The Story of the Nations: Portugal

by H. Morse Stephens

From these restless longings after the neighbouring thrones, and the ignoble schemes of the Portuguese monarch, it is a relief to turn to the actions of the Portuguese heroes. Their deeds will be related separately, but after the barren intrigues of Emmanuel, it will be as well to mention chronologically the chief discoveries of his captains. In 1497, Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope and reached India by sea; in 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral discovered Brazil, and Gaspar Corte-Real, Labrador; in 1501 João da Nova Castella discovered the islands of St. Helena and Ascension; and in that year and in 1503 Amerigo Vespucci first visited the Rio Plata and Paraguay; in 1506 Tristão da Cunha discovered the island which bears his name; and Ruy Pereira Coutinho explored Madagascar and the Mauritius; in 1507 Lourenço de Almeida touched at the Maldive Islands; in 1509 Diogo Lopes de Sequeira occupied Malacca and explored the island of Sumatra; in 1512 Francisco Serrão discovered the Moluccas; in 1513 Pedro de Mascarenhas first touched at the Île de Bourbon or Réunion; in 1516 Duarte Coelho worked his way up the coast of Cochin China and explored Siam; in 1517 Fernão Peres de Andrade established himself at Canton, and the same explorer made his way to Pekin in 1521; and in 1520 Magalhães (Magellan), a Portuguese sailor, though in the Spanish service, passed through the Straits which bear his name and led the way into the Pacific Ocean.

These exploits make up a list of achievements of which any country might be proud; the bare catalogue of them, without any epithets, justifies the description given of the reign of Emmanuel “the Fortunate” as the heroic age of Portuguese history. It has been shown that the king contributed little to this greatness, and the mistaken direction of his foreign policy has been noticed. It now remains to be seen how the seeds of rapid decline were sown. Emmanuel was far from being a bad man, though he does not show to advantage, when compared with such monarchs as John “the Great” and John “the Perfect;” he was a moral and pious man,—too pious as his expulsion of the Jews clearly demonstrates; he can hardly be blamed for his extravagance and taste for luxury, when the enormous wealth of the Portuguese Crown is considered; and he spent much of this wealth on art and architecture, as the construction of the magnificent palace of Belem, near Lisbon, testifies to this day. This superb building may have many faults to the eye of the architectural expert, but to the ordinary mind it seems almost the most superb structure in the world. With regard to internal administration, Emmanuel did not do much harm; the wheels of government had been put into such perfect order by John II. that the machine of administration worked well without interference. But John II. had made one great mistake, the fruits of which appeared in the reign of Emmanuel and his successor; he had changed the monarchy of Portugal from being patriotic and dependent on the good will of the people into an absolute monarchy, in which the king’s will was everything. The overthrow of the nobility and the wealth of the Crown had made the king independent of the support of his people, as represented in the Cortes. The nobility, deprived of their power at home, had thrown themselves with ardour into the career of Eastern discovery and conquest, and nearly all the great heroes of the period belonged to noble families. Emmanuel recognized the greatness of these men, and showered honours upon them; but in the next generation, the fatal result of despotism became evident, and the nobility, instead of thinking of their country, and looking to their fellow citizens’ approbation for their reward, looked rather to the king, and made loyalty to a man and not to their country their guiding principle. This attachment to the king was encouraged by the wealth of the Crown, which enabled the sovereign to bestow large pensions and pay enormous salaries, and the Portuguese nobility began to become a nobility of courtiers instead of a nobility of patriots. This extraordinary wealth of the Crown was due to its absorption of the trade with India, for the wealth of the East was conveyed to Lisbon on royal ships, and fetched thence by enterprising traders of other nations. It was then that the mistake of Emmanuel in banishing the Jews became more and more obvious, for Portugal only brought the products of Asia to Europe, but did not distribute them throughout Europe. It was in these respects that the seeds of decline were sown, in the loss of public spirit, and the absorption by the Crown of the whole wealth won by the valour of the people. Yet these steps towards decline were not at first visible to the eyes either of foreign nations or of the people themselves. The glory of Portugal was spread abroad, and the wealth of its monarch and his splendour became proverbial. The great literary movement, which in this reign is represented by Gil Vicente, Ayres Barbosa, Garcia de Resende, and Bernardim Ribeiro, will be discussed in another chapter, but it must be noted here in regard to Emmanuel, that, though he did banish the Jews, he was broad-minded enough to be a patron of literature and that he was in this respect the superior of the fanatical bigot who succeeded him.

