Portuguese national identity was fabricated by non-Portuguese European aristocratic migrants.

Evidence

This, however, was not a simple “nationalism”: a mass ethos bound to a national destiny. The Portuguese of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries were an extraordinary mix of western European and Mediterranean peoples. More important, the new nation’s ruling classes, the nobility and the bourgeoisie who wove the ideological tapestry of nationalism and constructed those ideographs that framed their families and deeds, were drawn from the landed and titled aristocracies of Spain (Castile, Aragon, and Catalonia), France (Flanders and Burgundy), and England. The threads of Portuguese nationalist identity were spun from a European source. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 481

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors Robinson’s broader claim in Black Marxism that European racial ideology was imposed from above by ruling elites — connects to how Othering of Africans gets constructed later in the book.
• SEED: Essay angle: how do imperial origin myths get constructed by émigré elites rather than native masses — the Portuguese case as template for other settler-colonial nationalisms.