slave, and the tyranny which she exercised was odious in the extreme.
Her wealth was great, for the king had in his infatuation granted her
for her own use the lordship of many of the most important cities
belonging to the Crown, including Villa Viçosa, Abrantes, Almada,
Cintra, Saccavem, Alemquer, Obidos, Torres Vedras, and Pinhel, and she
had obtained great estates for her brothers, of whom the elder, João
Affonso Telles de Menezes, became Count of Barcellos, and the younger,
Gonçalo, Count of Neiva. Her former husband, João Lourenço da Cunha,
tried to revenge himself for the loss of his wife by attempting to
poison the king; she at once had his lands confiscated, and ordered his
execution, which he only escaped by a timely flight into Gallicia. Her
revenge upon her sister, Maria Telles de Menezes, whom she had never
forgiven for opposing her marriage with the king, was horrible in its
wickedness, and affords an indisputable proof of her cruelty of
disposition. Maria, who was as beautiful as her sister, and far more
virtuous, had inspired a real passion in the bosom of Dom John, the
king’s half-brother and the elder son of Ines de Castro. The young
couple were married in 1376, and were as happy as they deserved to be.
Enraged at their happiness, and the more so, because they had a little
son, whereas her own sons both died in childhood, the queen set to work,
like Iago, to instil the passion of jealousy into the young husband. She
was soon successful, and Dom John murdered his wife with his own hand,
in his palace at Coimbra, while she was vainly protesting her innocence.
When the deed was done, the queen came into her dead sister’s presence,
and laughingly informed the unhappy wife-murderer that the accusations
were untrue. At this mockery, Dom John would have slain her, and on
being prevented by her guards, he fled to Castile. Donna Leonor had not
even the merit of being constant to her uxorious spouse, but carried on
an open intrigue with João Fernandes Andeiro, the former ambassador to
England, whom she persuaded the king to make Count of Ourem. Ines
Affonso, the wife of Gonçalo Vaz de Azevedo, first Grand Marshal of
Portugal, happened to hear a declaration of love made by the queen to
her lover, and she informed Dom John “the Bastard,” Master of the
Knights of Aviz. Some spy told the queen, and she determined at once to
rid herself of the pair. She had a letter forged, purporting to be
written by them to the king of Castile, full of treasonable passages,
and on the strength of it, she obtained the king’s order for their
arrest. When they were safely in prison, she tried to persuade her
husband to sign an order for their execution without trial. King
Ferdinand, who had a real affection for his half-brother, refused, and
Donna Leonor thereupon forged his signature to an order for them to be
beheaded at once. Fortunately for Portugal, the governor of the Castle
of Evora, where they were imprisoned, Vasco Martins de Mello, refused to
obey, and the future saviour of Portugal escaped.
The wonder is that the Portuguese people submitted so long as they did
to this tyranny, and it shows how deeply they felt the debt due to their
great monarchs, such as Affonso Henriques and Dom Diniz, that they made
no attempt to overthrow their unworthy descendant. So strong was their
attachment to the hereditary principle, that at a great Cortes held at
Leiria in 1376, the queen’s only surviving child, the Donna Beatrice,
was recognized as heiress to the throne. This declaration was of the
greatest importance, for it governed the future rule of succession in
the kingdom; and by declaring females able to succeed rejected the
well-known Salic law, which prevailed in France and other countries. The
queen steadily encouraged the king’s ambition to sit upon the throne of
Castile, and when his hopes revived, on the death of Henry II., she
persuaded him once more to send her lover, the Count of Ourem, as
ambassador to England. Richard II. received him cordially, and Edmund,
Earl of Cambridge, next brother to John of Gaunt, and better known by
his subsequent title of Duke of York, agreed to bring military
assistance to the aid of Ferdinand. In 1381, the Earl of Cambridge
arrived accordingly with two thousand English men-at-arms, and, as had
been suggested by the Count of Ourem, his eldest son, Edward, afterwards
second Duke of York, was solemnly betrothed to the Donna Beatrice, the
heiress to the throne of Portugal. The feeble Ferdinand, as usual,
refused to keep faith, and terrified by the approach of a Castilian
army, he deserted the English, who immediately began to ravage the
country round their camp near Oporto, while he made peace with John I.
