"Geographie De L'Espagne Morisque" by Henri Lapeyre (1959)

(This is a book review posted to amazon.com)

Most people probably are familiar with a sad episode of Spanish history: the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Fewer people are aware that another large group of people were expelled from Spain a century later. They were the nominally Christian descendants of the Spanish Muslims, known as the Moriscos, as well as any not-yet-converted Muslims (the Mudéjares).

Unlike the expulsion of the Jews, the expulsion of the Moriscos was carried out in many stages. Typically, when the Spanish took over a Muslim city during the Reconquista, they allowed the local Muslims to stay; but a few years later *something* would happen, and the tMuslims of that particular region would be told to convert to Christianity or to leave the country. A few decades later, something else would come along, and those "New Christians" of Muslim origin - a.k.a. the Moriscos - were thought to be dangerous for the state, and were to be relocated to another part of Spain, or to be expelled from the country altogether. And so it went through the 16th century, until the total expulsion of 1609-1614.

In his books - probably, one of the first "fully modern" books on the topic - Henri Lapeyre covers most of this sad history. His focus, however, is on the historical and geographical detail: he studies all census records, inquisition reports, ship manifests etc to figure how many people were actually expelled from each town or county and when; from which port (or Pyrenean pass) they departed, and where they went. The amount of statistics is somewhat excruciating for most non-specialist readers; however, if you have an interest in the history of some particular locality, here you can find all the relevant Morisco facts (or numbers) for it.

If Lapeyre were to write this book 50 years later, it probably would not be a paper book at all; these days, something like this could have been more easily published as an Excel file. (Incidentally, most of the pages in the copy of his book that I saw had not even been cut in 54 years since it had been printed). The books has plenty of fairly detailed maps, too - these days, that probably could have been done with a Google Maps layer.

Anyway, besides the dry statistics (totaling up to about 300,000 Moriscos and Mudéjares in Spain on the eve of the expulsion, and about 275,000 expelled), the book does have a lot of interesting detail. For example, the official motivation for the expulsion of the Moriscos was of the national security kind ("What if there is a war with Turkey?") and religious kind ("crypto-Muslims" - and their children don't join the clergy or monasteries, so their population grows way too fast!). But the more real, popular, motivation, was apparently different: it is said that in the popular view, at least, the Moriscos were working a bit too hard, and, even worse, spending much less money than their "Old Christian" neighbors. (Half as much, as per some ecclesiastics' reports). Thus they kept growing rich, despite often holding non-prestigious jobs in Spain's cities. So it seems to me that in the century after the expulsion of the Jews, the Moriscos took the same role in Spanish society - or at least in the popular mind - that Jews did elsewhere in Europe.

Of course, it's not like everyone wanted the Moriscos to go. For example, in Granada, the city government petitioned the Royal authorities to let some Moriscos stay: at least a dozen of plumbers (because nobody else knew how to maintain the 's plumbing in the Alhambra and elsewhere in the city), at least a dozen of silk dyers (so that they could teach some Christians how to produce the right colors), and, surprisingly, a dozen of real estate experts. In Valencia's countryside, too, 6% of all rural Moriscos were allowed to stay behind for some time in order to transfer the irrigation systems in good order to the new Christian settlers.

The children also became a thorny issue: in some areas (Valencia), children under 4 years old were allowed to stay behind, with parents consent, presumably to be adopted by good Christians. In Castile and Andalusia, Morisco children under 6 years old *had* to be taken from their parents stay behind if their parents were leaving for Muslim countries, but could be taken along by the parents if they were leaving for Christian countries. This rule, apparently, resulted in some rather strange itineraries.

I wish this book had a better coverage of what happened to the Moriscos once they landed in Africa - after all, some of them weren't even speaking Arabic anymore, 3-4 generation after the end of the Reconquista! This is obviously outside of the scope of the Lapeyre's book, and he only discusses the post-expulsion very briefly in the "Conclusion" of his book

Bert the Turtle teaches to duck and cover, in Japanese

Readers in the English-speaking world are used to seeing American and British scholars publish books on history of culture of other countries. But this, of course, is not a one-way process: scholars in the rest of the world are also publish results of their studies of all things American.

Recently, while browsing in a university library I've run across a volume that can be fascinating reading for someone who reads Japanese (I don't). Hiroko TAKAHASHI's compact, but densely packed volume, 封印されたヒロシマ・ナガサキ―米核実験と民間防衛計画 (Classified Hiroshima and Nagasaki: U.S. Nuclear Test and Civil Defense Program), published by Gaifusha Publishing, offers what appears to be a Japanese view of the civil defense programs started in the US in the late 1940s - once it became apparent that the USA would not be the world's nuclear power for long. The book's appendix contains lots of documents the authors obtained from US government archives using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) - or, in some cases, the government's responses indicating that a requested document can't or won't be released.

