Coutos de Alcobaça

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Alcobaça Abbey
Plan of the Coutos de Alcobaça

The name Coutos de Alcobaça refers to the former domain of the Abbey of Alcobaça (from 1153 to 1834) in Portugal . It was located in the historic Estremadura , in today's Centro , about 100 km north of Lisbon and covered about 500 km². It was donated in 1153 by the first king of Portugal Afonso Henriques to the abbot of the French abbey Clairvaux Bernhard von Clairvaux and extended between the 613 meter high Serra de Candeeiros and the Atlantic Ocean. The area was roughly identical to today's districts of Alcobaça and Nazaré and still included parts of the adjacent district of Caldas da Rainha to the south . The Monastery of Saint Mary of Alcobaça ( O Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Alcobaça ), also known as The Royal Abbey of Alcobaça ( A Real Abadia de Alcobaça ), was one of the largest monasteries in the history of the Cistercians. The Coutos did not coincide with the area of ​​jurisdiction of the abbey, which also included other areas, also at different times. In addition to Alcobaça, 13 other cities emerged in the Coutos, including four with their own ports, which had their heyday in the 16th to 18th centuries. After the abbey was dissolved in 1833/34, the cohesion of this urban community was lost, and attempts have only recently been made to reconnect with it, such as the creation of a separate museum for the Coutos de Alcobaça in 2001 in the city of Alcobaça . The cities have also developed completely differently. Historically, however, the Coutos de Alcobaça are an example of the systematic development of a region, its heyday and its decline.

Area of ​​the Coutos de Alcobaça

Arco de Memória, Serra dos Candeeiros
Former Arco da Memória near Alvorninha

Donation deed of April 8, 1153

While still on his deathbed, Bernhard von Clairvaux received the document of the first Portuguese king, with which he gave Clairvaux Abbey a verbally precisely defined area between Leiria and Óbidos , the Atlantic and the Serra dos Candeeiros mountains to found a new monastery. Historically, the area is always given as 44,000 hectares, i.e. 440 km², but taking into account the known sizes of the districts and communities involved, it should have been just under 500 km². The donation was made for political reasons, as King Afonso Henriques had crowned himself king in defection of the sovereignty of Castile and his kingship was still awaiting confirmation by the Pope. On the other hand, it corresponded to a practice of re-Christianizing the areas recaptured by the Moors as a result of the Reconquista after almost 500 years of Muslim rule by settling monasteries. Until the abbey was closed in 1833/1834, the monks defended their territory against royal claims. These were mostly corrected again by subsequent kings, such as Pedro I (1320–1367), João I (1385–1433), Manuel I (1469–1521), Henrique I (1512–1580), who himself was 40 Years also abbot of Alcobaça, and João IV (1640-1660), all great patrons of the abbey. Nevertheless, the monks secured their area with visible signs. Both at the south-east and at the north-east inland corner points of the Coutos (the other corner points met the Atlantic) they erected large arches as Arco da Memória (memorial gate), in which inscriptions proclaimed that the land beyond was the abbey of Alcobaça by the first king of Portugal. The south-eastern gate at Alvorninha was torn down in 1912, the north -eastern gate still stands in the desert of the Serra dos Candeeiros near Arrimal (today the district of Porto de Mós ), from where you can see the former abbey area to the ocean from a height of 450 m can. This gate, five meters wide and six meters high, collapsed in the 1755 earthquake , but was rebuilt in 1830 by order of King Miguel , as reported by an inscription. The other older inscription repeats the claim to territory - as with the gate in Alvorninha - and probably dates from 1647 (possibly also 1747).

Cities

In addition to Alcobaça, the Coutos included the following 13 cities:

Delimitations

Alpedriz

The town of Alpedriz , located in the Alcobaça district between Cós and Pataias , which Afonso Henriques conquered from the Moors in 1147 and to whom he had issued a charter in 1150, thus before the donation to Bernhard von Clairvaux, does not belong to the Coutos . King Sancho I (1154-1211) subordinated Alpediz in 1187 to the order of knights of Avis . Alpedriz received the city statute from King Manuel I in 1515. From 1567 onwards, the Order of Avis was also under the jurisdiction of the current Abbot General of Alcobaça after the abbey had risen to become the Autonomous Cistercian Congregation in Portugal.

