constitutional history of Portugal, and is only remarkable for one
memorable feat of arms, the recapture of Alcacer do Sal. On his
father’s death the young king, probably by the advice of the chancellor
Julião, summoned a “Cortes” or parliament, consisting of the bishops,
“fidalgoes” and “ricos homens” of the realm, which was the first regular
assembly of notables ever held in Portugal, for the Cortes of Lamego,
generally asserted to have met in 1143, is apocryphal. In the presence
of this Cortes Affonso II. gave his solemn adhesion to the final compact
which his father had made with the Church, and he then propounded a law
of mortmain, drawn up by Julião, by which religious foundations could
receive no more legacies of land, because they could not perform
military service. The new king proved to be no such warrior as his
father and grandfather had been, but he was very tenacious of the wealth
and power of the Crown, and he refused to hand over to his brothers the
large estates which King Sancho had bequeathed to them by his will. It
was not until after a long civil war, in which Alfonso IX. of Leon,
Alfonso VIII. of Castile, and Pope Innocent III. intervened, that he
gave his sisters their legacies, at the same time taking care that they
became nuns; but his brothers were forced to become exiles, and never
received the estates bequeathed to them at all.
Though Affonso himself was no soldier, the Portuguese infantry showed
how free men could fight in the great battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212,
in which Mohammed En-Nāsir, the successor of Ya’kūb, was utterly
defeated; and the Portuguese statesmen, bishops, and captains determined
to take advantage of the weakness of the Almohades after this reverse
to reconquer the Alemtejo. Fortunately for their purpose there arrived
at Lisbon in July, 1217, a great fleet of English, Dutch, and German
ships bearing crusaders to the Holy Land. The leaders of the English
crusaders were the earls of Wight and Holland, both friends of the
exiled prince, Dom Ferdinand, who had fled to his aunt, Donna Theresa,
in Flanders. Sueiro, Bishop of Lisbon, made an effort to detain this
powerful army, and succeeded in persuading the English division to stop,
though the eighty Frisian ships sailed away. The English knights and
men-at-arms disembarked at Lisbon, under their earls, and a Portuguese
army, not raised by the royal summons or commanded by the royal
officers, was led by Sueiro, Bishop of Lisbon, the Abbot of Alçobaça,
Martinho, Commander of Palmella, and Pedro Alvitiz, Grand Master of the
Portuguese Templars, to join them. The two armies formed the siege of
Alcacer do Sal, the city which Affonso Henriques had won with so much
difficulty, and which Sancho I. had been forced to surrender. The
defence was most obstinate, and in September, 1217, a Mohammedan army of
forty thousand infantry and fifteen thousand cavalry came up to relieve
the city, under the command of the _wālis_ of Badajoz, Seville, Jaen,
Cordova, and Xeres. The Christian and Mohammedan armies met in battle on
September 12th; the latter were defeated with immense loss, and were
pursued by the Templars for three days; the _wālis_ of Cordova and
Jaen were killed; and on October 18th the city of Alcacer do Sal
surrendered, and its gallant defender, Abu-Abdallah, in admiration of
the valour of the Christians, consented to be baptized.
In this expedition the king took no part; he was more bent upon filling
his treasury, a tendency which soon brought him again into conflict with
the Church. His chancellor, Gonçalo Mendes, who had inherited the policy
of Julião, and the chief officers of his Court, Pedro Annes, the Mordomo
Mor or Lord Steward, and Martim Fernandes, the Alferes Mor or Grand
Standard-bearer, encouraged him to lay hands on the great estates of
Estevão Soares da Silva, the noble and learned Archbishop of Braga. Pope
Honorius III. at once espoused the cause of the archbishop,
excommunicated the king, and laid an interdict on the kingdom, in order
to force Affonso to make restitution to the archbishop and to expel
Pedro Annes and Gonçalo Mendes from his Court. Affonso refused to
submit, and he was still under the interdict of the Church when he died
on the 25th of March, 1223. This avaricious monarch had devoted himself
to increasing the wealth and power of the Crown; to this must be
attributed not only his quarrels with his brothers and sisters and with
the Church, but the great constitutional measures which distinguish his
reign. It was for this purpose that he summoned the first Portuguese
Cortes to assent to his law of “mortmain,” and despatched the first
“inquiracão geral” through the kingdom to examine on oath into the
titles of all holders of landed property by sworn juries of inhabitants
of the vicinity, a proceeding exactly similar to the commissions sent by
Henry II. to inquire into cases of “mort d’ancestor” and “darrein
presentment.” Yet the reign of this irreligious and excommunicated king
was marked by a revival of religion in Portugal. Sueiro Gomes, one of
the earliest followers of S. Dominic, was a Portuguese, and was sent by
his master to found branches of the order of preaching friars in his
native land, and though in every way checked by Affonso, he made much
progress in all the great cities and towns. Far greater was the success
of the Franciscan friars, who were introduced into Portugal by Donna
Sancha, one of the king’s sisters, who had taken the veil and was
canonized in 1705, and for whom Queen Urraca built two splendid convents
at Lisbon and Guimaraens. The order took deep root, and its fame was
sealed by the martyrdom of the five friars sent by S. Francis of Assisi
to Morocco, whose bodies were brought to Portugal by Dom Ferdinand, the
king’s brother, and were buried at Santa Cruz in Coimbra, where they
were covered by the most sacred shrine in Portugal.
