CHAPTER I. EARLY HISTORY TO JOÃO I
LAND AND PEOPLE
[to 1383 A.D.]
The reasons for which Portugal is neglected are precisely those which in some eyes make her truly lovable. For a half-century art has done almost nothing for the natural river highways; and the Douro, the Guadiana, and the Tagus flow through this kingdom like the wandering rivulets of great English parks. The large towns of the interior, Coimbra, Santarem, Evora, and Miranda, look like pretty kiosks rising about flowering thickets; peaceful retreats, solitudes animated with a life that jogs quietly along and does not go with leaps and bounds as in France, where a satisfied humanity stands still, instead of rushing into the unknown risks of the future.
The cities of the coast, Lisbon, Oporto, appear more like dwelling-places conveniently placed the better to enjoy the sunlight and the ocean breezes than wide-awake communities guarding their mercantile interests in the commercial exchange of the products of the Old World with the riches of the New.
[to 1147 A.D.]
If the Portuguese had been as skilful speculators as they were intrepid sailors and distinguished warriors, Henry the Navigator, who set the example of maritime conquest, Dias, Vasco da Gama, Cabral, Albuquerque, valiant captains identified with all the glories of the Aviz dynasty, would have imitated the speculative prudence of the Dutch, their rivals. And if, when the illustrious house of Braganza opened the era of national liberties, the people had had in their heads less of poetic imagination and more power of reason; if, courageous and adventurous as they were, they had shown themselves more positive, the French, at first, and then the English, would never have invaded their treasury, exploited their soil, and paralysed their industries. Truly a childlike nation, satisfied with little, pursuing the ideal, economical without avarice, pure in morals, sober, generous, hospitable, the Portuguese have bred heroes in place of diplomats, poets in place of capitalists: they knew how bravely to defend their country against the Romans, the Arabs, and the Spaniards, and still more recently against the army of Napoleon. They have kept themselves a free nation, independent and original, possessing a language, a literature, distinct manners and customs, and governed politically by one of the most liberal constitutions of Europe.
To make Portugal complete, Brazil and the colonies were necessary to this country whose language is spoken on the European continent by only five millions of men; and again the narrow domain which so restricts the use of this tongue creates an obstacle to the popularity of the works to which language gives birth, just as its poverty impedes the development of the fine arts. Jealousy and indifference, the double affliction of southern nations, have curbed the artistic and literary aspirations of the Portuguese. What man of genius would resolve on a career of self-denial only to be calumniated and persecuted as was Prince Henry, to achieve a miserable end like Admiral Pacheo, or like Camoens; or to languish forgotten, like the painter Glama, reduced to making tavern signs; like the sculptor Machado de Castro and the founder Costa, creators of an equestrian statue of José I, worthy of ranking with the greatest art works of the eighteenth century? Encouragement and recompense are the safeguards of emulation, and emulation, utilising the moral resources of a people, permits them the use of its advantages to rise to the level of other nations.
Except for a few coins, the Phœnicians, the Phocæans, and the Carthaginians have left almost no trace in Portugal of their occupation or their passing; but the touch of Rome clings better than in Spain. Cæsar’s Pax Julia sleeps thirty feet beneath the city of Beja and needs only the simple power of will to be awakened, with its population of statues, its inscriptions, and its frescoes; Liberalitas Julia, the Ebora of Ptolemy, planted like Beja upon high ground in the province of Alemtejo, has a double character, that of a Grecian town with its temple of Diana and that of a Roman city with its great aqueduct, immense works, wrought under the hand of Quintus Sertorius, who made himself master eighty years before the Christian era. The aristocracy of Pax Julia and Liberalitas Julia was accustomed to spend its summers in the little municipality of Alcacer, where there was a famous bath under the protection of a local divinity, the nymph Salacia. Braganza, the Juliobriga; Lisbon, the Felicitas Julia of the Augustan era, had equally received their political baptism from the conqueror of Gaul; while ancient Lusitania, become a Julian or Cæsarian country, easily adapted the popular customs and organisations of the Roman government to its Carthaginian institutions.
Vespasian and Trajan made an important town of Chaves; Viseu is the Vesontium of the consul D. Brutus; Lamego, the Urbs Lamacœnorum of Trajan. Setubal occupies a terrace opposite the ancient Roman colony of Cetobriga. At Braga, Ponte de Lima, Salvaterra, we find traces of amphitheatres, aqueducts, baths, and temples; so that well-directed excavations would evoke the manes of that sovereign people which, governing the universe, kept watchful station on the coast of Hispania to keep an eye on Numidia.
[to 1170 A.D.]
From the seventh century to the capture of Lisbon in 1147 Moorish architecture had its compromising effect on the elegant majesty of the great lines and arches of the Saracens’ predecessors; the baths of Cintra, the wall and seventy-seven towers of Lisbon, the fortifications and palaces of Evora, and many mosques since transformed into churches, signified, towards the close of the twelfth century, the degree of Islam’s foothold on Portuguese soil—an unsteady tenure, without consistence, without depth, bearing witness to the rapidity of conquest as well as to the fear of ephemeral possession. Little by little, in place of the mosques, arose churches, veritable apostolic citadels, headquarters for the war against the infidel. Formless and rude at first, they developed as the Christian armies won back the land; but when the native peoples effected their definite triumph they were obliged to call in foreign artists, more skilful than themselves in the interpretation of the architectural vernacular.
The Portuguese knew how to fight bravely and to sing their triumphs, but they did not know how to build; and for this reason the monastery of Alcobaça, founded in fulfilment of a vow by Alfonso I, king of Portugal, in 1170, is an Anglo-Saxon church, built by workmen from England. A new architectural epoch dates from the fifteenth century, and its character has been best perpetuated in the abbey of Batalha. Of its kind, this is one of the most beautiful edifices in existence; and assuredly it is the most majestic and the most pure in form that Portugal possesses. It was built in the reign of João I (1385-1433) who brought from England a celebrated sculptor named Stephenson. Many German, English, and Norman artists summoned by the monarch came to aid him. João himself and his queen Philippa, granddaughter of Edward III of England, supervised the work. And that nothing might be lacking to the poetic magnificence and graceful details of the building, another queen, the pious Leonora, and two monarchs—João II, the poet king, and after him, Emmanuel—followed the continuance of the work with intelligent interest. Nothing in the whole peninsula rivals in magnificence the façade of the monastery, nor in boldness of design its chapter hall.[b]
THE ORIGIN OF PORTUGAL
[712-1109 A.D.]
It has been stated that geographically the kingdom of Portugal is an integral part of the Iberian peninsula; the only reason why it has retained its independence, while the other mediæval states of that peninsula have merged into the kingdom of Spain, is to be found in its history. When Philip II of Spain annexed Portugal it was a century too late for it to coalesce with Spain. It had then produced Vasco da Gama and Alfonso de Albuquerque, and its language had been developed from a Romance dialect into a literary language by Camoens and Sá de Miranda. Conscious of its national history, it broke away again from Spain in 1640, and under the close alliance of England maintained its separate and national existence during the eighteenth century. A union with Spain might have been possible, however, during the first half of the present century had not a generation of historians and poets arisen who, by recalling the great days of the Portuguese monarchy, have made it impossible for Portugal ever again to lose the consciousness of her national existence.
The history of Portugal really begins with the gift of the fief of the Terra Portucalensis or the county of Porto Cale to Count Henry of Burgundy in 1094; for any attempt to identify the kingdom of Portugal and the Portuguese people with Lusitania and the Lusitanians is utterly without foundation. With the rest of the Iberian peninsula, Portugal was colonised by the Phœnicians and conquered by the Carthaginians; and the Roman province of Lusitania, whether according to the division of Iberia into three provinces under Augustus or into five under Hadrian, in no way coincided with the historical limits of the kingdom of Portugal. In common with the rest of the peninsula, it was overrun by the Vandals, Alans, and Visigoths, and eventually conquered by the Arabs in the eighth century. It was not until the fifteenth century that an attempt was made by Garcia de Menezes to identify Lusitania with Portugal. Under the influence of the Renaissance, Bernardo de Brito insisted on the identity, and claimed Viriathus as a Portuguese hero. Other writers of the same epoch delighted in calling Portugal by the classical name of “Lusitania,” and Camoens, by the very title of his great epic, Os Lusiadas, has immortalised the appellation.
For two centuries Portugal remained subject to the Omayyad caliphs, and under their wise rule the old Roman coloniæ and municipia, such as Lisbon, Lamego, Viseu, and Oporto, maintained their Roman self-government and increased in wealth and importance. Towards the close of the tenth century, as the Omayyad caliphate grew weaker, the Christian princes of Visigothic descent who dwelt in the mountains of the Asturias began to grow more audacious in their attacks on the declining power, and in 997 Bermudo II, king of Galicia, won back the first portion of modern Portugal from the Mohammedans by seizing Oporto and occupying the province now known as Entre-Minho-e-Douro. In the beginning of the eleventh century the Omayyad caliphate finally broke up, and independent emirs established themselves in every large city, against whom the Christian princes waged incessant and successful war.[c]
In 1027 Alfonso V of Leon fell before Viseu, the siege of which was in consequence abandoned; but in 1057, both it and Lamego were recovered by his son-in-law, Ferdinand I; and the following year Coimbra shared the same fate. In 1093, Santarem, Lisbon, and Cintra were reduced by Alfonso VI, the famous conqueror of Toledo, whose arms were generally so successful against the misbelievers.[135] As these conquests were continually exposed to the irruptions of the Almoravids, in 1095 that monarch conferred the government of Portugal from the Minho to the Tagus, and the right of conquering as far as the Guadiana, on Henry of Besançon or Burgundy, who in 1072 had married his illegitimate daughter Theresa, and to whose arms he had been so much indebted for many of his recent successes.[136]
[1095-1139 A.D.]
