State-building in Portugal during the Middle Ages: a royal endeavour in partnership with the local powers?

Statebuilding in Portugal during the Middle Ages, when viewed from above, appears to be characterized by its precocity when compared to the Western world at that time. During the mid-twelfth century, the kingdom of Portugal achieves political independence – an autonomy obtained within the scope of the struggle against Islam in the Iberian Peninsula and legitimized by the acquisition of territory from the Muslims either by force or by diplomacy ahead of other Christian kingdoms, and by the synchronicity of interests between the ecclesiastical and political powers. In his essay on the country’s search for its identity, José Mattoso emphasizes royal power as the compositing factor that brought together all the previous antinomies, whether geographical, ethnical, social or economic. Actually, from the beginning of the thirteenth century a royal strategy was in place to construct and control the territory and centralize power based on the creation of juridical, administrative and judicial structures