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SEPARATION AND DISTINCTION: HOW THE COURT EXPERIENCED THE CITY

Rita Costa Gomes Towson University

Historical studies about the royal court in its relation to late medieval European cities tend to focus on the figure of the monarchs themselves. And rightly so, one might add, since it was the king’s presence that established the special kind of place that courts were according to the famous definition of the medieval Iberian legal tradition formulated in the thirteenth-century legal code of the Partidas. Yet we must consider also the royal court as a whole, not only the central figure of the king nor solely a small group of his closest followers. Did the stay of the monarch and the settlement of the royal court achieve an integration of the people that composed the king’s following into the city that hosted him? What would be the practical aspects of such integration? In the remarks that follow, I aim at answering these simple interrogations. Zooming out from the central figure of the ruler brings a change of perspective. We are forced to consider a larger human group, the variable configuration of men and women moving around with the king.

The logistics required by the transfer and settling of the numerous followers travelling with kings and queens certainly left an impact in local realities. Governance mechanisms had to be set in motion in order to lodge all the members of the court. How those mechanisms and decisions helped shape the lived experiences of the courtiers in urban environments is a subject far less discussed than, for instance, the solemn ceremonies and rituals associated to the royal visit. Yet it seems equally important to understand what happened to the king’s followers and the members of his court once the festivity or the entry ceremony, exceptionally breaking the day-to-day routine of both court and city, had taken its full course. Where would most members of the court be lodged? What places could they, at the end of the day, call home?

1. INITIAL REMARKS

These questions are not easily answered, because each city or stopping place of the royal itinerary had its own governance dynamics and its own urban characteristics. Sources available for the late medieval kingdom of Portugal, nonetheless, suggest a few directions of research that may be useful to the study of other contemporary Iberian courts¹. By moving around in the territories of the kingdom, the medieval monarchs of Portugal were followed in their displacements by several hundreds of people of diverse social status and background. The dimensions of the court varied along the way. Once settled for longer periods, as famously observed by king Duarte (r. 1433-1438), the royal court could easily reach thousands of people. Such large human dimension included many newcomers because the court of Duarte would serve as a centre of attraction for princely and aristocratic households and retinues, including the household of the queen and that of the king’s brothers². Many who did not live permanently within the king’s moving retinue would flock to the ruler’s presence. Besides the obvious impact of these numbers in the life of towns and cities of the kingdom, let us consider also what kind of human experiences they evoke for the courtiers themselves.

While analysing the displacement of the human entourage of the king, the concept of a «dislocation» of the court is most useful. The expression «the dislocation of troops», for instance, refers to the complex deployment operations by which the distribution of several entities composing an army is made into a number of different camps³. In spite of the scattering of its components in a particular terrain, a specific internal order is still kept when an army is in movement. This idea equally applies to the historical realities of the old itinerant courts. We should consider not only the movement of people, animals, or material resources that accompanied the ruler, that is, the logic of their displacement. The order of the court, not unlike that of an army, subsisted in the different locations and conditions of each town or city.

The argument goes against the grain of some often repeated generalizations. In the 1300s and the 1400s, a portrait of abuse and lack of respect of local privileges emerges from the complaints concerning the presence of the court, repeatedly presented by cities and towns in the meetings of the Portuguese cortes or parliaments. These texts propose a lawless and disruptive image of the king’s retinue which has been taken at face value by many historians⁴. Aristocratic abuse became consequently associated with an unruly presence of the king’s following in the cities of the kingdom. Those complaints generally referred, however, to the existence of an order to be respected, an order we have yet to reconstruct in all of its detail.

Because if it is true that the royal court was a place, it must be stressed that the court was also a distinctive spatial regime, a universe of rules to be respected⁵. These rules were especially important, as argued here, in matters of lodging. In that sense, the itinerant court of medieval and early modern times was a spatial reality that was not confined within locational parameters. It existed, tendentially, beyond and regardless of the characteristics and properties of the places themselves. In other words, the spatial arrangements that the royal court created or recreated in every locality, in every city, was subject to the same quite strict forms of order, and this had important consequences for the life of the courtiers.

