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2009
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Lisbon is located at 38º 43' north and 9º 8' west on the north bank of a navigable river and enormous estuary (the Tagus). The function of its port and the settlement of the court combined to shape the morphology and expansion of its urban area from the 16th to the 18th centuries. With the opening of the kingdom's economy to the exterior through seaborne trade, the waterfront areas would be densely occupied by several quays, shipyards and warehouses, shaping the urbanisation of the hillocks of Bairro Alto, Mouraria and, further to the north, of Rato and Amoreiras.
The transformation experienced by Lisbon between 1500 and 1800 can be perceived through the constantly rising number of inhabitants (and of houses). In 1528, in a kingdom with a little over 1,300,000 inhabitants, Lisbon had about 50,000 souls. But, in 1551, the city's population had already doubled, and the area delimited by the Dom Fernando I city wall (255 acres) was insufficient to house its 110,000 residents. Sources from the sixteen hundreds are very imprecise and provide very different figures. Some refer 120,000 souls for 1660; therefore, less than the 165,000 that others mention for 1620. The fallibility of coetaneous documents on the subject is obvious, but perhaps those figures may be used as an indicator of a deceleration in growth. At the end of the 18th century, after recovering from the casualties caused by the 1755 earthquake, which killed 12% of the population, Lisbon sheltered a little over 250,000 inhabitants.
Despite frequent outbreaks of plague, mainly until the first decade of the sixteen hundreds, and the dramatic impact of the 1755 earthquake (certainly much more dramatic than the one of 1531), the city's population varied at a considerable rhythm that was higher than the one of the rest of the kingdom in the 16th and 17th centuries, benefiting from internal migrations, the settlement of foreign communities and merchants and the importation of slaves. During the fifteen hundreds, Lisbon became one of the ten biggest European cities. This prominence is still felt during the 18th century and is a sign that Portugal followed the European rate of urbanisation, with Lisbon always strongly contributing to the level of that demographic and economic indicator. Between 1706 and 1801, the kingdom's population swelled from 578,733 to 754,390 households (about 2,200,000 inhabitants). The rate of urbanisation remained unchanged, reaching 18% in both years, but Lisbon sheltered 26.2% of the urban population in the former year and 32% in the latter.
The growth of the city justified changes to its limits and to the number of villages/ parishes, where vegetable plots and gardens appeared in the same areas of high-rise buildings and narrow and winding streets. Former circumscriptions, such as the one of Mártires, were subdivided in the second half of the 16th century, with the villages of Chagas (where many pilots from the Carreira da Índia and shipyard workers - carpenters and caulkers - found a home), Loreto and Santa Catarina do Monte Sinai appearing to the west of the Dom Fernando I city wall. To the north, the medieval limits would only witness small modifications until the 18th century, since the city spread itself along its waterfront. Rossio was in the border of the most densely occupied areas and featured the Hospital de Todos os Santos [All Saints Hospital] and the Palácio dos Estaus [Estaus Palace], contiguous to the seat of the Portuguese Inquisition. After the earthquake, there was still a large space to the north of Rossio to create a public promenade.
The expansion of its urban perimeter did not develop in regular rings from a centre; however, the socio-economic topography featured certain regularities at another level. Some neighbourhoods concentrated wealthy households; others hosted more modest buildings. Privileges and rents followed this inequality. If the contiguity of palaces and convents with people's houses was one of Lisbon's singularities, mainly in São Vicente and Alfama, it was equally true that the socioeconomic morphology carved the differences. Western neighbourhoods were ennobled, together with the outskirts in the direction of Belém, where the noblemen of the kingdom ordered their palaces to be built in farms and recreational resorts. As for the villages in the centre of the city, São Nicolau and Loreto, they were packed with several storey-high buildings occupied by opulent merchants. Their presence in these villages led to the choice of a street that ended at the Rua Nova, connecting the Pelourinho Velho square to the palace of the Corte Real (approximately near the Corpo Santo today), for the location of Lisbon's markets - a privileged place for the circulation of information and to conclude deals and contracts.
After the earthquake, the plans for an entire renovation projecting a new city in Belém, if Dom José were to determine that this would be the location of the royal palace, did not prevail. Nonetheless, what was materialised from these plans brought important innovations not only in the rectilinear design of the city centre's neighbourhoods and in their infrastructures that were better prepared to face natural disasters, but also and mainly in the symbolism of the royal residence that was moved to the village of Santa Isabel. The plans for the reconstruction of the city centre projected its articulation with the spaces destined to the court, perched up in Estrela.
