Prince Henry's Debts: Paid with Guinea and with His Own Lands (1460–1521)

Research Library · Torre do Tombo · 1460–1521

Prince Henry the Navigator died in debt. That much is well known. Less well known is how his debts were paid, and by whom. The royal registers show that the Crown paid his largest debt with a licence to trade in Guinea. They also show that three of his towns stayed in a creditor's hands for almost forty years, and that this pledge was the reason the monastery of Batalha never received the silver he left it. Alongside the debts to the living ran the debts to his soul: Masses paid for at Batalha, Tomar and Sagres, and, by order of the Pope, in every church of the lands he had discovered.

1. The biggest creditor: the Count of Viana

Dom Duarte de Meneses, Count of Viana, was one of the great soldiers of Afonso V's Morocco wars. In 1462 he was captain of Alcácer Ceguer, the town taken in 1458. He was also married to a woman whose marriage portion Henry had promised and never fully paid. The registers record three debts to him:

Whether the first two are the same debt, counted in two currencies, we cannot tell. If they are, the Guinea licence of 1462 did not clear it, because in 1499 the pledge still stood “until the three thousand five hundred coroas are paid”.

2. A debt paid with Guinea

On 24 March 1462, at Santarém, Afonso V answered a petition from the Count. The Count had shown him two royal orders for “quatrocentos e quarenta e quatro mil reais brancos” that “o Iffante dom Amrrique meu tio que deus aja” owed him “por seu casamento”. The king did not pay him in coin. He gave the Count leave to send to “nossos tratos de Guinee” ships and caravels of up to “trezentas e dez toneladas”, reckoned at “mil e quatrocentos e vinte e nove” reais a ton. 310 tons at 1,429 reais makes 442,990 reais, the nearest whole number of tons to the debt.

A little further on, after a struck-out word, the clerk calls it the trade “dos negros” beyond a cape whose name we cannot read with confidence. The licence sets a term of two years [?]. The king's revenue officer is to register the ships and their tonnage.

The licence names the trade, not the cargo, so we should not say more than it does. But the Guinea trade of the 1450s and 1460s dealt above all in enslaved Africans and in gold. The Crown, which took over the Guinea trade at Henry's death, settled his family debt by giving his creditor a share of that trade.

3. Henry's lands in pledge for forty years

For the marriage portion of 3,500 coroas, Henry had pledged three towns of the Beira: Tarouca, Lalim and Lazarim. The Count held them, then the Countess, then their son, Dom João de Meneses. In 1499 Manuel I turned the pledge into a life grant to Dom João, for his services at Arzila and Tangier. He took care to add that the towns were not to be taken from Dom João's heirs “ate primeiramente lhe serem pagas as ditas tres mill e quinhentas coroas”, until the 3,500 coroas had first been paid. Almost forty years after Henry's death, his debt was still open.

The same pledge explains a puzzle from our second article. In 1460 Henry had charged the sixteen marks of silver a year that he left to the monastery of Batalha on the rents of Tarouca. In August 1499 Manuel I explained that the monastery had received nothing from them because those rents were “apenhadas”, pledged. The Crown paid Batalha from its own revenues instead. Henry's debt to a nobleman had swallowed his gift to the Church.

4. Smaller creditors: his own men

The great were paid with trade and land. Henry's own servants were paid with what was left. On 4 July 1464 Afonso V gave Fernão Valarinho, squire and servant of the Infante, living in Lagos, houses in Lagos that had belonged to Henry. They were given “em desconto”, in part payment, of a debt of 44,650 reais that the Infante owed him. Two days later the king confirmed the deed. Our reading of these two entries is rough, and we cannot yet say what the debt was for.

5. Debts to his soul

Henry's testament also left obligations to his soul, and these lasted longer than the debts:

• Batalha, 1499: three Masses a day, paid at last as 36,480 reais a year, mostly by the Crown.
• Tomar, 1507: his fair shops yielded too little, so the Crown gave the convent two and a half marks of silver a year for 250 Masses.
• All the lands he discovered, 1503: at Manuel I's request, Pope Alexander VI confirmed that every church of the islands and lands discovered by Henry must say a Mass of Our Lady for his soul every Saturday, as his testament required.
• Sagres, 1511: the chaplain of the church of Santa Maria de Sagres received 10,000 reais a year, paid from the tuna fisheries of Lagos, for a daily Mass for the dead and for the souls of the Infantes Dom Henrique and Dom Fernando.
• Santiago, Cape Verde, 1521: a priest certified that he had served “the chapel of the Infante Dom Henrique” for six and a half months, so that the local revenue officer would pay him.

Sixty years after his death, Henry was still being paid for, in Portugal and in Africa.

6. What we cannot say

• Whether the 444,000 reais of 1462 and the 3,500 coroas of 1499 are one debt or two.
• Whether the Count of Viana used the licence: he died in Morocco in 1464.
• What exactly the Count brought back. The licence, as far as we can read it, names the trade, not the goods.
• What the Valarinho debt was for. Our reading of the 1464 entries is provisional.
• The 1503, 1511 and 1521 records are cited from the archive's catalogue; we have not read them.

Sources

• ANTT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 1, f. 7 (PT/TT/CHR/I/0001/35), 24 March 1462; printed in Monumenta Henricina, vol. 14.
• ANTT, Chancelaria de D. Afonso V, liv. 8, f. 114 (PT/TT/CHR/I/0008/000789–790), 4 and 6 July 1464.
• ANTT, Chancelaria de D. Manuel I, liv. 41, ff. 104, 107v–108r, 116 (1499).
• ANTT, Bulas, mç. 32, n.º 28 (1503); Chancelaria de D. Manuel I, liv. 8, f. 37v (1511); Corpo Cronológico, II, mç. 97, n.º 5 (1521), from the catalogue.
• ANTT, Ordem de Cristo/Convento de Tomar, liv. 232 (1507).
• António Carvalho da Costa, Corografia portugueza, vol. 2 (1712), for the earlier mention of the Tarouca pledge.
• Our earlier articles: Paid in Silver, What Happened to Henry's Silver, Where Prince Henry's People Were.

Part of the Henry the Navigator Project. Readings by AntiqueParchments.com Research Library from the Torre do Tombo's images, with AI assistance. Corrections are welcome.