A Country of One Million People Ruled Half the Ocean - Full Detailed Documentary
Ancestors Civilization
318,942 views
In 1500, Portugal held fewer than one and a half million people. It had no great army, no continental territory worth defending, and a border with a far larger neighbour that could have swallowed it in a season. Within thirty years it controlled trading posts from Brazil to Nagasaki, and the pepper price in Venice collapsed because of decisions made in Lisbon.
This documentary follows how that happened, and why it did not last.
The story begins on the Atlantic coast, where a kingdom pushed to the edge of Europe had only one direction left to expand. It follows the slow, expensive decades of coastal exploration down the African shore, where each voyage bought a few hundred miles of knowledge and cost ships and men. It covers the moment the Cape was rounded and the Indian Ocean opened, and the violent commercial system Portugal built there afterwards, run not by settlement but by fortresses, licences, and control of a handful of narrow sea passages.
You will hear how Goa, Malacca, Hormuz, and Macau functioned as a network rather than as colonies, and why a kingdom that could never occupy Asia could still tax its trade. You will hear what the arrangement cost the people living in those places, and what it cost Portugal itself, as silver and pepper flowed through a country that increasingly produced nothing of its own.
The final chapters cover the long unravelling. The Dutch and English arriving with better finance and more ships. The union with Spain that dragged Portugal into wars that were not its own. Brazil growing until it dwarfed the country that founded it. And the strange fact that the Portuguese empire outlasted every other European empire, holding territory into the nineteen seventies, long after the reasons for it had disappeared.
20 Comments
we are direct ancestors of the sailors from the Albuquerque campaign,after Vasco da Gama.
we speak,Pigeon Portuguese,
which is a dialect called KRISTANG,we have a community that have names like carvelo D'souza lazario etc, etc.for a country that is tiny,Portugal definitely is still formidable in the world stage.
A lot of the TV Shows I've watched end up mentioning "Portugal" and "Lisbon" as the central Western City of the Medieval World, but none have had travelling plots there, such a shame.
WHAT GOES UP MUST FALL DOWN
THE GRAVITATIONAL PULL LAW❤❤❤
A colourful tapestry of true perseverance of a wonderful people that time may try to erase but history never will.
A beautiful documentary, enjoyed it immensely.
Makes me extremely proud & sing from the rooftop.
Thank you ! 🇵🇹
✒️tq7
A Country of One Million People Ruled Half the Ocean - Full Detailed Documentary
Ancestors Civilization
318,942 views
In 1500, Portugal held fewer than one and a half million people. It had no great army, no continental territory worth defending, and a border with a far larger neighbour that could have swallowed it in a season. Within thirty years it controlled trading posts from Brazil to Nagasaki, and the pepper price in Venice collapsed because of decisions made in Lisbon.
This documentary follows how that happened, and why it did not last.
The story begins on the Atlantic coast, where a kingdom pushed to the edge of Europe had only one direction left to expand. It follows the slow, expensive decades of coastal exploration down the African shore, where each voyage bought a few hundred miles of knowledge and cost ships and men. It covers the moment the Cape was rounded and the Indian Ocean opened, and the violent commercial system Portugal built there afterwards, run not by settlement but by fortresses, licences, and control of a handful of narrow sea passages.
You will hear how Goa, Malacca, Hormuz, and Macau functioned as a network rather than as colonies, and why a kingdom that could never occupy Asia could still tax its trade. You will hear what the arrangement cost the people living in those places, and what it cost Portugal itself, as silver and pepper flowed through a country that increasingly produced nothing of its own.
The final chapters cover the long unravelling. The Dutch and English arriving with better finance and more ships. The union with Spain that dragged Portugal into wars that were not its own. Brazil growing until it dwarfed the country that founded it. And the strange fact that the Portuguese empire outlasted every other European empire, holding territory into the nineteen seventies, long after the reasons for it had disappeared.