Metadata: Drawers
Collection
- Country:
- Portugal
- Holding institution:
- The National Archive of Torre do Tombo
- Holding institution (official language):
- Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- Postal address:
- Alameda da Universidade, 1649-010 Lisbon
- Phone number:
- 00351 210037100
- Email:
- mail@dglab.gov.pt
- Reference number:
- PT/TT/GAV
- Title:
- Drawers
- Title (official language):
- Gavetas
- Creator/accumulator:
- Arquivo da Casa da Coroa / Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo
- Date(s):
- 1101/2017
- Language:
- Arabic
- French
- Italian
- Latin
- Portuguese
- Spanish; Castilian
- Extent:
- 264 bundles and 25 drawers
- Type of material:
- Textual Material
- Physical condition:
- Good
- Scope and content:
-
The Gavetas collection comprises various documents, mainly official records, including forals, wills, sentences, records on "morgados" (entails), treaties, correspondence, and numerous documents regarding the Portuguese overseas territories, such as records referring to the commerce and navigation in Africa, slave trade, papal bulls about missionary campaigns, correspondence between Portugal and Castille about territories in dispute, etc.
Within such a rich collection of records, many references can be found regarding New Christians and Portuguese Jewish communities before the late-15th-century expulsion.
Some examples are the following:
PT/TT/GAV/3/1/7: a donation given by King D. Dinis in 1317 to the “Almirante-Mor” “(royal admiral), consisting of houses that had belonged to the Jewish family Navarro.
PT/TT/GAV/10/12/17: terms of a contract between King Fernando and the Jews of Portugal, which included the definition of the "sisa judenga" (Jewish land transfer tax). August 11, 1353.
PT/TT/GAV/15/15/22: a "carta de mercê" (letter of favour) given in 1484 by King João II to D. Afonso, a son of the Marquis of Valença, of confiscated goods from a Jew, Mestre Guedelha, who had been indicted for bigamy.
PT/TT/GAV/23/10/19: fragment of the sale deed of the "foro" (incomes of a property leased by an emphyteusis contract) of some houses to the Jewish "comuna" (commune) of Lisbon. The deed was signed in the house of Juda Gabão, in the Judiaria Velha (Old Jewish quarter) of Lisbon. October 17, 1485.
PT/TT/GAV/15/6/14: a confirmation of the Royal Chancellery from 1496 of a contract between a Jewish woman named Cimfa and the city council of Santarém, in which she offered accommodation (400 beds and clothes) to nobles and royal officers visiting the city within the following ten years.
Several documents regarding the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal and the New Christian question can be found in particular in Gavetas 2, 13, 15 (PT/TT/GAV/2; PT/TT/GAV/13; PT/TT/GAV/15).
- Archival history:
-
Archival history
The Gavetas collection is as old as the Royal Archive/National Archive of Torre do Tombo. Its origins go back to the 12th century, when the royal court was still itinerant. It was only in the 14th century that the archive was established in the tower of the Castle of São Jorge in Lisbon.
The name of the collection, Gavetas (drawers), is presumably from the 16th century, and it refers to its organisation in the old Royal Archive. Each drawer stored a specific set of documents (city charters, wills, treaties, sentences, "morgados" (entails), etc). organised by location and type. Some chronological order was tried without full success. By the 18th century, the collection already had 20 drawers, with several documents from the 15th century onwards. After the Great Earthquake of 1755, the tower of the Castle of São Jorge was damaged, and the records were moved to new premises and reorganised. One of the early inventories of the collection was produced at the end of the 18th century by the "guarda-mor" (chief warden) João Pereira Ramos de Azeredo Coutinho, in order to ease the process of finding documents in the Royal Archive.
The organisation of the collection experienced some changes over time. At present, the drawers are no longer named by their contents but are ordered by numbers.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
The Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo is one of Portugal's oldest institutions. Its origins go back to at least the 14th century. The royal documents used to follow the itinerant medieval court, with only the most important documents being held at different monasteries. Once the court established itself in Lisbon, so did the royal archives. The first documental reference to a set location is from 1378. The archive was kept in one of the towers of São Jorge Castle, hence its name Torre do Tombo (Tower of the Archive). The "guarda-mor" (high-guardian) was responsible for its safekeeping.
Until 1755, the Torre do Tombo functioned as the Crown's archive, serving the king's administration and granting certificates to institutions and individuals. The oldest record reporting its organisation and content is from 1526: a letter from Tomé Lopes to King João III that mentions 149 books of Chancellery records and 47 of the so-named Leitura Nova (a compilation of copies of old documents ordered by King Manuel I).
In the 16th century, with the growing centralisation and the greater strength and complexity of the State, Torre do Tombo became a real state archive. Monarchs took notice of the archive, as they understood the importance of the relationship between information and power. Some documents from other areas of the central administration were incorporated into the archive. Torre do Tombo became a reference, even serving as an example to Philip II of Spain when regulating the Archive of Simancas.
