Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

Summary

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Stuff You Missed in History Class

Episode: Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
Hosts: Tracy V. Wilson & Holly Frey
Date: February 18, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tracy and Holly examine the monumental Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, exploring its causes, destructive impact across Europe and North Africa, and the profound influence it had on society, Enlightenment thinking, and disaster response. The hosts trace the seismic event’s ripple effects far beyond Portugal, including Morocco and across the Atlantic, discuss the devastation in Lisbon, and reflect on how the disaster reshaped both the city and philosophical debates in Europe.

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Main Discussion & Key Insights

1. Personal Connection and Introduction

• Tracy’s Experience in Morocco:
  • Tracy shares how references to the earthquake kept coming up during a recent trip to Morocco, as many historical sites were affected.
  • She recalls, “Our guides would say that a site had been uncovered in the earthquake or damaged in the earthquake. And it made me really curious... this earthquake was obviously also a big enough deal in Morocco that people are still talking about it at historic sites 200 years later.” (03:28)
• Literary Context:
  • Tracy notes she’d encountered the earthquake in Voltaire’s Candide but had not fully understood the true historical scale.

2. The Earthquake: Facts and Timeline

• When & Where:
  • Occurred November 1, 1755 (All Saints’ Day) at around 9:40 a.m.
  • Epicenter estimated on the boundary between African and Eurasian tectonic plates, in the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Lisbon.
  • Holly: “There were three distinct periods of shaking over the course of about 15 to 20 minutes.” (04:34)
• Magnitude & Reach:
  • Estimated at 8.5–9 on the moment magnitude scale.
  • Felt as far as Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Azores, and Cape Verde; aftershocks lasted months.
  • Major impact on Portugal, Spain, Morocco—earthquakes in the region were rare but known.

3. Destruction & Tsunami

• Tsunami Devastation:
  • Waves up to 20 meters (66 ft) overtopped city walls in Morocco, flooding interiors.
  • Tsunami reached Cornwall, Newfoundland, the Caribbean, Brazil, and even left sediment in Scotland.
  • Tracy: “Having been in some of those cities, that prospect is terrifying to me.” (08:04)
• Death Toll:
  • Estimates range wildly: 10,000 to 100,000 dead across affected regions.
  • Hard to pinpoint due to lack of census, quick burials, and multiple events around the same time.

4. Lisbon Before & After the Earthquake

• Lisbon Context:
  • Fourth-largest European city; major wealth from colonial empire, especially gold from Brazil and trade—often benefiting Britain.
  • Large, influential clergy and strong ties to Catholicism and the Inquisition.
  • Holly: “Portugal had also been on the periphery of the scientific revolution... In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Inquisition censored published material in Portugal.” (21:32)
• Religious and Social Impact:
  • Earthquake struck during All Saints’ Day mass; churches and monasteries were heavily frequented and highly vulnerable.
  • Tracy: “Churches and monasteries were typically very, very tall and architecturally complex, and a lot of them just collapsed during the earthquake with people inside.” (22:53)
• Destruction in Lisbon:
  • 4/5 of central Lisbon destroyed.
  • Fires, started by falling candles and possibly looters, raged for five days.
  • Royal palace, library, and opera house (just one month old) destroyed.
  • 35 out of 40 city churches gone, approx. 30,000 dead in the city (10% of population).

5. The Government & Rebuilding Response

• Rise of Pombal:
  • Sebastiao José de Carvalho e Melo (later Marquis of Pombal) led the recovery, empowered by King José I.
  • His coordinated response is seen as a model for modern disaster relief.
  • Apocryphal quote from Pombal to the King:
    • “Bury the dead and feed the living.” (29:32)
• Relief Measures:
  • 241 recovery provisions established: disease prevention, relief, food distribution, rebuilding.
  • Taxes suspended; sardine industry nationalized to support food supply.
  • Foreign aid: Britain sent funds and materials—one of the earliest cases of formal international disaster aid.
• Martial Law and Social Measures:
  • Price controls, prosecution of looters, mass burials (including at sea), discouragement of mass flight from the city.
  • Tracy: “These mass burials included people across the spectrum of race, ethnicity, age, and social status.” (32:38)

6. Urban & Architectural Transformation

• Urban Planning:
  • Replacement of the old medieval street grid with wide streets and squares to act as firebreaks.
• Earthquake-Resistant Design:
  • Gaiola Pombalina: Wooden cage-like structural system within masonry buildings to absorb shocks.
  • Buildings limited to 3–5 stories, designed to minimize debris falling into streets in future quakes.
  • Majority of new houses with shops on the ground floor, residences above.
• Long-Term Economic Impact:
  • Portugal lost between a third and half of its GDP; economic and colonial slowdowns ensued.

