the East India Company. They crossed into France on the 31st, had an audience with Philip V of Spain at Aix, and passed from Marseilles to Genoa on 15 December; they finally reached Rome on the 29th or 30th. In Rome, the pair scheduled audiences, lobbied cardinals, prepared their documents, and attended sessions at the Holy Office. They met Cardinal Fabroni, the secretary of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith on 10 January 1703 and two days later. On the 14th, they gave Fabroni the first round of documents: an overview, a dossier of verified testimony, books by De Rocha and Alenio, and a 1664 anti-Christian pamphlet by Yang Guangxian whose complaints proved that the Jesuits were mentioning Jesus's crucifixion to the Chinese. Some of these were rejected on various grounds, and they were forced to hire a lawyer surnamed Ursaia to present them in the proper format around March. The Franciscan Giovanni Francesco Nicolai da Leonessa had been opposing them before their arrival; on 10 March he was joined by the MEP missionary Artus de Lionne. Despite the Noël and Castner's efforts negotiating the Roman bureaucracy over the next two years, the voluminous Chinese testimony—including an official pronouncement by the Kangxi Emperor—on the respectful but not worshipful nature of Chinese veneration, and the pains the Jesuits undertook transmitting it around the French mission in Nanjing (which supposedly intercepted it under orders from Bishop Maigrot), there is no evidence that the Roman court ever weighed any of the Jesuit evidence. Instead, despite the pope's kind words, the decision had already been reached well ahead of its formal proclamation: Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon had been named legate for China and the East Indies on 5 December 1701 with the specific instructions to disallow further practice of Chinese rituals by Christians there; he was given papal-like supremacy over the clerics there and, on the 27th, consecrated as the titular patriarch of Antioch, making him the notional head of the churches across most of Asia. He left for the Qing Empire aboard the French ship Maurepas on 9 February 1703, only weeks after Noël's arrival, and disallowed the Jesuit leniency towards to the Malabar rites while he waited out the monsoon season in Pondicherry. By 1704, Noël and Castner were forbidden from publishing their arguments, although their opponents were printing their treatises in great volume, and correspondence and treatises shipped from