Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
In the early modern period – roughly from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries – Christianity, Islam, and, to a lesser extent, Buddhism exhibited extraordinary dynamism, penetrating regions they had never reached before, winning millions of new adherents, and coming to merit the name of “world religions.” The church could not compete with Islam in the interior of Africa or with Buddhism in inner Asia. As a rival to those religions, however, Christianity had one big advantage: its adherents carried it by sea. They could outflank Islam in Africa and dodge the forests, reaching directly deep into the tropics via the coasts. They could scatter missions and footholds around the Indian Ocean and maritime Asia, whereas Buddhists and Muslims could not respond by sending expeditions to Europe, or communicate directly with the vast new mission fields Christian evangelists were working in the New World.
From the 1430s, Portuguese adventurers justified slave-raids and trading ventures on the coast of the African Atlantic as part of a campaign to spread Christianity. The ambitious Prince, Dom Henrique, whom historians call “the Navigator” (rather misleadingly, as he only ever made two short sea trips), sponsored the voyages until his death in 1460, with support from successive popes, and sent expeditions as far as what is now Sierra Leone, but he never honored his promises to send missionaries to the region. Spanish friars strove to fill the gap, but they made little or no progress, partly because the Portuguese detested them as foreign agents. The merchants and private entrepreneurs who ran the Portuguese effort from 1469 to 1475 had no reason to waste hard-nosed investment on spiritual objectives.
In 1475, however, the crown took over the enterprise, perhaps in order to confront Spanish interlopers. West African navigation became the responsibility of the senior prince of the royal house, the Infante Dom João. Henceforth, Portugal had an heir, and, from his accession in 1481, a king committed to the further exploration and exploitation of Africa. He seems to have conceived of the African Atlantic as a sort of “Portuguese Main,” fortified by coastal trading establishments. Numerous informal and unfortified Portuguese outposts already dotted the Senegambia region. Freelance expatriates set most of them up, “going native” as they did so.
Dom João, however, had a militant and organizing mentality, forged in the war he waged against Spanish interlopers on the Guinea coast between 1475 and 1481. When he sent 100 masons and carpenters to build the fort of São Jorge, therefore, he was doing something new: inaugurating a policy of permanent footholds, disciplined trading, and royal initiatives. The natives could see and fear the transformation for themselves. A local chief said that he had preferred the “ragged and ill dressed men who had traded there before.” Another prong of the new policy was the cultivation of friendly relations with powerful coastal chieftains – the Wolof chiefs of Senegambia, the rulers, or “obas” as they were called – of the lively port city of Benin, and ultimately – much further south – the kings of Congo. Conversion to Christianity was not essential for good relations – but it helped. In Europe, it served to legitimize Portugal’s privileged presence in a region where other powers coveted the chance to trade. In Africa, it could create a bond between the Portuguese and their hosts.
Dom João therefore presided over an extraordinary turnover in baptisms and rebaptisms of rapidly apostasizing black chiefs. In one extraordinary political pantomime in 1488, he entertained an exiled Wolof potentate to a full regal reception, for which the visitor was decked out with European clothes and his table laden with silver plate. Further east along the coast, Portuguese missionary effort was still feeble, but the fort of São Jorge was Christianity’s shop window in the region, contriving an attractive display. Its wealth and dimensions were modest, but mapmakers depicted it as a splendid place, with high fortifications, penanted turrets, and gleaming spires – a sort of black Camelot. It had no explicit missionary role, but it did have resident chaplains, who became foci of inquiries from local leaders and their rivals, who realized that they could get help in the form of Portuguese technicians and weapons if they expressed an interest in Christianity. The obas of Benin played the game with some skill, never actually committing to the Church but garnering aid like supermarket customers targeting “special offers.” Not much came of any of the contacts, in terms of real Christianization, and in competition in the region neither Christianity nor Islam was very effective at first. But West Africa had become what it has remained ever since: an arena of spiritual enterprise in which Islam and Christianity contended for religious allegiance.