I can't refuse myself the pleasure of reproducing one of the book's illustrations: the early 1950s Duck and Cover comic strip, teaching American kids to be prepared in case of a nuclear explosion nearby. Somehow, it seems strangely appropriate to see it with Dr. Takahashi Japanses translations of the captions, where Bert the Turtle becomes 亀のバート (Kame-no bāto)...

In the 1960s, people used to make lots of fun about the "duck and cover" drills, but in reality they weren't utterly useless. Apparently, during the recent meteor (bolid?) event in Russia's Chelyabinsk a quick-thinking teacher who must have remembered her own duck-and-cover drills was able to save her own 40 pupils from being hurt by breaking glass.

Before Matteo Ricci: the first century of Sino-European interaction

The Anping Bridge - one of the famous ancient bridges of Fujian, built from giant stone blocks, over which Galeote Pereira and his fellow detainees were carried to Fuzhou 450 years ago - has been restored, even though the sea estuary it used to cross is now mostly dry land. （沧桑！。。。） (This is a slightly modified version of my book review of "South China in the Sixteenth Century (Paperback)" on Amazon.com

Orchid Press seems to be in the business of reprinting older Western books about Asia, and they seem to be able to find titles that are worthy of reprinting. Although I have not seen this reprint of theirs, I have read the original edition, "South China in the Sixteenth Century (1550-1575): Being the Narratives of Galeote Pereira, Fr Gaspar Da Cruz, Op , Fr Martin De Rada, Oesa, (1550-1575) (Hakluyt Society Second Series, 1953)", and can congratulate the publisher on making this valuable book more easily available to modern readers.

Many books on the intellectual exchange between China and Europe, such as D.E. Mungello's excellent treatise on Jesuits in China, seem to begin the discussion with Matteo Ricci, viewing everything that happened earlier as a "pre-history" of sorts. In a sense, this is justified, as it were Ricci and his colleagues who made a true "exchange" a reality, as they were the first Europeans capable to directly communicate on a serious level with the Chinese intellectual elites.

However, the "pre-history" - the 70 years of failed, or only partially successful, attempts of establishing a line of communication between the two cultures (counting from the first arrival of the Portuguese to the China coast ca. 1513 and to Ricci and Ruggieri's moving from Macao to Zhaoqing to live there full-time in 1583) are also of great interest for historians. As Donald Lach notes, the first decades of these contacts were marked by almost total blackout imposed by the Portuguese on the publication of the information collected by them in East Asia. For the earliest reports of the Sino-Portuguese interactions, one should see Ferguson's "Letters from Portuguese captives in Canton, written in 1534 & 1536" (1902), which is out of print, but whose full text is available on Google Books. Chronologically, that is followed by the accounts of the contemporary Portuguese historians, João de Barros and Fernão Lopes de Castnheda. After that, it is the turn of the sources translated and annotated by C.R. Boxer in the book under review.

In this book, first published in 1953, C.R. Boxer's did a great job of presenting the 3 most important first-hand accounts of Europeans' visits to China in the 1550s-1570s.

The original stone city of Quanzhou that so much impressed early European visitors has been mostly lost, but Quanshan Gate has been restored, and even got a couple turtles to guard it!

Galeote Pereira was, essentially, a Portuguese smuggler, detained for customs and immigration violations, as well as resisting arrest, in 1549. He spent a year in a Fuzhou prison, waiting for his death, and then - after a review of his and his compatriots' case by an inspector from Beijing - several more years in exile in Guangxi. After escaping, he wrote a rather desultory, but still fascinating, account of his experiences, later published by the Jesuits.

Gaspar da Cruz was a Dominican friar, who had widely traveled throughout the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia, and - after failing to convert any Cambodians to Catholicism - tried his hand, apparently, without much more success, in Guangzhou. Back in Portugal, he published (in 1569/1570) a small book that is considered the very first European book specifically about China. (As opposed to a chapter or two about China in Marco Polo or in Barros).

Martín de Rada was a Spanish Augustinian, who led a Spanish delegation to Fujian in 1575, with a view of setting up a permanent missionary system in China, and maybe even getting a small offshore island near Amoy (Xiamen) for the Spaniards' use, similar to the Macao had by the Portuguese. (Isn't it interesting how the "spiritual" and imperialist motives coexisted in so many early missionary stories?) The mission failed, for reasons not related to de Rada's own performance, but de Rada bought a lot of Chinese books in Fujian, and after coming back wrote extensively about the country, based both on his 4 months' experience there and the information translated to him from these books by the Chinese merchants ("Sangleys") living in the Philippines.

