ABSTRACT
The history of Portuguese expansion is at once very well known and hardly known at all. Virtually every history of Europe has a reference to Henry ‘the Navigator’ and Vasco da Gama, the latter’s voyage to India between 1497 and 1499 achieving that rare status of being an event of universally acknowledged importance. However, beyond these points of recognition knowledge quickly evaporates. More substantial histories provide some detail of the lives and activities of these two men, and add, perhaps, some significant information about the activity of Afonso de Albuquerque before diverting to other themes. Even those who penetrate into the world of scholarly monographs despair of getting the whole picture. They are forced to focus on individual geographical areasBrazil, perhaps, or Japan-or they are treated to wide-ranging thematic studies on religion or race relations or trade. The narrative of the first two and a half centuries of Portugal’s overseas expansion is seldom seen as a whole and in its full context.
