Jean-Baptiste Maldonado: a Flemish Jesuit in Ayutthaya

Little is known about Jean-Baptiste Maldonado's childhood years. We know that he was a Fleming who was born in 1634 in the Southern Netherlands and that he spent a large part of his childhood in Mons or Bergen in Wallonia.

His Spanish-sounding family name suggests that he was descended from 'Maranen', Jews who, after being expelled from Spain by royal decree in 1492, had converted to Christianity'converted'. A number of these converted Jews, mostly traders, had settled in the Southern Netherlands in the early sixteenth century.

He entered the Jesuit order around 1654 and was ordained a priest in 1665 in the French-Flemish Dowaai or Douai. Shortly after entering the order, in 1655 to be precise, as a novice he had officially declared his desire to serve in the Jesuit missions in the Far East. And perhaps during this period he already started to learn Japanese and possibly also Chinese. Almost immediately after his ordination, he asked permission for his Italian confrere Giovanni Filippo Marini SJ (1608-1682) who had been working since 1640 in Tonkin and Macao for the “Japanese province in exilewas charged with assisting. On April 13, 1666, he left Lisbon for Goa, the prosperous Portuguese colony on the Indian west coast. He stayed here for three months and then left for Macao with a stopover in Batavia. His stay in Batavia was very short-lived. The Dutch were not very supportive of the Jesuits in any case, and when Maldonado also became embroiled in a bitter polemic with Joddo Fereira de Almedeida, a Portuguese Catholic who had converted to Calvinism and who was a member of the small Portuguese Protestant community in Batavia. led, it was not long before he received a compelling request from Governor-General Johan Maetsuycker (1606-1678) to pack his bags and leave Batavia immediately. Whether Maetsuycker did this wholeheartedly remains to be seen, because he was the only Catholic who had ever succeeded in rising to the high office of governor-general.

A month later, Maldonado arrived in Macau, the oldest European colony in China. The Portuguese had founded this trading post in 1557 and developed it into an important trading center, not only for China but for the whole of Southeast Asia. It became Maldonado's home base for the following years. That he was not only concerned with the care of the souls of the Catholics expelled from Japan is evident from his involvement in the diplomatic mission that the Portuguese nobleman Manuel de Saldhana undertook to Beijing in 1667-1670 to communicate with the Qing emperor Kangxi (1654). -1722) to negotiate.

Sometime between late 1673 and early 1675, Maldonado ended up in the Siamese capital. It was not unknown territory for the order because the Jesuits had been present in Ayutthaya since 1625. However, a first attempt to set up a Jesuit community there failed in 1632. In 1655, the Sicilian Tomaso Valguarnera (1608-1677) took his chance; He would remain in Siam for fifteen years, leaving his mark on the very small monastic community. Thanks to a substantial bequest from the Portuguese sea pilot Sebastio Andrés, who died in Ayutthaya, Valguarnera was able to build a real school, the Collegio do San Salvador. In 1670, Valguarnera was appointed Apostolic Visitor to the Japanese and Chinese Ecclesiastical Provinces and left Siam. Maldonado may have been appointed as his successor shortly afterwards, but when Valguernera returned to Ayutthaya in 1675, it was the latter who built the Jesuit Church of Sao Paulo and the associated residence for the order in the Portuguese enclave next to the Chao Phraya. Two years later, Valguernera died and Maldonado became the new strongman of the Jesuit order in Siam.

Despite the fact that only a handful of Jesuits stayed in Ayutthaya, they were dominant. They not only rendered handyman services to the court as translators and interpreters, but also regularly acted as personal physicians for members of the royal family or went to work as engineers in the construction and maintenance of the waterways or of the forts and city walls. Furthermore, they perform apostolic work among the captives and among the wounded on the battlefields, helping slaves who were enslaved by their outstanding debts.

(Bill Perry / Shutterstock.com)

It was Maldonado who baptized the Greek adventurer Constantine Phaulkon (2-1682) in Ayutthaya on May 1647, 1688. Phaulkon was converted by the Namur Jesuit and astronomer Antoine Thomas. A few days later he also blessed Phaulkon's marriage to his Japanese-Portuguese-Bengali wife Maria Guyomar de Pinha. Phaulkon would become the chief advisor of the Siamese king Narai (1633-1688) until he was executed for high treason on June 5, 1688, after a coup.

