Portugal, like the rest of the Catholic Monarchy, had after 1600 increasingly depended on a supply of Swedish copper, mostly coming from the great Stora Kopparberg mine at Falun, a profitable enterprise sometimes referred to as “the Swedish Indies.” Gustavus Adolphus and Oxenstierna had recognized the importance of copper to Sweden’s economy and considered it a divine gift to the country.1 As Oxenstierna wrote in 1630, “Copper is the noblest commodity that the Swedish crown produces and can boast of, wherein also a great part of the crown’s welfare stands.”2 Sweden’s exports of that metal increased fivefold from 1600-1650; its only real competitor in supply being Japanese copper imported to Europe by the Dutch East India Company and used by it as well to buy pepper and textiles in India.3 The Dutch West India Company, although no less interested in acquiring this metal, never found a reliable source in the Atlantic, although it sometimes flirted with the idea of seizing the Cuban town of Santiago and its nearby copper mine.4 Overall, copper and iron became commodities that tied Scandinavia into a growing system of global exchange that the Portuguese and the Dutch had already initiated.5

The European empires had discovered that for various reasons copper was a commodity that was in demand in many areas of the world and that its commerce was both profitable and served imperial interests and needs. The Portuguese in Asia had utilized the copper carried in the commerce from Japan to Macao where then both in Goa, and in the famous artillery foundry of Manuel Tavares Bocarro in Macao, it was made into bronze canons and mortars that became renowned throughout Asia.6 Moreover, the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, learned that China had also been a market for Japan’s copper, and that they could profitably become intermediaries in that trade. After the Tokugawa expulsion of the Portuguese from Japan in 1639, the Dutch trading station at Deshima became the only European purchaser of Japanese copper after 1646. From that time until c. 1680, the Dutch East India Company was not only using large amounts of Japanese copper to trade on the Coromandel coast in India, in China and in South East Asia, but also importing almost as much to Amsterdam as was being imported from Sweden as can be seen in Figure 1. Some of it was probably ending up in the Dutch trade with Portugal.

In a parallel manner, metals like copper and iron had become essential items in the growing slave trade in West Africa that by the mid seventeenth century had attracted diverse European participants. Although a wide variety of products such as tobacco, alcoholic beverages, firearms, and textiles were also used in the slave trade, African demand for copper to be used for ornamentation, a means of exchange or specie, a symbol of status and power, objects of cult, and as the base of alloys of bronze and brass for practical objects and weapons remained high. By the eighteenth century copper bars, the so-called “guinea rods,” along with “voyage iron” became regular items of exchange in the slave trade.7 Various contracts and treaties confirm that the African buyers were knowledgeable about the differing qualities of copper, and quite specific in their requirements for this commodity.

The Spanish Habsburg embargo of 1635 and those before had complicated or disrupted not only the copper supply, but also Portugal’s salt exports, although Dutch ships sailing under other flags or with false papers had continued to be the principal carriers. These embargos, however, were measures of economic warfare imposed by Philip IV and Olivares that had been particularly disliked by interests in Portugal. Now, after the separation from the Catholic Monarchy, not only did Portugal hope to reestablish former commercial relations for its exports, but it sorely needed armaments and maritime supplies for its defense of the new dynasty, a fact that underlined the importance of the commodity chain of copper and its multiple connections to other economic activities.8 Whereas Portugal had hoped to establish a route to transfer copper directly from its African to its American peripheries as part of the sugar economy and its trade, it still continued to depend on European sources, now especially Baltic providers. Thus copper remained linked to the supply of timber, pitch and naval stores, to the Swedish and Dutch manufacture of armaments, to the ship building industries in the Netherlands, the Atlantic slave trade, and to the salt gathering pans of Portugal itself.9 There is a curious paradox between the Catholic Iberian need for, and dreams of, copper to fulfill its evangelical mission, and those of Lutheran Sweden in which its mines of copper and silver were seen as the providence of God that had enabled the defense of its faith.10

