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t h e b r ag a n z a s
dy n a s t i e s
A series of substantial narrative histories that look at the genesis of
dynasties, their dynamics and the derivation of power, demonstrating
that history can be seen and reflected through the dynastic process
and who or what ruling dynasties believed themselves to be. It seeks to
put dynasties under discussion and reflection.

Already published:
The Braganzas: The Rise and Fall of the Ruling Dynasties
of Portugal and Brazil, 1640–1910
Malyn Newitt

Forthcoming:
The Borjigids: The Dynasty of Chinggis Khan
Timothy May

The Mauryan Dynasty and Ashoka the Great

Colleen Taylor Sen
THE
BR AGA NZAS
The Rise and Fall of the Ruling
Dynasties of Portugal and Brazil,
1640–1910

M a ly n N e w it t

reaktion books
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2019

Copyright © Malyn Newitt 2019

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers

Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

isbn 978 1 78914 005 7

 Contents

Preface 7

1 The Idea of Monarchy and the Rise and Fall of

the Dynastic State 9

2 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy 19

3 Overview of the Braganza Dynasty and the Culture

of Royalty 39

4 The Rise of the Braganza Ducal Family and the

Reign of D. João iv 67

5 The Children of D. João iv 86

6 D. João V: The Golden Age 115

7 D. José: The Reformer 137

8 D. Maria i and D. Pedro iii 161

9 D. João vi: The Merciful 179

10 D. Pedro and D. Miguel 201

11 The Constitutional Monarchs: D. Maria ii,
D. Fernando and their Sons, D. Pedro v and
D. Luís 233

12 The Twilight of the Gods: D. Carlos and

D. Manuel 269

13 D. Pedro ii, Emperor of Brazil 298

dynastic tree 324

glossary 327
references 329
bibliography 348
acknowledgements 356
photo acknowledgements 357
index 359
 Preface

W riting the history of a dynasty presents an unavoidable dilemma

– how to write about kings, emperors and queens without writing
a history of the countries where they reigned. The choices that have
had to be made in order to make this book manageable will be only
too obvious. The key factors of the history of Portugal and Brazil,
especially the economic and social developments, if not exactly ignored,
have been given only a supporting role. If this book is largely about
royal families, this does not mean that I consider them to have been
the principal movers of history. In fact, it is only too obvious that
monarchs like D. João vi and D. Maria ii were never in control of events
and had to confine their activities to trying to stay afloat in very stormy
political waters.
There have been very few books in English about members of the
Portuguese Braganza dynasty, the exception being Catarina of Braganza
who has been, and continues to be, the subject of numerous biographies
and fictional writing. These apart, Francis Gribble’s The Royal House
of Portugal (1915) has some witty turns of phrase but is now largely
forgotten. Marcus Cheke’s Carlota Joaquina, Queen of Portugal (1947)
provides a detailed account not only of the queen but of the whole reign
of her husband D. João vi. It is very readable, but long out of print.
More recently there is only Jenifer Roberts’s excellent The Mad­­ness of
Queen Maria (2009). Malcolm Howe’s The Braganza Story (1999),
published by the British Historical Society of Portugal, is a somewhat
eccentric book, full of fascinating information and particularly notable
for the author’s collection of photographs of the Braganzas, a large
number of which are reproduced in the book. The emperors of Brazil
have been better served. There are two recent biographies of D. Pedro i:

7
the braganzas

Sergio Correa da Costa’s Every Inch a King (1950) has, perhaps, been
superseded by Neill Macaulay, Dom Pedro: The Struggle for Liberty in
Brazil and Portugal, 1798–1834 (1986). There are two outstanding biog-
raphies of D. Pedro ii: Lilia Moritz Schwarcz’s The Emperor’s Beard
(1999), translated from the Portuguese, and Roderick Barman’s Citizen
Emperor: Pedro ii and the Making of Brazil, 1825–9 (1999) and his com-
panion study of the Princess Imperial, Princess Isabel of Brazil (2002).
Writing about royal families, their marriages and networks of
family relations can be very confusing. In Portugal the title ‘Dom’ or
‘Dona’ (often abbreviated to ‘D.’) was always used as a prefix to the
names of the kings and queens, but this title was also used by noble-
men and women and by other people of high rank. However, I have
adopted the convention of using the title only for reigning monarchs
and I have abbreviated it thus: D. Maria i, D. Pedro ii to refer to Queen
Dona Maria i and King Dom Pedro ii. This, I hope, will make a clear
distinction between the monarchs and other people who may have had
the same name. I have also used Portuguese versions of names (except
in some quotations), so D. José, not King Joseph, and Catarina, not
Catherine. However, it has been decided to use the anglicized ‘Braganza’
rather than the Portuguese ‘Bragança’ for the name of the dynasty.
It is a quaint custom in Portugal to give each sovereign a descrip-
tive title: D. Manuel the Fortunate, D. Afonso the Victorious and so on.
These popular titles have been included in the list of the monarchs at
the start of Chapter Three.

8
 1

The Idea of Monarchy

and the Rise and Fall of
the Dynastic State

T he Braganza dynasty came to the throne of Portugal in 1640 as

the result of a coup d’état carried out by a small group of minor
nobility. There was general acquiescence by the population in the
change of dynasty and no serious attempt by the armed forces to oppose
the coup. In 1910 the monarchy fell as the result of a coup d’état car-
ried out by a small group of republican politicians, generally supported
by the population of Lisbon, with most of the armed forces standing
by and not intervening. A moralist might conclude that those who rise
through a coup d’état are fated to fall by a coup d’état, an interpreta-
tion that seems to fit with an understanding of Portuguese history as
being marked by ‘the organic mode of thinking in terms of growth
and decay’, to use Alan Freeland’s phrase.1 The Braganza dynasty
reigned in Portugal from 1640 to 1910 (and in Brazil until 1889) and
its story is the story of the rise, flowering, turmoil, decline and even-
tual demise of European monarchy itself. After the events of 1640 it
took nearly thirty years before the Braganzas were fully accepted
throughout Europe as the legitimate ruling dynasty of Portugal.
Throughout the succeeding two centuries the fortunes of the dynasty
were inextricably linked to Brazil, which provided the wealth that
ensured Portugal’s survival as an independent state and its continued
existence during the French revolutionary era. In the nineteenth cen-
tury the Braganzas, in both Portugal and Brazil, tried to reinvent
themselves as bourgeois constitutional monarchs, but in the end they
failed and were deposed by republican revolutionaries. This chapter
looks at some of the issues that surround the history of the institution
of monarchy in Europe and the underlying contradictions that were
to lead to its failure.

9
the braganzas

The monarchical tradition weaves together two distinct and often

conflicting strands of thought and imagination. On the one hand, there
is the idea of the warrior king who is strong enough to defend his
kingdom, defeat his enemies and provide security for his subjects. On
the other is the belief that the king’s authority is ordained by God and
that he rules in order to fulfil God’s purposes. Quite early in human
history it was believed that rulers possessed divine powers received
from the gods or were themselves divine beings. These ideas extended
authority beyond the exercise of force and protection and provided
monarchical power with a supernatural legitimacy. For the ruled, this
gave the security of feeling that they were governed by someone able
to bring prosperity and supernatural protection. However, it was self-
evident that this protection could be provided only by a competent
ruler, and from this grew the idea that the welfare of the community
depended on the health and strength of the monarch, the concept of
the ‘divine king’ famously described by Fraser. If the king began to fail
through impotence, old age or illness, the people as a whole would suffer.
In those circumstances it would be legitimate to remove the king and
replace him with someone more vigorous and more able to protect the
kingdom. According to Lilia Schwarcz in her remarkable study of
Brazil’s emperors, Emperor D. Pedro ii ‘mediated these two forces: the
political and institutional monarchy on the one hand, and the mythic
figure in the popular imagination on the other’.2
As kingship developed in western Europe there was always an
interplay between the idea that monarchy was somehow an institution
through which divine authority was exercised and the assumption that
the king needed to be able to perform the functions of a ruler and pro-
vide protection, justice and a guarantee for the lives and welfare of his
subjects. A king, it was believed, should also hold the balance between
competing forces within society. He should be a ‘moderating’ influence
as the idea was developed in the two Braganza monarchies of the nine-
teenth century. Struggles between different regions or elite factions, or
even between the elites and the mass of the people, could, in theory,
be mediated by the king, while loyalty to the throne could provide a
bond, countering forces that were otherwise centrifugal and might lead
to disintegration and chaos. Nowhere was this idea of kingship better
illustrated than in the remarkable career of Emperor Pedro ii in Brazil.
It was with these considerations in mind that the Aristotelian
concept of ‘the just king’ gained acceptance. The dangers of tyranny and

10
 The Idea of Monarchy and the Rise and Fall of the Dynastic State

oligarchy, when the state was captured by narrow sectional interests,

were best avoided through rule by a king whose legitimacy was mani-
fest through acting justly and enforcing the law. In this formulation
the ‘law’ was the absolute authority and the king, to some extent, its
servant. The law was enshrined in legal codes, like the Justinian Code
or, in Portugal, the Manueline Code, which was elaborated in the early
sixteenth century. It was not accepted that the king could change the
law at will. This was what tyrants did.3
In early modern Europe the authority of the monarch was severely
circumscribed by his need to respect the interests of the most powerful
noble dynasties which often became alternative centres of influence
and patronage.

Rather than being a centralised institution in which power ‘radi-

ated’ from the person of the prince . . . influence and, in some cases,
formal authority as well, emanated at court from a variety of sub-
sidiary sources: entrenched office-holders, noble magnates, senior
prelates, major army commanders . . . the carapace of autocracy
concealed a diversity of partly complementary, partly competing,
‘foyers of power’.4

The hereditary principle was supposed to give monarchy some stability,

but always came with the risk that a weak or incompetent heir or a
minor might succeed. Occasionally a situation presented itself where
a number of possible heirs disputed the Crown and the normal rules of
succession seemed difficult to apply. Such was the situation in Portugal
in 1580 on the death of Cardinal Henrique, the last king of the Avis
dynasty. Moreover, the problem of females succeeding to power was
never fully resolved and attempts automatically to exclude women
did not always succeed when confronted by the logic of the hereditary
principle.
The hereditary principle contained within it other dangers. In
societies, for instance in Africa, where multiple marriages were the norm,
the king could use marriage as a way of binding different sections of
society to the Crown, but this made the succession difficult to determine
as the children of different wives competed for the prize. In Christian
Europe, monogamy made it difficult for the king to bond in this way
with the society over which he ruled. A monogamous royal marriage
with a subject would be highly divisive and could upset the balance

11
the braganzas

within society. As a result, royal marriages were usually contracted with

the royalty of other states, a practice which had the added purpose
of cementing alliances and providing additional security against external
threats. In Portugal, for example, the marriage in 1386 of D. João i to
Philippa of Lancaster, granddaughter of Edward iii of England, was
an essential element in strengthening the foundations of the famous
Anglo-Portuguese alliance.
One way of preserving the inheritance of a dynasty, which might
be lost through an injudicious marriage, was for kings to marry a close
relative within their own families. In Europe first cousin marriages were
a frequent occurrence and the marriages of uncles to nieces or nephews
to aunts were also commonplace, especially in the Portuguese and
Spanish royal families. An anthropologist, taking the long view, might
see in this practice a survival of the incestuous brother to sister marriages
of pharaonic royalty, a practice also known in parts of sub-Saharan
Africa.
One bizarre consequence of the tradition of marrying royalty
from other countries was that royal families were often foreigners in
the countries they ruled. Sometimes they could not even speak the
language, like George i of Britain who could not speak any English.
The Braganza dynasty in Portugal was no exception. Only one of the
Braganzas married someone who was Portuguese: D. Maria i married
her uncle D. Pedro iii. Marriages were made either with Spanish or
with German princesses (except for D. Pedro ii, whose first marriage
was with a French princess, and D. Carlos, who also married a French
princess). After D. João vi most of the Portuguese Braganzas married
Germans and by the time the monarchy came to an end the royal family
had become unmistakably blonde-haired and Teutonic.
The idea that kingship was hereditary, and that its mystical as well
as its secular authority was passed down within a single family, led to
the emergence of royal dynasties. Marriages between members of these
dynastic families created an intricate pattern of family ties that made the
ruling houses of Europe nodes in a vast network that stretched across
western and even, to some extent, eastern Europe. Each dynastic mar-
riage was the result of often prolonged negotiations and in this world of
dynastic diplomacy princesses as well as princes became a highly market­­
able commodity. Almost as much care was taken over their marriages
as over those of the rulers themselves and each marriage constituted a
treaty aimed at securing friendship, peace and cooperation.

