ABSTRACT
By starting our study with the Lembranças (memoirs) of D. Francisco de Portugal, Conde do Vimioso (c. 1545) as our main source and crossing-referencing it with other sixteen-century documents, we want to assess the meaning of the Court and the courtier in the 16th century. We are in the presence of a very revealing document on royal liberality in an ambiance where the sovereign is the unifying and uniting element but also a critic of the backstage constraints, namely of a game of promises not always fulfilled and of the existence of interest groups.
It is a document with autobiographical data on a figure who was paramount in war, in diplomacy, and in arts, as well as in his senior functions as counselor and Vedor da Fazenda with a description of favors, posts at the palace and property, received or not, assessed in comparison with the favors distributed to others serving at the Court, both members and non-members of the nobility.
In this chapter, the truth of which has been verified, the environment in which a courtier lived is explained: the construction that the Court represents of a hierarchic and social-legal order established on Christian moral and political principles, therefore rationalized, to which the subjects of the sovereign submit themselves; the structure that the Court also embodies as a seat of prestige awakening opposing feelings of ambition and humility and causing affection and disaffection.
