The Pires and Camargo had political and military leaders, owners of huge wheat farms in Serra da Cantareira, therefore they competed for supremacy in São Paulo.
[2] The historian Afonso de Escragnolle Taunay says about this war in Ensaios Paulistas, 1958: These are the facts included in what is called the conflict between the Pires and the Camargos, named after the two great families whose irreconcilability resulted in a true civil war, similar to the devastating municipal struggles in medieval Italian cities and of which the best known is that of the Capuletto and Montechio families, from Verona, immortalized by Shekespeare.
Says Taunay: "Such a prolonged struggle, in fact intermittent, was born from mere rivalry between clan leaders, for no reason other than personalism, family spirit and the gregarious tendency so vehement in small agglomerations."
Debalde Salvador Correia de Sá came to try to calm the situation, asking for peace from those living in São Paulo and for them to go into the backlands in search of mines.
There was later an agreement negotiated by the Pires, on 12 May 1653, by which the Jesuits returned to their college with a formal promise not to shelter runaway Indians nor to publish the papal brief of Urbano VIII about the freedom of the Gentile.
The two factions continued their fight until the agreement of February 9 of 1654, by which Ortiz took over the Ombudsman's Office, but did not fulfill what he promised, and also lost the support of the General Government with the departure of the Count of Castelo Melhor, replaced by a magistrate closely linked to Pires.
An ecclesiastical intervention promoted yet another attempt at pacification, which resulted in representatives from both parties going to Bahia to come to an understanding with the new governor-general, Jerónimo de Ataíde, Count of Atouguia.
Atouguia was succeeded in the government by Francisco Barreto de Meneses who requested an expedition designed to “suppress the rushes of the gentiles through the Bahian backlands”.
Francisco Barreto even talked about personally going to accommodate the situation, he ended up dispatching the ombudsman and he was successful: with the parties exhausted, the two opposing leaders signed the agreement of January 1, 1660 and returned to the activity of the sertanista companies.