Emmanuel, as he increased in wealth, bestowed great appanages on his sons, while his daughters were sought in marriage by the greatest princes in Christendom. His eldest son Dom John married Catherine of Austria, sister of Charles V. Of his other sons, three—Dom Luis, Dom Ferdinand, and Dom Edward—were created respectively dukes of Beja, Guarda, and Guimaraens, while the other two took holy orders and became cardinals. Of his two surviving daughters, the elder, Donna Isabel, married the Emperor Charles V., and the younger, Donna Beatrice, the divinity to whom the poet Bernardim Ribeiro addressed his songs, married Charles III., Duke of Savoy. With such a family of sons it did not seem likely that in a few short years the male line of the house of Aviz would become extinct, and it was with a feeling of pride in his wealth and with assured confidence in the perpetuation of his line that Emmanuel “the Fortunate” died in his beautiful palace at Belem, on December 12, 1521.

The reign of John III. is that in which the rapid decline of Portugal is most perceptible. All the germs of decay which had appeared in the reign of Emmanuel, developed during the reign of his son, by the end of which, though the sovereign of Portugal was the richest in Europe, not excepting the Emperor himself, the greatness of the country was obviously disappearing. The natural growth of this decline was assisted by the fanaticism of John III., who was a bigot of the most pronounced type, and who powerfully aided the extinction of the greatness of the country by his introduction of the Inquisition. Though personally a pious and estimable man, he was absolutely unable to take any steps to check the downfall of his country’s greatness, and considered the greatest fame of his reign would be due to the establishment of the Inquisition and the introduction of the Jesuits. The greatest credit that can be given to him is that he kept his country out of all European complications, a task made comparatively easy by his close alliance with the greatest monarch in Europe, the Emperor Charles V. This alliance was sealed by three marriages; for King John was married to the Infanta Catherine, the sister of Charles V., his only son Dom John was married to the Infanta Joanna, daughter of Charles V., and his only daughter, Donna Maria, was the first wife of Philip, prince of the Asturias, the eldest son of Charles V., and afterwards King Philip II. These marriages knitted the bonds of alliance closely between the reigning houses of Spain and Portugal, and a powerful Portuguese fleet under the king’s brother, Dom Luis, Duke of Beja, assisted in the Spanish expedition against Tunis in 1535. Yet fighting with the Moors seemed to have lost its charm for the Portuguese people, for during the next ten years, all the chief towns held by Portugal in northern Africa, Azamor, Cafim, Cabo do Sul, and even Arzila and Alcacer Seguier, the captures of Affonso “the African,” were abandoned, in order that the whole strength of the country might be concentrated on its Indian and Brazilian possessions.

This quiet abandonment of all the north African possessions, except Ceuta and Mazagon, affords a yet further proof of the change in the character of the Portuguese nobility and their sovereign. They no longer desired to fight against the old hereditary enemy of the Christian religion, as crusaders; John III. was no “Ré Cavalleiro” like Affonso V., but preferred stamping out heresy at home to fighting infidels abroad; and king and nobles alike agreed that it was better to expend their power in the wealthy Indies than in barren Africa. The nobles became more and more dependent on the Crown, and spent all their energies in intriguing for “moradias” or pensions from the Court, and for rich governments abroad. The absolutism of the king and the employment of crowds of sycophant courtiers spread corruption into every department of government, and the officials of all sorts, both in Portugal and India, hurried to make fortunes by every means, honest or otherwise, in their power. “Personal worship of the king,” in the words of an able Portuguese writer, “had eaten out patriotism,”[12] and though such a man as Dom João de Castro may be cited as a specimen of the great-hearted Portuguese nobleman of the finest type, most of the nobility sank into Court lackeys or greedy fortune hunters, and even the famous navigator, Fernão de Magalhães, deserted his country and entered the service of Spain, because the pension he coveted was not conferred upon him. The Asiatic trade, it must be insisted upon, was the monopoly of the Crown, and only indirectly profited the ordinary trading classes, and in the hot pursuit of wealth, agriculture was neglected.

