The Story of the Nations: Portugal

by H. Morse Stephens

The youthful king had none to help him. His father Dom João, the only son of John III., had died fifteen days before the birth of his only child, and his mother, Donna Joanna, the daughter of the Emperor Charles V., had immediately retired to Spain, leaving the child to the care of his grandparents. On the death of John III. in 1557, his queen, Donna Catherine, the sister of Charles V., assumed the regency in the name of her grandson. From the very first, the Portuguese people, from the highest to the lowest, disapproved of her rule; she was so aggressively Spanish in speech, bearing, and appearance, and had so persistently refused to identify herself with her adopted country, in spite of her long residence there, that every one believed her to be plotting to secure the eventual succession of her favourite nephew, Philip II. of Spain, to the crown of Portugal. Her bigotry and encouragement of the Inquisition did not tend to make her popular, and national prejudice declared itself strongly against her. Yet she was not a bad ruler; she maintained the old servants of John III., and the machinery of administration though in many places clogged by corruption, went on smoothly, and she even managed to despatch a sufficiently powerful army to relieve Mazagon, when it was besieged by the Moors. Yet throughout her five years’ tenure of power the queen-regent found herself hampered by the intrigues of the Cardinal Henry, who, as heir to the throne, thought he ought to be in her place, and at last she decided to give up the struggle, and in 1562 she retired to Spain.

The Cardinal Henry then satisfied his ambition and became regent of the kingdom, of which he was to be for a short time the unfortunate monarch, and during his rule the government of the country fell entirely into the hands of two brothers, who had made themselves very conspicuous in the intrigues which had led to the retirement of Queen Catherine. Of these brothers, the elder, Luis Gonçalves da Camara, was an able Jesuit, who had been appointed confessor and tutor to the young king, while the younger, Martim, was prime minister, and carried on the work of administration during the regency of the Cardinal Henry. The two brothers were both men of considerable ability, and, though they made no attempt to initiate reforms or to check the decay of Portugal, they managed to conceal her rottenness as much as possible from the eyes of Europe. In 1568 Dom Sebastian was declared of age by the Camaras, though only in his fifteenth year, and from that time they excluded their former master, the Cardinal, from even a semblance of power. This behaviour did not ensure their continuance in office, for as soon as the young king began to take an active interest in affairs, he dismissed the brothers, and placed the chief power in the hands of an upright nobleman, Dom Pedro de Alçaçova Carneiro.

The character of Dom Sebastian was one of the most important factors in bringing about the final overthrow of Portugal, and therefore deserves some examination, the more especially as the nature of the Portuguese monarchy was now entirely absolutist, owing to the wealth brought into the private treasury of the king by the Asiatic trade, and his consequent independence of the Cortes. The young king was rather German than Portuguese in appearance, with his blue eyes and fair hair and his face disfigured by the Hapsburg lip, and in his nature there was much of the Teuton dreaminess and love of the marvellous, which impelled him to take part in rash undertakings.[19] He was fond of solitude, and of building up castles in the air, in which he always appeared as a Christian hero exterminating the Mohammedans. For with his German dreaminess he united a truly Spanish fanaticism. His tutor, Luis Gonçalves da Camara, made him a bigot, and his governor, Dom Aleixo or Alexis de Menezes, taught him to look upon warlike enterprise as the chief aim of a monarch’s career, and the double teaching had inspired him with crusading ardour. He was not likely to be satisfied like his grandfather, John III., with showing his zeal for Christianity by rigorous orthodoxy and systematic persecution at home, but longed rather to unite war with religion, and to spread Christianity, like St. Louis of France, by his sword. To fanaticism and warlike ambition he added an obstinacy and imperiousness of character, which made him a tyrant. While training himself from boyhood for war, he determined to train his people also by issuing a sumptuary edict that none of his subjects might have more than two dishes, and those of the simplest character, for their meals, forgetting that no decree could alter the daily life of his people. Lastly, with these characteristics he united a spirit of profoundest melancholy, which is evident in his portraits and in all his actions, a melancholy which seemed to presage his early and tragic death, and is indicated by the motto he selected for himself:

“Un bel morir tutta la vita honora.”

