One King, Two Crowns: The Iberian Union and the Unmaking of Portuguese Japan, 1580–1640

The Envoy Nobody Wanted

How Macao Swore Allegiance to Philip II in 1582

In May 1582 the Governor-General of the Philippines put a Spanish Jesuit named Alonso Sánchez aboard a vessel at Manila and sent him north to Macao and Canton with a piece of news and a demand. The news was that Felipe II of Spain had become king of Portugal. The demand was that the Portuguese of Macao swear to him.

Chinese officials detained the ship. The Macao merchant elite raised more than two thousand ducats in bribes to get the crew released, money spent to make a problem disappear rather than to solve it.

The problem was not the detention. The problem was the passenger.

For a quarter of a century the Portuguese had held their footing on the Pearl River delta by an argument they repeated to every Cantonese official who would listen, which was that the Spaniards at Manila were conquistadores and spies, a conquering people who took islands and baptized them afterward, and that the Portuguese by contrast were merchants who wanted a beach, a warehouse and the annual fair. It was a self-serving story, and, as sales pitches go, an unusually accurate one. Now a Spanish priest had arrived in a Spanish ship carrying letters from a Spanish governor, announcing that the two peoples had the same sovereign, and the Chinese authorities were entirely capable of drawing the obvious conclusion.

Sánchez worked the problem with the men who had the most to lose. Bishop Leonardo de Sá, the Captain-Major Aires Gonçalves de Miranda, and the Jesuit Visitor Alessandro Valignano, in the city at that moment shepherding four Kyūshū boys toward Europe on what became the Tenshō Embassy, between them calmed the merchants and the mandarins. Macao swore.

When it swore the records do not settle. One line of evidence has the casados, the married householders who formed the settlement's permanent population, taking the oath on 20 January 1582; another defers the proclamation to 18 December of the same year. Eleven months is a long gap for a matter of this weight, and the later date has the better story behind it, which in sixteenth-century documentation is not the same thing as being right.

Portugal's most valuable overseas asset in 1582 was the annual silk voyage from Macao to Nagasaki, and the men who ran it greeted the union of the crowns not with loyalty or with sedition but with the flat, professional dismay of people who have just watched a competitor acquire their firm.

The Twenty-Five Chapters

What the Cortes of Tomar Granted Portugal in 1581

The instrument that made all this binding was not a conquest. It looked like one, since the Duke of Alba had crossed the frontier in June 1580 with more than twenty thousand men and destroyed the improvised force of Dom António, Prior of Crato, at Alcântara on 25 August. But the throne had been left vacant by the death of the childless Cardinal-King Henrique, and Henrique's throne had been left vacant in the first place by the disaster at Alcácer Quibir, and Felipe II's claim through his mother Isabel, daughter of Manuel I, was genuinely the strongest on the table. What settled the succession was less Alba's tercios than Felipe's cash: he ransomed Portuguese captives out of Morocco at four thousand cruzados a gentleman and a hundred a servant, and bought the great merchant houses one by one.

The Cortes that met at Tomar in April 1581 therefore confirmed him as Filipe I of Portugal under terms he had already largely conceded. Twenty-five chapters set out what the union was, and the crucial point about them is that they described a personal union of two crowns on one head, not the absorption of a kingdom into Castile.

Portugal kept its flag, its institutions, its currency, its law and its language, at home and overseas. It kept, under the rule of indigenato, an absolute reservation of every civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical office in the kingdom and its colonies to Portuguese natives.

And the two empires were to remain commercially sealed against each other. Direct trade and settlement between Spanish and Portuguese possessions stayed illegal, and the drafters were explicit about why: to protect the Portuguese Padroado, the crown's exclusive ecclesiastical patronage in the East, and the Lisbon to Macao monopoly, from Castilian competition. Portugal's negotiators understood perfectly well that the danger of sharing a king was not tyranny. It was competition.

