Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (Santarém, c. 1500 – 1559 in Coimbra) was a Portuguese historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 in the early Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

.
His "History of the discovery and conquest of India", full of geographic and ethnographic objective information, was widely translated throughout Europe.

Life

Castanheda was the natural son of a royal officer, who held the post of judge in Goa

Goa

Goa , a former Portuguese colony, is India's smallest state by area and the fourth smallest by population. Located in South West India in the region known as the Konkan, it is bounded by the state of Maharashtra to the north, and by Karnataka to the east and south, while the Arabian Sea forms its...

. In 1528, he accompanied his father to Portuguese India

Portuguese India

The Portuguese Viceroyalty of India , later the Portuguese State of India , was the aggregate of Portugal's colonial holdings in India.The government started in 1505, six years after the discovery of a sea route to India by Vasco da Gama, with the nomination of the first Viceroy Francisco de...

 and to the Moluccas. There he remained ten years, from 1528 to 1538, during which he gathered as much information as he could about the discovery and conquest of India by the Portuguese, in order to write a book on the subject. In 1538, he returned to Portugal, having collected from written and oral sources material for his great historical work. In serious economic difficulties, he settled in Coimbra, where he held a modest post of bedel

Bedel

The bedel was, and is to some extent still, an administrative official at universities in several European countries, and often had a policiary function at the time when universities had their own jurisdiction over...

 in the University of Coimbra.

Works

It was in Coimbra that where printed eight of the ten books of his "História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos portugueses" (History of the discovery and conquest of India by the Portuguese): the first volume was issued in 1551, with a second edition in 1554. Six more volumes were published in his lifetime and three posthumously.
After the eighth volume was issued, regent Queen D. Catarina, pressured by few noblemen who disliked the objectivity of Castanheda, banned the printing of the remaining ninth ant tenth volumes. His work, full of geographic and ethnographic information was soon widely translated throughout Europe, first in French by Nicolas de Grouchy, a teacher at the University, Spanish (1554), Italian (1578) and English (1582).