Goa--the great Portuguese capital of the East--had become the centre of
a vast trade with India, Ormuz[102] in the Persian Gulf of trade with
Persia, while all the spices[103] of the East flowed into Lisbon and
even Pekin[104] had been reached.

From all these lands, from Africa, from Brazil, and from the East,
endless wealth poured into Lisbon, nearly all of it into the royal
treasury, so that Dom Manoel became the richest sovereign of his time.

In some other ways he was less happy. To please the Catholic Kings, for
he wished to marry their daughter Isabel, widow of the young Prince
Affonso, he expelled the Jews and many Moors from the country. As they
went they cursed him and his house, and Miguel, the only child born to
him and Queen Isabel, and heir not only to Portugal but to all the
Spains, died when a baby. Isabel had died at her son's birth, and
Manoel, still anxious that the whole peninsula should be united under
his descendants, married her sister Maria. His wish was realised--but
not as he had hoped--for his daughter Isabel married her cousin Charles
V. and so was the mother of Philip II., who, when Cardinal King Henry
died in 1580, was strong enough to usurp the throne of Portugal.

Being so immensely rich, Dom Manoel was able to cover the whole land
with buildings. Damiao de Goes, who died in 1570, gives a list of
sixty-two works paid for by him. These include cathedrals, monasteries,
churches, palaces, town walls, fortifications, bridges, arsenals, and
the draining of marshes, and this long list does not take in nearly all
that Dom Manoel is known to have built.

Nearly all these churches and palaces were built or added to in that
peculiar style now called Manoelino. Some have seen in Manoelino only a
development of the latest phase of Spanish Gothic, but that is not
likely, for in Spain that latest phase lasted for but a short time, and
the two were really almost contemporaneous.

Manoelino does not always show the same characteristics. Sometimes it is
exuberant Gothic mixed with something else, something peculiar, and this
phase seems to have grown out of a union of late Gothic and Moorish.
Sometimes it is frankly naturalistic, and this seems to have been
developed out of the first; and sometimes Gothic and renaissance are
used together. In this phase, the composition is still always Gothic,
though the details may be renaissance. At times, of course, all phases
are found together, but those which m