Some Reflections on Antonio Vieira: Seventeenth-Century Troubleshooter and

Troublemaker
Author(s): Dauril Alden
Source: Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 40, No. 1, Special Issue: António Vieira and the Luso-
Brazilian Baroque (Summer, 2003), pp. 7-16
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3513899
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Some Reflections on Antonio Vieira: Seventeenth-Century
Troubleshooter and Troublemaker

Dauril Alden

It was a privilege to lead off this important conference. As the author of a biograph
Charles R. Boxer, I was especially pleased to be on the campus of Yale University
institution where Boxer seems to have been happiest during his teaching and lecturin
in the United States, and in the city where he was married for a second time in
Twenty-three years later, in 1968, when he was contemplating a tempting offer to jo
University's distinguished History Department, he jotted down a daunting memoran
entitled "Scheme of Work, 1968-197?," i.e., of projects that he expected to complete
the next few years. Those projects included a short biography of Ant6nio Vieira, 1608
then under contract with the University of California Press. Boxer had been prepar
write that biography since the late 1940s and, as he customarily did, had been augm
his library with primary sources that he would need for that project. He also wrote
promising articles on Vieira, one concerning his significance in the seventeenth-cen
Portuguese world and the other examining his role in the creation of an apparatus that
defend Brazil's vital sugar trade against further depredations by the Dutch. But
drafting a promising chapter outline and a typically lucid preface, he never wrote th
contemplated biography. As a result, we still lack an English-language life of
remarkably contentious Jesuit, although we now possess Professor Thomas Cohen's in
analysis of Vieira's theological perspectives. In addition, there a series of arresting e
concerning various aspects of Vieira's long life recently appeared in a lavishly illust
special issue of the Portuguese review Oceanos. (See Select Bibliography for citatio
the limited space allotted to me I intend to focus upon certain features ofVieira's car
troubleshooter and troublemaker and to put some of his experiences within what I ho
be perceived as meaningful contexts.
As is well known, Ant6nio Vieira was born in Lisbon on 6 February 1608. He wa
eldest son of Crist6vao Vieira Ravasco, who hailed from Santarem, and Lisbon-born
de Azevedo. Both have been described as persons of humble birth, although I suspec
the extent of their modest origins may have been exaggerated. The father, after all,
important clerkship at the royal palace and subsequently would occupy a similar posi
the newly created High Court of Bahia, established in Brazil's first colonial c
Salvador, in 1609.
A few years after assuming that position Vieira Ravasco moved his family to Bah
was there that fifteen-year-old Ant6nio Vieira became a novice in the local Jesuit c
the first of the three colleges that the Society of Jesus had thus far established in its pr
of Brazil. Soon thereafter he was in trouble, though not of his own making.

Luso-Brazilian Review, XXXX I 0024-7413/01/007

? 2003 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Wisconsin System

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8 Luso-Brazilian Review, 40/1

