February 18, 2026 • 39 mins
On November 1, 1755, a massive earthquake took place on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Lisbon, Portugal. The destruction in Portugal led to one of the first coordinated government responses to a natural disaster.
Research:
- Algarve History Association. “The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and the Algarve.” https://www.algarvehistoryassociation.com/en/portuguese-history/algarve-history/194-the-1755-lisbon-earthquake-and-the-algarve
- Blanc, P.-L.: Earthquakes and tsunami in November 1755 in Morocco: a different reading of contemporaneous documentary sources, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 9, 725–738, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-9-725-2009, 2009.
- Borlase, William. “The Natural History of Cornwall.” Oxford : printed for the author; by W. Jackson: sold by W. Sandby, London; and the booksellers of Oxford. 1758.
- Cavendish, Richard. “Pombal and the Inquisition in Portugal.” History Today. 5/5/2001. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/pombal-and-inquisition-portugal
- Dynes, Russell R. “The Lisbon Earthquake in 1755: The First Modern Disaster.” University of Delaware Disaster Research Center. Preliminary Paper #333.
- Joel, Lucas. “November 1, 1755: Earthquake Destroys Lisbon.” EARTH. November/December 2015.
- Lai, Dria. “The Great Lisbon Earthquake: A Journey through the First Modern Disaster.” https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e30a2ea6401e4f2e8805dfbcfa604dc5
- Lisbon Earthquake Museum. “Inquérito.” https://lisbonquake.com/en-GB/blog/inquerito
- Lisbon Earthquake Museum. “Providências.” https://lisbonquake.com/en-GB/blog/providencias
- Martínez-Loriente, S., Sallarès, V. & Gràcia, E. The Horseshoe Abyssal plain Thrust could be the source of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami. Commun Earth Environ 2, 145 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00216-5
- Mascarenhas, J., Belgas, L., Branco, F.G., Vieira, E. (2024). The Pombaline Cage (“Gaiola Pombalina”): An European Anti-seismic System Based on Enlightenment Era of Experimentation. In: Endo, Y., Hanazato, T. (eds) Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions. SAHC 2023. RILEM Bookseries, vol 47. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39603-8_5
- Molesky, Mark. “The Vicar and the Earthquake: Conflict, Controversy, and a Christening during the Great Lisbon Disaster of 1755.” e-JPH, Vol. 10, number 2, Winter 2012.
- Penwith Local History Group. “The Mounts Bay Tsunami.” https://www.penwithlocalhistorygroup.co.uk/on-this-day/?id=269
Pereira, Alvaro S. “The Opportunity of a Disaster: The Economic Impact of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake.” The Journal of Economic History , Jun. 2009. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40263964
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
At various points on our trip to Morocco last year,
our guides talked about the Great Lisbon earthquake of seventeen
fifty five. It started at our very first stop on
our very first full day in Morocco, at Hassen Tower
in robot so Kleif. Abu Yusuf Yakub al Mansour commissioned
(00:38):
a mosque at the end of the twelfth century, but
then he died before construction on it was finished, and
it was never completed. Before his death, red sandstone Minaret
had been built to about half its planned height. It
was supposed to be the tallest minaret in the world
once it was done, but of course it was never finished,
(00:59):
and there were also some exterior walls and hundreds of columns.
A lot of these columns collapsed in the earthquake, and
today their remnants are sort of standing before the minaret
at different heights, depending on how much of them is left.
So this earthquake kept coming up over the rest of
the trip. Our guides would say that a site had
(01:21):
been uncovered in the earthquake or damaged in the earthquake,
and it made me really curious because they kept saying
Lisbon over and over. They were talking about the Lisbon earthquake.
But this earthquake was obviously also a big enough deal
in Morocco that people are still talking about it at
historic sites two hundred years later. I had definitely heard
(01:45):
of this earthquake before, because it is depicted in Voltaire's Candide,
which I have read and have also seen a theatrical
adaptation of. But I did not fully connect the setting
of Candide to the realities of an actual historic events.
So that's today's episode. This earthquake took place on November first,
(02:09):
seventeen fifty five. Its epicenter was on the boundary between
the African and Eurasian tectonic plates, on the floor of
the Atlantic Ocean, two hundred to three hundred kilometers southwest
of Lisbon, Portugal and about three hundred and fifty kilometers
northwest of Casablanca, Morocco. Those are obviously all approximations in
(02:30):
terms of its distance. There have been lots of efforts
to pinpoint the exact epicenter. But this tectonic boundary is
really complex, and the earthquake itself was also really complex.
There were three distinct periods of shaking over the course
of about fifteen to twenty minutes, and there has been
debate about whether at least one of those was really
(02:52):
an aftershock, or if there were two different earthquakes very
close together.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah, I read a.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Few different papers that pretty confidently said this is where
the epicenter was, and they were not in exactly the
same point. They had different substantiation for why they had
come to that conclusion. Does not seem like there is
exact agreement on the exact location of where it started. Today,
(03:20):
earthquakes are measured using the moment magnitude scale that started
replacing the Richter scale in the nineteen eighties. There's no
upper limit to this scale, but the strongest earthquake ever
recorded struck Chile in nineteen sixty, and that had a
magnitude of nine point five. The magnitude of the seventeen
fifty five earthquake has been estimated based on eighteenth century
(03:43):
accounts and other data, and it's generally accepted as having
a magnitude of between eight point five and nine, although
there are a few estimates that have arrived at like
a somewhat lower number. Regardless, though a very powerful earthquake,
and this earthquakes most destructive effects were in Portugal, Morocco
(04:03):
and Spain. This isn't an area that's really associated with
a ton of major earthquakes prior to this. In seventeen
twenty two and earthquakes struck southern Portugal, but many of
the records of that earthquake were destroyed in seventeen fifty five,
so we don't have a lot of detail about it.
Earlier major earthquakes in Portugal took place in thirteen fifty
(04:26):
six and fifteen thirty one. An earthquake struck Fez, Morocco
in sixteen twenty four and caused extensive damage. An earthquake
that struck Almedia in southern Spain in fifteen twenty two
killed an estimated two thousand, five hundred people and it
destroyed most of the city. So major earthquakes were not
unheard of in this region, but they were widely spaced.
(04:50):
They often happened centuries apart. The November one, seventeen fifty
five earthquake was felt as far away as Britain in
Ireland in the north, Hamburg, Germany in the northeast, the
Azores Archipelago in the west, and the Cape Verde Islands
off the coast of what's now Senegal to the southwest.
(05:10):
There were also reports of disturbances in lakes and rivers,
including the formation of standing waves all across western and
northern Europe, and then after shocks went on for months.
This earthquake also spawned a tsunami, which devastated the coasts
of Morocco, Spain, and Portugal, as well as islands and
archipelagoes to the west of Northern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula.
(05:35):
It caused major damage to ports and coastal settlements in
all of these places. Many of Morocco's cities were surrounded
by walls, which could offer some protection from a tsunami,
but in some places this tsunami measured about twenty meters
or sixty six feet, so it crested over the top
of those walls and it flooded the city's interiors. Having
(05:57):
been in some of those cities, that prospect is terrifying
to me.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yeah, because then there's no way for the water to
get out.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
No no, so Obviously, in addition to being very destructive,
this was deadly. This tsunami was also reported as far
north as the British and Irish Isles. For example, a
series of waves measuring six to ten feet or about
two to three meters struck the coast of Cornwall. Then
on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a similarly
(06:27):
sized wave also struck the coast of Newfoundland, and there
were waves of about one meter or three feet that
struck much of the Caribbean. In the coast of Brazil,
Smaller waves from the tsunami were also reported all along
the eastern coasts of North and South America. Sediments from
the tsunami have also been found as far away as Scotland.
