Zurara (or Azurara), Gomes Eanes de (1410/20–1473/4)

Portuguese chronicler, librarian, and archivist. He became keeper of the royal library in 1451 and royal archivist in 1454 (a post he held until his death). He was also appointed royal chronicler, and the first evidence of his literary activity is his Crónica da tomada de Ceuta/Chronicle of the Capture of Ceuta (1449). His last surviving work is the Crónica do Conde Dom Duarte de Meneses/Chronicle of Dom Duarte de Meneses, completed in 1467–68.

Zurara's three other chronicles also concern particular people and incidents. The first of these was Crónica do Infante Dom Henrique/Chronicle of Prince Henry, initially completed in 1452–53, but a lengthy panegyric was added after his death in 1460 and the expanded version became known as the Crónica dos feitos da Guiné/Chronicle of the Deeds in Guinea (probably 1468/73). Zurara's other two chronicles concentrated on members of the Meneses family. The first, composed in about 1458–63, relates the life of Pedro, first governor of Ceuta, while the second (composed in about 1464–68) concerns his son Duarte, captain of Alcaçer-Ceguer.

Zurara was educated at Afonso V's court. As keeper of the royal archive, he, like his predecessor Fernão Lopes, had unrestricted access to primary historical sources. However, since the events he chronicled were mostly still within living memory, he preferred eyewitness accounts, and at one stage travelled to Africa to conduct interviews and to gain an appreciation of the terrain. Despite this practical approach, he was content to rely on 13th-century scientific and geographical information elsewhere in his chronicles. The successive royal commissions were not entirely welcome to Zurara: as he complained constantly in the prologues to these works, their composition left him little chance to work on his own project: a general history of Portugal. The Crónica da tomada de Ceuta, which came to be considered the third part of Lopes's Chronicle of John I, was translated into Latin as De bello septensi by Afonso's former tutor Mateus Pisano, at the king's behest.