The Story of the Nations: Portugal
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Title: The Story of the Nations: Portugal
Author: H. Morse Stephens
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Language: English
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(etext transcriber's note)
Stories of the Nations
A Series of Historical Studies intended to present in graphic
narratives the stories of the different nations that have attained
prominence in history.
In the story form the current of each national life is distinctly
indicated, and its picturesque and noteworthy periods and episodes are
presented for the reader in their philosophical relations to each other
as well as to universal history.
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FOR FULL LIST SEE END OF THIS VOLUME
PORTUGAL
[Illustration: colophon]
[Illustration: PRINCE HENRY OF PORTUGAL.
(_From an Engraving of the Miniature in the MS. of “The Discovery of
Guinea,” 1448._)]
THE STORY OF THE NATIONS
PORTUGAL
BY
H. MORSE STEPHENS
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD; OXFORD UNIVERSITY EXTENSION LECTURER
AUTHOR OF “A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION”
NEW YORK
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1891
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
_Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London_
BY T. FISHER UNWIN
Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
[Illustration: text decoration]
PREFACE.
This volume is written on a different plan to that adopted in most of
the volumes in the same Series which have preceded it, and attempts to
give a short chronological history of Portugal. An episodical history,
though more interesting than a consecutive narrative, in that it treats
only of the most striking events, demands from the reader a groundwork
of accurate knowledge. This is not given with regard to the history of
Portugal in any book in the English language with which the author is
acquainted. Dunham, who combined a history of Portugal with that of
Spain, in five volumes published in Lardner’s _Cabinet Cyclopædia_
between 1838 and 1843, based his account on Vertot’s _Révolutions de
Portugal_, first printed at Paris in 1678, and modern English standard
books of reference still make use of Dunham, and contain the old
blunders of identifying Portugal with Lusitania, recognizing the
fictitious Cortes of Lamego in 1143, regarding the victory of Ourique as
a “prodigious” victory, &c., &c. Since the time of Dunham, a few books
have been published in England bearing on special periods of Portuguese
history, such as the lives of the Marquis of Pombal and the Duke of
Saldanha, published by John Smith, Count of Carnota, and two volumes of
a _History of Portugal_, by E. MacMurdo, and which is still in progress;
but there exists no book containing a complete and trustworthy history
to which students may be referred.
Yet within the last fifty years the history of Portugal has been
entirely rewritten. The modern school of historians, which derived its
first impulsion from Niebuhr and Ranke, found a brilliant representative
in Alexandra Herculano, who saw that history could only be written after
a careful examination of contemporary documents, and who in his
_Historia de Portugal_, published between 1848 and 1853, swept away much
of the cobweb of legend which had enveloped the early history of his
country. Herculano undoubtedly owed much to Heinrich Schäfer, who wrote
the history of Portugal in the _Geschichte der Europäischen Staaten_
edited by Heeren and Ukert; but he went much further than Schäfer, and
the history of the latter is now quite out of date. The works of
Herculano and his followers have quite superseded the histories of
Lemos, Sousa Monteiro, and J. F. Pereira, which are mentioned here only
as books to be avoided by the historical student.
It is not intended to give a complete bibliography of the works of the
modern Portuguese school of historians, but the author thinks it worth
while to refer to some of the books which he has used, and which can be
recommended as trustworthy guides to those who may wish to examine
further into the history of Portugal. First with regard to documents,
the _Colleccão de Livros ineditos de Historia Portugueza_, edited by
Correa da Serra, and the _Colleccão dos principaes Auctores da Historia
Portugueza_, and the _Portugalliæ Monumenta Historica_, edited by
Herculano, contain the best editions of the old chroniclers; while
perpetual reference must be made to the _Quadro elementar das Relacões
politicas e diplomaticas de Portugal_ of the Viscount of Santarem, which
was continued by Rebello da Silva as the _Corpo diplomatico Portuguez_,
and contains in thirty-six volumes, published between 1856 and 1878, the
“_fœdera_” of Portugal up to 1640, and to the _Colleccão dos Actos
publicos celebrados entre a Coroa de Portugal e as mais Potencias desde
1640 até o Presente_, edited by J. Ferreira Borges de Castro and J.
Judice Biker. As consecutive narratives, the short history of J. P.
Oliveira Martins, and the illustrated popular history, which is the
joint work of Antonio Ennes, B. Ribeiro, E. Vidal, G. Lobato, L.
Cordeiro and Pinheiro Chagas may be read; but it would be far better to
study the more scientific works of Alexander Herculano, _Historia de
Portugal_, 4 vols., 1848-53, which goes to 1279, and _Da Origem e
Estabelecimento da Inquisicão em Portugal_, 2 vols., 1854-57; the
_Historia de Portugal pendente XVI. e XVII. Seculos_, 5 vols., 1860-71,
by L. A. Rebello da Silva; _Historia de Portugal desde os Fins do XVII.
Seculo até 1814_, 1874, by J. M. Latino Coelho; and _Historia da Guerra
civil e do Estabelecimento do Governo Parlamentar em Portugal_, 6 vols.,
1866-1881, by S. J. da Luz Soriano. Among special books of interest in
different languages may be noted _Memorias para a Historia e Theoria
das Cortes_, by the Viscount of Santarem, 1828; _Las Rainhas de
Portugal_, by F. da Fonseca Benevides, 1878; _History of the Revolutions
of Portugal from the Foundation of that Kingdom to the year 1677, with
the Letters of Sir R. Southwell during his Embassy there to the Duke of
Ormond_, by R. Carte, 1740; _Les Faux Don Sébastien_, by Miguel Martins
d’Antas, Paris, 1866; _Le Chevalier de Jant_; _Rélations de la France
avec le Portugal au temps de Mazarin_, by Jules Tessier, Paris, 1877;
and _Life of Prince Henry the Navigator_, by R. H. Major, 1868. Coming
to the history of the present century, the great _History of the
Peninsular War_, by Gen. Sir W. F. P. Napier, is justly famous in all
countries, and it is so well known that only a very few pages have been
devoted to the subject in the present volume; but reference has also
been made to the _Historia geral da Invasão dos Francezes em Portugal_,
by Accursio das Neves; to the _Excerptos Historicos relativos a Guerra
denominada da Peninsula, e as anteriores de 1801, de Roussillon e
Cataluna_, by Claudio de Chaby; and to the Wellington _Despatches_. On
the history of the civil wars the best authorities are _Memorias para a
Historia do Tempo que duron a Usurpacão de Dom Miguel_, by J. L. Freire
de Carvalho, 1841-43; _Historia de Liberdade em Portugal_, by J. G. de
Barros e Cunha, 1869; _Despachos e Correspondencia do Duque de
Palmella_, 1851-54; _Correspondencia Official de Conde de Carneira com o
Duque de Palmella_, 1874; _Memoirs of the Duke of Saldanha_, by the
Count of Carnota; _The Wars of Succession in France and Portugal_, by
William Bollaert, vol. i., 1870, and _The Civil War in Portugal, and the
Siege of Oporto, by a British Officer of Hussars_ [Colonel Badcock],
1835. Much valuable historical material is also buried in magazines and
the transactions of learned societies, and special reference may be made
to two particularly interesting essays in the _Annaes des Sciencias
Moraes e Politicas, Dom João II. e a Nobreza_, by Rebello da Silva, and
_Apontamentos para a Historia da Conquista de Portugal por Filippe II._,
by A. P. Lopes de Mendonça.
Apart from Portuguese history, Portuguese literature deserves to be
studied. Several pages have been devoted to it in the present volume,
and with regard to the early poetry of the troubadour epoch, the author
desires to express his obligations to the learned introductions of
Theophilo Braga, himself a poet of no mean rank, to his _Antologia
Portugueza_, 1876, and his _Cancioneiro Portuguez_, 1878. The glory of
Portuguese literature is Camoens, and it is fortunate that his great
poem, _The Lusiads_, has found an adequate translator at last. I know of
no translation of any classic which can compare with Sir Richard
Burton’s translation of _The Lusiads_. By his profound knowledge of the
Portuguese character no less than of the Portuguese language, by his
intimate acquaintance with the places which Camoens describes, and,
above all, by his temperament, which resembled that of the
conquistador-poet, Sir Richard Burton was fitted to reproduce for the
English people the thoughts and words of the greatest Portuguese poet.
Every lover of Camoens, like every lover of Homer, has been tempted to
translate his mighty poem; but, at last, so it seems to me, the work of
translation has been done once for all for Camoens by the loving labour
of Sir Richard Burton, and Englishmen may read _The Lusiads_,
reproduced faithfully into their own language, alike in spirit and in
words. That the life-poem of a hero of the sixteenth century should have
been worthily translated by a hero of the nineteenth, seems to me a
circumstance of which all lovers of literature in both England and
Portugal should be glad and proud.
In conclusion, the writing of this volume has been to the author a
labour of love. In the intervals of a minute study of the history of
another period, that of the French Revolution, he has turned with
pleasure to the task of writing this “Story of Portugal.” He has not
been able to work at original authorities as thoroughly as he might
wish, owing to the absorbing nature of his more important work, but he
hopes the time may come when he will be enabled to spend a few years
among the Archives at the Torre del Tombo, and investigate more
thoroughly the history of the early relations of England and Portugal,
and of the Portuguese in the East. Is he too presumptuous also in hoping
that a clearer knowledge of the old and tried friendship of the English
nation with the Portuguese may influence in some degree the attitude
taken by a portion of the English people towards their ancient ally in
the dispute with regard to the extent of the Portuguese possessions in
Africa?
H. MORSE STEPHENS.
OXFORD,
_March 1, 1891_.
[Illustration: text decoration]
CONTENTS.
I.
PAGE
EARLY HISTORY 1
The importance of, and features of interest in, Portuguese
history--Greeks, Phœnicians, and Romans--Portugal is not
the ancient Lusitania--The influence of Rome--The Visigoths--The
rule of the Mohammedans--The Christian princes
commence their incursions--Ferdinand “the Great” captures
Coimbra--The successes of the Almoravides--The formation
of the County of Portugal.
II.
THE COUNTY OF PORTUGAL--DONNA THERESA 20
The character of Henry of Burgundy, first Count of Portugal--The
Countess Theresa--Her policy--Count Henry fights in
Spain--His death--The regency of Theresa--The nobility and
the bishops--The wars of Theresa--Theresa styled Infanta--The
battle of S. Mamede--Theresa introduces the religious
military orders--Death of Donna Theresa.
III.
PORTUGAL BECOMES A KINGDOM--THE REIGN OF
AFFONSO HENRIQUES 34
The youth of Affonso Henriques--The heroism of Egas Moniz--The
Gallician wars--Affonso assumes the title of king--He
is recognized by the Pope--The Treaty of Zamora--Independence
won by the Gallician wars--The state of the Moors--Affonso’s
first war with the Moors--The victory of Ourique--Legends
concerning it--The wars of conquest--The capture
of Santarem and Lisbon--The assistance of the English crusaders--Capture
of Alcacer do Sal--The Treaty of Cella Nova--Affonso
taken prisoner at Badajoz--Truce with the Moors--Further
fighting--Great victory over the Moors at Santarem--Death
of Affonso Henriques.
IV.
PORTUGAL ATTAINS ITS EUROPEAN LIMITS 60
The reign of Sancho I.--The successes of the Moors--Sancho’s
internal administration--His quarrels with the clergy
and the Pope--The marriages of his children--The reign of
Affonso II. “the Fat”--Recapture of Alcacer do Sal and
defeat of the Moors--Arrival of the friars--The reign of
Sancho II.--The capture of Elvas--His quarrels with his
bishops--He is deposed by the Pope--The reign of Affonso
III.--His conquest of the Algarves--His alliance with his
people--The Cortes--His death.
V.
THE CONSOLIDATION OF PORTUGAL 85
The reign of Diniz--The Order of Christ--His internal
administration--His encouragement of literature--Portuguese
poetry--Stanzas of Camoens on Diniz--Affonso IV. “the
Brave”--The victory of the Salado--Friendship between
Portugal and England--The murder of Ines de Castro--Pedro
“the Severe”--Ferdinand “the Handsome”--The Queen
Leonor--Riot in Lisbon--War between Portugal and Castile--The
wickedness of the queen--The Treaty of Salvaterra--The
Portuguese revolt under Dom John of Aviz--The defence
of Lisbon--Dom John elected king--The victory of Aljubarrota--The
Treaty of Windsor and alliance with John of Gaunt--Peace
with Castile.
VI.
PORTUGAL DURING THE AGE OF EXPLORATION 115
The policy of John “the Great”--The alliance with England--His
internal administration--The power of the feudal
nobility--The capture of Ceuta--The king’s sons--The growth
of Portuguese literature--The reign of Duarte or Edward--The
expedition to Tangier--The “Constant Prince”--Dispute
as to the regency--Dom Pedro regent--Overthrown at battle
of Alfarrobeira--The reign of Affonso V. “the African”--His
African expeditions--War with Castile--Defeated at Toro--His
patronage of literature.
VII.
THE PORTUGUESE EXPLORERS 140
Prince Henry “the Navigator” and his work--The importance
of a direct route to India--The discovery of Madeira--The
story of Robert Machin--The discovery of the Azores--Cape
Bojador passed--The commencement of the African slave
trade--The discovery of Guinea, and of Cape Verde--The
voyage of Cadamosto--Death of Prince Henry--The equator
crossed--Discovery of the Congo--The Cape of Good Hope
reached and doubled.
VIII.
THE HEROIC AGE OF PORTUGAL 158
John II. “the Perfect”--Overthrow of the power of the
nobility--His foreign policy--Treaty of Tordesillas with Spain--Friendship
with England--His encouragement of exploration--His
court--Emmanuel “the Fortunate”--Expulsion of
the Jews--His policy and marriages--The discoveries of the
Portuguese--The seeds of decline--John III.--His policy--The
abandonment of the ports in Morocco--Corruption at
Court--Rapid depopulation of Portugal--The Inquisition and
the Jesuits--Death John III.
IX.
THE PORTUGUESE IN INDIA AND THE EASTERN
SEAS 185
Romantic interest of the story of the Portuguese in India--The
voyage of Vasco da Gama--State of India, when he
reached it--His return--The voyage of Cabral and the victory
of Pacheco--The viceroyalties of Almeida and Alboquerque--The
capture of Goa--Alboquerque establishes a factory at
Malacca and attacks Aden--The policy of Alboquerque--The
rule of his successors--Their policy and the nature of their
government--The Christian missionaries--S. Francis Xavier--The
viceroyalty of Castro--His victory at Diu--The successors
of Castro--The settlements in South-east Africa--The
Portuguese at Malacca and in the Spice Islands--Their communications
with China and Japan--The career of Mendes
Pinto--Extraordinary energy of the Portuguese in Asia.
X.
THE PORTUGUESE IN BRAZIL 220
Importance of Brazil to Portugal--Cabral’s discovery of the
country--Spain abandons its claims--The aboriginal inhabitants--Early
days--The first settlers and their government--Emigration
from Portugal--The viceroyalty of Thomas de
Sousa--The Jesuits and their work--The government of Duarte
da Costa--Failure of the French Huguenots to establish
themselves in Brazil.
XI.
THE LAST KINGS OF THE HOUSE OF AVIZ--DOM
SEBASTIAN AND THE CARDINAL HENRY 236
The rapid decay of Portugal--The accession of Sebastian--The
regency of Queen Catherine--The regency of the Cardinal
Henry--The character of Sebastian--His crusading ardour--The
Portuguese in India--Athaide’s defence of Goa--Sebastian
determines to invade Morocco--His applications for foreign
aid--His preparations--He lands in Africa--The defeat of
Alcacer Quibir--The death of Sebastian--The reign of the
Cardinal Henry.
XII.
PORTUGUESE LITERATURE--CAMOENS 259
The “Golden Age” of Portuguese literature--The revival of
classical learning--History of the University of Coimbra--Gil
Vicente--Bernardim Ribeiro--Sá de Miranda--Ferreira--Camoens--His
life--His “Lusiads”--João de Barros--Other
writers--Decline of Portuguese literature.
XIII.
THE SIXTY YEARS’ CAPTIVITY 278
The claimants to the Portuguese crown--Defeat of the Prior
of Crato--Philip II. of Spain recognized as king of Portugal--Further
efforts and death of the Prior of Crato--The false
Dom Sebastians--The government of Spain and its disastrous
results--The reign of Philip II.--The Portuguese in Asia--The
conquest of Kandy--The missionaries and the Inquisition--The
Dutch and the English overthrow the Portuguese power
in Asia--The Dutch in Brazil--Count Maurice of Nassau--Results
of the rule of Spain.
XIV.
THE REVOLUTION OF 1640 300
Discontent of the Portuguese at the rule of the Spaniards--Fostered
by Richelieu--The Duke and Duchess of Braganza--The
Duchess of Mantua, and her advisers--Preparations for
revolt--The leaders--The Revolution of December 1, 1640--The
Duke of Braganza crowned as John IV.--He obtains help
from Holland and France--The “Caminha” conspiracy--The
victory of Montijo--Brazil expels the Dutch--War with
Holland--The King despairs, and offers to abdicate--Treaty
of alliance with France--Death of John IV.
XV.
THE ENGLISH ALLIANCE 326
The Queen as Regent--Schomberg organizes the army--Victory
of Elvas--Marriage of Charles II. of England to Catherine of
Braganza--Affonso VI. declares himself of age--The Ministry
of Castel Melhor--Victories of the Portuguese--Court revolution--Dom
Pedro regent--Peace with Spain--The rule of Pedro II.
as Regent and King--His foreign policy--Death of Charles II.
of Spain--The Methuen treaty and its results--The war of the
Spanish Succession--Death of Pedro II.--The decline of the
Portuguese power in Asia--Prosperity of Brazil--Discovery
of gold there.
XVI.
PORTUGAL IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY--THE
MARQUIS OF POMBAL 349
Portugal in the eighteenth century--Accession of John V.--End
of the war of the Spanish Succession--Peace policy of
the King--His long and prosperous reign--Accession of
Joseph--Early career of Pombal--The earthquake of Lisbon--Pombal,
prime minister--He attacks the Jesuits--The
“Tavora” plot--Banishment of the Jesuits--Short war with
Spain--Suppression of the Jesuits--Death of Joseph--The
administration of Pombal--His great reforms--Accession of
Pedro III. and Maria I.--Disgrace of Pombal--The reign of
Pedro and Maria--Death of Pedro III.--The Portuguese in
India in the eighteenth century--The prosperity of Brazil--Discovery
of diamonds there--Literature in the eighteenth
century.
XVII.
THE ERA OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION--THE
PENINSULAR WAR 382
The French Revolution--Persecution of sympathisers with it
in Portugal--Dom John sends help to Spain in the war against
France--Deserted by Spain at the Treaty of Basle--The
Treaty of San Ildefonso--Alliance with England--Dom John
declared Regent--The war of 1801--The Treaty of Badajoz--Policy
of Napoleon against Portugal--Mission of Lannes--Treaty
of Fontainebleau, 1807--Junot invades Portugal--The
Regent escapes to Brazil--Junot’s rule--Forms the Portuguese
Legion--General insurrection against him--The Portuguese
appeal to England--Victory of Vimeiro and Convention of
Cintra--Soult occupies Oporto--Expelled by Wellesley--Beresford
reorganizes the Portuguese army--The Regency--Masséna
before Torres Vedras--The Portuguese troops during
the Peninsular War--Conclusion of the War--Death of Queen
Maria Francisca.
XVIII.
MODERN PORTUGAL--CIVIL WARS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT
OF PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT 409
John IV. his queen, and his sons Dom Pedro and Dom
Miguel--Oporto and Lisbon revolt against the Regency--The
Constitution of 1821--Brazil declares itself independent--The
Constitution abrogated--Death of John VI.--The influence of
the army--The Charter of 1826--Pedro IV. abdicates in favour
of Maria II.--Dom Miguel, Regent--Elected King--Reign
of Dom Miguel--The “Miguelite” war, 1830-34--Convention
of Evora Monte--Reign of Maria da Gloria--Civil wars and
“pronunciamentos”--Era of peaceful parliamentary government--Reigns
of Pedro V. and Luis I.--Accession of Carlos I.--The
Portuguese settlements in Africa--Material prosperity--The
literary revival--Lessons taught by the history of
Portugal--Conclusion.
