Salvador, Vicente do (1564–1639)

Vicente do Salvador (b. 1564; d. 1639), Portuguese historian and member of the Franciscan order. At the age of sixty-three he wrote a History of Brazil that was more concerned with human events than with Brazilian fauna and flora as had been the case with his sixteenth-century predecessors. The first chapter was still devoted to nature and to Brazil's original inhabitants, but all the others narrated the main events of Portuguese colonization in America from 1500 until 1627. In his dedication to the Portuguese scholar Manuel Severim de Faria, the author wrote that he expected his work to be printed at this patron's expense. However, his History remained unpublished until the nineteenth century, and some chapters were lost.

Written in Bahia, Salvador's opus is a general history, rather than a local one. The Franciscan does not reveal his sources, but João Capistrano de Abreu, the nineteenth-century historian, proved that Frei Vicente had read Simão Estácio da Silveira's Relação sumária das cousas do Maranhão (1624) and Pero de Magalhaes Gandavo's História da Província de Santa Cruz (1576). Wars against the Indians, the French pirate attacks, and the Dutch invasions are narrated. Military actions of governors-general attract his attention more than the colonists and their agricultural and mercantile activities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

João Capistrano De Abreu, Ensaios e estuados: Crítica e história (2d ser. 1976).

José Honório Rodrigues, História da história do Brasil, vol. 1, Historiografia colonial (1979).

Additional Bibliography

Vieira, Nelson H. Brasil e Portugal—A imagem recíproca (O mito e a realidade na expressão literária). Lisbon: Ministério de Educação, Cultura e Língua Portugesa, 1993.

                            Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva