On Saturday 1 November 1755, a few minutes before 10 a.m., the ground in Lisbon began to shake dangerously. The increasingly violent shaking was accompanied by loud drumming and before the clock struck ten, the proud and splendid city was just a pile of unrecognisable rubble. It was All Saints’ Day, an important Christian holiday for the deeply religious Portuguese, and most of the inhabitants were already gathering in the many churches. Thousands of candles were burning in homes and churches, and so the fire spread rapidly after the earthquake. But even that was not all.
Few of the survivors, who were fleeing headlong from falling buildings and firebrands, noticed the unusual retreat of the water in the mouth of the Tagus River. The water returned like a tsunami with such force that it wiped out the entire coastal area of the town and with it hundreds of inhabitants. They sought shelter en masse by the water or on the many boats moored in the harbour. “God forgive us”, the survivors cried in despair, convinced that on this religious holiday they had received the divine punishment they deserved.
With a magnitude of around 9 on the Richter scale, the Great Lisbon Earthquake is the worst natural disaster to hit European soil in the last 500 years and the most powerful earthquake in recorded history. But in fact it was a triple catastrophe. The combination of earthquake, tsunami and fire not only shook to the core the cultural and architectural heritage of the capital of what was once the world’s greatest colonial power, but also had significant social and economic consequences.
The man who made the best use of them, and of the country, was the man after whom the period of the second half of the 18th century in Portugal is even named. That was the Marquis Pombal. He became the undisputed hallmark of the so-called Golden Age of Pombal, the era of Portugal’s renaissance and its return to the centre of the European chessboard of power.
Pombal’s political talent, developmental vision and hard work saw him rise to the position of Prime Minister of Portugal, effectively ruling on behalf of the weak and trusting King of Portugal, José I (1750-1777). Although he was Minister of Foreign and Military Affairs in the years before 1755, it was the earthquake that was the real springboard of his career. At the most delicate moments, when the mentally shaken and claustrophobic King was hiding in tents outside Lisbon, he took the reins and saved the city and the country from total collapse. He was also responsible for preparing the post-earthquake reconstruction of the city, and the new so-called post-earthquake Lisbon was born, with some of the first earthquake-resistant buildings in Europe.
But it has also used the crisis in a much more strategic way, and has not hesitated to pursue a long-term political, social and economic reform agenda. He built a modernised country on the foundations of a ruined capital. His long years of diplomatic service abroad had given him the opportunity to acquaint himself in detail with the Western European Enlightenment.
This made it all the more painful for him to realise how Portugal was in the grip of underdevelopment and backwardness. The once proud country that had brought many inventions to the world two hundred years before, introducing, among other things, “engraving in Japan, women’s convents in India, oxen in Brazil and maize in West Africa”, was, at the beginning of the 18th century, a shadow of its glorious past.
The country’s new impetus also required a redistribution of power and wealth. In doing so, Pombal made many enemies, especially among the powerful members of the high nobility and the Jesuits, who found the existing arrangement of acquired privileges very attractive. To this day, passionate debates continue to rage about the controversial nature of some of the “enlightened” decisions of this otherwise versatile man and politician.
Pioneer of maritime conquest
To understand the importance of Portugal’s position among European countries in the mid-18th century, it is necessary to take a brief look at its rich but also problematic colonial past.
At the beginning of the early modern European period – late 15th, early 16th century – Portugal was at its peak. A burgeoning imperial power, it had pioneered global conquests and maritime “discoveries”, and had become one of the richest and most developed monarchies through its expanding trade network and colonisation. Enterprising, daring, ambitious, but also learned and capable individuals played an important role. Who does not know the great names of the first generation of seafarers and adventurers – Vasco da Gama, Bartolomeu Dias, Pedro Cabral, Ferdinand Magellan (the latter flying the Spanish flag)? They explored the coast of Africa, sailed around it, came to India, China, Japan, “discovered” Madagascar, Mauritius, Ceylon, circumnavigated the world, settled Madeira, colonised Brazil, Macao, the Azores and Cape Verde, and on and on.
