From Seville to Manila
Luis Sotelo (ルイス・ソテロ) was born in Seville in 1574, into a noble family of that city.His family was among the foremost of the city in rank and power, and his brother Diego de Cabrera was later among the commissioners Seville sent to welcome the Japanese ambassadors at Coria.After studies at Salamanca, the young man took the habit of the strict Franciscan observance on May 11, 1594, at the convent of the Calvary in that city.He left Spain for the Philippines and Japan without telling his family, so that they could not stop him.In New Spain his relatives' letters asked the viceroy to keep him there, and for a time he taught theology.The viceroy, the Count of Monterrey, at last let him travel on, and he reached the Philippines about 1600.
In the islands the friar learned Japanese and became minister of the Japanese mission at Dilao, outside the walls of Manila.There he gathered Japanese traders into a congregation of their own.Governor Tello gave him charge of the dispatch of all Japanese ships at Manila, which won him friends among the Japanese.
Missionary and go-between in Japan
Sotelo went to Japan in 1603 as missionary and secretary to Fr Diego Bermeo, whom the governor of the Philippines sent as ambassador to Ieyasu (家康).The friars founded new houses at Osaka (大坂) and Sakai (堺).At Miyako (都) a fellow Franciscan admired his tireless zeal and resourcefulness.According to an account of the embassy printed in 1617, he learned Japanese within four months, trained the children of new Christians to teach the catechism, and translated the catechism himself.The same account says he set up hospitals for the sick poor and argued against junshi, the custom of retainers killing themselves to follow their dead lord.
He believed that trade between Japan and Spain through Mexico could help the spread of the faith.He assisted Rodrigo de Vivero, a former governor of the Philippines, in his talks with Ieyasu, and did much of the work on the Spanish treaty of 1610.The ruler first chose the friar as his own envoy to Mexico and Spain, but ill health led to his replacement by Fr Alonso Muñoz.On July 13, 1611, he came back from Mexico with Nuño de Sotomayor, ambassador of the viceroy of New Spain, whose banners and trumpets offended the court.In 1612 he was aboard while a Spanish captain sounded the ports of the Kantō (関東), and a Dutchman told the ruler that this was preparation for conquest.
A ship of over 400 tons, built by Spaniards at Edo (江戸) for trade with New Spain, sailed from Uraga (浦賀) on October 3, 1612, with Sotelo, its chief promoter, on board.It struck rocks the next morning and its whole cargo was lost.His superiors, who disliked his part in the New Spain trade, rebuked him and recalled him to Manila.When they called him back to the Shimo and he did not come, they even had his missal taken away, though he got it back.
Arrest in Edo, 1613
In 1613 persecution broke out in Edo, and the friar was arrested and condemned to be burned.After the small Franciscan church in the city was destroyed, he had set up a thatched house and oratory among lepers at Asakusa (浅草), where he said Mass for the Christians.The lepers and other Christians found there were chained, and he was taken with them.
Twenty-seven Christians were beheaded at Torigoe (鳥越) in August and September 1613.The Korean Christian Joaquim Hachikan, who had hidden the friar in his house, was beheaded there on August 16, 1613.Sotelo's catechist John, an excellent preacher, was beheaded at Edo on September 7, 1613, preaching all the way to the execution ground.The friar also collected alms from merchants to support the prisoners and their families.
His life was saved by Date Masamune (伊達政宗), lord of Sendai (仙台), who had the sentence revoked.The same 1617 account says the pyre was already built when the daimyo's courier arrived with letters asking for his pardon.He was freed and sent north to Masamune's domain on September 25, 1613.
Ambassador and bishop-elect
In October 1613 Sotelo set out at the head of Masamune's embassy to Seville, King Philip III and Pope Paul V.With him went the daimyo's retainer Hasekura Rokuemon (支倉六右衛門).The daimyo's letter to the Pope named the friar his legate, to whom any question about the lord's wishes could be put.In Seville the Asistente told the ambassadors that the city, and especially the archbishop and chapter, rejoiced because the embassy had been brought about by "a child of the city of Seville" (translated).In Spain he also presented a separate embassy to Philip III in the name of the emperor of Japan.
Paul V received the embassy in Rome in 1615.After consulting the cardinals of the Inquisition, the Pope decided that a bishop should be created for Ōshū (奥州), and named Sotelo.There had even been talk of an archbishop and four bishops for Japan, and of a cardinal's hat for him.Philip III objected that one of his subjects had been made a bishop without royal consent, and had the bulls withdrawn.The friar was nominated but never consecrated.
Years of waiting and the return
Held back by his superiors, Sotelo could not go back to Japan with the embassy.He sailed from Spain in 1617, and in June 1618 he reached Manila, where his papers were seized on the orders of the Council of the Indies.Spanish merchants there were hostile to his plans for trade between Japan and New Spain, and another friar went to Japan as superior in his place.Companions he had gathered on the way, such as Fr Pedro de Ávila and the lay brother Vicente de San José, crossed to Japan in 1619.In Manila he had several Jesuit catechists (dōjuku) given holy orders, glad to join the Franciscans and follow him.In Pangasinan he built a frigate to sail to Ōshū with Japanese priests he had had ordained, but the Spanish governor stopped the voyage.
