Lisbon earthquake 1755

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Azores-Gibraltar rupture zone (red line) and assumed location of the epicenter ★
Contemporary illustration of the earthquake:
Lisbon is on fire, ships capsize in the port in the waves of the tsunami ( copper engraving )

The earthquake in Lisbon on November 1, 1755, together with a major fire and a tsunami, almost completely destroyed the Portuguese capital, Lisbon . With 30,000 to 100,000 fatalities, this earthquake is one of the most devastating natural disasters in European history. It achieved an estimated magnitude (strength) of around 8.5 to 9 on the moment magnitude scale . The epicenter is believed to be in the Atlantic about 200 kilometers southwest of Cabo de São Vicente .

The earthquake had a significant impact on politics, culture and science. It exacerbated domestic tensions in Portugal and caused a rupture in the country's colonial aspirations. Because of the great destruction, it sparked diverse discourses among the philosophers of the Enlightenment ; In particular, it raised the problem of theodicy , that is, the question of how a benevolent God could allow evil in the world. There was also an impetus to develop earthquake research .

Earthquake and tsunami

root cause

The geological cause of the quake and tsunami is still controversial today. The most likely cause is the plate tectonics of the Azores-Gibraltar rupture zone , where the African and Eurasian plates collide. Due to the special situation at this point, massive vertical movements can occur, which can trigger particularly strong tsunamis. Recent surveys of the seabed off Portugal indicate the emergence of a new subduction zone that matches the observations.

Damage in Lisbon

The ruins of the Convento do Carmo
Ópera do Tejo ruin 1757 by Jacques Philippe Le Bas

According to eyewitness reports, at 9:40 a.m. on All Saints Day in 1755, the earthquake shook Lisbon for three to six minutes, tore open gaps in the ground several meters wide and devastated the city center. Serious fires broke out in numerous places. The survivors of the tremors took refuge in the harbor and saw that the sea had receded and exposed a seabed covered with shipwrecks and lost goods. A few minutes later, around 40 minutes after the quake, a tidal wave rolled over the harbor and shot up the Tagus River . Two smaller waves followed. The tidal waves put out the fires, but with their force tore the buildings that were still standing with them. In the areas that were not affected by the tsunami , the fires raged for days. The earthquake was followed by two aftershocks, each lasting about two minutes.

The disaster killed 30,000 to 100,000 of the 275,000 residents of Lisbon and the surrounding villages and towns. About 85 percent of all Lisbon buildings were destroyed, including the famous royal palaces and libraries, which were brilliant examples of 16th century Manueline architecture . What the quake did not destroy fell victim to the flames, such as the large opera house that had just opened . The royal palace on the banks of the Tagus, on today's Praça do Comércio , was destroyed, and with it the huge state library with over 70,000 books and irretrievable paintings by Titian , Rubens and Correggio . The records of Vasco da Gama's expeditions and other seafarers were also lost.

Almost all the church buildings in Lisbon were destroyed, especially the Cathedral of Santa Maria, the basilicas of São Paulo, Santa Catarina and São Vicente de Fora, as well as the Igreja da Misericórdia church . The remains of the Convento do Carmo , which were left in their ruinous state during the reconstruction of the city to commemorate the earthquake, still stand in the center of Lisbon . The Real de Todos os Santos (Royal All Saints Hospital ) burned to death in the ensuing conflagration, killing hundreds of patients. The statue of the national hero Nuno Álvares Pereira was also lost.

The red light district of Lisbon, the Alfama , was spared, as was large parts of the upper city of Lisbon .

Damage in other areas

Spread of the tsunami
red: 1–4 h ,  yellow: 5–6 h,  green: 7–14 h,  blue:  15–21 h

The disaster not only hit Lisbon. Especially in the Algarve in the south of the country, the tsunami destroyed cities and villages on the coast. Tidal waves 20 meters high rolled over the Atlantic coast of North Africa, possibly causing up to 10,000 deaths in Morocco . Other tidal waves crossed the Atlantic, hit the Azores and Cape Verde, and even caused damage in Martinique and Barbados .

