The War of Canudos took place between 1896 and 1897, when the fourth expedition sent by the First Brazilian Republic finally annihilated the last surviving rebels and raised Canudos to the ground. The novel’s description of the military strategy is largely accurate, but it is also an account of how the conflict was politicized as a battle between reactionary monarchists and progressive republicans. These factions are represented by the fictional characters Epaminondas Gonçalves and the Baron de Canabrava, respectively. Gonçalves’s conspiracy theory, which proposes that monarchists allied with the English are supporting the rebels, a lie spread via his newspaper, was a real tactic used by republicans. The riots against newspaper owners in Rio did really happen, and it took years before the reality was recognized: that the army had massacred a group of landless peasants without any connection to foreign powers or restorationists.

The republicans’ anxiety is understandable given that the monarchy had only been overthrown in 1889. The former emperor, Pedro II, was still deeply popular and the republic only had narrow support among military officers who wished to establish a dictatorship. Part of the basis for the monarchy’s popularity was that it had forced through the abolition of slavery in 1888, against the wishes of the landowning class.