Os eremitas, os monges e o rei. Em torno do primeiro século da presença jerónima em Portugal

The first documentary evidence of the presence of Fr. Vasco and his small eremitic community in Penha Longa, on the outskirts of Sintra, dates from 1390, in what would later become one of the first monasteries of the Hieronymite Order in Portugal. From early on, the new Portuguese monarch, King João I, appears in association with the history of this group, protecting it and enabling it to acquire the land on which they lived a poor and solitary life. The early history of the Order of St Jerome in Portugal reveals this close relationship with royalty and with the most important lay and ecclesiastical elites of the Portuguese kingdom, who protected and sponsored their monasteries, but also used them as examples of an exemplary, ordered life, in times of renewal of religious life. This is the path we propose in this article, questioning, at the same time, what is possible to know about the origins of the Order in Portugal and about its relations with the eremitic groups which, in Portugal, settled mainly south of the Tejo river, with its centre in Serra de Ossa, followers, like the first Hieronymites, of a poor and solitary life.