Kingdom of Portugal

A legend invented two centuries later

formationDrafted from Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)

Afonso Henriques inherited the county of Portugal from his mother Teresa, whom he had already fought and defeated to secure it for himself rather than for her own second husband. In July 1139, while much of the flower of Muslim Spain's own fighting strength was occupied fending off the Almohads in Africa, Afonso struck deep into Muslim territory and crushed a local governor and several of his subordinate lords at Ourique.

A story that grew for two hundred years before anyone wrote it down

What later chroniclers made of that victory bears little relation to what actually happened there. Two centuries after the battle, writers solemnly claimed that five kings had been defeated, that two hundred thousand Muslims had been killed, and that Afonso's own soldiers raised him on their shields afterward and hailed him as king on the spot. None of this has any support in a contemporary source. The same later tradition invented a "Cortes of Lamego," supposedly held in 1143 to pass Portugal's founding constitutional laws - a body that never actually met. Even the famous legend of Christ crucified appearing to Afonso in his tent the night before the battle, promising him victory, has no contemporary trace, however deeply it became embedded in Portuguese memory and however literally the kings of Portugal would go on wearing the five wounds of Christ on their own coat of arms.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · António José Pereira · Public domain

What the fabrication was covering for

Strip the legend away and Ourique becomes a real but modest victory: five provincial governors beaten in a country that already resented its Almohad overlords, won more through Afonso's own boldness in advancing so far from home than through any decisive tactical triumph. The emir he had defeated retook a Portuguese castle within a year. What actually secured Afonso's independence was not one battle but years of hard fighting against his own Christian cousin, Alfonso VII of León - and by 1143, León had recognized what the field at Ourique alone never could have settled on its own.

A fleet that stopped on its way to Jerusalem

formationDrafted from Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)

Afonso Henriques had long relied on crusaders passing through Oporto on their way to the Holy Land, since the pope had declared fighting the infidel in Spain as praiseworthy as fighting him in Palestine itself; in 1143 a band of French crusaders had already helped him raid the country around Lisbon. But it was doubtful, his own chroniclers thought, that Afonso would have moved against the city itself so soon after taking Santarém, had word not reached him that a great fleet of crusaders had put in at Oporto, and that the Bishop of Oporto had persuaded them to open their holy war by helping take Lisbon before sailing on toward Jerusalem.

A fleet of a hundred and sixty-four ships

The fleet, mostly English, had sailed from Dartmouth a hundred and sixty-four ships strong, under captains including Arnold of Aerschot and Christian Ghistell over the Germans, Flemings and men of Boulogne, and Hervey Glanvill, constable of the men of Norfolk and Suffolk. One of their own number wrote a letter describing the expedition and the siege that followed - a document rediscovered only in the century before Stephens wrote, making 1147 one of the best-documented single episodes in all of early Portuguese history.

Cintra, Palmela, Mafra, Almada

Lisbon fell after a siege supported by the crusader fleet alongside Afonso's own forces, and the surrounding strongholds surrendered without a fight in its wake - Cintra, Palmela, Mafra and Almada all in that same year. The city on the Tagus that would one day be Portugal's own capital was, for the first time, in Christian hands, and the foreign fleet that had made it possible sailed on to Palestine having fought its holy war, by the bishop's own persuasion, considerably closer to home than it had originally planned.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · Simon Burchell · CC BY-SA 4.0

First to finish

formationDrafted from Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)

Afonso III came to the throne in 1248 after his brother Sancho II had been driven into exile and died in Toledo, and rather than the civil war or clerical dominance that such a beginning might have predicted, his reign turned out to be the most constitutionally significant of early Portuguese history - and the one in which Portugal finished its own reconquest outright. He moved immediately to recover ground lost during his brother's troubles, taking Faro and the remaining Algarve strongholds in 1249 and 1250 with the help of the Knights Hospitaller.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · Hugo Ferreira · CC BY-SA 4.0

A gain Castile did not welcome

Alfonso X of Castile, "the Wise," was not pleased to see Portugal expand its own southern frontier without his consent, and only a short war persuaded Afonso III to accept a compromise: marriage to Alfonso's illegitimate daughter, and Portuguese possession of the Algarve reduced to usufruct rather than outright sovereignty. It took another thirteen years - and a papal ruling in 1262 that formally recognized Afonso's own son by that marriage as legitimate - before Alfonso X finally ceded full sovereignty over the Algarve in 1263, letting Afonso III adopt the title King of Portugal and the Algarve that Portuguese monarchs would carry from then on.

