O título deste trabalho, “Pedro Álvares Seco: a retroprojeção da memória da Ordem de Cristo no século XVI”, aponta para um duplo protagonismo, por um lado, Pedro Álvares Seco, autor e cronista, e, por outro, a Ordem de Cristo no século XVI. Também duplo é o seu sentido, expresso nos conceitos: retroprojeção e memória. Neste contexto, o termo retroprojeção foi usado por Luís Adão da Fonseca: “recordar é sempre, em alguma medida, projetar. No caso da memória histórica, esta é, efetivamente, uma...

This chapter offers a comparative study of hagiographic devotion in the lordships of three Military Orders inspired by the Cistercian model in late Medieval times: Avis and Christ in Portugal and Calatrava in Castile. The archival sources used to collect data were the visitorial records, written testimonies produced by the officers when visiting the military orders’ domains. The Military Orders’ devotion to women saints such as Mary Magdalen, Catherine of Alexandria and others represented virtues like the spirit of sacrifice and humility, which served to reinforce the vocation of the Military Orders to care for the poor and the sick. Churches were used not only as central points for organizing both religious services and events in the immediate vicinity but also as organizational centres for the order’s economic and administrative networks. Churches and the patron saints to which they were dedicated have been discussed in studies to date, but this work proposes to extend the findings.

The Templar archives should be considered at a plural level: there are national and multinational archives. These include the convent archives, the master’s archives, the commendatory archives, and the commendators’ archives. The Templar archives in Portugal should be viewed over a span of several hundred years. To this end, we will reflect on two issues: first, the temporal constitution of the Templar archives in Portugal from around 1128 onwards, and second, their dispersal following the suppression of the Order of the Temple after 1312. At the same time, we will analyse the possibility of creating a cartulary of the Order of the Temple in Portugal. Unlike in other Iberian kingdoms, there are no known medieval Templar cartularies in Portugal. Therefore, it was necessary to compile the Templar documentation identified mainly in national archives to create the so-called Cartulary of the Order of the Temple in Portugal.

The historiography of the crusade and reconquest in the Iberian Peninsula, and Portugal in particular, dates from the beginning of the twentieth century. Since the 1920s, it has been assumed that the reconquest was an output of the crusade in the Iberian West due to the so-called “Bull of Crusade” given to Portugal. The “idea of the Crusade” in Portugal was enhanced by Carl Erdmann in the 1930s and 1940s. This interpretation has been endorsed by the very context in which the Kingdom of Portugal emerged and developed throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. From the 1980s onwards, the launching of systematic research on the military orders also reinforced this perspective. The deep affinity between the military orders and the crusades in the context of the reconquest is reflected in this historiography. These concepts—military orders, crusade, reconquest—have been studied without distinction being made between them, adding to the complexity of this analysis. Considering the historiographical achievements regarding the crusade, it is pertinent to rethink the associations between reconquest, crusade and military orders. Reading certain historical narratives is crucial for this analysis, although the written records do not fully deplete the subject. To reinforce the relevance of this approach, we will also consider royal and pontifical diplomas. Tracing the terminology used in these documents and identifying how these historical realities were referred to are the two main goals of this paper. For that purpose, three key moments of the Portuguese reconquest have been chosen: the conquests of Lisbon (1147), Silves (1189), and Alcácer do Sal (1217). These have one feature in common: the presence of crusaders travelling to the Holy Land, which supports the terminological analysis of those discourses. Different perspectives are embodied in these conquest narratives when compared with royal and papal diplomas on the same issue and of a similar chronology. Historiography on Reconquest, crusade, and the military orders is often conditioned by ideology, occasionally revealing a tendency to repeat ideas without debating them. This paper’s analysis is based on the aforementioned written records and is undertaken in order to verify when the word crusade/crusader appeared in Portugal, to assess to what extent the war of conquest in Portuguese territory followed the example of the holy war and to evaluate the commitment of the crown and the Holy See in this complex process.

Contribuir para o aprofundamento do papel que as mulheres desempenharam ao longo da história é uma das bases para um conhecimento mais integrado e clarividente sobre o passado. Tendo em conta este princípio, o propósito deste trabalho é identificar e discutir o contributo feminino para a promoção de uma nova religiosidade entre programas de peregrinação e sócio-caritativos, durante os séculos XII-XIV. Estes programas foram desenvolvidos no contexto das ordens religioso-militares, que manifestaram profundas distinções entre si. Sendo umas mais militares e outras mais assistenciais, enquadraram as mulheres de formas diversas, sendo as de perfil mais assistencial aquelas que maiores expectativas tinham em relação à ação destas. Sob este enquadramento institucional, havia mulheres que ingressavam e viviam em comunidades de perfil monástico e outras que, sob diversas formas de vinculação, se associavam às ordens. No seu conjunto, as mulheres contribuíram para dinamizar a religiosidade ímpar e as redes de sociabilidade em torno das ordens religioso-militares e, com isto, para a definição da sua identidade.

Book review of The Land and the Cross. Properties of the Order of St John Between the Centre and Periphery (16th-18th Centuries), ed. by Valentina Burgassi, George Alexander Said-Zammit, and Valeria Vanesio. Routledge, 2025