The death of Afonso Henriques, 1185: Portugal's first king and his legends

The Coimbra annals known as the Chronicon Conimbricense give the event a single line. On the eighth day before the ides of December, in the Era 1223, which is 6 December 1185, “King Ildefonsus of Portugal died” (translated from Latin). The next entry follows: three days later, on the feast of Saint Leocadia, King Sancho entered Coimbra and began to reign in his father's place.1 source1 source

The dead king was in his mid-seventies; the same annals date his birth to 1109, though other years have been proposed. He had held power for 57 years, most of them at war.3 sources3 sources

His last years were not triumphant. Sixteen years earlier he had broken a leg in a gate at Badajoz and been taken prisoner by the king of León. A Portuguese chronicle later claimed that he went back to Coimbra, never sat on a horse again and travelled in a cart. In the summer of 1184 the Almohad caliph himself had besieged Santarém for five weeks.2 sources2 sources

Yet when he died, the frontier lay beyond the Tagus, the pope had called him king, and he was buried in Santa Cruz, the monastery he had endowed and where he kept his treasure.5 sources5 sources

In the early twelfth century there was no Portugal. There was a County of Portugal, held from the king of León by Teresa, a daughter of King Afonso VI, and her husband, Henry of Burgundy. Afonso Henriques, “Afonso son of Henry”, was their son.2 sources2 sources

Henry died young. Teresa governed and found a new ally in a Galician nobleman, the count of Trava. The historian José Mattoso explains how the young Afonso claimed royal rank through his mother, the daughter of a king, but in 1128 was in fact a lord chosen by other lords who had no wish to bow to a Galician count.1 source1 source

The break came on 24 June 1128, the feast of Saint John. On the field of São Mamede, near the castle of Guimarães, Afonso defeated the supporters of his mother and the Trava family and drove them out. The Chronica Gothorum, a set of Latin annals from the twelfth century, says that on that day he entered upon the kingdom, “or rather the principality”, of Portugal.2 sources2 sources

Mattoso writes that São Mamede might have been no more than a feudal skirmish; it mattered because of what came after. Afonso settled in Coimbra, a frontier city facing Muslim al-Andalus, in 1131, and from 1135 raided south from there. There he backed a new house of canons, Santa Cruz, founded in 1131 by the archdeacon Telo, the cathedral schoolmaster João Peculiar and eleven other canons, on the site of royal baths he gave them.2 sources2 sources

On 25 July 1139, the feast of Saint James, he fought a large battle against a Muslim king the chronicles call Esmar, at a place they name Ouric or Aulic, “then the heart of the land of the Saracens”. The Chronica Gothorum describes the Portuguese camped on a height and surrounded from morning to evening, a charge by picked knights, and the flight of the enemy. It adds that Muslim women fought in the manner of the Amazons and were found among the dead.1 source1 source

That is all the twelfth-century record says. It counts the battle in the eleventh year of his reign, dated from 1128, and mentions no crown. Mattoso allows that his knights may have acclaimed him king on the field, as was the custom in Navarre, and that he was hailed again in a triumphal procession into Coimbra. What is documented is that from about 1140 his chancery began to give him the title of king.3 sources3 sources

A title needed recognition. In 1143 the papal legate, Cardinal Guido de Vico, travelled to Coimbra and Zamora, where Afonso met his cousin Alfonso VII of León and Castile, who styled himself emperor. Their meeting on 5 October 1143 is remembered as the Treaty of Zamora, which Mattoso puts in inverted commas. After it, the fighting between the two men stopped.2 sources2 sources

The Torre do Tombo, Portugal's national archive, notes the catch: the pope's representative at Zamora still called Afonso only dux portucalensis, duke of Portugal, and the pope's word counted for more than any neighbour's.1 source1 source

So Afonso went over Alfonso VII's head. In a letter known from its opening words as Claves regni coelorum, he declared himself a vassal of Saint Peter and promised a yearly payment in gold. João Peculiar, by then archbishop of Braga, carried the letter to Rome in 1144. Mattoso thinks it was Peculiar's idea.2 sources2 sources

Rome took 36 years to answer in full. Pope Alexander III signed the bull Manifestis probatum, “it is clearly shown”, on 23 May 1179, when Afonso was nearly 70. It called him king of the Portuguese, granted him the kingdom and confirmed his right to the lands he had taken or would take from the Muslims. Peculiar did not live to see it; he died in 1175.3 sources3 sources

Mattoso reads the bull as Rome's final acceptance of a fact on the ground. The other Iberian kings already treated Afonso as one of them: his daughter Urraca married Fernando II of León, and in 1174 his son Sancho married Dulce, sister of the king of Aragon.2 sources2 sources

