Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas

By Mirela Altic

Analyzing more than 150 historical maps, this book traces the Jesuits’ significant contributions to mapping and mapmaking from their arrival in the New World.

In 1540, in the wake of the tumult brought on by the Protestant Reformation, Saint Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits. The Society’s goal was to revitalize the faith of Catholics and to evangelize to non-Catholics through charity, education, and missionary work. By the end of the century, Jesuit missionaries were sent all over the world, including to South America. In addition to performing missionary and humanitarian work, Jesuits also served as cartographers and explorers under the auspices of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French crowns as they ventured into remote areas to find and evangelize to native populations.

In Encounters in the New World, Mirela Altic analyzes more than 150 of their maps, most of which have never previously been published. She traces the Jesuit contribution to mapping and mapmaking from their arrival in the New World into the post-suppression period, placing it in the context of their worldwide undertakings in the fields of science and art. Altic’s analysis also shows the incorporation of indigenous knowledge into the Jesuit maps, effectively making them an expression of cross-cultural communication—even as they were tools of colonial expansion. This ambiguity, she reveals, reflects the complex relationship between missions, knowledge, and empire. Far more than just a physical survey of unknown space, Jesuit mapping of the New World was in fact the most important link to enable an exchange of ideas and cultural concepts between the Old World and the New.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jul 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226791197

Book preview

Cover Page for Encounters in the New World

Encounters in the New World

Encounters in the New World

Jesuit Cartography of the Americas

Mirela Altic

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79105-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79119-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226791197.001.0001

This book is published with generous support from the Barry MacLean Collection.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The Fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Slukan-Altić, Mirela, author.

Title: Encounters in the New World : Jesuit cartography of the Americas /Mirela Altic.

Description: Chicago ; London : University of the Chicago Press, 2021. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021861 | ISBN 9780226791050 (Cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780226791197 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cartography—America—History. | Jesuits—America—History. | America—Discovery and exploration—Maps. | America—Maps—Early works to 1800.

Classification: LCC GA401.S59 2021 | DDC 526.097/09031—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021861

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my husband, for his love and support

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1   The History and Concept of Jesuit Mapmaking

1.1   The Organization of the Society of Jesus and Its Educational System

1.2   The Society of Jesus in the Age of Encounter and Exploration

1.3   Cartographers of Heaven and Earth

1.4   The Emergence and Development of Jesuit Cartography in the Americas

1.5   Techniques of Jesuit Mapmaking

1.6   Editorial Interventions into Jesuit Maps: Originals and Their Edited Versions

1.7   The Iconography of Jesuit Maps

1.8   The Dissemination of Jesuit Maps and Their Impact on European Cartography

1.9   Changing the Discourse: Post-Suppression Jesuit Cartography

2   The Possessions of the Spanish Crown

2.1   The Viceroyalty of New Spain

2.1.1   The Jesuit Cartographic Endeavor in Florida

2.1.2   Mexico: Missionary Cartography of the Borderlands

2.1.2.1   Ivan Rattkay: Cartographic Pioneer of the Tarahumara Region

2.1.2.2   Adam Gilg and the Art of Surveying in the Province of Sonora

2.1.2.3   Eusebio Francisco Kino and His Followers: Mapping the Northwestern Frontier

2.1.2.4   Cartographic Synthesis from the Time of the Military and Juridical Reorganization of New Spain

2.1.2.5   Mapmaking Attempts in Sinaloa

2.1.2.6   The Jesuit Cartography of Nayarit

2.1.2.7   Juan Nentwig and Bernhard Middendorff: Cartographers of the Pima Uprising and Its Aftermath

2.1.3   Baja California: Revealing a Geographical Enigma

2.1.3.1   Eusebio Francisco Kino and the Appearance of the First Jesuit Maps of Baja California

2.1.3.2   Ferdinand Konščak (Fernando Consag): Confirming the Peninsularity

2.2   The Viceroyalty of Peru

2.2.1   The Province of Peru: Mapping the Moxos Missions

2.2.2   The Jesuit Cartography of Chile: Between Mythology and Utilitarianism

2.2.3   Patagonia: Jesuits at the Southern Edge of the Spanish Empire

2.2.4   The Province of Paraguay and the Río de la Plata: The Cartography of Conflicts and Martyrs

2.2.4.1   Cartographic Reflections of the Treaty of Madrid

2.2.4.2   The Jesuit Cartography of the Guaraní War and Its Aftermath

2.2.4.3   The Post-Suppression Jesuit Cartography of Paraguay

2.2.5   The Province of Quito: Challenging Border Disputes along the Amazon

2.2.5.1   The Post-Suppression Vision of Quito: From Territorialization to Idealism

2.2.6   New Granada: Defense and Commerce in the Orinoco River Region

3   Portuguese Possessions: Brazil

3.1   The Jesuit Mapping of Brazil: Cartography of the Edges of the Empire

3.1.1   Claiming the Amazon and Setting the Northern Brazilian Border with French Guiana

3.1.2   Mapping the Western Edge of the Empire: The Jesuit View of Minas Gerais

3.1.3   At the Southern Edge: The Jesuit Cartography of Colônia do Sacramento, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul

3.1.4   Back to the Northern Edge: The Amazon in the Aftermath of the Treaty of Madrid

4   New France: Searching for the Northwest Passage

4.1   The Early Jesuit Mapping of Huronia

4.2   Cartography under Iroquois Attacks: A New Discourse by Francesco Giuseppe Bressani

4.3   Mapping the Western Great Lakes (Huron, Michigan, and Superior)

4.4   Jacques Marquette and His Breakthrough to the Mississippi River

4.5   Pierre Raffeix and His Contribution to the Mapping of the Iroquois Country

4.6   The Final Decline of Jesuit Mapping in New France

Plates

Concluding Remarks

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

Introduction

Members of the Society of Jesus, more than any other religious order of early modern Europe, valued maps and geography not only for the control of their missionary space, but also as a powerful presentation of their achievements in terms of evangelization and cultural exchange. According to Harley, the Jesuit map had a special mission, which was to represent the power of the order and the colonial state.¹ It was a tool of visual persuasion accompanying the letters and relations that the Jesuits sent back to Europe. Even if patrons and superiors of the order had not traveled to the Americas, maps, as surrogates of geographical reality, made the conquest believable. Jesuit maps also served as the basis for developing strategies for future territorial expansion of the order. Moreover, Jesuit mapmaking, by helping to open up new territories to colonization and economic exploitation, became part of the wider campaign for colonial promotion. Therefore, Jesuit cartography is a testament of both territorial and the intellectual conquest. Compiled on the basis of firsthand knowledge, Jesuit maps promoted field observation and scientifically based mapmaking even before the European Enlightenment.

