Portugal was a by-product of the Christian Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. In the 11th century, Henry, a younger son of the Duke of Burgundy, joined the campaign of King Alfonso VI of León and Castile in the fight against the Moors. As a reward, he was married to the king's illegitimate daughter, Teresa, and was given as a dowry a territory then integrated into Galicia, becoming Count of Portugal in 1093. Henry's son Afonso Henriques (1109–85) conducted a series of brilliant campaigns both against the royal power of León-Castile and against the Moors. In 1139 he was proclaimed king of Portugal. León-Castile recognised the new kingdom in 1143 and a papal bull of 1179 acknowledged Afonso Henriques as the first king of Portugal. His successors consolidated the kingdom's independence, expanding its territory to what are virtually Portugal's present frontiers, in a process that culminated with the conquest of the Algarve in 1249–50. A new dynasty, the Dynasty of Aviz, which came to power in the course of a civil war of resistance to Portugal's annexation by Castile in 1383–85, initiated the European imperial expansion that shaped the modern world.

The language of this small country has become the official language of more than two hundred million people in four continents. It has a literary tradition going back some eight centuries that began in a language not yet distinguishable from its Galician roots and gave rise to a remarkable poetic flowering which lasted from the early thirteenth century to the middle of the fourteenth century. Practitioners in other areas of the Iberian Peninsula included King Alfonso X of Castile (1221–84), later known as ‘the Learned’ (el Sabio), who commissioned the famous Cantigas de Santa Maria. The secular cantigas, collected in three Cancioneiros, are divided into three main categories: cantigas de amigo (literally ‘songs of the lover’), cantigas de amor (‘songs of love’), which are often compared with the Provençal love lyric, and cantigas de escarnho e maldizer (‘songs of mockery and slander’), which are frequently slanderous, bawdy and misogynistic.

The most original features of Galician-Portuguese lyricism are found in the cantigas de amigo, poems in the female voice written by male authors, in which an underlying oral and musical tradition is incorporated into a literary genre that is highly sophisticated psychologically and strictly prescribed in poetic terms.