ubbed "The Perfect Prince," King John II, son of Afonso V and Queen Isabel, ruled Portugal from 1481 to 1495. It was at his court that Pedro Álvares Cabral was groomed to be a nobleman. John II was born on 3 May 1455, in a palace of São Jorge castle in Lisbon. In 1471, when he was just 16, he took part in the Morocco campaign during which the Portuguese conquered the cities of Arzila and Tangier. When he was 19, his father entrusted him with the administration of Guinea and the discoveries.

John married his cousin Leonor in Setúbal on 22 January 1471, and their union produced just one child, Prince Afonso, who was born in Lisbon on 18 May 1475.
When he assumed the throne in August 1481, King John II soon began carrying out his overseas policy. He can be credited with the conception and partial realization of an ambitious plan for Portuguese expansion. He consolidated Portugal’s hold over positions in Africa, including the construction in 1482 of São Jorge da Mina Castle, in Ghana. He also ordered

the exploration of the African coast south of the equator in 1482 with a view to finding the kingdom of Prester John - as Henry the Navigator had attempted to do in the past. The main objective was to reach wealthy India and its spices. As a result, this put an end to a certain lack of definition about the path the Expansion since the times of Prince Henry. Despite having clearly outlined his plans, John died without seeing them realized.
His authoritarian political stance sparked the resistance of powerful nobles. Some of them are even believed to have started conspiring against the monarchy. This accusation was leveled against Portugal’s greatest nobleman, the Duke of Bragança, who was imprisoned and executed in Évora in 1483. The house of Bragança’s property was confiscated by the Crown. Other nobles were either convicted or fled the country.

The high aristocracy’s opposition to John II was still latent, however. A second conspiracy was led by the young Diogo, Duke of Viseu, Queen Leonor’s brother, who planned to assassinate John II in Setúbal. Apprised of the plot, the king quickly forestalled it: on 28 September 1483, he summoned the duke to that city and stabbed him to death. Other conspirators were jailed, executed or escaped into exile.
Through these stern reprisals, John II firmly established royal authority throughout the country. After

extinguishing the greatest aristocratic houses that opposed him, he began promoting other, more loyal, nobles.
In 1485, John added "lord of Guinea" to his titles to demonstrate his control of the vast regions of Africa known by that name. He obtained a great deal of wealth, particularly gold, from these dominions.
John II was extremely interested in relations with Spain, and placed great hopes on the marriage of his son, Prince Afonso, to Princess Isabel, the eldest daughter of the Catholic Kings. John II nourished the ambition of a future political unification of all the Iberian kingdoms under the Portuguese crown. However, that prospect vanished a short time later, when Prince Afonso died on

13 July 1491 at the age of 16, after being married for seven months and twenty-two days. He had fallen from his horse during a tourney by the Tagus in Santarém the day before, and died of his injuries.
As Queen Leonor could not give him any more children, the king tried to exclude from the succession his cousin and brother-in-law Manuel, Duke of Beja, who had been appointed putative heir to the throne in 1484. John strove ingloriously to designate as his heir his bastard son Jorge, born in 1481. During the final years of John’s life, he failed to overcome opposition to this move, primarily from his wife Leonor, who steadfastly upheld her brother’s rights.
In 1494, after signing the Treaty of Tordesillas (a landmark event), John II launched the attempt to reach India.

In 29 September 1495, already very ill, he signed his will, designating Manuel his successor. John II died in the town of Alvor in the Algarve on 25 October 1495.