A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, Volume 2: From Beginnings to 1807: The Portuguese EmpireThe Kingdom of Portugal was created as a by product of the Christian Reconquest of Hispania. With no geographical raison d' tre and no obvious roots in its Roman, Germanic, or Islamic pasts, it for long remained a small, struggling realm on Europe's outer fringe. Then, in the early fifteenth century, this unlikely springboard for Western expansion suddenly began to accumulate an empire of its own, eventually extending more than halfway around the