The Attraction of the Portuguese Elites for Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity

Jerusalem accumulated the status of religious reference for Christianity with that of a political center of the same bloc, originally during the Byzantine era and then during the first half of the Crusade cycle. The complete history of the latter coincided roughly with the development of the processes of political affirmation and independence of the kingdom of Portugal from Castile (1096-1143), as well as of the expansion of its territory through the Christian reconquest carried out against the Muslims of the Iberian Peninsula,
concluded in 1249. Thus, Portuguese royalty and nobility were left out of the organization and the realization of offensives perpetrated in the so-called Holy Land by other Western powers.
If the Crusades constituted the first great movement of expansion launched from inside to outside the European continent, the second was promoted precisely from Portugal, from the beginnings of the fifteenth century, towards the northwestern and sub-Saharan parts of Africa, implying pioneering explorations of the Atlantic Ocean. Throughout that century and the first decades of the following, despite being engaged in the dynamization of overseas expansion, which also reached Asia and South America, the Portuguese royalty and several members of the nobility also focused their attention on Jerusalem.
What I want to discuss in my paper are both the particular meanings of the Holy City for such historical actors and the motivations of this interest vis-à-vis the EuroMediterranean geo-strategic framework.