This Gulf of Fire: The Destruction of Lisbon, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason

Praise for Mark Molesky’s

THIS GULF OF FIRE

Richly readable….[Molesky] paints an astonishing picture of the natural cataclysm that struck Lisbon on November 1, 1755.

—The Seattle Times

Molesky’s rendering of the continent-wide philosophical debate following the earthquake is particularly lucid.

—The New Criterion

Excellent….A comprehensive account of nearly every aspect of the disaster….As in any disaster story, great heroism and great treachery abounded, and Molesky shows us plenty of examples of both….Places this earthquake firmly in its historical context, arguing that the quake and its resultant disasters helped to shape the eighteenth century.

—The Christian Science Monitor

"Humanity’s perennial battles between faith and reason have always been tested most intensely in times of calamity. The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was the first and most dramatic of such tests in the modern era, and the great calamity has long been waiting for its historian. Now it has its brilliant chronicler and analyst in Mark Molesky, whose This Gulf of Fire is an extraordinary marriage of fine, vivid narrative and sharp, clear thought. Full of poignant stories, it makes gripping reading and like all powerful histories stays around in one’s mind long after the last page is read."

—Simon Schama

"The definitive history of the Lisbon earthquake and its aftermath. [This Gulf of Fire] combines exhaustive research with dramatic eyewitness accounts and modern discoveries in geology and seismology….Molesky has masterfully revived [the Lisbon tragedy] here….[This is] a powerful story about human and cultural loss and recovery that is hard to forget."

—Washington Independent Review of Books

A thoroughly absorbing take on a momentous event….Anyone interested in history and especially disaster history will find this book enthralling.

—Library Journal

[A] masterpiece of nonfiction.

—Essex News Daily

Magisterial in its account of a world-changing event, this is a book to savor.

—The History Book Club

Focused, well-researched, and fascinating….This smart, comprehensive, colorful account shows readers Lisbon’s phoenix-like recovery from destruction that is now nearly forgotten, and how it ushered in a more recognizably modern response to large-scale disasters.

—Publishers Weekly

Mark Molesky

THIS GULF OF FIRE

Mark Molesky studied history at the University of Michigan and received his AM and PhD from Harvard, where he was a lecturer on history and literature. He is currently an associate professor of history at Seton Hall University. He lives in New York City.

ALSO BY MARK MOLESKY

Our Oldest Enemy:

A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2016

Copyright © 2015 by Mark Molesky

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2015

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

A portion of this work was previously published in Chapter 7 of Flammable Cities (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). Reprinted by courtesy of The University of Wisconsin Press.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Molesky, Mark

This gulf of fire : the destruction of Lisbon, or apocalypse in the age of science and reason / Mark Molesky.—First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Lisbon Earthquake, Portugal, 1755. 2. Earthquakes—Portugal—Lisbon—History—18th century. 3. Tsunamis—Portugal—Lisbon—History—18th century. 4. Fires—Portugal—Lisbon—History—18th century. 5. Earthquake relief—Portugal—Lisbon—History—18th century. 6. Lisbon (Portugal)—Social conditions—18th century. 7. Disasters—Social aspects—Europe—History—18th century. 8. Enlightenment—Europe. I. Title.

DP762.M65 2015   946.9′42033—dc23   2015007131

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780307387509

Ebook ISBN 9781101875827

Cover design by Mark Abrams

Cover image © Granger, NYC - All rights reserved.

Author photograph © Michael Lionstar

Cartography by Mapping Specialists

www.​vintagebooks.​com

v4.1_c1_r1

a

TO MY MENTORS

Donald H. Fleming and Stephen J. Tonsor

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by Mark Molesky

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

PROLOGUE

The Last Victim

CHAPTER ONE

Babylonia Portugueza

CHAPTER TWO

November 1, 1755

CHAPTER THREE

An Unexpected Horror

CHAPTER FOUR

The Great Firestorm

CHAPTER FIVE

The Hour of Pombal

CHAPTER SIX

City of Ashes, Huts of Wood

CHAPTER SEVEN

Word Spreads

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Chaos of Stones

CHAPTER NINE

Uma Lisboa Nova

CHAPTER TEN

Reverberations

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustration Credits

Illustrations

Lisbon’s city center before the earthquake

PROLOGUE

The Last Victim

Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar, and saints pray.

–RICHARD III, ACT IV, SCENE 4

On a late Sunday evening in September 1761, an old Italian priest made his way up the steps of a large, newly erected wooden platform in Lisbon’s Rossio Square, where an executioner’s garrote was ceremoniously looped around his neck. For Father Gabriel Malagrida, the seventy-two-year-old Jesuit missionary and former favorite of the king, it was the climactic—if unhappy—end to what had been an unusually long day. The festivities had begun at seven that morning, when Malagrida, clad in the black woolen cassock of his order, was plucked from his dungeon cell and delivered to what was left of the cloisters of the nearby Monastery of São Domingos.¹ There—in the presence of the king, his ministers, and the entire Portuguese court—he was denounced as a heretic and a traitor, stripped of his priestly functions, and, in the macabre tradition of the Inquisição, forced to don a pointed cardboard miter and a long gray linen sack adorned with demons and bright red flames. His hands bound behind him, a mordaça (or gag) placed in his mouth, he began his final journey through the streets of the capital accompanied by a pair of Benedictine monks, two attendants, and over fifty fellow prisoners of the regime.²

It was not the first time that Malagrida had faced execution. Years before, in the sweltering jungles of Maranhão, near the river Itapecuru in northeastern Brazil, he and a group of Indian catechumens were ambushed by members of the fearsome Guaraní tribe, and he, the lone survivor, captured and sentenced to death. Tied to a tree, he could do little but pray as his naked, shrieking executioner bore down upon him with an enormous battle club. Yet just before the fatal blow could be administered, a Guaraní matron had interceded, staying the warrior’s hand. Do not dare kill the envoy of the Great Spirit, she reputedly exclaimed. His death will be your funeral. I knew the warrior who, many years ago, killed the first ‘black-robed one’ to appear among us. I saw him die a most horrible death. Eaten by animals, [he suffered] the greatest torments.³ And so, Malagrida was denied his first chance at martyrdom. Hustled through the thick undergrowth to the banks of the Itapecuru, he was thrown into the bottom of a canoe and set adrift upon the muddy, treacherous current. Only a fortuitous encounter with an Indian boy (who had also survived the massacre) enabled him, after three arduous days, to reach the village of his Indian allies.⁴

