The killing of Inês de Castro: Coimbra, 7 January 1355

The canons of Santa Cruz, the great Augustinian house in Coimbra, kept a book in which they noted events worth remembering. Under the Era 1393 someone wrote a single line in Latin: on 7 January, Dona Enes was beheaded by order of King Afonso IV. The writer did not need to add her surname: readers would know who Dona Enes was.1 source1 source

She was Inês de Castro, and she died in the houses of the Poor Clares' monastery of Santa Clara in Coimbra, where she lived with the king's son and heir, Pedro. Almost everything else about that morning, from the king's ride from Montemor-o-Velho to the children at the door, comes from chronicles written generations later.3 sources3 sources

Inês was born around 1325, an illegitimate daughter of Pedro Fernández de Castro, called “of the War”, one of the greatest lords of Galicia and Castile, and of Aldonça Lourenço de Valadares (Soares in some accounts), from the Portuguese lesser nobility. She grew up at Peñafiel, near Valladolid, at the court of the writer and magnate Juan Manuel.2 sources2 sources

Juan Manuel's daughter Constança was promised to Pedro, heir of Afonso IV of Portugal. When she came to Portugal, in 1340 or 1341, Inês came with her as a lady-in-waiting and kinswoman. Rui de Pina, writing in the early sixteenth century, says it was soon noticed that the prince loved her, and that Inês was made godmother of Pedro and Constança's first son, Luís, who died in infancy.4 sources4 sources

Being godmother made Inês the prince's comadre, a spiritual kinship that the Church treated as a bar to marriage. Pina says it was done to head off the affair, and the historian Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa thinks Constança arranged it on purpose. Afonso IV then sent Inês away, to her aunt Teresa at the castle of Albuquerque in Castile, near the border. Distance did not end the affair.3 sources3 sources

Constança gave birth to the heir, Fernando, in 1345 and died young. The year of her death is uncertain: Aubertin's notes of 1878 give 1345, while Vasconcelos e Sousa thinks 1348 more likely. Pedro brought Inês back and lived with her openly. They had four children: Afonso, who died young, João, Dinis and Beatriz. Pedro did not remarry.4 sources4 sources

The danger, as the court saw it, was her family. Her brothers Fernando and Álvaro Pires de Castro were great lords in Castile, and Pina says that through Inês they began to gain a large following in Portugal. In 1354 Inês's half-sister Juana de Castro married King Pedro I of Castile, who left her the next day.3 sources3 sources

Castile was sliding into civil war, and the Castros were among the nobles in revolt. According to the historians José Mattoso and Armindo de Sousa, they tried to draw the Portuguese heir into their cause by offering him the throne of Castile, which would have meant broken treaties and war. Pedro of Portugal was himself a grandson of Sancho IV of Castile through his mother, Queen Beatriz.2 sources2 sources

Pina gives the councillors' second fear. Fernando, Constança's son, was the legitimate heir. If the Castros could arrange his death, one of Inês's sons might inherit Portugal and the Algarve. The king's advisers said there was no remedy except to press Pedro to marry and to keep Inês out of the kingdom, and, if he refused, to have her killed while Afonso IV still lived.2 sources2 sources

Pina says Pedro was warned. His mother, Queen Beatriz, the Archbishop of Braga, Gonçalo Pereira, and other prelates urged him to put Inês somewhere safe. He took it all for threats that would never be carried out.2 sources2 sources

In Pina's chronicle, written between about 1514 and 1522 and printed in 1653, the king was at Montemor-o-Velho, west of Coimbra, when he agreed to the killing. He rode to Coimbra with many armed men. Inês, warned and unable to escape, met him at the door with her children, weeping, and begged for mercy. The king, moved, turned to leave.2 sources2 sources

Some of the knights who had come with him then made him say they could go back and kill her if they wished. Pina names three as the chief of them: Diogo Lopes Pacheco, son of the lord of Ferreira, Álvaro Gonçalves, the chief bailiff (meirinho-mor), and Pêro Coelho. They killed her. Pina adds that people held it against the king as abominable cruelty rather than justice.2 sources2 sources

Fernão Lopes, the royal chronicler commissioned in 1434, says he had already told the killing elsewhere, probably in a chronicle of Afonso IV that is now lost. In his chronicle of Pedro he names the same three as the men Pedro blamed most, but disagrees about one of them. Coelho and Gonçalves were guilty enough, he writes, but Pacheco was not, because he had often sent word through a friend warning the prince to guard Inês from his father's anger.3 sources3 sources