12
 The Idea of Monarchy and the Rise and Fall of the Dynastic State

For most of the ruling families of Europe, the interests of the

dynasty stood high in their order of priorities.There was an endless quest
to extend the power and prestige of the dynasty through magnificent
dowries, new inheritances, the acquisition of new lands. A consequence,
not always intended, was the creation of large dynastic states whose
parts might have little cultural or even geographical affinity. One can
immediately think of the Angevin ‘empire’ of the twelfth century or
the Habsburg empire of Charles v in the sixteenth. The dynastic state
was multi-lingual and multi-ethnic, held together through allegiance
to the sovereign, not by any idea of national identity. The renown and
power of the dynasty was often seen as separate from the interests of
the nation or the state and was deemed to take precedence over it. The
gradual emergence of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties, with
hereditary lands scattered throughout Germany and the rest of Europe,
is the clearest example. By the eighteenth century it was becoming
increasingly common for territories where a dynastic title was held
to be bargained, and transferred from one ruling house to another,
almost in the same way that maritime powers bargained, swapped and
traded colonial territories. Although the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is
supposed to have established the modern world order of sovereign nation
states, it took a long time for this idea to influence the dynastic pre­­
occupations of Habsburgs and Bourbons in Italy and the Netherlands,
let alone the ambitions and behaviour of the German princes within
the empire.
The common interests of the dynasty remained strong even when
the family split into different branches, as occurred with the Habsburgs
in the sixteenth, the Bourbons in the eighteenth and the Braganzas in
the nineteenth centuries.The family ties between the different branches
of the Habsburg family were a central factor in European politics until
the Habsburg dynasty in Spain died out at the end of the seventeenth
century, while the ‘family compacts’ that linked the various branches
of the Bourbon dynasty, which ruled in Spain and Naples as well as
France, dominated eighteenth-century politics.
Throughout the nineteenth century the web being woven by
dynastic marriages became ever more intricate. If Queen Victoria’s
daughters tied most of the royal families of Europe more or less closely
to the old matriarch, in other dynasties sons could play a similar role
and the princes of the Saxe-Coburg and the Orléans families provided
husbands for European royalty and added their interests to the dynastic

13
the braganzas

web. However, the growing power of the militarized nation state gradu­
ally put an end to the old idea of a multinational dynastic state and
with it to the old dance of dynastic diplomacy.
Hereditary kingship was not universal in Europe. Poland–
Lithuania had an elective monarchy, as did the Holy Roman Empire,
and in other states there were vestiges of the elective, or at any rate the
selective, principle. In Portugal, for example, the right to succeed to the
throne needed the consent of the Cortes and a new king was formally
acclaimed at a ceremony with reciprocal oath-taking, a practice that
contained within it vestiges of the idea of elective kingship and a social
contract. Nor was monarchy itself universally adopted. Venice, until
the seventeenth century one of the great powers of Europe, was a
republic, not very democratic to be sure, but definitely not a hereditary
monarchy, and the fifteenth century saw the emergence of the Swiss
Confederation, also briefly a European power of consequence, and one
that was firmly republican and which in some cantons retained rem-
nants of primitive direct democracy. Most of the Imperial Cities were
also republics, as were provinces like those that broke away in the 1570s
to form the United Netherlands. The republican principle was, there-
fore, well understood and accepted in parts of Europe, though elected
heads of state, like the Doge of Venice, the Stadholder of the Nether­
lands and the Pope, tended to approximate their style of rule to that
of neighbouring monarchies.
By the sixteenth century two ideas predominated: that kingship
was ordained by God and was passed through hereditary succession,
and that the king was bound to rule according to the law and to provide
security and protection for the people. Did this mean, however, that
the king who ruled by divine right was above the law? Or did it mean
that even divinely sanctioned rulers could be replaced if their rule was
not deemed just? What was the origin of the state, philosophers had
begun to ask. Did the state originate with the family and the natural
authority of parents over children, or was it a defensive mechanism
with individuals pooling their freedoms for the sake of security and
the cooperation needed for survival? If the latter, could the authority
freely given by the people be just as freely reclaimed? If so, wherein lay
the divine element in the royal authority? Here lay contradictions and
the interplay of these ideas formed the tapestry of much of European
history. When they came into conflict, as they did with increasing
frequency, the result could be profoundly disruptive.

14
 The Idea of Monarchy and the Rise and Fall of the Dynastic State

There were other contradictions as well. The idea that monarchs

in some way embodied the national identity gradually took hold but
had to coexist with the idea that monarchy transcended mere national
differences and constituted the unifying principle in multinational
states like those of the Habsburgs or Great Britain, with its three king-
doms and three separate parliaments, or even Portugal where the royal
title, King of Portugal and the Algarves, kept alive the fiction that
Portugal was made up of more than one kingdom.
Moreover, not far below the surface of European culture lay the
idea that monarchy was an inherently absurd and ultimately unjust
institution. In the early seventeenth century the follies and waste of
rulers faced mounting criticism and these perceptions were sometimes
articulated as a strain of republicanism. In France, the authority of the
Crown was profoundly challenged when the Protestant Henry of
Navarre succeeded to the throne of a Catholic kingdom. In Bohemia
in 1618 the Protestant nobility tried to install their own king rather than
follow the strict line of hereditary succession and in England the Civil
War led to the declaration of a republic in 1649, though one that soon
assumed a curious semi-monarchical form. In Portugal, the idea of
declar­ing a republic, as an alternative to continued rule from Madrid,
was apparently seriously discussed. So, when the duke of Braganza was
acclaimed as king of Portugal in 1640, it was at a time when the whole
idea of monarchy was in a state of flux.
To this crisis of authority, the ruling dynasties of Europe responded
with a strong reassertion of absolute power and divine authority. As the
critique of monarchy and traditional authority increased, so the counter­­
claims of royal absolutism became ever more extreme. The more
hereditary right was criticized, the more emphatically it was defended.
However, for absolutism to be a reality the ruling dynasties had to have
the financial and bureaucratic resources, as well as the military capacity,
to enforce the king’s will in all parts of the kingdom and over all elements
in society. The military revolution of the seventeenth century gave rise to
the standing armies that underpinned absolutism and the ideas of the
Cameralists paved the way for an expansion of the state’s administrative
capacity. In Portugal, however, these changes were slow to take root and
the newly installed Braganza dynasty had to struggle to assert its author­
ity. It was not until the discovery of gold in Brazil at the very end of the
seventeenth century gifted the Crown with substantial financial resources
that the absolutism of the dynasty became established.

15
the braganzas

The exotic rituals that were observed in royal courts in the seven­
teenth and eighteenth centuries were not the perpetuation of ancient
custom so much as examples of the invention of tradition. The rituals
that surrounded the French king in Versailles were largely invented by
Louis xiv and, though they were supposed to enhance the dignity of
the throne and stifle opposition and dissent, under his successors they
became empty ceremonies that merely encouraged the groundswell of
criticism of the king and the contempt in which the court was held. As
the subterranean swell of opposition to royalty grew, so the absurdities
of court ceremonial became ever more divorced from the realities of
the everyday life of the people. At the Braganza court in Portugal, for
example, no one was allowed to sit in the royal presence and courtiers
had to stand or kneel, even when playing cards, though women were
sometimes allowed to sit cross-legged on the floor.
The propaganda that supported monarchical absolutism became
ever more elaborate. Celebrations of royal births, baptisms, betrothals
and marriages became occasions for demonstrating royal power and
authority before the public. As Ana Pereira puts it, ‘the whole spectacle
was supported by a collection of symbols where abounded allusions
to the virtues of princes: Fame, Justice, Prudence, Magnanimity,
Sov­­ereignty, Love and Truth . . . In a society impregnated with religiosity
the spectacle of monarchy employed, to a great extent, the ecclesias-
tical ceremonial.’5 These elaborate public displays were designed as a
visual representation of royal power in societies where the majority of
the population was still illiterate, though they were more often aimed at
impressing other rulers and establishing a monarch’s place in the wider
hierarchy of European royalty. This display found its most extreme
expression in the royal palaces themselves. While the constitutional
kings of Great Britain were content with the modest and somewhat
antiquated quarters of Hampton Court and Kew Palace, the absolute
monarchs of continental Europe vied with each other to imitate and
eventually to outdo Versailles. It was the eighteenth century that saw
the strong intellectual challenge to the idea of monarchy, but this was
also the century that saw the building of Mafra in Portugal and Caserta
in Naples. In Portugal, ancient practices continued whereby a narrow
group of noble families received pensions from the Crown, even when
they were not performing any public duties, and benefited from the
antiquated forms of land tenure – the morgados, prazos and capelas – by
which they defined and maintained their status. However, these became