INDEX 433
GENEALOGICAL TABLES--
I. The Descendants of John “the Great” 139
II. The Descendants of Emmanuel 279
III. The Dukes of Braganza 303
[Illustration: text decoration]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
PRINCE HENRY OF PORTUGAL _Frontispiece_
SPECIMEN OF ROMAN ARCHITECTURE 9
VIEW OF OPORTO AND VILLA NOVA FROM THE SERRA CONVENT 16
COIMBRA (PRESENT STATE) 27
A VIEW OF THE ANCIENT MOORISH BATH AT CINTRA 42
ARCH OF THE WESTERN ENTRANCE TO AN OLD CHAPEL AT LEIRIA 47
VIEW OF LISBON 50
CONVENTO DE CHRISTO AT THOMAR 61
PRINCIPAL FAÇADE OF THE IGREGA DOS JERONYMOS AT BELEM (PRESENT STATE) 68
GATE AND WINDOW OF THE MONASTERY OF BELEM 77
FAÇADE OF LISBON CATHEDRAL 82
INES DE CASTRO 96
VIEW OF THE PALACE AT LISBON 108
TWO SIDES OF THE ROYAL CHAPEL OF THE MONASTERY
OF BATALHA (PRESENT STATE) 112
KING JOHN THE GREAT 116
QUEEN PHILIPPA 123
PORTUGUESE GOLD COINS 136, 137
ST. SALVADOR IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 142
STATUE OF PRINCE HENRY 152
TOMB OF PRINCE HENRY 155
CHART OF GOA 166
VASCO DA GAMA 168
ALBOQUERQUE, FROM THE SLOANE MS. 194
ALBOQUERQUE, FROM AN ENGRAVING BY SILVA 202
DOM JOÃO CASTRO 210
PROCESSION OF AN AUTO DA FÉ 232
LISBON IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 239
VIEW UP THE DOURO TOWARDS OPORTO 250
LUIS DE CAMOENS 269
JOÃO DE BARROS 275
PHILIP II. 282
FIGURES OF MEN AT AN AUTO DA FÉ 293
PORTUGUESE GENTLEMEN 310
JOHN IV. 322
CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA 328
PEDRO II. 335
OPORTO (PRESENT STATE) 339
SPECIMENS OF PORTUGUESE AND COPPER COINS 344, 345
THE MARQUIS OF POMBAL 356
BULL FIGHT 366
A PORTUGUESE MERCHANT, WITH HIS WIFE AND MAID-SERVANT 384
MARSHAL JUNOT, DUKE OF ABRANTES 394
PORTUGUESE PEASANTS 398
A FEMALE PEASANT FROM THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF CALDAS DA RAINHA 403
[A number of the views illustrating Portuguese scenery are taken from
photographs; others are copied from W. M. Kinsey’s “Portugal
Illustrated,” London, 1829; other volumes which have supplied
illustrations are “Les Royaumes d’Espagne et Portugal,” La Haye, 1720;
Murphy’s “Travels in Portugal,” 1798; Major’s “Prince Henry the
Navigator,” &c., &c.]
[Illustration: text decoration]
THE KINGS OF PORTUGAL
THE HOUSE OF BURGUNDY.
DATE
Affonso Henriques (Count of Portugal 1114),
King 1140
Sancho I. “the City-Builder” 1185
Affonso II. “the Fat” 1211
Sancho II. 1223
Affonso III. “of Boulogne”
(Defender of the Realm 1246) 1248
Diniz “the Labourer” 1279
Affonso IV. “the Brave” 1325
Pedro I. “the Severe” 1357
Ferdinand “the Handsome” 1367
THE HOUSE OF AVIZ.
John I. “the Great” 1385
Edward 1433
Affonso V. “the African” 1438
John II. “the Perfect” 1481
Emmanuel “the Fortunate” 1495
John III. 1521
Sebastian 1557
Henry “the Cardinal” 1578
THE SPANISH DOMINION.
Philip I. (Philip II. of Spain) 1580
Philip II. (Philip III. of Spain) 1598
Philip III. (Philip IV. of Spain) 1621
THE HOUSE OF BRAGANZA.
John IV. 1640
Affonso VI. 1656
Pedro II. (Regent 1667) 1683
John V. 1706
Joseph 1750
Maria I. and Pedro III. 1777
Maria I. alone 1786
John VI. (Regent 1799) 1816
Pedro IV. abdicated 1826
Maria II. 1826
(Miguel, 1828-1834.)
Maria II. 1834
Pedro V. 1853
Luis I. 1861
Carlos I. 1889
[Illustration: Map of Portugal]
THE STORY OF PORTUGAL.
I.
EARLY HISTORY.
The Story of Portugal possesses a peculiar interest from the fact that
it is to its history alone that the country owes its existence as a
separate nation Geographically, the little kingdom is an integral
portion of the Iberian peninsula, with no natural boundaries to
distinguish it from that larger portion of the peninsula called Spain;
its inhabitants spring from the same stock as the Spaniards, and their
language differs but slightly from the Spanish. Its early history is
merged in that of the rest of the peninsula, and but for two great men,
Affonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal, and John I., the founder
of the house of Aviz, Portugal would not at the present day rank among
the independent nations of Europe. The first of these monarchs created
his dominions into a kingdom like Leon, Castile, and Aragon, and the
latter encouraged the maritime explorations which gave the little
country an individuality and national existence, of which it was justly
proud. When Philip II. annexed Portugal in 1580, it was at least a
century too late for the Portuguese to coalesce with the Spaniards. They
had then produced Vasco da Gama and Alboquerque and other great captains
and explorers, who had shown Europe the way to India by sea; and their
tongue had been developed by the genius of Camoens and Sá de Miranda,
from a Romance dialect, similar to those used in Gallicia, Castile, or
Aragon, into a great literary language. Conscious of its national
history, Portugal broke away again from Spain in 1640, and under the
protection of England maintained its separate existence during the
eighteenth century. There was some probability of a union with Spain at
the beginning of the present century, when, after the conclusion of the
Peninsular War against Napoleon, certain statesmen began to point out
the anomaly of the Iberian peninsula being divided into two separate
kingdoms, but a generation of great historians and poets soon arose, who
reminded the people of the days of Portuguese greatness and of the
glories of the past, and made it impossible for the modern Portuguese to
lose the consciousness of their individuality as a nation.
But, though the history of Portugal possesses its peculiar interest as
showing how one small portion of the Iberian peninsula maintained a
separate existence, it presents also many features of romantic incident,
especially during the epoch when it was for a time the leading nation of
Europe. The extraordinary vigour shown by the inhabitants of this small
corner of Europe during the latter half of the fifteenth and first half
of the sixteenth centuries is most remarkable. Not only were Portuguese
navigators the first to creep down the west coast of Africa in small
boats, in which modern sailors would hardly like to cross the English
Channel, but they dared to double the Cape of Good Hope, and to sail
across the Indian Ocean to India and Ceylon. Thence they ventured round
the point of Singapore, and established themselves at Macao, from which
centre they explored the coasts of China and Japan. In the other
direction, to the west, they crossed the Atlantic and discovered and
colonized Brazil. Lisbon became the storehouse and centre of
distribution for the products of the East, and attained to a height of
wealth and luxury unrivalled since the days of ancient Rome. The history
of the Portuguese “conquistadores” in India for the first hundred years
after the discovery of the route round the Cape of Good Hope is one long
romance; the vastness of their designs, the grandeur of their exploits,
and the nobility of character of their great captains, combine to make a
story of surpassing interest. And when it is remembered that the
soldiers and sailors of these great discoverers and conquerors were
inhabitants of the smallest country in Europe, their success seems the
more extraordinary, and the interest in the story of the nation which
trained the Portuguese heroes becomes the more absorbing. As invariably
happens during the heroic age of a nation’s history, literature and the
arts flourished at a time distinguished by military and naval prowess,
and as Spenser and Shakespeare illustrated the Elizabethan age in
England as much as Drake and Raleigh, the age of Vasco da Gama and
Alboquerque in Portugal could boast also of Gil Vicente, Sá de Miranda
and Camoens. The abrupt fall of Portugal from the greatness and wealth
of its heroic period to an insignificant place among the nations is as
full of the great lessons which history teaches as the story of its
growth. Just as the chivalry induced by the constant fighting with the
Moors, and the inspiration to great deeds fostered by freedom and the
good government of worthy kings, produced a race of heroes, so not less
surely did the growth of luxury and absolutism, assisted by the
narrow-mindedness of a dynasty of bigots, lose for Portugal the lofty
place which her heroes had won for her. These are things well worth
pondering upon and lessons well worth learning, for the great value of
the study of history is in teaching such truths as these--truths which
are eternal, while nations wax and wane.
The early history of the country, which took the name of Portugal from
the county which formed the nucleus of the future kingdom, is identical
with that of the rest of the Iberian peninsula, but deserves some slight
notice because of an old misconception, immortalized in the title of the
famous epic of Camoens, and not yet entirely eradicated even from modern
ideas. Portugal, like the rest of the peninsula, was originally
inhabited by men of the prehistoric ages, whose implements are
frequently dug up at the present day, and remains of the cave-dwellers
have been found all over the province of the Alemtejo, and more
especially in the great cave near Alter do Chão. The most famous
prehistoric monument is, however, the beautiful “Anta de Guimaraens,”
about the exact date of which Portuguese archæologists are much
exercised. These prehistoric people were conquered and exterminated by
the first waves of the great Aryan race which has spread all over
Europe. There seems to be no doubt that the Celts, the first Aryan
immigrants, were preceded by a non-Aryan race, which is called by
different writers the Iberian or the Euskaldunac nation, but this
earlier race speedily amalgamated with the Celts, and out of the two
together were formed the five tribes inhabiting the Iberian peninsula,
which Strabo names as the Cantabrians, the Vasconians, the Asturians,
the Gallicians, and the Lusitanians. It is Strabo, also, who mentions
the existence of Greek colonies at the mouths of the Tagus, Douro, and
Minho, and it is curious to note that the old name of Lisbon, Olisipo,
was from the earliest times identified with that of the hero of the
Odyssey, and was interpreted to mean the city of Ulysses. The Celtic
Iberians certainly possessed the elements of civilization, and from a
very early period they had learnt to write, and it is a remarkable fact
that the formation of the letters of their alphabet is traceable rather
to Greek than Phœnician characters. This is the more remarkable, when
it is remembered that the Phœnicians, and not the Greeks, are always
mentioned in history as monopolizing the trade of Iberia. The
Carthaginians, though they had colonies all over the peninsula,
established their rule mainly over the south and east of it, having
their capital at Carthagena or Nova Carthago, and seem to have
neglected the more barbarous northern and western provinces.
It was for this reason that the Romans found far more difficulty in
subduing these latter provinces than they had in taking possession of
the former, which the Carthaginians had already conquered. The Romans
were at first satisfied with these provinces, which were ceded to them
after the conclusion of the second Punic war, but eventually they began
to spread over the hitherto neglected districts; and in 189 B.C. Lucius
Æmilius Paullus defeated the Lusitanians, and in 185 B.C. Gaius
Calpurnius forced his way across the Tagus. There is no need here to
discuss the gradual conquest by the Romans of that part of the peninsula
which includes the modern kingdom of Portugal, but it is necessary to
speak of the gallant shepherd Viriathus, who sustained a stubborn war
against the Romans from 149 B.C. until he was assassinated in 139 B.C.
because he has been generally claimed as the first national hero of
Portugal. This claim has been based upon the assumed identification of
the modern Portugal with the ancient Lusitania, an identification which
has spread its roots deep into Portuguese literature, and has until
recently been generally accepted.
The first Portuguese writer who assumed the identity of Portugal with
Lusitania was Dom Garcia de Meneses, Bishop of Evora, who wrote in the
reign of John II. at the close of the fifteenth century, though the two
terms had been used distinctively by early chroniclers, such as Lucas de
Tuy in his “Chronicon Mundi,” and Matthew de Pisano in his “Guerra de
Ceuta.” The mistaken notion was further developed in the days of the
Renaissance and of the Revival of Learning, and became generally
accepted by the close of the sixteenth century, and exaggerated by the
very title of such books as the “Monarchia Lusitana” of Bernardo de
Brito and the “De Antiquitatibus Lusitaniæ” of the great antiquary
Andrea de Resende. In fact, the Portuguese writers of that epoch
delighted in calling Portugal by the classical name of Lusitania, and
Camoens, the very greatest of them all, has, by the title of his famous
epic, “Os Lusiadas” or “The Lusiads,” stamped the mistake permanently on
Portuguese literature.
This false identification has had important historical consequences.
Modern writers have on this supposition spoken of the Portuguese as a
distinct branch of the Celtic population of the Iberian peninsula
identical with the tribe of Lusitanians spoken of by Strabo. They have
further identified them with the Lusitanians who struggled so gallantly
against the Roman Republic under the leadership of Punicus and
Viriathus; they have found passages in the Latin historians describing
the Lusitanians, and have moralized upon the manner in which the
characteristics of the ancient Lusitanians re-appear in the modern
Portuguese. The identity of two nations must consist in proving their
perfect succession in either race or territory, and in neither respect
can the identity be shown in the present instance. The Celtic tribe of
Lusitanians dwelt, according to Strabo, in the districts north of the
Tagus, while the Lusitania of the Latin historians of the Republic
undoubtedly lay to the south of that river though it was not used as the
name of a province until the time of Augustus, when the old division of
the peninsula into Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior was
superseded by the division into Betica, Tarraconensis, and Lusitania.
Neither in this division, nor in the division of the peninsula into the
five provinces of Tarraconensis, Carthaginensis, Betica, Lusitania, and
Gallicia, under Hadrian, was the province called Lusitania coterminous
with the modern kingdom of Portugal. Under each division the name was
given to a district south of the Tagus, and therefore not embracing the
modern provinces of the Entre Minho e Douro, Trasos-Montes, and Beira.
[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF ROMAN ARCHITECTURE.
(_The Castellum of Q. Sertorius at Evora._)]
It is important to grasp the results of this misconception, for it
emphasizes the fact that the history of Portugal for many centuries is
merged in that of the rest of the Iberian peninsula, and explains why it
is unnecessary to study the wars of the Lusitanians with the Roman
Republic, as is often done in histories of Portugal. Like the rest of
the peninsula Portugal was thoroughly Latinized in the days of the Roman
Empire; Roman _coloniæ_ and _municipia_ were established in places
suited for trade, such as Lisbon and Oporto, and commanding high-roads,
such as Lamego and Viseu; Roman institutions were generally adopted, and
the Latin language superseded the old Celtic dialects. The chief
Portuguese towns, like those in the rest of the peninsula, were granted
the “Jus Latinum” by Vespasian, and all the inhabitants became Roman
citizens under the famous decree of Caracalla. The influence of the
mighty sway of Rome has left its traces all over the peninsula, and to
as great degree in Portugal as in Spain. Portuguese law is based on the
old Roman law, as well as the Portuguese language upon Latin; and many
Portuguese institutions show the direct influence of Roman government.
Notably is this the case with regard to municipal institutions; many
Portuguese cities can boast of distinct existence ever since the Roman
Empire, and the _duumviri_ and _boni homines_ of those days have their
counterparts in the municipal government of the present day. During
these days of peace and prosperity Portugal also received the Christian
religion, and welcomed it as cordially as France and Spain, and
bishoprics were founded which still exist. In more material things the
dominion of Rome has left its traces in the roads and bridges made by
that race of engineers, in the beautiful remains at Leiria, and in the
aqueduct and the ruins of the temple of Diana at Evora.
Peaceful existence under the sway of Rome continued until the beginning
of the fifth century, when the Goths first forced their way across the
Pyrenees. During the first barbarian occupation, the Suevi seized
Gallicia and Tarraconensis, the Alans Lusitania and Carthaginensis, and
the Vandals Betica or Andalusia. The irruption of the Visigoths changed
this settlement; the Alans and the Vandals crossed to Africa, and the
Suevi occupied Betica and Lusitania. The Visigothic Empire left but
slight traces in Portugal, slighter even than in Spain, and the
Portuguese nobility do not, like the Spanish, invariably lay claim to
Gothic descent. Ethnologically the Gothic element is very slight in
Portugal, though the country passed under the rule of the Visigoths
during the reign of Ataulphus, who married the sister of the Roman
Emperor Honorius, and remained part of their dominion for three
centuries. While the Roman rule left so many traces of its existence,
and entirely modelled the language and civilization alike of Spain and
Portugal, that of the Visigoths, which lasted nearly as long, left
hardly any traces at all. The cause is to be found in the natural
assimilation of a race in a low state of civilization to the status of a
higher race. The number of Romans who actually settled in the peninsula
must have been very small, yet the Celts adopted their language and
civilization, while the conquering Visigoths, on the other hand, adopted
the religion and civilization of the people they had conquered. The
Visigothic power reached its zenith in the reign of Euric at the end of
the fifth century, and afterwards steadily declined, being torn by
internal dissensions, and especially by the great struggle between the
nobility and the rulers of the Christian Church. It was the leaders of
the latter party, Count Julian and Archbishop Oppus, who invited the
Mohammedans from Africa into Spain, and in fighting against them,
Roderick, the last Visigothic king, was killed near Xeres, at the battle
of the Guadelete, in 711.
The history of the Mohammedans in the Iberian peninsula has been treated
in another volume of this Series,[1] and it is only necessary to note
here that under the wise and tolerant rule of the Ommeyad sultans, the
rich plains alike of Spain and Portugal maintained the prosperity which
they had enjoyed under the Roman emperors and the Visigothic kings, and
that the old Roman _coloniæ_ and _municipia_ retained their Roman
self-government, and Lisbon and Oporto increased in wealth and
commercial importance. Though the Arabs were fanatical conquerors, the
Ommeyads were enlightened rulers, and the Christian religion was
protected, though not encouraged, as long as the Christian bishops
refrained from active exertions against the Mohammedans. In Portugal
also, owing to its distance from Cordova, the duties of government were
granted almost entirely to the Mosarabs, as the numerous native converts
to Islam were called, men who felt the importance of keeping the
adherents of the two prevailing religions from coming to blows.
But this peaceful state of things was not to last; the Iberian
peninsula, which had remained prosperous under Romans, Visigoths, and
Mohammedans, was to suffer centuries of fierce war, war which was to
devastate its fields and destroy its cities, but from which its people
were to develop into a race of hardy and chivalrous warriors. The people
of the peninsula under the rule of foreign sovereigns had become soft
and weak, occupied only in accumulating wealth, in which to live in
comfort and luxury. Architectural remains of the first thousand years of
the Christian era show to what a pitch of comfort the people had
attained, but the easy conquests of the Visigoths and the Moors prove
that they had become enervated by luxury. During the next five hundred
years a different state of things was to appear. The land and the cities
alike of Spain and Portugal were to be ravaged and destroyed in terrible
wars, and a race of soldiers, bred in all the laws and customs of
chivalry, was to arise--a race which, after finding no further exercise
for its energies at home, was to extend its power to India and to the
New World, as yet unknown, across the Atlantic. Whether it were better
to spend lives of luxurious ease or to become warriors was a question
not asked of the people of the Iberian peninsula; they had no choice in
the matter; but it must not be forgotten in watching the gradual
development of this race of warriors in one part of the peninsula, in
Portugal, that it was, when formed, to do great things for Europe and
for the advancement of a higher civilization than that of the stormy
centuries in which it arose.
Towards the close of the tenth century as the Ommeyad caliphate grew
weaker, the Christian princes of Visigothic descent, who dwelt in the
mountains of the Asturias, began to grow more bold in their attacks on
the declining power; and in 997 Bermudo II., king of Gallicia, won back
the first portion of modern Portugal from the Moors by seizing Oporto
and occupying the province now known as the Entre Minho e Douro. At the
beginning of the eleventh century, the great Moorish caliphate finally
broke up, and independent Mohammedan emīrs established themselves in
every large city, against whom the Christian princes waged incessant and
successful wars. In these wars the Celtic inhabitants of the peninsula
took but little part; the Moorish armies consisted of Mohammedans, the
descendants of the fierce soldiers of Abder-Rahmān and a few
Mosarabs, while the Christian armies consisted only of the feudal
chivalry of the northern mountains.
In each army different customs prevailed; the strength of the Moors lay
in their perfect military discipline and absolute obedience to their
generals; that of the Christians in the new impulse to valour given to
each individual knight by the laws of chivalry. On neither side was
personal ambition without an incentive; Moorish generals hoped to become
emīrs, Christian knights, feudal counts. The finest soldiers of both
armies were foreigners to the peninsula, being on the one side Africans,
on the other either of Gothic descent or else the flower of the chivalry
of northern Europe, which went to win its spurs in the wars against the
unbelievers, and especially admired and followed the Cid, Rodrigo Diaz
de Bivar. Between these two contending bands of warriors the unfortunate
Celtic inhabitants of the middle zone of the peninsula were crushed;
those of the mountains of the north were by feudal custom obliged to
take up arms to follow their lords, and after a century or two those of
the centre by the force of necessity became warriors also, and proceeded
to drive the Moors back to Africa.
The eleventh century was at first marked by great Christian successes,
especially in the west of the peninsula. In 1055 Ferdinand “the Great,”
king of Leon, Castile, and Gallicia, invaded the Beira; in 1057 he took
Lamego and Viseu; and in 1064 Coimbra, where he died in the following
year. He arranged for the government of his conquests in the only way
possible under the feudal system, by forming them into a county,
extending to the Mondego, with Coimbra as its capital. The first count
of Coimbra was Sesnando, a recreant Arab vizir, who had advised
Ferdinand to invade his district and had assisted in its easy conquest.
