A vow in stone: the first stone of Mafra is laid, 17 November 1717

Two days before the ceremony, the wind knocked the church down. It was only a temporary church of wood, put up over the spot where the real one would stand on a low rise just east of the town of Mafra, but it had been dressed for a king. João V ordered another built and decorated in the time that was left, and it was ready.1 source1 source

On the morning of 16 November 1717 Filipe de Sousa, precentor of the patriarchal see, blessed a cross sixteen palms high, and four priests raised it where the high altar stands today. The next day, 17 November, the friars fetched the patriarch from the tent where he had put on his vestments, and a procession made its way to the site on foot: the parish cross of Mafra with all the clergy from a league around, the clergy of the patriarchate, the canons in their mitres, the patriarch, the town council and, last of all, the king and his noblemen.2 sources2 sources

Inside the wooden church, Tomás de Almeida, the first patriarch of Lisbon, blessed the foundation stone, a block of white Carrara marble with a Latin inscription. He blessed twelve medals of gold, silver and base metal, struck with the king and queen, the pope, the patriarch, and the church and convent that were to rise. They went into the foundations in gold boxes, with a small gold chest holding the king's deed. In it, João bound himself to build the church to St Anthony “in satisfaction of the vow he had made to him”.2 sources2 sources

Counted the Roman way, the date at the end of the inscription as Prado printed it works out as 18 November, a day after the ceremony that Prado himself dates to the 17th.1 source1 source

After Mass, sung by the musicians of the patriarchal chapel, thirteen baskets of stones and carts of lime were waiting. The king picked up his basket, which was gilded, and his courtiers took theirs, which were silvered, and they carried the stones to the foundations. The Franciscan who described the scene in 1751 wrote that everyone present wept. The historian António Filipe Pimentel calls the pomp of the day unequalled and puts its cost at 200,000 cruzados.2 sources2 sources

João V became king at 17, when his father Pedro II died in December 1706. It was the first peaceful succession in more than sixty years of the young Bragança dynasty. In 1708 he married Maria Ana, an archduchess of Austria, but by early 1711 the couple had no child.1 source1 source

That mattered. Portugal was fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession, a European war over who should inherit the Spanish throne. A crisis had surrounded his own father's rise to power, and João's brother Francisco made little secret of his ambitions. A king without children risked a repeat.1 source1 source

The best-known account of what happened next comes from Frei João de São José do Prado, a Franciscan of the Arrábida province and the basilica's first master of ceremonies, who described the building and its consecration in a book of 1751, Monumento Sacro. In his telling, Nuno da Cunha, then the king's chief chaplain and later a cardinal, asked a friar known for his holiness, Frei António de São José, to pray that the king might have children. The friar answered twice, “He will have them, if he wishes.” Pressed to explain, he said the king would have children if he made a vow to God to found a convent of St Anthony at Mafra.1 source1 source

According to Prado, the king and queen made the vow, Frei António died on 9 March 1711 as news spread that the queen was pregnant, and on 4 December 1711 she gave birth to a daughter, Maria Bárbara, who later became queen of Spain. Five sons followed in the next years, which gave the Bragança throne a secure line.2 sources2 sources

The licence of 1711 was modest. It allowed a convent at Mafra for the Arrábida friars, an austere branch of the Franciscans, staffed by “thirteen religious only”. The king sent a trusted official, António Rebelo da Fonseca, to choose a site, then went to see it himself. The land on the hill called Alto da Vela was valued on 21 January 1713, and a treasurer, a clerk and a superintendent for the works were appointed on 19 July 1714. Every document still described a house for thirteen friars.2 sources2 sources

Digging began only in 1716, with 600 workmen, and the foundations were already so large that people said all the money in Spain would not finish them. The ceremony had first been set for 17 October 1717 and was put back a month. By then, Pimentel argues, the plan was probably for some eighty friars, and the church that rose from the foundations was far grander than a friary needed. The War of the Spanish Succession had ended in 1714, and remittances of gold from Brazil were starting to restore the king's finances.1 source1 source

