Barros, João de

Abstract

Barros was educated at court and combined a literary career with an important role in the administration of Portugal’s overseas empire. This enabled him to collect material for his great historical work, the Décadas da Ásia (Decades of Asia), for which he is best known. Though owing much to the Portuguese tradition of chronicle writing, and to the historians of ancient Rome, the Decades are original in the immense geographical range that they cover – the whole of maritime Asia and East Africa – and also in their impressive chronological sweep. However, he has been criticized for his reluctance ever to condemn the behavior of his fellow countrymen and for his concentration on individual deeds of heroism.

Rópica Pnefma (Spiritual Merchandize) is Barros’s most significant work of religious polemic. It is an allegorical dialogue, aimed at the Portuguese New Christians, in other words, hastily converted Jews whose faith was believed to be suspect. However, it contains much ambiguity, and Razão (Reason), the voice of Christian orthodoxy, does not always have an answer to the questions raised by the other speakers. Barros also shows some sympathy for the ideas of Erasmus, a writer who became increasingly suspect in sixteenth-century Portugal.

Barros’s linguistic writings are a contribution to the study of vernacular languages which became widespread in southern Europe during the Renaissance. Barros is not overawed by the Latin inheritance of Portuguese and acknowledges the influence of oriental languages.