King José I

José I became King of Portugal in 1750 and promptly handed the kingdom to someone else. Not through abdication or coup — through preference. He simply did not want the job. What he wanted was opera. He built a private opera house inside the royal palace at Ajuda, imported Italian composers, and attended performances with the fervor other monarchs reserved for war councils. While his ministers argued over trade routes and colonial policy, José was reviewing librettos.

The man who stepped into that vacuum was Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later the Marquis of Pombal — arguably the most consequential political figure in eighteenth-century Europe. Pombal didn't seize power so much as collect it from a king who kept leaving it on the table. By 1755, when the great earthquake leveled Lisbon on the morning of November 1st, killing somewhere between ten and a hundred thousand people, Pombal had already become the functional government of Portugal. The disaster didn't create his dominance. It simply made it undeniable.

What almost no one remembers is that José I developed a pathological fear of enclosed spaces after the earthquake — specifically buildings. He moved the royal court into an elaborate tent city on the hills above Lisbon and refused to sleep indoors for the rest of his life. For nearly two decades, the King of Portugal ruled from a canvas palace. He conducted audiences in tents, slept under canvas, and watched Pombal rebuild the city's stone streets from a distance he was never willing to close. The grandeur of Pombal's rebuilt Baixa district — the rationalist grid still visible in Lisbon today — was commissioned by a king who couldn't bring himself to enter it.

The assassination attempt of 1758 briefly made José relevant to his own reign. Gunmen attacked his carriage returning from a rendezvous; he survived, wounded. Pombal used the attack to destroy the Távora family and break the Jesuit order in Portugal entirely. Whether José sanctioned the severity of what followed remains genuinely unclear. He signed the warrants. He also, by most accounts, signed whatever Pombal set in front of him.