SMSR - uniroma1.it...STUDI E MATERIALI DI STORIA DELLE RELIGIONI Fondata nel 1925 da Raffaele Pettazzoni 82/2 - luglio-dicembre 2016 Direttore responsabile / eDitor-in-Chief: Alessandro

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Religion

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SMSR

82

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Studi e MateRiali di StoRia delle Religioni

82/2 (2016)

Religion as a Colonial Concept

in Modern History

(america, asia)

dipartimento di Storia, Culture, Religioni

SMSR

SapienzaUniversità di roma

ISBN 978-88-372-3085-2

Copertina SMSR 2-2016 1-4.indd 1 19/12/2016 15.08.11

STUDI E MATERIALI DISTORIA DELLE RELIGIONIFondata nel 1925 da Raffaele Pettazzoni82/2 - luglio-dicembre 2016

Direttore responsabile / eDitor-in-Chief: Alessandro Saggioro

ViCeDirettore / Deputy eDitor: Sergio botta

CaporeDattore / Chief of eDitorial Committee: marianna Ferrara

Comitato Di reDazione / eDitorial Committee: Paola buzi, Alberto camplani, Anna maria gloria capomacchia, Francesca cocchini, carla del Zotto, giulia Piccaluga, Alessandra Pol-lastri, emanuela Prinzivalli, Federico Squarcini, lorenzo Verderame

segreteria Di reDazione / eDitorial seCretariat: Tessa canella, Arduino maiuri, caterina moro, Valerio Salvatore Severino, chiara Spuntarelli, maurizio Zerbini

Comitato sCientifiCo / aDVisory boarD: Alessandro bausi (universität Hamburg), Philippe blaudeau (université d’Angers), carlo g. cereti (Sapienza università di roma), riccardo contini (istituto universitario orientale di Napoli), Francisco díez de Velasco (universidad de la laguna), Jean-daniel dubois (Paris, ePHe), giovanni Filoramo (università di Torino), Armin W. geertz (university of Århus), gaetano lettieri (Sapienza università di roma), bru-ce lincoln (university of chicago), maria grazia mara (Sapienza università di roma), chri-stoph markschies (Humboldt-universität, berlin), Annick martin (université de rennes 2), russell mccutcheon (university of Alabama), Santiago carlos montero Herrero (universidad complutense de madrid), enrico Norelli (université de genève), guilhem olivier (univer-sidad Nacional Autónoma de méxico), Tito orlandi (Sapienza università di roma), Adriano Santiemma (Sapienza università di roma), Francesco Scorza barcellona (università di roma Tor Vergata), giulia Sfameni gasparro (università di messina), manlio Simonetti (Sapienza università di roma), Paolo Siniscalco (Sapienza università di roma), Natale Spineto (univer-sità di Torino), Kocku von Stuckrad (universiteit van Amsterdam), michel Tardieu (collège de France), roberto Tottoli (istituto universitario orientale di Napoli), Hugh urban (ohio State university), ewa Wipszycka (university of Warszawa), Paolo Xella (cNr), elena Zocca (Sapienza università di roma)

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STUDI E MATERIALI DISTORIA DELLE RELIGIONI

Fondata nel 1925 da Raffaele Pettazzoni

82/2 (2016)

Religion as a Colonial Concept in Modern History

(America, Asia)

pubblicati dal Dipartimento di Storia, Culture, ReligioniSapienza - Università di Roma

MORCELLIANA

Stampato con il contributo della Sapienza Università di Roma

Finito di stampare nel dicembre 2016

Sommario 515

Sommario

Sergio Botta - marianna Ferrara - aleSSandro Saggioro,Editorial. Toward a Global History of Religions? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521

Sezione monograFica / theme Section

Religion as a Colonial Concept in Modern History (America, Asia)

Sergio Botta - marianna Ferrara, Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527

daniel BarBu, Idolatry and the History of Religions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537

Jana ValtroVá, “Religion” in Medieval Missionary Accounts about Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571

SilVia alFayé - FranciSco marco Simón, New Victims for old Gods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593

marianna Ferrara, Practices in Early Modern European Vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607

gonzalo Fontana elBoJ, Apocalyptica, Medieval Prophecy and Fran-ciscan Utopia. A New Heaven for the New Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629

óScar Fernando lópez meraz, The Paths of Bodies in Franciscan

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 662

eliSaBeth heiJmanS, From the Spanish Netherlands to Spanish Ame-

Madre de Dios in Brussels (1607-1614) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 683

daVid charleS Wright-carr, Persistence of Pre-Hispanic Military . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 699

maría celia Fontana calVo, Ezekiel’s Wheel at the Franciscan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 723

marina torreS trimállez, The Eternal Presence of the Ancestors.

Dominican 17th Century Missioner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 756

516 Sommario

michel KoBelinSKi, An Analysis of Luso-Brazilian Religiosity in the . . . . 789

madlen Krüger, Demarcation versus Conjunction. Challenged Inter-dependencies of Religious and Secular Notions in Pre-Colonial, Colo-nial and Post-Colonial Times in Sri Lanka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 814

mitSutoShi horii, with “Religion”: 1853-1858 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 838

anita agoStini, The Eastern Burma Mission. Ancestor Worshipping and the Latin American Paradigm among Minorities in Eastern Shan State, Myanmar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 870

Saggi / eSSayS

JenS ulFF-møller, Book of Settlement and Celtic Christianity in Iceland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 887

rocco ronzani, La corrispondenza Buonaiuti-Vannutelli nell’Archivio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 916

manuel ceccarelli, Tra paleoastronautica, secolarizzazione, indivi- . . . . . . . . . . . 952

JoSé a. delgado delgado, romano. La evidencia de los commentarii fratrum arvalium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 976

FranceSco Berno, Allegoria templare e topologizzazione del corpo di Cristo nel Vangelo di Filippo (NHC ii, 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 992

andrea anneSe, Rosmini, Newman e la critica al razionalismo teolo-gico. La dialettica tra ragione, kerygma e autorità e il principio dello sviluppo dottrinale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1009

note / noteS

leonardo amBaSciano, Achilles’ Historiographical Heel, or the Infe-

Big Gods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1045

ForumSindone, storia e (pseudo)scienza: un dialogo possibile? Intorno al libro di A. Nicolotti, Sindone. Storia e leggende di una reliquia controversa (Einaudi, Torino 2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1071

emanuela prinziValli, Introduzione . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1071

luigi campanella, Il punto di vista dello scienziato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1075

Sommario 517aleSSandro Saggioro, Sindonopoiesi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1076

marco Bella, Scienza, pseudoscienza, blog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1080

andrea nicolotti, Replica dell’Autore, conclusioni e prospettive . . . 1084

recenSioni / reVieWS

Andrea Annese, Il pensiero estetico di Rosmini. Prospettive teologiche [Giuseppe Lorizio], p. 1095 - Markham J. Geller, Melothesia in Babylonia. Medicine, Magic and Astrology in the An-cient Near East [Giuseppe M. Cùscito], p. 1096 - Jaclyn Neel, Legendary Rivals: Collegiality and Ambition in the Tales of Early Rome [Valentina D’Alessio], p. 1100 - Carlo Cardia - Giu-seppe Dalla Torre (eds.), Comunità islamiche in Italia. Identità e forme giuridiche [Sara Colan-tonio], p. 1107 - Giuseppina Paola Viscardi, di uno spazio artemideo [Valentina D’Alessio], p. 1115 - Philippe Borgeaud - Doralice Fabiano (eds.), [Luciana Furbetta], p. 1122 - Marisa Tortorelli Ghidini (ed.), Aurum. Funzioni e simbologie dell’oro nelle culture del Mediterraneo antico [Arduino Maiuri], p. 1129

liBri riceVuti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1137

The Sacrifice of oTherS 607

SMSR 82 (2/2016) 607-628

Marianna ferrara

The Sacrifice of OthersSouth Asian Religious Practices in Early Modern European Vocabulary

Religion as a comparative notion is crucial as well as controversial. While the history of the debate on religion goes far back, a critical discus-sion on the conventional, scholarly, and interpretative nature of religion is still at the centre of recent scholarship1. In the field of the religious stud-ies, far from being a closed chapter in its history, religion as an object of study still represents an open challenge for scholars.

