Latest / The History of Portugal: The Small Nation That Built a Global Empire — Fexingo History / The Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil: A Different Fire
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've spent a lot of time on the Inquisition in Goa, but there's another part of the Portuguese empire where the Inquisition took a very different shape — Brazil. And that's what I want to get into today. Luna: I thought the Inquisition was everywhere the Portuguese went. Wasn't it? Lucas: That's the common assumption, and honestly, it's what I assumed too until I started digging. But here's the thing: the Inquisition never actually established a tribunal in Brazil. The island of São Tomé had one for a while, Goa had one, but Brazil was officially under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition in Lisbon. Luna: Wait, so there was no Inquisition in Brazil at all? That seems like a huge oversight. Lucas: It was more deliberate than an oversight. The Portuguese crown and the church were wary of setting up a formal tribunal in a colony that was still being developed. They worried it could disrupt the fragile social order, especially with the growing sugar economy that relied on a mix of enslaved Africans, free laborers, and a significant community of New Christians — Jews who had been forcibly converted but many of whom still practiced their faith in secret. Luna: So they kind of turned a blind eye? Lucas: Not exactly a blind eye, because they did send periodic visitations. The first one came in 1591, just about thirty years after the start of the sugar boom. The Inquisition would send a visitor from Lisbon, usually a senior inquisitor, who would travel through the colony, set up shop in a major city like Bahia, and hear confessions and accept denunciations for a few months. Then they'd leave. Lucas: And before we go deeper, I want to take a moment to talk about how this podcast gets made. We have no ads, no sponsors — it's just you, me, and a microphone. But a handful of listeners do chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what funds making this many of these episodes. Luna: Yeah, I mean, we love doing this, but it's not free to produce. Every little bit helps. Lucas: Exactly. So if you've been getting something out of these conversations, consider that a kind of quiet thank you. But let's get back to the Inquisition. Lucas: So these visitations were sporadic. There were maybe four or five major ones over the seventeenth century, and each time they came, they caused a stir. People would line up to denounce their neighbors — or to confess their own sins, hoping for leniency. But between these visits, the machinery of the Inquisition was largely absent. Luna: So who was enforcing religious orthodoxy then? Lucas: That's where the 'familiares' come in. These were laypeople — often local elites — who were appointed as lay associates of the Inquisition. They had privileges, like exemption from certain taxes and the right to bear arms, and in return they were expected to identify and report suspected heretics. But because the Inquisition itself wasn't there, the familiares were often left to their own devices, and they could become more of a neighborhood watch than a truly feared institution. Lucas: And that had some interesting consequences. For one, the New Christian community in Brazil was large and integral to the sugar economy. Many were wealthy planters, merchants, and even slave traders. So local authorities were often reluctant to see them persecuted, because that would hurt the colony's economic bottom line. Luna: So it's like the Inquisition was there, but not really there. Lucas: Exactly. And the result was that Brazil became a surprisingly attractive destination for New Christians from Portugal who felt the pressure of the Inquisition in the homeland. They could escape to Brazil and practice a kind of crypto-Judaism relatively freely, at least for a while. There's a case from the 1640s of a New Christian woman named Branca Dias in Pernambuco, who was known for giving charity to the poor — and it came out later that she was also quietly observing Jewish fasts and praying in Hebrew. Luna: She sounds like she got away with it for a long time. Lucas: She did, for decades. But when the Inquisition's visitor arrived in Bahia in 1660, she was eventually indicted, and her story shows how the system worked: it relied on local informants, but it was also highly selective. The visitor could only process so many cases, and they targeted people who were either socially disruptive or who had already been accused by someone with a grudge. Lucas: And here's a key difference from Goa: in Brazil, the Inquisition rarely resorted to public autos-da-fé. There were a few, but they were much less frequent and often involved people who had been arrested years earlier and sent to Lisbon. So the spectacle of burning heretics was mostly a Lisbon phenomenon. Luna: So did Brazil end up with a more tolerant reputation? Lucas: In some ways, yes. The historian Alexandre Herculano even argued that the Inquisition had a corrupting effect on Portuguese society precisely because it was so active. But in Brazil, the distance meant that the church's teeth were blunted. That said, it wasn't all sunshine — the presence of the familiares and the occasional visitor kept a climate of fear smoldering. People still watched their neighbors suspiciously, and denunciations were a real threat. But compared to Goa, Brazil was a much softer target. Luna: What about the Jesuits? Did they play a role in policing belief in Brazil? Lucas: Oh, they were huge. The Jesuits were the primary missionaries in Brazil, and they were also deeply involved in the Inquisition's work, at least in the early period. They set up schools, and they often acted as informants themselves, reporting on the practices of New Christians and even on the native populations they were trying to convert. But they also sometimes shielded people from the Inquisition, especially if they thought the accusations were unfair or would harm their missionary efforts. Lucas: And that's part of the tangled story — the Inquisition in Brazil was not a monolithic, all-powerful force. It was shaped by local politics, economic interests, and the constant back and forth between Lisbon and the colonial capital in Bahia. Over time, as the colony became more established, the crown actually grew more lenient. By the late 1600s, the Inquisition's visits became less frequent, and the New Christians in Brazil were more or less left alone, unless they made themselves too obvious. Luna: It sounds like the Inquisition was almost a symbolic presence there. Lucas: That's a good way to put it. It was more about maintaining the image of orthodoxy than actually enforcing it rigorously. And you can see this in the kind of trials that did happen. They were often about minor offenses — bigamy, blasphemy, superstitious practices — rather than full-blown heresy. The infamous cases of crypto-Judaism were actually a minority. Lucas: So when we talk about the Portuguese Inquisition, we often think of the fires of Goa or the autos-da-fé in Lisbon. But Brazil offers a different narrative — one where the institution had to adapt to a distant colony, and where the result was a more ambiguous, often less lethal, but still deeply unsettling presence in people's lives. Luna: So would it be fair to say that Brazil's Inquisition was less a fire and more a slow burn? Lucas: I think that's exactly right. And it's a reminder that historical institutions rarely work the way they're supposed to on paper. They're shaped by the realities on the ground. So next time you think of the Inquisition, remember that even the Inquisition had its limits.