In 1560, the Holy Inquisition arrived in Portuguese Asia. Its efforts to enforce Catholic orthodoxy formed part of a wider shift across early modern Eurasia, as imperial authorities increasingly sought to police religious difference and control people moving across their borders. Yet people continued to travel between Portuguese, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal territories, crossing not only geographic and political boundaries but religious and social ones too.
TRANSRELIGIOUS, a research project funded through the EUI Widening Europe Programme, follows the lives of these mobile individuals through records left by the Portuguese Inquisition. We spoke to Giancarlo Casale, Head of the EUI Department of History, and Jorge Flores, Senior Researcher at the University of Lisbon, about what these lives reveal about mobility, faith, and imperial control in the 16th and 17th centuries.
TRANSRELIGIOUS focuses on people who crossed both religious and imperial boundaries. Who were these people, and what can following their lives show us that we miss when we organise history around individual religions or empires?
Giancarlo: People are used to imagining the 16th century as the beginning of European imperialism, and, along with it, the exportation of Christianity from Europe to the rest of the world. But, in reality, it was an “age of empires” in a much more general sense. The three most important empires in the history of Islam, the Ottomans in Europe and the Middle East, the Safavids in Iran, and the Mughals in South Asia, were all established at more or less the same time as the first European overseas empires. TRANSRELIGIOUS asks what this new world order of global empires meant for ordinary people, especially those who tried to operate between the boundaries of any one state or faith.
Jorge: These were rather diverse individuals with regard to birthplace, ethnic origin, social condition, political context, and educational background: Armenians and Jews from all walks of life, Turks, Portuguese and other Europeans, Africans, Indians, Malays, and Chinese. What ties them together is their troubled relationship with Christianity in the eyes of the Inquisition. Some changed faiths at some point in their lives and eventually embraced Catholicism in an “imperfect” way, as the Inquisitors often put it, while others, raised as Catholics, were eventually allured by “wrong” religions and customs.
If we think in terms of static systems of belief and fixed imperial formations, one misses the point. The lives and travails of these mobile and fluid people can tell us a lot, not only about themselves, but also about the nature of large-scale power structures of the early modern world.
The project begins at a moment when religious boundaries were becoming more tightly policed. What changed for people who had previously moved between different religious, social, and political worlds?
Jorge: Broadly speaking, the tribunal founded in Goa in 1560 stems from the growing impact of the Counter-Reformation in Asia. The activity of the Inquisition in India and beyond went hand in hand with several imperial restrictions on the ways in which Indigenous individuals and communities were organised socially, used domestic, urban, and sacred space, and ran their daily lives. These constraints applied to areas under the authority or influence of the Estado da Índia and also affected Portuguese subjects, Europeans from both Catholic and Protestant regions of the Old Continent, and members of diasporic communities such as Jews and Armenians. So, crown and church had some ability to restrain peoples’ movements and free will in Asia. There were travels and routes that one should not undertake, places and gatherings to be avoided, food practices and attires banned, languages and books forbidden.
Giancarlo: Our project is trying to capture the evolution of multiple trends at the same time. On the one hand, the Portuguese Inquisition was introduced into Portugal’s Asian territories around the middle of the 16th century, about 50 years after the first Portuguese arrived, and this had many important implications: For the first time, people living thousands of miles from Europe had their religious beliefs policed by an arm of the Catholic church.
But at the same time, the middle of the 16th century was also a moment of hardening boundaries between Shi’ism and Sunni Islam—a kind of sectarianism that people often imagine to have a much older history, dating back to the earliest century of Islam, but which in reality really crystallised as the result of rivalry between the Ottomans and Safavids. In fact, before the 16th century, Iran was not a predominantly Shi’ite place, nor was Ottoman territory particularly Sunni.
You are looking across Portuguese, Ottoman, Safavid, and, in some cases, Mughal territories. Were these empires confronting similar challenges in trying to control mobile people, or did they understand religious difference and belonging in very different ways?
Giancarlo: As mentioned above, there is a peculiar convergence of interest in enforcing orthodoxy across both European and Islamic empires during the latter 16th century, to the extent that some historians have begun to speak of a global “age of confessionalisation”. But there were also very important differences. One of the things Europeans today have difficulty coming to terms with—since freedom of religion is so closely associated with ‘European values’—is that, historically, the idea that everyone should be forced to belong to the same religion is really a European concept, one rarely found elsewhere in the world. Muslim rulers were becoming more interested in enforcing orthodoxy among their Muslim subjects, but it would never have occurred to the Ottoman Sultan or the Mughal Emperor to expel the many tens of millions of non-Muslims who lived in their realms, much less force them to convert en masse. This is the main reason why nothing like the Inquisition, or its archives, existed in the Muslim world.
Jorge: None of these empires, or any other empire for that matter, is a monolith, and Mughal India is an intriguing case. The Mughal imperial enterprise came into being with the conquest of Delhi in 1526 by Babur (r. 1526-1530), a Chagatai Turk who ruled over Kabul. The Mughals would reach their zenith at the turn of the late 18th century, when their political space had grown to encompass virtually the entirety of the Indian subcontinent. One of their “secrets” was to successfully accommodate multiple ethnicities and religions, and wanderers too, under the political and symbolic authority of a Muslim emperor, the Portuguese and the Jesuits being a case in point. This strategy was particularly rewarding under Akbar and his son Jahangir, between 1556 and 1627.