In early May 1624 a powerful Dutch force sailed into All Saints Bay and quickly gained
control of Brazil's capital city. Members of the Jesuit college were among those who fled
Salvador. While some were captured by the Dutch and were sent to Holland, Vieira escaped
that fate and probably utilized his recently acquired knowledge of the common Indian
tongue, the lingua geral, to encourage Indian resistance to the Dutch. Less than a year later
he and his companions rejoiced when a Luso-Spanish expedition overwhelmed the Dutch
intruders and recovered the city shortly before expected Dutch reinforcements arrived.
Having completed his two-year novitiate, Vieira took his first vows and pledged to devote
himself to the spiritual welfare of Brazil's indigenous and African-born peoples. Soon after
he was transferred to the Jesuit college in Olinda, Perambuco, to assume responsibility for a
course in rhetoric.
Before departing Bahia for Pernambuco, however, Vieira completed his famous carta
annua of 1626, sent to father-general Mutio Vitelleschi (1615-45). In that state-of-the-
Society in the Brazil province report, Vieira followed the customary form of summarizing
the number and grade of the province's members and its students who resided in the three
colleges, as well as of its six houses of instruction and thirteen missions. He also discussed
the recent demise of notable Jesuits, including Fernao Cardim, but he quietly passed over the
troubling fact that there were significantly fewer Jesuits serving in Brazil in 1626 than there
had been at the beginning of the century. The major thrust of Vieira's report concerned the
Dutch intrusion and the Hollanders' partial destruction of the Jesuit college and their
subsequent expulsion, a victory that he was certain was achieved with the aid of the deity.
What is particularly significant about Vieira's summary account, the first of a vast number of
papers that he wrote, is not only its comprehensiveness but also the fact that his superiors
entrusted such an important assignment to such a youthful member of the order.
Relatively little is known about Vieira's next eight years, save that he continued his
philosophical and theological studies in Salvador, where he was ordained in December 1634;
that he served for a time in missions in the peripheral lands of the great Bahian bay, the
Rec6ncavo; and that he became an admired orator because of his passionate patriotic
sermons, not only against Dutch heretics but also on behalf of "Philip the Great "(Philip IV,
1621-65) during that Spanish ruler's initial campaign to suppress the Catalan rebels in 1640.
Yet when word of the Lisbon-based December revolution against Spanish rule in the
Portuguese world and on behalf of Portugal's newly proclaimed sovereign, John IV (1640-
56) reached Bahia, the viceroy selected Vieira as one of the colony's three delegates sent to
the kingdom to congratulate the new monarch upon his achievement and to assure him of
Brazil's loyalty to the new regime. However, when the ship bearing Vieira and his two
companions-the viceroy's son and Fr. Simao de Vasconcelos, an experienced Jesuit
administrator and chronicler-reached the Lusitanian port of Penich in late April 1641, he
experienced the first of several detentions, in this case caused by a mob that believed the trio
represented the discredited Spanish regime.
Once liberated, Vieira was welcomed in Lisbon by the new king with whom he quickly
developed a close personal relationship. Much has been made of John's reliance upon Vieira
for advice, spiritual counsel, and troubleshooting, but it is well to remember that in the
1640s the condition of the new sovereign and his kingdom was precarious. Not only was the
kingdom bereft of significant land or sea forces or adequate financial resources, not only was
the empire in shambles after repeated assaults by Iberian foes, but the monarch himself
became the target of a serious conspiracy whose aim was to restore the rejected Spanish
regime. Its leaders included the archbishop of Braga, two bishops, a duke, a marquis,
members of the supreme court of appeals, and prominent New Christian businessmen. The
plot was exposed in late July 1641 and a month later several notables were beheaded; others

