In the epistle dedicatory of O Gentio de Angola Sufficientemente instruido nos mysterios de nossa sancta Fé (1642), the first bilingual Portuguese-Kimbundo catechism, the Jesuit António do Couto dedicated the work to the “illustrious lady” (Ilustre senhora) Isabel de Oliveira Corte Real in recognition of her patronage of the Jesuit activities in Angola. Couto’s brief epistle dedicatory illuminates the formation of the early Luanda colonial elite and their strategies of accumulation of symbolic capital. Indeed, this is a text published in the empire’s capital, written by a Luanda-born Jesuit and dedicated to a prominent member of the Luanda elite. Besides funding the Jesuit mission, Isabel de Oliveira raised five children, one of whom, Jerónimo de Corte Real, entered the Society of Jesus. Jerónimo died before 1642, at “the flower of his age” causing great pain to his family and to the Jesuits who had “great hopes of the many fruits of his work in the Lord’s vineyard.”Footnote 1
Little is known about Isabel de Oliveira Corte Real’s background. The names of her parents are unknown. It is possible that she was among the small group of children brought by the few Portuguese-born married couples who travelled with Paulo Dias de Novais and founded Luanda in 1575. However, in the available sources, her name is never associated with this small group of settlers. Another and stronger possibility is that she was the daughter of one of “the very wealthy forty Portuguese men” who left the Kingdom of Kongo during the Jaga invasion and took refuge on Luanda Island before 1575.Footnote 2 An anonymous account described the Luso-African community residing in Kongo as not being clean people (gente limpia) alluding to the New Christian and mixed-race background of most of the Portuguese and Luso-Africans who migrated from São Tomé to Kongo.Footnote 3 Part of the success of the Portuguese community in Kongo derived from their relationships with local women through marriage or concubinage—often encouraged by the local rulers and other power brokers.Footnote 4 These liaisons prompted the formation of an important community of itinerant traders and brokers (pombeiros) who operated in the hinterlands of Kongo and Ndongo.
The fact that Couto addressed Oliveira as an ilustre senhora and not with the more prestigious and honorific dona suggests that, during the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, the latter term was not yet commonly used to identify wealthy prominent women as would occur in later centuries. In fact, despite her wealth and influence in the Luanda trade, Oliveira is mentioned in the correspondence of Governor Fernão de Sousa without any honorific title and only as the widow of an early conquistador of Angola—a prestigious marker of identity in its own right.Footnote 5 It is also possible that the governor sought to downplay her prominence in Luanda amid the conflicts involving members of the Viloria family with factions close to Sousa.
Nonetheless, Isabel de Oliveira’s profile and trajectory seemed to anticipate the careers of the donas of Luanda and Benguela of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries examined by Mariana Candido, José Curto, Vanessa Oliveira, and Selma Pantoja.Footnote 6 Like them, Oliveira was an African or Afro-European woman married to a European colonial agent. Possibly connected with previous generations of Luso-African traders operating in the region, Oliveira also possessed the social capital and business acumen to access local trade networks and local resources to become a privileged intermediary between the merchants operating in Luanda and the hinterland African suppliers. Also, like the donas of the late eighteenth century, Oliveira’s prominent status derived from an adherence to Catholicism, demonstrated by her patronage of the Luanda Jesuits, and Portuguese material culture.
Isabel de Oliveira’s social prominence derived from both her mercantile activities and marriage to the Castilian-born captain Juan de Viloria Pinto, also known as João de Viloria Pinto. Theirs was a marriage that illustrates the observation made by António de Oliveira Cadornega that all the original conquistadores “accommodated themselves with Mulatas, daughters of worthy men and conquerors with female slaves or free Black women.”Footnote 7 These marriages followed similar lines to the matrimonial strategies employed by the elites of São Tomé, where mixed-race merchants and landowners sought to marry their daughters to Portuguese-born officials. These matrimonial alliances aimed to cement and enhance the status of local prominent families or individuals by cultivating proximity to the crown’s administrative apparatus.Footnote 8
The union between Oliveira and Viloria seemed to be yet another case of the implementation of this strategy. This was a marriage in which many interests converged. Viloria arrived in Luanda in the mid-1580s. Marrying someone connected with the Luso-African mercantile community offered him the opportunity to acquire wealth and to participate in an expanding network linking São Tomé, Kongo, Angola, and the Iberian Americas. By becoming a casado or married man, Viloria was also able to obtain the status of morador (resident), which granted a series of political rights that allowed him, albeit a foreigner, to access the municipal council and other relevant posts in the local administration. At the same time, besides the possibility of Oliveira enhancing her status by marrying a European military officer, her mercantile activities could benefit from Viloria’s position in the colonial apparatus.
Viloria and Oliveira together worked successfully to cultivate political capital based on their close proximity to the Crown and to the establishment of a network based on matrimonial alliances with other members of the Luanda elite with shared interests or backgrounds. In a letter to João de Argomedo, a Lisbon-based merchant with interests in the Angolan slave trade, the Castilian merchant Francisco de Mar exposed the modus operandi of the tandem of Viloria and Oliveira.
Like other members of the Luanda military apparatus, Viloria used the raids and expeditions in the hinterland to acquire or capture slaves who his wife then sold to Castilian and Portuguese slave traders.Footnote 9 Described by Mar as a shrewd businesswoman (tan negoçiadera), Oliveira operated as an intermediary who linked coastal merchants like Mar with hinterland suppliers. She also sold slaves captured during Viloria’s military activities. Between the 1600s and 1610s, Oliveira was able to dominate the Luanda slave trade thanks to her connections with prominent figures in the colonial apparatus and privileged access to slaves through the tributary sobados and military raids in the Angolan hinterland.Footnote 10 Mar’s letter notes that when he was unable to reach a favorable agreement with Oliveira, he asked Viloria to work to persuade his wife, but with little effect. Indeed, the letter suggests that, although the couple worked together in the slave trade, it was Oliveira who had the final word in all transactions and who delineated their business strategies.