The plans were by João Frederico Ludovice, born Johann Friedrich Ludwig in 1673 at Honhardt, in south-western Germany. He had trained as a goldsmith and had lived at the Lisbon court for years. In 1730 the Duke of Cadaval described him as “German by nation, a silversmith by trade” and, through his curiosity, a notable architect (our translation). Since 1707 he had coordinated the king's works in the royal chapel and the royal palace on the Lisbon waterfront. On 26 April 1718 the Milanese master mason Carlos Baptista Garvo signed a contract to build the convent and church following “the plan of the architect João Frederico Ludovice”.2 sources2 sources

Around 1721–22 the king changed his mind again, and this time radically. The friary would house 300 friars, and it would be wrapped inside a royal palace, with matching wings for the king and the queen on either side of the church and a great library at the back. The church was nearly finished and had to stay, but the convent was moved, foundations already dug were abandoned, and a hill south of the church had to be levelled.1 source1 source

Pimentel links the change to the collapse of João V's real dream: a vast royal palace and patriarchal cathedral on a hill above the Tagus in Lisbon, for which he had brought the celebrated architect Filippo Juvarra from Rome in 1719. When the Lisbon project failed, Mafra got its ambitions. A chronicler wrote that the king also meant to make the convent a university of all the sciences, and classes in grammar, logic, physics, mathematics, theology and music began soon after the friars moved in.1 source1 source

For most of the 1720s the work went slowly. The Swiss naturalist David-François de Merveilleux, who lived in Portugal from 1723 to 1726, saw the church built up as far as the nave and claimed to have seen 12,000 workmen there, busy, Pimentel thinks, levelling the hill. Soldiers helped, and the rubble filled a valley in front of the building to make the great square that lies before it today. The foundations of the new convent were only opened in September 1728.1 source1 source

Then the king fixed a date. In 1730, 22 October, his 41st birthday, fell on a Sunday, the day the Roman rite set for consecrating churches, and he wanted the basilica consecrated and the friars installed by then. From June 1729 workers were rounded up across the whole kingdom. Between June and October 1730, by Pimentel's account, 45,000 people worked at Mafra, joined by 7,000 cavalry and infantry, all lodged in a temporary town around the site nicknamed the ilha da madeira, the island of wood.1 source1 source

Estimates differ with the source and with what is counted. Pimentel's 45,000 workers plus 7,000 soldiers comes to 52,000 people; Doderer gives “more than 50,000” gathered in and around Mafra in 1729–30. Both describe the peak. In most years the site was far smaller, and after the consecration it shrank to about 10,000 workers and 6,000 soldiers in 1731.2 sources2 sources

The rush showed. The towers were finished on 1 September 1730, thanks to hoisting machines invented by the Portuguese architect Custódio Vieira, and the first bells were hung on St Michael's day, 29 September. During the consecration the towers were still wrapped in lifting gear, the dome stopped at its drum and was closed with timber covered in lead, and the niches for statues stood empty. On the south side workers were still blasting rock.2 sources2 sources

Two cardinals, Nuno da Cunha and João da Mota e Silva, reached Mafra on 18 October with their retinues, and bishops came to consecrate the altars. On 22 October 1730 the basilica was consecrated to Our Lady and St Anthony, and an octave of ceremonies followed. Some 210 friars moved into the convent, in rough conditions.3 sources3 sources

The building itself was not even half done, Pimentel writes. In 1733 the king had the rest contracted out in two lots, one for the building and one for the dome, with three years to finish. The outside of the convent and the dome were done in 1735, and by 1744, with many details still missing, the Real Edifício, the Royal Building, was complete. That year 342 friars lived at its heart. Doderer notes that the works were officially declared finished in 1750, the year João V died.2 sources2 sources

Portugal's own guide to the palace says its magnificence was made possible only by the flow of gold from Brazil, then Portugal's colony. The scale of that flow is now well measured. Using the records of a 1 per cent tax charged on gold landed in Lisbon from 1720, the economic historians Leonor Freire Costa, Maria Manuela Rocha and Rita Martins de Sousa counted 557 tonnes arriving between 1720 and 1807, about a third of all the gold mined in colonial Latin America.2 sources2 sources

