We find a highly heterogeneous group of individuals surrounding the king and sharing the diverse modalities of his presence. Based to a large extent on prosopographic data, my research attempts to define this heterogeneity by combining the possible reconstruction of individual and group family lines with a necessary understanding of the configurations of the court as a particular social world. This was a question of isolating and identifying, as far as possible, the numerous individuals surrounding the Portuguese monarch, whose presence was shown through the performance of court duties and by their mention in contemporary lists of names, so making their presence indisputable. Examination of their biographies shows, more than anything, the variety of individuals in their social standing, as well as the specific, variable position that they occupied within the court.

To this general characteristic of the court must also be added another, no less important, which is related to the construction of hierarchies, and is an essential criterion of ordinance in the light of the concepts of the actual age. Viewed globally, the court was a social, hierarchic universe both at its interior and because of the verifiable articulation between its internal divisions and those of society at the end of the Middle Ages. By starting off from a vast group of biographical lines spanning almost two centuries, it was possible to confirm that the careers of the servants of the king played a part in these logics which lie beyond the individual and enclose him within the more or less consistent fabric of a group, characterised by distinct forms of being and behaving and marked by the global design of the actual positions which fell to each one.