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Japan. The Namban Screens and Wenceslau de Moraes These painted folding screens - “biombo” in Portuguese, derived from the similarly sounding Japanese word "biô-bu" [byōbu (南蛮屏風)] - portray the arrival/presence of Portuguese in 16th century Japan. Namban, or Nanban-Jin, meaning barbarians[1] from the South, as they were known, arrived in Japan in 1543. 93[2] of…

The Portuguese Columbus The (hypo)thesis of a Portuguese nationality of Columbus should not surprise us as many other national/regional origins have been claimed for him by many different authors of many different nationalities: Catalan[1], Galician, Corse, Greek, French, English, Danish, Bulgarian, are some of the different claimed origins for Colombo listed by Alexandre Picheiro Marques.[2]…

The Euro / Debt Problem Rodrigues (2012) and Azevedo (1988) count till now several episodes of default or debt renegotiation by the Portuguese state along its existence in following years: 1543-4, 1549 and 1560 (trade factory of Antwerp, and Casa da Índia in Lisbon), 1605 (during the personal union with the Spanish crown), 1828 (shortly…

Luso-American Links Interactions between the two countries go way back to the early beginnings of what was to become the United States of America. Some of the readers who might have attended the outdoor drama, The Lost Colony, will have been confronted with the only two villains in the play: Wanchese, a treacherous Indian, and…

Portuguese Decolonization Decolonizition took 13-14 years of war in the continental African colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. Civilian African casualties were estimated at around 100 thousand deaths, some of them in massacres, the most scandalous of which in Wiriyamu (Viriamu) and surrounding villages of Mozambique was estimated at 385-500 deaths happened December 16, 1972. …

Chronology   1128. At the battle of São Mamede (near Guimarães in the North of today’s Portugal), Afonso Henriques, Count of Portugal[1], son of count Henry of Burgundy of the Capet family ruling France, who had come to Iberia before the turn of the century to assist the locals in their fight against the Moors,…

Portugal and the Jews Moisés Espírito Santo[1] goes as far as to defend the thesis according to which pre-Roman language, religion, toponymy, and other civilizational traits of Iberian people would stem from Phoenician and Canaanite, namely Hebrew/Jewish origins. This would contrast with Islamic vestiges that would be practically non-existent in religious traditions and a lot…

Monsanto (Holy Mountain) and its Portuguese origins, at least in name When I recently googled ‘Monsanto’ I got about 6,910,000 results in 0.27 seconds and the first ones refered to a A Sustainable Agriculture Company, to the respective entry of the English version of the Wikipedia (“Monsanto Company is a publicly traded American multinational chemical,…