ABSTRACT
The last phase of the so-called Christian century in Japan was marked by real crosses, on which missionaries and Japanese believers converted to the faith of a foreign God were martyred. The central power’s decision to brutally persecute Christians and the consequent failure of the Catholic missionary effort were linked to multiple reasons, not least the appearance of internal conflict within the missions: divided between Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and Jesuits, the Catholics entered into competition with each other in a desperate attempt to evangelize the archipelago. The land of the samurai thus became a land of martyrs, models for men and women in European parishes who learnt the deeds of those new saints from the numerous publications on the subject produced by the Jesuits and other orders; but the exemplarity of the Japanese faithful and missionaries also spread through sermons and works of art in early seventeenth-century Europe.
