[1580 - 1640] The Iberian Union (Philippine Dynasty)

The year is 1578. A feverish dream of glory has seized Portugal’s young king, Sebastião. He is not a statesman; he is a crusader born out of time, his mind filled with chivalric tales. Against all sober advice, he gathers a vast army—some 17,000 men—and sails for Morocco, intent on a holy war. On the scorching plains of Alcácer Quibir, under a relentless African sun, his dream turns to a nightmare. The Portuguese army, laden with heavy European armour and outmanoeuvred by the swift Saadian forces, is not just defeated; it is annihilated. In the chaos of that single, disastrous day, King Sebastião vanishes. Did he fall in the desperate final charge? Was he captured? Did he escape, destined to return one day to reclaim his kingdom? No one knew. His body was never definitively identified. Portugal was left with more than just a military catastrophe; it was left without a king and without an heir. An old, childless cardinal, Sebastião’s great-uncle Henrique, takes the throne. He is a temporary solution, a man of God holding a place for a king who will never come. When he dies just two years later, in 1580, the House of Aviz, which had guided Portugal through its golden Age of Discovery, is extinguished. A power vacuum is the most dangerous space in politics. And into this void steps the most powerful man in Europe: King Philip II of Spain. Philip’s claim was strong; his mother was Isabella of Portugal, daughter of a Portuguese king. He was not, in his eyes, a foreign invader, but a rightful inheritor. With a combination of bribery to sway the Portuguese nobility and the undeniable threat of his formidable armies, he outmanoeuvres his main rival, a populist claimant named António, Prior of Crato. António’s brief, desperate resistance is crushed. By 1581, Philip II of Spain is also Philip I of Portugal. The Iberian Union has begun. To a nation fiercely proud of its independence, its language, and its global achievements, this was a bitter pill to swallow. Philip, a shrewd politician, understood this. At the Cortes of Tomar in 1581, he made a solemn oath, a series of promises designed to soothe Portuguese pride. Portugal and Spain would be two kingdoms under one crown, not a single, unified state. Portugal would keep its own laws, its own currency (the *real*), its own government, and its own language. The lucrative posts in the Portuguese Empire, from Brazil to Goa, would be reserved for Portuguese nobles. He even promised to hold court in Lisbon from time to time. It was a union, he assured them, of equals. For a time, it almost seemed to work. The union brought stability. The combined might of the two greatest colonial empires on earth was staggering. The world map was now dominated by a single dynasty, controlling territory from Mexico and Peru, with their rivers of silver, to the spice-rich islands of the Moluccas and the trading post of Macau in China. The wealth that flowed through Lisbon and Seville was immense. You could see the shift in the very stones of the cities. The flamboyant, sea-inspired Manueline architecture of the previous age—with its carved ropes, shells, and armillary spheres—gave way to a new, more severe style. This was the "Estilo Chão," or the Plain Style. It was imposing, geometric, and rational, reflecting the solemn, bureaucratic nature of the Habsburg court. Great buildings like the Monastery of São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon rose up, monuments of grandeur and order, their clean lines a stark contrast to the organic chaos of the old style. But beneath the surface of this ordered union, resentment festered and grew. The promises of Tomar began to fray. Philip II visited Portugal only once after his coronation. His successors, Philip III and Philip IV, never set foot in the country at all. Lisbon, once the vibrant heart of a global empire, began to feel like a provincial backwater, its affairs managed by distant bureaucrats in Madrid. Worse still, Portugal inherited Spain's enemies. The Dutch and the English, once Portuguese trading partners, were now bitter foes of the Habsburgs. They began to attack Portugal’s vulnerabilities. The immensely profitable spice trade was a prime target. The Dutch East India Company, a marvel of early corporate power, systematically dismantled Portuguese control in Asia, capturing fortress after fortress. In the Atlantic, they briefly seized control of the sugar-producing heartland of Brazil. Each loss was a blow not just to the treasury, but to Portuguese honour. Their empire, built over generations with blood and daring, was being siphoned away to pay for Spanish wars in Flanders and Germany. By the 1630s, the situation had become intolerable. In Madrid, the powerful chief minister of Philip IV, the Count-Duke of Olivares, was determined to centralize the Spanish monarchy. He saw the separate laws and privileges of regions like Portugal and Catalonia as obstacles to a modern, efficient state. His solution? Force them into the Spanish mould. He levied new, crushing taxes on the Portuguese and, in the final, unforgivable insult, demanded that Portuguese nobles and their soldiers go to fight for Spain against a rebellion in Catalonia. This was the spark that lit the flame. Forcing the Portuguese to fight to suppress another people’s rebellion against the very same centralized power they themselves despised was too much. A conspiracy began to form in the shadowy halls of Lisbon’s palaces. A group of forty nobles, *Os Quarenta Conjurados*, risked everything. Their chosen leader was the most powerful nobleman in the land, a man who had the best claim to a native Portuguese throne: the Duke of Braganza. On the cold morning of December 1st, 1640, the conspirators struck. They stormed the royal palace overlooking the Tagus River. Their target was Miguel de Vasconcelos, the hated Secretary of State, a Portuguese man seen as a puppet of Olivares. They found him hiding in a cupboard. A pistol shot rang out, and his body was unceremoniously thrown from the palace window to the cheering crowds below. The Spanish regent, the Duchess of Mantua, was imprisoned. The conspirators rushed to the palace of the Duke of Braganza and declared him King João IV of Portugal. Legend says the Duke himself was hesitant, but his ambitious Spanish wife, Luisa de Guzmán, spurred him on with words that would echo through Portuguese history: "Better to be queen for a day than a duchess for a lifetime." The sixty-year union was over. But the fight was not. The acclamation of a new king was a declaration of independence, but it would take another 28 years of bloody warfare to force Spain to finally recognize it. The phantom king, Sebastião, never returned from the sands of Morocco, but on that winter day in 1640, the spirit of Portuguese independence most certainly did.