Christianity in the Orient
A map of pre-modern Christian influences in Asia.
Christianity’s presence in the areas often designated as the ‘Orient’ by Westerners was not altogether a new phenomenon. Religious and cultural exchanges along the Silk Road were common, beginning with the diffusion of Buddhism to the steppe peoples and China from its original core region in India. Syriac – who under St. Thomas also created a Christian community in Kerala - and Nestorian missions, whose proselytization was recorded in Mongolia and northern China, were to create vibrant congregations after the Han dynasty’s fall. These efforts were to be largely undone from the ninth century onwards; concomitant with the persecution of Buddhist monasticism and several sects under the Tang and later dynasties, most ‘foreign’ religions were also suppressed, among them Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism. Brief attempts at missions by the Catholic Church during the Yuan Dynasty were to be mostly fruitless. The ‘rebirth’ of Christianity in the East involved a new avenue of European contact; by sea, replacing the long and dangerous land journeys through Transoxiana, the Tarim basin and Mongolia.
Faced with expulsion from Northern Africa after Calipha Mariam’s campaigns and with all dreams of controlling the Asian land trade squashed, whose terminus was situated in the Middle East, the Portuguese attempted to reach India by sea, contradicting Ptolemy’s theory of the Indian Sea being enclosed. Instead, they managed to reach India by Sea, through the Cape of Good Hope. This was analogous with the Spanish attempts at exploring the Atlantic Ocean, eventually stumbling onto the Americas, making landfall in the Isle of Hispaniola in 1522, under Cabeza de Vaca.
Álvaro Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca's landfall in Hispaniola.
The lightning quick expansion of the Lisboeta Empire in Asia after Paulo da Gama’s ocean voyage to India was invariably followed by – as has been previously referenced on this work – missionary work, nearly always by Jesuits. They came hand in hand with European merchants, goods and embassies, and were often intermediaries between their compatriots and the peoples among which they dwelled. Jesuit priests took to great lengths to learn the local languages and dialects, and unlike their brothers in Europe, preached in the vernacular to ease conversion.
The emblem of the Society of Jesus (
Societas Iesu), whose members had a tremendous influence in missionary activities in Asia
Hundreds of missionaries travelled along East Asia, as far inland – European influence as mostly limited to coastal areas - as Tibet (by Father Andrade Mendes); even so, Catholicism was only to enjoy greater popularity in the lands most travelled by St. Francis Xavier, the Patron of the Orient: Japan – especially in Kyushu, where most of Portuguese trade was centered – southern India and Ceylon. In all of these regions Christian teachings filled a social, political or cultural niche that justified its widespread adoption.
In Japan, the internecine conflicts that lead to the weakening of the Bakufu during the Onin Wars continued during the Sengoku Jidai. The loosening of the central authority’s power and its usurpation by the provincial land-owning bushi removed the last obstacles to total war. With the peasantry’s increasing role in armies – in the form of ashigaru – lead by their feudal masters, the struggles between clans increased in scope and in destructive power. The daimyo were soon to make use of European support and weaponry, attempting to gain the upper hand against their adversaries.
A Nagasaki musket. Modeled after Portuguese arquebuses, large manufactories and arsenals were created to produce and store large amounts of these firearms. They were easy to use and relatively cheap, prompting their widespread adoption on the battlefield.
To the nobility, conversion meant privileged access to European cannons and arquebuses, as well as favorable trade treaties. Given East Asia’s long history of religious syncretism, their conversion could perhaps be said to not be as radical, say, a Christian prince’s adoption of Islam. Still, it meant the severing of important ties and incurring the wrath of non-Christian rulers; even then, the need for political expediency often justified shedding their previous beliefs in favor of the new religion. The merchants enjoyed better bargaining terms with the foreigners and the lower orders were attracted to the faith’s message of universal love. Communication between Japan and Europe was great enough to warrant the sending of a Japanese (Christian) embassy to Rome.
In southern India and Ceylon – which, in accordance with Portuguese naming and for convenience, shall be referred to as ‘The Malabar’ – matters were different. The Malabar, while having enjoyed prosperity under the Vijayanagara Empire, was also divided into several smaller, feuding states after its collapse to Nayak – feudal and military leaders – revolts. After their conquest of Goa, the Lisboetas began to acquire large expanses of territory in the region from the bickering kingdoms. The large populations of these new lands made the task of administering them a hard one for the Republic. Since its interests were in maintaining spice production for export, the colonial Portuguese were to support a policy of extensive inter-marrying with the former ruling classes in order to assure their loyalty. Their direct control of the lands enabled them to actively support Catholicism and missionary activities without fear of having their missionaries prosecuted by zealous heathen kings.