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Alden 9

were hanged, drawn, and quartered and still others, including Portugal's inquisitor general,
were imprisoned.
Although members of several religious orders were implicated in this widespread
conspiracy, not a single Jesuit was involved. It is therefore not surprising that John IV turned
to Jesuits to serve as court preachers, confessors, consultants, patriotic pamphleteers, and as
secret emissaries. Thus he dispatched Jesuits abroad to evaluate the loyalty of key colonial
officials such as Rio de Janeiro's Salvador Correia de Sa who had been appointed by the
former Spanish regime. Other Jesuits contacted the Catalan rebels and the ruler of Kongo, in
both cases apparently to negotiate military alliances against common foes.
The quest for allies failed and so did several embassies that Ant6nio Vieira undertook to
Holland and France between 1646 and 1648. On the first he assumed the disguise of a
colorfully attired lay adventurer but that did not prevent him from being captured-for the
first but not the last time-by pirates and put ashore in Dover, England. The purpose of
Vieira's two special missions to Amsterdam was to persuade the Dutch who had conquered
much of northeastern Brazil between 1630 and 1654 to return all (or part) of the occupied
territory in exchange for Portugal's recognition of their right to possess the sugar-rich
captaincy of Pernambuco. In France he tried to arrange the marriage of the king's eldest son,
D. Theodosio, to the daughter of a French duke who would serve as regent of the kingdom
while John withdrew to reside in Portugal's Atlantic islands. But neither the Dutch nor the
French were interested in such proposals and a frustrated Vieira even recommended that the
Portuguese government attempt to bribe members of the Estates General to achieve peace.
Vieira also traveled to Rome to try to arrange another marriage for D. Theod6sio, this time
with a Spanish princess, in order to bring about a cessation of the costly war with Spain. As
a troubleshooter Antonio Vieira proved to be a failure because his kingdom did not enjoy
much of a bargaining position.
Although those setbacks did not diminish Vieira's stature within the kingdom, another
measure with which he became intimately associated initiated his prolonged and celebrated
conflict with the Holy Office of the Inquisition. For much of its history the Society of Jesus
maintained close ties with the three branches of the Portuguese Holy Office but in the middle
decades of the seventeenth century, when the secular church of Portugal was conspicuously
weak because of the suspension of diplomatic relations between the kingdom and Rome and
because of its leaders' involvement in the 1641 conspiracy, the Inquisition and the Society
became serious competitors for royal favor. Initially they clashed in the early 1640s over a
minor dispute between the Holy Office and the Jesuit university in the city of Evora. While
Vieira had nothing to do with that controversy, he was closely involved in the next dispute,
which concerned royal guarantees proposed for stockholders of the new trading company
established in 1649 to safeguard Portugal's trade with Brazil.
As already mentioned, John IV inherited an empire in peril. In the East the once
lucrative commercial emporium of Malacca had fallen to the Dutch who tightly blockaded
the port of Goa, nerve center of the eastern empire, and menaced Portuguese shipping
between Mozambique and Macau. In the West the Hollanders controlled Northeastern Brazil
and for a time the slave colony of Angola. Despite the success of the unauthorized guerrilla
land war against Dutch positions in Brazil, beginning in 1645, the Dutch continued to
dominate the vital Atlantic shipping routes and captured more than 200 Portuguese vessels
sailing between the kingdom and the remaining Brazilian ports in 1647-48. The ships that
the Dutch missed were harried between the Azores and the Portuguese mainland by hostile
North African corsairs operating out of the ports of Algiers and Sale, which was adjacent to
Rabat, Morocco. Against the thousands of fighting ships their maritime enemies possessed,
the Portuguese crown, according to informed French intelligence reports, had but a score of
vessels. They ranged from the 1,400-ton Bom Jests to the 60-ton frigate Santa Ana Maria.

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10 Luso-Brazilian Review, 40/1

Vieira recognized that unless the indispensable sugar traffic from Brazil to Portugal
could be adequately defended the kingdom itself could not long survive. He also knew that
significant amounts of investment capital lay in the hands of New Christian merchants within
the kingdom and that they were correspondents of dispersed Jewish mercantile communities
in the major seaports of the Mediterranean and the North Sea, including Marseilles, Livoro,
Tunis, Algiers, Sa6l, Bordeaux, London, and Amsterdam. If such capitalists could be
persuaded to invest in a trading firm modeled on the successful Dutch and English East India
Companies, and if that firm assumed responsibility for the protection of Brazil's sugar fleets,
Portugal could survive.
From his contacts with the New Christian community, Ant6nio Vieira also knew that its
members were reluctant to invest in such a venture as long as there was the threat that their
assets and their persons might be seized on trumped-up charges by one of the three
Portuguese tribunals of the Holy Office. In proposing the formation of the Brazil Company,
as he had repeatedly done since 1643, Vieira therefore urged John IV to exempt prospective
investors from confiscation by the Inquisition, even those convicted of serious lapses
including the crimes of heresy, Judaism, and apostasy.
But the Inquisition, evidently with the support of many Old Christians in the kingdom,
vigorously and persistently opposed granting such protection to the New Christians. Its
officers managed to delay the formation of the company for some months. In the end,
however, John IV adamantly insisted that the conditions be met. The Brazil Company
commenced operations in 1649 and, as Vieira had hoped, the new armed convoys greatly
helped to reduce further shipping losses. In 1654 the last Dutch flag on Brazilian soil was
lowered, in part because of a shift in Dutch overseas priorities. By then Ant6nio Vieira had
turned his back on Europe and had become a full-fledged missionary, having survived an
unusual directive to terminate his affiliation with the Society of Jesus.
By the end of the 1640s Vieira had become a marked man. Many conservative
Catholics in the kingdom strongly opposed the concessions the crown granted New
Christians and seemingly held Vieira responsible for persuading the king to sanction them.
In addition, Vieira became involved in a serious fraternal dispute within the Portuguese
province of the Society of Jesus. That dispute centered on a proposal to divide the province
between the southern houses, extending from the Algarve to Evora and Lisbon and a second
province to embrace the rest of the kingdom. This bitter controversy, which aroused strong
sentiments in Jesuit facilities throughout the kingdom, had its counterparts elsewhere in the
Society, in Sicily for example, and resembled the sentiment in favor of political
fragmentation that currently exists in many parts of the world. It may seem surprising that
Vieira sided with the separatists of the 1640s. He did so, it appears, not out of personal
conviction but simply because his royal patron, John IV, who hailed from Braganca in
eastern Portugal, a leading separatist center, was an ardent, indeed an intractable, supporter
of the creation of a second Portuguese province.
Vieira's advocacy of exemptions for New Christian investors and his participation in
the separatist quarrel caused serious concern among Jesuit leaders in Rome. They therefore
took the extraordinary step of ordering him to resign from the Society and instructed him to
join another religious order. To understand their position it is important to recognize that
during the late 1640s and the early 1650s the Society of Jesus lacked the experienced sort of
leadership that had long guided it. From 1581 until 1645 only two fathers-general-Claudio
Aquaviva and Mutio Vitelleschi-directed the Society, but between 1645 and 1652 the order
was led by a succession of four short-lived, insecure fathers-general. Those four looked to
Pope Innocent X for direction. But both Innocent X and his immediate successors were
reluctant to recognize Portugal's independence until Spain agreed to do so. Consequently,
from the Roman headquarters' perspective Vieira's apparent meddling in inappropriate