Such a monarch was not the man to check the decadence of Portugal; only a practical man, who should try to husband the resources of the nation, could have attempted such a task, and even he would have had difficulties to face which might well seem insurmountable. But practical measures of reform, such as a systematic attempt to regulate the expenditure of the kingdom, and an effort to check the corruption which had grown up in all departments of the state, demanded an amount of serious and prolonged labour which the dreamy king was little inclined to bestow; he thought he had done enough in issuing his sumptuary edict, and paid no further attention to the evils which were sapping the strength of his kingdom. For one measure, however, he deserves much credit. Though paying no attention to the slaves in Portugal, and regarding negroes as a race made for slavery, he yet under the influence of the Jesuits issued a decree of the greatest importance for the colony of Brazil, by which it was ordered that for the future none of the aboriginal Brazilians should be publicly sold or sent as slaves to work in the plantations, except prisoners taken in a just war. Even in the higher domain of foreign politics as opposed to internal administration, he made no attempt to watch over the interests of Portugal. His early marriage was a matter of supreme importance to the kingdom, for the only male heir of the house of Aviz was his great-uncle, the Cardinal, and the deaths of Dom Sebastian and Dom Henry without direct heirs would inevitably be followed by a civil war arising from the disputed succession. This consideration weighed but little with the romantic monarch, who after making a half-hearted attempt in 1570 to secure the hand of the beautiful Princess Margaret, sister of Charles IX. of France, the famous “Reine Margot,” by the mediation of Dom Luis de Torres, abandoned the idea of marriage, and devoted himself to his schemes of fighting the Mohammedans.

The times were singularly unfit for a war against the infidels. Crusading ardour had long been extinct, and though Pope Pius II. (Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini) had in the preceding century tried to form a coalition against the Turks, and in 1571 Don John of Austria had broken their naval power at Lepanto, the ardour of the Pope and the navy of the prince were directed against the Turks, not because they were unbelievers, but because they were a conquering race and threatened Western Europe. The expeditions of the Emperor Charles V. against Tunis in 1535, and Algiers in 1541, were dictated rather by naval and commercial than by religious considerations, and John III. had acted with the thorough sanction of the Church, whose most humble devotee he was, in abandoning the smaller towns held by Portugal in Morocco. Yet Dom Sebastian persisted; he would be crusader rather than politician, and he was determined to fight the Mohammedans. His first idea was to go in person to India and place himself at the head of the Portuguese forces there; but the minister, Pedro de Alçaçova Carneiro, pointed out the difficulty of finding a regent to govern during his absence, and his former tutor, Aleixo de Menezes, turned his thoughts to Africa. He was fired by the fame of his ancestor, Affonso V. “the African,” and determined to waste what strength still remained to the exhausted Portuguese nation in useless expeditions to the barren regions of north-west Africa, where no possible advantage could be obtained of the slightest value to Portugal. Filled with the notion of recapturing the useless places which his grandfather had evacuated, such as Alcacer Seguier, Azamor, Arzila, and Cafim, King Sebastian in his twentieth year, in 1574, suddenly made up his mind to sail across to Africa. The expedition partook rather of the nature of a reconnaissance than of a serious campaign. The king spoke only of a visit to Tangier, and started off suddenly with his guards and courtiers from a hunting excursion, ordering the Duke of Aveiro to follow with a force of four hundred cavalry and one thousand two hundred infantry. With these troops Dom Sebastian made a few raids, and exhibited his personal courage by uselessly exposing his person, and he returned more bent than ever on a great war in Africa, which was to end in the Portuguese conquest of Morocco, and the acquisition of everlasting fame for its leader as a brave “soldier of the Cross.”

