After the Inquisition: the death of Damião de Góis, 30 January 1574

In the upper town of Alenquer, north of Lisbon, beside a stretch of the old castle wall, stands the church of Santa Maria da Várzea. Damião de Góis was baptised there in 1502. In 1560 he had a tomb built in it for himself and wrote a Latin epitaph to go on it. Fourteen years later, at the end of January 1574, he was buried in it.3 sources3 sources

The accounts of how he died do not agree. In the version told by the editor Gabriel Pereira in 1909, the old man sat down by his hearth on a cold January night and was found dead on the embers the next morning. Pereira added a question of his own, “congestion, apoplexy?”, and gave 30 January as the day Góis was buried.1 source1 source

Góis was about 71. He had spent the best part of two years in the cells of the Lisbon Inquisition, had seen everything he owned declared forfeit and had been sentenced to spend the rest of his life as a penitent in a monastery. He was also one of the best-known Portuguese in Europe: the friend and house guest of Erasmus, a composer printed in Germany and Italy, and the author of a book on the Ethiopians that was reprinted in Paris and translated in England.3 sources3 sources

He was born at Alenquer on 2 February 1502, the son of Rui Dias de Góis, the crown's revenue officer in the town, and Isabel Gomes de Limi. Her grandfather, Nicolau de Limi, was a Flemish nobleman who had settled in Portugal. In 1511, aged nine, he joined the royal household as a page, and he grew up alongside the heir to the throne, Prince João, born the same year.3 sources3 sources

His father died in 1513, and by 1518 the boy was a groom of the chamber to King Manuel I. Góis was present when Manuel died on 13 December 1521.4 sources4 sources

In 1523 the new king, João III, made Góis secretary of the Portuguese factory at Antwerp. He stayed abroad, apart from a short visit home in 1533, for 22 years.2 sources2 sources

The secretary soon became an envoy. In 1529 the king sent him to Poland to arrange a marriage between Prince Luís and the Polish king's daughter, and he spent long periods in Vilnius and Danzig. Other missions took him to Denmark and Sweden. In 1531, travelling from the Danish court back to Poland, he spent two days at Wittenberg, where he met Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. The marriage never happened.4 sources4 sources

Góis had first made contact with Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1532, when he enrolled at the university of Louvain. In the early months of 1534 he moved into Erasmus's house at Freiburg, at the foot of the Black Forest, and stayed about five months. The two kept in close touch until Erasmus died in 1536.3 sources3 sources

In Erasmus's house Góis met the Swiss music theorist Heinrich Glarean, who later printed one of Góis's three-part motets, Ne laeteris inimica mea, in his treatise Dodecachordon (Basel, 1547) as a model of the Aeolian mode. Only three of his pieces survive.1 source1 source

From Freiburg he went to Padua, where he studied at the university until 1538 or 1539 and came to know Cardinals Pietro Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto. He also met Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and a Portuguese member of Loyola's circle, Simão Rodrigues. Góis then settled in Louvain, in the Low Countries, where he finished his studies at the Collegium Trilingue and in 1538 married Johanna van Hargen, daughter of a Dutch counsellor at the court of Charles V.3 sources3 sources

In Louvain he wrote in Latin for a European readership. Fides, religio moresque Aethiopum (1540), on the faith and customs of the Ethiopians, argued that their different rites should not keep them out of communion with the Church, an Erasmian view. It was reprinted in Paris, Louvain and Brussels and translated in England by a son of Thomas More. In Portugal the censors banned it in 1541.1 source1 source

In 1542 a French army besieged Louvain. Góis helped lead the defence, was taken prisoner to France and was freed in 1543 against a ransom. The Emperor Charles V granted him a coat of arms for his services, and in 1545, at João III's call, he came home with his family.3 sources3 sources

Góis reached Évora in the middle of August 1545. The king and queen had summoned him to be tutor to their son and heir, Prince João. On 5 September, three weeks later, Simão Rodrigues, by then head of the Jesuits in Portugal and the prince's teacher of doctrine, went before the inquisitor of Évora and accused him of heresy.3 sources3 sources