Within a few decades, Portugal’s colonial empire encompassed millions of people and tens of thousands of square kilometres of land, while the mother country’s population was “only” around two million. They established close trade relations with the territories they failed to (forcibly) conquer and Christianise, as Europe craved luxury goods, especially from the Far East. For example, they set up outposts in the Scented Islands or the Moluccas in the Indonesian archipelago, the exclusive home of some of the most coveted spices and fragrances. Lisbon’s favourable coastal location has also made it a cradle of world trade.
The Portuguese were also the not-so-proud pioneers of the global trade in African slaves, which, in addition to luxury goods, abundant natural resources, gold, silver and precious stones, allowed the other colonial powers, which were fast on the Portuguese’s heels, to enrich themselves rapidly.
From the mid-16th century until the rise of the Marquis Pombal in the 18th, Portugal more or less limped along. It was a dark period of the Inquisition, of widespread superstition, fear and paralysis, not least because of the Church’s excessive intervention in all aspects of society. The largely uneducated clergy were greedy and rapacious, and were also eager to enrich themselves at the expense of the colonies, both at home and through missionaries in the colonies. The Jesuits became particularly influential and later played a tragic role in Pombal’s story.
Within the newly formed Iberian Union, the King of Spain was for a time even ruler of Portugal, although the latter remained formally independent (1580-1640). Relations with its oldest ally, England, also deteriorated, and Portugal slowly began to fall behind both it and the Netherlands in the colonial battle for dominance of the slave and spice trade. In Asia, the Dutch-Portuguese War took place, and the Dutch even invaded Brazil.
And Brazil, Portugal’s biggest goldmine, has become its curse. First, the brain drain from the homeland to the rich colony led to a decline in entrepreneurship and progress in the mother country, and it was not until the early 18th century that emigration was banned. Then it became clear that Brazil’s natural resources were not inexhaustible after all, and profits plummeted. All this contributed to Portugal’s significant development lag.
Portugal in the first half of the 18th century
But the wealth from the colonies was just enough for the ruling elite to bathe in, while indulging in the opulence of the Baroque that was seducing Europe. One fifth of all income from the colonies belonged to the king. The apparent prosperity and political stability were obscured by technological and mental stagnation. The Enlightenment reached Portugal late and on a limited scale, public debate was almost non-existent and new ideas, which were slow to penetrate society, were viewed with suspicion, as were their promoters. These were the so-called ‘itinerants’, Portuguese who were returning home after a long period of living abroad. One of them was the future Marquis Pombal.
Portugal also had its Sun King, João V (reigned 1706-1750), who, like Louis XIV of France, was scandalously wasteful and extravagant. Uncharacteristically obsessed with glamour, ceremony and appearance, he was like his European contemporaries, absolutist monarchs. He spent most of his money building churches and palaces and was a generous patron of music and the arts.
His most important project in life was the construction of the Portuguese Versailles, the church-king complex of Mafra, 40 kilometres from Lisbon. This gigantic feat of immense proportions took thirty years to build and included a royal palace, a monastery, a cathedral, all magnificently decorated with the most expensive marble and exquisite mosaics made from the most exquisite precious stones. The only economically useful building project was the construction of an engineering masterpiece, the 18-kilometre-long Águas Livres aqueduct (its entire network of canals runs for 58 kilometres), which provided the capital with fresh water.
At the time of Ivan V, there were at least eight hundred religious institutions in Portugal, and the Vatican granted him special privileges, although it was an open secret that many of the monasteries were in fact harems of the King’s mistresses and prostitutes. Portugal had “more priesthood than any country in the world, except perhaps Tibet”. Sixty per cent of all books were religious and only four per cent were devoted to scientific subjects. Both Portuguese universities were in the hands of Jesuits suspicious of Enlightenment ideas and intellectual curiosity. The University of Coimbra even rejected the ideas of Descartes and Newton in 1756.
