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.

FOR FULL LIST SEE END OF THIS VOLUME

PORTUGAL

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

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.

CONTENTS.

Genealogical Tables—

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

[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.]

THE KINGS 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

IV.
PORTUGAL ATTAINS ITS EUROPEAN LIMITS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

VI.
PORTUGAL DURING THE AGE OF EXPLORATION.

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.

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 brother in the duties of government, taking special interest in the progress of literature, and co-operating in all the various schemes for the development of Portugal. The third brother, Dom Henry, created by his father, Duke of Viseu, and appointed Master of the Order of Christ, and governor of the kingdom of the Algarves, has left his mark on the history of the world as Prince Henry “the Navigator.” This prince refused all the offers of the Pope, the Emperor, and of Henry V., to visit their courts, and established himself in 1418 at Sagre in order to devote himself and his wealth to the cause of discovering a continuous route by sea to India, which should bring the trade of Asia and its profits to the Portuguese. His efforts and the discoveries he superintended form the subject of a separate chapter, but it must be remembered that in all his efforts he was seconded by his father and elder brothers. The fourth brother, Dom John, Master of the Order of Santiago, married his niece Isabel, daughter of the Count of Barcellos, and became eventually third Constable of Portugal. The fifth brother, Dom Ferdinand, who earned the title of the “Constant Prince” in after years, was Master of the Order of S. Benedict of Aviz, as his father had been before his elevation to the throne; his piety was so well known, that he was requested to enter the Church, and promised a cardinal’s hat by the Pope, but he refused the honour, longing rather for the glory of a crusader than the influence of an ecclesiastic, and winning in the end a martyr’s crown. Their sister, Isabel, was as famous for her beauty, as her brothers for their valour, wisdom, and piety, and was married to Philip “the Good” of Burgundy, the founder of the Order of the Golden Fleece. To mar the unity of this illustrious and gifted family, there existed a half brother Affonso, the son of King John by Ines Pires, born before the marriage with Philippa of Lancaster, who was jealous of his legitimate brothers, and ultimately proved the evil genius of their destiny. This son was regarded with special favour by his father, who brought about his marriage with Donna Beatrice Pereira, daughter and heiress of the Holy Constable, and created him Count of Barcellos.

The latter years of King John “the Great’s” fortunate reign of nearly half a century were marked not only by the discoveries of Prince Henry “the Navigator,” but by the development of Portuguese into a literary language by many talented authors. Mention has been made of the poetry of the Portuguese troubadours, who sang in the reign of Diniz, and of the first Portuguese epic on the battle of the Salado, which foreshadowed the “Lusiads” of Camoens. But a literary language is formed not so much by its poetry as by its prose; the early poetry of Portugal differed but little from that of Gallicia, while its prose developed in an independent direction. The first Portuguese prose work of any length or importance was the famous romance of “Amadis de Gaul,” written by Vasco de Lobeira, who died in 1403. This romance gave rise to a host of imitations, and the taste for romances was further developed by the popularity of the “Prophecies of Merlin,” and the Arthurian tales, the knowledge of which came into Portugal with the English alliance. The king himself encouraged this literary revival; the “Book of the Chase,” one of the best specimens of early Portuguese prose was written for him under his superintendence, and among his sons, Dom Pedro wrote poems, and Dom Edward two excellent prose works, “Instructions in Horsemanship” and “The Faithful Councillor.” More important to notice are the works of the first great Portuguese chroniclers. Chronicles of early events in Portuguese history had been written in monasteries, and have a value of their own, but these works are little better than annals noted down year by year with no pretence to literary form. Next in order stands the anonymous “Chronica da Conquista do Algarves,” which represents the transition from the annalist to the chronicler, and in the reign of John I., under the special patronage of the monarch and his sons, the first great Portuguese chronicler, Fernan Lopes, who has been called the Froissart of Portugal, wrote his chronicles of the reigns of Pedro “the Severe” and Ferdinand “the Handsome,” and Matthew de Pisano, wrote his “Guerra de Ceuta,” a history of the famous expedition of 1415. These men were the forerunners of the great chroniclers of the fifteenth century, Azurara, Ruy de Pina, and Duarte Galvão.

After a reign, which ranks among the most glorious in Portuguese history, made famous by maritime discoveries and literary advancement, leaving behind him sons worthy and able to guide the people along the road of civilization to wealth and prosperity, John I., rightly surnamed “the Great,” died at his palace at Lisbon on August 14, 1433, having survived his wife Philippa of Lancaster nearly twenty years.

Contrary to the expectation of his subjects, the reign of King Edward was but short, and it is marked only by a signal disaster. His own great qualities, and the promise he had given of being both a good and a great king when assisting his father, combined to raise the highest hopes, which were destined to be cruelly shattered. On ascending the throne he believed himself strong enough to take a step, intended to check the perpetuation of power in the hands of the feudal nobility, which had often been discussed between his father, his brother Dom Pedro, João das Regras, and himself, and in 1434 he summoned a full Cortes at Evora. He there propounded the “Lei Mental” or the provision, which was assumed to have been in the mind of King John when he made his extensive grants of land to the nobility, namely, that they could only descend in the direct male line of the original grantee, and should revert to the Crown on failure of such heirs. The law was carried by the influence of the king’s brothers, in spite of the natural opposition of the nobility, who never forgave the supporters of the measure. In other matters Edward simply followed the example of his father. He continued the English alliance, ratified the treaty of Windsor, and was made a Knight of the Garter in his father’s room; he maintained an attitude of prudent neutrality towards Castile; he encouraged the literary movement, represented by Fernan Lopes, and took an intelligent interest in the schemes and plans of his brother, Dom Henry.

