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Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula in 1157. Afonso had already won many victories over the Moors. At the beginning of his reign the religious fervor which had sustained the Almoravid dynasty was rapidly subsiding; in Portugal independent Moorish chiefs ruled over cities and petty taifa states, ignoring the central government; in Africa the Almohades were destroying the remnants of the ...
Portugal's long shoreline, with its many harbours and rivers flowing westward to the Atlantic Ocean was the ideal environment to raise generations of adventurous seamen. As a seafaring people in the south-westernmost region of Europe, the Portuguese became natural leaders of exploration during the Middle Ages.
From the late Middle Ages, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal ascended to the status of a world power during Europe's "Age of Discovery" as it built up a vast empire. Signs of military decline began with the Battle of Alcácer Quibir in Morocco in 1578; this defeat led to the death of King Sebastian and the imprisonment of much of the ...
The Early Middle Ages begin with a fragmentation of the former Western Roman Empire into "barbarian kingdoms". [citation needed] In Western Europe, the kingdom of the Franks developed into the Carolingian Empire by the 8th century, and the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England were unified into the kingdom of England by the 10th century. [citation ...
Composed of the overseas colonies, factories, and later overseas territories, governed by the Kingdom of Portugal, and later the Republic of Portugal, it was the longest-lived colonial empire in European history, lasting 584 years from the conquest of Ceuta in North Africa in 1415 to the transfer of sovereignty over Macau to China in 1999.
Portugal, [e] officially the Portuguese Republic, [f] is a country in the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe.Featuring the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it shares the longest uninterrupted border in the European Union; to the south and the west is the North Atlantic Ocean; and to the west and southwest lie the ...
Medieval Kings of Portugal continued to rely on small assemblies of notables, and only summoned the full Cortes on extraordinary occasions. A Cortes would be called if the king wanted to introduce new taxes, change some fundamental laws, announce significant shifts in foreign policy (e.g. ratify treaties), or settle matters of royal succession ...
The Kingdom of Portugal [3] was a monarchy in the western Iberian Peninsula and the predecessor of the modern Portuguese Republic. Existing to various extents between 1139 and 1910, it was also known as the Kingdom of Portugal and the Algarves after 1415, and as the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves between 1815 and 1822.