What I intend to discuss is one of the issues that has strongly con-tributed to the definition of religion as a comparative notion from the beginning of the great encounter between the Western travellers and the inhabitants of foreign lands: ‘sacrifice’ as a cultural instrument in early modern travel writing. While there is a wide range of literature dealing with the cultural shock which impacted the first encounter between the Aztecs and Spanish2, less attention has been paid to the cultural instru-

1 Among the most critical approaches in last 10 years, cfr. W.J. Hanegraaff, Reconstructing “Religion” from the Bottom Up, in «Numen» 63 (2016), pp. 577-606; I. Strenski, Understanding Theories of Religion: An Introduction, Wiley Blackwell, Chichester - Malden (MA) 2015; K. von Stuckrad, The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000, De Gruyter, Berlin 2014; B. Nongbri, Before Religion. A History of a Modern Concept, Yala University Press, New Haven - London 2013; M. Staussberg (ed.), Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, Routledge, London 2009; T. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, MA 2008; M. Nye, Religion: The Basics (second edition), Routledge, London - New York 2008; W. Braun - R.T. McCutcheon (eds.), Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, Equinox, London - Oakville 2009; H. de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond a Concept, Fordham University Press, New York 2007.

2 The most important volume on this aspect is, with no doubt, C. Bernand - S. Gruzinski, De l’idolâtrie: une archéologie des sciences religieuses, Seuil, Paris 1988. A critical analysis has been provided, among other publications, in the issue of the «Journal of Ideas» 67, 4 (2006) – esp. C.L. Johnson, Idolatrous Cultures and the Practice of Religion, pp. 597-621; S. MacCormack, Gods, Demons, and Idols in the Andes, pp. 623-647; J. Sheehan, The Altars of the Idols: Religion, Sacrifice, and the Early Modern Polity, pp. 649-674 – and the recent volume: S. Botta (ed.), Manufacturing Otherness. Missions and Indigenous Cultures in Latin America, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle Upon Thyne 2013. Cfr. also G. Stroumsa, The scholarly discovery of religion in early modern times, in J.H. Bentley - S. Subrahmanyam - M.E. Wiesner (eds.), The Cambridge World History, vol. 6: The construction of a global world, 1400-1800 CE, part 2: Pattern of change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2015, pp. 313-333; C. Dodds Pennock, Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture. Lecturer in Early Modern History, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2008, pp. 22ff.

608 Marianna ferrara

ments and the narrative negotiation of identity and belonging employed by conquerors, adventurers, merchants, and missionaries who tried to un-derstand, describe, and communicate what they saw in India: landscapes, people, laws, and cultures in the field3.

What deserves attention is that in the 15th and 16th cs., any attempt among the European establishments to rationally include new customs, practices, and rules observed under the broader and reassuring ideas of ‘Humankind’ and ‘Religion’, was supported by an adequate cultural vo-cabulary, able to justify, communicate, and exploit concepts and catego-ries as ‘good to think with’. Such vocabulary has been gradually arranged and authorised by means of a strong interaction between humanists, poli-ticians, and religious institutions. Besides, when the Portuguese reached the Malabar Coast on the 20th of May 1498, India was not ‘entirely un-known’ nor ‘entirely known’ in the eyes of the Europeans. Since the times of Herodotus and Megasthenes, India and its mirabilia had been a part of the European imagery.

In order to open up new possibilities of research on the construction of religion in the early modern age, I will focus on ‘sacrifice’ as a se-mantically efficient ‘religion-maker’ in European travel writing on India from the 15th c. onwards. I argue that we can discuss the construction of religion as a colonial concept from a refreshed point of view dealing with the following interpretative hypotheses:

1) ‘sacrifice’ has served Europeans as a useful category to think about Others and has become a descriptive mark to compare and classify reli-gions. As a result, any attempt to define Others in travel accounts moves around a standard vocabulary consciously or unconsciously embodying the Christian pattern of the separation of monotheists from idolaters, Christians from not Christians.

2) ‘sacrifice’ has been employed as a label to facilitate the adjustment of the Old Testament paradigm for ‘Gentiles’ as ‘lost’ Christians with the people encountered in India at the time of the first sailing expeditions to

3 As a point of reference for researches at the cross-road of multiple disciplines, such as social history, religious studies, literature, economics, anthropology, and art history, see volumes by J.-P. Rubiés, such as Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge - New York 2000; Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond, Ashgate, Farnham

Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India, 16th-17th Centuries, University of Catholic Orientalism:

Portuguese Empire, Indian knowledge (16th-18th centuries), Oxford University Press, New Divins remèdes: médecine et religion en Asie du

Sud ceiaS - eheSSda Silva Flores (eds.), Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud: Sources, Itinéraires, Langues (xvie-xviiie siècle), eheSS, Paris 2015.


South Asia. The need to encapsulate a real human diversity in a literary taxonomy borrowed from mythologies of the past arose when the old model started to crack under the weight of reality.

3) ‘sacrifice’ has been employed by Western travellers as a religion-maker which, from a Christian point of view, connoted the pre-Christian origin of the religious attitudes, practices, and beliefs that were observed among foreign people of distant lands, and has become a device capable of enacting the visualisation of the diabolic nature of idolatry and the belief of a plurality of gods.

I intend to investigate what place the European observers have given to ‘sacrifice’ in the religious discourse on Others living far from Chris-tendom; how ‘sacrifice’ has been used as a cultural means to understand and include other religions in Christian narratives; how such a privileged placing – a focus on ‘sacrifice’ – has oriented the travelogue genre and the interests of the Humanists of the Renaissance on customs and reli-gions of India; and furtherly, how ‘sacrifice’ has served as a paradigm in comparing and classifying as well as interpreting the symbolic and ritual practices observed from faraway lands.

1. Sacrifice as ‘good to think with’ to familiarise with other religions

The first point I intend to discuss is the interpretative use of ‘sacri-fice’ for making a familiar representation of Indians. The starting point for discussion is the retelling of the first expedition of Vasco da Gama to India in 1497-99, on the basis of the first-hand source Roteiro da primeira viagem de Vasco da Gama à Índia, the voyage journal commonly as-cribed to the sailor Álvaro Velho4. The peculiar feature of this report is that we have evidence of when at their arrival to Calicut (present day

4 Cfr. argumentations in D. Köpke - A. da Costa Barao do Castello de Paiva (eds.), A. Velho, Roteiro da viagem que em descobrimento da India pelo Cabo da Boa Esperança fez dom Vasco da Gama em 1497. Segundo um manuscripto coetaneo existente na Bibliotheca publica

portuense, Typographia commercial portuense, Porto 1838, pp. vii-xviii. A debate over the authorship of the Roteiro’s is currently at stake among historians. Another hypothesis is that the Roteiro was redacted by João de Sá, scribe of the São Rafael, the ship headed by Paulo da Gama which sailed to India during the first expedition together with those headed by Vasco da Gama, Nicolau Coelho and Gonçalo Nunes (cfr. debate resumed in S. Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco Da Gama, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge - New York 1997, pp. 79ff). But the fact remains that the Roteiro has no identified author. An anonymous manuscript dated to the first half of the 16th century, but supposed to be a copy of the original, has been preserved for centuries in the Monastery of Santa Cruz at Coimbra and then transferred, in 1834, to the Biblioteca Pública Municipal do Porto (see D. Köpke - A. da Costa Barao do Cas-tello de Paiva [eds.], A. Velho, Roteiro da viagem, cit., p. 7). This manuscript has been scanned and since 2013 is available on line at the web site of the World Digital Library of Unesco, url: (09/16). For the first Portuguese printed edition of the Roteiro see: Á. Velho, Roteiro da primera viagem de Vasco da Gama: 1497-1499. Pref., notas e anexos por A. Fontoura da Costa, Agência Geral das Colónias, Lisboa 1940; more recently,


Kozhikode, in Kerala, southern India) the Portuguese thought they had found a Christian enclave5:

«The city of Calecut is inhabited by Christians. They are of a tawny complexion. Some of them have big beards and long hair, whilst others clip their hair short or shave the head, merely allowing a tuft to remain on the crown as a sign that they are Christians. They also wear moustaches. They pierce the ears and wear much gold in them. They go naked down to the waist, covering their lower extremities with very fine cotton stuffs. But it is only the most respectable who do this, for the others manage as best they are able.[...] When we arrived they took us to a large church, and this is what we saw: –The body of the church is as large as a monastery, all built of hewn stone and covered with tiles. At the main entrance rises a pillar of bronze as high as a mast, on the top of which was perched a bird, apparently a cock. In addition to this, the-re was another pillar as high as a man, and very stout. In the centre of the body, with a bronze door sufficiently wide for a man to pass, and stone steps leading up to it. Within this sanctuary stood a small image which they said represented Our Lady. Along the walls, the main entrance, hung seven small bells. In this church the captain-major [Vasco da Gama] said his prayers, and we with him.We did not go within the chapel, for it is the custom that only certain servants of the church, called quafees6, should enter. These quafees wore some threads passing over the left shoulder and under the right arm, in the same manner as our deacons wear the stole. They threw holy water over us, and gave us some white earth, which the Christians of this country are in the habit of putting on their foreheads, breasts, around the neck, and on the forearms»7.