Later on, Pereira's, Cruz's and Rada's writings all became the basis for The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof, published by Mendoza in 1585 - which was to remain a European bestseller for the next 30 years, but became virtually forgotten after being superseded by Ricci's book (1615) and other Jesuits' works.

Nonetheless, the writings of the two Portuguese and one Spaniard collected and translated by C.R. Boxer, and provided by him with an erudite preface and notes, are certainly worth reading. Maybe not so much for what they tell about the Ming China - there are, after all, lots of great modern books on the topic - but for what they tell us about the Iberians' early attempts to understand the country around them. They have made some correct observations, and also have said some things that are laughable ... but, all of it put together, this was, in a sense, a foundation on which the first generation of European scholars of China (i.e., mostly Jesuits starting with Ruggieri and Ricci) were to build.

P.S. There is apparently a more recent, 2010 reprint. For some reason Amazon pages for different editions don't automatically link to each other (as they usually would), so I am putting in this link as a service to the community.

This has not been reprinted since 1953?

(This is a slightly expanded version of a book review on Amazon.com)

Matteo Ricci's and Nicolas Trigault's "De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas", translated by Gallagher as "China in the Sixteenth Century", is, arguably, one of the most important books of the 17th century. (Look up that title on Wikipedia: it was me who wrote the article there). A fruit of Matteo Ricci's pioneering experience as a Jesuit missionary in China (1582-1610) it both provided Europe with its best "standard reference" on China for a the next several decades, and articulated Ricci's [[ASIN:0824812190 "accommodationist"]] strategy, which Jesuits were to follow for the next century in their attempts to make Christianity acceptable to the Chinese literati, and Chinese Confucian world view, to Europe's ecclesiastical and intellectual elites.

Matteo Ricci was not the first Catholic missionary to work in China, and not even the first one to write a book about the country. (The Portuguese Dominican friar Gaspar da Cruz, who spent a few months in Canton in 1556, and published his book in 1569, may be the one to claim the honor, if we ignore the Papal envoys who had been active in the Mongol-dominated China ca. 1300). However, what he (and his lesser known older comrade, Michele Ruggieri) did was cardinally different from what the previous generation of missionaries did. Da Cruz, or the Spaniard Martin de Rada (an Augustinian who entered Fujian from the Philippines for a few months in 1575) were utterly dependent on their interpreters, and were not all that "nuanced" about the "pagan" rites and beliefs to be condemned and exterminated. No wonder that they did not get all that far in their abortive attempts to get established in the Ming China.

In contrast, Ruggieri and Ricci, in the best Jesuit tradition, painstakingly worked on learning the spoken and written language of the country and trying to figure out what beliefs and principles guided the people of this land in their actions. All the same time, the two Jesuits plotted how they could get themselves closer to the Ming Empire's centers of power; much of the book thus is the story of their progress (taking almost two decades) from the Portuguese base in Macao to inland Guangdong's Zhaoqing and Shaoguan to more central Nanchang to the empire's "backup capital" Nanjing and, finally, to the Emperor's court in Beijing.

As a result of this enormous effort, Ricci was able to create an encyclopedic book that represented a much higher level of understanding of China than did Europe's previous "standard reference", [[ASIN:1108008194 History of the Great and Mighty Kingdome of China]] (which was written by a Spanish-Mexican Augustinian who had been appointed by the Spanish court as its envoy to China, but, alas, never got beyond Mexico). More importantly, he armed the Jesuits with a "modus operandi" that viewed Confucianism as a generally "positive" a-religious ideology, which could be used as an ally against the competing religious faiths (Buddhism and Taoism). While a modern academic study such as David E. Mungello's [[ASIN:0824812190 "Curious Land"]] may be a better way to learn about the Jesuits' approach (and the opposition to it from some of Europe's Catholic hierarchy), nothing replaces reading Ricci's original work for the sheer feeling of amazement at what Ricci and his colleagues did trying to understand the very different civilization from what they had left behind in Europe.

Well, how *can* you read Ricci's original work? His original "journals" were, naturally enough, in Italian, and not even published until the 20th century. (The work, "Fonti ricciane", with comments by Pasquale d'Elia, is not even on Amazon; see the Wikipedia article for the bibliographic information). Ricci's younger colleague, Nicolas Trigault, posthumously edited his work and turned it into Latin, and had it published in 1615; it quickly became a Pan-European bestseller, translated into Europe's most major languages; that all can be found on Google Books and/or in archive.org. The most recent English translation is apparently by the American Jesuit Louis J. Gallagher's, first published as "The China That Was" in 1942, and then (with a Chinese-words index based on d'Elia) in 1953, as "China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583-1610".