Nossa Senhora da Nazaré in Sítio

In any case, since the 17th century, the abbey was no longer under the rule of Sítio de Nossa Senhora da Nazaré , a part of Pederneira that has been called Nazaré since 1912 . In the Santuário de Nossa Senhora da Nazaré (Shrine of Our Lady of Nazareth) in Sítio, the most important Marian pilgrimage site in Portugal up to the beginning of the 20th century, an authentic carved image of the breastfeeding Madonna, found according to legend after 1179, is kept in 1182 to a fellow soldier of Afonso Henriques, Dom Fuas Roupinho, is said to have saved life. As a thank you, Dom Fuas gave this part of Pederneiras to the Virgin Mary. In any case, this legend led to the royal decision in the 17th century that the area could not belong to the Alcobaça Abbey.

São Gião Church

The church of São Gião , located opposite the Santuário on the other side of the Bay of Nazaré , one of the most important early church (and pre-Moorish) Christian sites on the Iberian Peninsula, belonged to Pederneira (today Nazaré) and thus to the abbey, which the church was already in It had given up in the 15th or 16th century and had decayed from the beginning of the 18th century.

Paredes da Vitória and Alvorninha

The port of Paredes da Vitória belonged to the Coutos after the northern border was drawn in the deed of donation, but it was claimed by the kings in the first centuries until the port came to the abbey in 1368 due to a donation from King Fernando I. Beyond the southern border of the donation, Alvorninha Abbey was founded, which is why there was a dispute with King Afonso IV (1291–1357) over this in the 14th century , but his son King Pedro I (1320–1367) retained the rights of the abbey in 1357 expressly recognized about this part.

Convent of Santa Maria of Cós

The monastery of Cós , which was set up as a women's convent as early as 1279, served from the beginning for the monastic accommodation of women who were close to monks of the monastery of Alcobaça, an institution not unusual in medieval monasteries. It was not until 1532 that the convent was recognized as an independent Cistercian monastery.

Other municipalities

In connection with the founding of Meierhöfen ( granjas ), the following communities still exist today, but they did not acquire their own town charter:

  • A special case is the city of Pataias , which gained importance around 1540 as a result of the mysterious decline of the city of Paredes da Vitória, after it had taken in many residents of Paredes and was also able to build on the original importance of Paredes.
  • The remaining other municipalities in the Alcobaça district are newer municipalities from the 19th or 20th century that arose in the historical areas of the Coutos, such as Bárrio or Benedita, with 8,233 inhabitants (as of 2001) the largest town in the district , with a large part located in the historic area of ​​Turquel.

Formation of the coutos

Settlement of the Coutos

The term coutos is derived from the Latin cautum in the meaning of security on the one hand with the sense of a feudal property, on the other hand that of a sanctuary. In Portuguese it is used to denote an entire area only with regard to the dominion of the Abbey of Alcobaça. It reflects the way in which the monks repopulated this region after they took it over from the Moors immediately after the successful liberation during the Reconquista . The settlement took place in such a way that the monks set up farms in the manner of Meierhöfe at no greater distance than a day's march around the Granjas Monastery and had these farmed by settlers under their guidance and supervision. After an average of three to six, sometimes even nine years, staggered according to the quality of the soil, the settlers were given land for their own cultivation and in future only had to pay the abbey fees in addition to the ancillary services to be rendered. At the same time, the monks, also in the first known schools of this kind, trained the settlers in manual skills, including iron extraction (from the rivers) and blacksmithing. The Coutos emerged as cities from these Meierhöfen and the settlements around them, as the abbey granted them an independent right of use as municipalities in a charter between the 12th and 14th centuries , regardless of the continuing tribute obligation and dependence on the monastery.

