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Mascate War, The War of the Peddlers or Guerra dos Mascates (Portuguese) was a conflict fought between rival groups of commerce in Olinda and Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil from 1710 to 1711.

Conflicts between the landowners and mills from the state were concentrated in Olinda and Recife Portuguese traders, called pejoratively of peddlers. When there was sedition among the peddlers of Recife and the European gentry of Olinda, the sectarians of the hawkers was nicknamed Tundacumbe, vines and Cameroon, and the nobles and their partisans, shaved legs - because when they would take arms, they went barefoot, with less embarrassment for the manning, and so were known as skilful in them, and very valuable, so in the history of Pernambuco, the moniker is synonymous with shaved legs nobility.

Background

In 1580, a succession crisis led to Portugal forming a personal union with Spain under the Habsburg King Philip II. The unification of the two Iberian kingdoms, known as the Iberian Union, lasted until 1640, although the institutions of both kingdoms remained separate. The Netherlands (the Seventeen Provinces) obtained independence from Spain in 1581, leading Philip II to prohibit commerce with Dutch ships, including in Brazil.

Since the Dutch had invested large sums in financing sugar production in the Brazilian Northeast, a conflict began with Dutch privateers plundering the coast: they sacked Salvador in 1604, from which they removed large amounts of gold and silver before a joint Spanish-Portuguese fleet recaptured the town.

From 1630 to 1654, the Dutch set up more permanently in commercial Recife and aristocratic Olinda, and with the capture of Paraiba in 1635, the Dutch controlled a long stretch of the coast most accessible to Europe (Dutch Brazil), without, however, penetrating the interior. The large Dutch ships were unable to moor in the coastal inlets where lighter Portuguese shipping came and went. Ironically, the result of the Dutch capture of the sugar coast was a higher price of sugar in Amsterdam. During the Nieuw Holland episode, the colonists of the Dutch West India Company in Brazil were in a constant state of siege, in spite of the presence of the Count John Maurice of Nassau as governor (1637–1644) in Recife. Nassau invited scientific commissions to research the local flora and fauna, resulting in added knowledge of the territory. Moreover, he set up a city project for Recife and Olinda, which was partially accomplished. Remnants survive to this day.

After several years of open warfare, the Dutch formally withdrew in 1661; the Portuguese paid off a war debt in payments of salt. Few Dutch cultural and ethnic influences remain.

After the expulsion of the Dutch in the Northeast of Brazil, the region's economy, dependent on the agro-manufacture of sugar, no capital to invest in crops, equipment and manpower (slave), compared to the decline in product prices in international market due to competition from the like product produced in the West Indies, went into crisis.

Economically dependent on Portuguese merchants, to whom aggravated by falling into debt in international sugar prices, the landowners did not accept the Pernambuco political-administrative emancipation of Recife, by then a county subject to Olinda. The emancipation of Recife was seen as an aggravating the situation of local landowners (debtors) before the bourgeoisie Lusitanian (creditor), which passed by this mechanism is put in the level of political equality.

The competition has affected the wealthy planters of Olinda, which fell into decay and did not get more profits from sugar production, had no capital to pay off their debts. In search of an exit, the planters were to borrow money. At that time the Portuguese traders called peddlers, occupied the city of Recife and had money to lend to you at Olinda, but were charging very high interest rates for loans, caused the increasing indebtedness of the olindeses.

Until the late seventeenth century, Olinda was the main city of Pernambuco, where they lived rich planters, who thought his fortune would never end. But it happened for a price war in the European market for sugar and sugar planters of Olinda began to borrow money from traders from Recife, a mere village. Gradually, hatred and conflicts arose. Aware of its importance, traders asked the king of Portugal that the village was elevated to town. As he was being implemented the separation between the two cities in 1710, the lords of Olinda revolted, having as one of the leaders mill owner Bernardo Vieira de Melo. No condition to resist, the wealthiest merchants of Recife fled to avoid being captured. The city intervened in the region in 1711, arresting the leaders of the rebellion. Recife was elevated to the status of capital of Pernambuco.

After the victory of the hawkers traders perceive the predominance of trade in relation to colonial production that had already occurred since the lords of Olinda caught the interest on money borrowed so the peddlers can keep their colonial system.

The Conflict

In February 1709, shortly after receiving the Royal Charter which brought the town to a village, traders opened the Pelourinho and the town hall, formally separating the Recife Olinda, the seat of captaincy.

Having members of the landed aristocracy abandoned Olinda to escape the plantations where they lived, hostilities commenced in Vitória de Santo Antão, led by their Captain General, Pedro Ribeiro da Silva. These forces, thickened in Afogados with reinforcements from São Lourenço and Olinda, under the leadership of Bernardo Vieira de Melo and his father, Colonel Leonardo Bezerra Cavalcanti, invaded Recife, demolishing the Pillory, tearing the Provincial regal, freeing arrested and persecuting people connected to the governor Sebastião de Castro Caldas Barbosa (peddlers). This, in turn, in order to ensure their safety, he withdrew to Bahia, and left the government over the captaincy of Bishop Manuel Alvares da Costa.

The peddlers fought back in 1711, Olinda invading and causing fires and destroying villages and plantations in the region.

The appointment of a new governor, Felix José de Mendonça, and the intervention of troops sent from Bahia ended the war. The commercial bourgeoisie was supported by the metropolis and Recife maintained its autonomy.

In the nineteenth century Frei Caneca write about it: "When the country lacked the arms and blood of their sons, along with the browns have not given him his arms and blood whites and blacks? When those tears have washed their irons despotism, did not go well with the edge of tears? Before the pernambucanos have suffered more than other major storms in Pernambuco. Sedition in the last century, all entering the fray, only about white people came the plagues and lightning, the dungeons were full of the most respectable people of Pernambuco, others piled on more entrenched in the woods and distant hinterlands, and they were loaded irons and sent to Portugal Colonel Leonardo Bezerra Cavalcanti and his two sons, Maj. Bernardo Vieira de Melo, and with a son (Andrew) and his brother, the Commissioner General Manuel Cavalcanti Bezerra, Captain André Dias de Figueiredo and his brother Lieutenant colonel, the licensee José Tavares de Holanda, Captain João de Barros Correia, Captain Cosme Bezerra Cavalcanti and others. '(Frei Joaquim do Amor Divino Caneca "Collection Trainers Brazil, 1994, page 283)

The feeling autonomist and anti-Lusitanian of Pernambuco, who came from the fight against the Dutch continued to manifest itself in other conflicts such as the Conspiracy of Suassuna, Pernambuco Revolution of 1817 and the Confederation of the Equator.

End

After much struggle, which included the intervention of colonial authorities, finally in 1711 the fact was consummated: Recife and Olinda was treated. So ended the War of the Peddlers. With the victory of the merchants, this war merely reaffirmed the dominance of merchant capital (trade) on the colonial production.