Dom Francisco Manuel de Mello
| Francisco Manuel de Mello | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 23 November 1608 Lisbon, Kingdom of Portugal |
| Died |
24 August 1666 (aged 57) Lisbon |
| Occupation | Writer, soldier |
Francisco Manuel de Mello (23 November 1608 – 24 August 1666), was a Portuguese writer.
De Mello, a connection on his father's side of the royal house of Braganza, was a native of Lisbon. He studied the humanities at the Jesuit College of St. Antão, where he showed a precocious talent, and tradition says that at the age of fourteen he composed a poem in ottava rima to celebrate the recovery of Bahia from the Dutch, while at seventeen he wrote a scientific work, Concordancias mathematicas.
The death of his father, Dom Luiz de Mello, drove him early to soldiering, and having joined a contingent for the Flanders war, he found himself in the historic storm of January 1627, when the pick of the Portuguese fleet suffered shipwreck in the Bay of Biscay. He spent much of the next ten years of his life in military routine work in the Iberian Peninsula, varied by visits to the court of Madrid, where he contracted a friendship with the Spanish poet Quevedo and earned the favor of the powerful minister Olivares. In 1637 the latter despatched him in company with the conde de Linhares on a mission to pacify the revolted city of Évora, and on the same occasion the duke of Braganza, afterwards King John IV (for whom he acted as confidential agent at Madrid), employed him to satisfy Philip III of Portugal of his loyalty to the Philippine Dynasty.
In the following year he suffered a short imprisonment in Lisbon. In 1639 he was appointed colonel of one of the regiments raised for service in Flanders, and in June that year he took a leading part in defending A Coruña against a French fleet commanded by the archbishop of Bordeaux, while in the following August he directed the embarcation of an expeditionary force of 10,000 men when Admiral Oquendo sailed with seventy ships to meet the French and Dutch. He came safely through the naval defeat in the channel suffered by the Spaniards at the hands of Maarten Tromp, and on the outbreak of the Catalan revolt became chief of the staff to the commander-in-chief of the royal forces, and was selected to write an account of the campaign, the Historia de la guerra de Cataluña, which became a Spanish classic.
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