Portuguese literature
Portogallo_ (_Contenuto della storia del Patriarca Alfonso Mendez_,
p. 115). This work was written in Latin in 1651 by AFONSO MENDEZ
(1579-1656), born at Moura, who became Patriarch of Ethiopia in 1623.
This splendid edition (_Rerum Aethiopicarum Scriptores_) also contains
three volumes of _Relationes et Epistolae Variorum_ (Romae, 1910-12).
[481] Nicolás Antonio dwells more than once on the invisibility of
Brito’s authorities (_Bib. Vet._ i. 65, 453; ii. 374): _Nos de invisis
hactenus censere abstinemus_. Antonio Brandão, Brito’s successor, he
says, _nullum horum vidit librorum quos Brittus olim historiae suae
Atlantes iactaverat; nihil autem horum librorum (quod mirum si ibi
asservabantur) vidit_. Soares (_Theatrum_) remarks epigrammatically:
_fama est eloquentiam minus desiderari quam fidem_.
[482] From a comparison of inscriptions he notes the similarity between
the Etruscan and ‘our ancient’ (Iberian?) letters. The Iberians may
have originally gone East from Tuscany.
[483] His _Elogios dos Reis de Portugal_ appeared in 1603.
[484] ff. 248 v.-249 v. give a very curious description of Ireland:
_tam remota de nossa conversação e metida debaixo do Polo Arctico_.
Brito had not inherited Barros’ knowledge of geography and confuses
Ireland with Iceland, but is far richer in fables, as these pages
delightfully prove.
[485] To Spanish readers they were presented later by Faria e Sousa in
his _Asia_.
[486] _Flores de España_ (1631), f. 248. Arias Montano refers to him as
a close friend (_Doc. inéd._ t. xli. p. 386).
[487] See _Cronica_, p. 46.
[488] Ten chronicles from Afonso I to João III. He says (1824 ed., p.
12): _Estam em este presente vollume recopiladas, sumadas, abreviadas,
todas as lembranças dos Reys de Portugal das caroniquas velhas e novas
sent mudar sustancia da verdade._
[489] _Dise ̃q hee de jdade de setenta anos, hos faz ẽ este feuʳᵒ ̃q
vẽ_ (Examination before the Inquisition, April 19, 1571). The name
appears as Goes, Gooes, Goiz, Guoes, Guoez, Guoiz, Goyos. Goes is a
small village some twenty miles north-east of Coimbra. The name also
occurs in the Basses-Pyrénées. See P. A. de Azevedo, _Alguns nomes do
departamento dos Baixos Pirineos que teem correspondencia em Portugal_
(_Boletim da Ac. das Sciencias de Lisboa_, viii (1915), pp. 280-1). It
may be one more trace of the former occupation of the whole Peninsula
by the Iberians (= high, on the height, as in Goyetche, &c.).
[490] See Marqués de Montebello, _Vida de Manoel Machado de Azevedo_
(1660), p. 3, ap. J. de Vasconcellos, _Os Musicos Portugueses_, i. 268.
[491] ff. 269 v.-71. The original manuscript disappeared, but a copy
(that of the Marqueses de Castello Rodrigo) is in the Biblioteca
Nacional at Lisbon.
[492] Antonio Galvam, _Tratado_, f. 59 v. He visited the Courts of
Charles V, François I, Henry VIII, and Pope Paul III. Nicolás Antonio
says of him (_Bib. Nova_): _morum quippe suavitate atque elegantia,
ergaque doctos liberalitate insinuabat se in cuiusque animum qui
Musarum commercio frueretur, facile atque alte_.
[493] He arrived on Palm Sunday, 1531, and learning that Luther was
preaching at once left the inn to hear him, but could only understand
the Latin quotations. Next day he had dinner (_jantar_) with Luther
and Melanchthon and afterwards returned to Luther’s house, where the
latter’s wife regaled them with a dessert of nuts and apples. Thence
he went to Melanchthon’s house and found his wife spinning, shabbily
dressed.
[494]
Venisti nimium usque et usque et usque
Expectate tuis.