(06:50):
Information did not travel nearly as quickly in seventeen to
fifty five as it does today, and the Japanese word
tsunami had not made its way into europe and languages yet,
but people did understand that earthquakes could be connected to
flooding and unusually massive waves or tides. For example, William
Borlaize published a book on the natural history of Cornwall
(07:13):
in seventeen fifty eight, and he described the huge waves
that struck Mount's Bay in seventeen fifty five, he talked
about the city of Lisbon being destroyed in an earthquake
that same day, with the Tagus River in Lisbon rising
twenty to thirty feet in cycles, and ships at sea
sixty leagues from port feeling the shock as though they
(07:35):
had run aground. Borlais wrote that it was difficult to
say exactly what connection there might be between what happened
in Cornwall and in Portugal, but quote, all these circumstances
seemed to declare very confidently that what we felt was
either the fainter part of that deplorable shock at Lisbon,
or the last expiring efforts of some similar subterraneous struggles
(07:59):
farther to the west and southwest under the Atlantic Ocean.
There were also two other major earthquakes in November of
seventeen fifty five in addition to this one. On November eighteenth,
an earthquake struck off the coast of Cape ann in Massachusetts,
with an estimated magnitude of five point eight. That is
(08:20):
much smaller than the November first earthquake, but it is
the largest known earthquake ever to strike Massachusetts. It topped
a lot of chimneys and church steeples, and it knocked
over fences, and it woke up John Adams, who wrote
about it in his diary. There is speculation that the
seismic conditions that led to this earthquake were triggered by
(08:43):
the earthquake on November first.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
And there was also another earthquake in Morocco later in November.
Documentation on this one is tricky. It struck the city
of Mechnus, which is southwest of Fez. Both cities were
badly damaged in an estimated fifteen thousand people were killed.
Sources in Arabic consistently report the date of this earthquake
(09:08):
is happening on November twenty seventh, but there are also
European reports of a strong earthquake in this part of
Morocco on November eighteenth, which was believed to be a
strong aftershock of that November first earthquake. Various writing from
the eighteenth century and later conflates all of these earthquakes,
and it is completely possible that some of the damage
(09:29):
our guides in Morocco attributed to the November first earthquake
really happened later in the month. During these secondary events,
the seventeen fifty five Mechnez earthquake occurred on a different
fault than the Lisbon earthquake, but it is possible that
it also developed from the seismic effects of that earlier quake.
Estimates of the death toll from the November first earthquake
(09:53):
and the tsunami and fires that followed it, which we
haven't even talked about the fires at all are all
over the place, like wildly all over the place. The
lowest estimates are about ten thousand people, but the highest
estimates report one hundred thousand people. Some of this is
(10:13):
because Lisbon, which faced some of the worst impacts, that
didn't have really an accurate estimate of the population from
before the earthquake. Bodies were also buried really quickly to
try to prevent the spread of disease, so there wasn't
a careful accounting of the dead. It's also likely that
some people just fled the hardest hit areas and then
(10:36):
weren't really tracked afterward. And it's also complicated because that
earthquake in Morocco just a few weeks later also had
a significant death toll, and it's not always clear which
of these earthquakes a person might have died in even
if those lower estimates are closer to correct. This was
(10:56):
one of the most destructive earthquakes ever to strike Southern
Europe and northern Africa. It also had a devastating effect
on Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. It was the biggest
disaster to strike a European capital since the Great Fire
of London in sixteen sixty six. We'll have more detail
on Lisbon after a sponsor break in seventeen fifty five.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Lisbon, Portugal, was the fourth largest city in Europe after London, Paris,
and Naples. As a nation, Portugal had become wealthy thanks
to its colonial empire, particularly gold mines in Brazil, which
were run using enslaved labor. Initially, Portugal had enslaved both
(11:50):
indigenous people and Africans in Brazil, but the enslavement of
indigenous Americans was banned in April of seventeen fifty five
in part with the hope that indigenous peoples would ally
with Portugal and border disputes with Spain. More enslaved Africans
were ultimately transported to Brazil than to anywhere else in
(12:13):
the world. In spite of its wealth, Lisbon was not
really thought of as being in the same league as
those other larger cities. For one thing, with a population
of about two hundred and seventy five thousand people, it
was significantly smaller than London or Paris. For comparison, London's
population was approaching three times that and Paris was about
(12:36):
twice as populous as Lisbon. Portugal was also dependent on
England for its naval defense. These two nations had a
relationship that had gone back for centuries, and then in
seventeen oh three, during the War of the Spanish Succession,
they had signed the Methuen Treaties. Those were named for
British negotiator John Methuen. Under these treaties, the British navy
(13:00):
would safeguard Portugal's ports and their trade, and then the
two nations would also have various favored trading statuses with
one another. Trade goods that were part of these treaties
included British textiles and Portuguese wines. Portugal did not have
a lot of industrial exports of its own, and as
(13:23):
a result of this relationship with England, port cities, including Lisbon,
had a really sizeable community of British merchants known as
the English Factory. They also used the term English or
British pretty broadly, meaning anyone from those islands that they
were just sort of everyone lumped together. This also means
(13:46):
that a lot of that gold mine wealth, while it
was making Portugal wealthy, it was also ultimately winding up
in the UK. Other major European powers also regarded Portugal
as somewhat backward and superstitious. This also had some connections
to religion. Like most of the rest of Europe, Portugal
(14:06):
had a state religion, in this case Roman Catholicism, but
Portugal also had a particularly large number of clergy compared
to its population. There were probably fewer than two million
people living in all of Portugal, and as many as
two hundred thousand of them were Catholic clergy. This was
(14:26):
a time when the Church was often tightly interconnected with
daily life in countries all over Europe, but that number
was just seen as a lot. Beyond that, the Jesuit
Order had control of Portuguese missions in the Americas and
the higher education system in Portugal. The Portuguese Inquisition had
(14:47):
also been established in the fifteen thirties and modeled after
the Spanish Inquisition, targeting heretics as well as people who
had been forced to convert to Christianity but were believed
to secretly still beach Jewish, including their descendants. The total
number of cases the Portuguese Inquisition tried and the number
(15:07):
of people that it put to death were smaller than
that of the Spanish Inquisition, but it was proportionately greater.
Portugal had also been on the periphery of the scientific
revolution that led to major developments in other parts of
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Inquisition censored
(15:28):
published material in Portugal, which meant that some scientific works
just were not available in Portuguese. In the eighteenth century,
people who tried to introduce new scientific discoveries into Portugal
were known as enstraggiados, which was the term for Europeanized intellectuals.
Sebastian Jose de carvaljo Emelo, secretary of State for Foreign
(15:50):
affairs in war, wasn't Estrangerrado and had been trying to
limit the Inquisition's power in the years leading up to
the earthquake, but it was still a major force in Portugal,
and various intellectuals and scholars had been forced out of
Portugal because of it. Yeah, the fact that, like intellectuals
who were trying to introduce new scientific discoveries were being
(16:11):
thought of as europeanized ye, and like Portugal is part
of Europe, but like it's clear that from that mindset,
the people who were introducing these thoughts were being thought
of as other, Yeah, and then being described using.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
A term that.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Has common origins with like stranger. Yeah, Like that just
sort of illustrates untrustworthy. Yeah, yeah, what was happening in Portugal.
