Francis Xavier sails from Lisbon for Asia, 7 April 1541

On Thursday 7 April 1541, in Passion Week, five ships lay in the Tagus off Belém, by the monastery of Our Lady just outside Lisbon, ready for the yearly run to India. On board the flagship, the Santiago, a priest from Navarre was spending his 35th birthday saying goodbye. Francis Xavier was sailing to Asia as the pope's envoy, with two companions and little else.2 sources2 sources

Simão Rodrigues, a Portuguese priest who had been one of his student friends in Paris, came aboard the governor's ship for the farewell. The two had expected to sail together. Instead Rodrigues was staying behind at the king's wish, and the friends never met again.2 sources2 sources

Francis Xavier was born in 1506 in the castle of Xavier, near Sangüesa in Navarre, in northern Spain. In 1525 he went to study in Paris at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe, where he shared a room with the Savoyard Pierre Favre and, from 1529, with an older Basque student, Ignatius of Loyola.2 sources2 sources

On 15 August 1534, in a chapel at Montmartre, Xavier, Favre, Loyola and four friends took private vows of poverty and chastity and promised to go to the Holy Land. War kept them out of Jerusalem, so they offered themselves to the pope instead. In 1539 they agreed to found a religious order, the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits.2 sources2 sources

João III of Portugal heard of the group from Diogo de Gouveia, head of Sainte-Barbe and one of his advisers, who urged him to ask for some of Loyola's companions as missionaries for the Indies. The king told his ambassador in Rome, Pedro Mascarenhas, to make the request. The ambassador asked for six. Ignatius would give only two, and the pope did not press him.2 sources2 sources

Ignatius named Simão Rodrigues, a Portuguese nobleman the king would welcome, and the Spaniard Nicolás Bobadilla. Rodrigues sailed for Lisbon at once with Paulo de Camerino. Bobadilla reached Rome from Naples just as Mascarenhas was leaving and fell too ill to travel. The ambassador would not go without his second priest.2 sources2 sources

Xavier answered that he was ready. He mended his clothes, got the pope's blessing, left his vote for the election of a superior general (for Ignatius), and rode north out of Rome with the ambassador in mid-March 1540. They crossed Italy, the Alps and Spain, and reached Lisbon in June.3 sources3 sources

The next India fleet would not sail until the spring, so Xavier and Rodrigues waited. João III received them for more than an hour, offered them rooms near the palace and meals from the royal kitchen. They chose to beg their food and lodge at the royal hospital of All Saints. Lisbon soon called them “the apostles”.2 sources2 sources

Their work included the prisoners of the Inquisition. The king's brother Henrique, the Inquisitor General, asked them to take charge of the prisoners' souls. Schurhammer counts 50 prisoners, most of them New Christians: Jews forced into baptism in 1497, and their descendants. He records that the two priests went with two of them to the stake.3 sources3 sources

Preaching and hearing confessions at court, the pair did so well that the king began to think they would be more useful at home. Rodrigues asked Ignatius to decide. Ignatius left it to the king but advised that Rodrigues stay and Xavier go. João III agreed. Rodrigues stayed to build the Jesuit order in Portugal.3 sources3 sources

Papal briefs arrived naming Xavier apostolic nuncio in the East, the pope's representative there. The Count of Castanheira, who was fitting out the fleet, asked what he needed and offered him a servant: a nuncio should not wash his own clothes and cook his own food. Xavier refused anything but a few books and warmer clothing.2 sources2 sources

Xavier sailed on the governor's own ship. He was seasick for the first two months, and then the fleet lay becalmed off the coast of Guinea. It reached Mozambique Island about five months out, too late in the season to cross to India, and the governor decided to winter there.2 sources2 sources

In Mozambique the three missionaries moved into the hospital. Xavier wrote that “as many as eighty died” of the sickness that swept the crews during the six months there. Schurhammer's 1928 biography counts 40 deaths on the island. Xavier caught a fever himself. When the governor sailed on, he left Paulo and Mansilhas behind with the sick and took Xavier with him as his confessor.2 sources2 sources

Goa impressed him: a city “entirely in the hands of Christians”, with a cathedral and a large Franciscan house. After five months preaching, teaching children and nursing the sick there, he left in about October 1542 for the Fishery Coast, the pearl-fishing shore near Cape Comorin at the southern tip of India.2 sources2 sources

Its people, the Paravas, had asked for Portuguese protection against Muslim rivals in the 1530s. Priests sent with the soldiers baptised about 20,000 of them without instruction, since nobody knew their language, and then left. Xavier had the main prayers translated into Tamil, learned them by heart and went from village to village teaching them.3 sources3 sources

On the Travancore coast in late 1544 he claimed to have made “more than ten thousand” Christians in a month. His letter described the method, from reciting the creed in the local language to the destruction that followed baptism.2 sources2 sources

In Malacca in 1547 he met Anjirō, a Japanese man who had fled his country after killing someone and wanted to become a Christian. Baptised in Goa as Paulo de Santa Fé, he went back to Japan with Xavier and two other Jesuits, Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernández. The party left Malacca on a Chinese junk in June 1549 and landed at Kagoshima, Anjirō's home town, on 15 August 1549.4 sources4 sources

Japan was harder than it looked. After a year in Kagoshima the missionaries moved on to Hirado and Yamaguchi. In the winter of 1550 to 1551 Xavier reached Kyoto, the imperial capital, hoping to win over the emperor, and found a city damaged by civil war and a powerless court. After 11 days he left. He did better back in Yamaguchi, now dressed as an envoy and bringing gifts, and then in Bungo, before sailing from Japan in November 1551.3 sources3 sources

