Junot’s main advantage lay in the extreme military impotence of Portugal. That realm found its one sole centre in Lisbon, where a tenth of the population of the whole kingdom and half of its wealth were concentrated. At Lisbon alone was there an arsenal of any size, or a considerable store of muskets and powder. Without the resources of the capital the nation was absolutely unable to equip anything fit to be called an army. Oporto was a small place in comparison, and no other town in the kingdom had over 20,000 souls. Almeida and Elvas, the two chief fortresses of the realm, were safe in the hands of French garrisons. The provinces might rise, but without lavish help from Spain or England they could not put in the field an army of even 10,000 men, for assemblies of peasants armed with pikes and fowling-pieces are not armies, and of field-artillery there was hardly a piece outside Lisbon, Elvas, and Almeida. Nor was there left any nucleus of trained soldiers around which the nation might rally: the old army was dissolved and its small remnant was on the way to the Baltic. The case of Spain and of Portugal was entirely different when they rose against Napoleon. The former country was in possession of the greater part of its own fortresses, had not been systematically disarmed, and could dispose--in Galicia and Andalusia--of large bodies of veteran troops. Portugal was without an army, an arsenal, a defensible fortress, or a legal organization--civil or military--of any kind. It is necessary to remember this in order to excuse the utter feebleness of the Portuguese rising in June, 1808. Otherwise it would have seemed strange that a nation of over 2,000,000 souls could not anywhere produce forces sufficient to resist for a single day a column of 3,000 or 4,000 French soldiers.