It is difficult to document how the copper was transported to Brazil. It does not appear as a major cargo item carried by the outbound ships of the Brazil fleets after 1648, nor do other shipping and tax records reveal its presence in quantity.11 However, there are occasional hints of its transport like the contract for the voyage in 1650 of the Santa Clara e Almas jointly owned by its Portuguese skipper (mestre) from Vila do Conde and by a Flemish merchant residing in Oporto. It was registered to sail from Oporto to Angola with a cargo of copper and then proceed to Bahia or Rio de Janeiro before returning to Viana do Castelo.12 It may be that, as had been suggested to the governors of Angola and Benguela, the crown was allowing the transport of this essential commodity as ballast in the outbound slaving vessels as an incentive to shippers. That would not have been strange to contemporaries since in Asia the Dutch East India Company often transported the heavy copper as ballast cargo.13

Other than its salt, Portugal had few resources to pay for the wars of its separation from Spain and defense of its empire against the Dutch except for the dye wood and sugar from its Brazilian colony. The previous income its crown had derived from the spices and pepper trade in the Indian Ocean had been seriously reduced by Dutch and English incursions and competition, and had fallen precipitously in the previous decade of the 1630s when less than 10,000 tons of shipping had arrived from India. By 1640, it was clear that India and its network of trade ports and commercial routes was no longer a dependable source of income, and that its role in the Portuguese imperial economy had been replaced by the south Atlantic complex of West Africa and Brazil.

While some modern observers have questioned the economic importance of the overseas territories to the Portuguese economy in general and have specifically dismissed their importance to the Bragança monarchy’s financing of the Restoration, there is much evidence that Dom João IV, his successors, and many of their contemporaries had no doubts about their value, nor about the growing economic significance of the South Atlantic to Portugal’s survival as an independent state.14 This was a theme that many project proposals (alvitrios) and advice to the crown and government addressed.15 During the 1641 negotiations for a truce with the United Provinces that were still in possession of Pernambuco, it was commonly said in Lisbon “ that without [all] Brazil. [D. João] was not king,” and in the same period the advisors of Maurits of Nassau, governor of Dutch Brazil, believed that without Brazil and Angola, D. João could not hold his throne.16 The Portuguese ambassador at the Hague reported in 1644 that the Dutch believed that the area they controlled in Brazil at that time was worth more than all of Portugal.17 Dom Joao IV himself calculated that if Portugal lost its colonies it could not remain independent, and he told an emissary of Cardinal Mazarin that the state of India was “a colossus that yields no benefits,” that were it not for the Catholic souls that would be lost, he wished he could honorably abandon it. As for Brazil, his “milchcow,” given the considerable profit that it gives him, along with that from the kingdom of Angola, the African stations, the islands of the Azores and Cape Verde; that he would not trade his situation for that of any other prince of Europe.”18 Finally, we should also recognize that Brazil had long served as an illegal outlet for Potosí silver smuggled from Buenos Aires, and after 1640 there were hopes that it would continue to do so. Unfortunately, for Dom João and his advisors, however, the debasement of Potosí minted coins in the period 1650-70 left such aspirations mostly unsatisfied since many merchants refused to accept them.19

The profit that Dom João IV and his successors hoped to gain from Brazil, however, was dependent on the political and economic conjunctures of the period. The loss of Pernambuco and its neighboring captaincies to the Dutch (1630-54) had deprived the Portuguese crown of some sugar revenues, although the Dutch controlled area’s share of Brazilian sugar production by that time was only about twenty percent. Thus, the income gained from the sugar trade of Bahia was crucial. So, when a Dutch expedition landed on Itaparica island in 1647 threatening to close the port of Salvador and disrupt the sugar exports from Bahia, Dom Joao IV, with an empty treasury, was willing to accept the advice of his Jesuit advisor, Father António Vieira, to raise the money for a fleet to expel the invaders by accepting a substantial loan from New Christian lenders whom he even met with personally.20

The rising against Dutch rule and the subsequent fighting in Pernambuco and its neighboring captaincies (1645-54) resulted in the burning of cane fields, the destruction of sugar mills, and the disruption of Atlantic commerce that lowered income for both the crown of Portugal and for the Dutch West India Company. Portugal was thus forced to finance the war by increasing taxes on sugar production and shipping in the areas it controlled at exactly the moment that capital was needed to rebuild and expand that industry. Then too, good prices for sugar in the 1630s had contributed to the English and French development of sugar producing colonies in the Caribbean on Barbados, Martinique, and other islands. By the 1640s, their production was reaching Europe, and as a result the percentage of Brazilian sugar in those markets declined. To some extent that drop resulted from mercantilist measures taken by England and France between 1651 and 1673 to protect the sugar producers in their own colonies by excluding Brazilian sugar. Moreover, the increase in Atlantic sugar production lowered the price of sugar. In Lisbon the price dropped by over 30 percent between 1659 and the end of the war with Spain in 1668, and it continued to do so until 1688, but the simultaneous increase in demand for labor in the new Caribbean colonies raised the price of slaves, one of the principal costs to Brazilian sugar planters. The result of these changes was growing stress on the Portuguese imperial economy that had become increasingly dependent on sugar, tobacco, and hides exported from its Brazilian colony.

