Aethiopica 6 (2003)
International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies
________________________________________________________________
ANDREU MARTÍNEZ ALÒS-MONER
Article
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste: Between Religious Reform, Political
Expansion and Colonial Adventure
Aethiopica 6 (2003), 54–69
ISSN: 1430–1938
________________________________________________________________
Published by
Universität Hamburg
Asien Afrika Institut, Abteilung Afrikanistik und Äthiopistik
Hiob Ludolf Zentrum für Äthiopistik
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste: Between Religious
Reform, Political Expansion and Colonial Adventure*
ANDREU MARTÍNEZ ALÒS-MONER
“Entreterey [a Sua Santidade] em pratica e em esperanças por não
demenuir da opinião que por qua se tem do rey do Abexim ser poderoso e de Vossa Alteza o poder ajuntar contra o Turco pois pera a
reputação tanto val o que he como o que se imagina e o mundo se
governa pello que lhe fazem crer.”1
The Jesuit mission stands as an important topoi in the history of the Christian Ethiopian kingdom. Since the pioneering works of Conti-Rossini, and
Girma Beshah and Merid Wolde Aregay2, up to the more recent studies by
Ramos and Pennec3, the events related to this mission have, little by little,
been unfolded. We now possess a more complex and dynamic picture of the
*
1
2
3
This paper is part of my doctoral research in History at the European University
Institute (Florence, Italy). I would like to thank Elizabeth Fordham for her patience,
insightful suggestions and skilled corrections.
“I will occupy [the Pope] with news and hopes so the esteem in which the Abyssinian
king is held does not diminish, and people continue to consider him powerful and
Your Majesty able to ally with him against the Turk, since in maintaining the reputation the imagined matters as much as the real, and world’s affairs are indeed governed
by what one tells them to be.”; Letter of Lourenço Pires de Tavora, Portuguese ambassador in Rome, to King João III, July 19, 1561, in VISCONDE DE SANTARÉM et al.,
ed., Corpo diplomático português... (Lisboa 1959–69), vol. IX, 300–03, here 303.
CARLO CONTI-ROSSINI, “Portogallo ed Etiopia”, in Id., Relazioni storiche fra l’Italia
e il Portogallo; memorie e documenti (Roma 1940), 323–59; GIRMA BESHAH – MERID
WOLDE AREGAY, The Question of the Union of the Churches in Luso-Ethiopian Relations (1500–1632) (Lisbon 1964).
See MANUEL JOÃO RAMOS, “The Invention of a Mission: the Brief Establishment of a
Portuguese Catholic Minority in Renaissance Ethiopia”, in J. MUCHA, ed., Dominant
Culture as Foreign Culture: Dominant Group(s) in the Eyes of the Minorities (New
York 1999); Id., “Machiavelian Empowerment and Disempowerment: the Violent
Struggle for Power in XVIIth Century Ethiopia”, in ANGELA CHEATER, ed., The Anthropology of Power. Empowerment and Disempowerment in Changing Structures
(London 1999), 191–205; HERVE PENNEC, Des Jésuites au royaume du Prêtre Jean
(Éthiopie): Stratégies, rencontres et tentatives d’implantation (1495–1633), Thèse de
Doctorat (Paris, Université de Paris I – Sorbonne 2000).
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste
activities carried out by the Jesuit missionaries and their Ethiopian contemporaries.
There are, however, some aspects that need further research. The foundation of the Patriarchate that accompanied this mission still remains largely in
the shadows. The theological nuances surrounding this singular Catholic
institution have remained, so far, untapped by scholars. As a contribution to
this specific problematic, I will attempt here to shed some light on the genesis
of this institution. Why did the Portuguese Crown decide, after more than
fifty years of diplomatic relations with Ethiopia4, to begin a mission of conversion over a former political ally? Why did this African Church, once seen
as a respectable member of the Christian “family”, become a target of the
Jesuit proselytist zeal? How did this religious process of conversion take over
the leading role, relegating the previous diplomatico-political movements to
marginal phenomena?
In this paper I will try to offer some responses to these questions. The
study will start rather far away from the Ethiopian highlands, in the tormented spaces of the Portuguese court, where the Jesuits took their first steps.
The religious impulse that this newly-found order brought to the court will
then be articulated within the geopolitical context of the Estado da India.
However, neither the political strategies of the Portuguese monarchy nor the
religious zeal of the Jesuit order can fully explain why a new Catholic Patriarchate was created. It is here that the figure and the polemic that surrounded
the mestre João Bermudez takes on a new dimension. His forgery, often seen
as a simple historical anecdote, becomes a key piece in the politico-religious
projects that Catholic Europe prepared for Ethiopia.
The Jesuit conversion of the (Portuguese) court
When the famous Portuguese military expedition of Christovão da Gama
arrived in Ethiopia in 1541, the first generation of Jesuits was already active
in Portugal. Similar to what happened in other countries where the Society
maintained members, their success at the Portuguese court was rapid. Just a
month after his arrival in Lisbon, Francis Xavier wrote to his colleagues in
Rome that “despues que pasaron tres o cuatro dias que llegamos en esta
4
I use here the term Ethiopia to mean the Christian kingdom that ruled in the Ethiopian highlands from the 13th to the 19th century. It should be noted that this “Ethiopia” has little to do with the nation-state that nowadays bears the same name, which
has a different economic, social and ethnic identity as well as much larger geographic
borders. Similarly, to keep close to the forms used in the sources, I will also refer to
Ethiopia and to its ruler as the Preste, and to the Ethiopian ruler also as the Emperor,
a form that seems to have been introduced by the Jesuit missionaries.