Unfortunately, no such reprieve seemed possible now, for Portugal had become more dangerous to Malagrida than all the dark-canopied forests of Maranhão had ever been. The Old World, as he once knew it, had been transformed. Only eleven years before, he—a modest barefooted priest from the Brazilian outback—had entered Lisbon in triumph. Hailed as a living saint for his legendary missions among the selvagens (as well as his many reputed miracles), he was received at the great Riverside Palace by His Most Faithful Majesty, the aging, half-paralyzed João V, on his knees. Do not call me king, the starstruck monarch implored his famous visitor. Call me sinner.⁵

Soon Malagrida was basking in the brilliant glow of his spiritual celebrity. Wherever he wandered, vast crowds followed, all jostling for the chance to kiss his hand or witness one of his impassioned extempore orations. At court, he became a fixture, leading the queen and her ladies-in-waiting in their daily Spiritual Exercises—while the dying king saw an opportunity to redeem a life marred by the gravest sexual transgressions. "Tell me, padre, he begged, what must I do to quiet my conscience?"⁶ To this end, he would grant all of Malagrida’s requests for the construction of schools, seminaries, convents, and houses of retreat in far-off Brazil.⁷ He even ordered an elaborate, custom-made dress encrusted with precious gems and decorated with gold for the much venerated statue of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of the Missions, which Malagrida had carried with him on his travels and which, ultimately, would find pride of place among the relics in the king’s bedside oratório. Yet, neither priest nor Virgin could, in the end, postpone the ravages of time and disease. How fortunate was [the king], remarked Pope Benedict XIV upon learning of the old sinner’s demise, that he had Malagrida as his spiritual guide, and that he expired in his arms.⁸

Less than a year after João V’s death in July 1750, Malagrida returned to Brazil, but not before promising the queen mother, Maria Ana of Austria, that he would sail back immediately if her health began to fail. Three years later, he did just that—although jealous courtiers conspired to deny him access to her bedchamber. But Malagrida’s bonds with the Braganças were deep. During morning prayers at the Church of Santa Maria in Setúbal on August 14, 1754, he announced to an astonished congregation, through fits of sobbing, that the queen mother had just given up her spirit to God!⁹ When some claimed (and many more believed) that his words had been spoken at the exact moment that Her Highness had passed away that day in the capital, his already lofty reputation soared. No longer just a wildly popular priest from the colonies, he had become a kind of supra-national religious hero, the living embodiment of that centuries-old mixture of mysticism and theatrical religiosity which had taken on a new career during the recent struggles of the Counter-Reformation. Embraced, as he was, by the new monarchs, José I and Mariana Vitória, the bulk of the old aristocracy, and the great mass of the common people—as well as many admirers across Europe and the New World—Father Malagrida appeared, in late 1754, at the apex of his power and prestige.

Then—quite suddenly—on a crisp, clear All Saints’ Day (November 1) morning in 1755, something occurred that would alter not only the course and trajectory of Malagrida’s life, but that of the Portuguese Empire. It began as a slight tremor, followed by a dull and persistent roar, which many lisboetas initially mistook for a giant clattering coach—or string of coaches—bounding recklessly through the city’s cobbled streets. But as the seconds wore on and the sound and intensity of the shaking increased, it became evident that this was no man-made phenomenon, but a terrible earthquake which, over the course of the next few minutes—and the arrival of two additional tremors—would bring one of the greatest cities of Europe to its knees.

Its origin (or hypocenter) lay not under the city, but several hundred kilometers off the southwest coast of the kingdom along one of the many faults that radiate out from the boundary separating the African and Eurasian continental plates.* The result of a 150–600-kilometer-long segment of that fault thrusting upward as much as 10 meters from the seafloor, the energy released was staggering: the equivalent of 475 megatons of TNT or 32,000 Hiroshima bombs. It was at least three times more powerful than the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa and a thousand times more potent than the devastating Haitian earthquake of 2010. Estimated by seismologists to have measured at least 8.5—and possibly above 9.1—on the moment magnitude scale (Mw), it was one of the most powerful earthquakes in human history, the largest ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean—and the most powerful to strike the continent of Europe in recorded human history.¹⁰

It was also one of the most deadly. Arriving at 9:45 a.m. during morning mass, it turned Lisbon’s churches into death traps, their arched ceilings toppling down upon thousands of terrified worshippers. Those who were not immediately buried in their homes or pinned beneath the rubble of collapsing buildings scrambled desperately to escape the chaos and confusion. I could hardly take a step without treading on the dead or dying, recalled one survivor. In some places lay coaches with their masters, horses and riders almost crushed in pieces…mothers with infants in their arms…ladies richly dressed….Some had their backs or thighs broken; others vast stones on their breasts.¹¹ Perhaps as many as ten thousand souls perished in that first fatal hour.

But the terrors of the day were not over. Of those who fled to the riverbank for shelter, many were swept away by an enormous, earthquake-induced tsunami, whose giant ten- to fifteen-meter waves would ravage the western and southern coasts of the kingdom before entering the Tagus River and slamming into Lisbon’s largely unprotected shoreline. The water rose to such a height, reported one ship captain, that it overcame and overflow’d the lower part of the city and so terrified the miserable and already dismayed inhabitants that they believed the dissolution of the world was at hand.¹² A rare occurrence in the Atlantic, the Great Tsunami would pummel beaches and sink ships, and demolish piers, seawalls, and coastal buildings, and drag one newly constructed marble quay into the Tagus River. It would also drown thousands, pulling many unfortunate victims miles out to sea.¹³ By day’s end, it would claim fatalities on four continents.