There was money attached. Felipe granted 300,000 ducats in redress, 120,000 of it for the Moroccan ransoms. The principles were compiled as the Estatuto de Tomar in two patent letters signed at Lisbon in November 1582.

Twenty-five chapters, and not one of them addressed foreign policy. Nobody wrote that clause because nobody in the room thought to.

A Town Council Against the Castilians

Habsburg Rule in Portugal and the Founding of the Macao Senate, 1583

Administratively the Habsburgs governed Portugal by building a parallel bureaucracy and then letting it fight itself. In Madrid sat the Conselho de Portugal, established in 1582 and required by law to be composed entirely of Portuguese. In Lisbon sat a viceroy or a board of governors, the first of them Felipe's nephew Cardinal-Archduke Albert of Austria, appointed in 1583 at the age of twenty-three and assisted by three Portuguese councilors who had rather more idea what they were doing. In 1604 a Conselho da Índia was added, a specialized overseas tribunal that was in principle exactly what a scattered maritime empire needed. It was strangled at birth by the jurisdictional resistance of the Conselho da Fazenda and the Desembargo do Paço, and abolished in 1614.

In Goa, Duarte de Menezes, viceroy from 1584, issued decrees excluding Spanish shipping and Spanish mendicants from the Far East. Below him sat the Captains-Major of the Japan Voyage, who held sovereign military and judicial jurisdiction over every Portuguese subject between the Straits of Malacca and Japan, and who until 1623 automatically served as interim governor of Macao during the year they spent in port waiting for the Canton silk to be assembled. Jerónimo Pereira was accused of carrying more than a thousand Japanese slaves out of Nagasaki in 1588, a figure produced by a writer with an interest in a large number.

The most consequential institution, though, was the one the Portuguese built for themselves. In 1583 the leading citizens of Macao, on the initiative of Bishop Belchior Carneiro, converted their informal assembly of casados into a formal town council, and they did it explicitly to defend municipal autonomy against the possibility of Castilian absorption. Viceroy Duarte de Menezes ratified its charter on 10 April 1586, granting Macao the privileges of the city of Évora. The Senado da Câmara comprised three vereadores, two juízes ordinários and one procurador da cidade, elected on a restricted property franchise. It ran its own budget and levied its own duties. And because both the Ming authorities and, later, the Tokugawa Shogunate recognized the Senate rather than the transient Captains-Major as the responsible power in the city, it carried real diplomatic weight, the Chinese classifying the procurador as a junior mandarin of the second or third class.

Portugal's most exposed Asian settlement responded to the union of the crowns by inventing a constitution.

The Arithmetic of the Great Ship

Why the Macao–Nagasaki Silk Trade Was So Profitable

What Macao was protecting was the most profitable single voyage in the world, and its profitability rested on an arbitrage so wide that it survived decades of mismanagement, piracy and taxation. China wanted silver and forbade direct trade with Japan. Japan had silver and wanted silk. The Portuguese, who were foreigners to both and therefore acceptable to both, carried the one to the other and took a cut of everything in between. The Great Ship sailed from Macao on the summer monsoon, unloaded at Nagasaki, wintered, and came back on the winter winds with holds full of bullion.

The Macao municipality capped the raw silk cargo at 1,600 piculs a year. This was not a limit imposed by supply. It was a cartel decision, taken because the Japanese market was narrow and a glut would collapse the price the entire settlement lived on. A picul ran between 113 and 133 pounds depending on who was weighing, so the quota came to roughly eighty to ninety-six metric tons, worth more than most European principalities earned in a year. Within it the Japan mission of the Society of Jesus held a protected allocation, fixed under Valignano's contract of 1578 at 100 piculs and worth a dependable four to six thousand gold cruzados annually, later cut to fifty and eventually to forty. The mission that converted Kyūshū was funded by a line item in a silk manifest.

