Portugal's history: a settled border and a frontier at sea

How a county on the Douro became a kingdom

The country is named after Portus Cale, a Roman-Celtic settlement on the banks of the Douro where Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia now stand. By the ninth century the form Portugale was used for the strip of land between the Minho and the Douro. By the twelfth it was written Portugal.

People had been in western Iberia far longer than any of that. The oldest human fossil found in the country is the Aroeira 3 cranium, a Homo heidelbergensis skull about 400,000 years old, excavated from the Cave of Aroeira in 2014. Celtic and pre-Celtic peoples followed, and the Lusitanians of the interior held off successive Roman generals under Viriatus, a shepherd from the Serra da Estrela, until he was assassinated in 140 BC by men the Romans had paid. Rome then governed the territory as Lusitania in the south and Gallaecia in the north, worked the copper and silver of the Iberian Pyrite Belt, and left behind the Vulgar Latin that Portuguese grew out of.

Germanic kingdoms came next. The Suebi settled Gallaecia from 411 and ruled from Braga until the Visigoths absorbed their kingdom in 585, and the Umayyad invasion of 711 to 716 took the peninsula from the Visigoths in turn.

The state that survives began as a county of León, recorded from 868. It broke away from the Kingdom of Galicia in 1095. Afonso Henriques, son of the Burgundian count Henry, proclaimed himself prince after the Battle of São Mamede on 24 June 1128 and took the title of king in 1139; León recognised him by the Treaty of Zamora in 1143. The recognition that counted outside Iberia came from Rome in 1179, in the papal bull Manifestis Probatum.

Why the border stopped moving in the thirteenth century

Portugal finished its reconquest early. The Algarve was taken in 1249 and acknowledged by Castile as Portuguese in 1267, and the capital moved to Lisbon in 1255. Castile's own reconquest ran on until 1492.

The line between the two kingdoms was fixed by the Treaty of Alcañices, signed by Denis of Portugal and Fernando IV of Castile in 1297, and with minor readjustments that treaty describes the border today. Seven centuries with one neighbour, in one place, on settled terms, is the condition under which the rest of this history happened.

There is one live exception and it is small. Spain has administered the town of Olivenza since 1801, Portugal has claimed it since the nineteenth century, and Spain claims the waters around the Portuguese Savage Islands. This catalogue records that both disputes exist and takes no position on either.

Two things followed from a settled frontier. One was a war about who should hold it: Ferdinand I died in 1383 leaving a daughter married to the king of Castile, and a faction of lesser nobles and commoners put John of Aviz on the throne instead, winning the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 under the command of Nuno Álvares Pereira. The other was the alliance signed the year after. The Treaty of Windsor of 1386 tied Portugal to England and has never been repudiated.

What Portugal built beyond the Cape of Good Hope

With the land settled, the frontier went to sea. An armada sailed for Ceuta on 25 July 1415 and took the North African trading city on 21 August, which is the conventional opening of the Portuguese Empire. Madeira was colonised from 1420 and the Azores from 1445. Gil Eanes rounded Cape Bojador in 1434, past the point where earlier voyages had vanished into stories about sea monsters, and a trading castle went up on the island of Arguim in 1448 to take African gold that had previously crossed the Sahara by caravan.

The rest followed quickly. Bartolomeu Dias passed the Cape of Good Hope in 1487. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 split the undiscovered world with Castile along a meridian 370 leagues, about 1,770 kilometres, west of the Cape Verde islands. Vasco da Gama reached Calicut on 20 May 1498, and Pedro Álvares Cabral sighted the coast of Brazil on 22 April 1500 while sailing the same route. Afonso de Albuquerque took Goa in 1510 and Malacca in 1511, Hormuz fell in 1515, three Portuguese traders reached Japan by accident in 1542, and in 1557 the Portuguese were permitted to occupy Macau.

In the sixteenth century about two million people living in Portugal itself administered territories with many millions of inhabitants in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The empire was built on a trade in people: Portugal was an early participant in and a major beneficiary of the Atlantic slave trade, and slavery lasted in Portugal itself for nearly four centuries. At home the same decades produced the forced conversions of 1497, when Manuel I ordered the abduction of Jewish children under fourteen and had most adult Jews in Lisbon baptised by force, and the Lisbon massacre of 1506, in which 3,000 New Christians were killed.

How Morocco cost Portugal its independence

King Sebastian died fighting at Alcácer Quibir in Morocco on 4 August 1578 with no heir, and much of the high nobility was captured and had to be ransomed at great cost. His great-uncle Cardinal Henry reigned two years and died on 31 January 1580.

