Portugal, 1600–1660

Philip had inherited Portugal with Spain in 1598, the crowns his father had joined in 1580. He ruled Lisbon from Castile and left much of the business of government to the Marquis of Denia, soon Duke of Lerma, whom he made his favourite. Who could reach the king now counted for more than any council.

Lerma controlled access to Philip and the patronage that flowed from him. Under the new favourite Cristóvão de Moura, who had been the old king's closest servant, lost his place at court. It was Lerma's pressure that sent Moura back to Lisbon as viceroy in 1608, much against his will.

Philip married his cousin Margaret of Austria in April 1599. With a circle of Habsburg women and confessors she fought Lerma, whom she thought corrupt, for influence over the king. In 1605 she bore the heir, the future Philip III of Portugal. Lerma fell only after her death in 1611.

Moura had led the party that won Portugal for Philip's father in 1580. Shut out of the new favourite's court, he was made Marquis of Castelo Rodrigo and, on 29 January 1600, viceroy in Lisbon. The Cortes of Tomar had reserved that office for men of royal blood; his appointment, and the taxes he raised, made him unpopular.

In Venice a Calabrian, Marco Tullio Catizone, gave himself out as King Sebastian, lost in Morocco in 1578. He spoke no Portuguese, yet nobles, scholars and clergy from the exiled circle of António, prior of Crato, backed him. He was hanged in 1603, the last of four false Sebastians of the Habsburg years.

João de Castro, a follower of the prior of Crato and grandson of the viceroy of India of the same name, spent his last years proving that Sebastian would return. In 1603 he printed in France the prophetic verses of the shoemaker Bandarra, with a commentary reading them as foretelling Sebastian's return to expel the Castilians.

Sailing for one of the companies soon merged into the Dutch East India Company, Heemskerck took the Portuguese carrack Santa Catarina off Singapore on 25 February 1603, laden with Chinese silk and porcelain. He had no clear authority to seize her, but her sale in Amsterdam raised the new company's capital by more than half.

Hugo de Groot, Heemskerck's cousin, was engaged to justify the prize. In 1604–05 he wrote a long treatise later called De iure praedae. One chapter, printed in 1609 as Mare Liberum, argued that the sea could belong to no one and must stay open to every trader: a direct challenge to Portugal's claim to the Indies.

In 1606 Matelief brought eleven company ships to Malacca and laid siege to it from 29 April; on 17 May he signed an alliance with the sultan of Johor. When the viceroy's fleet arrived in August he raised the siege and fought it off Cape Rachado, losing two ships, then returned and destroyed the Portuguese ships left at anchor.

Furtado, a veteran of wars in Ceylon, Malabar and the Moluccas, was captain of Malacca. With a small garrison and Japanese fighters he held the city for almost four months until the viceroy's fleet arrived. In 1609 he governed Portuguese India for three months, between the death of one viceroy and the arrival of the next.

Manuel Godinho de Erédia, born at Malacca to a Portuguese father and a Bugis princess, was a Jesuit-trained cosmographer who longed to find a southern land of gold. War service came first: he built a fort at Muar in 1604 and helped Furtado take Johor's capital. In 1613 he wrote his Declaraçam de Malaca; nothing in it proves he reached Australia.

Martim Afonso de Castro, viceroy since 1605, had gathered one of the largest fleets Portugal ever sent east. He relieved Malacca in August 1606 and damaged Matelief's ships off Cape Rachado, then sheltered in Malacca with his great ships at anchor, where the Dutch came back and destroyed them. He died at Malacca on 3 June 1607.

With the viceroy dead, Aleixo de Meneses, an Augustinian friar and archbishop of Goa, was named governor of India. The new viceroy sent out in 1608 died on the voyage, so Meneses governed for over two years, strengthening Malacca and Mozambique against the Dutch. He went home to be archbishop of Braga and, from 1612, viceroy of Portugal.

Pedro de Castilho, bishop of Leiria, became inquisitor-general in 1604 and was viceroy in Lisbon from 1605 to 1608. A general pardon for the New Christians, bought by the crown from Pope Clement VIII for 1,700,000 cruzados, took effect in 1605 while he headed the Holy Office. He then had its rules compiled and printed, as the Regimento of 1613.

After his first term Moura stayed in Lisbon on the king's orders and was called to Madrid only in 1607. In February 1608, under pressure from Lerma and much against his will, he was named viceroy again and governed Portugal until 1612. He died in Madrid the next year.

Spain and the Dutch Republic agreed a twelve-year truce at Antwerp on 9 April 1609. It stopped the war in Europe but said nothing about the Indies, where the company fleets, and soon English ships as well, went on attacking Portuguese forts and trade.

Adams, an English pilot who had reached Japan on the Dutch ship Liefde in 1600, became an adviser at Ieyasu's court and spoke there for Dutch interests; the first Dutch ships came to Hirado in July 1609. In 1610 Ieyasu gave him the Jesuit João Rodrigues's place as go-between with the Europeans.

Best commanded the English East India Company's tenth voyage. Off Swally, near Surat, late in 1612, his four ships beat four Portuguese galleons and their attendant barks, and the governor of Gujarat reported the fight to the emperor. In January 1613 Jahangir ratified a treaty letting the English trade at Surat.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, shogun from 1603, gave up the title in 1605 but ruled Japan until his death in 1616. After the Portuguese at Macau killed Japanese sailors in 1608, he turned against the Macau traders: in 1610 Japanese junks attacked their great ship, the Nossa Senhora da Graça, at Nagasaki, and her captain blew her up. In 1614 he banned Christianity.

