As well as their religious notions, the leaders of the globalization expeditions – the vice-kings – the admirals and their officers also carried their dynastic models in themselves and out into the distant expanse. The internalized images of the royal clients, no less than their real portraits, ensured that the expansion into the outer space, both in critical moments and in hours of triumph, could be experienced as an effective emanation from the personal centre of power. When the carriers of discovery firms return physically or think back sentimentally, they make inner and outer gestures that convey their allegiance to the European origin of power. Their activity can be compared to the behaviour of the Platonic ray of light, which erupted from the centre, turned around after arriving at its point of reflection, and returned to its source of emission. In this sense, all loyal European conquerors and discoverers were on their way as the executive rays of distant sun kings. Even the crudest emissaries of imperialism in the nineteenth century, the ‘men on the spot’, considered themselves bringers of light in the service of their nations. If the European agents presented themselves as the great bringers, it was also because they carried their dynastic splendour outside with them, while appropriating the treasures of the New World with the demeanour of harvest hands. They move about in the nimbus of their native majesty systems, and most or all of their finds remain tied to the throne rooms and halls of fame at home. What has been termed the exploitation of colonies merely conveys the most intensive form of bond to the colonizers’ homeland – most especially the Spanish, who unfolded a complicated bureaucracy of looting. Relics of this can still be viewed today in the Archivo de las Indias in Seville. The subject of looted art is as old as terrestrial globalization: gold treasures of the Aztecs were exhibited in Antwerp at the start of the sixteenth century, and the question of their rightful owners was never asked. Albrecht Dürer looked with his own eyes upon these works of an art from an entirely different place.
Without their inner royal icons, most expedition leaders of early globalization would not have known for whom – except themselves – they should achieve their successes; most of all, however, they would not have learned whose acknowledgement would have augmented, justified and transfigured them. Even the atrocities of the Spanish conquistadors in Central and South America were metastases of loyalty to their native majesties, who could be represented by extraordinary means. The title of vice-king thus has more than simply legal and protocol significance; it is also a category that sees to the very psychopolitical heart of the Conquista. The books of the vice-kings have yet to be written. It is because of them that the European kings were present always and everywhere in the outer expansions of the Old World, despite never visiting their colonies themselves.1 The conquistadors and princes’ pirates collected their spoils under imaginary majestic canopies – and whatever part of it they transferred home was appropriated by the treasurers of their kings like a wild tax. In these happy days of globalization, the riches from across the ocean proved that the wide world followed no other destiny than to owe tribute to the European houses.
In a sense, this is also true of the spiritual king of kings, the pope, who, as the wearer of the three-tiered crown, wanted to expand his throne into a hyper-majesty for the entire globe. For it was his elite troops – the Jesuits, who were pledged to him with their fourth oath as the commander of martial Catholicism – who covered the globe with a net of prayers for the pope and considerations for Rome: an Internet of fervent obedience formed by distant devotees of the centre. This was the model for the worldwide operations of today's telecommunications companies; the long-distance call was prefigured by the long-distance prayer for the pope. The Jesuits were the prototypical news group, communicating via their organization-specific network. The other missionary orders – Franciscans, Dominicans, Theatines, Augustinians, Conceptionists, Clarists of the first and fifth rules, Hieronymites, canonesses, Barefoot Carmelites and many others – were likewise committed through their Rome connection to the project of procuring successes for the spiritual Conquista. It was their ambition to spread a papally supervised commonwealth over all the earth's continents. Only in the twentieth century did the pope have the mass-medially correct idea of travelling to the provinces of his moral empire as the ambassador of his own state. This marked Catholicism's transition into undisguised telematic charismocracy: the Roman path to modernity.
In keeping with the laws of metaphysical communication in large-scale social bodies, however, Catholic telecommunication before the age of actual papal presence could still not dispense entirely with magical-telepathic mechanisms. The corpse of the first great Jesuit missionary in Asia, Francis Xavier, who had opened up India and Japan to the Roman church, found its final resting place in Goa. The saint's right arm was brought back to Europe, ‘tired from the baptism of thousands’; it is still preserved today in the order's mother church, Il Gesù in Rome, as the most precious relic of globalization.