55
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
Andreu Martínez Alòs-Moner
ciudad, el rey nos mando llamar y nos recibio muy benignamente”.5 The
next year, after having spent the winter period with the court in Almeirin,
he again wrote to Loyola to tell him about the progress achieved: “Envianos el rey muy favorescidos, y nos ha mucho encomendado al visorrey que
este año va a las Indias”.6 By march 1541, just a few weeks before the departure for the Eastern Indies, Francis Xavier could claim to have “reformed” the Portuguese court, gaining its full support as well as that of the
forthcoming viceroy of the Estado da India, Martin Alfonso de Sousa. In
their turn, the King and his ambassador in Rome, Dom Pedro Mascarenhas,
were quick enough to obtain for him four pontifical briefs, where “se le
nombra nuncio de la India Oriental y se le recomienda al rey de Etiopía y a
otros príncipes orientales”.7 The road to the Western Indies was therefore
fully open to the Jesuit dynamism and capacity for improvisation.
Besides “reforming” the court and collecting its favours, Francis Xavier
and Rodrigues were also introduced to some of its projects and dreams. It is
probable that during the intense 10 months that Francis Xavier spent at the
Portuguese court he knew about the Luso-Ethiopian affair. The year he arrived in Lisbon was indeed especially important for Luso-Ethiopian matters.
It is then that the two most important 16th cent. accounts on Ethiopia were
published. The Verdadeira Informação das Terras do Preste João, came to
light in Lisbon the 22nd October, whilst its author, Francisco Alvares, was
struggling in Italy to be received by the Pope. Damião de Goes’s Fides, religio, moresque was, on the contrary, published a month earlier and far from
the Portuguese court, in Louvain. Both works were direct offsprings of some
40-years engagement between the Portuguese kings and the Ethiopian Solomonic dynasty. They were also to some extent a sign of the open atmosphere
and dynamic life that could be felt in imperial and metropolitan Lisbon.
However, despite their qualities and public success, both publications were
received with distrust by authorities. Alvares needed some 10 years to have
his copy accepted: his book could only be printed after ecclesiastical and po5
6
7
“After three or four days in this town, the king called us and we were warmly received
by him”; Letter of Francisco Xavier to Ignacio de Loyola and Nicolas Bobadilla, July
23, 1540 (Lisboa), in FRANCISCO XAVIER, Cartas y escritos de San Francisco Javier, ed.
FELIX ZUBILLAGA (Madrid 1996), 59–63.
“The king dispatches us [to India] with much support, and he has recommended us to
the forthcoming Vice king of the Indies”; Letter of Francisco Xavier to Ignacio de
Loyola and Juan Coduri, March 18, 1541 (Lisboa), in FRANCISCO XAVIER, Cartas,
71–5.
“He is named nuncio of the Oriental Indies and is recommended to the Ethiopian
king and to other oriental princes”; FELIX ZUBILLAGA, “Introducción”, in FRANCISCO
XAVIER, Cartas, 4.
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
56
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste
litical censorship removed some disturbing parts. Goes’s fate was even worse
since he encountered the opposition of the cardeal infante D. Henrique, Inquisidor-Geral of the kingdom, who banned the circulation of his book. But
somehow, our newly-arrived Jesuits also managed to play an important role
in these polemics. Here, the dispute between Rodrigues and Goes moves to
centre stage8.
From 1534 to 1538, Damião de Goes was taking courses at the University
of Pádua. At the beginning of 1538, Rodrigues arrived there on a preaching
tour typical of the first years of the Jesuit order. He came from Rome where
he had been preparing with Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier and the rest of
the first Jesuits, the official texts to be presented to the Pope. It was at this
Venetian university that the two Lusitan personalities met, engaging in harsh
disputes over Protestantism and religious orthodoxy. Whatever the actual
contents of the dispute, it was enough for Simão Rodrigues to classify Goes as
heretic and dangerous to the Church. Once he was in Portugal, empowered
by his charge as provincial of the Portuguese Jesuits and confessor to the
prince D. João, he denounced Goes to the inquisitors in Evora. The brilliant
writer from Alenquer could thus hardly enjoy his return to the homeland. In
1545, the year of his arrival, an inquisitorial process was opened against him.
When the process was frozen Goes was once again able to develop his courtly
and literary career, but 26 years later the proceedings reopened and the Portuguese humanist, an old man by now, was sent to prison.
What were the actual reasons for Rodrigues to describe Goes as one who
“praised the doctrine of Luther?” Why damage his brilliant career? Whether
it was rivalry, since the important position of the mestre de letras to the prince
was at stake, or pure religious zeal9, what interests us is the fact that the Jesuit
who ruled the Provincia Lusitana for the first 12 years was a fervent enemy of
one of the most important intellectuals that the Portuguese court had produced. But, Rodrigues was thus also opposing the humanist who best understood and reacted most warmly to Ethiopian Christianity.
