Page:History of India Vol 6.djvu/80

40 THE QUEST FOE INDIA BY SEA policy of John the Great. The friendship of Portu- gal and England had, indeed, been of slow and solid growth. Toward the close of the twelfth century a body of London crusaders halted on their way to the Holy Land to help the Portuguese against the Moors. The end of the thirteenth and beginning of the four- teenth centuries found King Diniz " the Labourer " in close correspondence with our Edwards I and II. In the middle of the fourteenth century a marriage was negotiated, although not carried out, between Edward the Black Prince, of England, and the daughter of Af- fonso IV of Portugal. In 1352 Edward III issued a royal proclamation commanding his subjects thence- forth and for ever to do no harm to the Portuguese ; the next year a commercial compact was entered into and signed in the city of London; and on May 9, 1386, the Treaty of Windsor united the two countries by a close alliance. The claims of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and son of Edward III, to the throne of Castile for his Spanish wife, brought about a still nearer connection with Portugal. The Portuguese king discerned in those claims a source of support in his hereditary strug- gle with the Castilian dynasty. It seemed, indeed, as if the States of western Europe naturally ranged them- selves into a league of England, Portugal, and Flanders against France, Scotland, and Castile. In 1385, five hundred English archers under three squires of John of Gaunt fought on the decisive field of Aljubarrota which secured the independence of Portugal against