The margins are preserved in a trade memorandum of about 1600, which gives Canton cost against Nagasaki sale price in silver taels per picul. White raw silk bought at 80 sold at 140 to 150; fine twisted silk, the retros, bought at 130 to 140 and sold at 370 to 400. Gold was quieter and more structural: bullion moved at 5.4 taels of silver per tael weight in Canton against 7.8 in Nagasaki, because the gold to silver ratio stood between one to 5.4 and one to seven in China, and at one to ten in Japan in 1592. A merchant who understood the weights and the currencies could make money by moving metal between two places that disagreed about what it was worth.

The silver flowed accordingly. Between 1560 and 1600 the Portuguese carried 22,500 to 37,500 kilograms of Japanese silver out of the country every year. Ralph Fitch recorded the annual carrack carrying away above 600,000 cruzados' worth, Diogo do Couto over a million in gold cruzados. The figures do not reconcile, and the direction they point in is not in doubt.

The Price Set by Five Cities

The Itowappu Silk Guild of 1604 and the Squeeze on Portuguese Trade

The trade did not die of Dutch cannon. It was first squeezed by people who never fired a shot.

The first squeeze came from Edo. In 1604, or 1605 by some accounts, Tokugawa Ieyasu institutionalized the shiraito wappu, the raw silk allotment system, which the Portuguese called the pancada, meaning the blow or the knock. The mechanism was elegant and entirely one-sided. A guild of merchants drawn from the shogunal cities, Kyoto, Sakai and Nagasaki at first and Edo and Osaka from 1631, was empowered to negotiate a single fixed wholesale price for the whole of the incoming raw silk cargo, as one lot. Not a market. One buyer with three heads, later five, facing sellers who had nowhere else to unload and a ship that had to leave on the monsoon. Margins that had run at one hundred percent or better were compressed. What kept the trade alive after 1604 was not pricing power but privileged access, since the Portuguese were still the only Europeans who could buy at Canton, and even under the pancada that access left returns of forty to fifty percent.

The volumes moved the wrong way with them. Raw silk imports peaked at over 2,500 piculs in 1600, and by 1612 the carrack's share had fallen to 1,300 out of a Japanese import of five thousand, the difference carried by Japanese shuinsen, the red-seal ships licensed by the Shogunate.

The second squeeze came from the taxman. The crown took 8.5 percent at Goa and 7.5 percent at Malacca on transiting goods. Macao levied the caldeirão, the municipal cauldron tax that paid for the fortifications and the garrison, three percent on goods shipped to Japan and raised to eight in 1634. The Captain-Major took a ten percent freight commission on all silk embarked. By 1623 total deductions were reported at twenty-seven to twenty-eight percent of cargo value. At the far end, Nagasaki levied no formal customs duty and no anchorage fee whatsoever. Instead the Portuguese made voluntary annual presents to the Nagasaki bugyō, the Shogun and the senior councilors, averaging around twenty-five thousand ducats a year. The Tokugawa had discovered that a gift cannot be renegotiated by a foreign government, cannot be appealed, and never appears in anyone's tariff schedule as a grievance.

The third squeeze was the one Tomar had specifically legislated against, and it came from fellow subjects of the same king. Spain had taken Manila in 1571 and opened the Pacific galleon route, and New World silver crossed that ocean in quantities without precedent, arriving exactly as China's Single Whip fiscal reform made the appetite for the metal effectively bottomless. That silver bid up the price of Canton silk. Duarte Gomes de Solis complained in 1622 that Spanish demand had forced Macao to pay twice as much for silk as before, which meant the pancada was capping the sale price at Nagasaki while Manila raised the purchase price at Canton. As for the Tomar ban on direct Macao to Manila commerce, by the early 1630s the illicit traffic ran at an estimated 1.5 million pesos a year, and the men best placed to enforce the prohibition were the men profiting from its breach.

Portugal's empire lost the revenue. Portugal's merchants, particularly the New Christian houses with correspondents in Seville, Lima and Manila, made fortunes. Both were consequences of the same king.

