Edgar Prestage

“ He paid the penalty for telling the truth, as he knew it, in an age when an historian had to choose between flattery of the great and silence. The Chronicle of King Manoel was the first official history of a Portuguese reign to be written in a critical spirit, and Damião de Goes has the honour of having been the first Portuguese royal chronicler to deserve the name of an historian. ”

“ Damião de Goes was a man of wide culture and genial and courtly manners, a skilled musician and a good linguist. He wrote both Portuguese and Latin with classic strength and simplicity, and his style is free from affectation and rhetorical ornaments. His portrait by Albrecht Dürer shows an open, intelligent face, and the record of his life proves him to have been upright and fearless. ”

“ It was an onerous undertaking for a conscientious historian, since it was necessary to expose the miseries as well as relate the glories of the period, and so to offend some of the most powerful families. Goes had already written a Chronicle of Prince John (afterwards John II.) , and when, after more than eight years’ labour, he produced the First Part of his Chronicle of King Manoel (1566) , a chorus of attacks greeted it, the edition was destroyed, and he was compelled to issue a revised version. ”