Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0296/02964.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 39KB | 616 lines

$Unique_ID{COW02964}
$Pretitle{381}
$Title{Portugal
Chapter 2A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Robert Rinehart}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{portuguese
portugal
century
land
roman
king
afonso
moorish
north
reconquest}
$Date{1976}
$Log{Figure 2.*0296401.scf
Figure 3.*0296402.scf
Figure 4.*0296403.scf
}
Country:     Portugal
Book:        Portugal, A Country Study
Author:      Robert Rinehart
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1976

Chapter 2A.   Historical Setting

     Portugal derives its name from the medieval Latin term Portucalense,
which designated the country surrounding the Roman town Portus Cale (modern
Porto), roughly the northwestern region between the Rio Douro and the Rio
Minho. First mentioned in the ninth century A.D., the Portucalense was an
administrative area on the frontier of the Christian Kingdom of Leon, without
traditional borders or a previous history as a separate political unit. The
Douro-Minho core had been part of larger regions-the tribal lands of the
Lusitanians and the Swabian kingdom that had left it with a legacy of
isolation and separateness-but until the twelfth century its history was
indistinguishable from that of Spain. It was from this core area, however,
that the Portuguese state emerged and before the end of the thirteenth
century had extended southward to the borders it retains in the twentieth
century.

     Many historians, Portuguese and Spanish alike, have considered it an
accident that Portugal, exposed and peripheral, developed as an independent
entity. The country has no distinctive natural borders. Apart from the western
littoral its several regions are geographical extensions of larger ones in
Spain. In its origins Portugal lacked ethnic cohesion. Its language had a
common root with that of the dialects spoken by the people of Galicia, which
has never ceased to be a part of Spain. Historians have seen the maintenance
of Portuguese independence as resulting from the early development of a
colonial empire, an extraordinary political and economic relationship with
England, and Spain's untimely preoccupation with matters more urgent than
Iberian unification.

     Clearly a Portuguese government existed before a Portuguese nation.
Nationality developed around allegiance to the king during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, and from that grew political and cultural unity and a
common Portuguese existence for all the king's subjects. The selection of
Lisbon as the national capital tied Portugal's future to the Atlantic, making
the Portuguese, in the words of the Spanish writer Salvador de Madariaga, "a
Spaniard with his back to Castile." Portugal was the first European nation to
establish a seaborne overseas empire. Its dominion and civilization were
extended to parts of Africa, Asia, and America. Small, poor, and marginal in a
European context, Portugal ensured its continued existence in large measure by
its ability to exploit far-flung colonies, and developments in the colonies
often had a decisive effect on domestic Portuguese affairs. Throughout its
history as a separate state Portugal has had an ambiguous relationship with
Spain. It was an imperative of Portuguese policy to resist absorption and the
loss of national identity, but nonetheless the history of inter-Iberian
relations was marked by repeated efforts by Portugal and Castile to achieve
dynastic union. Ironically, in order to maintain the integrity of its empire
and its independence from Spain, Portugal became an economic dependency of
England.

     In the absence of an easily defined national character it is impossible
to determine which of the distinct regional characters is authentically
Portuguese. Family oriented, generally apolitical, basically conservative and
individualistic, the Portuguese is intensely patriotic but not public
spirited. Forgetting whatever in it has been unpleasant, he is given to
nostalgia for an idealized past. He tends to be phlegmatic but not practical
in his political attitudes. Foreign influences are often rejected because they
come from a mentality too different from his own to be assimilated.

     Contemporary Portuguese historians have been reluctant to study the
unstable and weak governments of the early twentieth century. Although proud
and boastful of their country's past achievements, they have been embarrassed
by the failure of liberal democratic government to take root in Portugal and
by the easy resort to authoritarian alternatives.

LUSITANIA

     The west flank of the Iberian peninsula has known human habitation for
many thousands of years; however, the prehistory of the area is even more
obscure than that of most parts of Europe, and the origin of those earliest
inhabitants as well as the origins of subsequent waves of migrants who each in
turn absorbed their predecessors is a matter of scholarly debate.
Archaeological finds in southern Portugal are similar to those excavated in
sites stretching across North Africa to the Middle East and are evidence of
participation in a common southern Mediterranean Paleolithic culture that had
its roots in the African continent. Although later Mesolithic settlers and
megalith builders, active before 3000 B.C., probably came into the region from
the north, all prehistoric cultures there appear to bear the impress of
African cultural influence. Compared with adjacent areas, however, the
territory lying within the geographic confines of modern Portugal was an
isolated backwater in prehistoric times.

Iberians

     During the course of the third millennium B.C. the Iberians spread over
the peninsula that came to bear their name. They provided the genetic base for
the populations of both Portugal and Spain. Archaeological evidence has been
variously interpreted as indicating an African or an eastern Mediterranean
origin, the weight of opinion leaning to the latter, but it is likely that the
Iberians who emerged into recorded history after 2000 B.C. were an amalgam of
several groups of migrants and still earlier inhabitants who after generations
of mingling came to share a number of cultural traits and adopt similar modes
of social organization. They differed greatly among themselves, however. In
some areas a sophisticated urban society emerged based on trade with the
Aegean in tin and copper-the components of bronze-and supported by a
prosperous agriculture. By contrast the Iberians who settled in the region
bounded by the Rio Tejo and the Rio Minho were primitive. Called Lusitanians,
they were described by the classical geographers Polybius and Strabo as a
loose, quarrelsome federation of tribes, living behind the walls of fortified
villages in the hills, engaging in banditry as their primary occupation, and
carrying on incessant tribal warfare.

     The Lusitanians were marked by their contact with the Celtic herders and
metalworkers who moved across the Pyrenees in several waves after 900 B.C. to
settle in the northern half of the peninsula. The heaviest concentration of
Celts was north of the Rio Douro in Galicia, where they easily adapted to the
damp, relatively cool climate similar to that of their Danubian homeland. The
Celtic settlers soon were fused racially and culturally with the native
Iberians among whom they lived. The degree to which there was a Celtic genetic
intrusion south of the Douro is a matter of discussion, but the Lusitanians
would seem to have been Iberians who assimilated Celtic culture rather than a
racial admixture of Celts and Iberians. Similar though they were in many
ways, even in their language, there was nonetheless a clear dividing line at
the Douro between the patriarchal bandits of Lusitania and the matriarchal
pastoralists of Galicia.

     From about 1200 B.C. the Phoenicians, later their Carthaginian
colonists, and by 800 B.C. the Greeks moved up the western Iberian coast to
Galicia and beyond in search of trade, but the Lusitanian coast held no
interest for them. Although they established in colonies elsewhere in
Ibe