[In the following essay, Parker outlines the historical events narrated in The Lusiads, providing the cultural and political contexts of the poem while suggesting that the epic transcends those particular events to reflect the spirit of the Renaissance.]

Camões was born in 1524 and died in 1580: his age is therefore the sixteenth century in transition from the High Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It would be pointless to attempt a survey of European history and culture in this period, for much. indeed most, of this would not be relevant to the poem we commemorate. No poem is so fully of its age as The Lusiads, not only in its artistic structure and poetic form, but also in its content. It is, in fact, a poem about its age, about the first voyage of Europeans to India, the expedition of Vasco da Gama in 1497-99; it is the great epic of the age as experienced by Portugal. I propose to select from the poem itself two aspects whose discussion may illuminate the age through the poem's connection with it. From this something of a historical framework will emerge that may perhaps lead us to see a little more clearly why the poem is what it is.

The first aspect is raised by the poem's opening lines:

As armas, e os barões assinalados,
que da occidental praya lusitana,
por mares nunca de antes navegados,
passaram …
Arms, and those matchless chiefs who from the shore
Of Western Lusitania began
to track the oceans none had sailed before …)

This is a direct echo of the opening of Virgil's Aeneid:

Arma, virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris
Fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
Litora …
(Of arms I sing, and of the man, whom Fate
First drove from Troy to the Lavinian shore)

The second aspect concerns the opening of Canto VII, where Camões calls on the powers of Western Europe to cease their internecine strife and collaborate in the international task of fighting the enemies of the Christian faith.

Echoes of, and allusions to, Virgil abound in The Lusiads. Its plan and structure are modelled on those of the Aeneid, as is also the way the theme is presented. In Virgil the voyages of Aeneas are overshadowed by the rivalry between Venus and Juno, the latter seeking to prevent the Trojans from achieving their destiny and founding Rome, the former aiding and defending them. In The Lusiads Venus leads the Portuguese on to India and rewards their heroism; their enemy is Bacchus: here, too, this rivalry is debated on Olympus under the presidency of Jupiter. The one poem imitates the other, not because Camões could not have written the poem in another way, but because he deliberately wanted it this way. He wanted not just to revive the classical past as erudition or as poetic ornamentation, but in order to emphasize the continuity of the present with the past. The modern Portuguese are Lusitanians; their expedition sets sail from Lisbon, a city founded by Ulysses, who had been present at the siege of Troy, and their exploits make them the Romans of modern times. Camões continually stresses this. The gods of Olympus recognize the Lusitanians as Romans, and recognize their Portuguese speech as Latin.

The sense of continuity with classical antiquity is, of course, a mark of the Renaissance. The word means the rebirth or revival of classical culture, and not, as used to be thought, the rebirth of the human spirit into the light of freedom after the obscurantism of a medieval night. This view had implied that the men of the Middle Ages were quite different from us, which is nonsense. One of the many things the scholarship of our century has done has been to study and revalue the impressive cultural achievements of medieval civilization. Nonetheless, there is a marked difference between the Middle Ages and the Age of Camões—not any difference in human nature, but one between the dominant intellectual interests and attitudes of the educated people in each epoch. The intellectual activity of medieval Europe had been sponsored, in the main, by the Church, which had included the majority of educated people in its professional ranks. Theology had been the major intellectual preoccupation and, on the whole, it had attracted the best minds of the Middle Ages.

With the Renaissance there developed in the field of intellectual studies, side by side with a continuing interest in theology, a more active concern with the problems of this world through the observation of natural phenomena and of human behaviour. For men with this concern the one great body of naturalistic literature available was that of Greece and Rome with its realistic observation of men. Renaissance scholars—the new Humanists—had to turn to classical literature for direct and concrete observation of human behaviour and for naturalistic speculation about it. This brought with it the excitement of discovery as they found and made known forgotten works which satisfied so aptly their own interest in the ordinary secular problems of human life. They felt that they were heralding a new dawn. Thus they paralleled the astronomers' exploration of the earth's place in the universe, and the navigators' discovery of a New World, by the discovery and exploration of the world of antiquity revealed in Greek and Roman literature. In every sphere, therefore, the Renaissance meant new discoveries and brought with it the excitement attendant thereon. Men saw themselves with new eyes, and saw in mankind a new dignity with which they endowed themselves as individuals.

