All had been simple at first when the Portuguese, regularly meeting Japanese merchants at the Island of Hirado, traded by barter and exported from Japan on an average of over three million dollars a year in gold. The three Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, St. Francis Xavier, Torres, and Fernandez, who landed in the Province of Satsuma in 1549, met with unexpected success in introducing the Catholic religion. The arrival of certain Spanish Franciscan friars, sent on a mission to Miaco by the governor of Manila, divided the Christian foreigners and converts in Japan into two rival parties, one consisting of the Portuguese Jesuits backed by the merchants of their own country, the other of the Spanish Franciscans supported by the Manila merchants, who bitterly resented the Portuguese monopoly of Japanese trade. The arrival of the Spanish Dominicans caused still further complications; the dissensions among the members and followers of the three orders giving direct provocation to the persecution of Christians by the Japanese government. In order to establish peace, Pope Gregory XIII in 1585 issued a Bull forbidding all religious orders but that of the Jesuits to exercise priestly offices in Japan. Vivero, the first Spanish official who landed in Japan, made efforts to poison the emperor’s mind against the Portuguese, with a view of securing the monopoly of gold exportation for the Spaniards. Vivero and the viceroy of Mexico also ignored Iyeyasu’s request for the expert Mexican miners, whom he had wished to employ to teach the Japanese the best methods of working their own gold mines. Viscaino, the first Spanish ambassador, maligned the Dutch, with whom a commercial treaty had just been made, and went so far as to threaten that if the Japanese intended to tolerate the Dutch, the Spanish king would not allow his subjects to have dealings with Japan. On the other hand, the protestant Dutch republicans, and their influential English friend, William Adams, denounced the religion of the Portuguese and Spaniards, and described the latter’s thirst for gold and success in conquering many remote countries which yielded the precious metal. The revelation that Viscaino’s secret mission was precisely to discover an unknown source of gold, presumably belonging to his dominion, was received by Iyeyasu simultaneously with the reproach of having unsuspectingly granted permission to survey the Japanese coast, which would unquestionably facilitate any future invasion of Japan, whether actually intended or not by the Spaniards. It seems possible that the existence of Viscaino’s charts may have suggested to the emperor and his counsellors the idea of closing all Japanese ports to foreign nations.