There was a rupture with the fundamental tradition that governed the city's spatial planning that had resulted from a Dom Manuel's decision. Having finished a land reclamation from the river and having left the palace of the castle's fortress abandoned, Dom Manuel opted for a space near the shipyards for the royal residence. This decision offered the court, when it was stationed in Lisbon, an unusual level of promiscuity with the people from the riverside, the fish and vegetable markets and the quays where the barges that supplied the city docked. The rules of Renaissance urban spatial planning which reserved for the power the areas far from the city's bustle were disregarded.
The king's quarters, so close to the Rua Nova dos Mercadores [New Merchant Street] and hosting on their ground-floor warehouses and the first Casa da Índia [House of India], were the public image of a State whose property depended upon mercantile activity; the palace signalled the importance of the empire and defined the Terreiro do Paço [Palace Square] as the city centre. The concentration of administrative buildings included the new customs house, constructed on the east side and contiguous to the Terreiro do Trigo [Wheat Square], which also featured a magnificent building built by Dom Manuel. The empire created Terreiro do Paço and marked the urban toponomy. The Marquis of Pombal's attempts to turn it into the Praça do Comércio [Commerce Square], by installing there the merchant exchange, are ignored by the Lisboners' custom. The toponym Terreiro do Paço, even after being stripped of that dignity, has imposed itself until today.
The toponym's resistance is not a sign of a lack of change, be it either in the morphology of the square, which would host the autos da fé staged by the Portuguese Inquisition during the 17th century, or in the one of the royal palace. It benefited from improvement works throughout time; however, these never included the paving of the square. The visit of Filipe II (III of Spain) to Lisbon gave occasion to the construction of a quadrangularly-designed turret that closed the square on its west side. Under Dom João V, in a time when gold abounded, the sumptuary expenses with the palace provided it with an additional quadrangularly-designed wing, comprising several sections with marble arched vaults connecting it to the Patriarchal Chapel. One of the inner courts of this annexe featured four jasper columns and wide side staircases. All was turned into rubble on 1 November 1755.
On the other hand, the Águas Livres aqueduct, a late answer to a problem worsened by the city's growth, and other great constructions from João V's reign survived the catastrophe. Started in 1731, the construction would continue during the whole of the following decade, with the Alcântara valley section only coming to an end in 1744. The wide arched reinforced with iron over the fault line demonstrated that the solution of Custódio Vieira, the engineer who did not followed Manuel da Maia's initial project, was effective. Even with the water supply solution proving to be good, it did not prevent Italian architect Ludovice, also involved in the construction, from attacking Custódio Vieira for having opted for that design, which even featured a gothic form that he considered to be rejected for many centuries.
Despite the constant investment in monumental constructions, erecting palaces, churches and monasteries, the foreigners who visited Lisbon were rarely impressed. In the austerity of the buildings plain architecture, one could see little that indicated that Lisbon contributed to diversify the European consumption of refined goods. It is true that the luxury of the interiors, richly decorated with exotic woods, golden woodcarving and eastern furniture, is also a recurring topic in the city's portray, but what could be fascinating in this ostentation of wealth was secondary in face of either the narrowness of the streets, unable to support the traffic of coaches and carriages, or the sewage problems.
With an abundance of domestic waste thrown into the street, the nauseous smell was difficultly lessened by the breeze from the river. However, more than purifying the air of a badly sanitised city, the Tagus offered Lisbon one of its biggest assets: a port and a quay where ships coming from various places could dock. Close to a fluvial road navigable up to Abrantes and easily crossed to the other bank, the riverside markets of bread, fruit, vegetables and fish were as distant from Almada and Seixal as from the farms of Benfica.
Thanks to the river, the city was supplied and grew. People ate fresh products from the RIbatejo, which arrived by the intense traffic of barges and boats that transited the river 3 or 4 times a week. In 1552, one could count 470 of them on the south bank and 660 on the north, including Santarém and Abrantes, but excluding the ones from Lisbons and its outskirts (all the way to Cascais) that amounted to 300.
This intense traffic naturally forged the complementarity between the two banks of the river. On the "other side," tidal energy served to power a wheat-grinding industry, much of which came from Europe by sea, but it also came from the Alentejo and Ribatejo and was returned to the north bank transformed into flour or baked into biscuits in the ovens of Vale do Zebro (Palhais) for the departing fleets. Through the profusion of sugarcane, the empire also fostered pottery on the south bank, where the shapes for the inevitable "sugar loaves" that Madeira and Brazil's sugar mills lacked were built.
