Knights of Aviz; and he, aided by five hundred English archers, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Spaniards at Aljubarrota, the Portuguese Bannockburn.  John of Aviz, known as the Great, married Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt; and from this union sprang a line of princes and kings under whom Portugal became one of the leading nations of Europe.  Prince Henry the Navigator, son of John the Great, devoted his life to the furthering of maritime adventure and discovery.  Like England’s First Lords of the Admiralty, he was a navigator who did not navigate; but it was unquestionably owing to the impulse he gave to Portuguese enterprise that Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to India and Pedro Alvarez Cabral secured for his country the giant colony of Brazil.  Angola, Mozambique, Diu, Goa, Macao—­these names mean as much for Portugal as Havana, Cartagena, Mexico, and Lima, for Spain.  The sixteenth century was the “heroic” age of Portuguese history, and the “heroes”—­notably the Viceroys of Portuguese India—­were, in fact, a race of fine soldiers and administrators.  No nation, moreover, possesses more conspicuous and splendid memorials of its golden age.  It was literally “golden,” for Emmanuel the Fortunate, who reaped the harvest sown by Henry the Navigator, was the wealthiest monarch in Europe, and gave his name to the “Emmanueline” style of architecture, a florid Gothic which achieves miracles of ostentation and sometimes of beauty.  As the glorious pile of Batalha commemorates the victory of Aljubarrota, so the splendid church and monastery of Belem mark the spot where Vasco da Gama spent the night before he sailed on his epoch-making voyage.  But it was not gold that raised the noblest memorial to Portugal’s greatness:  it was the genius of Luis de Camoens.  If Spenser, instead of losing himself in mazes of allegoric romance, had sung of Crecy and Agincourt, of Drake, Frobisher, and Raleigh, he might have given us a national epic in the same sense in which the term applies to The Lusiads.  With such a history, so written in stone and song, what wonder if pride of race is one of the mainsprings of Portuguese character!

But the House of Aviz, like the legitimate line of Affonso Henriques, dwindled into debility.  It flickered out in Dom Sebastian, who dragged his country into a mad invasion of Morocco and vanished from human ken on the disastrous battlefield of Alcazar-Khebir.  Then, for sixty years, not by conquest, but by intrigue, Portugal passed under the sway of Spain, and lost to the enemies of Spain—­that is to say, to England and Holland—­a large part of her colonial empire.  At last, in 1640, a well-planned and daring revolution expelled the Spanish intruders, and placed on the throne John, Duke of Braganza.  As the house of Aviz was an illegitimate branch of the stock of Affonso Henriques, so the Braganzas were an illegitimate branch of the House of Aviz, with none of the Plantagenet blood in them.  Only one prince of the line, Pedro II., can be said to have attained anything like greatness.  Another, Joseph, had the sense to give a free hand to an able, if despotic, minister, the Marquis of Pombal.  But, on the whole, the history of the Braganza rule was one of steady decadence, until the second half of the nineteenth century found the country one of the most backward in Europe.