The Baker Who Pretended to Be King of Portugal

The Baker Who Pretended to Be KING OF PORTUGAL

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

Sebastian was an unlikely figure to excite the romantic imagination, and it was his death, rather than his life, that ensured his narrative survival. He was the last of the Avis dynasty, which came to power in 1385 after the Battle of Aljubarrota, in which Portugal won its independence from Castile. The Avis dynasty's first ruler was João I. A ready supply of able seamen, adventurous merchants, and financial resources enabled overseas exploration and conquest during the next century. On a religious crusade and in search of wealth (the material objectives often draped in the spiritual), the Portuguese in the early fifteenth century began venturing into Africa. First came the conquest, in 1415, of the strategic jewel of Ceuta, just opposite Gibraltar, where the stronghold's owners could control traffic in and out of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The capture of Ceuta by one of João's many sons, Prince Henry, "the Navigator," was followed by the seizure of Atlantic islands and incursions down the West African coast and inland in search of gold and slaves. The Portuguese in 1471 captured the Moroccan towns of Asilah and Tangiers, and they rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. In 1497, Vasco da Gama reached India, opening up the sea routes to Asia and its spice trade, which Portugal dominated for the next century. Vasco de Gama's voyages were the basis for the greatest work of early Portuguese literature and its national epic, Luís Vaz de Camões's The Lusiads (published in 1572), which, as it happens, was dedicated to Sebastian:

And you, my boy King, guarantor Of Portugal's ancient freedoms, And equal surety for the expansion Of Christendom's small empire; You, who have the Moors trembling, The marvel prophesied for our times, Given to the world, in God's eternal reign, To win for God much of the world again.

Sebastian was born on January 20, 1554, eighteen days after the death of his father, the seventeen-year-old João, also an only child. Sebastian's mother was Juana of Austria, sister of Spain's King Philip II. His parents' marriage was part of a centuries-long strategy by Spain to keep a foothold next door. Chroniclers who knew how the story ended recounted Sebastian's beginnings as having been marked by dreams and visions, "fulfillment prophecies" typical of late medieval monarchs who were destined to be saviors of the faith. Juana's alleged visions as she awaited the birth of her child seemed to point toward Africa. By one account, she saw a group of Moors wearing robes of different colors enter her room. At first she thought they were her guards, but when they left and then entered again, she swooned into the arms of her servants. Portraits of Juana depict a stern but possibly beautiful woman whose intelligence leaps off the canvas. She was educated by the Portuguese servants brought to Castile by her mother, the Portuguese-born empress Isabel, and she married a Portuguese prince, her cousin João, in 1552. (The future Philip II had married João's sister María.) Just five months after João's death and her son Sebastian's birth, Juana was summoned back to Spain while Philip II went to England to marry Mary Tudor (María of Portugal having died in 1545). The nineteen-year old princess never saw her son again. She went on to be one of her brother's most trusted advisers, acting as regent in his absence. She established Madrid's most elite and beautiful convent, the Descalzas Reales, where there are several portraits of Sebastian, which he periodically sent to his mother. Deeply spiritual, she was possibly the first woman allowed into the Jesuits.

As a child, Sebastian was "fair, blond, and beautiful, with a happy disposition. In his time, navigation was very prosperous, with no shipwrecks," stated a history of Iberian royalty, pointing to a contemporary priority. Lisbon, the capital of his kingdom, was the largest and most imposing of Iberia's cities; the historian Fernand Braudel said that had Philip II made Lisbon his capital instead of Madrid, he could have transformed it into another London or Naples. Sebastian was raised by a series of Jesuit tutors and confessors and by two relatives: his grandmother, Catherine, who was both his father's mother and his mother's aunt, and his great-uncle Henry, who had entered the priesthood at fourteen, was an archbishop by twenty-two, and donned the red robes of a cardinal at thirty-three. The two in-laws had deeply opposing attitudes toward child-rearing, education, religion, and national allegiance. Catherine's primary loyalty was to Spain, whose ruler, Philip (her nephew and one-time son-in-law), was her constant correspondent and one of her few remaining relatives; she and her husband, João III, buried all nine of their children, only two of whom had survived long enough to marry. João III died in 1557, and three-year-old Sebastian was sworn in as king. Catherine served as regent until 1562, at which point Henry took over, marking a shift toward more Portuguese interests. He handed the throne to the fourteen-year-old Sebastian in January 1568.