The nature of the authority conferred on the new count has been a matter of much controversy between the Castilian and Portuguese writers. While the latter maintain that the concession of Alfonso was full and entire,—a surrender of all feudal claims over the country, which the count was to govern in full sovereignty,—the former no less zealously contend that the government was to be held as a fief, hereditary indeed, but no less dependent on the crown of Leon. In the absence of documentary evidence, probability only can guide us. It is unreasonable to suppose either that the king was willing, or, if willing, that his nobles would allow him to dismember at once and forever so fair a territory from his crown, and that too in favour of a stranger and an illegitimate daughter—for illegitimate she was, notwithstanding the allegations to the contrary by some Portuguese writers, who seldom regard truth if unpalatable to their national vanity. That Portugal was conferred as a dependent fief is also confirmed by the disputes between its early sovereigns and those of Leon—the former striving to maintain their avowed independence, the latter to reduce them to their reputed original vassalage. Alfonso died in 1109.
The administration of Henry was vigorous, and his military conduct glorious. His triumphs over the Mohammedans were frequent, whether achieved in concert with his father-in-law, Alfonso, or by his own unaided arm. Nor were his efforts to crush rebellion, whether of his local Christian governors or of his Mohammedan vassals, less successful. One of his last acts was to assist his natural sovereign, Urraca, daughter of Alfonso, against her husband the king of Aragon. He died in 1112, leaving many ecclesiastic structures enriched by his liberality. Braga, Oporto, Coimbra, Lamego, and Viseu were the places most indebted to his piety. Unfortunately for his memory, many of the great deeds recorded of him by his partial people rest on authority too disputable to be received. Probably some of them have been confounded with those of his more famous son.
During the minority of Alfonso [or Affonso], the son of Henry, who, at his father’s death, was only in his second year, the administration of the kingdom was assumed by the widowed Theresa. The character of this princess is represented as little superior to that of her sister Urraca: the same violence, the same unbridled passions, and the same unnatural jealousy of her son appear, though in a degree undoubtedly less criminal, to have distinguished her conduct. Yet on that sister and her nephew, the successor of Urraca, she sometimes made war, in the hope of profiting by the dissensions of the period; on every occasion she was repulsed, and was forced to sue for peace. Her intimacy with Dom Ferdinand Peres, whom she is supposed to have secretly married, and through whom all favours were to be solicited, roused the jealousy of the courtiers. By their persuasion Alfonso, whom she had rigorously endeavoured to exclude from all participation in public affairs, undertook to wrest the sovereignty from her hands. He had little difficulty in collecting troops; for no sooner did he erect the standard of resistance, than the discontented nobles flocked round it. His preparations reached the ears of his mother, who wrathfully armed to defend her authority. The two armies met near the fortress of Guimarães, where the princess was utterly routed, and forced to seek refuge in the castle of Leganoso. There she was speedily invested, and compelled to surrender the reins of government into the hands of her son, while her favourite or husband fled into Galicia. She survived her fall about two years.[137]
The new count was destined to prove a more formidable enemy to the Mohammedans than even his able father. During the first years of his administration, he was at variance with his cousin, Alfonso VII or VIII, whose Galician territories he invaded, and with whose enemy, the king of Navarre, he entered into alliance.[h]
When Alfonso Henriques was no longer checked by the enmity of his Christian neighbours, he prosecuted his enterprises against the Moors with such vigour that he soon extended his sway nearly to the Tagus; and, by the terror of his progress, obliged Ali to send from Africa a powerful army, to support the walis, next threatened against him. A battle ensued, esteemed the most memorable in Portuguese annals, but which has been so disfigured by national vanity or ignorance that the facts relating to it are not easily ascertainable. The numbers of the Mohammedans are rated at three hundred thousand, and even at six hundred thousand men; and this host is said to have been commanded by five kings. Since the establishment of the Almoravid domination, there were no Moorish kings left in Spain; but the name was erroneously given to the walis who led the troops of their respective provinces. What does seem certain respecting the battle in question is that the Mussulman forces were incomparably superior to the Portuguese; that, dreading an invasion, which, even if ultimately foiled, must still bring inevitable ruin upon his territories, the count boldly crossed the Tagus, and advanced to the plain of Ourique [or Orik], where he entrenched himself strongly, and awaited the attack; that the Moors repeatedly assaulted his fortifications and were as often repulsed, until at last, from weariness and mortification, they fell into some disorder; and that Alfonso Henriques, seizing the critical moment, burst out upon them from behind his lines, and completed their discomfiture. Upon the field of victory the army were said to have hailed their count king of Portugal; and this glorious day, the 25th of July, 1139, is considered the epoch of the foundation of the monarchy. The five walis of Badajoz, Beja, Elvas, Evora, and Lisbon were found amongst the dead, and honoured with the royal title. The conqueror assumed, as the arms of Portugal, their five shields, arranged in what he called a cross, though the figure they present more resembles that of a cinque upon dice; and accordingly the Portuguese arms are termed As Quinas, the Cinques.
[1139-1147 A.D.]
Alfonso’s military election was said to have been subsequently confirmed by the cortes of Lamego, with a solemnity well deserving attention, as perhaps the only instance on record of a formal compact between prince and people, at the original establishment of a monarchy.[i] But it is now denied that such a cortes ever sat, the story being of much later date. The true kingship of Alfonso Henriques dates from 1143 when, at the intervention of a papal legate, Alfonso VII recognised him as king and vassal of the pope.[a]
Having established his own independence of foreign authority, the new king proceeded to the emancipation of his clergy from their subjection to the archbishop of Toledo, whose primacy extended over the whole peninsula. This was the subject of long negotiations with the papal see; but Alfonso Henriques at length obtained from Pope Alexander III a bull dissolving the connection with Toledo, and constituting the archbishop of Braga primate of Portugal.
Alfonso Henriques’ last conquest from the Moors was the city of Lisbon, which he took by the help of a fleet of French, English, and German crusaders, who put into the Tagus in their way to the Holy Land. He easily persuaded these champions of Christianity that it would be no violation of their vow to suspend their voyage for a while, in order to fight the Mohammedans in Portugal; and some of them, chiefly English, he is said to have induced permanently to settle in his new acquisitions.[i]
[1147-1169 A.D.]
In 1147, we find the Portuguese intent on regaining Santarem. As the fortifications were strong, and the defenders numerous, he caused a small but resolute band to scale the walls by night: scarcely had twenty-five reached the summit of the wall, when the Moorish inhabitants took the alarm, and flew to arms. In vain one of the gates was opened by the Christians, and the rest of the assailants rushed in. The struggle which ensued, amidst the darkness of night, the clash of weapons, the groans of dying warriors, the shrieks of women and infants who were indiscriminately butchered, constituted a scene which none but a demon would have delighted to witness, which none but a demon would have commanded.[138] In an hour this important fortress, one of the great bulwarks of Christian Lusitania, was in possession of the victor. His success, and the embarrassment of the Mohammedan princes of Spain, both on account of the rising power of the Almohads in Africa, and of the hostilities of the kings of Leon and Castile, emboldened him to attempt the recovery of Lisbon. That city was invested; but the valour of the defenders and the strength of the walls would doubtless have compelled him to raise the siege, had not a succour arrived which no man could have expected. This was a fleet of crusaders, chiefly of English, under the command of William Longsword, who was hastening to the Holy Land. The Portuguese king had little difficulty in persuading them that the cross had no greater enemies than the Mohammedans of Spain, and that the recovery of Lisbon would be no less acceptable to heaven than that of the Syrian towns: the hope of plunder did the rest; the crusaders disembarked, and joined in the assaults which were daily made on the place. After a gallant defence of five months, the besieged showing no disposition to surrender, the Christians appointed October 25th for a general assault on the city. It was carried by storm; a prodigious number of the Moors were put to the sword; the crusaders were too much enriched to dream of continuing their voyage; so that, with the exception of a few who received lands in Portugal, the rest returned to their own country.
But the Mohammedans had still possession of one-half of Portugal, and of several strong fortresses. Having reduced Cintra, Alfonso passed the Tagus, and seized on several fortified places in Estremadura, and even in Alemtejo. It was not, however, until 1158 that he seriously attempted the reduction of Alcacer-do-Sal, which fell, after a vigorous resistance of two months. In 1165 Cezimbra and Palmella were invested: the former place was speedily taken; while, before the latter, he had to encounter a strong force sent to relieve it by the Moorish governor of Badajoz.[139] The misbelievers were defeated, and many places made to surrender.
The martial character of the Portuguese king, as well as the almost uninterrupted success of his arms, inclined him to perpetual war—whether with Moors or Christians appears to have given him little concern. In 1167 he seized on Limia, a territory of Galicia, which he claimed on the ground of its having formed part of his mother’s dowry. The following year he advanced against Badajoz, the Moorish governor of which was a vassal of the king of Leon. Ferdinand II hastened to its relief; but before his arrival the Portuguese standard floated on the towers. The forces of Ferdinand were greatly superior in number, and the Portuguese king prepared to issue from the gates—whether, as the national writers assert, to contend for his new conquest on the open field, or, as the Castilians say, to escape from the incensed monarch of Leon, is uncertain. What is indubitable is that, as he was passing through the gate with precipitation, his thigh came into contact with the wall or bars, and was shattered. He was taken prisoner by the Leonese, and conducted to their king, who treated him with courtesy, and consented to his liberation on the condition of his surrendering the places which he had usurped in Galicia. From this accident, however, he never recovered so as to be able to mount a horse; but it had a much worse effect than his own personal decrepitude: it encouraged the restless Mohammedans to resume their incursions into his territories.
