Sebastian

King of Portugal (r. 1557-1578)

• Born: January 20, 1554
• Birthplace: Lisbon, Portugal
• Died: August 4, 1578
• Place of death: Ksar el Kebir, Morocco

Sebastian’s dreams of invading North Africa and extending Portuguese territories there culminated in disaster, when the young king was killed along with nearly all his men in Morocco, thus extinguishing the reigning Portuguese Avis Dynasty. His name, however, lingered in Portuguese popular consciousness as a king who would return to usher in a better age.

Early Life

Historians consider the rule of Sebastian, sixteenth king of Portugal, as falling into two periods. The first from his immediate accession to the throne on June 16, 1557, at the age of three and in circumstances of great jubilation since the Crown risked falling to Spain was a period of regency. The first regent was Sebastian’s grandmother Catherine, the widowed queen of John III and sister of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and the second regent, from 1562, was Cardinal Henry. Of these two regencies, the former is accredited conscientiousness, the second incompetence. The second period of Sebastian’s rule followed his coronation on January 20, 1568, celebrated on the occasion of his coming of age at fourteen years.

Sebastian, despite a good physique, was of fragile health. He was subject to dizziness and fits of shivers and, in an age of high infant mortality, was not widely expected to survive. From early in life, however, he demonstrated two great passions: war and religious zeal, which his milieu only exacerbated. He grew up in the conviction that his future reserved great things for him, though his mysticism and fanaticism made of him a difficult and unwise leader of men.

He had little interest in study, despite having instructors as famed as the mathematician Pedro Nunes; he preferred jousting and horse riding. Sebastian’s religious proclivity manifested itself in his active support of missionary activity in the East and, especially, in his court, which came to resemble more a school of religious observation than a court of individual courtiers. His fundamentalism was reflected in his glee at attending the autos-da-fé of the Holy Office and his approval of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France.

Growing up amid two courtly regencies of opposing interests, Don Sebastian avoided both, championing instead a group of favorites, young men of his age with martial interests and keen to push the young king for the sake of self-advancement. Despite a number of possible brides, Sebastian showed only the greatest repugnance to the idea of marriage. Sebastian was also not much interested in affairs of state, nor did he have the patience or prudence to be very effective. These charges and responsibilities he happily passed to Martim Gonçalves da Câmara, erstwhile rector of the University of Coimbra, and Martinho Pereira. This allowed Sebastian the liberty of living his dream of crusade: subjecting the lands of Barbary, razing the walls of Constantinople, making himself lord of the Egyptian caliphate, and bringing Palestine into his sovereignty.

Life’s Work

Sebastian thus lived in his dreams, keeping him far not only from the affairs of state but also from his people, for whose sake he did not summon the Cortes (parliament) even once, and he refrained from traveling the countryside dispensing justice as his forebears had done. The regime remained far from his hands and became an object of detestation in the eyes of the people.

His reign did, however, see a fair amount of legislation (seventeen decrees, twenty-three laws, and fifty-two provisions) which, for the most part, were enacted before 1573, after which royal grants were more the norm. Legislative boundaries were redrawn, creating two jurisdictions (alçadas) for the counties north of the Tagus and another for the south. Otherwise, the royal monopoly on spices was abandoned in 1570 in favor of a system of contracts, which came into effect in 1576. The problem of piracy was addressed with legislation insisting on the accompaniment of a stipulated number of crew according to the ship’s tonnage. Military squadrons were dispatched to confront the corsairs off the rivers of Guinea and São Tomé.

Sebastian’s African policy began with exhortations to his governor Rodrigo de Sousa de Carvalho to enlarge the territories of the Portuguese military footholds in Tangier. After a personal visit in August, 1574, during which Sebastian saw for himself the impossibility of conquering seaports in Morocco, the idea of African crusades nevertheless continued to fascinate him. The excuse he sought to intervene more forcefully was found in a dispute within the Sa’di Dynasty surrounding a struggle for leadership following the death of al-Ghalib (r. 1557-1574). Sebastian tried to convince the Spanish to join an alliance, reasoning that once a successor to al-Ghalib succeeded in conquering Morocco, the peninsula would be easy prey to the Turks. Philip II of Spain remained unconvinced. Sebastian similarly tried to involve England in his Moorish plans, but the lord high treasurer and counselor to Queen Elizabeth I, William Cecil, first Baron Burghley, would have no part in the plan.