While Dom João IV was correct that in the long term Brazilian production would be essential to Portugal’s imperial economy, in the short term the only way to preserve the commerce from that colony during the fighting with the Dutch in the empire, and to prevent their continuing seizure of Portuguese sugar laden vessels, was to pay an indemnity to the Dutch republic and its West India Company for the loss of its Brazilian colony. After long negotiation and threats of a Dutch blockade of Lisbon, the final peace treaty between Portugal and the Netherlands in 1661, and a supplementary treaty of 1669 required Portugal to pay an indemnity of 4 million cruzados, much of which was actually provided by duty free Portuguese salt from Setúbal.21 Salt was an item much desired by the Dutch, and for which there was already a well-established trade.22 The strategy of paying in the long term by placing a lien on an existing resource or flow of income had often been used by the Portuguese crown as a way to finance its objectives despite its limited financial assets.23 The result here was that in the short term, Setúbal salt paid for the protection and persistence of the Atlantic empire, although at the cost of losing Ceylon and other parts of its Asian possessions as well as concessions made to Dutch trade.24

The importance of copper for Portuguese imperial objectives had continued during the period of economic downturn for sugar in the last half of the seventeenth century. After the acclamation of Dom João IV in 1640, and the reopening of trade with formerly prohibited nations, Swedish and Dutch ships began to visit Setúbal and Aveiro to carry away the famous Portuguese salt, widely preferred to French and Biscayan varieties because of its pure white color. That trade had flourished, and during the decade of the 1640s there was little that Spain could do to disrupt Swedish-Portuguese commercial exchange since Sweden was an enemy of the Habsburg Empire and, therefore, also of the Catholic Monarchy. Nevertheless, Swedish requests for direct trade with the Portuguese colonies, continued to fall on deaf ears as Portugal sought to maintain sole control of its colonial commerce.

Much changed, however, after the peace of Westphalia in 1648. Despite Axel Oxenstierna’s efforts to have Portugal present in the treaty negotiations, Spain successfully blocked the participation of “rebellious” Portugal, and Sweden, like its ally France, was not disposed to sacrifice the gains of peace for the interests of its former, but now less useful, Lusitanian ally.25 Spain’s monarch Felipe IV and his principal minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, knew how to use that fact to their advantage, and to conduct a successful political and diplomatic campaign on a variety of levels. With the accession of the young Queen Christina to the Swedish throne, Spain increasingly emphasized its own Gothic history while seeking better relations with Christina, who, “by the grace of God ,[was] destined to be queen of the Swedes, Goths and Vandals.”26 During the negotiations at Westphalia, Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, a distinguished Spanish diplomat and intellectual who in 1645 had published his La corona gótica, castellana y austriaca struck up a friendship with the Swedish diplomat Schering Rosenhane. That relationship reflected the growing influence of Spain at the Swedish court.27 Then too, the arrival of Antonio Pimentel del Prado at the Swedish court in 1652 brought a significant improvement in Spanish representation. Pimentel became an intimate councilor to the young queen. His published correspondence, reveals him as a subtle and effective diplomat who from the moment of his arrival, used his influence to, in his own words “undercut the negotiations of the rebel king of Portugal.28 For example on 7 September 1652 he wrote to Phillip IV about his efforts to interfere in the relationship between the queen and the Portuguese, and to convince her of the advantages of better relations with Spain. Pimentel wrote:

“It seemed a good opportunity to talk to her about the Rebel of Portugal, telling her that her vassals did not need to go to that kingdom for salt which is the thing that most obliges them to deal with the Portuguese because the coasts of Galicia and Viscaya are closer, and from them the same amount of salt can be had for less costs and in less time than in Portugal.”29

Pimentel also understood that his objective had to be pursued carefully. He wrote to Phillip IV from Stockholm on 2 November 1652 that the queen was of “subtle intelligence and very devoted to the welfare of her state and her subjects for whose benefit she would spare no effort, and thus I believe that one must proceed with great circumspection and care in dealing with her in all things.”30

