Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T08:39:09.331Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino, e Cocincina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2020

Edited and translated by
Get access

Summary

The Augustinian missionary Nicola Agustin Cima's Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino, e Cocincina, a manuscript of sixty-six pages completed around 1707 and kept in the Marciana Library, Venice under the shelfmark Ital. Cl. VI.76 (6036) was, frankly speaking, an unexpected find whilst researching other matters there. It is both a prescriptive document put forward for deliberation by the Venetian Senate, and a tour d’horizon of the commercial and political possibilities offered in the Orient. Having worked on a number of roughly contemporary missionaries in South-East Asia, I was immediately intrigued as to why the author of this memorandum, Nicola Agustin Cima, was unknown to me, and went unmentioned in the stock literature. I was to find out that even his primary editor, Francesco Surdich, considered Cima a “somewhat neglected (trascurato) personality, if not [to say] completely ignored.”

In my earlier work, I had tried to categorize, or at least clarify, the types of missionary working in the Asian mission fields: first the anunciadores, or self-styled “apostles to the Gentiles,” charismatic individuals destined for mass conversion like Samuel Fritz, “Apóstolo das Amazonas”; secondly, the bedrock missionaries—stable, often hard workers who spent their lives in one mission attending to the needs of their church communities (into which category I would place the Jesuit Maldonado de Mons); and finally the “floating clergy,” like the Italian Franciscan G. B. Morelli, who were of questionable impact on the mission fields, and whose “turbulence” often only stimulated internecine rivalries among the orders. Cima was, it seems, if not “turbulent” then of marginal impact, and, as we shall see from this text, distracted from any spiritual purpose. Many of his recommendations not only appear fleetingly and extremely speculatively, but would be interpreted by psychoanalysts as frankly delusional, both in the sense of a personal delusion de grandeur, but also with respect to a shocking ignorance of political realities around him. One is reminded of a bureaucrat in Madrid, who commented that those sent on missions were “not the most lucid” members of their orders.

A number of questions, however, emerge, particularly when cross-referenced to other traces Cima has left in the historical record

Type
Chapter
Information
Two Missionary Accounts of Southeast Asia in the Late Seventeenth Century
A Translation and Critical Edition of Guy Tachard's Relation de Voyage aux Indes (1690–99) and Nicola Cima's Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino, e Cocincina (1697-1706)
, pp. 155 - 180
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×