D. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal and 1st Count of Oeiras (Sernancelhe, Viseu, 13 May 1699 – 8 May 1782, Pombal), known as the Marquis of Pombal ( ), was a Portuguese statesman and diplomat. During the reign of King Joseph I from 1750 to 1777, Pombal served as the king's leading minister and would become the dominant political force in the Kingdom of Portugal and its overseas empire.
The son of a country squire and nephew of a prominent cleric, Pombal studied at the University of Coimbra before briefly serving in the Portuguese Army. Upon leaving the army, Pombal would return to academic life in Lisbon. In 1733, he withdrew to his family's estate in Soure after eloping with the widowed niece of a prominent nobleman. In 1738, with his uncle's assistance, he secured an appointment as King John V's ambassador to Great Britain. In 1745, he was named ambassador to Austria and served until 1749. When Joseph I ascended the throne in 1750, Pombal was appointed as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
Despite entrenched opposition from the hereditary Portuguese nobility, Pombal gained Joseph's confidence and, by 1755, had become the king's de facto chief minister. Pombal secured his preeminence through his decisive management of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, one of the deadliest earthquakes in history; maintaining public order, organizing relief efforts, and supervising the capital's reconstruction in the Pombaline architectural style. Pombal was appointed as Secretary of State for Internal Affairs in 1756 and consolidated his authority during the Távora affair of 1759, resulting in the execution of leading members of the aristocratic opposition and the suppression of the Society of Jesus. In 1759, Joseph granted Pombal the title of Count of Oeiras and, in 1769, Marquis of Pombal.
A strong advocate for absolutism and influenced by some of the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, Pombal instituted an ambitious project of centralization, modernization, and reform directed at the kingdom's administrative, economic, and ecclesiastical institutions as well as the army and navy. During his lengthy ministerial career, the Marquis accumulated and exercised autocratic power, curtailing individual liberties, suppressing political opposition, and promoting the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil. His persecution of the Jesuits and Portuguese peasantry led him to be known as "Nero of Trafaria", in reference to a village near Lisbon that defied his authority and was subsequently burned down, with all its inhabitants inside, on his orders.
As a leading estrangeirado, Pombal was strongly influenced by his observations of British commercial and domestic policy. During his ascendency, Pombal implemented sweeping mercantilist reforms, including the establishment of a system of royal monopolies, chartered trading companies, and guilds governing each industry. These efforts included the demarcation of the Douro wine region, created to regulate the production and trade of port wine. In foreign policy, Pombal desired to decrease Portuguese reliance on Great Britain but maintained the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, which was activated during the Seven Years' War and would play a decisive role in repelling the Spanish invasion of Portugal in 1762. Pombal enacted domestic policies that prohibited the import of black slaves into mainland Portugal and Portuguese India, established the General Company of Pernambuco and Paraíba (Portuguese: Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba) to strengthen the commerce of African slaves to Brazil, brought the Portuguese Inquisition under his control with his brother as chief inquisitor, granted civil rights to the New Christians, and policed civil discourse through a royal board of censorship (Portuguese: Real Mesa Censória).
In 1777, Pombal fell from power following the death of Joseph I and subsequent accession of Queen Maria I. Amid accusations that he had abused his power and behaved tyrannically, Pombal was stripped of his offices, prosecuted, and ultimately exiled to his estates, where he died in 1782. His legacy was only partially rehabilitated about a century after his death, due to efforts by his descendants, and remains highly controversial.
Early life
Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo was born in Sernancelhe, Viseu, Portugal on May 13, 1699. He was the eldest son and the first of twelve children of Manuel de Carvalho e Ataíde, a country squire (Portuguese: Fidalgo) with properties in the Leiria region, and his wife Teresa Luísa de Mendonça e Melo. The family had attained its minor, through respectable noble status and accumulated holdings through generations of service to both the Portuguese crown and the Church. His father, Manuel, had served in both the army and navy, and in 1708 attained a position at court as officer of the court cavalry. Paulo de Carvalho e Ataíde, Manuel's younger brother, Sebastião José's uncle, was a politically influential cleric, professor at the University of Coimbra, and later an archpriest under the Patriarch of Lisbon. When Manuel's father died in 1720, Sebastião José and his siblings became reliant on the generosity and patronage of their uncle.
During his youth, Sebastião José studied law at the University of Coimbra before briefly serving in the Portuguese Army, reaching the rank of corporal. He then moved to Lisbon, where his uncle owned a large estate, and resumed his academic career. However, his situation in the capital became complicated when, in 1723, he eloped with Teresa de Noronha e Bourbon Mendonça e Almada (1689–1737), the widowed niece of the Count of Arcos. The Noronha family, among the highest and most preeminent noble houses in the kingdom, disapproved of the left-handed marriage and made life difficult for the young couple. They would eventually withdraw from Lisbon, and Sebastião José would spend the next seven years managing his family's estate in Pombal and continued studying law and history, and securing admission in 1734 to a royal historical society.