He had married a Christian, and was ready to defend his new religion and
the dominions he held under the Christian king with all the more vigour
from the knowledge that the Moorish emīrs and wālis to the south
regarded him as an apostate. But though Sesnando’s county of Coimbra was
the great frontier county of Gallicia, and the most important conquest
of Ferdinand “the Great,” it was not thence that the kingdom which was
to develop out of his dominions was to take its name. Among the counties
of Gallicia was one called the “comitatus Portucalensis,” because it
contained within its boundaries the famous city at the mouth of the
Douro, known in Roman and Greek times as the Portus Cale, and in modern
days as Oporto, or “The Port.” This county of Oporto or Portugal was the
one destined to give its name to the future kingdom, and was held at the
time of Ferdinand’s death by Nuno Mendes, the founder of one of the most
famous families in Portuguese history.
[Illustration: VIEW OF OPORTO AND VILLA NOVA FROM THE SERRA CONVENT.
(_After a print by Godhino._)]
Ferdinand “the Great” was succeeded in his three kingdoms of Castile,
Leon, and Gallicia, by his three sons, Sancho, Alfonso, and Garcia, the
last of whom received the two counties of Coimbra and Oporto as fiefs
of Gallicia, and maintained Nuno Mendes and Sesnando as his feudatories.
Under them were many feudal barons, who held their lands on condition of
military service. It is fortunately not necessary to enter into the
history of the wars between the sons of Ferdinand; it is enough to say
that the second of them, Alfonso of Leon, eventually united all his
father’s kingdoms in 1073, as Alfonso VI. The successes of the
Christians aroused the stubborn resistance of the Moors; a fresh wave of
fanaticism passed over the Mohammedans of Africa and of the peninsula,
and a new dynasty, that of the Almoravides arose, which subdued the
various emīrs and wālis who had usurped the government of various
portions of the old Ommeyad caliphate, and once more united the Moorish
power. The new dynasty collected great Moslem armies, and in 1086
Yūsuf Ibn Teshfīn routed Alfonso utterly at the battle of Zalaca,
and reconquered the peninsula up to the Ebro. In this battle all the
chivalry of the Moors and Christians was engaged, and among the latter
was Sesnando, Count of Coimbra, followed by his knights. Alfonso tried
to compensate for this defeat and his loss of territory in the east of
his dominions by conquests in the west, and in 1093 he advanced to the
Tagus and took Santarem and Lisbon, and made Sueiro Mendes count of the
new district. But these conquests he did not hold for long; the
Almoravides were in the full flush of success, and their armies were
made almost irresistible by the fresh fanaticism inspired into them.
Their conquests in the east of the peninsula after the battle of Zalaca
were followed by rapid successes in the west. In 1093 Seyr, the general
of the Almoravide caliph Yūsuf, took Evora from the Emīr of
Badajoz; in 1094 he took Badajoz itself, and killed the emīr; and
retaking Lisbon and Santarem forced his way up to the Mondego. To resist
this revival of the Mohammedan power, Alfonso summoned the chivalry of
Christendom to his aid. Among the knights who joined his army eager to
win their spurs, and win dominions for themselves were Count Raymond of
Toulouse and Count Henry of Burgundy. To the former, Alfonso gave his
legitimate daughter Urraca and Gallicia; to the latter, his illegitimate
daughter Theresa, and the counties of Oporto and Coimbra, with the title
of Count of Portugal.
The history of Portugal now becomes distinct from that of the rest of
the peninsula, and it is from the year 1095 that the history of Portugal
commences. The son of Henry of Burgundy was the great monarch Affonso
Henriques, the hero of his country and the founder of a great dynasty.
Up to this time it has been impossible to separate the history of
Portugal from that of Spain, but it has been necessary to point out the
fact that the history of the two countries had been hitherto identical,
in order to dissipate the common error that the Spaniards and Portuguese
belong to distinct races. The fact that the history of Portugal does not
begin until such a comparatively recent date teaches another important
lesson, that the nations of modern Europe must not be looked upon as
having been complete entities from the earliest times, but in some
instances owe their distinct nationality at the present day to
fortuitous circumstances.
In 1095 a powerful county of Portugal was formed: its growth to a
kingdom and the extension of its dominions by conquests from the Moors
will now have to be studied, as well as its difficulty in maintaining
its independence among the other nations of the peninsula, before it can
be seen as the leading nation of the world, in the van of the march of
European civilization.
[Illustration: text decoration]
II.
THE COUNTY OF PORTUGAL.
Count Henry of Burgundy, his wife Theresa, and his son Affonso
Henriques, were the three founders of Portugal, and they were all of
them individuals of marked personality. They were typical figures of
their epoch, possessing the curious mixture of virtues and vices which
characterized the age of chivalry.
Count Henry was the second son of Henry, who was the third son of
Robert, first Duke of Burgundy, and he was like his father and
grandfather, a knight of the old French school, combining a passionate
love for adventure and for war with an ambitious and self-seeking
temperament. He had come to Spain to the assistance of the Christians,
as much with the purpose of founding a dynasty as for the love of war,
and from the first he turned his thoughts more to the hope of succeeding
his father-in-law, Alfonso VI., in one at least of his kingdoms, than to
carving a kingdom for himself out of the dominions of the Arab caliphs.
He received his county of Portugal, the dowry of his wife, Theresa,
illegitimate daughter of Alfonso VI., as a direct fief of the crown of
Gallicia, one of the three kingdoms of his father-in-law. This kingdom
Alfonso had granted, as a fief, not as a kingdom, to Count Raymond of
Toulouse, who had married his legitimate daughter, Urraca, and Count
Henry highly disapproved of being in some sort a feudatory of his
fellow-adventurer. At first the jealousy between Henry and Raymond did
not show itself; for Count Henry had to fight hard to defend his
southern frontiers against the incursions of the Mohammedan general
Seyr. To his help he summoned the chivalry of France, and the knights of
his native country flocked to his assistance, and were promoted to high
military positions and to feudal dignities by him. Battle succeeded
battle without either side gaining any decisive victory, until after
seven years’ hard fighting both Christians and Moors decided to rest
awhile to recover from their exhaustion.
Count Henry was, however, too much the restless knight of the Middle
Ages to remain quiet long. Since his Portuguese warriors were weary, and
the battle-ground for miles on each bank of the Tagus was laid utterly
waste, he could fight no longer in his own country against the
unbelievers, and so hurried off in 1103 with Maurice, Bishop of Coimbra,
to fight them in Palestine. For two years he served in the expedition
known as the Second Crusade, and when he returned he was still ready for
more fighting at home. His restlessness was typical of his epoch. The
knights of the Crusades were always knights-errant, always in search of
adventure, and never satiated with war. This spirit was encouraged by
the Church, and while the Almoravide caliph Yūsuf was organizing his
military forces for a fresh assault on the Christians, Count Henry, on
the other hand, went off in search of adventure abroad, leaving his
county under the government of his wife, Theresa.
Fortunately for Portugal, Theresa was a singularly able woman. Beautiful
and accomplished, the idol of poets and musicians, and capable of
inspiring the deepest devotion, she threw herself heart and soul into
the task which her restless husband abandoned, and spent the years of
his absence in training the Portuguese for fresh struggles. She too
possessed all the faults and virtues of her epoch; passionate to a
degree in every sense, she became the adored divinity of her nobles, and
prepared herself during this brief regency for the longer regency of her
widowhood. Her great aim at this time, as it was throughout her stormy
life, was to make the Portuguese nobles regard themselves as Portuguese,
and not as Gallicians, and thus prepare them to make their country
independent. But though her chief endeavour was to heighten and animate
the spirit of her nobles, she did not neglect other classes of her
subjects; she encouraged the citizens of her cities in their ideas of
municipal independence, and urged them to keep their fortifications in
good repair, and to be ready to go forth to war under captains of their
own choice, instead of under hereditary leaders from among the nobility.
The result of this policy was that, in the next generation, the military
retainers of the great nobles, who resided in their castles, went forth
to fight side by side with the free citizens under their elected
leaders, and that her son was able to lead two distinct classes of
soldiers under his banners, who vied with each other in prowess against
foreign foes, while they were a check upon each other at home, and could
be played off against one another in case either class became dangerous
to their suzerain.
When Count Henry returned from Palestine in 1105, he became united with
his former brother-in-arms, Count Raymond of Gallicia, by a common
feeling of jealousy. Both looked forward to inheriting portions of King
Alfonso’s dominions, and were extremely suspicious lest the old monarch
should favour his natural son, Sancho, whose mother was a Moorish
princess, Zaida, daughter of Ibn Abbad, Emīr of Seville. In their
dislike for Sancho they were encouraged by the priests, to whom
Alfonso’s affection for a Moorish woman was abhorrent, and an agreement
was made between the brothers-in-law by an ambitious French monk, named
Hugh of Cluny, afterwards Bishop of Oporto, to oust the son of the
infidel. This peaceful arrangement had no result, owing to the death of
Count Raymond in 1107, followed by that of young Sancho at the battle of
Uclés with the Moors in 1108, and finally by the death of Alfonso VI.
himself in 1109.
The king’s death brought about the catastrophe. He left all his
dominions to his legitimate daughter, Urraca, with the result that there
was five years of fierce fighting between Henry of Burgundy, Alfonso
Raimundes, the son of Count Raymond, Alfonso I., of Aragon, and Queen
Urraca, during which the Almoravides quietly consolidated their power
and prepared for a fresh attack upon the Christians. Nothing proves
more certainly that the crusading spirit was often only a cloak for
personal ambition than this terrible internecine war, in which princes
and nobles changed sides and broke their plighted words with a
recklessness supposed to be distinctive of a most abandoned age. While
they fought with each other, the Mohammedans advanced. The Almoravide
Ali, who had succeeded his father, Yūsuf, in Spain and Morocco,
reconquered Talavera and Madrid, and laid siege to Toledo, while his
famous general, Seyr Ibn Abi-Bekr, reconquered the Moorish emīrs of
the western towns, who had revolted, and in 1112 besieged Santarem,
which then formed the southernmost outpost of the county of Portugal.
Before he took it however, Seyr died, and Count Henry, who had been
forced to come south in order to meet the invaders, once more returned
to continue his wars with the Christian princes. Only one incident in
Count Henry’s march against the Mohammedans deserves record, and that is
the refusal of the citizens of Coimbra to admit their count into their
city, or to follow him to the front, unless he confirmed the privileges
granted to them by Donna Theresa, and granted them certain fresh
concessions. Henry was forced to grant them, and on the death of Seyr,
he again advanced into Spain, and joined in further intrigues. These did
not last long, for on May 1, 1114, Count Henry died at Astorga, not
without a suspicion that he had been poisoned by Queen Urraca, leaving
his wife Theresa as regent during the minority of his son, Affonso
Henriques, who was but three years old.
Theresa, who made the ancient city of Guimaraens her capital, devoted
all her energies to building up her son’s dominions into an independent
state; and under her rule, while the Christian states of Spain were torn
by internecine war, the Portuguese began to recognize Portugal as their
country, and to cease from calling themselves Gallicians. This
distinction between Portugal and Gallicia was the first step towards the
formation of a national spirit, which grew into a desire for national
independence. The people were the same in origin, and spoke the same
language. The province of Gallicia had both in Roman and Gothic times
spread as far south as the Tagus, and no distinction had been made
between the Gallicians of the north and south until Alfonso VI. had
given Count Henry his large domain. It was Donna Theresa who first tried
to make the distinction more marked. Count Henry had looked upon his
county as a step to the succession to the kingdom of Gallicia, if not to
the two kingdoms of Leon and Gallicia. Donna Theresa, on the other hand,
looked upon Portugal as an independent country, and desired rather to
extend her frontiers at the expense of Gallicia than to succeed to the
throne of that kingdom.
In her efforts to promote the unity of Portugal and its independence of
Gallicia, Donna Theresa was warmly seconded by her people, and
especially by the inhabitants of the cities whom she favoured, while
among the ruling classes she had the support of the clergy and the
opposition of the greater part of the nobility. Most of her nobles owned
great estates in both Gallicia and Portugal, for the feudal grants of
land conquered by the Christian kings from the Mohammedans were
generally made to noblemen, who had led large contingents to their help.
These nobles were naturally opposed to a separation between Portugal and
Gallicia, which would make them feudatories to two different lords, and
often oblige them in case of disputes between their suzerains to
sacrifice one of their properties. On the other hand, the Portuguese
bishops were suffragans of the reconstructed archbishopric of Braga, and
owed no obedience to any Gallician bishop; indeed, they were especially
hostile to the wealthiest of them, the powerful bishop of the great
pilgrim city of Santiago da Campostella. It has been said that many of
the Christian bishoprics continued to exist during the Moorish
occupation, and had a continuous history from the first conversion of
the people to Christianity, but some had lapsed owing to the poverty of
their sees. The advance of the Christian princes, which was due as much
to religious as to political motives, brought about the re-establishment
of the bishoprics which had lapsed, and the increased endowment of those
which had continued to exist. The new bishops held a very different
position from their predecessors. They were not the poor shepherds of
poor flocks, in a land ruled by infidels, but powerful barons, holding
great estates on military tenure, who united the influence of their
sacred rank to their temporal power. The metropolitan of these
Portuguese bishops was the Archbishop of Braga, and it was naturally his
policy to support the independence of the county of Portugal, for it was
better for him to be the head of the Church of an important county
than to be merely one of the archbishops of the kingdom of Gallicia.
This was the attitude taken up by the first great Archbishop of Braga,
Mauricio Burdino, a Frenchman, and the companion in Palestine of Count
Henry, who had promoted him from the bishopric of Coimbra to the
metropolitan see. In it he was supported by Hugh, Bishop of Oporto, the
most wealthy of his suffragans, and the history of the ensuing century
gives many instances of the patriotism of the Portuguese bishops, and of
their efforts to promote and maintain the independence of the new state.
[Illustration: COIMBRA. (PRESENT STATE.) (_After a Photograph._)]
The regency of Donna Theresa was marked by many struggles, the history
of which it is now difficult to trace, but throughout them all, the
growing unity of Portugal can be perceived. She took a keen interest in
the politics of Gallicia, for she hoped to extend her frontiers to the
north, and in 1116 she led her forces in person to the assistance of
Diogo Gelmires, Bishop of Santiago da Campostella, and the Count de
Trava, who had headed a rising, intended to depose Queen Urraca, and to
place her young son Alfonso Raimundes at once upon the throne of
Gallicia. In this war Theresa took the towns of Tuy and Orense, and the
warrior countess met, in the course of it for the first time, the young
hidalgo, Don Fernando Peres de Trava, with whom she fell passionately in
love, and whose history was for the future to be linked with hers. In
1117 the Moors, under their caliph Ali in person, invaded her dominions,
and besieged her in Coimbra, but she succeeded in beating them off, and
spent the following years in peace and quiet, in the constant company
of her lover, whom she made governor of Coimbra and Oporto, and Count of
Trastamare; while to his elder brother, Bermudo Peres de Trava, she gave
the hand of her second daughter by Count Henry, the Donna Urraca, and
the governorship of Viseu.
But this quiet enjoyment of peace and love was not long allowed to the
beautiful ruler of Portugal. Her half-sister Urraca, the Queen of
Castile, Leon, and Gallicia, had been hitherto too much engaged in
fighting with her second husband, Alfonso I. of Aragon, to pay any
attention to her; but she too was a warrior princess, and in 1121 she
ordered Theresa to surrender the city of Tuy. Theresa refused, and
Urraca led an army against her, which defeated the Portuguese at Tuy,
and eventually the queen took the Countess of Portugal prisoner after a
long siege of the castle of Lanhoso. It seemed as if the nascent
independence of Portugal was about to be crushed, but Bishop Gelmires
came to the assistance of Theresa, who had done so much for his friends
and relatives, the De Travas, and threatened to attack Urraca unless she
made peace with her half-sister. Urraca was forced to comply, and the
treaty of peace which was then signed marks another stage in the growth
of the independence of Portugal, for in it Donna Theresa is styled
Infanta, and treated as the equal of Queen Urraca, who further promised
to cede to her the cities and districts of Toro, Zamora, and Salamanca.
For the next few years the careers of the half-sisters were singularly
similar. Queen Urraca showered favours on her lover, Don Pedro de Lara,
until her young son, Alfonso Raimundes, assisted by Bishop Gelmires,
revolted against her; while Donna Theresa, with equal blindness, devoted
herself to her love for Don Fernando Peres de Trava, and thus aroused
the hatred of her boy-son Affonso Henriques and of Paio Mendes, who in
1121 had succeeded Mauricio Burdino as Archbishop of Braga. Her quarrel
with Paio Mendes commenced in the year after he became archbishop, and
well illustrates the attitude of the Portuguese bishops. As long as
Theresa had remained the living symbol of Portuguese unity and
independence the bishops had followed her, but as soon as she showed her
love for a Gallician nobleman they turned against her. Paio Mendes was
quite ready to lead the malcontents, for he was the brother of Count
Sueiro Mendes of Oporto, surnamed the Great, who was the head of the
purely Portuguese, as opposed to the mixed Portuguese and Gallician,
nobility. In 1122 Archbishop Paio protested against the gift of so many
important posts to Don Fernando, and the proud countess immediately cast
him into prison. She was obliged in a few days to release him, for fear
of a papal interdict; but she had made a bitter enemy, who was soon to
have an opportunity for revenge.
The discontent with Theresa did not show itself openly until 1127, when
Alfonso Raimundes, who had succeeded his mother Urraca in the preceding
year, and taken the title of Alfonso VII., King of Castile, Leon, and
Gallicia, invaded Portugal and forced Theresa to recognize him as
suzerain, and to surrender her claims to Tuy and Orense. The citizens
of Guimaraens, the capital of the county, at once declared Affonso
Henriques of age, and competent to reign; but Alfonso VII. marched
against the city, and Egas Moniz, the former tutor of the young count,
who was its governor, in order to make peace, promised on behalf of his
former pupil that he would ratify Theresa’s submission. Affonso
Henriques, however, though only a boy of seventeen, absolutely refused
to recognize the submission made by his mother and his tutor, and in
1128 he raised an army with the declared intention of expelling Donna
Theresa and her lover from the country. In this movement the boy was
encouraged by Archbishop Paio and his brother Sueiro Mendes, by one of
his brothers-in-law, Sancho Nunes, by his half-brother, Pedro Affonso,
an illegitimate son of Count Henry, by Emigio Moniz, and by Garcia
Soares. Donna Theresa also collected an army, consisting chiefly of
Gallicians, but she was defeated by her son at the battle of S. Mamede,
near Guimaraens, and taken prisoner, and was shortly afterwards
expelled, with Don Fernando, from the county she had ruled so long.
Thus ended the regency of Donna Theresa. She had not added a single town
to her son’s dominions, for her early conquests had been recaptured by
Queen Urraca and Alfonso VII. But she had done more for Portugal than
making conquests. She had asserted its independence, and though she
seldom called herself Queen, she never took any title less than that of
Infanta. She had also prepared for the extension of Portugal towards the
south at the end of her regency by encouraging the settlement of the
orders of religious knights there. To the Knights Templars she had
granted, in 1128, the frontier town of Soure; to the Knights of the Holy
Sepulchre S. Payo de Gouvea, Lodeiro, and Paços de Penalva; and to the
Knights of the Hospital, the town of Leça. From these beginnings great
results were to arise during the reign of her son.
The last years of Theresa’s life were quite out of keeping with the
brilliancy of her regency. After her expulsion she wandered about in the
mountains of Gallicia with her lover until her death, in poverty, on
November 1, 1130. Her body was taken to Portugal, and buried beside that
of Count Henry, her husband, in the Cathedral of Braga, and both of them
are reverenced by modern Portuguese as the founders of the independence
of their country. Her history is a strange one. To political instincts
and a capability for government which rank her among the most remarkable
women of the whole period of the Middle Ages; to a manly courage, which
inspired her to lead her soldiers in person to the fight and enabled her
to withstand a Moorish siege, she joined the most feminine of
qualities--that of entire devotion to the man she loved. Her love for
Fernando Peres may have made her deviate from the path she should have
followed as regent of Portugal, but it does not make her a less
interesting character in the eyes of posterity. If she loved too
greatly, she was greatly punished, and her death in exile more than
atoned for the favour she bestowed on her lover. The task commenced by
Count Henry and Donna Theresa was destined to be accomplished by one
greater than either of them, by the hero of early Portuguese history,
Affonso Henriques, who united his father’s restless and chivalrous
valour with the political ability of his mother.
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
III.
PORTUGAL BECOMES A KINGDOM. THE REIGN OF AFFONSO HENRIQUES.
