God's War: A New History of the Crusades (52 page)

Thus militarily and ideologically the Lisbon campaign sat easily within established conventions, expectations and experience of fighting infidels to which the preaching and recruitment of 1146–7 had lent special urgency. A contemporary vernacular song explicitly linked the Saracens in the east with the Almoravids in Spain.
¹⁴
Even so, anxiety over the propriety of expending time, effort and lives surfaced. During violent storms in the Bay of Biscay, there was terrified talk among the seasick of their being punished for the
conversio
, the change or alteration, of their pilgrimage, perhaps referring to an already agreed plan to join the Portuguese
reconquista
. The elaborate and comprehensive arguments deployed at length by the bishop of Oporto implied resistance to the idea of diverting the expedition, while, at Lisbon itself, elements in the fleet still argued for an immediate continuation of the journey to Jerusalem, even if for reasons more of material self-interest than single-minded piety.
¹⁵
In the event, the success at Lisbon justified the endeavour in the eyes of participants, even if the achievement received remarkably scant attention from observers elsewhere in western Europe.

The lack of unitary leadership exacerbated the tensions between the different regional groups and within each contingent, the statutes agreed at Dartmouth providing a forum for dissent as well as a structure for unity. Yet sufficient discipline was retained and agreement hammered out between the various groups to ensure enough cohesion to pursue a strenuous and precarious siege. Although leaving Dartmouth together on 23 May, the fleet was soon separated, straggling into the mouth
of the Duero and the city of Oporto between 16 and 26 June, the Anglo-Normans and Rhinelanders having visited Compostela on the way; the count of Aerschot arrived last. At Oporto, Afonso’s plan to hire the crusaders for an assault on Lisbon was presented to the Anglo-Normans and Rhinelanders by Bishop Peter but only after the full fleet reached the Tagus on 28 June did detailed negotiations on terms for military assistance begin. While the Flemish immediately signed up, some of the Anglo-Normans, led by William and Ralph Veil from Southampton, argued that greater profits could be gained in sailing directly to the Holy Land by preying on shipping in the Mediterranean. The dissidents from Southampton, Bristol and Hastings were abetted by veterans who remembered being left in the lurch by Afonso during the 1142 attack. Although the debate revolved around payment and booty it also raised serious questions about the unity of the whole expedition. Soon after the crusaders had established a bridgehead on the beach to the west of the city, those from Flanders, Boulogne and the Rhineland, presumably having accepted Afonso’s offers, moved to positions on the east of the city, where they remained a semi-detached force for the rest of the siege. The Anglo-Normans were left to thrash out their differences in a full, ill-tempered council where accusations of bad faith were hurled at the small but experienced minority – comprising eight ships, perhaps as little as 5 per cent of the fleet – who held out against serving Afonso. Apparently, only a passionate but diplomatic appeal to honour, unity and faithfulness to the Dartmouth-sworn contracts by the East Anglian commander Hervey of Glanvill persuaded the Veil faction to cooperate, and even then only after assuring them of adequate provisions and pay. The religious gloss put on events by Hervey of Glanvill’s chaplain Raol, who wrote the most detailed surviving account of the expedition, cannot disguise the national and regional tensions or the anxieties over supplies, profits and possibly the justice of the whole operation.
¹⁶
That the main opposition to joining an attack on Lisbon came from hardened seamen with experience of Iberian warfare, portrayed as piratical and mercenary gold-diggers, indicated military and political risks in the enterprise that the more optimistic or more naive elements discounted.

Afonso’s determination bordering on desperation to reach agreement with the crusaders was reflected in generous terms. The Portuguese ruler needed victory at Lisbon to exploit the temporary disunity among the Moorish princes of southern Iberia in the wake of the collapse of
the previously dominant Almoravid power in north Africa. Securing the Tagus frontier, Afonso would reinforce his credentials as a Christian warrior worthy of papal recognition as king and further assert his independence from his nominal overlord, Alfonso VII of León-Castile. Afonso offered the ‘Franks’, as the treaty had it, the entire booty from the captured city and the ransoms of all the inhabitants they rounded up. Once it had been thoroughly ransacked, Afonso would then allocate property in the city and surrounding countryside to the Franks, who would also enjoy exemption from certain commercial tolls. To encourage trust, Afonso promised not to desert the siege or try to twist the treaty provisions. Additionally, guarantees for supplies and pay were presumably settled with the dissident Anglo-Normans. The whole deal was confirmed by oaths and the exchange of hostages. Thus Afonso partly hired and partly allied with the Christian fleet.
¹⁷

