneva: Droz, 1980. 22 Waite, “Martyrs and Nicodemites Both?” 23 For example, J. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and “Early Enlightenment” Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 250: “Some followers of David Joris, who clearly rejected the doctrine of the Trinity…” 24 See, for example, the work by the famed Cambridge Platonist Henry More, who writes that “Familisme was invented by the malice of the Devil to lay aside the Office and Person of Christ,” for “talk as much of their begodded estate as they will,” their goal was that “Christ may seem lesse God then he is.” An Explanation of the grand Mystery of Godliness …, London, 1660, p. 511. He makes the same charge against Joris. 25 D. Joris, Twonder–boeck: waer in dat van der werldt aen versloten gheopenbaert is, 1551, [Vianen], 1584, part 2, fols 2v–3r. This chapter is not in the earlier 1542 edition. 26 Ibid., fols 2v–7v. 27 I am currently working on the reception of Joris in English polemics. 28 J. Sphyractes, David Gorge, Born in Holland, a Very Blasphemer of Our Messias Iesu Christ …, Basel, 1560. 29 T. Rogers, The Faith, Doctrine, and Religion, Professed, & Protected in the Realme of England …, London, 1607, p. 9. 30 Joris, Twonder–boeck, part 2, fols 51v–52r. 31 Ibid., part 1, fol. 41r. 32 M.G.K. van Veen, “Spiritualism in the Netherlands: From David Joris to Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33, 2002, 129–150. 33 Waite, “Conversos and Spiritualists;” and Yovel, The Other Within, p. 88. See also R.L. Melammed, A Question of Identity: Iberian Conversos in Historical Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
“Turning Turke” 89 34 S.B. Schwartz, All Can be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 51–69. 35 D.M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth- Century Amsterdam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; and M. Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 36 D.M. Swetschinski, “From the Middle Ages to the Golden Age, 1516–1621,” in J.C.H. Blom, R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld, and I. Schoffer (eds) The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 65–66. 37 Ibid., p. 67. See also Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, p. 22. 38 A. Costerus, Historie der Joden, Die t’sedert de verstooringe Jerusalems in alle landen verstroyt zijn …, Amsterdam, 1608. 39 P.J. Twisck, Chronijck vanden Onderganc der tijrannen ofte Jaerlycksche Geschiedenissen in Werltlycke ende Kercklijke saecken …, 2 vols, Hoorn, 1620. 40 H.F. Wijnman, “De Hebraïcus Jan Theunisz. Barbarossius alias Johannes A ntonides als lector in het Arabisch aan de Leidse Universitieit (1612–1613). Een hoofdstuk 49–177, Amsterdamse geleerdengeschiedenis,” Studia Rosenthaliana 2, 1968, 1–41, 1 here 172. 41 Wijnman, “De Hebraïcus Jan Theunisz,” p. 12. The title of the work was Antwoort op een Hebreuwschen brief van een Jode, begeerichlijck vereyschende onderwijs des Christen geloofs, Amsterdam, 1606. 4 2 Wijnman, “De Hebraïcus Jan Theunisz,” pp. 1–41, 149–171. 43 Copie van Eenen Brief ghesonden van Turckschen Keyser/ Aen de Doorluchtighe Hooghe Moghende Heeren/ de Staten Generael der Vereenighde Neder-landen, n.p., 1610. 4 4 Wijnman, “De Hebraïcus Jan Theunisz,” pp. 13–15. 45 See Waite, Jews and Muslims. 46 R. Robbertsz, Korte inleydinge der feesten Israels …, n.p., 1593. 47 Ibid., fol. Giiij v. 48 Ibid., fols Gij v–Giiij r. 49 F.A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge, 1972. 50 An English translation of the Fama Fraternitatis can be found online. www.crcsite. org/rosicrucian-library/fama-fraternitatis/ (accessed 10 August 2018). 51 R. Heisler, “Philip Ziegler: The Rosicrucian ‘King of Jerusalem,’” Hermetic Journal, 1990, www.levity.com/alchemy/h_zeiglr.html (accessed 21 July 2014). 52 J.H.J. van der Ley, Verborgene eygenschappen inde Heylighe Schriftuer/ als in een verseghelt Boeck in beyde Testamenten …, Amsterdam, 1626; J.H.J. van der Ley, Corte Verclaringhe vande Comste Messias …, Amsterdam, 1626. 53 J.H.J. van der Ley, Een warachtich stale van lavender Couleuren van’t Cleet des Wijsheyts/…, Amsterdam, 1626. 54 G.K. Waite, “Pieter Jansz Twisck on David Joris: A Conservative Mennonite and an Unconventional Spiritualist,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 91, 2017, 371–402. 55 P.J. Twisck, Religions vryheyt. Een korte Cronijcsche beschryvinghe van de Vryheyt der Religien/ tegen die dwang der Conscientien…, n.p., 1609. 56 J.D. Bangs, “Dutch Contributions to Religious Toleration,” Church History 79, 2010, 585–613, here 586 and 596; Twisck, Religions vryheyt, pp. 13–15. 57 Twisck, Religions vryheyt, pp. 71–75. 58 Ibid., pp. 82 and 231; Twisck, Chronijck, 2, pp. 1847–1853. 59 Bangs, “Dutch Contributions,” p. 586. 60 Twisck, Chronijck, 1, p. 26. 61 Ibid., p. 14. 62 Such as during a 109 CE uprising when Twisck reports that “sy der Christenen vleysch verscheurden ofte aten.” Twisck, Chronijck 1, p. 36. 63 Ibid., p. 26. 6 4 Ibid., p. 418.
90 Gary K. Waite 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87
88 89
Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., pp. 893–900. Ibid., p. 900. Twisck, Chronijck, 2, p. 1636. Ibid., p. 1849. Twisck, Religions vryheyt, p. 2. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 21–22. For details see Waite, “Pieter Jansz Twisck.” L. Busher, Religions Peace or a Reconciliation between Princes & Peoples, & Nations …, Amsterdam, 1614. See R. Peter et al., Clemens Ziegler. Christoph Freisleben, Leonhard Freisleben. Leonard Busher [Bibliotheca Dissidentium 30], Baden-Baden: Bouxwiller 2016, pp. 197–223. Busher, Religions Peace, p. 5. Twisck, Religions vryheyt, p. 12; Bangs, “Dutch Contributions.” Busher, Religions Peace, pp. 9–10. See W. Prest, “Finch, Sir Henry (c. 1558–1625),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/9436 (accessed 19 June 2014). W.J. op ’t Hof, “Een pamflet uit 1623 betreffende de bekering der Joden,” N ederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 65, 1985, 35–45, here 39. Prest, “Finch, Sir Henry.” [H. Finch], The Worlds Great Restauration. Or The Calling of the Iewes …, London, 1621, fol. A2r. Finch, The Worlds Great Restauration, p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Een schoone Prophecye, Van de Groote weder-oprichtijnghe des Weireldts, n.p., 1623, fol. A2v; Finch, The Worlds Great Restauration, p. 3. For more detail on this, see Waite, “Menno and Muhammad.” The editions are: A. du Reyer, L’Alcoran de Mahomet translate d’Arabe en Francois, par le Sier du Ryer Sieur de la Garde Malezair, Paris, 1647; A. Ross, The Alcoran of Mahomet…, London, 1649; and J.H. Glazemaker, Mahomets Alkoran …, Amsterdam, 1657. A. Ross, Pansebeia, or, A View of All Religions in the World, from the Creation, to these times. Together with a Discovery of all Known Heresies in all Ages and Places, London, 1653, p. 231. Ross, “The Life and Death of Mahomet,” in The Alcoran of Mahomet, pp. 395–404. He begins his rationale for producing the translation of the Qur’an by asserting There being so many Sects and heresies banded together against the Truth, finding that of Mahomet wanting to the Muster, I thought good to bring it to their Colours, that so viewing thine enemies in their full body, thou mayst the better prepare to encounter, and I hope overcome them.
“Translator to the Reader,” A2r. Ross also produced a critical treatment of Judaism, although it seems to avoid the worst anti-Semitic tropes, such as ritual murder: A View of the Jewish Religion containing The manner of Life, Rites, Ceremonies and Customes of the Iewish Nation … London, 1656. 90 As cited by W. Frijhoff, “Religious Toleration in the United Provinces: From ‘Case’ to ‘Model’,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia and H. van Nierop (eds) Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 27–52, here pp. 43–44. 91 B.J. Kaplan, Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age: Representations and Realities of Religious Toleration, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007, pp. 18–20. See also B.J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in
“Turning Turke” 91
92 93 94 95
Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 294–330; and G.A. Wiegers, “Managing Disaster: Networks of the Moriscos during the Process of the Expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula around 1609,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 36, 2010, 141–168. Waite, Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse. N.I. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 3. Kaplan, Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age, pp. 20 and 25; A.H. de Groot, The Ottoman Empire and the Dutch Republic. A History of the Earliest Diplomatic Relations, 1610–1630, Leiden/Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1978. S. Harchaoui, Chair of Board of Directors, The Position of Muslims in the Netherlands: Facts and Figures Factbook, 2010, Utrecht, FORUM – Institute for Multicultural A ffairs, 2010, p. 8, /www.eukn.eu/fileadmin/Lib/files/EUKN/2010/0_linkclick. pdf (accessed 3 August 2018).
Bibliography Published primary sources Broughton, H., Antwoort op een Hebreuwschen brief van een Jode, begeerichlijck vereyschende onderwijs des Christen geloofs, Jan Theunisz, trans., Amsterdam, 1606. Busher, L., Religions Peace Or A reconciliation between princes & Peoples, & Nations …, Amsterdam: [s.n.], 1614. Costerus, A., Historie der Joden, Die t’sedert de verstooringe Jerusalems in alle landen verstroyt zijn …, Amsterdam, 1608. [Finch, H.], Een schoone Prophecye, Van de Groote weder-oprichtijnghe des Weireldts, n.p., 1623. ———, The Worlds Great Restauration. Or The Calling of the Iewes …, London, 1621. Glazemaker, J.H., Mahomets Alkoran …, Amsterdam, 1657. Hof, W.J. op ’t, “Een pamflet uit 1623 betreffende de bekering der Joden,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 65, 1985, 35–45. Joris, D., Twonder-boeck: waer in dat van der werldt aen versloten gheopenbaert is, 2nd ed., 1551, [Vianen], 1584. Ley, J.H.J. van der, Corte Verclaringhe vande Comste Messias …, Veseler, Joris (wed.) Amsterdam, 1626–1627. ———, Een warachtich stale van lavender Couleuren van’t Cleet des Wijsheyts/ …, Amsterdam, 1626. ———, Verborgene eygenschappen inde Heylighe Schriftuer/ als in een verseghelt Boeck in beyde Testamenten …, Amsterdam, 1626. More, H., An Explanation of the grand Mystery of Godliness …, London: Printed by J. Flesher for W. Morden ..., 1660. Perron, J.D. du, Luthers Alcoran …, [S.l. : s.n.], 1642. Reyer, A. du, L’Alcoran de Mahomet translate d’Arabe en Francois, par le Sier du Ryer Sieur de la Garde Malezair, [S.l.]: Sommaville, Antoine de, 1597–665, 1647. Robbertsz, R., Korte inleydinge der feesten Israels …, n.p., 1593. Rogers, T., The Faith, Doctrine, and Religion, Professed, & Protected in the Realme of ambridge, England …, Cambridge: Printed by Iohn Legatt, printer to the Vniuersitie of C 1607. Ross, A., A View of the Jewish Religion containing The manner of Life, Rites, Ceremonies and Customes of the Iewish Nation …, London, 1656.
92 Gary K. Waite ———, Pansebeia, or, A View of All Religions in the World, from the Creation, to these Times. Together with a Discovery of all Known Heresies in all Ages and Places, L ondon: Printed by James Young, for John Saywell, and are to be sold at his shop, at the sign of the Grey-hound in Little Britain, without Aldersgate, 1653. ———, The Alcoran of Mahomet …, London: [s.n.], Printed, anno Dom. 1649. Sichem, C. van, Grouwelen der voornaemster Hooft-Ketteren…, [S.l.]: Dorp, Jan Claesz van 1623. Sphyractes, J., David Gorge, Born in Holland, a Very Blasphemer of Our Messias Iesu Christ …, [Printed at Basel: By Conradus Mense, In the year of our Lord M.D.LX. in the moneth of Januari.] [1560]. Theunisz, J., Copie van Eenen Brief ghesonden van Turckschen Keyser/ Aen de Doorluchtighe Hooghe Moghende Heeren/ de Staten Generael der Vereenighde Neder-landen, n.p., 1610. Twisck, P.J., Chronijck vanden Onderganc der tijrannen ofte Jaerlycksche Geschiedenissen in Werltlycke ende Kercklijke saecken …, 2 vols, [S.l.]: Cornelisz, Zacharias 1619. ———, Religions vryheyt. Een korte Cronijcsche beschryvinghe van de Vryheyt der Religien/ tegen die dwang der Conscientien…, n.p., 1609.
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“Turning Turke” 93 Heisler, R., “Philip Ziegler: The Rosicrucian ‘King of Jerusalem,’” Hermetic Journal, 1990. Online. Available HTTP: www.levity.com/alchemy/h_zeiglr.html (accessed 21 July 2014). Israel, J., Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kaplan, B.J., Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ———, Muslims in the Dutch Golden Age: Representations and Realities of Religious Toleration, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Katz, D.S., Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Lienhard, M., et al. (eds), Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer, vol.16, Elsass IV, Stadt Straßburg 1543–1552, Gutersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1988. Marshall, J., John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and “Early Enlightenment” Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Matar, N.I., Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Meihuizen, H.W., Galenus Abrahamsz 1622–1706: strijder voor een onbeperkte verdraagzaamheid en verdediger van het doperse spiritualisme, Haarlem: Tjeenk W illink, 1954. Melammed, R.L., A Question of Identity: Iberian Conversos in Historical Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Nadler, S.M., Rembrandt’s Jews, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago University Press, 2003. Peter, R., et al., Clemens Ziegler. Christoph Freisleben, Leonhard Freisleben. Leonard Busher [Bibliotheca Dissidentium 30], Baden-Baden: Bouxwiller 2016. Petry, Y., Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation: The Mystical Theology of Guillaume Postel, 1510–1581, Leiden: Brill, 2004. Prest, W., “Finch, Sir Henry (c. 1558–1625),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Online. Available HTTP: www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/9436 (accessed 19 June 2014). Quatrini, F., “Adam Boreel (1602–1665): His Life and Thought,” unpublished thesis, Università degli Studi di Macerata, 2017. Rose, L., Bodin and the Great God of Nature: the Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser, Geneva: Droz, 1980. Schwartz, S.B., All Can be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Swetschinski, D.M., “From the Middle Ages to the Golden Age, 1516–1621,” in J.C.H. Blom, R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld, and I. Schoffer (eds) The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 44–84. ———, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Veen, M.G.K. van, “Spiritualism in the Netherlands: From David Joris to Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33, 2002, 129–150. Vitkus, D., Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1 570–1630, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. Waite, G.K., “Conversos and Spiritualists in Spain and the Netherlands: The Experience of Inner Exile, c.1540–1620,” in J. Spohnholz and G.K. Waite (eds) Exile and Religious Identities, 1500 –1800, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014, pp. 157–170.
94 Gary K. Waite ———, “The Drama of the Two Word Debate among Liberal Dutch Mennonites, c. 1620–1660: Preparing the Way for Baruch Spinoza?” in B. Heal and A. Kremers (eds) Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017, pp. 118–136. ———, Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse: From Religious Enemies to Allies and Friends, London: Routledge Press, 2018. ———, “Knowing the Spirit(s) in the Dutch Radical Reformation: From Physical Perception to Rational Doubt, 1536–1690,” in M.D. Brock, R. Raiswell, and D.R. Winter (eds) Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (ca. 1400-1750), Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018, pp. 23–54. ———, “Martyrs and Nicodemites Both? Spiritualistic and Rationalistic Currents within the Dutch Anabaptist Tradition – David Joris, Sebastian Castellio, and P ieter Jansz Twisck 1535 –1648,” in B. Mahlman-Bauer (ed,) Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563) – Dissidenz Und Toleranz: Beitrage Zu Einer Internationalen Tagung Auf Dem Monte Verita in Ascona 2015, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018, pp. 423–457. ———, “Menno and Muhammad: Anabaptists and Mennonites Reconsider Islam, 1525–1650,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 41, 2010, 995–1016. ———, “Pieter Jansz Twisck on David Joris: A Conservative Mennonite and an Unconventional Spiritualist,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 91, 2017, 371–402. ———, (ed.), The Anabaptist Writings of David Joris, 1535–1543, Waterloo and Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1994. Wiegers, G.A., “Managing Disaster: Networks of the Moriscos during the Process of the Expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula around 1609,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 36, 2010, 141–168. Wijnman, H.F., “De Hebraïcus Jan Theunisz. Barbarossius alias Johannes Antonides als lector in het Arabisch aan de Leidse Universitieit (1612–1613). Een hoofdstuk Amsterdamse geleerdengeschiedenis,” Studia Rosenthaliana 2, 1968, 1–41, 149–177. Yates, F.A., The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge, 1972. Yovel, Y., The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Zijlstra, S., “De brief van David Joris aan het Hof van Holland, 1539,” Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 23, 1997, 133–149.
Part 2
Spatial and social disciplines
6 Before the Ghetto Spatial logics, ritual humiliation, and Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Florence Justine Walden Florentine censuses and mapping methodology What were Jewish-Christian relations in Florence like on the eve of building the Ghetto in 1571? Scholarship on Jews in Italy long focussed upon condotte, or moneylending agreements, and work from roughly 1990 to 2005 examined anti-Jewish preaching by Minorite friars. Work after the turn of the twenty-first century has more openly acknowledged the ambivalent position of Jews within Christian societies, examining, for example, the varying degrees to which they enjoyed real or proximal citizenship. A relatively recent turn has reconstructed quotidian relationships and examined Jewish conversion.1 Despite scarce documentation in Florence, spatial analysis helps reveal something more of Jewish experience and the multiple ritual, spatial, sensory, and structural ways in which Jews were marginalized and excluded in early modern cities. Florence had an extensive bureaucracy, and the city’s rich archives hold the traces of its reach. Yet denied citizenship, Jews were not subject to the same broad taxation system as Christians, and they are therefore on the whole not well-documented in sixteenth-century municipal records.2 To reconstruct Jewish experience and gauge Jewish-Christian relations, historians once relied heavily upon the moneylending condotte, since these agreements outlined the terms under which Jews were allowed to establish residence and lend money. But since the last condotte granted to Jews in Florence were issued in 1547 and since Jewish mobility was relatively high, documentation on Jews in Florence before the Ghetto is particularly elusive.3 However, Medici Duke Cosimo I commissioned a survey of Jews resident in Florence in 1567, probably in order to ascertain who was to wear the segno, the identifying sign used to mark the difference between Christians and Jews. This census, known as the Censimento degli Ebrei, was far more skeletal than the many other censuses that Duke Cosimo commissioned of convents, charitable institutions, and the urban population generally.4 It recorded 97 Jews then present in Florence, grouped into 19 households. The Censimento listed the names of male household heads and all of the bocche, or “mouths” – the Florentine term used in census counts – comprising each family as well as boarders and visitors. Details of profession and ethnicity (e.g. “Levantino”) were inconsistently appended, and residential locations were identified by parish, house, or street.5
98 Justine Walden Six years earlier, a more ambitious census had surveyed all of the roughly 10,000 Christian residences and workshops in Florence; a less ambitious one had also been carried out in 1551. A digital historic mapping and social data project based at the University Toronto, the DECIMA (Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive) project, has transcribed and digitized these larger censuses and made them available online at www.decima-net.6 The present study collates the Jewish Censimento of 1567, the Christian census of 1561, and a third census of Jews in Tuscany from 1570 to establish the names, identities, and sites of residence of Jews in pre-Ghetto Florence, and then contextualizes this information to understand Jewish experience and urban dynamics.7
Regulations Ecclesiastical prohibitions rooted in thirteenth-century canon law sought to restrict Jews and Christians from sharing meals, bathing together, cohabitating, and engaging in sexual relations.8 Popes renewed these prohibitions in subsequent centuries, and they were partly absorbed into civic regulations and custom in most European cities.9 In Florence, prohibitions on interfaith intermixing saw varying levels of enforcement in practice with perennial calls for firmer adherence.10 Interfaith relations were also strongly conditioned by the moneylending agreements. Jews were expelled from Florence along with the Medici family in 1527, and no new laws were made concerning Jews in 1537 when Duke Cosimo I came to power. In 1547, Cosimo I issued charters to the Abravanel family to lend money in Tuscany, but none that allowed Jewish moneylending in Florence. In 1549 and 1551, Cosimo I issued calls to Portuguese New Christians, Jews, and other foreign merchants to settle in Tuscany so as to stimulate commerce, and his sons and successors would later promote the expansion of Livorno as a free port which permitted Jewish, Orthodox, and Armenian Catholic worship for the same purpose.11 While Jewish immigration to Florence and Tuscany in the mid- sixteenth century is nowhere comprehensively documented, Cosimo’s overtures, followed by the establishment of the Ghetto at Rome and in 1555 with the bull Cum Nimis Absurdum, are thought to have increased Jewish settlement in Florence. But with Cum Nimis came more severe regulations: Jewish occupational choices were restricted to commerce and the used-clothing trades in the Papal States, and other Italian states were expected to follow suit.12
Centralization and ritual humiliation: the Mercato Vecchio Thus in Florence in 1567, a handful of regulations governed Jewish-Christian relations, but they did not issue from explicit or recent civic decisions, and enforcement was uneven and relatively lax. What can spatial data on Jewish settlement add to this portrait? Collating our various data sets and supplementing these with additional sources, it is possible to plot 33 locations with Jewish activity in sixteenth-century Florence: 23 residences, 5 work sites, 3 synagogues, and
Before the Ghetto 99
Ghetto (est. 1571)
RI
VE
Duomo (Central Cathedral)
Mercato Vecchio R
AR
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Jewish Residence
Figure 6.1 Jewish Residences in Florence, 1567. Source: J. Walden.
2 cemeteries.13 Residences were clustered in roughly 12 locations and followed two spatial patterns. As seen in 6.1, some Jewish residences clustered near the Mercato Vecchio, or Old Market in the city centre, while others lay in an arc southeast of the Duomo, or central cathedral. One can best understand the changing significance of Jewish settlement in sixteenth-century Florence by comparing it to where Jews had settled a century earlier. In the fifteenth century, all Jewish activities beyond banking were located south of the city in the industrial and artisanal district across the river Arno, and specifically in a neighbourhood close to the main bridge known today as the Ponte Vecchio. This neighbourhood was anchored by the Via degli Giudei, or “street of the Jews” (today’s Via degli Ramaglianti). Jews lived at this site since Roman times, when it was just outside of the city’s walls; only with the circuit of walls built in 1258 did this area come within the city proper. Thus before the sixteenth century, Jews were kept outside of or at the margins of the city. This urban development strategy, the placing of unwanted trades, activities, or undesirable populations at city outskirts, was both old and new.14 This form of marginalization began to change in the sixteenth century: Jews were now allowed to move further into the city and settle across the Arno in the centre. Even Jewish cemeteries, which in virtually all cities were located outside the walls, were allowed to cross the Arno – though they remained relegated decisively to the periphery.15 Figure 6.2 plots the sites of four Jewish cemeteries from the fifteenth through the beginning of the seventeenth century.
100 Justine Walden
Cemetery 2
Ghetto (est. 1571)
RI
VE
R
AR
Duomo (Central Cathedral)
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Cemetery 3
Cemetery 1 = Residence = Synagogue = Cemetery
Cemetery (15th c)
Figure 6.2 J ewish Cemeteries in Florence, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries. Source: J. Walden.
The fifteenth-century Jewish cemetery lay outside of the original city walls in the tiny Jewish neighbourhood located near the Ponte Vecchio and the Via Cassia where, according to tradition, it occupied the garden of the synagogue. At some point in the sixteenth century, a Jewish cemetery (Cemetery 1) was established near the Zecca, or mint, an area upriver to the east and outside the 1284 walls, and it continued to be used as a burial site even after the institution of the Ghetto. Another cemetery (Cemetery 2) lay north of the city centre on the Via Santa Reparata and is said to have given rise to the toponym Campaccio – a term loosely translatable as “nasty field.” In 1602, Jews purchased a piece of land outside of the San Frediano gate on the west side of the city and “under Monte Oliveto” for use as a cemetery (Cemetery 3). This served the Ghetto community until a much larger cemetery was opened in Viale Ariosto (also just outside the San Frediano gate) in 1777. Importantly, whether north or south of the Arno, the Jewish cemeteries continued to be located peripherally in relation to Christian settlement and city walls. The distance of the 1602 cemetery from the Ghetto and its decisive placement outside the city walls serves as a case in point, although of course by this point, more cities were restricting burials within their walls for health reasons. While the dead were held to the periphery, we can see a clear movement of Jewish residences to the centre of the city by the mid-sixteenth century. Figure 6.3 shows the location of Jewish residences by population size. As reported in the 1567 Censimento, the largest concentration of Jews in Florence, 39 people, lay at the
Before the Ghetto 101
Duomo (Central Cathedral)
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Mercato Vecchio RI
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Mercato Nuovo R
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Popolo S. Romeo
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P. Santa Croce Uffizi
Figure 6.3 Jewish Residences by Population Size in Florence, 1567. Source: J. Walden.
edge of the Mercato Vecchio, steps away from the Cathedral that was the city’s literal and spiritual centre, and not far from its political centre, the Palazzo della Signoria, where the republican councils had met and where the Medici dukes had located their palace. The second largest cluster comprised four families totalling 36 individuals, and lay in the parish of San Romeo southeast of the Mercato Vecchio.16 The shift towards more centralized Jewish settlement in the sixteenth century was the product of several overlapping social forces in Florence, including changes to the regulation of prostitution. In 1325, prostitutes, like Jews, were relegated to brothels outside of city walls and fined for plying their trade inside the city. Yet a brothel was built inside Florence’s city walls in 1403, and statutes of 1415 legislated two more. Gradually, prostitutes were readmitted to the area between the Cathedral and the Palazzo della Signoria and between today’s Via de’ Buoi and the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Both were areas with high concentrations of the poor and foreigners.17 By 1547, the Medici regime had developed a two-pronged spatial strategy that allowed prostitutes to live and work either on streets at the city’s margins, or directly in the city centre around the Mercato Vecchio. Figure 6.4 shows patterns of prostitute residence in relation to Jewish residential settlement. By 1561, the highest concentration of prostitutes in Florence – 27 in residence, and 15 working at brothels ringing the market – lay in the areas bordering the Mercato Vecchio, the area home to the highest concentration of Jews in the city.18
102 Justine Walden
Ghetto (1571)
Duomo (Central Cathedral)
Mercato Vecchio
Jewish Residence Prostitute Residence
Figure 6.4 R esidences of Jews and Prostitutes in Florence, 1561–1567. Source: J. Walden.
By the sixteenth century, the Mercato Vecchio was recognized as home to the nameless poor who formed the mass of the Florentine population, illicit activities such as prostitution, and Jews. Around mid-century, Medici urban planning began to focus on developing three areas just south and southeast of the Mercato Vecchio (indicated in Figure 6.3)19. In 1547, the year Cosimo I regulated prostitution in Florence, he erected the Mercato Nuovo, or “New Market,” a site of commercial exchange financed by “respectable men” and peopled by elite commercial establishments: the major commercial guild organization of the Arte de’Mercatanti; four banks; seven silk establishments; and seven goldsmiths’ shops.20 Known as the “Piazza del Duca,” the Mercato Nuovo was the Duke’s signature site. From 1560, Cosimo I built the Uffizi (i.e. The Offices) just adjacent to this area as a complex designed to consolidate the scattered branches of the Medici government and the guilds. The piazza fronting the Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce became used more frequently as a site of elite ceremony like genteel jousts.21 Thus, by the 1560s, Florence was becoming a grand laboratory of experiments in urban geometry, with the New Market representing a considered foil to the old. Contemporary media help deepen our understanding of the Old Market and the populations who circulated there. A trecento poem by Antonio Pucci describes the Mercato Vecchio as a theatre of iniquity and site of Jewish business activities: “swindlers (barattieri) are at ease there, because the market
Before the Ghetto 103 is full of their kind of commerce: that is, usurers and used-clothing vendors, moneychangers, and gambling-house keepers...”22 Pucci named prostitutes, ruffians, gold-valuers, (zanaiuoli), vile men (gaioffi), and greedy or scabious characters (tignosi) as likely to be found there. The only group Pucci overlooked was sodomites, though the Market had a longstanding affiliation with them as well. 23 The Old Market was thus an area of some ambivalence, lying in the centre of the city and the shadow of the Duomo, the city’s religious heart, yet serving as a catchment area for people and activities on the margins of Christian society. As it related to Jews, developments around the Old and New Markets represented the culmination of efforts to force members of the community to the legal, social, and economic margins of Christian society via occupational and residential restrictions while simultaneously keeping them close geographically. Diane Hughes and others have pointed to the associations made by premodern Christians between Jews and prostitutes. Christians used the same distinguishing sign, a yellow or red badge, circle, or sleeve, to mark both groups and underscore their shared marginal status. Fifteenth-century Minor Observant preachers explained that Jews were like prostitutes, since both moneylending and sex for hire, though necessary, were morally repugnant and harmful to the body social.24 By the sixteenth century, the two groups were considered of a piece, as when a commentator on Pope Pius V’s attempted 1566 expulsion of prostitutes from Rome and the Papal States assumed that Jews were included in this edict by default.25 Rulers experimented with similar tactics to manage the two populations, as when in 1568, Pius considered developing a space in which to enclose prostitutes each evening.26 Thus Christians came to locate the two groups within the same metaphorical space, and when Francesco de ‘Medici modified the brothels in Florence’s Mercato Vecchio to create the Ghetto in 1571, the apothecary Agostino Lapini seemed to consider it an unsurprising choice.27 Mary Douglas and David Nirenberg have shown how social conflict, mediated through metaphors of pollution, generates barriers between specific groups in the name of protecting community integrity. Julia Kristeva described how “spaces of abjection” arise to neutralize the discomfort produced by anomalous or unclassifiable individuals (she cites convicts, prostitutes, and corpses) who serve to define social hierarchy.28 The Mercato Vecchio activated both of these dynamics by designating the activities and persons of both Jews and prostitutes as polluting, then constituting a degraded and abject environment in which to both contain and justify them.29 At times, boundary-setting discourses of corruption and disease intersected with real outbreaks of epidemic, but more typically, discourses about the polluting effects of Jews and/or prostitutes arose during periods in which Florentines agitated for social order. Thus, a fifteenth-century Florentine law to ban Jewish moneylending and establish a Monte di Pietà employed the language of sickness and disease, characterizing usury as “a raging pestilence.”30 Justifying the opening of the Ghetto, Duke Francesco I accounted Jewish moneylending a “plague,” even though by now, Jews had decisively shifted away from the loan business and towards textile and mercantile pursuits.31
104 Justine Walden
Senses and abattoirs Discourses of pollution were metaphorical and moral, but also spatial and sensory. They rationalized the lowly position of Jews and prostitutes in the social hierarchy and then created a physical environment that both enacted and justified abjection. The Mercato Vecchio embodied these dynamics with its markedly narrow streets and its notoriously dilapidated and cramped housing stock, most of which consisted of ancient and subdivided palazzi.32 The Market was noisy, filled with the cries of street sellers and the mocking songs and catcalls that enveloped houses of prostitution. But most jarring was the Mercato’s olfactory presence.33 As the centre of Florence’s alimentary provisioning, the Mercato contained the greatest concentration of the city’s slaughterhouses, fish warehouses, and poultry yards. Meat processing brought with it the horrific sounds of slaughter, and its by-products were grisly and odoriferous.34 Moreover, urban slaughterhouses would have housed and processed pigs, an animal Jews considered unclean and offensive. Yet it was precisely here and in other spaces like this that Jews were required to reside. Figure 6.5 shows how the “Portuguese” at Piazza degli Agli resided at the crossroads of the city’s largest abattoirs, and that the three families of the Levita clan in the tiny parish of San Leo lived abreast of the only two fish warehouses in the city. The convergence of Jewish residence with sites of animal husbandry and prostitution suggests some degree of consciously or unconsciously intended ritual
Ghetto (est. 1571)
Duomo (Central Cathedral)
Mercato Vecchio
Slaughterhouses Stalls Jewish Residence
Figure 6.5 S laughterhouses and Animal Stalls in Florence, 1561. Source: J. Walden.
Before the Ghetto 105 humiliation. We can see this as either a resuscitation of the associations made between Jews and blood, beasts, and carnality of the sort perennially asserted by Christians from Chrysostom onward, or perhaps an intent to expose Jews to slaughtering techniques they found inhumane and repugnant.35 The idea is not far-fetched in light of the symbolic ritual punishments Florentines regularly devised for their enemies. In 1405, to drive home the point that Florentines were animals and asses, Pisans christened four donkeys with the names of prominent Florentines and hanged them. Florentines retaliated in kind, catapulting donkeys over Pisa’s city walls.36 Premoderns, and perhaps especially Florentines, were masters of the coded ritual gesture. And so while the co-location of Jews, prostitutes, and animal husbandry may have formed a plank in Medici urban planning strategies, it may equally be seen as an expression of a broader and more diffuse anti-Judaism that emerged periodically within Christian societies and to which Florentines gave particularly pointed expression. The location of Jews at the Mercato Vecchio points to the intersecting threads of these and a host of other interlocking cultural logics. Urban population control and segregation were not without precedent, for distinct quarters for Jews, foreign merchants, and other aliens had existed in several European cities during the medieval period.37 Yet the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw increasingly organized and concerted efforts to consolidate and manage Jewish populations, even before walled Ghettos were formally instantiated.38 In short, power asymmetries and symbolic equivalences were routinely inscribed into the fabric of early modern cities. In sixteenth-century Florence, the developing landscape of order, pomp, and decorum at Santa Croce served as a gilded foil to the sensory and symbolic humiliation represented by the Mercato Vecchio. The Mercato Vecchio was not the only site where sensorially undesirable activities and outsider populations intersected in Florence, nor did it lack earlier precedents at different spatial locations within the city. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jews, prostitutes, and meat-processing activities lay in the same tiny neighbourhood south of the Arno, where the Piazza della Passera or “Piazza of the Pussy” overlapped with the Via degli Giudei just a stone’s throw from the butcheries along the Ponte Vecchio (Figure 6.6). Local legend linked this site with pollution and contagion, declaring the Piazza della Passera to be ground zero for the plague that ravaged Florence in 1348. The overlapping patterns of degradation expressed at sites like the Mercato Vecchio and the Piazza della Passera were fluid, flexible, and dynamic. They replicated themselves on broader and on smaller scales, as in the parishes where Jews lived in sixteenth-century Florence. Thus the parish of Santa Maria Nepotecosa (or Hipotecosa), home of the well-respected Rabbeno family, was a known haunt of prostitutes, who were devoted to the Virgin at the parish’s church of San Cristofano. Criminals met in this parish’s tangled alleyways. The Jew Isac L ocalo and his family lived on the Via del Lamberteschi next to the Chiasso del Buco, site of an infamous sodomitic haunt, the Osteria del Buco. The exterior wall of the Levita residence was emblazoned with the Crocifisso dei Vecchietti,
106 Justine Walden
Sites of Prostitution Butchers
Piazza della Passera
Jewish Neighborhood
Figure 6.6 J ews, Prostitutes, and Butchers in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Source: J. Walden.
a fresco representing the crucified Jesus, while huddled under the Volta S Piero, the house of the Jewish widow Ricca was flanked by a Catholic chapel on the one side and by a livestock stall on the other. A corollary to pollution-oriented logics which directed contaminated populations towards the centre of the city in the was the idea that pollution could be purified and redeemed through religion. The 1561 Census offers two instances of Jews renting from or even residing with elite Florentine c anons – suggesting yet another, more opportunistic reason Christians began to invite Jews into their cities. In the first instance, “Davit Ebreo” lived in the house of the canon Nerone Neroni and paid no rent. 39 On the Via Palagio, the Jew Moise Buondi rented from Paolo Niccolini, Canon of Santa Maria del Fiore, for one scudo less than the property’s assessed price, with Niccolini residing next door.40 There are many seventeenth-century examples of Christians preying upon Jewish poverty by offering free or reduced-cost lodging in exchange for attempts at indoctrination or conversion. The evidence from sixteenth-century Florence, though slim, suggests these same dynamics may be at work.41 Other patterns of Jewish residence and experience suggest that, despite their literal residence in the centre of Florence, Jews were nothing if not marginalized socially, residentially, and occupationally – in short, structurally. Of 24 Jewish men whose occupations could be ascertained from the data, 13 were rigattieri, or used-clothing dealers, with another three working in the aftermarket textile trades of tailoring and veil making.42 Like the selling of used-clothing, tailoring
Before the Ghetto 107 and peddling were peripheral and often isolated occupations carried out on the fringes of social life. Denied the ability to own property in Florence, Jews sublet properties and workshops from Christian landlords, most likely developing informal, off-the-books arrangements. In the few cases of subletting relationships where the trades of both Christian landlord and Jewish tenant are known, members of both faiths participated in the marginalized textile trades.43 So the Athas-Naverra families of tailors and rigattieri rented from the Christian daughters of tailors and rigattieri. The Rabbeno family, hosts of one of Florence’s three synagogues in the 1560s, lived in a house-workshop-storehouse complex owned by two Christian tailors and a “reseller.” Isaiah the veil maker rented from and worked for the Christian Maestro Pier di Romolo, a merciaio, or milliner.44 The 1570 census described a dozen unnamed young Jewish tailors who lived “Jewishly” in the textile workshops of Christians.45 Most of the properties that Jews rented from Christians possessed workshop spaces, rented at or slightly under market value, and were owner-occupied.46 While the concatenation of these factors present more questions than answers as to the specifics of Jewish-Christian residential, trade-based, and quotidian relationships, evidence suggests that contacts and proximities between Jews and Christians crystallized around shared occupational connections forged at the margins – in this case, at the edges of the already unstable textile piecework economy, a sector into which the government intruded but little.47 These are some of the broader dynamics suggested by the information we can gain from censuses of Florence’s elusive pre-Ghetto Jewish population. Yet these censuses also contain other subtler and more microscopic indices of how Jews inhabited and negotiated space and social life in sixteenth-century Florence and how they were conceived of and treated by Christians. Such traces gesture to broader architectures of power and the corresponding survival strategies developed by immigrants, visitors, and outsiders – all categories that applied to Jews in one way or another. In the case of the three-person family of Isaac Del Calo, a rigattiere from Rome who rented from the Christians Giramonte di Pierfrancesco Gini and Michelangelo di Ser Bernardo Boroni (professions unknown), we catch a glimpse of how Jews were minimized or overlooked so as, perhaps, to camouflage or dismiss. As if a careless afterthought, the Ducal scribe recording the residence of Isaac Del Calo’s family in the 1561 census designates them simply as “tre altri pigionelli” – “three other renters.”48 This is an experience and a dynamic that is perhaps most common to the subaltern, that of cleaving so closely to the edge spaces as to be rendered nameless and invisible.
Conclusion Plotting and contextualizing Jewish settlement patterns in early modern Florence on the basis of early modern residential surveys shows how interfaith dynamics played themselves out in the spaces of the early modern city and sheds light on Jewish experience, Jewish-Christian relations, and broader urban and social dynamics. The Medici drive for urban renewal and glorification of Florence pushed
108 Justine Walden Jews towards the Old Market, part of which would be walled and transformed to create the Ghetto in 1571. The Market and the broader city landscape within which it fitted formed a geography that is richly expressive of the ambivalent position of Jews in Christian society long before the state-mandated exclusion formalized by the Ghetto. While allowing Jews to settle in the religious heart and ritual centre of Florence may have seemed on the face of it to be a gesture of acceptance, it was anything but. For here Christians forced Jews to live alongside structurally marginal and “polluted” groups such as criminals, prostitutes, and sodomites, and amid sensorially and ritually offensive activities such as animal slaughter. What residential proximities developed between Jews and Christians were formed in borderline and “unsavory” textile trades, and were mediated through apparent clerical attempts to negotiate the presence of Jews in Christian society by transforming them into Catholics. Ultimately, the logics of spatial and ritual exclusion in early modern Florence – fluid, fractal, and incremental – replicated themselves in different formats and venues. A series of complex cultural logics allowed Jews into the early modern city, while at the same time devising new ways of driving them to its edges and interstices.
Notes 1 On debates over, and definitions of, Jewish citizenship real and proximal, see O. Cavallar and J. Kirshner, “Jews as Citizens in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: The Case of Isacco da Pisa,” Jewish History 25, no. 3/4, 2011, 269; E. Traniello, “Tra appartenenza ed estraneità: gli ebrei e le città del Polesine di Rovigo nel Quattrocento,” in G.M. Varanini and R.C. Mueller (eds) Ebrei nella Terraferma veneta del Quattrocento: Atti del Convegno di studio, Verona, 14 novembre 2003, Florence: Firenze University Press, pp. 163–175; A. Toaff, “Judei cives? Gli ebrei nei catasti di Perugia del Trecento,” Zakhor: Rivista di storia degli ebrei in Italia 4, 2000, 11–36, 20. 2 Jews were subject to various gabelles, or import taxes, and paid annual taxes for the privilege of moneylending. But they were not included in Florentine catasti or decime. 3 Condotte were issued permitting the Abravanel to lend money outside of Florence from 1547 through 1567. S. Siegmund, From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto: The Construction of a Jewish Community in Florence, 1570–1611, unpublished thesis, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1995, Appendix 2. 4 S. Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 151; Archivio di Stato Firenze (hereafter ASF) Auditore poi Segretario Delle Riformagioni (hereafter ASDR) 10 (1567), fols 20r–22r, generously lent by Siegmund. Notes and specifics on the families discussed herein may be found as Arc-GIS map layer notes, www.decima-map.net (accessed 12 August 2018) 5 Two Christian servants working for Jewish families and an unspecified group of Christian workers living at the Rabbeno residence were also identified in the 1567 Jewish Censimento. 6 DECIMA consists of the digitization of ASF Decima Granducale 3780–3784. Properties are herein cited by city quadrant and DECIMA entry number, as in SC (Santa Croce) 304. 7 Though the Christian census of 1561 did not officially survey Jews, it named four. Other than the unnamed “Portuguese” listed in the 1567 Censimento, who were likely New Christians, none of the Jews mentioned herein appear to have been yet converted. ASF MS 4450, fols 172r–173r; Siegmund, The Medici State, p. 154.
Before the Ghetto 109 8 Jews had their own prohibitions upon mixing with Christians. They were forbidden from entering into seclusion with non-Jews, from sharing bread, wine, and oil with them, from housing animals in non-Jewish stables, and from delivering and nursing non-Jewish babies. D. Kaplan, “‘Because Our Wives Trade and Do Business with Our Goods’: Gender, Work, and Jewish-Christian Relations,” in E. Carlebach and J. Schacter (eds) New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations, Leiden: Brill, 2011, pp. 241–261. 9 The Florentine edicts of expulsion and ghettoization of 1570 and 1571, for example, cited “dishonor to God and danger to the soul” caused by Jewish-Christian intermixing. L. Cantini, Legislazione toscana raccolta e illustrata dal dottore Lorenzo Cantini, Florence: Albiziniana, 1800, pp. 253–255, 376. 10 Older regulations capped the total number of Jews at 70 and barred Jews from owning property inside Florentine city walls, though there are instances of Jews owning property in Florence in 1437 and 1441. U. Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze nell’età del Rinascimento, Florence: Olschki, 1965, pp. 120–122; see also note 17 herein. 11 In the 1540s, Cosimo courted the Portuguese Mendes merchant family to stimulate Florentine overseas commerce. By 1551, he issued a much broader call to Greeks, Turks, Moors, Jews, Egyptians, Armenians, Persians, and other “nations” to settle in Pisa and Livorno. 12 Jews other than those enclosed in the Roman Ghetto were expelled from the Papal States in 1569. For Cum Nimis, see K. Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 1515–1593, New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1977, pp. 291–298. 13 Seven sites are plotted by parish. While Florentine parish boundaries are notoriously difficult to define, those in the city centre were so small as to offer much greater specificity than heretofore available. On Florentine parish boundaries, see C. Rose, “Thinking and Using DECIMA: Neighbourhoods and Occupations in Renaissance Florence,” in N. Terpstra and C. Rose (eds) Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modern City, New York: Routledge, 2016. 14 The fifteenth-century architectural theorist Leon Battista Alberti advocated placing unwanted trades such as tanning, noisome smells, waste, and animals in peripheral locations, or “well away [from the center of the city] in the outskirts to the north…” He was familiar with the use of pollution metaphors to justify residential segregation: “Some might prefer the residential quarters of the gentry to be quite free of any contamination from the common people.” L.B. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, book 7, section 1, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, p. 192. 15 Cassuto discusses all these cemeteries but for cemetery 2. He also notes that lending capitoli, specifying terms of Jewish settlement from 1437, allowed Jewish lenders to acquire property in Florence under the value of 500 fiorini and to utilize their properties to bury their dead. Cassuto, Gli ebrei, pp. 2, 120–122, 219–220. The Zecca cemetery appears on the Buonsignori map as n. 201, “Burial Ground of the Jews.” The cemetery located near Santa Reparata is cited by E. Bacciotti, Firenze illustrata nella sua storia: famiglie, monumenti, arti e scienza: strade, famiglie, palazzi, monumenti, Florence: Tip. Cooperativa, 1886, p. 470. 16 DECIMA scribes and the Jewish Censimento did not employ the same parish designations. I follow those of the Censimento. Jewish residence at the site that would become the Ghetto contradicts Siegmund’s assertion that the Ghetto “was not a neighborhood in which Jews already resided.” Siegmund, The Medici State, p. 1. 17 The spatial regulation of public morals and sexuality increased in tandem with these developments. M.S. Mazzi, Prostitute e Lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento, M ilano: Saggiatore, 1991, 250–251; J.K. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680,” Sixteenth Century Journal 24, 1993, 273–300; N. Terpstra, “Locating the Sex Trade in the Early Modern City: Space, Sense, and Regulation in Sixteenth-Century Florence,” in idem and Rose Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement, p. 110.
110 Justine Walden 18 Ninety-eight Florentine residences housed meretrici (prostitutes) and functioned as brothels. SG 1241 and SG 1251 were each home to 12 prostitutes; SG 1238 housed three. Streets on which prostitutes were officially allowed to traffic are available as “Sex and the Sacred: Meretrici Streets,” www.decima-map.net (accessed 12 August 2018). 19 For the Ducal attention to orchestrating urban space, D. Calabi, Market and the City: Square, Street and Architecture in Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 61, 63; G. Spini, “Architecttura e polittica nel principato mediceo del Cinquecento,” Rivista Storica Italiana 33, no. 4, 1971, 792–845, 799. For Cosimo’s centralization of juridical and legal structures, E.F. Guarini, Lo stato Mediceo di Cosimo I, Firenze: Sansoni, 1973. For secular instruments used in social discipline, see K. Härter, “Disciplinamento sociale e ordinanze di polizia nella prima eta` moderna,” in P. Prodi (ed.) Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994, pp. 635–658. 20 “Uomini spettabili” financed the Loggia built at the Mercato in 1546. MAP Vol 629, fol. 1r, 23 Nov, 1546. 21 The splendor, grandeur, and expanse of Santa Croce depicted in Horse joust in Piazza Santa Croce (ca. 1555, Jan van der Straet (1523–1605)) presents a pronounced contrast to the artist’s contemporaneous portrayal of the decrepit and chaotic Mercato Vecchio. 22 A. Pucci, Proprietà di Mercato Vecchio, in N. Sapegno (ed.) Poeti minori del Trecento, Milano: Ricciardi Editore, 1952, pp. 403–410, l. 40–45, 88–90. 23 Strongly worded legislation against sodomy in 1542 named the Mercato Vecchio as a site of its occurrence. Cantini, Legislazione toscana, p. 212. 24 For spatial implementations of ideas of ritual pollution, see C. Nightingale, A Global History of Divided Cities, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 495. 25 Biblioteque nationale de France (BNF) MS 1416, 1417 Gaignières Epistola a Pio V per ottenere che gli ebrei e le meretrici non siano espulsi da Roma. fols 165–182. 26 MAP Vol 3080, fol. 396, 21 Aug, 1568. 27 Lapini described how Francesco forced prostitutes, whom he described as meccanichissime – utterly abject – out of their residences at the Old Market to make way for Jews. A. Lapini, Diario fiorentino di Agostino Lapini dal 252 al 1596, Florence: Sansoni, 1900, p. 171. 28 M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, L ondon: Routledge, 2015; D. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015 [1998]; J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010 [1980]. 29 For anthropological approaches to pollution see M. Bradley, “Approaches to Pollution and Propriety,” in M. Bradley and K. Stow (eds) Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 11–40, 17. 30 C.B. Menning, “The Monte’s ‘Monte’: The Early Supporters of Florence’s Monte di Pietà,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 4, winter, 1992, 661–676. 31 MAP 228/88R, 5 Mar, 1567. Virulent expressions of anti-Judaism in the letters of Cosimo and Francesco undermine Siegmund’s claim that ghettoization at Florence had nothing to do with earlier anti-Jewish discourses and that it was a resolutely secular matter – an early modern state flexing its bureaucratic prerogatives in a fashion without historical precedent (55, 81). If Jews were “not distinguished as different from other foreigners” (118), it must be explained more convincingly why other foreigners were not bracketed off as Jews were. For the Jewish shift to commerce, see M. Luzzati, “Dal prestito al commercio: gli ebrei nello Stato fiorentino nel secolo XVI,” Italia Judaica, 1986, 67–90.
Before the Ghetto 111 32 The Via dei Vecchietti near the Mercato was “una stradina stretta stretta:” a very narrow little street. R. Ciabani, Firenze: di gonfalone in gonfalone, Florence: della Meridiana, 1998, p. 177. 33 For senses playing a symbolic role in early modern cities, see D. Karmon and C. Anderson, “Early Modern Spaces and Olfactory Traces,” in The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, C. Richardson, T. Hamling, and D. Gaimster (eds), Abingdon: Routledge, 2016, pp. 354–370. 34 For early modern meat processing, see A.J. Fitzgerald, “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications,” Human Ecology Review 17, no. 1, 2010, 58–69 and K. Ottenheym, “Meat Halls and Fish Markets in the Dutch Republic,” in K. Ottenheym, M. Chatenet, and K. De Jonge (eds) Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe, Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, pp. 273–284. For the theory that tolerance for noxious smells declined with the rise of modern states, see J. Reinarz, Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014, p. 179. For the argument that low-cost housing, low-paying jobs, and poor environmental conditions coincide with slaughterhouse locations in contemporary society, see Fitzgerald, “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse,” p. 63. 35 The church father John Chrysostom denigrated Jews as dogs, pigs, and goats in Adversus Judaeos, Homily 1, II, 1. R. L. 36 G.M. Varanini, “I riti dell’assedio. Alcune schede dalle cronache tardomedievali italiane,” Estratto da Reti Medievali Rivista 8, 2007, 11. 37 At times Jewish families clustered in residential quarters for reasons of community or protection; at times they were relegated to such quarters by Christians. 38 Spoleto had a loosely defined Jewish quarter in the 1490s, but shortly thereafter saw a new push to relegate Jews to a specific corner of the city and separate them from Christians. A. Haverkamp, “Jews and Urban Life: Bonds and Relationships,” in C. Cluse (ed.) The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002, Turnhout: Brepols, 2004, pp. 55–69, 58. 39 SC 712. 40 SC 678. 41 Eighteen of the ninety-eight residences housing Florentine prostitutes in the sixteenth century were owned by ecclesiastical institutions, suggesting that residential efforts to redeem impoverished prostitutes formed a parallel campaign to that of converting Jews. 4 2 At least two women participated in this trade as well. The trade in used-clothing was particularly lowly as it was parasitical on the already base textile trades. It gained further ignominy through its associations with bereavement, plague, and fencing stolen goods. L. Fontaine (ed.), Alternative Exchanges: Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008, pp. 147, 105. 43 There is evidence of persistent Jewish presence at some of these locations. In 1492, 70 years before the five “Portuguese” in the 1567 Censimento lived in Piazza Bertoldi, Maestro Abramo di Nocii operated a Talmud Torah school there. Cassuto, Gli ebrei, p. 185. 4 4 Veil makers and milliners often worked together in peddling small goods. 45 Siegmund, The Medici State, p. 154. 46 Calculating market value estimates versus actual rents paid from the 1561 census reveals that all told, Jews paid under market value to rent their properties by 12 scudi – suggesting, though not confirming, that Jews negotiated favourable rental agreements with Christian landlords. By contrast, excessively high rents became statute in the ghetto at Venice. 47 For instances of Jewish-Christian urban integration in premodern Europe, see R.A. Perez, “Next Door Neighbors: Aspects of Judeo-Christian Cohabitation in Medieval France,” in A. Classen (ed.) Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age,
112 Justine Walden Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 309–330 or S. Lowenstein, “Jewish Residential Patterns,” in M. Kaplan (ed.) Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 95–106. For interstices as a way of c onceptualizing interactions between minority and majority cultures, see H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 1 and U. Israel, R. Jutte, and R. Mueller (eds), Interstizi: culture ebraico-cristiane a Venezia e nei suoi domini dal medioevo all’età moderna, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010. 48 SC 1203. An additional dynamic in Jewish settlement which I pass over due to space limitations is that of the Blanis and Abravanel, the two elite Ponentine-Neapolitan families in the Censimento. Both families settled far afield from Florence’s centre and other Jews. The Blanis settled on a northerly street called “Gualfonda.” Jacob Abravanel rented an expensive palazzo adorned with artworks by Raphael and Michelangelo from the Christian Giovanbatista d’Agnolo Doni.
Bibliography Published primary sources Alberti, L.B., On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Lapini, A., Diario fiorentino di Agostino Lapini dal 252 al 1596, Firenze: Sansoni, 1900. Pucci, A., “Proprietà di Mercato Vecchio,” in N. Sapegno (ed.) Poeti minori del Trecento, Milano: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1952, pp. 403–410.
Secondary sources Al Kalak, M., “Converting the Jews: Inquisition and Houses of Catechumens, from Rome to Outlying Areas,” in K. Aron Beller and C. Black (eds) The Roman Inquisition: Centre versus Peripheries, Turnhout: Brill, 2018. Bacciotti, E., Firenze illustrata nella sua storia: famiglie, monumenti, arti e scienza: strade, famiglie, palazzi, monumenti, Firenze: Tip. Cooperativa, 1886. Baumgarten, E., Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Bhabha, H.K., The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994. Brackett, J.K., “The Florentine Onestà and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680,” Sixteenth Century Journal 24, 1993, 273–300. Bradley, M. and K. Stow (eds), Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Caffiero, M., Forced Baptisms: Histories of Jews, Christians, and Converts in Papal Rome, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Calabi, D., Market and the City: Square, Street and Architecture in Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge, 2017. Cantini, L., Legislazione toscana raccolta e illustrata dal dottore Lorenzo Cantini, Florence: Albiziniana, 1800. Carlebach, E. and J. Schacter (eds), New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations, Leiden: Brill, 2011. Cassuto, U., Gli ebrei a Firenze nell’età del Rinascimento, Florence: Olschki, 1965. Cavallar, O. and J. Kirshner, “Jews as Citizens in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: The Case of Isacco da Pisa,” Jewish History 25, no. 3/4, 2011, 269–318. Ciabani, R., Firenze: di gonfalone in gonfalone, Florence: della Meridiana, 1998.
Before the Ghetto 113 Classen, A. (ed.), Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Cluse, C. (ed.), The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002, Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. Currie, E., Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Douglas, M., Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge, 2015. Fitzgerald, A.J., “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications,” Human Ecology Review 17, no. 1, 2010, 58–69. Fontaine, L. (ed.), Alternative Exchanges: Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, Oxford: Berghan Books, 2008. Guarini, E.F., Lo stato Mediceo di Cosimo I, Firenze: Sansoni, 1973. Herzig, T., “‘For the Salvation of this Girl’s Soul’: Nuns as Converters of Jews in Early Modern Italy,” Religions 8, no. 11, 2017, 252. Hughes, D., Distinguishing Signs: Ear-rings, Jews, and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance City, Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1986. Israel, U., R. Jutte and R.C. Mueller (eds), Interstizi: culture ebraico-cristiane a Venezia e nei suoi domini dal medioevo all’età moderna, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010. Kaplan, M. (ed.), Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kristeva, J., Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010 [1980]. Luzzati, M., “Dal prestito al commercio: gli ebrei nello Stato fiorentino nel secolo XVI,” Italia Judaica: Gli ebrei in Italia tra Rinascimento ed Età barocca. Roma: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1986, 67–90. Marconcini, S., Per amor del cielo: farsi cristiani a Firenze tra Seicento e Settecento, Florence: Firenze University Press, 2016. Margulies, S.H., “La famiglia Abravanel in Italia,” Rivista Israelitica 3, 1906, 147–154. Mazzi, M.S., Prostitute e Lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento, Milano: Saggiatore, 1991. Menning, C.B., “The Monte’s ‘Monte’: The Early Supporters of Florence’s Monte di Pietà,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 4, winter 1992, 661–676. Nightingale, C., Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Nirenberg, D., Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015 [1998]. Orefice, D., “Tra integrazione e separatezza: gli insediamenti ebraici in Toscana,” in R. La Franca et al. (eds) Architettura judaica in Italia: ebraismo, sito, memoria dei luoghi, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1994, pp. 303–325. Ottenheym, K., M. Chatenet, and K. De Jonge (eds), Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe, Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. Palmer, A. and H. Clark (eds), Old Clothes, New Looks: Secondhand Fashion, Oxford: Berg, 2005. Prodi, P. (ed.), Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Reinarz, J., Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.
114 Justine Walden Richardson, C., T. Hamling, and D. Gaimster (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Salvadori, R.D., Gli ebrei di Firenze: dalle origini ai giorni nostril, Firenze: Giuntina, 2000. Siegmund, S., From Tuscan Households to Urban Ghetto: The Construction of a Jewish Community in Florence, 1570–1611, unpublished thesis, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1995. ———, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Spini, C., “Architecttura e politica nel principato mediceo del Cinquecento,” Rivista Storica Italiana 33, no. 4, 1971, 792–845. Stow, K., Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 1555–1593, New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1977. Terpstra, N., “Sex and the Sacred: Negotiating Spatial and Sensory Boundaries in Renaissance Florence,” Radical History Review 121, 2015, 71–90. Terpstra, N. and C. Rose (eds), Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modern City, New York: Routledge, 2016 Toaff, A., “Judei cives? Gli ebrei nei catasti di Perugia del Trecento,” Zakhor: Rivista di storia degli ebrei in Italia 4, 2000, 11–36. ———, “Maestro Laudadio De Blanis e la banca ebraica in Umbria e nel Patrimonio di S. Pietro nella prima metà del Cinquecento,” Zakhor: rivista di storia degli ebrei d’Italia, 1997, No. 1, 95–111. Varanini, G.M. and R.C. Mueller (eds), Ebrei nella Terraferma veneta del Quattrocento: Atti del Convegno di studio, Verona, 14 novembre, Florence: Firenze University Press, 2005. Varanini, G.M., “I riti dell’assedio. Alcune schede dalle cronache tardomedievali italiane,” Estratto da Reti Medievali Rivista 8, 2007, 1–21.
