the empire had what it thought of as a civilizing mission: universal conversion to Christianity. Manila was thronged by missionaries, heads afire with the zeal to bring the Roman Catholic church to Asia. They forced Filipino and Malay natives to adopt the cross, but this was a side project. The true goal, at least at the beginning, was to conquer and convert China. Believing that Cortés (conqueror of Mexico) and Pizarro (conqueror of Peru) had needed only small bands of committed men to seize entire empires for Christ, these clerics and soldiers initially imagined that a few thousand Spaniards
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