Before entering on the history of this expedition, which was to end so disastrously, and strike a last and final blow at the declining power of Portugal, it would be as well to see how the Portuguese dominion in Asia had been faring during the regencies of Queen Catherine and the Cardinal Henry, and during the earlier part of Sebastian’s own tenure of power. Dom Constantino de Braganza, the friend of the poet Camoens, had succeeded Francisco Barreto, the enemy of the poet, in 1558, the year after the death of John III., and had distinguished his viceroyalty by the capture of Daman. He was a truly great governor, although he permitted the Inquisition to be established at Goa, and his high rank gave him an ascendency not possessed by previous viceroys. His conduct was so blameless and his power so wisely exercised that the queen-regent begged him to accept the viceroyalty for life. He refused, and at the end of his three years of office resigned and was succeeded by Dom Francisco Coutinho, Count of Redondo, a nobleman of high character, who died in office, and was succeeded first by João de Mendonça, and then by Dom Antonio de Noronha, who took the important city of Mangalore by assault. During his viceroyalty in 1565 occurred the battle of Talikot, in which the powerful Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, which embraced the greater part of Southern India was overthrown by the Mohammedan kings of Ahmadābād, Bīdar, and Bijápur, and the way prepared for the extension of the Mohammedan power over Southern India. The next viceroy, Dom Luis de Athaide, was specially selected by King Sebastian himself in 1568, and he certainly justified the choice of the boy-king and his advisers. The Mohammedan kings of the Deccan were full of delight at their great victory of Talikot, and Alī Adìl Shah, king of Bijápur, believed he could expel the Portuguese from his dominions. With this intention he collected a vast army of one hundred thousand men, recruited from various adventurers of the Mohammedan religion, and laid siege to Goa in 1570. The city was being ravaged by a pestilence, but nevertheless the defence was a gallant one—the last great feat of arms of the Portuguese in India. The siege lasted ten months, and ended in the discomfiture of the besiegers and their final defeat in a pitched battle beneath the walls of Goa, when a victory was won, second only to that of Dom João de Castro at Diu, twenty-five years before. On his return to Portugal, Dom Luis de Athaide was received with the greatest favour by King Sebastian, who created him Count of Atouguia, and also by the people of Lisbon, who gave him the greatest reception vouchsafed to any Indian governor on his return for many generations. King Sebastian then made an important alteration in the government of his Asiatic possessions. Hitherto all the petty governors from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan had been subject to the Governor-General or the Viceroy at Goa, an extent of command which caused many serious inconveniences. In 1571 this vast extent of land and sea was divided into three separate governorships. The new viceroy, Dom Antonio de Noronha, was to be supreme from Cape Guardafui to Ceylon with his capital at Goa, while Francisco Barreto was to govern the south-east coast of Africa with his headquarters at Mozambique, and Antonio Moniz Barreto was to rule from Pegu to China with his capital at Malacca. Antonio Moniz Barreto succeeded as viceroy in 1573, and Dom Diogo de Menezes in 1576; and in 1578, the very year in which King Sebastian met his fate, his faithful servant, Dom Luis de Athaide, became viceroy for the second time, and it is said that the defeat of his sovereign broke the heart of the defender of Goa and caused his untimely death.

The expedition which was to meet with such a disastrous termination had long been contemplated by Sebastian, but its despatch was hastened by the state of affairs in Morocco itself, which seemed to the king most propitious for the success of his enterprise. The empire of Morocco had been divided between two brother Sherīfs, as the rulers of that country were termed, in the early part of the sixteenth century. The younger of the brothers, Maulā[20] Mohammed, beheaded his senior, Maulā Ahmed, and was in his turn assassinated in 1556. The successor to the throne, Maulā Abdallah, murdered two of his brothers and was succeeded by his illegitimate son, Maulā Ahmed ibn Abdallah, the “Muly Hamet” of old English writers. At this, the brother of the late Maulā Abdallah, Abd-el-Melik, commonly known as Muley Moloch, fled to Constantinople and, with the help of the Turks, ousted his nephew, Maulā Ahmed. The defeated usurper then decided to make an application for Christian help, and when refused asylum by Philip II., of Spain, he appealed to Dom Sebastian. This was the opportunity the young king had longed for, and when Maulā Ahmed promised to hold the crown of Morocco as a vassal of the King of Portugal, Sebastian enthusiastically welcomed him and promised him assistance. The wiser statesmen of Portugal pointed out that the strength of Portugal in men and arms was in Asia, and that it was impossible to attempt such an enterprise as the invasion of Morocco without foreign help. Sebastian therefore sent embassies asking for help from the Pope, and from his uncle, Philip II. of Spain. Pope Gregory XIII. sent him an arrow of S. Sebastian and nothing else, but the arrangements with Philip II. were more important. The minister Pedro de Alçaçova Carneiro was sent in person to the King of Spain to ask for troops and ships, in recognition of which Dom Sebastian would marry a Spanish infanta. Philip opposed the project strongly, but eventually promised five thousand men and fifty galleys to assist in an attack on Larache (El Araish), an offer which he afterwards withdrew, when the Duke of Alva assured him that at least fifteen thousand veteran soldiers would be necessary. In December, 1576, Sebastian had an interview in person with his uncle, when Philip II. again opposed his nephew’s mad idea, and he is reported to have said when his efforts proved in vain, “If he win, we shall have a good son-in-law; if he lose, a good kingdom.”