Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia

By Mark Bourrie

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr's death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit's "martyrdom" became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary's fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf's accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781771966184

Mark Bourrie

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent book, Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, was nominated for several book awards.

Book preview

A Note about Names

I have tried to make it easy for readers to understand the people and geography described in this story. Sometimes I have used modern (some would say colonial) place names. For example, I write about Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, rather than use the names given to these bodies of water by Indigenous people. I believe it would be an affectation to use names that have long ago fallen out of use and would confuse readers.

I have also translated the names of the nations of the Huron Confederacy. The Huron names of their nations are easy to confuse. There is a glossary with their original names. I’ve used the common name for each of the Five Nations and call the overall group Iroquois. I’ve listed their actual names in the glossary.

The biggest challenge was the choice of the name for the people who lived on the Penetanguishene Peninsula and to the south and east in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Récollet Gabriel Sagard said these people called themselves Wendats, or Islanders. The French called them Hurons. For years, some writers have seized on the idea that Huron comes from what they saw as a racist and insulting French term, hures (boars’ heads). A closer look at the record suggests the word may have connotations of ferocity, that a warrior’s upright hairs resembled the bristles of a wild boar. Here’s where social change kicks in: we now see boars as swine, something contemptible. In the 1600s, however, when the name was first used, the wild boar was the most dangerous and feared animal in the forests of Europe, and the boars on farms were almost as nasty. (King Richard III used the wild boar as his personal emblem.) If the French wanted to call the Hurons pigs, the way the word is used now, they would have used cochon. They never did.

The names of the five constituent Huron nations and the subgroups among them were likely the main identity of most people in the Confederacy’s country, since several of the nations joined very late in its history. People such as the Wenros arrived just a few years before the region was invaded. It’s a mistake to see the Hurons of the first half of the 1600s as one cohesive First Nation. Power and identity started at the clan and village levels, and then at the original nation (the Bear, the Cord, etc.); only then did it reach the level of the federation (if it ever did). Later events caused the Hurons to see themselves entirely as Huron, with just their clan identities left to remind them of the old structures of their country. In the country’s destruction, the constituent First Nations that formed the short-lived Huron Confederacy were melded into one people.

Some survivors of this nation settled in the Quebec City area and, for centuries, called themselves Hurons. Recently, they have adopted Huron-Wendat, or just Wendat. I reached out to their First Nation for clarification and guidance on the use of names and did not hear back.

The Wyandots of the United States are mostly descended from the Petuns, who were closely associated with the Huron Confederacy but were not part of it (and had even waged war against it). The Petun and some Huron refugees who fled to the upper Great Lakes with them used Wendat, which evolved into Wyandot, as their national name, leaving open the possibility that the Wendat identity was spread farther than Huronia. It may have been a cosmological, not a national, identity. When Sagard asked who the Hurons were, they may well have been telling him they lived on Turtle Island.

So what did they call themselves? The record shows they went by the names of their constituent nations, such as Attignawantan (the Bear people) and Arendarhonon (the Rock people). I have chosen to use the name Huron, and, when possible, differentiate between members of the Bear, Cord, Deer, and other Huron nations.

A non-academic audience, especially in eastern Canada and among Roman Catholics, will be familiar with names such as Iroquois, Huron, Huronia, and the geography of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence region. They are less likely to connect these names to the ones used at the time. There is a revival of Iroquoian languages underway, and if Iroquoian terminology becomes familiar to people outside the First Nations and a tiny part of academia, I will be happy to revise these names in later editions.

Timeline

1517           Martin Luther nails his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Saxony, starting the Protestant Reformation.

1562           The Wars of Religion erupt in France.

1593           Jean de Brébeuf is born in Normandy (March 23).

1598           The Wars of Religion officially end, but there are serious cleavages in French society.

1608           Samuel de Champlain founds Quebec City.

1615           Champlain visits Huronia.

1617           Brébeuf becomes a Jesuit novice.

1619–21     Brébeuf interrupts his studies to teach at the Jesuit college in Rouen. He takes a break in 1620 because of a serious illness, possibly tuberculosis.

1622           Brébeuf is ordained as a priest.

1625           Brébeuf is sent to Canada. He arrives in June and spends five months in the wilderness with the Montagnais.

1626           Brébeuf travels up the St. Lawrence–Ottawa River–Lake Nipissing–French River canoe route to the Huron homeland on Georgian Bay. The Jesuits engineer the (temporary) removal of Étienne Brûlé, Nicolas Marsolet, and other trader/interpreters from Huronia and the Ottawa Valley.

1628           The Kirke brothers (David and Thomas), working for the English, lay siege to Quebec by preventing the arrival of supplies from France.

1629           Champlain surrenders Quebec and Brébeuf is repatriated to France.

1630           Brébeuf takes three Jesuit vows.

1630–33     Brébeuf is assigned teaching duties in France.

