Empire of Brazil - Runaway Monarch - South American History - Extra History - Part 1

lisbon portugal november 30th 1807 nervous people gather in the driving rain heading towards the docks to see if the rumors are true they say napoleon's troops have just entered the city and that the unthinkable has happened along the way they pass posters hastily nailed up around the city the ink is starting to run but they can still make out the message the house of bregunza is fleeing no they don't believe it that is until they see aristocrats trying to swarm aboard ships while others call in vain for family members lost in the confusion and even someone part way through loading the royal library has abandoned half the books to the reign on the dock then the crowd sees a group of ships already disappearing on the horizon ships that carry the queen and prince regent indeed the whole court abandoning the heart of their empire to flee into exile attempting to re-establish its rule in its wildest and largest imperial territory brazil [Music] this episode of extra history is brought to you by all of our wonderful patrons over on patreon thanks so much for your support though john vi was destined to inherit an empire no one would call him a lucky man he began his life with clear indications he'd lost the genetic lottery famously less than good looking and often sick there were times during his youth that it was thought he wouldn't survive he was also unlucky in love hustled into a political marriage with princess carlota joaquin of spain their marriage would be eternally unhappy when by proxy when he was 17 and she only 10 he found he neither liked nor trusted her suspecting she was a political agent of spain she in turn hated the portuguese court which was so religious and austere that women were not allowed to have social lives and theatrical comedies were banned she considered her husband ugly buffoonish and jealous of her vivacious personality and also she was totally a political agent of spain john was never supposed to be king but when he was 18 his father died followed two years later by his progressive and intellectual older brother then two years after that his mother the queen had a mental breakdown falling into a deep depression and occasionally being unable to understand what was happening around her mental symptoms which may have been a result of her incestuous ancestry yeah sorry we sort of skipped over the incest thing see john's father was also his mother's uncle the house of bergunza was interesting so here's john in 1792 suddenly being offered the role as prince regent to rule in his mother's stead and he refused to accept because you see under the laws of portugal if he died during his regency and his children were too young his wife would become regent and by this time it was pretty clear that if carlota got her way she'd make portugal into a spanish puppet his best option was to act unofficially as regent relying on counselors for seven years until his kids got older which just encouraged rumors that he was secretly mentally unstable as well and unable to take the reins and this wasn't a great time for rumors of weakness because revolution was sweeping europe the american colonies had broken away and in 1793 france executed its king then portugal joined spain and britain in a political block to invade france but were defeated resulting in spain switching sides all of which left jon in a political box allying with spain and france would make political and military sense but portugal was now economically tied to britain so his answer was a careful policy of neutrality balancing france against britain but that quickly collapsed and then in 1799 he finally accepted the official regency but then another player appeared on the scene napoleon bonaparte and he had had it with portuguese neutrality when john didn't commit to an alliance with france napoleon backed a brief spanish invasion that lost portugal several border areas and part of brazil to french guyana but still jon refused to give up the alliance with britain and in fairness he didn't really have much of a choice join napoleon and he'd probably bankrupt his country as well as make the passage to his lucrative colony of brazil incredibly dangerous or join britain and france would invade and as if these years of see-sawing interests weren't enough he also discovered a plot to remove him centered around none other than his wife [Music] but in 1807 the dam finally broke france officially announced its intention to invade and it was clear that the portuguese military couldn't stop them now prince regent john had a few choices but none of them were good ones and rather than end up a puppet king or under house arrest he decided to dust off an old contingency plan that had been kicking around for decades he his family and the entire court would board ships and evacuate to brazil which they'd fashion into a new imperial capital it was a mess john and his family boarded so fast that everyone but carlota and two daughters went on a single boat a dangerous prospect since if the ship was lost it would wipe out the royal family also hectic preparations meant ships went out overloaded with passengers but short on food and water families got separated and some aristocrats had to abandon their luggage to make it in time boarding with nothing but the clothes on their backs this chaos on the talk led to problems at sea the overcrowding was so bad food had to be strictly rationed and some of the most powerful people in europe had to sleep on the open decks an outbreak of lice forced many women to shave their heads and for two torturous weeks they were becomed in the middle of the atlantic meanwhile the inhabitants of brazil gathered to receive the royal couple with an air of understandable excitement this was the first time ever that the european royals visited one of their colonies oh and you know they've just seen all the portraits of prince regent john his princess and the queen they were pumped thus it was a little awkward when they met the couple and found out that not only had the portraits somewhat generously portrayed them as more attractive than they were with fewer facial warts but they were also very much worse for wear after the voyage the bragunzas by contrast saw worlds they could scarcely imagine rio de janeiro was nearly two and a half centuries old at that point yet it still felt like a frontier port streets were unpaved and muddy and it was small unable to house the thousands of courtiers that came in on the flotilla no matter the royal family moved into the governor's mansion using the attached jail as a servant's quarters and if any government official or court figure or you know just a royal friend or relation needed housing they just seized it on royal authority and booted out the current occupant which as you can imagine made them super popular in fact some homeowners avoided this fate by knocking down a few walls laying timber around and claiming their house was under renovation renovations that somehow just never seemed to stop but as the citizens of rio pretended to renovate their houses jon went about renovating rio first he declared it the new seat of the empire removing all of the restrictions it had suffered under as a colony previously only able to trade with portugal brazil could now send its sugar coffee and gold to other markets particularly the united kingdom which became its most lucrative partner john also established a working government and elevated the prestige of local churches but most importantly he established new cultural artistic and scientific institutions such as theaters a royal botanical garden and several universities focused on mathematics and natural science and that last one was big since those subjects were not allowed to be taught at a university level in the colonies he was essentially changing brazil from a backwater colony set up for nothing but extracting wealth to a territory that could stand on its own as a nation but there was something else that was different about brazil it wasn't just the muddy streets or rough buildings that struck them as they got off the ship it was the large number of enslaved africans brazil was the largest slave society in the americas the recipient of 40 of all people kidnapped enslaved and transported from africa in its history brazil imported four times the number of slaves as the united states or haiti did and nearly every aspect of their economy from sugar and coffee production to gold mining to how the rich got around cities carried on palaquins involved slave labor and that would increasingly cause friction with portugal's greatest ally the united kingdom which banned the slave trade the same year john arrived in brazil so there in a backwater colony with an economy based off perpetuating crimes against humanity john built his new court but what he didn't know was that he was also founding an empire you know one of the main reasons we're able to make episodes of 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Channel: Extra History

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Keywords: animated, extra history, history lesson, learn history, study history, world history, Empire of Brazil, extra credits Empire of Brazil, history of the world, history channel, Empire of Brazil part 1, history of Brazil, Brazilian History, military history, documentry, Literary Analysis, Portugal, Portuguese, Rio, military history lectures, history documentary, history explained, educational videos, house of braganza, napoleon, john vi, Portuguese history, spanish history, slaves

Id: DzUNfnVnIkw

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022