The Expansion of tolerance

Frans Post, View of Olinda (1662). Post emphasizes the ruinous state of the former
capital, which he may have witnessed during his stay in Brazil, as the stones of
buildings in Olinda were being used by the Dutch to build Recife and Mauricia.
churches and monasteries of Olinda were pillaged and burnt during the
course of the invasion of north-eastern Brazil from 1630 to 1632, most
Catholic foundations in the area overrun by the Dutch were preserved and
their integrity respected, even though a majority of the friars, and many
priests, actually fled the area under Dutch control. Hence, Catholic worship,
like Indian freedom, as decreed by the directors was firmly established in
Brazil well before Johan Maurits’s arrival on the scene. The edict of the Heren
XIX of 1635, expelling the remaining friars and Jesuits from Dutch Brazil a
year before the count’s arrival, was therefore not part of any denial of religious
toleration but simply a more precise implementation of the rules laid
down by the Company in 1629, and restated in the terms of surrender under
which Pernambuco, in 1630, and Paraíba, in 1634, submitted to the Dutch.
A policy of pragmatic co-existence increasingly took hold. After 1636, a
number of Portuguese were permitted to live in the inner township of Recife
(Pernambuco) alongside the Dutch and Jews. Yet the toleration accorded
to the Catholics was inevitably circumscribed in various ways, given the
circumstances of the struggle between the Dutch and the Iberian crowns.
Among the more restrictive measures were prohibitions on instituting a
bishop in the territory under the Dutch and on all correspondence of
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