The Donatary Captaincy in Perspective: Portuguese Backgrounds to the Settlement of Brazil

I

Luso-Brazilian historiography has never managed to achieve a very satisfactory understanding of the donatary captaincy, the institution above all others that provided the framework for the initial settlement of Brazil. Certainly Carlos Malheiro Dias contributed little, back in 1924, by expounding at some length on the “feudal” nature of the grants made to the donataries.¹ That nothing in his description remotely conformed to any viable definition of feudalism, or that medieval Portugal never experienced an identifiable “feudal” tradition, seems not to have perturbed him at all.²

Roberto Simonsen further built on Dias’ misinterpretation when he cast the question in terms of capitalism vs. feudalism.³ This pervasive interpretative dichotomy, from which few subsequent commentators have been able to escape, makes little sense except in a Marxist framework. Only for historians of the latter persuasion do feudalism and capitalism describe the same order of things—social systems based upon a certain type of economic exploitation. But Simonsen, whose inspiration seems to have derived from Gustav Schmoeller, not Marx, failed to give feudalism an economic definition; and when Alexander Marchant following in Simonsen’s footsteps adopted a radically juridical definition of feudalism, he failed to note that this step makes any further attempt at comparison or contrast with capitalism entirely pointless. To continue along these lines was simply to confuse the issue further.⁴

Indeed, such arguments continued as long as they did due to the failure of these pioneers to see the essentially emotional roots underlying the feudal-vs.-capitalism dichotomy. For these thinkers feudalism implied backwardness and capitalism progress; and the real question they were so insatiably posing was “under what star was Brazil born?” Did it begin its life history with a headstart or under a handicap? Only in the fight of such strong emotive significances can one explain the obsessive fixation of historians with the question in spite of the fact that no satisfactory answer in these terms is or ever was possible. As long as the socio-psychological roots of the problem went unperceived, however, historiography was fated compulsively to repeat it.

The only way off this interpretative treadmill was for someone knowledgable but emotionally uninvolved to step off and point the way to an approach both more objective and less charged with unspoken, half-unconscious wishes. That historian was Charles Verlinden, who, in 1954, threw out the comment (almost as a parenthetical aside) that the proper way to understand the donatary captaincy would be to gain a better insight into the late medieval Portuguese seignory, or senhorio.⁵ But aside from his article sketching out the captaincy system in the Atlantic islands,⁶ he left it for others to work out his suggestion. To date, no one seems to have made the attempt.

II

Possibly the stumbling block here has been that so few Brazilianists (even colonial Brazilianists) are well acquainted with the society and institutions of late medieval Portugal. There are not, in fact, many secondary works to go on; and many of the problems of interest to Brazilianists are either untreated or dealt with fleetingly in obscure articles published in little-known journals.⁷ Nevertheless, drawing upon some published collections of documents, as well as material that is still unpublished, it should be possible to gain something of an idea of the late medieval Portuguese senhorio, as well as its continuities with the Brazilian donatary captaincy of the early sixteenth century.⁸

First, we shall examine a royal grant of senhorio made at the end of the fourteenth century to Martim Vasquez da Cunha, a Portuguese noble; second, a grant of senhorio in the Azores made early in the sixteenth century that carried with it the title of captain;⁹ and finally, we shall compare these two with the well-known grant made to Duarte Coelho in 1534 that has traditionally marked the beginning of settlement along the northeastern coast of Brazil. The first charter will indicate what a royal grant of senhorio entailed in its essentials; the second will take this structure mid-way, both geographically and institutionally, from Portugal to Brazil; and finally, in discussing the third, we shall attempt to indicate the essential continuities among these grants to show how far back this tradition goes into Portuguese constitutional history.

In this fashion, it should be possible better to see what is old and what is new in the institution, and to assess, in somewhat longer perspective, the nature of the regime established in Brazil. Certainly this approach should provide a more sophisticated basis for judgment than to attempt to deal with the problem through the imposition— brutally and unhistorically—of some abstract straight-jackets upon materials which have not even yet been properly understood.

