y was to fill the coffers of a splendour-loving king with what
was, for the time, untold wealth, and so to enable him to cover the
country with innumerable buildings; but tempting as it would be to
accept Haupt's theory, it is surely more reasonable to look nearer home
for the origin of these peculiar features, and to see in them only the
culmination of the Manoelino style and the product of an even more
exuberant fancy than that possessed by any other contemporary builder.
Of course, when looking for parallels with such a special object in view
it is easy enough to find them, and to see resemblances between the
cloister windows at Batalha and various screens or panels at Ahmedabad;
and when we find that a certain Thomas Fernandes[110] had been sent to
India in 1506 as military engineer and architect; that another
Fernandes, Diogo of Beja, had in 1513 formed part of an embassy sent to
Gujerat and so probably to the capital Ahmedabad; and that Fernandes was
also the name of the architects of Batalha, it becomes difficult not to
connect these separate facts together and to jump to the quite
unwarrantable conclusion that the four men of the same name may have
been related and that one of them, probably Diogo, had given his
kinsmen sketches or descriptions on which they founded their
designs.[111]

With regard to Thomar, where the detail is even more curious and
Indian-looking, the temptation to look for Indian models is still
stronger, owing to the peculiar position which the Order of Christ at
Thomar now held, for the knights of that order had for some time
possessed complete spiritual jurisdiction over India and all other
foreign conquests.

This being so, it might have seemed appropriate enough for Dom Manoel to
decorate the additions he made to the old church with actual Indian
detail, as his builder did with corals and other symbols of the strange
discoveries then made. The fact also that on the stalls at Santa Cruz in
Coimbra are carved imaginary scenes from India and from Brazil might
seem to be in favour of the Indian theory, but the towns and forests
there depicted are exactly what a mediaeval artist would invent for
himself, and are not at all like what they were supposed to represent,
and so, if they are to be used in the argument at all, would rather go
to show how little was actually known of what India was like.

There seems also not to be even a tradition that anything of the sort
was done, and if a tradi