A thatched hut on the plateau: the founding of São Paulo, 25 January 1554

In the first weeks of 1554, a few days after Epiphany, a dozen or so Jesuits left the coastal town of São Vicente and climbed the forested wall of the Serra do Mar. It was one of the hardest paths anywhere in the world, Anchieta later wrote. At the top the forest gave way to open fields, and they made for a low hill between two streams, the Tamanduateí and the Anhangabaú.3 sources3 sources

There the local people built them a house. It was small, of mud and timber under a thatched roof, fourteen paces long and barely ten wide. The builders were Indigenous villagers who followed two chiefs, Tibiriçá and Caiubi, and who had chosen to gather near the spot.4 sources4 sources

On 25 January, the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, the Jesuits said their first Mass there. Months later one of them, a 19-year-old novice from Tenerife called José de Anchieta, described the day in a long report in Latin to his superiors in Europe.2 sources2 sources

The house of Saint Paul gave its name to the village, and the village grew into São Paulo, a city of more than 11 million people. The founding is usually told as a story about priests. Anchieta's letters, read in full, are just as much about the Indigenous families who built the house, fed its occupants and, eight years later, fought to keep it standing.3 sources3 sources

In 1549 the Portuguese crown sent its first governor-general, Tomé de Sousa, to Bahia, on the north-east coast. A small group of Jesuits sailed with him under Manuel da Nóbrega, who wrote home that they arrived on 29 March 1549 after eight weeks at sea and found forty or fifty settlers in the existing village.2 sources2 sources

The south was the captaincy of São Vicente, granted to Martim Afonso de Sousa. Above its coastal strip lay the Piratininga plateau, home to Tupiniquim villages. A Portuguese settler, João Ramalho, had lived among them for nearly fifty years. He lived with Bartira, also called M'bicy, a daughter of Tibiriçá, as his wife (Anchieta, who disapproved, called her his concubine), and their sons, of mixed Portuguese and Indigenous descent (mamelucos), were an influential family on the plateau.4 sources4 sources

Ramalho's settlement on the edge of the forest was made a vila, a chartered town with its own council, in 1553, under the name Santo André da Borda do Campo. Nóbrega looked further on. On 29 August 1553, guided by one of Ramalho's sons, he visited the villages in the open fields beyond, closer to the river Tietê, which ran inland towards Paraguay and the peoples he hoped to reach.3 sources3 sources

The Indigenous side of the bargain appears in a letter Nóbrega wrote on 12 June 1553. Three villages in the fields, he reported, wanted to join into one so that they could be taught. The Jesuit historian Hélio Viotti read this as the villagers' own initiative, which Nóbrega welcomed: without it, he argued, the college would not have gone up the hill. Serafim Leite, another Jesuit historian, put it the other way round and cited Anchieta's statement that the Indians built the new village on Nóbrega's orders.2 sources2 sources

Anchieta had landed at Bahia in July 1553 with the second governor, Duarte da Costa. He reached São Vicente on 24 December, in time for Nóbrega's next move. In January 1554 Nóbrega sent priests and brothers to start a college in the fields of Piratininga, 12 or 13 leagues from São Vicente.3 sources3 sources

Anchieta's report, quoted here in Lisboeta's translation of the 1933 Portuguese edition, is the fullest eyewitness account of the first year. The hut was at once school, infirmary, dormitory, refectory, kitchen and storeroom, and at times more than twenty people slept in it. Smoke filled it so badly that the brothers often taught Latin grammar outside, preferring the cold of the plateau to the fire indoors.1 source1 source

He was plain about who had built it. “The Indians by themselves built this house for our use,” he wrote, adding that a slightly bigger one was now planned, “with the sweat of our brow and the help of the Indians.” The new house and church were finished on 1 November 1556.2 sources2 sources

The Jesuits lived on manioc flour, game, beans, pumpkins and mustard greens, with river fish only now and then. Their main support was a brother who worked as a blacksmith for the villagers without asking for payment; in return the Indians brought flour, vegetables and sometimes meat and fish. Parents brought their children to the school of their own accord. In the village 130 people had been called to catechism and 36 to baptism, which the priests held back until after a long trial.2 sources2 sources

Anchieta also learned the coastal Tupi language well enough to write its grammar, printed at Coimbra in 1595. The letter shows how much the mission depended on interpreters such as the brother Pero Correia, whom it calls one of the leading men of the land and a great master of the Indians' language. Before he joined the Jesuits, the 1933 editor notes, Correia had spent years raiding villages and taking captives.3 sources3 sources

