The first characteristic is the existence of permanent residential structures for the king. At least two main royal residences existed in each of these cities. The presence of the king, however, was not only felt in the royal palace(s). Frequent and lasting stays of the monarch in those localities meant that other buildings were available providing a stable siege of activity for the different court departments, rooting them in the urban setting. Several families of the courtly nobility had their own residential buildings in those main cities of royal itinerancy, as did the great officers of the court9. All of these factors will be in the background, but not specifically considered in the discussion of our initial questions: was the court integrated into the city, and how did the courtiers experience such integration?
I will focus here, instead, mostly in the material structures and realities of the lodging of courtiers. Between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries the monarchs of Portugal found original solutions for a less daunting and disrupting settling of the court whenever they stayed in the major cities of the kingdom. The solutions were often found together with the local urban governments, a process that was especially relevant for Lisbon. What is striking about such arrangements is, on one hand, the way local markets were made to correspond to the sudden surges in demand for food and lodging associated with the royal visit and stay. On the other hand, courtly hierarchies would impose their stable logic on the ways the cities tried to cope with their obligations towards the monarchs presence, which meant that the temporary settling of the kings numerous followers soon originated local regulations and mechanisms of prevision and budgeting. The study of courtly lodgings in the late medieval period is a good point of observation of this general evolution. It is a historical process that runs parallel to the transformation then occurring in the traditional remunerations of the members of the court.
Without going into too much detail here, I would point out that the periodic remunerations of the official members of the royal court followed by the late fourteenth century a monetized system by which the «rations» corresponding to each quantity of bread, wine, fodder for the horses, and other individual payments in kind, had been transformed in the moradia, a word herein simply translated as «courtly wages»10. This remuneration was computed (and eventually paid) to each individual in money. I have argued together with other historians that by adopting these scales of payments rulers expressed their clear intent at controlling household expenses, but that the resulting dynamic also aimed at clarifying the internal status hierarchies of the court11. At the same time that this occurs with wages or liveries, monetized mechanisms were used to reinforce similar hierarchies for the lodgings of those who were part of the royal following.
The solutions found in the kingdom of Portugal for the lodging of the courtiers fully portray a logic of distinction and separation that the court brought within each city where the king settled. Royal courts were not meant to be unruly and unorganized bands of abusing individuals, as much as the local city governments would like to portray them as such, in condemning terms12. Inner separation and hierarchies between and within groups inside the court were kept when lodging was distributed according to the individuals position, courtly function, or office. The inevitable accommodation of the realities of the kings retinue to the profile and specific conditions of each city or town aimed first and foremost at keeping the courtly hierarchies in full force. Those hierarchies, as I have argued in several published works quoted above, had a fundamental role in ascribing and reinforcing personal status inside the Portuguese court.
The monarchs of Portugal promoted all through the 1300s the establishment of commercial lodgings (estalagens or estaus) in a multiplicity of places all around the kingdom, with special relevance to the cities where the royal court often travelled, and to those situated along the main roads. Commercial lodging was suited to deal not only with travellers and merchants, who moved around for their own reasons, but also with the dislocation of royal and princely retinues. Lisbon remained, nonetheless, a unique urban centre in the context of the kingdom due to the growth of its maritime trade and the related presence of many travellers and visitors, as well as communities of foreign merchants. It was one of the places in Portugal where commercial hospitality was arguably more developed in the late medieval period, something the monarch and the city government were interested in using in their search for practical solutions for the lodging of the royal retinues.
As stated earlier, courtly lodging was a persistent point of contention. In a well-known text of chronicler Fernão Lopes, a passage of his prologue to the history of king Fernando I (r. 1367-1383), he delineates with clarity what was at stake in Lisbon for the noble members of the kings court:
the king ordered that no lord should be given lodging [pousentadoria] in Lisbon except when he himself was there. Otherwise, this should be done by using paid hostelries and lodging against money payments, and he also ordered that the prices be reasonable. So he told his judges that they should force the nobles to pay, as his wish was that it should not be done any other way [...] And to better arrange for all of this, he ordered to all the bishops, the masters [of the military orders] and his commanders, and anyone else who had the right to be lodged [pousentadoria] that they should fix and maintain their own houses at their own expense, so that they could reside in them13.
For the cities of the kingdom, as for the monarchs, lodging was only due as an obligation to those who received moradia or who served as officers and were regularly incorporated to the court. But the noblemen defended that the privilege was due to them as they moved around the kingdom, for instance, when they were summoned to come to court at the kings service. And this would apply not only to them but to their own retinues, something the Portuguese monarchs of the late Middle Ages always contested. In this sense, the royal answer to the nobility at the different meetings of the Cortes was practically the same in the parliamentary meetings of king Fernando in the 1370s as it was a century later for king Afonso V in 1472: «you will not find that in the past lodging was given to noblemen, when they were on the road, without money being paid»14.
Who would be entitled to be lodged at the citys expense, and what services that would encompass thus became fundamental questions at the centre of a long-lasting dispute in the Portuguese kingdom. The first reforms of the Portuguese court dating from the 1200s already refer to the need to regulate such matters, most notably by establishing the number of dependents or servants associated with each major office of the kings household15. King João I (r. 1385-1433) in his long years of governance tried to simplify and regulate previous practice regarding the obligations of the main city of the kingdom. As a consequence of the support he had obtained from Lisbon in the revolutionary events of 1383-1385 which led to his election as king, João I continued to promote the aforementioned general principle of using commercial lodgings for hosting those courtiers of noble status who represented a significant proportion of the adults in his retinue16. This was to be understood, first and foremost, for those who did not own their own residences in the city, as suggested by the text of the chronicle of Fernão Lopes.