Two Patronages, One King

How Papal Bulls Broke the Jesuit Monopoly in Japan, 1585–1608

The legal architecture of the missions was older than the Union and, in theory, unaffected by it. The Padroado Real vested in the Portuguese crown the exclusive right and the corresponding duty to finance, staff and supervise the missions from East Africa to Japan; the Patronato Real did the same for Spain in the Americas. The dividing line rested on the Treaties of Tordesillas and Saragossa, which the Portuguese read as placing Japan inside their sphere and the Spanish had disputed for as long as the question was worth disputing.

That dispute is precisely why the Padroado needed papal reinforcement. On 28 January 1585 Gregory XIII issued Ex pastoralis officio, forbidding any religious order except the Society of Jesus to enter or preach in Japan, on pain of ecclesiastical censure. It was as clean a monopoly grant as the Church knew how to write.

It lasted twenty-two months. In November 1586 Sixtus V, who had been a Franciscan before he was a pope, issued Dum ad uberes fructus, raising the status of the Franciscan province in the Philippines and licensing missions throughout the East Indies. Rome now held two mutually exclusive positions on the same question, both in force. The men on the ground reached the answer their orders preferred.

The friars had in fact arrived before either document. In 1584 an Iberian junk sailing from Macao to Manila was storm-blown to Hirado, and Fray Juan Pobre, O.F.M., stayed some months ministering to converts, which is the sort of accident that establishes a precedent. In 1593 a formal Franciscan legation under Fray Pedro Bautista Blázquez arrived, and its members exploited Toyotomi Hideyoshi's appetite for direct Manila trade in order to build public missions at Kyoto, Osaka and Nagasaki, arguing that Ex pastoralis officio had bound the Jesuits and nobody else. Rome then formalized the retreat in two stages: Clement VIII's Onerosa pastoralis officii of 12 December 1600 admitted the mendicants on condition that they traveled by way of Portuguese India, and Paul V's brief of 11 June 1608 removed the routing restriction. In 1609 Philip III authorized Spanish trade directly between Manila and Japan, and the last legal wall between the two empires in the Far East came down.

The cohabitation was poisonous, and it was poisonous in public. The Jesuits and the friars accused each other of provoking the Japanese authorities, and did so in national terms: the Portuguese Jesuits called the mendicants' behavior wanton rashness, the Franciscans called the Jesuits merchants in cassocks who had put silk before the Gospel and made themselves comfortable with a tyrant. Each side wrote it down. Each side said it aloud. And they said it where the officials they were competing to influence could hear, furnishing them, at no cost, with a detailed account of European religious politics narrated by participants with every incentive to be specific about the other's failings.

The Man Who Told Hideyoshi

How Hideyoshi and Ieyasu Learned That Spain and Portugal Shared a King

The Jesuits had spent forty years constructing a single argument, and it was a good one. The Portuguese who came to Japan were merchants. The priests who came with them were priests. Trade did not require conversion, conversion did not require submission, and no European power had the slightest territorial designs on the islands.

The argument had one weakness. It was only true of the Portuguese.

The first breach came in 1592, when Fray Juan Cobo, O.P., arrived as accredited emissary of the Spanish governor of the Philippines and in audience informed Hideyoshi that Felipe II had annexed Portugal and was sovereign over both empires. Cobo was negotiating on behalf of Manila and had every reason to make his own king sound impressive. He succeeded. The ruler of Japan now knew that the merchants at Nagasaki and the friars from the Philippines answered, at the top, to the same man.

Four years later the San Felipe came ashore. The Manila to Acapulco galleon, carrying a cargo valued at 1.5 million pesos, was disabled by typhoons and grounded at Urado in Tosa in October 1596. Facing confiscation, someone aboard is said to have attempted to intimidate Hideyoshi's commissioner Mashita Nagamori by pointing to a map of the Spanish empire and observing that His Catholic Majesty was accustomed to sending missionaries first and armies afterward. The episode is the hinge of the traditional causal account of what followed, and it should be handled with tongs, being Jesuit in origin and flatly denied by Franciscan sources. What is documented is the aftermath: Spanish friars accused the Portuguese of conspiring to seize the cargo, the Portuguese accused the Spaniards of being conquerors in the American style, and both accusations were made where Japanese officials could hear them.