[495] Lib. III, pp. 264, 265: _Aliud Aeolij Modi exemplũ authore D.
Damiano à Goes Lusitano_.
[496] He had gone with others to negotiate terms and, when barely half
an hour was allowed to refer the terms to the Senate, remained in the
enemy’s camp in order to create a delay by conversing with Longueval.
Meanwhile relief had been received and the Senate refused the terms.
[497] In his trial he says that three of them became monks: _meteo tres
filhos frades_.
[498] Cf. _Prologo_: _em que muitos, como em cousa desesperada, se
nam atreveram poer a mão_. One of these ‘many’ was Goes’ rival, the
eloquent Bishop Antonio Pinheiro.
[499] The fourth part was approved on January 2, 1566.
[500] For the grounds of this disapproval see _Crítica contemporanea
á Chronica de D. Manuel_, 1914, ed. Edgar Prestage from a manuscript
in the British Museum. Dr. Joaquim de Vasconcellos and Mr. G. J. C.
Henriques have dealt very ably with many interesting points of Goes’
life and works.
[501] His friend Diogo Mendez de Vasconcellos (1523-99), Canon of
Evora, says that he died in 1575 _aet._ 80 (so the _Theatrum_: _obiit
octogenarius A.C._ 1575). Probably the 5 is an error or misprint for 3,
and the 80 correct.
[502] Luis de Sousa (_Hist. S. Dom._, Pt. I, Bk. i, cap. 2) praises his
_juizo e curiosidade de bom antiquario_, and there are many similar
passages in other writers. Resende furnished Barros, as Severim de
Faria later furnished Brito, with materials and advice.
[503] In a similar though more elaborate work (88 ff.) Frei Nicolau
Diaz (†1596) told the life and death of Princess Joana (†May 1490):
_Vida da Serenissima Princesa Dona Joana, Filha del Rey Dom Afonso o
Quinto de Portugal_ (1585).
[504] _Casamento Perfeyto_, 2ᵃ ed. (1726), p. 61.
[505] _Monarchia Lusitana_, Pt. V, Bk. xvii, cap. 5. Bernardo de Brito
also praises him, and Frei Antonio Brandão acknowledges his debt to
him. Faria e Sousa says that he received from him _cantidad de papeles_.
[506] _Europa Portuguesa_, vol. iii, pt. 3. Portugal, he says, is a
perpetual Spring, and he speaks of the women who earn their living by
selling roses and other flowers in Lisbon, of the almonds of Algarve,
the excellent honey, &c., &c. Vol. i covers the period from the Flood
to the foundation of Portugal; vol. ii goes down to 1557; vol. iii to
Philip II of Spain.
§ 6
_Quinhentista Prose_
Had latinization and the Renaissance come to Portugal in a quiet age
it is not pleasant to think what havoc they might have wrought on
Portuguese prose in the unreal atmosphere of the study. Fortunately
they found Portugal in turmoil. Stirring incidents and adventures were
continually occurring which needed no heightening of rhetoric or Latin
pomp of polysyllables. A scientific spirit of accuracy was abroad, and
the missionaries and adventurers, travellers, mariners, merchants,
officials, and soldiers who recorded their experiences wrote as men of
action, with life and directness.
