Ferdinand The Saint Prince - Saintly Cult

Saintly Cult

News of Ferdinand's death were met with great mourning in Portugal. The regent Peter of Coimbra, who had perhaps done the most to get Ferdinand released, ransomed some of the imprisoned members of his party, notably Ferdinand's secretary, Frei João Álvares, in 1448. Shortly after arriving in Lisbon, Álvares returned to Morocco in 1450 to ransom the remaining prisoners. Álvares had hoped to also ransom Ferdinand's remains, but he only managed to recover the hidden pot with Ferdinand's entrails. He returned to Lisbon and made his way to the court of King Afonso V of Portugal in Santarém in early June 1451. Frei João Álvares and João Rodrigues were instructed to take the relics and deposit them in the prepared tomb reserved for Ferdinand in the Aviz necropolis, the Founder's Chapel in Batalha Monastery. Álvares reports that on the way to Batalha, they passed through Tomar, where Prince Henry the Navigator joined the procession, and subsequently led the religious ceremony depositing the relics at Batalha. The tomb was originally carved with Ferdinand's personal arms and knightly motto le bien me plet ("The good pleases me"), which combined the motto of his father, por bem, with that of his mother, il me plait.

A popular saintly cult soon developed around the figure of Ferdinand, encouraged by the ruling House of Aviz. In January 1444, Peter of Coimbra endowed a fund for a yearly mass to be said in Ferdinand's honor at his chapel in Batalha. Henry the Navigator commissioned a tryptych of the life and sufferings of Ferdinand, painted by João Áfonso, to be set up in his own (Henry's) chapel. Some modern authors believe the celebrated Saint Vincent Panels by Nuno Gonçalves were commissioned by Peter of Coimbra as a funerary homage to Ferdinand the Holy Prince.

The religious iconography of Ferdinand the Holy Prince usually portrays him as a miserable prisoner, hungry, bearded, disshevelled in a black cloak and hood, his feet in leg irons and chains held in his hands. He also sometimes holds a hoe, for his labors in the palace gardens in Fez. Later on, Ferdinand was sometimes depicted in the armor of an imperial warrior

The promotion of the saintly cult, in particular the narrative twist that Ferdinand had "volunteered" for martyrdom rather than allow Ceuta to be surrendered, was principally due to Henry the Navigator, and may have been motivated by an attempt to deflect responsibility for his death away from himself. In the 1450s, Henry commissioned Frei João Álvares to set down the details of Ferdinand's life and captivity. Finished sometime before 1460, and first published in 1527, Álvares chronicle is the principal source of the life and travails of Ferdinand. Although originally intended as a piece of Christian hagiography to supplement the cult of the 'Holy Prince' and the Henrican interpretation, Álvares chronicle did not flatter Henry's leadership nor absolve him of responsibility for Ferdinand's fate. He makes it reasonably clear that Ferdinand did not seek out a martyr's fate, but had it imposed on him by the delays and machinations back in Portugal. At several points, Álvares surreptitiously points an accusatory finger at Ferdinand's brothers, via speeches from the mouth of Ferdinand, his companions and his captors. Another hagiography, the Martirium pariter et gesta, written by an unknown author, appeared around the same time or shortly after. Some have speculated the Martirium might have been written by Pero Vasques, the ransomed chaplain, although others believe it was a largely derivative piece, hurriedly written by someone else, commissioned by Isabella of Burgundy to support the campaign in Rome to promote Ferdinand to sainthood.

Ferdinand's sister, Isabella of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy, endowed a mass to be said in Brussels, and in 1467 decided to fund a chapel dedicated to Ferdinand the Holy at the Church of St. Anthony in Lisbon. To this end, Isabella dispatched Frei João Álvares to Rome to petition the pope for religious honors for her brother, possibly even beatification, the first step to formal sainthood. At Álvares's request, bulls were issued by Pope Paul II in 1470 granting permission for the Lisbon chapel and indulgences to anyone who attended an anniversary mass for Ferdinand. Although a contract was signed between Álvares and Lisbon municipal authorities in November 1471 to begin the chapel, the death of both Paul II and Isabella around this time probably prevented the campaign from going forward, with the result that Ferdinand remained unbeatified and uncanonized.