of Castile at Salvaterra. By this treaty, which was signed on April 2,
1383, and in which the hand of Donna Leonor is clearly to be perceived,
it was arranged that John I. should marry Donna Beatrice, who was but
eleven years old, and that Leonor should be Regent of Portugal if
Ferdinand died, until Beatrice’s eldest son came of age. At the wedding,
which took place at once, Ferdinand was too ill to be present: but the
queen and her lover were there in his stead, and behaved with such
unseemly hilarity that many of the Portuguese nobility, headed by Nuno
Alvares Pereira, who was to be known in Portuguese history as “The Holy
Constable,” could not refrain from openly expressing their disgust. Six
months afterwards, on October 22, 1383, King Ferdinand died, and Donna
Leonor assumed the regency in the name of her little daughter, the Queen
of Castile.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE PALACE AT LISBON.
(_From “Les Royaumes d’Espagne et Portugal.” La Haye, 1720._)]
But she did not hold it long. The whole Portuguese people detested her,
and their spirit of nationality was outraged by the contemplated union
of their crown with that of Castile. Dom John “the Bastard,” the Master
of the Order of Aviz shared both their personal hatred for the queen,
who had tried to take his life, and their political desire for
independence; and on December 6th, he headed an insurrection in Lisbon
and slew the queen’s lover, Andeiro, Count of Ourem, with his own hands
in the palace itself. The people everywhere applauded his action, and
attacked the friends of the queen; in Lisbon the Archbishop Martinho and
the Abbot of Guimaraens were killed upon the same day, and the example
was followed in the provinces, where among other notable murders, the
abbess of the Benedictine nuns was killed at Evora, and the Lord High
Admiral, Lançarote Pessanha, at Beja. Leonor among whose faults want of
courage could not be reckoned, fled to Santarem, and not only summoned
her son-in-law, John of Castile to her help, but began to raise an army
from among the vassals of her own adherents. At this news, Dom John felt
a momentary movement of weakness, and spoke of retiring to England, but
the people of Lisbon, through the mouth of the popular leader, the
cooper, Affonso Annes, so eloquently begged him not to desert them in
their peril, but to stay and be their ruler, that he consented on
December 16th, to remain, and named two of his wisest adherents, João
das Regras and Nuno Alvares Pereira, to the offices of chancellor and
constable.
Dom John then took upon himself the title of Defender of the Realm; but
he knew how little chance Portugal could have against Castile without
some powerful ally, and he therefore sent first Thomas Daniel and
Lourenço Martins, and then his Chancellor and the Master of the Knights
of Santiago to beg for help from England. The longed-for aid seemed
tardy, and Dom John proceeded to put Lisbon in a state of defence, and
despatched the “Holy Constable” to raise an army in the northern
provinces. In 1384, John of Castile slowly entered Portugal with a great
army and joined Donna Leonor at Santarem. But the allies soon quarrelled
as to the government in future of the country they both believed to be
already conquered, and Donna Leonor recommended her adherents to join
Dom John. Not satisfied with this, she planned to poison her son-in-law;
but her intention was discovered in time, and the wicked queen was sent
by John of Castile to the convent of Tordesillas, in his dominions,
where she ended her days in 1386. This act of justice done, the king of
Castile laid siege to Lisbon. The resistance was worthy of the cause,
which was indeed that of the continued existence of Portugal as an
independent country. The priests fought at the head of their
parishioners; the archbishop of Braga behaved as a gallant knight; and
Dom John showed his fitness to be the monarch of a warlike people. A
terrible pestilence, which broke out in the besiegers’ camp, did more
mischief than the bravery of the besieged, and John of Castile had to
retire discomfited. But it availed little to have repulsed one Spanish
army; the relative sizes of Portugal and Castile, made it obvious that
the struggle would be a severe one; the independence of Portugal was at
stake, and the Portuguese fought as men fight for their existence as a
nation. The heroic Constable enforced the lesson of the successful
defence of Lisbon by his defeat of the Castilians at Atoleiros, but it
was felt to be necessary to take yet stronger measures, if the war was
to end in a triumph.
