Jesuit Reducciones
During the next 200 years, the Roman Catholic Church, especially the ascetic members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), influenced the colony more strongly than the governors who succeeded Irala. The first Jesuits arrived in 1588, and in 1610 Philip III proclaimed that only the "sword of the word" should be used to subdue Paraguayan Indians. The church granted Jesuits extensive powers to phase out the encomienda system, angering settlers dependent on a continuing supply of Indian labor and concubines. In one of history's greatest experiments in communal living, the Jesuits had soon organized about 100,000 Guaraní in about 20 reducciones (reductions or townships), and they dreamed of a Jesuit empire that would stretch from the Paraguay-Paraná confluence to the coast and back to the Paraná headwaters.
The new Jesuit reducciones, however, were threatened by the slave-raiding mamelucos, who survived by capturing Indians and selling them as slaves to planters. Having depleted the Indian population near Sâo Paulo, they discovered the richly populated reducciones. The Spanish authorities chose not to defend the settlements, and the Jesuits and their thousands of neophytes thus had little means to protect themselves. The mameluco threat ended only after 1639, after the capture of thousands of Indian neophytes, when the viceroy in Peru agreed to allow Indians to bear arms. Well-trained and highly motivated Indian units bloodied the raiders and drove them off. This victory set the stage for the golden age of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Life in the reducciones offered the Guaraní higher living standards, protection from settlers, and physical security. The reducciones, which became quite wealthy, exported goods and supplied Indian armies.
The reducciones, where the Jesuits sponsored orchestras, musical ensembles and actors' troupes, and in which virtually all the profits derived from Indian labor were distributed to the laborers, earned praise from some of the leading lights of the French enlightenment, who were not predisposed to favor Jesuits. "By means of religion," d'Alembert wrote, "the Jesuits established a monarchical authority in Paraguay, founded solely on their powers of persuasion and on their lenient methods of government. Masters of the country, they rendered happy the people under their sway; they succeeded in subduing them without ever having recourse to force." And Voltaire called the Jesuit government "a triumph of humanity."
Because of their success, the Paraguayan Jesuits gained many enemies, and the reducciones fell prey to changing times. During the 1720s and 1730s, Paraguayan settlers rebelled against Jesuit privileges in the Revolt of the Comuneros and the government that protected them. Although this revolt failed, it was one of the earliest and most serious risings against Spanish authority in the New World and caused the crown to question its continued support for the Jesuits. The Jesuit-inspired War of the Seven Reductions (1750–61), increased sentiment in Madrid for suppressing this "empire within an empire." In a move to gain control of the reducciones wealth, the Spanish king Charles III (1759–88), expelled the Jesuits in 1767. Within a few decades of the expulsion, most of what the Jesuits had accomplished was lost. The missions lost their valuables, became mismanaged, and were abandoned by the Guaraní. The Jesuits vanished almost without a trace. Today, a few weed-choked ruins are all that remain of this 160-year period in Paraguayan history.
Read more about this topic: History Of Paraguay (to 1811)