7 To be a foreigner in early modern Italy. Were there ghettos for non-Catholic Christians? Stefano Villani
According to a 1649 account, when the Waldensian pastor Jacques Gilles had an audience with Victor Amadeus I, he mentioned the “Privileges” and “Concessions” granted by the Most Serene Dukes of Savoy to their Protestant subjects. The Duke interrupted him, saying that he should not use those terms but instead the word “tolerances” (“tolleranze”). He explained, “a privilege is one thing, and toleration is another; you tolerate gambling and whores […] and I hold this religion [of the Waldenses] in the same way.”1 This exchange between the pastor and the duke captures emblematically the concepts of toleration and tolerance in early modern times. As Benjamin Kaplan masterfully pointed out in his study on the practices of coexistence between different confessions in early modern Europe, the social practice that governed the coexistence of people of different faiths (“toleration”) had nothing to do with the principles of mutual acceptance and of positive consideration of differences that, since the Enlightenment, we associate with the term “tolerance.”2 Toleration in early modern times was a dirty thing, a pragmatic necessity. Just as prostitutes or gambling were tolerated, so, because of the necessities of trade or politics, you might be forced to suffer the presence of people of a different faith. You had to bear, to tolerate, a diversity that preferably would not exist at all. This essay investigates precisely the practices of toleration that were adopted to deal with largely Protestant foreigners who, especially for reasons of commerce, were traveling or residing in some early modern Italian states. It will set these practices into the context of responses to both the Jews and the Waldensians, drawing out parallels and contrasts which help us to understand the deep suspicion and ambivalence with which Italian authorities responded to religious diversity. An examination of practices of toleration cannot but start with a reference to the instrument that on the very eve of Luther’s protest against indulgences was first adopted in Venice against the Jews and then extended to other I talian Jewish communities: the ghetto. In 1516, the Venetian Republic ordered that the Jews who had lived in its territories for at least two centuries should move in a specific sector of the city, or a small island, where, in the past, the public foundries were concentrated (Gèto was the noun that defined the casting of molten metal). As Nicholas Terpstra pointed out, the early modern age was
116 Stefano Villani characterized by a growing anxiety about uniformity and purity.3 Following the expulsions of Jews from the Iberian peninsula in 1492 and 1497, Venice allowed the Jews to create a segregated space and settle in the city. Although the rhetoric emphasized the need to protect Christian society from Jewish corruption, the Ghetto nonetheless allowed Jews to live in the city. It is no coincidence that, a century after its establishment, there was a community of between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews living in the city.4 Lutheran ideas spread in Italy soon after the Indulgence controversy that began in 1517, initially among religious orders and particularly among the Augustinians. As early as 1520, the first anti-Lutheran text, Dominican A mbrogio Catarino Politi’s Apologia pro veritate catholicae et apostolicae fidei, was published in Florence.5 From the 1530s, reformed ideas circulated in many areas of the peninsula. Large reformed nuclei were established in Venice, thanks to a political elite determined to assert a degree of independence from Rome. In Ferrara, the Duchess Renata of France offered long-term protection to heterodox Christians and particularly the early followers of John C alvin. In Lucca, almost all of the city’s patriciate openly sympathized with the new religious ideas. More or less structured reformed presences are reported in M ilan, Cremona, Como, Pavia, Udine, Padua, Vicenza, and Modena. In Naples in the 1540s, a spiritual circle was formed around Juan de Valdès, whose heterodox ideas, without being openly Protestant, challenged t raditional Catholic doctrines.6 Spreading news of the diffusion of heresy in Italy alarmed officials in Rome and, in July 1542, led Pope Paul III to organize a special commission of six cardinals tasked with taking action against heretics, those suspected of h eresy, and any who helped them. This was the birth of the Congregation of the Holy Office, or the Roman Inquisition. Unlike the pre-existing Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, which had arisen with the purpose of controlling Jewish and Muslim converts to Catholicism, the Roman Inquisition aimed to stop the spread of Protestant ideas in Italy. The congregation was entrusted with the task of creating a court structure, spread throughout the peninsula, which reported directly to Rome. From the pontificate of Pius V, it was established that the pope himself would preside once a week – on Thursday – over the meetings held by the cardinals (up to 15 of them by 1670) to discuss cases. Usually these cardinals also met another time during the week without the Pope.7 Due to the dispersion of archives and documents over the years, it is difficult to establish either the number of trials or the number of death sentences carried out by the 48 main and permanent tribunals of the Inquisition in the Italian peninsula. We know that at least 128 people were burned at the stake in Rome. A rough calculation would suggest that, in the four centuries of activity of the Holy Office throughout Italy, between 1,100 and 1,400 people were executed (the last death sentence was carried out in 1761). About half of the sentences were against people accused of being Protestant or sympathizers of the Reformation. The others concerned diabolical witchcraft, men who administered the confession or celebrated mass without being consecrated, Jews, Judaizers, and
To be a foreigner in early modern Italy 117 Muslims. The repression of the Spanish Inquisition was more ferocious: it is thought that it carried out 12,100 death sentences.8 Repression played an important role in preventing the spread of Protestant ideas in Italy. Many dissidents chose to escape into exile and Italian Protestant churches were founded abroad, in Geneva, Zurich, and London. Italian branches of the Genevan church were also established in Paris, Lyon, and Antwerp.9 Italian Protestant churches were also active in Valtellina, a border territory with Switzerland which had come under the control of the Grisons in 1512. Some Swiss cantons had adopted Reformation-style church orders in the 1530s, and so even in the Valtellina territory, there was coexistence between Protestants and Catholics for some decades. This experiment of coexistence between different religious confessions came to a bloody end, however, in 1620, when a pro-Spanish revolt against the Grisons’ domination of the area led to the massacre of hundreds of Protestants (between 400 and 600 people were killed).10
The Valdese ghetto The only other areas of the Italian peninsula that saw an open Protestant presence were in the Piedmontese valleys west of Pinerolo, part of the Duchy of Savoy, where most of the population was Waldensian. These were the communities whose status pastor Jacques Gilles discussed with Duke Victor Amadeo I in 1649. These areas of the Western Alps had seen the presence of heretical groups for centuries, and not even the crusade launched by Pope Innocent VIII in 1487 had been able to completely wipe them out. Waldensians, described by Peter Biller as both a religious order and a Church, remained active in the isolated Alpine valleys of the Dauphine, Provence, and Savoy. Since the 1530s, some Waldensian barbes from Provence came into contact with the Swiss Protestants and it was probably after these initial interactions that some Protestant missionaries went into the valleys, spreading reformed ideas.11 It is, however, extremely significant that in the reports of the pastoral visit of 1545 of Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo, no mention is made of either Waldenses or heretics, showing that the parishes were (at least formally) still entirely Catholic.12 From 1536 to 1559 Western Piedmont was an integral part of the French kingdom and, in those years, the first reformed pastors arrived in the valleys. Being French subjects in French soil, they were able to preach publicly.13 In 1555, the first Protestant temples were built in Angrogna, Pellice, and Luserna.14 Ministers for these congregations soon arrived from Geneva. One of them was the Neapolitan Scipione Lentulo who, in 1559, accepted the commission offered by Geneva’s Vénérable compagnie des pasteurs to become minister in Angrogna. Expelled in 1566, he spent the last years of his life in Valtellina, where he died in 1599.15 At the time of his arrival, as far as we know, only two ministers had been barbes, Gillio de Gillio and François Laurens.16 From the very beginning, the Waldesian heretical tradition was exalted, becoming a powerful element of identity that nourished the myth of the continuity between Waldensians and Protestants. The myth found its symbol in the so-called Synod of Chanforan.
118 Stefano Villani According to a tradition that imagined a massive pre-existing Waldensian presence in the valleys, this meeting in September 1532 discussed and ratified a document that signalled the adhesion of the Waldensians to the Reform.17 The tradition of medieval Waldensianism and the presence of some heretics who had secretly kept it alive certainly created favourable ground for the adoption of Calvinism by the valley people. But it would be a mistake to think that Chanforan marked a simple passing of the baton between Waldensianism and Reformation, or that it represented the mass conversion of Waldensians to Protestant ideas.18 At the same time, the presence of the barbes of the valleys allowed those living there to present the new Calvinist churches as Waldensian. In the following years, Waldensian mountaineers fought against the efforts of the Dukes of Savoy to bring them back into the Catholic fold. On 5 June 1561, a peace treaty was signed in Cavour between the representatives of the Waldensian communities and those of the Duke of Savoy. This treaty granted religious freedom to the Waldensens in precise and defined territorial limits, and specifically in the more mountainous and uninhabited areas.19 The agreement was condemned by Rome. Paolo Sarpi recalls how “the pontiff felt great disgust that an Italian prince […] allowed heretics to live freely in his state.”20 In that same year, the Waldensian communities that had been established in Calabria – Montalto, La Guardia, San Sisto, and Vaccarizzo – were destroyed with thousands killed.21 With the Cavour treaty, a sort of “outdoor ghetto” was born in the Valleys. Roughly 15,000 Waldensens could now build temples, organize schools, and have pastors who had been trained in Geneva. The Waldenses could not live outside the prescribed areas of the valleys mentioned in the Treaty: Luserna high valley (now val Pellice) including Rorà and Angrogna; the valley of San Martino (now Val Germanasca); and the valley of Perosa (now Val Chisone), which included Pramollo. The term “ghetto,” which has been found in the historiography of these communities since the nineteenth century to define the Waldensian valleys, cannot be found in any document of the time. But even though it was not a space enclosed by walls, the term “ghetto” effectively describes the idea of a space that allowed the presence of people of a different religion in a Catholic country, with well outlined and defined borders. The Cavour treaty can, in fact, be seen as the first edict of tolerance issued in Europe. It went beyond the principle of cuius regio ejus religio established by the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which stated that the subjects of territories within the Holy Roman Empire were to follow the religion of their rulers. Over the years, Waldensian families settled outside the limits set up by the Treaty of Cavour. In 1655, an ordinance imposed on the Waldensian settlers commanded them to either convert to Catholicism or leave their homes. They refused, and a massacre followed. It has been estimated that about 1700 men and women were killed, and 148 children were taken away from the valleys and entrusted to Catholic families.22 The massacre stirred up popular indignation in the Protestant world, and John Milton preserved the memory of it in a famous sonnet, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.”23
To be a foreigner in early modern Italy 119 Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold, Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old, When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones; Forget not: in thy book record their groans Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow O’er all th’ Italian fields where still doth sway The triple tyrant; that from these may grow A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way Early may fly the Babylonian woe. Thanks to international support, those Waldenses who lived within the limits set by the Treaty were able to maintain their rights. Thus, the Waldensian v alleys – the ghetto of the Alps – represented the only area of religious freedom in the Italian peninsula after the massacres of the Waldenses of Calabria in 1561 and of the Protestants of Valtellina in 1620. Practices of tolerance and coexistence were put in place and expanded over the years. It was only with the patent letters that Charles Albert granted to the Waldensians on 17 February 1848 that the terms of Cavour’s treaty were overcome, and the community was permitted to build temples outside the 13 parishes of the valleys. The first ones built were in Turin and Genoa. Following the unification of Italy in 1861, the Waldesian church, having adopted the Italian language instead of the French, established temples throughout the peninsula.24
Foreigners Apart from the Waldensian valleys, Protestants were not allowed to live and worship openly in any of the Italian states even temporarily. Those who were found ran the risk of being prosecuted as formal heretics. The bull In Cœna Domini listed the most serious cases which would lead to excommunication. From at least 1610, it was solemnly read every Holy Thursday from the loggia of S. Peter’s Basilica, both in Latin and Italian, renewing the threat of excommunication against “Hussites, Wycliffites, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, Huguenots, Anabaptists, Anti-Trinitarians and Apostates of the Christian Faith.” Anyone who would become aware of the presence of heretics was obliged to report them. In 1592, it was explicitly forbidden for Italian Catholics to live in countries where mass was not celebrated openly. In 1623, the bull Romani Pontifici of Gregorio XV reiterated the ban on heretics seeking to enter Italy.25 In theory, if not always in practice, Protestants under trial by the Inquisition had only two options: either to “convert” to Catholicism or to be condemned to death as pertinacious heretics.
120 Stefano Villani Although “heretics” were prohibited by law from traveling, trading, and settling in a Catholic country, the reality is that the facts on the ground did not follow this precise and harsh rhetoric. Even in the sixteenth century, flexible practices countered the draconian rules, and “heretic” travellers who behaved in a prudent and judicious way were usually left entirely undisturbed. The presence of a strict rule, even if not always applied, certainly did leave ample space for arbitrary and occasional enforcement. As a result, Protestant governments tried over the years and often successfully to introduce some elements of protection for their nationals who needed to travel in Catholic countries. For example, the peace treaty between Spain and England in 1605 included provisions protecting British travellers from any persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition; these were subsequently extended to other Mediterranean countries under the jurisdiction of the Roman Inquisition. The only conditions this treaty imposed on the British protestants was that they refrain from spreading any kind of religious propaganda, and that they behave in a manner that would not give scandal to Catholics. This chiefly meant that these foreigners were forbidden from publicly expressing their adherence to a non-Catholic faith.26
Livorno What then was the foreign Protestant presence in Italy? Many non-Catholic foreigners lived in the great mercantile cities of the Italian peninsula: Venice, Milan, Genoa, Livorno, Rome, and Naples. In the Republic of Venice, non-Catholic foreigners studied at the University of Padua – where students from Protestant lands had special status – and some served as soldiers in the fortress of Palmanova. 27 In the northern regions, there was a continuous exchange between the Catholic and the Protestant world, with merchants and artisans moving from place to place. 28 In other Italian cities, the presence of non-Catholic foreigners was very limited, often temporary, and due to individual choices that are singular and escape any general rule. Most of these foreign “heretics” came from Germany, particularly in northern Italy. There were also, depending on the place, some French Huguenots, Dutch Calvinists from the Netherlands, schismatic Greeks and Armenians. 29 Non-Catholic British had a structured presence only in Venice, Genoa, Naples, and Livorno. 30 In the latter city, organized German and English Protestant communities were established in the seventeenth century. In addition to Livorno, a de facto tolerance towards Protestant merchants was also granted in the port cities of Nice, in the Duchy of Savoy, and in the port cities of Civitavecchia and Ancona in the Papal States.31 In all these places, Protestants were expected to be discrete and not to call attention to their distinct religious identity and practices. Since in theory it was not possible for them to reside in any Italian state, it would not have made sense to ask or require them to reside in any particular part of the city, as Jews did. Instead, they were asked to exercise discretion in their public practices, such as refraining from eating meat on fast days.32
To be a foreigner in early modern Italy 121 The emblematic case of this practice of exercising de facto toleration to those in Italy temporarily and for commercial purposes was Livorno. Non-Catholic merchants found safety by virtue of a set of decrees adopted by Grand Duke Ferdinando I in 1591 and 1593 and known as the Livornina. Though designed in the first instance to attract Sephardic Jewish merchants to settle in Livorno, the Livornina promised protection from the Inquisition for “merchants of all nations, Levantine and Ponentine, Greeks, Germans and Italians, Jews, Turks and Moors, Armenians, Persians and others.” Although they were not specifically noted in it, the Livornina also became a point of reference for non-Catholic Christians.33 Between the end of 1500s and early 1600s, only a small number of British and Dutch settled in Livorno. These were for the most part ship captains who were employed in the service of the Grand Duke. There were a smaller number of merchants, who initially were mostly Catholic. It was only in the 1620s that the English and Dutch mercantile presence expanded, and Livorno saw the emergence of a Protestant community that in a few years would become predominant. Their number was limited to a few dozen people, and most of these were bachelors or people who had left their wives at home, demonstrating that they only intended to stay Livorno temporarily. At a certain point, the substantial presence of these foreigners necessitated their organization in Nationi, or communities formally recognized by the Tuscan government. These Nationi were structured with their own statutes and self-governing bodies, with a consul at their head whose duties were almost exclusively mercantile rather than political.34 The German presence was completely negligible until at least the mid-eighteenth century. The few German merchants who resided in Livorno before were then considered part of the Dutch nation, which, in fact, was called Dutch-German, olandese-alemanna. There was almost certainly a small g arrison of Germanic soldiers, and the number of abjurations on the part of these soldiers makes it likely that most of them were Protestants. Yet almost nothing is known about this garrison. It is not even clear whether Livorno’s German Company (Compagnia Alemanna) was a free-standing group or simply a detachment of the German Company of personal guards of the Grand Duke (Trabanten or trabanti) that had existed in Florence since the first half of the sixteenth century.35 The tolerance granted to the Protestants in Livorno was limited and controlled. It offered them neither freedom of worship, nor the possibility of religious proselytism, nor the right to bury their dead with dignity and decorum. Furthermore, they were constantly subject to Catholic propaganda. As their mercantile communities grew in importance, the British and the Dutch started to feel uneasy with the strict limits imposed on their freedom and sought to widen the spaces of tolerance. The history of the Protestant presence in Livorno in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is thus also the history of the conflicts between these communities and the political and religious Tuscan authorities over their right to live openly according to their religious beliefs. The first to claim this right were the British who from 1644 tried repeatedly to appoint a
122 Stefano Villani Protestant minister for their community. Very significantly, the Tuscan authorities, both locally and centrally, were well aware of the fact that Protestant worship was practised in the city and did not raise any objections. However, every time that the Protestants went beyond the limits of desirable discretion, and the presence of their pastors became publicly known, the Inquisition intervened and forced state authorities to expel them. Between 1644 and 1677 we have reports of at least ten such expulsions. It was not until 1697 that, thanks to the extraterritoriality of the British diplomatic office, the English ambassador’s chaplain was also able to act informally as the chaplain for the English merchant community of Livorno. At first, this was only possible if he acted in secrecy, with discretion and prudence but, from 1707, he was able to carry out his duties openly and publicly. This change came only when England threatened to cut off diplomatic relations with Tuscany entirely. It is significant, however, that, even after 1707, Tuscan authorities asked the British to ensure that the buildings where the Protestant congregation met should not be recognizable in any way as chapels or churches. This was in contrast to the Jewish synagogues, which were clearly recognizable. In the case of Protestant places of worship, the authorities asked for a sort of invisibility. 36 From the 1640s, the Dutch and English in Livorno had real cemeteries where the erection of individual burial monuments was allowed. Before that time, they almost certainly buried their dead in unmarked graves. These cemeteries were not fenced off for about half a century, and when problems with animals and tomb-robbers developed, the community asked that the burial places be protected. The first request was probably made in 1685 by the Dutch, followed by one in 1706 by the English. Very laborious negotiations followed. The Dutch were allowed to fence their graveyard as early as 1695, but the English did not get permission until 1746. Authorities resisted permitting the fencing of non-Catholic cemeteries because they feared that religious rites would take place inside. For this reason, even when the construction of real walls was granted, they had to be low enough to allow people outside to see what was done inside. Authorities wanted to underscore the fact that the burial of the heretics had nothing to do with religion. For this same reason, they did not allow Catholics to participate in any Protestant funeral rites.37 Protestants in Livorno lived all over the city. The richest took up residence in the central streets, while the others stayed in less prestigious areas. The same thing, as far as we know, can be said of all the Italian cities in which there was a foreign presence. This coexistence in the same urban spaces inevitably led to processes of assimilation, especially among the less wealthy foreigners. In 1616, the inquisitor of Turin complained that Swiss merchants married Catholic women, leaving him unsure which church their children belonged to. We also know of many dozen foreign Protestants who, having decided to settle in Italy permanently, converted to Catholicism.38 There were, therefore, no Protestant ghettos in Italy. On the contrary, Protestants were asked to be as invisible as possible. Formally admitting the presence
To be a foreigner in early modern Italy 123 of organized Protestant congregations would not only have been a violation of canon law; it would have meant admitting that it was possible to be Christian without being Catholic.
Venice The closest thing to a “Christian ghetto” in early modern Italy was the large German merchant’s hostel known as the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice.39 This ethnic institution was established well before the Reformation in the mercantile centre of the city, close to the Rialto bridge, which was the centre of commerce. Across the Mediterranean, similar fondaci had been established between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries to serve both as warehouses and to house foreign merchants: the word comes from Arabic, funduq, which literally means “warehouse-house.” Gradually they lost their function as shelters and became essentially places where the authorities levied custom taxes. With the 1500s, the great period of the Fondaci had ended, due mainly to the impact of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople on Mediterranean trade, the search for new Atlantic routes, and the steady shifting of the commercial axis to northern Europe.40 The Fondaco dei Tedeschi of Venice was established in 1228 following the model of the Venetian fondaci in Byzantium and in the Islamic countries. It was the only one of these medieval structures to survive in the Italian peninsula.41 The structure housed about 100–120 German merchants in addition to a large number of workers who served as cooks and carriers. The State of Venice assumed responsibility for the direction of the Fondaco. Among the various Venetian officials, we find the Visdomini of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Consuls and the Sopraconsoli of the merchants, the Gastaldo. Alongside these management officers, a large number of subordinates worked at the Fondaco, and were responsible for weighing, packing, and transporting goods. Every German merchant was obliged to stay in the Fondaco; the boatmen who ferried them to Venice from the mainland were forbidden to take them to any place that was outside the Fondaco, though at times when there was no space, some did occupy hostels in the adjoining area. Entering the Fondaco, they had to give up both their arms and their money. Each merchant was assigned a “messetta” who was to act as an interpreter, to assist him in all his negotiations, and of course to control him.42 Many of these measures were adopted to prevent tax fraud. In 1505, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi caught fire and burned to the ground. The Republic gave orders to rebuild it immediately at Venice’s expense. The speed with which this decision was made and carried out clearly shows the economic importance that the Republic attributed to the German presence. The new warehouse, completed in 1508, was a compact building with harmonious shapes, decorated with frescoes by Giorgione and Titian. On the ground floor, around a square-shaped courtyard, there were the shops. On the two upper floors, there was a refectory and living quarters.43 In 1608, Venetian authorities deliberated on the possibility of allocating another similar building as place for Turkish merchants. The proposal became a
124 Stefano Villani reality in 1621 when the Fondaco dei Turchi was established in a palace converted to commercial use with warehouses, washrooms, and residential rooms – essentially a kind of “Muslim ghetto.”44 Many of the German merchants in Venice adopted protestant beliefs or came from cities which had adopted protestant Church orders. As early as 1529, the pope lamented that the Fondaco dei Tedeschi was a centre of heretical propaganda, and he was not wrong. A certain Jacob Ziegler was in correspondence with Luther, who wrote a letter of encouragement to the brothers from every nation who were in Venice, Vicenza, and Treviso.45 We do not have much information about the religious life of the Fondaco in the subsequent years. Yet the silence of the sources leads us to think that, in all probability, the Republic was effective in offering its political protection in exchange for the German community’s cautious behaviour, and their attempt to avoid any scandal. These dynamics are clearly similar to those that we have just described for the Tuscan scenario. At the same time, everyone knew that the warehouse was a nest of heretics. It is very significant that when diplomatic relations between Venice and Britain were restored in 1603, the rumour that this would lead to the establishment of a British Fondaco on the model of German one circulated. These rumours immediately caused great alarm in the Roman Curia, which feared the establishment of another Protestant hub in the Republic of Venice. In 1634, the apostolic nuncio of Venice wrote to the Congregation of the Holy Office that in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Rialto, almost all the merchants were heretics.46 In the changed religious climate that followed the end of the Thirty Years War, a Lutheran minister arrived in Venice in 1650, disguised as a doctor. He secretly conducted protestant worship services in two rooms (the ones numbered 81 and 82 on the third floor of the building). On Easter, in 1651, about 150 Lutherans took communion according to their rite: ten were merchants of the Fondaco and 150 were probably Germans living or travelling in other parts of the Republic, as well some students at the university of Padua.47 The successor of this first minister, Johann Georg Renier from Augsburg, was discovered in 1654 and denounced. At the request of the nuncio, he was expelled from Venice. This expulsion represented a major turning point for the German Protestant community of Venice which, to avoid possible future problems, worked out a set of 21 articles, that organized worship rigorously to ensure the secrecy of the community. There were clear provisions for newcomers and prescriptions on how to access the worship hall without arousing suspicion. In addition to the detailed longer version, they also prepared an abbreviated document that was read to the younger new members, at the time of their entry into the community.48 At the end of the seventeenth century, the consultori in Jure (the legal advisers of the Venetian state) formally declared that the Inquisition could not act against a Swiss Protestant who lived in Venice, because he was born and raised in a Protestant country. This statement contradicted the whole anti-Protestant system of the Catholic Church and represents a real turning point in the history
To be a foreigner in early modern Italy 125 of the protestant presence in Italy. In 1719, the German community was formally granted to the right to bury its dead in the cemetery of the island of San Cristoforo della Pace. Yet it was only after the fall of the Republic in 1797 that the Lutheran congregation could leave the Fondaco and buy the building of the Scuola dell’Angelo Custode in Campo Santi Apostoli, which is still home to the Lutheran church of Venice.49 The Fondaco was clearly at one and the same time an institution both of coexistence and of separation, and it is not unlikely that when the decision to establish the Jewish Ghetto was made, the German structure was, in some measure, a model for this project. In this brief overview, we have examined three models of interreligious coexistence that developed in early modern Italy towards Protestants: the first model was the en plein air ghetto of the Waldensian valleys. The second model was the de facto tolerance granted to foreign Protestants in Livorno and other mercantile cities, provided that they did not publicly express or demonstrate their adherence to a non-Catholic church. The third model was the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, a sort of “Christian ghetto,” which, on ethnic grounds, reproduced the multi-confessionalism of the German nation. The study of these practices of limited toleration, at a time when Catholic authorities were vigorously prosecuting a Counter-Reformation, reveals the methods that allowed early modern societies to maintain commercial relationships beyond confessional boundaries. As a result, it also serves as part of the larger exploration of how forms of coexistence and toleration evolved from the sixteenth century until today.
Notes 1 “altro è privilegio altro è toleranza, le toleranze sono come de’ giochi e putane […] et in tal concetto tengo questa religione,” in M.A. Rorengo, Memorie historiche dell’introduttione dell’heresie nelle Valli di Lucerna, Marchesato di Saluzzo et altre di Piemonte, Turin: Tarino, 1649, pp. 250–251. Rorengo was prior of Luserna. See also M. Laurenti, I confini della comunità. Conflitto europeo e guerra religiosa nelle comunità valdesi del Seicento, Turin: Claudiana, 2015, p. 156. 2 B.J. Kaplan, Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 8. 3 N. Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 4 B.D. Cooperman, “The Early Modern Ghetto. A Study in Urban Real Estate,” in W.Z. Goldman and J.W. Trotter, Jr. (eds) The Ghetto in Global History 1500 to the Present, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 57–73. 5 G. Caravale, Beyond the Inquisition. Ambrogio Catarino Politi and the Origins of the Counter-Reformation, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2017. 6 D. Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento, Turin: Einaudi, 2002; S. Caponetto, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy, Kirksville, MO, Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999; M. Firpo, Riforma protestante ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento. Un profilo storico, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2008; A. Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari, Turin: Einaudi, 1996; J. Tedeschi and J.M. Lattis (ed.) The Italian Reformation of the Sixteenth Century and the Diffusion of Renaissance Culture: A Bibliography of the Secondary Literature, ca. 1750–1997, Modena: Panini 2000.
126 Stefano Villani 7 A. Del Col, L’inquisizione in Italia. Dal XII al XXI secolo, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2007; G. Romeo, L’Inquisizione nell’Italia moderna, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002; A. Prosperi, L’inquisizione romana. Letture e ricerche, Rome: Edizioni di Storia della Letteratura, 2003. For a comparative outlook of the different early modern inquisitions see F. Bethencourt, The Inquisition: A Global History 1478–1834, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 8 Del Col, L’inquisizione in Italia, pp. 779–782. See also P. Benedict, S. Seidel Menchi, A. Tallon (eds) La Réforme en France et en Italie. Contacts, comparaisons et contraste, Rome: École française de Rome, 2007. 9 S. Adorni Braccesi, “Religious refugees from Lucca in the Sixteenth century: Political Strategies and Religious Proselytism,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 88, 1997, 338–379; O. Boersma, A.J. Jelsma (eds) Unity in Multiformity. The Minutes of the coetus of London, 1575, and the Consistory Minutes of the Italian Church of London, 1570–1591, London: Publication of the Huguenot Society, 1997, Quarto Series, V, 49, part., pp. 21–52; E.W. Monter, “The Italians in Geneva, 1550–1600: A New Look,” in Genève et l’Italie. Études publiées à l’occasion du 50e Anniversaire de la Société d’études italiennes, Geneva: Droz, 1969. 10 A. Pastore, Nella Valtellina del tardo Cinquecento, Rome: Viella, 2015; see also E. Campi, G. La Torre (eds) Il protestantesimo di lingua italiana nella Svizzera: figure e movimenti tra Cinquecento e Ottocento, Turin: Claudiana Editrice, 2000; Giampaolo Zucchini, Riforma e società nei Grigioni: G. Zanchi, S. Florillo, S. Lentulo e i conflitti dottrinari e socio-politici à Chiavenna (1563–1567), Chur: Archivio di Stato dei Grigioni, 1978. 11 E. Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldenses of the Alps 1480–1580, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984; Id., Waldenses. Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 12 A. Pascal, “Comunità eretiche e chiese cattoliche nelle Valli Valdesi, secondo le Relazioni delle visite pastorali del Peruzzi e del Broglia,” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 30, 1912, 61–63; see also Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics, p. 146. 13 Laurenti, I confini della comunità, p. 20. 14 A. Armand-Hugon, “Popolo e chiesa alle Valli dal 1532 al 1561,” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 110, 1961, 5–34, p. 16. 15 Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics, pp. 157–158, 173–174, 179–180; E. Fiume, Scipione Lentolo 1525–1599. “Quotidie laborans evangelii causa,” Turin: Claudiana, 2003. 16 Cameron, Waldenses, p. 270. 17 On the “myth” of the Synod of Chanforan, see Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics, pp. 138–144, 264–267. 18 P. Biller, The Waldenses, 1170–1530. Between a Religious Order and a Church, A ldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 19 Laurenti, I confini della comunità, p. 153. 20 “il pontefice sentì grandissimo disgusto che un principe italiano […] permettesse viver eretici liberamente nello Stato suo.” P. Sarpi, Istoria del Concilio Tridentino, C. Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 1974, pp. 716–717. See also R. De Simone, “La pace di Cavour e l’editto di S. Germano nella storia della tolleranza religiosa,” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 110, 1961, 35–50; P. Merlin, “Dal Piemonte all’Europa. I risvolti internazionali della politica antiereticale di Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia,” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 177, 1995, 74–86 (Frontiere geografiche e religiose in Italia); Armand-Hugon, “Popolo e chiesa nelle valli dal 1532 al 1561;” S. Peyronel, M. Fratini (eds) 1561. I valdesi tra resistenza e sterminio. In Piemonte e in Calabria, Turin: Claudiana, 2010, pp. 57–62. 21 P. Scaramella, L’inquisizione romana e i valdesi di Calabria (1554–1703), Naples: Editoriale scientifica, 1999.
To be a foreigner in early modern Italy 127 22 A. Armand Hugon, “Le Pasque Piemontesi e il Marchese di Pianezza (1655),” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 98, 1955, 5–49; E. Balmas, G. Zardini Lana (eds) La vera relazione di quanto è accaduto nelle persecuzioni e i massacri dell’anno 1655. Le ‘Pasque Piemontesi’ del 1655 nelle testimonianze dei protagonisti, Turin: Claudiana, 1987. 23 E. Balmas and E. Menascé, “L’opinione pubblica inglese e le ‘Pasque Piemontesi’: nuovi documenti,” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 150, 1981, 3–26; W. McComish, “Reazioni inglesi alla ‘primavera di sangue’ valdese del 1655,” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 149, 1981, 3–10. 24 A. Armand Hugon, Storia dei Valdesi, II. Dall’adesione alla Riforma all’Emancipazione (1532–1848), Turin: Claudiana, 1974; V. Vinay, Storia dei Valdesi, III. Dal movimento evangelico italiano al movimento ecumenico (1848–1978), Turin: Claudiana, 1980. 25 “Excommunicamus, & anathematizamus ex parte Dei Omnipotentis Patris, & Filij & Spiritus Sancti auctoritate quoque Beatorum apostolorum Petri & Pauli, ac nostra, quoscumque Hussitas, Wichlesistas, Luteranos., Zuinglianos, Calvinistas, Ugonottos Anabaptistas, Trinitarios, & à christiana Fide Apostatas ac omnes et singulos alios Hæreticos, quocumque nomine censeantur. Excommunicamus, & anathematizamus ex parte Dei Omnipotentis, Patris, & Filij & Spiritus Sancti auctoritate quoque Beatorum apostolorum Petri & Pauli, ac nostra, quoscumque Hussitas, Wichlesistas, Luteranos, Zuinglianos, Calvinistas, Ugonottos, Anabaptistas, Trinitarios, & à christiana Fide Apostatas ac omes & singulos alios Hæreticos quoqumque nomine censeantur.” The custom of reading a bull against heretics had its origin in the fourteenth century and was maintained until 1770 (the text of the bull was written in its final form in 1627). See P. Schmidt, “L’Inquisizione e gli stranieri,” in L’Inquisizione e gli storici: un cantiere aperto. Tavola rotonda nell’ambito della conferenza annuale della ricerca (Roma, 24–25 giugno 1999), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2000, pp. 365–372. On the importance of the bull In coena Domini see E. Brambilla, Alle origini del Sant’Uffizio. Penitenza, confessione e giustizia spirituale dal medioevo al XVI secolo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000, part., p. 187. 26 I. Fosi, Convertire lo straniero. Forestieri e Inquisizione a Roma in età moderna, Roma: Viella, 2011; M. Sanfilippo, “Il controllo politico e religioso sulle comunità straniere a Roma e nella penisola,” in M. Ghilardi, G. Sabatini, M. Sanfilippo, and D. Strangio (eds) Ad ultimos usque terrarum terminos in fide propaganda. Roma fra promozione e difesa della fede in età moderna, Viterbo: Sette Città, 2014, pp. 85–110. On Venice see G. Minchella, Frontiere aperte. Musulmani, ebrei e cristiani nella Repubblica di Venezia (XVII secolo), Rome: Viella, 2014. See also S. Villani, “‘Cum scandalo catholicorum…’ La presenza a Livorno di predicatori protestanti inglesi tra il 1644 e il 1670,” Nuovi Studi Livornesi 7, 1999, 9–58; P.A. Mazur, Converts to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy, London: Routledge, 2016; K. Siebenhüner, “Conversion, Mobility, and the Roman Inquisition in Italy around 1600,” Past & Present 200, 2008, 5–36. 27 On Padua see M. Valente, “Un sondaggio sulla prassi cattolica del nicodemismo: ‘Che li scolari tedeschi si debbano tollerare a vivere luteranamente, in secreto però,’” in S. Peyronel (ed.) Cinquant’anni di storiografia italiana sulla Riforma e i movimenti ereticali in Italia 1950–2000, Turin: Società di Studi Valdesi, 2002, pp. 175–216; G. Angeli, Lettere del Sant’Ufficio di Roma all’inquisizione di Padova (1567–1660), Padua: Centro Studi Antoniani, 2013, 71–73. See also G. Minchella, Musulmani, ebrei e cristiani nella Repubblica di Venezia (XVII secolo), Roma, Viella, 2014. On Palmanova, see G. Minchella, “Porre un soldato alla inquisitione.” I processi del Sant’Ufficio nella fortezza di Palmanova, 1595–1669, Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2009. 28 G. Maifreda (ed.) “Mercanti, eresia, Inquisizione nell’Italia moderna,” Special Issue of the Journal Storia economica, 1, 2014; M. Van Gelder, Trading Places: The Netherlandish Merchants in Early Modern Venice, Leiden: Brill, 2009; S. Luzzi, Stranieri in città. Presenza tedesca e società urbana a Trento (secoli XV–XVIII), Bologna: il Mulino, 2003. See also R. Mazzei, Itinera mercatorum. Circolazione di uomini e beni nell’Europa centro-orientale: 1550–1650, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1999.
128 Stefano Villani 29 G. Fedalto, Ricerche storiche sulla posizione giuridica ed ecclesiastica dei Greci a Venezia nei secoli XV e XVI, Florence: Olschki, 1967, Id. “Le minoranze straniere a Venezia tra politica e legislazione,” in H.G. Beck, Manoussos Manoussacas and A. Pertusi (eds) Venezia, centro di mediazione tra Oriente e Occidente (sec. XV–XVI): aspetti e problemi, Florence: Olschki, 1977, pp. 143–162; V. Giura, Storie di minoranze: ebrei, greci, albanesi nel Regno di Napoli, Naples: ESI, 1987; F. Patroni Griffi, A. Pellettieri, and V. Verrastro (eds) Minoranze etniche del Melfese. Ebrei, Greci ed Albanesi tra Medioevo ed età moderna, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2002; B.L. Zeckiyan (ed.) Gli armeni in Italia, Rome: De Luca, 1990. 30 M. Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean. The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England 1450–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 110–138. 31 Sanfilippo, Il controllo politico e religioso sulle comunità straniere a Roma e nella penisola. 32 S. Villani, “Unintentional Dissent: Eating Meat and Religious Identity among British in Early Modern Livorno,” in K. Aron-Beller and C. Black (eds) The Roman Inquisition: Centre versus Peripheries, Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2018, pp. 373–394. 33 L. Frattarelli-Fischer, Vivere fuori del Ghetto. Ebrei a Pisa e Livorno (secoli XVI–XVIII), Turin: Zamorani, 2008; F. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2009; M. Grenet, La Fabrique communautaire. Les Grecs à Venise, Livourne et Marseille v. 1770-v. 1830, PhD Thesis EUI, Florence 2010, http://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/14698 34 S. Villani, “Una piccola epitome di Inghilterra. La comunità inglese di Livorno negli anni di Ferdinando II: questioni religiose e politiche,” Cromohs 8, 2003, 1–23, and Id., “Religione e politica: le comunità protestanti a Livorno nel XVII e XVIII secolo,” in D. Pesciatini (ed.) Livorno dal Medioevo all’Età contemporanea. Ricerche e riflessioni, Pisa-Livorno: Banco di Sardegna, 2003, pp. 36–64; M. D’Angelo, Mercanti inglesi a Livorno, 1573–1737: alle origini di una British factory, Messina: Istituto di studi storici Gaetano Salvemini, 2004; L. Frattarelli Fischer and S. Villani, “People of Every Mixture.” Immigration, Tolerance and Religious Conflicts in Early Modern Livorno, in A.K. Isaacs (ed.) Immigration and Emigration in Historical Perspective, Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2007, pp. 93–108; Villani, “Cum scandalo catholicorum,” Id., “L’histoire religieuse de la communauté anglaise de Livourne (XVIIe–XVIIIe siecles),” in A. Burkardt, G. Bertrand, and Y. Krumenacker Commerce, voyage, et expérience religieuse (XVIe–XVIIIe), Rennes: PUR, 2007, pp. 257–274. 35 S. Villani, “Ambasciatori russi a Livorno e rapporti tra Moscovia e Toscana nel XVII secolo,” Nuovi Studi Livornesi 14, 2008, 37–95, part., pp. 68–69. 36 Villani, “Cum scandalo catholicorum.” 37 S. Villani, “Alcune note sulle recinzioni dei cimiteri acattolici livornesi,” Nuovi Studi Livornesi, 11, 2004, 35–51; M. Giunti, S. Villani, “L’antico cimitero degli inglesi di Livorno dalle origini al 1900,” in M. Giunti and G. Lorenzini (eds) Un archivio di pietra: L’antico cimitero degli inglesi di Livorno. Note storiche e progetti di restauro, Pisa Pacini 2013, pp. 15–30, 96–108. 38 The Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Vatican, Inquisizione, Stanza Storica, M–4b, vol. 1, f. 125, see Sanfilippo, Il controllo politico e religioso sulle comunità straniere a Roma, p. 103. 39 A. Zannini, Venezia città aperta. Gli stranieri e la Serenissima XIV–XVIII sec., Venice: Marcianum Press, 2009; G. Fedalto, “Stranieri a Venezia e a Padova,” in G. Arnaldi and M. Pastore Stocchi, Storia della Cultura veneta, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1976–1986, vol. 4/II: Dalla Controriforma alla fine della Repubblica. Il Seicento (1984), pp. 251–279; B. Ravid, “Venice and Its Minorities,” E.R. Dursteler (ed.) A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797, Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 449–85l.
To be a foreigner in early modern Italy 129 40 U. Israel, “Fondaci: città nelle città sulle sponde del Mediterraneo,” in D. Calabi and E. Svalduz (eds) Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa, VI, Luoghi, spazi, architetture, Vicenza: Colla, 2010, pp. 107–123; D. Calabi, “Gli stranieri e la città,” in Storia di Venezia, V, A. Tenenti and U. Tucci, Il Rinascimento: società ed economia, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996, pp. 913–946, Ead., “Gli stranieri nella capitale della repubblica Veneta nella prima età moderna,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, 111, 2, 1999, 721–732; G. Rösch, “Il Fondaco dei Tedeschi,” in Venezia e la Germania: Arte, politica, commercio, due civiltà a c onfronto, Milan: Electra, 1986, pp. 51–72. 41 G. Thomas, Capitular des deutschen Hauses in Venedig, Berlin: Asher, 1874; and H. Simonsfeld, Der Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venedig, Stuttgart: Neudruck der Ausgabe, 1887. 4 2 K.-E. Lupprian, Il fondaco dei tedeschi e la sua funzione di controllo del commercio tedesco a Venezia, Venice: Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, 1978. 43 J. Schulz, “Titian at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi,” The Burlington magazine, 143, 1182, 567–569. 4 4 M. Grenet, “Institution de la coexistence et pratiques de la différence: le Fondaco dei Turchi de Venise (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” Revue d’Histoire Maritime, 17, 2013, 273–301; see also G. Vercellin, “Mercanti turchi e sensali a Venezia,” Studi veneziani, n.s., 4, 1980, 45–78. 45 S. Oswald, L’inquisizione, i vivi e i morti : protestanti tedeschi a Venezia, Venice: Comunità evangelica luterana di Venezia, 2012, translation of Die Inquisition, die Lebenden und die Toten. Venedigs deutsche Protestanten, Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1989. 46 Oswald, L’inquisizione, p. 60. 47 State Archive of Venice, Collegio Secreta, Esposizioni Principi, 7 ott. 1604; Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English affairs, existing in the archives and collections of Venice, and in other libraries of northern Italy, London 1864–1947, vol. 10, 1603–1607, pp. 185–186. See also Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean, pp. 202–235. 48 Oswald, L’inquisizione, pp. 60–61. 49 Ibid., pp. 63–80, 87–104.
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To be a foreigner in early modern Italy 131 ———, Ricerche storiche sulla posizione giuridica ed ecclesiastica dei Greci a Venezia nei secoli XV e XVI, Florence: Olschki, 1967. Fedalto, G., “Stranieri a Venezia e a Padova,” in G. Arnaldi and M. Pastore Stocchi, Storia della Cultura veneta, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1976–1986, vol. 4/II: Dalla Controriforma alla fine della Repubblica. Il Seicento (1984), pp. 251–279. Firpo M., Riforma protestante ed eresie nell’Italia del Cinquecento. Un profilo storico, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2008. Fiume, E., Scipione Lentolo 1525–1599. “Quotidie laborans evangelii causa,” Turin: Claudiana, 2003. Fosi, I., Convertire lo straniero. Forestieri e Inquisizione a Roma in età moderna, Roma: Viella, 2011. Frattarelli Fischer, L. and S. Villani, ““People of Every Mixture.” Immigration, Tollerance and Religious Conflicts in Early Modern Livorno,” in A.K. Isaacs (ed.) Immigration and Emigration in Historical Perspective, Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2007, pp. 93–108. Frattarelli-Fischer, L., Vivere fuori del Ghetto. Ebrei a Pisa e Livorno (secoli XVI–XVIII), Turin: Zamorani, 2008. Fusaro, M., Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean. The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England 1450–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 110–138. Giunti, M., and S. Villani, “L’antico cimitero degli inglesi di Livorno dalle origini al 1900,” in M. Giunti and G. Lorenzini (eds) Un archivio di pietra: L’antico cimitero degli inglesi di Livorno. Note storiche e progetti di restauro, Pisa: Pacini 2013, pp. 15–30, 96–108. Giura, V., Storie di minoranze: ebrei, greci, albanesi nel Regno di Napoli, Naples: ESI, 1987. Grenet, M., “Institution de la coexistence et pratiques de la différence: le Fondaco dei Turchi de Venise (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” Revue d’Histoire Maritime, 17, 2013: 273–301. ———, La Fabrique communautaire. Les Grecs à Venise, Livourne et Marseille v. 1770-v. 1830, PhD Thesis EUI, Florence 2010, http://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/14698. Israel, U., “Fondaci: città nelle città sulle sponde del Mediterraneo,” in D. Calabi and E. Svalduz (eds) Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa, VI, Luoghi, spazi, architetture, Vicenza: Colla, 2010, pp. 107–123. Kaplan, B.J., Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Laurenti, M., I confini della comunità. Conflitto europeo e guerra religiosa nelle comunità valdesi del Seicento, Turin: Claudiana, 2015. Lupprian, K.E., Il fondaco dei tedeschi e la sua funzione di controllo del commercio tedesco a Venezia, Venice: Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, 1978. Luzzi, S., Stranieri in città. Presenza tedesca e società urbana a Trento (secoli XV–XVIII), Bologna: il Mulino, 2003. Maifreda, G. (ed.) “Mercanti, eresia, Inquisizione nell’Italia moderna,” Special Issue of the Journal Storia economica, 1, 2014. Mazur, P.A., Converts to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy, London: Routledge, 2016. Mazzei, R., Itinera mercatorum. Circolazione di uomini e beni nell’Europa centro- orientale: 1550–1650, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1999. McComish, W., “Reazioni inglesi alla ‘primavera di sangue’ valdese del 1655,” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 149, 1981, 3–10. Merlin, P., “Dal Piemonte all’Europa. I risvolti internazionali della politica antiereticale di Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia,” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 177, 1995, 74–86 (Frontiere geografiche e religiose in Italia).
132 Stefano Villani Minchella, G., “Porre un soldato alla inquisitione.” I processi del Sant’Ufficio nella fortezza di Palmanova, 1595–1669, Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2009. ———, Frontiere aperte. Musulmani, ebrei e cristiani nella Repubblica di Venezia (XVII secolo), Rome: Viella, 2014. ———, Musulmani, ebrei e cristiani nella Repubblica di Venezia (XVII secolo), Roma, Viella, 2014. Monter, E.W., The Italians in Geneva, 1550–1600: A New Look, in Genève et l’Italie. Études publiées à l’occasion du 50e Anniversaire de la Société d’études italiennes, Geneva: Droz, 1969. Oswald, S., Die Inquisition, die Lebenden und die Toten. Venedigs deutsche Protestanten, Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1989. Oswald, S., L’inquisizione, i vivi e i morti: protestanti tedeschi a Venezia, Venice: Comunità evangelica luterana di Venezia, 2012. Pascal, A., “Comunità eretiche e chiese cattoliche nelle Valli Valdesi, secondo le Relazioni delle visite pastorali del Peruzzi e del Broglia,” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 30, 1912, 61–63. Pastore, A., Nella Valtellina del tardo Cinquecento, Rome: Viella, 2015. Patroni Griffi, F., A. Pellettieri, and V. Verrastro (eds) Minoranze etniche del Melfese. Ebrei, Greci ed Albanesi tra Medioevo ed età moderna, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2002. Peyronel, S. and M. Fratini (eds) 1561. I valdesi tra resistenza e sterminio. In Piemonte e in Calabria, Turin: Claudiana, 2010, pp. 57–62. Prosperi, A., L’inquisizione romana. Letture e ricerche, Rome: Edizioni di Storia della Letteratura, 2003. ———, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Ravid, B., “Venice and Its Minorities,” in E.R. Dursteler (ed.) A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797, Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 449–85l. Romeo, G., L’Inquisizione nell’Italia moderna, Rome-Bari: Laterza 2002. Rösch, G., “Il Fondaco dei Tedeschi,” in Venezia e la Germania: Arte, politica, commercio, due civiltà a confronto, Milan: Electra, 1986, pp. 51–72. Sanfilippo, M., “Il controllo politico e religioso sulle comunità straniere a Roma e nella penisola,” in M. Ghilardi, G. Sabatini, M. Sanfilippo, and D. Strangio (eds) Ad ultimos usque terrarum terminos in fide propaganda. Roma fra promozione e difesa della fede in età moderna, Viterbo: Sette Città, 2014, pp. 85–110. Scaramella, P., L’inquisizione romana e i valdesi di Calabria (1554–1703), Naples: Editoriale scientifica, 1999. Schmidt, P., “L’Inquisizione e gli stranieri,” in L’Inquisizione e gli storici: un cantiere aperto. Tavola rotonda nell’ambito della conferenza annuale della ricerca (Roma, 24–25 giugno 1999), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2000, pp. 365–372. Schulz, J., “Titian at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi,” The Burlington Magazine, 143, 1182, 567–569. Siebenhüner, K., “Conversion, Mobility, and the Roman Inquisition in Italy around 1600,” Past & Present 200, 2008, 5–36. Simonsfeld, H., Der Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venedig, Stuttgart: Neudruck der Ausgabe, 1887. Tedeschi, J. and J.M. Lattis (eds) The Italian Reformation of the Sixteenth Century and the Diffusion of Renaissance Culture: A Bibliography of the Secondary Literature, ca. 1750–1997, Modena: Panini 2000. Terpstra, N., Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
To be a foreigner in early modern Italy 133 Trivellato, F., The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2009. Valente, M., “Un sondaggio sulla prassi cattolica del nicodemismo: “Che li scolari tedeschi si debbano tollerare a vivere luteranamente, in secreto però,”” in S. Peyronel (ed.) Cinquant’anni di storiografia italiana sulla Riforma e i movimenti ereticali in Italia 1950–2000, Turin: Società di Studi Valdesi, 2002, pp. 175–216. Van Gelder, M., Trading Places: The Netherlandish Merchants in Early Modern Venice, Leiden: Brill, 2009. Vercellin, G., “Mercanti turchi e sensali a Venezia,” Studi veneziani, n.s., 4, 1980, 45–78. Villani, S., “Alcune note sulle recinzioni dei cimiteri acattolici livornesi,” Nuovi Studi Livornesi 11, 2004, 35–51. ———, “Ambasciatori russi a Livorno e rapporti tra Moscovia e Toscana nel XVII secolo,” Nuovi Studi Livornesi 14, 2008, 37–95. ———, “‘Cum scandalo catholicorum…’ La presenza a Livorno di predicatori protestanti inglesi tra il 1644 e il 1670,” Nuovi Studi Livornesi 7, 1999, 9–58. ———, “L’histoire religieuse de la communauté anglaise de Livourne (XVIIe –XVIIIe siecles),” in A. Burkardt, G. Bertrand, and Y. Krumenacker Commerce, voyage, et expérience religieuse (XVIe–XVIIIe), Rennes: PUR, 2007, pp. 257–274. ———, “Una piccola epitome di Inghilterra. La comunità inglese di Livorno negli anni di Ferdinando II: questioni religiose e politiche,” Cromohs 8, 2003, 1–23. ———, “Unintentional Dissent: Eating Meat and Religious Identity among British in Early Modern Livorno,” in K. Aron-Beller and C. Black (eds) The Roman Inquisition: Centre versus Peripheries, Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2018, pp. 373–394. ———, “Religione e politica: le comunità protestanti a Livorno nel XVII e XVIII secolo,” in D. Pesciatini (ed.) Livorno dal Medioevo all’Età contemporanea. Ricerche e riflessioni, Pisa-Livorno: Banco di Sardegna, 2003, pp. 36–64. Vinay, V., Storia dei Valdesi, III. Dal movimento evangelico italiano al movimento ecumenico (1848–1978), Turin: Claudiana, 1980. Zannini, A., Venezia città aperta. Gli stranieri e la Serenissima XIV–XVIII sec., Venice: Marcianum Press, 2009. Zeckiyan, B.L. (ed.) Gli armeni in Italia, Rome: De Luca, 1990. Zucchini, G., Riforma e società nei Grigioni: G. Zanchi, S. Florillo, S. Lentulo e i conflitti dottrinari e socio-politici à Chiavenna (1563–1567), Chur: Archivio di Stato dei Grigioni, 1978.
8 Maintaining colonial order Institutional enclosure in Spanish Manila, 1590–1790 Allison Graham
When the seventeenth-century Dominican chronicler Diego Aduarte reminisced about the first decades of Spanish rule in Manila, he enthused that the city seemed to be a monastery in the transformation of life and customs of the vecinos, and particularly in the recogimiento of women, and this was so because, for one part, the example that the religious gave was great.1 He highlighted the exemplary lives of his own religious order, which, he suggested, initiated “the reformation of the said city,” and concluded that the people of Manila were “more careful with their lives, and for this it was said that the city had become a monastery.”2 By comparing Manila to a monastery, Aduarte evoked the common Spanish colonial trope that an urban space signified “reformation” among urban dwellers conforming to ideals of Spanish civility and Christianity. Moreover, the fact that Manila was a walled city or a physically enclosed space like a monastery underscored for Aduarte the significance of “recogimiento;” physical enclosure within a contained space was connected to moral enclosure or good behaviour. The post-Tridentine reform of monasticism led to the foundation of institutions that all valued, to different extents, physical enclosure as the best means to disseminate ideals and regulate behaviour. Institutional enclosures, including religious houses, colegios (typically boarding schools and orphanages), and hospitals, were fixtures of Spanish urban society, and were part of the desired cultural transformation of a colonial city. This essay will argue that, in Manila, these seemingly disparate institutions were each involved in propagating and protecting “Spanishness” by enforcing Spanish ideals and values among enclosed populations. In particular, these institutions contributed to the creation of a colonial order that prioritized a Spanish-Catholic model of gender to create women and men who would serve as proper subjects in the faraway colony of the Philippines. However, these imperial ambitions were regularly interrupted by institutionally enclosed individuals whose disorderly behaviour pushed the boundaries of enclosure. Ultimately, this essay sheds light on the shared, imperial goals found in a variety of institutional enclosures, and provides case studies of the scandalous behaviour that challenged those goals.
Maintaining colonial order 135
A “miserable” periphery3 Officially claimed by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, the Spanish conquest of the Philippines did not fully begin until Spain’s third expedition led by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi in 1564. The effects of colonization were felt most intensely in Manila. Located in central Luzon, the largest island in the archipelago, the Tagalogs were the main ethnolinguistic group of the area. In 1571, Legazpi took the port of Manila, which only a year earlier had come under Muslim control with the expansion of rajas from Borneo and the southern island of M indanao.4 The city was granted a royal charter in 1595 and became the capital of the Spanish East Indies. One of the first governors of the colony, Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas (1590–1593), began building the city’s wall, a move prompted by attacks from Chinese pirates.5 This wall separated Manila into two main spheres: Intramuros, the centre within the wall, and Extramuros, the suburbs outside of the wall.6 The first generations of Spaniards seemed overwhelmed with concern about the miserable state of the archipelago in the early seventeenth century. Manila’s walled Intramuros was supposed to be a Spanish urban centre, catering exclusively to the needs of Spanish citizens.7 However, part of the misery that Spaniards expressed was due to the fact that the presence of people of indigenous, Chinese, and African descent was largely unavoidable. After 200 years, the population of the Intramuros reflected a very different composition than administrators had hoped: a 1794 census reveals that the population of Spaniards and Spanish mestizos was just under 1,500, while the indigenous and Chinese mestizo population was upwards of 8,000.8 Despite Spanish anxiety, these numbers suggest the development of a multi-ethnic community in a diverse urban space. Moreover, after the initial invasion of Manila, the archipelago faced what historians have called a “general decline” demographically until the mid-seventeenth century, which resulted from an unfortunate combination of natural disasters, disease, and continued colonial violence.9 In 1638, Procurador General of Manila, Juan Grau y Monfalcón, compiled a memorial that emphasized the grave situation of the islands. He noted that “in those islands…with the continuous war and distemper of the climate, the Spaniards live little and thus seek to leave their children and women with honor and recourse.”10 The geographical distance of the Philippines from the Americas, and the resulting perceptions of the colony as a periphery of the Spanish empire, magnified the issues that made life in the Philippines purportedly miserable for Spaniards. In the 1580s and 1590s, the Acapulco-Manila galleon connection was not nearly as successful as it would become, losing numerous ships to treacherous seas. When those ships sank, communication from the Spanish crown was also lost, contributing to the perception that the colony was unruly and uninhabitable for a Spanish settler population.11 The struggle to foster a Spanish settler population, coupled with the seemingly inevitable disintegration of the Spanish family unit in the Philippines, was the cause for concern because it would be nearly impossible to fulfil the goals of the Spanish monarchy to “give to those strange lands the form of our own.”12
136 Allison Graham This discourse of misery in the Philippines can therefore be directly connected to the perceived inability to bring order to the islands based on Spanish imperial ideals. In the face of these concerns, religious houses, colegios, and hospitals in Manila’s Intramuros became necessary markers of Spanish civility. Institutional enclosures were supposed to contribute to the creation of a safe, organized settler colony because they were protected spaces in which Spanishness could be cultivated and, ideally, transferred throughout the colony.
