One of the more interesting and notable undertakings in the history of royal power in Western Europe between the mid-12th and mid-13th centuries was the gradual recovery by monarchs of essentially public rights, which in the political, social and economic circumstances of previous centuries, in particular between the 9th and 11th centuries, had been appropriated by both secular and ecclesiastical powers, at times by delegation from the royal authorities themselves, and which had limited the ability of monarchs to exercise full authority over the territories they ruled. As one would expect, this recovery was slow, with rhythms and timelines varying substantially according to political vicissitudes and the internal or external circumstances of each monarchy. In the Iberian case, as one would expect, the permanent border war with Islam substantially conditioned these evolutionary processes, variously accelerating or decelerating them in light of the possibilities and requirements of each moment.
The control of writing was an essential factor in this process of monarchical recovery. Indeed, for more than half of the Middle Ages, writing had been almost entirely dominated by churchmen, allowing them to exercise a considerable degree of power over the whole of society. Churchmen were the only guarantors of the written preservation of memory, laws, prescriptions and prayers, in short, of all the texts that regulated daily life.
From the late 12th century, the founding of the earliest universities enabled the creation of specialised o cials, particularly in the legal eld. This, alongside the complexi cation of governance structures, led monarchs to pay greater attention to those mechanisms that supported their authority. This was particularly the case with the royal chancellery, where decrees issued with royal authority were drafted, registered and disseminated throughout the territory. Hence the eagerness, for example, of 13th-century monarchs to precisely de ne the borders of their territories so that these were recognised in political, scal and judicial terms by all their subjects. Without disregarding the remarkable legacy received from his father and grandfather, the political actions of King Afonso II (1211-1223) in this regard were of fundamental importance in Portugal. Indeed, under Afonso II, the development of the kingdom reached a level which put the Portuguese monarchy on a par with its more developed counterparts, such as England or France.
Unable to make a mark through brilliance on the battle eld due to the leprosy which marked most of his short life, writing turned out to be Afonso II’s main weapon against opponents, both the members of the high nobility, starting with his closest relatives, and those bishops who resisted his push to assert royal power over all others. In the rst months of his rule, perhaps in May or June, the King called a meeting of his Curia Regis in Coimbra, which some believe may have been the rst meeting of the courts in Portugal. While this meeting resulted in the proclamation of a few dozen laws of real signi cance, this episode was also particularly important as a demonstration of the monarch’s exclusive legislative authority, as underlined by the King’s main biographer, Hermínia Vasconcelos Vilar. We should not be surprised, therefore, that this meeting and its e ects created a chasm and some con ict between the King and his brother princes.
In following years, but particularly from 1217, perhaps due to the important reconquest of Alcácer do Sal that same year, the monarch initiated a series of actions of signi cant governmental scope. This included the initiation of a chancellery register, the rst in Portugal and one of the earliest in the Iberian Peninsula and Europe, with most of the documentation issued from the royal chancellery being copied in a register, thus preserving records of the King’s reign. In that same year, the King further demonstrated his power by con rming or annulling privileges previously granted by himself and his predecessors. Finally, the General Inquiries, perhaps the most emblematic measure of Afonso II’s reign, were initiated in August 1220. The Inquiries of 1220 as a documentary typology are not without precedent, either in Portugal or in other kingdoms. Indeed, similar processes had been undertaken in England since the latter 11th century. The great novelty of the Portuguese Inquiries, however, was that their purpose was to survey the assets and revenues of the Monarchy over such an extended region, to a large extent coinciding with most of the Archdiocese of Braga, with whose Archbishop the King was locked in a heated dispute. From the Lima River to the Ave River, and from the sea to the Tua River, across almost all the parishes of thirty districts and land holdings, the commission made up mostly of regular and secular clerics and members of urban circles made a survey of Royal assets and of revenues and services owed to the monarch using the memories and knowledge of hundreds of local witnesses, revealing several infractions committed against these assets by various manorial powers. More remarkable still is the fact that the same inquirers also ascertained the assets held by the various ecclesiastical institutions - chapters, colleges and monasteries - and military orders in each of those parishes.
Alfonso II’s initiative was continued by his immediate successors, revealing an ongoing concern to increasingly “centralise” the powers of monarchs: in 1258, Alfonso II’ son, Afonso III, extended these inquiries to a much vaster geographical scope, from the river Minho to the northern slope of the Serra da Estrela; his grandson, King Dinis, went even further by extending the inquiries to surveying the possessions of lords in 1288; and nally, his great-grandson, Afonso IV, demanded the presentation of the royal documents that had granted rights to certain jurisdictions in mid-1330.
One might ask what the real outcome of the General Inquiries of 1220 was? While in the immediate term their scope may have been rather limited, in the longer term they were of exceptional signi cance, together with other governmental measures taken by King Afonso II, who undoubtedly laid some of the oldest and most long-lasting foundations of the Portuguese pre-state structure and placed Portugal on a par with the most developed monarchies of his time.
