Portugal, my homeland! – Observer
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My homeland sparks from the divine fire of the Celts, it is the daughter of the warrior daring of the Lusitanians of Viriato, defying the greatest empires in the world ever formed, based in the mythical and powerful Rome! Here was born the identity and the unbreakable will for independence and freedom of my homeland!
But my homeland is equally heir to the classical and philosophical culture of the Greek peoples, applied to the order of the greater culture of Egypt, of the administrative and military organization of Rome, influences always fused and civilization of the Celts, Phoenicians and other legal cultures of strong and remote.
My rare Christian homeland for over 1500 years, but received from the south the privilege of Muslim spice, brought by Tariq in 711, which has been eternalized and maintained with the grace of the divine, in habits and customs, in architecture, in aesthetics, but also in mathematics and other areas of knowledge. We became more resistant to culture than, very late, to other religions, to be so peacefully, interreligious and Christian, which coexisted with a religion so peacefully and of Christian origin, which, very late, became so peaceful.
My Homeland is the result of the reconquest created with Pelayo’s victory in Covadonga, Asturias, and continued by the Leonese Royal Family as we emerged from our desire to be Homeland and Nation, with our own identity and culture. It was founded with the courage and military genius of D. Afonso Henriques and supporters, in the Battle of S. Mamede on June 24, 1128, against the Galician brothers Peres de Trava, he both fell in love with D. Teresa, his mother; it was reinforced in Ourique in 1139, under the aegis of Santiago’s flaming sword, the Matamouros; formalized before the Kingdom of León in Zamora in 1143; and was definitively recognized by the Vatican, through the Manifestis proum of Pope Alexander III, on May 23, 1179.
From 1128 to the papal recognition of 1179 there was a lot of blood and tears, but also a lot of diplomatic skill, to which the Templars of Hugo de Payens, indoctrinated by the cousin of D. Afonso Henriques, São Bernardo de Claraval, great reformer of the Benedictine Order are not unrelated. and founder of the Cistercian Order, considered by many, with propriety, the Spiritual Father of Portugal. If the men of the Order of the Temple dealt with war and reconquest, with diplomacy and the political structuring of the State, they took care of the Regular Monks of the Monastery of Santa Cruz, in Coimbra, especially João Peculiar and S. Teotónio.
In 1147, St. Bernard reinforces his role as spiritual tutor of the Portuguese Nation by negotiating the Crusaders’ participation in the conquest of Lisbon from the Moors, consolidating his connection with Portugal, after the installation of the Cistercian Order in our country in S. João of Tarouca in 1142, followed by the Monasteries of Salzedas and later of Alcobaça, today recognized as a World Heritage Site.
My homeland is the fruit of the political-strategic genius D. Dinis who, after negotiating with Castile and León the oldest frontier in Europe in Alcanizes, instead of persecuting and killing the Templars and theirs, where Count D Henrique and his son, our founding King, determined Pope Clement V and the French King Felipe IV, converted into the Order of Christ, with the mission of defending our seas, thus constituting the Portuguese Navy. D. Dinis thus created “the knights of the seas” as they called Father António Vieira more than centuries later, laying the foundations of the discovery movement that would emerge with the conquest of Ceuta.
My homeland was made on August 14, 1385 in Aljubarrota, with the courage of our Master of Aviz, D. João I, and with the military genius of D. Nuno Álvares Pereira, against an important part of our Nobility that He had sold Castile for promises of prebends and other perks. D. João I was born the bastard son of a King, rolling up his sleeves and asserting himself among the European royal families with the conquest of a European country outside Europe, organizing the largest amphibious operation until the first Fez, conquering Ceuta the August 21, 1415.
From here, the genius and stubbornness of our Infante D. Henrique, the Navigator, the patronage of our court and the knowledge and means of our Order of Christ would do the rest, launching Portugal into the greatest of its epics, the discoveries, famously immortalized in the masterpiece of Portuguese literature, the Lusíadas by Luis Vaz de Camões.
The battles in Morocco against the so-called infidels were made of glories and tragedies, being these that we bear more recent scars than the palms of the former. Crowning this English effort is the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, where our young Dreaming King and a large part of our elites remained, in a military enterprise that was both ambitious and foolish. As always, history has later, after ours, those who, in 1578, announced the end of Portugal. Here Del Rei that we lost the King, the Nobility and Nobility and there is no Fatherland that can resist!
But Portugal resisted because, once again, the erudite thinkers of the time, forgot that the Fatherland was always the result of the indomitable will of the noble people who, prostrate on the ground and surrendered to the self-abandonment of the vanquished, once again sublimated the tragedy and he would invent the “Desired”, which would have to return on a foggy morning, no matter how bad the weather and peoples were. And that’s how our people discovered, for decades, King D. Sebastião were allowed to us by our mythical ability to resist, to dream and others to wait in Italy for national salvation.
