Teresa Cristina (1822–1889)

Teresa Cristina, empress of Brazil, youngest daughter of Francis I, king of Naples, and Maria Isabel, princess of Spain, was born March 14, 1822. In 1843 the young Emperor Pedro II needed a wife and Teresa Cristina, his first cousin, three years his senior, was available. Married at Rio de Janeiro, September 4, 1843, the couple proved ill-matched physically and intellectually. Teresa Cristina's devotion and her sweetness of character captured, for a while, Pedro's affections. She bore four children but her two sons died in infancy. The empress played no part in and exerted no influence on public affairs. Known as mai dos brasileiros (Mother of the Brazilians) she conformed to the gender role expected of her, closing her eyes to her husband's infidelities. She devoted herself to her family and to charitable giving. Plagued by sickness (mainly cardiac asthma) from middle age, she could not adjust, after the fall of the empire in November 1889, to a life in exile from Brazil. She died at Pôrto, Portugal, December 30, 1889.

See alsoBrazil, The Empire (Second); Pedro II of Brazil.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barman, Roderick J. Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825–1891. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Barman, Roderick J. Princess Isabel of Brazil: Gender and Power in the Nineteenth Century. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2002.

Williams, Mary Wilhelmine. Dom Pedro the Magnanimous, Second Emperor of Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937.

                                   Roderick J. Barman