The first of these measures was to legalize the position of Dom John,
the gallant leader of the people. A great Cortes was summoned to meet at
Coimbra, and in it João das Regras declared the throne of Portugal to be
elective on April 6, 1385. This proposition was agreed to by
acclamation, and after the Chancellor had produced a Papal bull,
declaring the children of Dom Pedro by Ines de Castro to be
illegitimate, the Cortes unanimously elected Dom John “the Bastard,” to
be king of Portugal. This measure legalized the position of Master of
the Knights of Aviz, who took the title of John I., and is known in
Portuguese history as John “the Great”; and the people believed the
measure to have the sanction of heaven when the news arrived that the
Holy Constable had won a great victory over the Spaniards at Trancoso,
in which four hundred Castilian knights were killed. The spirits of the
Portuguese were further raised by the landing of five hundred of the
famous English archers, under the command of three squires in the
service of John of Gaunt named Northberry, Mowbray, and Hentzel; but
this assistance was counterbalanced by the arrival of two thousand
French knights, who had joined the king of Castile. The two armies met
at Aljubarrota on August 14, 1385, and it was there that the
independence of Portugal was secured, and the House of Aviz made good
its title to the throne. The Holy Constable commanded the vanguard; Mem
Rodrigues de Vasconcellos the right, and Antao Vasques de Almada the
left; while Dom John rode from place to place and never failed to be in
the post of danger. Ten pieces of ordnance were used, this being their
first appearance in the military history of the peninsula; the English
archers did yeoman service, and repeated the glories of Crécy and
Poitiers, and after a hard-fought struggle the Spaniards fled in
confusion. Then did John I. feel himself king indeed; and he erected on
the spot where his victory had been won, the magnificent convent of
Batalha, which recalls in its name the famous Battle Abbey erected on
the field of Hastings. This victory was followed up by another at
Valverde, and then by the news that John of Gaunt was on his way with a
powerful English army. The Portuguese felt that they had anew achieved
their independence.
[Illustration: TWO SIDES OF THE ROYAL CHAPEL OF THE MONASTERY OF
BATALHA. (PRESENT STATE.)]
On May 9, 1386, the Treaty of Windsor was signed by which the kingdoms
of Portugal and England were declared to be united henceforth in the
closest bonds of friendship and alliance; and it proved to be the
corner-stone of the policy of the House of Aviz. On July 20, 1386, John
of Gaunt reached Corunna with two thousand English lances and three
thousand archers, accompanied by his wife Constance of Castile, and two
of his daughters, Philippa and Catherine. He marched triumphantly
through Gallicia; and at Oporto on February 2, 1387, the
Anglo-Portuguese Alliance was sealed by the marriage of King John to
Philippa, the daughter of John of Gaunt by his first wife, Blanche of
Lancaster. This marriage was followed by another, that of Catherine,
only child of John of Gaunt by Constance of Castile to Henry, Prince of
the Asturias, and heir to the throne of Castile. These marriages settled
the peace of the peninsula, for in concluding them, John of Gaunt
abandoned his claims to Castile, and insisted as one of the conditions,
on a truce between his two sons-in-law. This truce continued till 1411,
when at last the title of John as King of Portugal was recognized, and
peace between Castile and Portugal was solemnly declared.
King John “the Great” was now firmly seated on his throne; an effort of
his half-brother Diniz, the younger son of Ines de Castro, to overthrow
him in 1398, failed entirely, and foreign monarchs hastened to recognize
his power. Through this hero, and the race of heroes who fought under
him, the independence of Portugal was secured, and a new career opened
before its people. The era of consolidation was over; the era of foreign
discovery and of Asiatic conquests was to begin.
[Illustration: text decoration]
[Illustration: text decoration]
VI.
