A Samurai in Seville - by Lesley Downer

Hasekura in Rome. Portrait by Claude 
Deruet (1588-1660), with his galleon, 
the Date Maru, behind.

On October 28 1613 a samurai called Hasekura Tsunenaga set off on an epic voyage to an unexplored and little known part of the world - the land of the Southern Barbarians. He crossed the Pacific and travelled by way of Acapulco on a succession of magnificent galleons with gilded prows and billowing sails, and arrived in Spain on October 5th 1614. There he met King Phillip III, was baptised, and eight months later went on to Rome where he had an audience with Pope Paul V. All in all he was away for seven years.

The conquistadors and Japan

This was the era of the conquistadors, little more than a century after Columbus. The Spanish now ruled much of Central and South America, had colonised the Philippines and were eying up Japan.

But the Portuguese got there first. In 1543 they were already selling matchlock rifles to the warring Japanese clan lords. Shortly afterwards, in 1549, Francis Xavier and his Jesuit missionaries arrived and started converting sections of southern Japan. The Japanese realised that the Jesuits were the thin end of the wedge and that invading armies might follow, but they felt able to hold their own.

Portuguese with big hats enjoying very early female kabuki dancing
in Japan around 1603

In those days Spanish galleons plied the Pacific carrying Mexican silver to Manila where they loaded up with spices and goods from Asia to take back to Acapulco. In 1609 one of these galleons, the San Francisco, was wrecked on the coast of Japan near the booming city of Edo, present day Tokyo. The captain survived and went on to meet the retired shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and set up a trade treaty. The Englishman William Adams, model for James Clavell’s Shogun, had arrived 9 years earlier and become Ieyasu’s right hand man and the British East India Company had set up a factory (trading station) near Nagasaki.

Hasekura with his samurai sword as
depicted by Scipione Amati,
a German artist, in 1615

The One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu

Japan had recently come to the end of half a century of warfare and was now unified under the rule of Ieyasu but up north the formidable warlord Daté Masamune - the ‘One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu’ - had different ideas. He was interested in the Southern Barbarians and their Christianity and could see a way of using them to increase his own influence and perhaps escape from under the thumb of Ieyasu. So he decided to send a mission to the west. With Ieyasu’s approval he commissioned a splendid galleon, called the Daté Maru in Japanese and the San Juan Bautista in Spanish.

Hasekura’s adventure

Hasekura Tsunenaga was a samurai with a somewhat chequered background, but Daté decided he was the man for the job. He headed a delegation of thirty samurai plus 120 Japanese merchants, sailors and servants together with 40 Spanish and Portuguese. His brief was to negotiate trade treaties. This was Japan’s first official venture to Europe and he was the ambassador.

After three months at sea the galleon arrived at California then followed the coast to Acapulco where they stayed for two months. They were received with great splendour in Mexico City, then boarded another galleon, the San Jose, to cross the Atlantic and reached the port of Sanlùcar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the river Guadalquivir, in Spain, on October 5th 1614.

Seville in the 16th century with the river full of galleons and the cathedral
rising behind: Vista de Sevilla attrib. Alonso Sanchez Coello, d 1588

And so they arrived in Seville, the jewel in Spain’s crown. "The Japanese ambassador Hasekura Rokuemon, sent by Joate [Daté] Masamune, king of Boju [Oshu], entered Seville on Wednesday 23rd October 1614," reports a contemporary Spanish text. "He was accompanied by 30 Japanese with blades, their captain of the guard, and 12 bowmen and halberdiers with painted lances and blades of ceremony."

Seville, Seville

The Alcazar gardens with cathedral behind

Seville was the greatest and most glamorous city in Spain. It was the European port of departure for the Americas and had a monopoly on all Spanish trade with the new-found continent. Day and night galleons laden with American gold and silver and treasures from the Indies plied their way up the Guadalquivir, unloading their bullion at the Royal Docks. Seville was the hub of world trade, a cosmopolitan melting pot of money seekers, where merchants from across Europe flocked to acquire goods from the New World. Much of the bullion was spent on Seville’s glorious architecture and there was a huge flowering of the arts. Velazquez was starting his career, Cervantes was working on the second part of Don Quixote.

