The Spanish conquest of Luzon is presented as both a military victory and a missionary achievement, but the novel conveys it through a partisan recollection rather than an independent account. Friar Domingo remembers taking part in the campaign in 1575, when the Spanish destroyed the native king Lumalon and conquered Luzon. His story also gives the conquest a transnational dimension: Japanese converts fought alongside the Spanish, whom he recalls as formidable fighters.

The remembered campaign

Friar Domingo recounts the conquest to John Blackthorne while the two men are imprisoned in Osaka. After waking, he asks whether John Blackthorne had come from Manila, then recognizes that he is speaking with a European who has not previously been in Asia. The chance to speak his mother tongue draws the friar into a long account of his years away from home, including his service with the conquistadores in Mexico and the Philippines.

He places the conquest in 1575 and describes it in the language of victory and religious expansion: the Spanish destroyed Lumalon’s rule and brought the word of God to the Philippines. His recollection supplies few details of the campaign’s course, but it is unequivocal about its outcome: Luzon was conquered, and the Catholic Church, in his telling, took root there.

Converts and competing missions

The detail that Japanese converts fought with the Spanish makes the campaign part of a wider Asian Christian history, not simply a Spanish undertaking in the Philippines. Friar Domingo praises these converts as fighters, presenting them as participants in the conquest rather than distant recipients of missionary work. Their presence links Japan to the Spanish expansion he remembers.

The friar also insists that the Church was firmly established in Luzon without Jesuits or Portuguese. That claim reflects his hostility toward those rivals: he says that the Jesuits betrayed him, forcing him to leave Japan for Manila, and contrasts their influence with the Spanish Church’s position in the Philippines. His account therefore describes the conquest while also contesting who deserves credit for Christian expansion in the region.

A partisan account within the novel

Friar Domingo’s recollection is shaped by the circumstances in which he tells it. He speaks after years in Mexico and the Philippines, and his enthusiastic praise of the conquistadores and denunciation of Jesuits and Portuguese are part of the same story. The novel presents his assertions as his perspective, not as a neutral account of the campaign or of the competing religious orders.

That perspective sits beside a different picture of foreign power elsewhere in the narrative. Yabu describes Portuguese influence in Japan as bound up with trade: Portuguese intermediaries and Jesuit interpreters connect Japanese silver with Chinese silk, while the importance of that commerce compels Japanese rulers to tolerate the priests and their religion. Against this locally negotiated system, Friar Domingo’s story of Luzon emphasizes conquest and a Spanish missionary presence independent of Portuguese and Jesuit control. The contrast makes his memory relevant not only as a report of an earlier victory, but as one claim in the novel’s larger contest over the routes, intermediaries, and religious authorities shaping European power in Asia.