Most of the students studied law and theology. Unlike in Western and Northern Europe, there were no public libraries. Other state institutions were in a state of disrepair, forts and castles were crumbling, the army was almost non-existent, and the Cortes or the Assembly had not met since 1689.
When he died in 1750, Ivan left the country in debt. He was succeeded by his son Josip I, who, at the age of thirty-five, was inexperienced and unskilled in governing, but also rather disinterested in it. He preferred opera, hunting and fence jumping, and was happy to leave power to the able Pombal, who was in the right place at the right time.
A meteoric rise to the political summit
Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (1699-1782), later Count of Oeiras and from 1769 the first Marquis Pombal, known in history as Pombal, came from a low noble family. His distinguished uncle helped him to take his first steps into the world of influence and prestige. He first studied for a while at the University of Coimbra, then trained in the army, but soon showed a deep interest in history. He was later admitted to the Royal Academy of History and wrote several history books.
An extremely tall, handsome, clever and charismatic young man fell in love with the widowed niece of a count and, by marrying her, greatly improved his initial social position. He began to appear in high circles and was soon proposed to the then Prime Minister by his uncle for a prestigious ambassadorial post. This took him to London for a full seven years in 1738, and the following year his first wife died of ill health. This first political appointment was decisive not only for him and his career, but for the course of history into which he was soon to steer his country.
He spent his time in England in a very productive and, above all, useful way.Although he never managed to learn English very well (the language of the diplomats was French), he studied the political and economic system of the British Crown in detail, with the aim of getting to the bottom of the key reasons for its world supremacy. Above all, he wanted to find out why the relationship between England and Portugal was so unequal.
What tormented him most was the bitter fact that Portugal was totally dependent on England for its economic development. After having been the founder of world imperialism and colonialism in the 15th century, in the 18th century it was only a “British vassal”, a semi-colony, so to speak. “Britain’s purpose was to weaken the power of other nations in order to strengthen her own. Portugal was powerless and indecisive, all its actions guided by English desires”, the Marquis later wrote. Pombal’s life’s work was to restore Portugal to the elite of leading and respected countries.
In this age of reason, he was exposed to many new ideas and scientific advances, and became familiar with the works of Descartes, Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin and Paine, among others. He made many contacts with intellectuals and scientists, including members of the distinguished Royal Society, of which he became a member. He soon gained a reputation in diplomatic circles as a skilled and wise negotiator, and in 1745 he was sent as ambassador to Vienna, with the special task of mediating in the bitter dispute between the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa and the Vatican.
Not only was his official mission successful, but he also found a new wife at the Austrian court, again a noblewoman and countess from a powerful family, who was even a lady-in-waiting to Maria Theresa. The marriage may have been the result of Pombal’s personal ambitions, but in the end it was a happy one and produced five children.
In Vienna, he continued his penetrating observation of the rule of the enlightened despot, who was at this very time challenging the excessive influence of the Pope and the Jesuits. He was beginning to feel homesick, for after all he had learnt and learned in his ten years of service in Europe, he had a great deal of work to do. As his second wife had close ties with the wife of the King of Portugal, also of Austrian origin, the couple quickly secured a call-up on home soil.
With the help of a new Austrian-Portuguese family connection, he soon climbed even higher. When King Ivan V died in 1750 and his inexperienced son Joseph I took over the throne, Pombal was proposed to the latter by his Austrian mother as Minister of Foreign and Military Affairs.
For the next 27 years, he was an uncompromising major player on the Portuguese political stage, and his name marked the entire Pombal era. With untiring energy and working zeal, he embarked on a thorough reform programme to restore as much of the country’s lost splendour as possible.
The King trusted him completely, often blindly, and Pombal’s personal power and influence was so strengthened that he became a true autocrat. Both he and the King therefore amassed many opponents.
