Moving targets: Finding Young People in the Early Modern World with Professor Nicholas Terpstra

Daniel Gleeson: Hello. So as a parent of two young children, one of whom's a teenager, I find myself constantly worried about how they're navigating our rapidly changing world. Whether it's the changing economy, the changing political system, or the changing technologies. And it's fascinating from that perspective to think about how children navigated the same issues three or 400 years ago. My name is Daniel Gleeson and I'm the Director of Community Engagement here at the National Library.  

Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge Australia's First Nations peoples, the First Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and to pay my respects to their Elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  

It's great to see you all here for this event, which has been made possible in part by generous support from the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies. Tonight's event is presented in partnership with the Australian National University's Centre for Early Modern Studies. I would now like to invite the Director, Professor Rosalyn Smith to say a few words on behalf of the centre and to introduce our special guest. 

Rosalyn Smith: Thank you, Daniel, and a very, very warm welcome to everyone who has ventured out on this very wintry Tuesday Canberran evening for this talk, which as Daniel has said, is sponsored by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at ANU and the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies, and hosted by the incomparable team at the National Library of Australia.  

We're absolutely delighted to have Professor Nick Terpstra with us tonight, who's visiting from the University of Toronto. Nick is one of the world's leading early modern scholars and the outgoing President of the Renaissance Society of America, and as of yesterday, I think the new Provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Nick's primary area of research is early modern urban history, exploring questions at the intersection of politics, religion, gender, and charity, and issues having to do with space and sense. His recent books include "Senses of Space in the Early Modern World" published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, and "Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation," also published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. His earlier works, which explored how the politics of charity frequently silenced women's voices, include the award-winning “Cultures of Charity: Women and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy” 2013, and the micro history, " Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence," 2012.  

In 2011, Nick launched the Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive project, otherwise known as DECIMA. This groundbreaking collaborative mapping platform visualises the 1561 census of the city of Florence onto both an historic map and a modern map of the Italian city, conveying what it was like to walk around a Renaissance city hearing its sounds, moving through its buildings, and seeing its artwork.  

This evening, he's speaking on a topic that in some ways unites all of his research interests, the challenge of locating and understanding youth in the early modern world. Please join me in welcoming him to speak to us tonight. 

Nicholas Terpstra: Thanks very much, Rosalyn for that kind introduction and thanks to everybody for coming out on this evening. I really have a lot of people to thank. Certainly, the National Library of Australia who as Rosalyn has mentioned to the facilities, the people here are really quite extraordinary, and so we've been very well taken care of, very well prepared. I would also like to thank Rosalyn herself and the Centre for Early Modern Studies at ANU for the sponsorship of this talk, and also the Australian Centre for Italian Studies with Andrea Rizzi as it's Head right now and the Italian Institute for Culture and Dr Boolaroo in Sydney. So I have many people to thank and really, I have all of you to thank. I love coming to Australia. I love engaging with Australian colleagues. There's an extraordinary community of early modernists here, and so it's always a great privilege to be here and be able to share some of the things I'm doing. So let's do it.  

Oh. There we go, right. Thanks very much.  

Where do we find youths in the early modern world? Where do they find themselves? Often it was on the road or on the seas in motion from home to some other place or places, and seldom entirely by choice. As we become more curious about global history and to seeing how Europeans of the 15th to 18th centuries encountered the world and were shaped by it, we're drawn to the intersections of this mobility with gender and with race. Much of what was new in the early modern experience came first to and through young people, often as the involuntary agents of broader social and economic forces. Tonight, I'll focus first on a few individuals or groups of young people from different parts of the world who demonstrate these realities. I'll then pull back and consider why looking more closely at these youths might reshape our understanding of the early modern period more generally.  

By age 10 or 11, Thomas Platter had been abandoned by his widowed mother and was herding goats on a remote Swiss hillside. And Thomas is the one we see right here. He was passed down through the extended family to an elderly priest who attempted to beat an education into him before throwing him out the door with the gold coin and directions north to Germany. Through his teens and 20s, Thomas roamed across Europe, picking up work, joining gangs, developing practical skills, and getting an education. Taking a room in a Basel brothel to study with fewer distractions, an interesting concept, and eating raw turnips and sand to keep himself awake. Thomas studied the classics by night and picked up the printing trade by day. He was the printer of the first edition of John Calvin's “Institutes of Christian Religion” in 1536, and he moved steadily up the social ladder.  

He sent his son, Felix at age 14 to medical school in Montpelier. After a university career marked by charivari, sword fights, and secret nighttime autopsies with stolen bodies, Felix returned to Basel where a series of plagues that took the lives of older doctors allowed him to rise quickly up the ranks of the city and become chief civic physician by age 34. The plagues would also take most of Felix's siblings, but spare his own son, Thomas, who we have right here, who followed his father's path to Montpelier in medicine, and this is the medical faculty of Montpelier, and followed him to prosperity. In three generations, the Platter males rose from abandoned goat herds to bourgeois professionals. 

In her teens, Gluckel Leib was leaving Hamburg to marry a young gold merchant who lived 200 kilometres south. Betrothed two years earlier at age 12, Gluckel was the daughter of a wealthy Hamburg diamond trader. The family had been expelled from Hamburg in 1649 when Gluckel was 3. Gluckel received minimal formal schooling, but learned a lot from her parents about international gems and the international gem trade. She had many children before being widowed twice. She joined her husband in business, became a highly accomplished pearl trader. Like Thomas Platter, she wrote a memoir for her children. It's the only early modern women's memoir written in Yiddish.  