16
 The Idea of Monarchy and the Rise and Fall of the Dynastic State

ever more removed from the economic realities of the time and from
the experience of the population of the country.
The excesses of monarchy, however, were never just propaganda
posturing imposed from above, but were to some extent called into
being by the people. The strange rituals of the French and British
monarchies, whereby those suffering from scrofula could seek relief by
being touched by the monarch, represented a longing, even a demand,
by the common people for divine intervention in their lives.
Royal courts were bastions of class privilege and places to which
those seeking offices, honours and appointments had to come but they
were also centres of cultural patronage, as was demonstrated during
the reign of D. Manuel ‘the Fortunate’ in Portugal or in the Habsburg
and Bourbon courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When
the Crown of Portugal passed to the Spanish king in 1580, there was no
longer a royal court in Lisbon from which patronage could be dispensed
and this, over time, became a source of grievance for the Portu­­guese
and contributed to the cultural barrenness of the period.
While the political philosophers of the eighteenth century openly
speculated about the idea of a social contract and a republic without a
king, monarchists had to find a response that went beyond merely re­­
asserting their absolutism. After the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’ the
British crown had managed to combine monarchical and republican
ideas to produce a hybrid system of constitutional monarchy. Elsewhere
in Europe, the defenders of monarchical power sought to shore up
their authority by modernizing their states and co-opting the interests
of classes below the traditional elites.Various systems of service nobility
allowed members of the middle classes to invade the preserves of the
elite, whose exclusiveness had hitherto been protected by the Crown.
Nowhere was this attempt to co-opt middle-class interests more appar-
ent than in the measures taken, in the Habsburg lands and in Portugal,
for the emancipation of the Jews.
By the nineteenth century the absurdities of absolute monarchy
were only too apparent. The pantomime rituals, performed in the elab-
orate fancy dress of court costume, became increasingly divorced from
real life with the actors seeming ever more like stage characters in drag.
The divorce between rational, liberal thought, social progress and the
institution of monarchy inexorably widened. Hans Christian Andersen’s
famous story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, first published in April
1837, was a scarcely disguised commentary on monarchy in the

17
the braganzas

mid-nineteenth century. Even so, monarchy as an idea and as an insti-

tution continually tried to reinvent itself. One device was for kings to
turn themselves into emperors in spite of, or perhaps because of, the
Napoleonic associations. In the nineteenth century the British monar-
chy refurbished its image with the assumption of imperial splendour in
India. In Germany, the Kaiser tried to become the symbol of a national
unity that had only been achieved by force of arms, and in far-off Brazil
the Braganzas ceased to be kings and became emperors displaying a
bewildering array of invented symbols and traditions, borrowed from
Europe or invented by enthusiastic local artists. For nearly seventy
years the emperors successfully prevented the fragmentation of the vast
territory over which they ruled. Nothing, however, could prevent the
intellectual challenge to the hereditary principle of power that finally
died after the First World War.
The story of any ruling dynasty, therefore, is the story of the
struggle of the monarchical principle not only with the competing forces
within society that ultimately found expression in republicanism, but
with the inherent absurdities and internal contradictions that contin-
ually threatened to undermine and weaken the monarchy from within.
As Amy Jenkins wrote in The Guardian, ‘the whole fantasy of royalty
is a construct, an illusion. A “king” is an invented idea. As invented as
unicorns’ – and inevitably, as people grow up, they no longer believe
in unicorns.6

18
 2

The Early History of the

Portuguese Monarchy

T his chapter will look at the two dynasties that came before the
Braganzas. The Avis dynasty that reigned in Portugal from 1385
to 1580 witnessed the great era of the discoveries, the founding of the
Estado da Índia, the expansion in Morocco and the great flowering
of Renaissance culture in Portugal. This dynasty died out in 1580 and
was succeeded by the Habsburg dynasty when Portugal was incorpor­
ated into the Spanish monarchy between 1580 and 1640. During this
period the great expansion of settlement in Brazil began, but the Estado
da Índia came under increasing pressure from resurgent Asian states
and from attacks by the Dutch and English. With the king far away in
Madrid, Portugal was reduced to being little more than a province of
the Habsburg monarchy. The Braganzas were to inherit a monarchical
culture that had taken root over three centuries and was firmly embed-
ded in a range of institutions, ceremonies and practices. The revolution
that brought the new dynasty to the throne did not intend to overthrow
or even alter this monarchical tradition, but rather to take possession
of it to strengthen the legitimacy of its rule.
During the long centuries of Roman and Visgothic rule the Iberian
peninsula had been part of a single state that reflected a self-evident
geo­­graphical logic. Moreover, the Arab conquests, which began in the
early eighth century, also led to the installation of a single Caliph­ate,
which included the lands that later became Portugal. This geographical
logic, immediately apparent to anyone glancing at the map of Europe,
was never entirely cancelled out by historical events and the idea of the
natural unity of the Iberian peoples did not disappear, briefly becom-
ing a reality between 1580 and 1640 and frequently recurring up to
the present in the secret correspondence of statesmen and the dynastic

19
the braganzas

ambitions of both Spanish and Portuguese royal houses. If France,

Germany and Italy eventually experienced national unification and the
benefits of a single central government, it seemed to some to be only
logical that the Iberian peoples should follow in their footsteps.
In 1139 Afonso Henriques, a vassal of the king of León, declared
himself king in Portugal and, after significant amounts of gold had
changed hands, had his title recognized by the Pope in 1143. Although
the Portuguese monarchy had its beginning in these events, it took a
long time before anything like modern Portugal took shape. Lisbon
and the south had to be conquered from the Moors, but even after this
was achieved the kingdom remained closely connected to its imme-
diate neighbour. For a long time episcopal jurisdictions spanned the
new frontiers, as did the governance of the Military Orders. Moreover,
the leading aristocratic families of Portugal held lands across the
border and were also vassals of the Castilian kings. Their loyalties were
divided.
In 1383, on the death of D. Fernando (r. 1367–83), the legitimate
heir to the Portuguese throne was his daughter Beatriz, married to Juan,
the king of Castile. Backed by the French king and by a large portion
of the Portuguese nobility, Juan tried to enforce his claim, unsuccess-
fully laying siege to Lisbon in 1384, and in 1385 facing a force consisting
of English mercenaries and local Portuguese levies at the battle of
Aljubarrota. The destruction of the Franco-Castilian army in the battle
enabled a new dynasty to take the Portuguese throne.

The Avis Dynasty

The new king, D. João i (r. 1385–1433), was the illegitimate son of
D. Fernando’s father, D. Pedro i (r. 1357–67). He was Master of the
Military Order of Avis, from which the dynasty derived its name.
Only a minority of the nobility supported him and he had to use every
means available to him in order to secure the future of his dynasty. His
marriage with Philippa of Lancaster, niece of Edward the Black
Prince and daughter of John of Gaunt, secured the recognition and
alliance of England but at the cost of dragging Portugal further into the
diplomatic and military quagmire of the Hundred Years War. D. João
employed the services of eminent legal minds who successfully legit-
imized his claims before the Cortes in 1385 and engaged the brilliant
literary talents of Fernão Lopes, and later Gomes Enes de Azurara, as

20
 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy

royal chroniclers to record his struggle for the Crown and the glorious
achievements of his reign.
D. João’s successful expedition to seize the Moroccan port of
Ceuta in 1415 proved popular and reignited some of the fervour of the
Reconquista, the earlier wars against the Muslims in the Iberian pen-
insula. It provided employment for the military class that might otherwise
have been a disruptive influence, as well as looking after the interests
of those whose living was derived from trade, piracy and commerce
in northern Africa.
Perhaps D. João’s greatest advantage came from the success of
his marriage, which produced five princes and a princess. His sons – his
heir D. Duarte, Pedro, Henrique, João and Fernando – were endowed
with titles, crown lands and positions of authority within the Military
Orders. They became a bulwark to the throne and the foundation of
a new nobility. Meanwhile Isabel (1397–1471), his daughter, was
married to Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy (r. 1419–67), a marriage
that was the most obvious sign that the Avis dynasty had ‘arrived’ on
the stage of European royalty. A further successful marriage con-
firmed the status of the dynasty when, in 1454, Leonor (1434–1467),
the eldest daughter of D. João’s successor D. Duarte (r. 1433–8), was
married to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick iii (r. 1440–93), a
courtship and marriage portrayed by Pinturicchio in a series of paint-
ings in the Piccolomini Library at Siena Cathedral, produced at the
height of the Italian Renaissance. Leonor became the mother of
the redoubtable Emperor Maximilian (r. 1486–1519). The dynasty
that had begun with the apparently hopeless quest of the young bastard
Master of Avis was now recognized among Europe’s most distinguished
royalty.
The kings reflected the growing prestige of the Portuguese crown
by adopting ever more elaborate titles. Originally known as King of
Portugal and the Algarve, D. Afonso v (r. 1438–80) changed Algarve to
Algarves (to include Morocco) and added ‘daquem e dalem-mar em
África’ (‘on this side and beyond the sea in Africa’). To this was added
‘Lord of Guinea’, and after the establishment of the Estado da Índia in
1504 (in effect a new kingdom added to the Crown) the royal title became
more elaborate still. To the traditional titles were now added ‘lord of
the conquest, navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and
India’. As these titles suggest, Portugal itself was expanding its power
and influence to the far corners of the world.

21
the braganzas

The Avis dynasty presided over the astonishing expansion of

Portugal’s maritime activity around the world. The part played by the
infantes Pedro and Henrique in sponsoring oceanic voyages and island
settlements in the Atlantic, and the diplomatic activity that secured
Papal Bulls, enshrining Portugal’s exclusive rights to navigation and
ecclesiastical patronage, are well known, as are the Moroccan conquests
of D. Afonso v ‘O Africano’, D. João i’s grandson, and the exploratory
voyages sponsored by D. João ii (r. 1480–95), which led in 1488 to the
discovery of a sea route round the foot of Africa and in 1494 to
the treaty with Castile, which partitioned the world between the two
countries for purposes of discovery, proselytizing and exploitation.
Equally well known are the remarkable expeditions and conquests of
the reign of D. Manuel i (r. 1495–1521) – from the first return voyage
from Europe to India (1497–9) and the discovery of Brazil in 1500
to the founding of the Estado da Índia with its capital in Goa and
the circumnavigation of the globe by the fleet commanded by a
Portuguese renegade in the service of Castile, Fernão de Magalhães,
in 1519–21.
During the fifty years that followed the establishment of the
Estado da Índia in 1504, the Portuguese established around fifty com-
mercial settlements, most of them fortified, that stretched from the East
African coast to China and Japan. Shiploads of spices were brought to
Europe but the Portuguese also achieved a dominant position in cer-
tain branches of Asian commerce, establishing a monopoly over the
import of horses into India and in the supply of Japanese silver to China.
Meanwhile sugar plantations were being developed in the Atlantic
Islands and Brazil, and the networks of Portuguese commerce extended
literally around the world as large Portuguese commercial communities
grew up in Seville and in the Spanish cities in the New World. The
wealth that reached Lisbon soon made it one of Europe’s most cosmo-
politan cities, while the import of thousands of slaves made it also one
of the most ethnically diverse.
Dazzling as these achievements were, and important as was the
role of the royal dynasty in sponsoring them, confining the historian’s
attention to these epoch-making events obscures the real thrust of royal
policy, which was less single-mindedly focused on this national narrative
of overseas expansion. As the historian Mário Domingues wrote, ‘the
Portuguese monarchs thought more about the convenience of the family
than the independence of the kingdom.’1

