Brazil

When Pope Alexander VI divided the world between Spain and Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, he gave each the right to "discover and acquire" unknown lands. But this papal donation also imposed an exclusive obligation to win the people of those unknown lands to Christianity. Thus, when the King of Portugal, João III, decided to plant the first permanent colonies on the coast of South America, he declared, "the main reason which has led me to colonize Brazil is to convert the people therein to our holy Catholic faith."

When the first governor-general of Brazil, Tomé de Sousa, reached Salvador da Bahia in 1549, he was accompanied by six fathers of the Company of Jesus, a new missionary order founded a few years earlier as a militant and intellectual defender of the papacy. Although the Jesuits rapidly dominated missionary effort in Portugal's vast colony, other religious orders were also active in Brazil—the Franciscans, Carmelites, and Benedictines, who along with the Jesuits were subject to the Padroado Real (royal patronage) in Lisbon. Two other orders—the Capuchins and the Oratorians—depended for support on the Propaganda Fide in Rome, founded in 1622 to centralize missionary work.

The Jesuits first instructed and baptized Indians around Salvador, Bahia. Lacking missionaries, they adopted a dangerous policy of persuading Indians to congregate in specially built villages (Aldeias) rather than taking the gospel to them in their own homes. This system was disastrous for the Indians. Many disliked the regimented life in villages, whose huts and layout differed from their custom, and farming plots near sedentary villages were soon exhausted. More seriously, the aldeias were close to colonial towns: mission Indians were soon required by law to labor for many months each year for the settlers or colonial government. Although nominally free Christian subjects of the king of Portugal, they were treated as virtual slaves.

The new mission residents were also fatally vulnerable to a range of imported diseases against which Brazilian natives had no genetically inherited immunity. Smallpox, measles, plague, tuberculosis, influenza, and other epidemics took an appalling toll of otherwise strong and fit Indians. Jesuit fathers gave harrowing accounts of entire villages with every person dead or dying. The few survivors were too weak to bury their dead, or to plant for their own sustenance, so that famine followed pestilence. During the twenty years after 1563, some 60,000 mission Indians and 40,000 slaves died in the area around Bahia; countless thousands more perished in the interior and in villages along the coast.

In 1616 the Portuguese, having advanced up the entire coast of Brazil, established the settlement of Belém do Pará near the mouth of the Amazon. Throughout the next 150 years the few colonists of Pará wrought terrible destruction on the tribes living along thousands of miles of Amazonian rivers. Every year, troops of slavers paddled up the rivers to bring back Indian slaves, either luring them by deception or capturing them at gunpoint. Once downriver in Pará and Maranhão, the wretched captives died by the thousands, from imported diseases, overwork, and despair.

Franciscan missionaries were present at the beginning of this expansion into Amazonia, although their leader, Friar Cristovão de Lisboa, withdrew in disgust at the settlers' abuses. The Jesuits started operations on the Amazon in 1654, led by Father Antônio Vieira, one of the finest preachers of his age and a powerful figure at the Portuguese court. During the ensuing decades, Jesuit missionaries made expeditions up many tropical rivers and lured back entire tribes—who were then decimated by the effects of disease and forced labor. The Jesuits and other orders established thriving aldeias under their own control, particularly on Marajó Island at the mouth of the Amazon, where they had large herds of cattle. The prosperity of these missions and the fathers' defense of Indians aroused the fury of settlers, who briefly expelled the missionaries from Maranhão in 1661 and again in 1684.

Throughout almost three centuries of colonial rule, the Portuguese crown vacillated between missionary-inspired legislation protecting the Indians and laws permitting slavery to meet the settlers' incessant demands for Indian labor.

The management of mission villages was codified in the Regulations of Missions of 1686, which fixed daily routines and work quotas. In 1693, the government divided the vast Amazon basin among four missionary orders. The Franciscans and Brothers of Mercy (Mercedarians) were awarded the north bank, while the Jesuits were given the south bank of the Amazon. The Negro, Solimões, Japurá and other rivers were granted to the Carmelites. A less severe and intellectual order than the Jesuits, the Carmelites established some twenty prosperous aldeias on their rivers. Amazonian tribes responded better to the relaxed Carmelite attitude than to Jesuit discipline. Missionaries caused much havoc by "descending" tribal Indians to restock their aldeias, and they were required by law to accompany slaving expeditions to legitimize the victims' servile status. By the mid-eighteenth century 50,000 Indians were settled in aldeias under the Jesuits, Carmelites, or Franciscans.

