The Navy Arsenal were the old maintenance facility and ship repair the Portuguese Navy located in Lisbon. They were deployed to the west of the Palace Square, substantially in one site of the ancient Ribeira das Naus and the Tejo Opera House, destroyed by the earthquake of 1755. Until the establishment of the Republic were […]
Hanno from 1510 – 8 June 1516 was the pet white elephant given by King Manuel I of Portugal to Pope Leo X (born Giovanni de’ Medici) at his coronation. Hanno, actually an Indian elephant, came to Rome in 1514 with the Portuguese ambassador Tristão da Cunha and quickly became the Pope’s favorite animal. Hanno died […]
Jesuit in China The first attempt by Jesuits to reach China was made in 1552 by St. Francis Xavier, Navarrese priest and missionary and founding member of the Society. Xavier, however, died the same year on the Chinese island of Shangchuan, without having reached the mainland. Three decades later, in 1582, led by several figures including […]
Initially, the line of demarcation did not encircle the Earth. Instead, Spain and Portugal could conquer any new lands they were the first to discover, Spain to the west and Portugal to the east, even if they passed each other on the other side of the globe. But Portugal’s discovery of the highly valued Moluccas in […]
The Treaty of Tordesillas signed at Tordesillas (now in Valladolid province, Spain) on 7 June 1494 and authenticated at Setúbal, Portugal, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe betweenPortugal and Castile along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands (off the west coast of Africa). This line of demarcation was about halfway between the Cape […]
Infante Dom Henrique de Avis, Duke of Viseu (4 March 1394 – 13 November 1460), better known as Henry the Navigator was an important figure in 15th-century Portuguese politics and in the early days of the Portuguese Empire. Through his administrative direction, he is regarded as the main initiator of what would be known as […]