If, as a member of the royal court, you did not own a residence or could not be incorporated into the retinue of a nobleman or prelate of the kings following who effectively had access to one, you would be depending on the solutions provided by the city. In the case of Lisbon, the scattering of the courtiers throughout the different sections of the city represented a difficult logistic and practical problem for the local municipal government to solve. I should highlight here that this whole complex of obligations applied to male courtiers only, the female component of the royal courts being the object of distinctive practices that, in the case of Portugal, still await careful reconstruction17.
The system of the lodgings or aposentadoria for male courtiers relied on the establishment of distinctions, and the careful regulation of the services provided according to three different status positions for each court member: knight, squire, page (cavaleiro, escudeiro, moço). Certain household and bureaucratic offices were entitled to a fixed amount of lodgings, as it occurred for instance with the Wardrobe (repostaria) or the Butlery (copa). The services themselves were carefully defined using a system similar to that of commercial lodgings, by using the unit denominated camas, i.e. beds. The material aspects of these «beds» were also distinct according to the courtly rank of each person: the quality of the sheets, for instance, would be higher for the knight (cavaleiro fidalgo) than it was for the squire (escudeiro) or the youngster (moço).
The city of Lisbon in the second half of the 1400s preferred to contract with local providers the furnishings and the «bed» services instead of enforcing the obligation of having those who were subject to the vexing duty of the aposentadoria receive the members of the court in their own houses. The commercial service was designated by the end of the fourteenth century as an estau: a half-estau (meio estau) was composed of five «beds», and a full estau corresponded to ten units. The «bed» encompassed a full set of material furnishings: not only bed covers and bed sheets, but also a bench and table to sit, and cooking utensils, similarly to what was provided in other forms of paid lodging by the commercial inns.
Using a system of purveyance contracts, since at least the decade of 1460s the main cities of royal itineraries in the Portuguese kingdom Lisbon, Évora, and also the port-city of Setúbal would have recourse to professional innkeepers for the bulk of court lodgings18. The surviving contracts suggest that the solution found in Lisbon was replicated in the other main places of courtly settling. This system required active collaboration between the aposentador or furrier of the court and the local municipal governments. The contracts establish that the supplier had be warned in advance of a fortnight to a month, so the city was to be provided by the court official with a rough estimate of how many people it would have to lodge. Since inevitable fluctuations would occur between the estimate and the reality in the terrain, the municipalities should have, simultaneously, a list of people who were obligated to the aposentadoria, so that in last resort (and it is unclear how frequently this was done in the late 1400s in each of those cities) the members of the court or moradores would be lodging in private houses.
But the originality of the solution found in Lisbon also had a physical impact in the city, dating from the reign of king Duarte (r.1433-1438). The kings initiative lead to the construction of a special building as the centralized location where such lodging services could take place: the appropriately named Paço dos Estaus. Finished after 1438 during the regency of Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, this imposing building located in a main square next to the city walls (Rossio) became a well-known monument of Lisbon, often mentioned in contemporary descriptions and travel narratives. The influence of Duke Pedro, King Duartes brother, is generally mentioned as decisive in the adoption of this solution19. I would argue that his extensive travels may help explain the initiative, in particular his knowledge of the system of the famous Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. Pedro visited Venice in March 1428 coming from the court of emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg, under which he had fought in Hungary and Romania20. The inspiration of Venice, in my view, comes not so much from the architecture of the building or its commercial functions as it comes from the fact that it exemplified a regimented purveyance of lodging and hospitality.
As Olivia Remie Constable established in her comparative study of such structures, the specialized facilities of the Italian fondacos were modeled on the Islamic funduk. These were places made to accommodate, but also to regulate and segregate the presence and activity of western merchants in Islamic ports. The Venetian Fondaco dei Tedeschi, for instance, seems to have been closely modelled upon that of Alexandria21. An important goal of these kinds of structures was to facilitate not only commercial exchange but also its inevitable corollary: taxation. In this regard, the Iberian cities were not in need of Italian inspiration because they were quite familiar with these practices. Constable noted, for instance, that similar buildings were owned in late medieval times by Aragonese and Castilian kings in major commercial cities and ports. Such facilities, she explained, «frequently served as depots where incoming merchants were required to bring their goods for storage, taxation, and sale. Though some royal facilities could also serve as paid hostelries, most of them increasingly focused on the control of the goods, not of the merchants»22. In Venice, the two aspects were indissociable for no active merchant from beyond the Alps, if he were to engage in trade, could stay in any other place within the city but the Fondaco. No excuses were accepted, such as claiming that one arrived too late and the building was closed23. Since the thirteenth century, the city of Venice strictly controlled the merchants arrival by assigning individual city officers to the task and making compulsory the lodging in the Fondaco, where the trading commodities were recorded both at the moment of the merchants admission and at his departure. Taxation was less easily avoided when the control of the trading goods coincided with the compulsory stay of the trader.
By establishing the Paço dos Estaus, the Portuguese monarchs became the proprietors of such an assigned place where, from the decade of 1440s until approximately 1537, lodging was provided to all of those who, as members of the court or hosts of the king, were entitled to have it. The changing uses of this structure in the sixteenth century will not be detailed here, although the complex history of the building is revealing of the citys transformation, as noted by its use for lodging temporarily the expelled Jewish population in 1496, as the nearby Jewish quarters and synagogues of Lisbon were confiscated by royal order24. The date of 1537 marks the beginning of the activities of the Inquisition in the building, subsequently to become its Lisbon siege25. The «royal stables» followed the courtiers lodgings in this same location, and although built outside the walls, they easily communicated with the Paço dos Estaus through a small city door (postigo)26.