“They live with much confinement:” institutional enclosure and colonial order Historians of early modern Catholicism have argued that widespread acceptance of institutional enclosure as a strategy for upholding social order came out of the Catholic Reformation.13 Nancy Van Deusen’s pioneering work on recogimiento in Lima has shown that, after the Reformation, there was a “shift in emphasis toward recogimiento as a form of moral and physical control in the secular and religious realms.”14 Monasticism was perceived to create spiritual and behavioural perfection, and the strategy of monastic enclosure carried over to other institutions that would, in theory, have the same effects of creating perfect women and men. Institutional enclosure was also an integral part of Iberian colonization efforts, to protect and enforce an emerging colonial social order in urban centres. Across the Americas and Asia, Iberian church and government authorities founded institutional enclosures to fulfil a variety of social, cultural, and religious needs. Manila’s Intramuros was a relatively small space, but contained all of the expected architectural symbols of Spanish urban culture, including institutional enclosures. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, the Augustinians (1572), Franciscans (1577), Jesuits (1581), and Dominicans (1587) founded their monasteries. The Franciscans also founded two hospitals, the Hospital Real de Españoles (1570s), originally a military hospital for Spanish soldiers, and the Hospital Real de Naturales (1578) for indigenous patients. The Colegio de Santa Potenciana was established in 1594 for orphaned doncellas or virginal girls, and by the mid-seventeenth century, it also enclosed “scandalous” women in need of reform, including those petitioning for a divorce or accused of engaging in fornication or adultery. The first half of the seventeenth century saw the arrival of the Augustinian Recollects in 1606 and construction of the final male monastery in the city, followed by the Santa Clara convent of nuns in 1621. The remainder of the city’s enclosed educational institutions were also established during this time, including the Dominican Colegio de San Juan de Letrán for orphan boys (1620), the Brotherhood of the Misericordia confraternity’s Colegio de Santa Isabel (1632) for orphan and non-orphaned girls, and two colegio- seminaries for boys and young men, the Jesuit’s Colegio de San José (1601), and the Dominican’s Colegio de Santo Tomás (1611). In 1603, the Hospital Real de Naturales moved outside of the city walls, and the Misericordia opened a hospital in its place to cater to Manila’s poor and infirm. In 1656, the Order of
Maintaining colonial order 137 San Juan de Dios, a group of Franciscan lay brothers, took over the hospital. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, we see the last type of institution founded, the beaterio for third-order beatas or pious laywomen. The Dominicans eaterio established their Beaterio de Santa Catalina in 1716 and the Jesuit’s B de la Compañía was founded in 1732. By the mid-eighteenth century, Manila’s I ntramuros boasted eight religious houses, five residential schools, and two hospitals, an extensive network of institutions considering the city’s size. The maintenance of urban order achieved through institutional enclosure was connected to the tension surrounding colonial encounters, since they became spaces in which Spaniards, Spanish lineage, and Spanish culture could be protected and fostered. Although Spanish urban dwellers lived alongside people of indigenous, African, Chinese, and Japanese descent, life in Manila, as in other Spanish colonial cities, was supposed to be based on the “ideal of separation” between castes.15 Institutional enclosures were mechanisms for separation that were to preserve the privileges that came with Spanish lineage or from being “Hispanicized.”16 Institutional enclosures in Manila’s Intramuros were therefore supposed to bring order to colonial society by protecting Spanish inhabitants, or Hispanicizing those who were deemed capable of making the transition. Indigenous women accepted into Santa Clara were rare exceptions, and the convent’s eighteenth-century statutes reinforced the practice of refusing admission to women who did not have Spanish parents.17 The Dominicans and Jesuits were the male religious orders most accepting of indigenous admission, and by the end of the seventeenth century began receiving a limited number of indigenous, Chinese, and Vietnamese boys into their Santo Tomás and San José colegios to potentially join the priesthood. The colegios that prioritized the care and education of orphans, Santa Potenciana and Santa Isabel for girls and San Juan de Letrán for boys, maintained that they enclosed predominantly the daughters and sons of Spanish men into the eighteenth century.18 By emphasizing their orphaned state and their father’s Spanish lineage, administrators implied that many of the children in these three colegios were mestizos, the offspring of Spanish men and indigenous women.19 Hospitals were segregated by caste, with the first Hospital Real exclusively for Spaniards, while the San Juan de Dios hospital took in indigenous patients, enslaved Africans, and other Asian groups, as well as Spaniards, but ensured that all racialized patients were in rooms separate from the Spanish.20 Manila’s eighteenth-century beaterios were relatively unique in their diversity, as they catered to the spiritual lives of indigenous, Spanish, and mestiza laywomen. By organizing and categorizing Manila’s population into groups based largely on ethnicity, institutional enclosure was a critical factor in the creation of a caste-based colonial society.21 Establishing colonial order through institutional enclosure was also a gendered process. The protection of Spanish ideals in institutional enclosures can be clearly seen with regard to how each institution regulated the behaviour of inhabitants based on Spanish understandings of femininity and masculinity.22 The value that Catholic reformers placed on monasticism contributed to the
138 Allison Graham idealization of female and male religious as gendered models of behaviour in the Spanish world. They represented the desirable characteristics of morality, control, and moderation. One of the main gendered differences between the two is the extent to which propriety and morality was dependent upon physical enclosure. For the nun, cloister was an essential aspect of monastic life after the Council of Trent implemented a required vow of enclosure in the female convent.23 Unlike the passive nun, friars and missionaries were supposed to be active in the Spanish world, as they combated the “religious-cultural enemy” in indigenous mission towns, and provided paternal care for, and control over, their urban charges.24 These religious models of gender were not separate from the lives of the laity, but instead reinforced behaviours that all women and men were supposed to imitate.25 Women’s institutional enclosures in Manila emphasized the need for physical enclosure to maintain chastity, regardless of the women’s age or state. These institutions reinforced the belief that women needed physical enclosure to help them achieve moral enclosure. Ideals of female enclosure implemented in Manila’s institutions can also be seen across the early modern Catholic world.26 Women’s enclosures in Italy expanded under the conviction that women were “frail, weak, helpless, and tempting,” and reflected the belief that “women needed to be protected from themselves.”27 Laura Lewis examines “enclosure conventions” in colonial Mexico, arguing that “domestic confinement was the ideal,” because women were considered “weak and sinful.”28 In Manila’s Santa Clara convent, enclosure was specifically connected to maintaining a “sanctuary of virgins consecrated to Christ,” so that physical enclosure was directly tied to chastity.29 Manila’s beaterios and female colegios limited the physical freedom of their inhabitants, so that they lived in imitation of the cloistered nun. Young girls received praise for how they lived “with much confinement and seclusion.”30 In Santa Isabel, the girls were prepared “for the state of religiosas in the monastery of Santa Clara whose austerity and religion is notorious, or for marriage.”31 Women accused of moral failures or crimes were enclosed punitively, so that their “very serious scandals and offenses to God [could] be corrected and punished.”32 Although these ideals of female enclosure largely stemmed from the Catholic Church in the Philippines, historian Barbara Watson Andaya has found that similar concepts of seclusion existed in Islamic islands such as Indonesia and Malaysia by the sixteenth century, arguing that “the notion that well-born women belonged ‘inside’ had now assumed a moral dimension.”33 For men, physical enclosure was not always necessary to remain morally enclosed. Manila’s friars and missionaries were portrayed as active, and the most successful men were those who worked outside of the monastery because travel indicated their role in evangelization. Physical enclosure became more important to men if they lacked the health or ability to live an ideally active life. Old missionaries retired to their monasteries and rededicated themselves to physical enclosure, and men in poor health entered hospitals when they were too ill to take care of themselves. Young boys were put in colegios because they were deemed in need of protection, “so that they are not lost with bad habits.”34 But unlike girls,
Maintaining colonial order 139 boys were expected to grow out of their dependent state, and become capable, active men. Male enclosure was therefore considered necessary when they were “feminized,” dependent, and prone to disorder.
“Public and notorious:” institutional enclosure and disorder Despite the post-Reformation imperial goals of institutional enclosure in Manila, inhabitants had a range of responses to living behind walls; it was an individual experience, complicated by personal motivations and choices. However, such individual experiences are difficult to trace because city administrators often highlighted the uniformity achieved in institutions, and downplayed the variety in how women, men, and youths perceived and dealt with enclosure. Glimpses into the scandalous moments when individuals pushed back against the regulations of institutions demonstrate how frequently institutional space was an imperfect strategy for the imposition of societal order. Concerns over institutional disorder can be seen more clearly in female enclosures because women’s bodies were considered to be more prone to unruly behaviour, as discussed above. Administrators prioritized the enclosure of women of Spanish descent, who were commonly thought to be more innately capable of conforming to a monastic model of femininity because of their Spanish lineage. Institutional enclosure for women of Spanish descent was also considered necessary in a colony where, as Juan Grau y Monfalcón suggested above, their husbands and fathers frequently died in battle, leaving their families without a proper head of household. Establishing female enclosures was an even more pressing issue in the Philippines given the limited population of Spanish women.35 In Santa Potenciana and Santa Isabel, where most of the girls were expected to marry upon reaching the age of majority, forming proper potential wives within an enclosure would supposedly attract more Spanish men to the colony. A 1679 petition proposed that, to increase the number of Spanish male residents in Manila, any soldier who came to the city should be able to marry a girl from Santa Isabel and receive other benefits, such as larger encomiendas or impressive offices.36 The logic behind this offer was that, with more Spanish male settlers in the colony married to Spanish or mestiza women who could educate their children in Spanish customs, the Philippines itself could become more thoroughly Hispanicized. More generally, women were cast as the moral barometers of Spanish colonial society. Chronicler Aduarte’s comparison between Manila and a monastery specified that the moral well-being of Manila was especially contingent upon the enclosure of women. The idealized model of the cloistered nun connoted social order because of her physical enclosure, making her an important foil to the “wandering woman” who signified disorder.37 Women who circumvented the customs of physical enclosure, such as prostitutes or the veiled tapada, were portrayed as being “instrument[s] of mayhem” at the centre of urban chaos.38 The enclosure of women indicated the propriety of a city.
140 Allison Graham Women who transgressed the boundaries of their enclosure were therefore perceived as challenging ideals of femininity, as well as threatening the desired social order of the colony. For instance, the “scandalous” women who were enclosed in Santa Potenciana were portrayed as some of the most disorderly institutional inhabitants in the city. According to the Jesuit chronicler Pedro Murillo Velarde, “it was a very arduous task to watch over those who were ordered to be deposited in that retreat, for being a stumbling block of the Republic.” He explained that “this type of woman” was the most difficult challenge for the celebrated rectora, or head of Santa Potenciana at the time, Doña Francisca Samaniego, “because they, anxious for the free license to which they were accustomed, tried by all means to thwart her vigilance.” These women supposedly “sought to wear down in every way the perseverance of the rectora, but to all, her strong, manly bosom resisted.”39 Women who were “accustomed” to being “free,” or unenclosed, were considered obstacles to the proper functioning of the colony. Once institutionally enclosed, they required the supervision of a woman whose apparent masculine virtue provided the patriarchal control necessary to harness their rebelliousness. Women who already received the designation of “scandalous” were not the only ones who attempted to defy the conventions of institutional enclosure. In 1790, an incident occurred between Doña Ana Esquivel, a schoolgirl in Santa Isabel, and Don Joseph Carballo, a lieutenant in the Spanish military. The couple “had to be married immediately,” with the consent of Archbishop Juan A ntonio Orbigo de Gallego, who hoped that a marriage would ensure that news of the incident did “not go out to the public,” or in other words, it would not become a scandal. Governor Félix Berenguer de Marquina ordered that to prevent henceforth disorders that could happen and they [the Colegio] have started to experience, like the incident recounted between Doña Ana Esquivel, schoolgirl of the expressed colegio and the lieutenant Don Joseph Carballo, the people that make up the referred house of the Misericordia should place, for better safety and decency, double bars in the locutorio and that the schoolgirls should not go out without your permission or that of a Prelate.40 The governor felt strongly that the administrators of the colegio, the B rotherhood of the Misericordia, were to blame – so much so, that he called for Santa I sabel to be “under the direction of a public authority that could restrain, contain, and amend the disorders and defects which your tolerance or neglect allows.”41 However, a 1791 royal cedula stipulated the governor should not interfere in the affairs of the colegio. This case, although brief, illuminates the concerns over, and realities of, life in institutionally enclosed spaces. The vague description of an “incident” between Ana and Joseph, resulting in an immediate marriage, suggests that there was at least some contact between the two that was deemed inappropriate, likely the development of a sexual or romantic relationship. The ambiguity of the document
Maintaining colonial order 141 continues, as Berenguer de Marquina hinted that their relationship was only one of many “disorders” plaguing the colegio, implying that life in Santa Isabel was perhaps not as thoroughly regulated as administrators had hoped. Moreover, the governor’s concern about the locutorio sheds light on the perceived connection between women’s freedom and chaos. The locutorio was the parlour where girls could meet with visitors, following the model of a convent. In a typical convent locutorio, the nuns were separated from their visitors by a metal grille with “two strong bars of iron,” forming a grid so that a hand could not fit through the bars.42 As a semi-public space, the locutorio gained a more negative reputation over the seventeenth century, as some convents allowed an excessive number of visits and other activities that were not sanctioned by male prelates.43 It became synonymous with the “bad habits” that a lax convent might tolerate, particularly illicit romantic relationships.44 For Santa Isabel, the governor’s decree that the colegio was in desperate need of a grille to physically separate the girls from their guests points to how any physical mobility was perceived to jeopardize chastity, which caused disorder in the institution. However, this case also presents an opportunity to see individual agency within an institution, as enclosed inhabitants were using the locutorio to cultivate relationships outside of the colegio regardless of institutional regulations. Although Santa Isabel tried to conceal the disorders of enclosed life, for other institutions, women’s efforts to live beyond the restrictions of enclosure could result in a citywide scandal. Cecilia de Ita y Salazar entered the Santa Catalina Beaterio in 1719 as a “secular child,” and after ten years in the institution she professed as a beata. Approximately 15 years after her profession, Cecilia had a change of heart that developed into scandal for Manila’s Dominicans. She began corresponding with Don Francisco Antonio de Figueroa, the secretary to the governor of the Philippines. Figueroa lived in a house in front of the beaterio, and he was able to engage in a secret courtship with Cecilia. According to Juan de la Concepción, an Augustinian chronicler who was sympathetic to Cecilia’s predicament, Figueroa “communicated with that lady more than frequently, and it was more than what was appropriate.” Cecilia became frustrated with religious life as she struggled with her desire for a romantic relationship with Figueroa.45 Ultimately, she decided to leave Santa Catalina and revoke her vows, so that she could marry Figueroa. In 1744, Cecilia’s brother petitioned for her release, but the Dominican Provincial, Joseph de Cerrera, refused.46 In their efforts to make Santa Catalina as close to a convent of nuns as possible, the Provincial insisted that Cecilia had taken perpetual vows, and that she would not be allowed to leave.47 In 1746, Cecilia petitioned Archbishop Pedro de la Santisima Trinidad to allow her to plead her case for leaving Santa Catalina. When confessing to the Archbishop’s Señor Provisor, Cecilia’s version of the events leading to her decision to leave the beaterio, as recounted by Concepción, shifted. According to the chronicler, Cecilia downplayed her romantic affair with Figueroa, and instead emphasized how her profession did not match Tridentine regulations. Cecilia argued that she decided to become a beata “without any motion or
142 Allison Graham fondness” for religious life, but was “fleeing from an uncle who wanted to marry her, to which her father had also forced her.” She maintained that she “had no other way to escape” the situation, except to become a beata.48 For many women, institutional enclosure was one of the few socially sanctioned options outside of marriage. In Cecilia’s case, she chose enclosure to avoid an undesirable marriage, and was able to legitimately circumvent her father’s authority by staying in a beaterio. Unfortunately for Cecilia, life in Santa Catalina was not what she had hoped it would be. In her confession to the Señor Provisor, Cecilia insisted that her experience as a novice “had been very violent,” and that, “on one occasion she asked for her secular clothes” to leave Santa Catalina. The mistress of the beaterio refused to give her the clothes, and threatened her by claiming that, “if she left, her father would be killed.”49 Cecilia argued that she was therefore coerced into her final profession and forced to remain in the beaterio, which was strictly prohibited under the Tridentine doctrines. Her complaint demonstrates an apparent knowledge of a “legal avenue of escape” from the beaterio.50 Cecilia’s damning claims against Santa Catalina brought scandal to the beaterio and the Dominican administration. In his recollection of the scandal, Concepción claimed that the Dominicans were “despotic” in their control over the beatas, and that the coercive nature of Cecilia’s profession was unsurprising. Before making a concrete decision, the Señor Provisor took Cecilia out of Santa Catalina and placed her in Santa Potenciana. Although the move was not necessarily punitive, placing her in an institution that had a reputation for housing scandalous women was potentially a comment on her defiance against the norms of institutional life. Once in Santa Potenciana, Cecilia formally petitioned the archbishop to nullify her profession, arguing that not only were her vows professed under violent circumstances, but also, and perhaps more importantly, that she had not taken solemn vows in the first place, and as a result, her profession was not perpetual.51 The Dominicans did not take these charges lightly. In an effort to defend the collective honour of the beaterio, the Provincial ordered that the other 31 beatas be interviewed to counter Cecilia’s claims against the institution in May 1754. This deposition sought to vilify Cecilia and refute her most serious complaints against the beaterio, a similar strategy that individuals used to respond to defamation or dishonour in a legal court. The first task of the deposition was to prove that Cecilia was not coerced into her religious profession, as she claimed. When asked if Cecilia “made her profession freely and spontaneously,” the beatas unanimously responded that “she had not suffered any violence to make her profession.” Some beatas had witnessed her profession after her novitiate year, while others acknowledged they simply heard that her profession was not coerced. Nine beatas added that “she made her profession so freely and spontaneously that it was against the will of her father who wanted her to marry.” One of these nine beatas was identified as the Mistress of Novices who oversaw Cecilia’s profession, and she testified that three months before her profession “Cecilia took off her
Maintaining colonial order 143 scapular and threw it away,” threatening to leave the beaterio. However, the Mistress insisted that “after repentance and having returned for good advice [she] continued her novitiate happy and willingly.” According to the testimony, Cecilia received some backlash from the other beatas who thought she should not disobey her father, but that Cecilia “always replied that she did not want to take the state of marriage but to be a professed religiosa.” Cecilia’s resistance to her father and other relatives who tried to convince her to leave Santa Catalina, even promising her a large dowry to bribe her into submission, was supposed to be evidence that she was dedicated to joining the religious life of her own volition. The beatas were also asked if Cecilia was ever “unjustly mortified by a Prelate of our order, or mistreated and persecuted by the other religiosas,” to address the claims that Cecilia was threatened with violence to remain in Santa Catalina. All of the beatas declared that “they never saw that sister C ecilia was unjustly bothered or mistreated by any Prelate, or by any religiosa of the Beaterio.”52 The deposition aimed to discredit Cecilia by attacking her character. The beatas testified that Cecilia was never the recipient of malice, but rather was the perpetrator of chaos in the beaterio. One beata claimed that Cecilia was known in the beaterio for “bad manners and bad words,” particularly towards the “laywomen and secular girls, whom she called bitches, negras, devils, and other dictates that came to her mouth.” The beatas also claimed that Cecilia “did not show any signs in all the time she lived in the beaterio that she had the spirit of wanting to live not only as a good religiosa but even as a Christian.” They testified that “she seldom set foot in the choir with the other religiosas,” and that she rarely went to hear mass, even on the days when mass was mandatory. She generally showed “little affection” for spiritual exercises, with “little inclination to pray, and she was even angry at hearing prayer.” However, when it came to recreation and “fun things,” including visiting with people in the locutorio, Cecilia was “very diligent.”53 The remainder of the deposition conveyed the beatas’ accounts of Cecilia’s relationship with Figueroa in an effort to tarnish her reputation, suggesting that Cecilia was feigning concern about the validity of her vows and simply wanted to marry her lover.54 The beatas were asked if they knew if Cecilia had an “intimate friendship with some secular,” who that man was, and if he had entered the beaterio with Cecilia’s help. Thirteen beatas testified that they had no information about the relationship, and only knew that Cecilia was friendly with Figueroa “because at the time everything was talked about, and became public.” At the time of the deposition, then, details of Cecilia’s relationship were already public knowledge, revealing that the Dominicans did indeed push for the deposition to curb the resulting scandal.55 When interrogating the beatas about Cecilia’s illicit romance, the issue of enclosure comes to the fore. The beatas were asked to evaluate the extent to which Cecilia disregarded her enclosure, including how she communicated with Figueroa and whether or not Figueroa actually entered the institution. Nine said that they knew of the relationship because they saw
144 Allison Graham their mutual correspondence continued in papers, gifts, conversations en rejas [in the locutorio], and in a passageway that is in front of the house where the said secular lives, through which it was necessary for the religiosas to go to the Choir. Another nine beatas had more information about the relationship because they had witnessed or overheard encounters between Cecilia and Figueroa. One of these nine beatas testified that “there was a lot of frequent conversation during the day in the locutorio, and at night through the windows” between Cecilia and Figueroa. Two testified that Cecilia and Figueroa also sent letters up and down a string outside her cell window to communicate. One declarant mentioned that she did not believe Figueroa had entered the beaterio, but that she had seen Cecilia go outside to “speak more closely with this secular.” However, other beatas were convinced that Figueroa had made it into the institution. One testified that “although she had not seen any whoring,” she had heard from a fellow beata who spoke with Cecilia that “the said secular had climbed the beaterio by the wall of the orchard, but she did not know how, when, or with what friends, or how many times.” Although no one claimed to witness Figueroa enter Cecilia’s cell, one beata testified that she “often heard noise, like someone who went up or down the walls,” and explained that she believed these noises were Figueroa climbing into Cecilia’s cell at night.56 The deposition portrayed Cecilia as disrupting the ideals of femininity, causing disorder in the very institution that was supposed to maintain order. The Dominicans were aware that an unenclosed woman was the height of social disorder, and therefore depicted Cecilia as a chaotic presence in the beaterio. They emphasized her moral looseness and physical freedom to justify disciplinary action against her. Regardless of whether or not the deposition’s information is accurate, it provides a snapshot into the life of an institution inhabitant who both used, and later resisted, institutional enclosure for personal benefit. Cecilia’s case reveals that, like Ana in Santa Isabel, individuals could, and did, make decisions that challenged institutional regulations and ideals. Despite the case put forward by the Dominicans, the archbishop decided in favour of Cecilia, declaring that “the profession made by the said Cecilia in such beaterio was null” because the Dominicans could not enforce perpetual vows in Santa Catalina.57 Perpetual vows could only be taken by nuns in a convent, not a beaterio.58 Although this distinction may seem trivial given the shocking accusations that Cecilia and the Dominicans levied against each other, it was the deciding argument in the case. The archbishop asserted that, by insisting Cecilia’s vows were perpetual, the Dominicans had violated the royal mandate of 1732, which stipulated that beaterios could not act as convents, but should primarily be schools for girls. This scandal nearly resulted in the closure of all of Manila’s beaterios because Cecilia’s case was used as evidence that the institutions were not obeying the mandate that they remain distinct from convents. After the archbishop’s ruling, Cecilia was allowed to leave Santa Potenciana. She promptly married Figueroa, and by 1762, they were living together in Mexico.59
Maintaining colonial order 145
Conclusion Institutional enclosures were supposed to be spaces of order within the apparently chaotic colony of the Philippines, as Spanish city administrators transformed the Catholic Reformation’s goal of producing ordered, moral, and disciplined people into an imperial strategy. In Manila, institutional administrations sought to enforce a caste hierarchy and a religious model of gender, both of which prioritized Spanishness, while organizing and regulating the urban population. Although the immediate, everyday objectives of Manila’s institutions differed, ranging from religious edification to medical treatment, one of the overarching goals that all of these spaces shared was prioritizing the maintenance of an orderly colonial society. Manila’s institutions reveal how city administrators perceived institutional enclosure as one strategy for creating proper imperial subjects. These top-down efforts were not, however, universally successful in creating an orderly society. Administrators were constantly dealing with the d isorders that supposedly plagued various institutions, particularly those that enclosed women. The “scandalous” behaviour of enclosed women, including the especially salacious case of Cecilia de Ita y Salazar, suggests some of the ways enclosed individuals pushed back against institutional restrictions. Nora Jaffary argues that gender was one of “various mechanisms of colonial control,” as the articulation of gender norms was essential in the “establishment and maintenance of European colonial ventures.”60 Scandals demonstrate that, by flouting the norms of femininity created in Manila’s institutions, these enclosed women implicitly questioned the very effectiveness of institutional enclosure, thereby challenging the stability of the colony. Despite the perceived usefulness of institutional space in regulating behaviour and creating social order, personal motivations and desires could, and did, take precedence over imperial goals.
Notes 1 D. Aduarte, Historia de la Provincia del Sancto Rosario de la Orden de Predicadores en Philippinas, Japon, y China, Manila: Colegio de Santo Tomas, 1640, libro 1, p. 32. I would like to thank Kenneth Mills for his support with this research, Nicholas Terpstra for his feedback, and the Lily Library for their assistance in undertaking this project. 2 Aduarte, Historia, p. 33. 3 Governor Sabiana Manrique de Lara described the “miserable state” of the islands in his 1652 petition. See Archivio General de las Indias (Seville) [hereafter AGI] Filipinas 330, l.4, 1652, f. 271v. 4 J. Galván Guijo, “La Fundacion de Manila y su Trazado Urbanistico,” in L. Cabrero (ed.) Espana y el Pacifico Legazpi, Tomo II, Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2004, p. 150. 5 Galván Guijo, “La Fundacion,” p. 152. 6 Ibid., 151–152. 7 Literally translating to neighbour or resident, the term “vecino” was typically used to describe the Spanish community or a citizen. For more information, see T. H erzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
146 Allison Graham 8 K. Yamaguchi, “The Architecture of the Spanish Philippines and the Limits of Empire,” in C. Shammas (ed.) Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment: Europeans, Asians, Settlers, and Indigenous Societies, Leiden: Brill, 2012, p. 132; Spanish mestizos were people of Spanish and indigenous descent, and Chinese mestizos were of Chinese and indigenous parentage. 9 J.O. Mesquida, “Negotiating Charity, Politics, and Religion in the Colonial Philippines: The Brotherhood of the Misericordia of Manila (1594–1780s),” in N. Terpstra et al. (eds) Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2012, p. 194; Also see L. Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009, p. 198. 10 AGI, Filipinas 27, n.235, “Petición de la ciudad de Manila,” 1638, f. 1271v. 11 J. Crossley, The Dasmariñases: Early Governors of the Spanish Philippines, London: Routledge Press, 2016, p. 33. 12 K. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, p. 2. 13 For more information, see M.E. Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990; N. Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 14 N. Van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 116. 15 J. Mumford, Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, p. 48. 16 D. Nemser, Infrastructures of Race, Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016, p. 4. 17 Regla Primera dada por N.S.P.S. Francisco a la gloriosa virgen Santa Clara, Manila, 1729, p. 7. 18 AGI, Filipinas 297, n.120, “Petición del dominico Salvador de Contreras,” 1732, p. 2; AGI, Filipinas 35, n.52, “Carta de la Hermandad de la Misericordia,” 1602, f. 858v. 19 For more on enclosing mestizo children, see M.E. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 152; B. Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005, pp. 92–93. 20 AGI, Filipinas 18B, r.7, n.83, “Carta de L.P Mariñas,” 1597, p. 2 21 For more information on caste systems in the Spanish colonies, see I. Katzew, Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. 22 The intersection between race and gender is clear in Manila’s institutions, where ideals of gender were often conflated with Spanish lineage. However, racialized peoples had a variety of reasons for entering institutional enclosure, particularly because some types of enclosure, in a religious house or colegio, could provide a degree of social mobility. 23 A. Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. 87–90. 24 E. Lehfeldt, “Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century Spain,” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no.2, Summer 2008, 476. 25 A. Lavrin, “Masculine and Feminine: The Construction of Gender Roles in the Regular Orders in Early Modern Mexico,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34, no.1, Summer 2008, 3–26. 26 “Islamic customs” of female enclosure could also be seen prior to the late fi fteenthcentury Spanish cities such as Seville; see L. Bass and A. Wunder, “The Veiled Ladies
Maintaining colonial order 147
27 28 29 30 31 32 33
34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 4 2 43 4 4 45 46 47
48 49 50
51
of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima,” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1, Winter 2009, 118. N. Terpstra, Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, p. 9. L. Lewis, “Between Casta and Raza: The Example of Colonial Mexico,” in M.E. Martínez et al. (eds) Race and Blood in the Iberian World, Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012, p. 110. B. de Letona, La Perfecta Religiosa, Puebla, 1662, Libro III, p. 277. AGI, Filipinas 329, libro 2, “Petición de informe,”1606, f. 5v. AGI, Filipinas 194, n.19, “Real Decreto de la mesa de la misericordia,”1701, f. 2r. AGI, Filipinas 331, libro 7, “Petición de informe,” 1672, f. 39r–40r. B. Watson Andaya, “Delineating Female Space: Seclusion and the State in Pre- Modern Island Southeast Asia,” in B. Watson Andaya (ed.) Other Pasts: Women, Gender, and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa Press, 2000, p. 233. AGI, Filipinas 39, n.13, “Petición de Jerónimo Guerrero,” 1623, f. 3r. Lavrin, Brides, pp. 1–2. AGI, Filipinas 28, n.128, “Seis memoriales de Villatoro,” 1679, f. 926r. Perry, Gender and Disorder, p. 59. Bass and Wunder, “The Veiled Ladies,” p. 102. P.M. Velarde, Historia de la provincial de Philipinas de la compañía de Jesús: Segunda Parte, Manila, 1749, libro 1, f. 14r. AGI, Filipinas 338, l. 21, “Orden al gobernador,” 1791, f. 259r–261r. AGI, Filipinas 345, l.16, “Orden sobre moralidad en el Colegio,” 1791, f. 122r–122v. Regla Primera dada por N.S.P.S Francisco, p. 80. Lavrin, Brides, pp. 146–147. Ibid., p. 147. Concepción, Historia, vol. 12, p. 212. Ibid., p. 217. One of the earliest discussions about Cecilia de Ita is a brief account in C.R. Boxer’s Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 1415–1815: Some Facts, Fancies, and Personalities, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 103. Boxer incorrectly refers to Cecilia as a “professed nun,” overlooking the important difference between a beata and a nun, which became the crux of this case. Two scholars explore why the distinction between these religious designations was essential to Cecilia’s scandal: M. Camacho, “Los beaterios y recogimientos en Manila en el siglo XVIII acomodación religiosa y aportación social” in M.I. Viforcos Marinas and R. Loreto López (eds) Historias compartidas: religiosidad y reclusión femenina en España, Portugal, y América, siglos XV–XIX, León: University of León, 2007, pp. 367–390; and María García de los Arcos, “El convent de Santa Clara y los beaterios de Manila en el siglo XVIII,” in M. Ramos Medina (ed.) El monacato femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios, México: Centro de Estudios de H istorio de México, 1995, pp. 225–238. This essay adds new information to the case by examining a previously unused deposition of the Santa Catalina beatas. Concepción, Historia, vol. 12, pp. 216–217. Ibid. Anne Jacobsen Schutte, By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011, p. 4; For more on the legalities of women’s enclosure in monastic houses, see M.L. Giordano, “Historicizing the Beatas: The Figures behind Reformation and Counter-Reformation Conflicts,” in A. Weber (ed.) Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, London: Routledge Press, 2016, pp. 91–111. Concepción, Historia, vol. 12, p. 224.
148 Allison Graham 52 Archives of University of Santo Tomas (hereafter UST), Tomo 7, Roll 36, “Relación sumaria de la causa de Cecilia de la Circuncisión,” 1754, f. 43v–44v. 53 UST, “Relación,” f. 44v–45r. 54 Schutte questions the prevalence of romantic interest among petitions to leave monastic institutions in early modern Europe. Although Cecilia appeared to have a number of reasons for leaving the beaterio, the Dominicans focussed on her relationship with Figueroa likely to depict her as a deviant. See Schutte, By Force and Fear, p. 4. 55 UST, “Relación,” f. 46r. 56 Ibid., f. 46r–47v. 57 Concepción, Historia, vol. 12, p. 227. 58 Camacho, “Los beaterios,” pp. 374–375. 59 Concepción, Historia, vol. 12, p. 230; Boxer, Women in the Iberian Expansion, p. 95. 60 N. Jaffary, “Contextualizing Race, Gender, and Religion in the New World,” in N. Jaffary (ed.) Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007, p. 9.
Bibliography Published primary sources Aduarte, D., Historia de la Provincia del Sancto Rosario de la Orden de Predicadores en Philippinas, Japon, y China, Manila: Colegio de Santo Tomas, 1640. Concepción, J. de la., Historia general de Philipinas ….comprende los imperios, reinos y provincias de islas y continentes con quiones ha habido comunicación, Manila, 1788. Letona, B. de., La Perfecta Religiosa, Puebla, 1662. Murillo Velarde, P., Historia de la provincial de Philipinas de la compañía de Jesús: Segunda Parte, Manila, 1749. Regla Primera dada por N.S.P.S. Francisco a la gloriosa virgen Santa Clara, Manila, 1729.
Secondary sources Bass, L. and A. Wunder, “The Veiled Ladies of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima,” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1, Winter 2009, 97–144. Boxer, C.R., Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas, 1415–1815: Some Facts, Fancies, and Personalities, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Camacho, M.S., “Los beaterios y recogimientos en Manila en el siglo XVIII acomodación religiosa y aportación social” in M.I. Viforcos Marinas and R. Loreto López (eds) Historias compartidas: religiosidad y reclusión femenina en España, Portugal, y América, siglos XV–XIX, León: University of León, 2007, pp. 367–390. Crossley, J., The Dasmariñases: Early Governors of the Spanish Philippines, London: Routledge Press, 2016. Galván Guijo, J., “La Fundacion de Manila y su Trazado Urbanistico” in L. Cabrero (ed) Espana y el Pacifico Legazpi, Tomo II, Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2004, pp. 149–164. García de los Arcos, M., “El convent de Santa Clara y los beaterios de Manila en el siglo XVIII,” in M. Ramos Medina (ed.) El monacato femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios, México: Centro de Estudios de Historio de México, 1995, pp. 225–238.
Maintaining colonial order 149 Giordano, M.L., “Historicizing the Beatas: The Figures behind Reformation and Counter-Reformation Conflicts,” in A. Weber (ed.) Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, London: Routledge Press, 2016, pp. 91–111. Herzog, T., Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Jaffary, N., “Contextualizing Race, Gender, and Religion in the New World,” in N. Jaffary (ed.) Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 1–14. Katzew, I., Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Lavrin, A., Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. ———, “Masculine and Feminine: The Construction of Gender Roles in the Regular Orders in Early Modern Mexico,” in Explorations in Renaissance Culture 34, no.1, Summer 2008, pp. 3–26. Lehfeldt, E., “Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century Spain,” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no. 2, Summer 2008, pp. 462–494. Lewis, L., “Between “Casta” and “Raza:” The Example of Colonial Mexico,” in M.E. Martínez et al. (eds) Race and Blood in the Iberian World, Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012, pp. 99–124. Lindemann, M., Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Martínez, M.E., Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Melvin, K., Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Mesquida, J.O., “Negotiating Charity, Politics, and Religion in the Colonial Philippines: The Brotherhood of the Misericordia of Manila (1594–1780s),” in N. Terpstra et al. (eds) Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2012, pp. 187–206. Mumford, J., Vertical Empire: The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial Andes, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Nemser, D., Infrastructures of Race, Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Newson, L., Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009. Perry, M.E., Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Premo, B., Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Schutte, A.J., By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Terpstra, N., Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ———, Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Van Deusen, N., Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
150 Allison Graham Watson Andaya, B., “Delineating Female Space: Seclusion and the State in Pre-Modern Island Southeast Asia,” in B. Watson Andaya (ed.) Other Pasts: Women, Gender, and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa Press, 2000, pp. 231–253. Yamaguchi, K., “The Architecture of the Spanish Philippines and the Limits of Empire,” in C. Shammas (ed.) Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment: Europeans, Asians, Settlers, and Indigenous, Societies, Leiden: Brill, 2012, pp. 119–138.
Part 3
Cultural and religious politics
9 The Renaissance papacy and Catholicization of the “Manichean Heretics” Rethinking the 1459 purge of the Bosnian kingdom Luka Špoljari ć In January 1444, Pope Eugenius IV (r. 1431–1447) trumpeted to the C hristian princes his recent string of successes in bringing Eastern Christians into the Catholic fold. Having secured Church union with the Greeks at the Council of Florence in 1439, the Armenians, Jacobites, Maronites, Ethiopians, and Bosnians all followed suit, sending their envoys and submitting to the pope. Eugenius called on the Christian princes to support the crusader army led by the Polish and Hungarian king Władysław (r. 1434–1444) and papal legate Giuliano Cesarini. This army was supposed to drive the Turks from Europe, save Constantinople, and ensure the unity of all Christians under the wing of the Roman Church.1 The expedition, as is well known, ended in a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Varna in November 1444, but the papal project moved forward. By pursuing crusades against the Ottomans and securing recognition from the Eastern Christians, Eugenius and his successors sought, in fact, to reclaim their spiritual and political authority over all of Christendom.2 There were, however, two sides to that coin. Eastern Christians faced a problem: to receive help, they had to admit the errors of their traditions and accept the tenets of the Catholic faith and the primacy of the Roman Church. The pressure exerted by the papacy on the Greeks to accept the Union of Florence and the rifts this caused within the Greek communities are well studied.3 The popes, however, put no less pressure on the Bosnian kings. The confessional dynamics that the papacy faced in this kingdom, situated at the contact zone of Catholic and Orthodox Slavdom, was far more complicated than the one in the Greek lands. Next to the dominance of the Catholics in the western and northernmost parts of the kingdom, and that of the Orthodox in the southeast, Bosnia’s heartland was predominantly populated by the believers of the Bosnian Church, an autocephalous Christian church that had long wielded dominant influence over both the Bosnian court and society at large. Though the members of the Bosnian Church called themselves Krstjani (Christians, sing. Krstjan), the popes considered them dualist “Manichean heretics.” Eugenius thus may have framed his efforts to Catholicize Bosnia as part of his uniate programme of bringing the Eastern Christians under the papal wing, but there was no common ground with the Krstjani for talks over finer theological points. He and his successors sought to destroy them root and branch.
154 Luka Špoljari ć Although there had been earlier efforts to bring Bosnia into the Catholic fold, the kingdom entered more fully into the purview of papal politics in 1439. This was a few months after the Union of Florence, when pope Eugenius appointed Tommaso Tommasini, the Venetian bishop of the Dalmatian island of Hvar, as the papal legate in the kingdom. Tommasini’s efforts to woo Tvrtko II (r. 1404–1409, 1420–1443) initially had little effect. Yet by 1443, growing Ottoman pressure forced the king to send his envoy to Rome to renounce in his name the “Manichean dogma.” This embassy marked the beginning of what might be called Bosnia’s “uniate vicennium,” the two-decade process of the kingdom’s intense Catholicization. Between 1443 and the Ottoman conquest of the kingdom in 1463, the papacy put increasing pressure on Tvrtko’s successor, Stjepan Tomaš (r. 1443–1461), and Tomaš’s son, Stjepan Tomašević (r. 1461–1463), to dismantle the Bosnian Church. Finally, in the summer of 1459, Stjepan Tomaš sanctioned the forced conversion of 12,000 of the Bosnian Krstjani and their followers in an effort to prove his faith to the energetic Pope Pius II (r. 1458–1464). Forty members of the Bosnian Church who refused to heed the king’s orders were exiled from the kingdom, while three of their leaders were eventually deported to Rome where they were forced to recant their errors. The numbers, reported by Pius in his Commentaries – our principal source for this landmark event – suggest that this was one of the most ambitious attempts of the fifteenth century to cleanse an entire kingdom of religious Others. It can certainly in some respects be compared to the forced conversions of Jews and Muslims that were carried out in Spain and Portugal three to four decades later.4 This paper offers a new interpretation of the 1459 religious purge of Bosnia and challenges the long-established claim, largely based on Pius’ account, that the forced conversions and expulsions put an end to the Manichean question.5 It offers a more complete reconstruction of the episode by taking a closer look at the papal legates and nuncios, who, in Bosnia as elsewhere around the continent, played the key role in implementing the curia’s plans.6 To be sure, there are virtually no sources from the kingdom itself that would reveal anything about their activities. Most of the documentary and literary heritage of medieval Bosnia was lost in the Ottoman invasion of 1463 and only scattered documents remain today. This paper therefore resorts to other sources in order to contextualize the cursory and self-promoting account in Pius’ Commentaries. Most importantly, it brings into discussion the bulls in which the popes often summarized the reports on the situation in the kingdom and issued instructions to their legates. A number of bulls issued to the papal legates during the period have been published and extensively discussed, especially those concerning the earlier missions of Tommaso Tommasini.7 However, two unpublished bulls issued by Pope Pius II to Tommasini’s successors, Natale Zorzi (1460) and Luka Tolentić (1462), sparked little to no attention, and it is precisely these that alter the current understanding of confessional dynamics after Tomaš’s forced conversions.8 This paper uses these two bulls, translated in the Appendix, to trace the political negotiations between Bosnia and Rome concerning the question of “Manichean heretics;” it draws on other underutilized sources as well. It will be
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 155 seen how the forced conversions and expulsions sanctioned by King Tomaš in 1459 marked merely the beginning of the purge. The papal legates continued to assess the situation and, by mediating between the Bosnian kings and the pope, helped develop strategies that were supposed to ensure the successful eradication of heresy and control of orthodoxy.
Prologue: the Bosnian Church and Bosnia’s uniate vicennium When the resurgent papacy turned its attention to Bosnia in 1439, the Bosnian Church was already a formidable opponent.9 The Bosnian Church traced its origins to the Catholic bishopric of Bosnia, which renounced its allegiance to Rome in the first half of the thirteenth century for political reasons.10 At that time, the Hungarian kings managed, with papal support, to appoint their own candidate as the Bosnian bishop. He then relocated his seat to Đakovo in southern Hungary, and lost any contact with his flock in Bosnia other than serving as an instrument of Hungarian politics. Left to their own devices, the Bosnian clergy elected, with the support of Bosnian rulers and nobility, their own bishop and gradually developed their own ecclesiastical structure. The Bosnian Church seems after this to have functioned as a monastic order. Led by its own bishop, also called Djed (grandfather), it consisted of communities centred around hiže (houses, sing. hiža). These were religious houses that were headed by the Gosti (Guests, sing. Gost) and, lower in the hierarchy, Starci (Elders, sing. Starac). Although the Bosnian rulers expanded their rule over parts of Croatia and Serbia, and as a result began to govern the lands populated respectively by the Catholics and Orthodox, the Bosnian Church remained the state church. The Franciscans established monasteries across Bosnia in the middle of the fourteenth century, but they too had little success in diminishing the influence of the Bosnian Krstjani.11 The Catholics initially called the Krstjani and their followers “Patarenes,” though, with the growing popularity of the humanist movement in the fifteenth century, they increasingly used the term “Manicheans” to draw a relation to the ancient heresy that Augustine had combatted.12 They presented the Krstjani as dualist heretics, who in the words of Pope Pius II, “believe in two principles of reality, one of good, one of evil, and who neither recognize the primacy of the Roman Church nor admit that Christ is equal and consubstantial with the Father.”13 Scholars long accepted uncritically the views elaborated in Catholic heresiological treatises, but more recent studies have shown that parts of what was written about the Krstjani do not hold up.14 From what little we can gather from the poorly preserved sources produced by the Krstjani themselves, they indeed considered their church the true apostolic church as opposed to the Roman one. Yet they also believed in the Trinity, the feast days, and the saints. There is evidence to suggest that the Bosnian Church also developed its own views on the sacraments, oath-taking, and the veneration of relics – which is not surprising given their centuries-long isolation from both the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. In other words, though the Krstjani were certainly not radical
156 Luka Špoljari ć dualists who believed in the existence of two gods, their idiosyncratic religious practices did, in all likelihood, stem from some idiosyncratic theological beliefs which were framed by Catholic theologians within their heresiological models. As King Tomaš became more dependent on papal help against the Ottomans, the balance of power in the kingdom began to shift. During the uniate vicennium, the king and a circle of aristocrats from the western parts of the kingdom developed closer ties to the papal curia and Catholicism. A number of Catholic churches, all of them Franciscan, were built or enlarged during this period as a result of their patronage and with the support of papal indulgences. Since the kingdom still had no bishoprics or parish churches, the pastoral care over the entire Catholic flock was in the hands of the Franciscan Order. With special permission from the popes, the Franciscans began not only to play the role of chaplains at the royal court and at the courts of the aristocrats, but also to serve them as envoys. Supervising the whole project was the papal legate, Tommaso Tommasini bishop of Hvar, who spent large periods of time in the kingdom and often protected the king from the pressures of neighbouring rivals.15 Not all the power players rallied behind King Tomaš, however. The eastern lords, the Pavlovići and Kovačevići, received no papal dispensations; indeed, they seem to have maintained close contacts with the Bosnian Church until at least the purge of 1459.16 The popes and legates had far greater problems, however, with Duke Stjepan Vukčić Kosača, whose duchy covered half of the entire k ingdom. He ruled it as an independent lord, and often clashed with his son-inlaw, King Tomaš. Throughout this period, Duke Stjepan remained a supporter of the Bosnian Church, relying often on the services of Gost Radin Butković, the leading Krstjan in his lands and a powerful magnate in his own right.17 Duke Stjepan occasionally promised to submit to the pope, but these were mere political plays. Aside from shielding the Krstjani, he was also a supporter of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and promoted the construction of Orthodox churches in his lands. In 1449, in order to emphasize his independence from the Bosnian king and cater to the sensibilities of his Orthodox subjects, he took the title of Duke of St Sava, in honour of the Serbian saint whose relics were held in the Mileševa monastery located in the easternmost parts of his duchy.18 While this large and powerful Duchy thus remained outside of papal influence, the Catholicization in the King’s land continued. In 1451, Legate Tommasini famously wrote to Fra Giovanni da Capistrano that the “Manicheans” are disappearing before the Franciscans “as wax before a fire.”19 Scholars often make too much of this rhetorical description given by one of the king’s strongest advocates. While it is true that the Krstjani were being increasingly marginalized, they retained enough influence that Tomaš delayed dealing with them to the point when he felt he had no other option left.
The forced conversions and expulsions of 1459 King Stjepan Tomaš certainly tried to pursue an aggressive policy against the Ottomans. Yet when, in the early summer of 1459, he and his son and successor,
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 157 Stjepan Tomašević, faced the Sultan’s main army without any help from the Hungarian court, they were completely overwhelmed.20 Seeing no other way, they cut a deal. They delivered over to the Ottomans the Serbian fortress of Smederevo which was crucial for the defence of Hungary and which they had taken over with Hungarian blessing only mere months earlier. In return, they asked that the Sultan give them peace and that he send an expedition against Duke Stjepan. The backlash was intense. The new Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus (r. 1458–1490) and Duke Stjepan both accused Tomaš of colluding with the Turks. Fearful of losing the pope’s support, he played his last card and sanctioned the expulsion of the Krstjan hierarchy and the forced conversion of their flocks. The Observant Franciscans who reformed the Bosnian vicariate during the early 1430s seem to have been the ones who insisted on the idea of converting the Bosnian Krstjani leaders and their flocks. In 1435, Fra Giacomo della Marca, at the time the general vicar of the Bosnian Franciscans, asked the advisors of Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg to pressure the king of Bosnia into having his subjects baptized. Fra Giacomo, who had already gained repute for his anti-Judaic diatribes, insisted that with the king’s support all of Bosnia could be baptized within six months.21 Although the Bosnian Franciscans remained, as one scholar noted, “conventuals in observant habits,” the idea retained currency and the Franciscans kept up the pressure.22 In 1445, they denied the sacraments to King Tomaš because he publicly maintained cordial relations with the leaders of the Bosnian Church. He had to convince the pope that he was obliged to do so only because of the strength of the “Manicheans,” and that he was simply waiting for the right opportunity to force them to accept Catholic faith, or face exile or death.23 When Tomaš finally delivered on his promise in 1459, Pius reports that “about 12,000 people were baptized, while forty, or slightly more, persisted in their heresy” and fled to the refuge offered by Duke Stjepan. Pius’ account and the numbers he provides are somewhat ambiguous and have caused controversies among scholars. However, the number 40 is almost certainly 40 (not 40,000 as some contend), and this no doubt refers to the members of the Krstjan hierarchy.24 Aside from what Pius tells us, there are no other sources that describe how this action was carried out. Since Catholicization was already well under way in the western parts of Bosnia thanks to the efforts of the Francisan Observants, it seems that the focus of this action took place in the central parts of the King’s land. It is important to note that there was no papal legate in the kingdom at the time. The forced conversions were presumably carried out by the Franciscans with the help of royal troops. It would have been difficult for Tomaš to move against the Krstjani if he had not first made a deal with the Sultan, and thus, secured his eastern border. Indeed, the purge involved a lot of political bartering between the king and his subjects. The aristocrats in the east of the King’s land seem not to have posed a problem, but Tomaš certainly used the opportunity to secure the support of peasants. The Ottoman tax registers compiled after the conquest of the kingdom describe a piece of land located in the village of Orahovica near the town of Konjic, which the “cursed king (almost certainly Tomaš) took from the Krstjani
158 Luka Špoljari ć and gave to the villagers.”25 Conspicuously, this village lay some 30 miles from Hodidjed, the main Ottoman stronghold in Bosnia, whose commanders, as Bosnians complained around the same time, sought to draw the peasants to their territories by promising them freedom.26 It is important to note, however, that the numbers of converted and exiled people reported by Pius make quite clear that the king preferred conversion over exile. This was also the view of the last papal legate in the kingdom, Bishop Nicholas of Modruš, who later claimed that the king enticed the leading “Manicheans” to convert by offering them land and honours.27 There is thus plenty of evidence to contradict Pius’ snide comment that some believed the king’s persecutions to have been motivated primarily by greed. When King Tomaš’s envoys arrived in Rome in March 1460, they used the expulsions to present their king as a true Catholic and explained his contacts with the Turks as a political necessity.28 Initially, Pius entrusted the investigation of this matter to long-serving Legate Tommasini, who was supposed to summon the envoys of King Tomaš and Duke Stjepan to his residence in Venetian Dalmatia and then decide on the matter.29 However, the pope soon changed his mind. In May, he appointed a new legate in the kingdom who was to go to Bosnia to inspect the matter in person and, at the same time, persuade Duke Stjepan against welcoming the Krstjani exiled from the King’s land.30 The new legate was Natale Zorzi, Bishop of Nin, who brought the three leading heretics to Rome to recant their errors.
Figure 9.1 The Adriatic in 1460. Source: Luka Špoljarić.
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 159
The three Krstjani in Rome In his Commentaries, Pius implies that both the mass conversions and the arrest and abjuration of the three leading heretics in Rome happened around the same time. However, he conflated into one short passage events that had unfolded over the course of two years from the autumn of 1459 to the autumn of 1461. This omitted a lot of political wavering and decision-making that took place as legates and nuncios moved back and forth between Bosnia and Rome. The new legate Bishop Natale Zorzi was, like Tommasini, a Venetian prelate from Dalmatia, and he picked up where his predecessor had left off.31 His first mission to Bosnia in the summer of 1460 was primarily investigative in nature.32 Zorzi’s report on the situation in the kingdom is not preserved, but the bull he received from Pius immediately after his return (dated 28 December 1460: see Appendix 1) gives some idea of what it contained. Though Pius makes provisions in case of the Ottoman invasion, the focus is entirely on the internal situation in the kingdom and the question of the “Manichean heretics.” Pius states unequivocally that the “heresy which sprouted there, alas, in part still thrives today,” and speaks of the insurgents “who are rising against the Catholic faith.” Zorzi, called “the plowman of heresy and sower of Catholic faith,” is therefore given the broadest possible powers, that of a legate de latere, and instructed to suppress all opponents and rebels, of whatever dignity, without giving them the right of appeal. The bull thus provides additional background for understanding the account in Pius’ Commentaries. Though the wording of the bull is slightly vague, it does make clear that in the autumn of 1460, a year after the forced conversions and expulsions sanctioned by Tomaš, there were still rebel heretics in the King’s land. Leading these “rebels” were “three heretics,” whom by Pius’ account in the Commentaries, Zorzi brought to Rome so that they could publicly recant their errors. The three were brought to the curia either when he returned from his first mission in late November 1460, or perhaps in April 1461 when he might have returned from the second one.33 Whatever the case may be, the bull gave Zorzi free rein over dealing with their colleagues and followers and he seems to have spent large periods of 1461 in Bosnia exercising it, though we do not have any sources on the concrete measures he might have taken. With regard to the three leading Krstjani in Rome – Juraj Kučinić, Stojsav Tvrtković, and Radmil Vučinić – the curial documents and narrative sources allow us to reconstruct their Roman sojourn and abjuration in some detail.34 As soon as they arrived in the city, the three were separated, each accommodated in a different monastery and assigned a cardinal who was supposed to convince him to recant his beliefs. After they all had agreed to do so, Pius tasked another cardinal, the curia’s top theologian and heresiologist, Juan de Torquemada, to disprove a list of the 50 errors of the “Manichean heretics” which had been provided by the Bosnian Franciscans. The result was Torquemada’s Outline of the Truths of the Faith of the Roman Church Which Were Collected for Instructing the Manicheans (Symbolum veritatum fidei Romane Ecclesie que fuerunt colecte pro informatione Manicheorum).35 Torquemada admits in the prologue addressed to
160 Luka Špoljari ć Pope Pius that he had drawn up the treatise in haste. Its relatively simple form confirms this: each of the 50 errors is briefly countered with a truth, supported by references to the Old and New Testament and to patristic and scholastic authorities.36 The treatise served as a statement of faith. It was presented to the three Krstjani, who, after familiarizing themselves with it, accepted it on 14 May 1461 in a public ceremony in St Peter’s Basilica before the pope himself. The three, however, had no knowledge of Latin. According to the document of their abjuration, a Croatian priest Luka Tolentić, who worked at the curia as papal abbreviator, translated it for them.37 As the following section will make clear, this was not a simultaneous translation done by Tolentić during the ceremony, but arguably a now lost Slavonic translation of the treatise. What earlier studies have failed to answer is why Tomaš chose not to banish the three in 1459 along with the 40 other members of the church, but, instead, in concert with the pope, had them deported to Rome. We know that they were considered the “leaders of the heresy;” that they had villages and lands under their control; and that they held much influence both at the court and among the people.38 In other words, these three were the foremost dignitaries of the Bosnian Church in the King’s land. It seems, therefore, that King Tomaš believed that their abjuration would have far greater effects on the successful conversion of their flocks, than their expulsion. For his part, Pope Pius II may have also welcomed the propagandist potential of the episode. Three years earlier, when describing the Bosnian “Manicheans” he had lamented that “no decrees of the Apostolic See, no Christian armies have sufficed to eradicate this stain.”39 In 1461, Pius would have seen the abjuration as a spectacle that communicated to the ambassadors and liaisons of the Italian and European powers in Rome yet another of his successes in fighting the enemies of Christendom. The three Krstjani were certainly not Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, but they were among the last leaders of one of the most tenacious heresies that had resisted the efforts of the papacy for centuries. In August, some three months after the ceremony, Pius formally placed the three Krstjani under the king’s protection and gave them permission to build Catholic churches in their lands.40 With the Bosnian Church being formally dismantled, the three thus effectively became secular landholders, who were as such allowed to keep their lands and were expected to help bring their flock into the Catholic fold. Since Legate Zorzi was presumably already back in Bosnia, Pius had Luka Tolentić escort the three back to their lands.41 While two of the Krstjani remained true to their abjuration, the third escaped as they travelled through the lands of Duke Stjepan, who conveniently offered him refuge.42 The forced conversions of 1459 and the deportation of the three Krstjani to Rome in 1461 proved to be important steps in Bosnia’s diplomatic dealings with the papal curia. King Tomaš, however, was not the one to capitalize on them, as he had died in July 1461 and was succeeded by his son Stjepan Tomašević. When the new king’s envoys arrived in Rome, they asked the pope to finally establish Catholic bishoprics in their kingdom and send Tomašević the papal crown.43 Since the Hungarian kings claimed both political and ecclesiastical sovereignty
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 161 over Bosnia, these requests were tantamount to asking the pope to recognize Bosnian claims to independence. Pius describes this embassy in his Commentaries and suggests that he proceeded with the process of establishing the bishoprics, but rejected sending the crown without consulting first with King Matthias Corvinus. Though scholars have long interpreted King Matthias’ bitter letter to Pius in May 1462 as proof that the pope had acquiesced to both demands of the Bosnians, it is debatable to what extent he was willing to upset the political balance in the region.44
The plans for a Bosnian inquisition There is little doubt that these actions effectively dismantled the Bosnian Church, in the King’s land at least. Since the “Manicheans” were supposedly no longer a problem, the scholars have long interpreted Tomašević’s reign as a futile struggle to resist the inevitable Ottoman conquest.45 Indeed, the published sources suggest that, after Tomašević rose to the throne in 1461, the papacy became solely concerned with the Turks, especially since the new king cancelled the payment of tribute to which his father had agreed two years earlier. When departing once again for Bosnia in November 1461, Legate Natale Zorzi received instructions to preach the crusade and help prepare the kingdom’s defences.46 Yet Zorzi never made it to the royal court in Jajce. On his way he fell from his horse and, at the end of January 1462, died in Livno.47 The pope named yet another high-ranking Venetian prelate in Dalmatia, Lorenzo Zane, Archbishop of Split, as Zorzi’s successor in the role of the papal legate in Bosnia and reissued the very same instructions.48 Yet, the person who actually went to Bosnia was not Zane but the papal nuncio, Luka Tolentić.49 The bull that Pius issued to Tolentić on 8 April 1462 (see Appendix 2) offers detailed instructions about his course of action and completely changes the current understanding of the Manichean question after 1461. Like his predecessors, Tolentić was to strengthen Catholic institutions in the kingdom, issuing dispensations to prominent Catholics and would-be converts. He was to draft a report on the construction of cathedrals and parish churches, and to make sure that they were worthy of the nascent Catholic Church of Bosnia. Yet the bulk of Tolentić’s instructions deal with the heretics and converts. His first task was to visit the recent converts in the kingdom and have them swear loyalty to the Roman Church in return for a full remission of sins. This suggests that the papacy did not consider entirely valid the conversions of those who had been brought into the church during the mass conversions overseen by Tomaš in 1459; they had to be repeated before the papal nuncio, or his appointed aides, following a precise procedure. According to this procedure, the converts had to accept “the collected truths of Christian faith and [Manichean] errors” (veritates fidei Christiane quam ipsorum errores collectas). The wording reveals that this was not a reference to any list, but in fact to Torquemada’s work, or rather, more precisely, to Tolentić’s own Slavonic translation of it. The text, therefore, was not produced only for the purpose of converting the three leading Krstjani in
162 Luka Špoljari ć Rome, but also in order to be sent to Bosnia to serve, whether in full or abbreviated form, in the process of (re-)converting the kingdom’s population. While Tolentić’s mission in Bosnia was temporary, the fight against the Manichean heretics was supposed to continue. Pius gave the nuncio specific instructions on how to ensure the creation of a more permanent structure that would cleanse the kingdom of heresy. On the one hand, Tolentić was to appoint a head inquisitor who would be in charge of policing orthodoxy in the entire kingdom. On the other, he was supposed to pressure the king to build more monasteries and churches, especially in the places populated by the recent converts, where the Krstjan houses had been shut down during Tomaš’s persecutions. Nuncio Tolentić was also to make sure that these places were staffed by friars and priests who had both theological expertise and tenacity to keep the converts in faith and bring the heretics to light. The inquisitor and the local priests and friars were no doubt expected to rely on Tolentić’s translation of Torquemada’s work to convert the population. The most extreme cases of heresy were supposed to be transferred to Rome. Aside from the instructions for Tolentić, there are other sources that reveal the new-found concern for ensuring a supply of friars competent to deal with recent converts and with heretics. In a bull of March 1462 that Tolentić brought to Bosnia himself, Pope Pius allowed Fra Petar of Mile, one of the high-ranking friars of the Bosnian vicariate, to go with four of his brethren to pursue studies at any university in the west of their choosing. Fra Petar had pointed to Bosnia’s dire need of friars educated in theology, philosophy, and canon law, given the “vicinity of infidels and presence of the cursed sect of Manichean heretics.”50 There is no doubt that his supplication was done in concert with other leaders of the vicariate. It appears that during this very period Fra Petar’s superior, the vicar Fra Filip, decided to set up a studium in the Franciscan monastery in his hometown of Dubrovnik in order to provide his friars with a sufficient education in theology and philosophy.51 It may very well be that Fra Petar and four of his companions were sent to university so that one day they might assume the teaching posts in this studium. We do not know which one were they sent to, or even if they were sent at all. The fact that nuncio Tolentić was charged with implementing Pius’ instructions both in the King’s land and in the Duchy at first seems to suggest that Duke Stjepan had finally sanctioned the Catholicization of his lands. However, it is revealing that Tolentić was also supposed to warn any of the lords who were unwilling to heed the pope’s orders about the worldly and eternal punishments they would face for insubordination. This provision was made precisely for Duke Stjepan, who in fact continued to offer refuge to the Krstjani exiled from the King’s land. In 1461, with the death of his former rival King Tomaš and growing Ottoman pressure in the east, Duke Stjepan had reconciled with the new king and established contacts with the pope.52 This explains why Tolentić was specifically instructed to carry out his orders in the Duchy as well. Nevertheless, Duke Stjepan still had no intention of banishing the Krstjani or forcing them to convert. Indeed, he relied on Gost Radin’s services quite publicly, even during
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 163 Tolentić’s sojourn in Bosnia, and so it is not surprising that he was soon branded by Pius as an unrepentant heretic.53 Although it is impossible to say how successful nuncio Tolentić was in implementing Pius’ instructions, the bull speaks volumes about the scope and ambition of papal plans. After Tolentić returned to the papal curia in the autumn of 1462, the pope named as his successor Nicholas, Bishop of Modruš, another Croatian prelate, who may have already served in Bosnia in early 1461 as one of legate Natale Zorzi’s companions.54 Nicholas developed his own ideas about the best way to convert the Krstjani, but in the end did not have the chance of seeing them implemented. In the spring of 1463, a few months after Nicholas’ arrival at the Bosnian court, the Ottomans invaded and the kingdom fell within a matter of weeks.
