{ "id": "milicias-guaranies-de-las-misiones", "type": "entity", "name": "The Guarani militia of the Paraguay reductions (from 1639)", "summary": "In 1638 the mission Indians of the Parana and the Uruguay asked to be given firearms, and the Crown broke its own standing rule and agreed. Within a year the raiders out of Sao Paulo had been beaten in the field; a century later the order's historian called the result the greatest military resource the king had in that part of South America, and one costing him \"not a single farthing\". The same troops deposed a bishop in 1644, and their weapons stayed locked in the missionaries' stores.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "paraguay", "americas", "colonial-institutions", "indigenous-peoples", "military", "human-rights", "spanish-empire", "seventeenth-century", "jesuits" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "montoya-conquista-espiritual-1639" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "montoya-tesoro-lengua-guarani-1639" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "imprenta-de-las-misiones-guaranies" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "buenaventura-suarez-astronomo-de-san-cosme" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "gumilla-orinoco-ilustrado-1745" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "yerbales-de-las-misiones" } ], "questions": [ "Were indigenous people in Spanish America ever allowed firearms?", "What was the Guarani militia of the Jesuit reductions?", "Why did Spain arm the mission Indians of Paraguay in 1639?", "How did the reductions stop the bandeirante slave raids?", "What did the Guarani militia cost the Spanish Crown?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The request came from the Indians, not from the missionaries first. After the forced removals of the 1630s, Southey writes, \"the Indians dreaded a renewal of these forced emigrations, and earnestly entreated that they might be provided with fire-arms, to protect themselves and their wives and children. The Jesuits were well convinced of the necessity and justice of such a measure.\" Charlevoix records the same thing from the other side: the chiefs represented to the provincial \"that, as long as they could not engage the Mamelus with equal arms, it was impossible they should not become a prey to them in the end\".", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817", "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "What was being asked for was an exception to a standing rule. \"It was one of the principles of the Spanish government not to permit the introduction of fire-arms among the Indians whom it held in subjection\"; Charlevoix puts it as a maxim of state in Spain, and concedes that \"no precaution, it must be allowed, could be wiser in regard to the Indians given in command, and who lived intermixed with the Spaniards. These it imported greatly to keep under subjection.\"", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817", "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The argument that carried it was a distinction between two kinds of subject. The rule \"ceased to be applicable when the Indians were connected with the Spaniards, not in the relation of slaves to masters, but of men enjoying the same benefits of civil and religious institutions\". Charlevoix argues it as a calculation rather than a principle: the fidelity of the first sort, \"whose submission was involuntary, could only be depended upon in proportion to their inability to shake off the yoke\", whereas the second, having submitted voluntarily, \"could have no motive to revolt, as long as no attempts were made upon their liberty, in the possession of which the sovereign had promised to maintain them\".", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817", "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The petition was carried to Europe by two men sent by the provincial Diego de Boroa in 1638: Antonio Ruiz de Montoya to Madrid and Diaz Tano to Rome. Charlevoix adds that Boroa had not dared raise the matter with the local governors \"lest, his project coming to transpire, some oppositions might be made to it\", and instead wrote the article expressly into Montoya's instructions, who then put it to the royal council of the Indies.", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817", "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The terms offered were restrictive and were designed to cost the treasury nothing. The arms \"should be in the custody of the missionaries, and only delivered out in time of danger\"; the Society would \"defray the whole expence, and form all the arrangements, so that it should cost the government neither trouble nor disbursement of any kind\"; they would raise alms enough to purchase the arms; and \"some of the brethren who had served in the army before they entered the Order, would instruct the Indians in their use\" - lay brothers to be sent for from the kingdom of Chili. No more powder and shot were to be kept in a reduction \"than what were necessary to avoid being surprized\", the rest deposited at Asuncion.", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817", "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The obvious objection was stated in the papers rather than left unsaid. Montoya \"knew very well, that it would be objected, that, if these Indians, on seeing themselves as well armed as the Spaniards, should take it into their