But, unfortunately, the king’s life was shortened and Dom Henry’s explorations checked for a time by the fatal expedition to Tangier in 1437. This expedition was the natural sequel of the expedition to Ceuta, and was undertaken in opposition to the advice of the Pope, and of Dom Pedro. It was entirely the result of the earnest solicitations of the king’s favourite brother, Dom Ferdinand. This pious young prince burned with crusading ardour; his one longing in life was to fight the infidels, and he could not appreciate the fact that Dom Henry was doing far greater work for the world in exploring the coast of Africa, than in killing Mohammedans. The ardour of Dom Ferdinand won the day, and King Edward collected a fleet and army in the Tagus, and sailed for the coast of Africa. The object of the attack was Tangier and it was most foolishly chosen. Ceuta was on the sea coast, and the Portuguese soldiers could use their fleet as a base of operations, and could retreat to it in case of need; whereas Tangier was three miles from the coast. As might have been foretold, when King Edward with his eight thousand Portuguese soldiers formed the siege of Tangier, the Moors at once cut off his communications with the fleet, and in three days the Portuguese army was reduced to extremities. It was only by Dom Ferdinand’s willing sacrifice of himself as a hostage, that the troops were allowed to return to their ships and find their way back to Lisbon. This disaster and the captivity of his favourite brother so preyed upon King Edward’s mind that he died in 1438. His death was happier than that of Dom Ferdinand, who, after a long and cruel imprisonment, borne with such heroic patience and exemplary piety, as to win for him the title of “the Constant Prince,” died at Fez in 1443.

The noble conduct of Dom Ferdinand, who preferred death in captivity to safety purchased by the surrender of Ceuta, the only alternative which the Moors would accept, has its place also in the great epic, in which all noble deeds of Portuguese heroes are commemorated. Speaking of King Edward, Camoens says:

“Captive he saw his brother, hight Fernand,
the Saint, aspiring high with purpose brave,
who as a hostage in the Sara’cen’s hand,
betrayed himself his ‘leaguer’d host to save.
He lived for purest faith to Fatherland
the life of noble Ladye sold a slave,
lest bought with price of Ceita’s potent town
to publick welfare be preferred his own.

Codrus, lest foemen conquer, freely chose
to yield his life and, conqu’ering self, to die;
Regulus, lest his hand in ought should lose,
lost for all time all hopes of liberty;
this, that Hispania might in peace repose,
chose lifelong thrall, eterne captivity;
Codrus nor Curtius with man’s awe for meed,
nor loyal Decii ever dared such deed.”[8]

The successor of King Edward, his eldest son Affonso V., afterwards called “the African,” was only six years old when he ascended the throne, and his reign commenced with a dispute as to the regency. By his will, Edward had left the regency to his wife, Leonora of Aragon, but this arrangement was not at all satisfactory to the people, and a great Cortes at Torres Novas set aside the will, and appointed Dom Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, to be “defender” of the realm with all the duties of government, the Count of Arrayolos, minister of justice, and Queen Leonora, guardian of her son, the young king, with a large allowance. This arrangement shows how great the powers of the Cortes had become, and a still more important testimony to their recognized influence appears in the motion by Dom Henry, that three members of the Cortes should be annually elected to reside at the seat of government during the months in which the Cortes was not in session. This arrangement was highly unsatisfactory to the queen, who had expected to be sole regent under the terms of King Edward’s will, and, assisted by the discontented nobility, headed by the Count of Barcellos and the Archbishop of Lisbon, she attacked Dom Pedro, and endeavoured by force to overthrow the arrangements made by the Cortes of Torres Novas. The struggle was but a short one; the people of Lisbon rose en masse to support the son of their favourite monarch, John I., in whom they perceived his father’s administrative ability and love for commerce, and the queen and archbishop were forced to go into exile. The result of this movement was to seat Dom Pedro firmly in power with the title of regent and the guardianship of the boy-king.

The regency of Dom Pedro, better known by his title of Duke of Coimbra, is marked by the same features as the reign of his brother Edward; in it appears the same consistent attempt to check the power of the feudal nobility and the same wise encouragement of commerce. His foreign policy followed the same lines, and he maintained the same neutrality with regard to Spain and the same close alliance with England. In 1439 the regent solemnly confirmed the Treaty of Windsor in the young king’s name, and was made a Knight of the Garter, and the same honour was conferred upon Dom Henry, Duke of Viseu, in 1444, and on Dom Alvaro Vaz de Almada, Lord High Admiral of Portugal and Count of Arronches, in 1445. Dom Pedro also encouraged the maritime explorations of Dom Henry and the literary revival, which were making the name of Portugal renowned throughout Europe, and his power seemed to be at its height, when, in 1447, his daughter Isabel was married to her cousin, the king, Affonso V.

