the king had intrusted him.[1] This historian adds, that Don John was so indignant at the treachery of his favourite, that he outlawed him by a public decree, deprived him of all his benefices, and degraded him from his nobility. He decreed the same penalties against all his followers, and forbad all his subjects to hold any intercourse whatever with him, under pain of his displeasure. The count of Portalegre, the brother of the fugitive, was even confined as prisoner in the tower of Belem for having written to him, and kept under strict guard, until the Infanta Maria, on the point of her departure to marry Philip II, the son of the emperor Charles V, begged his liberation. The king granted the request, on condition that the count should go to Arzilla to fight against the Moors, and earn by his services the forgiveness of his fault.
The severity which the king Don John exhibited on this occasion, sufficiently shows the value which he attached to the papers which had been taken away. It is evident that they were of the greatest importance. They were secret papers; and may they not have been those which gave information of the discoveries of the Portuguese? Our atlases, therefore, may have been copied from these stolen documents; and it only remains for us to discover what has become of the originals.
Now, although the theories to which these maps
- ↑ Since the reading of this memoir at the Institute, M. Correa da Serra, to whom I had previously read it, has had the goodness to inform me of some researches which he has made upon this subject. He discovered that Don Miguel de Sylva left the kingdom of Portugal in 1542, that he only arrived in Italy in 1543 to receive the cardinal's hat, and he thinks that he could only have reached that country by passing through France, where he had formerly studied, and that he doubtless there left the originals from which our charts were copied.
