only was employed
on this Coro, but was afterwards summoned to superintend the great
Jeronymite monastery of Belem, which he finished. Meanwhile he was
charged by Joao III. with the building of the vast additions made
necessary at Thomar when in 1523 the military order was turned into a
body of monks. He lived long enough to become a complete convert to the
renaissance, for at Belem the Gothic framework is all overlaid with
renaissance detail, while in his latest additions at Thomar no trace of
Gothic has been left. He died shortly before 1553, as we learn from a
document dated January 1st of that year, which states that his daughter
Maria de Castilho then began, on the death of her father, to receive a
pension of 20,000 reis.

The new Coro is about eighty-five feet long inside by thirty wide, and
is of three bays. Standing, as does the Templars' church, on the highest
point of the hill, it was, till the erection of the surrounding
cloisters, clear of any buildings. Originally the round church, being
part of the fortifications, could only be entered from the north, but
the first thing done by Dom Manoel was to build on the south side a
large platform or terrace reached from the garden on the east by a great
staircase. This terrace is now bounded on the west by the Cloister dos
Filippes, on the south by a high wall and by the chapter-house, begun by
Dom Manoel but never finished, and on the north by the round church and
by one bay of the Coro; and in this bay is now the chief entrance to the
church. The lower part of the two western bays is occupied by the
chapter-house, with one window looking west over the cloister of Santa
Barbara, and one south, now hidden by the upper Cloister dos Filippes
and used as a door. [See plan p. 225.]

Inside, the part over the chapter-house is raised to form the choir, and
there, till they were burned in 1810 by the French for firewood, stood
the splendid stalls begun in July 1511 by Olivel of Ghent who had
already made stalls for Sao Francisco at Evora.[112] The stalls had
large figures carved on their backs, a continuous canopy, and a high and
elaborate cresting, while in the centre on the west side the Master's
stall ended in a spire which ran up with numberless pinnacles, ribs and
finials to a large armillary sphere just under the vaulting.[113] Now
the inside is rather bare, with no ornament beyond the intricacy of the
finely moulded ribs and the elaborate corbels from which they s