Charter and city rights

Shame stake in Turquel from 1512

The charter issued by the abbot as sovereign ( Carta de Aforamento da Povoação - mortgage and settlement letter ) granted first and foremost a right of settlement and laid down the rights granted to the settlers and their obligations. This was sometimes changed in later years, so that some Coutos have more than one license. The abbey rule remained unaffected. However, the Coutos used a weakness of the monastery and the royal family that emerged at the end of the 15th century to demand more self-government and independence. King Manuel I (1469–1525) gave in to the demands of the cities in 1514 by creating a new city statute for them, granting them a new city law, which, however, left the tribute obligation in favor of the abbey untouched. The reform gave the cities a certain amount of self-government, including a lower jurisdiction. Some cities are reported to have had two judges. The privileges of the monastic rule but were consistently maintained and an equipped in each city with the arms of the Abbey pillory , Portuguese Pelourinho , reaffirmed. Alvorninha possibly received the city statute through João III. (1502–1557), whose brothers, Cardinal Afonso de Portugal (1509–1540) and Cardinal Infante Henriques (1512–1580), who was also king in the last two years of his life, appointed the abbots in Alcobaça for almost 60 years. As a result of this urban reform, the abbey lost its direct sovereignty over the land to the cities of the Coutos. In 1506, King Manuel had already granted the transfer of this direct sovereign right to an area close to the monastery, the Vila São Bernardo , which is today's Vestiaria , to compensate for his intended reform .

State of the foundation area

Celts and Romans

In itself, the region taken over by the monks had been inhabited for a long time. As early as the Bronze Age , there were settlements that were part of the Bronze Age network of paths. Before the Carthaginians and the Romans came, the Turdulos ( turdolorum oppida ) settled there , a tribe related to the Celts, who also opposed the Romanization up to the (lost) Lusitanian war (155 BC - 138 BC) . An important battle is said to have been fought in the wider area of ​​the Coutos by Rome's governor of the province of Hispania Ulterior , Décio Juno Brito , which is why the Roman had a temple of Neptune built on the Bay of Nazaré, on which the early Christian church of São Gião was built should be. The area belonged to the Romans as early as 197 BC. The province of Hispania Ulterior, formed after the reform of the emperor Augustus, of the province of Lusitania , there the sub-province of Scallabis , today's Santarém . The area of ​​Alcobaça was crossed by a Roman road that connected the Roman cities of Colipo ( São Sebatião do Freixo near Leiria ), Araducta (probably today's Alfeizerão ) and Eburobritium (near Óbidos ), among others . Another Roman road connected the port of Paredes via Porto de Mós with Tomar and Conimbriga ( Coimbra ). In Bárrio, a municipality in the area of ​​the old town of Cela Nova, a Roman fort, which presumably watched over the lagoon, was discovered on the slope of the former Pederneira lagoon, dating from 200 to 400.

Teutons and Moors

The Visigoths that followed from 470 onwards settled in this region, as the church of São Gião suggests and finds there prove, and from 711 the Moors , who with the forts of Alcobaça and Alfeizerão (which they built or - according to another opinion - were rebuilt) and the castle of Óbidos to the south ruled the area. Parts of the abbey area had only been wrested from the Moors ten years before it was donated to Bernhard von Clairvaux. Thus the area left to the monks by Afonso Henriques was originally old cultivated land, which, however, had suffered considerably from the liberation struggles against the Moors and was at least partially depopulated.

Alfezeirão and Pederneira lagoons

In addition, there was the peculiarity that the country bordered the Atlantic Ocean at a width of about 20 km, but only had three entrances in the form of two lagoons (that of Alfeizerão and that of Pederneira, today Nazaré ) and a narrow valley near Paredes . These lagoons were first mentioned in writing by the Roman writer and poet Rufio Festo Avieno in his work Ora Maritima around 350 AD.Some cities of the Coutos such as Alfeizerão, Cela, Maiorga, today in the hinterland, were all located on the navigable lagoons. Both the Pederneira lagoon and the Alfeizerão lagoon extended about ten kilometers into the country. For the port of Alfeizarão it was reported that 80 ships could anchor there as late as the 16th century. In both of the ports of Alfeizerão and Sao Martinho located in this lagoon, flourishing shipyards developed into the 17th century, which at that time built ships suitable for the ocean, such as part of the fleet with which King Sebastião I (1554–1578) his expedition went to Morocco, where he met his death in the battle of Alcácer-Quibir . The lagoons were rich in fish and full of sea birds until the 16th century. In their end areas they were in a state of eutrophication . The monks operated salt pans in shallow water, and in 1294 King Dinis (1251–1325) granted them the royal right (the shelf ) to ship salt as well as wine. One of the essential early tasks of the monks was to extract arable land from these lagoons. All in all, the monks were facing a new beginning in agriculture.