What followed was decided by an army. António, Prior of Crato, was acclaimed king at Santarém in June 1580; Philip II of Spain, another grandson of Manuel I, sent the Duke of Alba across the border with about 20,000 men, beat António's improvised force of peasants and freed slaves at Alcântara, and took Lisbon. Philip was crowned at Tomar on 25 March 1581.

The sixty years that followed cost Portugal a foreign policy of its own. Spain's enemies became Portugal's: the alliance with England went cold and Hormuz was lost in 1622, and the Dutch war of 1595 to 1663 brought the loss of Salvador in 1624 and Pernambuco in 1630. On 1 December 1640 the Duke of Braganza was proclaimed John IV and a war of independence began that ran to 1668. The governors of Ceuta refused to accept him and kept their allegiance to Spain, so the first place the empire took is the one place the restoration did not recover.

The lost king outlived the crisis as a belief. Sebastianism, the expectation that Sebastian would return on a foggy day, produced four impostors between 1584 and 1598 and has persisted into modern times.

What the earthquake did to Lisbon and its politics

On the morning of 1 November 1755 a series of earthquakes destroyed Lisbon. An estimated 60,000 people were killed in the city alone and about 12,000 dwellings came down. It was All Saints' Day and much of the population was at mass, so the churches collapsed on congregations. The tsunami that followed raised waves of about 6 metres at Lisbon and about 20 metres at Cádiz, and reached Martinique, some 6,100 kilometres west, in ten hours. Fires burned in Lisbon for about six days.

Sebastião de Melo had been made prime minister that year, and his answer to the disaster is still quoted in Portugal: bury the dead and feed the living. The new downtown was laid out to survive the next one, with architectural models tested by marching troops around them to simulate the shaking, and de Melo sent an inquiry to every parish in the country asking what people had seen, which is one of the founding documents of seismology. He also demarcated the port wine region, the first attempt in Europe to control the quality and production of a wine, and abolished slavery in Portugal and in Portuguese India.

The earthquake made him. Joseph I gave his minister more power afterwards, and de Melo used it: the Távora family and the Duke of Aveiro were executed after a rapid trial for the attempt on the king's life in 1758, the Jesuits were expelled and their assets seized, and he governed effectively alone as Marquis of Pombal until Joseph died in 1779. Historians read the period two ways, as enlightened reform and as an apparatus for autocracy, censorship and colonial extraction, and the two readings have never been reconciled.

Brazil paid for it. Gold from Brazil and Maranhão reached the treasury as the royal fifth, and official estimates put migration to Brazil during the eighteenth-century gold rush at 600,000 people, enough that John V prohibited emigration from 1709.

Why the court sailed for Brazil and stayed

Portugal refused Napoleon's demand in 1807 to join the embargo against Britain, and a French army under Junot captured Lisbon on 8 December 1807. The prince regent João had already moved his court, his mother and the machinery of government to Brazil, and made Rio de Janeiro the capital of the Portuguese Empire. The last French troops were expelled in 1812. The war cost Portugal the town of Olivenza.

Brazil was raised to a kingdom in 1815 and joined to Portugal as a single state spanning two continents. Europe was quiet enough by then for João VI to return, and he stayed in Rio for six more years, going back to Lisbon in 1821 only when the Liberal Revolution that began in Porto in 1820 demanded it. He left his son Pedro behind. When Lisbon tried the following year to put Brazil back into a subordinate position, Pedro declared its independence with the support of the Brazilian elites, and Portugal recognised the new empire in 1825.

The succession then broke at home. John VI died in 1826, Pedro's status as a Brazilian monarch was held against him in both countries, he abdicated the Portuguese throne in favour of his daughter Maria II, and his brother Miguel seized power in 1828. Pedro landed with an army to reinstate her, and the Liberal Wars ended in 1834 with Miguel defeated, a constitution promulgated and Maria II on the throne.

Africa filled the space Brazil had left. Portuguese trading ports along the African coast pushed inland into Angola and Mozambique, the slave trade was abolished in 1836, and the Berlin Conference of 1884 formalised the borders of the African territories at Portugal's own request. The claim to the land between Angola and Mozambique, the Pink Map, ended with a British ultimatum on 11 January 1890 that the government accepted quietly; the reaction to that acceptance is held directly responsible for the republican revolt in Porto on 31 January 1891. The state declared bankruptcy on 14 June 1892 and again on 10 May 1902. Carlos I and his heir were shot dead in Lisbon on 1 February 1908, and the monarchy was overthrown on 5 October 1910.

How the monarchy fell and the republic failed

The First Republic moved against the Church before it did anything else. On 10 October 1910, five days after the proclamation, every convent, monastery and religious order was suppressed, their residents expelled and their goods confiscated. Divorce was legalised on 3 November, religious teaching was removed from schools, and the law separating church from state was passed on 20 April 1911. A constitution the same year created a parliamentary regime with two chambers and a weak presidency.