On 16 May 1546, from Amboina in the Moluccas, he wrote to João III. The first need he named was preachers. When Jesuit editors first printed the letter, around 1900, they worked from the original, then displayed for veneration on the high altar of the main church of Marchena, in Andalusia. Only the address was in Xavier's own hand, and the signature had been cut away.2 sources2 sources

Because such people were “many” and “spread through all the fortresses”, he went on, India needed the Inquisition and many preachers. A year earlier, in 1545, he had asked a fellow Jesuit in Portugal to have someone write to Henrique, the Inquisitor General, so that the Inquisition would punish those who persecuted converts. Paiva notes that this request was not aimed at New Christians.2 sources2 sources

Historians disagree on how much these letters mattered. António Baião argued in 1945 that the tribunal grew out of pressure from Jesuits, Xavier and Belchior Carneiro above all, who feared the growing number of New Christians in Kochi and Goa. Anant Priolkar took up his view in 1961.1 source1 source

Ana Cannas da Cunha, in 1995, did not deny the Jesuits' warnings but held crown policy mainly responsible: fear that New Christians from Portugal were taking hold in Asia and trading with Ottoman Jews, the poor results of conversion, and the need for one court to judge matters of faith. José Pedro Paiva, in 2017, sees a cluster of causes, and notes that the vicar-general of Goa, Miguel Vaz, had asked for a tribunal before Xavier did.1 source1 source

The 1546 letter names no one. Its targets were people living among the Portuguese who followed “the law of Moses” or Islam, and Paiva notes that New Christians feature in it. It says nothing about Hindus. Yet most of the people the Goa tribunal went on to try were Indian converts accused of keeping Hindu practices.2 sources2 sources

The Goa tribunal was ordered by Henrique on 2 March 1560, and its first two inquisitors, Aleixo Dias Falcão and Francisco Marques Botelho, arrived in December 1560, eight years after Xavier's death. It was the first Inquisition tribunal outside Europe. Between 1561 and 1812 it held about 15,000 trials and passed more than 200 death sentences.1 source1 source

Back in Goa at the start of 1552, Xavier turned to China, of which he had heard much in Japan. The viceroy agreed to send Xavier's friend Diogo Pereira, a merchant, as ambassador to the Chinese emperor, with Xavier in the party, and in April 1552 Xavier left Goa.2 sources2 sources

At Malacca the plan broke. The captain of the sea, Álvaro de Ataíde, a son of Vasco da Gama, refused to let Pereira sail as ambassador, had the rudder taken off his ship and put soldiers to guard it. Xavier sailed on without the embassy in mid-July, on the Santa Cruz, with a few companions including a Chinese servant, Antonio, hoping to be smuggled onto the mainland.2 sources2 sources

At the end of August the Santa Cruz anchored at Shangchuan, a small island off the Chinese coast near Canton, where Portuguese and Chinese merchants met to trade from straw huts on the beach. No Chinese trader would take him across. In late November he fell ill with fever and was moved from the ship to a hut on shore.3 sources3 sources

Antonio stayed with him. According to Schurhammer, Xavier died about two hours after midnight on Saturday 3 December 1552, holding the candle Antonio had lit for him. He was 46. Antonio, two helpers and a Portuguese buried him the next day in a wooden coffin filled with four sacks of lime, and rolled a stone over the grave.2 sources2 sources

When the Santa Cruz was ready to leave, about two and a half months later, the grave was opened to see whether the body could be moved. The man sent to open it reported that it was well preserved, which his contemporaries took as a sign of holiness. The ship sailed on 17 February 1553 and reached Malacca on 22 March, where the body was buried again in the church of Our Lady of the Mount.2 sources2 sources

It was carried on to Goa by sea and arrived on 16 March 1554, to be met by the viceroy, the clergy and crowds pressing to touch the coffin. It was laid in the church of the Jesuit College of St Paul. The Basilica of Bom Jesus, the Jesuits' church in Goa, begun in 1594, received it in 1624.2 sources2 sources

Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had received the pillow from Xavier's coffin as a relic and in gratitude paid for a marble base for the tomb. It was made under his court artist, Giovanni Battista Foggini, from 1689. It was shipped to Goa by way of Lisbon in 65 crates and assembled in Bom Jesus in late 1698 by two Florentine craftsmen.2 sources2 sources

Others followed Xavier from Lisbon. João III endowed a Jesuit college at Coimbra with 100 scholarships, and its students were eager for the missions: three Jesuits sailed for India in 1545 and nine in 1546. In 1927 the Catholic Church named Xavier patron of the missions.2 sources2 sources

In Goa he is Goencho Saib, as the state's Catholics call him. His body is brought out for public veneration about once a decade. At the opening of the 18th exposition, on 21 November 2024, the relics were taken to the Sé Cathedral in an electric carriage, and 12,000 people attended the inaugural Mass.2 sources2 sources

The Basilica of Bom Jesus was also tied to the colonial state. After the viceroy Francisco de Távora handed his staff of command to the saint during a Maratha attack in 1683, new viceroys and governors came to receive the saint's blessing in a ritual exchange of the staff.1 source1 source

The 1546 letter is part of the same record. An accurate account of Xavier includes the man who walked the Fishery Coast teaching prayers in Tamil and the man who ordered temples smashed and asked his king for the Inquisition.3 sources3 sources