Pedro went to war with his father. With his own men and those of Inês's brothers he raided the king's lands between the Douro and the Minho and in Trás-os-Montes, then tried to take Porto, where Archbishop Gonçalo Pereira shut himself in and defended the city. Pedro, who was fond of the archbishop, withdrew.2 sources2 sources

Peace was made at Canaveses in August 1355. Pina credits Queen Beatriz and the archbishop; Mattoso and Sousa credit mainly the Prior of the Hospitallers, Álvaro Gonçalves Pereira. Pedro pardoned everyone involved in the death of Inês, his father pardoned the prince's men, and Pedro was given wide powers of justice in his father's name. Both sides swore oaths.2 sources2 sources

Afonso IV knew his son still bore them ill will, oaths or no oaths. Dying in Lisbon in May 1357, he called Pacheco, Coelho and Gonçalves and told them to leave the kingdom, because he could no longer protect them. They fled to Castile while Pedro was hunting by the river Canha, about eight leagues away. Once king, at 37, Pedro declared the three traitors and gave away their lands.2 sources2 sources

For as long as Inês lived, and well into his own reign, Pedro never called her his wife. Lopes says Afonso IV often sent to ask whether he had married her, offering to honour her as such, and Pedro always said no. Then, in June 1360, at Cantanhede near Coimbra, he called a notary before his chief nobles and swore on the Gospels that he had married her. Lopes gives only the month, some four years into the reign; the year comes from Pina and modern historians.3 sources3 sources

The wedding, he said, had taken place at Bragança about seven years earlier, by words of present consent; he could not remember the day or the month. He had kept it secret for fear of his father. Three days later, in Coimbra, two witnesses were examined: Gil, by then Bishop of Guarda, who said he had married them, and Estêvão Lobato, a royal servant, who said it was on a 1 January.1 source1 source

Before bishops, clergy and a crowd, Count João Afonso of Barcelos announced the marriage and read a bull of Pope John XXII, granted when Pedro was a boy, allowing him to marry a noblewoman related to him in certain degrees of kinship. A later summary chronicle, the Crónicas dos reis de Portugal, says plainly why Pedro did it: he wanted the children he had by her to be legitimate.2 sources2 sources

Lopes then gives a chapter to those who did not believe it. No sane man, they argued, forgets the day of so notable a wedding, least of all one held on New Year's Day. Why had he not said so as soon as his father was dead? And it all looked like Pedro of Castile, who after María de Padilla died declared before his Cortes at Seville, with four witnesses on oath, that he had married her first, and had her called queen though she was dead. Lopes says he will not decide, and leaves the reader to choose.1 source1 source

The question came back in 1385, when the Cortes of Coimbra chose a new king after the crisis that followed Fernando I's death. The lawyer João das Regras argued that the marriage was unproven and in any case invalid: Inês was Pedro's kinswoman and had been godmother to his son Luís. To make the point he named a witness sitting in the hall who had been one of the child's godparents: Diogo Lopes Pacheco.1 source1 source

Pedro of Portugal and Pedro of Castile then struck a secret bargain, which Lopes places in the same year: each would arrest and hand over the other's fugitives. Castilian nobles who had taken refuge in Portugal were seized and sent to Seville, where they were killed. In Castile, Coelho and Gonçalves were taken. Pacheco had gone partridge hunting that morning.1 source1 source

A lame beggar who was given alms at Pacheco's house slipped out of the guarded town, found him on the road and told him what had happened. Pacheco put on the beggar's rags, walked towards Aragon, hired himself to muleteers and escaped, eventually reaching Henry of Trastámara in France. He later called the whole exchange a trade of donkeys for donkeys.1 source1 source

The other two were brought to Santarém. Pedro had them tortured to make them name who else was guilty and what his father had plotted against him. They told him nothing he wanted to hear. When the king struck Coelho in the face, Coelho called him a traitor, a perjurer, a butcher of men.1 source1 source

Coelho's heart was torn out through his chest, Gonçalves's through his back, and their bodies were burned in front of the palace, where the king could watch while he ate. Lopes, who otherwise admired Pedro's justice, says the king lost much of his good name by breaking his word to men who had been given safe refuge.1 source1 source

Pedro could do nothing more for Inês, Lopes writes, except honour her bones. He ordered a tomb of white stone, finely worked, with her image on the lid, and placed it in the church of the Cistercian monastery of Alcobaça. It did not stand at the entrance, where earlier kings lay, but inside, on the right, near the main chapel.1 source1 source

