Barroso appointed President of the European Commission.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 with an iron hand for over 4 decades. Prime minister from 1932, Salazar constructed a Fascist-inspired regime, the Estado Novo, or New State. He brought some order to the economy and managed to keep Portugal neutral during World War II. Dissent was suppressed and censorship strict. A secret police force—the PIDE—spread fear; opponents were jailed or worse.
In 1961, the regime was shaken by an Indian invasion of Goa, Daman, and Diu, Portugal’s last colonies in South Asia. That same year, pro-independence forces launched attacks in Angola, starting a war across Portugal’s African empire. Salazar struck back, dispatching ever more conscripts to fight rebel movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Proportionally, Portugal suffered more casualties in the colonial wars than the U.S. in Vietnam. The fighting drained the economy and left Portugal internationally isolated. Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese emigrants fled poverty, oppression, and conscription, mostly to France, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.
Salazar suffered a stroke in 1968 and died 2 years later, but the regime limped on. On April 25, 1974, a group of war-weary officers staged a coup and the people of Lisbon rose up to support the troops. Flower sellers in Rossio square handed out spring blooms to the young soldiers and sailors, so the uprising was immortalized as the “Carnation Revolution.” Censorship was lifted, exiles returned, and political prisoners were released to joyous scenes.
Four Navigators Who Changed world maps
From 1415 to 1580, Portuguese explorers opened up the world for Europe, discovering new routes to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. They created a global empire and redrew world maps.
Bartolomeo Dias (ca. 1450–1500) was 38 and from a family of navigators when he led an expedition of three boats down the coast of West Africa in 1487. He failed in his mission to find the mythical Christian kingdom of Prester John, but became the first European to sail around the southern tip of Africa into the Indian Ocean. Dias was killed in a shipwreck off the Cape of Good Hope in 1500, while serving with Pedro Álvares Cabral on the expedition that reached Brazil.
Vasco da Gama (ca. 1460–1524) wasn’t the first European to explore India—wealthy Europeans had been spicing their food with its cinnamon, pepper, and nutmeg for centuries—but the trade was controlled by price-hiking Venetian, Turkish, and Arab middlemen. By discovering the sea route in 1498, da Gama opened up direct trade between Europe and Asia. His adventures are celebrated in Portugal’s national epic, Os Lusíadas, by swashbuckling 16th-century poet Luís de Camões. The two men are buried near each other in Lisbon’s Jerónimos monastery. Da Gama died of malaria in 1524 in Kochi on his third voyage to India. Western Europe’s longest bridge, an Indian seaport, and a leading Brazilian soccer club bear his name.
Brazil was first reached by accident in 1500, when the fleet of 13 ships commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral (ca. 1467–1520) sailed too far west while heading down the coast of Africa on the new route opened by da Gama. At least that’s the official story. Some believe the Portuguese
