Blame it on the Spain

Apologies for the terrible pun on the Milli Vanilli hit song. And apologies to the singers, or rather, the lip-synchers, one of whom I understand has departed from this world. But it is appropriate in a sense that I mention some pretenders due to the peculiar events that occurred on the Iberian peninsula in the Year of Our Lord (let's play Catholic today, shall we?) 1580.

For that was the year of the Battle of Alcantara., which occured on August 25th 425 years ago. Philip II of Spain (pictured here, and made famous to English-speakers as the organizer of the Spanish Armada) had sent a large Spanish army to Portugal to claim its vacant throne. At the head of his army was the Duke of Alva, fresh from suppressing dissent ruthlessly in the Low Countries. The Duke and the Spanish Habsburg contingent, supported by a substantial number of Portuguese nobles, swept aside the last native pretender to the throne. This decisive battle resulted in the Union of the Crowns of Spain and Portugal (not to mention all the other kingdoms of the Habsburg empire) from 1580 until 1640.

The throne of Portugal lay vacant, largely due to the lemming-like crusading stupidity of the last Portuguese King, King Sebastian. A hundred years before, during the dying days of the Iberian Reconquista, the medieval remnants of chivalric office recommended that Portugal claim the lands facing them across the Mediterranean, in Morocco, from the Sultanate of Fez. While they were quite successful in capturing several ports, because the Sultanate suffered from internal dissent, they were never able to hold a great deal of lands to the interior. In the meantime, the riches of the Estado de India and the market for Asian spices had made most of the Portuguese nobility forget about crusades against Morocco and get themselves plum posts in the empire instead.

But Sebastian grew up sheltered and fed on stories of great deeds, crusades, and heroic murders of Muslim infidels (as one was in those days). Reputedly mentally unstable, and surrounded by a coterie of courtiers that encouraged his fiery idealism, he led a huge number of Portuguese troops, the flower of the nobility, to Morocco to increase his holdings there in 1578. Weeks later, debilitated by lack of water, they were attacked on the plains of Alcacer-el-Quvir by Moroccans and slaughtered.

As he died without an heir, only an elderly relation, the Prior of Crato, was able to take over the hereditary kingship of the Lords of Avis (the Portuguese noble family, not the rental car company). But because Portuguese kings for 150 years had been engineering marriages with Castile, hoping to ultimately take over the Spanish kingdom, what happened instead was the opposite. When the Prior of Crato died in 1580, Philip II engineered the reverse takeover.

It was for that reason that Portugal had its long-standing alliance with England abrogated and increasingly moved into the orbit of Spanish foreign policy. Although initially the kingdoms were kept separate operationally, by the 1620s things had turned against Spain in the 30 Years' War, and Spain demanded huge sums from the Portuguese government just as they were suffering from attacks by the Dutch on their shipping. From the 1590s to the 1630s, less than half of all ships leaving Portugal to its colonies and stations (like Macau) actually made it back in one piece.

As this was the age before insurance and Lloyd's list, the economic consequences were devastating, sending the Portuguese empire and the Estado de India into a death-spiral from which it never recovered. Cities like Macau that once benefited from a strong trade both with metropolitan Portugal and within Asia, had to find ways to survive on their own, particularly after Portugal resumed its independence in 1640 (after the damage was done to the empire).

So the Portuguese blame the Spanish for the loss of their empire. But the story of Don Sebastian may be the one they should first recall, along with their inability to integrate their New Christians (Jews and Muslims forced to convert, later threatened with death by the Inquisition) and their wealth into a new economic system.