22
 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy

Having won the recognition of Portugal as an independent king-

dom in the twelfth century, it might be thought that the Portuguese
monarchs would stoutly defend this independence and become a focus
for emerging national sentiment. However, while kings like D. Diniz
(r. 1279–1325) and D. Manuel i did preside over a flowering of Portuguese
national culture and periods of impressive economic prosperity based
on the expansion of maritime trade, many of the Portuguese kings pre-
ferred to act according to their own dynastic logic. Time and again
marriages were sought with the ruling dynasty of Castile, marriages that
had the clear intention of bringing together Portugal and Castile under
the rule of a single monarch. These dynastic ambitions of the kings of
Portugal would have seemed quite normal to an observer in the fifteenth
or sixteenth centuries but they should give someone in the twenty-first
century pause before seeking to identify the Crown as the true symbol
of national identity, let alone the defender of national independence.
The ambitions of the Avis dynasty were firmly fixed on a dynastic
union with Castile. D. Afonso v’s sister, Juana, was married to Enrique
iv of Castile (r. 1454–74), and D. Afonso v himself married her daughter
(his niece), known as Juana ‘La Beltraneja’, and fought a war between
1476 and 1479 to try to establish his wife’s claim to the Castilian throne
– an early example of the marriage of uncle to niece that was to become
a recurring practice in the Portuguese royal family. Opposed to him was
Isabella (the Catholic), Enrique iv’s sister. Had D. Afonso v been success­
ful, his marriage would have created a union of the Crowns of Portugal
and Castile instead of the union of Castile and Aragon that resulted
from Isabella’s success in the war and her marriage to Ferdinand of
Aragon. D. Afonso v was succeeded by his son, D. João ii, who arranged
a marriage between his infant son, another Afonso, and Isabella of Castile’s
daughter by which the two children would be brought up together at
Moura on the Castilian border, a prospective marriage union that came
to nothing when Afonso was killed in a riding accident in 1491.
D. João ii was succeeded in 1495 by his cousin, D. Manuel i, who
married the heiress of Isabella of Castile, resulting in the birth of a
prince, Miguel, heir presumptive to both thrones. However, Miguel’s
death in 1500 frustrated this attempt to unite the crowns. D. Manuel’s
active pursuit of a Castilian bride led him to adopt the strong measures
against Jews that was the price he had to pay for the hand of Isabella’s
daughter. D. Manuel, in fact, married two Castilian princesses in suc-
cession and his son, D. João iii (r. 1521–53), married the sister of the

23
the braganzas

Spanish king, Carlos v, in a double marriage that saw Carlos marry

D. João’s sister Isabella.
These marriages did eventually lead to a union of the two crowns
in 1580 and to Portugal’s absorption into the Habsburg monarchy. The
pursuit of a dynastic union with Castile had been almost obsessively
pursued over four reigns. Each of the marriages could have led to the end
of Portugal’s independence and they were arranged with this possibility
clearly in the minds of the Portuguese kings.
Meanwhile, the Avis kings had steadily strengthened the position
of the monarchy by vesting the Masterships of the Military Orders of
knights in members of the royal family, and ultimately in the Crown
itself, with the effect that the towns and fortresses of the Orders became,
in effect, part of the royal patrimony.
Second only to their dynastic ambitions, the priority of the Avis
kings and princes was expansion in Morocco. This was clearly the main
aim of D. João i’s sons, the infante Henrique (Henry the Navigator)
and his elder brother D. Duarte, who became king in 1433. Moroccan
conquests were then actively pursued by D. Afonso v, who was called
‘O Africano’ in recognition of his Moroccan ambitions. Meanwhile,
further exploration and ‘voyages of discovery’ were farmed out to pri-
vate enterprise. D. João ii also sponsored Moroccan expeditions and
expansion in Morocco was, after the Castilian marriage, the priority
for D. Manuel as well.
Under the spotlight provided by the royal chroniclers, the person-
alities of the Avis dynasty achieve a sort of three-dimensional image that
is rare in the later Middle Ages: D. Duarte, educated and an intellectual,
author of O Leal Conselheiro (The Loyal Councillor); Henrique, who
did not marry (very rare for a great nobleman at that time), achieved
a reputation for sanctity; Fernando, held as a hostage in Morocco for
the return of Ceuta; Pedro, the traveller in Europe, who seems to have
opposed the wasteful Moroccan expeditions and whose regency for the
young D. Afonso v ended in his death at the battle of Alfarobbeira in
1449, in Portugal’s miniature version of the Wars of the Roses. D. Afonso
v, a weak man under the influence of his powerful uncles, Henrique
and the duke of Braganza, was profligate with the Crown’s resources
and embarked on a hopeless attempt to win the Castilian Crown.
Later he went on his own quixotic embassy to the court of Louis xi of
France, tried to abdicate and go to the Holy Land and ended his life
sharing his rule with his son, D. João ii. D. João ii was the strong man

24
 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy

who asserted royal power against the nobles, murdering his principal
opponent, the duke of Viseu, with a dagger thrust in open court but
who, after the death of his son Afonso, left no legitimate offspring and
failed in the end to legitimize his eldest bastard, Dom Jorge. There was
also D. Manuel i, with his strange mystical obsessions and his equally
strange personal appearance (pale skin, green eyes and long arms reach-
ing almost to the ground), whose name was given to a uniquely
Portuguese style of architecture as well as to a codification of Portuguese
law. The vivid personalities of the kings and princes of the Avis dynasty
are not only part of the fabric of Portuguese history but have become
enshrined in Portugal’s sense of its national identity. In this respect,
they are comparable to the Tudor dynasty in England.
Portuguese kings, of course, had queens, two of whom stand out:
Philippa of Lancaster, strong-minded mother of five princes, who
imposed her values and discipline on the court of D. João i, and Leonor,
wife of D. João ii, who is remembered as the founder of the Santa Casa
da Misericórdia, the charitable brotherhood that extended overseas
and became the focus for Portuguese identity in distant settlements in
Asia, Africa and the Americas.

The Culture of Monarchy in Portugal under the Avis Dynasty

It has often been said that Portugal was not a feudal kingdom like
France but that there was a ‘strong tradition of centralized power result-
ing above all from its situation in the zone of the Reconquista’.2 The
power of the Crown was nevertheless limited in practice by the Church
and the Military Orders, both of which initially had jurisdictions that
overlapped the borders of the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms. It
would be only in the fifteenth century that the Military Orders were
brought effectively under royal control.
The relationship of the Church and the Crown, a fraught issue in
many European kingdoms, had features that make Portugal unusual if
not unique. By the fifteenth century the foreign jurisdiction of Castilian
bishops over the Portuguese Church had been brought to an end and two
Papal Bulls issued in the 1450s conferred on the Portuguese Crown
exceptional privileges with regard to the churches established in Asia and
Africa. These privileges became known as the padroado real and allowed
the Portuguese Crown to make ecclesiastical appointments, collect church
taxes and summon Church councils. It made the king of Portugal the

25
the braganzas

effective head of the Catholic Church in half the world. However, shortly
after the ecclesiastical authority of the Portuguese Crown in Asia had been
symbolically sealed with the creation of the archdiocese of Goa in 1530,
the Crown in Portugal established a branch of the Inquisition on terms
that made this body semi-independent of royal authority. A powerful rival
to the power of the Crown had been unwittingly created and was to prove
a significant check on royal absolutism until the late eighteenth century.
The Portuguese kings were not crowned in a ceremony presided
over by the Church, but were acclaimed by the nobility and the people
at a public ceremony during which the nobility took an oath of loyalty.3
Nor was the succession dependent exclusively on hereditary right as
the heir had to be formally accepted as such by the Cortes of the king-
dom, often before the death of his predecessor. As well as recognizing
the heir to the throne, the Cortes had the power to approve taxation and
present petitions. In 1478, when D. Afonso v announced that he would
abdicate the throne, the Cortes installed his son as king by acclam­
ation, and when Philip ii of Spain became king of Portugal his accession
to the throne was formally accepted by the Cortes at Tomar, where
Philip made extensive promises about his future relationship with the
Portuguese. In time this declaration of the heir became the most import-
ant, almost the only important, task of the Cortes and was still being
invoked in the succession crisis of the 1820s.
The power of the kings, although in theory deriving from God,
was dependent to an unusual degree on the ‘sanction of the people’.4
The kings of the Avis dynasty remained respectful of the public support
that had brought them to power and tried to remain in touch with public
sentiment. Like most kings in medieval Europe, they were itinerant,
moving about their kingdom from one castle or royal residence to another.
In this way they showed themselves to the people and became accessible
to petitioners and to the population at large. In pursuit of a policy of
centralizing royal power, D. Manuel i began the building of a new palace,
situated on the Lisbon waterfront, which became known as the Paço
da Ribeira (the Riverside Palace). Before it the Indiamen rode at anchor
and in the great square that faced it, the Terreiro do Paço, popular cere­
monies took place including the autos-da-fé of the Inquisition and the
burning of their victims. This remained the principal royal palace in
Portugal until it was destroyed in the earthquake of 1755.
The establishment of a royal palace in the urban setting of the
capital was a trend seen in many European states and brought to an

26
 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy

end the age when kings and their courts moved around the country. A
permanent residence for the king brought closer together the court and
the administrative bodies of the state and enabled the court to become
a centre for artistic and cultural patronage. It also allowed the personnel
of the court, the office holders and the households of important members
of the royal family to expand in number and influence.5
Although D. Manuel tried to make Lisbon the centre of his govern­
ment, summoning the Cortes to meet there and making it ‘the seat of
a more sedentary Court and the centre of the great financial interests
of the King’, it was a long time before the kings were able to settle
permanently in the city and cease the itinerant habits of medieval
monarchy. According to Ana Isabel Buescu, the court of D. João iii,
D. Manuel’s successor, was

constantly fleeing the plague which, since the beginning of the

reign, was ravaging the country, not sparing the capital. The court
maintained a quasi-forced itinerancy and . . . only returned to
Lisbon at the beginning of 1527. Only then did D. Catarina, [the
new] queen of Portugal, come to know the capital of the kingdom
and empire . . . In April of the same year, hearing of a new outbreak
of plague, the court abandoned Lisbon once again. After a stay in
Évora . . . prevented from returning to the capital, they departed
for their palace at Almeirim.6

Because of the persistence of plague during that reign, the Cortes met,
not in the capital, but at Tomar, Torres Novas or Almeirim.
The wealth coming to the Crown from the gold trade at Elmina
and from the spice fleets, coupled with the gradually tightening royal
control over the Military Orders, gave the Crown great reserves of
patron­age that brought the needy members of the nobility and the
class of knights, the homens ricos, fidalgos and cavaleiros to court in
search of commanderies in the Orders, postings in the growing empire
overseas or simply maintenance grants (tenças) for loyal service to the
Crown. This dependence on royal patronage immensely increased the
power of the Crown, attached all classes to the dynasty and helped to
keep the king in touch with national sentiment and the opinions of the
elites. Crown patronage was concentrated in the casa real, the royal
household, which included the separate households of the queens and
infantes, and which included nobles, courtiers and other servants of

27
the braganzas

Dirk Stoop, Terreiro do Paço (Palace Square, Lisbon), 1662, oil on canvas.

the Crown. It was a large and complex interlinking of personal and

family interests.7
At the same time the supremacy of the Crown within the kingdom
was firmly established with a ceremony of oath-taking. The French
historian Jean-François Labourdette explains how D. João ii, coming
to the throne in 1480, sought in this way to rein in the independent
power of the nobility:

The meeting of the Cortes, which the king summoned to Evora,

in November 1481, was preceded by an innovation that surprised
and angered the nobles. Before the assembly was even opened,
João ii imposed on all alcaides-mores [commanders of fortresses]
a new ceremony. They had to take an oath and do homage for the
fortresses that they held from the hand of the king . . . The lords
had to take their oath ‘to be good, loyal and true vassals, subjects
and servitors, using the formula ‘that you will obey, serve and fulfil
all your orders, loyally and truly like loyal and true vassals are
obliged to do for their king and lord’. They had then to kiss his
hands ‘as a sign of obedience, subjection and vassalage which we
owe directly and truly to the king our lord’.8

Oath-taking and the kissing of hands – known in Portugal as the beija

mão – was confirmed at the core of the rituals of royalty.

