1703. Carta de Beatriz Mendes para o seu marido, António Dias Marques, tratante.

Family letter from Beatriz Mendes to her husband, António Dias Marques, merchant.

The author asks her husband for news and sends regards from their family.

The defendant in this process is António Dias Marques, merchant, 33 years old, from the outskirts of Evora, accused of bigamy. In 1700, when he was in prison for smuggling tobacco, he married Beatriz Mendes, in order to avoid being sent to India, since he had dishonored her. He was then sent to the Limoeiro jail, where he got sick. He later asked to be sent to Angola, where he met Leonor Vieira de Lima, daughter of a local official and a slave. He asked for permission to marry her, but Domingos Lourenço Perdigão, his best man in the first wedding, wrote from Portugal telling that he did not allow it. António Dias Marques married Leonor Vieira de Lima anyway, living with her for one year and having a common daughter, Guiomar. Only later did he confess his crime, being condemned, in 1709, to be publicly flogged and to row for five years in the galleys, among other punishments.