href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@35738@[email protected]#footnote_39" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">^[39] The authorities of the City of Oporto obtained leave from Affonso V, on the 23rd March 1447, to have copies made of all the documents in the Torre do Tombo which related to them in any way, and these were furnished on December 25th, 1453, when Lopes was still Keeper of the Archives.

But Azurara was guilty of a yet graver delinquency than his destruction of the old Registers, and a charge of forgery must be brought against him. A detailed account of this affair may be read in the judgment of the Casa de Supplicação, delivered on January 12th, 1479, from which it appears that a dispute had arisen between the Order of Christ and some inhabitants of Punhete over rights claimed by the former in the River Zezere, a tributary of the Tagus. The Order based its claim on certain documents, one being of the reign of D. Fernando, and said to have been extracted from the Torre do Tombo, in which that monarch purported to confer on the Order of Christ jurisdiction over the towns of Pombal, Soure, Castello Branco and others, to the practical exclusion of his own authority therein.^[40] When a copy of this pretended grant was produced in support of the contention, Azurara's successor in the Archives, Affonso d'Obidos, received instructions to produce the Register of D. Fernando for the purpose of comparison, and to bring the scribes engaged in the Archive Office with him; whereupon the grant was found at the end of the Register in a different writing from the rest of the book. Neither d'Obidos, nor the scribe who had copied out the Register, could say how it came there, or who had inserted it, and the latter declared that no such grant existed in the old books from which he had transcribed the present one. On further examination the pretended grant proved to be in the handwriting of "Gomez Eannes, Cleric",^[41] a servant of Azurara, and it must have been fraudulently inserted in the Register after the latter had been bound up. On the discovery of this act of forgery, judgment was, of course, given against the Order, and it was fortunate for our Chronicler that the offence he had committed in its interests remained undiscovered until after his death.^[42]

Curiously enough, in the same year Azurara was rewarded by a pension. The grant dated from Cintra, August 7th, 1459, runs as follows:—"Dom Affonso, etc., to all to whom this letter of ours shall come we make known that, considering the many services we have received and expect hereafter to receive from Gomez Eanes de Zurara, Commander of the Order of Christ, Our Chronicler and Keeper of our Archives, and wishing to do him favour, we are pleased to give him a pension of twelve white milreis from the 1st day of January next, which amount he has had of us up to the present time."^[43]

It would appear from the last line that this document is rather the confirmation of an old grant than the gift of something new, but it has been interpreted to mean that Azurara had been receiving the money from the King's privy purse, and was henceforth to have it out of the public treasury. There can be no dispute that the recipient merited the gift for his past literary services, which were an earnest of the work he was to accomplish in the future, and the value of the latter will presently appear.

We possess the copy of one certificate issued by the Chronicler in the following year, together with the record of another, their respective dates being June 27th and October 22nd, 1460. The former, dated from Lisbon, was granted in answer to the petition of the inhabitants of Nogueira, who felt uncertain about the dues they were bound to pay the Bishop of Coimbra;^[44] the latter is mentioned by J. P. Ribeiro, but seems to have disappeared from the Torre do Tombo.

In 1461 there occurred an event, simple enough on its face, but one which Azurara's biographers have regarded as the mystery of his life, or else employed as a weapon wherewith to smite their hero—his adoption by Maria Eannes. In the king's confirmation of this, dated from Evora, February 6th, 1461, we are told that "Maria Eannes, a Lisbon tanner—considering the love and friendship that Johane añnes dazurara, erstwhile Canon of Evora and Coimbra, had always shown to her mother, Maria Vicente, as well as to herself and her husband, and the many good deeds she herself had received at his hands, being his godchild and friend, and considering that she had no children and was no longer of an age to have any, and also the love and friendship she had felt for Gomez Eannes dazurara, ever since his father's death, and the services he had rendered her—thereby adopted him as her son and heir to succeed to her real and personal property, including her country house at Valbom, in the Ribatejo, and a house she possessed in the Parish of S. Julião in Lisbon".^[45] Such is the substance of this document, over the explanation of which some controversy has taken place, because of the social gulf that separated the parties to it. The true motive for the adoption, as hints Senhor Rodriguez d'Azevedo, would seem to have been the existence of some near relationship between Maria Eannes and the Chronicler which it was not expedient to disclose; but whether this opinion find acceptance or no, there is nothing to [pg xxxiii]justify the old view which regarded the grant as a proof of Azurara's avarice and unscrupulousness: since, on the contrary, the preamble reveals a lively sense of gratitude in the donor for real benefits conferred by the donee. If, however, the above theory be worked out, the most plausible conclusion to arrive at is, either that Maria Eannes and Gomes Eannes de Azurara were brother and sister, both being children of the Canon and Maria Vicente, or that the Chronicler was half-brother to Maria Eannes, i.e., had the same father but not the same mother. It seems at least a fair inference to draw from the wording that the Canon and Maria Vicente were of a similar age, and the same may be said of the other pair, because at this time the Chronicler would count nearly sixty years, and his benefactress could not be much less, seeing that all possibility of her bearing children had passed by. Either of these hypotheses would account for the name Eannes being common to the lady and Azurara. The Canon would then have left his property between his two children, and as Maria Eannes was childless, it would be natural for her to bequeath her share of her fathers property to her brother. But be this as it may, we know