page_title: History of Portugal
section_title: Portuguese Empire
hierarchical_section_title: History of Portugal / Naval exploration and Portuguese Empire (15th–16th centuries) / Discovery of the sea route to India and the Treaty of Tordesillas / Portuguese Empire
caption_attribution_description: Half-length portrait of a bearded Ferdinand Magellan (circa 1480-1521) facing front.
context_page_description: The history of Portugal can be traced from circa 400,000 years ago, when the region of present-day Portugal was inhabited by Homo heidelbergensis. The oldest human fossil is the skull discovered in the Cave of Aroeira in Almonda. Later Neanderthals roamed the northern Iberian peninsula. Homo sapiens arrived in Portugal around 35,000 years ago.
  Pre-Celtic tribes such as Lusitanians, Turduli and Oestriminis lived in the centre and north. In the south the Cynetes lived in the Algarve and Lower Alentejo regions before the 6th century BC, developed the city of Tartessos and the written Tartessian language, and left many stelae in the south of the country. Early in the first millennium BC, waves of Celts from Central Europe invaded and intermarried with the local populations to form several ethnic groups and many tribes.
  Their presence is traceable, in broad outline, through archaeological and linguistic evidence. They dominated the northern and central area, while the south retained much of its Tartessian character, combined with the Celtici until the Roman conquest.
context_section_description: By the 16th century, the two million people who lived in the original Portuguese lands ruled a vast empire with many millions of inhabitants in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. From 1514, the Portuguese had reached China and Japan. In the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, one of Cabral's ships discovered Madagascar (1501), which was partly explored by Tristão da Cunha (1507); Mauritius was discovered in 1507, Socotra occupied in 1506, and in the same year, Lourenço de Almeida visited Ceylon.
  In the Red Sea, Massawa was the most northerly point frequented by the Portuguese until 1541, when a fleet under Estevão da Gama penetrated as far as Suez. Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf, was seized by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1515, who also entered into diplomatic relations with Persia. In 1521, a force under Antonio Correia conquered Bahrain and ushered in a period of almost 80 years of Portuguese rule of the Persian Gulf archipelago
  On the Asiatic mainland, the first trading stations were established by Pedro Álvares Cabral at Cochin and Calicut (1501). More important were the conquests of Goa (1510) and Malacca (1511) by Afonso de Albuquerque, and the acquisition of Diu (1535) by Martim Afonso de Sousa. East of Malacca, Albuquerque sent Duarte Fernandes as envoy to Siam (now Thailand) in 1511 and dispatched to the Moluccas two expeditions (1512, 1514), which founded the Portuguese dominion in Maritime Southeast Asia. The Portuguese established their base in the Spice Islands on the island of Ambon. Fernão Pires de Andrade visited Canton in 1517 and opened up trade with China, where, in 1557, the Portuguese were permitted to occupy Macau. Japan, accidentally reached by three Portuguese traders in 1542, soon attracted large numbers of merchants and missionaries. In 1522, one of the ships in the expedition that Ferdinand Magellan organized in the Spanish service completed the first circumnavigation of the globe.
caption: Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães)
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