Part 1

PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS

_By the same Author_

THE MAGIC OF SPAIN, 1912. IN PORTUGAL, 1912. POEMS FROM THE PORTUGUESE, 1913. STUDIES IN PORTUGUESE LITERATURE, 1914. LYRICS OF GIL VICENTE, 1914. PORTUGAL OF THE PORTUGUESE, 1915.

New York Agents LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET

PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS

BY

AUBREY F. G. BELL

_A notavel fama dos excelentes barões e muito antiguos antecessores dina de perpetua lembrança_

DUARTE PACHECO PEREIRA, _Esmeraldo_

Oxford B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET MCMXVII

TO

THE COUNTLESS FORGOTTEN HEROES OF PORTUGAL

In burning sands or Ocean’s blinding silt, In Africa, Asia, and the icy North, They lie: yet came they home who thus went forth, Since of their bones is all their country built.

Preface

Not seven, nor seventy, names exhaust the tale of Portugal’s great men. The reader need but turn to the fascinating pages of Portuguese history. There he will find a plentiful feast set out before him--the epic strife between Portuguese and Moor, Portuguese and Spaniard, and deeds of high emprise in the foam of perilous seas and the ever-mysterious lands of the East. His delight will be impaired unless he can follow the events in detail in the chronicles and histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for this a knowledge of Portuguese is requisite, since there are few satisfactory translations. But it is as easy to acquire a sufficient knowledge of Portuguese to read it with pleasure as it is difficult to write or speak it.

There is a whole literature, often not less attractive in style than in subject, of histories, memoirs, travels, accounts of wrecks and sieges, recording the deeds of the Portuguese on and beyond the seas. Of the battle of Ourique (1139) Portuguese historians have loved to tell how the Moors numbered 600,000 (since to say 900,000 were an exaggeration) and how, heavy rain having fallen after the battle, the streams that flowed into the far-distant Guadiana ran red with blood. But there were scrupulous and moderate chroniclers like Fernam Lopez and Azurara, and many of the historians of India were sober writers whose narratives (those, for instance, of Fernam Lopez de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto, and Gaspar Correa) bear the stamp of truth while they delight the reader by their wealth of detail and personal anecdote.

They may be pardoned for declaring that their heroes’ achievements outshone those of Greek and Roman. For indeed the half-century (1498-1548) between the voyage of Vasco da Gama and the death of Dom João de Castro is thick with names; the great men tread on one another’s heels in the halls of fame, worthily continuing the work of their predecessors during four centuries in Portugal. Sousa, Mello, Meneses, Cunha, Castro, Noronha, Mascarenhas, Coutinho, Pereira, Pacheco, Almeida, Azevedo, Sá, Silva, Silveira--these are names the very catalogue of which must be music to a Portuguese, and which would require a large volume to chronicle in detail.

And many women hold a high place in Portuguese history, as the Queen-Saint Elizabeth (or Isabel),[1] the stout-hearted bakeress of Aljubarrota, Brites (Beatrice) de Almeida, who slew, if we are to trust the tradition, seven Spaniards with her wooden baker’s shovel, or the heroines of Diu.[2]

Among the men there is Affonso Henriquez, first King of Portugal, half French by birth, and grandson of the Spanish King of Leon, but in heart and action wholly Portuguese; loyal Egas Moniz; Gualdim Paes and other legendary heroes in the conflict with the Moors which transformed Portugal from a dependent province into a free kingdom; and later, if not less legendary, Fernão Rodriguez Pacheco, the astute defender of Celorico, who in starvation by a miracle obtained a fish and sent it to the besieger to show that plenty reigned in the town; or the defender of Coimbra, Martim Freitas, heroically, almost quixotically loyal to the deposed King Sancho II.