The first grant dates from 1386 and involves the gift of certain rights from king Dom João I to Martim Vasquez, whom he calls “our vassal.” In this charter, the king makes, not a feudal grant in return for specified services, but rather a “pure and free” gift, inter vivos, “valid in perpetuity” to the recipient or donatary. The grant is to be heritable in the legitimate male line, and consists of various specified senhorios scattered about the map of Portugal. In these geographically delimited areas, Martim Vasquez was to have all jurisdiction, rights, and revenues that heretofore had pertained to the king, (including import and export dues or dues of trespass), with the exception of certain criminal jurisdictions that were reserved for the royal courts. Vasquez also received rights of patronage (i.e., the appointment of public notaries, judges, and other officials) as well as the right to levy “such fines and penalties as he wishes.” Further he was to be permitted to act in these areas as if they were “his own personal possession without impediment”—except for the restrictions specified in the grant. If his legitimate succession should die out, the lands and jurisdictions would revert to the crown.

There we have, in outline, the essence of the late medieval Portuguese senhorio. It does not necessarily involve direct ownership of land (though this is always possible);¹⁰ rather, it consists in the devolution, by gift, of royal powers of government (that is to say, the right to tax, to appoint officials, to judge, to monopolize certain activities, and so forth) into the hands of a noble or fidalgo. But this devolution is made subject to certain general conditions and includes certain powers reserved by the king as indicative of his “greater lordship” (maior senhorio).¹¹ The donatary (as the recipient of royal largess was called, since he was given a “gift” or doação) was to enjoy these rights “forever” and they are transmissible, under certain conditions, to his heirs. Unlike the classical fief, the grant was not dependent upon service, military or otherwise, but rather was given in reward for services, past, present, and future. The donatary could, of course, own property within his senhorio, but this was not a necessary part of the grant. That was limited to the gift of certain royal powers of governance including fiscal privileges, over the inhabitants of a certain delimited area, i.e. his senhorio.¹²

The second charter in the conspectus was granted in 1507 by king Dom Manuel, called the Fortunate, to Dom Fernando Coutinho, member of “our council,” and marshal of the realm. Like the charter given by Dom João I, this grant was a pure gift made in return for services, past, present, and future. The grant was hereditary in the eldest legitimate male descendant, “just as is the case with the captains of Madeira in their charters and grants.”¹³ If the heir was not of age to rule, the king reserved the right of wardship and could place someone else in his stead until he came of age. The grant evidently reverted to the crown if the legitimate male line died out.

Since the territory given was an island (Graciosa) in the Azores group, certain new characteristics appeared here which serve to link the territorial grants already made in Portugal with those which are to come in Brazil. Aside from the usual grant of judicial authority (exception here was made of cases involving death or dismemberment, which must be appealed to the royal courts), the lord’s right to monopolize capital improvements (banalities) was emphasized and elaborated. The captain was to have all the grain or grist mills on the island (aside from handmills for domestic use) as well as all the water-driven sawmills constructed there.¹⁴ Likewise, he was to have a monopoly of all non-domestic bakeovens, as well as of the sale of salt. The king further granted him a tenth part of the royal tenths, levied on all trade.

This grant is also significant for its provision regarding settlement on the island. The captain had the right to confer deeds with full title “to whomsoever he may wish, under the condition that the person to whom the land is granted shall improve it within five years, if he does not, the captain may regrant it to someone else.” This is the Portuguese sesmaria system, of which more will be said later. The grantees had the right to sell their property freely to whomever they chose.

Finally, in the more familiar grant made to Duarte Coelho, the king, as in previous charters, ceded by an irrevocable gift, inter vivos, an unusually large number of seignorial rights in the new territory of Brazil. The express object of the grant here was development (so that “my coast and land of Brazil be better populated”) in a far-off place, and consequently unusually lucrative rights were transmitted: e.g., the right to enslave natives and to sell them on the Lisbon market, to create towns and nominate their magistrates, a fifth of the profits on the brazilwood sold in Portugal, as well as the banal rights already stressed in the grant of 1507. In addition other rights were included that do not require mention.¹⁵

Thus all the grants may—indeed must—be viewed as so many species within the same genus. Depending upon circumstances, certain aspects are emphasized, modified, or eliminated. In the case of Brazil, where new territory is involved, numerous provisions regarding succession, rents granted the donatary, and monopolies were enlarged to attract takers and to meet a new situation. Nevertheless the continuity of type, the unity of the genus is clear. The seignorial tradition of medieval Portugal runs unbroken throughout.