Reforms, reforms, reforms
His first years, that is to say, especially before the Great Earthquake, were devoted mainly to internal affairs and the regulation of finances, but he also tackled the outdated medieval institution of the Inquisition, which portrayed Portugal as backward and barbaric in the eyes of the rest of Europe. He banned all so-called auto da fe trials, public tortures and executions of heretics not authorised by the King himself. In doing so, he cut the wings of the Church.
Over time, he also modernised the judicial system and made the streets of Lisbon, known for frequent violent riots, crime and prostitution, safer. Portugal also regained a military worthy of the name, and gunpowder, which had previously been imported, began to be produced on home soil. Ivan neglected the army and navy, relying entirely on England in the event of an external threat.
Pombal reformed education on the English model, and science and empiricism found a place in it. Until then, education had been the responsibility of the Jesuits, and when the Jesuits were expelled, 20,000 students were on the streets overnight. Secular technical and commercial schools and faculties of science, mathematics, philosophy and medicine were quickly set up.
Pombal was inspired by Enlightenment thinkers and had many supporters, especially influential lawyers, merchants and scientists. Many of them lived in exile during the reign of the wealthy King Ivan V.
Not a single shortcoming of the state apparatus escaped Pombal’s watchful eye or pen. Through systematic state interventionism, he slowly but effectively transferred power from king to state. The latter was increasingly represented by him. He also embarked on a court extravaganza, daring to reduce the number of staff in the court kitchen from 80 to 20.
But the country’s biggest problem has been with the economy. Portugal was totally dependent on its most important trading partner, Great Britain, for trade. Until Brazilian gold, new reserves of which were discovered at the beginning of the 18th century, began to pile up after the death of Ivan, the import/export balance between the two countries was still somewhat equal, but then, also because of the earthquake, it completely collapsed in favour of the English.
The reasons for the Portuguese’s subordinate role were historical. As early as the 12th century, the English sent crusaders to help the Portuguese fight the Muslims, and the two nations have since made numerous alliances over the centuries. In 1654, the English obtained important trade concessions in return for military aid, and commercial cooperation was further deepened by the Treaty of Methuen in 1703, which allowed many English products to be sold on the Portuguese market at low or even free tariffs. At the same time, the English were also granted privileged access to Brazil’s natural resources. During periods of tension with Spain, English troops were stationed in Portugal and the war fleet was anchored in Lisbon harbour.
And while the enterprising English encouraged their own industrial and textile production, the Portuguese imported most of the products they made in exchange for raw materials from the colonies. Over-reliance on gold, silver and diamonds from Brazil led them to abandon their own industry, so that it almost completely died out or did not develop. Even agriculture was similarly affected, with the countryside collapsing and rich landlords emigrating, often to Brazil.
The Portuguese have become dependent not only on imports of manufactured goods, but even of food and textiles. The “old” friends, the English, benefited the most. In the Brazil-England-Portugal triangle, the latter thus played only a mediating role. At least two thirds of all Brazilian gold never even left the port of Lisbon, because it was going straight to Britain to pay for things that Portugal could not or would not produce itself. The Portuguese were only ahead in wine production, but even here, until Pombal’s time, the English were the majority owners of vineyards and processing plants.
How to tackle the problem of English control over Portuguese trade without jeopardising too much the relationship with the most important military ally was therefore a matter of Pombal’s thinking.
But his reformist zeal was temporarily interrupted by a natural disaster of apocalyptic proportions, the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. Although much of Lisbon was wiped off the face of the earth, Pombal had already formulated ideas for reconstruction the day after the disaster. Medieval Lisbon soon became one of Europe’s most beautiful modern cities, and Pombal’s effective handling of the crisis promoted him to Prime Minister with unlimited powers.
The Great Lisbon Earthquake
In 1755, Lisbon celebrated its 500th anniversary as a capital city and was one of the oldest cities in Europe, inhabited for at least three thousand years. The first sight of the sumptuous city, dotted with sprawling palaces and churches, was magnificent in the reflection of the sea and the glint of the sun, and it took the breath away of the foreigners who approached it daily in the many boats that passed by.