Gentleman in padded breeches -
Seville Cathedral

Hasekura must have enjoyed this magnificent city of golden stone, so different from the wooden and bamboo cities he knew with their towering white-plastered castles. He no doubt visited the cathedral, completed a hundred years earlier, and marvelled at the ornate carving of the spire. Such a high-ranking envoy was probably invited to the Real Alcázar, Philip III’s residence in Seville, and must have admired the gold ceiling and intricate stone fretwork of the Salón de Embajadores and the lavish gardens, so different from the gardens of Japan. He also must have enjoyed the orange trees, which perhaps reminded him of the orange groves of Shikoku, and the streets crowded with fashionable ladies in ruffs and enormous bell-shaped skirts and gentlemen in doublets, padded breeches and hose.

Homecoming

Hasekura went on to Madrid where he met King Philip III on 30 January 1615 and delivered a letter from Daté Masamune proposing a trade treaty. He was baptised on Feb 17 1615 by the king’s personal chaplain.

In all he and his colleagues spent eight months in Spain, being treated with all the honour due to visiting dignitaries.

Hasekura meets the Pope in Rome, 17th century Japanese painting

Then they sailed on. They were forced by the weather to make a three day stop in Saint Tropez, where they caused quite a sensation. From there they went on to Italy where Hasekura had an audience with Pope Paul V, just as Galileo was formulating his theory that the earth circled the sun, not the sun the earth.

In April 1616 they were back in Spain and in June 1616 left Seville for New Spain (Mexico) on the first leg of their journey home. Six samurai stayed behind and in the little town of Coria del Río, just outside Seville, seven hundred of the 25,000 inhabitants now bear the surname Japón, marking them as descendants of the expedition.

Seville orange tree

But when Hasekura and his colleagues got back to Japan after seven years away, like Urashima Taro, the Japanese Rip van Winkle, they discovered everything had changed. The retired shogun Ieyasu had died and his son, the shogun, had decided to eradicate Christianity and persecute Christians. The treaties Hasekura had worked so hard to negotiate were useless.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale of nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Old pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. New pics author's holiday snaps.

The Plight of the Moriscos in 17th Century Spain

by Deborah Swift

Seventeenth Century Persecution in Spain

The Spanish Inquisition is associated with the persecution of the Jews but it is not common knowledge that Muslims were also tried and tortured by this institution. When researching A Divided Inheritance I took a trip to Seville and visited the remains of the San Jorge Castle, the place of imprisonment for victims of the regime. There I saw chilling evidence of this persecution, which the Inquisition applied not only to rival faiths to Catholicism but also to mystics of their own faith.

What made this climate interesting for my novel was that in seventeenth century England Catholicism was repressed, whereas in Spain Catholics were the ruling majority. To understand the climate of oppression for religious minorities in Spain in 1609, one must look back a few centuries to 1248, when Seville, formerly a Moorish city, fell to Christian armies.

Moorish tiles from the Alhambra

.

Symbols of Lost Culture
During the following centuries after moorish Spain was conquered, Christians were determined to expand their dominion over Spain, and in 1492 Muslim Granada fell - a momentous day for Christian Europe, a day of rejoicing, but for Muslims it became a day of eternal sorrow. Precious buildings were sacked and destroyed, atrefacts such as ceramics with islamnic designs smashed. 

Just as the day is marked by celebrations in Spain, in Morocco black flags are hung out to indicate loss and mourning. Some descendants of those expelled still retain the original 15th century keys of their Andalusian homes as a symbol of their lost culture.

After the conquest of Granada by Christians, the Jewish population was driven out, whilst tolerance was promised to its Moorish citizens. So by the seventeenth century the Moors had become indelibly Spanish. Some were genuine Christian converts, and many, like Sancho Panza’s neighbour Ricote (in Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote), and Luisa in my novel 'A Divided Inheritance', thought of themselves as ‘más cristiano que moro’ (More Christian than Moor).