An assembly built to check the Church

Afonso III's other lasting achievement was constitutional rather than territorial. Determined to curb the power of the bishops despite an earlier oath at Paris promising not to, he summoned a Cortes at Leiria in 1254 that, for the first time, brought elected representatives of the towns to sit alongside the nobility and higher clergy - an early recognition, matched at almost the same moment by Simon de Montfort and Edward I in England, that only an alliance with the wider body of the people could check the combined weight of feudal lords and churchmen. With that Cortes behind him, Afonso dared the interdict the Church laid on his own kingdom over his second marriage, and forced the clergy back to their duties regardless.

A king who crowned a corpse

formationDrafted from Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)

Dinis, who came to the throne in 1279, spent his reign less on conquest than on building the institutions of a kingdom already formed - reorganizing royal administration, founding the military Order of Christ out of the suppressed Templars' own Portuguese estates and lands, and founding, in 1300, the first Portuguese university at Lisbon. Student unrest and quarrels with the citizens drove it to Coimbra within a decade, and it would shuttle between the two cities for generations before finally settling for good - but the institution itself outlasted every one of those moves. Dinis was also a poet of real skill, trained in the troubadour tradition his own father had favored, and his court became the center of Portuguese literary life for a generation.

A prince who loved his wife's own lady-in-waiting

His grandson Pedro's story ended nothing like his. Married in 1336 to Constance Manuel to cement an alliance with Castile, Pedro fell in love with Inês de Castro, a Castilian noblewoman who had come to Portugal in his wife's own household. He treated Constance with every outward consideration during her life and fathered her children, but after her death his devotion to Inês became, in his own court's plain view, an absorbing passion rather than an ordinary prince's fancy. He refused every foreign match his father proposed and, by most accounts, went through some form of marriage with Inês in secret.

Murdered in the streets of Coimbra

King Afonso IV decided to end his son's infatuation by removing its object. On 7 January 1355, three courtiers acting on the king's own orders - Álvaro Gonçalves, Pedro Coelho and Diogo Lopes Pacheco - murdered Inês in the streets of Coimbra. Pedro raised his own vassals against his father in fury, and though the two reconciled before Afonso's death, Pedro's first act on taking the throne himself was to hunt down her killers. Pacheco escaped to England, but Pedro had the other two extradited from Castile and tortured to death before his own eyes outside the royal palace at Coimbra. Four years later, on 24 April 1361, he had Inês's body disinterred and carried to the Convent of Alcobaça, where it was solemnly crowned as queen before its second burial - a king's last word, whether of grief or of a claim to make her rightful queen, delivered to a corpse.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · Vitor Oliveira · CC BY-SA 2.0

A bastard elected king

expansionDrafted from Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)

The death of King Fernando I in 1383 without a legitimate male heir opened the succession to his Castilian son-in-law, Juan I of Castile - a prospect much of Portugal found intolerable. João, Master of the Military Order of Aviz and an illegitimate son of an earlier king, emerged as the rallying point for resistance, successfully defending Lisbon against a Castilian siege and winning a smaller victory at Atoleiros that showed the resistance could actually fight and win.

A throne declared elective, and a bastard chosen by acclamation

More than a battlefield victory was needed to make João's own claim legitimate. A Cortes summoned to Coimbra in April 1385 heard the chancellor João das Regras argue that the Portuguese throne was, by its own nature, elective rather than strictly hereditary - a proposition the assembly accepted by acclamation, before also hearing a papal bull declaring the children of an earlier royal liaison illegitimate and clearing the way. João was elected king by the same Cortes that had just redefined how a king of Portugal could be made.

Aljubarrota

The Castilian invasion that followed was met at Aljubarrota on 14 August 1385, reinforced on the Portuguese side by five hundred English archers sent by John of Gaunt and by artillery pieces making their first appearance in Peninsular warfare, and opposed by two thousand French knights who had joined the Castilian cause. The English archers repeated, on a smaller field, the kind of execution their countrymen had inflicted at Crécy and Poitiers, and the Castilian army broke and fled. João commemorated the victory by founding the monastery of Batalha on the battlefield itself - a Portuguese echo, in name and purpose alike, of the Battle Abbey William the Conqueror had raised at Hastings three centuries before. Portuguese independence from Castile, and the House of Aviz's own claim to the throne, were both secured on the same afternoon.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · Ingo Mehling · CC BY-SA 3.0

A dream he never sailed to see

peakDrafted from Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)

Prince Henry, a younger son of João I remembered to history as "the Navigator," never captained a single one of the voyages that made his own name famous. What he built instead, at Sagres on Portugal's own southwestern tip, was an institution: an observatory and school of navigation drawing mathematicians and astronomers from across Europe, improving the mariner's compass and the charts that Portuguese captains would carry down the African coast year after year under his own direction and patronage.