Travels both voluntary and forced, also marked the early years of Al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad Al-Wazan Al-Fasi, a Muslim aristocrat and Catholic convert. Born in Grenada shortly after the Spanish conquest to a Muslim father and a mother who may have been a Jewish convert to Islam Al-Hasan Al-Wazan and his family were expelled to North Africa in the early 1500s. An influential uncle arranged for a university education and a place in court and took him on diplomatic missions to Timbuktu. On a mission to Istanbul, Al-Hasan Al-Wazan was seized by Catholic Pirates on the Mediterranean and brought as a prize to Rome. In 1520, he converted to Catholicism and rose in the papal court as an author and a translator. Here, he wrote the description of Africa, a widely translated work that would earn him the nickname of Leo Africanus. Al-Hasan Al-Wazan disappeared into the pseudonym, and in fact, he disappeared before the description of Africa was even published. Troops of the Holy Roman emperor seized and sacked Rome in 1527 and Al-Hasan Al-Wazan disappeared into the chaos, most likely returning to North Africa. I should say that the image on the left has been thought to be of him. It's most likely not, and the image on the right is a modern image.  

In February, 1582, four Japanese youths sailed out of Nagasaki, headed to Europe. Ito Mancio Sukemasu, Chijiwa Miguel Seizaemon, Chara Martin, and Nakaura Julian made up a quasi diplomatic mission, the Tensho embassy, to link Japan's fledgling Christian community with Catholic powers in Europe. They were all 14 or 15, had been raised as Christians and spoke Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin. This was at the height of the Catholic mission when there may have been 130,000 converts in Japan. Landing in Lisbon in August, 1584, the 4 boys spent the next 20 months travelling through Portugal, Spain, and Italy, meeting nobles and churchmen, appearing in Japanese dress in processions in Rome and Venice, and being celebrated by Pope Gregory the 13th as signs of Catholicism's global scope. And that's them on the right, on the left, sorry, being received by Gregory the 13th.  

They returned to Japan in 1590 with maps, books, a printing press, and musical instruments on which they played European music for the Japanese emperor. The 4 joined the Jesuit order a year after their return to Japan, but were caught between two worlds. Having travelled Europe in Japanese dress as examples of Catholic universality, they now travel Japan in European clothes as signs of Christian exceptionality. Two died in Nagasaki, one fled to Macau, one seems to have abandoned Christianity.  

Marie-Joseph Angelique was born into slavery in 18th century Madeira and was purchased by a Flemish trader to New England before a Montreal businessman purchased her as a domestic servant. She joined a household dependent on the forced labour of young people, including enslaved Africans, indigenous youths, and indentured servants. She was treated as a possession and the businessman may have allowed or even arranged her sexual relations with a friend’s enslaved African male, which resulted in her bearing three children in two years, none lived more than five months. The businessman died the following year. And when his widow signalled her intention to sell Angelique, she escaped with an indentured white man. Captured shortly thereafter, Angelique was returned to her mistress. A month later, a fire broke out in the home and consumed the entire neighbourhood. Angelique was widely suspected of having set the fire to cover a second escape. She was arrested, charged, and tried, but through six weeks of trial, there was no evidence to convict her until a five-year-old girl testified to having seen her bring live coals to the attic. Within a few days, Angelique was tortured, hanged, and burned, her ashes scattered to the wind.  

A parallel fate could have overtaken young, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo from a leading Muslim family in Futa, in modern day Senegal. While travelling to sell slaves to British traitors, he was himself seized and shipped from Gambia to Maryland where he was put to work on a tobacco plantation. His manner, his bearing, his obvious learning, convinced many that he was different, but did not prevent him from being imprisoned when he fled the tobacco plantation. Ayuba Suleiman came to the attention of a small group in Boston who were determined to help him. They arranged for schooling, but still treated him as property, seeking compensation before they would free him.  

After three years in America, he was transferred to England and feted as an exotic prize, much as Al-Hasan Al-Wazan had been in Italy two centuries earlier. He was hosted at dinners and country house weekends while funds were raised for his release about 30,000 Australian dollars. After release, Ayuba Suleiman returned to Africa where he spent the remainder of his life working for the Royal Africa Company, which managed a good part of the Atlantic slave trade under a crown charter.  

In contemporary Manila, Cecilia Salazar born to a Spanish official and indigenous mother, was sent as a young girl to an enclosure called a Beaterio in the capitol. And the Beaterio are like the convents, these are these larger enclosures in a sense, on the outskirts. This is the Intramuros area, which is the walled area for Spanish only in the Manila area. Considered illegitimate, young women like Cecilia fell between two worlds: available as spouses to Spanish immigrants, but otherwise, lacking a place in either Spanish or indigenous society. Cecilia entered the Beaterio as a young girl and with no husband to facilitate her exit, she professed 10 years later.  

Yet from the Beaterio's windows, she managed to strike up a relation with a colonial official, Don Francisco Antonio de Figuero, and she was asked to leave in order to marry her lover, and she asked to leave in order to marry her lover. When the Beaterio refused, Cecilia took her cause to the Archbishop, arguing that she had professed under coercion and was mistreated in the home. Her sisters countered that she was rude and restless, broke the rules repeatedly and brought her lover into the convent itself. Cecilia was eventually released from her vows, marrying Don Francisco and crossing the Pacific to Mexico, where both disappear from the records.  

