While, in political life and commercial prosperity, the people of Portugal had been at home becoming more civilized, more self-controlled, and more wealthy during the fifteenth century, its sailors had been growing more daring and enterprising. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese were to have their reward. Lisbon was to take the place of Venice as the depôt for all the products of the East; the trade of Persia, India, China, Japan, and the Spice Islands, was to fall into their hands; they were to produce great captains and writers, and were to become the wealthiest nation in Europe. But that same sixteenth century was to see the Portuguese power sink, and the independence, won by Affonso Henriques and maintained by John “the Great,” vanish away; it was to see Portugal, which had been the greatest nation of its time, decline in its fame, and become a mere province of Spain. Hand in hand with increased wealth came corruption and depopulation, and within a single century after the epoch-making voyage of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese people, tamed by the Inquisition, were to show no sign of their former hardihood. This is the lesson that the Story of Portugal in the sixteenth century teaches, that the greatness of a nation depends not upon its wealth and commercial prosperity, but upon the thews and sinews and the stout hearts of its people. [Illustration: text decoration] [Illustration: text decoration] VIII. THE HEROIC AGE OF PORTUGAL. John II., surnamed “the Perfect,” the only son of Affonso V., succeeded his father as King of Portugal in 1481, and his short reign was marked by events of the utmost importance at home, as well as by the great discoveries of Diogo Cam and Bartholomeu Diaz. He had shown himself a gallant soldier in his father’s last African expedition, when he was knighted, and at the battle of Toro, and also a capable ruler, as regent, during the absence of Affonso V. in France, and during that king’s frequent periods of abdication. He saw the folly of his father in wasting his strength in African expeditions, and in fruitless wars with Castile, and he therefore recurred to the wise policy of his great-grandfather, John “the Great,” in avoiding all interference with Spanish affairs, and maintaining a close alliance with England. He also, as has already been said, adopted enthusiastically all the schemes of Prince Henry “the Navigator,” and laboured for the discovery of a route to India by sea. He possessed all the hereditary aptitude of the princes of the house of Aviz for literature, and fostered the spirit of the Renaissance in Portugal in the study of the classical languages, the advancement of science, and the encouragement of art. He was a broad-minded, tolerant man, with ideas far in advance of his age in many respects, and possessing at once an inflexible will and remarkable sweetness of disposition.