Chapter VIII: The Heroic Age of Portugal

John II., surnamed “the Perfect,” the only son of Affonso V., succeeded his father as King of Portugal in 1481, and his short reign was marked by events of the utmost importance at home, as well as by the great discoveries of Diogo Cam and Bartholomeu Diaz. He had shown himself a gallant soldier in his father’s last African expedition, when he was knighted, and at the battle of Toro, and also a capable ruler, as regent, during the absence of Affonso V. in France, and during that king’s frequent periods of abdication. He saw the folly of his father in wasting his strength in African expeditions, and in fruitless wars with Castile, and he therefore recurred to the wise policy of his great-grandfather, John “the Great,” in avoiding all interference with Spanish affairs, and maintaining a close alliance with England. He also, as has already been said, adopted enthusiastically all the schemes of Prince Henry “the Navigator,” and laboured for the discovery of a route to India by sea. He possessed all the hereditary aptitude of the princes of the house of Aviz for literature, and fostered the spirit of the Renaissance in Portugal in the study of the classical languages, the advancement of science, and the encouragement of art. He was a broad-minded, tolerant man, with ideas far in advance of his age in many respects, and possessing at once an inflexible will and remarkable sweetness of disposition.

But John II. was more than all this; he was a politician and a statesman of the first rank, and openly professed himself a disciple of Machiavelli and a believer in the theory of absolute government. He imitated Louis XI. of France, just as one of his predecessors, Sancho II., had imitated Louis IX., and in his policy and in his manner of carrying it out, he showed himself an apt pupil of his wily master. The first great task he set himself, in imitation of that monarch, was to break the power of the feudal nobility of Portugal. In doing this he relied, and with justice, upon the assistance of the mass of the people, who had learned during the last reign to detest and fear the almost unlimited power of the nobles.

The origin of the enormous estates held by the Portuguese nobility has already been pointed out, and the attempt made by King Edward to check accumulations by the “Lei Mental” has also been mentioned; but this regulation had had but little effect, owing to the profuse prodigality of Affonso V. This monarch had granted away nearly the whole patrimony of the crown; and John II. said with justice that his father had left him “only the royal high roads of Portugal.” This liberality had kept Affonso poor in spite of the increasing wealth of his people and his extravagance had been such, that he had been formally rebuked by a Cortes, held at Guarda in 1465, and had been obliged to promise amendment. Under the influence of this headstrong monarch and his favourites the evils, inherent in the feudal system, had increased alarmingly; crimes in country districts were only punished by fines, and every means which rapacity could suggest to wring money out of an impoverished tenantry were resorted to, while the wealth of the great landlords had been increased by the improvement in the cultivation of their lands due to the large importation of slaves. John II. determined to crush the powerful and turbulent feudal nobility, and to draw back some of its wealth into the royal treasury, and for this purpose he summoned a great Cortes to meet at Evora in 1481, the year of his accession. In this Cortes he proposed that a “inquiracão geral” should be held into all titles to landed property, and that the royal corregidors should alone be empowered to dispense and execute criminal justice throughout the country. Both measures were agreed to, but the nobles determined to resist the examination into their titles, and the loss of the lucrative privilege of dispensing criminal justice, and they combined to oppose the king, under the leadership of the Duke of Braganza.

Ferdinand, Duke of Braganza, was the wealthiest and most powerful nobleman, not only in Portugal, but in the whole peninsula. He was the grandson of Affonso, Count of Barcellos, the illegitimate son of John “the Great,” who had been created Duke of Braganza by Affonso V., and he had inherited the vast possessions of his grandfather and of his grandmother, the daughter of the Holy Constable. These possessions had been increased by the lavishness of Affonso V., who had showered favours on the first and second Dukes of Braganza. Ferdinand possessed fifty cities, towns, and castles, and nearly one-third of the land of the kingdom; he was patron of one hundred and sixty canonries and religious benefices; he maintained a royal household, and bore the titles of Duke of Braganza and Guimaraens, Marquis of Villa Viçosa, Count of Barcellos, Ourem, Arrayolos and Neiva, and Lord of Montalegre, Monporto, and Penafiel. His brothers were nearly as powerful as himself. The eldest, João, was Marquis of Monte Mor, and Constable of the kingdom; the second, Affonso, was Count of Faro; and the youngest, Alvaro, held the important office of Chancellor. In the reign of Affonso V. this great nobleman had quarrelled fiercely with John II., then heir apparent, but he believed he had secured his safety by marrying a sister of the future queen, for both Prince John and himself married daughters of Ferdinand, Duke of Viseu and Beja, the brother of Affonso V., and inheritor of the wealth of Prince Henry “the Navigator.” The Duke of Braganza took the lead in opposing the king’s decrees passed in the Cortes of Evora, and John II. was glad of it, not only because he coveted the wealth and lands of the Braganza family, which dimmed the splendour of the Crown, and on account of their former quarrels in the late king’s lifetime, but also because he remembered that he was, through his mother, the grandson of the great regent, Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, who had been defeated and slain at Alfarrobeira by this very Duke of Braganza and his father. For all these reasons John II. decided to strike a sudden and decisive blow, which should at once re-establish the power of the Crown and paralyze the feudal nobility with terror, and he therefore had the Duke of Braganza arrested, and executed, after a very short trial, at Evora, on June 22, 1483.