Based on the trajectories of Viloria and Oliveira, this article examines the formation of the first Luanda elites. The history of early seventeenth-century Angola remains little known. While the elite groups formed after the expulsion of the Dutch from Luanda (1648) and during the zenith of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century have been the subject of several studies, the formation of the early elites of colonial Angola remains little explored. One of the reasons for this is the destruction of a considerable number of documents produced between the arrival of Paulo Dias de Novais on Luanda Island in 1575 and the Dutch conquest in 1641. Cadornega in his Historia Geral das Guerras Angolanas, complained that the Dutch soldiers who occupied Luanda in 1641 threw the local archives into the Bengo River, “causing the loss of much news about the things of this Kingdom of Angola.”Footnote 11 The available information is thus rather fragmented. The few available sources make the history of the first stages of the colonization of Angola a broken mosaic with several missing pieces, which often require painstaking reconstruction through the formulation of hypotheses and the comparison with other Iberian colonial territories.
The growing historiographical interest in the development of a Portuguese southern Atlantic system has stimulated several studies that examine the formation of the Angolan colonial elites and how they participated in transatlantic networks and colonial administrative structures after 1641. Candido, Pantoja, Joseph C. Miller, Roquinaldo Ferreira, and Estevam Thompson, for example, have examined the formation of a Brazilian-born elite in Angola which fostered bilateral connections between Brazil and the Angolan ports, and successfully challenged the Portuguese crown’s interests on the slave trade contributing to a Brazilian hegemony on the Portuguese southern Atlantic system.Footnote 12 Luiz Felipe de Alencastro has highlighted how the economic complementarity between Brazil and Angola was crucial for the consolidation of the Portuguese southern Atlantic system, and generated an intense circulation of different agents between the two territories.Footnote 13
The transatlantic links between Brazil and Angola and their impact on the evolution of the conquest of Angola have also been examined by scholars such as Curto and Rodrigo Bonciani.Footnote 14 In a dialogue with the notion of “Atlantic creoles” proposed by John Thornton and Linda Heywood, the works of Candido, Ferreira, Curto, Pantoja, and Oliveira have also examined the development of Luso-African societies in Luanda and Benguela which mixed and manipulated European and African cultural traits.Footnote 15 The studies of Candido, Oliveira, and Pantoja have also highlighted the important role played in these processes of “creolization” and in the formation of the local elites.Footnote 16 These works, however, are essentially focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the formation of the early colonial elites of Angola remains a rather obscure subject. More recently, Arlindo Caldeira has examined how the municipal council of Luanda contributed to the formation of a powerful local oligarchy throughout the seventeenth century.Footnote 17 Catarina Madeira Santos’s studies on eighteenth-century Luanda also highlight how Luanda elites participated in imperial and municipal institutional structures, collaborating and competing with agents of imperial reform.Footnote 18
Isabel de Oliveira and a “Well-Seasoned” Man
Viloria probably arrived in Luanda around 1584 among the 200 soldiers commanded by João Castanho Velez.Footnote 19 According to the report sent by Domingos de Abreu de Brito to King Philip II, Viloria was an illustrative and successful example of how Castilian soldiers stationed in Portugal or serving sentences in Portuguese jails could be used in West Central Africa.Footnote 20 Described as someone “well-seasoned in war,” Viloria ascended rapidly during the conquest of Angola.Footnote 21 Throughout the mid-1580s and early 1620s, Viloria commanded several successful expeditions against Ndongo, being appointed to key posts in the Angolan military apparatus. Besides his military skills, he also enjoyed the benefits of being literate in a colony where most of the settlers were not able to read and write.Footnote 22 Throughout the 1580s and 1590s, he served at different times as ouvidor (judge) and as a member of the municipal council of Luanda.
This impressive career in the military and administrative apparatus of early colonial Angola owed much to his military prowess and literacy, as well as to a no less spectacular physical resistance to tropical conditions. Viloria died around 1622, living almost 40 years in Angola—a remarkable feat in a region where the European life expectancy was very reduced. It had been estimated that among approximately 3,480 individuals who landed in Luanda between 1575 and 1592, some 3,180 died in this period of 17 years—a death rate of almost 92%.Footnote 23
Viloria’s career is inseparable from the turbulent evolution of the Portuguese colonial apparatus in Angola. The conquest of Angola was a long process that not only involved the military occupation of the kingdom of Ngola and Benguela, but, above all, ongoing negotiations between the Portuguese crown and the so-called “old conquerors,” a group formed by the first royal officials and military men who took part in the exploits of Paulo Dias de Novais.
When Viloria arrived in Luanda, the so-called Kingdom of Angola was a donatory-captaincy granted to Paulo Dias de Novais, a model inspired by the Portuguese experiences in the Azores, Madeira, and Brazil. The charter granted to Novais envisaged the military conquest and colonization of a large territory along the Kwanza River, including the Kingdom of Ndongo.Footnote 24 To secure support for this expansionist project and guarantee his authority, Novais granted trustworthy military men and settlers the privileges of receiving and managing sobados, that is the lands and tributes paid by subdued chieftains, the sobas. These tributes, often paid in slaves, stimulated the involvement of the first settlers in the transatlantic slave trade. Like the prazo system in the Zambezi valley, the sobados were both an instrument of social and territorial control, since the sobas and their lands directly depended on the conquistadores.Footnote 25 The concession of sobados also prompted the formation of a colonial elite of Iberian-born men, like Viloria, whose name is included in a petition of amos, or holders of sobados, signed in 1587.
