Amor: The tragical love story of D. Inês De Castro and D. Pedro

When we speak of love, we refer more often to characters in literature than to people in real life. However, sometimes reality surpasses fiction.

The love relationship between Inês de Castro and King Pedro I of Portugal is full of myth, love and tragedy. It's the perfect example of this and Portugal's most beautiful love story.

Inês de Castro was born in 1320 or 1325 in Galicia, she was the illegitimate daughter of the Galician nobleman Pedro Fernandes de Castro and a Portuguese lady, Aldonça Suárez de Valadares.

She arrived in Évora, integrated into the retinue of D. Constança, in 1340. From an early age, D. Pedro's love for the Galician lady was immediate. This extra-marital relationship of the prince did not please the king his father.  As much as there is historical knowledge, D. Afonso IV was the only Portuguese king who had no children illegitimate and who has always fiercely fought such licentious situations. Inês went then exiled to the castle of Albuquerque, where she remained until D. Constança's death in1345. 

When D. Constança died (leaving only one son, the future King D. Fernando), she returned to Coimbra and lived openly with D. Pedro, of whom he already had three children in the Palace annexed to the Santa Clara Convent.

D. Inês de Castro had brothers, the powerful Castro, nobles who began to conspire to convince D. Pedro to consider himself entitled to the throne of Castile and Leon, which would allow one day a nephew of theirs (son of Pedro and Inês ) would come to rule this powerful Iberian kingdom.
D. Afonso IV – sensitive to the fragility of Portuguese independence – reacted against such ideas and his advisers easily convinced him that the only way to avoid a Castilian adventure would be to separate D. Pedro from D. Inês. Faced with the latter's refusal to accept this issue, and taking advantage of the Prince's absence, a summary trial was held in Montemor-o-Velho, which sentenced her to death.
Three nobles: Diogo Lopes Pacheco, Álvaro Gonçalves and Pero Coelho, taking advantage of the king's weakness of will due to his advanced age, insisted that the sentence be carried out, and the king eventually gave in. Alvaro Goncalves and Pero Coelho killed Inês right there, without any compassion for the three innocent children who saw their mother brutally murdered before their eyes.

The assassination of Inês de Castro, 1834 by Karl Briullov

D. Pedro reacted with violence to the execution of his beloved and mother of 3 of his children and started a period of civil war against the King, which only ended due to the mediation intervention of the Queen of Portugal, his Mother.
When D. Pedro ascended the throne in 1357, he immediately began a persecution of the three men who had murdered D. Inês and who, in the meantime, had taken refuge in Castile. Only two were caught. One of them, D. Pedro took the heart out of the chest; to the other, he took the heart in the back saying that "men who had killed an innocent woman could not have hearts". The third escaped and survived; there were rumours that, in fact he had not taken part in the murder and had even tried to dissuade his companions from doing so.

D. Pedro announced that he had secretly married D. Inês, who thus became Queen of Portugal; he then ordered tombs built for him and for her in Alcobaça, taking her remains from the Convent of Santa Clara de Coimbra to that monastery, demanding that all classes (clergy, nobility and people) pay homage to her. The transfer took place in a funeral procession that would remain in the memory of the populations.

Imagination soon turned such a symbolic tribute into a formal ceremony in which the three orders of the State (clergy, nobility and people) kissed the hand of the “Dead Queen” whose corpse, unearthed and seated on a throne, has always been assumed as the definitive sign of an unending passion.

The Coronation of Inês de Castro in 1361 by Pierre-Charles Comte