The Battle Where Three Kings Died and Spain Inherited Portugal

Sebastian I of Portugal was born in Lisbon on 20 January 1554, eighteen days after his father had died of unidentified disease. His mother was the Spanish princess Joanna of Austria; she returned to Spain when Sebastian was three months old and never saw him again. He inherited the throne of the House of Aviz at age three, under the regency successively of his paternal grandmother Catherine of Austria and his great-uncle Cardinal Henry. He was, throughout his life, the only direct male heir of his dynasty. The political stability of Portugal — which had been the dominant western European maritime power for most of the previous century — depended on his personal survival and on his producing a son.

Neither happened. By his early twenties Sebastian had developed an intense personal commitment to a Catholic crusading project against North Africa, modeled on the late-medieval crusading tradition of the Knights Hospitaller and the recent Spanish reconquista of Granada. He had no interest in dynastic marriage; his contemporary biographers strongly suggest he was homosexual. He had limited interest in the routine administrative work of monarchy; his daily schedule was substantially organized around military exercise, religious devotion, and the planning of his African expedition.

His advisors — including his great-uncle Cardinal Henry and his great-uncle’s diplomatic correspondent Philip II of Spain — counselled against the African expedition with substantial vigour. Sebastian was the only male Aviz heir; his survival was a state-political question. Sebastian ignored the advice. By 1577 he had spent approximately half of the Portuguese annual revenue on the assembly of a 17,000-man expeditionary force and was personally negotiating with a deposed Moroccan claimant for support.

The Moroccan claim

The political opportunity Sebastian thought he was exploiting was the Saadi succession dispute of 1576–1578. The Saadi sultanate had ruled Morocco since approximately 1554; the recently deposed sultan Abu Abdallah Mohammed II (called Mohammed al-Mutawakkil by his supporters and Mohammed the Black by his enemies) had been driven out of Marrakesh in 1576 by his uncle Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik I, who was substantially backed by the Ottoman sultan Murad III. Mohammed al-Mutawakkil traveled to Lisbon in spring 1577 and offered Sebastian the Portuguese-recognized status of Moroccan sultan in exchange for military assistance.

Sebastian’s strategic calculation was that a successful Portuguese intervention would simultaneously satisfy his crusading ambition, install a client sultan at Marrakesh, secure Portuguese commercial position along the Moroccan Atlantic coast against Spanish encroachment, and provide the personal military glory he had been pursuing since his early teens.

The strategic calculation was poor in almost every dimension. The Saadi sultanate of 1578 was substantially more militarily capable than 16th-century Portuguese intelligence had appreciated. Abd al-Malik had at his disposal approximately 50,000 troops — twice Sebastian’s force — including a substantial corps of Andalusian Morisco infantry (refugees from the Spanish 1492 expulsions and their descendants), well-trained Saadi cavalry, and a substantial Ottoman-trained artillery train. The terrain of the Moroccan interior was unsuited to the European pike-and-arquebus tactics Sebastian’s army was equipped for. The Portuguese supply lines from the coast were difficult and vulnerable.

Cardinal Henry, Philip II, and most of the Portuguese senior nobility tried to talk Sebastian out of the expedition. Sebastian sailed from Lisbon on 17 June 1578 anyway.

The march

The expeditionary force landed at the Portuguese-held port of Arzila on the northern Moroccan Atlantic coast in mid-July and began marching inland on 29 July. The supplies were inadequate; the heat in late July was severe; the troops included approximately 4,000 mercenaries (German Landsknechte, Italian Catholic volunteers, Castilian gentleman-adventurers) of varying military quality. Mohammed al-Mutawakkil’s promised Moroccan supporting forces did not materialize at expected strength. The total force facing the entrenched Saadi army was approximately 17,000, of which fewer than 5,000 were experienced Portuguese regular infantry.

Sebastian’s senior commanders — most notably the experienced soldier Aldana — advised the king on the evening of 3 August to halt the advance and retreat to the coast. Sebastian refused. He had spent the previous decade waiting for this engagement. He would not give it up the night before the battle.