King Afonso V of Portugal is reported to have invoked the memory of the martyrdom of his uncle in his three Moroccan campaigns of 1458, 1463/4 and 1471. In the last campaign, Afonso V finally captured Tangier. In the aftermath, negotiations were opened between Afonso V and the Moroccan strongman Muhammad al-Sheikh to deliver the bones and bodily remains of Ferdinand, which were still in Fez. These negotiations dragged on for a while, but the remains were finally obtained by the Portuguese in 1473 (or perhaps 1472) One version relates that a disgruntled Moroccan courtier, said to be the ruler's own nephew, seized the coffin containing Ferdinand's body, smuggled it out of Fez, and brought it all the way to Lisbon, selling it to the Portuguese king for a considerable sum. There were subsequently great ceremonies in depositing the bodily remains in Ferdinand's tomb in Batalha.

The cult of Ferdinand continued into the 16th C. and 17th Centuries. King Manuel I of Portugal had the sculptor Nicolau Chanterene sculpt an statue of Ferdinand on the left side of the magnificent western door of the Jerónimos Monastery c. 1517. In 1538–39, in accordance with an endowment of the late dowager-queen Eleanor of Viseu (the widow of John II, she had died in 1525) a retable was commissioned depicting the life and sufferings of Ferdinand, painted by Cristóvão de Rodrigues, to be set up in Ferdinand's chapel at Batalha (alas this retable has long since disappeared).

The saintly cult of the Ferdinand the Holy Prince fell foul of the ever-stricter rules of the Roman Catholic Church, which sought to discourage cults of unbeatified and uncanonized persons. The only clear evidence of the presence of the Ferdinand cult inside a regular church (outside the Batalha chapel) was the retable dedicated to Ferdinand set up at the church of Our Lady of the Olive Grove in Guimarães in 1472, in celebration of the imminent translation of the relics. In 1614, Martim Afonso Meixa, Bishop of Leiria, prohibited the Ferdinand cult at Batalha on account of his not being beatified. Nonetheless, the 1595 hagiography by Jerónimo Román and the 1623 history written by Frei Luís de Sousa tried to encourage it, suggesting masses for Ferdinand the Holy could be carried out subsumed in masses for All Saints. Jorge Cardoso included him in his Agiológio Lusitano (1666). The 1634 papal encycical Coelestis Hierusalem issued by Pope Urban VIII prohibited popular cults of unbeatified and uncanonized persons "unless they proved to be of time immemorial". The Bollandists used this clause to insert Ferdinand the Holy Prince in the "June 5th" entry of their Acta Sanctorum in 1695, controversially including a rare image of him with a halo.

Restrictions on the religious cult did not prevent the continuation of a secular cult of Ferdinand, connected to the narrative that Ferdinand was a voluntary martyr for Portugal's imperial mission. The Portuguese poet Luís de Camões made a brief mention of Ferdinand in his epic 1572 poem Os Lusíadas (Canto IV, stanzas 52–53), asserting Ferdinand had given himself to martyrdom voluntarily for patriotic reasons, "a sacrifice to love of country made, that not for him strong Ceuta be o'erthrown, the public weal preferring to his own." Perhaps surprisingly, the Fernandine legend got another gust of wind after the 1580 Iberian Union with Spain. The Spanish playwright Francisco Agustín Tárrega composed a drama La Fortuna Adversa del Infante D. Fernando de Portugal in 1595–98 (sometimes attributed to Lope de Vega), which was probably the basis for the more famous 1629 Baroque play El príncipe constante by Calderón.

Fortunato de São Boaventura, the exiled Archbishop of Evora published a more modern version of Ferdinand's story in 1836. In English, the story of Ferdinand the Holy Prince was told in an 1842 poem "The Steadfast Prince" by Richard Chenevix Trench The story was also turned into a 19th C. pulp historical fiction novel, The Constant Prince, by Christabel Rose Coleridge.

The Ferdinand legend received another lift in the 20th C., particularly encouraged by the Portuguese Estado Novo, which was keen on cultivating icons of nationalism and overseas glory. Ferdinand the Holy was given a position of prominence on the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, a monument erected in 1960 to celebrate the Age of Discovery and (more generally) the Portuguese Empire.