This book deals with the analysis of maps produced by the Jesuits during their missionary work in the possessions of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French crowns in both Americas. The research traces the Jesuit contribution to mapping and mapmaking from their arrival in the New World until their suppression (in the Portuguese possessions in 1759, in the French in 1764, and in the Spanish in 1767). It further focuses on their cartographic work in the post-suppression period, when the Jesuits continued their work in exile, even after the promulgation of the papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor in 1773. The book analyzes the Jesuit contribution to cartography in the context of their worldwide undertakings in science and art. Although primarily based on the Jesuits’ own exploration, their mapping of the New World was not just a physical survey of unknown space. In this encounter, the Jesuits were bearers of new cultural concepts and agents of new ideas. Their ongoing presence introduced the concept of relationship with the local nations, based on the exchange of new cultural ideas, which could henceforth be woven into the fabric of indigenous societies. The Jesuits were the most important link bringing the two cultures together, and they successfully enabled transatlantic cultural exchanges between the Old and New Worlds.

Accordingly, when analyzing maps, I did not focus only on the analysis of individual maps; rather, I tried primarily to establish the interrelationship between individual maps and the impact of any one map on others. I was particularly interested in the modalities of the transfer of information and in the ways the information noted on Jesuit maps affected other maps—both within and beyond Jesuit cartography. I also paid particular attention to the influence of the knowledge of local communities that was to a great extent implemented in Jesuit maps. Both sides benefited from this exchange of knowledge. Jesuit missionary work greatly impacted the transformation of local traditions, and at the same time the local nations transferred their own indigenous knowledge and experiences to the Jesuits. The knowledge exchange that started at the local level, between members of local communities and the Jesuit cartographers, then continued at a higher level as well—between the Jesuits and the colonial authorities. Not only did Jesuit maps influence one another, but they also had an effect on maps of colonial origin. Local colonial (and military) authorities often used Jesuit maps as the basis for their own mapmaking. Moreover, the Jesuits, who were very well acquainted with the terrain of the region, were often directly involved in cartographic campaigns aimed at creating maps for official purposes. In addition, Jesuit cartography also made a significant impact on European cartography of the early modern period. Thanks to the Jesuits’ frequent reports to their superiors in Europe, their maps were quickly assimilated into the mainstream of European cartography.

Despite the obvious importance of Jesuit cartography for the mapmaking of the Americas, as well as for the history of cartography in general, there is still no synthesis that would enable an overview into cartography developed by Jesuit missionaries in the New World. To date, a number of extensive studies have been published that deal with the contribution of the Jesuits to the development of science, especially mathematics and medicine. Among them, several need to be mentioned here as having also tackled the issue of Jesuit scientific interests important for mapmaking, such as astronomical observations, geodetic measurements, and navigation. Steven Harris was one of the first to frame Jesuit science as an important topic for understanding the global history of science. His dissertation, Jesuit Ideology and Jesuit Science: Scientific Activity in the Society of Jesus, 1540–1773 (University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1988), was the first synthesis of that kind that opened this topic to the wider scientific community. The international symposium Agents of Change: The Jesuits and Encounters of the Worlds (Loyola University, Chicago, 1992) was the first to recognize increased scholarly attention to the impact of the Society of Jesus in encounters between European and indigenous cultures in the Americas. This meeting led to the creation of a volume edited by Joseph A. Gagliano and Charles E. Ronan, Jesuit Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Chroniclers, Geographers, Educators and Missionaries in the Americas, 1549–1767 (Rome, 1997), that examined the role of Jesuit missionaries in transforming Amerindian cultures and considered how the Jesuits promoted cultural exchange. The proceedings and results of this conference evolved into an initiative that sought to rethink Jesuit contributions to the history of the Americas, and the meeting was followed by a series of other conferences and publications. In 1997 a group of scholars convened a major international conference to discuss the world of the Jesuits, which was continued in another conference held at Boston College in 2002. These two conferences led to the compilation of volumes 1 and 2, edited by John W. O’Malley et al., entitled The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto, 1999 and 2006), which discussed Jesuit work from a variety of perspectives. More recently, researchers made further contributions to this subject: Andrés I. Prieto’s study Missionary Scientist: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810 (Nashville, 2011) analyzes the Jesuits’ scientific activities in the Andean region, while Miguel de Asúa discusses Jesuit science in today’s Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay in Science in the Vanished Arcadia: Knowledge of Nature in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and Río de la Plata (Leiden and Boston, 2014). Agustín Udías, in Jesuit Contribution to Science: A History (Springer, 2015), synthesizes a comprehensive history of the many contributions the Jesuits made to science from their founding to the present. Thomás A. S. Haddad’s contribution, Global Infra-Connections? Science and Everyday Transactions in a Jesuit Early-Modern Missionary Setting (Newcastle, 2018) is crucial for better understanding the role of science in Jesuit missions and their global missionary activities. And in 2019 a special issue of the Journal of Jesuit Studies was devoted entirely to Jesuit cartography.

Although in recent decades significant light has been shed on the Jesuit contribution to the history of science, their cartographic work has remained somewhat in the shadow of their other scientific achievements. There are a fair number of works dedicated to individual Jesuit maps or Jesuit cartographers, but the broader and more diverse practices of Jesuit cartography in the Americas have proven relatively elusive. The promotion of greater awareness of the importance of the Jesuits in the mapping of the New World expectedly came from Church circles, particularly the Jesuits themselves, who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, encountered numerous Jesuit maps stored in archives and libraries in Rome, Madrid, and Lisbon, as well as other Jesuit centers. The exhibition organized in the gardens of the Vatican in 1925 marked a breakthrough in that, for the first time, numerous maps produced by Catholic missionaries were put on show in one of the pavilions. Recently several exhibitions have been devoted to Jesuit accomplishments in the field of cartography. The exhibition Galleons and Globalization (Donohue Rare Book Room, University of San Francisco, 2010), which commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci, presented the Jesuit’s 1602 map of the world, further establishing Ricci as the most important Jesuit cartographer in China. In 2014, on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the restoration of the Jesuit order, the Loyola University Museum of Art prepared an exhibition entitled Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814–2014, in which special attention was given to the nineteenth-century Jesuit mapping of America and to its most prominent representative, Pierre-Jean De Smet (1801–1873). In 2016 an exhibition titled China at the Center: Rare Ricci and Verbiest World Maps at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum once again pointed to Jesuit cartographic activities in China.

