ABSTRACT
Portugal, as most of you will recall, was the first European nation-state to attain its present boundaries, which it did with the final expulsion of the Moors from the Algarve in 1249, over two centuries before the Spaniards captured Muslim Granada in 1492. Portugal was also the first consciously imperial European state, since the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and the Venetian and Genoese trading empires in the Levant hardly qualify in this respect. The Portuguese capture of Ceuta in 1415 had its precedent in previous Christian attacks on the Muslim Levant and North Africa from the time of the crusades onwards; but the series of papal bulls and briefs, promulgated between 1452 and 1456 which authorized and encouraged Portuguese expansion in the Atlantic islands and down the West African coast "to the Indies," gave the most explicit and formal sanction to Portuguese imperial ambitions and provided them with a new dimension.
