Don (or Dom) Sebastian (King Sebastião I of Portugal; Sebastian I, b. 1554), aged 24, was fighting (invading) the Moors in Morocco, at the Battle of Ksar el Kebir (Alcazarquivir; Alcacer Quibir, ‘Field of the Three Kings’). His army was so badly defeated that scarcely 50 of his men made it out alive. A reckless youth, he had convinced himself that he was to be Jesus Christ’s captain in a crusade against the Muslims of Africa.

Don Sebastian invaded Morocco in support of a pretender to the Moroccan throne. Abu Marwan Abdalmalik I, ruler of Morocco, King Sebastian, and the Moroccan pretender, Muhammad, all died in the fighting.

The Moors said that they had his body and buried it at Belem, but Sebastian’s countrymen believed he had escaped and would return to lead them, a notion that developed into a long-lived cult named 'Sebastianism'.

Don Sebastian, a fanatic

Don Sebastian had grown up under the guidance of the Jesuits, in particular, D. Luiz Concalves da Camara and to D Aleixo de Menezes, a veteran who had served under Albuquerque and who imbued the young prince with religious fanaticism. Sebastian grew up resolved to emulate the medieval knights who bad reconquered Portugal from the Moors, and became a mystic who spent long periods either hunting or fasting. His sole ambition was to lead a crusade against Islam in north-west Africa, like the kings of the Middle Ages.

The rise of Sebastianism

It was a time of Portugal’s swift economic decline (between 1499 - 1580 Portugal had acquired an empire stretching from Brazil eastward to the Moluccas) as well as political upheaval, and when Portugal was politically absorbed by Spain (1581 - 1640 Spanish kings ruled over Portugal), the Portuguese lower classes responded to the loss of independence (and their king) in a way that seems odd to us today. The response to the circumstances of the times spread into the lower-middle classes as well, spurred by the fear that the counter-reformationist, King Philip II of Spain (1527 - 1598), would intensify the already rigorous Inquisition in Portugal, although this didn't eventuate. 

Despite the passage of many years, the conviction that Sebastian was still alive grew into a kind of messianic cult that persisted into the early 20^th Century, or at least the late 19^th, passing on from one Portuguese generation to another. Its devotees believed that the rei encuberto, or ‘hidden king’, was either absent on a pilgrimage, or, like King Arthur in Avalon, was waiting on some enchanted island until the hour of his second advent.

"Sebastianism" writes Payne (Payne, Stanley G, A History of Spain and Portugal, Volume 1, Ch. 12, 'Sixteenth-Century Portugal', University of Wisconsin Press, USA, 1973) " may also have been a reflection of the level of popular culture. The Portuguese peasantry were among the most ignorant of the peninsula, and indeed of western Europe. Little benefited by the wealth of empire, which was drained off by the upper classes, they remained extremely superstitious well into the twentieth century. Mythic fixation on the symbol of an intemperate prince was an expression of the saudade (sadness, longing, nostalgia) of a depressed people who had once accomplished great deeds but whose culture, social structure, and natural resources frustrated their transition to a more modern way of life."

So confident were people that he would return, sales of horses and other items were sometimes made, payable upon the second coming of King Sebastian. It was this fact that induced Jean-Andoche Junot (October 23, 1771 - July 29, 1813), a French general under Napoleon Bonaparte, when asked what he would be able to do with the Portuguese, to answer: “What can I do with a people who were still waiting for the coming of the Messiah and King Sebastian?”

The London Times of December, 1825 reported that old Portuguese visionaries would go out on windy nights, wrapped in cloaks, watching the movements of the heavens. Sometimes they would see a shooting star and cry “Here he comes!” 

Sebastianism in Brazil

The influential and ultra-patriotic Afro-Portuguese- Brazilian Jesuit, Antonio Vieira (February 6, 1608 - July 18, 1697, pictured), was a Sebastianist who also believed in the popular prophecies of Portuguese shoemaker/poet Gonçalo Anes Bandarra ('the Nostradamus of Portugal'; 1500 - 1556). Vieria, like Bandarra, foretold a millennium in which Portugal's rei encuberto and the Church would rule the world. He was condemned by the Portuguese Inquisition, forbidden to preach, and kept a prisoner from October, 1665, to December, 1667.

In Brazil, a legend grew up that Don Sebastian appears in the form of a black bull on the beaches of mysterious Lencois Island, off the coast of Maranhao. Many Brazilians believed that the king would return to help them against the ‘godless’ Brazilian Republic. Even before his death, Sebastian had had importance in the colony: in 1565, the city of Rio de Janeiro had been founded during his reign and in his honour, as city of Saint Sebastian of Rio de Janeiro (Cidade de São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro), a living saint.

Sebastian's impersonators

Four pretenders to the Portuguese throne successively impersonated Sebastian; the first two, known from the Portuguese towns in which they were born as the King of Penamacor and the King of Ericeira, were of peasant origin; they were captured in 1584 and 1585 respectively. The third, Gabriel Espinosa, was an educated man, whose followers included members of the Austrian and Spanish courts and of the Society of Jesus in Portugal. He, too, fell and was executed in 1594.

The fourth was one Marco Tullio of Calabria, Italy, who could not even speak Portuguese, yet he impersonated the rei encuberto at Venice in 1603 and gained many supporters. Like his predecessors, Tullio was eventually captured and executed. The Sebastianists had an important role in the Portuguese insurrection of 1640, and were again prominent during the Liberal Wars (1828 - 34). At an even later period and the cult appears to have survived until the beginning of the 20^th Century, although it declined as a political force after 1834.  

We might add that  Don Sebastian is supposed to be a name of terror to Moorish children.

Nor shall Sebastian’s formidable name
Be longer used to still the crying babe.
John Dryden, Don Sebastian (1690)

The Don Sebastian legend has a touch of the myth motif of the Sleeping King, or King in the Mountain, which finds echoes in King Frederick Barbarossa, Rip Van Winkle and also the Christian myth of the Seven Sleepers as discussed in the Wilson's Almanac Scriptorium.

* Santa Catarina: In late March 2004, the state was hit by the first ever hurricane recorded in the South Atlantic. Because there is no naming system for such an event, Brazilian meteorologists called it Catarina, after the state.