In the teeth of great opposition, too, he resolutely forbade the presence of women in his camp.
He was not less renowned for his chivalry towards the weak, women, prisoners, and peasants, than for his victories in battle. He provided pensions for “women who had been honoured and prosperous and were now poor.”
But his chivalry went further. A countess at Coimbra who had held out against him, and then plotted to seize his person by treachery, he secured from the reprisals of his followers; the wife of the commander of a captured town he sent away free to Castille. And these were no isolated instances; his conduct never varied in its simplicity, dignity and charming thought for others.
His biographers love to tell of the poor blind man of Torres Vedras who had no way of escaping from the advancing Castilians and whom Nun’ Alvarez carried behind him on his mule for four leagues out of the town. “Oo que humano e caridoso señor!” exclaims the old chronicler.
But it is the incidents of an illness when he was between thirty and forty that throw most light on his character and on the devoted attachment of those around him. The fever and deep depression that came over him seem to have been in part, at least, due to the perpetual self-seeking and mendicity with which he had to deal now that he was a power in the land as great as the King himself—greater, said his enemies. Sometimes, we are told, he seemed to have recovered from his illness, and then the very sight of a stranger, especially of a man with a letter, would give him a relapse. His secretary found it necessary to intercept all letters.
Nun’ Alvarez, who had sought health in vain at Lisbon, set out to return to Evora. Accompanied by his mother and his daughter, he was carried in a litter to Palmella. His illness prevented him from going further, and he was taken to the small village of Alfarrara, where there were many trees and streams. The very sight of the garden of the quinta where he was to lodge seemed to restore his health. Several of the foremost citizens of Setubal came to welcome him, and he received them gladly; but, as they were leaving, one of them (who was very stout) had the misfortune to bid him “remember the town of Setubal.”
Nun’ Alvarez, thus reminded of “men with letters,” fell into so great a passion and fever that he was like to die. He refused to eat, and it was only after much coaxing that he was persuaded to sit down at table. They brought him water for his hands and roast birds to eat. His daughter began to carve them before him, and his mother fanned him with a fan; but he refused to eat, telling his mother that “that bloated churl with his Setubal has been the death of me.”
His secretary, Gil Airaz, would have excused the offender, but Nun’ Alvarez turned on him in a rage: “The fellow, for what he said, deserved a score of blows, and if you cared for me or my health you would have given him them.”
Gil Airaz said that there was still time, if that was his pleasure, and the Constable answered that such a pleasure would seem to him all too long in coming. So the secretary, in his presence, took a stick and went out. When he came back and told him how he had beaten and kicked and covered with mud and water the citizen of Setubal, Nun’ Alvarez seemed to recover instantly and began to eat and drink.
To any other man, lord of half Portugal, it might perhaps have seemed a little thing to have had a citizen beaten and rolled in a ditch, but presently Nun’ Alvarez stopped eating, his eyes filled with tears, and he began to wish he was dead. “Do you not see, Gil Airaz,” he said, “that it would have been better for me to die than that you should have done what you did to that good man?” “Now would to God I had no part of all that land that God and my Lord the King have given me, so that this thing were undone!”