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Jesuits as Petitioners: Antonio Ruiz de Montoya and the Issue of Indigenous Slavery in the Early Seventeenth-Century South Atlantic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2023

Francismar Alex Lopes de Carvalho*
Affiliation:
University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Rio de Janeiro State University Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [email protected]
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Abstract

In the Spanish monarchy, corporations, religious orders, and other petitioners kept procurators in Madrid to lobby the royal councils on their behalf. Drawing on an efficient network of information, the Madrid-based Jesuit procurators were known for their insistence on solving the financial and personnel needs of several missions throughout the New World. This article analyzes a series of petitions composed by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in the late 1630s on behalf of Jesuit missions in Paraguay. These missions had been harassed by Portuguese slavers, who captured tens of thousands of natives in this region. Ruiz de Montoya's petitions reveal that the Jesuits’ lobbying actions had a much greater impact than has been assumed. Far from confining themselves to asking for material and human resources for the missions, the Jesuits proposed that the Spanish crown make a large-scale intervention in the administration of Portuguese domains in the South Atlantic, a program that Madrid would have implemented were it not for Portuguese independence in 1640.

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Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History

Jesuit activities among the natives of Paraguay began in 1609, when Governor Hernando Arias de Saavedra invited Father Diego de Torres Bollo, provincial of the Society of Jesus in that province, to establish missions among the Guaraní.Footnote 1 On December 29, the Jesuits founded the pueblo of San Ignacio, their first mission in the Guairá region. Spanish authorities understood the Guairá as a separate frontier jurisdiction east of Paraguay, roughly delineated by four rivers: the Piquiri, Paraná, Paranapanema, and Tibagi (see Figure 1). Spanish colonists had been present in this region since 1556; however, a group of conquistadors, convinced that they had been overlooked in the distribution of encomiendas in Asunción that year, decided to seek better opportunities to the east.Footnote 2 Two of the cities they founded, Ciudad Real and Villa Rica, achieved a certain stability by relying on Guaraní forced labor.Footnote 3

Figure 1 Portuguese Incursions and the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay in the Early Seventeenth Century

Source: Own elaboration adapted from John Manuel Monteiro, Negros da terra: índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994), 13; Brian Philip Owensby, New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021), 132; and Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Atlas Histórico do Brasil, https://atlas.fgv.br/marcos/igreja-catolica-e-colonizacao/mapas/missoes-jesuitas-na-bacia-do-paraguai. Artwork by Sanjay Dutt.

Franciscans began evangelization efforts in the Guairá in 1580, but Spanish authorities decided that the Jesuits were a more appropriate choice to mitigate encomendero influence in the region and defend it against the Portuguese.Footnote 4 The Jesuits began their work at a very complicated time, after Francisco de Alfaro, an inspector sent by the Audiencia of Charcas in 1611–12, imposed important limits on encomenderos’ exploitation of native laborers.Footnote 5 Since the Jesuits advanced rather quickly, founding 13 missions in Guairá between 1610 and 1628—the priests claimed to have reached more than 40,000 natives—scholars debate the reasons why the Guaraní accepted the reductions, considering motives such as protection from forced labor and the perception that the priests had interesting spiritual and material powers.Footnote 6

From early on, the Jesuits confronted the hostile proximity of the Portuguese from São Paulo (the Paulistas). Prior to their arrival, the Paulistas were already capturing and enslaving native peoples in the interior regions of Brazil but soon expanded their operations into Paraguay. Their first major expedition there took place between 1602 and 1604, when they captured 700 natives from Spanish encomiendas. Initially, the bandeirantes (as Paulista slave raiders were known) were more interested in enslaving women and children. John Monteiro examined a list of 628 Guaraní captives from the year 1615. Seventy percent were women and children, which, as explained by Barbara Ganson, “reflects the sexual division of labor in agriculture in which women were predominant in the planting and harvesting of crops.”Footnote 7 Scholars disagree on how many natives the bandeirantes enslaved in Guairá and Paraguay in the first half of the seventeenth century, but whether the number was 100,000 or 300,000, it is certain that large-scale slave trading had a tremendous impact on the native societies of the South Atlantic.

Most of the enslaved natives were employed in São Paulo, but a not insignificant number may have been sent to other parts of Brazil, such as Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, and Bahia.Footnote 8 Some bandeiras were led by Portuguese captains and had the backing of the governor of São Paulo; others, organized by independent slaveholders, dispensed with this veneer of legitimacy. The Paulistas were guided through the interior of Brazil by Tupi allies, enemies of the Guaraní evangelized by the Jesuits or in service to Spanish encomenderos. Many Paulistas had indigenous heritage, and by associating themselves with native women, they obtained the status and power of native chiefs.Footnote 9

Initially, the bandeiras undermined encomenderos’ activities more than those of the priests. In 1619, the city of Asunción complained that the Portuguese had captured as many as 7,000 natives and sold them as slaves in Brazil.Footnote 10 This scenario changed in the following decades: natives concentrated in missions were easier to capture, and some encomenderos saw advantages in allying with the Paulistas to destabilize the Jesuit program that limited their access to Guaraní labor.Footnote 11

The Jesuits wasted little time in protesting against the Paulistas’ abuses in Madrid. At that time, Portuguese domains were part of the Spanish empire under the Iberian Union (1580–1640). In September 1627, provincial Durán Mastrilli wrote to procurator Francisco Crespo in Buenos Aires, warning of the danger posed by the bandeirantes’ proximity to the province of Guairá: “The greatest hardship suffered here,” Mastrilli wrote, “is the insolence of many Portuguese from the village of San Pablo . . . , who come every year to enslave the Indians of these nations, taking them to Brazil, selling them as slaves and using them as such.” Mastrilli pleaded for intercession from the king of Spain, the Count-Duke of Olivares (chief minister to Philip IV from 1621 to 1643), and the Council of Portugal, and presented the depopulation of the village of São Paulo as the only solution for preventing “these tyrannies and cruelties.”Footnote 12 Crespo presented a petition to Philip IV with the same content as Mastrilli's letter, and a royal cédula of September 12, 1628 transmitted similar news to the governor of Río de la Plata. Philip IV's actions at that moment, however, were limited to recommending that authorities “[try] by all possible means to have the offenders punished in an exemplary manner.”Footnote 13

Jesuit priest Antonio Ruiz de Montoya witnessed Portuguese incursions firsthand as a missionary in Guairá and later served as the Jesuit procurator in Madrid. In this article, I focus on his activities as a petitioner for his order in the 1630s and 1640s. Ruiz de Montoya was born in Lima in 1585, the only son of Captain Cristóbal Ruiz de Montoya, a native of Seville, and Ana de Vargas, born in Lima. Orphaned at the age of nine, he decided after some hesitation to study philosophy and theology at the colegio of Santiago de Chile.

Following his 1611 ordination as a priest, Ruiz de Montoya was promptly sent to the Jesuit mission of Loreto in the Guairá. There, he became a central figure in the organization and defense of the Guairá missions against Paulista raids. In 1631, he oversaw the transfer of more than 12,000 Guaraní to new settlements along the Paraná River. In 1636-37 he served as superior of all the Guaraní missions. Also in 1637, he was appointed procurator before the court of Madrid to request remedy against the attacks on the missions. Most scholars have emphasized Ruiz de Montoya's lobbying efforts to create Guaraní militias and obtain tax advantages for Jesuit reductions. This essay focuses on Ruiz de Montoya's efforts (so far less studied) to halt Portuguese slave activities by bringing about a major administrative intervention by the Spanish crown in Portuguese domains during the late period of the Iberian Union.Footnote 14

In the Spanish empire, procurators were agents who represented the interests of individuals or groups in courts or other institutions. Religious orders usually chose procurators to lobby for the interests of each overseas province before the Council of the Indies (the king's main advisory body for the administration of the Indies) and other royal and ecclesiastical authorities.Footnote 15 In fact, by the early seventeenth century, subjects of the Spanish monarchy recognized the importance of having a procurator in Madrid to push the court to favor their petitions. Writing from Cochabamba in 1633, Father Antonio Luis Lopes de Herrera lamented that Peruvian vassals “barely got the crumbs that fell from the king's abundant table” because of their distance from the metropole. The religious were particularly disadvantaged and received very few concessions, with the exception of those who had someone at court to look after their interests.Footnote 16

Jesuit provincial congregations chose their procurators every six years. The procurators traveled to Madrid and Rome to petition for benefits for their province, before both the Council of the Indies and the superior general of the Society of Jesus. Scholars have documented the efforts of these procurators to obtain not only religious and economic privileges for their provinces, but also all sorts of material goods, such as liturgical objects, books, and other products.Footnote 17 These studies have increased our understanding of the role of the Jesuit procurators as lobbyists for material and human aid for the missions. However, little is known about their other political activities in Madrid, or about the other more ambitious projects they presented to the crown with ideas for administrative imperial reform.

Portuguese slave raids in Paraguay and in the interior and south of Brazil had a profound impact on the region's native societies, on relations between the Portuguese, Spanish, and Jesuits, and on the territorial conformation of the Iberian empires in the South Atlantic.Footnote 18 Despite the enormous literature available regarding the interactions between Guaraní, Jesuits, bandeirantes, and other Iberian agents in the South Atlantic in the early seventeenth century, the extent to which political communication between the Jesuits and Madrid interfered with those conflicts has been little studied.

In this article, I suggest that Ruiz de Montoya's activities as procurator in Madrid in the 1630s and 1640s went far beyond the usual work of the procurators for the religious orders. In their petitions, the procurators usually presented a summary of the difficulties and promises of the region they represented and concluded by asking for financial aid from the crown and for more priests. Instead, Ruiz de Montoya's papers called for a profound reform in the administrative structure of the empire in the South Atlantic. In doing so, Ruiz de Montoya seems to have joined a select group of arbitristas (projectors) who were able to convince the crown to adopt the reforms they proposed, something that scholars have so far failed to recognize. In the Spanish monarchy, people of any social status could send arbitrios (projects) to the king's councils to propose reforms and governmental interventions, to solve concrete problems in their local communities, or to address concerns in the broader spheres of the empire.Footnote 19 Numerous studies have shown that this form of political communication was widespread in both the seventeenth-century Spanish and Portuguese empires.Footnote 20 Although the crown rejected many of the proposals, it encouraged their production because they were an important source of information.Footnote 21 Arbitristas could become the laughingstock of the literati of the time.Footnote 22 However, Madrid considered some of the proposed reforms to be of plausible benefit and applied them, even if they entailed significant changes to imperial governance.Footnote 23

Ruiz de Montoya's proposals fall into this category. Madrid decided to implement them, even though they represented far-reaching changes in the governance of its South Atlantic empire. In this article, I argue that collaboration between Ruiz de Montoya and Lourenço Hurtado de Mendonça, a Portuguese secular priest, was crucial to Madrid's approval of these reforms. Mendonça, after mission work among natives in Peruvian mining regions, worked as a prelate in Rio de Janeiro and witnessed the havoc wreaked by the bandeirantes. Mendonça was an active petitioner to the Council of the Indies, and it is interesting to note that Ruiz de Montoya's proposals were very similar to his.Footnote 24 Among these proposals were the creation of a bishopric and an Inquisition tribunal in Rio de Janeiro; the designation of bandeira activity as a crime falling under inquisitorial jurisdiction; and the enforcement of existing laws that prohibited indigenous slavery.

It is important to mention that Madrid approved these reforms while Portugal was united with Spain in the Iberian Union. In practice, the reforms Mendonça and Ruiz de Montoya proposed signified a break with the premises of the 1581 Cortes de Tomar, according to which Spain would respect Portuguese law and each crown's domains would be administered with total autonomy in relation to each other.Footnote 25 Portugal's independence in 1640 probably eclipsed historians’ attention to the magnitude of the reforms Madrid was about to implement. I argue here that they were the materialization of a political vision for the jurisdictional unification of the Iberian empires in the South Atlantic.

Scholars have written extensively about Jesuit procurators’ lobbying activities, but most of these works have focused on their efforts to get financial aid to the missions. The Jesuits’ petitions containing imperial reform projects, which showed their participation in the arbitrista tradition of the Spanish empire, are still little known. Recent studies have shown that the Spanish empire was less hierarchical than assumed, but we still know little about how the Jesuits fit into this context, in which diverse actors shaped crown policy through petitions.Footnote 26 This article shows a little-known facet of the Jesuits: their actions as proponents of reforms that would have had a major impact on the Spanish empire by leading to a de facto incorporation of the Portuguese domains into Madrid's imperial guidelines.

This article is divided into three parts. The first deals with the reports of Ruiz de Montoya and his fellow Jesuits to the crown regarding Paulista slavers’ incursions against Jesuit missions. The second part focuses on the Jesuits’ representation of the Portuguese of Brazil in their writings and the origins of the idea of setting up an Inquisition tribunal in Rio de Janeiro. I further examine how the collaboration between Lourenço de Mendonça and Ruiz de Montoya contributed to Madrid's positive evaluation of their projects. The article concludes with an epilogue that discusses Ruiz de Montoya's activities after 1640 and an evaluation of the impact of his writings on the political communication of the early seventeenth-century Spanish empire.

Bandeiras and Indigenous Slavery

Ruiz de Montoya arrived at the missions of the Paranapanema River valley in 1612, joining two Italian Jesuits, José Cataldini and Simón Maceta, who had arrived there two years prior.Footnote 27 In 1617, the mission of Loreto had 350 married couples and the mission of San Ignacio had 425; some 1,200 boys attended mission schools.Footnote 28 Appointed superior of the mission of Guairá in 1622, Ruiz de Montoya described the prosperity of these reductions and warned of the increasingly palpable threat of incursions by Portuguese and their Tupi allies. In his 1628 annual letter, he wrote that the Paulistas captured only groups that were not yet reduced and warned that the bandeirantes threatened to kill anyone who tried to stop them from taking captives to São Paulo.Footnote 29

In his book Conquista espiritual, published in 1639, Ruiz de Montoya detailed the bandeirantes’ activities.Footnote 30 He described how the Paulistas instigated conflicts among native groups and performed “rescues” of captives by bartering them with tools provided by creditors living along the Brazilian coast. This mode of exchange revealed the existence of a network of people who were involved in financing the expeditions and participated in the distribution of indigenous slaves. Ruiz de Montoya learned from some Tupi about the “pombeiros” and their central role in the slave trade. This term was used in Congo and Angola to refer to the men, often of mixed African and European descent, who obtained slaves in the interior for Portuguese traders on the coast.