1633           Brûlé is murdered in Huronia (late spring).

1633           Brébeuf returns to Quebec; Hurons, worried he will use sorcery to avenge Brûlé, refuse to take Brébeuf inland.

1634           Brébeuf returns to Huronia as superior of the mission and chooses Ihonatiria, on the northern tip of the country, as his headquarters. Huronia is hit with its first major epidemic.

1635           Champlain dies.

1636           Brébeuf is a guest at the Feast of the Dead in Ossossanë.

1638           Smallpox arrives in Huronia.

1639           Jérôme Lalemant buys the site of Sainte-Marie and begins construction of a separate French community in the Huron country.

1640           Brébeuf and Chaumonot travel to the Neutral country (autumn).

1641           Brébeuf returns from the Neutral country with a broken collarbone (early spring). He returns to Quebec that summer because of Huron hostility over the Neutral expedition.

1641           Brébeuf starts missionary work among the Montagnais (Innu), Algonquins, and Hurons living around the town of Quebec (autumn). He is based in Sillery, upstream from Quebec City.

1642           Brébeuf finally has a surgeon set the collarbone he broke two years earlier.

1643           Brébeuf tries to return to Huronia, but the Huron traders won’t take him. Brébeuf writes the Huron Carol.

1644           Brébeuf finally gets back to Huronia. He stays close to Sainte-Marie, never visiting the Bear people.

1645–46     The French, Hurons, and Mohawks agree to a short-lived peace deal that ends when Jesuit Isaac Jogues is killed in the Mohawk country. Soon afterwards, the Senecas and Hurons also negotiate a truce. The social split between Christian and non-Christian Hurons generates violence in some of the larger communities.

1647           The truces end, though some diplomacy continues. At the same time, the Iroquois leadership becomes more effective at coordinating military strategy. They also get a large shipment of guns from Dutch traders at Fort Orange (Albany).

1648           Jacques Douart, a Jesuit lay employee (donné), is murdered. The majority of Huron leaders give the priests a massive payment in furs and symbolically turn their country over to the Jesuits. Teanaostaye is destroyed. Antoine Daniel is among those killed in the attack.

1649           Fathers Brébeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, and Chabanel are killed in Huronia. Jesuits burn Sainte-Marie after the Hurons flee their homeland. Huron and French refugees try to make a stand on Gahoendoe (Christian Island). Thousands starve there that winter.

1650           The Jesuits and most of the Hurons on Gahoendoe leave for Quebec.

1651           The last Hurons on Gahoendoe leave the island. The Huron country is empty until Anishinaabe people add it to their territory later in the century.

1663           Brébeuf’s ghost appears to a Jesuit priest to warn of the powerful Charlevoix earthquake.

1850s          Jesuit Félix Martin begins surveying Jesuit ruins in Huronia.

1896–1901 The Jesuit Relations are translated into English and a limited edition is sold to libraries, universities and people interested in the missions in North America.

1925           Brébeuf and seven others who died violently in missions to the Hurons, Petuns, and Iroquois in the 1640s are beatified. This is an important step toward sainthood. The Shrine of the Canadian Martyrs, under construction next to Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, opens the next year.

1930           Brébeuf and his seven colleagues are canonized as saints of the Roman Catholic Church.

1941           Archaeologist Kenneth Kidd excavates part of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons.

1950s         Wilfrid and Elsie Jury lead a team excavating the rest of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons.

1964           Reconstruction of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons begins. It is Ontario’s official project for Canada’s Centennial in 1967.

1984           Pope John Paul II visits Huronia and prays over Brébeuf’s skull.

Introduction

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. One was drenched in the blood of religious strife and sought to spread its version of truth to the world. The other was trying to cope with wrenching technological changes, pandemics, and the existential threat of encroaching European colonialism. Don’t judge the people of these worlds through a twenty-first-century lens. No one knew what the future would hold. No one had a workable plan.

The Jesuit missionaries operating out of New France in the first half of the 1600s did use fear and coercion to try to convert and rule the Hurons. They did ruin Huron society. But the insensitivity, callousness, and violence must be seen in the context of the times. It was a violent age, especially in Europe, which was in the grip of a decades-long continental war over religion. Governments and religious organizations, individuals, and armies doled out casual violence in ways that shock us now but seemed quite normal at the time. Since the Second World War, state violence in Western societies has become low-grade and often invisible. Blatant physical violence is exported to the poorer parts of the world. There have been a few exceptions, especially in Palestine and Ukraine, but armies and fighting factions in those wars have been partly constrained by a new morality, the threat of prosecution, the unblinking eye of visual and social media, and the threat of worldwide humiliation. This is relatively new, and we should not feel too smug about it. Just a few years ago, we also thought we had fascism beaten.

