Who Are the Portuguese in the SacramentoValley?
A Sacramento Silva or a Newcastle Neves of today might provide the
genefic links to fragments of carbon-dated 10,000-year-old paleolithic bones found in an archaeologic dig in a Minho River hillside, for the modern thread of Portuguese culture stretches back that far to ancient pre-history Portugal.
The land we call Portugal today was inhabited during the early paleolithic period of the Stone Age, as settlements of about 10,000 B.C. have been discovered near Coimbra and southern Portugal. But the real beginning of relatively "modern"
Portugal dates from neolithic times, a later Stone Age period, with the coming of the nomadic Iberian tribes in 2000 B.C.
Most people assume that the fair-skinned, fair-haired Portuguese one finds among his more prevalent brunette brothers and sisters is a result of the Flemish influence in the Azores. True, but not exclusively so, as suggested by a study of the migration and intermingling of different peoples throughout the continent of Europe from the earliest days of civilization.
Portugal and the Portuguese, like all of Europe and its people, is a homogeneous mixture of all kinds of cultures - Phoenidans, Iberians, Celts, Romans, Jews, Germanic tribes, and the so-called Moors - the Arabs and Berbers of northern Africa.
Successive waves of Germanic tribes from the region of Bavaria - Mans, Vandals, and Suevi - then invaded the Roman lands of northern Portugal in the fifth century, gradually integrated with the native Lusitanians and formed a kingdom,
with Braga as the capital. Today there can be seen traces of Suevian culture in the northern coastal regions of Portugal. Then the Visigoths, another
Germanic tribe, overcame the Suevi, taking over the entire peninsula during the seventh century.
The Christian Visigoth kingdom was destroyed with the eighth-century Islamic conquest by the Moors, who were comprised of three basic groups - Arabs, Berbers, and "Mozarabs" or Arabized Christians. The latter had been slaves and
serfs of the Visigoths who, when liberated, found it expedient to convert to Islam. The Arab contingent consisted mainly of Egyptians, Syrians, and Yemenis. The Egyptians settled in the Mgarve around Faro and Beja, the Yemenis populated Silves in the southern Mgarve, the Syrians were concentrated around Granada in Spain, and some Persians (who were not Arab), located at Mondego below Coimbra. The Berbers, under Arab leadership, formed the largest part of the Moorish invasion. They were
generally of a lighter complexion than the Arabs, some being fair-haired with blue-eyes.
Eventually, to capsulize this thumbnail history, King Ferdinand Ill of Castile and Leon captured Seville from the Moors in 1248, beginning the decline of Moorish Spain, and within a year all of the land of Hispania had been reconquered and reoccupied by the Lusitanians. It wasn't until January 2, 1492, however - coinciddentally the year that Columbus is credited with the discovery of America - that
the last Moorish ruler surrendered to the Catholic kings of Spain.
"Portugal" as an entity began, by some calculations, in the year 1143 when, then a county of Hispania under the Kingdom of Castile, Afonso Henriques declared himself ruler of the "kingdom" of Portugat its name having derived from that of a Roman settlement on the shore of the Douro River, Portus Cafe' a couple of centuries earlier.
All of the above is ancient history. We skip ahead another
couple of hundred years to the 15th century to enter the modern-history era more familiar to most of us - the age of exploration which marked Portugal as one of the world's great powers.
Part II ----- Sacramento Pioneer Family Histories |
