What exactly is the cortesã hand?

It is the name Portuguese palaeography gives to the rounded, joined chancery writing of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, between late Gothic cursive and the processual hands. In practice it covers a wide range, from the careful book version used for codices to the rapid script of a letter written at sea.

Is Caminha’s letter a typical example?

It is typical of practical writing rather than formal chancery production: quick, personal, heavily abbreviated, on an unruled page. A model that copes with it will usually cope with the correspondence and shipboard accounts of the same decades.

How are royal styles and honorifics handled?

They can be returned as written, marks in place, or expanded. Since a full royal style recurs dozens of times in a register, a consistent policy matters more than the choice; expanding in brackets keeps the page readable and the index complete.

Can the display line and the decorated initial be read?

Usually yes. Strapwork capitals are legible once the model is told they are letters and not ornament, and an initial left blank or filled with penwork is reported as such. Gold lettering photographed at an angle is the hard case and often needs a second image.

What about the marginal notes in later hands?

They are transcribed separately and labelled. A codex of the Ordenações may carry annotations from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and mixing them into the medieval text is the most damaging error a legal-history transcription can make.

Portuguese · c. 1385–1520

Read the chancery hands of the house of Avis

From the accession of João I to the end of the Manueline reforms, Portuguese clerks wrote a rounded, joined hand in which the ascenders of b, d, h and l carry wide loops and a letter often passes straight through its neighbour. Two things defeat ordinary recognisers here: the loop that turns an e into something that reads as c or o, and the density of contraction, where a whole royal style can be reduced to a handful of letters under a tilde.

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Sample pages

Real pages from public collections, shown beside their transcriptions. Pages whose transcription is still being checked are marked.

Opening of a 1494 royal instrument with a large decorated initial D and a display line beginning Dom Ioham per, the rest of the royal style continuing in a smaller chancery hand below — Sample 1. The Portuguese ratification of the treaty agreed at Tordesillas, 1494. Archivo General de Indias, Seville. The display line opens João II’s style — Dom Joham per graça de Deus — in strapwork capitals beside a pen-flourished initial; the smaller chancery hand carries it on below, rey de Purtugual e dos Algarves daquem e dalem mar em Africa e senhor de Guinee, then settles into long lines naming the ambassadors Rui de Sousa and João de Sousa.

Two columns of a fifteenth-century legal codex with a red pen-flourished initial, a running title and marginal notes — Sample 2. Ordenações Afonsinas, opening of Book I, in a fifteenth-century codex. Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Núcleo Antigo, Códice 4, f. 1r; the compilation was completed under Afonso V in 1446. Two ruled columns under the running title Livro I, a red pen-flourished initial, a prologue recalling the ordinances of the late king João I, and pointing notes added by later readers in the margin.

A crowded page of a 1500 letter in a fast looped cursive, about thirty lines with no rubrication and a single word at the head — Sample 3. First page of Pero Vaz de Caminha’s letter to Manuel I announcing the landfall in Brazil, written at Porto Seguro on 1 May 1500; the original is in the Torre do Tombo, Gaveta 8, maço 2, n.º 8, and this is the collotype facsimile published in 1892. The word Senhor stands alone at the head; below it some thirty lines of fast, looped chancery cursive.

A single column of fifteenth-century Portuguese law opening with a large blue and red initial and a rubric in red — Sample 4. Ordenações Afonsinas, opening of Book V, in a second fifteenth-century codex. Torre do Tombo, Núcleo Antigo, Códice 14, f. 1r. Where Códice 4 uses two columns, this volume is written long-line in a more upright cortesã, with a large parti-coloured initial, strapwork display letters and the rubric Titollo dos Ereges in red; the prologue announces that Book V will treat crimes and penalties, beginning with heresy.

Cortesã, the chancery book and the letter home

The script Portuguese palaeographers call cortesã grows out of late Gothic cursive during the fifteenth century and rules royal and notarial writing until the processual hands take over after about 1550. It is rounded and connected: strokes are made without lifting the pen, ascenders loop generously, descenders sweep left. Formal codices use a slower, more upright version with red and blue initials, as in the surviving codices of the Ordenações Afonsinas compiled under Afonso V; letters and instruments are written faster and more freely, as in Pero Vaz de Caminha’s report of 1500 or the ratification of the treaty settled at Tordesillas in 1494.

What the eye must learn is the joining. The e is a loop that closes against the next letter and is constantly taken for c, o or a; c and t differ mainly in the height of a hairline; long ſ and f are told apart by one crossbar; and descenders from the line below cut through the line above. Contraction is everywhere: q with a superscript stroke for que, tildes for a suppressed nasal, superscript o and a closing names and ordinals, and standing forms for the words a chancery repeats all day, among them elRey, Vossa Alteza, graça and mercee. Numerals are lower-case Roman with the last unit as j, so xiiij and viij sit inside a sentence; Arabic figures appear beside them from the late fifteenth century, and years run in the Era de Cristo.