28
 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy

In contrast, popular institutions flourished under the patronage of

the kings and gave rise to what today would be called civil society. The
kings led personally some of the major religious processions, notably
those celebrating Corpus Christi. The founding of the Misericórdias by
Queen Leonor and the granting of statutes that incorporated municipal
government, the Senados da Câmara, first in Lisbon but then throughout
the empire, laid the foundations for a kind of local democracy, or at least
self-government. Although D. Manuel i was the first king to be referred
to as Majesty, the letters written to him by his soldiers, captains and
governors referred to him only as Senhor and adopted an informal, even
intimate, language as though the king was part of a peer group along
with his captains.
The national culture promoted by the Avis dynasty was nothing
if not diverse and inclusive. In spite of the decision reached in 1495 at
the behest of Castile to expel all Jews who would not convert, the
Crown was prepared to tolerate the Jews who did convert (known in
Portugal as New Christians), bestow patronage on them and even to
appoint them to the royal council, while guaranteeing that there would
be no inquiry into their religious beliefs for at least twenty years. In this
Portugal followed a distinctly different path from nearby Castile, and
one that made room for some element of diversity. The large influx of
black slaves into Portugal added to that diversity.
The Avis dynasty had from the first been sensitive to the ways in
which popular opinion could be cultivated. A succession of royal chron-
iclers were appointed, often linked to the maintenance of the royal
archives in the Torre de Tombo. Fernão Lopes was succeeded by Azurara,
and he in turn by Fernandes de Lucena, Rui de Pina and Duarte Galvão.
The most famous of all the chroniclers and keepers of the Torre de
Tombo was João de Barros, whose great chronicle, the Décadas da Ásia
(published 1552–1613), is still one of the fundamental sources for the
history of the discoveries. The work of these chroniclers not only estab-
lished an official version of events that enhanced the power and authority
of the Crown but founded a significant historical and literary tradition.
The court also welcomed visiting humanists, scholars, poets and drama­
tists so that Portugal found a notable niche for itself as the culture of the
Renaissance spread throughout Europe – not least through the display
of exotic animals brought back from the East: elephants and, of course,
the famous rhinoceros whose image was engraved by Albrecht Dürer.
In this way the court became an effective centre for national life and a

29
the braganzas

promoter of art, Manueline architecture, literature and the distinctive

religious culture that grew up in Portugal.
The ruling dynasty was anxious to establish a reputation for sanc-
tity and this was systematically cultivated over the generations. The two
sons of D. João i, Henrique and Fernando, were, each in his own way,
held up by the chroniclers as models of sanctity, Henrique through his
celibacy and Fernando, held hostage till his death in Morocco, as a
martyr. D. Afonso v’s second child, Joana, eventually entered a nunnery
and acquired a reputation for sanctity, becoming known as the Princess
Saint of Portugal, although technically only beatified, not canonized.
The idea that the kings of Portugal were especially chosen by God to
fulfil His divine purposes became rooted not only in the narrative of
the chroniclers but in the minds of the kings themselves. The vision of
D. Manuel i, derived from the mystic Franciscan ideologies of Joachim
de Fiore, led him to believe that he was destined to liberate Jerusalem,
an objective only partly modified by the needs of realpolitik. D. João
iii’s piety also led him to believe in the divine purpose of his rule, while
the crusading fervour of his grandson, D. Sebastião, was to override all
the dictates of common sense and good policy and led Portugal to
catastrophe in Morocco at the battle of Alcacer el Kebir in 1578.

The Later Fortunes of the House of Avis

D. Manuel i was succeeded in 1521 by his son D. João iii, a king

who soon became overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems
facing the kingdom. Although Portugal remained in close alliance with
Castile, an alliance sealed by a double royal marriage in 1525 that pro-
vided the emperor Charles v with a Portuguese bride and D. João with
the emperor’s sister, and with a new partition treaty signed at Saragossa
in 1529, D. João iii kept his country, as far as possible, out of European
conflicts. Portugal did not become involved in the Italian Wars or the
religious wars engulfing Germany, the Low Countries and even France,
though its factory at Antwerp, important for the sale of Asian spices and
the purchase of armaments and silver, became increasingly threatened
by warfare in the Channel and was closed in 1545.
Meanwhile in Asia the Portuguese position had to be shored up
against challenges from the Ottomans, while French interlopers threat-
ened the settlements in Brazil. At the same time, the defence of the
Moroccan fortress towns drained the kingdom’s resources and D. João

30
 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy

iii was forced to abandon the expansionist policies of his predecessors.

The most significant aspect of this was the decision to withdraw
Portu­guese garrisons from all the Moroccan towns except for Ceuta,
Tangier and Mazagan. This was to be the end, or almost the end, of
Portugal’s ambitions for a reconquista in North Africa, the central policy
of the Avis dynasty since 1415.
As the problems of running a worldwide empire grew, D. João
iii, who as a young man had seemed to be a fitting heir to the glories
of the Manueline renaissance, became increasingly morose, reclusive
and focused on religious questions – a psychology not uncommon in
Catholic Europe after the Reformation.
A monarchy can survive one weak and ineffective ruler and antici­
pate a recovery under his successor, but what was to drag the House
of Avis, like the House of Tudor in England, inexorably towards extinc-
tion was the failure to produce any heir at all. In spite of the precautions
taken to avoid plague-stricken Lisbon, D. João iii’s nine children all
died young. One daughter, Maria Manuela, married to Filipe, Infante
of Castile, lived long enough to produce a son, the ill-fated Don Carlos,
and one son, João Manuel, struggled into his teens and was married to
Joanna of Austria. Before he died of diabetes a year later, he left his wife
pregnant with a son who was to be D. Sebastião.

D. Sebastião

D. Sebastião was abandoned by his mother soon after his birth. She
returned to Castile, and the young prince was only three years old when
his grandfather D. João iii passed away. For twelve years Portugal was
ruled by a regency. No civil war resulted as had happened during the
minority of D. Afonso v, but while D. Sebastião’s Castilian grand-
mother, Catarina, was regent (from 1557 to 1562), Portugal came close
to being a satellite of Castile and a process of the Castilianization of the
ruling classes intensified, in particular the adoption of the Castilian
language – a dangerous development as the ordinary people of Portugal
remained deeply hostile to Castile.
D. Sebastião came of age and assumed control of the government
in 1568, at the age of fourteen. He never married and when he was killed
in Morocco at the battle of Alcacer el Kebir in 1578 he left no heir.
D. Sebastião’s dramatic and tragic life has made him the most
controversial of all Portugal’s kings. As his biographer António

31
the braganzas

D. Sebastião painted by
Cristóvão de Morais,
c. 1570, oil on canvas.

Baños-Garcia wrote,

It is seldom that a life as short as that of king Dom Sebastião of

Portugal gives rise to such great interest and controversy in the
history of a country. He lived for only 24 years but the traces of his
disastrous life remain in the collective memory of the Portuguese
with all the characteristics of a real obsession.9

D. Sebastião’s foolhardy expedition to Morocco led directly to Portugal

being taken over by Castile and to a new dynasty of kings. Disastrous
as D. Sebastião’s rule had been, however, his death turned him into a
hero and his memory became the embodiment of an anti-Castilian
popular nationalism. This status as a national saviour went back even
to the circumstances of his birth, as Labourdette wrote:

The ‘desired one’ [D. Sebastião], before he was even born, was the
symbol of survival and the guarantee of the greatness and eternity of
the nation. In the messianic and mystical depths of the Portuguese
soul, his ‘marvellous’ birth, glowing with the halo of a miracle, gave
rise to the myth of a Sebastian given by Providence.10

32
 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy

For some historians the D. Sebastião who led the Portuguese, only
too willingly, along the path to national disaster was a youth deeply
flawed, an orphan brought up under the influence of extreme religious
ideas, a person strong-willed but with a kind of autism that made him
unable to hear, let alone listen to, what others were telling him, a psycho-
logical misfit who suffered from some congenital illness and from
psychosexual problems that made him shun women and all ideas of mar-
riage. For others, like his recent biographer, he was a tragic romantic:

His ascetic life was that of a monk knight belonging to a medieval

epoch. He seemed to be bound, as was his grandfather Charles v,
more to the rhythms of the past than the present . . . His indiffer-
ence to the female sex was the result of this omnipresent spiritual
world, an incarnation of the model of monastic chastity . . . His life
is a mystery of light and dark with flashes of a bittersweet taste.11

On D. Sebastião’s death in 1578, the only surviving legitimate male of

the House of Avis was the aged Cardinal Henrique, the last surviving
son of D. Manuel. He was 66 years old, infirm and celibate. Aware that
at his death there would be a contested succession, which would fur-
ther ruin a weakened and bankrupt country, Cardinal Henrique sought
means to prepare the way for the succession of Philip of Spain.

The Habsburg Kings

In the nationalist historical tradition of Portugal, the change of dynasty

in 1580 was a usurpation and the sixty years of Habsburg rule when, for
the only time in its history, Portugal was united with the Spanish king-
doms, was described as a ‘Babylonian captivity’ and the source of all
the disasters that overtook the great empire that had been built during
the reign of D. Manuel i. More recent historians, as is their wont, have
muddied such clear streams of interpretation.
No matter whether Philip ii of Spain’s accession to the Portuguese
throne was or was not a ‘usurpation’, the events that immediately
followed the death of Cardinal Henrique in 1580 had something of
the character of a coup or possibly even a revolution. The great merit of
hereditary monarchy is supposed to be that it leads to orderly succession
and political stability – but this fails when the line of succession becomes
hopelessly blurred. At the time of D. Henrique’s death there were no