In central-southern Brazil, pombeiros were indigenous slaves who specialized in enslaving other natives from the independent villages of the interior. They divided the sertão (backlands) into regions among themselves, and each had his own trading post where he kept knives, axes, machetes, and other tools, as well as clothes, hats, beads, and other European items. By offering these products in exchange for captives, pombeiros encouraged natives to wage war against other native groups to obtain captives and even to sell their own relatives. With the pombeiros, Paulistas began to depend on their own slaves to bring people from the sertão, rather than on independent intermediaries; the result was to boost the slave trade to new heights.Footnote 31

The Paulistas used several pretexts for their actions in Guairá. The bandeira of 1628–29 was one of the most important. Led by Antonio Raposo Tavares and composed of 900 Portuguese and 2,200 natives, the expedition operated under the pretext that the residents of Villa Rica of Paraguay were invading Portuguese territory. It was a dubious claim, since the very borders between the domains of Portugal and Spain were uncertain during the Iberian Union.Footnote 32 Raposo Tavares erected a palisade in the vicinity of the mission of Encarnación. He told the Jesuits he was capturing autonomous natives, but quickly began capturing natives from the reduction. Ruiz de Montoya and other Jesuits pressured the Paulistas to free the captives. After four months of tension, the Paulistas invaded the mission of Santo Antonio, destroyed its buildings, and enslaved more than a thousand natives, killing any who resisted. The Jesuits learned that the Paulistas later sold them as slaves in São Paulo.Footnote 33

Luiz Felipe de Alencastro has estimated that between 1627 and 1640, the Portuguese captured 100,000 natives from the missions of Guairá, Tape, and Itatín, or 7,143 per year. He also assumes that the number was higher than the number of enslaved Africans introduced to Dutch and Portuguese Brazil during the same period.Footnote 34 It is possible that the number of Guaraní captives was even higher.Footnote 35 The governor of Buenos Aires estimated that the bandeirantes took 60,000 natives from Spanish missions to Portuguese domains between 1628 and 1630.Footnote 36 Jesuits Justo Mansilla and Simón Maceta witnessed the capture of 20,000 natives by the 1628–29 bandeira as they tracked the Paulista enslavers’ return to Brazil. These Jesuits estimated the number of natives captured between 1628 and 1631 at 200,000.Footnote 37 The author of a memorial delivered to Viceroy Chinchón estimated the natives taken before 1632 at 50,000.Footnote 38 By 1634, the bandeiras had captured more than 10,000 souls from the newer reductions.Footnote 39 Finally, the Spanish crown estimated that, between 1614 and 1639, the bandeirantes had taken 300,000 indigenous captives.Footnote 40

While the death toll of these natives after their arrival in Brazil was certainly high, exacerbated by the terrible working conditions, it should be noted that many died in the “middle passage.” As described by Fernanda Sposito, the natives suffered all sorts of violence on the journey to São Paulo, which could last more than a month. Captives were frequently tortured and those who escaped were arrested and killed to terrorize the others. To avoid slowing down the march, slavers abandoned the elderly, young children, and the disabled along the way.Footnote 41 When Lourenço Hurtado de Mendonça traveled through the region as a visitor in the mid 1620s, he found that the bandeira of 1625 had captured 7,000 natives; only 1,000 arrived alive in São Paulo.Footnote 42

The bandeira of 1628–29 revealed the vulnerability of the Jesuits’ missions in the Guairá. On October 10, 1629, the Jesuits sent a report to the king detailing the bandeirantes’ hostilities. Mansilla and Maceta drafted this paper in the city of Salvador da Bahia.Footnote 43 In March of that year, Raposo Tavares and his companions carried out destructive attacks on the missions of Jesús María and San Miguel, after having already destroyed two others. These attacks resulted in the capture of thousands of people. In response, the Jesuits assigned Fathers Mansilla and Maceta to accompany the Portuguese back to Brazil. Their purpose was to express their objections to the Brazilian authorities, aiming to put an end to such expeditions and ensure the return of the native population. However, upon their arrival in Brazil, they were disheartened to discover that the authorities either supported these expeditions or showed indifference towards them. In São Paulo, local officials prevented Mansilla and Maceta from staying at the colegio of the Society of Jesus.Footnote 44

The two men then decided to go to Rio de Janeiro. Explaining the situation to the ouvidor (magistrate), Maceta noted that he did not dare to question the customs of the Paulistas, “for he knew the rebelliousness of those people.” The case was transferred to the general government in Bahia.Footnote 45 Some witnesses gave testimony in Salvador in September 1629, and governor-general Diogo Luís de Oliveira appeared to support the Spanish Jesuits’ cause.Footnote 46 He ordered the arrest of the criminals, the seizure of their goods, and the release of the indigenous slaves. If the slavers ran away, “their effigies should be hung,” to serve as an example.Footnote 47

Mansilla and Maceta returned to São Paulo in July 1630, accompanied by Francisco da Costa Barros, a royal official and notary from Rio de Janeiro, who carried Oliveira's decree against indigenous slavery.Footnote 48 Apparently, even the Jesuits themselves doubted the enforceability of the decree. They observed that the governor-general received questionable “gifts” from the Paulistas, suggesting a complicit relationship between them. And their doubts were well-founded. The Paulistas immediately rebelled against Barros’ presence. They not only threatened him with death but also expelled him from the town.Footnote 49 Realizing their own vulnerability, Mansilla and Maceta took the earliest opportunity to retreat and returned to the Loreto de Guairá mission by the end of the same month.Footnote 50 Father Maceta, drawing a comparison to the rebelliousness of a contemporary French city, described São Paulo as the “La Rochelle” of Brazil.Footnote 51

Informed of Mansilla and Maceta's failures to influence Brazilian authorities and fearful of a new bandeira, in 1631, Ruiz de Montoya organized the evacuation of approximately 12,000 indigenous people from Guairá. They traveled by river in 700 canoes and then overland approximately 520 miles (or 836 kilometers) to settle in the current territory of Misiones (Argentina). Recognizing the Jesuits’ lack of proper authorization from the Audiencia of Charcas for this relocation, Ruiz de Montoya documented that the Spanish residents of Ciudad Real erected a palisade near the Paraná waterfalls “to impede our passage” and “apprehend the people.”Footnote 52 Since the Spanish were few in number, the Jesuits and their natives forced their way through the palisade without being seriously harassed.Footnote 53 However, the exodus was a tragic experience overall. In one single epidemic, 1,500 people died.Footnote 54 According to Barbara Ganson, just one third of the natives made it through this forced migration; the rest died of epidemics or hunger, or were captured by the Portuguese.Footnote 55

While indigenous slave labor remained crucial to São Paulo's economy, Jesuits and other observers also noted sales of captives from the Spanish missions in other captaincies. Upon arriving in Bahia, Mansilla and Maceta accompanied ouvidor-geral Miguel Cisne de Faria as he conducted interrogations of witnesses regarding the trading of indigenous slaves along the Brazilian coastline. The depositions took place in Salvador on September 17, 1629, and revealed a common practice facilitated by the smooth coastal navigation between Santos, Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, and Bahia. The most common vessel was the patache, an old sailing ship with a bowsprit and two masts. One man said he had witnessed the sale of 45 adult natives in Espírito Santo and two children in Bahia. Slavers also sold a group with 25 natives, probably from among those captured by Raposo Tavares in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia.Footnote 56 The Portuguese sold the natives in a public square and called them slaves. Moreover, they separated children from their parents and wives from their husbands, forcing them to remarry in Brazil.Footnote 57

In the following years, other observers witnessed the continuing sale of enslaved Guaraní along the coast of Brazil. In 1637, Buenos Aires governor Pedro Esteban Dávila wrote that when he arrived in Rio de Janeiro, “the Indians brought by the residents of San Pablo were sold before his eyes in that city, as if they were slaves.”Footnote 58 In 1638, when Ruiz Montoya was in Rio de Janeiro waiting for the ship that would take him to Spain, he saw Paulistas selling Guaraní from the missions in exchange for gunpowder and weapons.Footnote 59 Writing in 1636, Spanish traveler Manuel Juan de Morales estimated that there were 40,000 enslaved natives in São Paulo. The Portuguese masters treated their slaves harshly, subjecting them to exhausting workdays and providing only meager food, mainly reduced to corn.Footnote 60

The Jesuits were consistent in describing the natives captured by the bandeirantes as slave laborers in colonial ventures on the coast of Brazil.Footnote 61 In one of his 1639 memoriales, procurator Ruiz de Montoya wrote that he was certain most of the natives captured in Paraguay were in São Paulo, but that the slave traders had also sold a significant number in Rio de Janeiro and some even as far away as Lisbon.Footnote 62 The Council of the Indies had no doubt that the Portuguese enslaved natives: “They enter the Indian reductions and take them captive and carry them violently to Brazil, and sell them as slaves, and occupy them in very laborious servitude, as in the sugar mills and on their farms.”Footnote 63

Another constant in the Jesuits’ memoriales was the attempt to define who was responsible for the damages to the missions. The Jesuits believed that Spanish settlers in Paraguay were accomplices of the Portuguese. This was not surprising, since the Spanish themselves exploited natives in the yerba maté plantations of the Paraná River valley. In 1630, the caciques of San Ignacio sent a petition to the Audiencia of Charcas (written in Guaraní and translated by the Jesuits) in which they criticized a recent royal provision of that court that allowed natives to be employed in mita for two months and to work on the Maracayú yerba maté plantations, although “only if they wanted to go.” Paraguayans used the term mita to describe the work shifts that natives living in pueblos did for their encomenderos. This modality was defined as encomienda mitaria, in contrast to the originaria, in which natives lived permanently with their employers.Footnote 64

The caciques referred to the abuses natives suffered as mitarios in the extraction of yerba. They also noted that the Spanish could interpret the decree in such a way as to continue to exploit natives: “And so we ask you for the love of God that you let our King and Lord know what we say and ask so that he will order us not to go to Maracayú even if we want to, because if [the king] says we could go if we want to, the Spaniards will harass us and take us there not only with this precaution but also against our will.”Footnote 65

Jesuit provincial Francisco Vázquez Truxillo understood that the Spaniards of Villa Rica had made some kind of agreement with the Paulistas, since they usually did nothing when they learned of the capture of natives.Footnote 66 José Vilardaga has examined one of the cases in question. He showed that in 1631, Francisco Benítez, a resident of the city of Villa Rica, was accused of using his position as commander of the militia defending that region to facilitate the Paulista slave raids.Footnote 67 Ruiz de Montoya noted that the Spanish militias sent to stop the Portuguese joined them in robbing and capturing natives.Footnote 68 In fact, according to Vázquez Truxillo, a good part of the residents of Villa Rica were of Portuguese origin.Footnote 69 Spanish officials also had information that the Paulistas were marrying in the Spanish cities that neighbored the regions they raided in search of slaves.Footnote 70 In 1633, the Jesuits accused Spanish lieutenant Lorenzo de Villalba of allying with the Portuguese, from whom he received indigenous slaves for his compliance. From his house near the Paraná River, Villalba dispatched a contingent of 22 Spanish soldiers and indigenous allies to conduct a survey of the frontier. However, upon their return, they brought back over 300 native captives, the majority of whom hailed from Jesuit reductions.Footnote 71 Villalba was probably trying to incorporate these captives as encomienda originaria, a practice commonly observed in Paraguay.Footnote 72

In 1632, several witnesses denounced Diego de Urrego, a resident of Xerez, for having assisted the Paulistas in an incursion to Itatín. He allegedly guided the bandeirantes to the village of a cacique named Pazagu and provided logistical support for the transport of up to 2,000 enslaved natives. Apparently, the Paulistas offered him asylum in São Paulo.Footnote 73 These episodes reveal that for many Spaniards, the Paulistas, rather than a threat, could be key actors in destabilizing the Jesuit missionary program, which limited Spaniards’ access to Guaraní labor.

The Jesuits were particularly incisive in denouncing the governor of Paraguay, Luis de Céspedes Xería, for his complicity with the Paulista expeditions. Céspedes Xería had served the Spanish crown in the wars in Chile and was appointed to the government of Paraguay in 1625. He entered the province through Brazilian lands, passing through Salvador, Rio de Janeiro (where he married the niece of governor Martim de Sá, who was the son of Salvador Correia de Sá), and São Paulo. The Sá family had great influence in Rio de Janeiro and good connections in Paraguay, the Río de la Plata, and Tucumán. Salvador Correia de Sá was married to Catalina de Ugarte y Velasco, daughter of an important landowner and niece of Luis de Velasco, the viceroy of Peru.Footnote 74

In São Paulo, Céspedes Xería did not take any action against the bandeiras; on the contrary, he showed the Portuguese as much sympathy as possible. However, his relations with the inhabitants of São Paulo were not so friendly as the Jesuits presumed. In a 1628 letter to Philip IV, Céspedes Xería denounced the Paulistas who had entered Paraguay and captured numerous natives from the Jesuit missions. He urged the crown to remain vigilant regarding these bandeiras. Céspedes's relationship with the São Paulo câmara was particularly tense: local officials demanded that he present a royal permit before they would allow his entourage to pass through São Paulo, causing him to hurry his departure. He later referred to the Paulistas as “people who committed the greatest evils, treacheries, and villainies.”Footnote 75

Despite some apparent sympathies, the Jesuits built a strong case against Céspedes in their memoriales. Arriving in the Spanish villages located on the border of Paraguay, the new governor was well received by the local elite and heard complaints against the arbitrariness of the Jesuits for monopolizing indigenous laborers and not favoring the encomenderos and their enterprises. In Villa Rica, Céspedes received a petition from the procurator of that city, Francisco de Villalba, to authorize the natives of the reductions to “serve and pay mita to their encomenderos.”Footnote 76

Céspedes Xería seemed to share an antipathy toward the Jesuits with the frontier Spaniards. In November 1628, he appointed Felipe Romero visitador of the reductions and instructed him to identify all the indigenous refugees in the missions and return them either to the encomenderos or to the Portuguese. Romero was also to encourage the natives to disobey the Jesuits if they received orders “contrary to the king's service.”Footnote 77 Not surprisingly, the encomenderos of Santiago de Xerez and Villa Rica praised Céspedes's government, while the Jesuits immediately opposed him.Footnote 78 Ruiz de Montoya, for example, refused to accompany him in visiting some reductions.Footnote 79

