2 - Fernão Lopes and the Writing of a Late Medieval Portuguese History

Summary

Modern history begins when more and more people emerge into social and political consciousness, become aware of their respective groups as historical entities having a past and a future, and enter into history.

Medieval historical writing is too diverse to admit of much valid generalisation. But those who produced it, virtually without exception, shared the belief that the ultimate object of their study was the working-out of God's purposes in human affairs. Not all medieval chroniclers would have defined their own immediate task in the terms applied to it by R. G. Collingwood: ‘to narrate the gesta Dei’. In English aristocratic chronicles, for example, reference to God has been characterised as ‘comparatively rare and casual … rhetorical rather than explanatory’. Yet few would have resisted the general presumption that human history was, in Beryl Smalley's phrase, ‘the history of man's salvation in time’. Revealed religion seemed to imply as much, and also to predict the major crises of that history: the Second Coming and the end of the world. Before that cataclysmic outcome, the rest of history seemed all of a piece; to quote Smalley again, ‘A medieval writer could distinguish stages in the history of salvation, but they were religious stages.’ Whatever more immediate crises might occupy his attention, the writer of history in the Middle Ages was aware that the really significant upheaval was yet to come. This awareness found one expression in the influential tradition of the world's six ages. The sixth and latest of these was seen as dating from the Incarnation; the Seventh Age would follow, after the end of history, as the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth.

Unusually among medieval historians, the 15th-century Portuguese chronicler Fernão Lopes was strongly conscious of living in a post-crisis era. Portugal under the early monarchs of the Avis dynasty was no Kingdom of Heaven; the disputes that brought the Infante Pedro to power as Regent in the late 1430s were a reminder of intractable social conflicts. Yet Fernão Lopes, writing in 1443, remained profoundly impressed by the transformation in Portuguese affairs that had accompanied the installation of the ruling dynasty 60 years earlier.