The coeval iconography looks at the city from the river, with ships of several sizes and shapes aiming to represent Lisbon's greatness through the economic meaning of the movement of its port as a European hub. Transatlantic trade indicated in its century-old tendencies of either contraction or expansion the beat, if not of the whole economy, at least of a substantial part of the State's revenue, of which Lisbon's customs houses were a focal point.
During the time of the Iberian Union (1580-1640), the Arbitristas remembered the king of the strategic position of the city for the Hispanic empire, which also had an Atlantic dimension.
For the City Council, the maritime dimension of the State, evident in the grandiosity of the city, seemed to be neglected by Madrid. The Austrias avoided the breeze of the Tagus and only stayed in Lisbon for a few years. Filipe III not even attempted a visit to Portugal. The absence of the monarch was seen as a way of lowering the prestige of the city and kingdom inside the monarchy. Nonetheless, this physical absence of the power justified waiting for Lisbon to polarise the information that was necessary for Madrid's administration. Therefore, it was the Austrias and not the Aviz - despite the empire and the fleets from India - that consecrated Lisbon in the role of "head of the kingdom" (capital), a status which would be confirmed by the Braganzas that made it the city of the court, from where it was only dislodged in 1808 with the invasion of the French.
Bibliography:
BRANDÃO, João, Tratado da Majestade e Grandeza e Abastança da Cidade de Lisboa em 1552, (ed. José Felicidade Alves), Livros Horizonte, 1990. CASTELO-BRANCO, Fernando, Lisboa Seiscentista, CML, Lisboa, 1956. MADUREIRA, Nuno, Cidade: espaço e quotidiano, Livros Horizonte, Lisboa, 1992. MOITA, Irisalva (coord), O Livro de Lisboa, Livros Horizonte, Lisboa, 1994. RODRIGUES, Teresa, Crises e Mortalidade em Lisboa, séculos XVI e XVII, Lisboa, 1990. SENOS, Nuno, O Paço da Ribeira, Editorial Notícias, Lisboa, 2002. SERRÃO, José Vicente, "O Quadro Humano", Mattoso, José (dir), António Manuel Hespanha (coord), História de Portugal, Circulo Leitores, Lisboa, 19 vol. IV.
Translated by: John Silva
The transformation experienced by Lisbon between 1500 and 1800 can be perceived through the constantly rising number of inhabitants (and of houses). In 1528, in a kingdom with a little over 1,300,000 inhabitants, Lisbon had about 50,000 souls. But, in 1551, the city's population had already doubled, and the area delimited by the Dom Fernando I city wall (255 acres) was insufficient to house its 110,000 residents. Sources from the sixteen hundreds are very imprecise and provide very different figures. Some refer 120,000 souls for 1660; therefore, less than the 165,000 that others mention for 1620. The fallibility of coetaneous documents on the subject is obvious, but perhaps those figures may be used as an indicator of a deceleration in growth. At the end of the 18th century, after recovering from the casualties caused by the 1755 earthquake, which killed 12% of the population, Lisbon sheltered a little over 250,000 inhabitants.
Despite frequent outbreaks of plague, mainly until the first decade of the sixteen hundreds, and the dramatic impact of the 1755 earthquake (certainly much more dramatic than the one of 1531), the city's population varied at a considerable rhythm that was higher than the one of the rest of the kingdom in the 16th and 17th centuries, benefiting from internal migrations, the settlement of foreign communities and merchants and the importation of slaves. During the fifteen hundreds, Lisbon became one of the ten biggest European cities. This prominence is still felt during the 18th century and is a sign that Portugal followed the European rate of urbanisation, with Lisbon always strongly contributing to the level of that demographic and economic indicator. Between 1706 and 1801, the kingdom's population swelled from 578,733 to 754,390 households (about 2,200,000 inhabitants). The rate of urbanisation remained unchanged, reaching 18% in both years, but Lisbon sheltered 26.2% of the urban population in the former year and 32% in the latter.
