the fifteenth century. After the fall of the
western Roman Empire in the fifth cen-
tury, Portugal became part of the kingdom
of the Visigoths. After the Moorish inva-
sion of the eighth century, the Christian
nobility fled to the northern mountains,
and from this remote region they took part
in the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
Portugal joined the Kingdom of Leon, of
northern Spain, and then became a part of
the Kingdom of Galicia. Portugal became
an independent realm after the Battle of
Sao Mamede in 1128, after which Prince
Afonso Henriques was declared the Portu-
guese king. The Christian armies drove
the last Moors from the southern region
of the Algarve in 1250, after which the
capital of the realm was established in Lis-
bon.
In the early fifteenth century, King
John I ordered a fleet of heavily armed
vessels to the port of Ceuta, on the Medi-
terranean coast of North Africa. The con-
quest of this city marked the starting point
for expansion of the Portuguese frontiers
thousands of miles across the oceans.
Within a few years, Portuguese captains
discovered the Azores, Madeira, and the
Canary Islands; and passed Cape Bojador
on the West African coast, a point beyond
which Europeans had never ventured. The
trading posts built by the Portuguese in
West Africa brought gold, ivory, and slaves
to the kingdom and within a century, trade
in Africa as well as Asia—which allowed
European merchants to bypass caravan
routes controlled by Arabs—would make
Portugal one of the wealthiest nations of
Europe. This age of exploration and con-
quest was inspired in large part by the ef-
forts of Prince Henry the Navigator, a son
of John I who patronized navigators and
organized expeditions to distant and un-
known realms.
By building a lighter and more ma-
neuverable ship known as the caravel, the
Portuguese were able to sail through re-
gions of unfavorable winds, down the
western coast of Africa, around the Cape
of Good Hope, and into the Indian Ocean.
Portuguese navigators founded dozens of
port cities in East Africa, India, and the
East Indies, all of them serving as depots
for a lucrative trade with Asia. When Spain
began exploring the Western Hemisphere
after the discoveries of Christopher Co-
lumbus, however, Portugal saw its mo-
nopoly on overseas exploration vanish.
The two kingdoms divided the new lands
they intended to colonize in the Treaty of
Tordesillas.
Renaissance scholarship and artistic
movements arrived in Portugal via con-
tacts with Spain and Italy. An important
writer of Renaissance Portugal was Joao de
Barres, who penned one of Europe’s first
complete histories of exploration,Decadas
de Asia. The discoveries of Portuguese
navigators also inspired an architectural
style known as Manueline, named for King
Manuel I. This heavily ornamented style
combined late-Gothic motifs and mari-
time symbols and emblems of foreign dis-
coveries. Churches, monasteries, and pub-
lic buildings financed by the riches in
spices and other foreign trade goods were
designed in the elaborate Manueline style
by Mateus Fernandes, Diogo de Arrudu,
and other prominent architects. The Man-
ueline style extended to sculpture as well
as the paintings of leading artists such as
Jorge Afonso, Vasco Fernandes, and Gre-
gorio Lopes.
Early in the sixteenth century, Portugal
began sending expeditions to Brazil, Per-
sia, Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), China,
and Japan. Portugal established settlements
at Goa, India, as well as the Malay Archi-Portugal