The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c7.s8.47

c7.s8.47

The Jesuits, commonly called Paulistines,⁸ gradually established themselves in every town and village;⁹ but in 1585 the Franciscans received charge of Mandapeshvar, Máhim, Bombay, Karanja, Mount Calvary, and Agáshi, in each of which places there was an official called "O Pay dos Christaõs" paid by the State.¹ Gradually all power fell into the hands of the ecclesiastics, and the Church was said to have a larger revenue in India than the King himself.² One writer says³ that "Few men can enjoy very peaceable lives who have any fair possession near the convents of the Jesuits: a pleasant seat and a fruitful plantation can hardly escape their gaining", and another that at the end of the seventeenth century the General of the North at Bassein had both an uneasy and precarious government because of the superintendence of the Church.⁴ Goa was said to equal any city in the world in the number and grandeur of its religious processions.⁵ The Jesuit college there conferred degrees, and while one Englishman at the end of the seventeenth century says that at Bándra their college "was not inferior to the building nor much unlike those of our universities," and that the Fathers "lived sumptuously, the greater part of the island Sálsette being theirs,"⁶ another about the same time reports the income of the chief church there to be of the value of a pound of gold a day. In 1598 a Father who had come from Europe to visit all the houses and colleges of the Society in India, was received at Bándra with great rejoicing, and entertained with a sham sea fight at the mouth of the river. The Father left four Panjábis converts to be educated at Bándra whom he had fallen in with at Chaul, and then visited the house at Thána, and all the churches in Sálsette (not named), founding the church of St. Cecilia at Ponçar (probably Poisar). He then went on to Bassein where he established a seminary called the College of the Purification, in which noble children, natives of those parts, might be brought up as missionaries. From Bassein he went on direct to Daman, from which the inference seems to be that there were no Jesuit houses between these two places.⁷