João Rodrigues, called Tçuzu, the interpreter, had served Hideyoshi and then Ieyasu as go-between with the Portuguese, and wrote the Arte da Lingoa de Iapam, printed at Nagasaki in 1604–08. After the 1610 crisis Ieyasu let most missionaries stay but replaced Rodrigues with William Adams. He went on to Macau and the China mission.

Filipe de Brito, a Lisbon-born adventurer, governed the port of Syriam for the king of Arakan, then made himself its master and won titles and recognition from Goa. In 1610 he marched on Toungoo, whose king had just submitted to Ava, burned it and carried the king, Natshinnaung, back to Syriam.

Anaukpetlun, king at Ava from 1605, was rebuilding the Burmese kingdom his grandfather Bayinnaung had ruled. He marched on Syriam, took it in April 1613 and had Brito impaled. More than four hundred Portuguese captives were taken to Ava, where they and their descendants served the Burmese kings as gunners.

Azevedo had spent eighteen years as captain-general of Ceylon, fighting to bring the whole island under Portugal. As viceroy from December 1612 he tried to drive the English from Surat. In September 1613 his men seized the Rahimi, the Mughal queen mother's pilgrim ship with some 700 passengers, though she carried a Portuguese pass; Azevedo called her worthy prey.

The Mughal emperor Jahangir had just seen the English beat the Portuguese off Surat. When the Rahimi was not returned he stopped the trade of Surat, laid siege to Portuguese Daman and closed the Jesuit church at Agra. The Portuguese offered compensation if he would expel the English; he refused, and the English stayed.

João Coutinho, Count of Redondo and a former captain of Tangier, sailed for Goa in 1617 to succeed Azevedo, with Nuno Álvares Botelho commanding one of his ships. Azevedo, who had obstructed the king's own envoy to Persia, went home to custody and a trial and died a prisoner in Lisbon's São Jorge castle in 1625. Coutinho died in November 1619.

In March 1612 a French fleet with 500 colonists under Daniel de La Touche, seigneur de La Ravardière, and François de Razilly sailed from Brittany for Maranhão, a coast Portugal claimed. With the regent Marie de' Medici's backing and Tupinambá support they founded Saint-Louis, today São Luís, on 8 September 1612.

Gaspar de Sousa, a veteran of Alcácer Quibir and the Armada and a nephew of Cristóvão de Moura, received his instructions as governor-general of Brazil in October 1612, with orders to drive the French out. He began his government in Pernambuco rather than Bahia and sent ships and men north under Jerónimo de Albuquerque.

Jerónimo de Albuquerque, born at Olinda to a Portuguese nobleman and the daughter of a Tabajara chief, had founded Natal in 1599. Named captain of the conquest in June 1614, he led some 500 men and many Indigenous allies to Guaxenduba, where on 19 November 1614 they routed a much larger French and Tupinambá attack.

Diogo de Campos Moreno, a Tangier-born veteran of Flanders, was sent from Portugal to join Albuquerque and left Recife with 300 men in August 1614. He fought at Guaxenduba, then went to Europe under the truce La Touche proposed. His unsigned Jornada do Maranhão tells the campaign, crediting himself generously.

When news of the truce reached Europe, the crown ordered the French dislodged. In October 1615 Alexandre de Moura, captain-major of Pernambuco, arrived with reinforcements and took command. He set the truce aside, surrounded Fort Saint-Louis on 1 November, and after two days of fighting La Touche surrendered; the French were shipped home.

Before leaving, Moura made Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco captain-major and sent him north to Pará. On 12 January 1616 Caldeira built a wooden fort, the Presépio, on Guajará Bay; the settlement beside it became Belém, the first European town on the Amazon. He was later sent to Lisbon and died in prison in 1619.

Cristóbal de Sandoval, Duke of Uceda, was Lerma's own son. With Baltasar de Zúñiga, the royal confessor Luis de Aliaga and Olivares he worked to bring his father down, and in October 1618 Lerma, who had sheltered behind a cardinal's hat, was forced from office. Uceda took his place as the king's favourite.

In 1619 Philip made the only visit of his reign to Portugal, a journey his new favourite applauded. Lisbon spent enormous sums on his welcome, and some urged him to make it the monarchy's capital. Leaving Portugal he fell gravely ill at Covarrubias and never fully recovered; he died on 31 March 1621.

Diego de Silva y Mendoza, born in Madrid, son of the Portuguese Rui Gomes da Silva, had been Lerma's man on the Council of Portugal and then its president. Made Marquis of Alenquer in 1616 so that he held a Portuguese title, he was viceroy from 1617 to 1621 and governed through the king's visit. To many Portuguese he stood for Castile's tightening grip.

Cristóvão de Moura's son and heir Manuel, Count of Lumiares, was deeply involved in preparing the visit; even Lisbon's council turned to him to finance the festivities. During it Philip confirmed him in all his father's titles. A gentleman of the prince's chamber, he seemed set to rise in the next reign.

João Baptista Lavanha, mathematician, engineer and cosmographer to the crown, had taught the prince mathematics from 1613 and was named chief chronicler of Portugal on 9 March 1618. His illustrated account of the royal journey and of Lisbon's reception was printed in Madrid in 1622, in Castilian and Portuguese, with engravings by João Schorquens.

Teodósio II, seventh Duke of Braganza, was the greatest lord in Portugal and son of the Infanta Catarina, the claimant passed over in 1580; as a boy he had fought beside King Sebastian at Alcácer Quibir. He served the Habsburg kings faithfully, yet when he came to pay homage in 1619 Uceda treated him harshly, as a possible leader of opposition.

Teodósio's younger brother Duarte held a Castilian title, Marquis of Frechilla, granted by Philip's father, and lived between Vila Viçosa and Évora until about 1620, then in Madrid. Several Portuguese poets dedicated their works to him.

