A History of Portugal

Portugal has the oldest fixed borders in Europe. The lines on the map today are very close to the lines drawn in the thirteenth century, which is not true of any of its neighbors. That continuity is the thing worth knowing about the country before anything else.

A kingdom, and then a border that stopped moving

Afonso Henriques took the title of king and, by the Treaty of Zamora in 1143, was recognized as one by his cousin in León. The country then spent a century pushing south, taking Lisbon in 1147 and reaching the Algarve by 1249. In 1297 the Treaty of Alcanices settled the eastern border with Castile. Allowing for a few small adjustments, it has been in the same place ever since.

So a Portuguese person and a Spanish person standing on either side of that line are standing on a border older than almost every other institution in Europe.

Going out into the Atlantic

In 1415 a Portuguese force took Ceuta, on the African side of the strait. What followed was not a single voyage but a program of them, pushed for decades by the king's son Henrique, the prince the English call Henry the Navigator. Madeira was settled from about 1420 and the Azores from the 1430s. Ships worked their way down a coast nobody had charted, a stretch at a time, and each return added to a picture of the ocean that only Portugal had.

The results came in a rush at the end of the century. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488. Vasco da Gama reached India by sea in 1498. Pedro Alvares Cabral made landfall in Brazil in 1500. Fernao de Magalhaes, sailing for Spain, set out in 1519 on the voyage that first went around the world, though he did not live to finish it.

The stone that gives this house its name

A crew that reached somewhere new did not plant a flag. They planted a padrao: a carved stone pillar, cut with the arms of Portugal and a name and a date, set into the ground and left standing. It was a marker, a claim and a message to the next ship, and it was meant to outlast everyone who saw it put up. Several are still standing. Some are in museums, and one or two are still where they were placed.

That object is where the name Casa do Padrao comes from. A padrao says someone was here and that it mattered enough to write down in stone.

The ground moves

On the morning of 1 November 1755 an earthquake destroyed Lisbon, and a tsunami and a fire finished what it started. Tens of thousands died. The city was rebuilt on a plan, by a minister who sent surveyors out to ask what people had felt and seen, which is one of the first things resembling a scientific study of an earthquake. The grid of the Baixa in Lisbon is that rebuild.

Half a century later Napoleon invaded, and in 1807 the court sailed for Brazil. For over a decade the Portuguese empire was run from Rio de Janeiro. The king went home in 1821, Brazil declared independence in 1822, and Portugal spent much of the century that followed arguing with itself about how it should be governed.

The republic, and the end of the titles

On 5 October 1910 Portugal became a republic. The Constitution of 1911 abolished noble titles outright. There is no Portuguese nobility recognized in law today, no register of it, and no authority that grants a title. What is left is history, family memory, and the affection people have for the words themselves.

The dictatorship known as the Estado Novo held power from the 1930s until 25 April 1974, when a coup led by junior officers ended it with almost no blood spilled. People handed carnations to the soldiers, which is how it got its name. Portugal has been a democracy since, and joined what is now the European Union in 1986.

Why any of this is on a shop

Because the honorific this shop sells belongs to the world described above, and not to the present one. Titles of nobility stopped being legal instruments in Portugal in 1911. A certificate from us is a keepsake that borrows the form of something the country once took seriously, and it is worth knowing what that something was. If you want the plain version of what we do and do not claim, the legal notice is the page for it.