There is also a connection between religion and why the
seventeen fifty five earthquake was so devastating to the city
of Lisbon. The earthquake started at about nine to forty
(16:52):
in the morning on All Saints' Day, that is the
major holiday in the Catholic Church, So a lot of
people in Lisbon and most of the other cities and
towns in Portugal were at mass that included the royal
family Portugals. Churches and monasteries were typically very very tall
and architecturally complex, and a lot of them just collapsed
(17:16):
during the earthquake with people inside. Much of Lisbon was
also destroyed by fire in the aftermath of the earthquake.
Those fires started as the quake was happening, many of
them sparked by candles and lamps falling from the altars
and other places around the churches. There were also some
eyewitness reports of fires being intentionally set by looters. These
(17:40):
fires spread due to strong winds, and the massive scale
of destruction from the earthquake made the fires even harder
to fight. Those fires burned for about five days. As
we said a moment ago, the first wave of the
earthquake started at about nine forty in the morning. It
was intense enough to raise a cloud of dust around
(18:01):
Lisbon as buildings started collapsing, and this dust really blocked
out a lot of the sunlight. Another even more destructive
period of shaking started at about nine fifty in the morning,
and then there was a third shock at about nine
fifty five. This earthquake destroyed churches and monasteries all over Lisbon,
(18:22):
as well as the royal palace. A large fissure opened
up in the city center. People trying to flee the
destruction and the fires, made their way to the Taugus
River and to the boats in the harbor to try
to escape, but at about ten thirty, so less than
an hour after the earthquake started. The water receded and
then returned as a tsunami that flooded the harbor and
(18:45):
much of the central city, which had been built over
what had been a dry creek bed. Many of the
people who had sought safety in the water drowned or
were crushed by debris and wreckage in the water. A
major aftershock struck at about eleven am. As we mentioned earlier,
Lisbon had a sizeable community of British subjects living in
(19:07):
the city, and one of them was Anglican vicar Richard Goddard,
who had gone to Lisbon for his health and to
check on his younger brother, who was working as a merchant.
After this aftershock, a group of more than one hundred people,
apparently believing that the earthquake was some kind of divine
retribution forcibly, baptized Goddard into the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Between the earthquake, the tsunami, and the fires, roughly four
fifths of central Lisbon was completely destroyed. Only about three
thousand of Lisbon's homes were in usable condition afterward. Of
the city's forty churches, thirty five were destroyed. The Royal Palace,
as we mentioned, was destroyed, including the Royal Library and
(19:52):
all of its records. So was the Opera House, which
was only about a month old at this point. The
Customs House was destroyed, along with commercial buildings and banks
and all of the records that all of these buildings contained.
As we mentioned earlier, deathtol estimates are all over the place,
but it is estimated that about thirty thousand people died
(20:12):
in Lisbon alone. That would have been about ten percent
of the population. Seventy eight people from the English factory died.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Because Portugal had an established British community, there was a
lot of documentation and writing about the earthquake and its
aftermath that was written in English. Some of this was
published in the UK in seventeen fifty five or not
long after. This is one of the reasons that the
earthquake is most associated with Lisbon. In addition to Lisbon's
(20:44):
importance as the Portuguese capital and the just immense scale
of the disaster there, there was also a lot of
writing about it that was very quickly accessible to people
in Britain and the Americas and then anywhere else that
was translating these British documents. There is also a lot
of documentation of the earthquake that is written in Portuguese,
(21:05):
and we'll get to that after we pause for a
sponsor break. In seventeen fifty five, Jose the First was
King of Portugal. He was at a royal residence in
Blame in western Lisbon when the earthquake struck. This palace
(21:30):
did have some damage, but the Blame area was not
affected nearly as badly as central Lisbon, and the king
was unharmed. Pedro Demota Isilva, secretary of State for the kingdom,
also survived, but he was in his seventies and sick.
He died only a few days after the earthquake. I
(21:50):
don't think he died as a result of the earthquake.
I think he was already ill, but it's a little
unclear in the sources that I read. Sebastian Jose de
Cavalo Imelo, secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and War,
was also unharmed. The king gave Sebastiao Jose broad authority
(22:11):
to manage the official response to the earthquake, and after
Pedro Damota y Silva's death, he became Secretary of State
for the Kingdom. Later on in his life he became
Marquess de Pombal, and most sources just call him Pombal,
regardless of when in his life they're talking about. Sources
give a range of reasons for why Pombal wound up
(22:33):
in this role. One is that being the Secretary of
State for Foreign Affairs and war made Pimo logical choice
to be in charge. The damage to Lisbon could be
compared to a massive enemy bombardment in a time of war.
I also saw one argument claiming that it was because
his house had been completely spared, and people interpreted this
(22:56):
as divine intervention and a sign that he should be
put in charge. I don't know how much truth there
is to that. Another made it sound like he was
just the one who took the initiative to do it,
that he left his family at home almost immediately after
the earthquake had stopped and went to find the king
and find out what the king wanted him to do.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Regardless, Pombal's involvement is a big part of why the
Great Lisbon earthquake is sometimes described as the first modern disaster,
because it had a well documented, coordinated government response. The
king and his government, largely directed by Pombal, took accountability
for the rebuilding effort and for helping as many people
(23:37):
as possible during the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and fires,
and minimizing harm as much as possible. There's a probably
apocryphal but widely repeated story that the king asked Pombal
what to do, and Pombal answered, quote, bury the dead
and feed the living. So Pombal did not do all
(23:59):
of this by himself. There were also twelve district leaders appointed,
and they had very broad authority to make decisions to
manage the emergency in each of their districts. And then,
of course there were all kinds of other managers and
workers and other people who were all part of the effort.
They were also guided by a set of two hundred
(24:19):
and forty one measures and provisions drafted by Pombal and
signed by the king. These were later published as a book,
and they included everything from reducing the spread of disease
to finding and distributing food, to providing medical treatment and
other care. Some taxes were suspended to help people afford necessities,
while all of this work was funded by a newly
(24:42):
established tax on trade. As part of the relief effort.
The government also nationalized the canned sardine industry. Food and
other provisions came from a range of sources. Ships that
were already in the harbor that were not destroyed in
the tsunami were forbidden to leave until it was confirmed
that they were not carrying cargo that could help with
(25:04):
the rebuilding effort. Taxes on fish were suspended, and people
were also encouraged to fish to try to bolster the
food supply. The British government sent monetary aid, as well
as loads of shovels and pickaxes and food, which is
one of the first known instances of formal international disaster
(25:25):
aid in history. A tent city was established at the
royal estate in Belem, and while the palace was undergoing repairs,
the king lived on the grounds as well. Pombal also
lived in a hut in Belem, even though his home
was apparently intact.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
During the recovery effort, Lisbon existed basically in a state
of martial law. Looters and smugglers were aggressively captured and prosecuted,
and a lot of them were hanged. The government implemented
price controls so that there would be no price gouging.
People who mass created as monks or nuns to try
to get free provisions were excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
(26:06):
The government also tried to keep people from simply fleeing
Lisbon and leaving the city without anybody still there to
help care for other people and to help rebuild, and
they ignored various requests from the wealthy to try to
get special treatment or extra help. We mentioned earlier that
one of the reasons that it's hard to determine an
accurate death toll for this disaster is that the dead
(26:29):
were buried very quickly to try to prevent the spread
of disease. Some people were buried in mass graves, and
others were weighted down on barges which were then sunk,
basically burying them at sea. These mass burials included people
across the spectrum of race, ethnicity, age, and social status.
