Look out to the ocean and picture the following scene: on March 8, 1808, 16 ships landed here at the old wharf next to the Imperial Palace Square. The ships carried the Portuguese royal family, with Prince Regent Dom João VI, his wife, Carlota Joaquina, their eight children, and Queen Maria I, known as the “mad queen.”
With them came a huge court of nearly 10 thousand people, made up of nobles, generals, Catholic bishops, servants, and domestic workers. For days, trunks, suitcases, and sacks filled with fine clothes, artwork, objects stolen from Lisbon museums, and the entire Royal Library – of over 60 thousand books – were unloaded from the ships. Also on board was the entirety of the Royal Treasury and the Crown Jewels, which left the Portuguese people penniless on the other side of the Atlantic.
The court arrived after three months of travel, fleeing an imminent invasion of Lisbon by Napoleon’s army. The French emperor dreamed of deposing the Portuguese monarchy to put his own family in their place.
When they landed in Rio, the nobles were received with pomp and circumstance. They were given accommodation in the center of the city, in houses that the Viceroy donated and in the Carmelite Convent. Additional homes were seized from Rio’s residents. The houses had been marked with “PR” just days before to show that the Prince Regent would confiscate them. For the everyday person, the abbreviation came to mean: “Put yourself on the Road.”
In all the years of colonization in the Americas, this was the first time that a monarch stepped foot on our continent. The court’s arrival made Brazil the headquarters of the Portuguese empire, which still included territory in Africa and Asia, and historians point to this event as the true beginning of Brazil as an independent nation. It was also the event that consolidated corruption, a common practice in the Portuguese court.
According to journalist Laurentino Gomes, the moment that Dom João set foot in Rio, a slave trader gave him a gift: the Quinta de Boa Vista, the finest house in the city. That slave trader, Elisa Antonio Lopes, became a “friend of the king” and received significant sums of money, a place in court, and various noble titles. In his book 1808, Gomes recounts that Dom João handed out more noble titles in eight years than had been distributed in 700 years of monarchy in Portugal. 28 marquises, eight counts, 16 viscounts, and 21 appeared overnight.