There were many different ways to move towards a global history of early modern youth. Recent work has shown how they played and fought, why they occupied certain streets at certain times, how they ruled the night with noises, costumes, and sometimes with violence. When they flexed their bodies, deployed sound as an instrument or experienced emotions and how they gradually ceased to be young. Without homogenising the varieties of youth experience around the globe from the 15th to the 18th centuries, we find recurrences, parallels, and shared experiences that bear the marks of common biological realities, patriarchal and gender norms, and social pressures.  

This gives us some of the pieces of a global history, but much of it would be true of youths in any period. Was there anything particular to the early modern era that might focus our comparisons? Mobility moves us further to that goal. Historians like Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Kapil Raj, Tamar Herzog, Julia McClure, and Lucy Underwood have posited the mobility of people and ideas as keys to early modern global connections and entanglements in commerce, ideology, religion, and medical care.  

Thomas Platter, Gluckel Leib, Al-Hasan Al-Wazan, Cecilia Salazar, and the others noted above, all travelled as youths, sometimes voluntarily, often not. They were each unmarried when travelling, and so by one of the most common definitions of the time, they were youths regardless of age, yet some were hardly young in chronological terms. Others were so bound by social and legal constraints that questions of marriage, adulthood, and agency are moot, yet all of them moved.  

The forces that moved them in their youth from hunger or enslavement to ambition, marriage or escape, defined life paths that sometimes ended well and sometimes not. When we use concepts like liminality and define youths relationally in terms of roles that move them towards adulthood, we project a narrative structure onto their lives. Yet with mobility, the last chapter of that narrative may be unwritten. We don't know how the story ends. Since the individuals often move right out of the historical record. That ambiguity may be central to a global history of early modern youth.  

We can still use these particular uses and their mobility to sketch a global history of youth since it was some of the most important, new, and distinct economic, diplomatic, religious, and social movements of the period that put them on the road. The mobility that directed these youths was defining- The experience was rendering inadequate, the common relational definition of youth as lying in some indistinct zone between the start of sexual maturity and marriage.  

A long historiographical tradition has defined the renaissance in Europe as a period of growing individuality and personal autonomy. It's seized on individuals like the Platters and Gluckel as inspiring examples of achievement and social mobility. When Thomas Platter moved from being an abandoned goat herding child and wandering beggar to self-taught humanist, teacher, and publisher, he demonstrated how young Europeans could shatter class restrictions, make a mark, start a bourgeois dynasty. When Gluckel of Hameln took the business acumen she had learned as a girl in Hamburg and developed a continent-wide seed pearl business in a small town while giving birth to over a dozen children, she demonstrated that limits of race, religion, and gender were no match for the human spirit and determination.  

For historians who saw the Renaissance sunny side up as the birth of a modern liberal order, young capitalists like Thomas and Gluckel demonstrated the social and economic mobility that expressed youthful energy and optimistic promise and that symbolised European modernity as it empowered individuals to move beyond social restrictions. It's a nice story.  

Historians are now demonstrating how much of this European social mobility and expanding capitalist prosperity was predicated on the forced labour of others. The beginning of our period marks the time when the Portuguese began enslaving large numbers of Black Africans and bringing them to Europe. Some were prized as ‘exotics’ and artists who in small numbers could be domestic servants or teach dancing or fencing. Many more were transported as labourers to the cork, sugar, and grain plantations that the Portuguese were developing on the continent and on the Atlantic Islands that they had also seized. Above all, the Madeiras and the Azores. The economic tools and techniques for objectifying humans in this way were provided by merchants and capitalists from Genoa, which had itself been a critical hub of the Mediterranean slave trade for over a century.  

Where the Mediterranean slave trade had been as much about ransom as about labour, the Atlantic slave trade was built on labour alone, and that meant that investors aimed to own the means of production. Mediterranean slaves were encouraged by their captors to find ways of ransoming themselves and returning home. This was largely an impossibility for the Africans imprisoned in the Atlantic chattel slave trade.  

So what does this have to do with the history of youth? The majority of those enslaved and transported in into the Americas were youths. This included both Africans captured and enforced overseas and indigenous people enslaved by European conquerors. Afua Cooper has estimated then in New France, the average age of enslaved Africans was 17 and of enslaved indigenous peoples 25. Working conditions across the Americas were such that most of the enslaved survived only eight years. Even allowing for local statistical variation, the slave economy was built on youths.  

These calculations were often written into the legal contracts and financial instruments that organised slave labour and made it such a profitable element in Europe's expanding global capitalist order. The transatlantic slave trade database estimates that just under 1 million Africans were enslaved and transported to the Americas in the 150 years from 1501 to 1650. 945,000 embarked, 727,000 disembarked, meaning that over 23% died on the voyage. That's just in that first period of 150 years. Looking more closely, the death rate on 16th century voyages reached almost 30%, falling to 20% as the number of ships and enslaved increased in the early 17th century. Children comprised 21.8% of those who survived and adult males 56.8%. Yet since those keeping these statistics calculated adulthood from age 13 or 14, we can safely assume that the majority of those enslaved were people that we would consider children and youths. The numbers in the Atlantic slave trade would grow rapidly over the coming centuries with an estimated total of 12.5 million taken from Africa and 10.7 million arriving in 36,000 voyages up to 1866 with a mortality rate of 14.52% on these voyages over the four centuries.  

