4 Port anD the Douro
French taking the Castilian side, first Edward III then Richard II of England plunged into
battle alongside the Portuguese. An alliance between Fernando I of Portugal and John of
Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster was sealed in 1373 with the express intent of defeating the
usurper King Enrique de Trastamara of Castile. However, when Fernando I died in 1383,
leaving his only daughter married to Juan I of Castile, the Castilians laid claim to Portugal.
With the help of five hundred English archers, the Castilians were soundly defeated at
the Battle of Aljubarrota in Portuguese Estremadura, thereby securing independence for
Portugal in 1385. In the meantime, Portugal’s ambassadors remained behind in England
and, after detailed negotiations, put their signatures to a new military, political and
economic treaty at St George’s Chapel, Windsor on 9 May 1386. Six hundred years
later, on the morning of Monday 12 May 1986, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II joined
His Excellency President Mario Soares of Portugal at St Georges Chapel for a service
of thanksgiving. I was fortunate to be among the congregation and, as we rose to sing
the hymn ‘All People that on Earth do Dwell’, thoughts turned back six centuries to
when Dom João I of Portugal and Richard II of England put their names to this ‘solid,
perpetual and real league, amity, confederacy and union ... on behalf of themselves and
their heirs and successors’. After the service we retired to toast the health of British and
Portuguese heads of state, present and past, with a glass of Port.
The Treaty of Windsor, the oldest and most enduring alliance between two nation
states, was reinforced when the new Portuguese king, João I, Mestre de Aviz, married
Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt, in Oporto the following year. It
yielded the enduring special relationship between Portugal and Great Britain. The story
of Port and the Douro is inseparable from Portugal’s emergence as a trading nation,
in which England, another rapidly developing mercantile power, played a crucially
important part.
wine anD CoDFish
The marriage of João and Philippa was a great success. There were eight children, the most
significant of whom was their third-born son who was named after his English uncle, later
Henry IV. Born near the waterfront in Oporto in 1394, the Infante Dom Henrique became
much better known by the English name of ‘Henry the Navigator’. He was encouraged
by the scholarly Philippa and led a studious life. From the isolation of his observatory at
Sagres near Cape St. Vincent, Prince Henry instigated Portugal’s golden age of discovery
(and ultimately her impoverishment) with his courageous exploits along the west coast of
Africa. His mantle was inherited in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a long line of
Portuguese explorers, among them Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama, Fernão Magalhaes
(Ferdinand Magellan) and Pedro Alves Cabral, who discovered Brazil for Portugal in 1500.
Ships returned with sugar from Madeira, spices from India and gold from Africa’s Gold
Coast reinforcing Portugal’s attraction to English traders. Under the reign of Manuel I, ‘the
fortunate’ (1495–1521), Portugal reached the apogee of its overseas influence with the blue