Her body came from Santa Clara on a bier carried by knights, followed by nobles, ladies and clergy, along roads lined with men holding lit candles for the 17 leagues to Alcobaça. Lopes calls it the most honoured translation of a body that Portugal had seen until then. Pina dates it to three years after Pedro became king, which means about 1360 or 1361.3 sources3 sources

Pedro had a matching tomb made for himself and set close to hers. He died at Estremoz before dawn on Monday 18 January 1367. On his deathbed he pardoned Diogo Lopes Pacheco, having become sure he had no part in the killing, and his son Fernando restored Pacheco's property. The body was taken to Alcobaça and laid in its tomb on the Wednesday, once Fernando arrived.1 source1 source

The monastery was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1989. Its own account of the listing names the tombs of Pedro and Inês as examples of the finest Gothic funerary sculpture.1 source1 source

The best-known version of the story says that Pedro had Inês dug up, dressed, crowned and seated on a throne, and made the nobles kiss her hand. Lopes, who describes the tomb and the procession in detail, mentions no such ceremony. The historian Ricardo Raimundo says no document proves it or even suggests it happened, and traces the episode to a Spanish play.2 sources2 sources

The pieces arrive one at a time. The Crónicas dos reis de Portugal, a summary chronicle attributed to the sixteenth-century writer Gaspar Correia, says Pedro had her body carried to Alcobaça “with a crown on her head”, which may mean the effigy. Camões, in 1572, called her the woman who was queen after she was dead. In 1577 the Galician friar Jerónimo Bermúdez, writing as Antonio de Silva, published two tragedies in Madrid; in the second, Nise laureada, Pedro exhumes her, marries her publicly and crowns her.4 sources4 sources

The hand-kissing is in print by 1628, in a work of history. In his Epitome of Portuguese Histories, printed in Madrid that year, Manuel de Faria e Sousa wrote that before the burial at Alcobaça Pedro ordered all his vassals to kiss her hand as their queen. The enlarged version, Europa Portuguesa, printed in Lisbon in 1679, moved the ceremony to Santa Clara: the corpse dressed, crowned and enthroned, the vassals kissing the bones that had been beautiful hands. Raimundo credits Faria e Sousa with bringing the episode to Portugal, after which it was retold as history.3 sources3 sources

By the nineteenth century the ceremony was told as fact. J. J. Aubertin's English Lusiads of 1878 quotes in its introduction an earlier account in which Inês was placed on a throne and crowned and all present kissed her hand. His translation of Camões's line goes further than the Portuguese: “Who after being slain was crowned as Queen.” Camões wrote only that she was queen.1 source1 source

Camões gave Inês eighteen stanzas of Canto III of the Lusiads, from 118 to 135, straight after his account of Afonso IV's victory at Salado in 1340. His Inês is “fair Ignez” in the fields of the Mondego, teaching the hills Pedro's name. Brought before the king by her killers, she pleads for her children. The king wants to pardon her, but the people, whom Camões calls stubborn, and her fate do not.1 source1 source

Tradition places that fountain in the Quinta das Lágrimas, an estate next to Santa Clara. Two springs there fed a channel that Queen Isabel, Pedro's grandmother, had built in 1326 to carry water to the convent. One is the Fonte dos Amores, said to be where Pedro and Inês met. The other is the Fonte das Lágrimas, the Fountain of Tears, where a stone is carved with Camões's stanza. Camões himself gave the fountain's name as “the loves of Inês”.3 sources3 sources

Local tradition adds more. Pedro is said to have floated letters to Inês in little wooden boats along the water channel, and the red algae on the stones of the Fonte das Lágrimas are said to be her blood. The estate is now a hotel. According to a history of it in the tourism trade magazine TNews, it has belonged to the same family since 1730, and the Duke of Wellington stayed there during the Peninsular War.2 sources2 sources

The killing settled nothing it was meant to settle. Inês's sons fought for Castile against Portugal, João das Regras said, and so lost any right to reign. The crown passed instead to Fernando and then, in 1385, to another of Pedro's sons, João, Master of Avis, born to a Galician woman named Teresa.2 sources2 sources

Her story went further than any of them. Between Garcia de Resende's verses in the Cancioneiro Geral of 1516 and a 2018 film, there are plays, poems, novels and, by the count of the Spanish theatre company Nao d'Amores, 29 operas on 21 different librettos. Adrien Roig's bibliography of 1986, Inesiana, already listed more than 1,400 studies and adaptations.2 sources2 sources