Leon, and Gallicia, by his three sons, Sancho, Alfonso, and Garcia, the
last of whom received the two counties of Coimbra and Oporto as fiefs
of Gallicia, and maintained Nuno Mendes and Sesnando as his feudatories.
Under them were many feudal barons, who held their lands on condition of
military service. It is fortunately not necessary to enter into the
history of the wars between the sons of Ferdinand; it is enough to say
that the second of them, Alfonso of Leon, eventually united all his
father’s kingdoms in 1073, as Alfonso VI. The successes of the
Christians aroused the stubborn resistance of the Moors; a fresh wave of
fanaticism passed over the Mohammedans of Africa and of the peninsula,
and a new dynasty, that of the Almoravides arose, which subdued the
various emīrs and wālis who had usurped the government of various
portions of the old Ommeyad caliphate, and once more united the Moorish
power. The new dynasty collected great Moslem armies, and in 1086
Yūsuf Ibn Teshfīn routed Alfonso utterly at the battle of Zalaca,
and reconquered the peninsula up to the Ebro. In this battle all the
chivalry of the Moors and Christians was engaged, and among the latter
was Sesnando, Count of Coimbra, followed by his knights. Alfonso tried
to compensate for this defeat and his loss of territory in the east of
his dominions by conquests in the west, and in 1093 he advanced to the
Tagus and took Santarem and Lisbon, and made Sueiro Mendes count of the
new district. But these conquests he did not hold for long; the
Almoravides were in the full flush of success, and their armies were
made almost irresistible by the fresh fanaticism inspired into them.
Their conquests in the east of the peninsula after the battle of Zalaca
were followed by rapid successes in the west. In 1093 Seyr, the general
of the Almoravide caliph Yūsuf, took Evora from the Emīr of
Badajoz; in 1094 he took Badajoz itself, and killed the emīr; and
retaking Lisbon and Santarem forced his way up to the Mondego. To resist
this revival of the Mohammedan power, Alfonso summoned the chivalry of
Christendom to his aid. Among the knights who joined his army eager to
win their spurs, and win dominions for themselves were Count Raymond of
Toulouse and Count Henry of Burgundy. To the former, Alfonso gave his
legitimate daughter Urraca and Gallicia; to the latter, his illegitimate
daughter Theresa, and the counties of Oporto and Coimbra, with the title
of Count of Portugal.
The history of Portugal now becomes distinct from that of the rest of
the peninsula, and it is from the year 1095 that the history of Portugal
commences. The son of Henry of Burgundy was the great monarch Affonso
Henriques, the hero of his country and the founder of a great dynasty.
Up to this time it has been impossible to separate the history of
Portugal from that of Spain, but it has been necessary to point out the
fact that the history of the two countries had been hitherto identical,
in order to dissipate the common error that the Spaniards and Portuguese
belong to distinct races. The fact that the history of Portugal does not
begin until such a comparatively recent date teaches another important
lesson, that the nations of modern Europe must not be looked upon as
having been complete entities from the earliest times, but in some
instances owe their distinct nationality at the present day to
fortuitous circumstances.
In 1095 a powerful county of Portugal was formed: its growth to a
kingdom and the extension of its dominions by conquests from the Moors
will now have to be studied, as well as its difficulty in maintaining
its independence among the other nations of the peninsula, before it can
be seen as the leading nation of the world, in the van of the march of
European civilization.
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II.
THE COUNTY OF PORTUGAL.
Count Henry of Burgundy, his wife Theresa, and his son Affonso
Henriques, were the three founders of Portugal, and they were all of
them individuals of marked personality. They were typical figures of
their epoch, possessing the curious mixture of virtues and vices which
characterized the age of chivalry.
Count Henry was the second son of Henry, who was the third son of
Robert, first Duke of Burgundy, and he was like his father and
grandfather, a knight of the old French school, combining a passionate
love for adventure and for war with an ambitious and self-seeking
temperament. He had come to Spain to the assistance of the Christians,
as much with the purpose of founding a dynasty as for the love of war,
and from the first he turned his thoughts more to the hope of succeeding
his father-in-law, Alfonso VI., in one at least of his kingdoms, than to
carving a kingdom for himself out of the dominions of the Arab caliphs.