Francisco Rodrigues Lobo, a New Christian poet from Leiria who wrote his pastorals in Portuguese when Castilian was the fashion, dedicated Corte na Aldeia (1619) to Duarte. Its dialogues on conversation and manners mourn a nobility left without a court of its own, and the dedication urges pride in the Portuguese language and nation.

Philip III of Portugal, Philip IV in Spain, came to the throne on 31 March 1621, a week short of sixteen. He ordered that every paper needing his signature go first to Olivares. On 9 April the Twelve Years' Truce with the Dutch ran out, and the war resumed on every sea.

Elisabeth, daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de' Medici, had been married to Philip in 1615. Queen of Spain and Portugal from 1621, she bore him a son and heir, Balthasar Charles, in October 1629.

Baltasar de Zúñiga, ambassador at Brussels, Paris and Vienna, had come home to lead the move against Lerma with Uceda and to run foreign policy from 1618. He had placed his nephew Olivares in the prince's household, and at the accession he had Uceda replaced by Olivares. Zúñiga died in October 1622, still in favour.

With his uncle dead, Olivares became the king's valido, favourite and first minister in one, for the next twenty years. His great problem was money and men for wars on many fronts; his remedy, the Union of Arms, asked each of the king's realms, Portugal among them, to share the burden.

On 3 June 1621, eight weeks after the truce expired, the States General chartered a West India Company with a monopoly of Dutch trade and war in the Atlantic. It would strike at Portugal's sugar colony in Brazil and at Spain's silver fleets.

Sent from Lisbon in April 1619 to drive the English from the Persian Gulf, Rui Freire de Andrade began a fort on the island of Qeshm in May 1621, against the warnings of the captain of Hormuz. Early in 1622 the Persians and English took Qeshm and Rui Freire with it; he later escaped his captors on the Indian coast.

Shah Abbas I, ruler of Safavid Persia since 1588, had been discussing an alliance against the Ottomans with Philip's envoys, but found their demands too high, among them that he break with the English East India Company. He took the Qeshm fort as an attack on his sovereignty and set out to drive the Portuguese from the Gulf.

Imam Quli Khan, Safavid governor of Fars, raised the army and pressed the English East India Company into lending its ships. Persian troops and English guns took Qeshm, then besieged Hormuz from February; the fortress at the mouth of the Gulf surrendered in April 1622 after ten weeks.

Francisco da Gama, Count of Vidigueira and great-grandson of Vasco da Gama, named viceroy for a second time in 1622, reached Goa after the loss. He acquitted Rui Freire and sent him back as governor-general of the Strait; from Muscat, now Portugal's base in the Gulf, Rui Freire took Sohar, Julfar and other Arabian strongholds in 1623–24.

Giacomo Rho, a Milanese Jesuit and mathematician bound for China, was at Macau when the Dutch landed. Portuguese accounts credit him with the cannon shot from the Monte fort that blew up the Dutch powder; a Swiss soldier on the Dutch side blamed an accident. Settlers, Jesuits and hundreds of enslaved Africans drove the Dutch back to their boats.

John Weddell, an East India Company captain, was joint admiral of the English fleet of five ships and four pinnaces that the Persians pressed into service. His ships took part in the attack on Qeshm and the siege of Hormuz early in 1622; he later gave the Admiralty court a detailed account of the voyage and its plunder.

Jan Pieterszoon Coen, governor-general of the Dutch East India Company at Batavia, judged from captured letters that Macau could not resist, and wanted a Dutch base on the China coast. He sent out eight ships with orders to gather more on the way; when his directors told him to wait, the fleet had already sailed.

Cornelis Reijersen arrived off Macau on 21 June 1622 with thirteen ships and 1,300 men, and landed 800 of them on 24 June. Shot in the belly at the beach, he was carried out of the fight; after the explosion and a counter-attack the Dutch fled to their boats. He sailed on and built a fort in the Pescadores.

Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos, governor of Angola from 1617, at first refused to use the Imbangala, roving warbands feared for their ferocity, then took them as allies. With bands under Kasanje, Kasa and others he invaded Ndongo, sacked its capital and drove its king to an island in the Kwanza river; thousands were taken prisoner.

Ngola Mbandi, king of Ndongo since 1617, had secured his throne by killing rival claimants, among them a half-brother, and his sister Njinga had fled to Matamba. Facing Portuguese gains, in 1621 he asked her to be his envoy to the governor at Luanda.

João Correia de Sousa, governor from 1621, received Njinga at Luanda and paid for her retinue. When the Portuguese doubted her commitment to peace she offered to be baptized; he stood godfather and she took the name Ana de Sousa. A treaty followed, but the Portuguese kept their forts inside Ndongo and went on raiding it for slaves.

Njinga came home to Kabasa in triumph late in 1622 and grew powerful at court as her brother sank into depression. When he died in 1624, of causes still disputed, she took power, married the Imbangala chief Kasa and had her young nephew, a rival claimant in Kasa's keeping, killed.

Fernão de Sousa, governor from 1624, refused to return the kijikos, slaves of the Ndongo crown living in Portuguese territory, as the treaty required, and demanded escaped Portuguese slaves instead. In late 1625 his soldiers protected Hari a Kiluanje, a noble who would not serve a woman, and on 15 March 1626 the Portuguese declared war on her. By 1628 she had been driven out of Ndongo.

Jacob Willekens, a herring merchant who had gone back to sea at fifty, sailed from Texel on 22 December 1623 with between 26 and 36 ships and some 3,300 men, the West India Company's first great expedition. In May 1624 the fleet took Salvador, capital of Portuguese Brazil, almost without a fight.