Drainage and flooding

São Martinho, sea gate with lagoon and silting zone

In the silting zones, the monks drained the lagoons and thus accelerated the siltation. When reclaiming land, they achieved such a skill that they were entrusted with the drainage of swamps throughout Portugal and lent goods there. Even if it had been heralding itself for several hundred years, the ecological catastrophe occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries. The inland waters collapsed, the fish died out, the sea birds migrated and the ports silted up. With the exception of the generally slower geological changes that have been observed for thousands of years, there is still no clear explanation for this rapid turnaround. The 18th century brought a multitude of disasters that began with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which was actually a seaquake and the greatest damage of which was caused by a tsunami with its flood and backflow. In 1772, large amounts of water again flooded even the Alcobaça monastery, ten kilometers from the ocean, the rivers clogged, and the backwashes drowned the monastery in mud. The Portuguese Prime Minister Marquês de Pombal, who was busy with the reconstruction of Lisbon, hired an English general and engineer two years later to organize the repair of this damage. Scientific studies of the effects on the two lagoons are still pending. However, since the backwaters could only flow away over a width of 20 km via the two 200-meter wide gates of the lagoons at São Martinho and Pederneira, they may have contributed significantly to the burial of the lagoons. The picture from the sea gate to the lagoon at São Martinho do Porto shows the extensive silting area behind it, in which ships still sailed at the beginning of the 17th century (such as the port of Alfeizerão, today located inland).

economy

As in many other areas, the monks played a crucial role in building up an agriculture. In the areas of the Coutos, they promoted the forms of higher agricultural refinement levels, such as the cultivation of wine, also of fruits, nuts and olives, very early on. They extracted salt in the salt pans and ore from the rivers. They caught fish in the lagoons and from the harbors. The regalia granted to them as early as the 13th century for this and also for the first forms of trade via the ports of the abbey prove a high level of economic added value for an unusually early period. The timber industry promoted shipbuilding, particularly favored by the lagoons with their inland ports. This turned the settlements into proper communities and prosperous cities throughout the Coutos. Until the end of the 18th century, trade was unthinkable without ports, the Coutos owned four until the beginning of the 16th century, and three after that. The ports created the region's prosperity. The Coutos must have been hit all the more by the ecological catastrophe of the late 17th and 18th centuries, when the lagoons disappeared in geological terms, or the lagoon of Alfeizerão melted into the lake of São Martinho, and the ports silted up. This cut must have turned out to be an economic catastrophe.

population

Figures for the population of the Coutos are only available for the beginning of the 19th century; before that, only unsystematic individual information was found. At the beginning of the 19th century, shortly before the end of monastic rule, the Coutos had around 20,000 inhabitants. For comparison, at that time Cologne had 50,000 and Nuremberg 30,000 inhabitants. The population of the cities was between 1000 and 2000, or 200 and 450 inhabited houses. These were numbers that, even in the context of the individual references, hold for the past. The only exception is Paredes, where during the reign of King Dinis (1279-1325), who used the port there for his residence in Leiria , 600 "fogos" (i.e. more than 2400 inhabitants) are said to have been counted (at the beginning of the 16th Century there were only 30).

education

The monastic training system, which was one of the earliest in the West, contributed significantly to the success of the Alcobaça coutos and their heyday in the 16th and 17th centuries. There is evidence of a public school in the Alcobaça monastery as early as 1269, which was then moved to Coimbra in 1290 and from which the University of Coimbra was created. From the 14th century, the monks ran agricultural and especially hydraulic engineering schools in Famalicão and Alvorninha. From the beginning, handicrafts such as iron extraction and blacksmithing and woodworking were taught. This led to an unusually early industrialization of the Coutos for Portugal, which in the 19th century had a considerable commercial economy with paper, glass and porcelain as well as textile factories and factories for fruit preservation. The poor political framework conditions in Portugal in the 20th century also left their mark here, even if today areas of the old Coutos are still characterized by a diverse and strong medium-sized economy. However, this does not apply to all cities, some have not been able to stop the apparent decline until today.

