On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. This article is about the archipelago. Madeira sauce-gold-blue vertical triband with a red-bordered white Cross of Christ. Portugal, the other being the Azores.

The archipelago includes the islands of Madeira, Porto Santo, and the Desertas, administered together with the separate archipelago of the Savage Islands. Roughly half of the region’s population lives in Funchal. Madeira, originally uninhabited, was claimed by Portuguese sailors in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator in 1419 and settled after 1420. The archipelago is considered to be the first territorial discovery of the exploratory period of the Age of Discovery. It is by far the most populous and densely populated Portuguese island. Archaeological evidence suggests that the islands may have been visited by the Vikings sometime between 900 and 1030.

Accounts by Muhammad al-Idrisi state that the Mugharrarin came across an island where they found “a huge quantity of sheep, the meat of which was bitter and inedible” before going to the more incontrovertibly inhabited Canary Islands. During the reign of King Edward III of England, lovers Robert Machim and Anna d’Arfet were said to have fled from England to France in 1346. Driven off course by a violent storm, their ship ran aground along the coast of an island that may have been Madeira. The first Portuguese settlers began colonizing the islands around 1420 or 1425. The first settlers were the three captain-donees and their respective families, a small group of members of the gentry, people of modest conditions and some former inmates of the kingdom. The settlement involved people from all over the kingdom.

It was from the Algarve that some of the early settlers set out. Many came with the important task of the landlord system employment. Servants, squires, knights and noblemen are identified as the ones who secured the beginning of the settlement. Majority of settlers were fishermen and peasant farmers, who willingly left Portugal for a new life on the islands, a better one, they hoped, than was possible in a Portugal which had been ravaged by the Black Death and where the best farmlands were strictly controlled by the nobility. Initially, the settlers produced wheat for their own sustenance but later began to export wheat to mainland Portugal. In earlier times, fish and vegetables were the settlers’ main means of subsistence. Grain production began to fall and the ensuing crisis forced Henry the Navigator to order other commercial crops to be planted so that the islands could be profitable.

These specialised plants, and their associated industrial technology, created one of the major revolutions on the islands and fuelled Portuguese industry. By 1480 Antwerp had some seventy ships engaged in the Madeira sugar trade, with the refining and distribution concentrated in Antwerp. By the 1490s Madeira had overtaken Cyprus as a producer of sugar. Sugarcane production was the primary engine of the island’s economy which quickly afforded the Funchal metropolis economic prosperity.

The production of sugar cane attracted adventurers and merchants from all parts of Europe, especially Italians, Basques, Catalans, and Flemish. Slaves were used during the island’s period of sugar trade to cultivate sugar cane alongside paid workers, though slave owners were only a small minority of the Madeiran population, and those who did own slaves owned only a few. Until the first half of the sixteenth century, Madeira was one of the major sugar markets of the Atlantic. Apparently it is in Madeira that, in the context of sugar production, slave labour was applied for the first time. The colonial system of sugar production was put into practice on the island of Madeira, on a much smaller scale, and later transferred, on a large scale, to other overseas production areas. Later on, this small scale of production was completely outmatched by Brazilian and São Tomean plantations. Madeiran sugar production declined in such a way that it was not enough for domestic needs, so that sugar was imported to the island from other Portuguese colonies.

In the 17th century, as Portuguese sugar production was shifted to Brazil, São Tomé and Príncipe and elsewhere, Madeira’s most important commodity product became its wine. Wine Culture’, which acquired international fame and provided the rise of a new social class, the Bourgeoisie. With the increase of commercial treaties with England, important English merchants settled on the Island and, ultimately, controlled the increasingly important island wine trade. The English traders settled in the Funchal as of the seventeenth century, consolidating the markets from North America, the West Indies and England itself. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Madeira stands out for its climate and therapeutic effects. In the nineteenth century, visitors to the island integrated four major groups: patients, travellers, tourists and scientists.