240
92. Thomar, Claustro dos Filippes }
93. Lisbon, Sao Vicente de Fora } 246
94. " " " Interior }
95. Coimbra, Se Nova } 250
96. " Misericordia }
97. Vianna do Castello, Misericordia 254
98. Oporto, N. S. da Serra do Pilar, Cloister} 258
99. Coimbra, Sta. Cruz, Sacristy }
100. Mafra, West Front } 266
101. " Interior of Church }

[Illustration: map of Portugal]

INTRODUCTION

No one can look at a map of the Iberian Peninsula without being struck
by the curious way in which it is unequally divided between two
independent countries. Spain occupies by far the larger part of the
Peninsula, leaving to Portugal only a narrow strip on the western
seaboard some one hundred miles wide and three hundred and forty long.
Besides, the two countries are separated the one from the other by
merely artificial boundaries. The two largest rivers of the Peninsula,
the Douro and the Tagus, rise in Spain, but finish their course in
Portugal, and the Guadiana runs for some eighty miles through Portuguese
territory before acting for a second time as a boundary between the two
countries. The same, to a lesser degree, is true of the mountains. The
Gerez and the Marao are only offshoots of the Cantabrian mountains, and
the Serra da Estrella in Beira is but a continuation of the Sierra de
Gata which separates Leon from Spanish Estremadura. Indeed the only
natural frontiers are formed by the last thirty miles of the Minho in
the north, by about eighty miles of the Douro, which in its deep and
narrow gorge really separates Traz os Montes from Leon; by a few miles
of the Tagus, and by the Guadiana both before and after it runs through
a part of Alemtejo.

If the languages of the two countries were radically unlike this curious
division would be more easy to understand, but in reality Castilian
differs from Portuguese rather in pronunciation than in anything else;
indeed differs less from Portuguese than it does from Catalunan.[1]

During the Roman dominion none of the divisions of the Peninsula
corresponded exactly with Portugal. Lusitania, which the poets of the
Renaissance took to be the Roman name of their country, only reached up
to the Douro, and took in