On the sea the first to signalise himself was Fuas Roupinho, in the twelfth century; and thenceforth Portugal never failed to produce hardy if obscure seamen, to fish for cod in the Northern Seas or to discover the west coast of Africa till Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the Cape of Storms in 1487, and King João II rechristened it the Cape of Good Hope.[3]

João II (1481-95), “the Perfect Prince,” or as Queen Isabella of Spain more bluntly called him _el hombre_, “the man,” was one of a series of great kings of the House of Avis, founded by João I (1385-1433) “of good memory,” darling of the Lisbon people. João I was succeeded by his eldest son, the noble but unfortunate student-king Duarte (1433-8). Other brothers of Prince Henry the Navigator, scarcely less famous, were the Infante Pedro, statesman and author, who travelled through “the seven parts of the world,” and the Infante Fernando, who died slowly with saintly patient heroism as a prisoner of the Moors in Africa.

Under Manoel I (1495-1521) the Great, the Fortunate, and his son João III (1521-57), Gama, Albuquerque and Dom João de Castro are the most conspicuous names; but Dom Francisco de Almeida, first Viceroy of India, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, discoverer of Brazil, Fernão de Magalhães, the harsh and fiery navigator[4] who first penetrated by sea to the North Pacific and was slain in the hour of his triumph--his name lives in the Straits of Magellan--and many more were almost equally celebrated. But especially among the discoverers and early adventurers in India the men of fame are but types of hundreds of less fortunate heroes who perished. Men left Portugal with their lives in their hands, and for every one who (like Fernam Mendez Pinto) survived to tell the tale scores sailed away who were never seen or heard of afterwards.

Yet the population of Portugal in the first third of the sixteenth century may have been but 1,500,000, and certainly did not reach twice that figure. That is a fact that must uplift and inspire those who study Portugal’s history or consider her future. For the Portuguese of the sixteenth century fought not against or not only against hordes of undisciplined savages, but against Moors and Turks highly civilised and well equipped with artillery.

Perhaps the secret of their success is that their motto was “God, King, and Country,” and that each man among them relied, under Heaven, on himself, not on this or that sect or party or philosophy, election promises or political programmes. They did not wait and watch for some wonderful Ism, like a brazen serpent, to change the face of the world: they as individuals simply, persistently set to work and--changed it. In less than fifty years after the Portuguese first reached India they were in Japan, converting and civilising the Japanese, and had made possible that tremendous saying of Camões:

E se mais mundo houvera lá chegára.

And had there been more world they would have reached it.

That is, of course, a terrible condemnation as well as an undying honour, for unless each generation were to produce an Albuquerque there could be no hope of maintaining conquests so wide, and Albuquerque had had his hands tied by his own countrymen, so that, like the blinded Samson, he achieved the ruin of his enemies by his unaided strength and at the expense of his own life. But if Portuguese statesmanship was at fault in India, there never failed a sprinkling of individuals who spent their lives in ungrudging service and heroic effort to counterbalance errors committed, and often died heartbroken for their pains.

Two anecdotes will give an idea of the spirit that animated the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. During the siege of Diu a soldier, Fernão Penteado, seriously wounded in the head, went to the surgeon, but, finding him busy with other wounded and hearing the noise of a Turkish attack, he returned to the fight and came back with a second serious wound in the head, only to find the surgeon busier than before. Again he went to fight, and when the surgeon was finally able to attend to him he had a third wound, in his right arm.

The second incident occurred in North-West Africa. During a fight Dom Affonso da Cunha, aiming a mighty cut with his sword at a Moor, missed him, and the sword leapt from his hand. “Go fetch it, you dog!” roared Cunha, and the terror-stricken Moor obediently picked it up and gave it to him, trembling. Cunha thereupon spared his life.

Such were those Portuguese of old, persistent, brave, proud, magnificent. And something of their spirit survives in the Portugal of to-day, ready to reappear at a crisis--more of it, perhaps, than is generally imagined.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Antonio Coelho Gasco in his _Conquista, Antiguidade e Nobreza da mui insigne e inclita Cidade de Coimbra_ (Lisboa, 1805) drew the following rash picture of her from an ancient portrait at Coimbra: “This very saintly lady was of gigantic frame and very stout, very white and very red, with a long face and large serene green eyes, nose rather low with wide nostrils, head long and beautiful.”

[2] Isabel Fernandez, Barbara Fernandez, and Isabel Madeira. Later heroines at home were Isabel Pereira in the defence of Ouguella against the Spanish in 1644 and Elena Perez in the similar siege of Monção in 1656.