My homeland was the land of the Kings of two Kingdoms, the Filipes of Castile, in which the former fulfilled the agreements he made with the Kingdom of his Mother, Isabel de Portugal, firstborn daughter of D. Manuel I, and his son and grandson , endowed with less intelligence and sensible policies, ignoring the agreements of the former and brought us the so-called “Desired King”, embodied in the figure of D. João IV, driven by the vanity of D. Luísa de Gusmão, “before Queen for a day , than Duchess all her life!”.
Homeland white, black and above all mestizo, carrying on the skin the impregnated scent of pepper, cloves and cinnamon from India, drinking tea from Japan and silk from China, carrying on my wrist the silver of S. Jorge da Mine and Brazil. But my homeland also carries within itself the scent of the tropics, the potato from Brazil, the okra from Angola, the curry from Mozambique and from so many other places, in a continuous movement of taking and bringing, giving and receiving, selling and to buy, or simply to exchange, in which the secret was always more in peaceful coexistence and in adapting to other peoples and cultures, integrating them, than in making war or trying to dominate, because Franciscan was our natural matrix. But it is also the water, the salt and the odors of the seas and oceans of the planet, where we leave the crease and the scarred mark of our ships and the tears and the tears and the flesh of our sailors and navigators.
My homeland is a mythical-philosophical product of the professions of Bandarra, Camões, Father António Vieira and Fernando Pessoa, in an ever unfinished movement of construction of the era announced by Joaquim de Fiore in the twelfth century, which after the age of the Father, God (Old Testament), with physical centrality in Jerusalem, from the age of the Son, Christ (New Testament), with physical centrality in Rome, would come that of the Holy Spirit and the Kingdom of Universal fraternity, in line with the idea of the V Empire of Anthony Vieira and Pessoa, centrally located in Lisbon, Queen of the Seas!
From this mythical-philosity movement we have the discoveries of the Templars, made Knights of the Seas by D. Dinis, and the Holy Spirit festivities sponsored by his wife, our Queen Saint Isabel, with unique expressions worldwide in the feast of the Tabuleiros in Tomar and, above all, in the Holy Spirit festivities in the Azores. For our luck and benefit, fate wanted D. Dinis and the Holy Queen to be avowed Joaquimites, despite the opposition of the Holy See and the ruling clergy!
D. João, who revolutionized geostrategy and the most perfect commerce by defining as a national goal to find the maritime route to India and the Christian kingdom of Prester João around the Cape of Storms, to which he managed to give the name of Cape of Good Hope, throwing the myth of the giant Adamastor into the dustbin of history. From the fleet of Bartolomeu Dias came, in 1488, the good news that confirmed as our navigators, cosmographers and mathematicians, that it would be possible to reach India from the south, removing the monopoly of the trade of differences to Arabs, Venetians and Genoese, turning to Lisbon from the 16th century the Capital of World Commerce and the most cosmopolitan in Europe. Fate wanted the chalice of glory raised by his successor and cousin, D. Manuel I, the lucky heir of a millimetric strategy and stubbornly followed by our D. João II, considered by many to be the creator of Science.
My homeland is deeply indebted to the navigators and sailors who traversed seas and oceans and who brought to our knowledge two thirds of the earth’s surface, such as Vasco da Gama, Bartolomeu Dias, Pedro Alvares Cabral, Diogo Cão, João Gonçalves Zarco, Tristão Vaz Teixeira, Gonçalo Cabral, among many others.
But my homeland is also the result of the thinking of Antero de Quental, Eça de Queirós, Oliveira Martins, Guerra Junqueiro, Ramalho Ortigão and the bucolicism of Teixeira de Pascoaes; the modernisms of Pessoa, Mário de Sá Carneiro and Almada Negreiros, and José Régio, Gaspar Simões, António Sérgio, Aquilino Ribeiro and Miguel Torga, among others, as well as the Lusitano Integralism of Francisco Rolão Preto, Alberto de Monsaraz, Hipólito Raposo and Antonio Sardinha.
My homeland is the hope of monarchists and calls for republicans, for men of the Estado Novo and for the hopes of April.
But my homeland is above all the work of the resilience, the will and the unbreakable will of its people who, against all the monitors of strategies and experts in geopolitics, always resisted and survived the greatest tragedies, made themselves great through genius, work and daring. of its people, and is today an example of a land of religious, ethnic, social, cultural and political tolerance.
My homeland is the head and face of Europe, as designed by Camões and Lima de Freitas (see), and its Atlantic pier, with Mediterranean baths to the south, coincides with a natural bridge to the world. It is not mainly for the world in Europe, because it is for Europe an experience with more than 600 years to go back, taking and coming, buying and selling, learning and teaching, sharing and sharing, but integrating and mediating cultures and civilizations, revealing itself if here the greatest of its virtues and perhaps its permanent and noble design.
Mine, and this one should not be said to avoid the envious part, best of all Homelands, because it is built and built from people, greed belongs to the Homelands and several Homelands belong to the Homelands!
My homeland, and I shouldn’t say, to avoid the greed of envy, is the best of all homelands, because all homelands built, made and from people from different distances are different homelands!