The "Surat Conspiracy". Between Rome, Lisbon and Mesopotamia: the bishop of Conchin, D. Fr. Pedro Pacheco, the "cristãos da Serra" and Propaganda Fide

Abstract

By the end of the seventeenth century, the increasing tensions between European powers have made clear that incipient nationalism was becoming an obstacle to the evangelization process in overseas territories. Hence, the Propaganda Fide designed a project aiming to control the Malabar coast, a place where the most ancient Christian community of India had been settled for centuries, taking advantage of the Portuguese loss of the territory in favour of a protestant power, Holland. This article intends to reconstitute, drawing on a set of documents left by bishop of Cochin, Fr. Pedro Pacheco, this process, developed by the Propaganda through contacts with catholic Austria, protestant Holland and orthodox Russia, with the aim of dispelling any Portuguese pretensions on that territory. Paradoxically, the loss of a catholic power to a protestant one has opened an opportunity for Rome to take in its own hands the evangelization of the Indian south.