33
the braganzas

direct male heirs. None of D. João iii’s children had survived and the
succession had to be traced back to the children of D. Manuel, Cardinal
Henrique’s father. Here the problem began, for the royal progeny had
spread their descendants throughout Europe.
D. Manuel’s eldest daughter, Isabella, had married Emperor
Charles v and was the mother of Philip ii of Spain. D. Manuel’s second
child had been D. João iii, whose line had ended with D. Sebastião. His
third child, Beatriz, had married the duke of Savoy and was the mother
of a line of male dukes.
His fourth child was Luís. He never married but had an illegitimate
son, António, who held the title of Prior of Crato (head of the Hospitaller
Order in Portugal). The fifth child was Cardinal Henrique. The sixth
was another boy, Duarte, who had married the daughter of the duke of
Braganza and had two daughters. The first, Maria, married Alessandro
Farnese, duke of Parma, the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands
and the most successful of Spain’s generals. They had a son, Ranuccio.
His second daughter, Catarina, had married her first cousin, João, the
duke of Braganza, and was the mother of Teodósio, seventh duke of
Braganza. The resulting complications provided constitutional lawyers
with a bewildering series of options.
If priority was to be given to the senior male descending in the
male line then there was only one candidate, Dom António, but he was
illegitimate. Although he tried to prove that his father had legitimized
him and/or that his father and mother had been secretly married, he
had the disadvantage that he and Cardinal D. Henrique had fallen out
and the cardinal was determined to block his claim. It was even alleged
that his mother had been a New Christian. If this was the case António
himself would be considered of New Christian descent, hardly endearing
him to the cardinal, who was the Inquisitor General.
All the other candidates descended either from D. Manuel’s
daughters or granddaughters. Here a conflict of the rules became appar-
ent. Philip of Spain was the child of D. Manuel’s eldest daughter and
had strengthened his claim by marrying a daughter of D. João iii, thereby
establishing a secondary claim through his wife. Next came the dukes
of Savoy, descended from D. Manuel’s second daughter, Beatriz, and
finally the descendants of Duarte’s two daughters, the Farnese dukes
descended from Maria and the Braganza dukes from Catarina. In the
eyes of some, these two lines had precedence because they descended
from D. Manuel’s son and not from a daughter. If this was accepted

34
 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy

the legitimate heir was the nine-year-old Ranuccio Farnese, but, for
the obvious reason that his father was the trusted general of Philip of
Spain, his claims were never pressed. Second to Ranuccio was Teodósio,
the heir to the duke of Braganza. Philip ii came third and the claims of
the duke of Savoy a poor fourth.
However, the complicated calculations of the genealogists and
constitutional lawyers were rapidly overtaken by events and by the
demands of realpolitik. D. Henrique had prepared the way for Philip
ii to take the Portuguese throne but on the cardinal’s death the Prior
of Crato, Dom António, had himself declared king in Lisbon and began
to raise an army. Philip at once despatched his army and a fleet, defeated
Dom António’s levies and in December 1580 entered Lisbon to take his
throne. Subsequently he was to declare that, as to the throne of Portugal,
‘I inherited it, I bought it and I conquered it’ – whether this saying
was real or apocryphal, it remains the definitive statement of a right to
succeed to any throne.
The succession crisis of 1580 has many features in common with the
crisis of 1383–5, when the throne was contested between Juan of Castile
and D. João, the Master of Avis. The outcome, however, was to be very dif-
ferent. In 1580, as in 1383, a Castilian king claimed the throne through his
marriage to a Portuguese princess. He was supported by the majority of the
Portuguese nobility but opposed by a ‘popular’ candidate who was an ille-
gitimate son of a previous Portuguese king and head of one of the Military
Orders. In both cases the ‘popular’ claimant appealed for an English alli-
ance and for military assistance. However, although the pieces of the jigsaw
seem the same, they did not fit to produce the same picture. In 1580 the
Castilian army proved too strong. There was no battle of Aljubarrota.
The English military intervention came too late and the ‘popular’ claimant
was unable to find a backer of the calibre of Nun’Álvares Pereira, who had
rallied support for D. João i among the military nobility.
The Portuguese throne was now to be occupied by three Habsburg
kings of Spain: Philip i (Philip ii of Spain) who ruled until 1598, Philip
ii (Philip iii) who ruled 1598–1621 and Philip iii (Philip iv) from 1621
to the revolt of 1640, which ended Habsburg rule.
The union of the Crowns had long been planned by both royal
families and Philip’s accession was the crowning moment for a dynastic
policy that frequently ran counter to national sentiment. It was also the
culmination of a gradual absorption of the Portuguese nobility and
cultural elite into the wider world of Castile. Many of the noble families

35
the braganzas

of Castile and Portugal had intermarried and the mercantile elites had
woven networks of commercial interest that linked the maritime empires
of both kingdoms. The intellectual elite of Portugal had also become
increasingly Castilianized and used the Castilian language for much
of their writing. During the regency of Catarina, the grandmother of
D. Sebastião, Portugal had become in effect a satellite of Castile.
In 1580 Philip made sure that the Portuguese nobility would sup-
port his cause through a judicious policy of confirming Portugal’s
autonomy before the Cortes of Tomar in 1581 and providing financial
assistance for noble families trying to ransom captives held hostage in
Morocco. Until March 1583 Philip resided in Lisbon and there were
rumours that he might make it the capital of his Atlantic empire in place
of the inland isolation of Madrid and the Escorial. However, after the
citizens of Lisbon had been given a taste of the Baroque splendour of
Philip’s royal style, the city had to reconcile itself to being simply the
principal seaport and arsenal for Spain’s Atlantic fleet from where the
great Armada set sail in 1588. Only on one further occasion, in 1619, did
the king, then Philip ii (iii of Spain), visit Portugal, and the occasion was
to secure the recognition by the Cortes that his son was heir to the throne.
How did the idea, image and practice of monarchy change during
the Habsburg sixty years? The most immediate impact was that the king
became more remote and the lines of communication with the Portuguese
people became attenuated. Whereas the presence of the king in the
centre of Lisbon had provided nobles, petitioners and those enjoying or
seeking royal patronage ready access to the court, now it became nec-
essary to go to Spain or to be content with what patronage the vice­roys
were able to dispense. The role that the Manueline court had played in
promoting the Portuguese renaissance ceased and the Habsburg years
were relatively barren culturally.
The Cortes, which had lost much of its influence during the Avis
dynasty, only met when the king was in Portugal – three times during
the sixty years and then only to deal with questions related to the suc­­
ces­sion. However, even though the person of the king was absent, the
authority of the Crown and its control over the government grew. A
Spanish system of governing Councils was introduced, a revised code
of laws was promulgated and the office of Inquisitor was combined with
that of governor or viceroy for much of the sixty years, thereby provid-
ing a remedy for what had become a dangerous division of authority
between Crown and Church.

36
 The Early History of the Portuguese Monarchy

Sebastianism and the Idea of the Saviour King

The remoteness of the Habsburg kings, the absentee nobility, the increas-
ingly heavy taxation and the losses overseas to the Dutch and English
all helped to stimulate a groundswell of anti-Castilian feeling. Until his
death in 1596, António, Prior of Crato, maintained his claim to the
throne but, although he was supported by the French and English for
their own purposes, his cause flickered and died in Portugal itself. Instead
a series of individuals, claiming to be the dead D. Sebastião, attracted
some popular support as well as backing among Portuguese exiles abroad.
At least four false Sebastians emerged and were dealt with by the author-
ities, but the Sebastianist cult soon began to morph from support for a
pretender into a more generalized hope or expectation that some figure,
the encoberto, ‘hidden one’, would emerge to provide redress for popular
grievances and lead the Portuguese people to what was perceived to be
their destiny. Sebastianism was, according to Labourdette, an expiation
for the collective responsibility for the national disaster,12 and provided
a political philosophy for the dispossessed and powerless.
The aura of Sebastianism was never quite to leave the Portuguese
monarchy. As Francisco Bethencourt has observed, Sebastianism was

used from the very beginning both as a mythical anchor of col-

lective identity and as a weapon of political action to challenge or
erode royal legitimacy. The originality of Sebastianism lies . . . in the
diverse uses of its mythical configurations; and in the long period
of its existence, during which it assumed functions ranging from
political weapon to tool of passive resistance . . . Longing for the
disappeared and failed king would in time be linked to the feeling
of saudade, the nostalgia for a past that never had been and a future
that never would be.13

In the seventeenth century the prophetic element in Sebastianism was

elaborated by the great Jesuit preacher António Vieira into a systematic
ideology according to which Portugal would bring about the birth of
the ‘fifth empire’, the Christian empire in succession to the Roman,
Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian empires. Vieira tried to pin his dreams
of a saviour king onto the figure of the duke of Braganza, hoping in this
way to shape a mystical ideology to support the restoration of Portuguese
independence.

37
Dramatis Personae: The Braganza Monarchs and their Spouses

D. João iv (r. 1640–56) (O Restaurador – the Restorer).

Married Luisa de Guzmán.
D. Afonso vi (r. 1656–68 (deposed), died 1683) (O Vitorioso – the Victorious).
Married Marie Françoise of Savoy; marriage annulled 1668.
D. Pedro ii (Regent 1668–83, r. 1683–1706) (O Pacífico – the Peaceful).
Married first Marie Françoise of Savoy and second Maria Sofia of Neuburg.
D. João v (r. 1706–50) (O Magnânimo – the Magnanimous).
Married Maria Ana of Austria.
D. José (r. 1750–77) (O Reformador – the Reformer).
Married Mariana Vitória of Spain.
D. Maria i (r. 1777–1816) (A Piedosa – The Pious).
Married her uncle D. Pedro iii (r. 1777–86); declared insane 1792.
D. João vi (Regent 1792–1816; r. 1816–26) (O Clemente – the Merciful).
Married Carlota Joaquina of Spain.
D. Pedro iv (r. 1826), abdicated in favour of his daughter D. Maria ii.
As D. Pedro i, Emperor of Brazil (r. 1822–31), abdicated in
favour of his son Emperor Pedro ii. (O Libertador – the Liberator).
Married first Leopoldina of Austria and second Amélia of Leuchtenberg.
D. Miguel (r. 1828–34) (O Rei Absoluto – the Absolute King).
Throne disputed with his niece D. Maria ii. Married Adelaide of Löwenstein.
D. Maria ii (r. 1826–53, effectively 1834–53) (A Educadora – the Educator).
Married first Augusto of Leuchtenberg and second Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg.
D. Pedro v (r. 1853–61) (O Esperançoso – the Hopeful).
Married Stephanie of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
D. Luís (r. 1861–89) (O Popular – the Popular).
Married Maria Pia of Savoy.
D. Carlos (r. 1889–1908) (O Diplomata – the Diplomat).
Married Amélie of Orléans.
D. Manuel ii (r. 1908–10), deposed (O Patriota– the Patriot).
Married Augusta Victoria of Hohenzollern.
Emperor D. Pedro ii of Brazil (r. 1831–89).
Married Teresa Cristina of Naples.
 3

Overview of the Braganza

Dynasty and the Culture
of Royalty

A French ambassador said of Emperor D. Pedro ii, one of the last

of the Braganzas to occupy a throne, that when he disagreed
with what was being said, ‘at such moments he has an astonishing
resemblance to Philip iii as painted by Velazquez’. The Braganzas were,
indeed, haunted by heredity, and these physical and cultural traits
marked the history of the family and can be seen clearly recurring
through ten generations. Successive members of the family were guided
by a devotion to the traditions of the monarchy which sustained it from
the coup d’état that brought it to the throne in 1640 to the monarchy’s
final demise in Brazil in 1889 and Portugal in 1910. It is the purpose
of this chapter to look at these traits and to view the family’s history
over the longue durée before embarking on chapters devoted to each of
the Braganza rulers.

