Portugal in the Age of Discovery
| Kingdom of Portugal and the Algarves |
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| Reino de Portugal e dos Algarves | ||||||||||
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| Capital | Lisbon | |||||||||
| Languages | Galician-Portuguese, Early Modern Portuguese | |||||||||
| Religion | Roman Catholic | |||||||||
| Government | Absolute Monarchy | |||||||||
| Monarch | ||||||||||
| • | 1415-1433 | João I (first) | ||||||||
| • | 1578-1580 | Henrique I (last) | ||||||||
| History | ||||||||||
| • | Conquest of Ceuta | 14 August 1415 | ||||||||
| • | Death of Henrique I | 31 January 1580 | ||||||||
| Currency | Portuguese dinheiro, Portuguese real | |||||||||
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The Kingdom of Portugal in the 15th century was one of the first European powers to begin building a colonial empire. The Portuguese Renaissance was a period of exploration during which Portuguese sailors discovered several Atlantic archipelagos like the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde, explored and colonized the African coast, discovered an eastern route to India that rounded the Cape of Good Hope, discovered Brazil, explored the Indian Ocean and established trading routes throughout most of southern Asia, and sent the first direct European maritime trade and diplomatic missions to Ming China and to Japan.
The Portuguese Renaissance produced a plethora of poets, historians, critics, theologians, and moralists, for whom the Portuguese Renaissance was their golden age. The Cancioneiro Geral by Garcia de Resende (printed 1516) is taken to mark the transition from Old Portuguese to the modern Portuguese language.
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