[3] The Portuguese accounts of these discoveries are most vivid and minute, a fascinating introduction to the geography of what is now largely part of the British Empire.

[4] Garcia da Orta introduces him with the words “The Devil entered into a Portuguese.”

Contents

I

PAGE

KING DINIS 1

II

NUN’ ALVAREZ 17

III

PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR 47

IV

VASCO DA GAMA 61

V

DUARTE PACHECO PEREIRA 79

VI

AFFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE 103

VII

DOM JOÃO DE CASTRO 127

List of Illustrations

NUN’ ALVAREZ _Frontispiece_ From the earliest (1526) edition of the _Cronica_.

FACING PAGE

PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR 49

VASCO DA GAMA 63

AFFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE 105 From Gaspar Correa, _Lendas da India_, frontispiece to vol. ii. pt. 1.

JOÃO DE CASTRO 129

I

KING DINIS

(1261-1325)

Co’ este o reino prospero florece.

CAMÕES, _Os Lusiadas_.

Um Dinis que ha de admirar o mundo.

ANTONIO DE SOUSA DE MACEDO, _Ulyssippo_.

When Henry of the French House of Burgundy became Count of Portugal in 1095 he merely held a province in fealty to the King of Leon, but by his son, the great Affonso I’s victories over the Moors it almost automatically became an independent kingdom. The second king, Sancho I, who has so many points of resemblance to King Dinis, further established the new realm, and he and his successors continued to wrest territory from the Moors. In the reign of the fifth king, Dinis’ father, Affonso III, the conquest of Algarve was completed, and the only remaining difficulty was the claim of the kings of Castille to this region.

Dinis, born on October 9, 1261, was but a few years old when he was sent to Seville to win the consent of his mother’s father, the celebrated Alfonso the Learned, to waive his right to the latest Portuguese conquest. As the shrewd Affonso III had foreseen, he proved a successful diplomatist. Alfonso X, enchanted with the grave, courtly bearing of his little grandson, knighted him and sent him home with all his requests granted.

Thus it came about that when Dinis, to whom his father had given a separate household but a few months before, ascended the throne at the age of seventeen, he was the first king to begin to reign over Portugal with its modern boundaries, from the River Minho to Faro. Two centuries of great deeds had achieved this result--two more were to pass before Spain was likewise entirely free of the Moorish invader--and Dinis now in a reign of half a century (1279-1325) saw to it that the heroism and sacrifices of his ancestors had not been in vain.

His tutor had been a Frenchman, Ébrard de Cahors, who now became Bishop of Coimbra, and the fame of his grandfather Alfonso X was spread through the whole Peninsula. But, young as he was, Dinis at once made it clear that he intended to rule as the national King of Portugal and had resolution enough to withstand the Castilian influence of his mother and Alfonso X. His first care was to acquaint himself thoroughly with his kingdom, and he spent the great part of the first year of his reign in visiting the country, paying especial attention to the still almost deserted region of Alentejo.

But the first years of his reign were not entirely peaceful, for his younger brother Affonso laid claim to the throne. Dinis was born before the Pope had legitimised Affonso III’s second marriage; Affonso, two years his junior, afterwards: hence the partisans of the latter affected to consider Dinis illegitimate. The dispute was scarcely settled when Dinis married Isabel, daughter of Pedro III of Aragon, who proved so efficacious a mediator in the even more serious troubles at the end of his reign, and, after sharing his throne for forty-three years, is still venerated as the Queen-Saint of Portugal.

In his differences with Castile, Dinis was successful, both in peace and war, and it was a tribute to his character and authority that he was chosen as arbitrator between the claims of the kings of Castille and Aragon. At home he was confronted by a powerful secular clergy, by the excessive and growing wealth of the religious orders, and by an overweening nobility, while his newly conquered kingdom urgently required hands to till it and walls and castles for its defence. Dinis dealt with all these problems in a spirit of equal wisdom and firmness, upholding the rights of the throne and the rights of the people till he had welded a scattered crowd of individuals into a nation.