Few stories are more intense and affecting than those told by the
Portuguese survivors of shipwreck in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Twelve of these appeared in the original collection edited
by BERNARDO GOMES DE BRITO (born in 1688): _Historia Tragico-Maritima_
(2 vols., 1735, 6).[507] The earliest and most celebrated is the
_Relaçam da mui notavel perda do galeão grande S. João_ [June 24,
1552], an anonymous narrative based on the account of a survivor,
Alvaro Fernandez, probably the ship’s mate, which tells of the death
of D. Lianor de Sepulveda and her husband with a simple pathos and
dramatic power unattained by the many poets who later treated the same
theme. But the accounts of the wreck of the _S. Bento_ (1554), the
_Conceição_ (1555), the _S. Paulo_ (1561), of D. Jorge de Albuquerque
(1565), and others, are scarcely less moving. The ships, of 1,000
tons, as the _Aguia_, ‘the largest vessel that had hitherto sailed
to India’ (1558), and under, often with rotten rudder, or the whole
ship rotten, _sepulturas dos homens_, with few boats, careless and
ignorant pilots, badly careened, overloaded, overcrowded, ill-supplied
with worm-eaten biscuit, ‘poisonous’ wine, and insufficient water,
seemed to invite destruction. Between 1582 and 1602 alone thirty-eight
ships were lost. The sea was not the only enemy: corsairs off the
coast of Portugal, French, Dutch, and English, Lutheran heretics
who threw overboard beads and missals, or a Turkish fleet ‘in sight
of Ericeira’, exacted their toll when all other dangers had been
successfully overcome. The story is told immediately after the event,
sometimes almost in the form of a diary or log, or years later,
by survivors or based on the account of survivors, and it varies
according as the narrator is the captain of the ship, a landsman with
a dislike of sailors, a plain soldier, a Jesuit priest, a Franciscan
monk, a distinguished Lisbon chemist (Henrique Diaz in i. 6), or a
famous historian (ii. 3 by Diogo do Couto,[508] ii. 4 by João Baptista
Lavanha[509]). All or most of their accounts are masterpieces of vivid
phraseology. We follow as in a novel their adventures as the sea
‘breaks into flower--_quebrando em frol_’, as they are stranded on a
desert island, boarded in sight of home, entrapped by savages, devoured
by wild beasts, tottering, _arrimados em paos_, exhausted by thirst and
hunger, or prostrated by heat, in comparison with which the _calmas_
of Alentejo ‘are but as Norwegian cold’: toils and perils borne with
heroic courage, told with the simplicity of heroes, without _adorno de
palavras nem linguagem floreada_.
Many books of travel were the natural consequence of the discovery of
India. The historian João de Barros’ passion for knowledge, especially
geographical knowledge, was the first cause[510] of the learned and
instructive _Chorographia_ (1561) of his nephew Gaspar Barreiros
(†1574), a description of the places through which he passed on his way
to Rome in 1545 to thank the Pope on behalf of the Infante Henrique,
_Cardinalem amplissimum_, for his cardinal’s hat. But this work (edited
by his brother, Lopo Barreiros) was an exception. Most of the travel
books were concerned with the far East.
The _Livro em que da relação do que viu e ouviu no Oriente_ (1516) by
DUARTE BARBOSA of Lisbon, brother-in-law of Fernam de Magalhães, exists
in a Portuguese manuscript in the Public Library of Oporto, but was
first published in Portuguese in 1821 as a translation from the Italian
_Libro di Odoardo Barbosa Portoghese_, itself a translation from a
copy at Seville. The author had spent the greater part of his youth in
India, and his work contains vivid and accurate notes on Eastern lands
and cities, especially Malabar.
One of the causes that most moved Portugal to curiosity and acted as
an incentive to discovery were the vague rumours of the existence of
a mighty Christian prince, the half-mythical Prester John, Negus of
Abyssinia. The priest FRANCISCO ALVAREZ (_c._ 1470?-_c._ 1540) set out
with Duarte Galvam, first Portuguese Ambassador to Abyssinia, in 1515,
but Galvam’s death delayed the mission, and it was not till 1520 that
Alvarez and the new ambassador, D. Rodrigo de Lima, reached the Court
of Prester John. They remained for six years in the country, and during
this time Alvarez recorded in straightforward notes every detail of the
country and its inhabitants with minuteness and accuracy. He considered
himself old[511] in 1520; he was certainly active: he shoots hares and
pheasants, washes unsuccessfully for gold, looks after his slaves,
his nine mules, his fourteen cows, and organizes a procession against
locusts. On their return, in Alvarez’ friend Antonio Galvam’s ship, to
Lisbon, bringing ‘the length of Prester John’s foot’, he was eagerly
questioned by king, prelates, and courtiers--the whole Court trooped
out along the road from Coimbra to meet them--and when he published
his fascinating diary of travel, _Verdadeira Informaçam das terras do
Preste Joam_ (1540), it was soon translated into almost every language
of Europe.[512] FREI GASPAR DA CRUZ of Evora, missionary in China,