(26:50):
This was of course controversial, especially since most of these
people had died suddenly and had not had an opportunity
for a final confession or last rights. Pomball and the
rest of the government also established a plan to rebuild
central Lisbon. It had previously been a medieval city with
(27:10):
some public plazas, but also a lot of very narrow,
winding streets that had been built and expanded haphazardly over
the centuries without any kind of official plan. The new
construction was planned out on an orthogonal grid, with wide
streets that would also act like fire breaks. The new
buildings were also designed to be earthquake resistant. They featured
(27:34):
what came to be known as the guiola pombalina or
pombaline cage. This was an interior support structure made of
wood with a lot of wooden cross bracing. The inside
of this structure was filled with small stone masonry that
could move and shift in the event of earthquakes. Masonry
facades were designed to slide down the side of the
(27:56):
building in the event of an earthquake, rather than toppling
out to the street. Decorative elements were mostly tile adornments
and iron balconies. These newly built buildings were typically between
three and five stories tall, with shops and services on
the ground floor and housing above.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
All of this.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Rebuilding took a very long time. The rebuilt central city
had two main squares, the Prosa de Commercio and the Prosaderosio.
The Prosida Commercio faces the harbor and its surrounded by
buildings that mostly house things like government offices and courts.
In seventeen seventy five, so twenty years after the earthquake,
(28:41):
an equestrian statue of King Jose the First was dedicated
at this square, and a lot of the surrounding construction
sites were draped with cloth or framed in wood that
was decorated to look like what the finished buildings would be.
It was still really a construction site. Even all of
the official steps to try to recover from the earthquake,
(29:04):
it was still, of course a major disaster. It's estimated
that Portugal lost between a third and half of its
gross domestic product because of the earthquake. Wages and prices
were also volatile for years afterward. The scale of the
earthquake and the recovery effort also slowed Portugal's colonial efforts
(29:24):
in the Americas. We also mentioned that there's a lot
of documentation of this earthquake from British subjects who were
living in Lisbon and elsewhere in Portugal. There's also documentation
from other foreign residents and visitors, and there is a
ton of Portuguese documentation as well. In January of seventeen
(29:47):
fifty six, Pombal sent a set of thirteen questions to
Portugal's bishops, with instructions to pass those questions on to
their parish priests and then collect all the answers. They
were specific questions about the quake itself, like what time
the tembler started, how long they lasted, how many waves
(30:08):
of shaking there were, and how far apart those waves were.
He asked whether the shaking seemed to come from a
specific direction. There were also questions about how many people
died and how many homes were destroyed, as well as
local relief efforts and whether they had faced any kind
of shortages. Because of this systematic collection of information about
(30:30):
the earthquakes and the types of questions that were asked,
Pombal is also recognized as contributing to the field of seismology.
This earthquake also happened alongside a lot of intellectual and
societal change in Europe near the start of the period
that is described as Europe's Age of Enlightenment or the
Age of Reason. This period is known for scientific discoveries
(30:53):
with a focus on rational thought and empirical evidence and
a shift away from looking for religious or divine explanations
for natural phenomena. There's been a lot of writing about
how the earthquake and its aftermath were related to this
and how they influenced people's thinking about nature, religion, and science.
Like the earthquake struck a Catholic country and destroyed a
(31:16):
lot of churches on a holiday while people were at mass.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
What did that mean? Was this divine retribution? And if
it was, what was it retribution for? Or was it
just a coincidence, a natural disaster with an explanation that
could be found in nature that didn't have any kind
of underlying religious meaning.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
As we sat up at the top of the show.
This earthquake is also part of Voltaire's satirical work Candid.
One of the many things that Candide satirizes is the
philosophy of optimism, including the work of German philosopher Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibnitz in his seventeen ten work The Odyssey. On
(31:56):
an incredibly basic level, this philosophy is root in the
idea that the world is the best possible world that
God could have created, and it was hard for people
to reconcile that idea with the earthquake. In Candid, Candid's tutor,
doctor Pangloss, insists repeatedly that they are living at the
(32:19):
best of all possible worlds. He says this no matter
what horrific thing is happening around them, including the earthquake.
Voltaire also wrote a poem that was explicitly about the
earthquake and the axiom to ebien.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Or all as well. At the same time, some of
the writing about this makes it sound very X plus
Y equal Z, summing it up along the lines of
people couldn't reconcile this terrible earthquake killing people in the
middle of church with the idea of God, especially with
the idea of a benevolent God. So voila the Enlightenment.
(32:55):
But that's incredibly reductive. The Age of Enlightenment is a
frie historians have developed to try to understand and talk
about the past. And it wasn't like a light switch.
Nobody was like, let's start the Enlightenment. You guys, I
woke up this morning and I was in the age
of reason. How about you? I felt enlightened, and I
(33:15):
want more people to feel that too. The changes and
developments that have led historians to frame this period in
this way started before the earthquake, and they were building
on the scientific revolution that had started centuries earlier. Also,
there are a lot of differing opinions about poem Mall.
He definitely had a huge influence on the recovery from
(33:39):
the earthquake in Lisbon and the rest of Portugal, and
some of the steps that the Portuguese government took to
try to mitigate this disaster are still things that continue
to be done after disasters today. But he is also
described as really overstepping his authority, just going way beyond
what was needed to recover from the earthquake, so that
(34:00):
he could try to push his more personal agenda, including
his own opposition to the Jesuit order. There is so
much more stuff that went on there, we would need
a whole other episode and honestly a way more thorough
understanding of the entirety of Portuguese history. But when King
(34:20):
Jose the First died in seventeen seventy seven, Pomeball immediately
lost his position, and then he spent the rest of
his life trying to fight off accusations of corruption and
abuse of power. He died in seventeen eighty two, you
got some listener mail lined up for us. I do
(34:41):
have listener mail lined up, so this listener mail is
from listener Timothy. And Timothy wrote after our episode on
Rickets and wrote, sometimes I get distracted while I'm listening
to podcasts and multitasking, so I apologize if I missed it.
Isn't sure if in the Rickets episode you talked about
(35:02):
the genetic disorders that can cause a person to have
rickets even if they're getting plenty of sunlight. I happen
to be one of these people. My dermatologists is always
telling me I need to use more sunblock and stay
out of the sun because of the sun damage that
I have to my skin. At the same time, I
am vitamin D deficient and have to take a large
dose of vitamin D every week to supplement. I found
(35:25):
out at fifty five years of age that I will
just always be vitamin D deficient if I don't take
a supplement. There are several genetic disorders which render humans
unable to use vitamin D or synthesize vitamin D from
sunlight regardless of sun exposure. This then lists off what
at least some of them are. So there's hereditary vitamin
(35:47):
D resistant rickets caused by mutations in the VDR gene.
The body can't use the vitamin D it produces or consumes,
leading to severe rickets, low calcium, and sometimes alopecia. Vitamin
D S dependent rickets type one A caused by mutations
in the CYP two seven B one gene, so the
body cannot convert vitamin D to its active form, and
(36:10):
vitamin D dependent rickets type one B vdd R one
B a rarer similar defect in the CYP two R
one gene. I don't know which one of these I'm
affected by, because when they find out you're vitamin D deficient,
it's cheaper and easier to just put you on a
supplement than to do a bunch of genetic tests just
to find out that you still need the supplement. I
(36:33):
don't have a pet right now, so I'm including a
picture of a wild deer that has been living in
my backyard and harassing me in my family. Not only
is she not afraid of people, she seems to want
to attack anyone who comes into our yard. I have
named her Venison, and we have had to fend off
(36:54):
her attacks with sticks. Timothy, I don't I'm not laughing
at your misfortune of having an aggressive deer in your backyard.