Self-assertion thus became conscious and deliberate in this new society. Self-assertion had of course existed in the Middle Ages—in the grabbing feudal landowner or the ambitious prelate—but in the self-assertion of the Renaissance man a new element is introduced into literature, the deliberate glorification of personal fame. What is noticeable in so much humanist writing is the common assumption that fame is worth striving for. A definite strand in this literature is the exaltation of human glory. This note is firmly struck in The Lusiads. Vasco da Gama and his men have exalted not only Portugual but the whole human race. At the end of Canto IX they receive their reward when they are led into the Hall of Immortal Fame on the Isle of Venus. This also explains the appearance of the gods of mythology in The Lusiads. These gods had been the human heroes of remote antiquity who were divinized in the memories of men when their exploits became legendary; so too will the human heroes of The Lusiads become immortalized, and thus divinized, in the Pantheon of Fame.

Camões summons his contemporaries to the continued pursuit of heroism in the quest for fame:

And your loved King you will illustrious make,
Now, it may be, with counsel wisely planned,
Now with the sword that shall immortal make
Your names, like all your forebears in the land.
Nothing is impossible to undertake.
Where will is, there's a way, and you shall stand
With splendid figures of heroic kind
And in the Isle of Venus welcome find.

(9. 95)

By surmounting all the dangers of hostile nature and of human enemies, Vasco da Gama endowed humanity with a new dignity. At the end of Canto I, as the King of Mombassa is planning a treacherous attack on the Portuguese fleet, Camões asks where can a weak man find refuge from tempests and war? How can a little bug crawling on the ground expect high heaven not to vent its indignation against it? That is what mankind had previously felt itself to be—a small earthbound bug that could be crushed at any time:

um bicho da terra tão pequeno

(1. 106. 8)

The age of Camões elevated the bug into a god-like figure, and he himself records the transformation by giving the highest artistic expression to his age's sense of the gloriousness of contemporary achievement in opening up the whole globe to navigation.

The spur to navigation was, of course, the economic motive, control of the spice trade. The motive of Portugal in searching for the sea route to India, and that of Columbus in sailing west to what he expected would be Asia, was the same: to break the Venetian monopoly of the distribution of spices in Europe. The economic motive is not necessarily the disinterested purpose of fostering the material well-being of humanity; it can be greed seeking its own satisfaction, personal gain to be achieved by ruthlessness and exploitation, as was to be quickly apparent in both Asia and America. But this was not what the Humanists foresaw. They welcomed the opening of sea routes and the discovery of new lands because this facilitated intercourse between different peoples, and they viewed such intercourse optimistically because that was what reason postulated. This optimism led to the formulation, around 1540, by Francisco de Vitoria in lectures at the University of Salamanca, of principles that were later to become the foundation of international law. The whole human race, he taught, constitutes one single family; friendship between nations and freedom of intercourse among them therefore constitute precepts of the Law of Nature. It is right and lawful that men of different nations and races should trade peacefully among themselves provided they do no hurt to each other. Vitoria was thus the first to affirm the basic freedoms of international intercourse: freedom of speech and of communication, freedom of movement and of trade, freedom of the seas.

This was one of the new discoveries of the age in the sphere of ideas. Vitoria's lectures dealt with the question, hotly debated in Spain at that time, of the legitimacy of Spain's title to the American lands. He dealt specifically with that question, but his doctrine was equally valid for the Portuguese in Asia and very much so in Africa. Spaniards, he said, have the right to go to America in order to develop intercourse and trade with the Indians provided they do them no physical and political harm; but they have no right to make war on the Indians except in self-defense, especially in defense of their right to free intercourse and trade. The refusal of the Indians to admit free intercourse would constitute just grounds for war, provided the benefits aimed at would accrue to all nations, for Vitoria laid down the principle that a particular state has a duty not only to its own citizens but to the whole international community. “Since a state,” he wrote, “is only part of the whole world, since even more a Christian state is only part of the whole Commonwealth of Christendom, even if war be to the plain advantage of a certain state or people, if it is on the other hand injurious to the world at large or to Christendom as a whole, it is on this account unjust.”

But, of course, the fact that the American Indians were undeveloped communities, with no organization or means of trading, meant that they and the Spaniards were not fully able to exercise their natural freedom of intercourse. Hence Vitoria adumbrated a system of mandates, laying down the right and duty of a State, on its own initiative or under mandate from the international community, to prepare backward peoples for dominion on a footing of equality with other states. On this ground Spain could claim a colonizing mission in America, but only if she conceived it in terms of the interests of the inhabitants, not primarily of her own; in Vitoria's words, “Spanish rule should be exercised in the interests of the Indians and not merely for the profit of the Spaniards.”