The new allies invested Lisbon on all sides. Ships lay in the river to the south of the city; Afonso and the Portuguese occupied high ground to the north with the Anglo-Normans on the west and the Flemish and Germans on a hill to the east. After a fruitless formal parley with the enemy further to reinforce the legitimacy of the attack, on 1 July, following a confused melee in the steep, narrow streets of the western suburb, the besiegers managed to drive the defenders back behind the walls of the main city, in the process uncovering a vast cache of food supplies concealed in cellars. There followed a bitter attritional conflict. The small Muslim garrison, with large numbers of civilians, including refugees from Santarem, faced a grim prospect. Denied the supplies hoarded in the western suburbs, with little prospect of relief, they were reduced to reliance on the strength of the city walls, the difficulty of the hilly terrain for siege engines, crude psychological warfare in the form of abuse aimed at insulting their attackers’ religion and the fidelity of their wives, and frequent costly sorties as much to undermine Christian morale as in the realistic hope of militarily forcing a withdrawal. Once attempts to persuade the governor of Evora to send help failed, the main Muslim strategy appeared to be to wait for something to turn up, most likely the disintegration of Christian harmony and the raising of the siege as in 1142. These tactics showed prospects of success when, in early August, concerted assaults from east, west and the sea by large and elaborate siege engines, including rams, trebuchets, towers, one reputedly ninety-five feet high, and precarious ‘flying bridges’ mounted
on pairs of ships, failed utterly, with most of the machines fired, stuck in the sand or damaged by Muslim artillery. Five times men from Cologne unsuccessfully tried to undermine the walls.

With casualties mounting, the besiegers faced a major crisis. The destruction of the siege engines left the attackers ‘not a little demoralized’ while with the failed mining operations, the East Anglian priest Raol remembered: ‘our forces again had cause for deep discouragement and, murmuring much among themselves, they made such complaints as that they might have been better employed elsewhere.’
¹⁸
Now the dividends of the hard-fought battles of May and June to maintain unity and a chain of corporate command became apparent. Stories of the hunger, privations and desperation of the Muslims circulated. To quell talk of abandoning the siege, the leaders hauled some ships on to the beaches and ‘lowered the masts and put cordage under the hatches, as a sign that they were spending the winter (
hyemandi signum
)’.
¹⁹
Successful foraging expeditions around Lisbon garnered rich pickings and heavy Muslim casualties as well as securing the besiegers from any threats to their supply lines. In the new mood of optimism, even the withdrawal of most of the Portuguese forces, leaving only Afonso and his military household with the bishop of Oporto, failed to cause a panic. As September arrived, instead of seeking an excuse to leave, the besiegers sensed their advantage as more and more of the besieged crossed the lines to surrender, bearing tales of the horrors within the city. According to a Rhineland witness most were so desperate that they accepted baptism; possibly these were in fact Mozarab Christians whom the northerners could not distinguish from Muslim locals; the cultural gulf remained unbridged: some of these unfortunate refugees ‘were sent back… to the walls with their hands cut off, and they were stoned by their fellow citizens’.
²⁰
Perhaps this incident merely underscores the sadism inspired by prolonged close-contact warfare; perhaps it dimly echoes the blurred rhetoric of conquest and forced conversion heard by the Germans from the lips of the abbot of Clairvaux.