In their memoriales, the Jesuits alleged that the new governor had come to Paraguay accompanied by Paulista slavers, who resumed their raids after returning to São Paulo. The priests also insisted that Céspedes harassed the natives by putting them to work on the yerba plantations, and that he encouraged disrespect toward the priests. Since Céspedes had married in Rio de Janeiro and had received a sugar mill in that city as a dowry, they suggested that the governor supported the slavers in order to secure a supply of slaves for his own plantation. It is worth noting that Céspedes traveled ahead of his wife, hoping perhaps to maintain good relations with the Paulistas to ensure her safe passage to Paraguay.Footnote 80 Father Francisco Crespo's 1631 memorial asserted that the governor had authorized the Paulistas to capture 2,000 natives on his behalf, to be delivered to his mill, which would be his bribe for allowing the bandeiras to capture natives in Guairá.Footnote 81

While the Jesuits accused Céspedes of complicity with the Paulistas, the governor accused the Jesuits of being the real troublemakers in the region. On June 23, 1629, Céspedes Xería sent an extensive report to the king in which he gave an account of what he had seen in the Guairá missions. According to Céspedes, the Jesuits were insubordinate to royal authority, refusing to help the governor with material and human resources during his visit to the missions. In addition, he reported that the priests illegally supplied natives with firearms, kept Tupi fugitives from Brazil in the missions instead of turning them over to civil authorities, and hindered the encomenderos’ access to native laborers.Footnote 82

In this war of information, the Jesuits seem to have prevailed. In 1631, Father Francisco Díaz Taño, procurator of Paraguay, sent a memorial to the Audiencia of Charcas in which he accused the governor of “omission and negligence” for failing to notify the Audiencia “of so many robberies, deaths and captivities and destruction of villages as occurred from the year 1629 to 1631.”Footnote 83 Ruiz de Montoya was one of the most insistent on Governor Céspedes's responsibility. In his 1631 statement about the attacks on the Guairá, the Jesuit specified two particularly explosive reasons: first, he reported that Céspedes had suggested to him that the Jesuits abandon their missions, as the Paulistas would soon destroy them. Moreover, Ruiz de Montoya relied on testimonies by Jesuits Simón Maceta and Justo Mansilla, stating that they had seen natives from Paraguay laboring in Céspedes's sugar mill in Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 84 Probably as a result of these denunciations, Céspedes Xería was taken to Charcas in 1631 and imprisoned there for a time. But by 1635, he was back in Buenos Aires. He spent some time in Paraguay and died in Rio de Janeiro in 1667.Footnote 85

The Inquisition and Indigenous Freedom

Ruiz de Montoya arrived in Madrid on September 22, 1638, to serve as procurator for the Jesuits in Paraguay. Soon after, probably in that same year, he submitted two memoriales to the Council of the Indies. In the first, he offered a brief account of the Portuguese invasions and presented Raposo Tavares as the chief person responsible.Footnote 86 In the second, he offered a set of wide-reaching administrative reforms for the Spanish empire in the South Atlantic. He insisted on the need to protect natives from slavery; advocated considering the enslaving of natives as a crime under inquisitorial jurisdiction; and proposed the creation of a bishopric and an Inquisition tribunal in Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 87 What was the origin of such proposals? What were their political and legal foundations? What did the Council of the Indies decide in this regard?

Ruiz de Montoya was not the first to think of the Inquisition as a solution to the problems of the viceroyalty of Peru. For example, in his 1614 memorial, Miguel Ruiz de Bustillo advocated appointing an inquisitor for each bishopric to avoid the disturbances that were generally caused by newcomers and foreigners, who were increasingly numerous in the kingdom. The inquisitors’ salaries would be paid for with funds from the sale of posts.Footnote 88

An anonymous proposal sent to Madrid by Viceroy Chinchón in 1632 defined four means for solutions to counter the Portuguese invasions. The first suggested granting freedom to the Paraguayan natives in Brazil. The second proposed Philip IV's purchase of São Paulo from Lope de Souza's descendants, allowing direct appointment of governors backed by military support. The third called for moving Paraguay's capital to Villa Rica to protect it from Portuguese influence. Lastly, the fourth proposal recommended the destruction of São Paulo for its crimes. Although the specific order of implementation is unclear, it appears evident that the destruction of the city should precede the arrival of the new Spanish governor and the subsequent reorganization.Footnote 89

Ruiz de Montoya's 1638 memoriales differed from previous ones, however, in their blunt suggestion that the residents of São Paulo were under the influence of Protestantism or Judaism, which would make their actions suitable for inquisitorial jurisdiction. In the first memorial of 1638, he stated that the bandeirantes made Christianity odious to the natives, and that they were close to the Dutch either through Judaism or heresy, thus endangering all of the viceroyalty of Peru.Footnote 90

The second memorial contained a more thoroughly developed argument for the Inquisition as a remedy against indigenous slavery. Ruiz de Montoya began by defending the application of a law of September 10, 1611, which in his understanding guaranteed indigenous freedom. In reality, this 1611 law allowed slavery in cases of “just war” and represented a step backward from another law from 1609.Footnote 91 Ruiz de Montoya's second memorial relied on two Jesuit theologians, Fernando Rebello (1546–1608) and Luis de Molina (1535–1600), Franciscan theologian Manuel Rodrigues (1545–1619), and Spanish Jurist Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575–1655). According to Ruiz de Montoya, the bandeirantes’ activities not only hindered the promulgation of the Gospel, but also caused the natives to lose their faith. The slavers destroyed temples and mocked religious images. They inculcated heresies and sins in the natives, such as polygamy and salvation by faith and not by works. Even more serious, Ruiz de Montoya presented evidence that the Portuguese manifested Jewish customs. The Paulistas, for example, did not obey Catholic food taboos and gave the indigenous slaves names from the Old Testament, such as Adam, Eve, Habakkuk (Abacú), Daniel, and others. Ruiz de Montoya considered it well known that there were Judaizing natives in Rio de Janeiro. A bishopric and an Inquisition tribunal in Rio de Janeiro would solve the problem, even helping to curb the corruption of officials who were the bandeirantes’ accomplices.Footnote 92

The Jesuits relied on the widely held belief that many Portuguese had Jewish origins to argue that the bandeirantes were Judaizers. Reporting to the king in 1620 regarding the situation in his jurisdiction, the archbishop of Charcas referred to the Portuguese entering Peru in the following terms:

Many foreigners pass into this kingdom . . . and many more Portuguese, who are not loyal to the crown of Castile and it is convenient to expel them from this kingdom and province. First, because of the danger of [their] being spies, and joining our enemies, who every year disturb us and cause some rebellion among restless people. Second, because they enjoy this kingdom and defraud it of a great part of silver, since they do not come for anything else, and as greedy people they become dealers in any kind of trade when they enter this kingdom.Footnote 93

In Spanish America, the terms “Portuguese” and “Jew” were considered synonymous.Footnote 94 It is interesting to note that the archbishop of Charcas's distrust of the Portuguese did not focus on this group's supposed “inferiority,” but on the assumption that they were more efficient than the resident Spaniards in trading and obtaining precious metal. Scholars who have compared so-called “middleman minorities” in various societies have found that such a stereotype was not uncommon.Footnote 95 The Portuguese were the predominant foreign group in the early sixteenth-century Spanish empire, comprising, according to Nathan Wachtel, more than 15 percent of the residents in certain cities, including Buenos Aires, Potosí and Veracruz.Footnote 96 By the early 1620s, however, hostilities between Spain and the Netherlands and the correspondence between Portuguese conversos and their relatives in the Netherlands, France, and Italy had led Spanish authorities, and particularly the Inquisition, to be increasingly suspicious of the Portuguese.Footnote 97

Allegations that Jews were flooding Peru had long been in circulation. In 1623, Philip IV ordered the Council of the Indies to look at reports from some recent discussions in the Council of the Inquisition about “the entrance of those of the Hebrew nation into Peru” and the means that the General Inquisitor had proposed to prevent this.Footnote 98 The Council of the Inquisition's consultations had been prompted by a memorial written by Manuel de Frías about the entry of Portuguese through Buenos Aires. In his memorial, Frías mentioned that these “Jews” traded enslaved Africans and European goods with their contacts and friends in Peru. Frías understood that they could cooperate with enemy powers and favor the loss of territories. As a solution, he proposed that at least one inquisitor reside permanently in Buenos Aires.Footnote 99 Identifying the foreigners entering through Buenos Aires as “New Christians from the Hebrew nation of the kingdoms of Portugal,” the general inquisitor expressed his full agreement with Frías's proposal and even suggested creating an Inquisition tribunal in that city.Footnote 100 The Council of the Inquisition's 1621 consultation also identified the Portuguese as “of the nation,” mentioning stereotypes such as doctrinal errors, avarice, the usurpation of royal revenues, and alliances with foreign powers. They also warned against the risk that these merchants might be sending riches to “strange kingdoms and infected provinces.”Footnote 101

Writing in 1623, the Council of the Inquisition alerted the monarch to the urgency of the situation, raising several issues: the fear that Jews, whom they referred to as “infectious people” (gente infecta), would “contaminate” the Spanish residents; the distance between Buenos Aires to Lima, which made the entry of Portuguese a problem that could be solved only if a commissioner of the Holy Office resided in the Río de la Plata; and the urgency of that business, as it was reported that many of those entering were fugitives from Inquisitor Marcos Teixeira's 1618–21 visitation in Bahia.Footnote 102 According to Francisco de Trexo, commissioner of the Holy Office of Peru in the port of Buenos Aires, eight ships bearing Portuguese conversos fleeing Brazil had landed in Buenos Aires in 1618–19.Footnote 103

In 1622, Francisco de Trexo wrote to the Council of the Inquisition, stating that the Portuguese, in addition to being slave traders and bandeirantes, were probably Jews because of their irreverent treatment of the crucifix and other abuses.Footnote 104 This circulation of denunciations, proposals, and assessments illustrates that, at the time Ruiz de Montoya was writing, the idea that many Portuguese were Judaizers was widespread among Spanish royal officials, from the local level to the higher councils. Ruiz de Montoya had maintained that the bandeirantes were Jews since at least 1631. That year, he included his account as superior of the Guairá missions in a collection of testimonies made by Jesuits working there and collected by the provincial Francisco Vázquez Truxillo to persuade the Spanish crown to do something about the Paulistas. He noted that: “The cruelties and disrespect of the Portuguese toward the Indians, the priests, and sacred things are more typical of Jews and heretics (as many of them I understand are . . .) than of bad Christians.” He also reported that when a priest asked why the bandeirantes were waging war against the natives, Raposo Tavares replied that it was “because of the permission that God gave them in the books of Moses.”

The Jesuit was naturally writing to an audience familiar with the Pentateuch verses that describe how the Israelites acquired slaves from other groups either by purchase (Exod. 12:44) or capture in war (Deut. 20:14), and that such slaves were held permanently (Lev. 25:44-46). As Jews, continued Ruiz de Montoya, the bandeirantes did not work on Saturdays, “keeping it as a feast day,” and despised religious images, placing images of the Virgin Mary on the soles of their shoes.Footnote 105 An anonymous memorial sent by Viceroy Chinchón insisted that it was common for the Portuguese to tell natives that Catholic law was false and that Jesus Christ was not God.Footnote 106

However, Jesuits’ accusations equating the Paulistas with Jews were not consistent, since they also labeled them as Protestants. The Jesuits insisted that the bandeirantes believed that everyone could be saved by faith, not by works. Simón Maceta reported the following: “These bad men must be heretics or Jews, or both, for one of them said ‘in spite of God I must be saved even if I do not do good works, because it is enough that I am a Christian.’”Footnote 107 In one memorial, Ruiz de Montoya affirmed that it was common for the Portuguese “to say that works are not necessary to be saved, but that it is enough for them to be baptized, and that even if it does not please God they will be saved.”Footnote 108 Later, Ruiz de Montoya described the Paulistas as iconoclasts: “burning and desecrating the temples, dragging the priestly garments, spilling the holy oils.”Footnote 109 During the siege of the Jesús María reduction, directed by Maceta, the bandeirantes desecrated and destroyed the interior of the church, killed three pigs, and ate them for Lent.Footnote 110

In the Jesuits’ descriptions of the incursions of the 1620s and 1630s, they endeavored to link the Paulistas, in a diffuse way, to Protestant heresy and the imminent possibility of a break in monarchical loyalty. Jesuit Diego de Boroa, who was in the reduction of Jesús María in Tape when the Paulistas attacked it, claimed that the Paulistas were loyal not to Philip IV but to the Count of Monsanto, the current proprietor of the captaincy of São Vicente. As proof of their religious infidelity, he pointed out that the bandeirantes, in addition to indiscriminately killing indigenous men, women and children, had desecrated and burned the churches, religious images, and holy oils; torn the baptismal book to pieces; and stolen precious liturgical objects, “showing themselves crueler than beasts and more inhuman than Arabs (alarbes), Calvinist heretics, or Huguenots.”Footnote 111

Diego de Boroa was not the only one to doubt the Paulistas’ loyalty and to assume that they were, in fact, following the party of the Count of Monsanto. In 1636, Manuel João Branco, a resident of São Paulo who, in historian Jaime Cortesão's opinion, was nothing more than a Spanish spy, authored a memorial to the king providing a remedy for those ills. Branco suggested that it was necessary to evict the Count of Monsanto from his possession of the captaincy of São Vicente and submit it to the direct control of the Spanish crown.Footnote 112

Ruiz de Montoya's description was deliberately ambiguous; he avoided labeling the Paulistas as Jews so as to have some margin with which to identify them as sympathetic to the Dutch enemy and thus disloyal to the monarchy. In a memorial, the Jesuit even said that the Paulistas contradicted the doctrine taught by the priests and considered it legitimate to have more than one wife.Footnote 113 By portraying the Paulistas as disdainful of religious images and engaging in forbidden meals during Lent, Ruiz de Montoya established a connection between them and the Protestants. However, the Jesuit's suggestion of a “conspiracy” involving the Paulistas, the Dutch, and the Jews carries significant weight. This alleged conspiracy aimed to bring Dom Antonio's son from Holland to Brazil, intending to establish him as a rival king to challenge Spain. Dom Antonio, prior of Crato (1531–95), was a claimant to the throne of Portugal who was defeated by Philip II in 1580. Although Ruiz de Montoya did not disclose how he came across these ideas, he dismissed their importance while also hinting at the possibility of their origin from Jews or heretics.Footnote 114 Ruiz de Montoya's proposal also included the creation of a bishopric in Rio de Janeiro. This modification, together with the creation of an Inquisition tribunal, would signify a powerful intervention by the Spanish crown in the administration of Brazil, indicating a future legislative unification of Portuguese and Spanish America.

