A refuge on a cape
In the early 1570s the end of Bay was not yet a city. The diocese of Nagasaki describes the place Father asked of as a long, narrow cape covered with pine and scrub, running out into quiet water. Torres wanted it for a particular purpose: land he could share out among Christians who had been driven from their homes elsewhere.That is the thread of this page. Nagasaki began as a refuge, and the question of 1580 was whether the Society of Jesus should itself become the lord of that refuge.
Before the town
There was already a Nagasaki before the port. Nagasaki-mura was the small castle town of Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage, a vassal of Sumitada and already a Christian. baptised about two hundred of its leading men in late 1567, and in 1568 came to preach.Jinzaemon gave Vilela a Buddhist temple. Vilela lived in it quietly until there were Christians to fill it, and in 1569 he pulled it down and built from its timbers a plain new church in honour of All Saints, Todos os Santos, the first church of Nagasaki.He wrote that at his first sermon the people listened with very bad grace, but at the second they began to change.
The harbour came next. In 1570 the new mission superior Francisco Cabral held a meeting at Shiki in Amakusa where the question of a new town and port at Nagasaki was settled, and Father Melchior de Figueiredo came in from Fukuda with the Portuguese captain Manoel Travassos to choose the spot.Hesselink's timeline counts this as the first Portuguese ship in the bay;the first to anchor at Nagasaki, under the Captain-Major Tristão Vaz da Veiga, came in 1571.In the spring of 1571 Sumitada's senior retainer, Tomonaga Tsushima no kami, laid out the first six streets on the cape, and at its tip Figueiredo built a small church dedicated to the Virgin Mary.The diocese notes that the tip of that cape is where the Nagasaki Prefectural Office later stood.
The town was not left in peace. Men from Fukabori and Isahaya attacked it in 1573 and 1574, and it survived by fortifying itself.Yet people kept coming. In 1579 Father Carrión described a settlement of more than four hundred houses, built by Christians of many kinds who had been driven out of their own places by their lords rather than give up the faith.
The year the ship went elsewhere
On 25 July 1579 the great ship of Captain Major Leonel de Brito anchored not at Nagasaki but at Kuchinotsu, in the domain of Sumitada's young nephew Arima Shigezumi, later called Harunobu. On board was the Visitor of the Jesuit missions in the East, .The Ōmura City History thinks the ship went to Kuchinotsu because Valignano wished it, since he hoped the young lord of Arima was close to baptism; Shigezumi was in fact baptised by Valignano in Arima early in March 1580.
For Sumitada this was a warning. The Ōmura City History judges that his greatest fear was that the Portuguese would make Kuchinotsu their regular port, and Nagasaki would lose the ships.That autumn he met Valignano, and he made an extraordinary offer: he would give Nagasaki, and the small harbour of Mogi on the far side of the peninsula, to the Society of Jesus.
The deed
The deed survives in the Roman archives of the Society, and the Ōmura City History prints it in Japanese translation.It is dated Tenshō 8, fourth month, twenty seventh day, which the History gives as 9 June 1580.In English it runs, in part, like this:
"This is the content of the gift that Dom Bartolomeu, lord of Ōmura, made of the two places Mogi and Nagasaki. Dom Bartolomeu, lord of Ōmura, and his son Sancho, considering how much they owe to the fathers of the Company, give to the said Company and to its Father Visitor, for ever and without charge, the town of Nagasaki with all the fields within its bounds... The fathers may place as captain of that land whomever they wish, and I give whoever they choose the power to judge as good government requires, and to punish and put to death those who break the law of that place."
Sumitada kept the customs on goods and the entry tax on ships for himself, but gave the Jesuits the anchorage fees the Portuguese paid, and promised that his own tax collectors would take no part in governing the town. Mogi was given "with all the fields that belong to it", and father and son signed so that the gift would never be changed.
Why did he do it? The sources give several answers. Valignano, writing to the General in Rome on 15 August 1580, gave three reasons he understood Sumitada to have. Ryūzōji Takanobu of Saga might demand Nagasaki and take it by force, and with it about three thousand ducats a year in trade income. If the town belonged to the Jesuits the Portuguese ship would surely keep coming, and Ōmura would keep the profit of the trade. And whatever happened, Sumitada would always have Nagasaki as a place of refuge.The Jesuit annual letter of 1580 also names fear of Ryūzōji, and adds Sumitada's wish to repay the fathers for their kindness.The Jesuit historian Hubert Cieslik grants that Sumitada also sought political and economic advantage.The deed itself names one more reason: father and son gave the town "considering how much they owe to the fathers of the Company".
