The Temptation of the Synthesis

In the mid-1980s, the first volume of the New History of Portugal, edited by A. H. de Oliveira Marques and Joel Serrão, was published. This was a work that examined the period of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and consisted of the fourth volume of a long and comprehensive edition of a New History of Portugal.2 The sole person responsible for this volume was Oliveira Marques, the author who, at the beginning of the 1970s, had been behind the publication of a new and innovative History of Portugal in only two volumes, but who proposed a synthetic revision of the History of Portugal through the eyes of a single author.3 This History of Portugal was to leave its mark on generations of students and researchers, being regarded for many years as the only example of a history that paid attention to the new historiographic problematics that had marked the 1950s and 1960s. Curiously, it proved to be necessary to wait a further decade4 for a new model to appear for the construction and presentation of the History of Portugal, founded on the contributions of different authors. This was the model proposed by the New History of Portugal, together with the History of Portugal, edited by José Mattoso and published shortly after the New History,5 and the History of Portugal by João Medina, presented in the early 1990s.6 In all of these histories, the medieval period was the subject of special attention, despite being approached in quite different ways. For the New History of Portugal, reflection about the medieval period spread over 3 volumes, if we consider a long chronology,7 each of them the responsibility of different authors, but it was the period between 1096 and the end of the fifteenth century that was afforded particular attention, with two large volumes on the subject, divided by the already firmly enshrined date of 1325, or in other words the death of Dom Dinis.8 This division was also the predominant feature of the volume of the History of Portugal edited by José Mattoso and dedicated to the “Feudal Monarchy.”9 Here, too, following on from this author’s study on “A Identificação de um País”, 1325 was taken as the date that divides the