Conclusion The forced conversions sanctioned by King Tomaš in 1459 did not mark the end, but rather the beginning of the purge of Bosnia. The Ottoman invasion of the kingdom in 1463 cut short an ambitious attempt to create an inquisitorial structure that would root out heresy and police Catholic orthodoxy in the converted kingdom. The forced conversions, the public recantations of faith, the drafting of inquisitorial texts, and the creation of a central inquisitorial office all suggest that what happened in Bosnia in 1459–1463 was in some respects similar to what was going on contemporaneously in Spain and Portugal. Yet the parallels only go so far. In Bosnia, the initial incentive to deal with the “Manichean threat” came not from a royal court, but from a resurgent papal curia determined to extend its authority through uniate politics. Bosnian kings and the papal agents had neither the power nor the logistical tools wielded by the Spanish and Portuguese authorities, not least because they had to deal with the expanding Ottoman juggernaut on their eastern borders, while the Iberians were dealing with an Andalusian kingdom in retreat. Moreover, in Bosnia, there was nothing remotely similar to the Spanish concerns with purity and blood that would later take the form of laws regarding limpieza de sangre. In the eyes of the papacy, the Bosnian heretics were members of the “Slavonic” or “Illyrian” nation whom their fellow countrymen, Bosnian and Croatian Catholics, had to bring to the light of truth.55 This, of course, does not mean that the Bosnian converts were not under continuing suspicion of crypto-Manicheism. It is no surprise that the papacy and the exiled Bosnian-Croatian elite in Rome ultimately ascribed blame for the fall of the kingdom to the crypto-“Manichean” commander of Bobovac, the main defensive fortress in the east. They turned this “heretic” into a national traitor for supposedly opening the gates to the Ottomans, which, in their view, sealed Bosnia’s fate.56 Whether or not this story has a kernel of truth, there were plenty of Catholic and Orthodox commanders in Bosnia and elsewhere who delivered their fortresses when confronted with the Sultan’s army.57 The story says more about the suspicions that converts faced from the authorities, than about any of
164 Luka Špoljari ć the real reasons for the fall of Bosnia, a kingdom which had been under growing pressure from the Ottomans for eight straight decades.58 The Ottoman tax registers reveal that, even after decades of papal pressures and Ottoman incursions, the Krstjani did survive the conquest.59 How they saw and interpreted the purge and the fall of the Bosnian kingdom, however, remains a mystery. There are no narratives that would humanize their experiences. The brief reference to a piece of land confiscated by the “cursed king” and given to the villagers, which an Ottoman official duly entered into his register some decades later, remains as only an echo of the powerful memories that the events of 1459–1463 evoked in their communities until they slowly disappeared in the coming centuries. When the popes turned their focus back to Bosnia, now a province of the Ottoman Empire, it was the Muslims and Orthodox whom they primarily sought to convert. The small communities of “Manichean heretics” were no longer their concern.
Appendix 1: Pope Pius II, bull to Natale Zorzi, 28 December 1460 Original: Vatican, Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV), Reg. Vat. 478, fols 305r–6v (not published). Pius etc. sends greetings in Lord to the venerable brother Natale, Bishop of Nin, the legate of the Apostolic See in the Kingdom of Bosnia. When We direct our caring gaze to separate regions devoted to God and the Apostolic See, We clearly see those provinces in particular, in which the enemy of the human race, the disturber of peace, and disseminator of discord has caused confusion and strife. We take great concern to root out and utterly extinguish all heresy from these provinces, so that they, and the people who live and dwell in them, can rest in sincere faith and soothing peace and quiet. However, because We are torn by a number of various concerns, and human nature prevents us from attending to each on our own, We – like He who, though is whole everywhere and governs all things according to His will, sent disciples whom He elected in His inscrutable wisdom across the entire world – on occasion impart apostolic responsibility upon those, who, by having full knowledge of spiritual and temporal matters, can bring fruits of salvation in the Lord’s field. Our attention is now drawn to the countless dangers to the souls which should be mourned by all the Christians, the misfortune of people, the loss of property, and the numerous attacks that the citizens and inhabitants of the Kingdom of Bosnia, which has bordered the treacherous and savage Turks for many years now, are suffering due to the heresy which sprouted there and, alas, in part still thrives today. We should resist those who are rising against the Catholic faith and are trying to extinguish Christian religion with such virtue and such tenacity that faithful to Christ remain steadfast and sincere in Catholic faith in the face of the perfidious heretics and Patarenes, confused in their wicked opinions. Since We have seen you have proven yourself worthy in both word and deed in
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 165 great and difficult tasks and by your sincere faith, and since the highest God has granted you the gift of graces, great knowledge, mature counsel, pleasant character, and signs of other great virtues, We have determined, with the counsel of our brethren, to send you to the said kingdom as the angel of peace and preacher of the crusade with full power of the legate de latere, to act as a plowman of heresy and sower of Catholic faith as it were. In this kingdom you are to tear, destroy, disperse, raze, build and sow, reform the deformed, erect what needs to be erected, correct what needs to be corrected, set up and arrange, as guided by heavenly grace and your foresight. By this letter We give you the full and free power to correct, set up, provide, arrange, instruct, administer and carry out, dispose and execute all and sundry what you would find necessary or in any way useful to the honour of God, restoration of ecclesiastical liberty, extirpation of heresy and schism, salvation of souls, and strengthening of the said kingdom; also, to suppress all opponents and rebels, of whichever dignity (even the episcopal one), station, position, order or rank, whichever ecclesiastical or secular office they may hold, without giving them any right of appeal; and whenever, God forfend, the Turks, the bitterest enemies of the Christian name, should attempt to invade the kingdom or any of its parts, or the news should arise of imminent danger of such invasion, and not on any other occasion, to preach and organize the preaching of the crusade in public before the people in the said kingdom and parts of Croatia. Thus, our brother, We entrust and command you by this apostolic letter to assume the office of this legation in respect to Us and the Apostolic See. You are to conduct yourself and perform this office with such care, discretion, and prudence, so that, aside from the glory of human praise and glory of eternal life, which is promised to those devoted to doing good, you earn our profuse thanks and the thanks of the said see, and that by divine mercy your achievements produce the desired fruits. Given in Rome, in the year etc. 1460, on the fifth day before the Kalends of January, in the third year of our pontificate.
Appendix 2: Pope Pius II, bull to Luka Tolentić, 8 April 1462 Original: ASV, Reg. Vat. 518, fols 79r–80r (not published). Pius etc. sends greetings to the beloved son, Luka Tolentić, Archdeacon of Korčula. As We think over in the depths of the mind your diligence, mature counsel, and profound foresight and sharp thinking in action – which We, as experience of great matters taught us, see thriving in you – as well as the sincere devotion you exhibit towards Us and the Roman Church, We consider it a truly worthy gift to burden you with duties which lead to the spread of Christian religion, the growth of faith, and the salvation of souls. Since our wish is that true faith and religion – which brings honour to God, salvation of the people, and the spread of orthodoxy – reign in the Kingdom and Duchy of Bosnia just as in other places of
166 Luka Špoljari ć Christendom, We have decided to send you to the dearest son in Christ, Stjepan King of Bosnia, and to the beloved son, the noble Stjepan Duke in Bosnia. By the authority of this letter, therefore, We task you to, as soon as you had reached the kingdom and the duchy, make all those who have converted from the Manichean dark into the wonderful light of truth, by renouncing their errors and professing Christian religion, firmly promise to follow the Holy Catholic Church and observe and abide by her mandates. They should also promise to make an effort to bring others across Bosnia who similarly err back to the Catholic faith. And so that you can confirm the converts and would-be converts in their faith, and instruct and guide them, We want you to absolve those whom you find to be truly repentant of all their crimes, transgressions, and sins (even of those for which usually the Apostolic See would have to be consulted) and to give them holy penance, as well as to grant full absolution to those in the hour of death. You are to present them on our behalf with the collected truths of Christian faith and their errors. Should you deem it useful or necessary, appoint a suitable secular or religious priest to perform these tasks also. If you happen to find in that land a suitable person of the church, task him with the inquisition of heresy, with all the faculties pertaining to the inquisitorial office. Finally, assemble the converts, as well as relapsed and still-existing heretics who dwell in the kingdom or in the duchy of beloved son Duke Stjepan, and persuade them, according to your possibility, to recognize the Holy Roman Church as the head of the Christian faith and the Roman pontiff as the true successor of St Peter, and to abide by them. Offer them safe passage to come, stay, and return freely to their lands. Furthermore, We wish, and task you by the authority of this letter, that you carefully inform yourself about the construction of churches that are supposed to be built in the kingdom, both the cathedral and parish ones. Make sure that this is done appropriately to the honour of the Bosnian Church. By the authority of this letter We also give you the power to appoint secular priests in the places where you will find it most necessary. By this letter you can also give license to all the people of the said kingdom who wish to have secular chaplains and construct oratories or chapels for their worship, that they can receive for any of the two purposes one priest or more for their needs, as long as they petition for a formal license. In order that per our heart’s wishes the said instructions achieve the desired effect and the converts can more fervently persist in faith and draw others to it, We wish and task you by this letter to ask and induce the said king to promise to erect, construct, and build the churches in the necessary villages and places. He is also to promise to establish and set up monasteries or churches in the places in which the converts used to have their gatherings and in which they congregated as heretics, and to place and assign there friars and instructors of true faith who have the knowledge, the will, and the ability to bring back those who have relapsed from the word of God and confirm the converts in their faith. The king and the duke are to force all in the kingdom and the duchy who live in this or some other heresy, depravity, and error, to profess Christian religion and venerate the Holy Mother Church, or to have them sent to the Apostolic See, so
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 167 that through discussions on true faith they are brought back to light. They are to offer fitting help, counsel, and support to you in every single matter necessary to achieve this and to make others do the same. Should, Heaven forfend, any lord or someone else, contrary to our wish, refuse to implement these requests, We want you to pressure them in our name and in the name of the Roman Church, and to explain to them, according to circumstances, that aside from the divine vengeance, which they can certainly expect for such actions, the Apostolic See will make sure to persist in pursuing indemnities for the expenses, damages, and loans which She has suffered and suffers as a result, and We shall proceed to issue an ecclesiastical censure against him or them. Should this person, as a true Christian and son of the Holy Mother Church take care to implement these requests, he shall have, aside from eternal rewards which he can undoubtedly hope for, our blessing and thanks and the blessing and thanks of the said see, and he shall always find Us inclined and well-disposed. You, therefore, make sure to carry out, treat, and execute everything with prudence, care, and diligence, so that your deeds bring forth bountiful fruits and our love for you grows so much that it rightfully urges us to honour and reward you. Given in Rome, in St Peter’s, in the year etc. 1462, on the sixth day before the Ides of April, in the fourth year of our pontificate.
Acknowledgments This essay is based on a paper delivered as part of an inspirational series of sessions on confessional dynamics in, and on the fringes of, the Ottoman Empire, and I am grateful to its organizer, Tijana Krstić, for inviting me to take part. I would also like to thank Mladen Ančić, Jadranka Neralić, Emir Filipović, and Peter Sposato for their advice and comments on the essay, as well as Margaret Meserve for generously providing me with an advance copy of the third volume of her edition and translation of Pope Pius’ Commentaries.
Notes 1 Though the same message appears elsewhere, see, for instance, the letter preserved by L. Wadding, Annales Minorum seu trium ordinum a S. Francisco institutorum, vols 11 and 12, Rome: Typis Rochi Bernabò, 1734–1735, pp. 211–212. 2 E. O’Brien, The Commentaries of Pope Pius II (1458–1464) and the Crisis of the Fifteenth-Century Papacy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015, pp. 18–44, analyses the challenges faced by the popes in the mid-fifteenth century. On fifteenthcentury crusades, see N. Housley, Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012; and B. Weber, Lutter contre les Turcs: Les formes nouvelles de la croisade pontificale au XVe siècle, Rome: École française de Rome, 2013. B. Weber, “Toward a Global Crusade? The Papacy and the Non-Latin World in the Fifteenth-Century,” in N. Housley (ed.) Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 11–44 traces the evolution of papal diplomatic contacts with the Eastern Christians.
168 Luka Špoljari ć 3 J. Gill, The Council of Florence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959, pp. 349–388; N. Necipoǧ lu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the Late Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 209–220. 4 Pius II, Commentarii, 2 vols, eds. I. Bellus and I. Boronkai, Budapest: Balassi kiadó, 1993, ch. 5.7; there are three other chapters in which the Pope discusses Bosnia (chs. 3.6, 11.13, 11.26). Pius worked on the Commentaries between the summer of 1462 and the spring of 1464; see O’Brien, The Commentaries, p. 16. Three volumes of the new edition and English translation of the work by Margaret Meserve and Marcello Simonetta have so far been published, covering books 1–7; see Pius, Commentaries, 3 vols so far, eds. M. Meserve and M. Simonetta, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. On Pius’ pontificate and the apologetic character of the Commentaries, see B. Baldi, Pio II e le trasformazioni dell’Europa cristiana (1457–1464), Milan: Unicopli, 2006; and O’Brien, The Commentaries. 5 S. Ćirković, Istorija srednjovekovne bosanske države [The history of the medieval Bosnian state], Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 1964., pp. 319–321; S. Ćirković ‘Bosanska Crkva u bosanskoj državi’ [The Bosnian Church in the Bosnian State], in E. Redžić (ed.) Društvo i privreda srednjovjekovne bosanske države [The Society and Economy of the Medieval Bosnian State], Sarajevo: Akademija nauka i umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine, 1987, pp. 252–253; J. Fine, The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation, New York: Columbia University Press, 1975, pp. 332–338; P. Ćošković, “Tomašev progon sljedbenika Crkve bosanske 1459,” [Tomaš’s Persecution of the Followers of the Bosnian Church in 1459], in N. Šehić (ed.) Migracije i Bosna i Hercegovina [Migrations and Bosnia and Herzegovina], Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 1990, pp. 43–50; S. Lovrenović, Na klizištu povijesti: Sveta kruna ugarska i sveta kruna bosanska 1387–1463 [The Landslide of History: The Holy Crown of Hungary and the Holy Crown of Bosnia, 1387–1463], Zagreb: Synopsis, 2006., pp. 334–336. 6 See the recent in-depth treatment of late medieval papal legation by A. Kalous, Late Medieval Papal Legation: Between the Councils and the Reformation, Rome: Viella, 2017. 7 They are mostly to be found in A. Theiner (ed.), Vetera monumenta historica Hungariam sacram illustrantia, vol. 2, Rome: Typis Vaticanis, 1860; and A. Theiner (ed.), Vetera monumenta Slavorum Meridionalium historiam illustrantia, vol. 1, Rome: Typis Vaticanis, 1863. 8 This is not to say that these bulls were completely unknown. Jadranka Neralić was the first to reference them in her comprehensive overview of notable Croats in fifteenthand sixteenth-century papal diplomacy; see J. Neralić, “Udio Hrvata u papinskoj d iplomaciji,” [The Role of Croats in Papal Diplomacy], in M. Andrlić and M. Valentić (eds) Hrvatska srednjovjekovna diplomacija [Croatian Medieval Diplomacy], Zagreb: Diplomatska akademija MVP RH, 1999, pp. 102–103 and 111. However, their contents have never been discussed or analysed in the context of the purge of 1459. Aside from the bulls, important information is also provided by the diplomatic and notary records, both published and unpublished, from cities located on the routes the legates took: Venice as well as Zadar, Split, and Dubrovnik, the three main port towns of Dalmatia. These, of course, offer little information on the religious situation in Bosnia, but they do allow us to trace the movements of papal legates between Bosnia and Rome from 1460 and 1462. 9 On the last decades of Bosnia’s history, see Ćirković, Istorija srednjovekovne, pp. 282–330. 10 The literature on the Bosnian Church is vast, but see Ćirković, “Bosanska Crkva;” J. Šidak, Studije o ‘Crkvi bosanskoj’ i bogumilstvu [Studies on the Bosnian Church and Bogomilism], Zagreb: Liber, 1975; and P. Ćošković, Crkva bosanska u XV. stolje ću [The Bosnian Church in the Fifteenth Century], Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2005.
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 169 11 For the general outline of history of the Bosnian Franciscans, see D. Mandić, Franjeva čka Bosna: Razvoj i uprava Bosanske Vikarije i Provincije 1340–1735 [Franciscan Bosnia: The Development and Administration of the Bosnian Vicariate and Province 1340–1735], Rim: Hrvatski povijesni institute, 1968; M. Ančić, “Pobožnost franjevaca Bosanske vikarije u drugoj polovici 14. stoljeća,” [The Piety of the Franciscans of the Bosnian Vicariate in the Second Half of the Fourteenth century], in M. Ančić, Na rubu Zapada: Tri stolje ća srednjovjekovne Bosne [At the Edge of West: Three Centuries of Medieval Bosnia], Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2001, pp. 225–242 discusses the various pastoral problems faced by the Bosnian friars. 12 On the use of these labels against the Krstjani see Ćošković, Crkva bosanska, pp. 90–103. Such classicizing heretical labels were typical of the Reformation era, which saw the re-emergence of “Arians,” “Pelagians,” “Donatists,” and others; see N. Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 47. 13 Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Europe, trans. R. Brown, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013, p. 115. 14 Ćirković “Bosanska Crkva;” Ćošković, Crkva bosanska; and, in English, M. L ambert, The Cathars, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998, pp. 297–313, present the Bosnian Church as dualist; Šidak, Studije o, as an orthodox Christian church. The most widely known in-depth study in English is Fine, The Bosnian Church, which puts forward a highly controversial hypothesis on the existence of both Krstjani and dualists in Bosnia, despite the fact that there is not a single contemporary source that would distinguish the two. Though it offers novel perspectives on certain episodes, a lot of sections of Fine’s study, including his analysis of the purge, are plagued by his desire to fit it within this interpretative framework. For an overview of historiography on the Bosnian Church, see Ćošković, Crkva bosanska, pp. 21–72. 15 On Tommasini’s activities as legate in Bosnia, see S. Krasić, Dominikanci u srednjovjekovnoj Bosni [Dominicans in Medieval Bosnia], Đakovo: Knjižnica U pravi trenutak, 1996, pp. 54–77. 16 Ćošković, Crkva bosanska, pp. 256–257. 17 Gost Radin’s testament from 1466 is one of the most important sources for understanding the Bosnian Church and the power of its senior ranks; see Ćošković, Crkva bosanska, pp. 36–37. 18 On Duke Stjepan, see the classic study by S. Ćirković, Herceg Stefan Vuk či ć-Kosa ča i njegovo doba [Duke Stjepan Vukčić-Kosača and His Age], Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1964. 19 Wadding, Annales Minorum, vol. 12, pp. 111–112. 20 On Tomaš’s anti-Ottoman activities, see E. Filipović “Exurge igitur, miles Christi, et in barbaros viriliter pugna… The Anti-Ottoman Activities of Bosnian King Stjepan Tomaš (1443–1463),” in J. Smo ł ucha (eds) Holy War in Medieval and Early Modern East-Central Europe, Krakow: WAM, 2017, pp. 201–241. 21 For more on this episode, see E. Filipović, “Boravak bosanskog kralja Tvrtka II Tvrtkovića u Beču tokom 1435. godine,” [About the Stay of the Bosnian King Tvrtko II in Vienna during 1435], Radovi Filozofskog fakulteta u Sarajevu (Historija, Historija umjetnosti,Arheologija), 16/2, 2012, 241. On Giacomo’s life, see C. Casagrande, “Giacomo della Marca,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 54, 2000, 214–220. 22 S. Džaja “Svijet politike i franjevaštvo u Europi 14. stoljeća” [The World of Politics and the Franciscans in Fourteenth-Century Europe], Croatica Christiana periodica, 29, 1992, 40. 23 D. Farlati, Illyricum sacrum, vol. 4, Venice: Apud Sebastianum Coleti, 1769, pp. 257–258. 2 4 Pius, Commentarii, ch. 5.7. Some studies (as, for instance, T. Vukšić, “Papa Pio II. i Kralj Stjepan Tomaš” [Pope Pius II and King Stjepan Tomaš], in F. Šanjek (ed.) Fenomen ‘Krstjani’ u srednjovjekovnoj Bosni i Humu [The Krstjani phenomenon in
170 Luka Špoljari ć
25 26 27 28
29 30 31
32
medieval Bosnia and Hum], Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2005, p. 282) argue that the number 40 implies 40,000. As most scholars (Ćošković, “Tomašev progon,” p. 45; Ćirković, Istorija srednjovekovne, p. 320), I do not agree with such an interpretation, since the movement of 40,000 people would have certainly left some trace in the rich archives of neighbouring Dalmatian cities. To earlier arguments, I can add that, if Pius would have wanted to state 40,000, he would have put “thousand” (milia), after forty, rather than simply leaving it implied, as is suggested by a number of other similar passages of the Commentaries where he does just that; see Pius, Commentarii, chs. 3.23, 3.43, 3.47, 7.13, 7.16, 9.11, 12.31. Aside from the number 40, the number 12,000 (duodecim milia) also caused controversies, as earlier editions of the work have here 2,000 (duo milia). The fact that the older Vatican manuscript of the work, the one partially written and corrected by Pius himself, has 12,000 (duodecim milia) suggests that the scribe of the second manuscript, which has 2,000 (duo milia), simply got careless and left out the decim. On the relations between the two manuscripts, see H. Kramer, “Untersuchungen über die Commentarii des Papstes Pius II,” Mitteilungen des Osterreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung, 38, 1934, 58–92. T. Okiç, “Les Kristians (Bogomiles Parfaits) de Bosnie d’après des documents turcs inédits,” Südost-Forschungen, 19, 1960, 128–129. Pius, Commentarii, ch. 11.13. S. Džaja, “Ideološki i politološki aspekti propasti Bosanskog Kraljevstva 1463. godine,” [The Ideological and Political Aspects of the Fall of the Bosnian Kingdom in 1463], Croatica Christiana periodica, 18, 1986, 1986, 213–214. That Bosnian envoys were in Rome already at the end of March of 1460 is suggested by the fact that, on April 4, the Pope responded to various supplications that came from Bosnia; see I. Pou Y Marti (ed.), Bullarium Franciscanum, nova series, vol. 2, Quaracchi: Collegium s. Bonaventurae, 1939, pp. 392–394 (docs. 767–769). For their meeting with Pius, see Theiner Vetera monumenta, p. 358 (doc. 539). Farlati, Illyricum sacrum, p. 263. Theiner, Vetera monumenta, pp. 358–359 (doc. 540). Like Tommasini, Zorzi was a Venetian who, after decades spent as bishop in a Dalmatian city, must have had some knowledge of Slavic. He was also a known figure at the papal curia, as he made regular trips to Rome and, most importantly, in the winter of 1459–1460, took part in the Congress of Mantua. On his career, see Neralić, “Udio Hrvata,” p. 111; and N. Jakšić, “The Evidence from Nin concerning Bishop Natalis (1436–1462), Apostolic Legate to Bosnia,” Miscellanea Hadriatica et Mediterranea 2, 2015, 41–50. The reason the pope sent Zorzi instead of Tommasini was thus not of political nature; Tommasini was presumably too old to travel to Bosnia. Judging from the letter of a fellow Venetian prelate, Maffeo Vallaresso archbishop of Zadar, Zorzi was appointed to the position of legate in Bosnia in May of 1460; see Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), MS Barb. lat. 1809, 425–427. As Pius suggests in his letter to King Matthias, Zorzi was tasked to investigate the scope of Tomaš’s persecution and persuade Duke Stjepan not to welcome the exiled Krstjani in his land; see Theiner, Vetera monumenta, pp. 358–359 (doc. 539–540). Zorzi first travelled to the lands of Duke Stjepan, passing through Dubrovnik on 18 June 1460; see Dubrovnik, State Archives in Dubrovnik (DAD), Cons. Rog., vol. 16, fol. 149v. (The record mentions the anonymous “papal legate who is departing for Bosnia;” M. Spahić, Bosanska kraljevina sredinom XV vijeka: Kralj Stjepan Tomaš [The Bosnian Kingdom in the Middle of the Fifteenth Century: King Stjepan Tomaš], Zagreb: Bošnjačka nacionalna zajednica, 2016, pp. 207–208, who draws attention to it, erroneously identifies the legate as Tommasini.) On his return from the Bosnian court, Zorzi, now in the company of Bosnian envoys, moved through Zadar in early October and Venice on 10 November; see BAV, MS Barb. lat. 1809, 167–168; and I. Nagy and A. Nyáry (eds), Magyar diplomacziai emlékek: Mátyás
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 171
33
34
35
36 37
38 39 40 41 4 2 43 4 4
45 46 47 48 49
király korából [Hungarian Diplomatic Records: The age of King Matthias], vol. 1, Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1875, pp. 80–82 (docs 52–53). He would have reached Rome a few weeks later. Pius, Commentarii, ch. 5.7. There is no documentary record of Zorzi’s movements during his second mission. If he would have left the curia around New Year to pick up the three Krstjani in Bosnia and bring them over to Rome, then he would have been back some three-to-four months later, that is, in April 1461. On Zorzi’s first mission, see n. 32. Pius, Commentarii, ch. 5.7; Juan de Torquemada, Symbolum pro informatione Manichaeorum, N. Lopez Martinez and V. Proaño Gil (eds) Burgos: [s.n.], 1958, pp. 37–39 and 131; Theiner, Vetera monumenta, pp. 363–364 (doc. 546); S. Furlani, “Giovanni da Torquemada e il suo trattato contro i bogomili,” Ricerche religiose, 18, 1947, 176–177. Torquemada, Symbolum, p. 38 (lines 48–53). Interestingly, the Bosnian Franciscans seem to have also had the list of errors of the Serbian Orthodox Church, their other main rivals in the battle for the souls of the Bosnian populace. They clashed with the Serbian priests in the region of lower Drina, which during the late 1440s and 1450s a few times changed hands between the Bosnian king and the Serbian despot. In 1455, the Bosnian Franciscans sent this list to Fra Giovanni da Capistrano who at one point tried to convert the Serbian despot. For more on this episode, see S. Andrić, “Saint John Capistran and Despot George Branković: An Impossible Compromise,” Byzantinoslavica: Revue internationale des Etudes Byzantines, 74, 2016, 202–227. Torquemada, Symbolum, 38 (lines 45–47). Ibid., 131 (lines 12–16). On Tolentić, see Neralić, “Udio Hrvata,” pp. 102–103; and J. Paquet, “Une ébauche de la nonciature de Flandre au XVe siècle: Les missions dans les Pays Bas de Luc de Tolentis, évêque de Sebenico (1462–1484),” Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome, 25, 1949, 31–40. Pius, Commentarii, ch. 5.7; Theiner, Vetera monumenta, pp. 363–364 (doc. 546); Torquemada, Symbolum, 37 (lines 17–18). Piccolomini, Europe, 116. Theiner, Vetera monumenta, pp. 363–364 (doc. 546). Tolentić passed through Dubrovnik on 22 September 1461 on his way to the Bosnian court, and on 20 November on his way back to Rome; see Ćirković, Herceg Stefan, p. 246 (DAD, Cons. Rog., vol. 17, fols 13v and 26v). Pius, Commentarii, ch. 5.7. Ibid., ch. 11.13. See, for instance, Ćirković, Istorija srednjovekovne, p. 324; and Lovrenović, Na klizištu, pp. 341–350. I will address the problem of Tomašević’s crowning elsewhere. In 1463/1464 the Albanian Catholic prelates and clerics similarly hoped that Pius would send the papal crown to their leader Skanderbeg; see O.J. Schmitt, Skanderbeg: Der neue Alexander auf dem Balkan, Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2009, pp. 246–247. Ćirković, Istorija srednjovekovne, pp. 323–329; Lovrenović, Na klizištu, pp. 339–360. Theiner, Vetera monumenta, pp. 366–369 (doc. 551). Neralić, “Udio Hrvata,” p. 111; Jakšić, “The Evidence.” Theiner, Vetera monumenta, p. 374 (doc. 559). After leaving Rome in early May, Tolentić passed through Venice, where the Senate, out of fear of the Ottomans, denied the pope’s request to allow Zane to preach the crusade, and further informed Tolentić that the crusade money collected for the Bosnians earlier had already been spent; see Venice, Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASVe), Senato, Secreta, vol. 21, fol. 89v. From Venice Tolentić presumably sailed to Split to meet with Zane, and then, finally, reached Dubrovnik on July 15; see Ćirković, Herceg Stefan, p. 248 (DAD, Cons. Rog., vol. 17, fol. 110r). From Dubrovnik, he would have first visited Duke Stjepan and then continued to the court of King Tomašević.
172 Luka Špoljari ć
50 51 52 53 54
55
56
57
58
59
As for Zane, it seems that, because of the Venetian ban, he did not preach the crusade, since we still find him in Split at the beginning of August; see Zadar, State Archives in Zadar (DAZ), The Old Split Archives (SSA), vol. 27, fasc. 2, fol. 134r. The episode illustrates well the problems faced by the papacy in organizing the crusade in the region. Pou Y Marti (ed.), Bullarium Franciscanum, pp. 523–324 (doc. 997). Mandić, Franjeva čka Bosna, p. 126. There is no further notice about this studium. It seems that, if it did indeed start working, it closed its doors soon after the fall of Bosnia in 1463. Ćirković, Herceg Stefan, pp. 241–246. Ćošković, Crkva bosanska, pp. 191–193; Pius, Commentarii, ch. 11.26. Tolentić never returned to Bosnia. Instead, in December 1462, he was sent to Burgundy, where, apart from brief trips to Rome, he would remain for almost three decades as a permanent papal nuncio; see Paquet “Une ébauche;” and R.J. Walsh, Charles the Bold and Italy (1467–1477): Politics and Personnel, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, pp. 60–64. In 1458, just before rising to the papal throne, Pius portrayed the Illyrians as a nation that covers Dalmatia, Croatia, Bosnia, Istria, and Krain; see Piccolomini, Europe, pp. 115–116. As the careers of Luka Tolentić and Nicholas of Modruš well illustrate, Croatian clerics, effectively the representatives of the Illyrian nation at the papal curia, played an important intermediary role in the process of Bosnia’s Catholicization. I will discuss the emergence of the Illyrian national idea in my biography of Nicholas of Modruš. Pius, Commentarii, ch. 11.26. The story is reported by Nicholas of Modruš and, as a result, has been rejected by some scholars as papal propaganda. However, the fact that, as I show elsewhere (L. Špoljarić, “Nicholas of Modruš and his De bellis Gothorum: Politics and National History in the Fifteenth-Century Adriatic,” Renaissance Quarterly, 72.2, 2019.) Nicholas formed a close-knit connection with the Bosnian elite in exile suggests that this was the commonly accepted view. For the references to the Bosnians who delivered their fortresses in the Ottoman tax registers, see Okiç, “Les Kristians,” p. 118. Duke Stjepan also lamented to the Venetians that a number of his commanders betrayed him during the Ottoman invasion; see Ćirković, Herceg Stefan, p. 253. T. Stavrides, The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelovi ć (1453–1474), Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 199–207 shows that Mahmud Pasha Angelović, the Grand Vezir of Sultan Mehmed II, r egularly coaxed discontented factions and fort commanders with promises of land and revenue. On the fall of Bosnia in historiography, see E. Filipović, “Historiografija o padu Bosanskog Kraljevstva” [Historiography on the Fall of the Bosnian Kingdom], in A. Birin (ed.) Stjepan Tomaševi ć (1461–1463.): Slom srednjovjekovnog Bosanskog Kraljevstva [Stjepan Tomaševi ć (1461–1463): The Fall of the Medieval Bosnian Kingdom], Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2013, pp. 11–28. Okiç, “Les Kristians.”
Bibliography Published primary sources Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Europe, trans. R. Brown, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013. Nagy, I. and A. Nyáry (eds), Magyar diplomacziai emlékek: Mátyás király korából [Hungarian diplomatic records: The age of King Matthias], vol. 1, Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1875. (=MDE)
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 173 Pius II, Commentarii, 2 vols, eds. I. Bellus and I. Boronkai, Budapest: Balassi kiadó, 1993. ———, Commentaries, 3 vols so far, eds. M. Meserve and M. Simonetta, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pou Y Marti, I. (ed.), Bullarium Franciscanum, nova series, vol. 2, Quaracchi: Collegium s. Bonaventurae, 1939. (=BF) Theiner, A. (ed.), Vetera monumenta historica Hungariam sacram illustrantia, vol. 2, Rome: Typis Vaticanis, 1860. ———, Vetera monumenta Slavorum Meridionalium historiam illustrantia, vol. 1, Rome: Typis Vaticanis, 1863. Torquemada, Juan de, Symbolum pro informatione Manichaeorum, N. Lopez Martinez and V. Proaño Gil (eds), Burgos: [s.n.], 1958. Wadding, L., Annales Minorum seu trium ordinum a S. Francisco institutorum, vols 11 and 12, Rome: Typis Rochi Bernabò, 1734–1735.
Secondary sources Ančić, M., “Pobožnost franjevaca Bosanske vikarije u drugoj polovici 14. stoljeća,” [The Piety of the Franciscans of the Bosnian Vicariate in the Second Half of the Fourteenth Century], in M. Ančić, Na rubu Zapada: Tri stolje ća srednjovjekovne Bosne [At the edge of West: Three centuries of medieval Bosnia], Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2001, pp. 225–242. Andrić, S., “Saint John Capistran and Despot George Branković: An Impossible Compromise,” Byzantinoslavica: Revue internationale des Etudes Byzantines, 74, 2016, 202–227. Baldi, B., Pio II e le trasformazioni dell’Europa cristiana (1457–1464), Milan: Unicopli, 2006. Casagrande, C., “Giacomo della Marca,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 54, 2000, 214–220. Ćirković, S., Istorija srednjovekovne bosanske države [The History of the Medieval Bosnian State], Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 1964a. ———, Herceg Stefan Vuk či ć-Kosa ča i njegovo doba [Duke Stjepan Vukčić-Kosača and His Age], Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1964b. ———, “Bosanska Crkva u bosanskoj državi,” [The Bosnian Church in the Bosnian State], in E. Redžić (ed.) Društvo i privreda srednjovjekovne bosanske države [The Society and Economy of the Medieval Bosnian State], Sarajevo: Akademija nauka i umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine, 1987, pp. 191–254. Ćošković, P., “Tomašev progon sljedbenika Crkve bosanske 1459,” [Tomaš’s Persecution of the Followers of the Bosnian Church in 1459], in N. Šehić (ed.) Migracije i Bosna i Hercegovina [Migrations and Bosnia and Herzegovina], Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 1990, pp. 43–50. ———, Crkva bosanska u XV. stolje ću [The Bosnian Church in the Fifteenth Century], Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2005. Džaja, S., “Ideološki i politološki aspekti propasti Bosanskog Kraljevstva 1463. godine,” [The Ideological and Political Aspects of the Fall of the Bosnian Kingdom in 1463], Croatica Christiana periodica, 18, 1986, 206–214. ———, “Svijet politike i franjevaštvo u Europi 14. stoljeća,” [The World of Politics and the Franciscans in Fourteenth-Century Europe], Croatica Christiana periodica, 29, 1992, 33–41.
174 Luka Špoljari ć Farlati, D., Illyricum sacrum, vol. 4, Venice: Apud Sebastianum Coleti, 1769. Fine, J., The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation, New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Filipović, E., “Boravak bosanskog kralja Tvrtka II Tvrtkovića u Beču tokom 1435. godine,” [About the Stay of the Bosnian King Tvrtko II in Vienna during 1435], Radovi Filozofskog fakulteta u Sarajevu (Historija, Historija umjetnosti, Arheologija), 16/2, 2012, 229–245. ———, “Historiografija o padu Bosanskog Kraljevstva” [Historiography on the Fall of the Bosnian Kingdom], in A. Birin (ed.) Stjepan Tomaševi ć (1461–1463): Slom srednjovjekovnog Bosanskog Kraljevstva [Stjepan Tomaševi ć (1461–1463): The Fall of the Medieval Bosnian Kingdom], Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2013, pp. 11–28. ———, “Exurge igitur, miles Christi, et in barbaros viriliter pugna… The Anti-Ottoman Activities of Bosnian King Stjepan Tomaš (1443–1463),” in J. Smo ł ucha (ed.) Holy War in Medieval and Early Modern East-Central Europe, Krakow: WAM, 2017, pp. 201–241. Furlani, S., “Giovanni da Torquemada e il suo trattato contro i bogomili,” Ricerche religiose, 18, 1947, 164–177. Gill, J., The Council of Florence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Housley, N., Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Jakšić, N., “The Evidence from Nin concerning Bishop Natalis (1436–1462), Apostolic Legate to Bosnia,” Miscellanea Hadriatica et Mediterranea 2, 2015, 41–50. Lambert, M., The Cathars, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998. Lovrenović, D., Na klizištu povijesti: Sveta kruna ugarska i sveta kruna bosanska 1387–1463 [The Landslide of History: The Holy Crown of Hungary and the Holy Crown of Bosnia, 1387–1463], Zagreb: Synopsis, 2006. Kalous, A., Late Medieval Papal Legation: Between the Councils and the Reformation, Rome: Viella, 2017. Kramer, H., “Untersuchungen über die Commentarii des Papstes Pius II,” Mitteilungen des Osterreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung, 38, 1934, 58–92. Krasić, S., Dominikanci u srednjovjekovnoj Bosni [Dominicans in medieval Bosnia], Đakovo: Knjižnica U pravi trenutak, 1996. Mandić, D., Franjeva čka Bosna: Razvoj i uprava Bosanske Vikarije i Provincije 1340–1735. [Franciscan Bosnia: The Development and Administration of the Bosnian Vicariate and Province 1340–1735], Rim: Hrvatski povijesni institute, 1968. Necipoǧ lu, N., Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the Late Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Neralić, J., “Udio Hrvata u papinskoj diplomaciji,” [The Role of Croats in Papal Diplomacy], in M. Andrlić and M. Valentić (eds) Hrvatska srednjovjekovna diplomacija [Croatian Medieval Diplomacy], Zagreb: Diplomatska akademija MVP RH, 1999, pp. 89–118. O’Brien, E., The Commentaries of Pope Pius II (1458–1464) and the Crisis of the Fifteenth-Century Papacy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Okiç, T., “Les Kristians (Bogomiles Parfaits) de Bosnie d’après des documents turcs inédits,” Südost-Forschungen, 19, 1960, 108–133. Paquet, J., “Une ébauche de la nonciature de Flandre au XVe siècle: Les missions dans les Pays Bas de Luc de Tolentis, évêque de Sebenico (1462–1484),” Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome, 25, 1949, 27–144.
Renaissance papacy and Catholicization 175 Schmitt, O.J., Skanderbeg: Der neue Alexander auf dem Balkan, Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2009. Spahić, M., Bosanska kraljevina sredinom XV vijeka: Kralj Stjepan Tomaš [The Bosnian Kingdom in the Middle of the Fifteenth Century: King Stjepan Tomaš], Zagreb: Bošnjačka nacionalna zajednica, 2016. Stavrides, T., The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand Vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelovi ć (1453–1474), Leiden: Brill, 2001. Šidak, J., Studije o ‘Crkvi bosanskoj’ i bogumilstvu [Studies on the Bosnian Church and Bogomilism], Zagreb: Liber, 1975. Špoljarić, L., “Nicholas of Modruš and his De bellis Gothorum: Politics and National History in the Fifteenth-Century Adriatic,” Renaissance Quarterly, 72.2, 2019. Terpstra, N., Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Vukšić, T., “Papa Pio II. i Kralj Stjepan Tomaš,” [Pope Pius II and King Stjepan Tomaš], in F. Šanjek (ed.) Fenomen ‘Krstjani’ u srednjovjekovnoj Bosni i Humu [The Krstjani Phenomenon in Medieval Bosnia and Hum], Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, 2005, pp. 269–308. Walsh, R.J., Charles the Bold and Italy (1467–1477): Politics and Personnel, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Weber, B., Lutter contre les Turcs: Les formes nouvelles de la croisade pontificale au XVe siècle, Rome: École française de Rome, 2013. ———, “Toward a Global Crusade? The Papacy and the Non-Latin World in the Fifteenth-Century,” in N. Housley (ed.) Reconfiguring the Fifteenth-Century Crusade, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 11–44.
10 Creole conquests Reformation, representation, and return in early colonial New Spain Lindsay C. Sidders
This article examines the pastoral writings of Bishop Alonso de la Mota y Escobar of Guadalajara (1597–1606) and Tlaxcala-Puebla (1606–1625) in order to illuminate the connections between and transformations of early modern Hispanic notions of reform and reformation, conquest and colonization, and Atlantic World epistemological creation and legibility.1 As a first-generation Hispanic-descended settler, creole or criollo, in New Spain, Mota y Escobar was a product, subject, and agent of trans-Atlantic imperial expansion and reformation. He inherited and defended the wealth, prestige, and legal entitlements of his predecessors, learned the lexicon and canon of Hispanic superiority and domination, and pursued enthusiastically the goals of cultural and religious knowledge collection and diffusion from colony to metropole.2 This article is divided into two sections. The first illuminates the transformations of peninsular Hispanic epistemology within the conditions of colonial contact. I argue that as a “first son” (primero hijo) of New Spain, Mota y Escobar believed that the Crown was indebted to his lineage for the conquest of Spanish America and that the functioning and success of the Empire depended on the cooperation of his caste of conquering criollos. The right of perpetual rule over colonial land and people was what the Crown owed to criollos as payment for conquering territory in the Americas. Contact violence and the collapsing, blurred triptych of warfare, religion, and lineage in Hispanic discourse fused into an elite colonial culture of entitled domination and power. The second section begins by exploring the seventeenth-century Iberian sense of the concepts of reform and reformation that were accepted by Bishop Mota y Escobar. Reformation, as a European preoccupation, shifted almost seamlessly into a colonial project, which assumed the superiority of a Hispanic “civilization” and viewed colonial subjects as travelling along a linear spectrum of civilizational development. Mota y Escobar was confident that he could and would return indigenous American colonial subjects to the path of civilization and Catholicism. The section continues by invoking Fernando Ortíz’s theory of transculturation to better illuminate Mota y Escobar as a transcultural figure. It pays particular attention to two revealing notations Mota y Escobar made during his tenure as Bishop of Guadalajara, which, I argue, capture the particularities of
Creole conquests 177 early criollo sensibility. In his 1947 monograph, Cuban Counterpoint, Ortíz takes tobacco and sugar as quintessential Cuban cultural products, arguing that these commodities defy easy coding as “indigenous,” “African,” or “European.” A more salient understanding, he contended, is that tobacco and sugar, as items of consumption, trade, and exchange, are also constantly evolving, contradictory, and entangled symbols of the inescapable tension between colony and metropole, slavery and freedom, dispossession and power.3 Mota y Escobar’s novohispano writings bear out Ortíz’s contrapuntal vision of cultural exchange, collision, and contact. As an intermediary of the imperial centre, Mota y Escobar recorded dutifully the ways in which New Spain resembled and differed from the peninsula. He did so with a curiosity and wonder that belied his unique location as a product of both Iberian and colonial culture.4 For the Spanish Atlantic Empire, difference was a sign of inferiority that needed to be violently corrected – and the consequent upheaval of indigenous life and cultural frameworks inaugurated a transcultural and transformed contact environment, chronicled in the pages of Mota y Escobar’s two lengthy, pastoral manuscripts. His writings confirm criollismo as a transcultural consequence of the imperial project of violent domination and civilizational reformation. Like the sugar cane and tobacco plants of Ortíz’s Cuba, the criollo of early colonial New Spain was a prodigiously uncertain agent of Empire.5 Such agents and administrators of the Hispanic Hapsburg Crown sought to create a new Spain. Instead, the project of colonization engendered something utterly original and unnameable within the confines of European thought. Mota y E scobar’s intention was to generate texts that would be useful to the metropole. He expected that his writings would physically and figuratively return valuable insight to the Crown: however, there is little to no evidence that either manuscript reached a metropolitan audience before the late eighteenth century. I a rgue that, ultimately, the unintelligibility of the Bishop’s insights vis-à-vis the Hispanic Empire was a harbinger of the ultimate failure of the collaboration between creole conquerors and the Crown to return the American continent to the path of civilization. In the seventeenth century, Mota y Escobar’s creolized vision of New Spain was illegible on the metropolitan side of the Atlantic – his words could not bridge the gap between the creole and metropolitan projects of conquest and reform. The first of Mota y Escobar’s manuscripts is the Descripcion geográfica de los reinos de Galicia, Vizcaya y Leon (Geographic description of the kingdoms of Galicia, Vizcaya, and Leon), a Crown-commissioned ethno-geographic treatise in the style of an early modern cosmo-graphia or relación geográfica genre.6 This manuscript was commissioned by the President of the Council of the Indies, who requested that the Bishop of Guadalajara complete a relación (description, appraisal, or summary) of the diocese.7 The individual accounts given in this first lengthy treatise lack precise dates, unlike the second pastoral manuscript; instead of: however, based on mentions of well-documented indigenous rebellions in the frontier diocese of Guadalajara, it is clear that the text was written between 1602 and 1606. The second manuscript’s title is abbreviated here as Aquí se halla en
178 Lindsay C. Sidders este libro luz y razón de todas las cosas que [h]e hecho en la administración de mi obispado de Tlaxcala (Here in this book, one finds the light and reason for all the things that I have done in the administration of my bishopric at Tlaxcala).8 Written between 1608, when Mota y Escobar entered the diocese of TlaxcalaPuebla as Bishop, and his death there in 1625, the bulk of this text is pastoral visitation records (visitas pastorales).9 Scholars have transcribed and published both manuscripts with introductory and genealogical remarks, but few scholars have investigated the various pieces of the Bishop’s corpus or biography using a critical historical lens.10 My research and analysis are the first to examine the Bishop and his full discursive observations systematically, and as a key representative of the nascent fracturing of the relationship between the ruling classes in the metropole and colony in the early Iberian Atlantic.11
“Profound pain in the soul and a just complaint:” conquistadores and criollos12 Born in Tenochtitlán-México City in 1546, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar was baptized on 18 May 1546 by the first Archbishop of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, a little more than two decades after the destruction of the Mexica-Aztec political structure.13 His father, Jerónimo Ruiz de la Mota, under the command of Hernan Cortés, had participated in the final naval overthrow of the M exica altepetl (a Nahuatl term for an ethnic city state). His maternal grandfather, Francisco de Orduña Loyando, also took part in military conquest against the polity at Tenochtitlán, acting as a secretary to Hernan Cortés, and both would hold influential political posts and acquire land for their “merits and services” to the Crown.14 Mota y Escobar’s mother (de Orduña’s daughter), Catalina Goméz de Escobar, was a “natural de Tordesilla[s],” and his mother and father married before the birth of their first child in 1539.15 Both sides of the family were of good raza (race in the early modern Iberian sense of historical religious lineage), having no Jewish, Muslim, or converso “blood.”16 Mota y Escobar received his bachiller from the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México in the early 1570s. In 1574, the Archbishop of New Spain, Pedro Moya de Contreras, ordained Mota y Escobar a secular priest.17 The Bishop also attended the Colegio de San Antonio de Portacelli de Sigüenza in Castile, where he earned a Doctor of Theology in 1579.18 Before being elected Bishop of Guadalajara in 1597, Mota y Escobar was nominated for and/or elected to ten separate ecclesiastic positions across the Hispanic Atlantic World: he accepted and held only three, all in central New Spain. He returned to the colony around 1590 and took up his post as Bishop of Guadalajara in 1598–1599. The Crown elected him Bishop of Tlaxcala-Puebla in 1606 and he entered the new diocese in 1608, remaining there until his death.19 Between 1595 and 1597, members of the Viceroyalty’s highest court, the Audiencia, interviewed Mota y Escobar in the Mexico City cathedral in his capacity as a high-ranking member of the church cabildo (government).20 The Crown had requested that the court collect information on “the state” of
Creole conquests 179 the encomienda, an institution with medieval Iberian roots, which bestowed the holder (the encomendero) authority over an area of land and its population. Its expansion to the Americas meant that a grant of encomienda gave the encomendero the right to collect tribute from the indigenous population of a region, town, or village. In New Spain specifically, the encomienda was often used illegally and exploitatively to compel free labour and service from indigenous persons in addition to its tall tributary burdens. An encomendero was often granted land parcels in proximity to the location of the encomienda.21 Mota y Escobar’s father received two encomiendas in the 1530s, which included title to seven estates near the community of Chiapa (now known as Chapa de Mota) and a second smaller grant at Mitlantongo in south central New Spain. In the mid to late 1590s, the Audiencia recorded 975 indigenous tributaries at Chiapa, and the family received yearly tribute worth several thousand pesos.22 His maternal grandfather also held significant land parcels in central New Spain as accumulated rewards for his colonial service. At the time of his death, Mota y Escobar’s grandfather owned an estate in Villa Rica, which had 24,000 heads of sheep, another estate with pigs, a factory near Xalapa, and two pastures near Coatepec and Cofre de Perote in east central New Spain. From 1531, he was encomendero and landowner of an estate near Santiago Tecali: in 1548, this area had 3,830 tributaries and, in 1598, it had 4,042.23 Orduña and his family lived off the income from this encomienda. The area seemed to continue to grow despite the significant population decline of the late sixteenth century: when Mota y Escobar visited during the third episcopal visit in 1610, he confirmed 1,991 criaturas (persons young in the faith).24 In both cases, the wealth, property, and prestige tied to the institution of encomienda had passed down to Mota y Escobar and his extended family. Like Charles I (V) and Philip II, Philip III was worried about the accumulated power of colonials who could not be controlled from Madrid and the effect of exploitative labour practices and tribute collection on the indigenous populations. By the time of Mota y Escobar’s deposition, a great deal of ink and vellum had already been expended attempting to regulate these tribute grants. 25 Unsurprisingly perhaps, Mota y Escobar testified that these grants were a “very necessary and useful thing” for the Kingdom. The Crown should “conserve them,” he said, so that the families and descendants of conquistadores be honoured and given what they needed to “sustain themselves” and the Kingdom. He argued that the conservation of this entitlement was directly related to the conservation of the colony itself, which, he testified “was of equal interest to the Crown.”26 Indigenous people should provide funding and labour to the descendants of conquistadores “in perpetuity,” as the grants were necessary to “satisfy and pay” for the “services of conquest.”27 To be “dispossessed and robbed” of encomienda would “engender profound pain in the soul” and constituted a just colonial complaint against the metropole, he argued.28 This interview clearly articulates Mota y Escobar’s own material and emotional investment in creole power in New Spain: conquistadores and their creole descendants were the past, present, and future of Hispanic power and control in the Americas.
180 Lindsay C. Sidders This investment in creole and settler power rested uneasily alongside de la Mota’s rather contingent and somewhat undefined commitment to the project of Hispanic civilization. His loyalty to the Crown remained intact, so long as the Crown gave his lineage its due in terms of land and servile labour. Hispanic civilization was the gauge through which he measured colonial life and behaviour, yet his writing revealed a lack of identification and a certain disavowal of españoles (Spaniards) in New Spain. For much of the Bishop’s writings, the españoles acted as a foil to Mota y Escobar’s unnamed Hispanism. In 1609, in the village of San Juan de los Llanos, the Bishop remarked that there was a wealthy, propertied Spanish population, but the town had “the poorest sacristy around”: it “is very typical of españoles in the Indies, to [show] little piety in the things of the divine cult,” he stated irreverently. He distinguished himself from españoles, and they were often the target of his exasperated prayers and sermons. He understood himself to be “other” than them, yet he never names himself as clearly criollo or Hispanic.29 When de la Mota described life without the presence of Spanish parishioners and mendicant friars, he painted a picture of idyllic indigenous sacred life. In the community of Tzoncoliuhcan, early in 1611, the Bishop wrote glowingly of “pure” indigenous villages. He described the Nahua indigenous peoples that lived in this village as “very sincere, well treated and calm: (sic) no Spaniard comes between them.” Is Mota y Escobar himself a “Spaniard” as referenced here? As an occasional and official interloper in the village, it would seem that he did not see himself as having any responsibility for the degradation of the indigenous community. In documents relating Mota y Escobar’s genealogical history, he is consistently called a “natural” or native, of New Spain. This is also the word used to refer to indigenous peoples, alongside the more pejorative indios. The terms español, peninsular (peninsular-born), or gachupín/catzopini (a term of Nahuatl origin for a Spaniard) did not apply to him: neither did the term criollo, which he himself used to categorize people of African descent born in the Americas.30 Nowhere in his own writings does Mota y Escobar identify himself using any of the caste categories above: the absence of a specific category, of a name, in this early period, suggests the naturalization and/or ambiguity of his caste in Hispanic epistemology. Mota y Escobar was a highly educated creole priest of considerable mobility and resources, studying and serving in the elite institutions of both the Americas and the Spanish kingdoms. His relationship to Mexican landscapes and systems was mediated through the triumph of his lineage in the brutal military defeat of indigenous peoples and the desire and entitlement to set down roots at the site in order to reap the rewards “in perpetuity,” if possible. To be a criollo in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain was to wield, contest, and construct authority. The course of his life broadly painted here demonstrates the desire of the Crown in Spain to educate and employ individuals like Mota y Escobar as intermediaries and spiritual models, guides, and leaders in its new, tenuous territories. The importance of a figure like Mota y Escobar, whose own words reveal his sense of the debt the metropole already
Creole conquests 181 owed to his caste, also illuminates the Crown’s uncertain hold on power and ambivalent physical and epistemological authority on the ground within colonized territory.