The first researcher who tried to give a synthetic overview of the work of Jesuit cartographers and to evaluate their maps in the context of their contribution to the mapping of South America was Guillermo Furlong Cardiff (1889–1974), an Argentinian Jesuit and historian. He was among the first to turn the attention of the scientific community to the important contribution of the Jesuits to the development of cartography. His book Cartografía jesuítica del Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires, 1936) was the first to draw the attention to the Jesuits as distinguished cartographers who significantly influenced the history of mapping, as well as the history of cartography. Ernest J. Burrus (1907–1991), a Jesuit and a leading historian of northwestern New Spain, devoted a significant part of his research to Jesuit cartographers. His book La obra cartográfica de la Provincia Mexicana de la Compañía de Jesús, 1567–1767 (Madrid, 1967) summarized Jesuit cartographic activities in New Spain, particularly in Baja California, and his Kino and the Cartography of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson, 1965) analyzed the cartographic work and influence of Eusebio Francisco Kino, the most famous of the Jesuit cartographers. Vicente D. Sierra, in his book Los jesuítas germanos en la conquista espiritual de Hispano-América (Buenos Aires, 1944), paid special attention to the cartographic contribution of the numerous Jesuits from the German-speaking countries. More recently the historian David Buisseret particularly distinguished himself in research on Spanish Jesuit cartography in his extensive article Jesuit Cartography in Central and South America (Rome, 1997), as well as several other important articles on indigenous cartography (1998) and Spanish colonial mapping (2007).

The first map historian to draw attention to the significance of Jesuit mapping projects from a more literary perspective was John Brian Harley (1932–1991). In his compact but extremely influential work The Map as Mission: Jesuit Cartography as an Art of Persuasion, Harley laid the foundation for further study of Jesuit cartography in the context of colonial power, ideology, and control of missionary space. By scrutinizing the maps’ symbolism rather than their accuracy, he drew attention to Jesuit mapping as a specific social construct. Based on Harley’s canon, a new generation of critical studies that combine epistemology with historical map experience appeared in the works of such scholars as Rodrigo Moreno Jeria, Luis I. de Lasa, María Teresa Luiz, Catherine Burdick, Camila Loureiro Dias, Margaret Ewalt, Santa Arias, and Eileen Willingham.

One of the first researches on Jesuit cartographers of the Portuguese possessions in America was carried out by the Brazilian Jesuit historian Serafim Leite (1890–1969). He dealt in particular with the work of the eminent Jesuit mapmaker Diogo Soares, which he summed up in his Diogo Soares, S.I.: Matemático, astrónomo e geógrafo de Sua Majestade no Estado do Brasil (1684–1748) (Lisbon, 1947). His work has been continued by a whole array of historians of cartography, including Jorge Pimentel Cintra, Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Friedrich Ewald Renger, Antônio Gilberto Costa, Artur Henrique Barcelos, Valquiria Ferreira da Silva, and André Ferrand de Almeida. The last-named published an extensive study on the Portuguese colonial mapping project of Brazil assigned to Jesuit royal mathematicians, A formação do espaço brasileiro e o projecto do Novo Atlas da América Portuguesa (1713–1748) (Lisbon, 2001), which is an invaluable reference to Jesuit cartography in Portuguese America. Artur Henrique Barcelos published O Mergulho no Seculum: Exploração, conquista e organização espacial jesuítica na América espanhola colonial (Porto Alegre, 2013), a synthesis of his research on the Jesuit mapping of the Spanish possessions stemming from his doctoral dissertation. The cartographic achievements of central European Jesuits in individual provinces in South America (Spanish and Portuguese) have been dealt with to some extent in the series Jesuiten aus Zentraleuropa in Portugiesisch- und Spanisch-Amerika (Münster, 2005–).

On the area of New France, the first comprehensive review of Jesuit contributions to the mapping of that part of North America is given in the dissertation of Nellis M. Crouse, Contributions of the Canadian Jesuits to the Geographical Knowledge of New France, 1632–1675 (Cornell University, 1924). Jean Delanglez, the renowned historian of the Society of Jesus, has made a significant contribution to the field of exploration and mapping of New France and the Mississippi Valley (1935, 1943, 1945, and 1948). During the second half of the twentieth century, the Canadian scholar Conrad E. Heidenreich particularly distinguished himself by publishing numerous works detailing his research on the Jesuit mapping of New France (1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1988, 2005, and 2007), becoming one of the most prominent experts in Jesuit cartography of Canada. More recently, David Buisseret wrote several important works on French Jesuit mapping, a catalog entitled Mapping the French Empire (Chicago, 1991), and several articles on Great Lakes (2017 and 2019) and the Mississippi (2011) coauthored with Carl Kupfer.