Our period marks the transition from one form of slavery to another. Al-Hasan Al-Wazan redeemed himself from Mediterranean slavery by converting to Catholicism and eventually escaping back to North Africa. Two centuries later, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was able to redeem himself by working with the patrons who raised the funds to recoup the investment of the man who had purchased and traded him and then returned to West Africa. But these were the exceptions. Angelique born into slavery in the Portuguese, Madeiras, shipped to New England by a Flemish trader, sold to a Montreal merchant who may have included forced intercourse in his work obligations, eventually hanged and burned by colonial French officials all before reaching age 30, Angelique was closer to the rule.  

Intersections of race, gender, capitalism, and procreation run through the colonialist enterprise. The cases and statistics I've just given show that youth were affected more than any other social group. The slave trade was part of this, but there were other forms of controlling and strategically mobilising youths. Indenture brought many Europeans to the colonies as sailors, soldiers, and labourers. Of the approximately half million Europeans who immigrated to British America over the colonial period, roughly 55,000 were prisoners, 215,000 were indentured, with 75% of the indentured being under age 25. Youths or their guardians signed contracts pledging to work for a fixed period of time before being released. Food, shelter, and clothing were part of the deal, but for those who were indentured, the motivating compensation came at the end of the term: money goods, lands or some other reward. Europeans drew on existing practises like apprenticeship when framing indentures. Unlike apprentices though, indentured youths received little, if any artisanal training. What they gained at the end of their contract was adulthood with the freedom and possibility and even an obligation to marry and establish a household.  

If the narrative of their lives followed the usual cultural pattern, their passage over the threshold or live in, gave them a greater stake in colonial society as householders. It also gave them a greater motivation to exaggerate those markers like race, which distinguished them from other forced labourers who would not find freedom.  

Global mobility complicated the life narrative for many early modern youths. The desire of colonising powers to draw more of their white populations to settle overseas compromised some traditional legal and social restraints, so it proved harder to control white settlers in colonial settings. Young males drove the colonial enterprise. Young women like Cecilia Salazar in Manila were their offspring and were often abandoned as their white fathers moved on. The children born from sexual encounters between indigenous and enslaved women and Spanish officials, English sailors, French soldiers, or the countless young factors sent out by monopoly trading companies, became a social challenge for colonial officials. In many ports and outposts, founding homes and orphanages were the first charitable institutions that authorities established.  

It's no coincidence that exclusionary racialising ideologies were increasing at precisely this time in Europe, and that barriers of blood and colour were hardening in metropolitans like London, Madrid, Paris, and Amsterdam. Racism expanded in this context.  

Faced with a demographic reckoning of their own making in their colonies, Europeans responded by shoring up the ideological barriers at home. They also firmed up architectural barriers overseas with complex series of walled enclaves and enclosures. It was far easier to enclose somebody like Cecilia Salazar in Beaterio than to acknowledge that racial purity was an artificial construct, legitimising economic exploitation. Enclosure rendered her invisible. In the eyes of colonial officials, the added benefit of an enclosure like Cecilia's Beaterio in Manila was that it could shelter mixed race women that poorer white Spanish settlers might want to marry. Marriage would eventually provide Cecilia with their ticket outta the Beaterio. Her migration with her new husband from the Philippines to Mexico, was in the eyes of Spanish officials, an entirely satisfactory outcome, both legally and demographically.  

The great majority of youth who traversed the early modern globe did so under duress. They were enslaved, indentured, press ganged or imprisoned. Some travelled widely, others were on one way trips. This merging of forced mobility and forced labour on a mass scale is a distinctly early modern development. It accelerates with the slave trade in the 15th century and carries on into the 19th century. The Portuguese and Spanish would dominate the Atlantic trade, depopulating West Africa as they eventually moved millions to Brazil and the Caribbean. From 1500 to 1650, 75% of those they enslaved would be sent to mainland plantations, but the British later would come to exercise the greatest variety of forms and arguably move the greatest number of people through their global empire. This included the enslavement of Africans, colonial convict transportation, and the movement of 12 million indentured South Asian labourers to Africa and the Caribbean after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. If we wanna frame a global history of early modern youth predicated on mobility, we have to start with the varieties of forced labour.  

The opportunities and necessities of an emerging global and colonial capitalism put these youths in motion and triggered unforeseen consequences. Youths were also disproportionately the agents realising capitalism and colonialism on the ground as traders, soldiers, planters, trappers, and sailors. This was the economic system that Ayuba Suleiman Diallo worked within before and after his period of enslavement. Of course, many more youths in Europe, travelled only short distances within local or regional circuits from farms to nearby towns or from one neighbourhood to another within a city. Most journeymen in Europe never moved more than 25 kilometres from home. Gathering their experiences allows us to compare practises across early modern spaces and cultures.  

Yet those comparisons will show us less about what was distinct about early modern global mobility and contact. Grim as it may sound, the first element in a global history of early modern youth is the objectification and exploitation of people and their labour, ranging from chattel slavery at the most extreme to various forms of indentured servitude and enclosures with forced labour.  

