The famous Omura Sumitada, known as the lord who opened the port of Nagasaki to foreign trade, had been the first of the daimyo to convert to Christianity following the arrival of the Jesuit missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century.
He is known as "Dom Bartolomeu".
Due to the instability during the Sengoku period, he and Jesuit leader Alexandro Valignano had conceived a plan to pass administrative control over to the Society of Jesus rather than see the Catholic city taken over by a non-Catholic daimyo.
Thus the city of Nagasaki has rom 1580 been a Jesuit colony, under their administrative and military control.
It has become a refuge for Christians escaping maltreatment in other regions of Japan Hideyoshi's campaign to unify the country had arrived in Kyūshū in 1587.
Hideyoshi, concerned with the large Christian influence in southern Japan, as well as the active and what he perceived as the arrogant role the Jesuits are playing in the Japanese political arena, had ordered the expulsion of all missionaries, and placed Nagasaki under his direct control.
The expulsion order has gone largely unenforced, however, and the fact remains that most of Nagasaki's population remain openly practicing Catholics.
The Spanish ship San Felipe is wrecked in 1596 off the coast of Shikoku, and Hideyoshi learns from its pilot that the Spanish Franciscans are the vanguard of an Iberian invasion of Japan.
In response, Hideyoshi orders the crucifixions of twenty-six Catholics (the "Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan") in Nagasaki on February 5 of this year.
Portuguese traders are not ostracized, however, and so the city continues to thrive.
