The earliest documents

For centuries people spoke Romance and wrote Latin. The everyday language — already plainly Galician-Portuguese — reaches the page as an autonomous written code only very late, and it does so first not in poetry but in practical texts: lists of debts, complaints, wills. The earliest documents in Portuguese are, accordingly, modest notarial pieces with no literary pretension, yet of immense value for the history of the language: in them we watch the vernacular break free of the Latin shell.

Latin as the language of writing

In the early Middle Ages, to write meant to write in Latin — even when no one spoke it natively any more. Notaries drew up contracts, donations and judgements in a Latin increasingly “coloured” by Romance, letting vernacular forms slip through above all in proper names and in terms with no easy Latin equivalent. For a long time the threshold between a heavily corrupted Latin and a still heavily Latinised Romance was faint and gradual, and the dating of the “first document” depends in part on where one decides to draw that line.

The Notícia de Fiadores (1175)

The research of Ana Maria Martins pushed that line considerably further back. The Notícia de Fiadores (“notice of guarantors”), drawn up by Paio Soares Romeu and dated 1175 (era of 1213), is today held to be the oldest known text written consistently in Portuguese. It is a simple list of the fiadores — the sureties — to an agreement, set down already outside the Latin mould, with Romance syntax and vocabulary. Its discovery moved the beginning of writing in Portuguese into the last quarter of the 12th century, where it had previously been placed in the early 13th.

The Testament of Afonso II (1214)

The most celebrated — and the most imposing — document is the Testament of King Afonso II, granted in June 1214. For the first time, the vernacular enters the very royal chancery: the king’s will was drawn up in Portuguese, and several copies were made and sent to the chief churches and monasteries of the realm, two of which have come down to us (one in Lisbon, one in Toledo). It is a careful text of solemn formulas, showing Portuguese already fit for official functions.

The Notícia de Torto (c. 1211–1216)

The Notícia de Torto is a document of a very different nature: a notarial draft listing the tortos — the wrongs, the injustices — committed against Lourenço Fernandes da Cunha by the sons of Gonçalo Ramires. Datable to the period 1211 to 1216, it is an irregular, much-corrected text of almost oral cast, which opens with a Latin formula (“De noticia de torto…”) and at once slides into a raw, expressive Romance. For its very spontaneity, it is one of the liveliest windows onto the spoken language of the early 13th century.

Three witnesses, three registers

Document	Date	Nature
Notícia de Fiadores	1175	list of sureties
Notícia de Torto	c. 1211–1216	list of grievances
Testament of Afonso II	1214	royal will

Together these texts span the whole spectrum of written use: routine administration, near-oral complaint, and the solemnity of the chancery. That Romance should appear at once on these three planes shows that by around 1200 writing in Portuguese was no longer an isolated daring act but a possibility within the reach of notaries and kings alike.

What language is this?

The language of these documents is Galician-Portuguese in its earliest phase, still very close to its Latin roots. In it we find features that modern Portuguese keeps and others it would lose: the spelling hesitates, the nasal vowels are already heard, and the syntax wavers between the calque of notarial Latin and the Romance’s own word order. The orthography is not fixed — a single word may appear in several shapes — because there was as yet no written norm to govern it.

Legacy

The earliest documents do not found the language — which had been spoken for centuries — but they found its written history. From the reign of King Dinis (1279–1325), who made Portuguese the ordinary language of administration, the vernacular became general on the page once and for all. The road that runs from the Notícia de Fiadores to the Dionisian chancery is the road by which a spoken language becomes, too, a language of written culture.