The burden of India was by now a Jesuit legend. It had been taken up when the first mission came to the court of Akman over three decades before. And even now the pagan fields of India remained, in many ways, the greatest challenge of the Society of Jesus and the Holy Church.
India had, it was true, been held in the grip of Portuguese sea power for many years before the first mission arrived in Agra. But Portuguese arms and trade had not served the work of the Church. They had served the greed of Portuguese merchants and the coffers of Portuguese royalty. The lost souls of India were denied the Grace of the Holy Church.
Then, in 1540, a priest named Ignatius Loyola, once a nobleman and a soldier, founded the Society of Jesus, whose dual purpose was to defend the Holy Church against the Protestant Reformation and begin preaching the True Faith
to the pagan lands of Asia and the Americas. In 1542 the Society of Jesus reached Portuguese Goa, on the very shores of India, in the person of Francis Xavier, a close friend of Ignatius Loyola's from student days at the University of Paris.
With Goa as base of operations, the society had immediately pushed farther eastward, reaching Japan and Macao a few short years later. Paradoxically, it was India itself that had initially eluded their influence. Finally, in 1573, the Great Akman journeyed south and encountered the members of the Society of Jesus for the first time. He was awed by their learning and moral integrity, and soon thereafter he posted an envoy to Goa requesting that a Jesuit mission be sent to his court. Three Jesuit fathers traveled to Fatehpur Sekri.
The Jesuits' hopes soared when they were immediately invited to debate the orthodox Islamic mullahs at Akman's court. The leader of the mission, a soft-spoken Italian father with encyclopedic learning, knew the Quran well in translation and easily refuted the mullahs' absolutist arguments—to the obvious delight of Akman. It was only after several months at Fatehpur Sekri that the three learned fathers began to suspect that Akman's real purpose in inviting them was to have on hand skilled debaters for entertainment.
Akman may have had scant patience with Islam, but it had grown obvious he had no desire to become a Christian either. He was an intellectual who amused himself by questioning the ideas and teachings of all faiths, with the inevitable result that he always found something in each to affront his own reason. He was, in fact, beginning to form the notion that he himself was as great a leader as any of the spiritual teachers he had heard about, and accordingly should simply declare himself an object of worship. After a decade the three Jesuits finally conceded their first mission was a failure and abjectly returned to Goa.
Almost a decade later, in 1590, Akman again requested that Jesuit fathers be sent to his court. Once more a mission was sent, and once more its members eventually concluded Akman had no real intention of encouraging Christianity in India. The second mission was also abandoned.
There remained some, however, in Goa and in Rome, who believed the Great Moghul Akman still could be converted. Furthermore, as the Protestant countries began to venture into the Indies, the political usefulness of having Portuguese priests near the ruler of India became increasingly obvious. Thus, in 1595, a third mission was sent to Akman's court. Father Pinheiro remembered well their instructions upon departing Goa. They would convert Akman if they could; but equally important now, they would ensure that Portuguese trading interests were protected.
The Jesuit fathers drew close to Akman, became valued advisers, and found themselves being consulted on questions ranging from whether Jesus was the Son of God or merely a Prophet, to the advisability of smoking tobacco. Still, the only lasting achievement of the mission was to extract from Akman a firman granting Jesuits the right to free exercise of the Catholic religion. They wanted his soul, and through it the soul of India, but the most they ever attained was his protection. He died a royal skeptic, but a sovereign whose religious tolerance shocked the dogmatic sixteenth-century world.