No element of the disaster, however, proved crueler than its third and final act: a terrible, seemingly unquenchable fire, which began almost immediately after the first tremor in hundreds of locations throughout the city and burned out of control for weeks. One of the most destructive conflagrations in European history, it gutted the principal institutions of Lisbon’s political, religious, and economic life, laying waste to its opulent churches, palaces, monasteries, convents, theaters, public markets, and private libraries. When it was finally extinguished, the entire densely populated city center, the low-lying Baixa, where much of the business of the empire took place, was rendered little more than a charred smoking ruin.¹⁴ I believe, wrote one dazed survivor, that so compleat a Destruction has hardly befallen any Place on Earth since the Overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah.¹⁵

Nearly six years later, the city still lay in ruins. The Crown’s ambitious rebuilding project, which promised to transform the capital into a glowing Neoclassical showplace, had only recently begun, and was, to the regret of the majority of Lisbon’s wretched inhabitants, proceeding at a snail’s pace.¹⁶ According to one visitor from France, the city presented an appalling spectacle, a frightful pile of fallen palaces, burned-out churches, and rubble that resembled a fortress blown to bits.¹⁷ Whole neighborhoods that had once pulsed with activity had become little more than vast heaps of rubbish and debris, while a few lonely structures stood sentinel, strange and terribly beautiful, like the remains of the ancient Romans and Greeks.¹⁸ Each night the unhappy city descended into anarchy, as gangs of thieves, hooligans, and indigent soldiers, as well as tens of thousands of stray dogs, which ate the refuse dumped into the streets and kept the inhabitants awake with their nocturnal howling, came into their dominion.¹⁹ The people are more wretched than can be imagined, wrote one resident. Poverty seems to preside universally among all ranks…[and] murders are here so common that there is little notice taken of them.²⁰ Until now, the only significant attempts at reconstruction had been those of private citizens, who, in their desire to shelter their families and get on with their lives, had built thousands of cramped, makeshift barracas (huts) amid the ruins and in the fields outside the city. Those of lesser means dwelt in squalid holes scraped into the foundations of collapsed buildings.²¹

The ruins of Lisbon’s cathedral, Santa Maria Maior de Lisboa Credit 1

It was these humble survivors who now surged into Lisbon’s squares and avenidas to catch a glimpse of Malagrida as he walked at the head of the great procession that was snaking its way silently toward the Rossio and the waiting scaffold.²² It had been more than two years since most lisboetas had laid eyes on the venerable priest. Incarcerated in the bowels of the infamous Junqueira prison until his recent move to the Palace of the Inquisition, Malagrida had suffered greatly during his confinement, engaging in the most excruciatingly painful contortions of self-imposed penance, often pressing his head violently against the cold floor for hours as he chanted his prayers.²³ While self-mortification had been part of his daily routine since childhood (in Brazil, he had worn a hair shirt and regularly beat himself with a horrible homemade chain tipped with metal spurs), years of such behavior had taken their toll.²⁴ Alone and ailing, clothed only in rags, he began to hear voices in the darkness. Who is calling me?…Who speaks? he cried out in his cell.²⁵ At some point, he came to believe that the voice of St. Anne, the mother of Mary, had come to comfort him in his suffering, dictating to him an account of her life, which he dutifully transcribed in a weak, faltering hand. In a second work, a Treatise on the Life and Empire of the Antichrist—a commission, he claimed, from the Blessed Virgin herself—he would prophesy that the last of the three future Antichrists would be born in Milan of a monk father and a nun mother in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty and would, upon reaching adulthood, wed the Greco-Roman goddess Proserpine.²⁶

A procession of prisoners during an auto-da-fé Credit 2

Unfortunately, the Inquisition (and the Portuguese state that now controlled it) was in no mood for flights of imagination, nor was it willing to acknowledge or excuse the obvious signs of madness.²⁷ In its dogged determination to prove Malagrida a heretic, the Holy Office would pedantically assert that the fanatical Jesuit had presented God and his glorious saints speaking Portuguese, mixing Italian and Latin words, and making more than a few grammatical errors.²⁸ If his fellow Jesuits are so convinced of Malagrida’s doctrinal orthodoxy, wrote the censor (in a rare, if not unprecedented, case of inquisitorial humor), perhaps he should be honored with the name BONagrida.²⁹

Yet now, out in the open air, among the teeming crowds, Malagrida regained not only a rush of lucidity, but that noble bearing and saintliness for which he had long been known.³⁰ Despite the absurdity of his costume, he was instantly recognizable. Fair-complexioned and ruddy-cheeked, with piercing blue eyes and a beard that had turned from blond to chalk white when he was still a young man, he had, most likely, once appeared as an angel or apparition to the dark-skinned mestiços, morenos, índios, and African escravos (slaves) of equatorial Brazil. Later, Portuguese authorities would attempt to subvert this seraphic image, portraying Malagrida in a widely circulated broadsheet as beardless, with a gaping mouth and an expression of malignancy, his brow and neck deeply lined.³¹

Also concerned with imagery, the planners of Malagrida’s execution had waited until sundown to begin the final procession so that the torches carried by each prisoner would emit a more sinister glow.³² In one corner of the Rossio, a richly adorned wooden amphitheater had been erected so that government ministers, judges, bishops, and priests, members of the high nobility, and dignitaries of various ranks and national origins could view the horrible event above and apart from the rabble, which was restrained from violence or any rash attempts to save the old padre by the presence of hundreds of strategically positioned soldiers and dragoons—each carrying eight cartridges as a precaution. Conspicuously absent was the royal family—but more than filling their shoes was the man truly in charge of the day’s proceedings, the master of ceremonies and principal architect of it all, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Portugal’s first minister and Count of Oeiras (later the Marquês de Pombal as he would be known to history and will hereafter be identified).³³

Profile of Gabriel Malagrida (on the left) in an example of anti-Jesuit propaganda Credit 3

Born in 1699 in the same townhouse in Lisbon’s Bairro Alto (Upper District) that he now occupied with his wife and family, this ferociously ambitious son of the lower gentry had been the earthquake’s greatest beneficiary. Tall and sinewy, with a long, knowing face, Pombal was both conspicuously handsome and physically imposing, his broad shoulders and six-foot frame towering over the legions of diminutive priests and stunted courtiers who flitted about the hallways of the Riverside Palace.³⁴ In his youth, the blond cavalheiro cut a dashing figure in the salons and streets of the Portuguese capital, where, it was said, he and a friend would regularly don white hats, cloaks, and shoes and challenge gangs of young, marauding noblemen.³⁵ Yet, for all his good manners and youthful bravura, Pombal’s rise had not been without struggle. His father, Manuel de Carvalho e Ataíde, although a respected and long-serving officer in the court cavalry, had provided little in the way of financial support or useful social connections to any of his twelve children, of which the future first minister was the eldest.³⁶

