LOPES, FERNÃO. - Portuguese chronicler. Biographical information about him is scant and uncertain: he perhaps lived from 1380 to 1460. King don Giovanni I appointed him to the trusted office of keeper of the archives of the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon: he remained there for 36 years, engaged in composing the chronicles commissioned from him on the kings of the national dynasties of Burgundy and Aviz.
He completed or sketched the ten biographies of the nine kings of the first dynasty and the first of the second: the last three have survived in the original, on don Pedro I (a sketch), on don Fernando, and on “his” don Giovanni I, sufficient to make him the greatest of Portuguese historians of his century (he is called the “father of Portuguese history”) and perhaps the most notable in Europe at that time. His history displays a scrupulous concern for truth and a constant aspiration to a “philosophical” ordering, as he himself puts it, between cause and effect in events. Of singular effectiveness are his portrayal of Nuno Álvarez, the saintly leader of the defence against the Spaniards (if, as part of the criticism still maintains, the Crónica do condestobre de Portugal Nuno Álvarez Pereira is also his), and his description of crowds.
Giuseppe Carlo Rossi