BCAMsann
679
MABCSETim
America from the Atlantic to the slopes of the Andes,
and from the Paraguay to the Orinoco. The enslave-
ment of the Indians by the conquerors began almost
wi^ the discovery of America, being recommended
and put m practice by Columbus himself as early as
1493, occasioning his first serious rebuke by Isabella.
In 1511 the Donunicans throughout Hispaniola (Haiti)
publicly preached against it, and sent one of their
number to Spain to protest against it at coiurt; their
actions resulted in a royal edict against the abuse, and
the official appointment of the celebrated Dominican
father, and later bishop, Bartolome de Las Gasas, as
" Protector of the Indians. In 1531 Paul III issued
a Bull redtoring liberty to all enslaved Indians. • In
1543, largely ttirough the effort of Las Casas, the
Spanish Government published a code of new laws for
the government of the Indians, limiting the existing
power of holding slaves, and prohibiting all future en-
slavement of Indians. The law appU^ only to the
native Indians, not to negroes. It served as a check
upon the worst abuses and was carried out strictly
wherever the watchful eye of the viceroy could reach,
but elsewhere it was treated with contempt.
The Portuguese who colonized Brazil in the sixteenth century were already the professional slave-dealers of Europe, and their settlements along the coast soon became a rendezvous for a lawless class of slavers, pirates, and other desperadoes. Intermarrying with the women of the wild tribes, the}^ produced the mixed breed of Mamelucos, which combined the courage and persistence of the white race, and the woodcraft and linguistic faculty of the Indian, with a cruelty im- tempcrcd by any restraining influence whatever. SSo Paulo on the South Brazilian coast, and Par£ at the mouth of the Amazon became tneir two great hcadauarters, from whidi, beginning about 1560, for a period of nearly two centuries, regular armies of slave- hunters, sometimes a thousand strong, fully armed and equipped with horses, guns, and blood-hounds, set out periodically, year after year, to slaughter and capture the helpless natives. In this work uiey were encouraged botn by the Brazilian colonists, who wanted slaves for the plantations and the mines, and by the Portuguese Government, which favoured them as a formidable barrier to the Spanish colonization, of which the Jesuit missions were considered outposts. Among all the Mamelucos, those of SSo Paulo, the Paulistas as they were call^, were most noted.
The first of the Guaranf missions of the Paraguay territory was established in 1610. In 1629 the Pamista armies invaded the territory, and within two years had destroyed all but two of the twel ve prosperous missions, plundering and desecrating the churches, slaughtering thousands of the inhabitants, and carrying on 60,000 Christian Indians for sale at SSio Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The result was the entire abandonment of these first missions and the exodus of the survivors, led by Father Montoya, into the remote southern province of Corrientes, Eastern Argentina, where the work was begun anew. The slave-hunters followed, and again the outlying missions were abandoned until at last, in 1638, Fathers Montoya and Tafio sailed to Europe and personally obtained from Urban VIII a letter threatening the church penalties upon the en- slavers of the mission Indians, and from Philip IV per- mission for the Indians to be furnished with guns and drilled in their use by Jesuit soldier veterans. This was done and at the next invasion, in 1641, the Chris- tian Guaranf. armed with guns and led by their own chief, inflicted such a defeat on the Biamelucos as kept them aloof for ten years. Then in 1651, taking ad- vantage of the war between Spain and Portugal, the MameTuco army advanced ag&hi, but was scattered by the neophytes led by the Fathers themselves. Thenceforth to the close of the Jesuit period the Guaranf missions were protected by an army of drilled and equipped Christian Indians.
Defeated in one direction, the Mamelucos turned in
another, and began a series of raids upon the flourish-
ing Chiquito missions of Southern Boh via, of which the
firet had been established by the Jesuits in 1691.
Whole villages were swept away one aftec. another,
until Father Aro6 gathered his people together, drilled
and armed them, and then with a few Spaniards led
them against the Mamelucos, whom he defeated and
drove across the Paraguay, never to appear again on
its western bank. On the Upper Amazon, according
to Hervis, the principal cause of the ruin and disper-
sion of Hie numerous tribes gathered into the Mamas
missions was the repeated raids of the Portuguese
slave-hunters, who in several attacks from 1CS2 to
1710 carried off moro than 50,000 Indians, besides the
thousands butchered. .Of the Omagua alone more
than 16,000 were taken. Of those who escaped the
majority fled to their original forests and reverted to
barbarism. In the Orinoco missions the same de-
struction was wrought by slavers from Pard, ascend-
ing the Rio Negro and engasinff the wild cannibal
txibes as their alEes, until checkedby the heroic enter-
prise of Father Roman in 1744, and finally made im-
possible by the establishment of Spanish frontier
earrisons aoout 1756. The entire number of Indians
slaughtered or enslaved by the Mamelucos from the be-
Cung of their career for a period of about 130 years been estimated by Father Muratori at two millions. (See also GuaranI; Maina; Maipure.)
Bancroft, ffiaC. CerU. Am., I (San Frandaoo, 1886); Dobbzi* BorrKn,H%9t.Abij>onibuM (tr. London, 1822); Grabam, A Fon* i^ied Arcadia (London, 1901). HervXs, Catdlogo de las Lengucu, I (Madrid, 1800); Humboldt, TravOatotheBquinocHalRegiafu of Am, a79»-1804), (London, 1881); Page, La Plata, etc. (New York, 1869). JamES Moonet.
MamATtiiiA PrUon. — The so-called "Mamertine Prison, bMcneath the church of S. Giuseppe dei Fale- snami, via di Marforio, Rome, is generally accepted as being identical with 'Hhe prison . . . in the middle of the city, overlooking the forum, mentioned by Livy (I, xxxiii). It consists of two chambers, one above the other. The low^r, known as the TuUianumf was probably built originallv as a cistern, whence its name, which is derived from the archaic Latin word tuUitis, a jet of water — ^the derivation of Varro from the name of King Servius Tullius is erroneous. The Tulliapum is a circular chamber, partly excavated from the rock, and (Mirtly built of tufa blocks, each layer of masonry projecting a little over that immediately below so as to form a conical vault. When the upper chamber was constructed, the top of the cone was probablv cut o£f, and the present roof, consisting of a flat arch of tufa blocks, substituted. The upper chunber is an irrepi- lar quadrilateral, and contains an inscription reoorduig a restoration made in a. d. 21. Sallust describes the Tullianum, or lower chamber, as a horrible dungeon, "repulsive and terrible on account of neglect, damp- ness, and smell" (Gat., Iv). In the floor of the Tulli- anum is a well, which, according to the l^end, mi- raculously came into existence while St. reter was imprisoned here, enabling the Apostle to baptise his jailers, Sts. Processus and Martinianus. The well, how- ever, existed prior to this date, and there is no reliable evidence that the Chief of the Apostles was ever im- prisoned in the TuUianum. The Acto of Sto. Proces- sus and Martinianus are of the sixth century. The two chambers are at present connected by a stairway, but originally there was no means of communication between them save a hole in the floor of the upper chamber, through which such famous prisoners as King Jugurtha and the Catiline conspirators were thrown into the lower dungeon, where they died of starvation or were steanjgled. The name Mamertine Prison is medieval, and is probably derived from ihm temple of Mars Ultor in the vicinity. The medieval "Itinerary" of Einsiedcdn alludes to the "foimtain of St. Peter, where also is his prison ". From the eighth
