ACQUAVIVA, RODOLFO, blessed. — Jesuit missionary and martyr, born at Atri on 2 October 1550, son of the duke of Atri, Giangirolamo, and nephew of Claudio Acquaviva, fifth superior general of the Society of Jesus. He had to overcome his family’s opposition in order to enter the novitiate in Rome in 1568, where s. Stanislao Kostka was his companion. Having obtained his mission assignment, he left Rome in 1577, receiving priestly ordination at Lisbon, and landed at Goa in November 1578. At the end of the following year, he was placed at the head of the small mission sent to the court of the “Great Mogul,” Akbar, at Fatehpur Krisi. He remained there for three years, even after his companion Antonio Monserrate returned to Goa; he learned Persian and won the sovereign’s benevolence through the austerity of his life and his ardent conviction, but he could neither overcome the opposition of the Muslims nor make conversions.
His mission is also significant for the introduction of European art to the court of the Indian sultans (Italian paintings and Flemish engravings, which were imitated by the court painters). On returning to Goa in February 1583, A. was appointed superior of the mission on the island of Salsete, near Goa. But after barely a week, he was killed at Cuncolim (27 July 1583) together with his companions, Fathers Alfonso Pacheco, a Spaniard, and Pietro Berno, of Ascona in Ticino, Antonio Francisco, and Brother Francesco Aranha, Portuguese. He was beatified with them by Leo XIII in 1893.
to the Court of Akbar, ed. J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee, Calcutta 1922; E. Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul, London 1932.