For instance, we can easily hypothesize that the movements of the court had an uprooting effect on those who followed the ruler in his regular displacement. But since the royal court always brought to each locality a regimented ordering of space, this order represented a recognizable pattern in everyday life. This could originate a comforting setting for those who lead this type of travelling life as part of the king’s retinue, thus effectively counteracting that uprooting tendency. Such permanence, the existence of reliable forms and rhythms of courtly life, would therefore function as a fundamental stabilizing mechanism in the middle of the constant removal and change that court life entailed.

Late medieval courts, therefore, should not be considered only in their geographical displacements. Following the suggestions of Georg Simmel, the courts of monarchical rulers must be studied also in the «abstract stability» of their spatial regimes, as «pivotal points»⁶ around which revolved the lives of a few hundred individuals. A good example of this stability would be, for instance, the reproduction of the same set of physical distances around the ruler. Regardless of the variety in the physical layout of the numerous royal residences, daily activities in the royal household required such proxemic rules⁷. There would always be in the king’s place of residence a space of restricted access for the royal chamber, and this happened even within a tent or at an improvised temporary lodging. There would be an inner quarter of the wardrobe and treasure. There would be a royal chapel, even if the latter used a local church as a place of worship because the building of the king’s residence did not include a dedicated chapel room. All these entities, organized around the king’s body and physical presence, had a human as well as a spatial dimension. A determined number of servants and officers, carrying in a set number of horses and carts the material implements required by their duties, would «settle» those spaces as prescribed by written rule and custom.

As such, spatial rules were part of the very substance of daily life at court because they allowed for everybody to go about their respective duties and functions, in a way that was deemed appropriate to the king’s dignity and status. The distinctive spatial regime, in fact, also defined the court by clearly identifying, in a variety of possible settings, the presence of the monarch through all the activities surrounding that physical presence. If, as I suggested earlier, we zoom out from the figure of the ruler, this will allow us to realize how rules and spatial regimes also prevailed for the rest of the court. The different status, occupation, and gender groups inside the royal court would tend to reproduce their arrangement and hierarchies in each city where the monarch settled. I will argue in this essay that this was done, among other mechanisms, by regulating and controlling the distribution of the lodgings to the courtiers and royal followers.

2. LODGING THE COURTIERS IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS

I do not want to suggest with these initial remarks that the characteristics of each city, its singularity in terms of urban landscape and layout, would be unimportant. Quite the contrary. Those realities also contributed to shape the lived experience of the men and women at court. In the case of late medieval Portugal, a few cities – among which Lisbon, Santarém, and Évora – were the most visited in the kingdom. They were also the preferred locations for longer stays of the royal court, a fact that must be taken into account if we want to understand the concrete forms of courtly life in Portugal⁸. The characteristics of these three localities imposed some specific solutions that the monarchs sought to replicate elsewhere.

The first characteristic is the existence of permanent residential structures for the king. At least two main royal residences existed in each of these cities. The presence of the king, however, was not only felt in the royal palace(s). Frequent and lasting stays of the monarch in those localities meant that other buildings were available providing a stable siege of activity for the different court departments, rooting them in the urban setting. Several families of the courtly nobility had their own residential buildings in those main cities of royal itinerancy, as did the great officers of the court⁹. All of these factors will be in the background, but not specifically considered in the discussion of our initial questions: was the court integrated into the city, and how did the courtiers experience such integration?

