A tragic figure in the history of medieval Portugal: Prince Pedro

Abstract

The rise and fall of Prince Pedro, which occupies more than half of the Crónica de D. Afonso V, attributed to Rui de Pina, can be regarded as a narrative in the sense given to that term in modern literary theory. It may be, though, that the original author of the chronicle was Fernão Lopes, rather than Rui de Pina. The nature of the text is such that the noble but unjustly persecuted figure of the prince became an essential referent of the epitomes of Portuguese history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in the poetry of the same period.