The Cortes of Coimbra elect João I king of Portugal, April 1385

The boys of Coimbra had made their horses themselves, out of canes cut in the reed beds, with pennants tied on. On Friday 3 March 1385 they ran out along the Leiria road for about a league, a few miles, to meet the man riding in from the south. As they ran they shouted for him as if he were already king.1 source1 source

The rider was João, Master of the military Order of Avis, an illegitimate son of King Pedro I, who had governed the part of Portugal loyal to him for fifteen months. He and his commander Nuno Álvares Pereira took the boys' cries for a sign from God, speaking through children as through the mouths of prophets. Outside the gates the clergy waited in procession. The Master got down from his horse, knelt, kissed the cross and walked into the city with them.1 source1 source

He was lodged in the royal palace of the Alcáçova, at the top of the hill, where most of the kings of the first dynasty had been born. Not everyone came out to greet him. Gonçalo Mendes de Vasconcelos, who held Coimbra castle, said his oath still bound him to Fernando I's widow, Leonor Teles. A few days later he changed sides, and he was present when the Master was elected.2 sources2 sources

Fernando I had died in Lisbon on 22 October 1383 without a son, and a treaty signed that spring left his crown to his daughter Beatriz, born in 1372, and her husband, Juan I of Castile. To many Portuguese that meant absorption by their larger neighbour. On 6 December 1383 the Master killed the queen's favourite, Count Andeiro, Lisbon rose, and he became regent and defender of the kingdom.2 sources2 sources

Juan invaded. On 6 April 1384 Nuno Álvares Pereira beat a much larger Castilian force at Atoleiros, near Fronteira, and from May Juan besieged Lisbon until plague in his camp drove him home on 3 September. In Lisbon nobles, clergy and people swore to the Master again as regent and defender, and he summoned the Cortes to Coimbra.1 source1 source

Coimbra filled with the men who meant to defend Portugal. Lopes names the Archbishop of Braga, five bishops and several abbots. Among the nobles were Nuno Álvares Pereira, Vasco Martins da Cunha the Elder with his sons, and Diogo Lopes Pacheco, one of the three men Pedro I had blamed for the killing of Inês de Castro in 1355, though Lopes thought him innocent. João das Regras counted about fifty procurators of towns and cities.2 sources2 sources

Not every town could send them. Santarém, the usual fifth great town, was under Castilian obedience, so the first bench of procurators was Lisbon, Porto, Évora and Coimbra. Lopes thought the Master had come for one purpose only, and he offered proof: Lisbon's corregedor, the crown's judge in the city, and its leading citizens had empowered their two procurators, Pedro Afonso Sardinha and Martim Lourenço, “to raise and receive as king and lord of these kingdoms the very noble lord Dom João, Master of the knighthood of Avis”.2 sources2 sources

Évora's mandate said the same, Lopes adds, and so did those of all the other towns. Armindo de Sousa doubts that the summons ever mentioned choosing a king. The council minutes of Loulé, in the Algarve, discuss the coming Cortes several times up to 2 April 1385 and never speak of an election.2 sources2 sources

Before the sessions began the town was already split. One party, led by Martim Vasques da Cunha and his brothers, wanted the Infante João, Inês de Castro's elder son, held prisoner in Castile since Juan arrested him in 1383, with the Master as regent until he was freed. Most of the other nobles and the common people would hear none of it: one prince was in a Castilian prison and the other had made war on Portugal.2 sources2 sources

The procurators met apart from the nobles, and one of them lost patience with the endless talk.1 source1 source

Nuno Álvares Pereira, then 24, led the Master's side among the nobles, and his quarrels with Martim Vasques grew so heated that the Master begged him to keep the peace. Nuno offered instead to rid him of “this braggart”. The Master refused. Then one day, while the Cunha brothers were with the Master in the palace, Nuno walked in with more than 300 squires in mail coats, with swords and shields. He spoke mildly to the Master, and one by one the Cunhas and their kinsmen, Diogo Lopes Pacheco and his sons among them, slipped away.2 sources2 sources