Should a religious order own a town?
The Jesuits did not leap at it. Their Constitutions did not allow the Society to own land of this kind, and Valignano handled the matter with care.Cieslik explains why he weighed it seriously all the same. The support promised by the Portuguese crown came irregularly and sometimes not at all, the mission's share of the silk trade was always at risk, and the demands kept growing as churches and colleges were built; at times the mission had as many as nine hundred people on its books. Valignano welcomed Nagasaki and Mogi as a way to support the Church in Japan from Japan itself.The consultation, as Hesselink summarises it, raised three objections: the Order could not hold real estate, it could not itself administer criminal justice, and accepting would seem to confirm the rumour that the Jesuits wanted political power.
Valignano put the question to the first general consultation of the Japan mission as item fourteen of twenty one: "whether it is good to hold the lands of Nagasaki and Mogi". It was discussed at Usuki in Bungo in October 1580, then at Azuchi in July 1581, and finally at Nagasaki, with Valignano giving his ruling in 1582.The twenty six fathers who took part agreed to accept. Their reasons, as the Ōmura City History lists them, were practical and sober. The Shimo region was never free of war and was ruled by lords who were not Christian, so the mission needed one safe and strong place. Nagasaki would be a refuge for Christians driven from their lands by persecution and war. The ship would help support the mission houses in Ōmura and pay for the gifts the lords expected. It would bring what the mission needed. And the Society would always be free to give the place up.Valignano approved, on the condition that the mission superior keep that freedom to let it go, and the matter was referred to Rome, where the General and then Pope gave their approval.
One sentence from the Bungo meeting shows how quickly things had changed. Hesselink translates it: "every time we think it would be better not to own these places, we have already come to understand, in this first year that we are holding it, how much our reputation has changed among the non Christian gentlemen who live around this port of Nagasaki and who are now coming to visit us with presents".
A town under the fathers
How was it governed? Valignano, himself a doctor of law, separated criminal from civil cases. Portuguese offenders were under the Captain Major. Japanese residents came before judges named by the Jesuits but holding their power from Sumitada, who stayed the overlord.In his instructions of 24 June 1580 Valignano ordered that Nagasaki and Mogi be fortified and armed, and that married Portuguese be encouraged to settle there; of the seven hundred ducats a year paid for anchorage, one hundred and fifty were to go to the walls.
The church life of the town grew with it. When Valignano came in 1580 Nagasaki had about four hundred houses and two churches, Todos os Santos and the church of the Assumption of Our Lady.In 1583 a layman named Justino and his wife founded the of the Misericórdia, with its own church in Kōzen machi; the diocese gives his surname as Casaria.Two chapels drew pilgrims: Santa Maria at the foot of Mount Tateyama, a resting place for townspeople, and Santa Clara beside the River, loved by sailors.In 1584 gave the Urakami district to the Society, and the diocese dates the Christian life of the Urakami villages from that gift.The church on the cape was enlarged in 1581, and in 1585 work began on a larger one still.
Taken back
It lasted seven years. In July 1587, after his conquest of Kyushu, banned Christianity and ended the Jesuits' authority over Nagasaki. His men pulled down the town's bastions and filled in its moat.The great new church on the cape was only half built.It stayed closed until 1590, when it was at last finished, and two years later Hideyoshi had it torn down; a year after that it was allowed to rise again.
Sumitada did not see it. He died in the fifth month of 1587, about a month before the edict.Early in 1588 his son Ōmura Yoshiaki and Arima Harunobu asked Hideyoshi to return Nagasaki, Mogi and Urakami to their old lords, since the Jesuits had been ordered away. Hesselink doubts that Hideyoshi ever agreed, and in 1588 Nagasaki became part of Hideyoshi's own domain.Mogi too was taken from the church; it passed to the Shimabara domain and then to direct shogunal rule.Under the Tokugawa, Ōmura City notes, Nagasaki stayed a directly ruled city and was lost to Ōmura for good.
The Jesuit lordship of Nagasaki was short, and it is still argued over. But the reason given for asking for the cape in the first place outlived it. The narrow strip of pines that Torres wanted for Christians with nowhere else to go became, for a generation, the place they went. And Urakami, given in 1584, is the village whose story this collection takes up again in 1865.