Return, reform, and transculturation and in New Spain In his 1611 lexicon, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Castilian Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco defined reformar (to reform) as follows: “To again give form to a thing that has been spoiled and changed of its being and condition. reformer (sic) and reformation.”31 Covarrubias’ definition provides the evolved (and evolving) conceptualization through which Hispanic colonizing agents like Mota y Escobar viewed the project of reform framed theologically by the Council of Trent as extending across the Atlantic World. In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century metropolitan and colonial Iberian Hispanic intellectual culture, reformation implied a return: it assumed a malleable but already recognizably altered subject. It also presumed the existence of an ideal form. Hispanic recognition that variation existed in New Spain was partnered with the anxiety that this variance, in its various cultural manifestations, was both a threat and an opportunity. Late medieval and early modern peninsular obsession with genealogical blood purity and the “taint” of religious distinctions mapped well onto ideas of what was viewed as civilizational difference in the Americas: cultural characteristics and the “capacity” for “civilized behaviour” were understood as biologically determined by the time of European contact.32 Cultural diversity between distinct indigenous groups, between Europeans and the European-descended, and between Europeans, the European-descended, and indigenous groups formed the ideological substance of altered “being and condition.”33 The official purpose of Mota y Escobar’s discursive tasks flows from these ideas. Confirming that the form of the “thing” was “spoiled and changed” was only part of the early project of colonization: in order to assuage the threat of indigenous peoples’ civilizational difference, metropolitan legibility of the pre-contact form was required. In the context of early colonial New Spain, the metropole and its colonial agents needed to understand the pre-Columbian lived experiences of the new subjects and measure their transference to the colonial present.34 Following the profound intellectual debates of the sixteenth century in Castile, which concluded that the indigenous peoples of the American hemisphere were in fact rational souls, reformation of indigenous societies as a project in the colonial Hispanic Atlantic world was deemed legitimate.35 The natural state of the human had been “spoiled,” but its malleability (and potential for rationality) assured, the being and condition of the colonial subjects (and their souls) could be transformed, and thus, returned to civilization. In his writings, the Bishop praises the return made successfully by some indigenous people from the “pagan” past to the Hispanic present – in these instances, and others like them in the records, the Bishop identifies a person of in-between status. In the pueblo of Acatlan in January 1611, the Bishop met the cacique
182 Lindsay C. Sidders (a term of Taíno origin for an indigenous leader) Don Domingo de los Angeles, whom he described as “honourable” and “ladino” – a category generally used to describe a non-European person (of indigenous and African descent) who spoke Spanish, but the term could also refer to an individual’s broader Hispanic similitude. Don Domingo served the Bishop with “much love and care,” as was the “good custom of the ancient caciques.”36 The description of de los Angeles as ladino articulates the flexible sense of the term in the Bishop’s understanding of it. He praises this indigenous noble as both distinct from the majority of his indigenous contemporaries but similar to his indigenous ancestors. The latter comment implies that conquest of the “ancient caciques” had stimulated a loss of something positive and generated a transformation into something negative. However, hispanization had repaired that first injury and returned Don Domingo to the exalted status of the ancients. Mota y Escobar made Don D omingo legible to his superiors in Spain as a transcultural figure, rehabilitated by the back and forth of imperial and indigenous power, culture, religion, and time. Further, Mota y Escobar seems to have imagined himself as implicated in this civilizational return. In the records described above, we see his dedication to chronicling and recording, acts that were, in his eyes, ideal tasks for colonial men like him. Mota y Escobar was a colonial intermediary invested in Empire and in his own fascination with the people, places, and things of New Spain. However, Mota y Escobar’s descriptions and analyses of the curious and wondrous of New Spain were as illegible to his metropolitan audience as was his criollo consciousness and positionality as a subject of Hispanic Empire. Bishop Mota y Escobar was a conquering creole who intended to return, and thereby reform, colonial subjects to Old World civilizational status: however, his discursive returns, his writings, to the metropole, to the peninsula, did not yield what he intended. Mota y Escobar expends a great deal of ink describing the curious, the wondrous, and the exotic of his dioceses: his comprehension of what he sees and the accompanying analyses illuminate the vibrancy and flexibility of his perspective. In what follows, two detailed notations provide compelling further evidence of the entangling of multiple Atlantic World knowledges and visions of the past, present, and future. Early in the Descripción geográfica manuscript, Mota y Escobar related the following story told to him by the indigenous peoples of the village of Tlala: in the time of their gentilidad…a great horde of giants came to the western part of this valley. These giants [were] of very monstrous stature and the indigenous say that there were 400 of them, but not one female giant was among them: their arrival in this valley caused such fear in the naturales that some ran away and those that remained gave the giants tribute in the form of a certain quantity of women only for eating and many times they were not sufficient…[T]he indigenous people also say that because the giants did not bring women [with them to the valley] they had committed an ugly sin and in punishment the valley became flooded with a great avenue of water that consumed all the giants.37
Creole conquests 183 He paused here and withdrew into analysis: How true this account is, we do not know, but we have seen by our own eyes the bones of their graves [and they are of] incredible size and when assembled we see a thigh bone seven hands long and a kneecap that when dipped in the sea is like a communal water container in size and we see other bones today of this same proportion.38 Giants were staples in medieval and early modern European imagination and lore about the unknown and the exotic. The biblical giants, Gog and Magog, appeared in classical, medieval, and early modern discourse as symbols of otherness and foreignness. Stories associated with them provided a sense of cultural solidarity and orientation, as the two giants represented an “alien force” that prompted the forging of a bond between people and their local landscapes.39 To early modern Europeans, giants were a “monstrous race” and their defeat represented the triumph of civilization over the “grotesque.”40 Furthermore, in early modern Spanish discourse, the biblical giants were used as metaphors to comment on lineage, purity, and calidad (quality). In his influential late fi fteenth-century treatise, Nobilario vero (Of True Nobility), Castilian Fernando Mexía noted that the intermarriage of two different bloodlines (that of Seth and Cain) led to the populating of the earth by their progeny – giants – which brought wickedness, barbarity, and destruction. Giants were symbols of impure blood and civilization and their expunging from the earth marked a return to stability.41 In his account, Bishop Mota y Escobar provided eyewitness testimony – he had seen the bones himself – thereby legitimating what he recorded to be indigenous understandings of landscape and territory, sex and gender, and divine punishment. He allowed indigenous entry into an established European trope and marked himself as the one who recognized it. We cannot know how much of this account is altered for the Bishop’s audience, but the shape of the story he told overall is illuminating. He argued that giants were a common enemy of Old World Christians and pre-contact indigenous peoples. Both civilizations had fought and obliterated this existential threat and, in recording this story without demonizing or valorizing it, he collapsed the space between European and non-European, demonic myth and legitimate history, and civilized and uncivilized. From the valley of Tlala in the east, Bishop Alonso doubled-back past the episcopal centre at Guadalajara and stopped at Navito on the Pacific coast. The frontier diocese of Guadalajara was a very large region and the distance between the two points was more than 1,400 kilometres. The Bishop’s time in this small community is chronicled over two folio pages and more than one of those pages is spent observing just one activity of the indigenous peoples in great detail. “[A]ll the indigenous born on [its] shores were great swimmers…doing things in the water that if you do not see [them,] they cannot be believed,” he remarked.42 This short sentence reveals the wonder and possessiveness of the quotidian that
184 Lindsay C. Sidders fills the pages of Mota y Escobar’s account of Navito. This is a community where the Bishop seemed to feel both wonder and belonging – neither reading nor simply acknowledging the aquatic proficiency of the indigenous population from afar would suffice: this small, local world had to be witnessed in order to “be believed.” The sense that his enthusiasm for the task of writing runs alongside a subtext of enthralment with, and deep interest in Navito’s inhabitants is best illustrated by his own words, quoted here at length: in particular, [the natives] do one [thing] with great facility with the alligators and crocodiles that are very abundant in all the rivers in great quantity, and that is that they dive into the depths of these rivers and they go into the caves and caverns where the crocodiles live and they move [close] to them without any fear and show them affection and…they throw a rope around the neck and the indigenous people ascend again, swimming, and… [they] pull them by the tail…bring them on land, where they play with them, exhausting them like a toro, and [the crocodiles] make their attacks, although slowly. Other indigenous people climb on them like knights [while] in their caves, and hitting them with sticks[,] they make them go to the surface and they travel on them in the water as if they were travelling by horse…[In] order to [confirm] the skill and spirit of these indigenous people, I will give [an example of] which many witnesses have affirmed. [When] an indigenous woman was washing on the shore of the river in the presence of her spouse, an alligator arrived and [took her by] her arm and carried her into the deep [water] and in the same instant her spouse chased after her and having reached the alligator, hit at him with such strength, that he [dropped] the woman from his mouth and threw her on land[, having] shattered her arm: and of great fame are these incredible moments as they occur a lot in these rivers.43 What did the Bishop hope to convey to his royal audience with this extended and specific writing of this “incredible moment?” When Mota y Escobar wrote about the skill and “spirit” of the indigenous people in their contact with reptiles, what imperial goal was being approached, and what could this digression reveal about places like Navito that existed all over the New World? Sentiments of danger, desire, anxiety, and exhilaration accompanied each investigation of unknown yet familiar territory, and in his role as informant, Mota y Escobar attempted to relate these evocative moments in order to demonstrate the singularity of the territory he believed was his to possess, enjoy, and control. His task, however, was not to construct affinities between colonials and metropolitans – his task was to inform Madrid of the progress of reform and to comment on any issues that might prevent the absorption of colonial subjects into Empire. In writing this account, the Bishop ushered the native population into the Great Chain of Being, further contributing to early modern questions about the human and civilization.44 Just as the colonial administrator was tasked with
Creole conquests 185 conquering, shaping, and pacifying nature with writing and reason, this record argued that so too did the indigenous people of New Spain with aquatic skills, games of humiliation, and accumulated knowledge through observation. Mota y Escobar reported that indigenous people were subjects of cunning and intelligence, capable of out-manoeuvring a reptile like a matador at the Iberian bullfight. This is not writing that demonstrated the need for civilizational reform that the Crown desired. From the Bishop’s words in prologue, it can be asserted that he understood the task of colonization to be great, to require calculation, study, and examples, to necessitate patience, ambition, and trust, and to invoke history and exegesis.45 Following his description of reptiles and indigenous people in action, Mota y Escobar turned the archosaur animal into an object of protoscientific knowledge: The description of this animal and of its characteristics and how it grows is written very well by Diodorus Siculus, [in his treatment] of the animals that are reared in the Nile, and all of those [same characteristics] I have verified [by my own eyes] in this land. It is very ferocious in its composure, very ugly to see, very repulsive in its color, like the negro [who is] very tanned: it has a snout and head very similar to a wild boar: the teeth and molars are in number each row of 15 to 17 and [there are] as many on the top as on the bottom, [but] of different forms[:] some sharp with the end to cut and others smooth in order to chew[. In] the end of the snout…it has two fangs and great teeth and in the same jaw [both] high and low[,] it has holes like buttonholes[. When] opening the mouth the teeth on top enter the buttonholes of the lower jaw and the two on the bottom[,] the buttonholes of those of the top…having shut the mouth these four teeth [are] two fingerbreadth [long], and so it is impossible to escape these teeth, when this animal shuts its jaws. Commonly it has a tail and body three varas of length and those that are very big [measure] at four [varas]. Its smell is of musk, although it is not very pleasant, the tonsils can be taken out…and placed in a chest where there are clothes, [and] they give a nice smell, although it does not last.46 For Mota y Escobar, knowing the secrets of this animal was clearly important. He articulates his knowledge of the ancient Greek authorities, drawing on references that would have been familiar to his audience. Like the ancient Mediterranean historians, Mota y Escobar asserted his power over the landscape, its places, its peoples, its animals, through a discourse that was officially sanctioned for the purposes of furthering Empire as it was directed from Madrid. Certainly, his comment on the “repulsive” colour of the reptile, and his comparison of it with the enslaved African, mobilized representational practices that drew on far-flung, racialized imperial “knowledge” in order to categorize, contain, and control. The violent comparing and contrasting of animals and human beings as demonstrated here runs parallel to the increasing institutionalization of the casta (caste) structure. Nevertheless, Bishop Alonso’s sense of wonder with
186 Lindsay C. Sidders New Spain’s ephemera was not sanctioned or legitimated by the Crown and was likely viewed as indulgent and indecipherable.47 His throwaway argument that the reptile’s teeth had a role in contributing to the material needs of the colonial enterprise is a reluctant return to his assigned task. For those long journeys by flota (fleet), crocodile tonsils could be extracted (undoubtedly by the enslaved) to sweeten the smell of tucked-away garments, but it is the very last point Mota y Escobar makes in this lengthy reptilian foray. The Descripción geográfica is written in stylized, formal Spanish and was clearly intended for an elite and influential audience; the visitas pastorales manuscript includes numerous politely defiant asides intended for the Crown’s attention.48 Yet it is highly probable that neither manuscript crossed the Atlantic until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768. The lack of metropolitan attention paid to these writings, alongside the aforementioned knowledge that Mota y Escobar was a highly “employable” and desirable agent and administrator of Empire, further reveals the lack of imperial value contained in his writings. The Hispanic Empire’s project of reformation in New Spain was one of accumulation, commodification, and return: they wanted and needed souls and soils, civilized subjects, and generative territories. For Mota y Escobar, commodification and power did not necessarily always go together. In his writings, we observe the tension between Crown directives and desires, and creole motivations and curiosities.
Conclusion The life and writings of Bishop Alonso de la Mota y Escobar reveal the conditions and complexities of early modern contact and reform in New Spain, and by extension, the greater Americas and Caribbean. The goal of civilizational reformation as defined by the metropole was pursued by the c onquering creoles who came into existence in the violence of encounter, but, in their pursuit, the nature of their colonial position altered course. This article has illuminated the ways in which one creole bishop articulated his vision of the colonial-metropolitan relationship as one of debt, acknowledgment, and perpetual collection: his writings reveal the ways he asserted the righteousness of this vision while walking the edge of imperial acquiescence and tolerance. The writings of Mota y Escobar provide evidence of both the violent means and ends of the civilizational reformation project of Hispanic Empire and the transcultural consequence of that same imperial project as reflected in a colonial subject borne of it: the criollo.
Notes 1 Thank you to Edward Behrend-Martinez, Andrew McCormick, Zeb Tortorici, and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS, Victoria University), especially Natalie Oeltjen, Alison Grossman, and the undergraduate and graduate student staff. I am also grateful for the helpful feedback I received from colleagues of the Department of History’s Early Modern Discussion Group (April 2018).
Creole conquests 187 Thanks also go to the editorial committee, Ken Mills, and to Melanie Newton for her patience, insight, and time. All translations are the author’s own unless specified. I have modernized the spelling of early modern hand-written and printed Spanish for ease of reading. This text was prepared at the University of Toronto. I wish to acknowledge the land on which the University operates. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today this meeting place is still the home to many indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and I am grateful for the opportunity to work on this land. 2 For an introduction to the historiography of criollismo in New Spain, see D.A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; S. Alberro, El águila y la cruz: orígenes religiosos de la conciencia criolla: México, siglos XVI–XVII, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Colegio de México, 1999; M.A. Burkholder, Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles Vs. Peninsulars?, Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2013; and J. Layfaye et al., “La Sociedad de Castas en la Nueva España,” Artes de México, no. 8, verano de 1990, 24–35. 3 F. Ortíz, Cuban Counterpoint: tobacco and sugar, trans. H. de Onís, New York: A.A. Knopf, 1947. 4 On criollos as spectres, shadows, and echos, see I. Osorio Romero, Conquistar el eco: la paradoja de la conciencia criolla, México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989 and S. Alberro, Del gachupín al criollo, o comó los españoles de México dejaron de serlo, México: Colegio de México, 2011. 5 Ortíz, Cuban Counterpoint, p. 8. 6 British Museum (BM), Ms. 13964 (Descripcion geographica), fol. 72r. This manuscript is contained in the bundle known as the Kingsborough Codex: its location at the BM is no longer explicitly listed on the BM’s online catalogue entry for Ms. 13964, but I have confirmed that it is still held there. J. Hamill, Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, the BM, “Descripcion geographica” Ms. 13964, email correspondence (19 December 2014 and 27 July 2018). See B.E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000 for the seminal work on this source genre. 7 BM, Ms. 13964, fol.72r. See S. Poole, Juan de Ovando: Governing the Spanish Empire in the Reign of Phillip II, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. 8 Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), Mss. 6877/ Mss.Micro 8698 (Aquí se halla en este libro luz y razón), fol. 1v (imagen 3v), http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer. vm?id=0000039751&page=1 (accessed 26 July 2018). 9 Philip II incorporated the Council of Trent’s legislation on visitas in Law XXIIIJ of the Recopilación de leyes de Indias. It stated that each prelate of the Indies should “personally inspect all of [his] diocese and examine the state of the doctrinas, the preaching of the Holy Gospel, and conversion of souls:” the law goes on to require that a clear relación describing all the territories of the district be sent to the Crown recounting what things were remedied and which things the Council of the Indies should be made aware of. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias…, 4a impresión, Madrid: por la viuda de D. Joaquin Ibarra, 1791, libro I, titúlo VII, ley xxiiij, pp. 60–61, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009264000/Home (accessed 26 July 2018). See “Council of Trent,” Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils Volume Two: Trent to Vatican II, N.P. Tanner (ed.), London: Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990, Session 24, ‘Decree on reform,’ Canon 3, pp. 761–763 for the 11 November 1563 remarks on the pastoral visit at the Council of Trent. 10 See M. Lundberg, “Alonso de la Mota y Escobar: Ambición y Santidad en la Nueva España, Siglos XVI y XVII,” in L. von der Walde Moheno and M. Reinoso I ngliso (eds) Virreinatos II, Mexico: Grupo Editorial Destiempos, 2013, pp. 78–90; M. Lundberg,
188 Lindsay C. Sidders
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Church Life between the Metropolitan and the Local Parishes, Parishioners, and Parish Priests in Seventeenth-Century Mexico, Orlando: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2011; J.F. Schwaller and C. Mathers, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family: The Mota Clan of Burgos and Mexico City,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 21, no. 3, 1990, 411–436; and J.F. Schwaller, “Tres familias mexicanas del siglo XVI,” Historia mexicana 31 no. 2, 1981, 171–196. Although this article focusses primarily on Hispanic concepts of reform and reformation as they were specifically related to the indigenous peoples of New Spain, in my dissertation I examine the place of Africans and Afro-creoles in the Bishop’s writings in greater depth. A. Mota y Escobar, Cuaderno tercero de la información recibida en Mexico en virtud de real cédula y a pedimento de la ciudad, sobre el estado en que se encontraba la sucesión de las encomiendas de indios y la conveniencia de hacer el repartimiento perpetuo – Mexico, 17 de abril de 1597, in F. de Paso y Troncoso (ed.) Epistolario de Nueva España: 1505–1818, vol.13, Mexico: Porrúa, 1940, p. 72. This testimony is contained in “notebook” three of four: Mota y Escobar’s testimony and dozens of others were received by the high court of the Viceroyalty of Mexico (Audiencia de Mexico) on 17 April 1597, in compliance with two royal orders dated 11 October 1595 and 28 October 1595. The original documents were sent to the metropole and are located at the Archivo General de las Indias (AGI), Papeles de Simancas, est. 145, caja 7, legajo 9. Tenochtitlán fell to Hispanic military forces in 1521. “Introducción,” in J. Ramirez Cabañas (ed.) Descripción Geografica de los Reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nueva León, 2nd edn., México: Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1940, p. 9. R. Cabañas cites C. Gutiérrez de Luna, Vida y heroicas virtudes del Dr. Don Pedro Moya de Contreras Arzobispo mexicano, México, 1619, 1928, p. 45. The baptismal record I believe to be that of Alonso de la Mota y Escobar is located in the Archivo de la Parroquia del Sagrario Metropolitano de Mexico (APSMM), L.1: Bautismos de Españoles: 1536–1547, fol. 170r (imagen 170). This record is dated 18 May 1546 and lists the padrino (godfather) as Francisco de Santa Cruz (Polanco), a maternal uncle and colleague of both Mota y Escobar’s father and grandfather within the Mexico City municipal cabildo. Thanks to Jorge Barba Gómez and the Academia Mexicana de Genealogía y Heráldica who added this record to the FamilySearch database, https:// familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939Z -R H N P-H?cc=1615259& wc=3P65- MNP%3A122580201%2C125329801 (accessed 26 July 2018). J.M. Vallejo García-Hevia, Juicio a un conquistador, Pedro de Alvarado: su proceso de residencia en Guatemala, 1536–1538, Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2008, p. 198. Documents of “merits and services” were prepared for the Crown by the conqueror or settler and a great quantity exist in colonial archives representing men from most of the New World territories invaded in the early colonial period. Many such documents are held in the Archivo General de las Indias (AGI), Patronato section. APSMM, L.1: Bautismo de Españoles: 1536-1547, fol. 39r (imagen 39), https:// familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939Z -R H V N-B?cc=1615259& wc=3P65- MNP%3A122580201%2C125329801 (accessed 26 July 2018); Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), OM-Caballeros_Santiago, Exp. 5586, bloque 1, fol. 5r (imagen 9) and bloque 2, fol. 3r (imagen 179); and AGI, Contratación, 5536, L.2, f.58 (4). See García-Hevia, Juicio a un conquistador, pp. 198–200 and M. Nettel, Los testigos hablan: la conquista de Colima y sus informantes, Colima: Universidad de Colima, 2007, p. 281. See M.E. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza De Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008 and M.S. Torres Hering et al., Race and Blood in the Iberian World, Berlin: Lit, 2012 for rigorous and in-depth discussions of Hispanic notions of race, “blood,” and lineage.
Creole conquests 189 17 J.M. Beristain y Souza, Biblioteca Hispano-Americana Septentrional, ó catalogo y noticia de los literatos, que ó nacidos, ó educados, ó florecientes en la America Septentrional Española, han dado a luz algun escrito, ó lo han dexado preparado para la prensa, tomo II, México: Amecameca, Tipografía del Colegío Catolico, 1883–1883, p. 307; AGI, Mexico, 212, N.53, fol. 1r (imagen 1); “Carta-Relación del arzobispo de Mexico D. Pedro Moya de Contreras, remitiendo al rey D. Felipe II reservados informes personales del Clero de su Diócesis. Mexico, 24 de Marzo de 1575,” in Cartas de Indias: Prelados XXXVII, Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernandez, 1877, p. 203; and M. Lundberg, ‘Alonso de la Mota y Escobar,’ pp. 80, 85. 18 M. Casado Arboniés, El Colegio-Universidad de San Antonio de Portaceli de Sigüenza en la Edad Moderna : estado de la cuestión, historiografía y fuentes, Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2010, p. 129. 19 AGI, Panama, 229, L.1, fol. 130v–132r; AGI, Panama, L.1, N.92; AGI, Quito, 1, N.58; AGI, Quito, 1, N.52; AGI, Gudalajara, 230, L.2, fols 83v–84v; AGI, Charcas, 1, N.70; AGI, Indiferente, 739, N.323; AGI, Indiferente, 744, N.246; AGI, Indiferente, 449, L.A1, fol. 109; Lundberg, “Alonso de la Mota y Escobar,” pp. 80–84; and A. Tello, Libro Segundo de la Crónica Miscelánea en que se trata de la Conquista espiritual y temporal de la Santa Provincia de Xalisco, Guadalajara: Imp. de la[República Literaria] de Ciro L. Guevara y Compañia, 1891, p. 717. There were at least four other creole bishops in New Spain in this particular mid-sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century moment. They include: Juan Bartolome de Bohórquez e H inojosa (b.1542–d.1633), Antequera (Oaxaca); Juan de Cervantes (b.1553–d.1614), Antequera (Oaxaca); Baltazar de Covarrubias y Múñoz (b.1560–d.1622), Antequera (Oaxaca) and Michoacán; and Juan de Zapata y Sandoval (1545–1630), Chiapas. Juan de Cervantes and Juan de Zapata y Sandoval were also consecrated by a creole bishop, Alonso de la Mota y Escobar, the subject of this article. From the founding of the diocese of Guadalajara (1548) to Mexican independence (1821), there were a total of 28 bishops of the diocese: five appear to have been born in the Americas (Mota y Escobar was one of them). From the founding of the diocese of Tlaxcala-Puebla (1525) to independence, there were a total of 24 bishops of the diocese: Mota y Escobar was the first creole in the role and there were only three others. My dissertation includes a broader examination of this broader criollo religious history in New Spain. 20 He held the position of deán (dean), the cathedral chapter’s highest dignitary rank. For a discussion of the various dignitaries and ranks of the cathedral chapter of sixteenth-century Mexico, see J.F. Schwaller, “The Cathedral Chapter of Mexico in the Sixteenth-Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 61, no. 4, 1981, 651–674. 21 See L.B. Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain: The Beginning of Spanish Mexico, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966 and V.A. Vincent, “The Avila-Cortés Conspiracy: Creole Aspirations and Royal Interests,” unpublished thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1993. 22 “Información recibida en Mexico en virtud de real cédula y a pedimento de la ciudad, sobre el estado en que se encontraba la sucesión de las encomiendas de indios y la conveniencia de hacer el repartimiento perpetuo – Mexico, 17 de abril de 1597,” in Epistolario de Nueva España: 1505–1818, F. de Paso y Troncoso (ed.), vol. 13, Mexico: Porrúa, 1940, p. 35; R. Brambila Paz, “Congregaciones del Siglo XVI en Chapa de Mota, Estado de Mexico,” Revistas 6, no. 1, 2008, p. 42; F. Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda, ed. L.B. Simpson, trans. A. Eustis, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963, pp. 119–120; Schwaller, “Tres familias mexicanas del siglo XVI,” pp. 173–174 (Schwaller cites AGN, Mercedes, vol. 2, fol. 245 and vol. 13, fol. 144); and V.M. Álvarez, Diccionario de conquistadores, tomo II, México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1975, pp. 489–491. See E. O’Gorman et al., Guía de las actas de Cabildo de la ciudad de México: siglo XVI, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1970 for greater detail on the Ruiz de la Mota properties.
190 Lindsay C. Sidders 23 “Información recibida en Mexico en virtud de real cédula,” p. 40 and R. Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010, pp. 208–209. 24 “Mayorazgo de Orduña: Puebla,” in G.S. Fernandez de Recas (ed.) Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1965, p. 322. Recas cites AGN, Jesuitas, legajo II, Vínculos y Mayorazgos, tomo 118. See also A. González Jácome, “El personaje,” in Alba González Jácome (ed.) Memoriales del Obispo de Tlaxcala, un recorrido por el centro de México a principios del siglo XVII, México: Secretaría de Educación del Estado de Tlaxcala, 2013, 1987, p. 4; A. Mota y Escobar, Memoriales, p. 87; and J. Hirschberg, “A Social History of Puebla de los Angeles,” unpublished thesis, University of Michigan, 1976, p. 405, note 92 and p. 505, note 103. 25 See L.B. Simpson’s classic monograph on these land and labour grants: The Encomienda in New Spain: The Beginning of Spanish Mexico, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. See also L.A. Clayton, Bartolomé De Las Casas: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 151–188 for a summary of Las Casas’ criticisms of the encomienda and B.P. Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. 90–108 for details on how the earliest encomenderos and their descendants sought to thwart Crown efforts to abolish the encomienda. V.A. Vincent’s 1993 dissertation, The Avila-Cortés Conspiracy: Creole Aspirations and Royal Interests, investigates and cogently synthesizes one of the most significant challenges to Crown authority surrounding the descendants of Hernan Cortés and their claim to encomienda and land parcelling associated with it. 26 Mota y Escobar, ‘Cuaderno tercero de la información recibida,’ p. 71. 27 Ibid., p. 70. 28 Ibid., p. 72. 29 BNE, Mss. 6877/ Mss.Micro 8698, fol. 8r–8v (imagen 10r–11v). 30 Ibid., fol. 267r–267v (imagen 269r–270v). This record is titled “Report of the black slaves and mulatos that are with me today the first of August 1617.” Mulato was a racializing category that denoted mixed lineage: usually one parent of African-descent and another of Hispanic-descent. This report has subheadings: “blacks,” “mulato slaves,” “black slaves,” and “mulatos and Chinese [Asian] slaves.” For example, the following entry appears under the subheading “blacks:” “Gaspar criollo de Compostela ladino soltero” (“Gaspar, creole, from Compostela, [diocese of Guadalajara], ladino, single.”) 31 My emphasis. Universidad de Sevilla, fondo antigua y digitalizada: S. de Covarrubias Horozco, “Reformar,” Tesoro de la language castellana o Española, Madrid: por Luis Sanchez impressor del Rey, 1611, imagen 1253, http://fondosdigitales.us.es/fondos/ libros/765/16/tesoro-de-la-lengua-castellana-o-espanola/ (accessed 26 July 2018). 32 E.A. Kuznesof, “Ethnic and Gender Influences on ‘Spanish’ Creole Society in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 4, no. 1, 1995, p. 160 and Martínez, Genealogical Fictions. 33 Africans, African-descended populations, and other non-European groups (e.g. Pacific World peoples) did not even enter the picture: conversations about these non-Europeans were conceptually distinct from those involving indigenous peoples of the Americas and Caribbean because the latter were often considered “Old World peoples.” See A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 1982. 34 By the late colonial period, as the eighteenth-century Borbón Reforms sought to Hispanicize at an accelerated pace to enhance the efficiency of empire, this notion would change dramatically and disastrously for Spain.
Creole conquests 191 35 See A. Angie, “Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law,” Social Legal Studies 5, 1996, 321–336; F. de Vitoria, Vitoria: Political Writings, eds. A.R. Pagden and J. Lawrence (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; and L. Valenzuela-Vermehren, “Vitoria, Humanism, and the School of Salamanca in Early Sixteenth-Century Spain: A Heuristic Overview,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 16, no. 2, 2013, 99–125 for a look at Francisco de Vitoria, a highly influential figure in debates about the nature of the human vis-à-vis the Americas. 36 BNE, Mss. 6877/ Mss.Micro 8698, fols 60r–60v (imagen 62r–63v). 37 A. de la Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo León, ed. Antonio Pompa y Pompa, Instituto Jaliesciense de Antropología e Historia Colección Historica de Obras Facsimilares 8, Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1993, pp. 35–36. 38 Ibid. 39 V.I. Scherb, “Assimilating giants: The Appropriation of Gog and Magog in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32, no. 1, 2002, pp. 59–60. 40 D. Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 51. 41 C.H. Lee, The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016, p. 27. Lee cites F. Mexía, Libro intitulado nobilario perfetamente copylado y ordenado por el onrado cavellero Hernando Mexia, veinte y cuarto de Jaen, tomo I, Sevilla, 1492, p. 48. I have used Lee’s translation of Mexía. 4 2 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, pp. 46–48. 43 Ibid. The Bishop uses both “lagartos” (alligators) and “cocodrilos” (crocodiles) in his account: he does not know precisely what animal he is writing about. 4 4 See M. de Asúa and R. French, A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 45 Mota y Escobar, Descripción geográfica, pp. 17–23. 46 Ibid., pp. 46–48. 47 K. Anderson, “‘The Beast Within:’ Race, Humanity, and Animality,” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 18, no. 3, 2000, 303. See S. Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 1988 for a discussion of the concept of wonder and its intersection with violence, dispossession, and colonization in Latin America and the Caribbean. 48 An example can be found in the 1610 visit to Tlapanala, Tepapayeccan, and Chalma, communities under mendicant Dominican supervision: he wrote, rather flippantly, that he did not know how the Dominicans were administering to the parishioners because “Su Majestad does not want us [,] the Bishops [,] to know.” BNE, Mss. 6877/ Mss.Micro 8698, fol. 45v (imagen 48v).
Bibliography Published primary sources Beristáin de Souza, J.M., Biblioteca hispano-americana septentrional; ó, Catálogo y noticia de los literatos, que ó nacidos, ó educados, ó florecientes en la America Septentrional española, han dado á luz algún escrito, ó lo han dexado preparado para la prensa, tomo II, Mexico: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1883. Cartas de Indias: Prelados XXXVII, Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernandez, 1877. Fernandez de Recas, G.S. (ed.), Mayorazgos de la Nueva España, Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1965.
192 Lindsay C. Sidders Mota y Escobar, A. de la, Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo León, ed. J. Ramirez Cabañas, México: Pedro Robredo, 1940. ———, Descripción geográfica de los reinos de Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya y Nuevo León, Durango: Editorial de la Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango, 2009. ———, Memoriales del obispo de Tlaxcala: Un recorrido por el centro de México a principios del siglo XVII, ed. A. González Jácome, México: Secretaría de Educación del Estado de Tlaxcala, 2013 [1987]. Paso y Troncoso, F. de (ed.), Epistolario de Nueva España: 1505–1818, vol. 13, Mexico: Porrúa, 1940. Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias: mandadas imprimir y publicar por la Majestad Católica del Rey Don Carlos II, nuestro señor: va dividida en tres tomos con el índice general, y al principio de cada tomo el índice especial de los títulos que contiene, 4a impresión, libro I, Madrid: por la viuda de D. Joaquin Ibarra, 1791. Tanner, N.P., et al., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils Volume Two: Trent to Vatican II, London: Sheed and Ward, 1990. Tello, A., Libro segundo de la crónica miscelanea en que se trata de la conquista espiritual y temporal de la santa provincia de Xalisco en el Nuevo Reino de la Galicia y Nueva Vizcaya y descubrimiento del Nuevo México, Guadalajara: Imp. de la[República Literaria] de Ciro L. Guevara y Compañia, 1891.
Secondary sources Alberro, S., El águila y la cruz: orígenes religiosos de la conciencia criolla: México, siglos XVI–XVII, México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Colegio de México, 1999. ———, Del gachupín al criollo: o de cómo los españoles de México dejaron de serlo, México: El Colegio de México, 2011. Álvarez, V.M., Diccionario de conquistadores, tomo II, México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1975. Anderson, K., “‘The Beast Within:’ Race, Humanity, and Animality,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 3, 2000, 301–320. Anghie, A., “Francisco De Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law,” Social & Legal Studies 5, no. 3, 1996, 321–336. Asúa, M. de, and R.K. French, A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Brading, D.A., The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Brambila Paz, R., “Congregaciones del siglo XVI en Chapa de Mota, Estado de Mexico,” Revistas 6, no. 1, 2008, 35–57. Burkholder, M.A., Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles Vs. Peninsulars?, Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Casado Arboniés, M., El Colegio-Universidad de San Antonio de Portaceli de Siguënza en la Edad Moderna. Estado de la cuestion, historiografia y fuentes, Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2010. Chevalier, F., Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda, ed. L.B. Simpson, trans. A. Eustis, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Clayton, L.A., Bartolomé De Las Casas: A Biography, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Greenblatt, S., Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017, [1988].
Creole conquests 193 Hering Torres, M.S., et al., Race and Blood in the Iberian World, Berlin: Lit, 2012. Himmerich y Valencia, R., The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Hirschberg, J., “A Social History of Puebla de los Angeles,” unpublished thesis, U niversity of Michigan, 1976. Kuznesof, E.A., “Ethnic and Gender Influences on ‘Spanish’ Creole Society in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 4, no. 1, 1995, 153–176. Layfaye, J., et al., “La Sociedad de Castas en la Nueva España,” Artes de México, no. 8, verano de 1990, 24–35. Lee, C.H., The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Lundberg, M., “Alonso de la Mota y Escobar: Ambición y Santidad en la Nueva España, Siglos XVI y XVII,” in L. von der Walde Moheno and M. Reinoso Ingliso (eds) Virreinatos II, Mexico: Editorial Grupo Destiempos, 2013, pp. 78–90. ———, Church Life between the Metropolitan and the Local Parishes, Parishioners, and Parish Priests in Seventeenth-Century Mexico, Orlando, FL: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2011. Nettel, M., Los testigos hablan: la conquista de Colima y sus informantes, Colima: Universidad de Colima, 2007. Martínez, M. E., Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza De Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Mundy, B.E., The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. O’Gorman, E., et al., Guía de las Actas de Cabildo de la Ciudad de México: trabajo realizado en el Seminario de Historiografía de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México: Departamento del Distrito Federal, 1970. Ortiz, F., Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. H. De Onís, New York: Knopf, 1947. Osorio Romero, I., Conquistar el eco: la paradoja de la conciencia criolla, México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989. Owensby, B.P., Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pagden, A., The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Poole, S., Juan De Ovando: Governing the Spanish Empire in the Reign of Phillip II, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Schwaller, J.F., and C. Mathers, “A Trans-Atlantic Hispanic Family: The Mota Clan of Burgos and Mexico City,” Sixteenth Century Journal 21, no. 3, 1990, 411–436. Schwaller, J.F., “Tres familias mexicanas del siglo xvi,” Historia Mexicana 31, no. 2, 1981, 171–196. ———, “The Cathedral Chapter of Mexico in the Sixteenth-Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 61, no. 4, Nov. 1981, 651–674. Scherb, V.I., “Assimilating Giants: The Appropriation of Gog and Magog in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32, no. 1, 2002, 59–84. Sibley, D., Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West, London: New York, 1995. Simpson, L.B., The Encomienda in New Spain: The Beginning of Spanish Mexico, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
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11 An Embattled Catholic Archbishop between Latins and Greeks in the Ottoman Aegean Andrew P. McCormick
The tempestuous episcopal career of Pietro Martire de Stefani, OP (1710–1773), who served as archbishop of Naxos and Paros from 1750 until his death, is indicative of the political and religious crosswinds that buffeted the small Catholic (or Latin) enclaves in the sea between what are now Greece and Turkey.1 Stefani’s appointment as archbishop of this historic diocese thrust him into a dilemma that had all the makings of Greek tragedy.2 He was expected to reform a notoriously fractious, multi-ethnic Catholic minority in the midst of an Orthodox majority, which lay on the fringe of a sprawling Muslim empire. Ironically, the Muslims and the Orthodox were the least of his problems. Aside from a few Ottoman officials, who left the islanders alone so long as they paid their taxes, there were few Muslims on the ground, and most of the Orthodox were peasants who depended on Catholic landlords. Stefani’s problem was rather his fellow Latins. These were divided among themselves by loyalty to their clans, on the one hand, and to their foreign patrons on the other: originally the Republic of Venice, but increasingly the Kingdom of France and, of course, the Holy See.3 Contemporaries knew this area, which is more or less coterminous with the Aegean, as the Archipelago. In token of its quarrelsome reputation, it has also been referred to as the “Archipelagus Turbatus.”4 Besides Naxos and Paros, the Latin enclaves were located on islands such as Santorini, Syros, and Tinos, and in ports such as Thessaloniki, Smyrna, and Constantinople. Though they lay amid important shipping lanes between North and South, East and West, the symbolic significance of these Western outposts matched and possibly outweighed their economic or strategic importance.5 In the early seventeenth century, Rome and Versailles joined forces in the A rchipelago.6 France was the official protector of Catholicism in the Ottoman Empire, while the Holy See legitimated its role and justified its access to the sultan’s territory. Their mutual goal was to ensure that the Catholic communities on this fault line between Christianity and Islam remained loyal to the West. The systematic enforcement of Tridentine reforms, with their emphasis on the centralized, divinely ordained authority of the pope, was the crux of Rome’s strategy, but, of course, this did not always accord with that of the French. In the spirit of Gallicanism, the French crown saw itself as the rightful director of ecclesiastical affairs within its sphere of influence, and the two allies could never
196 Andrew P. McCormick agree as to who was in charge.7 In any case, to judge from their silence in response to most of the letters, petitions, reports, and so forth that arrived by the bushel from the Archipelago, both the French and the papal officials lacked the time, or perhaps the inclination, to sort out the complexities involved. This essay revolves around just one chapter in the story of their collaboration. But first, a bit of historical background will help make sense of what follows. After Constantinople was sacked during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Byzantine Empire was divided between the Franks and the Venetians. Together with a number of comrades, Marco Sanudo, nephew of a Venetian doge, divided the islands into small Latin principalities. In 1207 or thereabouts, Sanudo himself founded the principality that came to be known as the Duchy of the Aegean or the Archipelago. He made Naxos its seat, and the Kastro – the fortified medieval city above the island’s harbour – its headquarters. In 1566, the island fell to the Ottomans, and then, in 1580, the entire Archipelago became an Ottoman province. The empire’s interest in the province was primarily fiscal: once every year, the commander of the sultan’s fleet, the kapudan pasha, came to collect the tribute. Beyond that, it interfered relatively little in the island’s internal affairs.8 Given the decline of Venice, which was famous for its defiance of papal authority in any case, it was only natural for the papacy to make common cause with France, which was on excellent terms with the Porte.9 Thanks to the capitulations that the French had negotiated with the empire, the kingdom was the official protector of Catholicism in the sultan’s territory, and in that capacity was granted unparalleled access.10 But because the objectives of Rome and Versailles were so often incompatible, the Archipelago, especially Naxos, became the locus of proxy wars between them. Arguably they bear no less responsibility for Stefani’s difficulties than the prelate himself or his flock. Heedless of local realities and doubtless preoccupied with more urgent matters, the cardinals and diplomats to whom the archbishop reported failed to anticipate the occasionally fatal consequences of their interventions in local life. The legal system on Naxos in the early modern period was such that Catholics could seek justice in several ways. They could choose between three different kinds of courts: the communal courts, over which a number of local notables presided, the ecclesiastical tribunal of the archbishop, or the Islamic court, of which the kadi was in charge. But they could also appeal directly to the French ambassador in Constantinople, or even the sultan. “In fact, many litigants resorted to more than one of these options, especially if they had not received the verdict they hoped for the first time, which indicates a remarkable knowledge of their rights under different legal systems.”11 Thanks to the privileged status of Naxos as confirmed by charters, the Ottomans recognized the island’s customary law and even gave that law precedence, especially as regards family matters, inheritance, and property. But since customary law was not codified, it was often a question of one person’s word against another. Of course this invited abuse, and not only by the powerful. Ecclesiastical judges, be they Latin or Greek, could not ignore customary law,
An Embattled Catholic Archbishop 197 but presumably because they saw it as a threat to their own jurisdiction, they did their utmost to repress it.12 On Naxos, most of the Latins lived in the Kastro. Standing on its hill above the harbour, the fortress is one of the first things visitors see when their boat approaches the island.13 Accessible by way of three massive wooden gates, the warren of narrow streets helped protect the town from pirates. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the estimated population fluctuated between roughly 300 and 500, while that of the entire island oscillated between 4,500 and, according to one source, as much as 15,000. These figures do not include the surprising number of Catholic clergy and religious who lived in or near the Kastro. In 1700, when the total population – Latin and Greek – is estimated to have been 7,000, there were no less than 12 canons, 8 secular clergy, and 7 seminarians, in addition to 4 Capuchins, 2 Franciscans, and 6 Jesuits (including lay brothers). As for female religious, there were 15 enclosed Ursuline nuns and 8 Third Order Dominicans.14 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the number of Latins had declined to about 350, or less than 10 per cent of the total population.15 With about one out of every seven Catholics being some form of clergy or another, it is safe to say that, by any standard, the Kastro was clericalized to an extraordinary degree. Because the Catholic Church had classified the Archipelago as mission territory, the region fell within the purview of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (commonly known as Propaganda Fide), which was founded in 1622.16 When Archbishop Stefani was consecrated in 1750, roughly two centuries after the Council of Trent, Propaganda Fide was still trying to impose Tridentine reforms on the region, in keeping with the centralizing spirit that animated both curial bureaucrats and Catholic reformers in Rome. The variety of the conflicts in which Stefani got himself entangled, few of which were strictly religious, are a reminder of the impact Trent had on not only religious, but also social, cultural, and political life around the globe – an impact that, on Naxos at least, was more often resented than not.17 In keeping with their aristocratic pretensions, the Latins on Naxos lived off their land – which included the most fertile tracts on the island – and disdained any form of gainful employment. The actual farming was done by the far more numerous Greek Orthodox peasants, sharecroppers who shouldered the bulk of the Ottoman tax burden until the Porte officially abolished the seigneurial rights of most Latins in 1721.18 From the time it was first inhabited by the L atins in the thirteenth century, the Kastro sent a message to the rest of the island about those who lived within its walls. The elaborate, time-honoured religious rituals – especially processions – that the Latins performed in the course of the church year sent the same message. Many of these rituals, in which the Catholics took enormous pride, were intended as much for the Greeks as for the Latins. As in Western Europe, the procession on the Feast of Corpus Christi was one of the highpoints of the church year, and attracted many Orthodox.19 Given the social and political connotations, no wonder many of the power struggles that bedeviled the community revolved around these rituals.
198 Andrew P. McCormick If Stefani was such a divisive figure, it is fair to ask why was he chosen for the job. The prelate’s superiors in Rome can be forgiven for thinking he was the perfect candidate. He had grown up in the Catholic community on nearby Chios, under circumstances that, on the face of it, resembled those on Naxos.20 Like the Latins on Naxos, those on Chios were outnumbered by Greek Orthodox, who were their social inferiors.21 No less than Orthodoxy, Islam too was part of his universe: Chios lies on the threshold of the Muslim world, within sight of Anatolia. But most importantly, his theological credentials were unassailable. After the Dominican convent school on Chios, he attended the order’s seminary at Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. The Collegio di San Tommaso would have instilled him with the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and, above all, a healthy respect for papal authority. Thus, with one foot in the East and the other in the West, who would have known more about the Archipelago than Stefani, or been better qualified to steer his diocese through the shoals of heresy, schism, and paganism? But as the new archbishop would soon learn, the Latins on Naxos, whose greatest concern was preserving the dwindling patrimony they had inherited from their Venetian forebears, were socially and economically reactionary compared to their peers on Chios. Obsessed with their titles, they eschewed any form of trade, whereas in keeping with their Genoese ancestors, the Catholic nobles on Chios believed that “commerce was not incompatible with social rank and standing.” The Chiots were therefore “engaged in trading, in the export of the mastic and other island produce, and of such products as cotton and silk, and in the import of goods of primary importance to the local industries.”22 Their coreligionists on Naxos would seem to have been more preoccupied with land and genealogy. This preoccupation would have made it especially difficult for outsiders – even for someone like Stefani who was born and bred nearby – to win the trust of, much less influence, the locals. Ever since Marco Sanudo, the first duke of Naxos, had apportioned the best property on the island to his comrades, land was a tangible symbol of the Latins’ hegemony, their exemption from Ottoman taxes, and – last but not least – their sole source of income, albeit in kind. It distinguished them from the Orthodox majority, and explained, even if it did not justify, their dominance.23 Marrying within the Latin community (i.e. endogamy) and ironclad dowry contracts were two means of preserving the land they had inherited within their families.24 The archives of Propaganda Fide hold numerous petitions from Naxos Catholics seeking permission to marry a second cousin.25 Given the socio-economic importance of property and kinship in the Kastro, it is not surprising that the Latins tended to act in concert with their relatives. A particularly well-documented example, corroborated by multiple witnesses, involves the dean of the cathedral, Niccolò Sommaripa. As the de facto patriarch of his clan, he was able to marshal blind support for a cause of no less consequence than the expulsion of Archbishop Stefani only five years after the latter’s arrival.26 On the morning of Easter Sunday 1755, the dean decided that the place he had been assigned in the paschal procession was beneath his dignity. Blaming
An Embattled Catholic Archbishop 199 the perceived slight on Stefani, he made a show of returning to the sacristy, removing his liturgical vestments and, despite the archbishop’s attempts to appease him, refusing to join the procession. The procession eventually got underway, but the dean’s relatives were not about to forget the slight. After reaching the church of the Jesuits, Stefani knelt before the Blessed Sacrament on the high altar, while the others took their place. Then just as High Mass was about to begin, the dean’s relatives stormed the chancel and began shouting insults at the archbishop. Fearing for the prelate’s life, his supporters hustled him out of the church, back to the cathedral – where his pursuers discovered and attacked one of his followers – and on to his residence, while he was still in full pontificals.27 The Easter Sunday incident shows how factions in the Kastro could be swiftly marshalled in defence of a particular individual or cause. This is not to say that the constituency of these factions was invariable: their members could sometimes find themselves in a different or even opposing one. The existence of such groups and the interests that united them stymied the efforts of the Catholics’ foreign patrons to bend the Kastro to their will. For his part, Stefani chastised his opponents, who included members of his own cathedral chapter, with every spiritual scourge at his disposal – thus exacerbating the situation.28 In some cases, he could be overruled by the Ottoman judiciary.29 But the intervention of Constantinople, much less Rome and Versailles, was never coordinated and often at cross purposes. Not seldom the consequent entropy played into the hands of the locals, who simply did as they liked. In view of the preceding, let us have a closer look at a few of the measures that Stefani took. Some of these are bound to seem familiar. The social, economic, and religious reforms that the new archbishop introduced had long been taken for granted elsewhere. But on Naxos they threatened – or were thought to threaten – a way of life that had evolved over hundreds of years.30 The prelate’s brief was to separate the sheep from the goats. Despite the physical seclusion of the Latins within the walls of the Kastro and the differences between the Latin and Greek rites, over time the two communities had gradually merged. According to one contemporary, Stefani was vexed by the extent to which the religious observances of the Latins and Greeks had come to resemble one another. Besides attending the funerals of the “schismatics” (as the Latins referred to the Greeks) and singing Masses on the anniversaries of their death, the Catholics attended Orthodox liturgies, had their sick blessed by Orthodox priests, and made their confessions in Orthodox churches – to say nothing of intermarriage (i.e. exogamy). The archbishop believed that these practices profaned the sacraments. Moreover, the Greeks were being led to think that, even though they did not embrace some of the central tenets of the Catholic faith, their salvation was not in danger and the differences between them and the Latins were purely ceremonial. It was by trying to drive a wedge between them, as Rome expected him to do, that, within months of setting foot on Naxos in 1751, the prelate managed to antagonize his flock. Stefani was not exaggerating the problem. Much to Rome’s dismay, communicatio in divinis (or in sacris) – that is, participation in what the Holy Office
200 Andrew P. McCormick considered schismatic or heretical worship – was common throughout the L evant. Like a good Dominican, our episcopal reformer was determined to end such abuse. On 6 April 1752, within just months of his arrival on Naxos, he circulated a letter among the Latin clergy of his diocese who were licensed to hear confession. “It has come to our attention,” he wrote, that many of the Latins in our diocese desecrate the Catholic faith by attending Masses celebrated by priests who have shaken off the yoke of obedience to the Holy See. Not only do they make offerings and leave pious bequests to these churches, they even ask the priests to bless their houses, pray for their sick and say Mass. He therefore ordered the confessors to interrogate penitents concerning their beliefs, and to deny absolution to anyone who did not know or embrace the basic tenets of the Catholic faith, particularly with regard to papal supremacy.31 Another of Stefani’s reforms was to prohibit moneylending at high interest rates. Although lending money at 10, 15, or even higher percentages was considered usurious by the church and banned by canon law, it was widely practised in the Levant, not only by lay people but also by members of the clergy and even religious communities. On Naxos, where cash was scarce, it was entrenched. The island lacked a good natural harbour, but its fertility, compared to its dry, rocky neighbours, enabled it to survive on its own produce. And as noted earlier, the Latins refrained from any form of trade. Rather than investing in the local economy, they tended to hoard whatever cash the Ottoman tax collector did not siphon off. Under these circumstances, borrowing and lending was the order of the day. Indeed, the enclosed community of Ursuline nuns were active moneylenders. Stefani vociferously objected, infuriating the sisters and their supporters. Nor was this the prelate’s only interference in the way the nuns did things. On the grounds that the community could not afford to expand, he capped the number of novices they were allowed to admit. He also refused to confirm the re-election of the mother superior, despite the fact that she was far and away the most qualified candidate and much loved by the nuns. She had held office for 18 years, far in excess of the canonical limit, and to the archbishop’s way of thinking, that is what mattered.32 But, however much these measures may have annoyed the laity, this was nothing compared to the row triggered by the prelate’s handling of the high-profile lawsuit that supposedly led to the murder of his nemesis, Jean-Baptiste Lastic baron de Vigouroux.33 During a trial in 1753, held in his own episcopal tribunal, the archbishop dared to assert the supremacy of Roman law over the island’s time-honoured but unwritten customary law. Given the Latins’ preoccupation with land and family, which distinguished them from their Greek neighbours, of course they saw this as a threat. By jeopardizing what amounted to the source of their prestige and income, Stefani alienated key residents of the Kastro, especially the baron, who had married into the powerful Loredano clan, as well as the baron’s close associates, the Jesuits. It may seem surprising to learn that Jesuit
An Embattled Catholic Archbishop 201 missionaries played such an active role in the partisan politics of the island.34 But the Jesuits on Naxos, like those in, say, Maryland, were major landowners.35 The latter used African slaves to work their land, while the former relied on Greek peasants, but they all shared the economic outlook of their fellow landowners. It was these landowners – including Baron de Vigouroux – whom the Jesuits rallied against the archbishop. The lawsuit itself concerned the last will and testament of a local Catholic by the name of Antonio Sommaripa.36 The will was challenged by Antonio’s brother Giorgio Sommaripa. After the death of their mother Diana Loredano, who died intestate, Giorgio and Antonio, both of whom were (and expected to remain) childless, split her dowry between them. In his will, Antonio apportioned his share of the dowry among several beneficiaries. Besides providing for his widow, he also made two so-called pious bequests for the salvation of his soul. First, he established a benefice on behalf of his wife’s brother Don Giovanni, one of the canons of the Naxos cathedral. Then on his deathbed Antonio made a cash bequest to Archbishop Stefani. In an illiquid economy like that of early modern Naxos, such bequests were especially valuable. There was just one problem. In keeping with the island’s customary law, Diana L oredano’s parents had done what many parents did in order to ensure that their daughter’s dowry would remain in their family: they stipulated in the dowry contract that if she or her future children were to die without issue, it should go to her next of kin. In the event, Diana’s next of kin was Caterina Loredano who, coincidentally, was married to none other than Stefani’s archenemy, Baron de Vigouroux. For his part, Giorgio Sommaripa had no vested interest in the estate of his late brother Antonio: indeed, Giorgio was not so much as mentioned in the will. And even if the will were to be annulled in favour of customary law, then as noted earlier, their mother’s dowry would go not to him but to their mother’s next of kin. Nevertheless, Giorgio brought suit against Don Giovanni, who stood to gain a benefice if the will was upheld. The fact that he chose the baron as his counsel suggests that the baron spurred Giorgio to take legal action. After all, if V igouroux managed to have Antonio’s will annulled, then his wife Caterina stood to inherit not only Antonio’s but also Giorgio’s share of the dowry since, as we have seen, he too was childless. That Giorgio’s decision to leave his estate to the baron coincided with the trial lends weight to this hypothesis.37 In the end, with a substantial amount of cash and property hanging in the balance, the lawsuit became a high-profile contest between two competing legal systems and their exponents: on the one hand, the local, uncodified, c ustomary system that was allowed to subsist after the Ottoman conquest of the A rchipelago, and on the other, the Western European system based on Roman law and upheld in Stefani’s tribunal. Like so many of the other conflicts in the A rchipelago that smouldered for centuries, the struggle for Antonio Sommaripa’s estate can be seen as a microcosm of the ongoing proxy war between an ever-changing cast of global players – mainly France, the Porte, and the Holy See during our period – and those on the ground.
202 Andrew P. McCormick As head of the local church hierarchy, Stefani was entitled to preside over his own tribunal. But instead of recusing himself because he (or in any case his diocese) had a stake in the outcome, he posed as an expert witness. In this capacity, he composed a lengthy legal brief (or opinion) in defence of Antonio’s testament.38 The long list of classical, medieval, and early modern jurists he cites and the scholastic argumentation point to the education he received from the Dominicans. Stefani insisted that parents had no right to place any restrictions on their daughters’ dowries. And on the grounds of a deposition signed by dozens of prominent members of both the Greek and Latin communities, he argued that even when such restrictions existed, they were routinely ignored.39 The baron and his faction countered that ignoring these restrictions would impoverish the Latins.40 Whether or not there was any real danger of this, the implication was that one way or another their land would fall into the hands of the Greeks, and that for all their blue blood, the Latin families would be ruined. Stefani took months to reach a verdict in the case. Given the archbishop’s opposition to customary law and, in particular, himself, the baron had little reason to expect a favourable decision. Being on good terms with the Ottoman authorities, he did what any Latin who could afford it would have done: rather than await Stefani’s verdict, he took his case to their tribunal. When Stefani was summoned to appear in the course of these proceedings, he took umbrage at what he saw as a violation of his immunity under Ottoman law, and blamed Vigouroux for an “unpardonable” act of insubordination.41 At a hastily organized meeting of his partisans, the prelate announced his intention to excommunicate the baron, an intention he proposed to make public during High Mass the following Sunday. News of the archbishop’s plan was greeted with shock and disbelief, and none of the attempts to dissuade him in the days that followed had the slightest effect. The atmosphere in the Kastro was charged as never before. The Frenchman himself was resigned to his lot, but his supporters refused to acquiesce. Some of the younger ones brandished arms and vowed to avenge their hero. In the end, it took a fellow religious to convince the prelate to postpone the anathema. But, in the meantime, the Kastro had been polarized. Some months later, on a cold November night in 1755, Stefani’s relations with his flock took a sharp turn for the worse. While walking home late at night in the Kastro, Baron de Vigouroux was gunned down in cold blood. As it happened, the archbishop himself was on an apostolic visit to Paros at the time of the murder. But this did not stop his many opponents from jumping to the conclusion that he was somehow responsible.42 Despite all the circumstantial evidence against the prelate, the crime was ultimately pinned on another suspect, who was tried by the Turks and then hanged on 7 September 1756. For its part, the Holy See gave little credence to the rumours about Stefani’s guilt, and, in fact, did everything it could to keep him on his cathedra. But in the end, local resistance was so great that the cardinals in Rome opted for a face-saving compromise: Stefani would retain his mitre, but pass the reins of the archdiocese to a vicar general. And so, the fervid reformer sat out the last 13 years of his episcopate on his native Chios.
An Embattled Catholic Archbishop 203 One of the puzzling things about Stefani’s fate is that until about 1755, some four years after he arrived on Naxos in other words, the locals had no complaints about their new archbishop. One cannot help but wonder what went wrong after that? In trying to understand the opposition to Stefani – which was led, significantly, by a French baron and a handful of French Jesuits – we should not lose sight of the larger, geopolitical context. First of all, there was no love lost between Naxos and Chios. As the Naxiots used to say, “If you’ve seen a prudent Chiot, you’ve seen a green horse.”43 Whatever this curious saying meant to contemporaries, the fact that their new archbishop was born and bred on Chios did nothing to help his relations with his flock – any more than it did those of Stefani’s predecessors who hailed from the same island.44 The Latins on Naxos believed the Chiots were their natural enemies, and that Stefani fit the mould.45 But there is more to the story than petty rivalry. In the early seventeenth century, under King Louis XIII and Pope Urban VIII, French Jesuits were more or less forcibly installed on Naxos, where the local Catholics had been accustomed to Italian missionaries.46 Raffaelle Schiattini, who served as archbishop of Naxos from 1625 until 1657, played a prominent role in securing their presence on that island in 1626, within just months of his own arrival. Despite his Italian background, it is fair to say that Schiattini was a French agent. Having distinguished himself at the Jesuit school on his native Chios, he was sent to the French ambassador in Constantinople.47 The ambassador saw to it that the gifted young man spent several years at the French court, and that as archbishop he, like other Levantine prelates, received a royal stipend.48 It was Schiattini’s job to find housing, a church and, last but not least, financial support for the Jesuits. He had already done the same for the French Capuchins on Chios.49 This would not have been easy in what was still the backyard of the Venetian Republic, but it was a crucial part of a joint, Franco-Roman strategy to consolidate strategic footholds in Ottoman territory. Given the Jesuits’ reputation as educators, the Frenchmen were allegedly welcomed on Naxos, where schooling for Latin children was minimal.50 But not everyone was happy about the new arrivals. In 1662, Stefani’s predecessor Bartolomeo Polla, archbishop from 1659 until 1691, complained that the Jesuits and the Capuchins were inciting the locals to rebel against their bishop, and had been doing so for some time before his arrival.51 Polla himself did not highlight the national connection, but the fact is that both the Capuchin and the Jesuit missions on Naxos were French foundations. Whether or not there is any truth to the allegations that Stefani was anti-French, the fact is that, as a product of the Dominican school on Chios and seminary in Rome, he would have been exposed to his order’s well-known hostility towards the Jesuits and their French patrons.52 Another way of looking at Stefani’s difficulties is from the perspective of episcopal reformers in other parts of the world. The parallels between his experience and that of his fellow bishops in very different geographical contexts are often remarkable.53 But what seems so striking about our prelate is the apparent naïveté
204 Andrew P. McCormick with which he set about reforming his diocese. After all, the traditions he attacked were the bedrock of his flock’s identity. Did he, or his ecclesiastical superiors in Rome, really think he could separate his fellow Latins from the “schismatics”? However unrealistic Stefani’s approach may seem, it was perfectly consistent with that of the French government. Consider the letter that France’s ambassador to Constantinople circulated among his consuls in the Archipelago. He drew the consuls’ attention to what he called “deux grands désordres” among French subjects and the other Latins under the crown’s protection: they had Greek clergy bless their marriages, even when Latin clergy were available; and second, when they married Greek women, they let them raise their children in the Orthodox faith. As the envoy wrote, his primary obligation and his greatest concern was to support the interests of religion, by which of course he meant the Catholic faith. He therefore warned that he would severely punish either violation: French subjects would be expelled from the Archipelago, and other Latins would lose French protection – not to mention further, unspecified penalties. The consuls were to pass his letter along to the parish clergy, so that they could broadcast the message from the pulpit.54 But what Latin would not have had at least a mother, a father, a cousin, or a friend who was Orthodox? Did Rome and Versailles honestly think it would be possible to extirpate the many “heretical” beliefs that the Latins had absorbed, to keep them out of Orthodox churches they had known since childhood, to prevent them from marrying the Greek boy or girl next door, or make them obey faceless authorities in remote capitals? However consistent these reforms may have been with the Council of Trent, it is hard to imagine they were taken very seriously on the ground. Though Stefani was himself a native son, his education, and the formative years he spent abroad, had evidently imbued him with beliefs, values, and practices that were out of step with those of his flock. When all is said and done, it was too late: for all their aristocratic titles and their pseudo- European airs, the Latins on Naxos, most of whose families had been living on the island for generations, were more Greek than not.55
Notes 1 This essay is largely based on two filze preserved in the Archivio Storico de Propaganda Fide (hereafter APF) in Rome: Congregazioni Particolari (hereafter CP), 121 (1757) and 131 (1759), fols 3r–177r. I am deeply indebted to the archivist of the APF, Mons. Luis Manuel Cuña Ramos, and his staff. In the following, the terms “Greek” and “Latin” are synonymous with “Orthodox” and “Catholic.” 2 On Stefani, see APF, CP 121 (1757), fols 171v–172r, dated 26 May 1754. 3 In a letter to Niccolò Maria Cardinal Lercari, the Holy See’s secretary of state, from 4 Feb. 1755, the French consul on Naxos, Chrysanthe Raymond de Modène, reduced the crisis on the island to a conflict between the friends and enemies of France. APF, CP 121 (1757), fols 224r–255v. 4 The term was made famous by the Dutch historian Ben Slot in his pioneering Archipelagus Turbatus: les Cyclades entre colonisation latine et occupation ottomane c. 1500–1718, Leiden-Istanbul: Uitgaven van het Nederlands Historisch Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1982.
