Blessed Amadeus of Portugal

Amadeus of Portugal (Campo Maior, Portugal ca. 1420 – Milan, Duchy of Milan, 10 August 1482), born João de Menezes da Silva, was a Portuguese nobleman who became first a Hieronymite monk, then left that life to become a friar of the Franciscan Order. Later he became a reformer of that religious order, which led to his founding of a distinct branch of the Friars Minor that was named after him, but later suppressed by the Pope in order to unite them into one great family of Friars Minor Observants (1568). His Apocalypsis nova, which contained prophecies of a pope, the "Angelic Pastor", who would work with an emperor to restore harmony in the church and the world, was influential well into the next century, in Rome and the monarchies of Spain and Portugal. He was born João de Menezes da Silva in 1420 in Campo Maior, Portugal, the youngest of the eleven children of Rui Gomes da Silva, the first alcaide of Campo Maior, on the border of Castile and Portugal, and of Isabel de Menezes, an illegitimate daughter of Pedro de Meneses, 1st Count of Vila Real and 2nd Count of Viana do Alentejo, under whom Silva served in Ceuta. One of his sisters was Beatrice of Silva, a noted Marian mystic and the foundress of the monastic Order of the Immaculate Conception. Silva married at eighteen, but left his bride the instant he was married, and went into Spain, where he fought against the Moors under John II. He then decided to become a monk, beginning his religious life in the Hieronymite monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe, where he spent about ten years. Desirous of joining the Franciscans, he abandoned that life and went to Úbeda, Castile, where he was received into the order in 1452, entering as a lay brother. He chose to seek Holy Orders after a few years, and was ordained in 1459. After that, while living in various friaries, chiefly in Milan, he attracted attention by his virtue and purported miracles.