After the Western Empire had apparently fallen beneath the Northern arms—­that is to say, five hundred years later—­and not until then, the Roman Code ameliorated the baneful tenure of emphyteusis.  A law of the emperor Zenos (A.D. 474-491) fixed whatever had theretofore been uncertain in the nature and incidents of emphyteusis.  The tenant was guaranteed from increase of rent and from eviction—­the alienation of the property by the state being held thenceforth to affect the quit-rent only—­and finally he obtained full power to dispose of the land, which nevertheless remained subject to the quit-rent in whatever hands it might be.  Before these reforms were effected, Portugal was conquered by the Visigoths, the Roman proprietors of the soil were expelled, and their laws and institutions suppressed.  This occurred in the year 476.  Whether emphyteusis in any form remained is not quite certain, but it seems not; and during this government, and the Moorish one which superseded it in the year 711, the Iberian Peninsula enjoyed an interval of prosperity to which it had been a stranger for ages.

In the eleventh century this happy condition of affairs was disturbed by the appearance of certain Spanish crusading knights, who, issuing from the mountainous parts of the country adjacent to their own, began to war against the Moorish authorities.  In the course of a century, and with little voluntary aid from the peasants, who distrusted them and their religious pretensions and promises of advantage, they managed to acquire possession of the country.  Now, what do you suppose was one of the first acts committed by these adventurers?  Nothing less than the re-enactment of the odious Roman tenure of emphyteusis, and that in its most ancient and worst form—­liability to increased rent and to eviction; not only this, but with certain base services combined.  The wretched inhabitants were required to work so many days in the week for these lords, to break up a certain amount of waste land; to furnish so many cattle; to kill so many birds; to provide (in rural districts remote from the sea) so many salt fish; to furnish so much incense or so many porringers, iron tools, pairs of shoes, etc.

Talk of the Western Empire having “declined and fallen,” as Messrs. Gibbon and Wegg put it!  Why, here it was again, and with the worst of its ancient crimes inscribed upon its code of law.  Emphyteusis was reintroduced into Portugal by King Diniz (Dennis) in the year 1279, and was followed by its usual effects—­ruin and depopulation.  In 1394 was born Prince Henry.  He was the son of John I. and Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and was therefore the nephew of Henry IV. of England.  Perceiving and commiserating the wretchedness of the people, and casting about him for a remedy, Henry saw but one:  that was departure from the land, emigration, colonization, escape from the tyranny of the soil, of nobles and of ecclesiastics—­a tyranny which both his illustrious rank and his piety forbade him to oppose.  Hence his intense devotion to the discovery and colonization of strange lands, which is in vain to be accounted for on the ground of a mere passion, the only one usually advanced by unthinking historians.