[1169-1185 A.D.]
Though these incursions were repressed by the valour of his son, Dom Sancho, who, not content with defending Portugal, penetrated into the Moorish territory, to the very outskirts of Seville, his people could not fail to suffer from the ravages of the misbelievers. This irruption, too, had its ill effect; it so much incensed Yusuf ben Yakub, the emperor of the Almohads, that he despatched a considerable force into the kingdom. The discomfiture of this army under the wall of Abrantes, and the exploits of the celebrated Dom Fuas Roupinho, one of Sancho’s captains, preserved the country indeed from the yoke of the stranger, but not from the devastation; Alemtejo, above all, suffered in this vindictive warfare.
Alfonso Henriques died December 6th, 1185. His memory is held by the Portuguese in the highest veneration; and hints are not obscurely given that he merited canonisation. He, who had been favoured by a celestial vision at Ourique, whose holy intentions had been so miraculously communicated to St. Bernard, and after death whose mantle, preserved with religious reverence, could cure the diseased, was surely worthy of ecclesiastical deification. That, in after times, when João I gained Ceuta, he appeared in white armour in the choir of Santa Cruz at Coimbra, and informed the holy brotherhood that he and his son Dom Sancho were proceeding to Ceuta to assist their vassals, no true Portuguese ever yet disbelieved: hence the peculiar office which the monks of that magnificent house solemnised in his honour. To a less Catholic reader, “this always adorable king” (sempre o rei adoravel) may, from his indiscriminate slaughter of the innocent and guilty, and from his amours, appear to have been imbued with the imperfections of our nature.[h]
HERCULANO’S ESTIMATE OF THE FIRST PORTUGUESE KING
[1128-1185 A.D.]
Alfonso I was not generally over-scrupulous in sacrificing his knightly generosity and even his political faith to public convenience. The methods which he nearly always adopted to secure the independence and extend the limits of Portugal do more honour to his strength and dexterity than to his delicacy on points of honour. If, however, the severe and impartial historian must perceive blemishes in the character of Alfonso I as a man, justice must, in his favour, throw into the scale the difficulties which beset him in bequeathing to the next generation a well-cemented political existence, and a nationality, as we may say, sufficiently compact to withstand the storms which shook the peninsula. He had to attend to the internal organisation of society and externally to secure it an advantageous position in relation to the various nations of Spain, Christian and Mussulman.
Founder of a new dynasty in the midst of a society equally new, what more natural than that Alfonso I should conceive it necessary gradually to accustom his subjects as well as foreigners to look upon his son Sancho as king before death came to make, as it were, solution of continuity between father and son, and therefore in the monarchy? In Leon and Castile heredity had superseded election to the throne in point of fact; but the Visigothic right of election still existed as a written law, and was still presupposed by the formula of coronation even in the thirteenth century. There were no particular institutions in Portugal to fix the succession, nor any security that the Leonese-Castilian dynasty would offer a long line of kings succeeding each other from father to son. Neither daring nor ambition were lacking in those days; and the death of the first king of the Portuguese might give rise to serious disturbance, either in the country itself or from without, especially as Ferdinand II had already shown in his conduct towards the young king of Castile that his generosity could not always resist an opportunity of adding another crown to that which he already possessed. These and similar considerations probably moved Alfonso I to associate his son with him in the government, not by any formal act of which we have record, but by giving him a free hand in the government of the state, especially in matters of warfare.
An Early Portuguese King
Following the phases of this long reign, and judging impartially the actions of the man placed by providence at the head of the nation, to guide it in the first years of its existence, it is recognised that the idea of fixing the Portuguese independence outweighed all other considerations in his mind, sometimes perhaps to the prejudice of some which should have been respected. It is this idea which in reality links together many acts of Alfonso Henriques which, taken separately, would give men a right to accuse him of little faith and immoderate ambition. Besides the revolt against Doña Theresa which is to be attributed rather to the nobles than to an inexperienced youth, the breaking of the truce with the emperor in 1137, the cruelties practised upon the Saracens, and finally his conduct towards the king of Leon, his son-in-law, whose noble and generous character cannot fail to cast a reflection upon that of Alfonso I, are actions which, taken separately, are worthy of condemnation, at least until records reveal some circumstances still unknown to us, which may absolve them. But, if we consider them in connection with the idea to which the king of Portugal had devoted himself, and which was so to speak incarnate in him, who will not find excuses for such actions, especially if we consider the barbarous epoch, the difficult situation of the country, and the real weakness of a society separated from another which struggled to bring it to reunion? The great need to which Alfonso I was bound to attend was to give homogeneity and internal and external strength to the nation which was being formed. For this purpose he was forced at the same time to seek the favour of the church, the first element of strength in those days; to favour the nobles, the chief nerve of the army, and finally to impart the utmost degree of vigour to the municipal spirit without which, in our opinion, popular spirit and keen love of country never have existed and never will exist.
Besides this labour of internal organisation, he had to extend the limits of the territory which he inherited, too narrow for the establishment of an independent state. The fear of his name among the Mussulmans and Christians and the daring of his troops were means to accomplish it. Naturally warlike, two successive generations learned in his school the hard business of war and succeeded in bequeathing to those to come the glorious traditions of strength and patriotic love which the nation guarded religiously for several centuries. However, before Alfonso I could trust the independence of the country to the chances of war, it was necessary to shield it while a frail plant, by political dexterity. In some cases this gave rise to actions which considered summarily would be condemned by severe morality. But view the picture in the proper light, and the stains which before cast a shadow upon the noble and haughty figure of the first Portuguese king will almost disappear, and the sympathy which the Portuguese nation has in all ages shown for the memory of the son of Count Henry will again appear estimable, for it has its roots in a sentiment rarely found among nations—gratitude to those to whom they are most indebted. This national affection went so far as to attribute to Alfonso Henriques the halo of the saints, and urge that Rome should bestow upon the fierce conqueror that crown which belongs to the martyr’s resignation. But if a creed of peace and humility forbade Rome to grant that crown, another religion likewise venerable, the religion of patriotism, teaches us that when we pass the pale, worm-eaten portal of the church of Santa Cruz we are about to pay homage to the ashes of that man but for whom the Portuguese nation, and perhaps even the name of Portugal, would not be in existence to-day.
REIGNS OF SANCHO I AND ALFONSO II
[1185-1211 A.D.]
The historical value of the twenty-six years’ reign of the son of Alfonso I is perhaps no less than that of his own long term of government; but the character of the two epochs differ as much as did the gifts and characters of the two princes who presided over the political life of each. Less able as a captain than his father, and without that superior invention and daring which incited the founder of the monarchy to great enterprises, Sancho I was far from winning equal renown as a conqueror, but wasted the best years of his manhood in wars for the most part useless and obscure.
Upon this point the two epochs admit of no comparison. Before the sword of Alfonso, Saracen and Christian drew back dismayed, citadels and castles opened their gates; the limits of the country were extended, and the foundations of the existence of Portugal, cemented by torrents of blood, were permanently laid in the west of Spain. After a conquest Sancho always lost again, and for years carried on a sterile strife with Leon; and if he recovered a part of the north and west of Alemtejo it was because the Almohads, whose power was already on the decline, had not sufficient forces to maintain the almost useless dominion of those inhospitable deserts, and so abandoned them, while the Christians, especially the military orders, gradually reclaimed them and built castles and preceptories.
But if we turn our eyes from the frontiers and look upon the interior of the country, the name of the second monarch appears no less glorious than that of the first, and we see his reign as a complement of the preceding reign. Fertilised by the ashes of the martyrs of the Gospel and the Koran, turned and furrowed by the steel of combatants and the whirl of battles, the land of Portugal received from the hands of Sancho the seeds of greatness and royal strength in the councils which were everywhere established; in the farms and villages which were founded in the districts least subject to invasion and incursions; and in the frontier castles which were crowned with bastions and provided with military stores. In those days the courage which faces death was but a trivial virtue. Without the grand idea which dominated all his conquests, without the political skill and extraordinary military talent with which he made up for the lack of strength and resources of the monarchy which he founded, Alfonso I, in spite of his courage and energy, would rank no higher than a fortunate knight.
Upon this point his son was not fortune’s favourite. However, he revenged himself nobly, labouring to earn the title of the Povoador, or city-builder, which he indeed deserved. History, so subject to the vulgar error of rating the barren laurel crown above the fruitful olive branch, has treated the last years of Sancho’s reign with scorn because therein he endeavoured to substitute cities for deserts, cultivated fields for waste lands, and life for death. He pursued this end with energy, and his highest praise lies in the collection of documents which prove his activity and which are perhaps but a small portion of those once existing. This monarch sincerely followed the system which the internal state of the nation demanded, and enabled his successors to be, if not more valiant, at least more fortunate soldiers.
Such is the justice due to Sancho as king. As a man his moral character was not relatively bad, it was vulgar; that is, he had the defects common to princes and barons of the times; he was ignorant and credulous—for science, according to the opinion of the age, was only fit for the mean-spirited—irascible, and violent, because moderation is not learned upon the battle-field, where his father educated him. Besides this he seems to have been inclined to gallantry and the pleasures of the chase. Certain facts of his life also cast upon him the suspicion of cupidity, and of having gathered large sums into his treasury by means grievous to his nation. Sancho himself asserts that the defenders of the state often lacked necessaries, and yet he left in his will nearly a million maravedis, almost all in gold coin, that is, more than three million cruzados of the actual currency—truly an incredible sum, if we consider the rarity of precious metals at that time. Such riches presuppose frequent rapine or a too violent system of taxation. Indeed it is proved by a law of Alfonso II that the king as well as his barons obtained the greatest necessaries of life at an incomparably inferior price, a monstrous imposition which may give us some idea of the other exactions of the treasury.