The Burning of Books
A short period of relatively peaceful co-existence between the Muslims and Christians was shattered when the Archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, was replaced by the fanatic Cardinal Cisneros, and Muslim religious leaders were persuaded to hand over more than 5,000 priceless books with ornamental bindings, which were then consigned to bonfires. Only a few books on medicine were spared the flames. Unsurprisingly, this event led to an armed response from Muslims in the First Rebellion of the Alpujarras in 1499. By 1502 the monarchy had rescinded the treaty of tolerance and Muslims in Andalusia were forced to convert or leave. Those who converted were called Moriscos, which means “little Moors”. 

The Expulsion of the Moors from Denia - Painting by Viincente Mostre

A Secret Religion

Many Moriscos professed their allegiance to Christianity while practicing Islam in secret. Every aspect of the Islamic way of life, including the Arabic language, dress and social customs – was condemned as uncivilised and pagan. A person who refused to drink wine or eat pork, or who cooked meat on a Friday might be denounced as a Muslim to the Inquisition. Even practices such as buying couscous, using henna, throwing sweets at a wedding or dancing to the sound of Berber music were un-Christian activities for which a person might be reported to the Inquisition by his neighbour, and obliged to do penance.

Rebellion
Further repression of the Moriscos resulted in a second Rebellion. Fearing the rebels were conspiring with the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, the uprising was brutally suppressed by Don John of Austria. In a spate of atrocities the town of Galera, to the east of Granada, was razed to the ground and sprinkled with salt, after the slaughter of 2,500 people including 400 women and children. Some 80,000 Moriscos in Granada were forcibly dispersed to other parts of Spain, including Seville. Christians from northern Spain were settled on their empty lands. Ayamena and Nicoloao in my story were displaced from Granada before settling in Seville.

As early as the 16th century The Council of State proposed expulsion as a solution to the on-going Morisco 'problem', for which the previous expulsion of the Jews provided a legal precedent. However, the action was delayed because of Spain’s pressing political concerns abroad and because of the drawbacks of losing so many skilled Muslim labourers from the Spanish working population. Muslim labourers and artisans were responsible for much of the beautiful spanish architecture we admire so much today.

Final Expulsion of 400,000 people

Juan de Ribera, the ageing Archbishop of Valencia, who had initially been a firm believer in missionary work, and the conversion of the Moorish population to Christianity, became in his declining years the chief partisan of expulsion. In a sermon preached on September 27th, 1609, he said that Spanish land would never become fertile again until these heretics (the Moriscos) were expelled. The Duke of Lerma, the corrupt chief minister agreed with him. The new king, Felipe III, known as Phillip the Pious for his supposed religious zeal, finally acquiesced to political pressure and in the expulsions began. 

The embarkation order was read out in Seville on January 10th 1610. The entire Muslim population, along with anyone who had converted from Islam to Christianity, was ordered to leave Spain on threat of death. By 1613 it is estimated 400,000 people had been forcibly removed in this mass expulsion from Spanish territory.

This little-known part of seventeenth century forms one of the threads of the narrative in my novel,' A Divided Inheritance'. Read more in this excellent article by Roger Boase in History Today

Light as a Feather - The Art of Levitation by Deborah Swift

'This is the art of Levitation...

levitation...

levitation...'

Do these words seem familiar? This is the beginning of the chant for the old parlour game I played when I was a child. Some of you may know it as 'Light as a feather, stiff as a board'. I first came across this at my primary school cloakroom when I was about eight years old. Amid the stink of old gym shoes and wet gabardine coats, a group of girls would gather around another girl, lying with arms crossed on the floor (the supposed corpse), chant a few words and then try to raise her off the ground by only one finger.

The leader would chant; 'She looks pale', to which we would all reply in ghostly tones, 'She is pale!' Leader: 'She looks dead.'
Us: 'She is dead!'