Farther south, where Portuguese ships reached but Muslim merchants and missionaries were unknown, was the kingdom of Congo, where people responded to Christianity with an enthusiasm wholly disproportionate to Portugal’s lackluster attempts at conversion. The kingdom dominated the Congo River’s navigable lower reaches, probably from the mid-fourteenth century. The ambitions of its rulers became evident when Portuguese explorers established contact in the 1480s. In 1482, battling against the Benguela current Diogo Cão reached the shores of the kingdom. Follow-up voyages brought emissaries from Congo to Portugal and bore Portuguese missionaries, craftsmen, and mercenaries in the reverse direction.
In Congo, the rulers sensed at once that the Portuguese could be useful to them. They greeted them with a grand parade, noisy with horns and drums. The king, brandishing his horse-tail whisk and wearing his ceremonial cap of woven palm-fiber, sat on an ivory throne smothered with the gleaming pelts of lions. He graciously commanded the Portuguese to build a church and when protesters murmured at the act of sacrilege to the old gods, he offered to put them to death on the spot. The Portuguese piously demurred.
On May 3, 1491, King Nzinga Nkuwu and his son, Nzinga Mbemba, were baptized. Their conversion may have started as a bid for help in internal political conflicts. The laws of succession were ill defined and Nzinga Mbemba, or Afonso I, as he called himself, had to fight for the succession. He attributed his victory to battlefield apparitions of the Virgin Mary and St. James of Compostela – the same celestial warriors as had often appeared on Iberian battlefields in conflicts against the Moors, and would appear again on the side of Spain and Portugal in many wars of conquest in the Americas. Congo enthusiastically adopted the technology of the visitors and embraced them as partners in slave-raiding in the interior and warfare against neighboring realms. Christianity became part of a package of aid from these seemingly gifted foreigners. The royal residence was rebuilt in Portuguese style. The kings issued documents in Portuguese, and members of the royal family went to Portugal for their education. One prince became an archbishop, and the kings continued to have Portuguese baptismal names for centuries thereafter.
The Portuguese connection made Congo the best-documented kingdom in West Africa in the sixteenth century. However Afonso I came to Christianity in the first place, he was sincere in espousing it and zealous in promoting it. Missionary reports extolled the “angelic” ruler for knowing:
the prophets and the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ and all the lives of the saints and everything about our sacred mother the church better than we ourselves know them . . . It seems to me that the Holy Spirit always speaks through him, for he does nothing but study, and many times he falls asleep over his books, and many times he forgets to eat and drink for talking of Our Lord . . . and even when he is going to hold an audience and listen to the people, he speaks of nothing but God and His saints.
Thanks in part to Afonso’s patronage, Christianity spread beyond the court. “Throughout the kingdom,” the same writer informed the Portuguese monarch, Afonso “sent many men, natives of the country, Christians, who have schools and teach our saintly faith to the people.” Not all Afonso’s efforts to convert his people were entirely benign. The missionaries also commended him for “burning idolaters along with their idols.” How much the combination of preaching, promotion, education, and repression achieved is hard to gauge. Portugal stinted the resources needed to Christianize Congo effectively. And the rapacity of Portuguese slavers hampered missionary efforts. Afonso complained to the King of Portugal about white slavers who infringed the royal monopoly of European trade goods and seized slaves indiscriminately.
Despite the limitations of the evangelization of Congo, the dynamism of Christianity south of the Sahara set a pattern for the future. The region was full of cultures that adapted to new religions with surprising ease. Profound or lasting evangelization was hard to achieve. In the seventeenth century, for instance, Queen Njinga of Ndongo showed characteristic expediency in slipping in and out of nominal Christianity as and when she needed or discarded Portuguese allies. Still, although Christianization was patchy and superficial, at least until the intensive missionary efforts of the nineteenth century, Christians never lost their advantage over Muslims in competing for sub-Saharan souls.