Affonso Henriques, the only son of Count Henry and Donna Theresa, who at
the age of seventeen, after the battle of S. Mamede, began his long and
prosperous reign, was one of the heroes of the Middle Ages. He succeeded
to the government of Portugal when it was still regarded generally, in
spite of Theresa’s claims, as a county of Gallicia, and after nearly
sixty years of incessant fighting he bequeathed to his son a powerful
little kingdom, whose independence was unquestioned, and whose fame was
spread abroad throughout Christendom by the victories of its first
monarch over the Moors. The story of his early years abounds in
miraculous legends and tales, like those told of the youth of Arthur and
Charlemagne, which, if not credible in themselves, are interesting as
showing the feelings of the Portuguese chroniclers and poets towards
him. His boyish exploits in the mountains around Guimaraens, in which he
is said to have fought wolves as he afterwards fought the Moors, and the
tale of the fire which played about his cradle without hurting or even
terrifying the youthful hero, savour of the marvellous and were
evidently invented in after years. But in telling the tale of his
education and bringing up his biographers were on firmer ground. His
father had died when he was but an infant, and his mother was too much
occupied with her lover and with the cares of government to pay much
attention to him. He was handed over entirely to the charge of a gallant
Portuguese nobleman, Egas Moniz, the governor of Guimaraens. The young
count showed himself an adept in all knightly exercises; he became a
skilful horseman and a fearless hunter; and added to these
accomplishments, a knowledge of reading and writing rarely acquired in
those times by any but ecclesiastics. His disposition was that of knight
of the Middle Ages; with the greatest personal bravery, he possessed a
love for poetry and romance, and delighted in the tales of chivalry
which were sung before him; and he was moreover a typical Christian of
the period, uniting a belief in superstitions, which made him a fanatic,
with a looseness of life, when love for women or romantic adventure was
in question, which directly belied his religious professions.
His initiation into public life began at the age of fourteen, when he
was taken by his tutor and guardian to Zamora to receive the honour of
knighthood, in the cathedral from his cousin, Alfonso VII. It was at the
feast of Pentecost, in 1125, that he thus devoted his life to chivalry,
and he made his vows and watched his arms throughout the night in the
cathedral with all the ardour of his age and temperament. He was to
fight in many a war with the cousin who then made him a knight; but
neither of them, though failing to lead moral lives, ever failed to
acquit himself as a chivalrous knight. Affonso returned to Guimaraens
with Egas Moniz, and many of the Portuguese nobility at once proposed
that he should assume the government of his county in person and deprive
his mother of the regency. He was trained to this idea by Archbishop
Paio Mendes and his party, and when Donna Theresa and Egas Moniz
promised for him that he would submit to Alfonso VII. he refused to
ratify their promises, and declared himself of age in 1128. He speedily
defeated his mother at the battle of S. Mamede, and then became the real
ruler of his county. In his conduct after this behaviour of his ward and
pupil, old Egas Moniz showed how fit he was to have been the tutor of a
hero. When the old nobleman understood that Affonso would not make the
submission to the King of Castile, Leon, and Gallicia, which he had
promised in the young count’s name, he went to Toledo with his wife and
children, and, surrendered himself to Alfonso VII. The young king
honoured the old man’s loyalty to his word, and, instead of punishing
him, pointed him out to his courtiers as a model to be imitated, and
said aloud, “What great things will not the pupil of such a noble knight
be able to perform!”
The reign of Affonso Henriques may be divided into four clearly marked
periods--the regency of Donna Theresa; the wars of dismemberment, by
which the independence of Portugal was established; the wars of
acquisition against the Moors, by which the southern frontier of the
country was extended; and the period of partial decline after the defeat
and imprisonment of the king in 1166. Of these four periods the first
has been described, but each of the others deserves a close examination,
for each of them possesses a distinct importance in Portuguese history.
The four wars of Affonso Henriques with Alfonso VII. ended in the
recognition of the Portuguese hero as king, and in the abandonment by
him of all interference in Gallicia. The first Gallician war consisted
of an incursion by Affonso Henriques into Gallicia, in 1130, the year of
his mother’s death, which was caused by the desire of the Count to
punish Fernando Peres, who was preparing on his side an invasion of
Portugal. From this incursion Affonso was recalled by the news that
Fernando’s brother, Bermudo Peres, who had married Affonso’s sister, and
was governor of Viseu, was in open insurrection. Affonso instantly
returned, took Bermudo’s castle of Seia, confiscated his estates, and
forced him to become a monk; and the Gallician party in Portugal
received a blow from which it never recovered. In 1135 Affonso made a
second incursion into Gallicia, took the town of Limia, and built the
great castle of Celmes. Alfonso VII., who had in this year been elected
Emperor, and whose supremacy was acknowledged not only all over Spain,
but in Provence as well, was not likely to brook this insolence on the
part of the Count of Portugal, and speedily sent an army, which captured
Celmes and then withdrew. Affonso did not feel grateful for the
leniency with which he had been treated, but in 1137 made a third
incursion into Gallicia, at the invitation of Gomes Nunes of Tuy, and
Rodrigo Peres of Limia, and utterly defeated the counts true to Alfonso
VII., headed by his old enemy Fernando Peres, and by Rodrigo Vela, in
the hard-fought battle of Cerneja. This defeat at last roused the
Emperor Alfonso, who came in person with a powerful army to punish the
count, or as he now termed himself, the Infante of Portugal. Fortunately
for Affonso the two armies did not come to blows; the ecclesiastics on
both sides argued that it was monstrous for two Christian princes to
fight with each other instead of with the Moors, and by the mediation of
the Archbishop of Braga and the Bishop of Oporto, on behalf of Affonso,
and of the Bishops of Tuy, Segovia, and Orense for the Emperor, the
Peace of Tuy was signed on July 4, 1137. By this peace Affonso Henriques
promised to abandon all interference with Gallician affairs, and to
submit himself as a vassal to the Emperor, and both princes swore to
turn their arms against the Mohammedans. But the Portuguese prince did
not abide by the terms of the Peace of Tuy, in so far as it made him a
vassal; and after winning his famous victory over the Moors at Ourique,
in 1139, he again invaded Gallicia, and in 1140 the last battle between
the sons of the two brothers-in-arms, the French counts, Raymond and
Henry, was fought. Affonso Henriques was wounded, and it was agreed, in
consonance with the ideas of the times, to refer the great question of
Portuguese independence to a chivalrous contest. In a great tournament,
known as the “Tourney of Valdevez,” the Portuguese knights were entirely
successful over those of Castile, and in consequence of their victory
Affonso Henriques assumed the title of King of Portugal.
This is the turning-point of Portuguese history, and it is a curious
fact that the independence of Portugal from Gallicia was achieved by
victory in a tournament and not in war. Up to 1136 Affonso Henriques had
styled himself Infante, in imitation of the title borne by his mother;
from 1136 to 1140 he styled himself Principe, and in 1140 he first took
the title of King. There is no document extant in which the Emperor
acknowledged his cousin as a sovereign as early as this date, and,
indeed, the agreement is only known as the “Truce of Valdevez,” but he
obviously acquiesced in it, on condition that Affonso Henriques gave up
all idea of interfering in Gallician politics or of extending his
frontiers towards the north. But a more important consent than that of
the Emperor had to be obtained before the Portuguese prince could obtain
admission into the sacred circle of Christian kings, and this was the
consent of the Pope. The head of the Church at this period was Innocent
II., who was earnestly desirous of promoting the crusading spirit, and
was especially grieved at the very existence of the Moors in Spain. He
despatched Cardinal Guy de Vico to establish union amongst the Christian
princes there, and the cardinal in 1143 drew up a regular peace and
treaty between the Emperor and Affonso Henriques at Zamora. By this
treaty the latter was recognized as sovereign monarch of Portugal, and
the Emperor also granted to him the lordship of Astorga as a fief, in
order that he might thus exercise some control over the Portuguese king.
In reward for the mediation of the cardinal, Affonso Henriques further
declared himself by letter to be a vassal of the Pope, and promised to
pay four ounces of gold a year, by which measure he placed himself under
the protection of the Spiritual Head of Christendom, and secured a
guarantee for the perpetuation of his dynasty.
Portugal was now an independent kingdom. The wars of dismemberment were
over; the wars of extension and establishment were now to take their
place. The next twenty-five years of the reign of Affonso Henriques were
spent in one long crusade against the Moors, and were full of incident
and adventure.
But before entering upon a summary description of these wars, which
spread the fame of the Portuguese and of their monarch throughout
Europe, something must be said of the Moorish wars, which were carried
on simultaneously with the wars of dismemberment. These Gallician wars
have been described first and by themselves, because of the common
mistake made that it was by his successes against the Moors that Affonso
Henriques won his crown. This mistake is of old standing; the early
Portuguese chroniclers always ascribed the independence of their country
as due to the successes of their first king over the infidels, and it
was not until the modern school of historians arose in Portugal, which
examined documents and did not take the statements of their predecessors
on trust, that it was clearly pointed out that Affonso Henriques won
his crown by his long struggle with his Christian cousin, and not by his
exploits against the Moors. This fact is such an important one that it
ranks amongst the most startling discoveries made by the modern
scientific school of historians, and to bring it into clearer prominence
the early years of war with the Moors have been purposely passed over
until now; although there can be no doubt that the exploits of the great
Portuguese crusader made the Emperor more ready to recognize him as an
independent sovereign, and the Pope more anxious to comply with his
desire to be admitted among the sovereigns of Europe. As a proof of his
admission it may be noted here that Affonso Henriques married in 1146
the daughter of a European prince, Matilda of Savoy, daughter of Amadeus
II., Count of Savoy, Maurrienne, and Piedmont.
[Illustration: A VIEW OF THE ANCIENT MOORISH BATH AT CINTRA.
(_From Murphy’s “Travels in Portugal,” 1795._)]
The condition of the Moorish power in Spain had been particularly
favourable to his early enterprises in Gallicia, for it had left him
comparatively free from the fear of invasion from the south, and given
him opportunities for winning signal victories. The wave of Mohammedan
fanaticism, which had established the Almoravid dynasty in Spain and
Morocco, and defeated the Christian chivalry at the battle of Zalaca,
had lost its power, and the Almoravides had degenerated.[2] Independent
Mohammedan dynasties had again established themselves in the different
provinces of Spain, while in Africa, the successor of the Mahdi,
Abd-el-Mumin, was destroying the power of the Almoravides with a fresh
fanatical movement. The three independent emīrs with whom the
Portuguese had to deal were those of the Alfaghar or Algarves, of
Al-kasr Ibn Abi Danes, which comprised Badajoz, Elvas, and Evora, and of
the Belatha, which included the Mohammedan possessions to the north of
the Tagus with the important cities of Lisbon, Santarem, and Cintra.
Under these emīrs were numerous “wālis” of districts, “vezīrs”
of cities, and “kāids” of castles, who were semi-independent; and as
not only the emīrs, but their subordinates were constantly at war
with each other, and could expect but little help from the Almoravide
caliph, the incursions of the Portuguese were generally crowned with
success.
After his accession to the government, Affonso Henriques had chiefly
left the duty of harassing the Moors to the Knights Templars and Knights
Hospitallers, who engaged in frequent expeditions from their
headquarters at Soure and Thomar, where they had been established by
Donna Theresa. Busied as he was with his schemes for independence,
Affonso did little to assist these knightly monks, except to build a
great castle at Leiria, which was intended at once to cover his capital
Coimbra, and to serve as a base for expeditions against Santarem and
Cintra. The erection of this castle alarmed the Mohammedans of the
Belatha, and caused them for a moment to drop their quarrels with each
other. They raised a large army, and in 1135, the very year in which the
castle of Leiria had been built, they stormed it, killed the 240 knights
who had been left as its garrison, and defeated a Christian army at
Thomar. At the time of these disasters Affonso was in Gallicia, but when
affairs there were temporarily settled by the Peace of Tuy, he prepared
to undertake a great expedition against the Moors and gathered all the
chivalry of Portugal to follow him.
When he had collected his army in May, 1139, he determined to do more
than make one of the usual expeditions into the ruined and devastated
districts of the Belatha, and to force his way to the south of the
Tagus, and thus drive the war into the heart of the enemy’s country. He
knew that the opposition would not be so serious as it would have been
in previous years, because Teshfīn, the last Almoravide caliph, who
had succeeded his father in 1137, had in 1138 taken the flower of the
Mohammedan chivalry of Spain across the straits to Africa to make a last
effort to subdue the growing power of the Almohades or followers of the
Mahdi. He knew also that his cousin Alfonso was making his second
incursion into the heart of Andalusia, and he therefore boldly crossed
the Tagus and entered the province of Al-kasr Ibn Abi Danes, as the
western portion of the old Moslem emirate of the Gharb was called. The
emīr, Ismar or Omar, tried to collect an army, but Affonso advanced
with rapidity and utterly defeated him, with four of his “wālis,” at
Orik or Ourique eight leagues south of Beja, on July 25, 1139.
This is the famous victory of Ourique, which, until modern investigators
examined the facts, has been considered to have laid the foundations of
the independence of Portugal. Chroniclers, two centuries after the
battle solemnly asserted that five kings were defeated on this occasion,
that two hundred thousand Mohammedans were slain, and that after the
victory the Portuguese soldiers raised Affonso on their shields and
hailed him as king. This story is absolutely without authority from
contemporary chronicles, and is quite as much a fiction as the Cortes of
Lamego, which has been invented as sitting in 1143 and passing the
constitutional laws, on which Vertot and other writers have expended so
much eloquence. One ought, perhaps, to speak with more reverence of the
legend which tells how Christ crucified appeared to Affonso in his tent,
on the evening before the battle, and promised him the victory, even
though there is no contemporary tradition referring to it; because it
would have been quite in keeping with the mysticism of the Middle Ages
for Affonso to assert that he had seen such a vision in order to
encourage his soldiers. This tradition was certainly current a century
after the battle, and the kings of Portugal to this day bear the five
wounds of Christ in a chief upon their coat of arms in memory of it.[3]
These legends all deserve record, if only to show how great was the fame
of the victory of Affonso, rather from his courage in penetrating so far
into the enemy’s country than from his success in the battle itself.
That success was a victory over five provincial wālis in a country
which hated the Almoravides, at a time when the flower of the Moslem
chivalry was fighting in Africa, and it was not by such victories, but
by hard struggles with his Christian cousin that Affonso achieved the
independence of his country. If any other further proof that the victory
was not all that poets and later historians painted it was needed, it
might be found in the fact that in the very next year Ismar or Omar, the
emīr who was defeated at Ourique, was able to raise a fresh army with
which he took the castle of Leiria by storm.
[Illustration: ARCH OF THE WESTERN ENTRANCE TO AN OLD CHAPEL AT LEIRIA.]
For many years after the recognition of Affonso’s independence the
history of his reign is filled by accounts of the wars against the
Moors. But the warfare no longer comprised single expeditions, such as
that crowned by the victory of Ourique, but steady persevering conquest
of the Belatha. The efforts of the Portuguese were at first directed
against cities and castles, and the country districts were ravaged and
left to lie waste. The whole of the district between Coimbra and the
Tagus was one great battle-ground, and Affonso had all he could do to
take and hold the cities, and was obliged to leave the villages in a
state of desolation. The population of his original kingdom was not
large enough to colonize the new conquests, and Affonso therefore
confined his efforts to laying waste the fields and garrisoning the
cities he took from the Moors with any soldiers he could manage to take
into his pay. It must be noted that the war was not one of
extermination; the Mohammedan and Christian soldiers fought fiercely
enough, but the Celtic inhabitants of the cities, and the large
intermixture of Jews, who dwelt amongst them, passed from the dominion
of the one race to that of the other quietly enough. The war was a war
of soldiers, and Affonso’s difficulty was to get enough of them to make
a successful attempt to maintain his conquests. The nobility of Portugal
followed him gladly with their vassals, and the religious orders of
knights repaid him by their services for the liberality with which Donna
Theresa had received them, but neither of these sources of military
strength were so valuable to him as the crusaders of northern Europe. He
gained their assistance in two ways. Pope Innocent II. had declared it
as praiseworthy to fight the infidels in Spain as in the Holy Land, and
many crusaders fulfilled their crusading vows by coming to Portugal and
taking service there. But most of the warriors of the cross preferred
rather to make their way to Palestine, and as those from England,
Flanders, and the north of France went round by sea, and invariably
touched at Oporto, Affonso was able to persuade many of them to do a
little fighting under his command against the Moors before proceeding to
attack the Saracens in the Holy Land. This was what he did in 1143,
when, with some French crusaders, he ravaged the district around Lisbon.
The history of the Portuguese conquest of the Belatha is of the greatest
importance in itself, and it is noticeable that Affonso’s first
incursion into the country, held by the Moors after the signature of the
Treaty of Zamora, took place at the invitation of a Moorish emīr.
Ahmad Ibn Kasi, Emīr of Mertola, wrote to him in 1144 under the name
and title of Ibn Errik, Lord of Coimbra, and begged him to come to his
assistance against the Emīr of Badajoz. But the Moorish soldiers of
Ahmad Ibn Kasi refused to fight in the same ranks with the Christians,
and Affonso was requested to retire and loaded with presents. After this
he felt increasingly that it was more advantageous for him to conquer
the neighbouring cities one by one than to make these distant
expeditions. It was obvious that his first attack should be directed
against the great and beautiful city of Santarem, which commanded the
upper reaches of the Tagus, and lay at but one day’s march from his
capital at Coimbra. Abu Zekeria, the “vezīr” of Santarem, was the
most famous Mohammedan warrior in the Belatha, and had inflicted a
signal defeat upon the Knights Templars at Soure, and in him Affonso had
a worthy opponent. The only way to take his city was to surprise it, and
for this end the Portuguese king made elaborate preparations. He told no
one of his real intention, except one old soldier, Mem Ramires, and the
first Portuguese canonized saint, St. Theotonio, then prior of the
convent of Santa Cruz at Coimbra. On March 2, 1147, he led his army
forth, and, surprising the city before its “vezīr” had time to
provision it, he laid siege for a few days, and on March 15th carried it
by storm with but slight resistance from the dispirited garrison.
[Illustration: VIEW OF LISBON. (_After a Photograph._)]
This feat of arms was surpassed in the same year by a still greater
event, the capture of Lisbon, the important city at the mouth of the
Tagus, the future capital of Portugal, and the port from which the
Portuguese ships were to sail forth on their voyages of discovery both
to the east and the west. Affonso Henriques had long wished to capture
this great city, for if he possessed it as well as Santarem, he would be
able to defend the Tagus as his southern boundary, and have a much
better base of operations. This ancient city was, from its position on
the Tagus, the natural capital of the western coast of the Iberian
peninsula, and had been an ancient Greek colony. The legend that it was
founded by Ulysses, who gave its name, Ulyssipo, afterwards corrupted
into Olisipo and Lisbon, is an ancient one; and it certainly held that
name up to the time of Augustus, when a Roman colony was fixed there,
and its name was changed to Felicitas Julia. Its capture by the Moors in
714 had marked one of their greatest stages of advance, and it remained
the capital of their province of the Belatha for more than four hundred
years. It had three times been captured by the Christians--in 792 by
Alfonso the Chaste, of Castile; in 851 by Ordonho I., of Leon; and in
1093 by Alfonso VI., the father-in-law of Count Henry, but had only
remained in their possession twenty years after the first recapture, and
only a few months upon the second and third occasions. On this occasion
Affonso hoped to be permanently successful, and to make it the capital
of his kingdom.
It is very doubtful if the Portuguese king would have entered upon this
hazardous feat of arms so soon after his capture of Santarem, had not
the news reached him from Oporto that a great fleet of crusaders had put
in there, and that the Bishop of Oporto had persuaded the soldiers of
the cross to commence their holy war against the infidels by assisting
to take Lisbon before they proceeded on their way to Palestine. The
bulk of these crusaders were Englishmen, and as a letter describing the
expedition and siege by one of their number has lately been discovered
and published,[4] it is possible to trace the whole history of this most
important event in the history of Portugal. The fleet which had sailed
from Dartmouth consisted of 164 ships, under several captains, of whom
the most important were Arnold of Aerschot and Christian Ghistell,
commanding the Germans, Flemings, and men of the county of Boulogne;
Hervey Glanvill, constable of the men of Norfolk and Suffolk; Simon of
Dover, “constable of all the ships of Kent;” Andrew of London, and Saher
de Arcellis. The English crusader tells in his letter that the
proposition of the Bishop of Oporto was not universally well received,
and that two “pirates,” named William Vitulus and Ralph his brother,
succeeded in leading away for a time the men of Hampshire, Bristol, and
Hastings, whose cooperation was, however, soon secured by the eloquence
of Hervey Glanvill. The northern crusaders thus re-united set sail for
the Tagus, and having disembarked at the mouth of the river, marched up
to join Affonso and his Portuguese knights. Even with this large
reinforcement, the King of Portugal had not sufficient soldiers to
blockade the great city, and he concentrated all his efforts on one
particular spot, where at last he forced an entrance on October 24th.
The resistance does not seem to have been very obstinate; the Moors of
the Belatha had been dispirited by the capture of Santarem; those of
the provinces to the south were either distracted by internecine war or
paralyzed into inaction by fear of the Almohades; and Affonso was
allowed to achieve and consolidate his conquest.
In addition to its intrinsic importance, the capture of Lisbon is worth
noticing because of the assistance rendered to the Portuguese by the
English; it is the first instance of the close connection between the
two nations, which has lasted down to the present century, a connection
which makes the history of Portugal of especial interest to Englishmen.