Sancho II. was only thirteen when he succeeded his father, and, as might
have been expected during a minority, the turbulent nobility and
intriguing bishops tried to undo the effect of the late king’s labours
to consolidate the royal authority. The old statesmen and advisers of
Affonso II., Gonçalo Mendes, the chancellor, Pedro Annes, and Vicente,
Dean of Lisbon, saw that it was necessary to get the interdict removed
if there was to be any peace during the king’s minority, and prudently
retired into the background, and Sueiro Gomes, the great Bishop of
Lisbon, came to the front, and with the help of the pious infantas, the
king’s aunts, made peace with the Archbishop of Braga and with Pope
Honorius III., who solemnly confirmed the crown to the boy king. The
archbishop then became the most powerful man in the kingdom, and with
Abril Peres, the new Mordomo Mor agreed with Alfonso IX. of Leon that
the Portuguese should attack Elvas, at the same time that the Spaniards
laid siege to Badajoz. The opportunity was a favourable one; a disputed
succession had resulted in a civil war amongst the Mohammedans both in
Spain and Morocco, and Elvas was stormed in 1226. At this siege the
young king performed prodigies of valour, and the Portuguese knights and
soldiers looked on him with admiration as a worthy successor of Affonso
Henriques. Confiding in the love and support of his people, young
Sancho, though only seventeen, then took the reins of power into his own
hands, and recalled his father’s friends to power making Vicente
chancellor, Pedro Annes Mordomo Mor, and Martim Annes Alferes Mor.
This change of power greatly disconcerted the party of the bishops, who
began to intrigue for the overthrow of the young king, but he wisely
continued to occupy himself with fighting the Mohammedans, knowing well
that no pope would dare to attack a crusading monarch. He tried in
everything, in his internal administration and his crusading ardour, to
imitate his cousin, Louis IX. of France, and this wise policy secured
him the protection of the Pope, who, in 1228, sent a legate, John of
Abbeville, Cardinal of S. Sabina, with full powers, and with orders to
rebuke the Portuguese bishops. The legate did his best to settle
long-standing quarrels in the Church, and especially that between
Martinho Rodrigues, Bishop of Oporto, the old adversary of Sancho I.,
and his chapter, and showed his approval of the king’s advisers by
making the chancellor, Vicente, Bishop of Guarda. The legate also
expressed his satisfaction at the king’s favourable treatment of the
friars and the military religious orders, and as the bishops still
intrigued against him, he persuaded Pope Gregory IX. to administer a
severe rebuke to them by an encyclical letter. The people, the friars,
and especially the military orders, simply adored their young monarch at
this time, and it was impossible to foresee the catastrophe which was to
sadly terminate his reign. The most distinguished military orders at
this time were the Knights Hospitallers, whose prior, Affonso Peres
Farinha, was the greatest warrior of his time, and who, in 1231,
captured the important towns of Moura and Serpa; and the knights of
Santiago, whose valiant prior, Paio Peres Correia, in 1234, took
Aljustrel. But the king himself was the most ardent crusader of them
all, and his youngest brother, Dom Ferdinand, who from Serpa ravaged the
districts held by the Mohammedans every year, soon won a reputation
second only to his own. In these halcyon days King Sancho II. imitated
his grandfather in attempting to settle and cultivate the lands of the
Alemtejo, on the same principles that Sancho I. had acted upon in the
Lower Beira and Estremadura, while peace was maintained with the
neighbouring kingdom of Leon, where, indeed, the greatest men at this
period were of Portuguese birth, namely, Dom Pedro, the king’s uncle,
who was Mordomo Mor of that kingdom, and Martim Sanches, an illegitimate
son of Sancho I., who was the principal general of its armies.
