The chief points of interest in the story of Portugal are first the stubborn restless independence of the people, always rising into fresh vigour after a seeming overthrow, and secondly their instinct for seamanship, which Henry was able to train into exploring and colonising genius. There was no physical justice in the separate nationality of the Western Kingdom of Lisbon any more than of the Eastern Kingdom of Barcelona. Portugal[30] was essentially part of Spain, as the United Provinces of William of Orange were essentially part of the Netherlands; in both cases it was only the spirit and endurance of the race that gave to some provincials the right to become a people, while that right was denied to others.
And Portugal gained that right by a struggle of three hundred years, which was first a crusade against Islam; then a war of independence against brother Christians of Castille; last of all a civil strife against rebels and anarchists within.
In the twelfth century the five kingdoms of Spain were clearly marked off from the Moslem States and from one another; by the end of the fifteenth there is only the great central Realm of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the little western coast-kingdom of Emanuel the Fortunate, the heir of Prince Henry. Nations are among our best examples of the survival of the fittest, and by the side of Poland and Aragon we may well see a meaning in the bare and tiresome story of the mediæval kingdom of Portugal. The very fact of separate existence means something for a people which has kept on ruling itself for ten generations. Though its territory was never more than one fourth of the peninsula, nor its numbers more than one third of the Spanish race—from the middle of the twelfth century, Portugal has stood alone, with less right to such independence from any distinction of place or blood, than Ireland or Navarre, fighting incessantly against foes without, from north, east, and south, and keeping down the still worse foes of its own household.
N.W. SECTION OF THE CATALAN MAP OF 1375-6.
[(see list of maps)]
But the meaning of the growth of the Portuguese power is not in its isolation, its stubbornly defended national distinction from all other powers, but in its central and as it were unifying position in modern history—as the guide of Europe and Christendom into that larger world which marks the real difference between the Middle Ages and our own day.
For Henry the Navigator breathed into his countrymen the spirit of the old Norse rovers, that boundless appetite for new knowledge, new pleasures, new sights and sounds, which underlay the exploration of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the exploration of one half of the world's surface, the finding of a new continent in the south and in the west, and the opening of the great sea-routes round the globe. The scientific effects of this, starting from the new proof of a round world won by a Portuguese seaman, Magellan; and the political effects, also beginning with the first of modern colonial empires, founded by Da Gama, Cabral, and Albuquerque, are too widespread for more than a passing reference in this place, but this reference must be connected with the true author of the movement. For if the industrial element rules modern development; if the philosophy of utility, as expressing this element, is now our guide in war and peace; and if the substitution of this for the military spirit[31] is to be dated from that dominion in the Indian seas which realised the designs of Henry—if this be so, the Portuguese become to us, through him, something like the founders of our commercial civilisation, and of the European empire in Asia.
By the opening years of the fifteenth century, Portugal—in a Catholic rather than a Classical Renaissance—had already entered upon its modern life, some three generations before the rest of Christendom. But its mediæval history is very much like that of any other of the Five Spanish Kingdoms. Like the rest, Portugal had joined in driving the Moors from the Asturias to Andalusia, in the two hundred years of successful Western Crusade (1001-1212). In the same time, between the death of the great vizier Almanzor, the last support of the old Western Caliphate (1001), and the overthrow of the African Moors, who had supplanted that Western Caliphate,—between those two points of Moslem triumph and Christian reaction, the Portuguese kingdom had been formed out of the County granted in 1095 by Alfonso VI. of Leon to the free-lance Henry of Burgundy.