The nobles, however, were not yet defeated, and they continued to intrigue against the king’s authority under the leadership of a yet nearer relation of his own, Diogo, Duke of Viseu and Beja, the eldest son of Dom Ferdinand, and grandson of King Edward, and the brother-in-law alike of the king and of the executed Duke of Braganza. But John II. was not dismayed: imitating Louis XI. of France, he determined not to spare his own relations, and on August 23, 1484, he stabbed the Duke of Viseu with his own hand in his palace at Setubal. This murder he followed up with decision: he had the Bishop of Evora, one of his father’s favourites, thrown down a well; and he executed, with or without trial, about eighty of the leading noblemen of the country. By these means John II. broke the power of the feudal nobility for ever, and as happened in France under Louis XI., and in England under Henry VII., the fall of the nobility was followed by the absolutism of the monarch. Now that the nobles had lost their power, and the Crown had become wealthy by the confiscation of their property, John II. needed the support of the people, as represented in the Cortes, no longer, and he became a despot, though a benevolent one. But the weight of this despotism was not yet felt, for John II. possessed all the political ability of his grandfathers. He tried to find means for encouraging his nobility, now that they were frightened out of treason, to enter into the career of maritime exploration, which had been opened by Prince Henry, while at home he won the love of his people by reorganizing the government of the kingdom, and proved so good an administrator that the Portuguese gave him the title of “the Perfect King.”

It has been said that in his foreign policy John II. followed in the course set before him by John the Great. With the great monarchs then ruling in Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, he consistently remained on friendly terms, and in 1490 his only legitimate son, Affonso, was married to Isabella, eldest daughter of these sovereigns. The death of this son in the following year, without leaving children, was a terrible blow to him, but he nevertheless maintained his friendship with Ferdinand and Isabella, and in 1494 concluded the Treaty of Tordesillas with them. By this treaty, which was confirmed by a Bull, issued by Pope Alexander VI., the limit of the future possessions of the Spaniards and Portuguese in the regions explored and discovered by their mariners was 370 leagues west of Cape Verde, and it was agreed that the Spaniards were to have full right to all lands discovered to the west of this line, and the Portuguese to all to the south and east. What a curious commentary this treaty forms on that of Cella Nova, concluded three hundred years before between Affonso Henriques of Portugal and Ferdinand of Leon, by which these two monarchs agreed to take the course of the Guadiana as the line to separate their future conquests from the Moors. Both nations had now developed; the energies of both, heightened by the long struggle with the Mohammedans, sought for fresh fields, and expanding far beyond the boundaries of Europe, were to prove themselves, in the one case in Mexico and Peru, and in the other in India and the countries of the East.

In the other cardinal point of the policy of John “the Great,” the maintenance of a close alliance with England, John II. carefully followed the example of the founder of the house of Aviz. Affonso V. had not neglected this important tradition, and had even promised his sister, Donna Catherine, to Edward IV., in 1461, a marriage only frustrated by the death of the princess in 1463; and the English monarch had solemnly ratified the Treaty of Windsor in 1471, and again after the battle of Barnet in 1472, and he had also included the name of the King of Portugal, as an ally of England, in his treaty with Louis XI. of France, in 1475. John II. drew the bonds of friendship still closer, and sent important embassies to the three kings of England, who ruled in quick succession in this country. In 1482 Edward IV. ratified the Treaty of Windsor in the presence of the ambassadors of John II., and recognized his new title of “Lord of Guinea,” and in 1484 Richard III. did the same. In 1485 the King of Portugal proposed in a Cortes held at Alçobaça, that his only sister Joanna should be given in marriage to Richard III., but the princess, who was famed for her piety and wished to become a nun, fortunately for herself, refused the alliance, as she afterwards did the hand of Charles VIII. of France. Henry VII. bore no enmity towards John II. on account of his friendship with Richard III., but, on the contrary, showed every disposition to assist him in his struggle with his nobility, and in 1488 went so far as to arrest the Count of Pennamacor, one of the insurgent Portuguese noblemen who had escaped to England, and to imprison him in the Tower. It was in this year also that the last treaty of commerce between England and Portugal, before the famous Methuen treaty in 1703, was concluded at Lisbon by Richard Nanfran and Thomas Savage, who had been sent for that purpose, and to invest John II. as a Knight of the Garter.