An Embattled Catholic Archbishop 205 5 For a map of the sea lanes through the Aegean, see D. Brewer, Greece, The Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule from the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence, L ondon: I.B. Tauris, 2010, p. 54. 6 See H. de Barenton, La France catholique en Orient durant les trois derniers siècles, d’après des documents inédits, Paris: Oeuvre de St-François d’Assise, 1902 and, more recently, B. Pierre, “Le père Joseph, l’empire Ottoman et la Méditerranée au début du XVIIe siècle,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 71, 2005, 185–202. 7 Both France and the Papacy “saw bishops as their own agents who were to be judged exclusively under their authority.” J.M. DeSilva, “Introduction,” in Episcopal Reform and Politics in Early Modern Europe, Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2012, p. 18. 8 For a recent survey of the history of Naxos from the Fourth Crusade to the Greek Revolt, including extensive bibliography in Greek and other languages, see A.D. Kotsakis, Έλληνες Ορθόδοξοι και Λατίνοι στη Νάξο (13ος–19ος Αιώνες), Athens: Herodotos, 2017. 9 “The Turks thought of the French as allies while the Venetians were their traditional enemies.” C.A. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1923, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 126. 10 The standard work on the capitulations is G. Pélissié du Rausas, Le régime des capitulations, 2 vols, Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1902–1905. See also G. Outrey, Études pratiques sur le protectorat religieux de la France en Orient, Center for Ottoman Diplomatic History, Istanbul: Les éditions ISIS, 2014. 11 E. Doxiadis, The Shackles of Modernity: Women, Property, and the Transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek State (1750–1850), Cambridge: Department of Classics, Harvard University, 2011, pp. 184–185. 12 A.E. Kasdagli, Land and Marriage Settlements in the Aegean: A Case Study of Seventeenth-Century Naxos, Venice: Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post- Byzantine Studies & Vikelea Municipal Library of Iraklion (Crete), 1999; Doxiadis, Shackles, p. 183. 13 For a richly illustrated study of the Kastro, see Y. Anomeritis, The Castle of Naxos and Its Churches, trans. V.-L. Rigos, Athens: Militos, 2010. 14 G. Hofmann, “La chiesa cattolica in Grecia (1600–1830),” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 2, 1936, 400–401. For Naxos population statistics from 1470 to 1901, including Catholic laity, clergy, and religious, see now Kotsakis, Έλληνες, pp. 169–176. For more about (and bibliography on) the Catholic orders on Naxos, whose activities are little known outside Greece, see G. Hofmann, Vescovadi cattolici della Grecia, vol. IV, Naxos, Rome: Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1938, pp. 38–43 and Kotsakis, Έλληνες, pp. 140–169. 15 Not all of the Catholics were communicants. According to an anonymous memo from April 1754, presumably penned by Stefani himself, 277 of the Catholics on Naxos at the time were “di communione,” and all of them, “ecceptis eccipiendis ut infra, adempirono al precetto della communione pasquale.” APF, CP 121 (1757), fols 731r–732r. 16 On the history of Propaganda Fide, see J. Metzler (ed.), Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum: 350 anni a servizio delle missioni = 350 Jahre im Dienste der Weltmission = 350 years in the service of the missions … 1622–1972, 3 vols in 5, Rome: Herder, 1971–1975. See now also G. Pizzorusso, Governare le missioni, conoscere il mondo nel XVII secolo: La Congregazione Pontificia de Propaganda Fide, Rome: Edizioni Sette Città, 2018. 17 On the resentment towards Stefani’s campaign against communicatio in divinis, see the letter to Propaganda Fide from Stefani’s vicar general Antonio Barozzi, dated 20 Aug. 1754, in APF, Scritture riferite nei Congressi (hereafter SC) 14 (Arcipelago, 1741–1749), fol. 296v. Barozzi claims the clergy were threatening to convert to Orthodoxy. Some two years later, by which time opposition to him was much broader
206 Andrew P. McCormick
18 19
20 21
22
23 24
25
26 27
28 29 30
31
and angrier, the prelate was undeterred: see his report on the state of his diocese from 22 November 1756, ibid., fols 344r–358v. Propaganda Fide’s continued reliance on the beleaguered prelate’s reports points to their unflagging support. Kasdagli, Land and Marriage, p. 111. For more on this incident, see APF, SC 14 (Arcipelago, 1741–1749), fols 720r–724r. For a description of Corpus Christi on Naxos from 1628, see Hofmann, Vescovadi cattolici, pp. 74–78. On the Italian origins of the feast, see C. Bernardi, “Corpus Domini: ritual metamorphoses and social changes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Genoa,” in N. Terpstra (ed.) The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 228–242. See P.P. Argenti, The Religious Minorities of Chios: Jews and Roman Catholics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, pp. 205–366. The inhabitants of Chios “were divided into two distinct sections – one consisting of the Latin overlords, the other of the indigenous Greeks.” P.P. Argenti, The Occupation of Chios by the Genoese and Their Administration of the Island, 1346–1566, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958, pp. 582–583. Ibid., pp. 603–604. For a withering contemporary account of the “noblesse pauvre et orgueilleuse” of Naxos, “restée étrangère aux innovations et à l’industrie qui faisait des progrès en Grèce comme en Europe, et gardant scrupuleusement les traditions de la féodalité,” see V. Fontanier, Voyages en Orient: entrepris par ordre du Gouvernement français, de l’année 1821–1829, Paris: Librairie universelle, 1829, pp. 238–240. According to the report of an apostolic visitor to Syros from 1652, Latins were forbidden to sell their land to foreigners or Greeks. APF, Scritture Originali riferite nelle Congregazioni Generali (hereafter SOCG) 187, fol. 567v. Ironically, the Latins were also known to use exogamy as a means of acquiring land. On 9 April 1748, the Greeks of Naxos complained to Propaganda Fide that, despite the king of France’s prohibition, his subjects would marry dowered Greek women, acquire their land, and then, by dint of their exemption, refuse to pay taxes on it – thus increasing the fiscal burden on the rest of the population. APF, SC 14 (Arcipelago, 1741–1749), fol. 504r. “[…] the Latins would rather make Alliance with the meanest Peasant, than marry Greek Ladies; which made them procure from Rome a Dispensation to intermarry with their Cousin-Germans.” J.P. de Tournefort, A Voyage into the Levant, 3 vols, London: printed for D. Midwinter et al., 1741, I, pp. 229–230. In 1748, Archbishop Antonio Maturi, Stefani’s predecessor, warned Propaganda Fide that the dean was “troppo attaccato a’ suoi parenti, e benchè non comparisca, tutti però conoscono che vi ha la mano co’ suoi consigli.” APF, CP (1757), fols 274r–275v. Ibid., fols 264r–v. The incident calls to mind Carlo Borromeo’s “difficulties in reorganizing and reforming the diocesan clergy,” and the attempt on his life “by a former friar of the Humiliati order.” A. Perid and J. Alexander, “Office and Patronage in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Tortona,” in DeSilva (ed.) Episcopal Reform, p. 81. For instance, Stefani (or one of his clergy) kept careful track of those individuals who were barred from confession because they refused to resolve some problem or other (e.g. concubinage). See APF, CP 121 (1757), fols 731r–732r. Doxiadis, Shackles, p. 184. For the decree concerning communicatio in divinis (or sacris), see Collectanea S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide seu Decreta Instructiones Rescripta pro Apostolicis Missionibus, Rome: Ex Typographia Polyglotta S.C. de Propaganda Fide, 1907 (republished 1971 by Gregg International Publishers Ltd, Westmead, Farnborough, Hants., England), vol I, pp. 99–101, n. 311 (1729). See also ibid., vol I, pp. 293–294, n. 455 (1764). See APF, CP 121 (1757), fols 258r–259v. According to Propaganda Fide, there was some resistance to Stefani’s directive: ibid., fols 160v–161r. See also APF, Acta (1753), fols 146r–148v.
An Embattled Catholic Archbishop 207 32 There are remarkable parallels between Stefani’s stormy relations with the Ursulines on Naxos and those of Sébastien Zamet, bishop of Langres, with their sisters in seventeenth-century Dijon. See L. Lierheimer, “Gender, Resistance, and the Limits of Episcopal Authority,” in DeSilva (ed.) Episcopal Reform, pp. 147–172, and U. Strasser, “Early Modern Nuns and the Feminist Politics of Religion,” The Journal of Religion 84, 2004, 529–554. For more on the Ursulines on Naxos, see Kotsakis, Έλληνες, pp. 154–155. 33 For a contemporary summary of the lawsuit, see APF, SC 17 (Arcipelago, 1 764–1765), fols 179r–182r. 34 See A. Carayon, Missions des Jésuites en Russie et dans l’Archipel grec, Paris: L’Écureux, 1869; idem, Relations inédites des missions de la Compagnie de Jésus à Constantinople et dans le Levant au XVIIe siècle, Poitiers: H. Oudin, 1864. 35 See E.F. Beckett, SJ, “Listening to Our History: Inculturation and Jesuit Slaveholding,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 28, no. 5, 1996, 1–48. In contrast, the Capuchins owned no land on Naxos: instead, the French crown sent 600 scudi to the order’s custos in Constantinople every year. Hofmann, Vescovadi cattolici, p. 125. For a more recent discussion of Jesuits and slavery, see M. Friedrich, Die Jesuiten: Aufstieg, Niedergang, Neubeginn, Munich: Piper, 2016, pp. 440–447. 36 For a long, detailed exposition of the conflict surrounding the will and its repercussions, see the unsigned, undated letter from, I suspect, Niccolò Sommaripa, dean of the cathedral of Naxos, to “Carissimo Signore Fratello.” APF, CP 121 (1757), fols 744r–746v and 757r–768r. For more on the will itself and Stefani’s interpretation of it, see APF, CP 131 (1759), fols 790r–v. 37 APF, SC 17 (Arcipelago, 1764–5), fol. 180r. 38 APF, CP 121 (1757), fols 94r–97r. See also ibid., fols 107r–v. 39 APF, CP 121 (1757), fol. 507r–v, dated 24 Feb. 1754. See also ibid., fols 114r–118v. 40 For a characteristic formulation of this point of view, see the anonymous, undated, fragmentary text in APF, CP 131 (1759), fols 757r–v. 41 Article 32 of the capitulations of 1740 guaranteed “la libertà dei Vescovi nell’esercizio della loro potestà,” while article 35 declared “le chiese cattoliche sotto la protezione francese anche nei posti secondari «échelles» del Levante […] libere ed immuni (da imposte).” Hofmann, Vescovadi, p. 38. 4 2 I hope soon to present a study of the baron’s murder and the circumstances that surrounded it. B. Slot, “Γιατροί και ιατρική στη Νάξο 16° αρχή 19ου αιώνα,” Φλέα 30, 2011, 9–14, esp. 12–13, describes the murder as “one of the most important events on eighteenth-century Naxos.” For a contemporary account of it, see APF, CP 121 (1757), fols 482r–497r. 43 Ibid., fol. 592v. 4 4 One morning on Naxos, Stefani’s compatriot Raphael Schiattini (see below) found the door of his residence “incrostata […] con un bitume quale la modestia et il dovuto rispetto a un tanto prelato non mi permette nominarlo.” APF, CP 121 (1757), fol. 274r. For a comparison between Chios and Naxos during our period, see Brewer, Greece, pp. 53–65. 45 “Ma egli [i.e. Stefani], in questo suo impegno di screditare in ogni genere ed in tutte le maniere li Naxiotti, si mostra vero Sciotto, perché li signori sciotti hanno nutrito non so quale sorte di emulazione ed antigenio contra la nobiltà di Naxia.” Anonymous, undated text. APF, CP 121 (1757), fol. 594r. 46 Slot, Archipelagus, pp. 144–147. 47 Philippe de Harley, comte de Césy (1619–1640). 48 See APF, SOCG 183 (1624–1629), fols 27bis r–28r, and APF, Visite 1 (1622–1624), fols 107r–108v, as well as V. Laurent, “La mission des jésuites à Naxos de 1627–1643,” Échos d’Orient 34, 1935, 360–363. 49 “[…] from the beginning the Capuchins in Chios were Frenchmen, installed through the agency of the French ambassador.” Argenti, Religious Minorities, p. 227. By
208 Andrew P. McCormick
50 51 52
53 54 55
contrast, French Jesuits did not come to Chios until 1695. Thenceforth the mission, founded by Chians and Sicilians and staffed chiefly by Italians, was dependent on the Jesuit provincial in Constantinople, who was French. Ibid., p. 273. On 20 June 1653, a group of prominent “procuratori, cittadini et habitanti” gave the Jesuits the exclusive right to operate a school in the Kastro. Hofmann, Vescovadi cattolici, pp. 97–98. APF, SOCG 272, fols 354r–v. See also the lengthy complaint about the Jesuits submitted to Propaganda Fide by Archbishop Antonio Maturi (1733–1749) on 17 Feb. 1736, in APF, SC 13 (Arcipelago, 1732–1740 e senza tempo), fols 480r–485v. On Stefani’s alleged anti-French bias, see, for instance, the petition to Propaganda Fide from a long list of Latins, dated 10 April 1755. It accused him, among other things, of going after “li nostri santi missionari gesuiti, contro li francesi della di cui protezione noi n’abbiamo un’estremo bisogno.” APF, CP 121 (1757), fols 208r–v. Cf. ibid., fols 216r–219r. For more on the Dominicans on Chios, see N.I. Tsougarakis, The Latin Religious Orders in Medieval Greece, 1204–1500, Medieval Church Studies 18, Turnhout: Brepols, 2012, pp. 190–194. DeSilva (ed.), Episcopal Reform. The letter is dated 27 June 1711. Archives Historiques de la Congrégation de la Mission, Paris (hereafter ACMP), I.B.13 (unpaginated). The ambassador in question, who is not identified, must have been Charles de Ferriol (1652–1722). As one missionary put it, “Les Chrétiens Levantins sont de petits Turcs, et les Catholiques tiennent souvent de caractère grec.” P.-F. Viguier, CM to J.-C. Vicherat, CM, 16 Feb. 1802, in ACMP, IX.G.24 (unpaginated).
Bibliography Published primary sources Barenton, H. de, La France catholique en Orient durant les trois derniers siècles, d’après des documents inédits, Paris: Oeuvre de St-François d’Assise, 1902. Carayon, A., Missions des Jésuites en Russie et dans l’Archipel grec, Paris: L’Écureux, 1869. ———, Relations inédites des missions de la Compagnie de Jésus à Constantinople et dans le Levant au XVIIe siècle, Poitiers: H. Oudin, 1864. Fontanier, V., Voyages en Orient: entrepris par ordre du Gouvernement français, de l’année 1821–1829, Paris: Librairie universelle, 1829. Metzler, J. (ed.), Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum: 350 anni a servizio delle missioni = 350 Jahre im Dienste der Weltmission = 350 years in the service of the missions … 1622–1972, 3 vols in 5, Rome: Herder, 1971–1975. Pélissié du Rausas, G., Le régime des capitulations, 2 vols, Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1902–1905. Tournefort, J.P. de, A Voyage into the Levant, 3 vols, London: Printed for D. Midwinter et al., 1741.
Secondary sources Anomeritis, Y., The Castle of Naxos and Its Churches, trans. V.-L. Rigos, Athens: Militos, 2010. Argenti, P.P., The Occupation of Chios by the Genoese and Their Administration of the Island, 1346–1566, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958. ———, The Religious Minorities of Chios: Jews and Roman Catholics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
An Embattled Catholic Archbishop 209 Beckett, E.F., “Listening to Our History: Inculturation and Jesuit Slaveholding,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 28, no. 5, 1996, 1–48. Brewer, D., Greece, The Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule from the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence, London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. DeSilva, J.M. (ed.), Episcopal Reform and Politics in Early Modern Europe, Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2012. Doxiadis, E., The Shackles of Modernity: Women, Property, and the Transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek State (1750–1850), Cambridge, MA: Department of Classics, Harvard University, 2011. Frazee, C.A., Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1923, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Friedrich, M., Die Jesuiten: Aufstieg, Niedergang, Neubeginn, Munich: Piper, 2016. Hofmann, G., “La chiesa cattolica in Grecia (1600–1830),” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 2, 1936, 164–190, 395–436. ———, Vescovadi cattolici della Grecia, 4 vols, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 107, 112, 115, 130, Rome: Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1934–1941. Kasdagli, A.E., Land and Marriage Settlements in the Aegean: A Case Study of Seventeenth-Century Naxos, Venice: Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies & Vikelea Municipal Library of Iraklion (Crete), 1999. Kotsakis, A.D., Έλληνες Ορθόδοξοι και Λατίνοι στη Νάξο (13ος–19ος Αιώνες), Athens: Herodotos, 2017. Laurent, V., “La mission des jésuites à Naxos de 1627–1643,” Échos d’Orient 33, 1935, 218–26, 354–375; 34, 1935, 97–105, 179–204, 350–367, 473–481. Outrey, G., Études pratiques sur le protectorat religieux de la France en Orient, Center for Ottoman Diplomatic History, Istanbul: Les éditions ISIS, 2014. Pierre, B., “Le père Joseph, l’empire Ottoman et la Méditerranée au début du XVIIe siècle,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 71, 2005, 185–202. Pizzorusso, G., Governare le missioni, conoscere il mondo nel XVII secolo: La Congregazione Pontificia de Propaganda Fide, Rome: Edizioni Sette Città, 2018. Slot, B., Archipelagus Turbatus: les Cyclades entre colonisation latine et occupation ottomane c. 1500–1718, Leiden/Istanbul: Uitgaven van het Nederlands Historisch Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1982. ———, “Γιατροί και ιατρική στη Νάξο 16° αρχή 19ου αιώνα,” Φλέα 30, 2011, 9–14. Strasser, U., “Early Modern Nuns and the Feminist Politics of Religion,” The Journal of Religion 84, 2004, 529–554. Terpstra, N. (ed.), The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Tsougarakis, N.I., The Latin Religious Orders in Medieval Greece, 1204–1500, Medieval Church Studies 18, Turnhout: Brepols, 2012.
Part 4
Life across boundaries
12 Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico, or, did Mexican women really have a counter-reformation? Jacqueline Holler
As is now widely recognized, women and their reproductive bodies were significant to both the Protestant Reformation and subsequent Catholic Reform. Efforts to control women’s sexuality, comportment, and bodily practices were not peripheral to religious reform, but at its heart. Most of what we know about reform and women, however, rests on evidence from the metropolis. Yet both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic or Counter-Reformation were global in their impacts, not least in the areas colonized by early modern Europeans. In the wake of the Counter-Reformation, the Holy Office of New Spain received a number of denunciations related to childbirth – a realm from which Inquisitors were self-evidently, as men, excluded, and also a particularly intense locus of magico-medical practices. The apogee of this effort came in 1627, when a flurry of denunciations resulted from the reading of an Edict of Grace on superstitious customs. In this essay, I examine 11 cases of midwives denounced, investigated, and/ or prosecuted by episcopal and formal Mexican Inquisitions between 1536 and 1664. I am principally interested in these records for what they reveal about childbirth and women’s embodiment in early New Spain. Here, however, my aim is to investigate the relationship between childbirth and reform over the first 150 years of the Mexican colony. Assessing the midwives’ cases, I find that the spirit of reform waxed and waned relatively independently of official emanations from Trent. Whatever the reformist zeal of individual Mexican churchmen, Inquisitors and the church in general withdrew their concerns over religious purity when faced with the medical realities of the colony, and, in fact, treated Spanish, African, and mixed-race (casta) midwives, and particularly their childbirth practices, particularly leniently, even relative to Inquisitors’ treatment of other women. Finally, I argue that Inquisitors’ lack of interest in penetrating the birthing chamber itself has suggestive implications for how we think about the effects of the Counter-Reformation in the everyday lives of women. Much research on this topic has focussed on childless women religious, while recent studies on Catholic laywomen have tended to emphasize their participation in worship and their navigation of Tridentine marital and sexual reforms rather than their experiences of childbearing. That is, scholars have viewed childbirth as “medical”
214 Jacqueline Holler rather than “religious,” and have therefore left it largely outside the ambit of their discussions of devotional change.1 But the birthing bed, as both material and documentary evidence make clear, was a religious space. No matter the many other spaces in which Tridentine Inquisitions shaped women’s experience of religion, inquisitorial attention (or inattention) to childbirth is significant. I argue that in assessing childbirth as beyond their reach, Mexican Inquisitors left a multi-ethnic religio-medical space largely beyond the reach of masculine religious authority. It is therefore perhaps not inappropriate to ask, as does this essay’s consciously provocative subtitle (pace Joan Kelly): “did Mexican women really have a Counter-Reformation?” Recent scholarship has demonstrated that European childbirth certainly experienced a Reformation. For Protestant reformers, the birthing bed was one of the sites of an intense de-Catholicizing war on superstition. In England, for example, the attempt to eliminate Popery from the birth chamber, coupled with Henry VIII’s expropriation of monastic assets, resulted in the seizure of a dizzying array of both secondary and tertiary contact relics or brandea, some of which had been in use for centuries. Among them were the staff of St Modwen of Burton upon Trent, which women leaned on while labouring; part of the shirt of St Thomas, “reverenced among pregnant women;” the girdle of St Werburga, “in great request by lying-in women;” and the ring of St Æthelthryth for lying-in women.2 In fact, girdles of the Virgin and various saints that could be borrowed or rented by local women were ubiquitous in the catalogue of objects prepared by Thomas Cromwell’s touring commissioners.3 “Birthing girdles,” scrolls painted with prayers and emblems of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, were destroyed, with the only extant one the well-known MS 632 from the Wellcome Library collection.4 These artefacts, catalogued by their destroyers, were simply the best documented examples of a broader Catholic phenomenon. For example, though the most famous “Madonna’s girdle” rests in the Prato cathedral in Tuscany, many other examples were to be found throughout late medieval Europe. Painted and printed images of the girdle were, like the relic itself, used to comfort labouring mothers.5 Over time, in regions where Protestant reformers mocked and extirpated these objects, the elimination of both birth relics and the intercessory role of saints and the Virgin created a recognizably Protestant culture of birth.6 This culture has attracted more scholarly attention than the Catholic birth practices that persisted in non-reformed jurisdictions, in part because such customs were often scantly documented. Birth relics, a hallmark of Catholic ritual practice widespread through Europe, have in most countries succumbed to time and disappeared from view rather than being inventoried by local Cromwells. Still, it is clear that, for Catholics, birth was not only personally and religiously significant, but a powerful religious and political metaphor – much as it was for Protestants. While Mary Fissell has catalogued the cultural and political meanings of birth as metaphor in Protestant England, scholars are beginning to study, for example, phenomena such as the sixteenth-century Franciscan Johann Nas’ publicizing of monstrous births in Lutheran territories as a means of attacking Protestantism.7 As these examples show, early modern childbirth was a contested cultural terrain
Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico 215 whose investigation can illuminate the nature and tensions of conversion, reform, medical practice, and popular piety, particularly as related to the embodied experiences of women.
Childbirth practices, healing, and piety in New Spain before Trent Despite its ubiquity and undeniable significance to the lives of women, childbirth is a subject only recently studied in any depth by early modern historians, in large part because the sources for its study are relatively rare. This is particularly true for early colonial New Spain, where administrative and licensing records relating to childbirth are extremely rare compared to those relating to other aspects of healing practice. Spain controlled medicine more tightly than other European countries through university chairs and the protomedicato or medical regulatory board; indeed, the Spanish kingdoms were at the vanguard of medical regulation in the sixteenth century.8 Not surprisingly, then, the cabildo (municipal government) of Mexico City established its own protomedicato soon after the city’s establishment to examine and license both Spanish and indigenous practitioners (though the effect on the latter was arguably minimal).9 Notably, both male and female practitioners were included; thus, birth attendance was at least nominally within the mandate of the urban protomedicato in its early years. However, by the time the Royal Protomedicato was formally extended to New Spain in 1570, it had lost its responsibility for obstetrics, since Philip II had suspended its jurisdiction over midwives in 1567. Not until 1750 was there any effort to examine midwives, and the licensed midwives in the late colonial and early republican periods could be counted on one hand.10 Institutions of medical oversight thus leave few helpful records of midwifery or childbirth, and secular sources focussed on licensing, training, and judicial activities relating to midwives derive from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.11 Religious institutions arguably exercised a more significant role than municipal or royal bodies in medical oversight – and in the early colonial encounter among medical systems and beliefs. Indeed, the religious were at the forefront of the transmission of European medical knowledge. In fact, the missionary orders, rather than trained physicians, were probably responsible for the transmission of humoral theory to the colonies.12 The medical role of priests is not surprising, given that New Spain’s hospitals, established remarkably early in the sixteenth century, were created and staffed by the religious. Priestly healing practices arose in part out of Christian duty, in part because of chronic shortages of trained physicians. Saints’ patronage of particular diseases and medical manuals’ careful instructions for the use of prayer in healing blurred the boundaries between natural and supernatural medicine; the role of religious as medical men made these borders even more porous.13 In addition to engaging in the practice of medicine, friars and priests studied, assessed, and often condemned Central Mexican (Nahua) healing traditions and practices – while often adopting elements of the indigenous herbolary. Despite
216 Jacqueline Holler some commonalities and overlaps between European and Nahua medical beliefs, each healing system was intimately linked to the cosmology and religion of its originators. As a result, indigenous healers (titiçih) of both sexes were often regarded with suspicion by missionaries, and their practices were scrutinized and censured for diabolical tendencies.14 On the other hand, the boundaries and mutual distrust between healing communities should not be overstated, nor should the transmission of knowledge be regarded as monodirectional. Missionary friars treated people of all ethnicities, indigenous healers were sought after by Spaniards and occasionally licensed to perform care, and healer-midwives of African descent appear to have been common by the late sixteenth century. People of all castes proved willing to follow the indigenous practice of ingesting peyote to divine and to locate lost objects. In addition, as Linda Newson has pointed out, because indigenous people had familiarity with the properties of the American materia medica, their medicine was perceived to have some advantage even over that of the colonizers. In the colonial context, according to Martha Few, medical frameworks both borrowed from and strove against one another, “reflecting the same mestizaje process that occurred at other levels of culture.”15 This process should not be understood as a confrontation between “traditional” and “medical” practices in modern terms. While female indigenous titiçih were ritual specialists whose activities went well beyond birth attendance, so were midwives in the Spanish republic.16 While supernatural elements of indigenous healing may have been censured, natural healing practices were often respected. Few formal attempts were made to transform indigenous medical practices outside of the suppression of overtly “idolatrous” customs.17 By the end of the sixteenth century, over 60 Nahua medicines would be included in Farfán’s Tractado Breve de Medicina.18 The early colonial healing environment was thus marked by ambiguity. On one hand, indigenous healing was viewed with suspicion by authorities; on the other hand, Nahua medicines and practitioners were not only tolerated but embraced. And while both indigenous and non-indigenous practitioners were criticized for superstition, both healing traditions were intensely magical. Missionaries were aware of the dangers and potential misunderstandings this implied. For example, they expressed concern about the utility and dangers of corporeal relics in central Mexico, given their awareness of the body practices (including sacral uses of dead bodies) of the pre-contact religions of Mesoamerica. Too much overlap could lead to misunderstandings, misappropriations, and even diabolical inversions. But it was apparently impossible for missionaries to resist the appeal of relics as integral components of healing – and as tools of conversion. In Mexico City, according to the sixteenth-century Franciscan missionary and chronicler Jerónimo de Mendieta, supplying relics for childbirth was among the order’s responsibilities. In his Historia Eclesiástica Indiana, written in the late sixteenth century (unpublished until the nineteenth), he details how Not many, but a few adults wore the cord of our father Saint Francis until the brotherhood of it was instituted by Pope Sixtus V, and after that many
Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico 217 Indians used it.19 But Indian women used it in difficult labours; from the beginning of their Christianity they began with much faith and devotion to call for the cord of St Francis as a remedy, through which (this faith and devotion working through it) our Lord has used great mercy in this land, because there have been women who have suffered birth pains for one or two days without being able to give birth; and remembering it, sending to the monastery, and then putting it on, they have given birth and find themselves out of the danger in which they had been. I at least, in the more than forty years that I have seen this tested remedy used, have never known the cord to be used without having its effect.20 Childbirth relics or pseudo-relics, however makeshift, were therefore a feature of at least central New Spain from the early days of the colony. Missionaries’ promotion of (and indigenous people’s apparent enthusiasm for) such curatives had to coexist with both millennial desires for spiritual purity and pragmatic concerns about unruly popular piety. Well before the Mexican receipt of the Tridentine decrees, New Spain’s episcopal inquisitors attempted to restrain the illicit creation of relics and holy images, some of which were created and marketed for use in childbirth. For example, Martin Nesvig documents the mid-sixteenth-century censorship of a small-time seller with a business printing and peddling miniature images of the Virgin, for which he claimed efficacy in labour.21 These attempts to control the circulation and legitimacy of relics did not, however, translate into a general hostility towards the quasi-magical practices central to healing in a Catholic context – or to a desire to meddle in the birthing chamber itself. In the early colonial period, friars and bishops nonetheless exercised inquisitorial authority over the practice of both indigenous and non-indigenous healers. For example, in 1538 Bishop Juan de Zumárraga tried Ana, an indigenous healer from Xochimilco. Her practice had included divining using the technique of tossing corn kernels, using incense to heal, and feigning the removal of paper from the body of an afflicted person – which she eventually attributed to the Devil’s suggestions. She was sentenced to receive 100 lashes after public shaming and abjuration of her errors, a harsh punishment that Zumárraga explicitly likened to an object lesson.22 The bishop also scrutinized Spanish healers. In 1536, he tried the Spanish midwife Isabel de Morales, resident in Mexico City, who came to Zumárraga’s attention through her connection with an African slave whom Morales and other women paid to cast spells. Questioned about her own practices, Morales reported that she used oils and “other things useful to birthing women” in her healing work. But she also used a variety of incantations, both for birthing women and for women with womb or stomach ailments, saying: In the name of the father and the son and the Holy Ghost; Saint Mary gave birth to other child and no more; that child lived, and will live forever. Thus, as this is truly and true, I remove from you all fatigue and all illness.23
218 Jacqueline Holler In addition, when she used a dark-handled knife to excise lepras (leprosy lesions or leishmaniasis) on women, her surgical technique was augmented by sympathetic magic. Isabel would first use her knife to cut thread and dry herbs, and would chant: “as I am cutting these dry herbs, so I dry up this illness.” Finally, Morales treated many children for the evil eye, including those of some of Mexico City’s most distinguished citizens. Morales’ reported incantations and other elements of her healing practice were judged superstitious, and the Spanish midwife was sentenced to a month of reclusion – a light sentence, but the only one handed down to a midwife in any of the cases examined here. In sentencing Morales, the episcopal inquisitor referred scathingly to her treatment of children, saying that she had treated many children for the evil eye “without knowledge of medicine, nor treating the illness the way it should be treated according to medicine in cases of evil eye.” This statement is noteworthy for two reasons. First, Morales was condemned not for believing in the evil eye, but for lacking adequate knowledge. This was a stance typical of sixteenth-century medical men, who did not deny occult or supernatural disease causation, but rather distinguished themselves from the unlettered (including female practitioners) through arguing that their training enabled them to comprehend the nature of an ailment.24 Not only Morales’ superstition, but her lack of medical knowledge and incursion into the territory of the physician were thus criticized. Significantly, however, her actual birth attendance was virtually absent from the case and exempt from condemnation. Zumárraga was able to pass judgment on both religious orthodoxy and correct medical practice, but stopped short of the birthing bed. Indeed, had Morales not come to inquisitorial attention through her connection to a slave accused of witchcraft, she might have used her own incantations and remedies without incident for many years. Still, as Isabel de Morales’ case suggests, Zumárraga was interested both in converting new Christians and reforming the old ones. Indeed, despite the notoriety of his trials of indigenous notables, the vast majority of his 152 inquisitorial proceedings involved Europeans, with only 19 cases clearly involving indigenous people.25 For Zumárraga, as for many of the sixteenth-century Franciscans, the reform of Spaniards was a co-requisite for the conversion of the indigenous. His desire to impose high Christian standards of behaviour led to repeated conflict not only with the local Spanish elite, but with important members of his own cathedral chapter.26 Thus Zumárraga’s spirit of “Evangelical Catholicism”27 produced a more arguably reformist spirit than the post-Trent cases. Aside from Morales’ case, however, there were few prosecutions of recognized midwives until the seventeenth century, when investigations would be conducted under the auspices of a formal Inquisition tribunal constituted precisely as the church reoriented itself in the aftermath of the Council of Trent.
Mexico’s Holy Office, Trent, the “reform” of female superstition, and midwives Because of the lack of secular oversight of midwives in colonial Latin America, the records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition constitute the largest body
Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico 219 of documentation for the study of midwifery and childbirth practices in the colony. Scholars have thus examined Inquisition cases involving midwives, but largely for the purpose of studying witchcraft and popular culture rather than midwifery per se, though Noemi Quezada includes some midwives in her study of 71 healers tried by the Inquisition.28 Nora Jaffary has drawn from Inquisition records to study pregnancy, birth, abortion, and infanticide from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century.29 The activities of the Inquisition with regard to midwives, however, remain poorly understood. The Mexican Inquisition has often been described as Tridentine, with good reason. Philip II, who established it, was a partisan of reform. A year after the conclusion of Trent in 1563, the king ordered that its decrees be obeyed as law in all of his kingdoms. Only seven years later, he mandated the creation of two tribunals of the Holy Office for America: one in Lima, with jurisdiction over much of South America, and the other in Mexico City, whose jurisdiction came to encompass the territory currently occupied by the American Southwest, Mexico, Central America, and the Philippines. The establishment of Mexico’s Holy Office was part of a larger consolidation of the colonial church that included three sixteenth-century provincial councils, the transfer of power from regular to secular clergy, and the implementation of Tridentine reforms. The first Inquisitor-General, Pedro Moya de Contreras, is emblematic of this consolidation, having served as both Archbishop of Mexico (1573–1591) and, briefly, Viceroy (1584–1585). In 1585, while holding the offices of Viceroy, Archbishop, Captain-General, and Inquisitor-General, he presided over the Third Provincial Council, the source of canon law for the Mexican church until 1918.30 Called to adapt and translate Tridentine decrees for the Mexican scene, the council focussed primarily on what was termed “the reform of customs,” which Jorge Trasloheros has described as having a particular meaning in New Spain. This term referred to “good life and customs” among the laity and “good example” among the religious; to church “order and decorum,” which reflected everything material that supported the divine cult; and to solidarity among the clergy.31 While both the establishment of the Inquisition and the Third Provincial Council expressed a commitment to reform, both faced roadblocks and oppositions. Among them was the consistent and widespread belief that European rules required significant adaptation to the colonial realities of New Spain. For example, medical doctors petitioned the Third Provincial Council in outraged opposition to a provision (actually a papal motu proprio) that required them to admonish the sick to seek confession and to discontinue treatment if written proof of confession were not obtained.32 The council concluded after many such petitions and complaints – but not with a clear triumph, since no printed copy of the council’s orders was forthcoming, and within New Spain there was controversy about whether the council had received papal approbation.33 As late as 1623, wrangling continued. The Inquisition’s reformist zeal faced even greater obstacles. In contrast to the earlier monastic and episcopal inquisitions, the newly constituted tribunal formally exempted Indians, leaving full authority with regard to indigenous people in the hands of the bishops.34 Though firm
220 Jacqueline Holler assertions are hindered by the disparate and incomplete quality of episcopal archives, there is little evidence that episcopal authorities subjected indigenous people to intense religious scrutiny or reformative efforts; rather, their efforts focussed on entrenching the Christian marital and sexual regime, not to mention engaging in ongoing disputes over jurisdiction with the religious orders.35 Moreover, even in dealing with the non-indigenous population, the Inquisition was hindered by the vastness of its territorial jurisdiction, its minimal staffing, and the diversity of the population of New Spain. While heresy was ostensibly at the heart of the Inquisition’s work (and motto), trials for heresy were a much smaller proportion of the total caseload than in Spain, and even in its major and most repressive trials, such as the 1598 trial of the Carvajals, the Holy Office retained a sense of limits.36 Much of the Mexican tribunal’s work involved policing the quotidian errors of a Christian population. In addition to proceeding against a dizzying variety of sexual, marital, and religious errors, the Holy Office issued repeated edicts delineating and condemning popular beliefs and practices deemed superstitious and/or potentially heretical. Many of those tried for superstition were women, who accounted for about 30 per cent of suspects and 16 per cent of trials. Ignored complaints and abandoned trials were common.37 Reformist zeal thus contended constantly with pragmatism. One last example of how reform was challenged by local conditions – and the implications for childbirth culture – can be seen in the case of relics. After the creation of the Congregation of Rites and Ceremonies in 1588, churches’ relics were assessed and given red seals of authenticity. Unfortunately for the reformist impulse, however, the market for relics was exploding at the same moment, driven in part by the relative paucity of relics in Mexico, and in part by the Tridentine mobilization of miracles in response to Protestant assertions of their cessation. Celebration of Catholicism’s “superior thaumaturgic capacities” coexisted with the desire to control superstition.38 In New Spain, despite the presence of some corporeal and contact relics in churches, the term “relic” came more often to signify printed images considered to possess holy powers. This conflation of relics and images was a medieval inheritance, but it endured in New Spain.39 By the seventeenth century, according to William Taylor’s recent volume on images and shrines in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico, many such images circulated, among them Mater Dolorosa pictures that were considered particularly efficacious in childbirth.40 The Inquisition was attentive to the marketing of false relics, such as the “little cakes of St Teresa” dealt with in the later seventeenth century, but printed images overwhelmed the Holy Office’s ability to control manifestations of popular piety and entrepreneurialism; to some degree, the Inquisition’s secrecy was defeated by the publicity of print, with effects for the many women who were able to access the comfort of contact with the Virgin in their hour of need.41 In New Spain, female superstition was nonetheless a regular target of Catholic reformers. As Raquel Martín Sánchez has pointed out, roughly half of the 2264 women brought for investigation before the Mexican Inquisition were accused of some form of superstition.42 A small number of these women were named as
Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico 221 midwives; others were generalized healers or simply “women” who, when one reads their cases, turn out to have delivered babies without being assigned the title of partera. Uncovering every woman tried by the Inquisition who engaged in healing practice or attended births is a laborious task to say the least. In the 1620s, at least eight denunciations (some of them involving multiple midwives) involved such women, almost all of whom were engaged in childbirth practices aimed at hastening the third stage of labour, or the delivery of the placenta. Some of those denounced used relics for this purpose, while others placed a slipper on the labouring woman’s belly.43 Almost all of these women were from Nueva Vizcaya, today the state of Sinaloa, a far-flung settler and missionary colony in Mexico’s north. Inquisition records thus reveal the presence of a surprising number of midwives in particular locations, and the concomitant impossibility of exerting any kind of reformative control over childbirth. The lack of any kind of licensing regime clearly increased the number of women who practised midwifery at least occasionally. For example, in April 1627, women in the village of San Miguel de Culiacan denounced five midwives, of whom at least four were currently practising. Given the small size of the community in question, one can surmise that there were many women who practised midwifery, if not on a full-time basis. The midwives denounced to the Holy Office were accused of a range of superstitious practices, from spells and incantations to palm reading to misuse of relics. Fairly typical of their confessions and denunciations was the self-denunciation of Costanza de Maldonado, who confessed that at the birth of her own children and at the births she had attended, she had removed relics “from the neck” of the labouring woman to ensure the rapid delivery of the placenta. Presumably, the relics in question were images that offered protection when the foetus was being born, but that were thereafter considered to hinder the expulsion of the afterbirth; unfortunately, no further detail elaborating on this was offered to confirm this presumption, in large part because not one of these cases was pursued.44 Mexico’s Holy Office did investigate cases involving misuse of relics or false relics; indeed, this was precisely the kind of information that should have attracted Inquisitors’ attention. There is nonetheless no evidence that any of these denunciations was investigated. Lest we assume that lack of interest can be attributed to the remoteness of the region from which the aforementioned denunciations came, another 1620s case involved a midwife in Mexico City who was denounced for her sideline in palm reading, which she claimed allowed her to “divine many things both present and future.”45 Her case also went without follow-up, so proximity or the lack of it cannot wholly explain the Holy Office’s action or inaction in these cases. Conversely, in 1653, when the mixed-race (mestiza) midwife Isabel Hernández was denounced for manufacturing husband-taming spells and powders and for wrenching the teeth from a dead woman to use them as relics, she was quickly ordered transported 120 kilometres to Mexico City for trial. Her belongings were sequestered, she was deposited in the home of a local notable for safekeeping, and she was subjected to in-depth questioning, including an interrogation in which her herbs and medicines were shown to her and she was asked to
222 Jacqueline Holler enumerate their nature and uses. Despite her admissions, Isabel’s lively and informed discussion of her substantial mestizo/hybrid medical toolkit exonerated her.46 In common with the other women studied here, Isabel was questioned only about the powders and medicines she administered to control husbands, and not about her birth practices per se. Indeed, the degree of inquisitorial reticence in the case is striking, given the claims made by witnesses. Hernández had concealed from a father the pregnancy of his daughter and had taken her to Hernández’s home for the delivery of the illegitimate child. She had repeatedly offered powders for husband-taming and attracting men; and she had wrenched the teeth from one of her deceased clients “for relics, because the dead woman was a saint.”47 The Holy Office’s relative inattention to midwives – and exoneration of Isabel Hernández despite incriminating evidence against her – demands explanation. How should one understand the Inquisition’s leniency towards midwives and reticence about birth practices? One answer lies in the Inquisition’s recognition of the need for some form of health care for the vast plebeian population without access to learned physicians. There was a profound shortage of licensed medical practitioners in the Americas, not least because medical degrees only began to be issued in the seventeenth century, despite the much earlier establishment of universities in Mexico City and Lima. Many of those who called themselves “médicos” were actually unlettered empirical healers.48 As a result, as Noemi Quezada has argued, inquisitors’ approach to curanderos was contradictory: on the one hand, their services were required as experts on the human body, as able surgeons, and as superior herbalists; on the other hand, they were harshly repressed for the magical part of their treatment, which frequently contained hallucinogens and which the authorities, according to the Western world view of the time, viewed as superstitious.49 Faced with the need for healers, the Holy Office often declined to push its reform agenda unless magical practices tended to diabolism. Of Quezada’s 71 cases, “harsh repression” came to only 19: one curandero appeared in an auto de fé, with one exiled, two publicly humiliated, and 14 publicly or privately reprimanded.50 On the other hand, Kathryn McKnight’s work on African-descent healers in Cartagena de Indias suggests that Cartagenan Inquisitors could and did impose harsh punishments on African men who engaged in folk healing that went beyond the pale – that is, that moved beyond herbs to activities that smacked of communion with the Devil.51 Pragmatic and local considerations rather than unalloyed reformist zeal made the difference. But understanding midwives simply as healers, however, may obscure the particularly gendered aspects of the response to midwives of New Spain’s Holy Office. In both indigenous and European societies, midwives were a recognized group of specialist healers who might engage in multiple forms of healing, but who had a special mastery of birth. Silent in much colonial documentation, midwives were nonetheless noteworthy women who were not yet stereotyped as
Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico 223 “ignorant matronas” as they would become in the nineteenth century.52 Generally referred to as parteras (but sometimes as comadres), they were, with nuns and beatas, the only women regularly identified by their trade (oficio) in Inquisition records, despite the fact that many of them were unlettered mixed-race plebeians and, as healers, empirics. They were also, to some degree, professionals. Judging from the cases studied here, they tended to be illiterate; only a few signed their names with great facility, suggesting full literacy. Still, most seem to have been poor, and to have performed births without expectation of cash payment, as was the case of Isabel de Morales, whom witnesses described as engaging in midwifery not for money, but “for friendship.”53 Midwives thus performed a vital service that was understood, in large part, as an act of Christian charity – which may explain why a good number of them engaged in other more lucrative forms of healing, in addition to selling powders and remedies. Even this was treated with leniency, suggesting that Inquisitors may have viewed the moneymaking activities of midwives as a necessary or understandable corollary to their childbirth practice. When Isabel Hernández explained that she sold useless magical powders because she needed money, this confession earned no condemnation from the Inquisitors. As valued community members, midwives were the only women given particular licence to administer a sacrament, that of baptism, and this occasionally blurred into religious status, as was the case of a mulatta midwife and beata denounced in 1627.54 Finally, midwives were also the only women with a recognized judicial role, serving as expert witnesses in cases of marital non-consummation and other cases where examination of women’s bodies was necessary to establish non-virginity or sexual assault. The Inquisition itself relied on midwives’ testimony, as was demonstrated in a 1557 diabolism case involving a 16-year-old girl whom the Inquisitors suspected of illicit congress with a local notable. As was typical, a midwife – in this case 58-year-old Leonor Velez – was called to examine the young woman, pronouncing her a virgin. Later, however, the girl claimed to be pregnant, so Velez was again called to examine her. Having done so, Velez explained: I undressed her and looked at her and examined her belly, and I did not find in her any sign of pregnancy other than that she is missing her period. And to all of the understanding of this deponent, Doña María is not pregnant, nor has she been. And if she was, then it could have been nothing more than that she appeared that way. And this deponent saw and understood it for having been and being a midwife, having served in this profession.55 Unlike most women, the midwife could be confident in her empirical knowledge of women’s bodies. Indeed, testimony from accused women suggests that midwives understood their authority in the birthing chamber – and the Inquisitors’ lack thereof. Interrogated by Zumárraga in the 1530s and asked whether she treated people’s illnesses, Isabel de Morales replied that she “heals women in childbirth.”56 Thus, Morales recognized where she could stand on safe ground: in the feminine realm of birth attendance. In none of the cases examined here
224 Jacqueline Holler did Inquisitors challenge women’s gynaecological knowledge or midwifery practice; indeed, not one of the denunciations relating to childbirth was followed up. Similarly, in none of the cases discussed here did Inquisitors enquire about abortion – surprisingly, in the case of Isabel Hernández, given that she possessed a powerful emmenagogue and had described using medicines to stimulate the labour of an unmarried girl.57 Indeed, the only reference to abortion I have found for the early seventeenth century concerns a woman who denounced herself for seeking an abortion for her daughter – from an indigenous man, not from a midwife. This association between abortion and male practitioners was also found in Counter-Reformation Italy.58 Though allegations against midwives generally emerged in response to edicts concerning superstition, the Inquisition treated these women and their childbirth practices particularly leniently. The actions of the Holy Office suggest not merely pragmatic tolerance of midwives, but respect for their status as licit practitioners and their knowledge of women’s bodies. Moreover, though the practice of early modern midwives in general and Mexican ones in particular was to modern eyes clearly magical, one must be careful of creating a false dichotomy between “magical” plebeians and “medical science” – between men of science and “ignorant and dangerous” women – in the sixteenth and even seventeenth centuries.59 As Yvonne Petry has argued for the mid-sixteenth century, the characteristic early modern medical viewpoint may have regarded popular beliefs with some scepticism, “but also functioned within a medical and legal framework that accepted the reality of a magical worldview.” Nowhere was this truer than in understandings of conception and birth.60 Considering the foregoing and the ubiquity of childbirth as a female experience, we can read the effects of Tridentine reform on women’s lives in new ways. New Spain’s midwives were rarely investigated by the Inquisition; and on the rare occasions when they were denounced and interrogated, they were generally questioned about non-midwifery activities. The evidence suggests, in fact, that their office and knowledge were respected by the Holy Office, and that, to a great extent, Inquisitors honoured the curtain drawn across the entrance to the birthing chamber itself. Frances Dolan has argued that, in Protestant lands, “the [Catholic] household was the crucial site of both observance and resistance,” its feminine spaces holding a place for concealed Catholic observance.61 Her plea for consideration of the “lost spaces” of Catholicism in the Reformation may not be directly relevant to New Spain; but attention to the interaction of reform with feminine and feminized spaces is applicable to childbirth. If, as I have suggested, Inquisitors hesitated to pull back the curtain of the birthing chamber, deferring to feminine knowledge in this sole area, this small space is significant. It becomes likely that while childbirth had a European Reformation, in Mexico at least it was virtually untouched by the Counter-Reformation. This may have implications for our understandings of women’s religiosity, since much of what we know about Tridentine “women’s religion” is drawn from studies of women who were generally childless: beatas, nuns, and mystics. In high-fertility regions such as New Spain – where some women who appeared before the Holy Office described seven, eight, or more births with the same midwife – the birthing
Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico 225 chamber may have been the site of the most intense and frequent connections among women, and between women and the sacred. This is a call to attentiveness to childbirth as a religious experience and religion as bodily practice – and, for the historian of women, a frustrating reminder that a curtain lies across much of what we know.
Notes 1 For a summary that remains largely valid despite the passage of time, see M. WiesnerHanks, “Women and the Reformations: Reflections on Recent Research,” History Compass 2, 2004, 1–27; important works published since include B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; J. Hillman, Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014; S.Laqua-O’Donnell, Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 2 R. Browett, “Touching the Holy: The Rise of Contact Relics in Medieval England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 68, no. 3, July 2017, 493–509. 3 D. Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England, London: Bloomsbury, 2000, p. 250. 4 For images and discussion, see “Wellcome MS. 632: Heavenly Protection During Childbirth in Late Medieval England,” 25 October 2015, http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2015/10/wellcome-ms-632-heavenly-protection-during-childbirthin-late-medieval-england/ 5 B. Cassidy, “A Relic, Some Pictures, and the Mothers of Florence in the Late Fourteenth Century,” Gesta 30, no. 2, 1991, 93. 6 M. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 7 J. Spinks, “Monstrous Births and Counter-Reformation Visual Polemics: Johann Nas and the 1569 Ecclesia Militans,” Sixteenth Century Journal 40, no. 2, 2009, 335–363. 8 L. Newson, “Medical Practice in Early Colonial Spanish America: A Prospectus,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 25, no. 3, 2006, 370. 9 J.R. Andrews and R. Hassig, “Editors’ introduction,” in ed. and trans. J.R. Andrews and R. Hassig Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions that Today Live Among the Indians Native to this New Spain, 1629, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984, p. 32. 10 L.M. Hernández Saenz, Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico, 1800–1870, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018, p. 89; J.T. Lanning, “Government and Obstetrics,” in J.J. TePaske (ed.) The Royal Protomedicato: The Regulation of the Medical Profession in the Spanish Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 298–324. 11 Lanning, “Government and Obstetrics,” pp. 298–324; L. Penyak, “Midwives and Legal medicine in Mexico, 1740–1846,” Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 1, no. 3, 2002, 251-66; L. Penyak, “Obstetrics and the Emergence of Women in Mexico’s Medical Establishment,” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 60, no. 1, 2003, 59–85. 12 Newson, “Medical practice,” p. 377. 13 Andrews and Hassig, “Editors’ introduction,” p. 32. 14 E.A. Polanco, “‘I Am Just a tiçitl:’ Decolonizing Central Mexican Nahua Female Healers, 1535–1635,” Ethnohistory 65, no. 3, 2018, 449. 15 M. Few, “Medical Mestizaje and Pregnancy in Colonial Guatemala,” in D. Bleichmar, P. De Vos, K. Huffine, and K. Sheehan (eds) Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 133.
226 Jacqueline Holler 16 Polanco argues that the term “partera” (midwife) is a colonizing one and a poor analogue for the tiçitl, whose role included a variety of natural and supernatural healing activities. However, Spanish and casta midwives also engaged in a similar breadth of activities. Indeed, few uses the term “ritual specialist” to describe colonial midwives. Polanco, “I Am Just a tiçitl,” 449; Few, “Medical Mestizaje,” 133. 17 Newson, “Medical Practice,” 378. 18 A. Megged, “Magic, Popular Medicine and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Mexico: The Case of Isabel de Montoya,” Social History 19, no. 2, 1994, 194. 19 The Confraternity of the Cord was established in Assisi in 1585 and extended to all Franciscan churches in 1587. 20 Fray G. de Mendieta, Historia Eclesiástica Indiana, Mexico: Antigua Librería, 1870, 331; translation by the author. 21 M.A. Nesvig, Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 22 Polanco, “I Am Just a tiçitl,” 449. 23 Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico) (AGN), Inquisición. 1536. Volume 38, exp. 2, ff. 50–110. Proceso fecho por el sancto officio de ynquisicion y el doctor Raphael de Cervantes fiscal en su nombre contra Marta esclava de Pedro Perez/y contra la Moralla, partera. 24 Y. Petry, “‘Many Things Surpass Our Knowledge:’ An Early Modern Surgeon on Magic, Witchcraft and Demonic Possession,” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 1, 2012, 50. 25 J. Klor de Alva, “Colonizing Souls: The Failure of the Indian Inquisition and the Rise of Penitential Discipline,” in M.E. Perry and A.J. Cruz (eds) Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 4–5. 26 See J. Holler, “A Dishonest Archdeacon before Trent: Juan Negrete and Catholic Reform in New Spain,” Global Reformations: A Reader (Routledge, forthcoming). 27 W. Jones, “Evangelical Catholicism in Early Colonial Mexico: An Analysis of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga’s Doctrina Cristiana,” The Americas 23, no. 4, 423–432; H.-J. Prien, Christianity in Latin America, trans. S. Buckwalter and B. McNeil, Leiden: Brill, 2013, 93. 28 L. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003; M. Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. 29 N. Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 30 S. Poole, “Opposition to the Third Mexican Council,” The Americas 25, no. 2, 1968, 111–159. 31 J. Trasloheros, “El tribunal eclesiástico y los indios en el Arzobispado de México, hasta 1630,” Historia Mexicana 51, no. 3, 2002, 489. 32 Poole, “Opposition to the Third Mexican Council,” p. 142. For several articles on the operations of canon law in colonial Spanish America, see The Americas 73, no. 1, January 2016. 33 Poole, “Opposition to the Third Mexican Council,” p. 157. 34 Trasloheros, “El tribunal,” 487. 35 Systematic study of episcopal oversight of indigenous people has been hindered by the untimely death of Roberto Moreno de los Arcos. See his “New Spain’s Inquisition for Indians from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century,” in Cruz and Perry, Cultural Encounters, 24–36. Left under ordinary jurisdiction, the indigenous might be subjected to inquisitorial proceedings, but were arguably subjected more readily to the authority of the confessional. See Klor de Alva, “Colonizing souls” pp. 4–5; Trasloheros, “El tribunal,” 487.
Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico 227 36 Margaret Mott, “Leonor de Cáceres and the Mexican Inquisition,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 1, 2001, 81–98. 37 S. Alberro, La actividad del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Nueva España, 1571–1700, Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología, 1981, 130. 38 A. Walsham, “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 4, 2003, 780. 39 J. Dillenberger, Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth-Century Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 13. 40 W. Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders: Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 255. 41 Ibid., 371. 4 2 R. Martín Sánchez, Hechiceras en la Colima novohispana: En busca de una genealogía feminina de la práctica médica, Colima: Universidad de Colima, 2005, p. 22. 43 For slippers, see AGN, Inquisición, 1626, Volume 360, 1st part, f. 161, and 2nd part, f. 483. 4 4 This analysis is supported by medieval English birthing belt stories found in hagiography, which attest to the belts’ ability to promote delivery or, in some cases (such as repeated spontaneous abortions), to prevent premature labour. See Hilary Powell, “The ‘Miracle of Childbirth’: The Portrayal of Parturient Women in Medieval Miracle Narratives,” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 4, 2012, 795–811. 45 AGN, Inquisición, 1626. Volume 360, 1st part, f. 7. Mariana de la Cruz contra Magdalena Cabeza de Vaca. 46 AGN, Inquisición. 1652. Volume 561, 1st and 2nd parts, Exp. 6. Proceso causal criminal contra Ysabel Hernandez biuda natural de Gueichiapa de oficio partera i curandera, vezina de Tlaxcala obpado de la Puebla. See also Holler, “Of Powders and Pregnancy: The Counter-Reformation Mexican Inquisition Takes on Female Superstition,” in Global Reformations: A Reader (Routledge, forthcoming). For a fuller discussion of the case, see J. Holler, “A Tlaxcalan Midwife’s Toolkit: The Body, Medicine, Childbirth and Contact Zone in Early to Mid-Colonial New Spain,” in J. Jajszczok and A. Musiał, eds., The Body in History, Culture, and the Arts. London: Routledge, 2019, 27—39. 47 AGN, Inquisición, Proceso causa criminal contra Ysabel Hernandez, f. 540. 48 Newson, “Medical Practice,” 375. 49 N. Quezada, “The Inquisition’s Repression of Curanderos,” in Cruz and Perry, Cultural Encounters, 38. 50 Ibid., 41. 51 K.J. McKnight, “En su tierra lo aprendió: An African curandero’s defense before the Cartagena Inquisition,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1, 2003, 78. 52 L.M. Hernández, Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico, 1800–1870, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018, 90. 53 “Por Amistad,” AGN, Inquisición, Proceso … contra la Moralla, partera, f. 104. 54 AGN, Inquisición, 1626, Volume 360, 1st part, f. 161. Contra Inés, mulata que trae habito del Carmen. 55 AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 35, Exp. 1, ff. 1–385. 1557–1571. Proceso contra Francisco del Valle Marroquín y María Campos, su mujer, por brujos, tener pacto con el demonio y vivir amancebados, ff. 108, 148, 148v. 56 “Que cura a las paridas.” AGN, Inquisición, Proceso … contra la Moralla, partera, f. 54v. 57 Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico, 33–34. 58 J. Christopoulos, “Abortion and the Confessional in Counter-Reformation Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 65, no. 2, 2012, 456. 59 Polanco, “I Am Just a tiçitl,” 449. 60 Petry, “Many Things,” 50. 61 F.E. Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4, 2002, 652.
228 Jacqueline Holler
Bibliography Published primary sources Mendieta, G., Historia Eclesiástica Indiana, Mexico: Antigua Librería, 1870.
Secondary sources Alberro, S., La actividad del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Nueva España, 1571–1700, Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología, 1981. Andrews, J.R. and R. Hassig, “Editors’ introduction,” in ed. and trans. J.R. Andrews and R. Hassig Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions that Today Live Among the Indians Native to this New Spain, 1629, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984, 32. Browett, R., “Touching the Holy: The Rise of Contact Relics in Medieval England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 68, no. 3, July 2017, 493–509. Cassidy, B., “A Relic, Some Pictures, and the Mothers of Florence in the Late Fourteenth Century,” Gesta 30, no. 2, 1991, 91–99. Christopoulos, J., “Abortion and the Confessional in Counter-Reformation Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 65, no. 2, 2012, 443–484. Diefendorf, B., From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Dillenberger, J., Images and Relics: Theological Perceptions and Visual Images in Sixteenth-Century Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dolan, F.E., “Gender and the ‘lost’ Spaces of Catholicism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4, 2002, 641–665. Few, M., “Medical Mestizaje and Pregnancy in Colonial Guatemala,” in D. Bleichmar, P. De Vos, K. Huffine, and K. Sheehan (eds) Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, 132–146. ———, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Fissell, M., Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hernández Saenz, L.M., Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico, 1800–1870, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018. Hillman, J., Female Piety and the Catholic Reformation in France, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014. Holler, Jacqueline. “A Tlaxcalan Midwife’s Toolkit: The Body, Medicine, Childbirth and Contact Zone in Early to Mid-Colonial New Spain,” in Justyna Jajszczok and Aleksandra Musiał, eds., The Body in History, Culture, and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2019): 27—39. Jaffary, N., Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Jones, W., “Evangelical Catholicism in early colonial Mexico: An analysis of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga’s Doctrina Cristiana,” The Americas 23, no. 4, 1967, 423–432. Klor de Alva, J., “Colonizing Souls: The Failure of the Indian Inquisition and the Rise of Penitential Discipline,” in M.E. Perry and A.J. Cruz (eds) Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 3–22.
Reforming birth in early colonial Mexico 229 Lanning, J.T., “Government and Obstetrics,” in J.J. TePaske (ed.) The Royal Protomedicato: The Regulation of the Medical Profession in the Spanish Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 298–324. Laqua-O’Donnell, S., Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Lewis, L., Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. McKnight, K. J., “En su tierra lo aprendió: An African Curandero’s Defense before the Cartagena Inquisition,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1, 2003, 63–84. Martín Sánchez, R., Hechiceras en la Colima novohispana: En busca de una genealogía feminina de la práctica médica, Colima: Universidad de Colima, 2005. Megged, A., “Magic, Popular Medicine and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Mexico: The Case of Isabel de Montoya,” Social History 19, no. 2, 1994, 189–207. Moreno de los Arcos, R., “New Spain’s Inquisition for Indians from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in M.E. Perry and A.J. Cruz (eds) Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 24–36. Mott, M., “Leonor de Cáceres and the Mexican Inquisition,” 62, no. 1, 2001, 81–98. Nesvig, M.A., Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Newson, L., “Medical Practice in Early Colonial Spanish America: A Prospectus,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 25, no. 3, 2006, 367–391. Penyak, L., “Midwives and Legal Medicine in Mexico, 1740–1846,” Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 1, no. 3, 2002, 251–266. ———, “Obstetrics and the Emergence of Women in Mexico’s Medical Establishment,” The Americas: A quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 60, no. 1, 2003, 59–85. Petry, Y., ‘Many Things Surpass our knowledge:’ An Early Modern Surgeon on Magic, Witchcraft and Demonic Possession,” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 1, 2012, 47–64. Polanco, E.A.., “‘I Am Just a tiçitl:’ Decolonizing Central Mexican Nahua Female Healers, 1535–1635,” Ethnohistory 65, no. 3, 2018, 441–463. Poole, S., “Opposition to the Third Mexican Council,” The Americas 25, no. 2, 1968, 111–159. Powell, H., “The ‘Miracle of Childbirth:’ The Portrayal of Parturient Women in Medieval Miracle Narratives,” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 4, 2012, 795–811. Prien, H.-J., Christianity in Latin America, trans. S. Buckwalter and B. McNeil, Leiden: Brill, 2013. Quezada, N., “The Inquisition’s Repression of Curanderos,” in M.E. Perry and A.J. Cruz (eds) Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 37–57. Spinks, J., “Monstrous Births and Counter-Reformation Visual Polemics: Johann Nas and the 1569 Ecclesia Militans,” Sixteenth Century Journal 40, no. 2, 2009, 335–363. Taylor, W., Theater of a Thousand Wonders: Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Trasloheros, J., “El tribunal eclesiástico y los indios enel Arzobispado de México, hasta 1630,” Historia Mexicana 51, no. 3, 2002, 485–516.
