Prima speditione all’Indie Orientali
The account by the Carmelite whom Pope Alexander VII sent to Malabar of his first mission there. Its opening chapters tell how the Thomas Christians renounced their Jesuit archbishop and made their archdeacon a bishop. It was printed thirteen years after those events.
The author was an Italian Discalced Carmelite sent by the pope as apostolic delegate to bring the Thomas Christians back to obedience. He left Rome in February 1656, and a declaration he prints was signed outside Cochin on 15 December 1657. In his note to the reader he says that he had written the account seven years before it was printed in 1666.
He was not in India in 1653. What he tells of the oath at Mattancherry and of the making of the archdeacon into a bishop is what he learned four years and more after the events, and he tells it as a party: he calls the archdeacon “the intruder” and the letters read to the people forgeries. The book is cited as the nearest printed account to the events that this wiki has found, with those limits stated. It gives no day or month for the oath and says nothing of a cross in the open air: in his account the people swore in a church, on the Gospels, before a crucifix set on the altar.
Cited in
- 1599 to 1653, firm date