heads to revolt, it would be impossible to reduce them; seeing it was impossible to conquer them, when they had no other arms but their arrows and their mancanas\".", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "Arms were one clause of a larger package granted in 1638-39, and the rest of it was law rather than weapons. The King confirmed the former laws in favour of the Indians; declared the conduct of the Paulistas, \"who had carried away more than thirty thousand slaves from Guayra\", to be contrary to all laws human and divine and cognizable by the Holy Office; ordered the enslaved set at liberty and future offenders punished as guilty of high treason; provided that all Indians converted in Guayra, Tape, Parana and Uruguay \"should be considered as immediate vassals of the Crown, and not on any pretext consigned to any individual for personal service\"; and fixed their tribute but deferred it to 1649.", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "Before the grant, the reductions lost even when they fought. In January 1638 the reductions of St Charles and the Apostles were abandoned by inhabitants \"though well able to defend themselves\"; in one skirmish thirteen hundred christians who made head against the raiders \"had at first some advantage; but, a sudden panick having seized them, they retreated to their reduction and set fire to it, though the enemy had not pursued them\", and when they returned with reinforcements and \"obtained a compleat victory\", Charlevoix records that \"unhappily, they knew not how to improve it\" and they walked into an ambuscade.", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The first result after the grant was a defeat inflicted on the raiders in 1639, and it was a joint Spanish and Indian operation under the governor. D. Pedro de Lugo, governor of Paraguay, intercepted a Paulista party \"with a good escort and with four thousand Indians\", accompanied by the superior of the missions Diego de Alfaro, who was recognised by a Mameluco and \"killed upon the spot by a musquet ball\"; the raiders were then attacked, \"many were cut to pieces, and almost all who escaped death were made prisoners\". The argument of Charlevoix's Book VII summarises the campaign as the new christians, \"allowed the use of fire-arms\", entirely defeating \"under the command of the governor of Paraguay, a large body of the Mamelus\".", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817", "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "Neither source treats the captured raiders as having been punished. The prisoners were taken eighty leagues to Asuncion, \"here it was expected that they would have been executed as banditti, but D. Pedro contented himself with reprimanding them\"; he sent them on to Buenos Ayres, \"there they made interest with the Governor, and were allowed to return home\".", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "Within months the force was being used by Spanish governors for ordinary policing far from the Brazilian frontier. Against the raiders and runaways lurking in the thousand square miles of swamp called Lake Ybera, the governor of the Plata sent D. Juan de Garay with a detachment of Spaniards from Buenos Ayres, and \"Romero joined him with a body of disciplined Indians, better suited for such warfare than the Spaniards: wherever the savages could fly they could follow\".", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "A century later the Jesuit historian of the province summed the institution up in fiscal terms: \"there has arisen among these Neophytes a militia, which, for more than an age past, has been the greatest resource of their sovereign in this part of South America, against both foreign and domestic enemies; and which, notwithstanding, it does not cost him a single farthing to pay or to maintain.\" He adds that after the grant neither the raiders nor their allies \"have dared to shew their faces in the christian reductions\".", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "\"Domestic enemies\" is not a figure of speech, and the clearest instance is a case against the missions rather than for them. At Asuncion in 1644 the governor Hinostrosa used the mission troops in a quarrel with Bishop Bernardino de Cardenas: the bishop rang the alarm-bell and told the assembled city \"that the armed Indians of the Jesuits had plundered Yaguaron, and were on their way to plunder Asumpcion\". An insurrection over the arrest of the Alcalde was averted only because the townspeople \"feared the Guaranies, who, as it was officially announced, were advancing in perfect discipline, and by the Governor's order\".", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c14", "text": "The bishop was then deposed and deported under the protection of that force. The governor \"ordered an hundred Guaranies into the city, half of whom he stationed at the College, and half at his own residence. Safe in the superiority which this force afforded him, he then proceeded in legal form\" - installing a canon in the bishop's place and sending a vessel to carry Cardenas and his household away. The episode reached print in the order's own history, whose Book VII argument concedes that the bishop of the Assumption \"abuses his spiritual power, and encroaches on the civil\".", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817", "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c15", "text": "The missionaries' own account of why the