Afonso's reputation rests on war. In 1135 he began building the castle of Leiria to stop raiders reaching the fields of Coimbra. Then, in a surprise attack at dawn on 15 March 1147, he took Santarém on the Tagus with a small force; one copy of the annals gives a date in May instead. The siege of Lisbon followed that summer and autumn, with a fleet of northern crusaders on its way to the Holy Land; it has its own article.2 sources2 sources

The push continued into the Alentejo. Alcácer do Sal, on the Sado, fell on the feast of Saint John in June 1158 after a siege of about two months; two earlier attempts with the help of passing crusader fleets had failed. Beja was taken at night on 30 November 1162 by a band led by Fernando Gonçalves. Évora was surprised at night by Geraldo, nicknamed “the Fearless”, a freebooter who handed it to the king. The Coimbra annals put this in 1166; an Arabic chronicle quoted by the historian Guillermo Kurtz gives 1165.3 sources3 sources

Badajoz ended the run. In 1169 Afonso came to help Geraldo, who had entered the town but not its citadel, held for the Almohads. Fernando II of León, his son-in-law, marched to relieve it. According to the chronicles, as Afonso rode out through the gate he struck his leg on the iron bolt, broke it and was captured. The Portuguese annals date the disaster to 1168, but for almost a year afterwards Leonese charters of 1169 and 1170 were dated by the year in which King Fernando captured the king of the Portuguese at Badajoz.2 sources2 sources

To be freed he gave up the castles he had taken in Galicia. The Portuguese chronicles say he swore to present himself to Fernando as soon as he rode again, and so never mounted a horse again. Kurtz reads this as a face-saving story: a man near sixty with a bad fracture probably could not ride.1 source1 source

Only one of his three legitimate sons survived. Born on the night of Saint Martin, 11 November 1154, he was baptised Martinho but known as Sancho. On 15 August 1170, a year after Badajoz, his father knighted him at Coimbra, and José Marques describes him as associated with his father's government in the years that followed.2 sources2 sources

In February 1179, three months before the papal bull, Afonso made his will, disposing of 22,000 maravedis, the coins of the day, deposited at Santa Cruz. Clerks drafted it, but Marques argues that it reflects the king's own concerns: the military orders, the churches being built, a bridge over the Douro and the poor of most dioceses.1 source1 source

The last great crisis of the reign came from the south. The Almohads, a North African dynasty that ruled al-Andalus, were striking back: in 1179 an army besieged Abrantes, and in 1180 another destroyed the castle of Coruche. On 23 June 1184, the eve of Saint John, their caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf arrived before Santarém with his army, laid waste the surrounding country and stayed five weeks.2 sources2 sources

The siege failed and the caliph died during the campaign. The Chronica Gothorum calls it a very great victory for Afonso; later chroniclers gave the defence to Sancho, with the old king leading the relief army. Eighteen months later Afonso was dead.2 sources2 sources

He was first buried in a plain grave at Santa Cruz. The seventeenth-century chronicler António Brandão, quoted by the Coimbra antiquarian Augusto Simões de Castro in 1885, wrote that it was covered with a simple cloth until King Duarte, in the fifteenth century, gave it a canopy of silk and gold.1 source1 source

Manuel I visited in 1502 and found the graves of the first two kings unworthy of them. From 1507 he had the Romanesque church almost entirely rebuilt. The two royal tombs were made between 1518 and 1522 by Diogo de Castilho, probably to a design by his brother João, with effigies carved by the French sculptor Nicolau Chanterene. They first stood at the far end of the nave. Today they face each other across the chancel: Afonso on the left as you look at the altar, Sancho on the right.3 sources3 sources

On the afternoon of 16 July 1520, according to the knight João Homem, who was there, Manuel had the old graves opened and showed the body to the nobles and people of Coimbra, with the lords holding torches and all the canons present. Homem said the body was found whole, in a long white woollen gown and a linen surplice, before it was laid in the new tomb. His account survives in a manuscript written at Santa Cruz around 1650 by the canon Timóteo dos Mártires. A rival chronicle of the canons gives another date, 25 October 1515, and a grander ceremony; Simões de Castro thought it unreliable.1 source1 source

The tomb was opened twice more: in September 1732, probably for a canonisation case that kings pursued in Rome without success, and on 23 October 1832, when King Miguel, passing through Coimbra, wanted to see the remains.1 source1 source

The Gazeta de Lisboa reported what was inside. A small cedar box held a few bones that seemed to be a child's. A larger one, which the canons' records identified as that of Queen Mafalda, held decayed wood and bones. Below lay a third cedar coffer, about six palms long, with the bones of the king: a complete skull with every tooth but one, and arm and leg bones the paper judged proportionate to the ten-palm effigy above.1 source1 source