An Illustrious Predecessor and Collaborator

The notion of a bishopric in Rio de Janeiro was not new, and in fact the idea had already been presented by Lourenço Hurtado de Mendonça in a 1631 memorial.Footnote 115 Born in the Portuguese city of Sesimbra in 1585, Mendonça had joined the Society of Jesus in 1602 but was expelled at some point before arriving in Peru in 1615.Footnote 116 He studied law and theology, earned a doctorate, and was ordained a secular priest. As a member of the Holy Office, he exercised various functions in Peru, including serving as commissioner of the Inquisition in Potosí. He also served as a missionary in the Chichas region and visitador to Paraguay.Footnote 117

Mendonça was a prolific petitioner whose proposals had reached the Council of the Indies numerous times. In 1629, he informed the court in Madrid that he had organized the native labor force of the mines of Tatasi, Chorolque, San Vicente, San Francisco, Monserrate, Chocaya, and Sorocaya (located in present-day Bolivia). He requested as a prize the accumulated wages of ten years, which he believed amounted to more than 10,000 ducats. Initially, Mendonça presented himself as an expert in mining matters, including fiscal issues and new methods for increasing the production of Potosí and other alluvial mines.Footnote 118 In another petition, he even proposed a safer route for conveying Peruvian silver to Spain.Footnote 119

While visiting the border between Paraguay and São Paulo in 1625, Mendonça witnessed the harm done by the Paulistas among the natives of the region.Footnote 120 He had requested the bishopric of Chile for himself, a prize he did not receive. Instead, he obtained the prelacy of Rio de Janeiro, a position he held from 1632 to 1637, albeit with great difficulty in the face of continuous threats from the region's inhabitants.Footnote 121

Knowing firsthand the problems Portuguese slavers had caused in that region, Mendonça hoped to come to Rio de Janeiro as a bishop with inquisitorial powers.Footnote 122 In his 1631 memorial, he described his reasons, claiming that the Paulistas went to Paraguay or the Río de la Plata under the pretext of joining the holy orders, only to return with indigenous slaves.Footnote 123 His main argument in favor of a bishopric in Rio de Janeiro, however, was that its territory was so vast that it could not be administered from Salvador. To support his argument, he described the geographic and economic situation of the prelature of Rio de Janeiro in the memorial: although it was a poor region with a small population, it was not as poor or as sparsely populated as some others, such as São Tomé, Ceuta, and Cape Verde, which already counted bishoprics. The tithes obtained from Rio de Janeiro yielded 50,000 ducats, no trivial sum. To avoid having to draw the future bishop's salary from other sources of the royal hacienda, he recommended earmarking part of the customs revenues. In fact, Rio de Janeiro was quite a large territory, spanning 400 leagues of coast and 300 leagues inland, seven captaincies, and 20 Portuguese cities, as well as numerous indigenous villages—all with difficult communication with Bahia and extensive trade with Angola and Río de la Plata.Footnote 124

Mendonça pointed out other problems that a bishopric could address. First, there was the great shortage of priests, which forced Rio de Janeiro to accept priests who were “New Christians, suspicious and of little satisfaction in the things of our holy faith,” individuals of dubious conduct from Portugal, and even fugitives from the Río de la Plata and Peru. Second, and more important, a bishop was needed in Rio de Janeiro to act as inquisitor, since there were already many of suspect faith. In this respect, Ruiz de Montoya's proposal was not at all original.Footnote 125

By 1599, there were already numerous proposals recommending that the Habsburgs incorporate the administration of Brazil, or at least the southern part of it, into direct government by Madrid. That year, the governor of Buenos Aires, Diego de Valdes y de la Vanda, reported his observations from the Brazilian coast to the court. He claimed to have seen a good number of English and Dutch married couples in Rio de Janeiro, which he learned was common in other parts of Brazil. He had heard that Portuguese sugar producers were sending their merchandise to Europe in Dutch, English, and German ships, by both legal and illegal means, and that English ships were conducting important business in São Vicente and Bahia. He considered it very advantageous to place a Castilian government in those provinces and reduce them to the crown of Castile, “to which they truly belonged,” and proposed that a fleet of six armed galleons escort the convoys of ships between Lisbon and Brazil, in the style of the silver fleet system, so that the English and Dutch enemies would no longer frequent those parts.Footnote 126

The Spanish crown's attitude toward the bandeiras and indigenous slavery had until then been remarkably complacent. In 1611, yielding to pressure from Portuguese slavers, Philip III weakened the substance of an earlier law on indigenous freedom and allowed slavery by “just war,” provided it was approved by the Board of Missions, a local council composed of religious and civil authorities. He also established that natives residing in villages should work for the settlers as long as they received wages, but this point was ostensibly ignored.Footnote 127 A royal cédula of September 12, 1628, ordered the governor of the Río de la Plata to repress the bandeiras, but gave no details on how the Spaniards would apprehend the delinquents, and nothing regarding this was communicated to the authorities in Portugal or Portuguese America.Footnote 128 The Council of the Indies downplayed the 1631 proposals for a bishopric in Rio de Janeiro and suggested asking the bishop of Bahia for more information and renewing the ban on Portuguese taking holy orders in Río de la Plata.Footnote 129 This attitude remained unchanged until 1639.

The similarity between Ruiz de Montoya's and Mendonça's projects and the collaboration between the two may have favored their positive reception at court. Mendonça had actively advocated for the jurisdictional unification of Iberian domains since at least 1630—at a time when criticisms of Olivares's Union of Arms were emerging in Portugal and Catalonia. In another paper submitted that year, Mendonça reported that the Portuguese living in Spanish America were being forced to pay unfair taxes as a result of a 1618 cédula and argued that instead the crown should give more equitable treatment to all subjects of the monarchy regardless of their place of origin.Footnote 130

Mendonça had been a severe and intransigent critic of indigenous slavery during his nearly five years as prelate of Rio de Janeiro. He reported that he received continuous death threats, and that one night some men threw a barrel of gunpowder into the room where he was sleeping, blowing up his house, from which he incredibly escaped unharmed.Footnote 131 His departure from that city in 1637 gave cause for speculation, but Madrid clearly accepted that the ouvidor and the town council conspired to expel him from the city.Footnote 132

The crown took Ruiz de Montoya's memoriales very seriously. Philip IV appointed a special junta composed of six councilors: from the Council of the Indies, Juan de Solórzano Pereira and Juan de Palafox; from the Royal Council, Sebastián Zambrano; from the Council of Portugal, Cid Almeida and Francisco Pereira Pinto; and the bishop of Porto, Gaspar Rego da Fonseca. Lourenço Hurtado de Mendonça, then prelate in Rio de Janeiro, assisted in the work.Footnote 133 Ruiz de Montoya later told a colleague that he “had many conversations with the Count-Duke [of Olivares] about the Portuguese, the Indians and the things of that province.”Footnote 134 After several sessions in which Ruiz de Montoya and Mendonça's papers were discussed, Juan de Palafox composed the consultation to the king.Footnote 135

As these discussions were taking place, Ruiz de Montoya published his celebrated Conquista espiritual in 1639. According to the author, Juan de Palafox asked him to write this work. Lourenço Hurtado de Mendonça examined the book and granted ecclesiastical approval.Footnote 136 Mendonça also read Ruiz de Montoya's linguistic works, correcting and inserting errata in them, as well as giving his ecclesiastical approval.Footnote 137 Conquista espiritual consists of 81 chapters and is divided into four parts: the first describes the province of Paraguay; the second deals with the province of Guairá, with emphasis on the Paulista attacks and the forced exodus of 1631; the third describes the reductions in general; and the fourth deals with the missions in their current situation and discusses priests’ martyrdom.Footnote 138 Denunciations against the bandeirantes abound in the work, which is undoubtedly one of the most important chronicles of the Jesuit experience in the Americas. Ruiz de Montoya admitted, however, that he had written the book in a hurry. Dictated to a scribe, the work preserves the nonliterary tone of the annual letters.Footnote 139

Ruiz de Montoya's success as a procurator in Madrid was undeniable. The crown accepted his proposals and on September 16, 1639, promulgated a royal cédula addressed to the viceroy of Peru, with copies sent to nearby governors. The cédula reproduced most of the points contained in Ruiz de Montoya's memorial as royal mandates.Footnote 140 The decree stated that the king had learned of the Paulista hostilities and ordered an armed contingent to defend the missions. It was reported that the Paulistas had captured up to 300,000 souls; thus their actions constituted a transgression of the law on indigenous freedom promulgated in Lisbon in 1611.

Those who enslaved natives were to be punished with the confiscation of property, loss of all privileges and honors, and perpetual banishment from Brazil. To ensure compliance with the law of 1611, Philip IV ordered the creation of a Tribunal of the Holy Office in Rio de Janeiro with full powers. The decree also incorporated Ruiz de Montoya's suggestion to repatriate enslaved indigenous people to Paraguay, except for those who where were married or elderly. In such cases, they were to be relocated to villages within Brazil. Additionally, the decree provided a list of individuals who were to be immediately apprehended and sent to appear before the Council of the Indies. These individuals included Raposo Tavares and Federico de Melo, as well as friars Antonio de San Esteban (Carmelite) and Francisco Valladares (Benedictine), and secular priests Juan de Campo y Medina, Francisco Jorge, and Salvador de Lima.Footnote 141

The legislation drafted in 1639 outlined a plan for the legal unification of the Spanish empire. Madrid proposed intervening in Portuguese America by establishing a bishopric and an Inquisition tribunal to suppress the activities of the bandeirantes. Individuals involved in enslaving natives would face harsh penalties and be sent to Madrid. This was the first time that Iberian royal officials considered granting indigenous freedom in both Portuguese and Spanish America, a concept that the Portuguese did not definitively adopt until 1755. Significantly, this law applied to anyone engaged in indigenous slavery, whether in Brazil, Portugal, Africa, or the Spanish Indies, thereby representing a legal standardization of these areas.

In 1639, the Council of the Indies received information about the presence of Portuguese in other border areas of the Spanish domains. In a letter sent on November 18 of the previous year, the president of the Audiencia of Quito reported that Portuguese captain Pedro Teixeira had arrived in that city, coming from Pará via Amazonian rivers. Teixeira escorted Fray Domingo Brieva, one of the Spanish Franciscan missionaries who had appeared in Pará fleeing a native rebellion, back to Quito. The governor of Pará had sent the other fray, Andrés de Toledo, to Madrid.Footnote 142 The Council of the Indies also received a complaint from the governor of Caracas that the Portuguese were entering Spanish Amazonia, taking natives as slaves and eventually appearing in that city to sell them. At the time, Madrid was reinforcing its prohibitions on indigenous slavery and preparing for a major institutional intervention in Portuguese domains, and the letter from the governor of Caracas was received with indignation. Madrid ordered “that the said Jacome Raimundo de Noronha, governor of the provinces of San Luis del Marañón, be severely reprimanded and punished for having dared without consultation and license . . . to make the said entradas and navigations and uncover the breasts of Peru, which although they were very near, we should try to cover up and erase from the memory of men.” It is interesting to note that in advancing in the process of institutional unification, the Council of the Indies determined the punishment of a Portuguese governor.Footnote 143

There was some contention, however, about who would be the new bishop of Rio de Janeiro. Ruiz de Montoya had proposed Dominican Juan de Vasconcellos, inquisitor of the Supreme Tribunal of Portugal, but the councilor of Portugal, Francisco Pereira Pinto, insisted that the new bishopric was a “small post for such a great person.”Footnote 144 In the end, Philip IV appointed Lourenço Hurtado de Mendonça, on October 7, 1639. Mendonça was in Lisbon with Ruiz de Montoya on December 1, 1640, awaiting the arrival of the papal bulls, when the movement to acclaim John IV as the new king of Portugal succeeded. Ruiz de Montoya and Mendonça returned to Madrid.Footnote 145 The bishopric of Rio de Janeiro was only created again within the Portuguese empire on November 16, 1676.

Although Ruiz de Montoya and Mendonça acted as arbitristas while they were in Madrid, they collaborated with each other rather than exchanging hostilities, as arbitristas normally did with their rivals. Ruiz de Montoya was in Rio de Janeiro in 1637, and the two likely returned to Europe together; they were both in Madrid between 1638 and 1639. Mendonça collaborated closely with Ruiz de Montoya's writings and petitions. Both stood to gain if the crown approved their projects: one would become bishop and the other would obtain security for the Jesuit missions. The crown certainly took this into account, as they did the fact that both men knew the region of which they spoke intimately and were united in their proposals. All these factors, I believe, contributed to Philip IV's decision to make an important administrative intervention in the Spanish empire in the South Atlantic, a reform that in practice meant the legislative unification of the two Iberian dominions.

