This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Europe Programme call 2026. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
The Office of the Holy Inquisition was introduced into Portuguese Asia in 1561, more than a half century after the first arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. As an institution designed to enforce Catholic orthodoxy, and to rigidly police the boundaries between Catholics and non-Catholics, it profoundly transformed a colonial enterprise which, until then, had included a comparatively wider space for accommodation, syncretism, and various forms of partnership between the Portuguese and other non-Catholic communities.
TRANSRELIGIOUS is the first study that uses the records of the Portuguese inquisition to trace sixteenth- and seventeenth-century individuals whose religious difference, or the perception of it, made them transgressors in the eyes of imperial authorities - not only within Portuguese Asia, but also in the neighbouring Islamic empires of the Ottomans, the Safavids, and in some cases the Mughals of South Asia. We refer individuals who crossed several boundaries in Early Modern Eurasia – geographic and imperial limits, on the one hand, belief and social demarcations, on the other. Geographically, the project covers a vast area between Anatolia and South India, traversed by sea lanes, caravan networks, mainland and port cities, rural areas and battlefields. Chronologically, it covers roughly a half century from the 1560s to the early 1600s, the high-point of “regimes of control” across the empires studied. Demographically, it includes a wide variety of religious communities: Armenian, Syriac, Orthodox and other eastern Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, “New Christians” forced to convert from Judaism, Protestants from Northern Europe, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims - and many others.
In their diversity, the people we wish to examine had at least two things in common. First, they moved through and between empires systematically and conspicuously, during a time in which barriers were being progressively raised to make such mobility more difficult. Second, their life stories have been recorded “on the spot” by the agents of the Holy Inquisition, providing the most “direct” (but also highly problematic) body of evidence available to study such experiences.
TRANSRELIGIOUS project uses these inquisitorial sources to study mobility and regimes of control in a bifurcated way, combining micro, meso, and macro approaches. At the “meso” level, studies key nodes of mobility and control: port cities and transit hubs where travellers came in contact with imperial authorities. At the “micro” level, it reconstructs a number of individual life stories, by identifying case files with particularly rich autobiographical content. Finally, at the “macro” level, it uses digital methods to track and map individuals across a large number of case records in order to present an aggregate picture of these emerging imperial regimes and their long-term effects.
For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.