The Samurai Who Became a Roman Citizen in 1615

A Samurai in Rome: The Journey That History Almost Forgot

In the early hours of October 26, 1615, a Japanese samurai named Hasekura Tsunenaga arrived at the Quirinal Palace in Rome and kissed the feet of Pope Paul V. Three days later, he rode on horseback through streets lined with cheering crowds, processed past ancient piazzas, and was formally made a citizen of Rome — the Eternal City itself. He had sailed the Pacific, crossed Mexico on foot, met the King of Spain, and traversed the length of the Mediterranean to get there. He had been baptised a Christian. He was the talk of Europe.

And then, almost nothing. His name fell out of recorded history for over two centuries.

The story of Hasekura Tsunenaga and the Keichō Embassy — the extraordinary Japanese diplomatic mission of 1613 to 1620 — is one of the most remarkable and underappreciated tales in the history of early modern diplomacy. It is a story about ambition and failure, about what happens when geopolitical realities overtake idealistic missions, and about one man who found himself transformed by a journey that ultimately achieved very little of what it set out to do.

What Was the Keichō Embassy and Why Did It Matter?

To understand Hasekura's journey, you first need to understand the volatile political moment that launched it. Japan in the early seventeenth century was not a unified, outward-facing nation in the modern sense. It was a feudal system of competing domains, nominally unified under the Tokugawa Shogunate, which Tokugawa Ieyasu had consolidated after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.

Date Masamune, the powerful feudal lord of the Sendai domain in northern Japan, was the driving force behind the embassy. He had two interlocking objectives. First, he wanted to open direct trade between Japan and New Spain — modern-day Mexico — which was then the jewel of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Second, he wanted Pope Paul V to authorise the sending of Franciscan missionaries to his domain, a goal championed by his co-organiser, the Spanish Franciscan friar Luis Sotelo.

These were not modest ambitions. They required navigating the full complexity of a Catholic imperial order that stretched from Madrid to Manila, from Seville to the South China Sea. Hasekura, a mid-ranking samurai from Sendai, was chosen as the official ambassador — a man tasked with representing Japan before the most powerful monarchs on Earth.

On October 28, 1613, the San Juan Bautista — a 500-ton galleon built in Japan with Spanish expertise — departed Japanese waters carrying around 180 men, bound first for the Pacific coast of New Spain.

The Pacific Crossing and the Problem Nobody Saw Coming

Two months at sea in the open Pacific was a brutal undertaking for men who had, in many cases, never left Japanese coastal waters. The crossing alone placed the Keichō Embassy among the most logistically audacious diplomatic missions of the age. When they made landfall near Cape Mendocino in late December 1613, they were approximately 200 miles north of what is now San Francisco.

But the problems had already begun, and not all of them were meteorological.

The Spanish Empire had spent decades developing its Pacific trade route — the Manila Galleon system — and guarded it with the zeal of a state secret. The route from Acapulco to Manila and back was the backbone of Spain's global commercial dominance, and King Philip III and his advisers were deeply wary of anything that might compromise it. Granting Japan access to Pacific trade lanes could open American coastlines to potential piracy, weaken Spain's stranglehold on Manila, and set a precedent they had no desire to set.

Philip had, in fact, already made a decision before the embassy arrived: Japan could have one round-trip Spanish ship per year, crewed exclusively by Spanish sailors, with no Japanese merchants permitted to set foot in New Spain.

The problem? The San Juan Bautista — a Japanese-built ship, partly crewed by Japanese sailors, carrying Japanese merchants and Japanese goods — had just sailed uninvited into Acapulco harbour. As historian Joshua Batts has noted, the arrival of the embassy effectively vindicated every anxiety Spain had about opening trade with Japan. The Keichō Embassy's first objective had technically been achieved before the ships even docked, and the embassy itself then proceeded to unravel it.

Diplomacy, Betrayal, and the Fractures Within the Mission

The internal tensions of the Keichō Embassy deserve more attention than they typically receive. Diplomatic missions of this era were frequently fractious — a collection of competing interests sewn into a single enterprise — and this one was no different.

Sebastián Vizcaíno, a Spanish explorer and diplomat travelling aboard the San Juan Bautista, did not get along with Sotelo. Upon arrival in Acapulco, a violent altercation broke out: several Japanese passengers beat and stabbed Vizcaíno. Both sides had different accounts of who provoked whom, but the damage was done. Vizcaíno wrote a scathing letter to Philip III accusing the Japanese of theft and suggesting the entire embassy was a commercial ruse dressed up as diplomacy.

The Spanish colonial administration was already wary. These internal conflicts made them more so.

There was also a structural problem that no amount of ceremonial pageantry could fix: Date Masamune was not the ruler of Japan. The Spanish knew this. His ambassadors, however impressive, lacked the sovereign authority to make binding agreements on behalf of the Japanese state. When Sotelo eventually realised this, he pivoted — leaning heavily into the religious dimension of the mission and orchestrating a series of high-profile baptisms. Around 60 Japanese passengers were baptised in Mexico City. Hasekura himself waited until Madrid, where his own conversion could carry maximum symbolic weight.

On February 17, 1615, Hasekura was baptised in the Church of La Descalzas Reales in Madrid, in the presence of King Philip III. He was given the Christian name Felipe Francisco Hasekura.

It was a spectacular moment of intercultural theatre. It changed nothing.

Rome, Citizenship, and the Limits of Symbolic Victory

If Hasekura's baptism in Madrid was theatre, his reception in Rome was spectacle on an entirely different scale. The Keichō Embassy arrived at the port of Civitavecchia on October 18, 1615, and made its way inland to Rome, arriving late at night on October 25. The papal audience that followed — Hasekura kissing the feet of Paul V after midnight — was intimate and charged with meaning.