About 1580, the year of Camões' death, Luis de Granada from his convent in Lisbon (he was, like Vitoria, a Dominican friar) could still take an optimistic view of navigation. In The Symbol of the Faith he wrote: “On the one hand the sea separated countries, dividing up the land; but on the other hand it also joins them, and thus creates friendship and harmony between them because of the mutual intercourse it makes possible. Therefore the Creator, wishing all nations to be friendly together, did not want one alone to contain everything necessary for human living, in order that the need one nation would have of another should bring them together in harmony. And so the sea, placed between the different lands, represents a great fair and market, with countless buyers and sellers and with all the goods necessary for sustaining our life. Since journeys across land are very arduous and it would not be possible to transport overland all that is needed, the Creator provided this new route for ships, large and small, to follow … so that nothing should be wanting to any man” (Introducción del símbolo de la Fe, I, viii).

This was how the consequences of the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama appeared to the reasonable and enlightened minds of the time. There seemed a real opportunity to create Vitoria's international community and to bring about collaboration between different peoples on a scale never envisaged before. But although all the optimistic ideals of the Humanists were to leave their positive mark on our civilization, none of them were to be fulfilled. The ideal of international collaboration for the peace of the world is still far from being realized today, despite the existence of machinery devised to facilitate it. In the sixteenth century the ideal was made unworkable by the fact that the opening up of communications between Europe, the East and the New World coincided with the disruption of European unity.

Camões was born just after Luther, in 1517, nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg, bringing into the open his challenge to the medieval ecclesiastical establishment. In 1520, the year Camões was born, the young Charles of Hapsburg, having succeeded to the crowns of Castile and Aragon and having been elected Holy Roman Emperor, left Spain for Germany to cope with this threat of disruption. The Emperor was still the titular head of Western Europe, but his effective power had not corresponded to his theoretical authority. Now, however, the Low Countries, Spain and Spain's possessions in the Neaw World were added to the Empire, and Charles V wielded more effective power than any previous emperor since Charles the Great. This seemed to make possible a universal European monarchy, and this was the political goal envisaged by his advisers in imperial affairs, but it was in religious and not political terms that Charles conceived his imperial duty of safeguarding the unity of Europe. This was due to the influence of his Spanish advisers.

It was in Spain that he affirmed, early in his reign, that any king who conquers what does not belong to him is a tyrant; and as he left Spain for Germany he affirmed in the Castilian parliament that he had accepted the emperorship, not to add new dominions under his rule, but to fulfil the arduous obligation of diverting the great evils that threatened the Christian religion and to fight the infidel enemies of the Faith. Spain, through Charles V, was thus still proclaiming the medical ideal of the universitas christiana, namely, the subordination of national self-interest to the interests of the unity of Christendom. One school of historians claim that Spain alone, at this time, had a world vision where other nations had a narrow nationalistic one, and that Charles alone of all the rulers of his time fought to create a federated United States of Europe. The fact that no other country heeded his appeal and that the Protestant Reformation could not be stopped, meant that he failed in his self-imposed task.

By the time of his abdication in 1556 religious disruption was accepted as a fact, and Germany, and indeed Europe, were divided along the lines of the new religious cleavage. This marked the beginning of the Counter-Reformation. Catholicism, after licking its wounds, turned to the offensive. The fight for the unity of Christendom now became the fight not only for the unity of Catholicism but also for its spread, which meant primarily carrying it overseas with the fleets of Portugal and Spain. Vitoria's conception of peaceful international relations without war gave way to the revival of the crusading spirit—the spread of the Faith by war. For the next century and more wars of religion were to shatter the optimistic ideal of the Humanists. All this is mirrored in The Lusiads, which in this, as in other lesser respects, is a product of the Counter-Reformation.

Camões' poem is a proudly patriotic one; nonetheless he viewed the opening of relations and trade with India not as a monopoly for Portugal but as an international enterprise for the security and expansion of Christendom. This is the theme that opens Canto VII. The Christian nations, says Camões, are now like the warriors sprung from the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus: they tear each other to pieces. When the Portuguese have reached India he makes an impassioned plea for Christian unity, stressing the scandal caused when France entered into alliance with the Grand Turk, the major enemy of Christendom, against the Emperor, the head and guardian of Christendom. Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, and Italians should unite with Portuguese and Spaniards in a common end above and beyond selfish national interests. The aim of the Crusade is now envisaged as a much wider one than the recovery of Jerusalem, and it is to be waged in a much vaster setting. In the last Canto Camões speaks with approval and hope of later expeditions to Asia that will by conquest place under the Christian yoke all the pagan rulers who will not immediately submit.

