Oliveira Marques, Antônio Henriques de

(1933-2007)

   Historian, scholar, and editor. Since 1970, Portugal's most widely published, prolific historian, he was born in Estoril in 1933. Trained as a medieval historian, Oliveira Marques mastered other fields of history as well, including the history of the First Republic (1910-26), the Estado Novo (1926-74), and the general history of Portugal. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he received his advanced degrees from the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon. His doctoral dissertation treated Portugal's trade with the Hanseatic League, a topic of medieval economic history. Oliveira Marques taught as a junior faculty member at his alma mater from 1957 to 1964, but left after a falling out with senior faculty and political authorities. For some years he taught at several institutions in the United States, including the Universities of Florida and Minnesota.

   Returning to Portugal during the last phase of the Marcello Caetano government, Oliveira Marques taught at the University of Lisbon. In November 1974, he was appointed director of the National Library of Lisbon, a prestigious but trying cultural post he held for some years. In the 1980s, he changed universities and joined the Faculty of Germanic Studies, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Of his vast bibliography, two of his historical works were published in English in the United States: Daily Life in Portugal in the Middle Ages (1971) and History of Portugal (2 vols., 1972, 1976, and later editions). In terms of public acclaim and book sales in Portugal, his most consistently popular work in print continues to be his survey, História de Portugal, in several volumes, published in many editions since the early 1970s.