As Spanish influence increased, Queen Christina’s image at the court in Spain improved. There the “gifts (prendas)” of the Queen caused admiration. One account by an anonymous Spanish cleric found her “simpática”, “energetic,” “almost supernatural”, and not very feminine– her voice and gestures that of a man, “an ideal king in skirts (faldas).”31 Described as just, courteous, intellectual, powerful, a Maecenas of the arts a stupor mundi, this ecclesiastic observer found her only fault to be “her lack of the true religion.” In the streets and in the corridors of state as well, her image was celebrated as the “Hope of the North (Esperanza del Norte),” a sobriquet with millenarian implications. The “Avisos” of Jerónimo Barrionuevo for the years 1652-58 are full of gossip, rumors, and positive notices about her majesty and intellect, rumors about her library of 50,000 volumes, her intention to visit the Spanish court, or after her conversion, to become a nun at the convent of the Descalzas in Madrid.32

Spanish influence on the Queen grew, and that of Portugal declined. Although as late as 1651 she was still seeking the right to trade directly with Brazil and Goa and expand trade with Portugal, she was more invested in increasing commerce with Spain.33 In 1653, supporters of Felipe IV, probably employed by Pimentel even dared to invade the residence of the Portuguese ambassador in Stockholm with seeming impunity. The final blow was her surprising and abrupt severing of relations with Portugal and expulsion of its ambassador. Only ten days before her abdication of the Swedish throne Christina wrote:

“I order Linde [palace courtier] that he make known on my behalf to the resident of the intrusive king of Portugal that his service at this court is useless as I have resolved to no longer recognize the Duke of Bragança as king of Portugal, since that title belongs only to Philip IV, king of Spain and his successors, and I will always consider the said Duke as an unworthy usurper . . . and that the prince, my successor, will treat him in the same manner as me.”34

The core of this missive reproduces exactly the arguments that the jurists and supporters of the Habsburgs had been using against the Duke of Bragança since 1640, and seems to directly reflect the influence of Pimentel del Prado, the Spanish ambassador.35 Portugal’s representative, António da Silva e Sousa and his staff were forced to move to Hamburg, and then to Amsterdam. Rather than anger or panic, however, the Portuguese response was temperate. A few months after the Queen had abdicated (Uppsala, 6 June 1654), and then under Spanish protection later converted to Catholicism, Dom João IV sought to renew relations with Christina’s successor. He sent a letter to her cousin who took the throne as Charles X, promising that “the ships that from here forward come to my kingdoms will encounter there the good treatment that they have always received, and even better, if better might even be possible.”36 To Silva e Sousa, his representative who returned to Stockholm, the Portuguese king emphasized that “after reputation, commerce is the most useful thing that can be gained from the friendship with that kingdom as experience has revealed.”37

Despite Christina’s warning that her successor would also reject the Bragança claim to the Portuguese crown, Sweden still needed its trade with both Spain and Portugal, and thus favored neither.38 The new king almost immediately made clear that he was not inclined to break relations with Portugal, and Christina herself did not push the matter any further.39 Subsequently, in fact, Christina’s relations to the Spanish Hapsburgs had become strained after 1656, and then after Portugal and Spain had come to terms (1668), she demonstrated continuing common interests and affinity with Bragança supporters, especially because of the millenarian expectations that she shared with many of them. Nevertheless, since she was no longer queen, and after 1655, resided in Rome, she had no further role in relations between Sweden and Portugal. Although the two monarchies still traded, Portuguese interests were represented by only a consul, and there was no formal exchange of envoys between the two countries from 1659-1662 despite common interests such as enmity toward the Dutch. Sweden continued to press for trading rights to Brazil and São Tomé, and Portugal negotiated for the continued provision of Swedish warships and armaments. This diplomatic hiatus with Sweden probably contributed to the growing Portuguese dependence on commercial and diplomatic ties to England.40

