Afonso V, the African king: born in Sintra, 15 January 1432

On the morning of 24 August 1471, St Bartholomew's day, the Portuguese poured over the walls of Arzila, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The fighting was worst in the mosque and then in the castle. By the end, the royal chronicler Rui de Pina wrote, every defender was dead or captive: about 2,000 killed and 5,000 taken, by common estimate.1 source1 source

Among the Portuguese dead was João Coutinho, Count of Marialva, a young lord killed in the mosque. King Afonso V went there when the town fell and found a cross already laid on the count's body. Beside the corpse he knighted his son and heir, the 16-year-old Prince João, whose sword was bent from the fighting.1 source1 source

Afonso was 39 and had been king since the age of six. Within five years he would be beaten at Toro in a war for the crown of Castile, and within ten he would die in Sintra, the town where he was born on 15 January 1432.2 sources2 sources

Afonso belonged to the House of Avis, the dynasty founded by his grandfather João I. His father, Duarte, was heir to the throne when Afonso was born and became king when João I died on 14 August 1433. Duarte and Leonor already had a son, João, born in Lisbon in October 1429, who died in childhood, before that August. His mother, Leonor, was the sister of King Alfonso V of Aragon; she and Duarte had married in Coimbra in 1428.2 sources2 sources

Duarte died at Tomar in September 1438, on the 9th according to Pina and the 13th according to the modern Encyclopaedia of Portuguese Expansion. The boy was proclaimed king at once, aged six and, as Pina put it, entering his seventh year. His father's will left the regency to Leonor alone. The towns' representatives, led by Lisbon's, wanted Duarte's brother Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, instead.3 sources3 sources

The Cortes at Torres Novas, late in 1438, tried to split the power. Leonor would be the king's guardian and control revenues and offices, Pedro would be “defender” of the kingdom, and the Count of Arraiolos would run justice. It did not hold. In Lisbon the townsmen met in the refectory of the São Domingos friary to back an agreement making Pedro sole regent, and so many craftsmen added their names that they would not fit in one large book.1 source1 source

On 10 December 1439 the Cortes in Lisbon confirmed Pedro as regent in the king's name. Leonor's supporters held castles in the Alentejo, and after they were besieged she fled across the border to Albuquerque, in Castile, at the end of December 1440. She died in Toledo in 1445, poor enough to live on gifts from Castilian prelates and widows.3 sources3 sources

Pedro raised the boy. Afonso was taught by tutors his uncle chose, Estêvão de Nápoles and Mateus Pisano, and in 1445 he married Pedro's daughter, his cousin Isabel. Pedro, a famous traveller, was remembered as the prince “das Sete Partidas”, of the seven parts of the world.2 sources2 sources

In January 1446 Afonso turned 14, the age at which, Pina wrote, Spanish custom gave a prince full power over his kingdom. At the Cortes in Lisbon, Pedro handed him the rod of justice. The boy asked him to carry on governing in his name, and he did.1 source1 source

Pedro's enemies worked on the young king: chief among them Afonso, Duke of Bragança, João I's illegitimate son, with his son the Count of Ourém and the Archbishop of Lisbon, who visited the king at night. Afonso soon demanded the government for himself. Pedro gave it up, and in May 1447 the king set up his household with his wife at Santarém. Historians date his personal rule from 1447 or 1448.3 sources3 sources

Rumour and accusation, much of it false according to Pina, did the rest. Afonso declared his uncle disloyal. In May 1449 Pedro marched south from Coimbra with his supporters and camped by the Alfarrobeira stream near Alverca, north of Lisbon. The king's much larger army surrounded him on Tuesday 20 May.2 sources2 sources

Pina says the king had decided not to attack that day. A stone from one of Pedro's bombards landed near the royal tent, and the king's men charged without orders. Pedro, on foot in a mail shirt and a crimson velvet tunic, was struck in the chest by a crossbow bolt and fell dead within a few paces. Pina gives his age as 57, but Fernão Lopes recorded his birth in Lisbon on 9 December 1392, which makes him 56. His friend the Count of Abranches died soon after.2 sources2 sources

Pedro's body lay three days in a hut without candle or prayer; Pina blamed the old courtiers more than the 17-year-old king. In 1455, at Queen Isabel's request, her father's bones went to the royal chapel at Batalha. Five centuries later the art historian António Filipe Pimentel wrote that memory still pictured Afonso with hands “forever stained with the blood of his tutor”.2 sources2 sources

Portugal had held Ceuta, on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, since 1415. An attack on Tangier in 1437 had ended in disaster, and Afonso's uncle Fernando, left as a hostage, died a captive in Fez in 1443. After his death, taking Tangier became a duty for the new reign.3 sources3 sources

When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, the pope called a crusade. Afonso was one of the few princes who answered, offering 12,000 men for a year at his own cost. When the rest of Christendom held back, he turned the effort on Morocco.2 sources2 sources