Yet, there were other youths who did not travel under force or duress. The ones furthest from compulsion were diplomats and administrators. Comparing their experiences shows us a very different experience of global mobility as we move between the extremes of enslavement and entitlement. New forms of labour required new forms of management and youths were central actors in both. While various forms of forced labour were transforming youth engagement in the global economy at the foundational level, the development of a professional class whose training was also mobile was transforming the middle and upper levels.  

Travelling in regional or international circuits for professional training or information was an expectation for European youths from more financially stable backgrounds. It included students moving for a university education in law or medicine or journeymen on their wounded yacht. Even as North European Protestant cities and states established new universities to avoid sending their use to ancient Catholic institutions in Italy and France, familiar patterns of international mobility remained.  

Thomas Platter may have published Calvin's Institutes and become a prominent burger in the leading Swiss Protestant city of Basel, but he still sent his son, Felix to Montpelier in Catholic France for medical training at age 14. Felix quickly learned to navigate the complex rules of cross-cultural survival, including how to fry eggs secretly over a candle during lent. No mean feat. His degree from an internationally renowned medical school, aided Felix's rapid professional advancement on his return to Basel. And a few decades later, he would send his own son, Thomas to his alma mater. Even as the recent wars of religion were smouldering with Montpelier as one of the 10th spots. The travels of these three generations of Platter youths in the early, mid, and later 16th century followed traditional patterns of individuals using university education to gain professional credentials and rise up the social ladder.  

Precedents for both the kind and scale of their travel could be found earlier and elsewhere. Al-Hasan Al-Wazan's travels as a young diplomat to Ottoman, Istanbul, Mamluk, Cairo, and Safavid, Baghdad would allow him to gain skills and weave a network for later professional success. And the four Japanese youths of the Tensho embassy were meant to develop their skills as cultural interpreters, even if the adults sending them may have had mixed ideas about what they might be interpreting and to whom.  

One factor that brought differences of kind and scale into early modern mobility was the religious schism known as the reformation. Some of the key events were led by youths, impatient with the structures and theologies of the institutional Catholic church. Martin Luther was in his mid 20s when he began questioning that structure and theology. John Calvin was roughly the same age when he was implicated in a religious upheaval in Paris that forced him to flee over the border. And Conrad Grable, who's on the far left there, and Menno Simons began framing their religious radicalism at roughly the same age. Public disputes were critical theatres for the performance of reformation at the time. While Luther ‘lost’ a public dispute held with Catholic theologians in the university, town of Heidelberg in 1518, he galvanised a host of university students and brought them over to his cause. University students [unclear] that excommunicated Luther and they went on to burn much else besides.  

Youths in their 20s, triggered the reformation and drove the actions that had some of their elders fearing that the anarchy of the apocalypse had settled on Europe. It would be middle aged theologians and politicians who channelled change back into the more familiar institutional forms. The determination of reforming youths to overturn existing religious ideas and structures often forced them to flee for short periods like Luther or for life, like Calvin and Menno Simons, or it cut those lives short as with Conrad Grable who died shortly after escaping from prison at age 28.  

Reformation had a global dimension that tied directly to the articulation of national identities among the European states that led the colonialist push into Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Religious institutions were becoming more intensely national and political just as European states were expanding globally. High profile converts were never just souls saved, but valuable talismans in religiopolitical competitions as the cases of Al-Hasan Al-Wazan, the Japanese Tencho embassy, and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo all demonstrate, yet not all would convert. Reform often entailed greater discipline and exclusion of those who deviated from the religious mainstream.  

This affected Jews first and accelerating expulsions dislocated Jews from European communities in the 15th and 16th centuries and continued well past the 17th. Gluckel's early flight as a child refugee from Hamburg, was a too common form of mobility within the early modern Jewish diaspora, driven and shaped by Europe's structural and episodic racism.  

Moreover, that religiously refracted racism forced the expectation of mobility on early modern Jewish communities. Gluckel moved to Hameln as a 14-year-old bride and her travels further across Europe for trade were part of a diasporic dispersal forced on Jews by Christian exclusion rather than by professional aspirations alone. The experience of Jews would extend to Iberian Muslims in the 16th and 17th centuries, forcing many to North Africa or the Ottoman Empire. And Europe's Christians did not spare each other. The early modern period was when the religious refugee becomes a mass phenomena. Within Christian, Catholic and Protestant reforms forced some to flee and led others to seek their future in places with fewer restrictions.  

Religious movements coming out of the reformation used youths as symbols, as missionaries, and as agents in the building of new and holy social orders. All of this required travel for formal schooling, for practical training or for implementation, who moved from where to where and for what and can these movements weave into a global history of youth? Here again, a couple of examples demonstrate how questions of intent, authority, and agency intertwined.  

Back to the Tensho embassy, these Japanese youths moving to Mediterranean Europe highlights the interconnections. These four youths were not diplomats in any formal sense with responsibility for negotiating treaties or trade concessions, nor were they missionaries. They were actors in a far larger drama about global, economic, religious, and cultural competition in exchange. In this instance, the drama left them as actors with little agency. Their mission from Japan to Rome was symbolic. It was critical that it involved Japanese Catholic youths and that it be widely advertised across Europe, especially in Protestant polities. Early modern Catholicism claimed that its universality was one of the key proofs of its superiority over upstart Protestant churches with their largely local followings. Yet these four returned not to triumph, but to ambiguity. Jesuit hesitancy around ordaining those who are not European, combined with the Tokugawa Shogunate's heightened campaign against all, but Japanese religious traditions meant that they were stranded in between with little opportunity to make an impact.  