In early 1684, Maldonado suddenly mysteriously disappeared from the radar. Many historians assume that in that year he carried out a secret diplomatic mission to China with a ship that was made available to him by King Narai. However, he was back in Siam in September 1687. In that month he was actively involved in arranging the travel of a number of Jesuits who belonged to a scientific diplomatic mission to the Chinese Imperial Court. At the request of the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688), who resided in Beijing, most of them were qualified astronomers who had to assist him in (re)building the old imperial observatory in the Chinese capital. Maldonade received them on their stopover in Siam and gave them shelter near the Jesuit-designed palatial residence at Lopburi.

It became more and more clear in that period that Maldonado was much more than just a priest in Ayutthaya. His busy correspondence showed that he was perhaps one of the best-informed Westerners in all of Southeast Asia, who had a strong network of informants and correspondents at his disposal and who enjoyed the confidence of the highest Siamese court circles. He was undeniably behind the efforts, directed by the Vatican and especially the French court, to convert Narai to Catholicism, but he was realistic enough to realize that this would never happen. He was also apparently on good terms with the main leaders of the Sangha, the Buddhist faith community. Unlike the Dominicans and Franciscans present in Ayutthaya, he was known to be tolerant and, together with his confrere Antoine Thomas, studied Buddhism instead of treating it as 'idolatryto point out. If there were any conflicts, they were mainly located in the corner of the Vatican. The Jesuits, but also the Spanish-Portuguese and the French court, had a very difficult time with the activities of the Vatican missionaries of the Mission Etrangeres de Paris, which were sent to Asia from 1658 by the Congregation for the Sacred Doctrine of the Faith. And certainly when the Vatican demanded an oath of allegiance from the missionaries of the other orders, this increased the already existing tensions.

The French King Louis XIV (1638-1715), for example, who had an absolute preference for the Jesuits, insisted on deciding for himself which missionaries he would send on French diplomatic missions to the Far East. And the Jesuits, who strongly insisted on their autonomy, were not immediately impatient to swear allegiance to Rome…. They regularly came into conflict with Monseigneur Louis Laneau (1637-1696), the first Apostolic Vicar of Siam. It was undoubtedly Maldonado's great credit that he succeeded in keeping the Jesuits, well known for their intrigues, out of the ecclesiastical power struggles fought out between the various orders to solidify their missionary claims to this part of Asia. And precisely this wisdom and insights were also highly valued by the Siamse Court.

Catholic Church in Ayuthaya (MR. AEKALAK CHIAMCHAROEN /Shutterstock.com)

Yet his stay in Siam was almost over and he seems to have fallen victim to the intrigues and internal power struggles. Unlike most of the French clergy in Ayutthaya and Lopburi, he had been spared imprisonment and torture after the palace revolt of 1688. That same year, after a series of talks with the Jesuit diplomat, the Vatican commission in charge of the Far East decided Guy Tachard SJ that the disputed oath of allegiance should be abolished for the missionaries in Siam, Cochinchina, Tonkin and China. In exchange, the Jesuits recognized the authority of the Apostolic Vicar in the region. All this was ratified in a treaty in Paris on March 13, 1689, but only applied to French missionaries. In view of the fact that Maldonado was considered Portuguese, he fell outside the provisions of this 'gentlemen's agreement'.

In January 1693, Francisco de Nogueira, the Jesuit Visitor for the umbrella Japanese mission, decided that Father Alexeio Coelho, as a visitator for Siam, Cochinchina and Cambodia, would travel to Phnom Phen to refloat the Cambodian mission. On the way, Coelho made a stopover in Siam to replace Maldonado with the young Antoni Diaz as head of the Jesuit Congregation, as instructed by de Nogueira. Coelho also had to ensure that Maldonado returned to Macau, but Monsignor Laneau put a stop to this, who regarded Coelho's actions as an attempt to undermine his authority. He believed that the Flemish Jesuit should go to Rome to get a story. In the following months and even years, Maldonado became the subject of a large-scale ecclesiastical wrangling that eventually led him to leave for the mission in Cambodia at the end of 1696. This remarkable clergyman died on August 5, 1699 in Phnom Penh. He did not live to see how the mission in Cambodia fell into complete decline a few years later, with the tragic culmination of the assassination of one of his successors in 1717.

The historian Henri Bosmans published in Leuven in 1910 'Correspondance of Jean-Baptiste Maldonado de Mons, missionaire belge au Siam et Chine au 17^e siècle' which offers an insight into the life and correspondence of this Flemish Jesuit, which is still worth reading today.