What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa Rossi

  Between 2000 and 2006, Portugal was allotted about $28 billion in EU funds to build infrastructure.2

  Loud, happy Spain is paella and bullfights; gentle, reserved Portugal is the mournful wailing of fado and legendary sightings of the Virgin Mary. Spaniards are fiercely proud of their national identity—and particularly of their regions, which they extol as having the best food, architecture, and football team; the slumped Portuguese will tell you that their country is the graveyard of ambition, a kingdom of mediocrity where the national hobby is complaining, and the ambitious leave.3

  Spain, under dictator Franco, was missing in action during much of the twentieth century; Portugal, under the forty-year dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, simply disappeared—and in some ways she still hasn’t come back: almost half of the Portuguese people reside outside the country.

  TWIN BROTHERS OF DIFFERENT MOTHERS?

  While Portugal was deep in her Salazar haze (1928–1968)—her press censored, her political system shut down, secret police roaming the streets, and thousands of dissenters thrown in jail—neighbor Spain was in her Franco daze (1939–1975) under similar repression. Both dictators isolated their countries and transformed their people into impoverished, malnourished masses, although in both countries a privileged elite made out (and still makes out) rather well. The two Iberian leaders weren’t chummy, but each respected the other’s territory and both dictators-for-decades flickered out in the 1970s.

  Kidnapped and driven off into darkness after Salazar grabbed power in 1928, Portugal was absent from the Second World War and slept through most of the last century politically smothered. It wasn’t until a military coup in 1974 pulled back the shroud that Portugal emerged, blinking, as the poorest and least-educated country in Europe. Despite some leaps, thirty years after democracy was restored, Portugal still isn’t fully up to speed: some 13 percent of women still can’t read,4 less than half the children make it to high school,5 and Portugal remains the low earner of Western Europe; even some Eastern European countries show a higher per capita income. That the country has come as far as she has—back in the Salazar days, about half of the population couldn’t read, and almost all lived in dire poverty—is partly a result of over $25 billion doled out for educational funds by the European Union since 1989.6

  Critics say much EU funding to Portugal was squandered, creating, for example, 60,000 government jobs that only further bureaucratize the place. Previous administrations were big spenders, investing in huge public works projects, such as the $1.7 billion Alqueva hydroelectric dam, which doesn’t put much of a dent in the country’s energy needs, while basic infrastructure is falling apart, as evidenced by the bridge that collapsed in Porto in 2001, killing seventy.

  Most of Portugal’s leaders since the 1974 revolution have appeared inept, but the hands-down most imbecilic was Pedro Santana Lopes, former mayor of Lisbon, who was hastily appointed to fill the prime minister’s seat in 2004 after José Manuel Durão Barroso was tapped to head the European Commission in Brussels. Resembling Barney of Mayberry, Santana Lopes acted even dopier. Arriving an hour late for his inauguration, he bumbled through his speech and seemed to be drawing names for cabinet appointments out of a hat. The woman whom the government had boasted only hours earlier would be the first high-ranking female involved in military matters was instead appointed Minister of Arts and Entertainment. Defense Minister Paulo Portas received a second portfolio, being named Secretary of Maritime Issues, an announcement that, to judge by his televised response, was as surprising to him as anyone else.7 So dismal were prospects for the new government that Lisbon magazine Visão noted that “expectations are so low that a few intelligent measures… can make it look good.”8 Alas, Santana Lopes didn’t make any mildly smart moves—he was booted out of the seat within months.

  Santana Lopes is known for his bloopers, among them writing a fan letter to poet Machado de Assis, who passed away in 1908, and extolling the violin concertos of Chopin, who never wrote any concertos for violin.9

  Thankfully, a new government is finally steering Portugal onto a steadier course. Prime Minister José Sócrates has tightened the economic belt, and has also made Portugal stand out for something besides soccer and buffoonery: under Socrates, the country is becoming a world model in renewable energy—building the world’s largest solar station, erecting more giant windmills, and using lumber waste and other biomass to generate electricity.

  Palácio da Pena in Sintra: Portugal’s Sleeping Beauty

  We don’t expect Portugal to transform into an economic Germany overnight; besides, a certain backwardness is part of her charm. Some liken the country’s rustic villages to Spain of a few decades ago, and many who set eyes upon her fall in love with the fair land that still feels like the final edge of the world. Portugal could use a bit more self-confidence and a lot more marketing. Spain is the second-most visited destination in the world, but gorgeous Portugal doesn’t even place in the top twenty-five.

