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This article analyzes the reception of Fernão de Magalhães’s “great adventure” in sixteenth-century Portuguese chronicle writing, arguing that the narrative construction of the episode results not only from documentary gaps, but from representational choices that condition the attribution of political and moral meaning to the voyage. Through a comparative reading of Portuguese chroniclers—with particular emphasis on Fernão Lopes de Castanheda and the humanist mediation of later traditions—the author examines how categories such as “treason,” “grievance,” and “breach of faith” were mobilized to frame Magalhães’s departure from the Manueline order and his eventual alignment with the monarchy of Charles V. Methodologically, the study reconstructs the “memorial order” of chronicle discourses, confronting the narration with the way it incorporates (or silences) memories and interrogations of participants involved in networks of power and commerce in Southeast Asia. The conclusion is that the Portuguese chronicles function simultaneously as testimony and as an interpretive device: by reorganizing facts, they reveal access to official archives and, above all, produce categories that reconfigure the consequences of the expedition in Luso-Iberian political and commercial circulation, including the role of private agents in the Moluccan spice trade.

The article proposes a critical recontextualization of the voyage of Fernão de Magalhães (1519–1522) and the so-called “Manueline counter-voyage”, arguing that the enterprise should not be read primarily as an intended circumnavigation, but as a project aimed at reaching the Moluccas via a western route not previously traversed. The author frames the endeavor within the Iberian competition in Southeast Asia, highlighting that the Luso-Spanish demarcation of the world, inspired by the Treaty of Tordesillas, generated relevant negotiations and restrictions, including the prohibition of sailing through areas of the Indian Ocean considered under Portuguese influence. Methodologically, the text articulates historiographical analysis and comparative reading, revisiting sixteenth-century Portuguese productions and contrasting them with contemporary approaches, especially from the end of the nineteenth century, in order to overcome panegyric limitations and critically reconstruct the political-economic context. As results, the tripartite structure of the voyage (southern America, vastness of the Pacific, and Philippine islands) is identified, and its cultural inscription in the European Renaissance is problematized, as it spurred cartography and debates over jurisdiction of the Moluccas. It concludes that Magalhães projects, with particular tenacity, a decisive stage of the first globalization, reconfiguring geographical knowledge and imperial disputes.

The article argues that the European “discovery” of the Philippine archipelago must be understood less as a simple factual record and more as a textual production: a set of discursive strategies that converted unknown spaces into legible objects for European audiences. Taking Antonio Pigafetta's *Primo viaggio intorno al mondo* as its central source, the study examines how the navigational narrative, supported by allied devices such as maps, letters, and drawings, governed the way in which the islands were represented, revealed, and also deformed or omitted. Methodologically, the text is treated as a literary construction and historiographical archive, situated within the broader context of early exploration accounts and their rhetorical and intellectual exigencies. The article further traces the complex material trajectory of the manuscript and its multiple versions (Italian and French) and printed editions, assessing how these mediations impacted the reception of the Philippine section—approximately one-third of the entire account—which would function as the centerpiece of the “production” of the Philippines in the European imaginary. It concludes that Pigafetta not only transmitted data but mobilized conventions of knowledge and wonderment that reconfigured the region as a field of ethnographic and literary knowledge.

The Apologia, written by Valignano between 1597 and 1598, documenting the confrontation between Jesuits and Franciscans, develops some arguments associated with the rights of the Iberian crowns in East Asia. According to the Franciscan argument, the right to the Castilian Padroado in Japan stemmed from the legitimacy of the Castilian Crown in legislating on religious matters, which ran counter to the papal breve Ex pastoralis officio (1585) of Gregory XIII. For Valignano, the Holy See could never abdicate the right to legislate on evangelical issues. The legitimacy of the papal letter of Gregory XIII was much broader, insofar as the Church found the most adequate way of establishing itself in Japan through the exclusive Jesuit presence. In this way, the analysis of the debate over Portuguese-Castilian rights in East Asia, in the context of rivalry between religious orders, will always have to take into consideration two different concepts of the Church and evangelisation.

The purpose of this work is to show the process of the first presence of the Salesians in East Timor, between 1927 and 1929. It is a meteoric presence for it did not last two whole years and it is also intriguing due to questions that rose. In fact, how is it possible that the Salesians decided to abandon the Island shortly after a year and a half, when the Salesians had accepted the administration of a school of arts and crafts existing already in Dili (capital of the territory) – after having celebrated a contract with the Bishop of Macau, Josè da Costa Nunes, for a sexennium – what important reasons led the Major Superiors to take such a decision before the bilateral contract celebrated in January 1927 come to an end? Such questions we tried to answer based on existing documents, mostly in the Archivio Salesiano Centrale (Rome) and in the Archive of the Portuguese Salesian Province (Lisbon), to try to dissipate the heavy cloud of mystery that wondered the island and in the range of the Provinces of the Salesians in Portugal and China.

This dissertation surveys the history of Christianity in China during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with particular attention given to Chinese clergy and lay Christians. A variety of issues are discussed: the social organization of Christian communities, the networks among communities in different localities, internal tensions and conflicts, and Christian devotions in relation to the printing and circulation of Chinese Christian texts known as "scriptures". By examining a group of unusual sources that have been mostly neglected by past scholars---the correspondence of Chinese Christians with ecclesiastical authorities in Rome, and other more familiar but little studied sources such as memorials and edicts regarding the investigation and interrogation of Chinese Christians and Western missionaries during the period of prohibition (1724-1844)---I intend to show how the imperial ban on Christianity in 1724, especially the expulsion of missionaries and the closing of all churches outside the imperial capital, may have affected Christian beliefs and practices at the local level. The historical survey of the period from 1724 to 1780 and the two case studies in Beijing and Jiangnan from 1780 to 1860 will demonstrate that the repression of Christianity and periodic anti-Christian campaigns did, to some extent, help to shape the Christian community in China, making them into a whole body of people connected by religious identity, as distinguished from non-Christians. Yet this strong sense of community may also have been due to spiritual and social connections with Christian communities beyond China. A second contribution of this dissertation study has to do with its exploring the nuances of Christian and other forms of popular devotions. Recent scholarship that sees Christianity primarily as a Chinese popular religion may have underestimated its distinctive "foreignness" and in part misunderstood what conversion meant in the context of Chinese religion and society. To some extent, Chinese converts were attracted to Christianity because it provided another choice for them beyond the existing religious traditions. A drastically different calendar characterized by distinctive feast days, fasting and abstinence, veneration of saints, along with other peculiar Christian beliefs and practices, have become what I define as "alternative devotions".