So the second edition must have been timed for the 400th anniversary of Ricci's birth; what surprises me is that such an important book has not been reprinted, say, in 2002 (for Ricci's 450th anniversary), or in 2010 (for the 400th anniversary of his death). But here we are: one of the most important documents of the Christian missionary history - if you want a complete English translation - is only available as an out-of-print book. Fortunately, most university libraries still would have a copy...

Emperor Zheng Ho, meet Comrade Kirov!

This review is from: Fra Mauro's Map of the World (Terrarum Orbis)

This product consists of two parts: a CD-ROM that contains a high-resolution scan of the famous Fra Mauro Map, and a huge book that contains transcripts of the labels on the map, their English translations with comments, and a couple hundred pages worth of articles about the various aspects of the map.

This map, created by the Venetian monk Fra Mauro ("Brother Mauro") ca. 1450 is, of course, famous, being perhaps the best example of the European map-making on the cusp of the Age of Discovery. A copy of this map was actually made for the Portuguese king of the day, so you could imagine Bartolomeo Dias and Vasco da Gama studying it in preparation for their pioneering voyages to[ward] Asia; Columbus may have looked at some similar map, wondering how far its western end really was from its eastern end.

Basically, it may be viewed as the last great maps created before two great revolutions - one in maritime technologies, allowing the Europeans to sail all over the world, and the other in book reproduction (the [re-]invention of printing in Europe) - revolutionized European cartography and led to the appearance of works by Mercator, Ortelius, etc. in the 16th century.

Fra Mauro's map is famous, in particular, because it appears contains a lot of geographic information that is (more or less) correct (i.e., not entirely fantastic), but about whose provenance we don't know anything. That is, the good Brother Mauro must have gotten it *somewhere*... but whatever his sources were, they just have not survived to our day. As one example, it shows a fairly reasonably-looking continent of Africa, one you can sail around, even with a Madagascar of sorts (called "Diab") south-east of it... all this a generation before Dias and da Gama.

Now, what do this book and CD give you? There is actually a small printed map coming in a pocket with the book, but since the original map was *huge*, you can't read much of anything on that small map, beyond the names of countries and major regions. The CD has of course high-resolution data - much better than a freely downloadable scan file available e.g. via Wikimedia Commons. But the data are not in some standard portable format such as JPEG or PDF; rather, they are only readable by some specialized program, for the Microsoft Windows operating system, included on the disk. So this is rather inconvenient, if you are used to view images in some general-purpose image file viewer. For example, the program's interface allows you to scroll through the image, or to zoom in on a small piece of it, but you can't zoom out - which means that you can't see more than a very small part of the entire map on the screen at once (unless, that is, you have a really huge screen, or can control your monitor's resolution to be 10,000 by 10,000 or something...) The "transcription" feature, however, is quite convenient: you can click on any text on the map (label, caption) and to see the transcription of the Italian original, or its English translation, as plain text in a pop-up window. A great help for someone not too comfortable with Mediaeval handwriting. (Although I'd say that the text on the map is fairly legible as it is).

The luxuriously printed book itself is... useful, although one wonders if the publisher could come up with a more compact format for what is, basically, a huge dictionary of transcribed and translated map labels, which now happens to be formatted so that most of the pages are 80% blank space. (This is why the thing probably weighs 5 pounds if not more).

The articles, written mostly by the curator of the maps at the Venetian Library, with a contribution from an art historian, are certainly very valuable for anyone interested in the "life story" of this particular map, and in Mediaeval cartography in general. The author tries to probe the problem of "missing sources", and come up with interesting ideas here and there. (Arab manuscripts; interviewing visiting Ethiopian and Russian churchmen...). Overall, he feel that "no longer identifiable oral accounts", mentioned by Fra Mauro himself (p. 33), were an important source in the creation of the map, so, in a sense, many critical "sources" of it probably never existed as written documents; and we probably should agree with him.