The threat to the Portuguese economy that Christina’s withdrawal of recognition had created apparently did not affect the supply of copper, most of which was still carried by the Dutch since they were allied to Portugal at the time, at least in Europe. Even though the Dutch West India company could have sought to limit the supply of copper to Portugal and its Brazilian colony as a way to cripple Portuguese Brazil’s sugar production and its competition, the fact that the copper trade and much of the sugar trade remained in the hands of private merchants and not in the control of the Dutch West India Company determined that these trades did not diminish. Moreover, even when after the Treaty of Múnster (1648) the rebellious provinces of the Netherlands concluded a peace with Spain and an active commerce between them began again, Portugal had other Baltic sources that could bring it the needed grain, naval supplies, armaments, and copper that were essential to its struggle for independence and for the maintenance of its empire.41 Evidence of the continuous access to copper in Portuguese Brazil is provided by the records of copper purchases made by the Jesuit sugar mill Engenho Sergipe do Conde in Bahia in which the price remained relatively stable throughout the first half of the seventeenth century at between 200 to 300 réis per pound. The occasional rise in price apparently due to manipulations of supply by the Swedish royal monopoly, rather than shortages in Brazil. In fact, a decrease in price during the sugar harvest (safra) of 1655-56 following Queen Christina’s break of relations with Portugal seems to confirm that Portugal was able to maintain its access to this essential commodity.

The apparent ability of Brazil to maintain its access to copper underlines another aspect of Portugal’s mercantile strategy for survival after 1641, and the importance of its relations to northern Europe. Iberia already had a long medieval tradition of trade with the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic sea42 Portugal’s early modern trade with Sweden and the Netherlands was paralleled by an active commerce with a number of Baltic cities such as Lübeck, Glückstadt, and Danzig, but the most important of which was Hamburg. That port had maintained an active trade to Iberia prior to, and during the time Portugal was part of the Iberian Catholic Monarchy, exporting primarily grains, textiles, and Hungarian copper while importing spices, sugar and salt, but after the Portuguese rebellion, the nature of the trade shifted. Sweden began to replace Hungary as the major source of copper during the Thirty Years War. In the 1630s only about 10% of Hamburg’s exports to Portugal had been raw metals (copper and iron), metal products, or armaments, but by 1647-48, those items became over a third of the trade.43 Sugar alone became almost 72% of Hamburg’s imports from Portugal.44 Commercial agents of both nations established their legitimacy as resident alien merchants, in the other country, paying taxes and contractually constrained in their mobility, but also permitted certain rights in terms of religious practices and business dealings.

Here, we should emphasize that in Hamburg as in Amsterdam there was a substantial community of people of “the nation,” that is “New Christians,” or conversos, the descendants of converted Jews who had left Spain or Portugal because of laws of exclusion and persecution by the Inquisition.45 Many of them had become involved in international trade and had maintained networks of commerce and contacts with the Iberian world.46 Within the Catholic Monarchy itself, the Count-Duke of Olivares had improved the conditions for conversos in Spain and had brought some of them into his financial plans despite objections from various quarters that eventually contributed to his fall from favor. Nevertheless, the majority of the Sephardic communities that had taken up residence outside of Spain and Portugal, saw in the separation of Portugal, and in the Bragança need for commercial and financial capital and expertise, a possibility for a considerable improvement in their situation. The Sephardi communities in southern France, Hamburg, other Baltic cities, and Amsterdam believed the alliance of the Netherlands and Portugal against their common enemy, Spain, created a collaboration with potential benefits in terms of their financial opportunities and their social and religious position.

Those expectations, in fact, proved exaggerated in the long run, but for a few decades, and especially during the brief period of 1641-60, the Portuguese crown was willing to make financial and social concessions to gain the support of these communities and their commercial networks.47 We see the evidence of this in the mercantilist creation in Portugal of the General Company of Brazil in 1648 whose founding charter encouraged New Christian participation by excluding their investments from seizure by the Inquisition, and in the employment as a diplomatic agent of the Jesuit António de Vieira, a well-known advocate of reintegrating the New Christians into Portuguese society and encouraging the return of the New Christian expatriates and their capital to Portugal.48

