Fernão Mendes Pinto is an important figure in the literary history of Portugal. He wrote only one text, but it is considered a literary masterpiece. Pinto's work describes his twenty-one years of adventures around the East in the mid sixteenth century. The great popularity of Pinto's manuscript during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is indisputable, and the work became an important source for people who wanted to know more about the East.

Pinto was born between 1509 and 1511, in Montemor-o-Velho, close to Coimbra. Even though he is the author of Peregrinaçam de Fernam Mendez Pinto em que da conta de muytas e muyto estranhas cousas que vio & ouuio no reyno da China, no da Tartaria, no do Sarnau . . . e tambem da conta de muytos casos particulares que acontecerão assi a elle como a outras pessoas (1614; translated as The Voyages and Adventures, of Fernand...