BARRADAS, MANOEL. - Portuguese Jesuit missionary, born at Monforte (Alamtejo) in 1572, died at Cochin in India on 31 July 1646. Having entered the novitiate at Evora in 1587, he left for India in 1591, where he pursued his studies and held various posts in the missions of Goa and Malabar. From 1621 to 1623 he worked in Ethiopia with Fr. Manoel d'Almeida, chiefly in the province of Tigré, residing at Fremona. On his return to Goa, he fell into the hands of the Turks at Aden, who held him prisoner for six months. He was subsequently provincial of Goa (1640–43) and of Malabar (from 1643 until his death).
The attribution to B. of treatises on the mythology, sects, and customs of the Hindus has been disputed (cf. H. Hosten, The authorship of the Portuguese Manuscript on Indian Mythology, in Anthropos, 2 [1907], pp. 272–74; Strem, Bibl., V, p. 214, is full of confusion). The manuscript he sent to Europe appears to have been no more than an extract or compendium of the Livro da seita dos Índios orientais by the Jesuit Giacomo Fenicio (born in 1558 and died in 1632) of Capua (cf. the introduction prefixed by J. Charpentier to the edition of Fenicio, Uppsala 1933, pp. LXXVIII–LXXII). More important are B.’s three treatises on Ethiopia: Do estado da S. Fe romana em Ethiopia; Do reyno de Tyre e seus mandos; Da cidade e fortaleza de Adem. Their edition constitutes volume IV (Rome 1906) of Fr. C. Beccari’s Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales inediti. Beccari himself reprinted their principal passages in Italian translation: Il Tigré descritto da un missionario gesuita del sec. XVII (2nd ed., Rome 1912).