A noble son of Naples
Marcello Mastrilli was born at Naples on September 14, 1603, into a noble family that came from Nola.His father, Girolamo, was marquis of San Marzano, and his mother was Beatrice Caracciolo.The baby was baptized on the third day in the Jesuit church of Naples, and his father promised him to the Society of Jesus at birth.Three of his uncles, Gregorio, Carlo and Gabriello, were Jesuits.
He later told the Jesuit General that his calls to the Society and to the Indies had been born together.His father nonetheless refused to let him enter religion, struck him, and took him to the family estates to distract him with hunting.At dawn one day the young man rode secretly from Monte Santo to the novitiate in Naples.He was received as a novice on March 25, 1618, the feast of the Annunciation, when he was not yet fifteen.In 1626 the General agreed to send him to the Indies with Sebastiao Vieira, procurator of Japan in Rome, but a Jesuit relative, Gregorio, prevented it and later begged his pardon on his knees.
The hammer and the vision
In December 1633 a falling hammer left Mastrilli close to death.He had built one of four altars for the feast of the Immaculate Conception in Naples, and while the decorations were being taken down that night, a hammer of over two pounds fell on his right temple.Paralysis took his left arm, and on the evening of January 2, 1634, he received the last anointing.During the illness, he said, a horseman in white appeared to him holding a pilgrim's staff and a candle, offering him the Indies or death, a figure later identified as St Francis Xavier.With his provincial, Carlo de Sangro, present and consenting, the sick man vowed to go to the Indies if God prolonged his life.
On the night of January 3, 1634, he heard his name called from beside an image of Xavier.In his own account the saint, dressed as a pilgrim, asked him, "do you want to die or go to the Indies?" (translated).The Jesuit was then led to repeat a Latin vow word by word and to pray for the grace of shedding his blood, a grace that Xavier himself had not obtained.Afterwards he ate, unwound his bandages to show the wound healed and his arm restored, and said Mass the next morning at the saint's altar.Cardinal Buoncompagni, Archbishop of Naples, ordered a formal inquiry with doctors and surgeons as witnesses and approved the account for printing.The room of the vision was made into a chapel.
From Naples to Goa
The Jesuit General, Muzio Vitelleschi, granted Mastrilli's request for the Indies, writing that he could not stop what the saint himself had ordered.Before leaving, the young priest nursed his dying mother at Nola for eight days and nights.On leaving Naples he took the name Francesco, which was in fact his baptismal name.He travelled by Genoa and Barcelona to Madrid, where King Philip IV received him standing and bareheaded and said he seemed to have a saint before him.The king allowed him 40 Jesuits at the Crown's expense, a number the royal treasurers cut to 33.In a Roman catacomb Mastrilli had found an inscription to "Marcello and forty companions, martyrs of Christ" (translated), and he took it as a sign.
The ships left Lisbon on Holy Saturday, April 7, 1635, the same day of the year on which Xavier had sailed for the Indies.They carried 33 Jesuits: 21 Italians, 10 Portuguese and 2 Germans.A voyage that normally took a little over five months lasted eight, with hunger, thirst and sickness.On board Mastrilli heard more than eighty general confessions, gave away most of the Fathers' rations, and slept on a mat or a bare plank.His ship entered Goa on December 8, 1635, the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
At Goa he spent his spare hours and nights kneeling at Xavier's tomb, which he called his paradise.He gathered alms for a great silver shrine for the saint's body.On the night of March 11, 1636, with the provincial and four others, he dressed the body in a vestment sent by the Queen of Spain and laid it in the new coffin.In the saint's hand he left a note signed in his own blood: "I leave to follow your holy footsteps in Japan: I dedicate myself wholly to you as a holocaust" (translated).
Manila and Mindanao
Mastrilli left Goa at the turn of April 1636, bound for Malacca, Macao and Japan.With a leaking ship and Dutch corsairs about, the captain turned for the Philippines, and the ship anchored at Cavite on the night of July 31, 1636, the feast of St Ignatius.The governor, Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, took the Jesuit with him on his campaign against Mindanao.There the priest raised an image of Xavier and a crucifix on two pikes and went forward in the front ranks.A small cannon ball tore his habit at the side without hurting him.Afterwards he nursed more than eighty men with poisoned wounds at Samboanga, and only two died.Corcuera believed that God had given him the victory through the merits of this priest.
In Manila Mastrilli studied Japanese with a Japanese teacher, and after six months he could hear confessions.In the end permission was given for him alone, not for his four companions.A letter from the Visitor Manuel Diaz, urging him to come to Macao instead, reached Manila after he had left.
