This edition of the “Entail of the Month” presents the Santa Bárbara estate, located in Salvador (BA), Brazil. Here, Francisco Pereira do Lago settled in the early decades of the 16th century, becoming famous for his service of arms. Together with his wife, Andreza de Araújo, in a will dated 1641, he determined on his burial site a chapel dedicated to Saint Barbara should be built adjoining the commercial houses they owned in the lower section of the city, in case this was completed or, “in the lack of it, in the Monastery of São Francisco”, and for this purpose binding some of their asset income. The administration of this trust would be affected by the only distant management of the properties as the first administrators, the heirs and their families would maintain their residence in Braga, in northern Portugal. Indeed, there were several complaints about the abuses committed on the tied properties due to these absentee administrators. Throughout the 19th century, as a result of this abandonment, the estate buildings underwent profound alterations, having been sold and converted into a warehouse and food market, although the original chapel was preserved inside, with worship of Saint Barbara maintained by the merchants and slaves, calling her the “Saint of Markets”. A product of Bahia’s religious and cultural syncretism, reverence for Santa Barbara, a Roman Catholic martyr, was attributed new meanings by African religious practices, associating her with Iansã-Oyá, a deity able to evoke the power of lightning and storms as forces of nature. The annual festival in her honour summons to the streets of Salvador, and to the current Mercado de Santa Bárbara, a profusion of religious practices, that combine the celebration of a Catholic mass and ritual offerings to Iansã.

To find out more details about this entail, go to this page with all the Entail of the Month information. Here, you may also find out about the other entails made available in the meantime, at: https://www.vinculum.fcsh.unl.pt/entail-of-the-month

You can also contribute to this initiative by making suggestions for future entails of the month and any details you may be able to provide. To this end, please contact the project at: vinculum@fcsh.unl.pt.

The VINCULUM project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Maria de Lurdes Rosa, Professor of NOVA FCSH and researcher at the Institute of Medieval Studies, awarded the first ERC Consolidator Grant to a Portuguese researcher in the field of History.