Chapter 4 continues the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (II), exploring the intellectual framework employed by Europeans (specifically Spanish, French, and British) to situate native peoples within a European worldview, taking the narrative from the sixteenth century, through the seventeenth century, and into the early eighteenth century. The chapter considers the use of the terms “civilization” and “barbarism” to characterize indigenous peoples, traditions of millennial thought and prophecy among the Franciscan friars, theories of demonology and witchcraft as applied to native inhabitants, and the myth of the so-called pre-Hispanic evangelization of the Americas and the identification of the Christian St. Thomas with the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, the myth of indigenous peoples as descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and finally the myth of the noble savage.

Although Chinese creoles formed the core of The Port’s identity, Mo Tianci came to preside over a tremendously diverse population additionally consisting of Qing sojourners and immigrants, Viet, Khmer, Siamese, Austronesians, and Europeans. They were multiconfessional, practicing Confucianism, Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity. He preserved the Cambodian noble hierarchy and official positions, while selectively adopting and adapting Sino-Viet institutions. In addition, he utilized religions and ethical systems, and devised some of his own practices for specific situations and depending on his constituency. Ultimately, he aimed to achieve two interrelated objectives: territorial expansion into the resource-rich hinterlands and the recruitment and retention of the population necessary to open up the new acquisitions.

Chapter 2 investigates growing competition between the Franciscan (Latin) and Greek Orthodox community over the legal and material possession of altars to understand these as vessels of political and spiritual legitimacy.

A shared biblical past has long imbued the Holy Land with special authority as well as a mythic character that has made the region not only a revered spiritual home for Muslims, Christians, and Jews but also a source of a living sacred history that continues to inform present-day realities and religious identities. This book explores the Early Modern Holy Land (1517–1700) as a critical place in which many early modern Catholics sought spiritual and political legitimacy during a period of profound and disruptive change. The Ottoman conquest of the region, the division of the Western Church, Catholic reform, the integration of the Mediterranean into global trading networks, and the emergence of new imperial rivalries transformed the Custody of the Holy Land (Custodia Terrae Sanctae), the venerable Catholic institution that had overseen Western pilgrimage since 1342, into a site of intense intra-Christian conflict by 1517. This contestation thrusts into relief the Holy Land’s importance both a frontier and sacred center of an embattled Catholic tradition, and in consequence, as a critical site of Catholic renewal and reinvention.

This chapter calls into question the longstanding notion that early Franciscans simply systematized or rehearsed ideas from Augustine and highlights instead how they employed Avicenna and Arabic philosophy to forge a completely new understanding of the bishop’s thought. Although this version of Augustinianism was initially passed off as a reading of the Aristotelian tradition as well, it became disassociated with Aristotle as the next generation came to a more authentic understanding of the Greek philosopher’s thought. By contrast, the Augustinianism invented by early Franciscans continued to be widely promulgated and defended for generations and thus impacted conceptions of Christian Platonism that remain influential to this day.

Although Francis of Assisi never set foot in person in the Holy Land, he was associated with the Crusader States through his presence in Egypt on the Fifth Crusade. The Franciscans established priories in the Holy Land, notably at Acre but also in other centres of population, and played a significant role in the pastoral life of the Latins in the thirteenth century, at a time when monasteries were struggling to maintain their landed properties and thus to minister to rural parishes. Franciscan spirituality manifested itself through care for prisoners and in the mission field.

Writings by and about Úrsula de Jesús from seventeenth-century Lima depict her as a black visionary and spiritual intermediary who conveyed messages between souls in purgatory, God, and the living. Úrsula de Jesús’s spiritual diary, in particular, develops a notion of beautiful and virtuous Christian blackness, framed as a corrective to the worldly hierarchies separating the poorer and darker-skinned slaves, servants, and donadas from the wealthier Spanish or criolla nuns in colonial Lima.

This chapter presents a thorough re-examination of the so-called ‘Great Conversion,’ a period after the Spanish Conquest when millions of natives were baptized.Countering mendicant apologetic narratives that presented the process as a great spiritual turning, and more recent work that has limited itself to critique the apologists, this chapter demonstrates baptism was inextricably related to the social and political repercussions of conquest and demographic crisis.The chapter begins by examining the politics of indigenous adhesion to Christianity in the aftermath of conquest, highlighting the early alliances between rulers and missionaries. The chapter then examines the role of spiritual warfare and iconoclasm in mass-baptisms, which was a by-product of these early alliances.Amidst this violence, however, missionaries also extended a promise to protect indigenous communities from Spanish exploitation and enslavement of the native population.By the mid-1530s large-scale conversions resulted from an emerging consensus in indigenous communities that the mission provided them with a means to preserve their lives, property, and communities.Self-interest, spiritual warfare, and the search for sanctuary all drove this phenomenon.Through the waters of baptism, native communities began the process of remaking Mesoamerica in the 1530s.

This chapter explores the mission’s vital antecedents by employing a transatlantic comparison of the ways in which religion served as a marker of sovereign power, connected violence to theologies of imperialism, and offered sanctuary amid the disruptions of unprecedented transatlantic contacts. Three lines of inquiry form the basis of this chapter.First, I examine religion as an expression of political sovereignty in fifteenth-century Mesoamerica and Iberia. Second, I address the most fundamental differences between Iberia and Mesoamerica. In Iberia, religious exclusivism fuelled a Spanish theological imperialism that sought to extend Catholicism to the exclusion of all competing god and religious institutions, while Mesoamerican empires integrated defeated gods to their pantheon. Part three, meanwhile, examines the way in which unprecedented cycles of encounter, conquest violence, widespread enslavement, and severe demographic crises in the Canaries and the Caribbean also made the mission a sanctuary from the worst depredations of early colonization. The transatlantic roots of the Mexican mission enterprise consist of three interconnected but also contradicting elements: religion as an expression of political sovereignty, as a basis for repression and violence, and as a promise of protection.