Viloria’s marriage to Isabel de Oliveira Corte Real, a woman associated with the local trading scene, implied a convergence of interests between the first conquistadores and the Luso-African settlers. Indeed, their marriage epitomized the interconnections between the emerging Atlantic trade based in Luanda, driven by the Luso-African settlers who migrated from Kongo and São Tomé, and the slaves paid by the sobas as a tribute to the conquistadores or captured in military raids.Footnote 26
After Novais’s death without heirs in 1589, Philip II sought to take direct control of the conquest of Angola by revoking the captaincy-donatory and appointing D. Francisco de Almeida as the territory’s first governor-general. Almeida’s task was to establish a royal administration that would subordinate the conquistadores to the crown. One of his main assignments was thus to end the amos system and transfer the tributes the sobas paid the conquistadores directly to the crown. Almeida’s demarches generated several tensions. In 1592, a group of Luanda notables, including the Jesuits and the municipal councilors, rebelled, arresting the governor and the new ouvidor-geral, Duarte Nunes. The rebels appointed the governor’s brother, D. Jerónimo de Almeida, to head an interim government. D. Jerónimo annulled his brother’s measures regarding the sobas’ tributes, alleging that there was a need for greater clarification from the crown. Viloria was among the rebels and was one of D. Jerónimo’s right-hand men. Indeed, the interim governor appointed him interim ouvidor, the post that Viloria had served before Nunes’s appointment.Footnote 27
Amid the crisis posed by the 1592 rebellion, Viloria travelled to the Iberian Peninsula, probably to present to the crown the positions of the old conquistadores. There is little information about his sojourn in Lisbon and Madrid. Nonetheless, Cadornega mentions that Viloria returned to Luanda in 1594 accompanying João Furtado de Mendonça, the new governor appointed by Philip II in 1593. He returned not only with the new governor but also with edicts confirming his status as a “person of great honours,” as a Noble Knight (cavaleiro fidalgo) of the Royal House and a Professed Knight of the Order of Christ.Footnote 28 Viloria’s metamorphosis from a rebel to a fidalgo of the Royal House suggests that Philip II sought to co-opt a prominent figure in the Luanda elites to guarantee a tranquil implementation of administrative reforms. Viloria’s promotion reveals the crown’s attempt to reconcile royal and local interests: by being willing to confirm and enhance the sociopolitical prominence of the old conquistadores rather than punishing them, the crown sought to buy acceptance of its policies. This strategy was very similar to the one implemented in places such as Bahia, Pernambuco or Rio de Janeiro, where the crown also granted privileges to members of the local elites to ensure their collaboration.Footnote 29
The more conciliatory approach adopted by the crown after the events of 1592 reveals an attempt to avoid an escalation of the tensions in Angola. Besides the Luanda revolt, Francisco de Almeida’s hardline approach estranged several sobas. Compounding these difficulties, in 1595, a widespread slave uprising in São Tomé culminated in the proclamation of one of its leaders, Amador, as the king of the island.Footnote 30 The revolt would be violently crushed, but the Portuguese authorities duly noted the proclamation of King Amador as a direct challenge to the crown’s authority and the local colonial apparatus. The proximity between Luanda and São Tomé and the chronological sequence of the two rebellions generated the perception that these were colonial spaces threatened by a high risk of political instability and social disintegration.
The realization, in 1605, that reports of vast silver deposits in Cambambe were an illusion led Philip III to halt the conquest of the Kingdom of Angola.Footnote 31 Since the first Portuguese exploits in the region, there were rumors of the existence of silver mines in the area of Cambambe east of the region of Kisama. The gifts of silver made by the ruler of Ndongo to the Portuguese authorities in 1520 contributed greatly to the perception of a new Potosí in Africa. After a series of military expeditions in the Kisama region with the aim of guaranteeing access to the silver mines, the Portuguese failed to find the mineral riches of Cambambe around 1604–05. Without the prospect of abundant silver deposits, the crown was unable to sustain the costs of a prolonged military conquest. The priority was now to enhance the colony’s economic and productive structures or, in Philip III’s own words, “to conserve the established trade and traffic, expand the Royal Treasury, and the wealth of my subjects.”Footnote 32
Between 1607 and 1611, the crown implemented a series of measures to restructure the conquista of Angola. The strategy delineated in Lisbon and Madrid sought to stimulate the slave trade, with strict royal supervision, and promote the development of productive structures that could ensure the profitability of the occupied territories.Footnote 33 Another key measure was the definitive dismantlement of the amos system. In 1607, Philip III instructed Governor Manuel Pereira Forjaz to impede the concession of “tributary chieftains to any person” and revoke previous concessions. The sobas would be under the direct tutelage of the crown and their tributes collected and managed by the Royal Treasury.Footnote 34
Besides the intention to cement royal authority in Angola, the crown’s policies seemed to respond to the demands of Seville-based merchants and financiers. This important lobby wished to participate directly in the Angolan slave trade and perceived the Portuguese contractors and their networks of intermediaries not only as competitors, but as destabilizing elements who promoted contraband.Footnote 35 The reform of the Iberian slave trade, and especially the obligation to force all contractors and merchants to sell their slaves in Seville, was thus regarded as essential to ensure royal control.Footnote 36 It was also a crucial measure to impede Portuguese businessmen from gaining access to the markets of Spanish America via the slave trade.Footnote 37 In 1607, the Consejo de Índias contemplated the possibility of annulling the contracts granted to Duarte Henriques and Jorge Rodrigues da Costa for the slave trade of Angola and São Tomé, respectively.Footnote 38 In 1611, the crown appointed Juan Alfonso de Molina Cano, a member of the Council of Indies, to manage the concession of licenses to slave traders who wished to operate in Spanish America. In 1615, the same license would be granted to Melchor Maldonado, a member of the Casa de Contratación. However, the number of licenses issued between 1611 and 1615 was below the minimum expectations of the crown, paving the way to a return to the asiento. In 1616, the Portuguese converso businessman António Fernandes de Elvas was running the asiento, as well as the contracts for the slave trade of Angola and Cape Verde.Footnote 39
To soften the impact of these reforms on the local elites, Philip III instructed Pereira Forjaz to distribute sesmarias (land grants) in 1607. This measure sought both to compensate the Luanda elites for losing their sobas, and to promote the development of a plantation system dedicated to cotton and sugar that could stimulate the colonization of the Angolan hinterland. Philip III’s plan aimed to emulate the successful Brazilian experience, where the concession of land grants spurred the settlement of Portuguese America and the development of a profitable sugar industry. As in Brazil, the holders of sesmarias who established plantations and engenhos (sugar mills) would benefit from fiscal exemptions. Similar privileges would also be extended to landowners who did not possess sesmarias. These financial benefits were intended to engage the local elites in the restructuring of the conquista and reduce their dependence on the slave trade.Footnote 40 In other words, these measures aimed to trigger a process of transition from what was essentially a slaver elite driven by their own agenda to a planter elite aligned with the crown’s policies.