Piet Heyn sailed as Willekens's vice-admiral at Salvador. In 1626 the two quarrelled over who should command a planned attack on Rio de Janeiro and parted, Willekens going home to Amsterdam; Heyn's great prize was still to come.

Johan van Dorth, a nobleman from Gelderland, had been appointed by the company governor of Bahia. He held the city but not the country around it: on 17 July 1624 he was killed in an ambush laid by Captain Francisco Padilha before the fort of Monte Serrat, and the Dutch were left penned inside the walls.

Diogo de Mendonça Furtado, governor-general since 1621, stood in the city with a handful of soldiers while Salvador's militia fled. The Dutch took him and his son and shipped them to Holland; he was freed in 1626. The colony was left without its capital or its governor.

The people who fled the city chose their bishop, Marcos Teixeira, as captain-major. From a camp at Rio Vermelho his men ambushed Dutch parties in the woods and kept the garrison inside the walls. He died on 8 October 1624, but the ambushes went on.

Matias de Albuquerque, captain of Pernambuco, was named governor-general in the emergency. He stayed at Olinda and sent men and supplies to the guerrilla camp outside Salvador, which made him the senior Portuguese commander in Brazil.

Fadrique de Toledo commanded the relief: more than fifty Castilian and Portuguese ships and some 12,000 men, the largest fleet yet sent south of the equator. The squadrons met at Cape Verde, entered the bay at the end of March 1625 and took the Dutch surrender on 30 April.

Manuel de Meneses, general of the armada of Portugal's coast, led the larger, Portuguese part of the fleet. He wrote an account of the recapture, his Relação, first published in 1859. In January 1627 his squadron was wrecked on the French coast; he survived, was named chief chronicler in 1628 and died that July.

Olivares wanted Portugal to bear more of the cost of its own defence and of the monarchy's wars. He backed the plan for a Portuguese East India Company against the doubts of the Council of Portugal, and he kept away from the king anyone who might rival him, among them Cristóvão de Moura's son Manuel, whom he saw as a dangerous intriguer.

Manuel de Moura had grown close to the king's brother Carlos, which alarmed Olivares. On 27 May 1629 he was sent to Lisbon to negotiate the means for two fleets, one to relieve Pernambuco and one for India, and stayed until mid-1630. Olivares then made him ambassador in Rome, far from the court.

Manuel de Faria e Sousa, a Portuguese poet who wrote in Castilian, published his Epitome de las historias portuguesas at Madrid in 1628. In Rome he served Moura's embassy as secretary, quarrelled with him and accused him of disloyalty to the king and of sodomy; Moura was put on trial in 1634–35.

Serafim de Freitas, a Lisbon-born canon lawyer and Mercedarian friar teaching at Valladolid, answered Grotius point by point. His De iusto imperio Lusitanorum Asiatico, printed at Valladolid in 1625 and dedicated to Philip, defended Portugal's right to its Asian empire and the papal grants on which it rested.

Duarte Gomes Solis, a New Christian merchant who had traded at Cochin and lived in Madrid from 1621, argued that Portugal should fight the Dutch and English companies with one of its own. His Discursos sobre los comercios de las Indias (1622) proposed a joint-stock company, and in 1628 he wrote in defence of the one just founded.

The king set the idea in motion in 1624 with a committee under Jorge Mascarenhas; in August 1628 the Companhia da Índia Oriental received its charter, governed by a president and directors elected by the investors. It never made a profit and was wound up in 1633.

Iskandar Muda, sultan of Aceh since 1607, had made his north Sumatran kingdom the strongest power on the Strait, sacking Johor and taking Nias. Hoping to seize Malacca before the Dutch or English did, he brought 236 vessels and some 19,000 men before it in June 1629, then went home and left the siege to his commanders.

Nuno Álvares Botelho had fought an Anglo-Dutch fleet under John Weddell to a draw off Hormuz in February 1625 and in 1628 sat in the three-man interim government at Goa. In September 1629 he sailed to Malacca's relief and destroyed the Acehnese fleet. He drowned off Sumatra in 1631 when a Dutch ship struck his boat.

In September 1628 Piet Heyn trapped Spain's silver fleet in Matanzas Bay, off Cuba, and brought home more than eleven million guilders, the West India Company's greatest prize; Hendrick Lonck sailed with him. The money made a second, larger attempt on Portuguese Brazil possible.

Hendrick Lonck, who had succeeded Heyn as captain-general in 1629, led the company's second Brazil expedition: 67 ships and sloops and some 7,000 men. They landed in mid-February 1630, took Olinda and, within weeks, Recife, after feeble resistance. Lonck sailed home in May; it was his last voyage.

Colonel Diederick van Waerdenburgh commanded the landing troops: from 17 February they marched along the beach and took Olinda with little trouble; Recife fell in early March. When Lonck left in May he became governor of Pernambuco, but Portuguese guerrillas in the marshes soon forced him to abandon Olinda.

Matias de Albuquerque had been sent back to Pernambuco in 1629 to put the coast in defence. He burned the sugar stores rather than let the Dutch have them and fell back to a fortified camp inland of Recife, the Arraial do Bom Jesus. From there his guerrillas kept the Dutch inside their towns for five years.

Constantino de Sá de Noronha, captain-general of Ceylon in 1618–22 and again from 1623, set out to conquer the Kandyan highlands. In 1630 he invaded Uva by way of Badulla. At Randeniwela his Sinhalese militia, the lascarins, went over to the enemy en masse; his army was destroyed and he was killed.

Senarat, king of Kandy since 1604, had won his throne by marrying his predecessor's widow and had often failed to stop Portuguese raids. Against Constantino his army fought under his youngest son, and the victory at Randeniwela on 25 August 1630 was the greatest of his reign.