Seeking wisdom, young Pombal entered the Jesuit University at Coimbra, where he studied law and encountered a curriculum firmly and unapologetically rooted in the late Middle Ages—as well as a student body that spent much of its considerable spare time whittling toothpicks.³⁷ Upon graduation, he moved to his uncle’s house in Lisbon and, following the path of his father, enlisted in the army, though the attainment of an important military post would remain elusive. He was, after all, a commoner, and Lisbon (he would soon learn) was a closed world where a tiny aristocratic minority jealously guarded entrée into its ranks and all the privileges that came with it. An audacious (and hopelessly naive) attempt to woo the daughter of one of Portugal’s most illustrious families, the Távoras, would end in humiliation when the lovesick striver was unceremoniously hurled out of the wrought-iron gates of Távora palace. It was a slight that would one day be avenged. Further disappointment arrived when a coveted position was denied him as war with Spain seemed imminent. In despair, he resigned his commission and retreated to his family’s small country estate at Soure, near Coimbra.³⁸

There he remained in self-imposed exile for several years, seething at his rejection by both the government and Lisbon’s elite for their inability to recognize his obvious talents. You will remember, he wrote his cousin many years later, how at a time when I was little more than twenty…I retired of my own accord to the Coimbra country, preferring, for more than seven years, a crust at Soure to my uncle’s table [in Lisbon].³⁹ Although João V would eventually appoint him to the newly created Academy of History, a sinecure that would have allowed him to spend the rest of his days in quiet study, it was his elopement with Dona Teresa, the well-to-do widow of a prominent nobleman, that catapulted Pombal’s fortunes and forced all of Lisbon to take notice of this vigorous and versatile young upstart.⁴⁰ Stints as ambassador to Great Britain (1738–1748) and special envoy to Austria (1745–1749) would introduce him both to the amoral subtleties of European diplomacy and the intellectual life of a continent in full thrall to Enlightenment ideas.⁴¹

When the earthquake struck, Pombal was Portugal’s secretary of state for foreign affairs and war and a trusted member of the inner circle of the new king, Dom José. Seizing the initiative in the chaos of the first days, he dashed off orders and proclamations with great gusto, riding amid the toppled, burning buildings on his horse with only a bowl of broth prepared by his wife (his second) to keep him going.⁴² With many of his fellow ministers either wintering on their country estates or, like the king, initially paralyzed by fear and shock, Pombal became Portugal’s indispensable man—and before long, its dictator. One might say that he was the earthquake’s fourth tremor, so swift and violent was his rise in the weeks after the disaster.

Malagrida, too, had been in Lisbon on the first of November; and like Pombal, he had confronted the terrors of the day with undeniable courage. When the first tremor began, he looked toward the Heavens shouting, My heart is ready, Father!…My heart is ready! before bounding out of his church, crucifix in hand, to succor the injured and deliver the last rites to the dying.⁴³ Soon afterward, however, he was recognized by the terrified crowds and carried aloft to the Rossio, where, inspired by the momentousness of the occasion, he began to preach. A sermon published many months after the disaster conveys a sense of that first earthquake oration—as well as the hundreds that he would deliver over the course of the next three years.⁴⁴ Know, oh Lisbon, he thundered, that the destroyers of so many houses and palaces, the devastators of so many churches and monasteries, the killer of so many people…are not comets, stars, vapors, exhalations, phenomena, accidents, or natural causes—but only our intolerable sins.⁴⁵ Lisbon, he proclaimed, had become a Babylon of inconsolable confusion, which the Good Lord, in His righteous outrage, had chosen to smash to the ground. The only option for the Portuguese was to repent, admit their transgressions, and, if possible, spend six days on retreat seeking spiritual guidance from the one terrestrial organization best able to provide these indispensable and holy services: Malagrida’s order, the Society of Jesus.⁴⁶

This was not at all what Pombal wanted to hear. Brutal, efficient, and (for his time) thoroughly modern, he was one of his country’s new men, a reformer who wished to bring enlightened ideas and practices to a kingdom he considered backward and superstitious. The man who would mandate the study of Newton and Descartes in Portuguese universities wanted the terremoto (earthquake) to be seen not as a divine punishment or warning from God, but as a random, natural occurrence, however horrific.⁴⁷ As first minister, he believed it his first duty to see that his king’s subjects occupy themselves with rebuilding the capital, not fret about the impending overthrow of the world by a vengeful God. In Malagrida, Pombal saw a fanatic and a fraud, a most dangerous and power-hungry priest, who along with his conniving Jesuit colleagues sought to incite the impressionable masses, turning them away from their national responsibilities, and driving them ever further into what he viewed as the pernicious embrace of the Companhia de Jesus. In a letter posted two days after the earthquake, Pombal implored the cardinal patriarch to forbid priests from delivering sermons that increased the anxiety of the people and caused them to cease working and flee to deserted places.⁴⁸ But Malagrida refused to be silenced. He continued to preach, and when his sermon was published in late 1756, he sent the thirty-one-page pamphlet to the most prominent figures in the kingdom—including, most fatefully, the first minister himself.⁴⁹

With this innocent yet decidedly ill-considered act, Malagrida became the special object of Pombal’s wrath. As the first minister became more powerful, Malagrida’s star began to fade. Exiled to Setúbal, Malagrida was, in 1758, implicated (and almost certainly framed) in an unsuccessful (and probably manufactured) attempt by the Duke of Aveiro and members of the Távora family to assassinate José I. Personally denounced by Pombal, Malagrida was thrown into the Junqueira.⁵⁰

There, he would languish for two years until his trial and sentence of death. To ensure the outcome would be in no doubt, Pombal appointed his brother, Paulo de Carvalho e Mendonça, Portugal’s inquisitor general.⁵¹ Although the first minister had outlawed autos-da-fé as barbaric vestiges of an unenlightened past, he saw fit to make an exception for his personal enemy.⁵² And while Malagrida’s execution would resemble previous acts of faith in every respect, this time it was Pombal—and not the Church—pulling the strings. For in the wake of the earthquake, he targeted the two institutions that stood squarely in his path to power: the Church and the nobility. With so many palaces and houses of worship destroyed in the disaster (his home, by contrast, had largely been spared), he would move against their owners with a ruthlessness that foreshadowed the social and cultural upheavals of the French Revolution.⁵³

The Jesuits, in particular, would fall within Pombal’s crosshairs. Historically close to the royal family, they exerted enormous influence over both court politics and official state policy. And their control of vast income-generating territories in the New World, which resisted state control and harbored tens of thousands of rebellious Indians (who might otherwise have joined the regular workforce), put them increasingly in conflict with the first minister’s imperial economic goals. For this, they would pay dearly.⁵⁴ For in Pombal’s newly conceived absolutist state, the twin demons of modernity—political violence and an abiding contempt for tradition—would be fully realized. And there could hardly be a more eloquent rebuke to the last two and a half centuries of Portuguese history than the fact that Lisbon’s last auto-da-fé would have as its victim not a Jew, but a Jesuit.⁵⁵