He received his county of Portugal, the dowry of his wife, Theresa,
illegitimate daughter of Alfonso VI., as a direct fief of the crown of
Gallicia, one of the three kingdoms of his father-in-law. This kingdom
Alfonso had granted, as a fief, not as a kingdom, to Count Raymond of
Toulouse, who had married his legitimate daughter, Urraca, and Count
Henry highly disapproved of being in some sort a feudatory of his
fellow-adventurer. At first the jealousy between Henry and Raymond did
not show itself; for Count Henry had to fight hard to defend his
southern frontiers against the incursions of the Mohammedan general
Seyr. To his help he summoned the chivalry of France, and the knights of
his native country flocked to his assistance, and were promoted to high
military positions and to feudal dignities by him. Battle succeeded
battle without either side gaining any decisive victory, until after
seven years’ hard fighting both Christians and Moors decided to rest
awhile to recover from their exhaustion.
Count Henry was, however, too much the restless knight of the Middle
Ages to remain quiet long. Since his Portuguese warriors were weary, and
the battle-ground for miles on each bank of the Tagus was laid utterly
waste, he could fight no longer in his own country against the
unbelievers, and so hurried off in 1103 with Maurice, Bishop of Coimbra,
to fight them in Palestine. For two years he served in the expedition
known as the Second Crusade, and when he returned he was still ready for
more fighting at home. His restlessness was typical of his epoch. The
knights of the Crusades were always knights-errant, always in search of
adventure, and never satiated with war. This spirit was encouraged by
the Church, and while the Almoravide caliph Yūsuf was organizing his
military forces for a fresh assault on the Christians, Count Henry, on
the other hand, went off in search of adventure abroad, leaving his
county under the government of his wife, Theresa.
Fortunately for Portugal, Theresa was a singularly able woman. Beautiful
and accomplished, the idol of poets and musicians, and capable of
inspiring the deepest devotion, she threw herself heart and soul into
the task which her restless husband abandoned, and spent the years of
his absence in training the Portuguese for fresh struggles. She too
possessed all the faults and virtues of her epoch; passionate to a
degree in every sense, she became the adored divinity of her nobles, and
prepared herself during this brief regency for the longer regency of her
widowhood. Her great aim at this time, as it was throughout her stormy
life, was to make the Portuguese nobles regard themselves as Portuguese,
and not as Gallicians, and thus prepare them to make their country
independent. But though her chief endeavour was to heighten and animate
the spirit of her nobles, she did not neglect other classes of her
subjects; she encouraged the citizens of her cities in their ideas of
municipal independence, and urged them to keep their fortifications in
good repair, and to be ready to go forth to war under captains of their
own choice, instead of under hereditary leaders from among the nobility.
The result of this policy was that, in the next generation, the military
retainers of the great nobles, who resided in their castles, went forth
to fight side by side with the free citizens under their elected
leaders, and that her son was able to lead two distinct classes of
soldiers under his banners, who vied with each other in prowess against
foreign foes, while they were a check upon each other at home, and could
be played off against one another in case either class became dangerous
to their suzerain.
When Count Henry returned from Palestine in 1105, he became united with
his former brother-in-arms, Count Raymond of Gallicia, by a common
feeling of jealousy. Both looked forward to inheriting portions of King
Alfonso’s dominions, and were extremely suspicious lest the old monarch
should favour his natural son, Sancho, whose mother was a Moorish
princess, Zaida, daughter of Ibn Abbad, Emīr of Seville. In their
dislike for Sancho they were encouraged by the priests, to whom
Alfonso’s affection for a Moorish woman was abhorrent, and an agreement
was made between the brothers-in-law by an ambitious French monk, named
Hugh of Cluny, afterwards Bishop of Oporto, to oust the son of the
infidel. This peaceful arrangement had no result, owing to the death of
Count Raymond in 1107, followed by that of young Sancho at the battle of
Uclés with the Moors in 1108, and finally by the death of Alfonso VI.
himself in 1109.
The king’s death brought about the catastrophe. He left all his
dominions to his legitimate daughter, Urraca, with the result that there
was five years of fierce fighting between Henry of Burgundy, Alfonso
Raimundes, the son of Count Raymond, Alfonso I., of Aragon, and Queen
Urraca, during which the Almoravides quietly consolidated their power
and prepared for a fresh attack upon the Christians. Nothing proves
more certainly that the crusading spirit was often only a cloak for
personal ambition than this terrible internecine war, in which princes
and nobles changed sides and broke their plighted words with a
recklessness supposed to be distinctive of a most abandoned age. While
they fought with each other, the Mohammedans advanced. The Almoravide
Ali, who had succeeded his father, Yūsuf, in Spain and Morocco,
reconquered Talavera and Madrid, and laid siege to Toledo, while his
famous general, Seyr Ibn Abi-Bekr, reconquered the Moorish emīrs of
the western towns, who had revolted, and in 1112 besieged Santarem,
which then formed the southernmost outpost of the county of Portugal.