A more comprehensive and deeper analysis of Jesuit maps that would offer a synthetic insight into the characteristics and development of Jesuit cartography in the New World has been particularly difficult because of the wide dispersal of Jesuit maps across numerous archives, libraries, and museums around the world. One of the most important among them is certainly the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Archive of the Society of Jesus in Rome), a central archival institution of the Jesuit order. It contains a catalog of the Jesuits who worked as missionaries in the New World, as well as of their numerous written reports, often supplemented with their autograph maps. Numerous maps are held in Madrid, Lisbon, and Paris, the centers of the Spanish, Portuguese and French crowns. As far as the Spanish possessions are concerned, most of the Jesuit reports ended up in the Casa de Contratación in Seville, a government agency of the Spanish Empire in charge of all Spanish exploration and colonization, as well as of its mapmaking enterprise. Today, these documents can be seen in the Archivo General de Indias (Seville) and in the Archivo General de Simancas, the official archive of the crown of Castile. In addition, a significant number of Jesuit cartographic sources are stored in three other institutions in Madrid: the Biblioteca Nacional de España (National Library of Spain), the Archivo del Museo Naval (Archive of the Naval Museum), and the Real Academia de la Historia (Royal Academy of History). The Brazilian Jesuits’ reports are mostly held by the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (National Library in Lisbon) and the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Overseas Historical Archive). Many manuscript originals of Jesuit maps are held in Paris by the Bibliothèque nationale. Not only did the Jesuit maps of New France arrive at this institution, but so did numerous maps from the possessions of the Spanish crown, especially after 1700, when Spain was directly linked to France through the House of Bourbon. A particularly important assemblage of Jesuit maps at the National Library of France is found in the collection of the renowned cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, who relied largely upon Jesuit efforts when producing his own maps of the New World. A significant number of manuscript originals remain in the colonial administrative centers in the Americas, such as Mexico City, Quito, Bogotá, Caracas, Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Rio de Janeiro, where they are kept to this day. Jesuit maps are also preserved in the rich archives of many Jesuit universities in Europe and in the Americas. I particularly point out the archival holdings at Loyola University in Chicago. Rich archival materials are also held by libraries and universities that specialize in the colonial history of the Americas, such as the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as private libraries, including the Newberry Library (Chicago), the MacLean Collection (Lake Forest), and the Huntington Library (San Marino), which also have in their collections a significant number of printed and manuscript Jesuit maps.

This book is an attempt to compare the Jesuit maps of Spanish, French, and Portuguese provenances, using the holdings from all the libraries and archives mentioned above. By carrying out a comparative analysis of these materials, I wanted to find out what Jesuit cartography was, in which contexts it developed, what its most salient characteristics were, and what impact it had on the development of the history of cartography in general. Interpretations of Jesuit maps of the Americas are given from both macro- and microhistorical perspectives.

1

The History and Concept of Jesuit Mapmaking

1.1 The Organization of the Society of Jesus and Its Educational System

Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) was a Spanish Basque priest and theologian who founded the religious order called the Society of Jesus and became its first Superior General. The personal history of the founder, as well as the general historical context prevailing at the time of the order was founded, largely determined the structure and the activity of the Society of Jesus in the centuries to come. Born Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola, he started his career by joining the army of the Kingdom of Castile at the age of seventeen. His military career, which ended when he was seriously wounded in battle while defending the Spanish city of Pamplona against the French in 1521, strongly influenced his later activity as a superior. In particular, the strict military hierarchy and discipline that he experienced while serving in the army had a powerful impact on the way in which the future Superior General would set up the Jesuit order. After a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1523, he studied Latin and theology at the Universities of Alcalá (1526) and Salamanca (1527). He then moved to Paris to study at the Collège de Montaigu (1528), where he remained for over seven years.¹ While in Paris, Ignatius witnessed the expansion of Protestantism as well as the Counter-Reformation, two movements that contributed to the permanent transformation of Europe’s religious and political landscape and had strong repercussions on Jesuit activities.

In 1534 Ignatius gathered around him the six key companions with whom he founded the Society of Jesus in 1539. They created a centralized organization for the order and stressed absolute obedience to the pope and to superiors in the church hierarchy. The Society was approved in 1540 by Pope Paul III, and Ignatius was chosen as its first Superior General. When the Society was founded, the Age of Encounter and Exploration was already in full swing. The Society of Jesus was preceded by other religious orders—Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Recollects, and Augustinians—in the rapid territorial expansion of European empires into the New World.² Even though these religious orders predated the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus soon became the most influential order in both worlds, the Old and the New. Up until the eighteenth century, the Society amassed a huge fortune and became immensely influential owing to the number and spread of its missions, their stability and economic self-sufficiency, the close links between the Jesuits and the Creole population whom they educated, the Society’s tremendous material wealth (a significant part of its estates had been bequeaths from wealthy Creoles), and the authority of the educational system it established, which was exquisite in all areas of science. That also lent to their prominence as explorers and cartographers, activities in which the Jesuits soon outstripped all the rest in extent and quality.

One of the most prominent features of the Society of Jesus was its missionaries’ mobility. In order to maintain discipline and efficiency in very remote areas and with members that traveled frequently, the Jesuits had to have an extremely centralized, almost military organizational structure. The order was governed by a Superior General, elected by a general congregation. The Superior General was the only person appointed by election. A province consisted of cities, as urban and educational centers of the Jesuit structure, and missions, as their provincial outposts. Several provinces constituted an administrative territory known as an assistancy (the name comes from the fact that each fell under the competence of one of the Jesuit general’s assistants), which corresponded approximately to the major nations or linguistic divisions in Europe: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.³ Assistancies and provinces were the main intermediaries between the heads of the order and the lower instances, such as cities and missions. Heads of individual assistancies and provinces were appointed from above rather than being elected locally, which created a strict hierarchical pyramid. The Jesuit organizational structure is clearly laid out in the so-called Ignatian Tree, published by Athanasius Kircher (fig. 1).⁴ The main branches of the tree correspond to the assistancies (their spatial sequence reflects more or less the chronological order of their establishment), while smaller limbs representing the provinces terminate in leaves bearing the names of towns in which Jesuit colleges were located. Ignatius himself is shown kneeling at the base of the tree and holding in his hands the Jesuit Constitutions. In that sense, the Ignatian Tree captured nicely the themes of unity so crucial for the governance of a geographically dispersed religious order.⁵

Figure 1. The Ignatian Tree, as represented in Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Rome, 1646). (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich)

The fact that missionaries came to America from a number of different countries proved to be extremely important in influencing Jesuit activities in missions as well as their relationships and status in the New World. Their ethnic diversity included not only educational and cultural differences but also different approaches to certain social and political issues, especially those related to the enslavement of the native population (this difference was especially visible between missionaries of European descent and those of Creole descent). For that reason, Spain normally exerted strict control of the entry not only of foreigners but also of Spaniards into all its overseas possessions. Thanks to some very complex agreements between Castile and Aragon, the New World was agreed to belong solely to Castile. Immigration to overseas countries was thus allowed only for the subjects of Castile and not for the subjects of other crowns—which is why many non-Spanish Jesuits entered the Americas under false names. The same concern about missionaries of foreign origin existed in the Portuguese realm. The number of non-Portuguese missionaries, especially those in high positions, has been the source of much controversy and tension in Brazil.⁶ As an instrument of political precaution, all the colonial powers as well as the Jesuits themselves took special care to balance the number of foreign missionaries against domestic ones.⁷ Yet, although their different backgrounds created tensions as well as a certain suspicion of the crown, the missionaries’ multinationalism contributed to a better understanding of native cultures and facilitated the creation of a multicultural colonial society.

