Flemish and German contingent, from whom they had parted company in a gale.

At Oporto, the Crusaders were met by the Bishop of that city, who had the King's commands to receive them courteously, and to invite them to proceed to Lisbon and to join the Portuguese troops in an attack upon that stronghold. After some discussion, and upon the arrival of the rest of the Crusaders, it was agreed by them to join their forces to those of the King, in a work kindred to that for which they had left their own country. The fleet accordingly set sail for the Tagus, while the King's troops marched thither by land. Much of the letter is taken up with accounts of the dissensions between the members of the various nationalities which composed the crusading armies, and the mode in which peace was kept among these unruly warriors by the King of the Portuguese.

The powerful fleet of the Crusaders cut off the communications of the Lisbon garrison by water, and the troops, disembarking and joining with the Portuguese, were sufficient to encompass the whole city; but the Moorish garrison was a strong one, and the defences in good order. Continual sorties were made from the city, and in the fighting which took place, the advantage was as often on the side of the Saracens as of the besiegers. Finally the English troops succeeded, after heavy loss, in penetrating the suburbs of the city, which, though lying outside the city wall, were tenanted by a large population Here also were the grain stores of the inhabitants, and from this time the garrison suffered severely from famine.

In the various arts of siege warfare, the Saracens had always the advantage. They were the more

ingenious, and the more watchful, and the more active. A tower on wheels built by the English Crusaders was burnt; another, constructed at great expense of time and trouble by the Germans, met the same fate; mining works, prepared by the Flemings on a large scale, were countermined by the garrison and destroyed. The war engines of the Saracens were superior in size and power to those of the Christians, and the besiegers were assailed by overpowering showers of stones and darts whenever they advanced to the assault.

Finally, however, a Pisan engineer devised a wooden tower on wheels, of unexampled proportions. Englishmen and Portuguese worked in company at its construction, and fifty English and fifty Portuguese soldiers having manned this moving castle, and each man of the hundred having been supplied with a piece of the True Cross, it was rolled up to the city walls amid the breathless expectation of the besieging hosts. The Saracens, seeing the imminence of their danger, sallied forth in great numbers and attacked the approaching tower. The Pisan engineer, who directed the operation, was wounded and disabled by a stone hurled from a Moorish catapult. The tide, flowing unusually high, covered the sands on which the tower was moving, and cut off support from the besiegers; but it came nearer and nearer, and finally reached to within a yard of the parapets, whose height it equalled. Then a drawbridge was thrown across, and the English and the Portuguese were preparing to enter the city, when the Saracens, seeing further resistance to be useless, surrendered. The city capitulated, and was

This is a slight modification of the account of the English Crusader. According to his statement, his countrymen had the

mercilessly sacked. The King lost no time in devising for the captured city a form of municipal government, which strongly testifies to his liberality, toleration, and wisdom, in an age when the narrow bigotry and ferocity of kings and rulers were usually as conspicuous as these qualities in their subjects. The Moslem population were treated by the Portuguese in a manner which was in singular contrast to the contemporary atrocities of the Crusaders in the East, for the Moors of Lisbon were neither put to the sword, nor compelled to change their religion, nor enslaved, nor even banished. They continued to reside in the city, and they enjoyed, under a charter granted by the King, considerable liberties and privileges. They retained in their own hands the election of a judge, and the taxation to which they were subjected does not appear to have been excessive. The King's administration of church affairs was equally liberal and judicious. He appointed many foreign ecclesiastics to the newly-created chief offices of the church; among whom Gilbert, an Englishman, was the first Bishop of Lisbon.

The King likewise turned his attention to the establishment of a navy, which his countrymen had never yet possessed. He favoured naval enterprise by conferring knightly rank and the privilege of citizenship on native and on foreign sailors, and he drew thereby Flemings, Englishmen, and North Germans into the new commercial marine of Portugal. Thus chief share in the capture of Lisbon. A Flemish relation, on the other hand, makes less of the English prowess, and takes credit for a successful assault by Flemings and Lorrainers. Herculano shrewdly remarks that had a detailed Portuguese narrative of the siege existed, his own countrymen would, no doubt, have received their full share of credit.

encouraged by a wise protection and by impartial justice, soon after the capture of Lisbon and what might have been its commercial ruin, its trade acquired a sudden, and a great, and a permanent development.

King Affonso, however, could give but little of his time to the peaceful arts of government. The Moors still occupied the country and the strong places to the south of Lisbon. The trans-Tagan province, most of which is now known as Alemtejo, is a vast plain, containing only in its extreme east a hilly region with valleys of great fertility. At the two most commanding points of this eastern upland district lay Iaborah, now Evora, and Bajah, now called Beja, Moorish cities and strongholds, and both of them important places at all periods of Portuguese history. At the western extremity of the province, towards the Atlantic, the trans-Tagan district juts out into a broad promontory, terminating in Cape Espichel, and here again the country ceases to be a plain: the land rises into hills, and each one is crowned, as the Moorish custom was, with fortified places. Of these, Palmella, which dominates the entrance of the river Sado, had already surrendered to the Christians during the siege; and Almada, a stronghold on the south bank of the Tagus, where sea and river meet, fell almost immediately afterwards into the hands of the King. Aleacer do Sal, a rich city, and an important place of arms, in the centre of this plain country, resisted the sudden attack made by the King in person, at the head of a handful of Christian knights, and the King received a severe wound; but within a year it had again been attacked, and had fallen. There now only remained Evora and Beja in the east, and when these

strongholds were captured by the Christians, the whole trans-Tagan plain country was at the mercy of King Affonso Henriquez.

In the meantime, he had been careful to apportion out the conquered land among the more worthy of his captains, and to endow the powerful Orders of militant and other monks, who had at all times either fought with him in the van of the Peninsular Crusade, or, in the case of the non-militant Orders, assisted in the colonisation of the land. One such endowment has survived almost to our own days a monument of these rude times and the wisdom of the King's dispositions. The broad strip of deserted frontier which has already been described as lying between Christian and Moorish territory, was now available for occupation; but the tenure of Portuguese power was still insecure, as was presently to be proved, and the district which had so long been a waste was not readily to be repeopled. In its centre, not far from the great Christian stronghold of Leiria, the King now settled a monastery of Bernardine monks, at Alcobaça, which soon became the largest, and perhaps the richest and most important, of the many Cistercian monasteries which the zeal of St. Bernard was helping to spread over the face of western Europe; and the industry and the example of the brothers of this austere Order soon converted the wilderness of western Estremadura into a well-tilled district, whose exceptionally high cultivation, conspicuous to this day in agricultural Portugal, may, I think, be traced to the early lessons of the monks of St. Bernard.

Changes in Spanish and in Moorish affairs began, ten years after the capture of Lisbon, to threaten danger to Portugal. Alonso, the Emperor of Leon and