The same letter already argued for force. Little or no fruit could be gathered from the Indians, Anchieta wrote, unless the secular arm came to subdue them. He closed by welcoming news of gold, silver and iron inland as the best and easiest means of conversion: Christians drawn by metals would bring the Indigenous peoples under Christ's yoke and make them do by force what they would not do for love.2 sources2 sources

Four hundred years later the founding became a matter of civic pride, and of argument. In 1954, the fourth centenary, supporters of Nóbrega and of Anchieta quarrelled publicly over which of them was the true founder. The geographer Virgílio Corrêa Filho summed it up: one had planned the enterprise and chosen the site, the other was a young novice in the party led by Paiva.1 source1 source

The date itself is safer than the cast. Anchieta's letter gives 25 January 1554 plainly, and the city's administrative history counts from it. Leite traced the village back to 29 August 1553, when Nóbrega, by his own account, solemnly made some fifty catechumens. Viotti argued that this episode belonged to Nóbrega's journey to Maniçoba, a village some 35 leagues into the interior, and not to Piratininga.4 sources4 sources

Even the building is argued over. The 1933 editor took the hut the Indians built and the little house of the first Mass to be the same; Leite read Anchieta as describing a separate small church beside the brothers' house. When Oscar Pereira da Silva painted the scene in 1909 he set the Mass in the open air before a crowd.3 sources3 sources

For six years Santo André, three leagues nearer the sea, and the Jesuit village coexisted on the plateau. In 1560 the governor-general Mem de Sá, after taking the French fort of Coligny, reached São Vicente on 31 March. At the request of Nóbrega and Luís da Grã he abolished Santo André and moved its pillory, the symbol of a town's jurisdiction, to São Paulo, where it was planted in front of the college. The new town council was installed in June 1560.4 sources4 sources

In 1561 Anchieta gave two reasons for the move: Santo André was in danger from enemies who had cut paths through the forest towards it, and it had no priest of its own. In 1584 he repeated only the second. Many historians of São Paulo have seen the move instead as a blow against João Ramalho and his mameluco sons, the priests' rivals for influence over the Indigenous villages.3 sources3 sources

The Indigenous families made their own decision. Anchieta wrote in June 1561 that the Indians had left Piratininga to live as they wished, though some of Caiubi's family stayed. The 1933 editor links their departure to the arrival of the Santo André settlers and says they founded new villages at Pinheiros and São Miguel. Caiubi, the old chief who had been the first to settle at Piratininga, died in 1561, more than a hundred years old by Anchieta's reckoning.2 sources2 sources

The attack that nearly ended São Paulo came from its own neighbours. Anchieta calls them “thieves of the house”: villages of the same people as the Indians of Piratininga, scattered inland, who had threatened war for years and had killed Portuguese traders in their lands. He keeps them distinct from the Tamoio, the enemies to the north. Among the attackers were Tibiriçá's brother, whom later writers call Araraí or Piquerobi, and that brother's son Jagoanharo.2 sources2 sources

In Anchieta's account the spark was the fate of an Indigenous Christian woman. Her Portuguese husband had been killed, and a village chief seized her to hold for ransom and to take as a concubine. She slipped out at night and was never seen again. Her captors said she had killed herself rather than submit; the Jesuits suspected they had murdered her.1 source1 source

An Indigenous man who had relatives in the village broke away from the attackers and ran ahead to warn the Jesuits. Converts from seven or eight villages came in by night with torches, shivering with cold, to help defend the place. Tibiriçá gathered his people from three small villages, pulling down their houses and leaving their fields to the enemy. For five days he walked the streets preaching to his followers to defend the church the priests had built for their children.1 source1 source

The assault came on the octave of the Visitation: 10 July 1562 by the 1933 editor's reckoning, 9 July in Serafim Leite's. Painted and feathered warriors attacked in the morning and besieged the village for two days. Brothers shot at brothers, cousins at cousins, nephews at uncles; two Christian sons fought on the Jesuit side against their own father. Portuguese women and children sheltered in the Jesuits' house and church.3 sources3 sources

On the second day the attackers killed the settlers' cattle and fled. Among their dead was a former catechumen, almost the attackers' captain, who stormed the fence of the Jesuits' garden and was killed by an arrow. The seventeenth-century chronicler Simão de Vasconcelos named him as Jagoanharo, and said he had first tried to talk his uncle out of defending the village.1 source1 source