Yet when the Portuguese arrive at Calicut there is a touching incident which one feels ought to have served as a prior symbolical repudiation of this bellicosity. Gama sends an envoy to the Zamarin, or ruler. In the streets he meets Monzaide, a Moor from Morocco who could speak Castilian and who had already encountered Portuguese in battle. All enmity is at once forgotten, so delighted are Portuguese and Moor to meet each other so far away from their homelands:

For nothing is more pleasing to the mind
Than in a strange land neighbor folk to find.

(7.27.7-8)

Monzaide is invited on board the flagship and is welcomed with joy by all the sailors: he is something familiar in a forbiddingly strange world. The traditional enmity of Portuguese and Moors resolved in India! This is a symbol precisely of the universal brotherhood of men that the Renaissance had hoped would result from the expansion of maritime communications. But the hatreds and ferocities of centuries could not be wiped away simply by newfound reason. In practice the attitude was different; it was the one propounded by the great historian of these events, João de Barros, in his Decades of Asia: “Though the Moors and Gentiles are certainly rational creatures and so potential converts to Christianity, yet since they show no disposition to be converted, we Christians have no duties towards them.”

What, in accordance with this attitude, the crusade could actually mean is seen in this report by Albuquerque to King Manuel after his second and final conquest of Goa from the Moslems in 1510: “In the capture of Goa our Lord did much for us. … Afterwards, I burnt the city and put all to the sword. For four consecutive days your soldiers slaughtered the Moors, not sparing a single one. They herded them into mosques and then set those buildings on fire. We reckoned that 6,000 Moors had been slain. Sir, it was a great deed, well fought and well finished, the first time that vengeance had been taken in India for the treacheries and villainies perpetrated by the Moors against your Highness and your people. I am not leaving a single Moorish tomb or building standing, and the Moors captured I have caused to be burned alive. … I am giving the property and lands of the Great Mosque as an endowment for the church in honour of St. Catherine which I am building, for it was on her day and on account of her merits that our Lord gave us the victory.” The mixture of piety and ferocity in this letter may astound us, but it was a mark of the age; it was also a mark of the original crusades, and has occurred in all places and at all times when the sword has been wielded by the arm of righteousness.

This, however, was only one side of the age. The other side of the crusading spirit, that of genuine piety, is seen in the impressive expansion of missionary activity. Enlightened churchmen of whom there were many, saw Asia and America as great opportunities for Christianity if properly handled; they did not want to see them lost by brutal soldiers, crooked politicians, or crafty traders. In the final Canto Tethys, the sea-goddess, shows Gama the world he has opened up and tells him of the future that lies before it. Through her Camões pleads for clergy to come east:

“If you are called, how can you make such claim,
Who go not forth to preach the Faith straightway?
For if you be the salt and fall to shame
At home, where not one prophet stands today,
Wherewithal shall we salt in times like these
(Forget the heathen!) swarms of heresies?”

And a little later Tethys says:

“Yet greater stretch of land is hid from thee,
Till the time come her mystery to show.
But do not shun the islands of the sea,
For Nature wills that hence her fame should grow.
This that fronts China, though half-hid it be
And first found out this little while ago,
Is called Japan, whence comes the silver fine.
It shall be lighted by the Law Divine.”

(10. 119.3-8, 131)

How typical of the age, of all European enterprises overseas, are these last two lines. Japan, the legendary islands of silver, a metal coveted by Europeans; and Japan, a seed-bed for the Christian faith. Even the Spaniards, who one would have thought had found enough silver in the New World, dispatched fleets from the Pacific coast of Mexico to search for the Silver Islands. They were not found by these seekers of precious metal, but they were found by the missionaries.

The great figure of Christian evangelization in Asia is St. Francis Xavier (San Francisco Javier). A Spanish Basque, and one of the earliest recruits to the new order of the Jesuits, he was picked out by St. Ignatius for the apostolate in India. In Lisbon he obtained the support of King John III and authorization to set out, which he did in 1541. In Gao his preaching met with success, and a Christian community was founded, which of course still exists today. Once it was established Francis moved on. His ambition was to reach the mysterious Japan, of which he first heard in Malacca. He succeeded in reaching it in 1549, making numbers of converts as he made friends with samurai, or with Buddhist monks when he attended tea-parties in the monasteries. He thus inaugurated what is now called the Christian Century in Japan, a period that lasted till 1650.

