The Story of the Nations: Portugal

by H. Morse Stephens

IV.
PORTUGAL ATTAINS ITS EUROPEAN LIMITS.

SANCHO I., the Povoador or City-builder, had already won his reputation as a warrior in his father’s life-time, and his fame as king rests rather on the success of his internal administration of his country. But before he had time to gratify his inclination towards the more peaceful duties of government, he had to continue the life and death struggle with the Moors. The great victory won the year before his accession, gave him a little breathing space, and in 1188 he even proposed to take part in the Third Crusade, for which great preparations were being made all over Europe. But the Moors were not likely to forget their repulse at Santarem, and in the same year Ya’kūb, the son of Yūsuf, the new Almohade caliph landed in the peninsula, and marched without a check until he was once more driven from before Santarem by the conjoined influence of pestilence and of the courage of the Portuguese knights. In the following year King Sancho took his revenge; he stopped at Lisbon first an army of Dutch, Frisian, and Danish crusaders; then a body of French crusaders under Jacques d’Avesnes, Bishop of Beauvais, and the Count of Bar; and finally a well-equipped force of Londoners, all on their way to the Holy Land—and with their help he not only reduced the whole of the Alemtejo, but even took Silves, the capital of the distant emirate of the Alfaghar or Algarves. Ya’kūb was astounded at these successes. He collected a large Mohammedan army, and again crossed to Spain. But ill-luck followed his advance; his army was badly equipped, and not well supplied with provisions; he was foiled by one hundred young London crusaders in an attack on Silves; he was driven back from Thomar, the headquarters of the Knights Templars, by their Grand Master in Portugal, Gualdim Paes; and was finally obliged to abandon the siege of Santarem by a pestilence, which the Portuguese ascribed to a visitation from God. But the great Almohade caliph determined to be more successful the next time; he spent two years in Africa in preaching the Holy War against the Christians, and in 1192 crossed to the peninsula with the finest Mohammedan army which had appeared there since the days of the Almoravides. King Sancho and his Portuguese knights had to oppose this formidable invasion unaided, for the crusaders had gone on their way to Palestine, and were there fighting under Richard Cœur de Lion, and Philip Augustus of France. The Mohammedan soldiers advanced in a triumphal march; they easily reconquered Silves and the Algarves, and then swept across the Alemtejo, taking in rapid succession Beja, Alcacer do Sal, the hard-won conquest of Affonso Henriques, and even Palmella and Almada—the cities which guarded the approach to Lisbon from the south. Sancho, seeing that resistance was of no avail, was only too glad to be permitted to make a treaty with the Moors, which fixed the Tagus as his southern boundary, and the vast Mohammedan army turned into Andalusia and utterly defeated Alfonso VIII. of Castile at the battle of Alarcos in 1195.

King Sancho recognized the fact that the Moors, while united under their great Almohade caliph, were too powerful for him to attack, and he therefore turned his attention to the disputes among the Spanish sovereigns, and to matters of internal administration. It is fortunately not necessary to relate the history of Sancho’s wars with his Christian neighbours. The independence of Portugal was now an established fact, and the minute details of the various wars waged up to the year 1200 have no especial importance or interest, except in so far as they contribute to a knowledge of the causes of the quarrel which ensued between Sancho and the Pope. It will be remembered that the eldest daughter of Affonso Henriques, Donna Urraca, had married Ferdinand II., King of Leon, and that she was the mother of Alfonso IX. This monarch had commenced his reign on friendly terms with Affonso Henriques, and his successor Sancho, and this friendliness had culminated in 1191, in the marriage of Alfonso IX. of Leon to Sancho’s daughter, Donna Theresa. This princess, whose virtues were such that she was canonized as a saint in 1705, was thus first cousin to her husband, and as the canon law was very strict against such marriages, Pope Celestine III. by threats of excommunication and of interdict, forced her husband to repudiate her and to send her back to Portugal in 1195. This insult not only brought about the wars with Leon, which have been mentioned, but left in the mind of King Sancho a rankling animosity against the Papacy, which found its outlet later in his great quarrel with Pope Innocent III.

His truce with the Moors in 1192, and his determination to abandon all interference in Leon and Gallicia after 1200, left King Sancho time to attend to the crying wants of his people. He recognized clearly that there was no use in his pushing across the Tagus and conquering the Alemtejo and the Algarves, when the little kingdom he actually ruled was not half populated. During his father’s reign there had been nothing but fighting, and except in Oporto and Lisbon, where a flourishing trade existed, fostered by the frequent visits of the crusading fleets from the north, and in the northern provinces of the Entre Minho e Douro and the Tras-os-Montes, where agriculture survived, the scanty population subsisted chiefly on the spoils taken in the yearly invasions of Mohammedan territory. The population of the Beira and the northern part of Portuguese Estremadura lived entirely in towns, or in villages clustered round the castles of the nobility, and looked upon war as the only means for obtaining a livelihood. This habit of mind had made a nation of warriors, but it had left the land uncultivated. Tracts of wilderness extended between the towns and villages especially in the more recently conquered districts to the south of Coimbra, and now that the truce with the Moors had deprived the population of their chief means of subsistence, King Sancho saw that it was necessary to revive the pursuit of agriculture.

But, first of all, King Sancho devoted himself to the task of repairing the old city walls, and to the foundation of new towns in commanding strategic positions, which gave him his sobriquet of “O Povoador” or the City-builder. This policy was dictated by the threatening attitude of the Moors under the Almohades; for Sancho, like most of his contemporaries, could not believe that the Moslem dominion in the Peninsula was nearing its close, and he made every preparation for resisting fresh invasions. His first care was to see that all the walls of old cities were put into thorough repair by the citizens, and adequately manned by the city militia; his next, to found new cities, which should command important roads, wherever they were not already in close proximity to powerful towns. Among these new cities, his favourite, and the one which afterwards attained the greatest historical importance was Guarda, which was founded to the westward of the threatening Spanish fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo. In matters of city government Sancho wisely followed the example of the Mohammedans in continuing the old Roman system of municipal administration, which left all matters of internal government entirely in the hands of the citizens, and when he granted the lordship of a city to a bishop, baron, or military order, he carefully regulated their functions, and allowed them only to take a fixed share of the municipal revenue for fulfilling certain fixed duties, such as leading the contingent of the city in war, or holding courts of justice. The rural districts he treated on a different principle. He granted large tracts to noblemen, military orders, and cities on the express condition that they should be cultivated and populated within a fixed period under pain of revocation of the grants. This plan proved effective in the Beira and northern Estremadura, which King Sancho hoped would be sufficiently secured against invasion by the great fortresses on the Tagus, Lisbon, Santarem, and Abrantes, but was quite inapplicable to the Alemtejo. This province he had, in imitation of his father’s policy, entirely portioned out among the great military orders before its recapture by Ya’kūb. He not only confirmed his father’s and grandmother’s large grants to the Templars, Hospitallers, and Knights of the Sepulchre, but greatly increased them; he showed especial favour to the Portuguese order of chivalry, the Knights of St. Benedict of Aviz, which Affonso Henriques had founded; and he introduced from Spain the Order of Caceres, to which he granted Alcacer do Sal, Palmella, and Almada, and that of Calatrava, to which he granted Evora, Alcanede, and Jurumenha, thus attracting to his kingdom some of the most famous warriors of Spain. It was true that the conquests of Ya’kūb had annulled the effect of these grants, but the knights looked upon their possessions across the Tagus, as only in the temporary occupation of the Mohammedans, and were inspired by this feeling into redoubled alacrity in guarding the line of the Tagus, and with an ardent desire for the war against the Moors to begin again.