On 5 February 1597 Hideyoshi had twenty-six Christians executed, six of them Franciscans, though not all Spanish, since Felipe de Jesús was Mexican-born and Gonzalo García born at Bassein in Portuguese India, three Japanese Jesuit lay brothers taken by mistake, and seventeen Japanese lay converts. Hideyoshi had condemned Christianity as a pernicious doctrine in his edict of 1587, on grounds that had nothing to do with Spain, and had left it unenforced because he wanted the silk. The executions of 1597 were the first time the enforcement was real.

The final stage of the education came after 1600, from a man with a professional interest in the subject. William Adams, pilot of the Liefde, spent years explaining European geopolitics to Tokugawa Ieyasu: the repeated warning that Spain and Portugal were governed by one king and that Catholic missionaries functioned as an advance party for invasion. Adams was not a disinterested witness. He was an English Protestant seeking a trading position, and everything he said served his interest.

It also happened to be true about the king.

Inherited Enemies

Dutch Attacks on Portuguese Asia and the Battle of Macao, 1603–1622

The war Portugal joined in 1580 had begun without it and would be fought largely at its expense. The Dutch had revolted against Felipe II in the Low Countries; the English had gone to war with him in the Channel. From the moment of the union every enemy of Madrid became automatically an enemy of Goa, Malacca, Macao and Nagasaki, and those enemies worked out with impressive speed that the Portuguese possessions were where Habsburg power was thinnest.

The opening exchanges set the pattern. In April 1600 the Liefde reached Bungo with twenty-four survivors of a five-ship expedition that had left Rotterdam nearly two years earlier, and the Portuguese at Nagasaki petitioned Ieyasu to execute the crew as pirates. He declined, and confiscated the ship's nineteen bronze cannon. In September 1601 the ouvidor of Macao hanged seventeen Dutchmen as pirates.

The retaliation was commercial, and it was ruinous. On 25 February 1603 Jacob van Heemskerck took the 1,500-ton carrack Santa Catarina off Singapore, explicitly in reprisal for the Macao executions. Her silk, gold and porcelain sold at Amsterdam for 3.4 million guilders. The legality of the seizure was contested enough that a young lawyer named Hugo Grotius was engaged to justify it, producing in the process the foundations of modern prize law and the doctrine of the free sea, an unusually productive piece of after-the-fact paperwork. For Macao the loss paralyzed the settlement's credit and gutted the Jesuit mission's finances at a stroke. Five months later the Erasmus and the Nassau took the annual Japan carrack in Macao roads with over 1,400 piculs of raw silk and gold worth 400,000 ducats aboard.

Then came the territory. Tidore fell in May 1605 and the Portuguese were driven out of the Moluccas. The Dutch opened a factory at Hirado in July 1609, the English followed in 1613, and the Company chartered in 1602 set about the systematic dismemberment of Portuguese Asia as declared strategy. In July 1618 the Portuguese abandoned the single great carrack, a magnificent target, in favor of fleets of fast galliots, which were not.

The high-water mark came on 24 June 1622, when Jan Pieterszoon Coen sent thirteen ships and 1,300 men against Macao, Japanese and Bandanese mercenaries among them. A landing force of six to eight hundred came ashore at Cacilhas beach. A shot from the fortress of the Monte, which Jesuit tradition attributes to the Italian father Giacomo Rho, though the attribution is uncorroborated and improves considerably with retelling, detonated a Dutch powder wagon, and the garrison, the citizens and the settlement's armed African slaves charged down the beach and routed the invasion. The Dutch official tally was 136 Europeans killed and 126 wounded, perhaps three hundred with the mercenaries. Richard Cocks, writing from Hirado on hearsay and considerable enthusiasm, reported three to five hundred dead. The gap between those two numbers is the gap between a defeated navy's return and a rival nation's rumor.

Macao held. Almost nothing else did.