230 Jacqueline Holler Walsham, A., “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 4, 2003, 779–815. Webb, D., Pilgrimage in Medieval England, London: Bloomsbury, 2000, p. 250. Wellcome Library, “Wellcome MS. 632: Heavenly Protection During Childbirth in Late Medieval England,” 25 October 2015, http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2015/10/ wellcome-ms-632-heavenly-protection-during-childbirth-in-late-medieval-england/ Wiesner-Hanks, M., “Women and the Reformations: Reflections on Recent Research,” History Compass 2, 2004, 1–27.
13 The Venetian Jewish household as a multireligious community in early modern Italy Federica Francesconi
Following the 1492 expulsion from Spain and the emigration of Jews forcibly converted in Portugal in 1497, Jews and New Christians were on the move throughout the Mediterranean. They settled and created networks especially on ttoman the eastern coasts in port cities such as Istanbul and Salonica under the O Empire, whose other Jewish subjects had already settled in the Balkans and North Africa. In this context, especially since the mid-sixteenth century, Venice and its active port became a notable pole of attraction for New Christians from the Iberian Peninsula – especially for Crypto-Jews interested in the possibility of reverting or converting to Judaism in the ghetto.1 Sephardic mercantile families who settled in Italian port cities after expulsion offer an interesting case study. Their houses hosted Jewish, Muslim, and Christian co-workers, servants, and slaves, and thus became unusual crossroads for multireligious communities in Catholic Italy. This essay is a preliminary investigation of apparently anonymous women who lived in these Jewish households, usually at the bottom of the social structure as servants and slaves, in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice. Recent historiography has challenged both early modern history and Reformation studies by attributing greater significance to the 1492 Jewish expulsion. As Nicholas Terpstra emphasizes, it was the first example on a national scale of the distinctly Reformation drive to purify an entire society of unbelievers and purge it from heresy. Within decades, religious groups other than Jews, including Dutch Anabaptists, Italian Calvinists, English Catholics, and Bohemian Hussites were also forcibly removed from their communities or voluntarily decided to leave. They often constituted new communities which exercised the same principles of exclusiveness, purification, and purgation that had characterized the communities within which they had been marginalized or from which they had been rejected.2 Reformation movements and religious communities of faith, considered heretical within the Catholic worlds, challenged Venice, although not enough to make the city into a Protestant one. In the sixteenth century, Venice was one of the major Italian centres of Reformation thought, and suspected Christian Catholic heretics – Evangelists, Protestants, Anabaptists, Antitrinitarians, and Millenarians, men and women from all social classes – articulated their hopes for religious and political reform while also clashing on refusals and intriguing
232 Federica Francesconi prospects of change.3 Despite the harsh persecutions enacted by the Holy Office in the previous century, seventeenth-century Venice was still a melting pot in which Lutherans, Calvinists, Jews, Muslims, and travellers from different places and with different faiths and religious confessions met, intermingled, and questioned travel reports, ideas of ownership, freedom, and justice.4 This essay aims to show how the Venetian ghetto and its Jewish households were part of this context. The ghetto was conceived in 1516 as an enclosure to isolate Jews and keep them out of view. Yet, despite the harsh conditions Jews had to deal with because of segregation, it became socially, culturally, religiously, and ethnically one of the most fluid enclaves of the early modern world that sometimes upheld and sometimes ignored the rules regarding socioreligious separation. In 1541, due to a complaint from visiting Levantine Jewish merchants that there was insufficient room for them and their merchandise in the ghetto and their request for additional space, the Venetian government ordered the enlargement of the original ghetto to include the area known as the ghetto vecchio, located across the canal from the ghetto nuovo, the first area in the city to be ghettoized and assigned to the Jewish bankers and merchants. The original legislation stated that L evantine merchants were allowed to stay there only temporarily without their families, but, in fact, merchants settled in the ghetto vecchio with their families and servants for lengthy periods. In 1589, in order to relaunch its maritime commerce, the Venetian government issued a charter inviting both Ponentine (literally “western Jews” for Iberian Jews in Venice) and Levantine Jews to settle in Venice under the condition that they resided in the ghetto.5 Among them in their households were servants and enslaved peoples, some of Euro-African ancestry, and many early modern refugees, who had followed their surrogate families. Since Venice was not only a Mediterranean enclave but also a European capital city, this study also attempts to bridge Europe and the Mediterranean by looking at another historiographical paradigm that has recently emerged. In her Trickster Travels, Natalie Zemon Davis explores the vicissitudes and adventures of A l-Hasan Al-Wazzan (also known as Giovanni Leone and Leo Africanus), an eclectic diplomat and author who crossed religious divides, social boundaries, and empires and states in the sixteenth century. She asks, “Did the Mediterranean waters not only divide north from south, believer from infidel, but also link them through similar strategies of dissimulation, performance, translation, and the quest for peaceful enlightenment?”6 The women whose stories are told in this essay were not affluent individuals who belonged to high-level social classes; all were destitute, many were maidservants, others were enslaved, some were black-African. Yet all these women travelled through multireligious, multisocial, and multi-ethnic worlds and, as will emerge, they often adopted many of the strategies described by Zemon Davis. Moreover, in their lives they navigated through a broad range of experiences: displacement, adjustment, precariousness, protection, solidarity, seduction, rape, attempts at conversion, and even sincere reciprocal religious attraction, experiences mostly unknown to privileged and affluent men like Al-Wazzan and other remarkable individuals at the centre of recent historical investigations.7
The Venetian Jewish household 233 While also highlighting the impact of rabbinic attitudes on intimacy and cohabitation within the Jewish household, this essay focusses on the lives of these women analysed through the prisms of intrasocial relations, emotions, and affections; race, gender, and religious interchange; and seduction, illicit sex, and sexual abuse. The analysis is based on rabbinic literature, notarial wills, and community correspondence as well as records of trials and testimonies released in front of Jewish courts, civic magistracies, and the Venetian Inquisition.
Intrasocial relations, emotions, and affections As earlier historians have demonstrated, some of the most elusive conditions of the premodern world were the physical intimacy of the household, the lack of privacy, and the close cohabitation of householders with their servants.8 Those conditions were even more apparent in the Italian ghettos where spaces were more constrained. Lack of privacy could also create more intense relations and various forms of acculturation. Notarial culture was common in early modern Venice and provides evidence of these intrasocial relations. Like their Christian neighbours, Jews often dictated their marriage contracts, testaments, and business transactions to local notaries, among them wives and widows of middle- and upper-class Sephardic Jews.9 A few servants employed by these women followed this practice as well.10 At times, this physical proximity could foster the development of intense sentiments: affection, loyalty, and gratitude are expressed in wills and other notarial acts, including even those of servants such as Sara Pappo from Salonica and Pacientia Mora from the Levant. When Sara and Pacientia each became aware that they were suffering an extreme illness – we do not know their respective ages – they decided to dictate their wills and dispose of their modest patrimonies. These consisted of a few objects, ducats, and clothes, which they bequeathed to others, mainly to the members of their household families. Both women lived in the ghetto vecchio and turned to the same notary, the Venetian Andrea Calzavara, active from 1638 to 1686.11 Sara, daughter of Jacob Pappo and servant in the house of the late Salomon Tobi, decided to make her testament in July 1659. She had clearly spent many years of her life in Tobi’s house. Calzavara describes her as “nicknamed of (detta di) Salomon Tobi.” Indeed, within the society of the Venetian ghetto, Sara was considered a sort of adopted daughter of Salomon. It could also be the case that this servant took her master’s name as her own to strongly identify herself with the family, a frequent custom among the enslaved as well. In any case, this attestation has a perfect counterpart in Sara’s direct words, which express a familial attachment to Salomon and the other members of the Tobi family, in particular Colomba and Oro, Salomon’s wife and daughter, respectively.12 Pacientia Mora, servant in the house of Rachel Aboaf, a well-to-do Sephardic matron, dictated her last will to Abram Tedesco, a co-worker in the ghetto in September 1664, leaving her small patrimony to her householder and friends in the ghetto. She appears to have been more destitute than Sara. We do not know
234 Federica Francesconi Pacientia’s origins except for her self-declaration as “a Levantine Jewess,” something that together with her family name – Mora, “black or Moorish” – suggests roots from North Africa and possibly a past as someone enslaved who had converted to Judaism. Jonathan Schorsh has recently suggested that Jews who had been persecuted because of the Inquisition may have named their slaves with specific references to sufferance and endurance.13 Quite probably when she referred to her dear companion Simcha as “una mia compagna mora serva da Mugnon Tomas” (“to a companion of mine, a black servant at Mugnon Tomas’s”), she meant a black Jewish woman, since “mora” is not capitalized. Unlike Sara Pappo, Pacientia Mora appears reluctant to express her emotions. Hers is often a tacit affection expressed through bequests rather than words. Listing her bequests to Simcha, for example, Pacientia adds in the Venetian dialect that she regrets having nothing else to donate (ne atro ghe).14 Not surprisingly, this process was not only unidirectional: in some cases, mistresses left patrimonies to their servants. For example, in 1641, the widow Fiore Sacerdotte, being alone and without any relatives, decided to leave her patrimony to her servant Rachel Abensusem “for [her] good merits and service” and to assign minor bequests to Joseph Abensusem, Rachel’s husband, some other women she was acquainted with in the ghetto, and, significantly, “her women’s confraternity (compagnia).”15 Rabbinic literature also seems to have moved towards appreciation of affections within the household beyond close family relatives. Some Italian responsa and contracts from the second half of the sixteenth century show the inclusion of reciprocal expressions of affections and love between male and female householders and their female servants in the rabbinic discourses and prescriptive literature. For example, a contract from 1577 to 1578 stipulated between Reushav Moderchai, son of R. Gamliel of Foligno, and David, son of the late R. Moses Leshis, describes the duties of the mistress Simha, Reushav’s wife, regarding David’s young, orphaned granddaughter as follows: to nurture a young female servant “like a mother to her children” and have her instructed in Hebrew and Italian, and also in “all the needs of the house that are suitable to be known by every enlightened woman.”16 Looking at the eighteenth century, R. Isaac Lampronti’s Paqad Yizhak (Isaac’s Piety) includes a responsum regarding a 1727 case from Cento that involved a poor young Jewish servant in the house of Sara called Sarach (significantly, the name of a survivor of Egyptian immigrants in Jewish tradition) whose father, Jacob, lived far away.17 Sara raised Sarach in her house “as her own daughter” and left in her will a gift intended to be used at the time when Sarach would be married, “as is the custom that fits Jewish daughters.” Due to the young woman’s refusal to marry a groom chosen by the father and the subsequent breaking of the marriage contract, this statement and the following decision by local rabbi Reuben Yachia, endorsed by R. Raphael Solomom Levi of Finale Emilia and L ampronti himself, acknowledged the loving-kindness and charity of the mistress and the intimate bonds between Sarach and her masters (the mistress and her husband as well as their children) at the same level as a daughter following her father’s decisions.18 This body of evidence suggests the gradual construction
The Venetian Jewish household 235 of a system of affection within Italian rabbinic literature that originated in the acknowledgement of the reality of the Jewish household in the Italian ghettos, one that had important reflections in the development of jurisprudence. Sara Pappo’s own formulations demonstrate the development of a system of emotions within the Italian Jewish household whose boundaries were very porous because of the elusive conditions in the juxtaposition of spaces. Sara emphasizes her gratitude to Colomba “for once in sign of obedience and for the love she always treated me with,” and her love “to my dear Oro, the daughter of my aforementioned mistress whom I consider like my daughter.” Specific objects served as tools to communicate sentiments: Sara left to Oro “a pair of earrings à la tour with the pendants adorned by pearls,” adding “and if I could, I would leave her more [as] a demonstration of the great love I feel toward her.”19 Indeed, these objects reflected Sara’s private life and can thus convey something about her story, sentiments, and emotions, as well as her efforts to acquire, collect, and then preserve these jewels that passed from the status of merchandise to that of “individualized objects.”20 Pacientia Moro and Sara Pappo reveal strong attachments to their household families and particularly to their mistresses.21 Both their autonomy and their appropriation of their mistresses’ habits resulted in their control of their very modest wealth and the personal relationships revealed by their bequests.
Race, gender, and religious interchange In 1579, the Holy Office initiated a trial against Samuel Maestro, a “young Jewish black” (more correctly a mulatto), born in Ferrara in 1560 or 1561, son of Moses, a Jew from Ferrara and Luna, a black servant, possibly previously enslaved, who lived in the Venetian ghetto in the house of his uncle David Maestro.22 The Inquisitors were questioning Samuel’s religious affiliation. That black Jews were in fact present in the Venetian ghetto emerges from the trial, which resulted in the absolution of the young man. According to Samuel’s testimony and other Jews’ declarations, they were the children of Jewish men and black women. The Inquisitors had been alerted through the report of a Spanish merchant, Ferdinando de Las Infantes, on 30 April 1579. Las Infantes declared that he had met a “young black” in the ghetto and had reprimanded him for his conversion to Judaism. The explanation he received in response was that the choice had been made in order to ensure economic survival. Las Infantes also reported that another Jew told him that there were “many blacks” in the ghetto, all acquired in Istanbul, circumcised, converted to Judaism, and brought to Venice. 23 A well documented presence of black Africans in early modern Venice is that of servants or enslaved individuals in the houses of well-off Levantine merchants, where they intermingled with Jewish, Christian, and even Muslim co-workers. As we shall see, the lives of the members of these multireligious and multiracial communities were often shaped by gender, religious interchange, and race, and took unexpected paths. At the time, and not only in the Jewish world, the definitions
236 Federica Francesconi of “slave” and “servant” could be quite fluid. Someone could be a slave for a while and then turn into a servant after manumission, as the case of Polish Mariana analysed below shows. Beyond the work they carried out, servants and the enslaved also functioned as a symbol of status. Moreover, many Venetians probably shared the view of the local and revered rabbi and scholar Leone Modena that contemporary slaves were more like employees than possessions: “Nowadays, when our servants are held by us as comrades and not as slaves, as they were wont to term them in the past, we will not put them to harsh work.”24 In some cases, the religious affiliation of enslaved women and of servants was uncertain. For example, Filipa Maura, a 26-year-old black slave from Congo, was acquired around 1566–1567 by the New Christian merchant Filipe de Nis (alias Solomon Marcos), while he was on the island of São Tomé. From at least the sixteenth century in Portuguese Afro-Atlantic trade settlements like São Tomé, A frican women who had been enslaved and who worked in domestic households were incorporated within the emerging communities of Christianized Africans.25 Filipa followed Filipe and his family, who were C rypto-Jews, in long wanderings across Europe, to Cologne, Antwerp, and finally Venice, where they returned to Judaism while still formally professing themselves to be C hristians.26 As we know from the records of an Inquisitorial trial against Filipe in 1588, Filipa followed her householders, crossing religious worlds from animism to Christianity to Judaism, and, as we shall see shortly, back to Christianity when discovered by Venetian Inquisitors. We can argue that she adapted to what had to be a religious syncretism in which Jewish and C hristian components mingled and adjusted to each other.27 In Venice, the cohabitation of black Africans, Jews, and Christians generated anxieties regarding potential religious interchange that had a century-long trajectory in Catholic theology, starting with the prohibition against Christian servants living in Jewish households because of potential conversion and sexual corruption. In 1569, an anonymous informer to the Holy Office accused Augustin Enrichez and Edoardo Gomez, two Portuguese New Christians, of having “Jews, Christians, and Blacks” among their servants in their own houses. The informer hristian also brought up the risk of dangerous mingling among their servants: “a C butler, the housekeepers, and the servants [are] all black,” and Christian servants, both male and female, could learn about their dissolute habits.28 In J anuary 1579, the Crypto-Jew David Pas was accused of saying that “not only those Marranos [pejorative for conversos] who [lived] in Venice, but also those who were in Portugal were Judaizing, including the slaves who worked in their houses, and because of this reason [Judaizing], they treated the slaves with love.”29 The presence of non-Jewish servants and slaves in the Jewish household posed halakhic problems ranging from kosher food to potential illegitimate children. It also generated obvious anxieties within Jewish societies as becomes apparent in rabbinic literature and jurisprudence. Sexual relations with a non-Jewish female servant or the enslaved were matters of major concern. They violated both the rule against cohabitating with a non-Jewish woman, and the laws regarding menstrual separation.30 Yet the reality of the ghetto in early modern Venice
The Venetian Jewish household 237 as elsewhere was that cohabitation with Jewish servants and slaves and sharing spaces with Christian servants (older than 40 years) during the day had become common despite Christian and Jewish authorities’ reservations.31 In 1583, an interesting case in Ferrara was debated by Italian rabbis: a woman named Dona Paloma had a black, non-Jewish enslaved maidservant (shifchah kushit) named Simha, whom she had passed on to her daughter, Dina. Dona Paloma’s brother had imported Simha into Portugal, from whence the family had moved to Ferrara some 30 years before. The brother had passed Simha over to his mother, who had subsequently passed her on to Paloma. In 1583, Dona Paloma testified before the rabbinic court in Ferrara that, when her daughter married, She went to the bathing house and also did this the said maidservant Simha who wanted to go bathe in order to be a Jewess [went]. We [the rabbinic court] asked [Dina’s mother Paloma] whether she [the maidservant Simha] had accepted the commandments of the Jews in front of three Jewish witnesses and [Dona Paloma] answered that she had not accepted anything in front of anyone. On the same issue the rabbinic court also interviewed Dona Confrada, a S panish “wise woman” (a typical consultant in gynaecology within early modern Jewish societies) in charge of the mikveh, the ritual bath in which according to the Halakhah (Jewish law) prospective converts and Jewish women after menstruation needed to immerse themselves. Confrada strongly asserted the validity of Simha’s ritual immersion as a step towards conversion, stating that the woman bathed in front of her properly and correctly in order to become Jewish. Simha then bore a male child with a Sephardic Jew in Ferrara, who had him circumcised and accepted him as a Jew.32 In Ferrara R. Yehiel ben Azriel Trabot (d. 1591) dealt with another non-Jewish black slave who had entered into a relationship with her master while regularly going to the mikveh; after a while the couple had a child together. Trabot ruled that because her immersion was not for the purpose of conversion but for ritual purity after menstruation so that she could have religiously correct sexual relations with her Jewish lover, the child was her son but not his and could not be considered Jewish until he properly converted.33 Significantly, this enslaved woman, whether due to her initiative or – more probably – her master’s, had acculturated in Jewish purity laws and maintained them quite rigorously. Some decades later the Venetian rabbi Samuel Aboab (1610–1694) gave a legal opinion on a similar case. A Jewish man brought a black, non-Jewish enslaved woman with whom he had established a special relationship and soon gave birth to a son. Neither the mother nor the child had ever been immersed in a ritual bath and hence neither had converted to Judaism. When the man died, and the enslaved woman and her son passed over to his heirs, the question arose whether conversion by immersion to Judaism would be adequate on its own, or whether she also needed a document of manumission. Aboab required both and included a document that had been used for freeing enslaved individuals in his community for the previous 45 years.34 Jonathan Schorsh demonstrates, for the
238 Federica Francesconi early modern period, the existence of Jewish perceptions of Kushites (Blacks) that drew on negative tropes of earlier discourse, but these attitudes were not univocal. The case of Italian rabbinic responsa, the bias towards race, is absent and the discourse concentrates more on finding a halakhic solution for transitioning Eurafrican children of Sephardic Jewish men, trapped in a liminal ambiguous ethnic, religious, and social status, into Judaism. We do not know the destiny of Filipa Maura, the black enslaved woman in the house of Filipe de Nis, who in December 1588 declared in the Venetian Holy Office her willingness to live as a good Christian. She admitted to having lived for two and a half years as a Jewess with the De Nis family in Venice, but without attending any synagogue in the ghetto. Penetrating her real sentiments and determining the truthfulness of her affirmations to the Venetian Inquisitors is impossible, yet we can easily imagine that she was exposed to different religious attitudes, sociocultural behaviours, and linguistic transformations. While in Venice, Filipa shared spaces, food, and work not only with De Nis and his wife Filipa (alias Dyanora; the occurrence of the same names Filipe and Filipa in the same household was due to the importance of King Philip II of Spain), but also with other servants. Two male servants, Francesco and Luca, seemed to have embraced some aspects of Judaism at least for a while. A young Spanish servant appeared firm in her Christian faith, while the housekeeper Speranza (alias Luna, Catherina, or Lyanora) was a Jewess from Safed who had resided with the De Nis family since about 1581, when she began working for Filipe in Antwerp (where they stayed seven years), living as Jews before moving to Venice.35 According to Speranza’s testimony on 17 October 1588, My father was in Safed, my father, my mother, my sisters, and also I am Jewish and none of us has been baptized; and being always firmly Jewish I came to Venice already a year and half ago with messer Filippo [Filipe], poor merchant. He is Spanish, but I don’t know from what place, but I have been with him in Antwerp for seven years and we all from the household (di casa) have lived in the same way and all in one place and all with Jewish customs and all have always eaten in our way, in Jewish style. And I have been three times in the scola [synagogue] where services are performed with the other Jews that are in Ferrara and in this ghetto of Venice twice but in Ferrara with a relative of mine whose name is also Luna, but she moved to another place.36 The De Nis’ household appeared solid and cohesive, and both Speranza and Filipa considered themselves members rather than mere employees.37 A stable surrogate family could make the difference for destitute servants while navigating different religions, yet at times women could stand up for themselves, or at least attempt to, in order to regain their own religious identity, as the two following cases demonstrate. In April 1624, Mariana (alias Maria) was arrested and conducted to jail out of fears that she might otherwise attempt to escape. Mariana was a 40-year-old destitute woman originally from Poland, who lived with her son in the ghetto and supported herself with irregular jobs as a servant.
The Venetian Jewish household 239 She was the declared wife of a Christian as well as the widow of a Polish Jew, Aaron. Around 1610, in unclear circumstances, she had been captured and enslaved and conducted first to Sardinia, then Palermo, and finally to Naples.38 There she had met a local hatmaker, Giovanni Domenico Brocaldo or Morcaldo, and married him. This solution had allowed her to regain a decent life with a man she declared she loved sincerely, yet she missed Judaism. Over the next eight years the couple lived in Rome, Naples, and Sorrento. During this period, Mariana behaved as a good Christian, but still privately considered herself Jewish. In 1623, she moved to Venice with the intention of facilitating her return to Poland. Her testimony of dissimulating as a Christian Catholic in Naples was clearly aimed at convincing the Inquisitors that, having always been a Jewess, there were no grounds to persecute her. However, behind the rhetorical construction, a notable flexibility in navigating between Christianity and Judaism stands out: I was going to the church as a Christian because I could not avoid it and assisted with the Mass while my husband told me also that I had to confess, but I never did. I went to the church because I liked listening to the sermons, but I never kneeled down before any priest and I never confessed.39 She added that her husband was used to confess and to take Holy Communion regularly when needed, and that she carried many crowns of rosary but never crossed herself. She followed Christian food customs on Fridays and Saturdays, but during Lent she had always asked for a special license from the doctors because of health issues. Regarding her attitude towards Christianity, she declared: “If I wanted to become Christian I would have converted the first day, I don’t have the thought to become Christian.” Yet the Jewish confraternity Pidion Shevuim (for the redemption of captives) failed to help her, and in order to be released, she had to renounce her Judaism and embrace Christianity, at which point she could be reunited with her husband.40 Christian servants in Jewish households could also develop an unexpected religious attraction towards Judaism. On 19 May 1660, Prudenza Pasquali, a poor young woman who had worked for eight months in the ghetto as a servant in the house of the Levantine merchant Abramo Papo, denounced herself for apostasy to the Venetian Holy Office. Prudenza explained that she had obtained the license to serve in Papo’s house from the Cattaveri, a Venetian magistracy responsible for various functions and in charge of the administration of the ghetto since 1516. She falsely declared herself to be 40 years old instead of around 20, and that a woman from Burano, a nearby small island, who had served for 12 or 14 years in Papo’s house had arranged the employment.41 She declared, At the time I dwelled in the house of the aforementioned Abramo, M adonna Ester, an old widow, mother of the householders, and Abramo himself had continuously attempted to convince me to become Jewish, telling me that they would send me to the Levant and give me a dowry of 300 ducats and I agreed that I would if my mother did not intervene. … Because of the
240 Federica Francesconi persuasions made to me by those Jews who did take my faith away from me, so I did not believe anymore in Jesus Christ nor in the Holy Virgin nor in anything else of the venerated faith nor did I go anymore to Mass but rather to the synagogue when women did go there, and similarly observed the fasts and not anymore those of the holy Church and ate meat on Friday and Saturday and even all through Lent I ate [meat]. They told me to not believe in a piece of wood and that Mary had been a piece in the world who declared herself a virgin.42 Apparently Prudenza’s high expectations met disappointment when “that Jew to whom they wanted to deliver (consegnare) me [the future husband] is named Rubino Samuelo, a Levantine [Jew], an old man of about 60 years.”43 Both Prudenza’s self-denunciation and testimony must have been considered weak or unsupported by other witnesses because the Holy Office did not open an investigation into the Papos and absolved Prudenza after imposing abjuration, some spiritual punishments, and the commitment to no longer work for Jews.44 Yet from her testimony we can detract a mixture of religious transformations and contradictory feelings. These include the challenge of being a member in a sort of exotic household, the attraction towards an unknown (and possibly fascinating) religion, the temptations of the prospect of a new and more comfortable life, and the rhetorical attempts to have the Inquisitors turn their attention from her to her former householders and their alleged Christian blasphemies. She ultimately decided to remain within Christianity.
Seduction, illicit sex, and sexual abuse As has already emerged in the previous sections, the potential dark side of the intimacy of the house and the cohabitation of householders and servants or co- workers could lead to the development of illicit sexual relationships. While women’s “choices” in these relationships were not always due to physical coercion (although they often were), coercive tactics were in play.45 In early modern Italy, we see a broad plethora of cases that often involved seduction, but also, at times, included sexual abuse and rape of minors. For example, of the approximately 700 criminal cases debated in the civil tribunal in Livorno in the years 1684–1708, there were 51 cases of stuprum (illicit sexual relations) of which seven were initiated by young Jewish women or their parents.46 In early modern Italy, Jews and Christians held to a similar definition of illicit sex according to both Roman law and Jewish law, referred to in Latin as stuprum and in Hebrew as ones. This term covers inappropriate sex ranging from consensual to the use of force outside marriage. Having sex with an honest virgin or a widow would have been classified as stuprum; a sexual relationship with a married woman would have been classified as adultery.47 Considering the broader Mediterranean of the early modern period, in 1686 the Italian Jewish community of Corfù issued an important ruling aimed at offering a solution after a woman, Leah, widow of the late Mr Samuel Senior, the son of the honourable Don Emmanuel Senior, interrupted the service of
The Venetian Jewish household 241 Rosh Hashanah in the synagogue according to the medieval customs of bittul hatmid (interruption of the service) or ikuv hakeriah (stopping the service). She rose up as men were taking out the Torah scroll in order to suspend the ritual of the reading, crying in distress, and complaining to the community leaders and the rabbis about Abraham b. Haim Pipi. She claimed that she had left her virgin daughter, Sarah, in his home when she accompanied her sister to Naples, and upon her return had found Sarah pregnant. Notably in this case, the mother forced the Jewish community to take action by using a medieval custom in the synagogue and not pursuing the case in the Jewish court, as seems to occur more frequently in the following decades. The ruling states that the restitution of the daughter’s honour would be accompanied by providing her with a dowry, thus enabling her to marry another man.48 A few years later in 1691, another case of illicit sex and pregnancy involving an abandoned baby in the ghetto of Venice, a Jewish maidservant, her Jewish master, and the Jewish community of the city initiated both disputes and investigations by the Cattaveri and the mahamad (the Jewish community council). On the night of 5 July, a baby with a mezuzah and the indication of his birth and supposed date for his circumcision was found in a basket, abandoned in the Venetian ghetto by Jewish dwellers.49 The massari (lay leaders) of the Jewish community and the Cattaveri were immediately alerted; the latter launched an investigation in order to ascertain if the baby was Jewish or Christian and the circumstances of his birth and subsequent abandonment. The massari also wrote an apologetic plea to the Cattaveri at the time of the inquiry in order to prove the Jewishness of the baby and to obtain his restitution. It is based on biblical sources, canonical law, and observations on the customs and morality of the Venetian Jewish society of the time. The Venetian Jewish leaders built their case around four main points: Jews’ traditional refraining from proselytism in order to prove that no Jew or Jewess (or any Christian) would leave a non-Jewish child in the ghetto with Jewish objects; the prohibition according to canon laws against Christian Catholics baptizing Jewish children invitis parentibus; the motivation of honour and threat of potential shame to explain the silence of the parents; and the awareness of the numerous adulterous relations and the presence of illegitimate children within the Venetian ghetto at the time. The massari did not refrain from admitting that they [Jews in the ghetto] should moderate senses and luxury in order to, being the Jew satisfied in the matters of Aphrodite regarding honest pleasures and concessions from her rules, give birth only to legitimate children, and in that case there would be no need to bother Your Excellencies. But given that 3,000 souls of any age and gender [live in this ghetto], it is impossible to avoid cases of illegitimate births, and in those circumstances because of reputation there is need to hide them.50 The conjuncture of porosity of boundaries and lack of privacy became an effective rhetorical tool in this circumstance.
242 Federica Francesconi The massari also added that without this refuge [the ghetto and the charity of the massari themselves] the situation would get worse: mothers could strangulate children, throw them into the wells; a girl raped or seduced [stuprata] or a woman in adultery could commit suicide rather than being exposed to public shame. Just take as a hypothesis [the case of] a Jewess who committed an error, what more should she do in order to hide her name and save her own son from another religion than what this one did?51 Powerful rhetoric is also employed to prove the Jewish identity of the mother: She put the child into a bag, at night, when the ghetto is closed, at the bottom or at the top of a stairway in the ghetto, close to the headquarters of the two leaders; she attached to it a paper called a mezuzah with a Jewish devotional prayer around it; she wrote there a report in Hebrew amid the binders that says that this baby was born on the 7th of the month of Tammuz and this in regard to the circumcision. … If the mother is currently committing adultery or if it is not safe for her life to declare herself publicly as the mother of this baby, once the situation changes she would not be able to help him, and what is the fault of this creature to be so deprived?52 While the attitudes examined above of rabbis and lay leaders towards Sephardic men who sought to bring their mulatto children into the Jewish fold clearly show an expression of patriarchy over the main matriarchal aspect of rabbinic Judaism according to which Jewishness (since the second-century CE) is transmitted through the mother, in this case the matriarchal line is brought back to the centre: the baby of a Jewish woman, even if she were transgressive, would automatically be Jewish.53 After investigation and summoning of witnesses, it was determined that the child was Jewish. A young Jewish maidservant, Corona Levi, had been seduced and made pregnant by her master, Sanson Sacerdote, in Nomi, a village on the Colli Euganei near Padua and Venice. A relative had taken the baby and abandoned him in the Venetian ghetto.54 Two years later the Jewish community of Mantua had to deal with another case of a young Jewish maidservant that again involved the same master, Sanson (or Sansone) Sacerdote. The girl serving in his household, Chella Levi, had become pregnant illicitly. The woman also could be the same of the previous case – כלילmeans crown (in Italian, corona). This time Sacerdote maintained that he was not the father, but he accepted the entailed expenditures.55 Certainly, relationships characterized by women’s exploitation generally went unnoted, except in cases resulting in pregnancy. The absolution of the kahal kadosh (the Jewish community) from any responsibility – for a minor servant’s loss of virginity, pregnancy, and future child – and consequent charges appeared to be one of the first priorities for the Jewish lay leaders. In similar cases during the eighteenth century, the solutions delineated above were further developed and
The Venetian Jewish household 243 consistently adopted by both Jewish lay leaders and rabbis. If servants were minors, their employers were considered responsible for their virginity. In cases of pregnancy when the fathers were not identified or were unable to provide for the girl and their future baby, the employer was obliged to pay the expenses of childbirth, nursing, and support of the child until adulthood. If the woman and the seducer were both single the court was inclined to pressure the accused to marry the girl, otherwise the father rather than the mother had to take care of the child. At times, this practice successfully reintegrated the women and their offspring, who would otherwise have been tragically lost, into society.56 The woman alone would have been unable to create such conditions, as was often the case in other contemporary Jewish and Christian European contexts. For example, in a recent article Elisheva Carlebach emphasizes that, in the second half of the eighteenth century in the Jewish community of Altona, a maidservant or wet nurse who had borne an illegitimate child was defined and treated as a “harlot.”57
Conclusions Because of their commercial and family cosmopolitanism, Jewish merchants’ houses became crossroads for multireligious communities. While outside the house legal norms, social codes, and the normative constraints that governed Jewish-Gentile relations restricted the life of these Jewish merchants in spite of their economic freedom, the household became a social and religious arena in which women, Jews, and enslaved and free people of African ancestry intermingled. The complexity and alterity of the Jewish society described here were shaped by a community of refugees on the move who, at least in Venice, were less prone to exclusivity, purification, and purgation than other early modern religious and ethnic communities. This may also contribute to the current historiographical debate on the use of the broad category “intersectionality” in the early modern period. If we apply intersectionality to early modern societies through the prism of Venetian Jewry, it appears evident – as recently suggested by some early modernist literary scholars – that what are often conceived as neat categories such as gender, sexuality, or race opposed to other categories such as patriarchy and oppression are in fact much more complicated and even fluid than is presumed.58 In early modern Venice, the boundaries within the Jewish household were very porous, and issues of class, purity, essence, and intersectionality could at times be crossed and at times regulated internally, by both Jewish communities and Jewish law and externally, by Church, state and civic normative institutions.
Notes 1 For a recent assessment, see B. Ravid, “Venice and its Minorities,” in E. Dursteler (ed.) A Companion to Venetian History 1400–1797, Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 449–486. 2 N. Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 3 See the classic study, J. Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
244 Federica Francesconi 4 F. Barbierato, The Inquisitor in the Hat Shop: Inquisition, Forbidden Books, and Unbelief in Early Modern Venice, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. 5 Ravid, “Venice and its Minorities,” pp. 476–477 and B. Ravid, “From Geographical Realia to Historiographical Symbol: The Odyssey of the Word Ghetto,” in D. Ruderman (ed.) Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, New York: New York University Press, 1992, pp. 373–385. On the history of New Christians and Ponentine Jews in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, see F. Ruspio, La Nazione Portoghese. Ebrei ponentini e nuovi cristiani a Venezia, Turin: Silvio Zamorani Editore, 2007. 6 N. Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim Between Worlds, New York: Hill and Wang, 2006, p. 13. 7 See, for example, M. García-Arenal and G. Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, A Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; N. Muchnik, Une vie marrane: Les pérégrinations de Juan de Prado dans l’Europe du XVIIᵉ siècle, Paris: Honoré Champion, coll. “Bibliothèque d’études juives,” 2005; Davis, Trickster Travels; L. Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, London: Harper Collins, 2007; S. Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien. Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011. 8 See, for example, E. Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 207. 9 See, for example, A. Bellavitis, Famille, genre, transmission. Venise au XVIe siècle, Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008. 10 F. Francesconi, “‘And if I Could, I Would Leave Her More…’: Women’s Voices, Emotions, and Objects from the Venetian Ghetto in the Seventeenth Century,” in F. Francesconi, S. Mirvis, and B.M. Smollett (eds) From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardic Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Jane. S. Gerber, Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp. 311–329, which includes materials I reworked for this section. 11 Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASVE), Fondo Notarile, Testamenti, Andrea Calzavara, busta n. 260, pratica n. 838, “Testamento di Sara quondam Giacob Pappo da Salonico detta di Salamon Tobi,” 3 July 1659 and pratica n. 739, “Testamento di Pacientia Mora hebrea levantina,” 9 September 1664. Two summaries of the wills were published some decades ago: C. Boccato, “Aspetti della condizione femminile nel Ghetto di Venezia (Secolo XVII): I Testamenti,” Italia 10, 1993, 124–125 and 132–123, while the texts are now transcribed and translated in Francesconi, “And if I Could,” pp. 325–329. 12 ASVE, Fondo Notarile, Testamenti, Andrea Calzavara, busta n. 260, pratica n. 838, “Testamento di Sara quondam Giacob Pappo da Salonico detta di Salamon Tobi,” 3 July 1659. The fact that in the notarial register she is considered “related to Salomon Tobi” and the misreading of the recto has in my opinion initiated the misinterpretation of some passages in the document such as a supposed extra conjugal relation between Sara and Salomon, a sort of pregnancy by proxy of Sara, and the adoption of her children by Salomon and his wife, Colomba, as their own. See Boccato, “Aspetti della condizione” and H. Adelman, “Jewish Women and Family Life, Inside and Outside the Ghetto,” in R. Davis and B. Ravid (eds) The Jews of Early Modern Venice, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, p. 154. For a general introduction to the life of servants (mainly Christian) in Venice during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see D. Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 13 J. Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 245 and 247. Schorsch indicates as examples of this trend names such as Esperansa, Fortuna, Vittoria, and Paciencia.
The Venetian Jewish household 245 14 ASVE, Fondo Notarile, Testamenti, busta n. 259, Andrea Calzavara, pratica n. 739, “Testamento di Pacientia Mora hebrea levantina,” 9 September 1664. 15 ASVE, Fondo Notarile, Testamenti, busta n. 258, Andrea Calzavara, pratica n. 344, “Testamento di Fiore relicta Marcho da Sacil Sacerdotte detto Marchuzo quondam Emanuele Mocchato,” 25 September 1641. 16 H. Adelman, “Servants and Sexuality: Seduction, Surrogacy, and Rape: Some Observations Concerning Class, Gender and Race in Early Modern Italian Jewish Families,” in T. Rudavsky (ed.) Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, New York: New York University Press, 1995, pp. 81–97, 81–82. 17 I. Lampronti, Paqad Yizhak (Venice, 1750), vol. Kuf, “Knas Shidduchim.” 18 See Francesconi, “And if I Could, I Would Leave.” 19 ASVE, Fondo Notarile, Testamenti, Andrea Calzavara, busta n. 260, pratica n. 838, “Testamento di Sara quondam Giacob Pappo da Salonico detta di Salamon Tobi,” 3 July 1659. 20 R. Ago, Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome, translated from the Italian by B. Bouley and C. Tazzara with P. Findlen, foreword by P. Findlen, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 61. 21 This is elaborated from my own previous publication, “And if I Could, I Would Leave.” 22 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 44, 30 April 1579, cc. 6r-6v. Mentions of Maestro also in Pullan, The Jews of Europe, p. 75. 23 Trials against Crypto-Jews and Conversos celebrated by the Venetian Inquisition have been translated and published in P. C. Ioly Zorattini (ed.) Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia contro Ebrei e Giudaizzanti (1548–1734), 14 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1980–1999, hereafter abbreviated as Processi. The documentation on the Samuel Maestro’s trial is preserved in ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 44, 30 April 1579, cc. 1r–14r; Processi V (1571–1580), pp. 101–107. 24 L. Modena, Ziknei Yehudah, Venice: Yitshak ben Yakov min ha-Leviim, 1650, responsum no. 34, discussed by Schorsh, Jews and Blacks, p. 68. 25 For a historical investigation of this context, see P. Havick, “Gendering the Black Atlantic: Women’s Agency in Coastal Trade in Trade Settlements in the Guinea Bassau Region,” in D. Catterall and J. Campbell (eds) Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities 1500–1800, Leiden: Brill, 2012, p. 317. 26 On the De Nis family, see in B. Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice 1550–1670, Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1983, pp. 215–217 and passim; Ruspio, La nazione portoghese, pp. 277–279. 27 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 54; Processi VII (1585–1589), pp. 77–171. 28 Processi II (1548–1560), pp. 71–74. 29 Processi V (1571–1580), p. 76. On the presence in early-modern Venice of black A fricans not connected to the Jewish society see K. Lowe, “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly, 66.2, 2013, 412–452. 30 On medieval rabbinic sources on this topic, see, for example, Y. Ben-Naeh, “Blond, Tall, with Honey-Colored Eyes: Jewish Ownership of Slaves in the Ottoman Empire,” Jewish History 20, 2006, no. 3/4, 324. 31 B. Ravid, “Cum Nimis Absurdum and the Ancona Auto-da-Fé revisited: their impact on Venice and some wider reflections,” Jewish History 26, no. 1/2, Essays in Honor of Kenneth Stow, May 2012, 89–90. 32 A. de Boton, Lehem Rav, Izmir: Avraham b. Yedidiah Gabai, 1660, responsum n. 44; discussed by Schorsh, Jews and Blacks, pp. 85–86. 33 Matanot Beadam, Ms. JTSA 7084, responsum n. 142; identical to Maarivei Nachal, Ms. JTSA 7085, responsum n. 132 discussed by Schorsh, Jews and Blacks, pp. 80–81 and Adelman, pp. 90–91.
246 Federica Francesconi 4 S. Aboab, Devar Shmuel, no. 369, Venice, 1702; Jerusalem, 1983. 3 35 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 54, 98r–99v. 36 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 54, 32v–34v. 37 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 92, 137v. 38 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 79, 18 April 1624; Processi IX (1608–1632), pp. 85–94. See also Pullan, The Jews of Europe, pp. 69–70. 39 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 79, April 18, 1624, 1v. 40 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 79, 18 April 1624, 2r–2v. According to Brian Pullan, she was eventually sent to the Inquisitors in Rome, who eventually acted as if it were still trying the case and retrieved the new information that Mariana had been already baptized in Ragusa; Pullan, The Jews of Europe, pp. 50–51. 41 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 107, 19 May 1660, cc. 12r–14r, 21r–v.; Processi XI (1642–1681), pp. 161–164. 4 2 ASVE, S. U., Processi, busta n. 107, 19 May 1660, 12r. 43 Ibid., 13v. 4 4 Ibid., 13r–13v. 45 See the methodological considerations in R. Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 46 C. Galasso, “‘Solo il loro servigio si brama, sia fedel, accurato e sincer’: Il servizio domestico nella comunità ebraica di Livorno (secc. XVII–XVIII),” Società e Storia 97, 2002, 460. 47 Francesconi, “Illicit Sex and Law.” See my contribution to the Sixth Early Modern Workshop: Jewish History Resources – “Continuity and Change in Jewish Communities of the Early Eighteenth Century,” January 2017. “Illicit Sex and Law in Early-Modern Italian Ghettos,” http://fordham.bepress.com/emw/emw2015/emw2015/5/ 48 S. Baron, “The Community of Corfù and its Organization,” in L. Ginzberg and A. Weiss (eds) Studies in Memory of Moses Schorr, New York: The Professor Moses Schorr Committee, 1944, p. 36. 49 ASVE, Fondo Inquisitorato sopra l’Università degli Ebrei, busta n. 40, 5 July 1691. Supplica ai Catteveri del 18 luglio 1691, 148r–151r; see my contribution to the Francesconi, “Illicit Sex and Law.” 50 ASVE, Fondo Inquisitorato sopra l’Università degli Ebrei, busta n. 40, July 5, 1691. Supplica ai Catteveri del 18 luglio 1691, 148r. 51 Ibid. 52 ASVE, Fondo Inquisitorato sopra l’Università degli Ebrei, busta n. 40, 5 July 1691. Supplica ai Catteveri del 18 luglio 1691, 148v. 53 For a portrait of, for some aspects, a very similar mechanism see A. Ben-Ur, A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Colonial Suriname, in R. Kagan and P. Morgan (eds), Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism (1500–1800), Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp. 152–169. 54 ASVE, Fondo Inquisitorato sopra l’Università degli Ebrei, busta n. 40, 5 July 5 1691. Supplica ai Catteveri del 18 luglio 1691. 55 Biblioteca Comunale di Mantova, Archivio della Comunità ebraica di Mantova, filza 52, fascicolo 2, 16.1.1693. 56 Francesconi, “Illicit Sex and Law.” 57 E. Carlebach, “Fallen Women and fatherless children: Jewish domestic servants in Eighteenth-Century Altona,” Jewish History 24, 2010, 295–308. For an example of dynamics similar to those described by Carlebach in contemporary Italian Christian societies, see G. Arrivo, Seduzioni, promesse, matrimoni: il processo per stupro nella Toscana del Settecento, Premessa di Daniela Lombardi, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2006. 58 On this, see, for example, V. Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment. Gender, Sexuality, and Race, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
The Venetian Jewish household 247
Bibliography Published primary sources Aboab, S., Devar Shmuel, Venice, 1702; Jerusalem, 1983. de Boton, A., Lehem Rav, Izmir: Avraham b. Yedidiah Gabai, 1660. Ioly Zorattini, P.C., (ed.) Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia contro Ebrei e Giudaizzanti (1548–1734), 14 vols, Florence: Olschki, 1980–1999. Lampronti, I., Paqad Yizhak, Venice, 1750, vol. Kuf, “Knas Shidduchim.” Modena, L., Ziknei Yehudah, Venice: Yitshak ben Yakov min ha-Leviim, 1650.
Secondary sources Adelman, H., “Jewish Women and Family Life, Inside and Outside the Ghetto,” in R. Davis and B. Ravid (eds) The Jews of Early Modern Venice, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. ———, “Servants and Sexuality: Seduction, Surrogacy, and Rape: Some Observations Concerning Class, Gender and Race in Early Modern Italian Jewish Families,” in T. Rudavsky (ed.) Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, New York: New York University Press, 1995, pp. 81–97. Ago, R., Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome, translated from the Italian by B. Bouley and C. Tazzara with P. Findlen, foreword by P. Findlen, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Arrivo, G., Seduzioni, promesse, matrimoni: il processo per stupro nella Toscana del Settecento, Premessa di Daniela Lombardi, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2006. Baron, S., “The Community of Corfù and its Organization,” in L. Ginzberg and A. Weiss (eds) Studies in Memory of Moses Schorr, New York: The Professor Moses Schorr Committee, 1944, pp. 25–41. Bellavitis, A., Famille, Genre, Transmission. Venise au XVIe siècle, Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008. Ben-Naeh, Y., “Blond, Tall, with Honey-Colored Eyes: Jewish Ownership of Slaves in the Ottoman Empire,” Jewish History 20, no. 3/4, 2006, 105–133. Ben-Ur, A., “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Colonial Suriname,” in R. Kagan and P. Morgan (eds) Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism (1500–1800), Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp. 152–169. Boccato, C., “Aspetti della condizione femminile nel Ghetto di Venezia (Secolo XVII): I Testamenti,” Italia 10, 1993, 105–135. Carlebach, E., “Fallen Women and Fatherless Children: Jewish Domestic Servants in Eighteenth-Century Altona,” Jewish History 24, no. 3/4, 2010, 295–308. Colley, L., The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, London: Harper Collins, 2007. Francesconi, F., Sixth Early Modern Workshop: Jewish History Resources – “Continuity and Change in Jewish Communities of the Early Eighteenth Century,” January 2017. “Illicit Sex and Law in Early-Modern Italian Ghettos,” http://fordham.bepress.com/ emw/emw2015/emw2015/5/. ———, “‘And if I Could, I Would Leave Her More…’: Women’s Voices, Emotions, and Objects from the Venetian Ghetto in the Seventeenth Century,” in F. Francesconi, S. Mirvis and B.M. Smollett (eds) From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardic Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Jane. S. Gerber, Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp. 311–329.
248 Federica Francesconi Galasso, C., “‘Solo il loro servigio si brama, sia fedel, accurato e sincer’: Il servizio domestico nella comunità ebraica di Livorno (secc. XVII–XVIII),” Società e Storia 97, 2002, 457–474. García-Arenal M., and G. Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, A Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Havick, P., “Gendering the Black Atlantic: Women’s Agency in Coastal Trade in Trade Settlements in the Guinea Bassau Region,” in D. Catterall and J. Campbell (eds) Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities 1500–1800, Leiden: Brill, 2012, pp. 315–356. Karras, R., Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Lowe, K., “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly, 66.2, 2013, 412–452. Muchnik, N., Une vie marrane: Les pérégrinations de Juan de Prado dans l’Europe du XVIIᵉ siècle, Paris: Honoré Champion, coll. “Bibliothèque d’études juives,” 2005. Pullan, B., The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice 1550–1670, Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1983. Ravid, B., “From Geographical Realia to Historiographical Symbol: The Odyssey of the Word Ghetto,” in D. Ruderman (ed.) Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, New York: New York University Press, 1992, pp. 373–385. ———, “Cum Nimis Absurdum and the Ancona Auto-da-Fé revisited: Their Impact on Venice and Some Wider Reflections,” Jewish History 26, no. 1/2, Essays in Honor of Kenneth Stow, May 2012, 85–100. ———, “Venice and its Minorities,” in E. Dursteler (ed.) A Companion to Venetian History 1400–1797, Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 449–486. Romano, D., Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Rothschild, E., The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Ruspio, F., La Nazione Portoghese. Ebrei ponentini e nuovi cristiani a Venezia, Turin: Silvio Zamorani Editore, 2007. Schorsch, J., Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sella, D., Italy in the Seventeenth Century, London: Longman, 1997. Subrahmanyam, S., Three Ways to Be Alien. Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011. Terpstra, N., Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. V. Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment. Gender, Sexuality, and Race, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Zemon Davis, N., Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim Between Worlds, New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.
