IBERIAN HISTORIOGRAPHIES: FROM CONQUEST TO EMPIRE

The Portuguese and Spanish chronicles of overseas discovery and conquest written in the sixteenth century constitute an important group among the genres of Renaissance historiography. Rather than drawing on pure classical models, they followed a vigorous indigenous tradition of medieval chronicles, books of `deeds' of kings and lords often written by secular authors, but providentialist and moralistic none the less. This was a tradition very much marked by the mythologisation of the process of territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms as a kind of reconquest or crusade, which by the twelfth century had fused the concepts of patria and Christendom. In Portugal, as in other parts of the Iberian Peninsula, these chronicles thus evolved from feudal epic towards a prose narrative centred on royal dynasties and a vaguely defined nation. The new emphasis on collective achievements (notwithstanding the hierarchical character of these societies) is especially obvious in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It made it possible to accommodate the fact that whilst the truly valid historical enemies were Muslim infidels, often the actual enemies were rival Christian powers. We might consider the examples of Ramon Muntaner (1256–1336), self-appointed chronicler of the providential success of the House of Barcelona and their Catalan subjects against Muslim and French–Angevin enemies alike, or the Portuguese Fernaäo Lopes (c. 1380–c. 1460), whose account of the succession struggle of 1383–5, which saw the triumph of the House of Avis, was marked by a remarkably populist, anti-Castilian rhetoric.