From the very start Francis fell in love with the Japanese people. In a letter to the Jesuit community in Goa, written three months after his arrival in Japan, he said: “They are the best race yet discovered, and I think that among non-Christians their match will not easily be found.” He praises their sense of honor, their courtesy, their moderation in eating and drinking, and their honesty. He continues: “They are a well-meaning people and very sociable and anxious to learn. They take pleasure in hearing of the things of God, especially such as they can understand. … They like to be appealed to on rational grounds, and are ready to agree that what reason vindicates is right.” He is amazed how all their domestic habits and social customs are the direct opposite to those of Europe, and he comments: “What I could not get over in all this was that a people so utterly unlike ourselves should yet be so highly civilized.” How new is this sincere admiration and warm affection on the part of a Christian for a non-Christian people! Here indeed we find the friendship between nations and races that the optimism of the Renaissance thought would result from the voyages of discovery. After leaving Japan, Francis wrote this in a letter to St. Ignatius in Rome: “I could never put down in writing all that I owe to the people of Japan, for through them God our Lord gave me a deep understanding of my infinite sinfulness.” “Una profunda comprensión de mis infinitas maldades”; again what a change—that contact with a pagan race should deepen in a Christian the sense of unworthiness and humility.

Admiration and respect must, of course, have been mutual. It is recorded that what captivated one of his Japanese converts was this: “the charity of Father Francis ravished him; the greatness of his designs so awed him, that he became lost in admiration of these strangers who had come thousands of leagues, through untold perils and hardships, for no personal advantage whatever but simply and solely to win men to the service of God.” Certainly this particular contact with an alien culture and a different philosophy of life must have astonished and impressed the Japanese. One of the Jesuits on the Asian missions, who had met Francis for a few days, gave this description of him: “a heart on fire with the love of God, burning with the love of men, a devouring zeal to help the sick, an incessant diligence to restore sinners to a state of grace, and this all with so much affability, so cheerful and serene an address! He seemed to be always smiling and yet somehow never to smile. The charity and jubilee of his spirit overflowed onto his countenance and lit it up with joy which gave him the appearance of always smiling, and yet he was so recollected, so deeply withdrawn from created things, that one could say he never smiled. He was all patience and loving kindness with even the greatest sinners, stooping to the level of their capacity that they might profit by his admonitions and teachings.”

After establishing Christian communities in Japan and receiving new missionaries to care for them, Francis wrote to the King in Portugal to inform him of his intention to enter China. This empire was strictly forbidden to all Portuguese because some traders had roused the Celestial anger by their arrogance and high-handed behavior, but Francis expected to be able to smuggle himself in. Leaving Goa in 1552 with two companions, he reached the little island of Sanchan, 100 miles from Hongkong and within sight of the Chinese shore. Here he waited several months in vain for a boat to take him across and died before the end of the year.

The previous month there was born in Rome Matteo Ricci, who was to become a Jesuit missionary, and who thirty years later was to be welcomed at the imperial court of China and made a Mandarin. The remarkable story of the Jesuits in China falls outside the Age of Camões, but it crowned the achievements of which The Lusiads sang, following where Francis Xavier had led. In order to present Christianity to the Chinese, Ricci and his fellow-Jesuits became themselves Chinese, accepting their customs and manner of life. No longer was it a question of imposing the faith by argument or by force, but of presenting it in a form adapted to Chinese traditions and habits of thought. It can be said that the spirit of the Renaissance—the belief that it is possible for men of different lands and races to communicate in friendship and peace—had a new, belated flowering. What Ricci did is what forward-looking Christian missionaries are nowadays trying to do; but he was too forward-looking for his age. Other missionaries, members of conservative-minded religious orders, were alarmed that the Jesuits were altering the Christian faith, comprising in order to accommodate it to false ideas. Complaints were sent to Rome, which shortsightedly ordered the Fathers to abandon their China policy. As a result all the missions collapsed, and relations between China and the West had to await the “gunboat diplomacy” of the last century in order to be resumed. It cannot be said that resumption, by these methods, had brought benefit either to China or to the rest of the world.

