ABSTRACT
{[f. 342]} When news arrived in Portugal that Emperor Claudio had died without any desire at all to obey the holy Roman Church, and that his brother Adamâs Çaguêd, who had succeeded him in the empire, was a bitter persecutor of those who professed our holy faith, and of the great hardships that he was causing to Father Patriarch Andre de Oviedo, and of the little yield that he was reaping in this land, because the people here and the emperors were stubbornly obstinate in their errors, and since the King of Portugal, Dom Sebastiam, had, on the other hand, heard of the great yield that was being reaped in the conversion of heathens in the kingdoms of Japan, he judged on the basis of considerable mature counsel that Our Lord would be better served if the father patriarch left Ethiopia and moved on to Japan. He therefore wrote to the ambassador that he had in Rome and to the father general of our Society for both of them to negotiate it with His Holiness Pope Pius V, who, from the information that he also already had about what was happening in Ethiopia, readily came to the same counsel and opinion. And so on 2nd February 1566 he issued a brief to the father patriarch, which I shall put here, translated faithfully from Latin into common language.
