MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Portugal

ONE LAND · 6 ATLASES

Portugal, on the map of history

What was Portugal before it was Portugal? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

Lusitania (mod. Portugal) · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

Lusitania. Its shepherd-general Viriathus humiliated Roman armies for a decade until Rome bought his assassination in 139 BC — a conquest by treachery Romans themselves told with embarrassment (“Rome does not pay traitors,” the consul allegedly told the assassins, after paying them). Augustus organized the province around Emerita Augusta (Mérida, founded 25 BC for discharged veterans), whose theatre, bridge and aqueduct still stand — provincial Rome at nearly metropolitan scale. Sueves seized the north after 409; the south passed to the Visigoths; and the province’s Latin, worked on by both, became Portuguese.

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Portugal — the western Reconquista · The Crusades, 1095–1291

Portugal was itself a child of the Reconquista, a new kingdom pushing south along the Atlantic. In 1147, English, Flemish and German crusaders bound for the Holy Land stopped to help take Lisbon from the Muslims — one of the only successes of the otherwise disastrous Second Crusade, and the making of the Portuguese capital.

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Portugal · The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848

Refused the Continental System, was invaded (1807), and watched its royal court sail to Brazil under British escort — the only European monarchy to reign from a colony. Wellington’s fortress (Torres Vedras) and Britain’s oldest ally, it emerged with a liberal constitution, civil wars, and the loss of Brazil (1822): a small country the age used as a hinge.

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Portugal · The Great War, 1914–1918

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Portugal · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

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Portugal · The Cold War, 1945–1991

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