The case for the Master in the assembly was made by João das Regras, a doctor of laws whom Lopes calls a man of perfect authority, famous among lawyers for his subtlety and clear speech. Lopes did not hear him. He admits he worked from what some laymen wrote down of the speech, “the crumbs” of what they could catch.2 sources2 sources

Regras began with a surprise. Some said the kingdom had no lawful heir, he told the assembly, but he would show that it had plenty: Juan of Castile and Beatriz, and Pedro I's sons by Inês de Castro. First he dealt with those who said so small and divided a gathering could not choose a king at all.1 source1 source

Then he took the heirs apart. Beatriz was born of a marriage made while her mother's first husband lived. Juan had broken the treaty. The Church then had two rival popes, and Juan and Beatriz obeyed the one at Avignon rather than Urban VI in Rome, which made them schismatics in the eyes of Portugal's defenders. The kingdoms, he concluded, were entirely vacant.1 source1 source

Inês's sons were the hard part, because Pedro I had sworn in 1360 that he had secretly married her. Regras called the story unbelievable, and argued that such a marriage would have been void anyway: Inês was Pedro's kinswoman and had stood godmother to his son Luís. The Cunha party would not be moved.2 sources2 sources

So, Lopes says, Regras produced documents. He read a letter in which Afonso IV asked the Archbishop of Braga, then at the papal court, to stop the Pope from granting his son a dispensation to marry Inês. He showed a parchment roll, worn with age and signed by Pedro's councillors, in which Pedro as king asked the Pope to confirm the marriage and make the children legitimate. Then he read Pope Innocent VI's letter refusing.2 sources2 sources

According to Lopes, this ended the argument. The assembly was astonished by things it had not known, and Martim Vasques da Cunha and his allies dropped their objection. Regras then listed what a king needed: good lineage, a great heart to defend the land, love for his subjects, goodness and devotion. The Master was a king's son and had held Lisbon through the siege and the hunger. Regras ended with the formula of election.1 source1 source

Prelates, nobles and procurators went together to the Master and asked him to accept. He said no. He was not fit for such an honour, he told them, and there were impediments: the defect of his birth and the vows he had taken in the Order of Avis. He would fight the King of Castile anyway, and if he won as a knight, the honour would be greater; if he lost as a king, the shame would be worse.1 source1 source

They begged him, Lopes says, at the tops of their voices. Without a king, people would lose heart, and the kingdom would fall to schismatics, rebels against the Church. They promised their bodies and goods, and embassies to Rome to obtain dispensations for his birth. The Master accepted, “in honour and reverence of the Holy Father and of the Apostolic See of Rome”.1 source1 source

Nuno was put in charge of making the palace ready. Walking through the hall where the new king would dine, he could not hold back: “This time my lord the Master will be king, by God's pleasure and whoever it may grieve.”1 source1 source

Lopes dates the day exactly: Thursday, the sixth day of April in the Era of 1423, the reckoning then used in Portugal, which is AD 1385, and 6 April 1385 was a Thursday in the Julian calendar. João was raised as king with church ceremony and secular rite, followed by spear-throwing at a wooden board and other games, in Coimbra and in the towns that held for him. In Lisbon a procession went from the cathedral to São Domingos, and the royal banner was carried through the streets to cries of “Real, real, for King Dom João!”1 source1 source

Lopes describes no crowning. The art historian António Filipe Pimentel thinks João was enthroned in royal robes and insignia at a Mass said by the Bishop of Lamego, not the Archbishop of Braga, probably in the palace chapel, and that Regras most likely spoke in the palace's great hall. The act of election itself survives in the Torre do Tombo, the national archive: a large parchment with signatures, notaries' marks and ten pendant wax seals, the seal of the council of Coimbra in the centre.3 sources3 sources

