DISCURSO DEL DOCTOR DON IUAN CEVICOS, COMISSARIO DEL S.OFFICIO. SOBRE UNA CARTA PARA SU SANTIDAD, QUE EN LENGUA LATINA SE IMPRIMIO, Y DIVULGÒ EN MADRID, POR DESTE AÑO DE 1628. FECHA EN OMURA, CIUDAD DEL IAPON A 20. DE ENERO DE [1]624. DE LA QUAL HAN HECHO
Cevicos, Juan:
Seville: Antonio Moreno, [1628]. 16 leaves ([32]pp.). Woodcut decorative initials on first three pages and illustration of the four winds blowing on a globe labeled, "Africa Europa Asia." Small folio. Dbd. Contemporary marginal annotations on first page. Occasional light foxing, else near fine. An extremely rare and interesting commentary on a letter attributed to Padre Luis Sotelo, the famous Franciscan martyr and missionary to Japan, with substantial information on early Japanese-Spanish relations by the author, Juan Cevicos. Cevicos, a merchant ship captain- turned-priest and scholar, was extraordinarily well- situated to comment on the political, economic, and religious cross-currents in Spain's first significant contact with Japan in the early 1600s. According to his autobiographical account at the beginning of the present work, Cevicos, a native of Cantalapiedra, Spain, arrived in New Spain in 1604. In 1608 he sailed for the Philippines as captain of the San Francisco, a Spanish galleon that traveled the annual Pacific route between Mexico City and Manila. On her return trip to Mexico in 1609, the San Francisco was shipwrecked off the eastern coast of Japan with a crew of 373 and the recent interim governor of the Philippines, Don Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco, on board. Before this time, the only Europeans to have established strong official ties with Japan were predominantly Portuguese Jesuits who first settled in Nagasaki in the mid-1500s. From this base in southwestern Japan, the Jesuits began operating a successful silk trade with the Portuguese in Macao, and by the 1570s had effectively become the sole brokers of trade between Japan, China, and Portugal. In the meantime, Spanish friars minor from Manila, critical of the Jesuits' worldly dealings and almost exclusive focus on the Japanese ruling class, covertly began filtering into Japan as their leadership plied Rome for permission to establish an official presence. In 1608, Pope Paul V authorized the mendicant orders to proselytize in the country, and the Franciscan Luis Sotelo immediately set to work on building a mission in Edo. When the San Francisco was wrecked near Iwada, Sotelo met and assisted Vivero during the his nine-month stay, a sojourn that would have major ramifications for Spanish political and trade relations with Japan. During his recent tenure as governor in the Philippines, Vivero had established contact with the powerful shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, through the English navigator and advisor to Ieyasu, William Adams. With Sotelo serving as interpreter, Ieyasu and Vivero continued their discussion of establishing direct trade between Japan and Spain, and when Vivero left in 1610, on a ship built by William Adams, he took with him an delegation of twenty-two Japanese to meet with the viceroy of New Spain. This embassy represented the first recorded Japanese voyage to reach North America. Cevicos, in the meantime, traveled throughout Japan, visiting all the principal cities from Nagasaki to Edo, meeting Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits along the way and learning about the new Dutch threat to the Catholic presence in the country. With their first carracks having recently arrived in Nagasaki, the Dutch had just built a trading factory in the area and torched a Portuguese galleon in the port. With these inroads by the Dutch, the Japanese had become increasingly suspicious of the Catholic monks as an advance force for Iberian conquest of the country, and Cevicos notes that the recent Dutch activities at Nagasaki led to increasing persecution of the religious orders by the Japanese authorities. In March 1610, Cevicos left for Manila, only to be captured by the Dutch off the coast during their siege of the city. He was released after Philippine Governor Juan de Silva engineered the attack and defeat of the Dutch in the harbor in April. Cevicos began studying intently in Manila and was eventually ordained a priest. He returned to Spain in 1623, where he continued his scholarship and began serving as an advisor to the Spanish Court on issues relating to East Asia. In 1627 he published an important recommendation that Spain not attempt to build a rival fort to the Dutch in Formosa, but rather devote itself simply to eradicating the Dutch presence on the island. Padre Sotelo was imprisoned and nearly executed by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1613, before being freed through the intervention of the fearsome, pro-Christian samurai, Date Masamune. Masamune and Sotelo subsequently conspired together to build a relationship between Masumane's realm and Rome and Spain, intended to help Masumane develop various technologies and establish a trade link with Mexico and, as murmurs had it, help Sotelo gain a bishop's chair in northern Japan. Masamune funded the ambitious 1613-18 Japanese embassy to Mexico, Spain, and Rome, which numbered 180 persons and was accompanied by Sotelo. Sotelo carried with him a letter in Latin from Masamune addressed to the Pope, often noted for its request for the Vatican to send him "as many padres as possible;" it has generally been assumed that Sotelo played a major role in the authorship of the letter. While extremely significant as the first known Japanese world voyage, the embassy ultimately failed to establish the ties it sought, in no small part because of news reaching Spain in 1616 of major renewed persecution of Catholics in Japan. After Christianity had been completely outlawed throughout the country (a policy to which Masamune reluctantly submitted), Sotelo sneaked back into Japan in 1622, was soon caught, and was executed by fire in 1624. He was immediately celebrated as a martyr and beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1867. The present work by Cevicos prints a Spanish translation of Masamune's letter and comments extensively on a controversy regarding a letter purported to have been written by Sotelo in prison shortly before his death, recently printed for Cevicos in Madrid. Only two copies of Cevicos' commentary have been located: one in the Max Besson Library of Japonica collection at the University of Tsukuba, and one recorded by EUROPEAN AMERICANA at the University of Grenada. Both Palau and EUROPEAN AMERICANA call for nineteen numbered leaves; however, this would seem to be an error, as this copy, with sixteen numbered leaves, begins with the "A" signature and ends at the conclusion of Cevicos' commentary with his printed signature and an ornamental cut clearly intended to conclude the text; nor would one expect an odd number of leaves in a folio collation. An extremely rare and fascinating volume, capturing the great breadth and complexity of Spain's tenuous relationship with Japan in the early 17th century. EUROPEAN AMERICANA 628/29. PALAU 54308. Lach, ASIA IN THE MAKING OF EUROPE III.
(Item ID: WRCAM39194) $37,500.00