Tibiriçá fell ill with dysentery later that year. He made his confession, left a will telling his wife and children to follow the priests' teaching, and died on Christmas Day 1562. He was buried in the Jesuit church, followed by the Portuguese settlers carrying the candles of their confraternity.1 source1 source

The same letter shows the hardening of Jesuit thinking. The war forced the converts to leave their scattered villages and gather inside Piratininga, behind a new wattle-and-daub wall they had built with the Portuguese. There they could be taught every day, and an alcaide, a local officer, made them go to church. “For this kind of people,” Anchieta wrote, in our translation, “there is no better preaching than the sword and the iron rod.”1 source1 source

Two days after writing that letter, on 18 April 1563, Anchieta and Nóbrega left São Vicente for Iperoig, on the coast, to negotiate peace with the Tamoio, and Anchieta stayed on there as a hostage.3 sources3 sources

Around the college the Jesuits ran a ring of aldeias, mission villages built on existing Indigenous settlements. Four were entrusted to them as royal villages: São Miguel, Pinheiros, Barueri and Guarulhos. From the mid-seventeenth century they also founded aldeias of their own, also called Jesuit farms, at Carapicuíba, M'Boy, Itapecerica, Itaquaquecetuba and São José.1 source1 source

The settlers wanted that labour too. Through the seventeenth century São Paulo's settlers organised frequent armed expeditions into the interior, known as bandeiras, to capture Indigenous people and bring them back as slaves. The historian John Monteiro showed that the hunt for slaves, more than exploration or the search for mineral wealth, drove this expansion. In the 1620s and 1630s Paulistas attacked the Spanish Jesuit missions of Guairá and Tape.3 sources3 sources

Royal laws and papal bulls upheld Indigenous freedom, from the law of 1570 to restatements in 1596, 1609, 1611, 1639 and 1696. In São Paulo the settlers got round them with a system called private administration. Monteiro found that “administered” Indians were sold, traded and left in wills like any other property, and that short of flight or rebellion their only way out was a deed of manumission.1 source1 source

When the Jesuits read out a papal brief against Indigenous slavery in public in 1640, the settlers threw them out of São Paulo, on 13 July 1640. The town council took over the royal aldeias. A royal decree of 3 October 1643 ordering the priests' return was ignored, and they came back only under an agreement of 14 May 1653, in which they gave up the papal brief and promised not to shelter Indigenous people who fled from the settlers.2 sources2 sources

By the mid-seventeenth century captives were harder to find. Expeditions had to go deeper into unknown country and met fiercer resistance. Some planters bought enslaved Africans instead, and some, such as Fernão Dias Pais, sank their fortunes into the search for precious metals. After gold was found in the 1690s, freed Indigenous people brought lawsuits and petitions with the support of crown judges, and Monteiro concluded that their growing resistance hastened the end of Indigenous slavery in São Paulo.1 source1 source

São Paulo grew slowly. At the start of the seventeenth century it had fewer than two hundred white residents, surrounded by thousands of Indigenous people and many mamelucos. It became the head of its captaincy by a provision of 22 March 1681.1 source1 source

In 1711 a royal letter raised the town to the rank of city. Sources disagree on the day: a 2011 notice of a tercentenary conference in the FAPESP research magazine dates the act to July 1711, the São Paulo court's official history to 24 July and the IBGE's municipal record to 11 June. The new city was installed on 3 April 1712. City status gave it more administrative and legal autonomy at a time when it was the base for expansion into the interior.3 sources3 sources

The village of 1554 is now a city of millions: the 2022 census counted 11,451,999 people in the municipality of São Paulo, which still dates its founding to 25 January 1554. The same census counted 19,783 people in the city who identify as Indigenous, 1,429 of them living in Indigenous lands within its borders.3 sources3 sources

The founding site has been rebuilt more than once. In 1759 the crown expelled the Jesuits from Portugal and its empire, and by the nineteenth century the square housed the seat of the provincial government. The Jesuit church, its roof brought down by a storm in 1896, was demolished soon after. A monument to the founders opened on the square on 11 June 1925.3 sources3 sources

The fourth centenary spurred a campaign that ended with the land handed back to the Jesuits, who rebuilt the church and college. The Museu Anchieta opened there in 1979 and keeps two walls from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 sources2 sources

Anchieta was beatified in 1980 and canonised by Pope Francis on 3 April 2014. Tibiriçá has had a quieter afterlife: his remains lie in a crypt about seven metres below the high altar of the cathedral.2 sources2 sources