Nor should modern members of the Society of Jesus be judged by the ferocity of their martyrdom-seeking precursors and the simplistic hell talk that Jean de Brébeuf and his colleagues used to frighten the Hurons. Modern Jesuits are still, in their own way, very militant. Now, many of them fight for social justice. Rather than trying to set up residential schools, they run great universities. For the most part, the Jesuits are stellar scholars, though it has taken them some time to face their own history. Brébeuf’s relics are at the Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario, because the Jesuits who had them in Quebec believed they were no longer relevant to their work. (These priests help kids living on the streets, and some four-hundred-year-old bones were rather useless for that.) In Midland, the relics give comfort and inspiration to Catholics—they might, in spiritual ways at least, even heal—which is why they were saved from a ruined Huron town nearly four centuries years ago.

There will be a faction of people who try to use the story of the destruction of Huronia as a cudgel against Indigenous people, especially the Iroquois. They will take the story out of context to frame First Nations as violent savages. And they will be wrong. The warring Iroquoian confederacies of the Great Lakes region formed as a reaction to existential threats to their people. The leaders of the Five Nations (Haudenosaunee) realized early in the colonial period that strength lay in unity and the creation of a nation that could bargain with Europeans from a position of power. It was the same logic behind the creation of the modern European nation-state. As epidemics spread inland, the Iroquois reacted by incorporating as many people as they could into their society. They did this peacefully, if possible, and used violence when they believed it was needed. The Iroquois took limited, ritualistic warfare and adapted it in nation-building. The Hurons struggled to maintain their political and economic power. They lost their independence because their French trader friends brought social change along with lethal diseases, and their destruction was guaranteed in that violent world because the Hurons’ enemies simply had more guns.

Brébeuf’s story ends in 1649, during the bloodiest and most destructive part of what’s sloppily called the Beaver Wars or the Mourning Wars.1 Historians of the last century believed this war was about the fur trade. In the centuries before that, they claimed it was an assault on Christianity and proof the Iroquois were a cruel people. Recent scholars tend to focus on the Iroquois’s desire to rebuild their population to stay strong in the face of colonialism. The Iroquois tried to add strength through numbers by expanding their power over the people of the southern Great Lakes region. That’s also what later resistance leaders like Pontiac and Tecumseh wanted. It was the only strategy that had a hope of success.

The Iroquois warriors of the 1600s won victories that have benefited their people for centuries. Unlike so many First Nations in eastern and central North America, most of the Iroquois still live in their old homeland or close to it. They were treated as allies and/or threats by France and Britain and by the United States of America, always recognized as a power in their own right. This couldn’t have happened if their population had been reduced to ten thousand people by smallpox and they had stayed peacefully in their upstate New York homeland through the 1600s and 1700s. Like some of the remnants of the Hurons who were caught in the United States Midwest, they all would have been forced to move to reservations in Oklahoma.2

The Iroquois were the first othered people of Quebec history and have been convenient villains and monsters for writers in French and English for four centuries. Arguably, mainstream Quebec history has always needed bogeymen. This story should help correct that narrative. Conversely, the Hurons have been portrayed as poor victims of Iroquois aggression. That framing strips the Hurons of their dignity and agency. Until the last two years of their nation, the Hurons gave as good as they got. They raided the Iroquois, engaged in diplomacy and pursued a foreign policy that they hoped would result in their dominance of the region. Instead, they lost the war and started down new paths, far from their old homeland.

My family’s history is intertwined in this story. We had ancestors in the French, Dutch, and New England colonies who were there when Brébeuf was in Huronia (one fringe player in this story is an ancestor, and I suspect several more are), as well as among the Ottawa River Algonquins, though I don’t claim to be part of that community. Interest in history seems to run in my family: my great-great-grandfather owned part of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons; one of my great-great-uncles, Ildege Bourrie, built the interior of the Martyrs’ Shrine. Another great-great-uncle, Alphonse Arpin, found what was then believed to be the site of Brébeuf’s death, St. Ignace II. A cousin, Joseph N. Bourrie, surveyed many of the Petun village sites in the Collingwood area in the middle of the last century. I grew up in Huronia and worked as a journalist in the region for thirteen years in the 1980s and 1990s. I visited many of the Huron village sites listed in this book and could feel the history and beauty of Huronia. In many ways, it is still home to me.

* * *

I don’t see myself as a revisionist, but I do believe this story needs a serious rethink. Much of the scholarship was done by Jesuits, who are often brilliant and dedicated researchers, but they are bound by faith. Lay scholarship was mixed, ranging between brilliant (Conrad Heidenreich, Bruce Trigger, Cornelius Jaenen, Emma Anderson, Elisabeth Tooker, John Steckley) and downright shabby. We are also seeing a new generation of Huron-Wendat scholars who are digging into their people’s past. Kathryn Magee Labelle led a team of Wendat women who crafted Daughters of Aataentsic, telling the story of seven generations of Wendat women. Georges Sioui, born at Wendake, Quebec, is an internationally recognized scholar who has done important work showing how Indigenous knowledge and practice underlies many Western ideals of democracy. The Wyandot in the United States work hard to tell their story and advocate for justice for their people. I hope I have been inspired by the better thinkers, Jesuit and non-Jesuit.