To some extent, the adhesion of the Congolese elite made up for the isolation and stagnation of Christian East Africa in the same period. Christianity had been the religion of Ethiopia’s rulers since the mid-fourth century, when King Ezana began to substitute invocations of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” for praise of his war-god in the inscriptions that celebrated his campaigns of conquest and enslavement. The empire had a checkered history, but in the late fourteenth century, the highland realm again began to reach beyond its mountains to dominate surrounding regions. Monasteries became schools of missionaries whose task was to consolidate Ethiopian power in the conquered pagan lands of Shoa and Gojam. Rulers, meanwhile, concentrated on reopening their ancient outlet to the Red Sea and thereby the Indian Ocean. By 1403, when King Davit recaptured the Red Sea port of Massaweh, Ethiopian rule stretched into the Great Rift valley. Trade northward along the valley was in slaves, ivory, gold, and civet, and Ethiopia largely controlled it.
Yet by the death of King Zara Yakub, towards the end of the 1460s, expansion was straining resources and conquests stopped. A major source for Ethiopian history in this period, saints’ lives, tells instead of internal consolidation, as monks converted wasteland to farmland. In 1481, the Ethiopian church resumed contact with Rome, where the pope provided a church to house visiting Ethiopian monks. European visitors were already familiar in Ethiopia, as Ethiopia’s Massaweh road became a standard route to reach the Indian Ocean. Italian merchants anxious to grab some of the wealth of the Indian Ocean for themselves would head up the Nile as far as Keneh, where they joined camel caravans across the eastern Nubian desert for the thirty-five day journey to the Red Sea. When Portuguese diplomatic missions began to arrive in Ethiopia – the first, in the person of Pedro de Covilhã, in about 1488, a second in 1520 – they found “men and gold and provisions like the sands of the sea and the stars in the sky,” while “countless tents” borne by fifty thousand mules transported the court around the kingdom. Crowds of two thousand at a time would line up for royal audiences, marshalled by guards on plumed horses, caparisoned in fine brocade. To the ruler of Ethiopia, Negus Eskendar, Covilhã was immediately recognizable as a precious asset, whom he retained at his court with lavish rewards.
Ethiopia, however, had already overreached its potential as a conquest state. Pagan migrants permeated the southern frontier. Muslim invaders pressed from the east, building up the pressure until, within a couple of generations they threatened to conquer the highlands. Ethiopia survived, with the help of a Portuguese task force in the 1540s. But in this region, the frontier of Christendom began to shrink. In the seventeenth century, Jesuit quibbles with Ethiopia’s Coptic tradition interrupted the missionary effort.
Farther south, the east coast of Africa was accessible to Muslim influence, but cut off from that of Christians until the sixteenth century, when the opening of a route around the Cape of Good Hope brought Portuguese merchants, exiles, and garrisons to the region. Here, however, Christianity never had the manpower or appeal to compete with Islam, while the inland states remained largely beyond the reach of missionaries of either faith.
Southward from Ethiopia, at the far end of the Rift valley, for instance, lay the gold-rich Zambezi valley and the productive plateau beyond, which stretched to the south as far as the Limpopo River, and was rich in salt, gold, and elephants. Like Ethiopia, these areas looked toward the Indian Ocean for long-range trade with the economies of maritime Asia. Unlike Ethiopia, communities in the Zambezi valley had ready access to the ocean, but they faced a potentially more difficult problem. Their outlets to the sea lay below the reach of the monsoon system and, therefore, beyond the reach of the normal routes of trade. Still, adventurous merchants – most of them, probably, from southern Arabia – risked the voyage to bring manufactured goods from Asia in trade for gold and ivory. Some of the most vivid evidence comes from the mosque in Kilwa, in modern Tanzania, where fifteenth-century Chinese porcelain bowls line the inside of the dome.
In the second quarter of the fifteenth century, the center of power shifted northward to the Zambezi valley, with the expansion of a new regional power. Mwene Mutapa, as it was called, arose during the northward migration of bands of warriors from what are now parts of Mozambique and KwaZulu-Natal. When one of their leaders conquered the middle Zambezi valley – a land rich in cloth, salt, and elephants – he took the title Mwene Mutapa, or “lord of the tribute payers,” a name that became extended to the state. From about the mid-fifteenth century, the pattern of trade routes altered as Mwene Mutapa’s conquests spread eastward toward the coast. But Mwene Mutapa never reached the ocean. Native merchants, who traded at inland fairs, had no interest in a direct outlet to the sea. They did well enough using middlemen on the coast and had no incentive for or experience of ocean trade. The colonists were drawn, not driven, northward, though a decline in the navigability of the Sabi River may have stimulated the move. Jesuits reached the court of Mwene Mutapa in the mid-sixteenth century, but effected few enduring conversions. The rulers repelled a Portuguese invasion in 1575.
