Matteo Ricci (3 page)

When Ricci studied at the Roman College, the work of Polish astronomer Copernicus,
29
containing the new and more correct hypothesis of the structure of the universe with the sun at the center of the planetary system instead of the earth, had already been in print for thirty years, and the seeds of the Copernican revolution, one of the most shattering in the history of Western science, had begun to sprout, paving the way for the radical conceptual changes in the fields of cosmology, physics, philosophy, and religion that were brought about in the seventeenth century through the work of Galileo and Kepler. The conflict between the heliocentric system of Copernicus and the geocentric system of Ptolemy did not, however, affect Ricci, who died in China long before the dramatic events that led to the clash between Galileo, the defender of the Copernican theory, and the Church, which considered it a heretical doctrine.

Mathematical and astronomical knowledge had immediate application in drawing up the calendar, an essential tool for agriculture and social life. Given Ricci’s particular flair for the scientific disciplines, it is reasonable to assume that he was one of the group attending a specialized course devoted to the construction of perpetual calendars, the study of the planetary tables, and higher-level astronomical calculations.
30
Promulgated by Julius Caesar in 46
bc
, the Julian calendar was still in use in Ricci’s day but was now out of step with the passing of the seasons. Its rectification was the task of a committee appointed by Pope Gregory XIII, with Clavius as one of its members. Even though Ricci had already left for the East by the time this reform was completed with the introduction of our present Gregorian calendar
31
in 1582, he was probably acquainted through his master with some of the problems of calculation to be addressed.

Ricci also studied geography and cartography, disciplines then in the full swing of development. The courses at the Roman College included not only Ptolemy’s
Geography
, the compendium of the geographic knowledge of antiquity translated from the Greek in the previous century, but also the works of the most famous Renaissance cartographers, who described the newly explored world and used new techniques to represent the earth’s surface. The innovations in cartography had proceeded in step with the new discoveries. While the map in which the name “America” appeared for the first time to indicate the New World had been drawn in 1507 by the German Martin Waldseemüller (1470–1521), the real progress was made sixty years later. It was in 1569 that the Flemish cartographer Gerhard Kremer (1512–1594), better known as Mercator, devised the “projection” that still bears his name, a geometric technique of map drawing in which the parallels, corresponding to degrees of latitude, became horizontal and the meridians, corresponding to degrees of longitude, became vertical, while the poles disappeared. On a navigation chart drawn in accordance with Mercator’s method, the progress of a ship in a constant direction with respect to the needle of the compass could be represented as a straight line, thus making it much easier for navigators to plot the course and then follow it. His compatriot Abraham Oertel (1527–1598), known as Ortelius, brought out the first atlas in the modern sense of the term, namely the
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
, a systematic collection of the most recent maps of the world developed with the collaboration of most of the leading geographers of the time. Published for the first time in 1570, it was regularly updated in subsequent editions.

The teaching imparted at the Roman College was not only theoretical but also included technical disciplines and the development of manual skills. The new scientific developments in the sixteenth century were in any case practically never the fruit of pure speculation but were matters of immediate application, and the theoretical capacities of natural philosophers were accompanied by practical skills that enabled them to construct the instruments they needed in order to explore nature.

Ricci also acquired technical understanding and developed his manual skills, learning among other things to construct globes that showed the heavenly vault and the earth’s surface on a sphere and to draw maps using the most recent techniques. He studied the mechanisms of instruments of astronomical observation like the astrolabe, a device of ancient origin used to measure the apparent height of stars above the horizon and described by Clavius in an exhaustive treatise.
32
He became familiar with the working principles and construction of sundials, ancient instruments that were well known to Clavius and that used the shadow cast by a gnomon onto a marked surface to tell the time of day. He also learned the secrets of the mechanical clocks introduced in the fourteenth century that used chimes to ring the hours. Though still very imprecise, these were becoming rather popular both as table clocks and in miniature versions as watches to be hung around the neck.

Ricci could hardly have imagined just how much use he would make of this theoretical and practical knowledge in his missionary work. Much of it was to prove invaluable during his stay in China to communicate with a civilization that was different but eager to learn the knowledge produced by another culture.

