ABSTRACT

In his dedication to John III of Portugal of his treatise The Disciplines (1531), the Valencian devotee of Erasmus Juan Luis Vives stated: "Today the whole universe has become cleared to the human genre." Just as a warrior sensibility characterized much of late-medieval European society, the Reconquista shaped the society and culture of Iberian kingdoms. The Portuguese ultimately conquered and held on to Ceuta, thus allowing John to knight his three sons. The Aragonese, in contrast, encountered severe difficulties in ruling Sardinia until the mid-fifteenth century. A distinction is considered to be too sharp and the result of hindsight; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England, the Netherlands, and other would-be colonial powers all shared with Spain and Portugal an interest in seizing overseas territories. Portugal, though, followed different dynamics. During the reign of Sebastian a desire to recover some of the North African outposts abandoned in previous decades emerged, a policy that was now seen with regret.