Is there one person or one case you have come across that, for you, captures what this project is about? What happened to them?
Jorge: So many! But if I had to choose one, I would probably go for Francisco Toscano, whose case shows how identity, and perceived religious affiliation, changed according to name, dress, and movement. Francisco was a Catholic “mestizo” born in Goa around 1566. When he was 12, the Muslims of Malabar, in what is now the Indian state of Kerala, captured him while he was sailing off the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and upon converting to Islam he took the name Kutti Ali and started to dress accordingly. He later reached the Portuguese fortress of Cannanore, whose captain gave him Portuguese clothes to put on, but Francisco was destined to wander around. He left Cannanore and crossed India overland wrapped in red ochre cloth like a true yogi, travelled from Diu to Sind, in present-day Pakistan, dressed in the local fashion, and then sailed to the Persian Gulf, wisely switching back to Portuguese clothing before entering the city of Hormuz.
Some time after his arrival, in February 1586, he was denounced as a Muslim and arrested by the Inquisition. Francisco, by then 21, tried to assure the Inquisitors that, in the course of his long and convoluted journeys, ‘he never had any dealings or close conversations with Muslims or Jews, or with other people professing the wrong faith’. Yet the inquisitors did not buy it and, besides imposing spiritual penalties and public acts of contrition, they shipped him to Lisbon and condemned him to three years in the galleys. One wonders which persona he adopted once in Portugal.
Giancarlo: For me it would have to be a man identified by the Christian name “Antonio of Venice” and the Muslim name Hamed. In reality, he was born near Belgrade, when it was still part of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Ottomans captured him as a boy, took him to Constantinople, circumcised him, and made him a Janissary [an elite Ottoman soldier]. Decades later, he was on an Ottoman galley near Hormuz when the Portuguese captured him and enslaved him a second time. After agreeing to be baptised again, he was sent to Portugal, but became disillusioned with life as a Christian and eventually tried to escape back to Ottoman territory, which is the reason for his trial. The escape was unsuccessful, but it involved many other people and led to other trials, which allows us to reconstruct his whole social network. There is also a final ironic twist: long after his own trial, he appears in the records again as a Turkish interpreter. That is, he eventually found work as an employee of the inquisition, helping to interrogate other Ottoman subjects.
Giancarlo, you recently spoke to An-Nahar about the history of Hormuz and the ways in which maritime traffic was controlled through customs, port charges, and navigation licences. You mentioned that this connects to your research for TRANSRELIGIOUS. How does Hormuz fit into the project, and what does its history tell us about the relationship between mobility and control?
Giancarlo: Hormuz is a fascinating place. Already in the Middle Ages, it became the hub of a remarkable maritime empire based almost completely on controlling trade, so successful that the island became home to one of the largest cities of the era, with between 50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants, despite being a barren outcropping of salt rock with no arable land and virtually no water. Its success was based on two principles. On the one hand, it used naval power to enforce a rule that every ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz had to stop and pay a flat 10% tax on their cargoes. However, the other pillar of Hormuz’s success was that everyone was welcome: Shi’ites, Sunnis, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Armenians, Chinese Buddhists, everyone from everywhere was allowed to trade, live, and worship in Hormuz without discrimination.
When the Portuguese arrived, they at first tried to change this by using Hormuz as a choke point to block trade and force it around Africa instead, which was the route to Europe they controlled. Over time, however, they learned that this was against their own interests, and went back to a system closer to the one in place before their arrival: charging everyone more or less the same rate, and keeping the city open to all rather than privileging Catholics, something completely unique in Portuguese Asia. The formula worked, and by the end of the 16th century, the customs house of Hormuz accounted for almost half of the budget surplus of the entire Portuguese empire.
Let me conclude by saying that, when we began this project, nobody in the policy world would have imagined how relevant this part of our research would be to contemporary global debates. It is a very good example of why it is often a good idea to let historians follow their instincts rather than try to chase the news.
Giancarlo Casale joined the EUI as Professor of Early Modern Mediterranean History in September 2018 and has been Head of the Department of History since January 2025. He is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and its connections with the early modern world, and his current research examines intellectual life in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Italy, particularly antiquarianism, cartography, cosmography, and other early modern sciences.
Jorge Flores is a Senior Researcher at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Sciences and Technology and the Institute of Studies on the History and Philosophy of Sciences at the University of Lisbon. A historian of the Portuguese empire in early modern Asia, he works on the Iberian empires in their global context, the Mughal Empire and its frontier with Portuguese India, the Persian Gulf and the Indo-Persian world, and the intermediaries who moved between these spaces. He held a professorship at the EUI from 2010 to 2019, after teaching at Brown University.
The EUI Widening Europe Programme, supported by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in targeted Widening countries.
Picture credits: Right Street in the City of Goa, Portuguese India, between 1579 and 1592. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, via Wikipedia Commons.