Before he took it however, Seyr died, and Count Henry, who had been
forced to come south in order to meet the invaders, once more returned
to continue his wars with the Christian princes. Only one incident in
Count Henry’s march against the Mohammedans deserves record, and that is
the refusal of the citizens of Coimbra to admit their count into their
city, or to follow him to the front, unless he confirmed the privileges
granted to them by Donna Theresa, and granted them certain fresh
concessions. Henry was forced to grant them, and on the death of Seyr,
he again advanced into Spain, and joined in further intrigues. These did
not last long, for on May 1, 1114, Count Henry died at Astorga, not
without a suspicion that he had been poisoned by Queen Urraca, leaving
his wife Theresa as regent during the minority of his son, Affonso
Henriques, who was but three years old.
Theresa, who made the ancient city of Guimaraens her capital, devoted
all her energies to building up her son’s dominions into an independent
state; and under her rule, while the Christian states of Spain were torn
by internecine war, the Portuguese began to recognize Portugal as their
country, and to cease from calling themselves Gallicians. This
distinction between Portugal and Gallicia was the first step towards the
formation of a national spirit, which grew into a desire for national
independence. The people were the same in origin, and spoke the same
language. The province of Gallicia had both in Roman and Gothic times
spread as far south as the Tagus, and no distinction had been made
between the Gallicians of the north and south until Alfonso VI. had
given Count Henry his large domain. It was Donna Theresa who first tried
to make the distinction more marked. Count Henry had looked upon his
county as a step to the succession to the kingdom of Gallicia, if not to
the two kingdoms of Leon and Gallicia. Donna Theresa, on the other hand,
looked upon Portugal as an independent country, and desired rather to
extend her frontiers at the expense of Gallicia than to succeed to the
throne of that kingdom.
In her efforts to promote the unity of Portugal and its independence of
Gallicia, Donna Theresa was warmly seconded by her people, and
especially by the inhabitants of the cities whom she favoured, while
among the ruling classes she had the support of the clergy and the
opposition of the greater part of the nobility. Most of her nobles owned
great estates in both Gallicia and Portugal, for the feudal grants of
land conquered by the Christian kings from the Mohammedans were
generally made to noblemen, who had led large contingents to their help.
These nobles were naturally opposed to a separation between Portugal and
Gallicia, which would make them feudatories to two different lords, and
often oblige them in case of disputes between their suzerains to
sacrifice one of their properties. On the other hand, the Portuguese
bishops were suffragans of the reconstructed archbishopric of Braga, and
owed no obedience to any Gallician bishop; indeed, they were especially
hostile to the wealthiest of them, the powerful bishop of the great
pilgrim city of Santiago da Campostella. It has been said that many of
the Christian bishoprics continued to exist during the Moorish
occupation, and had a continuous history from the first conversion of
the people to Christianity, but some had lapsed owing to the poverty of
their sees. The advance of the Christian princes, which was due as much
to religious as to political motives, brought about the re-establishment
of the bishoprics which had lapsed, and the increased endowment of those
which had continued to exist. The new bishops held a very different
position from their predecessors. They were not the poor shepherds of
poor flocks, in a land ruled by infidels, but powerful barons, holding
great estates on military tenure, who united the influence of their
sacred rank to their temporal power. The metropolitan of these
Portuguese bishops was the Archbishop of Braga, and it was naturally his
policy to support the independence of the county of Portugal, for it was
better for him to be the head of the Church of an important county
than to be merely one of the archbishops of the kingdom of Gallicia.
This was the attitude taken up by the first great Archbishop of Braga,
Mauricio Burdino, a Frenchman, and the companion in Palestine of Count
Henry, who had promoted him from the bishopric of Coimbra to the
metropolitan see. In it he was supported by Hugh, Bishop of Oporto, the
most wealthy of his suffragans, and the history of the ensuing century
gives many instances of the patriotism of the Portuguese bishops, and of
their efforts to promote and maintain the independence of the new state.
