pelago and Macao, off the coast of China.
At home, however, the royal dynasty ended
with the death of King Sebastian in 1578,
after which Spain invaded Portugal and
the Spanish king Philip II declared himself
King Philip I of Portugal, uniting the two
realms. Portugal remained under Spanish
rule until 1640. During this period Portu-
gal began losing its colonies to its Dutch,
French, and English rivals; its trading em-
pire was gradually eclipsed by more pow-
erful northern European nations and by
the eighteenth century the nation was in
economic and cultural decline.
SEEALSO: Aviz, House of; exploration;
Henry the Navigator
printing ...........................................
In the Middle Ages, books were labori-
ously copied by hand. They were rare,
carefully preserved in monasteries and pri-
vate collections, and too expensive for all
but the wealthiest to own. Few people were
literate; books were the preserve of the ar-
istocracy, the members of the church, and
university professors.
The first printing technology in Eu-
rope used wood-blocks, which were carved
with various designs and images that could
be transferred to cloth and, at the start of
the fifteenth century, to paper. This
method was invented by the Chinese and
may have been brought to Europe by over-
land merchant traders, or by Christian
missionaries and explorers on their return
from China. In the 1440s Johannes Guten-
berg, a German goldsmith, developed a
method of printing by movable type.
Gutenberg transformed a farmer’s press,
loading small blocks of letter type that he
cast from a metal alloy. The type was set
into a wooden matrix and then covered
with an oil-based permanent ink. Pressing
sheets of paper against the matrix created
a printed page.
Gutenberg used the press to create
elaborately illustrated Bibles, as well as
broadsheets, pamphlets, and color prints.
The press spread rapidly through western
Europe in the late fifteenth century, creat-
ing a new industry and revolutionizing
communication. Venice, Paris, and the
Netherlands became important printing
centers; bookshops began selling their
wares in every major city. Printing allowed
philosophers and scholars to distribute
their works all over the continent, and po-
ets to set their verse in a permanent form.
Presses were set up in the Spanish colonies
in the 1530s; the first in North America
was running in Massachusetts in 1638.
Printing shops operated as did many
other artisanal industries in Renaissance
Europe. The masters selected constructed
presses, selected titles to print, and pur-
chased materials. Apprentices mixed inks
and cut and prepared paper. Journeymen
were responsible for casting type, com-
positors set the type, and pressmen set up
pages and worked the printing press. Jour-
neymen had to serve many years of ap-
prenticeship and had to learn Latin, the
language of education, law, religious tracts,
and mass communication. Printing tech-
nology spread when journeymen moved
from town to town in search of new em-
ployers and opportunities to set up their
own shops.
The publishing industry grew rapidly
in the sixteenth century, when the first
large publishing houses opened for busi-
ness. Some were supported by groups of
wealthy men who pooled their capital and
published books as financial speculations.
Others printed and sold books by sub-
scription, in which those willing to buy a
book agreed to pay cooperatively for itsprinting