  For centuries now, the underlying issue in Portugal has been her depressive passivity and dreaminess. The Portuguese tendency to lose herself in wistful thinking is so well known that there’s a name for it: Sebastianismo, after sixteenth-century King Sebastião, who disappeared—and whose reappearance the people have been awaiting ever since.

  DOM SEBASTIÃO (1554–1578)

  He was sickly, barely educated, and mentally disturbed—never three winning qualities in a ruler—and then twenty-four-year-old King Sebastião became obsessed with Muslims. Previous rulers had already chased the Moors out of Portugal, but he still wanted to fight them, and headed across the Mediterranean to today’s Morocco. Setting off for North Africa in 1578 with 24,000 soldiers—whom he didn’t bother to train or equip terribly well—the king unleashed his pathetic army and was promptly defeated in the most devastating military disaster in Portugal’s history; one-third of his troops were slaughtered.10 The Muslims took hundreds of nobles as prisoners, demanding huge ransoms that drained the treasury. As for Sebastião, he probably perished in battle, but the news the Portuguese people received held a grain of hope: they were told he had merely vanished. The throne was empty and Sebastião had not left an heir. Spanish king Philip II annexed the country, and the Spanish rulers who followed stripped away Portugal’s autonomy, raised taxes, and made the Portuguese miserable. Resistance groups formed holding out hope out that the missing king would reappear and restore Portugal to her previous status as Europe’s richest land. Over the years, hapless Sebastião became a messianic figure; three centuries later, the faithful awaited his reappearance just as seriously, thinking only he could make Portugal great again, although he messed it up back when he had a real chance.

  Portugal is called “the country of the Three Fs”—football, Fátima, and fado. Football (soccer) is often the only way Portugal keeps her name in the news, with star players and events such as Euro 2004. Fátima is a pilgrimage site that lures millions, vividly illustrating Portugal’s continuing bonds with Catholicism. Sad fado—originally wailed by widows whose husbands were lost at sea—may best portray the passive Portuguese spirit that mixes deep yearning with a feeling of betrayal by forces beyond their control.

  History Review

  Some people get fine china when they trot down the aisle, but Teresa of León, the adored daughter of the king of Spain’s León region, did much better in 1096. When she wed Henry of Burgundy, a daring knight in the service of her father, the newlyweds received a future country as their wedding gift. The present was a mixed blessing. The territory in the Iberian northwest was a battle zone between Muslims, who’d been running the area since the eighth century, and Christians, who were driving them off in the reconquest. Dutiful son-in-law Henry kept the territory secure and loyal to León, but not so his son. Afonso Henriques expanded his parents’ patch of land to Portugal’s current boundaries, and in 1143 declared Portugal an independent and sovereign country.

  The Arab Muslims who landed on Iberia in the eighth cent
ury didn’t much care for the wetter, cooler climate of northern Portugal, and settled into the south around the Algarve. Chased out entirely by the thirteenth century, the Moors had nevertheless helped local agriculture by introducing citrus crops and had shown the Portuguese how to make azulejos, the painted tiles for which the country is now famous.

  UNKIND KIN

  Poor Teresa. When hubby Henry died in 1112, she was given control of their land, but then the boys of her clan barged in. Teresa’s nephew, the new king in the Spanish territory of León, wanted the land back and sent his army to reclaim it in 1127. Teresa clung tight to her wedding present—but then her son, Afonso Henriques, put together an army, and he too battled her beleaguered forces. Damned by the men in her family, Teresa finally relinquished control in 1128 and shuffled off to the fishing villages of the northwest.11