I’ve seen the Huronia story twisted into commercial fiction, using the same old tropes that so often mar the historic scholarship: cruel Iroquois and superstitious, ignorant Algonquins (Brian Moore’s Black Robe); Huron victims and the seduction of women captives (Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda and Franklin Davey McDowell’s The Champlain Road). The real story is better than fiction and, frankly, makes more sense.

This is my second book on a seventeenth-century European let loose into the interior of Indigenous North America. It’s my way of talking about worlds that no longer exist. I chose Pierre Radisson and Jean de Brébeuf because they are such great characters, but astute readers know that these books are also meant to explain what happened when troubled Europe, ripped by civil and religious strife, collided with Indigenous nations that had never had to cope with rapid technological change and epidemics. We need to keep talking about European-Indigenous contact and its ongoing affects. Modern North America was created at the expense of Indigenous people. Some of the genocide was deliberate; other times, it was by accident and callousness. Over time, millions of people arrived on this continent from all parts of the world and never gave a moment’s consideration to the injustice inflicted on First Nations. Indigenous people were not passive victims. Many embraced European technology and religious ideas. There were factions in First Nations that were inspired and empowered by Europeans to strip women of their rights as soon as they got the chance to impose their will. Each person goes through life making choices—some thrust on them, some because of perceived opportunity. Very few people always make wise choices, and no one can honestly claim every choice they make is altruistic. History is a great river of stories about people and their choices. There are very few real villains in the world, and heroes are just as rare.

Brébeuf must been seen through that lens. He was a man born on a continent torn apart by religious warfare, in a land where wars over religion had already taken almost 20 percent of the people. The Thirty Years’ War was a second conflict always in the background of this story. It killed a larger percentage of people in central Europe than the Second World War. Swaths of the continent were left starving. The English Civil War, arguably an offshoot of the Thirty Years’ War—or, at least, concurrent with it—raged while Brébeuf was in Huronia, and culminated in the public beheading of King Charles I just weeks before Brébeuf’s death.3 Brébeuf’s parents had seen the French Wars of Religion devastate their part of France. He was raised to believe in what we—including mainstream Roman Catholics—see now as an outdated form of martial, evangelical Catholicism. Brébeuf believed unbaptized people had no chance of reaching heaven, so, in his mind, his greatest gift to a Huron was baptism. After that, they were expected to be religious spectators, partaking in ritual, abandoning their culture, and evangelizing. They were not encouraged to make peace and love their enemy. They were to be foot soldiers for Catholicism, peasants in a nation run by Jesuits who came from noble families and believed it was only natural that they should govern. Brébeuf and his brethren were warriors who believed they were fighting the devil, who was real and lived in the world.

The Jesuit plan for Huronia ended up destroying Huron society.4 It was one of the most audacious colonization attempts in the Americas. But it was also part of a continuum of religious and cultural assault that generated outrages like residential schools and Canadian laws that stripped Indigenous people of their political rights, dismantled the rights of Indigenous women and children, took their land base and even banned their dances and ceremonies. Examining Brébeuf’s life gives us the chance to see how this happened. This is the story of a man whose efforts to do good had terrible consequences, some foreseeable, some not.

1

The Storm

Martin Luther may have banged his fingers or cut himself on a sliver when he spiked his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Saxony, in 1517. If he did, the blood that flowed was the beginning of a cascade. Blood from the Wars of Religion choked the creeks of central Europe, ran in the gutters of the cities of France, stained the fields of Britain and Ireland, the forests of North America, the tunnels of the silver mines of Bolivia. It flowed in Africa, in India, in Japan. It stills flows, though the torrents have been reduced to sporadic drips.

This was not Luther’s plan. The obscure, somewhat disturbed and narrow-minded monk was a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg when he decided his church cared more about money than souls. Luther tried to be nice at first, sending a letter to his bishop, who, he thought, had no idea that crooks were peddling get-out-of-hell cards to German peasants and nobles to raise money for a new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. One Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, sold these indulgences at prices that couldn’t be matched. Customers could buy God’s forgiveness for sodomy for twelve ducats (a gold coin that was a little smaller than a penny). Robbing a church was worth nine ducats. Sorcery cost four. A man could be forgiven for killing his father for the low price of four ducats. And, conveniently, a good Christian needing hell insurance was allowed to buy these hell-passes in advance.¹

Luther waited. Nothing came back from the bishop, so he decided to launch an academic debate at his university. Academic rules required notices to be posted on every church door in town, which explains why Luther was on the street with his hammer and printed copies of the theses.² The first act of the Protestant Reformation had begun, and the debate quickly leapt from the university to the battlefield.

