Portugal's military strength was reserved for protecting its own frontiers against Spanish incursions, but after 1648, the end of the Thirty Years' War allowed the reversal of those misfortunes.
[2] A series of successes by the Portuguese, with the help of a British brigade, made it clear that the Iberian Peninsula would not be reunited under Spanish rule.
The first took place on 8 June 1663, when the count of Vila Flor, Sancho Manoel de Vilhena, with Marshal Schomberg by his side, utterly defeated John of Austria the Younger, an illegitimate son of Philip IV, at the Battle of Ameixial before he retook Évora, which had been captured earlier that year.
One year later, on 7 July 1664, Pedro Jacques de Magalhães, a local military leader, defeated the Duke of Osuna at Ciudad Rodrigo in the Salamanca Province of Spain.
Portuguese sovereignty over its colonial possessions was reconfirmed except for the African exclave of Ceuta, a city that did not recognise the House of Braganza as the new ruling dynasty.
Seven years earlier, the nearby city of Tangiers had been awarded to King Charles II of England as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, as had been stipulated in the Marriage Treaty of 1661.
Portuguese trade was centered in the busy port of Lisbon and influenced especially by Anglo-Dutch capitalism and the colonial economy in Brazil.