Sebastião the Desired: the king born in Lisbon on 20 January 1554

On 20 January 1554, in Lisbon, Joana of Austria, a daughter of the Emperor Charles V, gave birth to a son. It was the feast of Saint Sebastian, the martyr whose name the boy would carry. Nobody had yet told her that she was a widow.2 sources2 sources

Her husband, Prince João, heir to the throne, had died on 2 January, 18 days earlier, aged 16. He had been married to his cousin at 14, in 1552, and had always been frail. Marcio Honorio de Godoy, who has written on the king's legend, says he died of a severe attack of diabetes.3 sources3 sources

The baby was the only living descendant of João III. The king and Queen Catarina had outlived every one of their own children: nine, by Godoy's count, ten in the guide published by the Jerónimos monastery. Marriage after marriage had bound the family to the Habsburgs who ruled Castile, and the court feared that Portugal would end up ruled from there. So the boy was the Desired, o Desejado, even before he was born.3 sources3 sources

A few months later Joana went back to Castile, and she never saw her son again. He was 24 when he rode into a battle in Morocco from which he did not return, and the hope that he would come back lasted for centuries.3 sources3 sources

João III died in 1557, and the crown passed to his grandson, aged three. His widow, Catarina of Austria, a sister of Charles V, governed as regent. In 1562 she handed the regency to Cardinal Henrique, a son of King Manuel I and the boy's great-uncle, who held it until Sebastião took power at 14, in 1568.4 sources4 sources

His teachers were chosen when he was five. The Jesuit Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, just back from Rome, taught him history, philosophy and grammar, and Amador Rebelo taught him to write. Rebelo, who also chronicled the reign, later set down what the boy had been taught.2 sources2 sources

How far his teachers made him is still argued over. Godoy describes an education aimed at a war against the Moors and the spread of the faith. Filipe Duret Athaide, writing on the king's legend, notes a long debate about his upbringing and the urge that took him to Africa twice. The Jerónimos monastery's guide sums it up as a rigorous training in religion and the art of war.3 sources3 sources

The young king's reign produced a stream of military law. Companies of 300 men were first raised in Porto on 6 March 1568, and the Regimento dos Capitães-Mores of 1570 extended the system to the whole kingdom, in companies of 250 with regular drill. In 1573 Sebastião inspected 122 companies in the Alentejo and the Algarve, more than 20,000 men.1 source1 source

In 1572 Luís de Camões published Os Lusíadas, his epic of the Portuguese voyages to India, with a long dedication to the 18-year-old king. It cast him as the hope of Christendom and urged him to outdo his ancestors.2 sources2 sources

Morocco was where he meant to fight. Portugal had held towns on its coast since the capture of Ceuta in 1415, but in 1550 it abandoned Arzila and Alcácer Ceguer, keeping only Ceuta, Tangier and Mazagão. In 1574 Sebastião crossed to North Africa with about 2,000 men so that, in his own words, his people could train in that war and produce experienced captains and soldiers.2 sources2 sources

Morocco was ruled by the Saadis, a dynasty of sharifs, men claiming descent from the Prophet. When Sultan Abdallah al-Ghalib died in 1574, his son Muhammad was proclaimed, against the old rule that the eldest man of the family came first. The sultan's brother Abd al-Malik, who had fought in the Ottoman army, came back with a small force lent by the governor of Algiers and entered Fez on 31 March 1576.2 sources2 sources

Muhammad, who took the title al-Mutawakkil, was chased out of Marrakesh and fled north to the Spanish outpost of Vélez de la Gomera. Philip II refused to help him, so he turned to Portugal. There, as the Moroccan historian Mohammed El Fasi puts it, a young king had dreamed since childhood of conquering Morocco and going on to free Christ's tomb in Jerusalem, and he took the exile's arrival as the argument his reluctant councillors could not refuse.2 sources2 sources

At the end of 1576 Sebastião spent a week with his uncle Philip at Guadalupe, in Castile. Spanish diplomacy had backed Abd al-Malik as the stronger candidate, and Philip agreed to help only on conditions he knew were hard to meet. In April 1578, on the eve of departure, he banned recruiting in Andalusia.2 sources2 sources

Abd al-Malik tried to talk the young king out of it. El Fasi quotes a letter whose Italian translation survives in French archives and was published by the historian Henry de Castries.1 source1 source

Raising the army was hard. Of 12,000 Portuguese militiamen planned, just over 9,000 were found. Mercenaries were hired in the Low Countries, where most of the weapons were bought too, and Spanish volunteers slipped across the border. Catarina, the grandmother who had brought him up, died in 1578, shortly before he sailed.2 sources2 sources

