Yet in spite of these glories, the heroic age of Portugal was over, and in little more than twenty years after John III.’s death, the country, which had so long maintained its independence, was absorbed by Spain. This was to be expected from the decline the causes of which have been analysed, but the final catastrophe was hastened by the death of the heir to the throne, Dom João, in 1554, which brought about on the death of John III., in 1557, the accession to the throne of a child of three years old, the ill-fated Dom Sebastian. Enough has been said of Portugal during the heroic age of the Portuguese nation; it is now time to study the deeds of the men, who made the age heroic by their valour and daring. [Illustration: text decoration] IX. THE PORTUGUESE IN INDIA AND THE EASTERN SEAS. There is no subject that calls more loudly for an historian than the history of the Portuguese in India during the sixteenth century. There are Portuguese authorities in plenty, for, with a vivid perception of the picturesque, many of the greatest writers of the golden age of Portuguese literature devoted themselves to this fascinating subject. João de Barros, the Portuguese Livy, and a contemporary of the great Indian viceroys, wrote a history of the first half century of Portuguese conquest in India in several volumes, full of interest and charm; Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto, and Manoel de Faria e Sousa, all worked in the same field, and the lives of the two greatest of the Portuguese viceroys have full light thrown upon them in the Commentaries of Affonso de Alboquerque,[13] published by his son, and the beautiful Life of Dom João de Castro by Jacinto Freire de Andrade, which is a model of a perfect biography. Nor have the leaders of the revival of the study of history neglected to treat this subject in a scientific manner; many valuable monographs and reprints of precious documents have seen the light within the last fifty years, and much material still remains undigested and unarranged in the archives at the Torre del Tombo. Yet this period, in spite of all the work which has been done upon it, still remains without an historian, fitted by a thorough knowledge, both of Indian history and of the state of civilization in India at the period in question, to draw out the salient and interesting points of the first direct contact between modern Europe and modern Asia, between the East and the West.