According to the Constitutions, all provinces had to maintain regular correspondence with the headquarters in Rome and, ideally, between themselves as well.⁸ It was from that obligation that so many Jesuit reports (known as relations) were produced; these were, in addition to their personal correspondence, the most important source of information about their activities in the field, including their explorations and mapping. In this regard, the Jesuits’ travels and field tasks were highly regulated as well.⁹ The Jesuits were instructed to record all local events and the characteristics of every indigenous culture with which they came into contact. This practice resulted in a robust textual production, composed of diverse documentary species—letters, reports, diaries, instructions, minutes, chronicles, natural histories, and so on. Not only was the production of texts a constant beginning with the early years of the order, but so were their circulation, both within the Society and to a wider audience that had access to part of it through publications. Thus, although dispersed, the Jesuits were not isolated. Official and private correspondence kept them in touch. Furthermore, their narratives consisted not only of text, but also of images. The abundance of images produced by the Jesuits, among which the maps had special meaning and value, distinguishes the order from their evangelizing counterparts. Their efforts led to the creation of many accounts accompanied by cartographic presentations that were based upon their original field observations and surveys. According to the map historian Júnia Ferreira Furtado, the reports were required to follow certain patterns of form and content to be considered reliable. The emphasis on reliability coincided with the Enlightenment’s scientific agenda of hypothesis and experimentation: the repeated gathering of data provided scientific reliability and accuracy.¹⁰ Each missionary had to send a report to his provincial, sometimes weekly but more often monthly, and the provincial would then put together four-month reports (litterae quadrimestres). At the end of the sixteenth century, these were pared down to annual reports known as litterae annuae. The gathering and redaction of the reports written by provincials were among the chief duties of the secretary to the general. All letters and reports were reviewed and edited, and only after these documents had passed a strict procedure would they be prepared to be printed for the general public in annual reports.¹¹ Correspondence between the Jesuits was also of particularly great importance for the dissemination of knowledge. Jesuit explorers often shared the experiences and results of their explorations. Several examples were known where personal correspondence led to the development or continuation of an exploration that would otherwise have been left unfinished or forgotten.¹²

Another central feature of the order was their academic excellence, both in science and in the humanities. Thanks to their well-organized colleges and seminaries, the Jesuits were among the best-educated people of their time, and many of them became tutors, confessors, and counselors to countless prominent figures and rulers. The most important decision in that respect was in 1560, when Diego Laínez (1512–1565), Ignatius’s successor, ordered that all Jesuits had to teach. Laínez’s decree determined the careers of almost all future Jesuits as teachers. The goal of Jesuit teaching went beyond saving souls: Jesuit schools had the secular purpose of improving civil society by educating boys to earn a living and to fill leadership positions. Moreover, the Jesuits soon recognized the potential of their education to serve and influence others, primarily the sons of the nobility. Their boarding schools for youths of noble birth, and a limited number of schools for boys from the citizen class, became numerous and extremely important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet, in practice, the vast majority of their students did not come from noble families. The existing data from the Jesuit school in Munich, one of the very few schools for which matriculation lists have survived, testify that between 1601 and 1776 only 4.9 percent of the students came from noble families, while another 11.9 percent came from families of civic office holders and no less than 83.2 percent of the students came from the rest of society.¹³ Jesuits’ status as the most prestigious educators of all social strata, including the nobility, explains their centuries-long influence on modern society. As soon as the first Jesuit school was founded in Messina in 1548, many others appeared across Europe. The first major Jesuit school was established in Rome in 1551 (Collegio Romano), which in 1556 was elevated to a university (studium generale). By the time of Ignatius’s death in 1556, the Jesuits were operating a network of forty-six colleges on three continents.¹⁴ They established an educational presence at every level—at universities and in seminaries, missions, and schools affiliated with the Society.¹⁵ Some of the most prominent Jesuit educational institutions in Europe were established in Italy (Rome, Messina, Macerata, Parma, Mantua, Palermo, Naples, and Bologna), France (Paris, La Fléche. Lyon, Billom, Poitiers, Dijon, Bordeaux, Reims, and Rouen), Spain (Alcalà, Salamanca, Seville, Toledo, Valladolid, and Gandía), German-speaking countries (Vienna, Innsbruck, Ingolstadt, Augsburg, Dillingen, Paderborn, Molsheim, Osnabrück, Bamberg, Munich, Cologne, Würzburg, Heidelberg, Trier, and Mainz), Portugal (Lisbon, Coimbra, Évora, Porto, Braga, and Bragança), and the Low Countries (Bruges, Antwerp, Liège, Leuven, and Douai).

Shortly after arriving in the New World, the Jesuits began founding their own colleges and universities there as well. The creation of educational centers in the main Spanish, Portuguese, and French cities in the Americas was instrumental to the establishment of the Society of Jesus on the continents. To meet the educational needs of the elite and to prepare future members of the order for their service, many Jesuit colleges soon developed into universities.¹⁶ The principles of their education in Europe and America had common foundations. The prevailing view so far has been that the largest number of Jesuit cartographers came from the lands of the German assistancy, that is, from the German-speaking area. Indeed, a large number of Jesuit cartographers working in the Americas were educated in Germany and the lands of the Habsburg monarchy (Eusebio Kino, Ivan Rattkay, Samuel Fritz, Bernhard Havestadt, Tadeáš Xaver Enis, and Martin Dobrizhoffer, among others). However, almost the same number of Jesuit cartographers came from Spain (such as José Cardiel, José Quiroga, José Gumilla, Bernardo Rotella, and José Sánchez Labrador), Italy (Antonio Machoni, Domenico Capacci, Giuseppe Bressani, and Filippo Salvatore Gilii), Portugal (Diogo Soares), and several other countries, including Belgium and France (Jean Magnin, Jérôme Lalemant, Jean de Brébeuf, Jacques Marquette, Claude-Jean Allouez, and Pierre Raffeix, to name a few). Also, it should be emphasized that not only did European Jesuit colleges serve as nurseries for Jesuit explorers, but a significant number of Jesuit cartographers were educated in Jesuit colleges in the Americas, such as Juan Francisco Dávila, Juan de Velasco, Alonso de Ovalle, Juan Ignacio Molina, and Joaquín Camaño y Bazán or José Palomino.

