The Portuguese Crown Jewels: Lost, Stolen, Scattered 

 

 

 

Somewhere in the Louvre, in a gallery called the Galerie d’Apollon, sits a pale yellow diamond of 55 carats. It’s one of the most famous gems in France. What the label doesn’t quite emphasize is that this stone began its European life as a Portuguese treasure. Looted by a desperate pretender to the throne, sold to fund a war he was already losing, and never returned.

 That was in 1581. In the four centuries since, the Portuguese royal has been destroyed by earthquake, scattered by revolution, drowned in debt, and robbed in broad daylight at a museum in The Hague. It has been rebuilt from the gold fields of Brazil, locked in a palace vault for over a hundred years, and lost again before anyone could look at it properly.

What survived is extraordinary. What was lost is almost impossible to believe. Welcome to Jewelry Pleasure. If you’re new here, this channel is about the stories behind royal and historic jewelry. Not just the stones and settings, but the lives they passed through. Today, we’re going deep into one of the least known and most dramatic collections in Europe, the Portuguese Crown Jewels.

 Subscribe and hit the bell so you don’t miss what comes next. The diamond that got away, the Sancy Stone. In 1580, the Portuguese throne fell vacant. The legitimate heir had died young and without children, and three claimants moved to fill the gap. The one who lost, Antonio, Prior of Crato, fled west to France, taking with him as much of Portugal’s loose treasury as he could carry.

 He was received at the French court by Catherine de Medici, and he began selling. The most consequential sale was a stone called the Sancy diamond, 55.23 carats, pale yellow, Indian in origin, almost certainly from the Golconda mines. It passed first to a French nobleman named Nicolas de Harlay, Seigneur de Sancy, who gave the stone his name.

 From Sancy, it went to the Duke de Sully. Eventually, it entered the French crown jewels, where it remained through kings and revolutions and republics. It is there now, in the Louvre, under French ownership, >> [music] >> quietly displayed without much fanfare about where it came from. Antonio never recovered the Portuguese throne.

He spent the rest of his life in exile, trying to fund a reconquest with the proceeds of a collection that was no longer his to sell. The stone he sold bought him nothing, not in the end. The crown that holds no gemstones, the crown of João VI. Most European crowns are exhibitions of wealth, rubies, sapphires, pearls, diamonds set into gold by the finest craftsmen the continent could produce.

The crown of João VI, Portugal’s only surviving royal crown, contains not a single gemstone. Pure gold, silver, red velvet, an iron armature beneath, and nothing else. It was made in 1817, not in Lisbon or Paris or London, but in Rio de Janeiro, in the workshop of a royal jeweler named Dom Antonio Gomes de A. Silva.

Portugal’s royal family had fled there 10 years earlier, escaping Napoleon’s advancing army with 36 ships and whatever they could carry. The court of one of Europe’s oldest monarchies had relocated to the edge of the Atlantic empire. And from those workshops in Rio, they had to rebuild the regalia almost from scratch.

 The crown’s form is imperial, eight half arches meeting at a monde surmounted by a cross. The base worked in baroque and rococo motifs. It is an accomplished piece of goldsmithing. But the absence of stones is the detail that stops you. The explanation most historians accept connects it to something that happened 170 years before the crown was made.

In 1646, King João IV had laid the actual Portuguese crown at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary at Vila Viçosa and declared her the true queen of Portugal. From that moment forward, no Portuguese monarch was physically crowned. They were acclaimed, the regalia displayed beside them, not placed upon them.

 The gold crown you see at Ajuda today was never worn. It was carried. It was used at seven acclamations. João VI himself in 1818. Then Pedro the IV. Maria the II. Pedro the V. Luís the I. Carlos the I and finally Manuel the II in 1908. Manuel the II was the last king of Portugal. He was 18 years old and the crown had just been beside his head at the ceremony when his father and elder brother were shot dead in the street.

Made in Rio, the scepter of the armillary sphere. The crown has a companion piece that deserves more attention than it usually gets, the Scepter of the Armillary Sphere, made in Rio de Janeiro the same year, 1817, by a craftsman named Inácio Luís de Castro Coroa to a design by the same royal jeweler who made the crown.

It’s 84 cm long, pure gold, 648 g. At its top sits an armillary sphere, the interlocking rings that represent the celestial model of the universe, a symbol chosen by King Manuel I more than three centuries earlier to mark Portugal’s seafaring ambitions. Below it, the arms of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves, a country that at that moment technically stretched from Lisbon to Rio to Macau.

The scepter was made on one continent to represent an empire that spanned three oceans. The craftsman in Rio looked at the armillary sphere, a symbol of Portugal’s claim on the known world, and hammered it in gold in a city that wouldn’t be part of Portugal much longer. Brazil became independent in 1822, 5 years after the scepter was finished.

There is also the Scepter of the Dragon, made later, in 1828, in London, gold, surmounted by the Braganza Dragon, commissioned for Queen Maria II to mark the new constitutional regime. It was made in London because the family was once again in exile. The country it was made to symbolize was simultaneously fighting a civil war.