The new king filled his household at once. Nuno Álvares Pereira was made constable, the commander of the army, an office Fernando I had introduced when English troops came to Portugal in his reign; the Fundação Batalha de Aljubarrota, which runs the battlefield centre, dates the appointment to the day after the Cortes closed. João das Regras took over the chancery in place of the chancellor, Lourenço Anes Fogaça, who was in England. The king kept the mastership of Avis for himself.3 sources3 sources

The towns had drafted their general articles before the election, and some were written as no Cortes wrote before or after. The first five, and one more, read as decisions of the assembly: “we agree”, “we consider”, “you will promise us”. The rest were requests in the usual pleading style. The historian Armindo de Sousa traced the radical ones to Lisbon, which also brought 32 special articles of its own, eight more than the general list.1 source1 source

They justified one of the boldest with a maxim of Roman law, which they put in Portuguese as “it is right that, in things which concern all and of which all feel the burden, all should be called to them”. They asked the king to make no war or peace, coin no money and marry no wife without their agreement, to hold Cortes every year, and to keep Fernando's councillors and the dowager queen's people out of office.2 sources2 sources

João I answered carefully. The war he had begun he would fight, Lopes reports, but he would start no other without their counsel. On his marriage he would promise nothing, since kings before him had married freely. He would force no one to marry by royal letter, as Fernando and Leonor had done, and he lifted the ban on hunting deer and partridge around Lisbon. Lisbon got the seat of the royal tribunals and a promise that only a native of the city would keep the public seals.1 source1 source

Then came the bill. The king had agreed to lift the sales taxes and levy no others, and the towns had promised him whatever the war required, so they voted a pedido, a one-off grant, of 400,000 libras, which Lopes reckoned at about 100,000 dobras. It was paid in old coin and silver and reminted as a debased real worth 10 soldos, at mints in Lisbon and Évora, to pay the soldiers. Almada, which had suffered a Castilian siege, was let off its share.2 sources2 sources

Lisbon was paid in land. A charter dated at Coimbra on 10 April confirmed all its privileges, and another gave it Sintra, Torres Vedras, Alenquer, Mafra, Colares, Ericeira and Vila Verde as its termo, the district it governed, so that the city's jurisdiction reached eight leagues out. Porto received Bouças, Maia, Gaia and other districts around it.1 source1 source

The election settled who would lead the war, not who would win it. A Castilian fleet was back off Lisbon in early April. From Coimbra the king sent envoys to England, to ask for recognition and troops, to the Pope and to the towns, and on 15 April he left for Porto, where he was welcomed with celebrations.1 source1 source

A Castilian raid into the Beira was beaten near Trancoso on 29 May. Juan I then invaded with his main army and was defeated at Aljubarrota on 14 August 1385. The English alliance was sealed at Windsor in May 1386.2 sources2 sources

The towns' great project came to little. Sousa found that the king satisfied the councils without weakening the monarchy his predecessors had built, and quoted the advice the Master's Lisbon ally Álvaro Pais had given him at the start of the crisis: give what is not yours, promise what you do not have, and forgive those who did you no wrong. Of the fourteen councillors proposed, João I kept six, and he reserved the right to choose his council himself.2 sources2 sources

Coimbra gave Portugal its second dynasty, the House of Avis. João I reigned until his death in 1433, almost half a century and the longest reign of the Portuguese Middle Ages. His son and successor Duarte gave Fernão Lopes a pension in 1434 to write the chronicles of the kings.3 sources3 sources

The historian Marcello Caetano, in a study first published in 1951, thought the towns' articles pointed towards a representative government that might have developed along lines parallel to Britain's. Sousa called the project revolutionary in intention and a failure in fact. João I went on calling Cortes often, six times at Coimbra alone between 1385 and 1400.3 sources3 sources

Much of the drama survives only because Fernão Lopes wrote it down. Historians now read him alongside the documents, among them the towns' articles, copied in Porto's municipal archive, and the sealed act in the Torre do Tombo.3 sources3 sources