In 1622 he finally left on a Chinese merchant junk, in lay dress, with the Japanese Franciscan priest Luis Sasada and the young Luis Baba.Landing in Satsuma (薩摩) in the autumn of that year, they learned that the friars Flores and Zúñiga had just been martyred, and the frightened crew took them to Nagasaki (長崎).A Japanese man from Manila betrayed the friar to the city's judge as the bearer of the embassy's reply.Questioned by Hasegawa Gonroku (長谷川権六), he declared: "I am Father Louis Sotelo, the same who went to Spain as an ambassador of Date Masamune."Claiming his title as ambassador, he had his case referred to the shogun, but as a religious he was sent to the prison at Ōmura (大村).
The prison at Ōmura
Sotelo spent about two years in the Ōmura prison, in a timber cage shared with other priests.The cage was only six to seven feet high and wide, and for more than fourteen months he shared it with the Dominican Pedro Vázquez, Luis Sasada, Brother Luis Baba and the Jesuit Miguel Carvalho.The youngest of them, a Franciscan tertiary, received the habit and made his profession there.
From the cage the friar wrote letters.A long Latin memorial to the Pope in his name is dated January 20, 1624, though its authenticity is disputed.The memorial argues that the Church in Japan needed bishops, saying that "religious without bishops are nerves without bones" (translated).It proposes either no bishop at all or one bishop for each order, and asks that Japanese be prepared for the religious life and holy orders.He also began a catechism suited to Japan, but finished only part of a book on the Creation.To the end the prisoner hoped for help from Masamune, and asked that the Pope's letter be delivered to the daimyo after his death.The memorial also says that he expected rather to die for Christ with his companions.In his last days he was ill with dysentery and fever.
Martyrdom at Hokonohara
Sotelo was burned alive with four companions at Hokonohara (放虎原), near Ōmura, on August 25, 1624.When the guards warned that Vázquez might die in prison, Gonroku ordered all five prisoners burned.They left the prison in their religious habits, with ropes round their necks, and were taken by boat to the place of execution.The day was a Sunday and the feast of St Louis of France, and three of the five martyrs bore the name Luis.Spectators were banned, the stakes stood three fathoms from the fire, and the prisoners were burned at a slow fire, as the sentence prescribed.They sang the litanies and the Te Deum.
When the young brother's bonds burned through, he walked through the flames to kneel before his master and the Dominican and kiss their hands, then went back to his stake.Baba died first, while Sotelo and Vázquez lasted about three hours in the slow fire.One account says the friar "endured, without ever moving him self, the fury of those flames, until at last he rendered his invincible soule to God."The ashes were scattered at sea, but some bones were recovered and venerated by Christians in Japan.Fr Diego de San Francisco, refused leave to land, could see only the flames from a boat offshore.The Church later recognized his martyrdom, and he is honoured as Blessed Luis Sotelo.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Birthplace. most sources say Seville, and Profillet gives his birth as September 8, 1574, at Seville;Sousa, following Fernández Gómez and Lee, says he was born at Coria del Río, where the surname Japón survives, though no early parish records exist.
- Arrival in the Philippines. a witness at the Manila process, Pedro Bautista, says he crossed with Sotelo in 1599, while Boero gives 1601.
- Arrival in Japan. 1603 is the usual date, but Pagès places his arrival in 1606, as does one entry of Anesaki's chronology, which also lists 1603; Murdoch has him on a Manila ship driven to Hizen in 1606, and Cary gives 1608.
- How he went to Mexico before 1611 is unclear. Pagès says he came back with the 1611 ambassador, and Cary suggests he may have gone out with Vivero.
- The 1612 shipwreck. Bishop Cerqueira dates the sailing to October 3 and the wreck to the next morning, Bartoli puts the wreck on October 4, and Cary dates the sailing to October 12, 1612, with the wreck the first morning.
- His character and motives are judged very differently. Bishop Cerqueira called him "a man of restless character" (translated) and blamed him for renewed persecution; the Jesuit Girolamo de Angelis thought he was "dying with desire to be bishop of Japan" (translated);Murdoch called him intriguing and ambitious, angling for an archbishopric for himself.Delplace credits him with zeal, though an indiscreet zeal, and rejects both Murdoch's portrait and the Franciscan Tasso da Fabriano's attacks on Sotelo's opponents.An oration printed in Amati's account of the embassy praises him as a preacher twice condemned to the fire for the faith.
- Cary thinks Sotelo largely wrote Masamune's letter to the Pope.Murdoch says he spoke in Madrid for a shogun who had disowned him, though he kept the shogun's dispatch to the king.
- Who blocked his consecration. Sotelo's memorial blames Jesuit pressure on the Council of the Indies;Cary says Philip III was probably influenced by the Jesuits and by letters from Manila.
- His movements in 1620. Murdoch says he was deported from Manila to New Spain in 1620 and came back in 1622, while other accounts have him remaining in the Philippines.
- His landing in 1622. his own letter says September, while Profillet and Charlevoix say October.
- The 1624 memorial attacking the Jesuits, published by the Dominican Diego Collado in 1628, is disputed: Charlevoix and Bartoli call it a forgery, Pagès thinks it genuine but perhaps altered, Pedro Bautista testified the signature was not Sotelo's hand, and Collado admitted changing wording in one section.In 1629 a special congregation in Rome chose not to examine witnesses on its authenticity.
- The place and date of death. Spinola has the martyrs taken to Shimabara, and Murdoch says Nagasaki, against Hokonohara near Ōmura;Profillet's heading gives August 26, and Fujita August 24, against August 25, 1624.Cary counts three foreign priests burned, Murdoch four.
- Marnas says he was also named papal legate for the whole empire; Murdoch speaks only of a legateship for northern Japan.The embassy's account calls him "of the royal blood of Seville" (translated), but his family was noble, not royal.