Martim Afonso de Sousa

Martim Afonso de Sousa ( – 21 July 1564) was a Portuguese fidalgo, explorer and colonial administrator. Life Martim Afonso de Sousa was born in Vila Viçosa, and had been raised in the Duke of Braganza household and was a personal friend since childhood of King John III of Portugal, being also a cousin. When he left the service of the Duke of Bragança, in 1516, to stay at the court of the Royal House, he began to take mathematics, cosmography and geography classes with the chief cosmographer Pedro Nunes. He justified the decision by saying: "The duke can make me mayor, but the king can make me duke", but that never happened. After the death of King Manuel II of Portugal, he accompanied the widowed Queen D. Leonor of Austria to Castile, where he married Ana Pimentel, from an illustrious Spanish family, around June 1523. Ana Pimentel was the daughter of Arias Maldonado, commendator of Estriana and governor of Salamanca and Talavera and of D. Joana Pimentel, daughter of D. Pedro Pimentel, Lord of Távara and sister of D. Bernardino Pimentel, 1st Marquis of Távara. The mother of Martim Afonso de Sousa's wife was thus a descendant, on her paternal side, of the Pimentel Counts of Benavente, a lineage of Portuguese origin that passed to Spain in the 14th century; and, on her maternal side, she descended from the Counts of Alba de Liste. This means that, through his marriage, Martim Afonso de Sousa became linked to some of the main lineages in Spain. At the time, it was unusual for non-titled Portuguese noblemen to marry Spanish women who came - even if, as in this case, through female origin - from families of the greatness of Spain, so it can be concluded that Martim Afonso managed to successfully develop a strategy of marriage alliance with positive repercussions in terms of his political career and connections with power in the first court of the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, where he lived for four years, he fought in the service of Emperor Charles V against the French. In the winter of 1525, Martim Afonso played a prominent role in the siege and capture of Fuenterrabía, in northwestern Spain. The emperor publicly praised him and invited him to remain in Castile.