The growth of the city justified changes to its limits and to the number of villages/ parishes, where vegetable plots and gardens appeared in the same areas of high-rise buildings and narrow and winding streets. Former circumscriptions, such as the one of Mártires, were subdivided in the second half of the 16th century, with the villages of Chagas (where many pilots from the Carreira da Índia and shipyard workers - carpenters and caulkers - found a home), Loreto and Santa Catarina do Monte Sinai appearing to the west of the Dom Fernando I city wall. To the north, the medieval limits would only witness small modifications until the 18th century, since the city spread itself along its waterfront. Rossio was in the border of the most densely occupied areas and featured the Hospital de Todos os Santos [All Saints Hospital] and the Palácio dos Estaus [Estaus Palace], contiguous to the seat of the Portuguese Inquisition. After the earthquake, there was still a large space to the north of Rossio to create a public promenade.
The expansion of its urban perimeter did not develop in regular rings from a centre; however, the socio-economic topography featured certain regularities at another level. Some neighbourhoods concentrated wealthy households; others hosted more modest buildings. Privileges and rents followed this inequality. If the contiguity of palaces and convents with people's houses was one of Lisbon's singularities, mainly in São Vicente and Alfama, it was equally true that the socioeconomic morphology carved the differences. Western neighbourhoods were ennobled, together with the outskirts in the direction of Belém, where the noblemen of the kingdom ordered their palaces to be built in farms and recreational resorts. As for the villages in the centre of the city, São Nicolau and Loreto, they were packed with several storey-high buildings occupied by opulent merchants. Their presence in these villages led to the choice of a street that ended at the Rua Nova, connecting the Pelourinho Velho square to the palace of the Corte Real (approximately near the Corpo Santo today), for the location of Lisbon's markets - a privileged place for the circulation of information and to conclude deals and contracts.
After the earthquake, the plans for an entire renovation projecting a new city in Belém, if Dom José were to determine that this would be the location of the royal palace, did not prevail. Nonetheless, what was materialised from these plans brought important innovations not only in the rectilinear design of the city centre's neighbourhoods and in their infrastructures that were better prepared to face natural disasters, but also and mainly in the symbolism of the royal residence that was moved to the village of Santa Isabel. The plans for the reconstruction of the city centre projected its articulation with the spaces destined to the court, perched up in Estrela.
There was a rupture with the fundamental tradition that governed the city's spatial planning that had resulted from a Dom Manuel's decision. Having finished a land reclamation from the river and having left the palace of the castle's fortress abandoned, Dom Manuel opted for a space near the shipyards for the royal residence. This decision offered the court, when it was stationed in Lisbon, an unusual level of promiscuity with the people from the riverside, the fish and vegetable markets and the quays where the barges that supplied the city docked. The rules of Renaissance urban spatial planning which reserved for the power the areas far from the city's bustle were disregarded.
The king's quarters, so close to the Rua Nova dos Mercadores [New Merchant Street] and hosting on their ground-floor warehouses and the first Casa da Índia [House of India], were the public image of a State whose property depended upon mercantile activity; the palace signalled the importance of the empire and defined the Terreiro do Paço [Palace Square] as the city centre. The concentration of administrative buildings included the new customs house, constructed on the east side and contiguous to the Terreiro do Trigo [Wheat Square], which also featured a magnificent building built by Dom Manuel. The empire created Terreiro do Paço and marked the urban toponomy. The Marquis of Pombal's attempts to turn it into the Praça do Comércio [Commerce Square], by installing there the merchant exchange, are ignored by the Lisboners' custom. The toponym Terreiro do Paço, even after being stripped of that dignity, has imposed itself until today.
The toponym's resistance is not a sign of a lack of change, be it either in the morphology of the square, which would host the autos da fé staged by the Portuguese Inquisition during the 17th century, or in the one of the royal palace. It benefited from improvement works throughout time; however, these never included the paving of the square. The visit of Filipe II (III of Spain) to Lisbon gave occasion to the construction of a quadrangularly-designed turret that closed the square on its west side. Under Dom João V, in a time when gold abounded, the sumptuary expenses with the palace provided it with an additional quadrangularly-designed wing, comprising several sections with marble arched vaults connecting it to the Patriarchal Chapel. One of the inner courts of this annexe featured four jasper columns and wide side staircases. All was turned into rubble on 1 November 1755.
