ich Henry was able to train into exploring and colonising
genius. There was no physical justice in the separate nationality of the
Western Kingdom of Lisbon any more than of the Eastern Kingdom of
Barcelona. Portugal[30] was essentially part of Spain, as the United
Provinces of William of Orange were essentially part of the
Netherlands; in both cases it was only the spirit and endurance of the
race that gave to some provincials the right to become a people, while
that right was denied to others.

[Footnote 30: See Note 1, page 137.]

And Portugal gained that right by a struggle of three hundred years,
which was first a crusade against Islam; then a war of independence
against brother Christians of Castille; last of all a civil strife
against rebels and anarchists within.

In the twelfth century the five kingdoms of Spain were clearly marked
off from the Moslem States and from one another; by the end of the
fifteenth there is only the great central Realm of Ferdinand and
Isabella, and the little western coast-kingdom of Emanuel the Fortunate,
the heir of Prince Henry. Nations are among our best examples of the
survival of the fittest, and by the side of Poland and Aragon we may
well see a meaning in the bare and tiresome story of the mediaeval
kingdom of Portugal. The very fact of separate existence means something
for a people which has kept on ruling itself for ten generations. Though
its territory was never more than one fourth of the peninsula, nor its
numbers more than one third of the Spanish race--from the middle of the
twelfth century, Portugal has stood alone, with less right to such
independence from any distinction of place or blood, than Ireland or
Navarre, fighting incessantly against foes without, from north, east,
and south, and keeping down the still worse foes of its own household.

[Illustration: N.W. SECTION OF THE CATALAN MAP OF 1375-6. (SEE LIST
OF MAPS)]

But the meaning of the growth of the Portuguese power is not in its
isolation, its stubbornly defended national distinction from all other
powers, but in its central and as it were unifying position in modern
history--as the guide of Europe and Christendom into that larger world
which marks the real difference between the Middle Ages and our own day.

For Henry the Navigator breathed into his countrymen the spirit of the
old Norse rovers, that boundless appetite for new knowledge, new
pleasures, new sights and sounds, which underlay the explo