The position of procurator of the Indians was officially established in Portuguese America with the alvará e regimento of 1596. However, at least since the 1560s, there are records indicating its existence and attempts to formalize it. The efforts in this regard were initially associated with the idea that the indigenous people should be tutored, …
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Contraband in Brazil during the Hispanic Monarchy
Contraband is defined for the first time in the Diccionario de Autoridades (1729) as “contravention of something that is forbidden by proclamation, published by proclamation, in the places or places destined to make public what the Prince wants to be observed, or not to be executed”. To this general definition are added specifications on its …
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Cartography of Brazil in the Hispanic Monarchy
The early modern European period was marked by important changes in the way of thinking about space and representing it in cartography. If during the medieval period the maps were linked to an idea of symbolic space, in early modernity there is a transformation in this conception. From geometry, space starts to be thought mathematically, …
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Hospital Care in Brazil during the Hispanic Monarchy
During the period of the Hispanic Monarchy, the installation and structuring of a hospital assistance in Brazil was still very incipient. In its early years (1580s), there are few reports and information about hospital facilities or medical and surgical care. Most of these data are related to the Santas Casas de Misericórdia, some already installed since …
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Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro
The place that was to be called Rio de Janeiro did not arouse the immediate interest of the Portuguese explorers after their arrival in the American lands. The same did not occur with Spanish and French navigators who soon recognized the advantages of the geographic position of Guanabara Bay and the opportunity to barter with the …
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Filipeia (Capitania of Paraíba)
The Paraíba region was conquered in 1584 thanks to the actions of Diego Flores de Valdés’ fleet, with his Armada of the Strait of Magellan. The conquest of the territory was driven by a wider Habsburg policy in an attempt to articulate and improve their defences on the Atlantic frontiers. In a general sense, that …
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Armada of the Strait of Magellan (1581-1584)
In 1520, the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, in command of a small Spanish fleet, used for the first time a sea route in the far south of the American continent which connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The proof of the existence of this inter-oceanic passage, which became known as the Strait of Magellan in …
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Indigenous Policy
The Portuguese Crown’s indigenist policy in Brazil was influenced by: the papal bulls, which guided and legitimized the Iberian overseas expansion; the slave trade in Africa; and the colonization and ordering experiences developed by Castile in the West Indies. The bulls Romanus Pontifex, from 1455, and Inter Caetera, from 1493, are at the basis of …
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Customs tithes (Taxes)
Since the Middle Ages, it was foreseen in feudal relations that vassals had the obligation to provide material and military aid to the lord, thus constituting the first approximation to taxation in modern times (AIDAR,2020:446). The process is related to a structural change in Western society that involved the forms of political domination. The centralization …
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Council of Portugal
With the Union of Crowns between Spain and Portugal in 1580, the Portuguese territory and its overseas possessions were inserted into the Castilian polisinodial system, a system of councils that made up the government of the Hispanic Monarchy and was the axis around which its administration revolved (Martínez Ruiz, 2007: 114). The creation of a …
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