Portugal

The 16th century was a time of crisis and change for Portugal’s empire.

Poor and small, Portugal was at the edge of late medieval Europe. But its seafarers created the age of ‘globalisation’, which continues to this day.

C.R. Boxer describes how the cultivated Viceroy of Portuguese India, on his way home from Goa, had a costly misadventure in the Indian Ocean.

In the coastal regions of the modern colonies of Kenya and Tanganyika,  the Portuguese, first among Europeans, came into contact with the Arab-African civilization that flourished on the edges of the Indian Ocean.

Portugal's colonial empire was, at the C.R. Boxer wrote this article in 1956, the oldest in the world, with Mozambique as its most prosperous possession.

In 1373, writes Jan Read, King Edward III signed an alliance with Portugal which has lasted ever since.

The last Huguenot to become a Marshal of France, Schomberg died in exile, fighting for William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. By C.R. Boxer.

C.R. Boxer describes how the Spanish and Portuguese empires were troubled by smugglers and interlopers on the high seas.

C.R. Boxer profiles an Anglo-Irish Protestant at the Portuguese Court, 1728-41.

Throughout his long life, including his years in Russia, Ribeiro Sanches kept in touch with ‘Men of Reason’ in many European countries.