I will focus here, instead, mostly in the material structures and realities of the lodging of courtiers. Between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries the monarchs of Portugal found original solutions for a less daunting and disrupting settling of the court whenever they stayed in the major cities of the kingdom. The solutions were often found together with the local urban governments, a process that was especially relevant for Lisbon. What is striking about such arrangements is, on one hand, the way local markets were made to correspond to the sudden surges in demand for food and lodging associated with the royal visit and stay. On the other hand, courtly hierarchies would impose their stable logic on the ways the cities tried to cope with their obligations towards the monarch’s presence, which meant that the temporary settling of the king’s numerous followers soon originated local regulations and mechanisms of prevision and budgeting. The study of courtly lodgings in the late medieval period is a good point of observation of this general evolution. It is a historical process that runs parallel to the transformation then occurring in the traditional remunerations of the members of the court.

Without going into too much detail here, I would point out that the periodic remunerations of the official members of the royal court followed by the late fourteenth century a monetized system by which the «rations» corresponding to each quantity of bread, wine, fodder for the horses, and other individual payments in kind, had been transformed in the moradia, a word herein simply translated as «courtly wages»¹⁰. This remuneration was computed (and eventually paid) to each individual in money. I have argued together with other historians that by adopting these scales of payments rulers expressed their clear intent at controlling household expenses, but that the resulting dynamic also aimed at clarifying the internal status hierarchies of the court¹¹. At the same time that this occurs with wages or liveries, monetized mechanisms were used to reinforce similar hierarchies for the lodgings of those who were part of the royal following.

The solutions found in the kingdom of Portugal for the lodging of the courtiers fully portray a logic of distinction and separation that the court brought within each city where the king settled. Royal courts were not meant to be unruly and unorganized bands of abusing individuals, as much as the local city governments would like to portray them as such, in condemning terms¹². Inner separation and hierarchies between and within groups inside the court were kept when lodging was distributed according to the individual’s position, courtly function, or office. The inevitable accommodation of the realities of the king’s retinue to the profile and specific conditions of each city or town aimed first and foremost at keeping the courtly hierarchies in full force. Those hierarchies, as I have argued in several published works quoted above, had a fundamental role in ascribing and reinforcing personal status inside the Portuguese court.

The monarchs of Portugal promoted all through the 1300s the establishment of commercial lodgings (estalagens or estaus) in a multiplicity of places all around the kingdom, with special relevance to the cities where the royal court often travelled, and to those situated along the main roads. Commercial lodging was suited to deal not only with travellers and merchants, who moved around for their own reasons, but also with the dislocation of royal and princely retinues. Lisbon remained, nonetheless, a unique urban centre in the context of the kingdom due to the growth of its maritime trade and the related presence of many travellers and visitors, as well as communities of foreign merchants. It was one of the places in Portugal where commercial hospitality was arguably more developed in the late medieval period, something the monarch and the city government were interested in using in their search for practical solutions for the lodging of the royal retinues.

As stated earlier, courtly lodging was a persistent point of contention. In a well-known text of chronicler Fernão Lopes, a passage of his prologue to the history of king Fernando I (r. 1367-1383), he delineates with clarity what was at stake in Lisbon for the noble members of the king’s court:

the king ordered that no lord should be given lodging [pousentadoria] in Lisbon except when he himself was there. Otherwise, this should be done by using paid hostelries and lodging against money payments, and he also ordered that the prices be reasonable. So he told his judges that they should force the nobles to pay, as his wish was that it should not be done any other way [...] And to better arrange for all of this, he ordered to all the bishops, the masters [of the military orders] and his commanders, and anyone else who had the right to be lodged [pousentadoria] that they should fix and maintain their own houses at their own expense, so that they could reside in them¹³.

For the cities of the kingdom, as for the monarchs, lodging was only due as an obligation to those who received moradia or who served as officers and were regularly incorporated to the court. But the noblemen defended that the privilege was due to them as they moved around the kingdom, for instance, when they were summoned to come to court at the king’s service. And this would apply not only to them but to their own retinues, something the Portuguese monarchs of the late Middle Ages always contested. In this sense, the royal answer to the nobility at the different meetings of the Cortes was practically the same in the parliamentary meetings of king Fernando in the 1370s as it was a century later for king Afonso V in 1472: «you will not find that in the past lodging was given to noblemen, when they were on the road, without money being paid»¹⁴.

