Donatários

Donatários, lord proprietors. In 1534 King João III made donatary grants of fifteen strips of land in Brazil to a dozen noblemen to encourage permanent settlement and better defense from pirates. The lord proprietors who received these grants were required to defend and settle the land at their own expense, to found and charter townships, administer justice, collect tithes, and license sugar mills. The donatários were similar to the proprietors of large land grants in English North America, although in the case of Brazil, most were absentee landlords. As a recipient of a captaincy, the donatário had extensive administrative, fiscal, and judicial powers over colonists. They were empowered to make land grants (sesmarias) to prospective settlers who arrived to form permanent settlements and establish sugarcane plantations and cattle ranches to export crops.

None of the donatários came from the high nobility, but they were all members of the Order of Christ. Some of the donatários were soldiers of fortune, like Duarte Coelho Pereira and Francisco Pereira Coutinho. Others were well educated, like the historian João de Barros, or were government bureaucrats.

The original donatários of the captaincies around 1534 were:

João de Barros and Aires da Cunha (Pará)

Fernão Alvares de Andrade (Maranhão)

Antônio Cardoso de Barros (Piauí)

Pêro Lopes de Sousa (Itamaracá, Santo Amaro, Santa Ana)

Duarte Coelho Pereira (Pernambuco)

Francisco Pereira Coutinho (Bahia)

Jorge Figueiredo Correia (Ilhéus)

Pêro do Campo Tourinho (Pôrto Seguro)

Vasco Fernandes Coutinho (Espírito Santo)

Pêro de Gó is (São Tomé)

Martim Afonso de Sousa (Rio de Janeiro, São Vicente

See alsoCaptaincy System; João III of Portugal.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carlos Malheiro Dias, ed., História da colonização portuguesa do Brasil, 3 vols. (1921–1926).

Alexander Marchant, From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500–1580 (1942).

Bailey W. Diffie, Latin American Civilization: The Colonial Period (1945), p. 642a, and A History of Colonial Brazil, 1500–1792 (1987).

Additional Bibliography

Metcalf, Alida C. Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Silva, Maria Beatriz Nizza da. De Cabral a Pedro I: Aspectos da colonização portuguesa no Brasil. Oporto, Portugal: Universidade Portucalense Infante D. Henrique, 2001.

                                        Patricia Mulvey