To understand the Reformation, we need to understand what the Roman Catholic Church was to Europeans in the 1500s. It was the only institution of the western Roman Empire that survived the Germanic and Hun invasions. As an international corporation without shareholders or government oversight, the Church controlled millions of acres worked by hundreds of thousands of peasants. Every year, more land and money came into its hands from will bequests, trust funds set up for perpetual masses for the dead—a huge money-maker—and the reinvestment of its own profits. The Church controlled every university and most other education. It provided Europe’s social services by building and staffing hospitals and handing out gifts to the poor. It even decided the holidays—holy days—that peasants were entitled to. Popes could, and did, unseat kings and literally brought others to their knees. Church law ran parallel to the laws of the European states. Not only did the Church courts have jurisdiction over moral issues such as marriage annulments (actual divorce was almost non-existent), but it also had the power to rule on cases involving its own clergy, offences committed on its lands and even allegations of slander. While it could not execute people (outside of Italy, where the Papal States were enthusiastic inflictors of capital punishment and had their own guillotine well into the 1800s), their courts could brand people as heretics and hand them over to local authorities to be burned.

The influence of the Catholic Church on public architecture continues to this day: any Gothic building, including the parliament buildings of Canada and the United Kingdom, is adapted from Church architecture, and is meant to inspire the same awe of power and wealth that peasants felt when they walked into a cathedral. Our law courts mimic the dress and manners of the old Church courts, trying to use clothes and architecture to separate the sacred from the everyday and instill reverence.

The Church was also a shelter for poorer members of the nobility and a soft landing for second sons of the rich (who usually got nothing because of primogeniture rules that kept large family fortunes intact in the oldest son’s hand) and for unmarried daughters. But many of the lurid stories circulating through the villages and palaces of sixteenth-century Europe were true. There were convents of racy nuns and monasteries of drunken, lewd, and even criminal monks. There were illiterate parish priests and well-connected bishops with secret families. Henry VIII, before the death of his brother Arthur, was one such second son. His theological education would ricochet on the institution that gave it to him. There was always room for newcomers, since the celibacy rule stopped clergy from creating a new class of descendants of (legitimate) children. There were jobs for almost everyone, from the plodding parish priest to the crazed evangelical war veteran to the aspiring university professor to women who wanted to teach, nurse the sick, write or hide away as contemplative nuns. The Church was home to the useless, to the adventurous, the fanatical, the brilliant, the introverted—a sort of parallel society.

Now the Church needed money to rebuild St. Peter’s in Rome because Catholicism’s most important basilica was a twelve-hundred-year-old unsalvageable Roman ruin. The popes decided to take this opportunity to outbuild their Eastern Orthodox and Islamic competitors. They would make St. Peter’s the largest church in Europe. In its hunger for cash to build a spectacular monument to its wealth and power, the Catholic hierarchy provoked a lowly monk to tear the entire Church apart.

When Luther’s populist movement, with its calls to muck out the stables and drive out the gatekeepers, swept across Europe, it tore the continent apart socially and politically. It was a class war as much as a fight over issues of faith. The schism generated ferocious extremists on both sides of the new divide, people with no tolerance for dissent. In the next couple of decades, as Protestantism evolved new theologies and hardened its intolerance, the schism split families, towns, regions and countries between Catholics and Protestants and between factions of Protestants.³ Local wars broke out, and everywhere in Europe, the religious majority, whether Catholic or Protestant, sought to crush religious minorities.

Both sides created shock troops. The Jesuits were the most famous and feared.

The Jesuits: Christ’s Bodyguard

The Loyola family may have had the name and the castle that made them members of the nobility of the Basque region of Spain, but they were quite poor: the castle, which still stands, had just two books when Iñigo was born in 1491, and no one bothered to add to the collection. Loyola’s mother died when he was young, so he was raised by an aunt—fathers didn’t do much parenting in the 1500s. Iñigo took up the pastimes of other young nobles who moved to Madrid: fencing, fighting, and lechery. He was accused of statutory rape, wounding, and slander, and one court paper calls him treacherous, brutal and vindictive.⁴ Then, after making this reputation, he disappeared from the royal Spanish court, possible because of an ulcerated nose, which, fairly or unfairly, was diagnosed by gossips as a symptom of syphilis.⁵ Fortunately, the French gave him something to do: in 1521, they crossed the Pyrenees mountains and invaded Navarre, a small independent state. Its chief city, Pamplona, fell to Francis I. Loyola was one of the diehards who refused to surrender the city’s citadel. The French responded with a cannonade, and one of the stone balls shattered Loyola’s right hip and leg. The French were so impressed with the courage of the defenders that they let them march out with the full honours of war, and a French colour guard carried Loyola back to the family castle on a stretcher. He was out of the war business and was of no other use to his country’s sovereign, Charles V. Hobbling around the castle was boring, so Loyola dug into those two books in the family library. One was The Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony. The other, Flos Sanctorum, was a book of the lives of the saints, written by Jacobus de Voragine. If that library had been bigger, or the books had been the popular chivalric romances of the time, history might have been quite different.