To anticipate and mitigate the dissatisfaction of key members of the Angolan military apparatus, Philip III granted several mercês to prominent military men to ensure their alignment with the crown’s new policies. As part of this strategy, in 1606, Philip III rewarded Juan de Viloria with the office of marcador de escravos and the privilege of transferring this office and its revenues to one of his daughters.Footnote 41 According to a 1607 anonymous account, the marcador de escravos in Angola did not receive a salary but collected two vinténs for each marked slave.Footnote 42 By granting a license as marcador de escravos, the crown sought to incorporate Viloria’s interests in the Angolan slave trade into the royal structures that regulated it. It was a suitable solution that preserved his clout in the Luanda slave market, and had the potential to dissuade a possible involvement in smuggling and contraband, enlisting Viloria in the crown’s efforts to control the slave trade and expand its revenues. In 1611, Philip III granted Viloria the privileges of a sesmaria to his estates in Batiquele in the outskirts of Luanda, a reward that exposes the crown’s efforts to encourage or pressure the local elites to participate actively in the establishment of plantations.
Notwithstanding the crown’s incentives to develop a plantation system, slave trafficking remained the driving force behind all investment and policies related to Angola.Footnote 43 As António Dinis explained in 1622 to Philip III, the wealth generated by the slave trade could be productively regulated by the crown without disturbing the institution by adopting monopolistic practices. The moradores of Luanda acquired slaves in the local markets for 10,000 réis and sold them to Spanish and Portuguese merchants for more than 22,000 réis. However, most of the slaves imported from Luanda were obtained at no cost from Portuguese warfare in the hinterland, which combined the goals of territorial expansion and enslavement.Footnote 44 Warfare accompanied and further facilitated the commercialization of slavery, shaping the development of trading networks in the region.Footnote 45 Baltasar Rebelo de Aragão, a prominent conquistador and holder of a sesmaria, reported to the crown, in 1618, that several moradores of Luanda, many of whom were linked to the military apparatus, invested much of their wealth in human and logistical resources that facilitated the acquisition of slaves in markets outside the territories under Portuguese control.Footnote 46
Rather than investing in the production of sugar and cotton, the landowners of Luanda oriented their arimos to the domestic market, ensuring a small-scale production which supplied Luanda with basic staples of the local diet such as vegetables, corn, and manioc. The fact that most landowners were also members of Luanda’s municipal council contributed to the arimos’ domestic-oriented production. In their capacity as vereadores (councilors) they were able to regulate food prices, establishing a rather closed market, which ensured the arimos’ viability with little investment, avoiding the risks inherent in large-scale production for exports. A considerable part of the production of these farming estates was destined for the ships calling at Luanda. According to Dinis, the moradores sold foodstuffs at inflated prices, a deliberate strategy that sought to compensate for the high prices of commodities imported from Lisbon, Seville, Salvador da Bahia, and Cartagena de Indias.Footnote 47 As Dinis sarcastically noted, in Luanda “a cow is sold for 16,000 or 20,000 reis… which means that a cow costs more than a slave.”Footnote 48 Due to the high demand for slaves in the Ibero-American ports, these prices were accepted by most traders who rapidly compensated for these costs with the sale of slaves in Brazil and Spanish America.Footnote 49
Extending the Family
Juan de Viloria’s social and political status and Isabel de Oliveira’s clout in the Luanda slave market were further maintained and reinforced by the establishment of matrimonial alliances with other old conquistador families and with white Portuguese-born military officers. These alliances established or reinforced existing connections with the colonial apparatus, integrating new members of the colonial administrative or military apparatus into the family configuration.
The strategic lines behind the expansion of the Viloria family illustrate Pierre Bourdieu’s description of the family as “one of the key sites of the accumulation of capital in its different forms and its transmission between the generations.”Footnote 50 The goal was to establish partnerships with individuals who shared similar interests and had the potential to participate in a dynamic network that generated and mobilized the required social capital to accumulate and manage economic, political, or symbolic resources that could improve the Vilorias’ status and agency.
Matrimonial alliances with wealthy or well-positioned European-born men not only could cement or extend the family’s material, social, and political capital, but also worked to “Europeanize” the family lineage. The incorporation of prominent metropolitan men into the family configuration sought to attenuate the risks of Africanization of its members through a symbolic “Europeanizing” based on connections with the metropole or the royal apparatus. At the same time, the African connections of the Luso-African families of Luanda, their participation in local trading networks, privileged access to local resources, and knowledge of local social and commercial practices were pivotal for the career of European-born colonial agents. For Iberian-born men to marry the daughters of prominent Luso-African families, versed in navigating both the European and African worlds, enhanced their possibility of accessing the municipal council, as well as profitable business ventures, not to mention the estates and slaves that could be included in the dowry.