Rodrigues said that about nine years earlier in Padua he and Góis had talked about Luther's errors for some two months, on the authority of the Pope and on confession, and that Góis praised Luther's doctrine. He recalled asking Góis whether, back in Portugal, he would go to Mass like other Christians.2 sources2 sources

The tutorship went to António Pinheiro, later Bishop of Miranda. Góis's standing abroad and his friends at court, Cardinal Henrique among them, kept the case from going further, and a second accusation by Rodrigues in 1550 also failed. In his written defence 27 years later, Góis said Loyola had rebuked Rodrigues for reports he made about Góis and had come from Venice to Padua to apologise in person. Rodrigues bore a grudge, he said, and hurried to the inquisitor to keep Góis from a post he wanted himself.4 sources4 sources

On 13 June 1548 João III appointed Góis to serve as guarda-mor, chief keeper, of the Torre do Tombo, the royal archive kept in a tower of Lisbon's castle, while its keeper, the chronicler Fernão de Pina, was held by the Inquisition. Pina was sentenced in 1550 and never returned, and Góis held the post in full from then on. His work is documented in the archive until 4 March 1571.2 sources2 sources

He found documents, signed certified copies for the king and private petitioners, inventoried papers and papal bulls, and oversaw the illuminated copies of old records known as the Leitura Nova. On one register of inquiries made for Afonso II he left a note about the old books his predecessors had written off.2 sources2 sources

He lived in rooms at the castle palace and kept open house. In 1554 he published at Évora a short Latin description of his city, Urbis Olisiponis descriptio, which opens by setting Lisbon beside Seville as the two capitals of the new oceanic world.3 sources3 sources

The Holy Office had not forgotten him. On 12 October 1556 a Flemish servant named Paulo accused his wife, Joana, of Lutheranism. Nothing came of it at the time, but the denunciations stayed on file.2 sources2 sources

In 1558, after the death of João III, Cardinal Henrique asked Góis to write the history of the reign of his father, Manuel I. Góis was never the official royal chronicler, but the archive gave him the documents. The Chronica do felicissimo rei Dom Emanuel came out in Lisbon in four parts, the first two in September 1566 and the last on 25 July 1567. His Chronica do Principe Dom Joam, on João II as prince, came out on 11 April 1567.3 sources3 sources

The crown rewarded him in January 1566 with the habit of the Order of Christ and a pension of 20,000 réis, which he passed to his son-in-law. Some of the great noble families were less pleased. Góis had said he would spare neither praise nor blame, and the events were recent enough for powerful families to take offence. In 1567 the first part of the Manuel chronicle was revised and printed again.3 sources3 sources

He was also frank about the darkest episodes of Manuel's reign: the expulsion of the Jews, the seizure of their children and the riot against New Christians in Lisbon, all told in our article on Manuel I's expulsion decree. Although Góis was writing in 1566, Gabriel Pereira observed in 1909, he made the cruelty of those acts plain.1 source1 source

On 24 September 1570 the Lisbon Inquisition called Góis in to confirm earlier statements. On 4 April 1571 it arrested him. His record gives him as a widower of 70, an Old Christian (of no Jewish descent), resident in Lisbon, accused of Lutheranism. The old denunciations by Simão Rodrigues were taken out of the files and joined to new ones.3 sources3 sources

Five days after the arrest his son-in-law, Luís de Castro, a gentleman and treasurer of Cardinal Henrique's household, came to the inquisitor unbidden to say what he knew against him. Guilherme Henriques, who published the trial in 1898, concluded that Castro had helped get the old denunciations reopened to protect his own interests after Joana's death, and noted that within seven months Castro was in a lawsuit with Góis's son Ambrósio.1 source1 source

The prosecutor charged that Góis had kept company with heretics abroad and, now that they were dead or far away, kept company with their books, which the index of the Council of Trent banned. Witnesses said he skipped fasts and called many clergy hypocrites, more tyrannical than laymen. One witness repeated a story she had heard from others: when his pregnant niece was served pork on a fish day, he took a slice from her plate and told her that what goes into the mouth does not kill the soul.2 sources2 sources

