{
  "id": "hernandarias-de-saavedra",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Hernandarias de Saavedra — the governor who asked for missionaries because he had no army",
  "summary": "Governor of the southern provinces at the turn of the seventeenth century, beaten and taken prisoner on the way to the strait of Magellan, and the man who told Madrid he was not strong enough to impose the law on the peoples of the Guayra and proposed to send priests instead. A royal cedula of 1608 approved it; the Jesuits sailed in December 1609; the missions began in 1610. The same page of the same historian records why the reduced Indians were deserting: the tyranny of the Spaniards.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "biography",
    "colonial-institutions",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "spanish-empire",
    "seventeenth-century",
    "exploration"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ordenanzas-de-alfaro-1612"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "montoya-conquista-espiritual-1639"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "imprenta-de-las-misiones-guaranies"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "encomienda"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who was Hernandarias de Saavedra?",
    "What was the royal cedula of 1608 on the Guayra?",
    "How did the Jesuit missions of Paraguay begin?",
    "Why did Indians desert their encomiendas in the Guayra?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "Hernandarias returned to the government on the death of governor Diego Valdes de Banda. Funes writes that it is not well established whether this was by appointment of the province or of the viceroy of Lima, but that it is established that in 1601 he obtained the government from the court in his own right. That the historian marks his own uncertainty on the first point and not on the second is worth carrying into the confidence here.",
      "sources": [
        "funes-ensayo-historia-civil-1816-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "He led an expedition towards the strait of Magellan and discovered more than two hundred leagues along that route. The peoples there, Funes writes, could not watch so sudden an invasion without alarm; they fell on the Spaniards with unexpected valour and won by their numbers, and everyone who survived was taken prisoner, Hernandarias included. He escaped, raised new forces out of Buenos Aires, and beat the enemy, who could not prevent the freeing of the prisoners.",
      "sources": [
        "funes-ensayo-historia-civil-1816-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Two further expeditions, to the conquest of the Parana and the Uruguay, went the other way. In the first he lost part of his army; in the second an army of five hundred men and the hope of the conquest with it. Funes, who admires him, prints both losses on the same page as the successes.",
      "sources": [
        "funes-ensayo-historia-civil-1816-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The same page carries the sentence that matters most for judging the whole arrangement, and it is not a hostile witness who writes it. The tyranny of the Spaniards, Funes states flatly, had made many of the reduced Indians of the Guayra desert their encomiendas, and had made many others refuse to enter into subjection at all, because of the lesson their compatriots' punishment taught them. The missionary policy that follows was a response to a failure of Spanish government, and its own chronicler says so.",
      "sources": [
        "funes-ensayo-historia-civil-1816-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Not believing himself to have forces enough to impose the law on those Indians, Hernandarias put the matter to the court, adding that in such a case it would be fitting to subject them by the arms of the faith. Philip III approved the proposal in a royal cedula of 1608. The wording is Funes's and it should be read exactly as it stands: the object was still subjection, and what changed was the instrument.",
      "sources": [
        "funes-ensayo-historia-civil-1816-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "Execution followed within two years. After no small difficulties it was agreed that the Jesuits Simon Mazeta and Jose Cataldino, both Italians, should have the province of the Guayra; they set out on 8 December 1609. About the same time Arapizandu, principal ruler of the Paranas, arrived at Asuncion asking for peace and for doctrineros for his people, and fathers Lorenzana and Francisco de San Martin took up that enterprise. In the following year, 1610, these men began the missions that afterwards drew criticism, hatred, envy and admiration in equal measure - the summary is Funes's own.",
      "sources": [
        "funes-ensayo-historia-civil-1816-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "A request from the other side is recorded in the same passage and is easy to lose: the Parana approach came from Arapizandu, who travelled to the Spanish capital to ask for it. The missions of the Parana begin in this account with an indigenous ruler seeking terms, not with a Spanish decision alone.",
      "sources": [
        "funes-ensayo-historia-civil-1816-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "His government ended in 1609 and Diego Martin de Negron replaced him, but the court of Spain, knowing his merits, called him a third time to the government of the Rio de la Plata. Having understood across his several terms that the territory the conquest covered was too vast for one chief to administer, he drew the Spanish government's attention to the need for a new province with Buenos Aires as its capital, and in 1620 the king decreed the division into the government of Paraguay and that of the Rio de la Plata, the two independent of each other and both answering to the viceroy of Peru and to the royal Audiencia.",
      "sources": [
        "du-graty-republica-del-paraguay-1862"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "Both witnesses are late and neither is neutral. Funes writes two centuries afterwards in a register of praise, calls the peoples of the Chaco barbarous and the mission enterprise the most agreeable part of his history, and credits Hernandarias with wanting those nations to yield to the empire of faith and reason rather than to be broken. Du Graty is a European compiler of 1862. No paper written or signed by Hernandarias was read for this object, and the cedula of 1608 is reported, not quoted.",
      "sources": [
        "funes-ensayo-historia-civil-1816-t1",
        "du-graty-republica-del-paraguay-1862"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Hernandarias appears in English mostly as a name in the list of governors of the Rio de la Plata, or as the man who let cattle loose on the pampas. This object gives the decision he is actually consequential for - the 1608 representation to Madrid that he lacked the force to impose the law and that priests should be sent instead, the cedula that approved it, the two Jesuits who sailed in December 1609 and the missions that opened in 1610 - and sets beside it, from the same pages and the same admiring historian, the two lost armies, the capture on the way to the strait, and the sentence that says the reduced Indians were deserting because of the tyranny of the Spaniards. It also keeps the detail every summary drops: the Parana mission was asked for by Arapizandu, who came to Asuncion to ask.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-13",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hernandarias-de-saavedra",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/hernandarias-de-saavedra.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Hernandarias de Saavedra — the governor who asked for missionaries because he had no army",
    "description": "Governor of the southern provinces at the turn of the seventeenth century, beaten and taken prisoner on the way to the strait of Magellan, and the man who told Madrid he was not strong enough to impose the law on the peoples of the Guayra and proposed to send priests instead. A royal cedula of 1608 approved it; the Jesuits sailed in December 1609; the missions began in 1610. The same page of the same historian records why the reduced Indians were deserting: the tyranny of the Spaniards.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hernandarias-de-saavedra",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-13",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Ensayo de la historia civil del Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres y Tucuman — Tomo Primero",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=jkVAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA323"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "La República del Paraguay",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=AimyGxVKnpgC&pg=PA23"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Hernandarias de Saavedra — the governor who asked for missionaries because he had no army"
  }
}