The Money Owed to Nagasaki

Macao's Debts to Japanese Lenders Before the 1639 Expulsion

By the 1620s the Estado da Índia was insolvent in the specific manner of a state that still has assets and can no longer reach them. Customs revenues at the major ports fell from roughly 500,000 cruzados in 1620 to 233,000 by 1634 as Dutch pressure closed the sea lanes.

With the Straits of Malacca under Dutch blockade, Macao was cut off from Goan capital, and it did the only thing available. It borrowed from the Japanese.

The instrument was respondência, a maritime loan repayable with interest only if the ship came home, so that the lender carried the shipwreck risk and priced it accordingly. In India such loans commonly ran at six to sixteen percent per voyage. The lenders of Nagasaki and Hakata, among them Suetsugu Sōtoku and Nakano Hikobee, charged twenty-five to thirty-five percent, and in some seasons as much as fifty. Macao paid it, because the alternative was not sailing.

The financing worked, in the sense that the volumes held up until the very end. Under the galliot system silver was counted in chests of roughly a thousand taels each: 1,500 chests in 1635, over 2,350 in 1636, valued by Dutch observers at 6,697,500 guilders, 2,600 in 1637, and 1,259 in 1638 with Dom João Pereira's fleet, the last that legally sailed. That was a remarkable performance for a trade three seasons from extinction.

The structure was a trap with a very specific shape. Macao's working capital was borrowed in Japan, at Japanese interest, against cargoes that had to be sold in Japan to service the debt. The edifice depended on the ships being allowed to keep coming.

In 1639 they were not. When the trade was severed the system collapsed on the spot, leaving Macao in default on somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 taels of debt that could never be recovered, because the creditors were in a country the debtors were forbidden on pain of death to enter.

The Bill from Madrid

What the Iberian Union Cost Portugal: the Armada, Taxes and Lost Ships

The costs of the union were not only opportunity costs. Madrid sent invoices.

The first arrived in 1588. Portugal supplied the core of the Armada: the Squadron of Portugal mustered ten galleons and two zabras, 7,737 tons of shipping, the largest vessels in the fleet. To help fund a project costing around ten million ducats, Felipe diverted 345,000 cruzados of Indian customs revenue in 1586, which is to say that the defense of the Estado da Índia was mortgaged to an invasion of England. Roughly four of the ten Portuguese galleons were lost, along with crews the kingdom could not replace.

The demands became routine. During his state visit to Lisbon in 1619, Felipe III of Spain, who was Felipe II of Portugal and had never previously troubled to visit the country, secured an annual Portuguese subsidy of 383,000 cruzados. Portugal paid 5.3 million cruzados between 1619 and 1632, and its merchants a further 900,000 a year through the 1620s.

Then the Count-Duke of Olivares proposed the Union of Arms. Introduced in 1624, it was designed to raise a common reserve of 140,000 men financed proportionally across the Habsburg domains, with Portugal, Catalonia and Naples each assigned 16,000 infantry. The Portuguese response was constitutional and correct: Tomar exempted them from military service or payment outside their own territory. Madrid bypassed the Cortes and imposed taxes directly. A drive to raise 200 million réis went through a twenty-five percent increase in the cabeção da sisa and the national extension of the real-d'água, a retail duty on meat and wine that yielded thirty-five million réis in Lisbon alone.

In August 1637 Évora rose over precisely these impositions, in a movement remembered as the Revolta do Manuelinho after a harmless local madman whose name was signed to the revolutionary proclamations. Protesters burned the fiscal and judicial registries, which is the most articulate act available to a population whose grievance is documentation. The rising was crushed by March 1638.

Underneath all of it, the shipping was failing. Before 1580 the Carreira da Índia lost roughly one vessel a year, about one in ten. The Union-era figures come from reckonings that do not agree with one another and should be read as indicative rather than as data: loss rates of twenty-three percent in the 1580s, thirty-six in the 1600s, thirty-five in the 1620s. In the decade from 1631 to 1640 only twenty-eight ships reached Asia and only fifteen came back.

