Convents as a Refuge in Early Modern Lisbon
Lisbon’s convents were not just religious houses, but safe havens for the noblewomen of Portugal offering refuge from abusive husbands, unhappy marriages and a city swarming with ‘dogs and devils’.
Portugal
The Conquest of Lisbon
The city surrendered to Afonso I of Portugal and a group of crusaders on 25 October 1147.
Soft Fascism
The buildings that came out of Portugal’s New State were described as an ‘architectural lie’.
Lisbon After The Earthquake
A readable history of the Portuguese capital emphasises the modern at the expense of the city’s deeper past.
Salazar: Portugal’s Great Dictator
A contemporary of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, Salazar is remembered by some of his compatriots as the greatest figure in the nation’s history. Why?
Habsburg Iberia Points West
The 16th century was a time of crisis and change for Portugal’s empire.
The First Global Empire
Poor and small, Portugal was at the edge of late medieval Europe. But its seafarers created the age of ‘globalisation’, which continues to this day.
The Count of Ericeira and the Pirates
C.R. Boxer describes how the cultivated Viceroy of Portuguese India, on his way home from Goa, had a costly misadventure in the Indian Ocean.
The Portuguese in Southeast Africa
In the coastal regions of the modern colonies of Kenya and Tanganyika, the Portuguese, first among Europeans, came into contact with the Arab-African civilization that flourished on the edges of the Indian Ocean.
Mozambique: Vicissitudes of an East African Colony, 1505-1955
Portugal's colonial empire was, at the C.R. Boxer wrote this article in 1956, the oldest in the world, with Mozambique as its most prosperous possession.