[Illustration: GATE AND WINDOW OF THE MONASTERY OF BELEM.]
Meanwhile the wise advisers of the youth of Sancho II. gradually died
off, and his Court was thronged with gay young knights and troubadours,
who filled him with conceit and encouraged him in foolish courses. The
first result of the removal of his old counsellors was to be seen in a
serious quarrel with the Church. When on the death of Sueiro Gomes, the
famous Bishop of Lisbon, in 1237, the royal candidate was not elected as
his successor, the king sent his brother Dom Ferdinand to the city,
where he burnt the house of the opposition candidate, João the dean, and
killed several priests; and the king’s uncle, Rodrigo Sanches, acted in
much the same high-handed manner at Oporto. Such behaviour was not to be
tolerated even in a crusading monarch, and a papal interdict was laid on
the kingdom; but prompt submission on the part of Sancho, and the
journey of his brother, Dom Ferdinand, to Rome to do solemn penance for
his misbehaviour, made atonement and the interdict was removed. The king
then once again turned his arms against the Mohammedans, and invaded the
Algarves, capturing Mertola and Ayamonte in 1239, Cacello in 1240, and
Tavira in 1244.
Unfortunately in the interval between these two last campaigns, King
Sancho paid a visit to the Court of Castile, where he fell in love with
Donna Mencia Lopes de Haro, the widow of a Castilian nobleman, Alvares
Peres de Castro, whom he probably married. This woman became the evil
genius of his life; the king grew lazy and sensual, and his Court
degenerated into a hotbed of vice and intrigue. The connection was most
distasteful to the people of Portugal, and gave an opportunity for the
bishops and discontented feudal nobility to overthrow Sancho, whom they
had always hated, if they could only find a leader and obtain the
assistance of the Pope. Even his brother, Dom Ferdinand, deserted him in
disgust, and became a vassal of Castile, and his worthless courtiers and
favourites, while urging him on to despotism and vicious indulgences,
made him more and more unpopular. Pope Innocent IV., who had been forced
to fly from Rome to France by the Emperor Frederick II., longed to show
his spiritual power over some monarch, and was easily persuaded by the
Portuguese bishops that Sancho was both impious and cowardly. A leader
was not hard to find, and in 1245, the king’s next brother, Affonso, who
had settled at the Court of Blanche of Castile, the mother of Louis IX.,
and who had there married the heiress to the county of Boulogne, offered
himself to the malcontents as a candidate for the throne of Portugal.
The Pope then issued a bull “Grandi non immerito,” of which the terms
were used as precedents in depositions of the more important monarchs in
later days, and João Egas, Archbishop of Braga, Tiburcio, Bishop of
Coimbra, and Pedro Salvadores, Bishop of Oporto, went to Paris and
offered Affonso of Boulogne the crown of Portugal on certain conditions,
which he accepted and swore to observe. Civil war had already broken out
before the arrival of Affonso at Lisbon in 1246, when he declared
himself Defender of the kingdom; Donna Mencia behaved in a most
disgraceful manner to the king, whom she had ruined; Sancho and the
Castilian troops which he brought to his help were defeated, and the
unfortunate monarch, whose early years had been so full of promise,
retired to Toledo where he died, deserted and unhappy, on January 8,
1248.
