Cunhal’s historiographical incursion highlights, first and foremost, the theoretical model he adopts, based on the writings of Marx and Engels, masters who are frequently quoted and paraphrased. The confrontation between the new productive forces and the feudal order, the analysis of the interests of different social classes and the conflicts arising from them, the assessment of the balance of power between the parties and the systems of alliances that bind them, the social and political determination of discourse and the legitimisation of power are conceptual representations and interpretative procedures that would be valid in themselves, as they constitute the entire body of the historical approach adopted. To the persuasiveness of a reading with its own philosophical basis and method, which would allow the researcher and reader to approach the historical object as an expected dialectical reality, and thus dissolve accidental fortune, is the example of the coordination of each of the facts present in the dramatic evolution of the period under consideration in a global and coherent vision, particularly those aspects that had resisted other interpretations, such as the unstable character of the monarch, the unusual effect of the epidemic, the eloquence of the tribune or even of the chronicler.

On a strictly historiographical level, Álvaro Cunhal sets out and substantiates the thesis that a bourgeois revolution took place in Portugal in 1383. Although this interpretation had already been defended, notably by António Sérgio, the communist leader distances himself from the arguments put forward by the latter, which he criticises vehemently.

Cunhal methodically characterises the different social classes of the time, which he conceives as structural historical characters, and then describes the dramatic process that led successively to the state of crisis during the reign of King Ferdinand, the bourgeois revolution and the acclamation of the Master of Avis, as well as the subsequent aristocratic counter-revolution (and, later, its own expansion). Against a backdrop of economic and social rise of the bourgeoisie, primarily the urban bourgeoisie, but also the men of influence in the municipalities and the incipient proletariat, the confluence of efforts would have brought about, in a revolutionary manner, the common interests, while the subsequent breakdown of this alliance would provide the conditions that allowed the landed nobility to regain a status similar to that which it had temporarily lost.

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