The strategy of Viloria and Oliveira seemed to be followed by other elite families throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Vanessa de Oliveira’s studies on nineteenth-century Luanda, for example, reveal how local elites sought to marry their offspring to Portuguese officials and businessmen to consolidate commercial and political partnerships that could enhance their interests in Angola or across the Portuguese southern Atlantic system.Footnote 51 A similar strategy of accumulation of social and symbolic capital was also adopted by the Luso-African elites of Benguela during the late eighteenth century.Footnote 52 The similarities between the approaches developed by the Vilorias in the early seventeenth century and the Luso-African families between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seem to corroborate Miller’s argument that the strategies utilized by Luanda powerbrokers built upon the approaches developed by elites during the conquest of Angola.Footnote 53
Such intentions are patent in the marriages Viloria and Oliveira arranged for their three daughters. Violante Corte Real married António Bruto, a military officer who arrived in Luanda with Governor João Rodrigues de Coutinho in 1602.Footnote 54 Bruto also participated in several campaigns under the command of Juan de Viloria. This proximity seemed to have been behind the marriage and Bruto’s rapid ascension. In the 1620s he was appointed to several high-ranking posts in the Angolan military apparatus, including that of captain-major, and in 1623 he became a vereador of the Luanda municipal council.Footnote 55 The 1630 report written by the Jesuit Pedro Tavares also mentions Bruto as the owner of an estate near the Kwanza River.Footnote 56 Violante and António were already married by 1612, when an edict issued by Governor Manuel de Cerveira granted the rent of “a place of alferez [ensign] each month and forever to Dona Violante, the wife of Captain António Bruto, the Captain of Masango.”Footnote 57
Another daughter, Joana Corte Real, married Gaspar Borges de Madureira, a military officer and a prominent landowner. Borges de Madureira’s career was initially dogged by an inquiry into his negligence regarding the loss of several ships during a failed Dutch attempt to blockade Luanda in 1624, an accusation that resulted in a brief period of detention in 1628.Footnote 58 In spite of this episode, he would be appointed to high-profile posts in the Angolan military and administrative apparatus. Borges de Madureira served as captain of a cavalry during the 1626 campaigns against Queen Nzinga.Footnote 59 Between 1627 and 1628, he received two estates of 1,000 braças in the Bengo and Kwanza areas, and another one of 1,500 braças in the Sequele area.Footnote 60 According to the Jesuit Pedro Tavares, Borges de Madureira was also an important slaveowner with at least 400 slaves on his Bengo estate alone.Footnote 61 Besides the slaves employed in his arimos, he also owned a considerable number of enslaved bowmen who were often employed in military expeditions. Around 1639 and 1640, Borges de Madureira headed a diplomatic mission to the court of Queen Nzinga.Footnote 62 In 1645 he was elected as the first vereador of LuandaFootnote 63 and around 1646 he commanded the Portuguese troops who defeated the troops of Nzinga and the Dutch in the Lumbo district.Footnote 64
There is little information about Joana Corte Real. Her name appears in the inquisitorial records for suspicions of using “heathen” rituals to protect her son.Footnote 65 The use of Mbundu healing and ritual, and other cultural practices in Luanda, was a cause of concern for Portuguese secular and religious agents who feared that the “Africanized” habitus of Luso-African populations posed a risk of detachment from the Catholic Church and the Portuguese crown. Joana Corte Real’s case illustrates the development of what Heywood and Thornton termed “Atlantic creole culture,” a long process of transcultural interaction between West Central African and Iberian cultures.Footnote 66 As Candido notes, in Luanda and Benguela “creolization” was a two-way process of sociocultural transformation triggered by the social and political changes catalyzed by Portuguese expansionism in the region. It was also a process in which Portuguese and African actors strategically picked, adopted, or reinvented European or African sociocultural elements according to their interests and circumstances.Footnote 67 In the case of the Vilorias, the manipulation of European and African sociocultural traits was strategic. While in the domestic sphere Joana had recourse to Mbundu rituals to ensure her son’s wellbeing, to the public eye her mother actively sponsored the proselytizing efforts of the Jesuits. If Joana’s case seems to illustrate the Africanization of the Luanda elites observed by Linda Heywood, the public association between Isabel de Oliveira and the Jesuits fostered the perception of the Viloria family as entirely aligned with the Catholic Church and Portuguese mores.Footnote 68 According to Cadornega, another unnamed daughter of Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira married João Pegado da Ponte, an important landowner in the Mobella area and a “person of authority.”Footnote 69
While Luso-African elites sought to marry their daughters to Iberian colonial agents to extend their networks to the metropolis and other overseas territories, their sons tended to marry daughters of other prominent Luso-African families in order to consolidate local political and commercial partnerships. It is possible that Mbundu and Kongo matrilineal descent practices influenced these matrimonial strategies. As Catarina Madeira Santos and Joseph C. Miller have noted in their studies on eighteenth-century Angola, the high mortality rate of European men in Angola favored the adoption of practices of patrimonial transmission based on the matrilineal line. These practices also stimulated the remarriage of widows as a strategy to concentrate and expand resources.Footnote 70
These strategies are clearly evident in the case of the marriage between António Ribeiro Pinto, one of the sons of Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira, and Dona Ana de São Miguel, the daughter of the Luso-African Maria das Neves and the Castilian-born captain Roque de São Miguel. Ribeiro Pinto’s in-laws shared a similar background to his parents. Roque de São Miguel was a Castilian military officer, mentioned by many Portuguese sources as a hidalgo or a member of the lower Spanish nobility, who arrived in Luanda in 1602.Footnote 71 In 1614, he was appointed captain of the fortress of Ango.Footnote 72
Unlike her husband, there is little information about Maria das Neves. The fact that the existing sources identify her without the honorific title dona suggests that, like Isabel de Oliveira, she was probably of African or mixed-race background.Footnote 73 One document mentions that Maria das Neves worked with Dona Ana in a stall in the market of Muxima, one of the structures supplying the Portuguese troops in Angola.Footnote 74
Dona Ana’s marriage with António de Ribeiro Pinto formalized a political partnership which enhanced Viloria’s prominence among the Castilian community of Luanda. The conquest of Angola had relied heavily on Castilian military men and mining engineers such as Juan del Rincón Salazar, the venerable veteran (“soldado velho desta Conquista” in Cadornega’s words) Pedro de Navaes, and the morisco captain Andrés Coronado.Footnote 75 The alliance between Viloria and Roque de São Miguel aimed not only to concentrate resources and power among members of the local elite, but also to form a sort of Castilian entente that could exercise influence and represent the interests of other Spaniards residing in Angola. The proximity between Viloria and other Castilians settled in Angola is clear in a petition presented by Baltasar Rebello de Aragão. While requesting rewards for his service in Angola, Rebello de Aragão complained about the privileges granted to Viloria and one of his trusted associates, a Castilian soldier named Pedro Rezoles. After Viloria’s ennoblement, Rezoles, who served under the captain-major, received a habit of the Order of Christ, as well as a pension of 50 réis and the post of captain of the fortress of Cambambe.Footnote 76 Rebello de Aragão’s complaints, apart from echoing the xenophobic and anti-Castilian postures of many Portuguese settlers in the overseas territories, suggest that the Castilians residing in Angola not only were favored by the crown, but also formed an efficient interest group.
