d it with
many privileges. The priors were exempt from the jurisdiction of the
bishop, and had themselves complete control over their own dependent
churches. All the canons were chaplains to the king, and after the
university came back to Coimbra from Lisbon in 1539 Dom Joao III. made
the priors perpetual chancellors.[135]

By 1522 then the church must have been practically ready, though some
carving still had to be done.

Marcos Pires died in 1524 and was succeeded by Diogo de Castilho, and in
a letter dated from Evora in that year the king orders a hundred gold
cruzados to be paid to Diogo and to Master Nicolas[136] for the statues
on the west door which were still wanting, and two years later in
September another letter granted Diogo the privilege of riding on a
mule.[137]

The interest of the church itself is very inferior to that of the
different pieces of church furniture, nearly all the work of foreigners,
with which it was adorned, and of which some, though not all, survive to
the present day.

Inside there is nothing very remarkable in the structure of the church
except the fine vaulting with its many moulded ribs, the large windows
with their broken Manoelino heads, and the choir gallery which occupies
nearly two bays at the west end. Vaulted underneath, it opens to the
church by a large elliptical arch which springs from jambs ornamented
with beautiful candelabrum shafts.

Of the outside little is to be seen except the west front, one of the
least successful designs of that period.

In the centre--now partly blocked up by eighteenth-century additions,
and sunk several feet below the street--is a great moulded arch, about
eighteen feet across and once divided into two by a central jamb bearing
a figure of Our Lord, whence the door was called 'Portal da Majestade';
above the arch a large round-headed window, deeply recessed, lights the
choir gallery, and between it and the top of the arch are three
renaissance niches, divided by pilasters, and containing three
figures--doubtless some of those for which Diogo de Castilho and Master
Nicolas were paid one hundred cruzados in 1524. The window with its
mouldings is much narrower than the door, and is joined to the tall
pinnacles which rise to the right and left of the great opening by
Gothic flying buttresses. Between the side pinnacles and the central
mass of the window a curious rounded and bent shaft rises from the
hood-mould of the door to end in a semi-