I'm laughing because it is so incongruous with the image
that a lot of people have of deer as like
very peaceful, gentle animals just quietly step through the forest
(37:22):
and eat leaves. This is a very pretty deer. I
am very sorry that she is causing problems in your life.
We did not mention any any genetic.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Conditions that can cause people either not to be able
to produce vitamin D or to use it. We talked
more about other conditions that can cause you not to
be able to absorb it from your food. So thank
you so much for sending this note to talk about that,
and for sending this deer picture. I have some of
(37:58):
a fondness for deer, while also are recognizing that they
can cause a number of problems due to the world
we have built for them to live in. Yeah, they
are wild animals. They are wild animals. There are also
a whole lot of them. And as we talked about
in our episode about tick born diseases, the prevalence of
(38:22):
lime disease seems to be associated with the fact that
there's a lot, a lot of deer nowadays.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Thanks for listening. If you would like to send us
a note about this or any other podcast, or at
History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else
you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(38:52):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
At various points on our trip to Morocco last year,
our guides talked about the Great Lisbon earthquake of seventeen
fifty five. It started at our very first stop on
our very first full day in Morocco, at Hassen Tower
in robot so Kleif. Abu Yusuf Yakub al Mansour commissioned
(00:38):
a mosque at the end of the twelfth century, but
then he died before construction on it was finished, and
it was never completed. Before his death, red sandstone Minaret
had been built to about half its planned height. It
was supposed to be the tallest minaret in the world
once it was done, but of course it was never finished,
(00:59):
and there were also some exterior walls and hundreds of columns.
A lot of these columns collapsed in the earthquake, and
today their remnants are sort of standing before the minaret
at different heights, depending on how much of them is left.
So this earthquake kept coming up over the rest of
the trip. Our guides would say that a site had
(01:21):
been uncovered in the earthquake or damaged in the earthquake,
and it made me really curious because they kept saying
Lisbon over and over. They were talking about the Lisbon earthquake.
But this earthquake was obviously also a big enough deal
in Morocco that people are still talking about it at
historic sites two hundred years later. I had definitely heard
(01:45):
of this earthquake before, because it is depicted in Voltaire's Candide,
which I have read and have also seen a theatrical
adaptation of. But I did not fully connect the setting
of Candide to the realities of an actual historic events.
So that's today's episode. This earthquake took place on November first,
(02:09):
seventeen fifty five. Its epicenter was on the boundary between
the African and Eurasian tectonic plates, on the floor of
the Atlantic Ocean, two hundred to three hundred kilometers southwest
of Lisbon, Portugal and about three hundred and fifty kilometers
northwest of Casablanca, Morocco. Those are obviously all approximations in
(02:30):
terms of its distance. There have been lots of efforts
to pinpoint the exact epicenter. But this tectonic boundary is
really complex, and the earthquake itself was also really complex.
There were three distinct periods of shaking over the course
of about fifteen to twenty minutes, and there has been
debate about whether at least one of those was really
(02:52):
an aftershock, or if there were two different earthquakes very
close together.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yeah, I read a.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Few different papers that pretty confidently said this is where
the epicenter was, and they were not in exactly the
same point. They had different substantiation for why they had
come to that conclusion. Does not seem like there is
exact agreement on the exact location of where it started. Today,
(03:20):
earthquakes are measured using the moment magnitude scale that started
replacing the Richter scale in the nineteen eighties. There's no
upper limit to this scale, but the strongest earthquake ever
recorded struck Chile in nineteen sixty, and that had a
magnitude of nine point five. The magnitude of the seventeen
fifty five earthquake has been estimated based on eighteenth century
(03:43):
accounts and other data, and it's generally accepted as having
a magnitude of between eight point five and nine, although
there are a few estimates that have arrived at like
a somewhat lower number. Regardless, though a very powerful earthquake,
and this earthquakes most destructive effects were in Portugal, Morocco
(04:03):
and Spain. This isn't an area that's really associated with
a ton of major earthquakes prior to this. In seventeen
twenty two and earthquakes struck southern Portugal, but many of
the records of that earthquake were destroyed in seventeen fifty five,
so we don't have a lot of detail about it.
Earlier major earthquakes in Portugal took place in thirteen fifty
(04:26):
six and fifteen thirty one. An earthquake struck Fez, Morocco
in sixteen twenty four and caused extensive damage. An earthquake
that struck Almedia in southern Spain in fifteen twenty two
killed an estimated two thousand, five hundred people and it
destroyed most of the city. So major earthquakes were not
unheard of in this region, but they were widely spaced.
(04:50):
They often happened centuries apart. The November one, seventeen fifty
five earthquake was felt as far away as Britain in
Ireland in the north, Hamburg, Germany in the northeast, the
Azores Archipelago in the west, and the Cape Verde Islands
off the coast of what's now Senegal to the southwest.
(05:10):
There were also reports of disturbances in lakes and rivers,
including the formation of standing waves all across western and
northern Europe, and then after shocks went on for months.
This earthquake also spawned a tsunami, which devastated the coasts
of Morocco, Spain, and Portugal, as well as islands and
archipelagoes to the west of Northern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula.
(05:35):
It caused major damage to ports and coastal settlements in
all of these places. Many of Morocco's cities were surrounded
by walls, which could offer some protection from a tsunami,
but in some places this tsunami measured about twenty meters
or sixty six feet, so it crested over the top
of those walls and it flooded the city's interiors. Having
(05:57):
been in some of those cities, that prospect is terrifying
to me.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Yeah, because then there's no way for the water to
get out.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
No no, so Obviously, in addition to being very destructive,
this was deadly. This tsunami was also reported as far
north as the British and Irish Isles. For example, a
series of waves measuring six to ten feet or about
two to three meters struck the coast of Cornwall. Then
on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a similarly
(06:27):
sized wave also struck the coast of Newfoundland, and there
were waves of about one meter or three feet that
struck much of the Caribbean. In the coast of Brazil,
Smaller waves from the tsunami were also reported all along
the eastern coasts of North and South America. Sediments from
the tsunami have also been found as far away as Scotland.
(06:50):
Information did not travel nearly as quickly in seventeen to
fifty five as it does today, and the Japanese word
tsunami had not made its way into europe and languages yet,
but people did understand that earthquakes could be connected to
flooding and unusually massive waves or tides. For example, William
Borlaize published a book on the natural history of Cornwall
(07:13):
in seventeen fifty eight, and he described the huge waves
that struck Mount's Bay in seventeen fifty five, he talked
about the city of Lisbon being destroyed in an earthquake
that same day, with the Tagus River in Lisbon rising
twenty to thirty feet in cycles, and ships at sea
sixty leagues from port feeling the shock as though they
(07:35):
had run aground. Borlais wrote that it was difficult to
say exactly what connection there might be between what happened
in Cornwall and in Portugal, but quote, all these circumstances
seemed to declare very confidently that what we felt was
either the fainter part of that deplorable shock at Lisbon,
or the last expiring efforts of some similar subterraneous struggles
(07:59):
farther to the west and southwest under the Atlantic Ocean.
