Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/569

Rh HISTORY.] PORTUGAL 547 the seven candidates only five need be seriously considered, for Pope Gregory XIII., who claimed as heir-general to a car dinal, and Catherine de Medici,who claimed through Affonso III. and his first wife, the countess of Boulogne, require no further notice ; the relationship of the other five to Em manuel can be best perceived from the following table : Emmanuel. John III., 6. 1502, d. 1557, m. Catherine of Austria John, b. 1537, d. 1554, m. Joanna of Spain. Sebastian, 6. 1554, d. 1578. Isabel, b. 1503, d. 1539, 7/1. Charles V. Philip II. Beatrice, b. 1504, d. 1538, m. Char es III. of Savoy. rhilibert Emmanuel, duke of Savoy. Louis, b. 1506, d. 1545, duke of I3eja. Antonio, prior of Crato (illegitimate). 1 | Ferdinand, Affonso, b. 1507, d. 1534, b. 1509, d. 1540, duke of Guarda. cardinal and archbishop of Lisbon. 1 i Henry, Edward, b. 1512, d. 1580, b. 1515, d. 1545, cardinal and duke of Guimaraeiis, king. m. Isabel of Braganza. 1 1 Catherine, m. duke of Braganza. 1 Maria, m. duke of Panna. i Ranuccio, duke of Parma. hpll f lain, It clearly appears that the heiress to the throne was Catherine, duchess of Braganza, and failing her heirs the duke of Farm; 1 ., and that the claims of Philip II. and of the duke of Savoy were only valid in case of the extinction of the line of Dom Edward. Yet, though the university of Coimbra declared in favour of the duchess of Braganza, Philip II. set to work to win over the majority of the cortes. Money and lavish promises assisted the eloquence of his two chief supporters, Christovfio de Moura and Antonio Pinheiro, bishop of Leiria ; and when the cardinal- king died on 31st January 1580 the cortes was quite ready to recognize Philip, although the people, or rather that small portion of the inhabitants who were really Portu guese, felt their old disinclination towards the union of Spain and Portugal. Philip prevented any movement on the part of the duke of Braganza by promising him Brazil with the title of king, and a marriage between the prince of the Asturias and his daughter, which, as the duke hated war and loved ease, were readily accepted ; but to Philip s surprise a competitor whom he had taken no account of, Antonio, the prior of Crato, declared himself king at San- tarem, and then entered Lisbon and struck money. Port ugal, however, enervated by wealth, oppressed by the Inqui sition, and reduced in free population, felt no inclination to make a powerful stand against Philip, who had all the prestige of being the son of Charles V., while the hot headed but incapable prior of Crato could not be compared to the great John I. ; and the cortes, which had in 1385, under the honeyed words of Joiio das Regras, enthusiasti cally fought for Portugal, in 1580 listened to the promises of Christovao de Moura and rejected the prior of Crato. The duke of Alva entered Portugal at the head of a Spanish army and easily defeated Dom Antonio at Alcantara, after which Philip was declared king of Portugal. The other candidates were obliged to acquiesce in Philip s success ; the duke of Braganza, though greatly dis appointed at receiving only the office of constable and the order of the Golden Fleece instead of the whole of Brazil, was, like the majority of his countrymen, too apathetic to strike a blow. Philip pledged himself to recognize the individuality of Portugal in a cortes held at Thomar in 1581, when he promised that he would maintain the rights and liberties of the people, that the cortes should be as sembled frequently, that all the offices in the realm should be given to Portuguese alone, that no lands or jurisdiction in Portugal should be given to foreigners, and that there should be a Portuguese council, which should accompany the king everywhere and have entire charge of all Portu guese affairs. But the lower classes refused to believe that Dom Sebastian was dead, a belief encouraged by the stratagem of a wounded noble on the evening of the battle of Al-kasr al-Kebir to gain admission into the city of Tangiers by asserting that he was the king ; and four successive impostors arose, who assumed the name of the dead monarch. The first two, who were mockingly called the &quot; king of Pennamacor &quot; and the &quot; king of Ericeira,&quot; were Portuguese of low birth, who were recognized by a few people in the vicinity of their native villages, and easily captured in 1584 and 1585; the third, Gabriel Espinosa, was given out as Dom Sebastian by a Portuguese Jesuit, and introduced as such to Donna Anna, a natural daughter of Don John of Austria, who believed in him, but he was executed in 1594 ; while the fourth, a poor Calabrian named Marco Tullio, who could not speak a word of Portuguese, asserted his pretensions at Venice as late as 1603, twenty-five years after Dom Sebastian s death, and, after obtaining some success in Italy, was also captured, sent to the galleys, and afterwards executed. Of more importance were the renewed attempts of the prior of Crato to assert his claims with the assistance of foreign allies. In 1582 he proceeded to the Azores with a strong French fleet under Philip Strozzi, but his ill-fortune fol lowed him : Strozzi was defeated and killed in a battle with the Spanish admiral Don Alvaro de Bacam, and Dom Antonio fled to England. There Elizabeth received him kindly, and in 1589 she sent a strong fleet under Drake and Norris to help him win back his &quot;kingdom&quot;; but Drake and Norris quarrelled, Portugal showed no willingness to receive him, nothing was done, and the English retired. The unfortunate prior, finding that Elizabeth would do nothing more for him, again returned to Paris, where he died in poverty in 1594. &quot;The sixty years captivity,&quot; as the domination of Spain Domina- over Portugal from 1580 to 1640 is called, was a time of tiou of disaster for the country : not only did the English sack s l )ain - Faro in 1595, but Dutch, English, and French all preyed upon its great colonial possessions; the Dutch in particular, after beating the Portuguese in India, took from them the greater part of the lucrative Indian trade. This they did with the more ease since, with the true commercial spirit, they not only imported merchandise from the East to Holland but also distributed it through Dutch merchants to every country of Europe, whereas the Portuguese in the days of their commercial monopoly were satisfied with bringing over the commodities to Lisbon, and letting foreign nations come to fetch them. The Dutch incursion into the Indies was directly caused by Philip s closing the port of Lisbon to them in 1594; and in 1595 Cornelius Houtman, a Dutchman, who had been employed by the Portuguese as an Indian pilot and then imprisoned by the Inquisition, offered to lead a Dutch fleet to the Indies, and in 1597 they erected a factory in Java. They speedily extended their sphere of operations by occupying the Moluccas and Sumatra, and in 1619 they built Batavia I as a rival commercial capital in the East to Goa. The English quickly followed their example; in the reign of Elizabeth the English captains had been content to ravage Pernambuco in 1594-95, Fort Arguin in 1595, and the Azores in 1596, and in the reign of James I. the East India Company was established in the Indies at Surat. The French also settled themselves in Brazil and opened a flourishing trade with South America and the