Portugal, Restoration of 1640

The revolt of December 1640 resulted in the acclamation of João IV, duke of Bragança, as king, bringing to an end sixty years of Spanish rule. Philip II had seized control of Portugal two years after the death of the unmarried King Sebastian at the battle of Alcacer Quibir in 1578. Prior to 1620, most of the opposition to the Hapsburgs came from the Portuguese masses, who were driven by economic hardship and by Sebastianism—the belief that King Sebastian, whose body was never recovered from the battlefield, would return to reclaim his throne. Portuguese elites voiced few protests during the early years of Spanish rule, which allowed a relatively high degree of administrative autonomy to the Portuguese and coincided with the rapid expansion of both the Brazil trade and contraband traffic with Spanish America. The Portuguese nobility and the church hierarchy generally accepted the Iberian union as a means of controlling the masses during a period of crisis in the domestic economy, and many Portuguese merchants (particularly New Christians, who faced persecution by the Inquisition) gained economic and social benefits from Spanish rule.

The independence movement gained ground rapidly after 1620 as a result of mounting domestic unrest and of military and economic threats to the Portuguese empire. As high taxation and increasing poverty among the masses led to a large-scale revolt in Évora (1637) and more limited rebellions elsewhere, the Dutch seized territory from the Portuguese in northeastern Brazil and West Africa, and gained dominance of the spice trade in Asia. The failure of the Spanish to mount an adequate counterattack in Brazil or to take steps to protect the Portuguese imperial economy strengthened Portuguese opposition to Philip IV. The gradual erosion of Portuguese political autonomy and the increasing provincialization of the nobility at the Vila Viçosa court of the Braganças (and at the courts of other leading families) added to the hostility of the Portuguese nobility toward the Spanish, as did the comparatively favorable position of New Christian merchants under the Hapsburgs.

The Restoration of 1640 is generally considered to have been conservative in character, a move to redress the grievances of the nobility and to forestall more widespread popular unrest of the kind that had occurred during the decade preceding independence. Portuguese jurists and clergymen produced an extensive literature that sought to legitimize the new dynasty, arguing that the people had a right to rebel against unjust rulers and that the Hapsburgs had usurped a crown that rightfully belonged to the Braganças. The war that followed the Restoration ended with the recognition by Spain of Portuguese independence in the peace treaty of 1668.

See alsoJoão IV of Portugal .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eduardo D'oliveira França, Portugal na época da Restauração (1951).

Charles R. Boxer, Salvador Correia de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1686 (1952).

Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, "Portugal and Her Empire, 1648–1688," in The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 5 (1961).

James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Bankers at the Court of Spain, 1626–1650 (1983).

Additional Bibliography

Stella, Roseli Santaella. Brasil durante el gobierno español, 1580–1640. Madrid: Fundación Histórica Tavera, 2000.

                                        Thomas M. Cohen