D. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal and 1st Count of Oeiras, known as the Marquis of Pombal, was a Portuguese despotic statesman and diplomat who effectively ruled the Portuguese Empire from 1750 to 1777 as chief minister to King Joseph I. A strong promoter of the absolute power and influenced by the Age of Enlightenment, Pombal led Portugal's recovery from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and reformed the kingdom's administrative, economic, and ecclesiastical institutions. During his lengthy ministerial career, Pombal accumulated and exercised autocratic power. His cruel persecution of the Portuguese lower classes led him to be known as Nero of Trafaria, a village he ordered to be burned with all its inhabitants inside, after refusing to follow his orders.

The Age of Enlightenment was the intellectual and philosophical movement that occurred in Europe in the 17th and the 18th centuries. The Enlightenment featured a range of social ideas centered on the value of knowledge learned by way of rationalism and of empiricism and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity, constitutional government and the formal separation of church and state.