There were also two other major earthquakes in November of
seventeen fifty five in addition to this one. On November eighteenth,
an earthquake struck off the coast of Cape ann in Massachusetts,
with an estimated magnitude of five point eight. That is
(08:20):
much smaller than the November first earthquake, but it is
the largest known earthquake ever to strike Massachusetts. It topped
a lot of chimneys and church steeples, and it knocked
over fences, and it woke up John Adams, who wrote
about it in his diary. There is speculation that the
seismic conditions that led to this earthquake were triggered by
(08:43):
the earthquake on November first.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
And there was also another earthquake in Morocco later in November.
Documentation on this one is tricky. It struck the city
of Mechnus, which is southwest of Fez. Both cities were
badly damaged in an estimated fifteen thousand people were killed.
Sources in Arabic consistently report the date of this earthquake
(09:08):
is happening on November twenty seventh, but there are also
European reports of a strong earthquake in this part of
Morocco on November eighteenth, which was believed to be a
strong aftershock of that November first earthquake. Various writing from
the eighteenth century and later conflates all of these earthquakes,
and it is completely possible that some of the damage
(09:29):
our guides in Morocco attributed to the November first earthquake
really happened later in the month. During these secondary events,
the seventeen fifty five Mechnez earthquake occurred on a different
fault than the Lisbon earthquake, but it is possible that
it also developed from the seismic effects of that earlier quake.
Estimates of the death toll from the November first earthquake
(09:53):
and the tsunami and fires that followed it, which we
haven't even talked about the fires at all are all
over the place, like wildly all over the place. The
lowest estimates are about ten thousand people, but the highest
estimates report one hundred thousand people. Some of this is
(10:13):
because Lisbon, which faced some of the worst impacts, that
didn't have really an accurate estimate of the population from
before the earthquake. Bodies were also buried really quickly to
try to prevent the spread of disease, so there wasn't
a careful accounting of the dead. It's also likely that
some people just fled the hardest hit areas and then
(10:36):
weren't really tracked afterward. And it's also complicated because that
earthquake in Morocco just a few weeks later also had
a significant death toll, and it's not always clear which
of these earthquakes a person might have died in even
if those lower estimates are closer to correct. This was
(10:56):
one of the most destructive earthquakes ever to strike Southern
Europe and northern Africa. It also had a devastating effect
on Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. It was the biggest
disaster to strike a European capital since the Great Fire
of London in sixteen sixty six. We'll have more detail
on Lisbon after a sponsor break in seventeen fifty five.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Lisbon, Portugal, was the fourth largest city in Europe after London, Paris,
and Naples. As a nation, Portugal had become wealthy thanks
to its colonial empire, particularly gold mines in Brazil, which
were run using enslaved labor. Initially, Portugal had enslaved both
(11:50):
indigenous people and Africans in Brazil, but the enslavement of
indigenous Americans was banned in April of seventeen fifty five
in part with the hope that indigenous peoples would ally
with Portugal and border disputes with Spain. More enslaved Africans
were ultimately transported to Brazil than to anywhere else in
(12:13):
the world. In spite of its wealth, Lisbon was not
really thought of as being in the same league as
those other larger cities. For one thing, with a population
of about two hundred and seventy five thousand people, it
was significantly smaller than London or Paris. For comparison, London's
population was approaching three times that and Paris was about
(12:36):
twice as populous as Lisbon. Portugal was also dependent on
England for its naval defense. These two nations had a
relationship that had gone back for centuries, and then in
seventeen oh three, during the War of the Spanish Succession,
they had signed the Methuen Treaties. Those were named for
British negotiator John Methuen. Under these treaties, the British navy
(13:00):
would safeguard Portugal's ports and their trade, and then the
two nations would also have various favored trading statuses with
one another. Trade goods that were part of these treaties
included British textiles and Portuguese wines. Portugal did not have
a lot of industrial exports of its own, and as
(13:23):
a result of this relationship with England, port cities, including Lisbon,
had a really sizeable community of British merchants known as
the English Factory. They also used the term English or
British pretty broadly, meaning anyone from those islands that they
were just sort of everyone lumped together. This also means
(13:46):
that a lot of that gold mine wealth, while it
was making Portugal wealthy, it was also ultimately winding up
in the UK. Other major European powers also regarded Portugal
as somewhat backward and superstitious. This also had some connections
to religion. Like most of the rest of Europe, Portugal
(14:06):
had a state religion, in this case Roman Catholicism, but
Portugal also had a particularly large number of clergy compared
to its population. There were probably fewer than two million
people living in all of Portugal, and as many as
two hundred thousand of them were Catholic clergy. This was
(14:26):
a time when the Church was often tightly interconnected with
daily life in countries all over Europe, but that number
was just seen as a lot. Beyond that, the Jesuit
Order had control of Portuguese missions in the Americas and
the higher education system in Portugal. The Portuguese Inquisition had
(14:47):
also been established in the fifteen thirties and modeled after
the Spanish Inquisition, targeting heretics as well as people who
had been forced to convert to Christianity but were believed
to secretly still beach Jewish, including their descendants. The total
number of cases the Portuguese Inquisition tried and the number
(15:07):
of people that it put to death were smaller than
that of the Spanish Inquisition, but it was proportionately greater.
Portugal had also been on the periphery of the scientific
revolution that led to major developments in other parts of
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Inquisition censored
(15:28):
published material in Portugal, which meant that some scientific works
just were not available in Portuguese. In the eighteenth century,
people who tried to introduce new scientific discoveries into Portugal
were known as enstraggiados, which was the term for Europeanized intellectuals.
Sebastian Jose de carvaljo Emelo, secretary of State for Foreign
(15:50):
affairs in war, wasn't Estrangerrado and had been trying to
limit the Inquisition's power in the years leading up to
the earthquake, but it was still a major force in Portugal,
and various intellectuals and scholars had been forced out of
Portugal because of it. Yeah, the fact that, like intellectuals
who were trying to introduce new scientific discoveries were being
(16:11):
thought of as europeanized ye, and like Portugal is part
of Europe, but like it's clear that from that mindset,
the people who were introducing these thoughts were being thought
of as other, Yeah, and then being described using.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
A term that.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Has common origins with like stranger. Yeah, Like that just
sort of illustrates untrustworthy. Yeah, yeah, what was happening in Portugal.
There is also a connection between religion and why the
seventeen fifty five earthquake was so devastating to the city
of Lisbon. The earthquake started at about nine to forty
(16:52):
in the morning on All Saints' Day, that is the
major holiday in the Catholic Church, So a lot of
people in Lisbon and most of the other cities and
towns in Portugal were at mass that included the royal
family Portugals. Churches and monasteries were typically very very tall
and architecturally complex, and a lot of them just collapsed
(17:16):
during the earthquake with people inside. Much of Lisbon was
also destroyed by fire in the aftermath of the earthquake.