Other youth missions had greater impact and sometimes local and global realities could give views greater agency even if it increased the immediate threats to them. In 1539, King Alfonso, the first of Kongo, wrote to his counterpart, King John III of Portugal, seeking safe conduct for a group of six noble youths whom he was sending to Lisbon and then onto Rome for priestly training. King Alfonso I had good reason to seek protection for them since a far larger group of 20 youths that he had sent to Portugal 13 years earlier in 1526, had essentially been lost and some of them possibly enslaved. Alfonso was building an indigenous Catholic church in Kongo that drew on European resources and expertise without being indebted to European clergy. He created an educational network that trained local noble youths in Christian religious concepts in schools in Kongo, Lisbon, and Rome, and then sent them across the country. Alfonso intended to construct Kongo's Catholic establishment on local social structures, as was the case in Europe. And he relied on youths to do the building. The Pope had appointed his son, Henrique as Bishop of Utica and the Kongolese youths that Alfonso I was sending to Portugal and Rome for seminary training were likely from the 12 matrilineal descent groups or kanda that comprised the Musi Kongo aristocracy.  

The Catholicism developed by these Musi Kongo youths incorporated forms of African religion. They were articulated in the Kikongo Catechism of the 1550s and disseminated via the far reaching educational system built by Alfonso I. Jesuit missionaries became more influential during the Portuguese conquest of Angola later in the 16th century, while initially aiming to institute a form of Catholicism free of syncretism or hybrid elements. By the 1620s, they had developed a Kimbundu catechism that adopted local forms. Both the Kikongo and the Kimbundu Catechisms incorporated elements of indigenous spirituality, which also influenced Catholicism in the Americas. Some enslaved Africans brought these catechisms and catechists with them, and Jesuit missionaries used both the Kikongo and Kimbundu Catechisms in their transatlantic mission work, importing West African elements into Brazilian Catholicism.  

As we trace the origin and spread of these catechisms developed and disseminated in a Catholic church with state sanction and an indigenous hierarchy, we see a very different outcome from that in Japan. Kongolese youths like those Alfonso I sent to Rome, were critical to the broader intersections of mobility, education, missions in print that were creating and disseminating a distinctly early modern global religion.  

Catholic religious orders sent thousands of missionaries, young men and women, to the Americas, Asia, and Africa from the early 16th century. While a smaller number of indigenous or mixed race Catholic youths moved toward Rome as the Kongolese and Japanese youth did, the institutional structure of the Catholic church provided one of the few social frameworks for this kind of transnational movement back and forth between Europe and other parts of the world. The need to train clergy, the structures of religious orders and the powerful draw of Rome as the destination for pilgrimage made a global reciprocal movement of young missionaries far more common within the early modern Catholic church than within contemporary Protestant churches.  

Even if Catholicism's status as the first global religion would be fully realised only in the modern era, the key patterns in early and first initiatives were early modern. Early missionaries to the America's searching for interpreters and collaborators deliberately recruited both the children of leading indigenous convert families and also the mixed race children of high born colonial officials. As with the Japanese and Kongolese youths, some of these young men travelled to Rome for schooling or on pilgrimage, and the publicity expanded the impact of their visits beyond what the small numbers might suggest.  

Protestant overseas missions were far slower to expand, and the common model of the Protestant clergy as married patriarchs, heading a holy household, meant that they would more often be older and less mobile. Moreover, Protestantism was never as dependent on its clergy as Catholicism, framed as the latter was around a sacramental system, which could not operate in the absence of ordained priests. This also meant that Protestants were less reliant on recruiting indigenous clergy. There was some notable exceptions.  

I've suggested that the mission or charitable activity most critical to the early modern colonial enterprise was orphanages. They housed the abandoned offspring that young traders, sailors, and soldiers abandoned when they moved on. They also served as a potential source of marriage partners for young males that authorities were seeking to draw out to the colonies. It was, again, predominantly young male and female missionaries who established and staffed them. Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and surgeons offered a wide range of services, including medical services and found leading orphan care through institutions called the Misericordias.  

These were important vehicles for acculturation, for legitimation, and for demographic expansion. Given the distances and dangers involved, their personnel over the first century were, again, largely youths. Since these were the only ones willing to undertake what most considered a dangerous mission.  

The Dutch East India company recruited the Netherlands Reform Church to set up orphanages in Cape Town and Batavia. This was something new. There were no orphanages in the small and often enclosed settlements across mediaeval Europe, like London Steel Yard, where young merchants lived and traded for a few years before returning home. Setting up orphanages in colonial outposts meant that Europeans intended to stay. They needed a spiritual rationale that would legitimate their seizures of land and people by adding a moral mission. Much of this work would fall to young people as the ones least established, most in need of professional experience, and most mobile.  

Young women and men alike, did this charitable work. Italian orphan, Angela Merici began the Ursulines as a consorority for young women who wanted to practise active community charity without being limited by religious enclosure, the French Daughters of Charity followed suit. Their work with schools and hospitals required mobility and inspired others to play an active role in colonial religious and charitable care. The Ursuline sister Marie de Incarnation and the young laywoman, Marguerite Bourgeoys, travelled to New France to open shelters for young indigenous mixed race and French women training them towards vocations or towards lay life as Christian wives and mothers. Bourgeoys avoided formal vows and enclosure when establishing the Congregation de Notre-Dame de Montreal in 1658. She then took a leading role in a project to bring young French women to the colony to marry the young French men already there.  