Sebastião José was fluent in Portuguese and French.
Political career Prior to his appointment as prime minister in 1755, Pombal had a relatively obscure career.
In 1738, with his uncle's assistance, Pombal received his first public appointment as the Portuguese ambassador to Great Britain, where, in 1740, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.The Royal Society, List of Fellows of the Royal Society 1660-2007. See under K-Z: Mello, Sebastian Joseph de Carvalho e, Marquis of Pombal.. Retrieved 28 December 2019. Pombal used his circulation among influential people to "investigate the causes, techniques, and mechanisms of British commercial and naval power."Maxwell. Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues. Routledge, 2013. pp. 94–95. . At his London residence, Pombal collected works by Thomas Mun, William Petty, Charles Davenant, Charles King, Joshua Gee, and Josiah Child. Pombal, however, did not become fluent in the English language during his time in Britain. By 25 September 1745, he had left his post in London.
Sir Benjamin Keene, a Member of Parliament who sat on the Board of Trade and would soon become British ambassador to Portugal, was not impressed by him. In a letter to British chargé d'affaires in Lisbon Abraham Castres dated October 1745, Keene shared his assessment of Pombal: "it is a poor Coimbran [mind] as ever I met with, to be as stubborn, as dull, is the true asinine quality... I shall only say that a little genius who has a mind to be a great one in a little country, is a very uneasy animal".
In 1745, he was appointed Portuguese ambassador to Austria. The Queen consort of Portugal, Archduchess Mary Anne Josepha of Austria (1683–1754), was fond of him; after his first wife died she arranged for him to marry the daughter of the Austrian field marshal Leopold Josef, Count von Daun. The King, John V, was not pleased, however, and recalled him in 1749. John V died the following year and his son Joseph I of Portugal was crowned king. Joseph I was fond of Pombal; with the Queen Mother's approval he appointed him as Minister of Foreign Affairs. As the King's confidence in him increased, the King entrusted him with more authority, more control over the state, and less oversight. By 1755, the King appointed him Prime Minister. Having witnessed and been impressed by Britain's economic success during his appointment to the Court of St. James's, Pombal implemented British-style mercantilist economic policies in Portugal.
In February 1761, during the reign of Joseph I, Pombal banned the import of black slaves within mainland Portugal and Portuguese India. This was not for humanitarian reasons, but because he wanted to prioritize the enslaved manpower demands of the Brazilian plantation economy. At the same time, he encouraged the trade in black slaves (referred to, in dehumanizing, instrumental terms as "pieces") to that colony, and two companies were founded, with the support and direct involvement of the Marquês de Pombal – the Grão Pará and Maranhão Company (Portuguese: Companhia do Grão-Pará and Maranhão) and the General Company of Pernambuco and Paraíba (Portuguese: Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba) – whose main activity consisted precisely in the trafficking of slaves, mostly from Africa, to Brazil. The list of shareholders of the two companies included, in addition to the Marquis himself, many nobles and clergy. Between 1757 and 1777, a total of 25,365 black slaves were shipped from the West African coast to Pará and Maranhão.
Pombal also reorganised the army and the navy, ended the Limpeza de Sangue (cleanliness of blood) civil statutes and their discrimination against New Christians (Jews that had converted to Christianity to escape the Portuguese Inquisition) and their descendants regardless of genealogical distance.
Pombaline Reforms The Pombaline Reforms were a series of reforms intended to make the Portuguese Empire economically self-sufficient by means of expanding Brazilian territory, streamlining the administration of colonial Brazil, and instituting fiscal and economic reforms both in the colony and in Portugal. However, implementing them would prove difficult and modern economists consider the policies to have largely failed in effecting the intended modernization of either the Portuguese or the Brazilian economy.
These reforms coincided with and often complimented Pombal's promotion and acceleration of the slave trade to Brazil. Certain policies actively encouraged slaveholding, such as a 1751 decree that protected colonists from foreclosure if they owned more than thirty slaves. Pombal believed that the expansion of Brazil, its economy, and the scale of resource exploitation would require a large-scale population transfer. In a secret letter to Captain general Gomes Friere de Andrade (1688–1763) dated January 1750, Pombal explains his reasoning: "as the power and wealth of every country consist principally in the number and multiplication of the people who inhabit it... this number is most indispensable now on the frontiers of Brazil". However, due to Brazil's size, providing this influx from Portugal alone was deemed "not humanly possible". In contrast to importing African slaves, Pombal also proposed the emancipation of Brazil's native population and its intermarriage with Portuguese colonists.