Those fires started as the quake was happening, many of
them sparked by candles and lamps falling from the altars
and other places around the churches. There were also some
eyewitness reports of fires being intentionally set by looters. These
(17:40):
fires spread due to strong winds, and the massive scale
of destruction from the earthquake made the fires even harder
to fight. Those fires burned for about five days. As
we said a moment ago, the first wave of the
earthquake started at about nine forty in the morning. It
was intense enough to raise a cloud of dust around
(18:01):
Lisbon as buildings started collapsing, and this dust really blocked
out a lot of the sunlight. Another even more destructive
period of shaking started at about nine fifty in the morning,
and then there was a third shock at about nine
fifty five. This earthquake destroyed churches and monasteries all over Lisbon,
(18:22):
as well as the royal palace. A large fissure opened
up in the city center. People trying to flee the
destruction and the fires, made their way to the Taugus
River and to the boats in the harbor to try
to escape, but at about ten thirty, so less than
an hour after the earthquake started. The water receded and
then returned as a tsunami that flooded the harbor and
(18:45):
much of the central city, which had been built over
what had been a dry creek bed. Many of the
people who had sought safety in the water drowned or
were crushed by debris and wreckage in the water. A
major aftershock struck at about eleven am. As we mentioned earlier,
Lisbon had a sizeable community of British subjects living in
(19:07):
the city, and one of them was Anglican vicar Richard Goddard,
who had gone to Lisbon for his health and to
check on his younger brother, who was working as a merchant.
After this aftershock, a group of more than one hundred people,
apparently believing that the earthquake was some kind of divine
retribution forcibly, baptized Goddard into the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Between the earthquake, the tsunami, and the fires, roughly four
fifths of central Lisbon was completely destroyed. Only about three
thousand of Lisbon's homes were in usable condition afterward. Of
the city's forty churches, thirty five were destroyed. The Royal Palace,
as we mentioned, was destroyed, including the Royal Library and
(19:52):
all of its records. So was the Opera House, which
was only about a month old at this point. The
Customs House was destroyed, along with commercial buildings and banks
and all of the records that all of these buildings contained.
As we mentioned earlier, deathtol estimates are all over the place,
but it is estimated that about thirty thousand people died
(20:12):
in Lisbon alone. That would have been about ten percent
of the population. Seventy eight people from the English factory died.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Because Portugal had an established British community, there was a
lot of documentation and writing about the earthquake and its
aftermath that was written in English. Some of this was
published in the UK in seventeen fifty five or not
long after. This is one of the reasons that the
earthquake is most associated with Lisbon. In addition to Lisbon's
(20:44):
importance as the Portuguese capital and the just immense scale
of the disaster there, there was also a lot of
writing about it that was very quickly accessible to people
in Britain and the Americas and then anywhere else that
was translating these British documents. There is also a lot
of documentation of the earthquake that is written in Portuguese,
(21:05):
and we'll get to that after we pause for a
sponsor break. In seventeen fifty five, Jose the First was
King of Portugal. He was at a royal residence in
Blame in western Lisbon when the earthquake struck. This palace
(21:30):
did have some damage, but the Blame area was not
affected nearly as badly as central Lisbon, and the king
was unharmed. Pedro Demota Isilva, secretary of State for the kingdom,
also survived, but he was in his seventies and sick.
He died only a few days after the earthquake. I
(21:50):
don't think he died as a result of the earthquake.
I think he was already ill, but it's a little
unclear in the sources that I read. Sebastian Jose de
Cavalo Imelo, secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and War,
was also unharmed. The king gave Sebastiao Jose broad authority
(22:11):
to manage the official response to the earthquake, and after
Pedro Damota y Silva's death, he became Secretary of State
for the Kingdom. Later on in his life he became
Marquess de Pombal, and most sources just call him Pombal,
regardless of when in his life they're talking about. Sources
give a range of reasons for why Pombal wound up
(22:33):
in this role. One is that being the Secretary of
State for Foreign Affairs and war made Pimo logical choice
to be in charge. The damage to Lisbon could be
compared to a massive enemy bombardment in a time of war.
I also saw one argument claiming that it was because
his house had been completely spared, and people interpreted this
(22:56):
as divine intervention and a sign that he should be
put in charge. I don't know how much truth there
is to that. Another made it sound like he was
just the one who took the initiative to do it,
that he left his family at home almost immediately after
the earthquake had stopped and went to find the king
and find out what the king wanted him to do.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Regardless, Pombal's involvement is a big part of why the
Great Lisbon earthquake is sometimes described as the first modern disaster,
because it had a well documented, coordinated government response. The
king and his government, largely directed by Pombal, took accountability
for the rebuilding effort and for helping as many people
(23:37):
as possible during the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami, and fires,
and minimizing harm as much as possible. There's a probably
apocryphal but widely repeated story that the king asked Pombal
what to do, and Pombal answered, quote, bury the dead
and feed the living. So Pombal did not do all
(23:59):
of this by himself. There were also twelve district leaders appointed,
and they had very broad authority to make decisions to
manage the emergency in each of their districts. And then,
of course there were all kinds of other managers and
workers and other people who were all part of the effort.
They were also guided by a set of two hundred
(24:19):
and forty one measures and provisions drafted by Pombal and
signed by the king. These were later published as a book,
and they included everything from reducing the spread of disease
to finding and distributing food, to providing medical treatment and
other care. Some taxes were suspended to help people afford necessities,
while all of this work was funded by a newly
(24:42):
established tax on trade. As part of the relief effort.
The government also nationalized the canned sardine industry. Food and
other provisions came from a range of sources. Ships that
were already in the harbor that were not destroyed in
the tsunami were forbidden to leave until it was confirmed
that they were not carrying cargo that could help with
(25:04):
the rebuilding effort. Taxes on fish were suspended, and people
were also encouraged to fish to try to bolster the
food supply. The British government sent monetary aid, as well
as loads of shovels and pickaxes and food, which is
one of the first known instances of formal international disaster
(25:25):
aid in history. A tent city was established at the
royal estate in Belem, and while the palace was undergoing repairs,
the king lived on the grounds as well. Pombal also
lived in a hut in Belem, even though his home
was apparently intact.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
During the recovery effort, Lisbon existed basically in a state
of martial law. Looters and smugglers were aggressively captured and prosecuted,
and a lot of them were hanged. The government implemented
price controls so that there would be no price gouging.
People who mass created as monks or nuns to try
to get free provisions were excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
(26:06):
The government also tried to keep people from simply fleeing
Lisbon and leaving the city without anybody still there to
help care for other people and to help rebuild, and
they ignored various requests from the wealthy to try to
get special treatment or extra help. We mentioned earlier that
one of the reasons that it's hard to determine an
accurate death toll for this disaster is that the dead
(26:29):
were buried very quickly to try to prevent the spread
of disease. Some people were buried in mass graves, and
others were weighted down on barges which were then sunk,
basically burying them at sea. These mass burials included people
across the spectrum of race, ethnicity, age, and social status.
(26:50):
This was of course controversial, especially since most of these
people had died suddenly and had not had an opportunity
for a final confession or last rights. Pomball and the
rest of the government also established a plan to rebuild
central Lisbon. It had previously been a medieval city with
(27:10):
some public plazas, but also a lot of very narrow,
winding streets that had been built and expanded haphazardly over
the centuries without any kind of official plan. The new
construction was planned out on an orthogonal grid, with wide
streets that would also act like fire breaks. The new
buildings were also designed to be earthquake resistant. They featured
(27:34):
what came to be known as the guiola pombalina or
pombaline cage. This was an interior support structure made of
wood with a lot of wooden cross bracing. The inside
of this structure was filled with small stone masonry that
could move and shift in the event of earthquakes. Masonry
facades were designed to slide down the side of the
(27:56):
building in the event of an earthquake, rather than toppling
out to the street. Decorative elements were mostly tile adornments
and iron balconies. These newly built buildings were typically between
three and five stories tall, with shops and services on
the ground floor and housing above.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
All of this.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Rebuilding took a very long time. The rebuilt central city
had two main squares, the Prosa de Commercio and the Prosaderosio.
