Inventorier et cartographier l’héraldique des municipalités portugaises : l’armorial de Cristóvão Alão de Morais

Abstract

As part of the reorganisation of the Portuguese monarchy following the restoration of independence from Spain in 1640, the magistrate Cristóvão Alão de Morais devoted himself to compiling the first armorial whose sole subject was the coats of arms of all the Portuguese municipalities. His objective was clear : to provide the monarchy with a heraldic map of the institutions that, below the king, formed the base of the kingdom’s sociopolitical organisation. To do so, the author used the printed sources at his disposal, supplementing them with direct observation of armorial monuments and, in some cases, seals. This method proved possible insofar as he benefited from the itinerary determined by his postings as a judge and by the network of correspondents that they him to establish ; on the other hand, he was limited by these circumstances, hence the unevenness of the information in his work. The armorial is presented as an abstract representation of the territorial and institutional parcels that made up the Portuguese monarchy. Hence the importance of the dual reproduction, written and graphic, of the municipal coats of arms. Based on an inventory of municipal emblems, Alão de Morais’s armorial was intended to contribute to the political and symbolic cartography of a monarchy in the process of rebuilding its identity.

Keywords

• heraldry
• blazon
• armorial
• Portugal
• municipalities
• seventeenth century