Goa, the capital of the Portuguese Oriental Empire. All goods from Portuguese Asia were brought here before shipment, and the city grew immensely due to its new-found prosperity.
The Portuguese maintained control over their lands both by working inside the caste system, through intermarriage and assimilation into the higher classes, and outside it, by propagating their faith. A series of Indo-Portuguese creoles appeared and prospered during this period, revealing the extensive cultural intermingling that occurred. This is not to say that Portuguese rule was not resented or even resisted by certain segments of society; just that their conciliatory policy towards the local elites allowed them to avoid most of the problems and expenses of maintain a strong presence overseas, in such a distant land, by enlisting the help of several segments of the native population. Once again, Catholicism was easily propagated among the lower classes, oppressed as they were by a rigid caste system, theoretically four-tiered, but in practice containing hundreds of sub-castes. The Shudras and Pariahs, as the lowest of the lot, were, much like the peasants and Burakumin in Japan, attracted to the religion as a means of assuring social ascension. However, others were far more distrustful of the religion. The Brahmas, the priestly castes, were threatened by the new religion’s grip on power, both for fear of having their morals replaced by an exotic new creed and for desiring to maintain their position at the top of the social pyramid.
While the Portuguese often denounced the syncretic tendencies among the new converts and even some of the assimilated Europeans as corruptions of the Christian message, most accepted them as inevitable compromise to maintain order in the region. To this end, the Inquisition was refused jurisdiction in Portuguese India – and later even repudiated altogether from the Republic following the events of the 1532 Lisbon Massacre.
After the Republic of Lisbon
The surrender of Lisbon to Murad Bey.
But more importantly, what happened to Christianity in the Orient after the Republic’s fragmentation and later dissolution at the hands of the Jalayirid Caliphate? Outside of Japan, the Malabar and a few outposts – ‘feitorias’ – it was seemingly forgotten. With the large-scale closure of Portuguese sea-lanes to the Orient – maintained as a well-guarded secret – the flow of goods and missionaries stopped, safe for a few intrepid souls, like Matteo Ricci. For the most part, the main attraction of the faith disappeared. European help barely trickled as the Republic was busy fighting its sister cities, which had rebelled in the wake of the Muslim Invasion of Al-Andalus; many of its lands and fortresses found themselves uncertain as to their loyalties: to their employer, the Republic of Lisbon, or to their home town, which had likely seceded from the Lisboetas’ control?
Amid this period of war and chaos, missionary results were lackluster. With a far smaller military force under the Republic’s control, and unable to intervene in all theatres of Asia, they chose to focus in India, where Portuguese control was more cemented. Non-Christian daimyo often suppressed their Christian subjects, although some valued their expertise in European ‘arts’: cannon-making, shipbuilding and the running of printing-presses, the largest of which was located in Nagasaki – Japan’s largest Christian stronghold, and the seat of the Japanese Patriarchate until its move to Kyoto.
The Republic’s death-knell and that of its rebellious sisters was delivered by Murad Bey during his Iberian campaigns. With the end of the Republic and the annual trade ships, laden with colonial magistrates and goods to use as barter, the administration of the Oriental Empire was thrown into further confusion. The colonies, whether they identifies as Lisboeta or otherwise, were now cut off from their homeland.
An excerpt from a Portuguese atlas of Asia
The East African ports and cities that had been seized from the Swahili Confederacy promptly reverted into their former owners, as their garrisons, clergy and administrators realized their precarious situation and fled to the Malabar. There, the fall of the Republic was not felt nearly as strongly as elsewhere. Republican ideals were quickly dropped, as indigenized Portuguese and Christian natives carved their own kingdoms from the Aedile’s lands, alongside Hindu princes and rajas. The Christian rulers were mainly supported by their converted subjects, but the Hindu princes counted on the help of the Northern kingdoms to drive out the Catholic menace. A series of campaigns followed where the number of Christian kingdoms was diminished. Still, they were never truly extinguished, and the Hindus found it difficult to persuade the masses to give up their new-found, militant faith; a number of resurgent Christian kingdoms appeared during the first half of the 17th Century. Their rulers bore Portuguese names, and under their rule the caste system was very much relaxed, though not altogether abolished. The Hindus eventually relocated northward as the result of campaigns to expand the faith. In India, Catholicism enjoyed a comfortable position among the traditional Tamil regions and up the coast to Goa. The kingdoms grew rich from trade, although relations with the Caliphate were sometimes tense due to religious differences, whereas commerce in the area was previously controlled by Muslim traders.
