Confronting nationalities. Italian Jesuits in China in the late seventeenth century

The chapter analyses the correspondence between some of the protagonists of the Jesuit China mission in the last decades of the seventeenth century with the aim to explore the different components that made up the missionary body over a delicate period of the history of Christianity and of the Society of Jesus present in China. Focusing on the Italian contingent, particular attention is devoted to the internal fractures and divisions as well as the renovated global disputes over the mission primacy, when new players intervened and took advantage of the waning Portuguese monopoly on Maritime Asia. The analysis focuses on the last two decades of the century, when the first Vicars Apostolic of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith (Propaganda Fide) and the missionaries-mathematicians of Louis XIV entered China. In particular, specific attention is paid to the Italian Jesuits, their contacts and relations with fellows much more aware of specific loyalties to their homeland in a time of profound tensions and national divides that flared even inside the Society of Jesus itself.