The basic document of their educational system, which came to be known as the Ratio Studiorum, promulgated in 1599, defined the main areas of teaching and teaching methods, including among them geography and astronomy (although at first only as additional content in the teaching of mathematics).¹⁷ Although the text of the Ratio Studiorum changed little in succeeding centuries, it is known that the original scope and theoretical approaches of Jesuit teaching expanded significantly, particularly their approach to the natural sciences. In the sixteenth century, geography was considered a part of cosmography—description of the universe—and its scope was to describe it and inscribe it on the terrestrial globe. Two traditions from ancient Greece were applied in early Jesuit colleges, one descriptive and indebted to Strabo, the other mathematical and derived from Ptolemy. While descriptive geography was taught as part of natural philosophy together with the commentaries of Aristotle and treaties on the heavens and meteors, mathematical geography belonged to the field of mathematics and involved the application of spherical geometry to the Earth, its projection onto a plane, and the determination of geographical latitude and longitude.¹⁸

At first heavily based upon Aristotelian philosophy and Ptolemaic astronomy, Jesuit geography gradually developed into an experimental science that used mathematical techniques.¹⁹ Christopher Clavius’s Christophori Clauii Bambergensis Ex Societate Iesu in Sphaeram Ioannis De Sacro Bosco Commentarius (Rome, 1581), one of the earliest textbooks for the teaching of mathematics and astronomy in Jesuit schools, presents geography in chapters II and III.²⁰ Another Jesuit, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, published an extensive work on geography entitled Geographiae et hydrographiae (Bologna, 1661). Following the tradition of mathematical geography, Riccioli focuses on the problem of determining latitude and longitude, attaching to his work a list of 2,800 locations with their coordinates. Geography as an academic discipline underwent especially important developments in Jesuit colleges in France, where humanism, natural philosophy, and mathematics were combined. In his three-volume work Parallela geographiae veteris et novae (Paris, 1648–49), Philippe Briet, a professor at the colleges in Paris and La Fléche, included extensive descriptions of European countries, accompanied by numerous maps. Georges Fournier, also a professor at La Fléche, wrote Hydrographiae (Paris, 1643) which is considered the first book on maritime geography. His colleague Jean François wrote La science de la geographie (Rennes, 1652), which was the first text to ignore the traditional descriptive approach and to define geography, on the basis of physical and mathematical principles, as a science of places.²¹

A change in the pronounced orientation of Jesuit education toward the natural sciences corresponded with changes in science in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, brought about by the advent of the Enlightenment. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, new concerns and ideas, driven by philosophers such as Descartes, Leibnitz, Malebranche, Gassendi, Locke, and others, changed the direction of these studies. A strictly scientific-empirical and experimental method was adopted, and many of the opinions of the ancient naturalist philosophers were discarded.²² Thus, for example, in German courses in the eighteenth century, not only geography was taught, but also architecture, engineering, hydrography, agriculture, and technical drawing.²³ In the French provinces, history and geography were taught in almost all colleges, with special attention to the European discovery of the Americas and the Spanish, French, and Portuguese explorations of the New World.²⁴ The status of geography as a prestigious science in the early eighteenth century was a very common theme on the covers and title pages of atlases and geographies. The title page of the well-known Jesuit Heinrich Scherer’s Geographia Artificialis (Munich, 1703) excellently thematizes how other sciences were invoked to support geography (plate 1).²⁵ The allegorical figures surrounding the globe show a hierarchy of sciences: Topography, History, Geometry, Astronomy, Arithmetic, and Cartography all support Geography, positioned at the top of the pyramid.

The changing status of geography in Jesuit education is quite well presented in an engraving from 1757 (fig. 2). It was published in the Acto académico of the Jesuit College of Cordelles in Barcelona, which illustrated the curriculum of that college. The eight fields of study include not only religion, political studies, heraldry, swordfighting, languages, and music and dancing, but also geography and astronomy, as well as cosmography.²⁶ The use of maps and globes in teaching is confirmed by several other records from Jesuit colleges, particularly Spanish ones, which, in their teaching, emphasized and elaborated on the application of mathematics to surveying, thus introducing the basics of geodesy into Jesuit education.²⁷ Their knowledge of geography and astronomy, as well as their knowledge of maps, enabled some Jesuits to develop into very prominent cartographers. On the other hand, an increasing number of Jesuit reports from the New World allowed them to quickly include their new insights in their students’ instruction. The Jesuits thus significantly influenced not only the history of the exploration of the Americas, but also the development of knowledge about it and the incorporation of that knowledge into European education and science.

Figure 2. Acto académico of the Jesuit College of Cordelles in Barcelona, showing their fields of study in 1757, among which geography with astronomy and cosmography took a prominent place. (Loyola University Chicago Archives & Special Collections)

1.2 The Society of Jesus in the Age of Encounter and Exploration

The Society, which from the very beginning had developed educational, cultural, and scientific activities, immediately engaged in missionary work as well. It was their missionary activity that would take them to the New World, where they would make a significant contribution to exploring and mapping as well as to the exchange of knowledge between Europeans and Amerindians. The founding of the Society of Jesus that coincided with the Age of Encounter made the exploration and mapping of the New World, to a large degree, the Jesuits’ missionary endeavor. European overseas exploration that led to the rise of European colonial empires and mercantilism enabled them to spread their influence beyond Europe. The interest of the Jesuits in traveling and exploring new lands was prompted by their fourth vow: to spread Catholicism through their missionary work. In this regard they followed the formula outlined in 1538 by Ignatius Loyola: Whatever the present Roman Pontiff and others to come will wish to command us with regard to the progress of souls and the propagation of the faith, or wherever he may be pleased to send us to any regions whatsoever, we will obey at once, without subterfuge or excuse, as far as in us lies. We pledge to do this whether he sends us among the Turks or to other infidels, even to the land they call India, or to any heretics or schismatics, or to any of the faithful.²⁸ Founded during the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuit order responded with their commitment to conversion to the Catholic faith and to the expansion of Catholicism, wherever the faithful might be.²⁹ That particular vow was skillfully used by European imperial politics, so that the Jesuits, by spreading the gospel among the indigenous peoples of the New World and the maps they were to produce, would also become a powerful tool for establishing and maintaining the colonial authority of the European imperial powers.