It was while he was still studying and concentrated on his spiritual path that Matteo Ricci submitted a request to become a missionary. It is not known whether this was of his own volition or under the influence of his superiors. The young man had to wait for a long time before his application was accepted, as the selection process was very rigorous. Various students dreamed of setting off for the missions, but not all were deemed suitable. The “ardent longing for the Indies”
33
was in fact not always accompanied by any real ability to cope with the hardships involved in the missionary’s life. Experience had shown that too many novices were unable to endure the rigors of ocean voyages and life in unhealthy climates, illness, and homesickness. After becoming Visitor of Missions in the Indies, Valignano himself had taken steps to ensure the selection of candidates with an intellectual and psychological profile in keeping with the demands of the undertaking, so as to avoid pointless suffering and failure.
34

Ricci had all the right qualities, being thoroughly prepared and fired with great determination. While he was completing the third year of his philosophy course, at the end of 1576, Martino da Silva, the Portuguese Procurator of Missions in India, returned to Italy in order to select new missionaries for the East and accepted Ricci’s request in agreement with Superior General Everard Mercurian.

The training and education received during the five years spent at the Roman College—repeatedly recalled by Matteo in his letters from China as a happy and intense period—provided him with the essential grounding for his life to come, a cultural background that was to prove invaluable in spreading the Gospel in the East.

Notes

Abbreviations

FR
Fonti Ricciane,
Storia dell’Introduzione del Cristianesimo in Cina
.

OS II
Matteo Ricci,
Le lettere dalla Cina
, in
Opere storiche del P. Matteo Ricci S.I.
, 2 vols., II.

1.
Harmonices Mundi
(1618), translated as
The Harmonies of Worlds
or
The Harmony of the World
, book III, ch. 1; quoted in Judith V. Field, “Astrology in Kepler’s Cosmology,” in
Astrology, Science, and Society: Historical Essays
, ed. P. Curry (Woodbridge, Suffolk/Wolfeboro, NH: Boydell and Brewer, 1987), p. 154.

2. The figures for 1617 give a total of 13,889 inhabitants (FR, book V, ch. XXI, p. 549, no. 2).

3. FR, book V, ch. XXI, p. 549.

4. FR, book V, ch. XXI, p. 550.

5. The Jesuit Sabatino de Ursis (1575–1620), one of Ricci’s companions on the China mission, was the author of his first biography,
P. Matheus Ricci S.I. Relação escripta pelo seu companheiro
(Rome, 1910).

6. The Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope near the southernmost tip of Africa in 1488. His compatriot Vasco da Gama landed in Calicut, India, in 1498.

7. For biographic details, see also FR, introduction, pp. ci ff, and book V, ch. XXI, pp. 549 ff.

8. Written by Ignatius Loyola between 1541 and 1550.

9. FR, book V, ch. XXI, p. 553.

10. Francisco de Jassu y Xavier (1506–1552). He founded the College of Saint Paul at Goa (India) in 1542 and was canonized in 1622 together with Ignatius Loyola.

11. Carlo Capra,
Età moderna
(Florence: Le Monnier, 1996), pp. 112 ff.

12. Franciscan friars entered China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries during the Mongol Yuan dynasty (see chapter 7, “China and the Cathay of Marco Polo”).

13. From a letter written by Loyola’s secretary Alfonso Polanco in 1551, in Riccardo G. Villostrada,
Storia del Collegio Romano
(Roma: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1954), p. 111.

14. Villostrada,
Storia del Collegio Romano
, pp. 112–13.

15. Villostrada,
Storia del Collegio Romano
, pp. 14–15.

16. FR, book V, ch. XXI, p. 556, no. 1.

17. Mario Fois, “Il Collegio Romano ai tempi degli studi del P. Matteo Ricci,” in
Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi Ricciani, Macerata-Roma, 22–25 October 1982
, ed. Maria Cigliano (Macerata: Centro Studi Ricciani, 1984), p. 206.

18. M. Fois, “Il Collegio Romano ai tempi degli studi del P. Matteo Ricci,” p. 207.

19. OS II, p. 12.

20. M. Fois, “Il Collegio Romano ai tempi degli studi del P. Matteo Ricci,” cit., p. 215.

21. R. G. Villostrada, op. cit., p. 72.

22. Galileo Galilei,
The Assayer
(1623), translated by Thomas Salusbury (1661), p. 178, as quoted in
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science
(2003), by Edwin Arthur Burtt (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications), p. 75.

23. Cit. in Morris Kline,
Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 31.

24. Christophorus Clavius,
Euclidis Elementorum libri XV
, Romae apud Vincentium Accoltum, 1574. Some editions of the
Elements
, originally in thirteen books, also contained two additional books that are considered apocryphal.