Besides Rodrigues’s particular character, a feature well known in the history of the Portuguese Jesuit province, there is room to suspect that there
were other reasons for such hostilities. Perhaps they should be sought less on
a personal than on a collective level. Since it was the Jesuits as an order who
were entrusted with the Ethiopian mission by the Portuguese crown, does it
8
9
The following facts concerning this dispute draw on two studies: FRANCISCO
RODRIGUES, História da Companhia de Jesus na Assitência de Portugal, Tomo I: A
fundação da Província Portuguesa, 1540–1560, Vol. II: Tribulação – Colégios –
Missões (Pôrto 1931), Chapter I; and ORLANDO NEVES, “Damião de Góis, Escritor,
humanista – 1502–1574”, http://www.vidaslusofonas.pt/damiao_de_gois.htm (2002).
RODRIGUES, História, 29.
57
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
Andreu Martínez Alòs-Moner
not seem logical to look at how they approached the Ethiopian affair? An
argument can indeed be made that Rodrigues’s opposition to Goes was less
isolated than it might at first appear.
Revealing silences
Paradoxically, it is silence that furnishes here, if only partially, some keys to
understanding the events. When looking at the texts, what is noteworthy is
less Rodrigues’s aggressive attitude toward Goes than the ostensible ignorance that Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier themselves displayed regarding both works, that of Goes as well as that of Alvares, as archival evidence suggests. How could the two most important diffusers of ideas about
the Preste be so compellingly passed over in silence by those who were
about to follow in their intellectual steps? What is even more intriguing is
that the two Jesuits knew about the books. As Schurhammer informs us,
Ignatius received an issue of the original edition of the Verdadeira informação in 155310. Even earlier, during the 10 months spent at the court of D.
João III, Francis Xavier may have known about such publications. Despite
this evidence, however, I have not been able to find a single mention of
either work in the correspondence of either Ignatius of Loyola or Francis
Xavier.
The first Jesuits, those who inherited the Ethiopian “mission”, were in fact
acting similarly to the Portuguese and Papal authorities. The works of both
Alvares and Goes were received with mistrust, if not embarrassment. Although they cannot in any sense be seen as apologies of Ethiopian Christianity, they appear even today rather tolerant, even generous towards this
Church. Besides the ritual listing of the Ethiopian “errors”, what they presented in their texts to the European reader was in fact, as Bataillon says,
“l’expression d’un christianisme authentique”11, a Christianity with its own
traditions, rites and forms, but nonetheless legitimate and true. The spirit of
reform and paternalist attitude of both the Portuguese monarchy and the
religious order could in no way welcome such a view of the things. In these
years the Portuguese monarchy had put all its efforts into preparations for the
Council of Trent, which was to reform the Church, its form and its contents,
10
GEORG SCHURHAMMER, Franz Xaver, sein Leben und seine Zeit, Bd. 1: Europa 1506–
1541 (Freiburg: Herder, 1955), 659, note 6. See also JEAN AUBIN, “Le prêtre Jean
devant la censure portugaise”, in Id., Le latin et l’astrolabe: Recherches sur le Portugal
de la Renaissance, son expansion en Asie et les relations internationales (Lisbonne –
Paris 1996), 183–210, here 208, note 99.
11
MARCEL BATAILLON, “Le cosmopolitisme de Damião de Góis”, in Id., Etudes sur le
Portugal au temps de l’humanisme (Coimbra 1952), 149–96, here 190.
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
58
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste
for more than three centuries to come. The Jesuits, in their turn, had proved
to be the most efficient instrument of this reform. Such masters of orthodoxy
could only recognise Ethiopian monophysism if it were shaped according to
the new Catholic dogmas.
Hence, what these mysterious silences seem to reveal is a certain complicity of the Jesuits with the dominant trend in Portugal and Rome. Instead of a
compromise, both the monarchy and the order chose to take the hard line:
Ethiopian Christianity was a heresy that had to be expurgated. The sending of
a religious mission, something that only became possible in 1556, was simply
the final outcome of discussions that had been going on in Lisbon and Rome
since the times of Alvares and Goes. It is during these years of polemics and
theological disputes that the idea of a global conversion of the Prester John
was forged.
The Jesuit conversion of the (Ethiopian) court
A letter sent by the cardeal infante D. Alfonso to the Ethiopian Emperor
Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl, as early as 1539, appears as the first document where a conversion of the Preste is hinted at12. In this long communication, the infante
reiterates the list of “errors” that Alvares and Goes already mentioned in
their texts. However, D. Alfonso goes much further. Focusing on what he
considers as the three main deviations of Ethiopian Christianity, he lists
methodically and with persuasive style the reasons to abandon circumcision, the practice of the Sabbath, and rebaptism. The document contains, in
a synthetic form, the main preoccupations that would orient the 80 years of
Jesuit action in Ethiopia.
But if D. Alfonso defined the main steps the Jesuits were to take, it was his
nephew and successor as cardeal infante who actually set up the infrastructure
they needed for their own expansion. The characteristic Jesuit mixture of
religious devotion and pragmatic action fit in perfectly with the ideas hosted
in the minds of people like D. Henrique. He was the one who called them to
Evora to rule the newly-founded Collegio de Artes (1551). At the request of
Francis Xavier, D. Henrique also installed the Inquisition in Goa (1560),
where the Jesuits maintained a permanent chair.
