this was not to be, and events in a distant and foreign country had long been preparing the way for a sudden and unlooked-for turn in the affairs of Portugal.

It is quite necessary to glance at these events. In Mahometan Spain, the warlike sect of the Almoravides, invited into Spain some fifty years before to stem the tide of Christian conquest, had done so most effectually (as we have already seen) at the great battle of Zalaca, fatal to the chivalry of Leon. After this, the Almoravides, turning their arms against their own allies, had overcome the Moorish rulers of Spain one after another, and established their supremacy over the whole Moslem Peninsula; but now the state of affairs was again changed. Half a century of power had lessened the first austerity of the Almoravides, and weakened their influence, both in Morocco and in the Peninsular provinces. There was abundant room for social, and for political, and for religious reform; and such reform came about in the sudden and subversive manner which is characteristic of Oriental life.

The son of a servant in a mosque, a Berber of the Atlas mountains, travelling to Cordova and afterwards to Bagdad, had acquired at these famous seats of Arabian letters the consideration which was in those days always conceded to superior learning. Returning to Morocco, he denounced fiercely the prevalent religious laxity, and the vices of people and rulers. Flying from the persecution which he met with, to the mountains, he preached a reformed Unitarianism, attracted a huge following of armed men, became a political power, and the Almohades, or Unitarian soldiers, formidable with a puritan sternness of religious zeal, threatened the security of the Almoravidian power in Morocco.

An emergency so sudden forced the Moors of Spain to prompt action. A large army was drained from all the provinces of the Peninsula, even those touching on the unquiet frontiers of the Christians. Such an

opportunity for the Christian powers had never before occurred. The impending campaign between Affonso Henriquez and his suzerain was suspended by mutual consent. A peace was hastily arranged at Tuy, in the

year 1137, and both rulers prepared to betake themselves to the Saracen frontiers of their dominions. Thus was the storm which threatened to overwhelm Portugal for the time averted.

By the summer of the year 1139 the Prince of Portugal had begun his march southward, gathering to his standards, at every farm and homestead within reach of his line of march, the horse and foot soldiers whose tenure of crown land obliged them to render warlike service to their prince. Instead of passing through the frontier wilderness of Estremadura, the usual path of raiders from either side,, the Prince, turning to the east, struck the Tagus in its upper waters, and found himself at once in a land where no Christian foot had stood for centuries-the alluvial plain of Alemtejo, the richest land in Portugal-then the garden of the Moorish territories. The rough Portuguese spoiled the land and advanced rapidly into the very heart of the Saracen territory. On the plain of Ourique, to the north of the populous city of Silves, a large Saracen army, drawn from all parts, prepared to give battle to the invaders.

1 Except, of course, the Mosarabes. Portuguese by race and Christian by religion, the Mosarabes conformed in dress, in manners, and in culture to the dominant race, lived among them, and contributed to the wealth and prosperity of the Moorish colonies of the Peninsula.

CHAPTER II.

THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL.

THE warfare between Portuguese and Saracen had hitherto been a warfare of sieges, of forays, of surprises and ambuscades, of skirmishes at river-fords, or irregular fighting in the defiles of mountains or in the fastnesses of forests. The Christian Portuguese had never yet dared to meet their enemies in the open field. It must be remembered that the Christian remnant who had preserved their independence in the hills of the north were, in almost every respect, à people inferior to their enemies in all the arts of peace and war; inferior in numbers, inferior in organization vastly inferior in civilization and social culture, and— what in such times was of chief importance to their very existence—in discipline, in strategy, and the mere practice of warfare. Against the Gothic pike and the short sword of the Christians, hardly improved from Roman times, the slender lance of the Saracens in the hands of their practised cavalry was what the rifle of the European soldier is when opposed to the assegai of the African savage or the rude matchlock of the Asiatic. Not till the Christian had borrowed the Arabian peaked saddle and the powerful curb-bit used by his enemies, not till he had learnt something of the skilful horsemanship of the Saracen, could he acquire an efficient use of the lance-that best of all cavalry weapons-and make any stand at all in the open field against his Moslem enemy.

In the long period before the faith feud between

the two races had turned to the religious enthusiasm and animosity which made the Crusades a possibility, many adventurous Christian knights took service, as we have already seen, with the Saracens, and fought without compunction against men of their own faith and country. It was through such men that the arts of war, and some social culture, and some of the refinements of military intercourse were borrowed by the Christians from a high-couraged and a courteous people, and grew at once into that spirit of Christian chivalry, whose influence for good, if it has been somewhat overrated, was certainly in no country and at no time so conspicuous as in the Peninsula and in this very generation.

Now, for the first time in the history of the great racial struggle on Portuguese soil, the ascendency of the two peoples was to be set on the issue of a pitched battle on a field where, if tradition is to be trusted for the exact site, neither side could derive any material advantage from superiority of position.

Affonso Henriquez was completely victorious.

With this short sentence we have exhausted almost all that the contemporary chroniclers have told us. One curious circumstance, indeed, they relate: namely, that a large number of women fought on the side of the Almoravides, and though such a practice was in accordance with the occasional usages of this warlike sect, it testifies plainly enough to the fact that the exodus of fighting men had been great enough to cause them to resort to an expedient which can never fail to be repugnant to human nature.1

1 'Era M.CLXXVII. (that is, the so-called Spanish era = A.D. 1139). Julio mense die D. Jacobi apostoli fuit victoria Alfonsi regis de Esmar rege Saracenorum et innumerabili prope exercitu in loco qui dicitur