From 1663 to 73, 10 years, the French government and the French East India company sent over 800 poor and largely orphaned young women from France to New France, and subsidised their dowries. Bourgeoys housed these young women and helped them find spouses, colloquially known as the Filles du Roi these young women's new families doubled the population of the new colony. The impact of their mobility was extraordinary and extraordinarily long lasting. Two thirds of the modern day French population of Quebec is descended from the families that they started. 10 years.  

Until recently, the historiography of early modern youth has been largely Eurocentric. At the same time, histories that have aimed to put early modern Europe into a global context have not paid much attention to questions of age and the role of youths in particular. We need to bring these two academic conversations together. That expanded conversation can probe the continuities between the European travels of marginalised people like Thomas Platter and Gluckel of Hameln, the enslavement and narrow escapes of captives, Al-Hasan Al-Wazan and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, the interplay of ritual, construction, and international competition in the lengthy transnational travels of Japanese and Kongolese youths and the efforts of Cecilia Salazar and of Angelique to escape enclosure and erasure. Mobility defined them all, shaping their prospects, their lives, and their fates. And these were distinctly early modern mobilities. It was a trafficking of youth's minds, and bodies for economic, diplomatic, religious, or demographic advantage in contexts that were new to the early modern period.  

Focusing on enslavement and indenture may not capture the experience of the majority of global youth, but it does underscore the early modern origins of phenomena that would transform the globe. As such, I would argue that it is a more significant sign of trajectories and impacts than statistics about the number of youths in schools, armies, and poor houses. Europe was at this point, a new and a very junior partner to global dynamics which were expanding along well-established roots across Asia and the Indian Ocean. Yet the multiplying connections and entanglements across this world that would fundamentally shape the modern era began in this period, and youths were the most active agents shaping that exchange. Thank you very much. 

Daniel Gleeson: Thank you so much. Thank you, Professor. We have some time now for some questions, so if you do have a question, just raise your hand and please wait for the microphone to come to you, so that the people who are watching online can hear your question, so hands up if you've got one. 

Audience member 1: Thank you. That was really wonderful. Very, very stimulating, but also it sort of raises all sorts of fascinating questions. And I just wanted to ask you, I just can't quite reconcile what you suggest. I get the issue around individualism and renaissance early moment. It's all about individualism. And yet, I find that the connection that you make so eloquently between individuals and the mass movements and mass forced, organised, structured, systematic removal of individuals sort of brought back sort of my mind much earlier cases of mass migrations of let's say in the late bronze era, for instance, age or what we have unfortunately experienced, what indigenous communities experience in Australia in the 19th century, stolen generation, 19th century, 20th century, stolen generation, another systematic removals of people. So I just, I don't know, I find difficult to reconcile the individuals who find themselves in specific circumstances and make choices or were forced to make choices against the really structured and ongoing movement of masses of youths. I just find it difficult to understand how you can put them together, if you like, and sort of in a way create a narrative when it seems that two categories are actually very distinct and one perhaps is very early modern, very typically modern, but the other, so the individual one perhaps, or the mass is much less typical and traditional, it's just that informed by economic drives that might not have been there before, but the systematic removal was there before and after. I dunno if that makes sense. 

Nicholas Terpstra: Sure. And I think that migration- I mean, migration's been going on all the time, right. I think that one of the things that's critical in this point is the biopolitics that what's being moved is labour. And so that intersection of colonialism and capitalism and the choice, because when you're enslaving people, you're not going to send older people across. So the number of people who otherwise migrate, when whole populations move, it's all age groups that are moving. What I think you find in the early modern period, what I'm trying to argue is that it's disproportionately young people. And that where these two come together is, I think that we have young people as being both the ones being moved, but then also they're the ones who are doing, who are in a sense organising the movement. And that's why I was trying in the first half, emphasise the enslavement and the second half emphasise this kind of professional managerial class.  

In some cases, they remain, so of course, they age in place, but often in the early stage when they first move over, its as youtsh. So I'm not trying to say that this mobility doesn't happen at any other time. What I was trying to figure out is, okay, what is it that's distinctive about early modern mobility? And even in that, in saying that, I wouldn't say that it never happens in any other time. But as an early modernist, trying to figure out, trying to look at this more carefully to see, when I was trained and I think even when I was teaching this, when I was first teaching about say, European voyages, age never occurred to me. It never occurred to me to think about what the ages were, but it was, again, more a number of these elements coming together and seeing things like the, well, the statistics in the slave trade database, the statistics of indenture, the statistics of not so much prison transport because there you get older people, but I think that's the difference between indenture and transport. And then even when you see some of the stories, maybe somebody's a Portuguese scholar, whoops, has done some work on who goes the medical, the doctors out into the Portuguese empire, to these [unclear]. Well, no older doctor who's established is going to go. So it's almost always people who have just graduated, not even graduated from medical school who go.  