After the conquest, most of the crusaders sailed on their way to the
Holy Land, but the Portuguese king, by liberal offers, managed to
persuade a few to settle down in his dominions, some of whom founded
great families. It was no wonder that Affonso was almost astounded at
his own success. Cintra, Palmella, Mafra, and Almada surrendered to him
without a blow in 1147; Alemquer, Obidos, Torres Novas, and Porto de Moz
in 1148; and he found himself master of the whole of the southern Beira
and of Estremadura. His great difficulty was how at the same time to
occupy and settle his new possessions, and to prepare for a further
advance, and it was only sheer lack of men that checked his conquering
career. Gilbert of Hastings, an Englishman, whom he had made Bishop of
Lisbon, went to England to preach the crusade in Portugal with the full
consent of King Henry II., but he did not bring many men back with him,
and Affonso had to wait ten years before he made his next decisive step
in advance. He spent these years in strengthening the fortifications of
his new cities, and attracting inhabitants to them from his older
cities; nor did he forget to show his gratitude to the Church, which had
allowed its sworn soldiers to help him; for he founded, in 1153, the
magnificent monastery of Alçobaça, the future resting-place of the kings
of Portugal, and the finest specimen of mediæval architecture in the
whole country. All this time he was impatiently longing to take a step
further in advance and to capture the wealthy city of Alcacer do Sal. In
1152 he was beaten back in his first attack on that city; in 1157 he was
again repulsed, although he had the assistance of Thierry of Alsace and
a body of crusaders; but at last, on June 28, 1158, he was successful,
and reached the height of his greatness and prosperity.
During these years, in which he had been fighting the Moors, Affonso
Henriques had observed the terms of the Treaty of Zamora, and had
prudently avoided all interference in the affairs of Spain; but the
death of his cousin, the Emperor Alfonso, in 1157, which left him the
oldest and most famous warrior in the peninsula, seems to have tempted
him to abandon this prudent policy. The Emperor had divided his
kingdoms, leaving Castile to his son Sancho, and Leon and Gallicia to
his son Ferdinand, a division which also seems to have tempted Affonso
to believe he could play a part in Spanish affairs. His alliance was
sought on all sides, and in January, 1160, he betrothed his eldest
daughter, Donna Matilda, to Raymond Berenger, heir to the throne of
Aragon; and a little later in the same year he promised his second
daughter, Donna Urraca, to King Ferdinand; and concluded the Treaty of
Cella Nova, by which it was agreed that each monarch should prosecute
his wars against the Moors independently, and that the course of the
Guadiana should be the limit between their respective lines of conquest.
This treaty was, undoubtedly, caused by the fact that the Moors in
Africa had again become united under the rule of the Almohade caliph,
Abd-el-Mumin, and that a great invasion of Spain by the Mohammedans was
to be expected.
This invasion occurred in the very next year, 1161. Abd-el-Mumin crossed
the straits of Gibraltar with eighteen thousand tried Almohade soldiers,
and after subduing the independent Mohammedan emīrs, inflicted upon
Affonso Henriques his first real defeat, and drove him back to Lisbon
and Santarem. The death of Abd-el-Mumin in 1163 again changed the aspect
of affairs. A disputed succession kept the Almohade warriors busy in
Africa, and independent bands of “salteadors,” who were little better
than brigands and free lances, began to establish themselves as petty
feudal princes in the various cities and districts of the Alemtejo, the
province south of the Tagus, which now became the battle-ground between
the Christians and the Moors. Affonso Henriques let them do as they
liked; he had a greater ambition, and as he had formerly schemed and
planned to take Santarem, Lisbon, and Alcacer do Sal, he now cast his
eyes upon the great city of Badajoz, although it lay upon the eastern
side of the Guadiana which he had agreed to leave to the King of Leon.
With this object in view he took Beja in 1162, Truxillo and Evora in
1165, and Caceres in 1166, thus gradually working up to the city which
he coveted. King Ferdinand was not the man to allow these breaches of
treaty to pass unnoticed, and founded the city of Ciudad Rodrigo, to
command and threaten the north-eastern districts of Portugal.
But Ferdinand was at this time engaged in fighting his nephew, Alfonso
IX. of Castile, and Affonso thought that he could take advantage of him.
In 1167 he once more occupied Tuy and Limia, the two Gallician frontier
cities, which he had formally surrendered by the Treaty of Zamora; and
in 1169 he laid siege to Badajoz. This breach of treaty naturally
incensed King Ferdinand, who collected a vast army, and besieged his
father-in-law in his camp. The Spaniards were in every way successful;
the Portuguese were everywhere defeated; their warrior monarch, now in
advanced years, had his leg broken, and was forced to capitulate.
Ferdinand used his victory with moderation; he remembered what great
things Affonso had done for Christendom; and after two months’
captivity, he allowed the Portuguese king to return to his country on
his surrendering the cities in Gallicia, and on the left bank of the
Guadiana, which he had taken in violation of treaties. But the spirit of
the old warrior was broken; he was never again able to mount a horse,
and about the year 1172, he associated his son Sancho with him in the
government of Portugal, to whom he gave the title of King, and assigned
all the duties of war and the leadership of the Portuguese armies.
Sancho was however a mere boy at this time, though he afterwards proved
himself a worthy son of his father, and it was necessary for Affonso to
take other measures against the Moors, who were now united under the
Almohade caliph Yūsuf. He first promised the Knights Templars
one-third of whatever they might conquer in the future, if they defended
the Alemtejo. But the Templars were too weak in numbers to do much, and
Yūsuf speedily reconquered the whole of the Alemtejo, and then laid
siege to Santarem. Here however he was foiled; the defences had been
strengthened with all the military skill known in the Middle Ages, and
the city was well provisioned. Yūsuf was obliged to retire, and when
he did so, Affonso, for the first time in his long career, made a truce
with the infidels for seven years.
When his son Sancho, who had in 1174 married Donna Dulce, daughter of
Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, and Petronilla, Queen of Aragon,
came to years of discretion, he broke this truce; and in 1176 he made an
incursion into Moorish Spain as far as the city of Seville, and brought
back much booty with him. This incursion revived perpetual fighting with
the Mohammedans, and for the next few years the Alemtejo once more
became a great battle-ground. In 1179, in which year Pope Alexander III.
affirmed the independence of Portugal by a special papal bull, the Moors
were beaten back from Abrantes; in 1180, they destroyed Corruche, and in
1181 they were defeated at Evora. The greatest struggle was yet to come.
In May, 1184, Yūsuf crossed the straits with the finest and
best-equipped Moslem army the Almohades ever brought into Spain; and in
June he laid siege for the second time to Santarem. Pestilence defended
the Portuguese city, and on 4th of July, 1184, Sancho utterly defeated
the fever-stricken army of the Moors in a great battle, in which
Yūsuf himself was mortally wounded. A legend runs that Affonso
Henriques was carried in his litter at the head of the reinforcements,
that enabled Sancho to win this signal victory, which, whether he
himself were present or not, formed a worthy close to the reign of the
great crusader-king.
During these last years of the Moorish wars, Affonso preserved all the
quickness of intellect, if none of the bodily activity of his early
years, and as his son Sancho was always at war, he devoted himself
entirely to his last remaining daughter, Donna Theresa. The beauty of
this princess was sung by the troubadours in all the courts of Europe,
and her hand in marriage was eagerly sought by many suitors. In 1183,
the old king at last accepted an offer for her, and she left her father
and her country to marry Philip, the wealthy Count of Flanders. Poets
and chroniclers agree in saying that the departure of this dear daughter
broke the old king’s heart; he lived however to hear of, even if the
legend be unfounded that he was not present at, the last great victory
at Santarem, and he died on 6th of December of the following year, 1185,
at Coimbra. He was buried in the church of the priory of Santa Cruz, in
that city of which his friend S. Theotonio had been prior, and his tomb
has been rightly reverenced as that of the true founder of Portuguese
independence.
It is seldom the case that in one man’s reign a small inconsiderable
county has grown into a powerful compact little kingdom, even during the
Middle Ages, and that the new kingdom should be perpetuated to modern
times is quite unparalleled in the history of Europe. This is what gives
the history of the reign of Affonso Henriques such unusual interest and
importance in general, as distinct from Portuguese, history. There is no
geographical or ethnological reason why the part of the Iberian
peninsula called Portugal should have formed an independent kingdom,
more than Leon or Castile. It was the greatness of one man which made it
an independent country. This is the first lesson taught by the Story of
Portugal, that nations are not always marked out by natural geographical
limits, or race divisions. The second lesson is, that a nation, which
has thus become independent, may under certain circumstances develop a
distinct individuality, which gives it a different character in every
way to its neighbours. It has been shown that chance, the foresight of
Donna Theresa and the greatness of Affonso Henriques made Portugal
independent; the course of the history to be narrated will show how,
while the other kingdoms of the peninsula coalesced into Spain, Portugal
remained independent and developed separately. Spain and Portugal are
now two separate countries with different languages, literatures, and
national characteristics; how they began to separate has been shown; how
they became finally distinct is now to be related.
[Illustration: text decoration]
IV.
PORTUGAL ATTAINS ITS EUROPEAN LIMITS.
[Illustration: CONVENTO DE CHRISTO AT THOMAR. (_After a Photograph._)]
Sancho I., the Povoador or City-builder, had already won his reputation
as a warrior in his father’s life-time, and his fame as king rests
rather on the success of his internal administration of his country. But
before he had time to gratify his inclination towards the more peaceful
duties of government, he had to continue the life and death struggle
with the Moors. The great victory won the year before his accession,
gave him a little breathing space, and in 1188 he even proposed to take
part in the Third Crusade, for which great preparations were being made
all over Europe. But the Moors were not likely to forget their repulse
at Santarem, and in the same year Ya’kūb, the son of Yūsuf, the
new Almohade caliph landed in the peninsula, and marched without a check
until he was once more driven from before Santarem by the conjoined
influence of pestilence and of the courage of the Portuguese knights. In
the following year King Sancho took his revenge; he stopped at Lisbon
first an army of Dutch, Frisian, and Danish crusaders; then a body of
French crusaders under Jacques d’Avesnes, Bishop of Beauvais, and the
Count of Bar; and finally a well-equipped force of Londoners, all on
their way to the Holy Land--and with their help he not only reduced the
whole of the Alemtejo, but even took Silves, the capital of the distant
emirate of the Alfaghar or Algarves. Ya’kūb was astounded at these
successes. He collected a large Mohammedan army, and again crossed to
Spain. But ill-luck followed his advance; his army was badly equipped,
and not well supplied with provisions; he was foiled by one hundred
young London crusaders in an attack on Silves; he was driven back from
Thomar, the headquarters of the Knights Templars, by their Grand Master
in Portugal, Gualdim Paes; and was finally obliged to abandon the siege
of Santarem by a pestilence, which the Portuguese ascribed to a
visitation from God. But the great Almohade caliph determined to be more
successful the next time; he spent two years in Africa in preaching the
Holy War against the Christians, and in 1192 crossed to the peninsula
with the finest Mohammedan army which had appeared there since the days
of the Almoravides. King Sancho and his Portuguese knights had to oppose
this formidable invasion unaided, for the crusaders had gone on their
way to Palestine, and were there fighting under Richard Cœur de Lion,
and Philip Augustus of France. The Mohammedan soldiers advanced in a
triumphal march; they easily reconquered Silves and the Algarves, and
then swept across the Alemtejo, taking in rapid succession Beja, Alcacer
do Sal, the hard-won conquest of Affonso Henriques, and even Palmella
and Almada--the cities which guarded the approach to Lisbon from the
south. Sancho, seeing that resistance was of no avail, was only too glad
to be permitted to make a treaty with the Moors, which fixed the Tagus
as his southern boundary, and the vast Mohammedan army turned into
Andalusia and utterly defeated Alfonso VIII. of Castile at the battle of
Alarcos in 1195.
King Sancho recognized the fact that the Moors, while united under their
great Almohade caliph, were too powerful for him to attack, and he
therefore turned his attention to the disputes among the Spanish
sovereigns, and to matters of internal administration. It is fortunately
not necessary to relate the history of Sancho’s wars with his Christian
neighbours. The independence of Portugal was now an established fact,
and the minute details of the various wars waged up to the year 1200
have no especial importance or interest, except in so far as they
contribute to a knowledge of the causes of the quarrel which ensued
between Sancho and the Pope. It will be remembered that the eldest
daughter of Affonso Henriques, Donna Urraca, had married Ferdinand II.,
King of Leon, and that she was the mother of Alfonso IX. This monarch
had commenced his reign on friendly terms with Affonso Henriques, and
his successor Sancho, and this friendliness had culminated in 1191, in
the marriage of Alfonso IX. of Leon to Sancho’s daughter, Donna Theresa.
This princess, whose virtues were such that she was canonized as a saint
in 1705, was thus first cousin to her husband, and as the canon law was
very strict against such marriages, Pope Celestine III. by threats of
excommunication and of interdict, forced her husband to repudiate her
and to send her back to Portugal in 1195. This insult not only brought
about the wars with Leon, which have been mentioned, but left in the
mind of King Sancho a rankling animosity against the Papacy, which found
its outlet later in his great quarrel with Pope Innocent III.
His truce with the Moors in 1192, and his determination to abandon all
interference in Leon and Gallicia after 1200, left King Sancho time to
attend to the crying wants of his people. He recognized clearly that
there was no use in his pushing across the Tagus and conquering the
Alemtejo and the Algarves, when the little kingdom he actually ruled was
not half populated. During his father’s reign there had been nothing but
fighting, and except in Oporto and Lisbon, where a flourishing trade
existed, fostered by the frequent visits of the crusading fleets from
the north, and in the northern provinces of the Entre Minho e Douro and
the Tras-os-Montes, where agriculture survived, the scanty population
subsisted chiefly on the spoils taken in the yearly invasions of
Mohammedan territory. The population of the Beira and the northern part
of Portuguese Estremadura lived entirely in towns, or in villages
clustered round the castles of the nobility, and looked upon war as the
only means for obtaining a livelihood. This habit of mind had made a
nation of warriors, but it had left the land uncultivated. Tracts of
wilderness extended between the towns and villages especially in the
more recently conquered districts to the south of Coimbra, and now that
the truce with the Moors had deprived the population of their chief
means of subsistence, King Sancho saw that it was necessary to revive
the pursuit of agriculture.
But, first of all, King Sancho devoted himself to the task of repairing
the old city walls, and to the foundation of new towns in commanding
strategic positions, which gave him his sobriquet of “O Povoador” or the
City-builder. This policy was dictated by the threatening attitude of
the Moors under the Almohades; for Sancho, like most of his
contemporaries, could not believe that the Moslem dominion in the
Peninsula was nearing its close, and he made every preparation for
resisting fresh invasions. His first care was to see that all the walls
of old cities were put into thorough repair by the citizens, and
adequately manned by the city militia; his next, to found new cities,
which should command important roads, wherever they were not already in
close proximity to powerful towns. Among these new cities, his
favourite, and the one which afterwards attained the greatest historical
importance was Guarda, which was founded to the westward of the
threatening Spanish fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo. In matters of city
government Sancho wisely followed the example of the Mohammedans in
continuing the old Roman system of municipal administration, which left
all matters of internal government entirely in the hands of the
citizens, and when he granted the lordship of a city to a bishop, baron,
or military order, he carefully regulated their functions, and allowed
them only to take a fixed share of the municipal revenue for fulfilling
certain fixed duties, such as leading the contingent of the city in war,
or holding courts of justice. The rural districts he treated on a
different principle. He granted large tracts to noblemen, military
orders, and cities on the express condition that they should be
cultivated and populated within a fixed period under pain of revocation
of the grants. This plan proved effective in the Beira and northern
Estremadura, which King Sancho hoped would be sufficiently secured
against invasion by the great fortresses on the Tagus, Lisbon, Santarem,
and Abrantes, but was quite inapplicable to the Alemtejo. This province
he had, in imitation of his father’s policy, entirely portioned out
among the great military orders before its recapture by Ya’kūb. He
not only confirmed his father’s and grandmother’s large grants to the
Templars, Hospitallers, and Knights of the Sepulchre, but greatly
increased them; he showed especial favour to the Portuguese order of
chivalry, the Knights of St. Benedict of Aviz, which Affonso Henriques
had founded; and he introduced from Spain the Order of Caceres, to which
he granted Alcacer do Sal, Palmella, and Almada, and that of Calatrava,
to which he granted Evora, Alcanede, and Jurumenha, thus attracting to
his kingdom some of the most famous warriors of Spain. It was true that
the conquests of Ya’kūb had annulled the effect of these grants, but
the knights looked upon their possessions across the Tagus, as only in
the temporary occupation of the Mohammedans, and were inspired by this
feeling into redoubled alacrity in guarding the line of the Tagus, and
with an ardent desire for the war against the Moors to begin again.
[Illustration: PRINCIPAL FAÇADE OF THE IGREGA DOS JERONYMOS AT BELEM.
(PRESENT STATE.) (_After a Photograph._)]
The latter years of Sancho’s reign were signalized by his quarrels with
his bishops and the Pope, and naturally enough since the Pope was
Innocent III. This struggle bears a close resemblance to the contest
between Henry II. of England and the Pope a few years before, and also
possesses an importance of its own. The main points were that Sancho
insisted upon priests accompanying their flocks to battle, and in making
them amenable to the civil courts. These ideas seemed monstrous to Pope
Innocent III., who sent legate after legate to demand Sancho’s
withdrawal of these claims and the payment of his tribute to the Holy
See. But Sancho had in his chancellor, Julião, a great statesman, who
had been the first Portuguese to study the revival of Roman law at
Bologna, and who had learnt broad notions there as to the extent of the
Papal authority; and he in the king’s name asserted the supremacy of the
royal power in everything, and even his right to resume the estates held
by the Church in Portugal. Pope Innocent declared these notions to be
heretical, but the king supported his chancellor, who in return took
every opportunity to support the royal authority. The lower clergy of
Portugal were not unwilling to comply with their sovereign’s demands,
and the military orders stood by him as a valiant crusader; his chief
difficulty was with his bishops, and especially with the wealthiest
among them. The bishops of Lamego, Viseu, Lisbon, and Guarda were all
poor, the latter not even possessing a cathedral or a palace in his
newly established see; but the Archbishop of Braga, and the bishops of
Oporto and Coimbra were ecclesiastical princes disposing of vast
revenues, and it was with them that King Sancho quarrelled. His quarrel
with the Bishop of Coimbra is worth noting, as affording evidence of the
superstitious disposition of even a crusading monarch in those times,
for it arose about a so-called witch, whom the king insisted on keeping
in his palace. His contest with Martinho Rodrigues, Bishop of Oporto, is
far more complicated, but need not be related at length. It is enough to
say that the bishop offended not only the king, but his chapter and the
people of his city, and that he was eventually shut up in his palace and
besieged there for five months. When he made his escape he fled to Rome,
and Pope Innocent III. forthwith placed the kingdom of Portugal under an
interdict. For a time, Sancho supported by his chancellor and by the
inferior clergy, who refused to obey the interdict, paid no attention to
the Pope, and went on building towns and castles, notably those of
Celorico and Linhares; but at last in 1210, feeling that his health was
declining and that he was about to die, he made his submission, received
the Bishop of Oporto back into the kingdom, and paid the Pope one
hundred marks of gold. He then retired to the convent of Alçobaça, where
he died on March 26, 1211, leaving a reputation as a warrior and a
statesman second only to that acquired by his father.
Nothing proves more certainly the assured position attained in so short
a time by the little kingdom of Portugal than the great marriages made
by some of King Sancho’s daughters, and the relations he entered into
not only with the kings of Spain, but with the more distant princes of
Christendom. It has been noted that one of Sancho’s daughters, Donna
Theresa, married Alfonso IX. of Leon, and was repudiated by the order of
the Pope, because the marriage infringed the laws of consanguinity. The
same interference for the same reason took place with regard to her
sister Donna Mafalda or Matilda, who married Henry I. of Castile after
her father’s death, and was forced to leave him by Pope Innocent III.
The beauty of the Portuguese princesses was so famous that their hands
were sought by distant kings. King John of England sent an embassy in
1199 to ask for the hand of an infanta in vain; and Sancho’s youngest
daughter, Donna Berengaria, married King Waldemar of Denmark in 1213.
Not less brilliant were the marriages of his sons. The eldest, Dom
Affonso, married Donna Urraca, daughter of Alfonso VIII. of Castile and
Eleanor of England, and sister of Blanche, the famous queen of France
and the mother of Louis IX., the crusader-saint; the second, Dom Pedro,
married a daughter of the Count of Urgel, and became lord of Segorba;
and the third, Dom Ferdinand, married Joanna, Lady of Flanders, and
fought at the head of the Flemish troops by the side of John of England
at the battle of Bouvines. These alliances show how thoroughly Portugal
was recognized at this early date as one of the kingdoms of Europe,
although at the death of Sancho her southern boundary was the Tagus, and
she had lost all the conquests made by Affonso Henriques in the
Alemtejo.
