Although it focuses on Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in the late fifteenth century, it also recounts the many feats that made Portugal a seafaring power and is clearly intended as an exhortation to the young king of Portugal, Sebastião I to restore Portugal’s position as a maritime power.
Not simply a masterpiece of Portuguese literature, Luís Vaz de Camões’s epic Os Lusiadas is also the national epic of Portugal. Although it focuses on Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India in the late fifteenth century, it also recounts the many feats that made Portugal a seafaring power and is clearly intended as an exhortation to the young king of Portugal, Sebastião I to restore Portugal’s position as a maritime power.