For Malagrida, the irony could not have been more evident, as he, the once beloved holy man, entered the Rossio and mounted the wooden steps of the makeshift scaffold. For two full hours, he stood silently as the official charges—a long catalogue of sins, scandalous abuses, and heretical acts—were read aloud. He was called a monster of the greatest iniquity, who had acted as if he were a saint and a true prophet. An inspirer of regicide, he had faked "miracles, revelations, visions, locutions, and other favores celestiaes" (heavenly favors) and freely admitted to having conversed regularly with St. Ignatius, St. Bonaventure, St. Philip Neri, St. Teresa, and St. Francis de Borgia, the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit who had recently been appointed national protector of Portugal against earthquakes and other disasters.⁵⁶ He had even claimed, in the words of his accusers, to have heard the clear and distinct voices of the Eternal Father, his Eternal Son, and the Holy Spirit.⁵⁷

At one time, Malagrida had been revered for his ability to commune with the saints. Now, he could only marvel at the physical and spiritual collapse of that world in which he had thrived. Born in 1689 on the banks of Lake Como, in the small Italian village of Menoggio in Lombardy, he revealed early on a remarkable capacity for both piety and religious fervor—as well as a morbid fascination with death. As a schoolboy at his desk, young Gabriele was frequently observed gnawing on his hand until it bled—preparation, he explained to his classmates, for the future sufferings of martyrdom.⁵⁸ Once, he witnessed a particularly virtuous priest in the painful throes of death display a smile of such serenity and contentment that it seemed as if he had already entered the kingdom of Heaven. Oh what a beautiful death! he was often heard to remark afterward. How sweet and consoling is dying at the end of a life completely devoted to the service of God.⁵⁹

It was this strength of spirit that had animated his decision to forgo the secure and comfortable life of the religious scholar and join the Jesuit order, created in the sixteenth century to crush heresy, counter the advances of Protestantism, and spread the Word of God to the most distant and dangerous corners of the globe. Toward the end of 1721, the intrepid young priest landed in São Luís, the provincial capital of the state of Maranhão, located on an island set in the dark turbid waters of São Marcos Bay. Surrounded by mangrove swamps and vast, desolate mud flats at low tide, the small city built on bluffs was the last civilized outpost for hundreds of miles. To the north lay the equator and the Central Atlantic, to the south, scorching, barely penetrable forests filled with jungle buffalo, spotted panthers, and gargantuan snakes, which, it was believed, swallowed horses and cattle whole.⁶⁰

It was here, against this tropical backdrop, that Malagrida developed his gift for dramatic gestures and stirring oratory. In the long silences of the jungle and the Brazilian sertão (scrub desert), both saints and demons cried out to him. The great biblical struggle between good and evil, between the righteous and the damned, between the prophets of salvation and those of perdition, was all around him. As he crisscrossed northeastern Brazil in his bare feet, baptizing Indians, founding churches and schools, curing the sick, and, many claimed, raising the dead, Malagrida’s resemblance to the Prophets grew more and more pronounced. When, in 1749, he arrived in Portugal, it was as if John the Baptist himself, clothed in skins and a loincloth, had suddenly emerged from the wilderness to indict a corrupt and sinful age.⁶¹

But all of that now seemed to belong to the distant past. From his position on the scaffold, he could see along the eastern slope of the Chagas Hill the ruins of the Igreja do Carmo (Carmelite Church), whose vaulted stone ceiling had buckled with the first tremor and collapsed onto the heads of hundreds of parishioners. To the southeast, atop the imposing São Jorge’s Hill, sat the crumpled ruins of the Castle of São Jorge, which for centuries had served as a fortress to both Moorish and Christian kings, and had been the site, in 1499, of King Manuel I’s historic meeting with Vasco da Gama after his discovery of the sea route to India. (It would not be repaired until the 1940s.)⁶² And to the south, out of sight, along the western edge of the Palace Square, lay the remains of the Riverside Palace, the fabled former abode of the Portuguese monarchy, where Malagrida had been received on his first visit to Lisbon by the affable and God-fearing Dom João.⁶³

Like the old city itself, Malagrida’s end had finally come, but not in circumstances that he had expected. When asked to confess his crimes, he said simply, Since I first put my foot on Portuguese soil, I have always served my Most Faithful Majesty as a good and loyal subject. However, if, through ignorance I have offended him or anyone in the least, I ask humbly and sincerely for forgiveness.⁶⁴ It was precisely at this moment, according to one eyewitness, that the night sky cleaved apart and a radiant light illuminated the square for several minutes as if it were day, causing many of the astonished spectators to cry out Milagro!…Milagro! (Miracle!…Miracle!). Others claimed that the heavenly rays had only illuminated the prisoner’s pale face.⁶⁵ Despite the determined efforts of Pombal to demonize the old man, many in the crowd still considered him a saint. Although a frequent guest in the grand palácios of the aristocracy, Malagrida enjoyed a special rapport with the common folk, especially those on society’s lowest rungs. Perhaps his most enduring act as a missionary had been his founding of the Schools of the Sacred Heart of Mary, which housed and educated former prostitutes, the Remorseful Magdalenes, as he called them.⁶⁶

When the executioner moved to secure the garrote, Malagrida remained still, his hands crossed gently against his chest. Father, have mercy on me! he cried. "Help me in this hour!…Into your hands, Senhor, I deliver my spirit…Jesus!…Maria!"⁶⁷ Then the garrote was tightened and he was strangled without a struggle. A directive in his sentence had called for death without the effusion of blood, a lone gesture of respect accorded him, presumably on account of his advanced age.⁶⁸ Few similar instances of compassion would be extended by the new regime. Indeed, two years before, as Pombal’s assault on the aristocracy intensified, several male and female members of the Távora family, his old nemeses, had been ritually torn apart in a publicly staged bloodbath of such concentrated cruelty that the future French revolutionary executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, might have recoiled in horror.⁶⁹

To complete the ceremony, Malagrida’s lifeless body was laid out on the scaffold, his face, recalled an eyewitness, white as marble.⁷⁰ After this, firewood was piled on top of the corpse and set ablaze. According to a priest, the body initially refused to burn, remaining miraculously intact beneath the rising flames, the head erect as if looking in the direction of heaven.⁷¹ But after soldiers tossed more wood on the fire, the sanctified remains finally yielded to material realities. By four in the morning, it was all over. In accordance with the dictates of his sentence, Malagrida’s ashes were carefully collected and cast into the Tagus so that they would not be gathered up by admirers and so that there…[would] be no memory of him or his remains.⁷² However, one oft-repeated story tells of a pious old matron who found the Jesuit’s heart completely unharmed beneath the cinders and carried it home to worship as a relic.⁷³