7. Seismology & Enlightenment Thought

• Documenting the Earthquake:
  • Pombal’s early form of scientific surveying: sent 13 detailed questions to parishes, leading to rich data on the event and its effects.
  • Recognized as a contribution to the development of seismology.
• Intellectual and Theological Reverberations:
  • The disaster challenged prevailing theological optimism and led to philosophical debates.
  • Spotlight: Voltaire’s Candide
    • Used the earthquake to satirize Leibnizian optimism.
    • Tracy: “It was hard for people to reconcile that idea [best of all possible worlds] with the earthquake in Candide.” (37:52)
  • The event fueled rational, scientific inquiry and the growing Enlightenment movement, though the hosts stress this was an ongoing, complex process.

8. Controversies and Legacy

• Pombal’s Methods and Legacy:
  • Post-earthquake, Pombal was both lauded (for disaster response) and critiqued (for authoritarian overreach, use of crisis to advance personal and anti-Jesuit agendas).
  • Upon King José I’s death in 1777, Pombal fell from power and faced accusations of corruption; he died in 1782.
• Long-term Influence:
  • The Lisbon earthquake remains a foundational event in disaster management, urban planning, and philosophical thought.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Our guides would say that a site had been uncovered in the earthquake or damaged in the earthquake. ... this earthquake was obviously also a big enough deal in Morocco that people are still talking about it at historic sites 200 years later.”
  — Tracy V. Wilson (03:28)

• “There were three distinct periods of shaking over the course of about 15 to 20 minutes. And there has been debate about whether at least one of those was really an aftershock or if there were two different earthquakes very close together.”
  — Holly Frey (04:34)

• “Having been in some of those cities, that prospect is terrifying to me.”
  — Tracy V. Wilson, about the tsunami (08:04)

• “Bury the dead and feed the living.”
  — Attributed to Pombal, regarding the government’s immediate response (29:32)

• “It was hard for people to reconcile that idea [best possible world] with the earthquake in Candide.”
  — Tracy V. Wilson (37:52)

• Satirical take on the Enlightenment:

  • Holly: “Nobody was like, let’s start the Enlightenment, you guys.” (39:26)
  • Tracy: “I woke up this morning and I was in the Age of Reason. How about you?” (39:30)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction & Morocco Connections: 02:24–04:14
• Earthquake Science and Impact: 04:14–12:58
• Lisbon Before the Earthquake & Social Context: 17:44–23:35
• The Disaster in Lisbon: 23:35–26:37
• Government Response and Rebuilding: 27:33–31:43
• Seismological Surveys and Enlightenment Debates: 35:43–39:46
• Pombal’s Legacy: 39:46–40:54

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

The episode combines sharp historical detail with the hosts’ accessible, conversational tone. Tracy and Holly stress how the earthquake was pivotal not just for its destruction, but for how it changed city planning, the science of earthquakes, and even European thought. They balance the scale of the devastation with fascinating stories about individual and governmental responses, philosophical challenges, and the rise and fall of consequential personalities.

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For listeners, this episode offers a vivid, nuanced look at the Great Lisbon Earthquake—not just as a tragic event, but as a fulcrum of history, thought, and recovery that still shapes our world today.

Transcript

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Mandy B]

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Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping in another world.

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[Holly Frey]

Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.

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[Holly Frey]

Council and pivotal welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Frey]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

At various points on our trip to Morocco last year, our guides talked about the Great lisbon earthquake of 1755. It started at our very first stop, on our very first full day in Morocco, at Hassan Tower in Rabat. So Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqb Al Mansur commissioned a mosque at the end of the 12th century. But then he died before construction on it was finished and it was never completed. The before his death, a 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. And then 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. 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 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 200 years later. I had definitely heard 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 event. So that's today's episode.

[Holly Frey]

This earthquake took place on November 1, 1755. Its epicenter was on the boundary between the African and Eurasian tectonic plates on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, 200 to 300 kilometers southwest of Lisbon, Portugal, and about 350 kilometers northwest of Casablanca, Morocco. Those are obviously all approximations in 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 15 to 20 minutes. And there has been debate about whether at least one of those was really an aftershock or if there were two different earthquakes very close together.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, I read a few different papers that pretty confidently said this is where the epicenter was, and they were not in exactly the same place. They had different substantiation for why they had come to that conclusion. It does not seem like there is exact agreement on the exact location of where it started. Today, earthquakes are measured using the moment magnitude scale that started replacing the Richter scale in the 1980s. There's no upper limit to this scale, but the strongest earthquake ever recorded struck Chile in 1960, and that had a magnitude of 9.5. The magnitude of the 1755 earthquake has been estimated based on 18th century accounts and other data, and it's generally accepted as having a magnitude of between 8.5 and 9. Although there are a few estimates that have arrived at, like, a somewhat lower number. Regardless, though, a very powerful earthquake.

