Zurara adopted the career of letters in middle life. He probably entered the royal library as assistant to Fernão Lopes during the reign of King Edward of Portugal, and he had sole charge of it in 1452. His Chronicle of the Siege and Capture of Ceuta, a supplement to Lopes's Chronicle of King John I, dates from 1450, and three years later he completed the first draft of the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, our authority for the early Portuguese voyages of discovery down the African coast and in the ocean, more especially for those undertaken under the auspices of Prince Henry the Navigator. It contains some account of the life work of that prince, and has a biographical as a geographical interest. On 6 June 1454, Zurara became chief keeper of the archives and royal chronicler in succession to Lopes. In 1456 King Afonso V commissioned him to write the history of Ceuta, the land-gate of the East, under the governorship of D. Pedro de Menezes, from its capture in 1415 until 1437, and he had it ready in 1463. A year afterwards the king charged him with a history of the deeds of D. Duarte de Menezes, captain of Alcácer-Ceguer, and, proceeding to Africa, he spent a year collecting materials and studying the scenes of the events he was to describe, and in 1468 he completed the chronicle. Afonso corresponded with Zurara on terms of affectionate intimacy, and no less than three comendas of the order of Christ rewarded his literary services. Zurara had little of the picturesque ingenuousness of Lopes, and loved to display his erudition by quotations and philosophical reflections, showing that he wrote under the influence of the first Renaissance. Many leading classical, early Christian and medieval writers figure in his pages, and he was acquainted with the notable chronicles and romances of Europe and had studied the best Italian and Spanish authors. In addition, he had mastered the geographical system of the ancients and their astrology. As a historian he is laborious, accurate and conscientious, though his position did not allow him to tell the whole truth about his hero, Prince Henry.
Chronicles
Chronicle of Discovery and Conquest of Guinea
The preface to the English version of The Chronicle of Discovery and Conquest of Guinea contains a full account of the life and writings of Azurara and cites all the authorities.
Chronicle of the Henrican Discoveries
Zurara's Crónica dos feitos da Guiné is the principal historical source for modern conception of Prince Henry the Navigator and the Henrican age of Portuguese discoveries. Commissioned by Henry himself, Zurara's chronicle is openly hagiographic of the prince and reliant on his recollections. As a result, the reliability of Zurara's chronicles is considered suspect by modern historians. Nonetheless, having little else to draw upon, historians have had to rely heavily on Zurara. Zurara claims to have based his account of the expeditions on a more detailed draft manuscript compiled by a certain "Antonio Cerveira". Alas, no copy of Cerveira's original account has ever been found. Zurara's own chronicle remained in manuscript form, and hidden from the public eye for centuries. Indeed, until the publication of João de Barros's Primeira Década da Ásia in 1552, there were no published works about the Henrican discoveries, save for the two brief memoirs of Alvise Cadamosto. João de Barros claimed to have constructed his 1552 account on the basis of a copy of Zurara's manuscript he found scattered in the archives. However, a little over a decade later, Damião de Góis, announced that the Zurara manuscript had disappeared. A hunt for a copy of the manuscript began, but would turn up nothing for a while. The Spanish cleric Bartolomé de las Casas, writing in 1540s, suggested he had a copy of Zurara, but that copy too was never tracked down. It was only in 1839, that an intact and splendidly preserved manuscript copy of Zurara's Cronica was rediscovered in the Royal Library of Paris by Ferdinand Denis. Significantly, the Paris codex included a frontispiece with a portrait of a man with a thin moustache in a black Burgundian chaperon that was instantly assumed to be the physical image of Prince Henry the Navigator. Luís António de Abreu e Lima, the Portuguese minister to France at the time, arranged for the first publication of Zurara's Cronica in 1841, with a preface and notes by Manuel Francisco de Macedo Leitão e Carvalhosa. The publication was a sensation, particularly as Portugal was then engaged in a diplomatic quarrel over recent Anglo-French colonial encroachments in West Africa where questions of priority of discovery were involved A second manuscript copy was found shortly after, 1845, by J.A. Schmeller in the Hof- und Staats-Bibliothek in Munich, as part of a collection of miscellaneous accounts of Portuguese expeditions originally compiled in 1508 by Lisbon-based German printer known as Valentinus Moravus. However, this version contains only extracts, and much abridged.
Legacy
In 2017 the role of Zurara in systemic racism was called into question in Ibram X. Kendi's book Stamped From The Beginning. Zurara's chronicle has been viewed as the first describing inferiority of people from African descent. Zurara says that the Africans that were captured and sold into slave trade were heathens and were in need of religious and civil salvation. Kendi suggests that Zarara and Prince Henry of Portugal were the first to justify slavery as salvation as opposed to enriching themselves. Thus starting systemic racism that has spread through the Western world.