As word of Malagrida’s death spread across Europe and the Atlantic, reactions varied widely. In Spain, Jesuit churches rang their bells in mourning and remembrance for days, while in Paris, anti-Jesuit rejoicing—undoubtedly inspired by Pombal’s recent propaganda campaign—broke out. In northeastern Brazil, thousands mourned the white-bearded saint who, for so many years, had carried the Word of God to the deepest recesses of that largely untamed land, while in Protestant Britain, the response was more muted (in time, the name Malagrida would become synonymous there with those who practiced disloyalty, religious fanaticism, or treason against the state).⁷⁴ In Switzerland, the aging philosophe and literary bane of the Church, Voltaire, whose career had been reinvigorated by the recent continent-wide debate on the meaning and causes of the earthquake, was personally outraged by Malagrida’s death. Thus, he wrote, was the excess of the ridiculous and the absurd joined to the excess of horror.⁷⁵ But closer to the centers of power, at Versailles, a genuinely saddened Louis XV—perhaps sensing that a new, more pitiless age was dawning—could offer up but a simple lament: It is as if I burned the old lunatic in the Petites [Maisons] asylum who says he is God the Father.⁷⁶

—

Six years after the Great Lisbon Earthquake, the world had indeed changed. In Portugal, a violent new regime had emerged from the rubble. Its aggressive reformist agenda, which some would later dub earthquake politics, was transforming the broad landscape of Portuguese national life and challenging the notion of what it meant to be modern in the eighteenth century. At the helm was Pombal—a force of nature all his own—who well understood that his power and authority were attributable to much more than talent, ambition, and a special rapport with the king. Terrible physical phenomena, wrote one contemporary, frequently change the face of empires.⁷⁷

But the destructive reach of the earthquake was by no means limited to Portugal or the Iberian Peninsula. Tremors were reported as far away as Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Italy, Cape Verde, and the Azores—while across the wide arc of Northern and Central Europe, strange agitations of the water were observed in ponds, inland lakes, streams, springs, fjords, and canals.⁷⁸ In Derbyshire, England, lead miners deep underground were jolted by as many as five tremors over a span of twenty minutes—while in Venice, over twelve hundred miles from the epicenter, a twenty-nine-year-old Casanova, imprisoned for impiety in the depths of the Doge’s Palace, lost his balance during a tremor and saw the ceiling beam in his jail cell suddenly turn on its axis, though not collapse, as he had hoped.⁷⁹ When the shaking returned, he would cheer it on with mounting excitement. Another, another, great God, but stronger [!], he cried.⁸⁰ Although delighted when, many weeks later, he realized that he had experienced the shock that had flattened Lisbon, he was, at the same time, despondent that it had not deposited him safe, sound, and free on the Piazza San Marco. It was thus, he wrote, that I began to go mad.⁸¹

Unfortunately for Casanova, most of the significant earthquake damage outside of Iberia occurred in northwest Africa.⁸² At Fez, Rabat, Algiers, and Marrakesh, and hundreds of tiny villages across Algeria and Morocco, the quake caused considerable destruction and many deaths—while the resultant tsunami battered the coasts of Portugal, Spain, and Morocco, and propelled waves of unusual size as far as the West Indies and the shores of northeastern Brazil, over four thousand miles to the southwest.⁸³ In all, the total area physically impacted by the earthquake encompassed more than 5.8 million square miles (3 percent of the earth’s surface), more than any other known disaster of its kind.⁸⁴

It was the Lisbon Earthquake’s impact on human history, however, that distinguishes it from all other natural catastrophes, before or since. Striking in the middle of the eighteenth century, when many believed that the natural world had been effectively tamed, if not mastered, by modern science, the great quake had, in the view of one historian, shocked western civilization more than any event since the fall of Rome in the fifth century.⁸⁵ With three violent shivers (and the destruction of a major capital city), Europeans were suddenly confronted with a phenomenon of nature that could, without warning, throw one back into the chaos of blind and destructive forces. Once again in its history, the West found its conceptions of God, Nature, and Providence under a barrage of scrutiny. And many, as a result, began to ask the all-important yet profoundly disturbing question of theodicy: How could a Creator, both beneficent and all-powerful, have permitted such a catastrophe?

The size and scope of the reaction were unprecedented—and deeply revealing. Over the next five years, theologians, philosophers, preachers, journalists, poets, and scientists from across Europe and the New World—including the three most celebrated minds of the century: Voltaire, Kant, and Rousseau—would weigh in on the disaster. The sum of their reflections—the Great Lisbon Earthquake Debate—would prove one of the defining events of the European Enlightenment.

For scientists, the disaster offered an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all unlock the mysteries of one of the last great terrestrial phenomena to have hitherto eluded scientific understanding. To this end, geological data on earthquakes and tsunamis were collected and analyzed; academic papers were published and distributed; and universities and scholarly institutes offered prizes to anyone who could explain the cataclysm.

While some interpreted the disaster as part of God’s overarching plan for the universe, others saw it as a reminder of His ongoing intervention in the world, if not a sign of the impending chaos of the Last Days. For it was still widely believed by Christians in the eighteenth century that when the sixth seal was opened on Judgment Day a catastrophe of terrifying seismic and cosmological dimensions would ensue.

And, lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.

—REVELATION 6:12⁸⁶

By the early 1760s, however, the Lisbon disaster had been largely forgotten. Over time, it would slip into a state of near-permanent historical oblivion. Have you heard of the Lisbon Earthquake? Lodovico Settembrini asks fellow patient Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s early twentieth-century novel The Magic Mountain. No—an earthquake? Castorp replies. I haven’t been reading newspapers here.⁸⁷ Today, few would be capable of answering differently.