Although João IV of Portugal, sorely needed the support of the Portuguese nobility and the Inquisition both of which opposed such policies, he, and later his widow, were not entirely opposed to making concessions to the expatriate New Christian merchant communities whose commercial networks were essential to Portugal’s financial survival; an attitude also supported by some of his key diplomats like the Count of Vidigueira, who represented the Bragança court in Paris, and whose translator, unofficial secretary, and confidant Manuel Fernandes Vila Real was a young New Christian expatriate with ties to the Portuguese community in Rouen.49 The Portuguese ambassador in Holland, Tristão Mendonça Furtado wrote to Dom João IV emphasizing the continued affinity that the expatriate New Christians, the nação hebrea of Amsterdam, felt toward their patria despite their persecution by the Inquisition; an attitude that was surely reinforced by their expectations that the alliance of Portugal and the Netherlands would open new commercial prospects, and perhaps improve their social acceptance. This combination of Bragança need and New Christian expectations produced the seeming anomaly of concessions of nobility or gowns of knighthood in the military Order of Christ to about 70 New Christians in the period 1641-70, and even to a few who were now practicing Jews living abroad.50 These rewards made in recognition of their financial and commercial services, in fact, at times had been essential to the operations of the diplomatic effort. Cases in point being the actions Duarte Nunes da Costa in Hamburg, and of his son, Jerónimo Nunes da Costa in Amsterdam, both of whom provided funds directly to the Portuguese ambassador and his staff, or of Diogo Lopes de Ulhoa, former sugar planter in Brazil, merchant in Antwerp, fidalgo of the royal house, member of the Amsterdam Sephardi community, and influential advisor to the Portuguese ambassadors in their negotiations with the Netherlands.51 It should be noted that to balance these concessions to the New Christians, Dom João IV never repudiated or abolished governmental debt contracted under the previous Habsburg administration, over seventy percent of which was held by the Portuguese nobility or ecclesiastic institutions; a strategy that insured the reputation of government obligations and reduced their objections to the needed social concessions made to the expatriate New Christians.52

Swedish copper, armaments, timber, and tar carried in Dutch vessels that returned to Holland, Hamburg, and other northern ports laden with Portuguese salt and Brazilian sugar in commercial arrangements made between Protestants, Catholics and Jews underlined the reality and complexity of international commerce, the irrelevance of flags of origin or religious difference, but also the particularly strong Sephardi networks in the commerce of the period.53 It is within this context that the seeming contradictions of diplomatic relations, religious politics, commercial ambitions, and millennial expectations involving Queen Christina, Sweden, and both Iberian monarchies should be seen. Despite determined resistance from their Inquisitions, elements of the nobility, and the general populations, the monarchs of both Spain and Portugal sought support and service from their resident and expatriate Sephardi communities during the period of the Bragança rebellion and the subsequent war of “Portuguese restoration” (1641-68).54 Both crowns employed agents in northern Europe to represent their competing commercial and occasionally political interests and needs. Habsburg Spain depended on conversos like Manuel de Belmonte who lived as a Jew in Amsterdam, and Manuel López Pereira who returned from Amsterdam to Madrid as a Catholic to become a confidant of Olivares, and an influential policy advisor on Flanders and Spain’s war against the rebel provinces of the Low Countries.55 There were also paradoxical cases like that of Jacob Rosales, also known as Manuel Bocarro Francés, a Portuguese New Christian physician who had written a pro-Bragança millenarian poem, but who eventually resided in Hamburg where he acted as a commercial agent for Hapsburg Spain, even after 1640.56 And, there were others like him. In fact, Christina after her abdication had resided in Antwerp in the home of Garcia de Illian, a converso contractor whom she had meet through Pimentel, and she also long depended on the financial support of Diego Teixeira, a wealthy Portuguese New Christian who had handled Spanish-Swedish relations in Antwerp, but had later converted to Judaism and became a leading figure in the Jewish community in Hamburg; a conversion to which Christina seemed indifferent, and that did not impede her occasional residence at his home in Hamburg, even after his relations with Spain had soured.57 In a similar fashion, Dom João IV of Portugal sought comparable support from these Sephardi communities in northern Europe, his diplomats often underlining the financial, informational, and commercial networking advantages that members of these communities could provide. Probably the most significant of these agents for Portugal were members of the Nunes da Costa (Curiel) family that served the crown throughout the seventeenth century, and were even granted honorific memberships in the knightly military religious orders and royal stipends despite their religious beliefs or background.58 To some extent these relationships revealed the conundrum faced by the kings of both Spain and Portugal, both of whom needed the trade networks, financial skills, and resources of the conversos, but also required the support of the nobility and the Inquisitions that opposed them.59 Nevertheless, these dealings were perhaps not as strange or contradictory as they appear, since even before the Portuguese rebellion of 1640, and the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, Sephardic merchants in southern France, Amsterdam, Hamburg and other Baltic towns had served as intermediaries in the illegal trade that had continued between the Netherlands and Iberia. In fact, the somewhat less restrictive policy in Iberia in this period paralleled a more general acceptance of Jewish communities in most of western Europe as was evidenced by the readmission of Jews to various cities in Germany, and to England by 1656. That openness or tolerance, although it eventually waned by the 1690s, had been generated mostly by practical commercial and financial considerations, but alongside these was also deeply held multi-denominational Christian millennial expectations which often involved the presence of, and eventual conversion of the Jews.60 Although many Christians also opposed these ideas, such millenarian sentiments could be manipulated with other goals in mind. For example, the Sephardi rabbi of Amsterdam Menasseh Ben Israel, whose own millenarian text The Hope of Israel began to circulate in England in 1650 and whose approaches to Sweden and England for Jewish resettlement underlined pragmatic advantages, was not oblivious to Christian millenarian hopes, even though he was no advocate for their goal of Jewish conversions.61

