Pedro I of Brazil

A Portuguese prince who broke Brazil away from his own father's kingdom, Pedro I became the first emperor of an independent Brazil in 1822. He ruled until 1831, briefly held the Portuguese crown as Pedro IV in 1826, and spent his last years fighting a civil war to put his daughter on the throne in Lisbon. Both countries came to remember him as "the Liberator", a champion of constitutional monarchy against absolutism.

Pedro was born on 12 October 1798 at the Queluz Palace near Lisbon, son of the future John VI and Carlota Joaquina of Spain, and became heir after his elder brother's death in 1801. In November 1807, as French troops sent by Napoleon advanced on Lisbon during the Napoleonic Wars, the royal family fled to Brazil, reaching Rio de Janeiro in 1808. Pedro grew up restless and impulsive, a fine horseman and a capable composer, but with a patchy education. In 1817 he married the Austrian archduchess Maria Leopoldina; their children included the future Maria II of Portugal and Pedro II.

The liberal revolution of 1820 in Portugal forced John VI to return to Lisbon in April 1821, leaving Pedro as regent in Brazil. He faced down mutinies by Portuguese troops and took a liberal, constitutional line. When the Lisbon parliament, the Cortes, tried to dissolve the government in Rio and summon him home, he refused on 9 January 1822, the "Dia do Fico" ("I am staying"). Advised by his minister José Bonifácio de Andrada, he toured Minas Gerais and São Paulo, and on 7 September 1822, having received fresh orders from Lisbon, he proclaimed Brazilian independence.

Pedro was acclaimed emperor on his 24th birthday, 12 October 1822, and crowned in December. The last Portuguese forces surrendered in early 1824. After quarrelling with Bonifácio, he dissolved the Constituent Assembly in November 1823 and issued his own constitution in 1824, which gave the crown strong powers. A secessionist revolt in the north-east, the Confederation of the Equator, was crushed the same year. Portugal recognised independence in 1825, but on terms many Brazilians found humiliating.

When his father died in March 1826, Pedro inherited Portugal too, but abdicated that crown within weeks in favour of his young daughter, Maria II. His brother Miguel, meant to marry her and govern under a liberal constitution, instead seized the throne as an absolute king in 1828. In the south, the war over the province of Cisplatina ended in 1828 with its independence as Uruguay. His open affair with Domitila de Castro and the death of the popular empress Maria Leopoldina in 1826 damaged his reputation. He remarried, to Amélie of Leuchtenberg, in 1829.

Parliament and the Liberal opposition attacked his Portuguese birth and his preoccupation with Portugal, and fought him over who should choose ministers. After street clashes between Brazilians and Portuguese in March 1831, troops in Rio deserted him, and on 7 April 1831 he abdicated in favour of his young son and sailed for Europe.

Taking the title Duke of Braganza, Pedro raised a small army of Portuguese liberals and foreign volunteers, sailed to the Azores and in July 1832 landed at Porto, where Miguel's forces besieged him for more than a year. An expedition to the Algarve turned the war, Lisbon fell in July 1833, and peace came in May 1834. Exhausted, Pedro died of tuberculosis at Queluz on 24 September 1834, aged 35. His heart remains in Porto; his body was moved to São Paulo in 1972, on the 150th anniversary of independence.

Our 1815 map shows Brazil still joined to Portugal, and the 1878 map shows the Empire of Brazil that he founded, by then ruled by his son.