[Holly Frey]

And this earthquake's most destructive effects were in Portugal, Morocco, and Spain. This isn't an area that's really associated with a ton of major earthquakes prior to this. In 1722, an earthquake struck southern Portugal, but many of the records of that earthquake were destroyed in 1755, so we don't have a lot of detail about it. Earlier, major earthquakes in Portugal took place in 1356 and 1531. An earthquake struck Fez, Morocco, in 1624 and caused extensive damage. An earthquake that struck Almeria in Southern Spain in 1522 killed an estimated 2,500 people, and it destroyed most of the city. So major earthquakes were not unheard of in this region, but they were widely spaced. They often happened centuries apart.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The November 1, 1755, earthquake was felt as far away as Britain and 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. There were also reports of disturbances in lakes and rivers, including the formation of standing waves all across western and northern Europe. And then aftershocks went on for months.

[Holly Frey]

This earthquake also spawned a tsunami, which devastated the coasts of Morocco, Spain, and Portugal, as well as islands and archipelagos to the west of northern Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. 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 20 meters, or 66ft. So it crested over the top of those walls and it flooded the city's interiors.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Having been in some of those cities, that prospect is terrifying to me.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, because then there's no way for the water to get out.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 6 to 10ft, or about 2 to 3 meters, struck the coast of Cornwall. Then, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a similarly sized wave also struck the coast of Newfoundland. And there were waves of about 1 meter or 3ft that struck much of the Caribbean and the coast of Brazil. Smaller waves from the tsunami were also reported all along the eastern coasts of north and South America. Sediments from this tsunami have also been found as far away as Scotland.

[Holly Frey]

Information did not travel nearly as quickly in 1755 as it does today. And the Japanese word tsunami had not made its way into European languages yet. But people did understand that earthquakes could be connected to flooding and unusually massive waves or tides. For example, William Borlase published a book on the natural history of Cornwall in 1758, and. And he described the huge waves that struck Mounts Bay in 1755. He talked about the city of Lisbon being destroyed in an earthquake that same day, with the Tagus river in Lisbon rising 20 to 30ft in cycles, and ships at sea 60 leagues from port, feeling the shock as though they had run aground. Borlaise wrote that it was difficult to say exactly what connection there might be between what happened in Cornwall and in Portugal. But all these circumstances seem 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 farther to the west and southwest under the Atlantic Ocean.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

There were also two other major earthquakes in November of 1755 in addition to this one. On November 18, an earthquake struck off the coast of Cape Ann in Massachusetts with an estimated magnitude of 5.8. That is much smaller than the November 1st earthquake, but it is the largest known earthquake ever to strike Massachusetts. It toppled 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 the earthquake on November 1st.

[Holly Frey]

And there was also another earthquake in Morocco later in November. Documentation on this one is tricky. It struck the city of Meknes, which is southwest of Fes. Both cities were badly damaged and an estimated 15,000 people were killed. Sources in Arabic consistently report the date of this earthquake is happening on November 27. But there are also European reports of a strong earthquake in this part of Morocco on November 18, which was believed to be a strong aftershock of that November 1st earthquake. Various writing from the 18th century and later conflates all of these earthquakes. And it is completely possible that some of the damage our guides in Morocco attributed to the November 1st earthquake really happened later in the month during these secondary events. The 1755 Meknes 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Estimates of the death toll from the November 1 earthquake 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 10,000 people. But the highest estimates report 100,000 people. Some of this is because Lisbon, which faced some of the worst impacts of 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 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.

[Holly Frey]

In, even if those lower estimates are closer to correct. This was 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 1666.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

We'll have more detail on Lisbon after a sponsor break.

[Holly Frey]

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[Narrator (Valley of Shadows Promo)]

In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband Mike was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.

[Holly Frey]

I said, I need you to tell.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Me exactly what you're doing.

[Narrator (Valley of Shadows Promo)]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Narrator (Valley of Shadows Promo)]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

Segregation and the Day Integration at night.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Promo)]

When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Promo)]

Inside Charlie's Place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it.

