(King Diniz)
(1279–1325)
king of Portugal
Dom Dinis was the sixth king of Portugal, a significant patron of the arts, and the most influential poet of his day.His poetry, written in the Galician-Portuguese language, owes something to the native tradition of Portugal, but more clearly displays the influence of some of the greater Provençal TROUBADOURS, like BERNART DE VENTADORN and Jaufré RUDEL. His was also the last royal court to patronize Portuguese lyric poets, and the tradition soon died out after flowering in Dinis’s court. Dinis was son of Alfonso III, whom he succeeded as king in 1279. He was knighted by his grandfather, ALFONSO X of Castile and Leon, and he married Isabel of Aragon.With Isabel, Dinis worked to improve the lives of the poor in his country, often through the founding of new social institutions like orphanages and other shelters. Largely because of such activity, Isabel was named a saint after her death. Dinis also made and enforced new criminal and civil law codes that, by reducing the power of the nobility, protected the lower classes from abuses. Dinis also sought to reduce the amount of land held by the church, setting off a conflict with the papacy that was only resolved by a special concordat with the pope in 1290.
Dinis was a hard-working and peaceful monarch in a time of war and unrest. He promoted economic and commercial development as well as improving agriculture (he was nicknamed the “farmer king”). He built the Portuguese navy, mainly to protect sea commerce, and he founded the first university in Portugal, at Lisbon (later Coimbra) in 1290. He signed a treaty with Castile defining the border between the two countries— an agreement that still stands today. He protected the property holdings of the Knights Templars in Portugal when Pope Clement V dissolved the order in 1312, founding a new Order of Christ that was essentially a continuation of the older order. King Dinis’s last years were marred by a rebellion by his son Alfonso. His wife Isabel is purported to have made peace between the two. Dinis died on January 7, 1325, in Santarem, and was succeeded by his son, who became Alfonso IV. Of all Dinis’s great accomplishments, he may be best remembered for his cultural interests, particularly in literature.He wrote several books himself, on hunting, science, and administration, but most memorably he composed poetry.His extant poems number 137. Of these, 73 are cantigas de amor (songs of love), which deal mainly with the pains of unrequited love. All but a few of these are in the same basic form, with three stanzas of seven lines each. They are also characterized by the use of a good deal of verbal and semantic parallelism and a great diversity of rhyme. Music for seven of his love songs has survived on a single fragmentary page from a songbook of about 1300, discovered in Lisbon in 1990.
Dinis’s compositions include 51 CANTIGAS DE AMIGO, or songs from a woman’s point of view. These tend to be more flexible in form and lighter in tone than his cantigas de amor, possibly because ultimately they spring from the popular tradition. But during Dinis’s reign and in his hands, the genre became more stylized and formal. Dinis is probably the best-known author of cantigas de amigo in Portuguese. One example is the poem beginning Non chegou, madr’, o meu amigo (“Mother, my friend did not arrive”), in which the speaker complains to her mother that her lover has failed to keep his promise to return to her:
That the traitor lied
grieves me, for he broke his
promise deliberately.
Oh mother, I am dying of love!
(Jensen 1992, 10.8, ll. 13–15)
Dinis is important not only because of his own literary output, but also for his support of poetry in his court. He encouraged the translation of Spanish, Latin, and Arabic texts into Portuguese, and he welcomed troubadours and JONGLEURS from Castile, Aragon, Leon, and elsewhere to become part of his brilliant court. He may have personally overseen the compilation of the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, and his influence certainly was the spirit behind the assembling of two other major anthologies of the period, the Cancioneiros da Vaticana and the Cancioneiros Colocci-Brancuti (or da Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa).Among these three compilations, 200 poets and some 2,000 poems are preserved, an accomplishment that ranks as one of King Dinis’s most important.
Bibliography
■ Ackerlind, Sheila R. King Dinis of Portugal and the Alfonsine Heritage. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
■ Bell, Aubrey F. G. Portuguese Literature. Reprinted with new bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.
■ Jensen, Frede, ed. and trans. Medieval Galician-Portuguese Poetry: An Anthology. Garland Library of Medieval Literature 87. New York and London: Garland, 1992.
■ Vidigal, B. ed. The Oxford Book of Portuguese Verse: XIIth Century–XXth Century. Chosen by Aubrey F. G. Bell. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
Encyclopedia of medieval literature. 2013.