Ten minutes that shook Europe

Wrath of God: the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, by Edward Paice

Portugal in the 18th century was at once a mystery and deeply familiar to the British. Deeply familiar, as one of Britain’s most enriching trading partners, providing Brazilian gold in exchange for British textiles and other manufactured goods. A mystery, because Portugal appeared to be hundreds of years behind the rest of Europe. The Jesuit control of the country forbade ‘any conclusion whatsoever opposing the system of Aristotle’; superstition was rampant (the Spanish derided their neighbours as pocos y locos — few and mad) as the Inquisition searched out not only heretics but bigamists, witches, Jews, sodomites and other undesirables, while the patriarchs of the church frequented (or owned) brothels, collected pornography or merely visited their nun-mistresses.

Yet into this quasi-medieval world, on All Saints’ Day 1755, came crashing an event that was in retrospect to be seen as one of the precipitating events of the Enlightenment, the herald of modernity. The earthquake that struck that morning is still the most powerful ever known in western Europe. It lasted perhaps ten minutes, has retrospectively been measured at nine on the Richter scale, and unleashed the same day a tidal wave that wiped out much of the harbour area of town, and set off tremors that were felt in Hamburg, in Cork and even on Loch Lomond, where the water suddenly lurched upwards. Its effects covered an area of six million square miles — twice the size of Australia.

In Lisbon itself it took more than half a decade just to clear the rubble, piled two stories high, from some of the streets. The royal family lived first in a tent, and for another year in a make-shift structure in the park of one of the palaces.