But the point in which the reign of Sancho has perhaps the highest significance lies in the beginning of that varied and complex fact which for three centuries constituted the principal feature of our Middle Ages. We speak of the alliance of the king and councils against the privileged classes, the clergy and the nobility. The first phases of the struggle are not only the beginning but the epitome, or rather the symbol of the whole. The burgesses of Oporto, attacking their bishop and lord with the officers of the crown, confiscating his property, expelling him covered with ignominy, and braving the anger of the powerful family of Martinho Rodrigues, are a type of the resistance and ill will exhibited by the municipality and the king towards the two high classes of the state, until the monarchy gained a final and decisive victory. Sancho, abandoning the citizens of Oporto, transferring, so to speak, his inert strength of a dying man to the opposite camp, and even associating himself with the clergy to assist in subduing the burgesses, gave a deplorable example to his successors and stirred up the popular spirit to future strife. In spite of this, history cannot condemn him, for everything seems to indicate that the last months of his life were one protracted agony; and if even in our own times, when religious feeling has grown dim and weak, souls calling themselves strongly tempered waver at the approach of death, and bow not only to the terrors of religion but often even to the superstitious beliefs of infancy which then importunately revive—how can we fail to excuse an ignorant and credulous man, born in an inexorable age, for sacrificing both political convenience and loyalty to the voice of a frequently legitimate remorse?[j]
[1211-1245 A.D.]
Alfonso II “the Fat” had no sooner ascended the throne than he showed a disposition to evade the execution of his father’s will. Not only did he refuse to allow his brothers the money which had been bequeathed them, but he insisted on the restitution of the fortresses which belonged to his two sisters, the saints Theresa and Sancha; and on their refusal to surrender them, he seized them by force. The infantas complained to the pope and the king of Leon: the former ordered his legate to see justice done to them; the latter, who still bore an affection towards his divorced wife Theresa, interfered more effectually by way of arms. The Leonese entered Portugal by way of Badajoz, reduced several fortresses, and spread devastations around them. In the sequel, Alfonso of Portugal, at the command of the pope and doubtless through fear of the Leonese, consented to treat with his sisters.
The transactions of Alfonso with the Mohammedans were not so remarkable as those of his predecessors—a circumstance that must be attributed not to his want of military spirit but to his excessive corpulency, which rendered the fatigues of the field intolerable. Though he sent a handful of troops to aid in the triumphs of Las Navas de Tolosa, he did not take the field in person against the enemies of his faith, until 1217 when the arrival in his ports of another crusading armament, which promised to co-operate in his designs, roused him to the reduction of Alcacer-do-Sal, a place that still remained in the power of the misbelievers. It held out till the end of September. The Mohammedans who had remained in Alemtejo, and were pressing the siege of several fortresses, were compelled to retire.
During the last three years of his reign, Alfonso had new disputes with the church. He appears to have borne little respect for the ecclesiastical immunities, some of which were, indeed, inconsistent with the interests of the community. Alfonso insisted on churchmen heading their own vassals in the wars he undertook, and such as refused were compelled to go. For such violence there was no excuse; but in subjecting the ecclesiastical possessions to the same contributions as were levied on the property of the laymen, and churchmen themselves to the secular tribunals, he attempted a salutary innovation on the established system of the clerical exemptions. The archbishop of Braga, like the English Becket of the preceding century, remonstrated with the king; and when remonstrances were ineffectual, hurled at the head of his abettors the thunders of the church. In return he was deprived of his revenues, and compelled to consult his present safety by flight. He complained to the pope: Honorius III ordered three Castilian bishops to insist on ample reparation, to excommunicate the king, and impose an interdict on the nation. The afflicted people now endeavoured to effect a reconciliation between the king and the archbishop: the former promised to make satisfaction, and in future to respect the privileges of the church; he was accordingly absolved, and the interdict removed, but before he could fulfil his share of the compact he was surprised by death (1223).
Sancho II, having reluctantly promised to respect the immunities of the church, prepared to extend the boundary of his dominions at the expense of the Mohammedans. He recovered the important town of Elvas, which had been regained by the Moors: next Jarumeñha and Serpa yielded to his arms. He now carried the war into Algarve. He appears to have left the enemy no fortified places in Alemtejo; the frontier fortresses of that province, thus rescued from the infidels, he intrusted to the defence of the order of Santiago, who triumphed in several partial engagements. The frontier places continued for some years to change masters, according as either of the hostile powers prevailed.
In his domestic administration, Dom Sancho was doomed to be far less fortunate. From his infancy he appears to have been of a weak constitution, and of a still weaker mind; but if he was weak, we have no proof that he was vicious, though great disasters afflicted his kingdom, and the historians of his country have stigmatised his memory. His hostility to the immunities of the clergy appears to have been the first and chief cause of his unpopularity.[h]
SANCHO II CALLED CAPELLO, “THE HOODED”
The account of the state of the kingdom which served as a foundation for the acts which afterwards emanated from the Roman curia affirmed that the king in spite of his former promises showed on the one hand pertinacity in the perpetration of violence, and on the other the most inexcusable tolerance towards criminals, and neither amended himself nor restrained his subjects; that robbers, highwaymen, incendiaries, sacrilegists, and murderers swarmed everywhere, robbing and killing clergy and laity without distinction, and living secure of impunity. That through this contagious example of the impotence of the laws, barons and knights, nobles and plebeians made general practice of those acts which the church by the most severe comminations had endeavoured to restrain. That certain patrons of parishes and monasteries, and others falsely giving themselves out as such, accompanied by illegitimate children, wasted the property of the said parishes and monasteries without pity, reducing them to such misery that the very ministers of worship could not maintain themselves; so that in some there was even no one to perform the indispensable services, and in others the cloisters, refectories, and other offices were converted into stables and brothels for the lowest of men, and it might almost be said that divine worship had ceased there and the property of these holy places was given over to dilapidation and plunder. That at the same time Sancho allowed the castles, towns, and revenues of the crown to be destroyed and squandered, and suffered the increase of assassinations without any distinction whatever of the class, age, or sex of the victims; as well as robbery, incest, the rape of nuns and secular women, grievous oppression of labourers, priests, and merchants, with the purpose of extorting money from them; violation of temples and cemeteries, incendiarism, and breaches of truce. That Sancho was aware of all this and yet tolerated it, and through neglect of punishment facilitated the perpetration of further crimes; that finally, by abandoning the defence of the frontiers, he, the king of Portugal, allowed the Saracens to occupy the lands and lordships of the Christians. “We,” added the prelates, “have used our utmost endeavours to move the prince to devote himself with due ardour to the repression of such evils; but he closes his ears to our admonitions, which have so far been entirely vain.”
If the reader will reflect upon this last invective of the clergy against Sancho, he will recognise with what good reason we attribute to the long wars of this reign an immense influence upon the strife with the clergy, and see in these repeated enterprises against the infidel an idea, or maybe a political instinct, of the monarchy which drew strength from them for the eternal duel with the priesthood. As far as documents throw light upon the last conquests in Algarve, the accusation that Sancho in a cowardly manner abandoned the defence of the frontier and allowed the Mussulman arms to encroach upon the territory of the kingdom was a calumny.
[1237-1245 A.D.]
But the heads of the clergy did not hesitate to adopt such means, for it was necessary to destroy the reputation of a conqueror of the enemies of the cross which the king of Portugal must still have enjoyed in the Roman curia, where the solemn testimonies of praise lavished upon him more than once by Gregory IX could not be yet forgotten. It was necessary to snatch the crown from the soldier’s helm and place it on a dishonoured brow, that they might afterwards roll it in the dust before the priestly sandal. But up to a certain point Sancho offered a pretext for such calumny by the fatal repose of the preceding years, and perhaps some obscure event, the loss of some unimportant tower or grange of Ayamonte in the east or Tavira in the west, a loss exaggerated by ecclesiastical malice, gave the absurd assertion some appearance of truth.
The description of the state of Portugal, drawn up by the Roman curia, although exaggerated, was based on facts proved by various documents and memoirs of that time, and above all by the inquisitions of the following reign. But these very inquisitions prove that the members of the secular clergy and monastic orders were not innocent of the public evils, especially as regards robbery and the diminution of the patrimony of the crown. They complained of the contempt in which canonical censure was held, but the fault was theirs. The spiritual sword was blunted by excessive use; excommunication, interdict, denial of burial in consecrated ground accompanied all the pretensions of the ministers of the altar, even those which the rudest of men could plainly perceive to be dictated by shameful cupidity. It is not surprising, therefore, that the nobles as well as the burgesses and peasants laughed at the chastisement which the clergy themselves taught them to despise. It was this contrast which throughout all Europe wounded the most enlightened men and gradually undermined the foundations and political influence of the church. The representation of the prelates was therefore doubly disloyal, attributing to the king alone the evils of which they were no less guilty, and describing the crimes and excesses of the laity towards the clergy, but forgetting to mention the abuse of divine things and the cupidity and lawlessness of the clergy.