[Illustration: COIMBRA. (PRESENT STATE.) (_After a Photograph._)]
The regency of Donna Theresa was marked by many struggles, the history
of which it is now difficult to trace, but throughout them all, the
growing unity of Portugal can be perceived. She took a keen interest in
the politics of Gallicia, for she hoped to extend her frontiers to the
north, and in 1116 she led her forces in person to the assistance of
Diogo Gelmires, Bishop of Santiago da Campostella, and the Count de
Trava, who had headed a rising, intended to depose Queen Urraca, and to
place her young son Alfonso Raimundes at once upon the throne of
Gallicia. In this war Theresa took the towns of Tuy and Orense, and the
warrior countess met, in the course of it for the first time, the young
hidalgo, Don Fernando Peres de Trava, with whom she fell passionately in
love, and whose history was for the future to be linked with hers. In
1117 the Moors, under their caliph Ali in person, invaded her dominions,
and besieged her in Coimbra, but she succeeded in beating them off, and
spent the following years in peace and quiet, in the constant company
of her lover, whom she made governor of Coimbra and Oporto, and Count of
Trastamare; while to his elder brother, Bermudo Peres de Trava, she gave
the hand of her second daughter by Count Henry, the Donna Urraca, and
the governorship of Viseu.
But this quiet enjoyment of peace and love was not long allowed to the
beautiful ruler of Portugal. Her half-sister Urraca, the Queen of
Castile, Leon, and Gallicia, had been hitherto too much engaged in
fighting with her second husband, Alfonso I. of Aragon, to pay any
attention to her; but she too was a warrior princess, and in 1121 she
ordered Theresa to surrender the city of Tuy. Theresa refused, and
Urraca led an army against her, which defeated the Portuguese at Tuy,
and eventually the queen took the Countess of Portugal prisoner after a
long siege of the castle of Lanhoso. It seemed as if the nascent
independence of Portugal was about to be crushed, but Bishop Gelmires
came to the assistance of Theresa, who had done so much for his friends
and relatives, the De Travas, and threatened to attack Urraca unless she
made peace with her half-sister. Urraca was forced to comply, and the
treaty of peace which was then signed marks another stage in the growth
of the independence of Portugal, for in it Donna Theresa is styled
Infanta, and treated as the equal of Queen Urraca, who further promised
to cede to her the cities and districts of Toro, Zamora, and Salamanca.
For the next few years the careers of the half-sisters were singularly
similar. Queen Urraca showered favours on her lover, Don Pedro de Lara,
until her young son, Alfonso Raimundes, assisted by Bishop Gelmires,
revolted against her; while Donna Theresa, with equal blindness, devoted
herself to her love for Don Fernando Peres de Trava, and thus aroused
the hatred of her boy-son Affonso Henriques and of Paio Mendes, who in
1121 had succeeded Mauricio Burdino as Archbishop of Braga. Her quarrel
with Paio Mendes commenced in the year after he became archbishop, and
well illustrates the attitude of the Portuguese bishops. As long as
Theresa had remained the living symbol of Portuguese unity and
independence the bishops had followed her, but as soon as she showed her
love for a Gallician nobleman they turned against her. Paio Mendes was
quite ready to lead the malcontents, for he was the brother of Count
Sueiro Mendes of Oporto, surnamed the Great, who was the head of the
purely Portuguese, as opposed to the mixed Portuguese and Gallician,
nobility. In 1122 Archbishop Paio protested against the gift of so many
important posts to Don Fernando, and the proud countess immediately cast
him into prison. She was obliged in a few days to release him, for fear
of a papal interdict; but she had made a bitter enemy, who was soon to
have an opportunity for revenge.
The discontent with Theresa did not show itself openly until 1127, when
Alfonso Raimundes, who had succeeded his mother Urraca in the preceding
year, and taken the title of Alfonso VII., King of Castile, Leon, and
Gallicia, invaded Portugal and forced Theresa to recognize him as
suzerain, and to surrender her claims to Tuy and Orense. The citizens
of Guimaraens, the capital of the county, at once declared Affonso
Henriques of age, and competent to reign; but Alfonso VII. marched
against the city, and Egas Moniz, the former tutor of the young count,
who was its governor, in order to make peace, promised on behalf of his
former pupil that he would ratify Theresa’s submission. Affonso
Henriques, however, though only a boy of seventeen, absolutely refused
to recognize the submission made by his mother and his tutor, and in
1128 he raised an army with the declared intention of expelling Donna
Theresa and her lover from the country. In this movement the boy was
encouraged by Archbishop Paio and his brother Sueiro Mendes, by one of
his brothers-in-law, Sancho Nunes, by his half-brother, Pedro Affonso,
an illegitimate son of Count Henry, by Emigio Moniz, and by Garcia
Soares. Donna Theresa also collected an army, consisting chiefly of
Gallicians, but she was defeated by her son at the battle of S. Mamede,
near Guimaraens, and taken prisoner, and was shortly afterwards
expelled, with Don Fernando, from the county she had ruled so long.