The quake was felt all over Europe:

consequences

First measures

Marquis of Pombal
Execution in the ruins of Lisbon. Detail from a German copper engraving from 1755 in the Museu da Cidade, Lisbon.

The Prime Minister Sebastião de Mello , who later became Marquês de Pombal, survived the quake. The pragmatism of his methods of government is characterized by the saying ascribed to him: “And now? Bury the dead and feed the living. ”He immediately began organizing the rescue and reconstruction efforts.

He raised troops to fight the fires, and other troops had to remove thousands of bodies from the city. In order to avoid epidemics , he had the bodies loaded onto ships and buried in the sea , although this was not in accordance with the customs of the time and the Catholic Church rejected it.

To looters deter, were at several prominent places of the city gallows erected, 34 people were on charges of looting executed . The army was mobilized to cordon off the city and prevent the unharmed from fleeing the city, who were forced to participate in the clean-up.

In Europe there was great solidarity with Portugal, because at almost every major European trading place there were merchants who had branches or business partners in Lisbon. In England, which had close trade ties with Portugal, Parliament approved emergency aid of £ 100,000.

Rebuilding

Plan for the reconstruction of Lisbon by Eugénio dos Santos and Carlos Mardel (1756)

Shortly after the crisis, the Prime Minister hired architects and engineers, led by Eugénio dos Santos and Carlos Mardel , to plan the reconstruction. Just a year after the quake, Lisbon was free of rubble and reconstruction had begun. The opportunity was used to plan the new city generously and carefully, with wide, straight streets and large squares. When asked about the meaning of such wide streets, Pombal is said to have replied that one day they would be considered small.

Attempts were also made to make the buildings earthquake-proof . For this purpose, wooden models of the houses were erected, around which soldiers were marched to create vibrations. The newly built city center of Lisbon, the Baixa Pombalina , is now one of the city's major tourist attractions. After Pombal's principle, other Portuguese cities were rebuilt, as the interest in the Algarve situated in Vila Real de Santo António .

Earthquake research

The Prime Minister not only arranged for the reconstruction, but also ordered a survey of all pastors to gather facts about the quake and its effects. She inquired

  • the duration of the earthquake
  • the number of aftershocks
  • the damage caused by the quake
  • special behavior of animals before the earthquake
  • Special features in wells and water holes

The answers to these questions have survived to this day and are located in the Torre do Tombo , the center of the National Archives of Portugal. Their studies allow modern scientists to reconstruct the quake, which would not have been possible without this survey by the Marquês de Pombal . That is why it is considered to be the forerunner of modern seismology .

Effect on the king

King Joseph I.

King José I, then 41, and his family survived the catastrophe by chance. A daughter of the king had wished to spend the holiday outside the city. After the morning mass on All Saints Day, the king and his court left Lisbon. They were in Santa Maria de Belém , about six kilometers from the center of the capital, when the quake struck.

After the quake, the king developed an uncontrollable fear of living within four solid walls. He preferred to build a huge tent city in the hills of Ajuda at the gates of Lisbon and then to reside there. This claustrophobia did not subside until his death. Only after the king's death did his daughter Maria I have the permanent Palácio Nacional da Ajuda built on the site of the paternal tent city.

Domestic politics

The earthquake also made waves in Portugal's domestic politics. At that time, the prime minister was already a protégé of the king, while the long-established aristocracy denigrated him because of his origins as a squire. The prime minister, for his part, despised the nobility, which he described as corrupt and incapable of constructive action. While there had been a tough power struggle between the prime minister and the aristocracy before the earthquake, the situation has now changed in his favor due to the prime minister's competence. The king slowly distanced himself from the nobility. The power struggle culminated in an assassination attempt on the monarch in 1759, as a result of which the powerful Duke of Aveiro and the Távora clan were eliminated.