But it was also full of hidden neighbourhoods, where unsanitary conditions, filth, poverty, crime and prostitution reigned in crowded and narrow streets. One of the most Catholic societies, it also had a huge clergy and “the Portuguese were more superstitious than any other people”. The people of Lisbon were more than used to disasters, both fires and earthquakes, and the last major earthquake was in 1724, and on the day of Ivan’s death in 1750, it shook the city’s ground.
But nothing can compare with what happened on 1 November 1755, sooner or later. Just a few days earlier, people all over Portugal and Spain had been experiencing strange phenomena: wells were almost dry, the evening tide was late, drinking water tasted strange and there was a sulphurous smell in the air, animals were strangely agitated and worms were crawling en masse to the surface.
And then, on a festive Saturday, when most people were going to church for mass, Lisbon was rocked. The earthquake lasted almost ten minutes and, with a magnitude of between 8.5 and 9 on the Richter scale, was the worst earthquake on European soil since data began to be recorded.
As it was All Saints’ Day, candles were burning everywhere, and soon a conflagration of biblical proportions began to spread. Those who had not been trampled under by the falling buildings were hysterically seeking cover, oblivious to the strange drumming approaching from the direction of the sea.
In Cascais, west of Lisbon, about an hour after the earthquake, people noticed that the sea had receded at least five kilometres from the coast. Then, at around 650 kilometres per hour, it came crashing up the Tagus estuary and six-metre waves crashed with all their force into the lower part of the city. Many boats were thrown ashore and the confusion was complete. In addition to the earthquake, the fire and the tsunami, which lasted for almost a week, the unfortunate town was shaken by a series of strong aftershocks, with at least five hundred more small aftershocks recorded over the course of a year.
The exact epicentre of the earthquake is still unknown, but it was most likely located on the Azore-Gibraltar fault, where the Eurasian and African tectonic plates meet. The earthquake and aftershocks were, of course, felt with varying intensity elsewhere in Europe. In Spain, the clocks stopped and in Madrid the earthquake lasted almost six minutes. Tremors were reported from France, Morocco, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, England, Austria, among other places, and the furthest place in Europe where it was felt was Turku in Finland, 3 500 kilometres from Lisbon.
Scottish lochs rose and then fell again at repeated intervals, similar phenomena were recorded in Norwegian fjords, ports in northern France, rivers, lakes, ponds across northern Europe, ships collided with each other in The Hague, many rivers in Switzerland became muddy, lake levels rose for hours, even the thermal waters in Czech spas became muddy and temporarily stopped flowing.
The worst was, of course, in Lisbon, which was almost completely destroyed. The disaster is thought to have claimed around 40,000 lives in the capital and another 10,000 elsewhere in the country, although no precise figures were available due to the absence of a census. Of the approximately 20,000 houses, only between 2,000 and 3,000 were intact, and almost all the churches, cathedrals, royal palaces, mansions, monasteries, a huge library, an opera house, noblemen’s mansions, museums, and on and on, were demolished or burnt down.
The King escaped without a scratch, as he and his family were out of town, but his magnificent palace in the main square by the waterfront was completely destroyed, along with all its treasures. There was the cultural and artistic heritage of centuries of past Portuguese greatness, with rich collections of paintings, sculptures, books, furniture, centuries-old historical artefacts, one of the most magnificent libraries of 18th century Europe, and invaluable archives of the first colonial ventures, including the first maps of maritime discoveries, navigational instruments and gadgets, were destroyed. The damage was incalculable and unimaginable.
The reaction of the survivors was even worse. People were convinced that they had been punished by God. The deeply religious inhabitants saw the catastrophe on such an important religious holiday as a divine warning against superstition and sin. God was telling them that a day of reckoning was coming. The scenes of religious fervor, as people walked around the city with crosses and kissed them, flogged themselves, and beat their faces and bodies until their limbs were limp, shocked the foreigners. It was like a madhouse. Then the mass exodus began and more than half of the survivors left the city. The whole of Europe was talking about the earthquake, and even the famous Voltaire, whose naive Candide survived it, commemorated it with a satirical attack on the philosophy of optimism and superstition.
