Destruction of Palmares and the death of Zumbi

Date

1694–1695

Category

Social & demographic

Region

Pernambuco and Alagoas, colonial Brazil

Era

Early Modern

Significance

Quilombo dos Palmares was the largest maroon community in the Americas, a confederation of settlements in the highlands of Pernambuco and Alagoas in northeastern Brazil founded by escaped enslaved Africans around 1600.

At its height it sheltered tens of thousands of people and resisted repeated Dutch and Portuguese expeditions for most of the seventeenth century, sustaining itself through farming, trade and raiding. After a prolonged campaign, a bandeirante army led by Domingos Jorge Velho stormed and destroyed the central settlement of Cerca do Macaco on 6 February 1694. The community's last great leader, Zumbi dos Palmares, fought on until he was betrayed, captured and beheaded on 20 November 1695, his head displayed publicly to crush hopes of resistance. The fall of Palmares ended nearly a century of autonomous Black self-government in colonial Brazil, but it became an enduring symbol of resistance to slavery across the Atlantic world; 20 November is now commemorated in Brazil as a day of Black consciousness. Palmares stands as the most celebrated of the many maroon polities, from Jamaica to Suriname to Spanish America, that enslaved people built in the forests and mountains beyond colonial control.

Empires active in 1694–1695

• Mughal Empire
  1526 CE – 1857 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE – 1974 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• Ottoman Empire
  1299 CE – 1922 CE

Related social & demographic events

• The Haitian Revolution begins in Saint-Domingue
  22 August 1791
• Cocoliztli Epidemic of 1545–1548
  1545–1548
• The Great Irish Famine
  1845–1852
• Emancipation of the serfs in Russia
  3 March 1861 (19 February O.S.)
• The Columbian Exchange and the demographic collapse of Indigenous America
  From 1493 (16th century)
• Influenza pandemic of 1918–1920
  1918–1920

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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