There was, however, a more serious cause for the decline of the power of Portugal than the absolutism of the Crown, the want of patriotism of the nobility, or even than the corruption of the officials, and that was the rapid depopulation of the country. The Alemtejo and Algarves had never been thoroughly peopled, for the devastations caused by the Moorish wars could not be easily repaired; and, though the exertions of Diniz “the Labourer” had made the Beira the garden of the whole Iberian peninsula, the part of the kingdom to the south of the Tagus had remained either in the hands of the military religious orders or split up into large feudal estates. The great discoveries at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries largely checked the natural increase of population. Not only did the bulk of the young men gladly volunteer to man the fleets and serve in the armies in India and the East, but whole families emigrated to Madeira, and after 1530 to Brazil. The Portuguese are essentially an adventurous nation, fond of travelling and full of enterprise, and no difficulty was found in manning the great Indian fleets and recruiting the armies of Alboquerque and his successors. Of the thousands who flocked to Asia, but few ever returned. The incidents of perpetual warfare, and the noxious climate, killed off most, and of those who survived, many married native women and settled down in India. Even of the people who did remain in Portugal, few remained in their native homesteads engaged in agriculture; most crowded into Lisbon, where the necessities of the Eastern trade afforded work for all. The capital trebled its population in eighty years, in spite of its most unsanitary condition and the periodical pestilences which ravaged it. The king, the nobles, and the military orders were, however, quite undisturbed by this extensive emigration and rapid depopulation, for their large estates were much more cheaply cultivated by African slaves, who had been imported in such numbers that the Algarves was almost entirely populated by them, and in Lisbon itself they out-numbered the free men by the middle of the sixteenth century. In this respect the condition of Portugal resembled that of Italy at the time of the decline of the Roman Empire, as the wealth of Lisbon resembled that of Imperial Rome, while the utter corruption and oppression of the officials in the Indian settlements resembled only too closely the peculation and corruption of the Roman proconsuls and procurators.

While the Portuguese nation was exhibiting these signs of rapid decadence, another factor of decline was added by the religious zeal of John III., who, from the moment of his accession, had striven to introduce the Inquisition into Portugal. The Church of Rome was not likely to hinder his pious desire, but for several years the “novães Christiãos” or neo-Christians, as the half-hearted converts made from the Jews, on condition that they might remain in Portugal, were called, managed to ward off the blow. But the king’s earnest wish was gratified at last, and in 1536 the tribunal of the Holy Office was established in Portugal, with Diogo da Silva, Bishop of Ceuta, as first Grand Inquisitor, who was soon succeeded by the king’s brother, the Cardinal Dom Henry. The Inquisition quickly destroyed all that was left of the old Portuguese spirit, and so effectually stamped out the revival of Portuguese literature that, while, towards the close of the sixteenth century, the rest of Europe was advancing in civilization under the influence of the Renaissance, Portugal fell back, and her literature became dumb. The establishment of the Inquisition was followed in 1540 by the introduction of the Jesuits, who speedily obtained control of the national education, and carefully checked intellectual development. The king received his reward from the Pope for these services to Catholicism; he was permitted to unite the Grand Mastership of the wealthy orders of Christ, Santiago, and Aviz, with the Crown, and to found the new bishoprics of Leiria, Miranda, and Porto Alegre, in Portugal, and the archbishopric of Goa, in India.

It must not be thought that the reign of John III. seemed to his contemporaries the era of decline it certainly was; no king was richer, no people more loyal, and no man more honoured. His reign, like that of Emmanuel, is studded with great names and great events, and a casual observer could not observe the seeds of decay. Besides João de Castro, there lived then many great Indian heroes and warriors, such as Nuno da Cunha, Antonio de Silveira, João de Mascarenhas, and Luis de Athaide; it was during this reign that Francisco Coutinho, Count of Redondo, conquered Ceylon, and Fernão Mendes Pinto paid his famous visits to Japan, and the present Portuguese settlement of Macao was founded. Still greater are the literary glories of the reign of the supporter of the Inquisition, for in it Camoens wrote the “Lusiads,” Ferreira wrote his dramas, João de Barros his history, and Sà de Miranda his poems, all works which do not seem to mark a declining country. In art, and especially in architecture, the king showed no mean taste, and his palace at Thomar and the great convent at Belem show that he was in this respect a worthy successor of King Emmanuel, and that the Portuguese workmen had attained to no small degree of skill in decorative work.

Yet in spite of these glories, the heroic age of Portugal was over, and in little more than twenty years after John III.’s death, the country, which had so long maintained its independence, was absorbed by Spain. This was to be expected from the decline the causes of which have been analysed, but the final catastrophe was hastened by the death of the heir to the throne, Dom João, in 1554, which brought about on the death of John III., in 1557, the accession to the throne of a child of three years old, the ill-fated Dom Sebastian. Enough has been said of Portugal during the heroic age of the Portuguese nation; it is now time to study the deeds of the men, who made the age heroic by their valour and daring.