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Updated: June 4, 2025
Muley Xeque caused a tall tower to be erected on his tomb, in memory of the victory of Tangier; but in 1473, two sons of Muley being made prisoners by the Portuguese, one was ransomed for the body of Dom Fernando, who was then solemnly laid in the vaults of the beautiful Abbey of Batalha on the field of Aljubarota, which had given his father the throne.
Laborde, indeed, arrived the same night at Batalha, eight miles distant, but on receiving the news in the morning that the British had already occupied Leirya, he advanced no farther.
Now here again, as at Thomar and Batalha, Haupt has seen a result of the intercourse with India; both in the balconies and in the turret roofs he sees a likeness to a temple in Gujerat; and it must be admitted that in the example he gives the balconies and roofs are not at all unlike those at Belem.
Batalha offered no position that he could hope to defend until the arrival of Loison; therefore, sending word to that general to move from Torras Novas, as soon as he reached that town, to Santarem, and then to march to join him at Rolica, he fell back to Alcobaca and then to Obidos, a town with a Moorish castle, built on a gentle eminence in the middle of a valley.
Maria da Victoria or Batalha, that is Battle, at a place then called Pinhal in a narrow valley some nine or ten miles north of Aljubarrota and seven south of Leiria.
The first document which speaks of him at Batalha is dated 1503, and mentions him as Matheus Fernandes, vassal of the king, judge in ordinary of the town of Santa Maria da Victoria, and master of the works of the same monastery, named by the king. He died in 1515, and was buried near the west door.
And yet even this ordinary plan has been compared by a German writer to that of the nave and transepts of Canterbury Cathedral, a most unlikely model to be followed, as Chillenden, who there carried out the transformation of Lanfranc's nave, did not become prior till 1390, three years after Batalha had been begun.
Batalha has been, and Alcobaça is being, saved from ruin. The Sé Velha at Coimbra has been purged too drastically perhaps of all the additions and disfigurements of the eighteenth century, and the same is being done with the cathedral of Lisbon. Such new buildings as have been put up are usually much less successful.
Seeing therefore how close the intercourse was between Lisbon and India, it is perhaps no wonder that, in his very interesting book on the Renaissance Architecture of Portugal, Albrecht Haupt, struck by the very strange forms used at Thomar and to a lesser degree in the later additions to Batalha, propounded a theory that this strangeness was directly due to the importation of Indian details.
The original plan for the tower is said to have been furnished by Garcia de Resende, whose house we have seen at Evora, and if this screen, which is built up of heart-shaped curves, is older than the cloister windows at Batalha, he may have suggested to Matheus Fernandes the tracery which has a more or less reticulated form, though on the other hand it may be later and have been suggested by them.
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