The fleet left Lisbon in late June 1578, and in July the army landed at Arzila, on Morocco's Atlantic coast, a town its governor had handed to the Portuguese in 1577. The declared target was Larache, a corsair base down the coast, and the plan was to attack it from the sea. At a council of war the king chose to march overland instead.4 sources4 sources

The column left Arzila on Tuesday 29 July and took six days over rough country to reach the plain between the rivers Makhazin and Loukkos, near the town of Ksar el-Kebir, which the Portuguese called Alcácer Quibir. Abd al-Malik had left Marrakesh on 20 April and made the town his headquarters. On 3 August the two armies faced each other for about two hours, but the Christian soldiers were judged too tired to fight. That night, according to Moroccan accounts, Abd al-Malik's men broke the bridge behind the invaders.2 sources2 sources

On the morning of 4 August the Christians marched out in one great block, with their baggage carts along the exposed flank. Gentlemen volunteers, the aventureiros, led in the centre, with the German mercenaries on their right and the Spanish on their left. El Fasi and Richard L. Smith, in an EBSCO reference article, put the Italians beside the Spanish. Luís Costa e Sousa, a military historian at Lisbon's NOVA University, puts them with the volunteers. Cavalry rode on the wings, and a few hundred of al-Mutawakkil's men came too.3 sources3 sources

The Moroccans spread out in a crescent, infantry and guns in the centre and horsemen on the horns, ready to close round the enemy. Costa e Sousa puts the centre at about 15,000 foot soldiers, with Abd al-Malik's best troops in its second line: 4,000 azuagos from the region of Bejaia, in Algeria, 2,500 elches, Christian-born converts to Islam, and 1,000 Turks.3 sources3 sources

There were 24 field guns, and horsemen Costa e Sousa estimates at 10,000 to 20,000. Christian veterans spoke of countless cavalry, but he thinks they overstated it, since loose masses of riders looked larger than tight European ranks.1 source1 source

Accounts of the opening differ. El Fasi says the mercenaries charged the Moroccan left; Costa e Sousa, following Christian eyewitnesses, has the volunteers and the king's heavy cavalry break the Moroccan right. Either way the Moroccan line gave ground, and Abd al-Malik, gravely ill and directing the battle from a litter, tried to rally his men.3 sources3 sources

El Fasi writes that the sultan got up, drew his sword and pushed forward, and that the effort killed him; Costa e Sousa reports a faint, or a shot by other accounts. His death was kept secret. In El Fasi's version he ordered it himself; in Costa e Sousa's, his commanders covered the body in the litter and said he had fainted.3 sources3 sources

Then the Moroccan cavalry closed in. As the Christian block broke, men fled to the river, found the bridge gone and drowned. Al-Mutawakkil drowned too, trying to swim to safety. His body was pulled out and taken to Ahmad, who was proclaimed sultan after the victory and took the name al-Mansur, the Victorious.2 sources2 sources

Sebastião kept fighting. When the last resistance gave way he rode with five companions towards the ford the army had crossed the day before and was surrounded by Moroccan horsemen. He resisted capture and took a fatal blow to the head. One companion, Nuno de Mascarenhas, saw it, and saw someone tear a strip from the king's shirt and tie it round his neck to mark the body.1 source1 source

That night four horsemen who had fled the battle reached the gates of Arzila and asked to be let in, saying they were escorting the king. Costa e Sousa thinks it was a ruse to get inside the walls before they were caught. It was also the first sighting of a legend.1 source1 source

In the Moroccan camp a royal page, Sebastião de Resende, heard Mascarenhas's account and offered to bring in the body. Late on 5 August it was shown by torchlight to the captive noblemen. A Castilian captain, Luís de Oxeda, described a great wound on the right side of the head, which seemed to have killed him, smaller wounds all over and an arquebus graze under one arm.1 source1 source

Surviving noblemen recognised the king, and later swore to it a second time in Lisbon, at the Carmo convent. The Jerónimos monastery says the body was first kept in the house of a local governor, Ibrahim Sufiani. Athaide and El Fasi say it was then taken to Fez and buried there while a ransom was discussed; El Fasi, drawing on Moroccan accounts, adds that al-Mansur, too proud to bargain, offered it to Philip II with no further delay.3 sources3 sources

In December 1578 the remains were dug up and taken to Ceuta, then still Portuguese, where they lay in the church of the Trinity until 1582.2 sources2 sources