A quack surgeon botched an operation on Loyola’s injured leg, leaving him lame.⁶ As he recovered and came to terms with his new status as a cripple at a time when people judged character by appearance and health, Loyola began creating what came to be known as his spiritual exercises. They are based on the idea that, in the spiritual and physical world, there are two opposing armies: one commanded by God, the other by Satan. The mind and soul must be trained to fight the devil and his army of demons. Loyola took a vow of chastity and swore himself to the service of God, gave away his court clothes, and left his sword hanging among the crutches at the shrine of the Black Madonna of Montserrat. He flogged himself so his soul could resist temptation and he kept track of his illuminations: the visions, emotions, and insights that were generated by his religious experiences. Inner discipline, rather than just self-mortification, was his goal, and he soon realized deliberate self-harm sapped a person of the strength needed to do God’s work. The exercises merged the self and the God, but the person remained in the world.⁷

The Jesuits, following Loyola, would not turn their backs on society; they would confront its ills head-on. At the same time, priests such as Jean de Brébeuf would pray for visions and would often see them. Their colleagues interpreted these visions and were sure that they were, like Loyola’s illuminations, messages from Jesus and not symptoms of mental illness.⁸

Loyola begged his way to Jerusalem where he hoped to start a new life, but the Turks who ran the city, along with the Franciscans who looked after the Christian holy places, pressured Loyola to keep his proselytizing to a minimum. Loyola rejected their rules, was kicked out of the Holy Land, and was on a ship headed for Spain in less than a month.

By the early 1530s, he was at the Sorbonne as a very mature student, having arrived in Paris with his worldly possessions (mainly books) tied to the back of a donkey. Loyola ended up in the Collège Sainte-Barbe, dubbed the Asshole of Mother Theology because of its grim medieval rooms. He was there with Jean Calvin, founder of Calvinism, though, at the time, neither man felt compelled to try to burn the other at the stake.

After Loyola finished his studies, he and six friends created a religious organization and began missionary work in the more backwards part of the Italian peninsula. (Italy was still far from being a country.) While they were there, the Jesuits were recognized as a religious order by the Pope, and Loyal was named first superior general in 1541.

From the beginning, the Protestants hated the Jesuits as propagandists and trained liars; the Jesuits believed the Protestants were heretics and apostates; and both sides created outrageous propaganda aimed at swaying uncommitted Christians and their rulers. Many Catholics shared the Protestant view that Jesuits were extremists and troublemakers who pushed their fractured society toward violence. The Order’s elitism made them suspect, too. This was an order of the rich, handsome, smart, and well-connected. Many Jesuits were men with deep religious fervour; but there were also the kind of adventure-seeking, privileged young men who, today, work for aid organizations doing voluntourism in interesting, dangerous places before applying to law school.

The Jesuits, at least in theory, accepted anyone who was single, Roman Catholic, and intelligent. It helped if they were, like Jean de Brébeuf, members of the old nobility. Loyola might have had a limp and strange visions, but the Order would not take people with physical or psychological problems that made them unfit for missionary work or teaching. If a person was cursed with notable ugliness, had a hunchback, disfigurement, or obvious physical defect, he wasn’t welcome, unless he had some incredible talent (or money) that the Order could use.⁹ Nor did they want people who had committed homicide unless there was irrefutable proof of rehabilitation of character. But the Jesuits would take novices with Muslim or Jewish ancestry, something the other religious communities refused to do. (Some Spanish Jesuits were scandalized by this policy and forced these false sons out of their houses.¹⁰)

Women were kept out of the Order, for the most part, but if a noblewoman had the wealth and power to be an asset, the rules could be bent. Juana (the Mad) of Castile, sister of Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, whose armies looted the Incas and Aztecs, used her influence to get Jesuit scholars into all the important chairs at the University of Castile. Loyola secretly made her a member of the Order, and other rich and well-connected women may also have been allowed to take Jesuit vows. Despite opposition from the Jesuits, some orders of nuns also adopted Jesuit vows and rules.

The Jesuits were always supposed to maintain a distance between themselves and women and were not supposed to act as chaplains to them. When they arrived in Huronia, Brébeuf and the Jesuits ignored that rule, since clan mothers and other powerful women had final say on important matters of state. An important woman in the Neutral Nation, northwest of Lake Ontario, saved Brébeuf’s life by sheltering him during his disastrous trip to that country in 1640/41, and an Iroquois woman, almost certainly a clan mother, prevented the murder of Fr. Isaac Jogues in 1642 when he was brought to her country as a captive. Both priests became quite close to these benefactresses. And the Jesuits had to do the work normally performed by nuns, since none went to Huronia.