The epitaph on the tomb says that Afonso beat twenty Moorish kings with a small army, that Christ appeared to him, and that he died aged 91 after reigning 73 years. Brandão already knew this was wrong: the inscription followed Duarte Galvão's chronicle, and the king had probably lived no more than 75 or 76 and a half years, reigning 57 from Saint John's day in 1128.1 source1 source

The vision of Christ is the largest of the legends. In its developed form, Christ appeared to Afonso on the eve of Ourique and promised victory, echoing the vision of the Roman emperor Constantine; the next day Afonso beat five Moorish kings and was raised to king. The historian Matthias Gloël, summarising the research, shows that the chronicles of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries describe only the fighting. One Santa Cruz chronicle written soon after 1340 has him become king at Ourique, still with no miracle.1 source1 source

The miracle is absent from the arguments used during the succession crisis of 1383 to 1385, when a story of divine favour would have been useful, which suggests it did not yet exist. It first appears fully formed in the Crónica de 1419, often attributed to Fernão Lopes, and passed from there into Duarte Galvão's chronicle of the king, finished in 1505, and into Camões's Lusíadas.1 source1 source

In 1632 the Alcobaça monk António Brandão added the Cortes of Lamego, an assembly supposedly held by the new king to bar foreigners from the throne, though he admitted he had seen no original. After 1640 it became a pillar of the case for the Bragança dynasty. Alexandre Herculano, the great nineteenth-century historian, rejected both the miracle and the Cortes, setting off a famous controversy. No historian has defended the Cortes as genuine for more than a century.1 source1 source

His height is a smaller but stubborn legend. João Homem's ten palms would make him about 2.2 metres tall if he meant the common medieval palm of about 22 centimetres, but other systems of measures were also in use. The effigy's length proves nothing, since Chanterene had no likeness to copy.3 sources3 sources

The sword is the one relic that survives. The canons' memoirs tell how King Sebastião borrowed it, with the king's shield, for his African campaign of 1578. The earliest known version of the story, in a 1604 life of Saint Anthony by the Spanish writer Mateo Alemán, claims both came back unused because their ship arrived after the defeat at Alcácer Quibir.1 source1 source

The sword reached the Museu Portuense in Porto in June 1834, after the religious houses were dissolved. Ana Paula Machado, a curator at the Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, notes that it was not listed among the relics when the case for the king's canonisation was assembled in the mid-sixteenth century, and catalogues it as a steel sword 99.5 centimetres long from the last quarter of the sixteenth century, with a question mark. It is now at the Museu Militar do Porto.1 source1 source

On 6 July 2006 a Portuguese and Spanish team led by the forensic anthropologist Eugénia Cunha, of the University of Coimbra, was at work in Santa Cruz. Workmen had begun easing out one of the limestone slabs of the tomb when word came through the university that the national directorate of the heritage institute, IPPAR, had stopped the work.2 sources2 sources

“We were already pulling,” Cunha told the news agency Lusa (translated from Portuguese), while denying that the tomb had been opened. IPPAR's regional directorate had approved the operation two weeks earlier, and so had the diocese of Coimbra. The national directorate overruled them: the authorisation of the culture minister, Isabel Pires de Lima, had not been given. Mortar had been taken from the joints and was put back.2 sources2 sources

The aims were specific: his stature, his age at death, the illnesses his bones recorded, a radiocarbon date, a genetic profile, his diet and a reconstruction of his face. Cunha pointed to similar studies of Columbus, Napoleon and Mozart.2 sources2 sources

The project became a quarrel. A monarchist deputy, Pignatélli Queiroz, said he had seen traces of fresh mortar and had heard that a slab had been sawn, and argued that only parliament should authorise an opening. The university then made a second request. At the end of March 2007 IPPAR's advisory council recommended refusal, saying the project did not guarantee the safeguarding of the heritage, and on 11 May the minister signed a decision endorsing that advice. Lusa reported applause from monarchists, from Duarte Pio of Bragança, pretender to the throne, and from the historian José Mattoso.3 sources3 sources

The university's rector contested the decision on 18 June 2007, but a year after the halted opening Cunha said she had lost hope. The art historian Carla Varela Fernandes adds a caution: the tomb also holds the remains of other men and women, so DNA results would be mixed.3 sources3 sources

Portugal counts its independence from the reign of Afonso Henriques, but not from one agreed date. The museum service that runs Guimarães Castle dates independence to 1143. The annals count his reign from São Mamede in 1128, and tradition makes him king after Ourique in 1139. The Torre do Tombo calls the bull of 1179 Portugal's birth certificate and its Magna Carta.4 sources4 sources

His burial place has a formal status too. The church of Santa Cruz, where he and Sancho lie, has the status of a National Pantheon, like the Jerónimos monastery in Lisbon. And the question of what lies in the tomb remains open: as far as is known, the bones seen in 1832 have not been looked at since.2 sources2 sources