Manuel I of Portugal

• 1. Introduction

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  Manuel I of Portugal died on the 13th of December 1521, with Lisbon gripped by an outbreak of the Black Plague. His court had stayed inside Ribeira Palace as the city suffered around them. A king who had made Portugal the wealthiest nation in Europe could not outrun the same disease that killed ordinary Lisboans. His body was carried the next day in a black velvet-draped coffin through streets lined with mourners, on its way to a provisional resting place at Restelo Church.

  But who was this man that history calls the Fortunate? Born the ninth child of a minor branch of the royal family, Manuel had no obvious claim to the throne. He rose through a series of deaths, executions, and dynastic accidents to become King of Portugal in 1495. What followed was a reign that sent ships to India, Brazil, and the Persian Gulf, and produced an architectural style still called Manueline in his honor today.

  How did one monarch preside over so much at once? And at what cost to the people who lived under his rule?

• 2. An Unlikely King

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  Manuel was born on the 31st of May 1469 in Alcochete, the ninth child of Ferdinand, Duke of Viseu, and Beatriz of Portugal. In a family that large, the throne was a remote prospect. His father was a nephew of Afonso V of Portugal, and his mother was a granddaughter of King John I, but Manuel himself was far down the line of succession.

  The path to the throne opened violently. In 1483, Fernando II, Duke of Braganza, leader of Portugal's most powerful feudal family, was executed for treason by King John II. A year later, John II stabbed Manuel's own older brother, Diogo, Duke of Viseu, to death with his own hand. Diogo had been accused of conspiring against the crown.

  John II then lost his legitimate son, Prince Afonso, and his attempts to legitimize his illegitimate son Jorge de Lencastre, Duke of Coimbra, ultimately failed. With no viable heir remaining, John named Manuel to succeed him. Manuel took the crown in 1495, inheriting not just a kingdom but a growing empire that his cousin had spent years building toward the sea.

• 3. The World Opened Up

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  Vasco da Gama's discovery of a maritime route to India in 1498 was the pivot on which Manuel's entire reign turned. It was the achievement that made everything else possible, and Manuel had financed the voyage. The route meant Portugal could bypass the Muslim-controlled overland trade networks and reach the spice markets of Asia directly.

  Pedro Alvares Cabral reached Brazil in 1500. Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real voyaged to Labrador in 1501. Fernao de Loronha built the first Portuguese trading post in Brazil in 1503, the same year Afonso de Albuquerque constructed a fort in the allied Kingdom of Cochin in India. By 1505, Francisco de Almeida, serving as the first viceroy of India, was building forts at Kilwa, Sofala, Angediva, and Cannanore.

  Manuel's strategic thinking ran in several directions at once. He wanted to strangle Muslim trade in the Indian Ocean by seizing its chokepoints. Capturing Aden would block traffic through the Red Sea. Controlling Ormuz in the Persian Gulf would cut off another major route. Taking Malacca would dominate trade with China. Albuquerque delivered Goa in 1510, Malacca in 1511, and Ormuz in 1515. Diogo de Azambuja took Essaouira in Morocco in 1506 and Safi in 1508. Tristao da Cunha seized the island of Socotra in 1507.

  Manuel styled himself King of Portugal and the Algarves, on this side and beyond the Sea in Africa, Lord of Guinea and the Lord of Conquest, Navigation and Commerce in Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India. The title alone was a map of his ambitions.

• 4. The Engine of Empire

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  Every ship that sailed under Manuel's flag was tracked through the Casa da India, a royal institution he established to manage Portugal's monopolies and coordinate imperial expansion. Trade did not flow freely. It flowed through the crown.

  The spice trade guaranteed by the sea route to India made Manuel the wealthiest monarch in Europe. He used that wealth deliberately. He became one of the great patrons of the Portuguese Renaissance, drawing artists and intellectuals to his court. Among them was Gil Vicente, the playwright whom history calls the father of Portuguese and Spanish theatre. Manuel also sponsored Francisco Alvares and other missionaries sent to the new colonies.

  Portugal's diplomats worked at the highest levels of world power. Commercial treaties and alliances were forged with the Ming dynasty of China and the Persian Safavid dynasty. Manuel sent a monumental embassy to Pope Leo X, designed to put Portugal's new riches on display before all of Europe. The Manueline architectural style, named for the king and now considered Portugal's national architecture, gave physical shape to this prosperity in stone.

  The Manueline Ordinances, a comprehensive recodification of the kingdom's laws, came out of this same period. Manuel reformed the courts of justice and the municipal charters, modernizing taxes and revising the concepts of tributes and rights. The Cortes, the assembly of the kingdom, met only four times during his reign, always in Lisbon, a sign of how thoroughly royal absolutism had concentrated power.

• 5. Faith, Forced Conversion, and Violence

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  At the start of his reign, Manuel reversed some of the harshest treatment that John II had imposed on Portugal's Jewish population. That shift did not last. In 1496, seeking to marry Infanta Isabella of Aragon, Manuel came under pressure from her parents, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He decreed that Jews who refused baptism must leave the country.

  Then, before the deadline for their expulsion arrived, he went further. By royal decree, he converted all remaining Jews to Christianity. The period technically ended the presence of practicing Jews in Portugal. Those who were converted, and their descendants, were called New Christians and given a grace period during which no inquiries into their faith were permitted. That protection was later extended to end in 1534.

  In 1506, during the Lisbon massacre, thousands of people accused of being Jews were killed by a rioting mob. Manuel had the leaders of the riot executed. He also ordered the expulsion of Muslims from Portugal and pressured Ferdinand and Isabella to end the toleration of Islam in Spain.

  Manuel was a genuinely religious man by the standards of his time. He invested heavily in missionary work in the new colonies and sponsored the construction of the Monastery of Jeronimos. He also pushed for a new crusade against the Turks. Pope Julius II awarded him the Golden Rose in 1506, and Pope Leo X awarded him a second Golden Rose in 1514, making Manuel the first person after Emperor Sigismund von Luxembourg to receive that honor more than once.

• 6. A Dynasty Built on Marriage

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  Manuel married three times, and all three wives came from the same family: Isabella, Maria, and Eleanor were daughters and a granddaughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The first marriage, to Isabella of Aragon, carried enormous stakes. Their son, Miguel da Paz, was named Prince of Asturias, Prince of Portugal, and Prince of Girona, making him heir to Castile, Portugal, and Aragon all at once. Miguel died in 1500 at the age of two, and with him died the possibility of a unified Iberian monarchy under Portuguese influence.

  Manuel's second wife, Maria of Aragon, was Isabella's younger sister. Two of their sons became kings of Portugal: John III, born on the 7th of June 1502, and Henry I, born on the 31st of January 1512. Henry would reign from 1578 to 1580 as the only cardinal in history to serve as king. Maria died in 1517 from complications of pregnancy.

  Manuel then married Eleanor of Austria, Maria's niece. Eleanor outlived Manuel and later became Queen Consort of France. Among the children of the second marriage, Isabel became Holy Roman Empress by marrying Charles V, while Beatriz married Charles III, Duke of Savoy. The youngest child of that third marriage, Maria, Duchess of Viseu, born on the 18th of June 1521, would live until 1577 and was known in her time as the richest woman in Europe.