35: Notes To Self

Flirting, In A Hurry, Clarity = God, History of Portugal, Nirvana

Author

Luke Clancy
April 12, 2024

Yo, it’s Luke!

Showing up a lil late today, but still have some short bangers for you!

Here is your weekly dose of 5 noteworthy ideas & things I learned about last week. Click on each link to dive further on that topic.

This was a nice lil blog post about the history of Portugal. Here were some of my favorite snippets:

  • In 1453, the luckiest thing happened for Portugal on the other side of the Mediterranean: Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, who forbade Christians from trading in the Silk Road. The Silk Road through the Mediterranean suffered, and suddenly the value of an alternative road to the Indies became extremely high. At that point, the seafaring Portuguese were the best positioned in the world to find an alternative route. They got on with it.

  • Over the next few decades, Portugal found the tip of Africa—proving that an alternative trade route was viable in this direction—reached the Indies, built trade posts and fortresses along the way, and started milking all these discoveries. This was the beginning of the Portuguese Empire.

  • Portgual stumbled upon Brazil when trying to turn around from a voyage to the Indies. This was completely independent of Spain’s discover of the Americas.

  • Portugal was a thalassocracy—a country based on a sea network rather than a concrete piece of land, like Greece, Carthage, Venice, Genoa, Aragon, or the Hanseatic League in Europe, or the Chola Empire, Majapahit, or Srivijaya in the Indian Ocean.

This is too good lol

Thanks for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday! If you liked this edition, send it over to a friend who would like it too 🤝 

Cheers,

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