Fernando I dies in Lisbon, and the crisis of 1383–85 begins

In September 1383 King Fernando I was gravely ill and did not want to be seen. He had been staying at Almada, across the Tagus from Lisbon, and asked to be brought into the city after dark. Nobody opened a door or set a candle at a window as he passed, because an order had gone out forbidding it, and he was carried quietly to his palace.1 source

He lay there for days, so changed that he no longer looked like the man who had once seemed a king among all men. That is how Fernão Lopes tells it, and almost every detail of these weeks comes from him: a royal chronicler who was commissioned in 1434 to write for the dynasty that replaced Fernando's line.3 sources

Dressed in the habit of Saint Francis, the king asked for the sacrament. When the articles of the faith were read to him, he answered that he believed them, then added a confession and wept, and everyone in the room wept with him.1 source

He died on the night of Thursday 22 October 1383. The next day his body was put on a bier covered in black cloth and carried by friars to the Franciscan friary at Santarém, with few mourners. Queen Leonor Teles did not go, saying she felt unwell. Lopes, no friend of the queen, adds that some said she feared what people would mutter, and that her absence made them talk more than her presence would have.1 source

Fernando, called o Formoso, the Handsome, had reigned since 1367. He was the ninth King of Portugal and the last of its first dynasty. He inherited a kingdom in fair shape and spent much of his reign fighting Castile, Portugal's much larger neighbour, in three wars that went badly.2 sources

During the second war a Castilian army reached Lisbon, and Fernando had a new wall built round the city between 1373 and 1375. The Cerca Fernandina was about 4,700 metres long, with 76 towers and more than 30 gates and posterns. In 1384 it helped Lisbon hold out against a Castilian siege.2 sources

The wars emptied the treasury, and repeated debasement of the coinage pushed up prices. After his death the leading men of Lisbon told the regent that his ruinous spending and his “unusable coins” had cost people most of their wealth, and that he had governed on the advice of foreigners.2 sources

His marriage caused open anger. Leonor Teles was already the wife of a nobleman, João Lourenço da Cunha, when Fernando took her. Lopes says some 3,000 armed Lisbon townsmen, led by a tailor named Fernão Vasques, marched on the palace to protest, but the king married her publicly anyway at the Hospitaller monastery of Leça, in the north.1 source

Their daughter Beatriz was born in 1372. By the 1380s a Galician nobleman, João Fernandes Andeiro, known as Count Andeiro, was Fernando's leading diplomat and was widely said to be the queen's lover.4 sources

Peace with Castile came in 1382, and Leonor, Andeiro and many nobles came to see a union of the two royal families as the best way to protect their interests. Juan I of Castile had been widowed in 1382, and Andeiro carried Fernando's offer of his daughter's hand to him. In March 1383 Juan's envoy, the Archbishop of Santiago, arrived at Salvaterra de Magos, on the Tagus, where Fernando was already ill, to settle the terms.3 sources

The Treaty of Salvaterra de Magos married Beatriz to Juan. The historian Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa dates it 2 April 1383; the Fundação Batalha de Aljubarrota, which runs the Aljubarrota battlefield centre, gives 6 April.2 sources

If Fernando died without a legitimate son, the crown would go to Beatriz, with Juan as her husband, and then to their children; only if that line failed would it pass to Juan and his heirs. Leonor would govern as regent until a son of Beatriz was over 14. The kingdoms were meant to stay separate, but many Portuguese read the terms as absorption by Castile.3 sources

Beatriz, under 12, was married at Elvas on 14 May and Badajoz on 17 May 1383. The treaty was approved by the Castilian Cortes at Valladolid in August and by the Portuguese Cortes at Santarém in September. By the end of October Fernando was dead.3 sources

As the treaty said, Leonor took over as “governor and regent of the kingdoms of Portugal and the Algarve”. She left the palace where Fernando had died for another near the church of São Martinho, and received visitors in a room hung with mourning, weeping for her husband. Lopes says people did not forget her bad name.1 source

At Juan's request, Leonor ordered towns to raise a banner for Beatriz with the customary cry, “Arraial, arraial, for Queen Dona Beatriz!”. In Lisbon the riders got as far as the cathedral, heard how angry the streets were and turned back. In Santarém an old woman answered the cry with one for the Infante Dom João, a furrier named Domingos Anes drew his sword, and the alcaide, the town's royal commander, fled into the castle dragging the banner while the crowd shouted “Long live the Infante Dom João!”.3 sources

