The work contains biographical and documentary material concerning the missionaries and their final attempt to enter a Japan from which Christianity had been proscribed. Rubino, an Italian Jesuit who had spent decades in the Asian missions and served as Visitor of the Jesuit provinces of Japan and China, occupies a substantial portion of the volume (approximately pp. 45–72). The text incorporates contemporary correspondence, including Rubino’s letter written at Manila on 4 July 1642 before the expedition, on pp. 54–59, as well as four letters of Antonio Capece.

The five missionaries belonged to the clandestine Jesuit effort to re-enter Japan during the period of severe Tokugawa persecution of Christianity. Rubino had conceived a mission intended in part to investigate reports surrounding Cristóvão Ferreira, the former Jesuit Provincial who had apostatized after torture in Japan in 1633. Rubino and his companions attempted separately to reach the country, were captured, and were brought into Japanese custody. The Breve relationepresents their sufferings and deaths within the contemporary Jesuit tradition of missionary martyrdom, culminating in the account of their execution at Nagasaki in March 1643 together with three Japanese secular Christians.

The historical circumstances recorded here are particularly significant because the traditional Jesuit account of the deaths was subsequently complicated by Japanese documentary evidence. A later Japanese prison register has led historians to question whether all three of Capece, Morales, and Marquez died in the manner and at the date reported by the European Jesuit sources.

The relation was composed in Portuguese by Pietro (Pedro) Marquez and appeared here for the first time, translated into Otalian, the translation has been attributed to Alexandre de Rhodes, the celebrated Jesuit missionary to Vietnam, under the name Francesco Rosini. No earlier edition is recorded in any language. Rhodes returned to Europe in 1649 and was in Rome during the period immediately preceding publication. The following year a French version appeared as Histoire de la vie et de la glorieuse mort de cinq Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus, qui ont souffert le martyre dans le Japon, avec trois séculiers, en l’année 1643 (Paris, 1653).

Published less than a decade after the events it describes, it preserves letters and biographical information relating to members of one of the last Jesuit attempts to penetrate Tokugawa Japan after the effective destruction of the public Christian mission.

Provenance: front pastedown with bookplate of the Fuerstlich Auerspergsche Fideicommisbibliothek zu Laybach; House of Auersperg library inscriptions dated 1655; label of dealer H. P. Kraus on front pastedown; private collection, Australia.

Rare, according to Rare Book Hub, the last copy offered at auction was in 1983 (Sotheby’s, London – also lacking the portrait plate). Institution copies, scarce as they are, don’t mention the portrait either, except for a copy in Italy and the BNF, the University of Mannheim copy does not have a plate,

Backer-Sommervogel 5, col. 598.