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1755 Lisbon earthquake

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: General history

   This 1755 copper engraving shows the ruins of Lisbon in flames and a
   tsunami overwhelming the ships in the harbor.
   Enlarge
   This 1755 copper engraving shows the ruins of Lisbon in flames and a
   tsunami overwhelming the ships in the harbour.

   The 1755 Lisbon earthquake took place on November 1, 1755, at 9:40 in
   the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly earthquakes
   in history, killing between 60,000 and 100,000 people. The quake was
   followed by a tsunami and fire, resulting in the near-total destruction
   of Lisbon. The earthquake accentuated political tensions in Portugal
   and profoundly disrupted the country's eighteenth-century colonial
   ambitions.

   The event was widely discussed by European Enlightenment philosophers,
   and inspired major developments in theodicy and in the philosophy of
   the sublime. As the first earthquake studied scientifically for its
   effects over a large area, it signaled the birth of modern seismology.
   Geologists today estimate the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9
   on the Richter scale, with an epicenter in the Atlantic Ocean about
   200  km (120  mi) west-southwest of Cape St. Vincent.

The earthquake

   The ruins of the Carmo Convent, which was destroyed in the Lisbon
   earthquake.
   Enlarge
   The ruins of the Carmo Convent, which was destroyed in the Lisbon
   earthquake.

   The earthquake struck on the morning of 1 November, the Catholic
   holiday of All Saints' Day. Contemporary reports state that the
   earthquake lasted between three-and-a-half and six minutes, causing
   gigantic fissures five  metres (16 ft) wide to appear in the city
   centre. The survivors rushed to the open space of the docks for safety
   and watched as the water receded, revealing a sea floor littered by
   lost cargo and old shipwrecks. Several tens of minutes after the
   earthquake, an enormous tsunami engulfed the harbour and downtown,
   rushing up the Tagus river. It was followed by two more waves. In the
   areas unaffected by the tsunami, fire quickly broke out, and flames
   raged for five days.

   Lisbon was not the only Portuguese city affected by the catastrophe.
   Throughout the south of the country, in particular the Algarve,
   destruction was general. The shockwaves of the earthquake were felt
   throughout Europe as far as Finland and North Africa. Tsunamis up to
   20 metres (66 ft) in height swept the coast of North Africa, and struck
   Martinique and Barbados across the Atlantic. A three-metre (ten-foot)
   tsunami hit the southern English coast. Galway, on the west coast of
   Ireland, was also hit, resulting in the partial destruction of the "
   Spanish Arch".
   Estimated epicentre of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.
   Enlarge
   Estimated epicentre of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

   Of a Lisbon population of 275,000, up to 90,000 were killed. Another
   10,000 were killed in Morocco. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's
   buildings were destroyed, including famous palaces and libraries, as
   well as most examples of Portugal's distinctive 16th-century Manueline
   architecture. Several buildings that had suffered little earthquake
   damage were destroyed by the subsequent fire. The brand new Opera
   House, opened only six months before (under the ill-fated name Phoenix
   Opera), was burned to the ground. The Royal Ribeira Palace, which stood
   just beside the Tagus river in the modern square of Terreiro do Paço,
   was destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami. Inside, the 70,000-volume
   royal library as well as hundreds of works of art, including paintings
   by Titian, Rubens, and Correggio, were lost. The precious royal
   archives disappeared together with detailed historical records of
   explorations by Vasco da Gama and other early navigators. The
   earthquake also damaged major churches in Lisbon, namely the Lisbon
   Cathedral, the Basilicas of São Paulo, Santa Catarina, São Vicente de
   Fora, and the Misericordia Church. The Royal Hospital of All Saints
   (the biggest public hospital at the time) in the Rossio square was
   consumed by fire and hundreds of patients burned to death. The tomb of
   national hero Nuno Álvares Pereira was also lost. Visitors to Lisbon
   may still walk the ruins of the Carmo Convent, which were preserved to
   remind Lisboners of the destruction.

