Gomes Eanes de Zurara

Gomes Eanes de Zurara ComC
A depiction of Zurara on the pedestal of the Camões monument, by Victor Bastos, 1860-67 (Praça Luís de Camões, Lisbon)
Chief Chronicler of the Kingdom of Portugal
In office 6 June 1454 – c. 1474
Monarch	Afonso V of Portugal
Preceded by	Fernão Lopes
Succeeded by	Vasco Fernandes de Lucena
High Guardian of the Royal Archives
In office 6 June 1454 – c. 1474
Monarch	Afonso V of Portugal
Preceded by	Fernão Lopes
Succeeded by	Afonso Eanes de Óbidos
Personal details
Born	c. 1410 Kingdom of Portugal
Died	c. 1474 Lisbon, Kingdom of Portugal
Signature

Gomes Eanes de Zurara (c. 1410 – c. 1474), sometimes spelled Eannes or Azurara, was a Portuguese chronicler of the European Age of Discovery, the most notable after Fernão Lopes.

Zurara adopted the career of letters in middle life. He probably entered the royal library as assistant to Fernão Lopes during the reign of King Edward of Portugal (1433–1438), and he had sole charge of it in 1452. His Chronicle of the Siege and Capture of Ceuta, a supplement (third part) to Lopes's Chronicle of King John I, dates from 1449 to 1450,^[1] and three years later he completed the first draft of the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, our authority for the early Portuguese voyages of discovery down the African coast and in the ocean, more especially for those undertaken under the auspices of Prince Henry the Navigator. It contains some account of the life work of that prince, and it has biographical as well as geographical interest.^[2]

On 6 June 1454, Zurara became chief keeper of the archives and royal chronicler in succession to Lopes. In 1456 King Afonso V commissioned him to write the history of Ceuta, the land-gate of the East, under the governorship of D. Pedro de Menezes, from its capture in 1415 until 1437, and he had it ready in 1463. A year afterwards, the king charged him with writing a history of the deeds of D. Duarte de Menezes, captain of Alcácer-Ceguer. Proceeding to Africa, he spent a year collecting materials and studying the scenes of the events he was to describe, and in 1468 he completed the chronicle. Afonso corresponded with Zurara on terms of affectionate intimacy, and no less than three comendas of the order of Christ rewarded his literary services.^[2]

Zurara had little of the picturesque ingenuousness of Lopes, and he loved to display his erudition by quotations and philosophical reflections, showing that he wrote under the influence of the first Renaissance. Many leading classical, early Christian and medieval writers figure in his pages; he was acquainted with the notable chronicles and romances of Europe and had studied the best Italian and Spanish authors. In addition, he had mastered the geographical system of the ancients and their astrology. As a historian he is laborious, accurate and conscientious, though his position did not allow him to tell the whole truth about his hero, Prince Henry.^[2]

The preface to the English version of The Chronicle of Discovery and Conquest of Guinea contains a full account of the life and writings of Azurara and cites all the authorities.^[2]

Zurara's Crónica dos feitos da Guiné is the principal historical source for modern conception of Prince Henry the Navigator and the Henrican age of Portuguese discoveries (although Zurara only covers part of it, the period 1434–1448). Commissioned by Henry himself,^[3] Zurara's chronicle is openly hagiographic of the prince and reliant on his recollections. As a result, the reliability of Zurara's chronicles is considered suspect by modern historians.^[4] Nonetheless, having little else to draw upon, historians have had to rely heavily on Zurara.

Zurara claims to have based his account of the expeditions on a more detailed draft manuscript compiled by a certain "Antonio Cerveira".^[5] Alas, no copy of Cerveira's original account has ever been found.^[6] Zurara's own chronicle remained in manuscript form and hidden from the public eye for centuries. Indeed, until the publication of João de Barros's Primeira Década da Ásia in 1552, there were no published works about the Henrican discoveries, save for the two brief memoirs of Alvise Cadamosto (published originally in Italy in 1507).

