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Bartolomeu Dias
Dias proved the sea route to India existed a full decade before Vasco da Gama sailed it, and received strikingly little reward or recognition for making that more famous voyage possible.
Portugal
The first global empire, run from the smallest capital that ever managed one.
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history.briefs History
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Ferdinand Magellan
Magellan is remembered as the man who circled the globe, but he died three-quarters of the way through the voyage, and it was his subordinate Elcano who actually sailed the last ship home.
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Mozambican War of Independence
A ten-year guerrilla war Portugal never won on the battlefield ended instead when its own soldiers overthrew the government in Lisbon that kept sending them to fight it.
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Vasco da Gama
Multiple independent chroniclers, not just a single hostile source, describe da Gama burning a ship of pilgrims and mutilating a captured messenger, which leaves little room to treat these as later exaggeration.