The prince who led Kandy's army at Randeniwela, Senarat's youngest son, would reign as Rajasinha II. The lascarins' defection, then arrows and musket fire through a night of torrential rain, destroyed the Portuguese force. When he became king in 1635 he looked for allies to drive the Portuguese from the coast as well.

Teodósio II, Duke of Braganza, died at Vila Viçosa on 29 November 1630, having served the Habsburg kings faithfully all his life. He left three sons: João, his heir; Duarte, who would seek his fortune in the Emperor's armies; and Alexandre.

João, born in 1604, became eighth Duke of Braganza, head of one of the greatest noble houses in the peninsula, with royal blood through his grandmother, the claimant of 1580. For ten more years he lived at Vila Viçosa as a loyal great noble of the Habsburg monarchy.

Philip governed Portugal from Madrid through Olivares and the Council of Portugal at court. In 1634 he made his cousin Margaret of Savoy, dowager Duchess of Mantua, vicereine in Lisbon; real power lay with the secretaries Olivares trusted.

Olivares needed Portuguese money for the war to recover Brazil and for his wider wars, and wanted it raised by men who answered to him. In Madrid and Lisbon he relied on two related officials, Diogo Soares and Miguel de Vasconcelos, rather than on Portugal's great nobles.

Diogo Soares, for twenty-two years an official of Portugal's treasury council, became secretary of state of the Council of Portugal in Madrid in 1631 and soon dominated it. In 1633 he obtained favours from the king for the Duke of Braganza's marriage. He married Vasconcelos's sister and later his daughter, and engineered Vasconcelos's appointment in Lisbon.

On 12 January 1633 the duke married Luisa de Guzmán, daughter of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, of one of Castile's greatest houses; the bishop of Elvas, Sebastião de Matos de Noronha, married them. It was a loyal Habsburg grandee's match, smoothed by favours from the king.

Luisa de Guzmán, born in 1613, gave the duke his first son, Teodósio, at Vila Viçosa in February 1634, and daughters Joana and Catherine followed in 1636 and 1638. Spanish by birth, she would later be said to have urged her husband to accept the crown.

Margaret of Savoy, the king's cousin and dowager Duchess of Mantua, became vicereine in December 1634. Contemporaries saw her as a figurehead, chosen because a woman was thought easier to direct; the secretaries governed in her name.

Miguel de Vasconcelos, treasury secretary from 1631, became secretary of state in January 1635. With Soares in Madrid and Olivares behind them, the two ran Portugal's administration and imposed the new taxes, and Vasconcelos became the most hated man in the kingdom.

For five years Matias held the Arraial do Bom Jesus and kept the Dutch inside their towns. From 1633 his volunteers included Henrique Dias, a free Black man who raised a company from enslaved people on the mills the Dutch had taken.

Domingos Fernandes Calabar had fought under Matias and knew every path of the coast. In April 1632 he went over to the Dutch and guided them to Igaraçu, Itamaracá, Rio Formoso and the Reis Magos fort. The war turned against the Portuguese.

The Arraial surrendered on 8 June 1635, and with it the north-east. Retreating south toward Bahia, Matias retook Porto Calvo, captured Calabar there and had him executed as a traitor; the friar Manuel Calado heard his confession. Recalled to Lisbon, Matias was blamed for the loss of Pernambuco and imprisoned in the castle of São Jorge.

Miguel de Noronha, Count of Linhares, a former captain of Tangier, took office as viceroy at Goa in October 1629 and governed until 1635, years of corruption and of losses in Ceylon and at Mombasa. The king ordered him to send a book describing every fortress of the Estado da Índia.

Linhares gave the task to António Bocarro, chronicler of Portuguese India and keeper of Goa's archive from 1631, son of New Christian parents. His Livro das plantas de todas as fortalezas (1635) described each fort, city and settlement of the Estado, from East Africa to Macau.

Pedro Barreto de Resende had sailed out in 1629 as Linhares's secretary and was already drawing the fortresses from the reports that crossed his desk. He let Bocarro use his plans in exchange for the chronicler's descriptions, and most of the Livro's drawings are his.

On 21 August 1637 Évora rose against new taxes on meat, fish and sales, levied without the Cortes to pay for recovering Brazil. Orders went out signed by Manuelinho, a poor simpleton of the town, to hide the real leaders; the riots spread across the Alentejo and the Algarve until the spring of 1638.

Back from India and sitting on the Council of Portugal, Linhares blamed the riots on Vasconcelos and Soares and urged Olivares to dismiss them: better to lose two unpopular ministers than risk losing the kingdom. Olivares refused. Linhares, who held that Portugal must remain a kingdom of its own, fell out with the favourite.

Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII's chief minister, took France into open war with Spain in 1635. France now fought Spain on the Pyrenees, in Flanders and in Italy, and Richelieu set out to make Philip face trouble inside his own kingdoms as well.

Pau Claris, canon of Urgell, was president of Catalonia's Generalitat when billeted troops, war levies and Olivares's demands drove the principality to revolt in 1640. After the viceroy was killed in June, he led the break with Madrid, and in January 1641 he proclaimed a Catalan republic under French protection; he died a month later.

Needing men against the Catalans, Olivares called on Portugal's nobility to serve there in 1640. Instead of going, a group of them turned to the Duke of Braganza.

Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen landed at Recife in January 1637 as governor of Dutch Brazil. Ships detached from the Brazil forces took Elmina, Portugal's old fort on the Gold Coast, in August 1637. He extended Dutch rule along the coast from Sergipe to Maranhão and built a new town, Mauritsstad, beside Recife.