João de Barros claimed to have constructed his 1552 account on the basis of a copy of Zurara's manuscript he found scattered in the archives. However, a little over a decade later, Damião de Góis (writing in 1567), announced that the Zurara manuscript had disappeared.^[7] A hunt for a copy of the manuscript began, but would turn up nothing for a while. The Spanish cleric Bartolomé de las Casas, writing in the 1540s, suggested he had a copy of Zurara, but that copy too was never tracked down.^[8]

It was only in 1839 that an intact and splendidly preserved manuscript copy of Zurara's Cronica was rediscovered in the Royal Library of Paris (now the Bibliothèque nationale de France) by Ferdinand Denis (how it ended up there is a mystery). Significantly, the Paris codex included a frontispiece with a portrait of a man with a thin moustache in a black Burgundian chaperon that was instantly assumed to be the physical image of Prince Henry the Navigator (there were no pictures of Henry before this; the Paris frontispiece became the basis of modern images of the prince, reproduced in countless books, paintings and monuments since). Luís António de Abreu e Lima (Viscount de Carreira), the Portuguese minister to France at the time, arranged for the first publication of Zurara's Cronica in 1841, with a preface and notes by Manuel Francisco de Macedo Leitão e Carvalhosa (Viscount of Santarém).^[9] The publication was a sensation, particularly as Portugal was then engaged in a diplomatic quarrel over recent Anglo-French colonial encroachments in West Africa where questions of priority of discovery were involved (to which Santarém contributed.)^[10]

A second manuscript copy was found shortly after, in 1845, by J.A. Schmeller in the Hof- und Staats-Bibliothek in Munich (Codex Hisp. 27), as part of a collection of miscellaneous accounts of Portuguese expeditions originally compiled in 1508 by a Lisbon-based German printer known as Valentinus Moravus (or in Portuguese, as "Valentim Fernandes"). However, this version contains only much-abridged extracts.^[11]

• Almeida, Manuel Lopes de; Costa Brochado, Idalino Ferreira da; Dinis, Antonio Joaquim Dias, eds. (1967), Monumenta Henricina, Coimbra{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) (volume 8 of 14 volumes; 1960–1974)
• Barros, João de (1778) [1552], Primeira Década da Ásia: Dos feitos, que os Portuguezes fizeram no descubrimento, e conquista, dos mares, e terras do Oriente, vol. 1, Na Regia officina typografica
• Beazley, C.R.; Prestage, E., eds. (1896–1899), The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, vol. 1, London: Hakluyt
• ——; ——, eds. (1896–1899), The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, vol. 2, London: Hakluyt
• Diffie, Bailey W.; Winius, George D. (1977), Foundations of the Portuguese empire, 1415-1580, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press
• Góis, Damião de (1905) [1567], Gonçálvez Guimarãis, A.J. (ed.), Chronica do prinçipe Dom Ioam: rei que foi destes regnos segundo do nome, em que summariamente se trattam has cousas sustançiaes que nelles aconteçerão do dia de seu nasçimento atte ho em que el Rei Dom Afonso seu pai faleçeo, Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade
• Leite, Duarte (1941), Acerca da "Crónica dos Feitos de Guinee", Lisbon: Bertrand
• Magalhães Godinho, Vitorino de (1945), Documentos sôbre a Espansão Portuguesa (2 volumes), Lisbon: Gleba
• Russell, Peter E. (2000), Prince Henry 'the Navigator': a life, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press
• Santarém, Visconde de (1841), Memória sôbre a prioridade dos descobrimentos portugueses na costa d'Africa occidental, para servir de ilustracao à Chronica da Conquista de Guiné por Azurara, Paris: J.P. Aillaud
• Schmeller, Johann Andreas (1847), Ueber Valentim Fernandez Alemão und seine Sammlung von Nachrichten über die Entdeckungen und Besitzungen der Portugiesen in Afrika und Asien bis zum Jahre 1508, enthalten in einer gleichseitigen portugiesischen Handschrift der königl. Hof- und Staats-Bibliothek zu München." Abhandlungen der Philosophisch-Philologischen Classe der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 4, Munich
• Teixeira da Mota, A. (January 1946), "A Descoberta da Guiné, Pt. 1", Boletim cultural da Guiné Portuguesa, 1 (1): 11–68

Attribution:

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Prestage, Edgar (1911). "Azurara, Gomes Eannes de". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 3 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 86.

Zurara's works include:

• Chronica del Rei D. Joam I de boa memória. Terceira parte em que se contém a Tomada de Ceuta (Lisbon, 1644)
• Chronica do Descobrimento e Conquista da Guiné (Paris, 1841; Eng. version by Edgar Prestage in 2 vols. issued by the Hakluyt Society, London, 1896-1899: The Chronicle of Discovery and Conquest of Guinea),

• Vol 1 online, English,
• Vol 2 online, English
• Version of 1841, in Portuguese Archived 2012-10-22 at the Wayback Machine copy

• Chronica do Conde D. Pedro de Menezes, printed in the Inéditos de Historia Portugueza, vol. ii (Lisbon, 1792)
• Chronica do Conde D. Duarte de Menezes, printed in the Inéditos, vol. iii (Lisbon, 1793)

• Works by Gomes Eanes de Zurara at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Gomes Eanes de Zurara at the Internet Archive