It seemed that the end of the world was indeed coming to Lisbon. But her saviour was none other than the collected and prudent Pombal.
Bury the dead, care for the living
All the ministers and advisers immediately gathered around the shocked king, but Pombal was the only one who could take the reins firmly into his own hands. He advised the king, “Bury the dead, take care of the living.”
The King himself, who after the earthquake developed an uncontrollable fear of spacious, high-ceilinged masonry buildings, retreated to a temporary royal tent village outside Lisbon. He left all important decisions to his confidant.
Pombal’s priorities were to restore order in the city and to start reconstruction as soon as possible. He sent the army into the streets with instructions to hunt down looters and the workforce to undertake public works and clean-up. Hundreds of corpses lay in the open and disease threatened to break out. With the consent of the Church (as the dead were to be ritually buried in the ground), he had the bodies, weighted down with stones, swept into the water. He froze food prices and organised temporary shelters.
His temporary home was a carriage, which he used to drive around the city. On his knees, he wrote more than two hundred regulations on the smallest details of post-earthquake measures, how to distribute food, where to house people, how to curb crime, because so many prisoners had escaped, how to maintain order and hygiene, how to help the wounded and how to look for the missing. He also asked for help from all the European courts, and they were all very generous.
Pombal felt that the catastrophe, in addition to the opportunity to rebuild the city into a modern European capital, was also an opportunity to rebuild the foundations of Portuguese society. He wanted to restore the capital’s past reputation as a thriving commercial centre. Since the King showed no desire to rebuild his palace in the middle of the city, Pombal had commercial and administrative buildings erected there instead of royal ones. The main square was called the Market Square (Praça do Comércio), but many people still call it the King’s Court, in memory of the royal palace that stood there before the earthquake. It is adorned with a huge statue of King Josip I, who hid rather dishonourably in a tented settlement after the earthquake.
The plans for the city’s reconstruction – six versions – were drawn up by the architect who designed the world-famous Aqueduct. They decided on a complete overhaul of the city centre, the so-called Baixa. From a cramped, dilapidated medieval quarter, a modern centre was created, with wide avenues following a precise, rectilinear street plan. The most progressive measure was the compulsory earthquake-proof construction. All new buildings had to comply with safety and sanitary regulations.
Among other things, these required a special timber frame that could better resist earthquake shocks. Each house also had a fire tank and there were fire walls between them. The owners had five years to rebuild their houses and, despite the protests of many, especially the English, they raised the tax on all commercial activities and dedicated it to rebuilding the town. Thus grew up a pombal Lisbon with a characteristic pombal architectural style.
But that’s not all, a few months after the earthquake, Pombal sent a detailed questionnaire to all parishes to find out how they were coping with the disaster and what it had caused. The survey included questions such as when exactly the earthquake happened, how many buildings were destroyed, how many people died, what happened to water areas, wells, springs, whether there were fires, how much the water rose, what measures were taken by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities.
This kind of inventory of the earthquake and its aftermath was the “birth certificate of modern seismology”, but it also provided the first real insight into the demography of the nation. Before the earthquake, they did not even know exactly how many inhabitants the kingdom had, with estimates ranging from 2 million to 3.7 million.
Since the earthquake, King Pombal has been even more in the King’s sights, becoming de facto Prime Minister. Historically and developmentally, the big question is what would have happened to the city and the country after the earthquake without him and his intervention.
Revitalizing the Portuguese economy
The time is now ripe to pursue a broader reform agenda, especially in the area of trade. The trade deficit and dependence on the English were a constant thorn in the side of Pombal and his supporters. The friendship with the naval superpower England, with its mighty navy, was otherwise of vital strategic importance for the national security of a weak Portugal, constantly in fear of neighbouring Spain. But Pombal was determined to rescue Portugal from the shackles of dependence and inferiority and to divert most of the profits into its pockets. The Portuguese therefore had to take control of their own trade, both in the metropolis and in the colonies, especially in Brazil.