PORTUGAL DURING THE AGE OF EXPLORATION.
[Illustration: KING JOHN THE GREAT.
(_From his recumbent statue over his tomb at Batalha._)]
The reigns of John I., surnamed “the Great,” and of his two successors,
occupy nearly a century, during which Portugal was learning to become
the greatest nation in Europe. It was the age of exploration and
discovery, during which the acutest intellects and the most daring
natures in Portugal were dreaming of a new route to India, and were
endeavouring to discover it. It was an age of growth, abounding in
statesmen, mariners, and chroniclers, who were to have their successors
in the all too short but immortal period of Portuguese greatness, in
such men as Alboquerque, Vasco da Gama, and Camoens. The history of
these maritime explorations and discoveries, of the painful and slow
progress down the western coast of Africa, and of the great schemes and
efforts of Prince Henry “the Navigator,” will form the subject of a
separate chapter; but it is first expedient to study the history of the
Portuguese people and monarchy at home during this period, and to see
how, from the reign of John I., a new spirit appeared alike among the
kings, and the merchants, and the soldiers, which was to culminate in
the glories of the heroic age.
King John, after the victory of Aljubarrota had firmly seated him on the
throne, felt it necessary to give Portugal such an interval of peace
after the great efforts of the Castilian wars, as King Diniz had given
it after the cessation of the wars against the Moors. This peace was
secured by a wise foreign policy, of which the key-notes were, a close
alliance with England, and systematic non-interference with the affairs
of Spain. He had seen the value of the assistance of England in the
final throes of his struggle with Castile, and the English monarchs on
their side felt the advantage of having such an ally as Portugal to act
as a thorn in the side of Castile, should the Spaniards come to the help
of the French. The statesmanlike idea of Henry II. of England when he
supported the proposal of the Count of Flanders for the hand of the
daughter of Affonso Henriques, that this marriage should cement an
unwritten alliance of England, Flanders, and Portugal, against France,
Scotland, and Castile, seems to have been in the minds of the English
statesmen of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Just as Scotland
afforded a convenient base of operations, whether military or political,
for France against England, so did Portugal give a similar position for
the English to act from against Castile, and the subsequent history of
Portugal shows how generously and wisely England treated her southern
ally. The people of the two nations gladly supported the political ideas
of their monarchs and rulers. Each country could supply what the other
wanted. From Portugal, the English merchants could obtain fruits and
wines, which found a ready market, and the Londoners, not satisfied with
supplying the home demand only, distributed these products of the south
among the countries of the north, and notably in those lying round the
Baltic Sea, Sweden, Denmark, Pomerania, and Lithuania. On the other
hand, the Portuguese had no manufactures, and gladly took in exchange
for the productions of their fertile soil, the cloth not only of the
English looms, but of those of Flanders, in which the London merchants
dealt.
This alliance was maintained in spite of dynastic changes and political
revolutions in the two countries. In 1389 the name of the King of
Portugal was introduced into the Treaty of Paris as an ally of the King
of England; in 1398 Richard II. sent a body of English archers, under
Edmund Arnold of Dartmouth, to assist in repelling the incursion made
into Portugal by the son of Ines de Castro and some Spanish knights; and
in 1400 John I. recognized his brother-in-law, Henry of Lancaster, as
Henry IV. of England, and was created by him a Knight of the Garter,
being the first foreign sovereign to receive that honour. In 1403 Henry
IV. solemnly ratified the Treaty of Windsor, and in the following year
the illegitimate daughter of John I., by Ines Pires, was promised in
marriage to Thomas, Earl of Arundel, one of the leaders of the English
nobility. This marriage was regarded as a further bond of alliance, and
was celebrated in 1405 in England with the greatest splendour. Equally
friendly relations were maintained with Henry V. and with the rulers of
England during the minority of Henry VI.; Henry V. sent provisions and
troops for the expedition to Ceuta in 1415, and in 1428 a strong force
of 144 lances was sent to join the King of Portugal. This English
alliance was the key-note of the policy of John I., and it was
maintained without a breach from the arrival of John of Gaunt in 1386
until the death of the great Portuguese monarch in 1433.