But it was not only on account of his suppression of the power of the feudal nobility, and of his wise peace policy, that John “the Perfect” was beloved by his people, it was also because he showed himself a worthy successor of Prince Henry “the Navigator,” in promoting exploration, and devoted his best energies to discovering a direct route to India. The two famous voyages of Diogo Cam and Bartholomeu Diaz, which had resulted in the discovery of the Congo and of the Cape of Good Hope, have been mentioned, but it was rather in other directions that the originality of mind which distinguished John II. showed itself. He was the first European monarch who thought that if it might be possible to reach India by sea by sailing round the continent of Africa, it might also be possible to find a road to “Cathay” by sailing round the continent of Europe to the north-east. On this mission he despatched Martim Lopes, who sailed past the North Cape into regions hitherto unexplored, and discovered the great island to the north of Russia, which still bears the name he gave it of Nova Zembla. John II. also had ideas of striking out new routes to India by land, or at least of exploring the land routes in order to correct prevalent geographical mistakes. With these ideas he sent forth the two first European explorers of the interior of Africa, Pedro de Evora and Gonçalo Annes, who managed to get as far as Timbuctoo. Still more important were the missions which he sent overland to India, and in search of that mythical Christian potentate, Prester John. The two travellers he despatched were João Peres de Covilhão and Affonso de Payva. The former of these enterprising men made his way safely to India by following the regular trade route and accompanying the caravans. He visited both Goa and Calicut, and though he was refused a passage to the Cape, he managed to find his way back to Arabia, and eventually to Abyssinia, where he became the chief adviser and almost prime minister of the king, at whose capital he died. The other traveller, Affonso de Payva, went direct to Abyssinia, where the mythical Prester John was supposed to reign, and also died there.

The energies of John II. were so wholly absorbed in these expeditions to the East, and he felt so certain that he was in the right direction in trying to reach India by eastern routes, that he made the great mistake in 1493 of dismissing Christopher Columbus from his court as a visionary. He listened to all the arguments of the great discoverer with patience, but he did not agree with his conclusions that it was possible to reach India by sailing westwards across the Atlantic, and he therefore lost the opportunity of immortalizing his name and reign by a greater discovery than that of Vasco da Gama, the discovery of the vast continent of America. In other departments his energies found full scope. He greatly improved the art of ship-building, and encouraged the immigration of skilled shipwrights from England and Denmark; he did much to promote the improvement of fire-arms, and established a cannon foundry and a corps of artillery, of which he made Diogo de Azambuja the first Inspector-General; and, above all, he patronized literature, and encouraged Ruy de Pina, the greatest of all the Portuguese chroniclers. His court abounded in great men, the founders of great families and the fathers of the coming generation of heroes, among whom may be noted, besides his navigators, Diogo Cam, Bartholomeu Diaz, and Lopo Infante, and his famous travellers just mentioned, his Lord High Admirals, Pedro de Alboquerque and Lopo Vaz de Azevedo; his Lord Stewards, Diogo Soares de Albergaria, Pedro de Noronha, and João de Menezes; his Master of the Horse, Affonso de Alboquerque; his Secretary-General Ruy Galvão; and his Chancellor, the acute lawyer and most strenuous supporter of the despotic power of the king, Ruy de Graa.

Yet the reign of John “the Perfect,” full as it was of great events, and great as is its importance in the history of Portugal, was but comparatively short. His happiness was clouded by the sad death of his only son, Dom Affonso, in 1491, the year after he had married the Infanta Isabella, eldest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, who then ruled in Spain, and he felt with repugnance that his successor on the throne must be Manoel, or Emmanuel, Duke of Beja, the brother of the murdered Duke of Viseu, a man in whom he could see no fit qualities for carrying on his own great schemes and projects. To oust him John II. thought of legitimatizing his illegitimate son by Anna de Mendonça, Dom Jorge, or George, whom he had made Grand Master of the Orders of Santiago and Aviz, but the reflection that on his death the country he loved so well would then be torn by civil war restrained him, and he did not interfere with the law of succession. During the last days of his life the “Perfect King” was busily engaged in fitting out the fleet which, under Vasco da Gama, was to realize his most cherished dream, and he was still in the ripe strength of manhood when he died at Alvor, in the province of the Algarves, on October 25, 1495.

The quarter of a century during which the successor of John II., Emmanuel “the Fortunate,” reigned, is the great heroic period of Portuguese history, and during it the great deeds, which make the Story of Portugal an important part of the history of Europe and of the world, were done. Discoveries and daring feats of arms distinguished nearly every year of this truly fortunate reign, and the fame of the great Portuguese generals, captains, and travellers is rivalled only by that of its poets and men of letters. As the progress of the Portuguese in the East and West, and their great literary development, will be examined in three different chapters, it will here be possible only to narrate the events of Emmanuel’s reign in Portugal, and to show how, at the period of the greatest glory of the country, the age of its rapid decline was at hand. The causes of that decline were manifold, and are generally placed in the reign of Emmanuel’s successor, but the seed of each appeared in the reign of the “fortunate” monarch himself.

