Lopes, Fernão (c. 1380–after 1459)

Portuguese historian. His Crónicas/Chronicles (begun 1434) relate vividly the history of the Avis dynasty of the Portuguese monarchy between 1357 and 1411.

Lopes rose from keeper of the royal archive at St George's Castle, Lisbon to become by 1422 also confidential secretary to one of John I's younger sons, Fernando (died 1443). By 1428 he was public notary to John I. John's successor Duarte appointed him royal secretary, also instructing him in 1434 to chronicle the lives of all Portuguese kings to the death of John I. His chronicles of the reigns of Duarte's three immediate predecessors (Pedro I, Fernando I, and John I) are all that have survived and even the last of these is incomplete.

Although Lopes' immediate successor to the post of royal chronicler, Zurara, did not plagarize and destroy his writings as Rui de Pina was to do, he rejected Lopes's use of archival documents in favour of rhetorically embellished eyewitness accounts. Yet if Lopes is often taken at his word as a historian striving for objectivity through use of documents and collation of chronicle sources, his observation (in his chronicle on John I) that he considers worthless any chronicles at variance with his own suggests he too had a penchant for destroying competing accounts.

Numerous 16th- and 17th-century manuscripts of Lopes's three chronicles survive, but none of them was printed until 1644.