In other directions, exploration and imperialism beyond the Atlantic disclosed worlds that were magnets for missionaries. In Asia, the contrast between the Philippines, where Spanish rule built up what is by far the biggest Christian community in Asia, and the many mission fields that proved barren or only briefly productive illustrates this. In 1564–1565, Andrés de Urdaneta, the Augustinian pilot who pioneered transpacific navigation, made it a condition of his work as an explorer that the crown promise to undertake the evangelization of the Philippines, but even in the Philippines, Christian success in direct competition with Islam was limited. In the Sulu Islands, where Muslim missionaries were active within reach of protection from a strong Islamic state in Brunei, the Muslim threat could be met by force of arms but not eradicated by Christian preaching. In the Philippine island of Mindanao, Muslim intruders arrived from the small but immeasurably spice-rich sultanate of Ternate in the 1580s. The Christian mission on Mindanao had barely begun and could not be sustained. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was all Spanish garrisons could do to keep at bay Muslim hotheads who launched holy wars against the Spaniards’ main base in Luzon. Yet, responding to his advisers’ view that the mission was not worth the cost and effort, King Philip II of Spain (r. 1556–1598) insisted that he would rather spend all the gold in his treasury than sacrifice one church where the name of Christ was praised.
For a while, Franciscans and Jesuits in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Japan encountered amazing success by targeting lords whose conversions were catalysts for the conversions of their followers. Once the missionaries had a place to say mass and a conspicuous aristocratic patron to make Christianity respectable, they could attract potential converts by displays of devotion, such as the magnificent requiem mass sung for the local ruler’s wife, Lady Gracia, at Kokura that attracted thousands of mourners in 1600. By the 1630s, more than 100,000 Japanese had been baptized. Successive central governments in Japan had treated the new religion with suspicion, as a source of subversive political ideas, foreign influence, and encouragement to local lords to usurp central authority. Sporadic persecution from the 1590s, however, had failed to halt the progress of Christianity. So from 1639, it was banned outright, and Christians who refused to renounce their faith were forced into exile or put to death.
China could not be converted by means similar to those the Jesuits followed in Japan. It was a relatively centralized state with no intermediate lords to serve as local flashpoints of Christian illumination. So, although, as recent work has shown, the Jesuits invested heavily in recruiting converts at all social levels, they concentrated their meager manpower on the scholar officials, or mandarins, who enjoyed huge social influence. Some of their converts were impressively committed: using Christian baptismal names, passing Christianity on to their friends and families, and proclaiming their faith in public. Yang T’ing-yün recalled a vivid conversion-experience in the presence of one of the Jesuits’ pictures of Jesus, which inspired him “with feelings of the presence of a great lord.” Debates with Jesuits followed: why could reverence for Buddha not be accommodated alongside acknowledgment of Jesus? How could the Lord of Heaven be subject to disgrace and suffering by being crucified? How could bread and wine be turned into the body and blood of Jesus? (Answer: “My Lord’s love for the world is boundless.”) After much agonizing, Yang repudiated his mistress – a more impressive test, perhaps, of Christian commitment than baptism – and went on to build a church, finance the printing of Christian works, and write books explaining Christianity. His fellow Christian, Hsü Kuang-ch’i, explained as an act of God his failure to pass the exam to enter the civil service that first brought him into contact with the missionaries and attributed to divine revelation, by way of a dream, his insight into the doctrine of the trinity.