Epilogue

After Portugal declared independence, Ruiz de Montoya concentrated his efforts on several other fronts. In his subsequent petitions, he requested firearms for the Guaraní, an Inquisition presence in the Río de la Plata, and a moderate indigenous tribute.Footnote 146

Meanwhile, the Paulistas continued their attacks on the missions; their 1636 expedition destroyed three missions in Uruguay and enslaved hundreds of natives.Footnote 147 These events impelled Ruiz de Montoya to request more firearms for the Guaraní. The notion of granting firearms to the Guaraní was not new. As we have seen, Céspedes had made public the fact that the Jesuits were arming the natives without a license in 1629.Footnote 148 In 1638–39, Paraguay was devastated by incursions led by Fernão Dias Paes. In January 1639, the governor of Paraguay, Pedro de Lugo y Navarra, led a troop of 70 Spaniards against the Portuguese. In the battle of Caazapá-guazú, the governor gave firearms to the Guaraní, who were commanded by Jesuit Antonio Bernal, a religious who had served as an officer in the Chilean wars. At a certain point during the battle, the governor thought it prudent to withdraw his men, while Bernal and his natives continued to fight and prove their superiority against the enemy. Nine Portuguese died in this conflict. The Guaraní captured 17 Portuguese and recovered 2,000 enslaved natives. After a few days, however, the governor released the prisoners and rebuked the Guaraní, to the Jesuits’ great consternation.Footnote 149

Following the success of the Guaraní in defending themselves with firearms, both the Jesuits and ecclesiastical authorities in Asunción petitioned for a royal permit.Footnote 150 The Jesuits sent two petitions requesting a license for natives to use firearms in 1639. Quoting an extensive body of juridical and theological authorities, the Jesuits claimed that natural law did not prohibit firearms, but permitted their use for the just defense of life, country, and Church, and that even when positive law prohibited clerics from using weapons, this prohibition ceased to apply in urgent cases.Footnote 151 Between March 11 and 18, 1641, the Paulistas suffered another important defeat, this time in the battle of Mbororé, which occurred near the confluence of the Mbororé and Uruguay rivers. Under the guidance of Brother Domingo de Torres, 3,000 Guaraní warriors surrounded the 400 Paulistas and their 2,500 Tupi auxiliaries and attacked them by surprise.Footnote 152 The Paulistas waited another nine years before they attempted another attack on the region.Footnote 153

Like other petitioners of his time, Ruiz de Montoya was requesting authorization for a practice that was already taking place without a license. He requested 500 firearms, 70 containers of gunpowder, and as many quintals of lead.Footnote 154 The success of the Guaraní military actions induced royal officials in Peru and Madrid to look favorably on supplying firearms to natives. In a 1642 cédula, Philip IV delegated the final decision to the viceroy of Peru. The viceroy consulted local authorities and decided to send the arms in 1646. Forty firearms would be given to each pueblo, and the natives would receive training from Jesuit brothers who served in the kingdom of Chile.Footnote 155

As early as 1644, Ruiz de Montoya could cite the first victories against the Paulistas that were accomplished with the use of firearms by the Guaraní.Footnote 156 The Guaraní also obtained a good number of firearms from the Paulistas they were defeating.Footnote 157 Thus equipped, the Guaraní also consolidated their status as militiamen of the Paraguayan government and were sent on expeditions against enemy native groups, especially the Calchaquí, Guaykuru, and Neenga.Footnote 158

The Guaraní militias had a formal organization similar to European ones. One witness stated that the natives had spears, pikes, flags, drums, and even masons, and that they had reserved every Sunday for conducting their alardos (military exercises), in which they practiced European-style war maneuvers.Footnote 159 Recent studies have revealed a shift in Guaraní perceptions of leadership as they experienced mission-governing institutions, including the cabildos and, notably, the militias.Footnote 160 The Guaraní militias continued to render valuable services to the government of Paraguay, such as the defense of the province against the Chaco natives; the repair of prisons and fortifications in the province and even the construction of new ones; and defense against the Portuguese.Footnote 161 Although the Guaraní received no salary for such services, the Jesuits continued to attend punctually to the colonial authorities’ requests. They could then include reports of these services to Madrid in support of their own petitions.Footnote 162

In his 1641 memorial, Ruiz de Montoya proposed the establishment of an Inquisition tribunal in either Buenos Aires or Córdoba. His argument stemmed from the Portuguese attempts to reach Potosí. While the Guaraní were preventing their passage through the missions, Buenos Aires remained vulnerable, as the Portuguese were allegedly spreading anti-Catholic doctrine. Thus, it became imperative to station one or two inquisitors there.Footnote 163 By 1643, the population of Buenos Aires included a significant number of Portuguese individuals, accounting for approximately 25 percent of the total.Footnote 164 However, the Council of the Indies deemed an Inquisition tribunal too costly to maintain in a region as peripheral as the Río de la Plata.Footnote 165

The last attempts Ruiz de Montoya made as procurator were aimed at achieving a reasonable and fair taxation for the indigenous people of the missions.Footnote 166 The information provided by the Jesuits about the damage that continuous Portuguese invasions had done to the missions and their “resources, buildings, and crops” led the king to grant natives ten additional years of tax exemption in 1643.Footnote 167 In yet another memorial, Ruiz de Montoya proposed a tribute rate of one peso per year per native for the Guaraní, while emphasizing their invaluable military service as a form of credit they were accumulating by supporting the monarchy: “If tribute and mitas were to be imposed on the said Indians, overloading them with the burden they have today of maintaining the war against the rebels, irremediable damage could be feared.”Footnote 168

Ruiz de Montoya's performance as procurator was fundamental to the consolidation of Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Deeply knowledgeable of the territory and its problems, and the political intricacies at play in the South Atlantic, Ruiz de Montoya received, classified, distilled, and channeled the flood of information and requests that arrived from Paraguay to bring them to the attention of the Madrid court and to have proceedings address them. The success of his work is undeniable, since almost all of the memoriales he presented were approved and resulted in laws. In addition, he used his time at court to publish his works, which became an obligatory reference for those interested in the missions. Ruiz de Montoya returned to Lima around 1643 and died there nine years later. His life was closely linked to the Paraguayan missions, and he even requested that his remains be buried in the mission of Loreto.Footnote 169

Ruiz de Montoya, along with Lourenço Hurtado de Mendonça, proposed not only the protection of the natives but also a significantly greater integration of the Iberian domains compared to what the Cortes of Tomar had established. While both men acted as solo petitioners in Madrid, they also collaborated on projects that gained favorable attention from the crown due to their intimate familiarity with the realities they addressed. Perhaps more importantly, Ruiz de Montoya went beyond the typical activities of religious order lobbyists and embraced the role of an arbitrista—a proponent of reforms for the empire—an aspect of his trajectory that was previously little-known. By doing so and with the collaboration of other Jesuits and the clergyman Mendonça, he successfully captured the crown's attention to address the issue of indigenous slavery in the South Atlantic. The success of his proposals certainly boosted the Society of Jesus's power and influence within the Spanish empire thereafter.

In the midst of these events, the Jesuits also collected enemies. Writing in 1643, Ruiz de Montoya presented a memorial defending the Jesuits against some defamatory papers that were circulating in Madrid. The accusations purported that the Jesuits were exploiting an important treasure they had hidden in Paraguay; that they encouraged enmity between natives and Spaniards; that they did not allow bishops and other authorities to visit their missions; and that they were preventing natives from working for encomenderos. Ruiz de Montoya carefully refuted each of these points, building a case for the Society of Jesus's loyalty to the monarchy.Footnote 170 In this he certainly succeeded, as evidenced by the important concessions the crown made to the Jesuits during this crucial period in the establishment of the missions.

Footnotes

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team of The Americas for their helpful comments and suggestions. Sincerest thanks to Kara Schultz for helping me with the translation of this article. Research for this article was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.

References

1. He reported on this in a letter to the king dated May 20, 1609. Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la Provincia del Paraguay (Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Perú, Bolivia y Brasil) según los documentos originales del Archivo General de Indias, Pablo Pastells and Francisco Mateos, eds., 8 vols. (Madrid: V. Suárez, 1912–1949) [hereafter HCJPP], 1:143–144.

2. Although prohibited since 1542, the encomienda persisted in frontier areas where the Spanish empire was unable to collect indigenous tribute directly. Native groups had to provide certain services to an encomendero who, in return, was required to ensure their religious instruction and contribute to the region's military defense. The institution remained in force in Paraguay until the end of the colonial era. See James Schofield Saeger, “Survival and Abolition: The Eighteenth-Century Paraguayan Encomienda,” The Americas 38:1 (1981): 60.

3. On these early developments, see de Montoya, Antonio Ruiz, Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañia de Iesus, en las prouincias del Paraguay, Parana, Vruguay, y Tape (Madrid: Imprenta del Reyno, 1639), chapt. 6Google Scholar, fols. 6v–7v; Annual letter of 1628, in Manuscritos da Coleção de Angelis, Jaime Cortesão, ed., and Helio Vianna, ed., vol. 4), 7 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1951–1970) [hereafter MCA], 1:259–298; Maeder, Ernesto, Misiones del Paraguay: construcción jesuítica de una sociedad cristiano guaraní (1610–1768) (Resistencia, Argentina: Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas, CONICET, 2013), 4757Google Scholar; and Sarreal, Julia, The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 2734Google Scholar.

4. The Jesuits began evangelizing in Brazil in 1549, resettling the natives in missions. They were decisive in implementing the Tridentine decrees in Peru, where, from 1568, they also ran colegios for the education of local elites and, with some hesitation, missions among Quechua and Aymara-speaking groups and independent natives. On this early period, with a focus on missions, see Charlotte de Castelnau-L'Estoile, Les ouvriers d'une vigne stérile: Les jésuites et la conversion des Indiens du Brésil, 1580–1620 (Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2000); and Aliocha Maldavsky, Vocaciones inciertas: misión y misioneros en la provincia jesuita del Perú de los siglos XVI y XVII (Seville: Spanish National Research Council [CSIC], 2012).

5. Amid fierce disputes with local interests, the Jesuits had the support of both Alfaro and Arias de Saavedra, with whom they worked out a plan to incorporate the natives into missions which, unlike the Franciscan pueblos, would not be subject to the encomienda. See Enrique de Gandía, Francisco de Alfaro y la condición social de los indios (Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1939), 456, 465, 510–513, 526, 568; Martín María Morales, “Los comienzos de las reducciones de la provincia del Paraguay en relación con el derecho indiano y el instituto de la Compañía de Jesús. Evolución y conflictos,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 67 (1998): 62, 120–125; and Juan Carlos Garavaglia, “Las misiones jesuíticas: utopía y realidad,” in Economía, sociedad y regiones (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1987), 128. On the Franciscans’ experience, the reference work remains Louis Necker, Indios guaraníes y chamanes franciscanos: las primeras reducciones del Paraguay, 1580–1800 (Asunción: Universidad Católica, Centro de Estudios Antropológicos, 1990 [1979]), 57, 196.

6. On these debates, see Wilde, Guillermo, Religión y poder en las misiones de guaraníes (Buenos Aires: SB Editorial, 2009), 113Google Scholar; and Austin, Shawn Michael, Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 8590, 96–100Google Scholar. The figure of more than 40,000 Guaraní appears in “Copia de las razones que hay para que el Real Consejo se sirva mandar [. . . ],” by Diego de Torres Bollo, c. 1631, MCA, 1:373.

7. Monteiro, John M., Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 56Google Scholar; Ganson, Barbara A., “Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Apostle of the Guaraní,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 3:2 (2016): 200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. The estimate of 100,000 is Alencastro's. Hemming and Monteiro found the figure of 300,000 in official Spanish correspondence, but Monteiro believes that the latter figure is exaggerated. Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, O trato dos viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul, séculos XVI e XVII (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000), 193–194; Hemming, John, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 274Google Scholar; Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, 62.

9. Metcalf, Alida C., Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 79, 8586Google Scholar.

10. Owensby, New World of Gain, 140.

11. Audiencia of Charcas to the king, February 1, 1619, Archivo General de Indias, Seville [hereafter AGI], Charcas, 19, r. [ramo] 9, no. 139.

12. Durán Mastrilli to Francisco Crespo, September 24, 1627, Buenos Aires, AGI, Charcas, 2. Found also in Anais do Museu Paulista (São Paulo: Museu Paulista, 1922) [hereafter AMP], 1:170–171.

13. Royal cédula to Francisco de Céspedes, September 12, 1628, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 5, no. 114.

14. For more details on Ruiz de Montoya's biography, see Francisco Xarque, Vida prodigiosa, en lo vario de los sucesos, exemplar en lo heroico de religiosas virtudes . . . (Zaragoza: Miguel de Luna, 1662), 19, 29, 43–44, 116, 158, 493–494; José Luis Rouillon Arróspide, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya y las reducciones del Paraguay (Asunción: Centro de Estudios Paraguayos Antonio Guasch, 1997), 19–20, 26, 49, 55, 66, 68; Fernando Rodríguez de la Torre, “Antonio Ruiz de Montoya,” in Diccionario biográfico de la Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2018), https://dbe.rah.es/biografias/5494/antonio-ruiz-de-montoya, accessed April 24, 2023.

15. For a recent review of the literature on procurators in the Spanish empire, see Caroline Cunill and Francisco Quijano, “‘Que nosotros quedemos en aquella figura como nuestra lealtad y servicios merecen’: cadenas de representación en el Imperio hispánico,” Nuevo Mundo/Mundos Nuevos, Débats, 2020, https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.79325. For different religious orders, see Lázaro de Aspurz, La aportación extranjera a las misiones españolas del Patronato Regio (Madrid: Consejo de la Hispanidad, 1946); and Pedro Borges Morán, El envío de misioneros a América durante la época española (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1977).

16. Antonio Luis Lopes de Herrera to the king, May 3, 1633, Cochabamba, AGI, Lima, 161.

17. On how Jesuit provincial congregations worked and how they selected procurators, see Markus Friedrich, Der lange Arm Roms? Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im Jesuitenorden 1540–1773 (Frankfurt; New York: Campus, 2011), 112–123, 221–225; Fabián Fechner, “Las tierras incógnitas de la administración jesuita: tomas de decisiones, gremios consultivos y evolución de normas,” Histórica 38:2 (2014): 11–31; and Fabian Fechner, Entscheidungsprozesse vor Ort: Die Provinzkongregationen der Jesuiten in Paraguay (1608–1762) (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2015), chapt. 4. On Jesuit procurators in the Spanish court and in Rome, see J. Gabriel Martínez-Serna, “Procurators and the Making of the Jesuits’ Atlantic Network,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 182; and Fabian Fechner and Guillermo Wilde, “‘Cartas vivas’ en la expansión del cristianismo ibérico: las órdenes religiosas y la organización global de las misiones,” Nuevo Mundo/Mundos Nuevos, Débats (2020), https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.79441. On procurators’ role in recruiting missionaries, see Felix Zubillaga, “El procurador de las Indias Occidentales de la Compañía de Jesús,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 22 (1953): 394–398; and Agustín Galán García, El ‘Oficio de Indias’ de Sevilla y la organización económica y misional de la Compañía de Jesús (1566–1767) (Seville: Fundación Fondo de Cultura de Sevilla, 1995), 197 and following pages. On procurators’ economic activities, especially buying books and other religious objects, see Fabián R. Vega, “‘Allá está de balde y aquí me serviría’: la circulación capilar de libros en guaraní en el Paraguay, el Río de la Plata y el espacio atlántico (siglo XVIII),” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 46 (2020): 131–154. With no intention of providing an exhaustive list, studies documenting Jesuit procurators’ lobbying on behalf of specific regions include the following: on Paraguay, Magnus Mörner, Actividades políticas y económicas de los jesuitas en el Río de la Plata: la era de los Habsburgos (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1968), 64, 67; on Chiquitos, Roberto Tomichá Charupá, La primera evangelización en las reducciones de Chiquitos, Bolivia (1691–1767): protagonistas y metodología misional (Cochabamba: Verbo Divino, 2002), 176–181; on Mojos, David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 67; and on the New Kingdom of Granada, José del Rey Fajardo, Los jesuitas en Venezuela: las misiones germen de la nacionalidad (Caracas: Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, 2007), 5:427. In another study, I looked at the financing of the Jesuit enterprise in Spanish Amazonia: Francismar Alex Lopes de Carvalho, “Disputas territoriais e o financiamento da empresa missionária jesuítica na Amazônia espanhola,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 44 (2018): 111–138.