That Infante, Fernando's half-brother, was out of reach. After killing his own wife, Maria Teles, Leonor's sister, on the strength of hints that he might then marry Beatriz, he had fled to Castile. When Fernando died, Juan I had him arrested, telling him it was not for anything he had done but for fear that some Portuguese would take him for their king.3 sources

João, Master of the military Order of Avis, was Fernando's half-brother, an illegitimate son of King Pedro I, and was 25 by Lopes's count. On 6 December 1383 he rode to the queen's palace in Lisbon with about 20 companions in mail. Andeiro pressed him to stay and eat; the Master refused, then led the count by the hand into an outer hall and spoke to him quietly by a window.2 sources

The Master drew a long knife and struck Andeiro on the head. The wound was not fatal, and as the count staggered towards the queen's chamber Rui Pereira ran him through with a sword. The Master ordered the doors shut and sent his page galloping through the streets.1 source

The cry was false, and planned. Lopes says the page did what had been arranged beforehand, and Álvaro Pais, a Lisbon ally of the Master, was already armed and waiting when he arrived. Crowds ran to the palace with firewood to burn the doors, until the Master showed himself at a window. Later that day a mob found the Bishop of Lisbon, Martinho, a Castilian from Zamora, in the cathedral tower, killed him and threw his body down.1 source

Lopes is careful with his hero here. He insists the Master killed Andeiro only to avenge the dishonour done to his dead brother, not out of any wish to rule, and says he even had two ships made ready to take him to England afterwards.1 source

Leonor left Lisbon for Alenquer and turned down an offer that she marry the Master and govern with him. In December, at the monastery of São Domingos, he accepted the people's call to be “Regedor e Defensor do Reino”, regent and defender of the kingdom. His council's chancellor was a lawyer, João das Regras, and in Lisbon he took gifts and loans from the citizens to pay for war.2 sources

Elsewhere, most castle commanders stayed loyal to Leonor and Beatriz, but towns rose against them. In Beja, early in 1384, townsmen seized the castle, captured Admiral Lançarote Pessanha, who was on his way to bring the town over to Castile, locked him in the keep and then killed him. Évora, Estremoz and Portalegre followed.2 sources

Juan I was already in Portugal by January 1384 and entered Santarém on the 12th. There he made Leonor hand over the regency, breaking the treaty, and in February, after uncovering a plot against him, sent her as a prisoner to the convent of Tordesillas, where she stayed until her death.1 source

On 6 April, at Atoleiros near Fronteira, the 23-year-old Nuno Álvares Pereira, the Master's commander in the Alentejo, beat a much larger Castilian force. The Fundação Batalha de Aljubarrota puts the Castilians at 5,000 and Nuno's men at 1,500; numbers for medieval armies are rarely precise.1 source

The Castilian fleet began arriving off Lisbon on 26 May, and on 29 May Juan's army closed the siege, with his headquarters at Santos-o-Velho. On 18 July a Portuguese fleet from Porto, 17 naus (sailing ships) and 17 galleys, fought its way into the Tagus past a Castilian fleet of 40 naus and its galleys. It lost three naus, but the rest got their food ashore.2 sources

Lopes adds that within a week 21 more naus and three galleys joined Juan, making 61 naus and 16 galleys, not counting carracks. The Fundação Batalha de Aljubarrota gives those later totals as the Castilian strength in the battle.2 sources

It was not enough. Refugees from the countryside had crowded inside the walls, and Lopes describes wheat at four libras the alqueire, a dozen eggs at 12 soldos and people eating bread made from olive pulp. Poor people, prostitutes and Jews were pushed out of the gates as useless mouths; the Castilians at first fed them, then whipped them back.1 source

Outside the walls plague, which had followed the Castilians since they entered Portugal, flared through the camp and the fleet. Lopes says 150 to 200 died on some days and that more than 2,000 of Juan's best men-at-arms were lost, among them the Master of Santiago and the Castilian admiral. Juan's brother-in-law Carlos of Navarre begged him not to tempt God by staying.2 sources

Juan gave up and left for Castile on 3 September 1384; his fleet sailed on 28 October. Lisbon held a procession of thanksgiving, and nobles, clergy and people swore to the Master as regent and defender. He summoned the Cortes, the assembly of the kingdom, to Coimbra.1 source