The truth is, however, that this new phase of the interminable conflict between the clergy and the civil power did not arise from the cause assigned, but from the conjunction of circumstances which gave the bishops the means of gaining a decisive victory over the crown. The idea of deposing a king through the initiative of the church was old, and was considered so feasible that in grave cases the popes did not hesitate to allude to it clearly in their comminations and threats. In Portugal especially, as a kingdom in a manner dependent upon the papal throne, such a course must have seemed even easier, as the king was without moral or material means of defence.[j]
SANCHO DEPOSED, ALFONSO III SUCCEEDS (1245 A.D.)
[1245-1253 A.D.]
Censures were passed on the monarch for his persecution of the dean of Lisbon. His subsequent repentance disarmed the pontiff; and, notwithstanding the complaints of the people that the laws were silent, and brute force only triumphed, he would doubtless have ended his reign in peace, had he not resumed or permitted the spoliation of the church. At length, both clergy and people united their murmurs; they perceived that the king was too feeble to repress the daily feuds of his barons, who broke out into open war and committed the greatest excesses. They applied to Innocent IV, who, in concert with the fathers of the council, issued a decree by which, though the royal title was left to Sancho, the administration was declared to be vested in the infante Alfonso, brother of the king.
No sooner did Alfonso hear of the extraordinary proceedings of the pope and council, than he prepared to vindicate the title which it had conferred upon him. He was then at Boulogne-sur-Mer, the lordship of which belonged to him in the right of his wife Matilda. Having sworn before the papal commissioners to administer Portugal with justice, and leaving the government of Boulogne in the hands of his countess, he embarked at that port, and safely landed at Lisbon. At first the king intended to oppose the infante; but seeing how generally the deputies owned him,—how all classes, nobles and citizens, prelates and peasants, joined his brother,—he retreated into Spain, to solicit the support of his cousin, Ferdinand III. As that saintly monarch was too busy in the Andalusian wars to assist the fugitive king in person, he recommended the interests of his guest to his son Alfonso. The Castilian infante showed no want of zeal in behalf of his relative. He collected a considerable army, and invaded Portugal. Arriving before Leiria without much opposition, he was preparing to storm that fortress, when he was visited by a deputation from the archbishop of Braga, which conjured him, as a true son of the church, not to incur excommunication by opposing the execution of the pontifical bulls. The Castilian infante listened, and obeyed: he led back his army; and the deposed monarch, now bereft of all hope, retired to Toledo, where, early in 1248, he ended his days. So long as the latter lived, some of the fortified places in Portugal refused to acknowledge the regent; but on his death without issue—there is no evidence that he was ever married—his brother was peaceably acknowledged as his successor.
[1253-1279 A.D.]
Alfonso III, on arriving at a height which, a few years before, his ambition could scarcely have reached, was not without apprehensions that the Castilian king or infante might trouble him in his usurpation, and assembled the three estates of his realm to deliberate on the means of defence. Fortunately for his ambition, both father and son were absorbed by their Andalusian conquests. To secure, if possible, the good will of the former, he sent a considerable aid to the Christian camp, which was readily received by the hero. In the meantime he himself resolved to profit by the reverses of the misbelievers, and finish the conquest of Algarve. At the head of a sufficient force, he accordingly penetrated into that province, and speedily recovered the places which the Mohammedans had again surprised. In a subsequent expedition, his ardour or avarice led him to encroach on the possessions of Alfonso el Sabio, Ferdinand’s successor. The Castilian army marched against the Portuguese, who were compelled to retreat. The Castilian king did not stop here. On the pretext that Algarve, as chiefly conquered by his subjects, the knights of Santiago, belonged to him, he invaded that province, and quickly reduced its chief fortresses. The Portuguese was glad to sue for an accommodation; and it was at length agreed that he should marry Doña Beatrice de Guzman, a natural daughter of the Castilian, and with her receive the sovereignty of Algarve. As the province had been conquered by the subjects of both crowns, equity would have indicated its division by the two monarchs; but as such a division would probably have led to future wars, the present arrangement might be a politic one. The Castilian appears to have reserved to himself the sovereignty of Algarve, his feudatory being required both to pay tribute and to furnish a certain number of forces whenever he should be at war. The cession, with whatever conditions it was accompanied, was disagreeable to the Castilians, who thought that their monarch had sacrificed the interests of the state in favour of his daughter. The marriage was solemnised in the following year (in 1254), and a few years afterwards Portugal was declared forever free from homage to the Castilian kings.
From the facility with which this matrimonial connection was formed, it would be inferred that the Portuguese was become a widower. But the countess Matilda still lived, and was anxious to return to her lord. Her only defects were her barrenness and her age—two which, though no canonist would recognise, were sufficient in the mind of so unscrupulous a prince as Alfonso. She sailed for Portugal. He refused to see her; and when at length she forced her way into his presence, he heard, unmoved, her entreaties, her expostulations, and threats. The queen (for such history must call her) retired to Boulogne, and laid her complaints before the pope and her liege superior, St. Louis. After a patient examination of the case, Alexander IV expedited a bull, by which he declared Matilda the lawful wife of Alfonso, and annulled the recent marriage with Doña Beatrice. The king persevered in his lust, as he had already done in his usurpation, even when excommunicated by the pope; and he and his household were interdicted from the offices of the church. A second time is she said to have visited Portugal, but with as little success. She had married him when poor—when almost an exile from his native court—and had thereby raised him to power and riches: and her unshaken attachment—unshaken even by his sickening ingratitude—proves that though the empire of the passions had ceased, she possessed an uncommon share of woman’s best feeling. Her last act, by which she bequeathed a considerable sum to this faithless deserter, was characteristic enough of her ruling misfortune. On her death, in 1262, his prelates obtained from the pope a bull to render legitimate the present marriage.[h]
POLITICAL IMPORTANCE OF ALFONSO’S REIGN
Alfonso determined to bridle the power of the bishops, in spite of his oath at Paris. Perceiving that this could only be done with the help of the mass of the people, he summoned a cortes at Leiria in 1254, to which representatives of the cities were elected and sat with the nobles and higher clergy. With the help of the cortes—one of great importance in the constitutional history of Portugal—he dared the interdict laid upon the kingdom for having married again (the daughter of Alfonso el Sabio) whilst his first wife (Matilda, countess of Boulogne) was alive. Finally, however, on the petition of the archbishops and bishops of Portugal, Pope Urban IV legalised the disputed marriage in 1262 and legitimated his eldest son, Dom Diniz, while in 1263, Alfonso X made over to him the full sovereignty of Algarve. On the other hand, the people made use of their power, and in a full cortes at Coimbra in 1261 the representatives of the cities boldly denounced Alfonso’s tampering with the coinage, and compelled recognition of the fact that taxes were not levied by the inherent right of the king but the free consent of the people. After a prosperous and successful reign Nemesis came upon Alfonso in the rebellion of his eldest son Diniz[140] in 1277, which continued until 1279, in which year the king died.
The period of war and of territorial extension in the peninsula was now over, and the period of civilisation was to dawn. Territorially and constitutionally Portugal was now an established kingdom; it remained for it to become civilised and thoroughly homogeneous before the great heroic period of exploration and Asiatic conquest should begin.
DOM DINIZ
[1279-1325 A.D.]
No better man for such work than the new king, Dom Diniz, could have been found; he was himself a poet and loved letters; he was a great administrator and loved justice; above all he saw the need of agriculture and the arts of peace to take the place of incessant wars, and nobly earned the title of the Ré Lavrador, or Diniz the Labourer. From all these points of view his reign is of vast importance in the history of Portugal, though, like all reigns of peaceful progress, it is not signalised by many striking events. It began with a civil war between Diniz and his brother Alfonso, who disputed his legitimacy, which ended in a compromise; and in 1281 Diniz married Isabella, daughter of Pedro III of Aragon, who for her pure and unselfish life was canonised in the sixteenth century. His reign is marked by only one war with Sancho IV and his successor, 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 Constanza, daughter of Diniz, while Alfonso, the heir to the throne of Portugal, married Beatrice of Castile, sister of Ferdinand. At the end of this reign war broke out between the king and the heir-apparent, and a pitched battle was only prevented in 1323 by St. Isabella riding between the armies 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.[c]
Treachery and abuse of power were so frequent that, notwithstanding various diplomatic disloyalties, Diniz was considered one of the most loyal and just princes and lords of the two kingdoms. For this reason the two great kingdoms of Aragon and Castile appointed him arbitrator in the most serious disputes, and submitted to his judgment. Although the genius of war did not weave martial crowns for him, as conqueror in battles—for during his time no great honours fell to the Portuguese arms—yet he was ever at the head of the national armies in all the campaigns; knowing that his most powerful allies had been destroyed and others had betrayed him, he had the skilful audacity to penetrate forty leagues into the interior of Castile, and availing himself of the opportunity afforded by his opponents’ weakness, he increased the Portuguese dominion by two castles and eleven important towns, as though he were the most successful of warriors. The civil dissensions which disturbed his reign both arose from the same causes and circumstances, mediæval feudalism, assisted by Castilian elements. Taking for leaders first the brother and then the son of Diniz, the rebels combatted royal power in the kingdom, which, supported by the people, daily increased feudal privileges and forces.
The husband of Isabella was as rapid and successful in his measures against his brother as he was undecided and weak in repressing his son. In the first instance his courage was heightened by the just ambition of safe-guarding his throne; whereas, in the second instance, it was weakened by paternal affection and respect of legitimacy in the succession of the crown.
However, the principal glory of Diniz was not won with his sword. Of his epoch a perfect king, penetrated by his country’s needs, he notably increased the territory of Alfonso Henriques, but above all he raised to an amazing height the edifice of internal organisation, the foundations of which had been laid by Sancho I. His disloyalties with respect to the neighbouring kingdoms, his rare moments of repressive cruelty, the errors into which he may have fallen as a politician, the many faults into which he was in truth led by an ardent and sensual character—Diniz redeemed them all by the general and profound reform he effected with regard to Portuguese society.