[Holly Frey]

You saw the kkk.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, they was dressed up in their uniform.

[Holly Frey]

The KKK set out to raid Charlie.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Take him away from here.

[Holly Frey]

Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him.

[Narrator (Charlie’s Place Promo)]

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[Narrator (Valley of Shadows Promo)]

On June 11, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing. It's an all out manhunt for John Ajay.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Every search and rescue team in LA.

[Narrator (Valley of Shadows Promo)]

County has been called in to help. Within days, tips started flooding into the sheriff's department. The rumor around the drug scene was that a deputy was taken care of. Is this the story of a man who just got lost in the desert? Or of a cover up inside the nation's largest sheriff's department?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1755, Lisbon, Portugal was the fourth largest city 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 indigenous people and Africans in Brazil, but the enslavement of indigenous Americans was banned in April of 1755. This was in part with the hope that indigenous peoples would ally with Portugal in border disputes with Spain. More enslaved Africans were ultimately transported to Brazil than to anywhere else in the world.

[Holly Frey]

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 275,000 people, it was significantly smaller than London or Paris. For comparison, London's population was approaching three times that and Paris was About twice as populous as Lisbon, Portugal was also.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Dependent on England for its naval defense. These two nations had a relationship that had gone back for centuries. And then in 1703, 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 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 a result of this relationship with England, port cities, including Lisbon, had a really sizable 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 that a lot of that gold mine wealth, while it was making Portugal wealthy, it was also ultimately winding up in the UK.

[Holly Frey]

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 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 2 million people living in all of Portugal, and as many as 200,000 of them were Catholic clergy. This was 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The Jesuit order had control of Portuguese missions in the Americas and the higher education system in Portugal. The Portuguese Inquisition had also been established in the 1530s and modeled after the Spanish Spanish Inquisition, targeting heretics as well as people who had been forced to convert to Christianity but were believed to secretly still be Jewish, including their descendants. The total number of cases the Portuguese Inquisition tried and the number of people that it put to death were smaller than that of the Spanish Inquisition, but it was proportionately greater.

[Holly Frey]

Portugal had also been on the periphery of the scientific revolution that led to major developments in other parts of Europe. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Inquisition censored published material in Portugal, which meant that some scientific works just were not available in Portuguese. In the 18th century, people who tried to introduce new scientific discoveries into Portugal were known as instragirados, which was the term for Europeanized intellectuals. Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e Melo, Secretary of State for Foreign affairs and war, was an estrangerado and had been trying to limit the Inquisition 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. The fact that, like, intellectuals who were trying to introduce new scientific discoveries were being thought of as Europeanized. Yeah. 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 a term that. That has common origins with, like, stranger.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Like, that just sort of illustrates.

[Holly Frey]

Untrustworthy. Yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. What was happening in Portugal. There is also a connection between religion and why the 1755 earthquake was so devastating to the city of Lisbon. The earthquake started at about 9:40 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. Portugal's churches and monasteries were typically very, very tall and architecturally complex, and a lot of them just collapsed during the earthquake with people inside.

[Holly Frey]

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 fires spread due to strong winds and the massive scale of destruction from the earthquake and made the fires even harder to fight. Those fires burned for about five days.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

As we said a moment ago, the first wave of the earthquake started at about 9:40 in the morning. It was intense enough to raise a cloud of dust around 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 9:50 in the morning. And then there was a third shock at about 9:55.

[Holly Frey]

This earthquake destroyed churches and monasteries all over Lisbon, 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 Tagus river and to the boats in the harbor to try to escape. But at about 10:30, so less than an hour after the earthquake started, the water receded and then returned as a tsunami that flooded the harbor and 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

A major aftershock struck at about 11am as we mentioned earlier, Lisbon had a sizable community of British subjects living in 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 a hundred people, apparently believing that the earthquake was some kind of divine retribution, forcibly baptized Goddard into the Catholic Church.

[Holly Frey]

Between the earthquake, the tsunami and the fires, roughly 4/5 of central Lisbon was completely destroyed. Only about 3,000 of Lisbon's homes were in usable condition. Afterward, of the city's 40 churches, 35 were destroyed. The royal palace, as we mentioned, was destroyed, including the royal library and 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, death toll estimates are all over the place, but it is estimated that about 30,000 people died in Lisbon alone. That would have been about 10% of the population. 78 people from the English factory died.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 1755, or not long after. This is one of the reasons that the earthquake is most associated with Lisbon. In addition to Lisbon's 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 than anywhere else that was translating these British documents.

