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Portuguese and Spanish Rivalry in the Far East during the 17th Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Extract
This brings us to the point where we must consider in more detail the action of the celebrated Dominican Friar Domingo Fernandez Navarrete, and his long-standing feud with the Portuguese Jesuits of the China Mission. Navarrete was born at Peñafiel and entered the Dominican Order in 1635, going to the Philippines in 1648, whence he proceeded to China ten years later. Unlike many of his Order, he was a cultured man of great ability, and a competent Sinologue for his century. Arrested on the occasion of the persecution of 1665, he was deported to Canton with the Jesuits and Franciscans from Peking and the provinces. Here he took a leading part in the ecclesiastical Junta held to discuss the controversial question of the Confucian Rites and allied topics in 1667–68. He escaped from Canton in rather equivocal circumstances in December, 1669, and after a short stay at Macao sailed to Europe by way of India and the Cape of Good Hope. On reaching Rome he was made Procurator of the Philippine Mission, and returned to Spain in 1674, publishing the first volume of his highly controversial Tratados Historicos, Politicos, Ethnicos, y Rdigiosos de la Monarchia de China two years later at Madrid. The work created a sensation on account of its outspoken criticisms of the Jesuits in China, but nowadays it is read more for the author's vivacious description of his own eventful odyssey in the Far East. A second volume entitled Controversias Antiquas y Modernas de la Mission de la Gran China was printed at Madrid in 1679, but never published, since the Inquisition suppressed it after the first 668 pages had been printed off.
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- Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1947
References
page 94 note 1 Compare the allegations anent the remarks made by the pilot of the San Felipe in Japan in 1597, and the detailed proposals for the Spanish conquest of China made by the Jesuit Alonso Sanches at Manila contemporaneously. (Colin-Pastells, Labor Evangelica, and Bernard, Henri S.J., Les lies Philippines, quoted in JRAS. 1946, Pts. III–IV, p. 149, n. 1Google Scholar.
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page 100 note 1 Tsinshan on the island of Chungshan or Heungshan, a few miles north of Macao.
page 101 note 1 He was not. Navarrete got to India all right. See the account in his Tratados, where he naturally speaks very highly of the chivalrous behaviour of the Captain-General, Dom Alvaro da Silva.
page 102 note 1 By “the City” is meant the Senate or Municipal Council which changed annually on the 1st January.
page 102 note 2 Exemplar Epistolae Ṛdmi P. Fr. Michaelis ab Angelis ex sacro online Diui Augustini Gubernatoris Episcopatus Macaensis. Ad. R. P. Antonium de Gouvea V. Provinciatē Sinensē. Juxta Originate, quod Pekini asservatr. in Collegio Societatis IESU. From the copy printed xylographically at Peking in 1704 in my collection. The original was reprinted at Macao in 1947.
page 104 note 1 Ibidem. Vasco Barbosa de Mello was Ordinary Judge in 1642, and recommended for a Commandery in the Order of Christ on the accession of King John IV. He assisted Manuel de Saldanha in Canton, 1668–9, and was alive in 1681, when one of his sons who had taken Holy Orders in Manila was drowned on the return voyage to Macao.
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