The public procession four days later was something else entirely. Romans, it seems, were captivated by the sight of Japanese men on horseback riding through their ancient streets, dressed in elaborate fashion, representing a civilisation most Europeans knew almost nothing about. The crowds were enormous. The fanfare was real.

And then, days later, Hasekura Tsunenaga was formally made a citizen of Rome — the first Japanese person ever to receive that honour. It was a moment of genuine historical significance, even if the political reality underpinning it was hollow.

Because the Pope, for all his ceremonial warmth, deferred to the Spanish Crown on the embassy's actual requests. Philip had already authorised only a handful of additional missionaries to be sent from Manila, and only if local officials there thought it wise. Sotelo would not be made Bishop of Japan. The comprehensive trade agreement Date Masamune had dreamed of was dead.

Worst of all, news was slowly reaching Europe that in February 1614 — just weeks after the embassy crossed the Pacific — Tokugawa Ieyasu had issued a sweeping expulsion edict, ordering all Christian missionaries to leave Japan and mandating the destruction of Christian institutions across the country. It was, effectively, the end of organised Christianity in Japan for generations.

The embassy had sailed across the world to build a bridge that, while they were still at sea, had already been demolished from the other side.

What Happened to Hasekura — and Why His Story Endures

The Keichō Embassy's return journey was slow and dispiriting. Money ran short. European patrons who had promised support dragged their feet. A small number of Japanese men chose to remain in Seville rather than face the journey home; their descendants live there to this day under the surname Japón.

Hasekura finally made it back to Japan in 1620, arriving in a country that had changed profoundly in his absence. He returned to Sendai, presented Date Masamune with a portrait of Pope Paul V, and had little else to show for seven years of extraordinary travel. What happened to him after that is murky. Some accounts suggest he recanted his Christianity to avoid persecution under the increasingly zealous Tokugawa regime. Others suggest he practised his faith in secret. He died in 1622, reportedly from illness, and his name largely disappeared from the historical record.

Sotelo's fate was grimmer and, in its way, more fitting for the man he was. He knew that returning to Japan meant death, and he returned anyway — smuggled aboard a Chinese trading vessel, apparently seeking martyrdom. He was captured in Nagasaki and spent his final two years imprisoned in a two-metre cage in a dark, vermin-infested location before being burned at the stake on August 25, 1624.

Hasekura was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, when the Iwakura Embassy — a Japanese diplomatic mission to Europe in 1871 — stumbled upon letters in Venice that Hasekura had written seeking financial assistance. Since then, his story has steadily been recovered, commemorated, and studied. There is a museum dedicated to him in Sendai. His likeness appears on commemorative stamps. A crater on Mercury bears his name.

The Keichō Embassy failed in every measurable diplomatic sense. It did not open Pacific trade. It did not bring missionaries to Japan. It did not make Sotelo a bishop. It arrived too late, was organised by the wrong authority, and sailed into a world that had already made up its mind.

And yet the image endures: a samurai from northern Japan, riding through the streets of Rome in the autumn of 1615, a citizen of the Eternal City, a man of two worlds, carrying the hopes of a mission that the world had already decided to refuse. History rarely offers neater symbols of the gap between ambition and outcome — or more quietly haunting portraits of what it means to travel very far and come back with almost nothing, and still have lived a life worth remembering.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Hasekura Tsunenaga?

Hasekura Tsunenaga was a Japanese samurai and diplomat from the Sendai domain in northern Japan. He served as the official ambassador of the Keichō Embassy (1613–1620), a diplomatic mission organised by feudal lord Date Masamune to negotiate trade and religious agreements with Spain and the Vatican. He was baptised a Christian in Madrid in 1615 and became the first Japanese person to be made a citizen of Rome.

What was the goal of the Keichō Embassy?

The Keichō Embassy had two primary objectives: to secure a direct trade agreement between Japan and New Spain (modern-day Mexico) with the approval of King Philip III of Spain, and to obtain papal authorisation for the sending of Franciscan missionaries to Date Masamune's domain in Japan. Both goals ultimately failed, largely because Japan's political situation had shifted dramatically during the embassy's journey.

Why did the Keichō Embassy fail?

The embassy failed for several interconnected reasons. Spain was unwilling to share its Pacific trade routes or grant Japanese merchants access to New Spain. The mission lacked full diplomatic legitimacy because Date Masamune, not the Shogun, was its sponsor. Internal conflicts — including a violent altercation involving Spanish diplomat Sebastián Vizcaíno — undermined Spanish confidence in the delegation. And crucially, while the embassy was still travelling, Tokugawa Ieyasu issued a comprehensive edict in 1614 expelling all Christian missionaries from Japan and banning the religion, which rendered the mission's religious goals entirely moot.

What happened to Hasekura Tsunenaga after he returned to Japan?

Hasekura returned to Japan in 1620 after seven years abroad, arriving in a country that had become deeply hostile to Christianity under the Tokugawa regime. Historical accounts of his final years are unclear. Some suggest he renounced his Christian faith to survive politically; others indicate he may have practised it in secret. He died in 1622, reportedly from illness. His story was largely forgotten until the nineteenth century, when the Iwakura Embassy discovered his correspondence in Venice, sparking renewed scholarly interest in his remarkable life.

Is there a Japanese community in Seville descended from the Keichō Embassy?

Yes. A small group of Japanese members of the Keichō Embassy chose to remain in Seville rather than return to Japan, likely aware of the worsening persecution of Christians back home. Their descendants continue to live in Seville today and carry the surname Japón — the Spanish word for Japan — making them one of the oldest documented communities of Japanese descent in Europe.