In a few years the Jesuits reduced the various hordes of this nation to a settled life, in large _aldeias_, or villages, denominated _reduçōes_, the number of which, in the year 1630, had arrived at twenty, with seventy thousand inhabitants. Those who had advanced to the Upper Paranna, with the intention of extending the spiritual conquest, were obliged, by eight thousand Paulistas, to fall back, in 1631, to the south of the Maracajú Serra. The Jesuit, Montoya, relates, that he and his colleagues retired from above to below the seven falls of the Paranna, with two thousand Indians, when the Paulistas invaded the Upper Paranna, and that the latter continued hostilely to visit the _reduçōes_ of the Lower Paranna; and that, in 1637, one hundred and forty Paulistas, with one thousand five hundred Indians, attacked the _reduçōes_ of Jesu Maria, St. Christovam, and St. Anna, and retired with seven thousand prisoners. The Jesuits next reduced the Tappes to the eastward, and continued to civilize those two nations, by teaching them all the useful arts, thus forming the celebrated Guaranitic empire, which moderate calculators never raised to more than two hundred thousand inhabitants; and it is said they were able to carry into the field an army of forty thousand men. One authority states that between the rivers Uruguay and Paraguay was established a powerful republic, comprising thirty-one large villages, inhabited by one hundred thousand souls; but Guthrie raises the population of these missions to three hundred and forty thousand families, making a surprising and incredible population of thirteen hundred thousand inhabitants.