tarem, had recently again defeated the Portuguese Templars of Soure, and King Affonso Henriquez gladly availed himself of this opportunity to make reprisals.

He joined his forces to those of Ibn Kasi, but the Saracen and his Christian ally were ill mated. It is clear that Affonso Henriquez did not desire, and would not consent to lend his help to any operations likely to establish the permanent ascendency of either party among the enemies of his faith and country. He wanted warlike occupation for his troops, and the rich plunder of the populous territory of the Saracens. The astute Ibn Kasi found in the King a sagacity greater and a will far stronger than his own. In the presence of Affonso Henriquez, to use the picturesque phrase of an Arab chronicler, Ibn Kasi was like a slave before his lord, hardly daring to lift his eyes from the ground. With so intractable and so dangerous an ally, the Saracen hastened to make any terms, and Affonso Henriquez and his army in time took their way back into Portugal, laden with valuable spoil in slaves, in arms, in armour, and in war-horses of the Arab and African races.

The continued possession by his enemies of the great stronghold of Santarem, a point d'appui for yearly aggression, was, we are told, an unceasing vexation to the soul of the Portuguese king. This city and citadel lay, and still lie, on the north bank of the Tagus, in the centre of a rich plain, which extended wedge-like into the heart of the desert border-land of Estremadura. It therefore was the Saracen position which lay nearest and was most threatening to the Christians. Santarem was believed to be impregnable; an opinion justified to this day in

the eyes of those who have traced out the ruins of its Moorish citadel on an eminence overlooking the Tagus, and surveyed the natural and artificial scarps and counterscarps of the hill-sides along which it is built.

Warfare in that age and country was, as we have already seen, to a great extent, an affair of sieges; and, in so far as it was so, the advantage was altogether with the Saracens. In the art of building strong places, of taking them, and of resisting capture, the Christian nations of Europe had inherited, and had not improved upon, the clumsy artillery (if we may use the word in its first sense) of the Romans; and the Crusaders, in Asia Minor and Syria, found themselves as much inferior to the Saracens in this branch of the military art as did the Christians of Spain and Portugal. The defenders of Santarem, therefore, felt perfectly secure in a strong, watchful garrison; in their lofty turrets, garnished with all the artifice of Arabian war science; and securer still in the proved ignorance of their enemies.

To take Santarem openly and in the light of day was clearly impossible; but it was an age in which stratagem made an essential and honourable branch of the art of war, and in which branch of it the keener and more subtle wits of the Orientals were also greatly at an advantage.

In the spring of the year 1147, King Affonso Henriquez lay at Coimbra, his capital, when he schemed an attempt upon Santarem. He is said to have obtained exact information of the height and position of the walls and towers of Santarem, to have prepared scaling-ladders, and to have sketched out a plan of assault.

In three night marches, his small

army had passed the fifty or sixty miles of wild and deserted country that lay between Coimbra and Santarem, successfully eluding the observation of the Saracen outposts and watchers by the way: on the third, some hours before daylight, he was under the walls of the city. The ladders were set, the walls scaled, and the troops, following their King with the war-cry of Sanctiago e Rei Affonso! overpowered the garrison, and the redoubtable stronghold of Santarem was in the hands of the Christians.1

The capture of Santarem was of more importance to the Christian cause in Portugal than any event within the previous fifty years. It extended Christian territory to the Tagus, made Moorish aggression more difficult, and the Christian invasion of Gharb easier than before.

The King, however, now meditated an exploit far greater than this, and which, if accomplished, would carry the fame of the Portuguese nation to every Christian Court and camp in Europe. This was the capture of Lisbon itself. But although to take an outpost like Santarem by a sudden and unexpected assault had been proved to be possible, there were circumstances connected with the defences of Lisbon which rendered its capture, with the resources of the King of Portugal, quite beyond the bounds of possibility.

'The narrative in the text is probably very near the facts. The usually cautious Herculano tells the story in detail, closely following the account of this episode given in the Life of St. Theotomio, Prior of Santa Cruz, a contemporary and, according to the Cistercian monk, his biographer, an adviser of King Affonso Henriquez. The date of the Life is uncertain; its queer latinity, its half-romantic style, and the narration of many very improbable circumstances, do not appear to the present writer, after a very painful perusal of it, to be like the truth, or even like the pious fraud of a contemporary.

Lisbon was at this time the richest and the most populous city of the Peninsula. Moorish accounts compute the number of its inhabitants at between four and five hundred thousand. Its magnificent sea approach had long made it the chief emporium of trade between Europe and northern Africa. The city lies on the northern bank of the Tagus, where the river broadens into a lake-like estuary: from the edge of the water rose the city, as it still rises, amphitheatrewise upon hilly ground. On the northern slopes of these hills was situated the Kassba, or Moorish citadel, with its round turrets, its ditches, and its battlemented curtains. Strong lines of fortification extended from either side of the fortress to the river, and enclosed the whole city, except on the river side, where it was sufficiently protected by the Moorish fleets. The efforts of the Portuguese against so formidable an enceinte would certainly have proved futile, and it is not likely that even the enterprising King Affonso Henriquez would have made any attempt, but for a wholly unlooked-for

occurrence.

Two years before the capture of Santarem, the first Crusade had ended in complete disaster to the Christian arms in Asia Minor, and levies were already gathering in France and in Germany for a fresh expedition to the East. A large force of Frenchmen and Germans were at this time travelling overland to Palestine, along the route which had already been followed by a previous generation of Crusaders; but the levies from England, North Germany, and the Low Countries, not unaccustomed to the sea, preferred, to the fatigues of a tedious journey afoot through Hungary and modern European Turkey, the long and dangerous voyage from the mouths of the Rhine, down

the British Channel, across the Bay of Biscay and through the Pillars of Hercules, into the Mediterranean. News of these sea-travelling Crusaders had probably reached the King of Portugal, through France, long before its slow and timid navigation had brought the fleet within sight of his shores; and it is almost certain that he had foreseen and planned the combination which he subsequently put into practice.

The German Crusaders under Arnulph of Areschot, and the Flemings under Christian of Gistell, had put in at Dartmouth, there to join the English contingent. These latter were commanded by four Constables, and the whole force assembled in the port of Dartmouth numbered about 13,000 fighting men, of whom the greater number probably were Englishmen.'

It happened that among the English Crusaders was a scholar, no doubt a churchman of inferior rank, who subsequently drew up a lengthy account, in the form of a letter, of the voyage and of its various incidents, in a manner so graphic that it furnishes us with by far the best and fullest description that has come down to the present time of the curious episode of the siege of Lisbon.2

The English portion of the fleet first made land on the coast of Northern Spain, then, creeping round westward, they put in at Oporto to await the arrival of the

'Pars eorum maxima venerat ex Anglia.'-Henry of Huntingdon.

2 Under the title of Cruce Signati anglici Epist. de expugnatione Ulisiponis, this document is well known to students of history. It is mentioned by Cooper (vol. i. page 166) with the title Expeditio francorum anglorum, etc., per Osbernum. The MS. exists, I believe, in the library of Corpus, Cambridge. It was printed in 1861 in the Monumenta Historica of the Lisbon Academy, from which copy I quote.