But the great regent counted without the enmity of the feudal nobility, headed by his own half-brother, the Count of Barcellos, who was created by the young king Duke of Braganza. This nobleman had always been jealous of the legitimate sons of John I., and in spite of the kind treatment of Dom Pedro, he hated the regent. This hatred he instilled into the mind of Affonso V., who was rather restive under his uncle’s control, and he eventually persuaded the young king that his uncle and father-in-law had poisoned both his father, King Edward, and his mother, Donna Leonora. Affonso V. believed these libels, and ordered the great regent to leave the Court. Dom Pedro obeyed; but the vengeance of the Duke of Braganza was not yet satisfied, and he gladly led an army to arrest the Duke of Coimbra on his estates. Dom Pedro, deserted by all his old friends and sycophants, except the Lord High Admiral, yet determined to fight, and he defeated the Duke of Braganza at Penella. Affonso V. then declared his former guardian a traitor, and summoned the feudal nobility to his side. The nobles were only too happy to aid him, and in the hotly-contested battle of Alfarrobeira the friends of the regent were defeated, and Dom Pedro, Dom Jaymé, his only son, and the Lord High Admiral, were slain, on May 21, 1449.

Affonso V., at the beginning of his personal government, yielded to the influence of the Duke of Braganza and his sons, who humoured his desire for knightly fame and his dream of sitting on the throne of Castile, and who obtained vast grants of royal property for themselves. Among them they secured the lordships of the old royal city of Guimaraens, the birthplace of Affonso Henriques, and even of Oporto, the second city of the kingdom; but they never got possession of the latter, owing to the fierce resistance of the citizens. The young king’s main idea at this time was to win fame as a knight and a crusader, and unfortunately this whim led him towards the country which was to be the tomb of his dynasty. It was to raise funds for the expeditions which won him the title of “the African” that Affonso first issued the beautiful coins known as crusados, and with money raised by this means he paid the expenses of his three expeditions. In the first of these adventures, in 1458, he took Alcazar es Seghir, or Alcacer Seguier; in the second, in 1464, he failed; and in the third, in 1471, he took Anafe, Tangier, and Arzila. It was in these expeditions that he uselessly exhausted the strength of his people, but nevertheless the works of maritime exploration went on apace, though with less energy after the death of Dom Henry “the Navigator” in 1460.

From wasting the power of his kingdom in African wars Affonso V. turned to a still more fatal pursuit, the encouragement of his dream of sitting on the throne of Castile. The lessons of his grandfather’s reign were lost on him; he failed to understand that the two countries had developed on separate lines and could not coalesce, and did not see that in a contest Portugal, owing to her smaller population, must needs have the worst of it, unless the war were national and calculated to rouse the spirit of enthusiasm and not merely dynastic. His family was now at the height of its fame—his aunt Isabel was Duchess of Burgundy; his eldest sister had married the Emperor Frederick III.; his youngest sister had married Henry IV. of Castile; and his remaining sister, Catherine, had been sought in marriage by the son of the King of Aragon and by Edward IV. of England. His first wife, Isabel, the daughter of the great regent, Dom Pedro, had died in 1455, after giving birth to the prince who was to be John II., and it was not until after his third expedition to Africa that he contemplated a fresh marriage, which should give him a claim to the succession to the throne of Castile.

With this idea Affonso V. married his own niece, Joanna, elder daughter of Henry IV. of Castile (though but a girl of thirteen), in 1475, and he claimed the kingdom of Castile in her name. But the Castilians preferred the Infanta Isabella, who had married Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and they were as determined to prevent a Portuguese king from sitting upon their throne, as the century before the Portuguese had been against the union of their country with Castile. The Castilians, fighting for their independence, as utterly defeated the Portuguese at Toro in 1476 as the Portuguese had defeated them at Aljubarrota in 1385. Affonso hurried to France, to beg help from Louis XI.; but his supplication was unheeded, and in 1478 he found himself constrained to sign the Treaty of Alcantara, by which he agreed to send his newly-married bride to a convent. He remained inconsolable at this failure of his schemes, and alternately abdicated and returned to the throne, until his death in 1481.

The “Ré Cavelleiro,” or knightly king, had thus done his best to upset the results of the wise policy of his grandfather, John “the Great.” Fortunately he had not done much harm, and his son and successor, John II., proved himself able to do more than compensate for his father’s mistakes. But it must not be considered that Affonso V. was a worthless king of the type of Ferdinand “the Handsome”; he was rather a restless knight after the fashion of Count Henry of Burgundy. He had literary tastes as well; he wrote much and ably on various subjects, and showed a great knowledge of what a king ought to be—perhaps learnt from the “Cyropaedia” of Xenophon, which had been specially translated for his instruction by the orders of the Duke of Coimbra. He was a liberal patron of men of letters, and made Duarte Galvão “Chronista Mor do Reino,” or Chronicler-General of the kingdom; and he appointed Azurara, another chronicler, librarian and keeper of the archives at the Torre del Tombo. He collected a great library at Evora, and founded the Order of the Tower and Sword; but perhaps the truest sign of the greatness which existed somewhere in his character is to be found in his answer to the chronicler Acenheiro, who asked how he should write the chronicle of his reign, when he said simply, “Tell the truth.”

These, then, were the kings who reigned in Portugal during the age of discovery. It is now time to see the nature, extent, and value of these discoveries, which were paving the way for the heroic age of Portuguese history.

VII.
THE PORTUGUESE EXPLORERS.

THE internal history of Portugal under the rule of John “the Great,” his son Edward, and his grandson Affonso V., has an interest of its own, yet it is not at home that the most important development of Portuguese energy is to be perceived. Great as were the services rendered to Portugal by King John, they mark no stages in the progress of Europe as the achievements of Dom Henry, his son, have done. Around the name of this prince, the discoveries of the Portuguese navigators may best be grouped, for he was the guiding spirit of these adventurers, and alike inspired and rewarded them.