III

The next to the last document in point of time, the charter granted to Coutinho, was the first in the series to mention a foral.¹⁶ Since numerous grants of senhorio in medieval Portugal presumed the prior existence of a foral, it was seldom expressly mentioned. As in other respects, the settled condition of the homeland meant that certain things could be taken for granted. In the newer areas of the islands and later in Brazil, however, such matters had to be spelled out. This was true, especially, of the foral which had to be created to meet the new situation in Pernambuco. The foral seems to have been particularly troublesome to commentators. E. Bradford Bums, in his preface to the translation of the Pernambuco foral, says: “In general, the land grants were set forth in a carta de doação and the obligations of the donee to the monarch in an accompanying foral.” Nevertheless, Portuguese medievalists know full well that it was traditionally the doação which regulated the relationship of the king vis-à-vis the donatary, while the foral dealt with the obligations of the inhabitants of the senhorio toward their lord, and was usually issued by him as a kind of gracious gift or mini-constitution.¹⁷ Why, then, was the foral for Pernambuco not issued by Duarte Coelho?

In approaching this question we enter the unexplored field of Portuguese constitutional history at the moment of the establishment of the “New Monarchy” in Portugal in the persons of João II and Manuel “the Fortunate.” It was the former who began, but the latter who completed, the reformation of the foral charters of the realm, an essential part of the institutional reforms upon which the “New Monarchy” was based.¹⁸ By royal letter (November 22, 1497), the existing forais were called in from the towns and villages to which they had been granted in order to be inspected and then rewritten by a royal commission. Ostensibly this was done because of generalized complaints from the citizenry about the “oppressions” and “disputes” which the multiplicity and complexity of non-royal forais had inflicted upon them. In actuality, we may well suspect that the Crown encouraged such “complaints” for its own purposes. However that may be, the recall of the forais permitted it to review, revise, and finally reissue them, and in the process they underwent a number of significant alterations. Inhabitants of the various lordships were not, in the future, to do “body service” for their lords (i.e., no private armies were to be recruited from among the inhabitants of the senhorio)¹⁹ nor were the latter ever to be “subtracted” from the crown’s authority, nor “given over” to their lord. Various other changes were also made, but all of them with the cumulative effect of reducing the independent power of the nobility by loosening its control over its dependent populations. The shift was symbolized—and this is the crucial point hereby the initial phrase used to preface each “new” foral charter. This now read: “Dom Manuel, etc. To all those who may see this our foral charter, given to . . .” (italics mine), thus emphasizing that the charter was granted, no longer by the lord of the territory, but directly by the Crown.²⁰

Thus by the time the donatary captaincy was carried to Brazil, it was an established constitutional principle in Portugal that the forais, although traditionally issued by the lord to regulate his relations with the dependents of his senhorios, were henceforth to be issued only by royal authority. The latter thus symbolized its supreme jurisdiction over all the territory of the kingdom. The foral does not regulate “the obligations of the donee to the monarch,” but rather the mutual obligations of the donatary captain to the settlers of his captaincy and vice versa, as well as the overriding obligations of both to the king, whose powers in the doações were much greater after the reform than had been traditionally the case in medieval Portugal.

