Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/567

Rh HISTORY.] PORTUGAL 545 king was now bent on the old chimerical scheme of win ning Castile ; for that purpose he married in 1475 his own niece, the infanta Joanna, only daughter of Henry IV. of Castile, and claimed the kingdom ; but the Castilians pre ferred the infanta Isabella, who had married Ferdinand, king of Aragon. The rival parties took up arms ; and the king of Portugal was utterly defeated at Toro in 1476, which sent him hurriedly to France to beg help from Louis XI. ; but his mission was in vain, and he saw no alterna tive save signing the treaty of Alcantara (1478), by which his newly-won wife was sent to a convent. He remained inconsolable at his loss, and alternately abdicated and returned until his death in 1481. ci II. His successor, John II., was a monarch of a very different type : though he had proved himself a brave and valiant soldier at the battle of Toro, he pursued the old policy of the house of Aviz, that of peace and family alliances with Castile and of commercial intimacy with England. But he was also a typical king of this period, and followed the example of Louis XI. in France and Henry VII. in England in breaking the power of the nobles, with the hearty acquiescence of the people. Besides political reasons for this policy, he remembered that he was the grandson of the great duke of Coimbra, and bound to revenge his murder at Alfarrobeira. The first act of his reign was to summon a full cortes at Evora, at which it was decreed that the royal corregidors should have full right to admin ister justice in all the feudal dominions of the nobility. This act brought him of course into direct conflict with the nobility, who were headed by Ferdinand, duke of Braganza, to the king s great delight, for, as he said, the wanton liberality of his father had left him only the high roads of Portugal for his inheritance. Hence the duke of Braganza was naturally the first object of the king s attack. He was the wealthiest nobleman not only in Por tugal but in the whole Peninsula ; his brothers held the high offices of constable and chancellor of the kingdom, and they too had all assisted in the overthrow of the duke of Coimbra. He believed himself to be safe because he and the king had married sisters, but he was promptly arrested for high treason, and after a very short trial exe cuted at Evora on 22d June 1483. His own and the king s brother-in-law, Ferdinand, duke of Viseu, a grand son of King Edward, succeeded to the leadership of the nobles ; but John II., imitating Louis XL s policy of not sparing his own family, stabbed him with his own hand at Setubal on 23d August 1484, and afterwards executed some eighty of the leading nobles, breaking the feudal power of the class for ever. This terrible struggle over, he occupied himself with such success in administration that he won the surname of &quot;the Perfect King.&quot; But he did not intend to keep the Portuguese in idleness. He was surrounded by the gallant knights who had been trained by his father, and who, though now frightened out of treason, yet needed some occupation, and at his court were the famous navigators trained by Dom Henry. In 1484 he built a fort at La Mina or Elmina to cover the increasing trade with the Gold Coast, and in 1486 Bartholomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached Algoa Bay. The king was full of plans for reach ing India and discovering Prester John ; besides despatch ing a special expedition for this purpose in 1487, he sent Pedro de Evora and Gongalo Annes to Timbuctoo, and Martini Lopes to Nova Zembla to find a north-east road to Cathay. With all his perspicacity, he made the great mistake of dismissing Columbus in 1493 as a visionary ; but he was occupied to the very last day of his life in getting ready the fleet with which Vasco de Gama was to find out the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope (see vol. x. p. 181 sq.). It was in his reign, in 1494, that the pope issued his famous bull dividing the undiscovered parts of the world between Spaniards and Portuguese. A great sorrow darkened the later years of John II. in the death of his only son Affonso, who in 1490 had married Isabella, eldest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain ; and he himself died in the flower of his age in 1495. The reign of Emmanuel &quot;the Fortunate,&quot; brother of Emman- the murdered duke of Viseu, is the heroic period of uel - Portuguese history. The great men and brave knights of the reigns of Affonso V. and John II. were still living, and Vasco de Gama, Francisco de Almeida, and Affonso de Albuquerque were to make their king s reign for ever glorious. Yet Emmanuel personally contributed L -1 t little to this glory ; his one idea was to sit on the throne of Castile. To gain this end he proposed to marry Isabella, eldest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and widow of Dom Affonso, and to win her hand he consented to expel the Jews from Portugal, although they were the richest and most useful class of people in the kingdom, and had been faithfully protected ever since the days of Affonso Henriques. He married Isabella in 1497, and was on a progress through Spain in the following year for the pur pose of being recognized as heir to the throne, when he died suddenly at Toledo, and with her disappeared his great hopes. Even then he did not despair, but in 1500 married his deceased wife s sister, Maria, though her elder sister Joanna was also married, and had a son, who was afterwards the emperor Charles V. While the king was thus occupied great things were being done in Asia by his subjects. In 1497 Vasco de Gama had crossed the Indian Ocean and reached Calicut ; in 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral discovered Brazil on his way to India; in 1502 Vasco de Gama paid his second visit to the Malabar coast ; in 1503 Duarte Pacheco defended Cochin and with 900 Portuguese defeated an army of 50,000 natives; and in 1505 Francisco de Almeida was appointed first viceroy of India. This is not the place to dilate on the great deeds of ALBUQUERQUE (q.v.) and of the Portuguese in India ; it is enough here to mark the dates of a few of the most important dis coveries and feats of arms which illustrate the reign of Emmanuel. In 1501 Joao da Nova discovered the island of Ascension and Amerigo Vespucci the Rio Plata and Paraguay; in 1509 Diogo Lopes de Sequieira occupied Malacca; in 1510 Affonso de Albuquerque occupied Goa ; in 1512 Francisco Senao discovered the Moluccas; in 1515 Lopes Soares built a fort at Colombo in the island of Ceylon; in 1517 Fernando Peres Andrada established himself at Canton, and made his way to Peking in 1521 ; and in 1520 Magalhaes (Magellan), a Portuguese sailor, though in the Spanish service, passed through the straits which bear his name. The reign of John III., who succeeded Emmanuel in John III. 1521, is one of rapid decline. The destruction of the feudal power of the nobility by John II. had not been an unmixed good : it had fatally weakened the class of leaders of the people ; the nobility lost all sense of patriotism and intrigued for &quot;moradias,&quot; or court posts; and, in short, their position was much the same as that of the French nobility before the Revolution of 1789. The overthrow of their power had also made the king absolute ; having now no feudal nobility to combat, he had no need of the support of the people, and the newly-created Indian trade brought him an income greater than that of any prince in Europe, so that he had no need of taxes. There was, however, a more serious cause of the declining power of Portugal than the absolutism of the government, and that was the rapid depopulation of the country. Alemtejo and Algarves had never been thoroughly peopled ; the devasta tion produced by constant war could not be easily repaired ; and, though the exertions of Diniz the Labourer had made XIX. 69