Emmanuel himself contributed but little to the blaze of glory which illustrates his reign. He despatched great fleets and armies to distant parts of the world, and received the wealth their discoveries and exertions brought into his treasury with equanimity; but he had only one fixed idea, the old wild dream which had brought disaster upon Ferdinand “the Handsome” and Affonso V., the longing to sit upon the throne of Spain and to unite the kingdoms of the peninsula under his sovereignty. To gain this end he proposed to marry the Infanta Isabella, the eldest daughter of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, and widow of the unfortunate Affonso, the only son of John II., and in order to be recognized as heir to the kingdoms of Spain, he promised to expel the Jews and unbaptized Moors from Portugal.

No class had done more to promote the height of commercial prosperity to which Portugal had attained than the Portuguese Jews. In another volume of this Series[11] Mr. Lane-Poole says: “Wherever the arms of the Saracens penetrated, there we shall always find the Jews in close pursuit,” and in no part of the peninsula had they collected in greater numbers than in the great cities of Portugal, especially in Lisbon, Santarem, and Evora. These Jews belonged for the most part to the Sephardim, and were in every intellectual quality superior to the Ashkenazim, or German and Polish Jews; protected by the Moors, they had grown in wealth and power, and when they came under the rule of Affonso Henriques, that great monarch extended the same tolerance towards them. His successors followed his example, and under monarchs with commercial aspirations such as Diniz and John “the Great,” the Jews had been more than protected, they had been favoured. While persecuted in other countries, they had met with consistent protection in Portugal, and they acknowledged the generous treatment which they received by extending the commerce of their adopted country. The Portuguese Jews possessed a high reputation all over Europe for wealth, integrity, and commercial acuteness, and had business agencies and banks in every land, which contributed to the wealth of the country, which had been for centuries their home. Such was the wealthy and industrious class of citizens, which Emmanuel consented to banish from his dominions, partly to please the bigotry of Ferdinand and Isabella, whom he hoped to succeed, and partly in order to absorb, as the Portuguese crown eventually did, the whole of the coming trade with the East. These unfortunate families were obliged to leave the country, which had been their fatherland, and the cities, which had been their homes, from generation to generation, with but six months in which to prepare for banishment; they were obliged to dispose of their flourishing businesses at a loss, and to start anew in the world to find new occupations and new homes. It is hardly a matter for wonder, that many Jews preferred to be baptized and to become half-hearted Christians rather than expatriate themselves, but these “Novaes Christiãos” had, as will be seen, no reason to rejoice a few years later at their apostasy. With the Jews were banished also many unbaptized Mohammedans, the especial enemies of Ferdinand “the Catholic.” This class had become numerous since the taking of Granada in 1492, when many of them fled from Spain into Portugal, and had been kindly received by John II. It is worthy of notice that the Most Catholic monarchs, who persuaded Emmanuel to take such severe steps against Jews and Mohammedans, who were ready to earn an honest livelihood as free men, made no protest against the thousands of negro slaves, who were being yearly imported into Portugal, and left to their belief in superstitions far more degrading than the religions either of Jews or Moslems.

For this decree of banishment passed against law-abiding Portuguese citizens, Emmanuel had his reward, for he was married to the Infanta Isabella in 1497. But the curse of the Jews followed him, and he never sat upon the throne of Spain. Whilst the royal bride and bridegroom were passing through the cities of Castile in a state progress as heirs to the thrones of Spain, Queen Isabella fell ill, and died at Toledo on August 24, 1498. She left an infant son, Dom Miguel, at whose birth she had died, but he did not survive to realize the hopes of his father, and died in 1500. Even these two deaths did not put an end to Emmanuel’s schemes, and in the same year 1500, he married the Donna Maria of Castile, the sister of his deceased wife. This marriage was not so likely to promote his success as the first; for whereas the Infanta Isabella was the eldest daughter of Ferdinand and his queen, the Infanta Maria was but the third daughter, and the daughter between them, the Infanta Joanna, had a son who, as the legitimate heir of his grandparents, was to succeed to thrones of Spain and eventually become the Emperor Charles V. By his second wife, Emmanuel had no less than six sons, but what has been called the “curse of the Jews” pursued them, and his descendants soon failed in the direct line. Even to the last, the same wild fancy possessed him, and in 1518, the year after his second wife’s death, he married again, and this time also with a view of succeeding Charles V., for he married his own niece, the sister of the Emperor. She survived him, and afterwards married Francis I. of France.

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.