Despite such promising instances, the Jesuits failed to convert China for three reasons. First, most Chinese were more interested in the Jesuits’ scientific learning and technical skills as mapmakers, astronomers, artists, clock makers, and designers than in their religious teaching. Second, the strategy the Jesuits adopted to convert China was a long-term one, and the revolutions of Chinese politics tended to interrupt it. No sooner had the Jesuits converted an empress than the Manchus overthrew the Ming dynasty in 1644. Finally, the church lost confidence in the Jesuits’ methods. This was the outcome of a conflict that began with the founder of the mission, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). He rapidly developed a healthy respect for Chinese wisdom. Indeed, the Jesuits became mediators not only of Western culture to China but also of Chinese learning in the West. He decided that the best way to proceed with Chinese converts was to permit them to continue rites of reverence for their ancestors, on the ground that it was similar to Western veneration for saints. As we have seen, this was just the sort of practice that, in the West, the clerical elite was attacking. The missionaries split over the issue, and the effectiveness of the mission suffered when Pope Clement XI ruled against the veneration of ancestors early in the eighteenth century.
In parts of South and Southeast Asia, missionary strategists targeted potential converts at various social levels. In the Molucca and Sulawesi Islands, in the seventeenth century, in what is today Indonesia Protestant and Catholic missions alike approached sultans, local notables, and village heads, with results that usually came to embrace many ordinary people but that never seem to have lasted for long. In Manado in northern Sulawesi, Franciscans launched an intensive mission in 1619. They began by obtaining permission from an assembly of village heads at the ruler’s court, but these notables disclaimed power over their fellow villagers’ religious allegiance. The friars preached from village to village, encountering universal hostility. The audience would shriek to drown out the preaching, urge their unwelcome guests to leave, and profess fidelity to their gods. They withheld food and shelter. The friars therefore withdrew in 1622. Their Jesuit successors made some progress by concentrating on the ruler and his family. When Franciscans returned to the villages in the 1640s, they enjoyed a much more positive reception. By the 1680s, under Dutch sponsorship, a Protestant mission in Manado made further headway by employing converted native schoolmasters to work among the children of the elite, wherever a local ruler would permit it. In Sri Lanka, Portuguese missionaries were more generally successful, but the Dutch who took over the island in 1656 were as keen to undermine Catholics as to convert Buddhists to Protestantism, and the long-term impact of Christianity proved slight.
In the New World, the bottom-up strategy of conversion was more usual. After initial contact, which, of course, often brought missionaries into touch with local leaders, ambitious programs of mass baptism and mass preaching rapidly followed. In the 1520s and 1530s, Franciscans baptized literally millions of Native Americans in the first fifteen years or so of the Franciscan mission in Mexico, in an experiment typical of the time: an effort to recreate the actions and atmosphere of the early church, when a single example of holiness could bring thousands to baptism and altar as if by a miracle. Clearly most conversions in these circumstances cannot have been profound, life-changing experiences of the kind specified in traditional definitions of conversion. The doctrinal awareness the friars succeeded in communicating was limited. The first catechism the Franciscans used in Mexico does not even refer to the divinity of Jesus, which is a central doctrine of Christian belief. Dominican friars denounced the superficiality of Franciscan teaching, but the same problems of deficient manpower, daunting terrain, and linguistic and cultural differences hampered their own efforts. The fear of backsliding and apostasy by new converts haunted the missions. As early as 1539, clergy in Mexico worried about the multiplication of small chapels “just like those the Indians once had for their particular gods.” In central Mexico, in the mid-sixteenth century, fears that new cults disguised pagan practices convulsed the church. Doubts arose even concerning the purity of the veneration of Our Lady of Guadalupe herself – the appearance of the Virgin Mary, supposedly to an Indian shepherd boy on the site of a pre-Christian shrine, which had demonstrated the sanctity and grace of Mexican soil in the 1530s. In 1562, one of the worst recorded cases of missionary violence erupted in Yucatán, when the head of the Franciscan mission became convinced that some of his flock were harboring pagan idols. The reports that alerted him came from native informants, motivated, probably, by traditional hatred and rivalry among Indian communities, rather than by any zeal for the facts. In the subsequent persecution, 4,500 Indians were tortured, and 150 died.