The author of the Roteiro describes Calicut as a Christian town and the Malabarians as Christian practitioners. The mistake may be evident, but it was not so for the first Portuguese travellers nor for Vasco da Gama who really did think – and hope – that those people were Christian. In support that the misunderstanding really concerns the first encounter be-

J. Marques (ed.), Á. Velho, Roteiro da primeira viagem de Vasco da Gama à Índia, Faculdade de Letras do Porto, Porto 1999.

5 Cfr. S. Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco Da Gama, cit., pp. 161ff; P. Aranha, Il Cristianesimo latino in India nel xvi secolo, Franco Angeli, Milan 2006, pp. 19ff.

6 Arabic , qâzî ? – actually Vasco da Gama had an interpreter of the Arabic language who mediated between him and the local inhabitants. The parallel between quafee/ and the local brahmins is entirely understandable if we consider how the social role of s might have been perceived by a man who had spent much time of his life among the Muslims. Like the qâzî, i.e. ‘judge’, the was a religious figure, learned in religious laws and doctrines; he was a representative of society, in some cases he could be the king’s counselor, engaged in his religious services. Also it is not excluded that the term qâzî might have been used as an honorific with no legal significance, as it has been suggested by another case study examined in D. Gold, Provincial Hinduism: Religion and Community in Gwalior City, Oxford University Press, Oxford - New York 2015, p. 268 note 31. On the interpretation of quafes/quafees as

7 E.G. Ravenstein (transl.) - Á. Velho, A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497-1499, Hakluyt Society, London 1883, pp. 49-54.


tween the first Portuguese and local people, we have further evidence in the words of Pedro Álvares Cabral, who was sent at the head of the second expedition to India at the beginning of 1500. Cabral refers to this misunderstanding when (in Ramusio’s edition) describes the king of Cali-cut as follows: «The king is idolater despite others had believed that he was Christian; they did not understand his customs like us who [, instead,] had much business in Calicut [...]»8.

On the contrary, another version of the encounter between Vasco da Gama and the Malabarians, redacted some decades after the descobri-mento, in 1551, by the royal chronicler Fernão Lopes de Castanheda9, suggests that the Captain-major immediately saw that it was a trick situ-ation. In this chronicle, it is said that the Portuguese understood that the local priests were not Christian as soon as they entered in the temple and saw monstrous statues and pictures10.

Further re-tellings of the story were elaborated by other Portuguese humanists (such as Damião de Góis in 1566 and Luís Vaz de Camões in 1572)11 in later years to intentionally show that Vasco da Gama, now the Portuguese hero, realised soon that there was no Christian society in Calicut.

According to Sanjay Subrahmanyam12, the original ‘mistake’ may be explained because Vasco da Gama’s interpreter of Arabic language – probably Fernão Martins – was able to mediate through two patterns: the Muslim and the Christian. As a consequence, when he tried to understand the words pronounced by the local priests, i.e. s, he sought to transfer concepts and words through his Arabic and Portuguese vocabu-lary13. Indeed, according to the Roteiro’s author, Vasco da Gama not only swapped a local place of worship for a church, even he got down on his

8 Transl. mine from G.B. Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi [first printed ed. 1550], ed. M. Milanesi, Einaudi, Torino 1978, vol. 1, p. 642: «Il re è idolatra, ancora che gli altri abbino creduto che ’l sia cristiano, li quali non hanno inteso tanto de’ suoi costumi quanto noi, che assai avemo negociato mercanzie a Calicut [...]» (italics mine).

9 F. Lopez de Castanheda, História do descobrimento & conquista da India pelos Portu-gueses. Nova edição. Livro I [first printed ed. 1551], Typ. Rollandiana, Lisboa 1833.

10 Ibi

igreja de Christãos».11 Cfr. P. Aranha, Il cristianesimo latino in India, cit., pp. 26ff.12 S. Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco Da Gama, cit., pp. 161ff.13 According to Jean Aubin, the fact that the Vasco da Gama’s interpreter, Fernão Martins,

learnt Arabian during his prisony in Morocco is a good reason to think that he probably under-stood the Such word has then been transcribed as quasî, quasees, then quafes or quafees. Cfr. J. Aubin, Préface, in P. Teyssier - P. Valentin, Voyages de Vasco de Gama: relations des expéditions de 1497-1499 et 1502-1503, Editions Chandeigne, Paris 1995, pp. 7-80: p. 63.


knees to pray the image of a local goddess thinking to be in front of an uncommon (heretical?) image of the Virgin.

When in 1498 the first ships came back to Portugal, the accounts of the Indian Christians were received with great interest, excitement and hope. However, in a matter of few months, other information was col-lected and the first impression of India had suddenly changed: now the inhabitants were not all Christians but mostly ‘heretical’14, their places of worship were not churches but ‘temples’, the statues were not images of the Virgin nor saints but ‘idols.’

Heresies, temples, and idols: a terminological triad that suggests the Catholic agenda at the beginning of the 16th c. Despite such controversial information, Manuel the king of Portugal looked as though he wanted to ignore the doubts. Enthusiastically he wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Lisbon, D. Jorge da Costa, to inform him about the considerable presence of a certain kind of Christians in India15. Against such expectations, dur-ing the second expedition headed by Cabral, a more accurate encounter with the Malabarians removed all doubt: the Indians were mostly pagan – not even heretical! – and worshipped the devil.

Far from naïve, a more attentive view of the Malabarian practices was suggested in an Italian re-telling of Vasco da Gama’s arrival to India, given by Girolamo Sernigi, a Florentine merchant who lived in Lisbon, in one of the letters he sent to Italy. The text of these letters, addressed to an unknown gentleman in Florence, has been preserved in three antholo-gies edited by three Italian humanists: the collection entitled Paesi nuo-vamente retrovati et Novo Mondo da Alberico Vesputio Fiorentino intito-

lato (1507, ascribed to Francesco da Montalboddo16), the so-called Codex Vaglienti (collected by Piero Vaglienti between 1499 and 1513), and Giovan Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi (written in the ’30s but printed between 1550 and 1606), respectively. Over and above specula-

14 Fantasies about the presence of Christian heresies in India were shared at leadership level in the European societies. As António da Silva Rêgo pointed out, «[e]sta informação era falsa, come se sabe, mas indica bem a confusão que reinava na época. Vasco da Gama teria chegado a Lisboa com a convicção de que o povo de Calecute era cristão, embora hereje» (Documentação para a história das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente: Índia. Coligida e anotada por

António da Silva Rêgo, 12 vols., Agência Geral das Colónias, Lisboa 1947-1958, vol. 1, p. 8, note [1]). Cfr. also P. Aranha, Il cristianesimo latino in India, cit., p. 26.

15 «O rey desta cidade se tem por christão e assy a mayor parte de seu povoo, os quaees mais com verdade sedevem teer por herejes, vista a forma de sua christandade, de que as Santo Padre stprevemos» (Documentação, cit., vol. 1, p. 8).

16 Cfr. A. Schiavo Musi, Intorno alla raccolta italiana di relazioni di viaggi edita a Vi-cenza nel 1507 con la designazione «Paesi nuovamente retrovati et Novo Mondo da Alberico

Vesputio Fiorentino intitolato», in AA.VV., Studi colombiani. Convegno internazionale di stu-di colombiani. v Centenario della nascita di Cristoforo Colombo, 3 vols., S.A.G.A., Genova 1952, vol. ii, pp. 419-441.


tions about the dependence of the last two upon the first one17, these three versions of Sernigi’s letter – almost the same – deserve attention because of a more cautious vocabulary than in the Roteiro had been employed regarding the religious features observed in Calicut. The following is the accurate English translation of Sernigi’s first letter by E.G. Ravenstein:

«Let us return to the above-named city of Chalicut, which is bigger than Lisbon, and peopled by Christian Indians, as said. In this city are churches with bells, but there are no priests, and the divine offices (divini officii) are not performed nor sacrificial [masses] (sacrifici) celebrated, but in each church there is a pillar hol-ding water, in the manner of the fonts holding our holy water, and a second pillar with balm. They bathe once every 3 years in a river which is near the city»18.