Afonso's uncle Henry the Navigator sailed with him to Alcácer Ceguer and talked him out of turning on Tangier. The town was a corsairs' port. Afonso turned its mosque into a church. The king of Fez besieged it for 53 days that winter and again in 1459, and its 800 or so inhabitants depended wholly on supplies from Portugal.1 source1 source

In 1471 he took his son. Pina says the town's commander, its alcaide, had just offered to negotiate when the Portuguese swarmed over the walls. The historian Maria Dávila calls it a policy of terror: this time the king would not accept a surrender.2 sources2 sources

The lord of Arzila, Muley Sheikh, was away fighting for the throne of Fez and chose a kingdom over a town. He signed a twenty-year truce that left Ceuta, Alcácer Ceguer and Arzila to the Portuguese, and a year later he became the first sultan of the Wattasid dynasty. The chroniclers dated the entry into abandoned Tangier to 28 August, the feast of St Augustine, a saint believed to have been born there.2 sources2 sources

From then on the kings of Portugal called themselves “King of Portugal and of the Algarves on this side and beyond the sea in Africa”. Afonso himself became “o Africano”, the African.1 source1 source

Within a few years of 1471, Afonso ordered a record of the campaign from the workshops of Tournai, in present-day Belgium. The Pastrana set has four hangings, each up to about 11 metres long and 4 metres high. Three tell the story of Arzila, landing, siege and assault; the fourth shows the taking of Tangier, where the king was not present.2 sources2 sources

Most tapestries of the time showed scenes from the Bible or classical myth. These showed events that had just happened, with ships, cannon and handguns in detail. Banners across the Arzila scenes carry the king's emblem, a wheel spraying drops of water. The textile historian Maria Antónia Quina reckons that 16 to 20 weavers on four looms needed three to five years to make them.3 sources3 sources

Nobody knows for certain how they left Portugal. The leading theory, according to the Meadows Museum in Dallas, is that Rui Gomes da Silva, the Portuguese-born Prince of Éboli and later first Duke of Pastrana, gave them to Philip II of Spain in the sixteenth century. Since at least the seventeenth century they have belonged to the Collegiate Church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Pastrana, in the Spanish province of Guadalajara.2 sources2 sources

Restored by the De Wit workshops in Mechelen, the four went on tour in 2010. Lisbon's Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga showed them together from 12 June to 12 September 2010, for the first time in Portugal since they left. Pimentel, then its director, called them a deliberate “record of glory” by a king who understood images.3 sources3 sources

Around 1457 or 1458 a German knight, Georg von Ehingen, met the king, then about 25, and a portrait of him survives with Ehingen's papers: slim, beardless, dressed in black. Beside it Ehingen wrote a verdict.1 source1 source

Rui de Pina, writing for Afonso's nephew Manuel I, drew a man of graceful presence and easy manners, so easy that courtiers forgot to show him respect. He was a good writer and loved music. He was also, Pina said, “more properly called prodigal than truly liberal”, giving away Crown lands and rents without great merit or need.2 sources2 sources

He minted coins called espadins, stamped with a hand holding an upright sword, and founded a chivalric Order of the Sword. Sixteenth-century chroniclers such as Damião de Góis and João de Barros painted him as weak and uninterested in the voyages. The historian João Paulo Oliveira e Costa reads the documents of his own time differently: they show a king closely involved in them.2 sources2 sources

In 1443, during Pedro's regency, the Crown had given Henry the Navigator a lifelong monopoly of voyages south of Cape Bojador. On 8 January 1455 Pope Nicholas V's bull Romanus Pontifex recognised the Portuguese Crown's exclusive right to navigation, trade and dominion along the African coast that Henry's caravels had reached; a separate article tells that story. When Henry died in 1460, Afonso kept the overseas trade for the Crown.3 sources3 sources

In 1466 he let settlers of Santiago, in Cape Verde, trade in Guinea, to get the island peopled. In 1468 he leased the Guinea trade to Fernão Gomes, a squire of modest rank, for 200,000 reais a year. Between 1470 and 1474 Portuguese caravels explored the Gulf of Guinea, reaching the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe and the gold of Mina in 1471.1 source1 source

Later writers said the lease obliged Gomes to explore the coast. Costa notes that the only surviving document of it, a royal charter of 1 June 1473, says nothing of the kind. From 1474 Afonso left overseas affairs to Prince João, the future João II.1 source1 source

Afonso's sister Joana had married Henry IV of Castile. In 1462 she bore a daughter, Juana, whom enemies of the king called “la Beltraneja”, claiming her real father was the royal favourite Beltrán de la Cueva. Henry's half-sister Isabella disputed Juana's right to the throne and married Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469.2 sources2 sources

Henry IV died on 12 December 1474, and Isabella proclaimed herself queen the next day. A party of great Castilian nobles backed Juana, and her uncle Afonso, a widower since 1455, set out to marry her and win her the throne. The Cortes at Évora granted him money for a war in February 1475.2 sources2 sources

