When next we hear of Azurara he is acting in his official capacity as Keeper of the Royal Archives. It seems that the people of Miranda had lost the "foral" given them by King Diniz in 1324, and required a copy of it, which Azurara made and handed to them on the 16th February 1456.35 This is the first of a series of certificates (certidões) signed by the Chronicler that has come down to us, and the issuing of these and similar documents appears to have been one of his chief duties as Royal Archivist.
But Azurara was too valuable a man to be allowed to spend his whole time and energy in the routine work of an office; and so we find that when the King had reigned twenty years or more, which would be in or about 1458, he commissioned him to relate the history of Ceuta under the Governorship of D. Pedro de Menezes, to whom the city had been entrusted on its capture.36 The story runs, that for some time João I was unable to meet with anyone who would undertake the responsibility of guarding the new conquest, and, word of this having been brought to D. Pedro while he was playing at "Chóca", he at once hastened into the King's presence, and said he would engage to hold the city against the whole strength of Africa with the olive-wood crook he had just been wielding.37 Be this incident true or not, certain it is that D. Pedro de Menezes succeeded in maintaining Ceuta, despite all the efforts of the Moors to expel him; and his achievements, as chronicled by Azurara, form by themselves sufficient ground for Affonso's commission. But another reason, no doubt, influenced the King, and that was the supreme importance attached to the possession of the old city. Its position as the key of the Straits enabled the Portuguese to hinder the Moorish corsairs from raiding the Algarve, and, at the same time, to help the Christian cause by attacks on the last relic of Mohammedan power in the Peninsula, the kingdom of Grenada. Added to this, its conquest was hailed as the first step in the realisation of that cherished ideal, an African Empire: for, besides being a great trading centre and the sea-gate of Mauritania, it formed a wedge driven into the heart of the Infidel, and a fitting crown to the struggle of seven centuries, which, commencing on the morrow of the battle of the Guadalete, had ended by the establishment of the Cross in the land of the Crescent. The tide had turned at last and for ever, and the Gothic monarchy was avenged.
Azurara, who on previous occasions had proved himself a ready writer, compiled the Chronica do Conde D. Pedro de Menezes more slowly, owing doubtless to the fact that his new official duties kept him from devoting his whole time to the work, and the Chronicle was not finished until 1463.
In this very year of 1458 occurred the first African Expedition of Affonso V, with its result, the capture of Alcacer. This event was probably the immediate cause of the writing of the Chronicle, because the record of his reign shows how the King cared more for African expansion than maritime expeditions, and how, like the old-time cavalier that he was, he preferred a land-war with the Moors to the seemingly theoretical, or at least distant, advantages to be gained by voyages of discovery. In 1460 D. Henrique died, leaving the fruit of his ceaseless endeavours to be plucked by other hands; since it was not until 1498, when Vasco da Gama cast anchor off Calicut, that the Infant's expeditions came to their legitimate conclusion, and a century of efforts received their reward.
But if Azurara possessed many of the higher qualities of an historian, he was by no means devoid of shortcomings; and two incidents, now to be related, form serious blots on his character as a Chronicler and a man.
In 1459 the Cortes met in Lisbon, and the Deputies of the People requested that a reform should be carried out in the Torre do Tombo, or Archive Office. They complained that the mass of old Registers which it was necessary to search in order to obtain copies of the documents existing there, together with the profitless prolixity of many of them, had long proved a source of great expense; and they therefore begged that such as were deemed of importance might be transcribed and the rest destroyed. This petition met with the King's approval, and Azurara charged himself with its pg xxviii]execution, a task which seemingly occupied the remainder of his life.38 He acted with a zeal worthy of barbarous times, and the memory of the destruction to which he condemned documents of the highest historical importance has been preserved by tradition, and his proscription is still spoken of. He appears to have been unconscious of the harm he did, for he prefaces each of the new Registers compiled by him from the old with an account of his handiwork. True it is that Barros praises Azurara for these Registers, but in reality they are only "dry, imperfect abstracts", as one writer calls them, for they throw little light on the periods to which they relate, and were, besides, the cause of the loss of their originals. Fortunately, however, some records escaped the general destruction, for it happened that certain Municipalities had previously obtained transcripts of the most precious, while others that existed in duplicate in the Archives, unknown to anyone, came to light during the administration of another Guarda-Mór.39 The authorities of the City of Oporto obtained leave from Affonso V, on the 23rd March 1447, to have copies made of all the documents in the Torre do Tombo which related to them in any way, and these were furnished on December 25th, 1453, when Lopes was still Keeper of the Archives.
But Azurara was guilty of a yet graver delinquency than his destruction of the old Registers, and a charge of forgery must be brought against him. A detailed account of this affair may be read in the judgment of the Casa de Supplicação, delivered on January 12th, 1479, from which it appears that a dispute had arisen between the Order of Christ and some inhabitants of Punhete over rights claimed by the former in the River Zezere, a tributary of the Tagus. The Order based its claim on certain documents, one being of the reign of D. Fernando, and said to have been extracted from the Torre do Tombo, in which that monarch purported to confer on the Order of Christ jurisdiction over the towns of Pombal, Soure, Castello Branco and others, to the practical exclusion of his own authority therein.40 When a copy of this pretended grant was produced in support of the contention, Azurara's successor in the Archives, Affonso d'Obidos, received instructions to produce the Register of D. Fernando for the purpose of comparison, and to bring the scribes engaged in the Archive Office with him; whereupon the grant was found at the end of the Register in a different writing from the rest of the book. Neither d'Obidos, nor the scribe who had copied out the Register, could say how it came there, or who had inserted it, and the latter declared that no such grant existed in the old books from which he had transcribed the present one. On further examination the pretended grant proved to be in the handwriting of "Gomez Eannes, Cleric",41 a servant of Azurara, and it must have been fraudulently inserted in the Register after the latter had been bound up. On the discovery of this act of forgery, judgment was, of course, given against the Order, and it was fortunate for our Chronicler that the offence he had committed in its interests remained undiscovered until after his death.42
Curiously enough, in the same year Azurara was rewarded by a pension. The grant dated from Cintra, August 7th, 1459, runs as follows:—"Dom Affonso, etc., to all to whom this letter of ours shall come we make known that, considering the many services we have received and expect hereafter to receive from Gomez Eanes de Zurara, Commander of the Order of Christ, Our Chronicler and Keeper of our Archives, and wishing to do him favour, we are pleased to give him a pension of twelve white milreis from the 1st day of January