The founding and maintenance of Jesuit missions in remote parts of the New World were often the only visible sign of European presence and colonial belonging. Just as the European colonial powers were expanding their possessions to the Americas, so was the scope of activities of the Jesuits expanding into new lands. It was the Jesuits, with the strong support of European rulers, particularly those of Portugal, Spain, and France, who played a key role in the territorial expansion of these empires, establishing their authority, especially in the hard-to-reach interiors of the conquered lands. Established as part of the colonial drive of Portugal, Spain, and France, missions played an integral part in the formation of Brazil, the Viceroyalties of New Spain, New Granada and Peru, and New France. Thus, almost from the start of the conquest of the New World, European rulers supported sending the Jesuits to those countries. In the broader context, Jesuits were important tools of modernity in general, whose consolidation in the New World coincided with the rise of the Society of Jesus. The fact that they were active in so many fields and directions confirms that Jesuits were the crucial link to the economic, social, and political transformations that took place in the early modern era. While the early years of the Society were devoted to laying its foundations in Europe through its network of colleges and its gradual connection to power circles, the years to come were marked by the order’s globalization. Jesuits’ commitment to expanding the order is best reflected in the publication Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu, by Johannes Bollandus (Antwerp, 1640), which they prepared to celebrate the Society’s hundredth anniversary. The second part of this work begins with a large illustration accompanied by the motto Unus non sufficit orbis (One world is not enough; fig. 3). The illustration shows an angel standing between two hemispheres; on one side are the Americas and the Pacific Ocean, and on the other Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Indian Ocean. The angel holds a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, alluding to the missionization of the Indies.³⁰ They also allude to the fact that the Old World is no longer enough—it is necessary to go to the New Worlds, specifically to America and Asia, pictured in the hemispheres. This particular emblem, placed in the part of the book that deals with the expansion and growth of the Society of Jesus, makes a clear statement of how the Society of Jesus saw its role in the world in the time of European expansion and colonialism—a world enlarged through Jesuit activities.

Figure 3. Emblematic illustration from Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu (Antwerp, 1640) with the Jesuit motto One world is not enough. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library)

The first Jesuit missionaries appeared outside Europe—in Asia and Africa—just after the order was founded. Portuguese Jesuits came to Goa as early as 1542; to Congo in 1547; to Morocco, Ceylon, and the Spice Islands in 1548; to Japan in 1549; and to China in 1552. Jesuits from Portugal arrived in Brazil as early as 1549—the first Jesuits in the Americas. In 1566 the Spaniards were given permission to go to the New World with the mission of spreading Christianity. Spanish Jesuits first came to Florida in 1566 and then extended their activities to New Granada (1567), Peru (1568), Mexico (1572), Chile (1583), Paraguay (1585), and Quito (1586). The last to arrive in the Americas were the French Jesuits, who first came to New France in 1609. Thanks to European expansion and with the strong support of colonial politics, just a few decades after its founding the Society became a global power, present in all corners of the earth. Yet, despite the almost lightning-fast rise of the Jesuits throughout the world during the sixteenth century, at the beginning of the seventeenth century the reality of the Society of Jesus began to change. And it changed in favor of the Americas. In the Far East, particularly in Japan, the missions failed. In 1639 the Jesuits dramatically ended their presence in Japan amid profound changes in local politics. Although the situation in China was optimistic, numerous internal disputes between French and Portuguese Jesuits generated serious problems. In Ethiopia, after 1632 the Jesuits were no longer allowed to evangelize, having been severely repressed by the local authorities.³¹ Of all the countries in which Jesuits established their activities, the Americas appeared to promise the best chance of success. This is precisely why, from the seventeenth century onward, the greatest efforts were made in the Jesuit expansion— the Spanish, Portuguese, and French undertakings—to the New World.

The Jesuits’ rapid expansion in Americas owes much to an organizational structure that effectively combined a spatially distributed network, formed as overseas missions, with multiple nodal points, represented by Jesuit colleges and universities. The circulation of people and narratives between European intellectual centers and the peripheries of Jesuit overseas missions enabled the Society to construct a kind of unique institutional frame in the production and dissemination of knowledge.³² At first the Jesuits went to urban areas. Eventually, however, a certain number of Jesuits were sent into the interior to establish missions among the indigenous peoples of the region. For example, in 1755 a total of 624 Jesuits worked in the Mexican provinces, while only 96 of them (15.5 percent) served in the missions.³³ This means that among the members of the Society of Jesus in the Americas, Jesuit missionaries, who were in a position to conduct field observations, constituted an extremely small group of prominent individuals. It was the latter group of Jesuits from which came the individuals who established themselves as outstanding cartographers.

The Jesuits not only witnessed European geographical discoveries and exploration, but were also important agents of these activities. Having arrived in the provinces, the Jesuits started the geographical exploration of a series of natural phenomena that significantly contributed to the history of exploration. Francis Xavier’s Letter from India, first published in 1545, was the first writings from the East ever to be printed in Europe, while José de Acosta’s description of Peru and Mexico (Seville, 1590) represented one of the earliest printed accounts of the Americas.³⁴ Acosta’s observations and discussions of natural phenomena gave him the well-deserved title of one of the Founders of Physical Geography, as he was described by Alexander von Humboldt. As great travelers and field observers, already in the first centuries of their existence the Jesuits published more than eight hundred titles on the geography and natural history of the New World. In the Province of Paraguay alone, between 1585 and 1767 the Jesuits organized and carried out twenty-five expeditions, exploring a much wider area than that covered by their missions or provinces. So it was the Jesuits who, reporting on the newly discovered lands, introduced previously unknown cultures to Europe.

As early as 1547, Ignatius was urging missionaries in India to describe everything they saw and report on it to the Roman authorities. Soon the Jesuits were sending dozens of narratives crammed with geographical information on remote regions; Steven Harris called these a geography of Jesuit knowledge, a systematic account of the natural world. The narratives were sent to Europe along with hundreds of objects, such as plants, rocks, and native artifacts, enabling Athanasius Kircher to equip his museum of natural curiosities, assembled from the 1630s to the 1650s. Not only did the Jesuits report; they were also active in exploration, thus directly contributing to the Age of Encounter and Exploration. I will mention only a few of the most remarkable examples.