A route worth an empire

Henry's own governing idea was simple and, in the end, correct: that a ship could sail around Africa to reach India directly, cutting out the long, expensive overland and Red Sea routes that had made Venice Europe's own distributor of eastern goods for centuries. Whoever found the sea route, he understood, could make Lisbon the new Venice. He spent more than forty years and a great personal fortune pursuing that route and died in 1460 without ever reaching it himself - the southern tip of Africa still ahead of every captain he had sent.

Calicut

The dream he could not complete belonged to a later generation. Vasco da Gama, a captain formed in the tradition Henry had built even though he was born after Henry's own death, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, fought through hostile receptions at Mozambique and Mombasa, found a friendly pilot at last at Melinda, and after eleven months at sea anchored his fleet off Calicut on 20 May 1498. The India he found there was not the India of a single vast empire but a patchwork of independent kingdoms - a political fact that would shape how Portugal's own commercial empire in the East was built in the decades that followed, city by fortified trading post rather than through any single decisive conquest. Henry's sea route to India, pursued for forty years by a prince who never once sailed it, had finally been found by men who counted themselves, in every sense that mattered, his own disciples.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · Gregório Lopes · Public domain

A route turned into an empire

peakDrafted from Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)

Vasco da Gama had found the route; it fell to Afonso de Albuquerque, governing Portuguese India after Francisco de Almeida, to turn it into something that could actually be held. An assault on Calicut itself ended badly - the Zamorin's palace burned and the city wrecked, but the populace rose and drove the Portuguese back to their ships, killing the Marshal of Portugal, Dom Fernando Coutinho, in the process. Albuquerque drew the lesson that Cochin, the Portuguese base until then, sat too far south to serve as a real capital for either trade or political power on the Malabar coast, and fixed instead on Goa, a port held by the Muslim king of Bijapur.

A city taken twice in one year

Albuquerque sailed for Goa with twenty ships and twelve hundred men. A single feat of arms by António de Noronha at Panjim, at the river's mouth, opened the way, and the citizens - already unsettled by a holy mendicant's prophecy that conquest by a distant foreign people was coming - surrendered without further resistance; eight of the city's leading men brought Albuquerque the keys, and he entered in triumph on 17 February 1510. He did not hold it long. Yusuf Adil Shah, the king of Bijapur, retook the city by force that August. Albuquerque refused to accept the loss, waited for reinforcements from Portugal, and on 25 November stormed Goa a second time, killing more than two thousand defenders and this time holding it for good.

A capital built to last

Goa became the seat from which every later Portuguese governor in Asia ruled, and Albuquerque's own administration set the pattern his successors would follow - keeping the existing village system intact and taking pains to avoid the appearance of new taxation, a restraint contemporaries credited with the settlement's own stability. The single voyage that had ended at Calicut in 1498 had become, within twelve years, a fortified capital city and the headquarters of a trading empire that would soon reach from Mozambique to Malacca.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · Fredericknoronha · CC BY-SA 4.0

A richer crown, a smaller country

contractionDrafted from Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)

Manuel I died in 1521 confident his line was secure and his kingdom's wealth beyond question, leaving behind sons married into the Habsburg dynasty and daughters sought by the greatest princes in Europe. His son and successor, John III, ruled for thirty-six years over a crown that grew richer while the country underneath it grew smaller - and by his own contemporaries' account nobody watching it happen would have called it decline.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · Cristóvão Lopes (attributed) · Public domain

An alliance sealed three times over

John III bound Portugal to the Habsburgs as tightly as marriage could manage: he married Charles V's own sister, his only son married Charles's daughter, and his own daughter became the first wife of the future Philip II of Spain. The alliance kept Portugal out of the wars convulsing the rest of Europe and freed John to concentrate on possessions his father's generation had fought hardest to win. A Portuguese fleet under the king's own brother joined Charles's expedition against Tunis in 1535, but within the following decade John abandoned nearly every Portuguese outpost in North Africa - Azamor, Safi, Alcácer Ceguer among them - concentrating the kingdom's strength on India and Brazil instead. The old crusading impulse that had driven Portuguese kings across the strait for over a century had, within one reign, simply stopped mattering enough to defend.

A kingdom hollowed out by its own success

What emptied Portugal was the same enterprise that had made it rich. Young men volunteered by the thousand for the India fleets and the colonial garrisons and mostly did not return, killed by disease or warfare or settled permanently abroad; whole families emigrated to Madeira and, increasingly after 1530, to Brazil. Lisbon's own population tripled within eighty years as the countryside emptied into it, while African slaves, imported in growing numbers to work estates the emigration had left short of labor, came to outnumber free residents in the capital by mid-century. A nobility that had once measured itself by crusading service against Morocco now competed instead for court pensions and colonial administrative posts, sinking, in one contemporary's own phrase, until personal devotion to the king had eaten out patriotism itself.