Who would be entitled to be lodged at the city’s expense, and what services that would encompass thus became fundamental questions at the centre of a long-lasting dispute in the Portuguese kingdom. The first reforms of the Portuguese court dating from the 1200s already refer to the need to regulate such matters, most notably by establishing the number of dependents or servants associated with each major office of the king’s household¹⁵. King João I (r. 1385-1433) in his long years of governance tried to simplify and regulate previous practice regarding the obligations of the main city of the kingdom. As a consequence of the support he had obtained from Lisbon in the revolutionary events of 1383-1385 which led to his election as king, João I continued to promote the aforementioned general principle of using commercial lodgings for hosting those courtiers of noble status who represented a significant proportion of the adults in his retinue¹⁶. This was to be understood, first and foremost, for those who did not own their own residences in the city, as suggested by the text of the chronicle of Fernão Lopes.

If, as a member of the royal court, you did not own a residence or could not be incorporated into the retinue of a nobleman or prelate of the king’s following who effectively had access to one, you would be depending on the solutions provided by the city. In the case of Lisbon, the scattering of the courtiers throughout the different sections of the city represented a difficult logistic and practical problem for the local municipal government to solve. I should highlight here that this whole complex of obligations applied to male courtiers only, the female component of the royal courts being the object of distinctive practices that, in the case of Portugal, still await careful reconstruction¹⁷.

The system of the lodgings or aposentadoria for male courtiers relied on the establishment of distinctions, and the careful regulation of the services provided according to three different status positions for each court member: knight, squire, page (cavaleiro, escudeiro, moço). Certain household and bureaucratic offices were entitled to a fixed amount of lodgings, as it occurred for instance with the Wardrobe (repostaria) or the Butlery (copa). The services themselves were carefully defined using a system similar to that of commercial lodgings, by using the unit denominated camas, i.e. beds. The material aspects of these «beds» were also distinct according to the courtly rank of each person: the quality of the sheets, for instance, would be higher for the knight (cavaleiro fidalgo) than it was for the squire (escudeiro) or the youngster (moço).

The city of Lisbon in the second half of the 1400s preferred to contract with local providers the furnishings and the «bed» services instead of enforcing the obligation of having those who were subject to the vexing duty of the aposentadoria receive the members of the court in their own houses. The commercial service was designated by the end of the fourteenth century as an estau: a half-estau (meio estau) was composed of five «beds», and a full estau corresponded to ten units. The «bed» encompassed a full set of material furnishings: not only bed covers and bed sheets, but also a bench and table to sit, and cooking utensils, similarly to what was provided in other forms of paid lodging by the commercial inns.

Using a system of purveyance contracts, since at least the decade of 1460s the main cities of royal itineraries in the Portuguese kingdom – Lisbon, Évora, and also the port-city of Setúbal – would have recourse to professional innkeepers for the bulk of court lodgings¹⁸. The surviving contracts suggest that the solution found in Lisbon was replicated in the other main places of courtly settling. This system required active collaboration between the aposentador or furrier of the court and the local municipal governments. The contracts establish that the supplier had be warned in advance of a fortnight to a month, so the city was to be provided by the court official with a rough estimate of how many people it would have to lodge. Since inevitable fluctuations would occur between the estimate and the reality in the terrain, the municipalities should have, simultaneously, a list of people who were obligated to the aposentadoria, so that in last resort (and it is unclear how frequently this was done in the late 1400s in each of those cities) the members of the court or moradores would be lodging in private houses.

