D. Duarte e a sua época: Arte, cultura, poder e espiritualidade

In 2002, the project of biographies of the kings of Portugal formally began to the “Circle of Readers”. Invitations were made and the first instructions were given. I then began a cohabitation with D. Duarte, who during the following three years
it would have everything that cohabitations generally have: complicity and strangeness, proximity and distance, heat and coldness (with extreme peaks of almost passion and almost repulsion – less for the character itself and more for the demands of the work), moments when I felt I understood him (I was about to write - “that we understood each other”…), others in which I perceived him as forever unattainable, as I learned in books that they are all protagonists from a distant past,
how I was taught over three decades to study, investigate and teach History.
This cohabitation was influenced by the conditions defined by the responsible for the collection: in the end I had to deliver a book of 1,100,000 characters, a biography, that is, the narration or description of a life. More ambitiously, the story of a life, that of Duarte. And he should do so without resorting to erudition excessive, reducing footnotes to a minimum and, above all, writing for a broad, non-specialized audience. There was a lot of discussion after this last one idea: what audience would this be? How to define it? It didn't seem complicated to me: people educated and interested, who liked reading and History, but without preparation specific in History and, more than that, without patience for some of the erudition tighter (and sometimes more useless) and more boring prose and so often less careful about our work.