On the morning of November 1, 1755, a catastrophic earthquake struck Lisbon. Measuring approximately 7. 7 on the Richter scale, with its epicenter about 200 kilometers off Portugal’s southwest coast, the quake unleashed a massive tsunami on the densely populated capital, followed by hours of firestorms and aftershocks. As many as fifty thousand people may have died in one of the most destructive earthquakes in recorded history.
Among the survivors was twenty-year-old Maria, eldest daughter of King José I of Portugal. The royal family was largely unscathed, but the king was psychologically scarred; he developed an extreme claustrophobia and relocated the royal court to tents outside the city at Ajuda, where it effectively operated for years. Maria had been born on December 17, 1734, in Lisbon’s Ribeira Palace, the eldest of four daughters of the heir to the crown, Dom José, and his wife Mariana Victoria. Her childhood was spent within the formal circles of the Portuguese court, where she received an advanced education for the time, including literature, languages, the Greek and Roman classics, and Catholic theology.
In 1750, her father succeeded to the throne as King José I. As the 1750s progressed and it became increasingly clear that the king and queen would produce no male heir, attention turned to Maria as the eventual successor. If she outlived her father, she would become the first reigning queen in Portugal’s long history. In her mid-twenties, with European royalty typically marrying young to secure heirs, the matter of Maria’s marriage became pressing.
A decision was made that she would marry her own uncle, the king’s brother, Infante Dom Pedro. They wed on June 6, 1760, when she was twenty-five and he was forty-two. Though strange by modern standards, marriage among cousins was not unusual in European royal houses, and this match was considered especially warranted: the accession of the former king’s brother as king consort would ease any reservations the Portuguese people might have about being ruled by a woman. Despite the age gap, the marriage was a happy one, though marked by tragedy.
The couple had seven children, four of whom died in infancy. Of the three who survived, Prince Joseph and Infanta Mariana both died within weeks of each other in late 1788 from smallpox, Joseph at twenty-seven and Mariana at only nineteen. Only Prince John, the future king, would live a long life. On February 24, 1777, King José I died, and Maria succeeded as the first queen regnant of Portugal, Queen Dona Maria I.
Her husband became King Pedro, but as king consort his role was largely ceremonial; Maria was the true ruling monarch. Her reign began with a decisive political move. Her father’s twenty-seven-year rule had been dominated by his chief minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal. A secular politician who had sought to reduce the role of the Catholic Church and the Jesuits in governance, Pombal had also implemented Enlightenment-inspired reforms.
Progressive as he may seem today, he had accumulated many enemies by 1777, seen as an excessively powerful figure. One of Maria’s first acts as queen was to dismiss him from public office. Pombal spent the rest of his life in political exile, while Maria formed a new government that restored the Church’s role. The first decade of her reign brought several successes.
In 1782, Portugal played a central part in forming the League of Armed Neutrality, an agreement among several European states to resist British efforts to stop and search merchant vessels traveling to and from Europe, attempts aimed at preventing the French from aiding rebels in Britain’s North American colonies. A year earlier, Maria’s government had successfully petitioned Austria for possession of Delagoa Bay, on the coast of what is now Mozambique. The Austrian East India Company had established a trading station there, but the region was understood to be a Portuguese sphere of influence. Acquiring the bay through diplomacy brought a major trading station under Portuguese control, yielding substantial income from the ivory trade and other commodities.
But in the mid-1780s, Maria faced a severe personal crisis. On May 25, 1786, her husband King Pedro died. Maria took his passing badly, and in the following months her mental health declined sharply, oscillating between intense depression and mania. She increasingly forbade cheerful festivities at court, and observers described the atmosphere as a continual funeral.
The situation worsened in late 1788, when two of her surviving children, Joseph and Mariana, died of smallpox within weeks of each other. Just weeks later, her confessor also passed away. Maria was devastated and became increasingly erratic and oppressive in her behavior. It has also been noted that her incestuous ancestry may have contributed to her condition; two of her sisters had similar afflictions, and both her maternal grandfather, Philip V of Spain, and her uncle, Ferdinand VI, had fallen into madness at the ends of their lives.
