Frommer's Portugal. Paul Ames
I orders Portuguese Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave.
DISASTER & decline On All Saints’ Day in 1755, churches were packed when Lisbon was struck by a great earthquake. The tremor was followed by a tsunami and raging fire. Much of the city was destroyed and up to 50,000 people are believed to have died. Reconstruction was led by Prime Minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later Marquis of Pombal. He laid out Lisbon’s downtown, or Baixa, in the grid pattern of sturdy, four-story buildings that remains today, although the Gothic ruins of the Carmo Convent were left overlooking the city as reminder of the quake’s destructive force.
Pombal also battled to modernize the country. He curbed the powers of the Inquisition and expelled the Jesuit order. Foreign experts were brought in to expand industry and agriculture. Education and the military were reorganized.
Still, Portugal’s days as a great power were already long gone when French troops marched in as part of Napoleon’s grand design for European domination. The French met little resistance and the royal family fled to Rio de Janeiro. Harsh French rule, however, saw uprisings in Spain and Portugal. Eventually Portugal’s old ally was able to land troops in support, and after a long campaign, the Duke of Wellington led a combined British and Portuguese army that drove Napoleon’s forces back to France in 1814.
Portugal was much weakened. The decline was compounded when Brazil declared independence in 1822 and civil war broke out in the 1830s between the liberal King Pedro IV (also Emperor Pedro I of Brazil) and his conservative brother, Miguel I.
As Europe pushed ahead with industrialization in the 19th century, Portugal fell further behind, dogged by political instability and slipping into economic backwardness. Government debt mounted, pushing the state toward bankruptcy.
Unrest grew. In 1908, King Carlos I and his oldest son were assassinated in Lisbon’s Praça do Comércio. Two years later, Lisbon erupted in revolution, the monarchy was overthrown, and the last king, Manuel II, left for exile in London.
The change of regime did little to ease Portugal’s economic woes or political tensions. Over the next 16 years, there were no less than 49 governments. Portugal entered World War I in 1916 on the side of its old ally, Britain. Around 8,000 soldiers were killed fighting the Germans in France and Africa. Instability continued until a military coup in 1926 put an end to the first Republic.
Pedro & Inês: A Medieval love story
Centuries before Shakespeare gave us Romeo and Juliet, Portugal was gripped by its own tale of star-crossed lovers.
Seeking Spanish alliances, King Afonso IV in 1339 married off his son and heir, Pedro, to Constance, a Castilian princess. Nineteen-year-old Pedro promptly fell in love with one of his new wife’s ladies-in-waiting, a noblewoman named Inês de Castro. They began a very public affair and Inês bore Pedro three children.
King Afonso was outraged, frightened of offending the Castilians and worried about the influence of Inês’ ambitious brothers. He pleaded with Pedro to break it off, then banished Inês to the Santa Clara Monastery in Coimbra. When all that failed to cool Pedro’s passion, Afonso had Inês murdered. In Coimbra today, beneath the clear spring water that bubbles to the surface at the spot where she was decapitated, there’s a red rock, supposedly forever stained by her blood.
Grief-stricken, Pedro revolted against his father. He captured two of the killers and personally ripped out their hearts. Pedro became king when Afonso died in 1357 and announced that he’d secretly married Inês before her death. On the day of his coronation, Pedro ordered Inês’ corpse removed from its tomb, dressed in a regal gown, and crowned queen beside him. Portugal’s nobles lined up to kiss the hand of the woman slain 2 years before.
The story has inspired poets, painters, and musicians from Camões to Ezra Pound. Today, Pedro and Inês lie side by side in ornate tombs within the great medieval monastery at Alcobaça.
Dictatorship & Democracy The junta appointed António de Oliveira Salazar as finance minister in 1928. He became the dominant figure in Portugal’s 20th-century history, establishing a dictatorship that ruled