Dissolution of the Coutos de Alcobaça

The end of the Coutos de Alcobaça came with the closure of all monasteries in Portugal , ordered by Queen Maria II in 1834 as a result of the victory of the liberals in the Miguelistenkrieg . But the Coutos de Alcobaça had been fermenting for ten years. The monks were often only able to enter the cities under military protection. A volunteer battalion of the Coutos took part in the Miguelistenkrieg on the side of the Liberals, which fought fierce battles with the troops of King Miguel in front of the monastery in Alcobaça in 1833 . As a result, the monks, who feared the loss of their privileges, gave up the monastery for good in October 1833. The population then stormed the monastery buildings and plundered it for eleven days. Most of the stakes bearing the coat of arms of the abbey ( Pelourinhos ) were torn down, four survived the time at their location (Aljubarrota, Cela Nova, Maiorga and Santa Catarina), two were found and re-erected (Alfeizerão and Turquel), in Nazaré it was placed in 1886 a boulder symbolically on the preserved base. With the formal end of the rule of the abbey in 1834, all cities, to which mostly several parishes belonged, became districts. But already in 1836 some districts were merged and the others followed in a major administrative reform of 1855. Most of these circles became part of the modern Alcobaça district, with the exception of Pederneira, which became an independent district again in 1895 and changed its name to Nazaré (Nazareth) in 1912 based on the local Marian pilgrimage site Nossa Senhora da Nazaré . Three cities (Alvorninha, Santa Catarina and Salir de Matos) went up in the neighboring district of Caldas da Rainha . For almost 150 years, the memory of the joint association of cities disappeared. In the fall of 2007, all the former towns and communities belonging to the Coutos de Alcobaça met for the first time in the chapter house of the monastery to remember their common past.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The information regarding the data is not always uniform in the literature, the list follows the information of the IPPAR, Portuguese Monument Authority, if available, as well as J. Vieira Natividade, Obras Várias, Alcobaça, As Granjas do Mosteiro de Alcobaça , and the cadastre of city rights from the 13th century, see: Saul António Gomes, Um Manuscrito ilumindado alcobacense trecentista: o Caderno dos Forais do Couto, PDF
  2. ↑ Pedro Penteado, A Lenda de Nossa Senhora da Nazaré (Uma versão crítica), http://www.portugal-linha.pt/index2.php?option=com_contento&do_pdf=1&id=787
  3. ↑ Peter Dinzelbacher : Bernhard von Clairvaux , Wiss. Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt 1998, pages 17-18, 45
  4. ^ História de Portugal, editor: José Mattoso, volume. 1, Antes de Portugal , Lisbon 1993, Editorial Estampa. ISBN 972-33-0920-3 , p. 218
  5. ↑ it: Rufio Festo Avieno
  6. ↑ Rufus Festus Avienus, Ora Maritima, [1] ; José Ribeiro Ferreira: Rufio Festo Avieno, Orla Marítima , 2nd edition Coimbra 1992, ISBN 972-667-195-7
  7. ↑ IPPAR, Portuguese Monument Authority
  8. ↑ Cf. on this - in Portuguese -: Quico, Célia (2008) Lagoa da Pederneira: como desapareceu um dos principais portos Portugueses do período áureo dos Descobrimentos? - Pederneira lagoon: how did some of Portugal's main ports disappear from the golden age of voyages of discovery? -, [2]
  9. ↑ "fogos", stoves, i.e. inhabited houses or households, were counted with just under 5,000, Maria Zulmira Furtado Marques, Um Século de História de Alcobaça, Alcobaça 2003, ISBN 972-97145-8-4 , p. 21

literature

  • História de Portugal, Ed .: José Mattoso, Vol. I: Antes de Portugal , 1993, Editorial Estampa, ISBN 972-33-0920-3
  • História de Portugal, Ed .: José Mattoso, Vol. II: A Monarqia Feudal , 1993, Editorial Estampa, ISBN 972-33-0919-X
  • IPPAR, Instituto Português do Património Arquectónico e Arqueológico; Arte Sacra nos antigos Coutos de Alcobaça , 1985, Depostio Legal N ° 88234/95
  • Maria Zulimra Albuquerque Furtado Marques; Por Terra dos Antigos Coutos de Alcobaça , Alcobaça 1994
  • J. Vieira Natividade: Os Monges Agrónomos do Mosteiro de Alcobaça , Obras Varias, II, Alcobaça 29-47, and: As Granjas do Mosteiro de Alcobaça , Obras Varás, II, pp. 59-79

Web links

Commons : Mosteiro de Alcobaça  - Collection of images, videos and audio files