Sweden too had considered the admission of Jews although Oxenstierna’s Council of State could not find enough economic benefit in their settlement to balance the Lutheran clergy’s objections. Nevertheless, Queen Christiana had long exhibited a definite philosemitic attitude, learning Hebrew, employing a Jewish physician, dealing with converso bankers in Antwerp for financial reasons, and sharing her deep interest in messianic and millenarian beliefs and expectations in correspondence with rabbi Menasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam and with the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère.62 The contact with La Peyrère was particularly important because his Du Rappel des Juifs (1643) had expressed a kind of “marrano eschatology” that made the presence of Jews and their eventual conversion essential to his millennial project. That book was in Christina’s extensive library, and she was also attracted to La Peyrère’s argument that a royal political messiah would precede and pave the way for the arrival of the spiritual messiah.63

After her abdication, and conversion to Catholicism in 1654, Christina moved to Rome and established a court where in the heated prophetic and millenarian atmosphere of the mid-seventeenth century, she began to see a role for herself as that “political messiah” who could prepare the way for a new millennial age as the “Agiatrix of Peace.”64 But, to do so, she needed a crown. In this period of heated millenarian expectations that were shared across religions and denominations, and in which her own Jewish physician and her financial agent had become ardent followers of Sabbatai Sevi, who had been widely accepted in Jewish communities as the messiah, Christina’s own religious conversion from Lutheran to Catholic made little difference as far as her eschatology was concerned. She was, after all, the daughter of Gustavus Aldophus who had seen himself as the “Midnight Lion” who would defeat the Papacy and the Eagle of the Holy Roman empire, and bring an eternal peace, according to the prophecy of Paracelsus.65 After her abdication and conversion the Catholicism, and in a period of solar eclipses and the comet of 1652 that generated a veritable explosion of tracts of a millenarian nature, Lutheran expectations shifted to her successor Charles Gustavus. These hopes provided an opportunity for Portugal to reinforce the new Swedish monarch’s rejection of Christina’s break in relations with the Braganza regime. In 1655, Antonio de Silva e Souza, Portugal’s representative in Sweden published in Stockholm, Ivizio o Vaticinio Politico al Noble Reyno de Svecia, a text in Spanish designed to flatter the new king, who the author referred to as a “valiente caudillo” (valient leader). Silva e Sousa, trained as a lawyer, and a loyal supporter of the Bragança regime, used this text to emphasize the judicial responsibilities of a king to his subjects, and the new Swedish king’s ability to do so. He also made clear to a broad audience, the failure of Spanish kings to provide justice to Portugal, a failure that justified the Bragança cause. To this argument he added the common interests of Sweden and Portugal.66

