Literature

Portuguese. The earliest monuments of Portuguese literature are ballads, after the Provencal fashion. They were doubtless sung by wandering minstrels, and owe their origin to the French knights who founded the political independence of Portugal. The last part of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century may be called the golden age of Portuguese poetry, though not until 1524 did a poet appear whose name attained celebrity outside of the peninsula. This was Luis de Camoens (1524-1579). His epic poem, the Lusiad, constitutes the great claim of Portugal to a literature. See Camoens