25. Pasquale D’Elia, “Echi delle scoperte galileiane in Cina vivente ancora Galileo (1612–1640),” in
Rendiconti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filosofiche
(Rome, I/5–6, 1946), pp. 131–32.

26. Henry Bernard,
L’apport scientifique du père Matthieu Ricci à la Chine
(Tientsin: Hautes Études, 1935), p. 28.

27. The Arab name of the
Megále mathematikè syntaxis tes astronomías
, known also by the Latin name
Syntaxis
.

28. The system was based on the geometric devices of the eccentric, epicycle, deferent, and equant.

29. Copernicus presented the heliocentric system in
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
, which was published in 1543. The author was on his deathbed when he saw the first printed copy.

30. Jonathan Spence,
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
(New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 143.

31. The Julian calendar divided every period of four years into three of 365 days and one of 366. As a result, a discrepancy of three days accumulated between the “tropic” or solar year and the Julian year every four hundred years, and the spring equinox fell on March 11 in the sixteenth century instead of March 21. The Gregorian calendar was introduced to solve this problem in 1582 with a decree whereby Thursday October 4, 1582, was followed by Friday October 15, and the cycle of leap years (of 366 days) was modified to comprise all of those exactly divisible by four but not centurial years unless divisible by four hundred. (The year 2000 is thus a leap year, for example, while 1900 and 2100 are not.) The difference in length with respect to the true solar year was reduced to 0.0003 of a day. The Gregorian calendar was subsequently adopted by nearly all nations, including non-Catholic peoples (Great Britain in 1752, the USSR in 1918, Greece in 1932, and China in 1911). It was introduced in Goa in 1583.

32. Christophorus Clavius,
Astrolabium
(Rome, 1593).

33. Gian Carlo Roscioni,
Il desiderio delle Indie
(Turin: Einaudi, 2001), p. 100.

34. Gian Carlo Roscioni,
Il desiderio delle Indie
, pp. 100 ff.

v

From Rome to Lisbon, Coimbra, Goa, Cochin, and Macao, 1577–1582

The Chinese cultivate letters seriously and hold learning in high regard but show little interest in arms.

The Chinese are alert, enterprising, and lively in their actions.

The Chinese have the best government imaginable and adhere rigidly to established customs.

—Alessandro Valignano
1

Departure: “All Those Seas”

It was on May 18, 1577, that the group of Jesuits departing from Rome for the East received the customary blessing of Gregory XIII. Not yet twenty-five years of age, Ricci left the capital immediately after this meeting with the pope—together with his fellow student Francesco Pasio from Bologna—for Lisbon, the port of departure for eastward-bound vessels. Priests traveling to the area covered by the Portuguese
padroado
2
(the protectorate over missions in the whole of Asia apart from the Philippines, which were under Spanish dominion) were required in that period to be Portuguese by birth or to obtain permission from the Portuguese authorities in order to embark in their ships. Spain and Portugal had vied for mastery of the oceans in the previous century until a precise boundary was established between the two empires with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. The imaginary line of demarcation, known as the
raya
in Portuguese, ran 370 Spanish leagues west of the islands of Cape Verde, di
viding Brazil approximately along the 46th meridian west of Greenwich. The Portuguese and Spanish had a free hand respectively east and west of the
raya
. When the earth was later proved to be round and after Magellan’s voyage of discovery in the service of Spain to the Philippines, where he died in 1521, it became essential to draw another line of demarcation antipodal to the first. The Spanish and Portuguese met in 1529 and agreed that the new
raya
would run along the 17th degree of longitude east of the Moluccas. What lay east of this belonged to Spain, and what lay west belonged to Portugal. In practical terms, the Portuguese had the whole of Asia apart from the Philippines, and the Spanish crown all of the Americas except Brazil.
3

Even though Ricci knew that he was unlikely ever to return from the missions, he did not make the trip to Macerata to see his loved ones again, which shows just how radical his decision to detach himself from his family was. He sailed from Genoa to Cartagena and then continued overland, arriving in Lisbon at the end of June.

Since vessels bound for India set sail only in March and April in order to take advantage of the favorable winds and the monsoon season in the Indian Ocean, Ricci had a long wait and spent nearly a year in Coimbra learning Portuguese, which he soon spoke better than Italian. He also began to attend the courses in theology required for entry into the priesthood at the Jesuit College, returning to Lisbon only when the ships were ready to set sail.