Henry, Duke of Viseu, Grand Master of the Order of Christ, and governor of the Algarves, was the third son of John “the Great” and Philippa of Lancaster, and after winning great credit in the capture of Ceuta, he took up his residence at Sagre, near Cape St. Vincent, in 1418, and devoted himself to the task of maritime exploration. His father and his brothers assisted him, but they recognized his special fitness for the work, and therefore, though encouraging him as much as possible, they did not interfere with his projects, and made no attempts to contest his well-earned title of Prince Henry “the Navigator.”[9] The prince was too wise to neglect scientific knowledge, and he therefore summoned learned mathematicians and astronomers from all parts of Europe to his aid. Enjoying immense wealth, he established an observatory and a school of navigation at Sagre, where he employed the men of science in making charts and, above all, in improving the working of the compass. This was the theoretical side of his work; the practical was not less important. He collected together all the most daring captains and mariners he could find, and sent them forth year by year on voyages of discovery along the western coast of Africa. He never went on any of these expeditions in person, but he was acknowledged by all the men of science and sailors in his pay to be their master and presiding genius.

The idea in Prince Henry’s mind was that it was possible to sail round Africa to India, and thus trade directly with the East, and he died after more than forty years of endeavour without having fulfilled his dreams. There were legends of old time, which he knew well, that the southern continent could be sailed round, legends probably founded on the tales of Carthaginian sailors, but no geographer of that period could assert that these legends were founded upon fact. If it were true, and ships could sail direct from Lisbon to India, it was easy to see what enormous profits must accrue to the people who found and followed this route. At that time the products of the East came by a long and dangerous journey to Venice, whence they were distributed over Europe. They had either to be conveyed by land all the way to the Levant, or else to be borne up the Red Sea and carried across Egypt. By either way the expenses and risk were enormous, and the prices of the commodities of the East were proportionately great. Could a direct sea route be discovered, it was obvious that these risks and expenses would be avoided, and that Lisbon would take the place of Venice as the distributor of the treasures of the East to Europe. Dom Henry understood this, and, urged by patriotism, as well as by an ardent zeal for the cause of exploration, he devoted his wealth and time to discovering this direct sea route. As has been said, he did not himself succeed in attaining this great end, but he did much towards it, and the navigators who were successful, Vasco da Gama and Pedro Alvares Cabral, were men imbued with his ideas and in a way his disciples. In speaking of the explorers of Prince Henry’s time, the word “ship” must not be taken to mean the comparatively well-built and well-appointed vessels of the end of the sixteenth century. Modern sailors would think but little of Drake’s famous ship the Pelican, yet it was far superior in size and equipments to the wretched sailing boats of the first explorers of the fifteenth century. The enterprise of Dom Henry did much to improve the ship-building of the Portuguese, and towards the end of his life their vessels could carry as many as sixty men, but at the beginning of his career his ships were little better than half-decked sailing boats, with a crew of at most thirty-six sailors.

A mere record of discoveries, a list of names of places along the inhospitable west coast of Africa, may be monotonous in itself; but when the scanty means of these early Portuguese mariners is considered, and the greatness of the goal at which they were aiming, a fresh interest arises in the study of the map of Africa. The first-fruits of Prince Henry’s exploring ardour were the discovery of the island of Porto Santo by Bartholomeu Perestrello, in 1419, and of the more important island of Madeira by João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz, in 1420. These successes delighted Prince Henry and his father, and John “the Great” immediately granted the two islands to the Order of Christ, of which his son was Grand Master. Prince Henry at once rewarded his captains, and leased Porto Santo to Perestrello, and Madeira in equal parts to its two discoverers. The provinces of the larger island were named Funchal, from “funcho,” the Portuguese word for fennel which abounds there, and Machico, said to be derived from the Englishman, Robert Machin. Prince Henry’s first effort, before proceeding further with his explorations, was to colonize these two islands. With Porto Santo he was not successful, for the rabbits introduced by Perestrello ate up the whole produce of the island; and a similar fate seemed to await Madeira, where the indigenous vegetation was almost entirely destroyed by a great fire, which lasted seven years. However, he did not despair, and it was Dom Henry who had the sugar-cane and the vine, which are to this day the chief sources of its wealth, introduced into Madeira.

It is but fair to mention that many authors have held these great discoveries to be merely re-discoveries. Some people affirm that Madeira was really discovered by Emmanuel Pessanha, the first Lord High Admiral of Portugal, in 1351, during the reign of Affonso “the Brave,” and there seems to be more foundation for the story of Robert Machin, which is at all events of great antiquity. The story runs that Robert Machin, son of a merchant in Bristol, loved and was beloved by a lady of noble birth, whose relations refused to countenance him, and threw him into prison. About the year 1370, on his release, he found that his lady love had married a wealthy baron, but he continued his suit and she consented to elope with him. He took her on board a ship intending to go to France, but a gale came on and the ship, after being driven south for thirteen days, struck upon an island. They found the island uninhabited and very beautiful, and Machin and some of his companions took up their residence upon it, and built huts under the branches of a spreading tree. Here they lived very happily until a storm one day drove the ship from its moorings, which so grieved the lady that she died in despair at the thought of never seeing her native land again. She was buried beneath the tree, and Machin soon followed her to the grave, having first erected a cross with a brief inscription, narrating his adventures, and begging any Christians who might come to the island to erect a church over the place where her remains rested. After his death, those of his companions, who remained, determined to try to escape in the ship’s boat, but they were taken by a Moorish cruiser and sold for slaves. While in captivity in Morocco, one of the Englishmen told a Spanish fellow-captive, named Juan Morales, the whole history, and this Morales, being afterwards taken prisoner by João Gonçalves Zarco, related the narrative to his captor and to Prince Henry. Morales, according to this tale, was the pilot of Zarco and Tristão Vaz on their voyage of discovery, and the story goes on to say that the grave of the two English lovers was discovered, and that Machin’s dying desire was fulfilled, and a church erected over their remains. Whatever may be the truth of this legend, and whether Machin ever landed on Madeira or not, the fact remains that the first occupation of the island, and its being marked upon the chart, were due to the enterprise of Prince Henry.