The first indexes of the archive were created during the 17th and 18th centuries, as the interest in these documents increased and their reorganisation was ongoing. A 1702 index, most likely created by João Duarte Lisboa, responsible for the archive’s reformation, reveals that, in 1656, the archive was arranged in 15 “armários” (cabinets). Twenty years later, the archive had five more “armários”.
In 1755, the tower of the castle was destroyed in the Great Earthquake. The documents were then temporarily saved in a woodshed and, two years later, partly transferred to the monastery of São Bento da Saúde in Lisbon. The papers were then reorganized, and several copies were made. The new organisation did not follow the old methods; instead, it followed the logic of the 18th century, favouring a methodical and chronological order. Many documents were lost in this new reorganisation and, even with the information given by the indexes, the original structure is still somewhat unclear.
The 18th century also brought a new way of looking at history and a new value to these documents. That explains the incorporation of the Society of Jesus' records in 1768, following the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal. It was one of the first examples of the incorporation into the Crown's archives of documents produced by other institutions. After the Liberal Revolution, these incorporations became customary, collecting records of old courts and religious corporations. In 1823, the royal archive changed its name to Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (National Archive of Torre do Tombo), making it clear that it was not only an archive of the Crown but of the whole nation. However, there was no active will or ability to enable access and to explore its documents, as the focus was only on their compilation.
The establishment of the Republic in 1911, along with the dictatorship (1926-1974), did not bring many new developments. In the 1950s, an effort was made by the director, João Martins da Silva Marques, to reorganise the documentation, leading to the creation of the Núcleo Antigo (Old Core) collection. In the 1960s and 1970s, António da Silva Rego undertook a project of describing and transcribing the contents of the Gavetas collection, whose result was the 12-volume work, As gavetas da Torre do Tombo. Several documents from this collection have also been digitised. Throughout the 20th century, many collections and documents were added to the archive, coming from different public and private institutions.
In 1990, the archives moved to a new building made specifically for that purpose, where they are still located. In more recent years, part of the fonds and collections were rearranged to match the original organisation. For instance, the Núcleo Antigo was disassembled, creating new fonds and collections, and incorporating other documents into already existing ones.
- Access points: persons/families:
- Juda Gabão
- King D. Dinis
- King Fernando
- King João II
- Marquis of Valença
- System of arrangement:
- This collection is divided into 25 "gavetas" (drawers), each divided into bundles.
- Access, restrictions:
- Most documents are available online. The original copies of those documents are not available for consultation.
- Finding aids:
-
Unpublished finding aids available in the archive:
Coutinho, João Pereira de Azeredo. 1776. "Núcleo Antigo: inventário". (L. 299A).
"Gavetas: índice suplementar de Próprios (A-V) e Comuns (A-Z)". 1912. (L. 269-270).
Maia, Manuel da. 1765. "Índice dos documentos que se guardauão nas XX Gavetas Antigas deste Real Archivo da Torre do Tombo da Letra A até a Letra Z". (L. 267-268).
Maia, Manuel da. [1766]. "Inventário dos documentos chamados das Gavetas". (L. 271-273).
Published finding aids:
Azevedo, Pedro de, and António Baião. 1989. “Documentos e Livros Da Antiga Casa Da Coroa.” In O Arquivo Da Torre Do Tombo: Sua História, Corpos Que o Compõem e Organização, 23–30. Lisbon: ANTT; Livros Horizonte.
Mattoso, José, ed. 1998. Guia Geral dos Fundos da Torre do Tombo: Instituições do Antigo Regime, Administração Central. Vol. 1. Lisbon: IAN/TT.
Olival, Fernanda, Isabel Castro Pina, Maria Cecília Henriques, and Maria João Violante Branco, eds. 1999. Guia de fontes portuguesas para a história da Ásia. Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses; Fundação Oriente; Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda.
Pina, Isabel Castro, and Maria Leonor Ferraz de Oliveira Silva Santos, eds. 1991. Guia de fontes portuguesas para a história de África. Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses : Fundação Oriente : Imprensa Nacional-Casa de Moeda.
Pina, Isabel Castro, ed. 2001. Guia de fontes portuguesas para a história da América Latina. Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses : Fundação Oriente : Imprensa Nacional-Casa de Moeda.
Serrão, Joel, Maria José da Silva Leal, Miriam Halpern Pereira, Ana Cardoso de Matos, Maria de Lurdes Nunes Henriques, and Darcy Damasceno. 1984. Roteiro de fontes da história portuguesa contemporânea. Lisbon: Inst. Nac. de Investigação Científica.
- Links to finding aids:
- https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=4185743
- Yerusha Network member:
- Universidade Nova de Lisboa - Western Sephardic Diaspora Roadmap
- Author of the description:
- Inês de Sá, 2021