Ricci and the thirteen other missionaries who were to sail with him were granted an audience with Sebastian I in the castle of Almeirim on March 20, 1578, and then were accompanied three days in a solemn procession to the quay on the banks of the Tagus. Awaiting them were three carracks, the
São Luis
, the
São Gregorio
, and the
Bom Jesus
, which they boarded on the evening of March 23. These three-masted vessels armed with cannons, broad-beamed, and riding high on the water, were still used halfway through the sixteenth century both for war and for long trading voyages before their definitive replacement with the faster and more manageable galleons. Loaded with goods for sale in the Eastern markets, each ship carried a group of Jesuits together with over a hundred sailors, soldiers, merchants, and adventurers of every type.

“Brother Ricci, student of theology,” as he was listed in the ship’s manifest, sailed on the
São Luis
, the flagship, together with the thirty-five-year-old Michele Ruggieri from the Puglia region, who had entered the novitiate a year before him after studying law in Naples. His real name, Pompilio, of Latin origin, had been replaced with a Christian name as required for priests.

The priests traveling on the other ships included Francesco Pasio; Rodolfo Acquaviva, son of the duke of Atri and nephew of Claudio Acquaviva; and the Portuguese Duarte de Sande. None of them knew their final destination, only that they were initially bound for Goa, a Portuguese outpost in India where they would stay at the Jesuit College of Saint Paul until their superiors decided on their definitive posting.

The moving scene on the quayside as the vessels set sail at dawn on March 24 was described by one of the missionaries in a letter from the East:

Fathers wept for their sons and sons for their fathers, women for the husbands they saw leaving them for such distant parts and such perilous seas, with little hope in most cases of ever seeing them again.
4

The ships were to follow a route similar to the one taken by Vasco da Gama in 1498, when he reached Calicut in India for the first time by circumnavigating Africa and then crossing the Indian Ocean. If all went well, the voyage would take six months.

Travel by sea was hard, unhealthy, and very risky in that period, when it was calculated that one ship in four would go down on average during a long voyage such as the one to be made by the missionaries. The dangers were many and varied. While attack by pirates or other maritime powers to seize possession of the rich cargoes of merchandise was very frequent, more serious perils lay in the structural fragility of the vessels and the lack of adequate instruments to plot their course.

Direction was calculated with the aid of the compass, the most important instrument on board, and latitude by using the astrolabe and quadrant to observe the height of the North Star and the constellations above the horizon and judge from their position in the sky how far the ship was from the equator. Longitude was instead calculated roughly on the basis of the estimated distance traveled from a known port. The margin of error was enormous. In the absence of reliable equipment to determine longitude,
5
a ship faced the open sea with no precise points of reference, at the mercy of the elements, and in danger of colliding with reefs. In order to arrive safely at their destination, everyone trusted to luck and, above all, the Lord’s help.

Other serious risks were run on board, where the passengers’ accommodation and sanitary conditions were at the limit of human endurance. The already confined space was crammed to the bursting point with merchandise and supplies for the voyage, including barrels of salted meat and fish, rice, hardtack, flour, dried fruit, and casks of wine. The hundreds of passengers competed for the tiny area left free. As the small amounts of fresh food and drinkable water soon went bad and the diet became less varied, travelers fell prey to illnesses. The most frequent was the dreaded scurvy, which decimated crews on long voyages until the beginning of the nineteenth century, due to the prolonged shortage of the vitamin C contained in fresh fruit and vegetables, which it was impossible to keep on board.

The four-berth cabin allotted to the Jesuits was scarcely big enough for them to lie down close to one another and try to sleep, tormented by insect bites and the heat, which became unendurable near the equator. The terrible hardships, which the missionaries were scarcely able to bear, were described as follows by one of the Jesuits who traveled with Ricci in a letter to his superiors:

Those desirous of traveling to India should not be too tied to life but ever ready to die, having great faith in Our Lord and a great desire for suffering, ready to mortify all their senses, for here one learns to know oneself by experience, not by theoretical reflection.
6

The extreme conditions did not prevent the Jesuits from practicing their faith and from ensuring its respect by the sailors as well. The missionaries offered confession and celebrated the most important religious festivities with processions on deck. They confiscated playing cards, dice, and any publications they considered obscene, and they punished blasphemy with a system of fines, on agreement that the money thus obtained would be used for the common good. Their work for the sailors also involved caring for the sick with medicinal herbs received from the Portuguese sovereign, which were boiled in cauldrons on deck.