The reign of Affonso II., “the Fat,” is chiefly important in the
constitutional history of Portugal, and is only remarkable for one
memorable feat of arms, the recapture of Alcacer do Sal. On his
father’s death the young king, probably by the advice of the chancellor
Julião, summoned a “Cortes” or parliament, consisting of the bishops,
“fidalgoes” and “ricos homens” of the realm, which was the first regular
assembly of notables ever held in Portugal, for the Cortes of Lamego,
generally asserted to have met in 1143, is apocryphal. In the presence
of this Cortes Affonso II. gave his solemn adhesion to the final compact
which his father had made with the Church, and he then propounded a law
of mortmain, drawn up by Julião, by which religious foundations could
receive no more legacies of land, because they could not perform
military service. The new king proved to be no such warrior as his
father and grandfather had been, but he was very tenacious of the wealth
and power of the Crown, and he refused to hand over to his brothers the
large estates which King Sancho had bequeathed to them by his will. It
was not until after a long civil war, in which Alfonso IX. of Leon,
Alfonso VIII. of Castile, and Pope Innocent III. intervened, that he
gave his sisters their legacies, at the same time taking care that they
became nuns; but his brothers were forced to become exiles, and never
received the estates bequeathed to them at all.
Though Affonso himself was no soldier, the Portuguese infantry showed
how free men could fight in the great battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212,
in which Mohammed En-Nāsir, the successor of Ya’kūb, was utterly
defeated; and the Portuguese statesmen, bishops, and captains determined
to take advantage of the weakness of the Almohades after this reverse
to reconquer the Alemtejo. Fortunately for their purpose there arrived
at Lisbon in July, 1217, a great fleet of English, Dutch, and German
ships bearing crusaders to the Holy Land. The leaders of the English
crusaders were the earls of Wight and Holland, both friends of the
exiled prince, Dom Ferdinand, who had fled to his aunt, Donna Theresa,
in Flanders. Sueiro, Bishop of Lisbon, made an effort to detain this
powerful army, and succeeded in persuading the English division to stop,
though the eighty Frisian ships sailed away. The English knights and
men-at-arms disembarked at Lisbon, under their earls, and a Portuguese
army, not raised by the royal summons or commanded by the royal
officers, was led by Sueiro, Bishop of Lisbon, the Abbot of Alçobaça,
Martinho, Commander of Palmella, and Pedro Alvitiz, Grand Master of the
Portuguese Templars, to join them. The two armies formed the siege of
Alcacer do Sal, the city which Affonso Henriques had won with so much
difficulty, and which Sancho I. had been forced to surrender. The
defence was most obstinate, and in September, 1217, a Mohammedan army of
forty thousand infantry and fifteen thousand cavalry came up to relieve
the city, under the command of the _wālis_ of Badajoz, Seville, Jaen,
Cordova, and Xeres. The Christian and Mohammedan armies met in battle on
September 12th; the latter were defeated with immense loss, and were
pursued by the Templars for three days; the _wālis_ of Cordova and
Jaen were killed; and on October 18th the city of Alcacer do Sal
surrendered, and its gallant defender, Abu-Abdallah, in admiration of
the valour of the Christians, consented to be baptized.
In this expedition the king took no part; he was more bent upon filling
his treasury, a tendency which soon brought him again into conflict with
the Church. His chancellor, Gonçalo Mendes, who had inherited the policy
of Julião, and the chief officers of his Court, Pedro Annes, the Mordomo
Mor or Lord Steward, and Martim Fernandes, the Alferes Mor or Grand
Standard-bearer, encouraged him to lay hands on the great estates of
Estevão Soares da Silva, the noble and learned Archbishop of Braga. Pope
Honorius III. at once espoused the cause of the archbishop,
excommunicated the king, and laid an interdict on the kingdom, in order
to force Affonso to make restitution to the archbishop and to expel
Pedro Annes and Gonçalo Mendes from his Court. Affonso refused to
submit, and he was still under the interdict of the Church when he died
on the 25th of March, 1223. This avaricious monarch had devoted himself
to increasing the wealth and power of the Crown; to this must be
attributed not only his quarrels with his brothers and sisters and with
the Church, but the great constitutional measures which distinguish his
reign. It was for this purpose that he summoned the first Portuguese
Cortes to assent to his law of “mortmain,” and despatched the first
“inquiracão geral” through the kingdom to examine on oath into the
titles of all holders of landed property by sworn juries of inhabitants
of the vicinity, a proceeding exactly similar to the commissions sent by
Henry II. to inquire into cases of “mort d’ancestor” and “darrein
presentment.” Yet the reign of this irreligious and excommunicated king
was marked by a revival of religion in Portugal. Sueiro Gomes, one of
the earliest followers of S. Dominic, was a Portuguese, and was sent by
his master to found branches of the order of preaching friars in his
native land, and though in every way checked by Affonso, he made much
progress in all the great cities and towns. Far greater was the success
of the Franciscan friars, who were introduced into Portugal by Donna
Sancha, one of the king’s sisters, who had taken the veil and was
canonized in 1705, and for whom Queen Urraca built two splendid convents
at Lisbon and Guimaraens. The order took deep root, and its fame was
sealed by the martyrdom of the five friars sent by S. Francis of Assisi
to Morocco, whose bodies were brought to Portugal by Dom Ferdinand, the
king’s brother, and were buried at Santa Cruz in Coimbra, where they
were covered by the most sacred shrine in Portugal.
Sancho II. was only thirteen when he succeeded his father, and, as might
have been expected during a minority, the turbulent nobility and
intriguing bishops tried to undo the effect of the late king’s labours
to consolidate the royal authority. The old statesmen and advisers of
Affonso II., Gonçalo Mendes, the chancellor, Pedro Annes, and Vicente,
Dean of Lisbon, saw that it was necessary to get the interdict removed
if there was to be any peace during the king’s minority, and prudently
retired into the background, and Sueiro Gomes, the great Bishop of
Lisbon, came to the front, and with the help of the pious infantas, the
king’s aunts, made peace with the Archbishop of Braga and with Pope
Honorius III., who solemnly confirmed the crown to the boy king. The
archbishop then became the most powerful man in the kingdom, and with
Abril Peres, the new Mordomo Mor agreed with Alfonso IX. of Leon that
the Portuguese should attack Elvas, at the same time that the Spaniards
laid siege to Badajoz. The opportunity was a favourable one; a disputed
succession had resulted in a civil war amongst the Mohammedans both in
Spain and Morocco, and Elvas was stormed in 1226. At this siege the
young king performed prodigies of valour, and the Portuguese knights and
soldiers looked on him with admiration as a worthy successor of Affonso
Henriques. Confiding in the love and support of his people, young
Sancho, though only seventeen, then took the reins of power into his own
hands, and recalled his father’s friends to power making Vicente
chancellor, Pedro Annes Mordomo Mor, and Martim Annes Alferes Mor.
This change of power greatly disconcerted the party of the bishops, who
began to intrigue for the overthrow of the young king, but he wisely
continued to occupy himself with fighting the Mohammedans, knowing well
that no pope would dare to attack a crusading monarch. He tried in
everything, in his internal administration and his crusading ardour, to
imitate his cousin, Louis IX. of France, and this wise policy secured
him the protection of the Pope, who, in 1228, sent a legate, John of
Abbeville, Cardinal of S. Sabina, with full powers, and with orders to
rebuke the Portuguese bishops. The legate did his best to settle
long-standing quarrels in the Church, and especially that between
Martinho Rodrigues, Bishop of Oporto, the old adversary of Sancho I.,
and his chapter, and showed his approval of the king’s advisers by
making the chancellor, Vicente, Bishop of Guarda. The legate also
expressed his satisfaction at the king’s favourable treatment of the
friars and the military religious orders, and as the bishops still
intrigued against him, he persuaded Pope Gregory IX. to administer a
severe rebuke to them by an encyclical letter. The people, the friars,
and especially the military orders, simply adored their young monarch at
this time, and it was impossible to foresee the catastrophe which was to
sadly terminate his reign. The most distinguished military orders at
this time were the Knights Hospitallers, whose prior, Affonso Peres
Farinha, was the greatest warrior of his time, and who, in 1231,
captured the important towns of Moura and Serpa; and the knights of
Santiago, whose valiant prior, Paio Peres Correia, in 1234, took
Aljustrel. But the king himself was the most ardent crusader of them
all, and his youngest brother, Dom Ferdinand, who from Serpa ravaged the
districts held by the Mohammedans every year, soon won a reputation
second only to his own. In these halcyon days King Sancho II. imitated
his grandfather in attempting to settle and cultivate the lands of the
Alemtejo, on the same principles that Sancho I. had acted upon in the
Lower Beira and Estremadura, while peace was maintained with the
neighbouring kingdom of Leon, where, indeed, the greatest men at this
period were of Portuguese birth, namely, Dom Pedro, the king’s uncle,
who was Mordomo Mor of that kingdom, and Martim Sanches, an illegitimate
son of Sancho I., who was the principal general of its armies.
[Illustration: GATE AND WINDOW OF THE MONASTERY OF BELEM.]
Meanwhile the wise advisers of the youth of Sancho II. gradually died
off, and his Court was thronged with gay young knights and troubadours,
who filled him with conceit and encouraged him in foolish courses. The
first result of the removal of his old counsellors was to be seen in a
serious quarrel with the Church. When on the death of Sueiro Gomes, the
famous Bishop of Lisbon, in 1237, the royal candidate was not elected as
his successor, the king sent his brother Dom Ferdinand to the city,
where he burnt the house of the opposition candidate, João the dean, and
killed several priests; and the king’s uncle, Rodrigo Sanches, acted in
much the same high-handed manner at Oporto. Such behaviour was not to be
tolerated even in a crusading monarch, and a papal interdict was laid on
the kingdom; but prompt submission on the part of Sancho, and the
journey of his brother, Dom Ferdinand, to Rome to do solemn penance for
his misbehaviour, made atonement and the interdict was removed. The king
then once again turned his arms against the Mohammedans, and invaded the
Algarves, capturing Mertola and Ayamonte in 1239, Cacello in 1240, and
Tavira in 1244.
Unfortunately in the interval between these two last campaigns, King
Sancho paid a visit to the Court of Castile, where he fell in love with
Donna Mencia Lopes de Haro, the widow of a Castilian nobleman, Alvares
Peres de Castro, whom he probably married. This woman became the evil
genius of his life; the king grew lazy and sensual, and his Court
degenerated into a hotbed of vice and intrigue. The connection was most
distasteful to the people of Portugal, and gave an opportunity for the
bishops and discontented feudal nobility to overthrow Sancho, whom they
had always hated, if they could only find a leader and obtain the
assistance of the Pope. Even his brother, Dom Ferdinand, deserted him in
disgust, and became a vassal of Castile, and his worthless courtiers and
favourites, while urging him on to despotism and vicious indulgences,
made him more and more unpopular. Pope Innocent IV., who had been forced
to fly from Rome to France by the Emperor Frederick II., longed to show
his spiritual power over some monarch, and was easily persuaded by the
Portuguese bishops that Sancho was both impious and cowardly. A leader
was not hard to find, and in 1245, the king’s next brother, Affonso, who
had settled at the Court of Blanche of Castile, the mother of Louis IX.,
and who had there married the heiress to the county of Boulogne, offered
himself to the malcontents as a candidate for the throne of Portugal.
The Pope then issued a bull “Grandi non immerito,” of which the terms
were used as precedents in depositions of the more important monarchs in
later days, and João Egas, Archbishop of Braga, Tiburcio, Bishop of
Coimbra, and Pedro Salvadores, Bishop of Oporto, went to Paris and
offered Affonso of Boulogne the crown of Portugal on certain conditions,
which he accepted and swore to observe. Civil war had already broken out
before the arrival of Affonso at Lisbon in 1246, when he declared
himself Defender of the kingdom; Donna Mencia behaved in a most
disgraceful manner to the king, whom she had ruined; Sancho and the
Castilian troops which he brought to his help were defeated, and the
unfortunate monarch, whose early years had been so full of promise,
retired to Toledo where he died, deserted and unhappy, on January 8,
1248.
With such a commencement it might have been expected that the reign of
Affonso III. would have been a period of civil war and internal
dissension, or at the least of complete submission to the Church and the
feudal nobility; but, on the contrary, it was from a constitutional
point of view the most important of all the early reigns, and also that
in which Portugal concluded its warfare with the Mohammedans in the
Peninsula and attained its European limits. In short, Affonso III.
proved by the events of his reign to be essentially a politic king, if
not a high-minded man. On his brother’s death he exchanged his title of
“visitador” or “curador” of the realm for that of king, and, in order to
establish his fame as a warrior and a crusader, he at once prepared to
complete the conquest of the Algarves, where most of the acquisitions of
Sancho II. had been lost to the Moors during the civil war. Aided by his
uncle, Dom Pedro, and the Knights Hospitallers under Gonçalo Peres
Magro, he was speedily successful, taking Faro, Albufeira, which he
granted to the knights of Aviz, and Porches, which he assigned to his
chancellor, Estevão Annes, in 1249, and Ayamonte, Cacello, and Tavira in
1250. This extension of the Portuguese territory was by no means
acceptable to Alfonso X. “the Wise,” who was now king of Castile and
Leon; and after a short war, Affonso III. consented to marry Alfonso’s
illegitimate daughter, Donna Beatrice de Guzman, though the Countess of
Boulogne was still alive, and to hold the Algarves in usufruct only.
Affonso then turned his attention to his own position in Portugal, and
determined to bridle the power of the bishops in spite of his oath at
Paris. Perceiving that this could only be done with the assistance of
the great body of his people, he summoned a great Cortes at Leiria in
1254, to which representatives of the cities of the kingdom were elected
to sit with the nobles and higher clergy. This Cortes is of the greatest
importance in the constitutional history of Portugal, and its
composition shows that Affonso III. understood, like Simon de Montfort
and Edward I. in England, that it was only by an alliance with the
people that he could check the power of feudalism and sacerdotalism. His
policy was rewarded; the bishops recognized the need for submission; and
with the consent of the Cortes, Affonso dared the interdict laid on the
kingdom for his second marriage, and forced the clergy to continue their
functions. Abroad he maintained peace through his alliance with Alfonso
the Wise, and finally, on the petition of the now submissive prelates of
Portugal, Pope Urban IV. legalized the king’s second marriage and
legitimated his son Diniz in 1262. He was everywhere honoured and
successful, and in 1263 Alfonso X. made over the full sovereignty of the
Algarves to him, when he assumed the title of King of Portugal and the
Algarves.
[Illustration: FAÇADE OF LISBON CATHEDRAL. (_After a Photograph._)
_The oldest church in the city, as expressed by the proverb, “Velho Como
a Sé”._]
The people now began to make their power felt in the Cortes, and Affonso
soon had to pay for the assistance which they had previously rendered to
him. In a full Cortes held at Coimbra in 1261, the representatives of
the cities boldly denounced the king’s habit of tampering with the
coinage, and compelled his recognition of the principle that taxes were
not levied by the inherent right of the king, but by the free consent of
the people. As a popular king, he completely mastered the bishops, in
spite of their ability and learning, and he was much aided in this work
by the orders and regulations specially issued by Pedro Hispano, the
great Portuguese scholar and theologian, who had been the king’s friend
when Archbishop of Braga, and who became a cardinal, and afterwards for
a short time pope, as Pope John XXI. After a prosperous and successful
reign, Nemesis came upon Affonso III. for his behaviour to his brother,
in the rebellion of his son Diniz in 1277, who remained in arms until
1279, when the king died in a state of despair, and of misery at his
son’s ingratitude.
During the reigns of Sancho I., Affonso II., Sancho II., and Affonso
III., Portugal attained its European limits, and started on the way to
become a great, free, and wealthy nation. The period of war and of
territorial extension in the peninsula was now over, and the period of
civilization was to dawn. Territorially and constitutionally, Portugal
was now an established kingdom; it remained for it to become civilized
and thoroughly homogeneous before the great heroic period of exploration
and Asiatic conquest should begin. The kingdom and its people had
passed through the stage of childhood; now was to come its stirring
youth, in which the great qualities of the Portuguese were to be trained
and developed, before the period of glorious manhood was to mark the
height of its greatness.
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
V.
THE CONSOLIDATION OF PORTUGAL.
No better ruler than Diniz, or Denis, could be found for a country
which, after centuries of war, needed to have a period of peace and
quiet. He was a poet, and loved literature; he was a great
administrator, and loved justice; he was a statesman, and avoided
foreign wars; he was a far-seeing man, and prepared for the extension of
Portuguese energies beyond the sea by encouraging commerce; and, above
all, he saw the need of agriculture and of the arts of peace to take the
place of incessant wars, and in every respect he nobly earned the
sobriquet of the “Ré Lavrador,” or “Denis the Labourer.” From all these
points of view his reign is of vast importance in the history of
Portugal, for it marks the development of the people into an independent
nation, but, like all peaceful reigns of quiet progress, it is not
signalized by many striking events.
The civil war, which Diniz had waged with his father, was followed on
his accession to the throne by a fierce struggle between Diniz and his
brother Affonso, who disputed his legitimacy, which ended in a
compromise. He then married, in 1281, Donna Isabel, daughter of Pedro
III. of Aragon, who was canonized in later years for her pure and
unselfish life. His reign is only marked by one war with Sancho IV. and
Ferdinand IV. of Castile and Leon, which was terminated in 1297 by a
treaty of alliance, according to the terms of which Ferdinand IV.
married Constance, daughter of Diniz, while Affonso, the heir to the
throne of Portugal, married Beatrice of Castile, the sister of
Ferdinand, but his reputation none the less stood very high in the
peninsula, as is shown by his being chosen in 1304 to act as joint
arbitrator with the King of Aragon between Ferdinand of Castile and his
cousin, Ferdinand of Lacerda. Still more interesting are the king’s
relations with Edward I. of England, with whom he exchanged many
letters, chiefly on commercial subjects, and with whom he made a treaty
of commerce in 1294. He had much correspondence also with Edward II.,
and in particular he agreed with the English king in 1311 that the
Knights Templars had been greatly maligned. When that famous order was
suppressed by Pope Clement V. in compliance with the wishes of Philip le
Bel of France, Dom Diniz took a course which demonstrated his political
wisdom. He recollected the great services which the military orders had
formerly rendered to Portugal, and bore in mind their influence and
power, and he therefore founded the Order of Christ in conjunction with
Pope John XXII. in 1319, and invested it with all the property of the
Templars, thus at once obeying the Pope and avoiding a serious
disturbance at home. He showed the same wisdom with regard to the
knights of Santiago in Portugal, whom he persuaded Pope Nicholas IV. to
release from the control of the Grand Master of the Order in Castile,
and to establish on an independent footing.
These few lines touch on every important event, in regard to foreign
affairs, which occurred during the long reign of Dom Diniz, but they
give no idea of the progress of Portugal during this period of nearly
fifty years. Agriculture was greatly encouraged by the monarch, who
founded agricultural schools and homes for farmers’ orphans, and
established model farms. He did much by showing honour to agricultural
pursuits to raise them in the consideration of his nobility, and he
attempted to wean his people in general from the notion that war was the
only occupation fit for a free man. He undertook several important
agricultural experiments himself, established farmers in the still
barren province of the Alemtejo, paid special attention to the
cultivation of vines in the north, and planted the great pine forest of
Leiria by which he hoped to reclaim the sandy regions in that
neighbourhood. He was also a great builder, and did much to improve the
three royal cities of Lisbon, Coimbra, and Santarem, in which the Court
used to reside, and he built the towns of Salvaterra and Villa Real. In
administrative matters, the feudal system, under which the country
districts were ruled was left almost untouched, as were the charters and
franchises of the greater cities and towns, and the only important
measures passed by the Cortes in 1286 and 1291 were still more
stringent laws of mortmain directed against the Church than that passed
in 1250. It was in the administration of justice that the greatest
reforms were introduced. The period of great chancellors, who were
statesmen rather than lawyers, which commenced with Julião, and included
Gonçalo Mendes, Vicente, and Estevão Annes, was over, and a new class of
chancellors was appointed. These men were invariably ecclesiastics, and
looked forward to a bishopric, as the reward of their services. They
were essentially lawyers, learned in the Roman law, which they had
studied at Padua and Bologna; and applying the maxims of their studies
to the common law of Portugal, which was largely founded on Visigothic
ideas, they began to build up a system of Portuguese law, of which the
importance became visible later. Diniz did not venture to abolish the
feudal courts, though he checked their abuses, and among other reforms,
he appointed royal “corregidors” in every city and town belonging to the
Crown in lordship, who were to act as judges of appeal from the feudal
and city courts, as well as to take charge of the police. His wise
encouragement of commerce appears in his commercial treaty with England,
and by his establishment of a royal navy, commanded by a new official,
entitled the “Almirante Mor,” or Lord High Admiral, which office was
first granted to a distinguished Genoese sailor, Emmanuel Pessanha.