Like in the Roteiro, also in Sernigi’s letter, what are stressed are the elements providing a comparison between the Christian imagery and the ‘discovered’ practices. The ‘familiar’ elements were the churches and their bells, the priests and their rites. In these descriptions of Vasco da Gama’s experience there is an attempt to define the Malabarian religion but the lack of hints of the Christian practices makes the comparison dif-ficult to achieve. In Sernigi’s language, it is noteworthy the way the au-

17 According to Luciano Formisano, the use of original kinds of iberism suggests that Ramusio and Vaglienti do not depend on Montalboddo. See Id., (ed.), Iddio ci dia buon viaggio e guadagno. Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, ms. 1910 (Codice Vaglienti), Edizioni Polistampa, Firenze 2006, p. 132; p. 328, § ; cfr. also F. Romanini, «Se fussero più ordinate, e meglio scritte...». Giovanni Battista Ramusio correttore ed editore delle Navigationi et viaggi, Viella, Roma 2007, pp. 105-108, 141-157.

18 E.G. Ravenstein (transl.) - Á. Velho, A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497-1499, cit., pp. 125-126. Some minor differences appear in Moltalboddo’s, Ramusio’s and Vaglienti’s version:

Lisbona (ab)hitata da christiani indiani bigi: ch(e) non sono nigri né bianchi: dove sono chiesie c(on) campane ma non vi sono sacerdoti: né fanno officii né sacrificio: solamente hanno ne le chiesie una pila de acqua a modo de acqua benedecta: et altre pile hanno de balsimo: et batezeno

Paesi

Nuovamente Retrovati et Novo Mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentino Intitulato, Enrico di S. Orso, Vicenza 1507, § cliii).

-

non v’è sacerdoti, né fanno ufizio divino né celebrano, solamente tiene una pila d’acqua nella

Iddio ci

dia buon viaggio e guadagno, cit., p. 132).

d’Indiani bigi, che non sono negri né bianchi, dicono esservi chiese, ma che non vi sono sacer-doti, né fanno officii divini né sacrificio; solamente hanno nella chiesa una pila d’acqua a modo di acqua benedetta, e altre pile hanno di certo liquore a modo di balsamo, e battezzansi ogni tre

Navigazioni e viaggi, cit., vol. 1, p. 608).


thor employs the two terms divini officii and sacrifici – definitively, an ecclesiastical language which does not appear in the Roteiro.

According to Ravenstein, ‘sacrifice’ refers here to the Christian Eu-charist, an interpretation which evokes the Ancient Church Fathers’ specula tion on ‘true’ sacrifice. The term sacrifici could be an addition by Sernigi which then re-appears also in Montalboddo’s and Ramusio’s anthologies, while Piero Vaglienti simply informs that the Indian people «do not celebrate». It goes without saying that such ‘celebration’ may be the Catholic Eucharist, as it has been suggested by Ravenstein.

Despite this evidence, it is not a merely speculation to suppose that the term ‘sacrifice’ could also evoke the ‘known’ world of sacrifices – both those performed by Christians (Eucharist) and those by pagans. The fact that, in the first descriptions of Indians, it is said that they did not perform ‘sacrifice’ at all bears witness to the difficult comparison be-tween ‘religion’ – Christianity – and ‘religions.’ That comparison was achievable only by forcing the data on unknown practices into a known category. It is not excluded that the success of this term in the subsequent debate against idolatry is also connected to its semantic fluidity. It can refer, ambiguously, both to the ‘good practice’ – ‘sacrifice of praise’ in-volved in the Liturgy of the Hours – and the ‘deviated’ practices – idola-try as worship of inanimate objects and belief in false gods.

The retelling of the arrival of Vasco da Gama to India suggests how weighty was the dashing of hopes that some Christians really dwelt in the conquered lands. If there was no sign of Christian liturgy, what kind of ‘practices’ would have Indians performed? Most of the travel accounts on the religious life of Indians revolve around this question in order to satisfy the appetite of the exotic and forbidden on the one hand, and the hope to spread Christianity in the conquered lands on the other one. At the same time, any information about ‘not Christian’ rites, according to a Christian view-point, was projected onto a past time period, in fara-way locations inhabited by pagans of any sort. This is exactly the angle from which one might reconsider the initial, almost positive, conjunc-tion between divini officii and ‘sacrifice’ as an effect of the optimistic attitude of the first European narrators about India. When new accounts on India and other foreign lands began to discourage premature Christian optimism, old literary patterns on idolatry arose from the same cultural repertory which had advocated a genuine comparison.

In order to investigate how the term ‘sacrifice’ came to mark religious otherness in the early modern European discourses on religion, I suggest consideration of two factors:

1) the literary cultural background – to which also Sernigi belonged – within which ‘sacrifice’ could be juxtaposed to the divini officii referring to the ‘true’, albeit Christian, rites;


2) the semantic slipping of ‘sacrifice’ from denoting the ‘expected’ practices of foreign lands – whereas it was expected to find Christians out of Europe – to connoting ‘unexpected’ practices whose description had satisfied the predetermined fantasies of a European – almost Christian – audience.

In its non-Christian connotation, the term ‘sacrifice’ was able to evoke an exotic scenario where the semantic opposition between Christian rites and ‘pagan sacrifice’ could give emphasis to the idea of ‘otherness’ in the discourse concerning the discovery of unknown places, flora, fauna, peo-ple, their customs and religions. As such, the intention to fulfil the Europe-an exoticism and the desire of forbidden or extraordinary knowledge has inspired all the great odeporic literature of 15th and 16th cs. The description of ‘otherness’ is a constant in this genre and the evocation of ‘sacrifice’ as a hint of ancient paganism responds to the same feeling, in Joan-Pao Rubiés’ words: «the tragedy of the European identities – religious, politi-cal and social – projected upon the new continent»19. Even if Rubiés refers here to the New World experience – which has been systematised from the 1520s onwards –, the same feeling comes often into the travelogues about India, especially when the narrator is a merchant or an adventurer in search of his fortune or at the service of a high-ranked patron.

Thus, Ravenstein’s interpretation of sacrifice in Sernigi’s letter as the Catholic Eucharist supports the hypothesis that at the beginning of 16th c. the positive use of the term ‘sacrifice’ was embodied in the hope that there were Christians in India and that any sign of the Christian liturgy would have been welcome in order to ideologically ‘support’ costs of colonial enterprise toward distant lands. As well, the term ‘sacrifice’ has been cast in a negative light when facts showed that it was not possible to hope anymore.

‘Sacrifice’ in relation to Vasco da Gama’s arrival to Calicut, on the one hand, makes more understandable the feeling of loss of the Portu-guese when they were at the first sight of an Indic temple and its odd statues, and their difficulty to explain what they really saw. On the other one, ‘sacrifice’ was a useful term which could allow a comparison, from a European point of view, between the Catholic imagery about foreign pa-gans and the religious practices really observed in those lands on whose mirabilia much had already been said before20. The disappointment of the Portuguese expecting to find Christians in India arises in Sernigi’s words

19 J.-P. Rubiés, Futility in the New World: Narratives of Travel in Sixteenth-Century Amer-ica, in J. Elsner - J.-P. Rubiés (eds.), Voyages And Visions. Towards a Cultural History of Travel, Reaktion Books, London 1999, pp. 74-100: p. 76.

20 Cfr. J.-P. Rubiés, Travel and ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through Euro-pean eyes, 1250-1625, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge - New York 2002 [2000], pp. 63ff, 74ff.


about divini officii and sacrifici. After that experience, no other sacrifices would have been recognised by European observers except of those per-formed by idolaters, albeit believers in false gods who used to worship inanimate things. They were conceived as lost pagans whose description was inspired by Old Testament accounts on idolatry.

Same decades after the arrival of the Portuguese to India, the Spanish experience in the New World confirmed the conviction, widely shared among European Christians, that waves of pagans/idolaters were spread to all corners of the world. While Spanish have kept their reports on Mexico secret for a long time, it looks that Ramusio could have received crucial information from the New World earlier than others. It seems probable that Ramusio had access to the official documentation from New Spain, maybe to extracts from the Spanish captains’ accounts of the events or Hernán Cortés’ Cartas de relación21, with the help of high-ranked inform-ants. When the dossiers on New World had started to circulate in Europe, the term ‘sacrifice’ had become to be definitively related to the worship of the new ‘idols’, confirming the initial overestimation of the Portuguese about Christians in India. As Carmen Bernard and Serge Gruzinski point-ed out, when the figurative objects worshipped among the Amerindians have become to be considered by Europeans as idols, from that moment the search for any sort of paganness or idolatry had started (and became rhetorically founded)22. Like a cultural instrument, ‘sacrifice’ served to achieve a comparison, that was an attempt to culturally understand what had initially shocked the «Christian consciousness»23. At the same time, it became a symbol of the fight against idolatry mirrored against the indi-genes of the New World and the converts of Jewish origin24 in South India.