It was not until 1770, 15 years after the earthquake, that the Prime Minister was given the high nobility title of Marquês de Pombal .

reception

Effect on philosophy

For philosophers and theologians, the earthquake raised the old theodicy problem anew: How can an almighty and benevolent God allow such a tremendous calamity as the Lisbon earthquake? Why did the quake hit the capital of a strictly Catholic country that worked for the spread of Christianity in the world? And why on the feast day of All Saints? And why had numerous churches fallen victim to the quake, but of all places the red light district of Lisbon, the Alfama , was spared? Scholars like Voltaire , Kant and Lessing discussed these questions.

Voltaire

The earthquake made a great impression on many Enlightenment thinkers . Numerous contemporary philosophers mention the earthquake in their writings or at least allude to it. Voltaire, for example, wrote a Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (poem about the catastrophe in Lisbon). Above all, however, the tremor in his novel Candide inspired him to a biting satire on the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff , according to which the existing world is the best of all possible worlds. Theodor Adorno wrote in Negative Dialectic in 1966 , “The Lisbon earthquake was enough to heal Voltaire from Leibniz's theodicy”. A controversy developed between Voltaire and Rousseau over optimism and the question of the bad in the world. Adorno saw an analogy between the 1755 earthquake and the Holocaust ; both catastrophes were so great that they were able to transform European culture and philosophy.

The young Immanuel Kant was fascinated by the quake and gathered all the news about it that he could get. Kant published three texts about the earthquake and tried to develop a theory about the origin of earthquakes. This postulated huge caves filled with hot gases under the sea floor, which was later refuted, but was one of the first systematic approaches to attribute earthquakes to natural causes. Kant's theory of the sublime is also influenced by the experience of the Lisbon catastrophe.

Werner Hamacher claims that the basis of René Descartes' philosophy began to shake in the wake of the earthquake and that the earthquake even had an impact on the vocabulary of philosophy. The frequently used metaphor of a solid basis for a philosopher's arguments had degenerated into an empty phrase in the face of the quake.

Literary works

In the literature, the theodicy problem has been repeatedly linked to the events of November 1, 1755. From Voltaire's philosophical novel Candide or Optimism (1759) and Kleist's story Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807) to Reinhold Schneider's story Das Erdbeben (1932) to its use in Peter Sloterdijk's novel The Magic Tree (1985) and a radio essay for children penned For Walter Benjamin , the earthquake in Lisbon became a symbol for the question of God's justification in the face of evil in the world.

Goethe's description

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) gives in the first book of his autobiographical work From my life. Poetry and Truth the following description:

“By an extraordinary world event, however, the boy's peace of mind was deeply shaken for the first time. On November 1st, 1755, the Lisbon earthquake struck and spread a tremendous horror over the world, which was already used to peace and quiet. A great, magnificent residence, at the same time a trading and port city, is unexpectedly struck by the most terrible misfortune. The earth shakes and sways, the sea roars, the ships collapse, the houses collapse, churches and towers overhang them, the royal palace is partly swallowed up by the sea, the cracked earth seems to spew flames: for smoke is being heard everywhere and fire in the ruins. Sixty thousand people, a moment before still calm and comfortable, perish with each other, and the happiest of them is the one who is no longer allowed to feel or reflect on misfortune. The flames continue to rage, and with them rages a host of otherwise hidden criminals who were set free by this event. The unhappy remnants are exposed to robbery, murder, and all abuse; and so nature asserts its unlimited arbitrariness on all sides.
Hints of this incident had spread over long stretches of land faster than the news; In many places weaker vibrations could be felt, in some sources, especially the salutary ones, an unusual pause could be noticed: the greater the effect of the news itself, which first in general, but then quickly spread with terrible details. Thereupon the God-fearing people did not lack considerations, the philosophers did not lack reasons for consolation, the clergy did not lack sermons. So much together focused the attention of the world on this point for a time, and the minds agitated by strange misfortunes were all the more frightened by worrying for themselves and their own, as by the widespread effect of this explosion from all places and ends several and more and more cumbersome messages came in. Yes, perhaps at no time has the demon of terror spread its shivers over the earth so quickly and so powerfully.
The boy, who had to hear all of this repeatedly, was not a little affected. God, the creator and sustainer of heaven and earth, whom the explanation of the first article of faith presented to him so wisely and graciously, had by no means proved himself to be fatherly by abandoning the righteous and the unrighteous to destruction. In vain did the young mind try to counteract these impressions, which was all the less possible as the wise men and scribes themselves could not unite about the way in which such a phenomenon should be viewed. "

