Lisbon

What was Lisbon like around 1715?

Lisbon sits where the River Tagus widens into a great harbour before meeting the Atlantic. It was the capital of Portugal and of an empire that reached from Brazil to Angola and India.

King João V came to the throne in 1706. Portugal made peace with France in 1713 and with Spain in 1715. Gold, and later diamonds, from Brazil gave the king so much money of his own that he stopped calling the Cortes, Portugal’s parliament. He spent lavishly on churches, palaces and his court. In 1716 he had Lisbon’s archbishop made a patriarch, a very senior church rank, and in 1720 he founded a Royal Academy of History.

Portugal and England were old friends. Their alliance dates from a treaty of 1373, and the British government still calls it the oldest diplomatic alliance in the world.

How did Brazilian gold reach Lisbon?

In the 1690s prospectors found gold in the rivers of Brazil’s interior, in the region later called Minas Gerais, “General Mines”. A gold rush followed from about 1693 to 1695. The crown claimed a fifth of all gold, a tax called the royal fifth.

The gold travelled to the coast and sailed for Portugal in the Brazil fleets, convoys of merchant ships from Rio de Janeiro, Salvador da Bahia and Pernambuco, guarded by royal warships. They also carried Brazilian sugar and tobacco. The fleets landed at Lisbon and at Porto. From 1720 gold arriving in Lisbon had to be registered at the city’s Mint, and almost all of it was turned into coins there. Portugal kept this convoy system until 1765.

Why did so much of Brazil’s gold end up in England?

On 27 December 1703 the English envoy John Methuen signed a trade treaty with Portugal. England lowered its taxes on Portuguese wine, and Portugal opened its markets to English woollen cloth. Wine for woollens became the backbone of trade between the two countries. Portugal’s own cloth industry suffered.

England sold Portugal far more than it bought, and the difference was paid in Brazilian gold. Historians estimate that somewhere between half and three-quarters of the gold reaching the Tagus left again, mostly for England, some of it smuggled. Small mail ships called packet boats carried much of it to Falmouth in Cornwall. London’s mint turned more than a million pounds’ worth of Portuguese gold into English coins between 1710 and 1714, and in 1713 a man in Exeter said almost all the money there was Portuguese gold.

What was the British Factory in Lisbon?

English merchants had lived in Lisbon since at least the early 1600s. A treaty of 1654 gave them special privileges, and they organised themselves as the Factory. Here the word meant a merchants’ association, not a workshop. It lasted until 1810.

The treaty of 1703 made the years that followed a golden age for these merchants. In the early 1720s, by one historian’s count, about six hundred English ships a year called at Lisbon. They brought cloth, cod and grain and loaded wine, Brazilian goods and gold. Only after 1755 did Portugal’s chief minister, later the Marquês de Pombal, set out to curb their privileges.

Why did Lisbon buy salt cod and grain?

Portugal had not grown enough grain to feed itself since the Middle Ages, and it imported wheat, often from England. Selling grain became an important business for the British merchants of the Factory. Shipments of flour and wheat from the American colonies grew later, becoming large only from the late 1730s.

Salt cod, called bacalhau in Portuguese, was an everyday food. Around this time Portugal bought 150,000 quintals (a quintal was roughly a hundredweight) or more of salt fish a year from the English fishery at Newfoundland. During the war of 1702 to 1713, when Spain was closed to English traders, Portugal was the only market still buying English cod.

Rice from Carolina came later. From 1704 English law forced colonial rice to travel through England first, and sales to Portugal and Spain nearly stopped. Only after a law of 1730 allowed rice to sail straight to southern Europe did Portugal become a big buyer.

What part did Lisbon play in the slave trade?

Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other place in the Americas: about 4.9 million people over nearly four centuries, according to the SlaveVoyages database. Many were taken from Angola, a Portuguese colony, through the port of Luanda. The gold rush made demand even greater, as enslaved people were forced to work the mines as well as the sugar plantations. In 1701 the crown tried to limit how many could be sent to the mines, but miners bought more illegally with untaxed gold.

Much of this trade ran directly between Brazil and Angola, and Brazilian ships carried many of the captives. Historians disagree about how much Lisbon controlled it. Some argue that Lisbon merchants held the royal contracts, lent the money and supplied most of the cloth, guns and other goods used to buy captives in Angola. Others stress the role of merchants in Brazil. Either way, Brazilian gold, sugar and tobacco bought with this forced labour flowed back to Lisbon.

What did the Inquisition do in Lisbon?

The Inquisition was a church court that tried people for religious crimes. In Portugal its main targets were New Christians, descendants of Jews who had been forced to convert, accused of secretly practising Judaism. From 1708 dozens of New Christians in Rio de Janeiro were arrested and shipped to Lisbon for trial. They were sentenced at autos-da-fé, public ceremonies of judgement, in 1709, 1711, 1713 and 1716, and lost their property. At Lisbon autos in 1726, 1729 and 1730 some prisoners were burned to death.

One of those caught up in the Rio arrests was Mariana Pequena, a woman from Angola who had been enslaved and taken to Brazil, and won her freedom there. The Lisbon Inquisition condemned her in 1711. Many New Christians fled instead: about 1,500 refugees from Portugal joined the Jewish community in London between 1700 and 1730.

What happened to Lisbon later?

On the morning of 1 November 1755, All Saints’ Day, a huge earthquake struck. A tsunami swept the waterfront and fires burned for about six days. Estimates of the dead in Lisbon range from about 40,000 to 60,000. Much of the city that João V knew was lost and had to be rebuilt. The Brazil fleets ended in 1765.