18. The classic study on the subject remains Taunay's Historia geral, a multivolume work heavily based on manuscripts. See Afonso de E. Taunay, Historia geral das bandeiras paulistas, escripta á vista de avultada documentação inedita dos archivos brasileiros, hespanhoes e portugueses, 11 vols. (São Paulo: Typ. Ideal, H. L. Canton, 1924–1950). Jaime Cortesão's Rapôso Tavares e a formac̜ão territorial do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Cultura, Serviço de Documentação, 1958) points out bandeirante penetration far beyond the missions of Paraguay. Ethnohistorians Susnik, Ganson, Wilde, Sarreal, and Austin have documented Guaraní responses to Portuguese, Spanish and Jesuit activities in Paraguay. See Branislava Susnik, El indio colonial del Paraguay, vol. 1, El Guaraní colonial (Asunción: Museo Etnográfico Andrés Barbero, 1965); Barbara A. Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de La Plata (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Wilde, Religión y poder; Sarreal, The Guaraní and Their Missions; and Austin, Colonial Kinship. Monteiro's 1994 Negros da terra (edition published in 2018) is a classic work on the impact of indigenous slavery on the economy of southern Portuguese America, while Vilardaga explores the region's personal, familial, and commercial networks that extended beyond Iberian borders. See Monteiro, Blacks of the Land; and José Carlos Vilardaga, “São Paulo na órbita do império dos Felipes: Conexões castelhanas de uma vila da América portuguesa durante a União Ibérica, 1580–1640” (PhD diss.: Universidade de São Paulo, 2010).

19. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco's Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611), fol. 61v, defined the word arbitrio as an opinion given by someone on a certain subject. In the period studied here, it was used to refer to petitions or projects that Spanish subjects brought to the court with reformist ideas about government. However, these projects were most often titled memoriales, a word that was also used to refer to any kind of petition to the crown. Real Academia Española, Diccionario de autoridades, 1726–1739 (Madrid: Imprenta de Francisco del Hierro), 4:538. It is important to note that Jesuits in Paraguay used the word memorial to refer to orders and recommendations for the missions left by visitors and provincials or resolutions taken in a provincial congregation. In this article, I do not use the word memorial in this latter sense. For examples of these orders and recommendations, see Josefina Piana and Pablo Cansanello, eds., Memoriales de la Provincia Jesuítica del Paraguay (siglos XVII-XVIII) (Córdoba: Editorial de la Universidad Católica de Córdoba, 2015).

20. On early seventeenth-century Iberian arbitrismo, see, among others, Berrogain, Jean Vilar, Literatura y economía: la figura satírica del arbitrista en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1973)Google Scholar; Bronner, Fred, “Peruvian Arbitristas under Viceroy Chinchón, 1629–1639,” Studies in Hispanic History and Literature, Scripta Hierosolymitana 26 (1974): 3478Google Scholar; Dubet, Anne, “Los arbitristas entre discurso y acción política. Propuesta para un análisis de la negociación política,” Tiempos Modernos 4:9 (2003): 114Google Scholar; Amadori, Arrigo, “Que se dé diferente modo al gobierno de las Indias, que se van perdiendo muy a prisa: arbitrismo y administración a principios del siglo XVII,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 66:2 (2009): 147179CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schaub, Jean-Frédéric, Le Portugal au temps du Comte-Duc d'Olivares (1621–1640) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2001), 103109, 135–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dantas, Vinícius, “Los arbitristas y la América portuguesa (1590–1640),” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 71:1 (2014): 145170CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Arndt Brendecke, Imperio e información: funciones del saber en el dominio colonial español (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2012) 80, 90–97, 100, 254–259.

22. On Miguel de Cervantes's texts, in which petitioners appear as pathetic individuals, see Vilar Berrogain's analysis in Literatura y economía, 65–71.

23. For examples and more literature, see Francismar Alex Lopes de Carvalho, “Between Potosí and El Dorado: Arbitrismo and Political Communication in Early Seventeenth-Century Peru,” Colonial Latin American Review 29:1 (2020): 47–72.

24. On Lourenço Hurtado de Mendonça, see Arlindo Rubert, “O Prelado Lourenço de Mendonça, 1o Bispo Eleito Do Rio de Janeiro,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 311 (1976): 13–33; Diogo Ramada Curto, “O Padre Lourenço de Mendonça: entre o Brasil e o Peru (c. 1630–c. 1640),” Topoi 11 (2010): 27–35; and Antonio Valiente Romero, “La integración de los imperios ibéricos a través de los memoriales de Lorenzo de Mendoza,” e-Spania. Revue interdisciplinaire d’études hispaniques médiévales et modernes 27 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/e-spania.26788.

25. The Cortes de Tomar stipulated that everything pertaining to Portuguese settlements in the overseas areas would go through Portuguese jurisdictional organs, namely the Cortes of Lisbon and the Council of Portugal. In defense matters, responsibility and financing rested with the Spanish crown, though such commitments weakened with time. See, among others, Fernando Bouza Álvarez, “Portugal en la Monarquía Hispánica (1580–1640): Felipe II, las Cortes de Tomar y la génesis del Portugal Católico” (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1987), 853; Guida Marques, “L'invention du Brésil entre deux monarchies: Gouvernement et pratiques politiques de l'Amérique portugaise dans l'union ibérique (1580–1640)” (PhD diss.: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2009), 348; and Rafael Valladares, Por toda la tierra: España y Portugal: globalización y ruptura (1580–1700) (Lisbon: CHAM, 2016), 201.

26. On how vassals from all social backgrounds proposed new laws, see Adrian Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation,” Hispanic American Historical Review 98:3 (2018): 377–406. On how Madrid encouraged these petitions by offering honors and awards in the expectation that petitioners would include information about what was happening in the peripheries, see Carvalho, “Between Potosí and El Dorado,” 65.

27. Ganson, “Antonio Ruiz de Montoya,” 199–200.

28. Annual letter of 1617, in Iglesia, Cartas anuas de la Provincia del Paraguay, Chile y Tucumán (1615–1637): documentos para la historia argentina, Carlos Leonhardt, ed. (Buenos Aires: Talleres S. A. Casa Jacobo Peuser, 1929), 20:96.

29. Annual letter of 1628, in MCA, 1:270.

30. Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual, chapt. 45, fol. 65.

31. John M. Monteiro, “From Indian to Slave: Forced Native Labour and Colonial Society in São Paulo during the Seventeenth Century,” Slavery & Abolition 9:2 (1988): 109; Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 169.

32. Owensby, New World of Gain, 142. In a classic study, Jaime Cortesão took the pretext of territorial defense at face value. For Cortesão, the Paulistas were interested not only in indigenous slaves, but also in extending the boundaries of Portuguese America to conform to the shape of the imaginary “Island-Brazil.” Many scholars have rejected this thesis, among them John Monteiro, whose greatest contribution was his demonstration that indigenous slaves drove the South Atlantic economy. See Cortesão, Rapôso Tavares e a formac̜ão territorial do Brasil, 37; and Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, 3, 86.

33. Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual, chapt. 35, fol. 46r; Xarque, Vida prodigiosa, 344–345.

34. Alencastro, O trato dos viventes, 193–194.

35. The cabildo of Villa Rica also gives the figure of 100,000 enslaved natives, but its report is from 1632. Certificate of the cabildo of Villa Rica, September 10, 1632, AGI, Charcas, 120, fol. 78.

36. Pedro Esteban Dávila to the king, October 12, 1637, Buenos Aires, AGI, Charcas, 113, in HCJPP, 1:547.

37. Testimony of Simón Maceta in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica del Espíritu Santo, AGI, Charcas, 7, fol. 4v; Francisco Vázquez Truxillo to the king, June 12, 1632, Buenos Aires, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 7, no. 162.

38. Daños que han hecho los portugueses de la Villa de San Pablo del Brasil a los indios de la provincia del Paraguay y su remedio, in Conde de Chinchón to the king, May 24, 1632, AGI, Lima, 43, Gobierno Secular, no. 19.

39. Memorial of Juan Baptista Ferrufino, procurator general [1634], AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 7, no. 162.

40. Royal cédula to the governor of the Río de la Plata, September 16, 1639, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 279, fol. 4r. Monteiro considered this figure exaggerated. According to his estimates, the average number of enslaved natives owned by each Paulista master was 22 in the 1620s and 37 in the 1640s. Monteiro, “From Indian to Slave,” 109.

41. Relación de los agravios, by Justo Mansilla and Simón Maceta, October 10, 1629, Salvador, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 7, fol. 5r; Fernanda Sposito, “Santos, heróis ou demônios? Sobre as relações entre índios, jesuítas e colonizadores na América Meridional (São Paulo e Paraguai/ Rio da Prata, séculos XVI-XVII)” (PhD diss.: Universidade de São Paulo, 2013), 271. Owensby uses the term “middle passage” in New World of Gain, 140.

42. “S. C. R. M., El doctor L. de M., prelado, con jurisdicción y oficio,” [Memorial of Lourenço de Mendonça,] 1638, Madrid, British Library [hereafter BL], 1324.i.9(14), fol. 2r.

43. Relación de los agravios, Mansilla and Maceta.

44. Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual, chapt. 35, fols. 46v–47r.

45. Simón Maceta to Francisco Crespo, December 13, 1629, Salvador, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 8, no. 177.

46. More details about the Jesuits’ stay in Brazil are in Taunay, Historia geral, 2:90–113.

47. “Auto,” Diogo Luís de Oliveira, Salvador, September 27, 1629, in MCA, 1:306–309.

48. Simón Maceta to Francisco Crespo, December 13, 1629, Salvador, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 8, no. 177; Taunay, Historia geral, 2:107.

49. Testimony of Simón Maceta in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fols. 3v–4r. Moreover, Pernambuco had just been conquered by the Dutch, and the Jesuits considered it unlikely that a royal official would enter into conflict with vassals from other captaincies. Simón Maceta to Francisco Crespo, May 12, 1630, Rio de Janeiro, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 8, no. 177.

50. Taunay, Historia geral, 2:109–113; Jurandir Coronado Aguilar, Conquista espiritual: A história da evangelização na Provincia Guairá na obra de Antônio Ruiz de Montoya, S.I. (1585–1652) (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2002), 267.

51. Simón Maceta to Francisco Crespo, December 13, 1629, Salvador, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 8, no. 177. The predominantly Protestant French port city of La Rochelle sided with the English during the reign of Louis XIII. In 1628, Richelieu managed to subdue the city after a 15-month siege. According to Adriana Romeiro, Jesuits Maceta, Mansilla, Ruiz de Montoya, and Díaz Taño helped construct an image of the Paulistas as rebellious subjects and semi-heretics that persisted well into the eighteenth century. See Adriana Romeiro, Paulistas e emboabas no coração das Minas: Ideias, práticas e imaginário político no século XVIII (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2008), 228.

52. Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual, chapt. 38, fol. 50r.

53. Annual letter of 1629, in Iglesia, Cartas Anuas de la Provincia del Paraguay, Chile y Tucumán, 730.

54. Sposito, “Santos, heróis ou demônios?,” 282. See also Carlos Ernesto Romero Jensen, El Guairá: caída y éxodo (Asunción: Academia Paraguaya de la Historia, 2009), 234.

55. Ganson, “Antonio Ruiz de Montoya,” 205.

56. Testimonies according to the petition of Simón Maceta and Justo Mansilla, September 17, 1629, Salvador, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 8, no. 177.

57. Testimony of Simón Maceta in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fol. 5v.

58. Pedro Esteban Dávila to the king, October 12, 1637, AGI, Charcas, 113, in HCJPP, 1:547.

59. Memorial by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 1638, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu [hereafter ARSI], Paraq., 11, fols. 133r–134v.

60. “Informe de Manuel Juan de Morales de las cosas de San Pablo y maldades de sus moradores hecho a Su Majestad por un Manuel Juan Morales de la misma villa,” 1636, in MCA, 1:186.

61. El padre Francisco Crespo de la Compañía de Jesús; and consultation of the Council of the Indies, 1631, AGI, Charcas, 7.

62. “Petición del P. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya,” 1639, Madrid, in MCA, 3:296.

63. Informe del Consejo de Indias, October 14, 1638, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, no. 14, doc. 348.

64. See Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual, chapt. 7, fol. 9r; and Saeger, “Survival and Abolition,” 60.

65. “Respuesta que dieron los Indios a las reales provisiones,” August 25, 1630, San Ignacio, in MCA, 1:354. Emphasis added.

66. Testimony of Simón Maceta in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fol. 4v.

67. Vilardaga, “São Paulo na órbita,” 230.

68. Testimony of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, April 28, 1631, in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fol. 13v.

69. Francisco Vázquez Truxillo to the king, June 12, 1632, Buenos Aires, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 7, no. 162.

70. Diego Marín de Negrón to the king, January 8, 1612, Buenos Aires, AGI, Charcas, 112. Some Portuguese married in Spanish cities and remained there. In 1629, Governor Céspedes Xería demanded that the Portuguese residing in Paraguay declare whether they were married or not. Some 22 Portuguese appeared, of whom 15 were married (six in Asunción, five in Villa Rica, two in Maracayú, one in Ciudad Real, and one in Xerez). This picture was far from complete: Céspedes published a decree targeting those in the Paraná River valley at that time: “Auto del gobernador sobre los que han entrado por la vía de San Pablo para que se manifiesten,” February 26, 1619, Maracayú, in AMP, 2:183–187. Marriage connections between residents of São Paulo and those of Ciudad Real and Villa Rica date back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1600, for example, Baltazar Fernandes married María de Zúñiga in Villa Rica; they lived together in the city for some time and had a daughter. Antônio Rodrigues Cabral also found his wife Joana de Escobar in Guairá; the daughter of this union married María de Zúñiga's brother and migrated to São Paulo. These family connections undoubtedly facilitated the slave trade, information exchanges, and the flow of goods and people between São Paulo and Paraguay. Residents of Ciudad Real and Villa Rica took advantage of their family ties to migrate to São Paulo when the Guairá finally collapsed in the 1630s. See Aracy A. Amaral, A hispanidade em São Paulo: Da casa rural à Capela de Santo Antônio (São Paulo: Livraria Nobel, 1981), 13–15; and Vilardaga, “São Paulo na órbita do império dos Felipes,” 209–210, 234–238, 253, 260–261.

