ABSTRACT
Since the second half of the sixteenth century, the religious orders had entertained ideas of conquering Japan, if not militarily at least spiritually. But after some initial successes, the Japanese rulers decided to ban Christianity from their dominions at the end of that century. The first decades of the seventeenth century would be characterized by the harsh persecution of Christians, both foreign and native. The religious orders, disobeying the expulsion decree, stayed clandestinely in Japan. Many of their members would be executed, adding to the swelling lists of ‘martyrs of Japan’, which the orders published regularly. As this article shows, these martyrs would be turned into powerful weapons in the fierce competition that existed between Jesuits, on the one hand, and Franciscans and Dominicans, on the other, for the control of the East Asian missions. At the same time, the competition and quarrels between the religious orders were closely intertwined with the competition and disputes caused by the imperial expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in Asia, in particular with the controversial question of which crown had jurisdiction over the missions of East Asia.