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Alden 11

matters became an embarrassment to the Society, which favored a reconciliation between the
two Iberian kingdoms and the repair of its own public image of serenity and confidence. But
John IV, sometimes perceived as a vacillating monarch, staunchly defended Ant6nio Vieira
and insisted that the directive requiring his resignation be withdrawn. It was and the matter
was soon forgotten.
Meanwhile, Vieira, having seen enough of political intrigues in European courts,
achieved his longstanding ambition to lead a group of missionaries to Brazil, specifically to
the Amazon. The Jesuits had long been interested in evangelizing throughout greater
Amazonia. One ofVieira's predecessors, Fr. Luis Figueira, had led the way. In January 1607
Figueira became one of the first two Jesuits to make contact with the Tapuia Indians of Ceara
but the times were not propitious to establish a mission among them. In 1636 he spent six
months traveling throughout the lower Amazon and became convinced that the abundant
Indian tribesmen would be receptive to Christianity. Not until 1643 was Figueira able to lead
a contingent of 17 Jesuits to the Amazon. As their vessel neared the island of Maraj6, it was
swamped by a massive storm: all but three of the Jesuits perished and by 1649 even they had
been killed as a result of an Indian uprising.
Despite such setbacks, both the king and the Society's leaders were determined to
reestablish a Jesuit presence in what was then defined as the State of Maranhao, which
included the Amazon river and its peripheries. In 1652 eleven Jesuits arrived in the State,
precursors of nearly 50 who would sail there during the 1650s. Their leader was Ant6nio
Vieira, equipped with authority to establish missions wherever he deemed them to be
appropriate. In the course of the next nine years Vieira and his colleagues founded 54
missions and claimed to have reached 200,000 souls. Vieira himself traveled the length of
the great river by foot and by canoe and personally undertook a difficult evangelical
campaign among hostile Indians residing on the island of Maraj6, an operation reminiscent
of Fr. Bartolome de las Casas's famous mission to the land of war in southern Mexico a
century earlier.
But not everyone applauded the Jesuits' efforts, certainly not the settlers. In a series of
stinging sermons resembling the verbal assaults by Las Casas, Vieira condemned the settlers'
reliance upon the enslavement of the Amerindians and the hypocrisy of their so-called
"ransoming" expeditions, by which they removed Amerindians from their forest domiciles
and compelled them to work with minimum compensation for the balance of their shortened
lives. In one of his best known admissions, he remarked on the first Sunday of Lent 1653
that he knew that the settlers were convinced that "our people, our country, our government
can not be sustained without Indians. Who will fetch a pail of water for us or carry a load of
wood? I answer yes and repeat yes again yes. You, your wives, your sons, all of us are able
to sustain ourselves with our own labor." Sternly, he contended that "It is better to live from
your own sweat than from the blood of others."
Vieira's unrelenting campaign on behalf of the Amerindians and in favor of an even
larger interventionist role for the Jesuits in regulating Luso-Indian labor relations inevitably
intensified opposition toward him and his colleagues. As he wrote to his protector, John IV,
"we have against us [here] the people, the [other] religious [orders], the proprietors of the
captaincies, and all those people in the Kingdom and in this State who are interested in the
blood and sweat of the Indians whose inferior condition we alone defend." In Lascasian
terms, he insisted that "the injustices and tyrannies that have been practiced on the Indians of
these lands exceed by far those that have been perpetrated in Africa. In the space of forty
years ... more than two million Indians and in excess of 500 Indian settlements ... have
been ravaged without any punishments for such misdeeds." For their part the settlers
responded by contending, as their descendants would for another century, that the Jesuit

