The verses of Dinis, essentially a love poet, are conventional in tone and form except when he uses the indigenous parallel strophed or cossante form which gives their real originality to the Galician-Portuguese cancioneiros. Speaking generally, the can cioneiros form monotonous reading owing to their poverty of ideas and conventionality of metrical forms and expression, but here and there men of talent endeavoured to lend their work variety by the use of difficult processes like the lexaprem and by introducing new forms like the pastorela and the descort. It is curious to note that no heroic songs are met with in the cancio neiros; they are all, with one exception, purely lyrical in form and tone. The romanceiro, comprising romances of adventures, war and chivalry, together with religious and sea songs, forms a rich collection of ballad poetry which continued in process of elabo ration throughout the whole of the middle ages, but scarcely any of those existing bear a date anterior to the 15th century.
Epic poetry in Portugal developed much later than lyric, but the signal victory of the united Christian hosts over the Moors at the battle of the Salado in 1340 gave occasion to an epic by Alphonso Giraldes of which some fragments remain.
The first frankly literary prose documents appear in the 14th century, and consist of chronicles, lives of saints and genealogical treatises. The more important are the Chronica breve do archivo national, the Chronicas de S. Cruz de Coimbra, the Chronica da conquista do Algarve and the Livros das Linhagens, portions of which have considerable literary interest. All the above may be found in the Portugaliae monuments historica. Romania has printed some hagiographical texts, and the Vida dos Santos Bar lado e Josafate has been issued by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences.
Romances of chivalry belonging to the various cycles must have penetrated into Portugal at an early date, and the Nobiliario of the Conde D. Pedro contains the genealogy of Arthur and the adventures of Lear and Merlin. There exists a mid-14th-century Historia do Santo Graal, and an unprinted Josep ab Aramatia, and we have some evidence of the existence of a primitive Portu guese prose redaction of Amadis de Gaula anterior to the present Spanish text.
best chronicler of any age or nation. Gomes Eannes de Azurara completed Lopes's chronicle of King John by describing the cap ture of Ceuta, and wrote a chronicle of D. Pedro de Meneses, governor of the town down to 1437, and a chronicle of D. Duarte de Meneses, captain of Alcacer, but his capital work is the chroni cle of the conquest of Guinea. (See AZURARA.) Though not a great chronicler or an artist like Lopes, Ruy de Pina is quite free from the rhetorical defects of Azurara, and his chronicles of King Edward and King Alphonso V. are character ized by unusual frankness. All these three writers combined the posts of keeper of the archives and royal chronicler, and were, in fact, the king's men, though Lopes at least seems rather the his torian of a people than the oracle of a monarch. Garcia de Re sende (q.v.) worked up Pina's chronicle of King John II. and added a wealth of anecdote and gossip. The taste for romances of chivalry continued throughout the 15th century, but of all that were produced the only one that has come down to us is the Estorea do Imperador Vespasiano, an introduction to the Graal Cycle, based on the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus.
The Constable D. Pedro of Portugal (1429-66), son of the prince of that name already referred to, has left some verses marked by elevation of thought and deep feeling, the Satyra de felice e infelice vida, and the death of his sister inspired his Tragedia de la insigne reyna Isabel (1457); he is best remem tiered by his Coplas del contempto del mundo in the Cancioneiro Geral. D. Pedro, who wrote in Castilian, is one of the first repre sentatives of those Spanish influences which set aside the Proven cal manner and in its place adopted a taste for allegory and a reverence for classical antiquity, both imported from Italy. It was to the constable that the marquis de Santillana addressed his historic letter dealing with the origins of Peninsular verse. The court poetry of the reigns of King Alphonso V. and King John II. is contained in the Cancioneiro Geral, compiled by Garcia de Resende and printed in 1516. Some 200 authors are there repre sented by pieces in Portuguese and Castilian, and they include D. Joao Manuel, D. Joao de Meneses, Joao Rodrigues and de Si e Meneses, Diogo Brandao, Duarte de Brito and Fernao da Silveira. The main subjects are love, satire and epigram. The epic achieve ments of the Portuguese in that century hardly find an echo, even in the verses of those who had taken part in them. Instead, an atmosphere of artificiality surrounds these productions, the in fluence is Spanish, and the verses that reveal genuine poetical feeling are very few, but some names appeared in the Cancioneiro Geral which were to be among the foremost in Portuguese litera ture ; e.g., Bernardim Ribeiro, Christovam Faith), Gil Vicente and SA de Miranda, who represent the transition between the Spanish school of the isth and the Italian school of the i6th cen tury, called Os Quinhentistas. Ribeiro and Falcao, the introducers of the bucolic style, put new life into the old forms, and by their eclogues in redondilhas gave models which subsequent writers worked by but could never equal.