Not desiring, however, to shed blood or provoke war, he
tried transportation. Three hundred persons, namely, twenty-two
Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustines, one hundred and seventeen
foreign Jesuits, and nearly two hundred native priests and catechists,
were arrested, sent to Nagasaki, and thence shipped like bundles of
combustibles to Macao.
Yet, as many of the foreign and native Christian teachers hid themselves
in the country and as others who had been banished returned secretly and
continued the work of propaganda, the crisis had not yet come. Some of
the Jesuit priests, even, were still hoping that Hideyori would mount to
power; but in 1615, Iyeyas[)u], finding a pretext for war,[19] called
out a powerful army and laid siege to the great castle of Osaka, the
most imposing fortress in the country. In the brief war which ensued, it
is said by the Jesuit fathers, that one hundred thousand men perished.
On June 9, 1615, the castle was captured and the citadel burned. After
thousands of Hideyori's followers had committed _hara-kiri_, and his own
body had been burned into ashes, the Christian cause was irretrievably
ruined.
Hidetada, the successor of Iyeyas[)u] in Yedo, who ruled from 1605 to
1622, seeing that his father's peaceful methods had failed in
extirpating the alien politico-religious doctrine, now pronounced
sentence of death on every foreigner, priest, or catechist found in the
country.
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