Ballads became popular in the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, and later in the Castilian courts of Henry IV (1454–1474) and his successors, the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1516). Thus, some ballads made their way into cancioneros or compilations of courtly poetry (R. Menéndez Pidal II, 19–29), and their popularity among the learned continued to increase. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, they began to appear in numerous, relatively inexpensive pliegos sueltos or broadsides (Rodríguez-Moñino 1997), and after the publication of Martín Nucio's Cancionero de romances impreso en Amberes sin año (c. 1548), several romanceros or book-sized ballad collections appeared (Rodríguez-Moñino 1973). Many ballads never reached print, however. A few, such as Silvana and Delgadinha, which deal with father-daughter incest, may have been omitted “por razones de autocensura” (Díaz-Mas 327). Others may have been regarded as too common or uninteresting, or simply may have escaped the attention of editors. Fortunately, the modern oral tradition preserves several such ballads, filling an important gap in our knowledge of the early tradition. One of them is La condesa traidora, which survives in Northeastern Portugal, Galicia, and among the Sephardim who settled in Morocco. Together with its style, this geographic distribution suggests that it dates to the Middle Ages, and that the Sephardim already knew it prior to their exile of 1492.

The Sephardic versions rhyme in í–o, as does the single Galician version, a fragment from Ourense which, as we shall see, derives from the Portuguese tradition. My purpose here is to show how, besides witnessing the conservative character of the Portuguese tradition, A Condessa Traidora testifies to a phenomenon that is unique to Portugal, namely the special, extensive manner in which some modern ballads perpetuate medieval parallelism. In addition to some versions in í–o (RPI, M7), the Portuguese tradition also preserves the ballad in á–o (RPI, M8), and in parallelistic strophes with rhymes in í–o, á–o, í–a, and á–a (Galhoz 1987–88: no. 261; 1995: 241–43).

To date, the ballad is documented only in Trás-os-Montes (counties of Chaves, Vinhais, and Vimioso). The versions in í–o can be divided into two subtypes, the second of which is always shorter. The single published version of the first, more developed form was collected in the village of Tuizelo (Vinhais).