With such a commencement it might have been expected that the reign of
Affonso III. would have been a period of civil war and internal
dissension, or at the least of complete submission to the Church and the
feudal nobility; but, on the contrary, it was from a constitutional
point of view the most important of all the early reigns, and also that
in which Portugal concluded its warfare with the Mohammedans in the
Peninsula and attained its European limits. In short, Affonso III.
proved by the events of his reign to be essentially a politic king, if
not a high-minded man. On his brother’s death he exchanged his title of
“visitador” or “curador” of the realm for that of king, and, in order to
establish his fame as a warrior and a crusader, he at once prepared to
complete the conquest of the Algarves, where most of the acquisitions of
Sancho II. had been lost to the Moors during the civil war. Aided by his
uncle, Dom Pedro, and the Knights Hospitallers under Gonçalo Peres
Magro, he was speedily successful, taking Faro, Albufeira, which he
granted to the knights of Aviz, and Porches, which he assigned to his
chancellor, Estevão Annes, in 1249, and Ayamonte, Cacello, and Tavira in
1250. This extension of the Portuguese territory was by no means
acceptable to Alfonso X. “the Wise,” who was now king of Castile and
Leon; and after a short war, Affonso III. consented to marry Alfonso’s
illegitimate daughter, Donna Beatrice de Guzman, though the Countess of
Boulogne was still alive, and to hold the Algarves in usufruct only.
Affonso then turned his attention to his own position in Portugal, and
determined to bridle the power of the bishops in spite of his oath at
Paris. Perceiving that this could only be done with the assistance of
the great body of his people, he summoned a great Cortes at Leiria in
1254, to which representatives of the cities of the kingdom were elected
to sit with the nobles and higher clergy. This Cortes is of the greatest
importance in the constitutional history of Portugal, and its
composition shows that Affonso III. understood, like Simon de Montfort
and Edward I. in England, that it was only by an alliance with the
people that he could check the power of feudalism and sacerdotalism. His
policy was rewarded; the bishops recognized the need for submission; and
with the consent of the Cortes, Affonso dared the interdict laid on the
kingdom for his second marriage, and forced the clergy to continue their
functions. Abroad he maintained peace through his alliance with Alfonso
the Wise, and finally, on the petition of the now submissive prelates of
Portugal, Pope Urban IV. legalized the king’s second marriage and
legitimated his son Diniz in 1262. He was everywhere honoured and
successful, and in 1263 Alfonso X. made over the full sovereignty of the
Algarves to him, when he assumed the title of King of Portugal and the
Algarves.
[Illustration: FAÇADE OF LISBON CATHEDRAL. (_After a Photograph._)
_The oldest church in the city, as expressed by the proverb, “Velho Como
a Sé”._]
The people now began to make their power felt in the Cortes, and Affonso
soon had to pay for the assistance which they had previously rendered to
him. In a full Cortes held at Coimbra in 1261, the representatives of
the cities boldly denounced the king’s habit of tampering with the
coinage, and compelled his recognition of the principle that taxes were
not levied by the inherent right of the king, but by the free consent of
the people. As a popular king, he completely mastered the bishops, in
spite of their ability and learning, and he was much aided in this work
by the orders and regulations specially issued by Pedro Hispano, the
great Portuguese scholar and theologian, who had been the king’s friend
when Archbishop of Braga, and who became a cardinal, and afterwards for
a short time pope, as Pope John XXI. After a prosperous and successful
reign, Nemesis came upon Affonso III. for his behaviour to his brother,
in the rebellion of his son Diniz in 1277, who remained in arms until
1279, when the king died in a state of despair, and of misery at his
son’s ingratitude.
During the reigns of Sancho I., Affonso II., Sancho II., and Affonso
III., Portugal attained its European limits, and started on the way to
become a great, free, and wealthy nation. The period of war and of
territorial extension in the peninsula was now over, and the period of
civilization was to dawn. Territorially and constitutionally, Portugal
was now an established kingdom; it remained for it to become civilized
and thoroughly homogeneous before the great heroic period of exploration
and Asiatic conquest should begin. The kingdom and its people had
passed through the stage of childhood; now was to come its stirring
youth, in which the great qualities of the Portuguese were to be trained
and developed, before the period of glorious manhood was to mark the
height of its greatness.
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
V.
THE CONSOLIDATION OF PORTUGAL.
No better ruler than Diniz, or Denis, could be found for a country
which, after centuries of war, needed to have a period of peace and
quiet. He was a poet, and loved literature; he was a great
administrator, and loved justice; he was a statesman, and avoided
foreign wars; he was a far-seeing man, and prepared for the extension of
Portuguese energies beyond the sea by encouraging commerce; and, above
all, he saw the need of agriculture and of the arts of peace to take the
place of incessant wars, and in every respect he nobly earned the
sobriquet of the “Ré Lavrador,” or “Denis the Labourer.” From all these
points of view his reign is of vast importance in the history of
Portugal, for it marks the development of the people into an independent
nation, but, like all peaceful reigns of quiet progress, it is not
signalized by many striking events.