Most of that gold went to private individuals; only 22 per cent was shipped to the state. The bills for Mafra, Pimentel notes, were paid through the House of Bragança, the royal family's own estate, which gave the king a free hand. His biggest orders, placed between 1728 and 1735 mostly with Italian artists, included 58 marble statues for the façade, paintings and church plate; vestments came from France and Flanders.3 sources3 sources

The most famous purchase hangs in the towers. Two carillons, sets of tuned bells played from a keyboard, came from the Low Countries, made by two bell-founders, Willem Witlockx of Antwerp and Nicolas Levache of Liège, and were already mounted on temporary scaffolds for the consecration in 1730. Counts of the bells vary. Prado counted 114 in 1751 and another eighteenth-century account 122; the culture ministry's guide gives 92 in the two carillons; reports on the 2020 restoration counted 119 bells for the hours, the liturgy and the carillons.4 sources4 sources

The carillons fell silent in 2001. Their wooden frames had rotted, and from 2004 the bells were held up by scaffolding. Europa Nostra, the European heritage federation, put them on its list of the seven most endangered sites in Europe. A €1.5 million restoration began in the summer of 2018. The carillons were due to be heard again from 1 February 2020, though only the south tower's was to be kept playing.1 source1 source

The basilica also has six organs, an unusual number for one church. The instruments heard today come from a remodelling carried out between 1792 and 1807 under the royal organ-builder António Xavier Machado e Cerveira, with Joaquim António Peres Fontanes, and were restored between 1998 and 2010.2 sources2 sources

At the far end of the building, balancing the basilica, is the library. Pimentel describes it as the largest and noblest room in the whole building, a long hall laid out as a cross under a hemispherical dome, where the royal apartments meet again at the back. UNESCO puts its collection at 36,000 volumes; the culture ministry's guide says about 38,000.3 sources3 sources

Mafra was never the royal family's usual home. Kings came for religious feasts and to hunt in the Tapada, the royal hunting park behind it. In 1771 the Marquis of Pombal, the all-powerful minister of the next reign, moved the Franciscans out and gave the convent to the Augustinian canons; the Franciscans returned in 1791 in smaller numbers.2 sources2 sources

The prince regent, the future João VI, lived at Mafra with the court in 1806–07 and had many rooms redecorated. When the court sailed for Brazil ahead of the French invasion of 1807, it took most of the palace's valuables with it. General Junot's troops entered Mafra on 8 December 1807, when only twenty elderly friars remained. The last Franciscans fled in 1833, during the civil war between liberals and absolutists.1 source1 source

For many Portuguese readers, Mafra means a novel. In Memorial do Convento (1982), published in English as Baltasar and Blimunda, José Saramago set a love story among the builders of João V's convent: Baltasar Sete-Sóis, a soldier who lost his left hand in the war, Blimunda, who can see inside people's bodies, and a priest, Bartolomeu, building a flying machine powered by human will. The Swedish Academy called it his breakthrough when it gave him the Nobel Prize in 1998, and the Italian composer Corghi based an opera, Blimunda, on it.2 sources2 sources

The novel gives as much space to the workers as to the king, and Saramago returned to them in his Nobel lecture in Stockholm.1 source1 source

In the same lecture he put the building down to the vanity and megalomania of a king. That is a novelist's verdict, not a historian's. The story of Saramago's prize is told in a separate article.1 source1 source

On the morning of 7 July 2019, meeting in Baku, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee inscribed the Royal Building of Mafra, with its palace, basilica, convent, Cerco garden and Tapada hunting park, on the World Heritage List. The Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte in Braga was inscribed in the same session. UNESCO described Mafra as a building conceived by João V in 1711 as a tangible representation of his idea of the monarchy and the state, and as an exceptional example of Italian Baroque.1 source1 source

The church whose first stone was laid in 1717 is still the centre of everything. When the plan grew, it was kept, and the palace was arranged around it: the king's wing to the north, the queen's to the south, their two tribunes looking down on the high altar, and a balcony over the entrance from which blessings could be given to the square, as in Rome. Pimentel reads the whole building as the absolute monarchy drawn in stone, with the church, the convent and the library held inside the king's house.1 source1 source