The Western maritime discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in which Portugal played a leading role, were the culmination of an odyssey which had begun in ancient times. They extended the bounds of the adventure embarked on long before by the Phoenicians and the Greeks to all the seas of the world. The cycle of modern discoveries was symbolically closed in 1520 by Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator who sailed for the King of Spain. After him there began an era of methodical, scientific exploration of what the twentieth-century poet Fernando Pessoa called the “endless sea”, the mare nostrum of the Romans enlarged to global dimensions.

If this image exaggerates the real maritime area traversed by the navigators of Portugal, Italy, Spain and other European nations between the beginning of the fifteenth century and Magellan's voyage, it epitomizes the difference between the voyages of the Ancients and those of the modern era. In the first decade of the sixteenth century, Westerners acquired firm evidence that the Earth is round, and knew from “knowledge which owes everything to experience”—to quote a line of The Lusiads—of a sea that extended from Europe to Japan and from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego.

This knowledge was acquired the hard way, after more than a century of sporadic but methodical exploration whose modest beginnings led to the reconnaissance of the south Atlantic and the entire west coast of Africa. Underlying this exploration was the dream of sailing round a continent which was still little known to Europeans, in order to reach the Indies. The most amazing feature of this enterprise was that it should have been pursued for so long by a single country, Portugal, which often employed foreigners (Genoese, Catalans, even Castilians) in its service, while other, much richer and more powerful nations, which also possessed a maritime tradition, made no attempt to follow suit. The main reason for this was that most of the Portuguese voyages were not private undertakings like those of the great Genoese, Catalan and Venetian shipowners of the same period, or of the later French and English navigators, but a kind of state enterprise, even though their initiator was a prince, Henry the Navigator, and not the king.

The Portuguese maritime adventure was modern both in its means and in its results, but paradoxically it was “medieval” in character. By this we mean that it was simultaneously technical, mercantile and religious in character. When Camões wrote his epic a century and a half after the beginnings of maritime exploration, in a context that was already fully modern, this medievalism still dominated his vision of the world.

The aim pursued by the Portuguese navigators was tantamount to a crusade. The Christian cross emblazoned on the sails of their caravels was more than merely symbolic. At that period, from a really “modern”, bourgeois standpoint like that of the Genoese or the Venetians, such an emblem would have been seen as an obstacle to communication with peoples of other cultures and religions. But the Portuguese voyages of exploration in the fifteenth century were undertaken on the initiative of an institution that was both religious and military, not to say militant. Later the enterprise became “royal” and therefore more “secular”—if such a word had any meaning in the Portugal of that time. But the religious aspect of the discoveries was always present. This is what made them an extremely complex episode in the history of Western culture.

No one understood this complexity better than Camões. He celebrated the discoveries both as an extraordinary adventure of the human spirit, a fantastic acceleration in our knowledge of the universe and its mysteries—in other words, a challenge assumed by men against the gods—and as a crusade by Christian man, bearer of a faith that had recently been assaulted in other parts of Europe.

A unique poem in European as well as Portuguese culture, The Lusiads has always provoked perplexity as well as admiration among figures as various as Cervantes and Ezra Pound. It was written at a turning point in history. Its context is the end of the Renaissance—a twilight era full of energy and sensuality—but also the dawn of the baroque age, with its ambiguous interplay between day and night. Camões combines glorification of the daring modernity of his countrymen's maritime exploits with a fascination for ancient cultural models. Yet this attraction is far from passive. Indeed, it contains an element of challenge. Literally and figuratively, The Lusiads stands at a crossroads in history when the West, and especially the Iberian peninsula, was hesitating between exposure to a new historical situation, of which the discoveries were themselves the signal, and withdrawal into ethical and religious certainties which had been shaken by the material and conceptual upheavals of the Renaissance.

Camões emphasizes above all the chivalrous aspects of the Portuguese discoveries. But this chivalry, unlike that evoked by the Italian poet Ariosto (1472-1533), is realistic rather than dream-like. He rejects the moral disorder which conquering expansion brought in its wake—the unbridled ambition, the corruption, the abuse of power, whose devastating effects he saw for himself in the East.

Above all—and this is where the poem elevates a national epic to the dignity of a universal myth—he was not content to transpose the Portuguese voyages into a heroic episode in the history of planetary discovery. He transmuted them into a kind of noble hymn to Eros, a naturalistic but also neo-Platonic version of the great Italian poet Petrarch's “Triumph of Universal Love”, in which the Portuguese in a sense play the role of Argonauts. Petrarch's celebrated theme, still an abstract vision, becomes in the hands of Camões fully dionysiac, a link and a place of harmony not only between Heaven and Earth but between humanity hitherto divided by space, race and prejudice. All Nature participates in the feast which crowns the exploits of Vasco da Gama's sailors. In the “Island of Love” episode, what begins as a hymn of national rejoicing becomes an epic of love, in which spirit and senses mingle. The heroic adventure, man's struggle with hostile elements, ends allegorically on this island, a dream of paradise where the force and violence of war assume the colours of love, and love assumes the colours of a new alliance between peoples.

Of course, the poem is marked by certain Western prejudices. It belongs to an era in which religious militancy was particularly fierce since Westerners felt that their faith was threatened. Despite this inevitable eurocentrism, and thanks to its universalist impulse, its ethical force, and its treatment of the whole range of human physical and spiritual experience, The Lusiads is far from being a mere eulogy of the Portuguese discoveries as an episode in the history of a people. Even more than a great hymn to a glorious moment in the destiny of Portugal, it is the epic of the European movement to new shores, to infinite possibilities in space and time.