  As a runaway Spanish territory, Portugal was always looking over her shoulder at the kingdoms of León and Castile, which eventually came together to dominate Spain. The Portuguese monarchy was so wary of the easterly neighbors that as early as the fourteenth century, Portugal forged a military alliance with England. That bond paid off. In 1385, England helped the Portuguese shove back the kingdom of Castile, thanks to skilled English archers. The Portuguese were so gushingly grateful that they signed the 1386 Treaty of Windsor, which solidified “an inviolable, eternal, solid, perpetual, and true league of friendship.”12 The treaty soon led, as so many do, to daughter-swapping. The Duke of Lancaster, who had negotiated the treaty, married off his Philippa to Portuguese King João I. But an even more lavish affair—one that further cemented the Portuguese-Anglo bond—was the 1662 wedding of King João IV’s daughter Catherine of Braganza to King Charles II of England. The Portuguese princess came with an impressive dowry, the contents of which could not fit in one hope chest: papa shipped her off with $600,000 worth of gold, the Indian city of Bombay, the North African city of Tangier, and a lifetime supply of tea. Nevertheless, Charles quickly tired of her and was always trotting off having affairs.

  Portuguese princess Catherine is credited with starting the English tea craze and introducing that breakfast essential, orange marmalade.

  Fear of Spain did more than drive Portugal into England’s arms. Claustrophobically wedged between her Iberian rival and the ends of the earth—waters off Portugal were believed to mark the edge of the world—the Portuguese went on a potential suicide mission and headed to sea. The motivation wasn’t only lack of love for the Spanish, who blocked them from grabbing any additional land in Iberia. Conflicts between Christians and Muslims, including the Crusades, jammed up the overland spice trade across Asia. Parts of the Silk Road were blocked, attackers ran rampant, and some Muslims traders shunned business with Christians—all problems requiring finding new routes. A further factor: spreading Christianity. The Portuguese loathed Muslims, who had long ruled their land, and also wanted to butter up the Catholic Church, with which Spain was always currying favor.

  The Portuguese Age of Discovery officially began when the Portuguese conquered Ceuta, a North African town popular with Arab traders. Along with English bowmen, the Portuguese attacked the settlement in 1415; few Portuguese died in the battle that left most of Ceuta’s population dead in the streets. Beyond the corpses, however, they found hoards of spices, tapestries, gold, china, and silk, since traders used Ceuta as a storehouse between travels. The town never again filled up with such wealth. Once word of the Portuguese conquest got out, traders stopped coming.

  Hoping to uncover other treasure troves, Prince Henry—told by an astrologer that he would lead men to discoveries—set up the world’s finest maritime school in 1418, bringing together geographers, cartographers, astronomers, Genoese, Venetians, and Jews to study the mechanics of the discovery business. They pored over all the world’s maps, plotting out known physical geography drawn from Marco Polo, Ptolemy, and seafarers’ legends. They fashioned new instruments to measure geographical locations and consulted mapmakers about methods to best record what was seen. Henry’s navigation school even invented a more maneuverable vessel, the caravel, better suited for exploration. Then, brimming with new knowledge, the explorers shoved off into the unknown, marking Porto Santo and Madeira in 1420 and the Azores in 1427 as their first claims.

  In Madeira, while clearing the brush, the Portuguese inadvertently started a fire that raged for seven years.13 The result, once the blaze smoldered out, was potash-rich soil well-suited for growing grapes—launching the Madeira wine business—and was later used for gunpowder.

  The voyagers possessed the era’s most sophisticated technology and the most well-rounded knowledge of the physical world, but superstition still reigned; even the compass was suspected by many to be a likely toy of Satan. The most persistent folkloric beliefs concerned North Africa’s Cape Bojador, a promontory to the south of Morocco that was feared to be the absolute end of the earth and proved to be a profound psychological barrier. Henry sent out over a dozen ships with the sole goal of passing it, but crews mutinied and captains buckled under the fear. Even respected navigator Gil Eanes reported upon return that the cape was impassable—but Henry sent him straight back out. Facing what he believed was certain death, Eanes pushed on, only to discover that the ship didn’t plunge off the earth. The door to the rest of the world thus opened, and the rape of West Africa began.

  The brave Portuguese were shamelessly brutal as they uncovered what they called the Gold Coast, Ivory Coast, and Grain Coast for the treasures taken from those spots, slaughtering villagers who responded to their arrows with sticks and stones. The expanding Portuguese Empire grew wealthy from more than just metals, jewels, and tusks; the Portuguese also initiated the intercontinental African slave trade, later hauling their victims to Brazil, which they discovered in 1500.