It is around these two important figures that the idea of a religious mission
to the Preste took form. They sponsored the newly arrived Jesuit order and
sparked their interest in the Ethiopian affair. During the difficult decades of
12
Letter of Cardinal D. Alfonso to “Davidem regem Aethiopiae”, March 20, 1539, in
CAMILLO BECCARI, ed., Relationes et Epistolae Variorum, pars prima, liber I, Rerum
aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales inediti a saeculo XVI ad XIX, vol. X (Romae
1910), 5–18.
59
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
Andreu Martínez Alòs-Moner
the 1540’s and 1550’s the Jesuits found in these two powerful figures the
necessary oil to speed up the wheels of the Portuguese and Vatican bureaucratic machinery. They provided the Jesuit order with a whole set of briefs,
bulls, indulgences, privileges and permissions necessary for their movements
and to fulfil their ambitious projects.
The beginning of a Jesuit engagement may be dated to the years of Francis
Xavier’s apostolate in India. As mentioned above, he travelled there with
intentions to reach also Ethiopia. Hence, the words of the King “se le recomienda al rey de Etiopía”. In a letter written from Punicale in 1544, addressed
to his fellow Francisco Mansilhas, Francis Xavier fully expressed his desire to
go to the Preste, “donde tanto servicio se puede hacer a Dios nuestro Señor,
sin tener quien nos persiga”.13 As is well known, his intentions were never
fulfilled. His deeds may however have been crucial for the trust and support
that the monarchy offered to his order. Better than a simple missionary, Francis Xavier was a compulsive traveller and a chief organizer, and to a certain
extent he showed the crown the potentialities of movement that marked the
newly acquired domains.
However, the Jesuits would only be officially entitled with this mission
after the outcome of one of the most controversial histories in LusoEthiopian relations, that of the Pseudo-Patriarch Bermudez. Usually seen by
scholars as a simple trickster14, a typical profiteer of the ill-structured politics
of Early Modern Europe, this self-claimed Patriarch of Alexandria and
Ethiopia had nonetheless a fundamental role in the events.
The Bermudez affair
João Bermudez had initially taken part in the embassy of D. Galvão/R. da
Lima as its surgeon. When the main body of the embassy, including da
Lima and Alvares, left for Lisbon in 1526, he, together with the painter
Lázaro de Andrade, stayed in the country, half as guests, half as captives of
the Ethiopian Emperor. The forthcoming ten years that the “Mestre João”,
as Alvares’s narrative portrayed him, spent in Ethiopia would change completely his fate. It was then that Bermudez’s Ethiopian career took off and
that the surgeon became both ambassador and Patriarch of the Preste.
13
“Where so high service can be rendered to Our Lord, without being molested”; Letter
of Francisco Xavier to Francisco Mansilhas, November 9, 1544 (Punicale), in
FRANCISCO XAVIER, Cartas, 146.
14
This view is synthetized in the harsh and critical comments reserved to Bermudez in
the nonetheless excellent official history of the Portuguese Province: FRANCISCO
RODRIGUES, História, 568f.; see also: Id., “Mestre João Bermudes”, Revista de
História 3, Lisboa 1919, 119–37.
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
60
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste
Under the increasing strain caused by the rise of Aḥmad Grañ, whose
power reached its peak precisely during the 1530’s, Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl seems to
have seen in Bermudez a new oportunity for reaching his strongest European
ally. Around 1535–36 he shipped the surgeon, now entitled ambassador, to
Europe begging for urgent help. Judging by the rapid and decisive arrival at
Massawa of Estevão da Gama’s army, only 5 years after this mission was initiated, Bermudez’s intervention could never have proved more decisive. He
visited Lisbon in 1537, to lobby for the Ethiopian cause before the Portuguese ruler. In 1539, back in Goa, Bermudez laid the ground for what later
became Christovão’s famed army. Is was there that, according to Gaspar Correa’s account, Bermudez was to gather all the craftsmen that were to prove so
decisive for the Luso-Ethiopian army in the Ethiopian highlands15.
However, as is well known, Bermudez did not content himself with his
high position in Ethiopian “diplomacy”. At the end of his first stay in Ethiopia he also tried to set up a more ambitious and dangerous career as a religious
figure. In his own narrative he claims that shortly before his departure for
Europe he was named Patriarch of Ethiopia by the dying Coptic Metropolitan Marqos. Later, during his visit to the Holy City in 1536, Pope Paul III
also, it appears, made him head of the Alexandrian Patriarchate.
As most scholars have rightly noticed, these religious titles were probably
only the product of Bermudez’s imagination and perhaps, as well, of Lǝbnä
Dǝngǝl’s political pressures. For, on the one hand, Ethiopia never had, nor
would have until well into the 20th cent., an autonomous head. What Bermudez and later the Jesuits attempted, was in clear breach of the traditional
ties that linked the Churches of Ethiopia and Egypt. Such a move could
hardly have ever been attempted by any Ethiopian Emperor, and certainly
not by a Coptic Metropolitan. On the other, no contemporary evidence has
been found to prove Bermudez’s assertions. If anything, his own European
contemporaries faced his Patriarchal claims with much skepticism, or rather
pure denial. It is in this sense revealing that at the Portuguese court he was
15
Bermudez says in his own narrative that “ja em Portugal me fizera el Rey merce de
com sua autoridade prover todos os officios necessarios pera a gouernança da gente
que levasse commigo” (17, also 43); to it, Gaspar Correa adds interesting details on the
composition of Christovão’s army: “Antre esta gente [the soldiers] hião passante de
setenta homens officiaes de todolos officios macanicos, a saber : besteiros, ferreiros,
carpinteiros, pedreiros, çapateiros, armeiros, e outros officiaes que o Bermudes ajuntou pola India...”, in: GASPAR CORREIA, Lendas da India. Livro Quarto…, (Germany
1976 [repr. anastasica of the edition Lisboa: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias, 1864]), 200.