In his work from 1811, Goethe, who was six years old at the time of the earthquake, tries to reconstruct the child's perspective from a distance of more than five decades and to describe the impression that the reports about the earthquake had on him. For the factual information he orientated himself on contemporary descriptions, above all on the text Description of the earthquake, published in Danzig in 1756 , which overturned the capital Lisbon and many other cities in Portugal and Spain, partly completely, partly very damaged , which he in May 1811 borrowed from the Weimar library .

music

Georg Philipp Telemann composed the Thunder Ode based on texts from the 8th and 29th Psalm , which was premiered in 1756. Here the bass duet "He thunders that he may be glorified" refers to the Lisbon earthquake.

Voltaire's Candide found musical expression in the operetta Candide by Leonard Bernstein (1956).

The Portuguese metal band Moonspell deals with the destruction of Lisbon in their album 1755 , released in 2017 .

literature

swell

  • Complicated and reliable news of the terrible and unheard-of earthquake, which hit the world-famous city of Lisbon and other elegant places on the 1st of November of this 1755th year: in secure letters, which Tit. Herr Rathherr Ruffier, a distinguished trader here, received from it; communicated to awaken a true fear of God and Christian compassion , Strasbourg 1755.
  • Hermann Gottlob: Lisbon, as it used to be in its most beautiful pile, on November 1st. of the 1755th year but turned into a pile of stones by a terrible earthquake: In addition to geographical descriptions of Belem, Setubal, Coimbra, Braga, Cadix and Conil, and some considerations of the earthquake, the same accurate determination of all from the beginning of the world bit on ours Times caused earthquakes. ... With D. J. Olearii prayer in the event of an earthquake ... / designed by M. G. H. Arch. B. Stolpen o. J. [1755?].
  • The sad transformation of Lisbon to rubble and ashes: after it was hit on November 1st, 1755 by a huge earthquake and a severe conflagration that resulted /… an impartial feather , Frankfurt am Main, no year [1755?].
  • Wolfgang Breidert (ed.): The shock of the perfect world. The effect of the Lisbon earthquake in the mirror of European contemporaries, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , Darmstadt 1994, ISBN 3-534-12079-5 .
  • British Historical Society of Portugal (ed.): O terramoto de 1755: testemunhos britânicos = The Lisbon earthquake of 1755: British accounts. Lisboa 1990, ISBN 972-9394-03-2 .
  • Dirk Friedrich (Hrsg.): The earthquake of Lisbon 1755. Sources and historical texts. Minifanal, Bonn 2015, ISBN 978-3-95421-077-0 .
  • Dirk Friedrich (Ed.): The sad transformation of Lisbon to rubble and ashes. The 1755 earthquake in contemporary reports. Minifanal, Bonn 2015, ISBN 978-3-95421-076-3 .

Secondary literature

Web links

Commons : Lisbon Earthquake  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: «Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne»  - Poem by Voltaire (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: Tsunamis - Assessing the Hazard for the UK and Irish Coasts ( Memento of the original from January 23, 2013) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , June 2006, p. 4 ff. (PDF; 8.2 MB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / archive.defra.gov.uk
  2. ↑ João C. Duarte, Filipe M. Rosas and others: Are subduction zones invading the Atlantic? Evidence from the southwest Iberia margin . In: Geology. June 6, 2013, doi: 10.1130 / G34100.1
  3. ↑ Sandra Kinkel: Langerwehe-Wenau: Monastery is waiting for many visitors . In: Aachener Nachrichten . August 25, 2011, accessed November 10, 2018.
  4. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Negative Dialektik. Suhrkamp, ​​1966, p. 354.
  5. ↑ Review in the metal magazine "Silence"
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on April 7, 2006 .