Willem Piso, a Leiden physician, went to Brazil in 1637 in Johan Maurits's service with a team of scientists and artists. He studied tropical diseases and the remedies Indigenous people used, and later prepared the results for the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae of 1648.

Georg Marcgraf, a German naturalist, astronomer and mapmaker, arrived early in 1638 and travelled the colony collecting plants and animals and observing the sky. In 1643 he went on to Africa and died at Dutch Luanda in August 1644; his notes and drawings make up much of the 1648 Historia.

Frans Post, a Haarlem painter, came with Johan Maurits and lived in Brazil from 1637 to 1644, the first European artist to paint the landscapes of the Americas. The six paintings he finished there, dated 1637–40, Johan Maurits later gave to Louis XIV.

Admiral Adam Westerwolt and Kandyan troops took the Portuguese fort at Batticaloa on 18 May 1638. Five days later he and Rajasinha signed a treaty there: the Dutch would fight the Portuguese and garrison every fort they took, at the king's expense. Those terms would let the Dutch keep whatever they took.

Rajasinha II, king of Kandy since his father's death in 1635, wanted the Portuguese out of Ceylon: they held the coastal lowlands and the cinnamon, while Kandy kept the hills. In 1638 he sent to the Dutch for help.

Tokugawa Iemitsu, Ieyasu's grandson and shogun since 1623, blamed the Portuguese for the Christian rising at Shimabara and banned their ships from Japan on 4 August 1639. In 1640 Macau, whose wealth rested on the Japan trade, sent envoys to plead for it; sixty-one of them were executed at Nagasaki.

João Pinto Ribeiro, a lawyer who ran the Braganza house's business in Lisbon, had argued in a 1632 tract that Portuguese nobles and soldiers should not be spent in Castile's wars. He linked the conspirators to the duke, and when João hesitated he is said to have pressed him to go on.

Antão de Almada hosted the conspirators' meetings, the last four days before the rising. On 1 December 1640 they stormed the palace, shot Vasconcelos and threw his body from a window; Almada held the vicereine and made her order the castle garrison to surrender. In February 1641 he sailed as ambassador to England.

Miguel de Almeida, eighty years old and soon Count of Abrantes, gave the signal with a pistol shot and, from a palace window, acclaimed the duke king before the crowd. João made him an overseer of the treasury in January 1641 and steward of the queen's household.

Rodrigo da Cunha, archbishop of Lisbon, backed the rising and, with the archbishop of Braga, governed the kingdom until the duke arrived from Vila Viçosa. He stood among the principal witnesses of the oath to the new king on 15 December.

João came in from Vila Viçosa and was acclaimed King João IV in Lisbon on 15 December. On his secretary's advice he kept the privileges granted under the Habsburgs, and he set about upgrading the frontier fortresses and rebuilding an army for the war with Spain.

Francisco de Lucena, from a family long tied to the Braganzas, had served seventeen years as secretary of the Council of Portugal in Madrid. As João's secretary of state he refused rewards to most of the conspirators of 1640 and argued against mercy for the plotters of 1641.

Sebastião de Matos de Noronha, the bishop who had married João and Luisa, was archbishop of Braga, president of the royal court of justice and a firm partisan of Philip. The conspirators of 1640 spared him, and he shared the government until João arrived. He then wrote to Olivares, got no answer, and set about organising a counter-revolution.

Luís de Noronha e Meneses, Marquis of Vila Real, a former captain of Tangier and governor of Ceuta, joined the archbishop's plot with his son, the Duke of Caminha. It was uncovered; on 29 August 1641 Vila Real, Caminha, the Count of Armamar and five others were executed in the Rossio. The archbishop died a prisoner months later.

Francisco de Castro, inquisitor-general since 1629, had sworn loyalty to João, but he was named among the plotters and arrested in 1641. He spent nearly two years in the Belém tower before his release in February 1643, when he recovered his offices.

João's younger brother Duarte had left Portugal in 1634 to serve the Emperor in the Thirty Years' War, rising to general of artillery; on a visit home in 1638 he had been asked to lead the plot and stayed out of it. At Spain's request the Emperor had him arrested at Passau; handed over to the Spanish, he died a prisoner in Milan in 1649.

Manuel de Sousa Coutinho governed Malacca when the Dutch East India Company and Johor laid siege to it in August 1640. Disease and famine wore down both sides, and two Dutch commanders died in turn. On 14 January 1641 the Dutch stormed the citadel and the city surrendered, ending 130 years of Portuguese rule.

Johan Maurits sent Cornelis Jol across the Atlantic with a fleet before the new truce with Portugal could take effect. Jol took Luanda in August 1641 and then the island of São Tomé, and died that October. The company now held the port that shipped enslaved Africans to the sugar mills of Brazil.

Pedro César de Meneses, governor of Angola since October 1639, abandoned Luanda and withdrew inland with the Portuguese settlers and soldiers. From the river fort of Massangano he kept a Portuguese government alive until 1645, while Njinga and the king of Kongo sided with the Dutch.

Louis XIII, at war with Spain, followed Richelieu's advice to back João, reckoning that a Portuguese war would drain Spanish men and money. A treaty of alliance between France and Portugal was concluded at Paris on 1 June 1641.

Richelieu died on 4 December 1642, and the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin took his place as first minister, keeping it under the boy Louis XIV after Louis XIII died in May 1643. Portugal's French alliance now depended on Mazarin's reckoning of France's interest against Spain.

Olivares, blamed for the revolts in Catalonia and Portugal, was dismissed in January 1643. His Portuguese secretary Diogo Soares lost his protector and died in Madrid in 1649. Olivares's nephew Luis de Haro became the king's new favourite.

