Luís de Camões

Timeline

1. c. 1524–1553Lisbon · LisbonTraditional accounts hold that he received a classical humanist education at Coimbra and entered the court of John III around age twenty to begin writing poetry. He later served in North Africa at Ceuta, losing his right eye in a naval battle in the Strait of Gibraltar. Already registered for the voyage to India in 1550, he was jailed after stabbing a court messenger in a Corpus Christi brawl, pardoned in March 1553, and sailed aboard the São Bento by taking another man's place.
2. 1553–1570Goa · GoaAfter arriving in Goa in 1554, he took part in military operations against the Pepper Country and elsewhere, and traveled with forces to the Red Sea and Hormuz. From about 1563 he served in Macao as administrator of the property of the dead and missing, where tradition says he continued the epic in a local cave. Shipwrecked at the mouth of the Mekong on the return to Goa, legend holds he saved only himself and the manuscript of the Lusíadas. Stranded in Mozambique after 1567, he reached Cascais in April 1570 aboard the Santa Clara.
3. 1570–1580Lisbon · LisbonAfter returning home he read the epic to the young king Sebastian; the Lusíadas was published in 1572, its ten books in ottava rima celebrating Vasco da Gama's opening of the sea route to India while interweaving Lusitanian history and classical myth. The king granted him an annual pension of about fifteen thousand reais, though payments were irregular. Deeply shaken by the disaster at Alcácer Quibir, he felt the empire doomed and died in Lisbon on June 10, 1580, as Portugal was drawn into the crisis of the Iberian Union.