The wedding between António de Ribeiro Pinto and Ana de São Miguel seemed to have been celebrated around the same time or shortly before Roque de São Miguel presided over the Câmara of Luanda in 1627 and 1630.Footnote 77 Indeed, until 1627, although a prominent name in the Luanda elite, Roque de São Miguel was never elected to the municipal council, an institution where the Viloria family had significant clout. The available information regarding the composition of the Luanda municipal council indicates that António Bruto, who married Violante Corte Real, served as a municipal councilor in 1623.Footnote 78 Between 1625 and 1626, one of the sons of Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira, Francisco de Viloria Pinto, was among the vereadores, and in 1629 and 1655 he presided over the council.Footnote 79 Roque de São Miguel’s son-in-law also served as a vereador in 1628 and 1641.Footnote 80 Tomás Borges de Madureira, Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira’s grandson, also had a long career in the municipal council serving as vereador in 1650 and 1656, and as president in 1663 and 1668.Footnote 81
As one of the sons of Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira, António Ribeiro Pinto rapidly became a prominent member of the Luanda Luso-African elite. Besides being elected twice to the municipal council, he served as captain of the moradores of Luanda, commanding the militia formed by the residents of the city. In 1628, Governor Fernão de Sousa granted him an estate in the Quimbe area, in the outskirts of Luanda, measuring 1,500 braças (about two miles). Like his mother, Ribeiro Pinto was an important patron of the Catholic Church in Angola, sponsoring the reconstruction of Saint Anthony’s chapel, a popular place of worship in Luanda.Footnote 82 As the eldest member of the Luanda municipal council, Ribeiro Pinto led the acclamation in Luanda of John IV as King of Portugal in 1641, being one of the main political actors who ensured Angola’s alignment with the new Braganza regime.Footnote 83
Ribeiro Pinto’s career, however, would be tarnished by two incidents which led to his imprisonment. The first, and probably more serious, occurred in 1624. According to a report from Fernão de Sousa, after the celebration of the Sunday mass at Luanda’s cathedral, the unnamed wife of Simão Pinto had a discussion with Isabel de Oliveira over a slave transaction. Ribeiro Pinto intervened “with many injurious words scandalizing the people of this land.”Footnote 84 One “heinous insult” was that Simão Pinto’s wife was a Jew and a prostitute, alluding to her past as one of the so-called converts from the Casa Pia, a group of young women who had been separated from crypto-Jewish families or involved in prostitution. Ribeiro Pinto was duly arrested for the gravity of his insults. These not only attacked the integrity of one of the king’s orphans, but also questioned the crown’s policy of promoting the establishment of white Portuguese-born families in Angola. Indeed, the marriages between white settlers and the orphans sent by the crown, and the royal privileges granted to these couples, had the potential to form a rival elite group who could benefit from claiming a full Portuguese lineage without traces of African ancestry. Ribeiro Pinto’s insults thus implied the existence of problems of blood purity among these couples, problems which could be regarded as more serious than coming from a lineage of Catholic Africans.
Ribeiro Pinto’s detention reflected a conflict between different factions of the Luanda elites that invited the governor to intervene to affirm the crown’s authority. As Fernão de Sousa reported to Philip IV, the detention was necessary because Simão Pinto was afraid to present a formal charge “since António Ribeiro is wealthy, powerful and well-connected [aparentado].”Footnote 85 The governor, however, was careful not to antagonize the Viloria faction. Ribeiro Pinto was placed under house arrest and allowed to leave his confinement to “listen to mass during holy days and one day per week he can go out to take care of his businesses.”Footnote 86
Philip IV pardoned Ribeiro Pinto in 1626.Footnote 87 Despite his rehabilitation, two years later, Ribeiro Pinto was arrested for dueling with Manuel de Medela, a Portuguese-born military officer and protégé of Governor Fernão de Sousa.Footnote 88 Once again, Ribeiro Pinto clashed with someone perceived as a member of a rival faction. Thanks to his connections with the governor, Medela owned a plantation in the Bengo area and became a vereador.Footnote 89 He was also the brother of Domingos Luís de Andrade, another royal official and former page of Fernão de Sousa. Andrade arrived in Angola in 1622, two years before his patron, and in Luanda married the sister of Martim Correia—a military officer, who, like Juan de Viloria, became a Noble Knight of the Royal House and served in the municipal council in 1623 and 1625.Footnote 90
After António Ribeiro Pinto’s death in the early 1640s, Ana de São Miguel continued to be attached to the Viloria family, using her remarriages to extend the network. Soon after becoming a widow, she married a Portuguese settler identified only as Carvalho. This marriage resulted in the only known offspring of Dona Ana, a daughter named Ana Maria de Carvalho. By the end of the 1640s, Ana de São Miguel was again a widow.Footnote 91 She would remarry António Teixeira de Mendonça, a Portuguese military officer with the status of fidalgo.