71. Juan Bautista de Irazabal to the rector of the Colegio of Asunción, May 20, 1633, Maracayú, AGI, Charcas, 120.

72. Originarios were Guaraní rebels or individuals from independent groups captured in war. Their situation was similar to slavery, except that their sale was forbidden. Francisco de Alfaro, in Paraguay from 1610 to 1612 to reform the encomenderos’ abuses, insisted on transforming the mita into wage labor and abolishing the encomienda originaria, but in both cases he met local resistance. See Gandía, Francisco de Alfaro, 520; Morales, “Los comienzos de la reducciones,” 121–122; and James S. Saeger, “Warfare, Reorganization, and Readaptation at the Margins of Spanish Rule: The Chaco and Paraguay (1573–1882),” in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3: South America, Part 2, Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 270.

73. Testimonies of Alonso (a Guaraní native), Miguel Lopes, and Andrés Bernal de Mercado, March 10 and 18, 1632, Asunción, in “Residencia de Luis de Céspedes,” AGI, Escribanía de Cámara, 892A, fols. 479r–481v, 480v, 485r.

74. Charles R. Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1686 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 96; José Luis Mora Merida, Historia social de Paraguay, 1600–1650 (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1973), 251–259; Alencastro, O trato dos viventes, 199–204.

75. Luis de Céspedes Xería to the king, November 8, 1628, AGI, Charcas, 30, r. 1, no. 1; Taunay, Historia geral, 2:9.

76. Testimonio de la petición, November 6, 1628, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 30, r. 1, no. 1, fol. 26v.

77. Testimonio de la instrucción, Luis de Céspedes Xería to Felipe Romero, November 2, 1628, AGI, Charcas, 30, r. 1, no. 1, fol. 38v. The Jesuits responded to this by giving asylum to more Guaraní who, despite their origin, claimed to have been newly brought from their lands to the mission. Regarding Romero's visit to the pueblo of San Francisco Xavier on November 28, 1628, see Romero Jansen, El Guairá, 123.

78. “Petición del procurador,” Francisco de Villalba, November 14, 1628, Villa Rica, and the cabildo of Xerez to the king,” December 28, 1628, in AMP, 2:91–93, 222–223.

79. “Testimonio de una relación de los sucesos ocurridos al gobernador del Paraguay don Luis de Céspedes Xería durante su viaje desde que salió del rio Paranapane,” June 23, 1629, Asunción, in AMP, 1:210.

80. Testimony of Simón Maceta in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fol. 5r.

81. El padre Francisco Crespo de la Compañía de Jesús, and consultation of the Council of the Indies, 1631, AGI, Charcas, 7.

82. “Testimonio de una relación de los sucesos ocurridos al gobernador del Paraguay don Luis de Céspedes Xería,” in AMP, 1:207–212.

83. “Informe hecho por el P. Francisco Díaz Taño de la Compañía de Jesús a la Real Audiencia contra D. Luis de Céspedes Xería,” 1631, in MCA, 1:404–405.

84. Testimony of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, April 28, 1631, in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fol. 15r.

85. Mora Merida, Historia social de Paraguay, 251–259; Coronado Aguilar, Conquista espiritual, 296.

86. Memorial by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 1638, ARSI, Paraq., 11, fols. 133r–134v.

87. Memorial, Ruiz de Montoya, 1638, ARSI, Paraq., 11, fols. 135r–141v.

88. Memorial by Miguel Ruiz de Bustillo, March 1, 1614, Chayanta, AGI, Lima, 144.

89. Daños que han hecho los portugueses de la Villa de San Pablo, in Conde de Chinchón to the king, May 24, 1632, Lima, AGI, Lima, 43, Gobierno Secular, no. 19. The proposal to depopulate São Paulo had reached the Council of Indies years before: in 1616, Buenos Aires Governor Hernando Arias de Saavedra recommended exactly this in view of the recent Paulista slave raids in Guairá: Arias de Saavedra to the king, July 28, 1616, Buenos Aires, in AMP, 2:8–9. I have already mentioned Mastrilli's 1627 proposal.

90. Memorial by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 1638, ARSI, Paraq., 11, fols. 133r–134v.

91. In Portuguese America, a “just war” was a war authorized by royal officials whose legal prerogatives could include the enslavement of natives. Indigenous slavery was permitted in Brazil until 1755, with only three short periods of interdiction (1609 to 1611, 1647 to 1653, and 1680 to 1688). Although the law of July 30, 1609 had unconditionally prohibited indigenous slavery, pressure from colonial sectors led to the law of September 10, 1611, which reaffirmed the “just war” principle as justification for enslaving natives. On this legislation, see Hemming, Red Gold, 314–316; Beatriz Perrone-Moisés, “Índios livres e índios escravos: Os princípios da legislação indigenista do período colonial (séculos XVI e XVIII),” in História dos Índios no Brasil, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ed. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 124–125, 127; and Carlos Alberto de Moura Ribeiro Zeron, Linha de fé: a Companhia de Jesus e a escravidão no processo de formação da sociedade colonial (Brasil, séculos XVI e XVII) (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2011), 233. See transcriptions of these laws in José Oscar Beozzo, Leis e regimentos das missões: Política indigenista no Brasil (São Paulo: Loyola, 1983), 183–187.

92. Memorial, Ruiz de Montoya, 1638, ARSI, Paraq., 11, fols. 135r–141v. On the conversos settled in the captaincy of São Paulo, with valuable information on the converso ancestors of Antonio Raposo Tavares and others, see José Gonçalves Salvador, Os cristãos-novos: Povoamento e conquista do solo brasileiro (1530–1680) (São Paulo: Livraria Pioneira Editora, 1976), 124–153. On anti-converso policies and attitudes in the Society of Jesus, see Maryks's work and the literature cited there: Robert Maryks, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

93. Fray Jerónimo Méndez de Tiedra, “Relación de avisos de cosas del servicio de Dios nuestro señor y de Su Majestad que dice conviene que el Consejo tenga entendido,” 1620, AGI, Charcas, 135.

94. Harry E. Cross, “Commerce and Orthodoxy: A Spanish Response to Portuguese Commercial Penetration in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1580–1640,” The Americas 35:2 (1978): 151; Ana E. Schaposchnik, The Lima Inquisition: The Plight of Crypto-Jews in Seventeenth-Century Peru (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 80.

95. According to Edna Bonacich, “middleman minorities” were usually sojourners whose success placed them in conflict with different sectors of the host society. See Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities,” American Sociological Review 38 (1973): 583–594. Following Bonacich's approach, Saguier showed that local elites’ conflicting interests shaped the experience of the Portuguese in seventeenth-century Buenos Aires: Eduardo R. Saguier, “The Social Impact of a Middleman Minority in a Divided Host Society: The Case of the Portuguese in Early Seventeenth-Century Buenos Aires,” Hispanic American Historical Review 65:3 (1985): 472. On the Peruvian inquisitors’ perception that the Portuguese, in addition to being suspected Jews, monopolized Spanish Atlantic trade, see Ricardo Escobar Quevedo, Inquisición y judaizantes en América española (siglos XVI-XVII) (Bogotá: Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2008), 160.

96. Nathan Wachtel, The Faith of Remembrance: Marrano Labyrinths (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 8–9.

97. Stuart Schwartz, Da América Portuguesa ao Brasil: Estudos históricos, translated by Nuno Mota (Lisbon: Difel, 2003), 188–190.

98. Decreto de Su Majestad con unas consultas del Consejo de la Inquisición sobre la entrada de los de la nación hebrea en el Perú, June 13, 1623, Madrid, AGI, Indiferente General, 615.

99. Memorial del capitán Manuel de Frías sobre la conveniencia de crear un tribunal de Inquisición en Buenos Aires [1619], AGI, Charcas, 7.

100. Report of the General Inquisitor, [1623, Madrid] in Decreto de Su Majestad, Madrid, June 13, 1623, AGI, Indiferente General, 615.

101. Report of the Council of the Inquisition, February 1, 1621, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 7.

102. Council of the Inquisition to the king, March 31, 1623, Madrid, in Decreto de Su Majestad, Madrid, June 13, 1623, AGI, Indiferente General, 615. On the impact of Marcos Teixeira's visitation, see “Copia de una carta que los inquisidores del Pirú,” April 20, 1620, AGI, Charcas, 7.

103. Francisco de Trexo to the Lima Inquisition tribunal, April 22, 1619, Buenos Aires, in Decreto de Su Majestad, June 13, 1623, Madrid, AGI, Indiferente General, 615. See also Kara Danielle Schultz, “‘The Kingdom of Angola is Not Very Far from Here’: The Río de la Plata, Brazil, and Angola, 1580–1680” (PhD diss.: Vanderbilt University, 2016), 33–34.

104. Francisco de Trexo to the Council of the Inquisition, June 15, 1622, Buenos Aires, in Decreto de Su Majestad, June 13, 1623, Madrid, AGI, Indiferente General, 615.

105. Testimony of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, April 28, 1631, in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fol. 13r; Francisco Vázquez Truxillo to the king, June 12, 1632, Buenos Aires, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 7, no. 162.

106. Daños que han hecho los portugueses de la Villa de San Pablo, in Conde de Chinchón to the king, May 24, 1632, Lima, AGI, Lima, 43, Gobierno Secular, n. 19.

107. Testimony of Simón Maceta in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fol. 3r. Justo Mansilla and Simón Maceta had made this point before: Relación de los agravios, October 10, 1629, Salvador, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 7, fol. 2r.

108. Memorial, Ruiz de Montoya, 1638, ARSI, Paraq., 11, fols. 135r–141v.

109. Memorial, Ruiz de Montoya, 1638, ARSI, Paraq., 11, fols. 133r–134v.

110. Testimonies of Justo Mansilla and Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fols. 10r, 13r.

111. Diego de Boroa to the king, January 28, 1637, Uruguay, in MCA, 3:140–141.

112. Cortesão, Rapôso Tavares e a formac̜ão territorial do Brasil, 249–251.

113. Memorial, Ruiz de Montoya, 1638, ARSI, Paraq., 11, fols. 133r–134v.

114. Testimony of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, April 28, 1631, in “El padre Francisco Vázquez Truxillo,” February 25, 1631, Villa Rica, AGI, Charcas, 7, fol. 12v. Supported by English and French allies, the prior of Crato undertook three unsuccessful expeditions to Portugal in an attempt to establish his claim as king. It remains uncertain which of his numerous illegitimate sons was involved in the aforementioned conspiracy.

115. Mendonça, “Por la administración y prelacía eclesiástica del Rio de Janeiro,” Madrid, 1631, BL, C.62.i.19 (56). See also El Doctor Lorenzo de Mendoza, administrador eclesiástico del Río de Janeiro, suplica a V.M., 1631, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 6, doc. 148.

116. Rubert, “O Prelado Lourenço de Mendonça,” 13; Valiente Romero, “La integración.”

117. Consultation of the Council of the Indies, February 12, and September 12, 1631, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 6, doc. 148; Lourenço de Mendonça to the king, April 4, 1636, Rio de Janeiro, AGI, Charcas, 101, no. 61.

118. “Señor. El Doctor Lorenço de Mendoça presbítero, dice: Que ha servido a V.M. por más de quince años,” [1629, Madrid] BL, 1324.i.2 (24).

119. “Memorial a Su Majestad que Dios guarde, en razón de la seguridad de su plata, y armada del Pirú, y de los galeones de Tierra Firme,” [1630, Madrid] BL, 1324.i.5 (8).

120. Mendonça, “Por la administración y prelacía eclesiástica del Rio de Janeiro,” 1631, Madrid, BL, C.62.i.19 (56); “S. C. R. M., El doctor L. de M., prelado, con jurisdicción y oficio,” [Memorial of Lourenço de Mendonça], Madrid, 1638, BL, 1324.i.9(14), fol. 2r. On this page of this second memorial, Mendonça described the violence committed by Portuguese slavers, which he had witnessed in 1625.

121. Informe del Consejo de Indias, October 14, 1638, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, no. 14, doc. 348. See also Curto, “O Padre Lourenço de Mendonça,” 29; and Valiente Romero, “La integración.”

122. In both Iberian empires, in the absence of an Inquisition tribunal, the episcopal office—that is, the bishops—held jurisdiction over heresy. For instance, before the establishment of the tribunals of Lima (1569) and Mexico (1571), an active episcopal inquisition was already in operation. For the case of New Spain, see Richard E. Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 8. Portugal established its first peninsular tribunals in 1536, at Lisbon, Évora, and Coimbra; they were joined in 1560 by the Goan tribunal. Portugal did not create tribunals in Brazil, which remained subject to the Holy Office of Lisbon. Recent research has shown that collaboration between the bishops of Bahia and the Inquisition was ambiguous and sometimes tense. Some bishops in Bahia had suspects arrested and even initiated inquiries. As the inquisitors were extremely zealous in exercising their prerogatives, the bishops soon had to forward the cases to Lisbon. On the ambiguities of these jurisdictions, see Bruno Feitler, “Usos políticos del Santo Oficio portugués en el Atlántico (Brasil y África Occidental). El período filipino,” Hispania Sacra 59:119 (2007): 274–277.

123. Mendonça, “Por la administración y prelacía eclesiástica del Rio de Janeiro,” 1631, Madrid, BL, C.62.i.19 (56). Mendonça certainly had the Jesuits’ support. In a project sent the same year, the procurator Francisco Crespo also noted that, due to the lack of religious in Brazil and the distance of the bishopric of Bahia, candidates went to Buenos Aires to take holy orders. Some remained in Spanish dominions, to the detriment of evangelization efforts in Brazil, while others returned with a good number of indigenous slaves. He also proposed the creation of a bishopric in Rio de Janeiro, or at least that the current prelate (Mendonça) be consecrated (that is, be given episcopal powers), as he “was a person with capacity and letters for this activity.” P. Francisco Crespo, August 22, 1631, Madrid, and Respuesta del fiscal, December 1, 1631, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 7, no. 162.

