A strong advocate for absolutism, and the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, Pombal led Portugal's recovery from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and reformed the kingdom's administrative, economic, and ecclesiastical institutions.

[4] The son of a country squire and nephew of a prominent cleric, Pombal studied at the University of Coimbra before enlisting in the Portuguese Army, where he reached the rank of corporal.

In foreign policy, although Pombal desired to decrease Portuguese reliance on Great Britain, he maintained the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, which successfully defended Portugal from Spanish invasion during the Seven Years' War.

Pombal enacted domestic policies that prohibited the import of black slaves into mainland Portugal and Portuguese India,[5] and established the "Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba" to strengthen the commerce of African slaves to Brazil, put the Portuguese Inquisition under his control with his brother as chief inquisitor,[6] granted civil rights to the New Christians, and institutionalized Censorship with "Real Mesa Censória".

[8][12] In 1738, with his uncle's assistance,[11] Pombal received his first public appointment as the Portuguese ambassador to Great Britain, where, in 1740, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

[8] The Queen consort of Portugal, Archduchess Mary Anne Josepha of Austria (1683–1754), was fond of him; after his first wife died she arranged for him to marry the daughter of the Austrian field marshal Leopold Josef, Count von Daun.

In February 1761, during the reign of D.José I, Pombal banned the import of black slaves within mainland Portugal and Portuguese India,[15] not for humanitarian reasons, which were contrary to his nature, but because they were necessary labor workforce in Brazil.

[16] At the same time, he encouraged the trade in black slaves ("the pieces", in the terms of that time) to that colony, and two companies were founded, with the support and direct involvement of the Marquês de Pombal - the Grão Pará and Maranhão Company and the Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba - whose main activity was precisely the trafficking of slaves, mostly Africans, to brazilian lands.

Even exports from Portugal went mostly through expatriate merchants like the English port wine shippers and French businessmen like Jácome Ratton, whose memoirs are scathing about the efficiency of his Portuguese counterparts.

These reforms gained him enemies in the upper classes, especially among the high nobility, who despised him as a social upstart; but also from the common people who saw the centralization and control of the wine production as harmful to their own businesses.

The riots were eventually calmed but Pombal's brutality was once more shown when he ordered the main rioteers to be executed and their bodies displayed above Porto's medieval gates.

[citation needed] Further important reforms were carried out in education by Pombal: he expelled the Jesuits in 1759, created the basis for secular public primary and secondary schools, introduced vocational training, created hundreds of new teaching posts, added departments of mathematics and natural sciences to the University of Coimbra, closed University of Evora, and introduced new taxes to pay for these reforms.

[citation needed] Disaster fell upon Portugal on the morning of 1 November 1755, when Lisbon was awakened by a violent earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale.

This rapid recovery can be attributed to the quick response on the part of the Marquis to enact several "Providences" with the aim of stabilizing the situation and helping the inhabitants of Lisbon.

The questionnaire asked whether dogs or other animals behaved strangely prior to the earthquake, whether there was a noticeable difference in the rise or fall of the water level in wells, and how many buildings had been destroyed and what kind of destruction had occurred.

It seems that the results were not properly analysed during the 18th century, in part due to the death of the person in charge, but the answers have allowed modern Portuguese scientists to reconstruct the event with greater precision.

[citation needed] 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.

On 5 May 1762, Spain sent troops across the border and penetrated into Trás-os-Montes to capture Porto, but they were repelled by the guerrillas and forced to abandon all their conquests but Chaves, after suffering huge losses (10,000 casualties).

In a second invasion (Province of Lower Beira, July 1762) a combined Franco-Spanish army was initially successful in capturing Almeida and several almost undefended fortresses, but they were soon ground to a halt by a small Anglo-Portuguese force entrenched in the hills East of Abrantes.

Victory in the battles of Valencia de Alcántara and Vila Velha – and above all – a scorched earth tactic coupled with guerrilla actions in the Spanish logistic lines induced starvation and eventually the disintegration of the Franco-Spanish army (15,000 casualties, many of them inflicted by the peasants), whose remnants were driven back and pursued to Spain.

The Spanish headquarters in Castelo Branco was taken by a Portuguese force under Townshend, and all the strongholds that had previously been occupied by the Bourbon invaders were retaken, with the exception of Almeida.

"[25]Having lived outside of Portugal in Vienna and London, the latter city in particular being a major centre of the Enlightenment, Pombal increasingly believed that the Society of Jesus, also known as the "Jesuits", had a grip on science and education,[26] and that they were an inherent drag on an independent, Portuguese-style iluminismo.

[27] He was especially familiar with the anti-Jesuit tradition of Britain, and in Vienna he had made friends with Gerhard van Swieten, a confidant of Maria Theresa of Austria and a staunch adversary of the Austrian Jesuits' influence.

As prime minister Pombal engaged the Jesuits in a propaganda war, which was watched closely by the rest of Europe, and he launched a number of conspiracy theories regarding the order's desire for power.

During the Távora affair (see below) he accused the Society of Jesus of treason and attempted regicide, a major public relations catastrophe for the order, in the age of absolutism.

In 1771, botanist Domenico Vandelli published Pombalia, a genus of flowering plants from America, belonging to the family Violaceae and named in honour of the Marquis of Pombal.

[40] In January of 1777, the village of Trafaria was deliberately and completely burned down, with the purpose of capturing rebels who were taking refuge there, with many people dying, either by the fire, or killed by Pina Manique's troops who surrounded the exits .

[41] Pombal ordered the fire of the huts in Monte Gordo aiming to transfer the fishermen to Vila Real de Santo António, where many of those who escaped preferred to later settle in Spain, in Higuerita (Isla Cristina).

[42] In 1757, a popular revolt against the Companhia Geral de Agricultura dos Vinhos do Alto Douro, which had raised the price of wine in the taverns it had a monopoly over, was fiercely repressed by the Marquis.

Several intellectuals of the time, such as Almada Negreiros, expressed their dismay and asked this statue to be removed, but it became an important symbol for the Dictatorship and later for the Portuguese Estado Novo.