Here’s a full breakdown of why he is fictional, how he functions in the novel, and why people sometimes wonder if he might be real. In The History of the Siege of Lisbon , Amadeu de Prado is a ghostly, philosophical presence rather than the main protagonist. The story centers on Raimundo Silva , a lonely proofreader. While correcting a history book, Silva impulsively inserts a negative (“not”) into a sentence, changing the historical fact that Crusaders helped the Portuguese conquer Lisbon in 1147 to the opposite: that the Crusaders did not help .
If you encountered Amadeu de Prado in a discussion or academic text, it was almost certainly a reference to Saramago’s novel, not to a real historical figure.
No, is not a real person . He is a fictional character created by the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago in his 1998 novel The History of the Siege of Lisbon ( História do Cerco de Lisboa ).