124. Mendonça, “Por la administración y prelacía eclesiástica del Rio de Janeiro,” BL, C.62.i.19 (56). The author mentioned distances of approximately 1,040 miles (1,673 km) along the coastline and about 780 miles (1,255 km) inland. The coastal distance mentioned is similar to the current coastline of the Brazilian states of Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, which measures around 1,025 miles (1,650 km).

125. Mendonça, “Por la administración y prelacía eclesiástica del Rio de Janeiro,” BL, C.62.i.19 (56).

126. Diego Rodríguez de Valdés y de la Vanda, May 20, 1599, Buenos Aires, AGI, Charcas, 112, no. 13. In 1612 there were also people requesting a strong Habsburg administrative intervention in the governance of Brazil, especially in São Paulo, due to the damage caused by Paulista bandeiras in the Río de la Plata region. A royal official opined that the enslavement of thousands of natives who had been violently taken from missions was intolerable. Diego Marín de Negrón to the king, January 8, 1612, Buenos Aires, AGI, Charcas, 112.

127. Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, 27–28; Perrone-Moisés, “Índios livres e índios escravos,” 124–127.

128. Royal cédula to Francisco de Céspedes, September 12, 1628, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 5, no. 114.

129. Consejo de Indias: dize lo que se le oferece sobre lo que refiere el D.or Lorenzo de Mendoza, September 30, 1631, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 6, no. 148.

130. Lourenço de Mendonça, “Suplicación a Su Majestad Católica del Rey nuestro señor, que Dios guarde. Ante sus Reales Consejos de Portugal y de las Indias, en defensa de los Portugueses,” 1630, Madrid, BL, 8042.c.31. See Cardim's remarks on the theme of the union of all for the defense of the monarchy in Mendonça's writings: Pedro Cardim, “‘Todos los que no son de Castilla son yguales’. El estatuto de Portugal en la Monarquía española en el tiempo de Olivares,” Pedralbes: Revista d'Història Moderna 28 (2008): 535, 542. Olivares advocated integrative policies that would lead Portuguese and Catalans over time to identify themselves as Spanish as well. His 1626 Union of Arms project recommended the creation of a reserve army of 140,000 men, for which each province would provide a specific proportion. Commenting on Portuguese and Catalan opposition to the Union of Arms, Elliott wrote: “The backslidings of the Portuguese only served to confirm Olivares's belief that they must be integrated into the Spanish Monarchy at the first possible opportunity.” See John H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598–1640) (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 204–205, 514 (quotation). Defending the rights of the Portuguese in Peru did not mean opening the doors of the Spanish domains to more Portuguese. Mendonça made this distinction clear. In 1636, for example, he expressed his concerns about the concession of Rio de Janeiro's government to Salvador Correia de Sá, who was married in Tucumán, fearing that “this would lead to the complete opening of this forbidden communication.” Madrid granted the government to Correia de Sá anyway (Lourenço de Mendonça to the king, April 4, 1636, Rio de Janeiro, AGI, Charcas, 101, no. 61).

131. “S. C. R. M., El doctor L. de M., prelado, con jurisdicción y oficio,” [Memorial of Lourenço de Mendonça,] 1638, Madrid, BL, 1324.i.9(14), fol. 4r.

132. On the disputes between Mendonça and local elites over indigenous slavery, see José Mauricio Saldanha Álvarez, “‘Foi público e notório para toda a gente’: Arte no teatro da política portuguesa no Rio de Janeiro colonial, 1630–1641,” Portuguese Studies Review 12:2 (2004–2005): 148; and Carlos Ziller Camenietzki, “Mil ódios contra si. D. Lourenço de Mendonça, bispo eleito do Rio de Janeiro, seu combate à escravidão indígena, sua deposição e seu destino entre duas monarquias,” Topoi 19 (2018): 161–163.

133. Rouillon Arróspide, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 289.

134. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya to Diego de Boroa [1640], Archivo General de la Nación Argentina, Buenos Aires [hereafter AGN], Jesuitas [?], quoted in Pablo Hernández, “Un misionero jesuita del Paraguay en la Corte de Felipe IV,” Razón y Fe 33 (1912): 75–76.

135. Junta sobre los memoriales de Francisco Díez Taño y Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, March 29, 1639, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 7.

136. Ruiz de Montoya to Boroa [1640], AGN, Jesuitas [?], quoted by Hernández, “Un misionero jesuita,” 216; Junta, March 29, 1639, AGI, Charcas, 7. Mendonça's approval is dated May 16, 1639, and is included in the book itself.

137. While in Madrid, Ruiz de Montoya also published his linguistic works: Tesoro de la lengua Guaraní (1639), Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Guaraní (1640), and Catechismo en lengua Guaraní (1640). See Fernando Bouza Álvarez, “El arbitrio de la hierba ‘provechosa’ del Paraguay de 1637: experiencia y práctica en la construcción de saberes locales de Indias a través del Atlántico,” Anos 90 24:45 (2017): 75.

138. Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual. It was printed on the Royal Press in 1639.

139. Ruiz de Montoya to Boroa, 1640, AGN, Jesuitas [?], quoted by Hernández, “Un misionero jesuita,” 216.

140. Royal cédula to the governor of the Río de la Plata, September 16, 1639, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 279.

141. The list also mentioned Sebastián de Peralta, Diego Guillermo, Diego Dorrego, Fulano Ponce, Francisco Sánchez, and Pedro Domínguez. The reference to the religious who accompanied the bandeirantes is consistent with the Jesuits’ denunciations. In his memorial sent the previous year, Ruiz de Montoya recalled that the chaplain of the bandeira of 1636 was from a regular order (which he did not mention) and that he was assigned part of the booty corresponding to 500 souls. Memorial by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 1638, ARSI, Paraq., 11, fols. 133r–134v.

142. Relación de fray Andrés de San Pedro sobre las exploraciones franciscanas sobre el río Napo [c. 1637], General Archive of the Order of the Friars Minor, Rome, M-42, no. 5, fols. 151v–152r; Alonso Pérez de Salazar to the king, November 18, 1638, Quito, Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon, 51-v-41, fol. 3r. On his return trip to Brazil, Teixeira established a Portuguese landmark on the Napo River that would become the source of demarcation conflicts in the eighteenth century. For more on these encounters, see José Rumazo González, La región amazónica del Ecuador en el siglo XVI (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1946), 255–261.

143. Señor, en el consejo se ha leído una carta del gobernador de Caracas, 1639, AGI, Indiferente General, 761.

144. Ruiz de Montoya to Boroa [1640], AGN, Jesuitas [?], quoted by Hernández, “Un misionero jesuita,” 76.

145. Memorial of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, [November 8,] 1644, Lima, in “Provisión del Gobierno de Lima,” January 19, 1646, AGI, Charcas, 282, fols. 10r–13v.

146. “Copia de un memorial que presentó en la Corte de España el P. Antonio Ruiz [de Montoya], por el cual pide se visiten las reducciones,” 1639, and “Copia de la petición del P. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya hecha a Su Majestad suplicando por el remedio,” 1640, in MCA, 1:430–433 and 1:433–434, respectively; Memorial of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, in royal decree to the Count of Castrillo, September 15, 1641, Madrid, AGI, Indiferente General, 620. As early as December 20, 1640, Philip IV ordered the junta that had examined Ruiz de Montoya's memorials to reassemble in light of the Portuguese rebellion and the new proposals made by the Jesuit procurator. With the exception of Palafox (replaced by Francisco de Alfaro), the aforementioned members reconvened and presented their report to the king in Consulta del Consejo de Indias, January 17, 1641, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 11, no. 285.

147. Diego de Boroa to the king, January 28, 1637, Uruguay,; Boroa to other Jesuit priests, March 4, 1637, Corpus; and Boroa to the Society of Jesus's general, April 10, 1637, Santa Fé, in MCA, 3:139–141, 3:143–148, and 3:153–161, respectively.

148. In reality, the Jesuits had been arming the Guaraní since at least 1611. In 1618, they sent 100 firearms to the Guairá. Asunción cabildo to the governor of Paraguay, March 21, 1618, in MCA, 1:160–161. Recent studies have shown that the Guaraní viewed the Jesuits as armaments suppliers in a context of sustained violence. Svriz Wucherer shows that the Guaraní used these weapons not only to defend themselves against the Paulistas but also to assert themselves against other indigenous groups in the region. See Pedro Miguel Omar Svriz Wucherer, Resistencia y negociación: milicias guaraníes, jesuitas y cambios socioeconómicos en la frontera del imperio global hispánico (ss. XVII-XVIII) (Rosario: Prohistoria, 2019), 160–194. See also Austin, Colonial Kinship, 105–107.

149. Ecclesiastical cabildo of Asunción to the viceroy of Lima, March 18, 1639, in MCA, 3:267–271. See also Memorial of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 1643, AGI, Charcas, 7, in Pablo Hernández, Organización social de las doctrinas guaraníes de la Compañía de Jesús (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1913), 2:620.

150. Ecclesiastical cabildo of Asunción to the viceroy of Lima, March 18, 1639, in MCA, 3:267–271.

151. “Informe, hecho en favor de los Indios y de la justificación con que usan de las armas de fuego,” 1639; and “Informe sobre la justificación con que los Indios de las reducciones del Paraná y Uruguay que están a cargo de los padres de la Compañía de Jesús usan para su defensa de armas de fuego,” 1639, in MCA, 3:303–314 and 3:315–326, respectively.

152. The battle is described in “Relación de la guerra que tuvieron los Indios contra los Portugueses del Brasil, escrita por el P. Claudio Ruyer,” San Nicolás, April 6, 1641, in MCA, 3:345–368. Francisco Díaz Taño provided the number of Paulista troops in Díaz Taño to Diego de Montiel, November 9, 1641, in HCJPP 2:61. For more details on this battle, see Taunay, Historia geral, 2:336 and following pages.

153. Ganson, “Antonio Ruiz de Montoya,” 206.

154. “Copia de la petición del P. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya hecha a Su Majestad suplicando por el remedio,” 1640, in MCA, 1:433–434; Memorial of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Lima, [November 8] 1644, in “Provisión del Gobierno de Lima,” January 19, 1646, AGI, Charcas, 282, fols. 10r–13v.

155. Royal cédula to the viceroy of Peru, November 21, 1642, Zaragoza, in Hernández, Organización social, 1:525–526; “Provisión del Gobierno de Lima,” January 19, 1646, AGI, Charcas, 282.

156. Memorial of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Lima, [November 8,] 1644, in “Provisión del Gobierno de Lima,” January 19, 1646, AGI, Charcas, 282, fols. 10r–13v.

157. Testimony of Miguel Vidal, in “Servicios que los indios del Paraná y Uruguay están haciendo a S.M.,” Buenos Aires, January 9, 1644, AGI, Charcas, 119, fol. 303r.

158. Victoria contra los guaycurús y castigo grande [1644], AGI, Charcas, 119, fol. 330r. Svriz Wucherer has examined the intermittent conflicts between the Guaraní and other native groups. See Resistencia y negociación, 251–262.

159. Testimony of Miguel Vidal, in “Servicios que los indios del Paraná y Uruguay están haciendo a S.M.,” Buenos Aires, January 9, 1644, AGI, Charcas, 119, fol. 303r.

160. See, among others, Wilde, Religión y poder, 79–86, 164–168; María Laura Salinas and Pedro Miguel Omar Svriz Wucherer, “Liderazgo guaraní en tiempos de paz y de guerra. Los caciques en las reducciones franciscanas y jesuíticas, siglos XVII y XVIII,” Revista de Historia Militar 110:6 (2011): 130–145; and Kazuhisa Takeda, “Cambio y continuidad del liderazgo indígena en el cacicazgo y en la milicia de las misiones jesuíticas: análisis cualitativo de las listas de indios guaraníes,” Tellus 23 (2014): 59–79.

161. Mercedes Avellaneda and Lía Quarleri, “Las milicias guaraníes en el Paraguay y Río de la Plata: alcances y limitaciones (1649–1756),” Estudos Ibero-Americanos 33:1 (2007): 113–114, 118–121. Avellaneda has also studied the intervention of Guaraní militias in Paraguay's Revolt of the Comuneros. See Mercedes Avellaneda, Guaraníes, criollos y jesuitas: luchas de poder en las revoluciones comuneras del Paraguay, siglos XVII y XVIII (Asunción: Tiempo de Historia, 2014).

162. Felipe Rexe Corvalán, Governor of Paraguay, “Del proceder de los Indios en ocasiones del Real Servicio,” April 13, 1680, AGI, Charcas, 131, fol. 106.

163. Memorial of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, in a royal decree to the Count of Castrillo, September 15, 1641, Madrid, AGI, Indiferente General, 620.

164. Ricardo de Lafuente Machain, Los portugueses en Buenos Aires: siglo XVII (Madrid: Tip. de Archivos, 1931), 250.

165. Consulta del Consejo de Indias, January 17, 1641, Madrid, AGI, Charcas, 2, r. 11, no. 285. See also Decreto de S.M. con un memorial del P.e Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, February 7, 1642, Madrid; and Consultation of the Council of the Indies, March 10, 1642, both in AGI, Charcas, 7.

166. “Copia de un memorial que presentó en la Corte de España el P. Antonio Ruiz [de Montoya], por el cual pide se visiten las reducciones,” 1639, in MCA, 1:430–433.

167. Royal cédula, April 7, 1643, Madrid, AGI, Buenos Aires, 2, libro 5, fols. 304v–306r; also in HCJPP 2:77–78.

168. Memorial to the viceroy of Peru by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Lima, before March 16, 1649, AGI, Charcas, 120, fol. 291v [167v].

169. Ganson, “Antonio Ruiz de Montoya,” 207, 210.

170. Memorial of Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 1643, AGI, Charcas, 7, in Hernández, Organización social, 2:620–639.

Figure 0

Figure 1 Portuguese Incursions and the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay in the Early Seventeenth CenturySource: Own elaboration adapted from John Manuel Monteiro, Negros da terra: índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994), 13; Brian Philip Owensby, New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021), 132; and Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Atlas Histórico do Brasil, https://atlas.fgv.br/marcos/igreja-catolica-e-colonizacao/mapas/missoes-jesuitas-na-bacia-do-paraguai. Artwork by Sanjay Dutt.