ration 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.

[Footnote 31: W.H. Lecky, _Rationalism_.]

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
mediaeval 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.

For the next three hundred years (1095-1383), under his descendants who
reigned as kings in Guimaraens or Lisbon, we may trace a gradual but
chequered national rise, to the Revolution of 1383 with two prominent
movements of expansion and two relapses of contraction and decline.

First comes the formation of a national spirit by Count Henry's widow
Donna Theresa and her son Affonso Henriquez, who from a Lord of Coimbra
and Oporto, dependent on the Kingdom of Gallicia or of Leon, becomes the
fir