61
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
Andreu Martínez Alòs-Moner
solely received as the “embaxador do Preste” 16, his religious “titles” being
much an issue of disturbance for the King17.
This aside, Bermudez’s Patriarchate proved no less decisive than his diplomatic intervention in the crisis provoked by Grañ. To help grasp its full
meaning, we shall look now to his later involvement in the military expedition
to Ethiopia from a chronological perspective.
It was after his visit to the Papal and Portuguese courts, during his two
year stay in Goa between 1539–41, ands specially during the Ethiopian campaign, that ran throughout the 1540’s, that Bermudez’s “Patriarchate” seems
to have taken shape. There, he appears indeed to have fully enjoyed for a
short time the titles of “Patriarca da Etiopia” or “Patriarca do Preste”18, that
never convinced his audience in Europe. The chronicle of Castanhoso, his
rival during Christovão’s expedition and hence little inclined to praise, leaves
few doubts about Bermudez’s religious role. According to this narrative, he
actually acted, at least for a short time, as the religious leader of the Portuguese expedition. In February 1542, just before a battle, he is portrayed giving
absolution to the Portuguese army; when the Portuguese take a hill formerly
occupied by Grañ’s army, he appears again to consecrate a mosque, later renamed “Igreja do nosso senhor da Vitoria …”19. These Ethiopian moments
would indeed be the most glorious for his Patriarchate.
Bermudez’s Patriarchal take off in Goa happened, therefore, without the
authorities knowledge and consent; his title, as was said above, embarassed
more than anything else the Portuguese authorities, who, although by the end
of 1530 hosted plans to convert the Preste, never imagined such a straightforward move. But besides Bermudez’s actual personal ambitions, his “enthronement” as Patriarch seems to have been related to the popular religious
fervor that the figure of the Prester John aroused in Portugal and India. Although there is no place here for a full development of the role played by this
myth in Luso-Ethiopian relations, it is important to note that by the time
Bermudez became a Patriarch, the association between the Preste and the
16
See the above mentioned Letter of cardinal Alfonso to Lebna Dengel, 20 March 1539,
in CAMILLO BECCARI, Relationes, 17.
17
See FRANCISCO RODRIGUES, “Mestre”.
18
See, for instance, DIOGO DO COUTO, Da Ásia, (Lisboa 1777–82), Década V, Livro
VII, Capítulo IX; Década VII, Livro I, Capítulo I.
19
MIGUEL DE CASTANHOSO, História das cousas que o mui esforçado capitão Dom
Cristóvão da Gama fêz nos reinos do Preste João com quatrocentos Portugueses que
consigo levou [1564], AUGUSTO CÉSAR PIRES DE LIMA, ed. (Pôrto 1936), chapter XII;
see also ch. VIII.
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
62
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste
Ethiopian Emperor was not only fully realized politically but also a vivid
reality in the people’s imagination.20
Bermudez’s chameleonic transformation from simple surgeon to ambassador and later religious leader has much of colonial adventurism. He exploited
to his own advantage all the possibilities that an Indian career offered him. He
profited from or perhaps even genuinely participated in the politico-religious
“fervor” surrounding the figure of the Prester John. Similar to Christovão da
Gama and the other Portuguese and Spaniards that followed him to Ethiopia,
he held millenarian and eschatological beliefs in the Prester John of Ethiopia.
And like them, he was also tempted by the infinite possibilities that the colonial world, which Portugal was unfolding, promised. Indeed, as one of the
responsables of the military expedition that was to rescue the Preste from
annihilation, he found himself at the very core of this mythology. In a world
where the borders between the secular and the religious were unclear, the step
from political envoy to religious savior was, for Bermudez, a simple one to
take.
Improvising the policies?
Bermudez’s deeds soon reached the court in Lisbon. By 1546 King D. João
III was warning his embassador in Rome of the danger that this figure represented. To remove the nuisance he proposed to quickly dispatch a new
Patriarch, the Jesuit mestre Fabro. In the same communication the King
reported the mysterious visit of a certain Paulos, an Ethiopian bishop who
may have been sent by the Ethiopian court in search of a new Metropolitan21. There is much ground to doubt the veracity of this visit: shortly after
D. João III’s letter, around 1548, Ethiopia would receive the newly appointed Coptic Metropolitan, abunä Yosäb, that Gälawdewos had rushed
to ask to Alexandria at the death of Grañ. Be it as it may, the news about
Bermudez were disturbing enough as to press forward the project of a mission.
The same year, João III addressed a formal request to Ignatius of Loyola to
send missionaries to Ethiopia22. A request repeated in December 1553. This
20
See MANUEL JOÃO RAMOS, “O destino etíope do Preste João: a Etiópia nas representa
ções cosmográficas europeias”, in FERNANDO CRISTOVÃO, ed., Condicionantes culturais da literatura de viagens: estudos e bibliografias, (Lisboa 1999), 235–59.
