Note 103 — Letters from Tavora to Felipe IV

Father Fray Nicolás Melo, or Moran, Portuguese by birth, and the lay-brother Fray Nicolás de San Agustín, a Japanese, were sent on an important commission to Europe in 1597. They went to Malacca, and thence to Goa—where, not finding facilities to embark, they determined to make the journey by land. They journeyed toward Persia, in company with other Augustinian religious, who were going to our missions in that empire. Thence they went to Moscow, where Father Melo comforted the persecuted Catholics (to whom he administered the holy sacraments), and tried to convert the Calvinist heretics, for which reason they were imprisoned and suffered penalties without number. When they reached Nisna, near the Caspian Sea, brother Fray Nicolás de San Agustín was beheaded on the thirtieth of November, [244n] 1611, for refusing to apostatize from the holy Catholic faith. Father Nicolás Melo was burned alive in Astrakán, together with Princess Bárbara Noski, a tertiary of our order, on the first of November, 1616.—Coco.