Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a Mughal Emperor

Abstract

The chapter looks at Jesuit interactions with the Asian world in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in particular at the idea of the exchange and circulation of political models. It focuses on the treatise Ādāb al-Saltanat, written by Jeronimo Xavier (with ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri). It shows how the Jesuit attempted to pick and choose examples both from the distant Mediterranean past (Greece, Rome, the Bible and Byzantium), and a more recent one (medieval and early modern Iberia, France, Italy and even England), to provide a certain image of the functioning of politics. While trying to over-emphasise the “idealistic” side of European politics, Xavier was nevertheless unable to prevent his examples from often sliding into a more “realistic” register, thus revealing the influence of Machiavelli.