Afonso crossed into Castile in May 1475, on the 25th by the usual reckoning, though the Aragonese chronicler Zurita says the 10th. At Plasencia, on 30 May, he married the 13-year-old Juana and was proclaimed King of Castile. The marriage was never consummated: it needed a papal dispensation, because they were uncle and niece, and Pope Sixtus IV granted one in 1477 only to revoke it the next year.2 sources2 sources

The war dragged on through 1475, and the town of Zamora went over to Isabella in December. By February 1476, after eight months in enemy country, Afonso's army was short of food and money, and he was camped opposite Ferdinand at Zamora, across the Douro.1 source1 source

Before dawn on 1 March Afonso broke camp and marched back upstream towards Toro. Castilian light horse caught him around midday. With part of his army already in Toro, he turned to fight. The battle began late in the afternoon in rain, and darkness ended it about three hours later.2 sources2 sources

Both sides agree on the outline. Prince João, on the left with 800 picked men-at-arms and the handgunners, charged first and routed the Castilian divisions facing him. In the centre, Ferdinand's main body broke Afonso's; Pina blamed heavily armoured Castilian men-at-arms and a mass of handgunners whose fire made the Portuguese horses shy. The royal standard was taken, and Afonso fled with a handful of riders to the castle of Castronuño.2 sources2 sources

The accounts part company at nightfall, as Marcelo Encarnação shows in his doctoral study of more than twenty chronicles. Each side wrote down its own victory.1 source1 source

On the ground, Encarnação concludes, Toro was inconclusive. In politics it was the beginning of the end for Afonso. Castilian nobles changed sides, Zamora's castle surrendered on 19 March, and in April the Cortes of Madrigal swore allegiance to Isabella as queen.2 sources2 sources

Afonso looked for help from Louis XI of France. In August 1476 he sailed from Lisbon with 16 ships and 2,200 men. He met Louis at Tours in November, visited Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, at the end of December, and spent months waiting while the French king made promises.2 sources2 sources

Charles the Bold was killed in January 1477, and by the end of the year Louis was negotiating peace with Castile. In September 1477, at a Norman port at the mouth of the Seine where his fleet was being made ready, Afonso decided that God was against him.3 sources3 sources

Before dawn on 24 September he rode off with two servants of his chamber and two grooms, meaning to go to Jerusalem unrecognised. He left a locked chest of letters: one ordered Prince João to proclaim himself king. Louis XI's men tracked him down two days later at his lodging in a village. Persuaded by his own nobles and a letter from the French king, Afonso agreed to go home.1 source1 source

João was acclaimed king in the porch of São Francisco at Santarém on 10 November 1477, in tears. Days later his father reached Cascais and learned that he had a successor. When they met at Oeiras, João knelt, kissed his hand and gave the crown back.2 sources2 sources

The war wore on along the border until a Portuguese force under the Bishop of Évora was beaten at La Albuera, in Extremadura, on 24 February 1479. Two women prepared the peace: the Infanta Beatriz, Afonso's sister-in-law and Isabella's aunt, met Isabella at Alcántara in March 1479.3 sources3 sources

At Alcáçovas, in the Alentejo, the treaties were signed on 4 September 1479 and ratified at Toledo on 6 March 1480. Afonso gave up the title of King of Castile, and Isabella and Ferdinand gave up their claim to Portugal. Juana was to marry Isabella's infant son or enter a convent. Prince João's son Afonso was to marry Isabella's eldest daughter, with both children held in the care of the Infanta Beatriz at Moura.3 sources3 sources

The sea clauses mattered more in the long run. Castile kept the Canary Islands and the right to conquer Granada. Portugal kept Madeira, the Azores and Cape Verde, the conquest of Fez and the whole coast of Guinea “discovered and to be discovered”, with its seas and trade. Pope Sixtus IV confirmed the terms in 1481. It was the first division of the ocean into zones, 15 years before the Treaty of Tordesillas.2 sources2 sources

Juana chose the convent. On 15 November 1480, at Santa Clara in Coimbra, she took the black veil before Castilian envoys. Pina says Afonso fell gravely ill at Coimbra that season, from grief over the choice she was forced into. The Portuguese went on calling her “the Excellent Lady”.2 sources2 sources

In 1481 Afonso planned to hand the kingdom to his son at Cortes in Estremoz and retire, as a layman, to the friary he had founded at Varatojo, near Torres Vedras. Early in August he went to Sintra. There he caught an acute fever and died on 28 August 1481, aged 49, “in the very house in which he was born”. His body was carried to Batalha by mule.2 sources2 sources

Afonso V's reputation suffered from the men around him. His uncle Pedro and his son João II, the “Perfect Prince”, were cast as the able rulers, and he as the knight-king between them. Pimentel noted that the uncle was remembered for his travels while Afonso, who went from Castile to France, was never given any credit for his.2 sources2 sources

Yet João II inherited from him the gold of Mina, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, two military orders and a treaty that kept Castile out of the African Atlantic. Costa calls it an extraordinary and often undervalued legacy. The towns Afonso took in Morocco were less lasting: Alcácer Ceguer was abandoned in 1550.3 sources3 sources