He saw the solution in the creation of five monopoly companies, following the example of the British and Dutch East India Companies. The two most successful were the two companies that controlled the Brazilian market from then on. He granted Grão Pará and Maranhão a twenty-year monopoly over trade with the Amazon region and successfully promoted trade in cocoa, rice and cotton, while its sister company, Pernambuco and Paraíba, was given the mandate for southern Brazil. The latter promoted trade and production in sugar, tobacco, cocoa, cotton and animal skins.
He thus forced the English out of trade with Brazil, and further upset them by setting up a wine association for the upper Douro region, where they had until then enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the production and sale of wine, especially the famous Port. The company was concerned with ensuring prices, quality and profits, and bypassed many retailers and taproom owners. There were violent revolts in Porto, but Pombal crushed them harshly and even punished the most violent rebels with death.
He also reduced the trade deficit and revived domestic industry by banning the import of certain luxury goods and by cutting taxes, state subsidies and other stimulus measures, for example, to help the domestic silk industry, the diamond trade, sugar and confectionery production, glass, crystal and textiles. From then on, all uniforms worn by Portuguese soldiers had to be made on home soil and all windows had to be made of home-grown glass. This slowly reduced dependence on imports and thus curbed the export of Brazilian gold.
Pombal’s development policy resulted in the creation of around 200 new manufacturing companies. Some were managed directly by the Crown. More than half were in Lisbon and a quarter in Porto.
He also took on Portugal’s largest colony, Brazil. This was largely in the hands of the Jesuits, who, through the missions, had virtually total control over the natives. But they were also involved in smuggling networks and many profitable activities in a vast territory that was difficult to control effectively from the other side of the ocean.
But Pombal wanted a strong, centralised empire. For this, he needed a large, educated and, in his words, “civilised” population, which Portugal did not have in numbers. So he decided to assimilate the natives and give them equality. The Jesuits thus lost their free labour force, since until then the Indians had in fact been their slaves.
In addition, he sent his brother to Brazil as governor to oversee the introduction of new administrative, economic, political and cultural policies. Schools for boys and girls were set up in every village, Portuguese was made compulsory, interracial marriages were encouraged, uninhabited areas were settled and cultivated.
With all this reforming zeal, he has made more and more enemies. Portugal was one of the countries with the most closed and exclusive circle of nobles, and Pombal, who reached for their privileges, was seen as an upstart and a prig. At the same time, they envied his influence over the King and felt increasingly excluded from the running of the country. The vast conspiracy against the King and, indirectly, Pombal, developed into one of the most horrific and vindictive affairs, reverberating throughout Europe and casting a dark shadow over the Marquis’s reputation.
The chilling political scandal of Távora
Before Pombal’s rise, the most powerful dynasties were the fifty or so rich dynasties that had ruled Portugal for at least 125 years. Their members married each other according to very strict criteria in order to keep the bloodline pure. One of these families was the Távora family. The head of the family, Count Távora, was a former royal viceroy in India, and they also had very strong ties with the Jesuit order. The family confessor, Malagrida, was one of the most influential Jesuits in the country.
All the leading members of the family joined Pombal’s opposition, rallied around the king’s younger brother Pedro and led by their relative, the powerful Prince Aveiro, who contemptuously called the Prime Minister “King Sebastian” and wanted to overthrow him by any means necessary. They first tried petitioning the King, but he worshipped Pombal as a demigod.
The King was known for his many love affairs, and years ago he took as one of his mistresses the wife of the heir to the Count of Távora, further irritating his opponents. On the night of 3 September 1758, as he was returning home from a love visit to the young Teresa of Távora, he was ambushed. The assassination attempt was unsuccessful and the King carried her away with a wounded arm and a few scratches. But Pombal used this event as a pretext for a monstrous revenge against the Távoras.