His quarrel with the clergy, who protested that the King had infringed their rights, was referred to Rome, and in 1289 a formal but not a lasting agreement was reached.

Two years later the King checked the ever-growing possessions of the religious orders by a law limiting their right to gifts and legacies. Their wealth was the result of the great part they had played during the long conflict against the Moors, but it naturally began to prove inconvenient to King and people in time of peace. The nobles were in like case, and Dinis showed the same resolution towards them and abolished certain of their privileges.

He could protect as well as check. When the Knights Templar were abolished by the Pope, Dinis secured an exception for Portugal and reorganised them as the Order of Christ in 1319. Indeed he was essentially a builder, not a demolisher. In 1290 he founded the University of Coimbra; in 1308 he renewed and consolidated the treaty between Portugal and England; in 1317 he invited to Portugal a Genoese, Manuel Pezagno, to organise his fleet and command it as Admiral.

He encouraged agriculture, calling the peasants the “nerves of the republic” and passed many laws to ensure their security, so that in his reign men began to go in safety along the roads of Portugal, hitherto infested by brigands, and he divided grants of land among the poor of the towns. He planted near Leiria the pines which still form so delightful a feature of the country between that town and Alcobaça.

Some have called King Dinis a miser, others declare that in his reign there was a saying “liberal as King Dinis.” It is certain that he expended his money wisely, and, while no early king ever accomplished more for the land over which he ruled, he left a full treasury at his death. The charge of avarice perhaps arose from the charming legend which so well exemplifies the simplicity of those times.

The Queen was in the habit of distributing bread daily to a large number of poor, and Dinis, who perhaps would rather have seen them digging the soil, forbade the charity. Queen Isabel continued as before, and one morning the King met her as she went out with her apron full of bread.

“What have you there?” said King Dinis.

“Roses,” said the Queen.

“Let me see them,” said King Dinis.

And behold the Queen’s apron was filled with roses.

In the matter of buildings King Dinis not only fortified many towns with castles and walls, but founded numerous churches and convents. The traveller in Portugal even now can scarcely pass a day without coming upon something to remind him of the sixth King of Portugal. The convent of Odivellas, the cloisters of Alcobaça, the beautiful ruins of the castle above Leiria are but three of many instances which show how King Dinis’ work survives even in the twentieth century.

It was said of him that--

Whate’er he willed Dinis fulfilled.

But he nearly always wrought even better than he knew. He realised no doubt that Portugal was an all-but-island, especially when the relations with Castille were unfriendly; but he could scarcely foresee that of his pinewoods would be built the “ships that went to the discovery of new worlds and seas”; that a future Master of his new Order of Christ would devote its vast revenues to the great work of exploring the West Coast of Africa, the work which bore so important a share in transforming Europe from all that we connect with mediævalism to all that is modern; that his embryo fleet would grow and prosper till Portugal became the foremost sea-power; or that the treaty with England would still be bearing fruit six centuries after his death.

The University, too, lasted and became one of the glories of Portugal, and a source of many of her greatest men in the sixteenth century. Since the sixteenth century, after being several times moved from Coimbra to Lisbon and from Lisbon to Coimbra, it has been fixed in the little town on the right bank of the Mondego and remains one of the most treasured possessions of modern Portugal. The quality that explains how so many of King Dinis’ institutions endured and prospered marvellously in succeeding centuries was thoroughness, the conviction that any work, however humble, if thoroughly done must bear excellent fruit, and a certain solidity which finds little satisfaction in feeding beggars precariously, but great satisfaction in setting them to work on the land.

Perhaps, then, it may come as a surprise that King Dinis was also a poet, one of the greatest of Portugal’s early poets. We have nearly one hundred and fifty poems under his name. He may not have written them all, some may have been composed by the palace _jograes_, but he showed his good taste and inclination for the national and popular elements in writing or collecting not only poems in the Provençal manner, then on the wane in Portugal, but that older, indigenous poetry which is the most charming feature of early Portuguese literature.

And King Dinis’ poems are among the most charming of all. Here is one of his quaint popular songs, the fascination of which is only faintly discernible in translation:

Friend and lover mine --Be God our shield!-- See the flower o’ the pine And fare afield.