experiment succeeded is not a liberal one, and is worth quoting against them. Charlevoix writes that what is \"still most surprizing in these Indian troops\" is that the glory of their victories, \"so far from puffing up their hearts, and giving them an air of liberty and independence, as might be naturally apprehended, has put a stop to those mutinies, which their reiterated misfortunes had used before to occasion; so that their pastors have never found them more submissive and docile\". The arms were also never meant to be at the neophytes' disposal: the missionaries \"were resolved to keep them themselves, with all their ammunition, and never put them into their hands, but when they had good grounds to fear some irruption\".", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c16", "text": "The two witnesses used here are not independent of each other, and the pages say so. Southey's marginal notes beside this narrative read \"Techo, 102. Charlevoix, 447-458\" and \"Techo, 104. Charlevoix, 451. Azara, 1, 81\", so on the arming of the Guaranies the Protestant English historian is largely reworking Jesuit sources, one of them Charlevoix himself. Where they diverge it is in emphasis: Southey supplies the 1644 episode at length, Charlevoix supplies the terms of the grant and the fiscal summary.", "sources": [ "southey-history-of-brazil-vol2-1817" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c17", "text": "Charlevoix also records why the missions had to ask Madrid rather than the nearest governor. He calls it \"very surprizing, that the Spanish governors, to whom the missionaries made reiterated representations on that head, should have paid so little regard to them\", and attributes it to men \"who had nothing in view but their own private interest\", to which they sacrificed church and state alike \"from an unwillingness to see any of the natives become christians, but such as they could make slaves of\".", "sources": [ "charlevoix-history-of-paraguay-1769" ], "confidence": 0.8 } ], "takeaways": [ "Spanish law barred firearms to subject Indians as a matter of state policy, and in 1639 the Crown made an exception for the Paraguay reductions that it then refused for a century to revoke.", "The exception was argued on a distinction between Indians held in encomienda and Indians who were direct vassals of the Crown, and the same royal answer that granted the arms also declared the mission converts immediate vassals not consignable to personal service.", "The resulting force did the Crown's fighting in the Plata for more than a century at no charge to the treasury, by the reckoning of the order that raised it.", "It was also used against a bishop in 1644, in a purely Spanish quarrel, and the city of Asuncion was kept quiet by fear of it.", "The arms were kept in the missionaries' stores and issued only on their judgement; the Jesuit historian counted it a success that victory made the troops \"more submissive and docile\"." ], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "The arming of the Guarani reductions is usually met either as a line in an account of the bandeirantes or as the battle scene of a film, and almost never with the paperwork attached. What is set out here comes off two eighteenth and nineteenth century printings read page by page: the petition and who made it, the maxim of state it broke, the legal distinction that carried it, the exact conditions - arms in the missionaries' custody, surplus at Asuncion, bought with alms, drilled by ex-soldier lay brothers - and the fiscal boast that followed. It also carries the case against: a bishop deposed in 1644 by the same troops, an order historian pleased that armed Indians had become more docile, and the marginal citations that show the two witnesses are largely one.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-12", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/milicias-guaranies-de-las-misiones", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/milicias-guaranies-de-las-misiones.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The Guarani militia of the Paraguay reductions (from 1639)", "description": "In 1638 the mission Indians of the Parana and the Uruguay asked to be given firearms, and the Crown broke its own standing rule and agreed. Within a year the raiders out of Sao Paulo had been beaten in the field; a century later the order's historian called the result the greatest military resource the king had in that part of South America, and one costing him \"not a single farthing\". The same troops deposed a bishop in 1644, and their weapons stayed locked in the missionaries' stores.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/milicias-guaranies-de-las-misiones", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-12", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "The History of Paraguay: containing amongst many other new, curious and interesting particulars of that country, a full and authentic account of the establishments formed there by the Jesuits, volume I", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=40sIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA385" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "History of Brazil, part the second", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=5FIOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA322" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The Guarani militia of the Paraguay reductions (from 1639)" } }