The Jesuits, in one of history's greatest…
1600 CE to 1611 CE
The new Jesuit reducciones are unfortunately within striking distance of the mamelucos, the slave-raiding, mixed-race descendants of Portuguese and Dutch adventurers.
The mamelucos are based in São Paulo, Brazil, which has become a haven for freebooters and pirates by the early 1600s because it is beyond the control of the Portuguese colonial governor.
The mamelucos survive mostly by capturing natives and selling them as slaves to Brazilian planters.
Having depleted the native population near Sao Paulo, they venture farther afield until they discover the richly populated reduciones.
The Spanish authorities choose not to defend the settlements.
Spain and Portugal are united from 1580 to 1640.
Although their colonial subjects were at war, the governor of Río de la Plata Province has little incentive to send scarce troops and supplies against an enemy who is nominally of the same nationality.
In addition, the Jesuits are not popular in Asunción, where the settlers have the governor's ear.
The Jesuits and their thousands of neophytes thus have little means to protect themselves from the depredations of the "Paulistas," as the mamelucos also are called (because they come from São Paulo).
In one such raid in 1629, about three thousand Paulistas destroy the reducciones in their path by burning churches, killing old people and infants (who are worthless as slaves), and carrying off to the coast entire human populations, as well as cattle.
Their first raids on the reducciones nets them at least fifteen thousand captives.
Faced with the awesome challenge of a virtual holocaust that is frightening away their neophytes and encouraging them to revert to paganism, the Jesuits take drastic measures.
Under the leadership of Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, as many as thirty thousand natives (twenty-five hundred families) retreat by canoe and travel hundreds of kilometers south to another large concentration of Jesuit reducciones near the lower Parana.
About twelve thousand people survive, but the retreat fails to deter the Paulistas, who continue to raid and carry off slaves until even the reducciones far to the south face extinction.
Locations
People
Groups
Tupi people (Amerind tribe)
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Germans
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Guaraní (Amerind tribe)
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Portuguese people
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French people (Latins)
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Christians, Roman Catholic
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English people
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Italians (Latins)
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Querandí
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Spain, Habsburg Kingdom of
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Spaniards (Latins)
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Neo-Inca State
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Jesuits, or Order of the Society of Jesus
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Río de la Plata, Governorate of the
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Charcas, Real Audiencia of (Upper Peru)
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Spain, Habsburg Kingdom of
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