  Soon the Cape of Good Hope, Africa’s southernmost point (and another psychological block), was rounded by Bartolomeu Dias—accidentally. In 1467, a violent storm blew his ship around the cape; even though the leap had been made, his frightened crew refused to push on. But the loudest “ka-ching” of all came from the 1497 voyage made by Vasco da Gama. Setting out with three ships and three years’ worth of food, he too rounded the cape, then stopped at today’s Mozambique and Kenya, searching for a pilot to lead him to India. He went through quite a few, but finally a Muslim guide sailed with him to Goa, in the south of the Indian subcontinent. And from the moment that da Gama dropped anchor, the fate of that part of the world changed forever.

  Despite his reputation as a sage “problem solver,” da Gama was short on diplomatic skills, often leaving a river of blood wherever he stepped ashore. In 1502, passing a boat of Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca, he first robbed them, then locked them in their hold before setting fire to the ship of 380 men, women, and children.14 His actions at Calicut, India, were just as despicable. Upon arrival in 1502, he demanded that the leader hand over the sultanate. The leader instead sent out envoys to negotiate peace. Da Gama killed them and chopped them into pieces. Their boat, heaped with body parts, was sent back with a message that here were the ingredients for the Calicut leader’s next curry.15

  The Portuguese lassoed Malacca, the Spice Islands, Timor, and Macau. When Columbus discovered what he called the East Indies (and what we know today as the Caribbean islands), King João II demanded the lands be ceded to Portugal, since they weren’t far from the Portuguese Azores. The Spanish, under whose flag Columbus had sailed, begged to differ, and the pope was called in to decide. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI drew a line in the Atlantic to demarcate how to divvy up new holdings. His decision: everything east of the line went to Portugal; lands to the west were Spain’s. The next year, he redrew the line 1,000 miles farther east. Under this second Treaty of Tordesillas, Portugal bagged Brazil. Perhaps the change was due to divine vision, but it’s more likely that the Portuguese had already stumbled upon Brazil, and gave the holy man a handsome financial incentive to pick up his pen again.

  After breaking the Arab
and Chinese hold on eastern markets, in 1505 Portugal declared a spice trade monopoly and tightly guarded the secret maps that showed the exact locations of the lands of nutmeg, pepper, and cloves. Every ship carried a map specialist who recorded new observations and kept maps heavily locked. One map keeper was a Dutchman, who bit by bit cribbed the maps; in 1596, he published the coveted Portuguese secrets, launching a nonstop spice war among Europeans.

  PORT OF CALL

  Port wine—fortified with brandy or other high-octane alcohol—made its official debut in the 1670s, after the British blockaded the French, foolishly cutting off their own access to wine. The Brits turned to Portugal, but found the wines to be swill, and jumped into producing wine themselves. To stabilize vinho for voyages, Brits added brandy—thus creating a libation called port, adored by connoisseurs. The British may have the reputation of being the world’s biggest fans of port, savored as an aperitif or dessert wine with Stilton and fruit, but the French actually sip more rubies, tawnies, and vintage ports than anyone else.16 Many ports are at their peak after aging over a century; some of the most valuable have been collecting dust since Napoleon’s time.17

  The sixteenth-century golden age, when Lisbon rose as Europe’s major trade center for goods from the Far East, was punctuated by dark moments, including a 1531 earthquake that killed thousands. Still, despite battles on the high seas, the country flourished all the more after the discovery of gold in Brazil, until foolish King Sebastião’s 1578 crusade sucked the treasury dry and left Portugal without a leader. Spaniards soon swept in. King Philip II ruled Spain and Portugal as one during the sixty-year period that Portuguese refer to as “the Spanish captivity.” Spain gobbled up Portugal’s remaining riches and dragged her into endless wars, including one against the English, long Portuguese allies. The Spaniards prevented Portugal from tending to her overseas lands, and the Dutch snatched up Portuguese territories in the East Indies and Brazil. In 1640, while Spaniards were distracted by internal uprisings, the Portuguese finally slipped off, grabbed a new monarch, and declared themselves independent; Spanish forces were spread too thin to grab the runaway back. Portugal remained free, but never regained her previous prominence or wealth, even with additional income from Brazil. In fact, Brazil, where Portugal set up cotton and sugar plantations, was in some ways a drain. So many Portuguese preferred living there that Portugal’s population diminished drastically into the eighteenth century, when King João V formally banned further emigration.18