According to one authority, Azurara began his career as author in the reign of D. Duarte by compiling a detailed catalogue of the Miracles of the Holy Constable, Nun' Alvares Pereira.[15] The MS., which is said to have existed in the Carmo Convent in Lisbon as late as 1745, has disappeared, but the substance of this curious work may still be read in Santa Anna's _Chronica dos Carmaelitas_, together with a number of contemporary popular songs about the Constable, extracted from MSS. left by Azurara.[16] [Footnote 15: D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, however, is of opinion that this, and the popular songs hereafter referred to, are pious frauds, invented in the first half of the seventeenth century to form materials for the canonisation of Nun' Alvares.] [Footnote 16: _Chronica dos Carmaelitas_, vol. i, pp. 469, 486. Lisbon, 1745.] More than ten years now elapse without any mention of Azurara's name, and we hear of him for the first time, definitely, in 1450. On March 25th of that year he finished at Silves, in the Algarve, his _Chronicle of the Siege and Capture of Ceuta_, an event that took place in 1415, and formed the first of a long line of Portuguese expeditions, and the starting-point in their career of foreign conquest. Fernão Lopes, the Froissart of his country, and the father of Portuguese history, was still alive at the time Azurara wrote this work, but had become too old and weak to carry on his history of the reign of João I, to which it is a sequel. After paying a tribute to Lopes as a man of "rare knowledge and great authority",[17] Azurara tells us that Affonso V ordered him to continue the work, that the deeds of João I might not be forgotten; and this he did, culling his information from eye-witnesses as well as from documents, with that honesty and zeal which are his two most prominent features as an historian.[18] He began the _Chronicle_--which was printed once only, and that in the 17th century--thirty-four years after the capture of Ceuta, _i.e._, in the autumn of 1449, and concluded it, as the last chapter states, on March 25th, 1450. It was, therefore, written in the short space of about seven months, which, says Innocencio, seems well-nigh incredible, considering how deliberately and circumspectly histories were compiled in those days.[19] The narrative is, with a few exceptions, full and even minute. [Footnote 17: _Chronica de Ceuta_, ch. 2.] [Footnote 18: Azurara's chief informants were D. Pedro, Regent in the minority of Affonso V, and D. Henrique, in whose house he stayed some days for the purpose by the king's orders; "for he knew more than anyone in Portugal about the matter" (_Chronica de Ceuta_, ch. 12). To this fact must be attributed the prominent place he gives D. Henrique in his narrative. The same circumstance is noticeable in the _Chronica de D. Duarte_, which was begun by Azurara and finished by Ruy de Pina, of which hereafter.]