But the originality of the solution found in Lisbon also had a physical impact in the city, dating from the reign of king Duarte (r.1433-1438). The king’s initiative lead to the construction of a special building as the centralized location where such lodging services could take place: the appropriately named Paço dos Estaus. Finished after 1438 during the regency of Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, this imposing building located in a main square next to the city walls (Rossio) became a well-known monument of Lisbon, often mentioned in contemporary descriptions and travel narratives. The influence of Duke Pedro, King Duarte’s brother, is generally mentioned as decisive in the adoption of this solution¹⁹. I would argue that his extensive travels may help explain the initiative, in particular his knowledge of the system of the famous Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. Pedro visited Venice in March 1428 coming from the court of emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg, under which he had fought in Hungary and Romania²⁰. The inspiration of Venice, in my view, comes not so much from the architecture of the building or its commercial functions as it comes from the fact that it exemplified a regimented purveyance of lodging and hospitality.

As Olivia Remie Constable established in her comparative study of such structures, the specialized facilities of the Italian fondacos were modeled on the Islamic funduk. These were places made to accommodate, but also to regulate and segregate the presence and activity of western merchants in Islamic ports. The Venetian Fondaco dei Tedeschi, for instance, seems to have been closely modelled upon that of Alexandria²¹. An important goal of these kinds of structures was to facilitate not only commercial exchange but also its inevitable corollary: taxation. In this regard, the Iberian cities were not in need of Italian inspiration because they were quite familiar with these practices. Constable noted, for instance, that similar buildings were owned in late medieval times by Aragonese and Castilian kings in major commercial cities and ports. Such facilities, she explained, «frequently served as depots where incoming merchants were required to bring their goods for storage, taxation, and sale. Though some royal facilities could also serve as paid hostelries, most of them increasingly focused on the control of the goods, not of the merchants»²². In Venice, the two aspects were indissociable for no active merchant from beyond the Alps, if he were to engage in trade, could stay in any other place within the city but the Fondaco. No excuses were accepted, such as claiming that one arrived too late and the building was closed²³. Since the thirteenth century, the city of Venice strictly controlled the merchant’s arrival by assigning individual city officers to the task and making compulsory the lodging in the Fondaco, where the trading commodities were recorded both at the moment of the merchant’s admission and at his departure. Taxation was less easily avoided when the control of the trading goods coincided with the compulsory stay of the trader.

By establishing the Paço dos Estaus, the Portuguese monarchs became the proprietors of such an assigned place where, from the decade of 1440s until approximately 1537, lodging was provided to all of those who, as members of the court or hosts of the king, were entitled to have it. The changing uses of this structure in the sixteenth century will not be detailed here, although the complex history of the building is revealing of the city’s transformation, as noted by its use for lodging temporarily the expelled Jewish population in 1496, as the nearby Jewish quarters and synagogues of Lisbon were confiscated by royal order²⁴. The date of 1537 marks the beginning of the activities of the Inquisition in the building, subsequently to become its Lisbon siege²⁵. The «royal stables» followed the courtier’s lodgings in this same location, and although built outside the walls, they easily communicated with the Paço dos Estaus through a small city door (postigo)²⁶.

The use of this building allowed for carefully regimented and centralized administration of court lodgings, either paid for by the city or by the king directly, as the case may be. While as the control of the lodging obligations and services was thus facilitated, the integration of the courtier in the city was transformed, his experience becoming ever more similar to the precarious settling of the traveller. The place of activity of court members (but also bureaucrats, notaries, and officers of the royal households), the Paço dos Estaus was also place of hospitality for foreign guests and even, on occasion, a place of residence for the king or members of the royal family in the 1500s. As a residential structure associated with the courtier’s experience of the city, the prevailing use of the Paço dos Estaus fully exemplifies, nonetheless, the logic of separation and internal distinction that the court hierarchies embodied.