21 Cfr. T. Veneri, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, molto più di uno spettatore. Le quinte delle Navigationi et viaggi, in «ITALICA» 89, 2 (2012), pp. 162-201: esp. p. 188 – partially based on G.B. Parks, Ramusio’s Literary History, in «Studies in Philology» 52, 2 (1955), pp. 127-148.

22 C. Bernand - S. Gruzinski, De l’idolâtrie, cit., p. 14. On the Franciscan missionary discourse on idolatry, cfr. in S. Botta, Towards a Missionary Theory of Polytheism: The Fran-ciscans in the Face of the Indigenous Religions of New Spain, in Id. (ed.), Manufacturing Oth-erness, cit., pp. 11-35; Id., The Franciscan Invention of Mexican Polytheism: the Case of the Water Gods, in «Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni» 76, 2 (2010), pp. 411-432.

23 G. Stroumsa, The scholarly discovery of religion in early modern times, cit., pp. 315.24 I cannot say whether we may talk of an ‘anti-Jewish’ stigamatisation of the bad – forbid-

den, suspicious – practices performed or supposed to be performed among the non-Christian Indians, however, recent studies confirm that an intentional repression – often supported by the Goan elites of Hindu origin – against the Indian converts of Jewish origin was facilitated by the Inquisition established in Goa in 1560. Cfr. P. Aranha, Early Modern Asian Catholicism and European Colonialism: Dominance, Hegemony and Native Agency in the Portuguese Estado da Índia, in K. Koschorke - A. Hermann (eds.), Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity / Polyzentrische Strukturen in der Geschichte des Weltchristentums, Harrassowitz

The Wheel of Torments”: mobility and

redemption in Portuguese colonial India (sixteenth century), in S. Greenblatt et al. (eds.), Cul-tural Mobility: A Manifesto, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, pp. 24-74: pp. 32ff.


2. Sacrifice as ‘good to think with’ to classify other religious practitioners

The Spanish colonial experience has been systematised only at the end of the first couple of decades of the 1500s. After that time, the term ‘sacrifice’ has terribly inspired both a certain imaginaire related to the Christian idea of ‘paganness’ before and after the struggle between Cath-olics and Reformed Protestants, and a certain way to qualify death in connection with a bloody ritualistic act among the people of the colonised lands. Such connection has become functional especially when, from the first decades of the 16th c. spent in the New World, the conquistadores could explain the nature of corpses, bones and skulls found close to the figurative objects now familiar as idols. If ‘human sacrifice’ could have been functional for understanding and explaining which sort of practice was the ritual killing of men observed among the new ‘pagans’ of Mexico and Peru, similarly, the term ‘sacrifice’ would have worked for describ-ing any ‘pagan’ in the world, especially with regard to a bloody ritual.

Despite the documents from New Spain still being ignored at the begin-ning of the 16th c., the European audience was hungry for mirabilia, I mean it was ready for knowing what kind of strange things happened in distant lands. Moreover, the connection between sacrifice and blood was vivid in the European imagery imbued with Christian stories and speculations on pagans. Therefore, while such imaginative vitality has some roots in the Old Testament imagological heritage and the New Testament requalifica-tion of blood, the travel writers – who shared the same background of their audience – had just to adequate their eyewitnessed accounts – or presum-ably eyewitnessed accounts – into the readers’ language and imagery.

Much earlier and far from the conquistadores’ experience with ‘hu-man sacrifices’, the power of bloody images was peculiar in the account on India compiled by the Portuguese officer Duarte Barbosa (1480-1521), who lived in India between 1500 and 1516-17. Barbosa was the interpret-

Second Viceroy of India from 1509, thus his writings had a great circula-tion. In his Livro em que dá relação do que viu e ouviu no Oriente (1516), Barbosa provides us with a detailed description of the religious practices in Malabar where he employs the term ‘sacrifice’ (Portuguese: sacrifício) twice in one circumstance while he describes the practice to offer human blood to gods. More specifically, he describes a thanksgiving ritual per-formed by a young maiden who wanted to marry the man she wishes for:

«And she takes a large waggon with oxen, and they fix it in a very high crane, such as those with which they draw water, and they fasten it to an iron chain with two iron hooks25, and she comes out of her house with great honour, accompa-

25 Other devotional practices consisting in hooking and swinging human devotees have


nied by all her relations and friends, men and women, with much singing and playing of instruments, and many dancers and jesters; and she comes wrapped very tightly round the waist with her white stuffs, covered from the waist to the knees, the rest bare, and at the door of her house, where the car stands, they lower the crane, and stick the two hooks into her in the loins between the skin and the flesh, and put into her left hand a small round shield, and a little bag with lemons and oranges. They then raise the crane with great shouting and sound of instru-ments, firing guns, and making other festal demonstrations: and in this manner the car begins its march on the way to the house of the idol to which she promised a sacrifice [o ídolo a quem ela votou tal sacrifício], and she goes suspended by those hooks fastened into her flesh, and the blood runs down her legs showing no pain [vai-lhe o sangue correndo pelas pernas abaixo, de que ela não mostra nenhuma dor]»26.

The association between blood and sacrifice suggests a bloody offer-ing, specifically a voluntary bloody self-offering: «she shows no pain» (ela não mostra nenhuma dor). Such semantic association deserves atten-tion when the Indian priests become the ‘Gentiles’ (Portuguese: Gentios) of India. From a Christian perspective, the Malabarians, like the ancient Greeks and Romans – ‘fallen Christians’27 – performed ‘pagan’ ritual practices. Such practices could not but be wrong, false.

More than twenty years had passed since the ‘discovery’ of new lands by Colombo and Vespucci, and information had circulated widely in Eu-rope at the end of 15th c. thanks to their documentation. Especially in

been described by Gasparo Balbi in his Viaggio dell’Indie orientali (Camillo Borgominieri, Venetia 1590, pp. 90ff), then by J.A. Dubois in his Mœurs, institutions et cérémonies des peu-ples de l’Inde (Imprimerie royale, Paris 1925, vol. 2, pp. 372ff), and British administrators in 19th-century colonial reports (cfr. G.A. Oddie, Hook-Swinging and Popular Religion in South India during the nineteenth century

1 [1986], pp. 93-106; Id., Regional and Other Variations in Popular Religion in India: Hook-Swinging in Bengal and Madras in the Nineteenth Century, in «South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies» 10, 1 [1987], pp. 1-10; Id. [ed.], Popular Religion, Elites and Reform: Hook-Swinging and its Prohibition in Colonial India, 1800-1894, Manohar, Delhi 1995). Called

prohibited in 1894 as a cause of death. However, while the colonial discourse on hook-swing-ings has produced a standard ‘bloody’ model for normative purposes – nurtured by prejudges on folk (albeit low-status) ‘practices’ opposed to elitarian (albeit high-status) ‘religions’ –, one must consider that there were different forms and contexts involving the pain-inflicting ac-tions that cannot be understood in merely descriptive terms. Cfr. U. Schröder, Hook-Swinging in South India, in U. Husken - F. Neubert (eds.), Negotiating Rites. Negotiating the subaltern space within a colonial society, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2011, pp. 215-236.

26 D. Barbosa, Livro em que dá relação do que viu e ouviu no Oriente. Introd. e notas de A. Reis Machado, Agência Geral das Colónias, Lisboa 1946; En. Transl. Book of Duarte Barbosa, by M. Longworth Dames, Asian Educational Services, Repr. New Delhi 2002 [or. ed. 1918-21].

27 Cfr. S. Srivastava, Situating the Gentoo in history: European perceptions of Indians in early phase of colonialism, in «Economic and Political Weekly» 36, 7 (2001), pp. 576-594; A. Heen, Jesuit Rhetorics: Translation Versus Conversation in Early-Modern Goa, in C. Meyer - F. Girke (eds.), The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture, Berghahn Books, New York 2011, pp. 210-224: p. 220.


Vespucci’s words one can find some statements that show how the associ-ation between blood and sacrifice was clearly thought in connection with non-Christian religions and a life-style devoted to sensual enjoyment:

«We did not find that these people had any laws; they cannot be called Moors nor Jews, but worse than Gentiles. For we did not see that they offered any sacri-fices, nor have they any place of worship. I judge their lives to be Epicurean»28.

There, the association between blood and sacrifice was also the result of a well-established stereotype. What Vespucci’s words suggest is that if ‘sacrifice’ was a practice for ‘Gentiles’, albeit idolaters29, these native people were worse because unlike the pagans, they did not even offer sacrifices, appearing as if they had no ‘faith’30.

What happend in South Asia should be rethought keeping into ac-count two levels of stereotypisation. On the one hand, the circulation of standardised descriptions of the Amerindians in Europe provided an icon-ographic and imagological repertoire which would have been used, re-defined or domesticated, and enriched for sure with new data from Asia. On the other one, the term ‘sacrifice’ was useful to consider the Indian practices as different but comparable with the Christian religion.