Francisco de Sousa Coutinho, who had gone abroad with João's brother Duarte in 1634, became one of the new king's diplomats. In March 1641 he was sent to Copenhagen, opening relations with Denmark. Later, as ambassador at The Hague, he had to seek Dutch help against Spain while the Dutch companies held Portuguese colonies.

António Vieira, a Lisbon-born Jesuit raised in Brazil, came to Lisbon in 1641 with the viceroy's son to bring Brazil's allegiance to João. The king made him royal preacher, tutor to Prince Pedro and a councillor. In 1643 he proposed trading companies for India and Brazil, funded by New Christian merchants whose capital would be safe from the Inquisition.

In 1642 the Cortes accused Lucena of secret correspondence with Castile and blamed him for Duarte's captivity. Tried as a traitor, he was beheaded in the Rossio on 28 April 1643, declaring his innocence; a great-grandson later cleared his name.

Francisco Manuel de Melo had served Spain in Flanders and in Catalonia, where he wrote the history of the campaign, and been imprisoned by Olivares; freed, he came over to João and brought a fleet from Holland in 1641. On 19 November 1644 he was arrested on a false murder charge, prompted by a jealous husband, and spent about nine years in prison.

Freed from São Jorge at the Restoration, Matias de Albuquerque was given command on the Alentejo frontier. On 26 May 1644 he met a Spanish army at Montijo; both sides claimed the victory, and João made him Count of Alegrete.

Johan Maurits's lavish spending alarmed the company's directors, and refusing to stay without a free hand he sailed home in July 1644. The company then pressed the planters for the debts they owed it and seized the mills of those who could not pay.

Sigismund von Schoppe commanded the company's field army in Brazil. In April 1648 he marched out of Recife with some 5,000 men in five regiments and field guns to break the rising, and met the insurgents on the hills of Guararapes, where he was wounded and lost about a thousand men.

João Fernandes Vieira had grown rich under the Dutch on the company's loans and owned five sugar mills. On 15 May 1645 he and seventeen other leaders swore to fight the company, and the rising began on 13 June; on 3 August his men drew a Dutch column into an ambush at Tabocas and beat it.

André Vidal de Negreiros, born on a Paraíba sugar estate, had fought the Dutch at Salvador in 1624 and come back from Portugal and Spain to lead the rising with Vieira. The governor-general at Bahia, António Teles da Silva, told the Dutch he could not control the insurgents, yet helped them. Vidal later commanded the siege of Recife.

Henrique Dias, the free Black volunteer of 1633, now governor of the Blacks, marched up from Bahia with his regiment of free and formerly enslaved men to join the rising. His men fought at both battles of Guararapes.

António Filipe Camarão, a Potiguar leader whose own name was Poti, had fought the Dutch since 1630 at the head of an Indigenous regiment and been made a knight of the Order of Christ. He came up from Bahia with Dias and led the right flank at the first battle of Guararapes; he died that August, aged about 68.

Frei Manuel Calado, a friar from Vila Viçosa who had lived some thirty years in Bahia and Pernambuco, a friend of Johan Maurits and Calabar's confessor, joined the resistance and narrowly escaped a Dutch death sentence. Back at court he published the first part of O Valeroso Lucideno, his account of the war, in 1648.

In 1647 João sent Francisco Barreto de Meneses, a professional soldier, as mestre-de-campo-general to command the insurgents. On 19 April 1648, with about half the Dutch numbers and no guns, his Portuguese, Black and Indigenous regiments beat Schoppe's army at Guararapes and drove it back into Recife.

Njinga had conquered Matamba in 1631–35 and made it her base. When the Dutch took Luanda she allied with them, sold them slaves for firearms and won back much of Ndongo; she beat the Portuguese at Ngoleme in 1644 and Kombi in 1647, and by 1648 was besieging their last stronghold, Massangano.

Garcia II seized the throne of Kongo in January 1641, just as the Dutch took Luanda, and at once sent his armies to help them under a Kongo–Dutch pact against the Portuguese. His men drove the Portuguese from the Bengo river in 1643, but the Dutch would not press on to Massangano, and Njinga's conquests offended him.

Brazil's mills depended on slaves shipped from Luanda. Salvador de Sá, governor of Rio de Janeiro and newly named governor of Angola, sailed from Rio with a fleet in 1648 and besieged Luanda; after a heavy bombardment the Dutch agreed on 24 August to leave Angola. Njinga, abandoned by her allies, fell back to Matamba.

On 30 January 1648 Spain and the Dutch Republic made peace at Münster, ending eighty years of war. The Dutch no longer needed Portugal against Spain; but from 1652 their own war with England kept them from sending reinforcements to Recife.

On 19 February 1649 Barreto beat the Dutch again at Guararapes. Recife and its forts held out for five more years, cut off by land, while the insurgents waited for help from the sea.

Pedro Jaques de Magalhães, who had escorted the new Brazil Company's first convoy in 1649, came back off Recife on 20 December 1653 with some sixty ships. With the harbour closed, the besiegers stormed the outworks in January, and on 26 January 1654 the Dutch signed their surrender.

Vieira argued that only a company built on New Christian capital could pay for armed convoys to Brazil, and that its investors must be safe from confiscation by the Inquisition. On his diplomatic missions of 1647–50 he even urged, in his Papel Forte, giving Pernambuco to the Dutch as the price of peace.

The Companhia Geral do Comércio do Brasil was founded on 8 March 1649 to run armed convoys between Lisbon and Brazil, largely with New Christian money. João protected its investors' capital from confiscation by the Inquisition; its fleet would close the sea off Recife in 1653.

Francisco de Castro, restored as inquisitor-general, headed the Holy Office when the king barred it, in 1649, from confiscating New Christian property. The crown and the Inquisition quarrelled over it for the rest of the reign; the ban was withdrawn only after João's death.

