What the book is
Il Giappone is Daniello Bartoli's history of the Jesuit mission in Japan, printed at Rome in 1660 by Ignatio de' Lazzeri as a folio of 839 and 508 pages.Its title presented it as the second part of the Asia, within a larger history of the Society of Jesus.The author was an Italian Jesuit, and he wrote the work in Italian.His life of St Ignatius, printed at Rome in 1650, was the first part of that monumental history, and the Asia followed at Rome in 1653.In books 3 and 8 of the first part of the Asia, he had already told the Japan story up to the deaths of St Francis Xavier's two companions, Torres and Fernández.Il Giappone carried the narrative on without a break to 1640, the centenary year of the Society.
Before printing, the work was reviewed by Jesuit theologians, and the Jesuit General Goswin Nickel licensed it at Rome on June 21, 1659.The book opened with the standard protest required by the decrees of Pope Urban VIII of 1625, 1631 and 1634.In it the author declared that the miracles, martyrdoms and holiness he reported rested on human authority only, not on the judgement of the Church, except for those the Holy See had already canonized or beatified.
Five books for five rulers
Bartoli arranged his history by the rulers of Japan, giving each one a book of his own.The author spoke of "the five emperors, Nobunanga, Taicosama, Daifusama, and the one and the other Xongun, each of whom has his own Book in this Work" (translated).These were Oda Nobunaga (織田信長), Hideyoshi (秀吉), Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康), and the two shoguns Tokugawa Hidetada (徳川秀忠) and Tokugawa Iemitsu (徳川家光), so that the rise and ruin of the faith followed their succession.
Book One, L'Imperio di Nobunanga, opens in 1571, where the last book of the first part of the Asia had stopped, and only recalls Xavier's mission without telling it again.Its 100 chapters run from about 1570 to 1591 and cover the conversions in Ōmura (大村), Arima (有馬) and Bungo (豊後), the first visitation of Alessandro Valignano, Nobunaga, and the Tensho embassy and its return.The last 29 chapters form one continuous story of that embassy and of the Jesuit's 1591 embassy to Hideyoshi, ending with the four envoys entering the Society.
Book Two, L'Imperio di Taicosama, covers the whole course of Taicosama's rule.Its last dated event is the death of Fr Alfonso Gonzalez on February 23, 1601.Book Three, L'Imperio di Daifusama, follows Ieyasu and ends with his death and deification, the last year covered being 1616.Book Four, L'Imperio di Xongunsama, picks up from that death and follows the reign of Hidetada to 1630, closing with the shogun's death, which it places in 1631.Book Five, L'Imperio di Toxongun, covers the reign of Iemitsu.Its chapters include Ferreira's apostasy, a long account of Marcello Mastrilli, the killing of thirty-seven thousand Christians of Arima, and the ten Jesuits who entered Japan after the embassy from Macao.
How Bartoli built the history
The historian worked from letters, reports and legal records that had reached Europe from Japan.For the friars and the embassies from the Philippines up to 1598, he said he used authentic processes, printed and in manuscript, made before church and civil courts, rather than Jesuit reports.Manila, he noted, was one of the three places where the processes for those who died for the faith in Japan were drawn up.
For Carlo Spinola he followed the account of Fr Benedetto Fernandes, checked and confirmed by the Provincial Francisco Pacheco, together with Spinola's original letters.He also printed the prisoner's own story of his examination and his transfer from Nagasaki (長崎) to the prison of Suzuta in Ōmura.The historian valued the martyr's prison letters above all, since his body had been burned twice and scattered to wind and sea: "And these letters of his are the most precious part of him that has remained to us" (translated).
For the far north, Bartoli had Girolamo de Angelis's description and map of Ezo (蝦夷).For Oshu (奥州) he followed the agreeing accounts of men who had lived there a long time, some of them martyrs, and of leading local people.For Ōmura and Nagasaki in 1627 he had only an abstract made by Fr João Rodrigues from fuller narratives sent to Macao, which he reproduced.
The author was open about gaps in his sources: the letters from Japan between October 1599 and October 1600 were lost, so few details of the conversions of that time survived.For the martyrs under Hidetada his record was selective, partly because no one was any longer gathering everywhere the words and deeds of those who died, as before.He sometimes shortened long documents, as with a letter of Pietro Paolo Navarro, and elsewhere gave them in full, as with the Jesuits' sworn reply to accusations, which he translated from Portuguese into Italian.