What happened to a possible sense of continuity within the court’s dislocation, discussed earlier in this essay? How can we define the peculiar sociability that the courtly order would establish within the main cities of the kingdom? A glimpse of the courtier’s experience using this lodging system is available in the poetry produced in courtly environments of the late fifteenth century, most notably the compositions of João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco. This poet uses a well-established topos of opposition between court and countryside by evoking, as part of the courtier’s miserable experience in the city, the broken table, the fleece-infested sheets, the hunger endured while sharing lodgings with his companions. In these texts, the poet mentions exactly the same material implements described in the lodging contracts of Lisbon or Évora: the bed sheets, the furniture, the cooking utensils²⁷. A lifelike image by the end of the 1400s, therefore, would be an image of discomfort and unalluring poverty, as the topic motif demanded, an image meant to provoke a knowing smile from those who were part of this world – in fact, the poet’s public. Distinction and separation from the lives of regular city dwellers reinforced the courtly hierarchies, but also set up the conditions for another aspect of life at court: its requirements of well-connected social relations and substantial expenditure.

EDITION OF SOURCES

LOPES, Fernão, Crónica de El-Rei Dom Fernando, ed. by Giuliano MACCHI, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1975.

MOROSINI Antonio, Il Codice Morosini. Il mondo visto da Venezia (1094-1433), ed. by Andrea NANETTI, Spoleto, Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2010.

RESENDE, Garcia de, Cancioneiro Geral, ed. by Aida Fernanda DIAS and Álvaro Júlio da Costa PIMPÃO, Coimbra, Centro de Estudos Românicos, 1973.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BARROS, Henrique da Gama (1945-54²), História da Administração Pública em Portugal nos séculos XII a XV [1885-1922], Lisboa, Sá da Costa, 11 volumes.

BEIRANTE, Maria Ângela Rocha (1995), Évora na Idade Média, Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian – Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica.

BERTELLI, Sergio, CRIFÒ, Giuliano (eds.) (1987), Rituale, ceremoniale, etichetta, Milano, Bompiani.

CASTILHO, Júlio (1937), Lisboa Antiga: os Bairros Orientais, Lisboa, Câmara Municipal, vol. X.

COELHO, Maria Helena da Cruz (2013), Dom João I, o que re-colheu Boa Memória, Lisboa, Círculo de Leitores.

CONSTABLE, Olivia Remie (2003), Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press.

COSTA GOMES, Rita (2003), The Making of a Court Society. Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

COSTA GOMES, Rita (2011), «Os Convivas do Rei e a estruturação da corte (séculos XIII a XV)», in Ana Isabel BUESCU, David FELISMINO, (eds.), A Mesa dos Reis de Portugal. Ofícios, Consumos, Cerimónias e Representações (séculos XIII-XVIII), Lisboa, Temas & Debates, pp. 26-43.

COSTA GOMES, Rita (2015) «La Cour en mouvement et l’organisation des séjours au Portugal: aspects matériels et économiques», E-Spania, 20, http://e-spania.revues.org/24206; DOI: 10.4000/e-spania.24206.

COSTA GOMES, Rita (2017), «Lisbonne, ville de cour», in Boris BOVE, Murielle GAUDE-FERRAGU, Cédric MICHON (eds.), Paris, Ville de Cour XIII^e-XVIII^e siècles, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp.129-140.

FARINHA, Maria do Carmo Dias (1994), «Palácio dos Estaus», in Francisco SANTANA, Eduardo SUCENA (eds.), Dicionário da História de Lisboa, Lisboa, Carlos Quinas, pp. 361-364.

FRANÇA, José-Augusto (2009), Lisboa. História Física e Moral, Lisboa, Livros Horizonte.

GIEBELS, Daniel Norte (2016), A Inquisição de Lisboa. No epicentro da dinâmica inquisitorial (1537-1579), University of Coimbra, Unpublished PhD Thesis in History.

LUPPRIAN, Karl-Ernst (1978), Il Fondaco dei tedeschi e la sua funzione di controllo del commercio tedesco a Venezia, Venezia, Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani.

