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Portugal Control of the Royal Patrimony
Disputes over land ownership became an increasing
source of
conflict between the crown and the upper nobility and
clergy.
Land ownership was important because the crown's main
source of
revenue was taxes from the great estates and tithes from
lands
owned directly by the king. But in medieval Portugal,
hereditary
title to land did not exist in any developed legal form.
As the
original grants of land were obscured by passing years,
many of
the upper nobility and clergy of the church came to
believe that
they held their land by hereditary right. Thus, each time
a new
king ascended the throne, the crown had to review land
grants and
titles in order to assert its authority and reclaim land
removed
from the king's patrimony.
The first king to confront this problem was Afonso II,
who
discovered when he ascended the throne in 1211 that his
father,
Sancho I, had willed much of the royal patrimony to the
church.
In 1216, after a lengthy legal battle between the crown
and the
Holy See over various provisions of Sancho's will, the
pope
recognized Afonso II's right to maintain the royal
patrimony
intact. From 1216 until 1221, the Portuguese crown
asserted this
general right by requiring those who had received
donations from
previous kings to apply for letters of confirmation. The
crown
thus created the power to review grants to nobles and
ecclesiastical bodies.
The process of confirmation was carried a step further
when
the king appointed royal commissions authorized to
investigate
land ownership, especially in the north where much of the
feudal
land tenure predated the creation of the monarchy. These
inquiries, as they were called, gathered evidence from the
oldest, most experienced residents in each locale without
consulting local nobles or church officials. They revealed
a
large number of abuses and improper extensions of
boundaries, as
well as conspiracies to defraud the crown of income. The
first
inquiry found that the church was the biggest expropriator
of
royal property. The archbishop of Braga, angered by the
activities of the commissions, excommunicated Afonso II in
1219.
The king responded by seizing church property and forcing
the
archbishop to flee Portugal for Rome. In 1220 the pope
confirmed
the king's excommunication and relieved him of his oath of
fealty
to the Holy See. This dispute between church and crown
ended
temporarily when the excommunicated king died in 1223 and
his
chancellor arranged an ecclesiastical burial in exchange
for the
return of the seized church property and the promise that
future
inquiries would respect canon law.
The conflict between the church and crown concerning
property
was finally resolved during the reign of King Dinis
(r.1279-1325). In 1284 Dinis launched a new round of
inquiries
and in the following year promulgated deamortization laws,
which
prohibited the church and religious orders from buying
property
and required that they sell all property purchased since
the
beginning of his reign. For this action against the
church,
Dinis, like his father and grandfather, was
excommunicated. This
time, however, the king refused to pledge obedience to the
pope
and established once and for all the power of the
Portuguese
crown to regulate and control the royal patrimony.
This power allowed Dinis to nationalize the most
powerful and
wealthy of the military-religious orders. The Calatravans,
founded in Castile, had in effect become Portuguese when
the town
of Avis was bestowed upon them by Afonso and they became
known as
the Order of Avis. In 1288 the Knights of Saint James,
also of
Castilian origin, became Portuguese when the order elected
its
own master. In 1312, as the result of an investigation
into the
activities of the Templars, Pope Clement V suppressed this
order
and transferred their vast properties in Portugal to the
Hospitallers. Dinis was able to prevail upon the pope to
give
this wealth to a newly founded Portuguese
military-religious
order called the Order of Christ, which was initially
situated at
Castro Marim but was later moved to Tomar. After
nationalization,
most of these orders became chivalric bodies of
quasi-celibate
landowners. The Order of Avis, however, remained on a war
footing
and contributed significantly to Portugal's independence
from
Castile. The Order of Christ also remained a
military-religious
order, and its wealth was later used by Prince Henry the
Navigator to pay for the voyages of discovery.
Data as of January 1993
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