Stars that shimmer, the Diadem and Necklace of the Stars. If you look up Portuguese royal jewelry, one image comes up more than any other, a tiara of five-pointed stars, each set en tremblant, mounted on tiny springs so so every movement sends the stars shimmering independently, like something caught in slow light.

 This is the Diadem of the Stars, commissioned in 1863 by Queen Maria Pia of Savoy, consort of King Luis I. She was 14 when she married him and arrived in Lisbon from Italy. Within a year, she had engaged the Portuguese court jeweler Estevão de Sousa and begun designing. The full parure, the matching set, was vast.

 Nine large stars forming the tiara, a necklace of smaller stars, brooches, shoulder pins, earrings, bracelet, comb. 69 stars in total. The diamonds came from the royal stockpile, Brazilian stones, colorless and pink. Some recycled from a tiara that had belonged to Maria II, some from a jeweled walking stick. Some from a large fancy yellow stone the collection called a Maria Pia diamond.

Many of the stones had never been seen in public. They had just been sitting in the royal vault. When Luis I died in 1889, Maria Pia passed the star parure to her daughter-in-law, Queen Amelie. Amelie wore the tiara and the brooches many times. She also expanded the set, adding a diamond riviere to the base, inserting extra rows of stars just before 1908.

Just before the assassination. The tiara and necklace survived. Several smaller stars were dismantled in the 20th century and used to make other pieces. Others vanished in the theft of 2002. What remains is at the Royal Treasure Museum in Lisbon, still shimmering on its mounts. The Emerald Bow, Queen Maria Barbara’s bodice ornament.

In the mid-18th century, someone, most likely at a jeweler’s workshop in Lisbon, sat down with 31 Colombian emeralds and began setting them into a bow. The result is the Queen Maria Barbara emerald and diamond bow bodice ornament, and it is extraordinary in scale. The central emerald alone weighs 47.91 carats.

 The full parcel of emeralds totals 301 carats. From the base of the bow hangs a diamond tassel anchored by a 24-carat diamond. It was commissioned for Maria Barbara de Bragança, a Portuguese-born princess who became Queen of Spain as the wife of Fernando VI. After her death, the piece returned to Portugal. For scale, this is one of the largest 18th-century bodice ornaments that still exists in any collection in the world.

The emeralds are Colombian, almost certainly from the Muzo mine, the same source that sent the finest stones to the Mughal emperors and the courts of Madrid and Versailles for three centuries. Portugal controlled those routes. The earthquake of 1755 nearly ended that control entirely. That earthquake, on All Saints’ Day 1755, destroyed the Paço da Ribeira, the royal palace, along with almost everything that had been accumulated since the reign of Manuel I.

 The Emerald Bow survived because it had already traveled to Spain. >> The Rococo masterpiece, King Jose I’s diamond snuffbox. In 1755, the year of the earthquake, a Parisian goldsmith named Jean Ducrollay was working on a commission for the Portuguese court, a snuffbox for King Jose I. The earthquake that destroyed the palace in November of that year actually interrupted the work, but the box was finished regardless, completed around 1755 to 1756, and it remains one of the finest surviving pieces of Rococo goldsmithing in any collection. Gold and silver,

hundreds of diamonds, emeralds, and at the center, a 30-carat Brazilian diamond. At a time when Indian mines were producing less, and the Minas Gerais fields were transforming the supply of rough stones across Europe, a 30-carat Brazilian diamond in a royal gift object was a statement of imperial wealth that everyone in a Paris salon would have understood.

 Ducrollay worked with Louis Roussel under the direction of Pierre Andre Jacquemin, jeweler to Louis the 15th. The piece that came back to Lisbon was the product of the finest atelier in Europe, built around a stone pulled from the Portuguese colonies in South America. It is now in the Royal Treasure Museum, small enough to hold in one hand, detailed enough to study for an hour.

Queen Maria Pia, if you want a queen, you have to pay for her. Maria Pia of Savoy arrived in Lisbon at 14, the youngest daughter of Victor Emmanuel II, the man who unified Italy. Her godfather was Pope Pius the 9th, who gave her a golden rose at her baptism. She married Luís I on the 6th of October, 1862, and for the next 27 years she accumulated jewelry, dresses, debts.

She was famous for changing costumes three times at a single masked ball. She smoked expensive cigars. She told the Portuguese Parliament when they complained about the royal household spending, “If you want a queen, you have to pay for her.” Among her wedding gifts that year, the Castellani archaeological parure from the city of Rome, 33 pieces in Greek, Etruscan, and Roman revival style, designed by the legendary Roman firm Castellani, who were the 19th century’s greatest revivalists of ancient jewelry.

A coral tiara from Naples, convertible into three brooches and a comb. The founders’ jewel from the people of Naples, yellow gold, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, pearls, and eventually Fabergé pieces from King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, her nephew. She also left behind something less flattering. 369 pieces of her personal jewelry pledged as collateral to Henri Burnay, Portugal’s richest banker, against loans she had taken in her later years.