A Jesuit's point of view
Il Giappone was a Jesuit history that defended the work of the Society.One chapter set out the accusations made against the Jesuits in Japan and their answers.Bartoli also rebutted an unnamed writer who claimed that Ieyasu had persecuted the Jesuits for urging Agostino to war, so that the empire would fall to Agostino and the Society.
The historian admired the Japanese as sharp, reasonable, brave, eager for glory and courteous even among peasants and craftsmen, and thought them very fit to become an excellent Christian people.He held that the patient constancy of Fathers Vilela, Frois and Organtino, not a rash zeal that provoked bonzes and princes, was the true apostolic way.On the fall of Nobunaga he warned that Japan was not a country to be won by "running through the streets with the Crucifix in one hand, and the water for baptizing in the other" (translated).He went so far as to claim that, had the work begun by Xavier been allowed to finish, no pagan would be left in Japan, where in his own day it was uncertain whether a single Christian remained.
Later editions
In the 19th century Il Giappone was reprinted at Turin by Giacinto Marietti in 1825, in five books forming volumes 10 to 14 of Bartoli's complete works, and at Florence in 1830 in five volumes.The publisher sold the series by subscription from his shop in the Via di Po, in octavo and also in quarto on fine paper.The Turin volume of Book Two opened with a long letter from Angelo Pezzana, librarian at Parma, to Giuseppe Grassi, in praise of the Jesuit as a writer.The librarian noted that the Marietti reprint carried on after Del-Majno of Piacenza had broken off his own edition of Bartoli's histories.Copies of the 1660 Rome edition are held in Japan at Tokyo University, the Toyo Bunko, Tenri and Keio, among other places.
The Asia, the first part of the wider work, was reprinted and translated within a few years.It was printed again at Genoa in 1656, and its first part reached a third edition at Rome in 1667.Fr Louis Janin translated it into Latin at Lyon in 1666 and 1667, with a third part following there in 1670.
How later writers used and judged it
Later historians leaned heavily on Il Giappone, while some critics doubted its fairness.In the preface to his own history, Charlevoix named Bartoli as the author he had drawn on most.He praised the Italian's exactness, but said his source had written less a history of Japan than a history of his own Society.Charlevoix felt that Bartoli, writing for a church audience, had dwelt at length on quarrels among the missionaries and attacks on the Jesuits, and he chose to treat these briefly.Even so, when he gave a frank account of Gago's failing, he defended himself by citing his Italian source and St Jerome.
In 1862 Fr Boero's book on the three Jesuit martyrs of 1597 took its whole account of their death from Bartoli, word for word.He praised the narrative's elegance and said its author had drawn on the processes made by order of the Sacred Congregation of Rites and of the royal court of Spain, and on letters from eyewitnesses that the Jesuits still kept.Satow cited the 1660 history on the many books from the Jesuit presses, in European and Japanese letters, at Macao and Nagasaki.
In Italy, opinion was divided.Corniani said of Bartoli's histories "that these are nothing but panegyrics under the name of history" (translated), and Giuseppe Maffei listed him among the grammarians.Salfi likewise placed the Jesuit only among grammarians, while Tiraboschi and, in Pezzana's day, Pietro Giordani, Perticari, V. Monti, A. Cesari and Colombo restored his histories to honour.Reville later judged his life of Xavier a little given to exaggeration, though it thrills readers with its epic ring.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- The date of the Turin reprint is unclear. the title page of Book One is dated 1825, but its price slip says it was published on November 8, 1828.
- The Pezzana letter at the front of Book Two is dated January 30, 1829, although that volume's title page says 1825, so the volume may be a later issue.
- Pezzana praised the Marietti text as more correct than the original editions, yet the volumes end with lists of errata found in both the octavo and quarto printings.
- Laures records the 1660 Rome edition as 839 and 508 pages, while Cordier lists only the first part on Japan, of 839 pages.
- Writers disagreed about Bartoli's fairness. Charlevoix praised his exactness but thought he wrote the history of his Society more than of Japan, Corniani and Maffei called his histories panegyrics, and Boero praised the narrative and its sources.
- The scanned copies of the Turin edition behind these facts are missing many printed pages, so some passages, such as parts of the Spinola and Navarrete chapters, could not be checked.