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12 Luso-Brazilian Review, 40/1

fathers had become "absolute masters" of the State of Maranhao and were bringing about its
economic ruin.
In 1660 fever and smallpox, always forerunners of major conflicts between settlers and
missionaries in the Amazon because of the ensuing scarcity of Indian workers, ravaged
Maranhao. Instead of recognizing that the labor scarcity was a consequence of disease and
the flight of panic-stricken tribesmen, the municipal council of Belem insisted that the
shortage of workers was the result of the mindless efforts by the Jesuits to restrict legitimate
ransoming expeditions to the interior. In response, Veiria denied that allegation but, rather
surprisingly, insisted that the real solution to the settlers' labor requirements was the same
that was being utilized in other parts of Brazil, namely the procurement of black slaves from
Africa since they were more suited to arduous labor and more resistant to disease than the
Amerindians.
I shall assess Vieira's position on African slavery later. Suffice it to say here that the
settlers could not afford to purchase blacks and were unwilling to wait until they could. On
15 May 1661, during the Feast of the Holy Ghost, the colonists of Sao Luis do Maranhao
arrested the Jesuits serving in the city and in nearby missions. A month and two days later
the citizens of Belem followed suit. By 1662 all Jesuits assigned to the State of Maranhao
had been rounded up and sent back to the kingdom.
Ant6nio Vieira returned to Lisbon, undoubtedly expecting government backing. He did
not receive it. True, he briefly became royal preacher at the palace, a prestigious position that
he had earlier occupied during the 1640s, and the court applauded his "Sermon on the
Missions," given on Three Kings Day 1662. The queen regent, Luisa de Gusmao, was so
moved that she proclaimed herself patroness of the Maranhao missions, but that proved to be
an empty gesture for, as a result of a palace coup in June 1662, she was banished to a
convent while Vieira was sent first to Porto and then to Coimbra.
It was in Coimbra that the Inquisition targeted Ant6nio Vieira for what proved to be a
prolonged, at times very uncomfortable, investigation. Ostensibly the reason for the thirty
interrogations that Vieira underwent during the mid- 660s was certain messianic writings
that he had composed during his sojourn in the Amazon. In those allegedly heretical writings
Vieira predicted that the late monarch, John IV, would rise from the dead and establish a
universal Christian church under Portuguese leadership. Since Vieira was by far the most
conspicuous Jesuit in the Portuguese Assistancy, it is obvious that the intent of the Coimbra
commissioners was not only to silence this Jesuit firebrand but to humiliate his order as well.
But Vieira gained rather than lost stature among his peers at the end of his order, for when
the inquisitors delivered his two-hour sentence on Christmas Eve 1667, the entire Jesuit
faculty of the College of Arts stood with him in silent protest. And although Vieira was for a
brief time kept mute in a Jesuit house attached to the college of Sao Louren:o in Porto, the
ascendancy of Prince Pedro, a friend of many years standing, as a result of another palace
coup in 1668, enabled him to return to Lisbon and to initiate proceedings that would free
him from the Inquisition's sanctions.
In August 1669 Vieira returned to Rome. Upon this occasion Vieira, who soon became
a popular preacher at the court of the self-exiled queen of Sweden, tried to advance the
century-old cause of the forty martyrs, Jesuits who were deliberately drowned by French
Huguenots in 1570 while en route to Brazil, and also to gain papal protection for himself
against further actions by the Portuguese Inquisition. Once again, however, he became
involved in a New Christian proposal that the Portuguese Inquisition adamantly opposed.
In May 1671 a young man of New Christian origin broke into a church near Lisbon and
stole some silver plate. In consequence, the New Christian communities throughout the
kingdom were blamed for the offense. Many of their leaders were incarcerated; others were
banished or suffered various forms of socio-economic deprivation. To defend the community