Mendonça, who arrived in Luanda in the mid-1620s, also developed links with the Ngola aristocracy, being regarded as the de facto husband of one of the daughters of Ngola Ari, the ruler of Ndongo. Although this relationship seemed not to have been validated by a Catholic marriage, the Portuguese officer benefited from a sort of wedding gift of 10,000 Ndongo subjects who followed Ngola Ari’s daughter to Mendonça’s estates, making him one of the most influential landowners of Angola. When Mendonça’s companion died, the 10,000 Ndongo subjects remained at his estates, since the Ngola ruler considered the Portuguese officer to be his son-in-law.Footnote 92
Dona Ana de São Miguel’s marriage with António Teixeira de Mendonça not only consolidated her status as a prominent landowner of Luanda, but also established a connection between the Viloria network and the Ngola royalty. This marriage, however, was brief. Mendonça died around 1652 and Dona Ana would never marry again.Footnote 93
After Mendonça’s death, Ngola Ari appealed to the Portuguese crown to return his 10,000 subjects. Confronted by the crown’s initial assent to this request in 1654, Ana de São Miguel contested the decision by utilizing the Viloria network.Footnote 94 In 1661, the Overseas Council revoked the decision taken in 1654 and stated that the issue should be settled by a special court formed by the ouvidor-geral of Luanda and two municipal councilors.Footnote 95 The members of the Overseas Council justified their volte-face on the grounds that it had been discovered that their previous decision was based on “sinister information given by enemies of Dona Ana, without her being ever heard to explain her version of the facts.”Footnote 96 The council’s judgment was extremely favorable to Ana de São Miguel, since it established an ad hoc court formed by members of the local Luso-African elites, to which Dona Ana belonged. It is highly possible that she was in permanent contact with the members of this court. In fact, in 1663, the municipal council was presided over by Tomás Borges de Madureira, a grandson of Juan de Viloria and Dona Ana’s nephew via her first marriage with António Ribeiro Pinto.
Luso-Brazilian and Jesuit Connections
Although not a matrimonial alliance, the entry of Jerónimo de Corte Real into the Society of Jesus reveals an interesting convergence of interests between the Padres and the Vilorias. As in other Iberian overseas territories, to have a son or a daughter enter a religious order was an important mark of distinction which had the advantage of suggesting the existence of purity of blood—an element always important in the strategies of the Luso-African elites. To cultivate links with the Jesuit mission also offered business opportunities. The Jesuits were among Luanda’s main landowners and slave owners, managing a true agricultural and commercial enterprise which, taking advantage of the Jesuit structures in Brazil, gravitated around the slave trade between Angola and Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro. Besides, as holders of sobas, the Jesuits and Juan de Viloria also shared a common interest in the preservation of the amos system and its privileges, which were under threat after the appointment of Jerónimo de Almeida as governor.
The connections between the Jesuits and the Viloria family are revealed in the documents related to the 1592 rebellion. Juan de Viloria was not only among the group of leaders of a Jesuit-backed rebellion, but his visit to the court of Philip II in 1593 coincided with that of Baltasar Barreira, the superior of the Jesuit mission in Angola. The coincidence between the travels and demarches of both Barreira and Viloria in the Iberian Peninsula suggests that the two forged a partnership. Some years later, in 1605, when Viloria travelled again to Lisbon and Madrid, Barreira, now the superior of the Jesuit mission of Cape Verde and the Rivers of Guinea, eagerly recommended the captain-major, noting that Philip III should attend Viloria’s demands for “always achieving prosperous successes” in Angola.Footnote 97
Barreira’s lobbying reveals another important benefit of establishing ties with the Padres—the possibility of leveraging the Jesuit connections in Lisbon and Madrid to obtain benefits from the crown. Isabel de Oliveira’s patronage of the Angola mission thus sought to engage the Jesuits with the family’s political and social agenda, cementing an alignment based on perceived shared interests and quid pro quo exchanges. The entry of one of her sons, Jerónimo de Corte Real, into the Society of Jesus reinforced this partnership. Jerónimo could be used both to represent the interests of his family within Jesuit structures and to serve as an intermediary between the Vilorias and the Padres.
An intense relationship between the Angolan and Brazilian missions shaped Jerónimo de Corte Real’s brief career as a Jesuit. According to a letter from António Vieira, Jerónimo entered the Jesuit college of Pernambuco at the age of sixteen as a very promising novice who excelled in Latin and was fluent in Kimbundo, a quality described as “so necessary and beneficial in these lands.”Footnote 98 The so-called “lingoa de Angola” was crucial for the success of the conversion and catechism of the slaves who arrived at the Brazilian ports from Angola and Kongo. Jerónimo’s death at the age of nineteen “caused a universal pain.”Footnote 99
The connections between the Vilorias and Brazil were not limited to Jerónimo’s residence at the Jesuit college of Pernambuco. His paternal aunts, Isabel de Viloria and Francisca de Viloria, were married respectively to Duarte Moniz de Barreto and Francisco Moniz de Barreto (also known as Francisco Moniz de Barreto Teles): these were sons of Jorge Barreto de Mello, the third alcaide-mor (chief administrator) of Salvador da Bahia and a member of a family that monopolized the municipal council of the capital of colonial Brazil. In fact, Duarte was named after his grandfather, who was the second alcaide-mor of Bahia and around 1646, Francisco Moniz de Barreto inherited from his father the alcaldia-mor of Salvador, a post he held until his death in 1647.Footnote 100 The two brothers were military officers and arrived in Luanda probably in the early 1620s. Their marriages with Juan de Viloria’s sisters established an association between the Angolan and Bahian elites, two groups with shared interests in the transatlantic slave trade and whose sociopolitical interests vis-à-vis the crown tended to converge. It was also a matrimonial alliance that joined two families involved in the municipal councils of Luanda and Salvador.