Though the young Sebastian was an avid sportsman and rider, he also was reported to be sickly. The first indication we have is that he suffered severe chills after a day of heavy hunting when he was eleven. The incident was blamed on excessive exercise, but soon it became apparent that there was something urogenital about the ailment, though successive doctors could not decide what it was. Juana sent one of her most trusted aides, Cristóbal de Moura, from Madrid to investigate in 1565, and Philip II sent his own team of doctors. The symptoms appear to have involved involuntary ejaculation, vertigo, fevers, and chills. At least one medical report referred to gonorrhea. The question on everyone's mind, of course, was whether he could have heirs; sadly, the question appears never to have been put to the test. The Spanish ambassador, in the midst of later negotiations to arrange an appropriate marriage for Sebastian, told Philip II in 1576, "It has been shown that the king has not proved himself nor has he ever tried." Furthermore, he said, voicing the opinion of all Spanish emissaries throughout Sebastian's life, "he so hates women that he cannot bear to look at them. If a lady serves him a drink, he tries to take it without touching her.... The Jesuits who educated him taught him that contact with women was tantamount to the sin of heresy, and in absorbing this doctrine he lost the capacity to distinguish virtue and gentility from offenses to God." Enemies of the Jesuits as well as those simply concerned about the rocky Portuguese ship of state accused the boy's tutors of essentially holding him captive.

If Sebastian did not like women, he adored activity, both spiritual and physical. Chroniclers and biographers all make note of Sebastian's athleticism and his admirably enthusiastic religiosity. He "was by nature extremely bellicose and since childhood inclined toward weaponry and war games." The Spanish playwright Luis Vélez de Guevara around 1607 depicted a servant asking the young monarch if he wished to dance, paint, or fence, suggesting that dancing would be the correct choice:

Mi corazón tales cosas no apetece. Soy colérico y no quiero estar dos oras o tres, moliendo el cuerpo y los pies al compás de un majadero. A armas mi estrella me yncita, quanto es flema lo aborrezco, y si la caça apetezco, es porque la guerra ymita.

There probably was no Christian in mid-sixteenth-century Iberia (or anywhere else, for that matter) who was not devout, but there were degrees, and Sebastian's piety was of the militant brand. In particular, he was consumed with a passion for taking back portions of North Africa that his grandfather João III had been forced to relinquish in the 1540s. That retreat was regarded by many as a shameful episode, one Sebastian felt duty-bound to rectify. This deeply religious young man who, judging by his mother's visions, was born to fight the infidel was called O Desejado, "the desired one." Son after son and cousin after cousin had died, and few courtiers would dare criticize or tether the only royal male heir left to Portugal. (His most famous dead cousin was don Carlos, son of Philip II and María of Portugal, who was imprisoned by his father and died in suspicious circumstances in 1568 at the age of twenty-three.) An account of Sebastian's childhood written by his confessor informs us that the boy was "endowed with such extraordinary force that he exceeded all others of his time." He was gifted at sports and "incomparable in the agility of his arms and legs.... He was of good stature, with proportionate limbs ... with absolutely no defects [and with] grace and beauty." The adulation was such, Spanish ambassador Juan de Silva informed a colleague in Madrid, that "they will tell him he's the tallest man in Portugal, or the best musician, or anything similar. His wit is sharp but confused, he imagines things he cannot understand, and thus monsters are born and they tell him he is better than [Cicero]." Later that month Silva told Philip II that Sebastian's education had been so "barbarous" that his virtues would remain forever hidden. Silva cannot have been surprised; he had been warned by his predecessor, Juan de Borja, that he would have to walk on eggshells with his sensitive compatriots (Silva had Portuguese blood) and their king, always reassuring them of Spain's love for them.

In Search of a Land to Reconquer

Persistent inbreeding, ideologically rigid education, religious excess, vanity and adulation, and a proven inability to reason with much intellectual capacity are not the sorts of elements advisable when launching a military expedition. But those, according to chroniclers, ambassadors, and relatives, were the characteristics that defined the teenage monarch, increasingly obsessed with the religious mission of his family and his nation. In the summer of 1569, when a fierce epidemic obliged the royal family to leave Lisbon (some fifty people a day died in Lisbon for weeks; one historian says that half of Lisbon's population perished), he traveled throughout Portugal and decided to open up the tombs of several of his ancestors at the beautiful Alcobaça monastery. Over the protests of the Cistercian monks who guarded the royal remains, he swore to the unearthed bodies, including those of Afonso II and Afonso III, that he would restore Portugal's glory. According to later accounts, he was impervious to the voice of reason: "Sire, these Kings and your ancestors did not set for you an example of conquest of other kingdoms but rather they taught you to conserve your own," counseled Father Francisco Machado, of the University of Paris, who happened to be at Alcobaça. "May God grant you a long life and give you a name and a tomb as honorable as these."