Thus ended the regency of Donna Theresa. She had not added a single town
to her son’s dominions, for her early conquests had been recaptured by
Queen Urraca and Alfonso VII. But she had done more for Portugal than
making conquests. She had asserted its independence, and though she
seldom called herself Queen, she never took any title less than that of
Infanta. She had also prepared for the extension of Portugal towards the
south at the end of her regency by encouraging the settlement of the
orders of religious knights there. To the Knights Templars she had
granted, in 1128, the frontier town of Soure; to the Knights of the Holy
Sepulchre S. Payo de Gouvea, Lodeiro, and Paços de Penalva; and to the
Knights of the Hospital, the town of Leça. From these beginnings great
results were to arise during the reign of her son.
The last years of Theresa’s life were quite out of keeping with the
brilliancy of her regency. After her expulsion she wandered about in the
mountains of Gallicia with her lover until her death, in poverty, on
November 1, 1130. Her body was taken to Portugal, and buried beside that
of Count Henry, her husband, in the Cathedral of Braga, and both of them
are reverenced by modern Portuguese as the founders of the independence
of their country. Her history is a strange one. To political instincts
and a capability for government which rank her among the most remarkable
women of the whole period of the Middle Ages; to a manly courage, which
inspired her to lead her soldiers in person to the fight and enabled her
to withstand a Moorish siege, she joined the most feminine of
qualities--that of entire devotion to the man she loved. Her love for
Fernando Peres may have made her deviate from the path she should have
followed as regent of Portugal, but it does not make her a less
interesting character in the eyes of posterity. If she loved too
greatly, she was greatly punished, and her death in exile more than
atoned for the favour she bestowed on her lover. The task commenced by
Count Henry and Donna Theresa was destined to be accomplished by one
greater than either of them, by the hero of early Portuguese history,
Affonso Henriques, who united his father’s restless and chivalrous
valour with the political ability of his mother.
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[Illustration: text decoration]
III.
PORTUGAL BECOMES A KINGDOM. THE REIGN OF AFFONSO HENRIQUES.
Affonso Henriques, the only son of Count Henry and Donna Theresa, who at
the age of seventeen, after the battle of S. Mamede, began his long and
prosperous reign, was one of the heroes of the Middle Ages. He succeeded
to the government of Portugal when it was still regarded generally, in
spite of Theresa’s claims, as a county of Gallicia, and after nearly
sixty years of incessant fighting he bequeathed to his son a powerful
little kingdom, whose independence was unquestioned, and whose fame was
spread abroad throughout Christendom by the victories of its first
monarch over the Moors. The story of his early years abounds in
miraculous legends and tales, like those told of the youth of Arthur and
Charlemagne, which, if not credible in themselves, are interesting as
showing the feelings of the Portuguese chroniclers and poets towards
him. His boyish exploits in the mountains around Guimaraens, in which he
is said to have fought wolves as he afterwards fought the Moors, and the
tale of the fire which played about his cradle without hurting or even
terrifying the youthful hero, savour of the marvellous and were
evidently invented in after years. But in telling the tale of his
education and bringing up his biographers were on firmer ground. His
father had died when he was but an infant, and his mother was too much
occupied with her lover and with the cares of government to pay much
attention to him. He was handed over entirely to the charge of a gallant
Portuguese nobleman, Egas Moniz, the governor of Guimaraens. The young
count showed himself an adept in all knightly exercises; he became a
skilful horseman and a fearless hunter; and added to these
accomplishments, a knowledge of reading and writing rarely acquired in
those times by any but ecclesiastics. His disposition was that of knight
of the Middle Ages; with the greatest personal bravery, he possessed a
love for poetry and romance, and delighted in the tales of chivalry
which were sung before him; and he was moreover a typical Christian of
the period, uniting a belief in superstitions, which made him a fanatic,
with a looseness of life, when love for women or romantic adventure was
in question, which directly belied his religious professions.