But the greatest qualification of Dom Diniz for the sovereignty of a
country, which had at last got time to learn the arts of peace and to
become civilized, was his affection for literature and his
encouragement of education. It was Diniz, who, in 1300, founded the
first Portuguese university at Lisbon, which after many changes between
that city and Coimbra, found its permanent home in the latter city, and
became the centre of literary influence in Portugal. The king was also a
poet of exquisite taste, and in the number, beauty, and variety of his
songs he proved himself the greatest poet of his Court. Educated by
Aymeric d’Ebrard of Cahors, whom he made Bishop of Coimbra, he shows in
his poems the influence of the troubadours, and not of the trouvères who
had thronged his father’s Court. He had inherited poetic feeling and
power of expression from his father, Affonso III., who was no mean poet,
and who is said to have written a powerful “sirvente” against Alfonso
X., but his father had during his long residence at Paris been impressed
with the poetry of northern France, and had invited trouvères only to
his Court. Dom Diniz, both by education and feeling, belonged to a
different school, and preferred the softer themes and methods of the
troubadours. With the Courts of Love which he introduced into Portugal
came the substitution of the Limousin decasyllabic for the national
octosyllabic metre, and the ancient forms were lost in the intricacies
of the “ritournelle.” But the best service done by Diniz and his poetic
courtiers was in developing the Portuguese dialect into a beautiful and
flexible literary language. The king went further; as he grew older, he
threw off the trammels of Provençal forms, and perceiving the beauty of
his people’s lyrics, he wrote some quaint and graceful “pastorellas”
inspired by their influence, which are full of poetic life and truth.
The effects of the influence of Dom Diniz, in the words of a recent
writer on Portuguese literature, “pervade the whole of Portuguese
poetry; for not only was he in his ‘pastorellas’ the forerunner of the
great pastoral school, but by sanctifying to literary use the national
storehouse of song, he perpetuated among his people, even to the present
day, lyric forms of great beauty.”[5] Literary excellence and the growth
of a national poetry form the natural sequel of the attainment of
national independence; and it is interesting to observe that the king,
who peacefully consolidated the Portuguese kingdom, was the founder of
Portuguese literature. Camoens happily hits off in a couple of stanzas
the characteristics of his reign.
“See, next that Diniz comes in whom is seen
the ‘brave Afonso’s’ offspring true and digne;
whereby the mighty boast obscurèd been,
the vaunt of lib’eral Alexander’s line:
Beneath his sceptre blooms the land serene
(already compast golden Peace divine)
With constitution, customs, laws and rights,
a tranquil country’s best and brightest lights.
The first was he who made Coimbra own
Pallas-Minerva’s gen’rous exercise;
he called the Muses’ choir from Helicon
to tread the lea that by Mondego lies:
Whate’er of good whilere hath Athens done,
here proud Apollo keepeth ev’ery prize:
Here gives he garlands wove with golden ray,
with perfumed Nard and ever-verdant Bay.”[6]
Personally dissolute, as the nature of much of his poetry and his
encouragement of the troubadours and their Courts of Love show, the
stories told of the Court of Dom Diniz are far from edifying. Yet some
of them are full of romantic interest, and exhibit the more constant
love of the south instead of the airy fancies of Provence. Of these
stories, the most romantic of all is perhaps that of Donna Branca or
Blanche, the sister of Diniz and the abbess of Lorvão and Huelgas, who
loved a humble carpenter Pedro Esteves, and was the mother of a son,
João Nunes do Prado, who became Master of the Order of Calatrava, and
was beheaded by Pedro the Cruel of Castile. It is this story which has
furnished the plot of one of the most striking of modern Portuguese
dramas, Almeida-Garrett’s “Donna Branca.” The king’s favours to his
bastards, João Affonso and Affonso Sanches, whom he successively made
Mordomo Mor, and Pedro Affonso, whom he made Alferes Mor and Count of
Barcellos, involved him towards the end of his reign in bitter disputes
with his only legitimate son, Affonso. Open war at last broke out
between Dom Diniz and his heir-apparent, and a pitched battle was only
prevented by S. Isabel riding between the armies in 1323, and making a
peace between her husband and her son, which lasted until the death of
the great peace monarch, the “Ré Lavrador” in 1325.
Immediately on his accession to the throne, Affonso IV., the successor
of Dom Diniz, gave full vent to his rage against his half brothers, and
with the consent and assistance of the nobility of Portugal, he beheaded
João Affonso and confiscated all his lands, as well as those of Affonso
Sanches, who had escaped to Castile. This act of revenge, or of justice,
as he called it, consummated, he settled down as a worthy successor of
his father, and fostered all the schemes of Diniz for the development of
Portugal. He also continued his father’s policy of peace with Castile,
and made a formal alliance with that country in 1327 when he married his
daughter Donna Maria to Alfonso XI. of Castile. This marriage did not
prove a happy one; the king neglected his young wife for Leonora de
Guzman, and treated her so badly that in 1336 Affonso IV. invaded
Castile. A terrible war was impending, when S. Isabel once more played
the part of peacemaker. Leaving the convent of Poor Clares at Coimbra,
whither she had retired after her husband’s death, she hurried to
Estremoz, where the two armies were facing each other, and made peace
between the opposing monarchs. Alfonso XI. promised to treat his wife
better, and the Infant Dom Pedro, the only surviving son of the King of
Portugal, was granted the hand of Constance Manuel, daughter of the Duke
of Penafiel. The strength of the new alliance was soon tried; for in
1340 Abu-l-Hasan, king of Morocco, crossed the straits to come to the
help of the king of Granada, with a great army. Alfonso XI. sent his
wife to beg for the assistance of the Portuguese chivalry, and Affonso
willingly complied. In the great battle of the Salado on 29th of October
the Moors were utterly defeated, and the two generals who were most
conspicuous on the Christian side, were Affonso IV. of Portugal, who won
the sobriquet of Affonso “the Brave,” and Don Pedro Fernandez de
Castro, Mordomo Mor of Castile. This victory also marks an advance in
Portuguese poetry, for on it was written the first Portuguese epic by
Affonso Giraldes, the forerunner of Camoens.
It is interesting during this reign to notice the close intimacy growing
up between Portugal and England, which was to have many important
results. Directly on his accession, Affonso IV. determined to maintain
the friendly relations which Diniz had commenced, and in 1325 he sent an
ambassador to propose a matrimonial alliance with the English royal
family, probably with a view of contracting a marriage between his elder
daughter, Donna Maria, and the young Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward
III. The English Court, then under the influence of Queen Isabella,
replied that the ambassador was not of sufficiently high rank for his
application to be received. Accordingly, in the following year, Affonso
sent his Lord High Admiral, Dom Manoel Pessanha, and Dom Rodrigo
Domingues on the same mission, but their embassy led to no result,
probably owing to the disturbed state of affairs in England, and Donna
Maria married, as has been said, the King of Castile. Friendly
communications continued, nevertheless, between Portugal and England,
and in 1344 Edward III. sent two ambassadors, Henry, Earl of Lancaster,
and Richard, Earl of Arundel, to draw up a treaty of alliance with
Affonso IV. This was followed by the mission of Andrew of Oxford,
Richard of Saham, and Philip Borton to ask for the hand of Donna
Leonora, the King of Portugal’s younger daughter, for Edward, Prince of
Wales, better known as the Black Prince. The marriage was agreed upon,
and in 1347 Robert Stratton and Richard of Saham arrived to fix the day
for the passage of the infanta to England. But at this moment
matrimonial alliances of more political importance occurred to each of
the high contracting parties, and in this very year Donna Leonora was
married to King Pedro IV. of Aragon, and the Black Prince to the Fair
Maid of Kent. The rupture of this marriage scheme did not break the
friendship of the two kings, both of whom perceived the wealth to be
obtained for their countries and themselves by encouraging commerce. The
business relations between the two nations soon became very close, and
the wine of Portugal was freely exchanged for the long-cloth of England.
On July 25, 1352, Edward III. issued a royal proclamation, ordering his
subjects never to do any harm to the Portuguese, and on October 20,
1353, a curious sequel to the commercial treaty of 1294 was signed in
London by Affonso Martins Alho. This young wine merchant had been sent
to England as representative of the merchants of the maritime cities of
Portugal, and the treaty he negotiated with the citizens of London was
one guaranteeing mutual good faith in all matters of trade and commerce,
with many other technical clauses referring to special lines of
business. The very fact of this treaty or agreement being signed is a
proof, not only of the close connection between Portugal and England,
but of the high degree of wealth, intelligence, and business capacity
possessed by the merchants of both countries.
[Illustration: INES DE CASTRO.]
The later years of the reign of Affonso IV. were marked by a fearful
pestilence and a sad tragedy. In 1348 the plague, or, as it was more
commonly called, the Black Death, reached Portugal, after traversing
Europe, and more than decimated the inhabitants of Lisbon. On January 7,
1355, Donna Ines de Castro was murdered in the streets of Coimbra. The
history of the various dynasties of Portugal is full of romantic
stories, some with ludicrous, and others with tragical, endings, which
illustrate, not only the characters of the respective monarchs, but the
tendencies of their different epochs. The story of Donna Branca, the
princess who loved a carpenter, has been told, with the comment that her
son became Grand Master of the wealthy Order of Calatrava; the romance
of Dom Pedro’s life ended more tragically. Dom Pedro was the only son of
Affonso IV. and Beatrice of Castile who had survived his first year. He
was born in 1320, and had married in 1336, in order to cement his
father’s alliance with Castile, the Donna Constance Manuel, daughter of
the Duke of Penafiel. In her suite as lady-in-waiting came the Donna
Ines de Castro, daughter of Pedro Fernandez de Castro, Mordomo Mor of
Castile, and hero of the battle of the Salado, and sister of Alvaro
Peres de Castro, first Constable of Portugal. Dom Pedro fell in love
with the beautiful Castilian lady, and though, during his wife’s
lifetime, he always treated his wife with the utmost consideration, and
was the father by her of Dom Ferdinand, afterwards King of Portugal, and
of Donna Maria, afterwards Queen of Aragon, it was well known at the
Portuguese Court that the love of Dom Pedro’s heart was centred on Donna
Ines. In that dissolute Court little attention was paid to the conduct
of the prince; princes were in those days privileged persons, and he was
known besides to have another lady-love, the Donna Theresa Lourenço, who
was the mother of João, afterwards King of Portugal. It was not until
after the death of his wife that it was perceived that Dom Pedro’s love
for the Donna Ines was more than the ordinary fancy of a prince, and was
an absorbing passion. For love of her, he refused to marry any of the
foreign princesses proposed to him by his father, and it is probable
that he went through a form of marriage with her after his first wife’s
death. However that may be, King Affonso determined to put an end to his
son’s infatuation by murdering the object of it, and by his directions
Donna Ines was murdered in the streets of Coimbra by three courtiers,
Alvaro Gonçalves, the “Meirinho Mor” or Lord Chamberlain, Pedro Coelho,
and Diogo Lopes Pacheco. This is the tragedy which Camoens has
celebrated in an immortal passage,[7] and which has since become a
common theme for the playwrights of the world, good, bad, and
indifferent; and it may be said, that it is not so much in the murder
itself, as in the events which followed it, that the most romantic part
of the story is to be found. Dom Pedro was absent on his estates in the
south when he heard of the murder of Ines. He at once collected his
vassals, and prepared to attack his father, but, as had happened in the
days of S. Isabel, the Queen, Beatrice of Castile, interposed, and a
compromise was made, by which father and son agreed to see each other no
more, and to abandon active hostilities, and this compact lasted until
the death of Affonso “the Brave” in 1357.
The first act of Dom Pedro on ascending the throne was to punish the
murderers of Ines de Castro, and he induced the King of Castile to
surrender Alvaro Gonçalves and Pedro Coelho to him. Pacheco had escaped
to England, and could not be found, and thus escaped the fate of his
accomplices, who were slowly tortured to death in front of the royal
palace at Coimbra before the eyes of Dom Pedro. The king four years
later had the strange ceremony performed, which is far better known than
the circumstances of his love affair with Donna Ines. On April 24, 1361,
either to show his undying affection for her, or to confirm the story of
his marriage and legitimate his children by her, he had her body
disinterred at Coimbra, and conveyed to the Convent of Alçobaça, where
it was solemnly crowned, and then buried. It is usual to speak of the
Convent of Alçobaça as if it had been the burial-place of all the kings
and queens of Portugal up to this time. Such was not the case; only
Affonso II. and Affonso III. and their queens were buried there. Count
Henry and Donna Theresa had their last resting-place in the Cathedral of
Braga, Affonso Henriques and Sancho I. and their queens in the Convent
of Santa Cruz at Coimbra, Diniz in the Convent of Odivelas, near Lisbon,
S. Isabel in that of the Poor Clares at Coimbra, Affonso IV. and his
queen in Lisbon Cathedral, and Dom Pedro’s wife, Constance Manuel, in
the Convent of S. Francis at Santarem.
The spirit of stern, revengeful justice which had marked the
commencement of the short reign of Dom Pedro continued to show itself in
all matters of administration; the king loved to dispense justice in
person, and the rigour with which he treated all culprits, noble and
priest as well as merchant and vagabond, won for him the title of “Pedro
the Severe.” This severity was not unpleasing to the people, and many
tales are extant of the king’s visits _incognito_ to the law courts, and
of his rigorous punishment of unjust judges. Many of the famous stories
told in the “Arabian Nights” of the Caliph Harun-ar-Rashid are also told
of Dom Pedro, and in them his Chancellor, Vasco Martins de Sousa, played
the part of the Vizīr, as companion and butt. In matters of policy
Dom Pedro followed in his father’s and grandfather’s steps, avoiding
interference with the other kingdoms of the peninsula, and maintaining a
close political and commercial connection with England. His reign was
too short to leave much trace on the history of Portugal, for he died in
1367 at Estremoz, and was buried at Alçobaça by the side of Ines de
Castro.
The accession of Ferdinand, called “the Handsome,” the only son of Dom
Pedro by Constance Manuel, marks a crisis in the history of the
Portuguese monarchy. As a natural result of the long era of peace and
prosperity which had succeeded the final conquest of the Algarves, the
people of Portugal had become more wealthy, more cultivated, and more
conscious of their nationality than almost any people in Europe while
the Court had become more and more dissolute, and more out of consonance
with the feelings of the people. If the Portuguese monarchy was to
continue to exist, it was obvious that it must again become a truly
national monarchy, as it had been in the days of Affonso Henriques and
of Diniz, which should lead the way in finding new outlets for the
growing energies of the people, and that the kings must remember their
duties, and not think only of their pleasures. The affection the people
showed for Dom Pedro, who was by no means a good king, but rather a
despot of the Oriental type, was a proof that they were ready to
recognize with gratitude the efforts of a just monarch, and their
energies, now that, owing to long peace, they were the richest nation in
the peninsula, only needed to be directed. Neither the priesthood nor
the nobility showed any disposition to check the dissoluteness of the
Court. The bishops lost their old commanding influence, as the Papacy,
on which they depended, became degenerate, and the nobles, now that they
had no longer wars to occupy them, either became courtiers and abettors
of the vices of the kings and princes, or else lived on their feudal
estates and imitated them. The people had now no share in the
government. The power which the Cortes had obtained during the reign of
Affonso III. was in abeyance, because the king did not need its help
against his bishops and nobles, but it was only in abeyance, and ready
to spring forth again into new life.
The life and reign of Ferdinand “the Handsome” are marked, like those of
his father, by a romantic amour, which, if not so tragic as the story of
Ines de Castro, had far greater political importance. Ferdinand was a
weak and frivolous, but ambitious, king, who, after binding himself to
marry Leonora, daughter of the King of Aragon, suddenly surprised every
one by claiming the thrones of Castile and Leon in 1369, on the death of
Pedro “the Cruel.” This claim was derived through his grandmother,
Beatrice of Castile, and was good in law, and Dom Ferdinand was
favourably received at Ciudad Rodrigo and Zamora. But the majority of
the Castilians, both noble and plebeian, had no desire to see a
Portuguese monarch on their throne, and therefore espoused the cause of
the illegitimate Henry of Trastamare as Henry II. of Castile and Leon.
The war which followed turned to the advantage of the Castilian
pretender, and the contest ended in 1371 by the intervention of Pope
Gregory XI., when Ferdinand agreed to surrender his claim to the throne
of Castile, and to marry Leonora, daughter of Henry II. However, in
spite of the Pope, this treaty was never carried out, for at the
marriage of his half-sister, Beatrice, the daughter of Dom Pedro and
Ines de Castro, to Sancho Count of Alboquerque, King Ferdinand saw and
fell passionately in love with Donna Leonor Telles de Menezes, daughter
of a nobleman in the Tras-os-Montes, and wife of João Lourenço da Cunha,
Lord of Pombeiro. This passion was the king’s ruin, for the object of it
was a sort of Portuguese Lucrezia Borgia, of whom horrible stories are
told, which historical research has unfortunately shown to be only too
well founded. At this very period, when she first met the king, she made
no attempt to repulse his advances, though she was a married woman, and
she bore an undying feeling of revenge against her sister, Donna Maria
Telles, for her attempts to repulse the amorous monarch. In spite of her
sister’s efforts, Donna Leonor managed to captivate the king, who, in
his infatuation for her, and in compliance with the dictates of her
ambition, refused to marry the daughter of Henry II. of Castile. This
refusal exasperated the people of Lisbon, who knew that the Castilians
would not tamely suffer such an insult, and a great popular tumult and
riot burst forth in the city. The story of this riot has been admirably
told by the chief modern historian of Portugal, Alexandra Herculano, in
one of his historical novels, and it affords a striking example of the
political foresight of the people, and of their conviction of a coming
revolution. The popular leader was a tailor named Fernan Vasques, under
whose command the mob burst into the palace at Lisbon, hunted in vain
for Donna Leonor, and made King Ferdinand swear to marry the Castilian
infanta on the very next day. But Ferdinand escaped the same night to
Santarem, and once there with his beloved, he forgot his oath, and sent
all the troops he could collect to punish the rioters of Lisbon. They
made but little resistance, being unprepared for their sovereign’s want
of faith to his plighted word, and Fernan Vasques, the tailor, and his
principal followers were beheaded. This cruel punishment inflicted, the
king betook himself to Oporto, and there married the Donna Leonor at
the Church of S. João do Hospital, although her first husband was still
alive. It shows to what a depth of degradation the Portuguese nobles had
sunk that all the nobility, with the exception of Dom Diniz, one of the
king’s half-brothers, acquiesced in this bigamous marriage, and
recognized Donna Leonor as queen. At the head of those who submitted
were Dom João or John, the elder son of the late king by Ines de Castro,
and Dom John, known as “the Bastard,” the Master of the Knights of Aviz,
and the son of Pedro by Theresa Lourenço.
The people of Lisbon were right in believing that the Castilians would
regard the marriage of Ferdinand to Donna Leonor as a deadly insult to
their infanta. Henry II. at once invaded Portugal, and laid siege to
Lisbon; Ferdinand lived meanwhile quietly at Santarem with his queen,
and made no effort to intervene; and the war would have ended badly for
Portugal, had not Cardinal Guy of Boulogne, who happened to be in Spain
as legate, interfered, and by using all the authority of the Church,
forced Henry II. to retire, and to make a treaty of peace with Ferdinand
at Santarem. Even after this proof of the power of Castile, and after
the sufferings incurred by the people of Lisbon during the siege,
Ferdinand refused to keep the peace. He would not believe that Henry II.
was firmly established on the throne, and in 1373 he treacherously
renewed the negotiations which he had entered into the year before with
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. This son of Edward III. claimed the
throne of Castile for his wife Constance, the daughter of Pedro “the
Cruel,” and Ferdinand signed a treaty of alliance with Edward III.,
through his ambassadors, João Fernandes Andeiro and Vasco Domingues, by
which he agreed to support the claims of the English prince. But Donna
Leonor did not approve of the English alliance, and in 1374, Ferdinand
as usual broke his plighted word, and again made peace with Castile.
The queen was now supreme; her weak and vacillating husband was her
slave, and the tyranny which she exercised was odious in the extreme.
Her wealth was great, for the king had in his infatuation granted her
for her own use the lordship of many of the most important cities
belonging to the Crown, including Villa Viçosa, Abrantes, Almada,
Cintra, Saccavem, Alemquer, Obidos, Torres Vedras, and Pinhel, and she
had obtained great estates for her brothers, of whom the elder, João
Affonso Telles de Menezes, became Count of Barcellos, and the younger,
Gonçalo, Count of Neiva. Her former husband, João Lourenço da Cunha,
tried to revenge himself for the loss of his wife by attempting to
poison the king; she at once had his lands confiscated, and ordered his
execution, which he only escaped by a timely flight into Gallicia. Her
revenge upon her sister, Maria Telles de Menezes, whom she had never
forgiven for opposing her marriage with the king, was horrible in its
wickedness, and affords an indisputable proof of her cruelty of
disposition. Maria, who was as beautiful as her sister, and far more
virtuous, had inspired a real passion in the bosom of Dom John, the
king’s half-brother and the elder son of Ines de Castro. The young
couple were married in 1376, and were as happy as they deserved to be.
Enraged at their happiness, and the more so, because they had a little
son, whereas her own sons both died in childhood, the queen set to work,
like Iago, to instil the passion of jealousy into the young husband. She
was soon successful, and Dom John murdered his wife with his own hand,
in his palace at Coimbra, while she was vainly protesting her innocence.