A Reflection on Sources

Although monarchs are usually close to the centre where decisions are
made, the Braganza monarchs, until the nineteenth century when they
had a German makeover, are often figures that are curiously two-
dimensional. The Portuguese historian Caetano Beirão commented on
the absence of contemporary memoirs, diaries, even letters, written
by members of the royal family or by Portuguese close to the court.
Reflecting on the numerous sources available for the study of the French
and English royal families, he pointed out that

In Portugal these historical sources are completely lacking and . . .

none are lacking so much as for the reign of D. Maria i . . . Almost

39
the braganzas

no texts contemporary with the sovereign are known that furnish

information about her sentiments in regard to the persons or the
events of her time, her habits, her conflicts, her opinions and even
about the life of her family.1

It is striking that even modern historians like Joaquim Verissimo Serrão

have to rely on the official Gazetta de Lisboa for much of what they have
to say about the royal family before the nineteenth century.
The Braganza family were not great letter writers or memorial-
ists, and contemporary foreign gossip had it that D. Pedro ii (r. 1668–1706)
and his grandson D. Pedro iii (r. 1777–86) were virtually illiterate. To
this, however, there are interesting exceptions, three of them women.
Catarina of Braganza (1638–1706), who became the queen of England,
wrote numerous letters (many to her brother D. Pedro ii) that have
survived and formed the basis for Lillias Campbell Davidson’s ground-
breaking biography. Queen Mariana Vitória (1718–1781), married to
the infante (later King) José (r. 1750–77), wrote regularly to her mother,
the queen of Spain, and her letters, written in highly idiosyncratic
French, were published in 1936.2 D. Maria i (r. 1777–1816) also wrote
to her relatives at the Spanish court in her own stylized handwriting –
her last apparently sane letters being written in 1792, the year she finally
lost control of her mental faculties and was relieved of the responsibil-
ities of government. The letters written to relatives at the Spanish court,
and archived in Spain, seem to show that the Braganza queens wrote
their own letters and did not have secretaries to handle their private
correspondence.3 Of the later Braganzas, it was D. Pedro v (r. 1853–61)
who left the most considerable literary legacy in the form of memo-
randa, diaries and personal letters. The emperor D. Pedro ii of Brazil
was a great letter writer, especially to his lady friends throughout the
world, and his letters to the countess of Barral are of particular interest.
He also irregularly kept a diary, especially during his visits to Europe.
The relative absence of contemporary Portuguese writing has
meant that historians have had to rely on the observations of foreign-
ers, many of which appear to provide vivid and personal detail. However,
herein lies a problem. Foreign writers have, of course, their own per-
spectives and write with their own cultural understanding. Most have
had clear political or even personal agendas and the rivalries of France
and Britain lurk near the surface of many of the accounts. Some of these
descriptions of Portugal and the Portuguese court are extremely

40
 Overview of the Braganza Dynasty and the Culture of Royalty

colourful and interesting and, not surprisingly, historians have been

tempted to make use them, for example William Beckford’s brilliantly
written and utterly charming account of his stay in Portugal in the 1780s.4
Many, perhaps most, of these accounts, however, were compiled long
after the events they describe. Beckford published his reminiscences of
his time in Portugal forty years after the event. Nathaniel Wraxall’s
memoirs, which include a detailed account of the Portuguese court of
D. José, were published in 1815, forty years after the death of that king.5
The memoirs of the so-called duc de Châtelet (actually written by Pierre
Dezoteux de Cormatin), on whom historians have relied for some of
the best anecdotes of the eighteenth-century Portuguese court, were
published in 1798, twenty years after the most recent of the events
described.6 Laure Junot, whose husband had been ambassador in Lisbon
and later commanded the French army of occupation, also published
her memoirs more than twenty years after her experiences in Portugal.7
The same is true of some Portuguese accounts. For example, the Elogio
of José Bonifácio, which purported to give a detailed account of the life
of the young princess Maria, later D. Maria i, and included many exam-
ples of her early piety and learning, was produced only after the queen’s
death in 1816, seventy years after some of the events he described.8
There is a temptation for an English-speaking historian to rely on
the numerous accounts of British visitors to Portugal, and to be guided
by Rose Macaulay through the pageant of personalities who came and
went between England and Portugal,9 but it was the French who
ob­­served and wrote about Portugal and Portuguese affairs with most
insight. Indeed, after the strange fading away of Portugal’s own tradition
of history writing, it was French historians of the seventeenth and eight­
eenth centuries who laid the foundations for a coherent history of
Portugal and its empire. Michel Blouin, Sieur des Piquetièrre’s Relation
des troubles arrivez dans la cour de Portugal en l’année 1667 et en l’année
1668 (1674) was a contemporary account of the dethroning of D. Afonso
vi,10 while in 1728 the Abbé René-Aubert de Vertot published his Histoire
des révolutions de Portugal, a carefully researched account of the restor­
ation of 1640, which went through many editions and in September
1836 was being read by Princess Victoria, soon to become queen of
Great Britain, to inform herself about Portuguese history.11
Charles Dellon’s account of his experiences at the hands of the
Goa Inquisition was also translated into English and became a funda-
mental source for those writing on the subject.12 An important French

41
the braganzas

account of the Portugal of D. João v is the Description de la ville de

Lisbonne, whose author is unknown.13 It is significant that when José
Saramago came to write Memorial do convento (Baltasar and Blimunda,
1982), his novel about the reign of D. João v, much of his detailed
knowledge about the king, the court and the Portugal of his time came
from French sources. Meanwhile Joseph François Lafitau produced
an account of Portuguese overseas expansion in two magnificent volumes
and Nicolas de La Clède published a two-volume Histoire genérale de
Portugal in 1735.14 As important as the work of the English memorialists
is the Etat présent du Royaume de Portugal en l’année 1766 by the future
revolutionary general Charles François Dumouriez15 and the diaries of
the French ambassador, the marquis de Bombelles.16 The crowning
French achievement was that great work of the Enlightenment, the
Histoire philosophique et politique des établis-semens et du commerce des
Européens dans les deux Indes by the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal,
published in 1773–4.17
Foreign visitors to Portugal loved to describe the strange and
the exotic: the elaborate religious processions, the bullfights, the autos-
da-fé, the crowds of beggars, monks and ‘negroes’ that filled the streets
and the hallways of the noble palaces. And they scarcely disguised their
contempt for this backward, superstitious and ignorant country. Few
were interested in the strides towards modernity and enlightenment
that were being made. For them Pombal had been a monster, an auto-
crat who had left the country ruined and the prisons full. That he had
vigorously, and not unsuccessfully, given Portugal a modern and pro-
gressive makeover was largely ignored. By the late 1770s, when so many
of the foreigners were writing, a new generation of students were grad-
uating from the reformed university of Coimbra and Portugal was
producing its scientists and mathematicians. As Mário Domingues
noted, although foreign observers mostly commented on the religious
obsessions of D. Maria i and her husband, she was at the same time
giving her backing to a variety of initiatives to train military and naval
engineers, to modernize the navy and organize a national system of
primary education. Meanwhile, alongside their participation in religious
festivals, the Portuguese nobility were among the first in Europe to
make experiments with flight, using hot-air balloons.18
If contemporary Portuguese memoirs and descriptions of the court
are lacking, there is also a lack of contemporary images of the royal
family. Generally speaking, monarchs have been extremely sensitive

42
 Overview of the Braganza Dynasty and the Culture of Royalty

about their image, understanding that ultimately their authority stands

or falls on the way their public personality is projected. The concern
with the ruler’s image, so clearly seen in the self-projections of rulers of
antiquity like Alexander the Great and Augustus, became a preoccu-
pation of the Habsburgs who had their portraits painted by leading
artists of the day like Titian and Velázquez, while in England Queen
Elizabeth used royal portraiture as powerful and effective propaganda
for her rule. Louis xiv of France took self-aggrandizement, through a
carefully managed portraiture and imagery, to an even higher level. In
Portugal, for some reason, less attention was paid to the image of the
monarch. Catarina, Queen of England, is an exception and her portrait
was made many times, according to the traditions of the English court.
D. João v was very conscious of the need for the visual projection of
royal power, but this took the form of religious art and the embellish-
ment of churches rather than portraiture. Caetano Beirão, commenting
on the 25 oil paintings and ten prints of D. Maria i that have survived,
many of them copied from one or two originals, says they were the most
numerous portraits of any of the rulers to date.19 Indeed, the best-known
Portuguese portrait of the eighteenth century is not that of one of the
Braganza family at all, but the posthumous portrait of the marquês de
Pombal by Louis-Michel Van Loo.
The situation changed with D. João vi (r. 1816–26) and subsequent
members of the Braganza dynasty. D. João vi was a modest man, with
few outstanding personal characteristics, but his portrayal in paintings
and prints far exceeded in number that of earlier monarchs. This has
not helped his reputation, as he had a most unfortunate face with a
bulging forehead, a slightly open mouth and staring eyes, which those
who drew his likeness seldom attempted to disguise. These ungainly
features have made him one of the most easily recognized of all the
Portuguese monarchs.

The Idea of Monarchy in Portugal

According to fifteenth-century jurists, the king ruled with an authority

that was both human and divine in origin and he had power of life and
death over his subjects.20 However, the path from this legal definition
of kingship to a fully functioning absolute monarchy was not straight-
forward. The Braganza kings of Portugal were not anointed and there
was no crowning ceremony. In 1646 D. João iv dedicated his kingdom

43
the braganzas

to Nossa Senhora da Conceição (Our Lady of the Conception), and had

her crowned as queen of Portugal. From this time, no Braganza wore
a crown and in portraits the crown always rests near them on a table.
The idea survived, and was reaffirmed at the start of each reign, that
there was a contract between the king and the people.This took the form
of an exchange of oaths at a public ceremony known as the ‘acclama-
tion’. The monarch took an oath to serve God and the country and the
people, through their representatives, took an oath of loyalty to the ruler.
According to the French historian Jean-François Labourdette, this
ceremony demonstrated the ‘contractual origin of his power’.21 The cere­
mony of ‘acclamation’ accompanied the Braganza monarchs to the end:
the last such ceremony was the ‘acclamation’ of D. Manuel ii in 1908.
When D. Pedro (Pedro iv of Portugal and Pedro i of Brazil) estab-
lished the empire in Brazil, he was acclaimed in the traditional Portuguese
manner but he also introduced a crowning ceremony, said to have been
inspired by Napoleon’s coronation as emperor on 2 December 1804.
D. Pedro’s successor as emperor, D. Pedro ii (r. 1831–89), was also
crowned as well as being ‘acclaimed’.
One of the most impressive ‘acclamation’ ceremonies was that held
at the start of D. Maria i’s reign in 1777, as described by Jenifer Roberts:

First came the heralds and knights-at-arms, followed by the aris-

tocrats, the religious establishment, and the secretaries of state . . .
Maria’s consort [D. Pedro iii] wore a cloak of flame colour stripes,
his robes studded with diamonds. Over a long bag wig, he wore a hat
adorned with white feathers and he carried a sword of solid gold . . .
After several declarations were read in ringing tones, Maria knelt

Panoramic painting of Lisbon in the 1690s.

