Who was Pedro I of Brazil?

A prince raised in Rio

Pedro I was the first emperor of Brazil, and in Portugal he is remembered as King Pedro IV. He was born on October 12, 1798, at the palace of Queluz, outside Lisbon, the son of the future King João VI. In 1807, when Napoleon’s army marched on Lisbon, the whole royal family sailed for Brazil. Pedro was 9.

He grew up in Rio de Janeiro, running free between the São Cristóvão palace and the stables. He loved horses and music, composed and played several instruments, had epilepsy and a short fuse. In 1817 he married Archduchess Leopoldina of Austria, who arrived with a party of scientists. They had seven children, among them the future Pedro II.

Emperor at 24

When his father went back to Lisbon in 1821, Pedro, 22, stayed in Brazil as prince regent. Within eighteen months he had defied Portugal’s parliament, proclaimed Brazil separate on September 7, 1822, and been acclaimed emperor on October 12, his 24th birthday. The full sequence is in How did Brazil become independent from Portugal?. The musician in him left a mark too: he wrote the melody of the Hino da Independência, the Independence Hymn, to words by Evaristo da Veiga.

The other side of the reign

As emperor, Pedro showed another face. In November 1823 he sent troops to close the constituent assembly he had called. In 1824 he imposed a constitution that gave him a fourth, moderating power above the executive, the legislature and the courts. When Pernambuco rose in revolt, the rising was put down, and the friar Frei Caneca was shot in 1825 after the executioners refused to hang him.

His private life was a public scandal: an open affair with Domitila, the Marquise of Santos, while Leopoldina was alive. She died in December 1826, aged 29. By 1831 Pedro had lost the Cisplatine war, which created Uruguay, and quarreled with the liberals, the press and the streets. On the night of April 6, troops and crowds filled Rio’s Campo de Santana. Before dawn he signed:

Using the right that the Constitution grants me, I declare that I have most willingly abdicated in favor of my much beloved and esteemed son, Dom Pedro de Alcântara.

The boy was 5. His long reign is in Who was Dom Pedro II?.

King Pedro IV of Portugal

Portugal had already had three kings named Pedro, so there he is the fourth. When João VI died in 1826, Pedro inherited the Portuguese crown as well and soon handed it to his eldest daughter, Maria, aged 7. His younger brother Miguel seized the throne instead. After leaving Brazil, Pedro went to war against Miguel on his daughter’s behalf, held out through a long siege of Porto, and won in 1834. He died on September 24 that year, aged 35, in the same room at Queluz where he had been born.

A heart in Porto

He left his heart to the city of Porto, and it is still kept in the Lapa church there. His body was brought to Brazil in 1972, for the 150th anniversary of independence, and lies in the crypt of the Independence Monument at the Ipiranga, in São Paulo, near Leopoldina. When researchers from the University of São Paulo examined the remains in 2012, they found four broken ribs from riding falls in 1823 and 1829, and saw that he had been buried as a Portuguese general. In August 2022, for the bicentennial, the heart crossed the Atlantic to Brasília, then went home to Porto.