The civil war, which Diniz had waged with his father, was followed on
his accession to the throne by a fierce struggle between Diniz and his
brother Affonso, who disputed his legitimacy, which ended in a
compromise. He then married, in 1281, Donna Isabel, daughter of Pedro
III. of Aragon, who was canonized in later years for her pure and
unselfish life. His reign is only marked by one war with Sancho IV. and
Ferdinand IV. of Castile and Leon, which was terminated in 1297 by a
treaty of alliance, according to the terms of which Ferdinand IV.
married Constance, daughter of Diniz, while Affonso, the heir to the
throne of Portugal, married Beatrice of Castile, the sister of
Ferdinand, but his reputation none the less stood very high in the
peninsula, as is shown by his being chosen in 1304 to act as joint
arbitrator with the King of Aragon between Ferdinand of Castile and his
cousin, Ferdinand of Lacerda. Still more interesting are the king’s
relations with Edward I. of England, with whom he exchanged many
letters, chiefly on commercial subjects, and with whom he made a treaty
of commerce in 1294. He had much correspondence also with Edward II.,
and in particular he agreed with the English king in 1311 that the
Knights Templars had been greatly maligned. When that famous order was
suppressed by Pope Clement V. in compliance with the wishes of Philip le
Bel of France, Dom Diniz took a course which demonstrated his political
wisdom. He recollected the great services which the military orders had
formerly rendered to Portugal, and bore in mind their influence and
power, and he therefore founded the Order of Christ in conjunction with
Pope John XXII. in 1319, and invested it with all the property of the
Templars, thus at once obeying the Pope and avoiding a serious
disturbance at home. He showed the same wisdom with regard to the
knights of Santiago in Portugal, whom he persuaded Pope Nicholas IV. to
release from the control of the Grand Master of the Order in Castile,
and to establish on an independent footing.
These few lines touch on every important event, in regard to foreign
affairs, which occurred during the long reign of Dom Diniz, but they
give no idea of the progress of Portugal during this period of nearly
fifty years. Agriculture was greatly encouraged by the monarch, who
founded agricultural schools and homes for farmers’ orphans, and
established model farms. He did much by showing honour to agricultural
pursuits to raise them in the consideration of his nobility, and he
attempted to wean his people in general from the notion that war was the
only occupation fit for a free man. He undertook several important
agricultural experiments himself, established farmers in the still
barren province of the Alemtejo, paid special attention to the
cultivation of vines in the north, and planted the great pine forest of
Leiria by which he hoped to reclaim the sandy regions in that
neighbourhood. He was also a great builder, and did much to improve the
three royal cities of Lisbon, Coimbra, and Santarem, in which the Court
used to reside, and he built the towns of Salvaterra and Villa Real. In
administrative matters, the feudal system, under which the country
districts were ruled was left almost untouched, as were the charters and
franchises of the greater cities and towns, and the only important
measures passed by the Cortes in 1286 and 1291 were still more
stringent laws of mortmain directed against the Church than that passed
in 1250. It was in the administration of justice that the greatest
reforms were introduced. The period of great chancellors, who were
statesmen rather than lawyers, which commenced with Julião, and included
Gonçalo Mendes, Vicente, and Estevão Annes, was over, and a new class of
chancellors was appointed. These men were invariably ecclesiastics, and
looked forward to a bishopric, as the reward of their services. They
were essentially lawyers, learned in the Roman law, which they had
studied at Padua and Bologna; and applying the maxims of their studies
to the common law of Portugal, which was largely founded on Visigothic
ideas, they began to build up a system of Portuguese law, of which the
importance became visible later. Diniz did not venture to abolish the
feudal courts, though he checked their abuses, and among other reforms,
he appointed royal “corregidors” in every city and town belonging to the
Crown in lordship, who were to act as judges of appeal from the feudal
and city courts, as well as to take charge of the police. His wise
encouragement of commerce appears in his commercial treaty with England,
and by his establishment of a royal navy, commanded by a new official,
entitled the “Almirante Mor,” or Lord High Admiral, which office was
first granted to a distinguished Genoese sailor, Emmanuel Pessanha.