The discovery of these islands formed no part of Prince Henry’s plan. His desire was to circumnavigate Africa; the expeditions of Perestrello, Zarco, and Tristão Vaz were all intended to sail south and double Cape Bojador, and it was certainly in an attempt to achieve this purpose that Perestrello was driven out to sea to the island of Porto Santo. Many years passed, during which Cape Bojador remained the great obstacle to the Portuguese mariners. Year after year Prince Henry despatched fleets of two or three ships at a time, which sometimes made important discoveries among the islands off the north-west coast of Africa, but they never doubled the great cape. Among these discoveries the most important were the Canary Islands and the Azores. With regard to the former group, the Portuguese were met by a prior claim on the part of Castile; and after a dispute, into the details of which it is not necessary to enter, John the Great, in pursuance of his consistent policy of maintaining peace with Spain, and at the request of Dom Henry, who did not wish to waste his strength in occupying islands, surrendered the Canary Islands to Castile. The Portuguese, however, successfully maintained their claim to the Azores, which still belong to them. This group was first touched at by Bartholomeu Perestrello, the discoverer of Porto Santo, in 1431; and in the following year Gonçalo Velho Cabral discovered the island of Santa Maria. To this captain was allotted the task of further exploring and occupying this cluster of islands; and in 1444 he discovered the island of St. Miguel or St. Michael, where he founded the beautiful little town which gives its name to the St. Michael oranges.

Prince Henry’s endeavours were crowned with partial success, though not in the reign of his father, for in 1434 Gil Eannes doubled Cape Bojador, and in 1436 Affonso Gonçalves Baldaya reached the Rio d’Ouro. The attention of “the Navigator” was, however, soon absorbed by the progress of political affairs at home, and he had for a time to abandon his schemes of exploration. He served with distinction in the unfortunate expedition to Tangier, and then played an important part in the events, which ended in confirming the power of his brother Dom Pedro, the Duke of Coimbra, as Regent of Portugal. This enlightened prince took the greatest interest in the African explorations, and he assisted Prince Henry with even greater ardour than King John or King Edward. These were the most successful years of Prince Henry’s career. In 1441 Antão Gonçalves went a hundred leagues further than the Rio d’Ouro, and in the same year Nuno Tristão, the greatest and most daring of all Prince Henry’s captains, reached the cape which closes on the south the sort of shoulder formed by North-west Africa, and named it the Cabo Branco or White Cape. He did more than this; he brought home several captives, including a native prince. The capture was hailed with enthusiasm, and from this time the slave trade on the coast of Africa really began.

It is strange that Prince Henry “the Navigator” should have been the founder of the African slave trade, but so it was, and the reasons are not hard to find. The provinces of the Alemtejo and the Algarves had never been thoroughly populated since their conquest, and the great lords and religious military orders, the owners of those districts, had never been able to bring them properly under cultivation. Slavery was not regarded with the modern sentiment of abhorrence; it was the natural fate of prisoners of war, and flourished greatly in the neighbouring country of Morocco. Prince Henry and the Duke of Coimbra felt the need of procuring labour to cultivate the southern provinces, and it seemed quite natural to them to carry off the unfortunate savages of the African coast. This idea greatly impressed the Portuguese nobles with Prince Henry’s sagacity; they did not understand his schemes about discovering a direct route to India, but they highly appreciated the introduction of cheap forced labour. The commencement of the slave trade greatly favoured the progress of the Portuguese navigators; they no longer came home empty-handed, and exploring became a profitable as well as an adventurous business. In 1444 Lançarote, with a fleet of eight ships, went upon a slave-taking expedition, and brought home two hundred captives, who were set to work on the domains of the Order of Christ in the Algarves, and in 1445 the same captain sailed with a fleet of fourteen ships from Lagos and brought home a still larger body of unfortunate slaves. From this time forth the tracks made by the explorers were followed closely by the slave-dealers. Large profits were made in the trade, which had its centre at Lagos, and by the labour of the captives the great estates of southern Portugal were speedily brought under cultivation. The employment of slave labour was to have serious consequences in the near future; but at this period, during the life of Dom Henry, it had not yet begun to drive the poorer class of the Portuguese people out of work in the fields, and into more precarious modes of earning a livelihood.

