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The history of Portugal can be traced from circa 400,000 years ago, when the region of present-day Portugal was inhabited by Homo heidelbergensis.. The Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, which lasted almost two centuries, led to the establishment of the provinces of Lusitania in the south and Gallaecia in the north of what is now Portugal.
Portugal was the leading country in the European exploration of the world in the 15th century. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 divided the Earth outside Europe into Castilian and Portuguese global territorial hemispheres for exclusive conquest and colonization .
Unlike Spain, Portugal did not divide its colonial territory in America. The captaincies created there functioned under a centralised administration in Salvador, which reported directly to the Crown in Lisbon. The 18th century was marked by increasing centralisation of royal power throughout the Portuguese empire.
In 1777, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of San Ildefonso, which mainly resolved a number of border disputes between their South American colonies. During the Age of Enlightenment, Portugal was considered one of Europe's unenlightened backwaters; it was a country of three million with 200,000 people in 538 monasteries in 1750. Melo seems ...
Year Date Event 80 to 72 BC: The Sertorian War takes place, with Quintus Sertorius, a Roman general, rebelling against Rome with the support of the Lusitanians.: 27 BC: Augustus replaces the old Hispania Ulterior and Citerior division with a new one: Lusitania (Centre and South of modern Portugal and some territory of Modern Spain, namely the capital of Lusitania, Mérida), Baetica (only ...
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 ...
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 .
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.