It shrank the globe, thereafter yoking Asia inseparably with western Europe. Vasco da Gama’s singular voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, up the East Coast of Africa, and across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, India, is the event that a number of historians have seen as the defining moment of the beginning of modernity. But he had friends and relatives in high places, and in Coimbra he acquired a solid grounding in classical literature just 50 years after the Portuguese reached India. There is no record of his having officially attended the University of Coimbra. He was born to a Portuguese family of minor nobility. Yet if he was ready to defend his own honor or that of others with his sword, it would be his pen that would most indelibly mark history. Of his otherwise undocumented soldiering, we know that he lost the use of that one eye in Ceuta. He was well-read in the humanities, well-versed in the sciences, skilled at arms, and valiant of spirit” (Lund, p. He was a man of sharp mind, clear judgement and rare wit. His face was freckled and he was blind in one eye. The following description is found in an anonymous early-seventeenth-century memoir: “That famous poet Luís de Camóes-who, speaking in absolutes, was the prince of them all-was a tall man with broad shoulders and reddish hair. In bold Renaissance fashion, Luís de Camóes (1524?-80) fashioned himself into a scholar, a poet, and a soldier. Portugal’s national epic poem, The Lusiads celebrates the Portuguese nation and its discovery of the sea route to India, including a recapitulation of the entire history of Portugal and a competition between Roman gods to promote or foil the expedition.Įvents in History at the Time of the PoemĮvents in History at the Time the Poem Was Written An epic poem set in Portugal, Africa, and India and at sea between 1139 to the mid-1500s published in Portuguese (as Os Lusfadas) in 1572, in English in 1655.
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