A comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of Portugal's formation and history up to 1807 and of its acquisition of a wide-flung maritime empire from the early fifteenth century.[...]
The Kingdom of Portugal was created as a by-product of the Christian reconquest of Hispania. With no geographical raison d'etre and no obvious political roots in its Roman, Germanic, or Islamic pasts, it for long remained a small, struggling realm on Europe's outer fringe. Then, in the early fifteen[...]