The Cortes met at Coimbra from 3 March to 6 April 1385. João das Regras counted about fifty representatives of towns and cities there, besides nobles and clergy. They had to pay for the war and decide who should be king. The two main parties backed the Infante João, still a prisoner in Castile, and the Master; a few still spoke for Beatriz or Juan.2 sources

João das Regras answered them all. Lopes gives the speech at length, and admits he was working from what others had written down of it. Regras began by conceding that there were plenty of heirs: Juan, Beatriz, and the two sons of Pedro I and Inês de Castro. Then he set out to show that none of them could inherit.1 source

Beatriz was illegitimate, he argued, because her mother's first husband was alive when Leonor married Fernando, and gossip about Leonor made the girl's paternity doubtful. Juan had broken the treaty. The Church then had rival popes, and Juan and Beatriz obeyed the one in Avignon, not Urban VI in Rome, whom the Master's party followed. Nobody could prove that Pedro had married Inês, so her sons were illegitimate too.1 source

To those who said so small and divided an assembly could not choose a king, Regras replied that if every cardinal but one died, that one could still elect a pope.1 source

Arguments were not the only pressure. Nuno Álvares Pereira kept 300 well-armed squires in the city, which, the Fundação Batalha de Aljubarrota notes, helped shorten the debate. On 6 April 1385 the Master was proclaimed King João I, and the next day he made Nuno, then 24, constable, commander of the army. The parchment recording the acclamation, with ten wax seals, is in the Torre do Tombo national archive.2 sources

Juan came back. A Castilian raid into the Beira was crushed near Trancoso on 29 May 1385, and on 8 July the main army crossed the border at Almeida and marched by Coimbra and Leiria towards Lisbon, which the Castilian fleet had blockaded since April. At a council at Abrantes on 6 August, João I first favoured raiding Castile instead, but Nuno insisted on fighting, and the king joined him.1 source

On 14 August 1385, on the plateau of São Jorge near Aljubarrota, the Portuguese dug ditches and pits across a narrow front and waited, with dismounted men-at-arms in the centre and crossbowmen and English archers on the wings. The Castilian attack began at about a quarter to six in the evening, led by French knights, and broke within about an hour. Juan fled to Santarém, then by sea to Seville.1 source

England had helped from the start. In December 1383 the Master sent envoys to Richard II and to John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who claimed the Castilian crown through his wife, and some 800 Anglo-Gascon troops later fought for him. The Treaty of Windsor, dated 9 May 1386, made a perpetual league between the two kings and let their subjects trade and live in each other's kingdoms.3 sources

On 2 February 1387 João married Gaunt's daughter, Philippa of Lancaster, in Porto cathedral. The king rode through the night to get there, because the church season about to begin barred weddings until after Easter; the feast followed on 14 February. The alliance was renewed many times, including in a secret declaration of 1899, the subject of a separate Lisboeta article.3 sources

Almost everything above comes, directly or not, from one man. Fernão Lopes was born in the 1380s, too late to see the crisis himself, and kept the royal archive in the tower of Lisbon castle from 1418 to 1454. In 1434 King Duarte, João I's son, gave him a pension of 14,000 reais a year to write the chronicles of the kings of Portugal. No original survives; we read him in copies made from the late fifteenth century on.3 sources

Lopes declared that lying was far from his intention, and he did work from documents and from the testimony of people who had been there. But he was writing for the son of the man whose seizure of power he described. The historian Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa puts it plainly.2 sources

Because João I had no hereditary right, Sousa argues, Lopes built his case on the support of the towns and on the speech of João das Regras. The bias shows in details: Lopes insists that no Portuguese, inside the city or among the prisoners, caught the plague that killed thousands of Castilians so close by. He also called the years after 1383 a “seventh age” of the world.2 sources

The other side was written too. Pero López de Ayala, chancellor of Castile, was captured at Aljubarrota and wrote the Castilian royal chronicle; Jean Froissart told the story for French and English readers. A doctoral thesis under way at the University of Porto reads the three side by side, rather than taking Lopes's version alone.1 source

Aljubarrota settled the question in the field. Some castles held out for Beatriz after the battle, and Castile never again gathered an army big enough to threaten the kingdom. Peace was signed at Ayllón, near Segovia, on 31 October 1411, and Portugal remained a separate kingdom under the House of Avis.2 sources

The alliance with England is still in force and is often called the oldest in the world. Lopes's chronicles, with their crowds, sieges and starving townspeople, rank among the classics of Portuguese literature as well as history.4 sources