The Ethiopian Embassy to King Sebastian: A Patriarch, a Prince, and the Rescue of Prester John
How a Portuguese physician with a cut-off tongue talked his way into a patriarchate
Topic
People
The missionaries, warlords, interpreters, samurai, and renegades whose lives shaped the Portuguese-Japanese encounter.
Early Contact (1543–1568)(6)
Francis Xavier and the Jesuit Mission in Japan
Arriving in Kagoshima in 1549, the Navarrese co-founder of the Society of Jesus launched one of the most ambitious evangelization campaigns in history. His two years in Japan set the course for decades of religious and cultural transformation.
Brother Lourenço of Hirado: The Blind Minstrel Who Built a Church
He was half-blind, unlettered, six-fingered, and described by men who admired him as having a face painful to look at. He was also the greatest preacher the Jesuit mission in Japan ever produced, and without him there would have been no Christian Century.
The Man Who Stayed: Cosme de Torres and the Long Decade of the Japanese Mission
Successor to Francis Xavier and Superior of the Japan mission for nineteen years, the Valencian priest Cosme de Torres ran the entire Jesuit operation through the chaos of the Sengoku period. Less famous than his predecessors and successors, he laid the foundations on which Japanese Christianity's apogee would be built.
O Desejado: Dom Sebastião and the Ghost That Haunted Two Empires
A posthumous orphan, a boy-king obsessed with crusade, and a catastrophic death in Morocco, how one man's medieval fantasies in Lisbon reshaped the future of Christianity in Japan
The Man Who Walked into Kyoto: Gaspar Vilela and the Mission to the Imperial Capital
A half-blind lute player, a shaved-headed Portuguese priest, and the most audacious gamble in the history of the Jesuit mission in Japan, the story of how one man planted Christianity in the imperial capital and changed the course of Japanese history.
Azuchi–Momoyama (1568–1600)(9)
Lord Fool to Demon King: The Life and Personality of Oda Nobunaga
He threw incense at his father’s funeral, dressed like a vagrant, and befriended a Jesuit. From provincial fool to the man who nearly unified Japan, the life of the warlord who embraced Portuguese firearms, patronized the Jesuits, and declared himself a living god.
The Soldier Who Would Not Bend: Francisco Cabral and the Battle for Japan’s Soul
A Portuguese soldier turned Jesuit priest was given command of the most culturally complex mission in Christendom. He responded by trying to make Japan more like Portugal. The results were catastrophic.
Takayama Ukon: The Samurai Who Chose God Over Japan
One of the finest generals of the Sengoku age, a master of the tea ceremony, and Japan’s most powerful Christian lord, Takayama Ukon chose faith over everything, and lost everything.
João Rodrigues Tçuzzu: The Interpreter Who Spoke for an Empire
A peasant boy from rural Portugal mastered Japanese so completely that two successive rulers made him their confidant, and spent thirty-three years as the indispensable man between two civilizations.
The Visitor: Alessandro Valignano and the Remaking of the Japan Mission
A Neapolitan aristocrat who slashed a woman’s face in his twenties became the most consequential European in sixteenth-century Asia, reshaping the Jesuit enterprise across three decades, three continents, and three visits to a country he could barely comprehend.
Gaspar Coelho: The Priest Who Thought He Was a Prince
Alessandro Valignano chose him because he seemed docile. For nine years, as Vice-Provincial of Japan, Gaspar Coelho proved he was nothing of the kind, a would-be daimyō who stockpiled weapons, paraded his private warship, and brought the 1587 expulsion edict down upon the Church he was meant to shepherd.
The Tenshō Embassy: Japanese Princes in Renaissance Europe
In 1582, four young Japanese nobles embarked on an extraordinary journey to Europe, meeting Philip II of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII. Their voyage is one of the most remarkable episodes of early modern global diplomacy.
The Monkey Who Became God: The Life and Personality of Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Born a nameless peasant, he talked, fought, and schemed his way to the summit of Japanese power, the most improbable biography in pre-modern Japan and one of the most extraordinary tales of social mobility in the early modern world.
The Barefoot Invasion: The Franciscan Friars in Japan
A Spanish ex-soldier who fought in the tercios, a Dominican Sinologue killed by headhunters in Formosa, and a Castilian lay brother who jumped ship in the middle of the Pacific, the story of how the Spanish mendicant orders crashed into a Japanese mission that the Portuguese Jesuits had built and the Pope had reserved for them alone.
Early Tokugawa (1600–1614)(5)
The Patient Conqueror: The Life of Tokugawa Ieyasu
Born a hostage and forged into the most patient political mind in Japanese history, the man who ended a century of civil war, shut the door on the Christian mission, and built a state that lasted 250 years.
William Adams and the Protestant Disruption
In 1600, a dying English pilot washed ashore in Japan and quietly destroyed a sixty-year Catholic monopoly. William Adams became a samurai, an advisor to the shōgun, and the man who proved that European trade could be separated from European God.
The Dutiful Son: Tokugawa Hidetada and the Machinery of Persecution
How the most boring man in Japan built the most effective authoritarian state in the early modern world, and destroyed Christianity in the process, one bureaucratic edict at a time.
The Wrong Cloth in the Wrong Town: The English East India Company at Hirado, 1613–1623
On a June afternoon in 1613, a ship called the Clove anchored in a small Kyushu harbour and a captain named John Saris stepped ashore carrying a letter from King James I, a cargo of unsold broadcloth, and a grudge against the only Englishman in Japan. Ten years later, the English would sail away in debt, in disgrace, and in tears.
The Keichō Embassy: A Samurai in the Court of the Spanish King
In 1613, a one-eyed northern warlord sent his retainer across three oceans to negotiate with Philip III of Spain and Pope Paul V. The mission spanned seven years, three continents, and ended in failure, martyrdom, and a galleon sold for scrap.
Persecution (1614–1635)(4)
Number of Christian Converts in Japan, 1549–1700
Christianity rose to perhaps 300,000 active believers in seventy years and was driven underground in twenty-five. A guided tour of the demographic curve, the contested numbers behind it, and the men who pushed it up and down.
The Commissioner Who Left No Wake: Ibi Masayoshi and the Seven-Year Journey to Europe, c. 1615–1622
A shogun who listened for three days and nights, a servant who crossed the world and came back with an answer, and a single quoted paragraph in an English history book of 1903 that is the only evidence any of it happened. Ibi Masayoshi was sent by Tokugawa Hidetada to inspect Christianity in Europe, and the archives of two continents have never produced his name.
Born to Rule: Tokugawa Iemitsu and the Perfection of Control
The third Tokugawa shōgun never won a battle, yet turned his grandfather’s conquest into an airtight bureaucracy , the sankin kōtai, Nikkō’s gilded shrine, the sealing of the country, and a persecution so morbid it outlasted the faith it was designed to destroy.
Cristóvão Ferreira: The Fallen Jesuit of Japan
The highest-ranking Jesuit in Japan broke under torture in 1633, renounced his faith, and spent the rest of his life helping the shogunate destroy the Church he had served for three decades. His apostasy is the darkest chapter of the Christian Century.