21
This is the well-known letter of King D. João III to Balthasar de Faria, 27 August
1546, in Corpo diplomático portuguès, vol.VI, 69–72.
22
Quoted in FRANCISCO RODRIGUES, História, 571, note 1; see also Letter of João III to
“governador-mor [Goa]”, 1553, in Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, caixa 218, n. 94; and
Id. to “Padre Ignacio”, [1553] in ID., n. 132.
63
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
Andreu Martínez Alòs-Moner
time, however, the King, instead of proposing a candidate, left the decision at
the hands of the Jesuit general. To respond to his request, between 1553 and
1556 Loyola wrote his well-known “Instructions to the missionaries” and the
“Sumario delle cose necessarie per l’Ethiopia”.23 In them he repeated, not
surprisingly, the same ideas expressed 17 years earlier by the cardeal infante
Alfonso in his letter to Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl. Even the famous prudence Ignatius of
Loyola requested of his envoys was not an original feature. He dealt with the
Preste in a very similar way to how the cardeal infante had done. They were
both thinking of the Ethiopian affair less as a matter of conversion than as a
matter of expurgation. Ethiopian Christianity demanded less a complete
transformation than a sort of “religious lifting”. Hence the idea of a pure
Christianity that had been corrupted through contact with non-Catholic
lands; of a church trapped in a land surrounded by heretics24. Loyola therefore presented this mission as a service offered rather than as a foreign imposition. Thanks to dispatching his priests there would be no more need for the
Ethiopians to receive the Patriarchs from “tierras de moros ni de christianos
scismaticos.”25
That the affair mattered much to Ignatius of Loyola can be clearly inferred
by a letter he sent to his fellow Jesuit Diogo Miró in 1553. The Jesuit general,
through his persuasive and upfront style, was trying to convince the newlyappointed provincial of Portugal to accept the important charge of royal
confessor. Among the reasons he used, was the well-being of the Ethiopian
project, which by 1553 was still under discussion:
Since you judge one instance by another, consider whether there
could be a more important memorial left by a confessor than to bring
to a conclusion the appointment of the patriarch of Ethiopia, which
involves the salvation, not of many souls but of many cities and
provinces. Whichever of you acts as his highness’s confessor, be sure
that you do not fail to come to some understanding on this appoint23
The first doc., “Minuta delle istruzioni che S. Ignazio diede ai suoi missionari
d’Etiopia”, [1553] was published in CAMILLO BECCARI, ed., Notizia e saggi di opere e
documenti inediti riguardanti la storia di Etiopia durante i secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII.
Rerum aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales inediti a saeculo XVI ad XIX, vol. I
(Roma 1903), 237–54; for the second, I rely on my own transcription from Ignatius of
Loyola, “Sumario delle cose necessarie per l’Ethiopia”, [1556], Archivium Romanum
Societas Iesu, Goa 39 I, 5r–v.
24
It is interesting to note that such ideas are still quite present in scientific historiography. Marcel Bataillon would take a similar path when he spoke of “cette Éthiopie demeurée fidèle au Christ malgré de longs siècles d’isolement au coeur du continent
noir”, MARCEL BATAILLON, “Le cosmopolitisme”, 183.
25
Ignatius of Loyola, “Minuta”, 239.
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
64
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste
ment, and every time you write to Rome be sure to mention this
matter and let me know what you have done.26
“El negocio del patriarca” thus implied without hesitation something other
than a simple mission; rather, it was believed, and would continue to be so
in the 17th century, to be the key to the conversion of the whole African
continent.
By then Bermudez’s glory in Ethiopia and India had already waned. The
arrival of the new Coptic Metropolitan left little room for him. The charge of
“Patriarca dos Portugueses” that the Emperor henceforth offered him was
little comfort for one who had dreamt to rule over an Empire. The dethroned
Patriarch then put all his efforts in abandoning the country, only reaching
Goa in May 1556.
A symbolic turning point came with his arrival in the Indian capital. The
exiled “Patriarch” spent the following 10 months at the Jesuit college of St.
Paul. It is there that he met D. João Nunes Barreto, the Jesuit Patriarch that
the Papacy and the Portuguese crown had rushed to send from Europe precisely to replace him. Surprisingly, an apparently peaceful atmosphere surrounded these moments; Bermudez would later write that he was received
with “muita honra e caridade”27. In addition, there is no trace in the literature
of any polemic between the two Patriarchs during the near half a year they
spent together in Goa. Such a strange benevolence was matched later by King
D. Sebastião, who provided Bermudez, on his return to Lisbon, with a generous fund. Thus, instead of facing a trial to answer for his forgery, he will,
ironically, spend his last years comfortably writing a hagiographical narrative
of his own Ethiopian career.28
It could be argued that the hospitality that wellcomed Bermudez both in
India and at the Portuguese court was an acknowledgement of the role he had
in the mission to the Preste. After all, he was the first to have attempted to
introduce in Ethiopian Christianity a figure that this Church ignored. Besides, the royal fund that permitted him to live a comfortable retirement in
26
Letter of Ignatius of Loyola to Diogo Miró, February 1, 1553, Rome, in:
http://www.georgetown.edu/centers/woodstock/ignatius/letter24.htm (2002).