While Ricci did not describe the voyage—which can be reconstructed on the basis of documents and the correspondence of other passengers—in his letters from the East, he did make an indirect reference to it when he was threatened with expulsion from China in 1587 and begged the Chinese to let him stay, stating that he would never be able to travel back across “all those seas” between China and his native land.
7

Once past Madeira and the Canary Islands, the carracks were threateningly accompanied for a short distance by two French ships, which then sailed away without taking hostile action as they headed for the Brazilian coast to take advantage of the favorable winds. They crossed the equator after a month of sailing and steered southeast toward the Cape of Good Hope.

When on deck, observing the sky by day and contemplating the stars by night, Ricci thought over what he had learned in the astronomy course at the Roman College. It was generally accepted that the earth was round at the end of the sixteenth century, and the Jesuit had the opportunity to see the proof—something which was self-evident to seafarers—for himself. A note in the margin of one of the maps drawn in China referred to his observation during the voyage that the north and south pole stars were the same height above the horizon.
8

Leaving the islands of Cape Verde behind them, the ships arrived in June at the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost tip of the African continent, lashed by gales and high seas. Bartolomeu Dias, the first to sail those perilous waters in 1488, called it
Cabo Tormentoso
, the Stormy Cape, a name that the king chose to change on his return to Portugal into
Cabo da Boa Esperança
, a reference to his hopes of discovering the long-sought sea route to India.

Having rounded the cape, the carracks entered the Indian Ocean and stopped for a stay of six weeks at Mozambique, where the Portuguese had a trading outpost, on the mainland facing the island of Madagascar. The sailors replenished the stores of food and water, and the merchants loaded a few hundred slaves for sale on the Eastern markets. The small fleet resumed its voyage in August, sailing around the Horn of Africa to head across the Indian Ocean for Goa. While the ship faced the last stretch of open sea, Ricci was unaware that Chinese navigators had made the same trip various times starting from the opposite direction nearly two centuries before on junks far more imposing than the Portuguese ships. By order of Yongle, the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, who reigned from 1403 to 1424, six voyages of exploration led by Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch remembered as the greatest admiral in Chinese history, arrived as far as the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the coasts of Kenya. A seventh expedition was organized to the same lands during the reign of Xuande and was completed in 1433. The sailors caught zebras, leopards, and giraffes in Africa and brought them back to the court as weird and wonderful trophies, an event recorded in the dynastic chronicles. According to historical reconstructions, the Chinese fleets of the time were of a size inconceivable for Westerners and presented technical characteristics clearly superior to those of any other country. The expeditions commanded by Zheng He were in fact made up of hundreds of vessels and carried between twenty and thirty thousand passengers, including mounted troops, interpreters, government officials, and physicians. The ships were already fitted with watertight compartments and carried all possible provisions as well as fresh water in special tanks. The junks on which the dignitaries traveled were gigantic. While the length of one hundred meters suggested by some scholars has been challenged as excessive, it can reasonably be asserted that the largest vessels reached up to sixty meters and were equipped with three decks and four or five masts.
9
Even on the most conservative estimates, they were far more impressive than any Portuguese carrack or galleon of the late sixteenth century.
10
Moreover, the Chinese ships were also equipped with a rudimentary compass consisting of a magnetic needle on a floating support in a container filled with water, an instrument whose invention is regarded by many historians as yet another instance of Chinese superiority over Europe. The first description of the magnetic needle as an aid for navigation is in fact to be found in a Chinese document of the twelfth century, and even though this period coincides more or less with the first appearance of the device on ships in the West, its use on Chinese junks appears to have begun long before. One established fact is that the Chinese had known the properties of magnetite, the material used to make the compass needle, since the earliest times, as there are records of spoon-shaped instruments on bronze supports very similar to primitive compasses used by geomancers in magical and divinatory practices long before the Christian era.

Despite their considerable advantage over the West in the nautical field, the Chinese lost their maritime supremacy immediately after the last expedition and the death of Zheng He, when the emperor decided to dismantle the fleet and put an end to the great voyages of exploration. The serious threat of the Mongols from the North, which necessitated the mobilization of ever-greater military and economic resources while the imperial coffers were increasingly impoverished, and competition from private expeditions, which had taken control of the most lucrative branches of trade, had made maritime undertakings on such a scale unfeasible. No imperial fleet had since sailed west across the seas, and a century later it was Portuguese ships that set sail for the East in search of new markets.

In India