The Marriages of the Royal Family and the Portuguese External Policy (1146-1913)
1.12.2009
Project status
ongoing
Execution period
2009-
Main research unit
Centre for History of the University of Lisbon
Principal Investigator
Ana Leal de Faria (ULisboa)
Research team
Ana Leal de Faria (ULisboa), Adriana Romba de Almeida (ULisboa), Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues (ULisboa), Ana Paula Antunes (Museu de Lisboa), Andreia da Silva Almeida (ULisboa), António Martins Costa (U. Coimbra), David Nogales Rincón (U. Complutense), Hélder Carvalhal (U. Évora), Isabel Cluny (NOVA-FCSH), Isabel de Pina Baleiras (ULisboa), Isabel Drumond Braga (U. Évora), Julia Korobchenko (ULisboa), Leonardo Carvalho-Gonçalves (Université Paris 1-Sorbonne), Manuela Santos Silva (ULisboa), Nuno de Castro Luís (ULisboa), Patrycja Milczanovska (U. of Krakow), Paula Rodrigues (ULisboa)
The aim of this project is to identify, list, collect, make available to the public, and study the documents concerning the matrimonial arrangements of the Portuguese Royal Family. It includes material ranging from the marriage of King Afonso Henriques to Mahaut of Maurienne (1146) to the marriage of King Manuel II to Augusta Victoria of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1913), whether these marriages did eventually succeed or did not surpass the phase of negotiations. In doing so, we intend to throw a new light on the external policy of the Portuguese monarchy.
Marriages have always been an essential element on royal houses’ strategy for maintaining power. Indeed, they needed to restrain the risk of biological extinction and to secure dynastic continuity, thus favouring the marriage of their offspring in detriment of the religious careers that were pursued by noble families to place their numerous prole that they could not endow appropriately. Yet marriages amid royal families also had the purpose of establishing new alliances or strengthening old ones, promoting peace or obtaining support for starting or pursuing war. Envisaged as any other contract, princely marriages were nevertheless much more important because of their political repercussions, either internally or externally, thus requiring serious considerations and careful negotiations.
In this sense, we consider the study of the matrimonial policy of the Portuguese Royal Family a privileged way of approaching Portuguese external policy during the time of the Monarchy. Whether the projected marriages were carried through or not, they allow us to observe periods of greater opening of the realm towards the outside, or on the contrary, periods of its closing onto itself. The former were characterised by the reinforcement of the links with neighbouring royal families and the establishment of new relationships with more distant realms that would create new areas of activity and business. The latter reveal the difficulties felt by the Portuguese monarchy in affirming itself, not only in facing its European counterparts, but also at an internal level, as it succumbed to the pressure of a noble faction, privileging it to the detriment of all the others, an attitude that will always cause great disruption in the future. In both cases, we think it is important to study and bring to light what caused the progress or the retreat of the assertion of Portugal beyond its frontiers.