He raised the population of the country, as none of his predecessors had done, by the means we have spoken of; he brought agriculture to a pitch of prosperity which we now marvel at; he created the internal industry and commerce, promoted municipal organisation, favouring labour, encouraging markets, and raising the spirit of the people; he safeguarded navigation by establishing vast societies of mutual aid between merchants, and definitely established a navy, with which he defended the coasts and the Portuguese merchant ships against pirates, and equipped his subjects for the discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which brought universal and eternal fame upon Portugal. He built nearly fifty fortresses, reorganised the popular militia, and nationalising the military orders with praiseworthy abnegation, he widely prepared the defence of the country, and bequeathed to Dom João I the possibility of opposing a formidable invasion by Castile and establishing once for all, with immortal glory, the independence of the country.
He was a zealous administrator, wise and economic, so that with the national resources he left the public treasury wealthy. Of a tolerant spirit, prudent and just in the application of the laws, no prince of his own times surpassed him in these qualities, then most rare. With gentle measures, affectionately and frequently protecting individual rights, he was one of the most determined opponents of the excessive privileges of the nobility and the church. Having received civil power, bound beneath the yoke of the Portuguese clergy, in their turn fettered to the Roman tiara, Diniz not only raised this power, but even succeeded in giving life to the national episcopacy.
The establishment of the councils begun by previous governments largely progressed, and the cortes, continuing to summon the deputies of the people, was a new and powerful aid towards the destruction of mediæval, ecclesiastical, and military feudalism in Portugal. With the laws respecting mortmain decreed and executed with civic firmness and superior wisdom, the clergy were deprived of territorial power and the sovereign right of administering justice; civil actions were brought before secular tribunes, which by a usurpation of jurisdiction had up to that time been brought before ecclesiastical tribunals.
The nobles were prohibited from raising new seigniorial castles, and many of the old were levelled; they were deprived of their traditional rights of deciding mutual disputes with the sword, of making knights, of exempting themselves from the royal tax, turning into fiefs and boroughs the lands they had seized without just cause, and even those with which they had established merely personal relations, and finally by giving judgment in causes in which the nobles claimed for themselves exclusive knowledge, the feudal nobility was totally destroyed, as was the temporal power of the church. Up to then the beneficial influence of the times sufficed to totally undermine the old oligarchic institutions of the Middle Ages, which were an overwhelming oppression of the people, and absorbed the forces of the state.
[1300-1340 A.D.]
Finally Diniz, who was the greatest poet of the first four centuries of Portugal, founded to his honour the Estudaria de Santo Eloy in Lisbon, and also the university, causing general enthusiasm; and by spreading the love of letters and study in the country, laid the foundations of secular and public instruction and opened to the Portuguese people the gates of science, and consequently those of civilisation and liberty.
After the work of Alfonso Henriques, that of Diniz is the most important which Portuguese history records to us: the first was the founder of the military nation; the second, that of the cultured people. The union of those two works gave to Portugal centuries later the possibility of realising, in the long evolution of mankind, her glorious mission of enlarging the known world.[k]
Alfonso IV, surnamed the Brave, had scarcely grasped the reins of sovereignty, when he exhibited, in a manner little becoming royalty, his vindictive feelings towards his illegitimate brother, Alfonso Henriques, who, to escape his wrath, had just fled into Castile. Having collected some troops, and been joined by a prince of Castile, he entered Portugal, laid waste the frontiers, and put to the sword every living being that fell in his way. The king now took the field in person, and laid waste the neighbouring territories of Castile. These harassing though indecisive hostilities might have continued for years, had not St. Isabella left her retreat in the convent of St. Clair, which she had founded, and prevailed on her son to permit the return of the exile.
Another defect of the new king gave great offence to the people—his neglect of public business, and his addiction to the chase. The first twelve years of Alfonso’s reign were distracted by hostilities with his namesake of Castile, the husband of his daughter. Though these hostilities were chiefly owing to the perversity of the infante Don Juan Manuel, it cannot be denied that the Portuguese king had abundant reason for dissatisfaction with his son-in-law. The usage experienced by the Castilian queen at the hands of her husband; her mortification at seeing a mistress, Leonora de Guzman, not only preferred to herself, but the sole depository of the royal favour; the studied insults to which she was daily exposed both from her husband and his minion, at length exhausted her patience, and drew forth some complaints to her father. The influence, too, which Don Juan Manuel obtained in the Portuguese court through the marriage of his repudiated daughter Constanza with Pedro, son and heir of the Portuguese king, was uniformly exerted to embroil the two crowns. Alfonso of Portugal at length sent a herald at arms to defy his son-in-law, on the ground both of the unjust treatment of the queen, whom her husband was suspected of seeking to repudiate, and of the continued detention of Constanza. His next step was to enter Castile and ravage the country as far as the vicinity of Seville.
The war was now as destructive as it was indecisive and even inglorious: it was one of mutual ravage, of shameless rapine, and unblushing cruelty. Instead of meeting each other on a fair field, they seemed intent on nothing but laying waste each other’s territory, and collecting as much booty as they could carry away: sometimes, however, the contest was decided on the deep, but with little success to either party. At length, through the efforts of the pope, the two princes agreed to a truce, and to the opening of negotiations for peace. But one of the conditions was the removal of Leonora de Guzman—a condition which Alfonso of Castile, who was entirely governed by that lady, was in no disposition to execute, but the preparations of the Mohammedans, which he knew were chiefly directed against himself, and the loud complaints of his own subjects, forced him to promise at least that it should be conceded. To the departure of Constanza, the restitution of some insignificant fortresses which had been reduced, and even to the return of his queen, the Castilian felt no repugnance; but though he consented for Leonora to leave the court, he recalled her immediately after the conclusion of peace. To his queen, however, he no longer exhibited a marked neglect: on the contrary, he treated her with all the outward respect due to her character and station; and the good understanding was confirmed by her admirable moderation.
In the wars which the Castilian had to sustain against the Mohammedans, the Portuguese—so nobly did he forget his wrongs when the interests of Christendom were at stake—was no inefficient ally. He was present at the great battle on the banks of the Salado, in which the barbaric power was so signally humbled. This aid he continued readily to supply, until the death of Alfonso of Castile, by the plague, before Gibraltar, in 1350.
THE ROMANCE OF IÑES DE CASTRO
[1340-1357 A.D.]
The tragedies represented in Castile by Pedro the Cruel, successor of Alfonso XI, were fully equalled by one in Portugal. Soon after his marriage with Constanza, Pedro, the infante of Portugal, had become passionately smitten with one of her attendants, Doña Iñes de Castro, a lady of surpassing beauty, and frail as beautiful. That he made love to her, and that his criminal suit was favourably received, is indubitable, both from the deep grief which preyed on the spirits of Constanza, and from the anxiety of the king, lest this new favourite should be the cause of the same disturbance in Portugal, as Leonora de Guzman had occasioned in Castile. To prevent the possibility of a marriage between the two lovers, Alfonso caused Iñes to hold over the baptismal font a child of Pedro’s—in other words, to contract a near spiritual affinity. But the man whom the sacred bond of wedlock could not restrain was not likely to be deterred from his purpose by an imaginary bar. After Constanza’s death in childbed, 1345, he privately married the seductive favourite. How soon after the death of the first wife this second union was contracted, whether immediately, or after Iñes had borne him three children, has been matter of much dispute. It appears that the marriage was celebrated on the 1st day of January, 1354, when Iñes must have borne him four children, of which three survived. It also appears that a papal dispensation was obtained for it, and that it took place at Braganza, in presence of a Portuguese prelate and his own chamberlain. However secret this step, it was suspected by some courtiers, who, partly through envy at the rising favour of the Castros, and partly through dread of the consequences which might ensue, endeavoured to prevail on the king to interfere in behalf of young Ferdinand, the son of Pedro and Constanza, and the lawful heir to the monarchy. From the boundless influence possessed over the mind of Pedro by Doña Iñes, it was feared that the true heir would be set aside from the succession in favour of her offspring. In the end, they wrung from him a reluctant consent to her death. The king, hearing that his son had departed on a hunting excursion for a few days, hastily left Monte-mor, and proceeded to the convent of St. Clair, at Coimbra, where Iñes then was. On learning his approach, she at once apprehended his object. Her only resource was an appeal to his pity. Taking her three children by the hand, she issued from the convent to meet him, prostrated herself at his feet, and in the most pathetic terms begged for mercy. Her beauty, her youth, her deep emotion, and the sight of her offspring—his own grandchildren—so affected him that, after a struggle between policy and nature, the latter triumphed, and he retired. No sooner, however, was he in private with his confidants, than they censured his compassion, though natural in itself, as ruinous in its consequences to his family and kingdom, and obtaining his consent hastened to the convent. The unfortunate, guilty Iñes fell beneath their daggers. The fate of this lady has called forth the deepest commiseration of novelists and poets, and has given rise to some vigorous effusions of the tragic muse.
When Pedro returned from the chase, and found his wife so barbarously murdered, his grief was surpassed, if possible, by his thirst for revenge. He leagued himself with the kindred of Iñes; and though he could not fall on the murderers, who were protected by the king, he laid waste the provinces of Entre-Douro-e-Minho, and Tras-os-Montes, where their possessions chiefly lay. King Alfonso was in consternation at the unexpected fury of his son. In the end he proposed, as the price of reconciliation, that the obnoxious nobles should be banished, and his son admitted to the chief share of the administration. Pedro accepted it, laid down his arms, and proceeded to court where he was received with an affection truly paternal, and where he engaged, though with a fixed resolution of breaking the engagement, never to seek revenge on the assassins of Doña Iñes.
