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Portugal became an independent kingdom in 1139, cleared the Algarve of Muslim rule by the mid-1200s and secured its land border with Castile in 1411, freeing it to look to the sea. In 1415 Prince Henry the Navigator’s fleet took Ceuta, hoping to capture the trans-Saharan gold trade, but the caravans simply rerouted. Portugal instead invested in the caravel, whose lateen sails could tack upwind, and pushed down Africa until Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and Vasco da Gama reached India. Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil in 1500, and by the late 1500s fortified trading posts stretched from Lisbon to Nagasaki, with spices worth about a fifth of Portugal’s per capita income.

That sea empire proved fragile. When Philip II of Spain claimed the throne in 1580, Spain’s enemies treated Portuguese posts as Spanish, and the Dutch East India Company took Malacca and Ceylon. Independence came back after the 1640 Restoration War and Spanish recognition in 1668, and Portugal shifted to Brazil’s sugar and the 1690s gold rush of Minas Gerais. Fleeing Napoleon in 1807, the royal court of 10,000 to 15,000 people moved to Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil declared independence in 1822 under the king’s son. A third empire in Africa followed, defended by the Estado Novo through renamed overseas provinces and forced labor, until the 1961 to 1974 colonial wars and the Carnation Revolution brought it down.

• The Minas Gerais strike was the largest gold rush in history until California.
• A British ultimatum in 1890 blocked Portugal’s plan to link Angola and Mozambique across Africa.
• In 1951 the Salazar regime relabeled its colonies overseas provinces under the doctrine of pluricontinentalism.
• India annexed Goa, Daman and Diu in 1961, the same year war broke out in Angola.
• Portugal handed Macau to China in 1999, closing nearly 600 years of empire.