To end the quarrel with England, João sent his chamberlain, João Rodrigues de Sá e Meneses, Count of Penaguião, to London. He signed the Treaty of Westminster with Cromwell's government in 1654, buying peace with English access to Portugal's trade. João held back ratification until 1656, when an English fleet threatened Portuguese ships off Lisbon.

Robert Blake, general-at-sea of the English Commonwealth, anchored off Lisbon in February 1650 to make João expel Prince Rupert's royalist ships. When the king backed Rupert, Blake blockaded the Tagus, took seven ships from a Portuguese fleet of twenty-three, and sailed for Cádiz with them.

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector from December 1653, inherited the quarrel. England's price for peace was high: English merchants wanted access to Portugal's colonial trade, above all Brazil's, and English residents in Portugal won the right to worship in private houses and to a burial ground of their own.

Teodósio, João's eldest son, had been created Prince of Brazil in 1645, a new title for the heir of a new dynasty, and Vieira's mission to Rome in 1650 had sought him a Spanish bride. He died in May 1653, aged nineteen.

Afonso, born in 1643 and of doubtful health, became heir. When João IV died on 6 November 1656, Afonso was acclaimed king on 15 November, at thirteen, amid rumours that he was unfit to rule.

Luisa de Guzmán took the government as regent the day her son was acclaimed. She kept João's household officers and set out to master the rival factions at court, with a Spanish offensive expected on the frontier.

Gerard Pietersz Hulft, an Amsterdam brewer's son, sailed for the Indies in 1654 with letters naming him director-general, and in 1655 was sent with a fleet to Ceylon. He took Kalutara by surprise and laid siege to Colombo in October; the first assault in November cost the Dutch 300 dead. On 10 April 1656 he was killed by a shot from the walls.

António de Sousa Coutinho, a veteran of Portuguese India named captain-general of Ceylon, held Colombo through seven months of bombardment and hunger with no relief from Goa. With his powder gone he surrendered, and on 12 May 1656 the garrison marched out.

Rajasinha's army had besieged Colombo with the Dutch. When the city fell, the Dutch shut its gates on him and kept it, as the treaty of 1638 let them garrison what they took; he laid waste the country around it and went back to his hills.

Vieira reached Maranhão early in 1653 to work among its Indigenous peoples. In June 1654 he sailed to Lisbon to plead their case, and in April 1655 won decrees that put the missions under the Jesuits, with himself as superior, and forbade enslaving Indigenous people except in specified cases. The settlers turned against him.

Luisa governed through João's old servants, balancing the court's factions while preparing for a Spanish invasion. She also led the search for allies abroad, including talks for her daughter Catherine's marriage.

She named Francisco de Faro, Count of Odemira, the boy king's aio, his governor and guardian. An old courtier tied by marriage to the greatest houses, he had once prepared a lodging for João's brother Duarte on his visit of 1638.

As the Spanish besieged Elvas, Luisa gave António Luís de Meneses, Count of Cantanhede, command of all Portuguese troops in the Alentejo. He gathered some 8,000 foot and 2,900 horse at Estremoz, recruiting as far as Viseu and Madeira, and on 14 January 1659 broke the Spanish lines and drove Haro's army back to Badajoz.

Sancho Manuel de Vilhena, a veteran of the Brazil war, defended Elvas while plague killed some 300 a day inside the walls and Spanish guns bombarded it. He agreed with Cantanhede where the relief army should strike the lines, and that year was made Count of Vila Flor.

Luis de Haro, Olivares's nephew and the king's favourite since 1643, led the Spanish army against Elvas in person in the winter of 1658–59, with some 14,000 foot and 5,000 horse. Beaten at the lines, he withdrew to Badajoz and turned to making peace with France.

Rijckloff van Goens, commanding the Dutch East India Company's forces, carried the offensive on after Colombo. In 1658 he took Tuticorin on the Coromandel coast and then Mannar and Jaffna, the last Portuguese strongholds on Ceylon. The Dutch now held the island's coast and cinnamon; Rajasinha kept the hills.

With the Dutch gone, Njinga, now a Christian with Capuchin friars at her court, turned to negotiation. After talks from 1651, she signed peace with the Portuguese in late 1656: the Lucala river became the border and Portuguese traders were admitted to Matamba. She hoped to see her captive sister Kambu, baptised Barbara, freed.

Mazarin and Haro negotiated the peace between France and Spain themselves. Signed on 7 November 1659, the Treaty of the Pyrenees gave France Roussillon and Artois; in return France gave up supporting Portugal, breaking its alliance of 1641, and recognised Philip as Portugal's lawful king.

The treaty also married Louis XIV, king since 1643, to Philip's daughter Maria Theresa; the two kings met on the Isle of Pheasants in June 1660 and the bride crossed into France. Luisa's hope of an alliance with the French king fell through.

Charles II, son of the executed Charles I, was restored to the English throne in May 1660. Despite English preference for a Protestant queen and Spain's objections, talks for his marriage to Catherine of Braganza reopened; the treaty, signed on 23 June 1661, brought England Tangier and Bombay.

Francisco de Melo e Torres, a soldier and mathematician who had fought at Montijo and commanded the Alentejo artillery, went to London as ambassador in July 1657 to seek English help against Spain and the Dutch. On 28 April 1660 he concluded an agreement with England's Council of State, weeks before the monarchy was restored.

Catherine, born at Vila Viçosa in 1638, had been offered in marriage abroad since childhood. Her mother had led the talks since 1656, and in 1660 they turned to England's new king. At the end of 1660 she was still a prospective bride; the treaty came in 1661 and the wedding in 1662.