This is the effigy on the tomb of Inês de Castro (1325-55), the mistress & great love of King Peter I of Portugal. Here is the story of how poor Inês ended up in her tomb & how Peter coped with her death (spoiler - not well)
Inês was a noble (ish) women whose family had many ties with royalty through illegitimate lineage - specifically with the Castilian nobility.
Inês was the illegitimate daughter of Pedro Fernández de Castro, Lord of Lemos and Sarria, and his noble Portuguese mistress Aldonça Lourenço de Valadares. (19th-century depiction of Inês de Castro)
Her grandmother was Violante Sánchez of Castile, Lady of Uzero, the illegitimate daughter of Sancho IV of Castile. Her Her great-great grandfather was the illegitimate son of Alfonso IX of León, and so forth.
Inês family had links with Portuguese, Castilian and Galician Royalty. This made her part of the aristocracy but ever so slightly suspicious to the Portuguese royal family
But it certainly wasn’t enough to stop her bagging a job as lady in waiting to Constance of Castile in 1340. Constance had recently married Prince Peter, heir to the Portuguese throne.
Peter quickly fell in love with Inês and it soon became apparent that this was no quick fling or passing crush. Peter was utterly obsessed. (Ernesto Ferreira Condeixa, Dom Pedro e Dona Inês, late 19th century)
This did not go down well with King Afonso IV of Portugal who was seriously concerned at the influence Inês held over his son. What’s worse, Peter became good mates with her brothers & started cosying up to exiled Castilian nobility.
King Afonso kept hoping his son would get bored & return to his wife. It didn’t happen. All this rattled the cages of the Portuguese royal establishment who saw her influence over the future monarch growing at an alarming rate. (Afonso in Genealogy of the Kings of Portugal)
Then in 1345, Constance of Castile died. Rather than clearing the way for the lovers to be together, the king forbade his son from marrying Inês, declaring her entirely unsuitable and not eligible to be queen. (Effigy of Constance in a 1645 Genealogy of the Kings of Portugal)
Peter and Inês lived together as man and wife and had three healthy, illegitimate children - while Peter’s only legitimate son (Ferdinand) was quite a sickly boy. Alfonso was fuming.
Despite his father’s urging, Peter refused to take anyone else as a wife and eventually Alfonso banished Inês from court and had her imprisoned in the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Velha in Coimbra (Eugénie Servières, ‘Appeal by Inês de Castro’, 1822)
The final straw came in 1354 when Peter declared himself pretender to the throne of Castile. In 1355 Alfonso gave the order to have Inês killed. 3 men, Pêro Coelho, Álvaro Gonçalves, & Diogo Lopes Pacheco, went to the monastery & stabbed Inês to death in front of her children
King Alfonso hoped this would be an end of it. How wrong he was. Peter was beyond distraught and set about destroying those who wronged him. (Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, ‘Tragedy of Inês de Castro’, 1904)
Peter became king of Portugal in 1357 & promptly announced that he had secretly married Inês when no one was looking and that made her the queen. There is no evidence of this at all, but it’s not easy to tell a king he is wrong.
In 1360, Inês’s body was moved to a magnificent mausoleum in the abbey church at Alcobaça & Peter proclaimed all their children were legitimate and in line to the throne. (Karl Bryullov, ‘The Assassination of Inês de Castro’, 1834)
Legend has it that before he had Inês buried again, Peter ordered that her body be dressed in royal robes, and taken to the place of coronation, where it was anointed and crowned. (Pierre Charles Comte, ‘The Coronation of Inês de Castro in 1361’, 1849)
It is said The king then ordered the court swear loyalty to their queen and kiss her hand. This is the part of the story that caught the imagination of poets and painters ever since, but it is almost certainly a myth. (Inês de Castro’s tomb (right side), c. 1360)
What is not a myth is what Peter did to the men who killed his love. It took a few years but in 1361, Peter hunted down two of the men who murdered Inês and had them publicly executed.
Specifically, he ordered their hearts be torn out while they were still alive - as this is what they had done to him. (Brutally poetic, Pete)
When he died, Peter was buried opposite Inês, so that when the day of judgment finally comes, Peter and Inês can see each other as they rise from their graves together.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Whores of Yore

Whores of Yore Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @WhoresofYore

6 May
In 2013, the skeleton of Gaspare Pacchierotti, a very famous 19th century mezzo-soprano, was exhumed in order to study the effects that castration had on his body. This is his skull.

Thread
Opera became hugely popular in Italy from around 1600, & as the demand for soprano voices grew, so too did the demand for castrated boys, whose singing voice would be preserved into adult life.
The castration ‘procedure’ was incredibly dangerous. The most common surgical technique was either to sever the spermatic cords or crush the testis with the fingers. The child would be heavily drugged throughout. (Image showing a castration, from Stromayr's 1559 Practica Copiosa)
Read 12 tweets
12 Apr
1/5 In light of yesterday’s discussion around the ethics of editing old photographs (mugshots in particular), I’ve been thinking a lot about the rights & wrongs of using vintage mugshots for my word of the day & would like your thoughts on this. Here are mine. ImageImageImageImage
2/5 I secured permission from the Tyne & Wear archive to use their images like this, years ago. I cite the copyright on every image so it ppl can look the original up. I link to the archive on my website. I don’t make any money from my use of these images.
3/5 I’m not presenting them as any kind of historical truth or trying to say anything about the person in them. I always felt ok to use the images because I had permission. It it legal for me to do so. BUT maybe it’s not ok to use these images like this.
Read 7 tweets
11 Apr
I’m glad @VICE have taken down the article featuring Matt Loughrey’s edited photographs of victims of the Cambodian genocide, but their article featuring Loughrey’s manipulating mugshots of Australian female convicts is still there
👇
vice.com/amp/en/article…
I really value colourising historical images. It can bring history to life & is a powerful tool in creating empathy, but manipulating images is just wrong, especially when the image is one of trauma.
This is Matilda ‘Tilly’ Devine, a former sex worker, gang boss, & madam of a chain of brothels in Sydney. She was a violent mob boss & slashed a man’s face open with a razor. Loughrey has given her a big smiley face & youthful complexion.
Read 11 tweets
3 Apr
Munchausen syndrome (or factitious disorder) is a disorder where a person fakes illness. The name comes from Rudolf Erich Raspe’s 1785 fictional character Baron Munchausen - but he was based on a real person.

Thread.
Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen (1720-97) fought for the Russian Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739. After retiring, he became famous for his outrageous stories about his time in the army.
He wasn’t looked on so much as a liar, as a fantastic storyteller - even royalty came to listen to him. After hearing him, Raspe (who was a bit of a git all round) wrote his stories down and published them anonymously in England.
Read 13 tweets
2 Apr
Dorothy Hart and a vintage Easter bunny who looks like he’s on the sex offender’s register.
Looks like creepy Easter pinup bunnies was definitely a thing
Read 6 tweets
27 Mar
This is Elena Milagro de Hoyos (1910-31), a beautiful Cuban-American woman who sadly died of tuberculosis. Elena’s doctor, Carl Tanzler (1877-1952) was madly in love with her, and wasn’t going to let a little thing like her dying get in the way of them being together.

Thread
Tanzler was a German-born radiology technologist at the Marine-Hospital Service in Key West, Florida. He married married Doris Schäfer in 1920, had two kids & the family emigrated to the US, where Tanzler left the family & set up on his own.
Tanzler was certainly something of an eccentric & claimed to have had visions of Countess Anna Constantia von Cosel (a long dead ancestor) who showed him a beautiful, dark haired woman was going to be his true love.
Read 31 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(