The alliance between the Vilorias and the Moniz Barretos also illustrates the rapid “Atlanticization” of colonial Angola, a process driven by the slave trade, but also shaped by a convergence of political interests and aspirations among the members of the Luandan and Luso-Brazilian oligarchies. This convergence reflects the process of complementarity noted by Luiz Felipe de Alencastro between Angola, a region of slave reproduction, and Brazil as a region whose productive structures relied on enslaved manpower.Footnote 101
Conclusion: An Enduring Configuration
The Brazilian connections of the Vilorias offer an example of the intricate web of interests and interdependencies that shaped the extension of the family. To borrow Norbert Elias’s definition of configurations (or figurations, as he preferred), the tandem formed by Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira invested in a family configuration which operated as a “structure of mutually oriented and dependent people” in which each member of the configuration fulfilled the specific needs of other members for social recognition, power, or financial resources.Footnote 102 Indeed, the couple established matrimonial alliances with individuals identified as having the potential to enhance their social and political capital, but who also benefited from their ties with the Vilorias.
Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira’s lives spanned the formative years of colonial Angola. Much of their rapid ascent derived from being able to take advantage of the conditions offered by a peripheral frontier territory, which lacked some of the social and political constraints of metropolitan Iberia, not to mention the contingent and improvisational nature of the conquest of Angola. Like other members of the early elites of colonial Luanda, the Vilorias were able to accumulate social, economic, and political capital through a flexible alignment with the crown’s policies, which involved ongoing negotiation with royal officials. In other words, the Vilorias exploited a situation in which the fragility of the royal apparatus in Angola increased the reliance on the good service of local luminaries, prompting the crown to stimulate and nurture the formation of a local oligarchy that could guarantee the implementation of royal policies.
The intricate web of interdependencies created by the Viloria family configuration sought to establish a protective shield against rival factions, as well as to leverage the position of its members in their interactions with the royal apparatus. As the nobreza da terra (nobility of the land) of Brazil or the beneméritos of Spanish America, the so-called conquistadores of Angola and their descendants developed extensive family networks to control the local municipal council and accumulate several posts in the administrative and military apparatus. The early Luanda elites continuously exploited the connections between nobility and military service to acquire material and symbolic benefits to enhance their status. The descendants of the first conquistadores actively sought engagement in the military apparatus in Angola. This was true of one of the last known descendants of Juan de Viloria Pinto and Isabel de Oliveira Corte Real. Appropriately named after the founder of the lineage, João de Viloria PintoFootnote 103 had a long career serving the Portuguese crown in the campaigns against the Dutch and Queen Nzinga. In 1662, while en route to Lisbon, Viloria Pinto was captured by Turkish pirates. His good service in Angola and four-year captivity in Argel would be rewarded by the crown in 1669 with an appointment to the post of captain of the infantry of Angola.Footnote 104
Although part of the Viloria family configuration was built on the endogamous practices behind the marriages of male descendants, the configuration also aimed to co-opt outsiders from the metropole or Brazil through the matrimonial arrangements of the female members of the family. The incorporation of these outsiders created opportunities to expand social and material capital, offering the additional advantage of “Europeanizing” the lineage. This strategy continued to be put into practice by the descendants of Juan de Viloria and Isabel de Oliveira. One of their granddaughters, Ana de Viloria Corte Real, married Luís de Álvares Baines. A military officer with a long record of service in Brazil, Angola, and Europe, Baines was close to Salvador Correia de Sá, the pro-Braganza Luso-Spanish aristocrat who served as governor of Rio de Janeiro (1637–42), Angola (1648–52), and Southern Brazil (1658–62).Footnote 105 Baines’s role in the Portuguese Restoration War and the campaigns against the Dutch in Angola was duly rewarded by the crown. In 1649, João IV appointed him to the post of lieutenant general.Footnote 106 One year later, he received a habit of the Order of Christ and a promotion to the post of lieutenant camp master (tenente do mestre de campo).Footnote 107 After Baines’s death, around 1659, the crown granted half of his comenda (benefit) worth 40,000 réis to Ana Viloria, and the other half to their son, João Álvares Baines.Footnote 108 The latter was also appointed, due to the good service of his father, to the post of overseer of the Royal Treasury in Angola.Footnote 109
Baines’s marriage to Ana de Viloria allowed the Viloria family configuration to maintain its influence in the local administrative and military apparatus, but above all it made it possible for the configuration to resist the impact of the Dutch occupation of Luanda. The war against the Dutch (1641–48) inflicted several casualties among the old conquistador families, including members of the Viloria family configuration such as António Bruto, Gaspar Borges de Madureira, and Pegado da Ponte. Although the Vilorias continued to play a crucial role in the municipal council of Luanda after 1648, the conflict paved the way for the formation of another elite group, the so-called “restorers of Angola,” formed by Portuguese-born and Brazilian-born soldiers and officials who participated in the campaigns against the West-Indische Compagnie (WIC, Dutch West India Company).
The matrimonial alliance between Ana de Velória and Luís Álvares Baines, an individual related to the “restorers of Angola,” reveals how the intricate web of interests that structured the Viloria family configuration allowed it to adjust to new contexts and endure. Indeed, one of the last known documents referring to the Viloria Corte Real surname dates from 1739. It is a petition from one Barbara Jusarte Corte Real related to the estate of Maria de Viloria Corte Real, the widow of Vicente Pegado da Ponte.Footnote 110 The same surnames in the same network during a period covering two centuries.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Bethany Aram and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. All errors and omissions are mine. This article has been supported by Grant PID2019-111081RJ-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033; Grant PID2024-161493OB-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, ERDF A way of making Europe, and the European Union; Grant RYC2021-033242-I funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR; and the FEDER-UPO project 1380997, co-financed by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) and the Consejería de Economía, Conocimiento, Empresas y Universidad of the Junta de Andalucía. Funding for open access publishing: Universidad Pablo de Olavide.
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