So far attention has been concentrated on the juridical structure of the captaincy and its antecedents. Nevertheless we should not forget that the establishment of donatary captaincies in Brazil was directed toward one overriding purpose: the settlement and development of vacant territory. The tradition of frontier settlement, of course, had a long history in Portugal as a result of the centuries of Reconquest (ca. 800-1250).²¹ From as early as the tenth century, lords were issuing so-called “settlement charters” (cartas de povoação) which set down in writing the terms by which newcomers were to hold land from them.²² The forais were, in a sense, merely an enlargement and extension of this juridical figure, charters issued collectively to a group of settlers. When a town or a village was established and granted a foral, often it was (especially if it were on the frontier) also granted a certain amount of land as its territory (termo), part of which was usually retained as community property while the rest was given out to individual settlers with the idea of attracting them to take root in the township. The person charged with the division of these lots among the newcomers was called the sesmeiro after the lots (sesmos) which he distributed. Not only was the sesmaria system used during the reconquest to populate newly conquered lands, but during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, long after the end of the struggle with Islam, it continued to be employed both to repopulate lands which had been abandoned for various reasons, as well as to settle the various newly discovered islands in the Atlantic.²³ A good understanding of the practice, in fact, can be had from a rather late charter of repopulation (August 23, 1513) published by Virginia Rau in the appendix to her classic study of the Portuguese sesmarias:²⁴

Here are illustrated several of the essential characteristics of the sesmaria system. The lands granted must be empty or unclaimed, they are usually located in the territory of some specific town, and a special person is given authority to grant out these lands, with the understanding that the recipient shall work and improve them; he also has the right freely to sell or transmit them by inheritance. Finally it is up to the sesmeiro to decide who shall receive the lands, depending principally upon fitness and need.

Thus the powers to act as sesmeiro which were granted to Duarte Coelho and other captains who undertook the settlement of Brazil were prefigured in nearly all their essentials in the long tradition of medieval charters of repopulation and settlement, as well as in the forais, especially those that implied the granting of sesmarias. This system—held, so to speak, in the Portuguese constitutional repertoire— was ready for transplantation, first to the Atlantic islands, as Verlinden has shown, and thence to Brazil. Thus in contradiction to Gilberto Freyre who emphasizes Portugal’s fitness for tropical colonization because of its special climate,²⁵ one might better stress Portugal’s unique experience in repopulating empty spaces during the centuries of Reconquest as the prime factor which fitted it to undertake the colonization of Brazil. It had been doing this very thing for centuries at home; and when the necessity arose for colonizing vast territories overseas, it was institutionally prepared.

IV

Put in the perspective of the medieval Portuguese senhorio, then, the donatary captaincy can be viewed as drawing upon and incorporating a number of institutions to produce a unique result. From this viewpoint, that is to say a genetic one, the question as to whether it is “feudal” or “capitalistic” seems rather crude, if not irrelevant. A Marxist might find it legitimate to say that the donatary captaincy was “feudal” in character because it was based upon the structures of the late medieval Portuguese senhorio; for him the legal distinctions between seigneurialism and feudalism are insignificant. But what then would he make of the fact that the crown evidently established the institution in Brazil, as Celso Furtado has pointed out, with previously formed intentions to engage in commercial agriculture?²⁶ Most of the land in the areas that were colonized was granted out to sugar planters, often financed by Flemish or Genoese capital. Here the captain had the advantage of having not only the largest parcel of land for his own use, but also a monopoly of what might be called the capital improvements: the “engines” used to process the sugar cane that became so important in the economy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.²⁷ By the time sugar planting came to be based on a slave labor force there can be no doubt that the situation was one of latifundia capitalism that calls to mind, more than anything else in the European past, the society of the early Roman Empire. So, to those who are still worried about the definition of the social system under which Brazil began its historical career, one might be tempted to reply that it was conceived in classical slavery, a state even prior to “feudalism” in the Marxist cursus honorum. But this, if nothing else, should prove again how little such precipitate labelization contributes to our understanding. Rather than resorting to general synchronic categories, which lead, almost inevitably, to arid squabbles over definitions, it would be preferable to opt for a genuinely historical, that is, a diachronic exegesis of the problem. For only after the fundamental institutional continuities between late medieval Iberia and early sixteenth century America have been spelled out as carefully and accurately as possible, can we begin to measure and evaluate the countercurrents of innovation—all toward the end of a fuller comprehension of the problem of continuity and change in the migration of cultures.

Author notes