Those figures are unreliable in detail. The threefold collapse they describe is not.

The Ruling at Nagasaki

Why Japan Expelled the Portuguese in 1639

In 1628 a Spanish squadron destroyed a Japanese red-seal ship at Ayutthaya in Siam, and the Shogunate responded by embargoing five Portuguese galliots at Nagasaki.

The Macaonese made the argument they had been making for half a century, and made it well. Macao was a Portuguese settlement. Manila was Spanish. The two were separate colonies with separate governments, garrisons, treasuries and trades, and a Portuguese merchant at Nagasaki bore no more responsibility for a Spanish captain in the Gulf of Siam than a Japanese merchant at Hirado bore for a pirate off Fujian. The incident at Ayutthaya was nothing to do with them.

The Nagasaki authorities rejected the defense. Spain and Portugal, they held, formed a dual monarchy under the same king, and the subjects of both crowns were collectively answerable for one another.

The sources paraphrase the ruling rather than quote it, but its content is not in doubt, and it was the end of the argument the Jesuits had built the mission on. From 1628 the Portuguese in Japan were not merchants who happened to be Catholic. They were subjects of Felipe IV.

What followed reads less as a sequence of decisions than as the working out of a premise. The expulsion edict of 1614 had already shipped out most of the clergy. In October 1636 the mixed-race children of Portuguese fathers and their Japanese mothers were deported from Nagasaki, 287 of them by the shogunal registers, more than 290 by the Jesuit Francisco Colín working from the Macao church rolls. Then the rising at Shimabara put tens of thousands of peasants and rōnin behind the walls of Hara Castle under banners bearing Portuguese inscriptions, and the Shogunate destroyed them.

On 4 August 1639 the rōjū, the senior council of state, signed the definitive expulsion. Three reasons were given: that Portuguese vessels were being used to smuggle Catholic priests into Japan, that they were the finance channel keeping the clandestine mission alive, and that the smuggled priests, money and weapons had fomented Shimabara. When the Captain-Major Vasco Palha de Almeida arrived that summer with two ships, he was forbidden to trade, refused permission even to land goods intended to settle existing debts, and handed the edict.

Macao's Senate declined to accept exclusion in silence, and in July 1640 sent a deliberately non-commercial embassy of seventy-four members headed by four of the city's most respected citizens, all of them past fifty. They carried no cargo. The whole delegation was arrested and confined on Deshima, and on 3 August sixty-one of them were beheaded on Nishizaka, the ship and its goods burned in the bay. Thirteen were spared to carry home a decree stating that if King Felipe himself, or the God of the Christians, or the great Buddha contravened the prohibition, they would pay for it with their heads.

The Japanese had named the king. He was not Portuguese.

The Reckoning

How the Iberian Union Ended in 1640, and What It Cost Portuguese Japan

Four months later, on the morning of 1 December 1640, a group of Portuguese fidalgos walked into the Paço da Ribeira in Lisbon, killed the Secretary of State Miguel de Vasconcelos, arrested the Vicereine, and ended the Union. The timing was accidental in the strict sense and not at all in any other, since Olivares had ordered the Portuguese nobility mobilized and marched to Catalonia at Portugal's own expense, which handed the conspirators both an armed network and a deadline.

The news traveled at the speed of the sea. Macao heard last, on 30 May 1642, when António Fialho Ferreira arrived having traveled in disguise through Dutch Batavia to reach a city that had been at war with the Dutch for forty years and cut off from Japan for three. On 31 May the Senate and citizens assembled, 276 of them, and signed a solemn declaration of loyalty. João IV granted Macao the title it still carries: Cidade do Nome de Deus de Macau, Não há outra mais leal, the City of the Name of God of Macao, there is none more loyal.

The bill was still being paid. Malacca fell to the VOC on 14 January 1641, and in May the Dutch factory at Hirado was closed by shogunal order and its staff confined on the artificial island at Deshima that the Portuguese had been made to build and pay for, which is how the closing of Japan rewarded its winners.