Undaunted, various measures were adopted to fill the royal treasury and pay for Sebastian’s campaigns in North Africa. The pope was prevailed on to announce the African expedition a crusade and to force the holders of ecclesiastical benefices to contribute a certain tax to the state. Prelates, officeholders, wealthy merchants, and principal towns of the realm were asked to make a voluntary contribution to the royal treasury. Even the special funds for orphans and of the “dead and absent” (defuntos e ausentes) were raided with the promise that they would be promptly replenished on the king’s return from Africa. Rights to salt and pepper were contracted out, while the New Christians were offered a ten-year amnesty in return for 240,000 cruzados.

Armed and supplied, Sebastian’s forces landed in Tangier, Morocco, and moved on to Arzila. From there on July 29, 1578, a small and ill-equipped Portuguese expeditionary force, led by the king himself, set out for Larache on an overland march. On August 4, 1578, it was engaged in battle at Ksar el Kebir (also known as the Battle of the Three Kings or, in the Arab tradition, the Wad el-Mekhazen). It was a disaster for the Portuguese. More than eight thousand Portuguese died, while fifteen thousand of the Portuguese and their allied forces became prisoners in Morocco. Sebastian was killed along with the flower of the Portuguese nobility. The Moroccan leader was drowned while fording a river. Only one hundred people from the Portuguese host managed to avoid death or capture and to make their way back to the fleet anchored off the coast.

Significance

The aftermath of defeat at Ksar el Kebir in Portugal was upheaval and domestic chaos akin to that of the 1383-1385 dynastic revolution, chiefly because of the lack of an obvious successor. In 1580, Spain annexed Portugal.

In another development, Sebastian became associated with a particular strain of Portuguese messianism, which was fed by rumors that the body that had been handed over to the governor of Ceuta (a Spanish enclave in Morocco) in December, 1578, was not Sebastian’s. The belief persisted that the king had survived and would return again one morning to make Portugal great again. The belief that Sebastian still lived received encouragement from a story published in France. It claimed that a wounded noble arrived in Tangier soon after the battle and won admittance to the fortress by declaring himself to be the king. Other versions rumored Sebastian to be living with the mythical priest-king Prester John in Persia or incognito somewhere in Europe. Indeed, pretenders presented themselves sporadically at the Portuguese court and elsewhere, only to be unmasked and executed. None of these executions, however, quelled belief in the Rei Encuberto, or hidden king, whose cult persisted often in semiofficial circles into the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Birmingham, David. A Concise History of Portugal. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. A good and accessible overview that includes discussion of Sebastian. Also includes bibliographical references.

Bovill, E. W. The Battle of Alcazar: An Account of the Defeat of Don Sebastian of Portugal at El-Ksar el-Kebir. London: Batchworth Press, 1952. A full if somewhat old-fashioned narrative account of the train of events leading to the battle, as well as a description of the deadly battle itself.

Bowen, Marjorie. “Dom Sebastião, King of Portugal and Algarve (1554-1578).” In Sundry Great Gentlemen: Some Essays in Historical Biography. London: Lane, 1928. Very much a biographical panegyric and written in a romantic style but based on sound bibliographic research. The idea sustained is that Sebastian was one of the last gleams of medieval chivalry.

Olsen, H. Eric R. The Calabrian Charlatan, 1598-1603: Messianic Nationalism in Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. The microstudy of one of the many pretenders to come forward and claim to be the Portuguese king Sebastian, in this instance twenty years after his death among a community of Portuguese exiles in Venice. Olsen describes the political and millenarist context of the day as he traces the charlatan’s rapid demise at the hands of the Spanish authorities.