Adulterers and Adulterators

Abstract

The ever-increasing death rate among the Portuguese nobility in the wars against Castile,¹ civil wars like the Battles of Alfarrobeira (1449) and Toro (1476) and in the Crusade in North Africa, was made even greater by frequent shipwrecks during the maritime explorations and the Portuguese presence in Africa, where these knights built fortresses, explored rivers and hinterlands and lost their lives at the hands of the enemy or through diseases that were then incurable. In this stormy dawn of the Empire in the fifteenth century a paradox arose — although there were many more women than men in the kingdom, ‘rich’ widows, members of distinguished families, were passionately wooed and disputed over because they had accumulated inheritances, titles and lands and some, even of mature age, got tired of receiving claimants, sometimes much younger than themselves. If parents did not cloister their daughters inside walls of a convent, they ran the risk of losing them. The genealogists, however, devoted their efforts to marriages and descendants. I must do the same thing.