Sebastian I of Portugal: the king and Sebastianism

The king who never knew his father. The heir to the throne, the Infante John, the only surviving son of John III, died of illness on 2 January 1554, eighteen days before his wife gave birth: the chronicle of the reign records that the king and queen hid it from princess Joanna of Austria until the birth, coming to see her with smiling faces. The pains took her at midnight, on 20 January 1554. John III died in 1557, and the child was king at three. His grandmother Catherine of Austria governed for him, cardinal Henry replaced her as regent in 1562, and he took power himself in 1568.

His name comes from the day he was born. Baptised on the eighth day, he was given the name Sebastian, the first king of Portugal to bear it, because he was born on Saint Sebastian’s day: in the night a procession had crossed Lisbon carrying the martyr’s arm, brought from Rome under Clement VII. His byname says the other half of the matter. He is called o Desejado, the Desired, because the inheritance of the kingdoms hung, the same chronicle writes, on the single life of prince John, and that prince had just died at sixteen.

He was raised for religion and for war. The notice of the Hieronymite monastery, where he lies, speaks of a rigorous education centred on religion and the military art, and of a child who grew up wanting to extend the Christian empire; it recalls that Camões dedicated the Lusiads to him, where he is the hope of Christendom. He made a first voyage to Africa in 1573. The chronicle of his reign insists on his chastity, which he kept until death, and reports that the less kindly drew another explanation from it. At twenty-four he had neither wife nor child.

In battle, on 4 August 1578, near Alcácer Quibir, in northern Morocco. He had crossed into Africa to support a sultan driven from the throne, al-Mutawakkil, against his uncle Abd al-Malik. The battle began at ten in the morning, in full heat, and the Portuguese army was surrounded and crushed. The chronicle of the reign, published under the name of brother Bernardo da Cruz, sums up the day: three kings so powerful met their end on a single day, in less than two hours, and so near one another that in dying they could see each other.

Nobody saw him die, and the chronicle says so itself. He had been seen going towards the river, at the end of the field, and was found there dead; but since there was nobody who knew in what manner he had died, some supposed he had been taken captive and then killed in a quarrel over who would carry him off, others that he had defended himself to the death when they tried to strip him. It is that hole in the account, and not the absence of a body, that opens everything that follows.

Hence its other name: the battle of the Three Kings. All three died on the same day, Sebastian, Abd al-Malik and al-Mutawakkil. A review published in the Annales in 1995 of Lucette Valensi’s book on that day gives the reckoning: Morocco came out of it enriched and took on the look of a regional power, Portugal suffered enormous losses and passed under the crown of Spain in 1580. That book, the review specifies, is not a battle narrative: it is a history of the accounts the winners and the losers made of it.

A body was found, identified and buried; whether it was his was disputed from the first days, and still is. Both things are true at once, and that is what makes everything after it possible.

The most detailed account comes from a prisoner. On the day of the battle itself, a chamber servant of the king, Sebastião de Resende, went among the dead, friends and enemies mixed, all naked and stripped, without any difference, and recognised his master’s body. The next day he covered it with his own shirt and brought it back on a mount: a wound in the forehead, another, very large, under the right arm. The noble captives recognised it in their turn. But the man who tells this, Jerónimo de Mendonça, who was among them, adds a reservation at once: if eyes so covered with tears could recognise anything entirely.

The chronicle of the reign adds another, more awkward. Before the burial the governor of the town had captives brought to identify the body; one of them, Martim de Castro dos Rios, came before a face swollen by three days of death, did not recognise it and refused to state that it was him. Three centuries later the historian Oliveira Martins notes that the prisoners had drawn up a deed of recognition, but that it was afterwards said they had done it to cover their escape, by taking from the enemy the hope of holding the king alive.

The route of the remains is documented. The Hieronymite monastery, which houses them, retraces the stages: the body gathered the day after the death in the house of the alcaide Ibrahim Sufiani, handed over months later at Ceuta, then Portuguese, laid for four years in the church of the Trinity, then transferred in August 1582 to Belém on the order of Philip II of Spain, who had become Philip I of Portugal. The same notice adds that the surviving nobles are said to have sworn a second oath on their identification, later, in Lisbon, at the Carmelite convent. The marble tomb seen today, borne by two elephants, is from 1682.

Some historians decide one way. Two researchers of the university of Minho, who have traced the reception of the myth in France and Morocco, quote Bernard Rosenberger: Sebastian’s body was found, although it was said to have disappeared, which some believed for a long time while awaiting his return. They also quote the Moroccan diplomat Younès Nékrouf, who works on the archives of France, Spain and England and concludes that all attested it was indeed him. What is missing is therefore not the body: it is a witness to the death.

A king dead without a child, and a branch extinguished. Sebastian was the last direct descendant of John III; after him the crown went to his great-uncle, cardinal Henry, fifth son of Manuel I, ordained priest at fourteen because nobody imagined he would reign. The Hieronymite monastery sums up that two-year reign: Henry gave up his clerical office and at once looked for a wife to continue the house of Aviz, but pope Gregory XIII, close to the Habsburgs who were claiming the throne, refused to release him from his vows.

For three weeks the kingdom had no dead king. On 24 August 1578 a public deed made the cardinal governor, curator and successor of the kingdom, held to be orphaned for as long as Sebastian’s death was not established. It took the letter of Belchior do Amaral, who had buried the body and testified to having seen it, for Lisbon to hold the funeral ceremonies, on 27 August. The rumour was already running: many asserted that the king was alive, the chronicle notes, and others laid heavy bets on it.

