BECOMING A NATION

There is no doubt that by late Medieval times Portugal was already a fully autonomous kingdom. But how and to what extent did its people, inhabitants of a country that had been born of the politics of feudalism and the Reconquest, also go on to attain an awareness of their collective identity, a sense of nationhood and a commitment to being Portuguese?

These have long been absorbing questions for Portuguese historians, giving rise to much thought and discussion. But one fact, already implicit in our story so far, seems undeniable: the kingdom was an essential prerequisite for the nation, and the latter could not have developed without the pre-existence of the former. That having been acknowledged, it can nevertheless be said that by the early fourteenth century one of the key cultural ingredients of Portuguese nationhood was already in place. This was the national language, with an early form of Portuguese being spoken and written throughout the country. Portuguese was a composite tongue that took its structure and most of its vocabulary from the Galician-Portuguese used in the northwest of the peninsula at the time of Afonso Henriques; but it also borrowed significantly from Lusitano and other Mozarab dialects, thereby absorbing hundreds of Arabic words. During the thirteenth century it was increasingly used in official documents, and by the reign of King Dinis it had become the exclusive language of secular government, leaving Latin to the church. Portugal was among the first European states to accomplish this change.