Sebastian's religious enthusiasm was further fueled by the famous battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, the hero of which was don Juan of Austria, Sebastian's uncle. Don Juan had just suppressed the Moriscos (converted Muslims) in the Alpujarras mountains outside Granada, who revolted in 1568 over increased and repressive restrictions. After his victory there, don Juan took command of a Holy League fleet organized by Pope Pius V and secured a dramatic and audacious victory against the Turks, capturing some two hundred of their galleys and thousands of men, as well as freeing fifteen thousand galley slaves. As many as forty thousand men may have been killed at Lepanto. The league promptly fell apart, and the Turks rearmed, but Lepanto nonetheless became a benchmark for both victors and vanquished, a latter-day Battle of Actium where West defeated East and Christendom triumphed over the infidel. The following year, in July 1572, the Portuguese viceroy of India, Luís de Ataíde, returned to Lisbon to huge celebrations and processions. This, too, fired Sebastian's imperial visions, and he commenced efforts to raise troops and ships, though it was unclear who exactly the enemy would be.

There were bad omens, though, which everyone would remark upon later. The 1569 plague was later interpreted as the first of these signs. On September 13, 1572, a vicious storm struck Lisbon, and thirty warships in the harbor were dashed to pieces, while houses and structures up and down the Tagus River were destroyed. And the young king continued to show alarming signs of bad health. Philip II's ambassador during Sebastian's youth, Juan de Borja, regularly informed his master of the chills, fevers, and bleeding.

Yet with the triumphant backdrop of Lepanto and Ataíde's return to Portugal, Sebastian in the summer of 1574 began planning his own crusade. The Spanish royal chronicler Antonio de Herrera wrote that Sebastian initially wanted to go to India but his advisers talked him down to Morocco, never dreaming he would actually go. His plan was to recapture the territory from the Moors, an objective the chroniclers said he had cherished since childhood and for which, it will be remembered, he was destined. Though the bolder of his ministers counseled him to abandon the plan, really not much of a plan at all, the king resisted, ordering recruiters to raise men, all the while trying to keep the project a secret. Borja wrote Philip II on August 14, "The king left Lisbon for [the nearby royal retreat of] Sintra on 3 August, and though people have suspected for days that he sent don António with soldiers to Tangiers [in July] in order to later go there himself, it seemed so crazy I did not even inform Your Majesty, having had the same suspicions last year.... But this time there is so much evidence that it is true that I am obliged to write, although the king has not yet informed the queen [Catherine] of his objective." Indeed, Sebastian's grandmother, from whom he was estranged, was kept in the dark until it was too late. "My grandson sailed yesterday and everyone tells me he will go to Africa. He always hid it from me and he also hid his departure, and though today I was given a letter from him saying he will go to Algarve [southern Portugal], I fear what everyone says and I am suffering and in great sorrow," Catherine wrote to Philip II. Cardinal Henry, "tired and distressed because the king would not listen to him," instructed Sebastian to first produce an heir and only then go to war, if he insisted. Sebastian ignored him. There were, it was said, noblemen on board the king's ship who had no idea where they were bound, and news of the arrival in Africa of the paltry expedition, numbering some three thousand men, was received with shock and anger in Lisbon and Madrid. A young monarch with no heir in sight had no business putting his life in danger.

The expedition, based in Tangiers, lasted around three months and was marked by its obvious lack of purpose. At one point Catherine sent a messenger to Sebastian telling him that if he did not come home right away she would go and fetch him. Another person who corresponded with Sebastian was Abu Abdallah Muhammed, "Lord of the Lords of the Monarchy and Empire of Africa and all its inhabitants," and he would not be the last Moroccan ruler to advise Sebastian to stay away. He had been informed that the king of Portugal, moved by his "royal and generous spirit," had decided to visit his lands. "We are very grateful for this noble act" and are willing to help him in all possible ways, he wrote. "But if your intent is other" than noble, Muhammed cautioned him, "you will find our people waiting, ready to show their force against your rash impudence." While in Tangiers, Sebastian deposed don António as governor of that outpost, replacing his cousin and the eventual pretender to the throne with Duarte de Meneses. The adventure finally came to an end in October, when the weather turned cool and Philip II refused to send the young king's forces a shipment of grain to replenish their exhausted food supply. A bit on the defensive after spending three months harassing bewildered North Africans who mostly left him alone, Sebastian wrote several open letters to Portugal's cities upon his return explaining that he had really only meant to visit his forts. He also wrote a chaotic, fifty-three-page account of the adventure.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Baker Who Pretended to Be KING OF PORTUGAL by RUTH MACKAY Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---