Alfonso did not long survive this forced reconciliation with his son. His death, which happened at the beginning of 1357, is said to have been hastened by remorse for the tragical deed of which he had been the occasion. That he exhibited great repentance is certain; but his character was unamiable. He had been a disobedient son, an unjust brother, and a harsh father. The rebellion of his son was but fit retribution for his own conduct to the royal Diniz. His justice too often degenerated into blind vengeance. During his reign (in 1348) Portugal was afflicted with the plague, which spread throughout most of Europe, but which raged with more violence in that kingdom than anywhere else. Whole towns are said to have been left desolate, and some priests to have abandoned their flocks to the care of the monks.[h]
If we consider Alfonso IV—not isolated, nor in the light of our present-day views and social conditions as a son or as a father (even in this character we can bring forward the virtuous and exemplary spouse), but principally as leader and as king, in the moment when he assumed and exercised his power—we must confess, in face of the numerous documents relating to his external policy and his enormous legislation, that he is one of the most important figures, and that his government was one of the most advantageous, the most brilliant, and the most able of the intelligent and energetic governments which presided over the national formation of Portugal. In the character of this king there is a certain harmonious stamp of austerity which gives him a decided and characteristic originality in the midst of the free customs, and, we may say, of the traditional moral license of the kings of his time. Dom Diniz, the father of King Alfonso IV, in spite of the perfect devotion of his wife, was the easy prey of adulterous loves, and far from disguising them, flagrantly and heedlessly published them by the generosity of his gifts, calling to himself his bastard children and lavishing favours upon them, and confessing even by public documents the rewards conferred on his mistresses.
As to Dom Pedro, the Romeo of Iñes de Castro, we know that he was not so absorbed by this fatal passion but that the nation’s history owes to him the bastard progenitor of the second dynasty. In this instance Dom Alfonso presents a totally distinct character from that of his son; an exemplary husband, he made every effort to raise by royal authority the moral tone in the relation between the sexes, and to check the dissolute customs of the times. He made severe laws against those who availed themselves of such usages and customs up to that time in vogue, which seduced by endearments, or other means, various virgins and widows leading honest lives to make use of them for their evil purposes; he denounced “any man or woman guilty of panderage, and keeping in their houses for this purpose virgins, married women, religious, or widows.” At the exact moment that he was publishing some of his most severe laws upon this matter his son gave cause of scandal by his real or apparent cohabitation with Doña Iñes de Castro. Finally he left the kingdom to his successor in perfect internal and external peace, and it would be cruel injustice to deny that under his government the work of the political consolidation of Portuguese society made important progress.[k]
PEDRO THE SEVERE
[1357-1361 A.D.]
Pedro I was scarcely established on the throne before he gave way to his uncontrollable desire for vengeance on the murderers of Doña Iñes. Knowing that they had sought protection in Castile, and how eager his namesake of that country was for the surrender of several Castilians, who, in like manner, had obtained an asylum in Portugal, he paid court to that monarch, with whom he entered into a close alliance, and to whom he despatched ten of his galleys to serve in the war against Aragon. Having declared the fugitive nobles, who were three in number, Pedro Coelho, Alvaro Gonsalves, and Diogo Lopes Pacheco, traitors to their country, and confiscated all their possessions, he either proposed or received the proposal—there is some doubt from which of the two monarchs it originally came, or whether it may not be equally attributed to both—for the arrest of their personal enemies. On a given day the obnoxious Castilians were arrested in Portugal, the Portuguese in Castile, and were surrendered to their respective executioners. Of the three Portuguese, however, Pacheco escaped.
The escape of even one victim was gall to the Portuguese king; but he resolved to satiate his rage on the two who were placed in his reach. Both were thrown into a deep dungeon, put to the torture, with the view of eliciting whether others were implicated in the same crime. They withstood the acute torments they were made to endure with a firmness truly admirable—a circumstance that increased beyond measure the rage of Pedro, who was present at the hellish scene. With Coelho in particular, whom not a word, not a groan had escaped, he was so exasperated that he seized a whip and struck him on the face. This indignity affected the high-spirited knight far more than his present sufferings. Regarding the king with eyes full of fury, he loaded him not merely with the keenest reproaches, but with a torrent of abuse. The latter foamed at the mouth, and ordered his victims to be transferred from the dungeon to a scaffold erected in front of his palace. There he appeared at the window, expressing a savage delight at the new torments they sustained. At length the living hearts of both were plucked from their bodies; hearts and bodies were next consigned to the flames; and when consumed, the ashes were scattered by the winds.
The next proceeding of Pedro was to honour alike the remains and memory of the unfortunate Iñes. He convoked the states of his kingdom at Castanedo, and, in their presence, made oath on the holy Gospels that, in the year 1354, he had married that lady. The witnesses of the fact, the bishop of Guarda and his own chamberlain, were likewise publicly sworn, and the bull of dispensation produced which Pope Innocent VI had granted for the celebration of the ceremony. No doubt was entertained by the assembled nobles and clergy that Iñes had been the lawful wife of their prince; and she was unanimously declared entitled to the honours usually paid to the Portuguese queens. That the legitimacy of her offspring might never be disputed, copies of the papal dispensation and of the oaths taken on this occasion were multiplied and dispersed throughout the kingdom. The validity of the marriage being thus established, Pedro now proceeded to show due honour to her remains. He ordered two magnificent tombs, both of white marble, to be constructed, one for himself, the other for that lady, and placed them in the monastery of Alcobaça. He then proceeded to the church of St. Clair at Coimbra, caused her corpse to be brought from the sepulchre, to be arrayed in royal ornaments, to be placed on a throne with a crown on the head and a sceptre in the hand, and there to receive the homage of his assembled courtiers. From that church it was conveyed on a magnificent car, accompanied by nobles and high-born dames, all clad in mourning, to the monastery of Alcobaça.[141]
[1361-1367 A.D.]
As the subsequent transactions of the Portuguese king with his namesake of Castile have been already related [in the history of Spain, Chapter III], nothing now remains but briefly to notice his internal administration. It is allowed to have been as rigorous as it was whimsical. With the view of correcting the extravagance which had long seized on the higher orders of his people, he made a law that whoever bought or sold on credit should be punished—if the first offence, by stripes; if the second, by death. In his own household he set the example of paying for everything in money the instant it was purchased. If he was thus severe against thoughtless imprudence, he could not be expected to be more lenient towards guilt. Of the vices which he visited with unpitying vengeance, fornication and adultery were the most obnoxious to him. That the lover of Iñes de Castro should thus hold in abhorrence those which he had so long practised might create surprise, were it not proved by general experience, not only that we are most forward to condemn in others imperfections to which ourselves are prone, but that kings are too often eager to plead exemption from obligations binding on the rest of mankind. Hearing that the bishop of Oporto lived in a state of concubinage, the royal moralist laid on him unmercifully with a whip. As he was one day proceeding along a street, he heard a woman call another by an opprobrious name. He speedily inquired into the affair; and, finding that the latter had been violated previous to her marriage by her husband, he consigned the offender to the executioner. Suspecting that the wife of a certain merchant was unfaithful to her conjugal duty, he caused her to be watched until he detected her in the actual crime; both lady and paramour were immediately committed to the flames. An old woman prostituted her daughter to a Portuguese admiral; the woman was burned, the admiral sentenced to lose his head—a sentence, however, which he escaped by flight. Other offences against the laws were punished, sometimes in proportion to their magnitude, but generally to his caprice. An inferior officer of the law one day complained that a gentleman on whom he had served a process had struck him and plucked him by the beard; Pedro turned to the presiding judge, and said, “I have been struck, and my beard has been plucked, by one of my subjects!” The judge, who understood the appeal, caused the culprit to be arrested and beheaded. Perceiving that causes were frequent, tedious, and expensive, and shrewdly divining the reason, he purged his courts of all advocates and proctors,—of all who had a manifest interest in litigation, and reduced all processes to a simple statement of the case by the parties concerned, and of the sentence by the judges, reserving, however, to himself the privilege of deciding appeals. If we add that Pedro was liberal of rewards, and fond of music and dancing, the character of the royal barbarian will be completed.
[1367-1382 A.D.]
Ferdinand I, son of Pedro and the princess Constanza, was ill fitted to succeed monarchs so vigorous as his immediate predecessors. Fickle, irresolute, inconstant, without discernment, directed by no rule of conduct, obedient only to momentary impulse, addicted to idleness, or to recreations still more censurable, the very benevolence of his nature was a calamity.
After the death of the Castilian Pedro the Cruel, Ferdinand, considering himself the true heir to the crown, assumed the regal title and arms of Castile. His ambition was lamentably inadequate to an enterprise so important as that of encountering and attempting to dethrone the bastard usurper Henry of Trastamara. From the recesses of his palace, he appeared to witness the invasion of his kingdom and the defeat of his armies with indifference. When, in 1373, Lisbon itself was invested by the Castilian king, the defence of the place was abandoned to the valour of the inhabitants, and to their deep-rooted hatred of the Spanish sway. The same year, indeed, peace was made through the mediation of the pope; but it was often broken by Ferdinand during the reign both of Henry of Trastamara and Juan I, the son and successor of that prince. The marriage of Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinand, with Juan, in 1382, and the treaty for uniting the two crowns, have been related in the history of Spain [Chapter V], and to that history the reader is referred for an account of the obscure and indecisive, however destructive, wars between the two kingdoms.
[1372-1376 A.D.]