It was not easy for a would-be Jesuit to make the cut. Even now, about half of the new candidates for the Society of Jesus quit or wash out in the first two years, even though the rules have been relaxed somewhat. Until a Jesuit is ordained as a priest, it is easy for either side to end the relationship.¹¹ Once ordained, the bond is expected to last for life. A Jesuit was, and is, bound by a set of instructions written in Loyola’s plain-speaking style. The constitution instructed a priest on all aspects of his physical and spiritual life. For example, priests were told not to move their head from side to side in conversation, unless there was good reason to, and to converse with their eyes lowered and not darting from side to side (rules 1 through 3). Another rule (6) said the lips should not be compressed too severely, nor should the mouth be open too wide. Rule 10 told priests to walk at a moderate pace; they should walk quickly only when there was a pressing need to do so. The rules advised priests on other matters, too. They were told how to counter anti-Jesuit propaganda, for example. Jesuits were expected to use their reasoning skills and their common sense, but, at the same time, be obedient. This demand has one caveat: The rule of obedience is only binding when that which one has been ordered to do does not constitute a sin (Rule 31).¹²

A two-year novitiate—a period of probation and spiritual instruction—was followed by vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The Order decided whether a novice was destined to be a lay brother (about a quarter of the novices) who provided the labour to support the priests—tasks like cooking, maintaining buildings, and gardening—or was fit for the priesthood.¹³

Those, like Brébeuf, who were put on the priest track (scholastics) spent about three years in intense readings of philosophy, followed by four years of study of theology, with a break between the two sessions. During that gap, they taught school. The novice would then do the spiritual exercises while the Order sized him up to determine if he was adaptable, strong, and smart enough for missionary work in Europe or abroad. If so, he was allowed to take the fourth vow of obedience to the pope, promising to go anywhere His Holiness will order, whether among the faithful or the infidels, without pleading any excuse, and without requesting any expense for the journey, for the sake of matters pertaining to the worship of God and the welfare of the Christian religion.¹⁴ Novices did not always take the vows at the same time, and some, like Brébeuf, were sent overseas before they took the fourth vow.¹⁵

Those who were assigned to the Jesuits’ growing network of schools taught some of the greatest minds of Catholic Europe. The brightest students paid no tuition. By the end of the 1500s, the Jesuits were opening six new schools a year, and by 1630, they were teaching forty thousand students in France alone.¹⁶ René Descartes and Molière were among their students. But even in staunchly Catholic countries there was some opposition to Jesuit schools. Not all of Europe was hell-bent on religious strife, and towns that had managed to work out local live-and-let-live policies feared the Jesuits and their students would shatter the peace.¹⁷

Many Europeans could not have cared less about religion and didn’t think transubstantiation—the Catholic belief that the Communion host was transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ during the Mass—was worth arguing about, let alone dying for. It was a common belief, written down in one seventeenth-century pamphlet, that religion is strangely metamorphosed into snarling, that a generation of tautological tongue men had brought too much gall to the pulpit, and such a store of wormwood to the press, that hath drowned too many of us in the gall of bitterness.¹⁸ Likely, Elizabeth I of England felt that way as she struggled to come up with a religious settlement to keep her country at peace while snuffing out extremism and extremists like the Jesuits, who were publicly butchered if they were caught. There was no search for a religious compromise on the Continent. France was plunged into decades of civil war between Protestants and Catholics. Then Germany and central Europe fell into war and anarchy.

Most Jesuits sought confrontation. Others preferred polite debate, but all of them were unwilling to bend. They believed in attacking heresy, not defending a status quo where Protestants and Catholics coexisted. They hunted for the highest-profile converts, people like Queen Christina of Sweden and the Muslim emperor of India. If that meant fighting or even starting a war, so it went. It was a Jesuit who gave the Apostles’ names to the twelve giant siege guns that knocked down the walls of Prague in 1620, at the start of the Thirty Years’ War.

The suspicious rulers of France saw the Jesuits as tools of Spain. Spain thought the Jesuits pushed the interests of Portugal. Various popes tried to leash them, but never lived long enough to seriously curtail the Order. Some Catholics, including senior clergymen, saw the Jesuits as arrogant, grasping, greedy, power-hungry, and too much of the world. Organizations like the Récollet friars (a Franciscan order), who were the first missionaries in New France, resented being pushed out of their mission fields by the Jesuits. The suspicion, fear, and sometimes hatred of the Jesuits existed through the Church hierarchy. In 1555, Loyola’s last full year of life, Pope Paul IV sent papal troops to search for weapons hidden in the Jesuits’ Rome headquarters, and his troops found some. The Jesuits managed to weasel out of that with just a few curtailments to their privileges¹⁹; though when Loyola died, the pope said, The Jesuits have lost their idol, before muttering under his breath, Ignatius ruled over the society like a tyrant.²⁰ Coming from a sixteenth-century pope, this was a mix of praise and damnation.