   It is said that many animals sensed danger and fled to higher ground
   before the water arrived. The Lisbon quake is the first documented
   reporting of such a phenomenon in Europe.

The day after

   The Ruins of Lisbon. Survivors lived in tents on the outskirts of the
   city after the earthquake, as shown in this fanciful 1755 German
   engraving.
   Enlarge
   The Ruins of Lisbon. Survivors lived in tents on the outskirts of the
   city after the earthquake, as shown in this fanciful 1755 German
   engraving.
   Detail from above: Executions in the aftermath of the Lisbon
   earthquake. At least 34 looters were hanged in the chaotic aftermath of
   the disaster. As a warning against looting, King Joseph I of Portugal
   ordered gallows to be constructed in several parts of the city.
   Enlarge
   Detail from above: Executions in the aftermath of the Lisbon
   earthquake. At least 34 looters were hanged in the chaotic aftermath of
   the disaster. As a warning against looting, King Joseph I of Portugal
   ordered gallows to be constructed in several parts of the city.

   Owing to a stroke of luck, the royal family escaped unharmed from the
   catastrophe. King Joseph I of Portugal and the court had left the city,
   after attending mass at sunrise, fulfilling the wish of one of the
   king's daughters to spend the holiday away from Lisbon. After the
   catastrophe, Joseph I developed a fear of living within walls, and the
   court was accommodated in a huge complex of tents and pavilions in the
   hills of Ajuda, then on the outskirts of Lisbon. The king's
   claustrophobia never waned, and it was only after Joseph's death that
   his daughter Maria I of Portugal began building the royal Ajuda Palace,
   which still stands on the site of the old tented camp. Like the king,
   the prime minister Sebastião de Melo (the Marquis of Pombal) survived
   the earthquake. "Now? Bury the dead and feed the living," he is
   reported to have said, and with the pragmatism that characterized his
   coming rule, the prime minister immediately began organizing the
   recovery and reconstruction. He sent firefighters into the city to
   extinguish the flames, and ordered teams to remove the thousands of
   corpses before disease spread. Contrary to custom and against the
   wishes of representatives of the Church, many corpses were loaded onto
   barges and buried at sea beyond the mouth of the Tagus. To prevent
   disorder in the ruined city, and, in particular, as a deterrent against
   looting, gallows were constructed at high points around the city and at
   least 34 people were executed. The Portuguese Army surrounded the city
   to prevent the able-bodied from fleeing, so that they could be pressed
   into clearing the ruins.

   Not long after the initial crisis, the prime minister and the king
   quickly hired architects and engineers, and less than a year later,
   Lisbon was free from debris and undergoing reconstruction. The king was
   keen to have a new, perfectly ordained city. Big squares and
   rectilinear, large avenues were the mottos of the new Lisbon. At the
   time, somebody asked the Marquis of Pombal about the need for such wide
   streets. The marquis answered: one day they will be small. Indeed, the
   chaotic traffic of Lisbon today reflects the wisdom of his reply.

   Pombaline buildings are among the first seismically-protected
   constructions in the world. Small wooden models were built for testing,
   and earthquakes were simulated by marching troops around them. Lisbon's
   "new" downtown, known today as the Pombaline Downtown (Baixa
   Pombalina), is one of the city's famed attractions. Sections of other
   Portuguese cities, like the Vila Real de Santo António in Algarve, were
   also rebuilt along Pombaline principles.''''

Social and philosophical implications

   Voltaire.
   Enlarge
   Voltaire.

   The earthquake shook much more than cities and buildings. Lisbon was
   the capital of a devout Catholic country, with a history of investments
   in the church and evangelism in the colonies. Moreover, the catastrophe
   struck on a Catholic holiday and destroyed almost every important
   church. For eighteenth-century theology and philosophy, this
   manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain.

   The earthquake strongly influenced many thinkers of the European
   Enlightenment. Many contemporary philosophers mentioned or alluded to
   the earthquake in their writings, notably Voltaire in Candide and in
   his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ("Poem on the Lisbon disaster").
   The arbitrariness of survival motivated Voltaire's Candide and its
   satire of the idea that this was the " best of all possible worlds"; as
   Theodor Adorno wrote, "[t]he earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure
   Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz" (Negative Dialectics 361). In the
   later twentieth century, following Adorno, the 1755 earthquake has
   sometimes been compared to the Holocaust as a catastrophe so tremendous
   as to have a transformative impact on European culture and philosophy.

   Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also influenced by the devastation following
   the earthquake, the severity of which he believed that was due to too
   many people living within the close quarters of the city. Rousseau used
   the earthquake as an argument against cities as part of his desire for
   a more naturalistic way of life.
   Immanuel Kant.
   Enlarge
   Immanuel Kant.

   The concept of the sublime, though it existed before 1755, was
   developed in philosophy and elevated to greater importance by Immanuel
   Kant, in part as a result of his attempts to comprehend the enormity of
   the Lisbon quake and tsunami. Kant published three separate texts on
   the Lisbon earthquake. The young Kant, fascinated with the earthquake,
   collected all the information available to him in news pamphlets, and
   used it to formulate a theory of the causes of earthquakes. Kant's
   theory, which involved the shifting of huge subterranean caverns filled
   with hot gases, was (though ultimately shown to be false) one of the
   first systematic modern attempts to explain earthquakes by positing
   natural, rather than supernatural, causes. According to Walter
   Benjamin, Kant's slim early book on the earthquake "probably represents
   the beginnings of scientific geography in Germany. And certainly the
   beginnings of seismology."

   Werner Hamacher has claimed that the earthquake's consequences extended
   into the vocabulary of philosophy, making the common metaphor of firm
   "grounding" for philosophers' arguments shaky and uncertain: "Under the
   impression exerted by the Lisbon earthquake, which touched the European
   mind in one [of] its more sensitive epochs, the metaphor of ground and
   tremor completely lost their apparent innocence; they were no longer
   merely figures of speech" (263). Hamacher claims that the foundational
   certainty of Descartes' philosophy began to shake following the Lisbon
   earthquake.

   In Portuguese internal politics, the earthquake was devastating. The
   prime minister was the favorite of the king, but the aristocracy
   despised him as an upstart son of a country squire. (Although the Prime
   Minister Sebastião de Melo is known today as Marquis of Pombal, the
   title was only granted in 1770, fifteen years after the earthquake.)
   The prime minister in turn disliked the old nobles, whom he considered
   corrupt and incapable of practical action. Before November 1, 1755
   there was a constant struggle for power and royal favour, but
   afterwards, the competent response of the Marquis of Pombal effectively
   severed the power of the old aristocratic factions. Silent opposition
   and resentment of King Joseph I began to rise. This would culminate in
   an attempted assassination of the king, and the elimination of the
   powerful Duke of Aveiro and the Távora family.

The birth of seismology

   The prime minister's response was not limited to the practicalities of
   reconstruction. The marquis ordered a query sent to all parishes of the
   country regarding the earthquake and its effects. Questions included:
     * how long did the earthquake last?
     * how many aftershocks were felt?
     * what kind of damage was caused?
     * did animals behave strangely? (this question anticipated studies by
       modern Chinese seismologists in the 1960s)
     * what happened in wells and water holes?

   The answers to these and other questions are still archived in the
   Tower of Tombo, the national historical archive. Studying and
   cross-referencing the priests' accounts, modern scientists were able to
   reconstruct the event from a scientific perspective. Without the query
   designed by the Marquis of Pombal, this would have been impossible.
   Because the marquis was the first to attempt an objective scientific
   description of the broad causes and consequences of an earthquake, he
   is regarded as a forerunner of modern seismological scientists.

   The geological causes of this earthquake and the seismic activity in
   the region continue to be discussed and debated by contemporary
   scientists. Some geologists have suggested that the earthquake may
   indicate the early development of an Atlantic subduction zone, and the
   beginning of the closure of the Atlantic ocean. Indeed, the only other
   recorded earthquakes of this size have been megathrust earthquakes
   involving subduction, making it all but certain that the Lisbon event
   was a megathrust earthquake as well.

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