Chief of the King's Guard (Portugal and Castile)

[1] Some authors, when speaking of this position, state that it was more "honorific than effective", although Jaime de Salazar y Acha points out that this may have been the case during the last period of the Late Middle Ages, but not in its beginnings, since in the first instance the king's security was in the hands of his ensign, but the latter in turn would delegate this responsibility to the officer of lower rank who would possibly, over the centuries, evolve into, in the opinion of this historian, the officer known as the Chief of the King's Guard.

In the Crónica (chronicle) of this monarch, the Portuguese nobleman Esteban Pérez Florián is mentioned as "guard of the King", and in the document from 1290 Diego Gómez de Roa is mentioned as "guard-major of our Body" ("guarda-mor de nosso Corpo").

[2] Around 1424, the position of chief guard was shared by two individuals, although it is not known whether this was because it had then become more of an "honorific than an effective" title, or because they alternated in holding it.

[3] In the reign of Alfonso X of Castile, as Manuel González Jiménez has pointed out, the chief of the king's guard was responsible for the safety of the king and his family at court or in his palace, and a small group of men were at his command, including twenty infantry crossbowmen and ten on horseback,[4] who protected the court or the place where the monarch was, although the twenty knights and a similar number of squires on foot were in charge of protecting the monarch and his family.

[4] Other duties of the chief guard were: From this century several families held the position hereditarily and simultaneously:[30]