João V of Portugal
João V ruled Portugal from 1706 to 1750 and spent Brazilian gold on the most extravagant court in Europe. Born in 1689, the son of Pedro II, he inherited a kingdom at war and a treasury filling rapidly from the mines of Minas Gerais, whose royal fifth arrived in Lisbon in enormous quantities for most of his reign. He is called the Magnanimous. The revenue made him independent of the cortes, which he never summoned in forty-four years, and he governed as an absolute monarch on the French model. His spending was directed at magnificence and at the church. He built the palace and convent at Mafra, begun in 1717 as a modest vow and expanded to house hundreds of monks, with a basilica, two carillons of bells ordered from Flanders and a library of thousands of volumes; tens of thousands of workers were employed on it. He built the Águas Livres aqueduct that supplied Lisbon with water and survived the 1755 earthquake, funded the Coimbra university library, and commissioned an entire chapel in Rome, decorated in lapis and porphyry, to be shipped to Lisbon and reassembled. He pursued honours from the papacy with persistence, obtaining the elevation of the Lisbon see to a patriarchate in 1716 and the title Most Faithful King in 1748, and he sent embassies to Rome designed to astonish. He supported science and letters, founding the Royal Academy of History in 1720 and employing foreign scholars, without reforming the Inquisition or the universities. He was incapacitated by a stroke in 1742 and governed little thereafter. He died in 1750, leaving the treasury much reduced.
- Lived: 1689 CE – 1750 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: king, head_of_state
