Fr. Miguel da Purificação between Madrid and Rome: account of a journey to Europe by a Portuguese friar born in India

Abstract

The Iberian imperial experiences stimulated the establishment of transnational missionary networks and an intense mobility of the regular clergy. Apart from the traveling of friars and clerics who left Europe for different American, African and Asiatic territories –already covered by a vast secondary literature– the travels to Europe by the clerics established or born in those territories also deserve to be studied. This essay analyzes the journey of Miguel da Purificação, a Franciscan friar born in India in the late sixteenth century, to Madrid, Rome and Lisbon in the 1630s, where he hoped to resolve jurisdictional issues relating to the Franciscan province to which he belonged. His was also a written journey, displayed in a report –the Relação Defensiva– which allows for insights into the bureaucracy of ecclesiastical processes in the context of the relationship between the Iberian Union and the Papacy in times of royal patronage and Propaganda Fide, the role of ecclesiastical writing in the dynamics of Creolization, and the place of writing in the travels of clerics. An attempt is also made to compare this type of travel with clerical journeys in the Spanish part of the Habsburg Empire.