The Great Mogul--Rudolph Aquaviva--Jerome Xavier--de Nobili--de Britto--Beschi--The Pariahs--Entering Thibet--From Peking to Europe--Mingrelia, Paphlagonia and Chaldea--The Maronites-- Alexander de Rhodes--Ricci enters China--From Agra to Peking-- Adam Schall--Arrival of the Tatars--Persecutions--Schall condemned to Death--Verbiest--de Tournon's Visit--The French Royal Mathematicians--Avril's Journey.
At the very time that Queen Elizabeth was putting Jesuits to death in England, there was a remarkable pagan monarch reigning in what is now part of English India, who was inviting Jesuits to his court and making them his friends. His name was Akbar, and he is known in history as the Great Mogul. He was born in 1542, and ruled four years longer than the forceful Eliza. She was queen from 1558 to 1603; he was king from 1556 to 1605. Akbar appears first as the ruler of the Punjab and the country around Delhi and Agra; but in 1572 he drove the Afghans out of Bengal, and reunited the lower valley of the Ganges to Hindostan. Later, he annexed Cabul, Kashmir, Sind and Kandahar. He was a mighty warrior, but remarkable likewise as a civil ruler, the proof in this case being that he levied more money in taxes than England extracts at the present day from the same territory. He was very much interested in religious matters, and Christianity appealed to him, because one of his numerous wives had been a Christian; but he fancied that it was part of a general system which could be incorporated in a new cult which he had devised to conciliate the conflicting creeds of his realm. His own personal devotion was sun-worship, and he appeared every morning in public, devoutly offering up his orisons to the god of day. He fancied it was the world-soul that animates all things, a concrete form of one of the illusions of the present time.
At the invitation of Akbar, Rudolph Aquaviva, accompanied by Anthony Montserrat and Francisco Henriques, left Goa in 1579, to present himself at his court for the purpose of explaining to him the doctrines of the Christian Faith. He listened with pleasure and intelligence, but his interest was purely academic. As with other Oriental despots, nothing practical could be hoped for, on account of the harem. Seeing that it was lost time to remain there, Aquaviva returned to Goa, and was then sent down to the peninsula of Salsette, as superior of the mission established at that place. His stay there was not a long one, for on July 15, 1583, he and Alfonso Pacheco were attacked by the natives and cut to pieces. Fathers Pietro Berno, Antonio Francisco and Francisco Aranha, a lay-brother, together with twenty of their neophytes were included in the massacre.