44
 Overview of the Braganza Dynasty and the Culture of Royalty

on a crimson cushion and, in a quiet voice, promised to govern her

country well, administer justice, and guard the customs, privileges
and liberties of her people. Her husband and sons paid her homage,
her courtiers swore allegiance, and the royal standard bearer
acclaimed her as queen.22

The heir to the Portuguese throne had first to be recognized by

the Cortes, which sometimes had to adjudicate on matters related to
the succession and to decide who was the rightful heir. At four points
in Portugal’s history the Cortes had been summoned at a time when
the succession had been disputed: in 1385, 1581, 1641 (when João, duke
of Braganza, was confirmed as king) and 1828 (when D. Miguel was
recognized as king). But the Cortes was also summoned to 1654 and
in 1674 to confirm the line of succession and to discuss the issues raised
by the prospect of a female heir.
The succession was regulated by the so-called Lei Fundamental
of Lamego. This law, supposed to have been promulgated in 1143 by
the Cortes of Lamego, had been ‘discovered’ in 1632. It purported to
regulate the succession to the throne and to exclude non-Portuguese
from becoming king. Importantly it also decreed that a woman could
inherit, but only if she married a Portuguese. In the event of her marry­
ing a non-Portuguese she would forfeit her title. The so-called ‘laws of
Lamego’ were in reality part of the anti-Spanish propaganda that was
spreading during the 1630s and were used to justify the accession of
the Braganzas to the throne in 1640.23
The deaths of the monarchs were also occasions for great cere-
monial. In addition to the funerals and the ceremonial interment in
the crypt of the church of São Vicente da Fora in Lisbon, there was the
ceremony of the breaking of the shields. These wooden shields, painted
black, were carried by the judges and were formally splintered to mark
the fact that royal justice had ceased on the death of the king. According
to Diogo Ramada Curto, writing of the funeral of D. João v in 1750,
‘the principal rite of the breaking of the shields took place in Lisbon
and in all the cities and towns of Portugal and its empire’.24 The last
time this ceremony was performed was on the death of D. Luís in 1889.
In theory the Braganza kings were ‘absolute’ monarchs and, as
late as 1827, the arrival of D. Miguel in Lisbon was greeted by crowds
shouting vivas for the ‘rei absoluto’.The realities of monarchical power,
however, were always very different from the theory. There was no

45
the braganzas

escaping the fact, whatever the theorists might argue, that João, duke
of Braganza, owed his throne to a coup d’état carried out by a faction
of the nobility. After his death, another noble faction intervened in 1668
to depose D. Afonso vi and to replace him with his brother Pedro, and
Pedro was continually made aware that he owed his position to noble
consent, which might at any time be withdrawn. So dominant were the
noble factions that the government of Portugal during this period has
often been called a ‘monarchy of the nobles’.
The gold discoveries in Brazil at the very end of the seventeenth
century put the king, almost overnight, in control of vast wealth that
had the effect of making the monarchy increasingly independent of
noble and even clerical support. The Cortes lost any claim to influence
and was no longer assembled even to confirm the succession.The king’s
power, however, was still limited by the privileges enjoyed by the nobil-
ity and by the Church, especially the latter with its extensive land and
property holdings and the jurisdiction wielded by the Inquisition. The
state structure inherited from the Spanish kings and confirmed by
D. João iv was conciliar in form, the councils dealing with war, justice
and the Military Orders being dominated, as of right, by the small group
of leading noble families. In the eighteenth century conciliar govern-
ment was gradually replaced in Portugal, as in the rest of Europe, by
ministerial government, where power was wielded by the secretaries of
state, answerable directly to the Crown. In Portugal there were three
of these secretaries, whose competence covered foreign affairs and war,
the navy and colonies, and the domestic affairs of the kingdom. The
increasing power of the secretaries of state led eventually to one of
their number, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, better known as the
marquês de Pombal, becoming dominant during the reign of D. José
(r. 1750–77). The eighteenth century saw a steady shift of real power
away from the nobility and towards a professional bureaucracy, a trend
that was apparent elsewhere in Europe where Cameralist ideas were in
the ascendant. It was this professionalization of the government that
was such a marked feature of Pombal’s government.
In the nineteenth century, after three very disturbed decades, both
Portugal and the now independent Brazil settled down under constitu-
tions that replaced royal absolutism with a constitutional monarchy.

46
 Overview of the Braganza Dynasty and the Culture of Royalty

Fears for the Succession

The Braganza monarchy was, from the start, plagued by insecurity.

For the first 28 years of its existence its legitimacy was not universally
recognized in Europe. Portugal was excluded from the Westphalia peace
negotiations in 1648 and it was not until 1668, when the first two
Braganza kings had come and gone, that Spain and the papacy finally
recognized the new dynasty and the attempts of Spain to reassert its
sovereignty over Portugal ceased. The lack of recognition from Rome
had meant that no new bishops had been instituted for a whole gen-
eration and the Portuguese Church had almost ceased to function.
After 1668 the legitimacy of the dynasty was not challenged, except
briefly when Napoleon declared in 1807 that the Braganza dynasty had
ceased to reign.
However, in spite of the recognition accorded in the 1668 treaty
with Spain, insecurity persisted because successive Braganza monarchs
found difficulties in producing an heir. D. Afonso vi (r. 1656–68) had
no children and may not have been capable of having any; D. Pedro ii
and his first wife, Marie Françoise of Savoy, had only a daughter, giving
rise to critical debates about the future of the monarchy in the Cortes
of 1674, while providing her with a husband became a highly sensitive
political issue. D. Pedro’s second marriage in 1687 was more successful
and produced four male children, but three years after the marriage of
his successor D. João v to Maria Ana of Austria in 1708 no child had
been born. The vow to build the palace-convent of Mafra if a child
should arrive was followed by a birth, but of a daughter. When a son
eventually came, he lived only two years. Eventually two male children
secured the survival of the dynasty.
Of D. José’s eight children only four girls survived, threatening
once again a succession crisis when the heiress, Infanta Maria, would
have to choose a husband. The Braganzas resolved this dilemma by hav­
ing recourse to incest (condoned by papal dispensation) and D. Maria
was married to her uncle Pedro. Royal incest also seemed to resolve
the problem of possible foreign interference or even the succession
of a foreigner, which threatened to revive the spectre of the Habsburg
takeover in 1580. As if to underline the precariousness of the succes-
sion, which had led to her incestuous marriage, one of the portraits of
D. Maria showed her pointing unambiguously at the Actas do Cortes
de Lamego, the medieval law that was supposed to have laid down rules

47
the braganzas

of succession that would prevent a princess who was heir to the throne
from marrying a foreigner.25 D. Maria i and D. Pedro iii had seven
children but four of these were either stillborn or died in early child-
hood. An incestuous marriage once again recommended itself as a way
of keeping the succession in the Braganza family and the heir, the infante
José, was duly married to his aunt, D. Maria’s sister, who was fifteen
years older than him. The infante José died childless in 1788 at the age
of 27 and the Crown passed to his brother, later D. João vi, married to
a Spanish princess, Carlota Joaquina, who was his cousin. At first there
were doubts whether Carlota would produce children and fears for
the succession led to the Spanish infante Pedro Carlos, the only child of
D. Maria’s daughter Maria Ana Vitória and the Spanish prince Gabriel,
being brought from Spain to Portugal by way of insurance. In the end
D. João and Carlota had nine children, including two boys who survived
to manhood, Pedro and Miguel. Doubts over whether D. João was really
the father of the boys were not allowed to disrupt the succession.
Incestuous marriages, accompanied by ecclesiastical dispensa-
tions, continued. Of D. João vi and Carlota’s children, three of the
daughters married Spanish uncles and D. Miguel, their youngest son,
was also betrothed to his niece, D. Pedro’s daughter Maria da Gloria.
Maria da Gloria herself later married her step-uncle, the duke of
Leuchtenberg, who died shortly after the wedding. The decision of
D. Maria ii to marry for a second time with Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg
was made not only for sound political reasons but because of the known
prowess of the Saxe-Coburg princes in the marriage bed. D. Maria ii
had eleven pregnancies and seven of her children survived, including
four sons. This, it might be assumed, would ensure the survival of the
dynasty but three of the princes died of typhoid in 1861. The last king
of Portugal, D. Manuel ii, died childless in exile in 1932. This created
a succession crisis in the exiled royal family and the succession to the
title of ‘king’ in absentia had to pass to a descendant of D. Miguel, the
king who had been deposed in 1834. Meanwhile the Brazilian branch
of the family was also threatened with a succession crisis when both
the sons of Emperor Pedro ii died young and the succession devolved
on Princess Isabel. The declaration of the Brazilian republic in 1889
resolved the issue.
Glancing sideways from the main line of succession, the Braganzas
were not a prolific family. Catarina, daughter of D. João iv and wife
of Charles ii of England, had no children. Her brother D. Pedro ii’s

48
 Overview of the Braganza Dynasty and the Culture of Royalty

daughter, Isabel Luisa, never married and had no children, and of his
sons, Francisco, António and Manuel did not marry and had no legit-
imate offspring. D. João v’s daughter Bárbara, who married the king of
Spain, also had no children. D. João v had three illegitimate sons but
none of these married or had offspring. Of D. José’s daughters, Maria
Doroteia never married and Maria Benedita, who married her nephew,
the infante José, had no children. D. Pedro v died without any children
and his brother Augusto never married. Although D. Luís had two sons,
one of these, Afonso, only married late in life and had no children.
Many of the children who were conceived were either stillborn
or died young. One after another, first-born sons died before they could
succeed, with a regularity that came to resemble a family curse. D. João
iv’s first-born son, Teodósio, died in 1653; D. Pedro ii’s first son, João,
Prince of Brazil, died less than a month old in 1688; D. João v’s eldest
son, Pedro, died at the age of two. D. José’s sons were all stillborn and
D. Maria’s eldest son died of smallpox in 1788 at the age of 27. D. João
vi’s eldest son, António Pio, died aged only six years old, and D. Pedro
iv’s son, João Carlos, also died as an infant. The curse continued into
the Brazilian branch, with both of Emperor Pedro ii’s sons dying in
infancy, and pursued the Braganzas to the end, with D. Carlos’s eldest
son, Luís Filipe, being murdered beside his father in February 1908.
Most of the early Braganza kings had illegitimate children, even
the solid and respectable D. João vi, but although some of these were
recognized and legitimized (D. João v’s three bastard princes, the so­­
called meninos de Palhavã, lived in semi-royal state), there was no place
for their mothers at the royal court, no maîtresse en titre as was the case
in France. Both D. Pedro iv and D. Miguel had illegitimate children;
their sister Isabel Maria, who acted as regent between 1826 and 1828,
never married and is also believed to have had illegitimate children.
The problems with the succession were not made easier by the
strain of mental instability that ran in the family. D. Afonso vi was
removed from the throne by a palace coup in 1667, largely because of
his perceived mental instability, while D. Maria i, after years on the
verge of mental breakdown, finally succumbed to madness in 1792. Her
sister Doroteia suffered from the same symptoms, as well as anorexia,
and died at the age of 31.26 Marianna, another of her sisters, also
became mentally ill. D. João vi at times suffered from depression and
in 1805 his wife, Carlota, tried unsuccessfully to have him declared
insane.

49
Exploring the Variety of Random
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