‘Sacrifice’ was a good term from the ecclesiastical language to define other religious practices than those of Christianity. The not Christians could have been adjusted into a new mental map as possible variables of the old model of ‘paganness’31, not because the newly encountered inhabitants of the world sound as really new in the literary background of the Italian humanists, but rather because the old informations about the unknown places would have been gradually replaced by empirical data32. Also ‘sacrifice’ as a cultural mark could have redefined the semantic field in which the new pagans would have been inscribed (as nature, savagery) in contrast with the ‘world of men’33. Even though such paradigm arises

28 C.R. Markham (ed.), The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Illustrative of His Career, Hakluyt Society, London 1894, p. 9 (emphasis mine). Original text in I. Caraci Luzzana, «Per lasciar di me qualche fama». Vita e viaggi di Amerigo Vespucci, Viella, Roma 2007, p. 275: «In questa gente non conoscemmo che tenessino legge alcuna, né si posson dire mori né Giudei, e piggior che gentili, perché non vedemmo che facessino sacrificio alcuno, nec etiam non tenevano casa di orazione alcuna: la lor vita giudico esser epicurea».

29 I. Caraci Luzzana, «Per lasciar di me qualche fama», cit., p. 275, footnote 38.30 Ibidem.31 The need of a ‘mental adjustment’ has been suggested by J.H. Elliott when he pointed

up «the apparent slowness of Europe» in incorporating America within its field of vision (J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492-1650, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992 [1970], p. 8).

32 Cfr. J.-P. Rubiés, Nuovo mondo e nuovi mondi: ritorno alla questione dell’impatto cul-turale, in M. Catto - G. Signorotto (eds.), L’ambrosiana e la conoscenza dei nuovi mondi (secoli xvii-xviii), Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milano 2015, pp. 9-41.

33 Cfr. also N. Gasbarro, 1492... Apparve la terra, Giuffrè, Milano 1992, pp. 50ff.


especially from the experience of the Spanish in the New World, it sug-gests a suitable perspective to rethink the encounter between the Portu-guese and the Malabarians in connection with the impact of the colonial experience in South America. As a result, ‘sacrifice’ is not merely a topos of the early modern odeporic literature, rather it is also an instrument to study the forms and the way in which the 15th- and 16th-century travel writing, which was supported by humanist circles as well as economic and political interests34, has faced and then canonised otherness35.

Religion, at least as regards Ramusio – who was first and foremost a high officer of the Venetian Republic36 –, was one aspect among others to promote and preserve a privileged relationship between Venice and the rest of the world, in primis the Eastern side of the trade network. In the same years that the Ramusian project went to print, the Roman edito-rial industry reached the field of geographical studies which had been a privilege of Venice up until that moment. As a result, while the Venetian publishing contributed to rethinking the economic and cultural otherness within a long-winded political affair, the Roman court «was to become the point of collection of information on the state of religion»37.

The advance of the Roman publishing toward the field of travel litera-ture and geographical discoveries also marked a movement of the view-point through the semantic space. The juxtaposition of ‘sacrifice’ and di-vini officii in the words by Sernigi, then transcribed by Montalboddo and Ramusio, de facto has been gradually reversed into an opposition, becom-ing a topic of the Catholic propaganda addressed to the conquest of the religious space among the non-European people. The semantic slipping of ‘sacrifice’ from an ideal Catholic Eucharist among faraway Christians (e.g. Vasco da Gama, Sernigi) to a real idolatry among foreign pagans (e.g. Barbosa, Cortés) marked also a shift from a descriptive approach to a stereotyping device. Those who did not perform the ‘sacrifice of praise’ have become those who performed ‘pagan sacrifice’, albeit cruel and bloody sacrifices.

As Bernard and Gruzinski suggest, the shift in focus from descrip-tion to stereotypisation was achieved in the changeover of the witness

34 Cfr. J.-P. Rubiés, Instructions for travellers: teaching the eye to see, in «History and Anthropology» 9, 2-3 (1996), pp. 139-190: esp. p. 153.

35 An interesting case study which suggests how the Religious studies and the study of Modern Languages and Cultures may dialogue in cross-disciplinary approaches is provided in L. Formisano, Letteratura di viaggio e letteratura italiana, in «Intersezioni» 17, 1 (1997), pp. 109-115.

36 Cfr. M. Donattini, Ombre imperiali. Le Navigationi et viaggi di G.B. Ramusio e l’im-magine di Venezia, in M. Donattini - G. Marcocci - S. Pastore (eds.), L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi, cit., pp. 33-44.

37 A. Prosperi, Lo stato della religione tra l’Italia e il mondo: variazioni cinquecentesche sul tema, in «Studi storici. Rivista trimestrale dell’Istituto Gramsci» 1 (2015), pp. 29-48: pp. 31-32 (transl. mine).


from the discoverer to the chronicler for an occupation, from the eyes of the travellers in the field to the pen of the writers by profession. Such a transformative passage touches upon many important facets and allows the overlapping of different kinds of attitudes, feelings, and prejudices which, in some cases are consistent between each other. The new other-ness acquired through the lens of the politicians, merchants, and the trav-ellers was mediated from two models: (1) a ‘literate model’ governed by the classical taxonomy between Christians and pagans – Christian memo-ries of the ancient Greeks and Romans recalled in the representations of indigenous people –, and (2) a more ‘pragmatic model’ was characterised by the economical dichotomy between Christian allies and Muslim com-petitors (in trade network) and rivals (in war)38. It is not a coincidence that the European narrators mostly distinguish the local people into Moors and Gentiles. It is also meaningful that such a model has a parallelism in the dualistic perception of the inhabitants of India described in the Per-sian chronicles: similarly to the monotheist Christians, the Persian travel-lers distinguished people into Muslims and infidels.

However, from the Christian point of view, ‘sacrifice’ was a feature familiar and powerful to indicate the ‘religion’ – then ‘false religion’39 – of India, like that of the ancient pagans.

3. Sacrifice as a powerful label to define and describe the new ‘Gentiles’

The second case I would like to examine is the travelogue by Lu-dovico de Varthema, a traveller from Bologna, possibly a spy at the

38 Cfr. A. Classen, East Meets West in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times. Trans-cultural Experiences in the Premodern World, De Gruyter, Berlin - Boston 2013, esp. essays by A. Holt, Crusading against Barbarians: Muslims as Barbarians in Crusades Era Sources, ibi, pp. 443-456; and A.P. Coudert, Orientalism in Early Modern Europe?, ibi, pp. 715-756. However, travelogues and travel journals show that it is precisely Muslims who have played a relevant role as translators, pilots, hostages, or spies. Cfr. I. Luzzana Caraci (ed.), Scopritori e viaggiatori del Cinquecento e del Seicento, t. 1, Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, Milano - Napoli 1941, passim.

39 During the Reformation, the Protestant propaganda also had begun to use the same theme to redefine the boundaries of what it deemed a false religion, including certain practices accepted by Catholics but that, instead, were rejected by Reformers because they were considered as idolatrical and superstitious. Cfr., among others, J. Spinks, The Southern Indian “Devil in Calicut” in Early Modern Northern Europe: Images, Texts and Objects in Motion, in «Journal of Early Modern History» 18 (2014), pp. 15-48: pp. 24ff; A. Prosperi, Lo stato della religione tra l’Italia e il mondo, cit.; J.L. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, Reaktion Books, London 2004; L. Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995; J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492-1650, cit., pp. 36ff; C.M.N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worshipfrom Erasmus to Calvin, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1986; P. Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands, 1544-1569, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1978.


service of the Portuguese40, but primarily «the author of a book and, secondarily, when we can believe him, the protagonist of a journey»41. Departing from Venice on 1500, Varthema visited Vijayanagar (in pre-sent-day Karnataka) and Calicut, which were also the main cities of the Southern kingdoms.

«The King of Calicut is a Pagan [gentile], and worships the devil in the manner you shall hear. They acknowledge that there is a God who has created the heaven and the earth and all the world; and they say that if he wished to judge you and me, a third and a fourth, he would have no pleasure in being Lord; but that he has sent this his spirit, that is the devil, into this world to do justice: and to him who does good he does good, and to him who does evil he does evil. Which devil they call Deumo, and God they call Tamerani42. And the King of Calicut keeps

40 Cfr. J.-P. Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, cit., p. 130; E. Musacchio (ed.), Ludovico Varthema, Itinerario, cit., p. 13.

