Pedro II of Portugal
Pedro II ruled Portugal as regent from 1668 and as king from 1683 to 1706, having taken the throne from his own brother. Born in 1648, the younger son of João IV, he was physically strong and forceful where his brother Afonso VI was disabled and easily led. In 1667 he removed Afonso's minister, took the regency, and had his brother confined. Afonso's marriage to Marie Françoise of Savoy was annulled for non-consummation, and Pedro married her three months later — a sequence that was widely understood at the time as a coup dressed in canon law. His first act of government was to conclude the war. The Treaty of Lisbon in February 1668 secured Spanish recognition of Portuguese independence after twenty-eight years of fighting, ending the Iberian union permanently in exchange for the cession of Ceuta. He governed without summoning the cortes after 1697, and the balance of the constitution shifted decisively towards the crown. Two developments transformed the kingdom's finances. Gold was discovered in Minas Gerais in Brazil in the 1690s, and the quinto, the royal fifth, made the crown independent of parliamentary taxation for a century. And in 1703 his government signed the Methuen Treaty with England, admitting English woollens in exchange for preferential duties on Portuguese wine — which built the port trade, tied Portugal firmly into the English alliance, and is often blamed for stunting Portuguese manufacturing. He brought Portugal into the War of the Spanish Succession on the Grand Alliance side in 1703, and Lisbon became the base for the allied campaign in Spain. He died in 1706.
- Lived: 1648 CE – 1706 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: king, head_of_state
