Historedia
Episode 1 of 2

Aftermath of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake

When
1755
Where
Lisbon
Part of
Portuguese Ban on Slave Trade

The 1755 earthquake destroyed Lisbon's slave-trade fiscal records and enabled Pombal's rise to de facto rule before the 1761 ban.

The 1755 earthquake and tsunami, one of the kingdom's worst recorded natural disasters, struck Lisbon and damaged the records of the Casa de Guiné and the Casa dos Escravos, the royal institutions responsible for the sale of black enslaved people, destroying their fiscal records of numbers and sales. In the aftermath, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal, emerged as the country's de facto ruler, the position from which he later decreed the 1761 ban.

Sources

  1. Portugal Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-26
  2. Slavery in Portugal Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-22

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.