An earthquake handed Portugal to its most feared minister
When the 1755 earthquake flattened Lisbon, one of the deadliest in history, a little-known minister kept order, organised relief and rebuilt the capital in a new style still named after him. That crisis made Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e Melo, later Marquis of Pombal, the real ruler of Portugal for over two decades.
Until his mid-fifties his career was fairly obscure. A country squire's son born in 1699, he studied law at Coimbra, served briefly as an army corporal and caused a scandal in 1723 by eloping with the widowed niece of a count, whose powerful family made life hard for the couple. His uncle, an influential cleric, later secured him the post of ambassador in London in 1738. There he joined the Royal Society and studied what made British trade and naval power so strong, though he never became fluent in English. A spell as envoy in Austria followed.
King Joseph I made him foreign secretary in 1750, and despite hostility from the old nobility he became chief minister in all but name by 1755. The Tavora affair of 1759 let him crush aristocratic rivals, several of whom were executed, and expel the Jesuits. He was created Count of Oeiras that year and Marquis of Pombal in 1769.
His programme blended absolutism with Enlightenment ideas. He set up royal monopolies, chartered companies and guilds, and marked out the Douro wine region to regulate port. He kept the old British alliance, which helped repel a Spanish invasion in 1762. He gave civil rights to New Christians and banned importing enslaved Black people into mainland Portugal, while simultaneously founding a company to expand the slave trade to Brazil. He also ran censorship and put his brother in charge of the Inquisition.
The methods were brutal, curbing liberties and persecuting opponents, which earned him the nickname Nero of Trafaria after a defiant village near Lisbon was burned on his orders. When Joseph died in 1777 and Maria I took the throne, Pombal was stripped of office, put on trial and banished to his country properties; he died there in 1782. His reputation remains fiercely argued over.
Source: Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal
