Founded in 1579 by converts to the new faith, and made the centre of the Portuguese trade to Japan, as well as of the Jesuit missions, Nagasaki had grown up with great rapidity; nor was any other worship practised in it except that of the new religion. It had become the largest and most important town in Shimo; and, since the recent subjection of that island to the imperial authority, according to the new policy of weakening the local princes, the emperor had assumed the appointment of its governor,—Nagasaki being placed, along with Miyako, Ōsaka, and Sakai in the list of imperial towns. At the date of the edict, so unexpectedly issued in 1587, for the banishment of the Jesuits, there were in Japan three hundred members of the company, a novitiate, a college, two preparatory seminaries for the education of young nobles designed for the church, two hundred and fifty churches, and a number of converts, amounting, probably, to between two and three hundred thousand, though the estimate of the Jesuits was much larger. Notwithstanding the apostasy of Yoshimune, the young king of Bungo (whose father, Civan, had died just before the emperor’s edict had appeared), the numerous converts in that kingdom remained firm in the faith. That zealous Catholic, the prince of Ōmura, had also lately deceased; but the young prince, his only son and successor, who had been educated by the Jesuits, was hardly less zealous than his father had been. The king of Arima also continued steady in the faith. It was this king who, along with the deceased king of Bungo and the deceased prince of Ōmura, had sent the ambassadors to the Pope, of whose visit to Europe an account has been given in a preceding chapter, and whom the last chapter left at Macao, on their return to Japan, in company with Father Valignani, who had been deputed by the viceroy of Goa as his ambassador to the emperor.