The voyage into Japan
To hide the voyage, the governor announced that Mastrilli was going to China and put him aboard a Chinese junk in Chinese dress.Japanese craftsmen secretly built a small Japanese boat (fune) to be carried on the junk and launched within sight of Japan.He sailed from Manila at dawn on Friday, July 10, 1637, with eight Japanese to crew the boat.After storms off Formosa, the fune was launched with the priest and the eight Japanese, and the junk went back to Manila.About September 19 he reached the coast of Satsuma, then went along Osumi and Hyuga, where local people suspected him as a foreigner despite his Japanese clothes.
He landed and hid in a wood with one Japanese, Andrea, a native of the area.The others were caught and brought to the Nagasaki governors.Under torture they revealed where the priest had landed, and all of them gave up the faith, except perhaps one who was said to have died in his torments.Spies and soldiers traced Mastrilli by the smoke of his fire and found him kneeling in prayer under a shelter of branches.Under heavy guard he was brought into the harbour of Nagasaki on October 5, 1637.
Trial, the pit and death
Before the judges, Mastrilli said he had come as Xavier's ambassador to cure the shogun and teach him Christ's law.The medicine he meant was pellets made from relics of the saint that he had brought from Goa.The judges answered that Japan was a place for suffering torments, not for showing prodigies.He was hung head down and dropped into a tub of water, and on the second day more than four hundred basins of water were poured over his face until he fainted.When his companions, who had already given up the faith, were allowed to visit him, it is said that he wept for an hour and then urged them to return to it.
On Wednesday, October 14, 1637, an hour before noon, he was led out to the pit.Half of his head was shaved and half his face painted red, the mark of notorious criminals, and a spiked iron gag was put in his mouth.Bound on horseback, he passed through the street where the Portuguese lived and bowed to them three times.The crews of six Portuguese ships were ashore at Nagasaki that day.He hung in the pit until the afternoon of Saturday, October 17.Offered water, he refused it, saying, "I desire nothing, I lack nothing: I am in Paradise" (translated).Because the next day was a festival of an idol that a dying criminal would profane, the governors ordered him beheaded.The first two sword strokes barely marked his neck, and the third took off his head.His body was burned and the ashes thrown into the river at Nagasaki.The governors kept the powdered relic of Xavier to send to the shogun.
A Japanese companion, André Yamada, died in the pit at Nagasaki in the same days.
A martyr remembered
News of his death was celebrated with solemn feasts at Macao, Manila, Lisbon and Madrid.His own account of the voyage to the Indies, written for the Queen, was printed at Douai in 1638.Lives of him appeared at Lisbon in 1639 and at Madrid in 1640.From his cure came the devotion later known as the Novena of Grace, built on the promise he reported that Xavier would help all who invoked him nine days running.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Birth date. Bartoli, Profillet and Pagès give September 14, 1603;Charlevoix gives September 4.
- The hammer. Charlevoix says it fell 225 feet,Bartoli says from a ladder thirty palms high, and Pagès's Xavier volume says 25 feet.
- Number of companions. Profillet and Bartoli say 40 Jesuits were granted and 33 sailed;Fujita says 34;Bartoli also says the ministers at Lisbon had first cut the number to eighteen.
- Arrival at Goa. most sources give December 8, 1635;Profillet gives October 10, 1635.
- Arrival at Manila. Bartoli and Charlevoix give the end of July 1636;Pagès gives July 3.
- Landing in Japan. Bartoli and Pagès place it about September 19, 1637, in Satsuma;Delplace says he landed in Hyuga on August 4;Profillet says he sighted the Ryukyu on August 3.
- His motive. Pagès and Fujita link the 1635 mission to reparation for Cristóvão Ferreira's apostasy, and Charlevoix and Caddell say he spoke of coming to bring back or replace Ferreira.Elison rejects the link, since news of the apostasy could hardly have spread so far in time.
- The torture. Bartoli says his protest stopped the executioners from using red-hot irons on him;Profillet says he was burned with them.
- The escort to Nagasaki. 200 soldiers in Profillet and Pagès, 250 in Bartoli.
- The manner of his death. the Jesuit accounts surround it with wonders, such as a trance in the pit, failed sword strokes, an earthquake and darkness.The Japanese inquisition record Kirishito-ki, as reported by Elison, says he died "screaming and wailing in the pit" and calls the wonders inventions spread from Macao.
- Time in the pit and date of death. most sources say October 14 to 17, 1637, with beheading on October 17.Anesaki's summary of Pagès gives October 14 to 18;Marnas says 17 days in the pit and death on November 1;Charlevoix (Tours edition) says he was taken out alive on the seventeenth day.Cary dates his death to the year after the Dominicans'.
- His Japanese companions. Pagès names both Andrea Cotenda and André Yamada as dying in the pit; other lists name André Yamada or André Koteda, and Bartoli doubts that even one companion died.