Enemies of the Order claimed the Jesuits were trained deceivers. They pointed to reservatio mentalis: the idea that an unstated thought can negate a lie. For example, if a person was asked whether they had broken into a house, he could honestly answer no, followed by the unspoken thought the door was unlocked, and I walked in. In English, this was called equivocation, and its use by Jesuits as a means of evasion, even under oath, scandalized English rulers and policy leaders. It was cited as one of the reasons that Jesuits were put to death if they were caught in England. After the failure of the Gunpowder Plot—an attempt by Catholics to blow up Parliament, King James I, and his family in 1605—it was clear reservatio mentalis had lethal consequences. Any denial of charges made against the unfortunate Jesuits caught after the plot was called equivocation. Since the Jesuits were proven liars, English authorities had free rein to heap outrageous accusations upon them, and the public believed all of them.²¹

Bankers with Attitude

By the mid-1600s, the Jesuits’ stores of wealth and their banking network resembled the international corporation of the medieval Knights Templar. Monarchs and Catholic merchants used the Jesuit banking system to move money across borders. Those unfortunate enough to need credit from the Jesuits endured interest rates of 30 percent. While the Jesuit colleges were supposed to be open to all, they did, in fact, collect tuition from any students who could afford to pay. No one will ever know how much money the Order had—its balance sheets were secret—but the Spanish had a saying, Don Dinero es muy Católico (Lord Money is a good Catholic). When the Order was temporarily suppressed and dissolved in the 1770s, the states that seized their assets made a lot of money. The Austrian assets of the Order netted the Hapsburg monarch the equivalent of some five million silver dollars (each dollar having one ounce of silver.) Tuition, donations, interest, and banking fees financed the missions around the world. One Jesuit ship sailing under the French flag was captured by the English in 1664 as it returned from Asia. It was stuffed with exotics like rhinoceros’ horns, gorgeously embroidered silks, jewels, and drugs, a cargo so valuable that English commentators were floored. King Charles II, in the secret pay of his young cousin, Louis XIV, allowed the ship to continue its journey to France.²²

Jesuits were renowned for their worldliness, which often resulted in them justifying the sins of their clients. In Theologia Moralis Universalis, Spanish Jesuit Antonio Escobar y Mendoza wrote: For merchants the giving of short weight is not to be reckoned with as a sin when the official price for certain goods is so low that the merchant would be ruined thereby. Such moral flexibility, along with the Jesuits’ preference for mild penance and their education, made them quite popular confessors and counsellors. European royalty, the senior nobility, and the new class of incredibly wealthy merchants that arose in the early modern era all wanted Jesuits in their corner.²³

Still, it was a religious enterprise. Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises was published internally in 1548, and, sixty years later, all Jesuits were required to revisit them at least once a year. The priests’ focus on the exercises is key to understanding why the Jesuits built their own fort in Huronia and tried to live apart from the Hurons. The exercises and the book that explained them were secret, which added to the Jesuit mystique.

The Spiritual Exercises proposes this schedule of meditation and contemplation:

Week One: The penitent has to contemplate sin and its eventual consequences, the torments of hell.

Week Two: The participant must decide whether he wishes to follow the banner of Satan or to enlist in the company of Jesus Christ.

Week Three: The participant vicariously experiences, down to the smallest detail, the suffering and ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Week Four: The participant vicariously experiences Christ’s resurrection and is given a foretaste of the Christian’s early reward.²⁴

In many ways, the intensity of these exercises resembles the courses of Scientology. Loyola, like a modern huckster, claimed sinful impulses would go away if the exercises were done right. If a priest still had these urges, he must have done the exercises wrong, although Loyola didn’t expect his men to suffer self-mortification. The hardships of missionary work were painful enough, and Jesuits had to stay sharp. But the leadership turned a blind eye to men like Brébeuf who inflicted pain upon themselves with whips, hair shirts, and spiked belts, and who left painful injuries untreated.²⁵

At the time of Loyola’s death in 1556, there were about a thousand Jesuits. By 1625, when Brébeuf was making his first trip to North America, there were more than fifteen thousand, mostly working in Europe teaching rich children and trying to roll back the Reformation. The glamorous missionaries working abroad got most of the attention. They could—and did—sit at the feet of emperors and were quite willing to use gifts and bribes to get there. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit who became China’s court astronomer, wore a long pigtail and dressed in silk Chinese court clothes that would have made him unrecognizable to his European colleagues. Adam Schall von Bell remade the Chinese calendar.²⁶ Ferdinand Verbiest helped redesign Beijing’s fortifications, bristling with cannon he engineered and blessed.²⁷

Jesuit militance generated backlash, which had the happy result of creating martyrs. Not only did the blood of these martyrs irrigate the mission fields and inspire zeal in surviving Jesuits, but the killing also generated holy relics that the Jesuits believed, or at least claimed, contained spiritual power. Pieces of Francis Xavier, the Order’s first great missionary, were snipped from him as he lay in state in the Portuguese-held Indian city of Goa. François Regis, who took the fight to rural France, was considered so blessed that hunks of him, dirt from his tomb, and swatches