Layout follows the genre. A royal instrument opens with a display line, sometimes gilded, carrying the intitulatio: Dom Joham per graça de Deus rey de Purtugual e dos Algarves. A decorated initial fills the left margin, the body runs in long lines, and the act closes with place, date, the clerk’s name, the royal signature and the notary’s sinal, a drawn monogram that is not writing at all. A codex of the Ordenações is different again: ruled in one or two columns, rubrics in red, running titles, numbered paragraphs, and margins that collect the notes of later readers. Caminha’s letter has none of this — thirty crowded lines to the page and abbreviation that grows heavier as the writer tires.

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Letters that share their strokes

Because the pen rarely leaves the page, one letter’s exit stroke is the next letter’s entry, and loops enclose the characters beside them. Models trained on separated letterforms cut these joins in the wrong place and return plausible non-words. What is needed is a reader that recognises whole words and formulae, and a transcription that marks the joins that are genuinely ambiguous.

A chancery vocabulary written in shorthand

Titles, offices, courtesies and dates are abbreviated by convention rather than rule: elRey, V. A., dº for dito, mº for muito, gª for graça. Expanded silently they read smoothly but hide the page; left standing they make the text unsearchable. Decide early which the project wants, and whether expansions are bracketed.

Numbers, money and measures

Distances, soundings, quantities and sums run through these documents in lower-case Roman numerals, sometimes with a superscript c or m for hundreds and thousands. A recogniser that normalises them to Arabic figures loses the form and often the value. Transcribe the numeral as written and supply the modern figure beside it.

Display lines, sinais and later hands

The gilded intitulatio, the drawn sinal and the royal signature belong to different systems from the body text, and archivists have added shelfmarks, summaries and stamps to the same leaf for four centuries. Each has to be labelled for what it is, so that a nineteenth-century pencil note is not read as part of a fifteenth-century act.

Who works with this material

Historians of the Portuguese expansion

The Gavetas, the Corpo Cronológico and the chancery registers hold the instructions, reports and accounts of the voyages. Researchers need ship names, place-names and quantities exactly as written, because these are the words that later copies and translations quietly change.

Legal and institutional historians

The Ordenações, the forais and the registers of grants are read clause by clause. What helps is a text that preserves rubrics, paragraph numbers and running titles, so a passage can be cited by book and title rather than by the page of a modern reprint.

Archivists writing catalogue entries

A catalogue entry needs the date, the parties, the type of act and the clerk’s name. A first machine reading of the opening and closing lines of each item turns a maço of loose parchments into a searchable list far faster than reading each one through.

Teachers of Portuguese palaeography

Cortesã is where most students meet joined writing. Setting a transcription beside the image, with expansions marked, shows a class exactly which loop was misread and why, on a dated corpus they can practise with.

Getting the best transcription

Step 1

Name the script and the period

Say that the document is Portuguese of the fifteenth or early sixteenth century in a cortesã chancery hand, that the writing is joined, that e can look like c or o, and that the text may open with a display line in a different script from the body.

Step 2

Fix the treatment of abbreviations and honorifics

List the forms you expect — elRey, V. A., dº, mº, gª, the barred q, the nasal tilde — and say whether to expand them, bracket the expansions or leave them standing. A short glossary given up front is worth more than any correction afterwards.

Step 3

Decide what counts as text

Ask for the intitulatio, the signature and the sinal to be recorded as separate elements rather than folded into the last line, and for marginal notes and archival stamps to be labelled. On a codex page, keep rubrics and running titles apart from the body.

Step 4

Test on a page with numbers in it

Choose a folio full of dates, distances or sums. If the Roman numerals come back with their final j and their superscript letters intact, and modern values are supplied beside them rather than substituted, the series can be trusted.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly is the cortesã hand?: It is the name Portuguese palaeography gives to the rounded, joined chancery writing of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, between late Gothic cursive and the processual hands. In practice it covers a wide range, from the careful book version used for codices to the rapid script of a letter written at sea.
Is Caminha’s letter a typical example?: It is typical of practical writing rather than formal chancery production: quick, personal, heavily abbreviated, on an unruled page. A model that copes with it will usually cope with the correspondence and shipboard accounts of the same decades.
How are royal styles and honorifics handled?: They can be returned as written, marks in place, or expanded. Since a full royal style recurs dozens of times in a register, a consistent policy matters more than the choice; expanding in brackets keeps the page readable and the index complete.
Can the display line and the decorated initial be read?: Usually yes. Strapwork capitals are legible once the model is told they are letters and not ornament, and an initial left blank or filled with penwork is reported as such. Gold lettering photographed at an angle is the hard case and often needs a second image.
What about the marginal notes in later hands?: They are transcribed separately and labelled. A codex of the Ordenações may carry annotations from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and mixing them into the medieval text is the most damaging error a legal-history transcription can make.

Related scripts and pages

Portuguese Gothic Documentary Hands, c. 1200–1400The Gothic charters and registers out of which the cortesã hand grew.Portuguese Processual and Encadeada Records, c. 1500–1650What happened when the same chancery writing sped up into the chained hands of the courts.Cortesana Court and Chancery Documents, c. 1400–1550The Castilian counterpart, often bound up with Portuguese business in the same archives.All Portuguese domainsVisigothic charters, Gothic registers, chancery books, court records and colonial paperwork.Image to TextEvery language and hand covered by the showcase.

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