THE COMING OF JOÃO I: A BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION?

The celebrated historian and essayist António Sérgio once described the dramatic events of 1383–5 as a ‘bourgeois revolution’ in which maritime commercial interests triumphed over the nobility. In other words, he considered there was a clash of classes, and that victory fell to the class that allegedly inspired Portugal's great seaborne discoveries of the fifteenth century – the urban bourgeoisie. Joel Serrão later developed a rather more sophisticated variant of this model, based on deeper research. He concluded that it was the urban proletariat that initially seized the initiative and that the bourgeoisie only assumed prominence at a later stage. To Joel Serrão there were therefore two distinct and successive revolutionary phases: the proletarian phase in 1383 and the bourgeois in 1385.

Other historians have reacted to these interpretations with varying degrees of scepticism. Verríssimo Serrão avowed that there was simply no class struggle at all in 1383–5, no pitting of the people against nobles and clergy. However, Oliveira Marques took a more nuanced view, arguing that undercurrents of social tension were indeed present, but that to interpret what happened as simply a struggle between city interests and the traditional nobility was an oversimplification. The reality was more fluid and more complex.

The relevance of this last observation may become clearer if we review briefly what the chronicler Fernão Lopes had to say.