Faro.
Faro is nearly two hundred miles due south of Evora, and between the two towns is all the difference between serious solid conservative Alemtejo and gay epicurean Algarve. Faro cannot vie with Evora in the matter of buildings, it has no palaces or convents, though it has an interesting little cathedral. Of the Convent of São Bento only the cloisters survive. But in its position on the sea, its lines of low houses washed in many light hues, its inner harbour, like some still sky-reflecting lagoon, its markets and the shifting scenes that enliven its streets and praças, it is one of the most charming of Portugal’s towns, and gives the traveller one of those lively impressions of contrast in which the whole land of Portugal abounds. Surely no other combines in so small a space so many varieties of natural scenery and of architecture.
CHAPTER VII
HISTORICAL SURVEY
Count Henry.
The early, the first five, centuries, of Portugal’s history read like some enchanting romance of chivalry, a long chain of heroic deeds by a few great men in an age when the individual counted for everything. In Roman history, Viriathus, the chieftain of the Serra da Estrella, and the Lusitanians under Sertorius had signalized themselves for their courage and powers of resistance. But Portugal was but a part of a Roman province—modern Portugal corresponds only in part to the ancient Lusitania—nor was it in existence as a separate region when Count Henry of Burgundy became Count of Portugal in 1095. The Moors, who had conquered Lisbon three centuries after the Roman rule in Lusitania came to an end in A.D. 409, were still in possession, although temporarily ousted by Alfonso VI, King of León, in 1093. Thus the province which separated itself from Galicia consisted of a narrow tract with wavering borders between the Minho and the Tagus.
Affonso I.
Count Henry had extended its southern frontier before he died in 1112, but it was his son Affonso Henriques, who, by his mighty deeds of war, really established the kingdom. Santarem was taken in 1147, and in the same year, with the help of English and other Crusaders, Lisbon. His mother, the Countess Theresa, was Regent from 1112 to 1128, but in the latter year he took over the reins of power. For the first year of his rule he was at war with Castille, but soon all his energies were directed against the Moors, and the battle of Ourique, before which Christ was supposed to have appeared to the Infante, promising him victory, definitely turned the scales in favour of the Christians (1139). Henceforth he was known as King of Portugal, a title conferred perhaps on the battlefield of Ourique and confirmed at the Cortes of Lamego (1143). The King’s untiring energy had the great incentive that whatever territory he won from the Moors he held in his own right, and if this territory became greater than that originally held in fealty to León, Portugal would almost naturally become independent. His prudence seems to have matched his valour, and he parried the claims of León by making Portugal tributary to the Pope. In 1184, after nearly sixty years of warfare, begun in 1128 against his own mother in order to obtain his kingdom, the old King was once more in arms, with the object of relieving his son, besieged in Santarem by the Moors. He died in the following year, in great honour and glory. The King had made the nation.
Sancho I.