Abstract European expansion from the fifteenth century onward triggered the global movement of numerous materials and objects, including Christian relics, which were crucial to missionary work. Nearly all ships departing Europe carried relics, which were essential for consecrating new churches in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Portugal, needing many relics for its overseas churches, sourced many of them from Cologne, home to the relics of Saint Ursula and her 11,000 virgin companions. These relics were particularly suited to the needs of the Portuguese due to their symbolic ties to long-distance travel, missionary work, and martyrdom— paralleling the activities of early modern missionaries. The abundance of relics from Ursula’s group allowed for widespread distribution, facilitating a shared religious calendar across vast regions. Additionally, and this is what this article argues, the kinship connections among Ursula’s companions symbolically reinforced political unity across the Portuguese empire. The article also argues that images of saintly noble women filled a void in the Estado da India, as women from Europe very rarely traveled or settled there. This article brings together and analyzes the surviving pictorial evidence of the Ursula cult from the Estado da India.
Urte Kraß (2026) studied this question.