FERDINANDO (FERNANDO) of PORTUGAL, Blessed. - Son of Giovanni I, king of Portugal, and of Filippa, daughter of Giovanni of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster; born at Santarem on 29 Sept. 1402, died in prison at Fez (Morocco) on 5 June 1443. Piously educated, he reluctantly accepted, as a remedy for his poverty, the rank of Grand Master of the Knights of Aviz; but he refused the cardinalate offered him by Eugenio IV.
Together with his brother, Enrico the Navigator, he led an expedition against the Moors of Africa in order to drive them from Tangier; but, overwhelmed and defeated, F. was taken hostage as a pledge for the cession of Ceuta. When the hope of obtaining this city was abandoned, the Moors changed their courtesy into maltreatment, slave labor, and imprisonment. Transferred from Arzilla to Fez, to the king and his cruel vizier, he was left to languish in prison until his death. Yet amid such suffering, not a word of complaint ever passed his lips. His fellow prisoner João Alvarez, having regained his freedom, brought his heart back to his homeland in 1452; later, his mortal remains also, discovered in 1463, were buried in the church of Our Lady at Batalha, near Leiria. Paolo II declared him Blessed in 1470.
F. is the hero of one of Calderon’s most moving dramas: Il principe constante, composed in 1629.