In 1573–74 José de Acosta traveled from Lima across a great part of southern Peru to Cuzco. Then he crossed the high plateau to Lake Titicaca and arrived in La Paz, whence he continued south to the region of the Pilcomayo River in southern Bolivia. He was one of the first Europeans to cross the Andes, and his geographical description of the regions he traveled, published in Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590), testifies to his important contribution to the history of exploration of that part of the world. When the Portuguese Captain Pedro Teixeira led the expedition to the Amazon River (1537–39) to claim it in the name of the king of Portugal, he was accompanied by the Spanish Jesuit Cristóbal Diatristán de Acuña, who carried out the first scientific measurements and exploration of the Amazon River. It was Acuña’s diary that enabled the appearance of the first map of the Amazon region, which was compiled by Blaise François comte de Pagan and titled Magni Amazoni Fluvii (Paris, 1655).³⁵ Father Samuel Fritz’s journey down the Amazon River and back in 1689–91 made possible the first highly detailed exploration and mapping of the vast equatorial area from Quito in the west to the mouth of the Amazon in the east. His map of the Amazon, completed in 1691, would serve as the main source of geographical knowledge of the region until the mid-eighteenth century. The Jesuits also played a crucial role in the exploration of the source of the Paraguay River, which continued to be debated for centuries. Back in the early eighteenth century, it was believed that the source of that mighty river was located in the mythical Lake Xarayes (Xareyes, Xaraes) in today’s Pantanal. In 1703, in order to discover the riverhead, the Jesuits Bartolomé Jiménez, José de Acre, Juan Bautista Zea, Francisco Hervás, Johann Neumann, and Silvestre González navigated through Xarayes Lake and concluded that it was not the source of the river but the result of its seasonal floods.³⁶ A connection between the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers was yet another question that occupied the minds of explorers and scientists for a very long time. In 1744, while ascending the Orinoco River, the Jesuit priest Manuel Román discovered a natural canal (bifurcation) between it and the Río Negro. On his journey he met some Portuguese slave traders from the settlements on the Río Negro. He accompanied them on their return, by way of the Casiquiare canal, and afterward retraced his route to the Orinoco. Seven months later Charles Marie de La Condamine was able to give to the Académie Française an account of Father Román’s voyage and thus confirm the existence of this waterway, first reported by Father Acuña in 1639. The Croatian Jesuit Ferdinand Konščak was chosen by the Spanish court to provide the final proof of whether Baja California was an island or a peninsula. His expedition, undertaken in 1746, brought the final verdict: Baja California was not an island; Konščak had explored it and mapped its connection with the mainland. With regard to the Jesuit contribution to the exploration of New France, most of the crucial explorations of the Great Lakes, and especially of the Mississippi River, were conducted by the Jesuits. Jacques Marquette, who first descended the Mississippi in 1673, proved that it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, and not into the Pacific Ocean, concluding the centuries-long quest for the Northwest Passage to China.

Besides their contribution to the discoveries and exploration through research in the field of geography, the Jesuits were also acknowledged for their exploration of the human history of the Americas. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Society of Jesus led the vast majority of research on pre-Columbian history (in the sixteenth century that field had been dominated by the Dominicans and Franciscans). The purpose of that research was to convey to the colonial authorities knowledge about the antiquity of the territory they ruled. This new momentum started with the pioneering archaeological and ethnographic explorations of the New Spain–based writer Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700), who, from 1660 to 1668, was a member of the Society of Jesus. His studies of Aztec culture were in fact a pioneering attempt to create an American cultural identity that was later continued in the work of Juan de Velasco, who studied the civilization of the Incas. During their stay in the Americas, as well as during their post-suppression exile, the Jesuits wrote a number of narratives of human history based upon cultural syncretism. The most celebrated text in line with such a cultural policy was written by another Creole Jesuit, Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–1787). His Storia antica del Messico (Cesena, 1780–81), describing pre-Columbian Mexico and its subsequent conquering and colonization by Spain, established a new value system, introducing new identities into the conversation about civilization and culture. Clavijero was to call New Spain Mexico, its indigenous peoples Mexicans (rather than indios), and the Creole people to whom he belonged his compatriots.

Even from this brief overview it is clear that without the Jesuits the course of Age of Encounter and Exploration of the Americas would have had different outcomes. Systematic Jesuit explorations that were carried out individually or in the form of expeditions, either for the general dissemination of knowledge or for the purpose of informing the crown about the potentials of its possessions, led to the development of firsthand knowledge of these newly acquired lands and their native populations. Even where they were not initiators of journeys, the Jesuits, as educated people, proficient in the natural sciences and in the knowledge of local languages and customs, were preferred members of numerous scientific expeditions taken on behalf of the king and/or the local colonial authorities. The fact that, having strong support from both monarchs and Church institutions, they were able to travel to unexplored and unknown lands placed the Jesuits in the role of true explorers, who would definitively shape the European perception of the New World. Thanks to their regular reports, as well as to their strong connections to the intellectual centers of Europe (especially the French Academy of Sciences), the Jesuit contribution to the Age of Encounter and Exploration remained well documented, and the geographical knowledge accumulated during their expeditions was effectively disseminated both in the Old and New Worlds. The long-distance Jesuit network functioned well thanks to their organizational structure, which greatly facilitated the gathering and dissemination of scientific information within and beyond the Society. Owing to their early entry into education, the Society ensured a unique corporate structure, an overseas network of missionaries that was directly connected with the network of intellectual centers—their seminaries, colleges, and universities. Their sense of obligation, persistence, and social cohesion ensured the development of Jesuit corporate culture in which the sharing of information and collaboration in large projects became standard operating procedure. Although these elements of organization were initially and primarily developed to serve their administrative needs, over time the Society managed to develop a geographical network that encircled the world, enabling them to became major stakeholders in the history of exploration.

1.3 Cartographers of Heaven and Earth

As active participants in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, the Jesuits became prominent protagonists in various scientific undertakings, exercising a powerful influence on the intellectual communities of the Old and New Worlds. Their interest in observational astronomy, Euclidean mathematics, and geometry, as well as their belief in the hierarchical and structured nature of knowledge, enabled them to become distinguished scientists in various fields, many of which were related to cartography. Being well educated in the natural sciences, the Jesuits very early began to observe the sky. Apart from contributing to philosophical and theological discussions,