Second only to the Amazon as an arena of missionary activity was the Northeast. In the sixteenth century the Jesuits based in Salvador established missions along the Bahian coast. To the north, the Franciscans set up a base at Olinda in Pernambuco, and labored especially between Paraíba and Alagoas. Also based in Olinda were the Carmelites. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuits and Franciscans, accompanied by the Capuchins and Oratorians, left the coast for the hinterland of the Northeast along the Rio São Francisco. The Italian Capuchins used a system of "ambulatory missions"; the Jesuits, in contrast, built their mission villages far from the towns and plantations to avoid settler abuse of Indian labor.

In the mining states of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, and Goiás, mission activity was largely in the hands of parish priests, who preached to the Indians and baptized their children as part of their clerical duties. Since they attended to the religious needs of the mining towns, they had little free time to devote to the aldeias.

In the south the Jesuits and Franciscans were also active in Rio de Janeiro and São Vicente. In 1554 the Jesuits moved inland to build a college at São Paulo, from which they attempted to defend the Indians against labor abuse. Their efforts were so threatening that local settlers forced them out between 1640 and 1653.

At this same time, Spanish Jesuits established themselves among the Guarani-speaking tribes of what is now Paraguay. The Guarani were by nature a highly spiritual people. They also lived in large, well-ordered communities and farmed extensively. They therefore accepted what the Jesuits had to offer: intensive religious teaching and observance, regimented existence from cradle to grave, and instruction in large-scale agriculture. Cattle imported from Europe thrived on the grasslands of the Guarani homeland. Spanish Jesuits thus created a theocracy based on forty populous "reductions" (reduções) of Guarani Indians. Each reduction had a large baroque church and missionaries' quarters. The Indians lived simply in tidy rows of rectangular huts without chimneys and with minimal furniture.

In the early decades of the seventeenth century, bands (Bandeiras) of Luso-Brazilians from São Paulo marauded deep into the interior in search of natives to enslave. In 1629, these ruthless bandeirantes attacked Paraguayan missions and led their Christian Indians to captivity in Brazil. Under pressure from bandeirante attack, the Spanish Jesuits had to abandon missions in what are now the Brazilian states of Paraná and southern Mato Grosso. The conflict was reversed in 1641, when at the battle of Mboreré the Portuguese were defeated by mission Indians, who had been armed and trained by Jesuits with military experience. The Paraguayan reductions were left to flourish in peace for over a century.

In 1750 the Treaty of Madrid divided South America between the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal, roughly establishing the frontiers of modern Brazil. In the south, the boundary was fixed along the Uruguay River, which isolated seven large Spanish Jesuit reductions within Portuguese Brazil. The Christian Guarani of those reductions refused to accept this change of sovereignty or to move to new locations west of the Uruguay. The tragic outcome was a campaign by a Spanish-Portuguese military force that slaughtered 1,400 Guarani converts at the battle of Caibaté (1756).

Meanwhile, the colonists' envy and hatred of the Jesuits on the Amazon was bearing fruit. The virtual dictator of Portugal, the future marquis of Pombal, developed a passionate loathing of the black-robed fathers, which culminated in the expulsion of Jesuits from all Portuguese dominions in 1759, followed by their banishment from Spanish South America in 1767. Many mission villages were put under lay "directors," and their Indians suffered terribly from these rapacious new masters. During the centuries of missionary rule, thousands of natives underwent Christian instruction and conversion. But tribal populations declined so catastrophically, their tribal societies were so damaged, and their aldeias were so shattered after the departure of the missionaries, that there is little lasting legacy of all that religious effort.

See alsoMissions: Jesuit Missions (Reducciones); Slavery: Indian Slavery and Forced Labor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (1978).

Eduardo Hoornaert, "The Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil," in The Cambridge History of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell (1984).

Additional Bibliography

Azevedo, Francisca L. Nogueira de, and John M. Monteiro. Confronto de culturas: Conquista, resistência, transformação. Rio de Janeiro: Expressão e Cultura; São Paulo: Edusp, 1997.

Castelnau-L'Estoile, Charlotte de. Les ouvriers d'une vigne stérile: Les jésuites et la conversion des Indiens au Brésil, 1580–1620. Lisbonne: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; Paris: Centre culturel Calouste Gulbenkian; Lisbonne: Commission nationale pour les commémorations des découvertes portugaises, 2000.

Cohen, Thomas M. The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Flores, Moacyr. Reduções jesuíticas dos guaranis. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 1997.

Golin, Tau. A expedição: imaginário artístico na conquista militar dos Sete Povos jesuíticos e guaranis. Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina, 1997.

Pompa, Cristina. Religião como tradução: missionários, Tupi e Tapuia no Brasil colonial. Bauru: EDUSC; São Paulo: ANPOCS, 2003.

Santos, Júlio Ricardo Quevedo dos. Rio Grande do Sul: Aspectos das missões. Porto Alegre: Martins Livreiro, 1991.

Tavares, Eduardo, and Renato Dalto. Missões. São Leopoldo: UNISINOS, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, 1999.

                                             John Hemming