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Mayor of Guimarães,
Speaker of the Guimarães Municipal Assembly,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

I received with deep emotion, from little Afonso’s hands, this Gold Medal that the City of Guimarães has dedicated to King D. Afonso Henriques. Whilst Head of the Portuguese State I shall remain it’s faithful and dedicated guardian.

The figure of D. Afonso Henriques stands, before those who succeeded him, as the first link of the long chain that binds us, who live in the present, to the acts of the founding fathers.

That chain, started by the Founder, is as an anchor that holds us to what we are. An anchor that does no bind us to the past, but ensures that the past is still alive within us.

We know that the deeper the root, the higher grow the branches which feed on it. And that the reason for an authentic life is to preserve in equal terms not just the point of departure and the route travelled but also the future projects.

Tradition anchored in the living memory of a people tells us that this is the Cradle City. For this reason, on this day that the city kept as its own, the day of the battle of S. Mamede, we have gathered in Guimarães to maintain alive within us the fundamental acts. It is our duty to do so, certain that without the pillar of the past, the present would be no more than a contingency.

For this reason exactly, this remembrance must not allow us to disturb the debate over certain circumstances, such as the place and date of birth of Prince D. Afonso.

To the doubts of the historians we simply answer: he saw the first light in a land which became Portugal and, fortunately, was born when it was necessary.

His existence shows the happy instance of a man who, in his time, and together with his contemporaries, found and was able to achieve an historical purpose.

With the magic of a man who is a leader, D. Afonso Henriques has for ever remained with the visible face of the primordial moment. He was the first, however not the only one. His enduring glory arises – and there is no meagreness here – from the courage to start.

Everything was so uncertain, the result of what was being started so unforeseeable and the risk so high. Notwithstanding all this, he set up a host of men who accepted sharing the same objective and the same design. He was obviously an exceptional leader.

At a certain moment, he broke silence and spoke of his will to create Portugal. Time, unfortunately, did not preserve his exact words. We do not know how he transformed his dreams into words.

Our imagination will have to suffice to reconstitute how he persuaded his people to follow him. Words of hope, of faith, and promises, will surely have been put forward. The trust was generated that justified the adhesion to his targets. Commitments, we guess, were undertaken.

And thus a constant factor of men’s collective life is pictured: whoever thinks and acts as if he were alone will continue alone; whoever calls for men’s pluralism will be followed.

What is certain is that, together, D. Afonso and his followers started something new. And then went from words to acts.

The chronicler asserts that D. Afonso was “brave in war”. In the more decisive moments, he risked all in each stage. As a leader he always gave the example.

But were the warring deeds enough to make the name of D. Afonso Henriques deserving of memory and his example worthy of being copied by the coming generations?

The worst weakness of the strong is to solely believe in strength. King D. Afonso I, as a consummate diplomat, believed in the subtlety of negotiation. He was, stresses the chronicler, “much prudent in his actions, with a clear intelligence”.

There he had the supreme quality of the statesman: he knew how to wait. He waited for a long time, always armed with the same convictions, following the same strategy, never changing his course.

He waited for decades until, almost at the end of his long reign, in 1179, through the edict Manifestis Probatum Est, he obtained the unequivocal consecration of a consummated fact: he was recognized as a competent, virtuous and just king of an independent kingdom, which would be passed on to his heirs.

D. Afonso Henriques was a politician in the noblest of senses: he brought together men with the objective of creating joint undertakings, in a cooperative effort that was the birth of a lasting community.

He was accepted as leader by his soldiers and as king by his subjects.

He used his leadership, not to subordinate the others for his private ends, but to express his own subordination to the objective which was being undertaken by all. .

We are not in his debt for the Portugal we are. This is a result of joint work, slowly undertaken throughout the centuries by all of us, the Portuguese of yesteryear and of today.

But we owe him the fact of being Portugal. We owe him the possibility of building a fatherland, that is, a place and an idea which we believe is ours and in which we feel at home.

Our home will never be a completed building. Each generation of Portuguese continues the undertaking, adding to it, bringing in renewal. Each new link in the chain will differ from that which preceded it, but does not for any reason renege on the primordial acts.

The great Roman thinker Cicero said:

“There is no undertaking in which human virtue gets closer to the divine than that which is the founding of new cities or the preservation of those already in existence”. He thus placed the act of preserving communities on the same supreme symbolic level which he attributed to the founding act.

D. Afonso Henriques made Portugal possible. Here, in Guimarães, convinced of our historic responsibility, inspired in the deeds of the Founder and by the uncommon spirit that arises from these flagstones, it is with determination that we assert the continuity of Portugal.