Fifty years after the death of King Dinis it seemed as if the kingdom that he had so carefully built up was to crumble away like dry sand. The disorders and extravagances of King Ferdinand’s reign had brought it to the verge of ruin, and the marriage of his only child Beatrice with the King of Castille in 1383 appeared to destroy the last hope of an independent Portugal. It is ten years before that date that Nun’ Alvarez Pereira, to whom mainly Portugal was to owe her continued existence as a separate nation, first comes on the scene. His father was the powerful Prior of Crato, Dom Alvaro Gonçalvez Pereira, in high favour at Court, son of the Archbishop of Braga and descendant of a long line of nobles. His mother, Iria Gonçalvez, was lady-in-waiting to the Princess Beatrice. In 1373 there was war between Portugal and Castile, and a rumour spread that the enemy was approaching Santarem. The Prior sent Nuno and one of his brothers with a few horsemen to reconnoitre. On their return they were received by the King and Queen. Queen Lianor, struck by the bearing of the shy, precocious boy of thirteen, took him for her squire, and the King knighted him, after a suit of armour of his size had at last been found, belonging to the king’s half-brother John, the Master of Avis, he who was king thereafter. For three years in the palace the Queen’s squire gave his days to riding and the chase, and to the reading of books of chivalry, of Sir Galahad and the knights of the Round Table. Then his father arranged a marriage for him with the rich and noble Dona Lianor d’Alvim, a young widow of Minho. Marriage was not in Nuno’s thoughts, but Dona Lianor had consented, the King approved, and reluctantly he yielded. His life on their estate was happy. Fifteen squires and thirty henchmen were in attendance in their house, and after hearing his daily mass Nun’ Alvarez would spend long days hunting the boar and the wolf in the wooded hills of Minho or exchanging visits with the Minhoto nobility. Of their three children two sons died in infancy; the daughter, Beatriz, was married to the Count of Barcellos, son of King João I, and through her Nun’ Alvarez was the ancestor of that line of kings which was still reigning in 1910. It was a life too quiet for the times, and a few years later Nuno was ordered to Portalegre to defend with his brothers the frontier against the Spanish. As they marched from Villa Viçosa to Elvas, Nuno, the wish father of the thought in his keenness to encounter the enemy, mistook the glint of the morning sun on the lances of their own footmen, who had been sent on ahead, for the enemy advancing and gave the alarm. To his vexation there was no fighting, and when he challenged the son of the Master of Santiago to combat, ten against ten, the king forbade the encounter, and the Earl of Cambridge, then at the Portuguese Court, to whom Nun’ Alvarez appealed, pleaded for him in vain.