Occasionally, however, the memory of All Saints’ Day 1755 did break through the cultural fog. During the final days of that most tumultuous year in European history, 1848, Londoners of all social classes would stream into the Colosseum near Regent’s Park to witness a spectacular new Cyclorama exhibition on the Lisbon disaster. As an effort of scenic illusion, wrote the Spectator, it surpasses anything before attempted of this kind in boldness of design and the artistic skill and ingenuity with which it is attempted.⁸⁸

As the audience sat in the darkness, surrounded by faux marble columns, gilded sculptures, and hangings of crimson silk velvet, a procession of large painted panels was presented to them—the first showing the Tagus filled with ships, another the great city as viewed from the river. When the earthquake arrived, rumbling and rushing could be heard offstage—followed by the tolling of bells, the crash of falling buildings, and, finally, the shrieks and cries of victims.

To heighten the mood, various musical works were performed on an Apollonicon organ by a Mr. Pittman—including Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, an aria from the Marriage of Figaro, Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, a Brazilian melody, and a Portuguese dance called The Earthquake. A final scene showed Lisbon in ruins. In the words of the Spectator, the exhibition offered as good an idea of the horrors of an earthquake (the tremulous shock excepted) as mechanical means may produce. A box office sensation, it would continue to entertain audiences until 1851.⁸⁹

Like London’s celebrated Cyclorama, this book seeks to provide an accurate and absorbing re-creation of the terrible events of All Saints’ Day 1755 as possible. To this end, documents and printed materials from four continents have been gathered and employed; and the latest historical and scientific scholarship have been consulted. While the international nature of the disaster is a major theme, a special effort has been made to preserve Portugal’s place at the center of the narrative. To accomplish this, the eyewitness testimonies of two Oratorian priests (the first, almost entirely unknown to scholars, the second known only through an incomplete transcription) undergird the text.⁹⁰

This book, like all works of history, is at its heart concerned with memory—with how individuals and nations choose to recall, commemorate, and, in some cases, forget or suppress an event of lasting importance. One place where the earthquake was never forgotten but lingered on in the collective memory of its inhabitants was Lisbon. No municipality suffered as much in the disaster; and none was more deeply or meaningfully transformed. Indeed, the forces that brought down Portugal’s capital on the morning of November 1, 1755, did more than just demolish buildings and extinguish lives, they put an effective end to one of the most vibrant, singular, and (to later generations) largely unfamiliar urban cultures in European history. Of that global emporium, wrote the poet Francisco de Pina e de Mello in 1756,

Where Neptune raised his trident,

And all the Orient, America, and the most distant provinces

Bestowed their treasures in continuous fleets,

There is nothing more, except a pitiable memory.⁹¹

Today, proud but clear-eyed lisboetas still refer to their beloved capital as the earthquake city ("a cidade do terramoto"), so decisive was that event in the shaping of its history, a dividing line between the greatness of its past and the obscurity of the last two and a half centuries.

* The hypocenter (or focus) refers to the point where an earthquake occurs, while the epicenter refers to the point on the surface of the earth or sea directly above the hypocenter.

CHAPTER ONE

Babylonia Portugueza

Lisbon might be said to be at once the most visibly rich, and the most abandonly wicked and superstitious city in the world.

—The London Magazine, JANUARY 1756

QUEEN OF THE SEAS

If there was one thing that Prince José may have enjoyed more than hunting—both wild game and the daughters of the nobility—it was opera. All of the Braganças were music lovers, and during the first four decades of the eighteenth century the Portuguese royal family had spared little expense in luring Europe’s finest singers, dancers, and musicians to the banks of the Tagus.¹ But in April of 1740, José’s father—the legendary João V—suffered the first of several debilitating strokes and the music halls fell silent. The King has forbidden all theatrical performances and balls, complained a composer from Bologna. [He] wants to force people into becoming saints.²

Now, after ten long years of religious processions and somber masses, the old king was dead; and his pleasure-loving son conceived of a plan that would bring glory to his new reign and, he fervently hoped, revive the jaunty, permissive spirit of his youth. He would build a glittering opera house near his Riverside Palace that would rival any on the continent. A gift to his people, his court, and, of course, himself, the new theater would celebrate the dramatic resurgence of Portugal’s fortunes over the last half century as well as provide him with a cushioned, royal perch from which to inspect his comeliest subjects.³

Completed in the spring of 1755, Lisbon’s Casa da Ópera was nothing short of a sensation, [surpassing] in magnitude and decorations all that modern times can boast, wrote one visitor from England.⁴ Its immense stage, 180 feet long and 60 feet wide, easily accommodated the lavish and inventive sets designed by renowned Italian architect Giovanni Carlo Galli-Bibiena—although one writer complained that the spectators were unwittingly distracted…by the richness of the house and all the gilded decorations.⁵ With its 350 seats and 38 boxes, it was not quite the largest theater in Europe, but it could easily accommodate everyone who counted in eighteenth-century Lisbon: generals and judges, bishops and merchants, government officials and their female servants. Even the court bloodletter and the king’s three illegitimate half brothers, the so-called Boys of Palhavã, had their assigned places in this most exclusive of institutions.⁶

For decades, foreign visitors had complained that despite the extraordinary wealth and extravagance of the Portuguese Crown, Lisbon lacked the ceremonial diversions of Versailles and Vienna.⁷ There is no court in Portugal, sniffed the Chevalier des Courtils in 1755. "One never sees the King or the Queen eat. Nobody attends the King’s lever and coucher [the public waking and putting-to-bed rituals]. The Queen does not [even] have her toilette in public."⁸ But now the Portuguese had a true royal theater where both king and queen could be entertained (and observed) in the presence of their opera-starved subjects.

And so, on March 31, 1755, when the curtain went up for the first time in honor of Queen Mariana Vitória’s thirty-eighth birthday, it appeared that her husband’s dream of a city transformed through spectacle had finally been realized.⁹ He had, after all, assembled the greatest singers then existing: Domenico Luciani, Anton Raaff, Giuseppi Morelli, Carlo Reina, and the incomparable Caffarelli (Gaetano Majorano), who had been paid the princely sum of 40,000 cruzados for a year of service in the Portuguese capital. Although the swoon-inducing Italian castrato Farinelli (arguably the most famous singer of the eighteenth century) was not present, one audience member affirmed that the Lisbon production exceeded all that Farinelli had attempted during his previous year in Spain.¹⁰ The protagonist of the evening’s opera—Allessandro nell’ Indie (Alexander in India) by David Perez—was, like Dom José, a European monarch known for his extensive global empire. But whereas the immortal Macedonian had once claimed conquests on three continents, Portugal’s king—it was commonly known—had possessions on four.¹¹