The revisionist case against calling any of this a Spanish captivity is strong and mostly correct. The Estado da Índia was already deteriorating through overstretch and administrative decay in the 1570s. The South Atlantic sugar economy expanded under the Union rather than contracting. Portuguese merchant networks reached American silver they could never otherwise have touched. And the pressures that closed the Japan trade were substantially Japanese in origin: the shuinsen, the pancada cartel of 1604, and an anti-Christian turn whose roots are visible in Hideyoshi's grievances of 1587 about temple-burning, forced conversion and the sale of Japanese people abroad, not one of which had anything to do with Madrid.

But there is one point on which the older reading holds, and it was delivered in a magistrate's chamber at Nagasaki in 1628. The Jesuits had spent two generations teaching Japanese rulers a distinction: that the merchant and the missionary and the soldier were three different Europeans, and that Japan could take the first without the third. It was a fragile argument, sustained by careful men against constant evidence, and it was the entire basis on which the trade and the mission both survived. The Union did not disprove it. It simply made it impossible to say out loud, because after 1580 there was one king behind all three, and everyone in Nagasaki knew his name.

The Portuguese went on making it anyway, for another eleven years, in front of officials who had already ruled on it. They were still making it in July 1640, when four elderly gentlemen of Macao sailed into Nagasaki harbor with no cargo aboard, to explain that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding.

Sources & Further Reading

Bouza, Fernando. Portugal no Tempo dos Filipes: Política, Cultura, Representações (1580-1668). Edições Cosmos, 2000. The essential revisionist account of the Habsburg period as a composite monarchy rather than an occupation, and the basis of the constitutional framing used here for Tomar and the Estatuto.

Boxer, C. R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650. University of California Press, 1951. Still the indispensable narrative of the mission from Xavier to the closure, and the standard treatment of the Jesuit and mendicant quarrel and its consequences at the Japanese court.

Boxer, C. R. The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555-1640. Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1959. The single most important work for this article: the silk quotas, the pancada, the Captain-Major's freight commission, the caldeirão, the galliot fleets and the silver chests all derive from Boxer's reconstruction of the voyage accounts.

Boxer, C. R. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. Hutchinson, 1969. Provides the imperial frame, including the Carreira da Índia shipping losses and the fiscal condition of the Estado da Índia under Dutch pressure.

Cooper, Michael. Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China. Weatherhill, 1974. Follows the Jesuit silk allocation and the mission's commercial entanglement from the inside, through the career of the man who negotiated much of it.

Disney, A. R. A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, Volume 2: The Portuguese Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2009. A clear modern synthesis of the Union's administrative machinery, the councils in Madrid and Lisbon, and the sequence of territorial losses to the Dutch.

Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 1973. The authoritative analysis of how the Japanese authorities came to read Christianity as a political threat, including the language and logic of the expulsion edicts.

Elliott, J. H. The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline. Yale University Press, 1986. The definitive account of the Union of Arms, the fiscal drive of the 1630s and the Catalan crisis that gave the Portuguese conspirators their opening.

Hesselink, Reinier H. The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560-1640. McFarland, 2016. Reconstructs Nagasaki as a city and a market, and is particularly useful on the silk allotment guild, the presents to the bugyō and the final embassy of 1640.

Massarella, Derek. A World Elsewhere: Europe's Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Yale University Press, 1990. Places the Portuguese collapse alongside the Dutch and English ventures, and is properly skeptical about the numbers all three nations reported concerning each other.

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History. Longman, 1993. The best account of the economic structure of the Estado da Índia, the leasing of voyages, and the Manila silver corridor that Tomar prohibited and nobody prevented.

Valignano, Alessandro. Sumario de las cosas de Japón (1583). Edited by José Luis Alvarez-Taladriz. Sophia University, 1954. The Visitor's blunt internal assessment of the mission's finances and prospects, written in the first years of the Union by the man who had negotiated the Jesuit silk contract.