Prestige, Power, and Piety in Colonial Brazil: The Third Orders of Salvador

Abstract

HE spirit of Christian charity and social philanthropy which had swept through Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was largely attributable to St. Francis and St. Dominic. Brotherhoods and sororities had been established with the prime goals of exemplifying the ideals of Christianity in thought and deed, performing charitable works, and assuming corporate responsibility for members of such sodalities. One of the earliest such brotherhoods had been the Third Order of Penitence established by Francis of Assisi in 1221. Members had been known as tertiaries, were both male and female, were seculars, and did not live in monasteries or convents. In Portugal, the Third Order of St. Francis had been established in 1289. With the creation of a seaborne empire ranging from Amboina to the Amazon, the Portuguese took with them to Africa, Asia, and America those institutions which had become part of the warp and woof of metropolitan life. These included the Santa Casa da Misericordia; the Third Orders of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and the Carmelites; and other Christian brotherhoods. The foundation of corporations, brotherhoods (including the Third Orders), and confraternities had been essentially an urban phenomenon. In Europe, they had represented a response by Christians to the plight of their compatriots in the burgeoning cities of the mercantile florescence of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, whose darker side included plague, endemic disease, unsanitary living conditions, prostitution, crime, overcrowding, abandoned children, vagrancy, destitution, and irregular and inadequate food supplies. Especially vulnerable had been a rural populace drawn to the cities by hope but lacking marketable skills. Such conditions were present for much of the colonial period in Brazil, where they were joined to the medical and environmental problems of a sub-