Stuff You Missed in History Class · iHeartPodcasts

Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755

February 18, 2026·39 min·3 clips

A 20-meter tsunami from the Lisbon earthquake crested over city walls in Morocco, trapping people inside with no escape.

Portugal was part of Europe. Still, the episode points out how some European scientific ideas were treated there as odd or foreign, which says a lot. The excerpt builds a picture of a country where the church sat deep inside daily life, even in a period when that was true across much of Europe. Power moved through more than one channel. The Jesuit order controlled Portuguese missions in the Americas and had real influence over higher education in Portugal. Censorship was another piece of it. The Portuguese Inquisition, modeled after the Spanish Inquisition and established in the 1530s, targeted heretics and forced converts suspected of secretly remaining Jewish, including their descendants. The numbers still need care. Its total cases and executions were smaller than Spain's, but the episode stresses that the Portuguese version was proportionally greater. Grim math, basically. That is the setting for Portugal sitting near the edge of the scientific revolution that had changed other parts of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Some books never arrived. Because the Inquisition censored published material, scientific works that might have circulated elsewhere were not available in Portuguese. That absence mattered. The people trying to bring newer scientific discoveries into Portugal were called estradurados, a term the hosts pause on because it frames them as Europeanized and strangely outside the norm. Carvalho e Melo is the central figure here. As Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and War, he was one of them, and he had already been trying to reduce the Inquisition's power before the earthquake. One host picks up on how strange it sounds for Portugal to treat European intellectual currents as foreign, then notices that the language itself carries that distance. Then the disaster arrives. The earthquake began around 9:40 in the morning on All Saints' Day, when many people in Lisbon and elsewhere in Portugal were at mass, including the royal family. The catastrophe is told through geology, yes, but also through the religious life and institutions that shaped where people were and what they could know.

As heard by us

A context-rich look at the Lisbon earthquake through church power, censorship, scientific suspicion, and reformist pressure.

Stuff You Missed in History Class approaches the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 through the world Lisbon occupied before disaster struck: a Portugal where church authority, Jesuit influence, the Inquisition, and censorship shaped public life and the movement of ideas.

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You want the Lisbon quake explained through Portugal's church, censorship, and early-science tensions.

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