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On 14 December 1800, Emperor Ferdinand of Spain fell ill and was found dead in his bed, leaving no surviving children, his younger brother Luiz, Prince of Viseu became emperor, making his estranged wife Paola, Empress Paula of Spain. Living in Florence, she had taken Napoleone as a lover...

On 30 December 1777, Maximilian Joseph, Elector of Bavaria died of smallpox, leaving no children and in his will leaving the Duchy to Charles IV Theodore, Count Palatine, a scion of the senior branch of the House of Wittelsbach. Like Maximilian, Charles IV Theodore had no legitimate children to...

Here is a crude map of the world in 1756. My map making skills aren't the best so I just edited this map I found online to give readers an idea of areas of what the Portuguese dominions look like.

An important part of the transformation of New France and particularly Quebec during the 1790s would be the arrival of large numbers of refugees from Metropolitan France. These newcomers were so numerous that by 1801, one in every three inhabitants of Quebec's 237,000 inhabitants had born in...

Perhaps the most pivotal event in the modern history of New France, would be the arrival of the King of France to Quebec in 1793. The arrival of the King and his household was followed by the transplant of the the entire governing apparatus of the Ancien Regime from France, 3,300 miles west to...

On 18 July 1756, forty days after leaving Portugal, and after a brief stop on the island of Terceira, King Jose I arrived in Nova Lisboa accompanied by a fleet of 18 ships carrying with him the majority of the royal family, the court and much of their personal belongings. The Viceroy, Marcos...

On the morning of Saturday, 1 November 1755, Lisbon's inhabitants were celebrating All Saints Day, and the dozens of churches around the city were filled with the faithful. All social classes and backgrounds were present when the earth started to rumble. At around 9:30 in the morning the...

In the East, the Estado da India had been engaged it what seemed to be a never ending series of conflicts during the first half of the 18th century. Between 1737 and 1743 the Portuguese battled the Maratha who came close to seizing Goa. As a result, the Portuguese had sent 14,500 troops to Goa...

On 18 June 1737, Infante Dom Francisco, Duke of Beja, arrived in Porto Real with a flotilla of two frigates, becoming the first member of European Royal House to travel to the New World. He had been enthusiastic about naval expansion and imagined himself a latter day Prince Henry the Navigator...

Throughout the reign of King John V of Portugal, the amount of gold arriving into the kingdom from Brazil increased every year, but wars among the great powers threatened to disrupt this Transatlantic pipeline. With the king's younger brother, the Duke of Beja as the head of the Portuguese Navy...

After the installation of the republican government in France, the emigration of the nobility which had begun in 1791, had intensified with the departure of the royal family in 1793 and fall of Brest to the revolutionaries in 1794. Though the first émigrés had been members of the royal family...