Authority, Guidance, and the Management of Land: Key Motives Behind the Establishment of the Queen’s Chancellery in Early Fifteenth-Century Portugal

Abstract

The Portuguese Royal Chancelleries preserve a substantial number of royal charters issued for the queens consort. Through these charters, they were granted royal revenues and rights collected from various towns belonging to the Crown's patrimony, derived from their exercise of jurisdictional authority over these places and their inhabitants. From the early fifteenth century onwards, there was a growing rationalization of the functional and political communication between queens or infantas (royal daughters or daughters-in-law) and the local authorities of the lands over which they held lordship. This process involved the creation of property registers (tombos) and cartularies in which all documentation exchanged between kings, queens, and the Crown’s lands was to be recorded. At the same time, the queens also established their own chancelleries where the documents they issued were preserved.