The internal government of King John I. was hampered in one respect to
such an extent as to vitiate the effect of his great administrative
reforms. It will be remembered that he was elected to the crown by the
Cortes, and followed to the field of Aljubarrota by all classes of the
Portuguese people. Yet for some reason he would not trust in the people
who loved him, but believing he owed his success to the nobles who had
supported him, he began his reign by making extensive grants of lands
and privileges to his principal supporters of noble birth. It would
perhaps be too much to expect the political knowledge of a statesman in
the nineteenth century from a king in the fourteenth, but it seems to
posterity that King John greatly over-estimated the assistance of his
nobles, and that he over-rewarded them by granting them nearly the whole
of the old royal estates of the kings of Portugal. It may be believed
that he feared the secession of his nobles to the Castilian party, and
that he thought they could take their vassals with them, but whatever
may have been the reason, he gave them such enormous grants as to
seriously weaken the royal power. These grants however did not
impoverish the treasury, which was filled more by the proceeds of the
customs duties, a source of income, which his wise commercial policy
increased, than by rents from landed estates. So wealthy did he become
that he left his mark on the country in his great buildings; besides the
magnificent convent of Batalha on the field of Aljubarrota, he
constructed no less than four palaces at Cintra, Almeirim, Cezimbra, and
Lisbon. The last-mentioned city was his favourite place of residence;
under his fostering care it became the official capital of Portugal
instead of Coimbra, and soon surpassed the wealth of Oporto as a
commercial city. The citizens of Lisbon regarded him much as the
citizens of London did Edward IV. a century later; they never forgot his
gallant conduct in the great siege, and were at all times ready to obey
him and to pay him a fair tithe of their wealth. In one respect
especially did King John gratify the aspirations of the religious
section of the people of Lisbon, by obtaining the sanction of the Pope
to erect the bishopric of Lisbon into an archbishopric.
It is not to be wondered at that King John loved to live in Lisbon, and
watch the daily passage up and down the Tagus of the ships, which were
making his capital a great commercial centre, when it is remembered how
slight was his actual power over the greater part of his kingdom. The
other cities were indeed fairly well governed owing to their possession
of ancient charters from kings, bishops, or lords, granting them a
system of municipal self-government, but the country districts were
ruled by the strictest feudal law and custom, and the king was powerless
to interfere. Now was to be seen the harm done by the monarchs who had
conquered the Alemtejo and the Algarves from the Mohammedans by the
distribution of their conquests in estates among the military orders and
private individuals. The result was the division of these provinces into
enormous feudal counties and lordships, dangerously large to be the
properties of subjects in such a small kingdom as Portugal. The
condition of the Beira was a little better, and the two northern
provinces of the Entre Minho e Douro and the Tras-os-Montes, were, as
they are still, the homes of the sturdy Portuguese peasantry, who gave
to the Portuguese armies and fleets their bravest and stoutest soldiers
and sailors. Bitterly did John the Great repent the mistake he had made
by his large grants to the Portuguese nobility, and his consequent
inability to correct the most crying evils of the feudal system. He had,
however, at the beginning of his reign, some wise and able counsellors,
in the Holy Constable, in Lourenço, the brave Archbishop of Braga, and
in his great chancellor, João das Regras. With the help of the latter he
managed to get some valuable laws passed in the Cortes affecting
criminal procedure and jurisdiction, by means of which he somewhat
controlled the feudal methods of holding courts of justice without much
offending the great nobility, but he dared go no further in this
direction, and had to allow many abuses, inherent in the feudal system,
to continue to exist. In every other respect his administration was
extremely good; his cities grew in wealth; his navy increased in number
of ships; his sailors became famous for their daring; and in minor
points many reforms were made, such, for instance, as introducing the
use of the Portuguese language into the law courts, and changing the era
from that of Augustus to that of Christ, which made the date of the year
consonant with that of the rest of Christendom.