In a similar case in central Peru in 1609, a parish priest was condemned for using excessive violence toward backsliders among his flock. The papers he collected include the story of a revealing trauma. Don Cristóbal Choque Casa, the son of a local Indian notable and community leader, reported that, some thirty or forty years after a vigorous Jesuit mission had nominally converted his people, he was on his way to meet his mistress at the abandoned shrine of a tribal god, when the devil in the form of a bat attacked him. He drove out the demon by reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, and the following morning summoned his fellow natives to warn them not to frequent the shrine on pain of being reported to the parish priest. But that same night, he dreamed that he was irresistibly drawn to the accursed spot himself and compelled to make a silver offering to the god. The story evokes a vivid picture of the consequences of “spiritual conquest”: old shrines, so neglected that they are fit only for bats and fornicators; abiding powers, so menacing that they can still haunt the dreams, even of a sinner sufficiently indoctrinated to be able to pray in Latin.
For the rest of the colonial period, the eradication of pre-Christian devotions in Peru became the work of professional “extirpators.” In most of the rest of the Spanish American world, every new generation of clergy repeated the frustrations and disillusionment of their predecessors. The Indians seemed unable to forget their old rites for appeasing nature. In the early eighteenth century, in Guatemala and Peru, priests were still making the same complaints as their predecessors a century and a half before. Indians were attached to “idols” and to their own healers and seers. They turned the saints into pagan deities. They accused each other of “superstition” and working with demons. Only with extreme caution could they be trusted to revere sacred images of Jesus and the saints without idolatry.
Outside the areas of responsibility of the Spanish crown, both efforts and results were disappointing. In the Great Lakes region, French Redemptorists and Jesuits plunged into the divided politics of the Iroquoian-speaking world; but the Huron, who embraced the French as allies and their religion as useful, largely died out under the impact of war and disease, while the Iroquoian confederacy resisted the religion of the French along with their imperial pretensions. Dutch propaganda made much of the opportunities for finding friends and converts among the natives of the New World, but in practice the opportunities were largely neglected. “Come over and help us,” said the Indian on the official seal of the trading company responsible, under the English crown, for colonizing Massachusetts in the early seventeenth century. On the whole, however, missionizing was a rare vocation in Protestant Europe. There were a few exceptions. The conviction that the Algonquin Indians were a lost tribe of ancient Israel inspired John Eliot, who created “praying towns” in late seventeenth-century New England where native pastors led congregations in prayers, readings from the Bible, and sermons. Normally, however, only Roman Catholic religious orders had enough manpower and zeal to undertake the missions on a large scale, and outside areas of Spanish rule, their efforts were patchy.
The forms of Catholic Christianity that became characteristic of Spanish America were, in their way, every bit as different from the Catholic mainstream as was the Protestantism of most of the English colonies. In part, this was because of the imperfections of the “Spiritual Conquest” of Spanish America by Catholic missionaries. Missionaries were few. Cultural and linguistic obstacles impeded communication. Pre-Christian religion was probably too deeply rooted to be destroyed. In partial consequence, Latin American Catholicism is rippled, to this day, with Native American features.
Secular scholars, and Protestant critics of Catholic missionary activities, sometimes call these Native American influences “syncretic” features or “pagan survivals” because Christianity and paganism seemed to fuse in a new religion that was not quite either but was a blend of both. Yet the proper comparison for colonial religion is not – or not solely – with the religion of the Native American past but with that of Europe of the same era, where clerical bafflement at the stubborn survival of “popular” religion was every bit as great. The Christianity of the American countryside was deficient in similar ways to that of the European countryside. Anxiety about how to survive in this world interfered with people’s concern about their salvation in the next. Rites to induce rain, suppress pests, elude plague, and fend off famine drove Scripture and sacraments into neglected corners of ordinary lives. As the programs of reform unfolded in Europe, clergy and educated laity acquired ever-higher standards of doctrinal awareness, ever-deeper experiences of Christian self-consciousness. Their expectations of their flocks increased accordingly – which accounts for the continual renewal of their dissatisfaction. The more Christianized the elite became, the more Christian the clergy expected ordinary people to behave. Meanwhile, the Christianity of Indians in Spanish America had as much variety as in that of Europeans in Anglo-America.