The battle

The Battle of Alcácer Quibir — known in Arabic as Wadi al-Makhazin (the Battle of the River of Death) — was fought on the morning of 4 August 1578 on a small floodplain between two tributaries of the Oued Loukos. The Portuguese army arrived in good order and formed up in three squares with substantial artillery and cavalry support. The Saadi army outnumbered them substantially and surrounded them from three sides over the first hour of fighting.

The combat lasted approximately four hours. The Portuguese center held longer than expected; the Portuguese flanking cavalry was destroyed early in the engagement; and a substantial portion of the Saadi center was redeployed against the flanks during the middle phase of the battle. By approximately midday the Portuguese center was being subjected to converging artillery fire and was substantially out of effective musket ammunition. The Portuguese lines progressively collapsed over the next ninety minutes. The slaughter that followed killed approximately 8,000 Portuguese troops including most of the senior Portuguese nobility. Approximately 15,000 of the survivors were captured and progressively ransomed back to Portugal over the following decade at enormous personal cost.

Three kings died in the four-hour battle. Sebastian I of Portugal was killed in the final collapse of the Portuguese center; his body was never reliably identified after the battle and one of the persistent Portuguese cultural myths — Sebastianismo — held for centuries that he had survived and would eventually return. The reigning Saadi sultan Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik I died during the engagement of pre-existing illness (probably typhus, possibly poison) at approximately the moment of his army’s tactical victory; his death was concealed by his attendants and his orders were issued from a covered litter for the remainder of the day. The pretender Abu Abdallah Mohammed II drowned in the Oued Loukos while attempting to flee.

The Saadi succession passed to Abd al-Malik’s brother Ahmad al-Mansur, who would rule Morocco for the next twenty-five years, conquer the Songhai Empire of West Africa, and substantially restore Moroccan political-economic independence vis-à-vis both the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.

The Portuguese collapse

The political-fiscal consequences of Alcácer Quibir destroyed the independent Portuguese state. Portugal had no male Aviz heir. The crown passed first to Sebastian’s elderly great-uncle Cardinal Henry, who reigned for less than two years before dying in January 1580 at age 67. The half-dozen surviving claimants to the Portuguese throne included two Iberian queens and the substantially indirect candidacy of Philip II of Spain, whose claim ran through his mother (a Portuguese princess who had married Charles V).

Philip combined the substantial legitimacy of his maternal claim with the substantial military force of the Spanish state. The Portuguese senior nobility was divided. A short Spanish military campaign in summer 1580 — substantially preceded by the systematic Spanish bribery of the relevant Portuguese political figures — produced Philip’s recognition as King Philip I of Portugal in September 1580. The Iberian Union of the two crowns under a single Habsburg monarch would last sixty years, until the Portuguese Restoration War of 1640.

The Armada

The political-financial consequences of the Iberian Union were substantial. Philip II’s accession to the Portuguese throne added the Portuguese global empire — Brazil, the Indian Ocean factories, the African coastal stations, the spice-trade routes — to the substantially larger Spanish Atlantic and American empire. The combined Iberian global commercial system of the 1580s was the largest single colonial empire that had yet existed.

The new combined fiscal-military capacity of Iberian Philip enabled the political-military ambitions that would produce the catastrophic Spanish Armada of 1588 — Philip’s attempted invasion of Elizabethan England. The Armada drew substantially on Portuguese ships and Portuguese commanders; the Armada’s chief naval commander Antonio de Oquendo was Castilian but most of the Portuguese-built galleons of the fleet were inherited from the pre-1580 Portuguese navy. The Armada’s destruction by English action and Atlantic storms in September 1588 broke Spanish naval ambitions in the North Atlantic for a generation.

The complete chain of Iberian political failure — Sebastian’s adolescent fixation on a crusading expedition, his death at Alcácer Quibir, the absent heir, the Habsburg Iberian Union, the consequent enlargement of Spanish strategic ambition, the failed Armada — connects two specific Moroccan summer days in 1578 with the strategic ascendancy of the English maritime tradition that would characterize the next four centuries of North Atlantic political-commercial history. Sebastian was 24. He had ruled Portugal for nine years personally. He had been on Moroccan soil for sixteen days.