The Prosida Commercio faces the harbor and its surrounded by
buildings that mostly house things like government offices and courts.
In seventeen seventy five, so twenty years after the earthquake,
(28:41):
an equestrian statue of King Jose the First was dedicated
at this square, and a lot of the surrounding construction
sites were draped with cloth or framed in wood that
was decorated to look like what the finished buildings would be.
It was still really a construction site. Even all of
the official steps to try to recover from the earthquake,
(29:04):
it was still, of course a major disaster. It's estimated
that Portugal lost between a third and half of its
gross domestic product because of the earthquake. Wages and prices
were also volatile for years afterward. The scale of the
earthquake and the recovery effort also slowed Portugal's colonial efforts
(29:24):
in the Americas. We also mentioned that there's a lot
of documentation of this earthquake from British subjects who were
living in Lisbon and elsewhere in Portugal. There's also documentation
from other foreign residents and visitors, and there is a
ton of Portuguese documentation as well. In January of seventeen
(29:47):
fifty six, Pombal sent a set of thirteen questions to
Portugal's bishops, with instructions to pass those questions on to
their parish priests and then collect all the answers. They
were specific questions about the quake itself, like what time
the tembler started, how long they lasted, how many waves
(30:08):
of shaking there were, and how far apart those waves were.
He asked whether the shaking seemed to come from a
specific direction. There were also questions about how many people
died and how many homes were destroyed, as well as
local relief efforts and whether they had faced any kind
of shortages. Because of this systematic collection of information about
(30:30):
the earthquakes and the types of questions that were asked,
Pombal is also recognized as contributing to the field of seismology.
This earthquake also happened alongside a lot of intellectual and
societal change in Europe near the start of the period
that is described as Europe's Age of Enlightenment or the
Age of Reason. This period is known for scientific discoveries
(30:53):
with a focus on rational thought and empirical evidence and
a shift away from looking for religious or divine explanations
for natural phenomena. There's been a lot of writing about
how the earthquake and its aftermath were related to this
and how they influenced people's thinking about nature, religion, and science.
Like the earthquake struck a Catholic country and destroyed a
(31:16):
lot of churches on a holiday while people were at mass.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
What did that mean? Was this divine retribution? And if
it was, what was it retribution for? Or was it
just a coincidence, a natural disaster with an explanation that
could be found in nature that didn't have any kind
of underlying religious meaning.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
As we sat up at the top of the show.
This earthquake is also part of Voltaire's satirical work Candid.
One of the many things that Candide satirizes is the
philosophy of optimism, including the work of German philosopher Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibnitz in his seventeen ten work The Odyssey. On
(31:56):
an incredibly basic level, this philosophy is root in the
idea that the world is the best possible world that
God could have created, and it was hard for people
to reconcile that idea with the earthquake. In Candid, Candid's tutor,
doctor Pangloss, insists repeatedly that they are living at the
(32:19):
best of all possible worlds. He says this no matter
what horrific thing is happening around them, including the earthquake.
Voltaire also wrote a poem that was explicitly about the
earthquake and the axiom to ebien.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Or all as well. At the same time, some of
the writing about this makes it sound very X plus
Y equal Z, summing it up along the lines of
people couldn't reconcile this terrible earthquake killing people in the
middle of church with the idea of God, especially with
the idea of a benevolent God. So voila the Enlightenment.
(32:55):
But that's incredibly reductive. The Age of Enlightenment is a
frie historians have developed to try to understand and talk
about the past. And it wasn't like a light switch.
Nobody was like, let's start the Enlightenment. You guys, I
woke up this morning and I was in the age
of reason. How about you? I felt enlightened, and I
(33:15):
want more people to feel that too. The changes and
developments that have led historians to frame this period in
this way started before the earthquake, and they were building
on the scientific revolution that had started centuries earlier. Also,
there are a lot of differing opinions about poem Mall.
He definitely had a huge influence on the recovery from
(33:39):
the earthquake in Lisbon and the rest of Portugal, and
some of the steps that the Portuguese government took to
try to mitigate this disaster are still things that continue
to be done after disasters today. But he is also
described as really overstepping his authority, just going way beyond
what was needed to recover from the earthquake, so that
(34:00):
he could try to push his more personal agenda, including
his own opposition to the Jesuit order. There is so
much more stuff that went on there, we would need
a whole other episode and honestly a way more thorough
understanding of the entirety of Portuguese history. But when King
(34:20):
Jose the First died in seventeen seventy seven, Pomeball immediately
lost his position, and then he spent the rest of
his life trying to fight off accusations of corruption and
abuse of power. He died in seventeen eighty two, you
got some listener mail lined up for us. I do
(34:41):
have listener mail lined up, so this listener mail is
from listener Timothy. And Timothy wrote after our episode on
Rickets and wrote, sometimes I get distracted while I'm listening
to podcasts and multitasking, so I apologize if I missed it.
Isn't sure if in the Rickets episode you talked about
(35:02):
the genetic disorders that can cause a person to have
rickets even if they're getting plenty of sunlight. I happen
to be one of these people. My dermatologists is always
telling me I need to use more sunblock and stay
out of the sun because of the sun damage that
I have to my skin. At the same time, I
am vitamin D deficient and have to take a large
dose of vitamin D every week to supplement. I found
(35:25):
out at fifty five years of age that I will
just always be vitamin D deficient if I don't take
a supplement. There are several genetic disorders which render humans
unable to use vitamin D or synthesize vitamin D from
sunlight regardless of sun exposure. This then lists off what
at least some of them are. So there's hereditary vitamin
(35:47):
D resistant rickets caused by mutations in the VDR gene.
The body can't use the vitamin D it produces or consumes,
leading to severe rickets, low calcium, and sometimes alopecia. Vitamin
D S dependent rickets type one A caused by mutations
in the CYP two seven B one gene, so the
body cannot convert vitamin D to its active form, and
(36:10):
vitamin D dependent rickets type one B vdd R one
B a rarer similar defect in the CYP two R
one gene. I don't know which one of these I'm
affected by, because when they find out you're vitamin D deficient,
it's cheaper and easier to just put you on a
supplement than to do a bunch of genetic tests just
to find out that you still need the supplement. I
(36:33):
don't have a pet right now, so I'm including a
picture of a wild deer that has been living in
my backyard and harassing me in my family. Not only
is she not afraid of people, she seems to want
to attack anyone who comes into our yard. I have
named her Venison, and we have had to fend off
(36:54):
her attacks with sticks. Timothy, I don't I'm not laughing
at your misfortune of having an aggressive deer in your backyard.
I'm laughing because it is so incongruous with the image
that a lot of people have of deer as like
very peaceful, gentle animals just quietly step through the forest
(37:22):
and eat leaves. This is a very pretty deer. I
am very sorry that she is causing problems in your life.
We did not mention any any genetic.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Conditions that can cause people either not to be able
to produce vitamin D or to use it. We talked
more about other conditions that can cause you not to
be able to absorb it from your food. So thank
you so much for sending this note to talk about that,
and for sending this deer picture. I have some of
(37:58):
a fondness for deer, while also are recognizing that they
can cause a number of problems due to the world
we have built for them to live in. Yeah, they
are wild animals. They are wild animals. There are also
a whole lot of them. And as we talked about
in our episode about tick born diseases, the prevalence of
(38:22):
lime disease seems to be associated with the fact that
there's a lot, a lot of deer nowadays.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Thanks for listening. If you would like to send us
a note about this or any other podcast, or at
History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else
you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(38:52):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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