The internal government of King John I. was hampered in one respect to such an extent as to vitiate the effect of his great administrative reforms. It will be remembered that he was elected to the crown by the Cortes, and followed to the field of Aljubarrota by all classes of the Portuguese people. Yet for some reason he would not trust in the people who loved him, but believing he owed his success to the nobles who had supported him, he began his reign by making extensive grants of lands and privileges to his principal supporters of noble birth. It would perhaps be too much to expect the political knowledge of a statesman in the nineteenth century from a king in the fourteenth, but it seems to posterity that King John greatly over-estimated the assistance of his nobles, and that he over-rewarded them by granting them nearly the whole of the old royal estates of the kings of Portugal. It may be believed that he feared the secession of his nobles to the Castilian party, and that he thought they could take their vassals with them, but whatever may have been the reason, he gave them such enormous grants as to seriously weaken the royal power. These grants however did not impoverish the treasury, which was filled more by the proceeds of the customs duties, a source of income, which his wise commercial policy increased, than by rents from landed estates. So wealthy did he become that he left his mark on the country in his great buildings; besides the magnificent convent of Batalha on the field of Aljubarrota, he constructed no less than four palaces at Cintra, Almeirim, Cezimbra, and Lisbon. The last-mentioned city was his favourite place of residence; under his fostering care it became the official capital of Portugal instead of Coimbra, and soon surpassed the wealth of Oporto as a commercial city. The citizens of Lisbon regarded him much as the citizens of London did Edward IV. a century later; they never forgot his gallant conduct in the great siege, and were at all times ready to obey him and to pay him a fair tithe of their wealth. In one respect especially did King John gratify the aspirations of the religious section of the people of Lisbon, by obtaining the sanction of the Pope to erect the bishopric of Lisbon into an archbishopric.