At the center of the empire was Lisbon, Queen of the Seas. For two and a half centuries, her storehouses along the Tagus River had overflowed with riches from the four corners of the globe: pepper from India, sugar from Pernambuco and São Tomé, cloves, mace, and nutmeg from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, fine porcelains and silks from China and Japan, rugs from Persia, and, most recently and momentously for the empire, vast quantities of gold and precious gems from the mines of central Brazil.¹² By 1755, Lisbon had become perhaps the most ostentatiously wealthy city in the world, an opulent, Baroque metropolis that, in its way, rivaled Rome, Paris, Vienna, and London. Now, with the construction of the Casa da Ópera, its aspiration to become one of Europe’s foremost cultural centers had been greatly bolstered—though some, like Malagrida, saw the darker side of such hubris, envisioning the capital instead as a new Babylon, whose theaters, songs, immodest dances, obscene comedies, amusements, [and] bullfights made it guilty in the eyes of God.¹³

Yet one suspects that few, on that glorious March evening in 1755, raised any such objections. As the spectacle rose to a delirious, showstopping climax, several hundred armor-clad warriors were joined on stage by a troop of twenty-five horsemen led by the king’s own riding master atop Bucephalus, Alexander’s fabled steed. According to one observer, the clomping of the horses’ hooves was integrated into the rhythm of Perez’s grand march.¹⁴

Unfortunately, the only image that has survived of Dom José’s Casa da Ópera (besides a few architectural sketches found in the National Museum of Art in the 1930s) is a romanticized depiction of its ruins by the French engraver Jacques-Philippe Le Bas.¹⁵ Rendered in 1757, two years after the disaster, the composition reveals not a theater, but an immense crumbling shell of mortar and brick exposed to a sun-drenched day. Along shattered walls once covered in bronze, disparate clumps of vegetation have taken root—while inside the hollowed-out foundation, a few sightseers clad in coats of brilliant red and blue stroll about like pilgrims to the Roman Forum, contemplating the overthrow of a once fabled if decadent city.¹⁶

—

The ruins of Dom José’s Casa da Ópera Credit 4

Like Rome, Lisbon was built on seven hills, and like the Eternal City, ancient Olisipo could trace its origins to the aftermath of the Trojan War. According to legends championed by Renaissance scholars, the Greek warrior Odysseus founded the city on one of his westward voyages in search of the garden of the Hesperides nymphs, said to lie at the very edge of the known world.¹⁷ Over time, it was claimed, the name of its founder, Ulysses, evolved into the present-day Lisboa through a number of intermediary forms (Olisipo-Olispona-Lisipona-Lisibona-Lixbona) in a tantalizing, though almost certainly apocryphal, etymological link to a now forgotten heroic past.¹⁸ What is certain is that for most of its history the future capital of Portugal existed in obscurity, an insignificant backwater on the periphery of several large ancient empires.

Archaeological evidence indicates that a variety of Paleolithic peoples once lived in the hills and verdant valleys at the mouth of the Tagus, hunting the abundant herds of deer, bison, goat, wild cattle (aurochs), and elephant (as well as the occasional rhinoceros) that once populated the area. Sharing their territory and competing for food were small bands of Neanderthals, the thick-browed, barrel-chested cousins of modern humans who made the Iberian Peninsula one of their last redoubts before their mysterious extinction some forty thousand years ago.¹⁹

Like their kinsmen at Altamira and Lascaux, these Paleolithic forebears left hauntingly beautiful images of their quarry on cave walls, buried their dead in graves streaked with ocher powder, and thus began to experience the first stirrings of religious sentiment (a dominant theme in Portuguese history).²⁰ They also started to exploit the great bounty of marine life along the Atlantic coastline. One early tool was a kind of pick or chisel used to separate mussels and other shellfish from the rocks.²¹

Although humans first cultivated crops and formed settlements in the lands of the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 BC, it took over seven thousand years for these developments to find their way to eastern Iberia. By this time, the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia were already highly advanced and Portugal was home to a mysterious culture that littered the landscape with hundreds of giant stone monuments or megaliths, used primarily as tombs.²² These pioneers of the Neolithic Era were the first to plant wheat and barley in the Portuguese soil, coax animals into domestication, consume cow’s milk, and use copper and bronze to fashion their weapons. As their culture became more complex, they employed a still undecipherable form of writing (possibly derived from a Phoenician script) to mark their burial sites.²³

Around 1000 BC, however, their world was violently upended, when a rapacious, fair-haired invader from Central Europe—the Celts—swept across the Pyrenees into Spain and northwest Portugal, raiding villages and towns and seizing everything in their path. These tall, mustachioed horsemen of Indo-European origin quickly subjugated the indigenous populations of Iberia, imposing their language, their religion, and their distinct and elevated culture, which included a facility with metalwork and a corollary interest in mining. They were not, however, the only outside influence on the peninsula.²⁴

Two centuries before, Phoenician sailors from the Levant first ventured out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic and built trading settlements along the Portuguese coast where they exchanged salt, silver, tin, copper, and horses with the rustic natives of the interior. At some point, they constructed an outpost along the southern slope of what would one day be known as São Jorge’s Hill in Lisbon (the remnants of which are believed to lie beneath the present-day cathedral of Santa Maria Maior). In their wake came the Greeks, who managed a flourishing commercial market along the coastal region of southern Iberia, shipping their wares in amphorae-laden ships to the far ends of the Mediterranean and beyond. One local product, garos (or garum in Latin), a type of fish sauce made from the entrails of tuna, mackerel, or eel, was greatly prized in Classical Athens and would later become the principal condiment (a kind of ancient catsup) consumed by both rich and poor throughout the Roman Empire.²⁵ As Greece’s power waned, the Carthaginians—a seafaring, Semitic people from North Africa—closed off the Strait of Gibraltar to rival shipping and penetrated deep into Iberia looking for able-bodied men and the much coveted Spanish swords to aid them in their wars against the Romans.

But the renowned Carthaginian general Hannibal failed in his attempt to capture his enemy’s capital city in the Second Punic War; and, thus weakened, the lands of Iberia fell to the brutal armies of Rome. As a consequence, Lisbon, now called Olisipo, became a far-flung western outpost in the newly created Roman province of Lusitania.²⁶ Although local resistance by the native Lusitani was fierce (one legendary guerrilla leader named Viriatus won a series of improbable, yet ultimately Pyrrhic, victories against the Italian invaders between 146 and 139 BC), by the end of the first century Lisbon had accepted its fate and begun to transform itself into a proper Roman city.²⁷ In recognition of its loyalty in the struggle against the Lusitani, it would receive the