During these transactions proposals were frequently made for restoring permanent harmony by matrimonial alliances. At first Ferdinand cast his eyes on the infanta Leonora of Aragon, whom he engaged to marry; but, with his usual fickleness, he escaped from the obligation. He next promised to raise a daughter of Henry of Trastamara, also named Leonora, to the Portuguese throne. When the time approached for the celebration of this marriage, Ferdinand fell passionately in love with one of his own subjects—a Leonora like the rest.[142] To beauty of the finest order, Leonora added a sprightliness which charmed and a wit which captivated him; but these were far inferior to her ambition, and unsupported by one single principle of honour or virtue. She was already the wife of Dom João Lourenço da Cunha, lord of Pombeiro. “Of that we are well aware,” said Ferdinand; “but they are related by blood, and they married without a dispensation: the engagement may easily be annulled.” Proceedings for the cassation of the marriage were instituted in the ecclesiastical courts; and as the husband offered no opposition to them,—doubtless because he had no wish to contend with a plaintiff whose cause was backed by legions of soldiers,—it was declared null. Not considering himself safe in Portugal, Dom Lourenço fled into Castile, evidently little afflicted at the loss of an unprincipled woman.[143] There is reason to believe that it was Ferdinand’s original intention to make her his mistress; but she had too much policy to become the tool of one whom she had resolved to rule; and she assumed the appearance of so much modesty, that to gain his object he was forced to marry her.
But this marriage was strictly private—a precaution adopted as well to stifle the murmurs of his subjects as to prevent the indignant remonstrances of Henry. It was, however, suspected, and the very suspicion produced great dissatisfaction throughout the kingdom—nowhere so great as in the capital. A mob, formidable from its numbers, assembled in the streets, and headed by a tailor, proceeded to the palace to reproach the king for his imprudence. Ferdinand said that he had neither married nor intended to marry Leonora. This declaration satisfied the mob; who, however, insisted that he should take an oath the following day to the same effect in the church of Saõ Domingos—a promise which he readily made. At the time appointed, they proceeded to the church, but found to their mortification that, during the night, the king and Leonora had fled to Santarem. In the height of their fury they apostrophised both in no measured terms. Their insulting conduct so incensed the queen that she procured a royal order for the arrest and execution of the tailor and his chief associates. The fear which this act of severity struck into the people emboldened the king to publish his marriage. The nobles and prelates now hastened to court, to recognise their new queen. All readily kissed her hand with the exception, of Dom Diniz, son of Pedro and Iñes de Castro, who accompanied his refusal in open court with expressions of contempt. Ferdinand drew his poniard, and would doubtless have laid his obnoxious brother at his feet, but for the interference of two nobles who arrested his arm. Even João, the grand-master of Aviz, a natural son of the late king, who is about to perform so memorable a part in the national history, bowed before the triumphant Leonora. To render her power more secure, she began to act with great policy, disarmed hostility, and secured to herself an undisturbed possession of her new dignity.
The insult to the royal family of Castile involved in this imprudent marriage was one of the causes which led to the hostilities that followed—hostilities in which the country was laid waste, from Badajoz to Lisbon, and that capital invested. On the conclusion of peace, in 1373, which was cemented by the marriage of a natural daughter of Ferdinand with a natural son of Henry, tranquillity visited the kingdom for some years; but the Portuguese court, through the ambition and wickedness of the queen, was often distracted and disgraced. As Ferdinand had only a daughter—the princess Beatrice—by Leonora, and as no hopes of future issue appear to have been entertained, the infante João, brother of the king, (not the bastard of that name who was the grand-master of Aviz, but the eldest surviving son of Pedro and Iñes de Castro), was regarded as the presumptive heir to the crown. To set him aside from the succession was now the object of the queen. Fortunately for her purpose, the imprudence of the prince presented her with the means. Struck with the personal charms of Donna Maria, sister of the queen, he privately married her. The step was not hidden from Leonora; who, so far from betraying her knowledge of it, and to lull her intended victim into profound security, proposed to the infante the hand of her own child, and with it the throne of Portugal. As she expected, her offer was declined; but she was resolved to move heaven and earth rather than see her sister and brother-in-law in the possession of supreme power. The former she appears to have hated: her destruction was certainly planned with demoniacal coolness. Sending one day for the infante, she assumed the appearance of intense affliction; assured him that she knew of his marriage with her sister; but that regard for him and his honour, as well as for the honour of the royal family, would not permit her to conceal that sister’s depravity. “You are betrayed, prince!” was the substance of her address. “Maria loves another, to whom she grants her favours!”
[1376-1381 A.D.]
Unfortunately, João, who was unacquainted with her real character, and who could not suppose her capable of deliberately destroying a sister, implicitly believed her; and in the madness of his rage, hastened to Coimbra, where the princess then abode. She met him with her usual smiles, and, on being repulsed, falteringly demanded the cause. “Because,” replied the infuriated husband, “you have divulged our marriage and sacrificed my honour.” “Bid your attendants retire,” pleaded the poor woman, “and I will satisfy you.” “I come not to hear your excuses,” João returned furiously, “but to punish your guilt,” and at the same time his dagger found a way to her heart. She fell into the arms of her weeping attendants, while he mounted his horse and fled. The cause of all this wickedness affected inconsolable grief, threw herself at the royal feet, and cried for vengeance on the murderer. But whether she found the king averse to justice, or whether she feared the indignation of the infante, who, sooner or later, would become acquainted with the innocence of Maria, she suddenly changed her proceedings, and obtained permission for him to return to court. But there everyone shunned him—no one more eagerly than Leonora; so that, seeing his hopes of Beatrice at an end, he retired into the province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho, where he was soon acquainted with the bloody perfidy of the queen. Having reason to distrust his safety, he fled into Castile, his heart torn by remorse for the fate of one whom he had passionately loved, and whose bleeding image was incessantly before him.
Though on the accession of Juan I of Castile Ferdinand readily renewed the peace between the two crowns, and consented to marry his daughter Beatrice to the heir of the Castilian, his characteristic fickleness was such that he soon resolved to resume hostilities. To engage the duke of Lancaster in his cause, he sent a trusty messenger to England, Dom João Ferdinand Andeiro, who concluded a league with the Plantagenet. To conceal this negotiation from the world, especially from the Castilian, he pretended great anger with Andeiro, whom he arrested, and confined to the fortress of Estremos. During his agreeable captivity in this place, he was frequently visited by the disguised king, who was sometimes accompanied by the queen, and was made to unfold the conditions he had contracted, and solicited for his advice. As his person was unexceptionable, his address elegant, and his manners prepossessing, he soon won so far on the credulous Leonora that she became the willing partner of his lust, and still more of his ambition. In the hostilities which followed the arrival of the earl of Cambridge, he was released, and, by her influence, was invested with the lordship of Ourem.
[1381-1383 A.D.]
Ferdinand at length saw that the affections of his queen were estranged from him, and transferred to Andeiro. Yet—such was his deplorable weakness!—he met both with constrained smiles, and deputed both to be present at the marriage of his daughter Beatrice with Juan of Castile. On this occasion the favourite appeared with a splendour which might have become a sovereign prince, but which filled the beholders with indignation or envy. The perpetual sight of a faithless wife and her insolent paramour was at length too much even for the feeble Ferdinand. In the agony of his feelings he one day opened his heart to the grand-master of Aviz, who he knew hated Andeiro, and with whom he planned that minion’s assassination. But his own death, the result alike of constitutional weakness of frame and mental suffering, saved him from the guilt of murder. The reign of this sovereign was one of the most deplorable that ever afflicted Portugal. The wars with Castile,—wars lightly undertaken and ingloriously conducted,—and the consequent invasions of his territory by his more powerful neighbours, impoverished his people.[h]
FOOTNOTES
[135] According to the Chronicon Lusitanum,[d] the Chronicon Complutense,[e] and other authorities, Lisbon and Cintra were taken by Alfonso. They must, however, have been soon recovered by the Moors.
[136] That Henry, whose extraction has given rise to much disputation, was of the family of the first duke of Burgundy, and of the royal blood of France, is indisputable from a MS. discovered in the monastery of Fleury, according to La Clède.[f]
[137] Lemos[g] endeavours to vindicate the character of Theresa from the charges imputed to her: the same vain effort, as the reader will remember, has been made by the Castilian writers in favour of Urraca.
[138] “Mas o rei mandando fazer as mortes indistintas, sem differenca de sexo, e idade; o horror dos gemidos, o tropel da genté, o clamor das mulheres, a meninos, o escuro da noite causan hum espanto tao geral.”—Lemos.[g]
[139] On this occasion Alfonso, with no more than sixty horsemen, is said to have encountered five hundred horsemen of the Almoravids, and forty thousand foot; and, what is more, to have defeated them! (See Chronicon Lusitanum.[d]) These prodigious relations were admitted without scruple by the earlier historians of Portugal.
[140] [According to some authorities Diniz did not rebel at all, but was an exemplary son, and was present at his father’s death-bed.]
[141] [Like all other romantic events, this story has attracted the critics, their chief objection to it being the fact that the contemporary historian Lopes,[l] who describes the death of Iñes with much detail, has nothing to say of the exhumation and coronation. But such negative argument must be cautiously used and historians have not yet annulled the story of Iñes.]
[142] “This name proved terrible to the king,” says Lemos.[g] This name, indeed, in all the three cases, is a most singular coincidence: it did not prove terrible, however it might be pernicious to the interests of the kingdom.
[143] To disarm ridicule by braving it, and to prove how little the affair had affected him, the exiled husband attached to each side of his cap a golden horn.
