José I of Portugal (1714–1777)
José I of Portugal (1714–1777)
José I of Portugal (b. 6 June 1714; d. 24 February 1777), king of Portugal (1750–1777). Called the "idle king," in contrast to his energetic chief minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Count of Oeiras (known as the Marquês de Pombal), José was eclipsed as Pombal pushed absolutist tendencies to despotic heights following the cataclysmic Lisbon earthquake of 1755. The king never challenged Pombal's attacks on the aristocracy, his suppression of the Jesuits, or his extensive administrative, economic, and fiscal reforms that worked toward a more bourgeois and secular state. José's marriage to the Spanish Bourbon princess Mariana Victoria (1729) produced four daughters. The oldest, the future María I, inherited the throne at his death.
See alsoLisbon Earthquake; Pombal, Marquês de (Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
João Lúcio De Azevedo, O Marquês de Pombal e a sua época (1922).
Alan David Francis, Portugal, 1715–1808 (1985).
H. V. Livermore, A New History of Portugal (1976), pp. 212-238.
Additional Bibliography
Domingues, Mário. Marquês de Pombal: O homem e a sua época. Lisboa: Préfacio, 2002.
Lopes, António. Enigma Pombal: Nova documentação, tentative de interpreção. Lisboa: Roma Editora, 2002.
Maxwell, Kenneth. Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Catherine Lugar