When Portugal’s dominance of the Asian sea route declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the rise of the Dutch and British East India Companies, the focus of its empire shifted to Brazil, whose territories were vaster and richer by far than those of any other colony in the world. Since its annexation by Portugal in 1500, Brazil had been exploited as a slave worked plantation, producing sugar and tobacco in industrial quantities but when gold was discovered in the Brazilian highlands in 1697, the fortune of both countries were transformed overnight.
Mass emigration from rural Portugal during the early years of the Brazilian gold rush hastened the collapse of domestic industries such as textile, fishing and agriculture, while labourers and overseers in the Brazil plantation also fled to the highlands of the north in search of gold.
Soon Lisbon was largely dependent for its income on the products of the Brazilian mines, supplemented by the British run port wine industry that was developing around Oporto in the North.
Slowly but surely, Portugal was laying the foundations of its economic future, in which short term prosperity would give way to long term dependency, with most industries in terminal decline and much of its trade in foreign hands. But as long as the supply of gold (and later, diamonds) kept coming in from Brazil, the situation in Lisbon appeared sustainable.
The sheer scale of Portugal’s income from gold mines of Brazil is hard to comprehend, although it was quickly matched by the scale and enthusiasm of its expenditure by the crown. The first half of the eighteen century saw at least a thousand tones of Brazil gold make its way into Lisbon harbor. Compared with the annual yield of half a tone that had been shipped from the West African gold cost during the first imperial boom years of fifteenth and sixteen centuries, these were unimaginable riches and they drove the King of Portugal delirious with wealth.
Dom Joao V, who ascended to the throne at the age seventeen in 1706, just as the gold rush begin in earnest, did what any young monarch would have done in his place: he dispensed with parliament, surrounded himself with sycophants and mistresses and embarked upon the creation of an absolutist regime that would be known throughout the world for the lavishness of its spending. He was after all, the richest monarch in Christendom and he was ken that all of Christendom should know it.
Dom Joao’s programme of public expenditure began with the wholesale ornamentation of Lisbon’s sixty five medieval and baroque churches, along with the building of dozens of new ones in the modern neo-classical style. Although a tenth of the population of Lisbon remained homeless, the interiors of their city’s churches- thanks to the bounty of the Brazilian mines-were soon swimming with gold from floor to ceiling, their walls draped with the costliest paintings and their side chapels studded with gems and precious stones collected from around the world. The Chapel of St John the Baptist for example, which was installed in the ancient church of St Rock in 1750 after eight years’ labour by a team of Italian craftsmen was the most expensive chapel the world had ever seen. Constructed from the rarest marbles and semi precious stones including lapis lazuli, porphyry, jade, agate and amethyst and heavy gilded and tiled throughout, the chapel featured a series of exquisite mosaics depicting scenes from the life of Christ and the Apostles, inlaid into carved surrounds of the finest Carrara marble. Visitor to the church- once they had made their way past the throng of beggars at the door- could hardly believe what they saw, ‘’all was so magnificently, so superstitiously grand’, in the words of George Whitefield, the Methodist minister, whose disapproval of Portuguese religious excess kept faltering before its sensory allure.
