Branca Dias

Olinda · 1550s–1570s

The school, and the house on Fridays

Near Olinda's parish church, Branca opens a school where the town's girls learn to spin, embroider, sew and cook. Her older daughters, Inês and Guiomar, teach alongside her.

Among the pupils were Joana Fernandes, born in Africa, who learned sewing there in 1558; Maria Camelo, who lived in the house at ten; Isabel Póvoa; and Catarina da Costa, who learned needlework at seven. Decades later, all of them would be called to say what they had seen. At the mill, witnesses would speak of an esnoga, a synagogue, at Camaragibe.

Pernambuco · 1593–1595

Denounced after death

Branca dies in Pernambuco before 1588, after Diogo. In 1593 the Holy Office's visitor, Heitor Furtado de Mendonça, arrives in Olinda and opens the table of denunciations.

Dead for years, Branca is denounced twelve times, more than anyone except the merchant João Nunes. Some former pupils describe the Sabbaths, the yellow dish, the Torah on the bed. Others refuse to accuse her.

The family

Eleven children and a stepdaughter

Seven were born in Portugal, four in Pernambuco. Branca also raised Briolanja, Diogo's daughter by another woman. Tap a flame.

The legend

Why only her name?

In Recife they say she threw her silver into the stream at Apipucos before her arrest, which is why it is called the Riacho da Prata, the silver stream. Her ghost in white is said to appear at the Açude do Prata on full-moon nights. In Paraíba they tell that she was burned in Lisbon.

None of it happened: she died at home. But the legend grew. In 1896 Irenêo Joffily asked: “Por que entre tantas vítimas … a memória popular só conservou o nome de Branca Dias?”, why, of so many victims, did popular memory keep only Branca Dias's name? Dias Gomes had her burned in a play aimed at the dictatorship's censors, Drummond doubted in verse that she ever existed, and many families in the Northeast say they descend from her.

Descendants

A thread that reaches today

Genealogists link whole families of the Northeast to her, above all in the Acaraú valley and Sobral, in Ceará. In Cândido Pinheiro Koren de Lima's genealogy (Branca Dias, 3 volumes, 2012–2016), among many others:

The eraser

“As there never was in Pernambuco”

From 1748, Antônio José Victoriano Borges da Fonseca wrote the Nobiliarchia Pernambucana, the great genealogy of the captaincy's noble families. Branca Dias appears in passing. Brites Mendes “the younger”, a daughter of Agostinho de Holanda, married Felipe Dias Vaz, a sugar-mill owner whom “the old memoirs” called Branca's son. And the genealogist rejoices:

“… and this marriage was fortunate only in leaving no issue, as there never was any issue of Branca Dias in Pernambuco.”Borges da Fonseca, Nobiliarchia Pernambucana, vol. 1, pp. 336–337: “só foi feliz este matrimonio em não haver successão delle, como nunca houve em Pernambuco de Branca Dias”

Brites, he adds, was related to Branca in no way “but by marriage”, and anyone who said otherwise was “malevolent and lacking judgement”.

It was false, and the book gives itself away. On the same page, Brites's mother is Maria de Paiva, daughter of an “Ignez Fernandes de Goes” with no parents named, a surname which, as Gonsalves de Mello noted, the documents never give her: there she is always plain Inês Fernandes. In 1594, before the Holy Office's visitor, Maria de Paiva had said who she was: a New Christian, daughter of Inês Fernandes. And a witness said who Inês was: “filha de Branca Dias defunta”, the daughter of the late Branca Dias. Brites “the younger” was Branca's great-granddaughter. Felipe, for that matter, was really Filipe Dias do Vale and no son of hers, as Gonsalves de Mello showed. The family the book declares extinct fills the pages that follow: Brites's brothers and sisters leave descendants, one of them “wide succession”, and from Maria de Paiva's marriage there are “qualified descendants”, passed in the inquiries into purity of blood.

Why? Borges da Fonseca was a familiar of the Holy Office and a knight of the Order of Christ, honours kept for those who proved themselves, in the formula he uses, “sem raça alguma de Judêo”, without any Jewish blood. In his preface he lashes out at the “malevolent” men who used the lists of the Dutch levy on New Christians “to stain” families, and warns that his own book, with the families it leaves out, must not serve, like those lists, as proof for lies. And the Holandas were, in his words, the family “from which most of the nobility of Pernambuco descends”. In 1760, asked whether a young man of the family could safely apply to the Holy Office, he answered that he “could, safely”, and admitted that the contrary opinion had “a great (but irrational) following in my homeland”. Gonsalves de Mello, who undid the error, called the genealogist “prejudiced”. Error or lie, the effect was the same: in the book where Pernambuco's nobility learned to count its grandparents, Branca had left no one.

Sources: Borges da Fonseca, Nobiliarchia Pernambucana (Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional 47–48, pub. 1935), vol. 1, pp. 8, 268, 336–337, 399, 484, 488, and vol. 2, pp. 187–190, 289; Denunciações de Pernambuco, pp. 222, 253; José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, Gente da Nação (2nd ed., 1996), pp. 130–135.

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