News of a defeat reached Lisbon around 10 to 12 August, but the king's death was confirmed only on 24 August, and on 27 August it was proclaimed. A nobleman in black rode out from the city hall behind three men carrying black wooden shields. At the cathedral, in the Rua Nova and at the All Saints hospital, one of them cried out that the king was dead and smashed a shield on the stone steps.2 sources2 sources

Few of the invaders got home. Traditional accounts put the Christian prisoners at about 14,000, El Fasi writes, and the ransoms paid for the noblemen were so large that some historians trace al-Mansur's other name, al-Dhahabi, the Golden, to them.2 sources2 sources

The crown passed to Cardinal Henrique, aged 66, who died without an heir on 31 January 1580; Philip II's army beat the rival claimant, António, Prior of Crato, at Alcântara on 25 August 1580, and Philip became king of Portugal.3 sources3 sources

In August 1582 Philip ordered the remains brought from Ceuta to the church of the Jerónimos monastery at Belém, where Manuel I and João III were buried. For believers, the burial settled nothing.2 sources2 sources

Within seven years of the battle two men in Portugal had claimed to be the king. The historian Jean-Frédéric Schaub, quoted by Athaide, points out that they came before Sebastianism was a settled set of beliefs. It was João de Castro, an exiled supporter of António, Prior of Crato, who later gave it a doctrine and a network of followers across Europe.1 source1 source

Of the two Portuguese pretenders, the Ericeira king went further. According to the historian José Henrique Dias, Mateus Álvares lived as a hermit near the coast and was said to whip himself at night. Once acclaimed, he handed out titles and his band raided the farms of men loyal to the Spanish government, until a force sent from Lisbon broke it up. Before he was hanged he told his judges that he had meant to take Lisbon on the night of the Saint John festivities.1 source1 source

The Venice king had the widest echo abroad. He appeared in 1598 and many exiles accepted him, although his Portuguese was halting and he looked nothing like Sebastião. At Spain's request Venice held him from November 1598 to December 1600. Arrested again in Tuscany, he was handed to the Spanish viceroy of Naples, identified in 1601 as Marco Tullio Catizone and hanged in Spain in 1603.2 sources2 sources

The case reached England too. Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I's secretary of state, drafted a letter asking Venice whether the rumours were true; the historian Luís Filipe Silvério Lima argues that it was written in early 1601, not in 1605 as the archive's endorsement says.2 sources2 sources

The believers also had a prophet. Gonçalo Anes Bandarra, a shoemaker in Trancoso, in the Beira, wrote rhyming verses, the Trovas, in the early sixteenth century, foretelling a Portuguese king who would lead all peoples to one faith and the return of a hidden one, the Encoberto. The Inquisition tried him in 1541 and banned the verses, but copies went on circulating. João de Castro was the first to print them, with his own commentary, in Paris in 1602 or 1603 (sources give both years).3 sources3 sources

In the next century the Jesuit preacher António Vieira read the same verses differently. In Esperanças de Portugal (Hopes of Portugal), a letter written around 1659 to the queen's confessor and meant to console the widowed queen, he argued from Bandarra's verses that her husband, João IV, who had died in 1656, would rise from the dead to lead a Fifth Empire, spiritual under the Pope and temporal under Portugal.2 sources2 sources

Vieira first appeared before the Inquisition on 21 July 1663, and on 1 October 1665 its tribunal in Coimbra jailed him. On 23 December 1667 he was sentenced, stripped forever of the right to preach and confined to a Jesuit house. The penalties were lifted in June 1668.2 sources2 sources

Popular belief held that Sebastião would come back on a foggy morning to save Portugal. In 1934 Fernando Pessoa published Mensagem (Message), a sequence of poems on Portuguese history and myth, and in its first part gave the lost king his own voice.2 sources2 sources

In Morocco the battle is remembered as a great national victory. Moroccan historians name it after the river, Wadi al-Makhazin, and El Fasi, writing for UNESCO, ranks it among the most important battles in the history of Morocco and of Islam. The ransoms enriched the Saadi state, and al-Mansur later sent an army south against the Songhay empire and took Timbuktu.3 sources3 sources

The story travelled. George Peele's play The Battle of Alcazar, printed in London in 1594, put it on the Elizabethan stage, and in 1990 the Moroccan director Souheil Ben-Barka made a film of it, The Battle of the Three Kings.2 sources2 sources

In Portugal the defeat cost the country its king, thousands of men and, within two years, its own crown. Costa e Sousa argues that the king's military reforms, beaten on the field, still marked the end of medieval warfare in Portugal. The idea of a hidden king who would one day restore the country outlived the union with Spain and found its way into Pessoa's poetry.4 sources4 sources