At the same time, it seems that quite a few silly statements, or at least unexpected omissions, are hidden in plain view among the books' annotations. For example, the famous seven 15th-century Chinese expeditions to the Indian Ocean are described as being "ordered by emperor Zheng Ho" (item 19, pp. 178-179). (Hint 1: the emperors at the time were Yongle and Xuande; Zheng He was the eunuch in charge of the fleet. Hint 2: with Chinese names, you either use the modern Pinyin transcription [e.g. Zheng He] or the more traditional Wade-Giles [Cheng Ho], but try not to mix the two, at least not in the same name). Mozhaisk (the center of a small Russian principality west of Moscow) is described as having become "famous for its resistance of the Mongols in 1237-40" (pp. 91-92). (Hint: the small city famous for its resistance to the Mongols during that invasion was Kozelsk; I don't believe there was anything ever said about Mozhaisk in that regard). While "Provincia Mordua" is absolutely correctly linked to the Mordvin (Mordva) people, it is quite amusing to read that the nearby "Provincia Quier" "suggests a reference to the city of Kirov" (p. 93). (Hint: Kirov was so named after the pseudonym of a Soviet Communist leader, S.M. Kirov, in the 1930s; the place was known as Vyatka or Khlynov during the preceding 1000 years.)

Neither of these issues is a major one, and one cannot expect them all to be visible to any single author or editor; but if they are noticeable even to a casual reader, I wonder what an expert in the historical geography of a particular region would say if asked to proofread the chapter on the area of his expertise. The book probably could have benefited from having such a proofreading done in advance of its publication. Nonetheless, even as it is, this weighty volume is a valuable addition for any research library with a budget to afford it and the shelf space to go with it.

"Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology" by David E. Mungello

(This is a slightly expanded version of my book review on Amazon.com)

I read David E. Mungello's Curious land: Jesuit accommodation and the origins of Sinology a few years ago, almost by accident. The book sat on a library table, waiting for reshelving, and the cover looked sort of ... curious. I wondered for a short while if this is just one of many lightweight popular-history books that, basically, regurgitate the same well-known facts in different order. But once I opened the volume, I saw that it was full of names and events I had not heard about. So I checked it out, just to see if it will be interesting enough to read throughout. As it turned out, not only was it interesting enough - the subject area it discussed was just so interesting, that I have read another dozen books on related topics since then!

There are many good and not so good books about contacts between Europe and China, but, as I said, it seems that many of them give you a pretty superficial review of the same basic points, spiced with a few more or less familiar anecdotes. "Curious Land" is very different. For one, D.E. Mungello strictly focuses on the subject matter (Jesuits in China, and their European contacts) and the time period (from the Jesuits' arrival to China, i.e. ca. 1580, until 1700). Which means that many other stories - such as the Portuguese' arrival to Chinese coast and their early exploits, or the Spanish Dominican and Augustinian friars' attempts to bring gospel to China are not covered in this book; nor is any of the post-1700 history. (If you are interested in any of this, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800 by the same author can be recommended for a much more concise and "non-specialist" overview of the "big picture" and for more literature pointers. C.R. Boxer's works, and in particular his South China in the Sixteenth Century (1550-1575) - an annotated translation of the narratives of Galeote Pereira, Gaspar Da Cruz, and Martin De Rada - are perhaps the best coverage of the early Portuguese and Spanish contacts; this last book would give you a good idea of what the first Jesuits to work inside the "mainland" China, Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci, may have read about the country on their way there).

More importantly, having delimited his topic so precisely, Dr. Mungello manages to provide a really in-depth study of what the Jesuits saw in China, how they understood it, how they presented it to the European audience, and what was the reaction of Europe's scholars. He explains in detail the "accommodation" policy developed by the Jesuit China Mission's founding father, Matteo Ricci, and promoted by several generations of his successors. The policy tried to make Christianity acceptable to Ming China's literati by declaring that Confucianism and ancestor veneration are, in principle, compatible with Christian faith, because they really are just a system of moral and political beliefs (fully compatible with Christianity) and civil rites (which, with certain reservations, can be accommodated in a Christian's life as well). This truly Jesuitical (hey, I have chance to use this word!) view of the Chinese world affected of course both what Jesuits said and did in China (e.g., not talking too much about Crucifixion and Resurrection until a prospective convert was ready) and what they said about China in Europe. The "accommodationist" ideology (and its later, Qing-era development, known as the "Figurism") may have been quite successful in making Christianity a truly widespread religion in China, but it came under attack from influential Christian purists in Europe, and was eventually disallowed by the Pope, drawing the period of flourishing Jesuit activity in China to an end.

Nonetheless, over a century of Jesuits' study of China, its language, philosophy, history and culture resulted in the creation of a tremendous intellectual capital, quite influential with a number of European thinkers of the period, from Leibniz to a group of rather obscure scholars in the Prussian capital Berlin. While the story of the latter group may be just a vignette in the overall story of the Sino-European intellectual contact, it certainly is worth telling, and Dr. Mungello's does it very well too.