Portugal

Geographical PositionEstablishing and Identity… Reconquista

Capitulaciones 1479 Union of the Crowns – Portugal remains apart

City: regionalismSociety

Grandee families (dukes, marquis, count) and lesser nobles (dons) Hidalgo

The Clergy Secular and Orders

All tax exempt from the Crown

Dominated by mountains and lacks arable land in many areas – need for trade partnersHad to import grain and manufactured goodsExported wool, wine, fruit, cork, olive oil, salt, and fish

Castile Interior pastoral economy—Genoese traders monopolized wool

trade

Aragon and coastal areasTradeOverseas company—

investor and factorFactory

Factory system helped facilitate trading post empire

4th son1394-1460Deeply religiousSearch for knightly honor

Ceuta and beyondMaps and dreams

CeutaShortage of gold

hindered European trade

1415 King John I and his songs organize expedition to conquer this North African city

Financial failure but spurs Portuguese interest

Colonization of the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé

Model for future patterns of colonizationWine, wheat, sugarSlave labor

Different than most areas within the Portuguese realm

Colonization involved medieval precedent & goal of capitalistic agricultural development

Donatary captaincy- PortugalEncomienda - Spanish

After the taking of Ceuta [in Muslim North Africa, 1415] he always kept ships well armed against the Infidel, both for war, and because he had a wish to know the land that lay beyond Cape Bojador, for up to his time [nothing] was known with any certainty about the land beyond that Cape. [Muslim knowledge extended little further, nowhere near Africa’s southern tip.] …Since it seemed to him that without knowledge no mariners or merchants would ever. . . sail to a place where there is not a sure … hope of profit, he sent out his own ships. the products of this realm might be taken there, which traffic would bring great profit to our countrymen. [Also] he sought to know if there were in those parts any Christian princes, [who] would aid him against the enemies of the faith. [Moreover, it] was his great desire to make increase in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ and to bring to him all the souls that should be saved.

--The Portuguese historian Azurara

Our land is the home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles, meta-collinarum, cametennus, tensevetes, wild asses, white and red lions, white bears, white merules, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses, wild oxen, and wild men -- men with horns, one-eyed men, men with eyes before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high giants, cyclopses, and similar women. It is the home, too, of the phoenix and of nearly all living animals.

--Letter of Prestor John

50 trading posts by mid-sixteenth c.

Used heavy artillery Purchase safe conduct

passes Unable to enforce;

pepper and spices Followed by the Dutch

and English

“The king of Portugal has often commanded me to go to the Straits, because…this was the best place to intercept the trade which the Moslems…carry on in these parts. So it was to do Our Lord’s service that we were brought here; by taking Malacca, we would close the Straits so that never again would the Moslems be able to bring their spices by this route…. I am very sure that, if this Malacca trade is taken out of their hands, Cairo and Mecca will be completely lost.”

How was the Brazil that

the Portuguese

found different than the Americas

discovered by the

Spanish?

Die-off of AmerindiansEarly colonists focus on export of brazilwoodTurn to plantation agriculture; nobles receive land

grantsAfrican slave labor used as a replacement; less

bureaucratic means to extract laborSimilar to Amerindians in the North, the peoples of

Brazil were pushed to fringe areasHowever, there was greater miscegenation with

Europeans and people of African descent.

Large proportion of wealth came from sugar exports compared to exports in Spanish America Sugar exports peaked in 1650 due to

competition

Later gold and diamond discoveries fueled interest in the interior regions

While religion was important, it was less of a focus in Brazil than Spanish America

1484 Portuguese King rejects the proposals of Christopher Columbus

After the discovery of the Americas, Queen Isabella of Spain request s Pope Alexander VI to endorse a series of bulls

Line of Demarcation modified in a treaty of 1494