made alike in detail and
in construction.

[Illustration: FIG. 31.

ALCOBACA.

CHAPEL WITH ROYAL TOMBS.

(DOM PEDRO AND DONA BEATRIZ.)]

[Illustration: FIG. 32.

ALCOBACA.

TOMB OF DOM PEDRO I.]

CHAPTER IV

BATALHA AND THE DELIVERANCE OF PORTUGAL

Towards the end of the fourteenth century came the most important and
critical years that Portugal had yet known. Dom Pedro, dying after a
reign of only ten years, was succeeded by his only legitimate son,
Fernando, in 1367. Unfortunately the new king at his sister's wedding
saw and fell in love with the wife of a northern nobleman, and soon
openly married this Dona Leonor Telles de Menezes, though he was himself
already betrothed to a Castilian princess, and though her own husband
was still alive. At the first court or Beja Manos held by Dona Leonor at
Leca near Oporto, all the Portuguese nobility except Dom Diniz, the
king's half-brother and a son of Inez de Castro, acknowledged her as
queen. But soon the evil influence she exercised over the king and the
stories of her cruelty made her extremely unpopular and even hated by
the whole nation. The memory of the vengeance she took on her own
sister, Dona Maria Telles, is preserved by an interesting old house in
Coimbra which has indeed been rebuilt since, in the early sixteenth
century, but is still called the House of the Telles. To the dislike
Queen Leonor felt for the sons of Inez de Castro, owing to Dom Diniz's
refusal to kiss her hand, was added the hatred she had borne her sister,
who was married to Dom Joao, another son of Dona Inez, ever since this
sister Dona Maria had warned her to have nothing to do with the king;
she was also jealous because Dona Maria had had a son while her own two
eldest children had died. So plotting to be rid of them both, she at
last persuaded Dom Joao that his wife was not faithful to him, and sent
him full of anger to that house at Coimbra where Dona Maria was living
and where, without even giving his wife time to speak, he stabbed her to
death. Soon after Dona Leonor came in and laughed at him for having
believed her lies so as to kill his own wife. Failing to kill the queen,
Dom Joao fled to Castile.

When Dom Fernando himself died in 1383 he left his widow as regent of
the kingdom on behalf of their only daughter, Dona Brites, whom they had
married to Don Juan I. of Castile. It was of course bad enough for the
nation to find itself under the regency of such a woma