Henry summoned the claimants as one summons parties to a lawsuit. Philip II of Castile; Catherine, wife of the duke of Braganza, at Vila Viçosa; Antony, prior of Crato, who was forbidden to enter the court; the duke of Savoy and prince of Piedmont; Ranuccio, son of the prince of Parma. The king of France was for his part looking for grounds for an action, and the cities pleaded a right to elect. The argument that won was Philip’s: eldest grandson of Manuel I, born of his eldest daughter the empress Isabella, and a man, which set aside Catherine because she was a woman and Antony because Henry had declared him illegitimate.

Henry died on 31 January 1580, on his sixty-eighth birthday, without having decided. His governors, taking refuge at Castro Marim, gave the crown to Philip by sentence. Antony, acclaimed king in Lisbon, was beaten in August at Alcântara by the duke of Alba. In April 1581 the Cortes meeting at Tomar recognised Philip II of Spain as Philip I of Portugal. The union of the two crowns would last sixty years, until 1640.

The belief that Sebastian did not die at Alcácer Quibir and would come back to Portugal on a foggy morning to restore its independence. That is the definition given by the Priberam dictionary of the Portuguese language, which adds two more: by extension, an immoderate, almost religious hope in the saving role of something or someone; and, pejoratively, attachment to what is out of date.

It is not a legend invented later. The chronicle of the reign, written in the decades that followed, notes that the report of a living king could not be put out, and that it lasted until the cardinal’s death and long after. Oliveira Martins tells an episode from the same weeks: a masked fugitive presented himself before Arzila calling himself Sebastian, to have the gates opened to him; the captain of the place and the liar himself testified, in vain, for the people saw in these denials only a trick of those who governed them.

The annexation changed the nature of the waiting. Two researchers of the university of Minho distinguish historical Sebastianism, born of uncertainty about the king’s fate, from the Sebastianist messianism that succeeded it and that the attachment of Portugal to Spain fed: it is no longer only a man who is awaited, it is the Redeemer who will give the kingdom back its independence. They sum the myth up in two faces, the Desired and the Hidden, o Encoberto, and note that it rests largely on rumours: might the king be alive somewhere in Morocco or in Portugal?

Its founding text is not a chronicler, it is a cobbler. The Trovas of Bandarra, of Trancoso, rhymed before the battle, serve as a reading grid for everything that follows. To them is added the legend of the miracle of Ourique, where Christ is said to have promised Afonso Henriques, founder of the kingdom, a Christian empire at the sixteenth generation of Portuguese kings. By introducing that theme of the sixteenth generation, writes Lucette Valensi, quoted by the same researchers, Sebastian was designated as the one who would make the promise real.

Four men called themselves Sebastian between 1584 and 1603, and all four were tried and put to death. These are not legends: they are trials, sentences and dates.

The first two came out of the country itself. In 1584 and then in 1585, Oliveira Martins recounts, the people acclaimed in turn a potter, the king of Penamacor, near the frontier at the foot of the serra da Estrela, and a stonecutter, the king of Ericeira, by the sea. Both died on the scaffold. The historian refuses to call them impostors or charlatans: he sees in them simple men, as the people who acclaim and follow them are simple.

The third was Castilian and a pastry cook. The Digital Library of Castile and León holds a Historia printed in Madrid in 1785 whose title says everything: the history of Gabriel de Espinosa, pastry cook at Madrigal, who pretended to be king Sebastian of Portugal, and likewise that of brother Miguel de los Santos, in the year 1595.

The fourth falls in 1598, just twenty years after the disappearance. At Venice appeared a Calabrian, Marco Túlio Catizone, calling himself the king lost in Africa, in a year already saturated with prodigies and announced miracles. A year earlier, João de Castro, grandson of the viceroy of the same name, had published his calculation: by his reckoning the king would reappear before people began counting sixteen hundred, and he held it very firm, it would infallibly be in 98. Catizone and a few accomplices were condemned at San Lúcar de Barrameda on 23 September 1603.

Oliveira Martins draws the lesson of the series in one sentence: for the people, every successive Sebastian was true, and became false only by dying.

The waiting survived the union, then the restoration of independence in 1640. Oliveira Martins finds it again in 1808, when Junot occupied Lisbon: Sebastianism reappeared as always, he writes, Napoleon was the Encoberto, and people reread in Bandarra the N and the eagle, two lines there announcing that the imperial eagle rises and makes its nest in Portugal. For him it is the liberal revolution of the nineteenth century that finally finishes off that body of ideas, ambitions and habits he names in a single word.

The myth crosses borders too. The two Minho researchers have followed its French and Moroccan reception: Donizetti’s grand opera in five acts, Dom Sébastien, roi de Portugal, to a libretto by Eugène Scribe, performed at the Paris Opera in 1843, was one of the decisive moments of that transfer. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Younès Nékrouf, Lucette Valensi and Catherine Clément each come back to it in their own way, essay or novel.

In 1934 Fernando Pessoa places the king at the threshold of the last part of Mensagem, the only book of poems in Portuguese he published in his lifetime. He has him say four words that hold the whole myth: “Sperae! Cahi no areal”. Hope, or wait: in Portuguese the verb esperar carries both senses. The king acknowledges the fall and the sand, then the next stanza tips into the future, what he dreamed himself being what he will come back to be.

What is left is a tomb and a few set phrases. The two Minho researchers close their article on the ones still heard in Portugal: we need King Sebastian, King Sebastian will come one foggy morning, perhaps. The Hieronymite monastery, where he has lain since 1582, gives visitors the same image, and adds that this hope lasted for centuries.