The suspicious calm before the storm lasted for three months after the attempted assassination of the King. During this time, Pombal launched a detailed investigation into the crime and painstakingly gathered evidence. When he was satisfied with them, and had obtained confessions from the assailants that they had acted on behalf of Aveiro and Távora, he had the whole family, not just its closest members, executed. This meant around seventy people, including many women and children. They were joined by a handful of prominent Jesuits, who were also said to be among the schemers. They were suspected and charged with conspiracy against the King, that is to say, high treason, and with attempting to assassinate the King. The penalties were draconian.
On 13 January 1759, a huge morgue was built in a clearing near Lisbon. It was predicted to be the most sensational event since the earthquake, with as many as 70 000 people gathered. The court sentenced the entire family, including women and children, to execution, but the Queen and her daughter prevented it. Thus, only a select few, including the wife of Count Távora, one of Pombal’s main mortal enemies, faced a gruesome trial.
The almost 60-year-old former beauty climbed into the morgue with her husband, two sons, the Prince of Aveiro and a handful of other convicts. Her fate was the least cruel of all, as the executioner cut off her head in one fell swoop. The body was covered and left in the morgue.
Then it really started. The barbaric spectacle, which lasted almost the whole day, continued with the slow torture and execution of the main culprits. The level of cruelty increased with each victim. First they were slowly tied to stakes, the sons were strangled, then all their limbs were broken and they were thrown on a huge wheel, the prince and the count were first broken limb from limb with heavy hammers and then strangled, and the assailant who shot at the king was burned alive. Finally, the whole place was set on fire and the place was covered with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again.
The affair continued to reverberate across Europe for a long time. The intellectual elite in particular looked with disapproval on such harsh treatment of convicts. However, many details of the real involvement in the attempted murder of those who paid with their lives remained shrouded in darkness. Was it not just a personal vendetta against the all-powerful Pombal?
The persecution of the Jesuits and the end of Pombal
After the affair, the King elevated the latter to the rank of Count, which prompted him to continue the purges. The Jesuits were still a thorn in his side, and he was determined to drive them out for good. He accused them of personal embezzlement, especially in Brazil, of poor educational standards, of conspiratorial activities and, last but not least, of encouraging superstition after the earthquake. He had Malagrida, a close confidant of Távor, burned at the stake and the whole order driven out of the country to Rome. Pombal was also instrumental in driving them out of France, Spain, Naples and Sicily.
The Order, one of the most respected and successful religious communities in Portugal in the 16th and 17th centuries, recruiting members from only the most elite families, controlling universities and leading missions in the colonies, and regarded as the spiritual leaders of the Portuguese kings with unparalleled political power, was out of favour throughout Europe thanks to Pombal. All their possessions were usurped by the Crown.
So Pombal took his enemies to task and continued his sweeping reforms for another decade. During this time, the Seven Years’ War engulfed Europe and, during the Spanish-French invasion of Portugal in 1762, England again came to the rescue.
But even for Pombal, who finally became Marquis in 1769, time was running out. When, after Joseph’s death in 1770, his daughter Maria, who hated him outright, became Queen, he lost all influence in an instant. He was not allowed within 32 kilometres of the Queen. The bronze medallion bearing his image, which adorned the statue of Joseph I in the beautiful Market Square, was removed. Around eight hundred victims of the Pombal regime were released from prison, including a number of Távors.
Many demanded his death, but he quietly retreated to the countryside. But he did not escape the trial on suspicion of abuse of power. At the age of 80, he defended himself so cleverly that the jury was unable to agree. The Queen took the Solomonic decision, first to convict and then to acquit. He died peacefully not long afterwards.
The Marquis Pombal was undoubtedly one of the most able statesmen of the 18th century. A visionary, dedicated to his country and its well-being, he left behind a legacy of honour. But all too often he was prepared to use all available means to achieve his goals. Modern political trends are also moving in this direction. Unfortunately, more often than not, they are driven by personal ambition rather than the good of the nation.