41 J.-P. Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, cit., p. 133. The carefulness displayed in Rubiés’ words makes good sense because the figure of Varthema sometimes looks more «a wonderful picaresque figure avant la lettre» (M. Eliav-Feldon, below) than an attentive chronicler. As M. Eliav-Feldon has noticed, «If we believe his stories, his roles during six years of travel (1502-08) included a Mameluk guard for a caravan from Damascus to Mecca, an artillery engineer, a pilgrim, a madman, a lover of a Muslim princess, a poor Moorish beggar, a physician, a Muslim saint, a military spy and a Christian knight» (Ead., Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2012, p. 55).

42 (var. tambaran, or tampuran)

families (H. Gundert, A Malayalam and English Dictionary -lore - London, 1872, s.v. “

) who ruled in the Southern regions in early medieval period. Also F. Lopez de Castan-heda in his chronicle of Portuguese exploration (1551) describes the Tambarane as God (Deos) invoked by some people alleged to be Christians, then as a sacred stone (pedra) carried with

sanctos) called Baneanes (cfr. F. Lopez de Castanheda, História do descobrimento & conquista da India, cit., Livro i, p. 87; Livro ii, p. 51). In 1619, the French navigator François Pyrard de Laval (ca. 1578-ca. 1623) described the Tambiraine as the king: «Ces Moucois sont peuples comme esclaves du Roy et des Naires (comme je dirai ci-après) ils appellent le Roy en leur langue Tambiraine, qui veut dire Dieu» (Voyage de François Pyrard de Laval, contenant sa navigation aux Indes Orientales, Maldives, Moluques, Brésil, S. Thiboust, Paris 1619 [1611], p. 380). However, according to Partha Mitter, the term used by Varthema might have been referred to Peria Tambaran, a local deity (Id., Much Maligned Monsters: A His-tory of European Reactions to Indian Art, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago - London 1992 [1977], p. 17). The question still requiring an answer is the reason why Varthema employs

that is a generic term to define god, while in Indian traditions gods are always called by their proper name. Another explanation – probably unknown to Varthema – may be related to the role of certain chiefs/ s in local religious performance art at that time, especially in case they were concretely patrons of religious services and performances. Indeed, between 17th and 18th s became very popular as authors of -man [eds.], The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries, s.v. University Press, Princeton 2016, pp. 379-382; K.R. Nair, Medieval Malayalam Literature, in K. Ayyappa Paniker [ed.], Medieval Indian Literature. An Anthology, vol. 1, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi 1997, pp. 299-323, pp. 316ff). According to K.R. Nair (ibi, p. 313), the growth of

th c. is partially related to the arrival of the


this Deumo in his chapel in his palace, in this wise: his chapel is two paces wide in each of the four sides, and three paces high, with a wooden door covered with devils carved in relief. In the midst of this chapel there is a devil made of metal, placed in a seat also made of metal. The said devil has a crown made like that of the papal kingdom, with three crowns; and it also has four horns and four teeth, with a very large mouth, nose, and most terrible eyes. The hands are made like those of a flesh-hook, and the feet like those of a cock; so that he is a fearful object to behold. All the pictures around the said chapel are those of devils, and on each side of it there is a Sathanas seated in a seat, which seat is placed in a flame fire, wherein are a great number of souls, of the length of a finger and a finger of the hand. And the said Sathanas holds a soul in his mouth with the right hand, and with the other seizes a soul under the waist. Every morning the Brahmins, that is the priests, go to wash the said idol all over with scented water, and then they perfume it; and when it is perfumed they worship it; and some time in the course of the week they offer sacrifice to it in this manner: They have a certain small table, made and ornamented like an altar, three spans high from the ground, four spans wide, and five long; which table is extremely well adorned with roses, flowers, and other ornaments. Upon this table they have the blood of a cock and lighted coals in a vessel of silver, with many perfumes upon them. They also have a thurible, with which they scatter incense around the said altar. They have a little bell of silver which rings very frequently, and they have a silver knife with which they have killed the cock, and which they tinge with the blood, and sometimes place it upon the fire, and sometimes they take it and make motions similar to those which one makes who is about to fence; and finally, all that blood is burnt, the waxen tapers being kept lighted during the whole time. The priest who is about to perform this sacrifice puts upon his arms, hands, and feet some bracelets of silver, which make a very great noise like bells, and he wears on his neck an amulet (what it is I do not know); and when he has finished performing the sacrifice, he takes both his hands full of grain and retires from the said altar, walking backwards and always looking at the altar until he arrives at a certain tree. And when he has reached the tree, he throws the grain above his head as high as he can over the tree; he then returns and removes everything from the altar»43.

The first edition of the Ludovico de Varthema’s Itinerario (Voyage) was published in Italian in 1510 and has been translated in many lan-guages. First it was translated into Latin, then quickly into German, Cas-tilian, French, Dutch, and English. By this means, it achieved notoriety throughout Europe44.

Portuguese to Calicut as it was a response to the disrupting impact of the new dominion on local religious life.

43 En. Transl. by John Winter Jones of The Itinerary of Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna from 1502 to 1508 as Translated from the Original Italian Edition of 1510, Haklyut Society, London 1863, pp. 136-139 (italics mine).

44 On the historical frame within which the Itinerario has become one of the most popular travelogue on India, see V. Martino (ed.), Ludovico de Vartema, Itinerario, Edizioni dell’Orso, Alessandria 2011; P. Barozzi, Ludovico de Varthema e il suo “Itinerario”


Also in Varthema’s linguistic choices, the association between sacri-fice and blood is evident. What deserves attention is that in Varthema’s imagery such an association evokes a genuine opposition between God and Satan, between Christians and Gentiles. He describes the devil wor-shippers as merely imitating the worshippers of god. As a result, in Var-thema’s depiction, the Indian religion is a distorted religion and the Indi-an devotees are mistaken worshippers. On the base of such a description, I would suggest that a well-established imagery on sacrifice – connected with blood and inanimate idols45, therefore with strongly iconic religions – was dipped in the European doctrinal, theological, literary, and icono-graphic repertory, so that it could facilitate any attempt to define (and stereotype) the religions which were perceived as irreducibly other from the historical monotheisms.

Indeed, the Itinerario’s success throughout Europe may be entirely understood if we consider both the European print culture and the great doctrinal turmoil among Catholics and Reformed Protestants at the begin-ning of 16th c. Among the several editions of Itinerario, the German edi-tion of 1515 requires special emphasis because of the included woodcut illustrations by Augsburg artist Jörg Breu the Elder (c. 1475/80-1537). In-deed, while the verbal description of Indian worshippers by Varthema is connoted by a «biblical-monstrous-diabolical-apocalyptic»46 imagery ad-dressed to invert Christianity into its opposite – idolatry, demonolatry –, the illustrations by Breu add some visual details which open a glimpse into the religious climate and the print culture of 16th-century Middle Eu-rope. As Stephanie Leitch has recently pointed out,

«[i]n order to furnish this Indian god with the Gestalt of a typical demon, Breu appropriated motifs from temptations of St. Anthony or from Last Judgment imagery. Breu also crowns the deumo with the triple tiara similar to that worn by the Pope and parodied by contemporary anti-papal propaganda»47.

This difficulty arises when contrasting Christianity with other re-ligions in the attempt to find terms for comparison, but this is only one side of the coin. The other side shows many attempts to describe «distorted bodies and bizarre customs»48 in contrast to the Christian

italiana, Roma 1996; C. Forti, Sull’itinerario di Ludovico de Varthema, in M. Donattini - G. Marcocci - S. Pastore (eds.), L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi. Per Adriano Prosperi, vol. ii, Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, Pisa 2011, pp. 21-31.

45 Cfr. the attention on the corruptive, handmade and inanimate nature of idols in Wis 13; 14:8, 11-12, 27, 29; 15:15; Apoc 2:20; 9:20.

46 Cfr. T.K. Beal, Religion and its Monsters, Routledge, New York 2002, p. 114.47 S. Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print

Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke - New York 2010, p. 132.48 J.M. Archer, Old worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in early modern


sense of normalcy. In some respects Breu did little more visually than Varthema has already written. Varthema’s words to describe the statue worshipped by the king of Calicut already provided a clear relation, in opposing terms, with the head of the Catholic church when he writes that a monstrous statue called Deumo, bearing theriomorphic marks, dressed in a crown made like that of the papal kingdom. It is not much of a surprise that such transfiguration of the inverted Pope has been then easily satirised in the polemical pamphlets during the Reformation49, becoming from «simply a matter of ethnography» to «heavy artillery» against Catholic Christianity50.

