The Story of the Nations: Portugal

[...]point of Singapore, and established themselves at Macao, from which centre they explored the coasts of China and Japan. In the other direction, to the west, they crossed the Atlantic and discovered and colonized Brazil. Lisbon became the storehouse and centre of distribution for the products of the East, and attained to a height of wealth and luxury unrivalled since the days of ancient Rome. The history of the Portuguese "conquistadores" in India for the first hundred years[...]. The Story of the Nations: Portugal by H. Morse Stephens THIS volume is written on a different plan to that adopted in most of the volumes in the same Series which have preceded it, and attempts to give a short chronological history of Portugal. An episodical history, though more interesting than a consecutive narrative, in that it treats only of the most striking events, demands from the reader a groundwork of accurate knowledge. This is not given with regard to the history of Portugal in any book in the English language with which the author is acquainted. Dunham, who combined a history of Portugal with that of Spain, in five volumes published in Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia between 1838 and 1843, based his account on Vertot’s Révolutions de Portugal, first printed at Paris in 1678, and modern English standard books of reference still make use of Dunham, and contain the old blunders of identifying Portugal with Lusitania, recognizing the fictitious Cortes of Lamego in 1143, regarding the victory of Ourique as a “prodigious” victory, &c., &c. Since the time of Dunham, a few books have been published in England bearing on special periods of Portuguese history, such as the lives of the Marquis of Pombal and the Duke of Saldanha, published by John Smith, Count of Carnota, and two volumes of a History of Portugal, by E. MacMurdo, and which is still in progress; but there exists no book containing a complete and trustworthy history to which students may be referred. Yet within the last fifty years the history of Portugal has been entirely rewritten. The modern school of historians, which derived its first impulsion from Niebuhr and Ranke, found a brilliant representative in Alexandra Herculano, who saw that history could only be written after a careful examination of contemporary documents, and who in his Historia de Portugal, published between 1848 and 1853, swept away much of the cobweb of legend which had enveloped the early history of his country. Herculano undoubtedly owed much to Heinrich Schäfer, who wrote the history of Portugal in the Geschichte der Europäischen Staaten edited by Heeren and Ukert; but he went much further than Schäfer, and the history of the latter is now quite out of date. The works of Herculano and his followers have quite superseded the histories of Lemos, Sousa Monteiro, and J. F. Pereira, which are mentioned here only as books to be avoided by the historical student.