The arrival of slaves from Africa created, in the long run, a new mission field; most owners, however, were slow to see the merits of introducing their slaves to doctrines as potentially subversive as those of the tradition of Moses and the religion of Onesimus. In Surinam, missionaries were forbidden to evangelize slaves until 1856 (though the Moravians were allowed access to the free maroon communities from 1762 onwards). Brazil is the best-documented area and has a characteristic profile. Here, in colonial times, black artistic vocations and religious devotion were centered on cult images that charitable associations of black Catholic lay people often supported financially. These confraternities, as they are called, were vital institutions for colonial society generally, melding the culturally up-rooted into a coherent community, renewing their sense of identity and belonging. They were even more important for black people, who were compulsory colonists, traumatically transferred as slaves from Africa to an alienating environment on another continent. Confraternities cushioned and comforted them in a white man’s world: unstable organizations, “created and dissolved with extraordinary rapidity,” as one of their most distinguished historians has said. Encouraged by the church, and especially by the Jesuits and Franciscans, the black brotherhoods were hot beds of disorder.
For the guardians of the colonial power structure, the confraternities’ choice of patron saints, whose statues they paraded through the streets and elevated in shrines, was often self-assertive, sometimes defiant. St. Elesbaan, for instance, was a warrior-avenger, a black crusading Emperor of Ethiopia, who led an expedition to avenge the massacre of Christians by a Jewish ruler in Yemen in 525. He was easy to re-interpret as a symbol of resistance to the many plantation owners of Portuguese–Jewish ancestry. St. Benedict of Palermo, perhaps the favorite patron of black confraternities, was born the son of Nubian slaves in Sicily in 1526. He became a hermit in his youth, to escape taunts about his blackness. Then, as a Franciscan lay brother, he rose to become guardian of his friary and work miracles after his death in 1583. The cult of St. Iphigenia, a legendary black virgin, who resisted the spells of her suitor’s magicians with the help of 200 fellow virgins, embodied the triumph of faith over magic. But it had its subversive aspect, too, sanctifying virginity in a slave society where women wished sterility on themselves in order not to produce children who would become slaves. Veneration of the Mother of God was closer in spirit to the fertility religions supposedly traditional among migrants from Africa and more consistent with the interests of slave-owners, who wanted their human livestock to breed. Black Catholicism was an excitant, not an opiate. Rather than playing the role commonly assigned to religion – keeping believers in their place – it inspired hopes of betterment in this world. A commonly depicted scene was of white Judas, tortured in hell by black tormentors.
Colonial black Catholicism really was different from that of white people. Masters excluded slaves from mass, ostensibly “on account of the smell,” but really to keep them away from dangerously radical clergy. White confraternities reviled blacks “with their guitars and drums, with their mestizo [mixed white and Indian] prostitutes,” and with their revolutionary pretensions, “just as though they were no different from honest white people.” Fugitive blacks who set up their own backwoods communities and independent kingdoms were formally excommunicated. The Church hierarchy usually refused their requests for chaplains. Missionary activity in Brazil began in the early sixteenth century before the Counter-Reformation, when the clergy were still content with superficial levels of Christian teaching. It continued in an era of growing Catholic sensitivity to the native heritage of potential converts, who were not always called on to renounce all their culture to become Christians. The mulatto priest António da Vieira (1608–1697), who became a royal chaplain in 1641, imported “masks and rattles to show the heathen that the Christian religion was not sad.” In partial consequence, Brazilian Catholicism is an umbrella-term for a bewildering range of styles of devotion. Outside the Spanish and Portuguese colonies – and especially in those of the British and Dutch, where plantations were inaccessible to Catholic religious orders – the lack of missionary activity was even more marked. In consequence, African religions persisted, and syncretism happened because the slaves often learned Christianity by themselves and blended it with African religious beliefs.
Still, ordinary people’s accessibility to the ministry of missionaries made the New World an extraordinarily rich and rewarding mission field. Aided by the tendency – exceptionally common in the New World – of some cultures to welcome and defer to strangers, missionaries could penetrate areas otherwise untouched by any European presence, establish an honored place in their host societies, learn the languages, and guide congregations, by intimate, personal contact, into redefining themselves as Christians.