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Alden 13

against further threats, Manuel da Gama de Padua, a wealthy New Christian merchant,
traveled from Lisbon to Rome to seek papal protection. There he encountered an old
acquaintance, Ant6nio Vieira, whom he had known since he served as sugar broker for
Vieira's brother in Bahia years before.
Vieira introduced Gama to Fr. Baltasar da Costa, provincial of the province of Malabar
in southern India. The provincial had come to Rome to seek urgent assistance for his stricken
province, overrun by the Hollanders. By the beginning of the 1670s only vestiges of
Portugal's eastern empire remained. Besides Ormuz and Malacca, the spice islands of the
Indonesian archipelago as well as the island of Sri Lanka and both the Coromandel and
Malabar coasts of India had been lost. Even Bombay had been ceded to England, Portugal's
supposed benefactor. Although the crown periodically issued statements promising to
recover its lost territories in the East, there was no serious prospect of that being
accomplished.
After listening to the provincial's concerns, Gama drew up a plan which excited both
Frs. Da Costa and Vieira: New Christians would form a company modeled on the earlier
Brazil Company to help revive Portugal's decadent trade with India. It would defray the cost
of sending 5,000 troops to India immediately and would promise to send additional
contingents later on. It would also provide financial assistance both to missionaries serving
in India and to the royal government there. What the community required in return was a
general pardon issued by the papacy exempting its members from the seizure of their assets
or their imprisonment by the Portuguese Holy Office because of alleged religious
transgressions.
Vieira, who had urged the formation of a parallel East India company as early as the
1640s, was naturally sympathetic with this proposal and promised the king's confessor in
Lisbon that he would do everything possible to gain papal support for it. However, he
warned that "My endeavors will be very circumspect because, as Your Reverence will
comprehend, since it is opposed by the Inquisition, the father general does not wish any
member of the Company [of Jesus] to work on its behalf openly, although everyone in the
Company, including the father general, considers the plan not only appropriate but necessary
and urgent."
So, too, did many Jesuits in Portugal and some important non-Jesuit ecclesiastics,
including the archbishop of Lisbon. For a time the acting head of government, Regent Prince
Pedro, was himself favorably disposed. But the three branches of the Holy Office martialed
strong arguments against the plan. They asserted that if Pedro approved a general pardon to
New Christians his kingdom would soon be swarming with crypto-Christians from foreign
lands who would compete for jobs in an already depressed kingdom and who would corrupt
the faith. In short, the recovery of India was not worth the risk. That view was shared by the
newly convened cortes, Portugal's occasionally assembled legislative body, which met in
January 1674 to approve the court's proposed succession of the infante as Pedro's legitimate
heir and to vote for the renewal of taxes. After several months of deliberations, the three
estates informed the acting monarch of their unalterable opposition to any concessions to the
New Christians. Confronted by such opposition, Pedro finally turned against the New
Christian proposal.
Vieira himself recognized that the plan was dead and ceased to speak about it.
Nonetheless, he retained an interest in the problems of the State of Maranhao. If Portugal's
positions in India were beyond recovery, why not reproduce India in Brazil? Knowing that
cacao, sarsparilla, and cloves could be extracted from the Amazonian rainforest, he urged
that additional spices be brought from India and grown on plantations with imported African
labor. At first sight it might seem surprising that Vieira, who reputedly possessed African
blood himself and who so staunchly opposed Amerindian slavery, would advocate the use of