On the other hand, the Águas Livres aqueduct, a late answer to a problem worsened by the city's growth, and other great constructions from João V's reign survived the catastrophe. Started in 1731, the construction would continue during the whole of the following decade, with the Alcântara valley section only coming to an end in 1744. The wide arched reinforced with iron over the fault line demonstrated that the solution of Custódio Vieira, the engineer who did not followed Manuel da Maia's initial project, was effective. Even with the water supply solution proving to be good, it did not prevent Italian architect Ludovice, also involved in the construction, from attacking Custódio Vieira for having opted for that design, which even featured a gothic form that he considered to be rejected for many centuries.
Despite the constant investment in monumental constructions, erecting palaces, churches and monasteries, the foreigners who visited Lisbon were rarely impressed. In the austerity of the buildings plain architecture, one could see little that indicated that Lisbon contributed to diversify the European consumption of refined goods. It is true that the luxury of the interiors, richly decorated with exotic woods, golden woodcarving and eastern furniture, is also a recurring topic in the city's portray, but what could be fascinating in this ostentation of wealth was secondary in face of either the narrowness of the streets, unable to support the traffic of coaches and carriages, or the sewage problems.
With an abundance of domestic waste thrown into the street, the nauseous smell was difficultly lessened by the breeze from the river. However, more than purifying the air of a badly sanitised city, the Tagus offered Lisbon one of its biggest assets: a port and a quay where ships coming from various places could dock. Close to a fluvial road navigable up to Abrantes and easily crossed to the other bank, the riverside markets of bread, fruit, vegetables and fish were as distant from Almada and Seixal as from the farms of Benfica.
Thanks to the river, the city was supplied and grew. People ate fresh products from the RIbatejo, which arrived by the intense traffic of barges and boats that transited the river 3 or 4 times a week. In 1552, one could count 470 of them on the south bank and 660 on the north, including Santarém and Abrantes, but excluding the ones from Lisbons and its outskirts (all the way to Cascais) that amounted to 300.
This intense traffic naturally forged the complementarity between the two banks of the river. On the "other side," tidal energy served to power a wheat-grinding industry, much of which came from Europe by sea, but it also came from the Alentejo and Ribatejo and was returned to the north bank transformed into flour or baked into biscuits in the ovens of Vale do Zebro (Palhais) for the departing fleets. Through the profusion of sugarcane, the empire also fostered pottery on the south bank, where the shapes for the inevitable "sugar loaves" that Madeira and Brazil's sugar mills lacked were built.
The coeval iconography looks at the city from the river, with ships of several sizes and shapes aiming to represent Lisbon's greatness through the economic meaning of the movement of its port as a European hub. Transatlantic trade indicated in its century-old tendencies of either contraction or expansion the beat, if not of the whole economy, at least of a substantial part of the State's revenue, of which Lisbon's customs houses were a focal point.
During the time of the Iberian Union (1580-1640), the Arbitristas remembered the king of the strategic position of the city for the Hispanic empire, which also had an Atlantic dimension.
For the City Council, the maritime dimension of the State, evident in the grandiosity of the city, seemed to be neglected by Madrid. The Austrias avoided the breeze of the Tagus and only stayed in Lisbon for a few years. Filipe III not even attempted a visit to Portugal. The absence of the monarch was seen as a way of lowering the prestige of the city and kingdom inside the monarchy. Nonetheless, this physical absence of the power justified waiting for Lisbon to polarise the information that was necessary for Madrid's administration. Therefore, it was the Austrias and not the Aviz - despite the empire and the fleets from India - that consecrated Lisbon in the role of "head of the kingdom" (capital), a status which would be confirmed by the Braganzas that made it the city of the court, from where it was only dislodged in 1808 with the invasion of the French.
Bibliography:
BRANDÃO, João, Tratado da Majestade e Grandeza e Abastança da Cidade de Lisboa em 1552, (ed. José Felicidade Alves), Livros Horizonte, 1990. CASTELO-BRANCO, Fernando, Lisboa Seiscentista, CML, Lisboa, 1956. MADUREIRA, Nuno, Cidade: espaço e quotidiano, Livros Horizonte, Lisboa, 1992. MOITA, Irisalva (coord), O Livro de Lisboa, Livros Horizonte, Lisboa, 1994. RODRIGUES, Teresa, Crises e Mortalidade em Lisboa, séculos XVI e XVII, Lisboa, 1990. SENOS, Nuno, O Paço da Ribeira, Editorial Notícias, Lisboa, 2002. SERRÃO, José Vicente, "O Quadro Humano", Mattoso, José (dir), António Manuel Hespanha (coord), História de Portugal, Circulo Leitores, Lisboa, 19 vol. IV.
Translated by: John Silva