Holy and Unholy Alliances: Clerical Participation in the Flow of Bullion from Brazil to Portugal during the Reign of Dom Joao V (1706-1750)

In his História da America Portugueza, the Bahian historian Sebastião da Rocha Pitta noted two qualities essential to a monarch. The first was religion, "a mais firme columna das monarchias." The second was generosity, "a generosidade é o segundo atributo nos príncipes." Rocha Pitta observed that both qualities were not merely present but superabundantly so in the persona of Dom João V. The former found its expression in his financial and spiritual support for churches in Lisbon, the unprecedented splendor of the royal chapel, his appointments to bishoprics and high ecclesiastical office of persons of exceptional spiritual and scholarly gifts, and the unparalleled splendor of processions, most notably Corpus Christi, whose magnificence and pomp bedazzled visitors from other Catholic nations. His generosity (generosidade and liberalidade) found expression in his financial support for wars against Islam and in his unstinting satisfaction of infinite requests for financial assistance which he was able to provide with gold from Minas Gerais. Rocha Pitta would have been far too circumspect to comment that it was that selfsame Brazilian gold that permitted Dom João V to be the most absolutist monarch of Europe, but in his often baroque vision of the world, the Coimbra-educated scion of a leading planter family of Bahia made the connection between riches and the church and suggested how Brazilian gold--in the right hands--could contribute to the greater glory of the church (and by extension, of Portugal and her king). ¹

The impact on the Portuguese-speaking world of the discovery of the first placer mines on the Rio das Velhas in Minas Gerais was but a small sampling of what was in store. With further strikes in Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Goiás, Bahia and as far afield as Ceará and Sergipe, the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed the irresistible attraction exercised by Brazil over men and women of every vocation or profession, civil status, slave or free. They came from Portugal, the islands of the Portuguese Atlantic (Madeira, the Azores, and Cape Verde), Angola, and the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. Some who were homeward-bound from Macao, Goa, or Cochin stayed in a Brazilian port rather than continuing to Lisbon. Some achieved wealth beyond their wildest dreams and invested their new found riches in their new found land; others returned to hamlets in the Alto Douro or Trás-os-Montes or to fishing communities in Portugal or the Atlantic islands and discovered that their gold could acquire for them lands, respect, and social status to which they would not otherwise have been entitled. But the vast majority discovered physical hardships and disillusionment, finding employment other than in mining, eking out a living in Brazil, or suffering destitution and death. Gold enabled the more successful entrepreneurs to offset the chronic shortage of capital and invest in commerce. The burgeoning of Rio de Janeiro as the major commercial entrepôt of the South Atlantic in the eighteenth century was attributable to gold "from them thar hills."

The original name for what came to be known as Brazil was "Land of the True Cross." We do not know when the first clerics arrived in Portuguese America, but their presence was evident during the donatarial period (1532-49). Accompanying Tomé de Sousa, charged by Dom João III with the establishment of royal government in the colony and the building of a capital, were six Jesuits under the leadership of Father Manuel da Nóbrega to whom the king had entrusted spiritual leadership in the colony. ² A papal bull of 25 February 1551 created the bishopric of Bahia, which was elevated to an archiepiscopal...