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The history of Portugal can be traced from circa 400,000 years ago, when the region of present-day Portugal was inhabited by Homo heidelbergensis. The Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, which lasted almost two centuries, led to the establishment of the provinces of Lusitania in the south and Gallaecia in the north of what is ...
- Portugal
Portugal spearheaded European exploration of the world and...
- Timeline of Portuguese history
This is a timeline of Portuguese history, comprising...
- History of Portugal (1415–1578)
The history of Portugal from the dynastic crisis in 1578 to...
- Portugal in the Middle Ages
Portugal in the Middle Ages. The Kingdom of Portugal was...
- Portugal
Portugal spearheaded European exploration of the world and the Age of Discovery under the sponsorship of Prince Henry the Navigator. Portugal explored the Atlantic, encountering the Azores, Madeira, and Portuguese Cape Verde, which led to the first colonization movements.
This is a timeline of Portuguese history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Portugal and its predecessor states. To read about the background to these events, see History of Portugal .
5 giorni fa · Portugal, country lying along the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe. Once continental Europe’s greatest power, Portugal shares commonalities, geographic and cultural, with the countries of both northern Europe and the Mediterranean. Learn more about Portugal.
- John I
- Edward
- Afonso V
- Imperial Expansion
- Sebastian I
- Dynastic Crisis and Union with Spain
- Explorations
- See Also
- References
John I of Portugal acceded in 1390 and ruled in peace, pursuing the economic development of his realm. The only significant military action was the siege and conquest of the city of Ceuta in 1415. By this step he aimed to control navigation of the African coast. But in the broader perspective, this was the first step opening the Arab world to medie...
Under king Edward, the colony at Ceuta rapidly became a drain on the Portuguese treasury, and it was realised that without the city of Tangier, possession of Ceuta was worthless. In 1437, Duarte's brothers Henry and Ferdinand persuaded him to launch an attack on the Marinid sultanate of Morocco. The expedition was not unanimously supported: Infante...
Treaty of Tordesillas
Meanwhile, colonization progressed in the Azores and Madeira, where sugar and wine were now produced; above all, the gold brought home from Guinea stimulated the commercial energy of the Portuguese. It had become clear that, apart from their religious and scientific aspects, these voyages of discovery were highly profitable. Under Afonso V (1443–1481), surnamed the African, the Gulf of Guinea was explored as far as Cape St Catherine (Cabo Santa Catarina), and three expeditions (1458, 1461 and...
Afonsine Ordinances
While the Crown was thus acquiring new possessions, its authority in Portugal was temporarily overshadowed by the growth of aristocratic privilege. After the death of Edward, further attempts to curb the power of the nobles were made by his brother, D. Pedro, duke of Coimbra, who acted as regent during the minority of Afonso V of Portugal (1439–1448). The head of the aristocratic opposition was the Duke of Braganza, who contrived to secure the sympathy of the king and the dismissal of the reg...
John II (r. 1481–1495) famously restored the policies of Atlantic exploration, reviving the work of his great-uncle, Henry the Navigator. The Portuguese explorations were his main priority in government, pushing south the known coast of Africa with the purpose of discovering the maritime route to India and breaking into the spice trade. Manuel I(r....
Sebastian of Portugal was the penultimate Portuguese monarch of the House of Aviz.He was the son of John Manuel, Prince of Portugal, and his wife, Joanna of Austria. Sebastian succeeded to the throne at the age of three, on the death of King John III, his paternal grandfather. Soon after his birth, his mother Joanna of Spain left her infant son to ...
Following the Portuguese crisis of succession, a dynastic union joined the crowns of Castile, Portugal and Aragon along with their respective colonial possessions, under the rule of the Habsburg dynasty The unification of the peninsula had long been a goal of the region's monarchs with the intent of restoring the Visigothic monarchy. The history of...
Reasons for exploration
Portugal's long shoreline, with its many harbours and rivers flowing westward to the Atlantic ocean was the ideal environment to raise generations of adventurous seamen. As a seafaring people in the south-westernmost region of Europe, the Portuguese became natural leaders of exploration during the Middle Ages. Faced with the options of either accessing other European markets by sea (by exploiting its seafaring prowess) or by land (and facing the task of crossing Castile and Aragon territory)...
Portuguese nautical science
The successive expeditions and experience of the pilots led to a fairly rapid evolution of Portuguese nautical science, creating an elite of astronomers, navigators, mathematicians and cartographers, among them stood Pedro Nunes with studies on how to determine the latitudes by the stars and João de Castro.
Henry the Navigator
It was the genius of Prince Henry the Navigator that coordinated and utilized all these tendencies towards expansion. Prince Henry placed at the disposal of his captains the vast resources of the Order of Christ, of which he was the head, and the best information and most accurate instruments and maps that could be obtained. He sought to effect a meeting with the half-fabulous Christian Empire of "Prester John" by way of the "Western Nile" (the Sénégal River), and, in alliance with that poten...
Sources
1. Braudel, Fernand, The Perspective of the World1985
History of Portugal. Pre-Roman, Roman, Germanic, and Muslim periods. The earliest human remains found in Portugal are Neanderthal-type bones from Furninhas. A distinct culture first emerged in the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) middens of the lower Tagus valley, dated about 5500 bce.
Portugal in the Middle Ages. The Kingdom of Portugal was established from the county of Portugal in the 1130s, ruled by the Portuguese House of Burgundy. During most of the 12th and 13th centuries, its history is chiefly that of the gradual reconquest of territory from the various Muslim principalities ( taifas) of the period.