Like most things human the Renaissance proved a partial success and a partial failure. The humanist belief in a reign of reasonableness and toleration, whereby the opening up of the world would banish war and enable all men to constitute one family, giving to each other in peaceful trade what each lacked and living in friendly contact under an international law guaranteeing the natural rights of mankind—freedom of the seas, freedom of trade, freedom of movement, freedom of communication, freedom of speech—was shattered by the disruptive effects of the Reformation, the resulting wars of religion and the revival of the crusading spirit, all of which was to lead eventually to the devastation of the Thirty Years War. The benefits of international trade were grossly and savagely marred by the institution of Negro slavery—itself a tragic result of the Portuguese voyages of discovery—and by the exploitation of other weak peoples by the economically strong.

Nonetheless the clock was not set back in every single respect. The missions in both Asia and America did represent a liberalization and humanization of the relations between believer and unbeliever. And however far away we still are in 1972 from the humanist ideal, the fact that we can still feel its force and are nearer fulfilling it than the Humanists themselves were is itself a sign of the partial success of the Renaissance. In one respect, of course, the Renaissance was a total success. In the exploration of its past cultures humanity has never looked back. Then it was the culture of Greece and Rome; nowadays every single culture, alive or dead, advanced or primitive, can be studied. This exploration of man's own world—his natural environment and his cultural past—was initiated by the Renaissance and has never stopped.

And what of Portugal, that tiny nation whose endeavors in exploration and navigation, so greatly disproportionate to her resources, by establishing relations between East and West did so much to create the Modern World? The revival of the crusading spirit—or the failure to extinguish it—proved her undoing. While she sponsored and protected the selfless labors of Francis Xavier and his successors in the Far East, nearer home she was fostering the bellicose crusading ardor that led in 1578 to the invasion of Morocco by the young King Sebastian. Portugal's army, her nobility, and her King himself were annihilated at the calamitous battle of Alcaraz-Kebir, which was to lead directly to the loss of Portugal's independence. In 1572 Camões exalted in noble verse the astonishing exploits of his small but valiant country; he called his countrymen to a renewal of heroic endeavor, and summoned the whole of Western Europe to co-operation in the fight against the enemies of the Christian faith. Six years later came Alcazar-Kebir. In a fragmentary letter that may perhaps be the last surviving relic from his pen, Camões wrote: “I loved my country so much that I shall die with her.” On June 10, 1580, he died as the Spanish army was advancing to ensure Philip II's succession to the Portuguese crown.

The Age of Camões, moving from hope to disillusion, may well be the pattern of the lives of most individual men; it is certainly the recurring pattern of human history. The optimism of the Renaissance led to the pessimism of the seventeenth century. This was succeeded by the optimism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which has given way to the prevailing pessimism of our own times. Not so long ago, scientific rationalism was thought by its adherents to be about to usher in the long-awaited Golden Age. Possibly only Marxists, who are compelled to this by their dialectic, really believe nowadays in the existence of a future Golden Age. The achievements of science are fantastic. The continuing journeys to the moon stagger the imagination of they have not blunted it already, but it is significant that the exploration of space, unlike the explorations of the Portuguese and Spanish navigators of the Renaissance, has so far discovered only the utter stillness of endless wilderness.

There is no longer the sense of excitement at the urge to discovery that prevailed when Camões was born; rather does there seem to be in a considerable sector of the young, who are the lords (Camões would have wanted to say the heroes) of tomorrow, little belief in either science or reason. What we may perhaps derive from reading the splendid poem of The Lusiads and studying the age that produced it is the realization that the history of mankind has had splendid moments, that however much they have been frustrated, ideals have existed which have pointed to enduring positive values, and that the human spirit is indomitable, capable of triumphing over disillusion; that, in short, optimism can always have a Renaissance.

Bibliographical Note

Quotations from The Lusiads are from the translation (with an occasional modification) by Leonard Bacon (New York, 1950), which does not, alas, approach the poetic tone and dignity of the original. Portugal's overseas enterprise is fully covered in D. F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago, 1965), Vol. I. For Vitoria and a translation of his De Indis, see No. 7 in the Classics of International Law (1917). R. Menéndez Pidal expounded Charles V's conception of European unity in La idea imperial de Carlos Quinto (reprinted in España y su historia, Madrid, 1957). James Broderick has written the best life of St. Francis Xavier (London, 1952); the quotations from his letters are taken from here. C. R. Boxer's The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1630 (London, 1951) is a standard work. For Ricci and the controversy on the Chinese missions see the two relevant sections in G. H. Dunne, Generation of Giants (Notre Dame, Ind., 1962). The anti-Jesuit case is studied by J. S. Cummins in the Introduction to his edition of The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo de Navarrete (Cambridge, England, 1960).