MATTOSO, José (1983), « Les Nobles dans les Villes Portugaises du Moyen Âge », in Les Espagnes médiévales. Aspects économiques et sociaux. Mélanges offerts à Jean Gautier Dalché, Nice, special number of Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Nice, pp. 125-140.

MORAN CABANAS, Isabel (1999), «Sobre as cartas rimadas de João Rodrigues de Castelo Branco no Cancioneiro Geral de Garcia de Resende», in Rosario ALVAREZ, Dolores VILAVEDRA (eds.), Cingidos por unha arela común. Homenaxe ó Professor Xesús Alonso Montero, Santiago de Compostela, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, vol. II, pp. 1017-1035.

SILVA, Augusto Vieira da (1987), A Cerca Fernandina de Lisboa, Lisboa, Câmara Municipal, vol. I.

SIMMEL, Georg (1997), «The Sociology of Space», in David FRISBY, Mike FEATHERSTONE (eds.), Simmel on Culture: Selected Studies, London, Sage, pp. 137-169.

VALE, Malcolm (2001), The Princely Court. Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270-1380, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

VENTURA, Margarida Garcez (2013), A Corte de D. Duarte. Política, Cultura e Afectos, Vila do Conde, Verso da História.

1. COSTA GOMES, 2015.

2. This aspect of Duarte’s court is discussed in COSTA GOMES, 2003, pp. 286-288; it is downplayed in VENTURA, 2013.

3. The Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969, s.v. “Dislocation”.

4. The texts of the petitions presented by the cities in parliamentary meetings (capítulos de Cortes) have traditionally been interpreted in such literal way. See the classical remarks by BARROS, 1945-54, Vol II, pp. 417-424.

5. See, for instance, the law of 1325 about the limits of the “peace of the court”: Ordenações del-Rei Dom Duarte, pp. 376-378.

6. SIMMEL, 1997, p. 147.

7. BERTELLI, GRIFÒ, 1985, pp. 88-92.

8. COSTA GOMES, 2003, pp. 291-309.

9. For Santarém: MATTOSO, 1983; for Évora: BEIRANTE, 1995, pp. 563-564; for Lisbon: COSTA GOMES, 2017.

10. COSTA GOMES, 2011, pp. 32-38.

11. VALE, 2001, pp. 93-99.

12. See for instance the petitions of the parliamentary meetings of 1439: Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Suplemento de Cortes, Maço 2, n. 19, folios 5-8.

13. LOPES, Crónica de El-Rei Dom Fernando, pp. 8-9 (my translation).

14. «não achareis que antigamente aos fidalgos per caminho pousadas sem dinheiro se dessem»: Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Cortes, Maço 2, 14, f°61r° (documents of the parliamentary meetings of 1472-1473).

15. COSTA GOMES, 2011, p. 33.

16. COELHO, 2013, pp. 137-138

17. In most contemporary courts, unmarried noble women following the court were lodged preferably in royal residences, and other female groups (such as a set number of prostitutes, for instance) had lodgings allocated for them. Both practices have been attested for Portugal: COSTA GOMES, 2011, pp. 76-77 and 328.

18. COSTA GOMES, 2015.

19. CASTILHO, 1937, pp. 32-49; FARINHA, 1994 (includes bibliography about this building).

20. MOROSINI, Il Codice Morosini, t. III, p. 1268.

21. CONSTABLE, 2003, pp. 137, 191.

22. CONSTABLE, 2003, pp. 186-187.

23. LUPPRIAN, 1978.

24. FRANÇA, 2009, p. 123.

25. More exactly the first inquisitorial audiences in the building started in September 3 1537 according to the recent research of GIEBELS, 2016, p. 45. We thank the author and also José Pedro Paiva for this communication.

26. SILVA, 1987, pp. 94-95 and Map V.

27. RESENDE, Cancioneiro Geral, vol. I, p. 342; MORAN CABANAS, 1999.