Francisco de Souza de Castro

Properties2
tagsperson, portuguese, noble, prisoner, 17th-century, diplomat, envoy, catholic, achehnese, diplomacy
aliasesFrancisco de Souza de Castro (Portugese edelman), De Castro, Portuguese prisoner of Atjeh, Francisco de Sosa de Castro, Francisco de Sosa, Sosa de Castro, Portuguese envoy to Atjeh 1638, Castilian envoy to Atjeh, Envoy of the Viceroy of Goa to Atjeh

6 min read

Francisco de Souza de Castro (also rendered as Francisco de Sosa de Castro) was a Portuguese nobleman (Portugeesche edelman) who, as the envoy of the Viceroy of Goa charged with offering the homage of Portugal to the newly chosen sultan of Atjeh in 1638, presided over the embassy in the course of which his chaplain Pater Dionysius of the Nativity and the lay brother Brother Redemptus à Cruce were put to death on the strand of Atjeh on 29 November 1638. Sosa de Castro was the sole survivor of the company: the sultan spared the envoy himself while condemning all his retinue to execution. Three years later, at the time of Pieter Soury’s embassy to Atjeh in 1641, the same Portuguese nobleman was still held as a prisoner in Atjeh. His captivity in the sultanate was a small but consequential piece of the European diplomatic chessboard at the moment when the VOC, Atjeh and Djohor had just cooperated to drive the Portuguese from Malakka (also in 1641), and when Portugal had just been freed from Spain (in 1640).

The 1638 embassy

The mission is described in the mission jubilee volume. A gezant van den onderkoning van Goa was to proceed to Atjeh to offer the homage of Portugal to the newly elected sultan. Sosa de Castro, the designated envoy, made his acceptance conditional on the appointment of Pater Dionysius — born Petrus Berthelot, a former navigator — as scheepshevelhebber (ship’s commander) and confessor; and the lay brother Redemptus à Cruce volunteered to accompany the priest.

The embassy sailed on 25 September 1638 from Goa on two warships (twee oorlogsbodems) carrying some seventy Portuguese, the two Carmelites, two Franciscan fathers, and an indigenous priest.

The trap and the apostasy-ultimatum

Upon arrival at Atjeh, the embassy was destroyed by a slander — “a slanderous report that this homage concealed only a cunning design directed against the independence of Atjeh and the power of the crescent” (een lasterlijk bericht, als zou dit huldebetoon slechts een listigen opzet verbergen, gericht tegen de onafhankelijkheid van Atjeh en de macht der halve maan). The sultan resolved “to meet craft with craft”: he seized the entire crew and attempted to compel their renunciation of Christianity. The captives endured “the most shameful maltreatment” with constancy. When they refused to apostatise, they were condemned to death — “allen, met uitzondering van den gezant” (“all, with the exception of the envoy”).

Sole survivor of the 1638 martyrdom

The source records the fact of Sosa de Castro’s survival without explanation. The company — saving the envoy — was led to the sea-shore, made to kneel, and executed by bullet and kris. Sosa de Castro was therefore the only member of the embassy to be spared from execution, and it is presumably from his report — though the source does not say so explicitly — that the European record of the martyrdom derives.

The single sentence spared to him in the source — “met uitzondering van den gezant” — leaves his subsequent fate, his report to the Viceroy at Goa, and the Portuguese response wholly unrecorded. The silence of the source on these points is itself a document of the limits of the Catholic mission’s own archival record of the event.

The Atjeh captivity (1641)

Godee Molsbergen’s reference to the same figure, three years after the martyrdom, is brief: “Toentertijd zat in Atjeh een Portugeesch edelman, Francisco de Souza de Castro, gevangen” — At that time there sat a Portuguese nobleman, Francisco de Souza de Castro, prisoner in Atjeh. The cause of his imprisonment is not stated in Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, but the fact of a high-born Portuguese captive in Atjeh in 1641 is itself historically plausible: the Atjeh sultans had been at war with Portuguese Malakka for the better part of a century, and Portuguese prisoners of rank were routinely held for ransom or exchange. The continuation of his captivity from 1638 to 1641 is consistent with the sultan’s sparing of the envoy at the time of the martyrdom: Sosa de Castro was kept alive but detained, and was still a prisoner when the Soury embassy arrived.

Connection with Soury’s mission (1641)

De Castro’s captivity had a direct bearing on Soury’s embassy. At an audience attended by the Panglima’s of Pedir and Deli and many other Atjeh nobles, the chiefs asked whether the Dutch had brought “Portugeesche jonge dochterkens” — Portuguese maidens — to be delivered as losprijs (ransom). The request is treated separately under Maagden als losprijs. The Atjeh court clearly associated the Dutch visit with the prospect of a Portuguese exchange, and De Castro’s person was part of that calculation.

The diplomatic clarification that Soury’s embassy was instructed to provide — that Portugal in 1640 had been freed from Spain, was no longer the Republic’s mortal enemy, and that the Republic had concluded a ten-year truce with Portugal the following year — also bears on De Castro’s situation. The Dutch-Portuguese truce complicated the Atjeh court’s calculation of what to do with its Portuguese captive.

Significance

For Atjeh’s history, De Castro is significant as the named Portuguese prisoner whose captivity intersected with the Soury embassy of 1641 and with the Atjeh court’s wider negotiations over ransom and exchange. His case is one example of how the long Atjeh-Portuguese conflict produced European captives in the sultanate, and of how those captives became pawns in the sultanate’s subsequent diplomacy with the Dutch.

He is significant, too, as the principal — and indeed only documented — Portuguese envoy to the sultanate of Acheh in the seventeenth century, and as the survivor whose testimony underlies the Catholic martyrological record of the 1638 embassy. The fact of his survival, juxtaposed with the execution of his religious retinue, fixes the early-modern Atjehnese diplomatic convention of sparing the envoy while executing the escort — a convention that marks the sultan’s recognition of the envoy’s personal inviolability even in the act of repudiating his embassy. The embassy itself documents the continuing Portuguese interest, in the period of the *bloeitijdperk* of Sultan Iskandar Muda and his immediate successors, in securing Atjehnese friendship or vassalage — an interest that the sultan of 1638 evidently regarded as incompatible with Atjehnese sovereignty. His continued captivity three years later, in 1641, documents the sultanate’s continuing leverage over the Portuguese diplomatic record even after the execution of the embassy.

See Also

Sources

Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, by Dr. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Oud-Hoogleeraar, Landsarchivaris te Batavia (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger Boekhandel en Uitgevers Mij., 1932), chapter XI (“Atjehsche ambassade. Inlandsche feesten. Maagden als losprijs”), pp. 39–43 of the numbered-letter sequence.

Vierhonderd jaren missie in Nederlandsch-Indië, 1593–1934 (Batavia: Algemeen Comité van Voorbereiding tot de Feestelijke Herdenking van 400 jaar Missie in Ned.-Indië, [1934]), pp. 54–55.

Graph View

Backlinks