Tensho Boy Mission to Europe

1583

Four young Japanese Catholic nobles departed Nagasaki on a Jesuit-orchestrated diplomatic voyage to Europe. They would visit Lisbon, Madrid, Florence, and Rome, meet Philip II and two popes, and return home eight years later with printing presses, astronomical instruments, and painful news about European squabbles. The boys' audience with Pope Gregory XIII was one of the sixteenth century's most dramatic cultural encounters.