Portuguese Empire
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The Portuguese empire was the first global maritime empire, stretching from Brazil to Macau and holding out until 1975, though its greatest age lasted from the early fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Prince Henry the Navigator sent ships down the African coast from the 1420s, and explorers rounded the bojador and the cape: Bartolomeu Dias reached the southern tip in 1488 and Vasco da Gama sailed to India in 1498. Afonso de Albuquerque took Goa in 1510, Malacca in 1511 and Hormuz in 1515, giving Portugal control of the spice route, while the fatorias, fortified trading posts, relied on a fleet of caravels and later galleons. Brazil was claimed from 1500, sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans made it valuable, and gold from Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century shifted the colony's weight. The union of the crowns with Spain from 1580 to 1640 left the empire exposed to Dutch and English attack, and the Dutch took part of Brazil, the Cape and Ceylon. Portugal kept Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Macau and East Timor into the twentieth century, when the Carnation Revolution of 1975 and the independence wars ended the last colonies. Portuguese remains the language of some 250 million people.