Kingdom of León in the context of "Kingdom of Castile"

Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. It is an unitary semi-presidential republic composed by continental Portugal and two autonomous regions, with Lisbon as both its capital and largest city. The continental portion borders Spain to the north and east, with Madeira and the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean. It features the westernmost point in continental Europe.

The western Iberian Peninsula has been continuously inhabited since prehistoric times, with the earliest signs of settlement dating to 5500 BC. Celtic and Iberian peoples arrived in the first millennium BC. The region came under Roman control in the second century BC. A succession of Germanic peoples and the Alans ruled from the fifth to eighth centuries AD. Muslims invaded mainland Portugal in the eighth century, but were gradually expelled by the Christian Reconquista, culminating with the capture of the Algarve between 1238 and 1249. Modern Portugal began taking shape during this period, initially as a county of the Christian Kingdom of León in 868, and formally as a sovereign kingdom with the Manifestis Probatum in 1179.

The Kingdom of Portugal was a monarchy in the western Iberian Peninsula and the predecessor of the modern Portuguese Republic. Existing to various extents between the mid-12th century and the early 20th century, it was also known as the Kingdom of Portugal and the Algarves after 1471, and was the main constituent of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves, which existed between 1815 and 1822. It coexisted with the Portuguese Empire, the realm's overseas colonies.

The nucleus of the Portuguese state was the County of Portugal, established in the 9th century as part of the Reconquista by Vímara Peres, a vassal of the King of Asturias. The county became part of the Kingdom of León in 1097, and the Counts of Portugal established themselves as rulers of an independent kingdom in the 12th century, following the Battle of São Mamede. The kingdom was ruled by the Afonsine Dynasty until the 1383–85 Crisis, after which the monarchy passed to the House of Aviz.

As of 1 October 2025, Spain had a total population of 49,442,844. The modern Kingdom of Spain arose from the accretion of several independent Iberian realms, including the Kingdoms of León, Castile, Navarre, the Crown of Aragon and Granada, all of which, together with the modern state of Portugal, were successor states to the late antique Christian Visigothic Kingdom after the Reconquista.

Spain's population surpassed 49 million inhabitants for the first time in history in 2025, with a total population of 49,442,844 people living in Spain. Its population density, at 97 inhabitants per square kilometre (250/sq mi), is much lower than other Western European countries, yet, with the exception of microstates, it has the highest real density population in Europe, based on density of inhabited areas. With the notable exception of Madrid, Spain's capital city, the most densely populated areas lie around the coast.

The Crown of Castile was a medieval polity in the Iberian Peninsula that formed in 1230 as a result of the third and definitive union of the crowns and, some decades later, the parliaments of the kingdoms of Castile and León upon the accession of the then Castilian king, Ferdinand III, to the vacant Leonese throne. It continued to exist as a separate entity after the personal union in 1469 of the crowns of Castile and Aragon with the marriage of the Catholic Monarchs up to the promulgation of the Nueva Planta decrees by Philip V in 1716.

In 1492, the voyage of Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the Americas were major events in the history of Castile. The West Indies, Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea were also a part of the Crown of Castile when transformed from lordships to kingdoms of the heirs of Castile in 1506, with the Treaty of Villafáfila, and upon the death of Ferdinand the Catholic. The discovery of the Pacific Ocean, the conquest of the Aztec Empire, the conquest of the Inca Empire, the Spanish conquest of New Granada as well as the conquest of the Philippines all helped shape the Crown of Castile into a global empire in the 16th Century.

The County of Portugal (Galician-Portuguese: Comtato de Portugalle; referred to as Portugalia in contemporary documents) refers to two successive medieval counties in the region around Guimarães and Porto, today corresponding to litoral northern Portugal, within which the identity of the Portuguese people formed. The first county existed from the mid-ninth to the mid-eleventh centuries as a vassalage of the Kingdom of Asturias and the Kingdom of Galicia and also part of the Kingdom of León, before being abolished as a result of rebellion. A larger entity under the same name was then reestablished in the late 11th century and subsequently elevated by its count in the mid-12th century into an independent Kingdom of Portugal.

Manifestis Probatum (Latin for 'Manifestly proven') is a papal bull and the founding document of Portugal. On 23 May 1179 Pope Alexander III promulgated the bull. The bull officially recognized the independence of Portugal from Leon by confirming the Kingdom of Portugal to the now-recognized king Afonso Henriques and his successors. The bull is, therefore, the single most important written document from Portugal's independence process.

The Papacy did not recognize the legitimacy of Afonso's adoption of the royal title in 1139, and continued to regard him as a vassal of the kingdom of León. On December 13, 1143, Afonso wrote Pope Innocent II the letter Claves Regni (Latin for 'Keys of the Kingdom'), declaring his decision to enfeoff Portugal to the Holy See and asking for protection against any interference in Portugal's territory. On May 1, 1144, Pope Lucius II replied by letter Devotionen Tuam (Latin for 'Your Devotion') and stated that he recognized Afonso's devotion, but still referred to Portugal as a land instead of a kingdom, and to Afonso as duke instead of a king.

The Iberian Crusades were papally promoted wars, part of the Reconquista, fought against the Muslim states of the Iberian Peninsula within the wider Crusading movement from 1095 to 1492. The Muslim conquest of the peninsula was completed in the early 8th century, when the Christian Visigothic Kingdom fell, yet the small realm of Asturias endured in the north-west. From the 9th century, its southward expansion against al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) was portrayed in local chronicles as a divinely sanctioned war of recovery. This expansion, along with Frankish advance, gave rise to new Christian realms—Navarre, León, Aragon, Castile, Portugal, and Barcelona—in the north. After al-Andalus split into taifas (small states) in 1031, the Christian realms exploited Muslim disunity to further expansion. From the 1060s, the papacy occasionally supported campaigns against al-Andalus by granting spiritual rewards to participants.

As the Reconquista advanced, the taifa rulers sought aid from the fundamentalist Almoravids of North Africa, who halted the Christian expansion. Soon after proclaiming the First Crusade for the liberation of the Holy Land at the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II extended the same spiritual privilege—remission of sins—to Iberian lords who took up arms against the Moors (Iberian Muslims). Peter I of Aragon was the first ruler, in 1100, to fulfil his crusading vow within the peninsula, and his example was soon followed by others. Leading crusading armies, Alfonso I of Aragon captured Zaragoza (1118), Afonso I of Portugal seized Lisbon (1147), and Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona took Tortosa (1148). The renewed Christian advance provoked another North African intervention, this time by the Almohads, who could only temporarily halt the Christian expansion. Occasionally, the Moors' Christian allies, such as Alfonso IX of León were also targeted by crusading campaigns. After crusader forces inflicted a decisive defeat on the Almohads at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the Reconquista gained new momentum. Papal grants of crusade indulgence then supported James I of Aragon in the conquest of Mallorca (1231) and Valencia (1238), and Ferdinand III of Castile in the capture of Córdoba (1236) and Seville (1248), reducing al-Andalus to the Emirate of Granada by 1262.

The Cortes of León or Decreta of León from year 1188 was a parliamentary body in the medieval Kingdom of León. According to UNESCO, it is the first historically documented example of a parliamentary system.

After coming to power, King Alfonso IX, facing an attack by his neighbours, Castile and Portugal, decided to summon the curia regis or king's court/royal council to the Basilica of San Isidoro, León. This was a gathering of the nobility and the higher clergy called to advise the king, used in numerous countries during the Middle Ages. Because of the seriousness of the situation, Alfonso IX also called in representatives of the wealthy merchants and tradesmen from the most important cities of the kingdom, thus uniting the three Estates of the Realm in one council.