Friend and lover, ah me! --Be God our shield!-- See the flower on the tree And fare afield.

See the flower o’ the pine --Be God our shield!-- Saddle the colt so fine And fare afield.

See the flower on the tree --Be God our shield!-- The bay horse fair to see And fare afield.

Saddle the little bay --Be God our shield-- Hasten, my love, away, And fare afield.

The horse so fair to see --Be God our shield!-- My friend, come speedily To fare afield.

It was King Dinis’ affection for his illegitimate son, Dom Affonso Sanchez, also a poet, that brought trouble on the latter years of his reign. His eldest son and the heir to the throne, Affonso, jealous of the regard, the lands, and privileges bestowed upon Dom Affonso Sanchez, afraid perhaps that the King might devise a way of leaving him the throne, rose in rebellion in 1320 and advanced through Minho to Leiria and Coimbra, ravaging the country as he came. The King, now nearly sixty years old, set out against him and several engagements were fought: it was not till 1322 that Queen Isabel succeeded after strenuous exertions in bringing about peace.

The reconciliation was but temporary. Dom Affonso Sanchez retired to Spain, but returned, and the Prince Affonso rose in arms again in 1323. Again Queen Isabel, going from one to the other, exerted herself to make peace. King Dinis, his anger now thoroughly roused, was not easily appeased. Finally he agreed to increase the Prince’s income, and, much against his will, to part once more from Dom Affonso Sanchez.

Not many months after this settlement King Dinis fell ill at Lisbon, where he had been born, and which he made the real centre of his kingdom (his instinct unfailing in this as in other matters concerning the future greatness of his country). Prince Affonso was summoned from Leiria, and a sincere reconciliation followed. The Queen watched day and night by her husband’s bedside, and to her his last words were spoken when on January 7, 1325, one of the greatest of Portugal’s kings died. He was buried according to his wish in the Convent of São Dinis de Odivellas, which he had founded near Lisbon.

Three hundred years after his death it was still the custom in Portuguese law-courts for a prayer to be said for his soul; and if we consider how far-reaching, how immense were the results of the measures taken by this strong-willed, wise, and energetic ruler, we may conclude that the custom might well be continued in the twentieth century. Humane and affable (_conversavel_, the quality of so many great men), he won the personal love of his people and gave them immediate prosperity, but he also, apparently, saw deep into the future.

II

NUN’ ALVAREZ

(1360-1431)

Mas quem podera dignamente contar os louvores deste virtuoso barom, cujas obras e discretos autos seemdo todos postos em escrito ocupariam gram parte deste livro?--FERNAM LOPEZ, _Cronica del Rei Dom Joam_.

Fifty years after the death of King Dinis it seemed as if the kingdom that he had so carefully built up was to crumble away like dry sand. The disorders and extravagances of King Ferdinand’s reign had brought it to the verge of ruin, and the marriage of his only child Beatrice with the King of Castille in 1383 appeared to destroy the last hope of an independent Portugal.

It is ten years before that date that Nun’ Alvarez Pereira, to whom mainly Portugal was to owe her continued existence as a separate nation, first comes on the scene. His father was the powerful Prior of Crato, Dom Alvaro Gonçalvez Pereira, in high favour at Court, son of the Archbishop of Braga and descendant of a long line of nobles. His mother, Iria Gonçalvez, was lady-in-waiting to the Princess Beatrice.

In 1373 there was war between Portugal and Castile, and a rumour spread that the enemy was approaching Santarem. The Prior sent Nuno and one of his brothers with a few horsemen to reconnoitre. On their return they were received by the King and Queen. Queen Lianor, struck by the bearing of the shy, precocious boy of thirteen, took him for her squire, and the King knighted him, after a suit of armour of his size had at last been found, belonging to the king’s half-brother John, the Master of Avis, he who was king thereafter.

For three years in the palace the Queen’s squire gave his days to riding and the chase, and to the reading of books of chivalry, of Sir Galahad and the knights of the Round Table. Then his father arranged a marriage for him with the rich and noble Dona Lianor d’Alvim, a young widow of Minho.