BARROS, JOÃO de. – Portuguese writer and historiographer, b. at Viseu in 1496, d. near Pombal in 1571.
In 1520 he published the Crónica do Imperador Clarimundo, which, conceived as a chivalric romance of adventures and alternating prose and verse, rich in characters and episodes, already revealed that intention of glorifying the fatherland which constitutes the purpose of the B.’s major work, namely the Décadas da Ásia, extremely useful for learning about the history of the Portuguese empire in the East. The B. proceeds by selecting from the best documents, but his desire to exalt his country leads him to collect only those elements suited to this purpose; consequently, the history of the conquest is presented from a decidedly tendentious point of view and lacks proportion and objectivity, while it is his admiration for the histories of Livy that inspires the passionate speeches of his heroes. The work, which would become one of Camões’s sources, was to consist of four sections, each devoted to one of the parts of the world that had been the scene of Portuguese activity, but this vast design could not be carried out. Of the B. there remain only four decades of the Ásia, the last of which was published posthumously; another eight were composed by Diego do Couto and a thirteenth by Antonio Bocarro. The B. is also the author of moralistic and didactic writings (the Ropica pnefma, a Dialogo da viciosa vergonha in which Christian morality is combined with heroic exaltation and the love of glory, etc.), a Portuguese grammar for the use of the indigenous peoples, with prayers and precepts of Christian doctrine, and various dialogues and discourses.
Recently (Lisbon 1921), a selection from the first decade was published in the collection Antologia portuguesa of A. de Campos, and R. Lapa edited an edition of the Panegiricos.