Creativity in the 16th-century representation of King Sebastião’s in the Battle of Ksar-el-Kebir

The concept of Hero lies at the core of this analysis of its representation and of how creativity, intuited as a process that results from the interaction between the authors of the several chronicles and their readers in two texts, king Sebastião’s Journey in Africa and Sherif Mulei Mahamet’s Chronicle. The analytic topos is the moment of the battle of Ksar-el-Kebir and the echoes put forward by the authors who gathered information and described the actions of the various actors in the conflict, focusing on the representation of the hero and the authorial creativity therein exposed. King Sebastião’s Journey in Africa and Sherif Mulei Mahamet’s Chronicle help us to decode the way this monarch’s profile was shaped. It is in the confrontation of narrative modelling of the hero, as an example and persona chiara/scura, that actors, authors and textual purposes are uncovered, where the tone of voice and peroration cross the writing of a battle and those who were its "publicos”.