It never held. Entry into the First World War was meant to secure the African colonies against foreign occupation and to build a national consensus, and it deepened every existing division instead, making room for two dictatorships inside the republic: Pimenta de Castro from January to May 1915, and Sidónio Pais from December 1917 to December 1918. Pais was murdered on 14 December 1918. A monarchist restoration was proclaimed in the north on 19 January 1919 and driven out of Porto by 13 February. On 19 October 1921 a military rising killed the prime minister António Granjo and several other conservative figures, an episode remembered as the night of blood.

Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal had forty-five governments. The Portuguese Republican Party kept winning elections and could not turn the wins into stable administrations, and the opposition turned to the army. The coup of 28 May 1926 had the support of most army units and most political parties, and the population of Lisbon did not rise to defend the republic.

Historians divide three ways on what the First Republic was: a progressive regime becoming more democratic, a continuation of the elite liberal politics of the nineteenth century, or a Jacobin dictatorship in republican dress. The argument is unresolved.

What the Estado Novo was built to preserve

The 1926 coup installed a National Dictatorship that became the Estado Novo in 1933 under António de Oliveira Salazar, an economist who governed through a single party, a corporative structure, censorship, a political police and elections whose results were controlled. Opposition parties were tolerated far enough to be split into factions.

Portugal stayed neutral in the Second World War and traded with both sides, selling tungsten to Britain and to Germany until June 1944, allowing the Allies air bases in the Azores from late 1943 against German submarines, and admitting several thousand Jewish refugees. Lisbon kept air links to Britain and the United States and became the base from which the International Red Cross distributed relief to prisoners of war.

What the regime was for was the empire. India took Goa and the remaining Portuguese territories there by force in 1961, and in the same year the fighting began in Angola that spread to Guinea and Mozambique. The Portuguese Colonial War ran from 1961 to 1974, and some 122,000 Africans died in it. Portugal was a founding member of NATO on 4 April 1949, entered the United Nations on 14 December 1955 and the OECD on 4 August 1961, and fought the war as a member of all three.

The country the regime governed was poor and getting less so. Portuguese GDP per capita stood at 38% of the average of the twelve countries that would form the European Community in 1960 and 56% by 1973. The illiteracy rate was 26% in 1970, when 37% of births took place in a health facility and 47% of households had piped water. Salazar was disabled by a stroke in September 1968 and died on 27 July 1970, having never been told that he had been replaced. Marcelo Caetano eased censorship slightly, kept the political prisoners and continued the war.

How the African wars ended the regime at home

Two things turned the officer corps. In mid-1973 a government measure commissioning militia officers for colonial service alienated career soldiers. In February 1974 General António de Spínola, a decorated commander of the colonial wars, published Portugal e o futuro, which argued that the African wars could not be settled by force of arms. Between 200 and 300 officers calling themselves the Armed Forces Movement planned and carried out the coup of 25 April 1974, and met little resistance.

Independence came fast and unevenly. Guinea-Bissau was recognised almost immediately, Cape Verde and Mozambique in July 1975, Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe later that year, and Indonesia annexed East Timor before independence could be arranged. Angola went straight into an internationalised civil war after the Portuguese left.

At home the revolution ran through a radical phase between a failed right-wing coup on 11 March 1975 and a failed left-wing one on 25 November 1975. Banking, transport, heavy industry and the media were nationalised, farmworkers in the Alentejo took over the large estates, and about thirty people died in public violence. The election for a constituent assembly in April 1975 drew 92% of eligible voters. The constitution approved in April 1976 committed the country to socialism; the elections held on 25 April 1976 produced no majority; and constitutional revisions from 1982 onward cut the president's powers and abolished the Council of the Revolution, which had given the military a veto over legislation.

The empire came home with the soldiers. More than a million Portuguese citizens left the African territories between May 1974 and the end of the decade, and about 580,000 of the 9.8 million people counted in Portugal in 1981 were retornados. The economy took two IMF programmes, from 1977 to 1979 and from 1983 to 1985, before Portugal was admitted to the European Economic Community on 1 January 1986. Schengen followed on 26 March 1995 and the euro on 1 January 1999, with the escudo withdrawn in 2002. Public debt rose from 68% of GDP in 2007 to 126% in 2012 and a European and IMF programme of 78 billion euros ran from 2011 to 2014.

Macau went back to China in 1999 and East Timor's independence was recognised in 2002, which closed the frontier that had opened at Ceuta in 1415. The state left inside it counted 10,347,892 people at the census of 2021, on the land the Treaty of Alcañices described in 1297.