Christina’s own millenarist ambitions, however, remained firm. While her political aspirations to become perhaps the vicereine of Flanders or Naples with Spanish backing were discussed with, and probably promoted by, Pimentel, by 1656, her popularity and usefulness to Spain was in decline. In Rome, she became involved in Vatican politics and began to court support from the French ambassador. A visit to Paris in that year during which she was warmly welcomed by Cardinal Mazarin with whom she discussed the possibility of assuming the crown of Naples or Sicily with French backing, made clear a shift in her alliances and cost her support in Spain.67 When the playwright Calderon de la Barca penned an auto sacramental about her conversion to Catholicism, Phillip IV prevented its performance because, “ the matters of this lady are no longer in the same state as they were at first.”68 Ultimately her ambitions were frustrated by political realities, and when Spain and France concluded the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, she had little to offer either. In a way, she had become politically irrelevant, but her value to the papacy as an icon of the Catholic reformation assured its favor. The mini-court and cultural salon she developed in Rome became an intellectual and spiritual focal point that drew her toward individuals and ideas that satisfied her millenarian and mystic interests and aspirations. Influenced by Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits in her conversion to Catholicism, and joined in Rome as her confessor by her former ambassador to Portugal, Lars Skytte who had become a Franciscan, Christina by the 1670s was increasingly drawn toward those who shared those millenarian expectations.69 No one did so better than the Portuguese Jesuit Padre Antonio Vieira, whose own struggle against the Portuguese Inquisition and in favor of the reintegration of New Christians paralleled Christina’s tolerant attitude toward Jews. Moreover, his writings incorporated a long Portuguese prophetic providential tradition into a national messianism centered on the role that Dom Joao IV could play in the creation of a “Fifth Empire,” and then in Portugal’s destiny to reunite all of Christendom had appealed to the former queen.70 In Rome, Vieira preached for Christina and dedicated a sermon to her, but he declined her invitation in 1674 to become the Queen’s resident preacher, and did so again in 1679, despite the urgings of his Jesuit superiors.71 He returned to Brazil. Their common faith and their shared millenarian expectations were not enough to hold him. The former queen’s hope to become a providential monarch facilitating millenarian prospects remained unfulfilled, and those expectations slowly diminished in Europe as a new century approached. Trade between Portugal, Sweden and other Baltic states exchanging salt, wine, and Atlantic colonial products for grain, metals, timber and maritime materials not only continued, but grew.72 Copper had remained essential for armaments. The final major battles of Portugal’s war for independence from Spain (Ameixial, 1663; Montes Claros, 1665) finally led to peace in 1668. Portugal continued to supply Sweden’s growing demand for sugar without a problem. Despite fluctuations, its price remained relatively stable from 1624-1694 while the general price index in Sweden was rising.73 Brazil remained a major source. In 1700, French agents sought to convince Swedish sugar refiners to end their dependence on Brazilian sugar in favor of France’s Caribbean colonies, and by the 1730s, Portuguese Brazil no longer remained the principal origin of Sweden’s sugar imports.74 Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century, the commerce between Portugal and Sweden expanded considerably.75 It did so, however, within a new diplomatic and commercial context in which the former political alliance between these countries no longer played the role it had in the mid-seventeenth century.

This complex story of European diplomatic, political and military maneuvering for three decades in the mid-seventeenth century by second rank or declining imperial powers might seem to have a limited importance for a broader global history. Nevertheless, the history of the unbraiding of the first global empire and of the multifaceted political and commercial relations that accompanied that process questions long-accepted assumptions about the early development of capitalism, the role of colonial trades in it, and the study of commodity chains a global history.76 In this case, the linking of Japanese and Swedish copper and Baltic grains, pitch and timber to the sale of Portuguese salt, Brazilian sugar, South Asian spices, and African slaves demonstrates the difficulty of separating the commodity chains of “luxury” goods from basic or utilitarian items. Portugal’s need for copper and the manner in which that metal was acquired demonstrates the ways in which mundane goods like salt and copper and exotic goods such as sugar and spices were so intertwined that separating their study makes little sense. It also questions an over-emphasis on the expansion of “luxury” items such as spices, silk, tobacco, or sugar as the key to the growth of demand as the principle driver of mercantile expansion by diminishing the role of state mercantile control of large scale purchases. Moreover, the idea that colonial areas were always the suppliers of raw materials to Europe was inverted in this case by the export of central European and then Swedish copper and copper based metals to Africa and India, where instead of a dumping ground for baubles, Europeans often found a well-informed and highly selective demand. The differing value of copper between Africa and Europe based on cultural, social, and esthetic perceptions makes clear that commodity chain analysis can not be limited to the economic dimensions of supply and demand, or those of production and market. Cultural, political, diplomatic, fiscal. monetary, and military needs and decisions had much to do with the way in which these specific links became articulated. Finally, in addition to the relations between Sweden, Spain and Portugal, the varying and shifting roles of the Dutch United Provinces and England as transporters, commercial intermediaries, contrabandists, rivals, political opponents and allies can not be separated from the narrative of the mercantile contacts and commodity exchanges between the Baltic lands and the Iberian monarchies and their global empires.