It is not necessary to do more than notice the commencement of the slave trade here; it is far more important to trace the progress of the explorers.[10] In 1445 Nuno Tristão sailed as far as the Senegal river, and in the same year, Diniz Dias, his most daring rival, discovered Guinea, and first saw the really black negroes. This advance, as a glance at the map will show, meant much; the Portuguese explorers had now thoroughly learnt how to find their way round the inhospitable shoulder of North-west Africa; Cape Bojador and Cabo Branco had no terrors for them, and their hopes of reaching India were excited by finding that the coast trended abruptly to the east. The country, too, was very different to that which they had toiled around so slowly; the fertile land of Guinea with its powerful negroes, its spices and ivory, and its prospect of gold, gave them encouragement, and on their return, the acute merchants of Lisbon were not long in opening up a trade with the newly-discovered country. Unfortunately the slave trade accompanied the ventures of the Lisbon merchants, and the white men, instead of making friends with the blacks, did not hesitate to seize them and to sell them into slavery. The Church made no effort to restrain this traffic; the blacks were heathen, and so it was to their advantage to be brought to a Christian land to work, and perhaps to be converted.

The next two years were marked by the greatest activity. In 1446 Diniz Diaz reached Cape Verde, which he called by that name from its green appearance; and in the same year, Nuno Tristam was killed in a chase after slaves, and Alvaro Fernandes, the nephew of João Gonçalves Zarco, who had discovered Madeira, starting from that island, went one hundred leagues further than Cape Verde, and left João Fernandes at his own request among the negroes. It is a strange commentary upon the death of Nuno Tristão, that João Fernandes was able to remain among the negroes for seven months in safety, learning their language and studying their customs. It shows that there was no deep-rooted antipathy between the whites and the blacks, and that the latter only attacked the Christians, when they showed themselves enemies, and tried to rob them of their liberty. João Fernandes was taken off in safety by Antam Gonçalves, in the year 1447, and testified to Prince Henry that the blacks, if heathen, were not monsters, but people of peaceful and affectionate dispositions.

This activity was followed by another pause. Dom Henry was deeply affected by the overthrow of his brother Dom Pedro; and his nephew, Affonso V., failed to give him the moral and material support he had formerly received. It is indeed a blot upon the reputation of “the Navigator” that he made no greater effort to assist the great regent, and that he was not by his side at Alfarrobeira. The next decade is marked only in the history of maritime exploration by the discoveries of Luigi Cadamosto, a Venetian, who had entered the service of Dom Henry, and who had become his right hand both as a cartographer and an explorer. On the voyages of Cadamosto there has been much controversy. Some writers, resting upon certain notes of his, assert that he discovered the Gambia as early as 1445, and the Cape Verde Islands in 1446; but modern inquirers believe that he greatly antedated his discoveries in order to enhance his own glory. It is now generally believed that in his famous voyage in 1455 and 1456 he managed to get past the Senegal, and discovered the Gambia, and that the Cape Verde Islands were discovered in 1460 by Diogo Gomes. The tale that Cadamosto went as far as the Rio Grande is quite discredited, and seems in itself, apart from the evidence, to be most improbable.

The period of the discoveries made under the direction and inspiration of Prince Henry “the Navigator” was then at an end, for he died at Sagre on November 13, 1460. What he had done appears better from a study of the map then in any number of words. He had not discovered a direct sea route to India, but he had paved the way for it, and it was quite certain that, if it existed, the gallant captains trained by him would find the route in time. His services are beyond dispute, and though he left no successor to carry on the work, he had given it such an impulse, that it remained only for the sailors themselves to complete it. He was never married, but was succeeded as Duke of Viseu, Lord of Beja and Madeira, and Grand Master of the Order of Christ, by his nephew, Dom Ferdinand, the second son of King Edward, and brother of Affonso V., whom he had adopted. This prince had also become Grand Master of the Order of Santiago by his marriage with his first cousin, Donna Leonor, daughter of Dom John, the fourth son of John “the Great,” by whom he was father of Dom Manoel, or Emmanuel, who reigned under the title of Emmanuel “the Fortunate,” and was to reap the fruits of the discoveries of Vasco da Gama and Pedro Alvares Cabral.

The death of Prince Henry did much to check maritime exploration for exploration’s sake, and for the purpose of discovering the direct route to India; but the slave trade and the general trade with the Guinea Coast were growing into importance, and the results of the labours of the early Portuguese navigators were not forgotten. Affonso V. was more bent on his Moorish expeditions and his schemes upon the crown of Castile, than upon maritime discoveries; but, nevertheless, something of importance was done during his reign in strengthening the hold of the Portuguese upon the part of the African coast already known, and in making their topographical information more exact. What Affonso did was done rather to improve trade or protect it for the benefit of his own exchequer than for love of exploration. It was for these reasons that he built a fort on the island of Arguin, near Cabo Branco, which became the depôt for the trade with Guinea, and eventually he granted the monopoly of the trade with the African coast to Fernan Gomes for five hundred crusados a year. This enterprising merchant employed able captains, of whom the chief were João de Santarem, Pedro Escobar, and Lopo Gonçalves, who worked their way further along the coast; and in 1471, in which year Fernando Po discovered the islands of St. Thomas, Fernando Bom and Anno Bom, they crossed the equator, and explored as far as Cape St. Catherine.

John II., the successor of Affonso V., set the seal upon Prince Henry’s labours. He it was who built the fort of Elmina, and took the title of Lord of Guinea; and it was in his reign that Diogo Cão or Cam discovered the Congo in 1484, and Bartholomeu Diaz reached Algoa Bay in 1486, and doubled the cape, which he called Cabo Tormentoso, or Stormy Cape, from the winds he met there, but which his sovereign, presaging from this fortunate voyage the future glory of his country, called the Cape of Good Hope. John II., like Prince Henry, was fated not to see the fulfilment of his dearest hopes, and it was not until the fifteenth century was within three years of its close that Vasco da Gama made his way from Lisbon to Calicut.