When the deed was done, the queen came into her dead sister’s presence,
and laughingly informed the unhappy wife-murderer that the accusations
were untrue. At this mockery, Dom John would have slain her, and on
being prevented by her guards, he fled to Castile. Donna Leonor had not
even the merit of being constant to her uxorious spouse, but carried on
an open intrigue with João Fernandes Andeiro, the former ambassador to
England, whom she persuaded the king to make Count of Ourem. Ines
Affonso, the wife of Gonçalo Vaz de Azevedo, first Grand Marshal of
Portugal, happened to hear a declaration of love made by the queen to
her lover, and she informed Dom John “the Bastard,” Master of the
Knights of Aviz. Some spy told the queen, and she determined at once to
rid herself of the pair. She had a letter forged, purporting to be
written by them to the king of Castile, full of treasonable passages,
and on the strength of it, she obtained the king’s order for their
arrest. When they were safely in prison, she tried to persuade her
husband to sign an order for their execution without trial. King
Ferdinand, who had a real affection for his half-brother, refused, and
Donna Leonor thereupon forged his signature to an order for them to be
beheaded at once. Fortunately for Portugal, the governor of the Castle
of Evora, where they were imprisoned, Vasco Martins de Mello, refused to
obey, and the future saviour of Portugal escaped.
The wonder is that the Portuguese people submitted so long as they did
to this tyranny, and it shows how deeply they felt the debt due to their
great monarchs, such as Affonso Henriques and Dom Diniz, that they made
no attempt to overthrow their unworthy descendant. So strong was their
attachment to the hereditary principle, that at a great Cortes held at
Leiria in 1376, the queen’s only surviving child, the Donna Beatrice,
was recognized as heiress to the throne. This declaration was of the
greatest importance, for it governed the future rule of succession in
the kingdom; and by declaring females able to succeed rejected the
well-known Salic law, which prevailed in France and other countries. The
queen steadily encouraged the king’s ambition to sit upon the throne of
Castile, and when his hopes revived, on the death of Henry II., she
persuaded him once more to send her lover, the Count of Ourem, as
ambassador to England. Richard II. received him cordially, and Edmund,
Earl of Cambridge, next brother to John of Gaunt, and better known by
his subsequent title of Duke of York, agreed to bring military
assistance to the aid of Ferdinand. In 1381, the Earl of Cambridge
arrived accordingly with two thousand English men-at-arms, and, as had
been suggested by the Count of Ourem, his eldest son, Edward, afterwards
second Duke of York, was solemnly betrothed to the Donna Beatrice, the
heiress to the throne of Portugal. The feeble Ferdinand, as usual,
refused to keep faith, and terrified by the approach of a Castilian
army, he deserted the English, who immediately began to ravage the
country round their camp near Oporto, while he made peace with John I.
of Castile at Salvaterra. By this treaty, which was signed on April 2,
1383, and in which the hand of Donna Leonor is clearly to be perceived,
it was arranged that John I. should marry Donna Beatrice, who was but
eleven years old, and that Leonor should be Regent of Portugal if
Ferdinand died, until Beatrice’s eldest son came of age. At the wedding,
which took place at once, Ferdinand was too ill to be present: but the
queen and her lover were there in his stead, and behaved with such
unseemly hilarity that many of the Portuguese nobility, headed by Nuno
Alvares Pereira, who was to be known in Portuguese history as “The Holy
Constable,” could not refrain from openly expressing their disgust. Six
months afterwards, on October 22, 1383, King Ferdinand died, and Donna
Leonor assumed the regency in the name of her little daughter, the Queen
of Castile.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE PALACE AT LISBON.
(_From “Les Royaumes d’Espagne et Portugal.” La Haye, 1720._)]
But she did not hold it long. The whole Portuguese people detested her,
and their spirit of nationality was outraged by the contemplated union
of their crown with that of Castile. Dom John “the Bastard,” the Master
of the Order of Aviz shared both their personal hatred for the queen,
who had tried to take his life, and their political desire for
independence; and on December 6th, he headed an insurrection in Lisbon
and slew the queen’s lover, Andeiro, Count of Ourem, with his own hands
in the palace itself. The people everywhere applauded his action, and
attacked the friends of the queen; in Lisbon the Archbishop Martinho and
the Abbot of Guimaraens were killed upon the same day, and the example
was followed in the provinces, where among other notable murders, the
abbess of the Benedictine nuns was killed at Evora, and the Lord High
Admiral, Lançarote Pessanha, at Beja. Leonor among whose faults want of
courage could not be reckoned, fled to Santarem, and not only summoned
her son-in-law, John of Castile to her help, but began to raise an army
from among the vassals of her own adherents. At this news, Dom John felt
a momentary movement of weakness, and spoke of retiring to England, but
the people of Lisbon, through the mouth of the popular leader, the
cooper, Affonso Annes, so eloquently begged him not to desert them in
their peril, but to stay and be their ruler, that he consented on
December 16th, to remain, and named two of his wisest adherents, João
das Regras and Nuno Alvares Pereira, to the offices of chancellor and
constable.
Dom John then took upon himself the title of Defender of the Realm; but
he knew how little chance Portugal could have against Castile without
some powerful ally, and he therefore sent first Thomas Daniel and
Lourenço Martins, and then his Chancellor and the Master of the Knights
of Santiago to beg for help from England. The longed-for aid seemed
tardy, and Dom John proceeded to put Lisbon in a state of defence, and
despatched the “Holy Constable” to raise an army in the northern
provinces. In 1384, John of Castile slowly entered Portugal with a great
army and joined Donna Leonor at Santarem. But the allies soon quarrelled
as to the government in future of the country they both believed to be
already conquered, and Donna Leonor recommended her adherents to join
Dom John. Not satisfied with this, she planned to poison her son-in-law;
but her intention was discovered in time, and the wicked queen was sent
by John of Castile to the convent of Tordesillas, in his dominions,
where she ended her days in 1386. This act of justice done, the king of
Castile laid siege to Lisbon. The resistance was worthy of the cause,
which was indeed that of the continued existence of Portugal as an
independent country. The priests fought at the head of their
parishioners; the archbishop of Braga behaved as a gallant knight; and
Dom John showed his fitness to be the monarch of a warlike people. A
terrible pestilence, which broke out in the besiegers’ camp, did more
mischief than the bravery of the besieged, and John of Castile had to
retire discomfited. But it availed little to have repulsed one Spanish
army; the relative sizes of Portugal and Castile, made it obvious that
the struggle would be a severe one; the independence of Portugal was at
stake, and the Portuguese fought as men fight for their existence as a
nation. The heroic Constable enforced the lesson of the successful
defence of Lisbon by his defeat of the Castilians at Atoleiros, but it
was felt to be necessary to take yet stronger measures, if the war was
to end in a triumph.
The first of these measures was to legalize the position of Dom John,
the gallant leader of the people. A great Cortes was summoned to meet at
Coimbra, and in it João das Regras declared the throne of Portugal to be
elective on April 6, 1385. This proposition was agreed to by
acclamation, and after the Chancellor had produced a Papal bull,
declaring the children of Dom Pedro by Ines de Castro to be
illegitimate, the Cortes unanimously elected Dom John “the Bastard,” to
be king of Portugal. This measure legalized the position of Master of
the Knights of Aviz, who took the title of John I., and is known in
Portuguese history as John “the Great”; and the people believed the
measure to have the sanction of heaven when the news arrived that the
Holy Constable had won a great victory over the Spaniards at Trancoso,
in which four hundred Castilian knights were killed. The spirits of the
Portuguese were further raised by the landing of five hundred of the
famous English archers, under the command of three squires in the
service of John of Gaunt named Northberry, Mowbray, and Hentzel; but
this assistance was counterbalanced by the arrival of two thousand
French knights, who had joined the king of Castile. The two armies met
at Aljubarrota on August 14, 1385, and it was there that the
independence of Portugal was secured, and the House of Aviz made good
its title to the throne. The Holy Constable commanded the vanguard; Mem
Rodrigues de Vasconcellos the right, and Antao Vasques de Almada the
left; while Dom John rode from place to place and never failed to be in
the post of danger. Ten pieces of ordnance were used, this being their
first appearance in the military history of the peninsula; the English
archers did yeoman service, and repeated the glories of Crécy and
Poitiers, and after a hard-fought struggle the Spaniards fled in
confusion. Then did John I. feel himself king indeed; and he erected on
the spot where his victory had been won, the magnificent convent of
Batalha, which recalls in its name the famous Battle Abbey erected on
the field of Hastings. This victory was followed up by another at
Valverde, and then by the news that John of Gaunt was on his way with a
powerful English army. The Portuguese felt that they had anew achieved
their independence.
[Illustration: TWO SIDES OF THE ROYAL CHAPEL OF THE MONASTERY OF
BATALHA. (PRESENT STATE.)]
On May 9, 1386, the Treaty of Windsor was signed by which the kingdoms
of Portugal and England were declared to be united henceforth in the
closest bonds of friendship and alliance; and it proved to be the
corner-stone of the policy of the House of Aviz. On July 20, 1386, John
of Gaunt reached Corunna with two thousand English lances and three
thousand archers, accompanied by his wife Constance of Castile, and two
of his daughters, Philippa and Catherine. He marched triumphantly
through Gallicia; and at Oporto on February 2, 1387, the
Anglo-Portuguese Alliance was sealed by the marriage of King John to
Philippa, the daughter of John of Gaunt by his first wife, Blanche of
Lancaster. This marriage was followed by another, that of Catherine,
only child of John of Gaunt by Constance of Castile to Henry, Prince of
the Asturias, and heir to the throne of Castile. These marriages settled
the peace of the peninsula, for in concluding them, John of Gaunt
abandoned his claims to Castile, and insisted as one of the conditions,
on a truce between his two sons-in-law. This truce continued till 1411,
when at last the title of John as King of Portugal was recognized, and
peace between Castile and Portugal was solemnly declared.
King John “the Great” was now firmly seated on his throne; an effort of
his half-brother Diniz, the younger son of Ines de Castro, to overthrow
him in 1398, failed entirely, and foreign monarchs hastened to recognize
his power. Through this hero, and the race of heroes who fought under
him, the independence of Portugal was secured, and a new career opened
before its people. The era of consolidation was over; the era of foreign
discovery and of Asiatic conquests was to begin.
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
VI.
PORTUGAL DURING THE AGE OF EXPLORATION.
[Illustration: KING JOHN THE GREAT.
(_From his recumbent statue over his tomb at Batalha._)]
The reigns of John I., surnamed “the Great,” and of his two successors,
occupy nearly a century, during which Portugal was learning to become
the greatest nation in Europe. It was the age of exploration and
discovery, during which the acutest intellects and the most daring
natures in Portugal were dreaming of a new route to India, and were
endeavouring to discover it. It was an age of growth, abounding in
statesmen, mariners, and chroniclers, who were to have their successors
in the all too short but immortal period of Portuguese greatness, in
such men as Alboquerque, Vasco da Gama, and Camoens. The history of
these maritime explorations and discoveries, of the painful and slow
progress down the western coast of Africa, and of the great schemes and
efforts of Prince Henry “the Navigator,” will form the subject of a
separate chapter; but it is first expedient to study the history of the
Portuguese people and monarchy at home during this period, and to see
how, from the reign of John I., a new spirit appeared alike among the
kings, and the merchants, and the soldiers, which was to culminate in
the glories of the heroic age.
King John, after the victory of Aljubarrota had firmly seated him on the
throne, felt it necessary to give Portugal such an interval of peace
after the great efforts of the Castilian wars, as King Diniz had given
it after the cessation of the wars against the Moors. This peace was
secured by a wise foreign policy, of which the key-notes were, a close
alliance with England, and systematic non-interference with the affairs
of Spain. He had seen the value of the assistance of England in the
final throes of his struggle with Castile, and the English monarchs on
their side felt the advantage of having such an ally as Portugal to act
as a thorn in the side of Castile, should the Spaniards come to the help
of the French. The statesmanlike idea of Henry II. of England when he
supported the proposal of the Count of Flanders for the hand of the
daughter of Affonso Henriques, that this marriage should cement an
unwritten alliance of England, Flanders, and Portugal, against France,
Scotland, and Castile, seems to have been in the minds of the English
statesmen of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Just as Scotland
afforded a convenient base of operations, whether military or political,
for France against England, so did Portugal give a similar position for
the English to act from against Castile, and the subsequent history of
Portugal shows how generously and wisely England treated her southern
ally. The people of the two nations gladly supported the political ideas
of their monarchs and rulers. Each country could supply what the other
wanted. From Portugal, the English merchants could obtain fruits and
wines, which found a ready market, and the Londoners, not satisfied with
supplying the home demand only, distributed these products of the south
among the countries of the north, and notably in those lying round the
Baltic Sea, Sweden, Denmark, Pomerania, and Lithuania. On the other
hand, the Portuguese had no manufactures, and gladly took in exchange
for the productions of their fertile soil, the cloth not only of the
English looms, but of those of Flanders, in which the London merchants
dealt.
This alliance was maintained in spite of dynastic changes and political
revolutions in the two countries. In 1389 the name of the King of
Portugal was introduced into the Treaty of Paris as an ally of the King
of England; in 1398 Richard II. sent a body of English archers, under
Edmund Arnold of Dartmouth, to assist in repelling the incursion made
into Portugal by the son of Ines de Castro and some Spanish knights; and
in 1400 John I. recognized his brother-in-law, Henry of Lancaster, as
Henry IV. of England, and was created by him a Knight of the Garter,
being the first foreign sovereign to receive that honour. In 1403 Henry
IV. solemnly ratified the Treaty of Windsor, and in the following year
the illegitimate daughter of John I., by Ines Pires, was promised in
marriage to Thomas, Earl of Arundel, one of the leaders of the English
nobility. This marriage was regarded as a further bond of alliance, and
was celebrated in 1405 in England with the greatest splendour. Equally
friendly relations were maintained with Henry V. and with the rulers of
England during the minority of Henry VI.; Henry V. sent provisions and
troops for the expedition to Ceuta in 1415, and in 1428 a strong force
of 144 lances was sent to join the King of Portugal. This English
alliance was the key-note of the policy of John I., and it was
maintained without a breach from the arrival of John of Gaunt in 1386
until the death of the great Portuguese monarch in 1433.
The internal government of King John I. was hampered in one respect to
such an extent as to vitiate the effect of his great administrative
reforms. It will be remembered that he was elected to the crown by the
Cortes, and followed to the field of Aljubarrota by all classes of the
Portuguese people. Yet for some reason he would not trust in the people
who loved him, but believing he owed his success to the nobles who had
supported him, he began his reign by making extensive grants of lands
and privileges to his principal supporters of noble birth. It would
perhaps be too much to expect the political knowledge of a statesman in
the nineteenth century from a king in the fourteenth, but it seems to
posterity that King John greatly over-estimated the assistance of his
nobles, and that he over-rewarded them by granting them nearly the whole
of the old royal estates of the kings of Portugal. It may be believed
that he feared the secession of his nobles to the Castilian party, and
that he thought they could take their vassals with them, but whatever
may have been the reason, he gave them such enormous grants as to
seriously weaken the royal power. These grants however did not
impoverish the treasury, which was filled more by the proceeds of the
customs duties, a source of income, which his wise commercial policy
increased, than by rents from landed estates. So wealthy did he become
that he left his mark on the country in his great buildings; besides the
magnificent convent of Batalha on the field of Aljubarrota, he
constructed no less than four palaces at Cintra, Almeirim, Cezimbra, and
Lisbon. The last-mentioned city was his favourite place of residence;
under his fostering care it became the official capital of Portugal
instead of Coimbra, and soon surpassed the wealth of Oporto as a
commercial city. The citizens of Lisbon regarded him much as the
citizens of London did Edward IV. a century later; they never forgot his
gallant conduct in the great siege, and were at all times ready to obey
him and to pay him a fair tithe of their wealth. In one respect
especially did King John gratify the aspirations of the religious
section of the people of Lisbon, by obtaining the sanction of the Pope
to erect the bishopric of Lisbon into an archbishopric.
It is not to be wondered at that King John loved to live in Lisbon, and
watch the daily passage up and down the Tagus of the ships, which were
making his capital a great commercial centre, when it is remembered how
slight was his actual power over the greater part of his kingdom. The
other cities were indeed fairly well governed owing to their possession
of ancient charters from kings, bishops, or lords, granting them a
system of municipal self-government, but the country districts were
ruled by the strictest feudal law and custom, and the king was powerless
to interfere. Now was to be seen the harm done by the monarchs who had
conquered the Alemtejo and the Algarves from the Mohammedans by the
distribution of their conquests in estates among the military orders and
private individuals. The result was the division of these provinces into
enormous feudal counties and lordships, dangerously large to be the
properties of subjects in such a small kingdom as Portugal. The
condition of the Beira was a little better, and the two northern
provinces of the Entre Minho e Douro and the Tras-os-Montes, were, as
they are still, the homes of the sturdy Portuguese peasantry, who gave
to the Portuguese armies and fleets their bravest and stoutest soldiers
and sailors. Bitterly did John the Great repent the mistake he had made
by his large grants to the Portuguese nobility, and his consequent
inability to correct the most crying evils of the feudal system. He had,
however, at the beginning of his reign, some wise and able counsellors,
in the Holy Constable, in Lourenço, the brave Archbishop of Braga, and
in his great chancellor, João das Regras. With the help of the latter he
managed to get some valuable laws passed in the Cortes affecting
criminal procedure and jurisdiction, by means of which he somewhat
controlled the feudal methods of holding courts of justice without much
offending the great nobility, but he dared go no further in this
direction, and had to allow many abuses, inherent in the feudal system,
to continue to exist. In every other respect his administration was
extremely good; his cities grew in wealth; his navy increased in number
of ships; his sailors became famous for their daring; and in minor
points many reforms were made, such, for instance, as introducing the
use of the Portuguese language into the law courts, and changing the era
from that of Augustus to that of Christ, which made the date of the year
consonant with that of the rest of Christendom.
In such labours passed the first thirty years after the battle of
Aljubarrota, and Portugal and its great king became renowned throughout
Europe. During this period, a new generation grew up, the sons of the
men of Aljubarrota and Trancoso, and the young nobility burned to prove
themselves worthy sons of their brave fathers. In their aspirations they
were headed by the princes of Portugal. The union of the old royal
family of Portugal as represented by King John, with the blood of the
English Plantagenets in the person of his queen, Philippa of Lancaster,
produced the five famous princes, whose names stand out conspicuously in
the history of the fifteenth century. The three elder sons of John and
Philippa, Dom Duarte or Edward, Dom Pedro, and Dom Henry, were in 1414
respectively 23, 22, and 20 years of age; they longed to win their
knightly spurs, and to show themselves worthy cousins of Henry V. of
England. The King of Portugal did not wish to check their ardour; he
felt the need of occupying the energies of his youthful nobility; and as
there were no enemies at home, he acquiesced in the desire of his sons
to attack the old enemies of Portugal, the Moors, in Morocco. By such an
expedition against the Mohammedans the young princes would show
themselves crusaders, and would find adversaries worthy of their swords,
without arousing the jealous watchfulness of the King of Castile. Ceuta
was the city of Africa selected for attack, not only because it was the
chief port of the Moors in the north-western corner of Africa and
threatened the south of Spain, but also because it was the headquarters
of the numerous corsairs and pirates, who preyed upon the already
growing traffic of Portugal with the west coast of Africa, and at times
made descents upon the Portuguese province of the Algarves. The
expedition sailed from Lisbon in 1415; the three princes were followed
by the flower of the Portuguese chivalry, and accompanied by their two
boy brothers, Dom John, who was but fifteen, and Dom Ferdinand not yet
thirteen; from her deathbed the Queen sent her blessing, and in the
month of June the expedition safely disembarked on the African coast.
The Moors fought bravely on their native soil, and it was not until 24th
of August that the city of Ceuta was stormed, after a siege, in which
the sons of John the Great showed themselves to be gallant soldiers and
prudent leaders. This conquest was of importance in two ways; it was the
first conquest made by the Portuguese outside the limits of their own
country, and was therefore a proof of their energy and the expansion of
their power; but, on the other hand, it pointed in a false direction,
and was the first of a series of African expeditions, which were not
profitable to the country, even when successful, and which terminated in
the great disaster associated with the name of Dom Sebastian.
[Illustration: QUEEN PHILIPPA.
(_From her recumbent statue over the tomb at Batalha._)]
The conquest of Ceuta completed, the elder princes devoted their
extraordinary powers of mind and body to pursuits worthy of the cousins
of Henry V. of England. Dom Edward, so named after his
great-grandfather, Edward III. of England, the eldest son, married Donna
Leonora of Aragon, and helped his father in the duties of government. He
proved an apt pupil of João das Regras, the chancellor, and, after
devoting much time to legal studies, he drew up the first code of
Portuguese law. Dom Pedro, the next brother, who was created by his
father Duke of Coimbra after the storming of Ceuta, travelled all over
Europe, enjoying in turn the hospitality of Henry V. of England, of the
Emperor, and of the Pope, and astonishing those monarchs by his
abilities. He proved his valour by fighting beside the Teutonic knights
against the Lithuanians, in the extreme east of civilised Europe, and
his literary taste by his enlightened patronage of men of letters in all
parts of the continent. In 1428 he ended his travels, and settling at
Lisbon, he married Donna Isabel, the daughter of the Count of Urgel, and
assisted his father and elder brot
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