It is noteworthy that the vivacious circulation of a literary and icono-graphic repertory – partially due to the notoriety of Vespucci’s (authentic or apocryphal) writings51 – has probably influenced Varthema – and then facilitated Breu – to outline the motif of anthropophagy among the ‘pa-gans’ of the Indies. It should be recalled that in addition to the Deumo put in the middle of the chapel as an inverted Pope, there were also other ‘dev-ils’ (Sathanas) described by Varthema as diabolic figures seated among flames and eating damned souls. With no doubt, such a kind of represen-tation is immersed in a strong medieval hell imagery that can be easily found throughout 14th-century Italian art52, tracing back to the apocalyptic imagery against the worshippers of inanimate and handmade objects. Such a background provided Varthema with powerful imagery and terminology for implied suggestion and shared meanings particularly surrounding the concept of ‘sacrifice’.

From the same milieu arose a consistent repertory that provided Eu-ropean chroniclers with similar features for the description of Huitzilo-

English writing, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2001, pp. 151ff; cfr. also J. Spinks, The Southern Indian “Devil in Calicut” in Early Modern Northern Europe, cit., pp. 31-33; S.N. Balagangadhara, “The heathen in his blindness”–: Asia, the West, and the dynamic of religion, Brill, Leiden - New York 1994, pp. 82ff; P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, cit., infra.

49 See, as an example, Das Wolffgesang (Adam Petri, Basel 1520) attributed to Joachim von Watt, for a pamphlet where Lutheran propagandists attack Thomas Murner, one of Luther’s opponents, and the Catholic clergy. Cfr. R. Gelders, Genealogy of Colonial Discourse: Hindu Traditions and the Limits of European Representation, in «Comparative Studies in Society and History» 51, 3 (2009), pp. 563-589: pp. 574ff; S. Leitch, Mapping Ethnography, cit., pp. 132-133; E.L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge - New York 1983, p. 166.

50 R. Gelders, Genealogy of Colonial Discourse, cit., p. 582.51 On circulation of Vespucci’s writings, see S. Leitch, Mapping Ethnography, cit., pp.

140ff; L. Voigt - E. Brancaforte, The Traveling Illustrations of Sixteenth-Century Travel Nar-ratives, in «PLMA. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America» 129, 3 (2014), pp. 365-398: pp. 371ff; I. Caraci Luzzana, «Per lasciar di me qualche fama», cit., esp. pp. 65-94.

52 Cfr. P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, cit., p. 17; T.K. Beal, Religion and its Monsters, cit., pp. 114ff; J. Le Goff - N. Truong, Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge, Liana Lévi, Paris 2003.


pochtli, the Aztec god worshipped at Templo Mayor, of whom no idol has ever been found53. As Elizabeth Hill Boone noticed, among Europeans

«[o]ne tradition saw Huitzilopochtli along the lines of a Graeco-Roman deity. The other was based in the Christian analogue, whereby Huitzilopochtli, who was clearly incompatible with a saint or one of the Trinity, was held to be an incarnation of the devil»54.

The strong similarity between this Aztec god, as it has been painted in illustrations of European books from the 17th c., and the Deumo described by Varthema and then designed by Breu should be searched in the hy-pothesis that a pre-existent imagery in Europe about religions other than Christianity has aided the transposition of mirabilia from the eyewitness reports to their readers. Moreover, stereotyped representations of other religions have started to circulate using those same illustrations – often cheaper for publishers who could not pay professional woodcutters and engravers – that often accompanied the editions of travelogues and the books on the New World and natives, enthusiastically received by Euro-pean audiences55. But a great role has also been played by Franciscans in New Spain. Among others, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún redescribes, in his Códice Florentino, the pictographic representations of Huitzilopochtli gradually diabolising this extra-human entity from a Graeco-Roman war-rior god into a devilish fire breathing dragon56. A major attention to the impact of the circulation of pre-existent imagery in Europe might thus, contribute to enlarge Boone’s investigation on the construction of a de-vice, which has served Europeans to encapsulate the discovery of a plural otherness into a pattern that has been reiterated in the colonial experience.

What I would like to stress is the need of a successful communication between travellers, conquistadores, merchants – in search of mirabilia – and the European audience – expecting mirabilia – as two sides of the same coin. Such communication has been satisfied at two levels:

1) the newcomers provided the keys and the models to interpret local societies;

2) their audience received exactly what they expected because they started off with the same repertory.

53 E.H. Boone, Incarnations of the Aztec Supernatural: The Image of Huitzilopochtli in Mexico and Europe, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia 1989, p. 3.

54 Ibi, p. 57.55 Ibi, pp. 59ff; L. Voigt - E. Brancaforte, The Traveling Illustrations of Sixteenth-Century

Travel Narratives, cit., pp. 367ff; M. van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590-1634), Brill, Leiden - Boston 2008, passim; B. Bu-cher, Icon and Conquest, cit., esp. pp. 3-12, 31-39.

56 Cfr. L. Valiñas, Descubriendo una nueva imagen de Huitzilopochtli oculta en el texto náhuatl del Códice Florentino, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City 2007; S. Botta, Toward a Missionary Theory of Polytheism, cit., pp. 22ff.


As a result, the more divergent from that familiar model a reality appeared, the more it required a manipulated remoulding to be digested in European terms. While Europeans tried to adjust their mental map to the new ‘cultural landscapes’, the framework within which otherness was incorporated has become increasingly strict.

The final act of this process was, in fact, the age of missions and con-versions at any price. But that is another story.

To conclude, in describing the ‘sacrifices’ of Others, the Europeans – travellers, merchants, military officers – stressed the ‘idolatrous’, ‘pa-gan’, and ‘erroneous’ nature of local practices. At the same time, ‘sacri-fice’ as an interpretative category provided them with a tool of compari-son between local religions and their personal Christian background.

Among the plurality of ritual activities, ‘sacrifice’ has been even-tually identified with an efficient pattern to define and understand the ‘new Gentiles’, in line with the Christian exegetical repertory of the fight against idolaters and pagans. As a result, ‘sacrifice’ has become a ‘good term’ to think with, describe, and communicate ‘otherness’ to the Euro-pean audience in religious and aesthetic contexts. ‘Sacrifice’ allowed the eyewitnesses to overcome the cultural shock and to convert empirical data into topics for the hunger of the exotic shared among European read-ers. At the same time, ‘sacrifice’ was a functional category to reiterate the triumph of monotheists over the idolaters and the ‘sacrifice-performers’.

In such a scenario ‘sacrifice’ has worked as a device able to produce a particular effect: a slow demonisation of other religions. As a result, other gods have gradually become false gods, inanimate idols, monstrous de-mons, and corrupted devils in the European representations of Otherness.

ABSTRACT

What I intend to discuss is an issue that has strongly marked the at-

tempts to define religion as a comparative notion in the early modern age,

at the beginning of the great encounter between the European conquer-

ors, merchants, and travellers and the inhabitants of the faraway lands. In

order to discuss the construction of religion as a colonial concept, I will

focus on the use of ‘sacrifice’ as a semantically efficient term in various at-

tempts made, from 15th c. onwards, by Christian Europeans to describe In-

dia and the Indian people, rites, and laws for their audience. I will suggest

that ‘sacrifice’, strictly connected with idolatry, has served as a category

that is ‘good to think with’ for the understanding of Others. It served, at

the same time, as a cultural instrument to visualise the features of false

religions when the discourse and the narratives on ‘otherness’ have defini-

tively shifted from simple description to obsessive stereotypisation.


In questo articolo intendo trattare uno dei temi che ha maggiormente

segnato ogni tentativo, in Età moderna, di definire la nozione di religione

in prospettiva comparativa, focalizzando il momento dell’incontro tra gli

europei – conquistatori, mercanti e viaggiatori – e gli abitanti di terre

lontane. Al fine di discutere la costruzione della religione quale concetto

coloniale, mi soffermerò sul tema del ‘sacrificio’ quale termine dalla se-

mantica efficace che, dal xv secolo in poi, è stato impiegato nelle lingue dei cristiani europei nell’impresa di descrivere ai lettori in patria l’India

e i suoi abitanti, i riti e le leggi. Intendo inoltre mostrare come ‘sacrifi-

cio’, in stretta correlazione con la nozione di idolatria, funga da catego-

ria ‘buona da pensare’ nelle dinamiche di comprensione dell’altro e, al

tempo stesso, da strumento culturale per visualizzare gli elementi costi-

tutivi della ‘falsa religione’. Questo aspetto è riscontrabile nel passaggio

da un liguaggio squisitamente descrittivo a uno fortemente omologante

nella dimensione discorsiva e narrativa.

KEYWORDS

sacrifice, idolatry, travel writing, Ludovico de Varthema, colonial dis-course in early modern agesacrificio, idolatria, letteratura odeporica, Ludovico de Varthema, discor-