The empire in the duke’s palace: Global material culture in sixteenth-century Portugal

From the death of his father in 1532, to his own demise in 1563, Teodósio I led the wealthiest, most prominent and powerful family of the Portuguese nobility as the 5th Duke of Bragança. When he died, an extraordinary inventory was made listing the contents of the family’s main palace, in Vila Viçosa, in the southeast of Portugal. It is the largest inventory to have survived from sixteenth-century Portugal and one of the largest of the same period in Europe.
Given the exceptional wealth of information it contains, this inventory can be approached from many angles and its data can be used for the analysis of many aspects of the material, social, cultural and even political life in early modern Portugal. In this chapter I will focus on the entries that reflect the duke’s interest and involvement in the maritime voyages that the Portuguese had been engaged in since the early fifteenth century.