6 - A Catholic Conceptualization of the Pacific Ocean : The Mental Geography of Giambattista Lucarelli on His Journey from Mexico to China (1578)

Summary

Abstract

The following text is part of a travel report written by the Italian Franciscan missionary Giambattista Lucarelli about his journey from Italy to China, which occurred between 1577 and 1578. The report conveys a unique mental landscape in which space and time are represented and conceptualized not only on the basis of measurable elements, but mainly using religious recurrences and events, such as miracles, festivities, and visions. Lucarelli's religious conceptualization extends to elements such as social social relations, the construction of gender, and the representation of native peoples.

Keywords: Mexico, Philippines, China Franciscan missions, religious geography

This document is an excerpt from a travel report concerning the Pacific crossing and arrival in Asia made in 1578 by the Italian Franciscan missionary Giambattista Lucarelli (1540–1604). It forms part of a broader account of Lucarelli's journeys from Italy to China consisting of 325 folios and is found in volume 46-IX-23 of the Symmicta Lusitanica series at the Ajuda Library in Lisbon.2

Lucarelli was born in Pesaro, and was a subject of the pope. In 1571 he accompanied the nobleman Francesco Maria II Della Rovere to Spain as an official confessor. In 1572, while in Madrid, Lucarelli left the Conventuals Franciscan, joining the Observant Congregation and entering the local monastery of Saint Bernardino. In March of 1577, he met Antonio di San Gregorio, a Spanish lay friar, who had returned in 1576 from a military campaign in Peru to plead the cause of the missions in the Indies to the pope. Antonio di San Gregorio had received authorization from Gregory XIII to return to Spain to recruit twelve missionaries willing to follow him in this enterprise. Among them was Giambattista Lucarelli.

The text takes the form of a dialogue between the author and an ideal pilgrim asking questions about the journey. The excerpt included here is divided into two parts. The first part covers Lucarelli's crossing of the Pacific Ocean, while the second concerns the friar's missionary activities in the Philippines and his arrival in China. In the Philippines, he established the archipelago's first Franciscan monastery and baptized about six thousand native inhabitants.

Lucarelli's narrative concerning the voyage across the ocean and through territories whose shores touch the Pacific (Mexico, Philippines, and China) evokes an idiosyncratic mental landscape.