14 Exile identity and the Pietist reform movement Constructing the Georgia Salzburgers from Alpine Crypto-Protestants Christine Marie Koch In the eighteenth-century American south, the Pietist vision of reforming the world appeared to be within reach.1 A group consisting of religious exiles from the area around Salzburg, together with pastors from Halle, was invited to settle in the newly established colony of Georgia. Here, their diasporic community called “Ebenezer” was to serve as a Protestant Christian stronghold against the Catholic Spanish, a missionary island for Native Americans, and a pious place of order and industriousness. In order to maintain the support of benefactors and to perpetuate confessional identification, reports consisting mainly of the pastors’ diaries were published and correspondence was conducted frequently for almost a century. The discursive construction of a group we can call the “Georgia Salzburgers” reveals processes of community formation through inner-communal unity and conversion, interfaith contacts, and inventing of tradition through constitutive moments. This essay will critically examine how these eighteenth-century sources depict the Salzburgers as a model congregation of German Pietists that was self-consciously continuing the religious traditions of the Reformation, in sharp rhetorical contrast to their host society. In doing so, this study explores the continuing dynamics set in motion by “the Reformation” in a different time period and geographical area.2 The religious movement within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lutheranism referred to as “Pietism” understood itself as standing in direct succession to Luther’s reformation of doctrine and supplementing this with a reformation of life.3 Pietist movements developed in many protestant communities in the later early modern period, and are today understood as the most important spiritual and ecclesiastical development within European Protestantism generally after the Reformation.4 While originally a pejorative term used by opponents, the expression has come to be used, sometimes anachronistically, to describe a significant number of people from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whose propagations of reform very consciously evoked the theology and tradition of Martin Luther. Their claim to be merely continuing Luther’s reformation did not just serve as a defence against accusations of sectarianism and a legitimization for criticism of the established Lutheran state churches and society in general, but also as the foundation for behavioural standards and an individualization of faith.5 In the context of early modern European history, the phenomenon of Pietism can be assessed in the contexts of explanatory models such as confessionalization
250 Christine Marie Koch and enlightenment, which were simultaneous, sometimes parallel to and other times in opposition to Pietism.6 In order to achieve their goal of improving the world, Pietists expected that a very specific improvement of people had to take place first. This would involve a return to a more personal and practised religion, instead of what they viewed as the façade of a formal confession that had no impact on everyday life. This required individual conversion, a true change of heart. The implementation of these ideas relied on education and social disciplining as the Pietist pillars of human betterment. One source of this Pietist activity was the so-called Glaucha Institutions in Halle founded by pastor and professor August Hermann Francke (1663–1727).7 The famous institutions known as the Waysenhaus included schools where orphans and the poor, as well as children from the bourgeoisie and nobility, were raised and educated according to the Pietist vision of how to become useful and self-sustaining individuals as well as multipliers of the faith. The Glaucha Institutions exhibited global influence by sending pastors trained in Halle across many parts of Europe, as missionaries to Tranquebar in South East India, and to the North American colonies where they ministered to congregations in Pennsylvania and Georgia.8 In the eyes of these Halle Pietists, the uneducated and penniless protestant refugees forced to flee from the prince-archbishopric Salzburg in the early 1730s were the perfect soil for God’s tillage. Even though a Catholic archbishopric, Protestant ideas had subsisted in the rural alpine regions surrounding S alzburg for centuries, visible in the interconfessional practices of so-called Crypto- Protestants.9 There was periodic prosecution of the group after the Reformation. Times when Crypto-Protestants were left in peace alternated with periods of intolerance such as the Deferegger and Dürrnberg expulsions of the late seventeenth century and the “Great Emigration” of the 1730s.10 The forced emigration of about 20,000 inhabitants in 1731–1732 has become the most prominent event in Salzburg’s history of confessional friction due both to its comparatively high number and because of its disproportionally large medial output. In addition to the emigrants themselves, many actors, including Archbishop Leopold Anton von Firmian, King Frederick William I of Prussia, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, became involved in the highly publicized conflict. Beyond confessional differences, the emigration was also the culmination of a conflict between Salzburg’s rural and urban cultures.11 When Leopold Anton von Firmian became prelate of Salzburg in 1727, he appointed a group of Jesuits to inspect the religious and moral state of S alzburg.12 Known for their strict enforcement of confessional behaviour and belief, J esuits had been the leaders in the broader restoration of Catholicism across the archbishopric and the Holy Roman Empire through the seventeenth century.13 Their investigations were met with a “calculated verbal screen of conformity” among the Crypto-Protestants.14 Only when the corpus evangelicorum, an institution at the Regensburg diets that considered itself representative of German Protestant interests, became involved in 1730 did the conflict become an empire-wide matter.15 Press releases on both Catholic and Protestant sides and a newly instigated commission that identified more than 20,000 Protestants in
Exile identity and Pietist reform movement 251 the Pongau district conveyed the impression of outright disobedience.16 Firmian attempted to suppress what was presented as a rebellion disguised as a confessional matter.17 On 31 October 1731, a date highly resonant symbolically for Protestants, he published an emigration edict “to ‘extirpate and uproot these unruly, seditious, and rebellious folk wholly and henceforth.’”18 It was at best a hazy legal attempt to combine “civil rebellion as grounds for prompt action, religious dissent as grounds for expulsion.”19 Its consequent nonconformity with the triennial grace period guaranteed for religious emigrants by the Peace of Westphalia led to more outrage from Protestants across the Holy Roman Empire.20 The image of the homeless Salzburgers (who had been given less time to leave) wandering about southern Germany and living on charity in the midst of winter came to represent the plight of their fellow emigrants in Protestant publications.21 Consequently, Frederick William I of Prussia could be fashioned as the charitable saviour when he formally offered the Patent of Invitation in February 1732, by which he agreed to receive the refugees into his territory.22 The majority of the Salzburg exiles accepted the king’s offer and settled in East Prussia, but up to 200 decided to relocate instead to the newly founded Colony of Georgia in British North America. Soon after their expulsion, the Salzburgers had become the subject of discussion and fundraising among protestant communities internationally.23 This included the German Pietists Gotthilf August Francke (1696–1769) in Halle and Samuel Urlsperger (1685–1772) in Augsburg, and the British Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), a group of London philanthropists already interested in Halle’s missionary activities in India.24 The SPCK successfully lobbied the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia, and King George II then issued an invitation to the exiles to settle in the newly established colony, further burnishing the reputation of the Hanoverian house as leaders in Protestant patronage within the German empire and indeed internationally.25 On the symbolic level, the Salzburger exiles also fit exceedingly well into the philanthropic ideals of the Colony Trustees – Georgia was to become a colony exempt from sins like alcohol and slavery, and a refuge for the poor, persecuted, and righteous.26 Beyond this pious rhetoric, and more practically, the colonists were to provide a human shield offering protection from Native Americans and the French and Spanish.27 Samuel Urlsperger was sceptical of the plan from the beginning. Given the perilous passage across the Atlantic and the rigours of frontier life, why should Salzburger emigrants favour a faraway British colony over Prussia where plenty of kin had already settled? He saw great promotional and practical difficulties in the endeavour.28 And indeed, the Salzburgers who chose to emigrate to the Colony of Georgia did not comprise a representative sample demographically of the Crypto-Protestant community as a whole. The secluded life style of emigrants from the prince-archbishopric Salzburg had made it difficult to minister to them, and this, in turn, had created a faith community that placed a great emphasis on family devotions and had a comparatively high level of literacy, even among women and children.29 A great majority of the 20,000 emigrants, possibly as many as 80 per cent, lived in widely scattered and largely autonomous family
252 Christine Marie Koch groups; each individual farmstead forming its own “elemental social, cultural, and economic unit.”30 They lived on grass, that is, milk, cheese, and meats, and only wealthier farmers grew crops.31 A significant number were farmhands who were not permanent members of a household.32 In fact, it was difficult to find enough volunteers to choose Georgia over Prussia, or even to fill the 70 initially available spots.33 Among the 45 people on the first transport to the new colony in 1733/1734, there were at least nine non-Salzburgers.34 The following three transports in 1734/1735, 1735/1736, and 1741 brought along about 167 other Salzburgers and non-Salzburgers.35 The first transport – of particular importance because of its pioneer-character, which precluded chain-migration as a factor – included only 12 people occupied with farming.36 The rest consisted of one weaver, one miller, a distiller, four miners, and two general labourers (presumably also occupied in mining).37 The relatively large number of six miners, some of whom also brought their families, is significant when exploring possible motives for immigrating to Georgia.38 In the archbishopric Salzburg, miners had a special status, reinforced with particular exemptions and privileges, and comprised a self-identified group distinct from peasants in local folklore.39 Cooperation among them was particularly important.40 In addition, they (and their wives) were more independent and accustomed to danger and risk, increasing their willingness to immigrate to Georgia instead of Prussia.41 In fact, most of the migrants on the first transport were young and independent men taking a risk in order to change or improve their lives.42 The first group, led and supported by two pastors from the Glaucha Institutions, arrived in Georgia on 12 March 1734. Because the colony of Georgia was new and had a small population of European settlers, tracts of land were designated specifically for the Salzburgers. Over the course of several decades, they drew in additional groups of German-speaking immigrants and so established their own ethno-religious community. Their settlement of Ebenezer was located 25 miles north of Savannah, the only major city of the colony, on the Savannah River. The utopian drive behind this endeavour was apparent both in the name of the town itself and in Ebenezer’s outward impression.43 The name was an adaptation of the Hebrew “ebhen hā-ʽezer,” meaning “stone of help;” and referring to the stone which the prophet Samuel had erected in order to commemorate God’s help to the Israelites when they had won a victory over the Philistines at Mizpah (1 Samuel 7:12). The Biblical name left no doubt as to what the Salzburgers thought that they – and their indigenous neighbours – represented. They were confident that God had helped them hitherto and would continue to do so in the future in what they saw as a promised land. For the SPCK and Halle Pietists, the intent in supporting the Georgia Salzburgers was that [...] those that have such a good impression of religion that they left all that was theirs because of Jesus Christ [should] enjoy all possible encouragement and assistance from their fellow-Christians in order to secure their faith and enable them to transmit it to their descendants.44
Exile identity and Pietist reform movement 253 The normative ideas about the Salzburger exile community in Ebenezer, Georgia, reveal the teleological approach behind this Anglican and Pietist joint venture.45 The SPCK’s philanthropic mission was in accordance with Pietism’s utopian objective: the betterment of the world from its centre in Halle. This was put into practice in Ebenezer under the strict supervision and pastoral care of the two missionaries from Halle, Johann Martin Boltzius (1703–1765) and Israel C hristian Gronau (1714–1745). Before leaving the prince-archbishopric of Salzburg, the Salzburgers had been forced to practise their religion secretly, relying mainly on Christian devotional literature and correspondence with Protestants in other lands as they developed their lay interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, the Pietist pastors also fulfilled the role of inner missionaries and teachers to their flock and became the spiritual as well as secular leaders of the Ebenezer community. This was especially the case for Boltzius, the principal pastor, who is also responsible for most of the written source material about colonial Ebenezer. Employing an already established practice of fundraising, the diaries of Pastors Boltzius and Gronau, and excerpts of their correspondence, were edited and circulated, presenting an idealized version of the Georgia Salzburger community in order to attract sponsors for the Ebenezer endeavour.46 Together with a multitude of unpublished transatlantic correspondence, these sources shed light on the construction of a Georgia Salzburger collective identity. In what follows, I will dissect the process of creating this identity by investigating four main areas: first, the characteristics of the model Salzburger settler as presented in representational material; second, the rhetorically constructed contrast between the Pietist community and the society surrounding it; third, the permeability of the community; and fourth, the practical measures enforcing these ideals and strengthening the community. Because the Salzburger expulsion was deemed such an extraordinary and controversial event, letters and publications about the behaviour of the Salzburger exiles were widely circulated even before they embarked on their voyage across the Atlantic. This textual staging provided the foundation for the characterization of the Georgia Salzburgers. Some of these narratives include the very popular “Song of Exile,” in which the persecuted Salzburger is depicted as poor, innocent, devotional, and a “pilgrim” follower of Jesus.47 The travel reports on the first Salzburger transport to Georgia also paint a very Christian picture of the group, describing how they sang and prayed before and after meals, and behaved in such a humble and orderly fashion that their travel companions were deeply touched. The diaries circulated in later years continued to depict them as a very industrious people, serving to further legitimize their cause: The Salzburgers […] do not need to be urged to work, but I [Boltzius] try to remind them of the fifth commandment so that they will not hurt their body through too much and hard work. As soon as they come from community work, which is at about 9, everybody goes to his lot at the house to build a fence and plant something within; or they make shingles until they are called back in to communal labor between 2–3.48
254 Christine Marie Koch Reinforcing these positive characteristics and putting them into a distinctly Biblical context, the community in Ebenezer is depicted as a “chosen people.” They are called “[God’s] creation, his transport, his flock.”49 Urlsperger underlines their chosen-ness by describing the dangers that they had had to face on land and water and emphasizing that they were saved through the grace of God. Examples of godly providence are continuously repeated. In addition, the behaviour of the Salzburgers is described as “the way of the true disciples of Christ […], to follow wherever the Lord sends them, even if it seems to be adverse, absurd and difficult.”50 The expulsion of the Salzburgers is compared explicitly to the exodus of the Israelites. In a report of 1741, Boltzius writes: “As God has led the old Israelites out of Egypt, and gave them a lot of good in earthly as well as spiritual matters, the Salzburgers received the same grace.” In order to appeal to benefactors and underline the intent of forging a future-oriented promised land, he goes on to describe the descendants of the Salzburgers as “the people that shall be created.” To assure the reader that these reports do not just serve a financial and thus worldly purpose, Boltzius states that the fortune of Ebenezer is written down and published for the praise of God and remembrance by posterity.51 This allusion to Psalm 102 also points to an Old Testament covenant: the community in Ebenezer is indeed a promised land and the offspring are a chosen people. There is a special bond between God and the Salzburgers. In the teleological sense, they are the forerunners of the chosen people of the future, and so those who support their endeavour are helping to create the Christian society of the future. In order to directly include the donors in this story of humble success and assure them of the importance of their contribution, the gratitude of the Salzburgers is often mentioned. The benefactors do not just receive gratitude and proof of the success of the endeavour they are supporting, but also something substantial in return, for the Salzburgers promise to include them in their prayers. In this advertising narrative, the Salzburgers are represented as a cohesive and homogenous model congregation. These publications did not just serve to foster the willingness of potential sponsors to offer funds and other support, but also provided a role model and a means for confessional identification. In addition, the enhanced reports travelled back to Ebenezer, where parts were read to the congregation and thus offered self-assurance and perpetuation of communal identity. The Georgia Salzburger community was also constructed by contrasting it with other groups. Although Georgia was still relatively young and had as yet few European colonial settlers, the two cities nearest to Ebenezer, Savannah and Purrysburg, provided opportunities for contact with a diverse population of English, French, Africans, Native Americans, Jews, and also other Germans. All were pictured in opposition to the Salzburgers. While, in the published versions of the diaries, the negative characterizations of these “Others” have largely been deleted, they can be found in the manuscript diaries and letters of pastors Boltzius and Gronau. The manuscripts thus offer a glimpse into views these religious leaders may have shared with or conveyed to the community. Even during the voyage at sea, Boltzius described the exiles’ fellow passengers in a very negative way; this was a common assessment of “Others” in Pietist
Exile identity and Pietist reform movement 255 travel reports.52 He regards the behaviour of these “people from the Engellandish nation” in direct opposition to that of the Salzburgers. Boltzius writes: “their attitude was dislikable to me;” he finds “few among them take a liking to such speeches and words which God commands through his holy word.”53 With this strict interpretation of faith in the Halle Pietist sense, it is not surprising that Boltzius would claim to find a lack of piety among them. Apart from the voyage at sea, personal contact with non-German-speaking colonists was scarce, due to the language barrier for most, and also because of Ebenezer’s relative geographic and social isolation.54 This was particularly true for the Salzburger settlers without business or religious matters to attend to in other places like the pastors – their contact with others depended on visitors from the outside.55 According to Boltzius, these other colonial settlers came badly prepared and unwilling to work on the land.56 Framed and described in such negative terms, they serve as the rhetorical “Other” that enhances the Salzburgers’ diligence. Early on, Boltzius depicts the English and French colonists as good-for-nothing: For the English and French who live here are for the most part such people that cannot subsist in England due to their laziness and disorderl[y] life. That is why they let themselves be transported here out of need under the impression that they will acquire riches and good days through commodities.57 Boltzius characterizes the English and French as economic migrants and parasites, implicitly contrasting them to the Salzburgers who came to Georgia out of a higher purpose. But it is not just Boltzius’ initial impression that other colonists mainly came for worldly reasons, he also finds their general piety deeply deficient, creating desolate surroundings for an Ebenezer oasis: One finds here in the land little Christianity, and one hears more good about the Indians here as heathens than about the so-called Christians. The dear gospel of Christ has become an old fable to most of them. The particulars that we have seen and heard are most grievous; may God have mercy on this wretchedness!58 Boltzius’ description follows typical Pietist criticism of society. In depicting the colony in concurrence with the theological definition of the world outside, Ebenezer rhetorically becomes a spiritual paradise.59 Following Francke’s belief that God’s favour is already reflected on earth in the success of his endeavour, Boltzius regards the high mortality rate among colonists as the inevitable outcome of such unchristian behaviour: Because, as aforementioned, most people lead such a disorderl[y] life, it is no wonder that many of those that come here die […] since the sin is the doom of the people.60
256 Christine Marie Koch In this same letter, Boltzius mentions Africans for the first time, although contact with them was rare during the early years since slavery was initially forbidden in Georgia. In the yearlong debate concerning the legalization of slavery in the colony, the Ebenezer community played a significant part.61 Within discussions focussing on pragmatic aspects – in contrast to later morally and ethically charged arguments – the Salzburger community was constructed as a prime example of the success of white-only labour.62 The idea that economic success in Southern climates was possible without slaves provided the main argument against the introduction of slavery. The community in Ebenezer was described positively in order to serve as a contrast to the lazy advocates of slavery and the accounts of its economic success further built on stereotypes of Germans as particularly industrial.63 The Salzburger self-fashioning narrative of exceptionalism received ample encouragement from the outside in these debates. The Ebenezer community itself also actively opposed slavery, although not only because of concerns regarding labour competition, but also because they feared the A fricans as “Other.”64 Their strong antipathy towards Africans stemmed less from oldworld associations of the colour black with the devil than from reports of slave revolts – and their own negative impressions of the enslaved people from South Carolina who had helped prepare their settlement.65 Pastor Boltzius himself did not oppose slavery for humanitarian reasons, but because he believed it would be too expensive and too dangerous. Georgia wouldn’t be able to afford slaves and these “unfaithful and malicious Africans” could very easily defect to the Spanish.66 Fear of the Catholic Spanish to the south of them was thus another important factor in initially rejecting Africans.67 Yet the Salzburgers’ attitude towards Africans changed within a few decades as they began to see how enslaved workers might be useful for their own agenda. The differing tone and attitude became clear soon after slavery became legal in Georgia in 1751. Boltzius came to portray Africans as prospective Christians, subjects for his own missionary ambition.68 He consequently considered them as individuals to be differentiated and ethnographically investigated.69 While inhabitants of Ebenezer held fewer enslaved people than most others in the colony, the Salzburger settlers were quick to adapt to the new possibilities that outweighed their initial aversions against Africans.70 Ebenezer’s attitudes towards Native Americans were similarly subject to change. Even though their land had been bought from Native Americans by the Georgia Trustees, the settlers in Ebenezer often came in contact with the Yuchi tribe due to their town’s proximity to Native American territory and through trade.71 Relations were initially neutral, in line with official Georgian policy; on the whole, the conduct of Ebenezer’s settlers in regard to Native Americans can be considered relatively humane.72 The ideas of the settlers fluctuated between goodwill and compassion in theory, and a lack of understanding and rejection in practice.73 In his early accounts, Boltzius makes rather neutral remarks and writes “[…] here and there live a few Indians, which, however, do not have a fixed place in the country, but due to hunting which sustains them move from place to place, but expel nobody from their home and property.”74 He depicts
Exile identity and Pietist reform movement 257 the indigenous people as different but peaceful, sometimes as even better than the colonists. The first edition of the Detailed Reports even portrays their chieftains as comparable to European sovereigns, embedding them in categories familiar to the reader instead of marking them as incomprehensible and distinctly different.75 This initially positive attitude can partly be explained by the pastors’ missionary intentions.76 While Boltzius retained this prospect throughout his life, his increasingly critical accounts including assumptions of the cultural superiority of European Christians also concur with prevailing opinions among colonizers.77 The favourable depiction of the few Jews in Savannah may have a similar background in missionary intentions, as the conversion of Jews was an important Pietist goal.78 Boltzius writes: The Jew […], as well as his wife, proves himself quite helpful towards us and the Saltzburgers that one cannot praise it enough; such honesty and loyalty would be futile to look for regarding others of his race and even among most Christians […]79 While there were clear differences with other Protestants, contact with other denominations such as Calvinists in Purrysburg and Anglicans in Savannah, including George Whitefield, was pragmatic and polite.80 On paper, these relations were depicted as durable and sound in order to rhetorically stress Ebenezer’s importance as religious centre in the southeast, and also to avoid tension with Ebenezer’s supporters in the non-denominational SPCK. Boltzius corresponded with and visited some clergy, and on occasion, they came to Ebenezer.81 While Boltzius and his congregation were adverse towards Catholics, there was no direct contact with them in the Protestant colony.82 Thus, lacking either Catholic or orthodox Lutheran opponents nearby, Boltzius used newly emerging sects as a contrast to the spiritual superiority of the Ebenezer community, denouncing their emotionality while approving of mythic elements such as the struggle for conversion within the boundaries of Halle Pietism, Anglicanism, and Puritanism.83 Religious belief and practice were also Boltzius’ main criteria regarding the evaluation of other German-speaking immigrants. These non-Salzburgers often came as indentured servants, and some married into the Ebenezer community.84 Boltzius denounced their economic reasons for migration as worldly, and thus, illegitimate. He also found their religious practices too lax, framing his negative evaluation in direct opposition to the much better Salzburgers. He etched the differences clearly in one letter written when he was expecting the arrival of another transport of immigrants: The Salzburgers that we are expecting with longing and joy, will closely unite with their fellow countrymen […] Should they, however, be other German people, namely a mixed crowd such in Savannah and Purrysburg, I wish they would establish their own city and are provided with their own
258 Christine Marie Koch teacher […] Admittedly, the so called high Germans that always want to be better than the Salzburgers as long as they are unconverted, do not fit in among our modest audience, as we have experienced enough. When German people convert to God, they receive righteous love for us, and agree with our people, before that they are rather enemies.85 This paragraph, representative of several instances, shows that Boltzius regarded “his” Salzburgers as superior to other Germans, due above all to their greater piety. Through this “demarcation between converted and unconverted,” the Ebenezer community is not just rhetorically separated from other German immigrants, but also elevated above all other inhabitants of the colony.86 However, this emphasis on conversion also marks the “fundamental difference” between the (heuristic) categories of Salzburger Crypto-Protestantism and Halle Pietism.87 Even though they could be considered as “Pietists avant la lettre,” Salzburger Crypto-Protestants did not hold decided theological views that were exactly like the Halle Pietists.88 Nor was theirs a movement within an established Lutheran church, requiring separation from a perceived Lutheran Orthodoxy.89 Rather, their practices were caused in part by the necessity to remain secret and were grounded in the vital importance of the individual and the book as a medium.90 Even though exposed to Protestant devotional literature that became foundational for Pietists, and in spite of Schaitberger’s presumed Pietist impression, those Salzburgers who for decades had adapted some of the outward forms of Catholicism could hardly be counted as Pietists upon their emigration.91 Under the care of Pietist pastors from Halle, attempts were made to change the Salzburgers’ conduct through rhetorical depictions as well as in practice.92 While Boltzius often portrays the Salzburgers as a homogenous group, distinct from and better than others, he realizes that not all Salzburgers conformed to his standards of behaviour: 21st of March 1737: My dear colleague [Gronau] has taken the Maurer woman, an unmarried female from Salzburg, into service as a maid; but he is not well taken care of in this respect. Not only is she simple by nature; but she is also spiteful, ill-natured, and insolent and thus is quite different from the nature and feelings of the honest Salzburgers.93 Here, Boltzius differentiates between mere Salzburgers, and “honest,” that is, conforming, ones. In addition to the exclusion of these passages from the promotional material, practical measures were also taken in order to homogenize the Ebenezer community. Disciplinary action included private conversation, public repentance, and exclusion from communion. At the end of the sermon I had to apply the discipline of the church, in the presence of the congregation, against someone [Ruprecht Zittrauer] who had offended the congregation last Wednesday by getting drunk once again […] since he had deceived me before with his good words, I could not do
Exile identity and Pietist reform movement 259 otherwise than take up this sad affair in today’s assembly and publicly exclude him as a rotten and dead limb, from Holy Communion and other holy acts until such time as he proves his sincere penance before the congregation which he scandalized.94 In addition to such evaluations and disciplinary measures carried out on community members who would not conform, Boltzius depicts a struggle for atonement and conversion of individual members that lasted for decades. Since these descriptions remain filtered through the Pastors’ eyes and follow the Halle Pietist conversion-narrative, designating these Salzburgers as self-identifying Pietists, though they were no doubt heavily influenced by their Pastors, remains problematic.95 Next to such individual measures of achieving communal homogeneity, there was, however, also positive reinforcement of Ebenezer identity through memorial practices. By inventing traditions, Pastor Boltzius fashioned a common past for the young community overwriting the Salzburgers’ Crypto-Protestant history. For instance, he reports that the congregation celebrated their arrival in Georgia with an annual Thanksgiving feast; this tradition continued for almost 25 years. In addition to celebrating the arrival of the Salzburgers, Boltzius reminds his congregation of the birthdays of benefactors Friedrich Michael Ziegenhagen and Samuel Urlsperger: Wednesday, 31st of August […] that is memorable and uplifting each year as the birthday of our dearest father Sen. Urlsperger […] that it has now been 30 years that the first transport with the many spiritual a[nd] worldly troubles left the dear beneficial Augsburg […] At this opportunity, we are made aware of the memory of the wholly undeserved favor of our two other dignified fathers in London and Halle.96 The formation of such a distinctive historical consciousness or collective memory had a major influence on a community’s identity, fashioning its members not only as abstract brothers and sisters in faith, but also as one people united through a shared past. Ebenezer’s continuation as a town turned out to last only as long as British rule over Georgia. The community began to disperse in the decades after Boltzius’ death in 1765, as people moved to plantations in the surrounding area. During the Revolutionary War, most of the town was destroyed. Jerusalem Lutheran Church in Ebenezer remained the centre of congregational life and outwardly distinct, at least until Pastor Christoph Friedrich Bergmann (1793–1832) introduced English as the language of worship.97 While Philip A. Strobel stated in 1855 that the descendants of the Salzburgers no longer had a communal identity or even knowledge about their ancestors, branches of the Lutheran Church in America repeatedly invoked the Salzburgers as Lutheran Pilgrim Fathers of the South.98 In 1925, a group of people in Effingham County who referred to themselves as Georgia S alzburgers founded the Georgia Salzburger Society that continues to be active.
260 Christine Marie Koch August Herman Francke’s Pietism envisioned the global reform of the world through a betterment of its people. This goal was exemplified in the settlement of Ebenezer in Georgia by a group of the Crypto-Protestant refugees who had been expelled from the Archbishopric of Salzburg in 1731–1732. The community was constructed through a mixture of rhetorical representation and practical enforcement, and its origins and development reveal the tensions that could emerge at the intersections of a self-consciously revivalist Reformation Protestantism with African, indigenous, and Jewish neighbours in a colonial settler society. The Salzburgers had developed a distinct and localized Crypto-Protestantism over many decades of persecution and concealment, yet that persecution prevented the development of a public communal identity or confessionalist documents. Moving from remote alpine valleys to a remote American colony allowed them to embody the ideals of a Chosen People and Promised Land that the Pietist pastor-leaders strove to present, while creating new challenges regarding the creation of a homogenous utopia as a continuation of reformation ideas.
Notes 1 A.H. Francke, “Project. Zu einem Seminario Universali oder Anlegung eines Pflantz-Gartens, von welchem man die reale Verbesserung in allen Ständen in und auserhalb Teutschlandes, ja in Europa und allen übrigen Theilen der Welt zugewarten [1701],” in E. Peschke (ed.) August Hermann Francke. Werke in Auswahl, Berlin: Evang. Verl.-Anst, 1969, pp. 108–115. 2 The author is currently writing her dissertation on “Salzburger Migrants and Communal Memory in Georgia,” a longitudinal study about the perpetuation, transmission, and instrumentalization of Georgia Salzburger Memory throughout the centuries. 3 For a critical discussion of the term, refer to V. Albrecht-Birkner, “‘Reformation des Lebens’ und ‘Pietismus’. Ein historiografischer Problemaufriss,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 41, 2015, pp. 126–153. For an English introduction please refer to D.H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe, Young Center books in Anabaptist and Pietist studies, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 4 See, for instance, W. Breul, Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, s.v. “Pietismus.” Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 2006. 5 Calvinist and mythic-spiritualistic currents within Pietist movements provided cause for this criticism. Part of the individualization was constant self-examination and exegesis of the Bible by lay-people in so-called “conventicles.” 6 For confessionalization in the sense of the German paradigm of Konfessionalisierung by W. Reinhard, H. Schilling, and T. Kaufmann, refer to T. Kaufmann, Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, s.v. “Konfessionalisierung.” Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2007. Albrecht-Birkner argues in favour of regarding Pietism within the context of early modern Reformprotestantism as its “persuasive-basis-oriented” bottom-up phenomenon, V. Albrecht-Birkner, “‘Reformation des Lebens’ und ‘Pietismus’. Ein historiografischer Problemaufriss,” 137. Regarding Pietism and enlightenment, see, for instance: H.-J. Schrader, “Feindliche Geschwister? Der Pietismus als Widersacher und Weggefährte der Aufklärung,” in S. Stockhorst (ed.), Epoche und Projekt: Perspektiven der Aufklärungsforschung, Göttingen: Wallstein Verl., 2013, pp. 91–130. Schrader argues that the Pietist movement reached more people than the (more popularly known) enlightenment.
Exile identity and Pietist reform movement 261 7 Later referred to as the Francke Foundations. Born in Lübeck and raised in Erfurt, Francke came to Halle as Pastor of St Ulrich’s Church in Glaucha and Professor at Friedrichs University. 8 Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg (1711–1787), for instance, became known as the founding father of the Lutheran Church in America. 9 Cf. K. von Greyerz, (ed.), Interkonfessionalität – Transkonfessionalität – binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität: Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verl.-Haus, 2003. 10 M. Walker, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth- Century Germany, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 19–25. Of particular importance is salt miner Joseph Schaitberger (1658–1733) who emigrated to Nürnberg from where he transmitted a stream of Protestant devotional material into the Salzburg region, inter alia urging his countrymen to follow his example and openly express their faith and emigrate if necessary – Walker, The Salzburg Transaction, p. 26. 11 Ibid., pp. 1, 4. 12 Ibid., p. 31. 13 Ibid., p. 38. This was not an uncommon practice. 14 Ibid., p. 40. 15 Ibid., p. 43. 16 Ibid., pp. 44–57. The main emigration areas were the Pinzgau and especially the Pongau region – ibid., p. 8. 17 Ibid., p. 60 f. 18 Walker’s translation – Walker, The Salzburg Transaction, p. 62. For the d igitized original, refer to “AUR 1731 X 31,” Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Salzburg, Erzstift (798–1806), virtuelles Urkundenarchiv Monasterium, http://images.monasterium. net/pics/AT-OeStA-HHStA/AUR-Salzburg-Erzstift/HHSTA_Salzburg_1731_ 10_31.jpg (accessed 30 April 2018). 19 Walker, The Salzburg Transaction, p. 65. 20 Ibid., p. 64; C.E. Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika. Mobilität und Kultur einer Gruppe religiöser Emigranten im 18. Jahrhundert, Studien zur Historischen Migrationsforschung, Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2011, p. 51. 21 Walker, The Salzburg Transaction, p. 84. 22 Ibid., pp. 84, 107. The “transaction” between Firmian and Frederick William through Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation, was in fact “sound business practice for Prussia, performed quickly and efficiently,” ibid., p. 98, additionally symbolizing Prussia’s Protestant leadership – ibid., p. 101. 23 J. van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, Cambridge Studies on the American South, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 104. In the course of the year 1732, the SPCK raised funds that were sent to Urlsperger to distribute among Salzburger exiles as he saw fit. 24 For further reading on the Ebenezer project as a joint venture, cf. A. Pyrges, “Network Clusters and Symbolic Communities: Communitalization in the Eighteenth-Century Protestant Atlantic World,” in J. Strom (ed.) Pietism and Community in Europe and North America, 1650–1850, Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 199–224; A. Pyrges, Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer: Formen und Mechanismen protestantischer Expansion in der atlantischen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015. 25 van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 111. 26 Ibid., pp. 105 f., 111. 27 Ibid., p. 106. 28 Ibid., p. 112. 29 Ibid., pp. 15, 146 f. 30 Ibid., p. 145 f. 80 per cent according to Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction, p. 150.
262 Christine Marie Koch 31 van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 168. 32 Twenty per cent according to Walker, The Salzburg Transaction, p. 150. 33 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 67; van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 112. 34 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 70. 35 Ibid., p. 70 f; for a detailed description of the transports, see: N. Stein, Chronik der Marschzüge: Salzburger Emigranten 1731 bis 1741, ed. R. Kleckley, trans. C.M. Koch, forthcoming, pp. 601–628. 36 Seven peasants, three farmhands, and two maidservants. 37 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 70 f. 38 Mining families were relatively overrepresented here in comparison to the number of other migrants from the Gastein valley – van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 116. 39 Ibid., p. 117. 40 Ibid., p. 118. 41 Ibid., p. 119 f. 4 2 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, pp. 68, 155. 43 A. Pyrges, “Rechter Glaube, rechte Ordnung, rechter Winkel. Protestantische Utopien und Idealstädte in den nordamerikanischen Kolonien,” in H. Zaunstöck (ed.) Gebaute Utopien: Franckes Schulstadt in der Geschichte europäischer Stadtentwürfe, Halle: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2010, p. 179. 4 4 Letter from [Henry Newman] to [Samuel Urlsperger] about the legal conditions regarding the settlement of Salzburger emigrants in Georgia, 6/7/1733, AFSt/M 5 C 4:15, Archives of the Francke Foundations, Halle (Saale), Germany. Translated by author. 45 According to van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 103, “Pietists and the Anglican laymen who made up the society’s activist core shared a spiritual sensibility that transcended whatever theological differences may otherwise have separated their churches.” 46 Cf. for instance U. Gleixner, “Expansive Frömmigkeit. Das hallesche Netzwerk der Indienmission im 18. Jahrhundert,” in H. Liebau, A. Nehring, and B. Klosterberg (eds) Mission und Forschung: Translokale Wissensproduktion zwischen Indien und Europa im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, Halle: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2010, p. 58. 47 See for instance AFSt/M 5 C 5:24. 48 Diary entry 4/17/1736, AFSt/M 5 D 2:7. Translated by author. 49 Samuel Urlsperger, ed., Acht Berichte über die Ankunft der Salzburger Emigranten in Dover (Augsburg, 1734), 126, AFSt/M 5 A 1 : 27, translated by author. 50 Diary entry 04/07/1734, AFSt/M 5 D 1 : 1, translated by author. 51 Diary entries 05/09/1741 and 06/02/1741, AFSt/M 5 D 8, translated by author. 52 See, for instance, diary entry 4/15/1744 from Peter Brunnholtz about his journey to Pennsylvania, AFSt/M 4 A 2: 32a; cf. J.-H. Evers, “Sitte, Sünde, Seligkeit – Zum Umgang Hallescher Pastoren mit Ehe, Sexualität und Sittlichkeitsdelikten in ihren deutsch-lutherischen Gemeinden in Pennsylvania, 1742–1800,” unpublished thesis., Universität Göttingen, forthcoming. 53 Letter from Boltzius to Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten (translated copy), 03/22/1734, AFSt/M 5 A 2 : 2, translated by author. 54 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, 146 f., 151 ff; Pyrges, Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer, p. 401. 55 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, pp. 147, 149, 152. 56 Ibid., p. 148. 57 Letter from Boltzius to Georg Christoph v. Burgsdorff, 5/6/1734, AFSt/M 5 A 2:3. Translated by author. Alternative translation: R. Kleckley, The Letters of Johann Martin Boltzius, Lutheran Pastor in Ebenezer, Georgia: German Pietism in Colonial America, 1733–1765, Lewiston: Mellen, 2009, p. 77 f.
Exile identity and Pietist reform movement 263 58 Letter from Boltzius to his uncle Johann Müller, 5/6/1734, AFSt/M 5 A 2:5. Translation: Russell Kleckley, The Letters of Johann Martin Boltzius, p. 84. 59 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 194; Pyrges, Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer, p. 400. 60 AFSt/M 5 A 2:3. 61 Most recently explored in: van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier. 62 Ibid., p. 205; Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 121. 63 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 124. 6 4 van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 211. Through their opposition, they clearly distanced themselves from the so-called Malcontents – Pyrges, “Network Clusters and Symbolic Communities,” p. 221. 65 van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 212 f. 66 AFSt/M 5 A 2:3. 67 van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 215. 68 Ibid., p. 245. 69 Ibid., p. 248. 70 Ibid., p. 249; Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, pp. 119, 141. 71 Ibid., pp. 103, 113. 72 Ibid., p. 107; especially during the first 20 years, trustees kept their promises to Georgia’s Native Americans – Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 110. 73 Ibid. 74 AFSt/M 5 A 2:3. 75 J. Gröschl, “Ebenezer in Georgia. Die Darstellung der Salzburger Emigrantengemeinde und der Kolonie Georgia in Drucken, Tagebüchern und Briefen der hallischen Pietisten,” in C. Veltmann, J. Gröschl, and T.J. Müller-Bahlke (eds) Freiheit, Fortschritt und Verheißung. Blickwechsel zwischen Europa und Nordamerika seit der frühen Neuzeit, Halle: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2011, p. 77. 76 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 105; J. Gröschl, “Ebenezer in Georgia,” p. 77 f. 77 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, pp. 106, 109 f., 112, 115; J. Gröschl, “Ebenezer in Georgia,” pp. 78, 81; Similarly dichotomous are missionary Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg’s descriptions of “heathens” in India that differentiate according to his addressee – R. Kamath, “Die Darstellung Indiens in den Briefen und Berichten Ziegenbalgs,” TRANS Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, no. 13, 2002, www.inst.at/trans/13Nr/kamath13.htm (accessed 16 April 2018). 78 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 146; further reading: C. Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus und Judenmission: Johann Heinrich Callenbergs Institutum Judaicum und dessen Freundeskreis (1728–1736), Hallesche Forschungen, Tübingen: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Niemeyer-Verl., 2004 and P.G. Aring, Christen und Juden heute, und die “Judenmission”? Geschichte und Theologie protestantischer Judenmission in Deutschland, dargestellt und untersucht am Beispiel des Protestantismus im mittleren Deutschland, Frankfurt: Haag + Herchen, 1987. 79 Diary entry 3/21/1734, AFSt/M 5 D 1:1. English translation by S. Urlsperger, Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America…, vol I, 1733–34, ed. G.F. Jones, trans. H.J. Lacher, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968, p. 86. 80 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 195; for instance, a clear distinction between themselves and the Moravians – Pyrges, “Network Clusters and Symbolic Communities,” p. 221. 81 Pyrges, Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer, p. 430 f. 82 Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 195. 83 Ibid.
264 Christine Marie Koch 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97
98
Ibid., p. 149. Diary entry 10/9/1741, AFSt/M 5 D 8. Translated by author. Pyrges, Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer, p. 334. Translated by author. Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 190. van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 53; Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 190. Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, p. 189. Ibid., pp. 183, 190. Ibid., pp. 186, 190; van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 272 f. Haver, Von Salzburg nach Amerika, pp. 189, 192. Diary entry 3/21/1737, AFSt/M 5 D 3:34. Translation by S. Urlsperger, Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America…, vol I, 1733–34, ed. G.F. Jones, trans. R. Wilson, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976, p. 37. Diary entry 2/28/1736. English translation by S. Urlsperger, Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America…, vol I, 1733–34, ed. G.F. Jones, trans. M. Hahn, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972, p. 57 ff. van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, p. 176 f., 192. Diary entry 8/31/1763, AFSt/M 5 D 9. Translated by author. Further reading: M. Berger, “Hallesche Pastoren im anglophonen Nordamerika 1742–1825. Hindernisse und Herausforderungen der Bilingualität,” in M. Häberlein and H. Zaunstöck (eds) Halle als Zentrum der Mehrsprachigkeit im langen 18. Jahrhundert, Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, Harrassowitz Verlag in Kommission, 2017, pp. 201–214. P.A. Strobel, The Salzburgers and Their Descendants. Being the History of a Colony of Germans (Lutheran) Protestants, Who Emigrated to Georgia in 1734, and Settled at Ebenezer, Twenty-Five Miles above the City of Savannah, Baltimore, MD: T. Newton Kurtz, 1855.
Bibliography Published primary sources Francke, A.H., “Project. Zu einem Seminario Universali oder Anlegung eines Pflantz-Gartens, von welchem man die reale Verbesserung in allen Ständen in und auserhalb Teutschlandes, ja in Europa und allen übrigen Theilen der Welt zugewarten [1701],” in E. Peschke (ed.) August Hermann Francke. Werke in Auswahl, Berlin: Evang. Verl.-Anst, 1969, pp. 108–115. Kleckley, R., The Letters of Johann Martin Boltzius, Lutheran Pastor in Ebenezer, Georgia: German Pietism in Colonial America, 1733–1765, Lewiston: Mellen, 2009. Stein, N., Chronik der Marschzüge: Salzburger Emigranten 1731 bis 1741, ed. R. Kleckley, trans. C.M. Koch, forthcoming, pp. 601–628. Strobel, P.A., The Salzburgers and Their Descendants. Being the History of a Colony of Germans (Lutheran) Protestants, Who Emigrated to Georgia in 1734, and Settled at Ebenezer, Twenty-Five Miles above the City of Savannah, Baltimore, MD: T. Newton Kurtz, 1855. Urlsperger, S., Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America…, vol I, 1733–34, ed. G.F. Jones, trans. H.J. Lacher, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968. ———, Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America…, vol I, 1733–34, ed. G.F. Jones, trans. R. Wilson, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976.
Exile identity and Pietist reform movement 265 ———, Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America…, vol I, 1733–34, ed. G.F. Jones, trans. M. Hahn, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.
Secondary sources Albrecht-Birkner, V., “‘Reformation des Lebens’ und ‘Pietismus’. Ein historiografischer Problemaufriss.” Pietismus und Neuzeit 41, 2015, 126–153. Aring, P.G., Christen und Juden heute, und die “Judenmission”? Geschichte und Theologie protestantischer Judenmission in Deutschland, dargestellt und untersucht am Beispiel des Protestantismus im mittleren Deutschland, Frankfurt: Haag + Herchen, 1987. Berger, M., “Hallesche Pastoren im anglophonen Nordamerika 1742–1825. Hindernisse und Herausforderungen der Bilingualität,” in M. Häberlein and H. Zaunstöck (eds) Halle als Zentrum der Mehrsprachigkeit im langen 18. Jahrhundert, Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, Harrassowitz Verlag in Kommission, 2017, pp. 201–214. Breul, W., Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, s.v. “Pietismus,” Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006. Evers, J.-H., “Sitte, Sünde, Seligkeit – Zum Umgang Hallescher Pastoren mit Ehe, Sexualität und Sittlichkeitsdelikten in ihren deutsch-lutherischen Gemeinden in Pennsylvania, 1742–1800,” unpublished thesis, Universität Göttingen, forthcoming. Gleixner, U., “Expansive Frömmigkeit. Das hallesche Netzwerk der Indienmission im 18. Jahrhundert,” in H. Liebau, A. Nehring, and B. Klosterberg (eds) Mission und Forschung: Translokale Wissensproduktion zwischen Indien und Europa im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, Halle: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2010, pp. 57–66. Gröschl, J., “Ebenezer in Georgia. Die Darstellung der Salzburger Emigrantengemeinde und der Kolonie Georgia in Drucken, Tagebüchern und Briefen der hallischen Pietisten,” in C. Veltmann, J. Gröschl, and T.J. Müller-Bahlke (eds) Freiheit, Fortschritt und Verheißung. Blickwechsel zwischen Europa und Nordamerika seit der frühen Neuzeit, Halle: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2011. Haver, C.E., Von Salzburg nach Amerika. Mobilität und Kultur einer Gruppe religiöser Emigranten im 18. Jahrhundert, Studien zur Historischen Migrationsforschung, Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2011. Kamath, R., “Die Darstellung Indiens in den Briefen und Berichten Ziegenbalgs,” TRANS Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, no. 13, 2002. Online. Available HTTP: www.inst.at/trans/13Nr/kamath13.htm (accessed 13 August 2018). Kaufmann, T., Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, s.v. “Konfessionalisierung,” Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2007. Pyrges, A., Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer: Formen und Mechanismen protestantischer Expansion in der atlantischen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015. ———, “Network Clusters and Symbolic Communities: Communitalization in the Eighteenth-Century Protestant Atlantic World,” in J. Strom (ed.) Pietism and community in Europe and North America, 1650–1850, Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 199–224. ———, “Rechter Glaube, rechte Ordnung, rechter Winkel. Protestantische Utopien und Idealstädte in den nordamerikanischen Kolonien,” in H. Zaunstöck (ed.) Gebaute Utopien: Franckes Schulstadt in der Geschichte europäischer Stadtentwürfe, Halle: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2010, pp. 171–179. Rymatzki, C., Hallischer Pietismus und Judenmission: Johann Heinrich Callenbergs Institutum Judaicum und dessen Freundeskreis (1728–1736), Hallesche Forschungen, Tübingen: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Niemeyer-Verl., 2004.
266 Christine Marie Koch Schrader, H.-J., “Feindliche Geschwister? Der Pietismus als Widersacher und Weggefährte der Aufklärung,” in S. Stockhorst (ed.) Epoche und Projekt. Perspektiven der Aufklärungsforschung, Göttingen: Wallstein Verl., 2013, pp. 91–130. Shantz, D.H., An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe, Young Center books in Anabaptist and Pietist studies, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. van Horn Melton, J., Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, Cambridge Studies on the American South, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. von Greyerz, K. (ed.), Interkonfessionalität – Transkonfessionalität – binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität: Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verl.-Haus, 2003. Walker, M., The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Index
Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aboab, Samuel 237 Acapulco-Manila galleon 135 de Acosta, Jose 15 Aduarte, Diego 134, 139 affections 143, 184, 233–5 Alberti, Leon Battista 109n14 Al-Hasan Al-Wazzan 232 de Almeida, Luís 42 Amakusa-Shimabara Rebellion 35 Amsterdam Conversos 78 Anabaptists 5, 73–5, 78, 86 Antichrist 80, 82, 84 anti-Judaic diatribes 157 anti-Protestant system 124–5 anti-Semitic violence 82 anti-Trinitarianism 75, 76, 77 Apologia pro veritate catholicae et apostolicae fidei (Politi) 116 Archipelago 135, 195–8, 201, 204 “Archipelagus Turbatus” 195 Augustinian Recollects 136 Barberini, Francesco 57 Barreto copy 38, 45n20 Beaterio de la Compañía (Jesuit) 137 Beaterio de Santa Catalina (Jesuit) 137 Benevento, Bartolomeo 56 Bengali tradition 13 Berenguer de Marquina, Félix 140, 141 Bergmann, Christoph Friedrich 259 birthing girdles 214 Bishopric of Bosnia 155 black African 190, 232–8, 256, 260 Blesdijk, Nicholas Meyndertsz van 76 Bodhidharma 15 Bodin, Jean 76
Bohemian Reformation 14 Boltzius, Johann Martin 253–9 Bosnian Church 153–7, 160, 161, 166 Bosnian-Croatian elite 163 Bosnian inquisition 161–3 Boyle’s Law 19 Brackney, William H. 84 Brancaccio, Francesco 59 Brancazi, Cesare 56 Broughton, Hugh 79 Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Gombrich and Obeyesekere) 22 Buddhist: abundant use of 38; ancient transmission of 13–14; Chan/Zen 15; China into Japan 15; and Confucian culture 37; frontier, definition of 17; historiography of 21; history of 15; and Mongol terms 15; pre-existing of 15; reintroduction of 15; sexism 41; spread of 14; tradition 13; women, oppressive treatment of 33; women’s sanctity 33; Yōfō Paulo’s criticism of 41 Buddhist Conquest of China (Zürcher) 18, 21 Buddhist Religions (Robinson) 21 Bulliet, Richard 20 Buoncompagni, Francesco 59 Busher, Leonard 75, 84 cabildo (municipal government) 178, 215 Calvin, John 10, 116 Calvinist 78, 81, 83 Calzavara, Andrea 233, 244n12 Caravale, Giorgio 4–5 Cartagenan Inquisitors 222
268 Index Catholic Church 4, 11, 37, 43, 160, 161, 166 Catholic/Counter-Reformation 213 Catholic faith 5, 153, 157, 159, 164, 165, 166, 169, 200, 236 Catholicism: apparent embrace of 5; broader restoration of 250; “lost spaces” of 224; official protector of 195, 196; outward forms of 258; reformation impulses 11; “superior thaumaturgic capacities” 220; women, subjugation of 33 Catholic laywomen 213 Catholic Reformation 14, 33, 42, 136, 145, 213 Cavour treaty 118 Cecilia de Ita y Salazar 141, 145 Censimento degli Ebrei 97 centralization 98–103, 110n19 Cesarini, Giuliano 153 Chan/Zen Buddhism 15 Charles I (V), Holy Roman Emperor 179 Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor 250 Ch‘en, Kenneth K.S. 22 childbirth culture, implications for 220 childbirth relics/pseudo-relics 216 The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism (Ch‘en) 22 “Christian Century” in Japan 34, 37 Christian citizenship 58–60 Christian ghetto 123, 125 Christianity: Bohemian Reformation 14; expansion of 13; missionary 33; mystical strands of 24; work outside of 16 Christian martyrdom: concept of 37; theological notion of 33 civil society, definition of 2–3 Clements, Rebekah 36, 37, 46n22 Clossey, Luke 3, 11, 22 Colegio de San José (Jesuit) 136 Colegio de San Juan de Letrán 136 Colegio de Santa Isabel 136 Colegio de Santa Potenciana 136 Colegio de Santo Tomás 136 Coleman, James William 22 colonial healing environment 216 colonial-metropolitan relationship 186 colonial order 134, 136–9, 176–86, 213–25, 253–60 Commentaries (of Pius II) 154, 159, 161, 171n33 A Concise History of Buddhism (Andrew) 21 confessionalization 153–54, 249–50, 260n6
confessional region 17 Congregation of Rites and Ceremonies 220 conquest-diffusion model 18–20, 23 consultori in Jure 124 “contact-expansion” conquest/diffusionist model 21 conventicles 260n5 conversion-by-the-sword explanation 17 Coornhert, Dirck Volkertsz 74, 81 corpus evangelicorum 250 Corvinus, Matthias 157, 161 cosmopolitan 19 cost-benefit analysis 25 Council of Florence 7, 153 Council of Trent 138, 181, 187n9, 197, 204, 218 Counter-Reformation 9, 125, 213, 224 de Covarrubias, Sebastian 181 creole 178–81; in New Spain 181–6 Commonwealth, England 85 Cromwell, Thomas 214 Cromwell, Oliver 85 cross-cultural dynamics 7 cross-cultural identities 33 cross-cultural transmission 4 Crossings and Dwellings (Tweed) 22 Crypto-Jews 231, 236 crypto-“Manichean” 163 Crypto-Protestant 10, 250, 258, 260 cuius regio ejus religio 118 cultural gradient 19 Cum Nimis Absurdum 98 Dalai Lama 15 Dasmariñas, Gómez Pérez 135 “Davit Ebreo” 106 DECIMA (Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive) 98, 109n16 Descripcion geográfica de los reinos de Galicia, Vizcaya y Leon (Mota y Escobar) 177, 182, 186 diabolism, 1557 case 223 diffusion-conquest model 20 digital historic mapping 98 Dolan, Frances 224 Dominicans 136, 137, 142–4 Doña Ana Esquivel 140 Doña Francisca Samaniego 140 Don Joseph Carballo 140 Doopsgezinden 74, 75, 78, 84, 86 Douglas, Mary 103 Duchess Renata of France 116 Duke of Savoy Charles Albert 119
Index 269 Duke Cosimo I 97, 98, 102 Duke Ferdinando I 121 Duke Francesco I 103 Duke of St Sava 156 Duke Stjepan Vukčić Kosača 156, 162 Duke Victor Amadeo I 117 Du Perron, Edgar 73 Durán, Diego 23 Dutch Anabaptists 5, 231 Dutch Calvinists 120 Dutch East India Company 35 Dutch Reformation 74 Eastern Christians 153 Eaton, Richard 17 “Ebenezer” 249, 252, 254–60 Eliav-Feldon, Miriam 52–3 Elisheva Carlebach 243 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 17 emotions 233–5 enclosure 134–45 English merchant community, Livorno 122 English Presbyterian 79 enslaved peoples 177, 185–6, 190, 217–18, 235–8, 256 ethno-geographic treatise 177 ethnolinguistic group 135 Eugenius IV (Pope) 153 Euro-African ancestry 232 Evangelical Catholicism 218 “facilitate” movement 7, 22, 24 female indigenous 216 female religious 138, 197 female superstition 220 femininity, monastic model of 139 Ferdinandus, Philippus 78 Few, Martha 216 de Figueroa, Don Francisco Antonio 141, 143, 144 Finch, Henry 75, 84–5 Firmian, Leopold Anton von 250 Fissell, Mary 214 Fletcher, Joseph 14 Florence, Jewish: alimentary provisioning 104; cemeteries in 100, 100; moneylending in 98; pre-Ghetto Jewish population 107; residences in 99, 101, 102 Florentine censuses 97–8 fondaci 123 Fondaco dei Tedeschi (Venice) 123, 124–5 Fondaco dei Turchi (Venice) 124 foreigners 17, 54, 119–20
Foulk, Griffith T. 23 Francesconi, Federica 9, 10 Franciscans 34, 136, 155–7, 197 Francke, A.H. 260n1 Francke, August Hermann 250, 251, 255, 260 Franck, Sebastian 81 Franco-Roman strategy 203 Fraser, Angus 66n1 Frederick William I 250, 251 García-Arenal, Mercedes 67n14 gender 33, 36–43, 134–45, 183, 213–25, 235–40 George II 251 Georgia Salzburgers 10, 249, 252–4, 259 German Protestant community (Venice) 124 ghetto: centralization 98–103; Florentine censuses 97–8; mapping methodology 97–8; Muslim 124; “Protestant” 123–25; regulations 98; and ritual humiliation 98–103; senses and abattoirs 104–7; Venice 125, 231–48 ghetto-like isolation 10 ghetto nuovo (Venice) 232 ghetto vecchio (Venice) 232 Gilles, Jacques 115, 117 Giovanni da Capistrano 156 Glaucha Institutions (Halle) 250 Glazemaker, Jan Hendriksz 86 Gombrich, Richard 22 Gouge, William 85 Graham, Allison 7 Grau y Monfalcón, Juan 139 Great Emigration 250 Gregory XV (pope) 119 Gregory, Brad 37 Gronau, Israel Christian 253 Gyatso, Sonam 15 gypsies: attitude towards 52; condition of extraneousness 54; identification documents 53; social position of 52 see also Rome, gypsies in de Haan, Galenus Abrahamsz 75 Haim Pipi, Abraham b. 241 Halle Pietism 258, 259 healing traditions 216 Helwys, Thomas 84 Henry VIII 214 heretics 120, 153–66 Hernández, Isabel 221, 223, 224 heterodox Christians 116
270 Index Hispanic Hapsburg Crown 177 Historia de las Indias (Durán) 23 Historia Eclesiástica Indiana (de Mendieta) 216 historiographical issues 16–18 History of Islamic Societies (Lapidus) 19 Hodgson, M.G.S. 18, 19 Hoffman, Melchior 73 Holler, Jacqueline 9 Holy Office of New Spain 213 Hospital Real de Españoles 136 Hospital Real de Naturales 136 Hughes, Diane Owen 103 Huguenots 73, 120 humoral theory, transmission of 215 Iberian Hispanic intellectual culture 181 Ignatius of Loyola 34 illicit romantic relationships 141 illicit sexual relationships 240–3 In Coena Domini 119 indigenous healing 216 Indigenous people 177–86, 215–17, 220, 222, 224, 226, 256–7, 260 Indulgence controversy 116 Innocent VIII (Pope) 117 Inquisition 82, 83, 116–17, 120, 213, 214, 219, 220 interfaith relations 98 intersectionality 2–4, 243 intrasocial relations 233–5 Islam: diffusion of 20; explanation of 16, 17, 24; formal adoption of 24; frontier 17; historiography 17; modern expansion of 16; personal conversion in 24; problematic in 16; spread of 14; toleration of 86 Islamicate world 13, 18 Islamic tradition 13, 25 Italian Jewish community 115, 240 Italian Protestant churches 117 Italian rabbinic literature 235 Italian rabbinic responsa 238 Jaffary, Nora 219 James I 84, 85 Jerusalem Lutheran Church 259 Jesuit Japan mission 33, 45n18 Jesuit Japan Press (JJP) 36, 42 Jesuits 4, 14, 15, 22, 33, 136–7 Jesus, confession of 13, 74 Jewish Censimento 98 Jewish-Christian relations 97, 98 Jewish citizenship, definitions of 108n1
Jewish community 6, 240–3 Jewish-Gentile relations 116, 243 Jewish Ghetto see Ghetto Jewish household 9, 231–43 Jews: ambivalent position of 97, 108; anabaptists and spiritualists 73–4; Arminian Remonstrants 78; broader spiritual community 74; of Christ’s 85; co-location of 105; commandments of 237; conversion of 84; conversions of 154; depiction of 82; Dutch Republic 77–8; Dutch toleration of 86; emigration of 231; expulsions of 116; marginalization 99; polluting effects of 103; translation, involvement of 79 Joris, David 73; doctrinal stance 76; Doopsgezinden 75; of Hoffman 73; life and teaching 76; modern antiTrinitarianism 76, 77; post-mortem trial 77; pro-tolerance works 84; religious diversity 81; religious, olerance of 75, 76; scripture, interpretation of 77; spiritualism 76, 77 Juan de la Concepción 141 Judaeo–Christian empire 85 Judaism 74, 75, 77, 78, 86, 231, 235, 237–9, 242 Kaplan, Benjamin 115 Khan, Altan 15 Khan, Qubilai 15 “king of Jerusalem” 81 Kirishitanban 35–7 Kirishitan literature 4, 35, 36, 42 Kristeva, Julia 103 Krstjani 7, 155 Kučinić, Juraj 159 La “conquête spirituelle” du Mexique (Ricard) 18 Lampronti, R. Isaac 234 Lapidus, I.M. 18, 19 de Las Infantes, Ferdinando 235 Lastic, Jean-Baptiste, baron de Vigouroux 200 de Legazpi, Miguel Lopez 135 Leiden, Jan van 75 “Levantine Jewess” 234 Levi, Corona 242 Levy, Indra 36 Lewis, Laura 138 Ley, Jan Hendrick Jarichs van der 80–1 limpieza de sangre, Spanish ideology of 52
Index 271 “little cakes of St Teresa” 220 Livornina 121 Livorno 120–3 Loos-Noji, Pamela 40 Loredano, Diana 201 Lutheran Orthodoxy 258 Luther, Martin 75, 249 McCormick, Andrew 8, 186n1 McKnight, Kathryn 222 Madonna’s girdle 214 Magellan, Ferdinand 135 Mahākaccāna 17 mahamad 241 de Maldonado, Costanza 221 Malleus Maleficarum 9 Manicheans 7, 154, 158–9, 160, 161, 163 Manik-pir seizes 13 mapping methodology 97–8 martyrdoms 34, 37–8 massari 241 mass expulsion 3 Matar, Nabil 86 Mater Dolorosa 220 materia medica 216 matronas 223 Medici Duke Cosimo I 97 Medici family 98 medicos 222 Meiji Imperial Restoration government 35 Menasseh ben Israel 75 de Mendieta, Jerónimo 216 Mentuato, Camillo 56 Mercato Vecchio 101, 102, 103 mestizaje process 216 mestizo/hybrid medical toolkit 222 Mexica-Aztec political structure 178 Mexican Inquisition 213, 214, 219, 220 Mexican women: childbirth practices 215–18; female superstition, “reform” of 218–25 mezuzah 241 midwives’ cases 213 Milton, John 118 “mission”: Catholic Spanish 10; and frontier 16; Islamic equivalent to 23; models of 25; “religious-cultural enemy” in 138 missionaries, British 18 Modena, Leone 236 monastic assets, expropriation of 214 monasticism 136 moneylending agreements 97
Mongolian Buddhism 15 Mongol terms 15 “monstrous race” 183 de Morale, Isabel 218, 223 Morejón, Pedro 42 Mota y Escobar, Alonso de la 8, 176–8, 182, 183 Moya de Contreras, Pedro 219 Muhammad al-Taghlibī, Abd al-‘Azīz b. 73, 74 Mühlenberg, Heinrich Melchior 261n8 multi-ethnic: Catholic minority 195; community 135; religio-medical space 214 multireligious communities 231 Murton, John 82 Murillo Velarde, Pedro 140 Muslim ghetto 124 Muslim Mughal 17 Muslims see Islam Nas, Johann (Franciscan) 214 Nationi 121 Native American territory 256 Neelis, Jason 13 Neralić, Jadranka 168n8 Neroni, Nerone 106 Nesvig, Martin 217 The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition (Coleman) 22 New Christians 231 New Jerusalem 10 Newson, Linda 216 New Testament 37, 160 Niccolini, Paolo 106 Nicholas of Modruš 158, 172, 172n55 Niclaes, Hendrik 74 Nirenberg, David 103 de Nis, Filipe 238 novohispano (Mota y Escobar) 177 Nuncio Tolentić 162 Obeyesekere, Gananath 22 Oda Nobunaga 34 olandese-alemanna 121 Old Testament 160, 254 Old Testament Israelite kingdom 75 “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” 118 Orbigo de Gallego, Juan Antonio 140 Ortíz, Fernando 176 Ottoman expansion 5 Ottoman law 201
272 Index Ottoman religious polity 73 Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I 79 Oxford English Dictionary 17 Oyrat/Qalmaq khan 23 Paget, John 79 Pallache, Samuel 79 Paloma, Dona 237 Paqad Yizhak (Isaac Lampronti) 234 Pardo, Joseph 79 “partera” (midwife) 226n16 Patent of Invitation 251 Patristic literature 37 Paul III (Pope) 116 Peace of Augsburg of 1555 118 Pedro de la Santisima Trinidad 141 du Perron, Jacques Davy 73 Peter, S. 119 Petar of Mile 162 Petry, Yvonne 224 philanthropic mission 253 Philip II 215, 219 Philip III 83 Piazza del Duca 102 Piccolomini, Francesco Bandini 56 Pier di Romolo 107 Pieter Jansz Twisck 75, 81 Pietist reform movement: Luther’s reformation 249; reforming, vision of 249 Pietists, Halle 250, 251, 255 Pius II (Pope) 7, 155, 160, 162, 164–7 Pius V (Pope) 103 Playmobil Luther 1–2 Politi, Ambrogio Catarino 116 Portuguese Afro-Atlantic trade settlements 236 Portuguese Jesuits 34 post-Tridentine reform 134 prince-archbishopric Salzburg 251 Protestantism 6, 14, 73, 213 Protestant Reformation 14, 213, 249–50, 260 Protestant/Tridentine objectives 3 protomedicato 215 Pucci, Antonio 102, 110n22 Quezada, Noemi 219, 222 Qur’an 14, 16, 24, 85, 86 rabbinical attitudes, impact of 233 race 146, 178, 183, 213, 221–3, 235–40, 256–60
Rebiba, Scipione 55 reformar, definition of 181 reformation literature 35–7 reformation movements 231 Reformation-style church 117 Religion’s Freedom (Twisck) 82 Religion’s Peace: or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience (Busher) 84 religious-confessional frontier moves 17 “religious-cultural enemy” 138 religious expansion, models of 21 religious freedom 119 religious identity 8, 24 religious interchange 235–40 religious intersections, Japan: Kirishitanban translations 37–8; Kirishitan women, Sanctity of 42–3; martyrdom, ideal of 34–5; vernacular translation 35–7; virgin martyr saints 38–42 Renier, Johann Georg 124 Revolutionary War 259 Ricard, Robert 18 de Ries, Hans 78 Rieuwertsz, Jan 86 Rinaldo di Paolin 60 Rio Grande 18 The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (Eaton) 17 ritual humiliation 98–103 Robbertsz le Canu, Robbert 80 Robinson, Pilgrims John 82 Roman Inquisition 116 Romani 4–5 see also gypsies Rome, gypsies in: acquisition of goods and property 65; assimilation strategy 54, 58; “being gypsies” 65; capital punishment for 56; Christian citizenship, concept of 58–60; collective identity 65, 67n14; de facto segregation 56; “gypsy lifestyle” 60; harsh repressive stance by Pius V 56; material abandonment of gypsy clothes 58; naturalization process 66; policy of forced assimilation 57; proclamation on 55–6; provincial councils on 57; sedentarization process 61–3; trial of 61–4 Rome, Krstjani in 159–61 Rosenkreuz, German 81 Ross, Alexander 85 Rossi, Gerolamo de 55 Royal Protomedicato 215 Russian Orthodox 14 du Ryer, Andrew 85
Index 273 Sacerdote, Sanson 242 Saldus, Matteus 79 salvation, pious bequests for 201 Salzburger community 249–60 Salzburger Crypto-Protestantism 258, 259 Samuelo, Rubino 240 Sánchez, Raquel Martín 220 Sanctos no gosagvueo no vchi nvqigaqi (SGN) 38, 39 San Juan de Dios 137 Santa Catalina 142, 143 Santa Clara 138 Santa Isabel 138, 139, 140, 141 Santa Potenciana 139, 140 Sarpi, Paolo 118 Schaitberger, Joseph 261n10 “schismatics” 199 Schorsh, Jonathan 234, 237–8 Scipione Lentulo, Neapolitan 117 seduction 240–3 Señor Provisor 141 senses and abattoirs 104–7 sephardic mercantile families 231 Sephardic synagogue 78 Serbian Orthodox Church 156 Servetus, Michael 76 sexual abuse 240–3 sexual reforms 213–14 sexual relations 236 Shogun Hidetada 35 Short Introduction to the Festivals of Israel 80 Siegmund, S. 108n4 Skilton, Andrew 21 “slave” and “servant” 235–6 Smyth, John 84 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 14, 251 Society of Jesus 34 Soldo-Organtino, Gnecchi 42 solid-state physics 20 Sommaripa, Antonio 201 Sommaripa, Giorgio 201 Song-dynasty China 24 “Song of Exile” 253 “spaces of abjection” 103 Spanish-Catholic model 83, 134 Spanish colonial trope 134 Spanish colonization 7 Spanish Inquisition 82, 83, 117, 120 Spanish midwife 218 “Spanishness” 134 Spanish settler population 135
SPCK see Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) spiritualistic approach 74 spiritualistic ethos 82 de Stefani, Pietro Martire 8, 195, 197–204 Stouppe, Jean-Baptiste 86 Strobel, Philip A. 259 Synod of Chanforan 117 Taylor, William 220 Terpstra, Nicholas 115, 231 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espanola 181 Thanksgiving feast 259 That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew 75 thaumaturgic 220 Theunisz, Jan 74, 75, 78–9 Third Provincial Council 219 Thoreau, Henry David 17 Tokugawa Ieyasu 34 Tolentić, Luka 154, 162 toleration 5, 6, 75, 77, 79, 87, 115, 121, 125 Tomašević, Stjepan 154, 156, 157, 160, 162 Tommasini, Tommaso 154, 156 de Torquemada, Juan 159 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 34 Trabizond, Islamization of 20 Trabot, R. Yehiel ben Azriel 237 Tractado Breve de Medicina (Farfán) 216 trans-Atlantic imperial expansion 8 “transfluvial currents” 22 “transvestite virgin” 39 Trasloheros, Jorge 219 Trickster Travels (Zemon Davis) 232 Tridentine Inquisitions 213–14 Tridentine reforms 195 Turner, Frederick Jackson 17 “turning Turke” 73, 87 Tvrtković, Stojsav 159 Tweed, Thomas 22 Twisck, Pieter Jansz 75, 81–4 Tzoncoliuhcan, community of 180 “unbelieving Jews” 80 uniate vicennium 153–6 Union of Florence 153, 154 urban development strategy 99 urban population control 105 Urlsperger, Samuel 251, 259 Valdese ghetto 117–19 de Valdès, Juan 116 Valensi, Lucette 65
274 Index Van Deusen, Nancy 136 Vénérable compagnie des pasteurs 117 Venetian Catholic elite 8 Venetian Dalmatia 158 Venetian ghetto 232, 235 Venetian Jewish 241 Venice 123–5 Venture of Islam (Hodgson) 19 “verminization” 66 vernacular translation 35–7 Vicente Tōin 38, 40, 42 Viceroyalty of New Spain 178 Victor Amadeus I 115 de Vigouroux, Baron 201, 202 Villani, Stefano 6 virgin martyr saints 38–42 Vitelli, Vitellozzo 56 Vučinić, Radmil 159 Wahabbi movement 14 Waite, Gary K. 5 Walden, Justine 5 Waldensian communities 118
“walkabout” 16 Walker, M. 261n10 “wandering woman” 139 Ward, Haruko Nawata 4 Watson Andaya, Barbara 138, 147n33 Waysenhaus 250 Welz, Justinian 14 Whitefield, George 257 Wijnman, H.F. 79 Women, “ignorant and dangerous” 224 Xavier, Francis 34 Yōfō Paulo 38–42 Zemon Davis, Natalie 232 Ziegenhagen, Michael 259 Ziegler, Jacob 124 Ziegler, Philipp 81 Zinzendorf, Nicolaus 14 Zorzi, Natale 154, 159, 161, 164 de Zumárraga, Juan 217, 218, 223 Zürcher, Erik 18