The Rise of Portuguese Power in India, 1497-1550 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II The Portuguese?Malabar The Portuguese.?The Portuguese nation was moulded in a hard school. Until the end of the nth century its history was that of the resit of the Spanish Peninsula. Peopled originally by Celts, it had been thoroughly incorporated with the Roman Empire, but its subsequent history so far differed from that of Spain that the wave of invading Visigoths had spent some of its force before the Western Ocean was reached, and its nobility rarely claim Gothic descent. With the rest of the Peninsula it was subdued by the Moors in the 8th century. Its existence as a separate entity began in 1095 A.D., when Count Henry of Burgundy was given the County of Portugal as the dowry of his wife Theresa. The limits of the new county comprised, however, only the districts of Coimbra and Oporto, which within the preceding 100 years had been won back from the Moors by dint of hard fighting. This contest had not been carried on by the original inhabitants, the Celts, but by armies recruited from the north, and the first Count of the new county was himself a French Knight. In the struggle with the Moors that occupied the next two and a half centuries, the leaders, in the absence of a native nobility, were the flower of northern chivalry. The armies, too, were at first recruited by northern crusading soldiers, and it was not until some years had elapsed that the native inhabitants of either the cities or the countrywere swept into the general movement. By the middle of the 13th century, however, when the Muhamedan Wars on Portuguese soil ceased, the effects of the long struggle had penetrated to all classes, the towns emerged with municipal institutions, and the people had, through the Cortes, some voice in the government of the country. Still a large share of the soil wa...