Francis Xavier

Francis Xavier (1506–1552), a Navarrese cleric, was one of the founders of the Society of Jesus and the first great Jesuit missionary in Asia. In Paris his roommate Ignatius of Loyola turned him from ambition, and in August 1534 they vowed with five others at Montmartre. At the Portuguese king's request he left Rome in 1540, reached Goa in 1542 and preached in India and the Maluku Islands.

At Malacca he met a Japanese samurai who urged him to go to Japan. He landed at Kagoshima in 1549, failed to reach the Kyoto emperor in 1551 but won leave to preach at Yamaguchi, where an abandoned temple became Japan's first lasting church.

Believing China was the key to Japan, he sailed in 1552 but was stopped on Shangchuan Island, dying there on 3 December aged forty-six. Scholars estimate he converted some thirty thousand people. He was canonized in 1622.