Marquis of Pombal
The Marquis of Pombal governed Portugal for twenty-seven years in the name of a king who preferred hunting, rebuilt Lisbon after the earthquake on a grid with the first buildings designed to survive the next one, expelled the Jesuits before any other state did, broke the old nobility on a scaffold, and was dismissed the week the king died. He was born Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo in 1699 into the minor gentry, tried the university and the army and abandoned both, eloped with a widow above his station, and found his career abroad, as envoy in London from 1738 and Vienna from 1745, where he read how the English made money and the Austrians made a state. José I, succeeding in 1750, made him secretary of state for foreign affairs and war, and within five years he was the government. On All Saints' morning 1755 the earthquake, the fire and the wave killed perhaps thirty thousand people and destroyed the lower city. Asked what to do, he is recorded as saying to bury the dead and feed the living, and he did, with troops, price controls, gallows for looters, a survey of every parish that is the first seismological questionnaire, and a plan for the Baixa of straight streets and standard façades on timber cages that modern engineers have tested and approved. Power followed. An attempt on the king's life in September 1758 was laid to the Duke of Aveiro and the Távora family, who were broken on the wheel in public in January 1759, and to the Jesuits, who were expelled from Portugal and its empire that September and their confessor burned. He created the Douro wine company, the first regulated wine region, in 1756, abolished slavery in metropolitan Portugal in 1761, abolished the legal distinction between Old and New Christians in 1773, and rewrote the University of Coimbra in 1772 around experiment. He was made Count of Oeiras in 1759 and Marquis of Pombal in 1769. José died in February 1777 and his daughter Maria I dismissed him within days, to public rejoicing called the Turnabout. A tribunal found him guilty of abuses and the queen, citing his age, banished him to his estates at Pombal, where he died in May 1782. The square at the top of the Avenida is his.
- Lived: 1699 CE – 1782 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: statesman, minister
