On April 7, 1506, Francisco de
Jasso y Azpilicueta was born in the Kingdom of Navarre at the Castle of Xavier,
from which he would later take his surname. He was the youngest son of
Juan de Jasso, an adviser to the king, and wealthy heiress Doña Maria de
Azpilcueta y Aznárez. When Francis was six, Spain invaded Navarre.
After his father’s death, Francis's older brothers worked alongside French
conspirators hoping to repel the Spanish invaders. When the plot failed,
the family was stripped of its land holdings and their castle was reduced to a
residence with all of its battlements destroyed.
The ideas were formative to young
Francis's thinking, and he was considered a promising genius when he began
studies at the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris. There he met men such as
Ignatius of Loyola and Pierre Favre who would later found the Society of Jesus
(Jesuit) monastic order. While Francis agreed with much of the men's
thinking, they eventually parted ways as Francis considered himself more of a
humanist, replying to Ignatius of Loyola's Biblical rhetorical question,
"What will it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own
soul?" with "The world, for a time," treating it as a
cost-benefit analysis.
Francis could not be satisfied with
the theories of academia and wished for action.
He left his teaching position at Beauvais college to apply himself to
the growing field of economics and banking. He caught the attention of
Martim Afonso de Sousa, an adventurer who began the colonization of Brazil and
furthered Portuguese expansion in India. When de Sousa was to be
dispatched to India in 1541 as the new viceroy, he brought Francis along with
him. Their ship, the Santiago, also carried Jesuits whom King John
III had asked to help restore the characters of Portuguese men stationed in the
east as they had fallen toward the pagan ways.
Francis and the Jesuits again compared philosophies, and again Francis
sought to build up the world’s condition rather than attempt to alleviate it.
Arriving in India, Francis was
appalled alongside the Jesuits of the imperialists' treatment of locals.
He argued for the Indians' natural rights and gained favor from both sides with
the encouragement of economic investment to improve the region. While
Jesuits aided the poor and spread the Word, Francis worked to build banks and
fair courts in addition to the factories and fortresses set up by de Sousa. Portuguese soldiers and administrators there
were fraught with ambition, which Francis fostered, as well as corruption, against
which Francis worked with the establishment of stiff penalties and economic
blacklisting. He refused to allow
slavery and instead argued for fair wages to Indians and Portuguese alike.
The formula worked well. The
local economy flourished, and soon the native populace was eager to attend the
Jesuits’ schools to learn Portuguese. As
soon as Francis built up a bank in one port, he used the excess funds to expand
banking to the next. India came under
Portuguese rule with military power linked to economic success: any rebellion
or invasion by other European power would cripple the wealth and was thus
opposed by locals.
By 1545, Francis began expansion of
his planned trading empire eastward to what were known as the Spice
Islands. Again using the Jesuits as a
method to inspire confidence among the locals, he was able to communicate his
economic principles and investment strategies.
In 1548 he met with a Christian Japanese man, Anjiro, later called Paulo
de Santa Fe, who had fled to the Jesuits seeking a better life. He gave lengthy details of his homeland,
which inspired Francis to travel there.
The Japanese proved unfriendly with no port agreeing to take in his ship
until he met with the daimyo of Satsuma.
The Japanese aristocracy resisted Jesuits who had come with Francis and
outlawed Christianity. Rather than give
up his business, Francis changed his formula and worked almost exclusively with
the merchant class, boosting imports, encouraging factories, and gradually making
the culturally outcast profession into a noble one.
In 1552, Francis set sail for a new
market, arguably the greatest yet:
China. While waiting during an
attempt to get cheaper passage and entry into China, he died of a fever on the
island of Shangchuan. Although his
economic principles did not reach China during his lifetime, they had
established an enormous stronghold for Portuguese power in the East. Later colonizers would battle over China with
the English eventually wresting control of the empire away from the French.
With such a monopoly, the
Portuguese attracted eager allies as well as enemies among the rest of
Europe. Portuguese became the
international language of banking, and Portugal state banks were found even in
colonies of other nations. Naval warfare
through the eighteenth century weakened Portugal’s hold, and eventually their
colonies would gain political independence.
Even today, however, Lisbon rivals London and Zurich as a banking hub
and international markets are centered on Portuguese-based trading in economic
capitals like Goa, Malacca, and Nagasaki.
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In reality, Francis Xavier grew up
close to his family in worn-torn Navarre.
Arguably due to his experience in suffering, he left the world of
academia to join Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits. He worked tirelessly to bring Christianity to
the Orient and has become a patron saint of missionaries alongside the biblical
Saint Paul.
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