 When she died in Italian exile on the 5th of July, 1911, 8 months after the monarchy fell, the bank held the collection. In July 1912, the Bank of Portugal auctioned every piece. The total realized roughly $275,000 in 1912 dollars. The pieces scattered to buyers across Europe and America. Portugal spent decades trying to buy them back.

 In 1998, they recovered one, a diamond and pearl bow brooch made by the Turin firm Musy, originally a wedding gift from her father in 1862. One piece from 369. The last queen’s tiara, the Dom Luis diamond tiara. Queen Amélie of Orléans arrived in Portugal in 1886 to marry the future Carlos I. Her father-in-law, King Luis I, commissioned a tiara for her from the Portuguese crown jewelers Leitão & Irmão, a firm that is still in business today, still on the same street in Lisbon.

The Dom Luis diamond tiara cost $10,000 at the time. Hundreds of diamonds in silver and gold, fleur-de-lis motifs separated by rows of collets, the largest stones rising to the peaks of the design. Amélie wore it at the acclamation of Carlos I in December 1889, at state openings of Parliament, and in the famous 1905 portrait by Vittorio Matteo Corcos.

 On the 1st of February, 1908, her husband, King Carlos, and their eldest son, Crown Prince Luis Filipe, were shot dead by anarchists in the Praça do Comércio. Their second son, aged 18, became King Manuel II. Two and a half years later, the monarchy fell. Amélie fled with Manuel to Gibraltar, then to England. She took the tiara.

 In exile in France and later Britain, Amélie lived for another 41 years. She died in 1951 at 86. In her will, she left the tiara to her godson, Duke of Braganza, the heir to the now abolished throne. It disappeared from public record for over 40 years. On the 13th of May, 1995, at the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon, the same monastery where Vasco da Gama is buried, Isabel de Herédia wore the tiara at her wedding to the Duke of Braganza.

 It was the first royal wedding in Portugal since 1886, the year the tiara was made. The Dom Luís tiara is still in the private Braganza collection today. The theft at The Hague. What was lost in 2002? In late 2002, 15 pieces from the Portuguese collection traveled to the museum in The Hague for an exhibition called The Diamond from rough stone to gem.

 On the morning of the 3rd of December, 2002, professional thieves broke in. They took six pieces, the six most valuable in the loan. Among what was stolen, a 138.5 carat uncut Brazilian diamond, the second largest rough stone in the royal collection, the larger of the two diamond rivière necklaces, an 18th century diamond choker, a diamond ring of João VI, several diamond pins, and a jeweled cane knob.

None of it has ever been recovered. That was more than 23 years ago. The Dutch government paid 6 million euros in reparation. The stones themselves, with all the history that made them irreplaceable, were almost certainly cut apart and repolished, which is the standard fate of high-value stolen royal jewels.

 The 138.5 carat rough diamond from Minas Gerais, which had survived earthquakes and revolutions and bank auctions and a century in a vault, is gone. The museum that took 226 years to open, a jewel today. Construction of the Ajuda National Palace began in 1795. It was never finished. Napoleonic invasions, civil war, chronic underfunding.

 Only about a third of the original neoclassical plan was ever completed. The jewels sat in its vaults for over 100 years, visible only to scholars and the occasional dignitary. In June 2022, 226 years after construction began, the Museu do Tesouro Real, Royal Treasure Museum, opened in the long-derelict west wing. The designers built what they called the largest safe box in the world, a gold-colored high-security structure inside the old palace walls, with airport-style screening, 11 thematic galleries, and roughly 1,000 objects on display.

Among those objects, the gemless gold crown of João VI, the star diadem that Maria Pia commissioned at 15, the emerald bow from the 18th century, the snuffbox from Paris, the 35.80 carat rough diamond from Minas Gerais, the largest remaining rough stone since the 138.5 carat one was stolen, a 22-kg gold nugget from Brazil, one of the largest in the world.

 There is also a golden rose in the diplomatic gifts gallery, given to Maria Pia as a baptismal gift by Pope Pius the IX. Only two such roses are in the entire collection. Gifts of that kind are extraordinarily rare. She received hers before she was old enough to walk. The Portuguese crown jewels won’t win any superlatives. Not the biggest, not the most dazzling, not the most photographed.

What they have instead is a survival record that almost no other collection can match, and a loss record to go with it. Twice, the entire treasure was effectively destroyed. First in 1581, when a desperate claimant fled the country selling diamonds to fund a war. Then again in 1755, when the earthquake and fire took the palace and almost everything in it.

 The collection you can see at Ajuda today was assembled from scratch, largely in a workshop in Rio de Janeiro, by a family who’d lost almost everything and were trying to look like an empire while their empire was already dissolving. And then the jewels went into the vault for a century, and the vault was finally opened, and six pieces were lent to a museum in the Netherlands and stolen in the night and never seen again.

When you stand in front of that simple, gold, gemless crown, made not in Paris or Vienna or London, but in Rio in 1817, by craftsmen at the edge of the Atlantic world, you’re looking at almost the only thing that made it through all of it. The earthquakes, the fires, the fleeing kings, the spending queens, the exile, the auctions, the thieves.