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14 Luso-Brazilian Review, 40/1

black slaves. Ant6nio Vieira was often-though not always-a realist: he knew full well that
the plantation economies of Brazil depended heavily upon regularly replenished African
labor. Indeed, members of his own family were closely tied to the slave-produced cane sugar
industry; and though he may not have approved of it, the Brazilian colleges of the Society of
Jesus were also important consumers of African slaves because of their increasing reliance
upon the production and export of sugar to sustain their mission and educational operations.
To be sure, as David Sweet has demonstrated in a seminal article, Vieira was, like a number
of other Jesuit writers, deeply concerned about the mistreatment of black slaves and in three
well-known sermons he warned masters that it was in their own interest, in this life and in
the next, to treat their slaves as fellow Christians. He expressed sympathy for the plight of
African slaves, but he insisted that they were better off in Brazil than they had been in Africa
and that whatever Christ-like sufferings they endured in their new homes would be offset by
their heavenly redemption.
In 1675, when Vieira urged that Maranhao become a new India, he was back in
Portugal. He was summoned home by Prince Pedro. But he quickly discovered that while the
Regent wanted him removed from the highly charged political atmosphere of Rome, he did
not want him to frequent the royal palace. By 1681 Vieira concluded that, like old generals
and old professors, it was time for him to fade away. He returned to what resembled self-
imposed exile in Bahia that year and spent the remainder of his days there.
For three years in Bahia he bore the honorific title of visitor-general of his order but,
unlike others who held that office, he did not travel beyond the limits of Salvador and its
suburbs. Nevertheless, he monitored his order's progress and undoubtedly rejoiced that
during his lifetime the Society's colleges in Brazil had increased from 3 to 8, extending from
Santos to Belem do Para; that by the 1690s it was responsible for more than 50 missions;
and that its membership had grown from about 170 to 380.
But the Society of Jesus remained a controversial order and Vieira himself was still
drawn into its controversies. Not long after his return to Salvador, a bitter factional dispute
surfaced, which pitted a group of local officials, led by an arrogant governor-general, against
other elite members of the community, including Vieira's brother and nephew. Following a
mysterious daylight assassination of a contentious collaborator of the governor-general, that
worthy ordered the arrest of several members of the Vieira family. Not only was Ant6nio
Vieira, a would-be peacemaker, barred from the governor-general's palace, but he was even
accused of being involved in the murder plot.
Meekness was not one of Ant6nio Vieira's conspicuous qualities. He knew very well
how to play hardball. He wrote to important friends in the kingdom to protest his indignation
and to defend the innocence of his family. In the end, the hostile governor-general was
replaced and the charges against the Vieira Ravascos were dropped.
Despite his increasing infirmities and near blindness, Ant6nio Vieira had sufficient
energy in the mid-1690s to resume his defense of Brazil's indigenous inhabitants. In 1691
the crown issued the latest of a long series of decrees prohibiting Amerindian enslavement.
As in the past, such enslavement remained most widespread in the peripheries-the
Amazonian North and the Paulista Southeast. In order to persuade the Paulistas to respect
the new law, the governor-general dispatched Fr. Alexandre de Gusmao, a Paulista-born
Jesuit and the order's provincial, to go to Sao Paulo to persuade the Paulistas to comply with
the royal directive. The provincial returned to Bahia with a signed agreement by which the
Paulistas promised to serve the Amerindians as "administrators, tutors, and guardians."
Despite the fact that the agreement was an evident subterfuge, most of the leading Jesuits in
Salvador, including Jorge Benci, later to become a prominent critic of the settlers' abuses of
black slaves, and Giovanni Ant6nio Andreoni, best known for his remarkably informative
treatise Wealth and Culture of Brazil (1711), favored the accord's acceptance.

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Alden 15

But the eighty-seven-year-old Ant6nio Vieira clearly did not. Consistent with the views
that he had expressed a half-century earlier, he wrote the crown a cogent memorandum in
1694 protesting the agreement. He insisted that all its alleged benefits would accrue to the
settlers, while its burdens would fall entirely upon the Amerindians. He argued that it
deprived them of personal freedom, of the choice of free movement, and of their lands.
Effectively, he declared, the agreement kept them as captives rather than elevating them to
the status of free men just as had been the case with the encomendero system in the Spanish
empire so vigorously condemned by Las Casas. He insisted that if the Paulistas offered the
Amerindians fair wages they would willingly settle near their estates and work for their
owners.

