A draft of instructions to embassies during the reign of King John III: sites, buildings and sketches

Abstract

The subject of this essay is a text from a codex revealed and transcribed by Pedro Pinto, which is neither dated nor has a specific addressee. Pinto suggests that it is a draft for an unspecified embassy of the royal ambassador Pedro Mascarenhas to Italy, before 1538. The document/minute aims to obtain information on the political, social, ecclesiastical, economic, military, technical and artistic aspects of the territories visited. The comparison with the Portuguese reality is always underlying, in a survey whose purpose is to collect concrete, documentary, regimental and material information, and even iconographic records, as is the case of  heraldic information. Considering the nature and final form of the document, we believe that it was intended to be a kind of general "regiment", like others that ambassadors carried at the behest of the king, and that it was a document of greater scope and surprising modernity.