The inquisitors asked about the foreigners who came to his house, and about a storeroom of his above the castle chapel where, someone claimed, brine from his barrels of salted pork had dripped onto the crucifix. Góis said any drip must have been rainwater through the broken roof tiles. Of the foreigners he said, on 20 May 1572, that his house was an inn for them, and that after dinner they all sang Masses and motets in parts, because he loved music.2 sources2 sources

He wrote his defence in his own hand. He admitted that during his first years in Flanders he had come to think the Pope's indulgences were worth little and had doubted confession, but said he had been cured of it in Italy. He denied ever trying to win anyone over to Luther, and he answered the charge that he preferred foreigners to his own people.3 sources3 sources

The inquisitors had told him that if he confessed there would be no formal indictment and all would end in mercy. He confessed, and the indictment came anyway. “I have seen the indictment, and I am still waiting for the mercy,” he wrote. After nine months in the cells he complained that he was over 70 and ill, could barely stand and was so covered in sores and scabies that he could almost pass for a leper.2 sources2 sources

The inquisitors voted on 16 October 1572. They agreed unanimously to receive him back into the Church. By a majority they ruled that he should abjure in private before them, not in a public auto-da-fé, because he was so well known in the heretics' lands abroad, and serve perpetual imprisonment in a place assigned by “His Highness”. Henriques took that to mean the Cardinal; the Torre do Tombo summary says the king.2 sources2 sources

Góis signed his abjuration on 6 December 1572. Three days later a certificate went to the treasury judge that his goods were forfeit to the treasury and the royal chamber, and on 16 December he was handed over to the monastery of Batalha.3 sources3 sources

What happened next is barely documented. At some point he was allowed to go home to Alenquer, old, poor and ill; the municipality's biography says on the king's orders. The archaeologist Conceição Machado, who studied his remains in 2002, pointed out that no known document covers his life between his arrival at Batalha and the record of his death in 1574.3 sources3 sources

The Torre do Tombo, drawing on its records, says simply that he died in his house at Alenquer on 30 January 1574 and was buried at Santa Maria da Várzea. RTP's history service adds that he was found dead, with suspicions of murder.2 sources2 sources

The idea of opening the tomb is old. In 1898 Henriques proposed checking how many skeletons it held and whether any bones showed signs of burning. By 1941 Santa Maria da Várzea was in ruins, and that year his remains were moved to a side chapel of the church of São Pedro, which overlooks the town, decorated with his arms and his wife's.3 sources3 sources

On Friday 27 September 2002, the year of his 500th anniversary, a team led by the archaeologists Conceição Machado and Fernando Rodrigues Ferreira had the lead box in São Pedro opened. Inside were a small heap of yellowed bones, some of them not his, a green glass bottle holding a record of the 1941 transfer and an old shoe-polish tin containing a coin of King Sebastião.1 source1 source

The skull shown that afternoon had a horizontal crack across the occipital bone that could be read as the mark of a blow from behind. Machado said this, first noticed in 1941, was what raised the idea of a violent death. The team planned CT scans, digital X-rays and bone-density tests, and a descendant, Francisco Goes, offered a hair for DNA comparison.1 source1 source

Góis left the Manuel chronicle, reprinted in 1619, 1749, 1790 and 1909, and a shelf of Latin works that reported Portugal's expansion to humanist Europe. As a historian, Ana Isabel Buescu writes, he was accurate and unbiased even when it made him enemies. The historian António José Saraiva summed him up in a phrase.2 sources2 sources

By 1571, Buescu notes, Portugal's spiritual climate had changed completely since his brief visit home in 1533, and Góis was one of the last survivors of a bygone generation. Alenquer has taken him up as its own. On 20 May 2017 the town opened the Museu Damião de Góis e das Vítimas da Inquisição in Santa Maria da Várzea, the church where he was baptised and first buried. Every February, around his birthday, it holds a season of events in his name.3 sources3 sources