In August 1415, a Portuguese fleet led by King João I and his sons, including the future Prince Henry the Navigator, captured the North African port city of Ceuta from the Marinid Sultanate. This military expedition is widely regarded as the symbolic opening of the Portuguese Age of Discovery, shifting European attention southward along the African coast. Ceuta's capture gave Portugal a strategic foothold in North Africa and fired the imagination of subsequent explorers and cartographers. The event initiated a century of maritime expansion that would irrevocably alter the global balance of trade, culture, and political power.

The capture of Ceuta and the broader Age of Discovery it inaugurated became the central subject of Luis de Camões's epic 'Os Lusíadas' (1572), the foundational text of Portuguese literary identity. Camões cast Portugal's maritime heroes in Virgilian terms, framing exploration as a form of epic poetry in action. The encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Americas that flowed from this opening moment generated a vast literature of wonder, encounter, and colonial anxiety — from chronicles and romances to later postcolonial verse responding critically to the same tradition.