The Portuguese are expansionist and seafaring. They start the game with Pottery and Alphabet and build carracks instead of caravels. In 1139 CE, Afonse Henriques, appointed count of the province of Portugal by the king of Castile, defeated a Muslim army at Ourique. Impolitely, he took that opportunity to declare Portugal independent of Castile, with himself as king of the new country. He was able to get away with it largely due to the recognition by the Christian kingdoms of Spain that the Muslims were the common enemy, and when assured that Portugal would still play an active role in the impending Reconquista, Castile-Navarre and Aragon were willing to overlook Henriques's impudence. Two hundred years later, once the Muslims were confined to their tiny corner of Spain in Granada, Castile saw fit to repossess the Portuguese kingdom. When the Castilian army was soundly thrashed in battle by the warrior king John of Aviz, it was clear to all that Portugal was there to stay. After the victory over Castile and the collective reconquest of Iberia from the Muslims, Portugal looked overseas to continue its expansion. King John led a campaign against Ceuta in North Africa (modern-day Morocco). The ease of Ceuta's conquest caught the attention of his third son, Prince Henry the Navigator. Henry's older brother Duarte succeeded to the throne after John's death, and the two were often at odds, with Duarte skeptical and suspicious of Henry's ambitions to explore new lands and convert the natives to Christianity. For the next twenty years Henry sponsored expeditions to western Africa, and even led a campaign to invade Tangiers in 1437 (which ended in defeat). But on the whole Henry's personal seafaring experience was limited; his sobriquet comes from his patronage of other adventurers and the resulting age of discovery and colonization that they inaugurated with his support. Portuguese explorers continued their discoveries after Henry's death in 1460. The greatest was Bartolomeu Dias, whose 1488 voyage around the southern coast of Africa made Europe aware of the Indian Ocean and a shorter route to India than the one Columbus gambled on just four years later. Dias also traveled across the western Atlantic to Brazil; on that voyage he was lost at sea in 1498. Closely following Dias was Vasco da Gama, who took Dias's maps