The final stages of the siege revolved around perfecting the mechanics of undermining or overtopping the stubborn city walls conducted in more or less security, as the defenders’ ability to launch sorties had subsided in the face of starvation and a massive sustained fusillade by the Anglo-Norman trebuchets firing at a rate of more than eight stones a minute. During September, while the Germano-Flemish dug a huge
galleried mine under the eastern walls, the Anglo-Normans, directed by a Pisan engineer, constructed a new eighty-three-foot tower on the western beach. The final assaults, though protracted, appeared coordinated. The eastern mine was fired on the night of 16 October, causing a large section of the walls to collapse, although the pile of rubble in front of the breach prevented the attackers from forcing an immediate entry into the city. On 19 October, after the ritual dimension of warfare had been observed with the blessing both of the siege tower and the troops, the tower began to be manoeuvred into place before the south-western corner of the walls. So narrow was the level area of beach that the tower became surrounded by water, cutting it off from the main force. Throughout the night of 19 October and the whole of 20 October, the garrison of 100 Anglo-Norman and 100 Portuguese knights led support troops in a desperate defence of the tower, from fire, salvoes of missiles and sorties from the walls. Seven young men from Ipswich played a crucial part in dousing the flames that threatened to destroy the engine during the night of 19–20 October. Christian casualties mounted, the Pisan engineer was wounded by a stone and the Portuguese fled, the tower garrison only being relieved on the evening of 20 October.
²¹
Next day saw the final assaults from both east and west. Seeing they would be overwhelmed, rather than be massacred the Muslim defenders asked for surrender terms. Negotiations became protracted, inciting restless elements in the crusader army to mutiny against the leadership, whom they suspected of selling out their rights to plunder and booty; the Anglo-Norman camp was wrecked by a group of 400 sailors led by a priest from Bristol, and the Portuguese camp threatened by a Germano-Flemish mob. Unsurprisingly, the Muslims temporarily withdrew their peace overtures until order had been restored. The treaty finally agreed on 23/4 October allowed the governor alone to retain food and property, while on 24 October 140 Anglo-Normans and 160 Germano-Flemish were peacefully to occupy the citadel and organize the despoliation of the city and its citizens. In the event the Germans and the Flemish smuggled in 200 more and the orderly occupation soon turned into looting, rape and pillage. The governor was captured; the Mozarab bishop had his throat cut.
²²
Having achieved immediate gratification, the Flemish and Germans then submitted with the other crusaders to the orderly ransacking of the city and expulsion of the citizens, which lasted five days (25–29 October). To the familiar accompaniment
of rotting corpses, religious processions, racketeering and refugees, Lisbon returned to Christian rule.

Given the time of year, there was no prospect of an immediate resumption of the journey to Jerusalem. Afonso was eager to entice colonists and settlers, agreeing to the appointment of Gilbert of Hastings as the new bishop of Lisbon in a signal display of cultural imperialism.
²³
With the Mozarab bishop conveniently murdered, there was no question of another local; equally Afonso may have hoped to encourage settlement and to display to the papacy his orthodox international ecclesiastical connections: Bishop Gilbert introduced the Salisbury breviary and missal into his cathedral and, a few years later, returned to England to recruit more soldiers and settlers. Others remaining included the priest Raol, to whom is attributed the most detailed account of the siege; he maintained his contacts with home, some years later sending a copy of his narrative to a Suffolk clerk, Osbert of Bawdsey. Such settlement witnessed the effective end to the unity so hard won and preserved since Dartmouth. While the thirst and competition for booty had both imperilled and inspired the assault on Lisbon, the lure of profitable and privileged colonization broke up the crusader army. In early February, part of the fleet embarked for the Mediterranean to fulfil their vows separately,
per varia discrimina
, as a Rhineland crusader put it. Before passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, one group, probably Flemish and German, attacked the port of Faro, without success, an attempt to extract protection money from the Muslims proving a messy failure. Once in the Mediterranean, some contingents sailed directly to the Holy Land.
²⁴
Others, mainly Englishmen but also Flemings and Germans, who may have lingered at Lisbon until April, tried their luck with the papally blessed Christian campaigns in eastern Iberia, culminating in the Genoese-Catalan-led siege of Tortosa on the Ebro on the southern border of Catalonia (July to December 1148), after which a few continued to Palestine while their comrades, as at Lisbon, settled. One such, Osbert ‘Anglicus’, the Englishman, only honoured his Jerusalem vow after two decades waxing rich in the new Christian enclave.
²⁵