[Holly Frey]

There is also a lot of documentation of the earthquake that is written in Portuguese, and we'll get to that after we pause for a sponsor break.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1755, Jose I was King of Portugal. He was at a royal residence in Belem in western Lisbon when the earthquake struck. This palace did have some damage, but the Belem area was not affected nearly as badly as central Lisbon, and the king was unharmed. Pedro de Mota y Silva, Secretary of State for the Kingdom, also survived, but he was in his 70s and sick. He died only a few days after the earthquake. I 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. Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho Imelo, Secretary of State for Foreign affairs and War, was also unharmed.

[Holly Frey]

The king gave Sebastiao Jose broad authority to manage the official response to the earthquake. And after Pedro Da Mota y Silva's death, he became Secretary of State for the Kingdom. Later on in his life, he became Marques de Pombal. And most sources just call him Pombal, regardless of when in his life they're talking about.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Sources give a range of reasons for why Pombal wound up in this role. One is that being the Secretary of State for Foreign affairs and war made him a 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 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.

[Holly Frey]

Regardless, Pombal's involvement is a big part of why the Great Lisbon earthquake is sometimes described as the first modern disaster, and 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 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 Pumbal what to do, and Pombal answered, quote, bury the dead and feed the living.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So Pombal did not do all of this by himself. There were also 12 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.

[Holly Frey]

They were also guided by a set of 241 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 established tax on trade. As part of the relief effort, the government also nationalized the canned sardine industry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 the rebuilding.

[Holly Frey]

Effort.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 aid in history.

[Holly Frey]

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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 masqueraded as monks or nuns to try to get free provisions were excommunicated from the Catholic Church. 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.

[Holly Frey]

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 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. 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 rites.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Pombal and the rest of the government also established a plan to rebuild central Lisbon. It had previously been a medieval city with 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 firebreaks.

[Holly Frey]

The new buildings were also designed to be earthquake resistant. They featured what came to be known as the Gaiola 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 building in the event of an earthquake, rather than toppling out into 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

All of this rebuilding took a very long time. The rebuilt central city had two main squares, the Praca di Comercio and the Prasa di Rossio. The Prasa de Comercio faces the harbor, and it's surrounded by buildings that mostly house things like government offices and courts. In 1775, so 20 years after the earthquake, an equestrian statue of King Jose I 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.

[Holly Frey]

Even with all of the official steps to try to recover from the earthquake, 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 in the Americas.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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 1756, Pombal sent a set of 13 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 timbers started, how long they lasted, how many waves 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 the earthquakes and the types of questions that were asked, Pombal is also recognized as contributing to the field of seismology.

[Holly Frey]

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 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 lot of churches on a holiday while people were at Mass. 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?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

As we said up at the top of the show, this earthquake is also part of Voltaire's satirical work, Candide. One of the many things that Candide satirizes is the philosophy of optimism, including the work of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his 1710 work The Odyssey. On an incredibly basic level, this philosophy is rooted 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 candide. Candide's tutor, Dr. Pagloss, insists repeatedly that they are living in the 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 tu et bien, or all is well.

[Holly Frey]

At the same time, some of the writing about this makes it sound very x y equals 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. But that's incredibly reductive. The Age of Enlightenment is a framework 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I woke up this morning and I was in the Age of Reason. How about you?

[Holly Frey]

I felt enlightened, and I 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.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Also, there are a lot of differing opinions about Pall Mall. He definitely had a huge influence on the recovery from 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 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 Jose I died in 1777. Pombal 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 1782.

[Holly Frey]

You got some listener mail lined up for us?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I do 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. I wasn't sure if in the rickets episode you talked about the genetic disorders that can cause a person to have rickets even if they're getting play plenty of sunlight. I happen to be one of these people. My dermatologist 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 out at 55 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 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 dependent rickets type 1a caused by mutations in the CYP27B1 gene so the body cannot convert vitamin D to its active form. And vitamin D dependent rickets type 1b, VDDR1b, a rarer similar defect in the CYP2R1 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 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 and 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 her attacks with sticks. Timothy, I'm. 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 that just quietly step through the forest 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 genetic 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 a fondness for deer while also recognizing that they can cause a number of problems due to the world we have built for them to live in.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, they are wild animals.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

They are wild animals. There are also a whole lot of them. And as we talked about in our episode about tick borne diseases, the prevalence of Lyme disease seems to be associated with the fact that there's a lot, a lot of deer nowadays. Thanks for listening. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we're at history [e-mail] and you can subscribe to the show on the iheartradio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcast. Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast guaranteed.