Vieira's famous voto of 12 July 1694 was destined to be his last effort to d
Brazil's indigenous peoples. He would be the last Jesuit of his stature to defend
freedom that, despite subsequent legislation extending from the eighteenth century
present, would not be wholly respected. On the same day three years later Ant6nio
completed his final revisions on the last of his twelve volumes of sermons; six days
went to his reward. Within less than two years he was followed to the grave by Fr
Soares, his faithful amanuensis for the previous forty years. Shortly before his own de
Fr. Jos6 reported that he had seen a vision of Ant6nio Vieira who assured him that
measured up to his expectations and that it was time to join him. Seemingly, Ant6ni
remained both confident and persuasive even in the hereafter.

Ant6nio Vieira was a many-sided figure. He was unquestionably an exceptio

powerful, persuasive writer and orator. He was surely an ardent defender of Por
independence and of the authority of the crown. He was a vigorous champion of
freedom, albeit in forms that connote wardship rather than absolute equality. He symp
with the plight of abused African slaves but he never overtly opposed their subjuga
espoused guarantees for New Christians primarily because they and their Jewish r
beyond Portugal appeared to be potential saviors of the empire. As a troublesho
achieved no great successes. Some of his own troubles during his long, combativ
were of his own making; others were not. I leave to those more competent than I to ass
linguistic prowess, his literary achievements, and his theological insights.
Charles R. Boxer contended that Ant6nio Vieira "was certainly the most remar
man in the seventeenth-century Luso-Brazilian world." If not "the most remarkable,
certainly one of a small group. Three hundred years after his death, the impact of
Vieira upon his century and those that have followed is still being assessed. And that
we have conferences such as this one.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alden, Dauril. Charles R. Boxer: An Uncommon Life. Soldier, Historian, Teacher,

Collector, Traveler. Lisbon: Fundacao Oriente, 2001.
."Black Robes vs. White Settlers: The Struggle for 'Freedom of the Indians' in
Colonial Brazil," Charles Gibson and Howard Peckham, eds. Attitudes of Colonial
Powers toward the American Indian. Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 1969. 19-45.
. "Indian versus Black Slavery in the State of Maranhao during the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries," Richard L. Gamer and William B. Taylor, eds. Iberian
Colonies, New World Societies: Essays in Memory of Charles Gibson. Privately
printed, 1985. 71-102.

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16 Luso-Brazilian Review, 40/1

. The Making of an Enterprise. the Jesuits in Portugal its Empire and Beyond, 1540-
1750, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Azevedo, Joao Licio de, ed. Cartas do Padre Antdnio Vieira. 3 v. Coimbra, 1925-28.
. Hist6ria de Ant6nio Vieira. 2 v., 2d ed. Lisbon, 1931.
Boxer, Charles R. ed. "Quatro carts in6ditas do Padre Ant6nio Vieira." Broteria 45:5 (Nov.
1947): 455-76.
. "Padre Ant6nio Vieira, S.J. and the institution of the Brazil Company in 1649." The
Hispanic American Historical Review 29:4 (Nov. 1949): 474-97.
"A Great Luso-Brazilian Figure: Padre Ant6nio Vieira, S.J., 1608-1697."
Diamante, The Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Councils 5 (1951).
Cohen, Thomas M. The Fire of Tongues. Antonio Vieira and the Missionary Church in
Brazil and Portugal. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Graham, Richard. Ant6nio Vieira and the Economic Rehabilitation of Portugal. Sao Paulo,
1978.
Hespanha, Ant6nio Manuel, et al. "Vieira, 1697-1997." Oceanos 30/31 (Apr-Sept. 1997).
Leite, Serafim, SJ. Hist6ria da companhia de Jesus no Brasil. 10 v. Rio de Janeiro, 1938-50.
Schwartz, Stuart B. Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil. The High Court ofBahia
and its Judges, 1609-1751. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Sweet, David G. "Black Robes and 'Black Destiny': Jesuit Views of African Slavery in 17th
Century Latin America." Revista de historia de America No. 86 (July-Dec. 1978): 87-
133.

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