While, in political life and commercial prosperity, the people of Portugal had been at home becoming more civilized, more self-controlled, and more wealthy during the fifteenth century, its sailors had been growing more daring and enterprising. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese were to have their reward. Lisbon was to take the place of Venice as the depôt for all the products of the East; the trade of Persia, India, China, Japan, and the Spice Islands, was to fall into their hands; they were to produce great captains and writers, and were to become the wealthiest nation in Europe. But that same sixteenth century was to see the Portuguese power sink, and the independence, won by Affonso Henriques and maintained by John “the Great,” vanish away; it was to see Portugal, which had been the greatest nation of its time, decline in its fame, and become a mere province of Spain. Hand in hand with increased wealth came corruption and depopulation, and within a single century after the epoch-making voyage of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese people, tamed by the Inquisition, were to show no sign of their former hardihood. This is the lesson that the Story of Portugal in the sixteenth century teaches, that the greatness of a nation depends not upon its wealth and commercial prosperity, but upon the thews and sinews and the stout hearts of its people.

VIII.
THE HEROIC AGE OF PORTUGAL.

JOHN II., surnamed “the Perfect,” the only son of Affonso V., succeeded his father as King of Portugal in 1481, and his short reign was marked by events of the utmost importance at home, as well as by the great discoveries of Diogo Cam and Bartholomeu Diaz. He had shown himself a gallant soldier in his father’s last African expedition, when he was knighted, and at the battle of Toro, and also a capable ruler, as regent, during the absence of Affonso V. in France, and during that king’s frequent periods of abdication. He saw the folly of his father in wasting his strength in African expeditions, and in fruitless wars with Castile, and he therefore recurred to the wise policy of his great-grandfather, John “the Great,” in avoiding all interference with Spanish affairs, and maintaining a close alliance with England. He also, as has already been said, adopted enthusiastically all the schemes of Prince Henry “the Navigator,” and laboured for the discovery of a route to India by sea. He possessed all the hereditary aptitude of the princes of the house of Aviz for literature, and fostered the spirit of the Renaissance in Portugal in the study of the classical languages, the advancement of science, and the encouragement of art. He was a broad-minded, tolerant man, with ideas far in advance of his age in many respects, and possessing at once an inflexible will and remarkable sweetness of disposition.

But John II. was more than all this; he was a politician and a statesman of the first rank, and openly professed himself a disciple of Machiavelli and a believer in the theory of absolute government. He imitated Louis XI. of France, just as one of his predecessors, Sancho II., had imitated Louis IX., and in his policy and in his manner of carrying it out, he showed himself an apt pupil of his wily master. The first great task he set himself, in imitation of that monarch, was to break the power of the feudal nobility of Portugal. In doing this he relied, and with justice, upon the assistance of the mass of the people, who had learned during the last reign to detest and fear the almost unlimited power of the nobles.

The origin of the enormous estates held by the Portuguese nobility has already been pointed out, and the attempt made by King Edward to check accumulations by the “Lei Mental” has also been mentioned; but this regulation had had but little effect, owing to the profuse prodigality of Affonso V. This monarch had granted away nearly the whole patrimony of the crown; and John II. said with justice that his father had left him “only the royal high roads of Portugal.” This liberality had kept Affonso poor in spite of the increasing wealth of his people and his extravagance had been such, that he had been formally rebuked by a Cortes, held at Guarda in 1465, and had been obliged to promise amendment. Under the influence of this headstrong monarch and his favourites the evils, inherent in the feudal system, had increased alarmingly; crimes in country districts were only punished by fines, and every means which rapacity could suggest to wring money out of an impoverished tenantry were resorted to, while the wealth of the great landlords had been increased by the improvement in the cultivation of their lands due to the large importation of slaves. John II. determined to crush the powerful and turbulent feudal nobility, and to draw back some of its wealth into the royal treasury, and for this purpose he summoned a great Cortes to meet at Evora in 1481, the year of his accession. In this Cortes he proposed that a “inquiracão geral” should be held into all titles to landed property, and that the royal corregidors should alone be empowered to dispense and execute criminal justice throughout the country. Both measures were agreed to, but the nobles determined to resist the examination into their titles, and the loss of the lucrative privilege of dispensing criminal justice, and they combined to oppose the king, under the leadership of the Duke of Braganza.