Colombo, the capital of Portuguese Ceylon was named after Fernando Colombo, the leader of the first Portuguese expedition to land in Ceylon. The city was to remain an important nucleus for several post-Lisboeta Christian kingdoms.
In Ceylon, the period after Lisboa’s fall was less violent, as the island’s traditionalist rulers, mostly based in the central highlands, fought unsuccessively against the Christian Rés (kings). Unlike in the continent, a distinct European identity remained, since the Portuguese did not feel assimilation was as pressing as in the mainland, and the isolated and peaceful period that followed kept the Europeans on the island from being driven off or forcefully integrated. Instead, many formed dynasties of their own, alongside Christianized native rulers. The last Buddhist kingdoms were driven off in 1622, by then mere enclaves. The island’s solidarity with their brothers in the faith in the mainland was expressed through several expeditions against the Hindu kingdoms by the likes of João Rodrigues and Ré Álvaro Jayakody. With the threat of Hindu conquest dissipated, and in the wars that followed between most Christian kingdoms, alliances by states on Ceylon and in the continent were common and demonstrate the close bonds between the various kingdoms and polities, thanks to their common religious and cultural bonds. Together with Christianity, these Rénatos (kingdoms) stood out by their far larger European cultural heritage, at least in comparison with Japan.
 Originally meaning the Levant and Middle East, the Orient in the western mind has gradually shifted eastwards, as European explorers braved new lands. Orientalist painting and literature depicting it as an exotic, sensual land proliferated in the 18th and 19th centuries, dealing with everything from the Arabian Nights (a collection of folktales) to scenes of everyday life in India. The representation of the Orient as a more morally lax land, while not altogether true, proved popular with painters, who struggled with finding settings in which to set up nudes that did not involve the restrictions of classical Greco-Roman mythology.
 While battles had once been matters of personal dispute, subject to one-on-one fighting, the Sengoku Jidai introduced armies in which only the core was constituted by elite, aristocratic warriors, the samurai. The vast majority of the army was composed of conscripted peasants, usually wielding weapons that were easier to use in formations, such as spears. The introduction and widespread use of firearms enabled quick training of peasants in their use, and contributed to the increase in the destructive capabilities of war.
 In fact, the ‘Malabar’ usually means only the stretch of coast from Cape Comorin to approximately Mahe. However, the Portuguese referred to all of their south Indian domains by this name, and it will be used in this work to avoid repetition of the terms ‘Ceylon’ and ‘South India’, the latter of which may include non-Christian areas.
 Called the Kingdom of Bisnaga by the Portuguese, it enjoyed hegemony over the Indian continent for a certain time. The coalition of Northern Indian states, led by Rajputana, together with disagreements over the division of land and the Nayaks’ desire to carve their own kingdoms dictated its end, allowing the Portuguese to expand freely in the south.
A group of Dominican friars instigated a terrible riot that lead to the death of six thousand – alleged or open – Jews in Lisbon on 27th July 1532. The Jews enjoyed better relations with the Republic than with the monarchy, serving as moneylenders and sometime even as merchants in the Far East. The Inquisition, although not directly implicated in the riots, was expulsed from fear that it would lead to the prosecution of converted Jews, much like it did in Spain.
Alongside their own inhabitants, the Republic employed large quantities of men from its subordinate sister-Republics on the rest of the former Kingdom of Portugal. These found themselves with conflicting loyalties after their city’s secession. The Lisboetas’ often heavy-handed attempts to maintain them in line often contributed to desertion and sometimes even secession of colonies to other Republics, like Mombasa’s, who moved into Oporto’s sphere.
 These were driven out during the Lisboeta administration of the Malabar, and although some returning during the Hindu kingdoms’ control of the area, they later found themselves discriminated against by the Catholic kingdoms, who had also adopted European shipping practices, using ships with large hulls and huge tonnage, compared with the small dhows used by Muslims outside the Caliphate.
 What is here featured is transliterated Ceylonese; this language, borne out of Portuguese-Indian creoles and standardized only at the beginning of the 20th Century, is written in the ‘Sinhala’ alphabet, updated to accommodate new phonemes absent in non-Purthugalay (those that do not possess vast vocabulary or grammatical borrowings from Portuguese) languages and dialects. To avoid confusion, any and all words shall be referred to using their equivalents in modern Ceylonese (i.e. Nirena vs. Ré, both meaning king, one in the old Jaffna dialect and the other – a borrowing from Portuguese - in proper Ceylonese).
Originally, this chapter numbered over 4000 words, so I split it in half for your sakes. I’ll post Part two shortly. Treat it as me making amends for not updating last weekend!