After this somewhat morbid chant we would count backwards from three to one and...oh cripes! The person would actually lift off the ground. Half-terrified, half-amazed, we would scream in horror and the person would fall in a tangled heap back to the ground. Where on earth did this 'game' come from? Do children still do it today? Thinking back on this now, it seems a completely creepy and bizarre activity.

Samuel Pepys

Or it did, until I was reading Pepys's Diary last week.  As part of my research for my next book, I was astonished to come across a report of precisely this activity. Three hundred and fifty years ago schoolgirls were apparently doing exactly this. Now whether the activity came from Pepys's Diary and subsequent girls copied that, or whether it was already existent, piqued my interest. Here is Pepys's version, told to him by a friend on 31st July 1665:

"This evening with Mr. Brisband, speaking of enchantments and spells; I telling him some of my charms; he told me this of his owne knowledge, at Bourdeaux, in France. 
The words these:

Voyci un Corps mort,
Royde come un Baston, 

Froid comme Marbre, 

Leger come un esprit, 

Levons to au nom de Jesus Christ.

He saw four little girles, very young ones, all kneeling, each of them, upon one knee; and one begun the first line, whispering in the eare of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first. Then the first begun the second line, and so round quite through, and, putting each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground, as if he was dead; at the end of the words, they did with their four fingers raise this boy as high as they could reach, and he [Mr. Brisband] being there, and wondering at it, as also being afeard to see it, for they would have had him to have bore a part in saying the words, in the roome of one of the little girles that was so young that they could hardly make her learn to repeat the words, did, for feare there might be some sleight used in it by the boy, or that the boy might be light, call the cook of the house, a very lusty fellow, as Sir G. Carteret’s cook, who is very big, and they did raise him in just the same manner. This is one of the strangest things I ever heard, but he tells it me of his owne knowledge, and I do heartily believe it to be true. I enquired of him whether they were Protestant or Catholique girles; and he told me they were Protestant, which made it the more strange to me."

St Joseph of Cupertino

I have found no earlier reference to schoolgirls attempting to levitate, but perhaps the idea came from St. Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663) who was an Italian saint who flew high in the air or hovered just above the ground whilst in mystical ecstasy. His life being just before Pepys's time, perhaps these girls could have heard of him, and the craze started then.

Of course St Joseph of Cupertino was nothing new; in the first century a man named Simon Magnus levitated in full view of St. Peter in a challenge to prove he was endowed with supernatural powers. But Cupertino would have been much talked of in Pepys's period, as his 'floatings' were apparently witnessed by hundreds of people, many of whom testified, as part of his canonization process, to seeing the phenomenon. There are written records in the Vatican from many eminent churchmen, along with ordinary people, giving copious details about Cupertino’s levitations. 

Of course in England there was suspicion at that time of anything Catholic. This would explain Pepys's comment "I enquired of [Mr. Brisband] whether they were Protestant or Catholique girles; and he told me they were Protestant, which made it the more strange to me."

I find it surprising that young girls should do it at all, in an age where to float would be tantamount to witchcraft. In fact one of the tests of witchcraft was whether the woman would float in water, and whether she was light enough to fly. 'Weighing' witches was common in this era. 

The floating, light and ethereal body is an idea found in most religions, and the wish to levitate akin to a desire to rise above the physical, whilst still inhabiting an earthly body. The idea of levitation was particularly prominent in the Victorian era when it became conflated with Spiritualism and psychic phenomena such as poltergeists. In the Victorian era is nearly always a woman floating, mysteriously under the control of a man, so it is rather nice that this weird ritual has been (as far as I can tell)  mostly the province of girls.

In our popular imagination, to be able to fly and defy gravity is the stuff of dreams. Of course as an eight year old girl, I knew none of this. The unexplained is always thrilling whether you live now or in 1665, and children's games are often much older (and darker) than we suspect. Do any of you remember other versions of this 'game?'