Portugal Banknotes 10000 Escudos banknote 1998 Prince Henry the Navigator
Bank of Portugal - Banco de Portugal
Obverse: Portrait of Prince Henry the Navigator at right. Infante Dom Henrique de Avis, Duke of Viseu (4 March 1394 – 13 November 1460), better known as Henry the Navigator (Portuguese: Henrique, o Navegador) was an important figure in 15th-century Portuguese politics and in the early days of the Portuguese Empire. Coat of arms of the House of Lancaster at right.
Reverse: Model of a Portuguese Caravel Ship at right, Red Cross of the Order of Christ at upper right. Frontispiece of Zurara's Crónica dos Feitos de Guiné (Paris codex) - "Chronicle of the Henrican Discoveries" at left.
Watermark: Reversed portrait of Prince Henry the Navigator.
Size: 156 x 75 mm. Author: Luis Filipe de Abreu Inv.
Printer: Thomas De La Rue & Company Limited, London England.
First Issue: 2 May 1996. Last Issue: 12 February 1998, 56,675,103 notes were issued.
Withdrawn from circulation: 28 February 2002.
Portugal banknotes - Portugal paper money
1995-2000 "Portuguese Seafarers & Explorers" Issue
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Prince Henry the Navigator
Infante Dom Henrique de Avis, Duke of Viseu (4 March 1394 – 13 November 1460), better known as Henry the Navigator (Portuguese: Henrique, o Navegador) was an important figure in 15th-century Portuguese politics and in the early days of the Portuguese Empire. Through his administrative direction, he is regarded as the main initiator of what would be known as the Age of Discoveries.
Prince Henry was the third son of King John I (João I) of Portugal and his English wife, Philippa of Lancaster. When he was 21, Prince Henry (with his father and brothers) attacked the Moslem port of Ceutha in north Morocco (in Africa, across the Mediterranean Sea). This successful attack in 1415 inspired Prince Henry to explore Africa, most of which was unknown to Europeans. Prince Henry was determined to see Portuguese sailors sail down the west coast of Africa to find the limits of the Muslim world (in order to defeat the Muslims), and to find the legendary Christian empire of the priest-king Prester John (who did not, in fact, exist). In 1419, his father appointed Prince Henry the governor of the province of Algarve (on Portugal's southern coast).
Origin of the 'Navigator' nickname
No one used the nickname 'Navigator' to refer to prince Henry during his lifetime or in the following three centuries. The term was coined by two nineteenth-century German historians: Heinrich Schaefer and Gustav de Veer. Later on it was made popular by two British authors who included it in the titles of their biographies of the prince: Henry Major in 1868 and Raymond Beazley in 1895. In Portuguese, even in modern times, it is uncommon to call him by this epithet; the preferred use is "Infante D. Henrique".
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 (although Zurara only covers part of it, the period 1434-1448). 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 (published originally in Italy in 1507).
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 (writing in 1567), 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 splendid preserved manuscript copy of Zurara's Cronica was rediscovered in the Royal Library of Paris (now the Bibliothèque nationale de France) by Ferdinand Denis (how it ended up there is a mystery). 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 (there were no pictures of Henry before this; the Paris frontispiece became the basis of modern images of the prince, reproduced in countless books, paintings and monuments since). Luís António de Abreu e Lima (Viscount de Carreira), 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 (Viscount of Santarém). 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 (to which Santarém contributed.)
A second manuscript copy was found shortly after, 1845, by J.A. Schmeller in the Hof- und Staats-Bibliothek in Munich (Codex Hisp. 27), as part of a collection of miscellaneous accounts of Portuguese expeditions originally compiled in 1508 by Lisbon-based German printer known as Valentinus Moravus (or in Portuguese, as "Valentim Fernandes"). However, this version contains only extracts, and much abridged.