27
JOÃO BERMUDEZ, Breve relação da embaixada que o Patriarcha D. João Bermudez
trouxe do imperador da Ethiopia vulgarmente chamado Preste João, dirigida a el-Rei
D. Sebastião (Lisboa 1875 [reprint of: Lisboa, Francisco Correa Impressor do Cardeal
Inffante 1565]), 123.
28
SEBASTIÃO GONÇALVES, Primeira parte da historia dos religiosos da Companhia de
Jesus e do que fizeram com a divina graça na conversão dos infieis a nossa sancta fee
catholica nos reynos e provincias da India Oriental, Vol. 2: Historia da Companhia de
Jesus no Oriente: (1546–1561), ed. JOSEF WICKI (Coimbra 1960 [1612]), 139ff.
65
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
Andreu Martínez Alòs-Moner
Lisbon was certainly used to keep him away from the new project designed
for the Preste by the Jesuits. However, it appears as well as an embarassing
tribute to the person who had opened the way for a politico-religious adventure that was to last for the following eighty years.
A Baroque Patriarchate
Bermudez’s genuine colonial forgery was replaced by a huge collective effort of imagination carried out by the Portuguese crown, the Jesuit order
and the Papacy. The dispatch of the Patriarch was prepared with care. The
new institution was shaped with outstanding parade and solemnity. In a
way that recalls the subsequent interest of the Jesuit order in the arts, especially theatre and architecture, the Patriarch was to be enveloped in such
wealth and beauty as to convince the Ethiopians of Catholic superiority.
Loyola was precise in his recommendations, when he insisted several times
on providing relics, “calices, cruces acetres que sirven al culto exterior”.29
Every detail mattered to give the Patriarch the colour and the dignity
needed to astound the Ethiopians. An oversight in the correspondence not
only of the Jesuits, but also of the Portuguese political authorities may offer
an idea of the huge effort, economic, political and even emotive, that this
project mobilised.
In a letter that a Portuguese Jesuit addressed to his superior in Rome, the
author openly reveals his own astonishment whilst describing the huge retinue accompanying the Patriarch. His listing of the instruments and luxury the
King offered to the Ethiopian mission ends up with a summary reference to
the enormous economic investment at stake: “calices, hum bacio e huma cruz
e dous baculos, de prata todos, e huma custodia com outras muytas e mui
ricas peças. Deu tambem muytas cousas de ornamentos, assi como vinte vestimentos de damasco... causa grande espanto, porque muytos dezião que a
armada da India atée o Preste João pollo mar avia de fazer de gasto cem mil
cruzados.”30
29
30
CAMILLO BECCARI, Notizia, 250f.
“Chalices, a basin for the Mass offerings, a cross and two croziers, all of silver, and a
custody with many other precious objects. [The King] also provided objects for ornamentation, as well as attires of damask...this all produces admiration and fear, since
many people say that the armada from India to the Preste costed 100,000 cruzados”;
Letter of Gaspar Calaça to “Praepositum Generalem S.I.”, April 30, 1556, in: CAMILLO BECCARI, Relationes, 55–61, here 59. For more elements of this “appareillage”,
see FRANCISCO RODRIGUES, História, 580 passim. Another contemporary Jesuit
account provides also vivid pictures: SEBASTIÃO GONÇALVES, Primeira, 215–21.
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
66
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste
The retinue also involved a large number of missionaries. In the armada
that left Lisbon in 1556, of the ten Jesuits on board seven were destined to the
Preste31. Among them there was the Patriarch, João Nunes Barreto, and one
of the two bishops, André de Oviedo. Oviedo, along with the second bishop,
Melchior Carneiro, were the first holders of two titles, those of Bishop of
Nicea and Hierapolis, that were also genuine products of the Catholic imagination. Two years earlier, five other Jesuits had already headed to India with
the same goal. Interestingly, the embassy was also provided with a printing
officer, a Jesuit lay brother named João de Bustamante. Among his first tasks
in Goa was to print the Doctrina Christãa of Francis Xavier, a text destined to
become the standard missionary guidebook for the coming 50 years in India,
and that the Jesuits were planning to use in Ethiopia32. Bustamante’s establishment would also become the first printing house in the whole Estado da
India33.
An Empire in difficulties
But describing the forgeries and beauties of the Patriarchs we seem to have
lost track of our main and initial concern: what was changing when the
Portuguese kings decided to invest in a baroque Patriarch and to convert
the Preste? And besides that, why did they do so?
The sending of the Jesuit Patriarch reveals a change in the policies that had
been guiding the Conselho da India. It sets the start of what could be called a
missionary era in the Estado da India, an era that was to be strongly shaped
by the style and the ethos of the Jesuit order. It is at this moment that the
Estado changed its attitude towards its neighbours. The diplomatic embassies
were little by little replaced by religious missions where Jesuit priests were in
most cases in charge. These newcomers to the religious life undertook the
tasks that the Portuguese monarchs requested them to carry out zealously, in
a markedly different way from former religious orders.
Prior to the 1550’s, the Portuguese crown had entrusted some diplomatic
missions to religious orders: Augustinian monks for instance were sent on
more than one occasion to Persia to meet with the Safavid rulers. But they
hardly ever seriously attempted any conversion; the main purpose was always
to set political alliances. In the new missions that the Jesuits organised this
political aspect did not disappear. However, following the reform trends
within the Catholic world, the Jesuits stressed the need to reform every soci31
Letter of P. Gaspar Calaça, 57.