So it's accumulation, right. And then trying to figure out how does this give us a sense of what's distinct and why is it distinct? And I think that's where, again, I would think that it's the intersection of colonialism and capitalism and then with enslavement and simply, if I put need in quotation marks, the ‘need’ at that intersection for human labour and what's the human labour that's gonna be most valuable,  it's young labour, right. We know that from European labour statistics as well. So there's a selectivity that I think brings those elements together at that time. 

Audience member 2: Thanks, Nick. Just a tour to force that makes me think about so many things in so many ways. My question's about sources, how we know the stories of those individuals that you mentioned. I mean, the Platters, I know of their work and stuff, but I'm wondering here about literacy and the ability to tell your own story in the way that Leo Africanus does, et cetera. So what's the difference and is there a gender there, a gender element to those stories? 

Nicholas Terpstra: Oh yeah, there'd be generality. So one of the only reasons why we know about Angelique for instance is, and what the document I showed, that's the trial account, right. So Angelique left no record of her own, but that is the trial account. With Diallo, it's an account that was penned afterwards. Like there's actually a number of, because in a sense, he was a cause celebrity, so there was a lot written about him and a lot that kind of idealised him as well as a person who was worthy of redemption or worthy of ransoming, put it that way. So in many cases, it's secondhand accounts.  

With the Platters, one of the reasons why so many people focus on the Platters is, 'cause there's a three generation chronicle that they all keep. So it starts with Thomas carries on with Felix, carries on with Thomas, the younger. And it's quite fascinating, 'cause they have extraordinary descriptions of all sorts of things about early modern life. But also then like many of these chronicles, when you're writing a memoir, you write about your youth, right. You write about your time in university. So, there's a lot of that element there.  

So it is hard and that's where the individuals come in because of course, for many of these people that I'm talking about, we have no stories. We have statistics, but we have no stories. So you are going back to then some of the selective literary accounts.  

With somebody like the Tensho embassy, it's very difficult to find, I mean there's been a few things written about it now. There's been more that's been uncovered. But even there, it's not even entirely clear what happened with all of them. And there's some doubt, there's been some dispute when I said that one of them may have let Christianity. There's some discussion as to whether he actually did or not. There's a thought that actually, there's what looked to some people like a rosary in his, he actually overtly rejects Christianity, but then in what is thought to be his grave, there's some people think they found a rosary. So a lot of these are still disputed. So it is difficult to try to piece together and you are then relying on memoirs, which again, may or may not be entirely clear. Cecilia Salazar, that's again the case that's brought to the archbishop. So, the classic source for social historians is cases, right. Court cases, memoirs, and long lists of statistics. 

Audience member 3:  Thank you. That was a fascinating. I know a little bit about the Tensho embassy, but I wasn't so boned up on the Kongolese one. And of course, the record of their travels by Duarte de Sande is just ventriloquized Valignano and it's very conventional and- 

Nicholas Terpstra: Yeah. 

Audience member 3: -we can't really access their subjectivity, I guess their true experiences in Europe. But I was just wondering whether you'd had a look at some of "The Indipetae" letters. Elisa Frei, for example, has been doing a lot of work on these Jesuit letters to the Jesuit general, or those by students, young men seeking postings to the missions. And yeah, it seems to be a bit of an industry in it now in fact. Also looking at the modern, the sort of post restoration society letters as well and seeing these rhetorical continuities. And yes, although, it's difficult to get it to reconcile the individual and the masses, it may be worth actually having a look at some of those four. Yeah. The aspirations and the emotions of those youths, perhaps the ones that weren't being forced to travel. 

Nicholas Terpstra: Right. There's an Australian scholar, Camilla Russell, who's done precisely that, right. And she's looked at the letters by which these Jesuit or young aspirants went to travel. And what she found is that, most of them wanted to travel to China. They don't wanna go to Canada. I have no idea why not. And she's also found, there's tropological elements that come back into it, right. But what's interesting and is also the comments on the letters that are written by Jesuit officials. ‘So and so has written this, but actually he's not a very good student at all’ and this kind of thing. So yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I mean, I think that we get more of that kind of individuality in some of those accounts.  

One of the problems comes with, later on in if we're using those Jesuit accounts to find out what their experience was. Because of course, when the Jesuits are writing back with their relations, they're writing of how successful they are and often quite critical of the societies they're in, but then often quite laudatory of their own things. And Sanjay Subramanian has that account where he's able to look at a Jesuits account of his experience in the Persian court, and then Persian court records of that same experience. And they're as far apart as chalk and cheese, right. I mean, the Jesuit account is, he's just this wonderful person who in convinces everybody and the Persian account is ‘who is this idiot?’ So I think that's always the case with these things. We often have just one side of the exchange. And I think at that point, all we can do is keep getting as much as we can. And the fact that Camilla was able to work with those letters is phenomenal. 

Daniel Gleeson: Thank you, professor. And could we have a final round of applause for Nicholas Terpstra, please. We've run out of time, but before we wrap up, I just have a few final messages. If you enjoyed the talk tonight, then please keep an eye out for our upcoming events, which you can find on our website. Over the next few weeks, we're hosting a discussion about the creative process leading to the upcoming Torres Strait Island musical, which is called "Straight From the Strait." You may have seen it featured on 7.30 Report, as well as presentations by Library Fellows on topics including Australian women pilots, Aviatrixes, and the early life of pianist, composer, and music educator, Miriam Hyde. So more details on our website. We hope to see you at the Library or online again soon. Thank you very much and goodnight.