Before going on with the chronicle, it will be well to read a Portuguese historian’s picture of the decline of this period.[a]
ENNES’ ACCOUNT OF THE DECADENCE OF PORTUGAL
[1521-1557 A.D.]
We are about to enter upon the saddest and most unfortunate period in the history of Portugal. The brilliant epic which the bright sword of Alfonso Henriques began with the battle of Ourique, stops at the exact epoch at which an immortal bard appears. The Lusiadas, that Homeric apotheosis of a great, heroic people, arises almost at the hour of their fatal fall. But a few years and the epic is transformed into an elegy, the apotheosis into a funeral panegyric. But a few years and Camoens drags from his Olympic strophes these four lines:
“Fazei, senhor, que nunca os admirados
Allemaes, Gallos, Italos e Inglezes
Possam dirzer, que sao para mandados
Mais que para mandar, aos Portuguezes.”
—in vain, when the descendants of the old heroes were cowardly and infamously about to sell their humiliated country, poor and agonised, to the sinister son of Charles V, the emperor of legends.