Letter of Patriarch Nunes Barreto to “Aloisium Gonçalves”, November 6, 1556, Goa,
in: CAMILLO BECCARI, Relationes, 64.
33
FRANCISCO RODRIGUES, História, 537, note 3.
32
67
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
Andreu Martínez Alòs-Moner
ety the Portuguese crown was in contact with, to act upon alien religious
practices and beliefs claimed to have been corrupted over time. The nature of
the interactions between the Estado and its neighbours was therefore transformed. A certain verticality in interactions replaced horizontal ways of
communication. Hence, allies such as the Ethiopian monarchs also became
the targets of a religious reform that took on a global scale.
The Ethiopian mission came also at an important geopolitical moment. It is
right around the 1550’s that the building of the Estado was virtually completed. No other territorial possessions were acquired after the arrival of the
Jesuits in India. The siege and capture of Diu in 1535 (only really concluded
in the 1550’s) marked the peak of the expansion. Still, since the initial years
when Albuquerque visited the Red Sea in search for rumes, up to the years of
the Patriarchate, the Ottoman Empire had also extended its reach to the Arabian Peninsula, seriously menacing the Portuguese self-proclaimed hegemony
in the Indian Ocean. New challenges to this hegemony also came from Europe, where England and Holland were breeding their own expansionist
dreams for the Eastern Indies.
Therefore, the Estado found itself at an impasse. Incapable of other important acquisitions and seriously menaced by other military powers, all it
could do was to try to keep and administer its current possessions. The Jesuit
order could have appeared to provide a solution, if only temporary, to such
an impasse. Its attempt to reach the most exotic of the courts – from Ethiopia
to Japan – may have strongly appealed to the Portuguese rulers. Perhaps with
the religious subtleties of the Jesuit fathers the Estado might indeed reach
further than through the hands of soldiers. Perhaps their zeal could be a solution to the chronic shortage of means, people and resources in an enterprise
that had such great goals.
Finale
Little of the wealth and beauties of the Patriarchate were, however, to be
seen in Ethiopia. The 12 missionaries who in imitation of the Apostles,
were to proselytize the country were reduced to three fathers and two lay
brothers who tried to survive in the Tigray, in the north of Ethiopia, away
from a hostile court. The Patriarch himself did not either reach “his” diocese; he remained in Goa until his death in 1562.
Goa a velha, the new and beautiful metropolis of the Portuguese Eastern
dominions, enjoyed and assimilated most of this wealth. If one were able to
walk during these years through the streets of Goa, one might see the Patriarch, “revestido com capa mitra e bago com muitos outros pes. que tambem
Aethiopica 6 (2003)
68
The Jesuit Patriarchate to the Preste
reuestidos com capas o acompanhauão”34, blessing the army of the governor
Francisco Barreto before it went to fight the Idalcão, as one contemporary
described. A walk into the cathedral would also reveal “ricos ornamentos pera
o altar como de pontificaes, com a baixella necessaria pera os sagrados ministerios, e hum fermoso sino”, originally a royal gift to the Patriarch and his
bishops. And what about these “ornamentos e prata [que] ficou a igreja do
collegio de Sam Paulo”35, once also part of the Patriarchal dowry?
The institution invented by Portugual and the Jesuits did not work any
better than that created in the mind of Bermudez. Neither the neo-scholastic
mastery of the priests nor the Baroque refinements proved successful in
bringing Ethiopian Christianity “back” to Rome. This Church, on the contrary, remained up to our days faithful to its traditions and identity.
This Early Modern adventure remains, however, a captivating example of
the politico-religious processes that shook the world during the era of the
discoveries. It also shows that no colonial or missionary project, no matter
how official it may have been, was free from its jokers. As the quotation
opening this paper suggests, politics and religion were also arts of imagining.
Summary
In this paper I analyse the reasons that lead Portugual to send a Jesuit Patriarch to
Ethiopia. Such a mission represented a radical break from the tolerant attitude the Lusitans had been showing vis à vis this African Church; the embassies that for decades
flowed between Ethiopia and Portugal were suddenly replaced by a one-way attempt of
conversion that deeply affected Ethiopian Christian society for more than a century.
This mission is placed at the crossroads of both a process of spiritualization that the
Portuguese court, under the influence of the Jesuit fathers and the cardinal infantes,
endured, and of the political stagnation of the Indian colonial project. But the Catholic
Patriarchate would only come to the fore, I contend, at the outcome of the Bermudez
affair. This episode, which has largely been underestimated by historiography, was crucial for pushing forward the King João III, the Pope and the Jesuits in the Patriarchal
adventure.
34
“Covered with a cape, a mitre and a crozier, together with many other fathers, also
themselves dressed with capes, who came with him”; anonymous, “Governadores Da
India” [1579?], manuscript, in Archivium Romanum Societas Iesu, Goa 38II, 229r–
242v, here 233v.
35
“Rich adornments for the altar, like pontificals, with the tableware used for the Holy
Orders, and a beautiful bell”; “adornments and silver [that] were given to the college
of S. Paulo”; Both quotations taken from SEBASTIÃO GONÇALVES, Primeira, 215.
69
Aethiopica 6 (2003)