Medical help was sought. Francis Willis, the esteemed physician who had treated King George III of Britain in his mental distress, was enlisted, but as with his charge in England, he was unable to provide effective treatment. Maria’s condition was in any case not as severe as George III’s, who eventually became entirely incapacitated. She was most likely suffering from severe clinical depression, compounded by the multiple tragedies of the late 1780s.
Nevertheless, in 1792, the Portuguese government decided to effectively sideline the queen. Her only surviving child, Prince John, played an increasingly significant role in governing the country, though Maria retained her position as queen. Two years later, in 1794, the royal tents at Ajuda burned down, and the court moved to Queluz, where the queen spent most of her days in her apartments. One visitor who stayed near her claimed to have heard the most agonizing shrieks, inflicting a sensation of horror he had never felt before.
Maria’s manic episodes included screams that she was damned and that the devil was inside her, as well as attacks on her servants. She fluctuated between violent excitement and complete catatonia. Other treatments, such as bloodletting and enemas, were tried, but none helped. Maria’s decline unfolded as Portugal became drawn into the conflicts that would ravage Europe for a quarter-century after the French Revolution of 1789.
When she came to the throne, Portugal was a much weakened international and colonial power. In the early sixteenth century, it had been formidable globally, with territories along the African coast, enclaves in India, and an empire in the East Indies. By the eighteenth century, nearly all of these colonies were lost. The great exception was Brazil.
Under the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, the papal agreement that had divided the Americas and much of the Far East between Spain and Portugal, Portugal had ended up in control of the enormous South American colony. Brazil had developed slowly in the seventeenth century, but by the late eighteenth it was becoming a major state in the Americas. Portuguese possession of Brazil would become a major factor in Maria’s reign. In 1789, revolution erupted in France.
King Louis XVI was removed from power, and eventually the French executed their king and formed a republic. The other major European powers went to war with France. The French Revolutionary Wars lasted for years and eventually became the Napoleonic Wars after Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor. In the course of these conflicts, both Spain and Portugal were occupied by France, with enormous consequences for Queen Maria.
From 1801 onward, the Spanish, with French encouragement, began seizing border towns in northern and eastern Portugal. Matters became far worse in 1807, when Napoleon decided to take more direct control of Spain and Portugal. Prince John made the decision to flee Portugal and moved the royal court to Salvador da Bahia in Brazil. As they fled, Maria, believing she was being kidnapped, refused to board the ship and was forcefully carried aboard by the fleet commander.
She reportedly spent much of the three-month voyage screaming, terrifying the crew. By now in her early seventies and suffering from dementia, she would spend the last years of her life presiding over a Portuguese royal court in exile in Brazil. These years were peculiar ones for Maria and the Portuguese nation. No sooner had the court established itself in Brazil than the British general Arthur Wellesley undertook a campaign to reconquer Portugal from the French, then expanded the conflict into Spain.
The Peninsular War proved central to the Napoleonic Wars. The Portuguese government in Brazil provided significant resources throughout. In 1815, in recognition of Brazil’s aid to Portugal during the wars, Prince John elevated Brazil from the status of colony to that of a separate kingdom. Maria died on March 20, 1816, at the age of eighty-one, at the Carmo Convent in Rio de Janeiro.
She was succeeded by her only surviving son, Prince John, who had ruled Portugal informally for many years and now officially became King John VI. To this day, there is no consensus on what mental illness afflicted Maria, though research suggests she likely suffered from bipolar disorder. Despite her psychological struggles, she is well regarded today, particularly in Brazil, where she is viewed as an important figure in the formation of the Brazilian state. Her reign saw Brazil elevated to the status of a kingdom, an important step toward Brazilian independence in 1822.
Often remembered as Maria the Mad, Queen Maria I was in fact a largely successful monarch in Portugal’s political history.