Ferdinand, Duke of Braganza, was the wealthiest and most powerful nobleman, not only in Portugal, but in the whole peninsula. He was the grandson of Affonso, Count of Barcellos, the illegitimate son of John “the Great,” who had been created Duke of Braganza by Affonso V., and he had inherited the vast possessions of his grandfather and of his grandmother, the daughter of the Holy Constable. These possessions had been increased by the lavishness of Affonso V., who had showered favours on the first and second Dukes of Braganza. Ferdinand possessed fifty cities, towns, and castles, and nearly one-third of the land of the kingdom; he was patron of one hundred and sixty canonries and religious benefices; he maintained a royal household, and bore the titles of Duke of Braganza and Guimaraens, Marquis of Villa Viçosa, Count of Barcellos, Ourem, Arrayolos and Neiva, and Lord of Montalegre, Monporto, and Penafiel. His brothers were nearly as powerful as himself. The eldest, João, was Marquis of Monte Mor, and Constable of the kingdom; the second, Affonso, was Count of Faro; and the youngest, Alvaro, held the important office of Chancellor. In the reign of Affonso V. this great nobleman had quarrelled fiercely with John II., then heir apparent, but he believed he had secured his safety by marrying a sister of the future queen, for both Prince John and himself married daughters of Ferdinand, Duke of Viseu and Beja, the brother of Affonso V., and inheritor of the wealth of Prince Henry “the Navigator.” The Duke of Braganza took the lead in opposing the king’s decrees passed in the Cortes of Evora, and John II. was glad of it, not only because he coveted the wealth and lands of the Braganza family, which dimmed the splendour of the Crown, and on account of their former quarrels in the late king’s lifetime, but also because he remembered that he was, through his mother, the grandson of the great regent, Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, who had been defeated and slain at Alfarrobeira by this very Duke of Braganza and his father. For all these reasons John II. decided to strike a sudden and decisive blow, which should at once re-establish the power of the Crown and paralyze the feudal nobility with terror, and he therefore had the Duke of Braganza arrested, and executed, after a very short trial, at Evora, on June 22, 1483.

The nobles, however, were not yet defeated, and they continued to intrigue against the king’s authority under the leadership of a yet nearer relation of his own, Diogo, Duke of Viseu and Beja, the eldest son of Dom Ferdinand, and grandson of King Edward, and the brother-in-law alike of the king and of the executed Duke of Braganza. But John II. was not dismayed: imitating Louis XI. of France, he determined not to spare his own relations, and on August 23, 1484, he stabbed the Duke of Viseu with his own hand in his palace at Setubal. This murder he followed up with decision: he had the Bishop of Evora, one of his father’s favourites, thrown down a well; and he executed, with or without trial, about eighty of the leading noblemen of the country. By these means John II. broke the power of the feudal nobility for ever, and as happened in France under Louis XI., and in England under Henry VII., the fall of the nobility was followed by the absolutism of the monarch. Now that the nobles had lost their power, and the Crown had become wealthy by the confiscation of their property, John II. needed the support of the people, as represented in the Cortes, no longer, and he became a despot, though a benevolent one. But the weight of this despotism was not yet felt, for John II. possessed all the political ability of his grandfathers. He tried to find means for encouraging his nobility, now that they were frightened out of treason, to enter into the career of maritime exploration, which had been opened by Prince Henry, while at home he won the love of his people by reorganizing the government of the kingdom, and proved so good an administrator that the Portuguese gave him the title of “the Perfect King.”

It has been said that in his foreign policy John II. followed in the course set before him by John the Great. With the great monarchs then ruling in Spain, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, he consistently remained on friendly terms, and in 1490 his only legitimate son, Affonso, was married to Isabella, eldest daughter of these sovereigns. The death of this son in the following year, without leaving children, was a terrible blow to him, but he nevertheless maintained his friendship with Ferdinand and Isabella, and in 1494 concluded the Treaty of Tordesillas with them. By this treaty, which was confirmed by a Bull, issued by Pope Alexander VI., the limit of the future possessions of the Spaniards and Portuguese in the regions explored and discovered by their mariners was 370 leagues west of Cape Verde, and it was agreed that the Spaniards were to have full right to all lands discovered to the west of this line, and the Portuguese to all to the south and east. What a curious commentary this treaty forms on that of Cella Nova, concluded three hundred years before between Affonso Henriques of Portugal and Ferdinand of Leon, by which these two monarchs agreed to take the course of the Guadiana as the line to separate their future conquests from the Moors. Both nations had now developed; the energies of both, heightened by the long struggle with the Mohammedans, sought for fresh fields, and expanding far beyond the boundaries of Europe, were to prove themselves, in the one case in Mexico and Peru, and in the other in India and the countries of the East.

In the other cardinal point of the policy of John “the Great,” the maintenance of a close alliance with England, John II. carefully followed the example of the founder of the house of Aviz. Affonso V. had not neglected this important tradition, and had even promised his sister, Donna Catherine, to Edward IV., in 1461, a marriage only frustrated by the death of the princess in 1463; and the English monarch had solemnly ratified the Treaty of Windsor in 1471, and again after the battle of Barnet in 1472, and he had also included the name of the King of Portugal, as an ally of England, in his treaty with Louis XI. of France, in 1475. John II. drew the bonds of friendship still closer, and sent important embassies to the three kings of England, who ruled in quick succession in this country. In 1482 Edward IV. ratified the Treaty of Windsor in the presence of the ambassadors of John II., and recognized his new title of “Lord of Guinea,” and in 1484 Richard III. did the same. In 1485 the King of Portugal proposed in a Cortes held at Alçobaça, that his only sister Joanna should be given in marriage to Richard III., but the princess, who was famed for her piety and wished to become a nun, fortunately for herself, refused the alliance, as she afterwards did the hand of Charles VIII. of France. Henry VII. bore no enmity towards John II. on account of his friendship with Richard III., but, on the contrary, showed every disposition to assist him in his struggle with his nobility, and in 1488 went so far as to arrest the Count of Pennamacor, one of the insurgent Portuguese noblemen who had escaped to England, and to imprison him in the Tower. It was in this year also that the last treaty of commerce between England and Portugal, before the famous Methuen treaty in 1703, was concluded at Lisbon by Richard Nanfran and Thomas Savage, who had been sent for that purpose, and to invest John II. as a Knight of the Garter.