PROTECTORATE
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PROTECTORATE
recommendation of his ambassadors and consuls to
the Porte and the pashas, obtained justice and protec-
tion from their enemies. Though the missionaries
were sometimes on such amicable terms with the non-
Catholic clergy that the latter authorized them to
preach in their churches, they usually experienced a
lively hostility from that quarter. On several occa-
sions the Greek and Armenian schismatical patri-
archs, displeased at seeing a great portion of their
flocks abandon them for the Roman priests, on various
pretexts persuaded the Turkish Government to forbid
all propagandism by the latter. The representatives
of Louis XIV successfully opposed this ill-will. At the
beginning of the reign of Louis XV the preponderance
of French influence with the Porte was also manifested in
the authority granted the Franciscans, who were prote-
ges of France, to repair the dome of the Holy Sepulchre :
this meant the recognition of their right of proprietor-
ship in the Holy Sepulchre as superior to the claims of
the Greeks and the Armenians. In 1723 the schismat-
ical patriarchs succeeded in obtaining from the Sultan
a "command" forbidding his Christian subjects to
embrace the Roman religion, and the Latin religious
to hold any communication with the Greeks, Arme-
nians, and Syrians, on the pretext of instructing them.
For a long time French diplomacy sought in vain to
have this disastrous measure revoked. At last, as a
reward for the services rendered to Turkey during its
wars with Russia and Austria (1736-9), the French
succeeded in 1740 in securing the renewal of the capitu-
lations, with additions which explicitly confirmed the
right of the French Protectorate, and at least implic-
itly guaranteed the liberty of the Catholic apostolate.
By tlie <Mglity-seventh of the articles signed, 28 May,
1740, Sultan Mahmud declares: "... The bishops
and religious subject to the Emperor of France living
in my empire shall be protected while they confine
themselves to the exercise of their office, and no one
may prevent them from practising their rite according
to their custom in the churches in their possession, as
well as in the other places they inhabit; and, when our
tributary subjects and the French hold intercourse for
purposes of selling, buying, and other business, no one
may molest them for this sake in violation of the sa-
cred laws." In subsequent treaties between France
and Turkey the capitulations are not repeated verba-
tim, but they are recalled and confirmed (e. g. in 1802
and 1838). The various regimes which succeeded the
monarchy of St. Louis and of Louis XIV all maintained
in law, and in fact, the ancient privilege of France in
the protection of the missionaries and Christian com-
nmnities of the Orient. The expedition in 1860 sent
by Napoleon III to put a stop to the massacre of the
Maronites was in harmony with the ancient role of
France, and would have been more so if its work of
justice had been more complete. The decline in re-
cent years of the French Protectorate in the Levant
will be treated below.
Protector.\te of the Far East. — Portuguese Pat- ronage. — In the Far East — this refers especially to China — there was not, prior to the nineteenth cen- tury, any protectorate properly so called or based on a treaty. What is sometimes called the "Portuguese Protectorate of Missions" was only the "Portuguese Patronage" (Padroado). This was the privilege, granted by the popes to the Crown of Portugal, of designating candidates for the sees and ecclesiastical benefices in the vast domains acquired through the ex- peditions of its navigators and captains in Africa and the East Indies. This concession, which brought to the King of Portugal a certain portion of the ecclesiastical revenues of his kingdom, carried the condition that he should send good missionaries to his new subjects, and that he should provide with a fitting endowment such diocese8,parishcs, and religious establishments as should be established in his acquired territories. At first Por- tugal's zeal and generosity for the spread of Christian-
ity corresponded to the liberality of the sovereign pon-
tiffs manifested in the grant of the -padroado; but in
the course of time this patronage became the source of
most unpleasant annoyances to the Holy See and one
of the chief obstacles to the progress of the missions.
The main cause of this regrettable change was the
failure of Portugal to observe the conditions agreed
upon at the time of the bestowal of the privilege; an-
other reason was the disagreement between Portugal
and the Holy See with regard to the extent of the
patronage, for, while Rome maintained that it had
never granted the privilege except for really conquered
countries, Lisbon claimed the right for all the coun-
tries designated by the famous demarcation of Alex-
ander VI as future possessions of Portugal. In virtue of
this interpretation the Portuguese Government vio-
lently contested the papal right to appoint, without
its consent, missionary bishops or vicars Apostolic in
countries which were never subject to its dominion,
such as the greater part, of India, Tong-king, Cochin-
China, Siam, and especially China. In the vast Chi-
nese empire, where Portugal had never possessed more
than Macao, the popes consented to end the strife by a
sort of compromise. Besides the See of Macao they
created in the two chief cities, Peking and Nanking,
bishoprics in the appointment of the King of Portugal,
to which were assigned five of the Chinese provinces;
the other provinces were left to the vicars Apostolic
named personally by the pope. This system lasted
from 1696 to 1856, when Pius IX suppressed the titles
of the sees of Peking and Nanking; thenceforth all the
Christian settlements of China were administered
only by vicars Apostolic.
Passing over the quarrels regarding the padroado, we must confess that the missions of the East owe much to the munificence of the kings of Portugal, although these were never accepted by the infidel sovereigns as the official protectors of the missionaries, much less of the native Christians. Portugal strove to play this honourable role in China, especially by dispatching formal embassies to Peking during the eighteenth cen- tury, for, besides their ostensible instructions, the am- bassadors received orders to intervene as much as possi- ble in behalf of the missionaries and native Christians, who were then being cruelly persecuted in the prov- inces. The first of these embassies (1727) almost had a disastrous ending, when the Portuguese envoy, Dom Metello de Souza, petitioned the Emperor Yung-ching to recognize the liberty of Christian preaching ; the sec- ond (1753) avoided a similar danger by maintaining silence on this critical point. It is only just to add that these embassies, having flattered Chinese vanity, pro- cured for the mission a measure of respite from, or moderation of, the persecution. Later, by expelling the Jesuits and other religious societies which had established for it such successful missioas, Portugal excluded itself from subsequently occupying any posi- tion in a sphere in which it had earlier been foremost, and by its own act destroyed the basis of its patronage and its protectorate, such as it was.
French Protectorate in China. — The protectorate still exercised by France over the missions in the Chinese Empire dates, as far as a regular convention is con- cerned, only from the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury, but the way was prepared by the protection which French statesmen had accorded the mission- aries for almost two centuries. The zeal and liberality of Louis XIV permitted the foundation of the great French Jesuit mission, which in less than fifteen years (1687-1701) more than doubled the number of apos- tolic workers in China, and which never ceased to pro- duce most capable workers. The first official relations were formed between France and China when the mis- sionaries brought thither by the " Amphitrite", the first French vessel seen in Chinese waters (1699), pre- sented gifts from Louis XIV to Emperor K'ang-hi. The two monarchs shared the expense of erecting the
