Jean baptiste colbert biography brevedad

The growth of the Society of Jesus in the early decades of its existence was dependent upon the continuous intake of personnel, the rapid proliferation of colleges, and firm direction from Rome. Clear channels of written communication were key to the early Jesuit endeavor. At the same time, managing the flow of documents proved a challenge for the growing, increasingly far-flung organization. The scale of expansion within the early Society was significant: only a handful of colleges existed in the mid-1540s, but by the time of Ignatius’s death in 1556, there were more than forty colleges and some 1,000 Jesuits. Over the next twenty years, a further hundred colleges and numerous other establishments (professed houses and houses for novices) were founded. In regions such as northern Italy and Castile, colleges were concentrated in relatively close proximity to one another. In many instances, however, the geographic dispersal of Jesuit establishments taxed the limits of communication in the early modern world. Jesuits in Paris (from 1540), Coimbra (1542), Goa (1542), Valencia (1544), Sicily (1548), Brazil (1549), Vienna (1551), and Prague (1556) were all

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