The Inquisition, and what it cost

John pursued one project with more determination than any other: from the moment of his own accession he worked to bring the Inquisition to Portugal, over years of resistance from the kingdom's converted Jewish community. He got his tribunal in 1536, with the bishop of Ceuta as first Grand Inquisitor, succeeded soon after by the king's own brother, Cardinal Henry; the Jesuits followed in 1540, quickly gaining control of national education. The damage was not immediately visible - John's own reign is studded with real achievement, the conquest of Ceylon, the founding of Macau, and above all a literary flowering that produced Camões's Lusíadas even under the Inquisition's own watch - but the apparatus John built would go on suppressing the intellectual life his own reign had still managed to produce, long after the wealth that had made his crown the envy of Europe stopped translating into any underlying strength at home.

A battle that killed three kings

contractionDrafted from Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)

Sebastian, the last Aviz king with any real claim to vigour, spent years dreaming of a crusade in Morocco, and in 1578 he finally sailed with an army heavy on Spanish, German and Italian mercenaries and light on cautious advice - only about ten thousand of his roughly seventeen thousand men were actually Portuguese. He wasted the early weeks of the campaign hunting near Tangier and encamping idly at Arzila while his Moroccan opponent, Abd al-Malik, gathered his own far larger force. Offered the chance to cede the contested town of Larache without a fight, Sebastian refused to even answer.

A position with both flanks open

The armies met near the small town of Alcácer Quibir on 4 August 1578. Sebastian had chosen ground that left both his flanks exposed to a much larger Moroccan cavalry force, and after four hours of fighting the outnumbered Portuguese army was cut to pieces - more than nine thousand killed, nearly all the rest taken prisoner. What made the battle legendary even beyond its scale was that all three principal rulers involved died within it: Abd al-Malik, already dying, expired from the exertion of mounting his horse for the first charge and had his death concealed until the fighting was over; his rival claimant to the Moroccan throne drowned attempting to flee across a river; and Sebastian himself vanished so completely, with accounts of his death contradicting each other in every particular, that a persistent legend long refused to believe he had died at all and would return one day to save Portugal.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · Unknown · Public domain

A dynasty that outlived its last real heir by two years only

Sebastian had no children, and no full brother left living. The crown passed to his elderly great-uncle, Cardinal Henry - a celibate priest in his sixties whose own accession settled nothing about who would follow him, since the office he had spent his life in made an heir of his own body impossible. Portugal had lost, in a single afternoon on a Moroccan battlefield, both its king and any clear answer to who should come after him.

A crown taken by an uncle

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Cardinal Henry's two years on the throne solved nothing about the succession he had inherited unresolved, and when he died in 1580 the strongest claimant by blood was Philip II of Spain - Sebastian's own uncle, and grandson of a Portuguese king through his mother. A rival Portuguese candidate, António, Prior of Crato, raised what support he could, but the Portugal of 1580 bore little resemblance to the Portugal that had elected João of Aviz two centuries before. Wealth, luxury, the Inquisition and a shrunken free population had worn down the appetite for another fight against a Spanish claim to the crown, and the Cortes that met to decide the question listened to the promises of Philip's own agent rather than to any Portuguese Joao das Regras arguing for national election as it had in 1385.

Alcântara

António raised a small force regardless, and the Duke of Alva, leading twenty thousand Spanish troops into Portugal, crushed it without much difficulty at Alcântara on 26 August 1580. António fled to France, and Philip II was proclaimed king of Portugal in his place - a conquest completed in weeks against resistance that never had a real chance of holding.

Promises sworn at Tomar

The following year Philip entered Lisbon and, before a Cortes convened at Tomar, swore on 15 April 1581 to govern Portugal as a distinct kingdom rather than a mere province: its own Cortes summoned regularly, its own offices and church dignities reserved for Portuguese subjects, its own revenue kept separate from Castile's, its own courts final in matters of Portuguese justice, and the lucrative trade of Africa, Persia and India reserved to Portuguese ships alone. Whether those promises would hold for as long as Philip's own successors ruled remained to be seen; what was certain, on the day they were sworn, was that the line running from Afonso Henriques's own breach with León four hundred and forty years earlier had ended, and a Spanish king now wore the Portuguese crown as well as his own.

Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891) · Ingo Mehling · CC BY-SA 4.0