During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus relied heavily on Portuguese trade routes in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in order to reach Ethiopia. However, geopolitical shifts, particularly the rise of Ottoman sea power in the Indian Ocean and the Spanish conquest of Portugal in 1580, ended this route’s viability for the Jesuits. In order to sustain Jesuit connections with Ethiopia, Father General Mutio Vitelleschi decided in 1627 to abandon the Portuguese and send four Jesuits with French passports through Ottoman territory and up the Nile, whence they would travel overland into Ethiopia. After arriving in Egypt, however, the Jesuits were arrested, interrogated and expelled by the Ottoman governor, who suspected that they were Habsburg spies. The course of this failed Jesuit effort to reach Ethiopia has three important implications for our understanding of the Mediterranean and its relationship with other sea spaces in terms of early modern empire building and Catholic evangeli...

Jesuit thalassology reconsidered: the Mediterranean and the geopolitics of Jesuit missionary aims in seventeenth-century Ethiopia

A survey of the latest scholarship on Catholic missions between the 16th and 18th centuries, this collection of fourteen essays offers a global view of the organization, finances, personnel, and history of Catholic missions to the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

A Companion to the Early Modern Catholic Global Missions

In A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean, Robert Clines retraces the conversion and missionary career of Giovanni Battista Eliano, the only Jewish-born member of the Society of Jesus. He highlights the lived experience of conversion, and how converts dealt with others' skepticism of their motives. Clines uses primary sources, including Eliano's personal letters, missionary reports, and autobiography, together with scholarship on conversion in the early modern Mediterranean world to illustrate how false and sincere conversion often mirrored each other in outward performance. Devout converts were not readily taken at face value and needed to prove themselves in the moment and over the course of their lifetimes. Consequently, Eliano's story underscores that the mystical, introspective nature of religious belief and the formulation of new spiritual selves came into direct confrontation with the ways in which converts needed to present themselves to others in an age of political and religious turmoil.

A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean: Early Modern Conversion, Mission, and the Construction of Identity

The Coptic Mission, Mediterranean Geopolitics, and the Mediation of Eliano’s Jewish and Catholic Identities


The forty-one years between the Society of Jesus’s papal suppression in 1773 and its eventual restoration in 1814 remain controversial, with new research and interpretations continually appearing. Shore’s narrative approaches these years, and the period preceding the suppression, from a new perspective that covers individuals not usually discussed in works dealing with this topic. As well as examining the contributions of former Jesuits to fields as diverse as ethnology—a term and concept pioneered by an ex-Jesuit—and library science, where Jesuits and ex-Jesuits laid the groundwork for the great advances of the nineteenth century, the essay also explores the period the exiled Society spent in the Russian Empire. It concludes with a discussion of the Society’s restoration in the broader context of world history.

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The Years of Jesuit Suppression, 1773-1814: Survival, Setbacks, and Transformation

Beginning in 1609, as a result of the Capitulations concluded between France and the Ottoman Empire, the French Jesuits launched their missionary work in Istanbul. Protected by the French ambassador, the French Jesuits defined themselves as both French subjects and Catholic missionaries, thus experiencing in a new and complicated geopolitical context the tensions that were at the core of their order’s identity in France, as elsewhere in Europe. The intricate story of the French Jesuit mission to the Ottoman Empire is here considered through two snapshots. One focuses on the foundational period of the mission in Istanbul, roughly from 1609 to 1615. A second one deals with the temporary suspension of the Jesuits’ mission in Istanbul in 1628. These two episodes illustrate multilayered and lasting tensions between the French and the Venetians, between the hierarchy of the Greek Orthodox Church and Western missionaries, and between missionaries belonging to different Catholic orders, between the Roman church’s centralism and state-funded religious initiatives. Based on missionary and diplomatic correspondence, the article is an attempt to reconstitute the way in which multiple allegiances provided expedient tools for individual Jesuit missionaries to navigate conflicts and to assert their own understanding of their missionary vocation.

Adina Ruiu

Papers

Conflicting Visions of the Jesuit Missions to the Ottoman Empire, 1609–1628