Our understanding today of the history of Portugal during the second half of the fourteenth century depends heavily on the chronicle of King Fernando written by Fernão Lopes. Few historical narratives have had such an enduring and profound influence in Portuguese culture since the nineteenth century as the one you are about to read, published for the first time in 1816, after almost 400 years of restricted manuscript circulation. In the words of a modern critic, the characters created by Fernão Lopes in this chronicle have inspired Portuguese poets, novelists, and play writers as much as ‘the Greek theatre was nourished by the creations of Homer’.

Historian Fernão Lopes (c. 1380–c. 1460) wrote the chronicle of the reign of Fernando of Portugal in his role of official chronicler and chief-archivist of the kingdom. Fernando ruled from 1367 to 1383. Chronology is important here, since the major project of Lopes as a historian was to provide an official version of the events leading to the dynastic change that took place in 1385, two years after the king's death. A new dynasty of monarchs acceded to the Portuguese throne in 1385, soon to be called the House of Avis. Those momentous events were close to his lifetime, as Lopes was born, most probably, in the same decade. Gaining power from a controversial political act – the election of a new king by the parliament, or Cortes, in 1385 – the first rulers of the House of Avis had to contend with the looming shadow of a contested legitimacy. For almost two decades, the King of Castile continued to proclaim the right to the Portuguese throne of his wife Beatriz, daughter of the deceased Fernando, a contention that echoed in the early fifteenth century across the Peninsula and beyond the Pyrenees. This is the context within which the chronicle was conceived.

In order to narrate and explain the events that led to the establishment of the Avis dynasty in Portugal, Lopes composed a narrative trilogy based on the reign of three singular monarchs. This narrative cycle, consisting of three distinct chronicles, reaches back to the reign of King Pedro (r. 1357–1367), the father of the first Avis ruler; its middle chronicle is the one presented here in this volume.