"Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!"

Posted on Tuesday 13 April 2004 to Story So Far

One of the very first military actions of the Second Crusade was the capture of the city of Lisbon from the Moors in 1147. It was taken by an Anglo-Norman expedition which had set out from Dartmouth in England to capture a number of Moorish positions along the Iberian coast as well as to give aid to Don Afonso Henriques, who already laying siege to the city. Afonso became the first king of the independent country of Portugal and gained Papal recognition in 1179.

This action was also one the earliest victories of the Reconquista, the resurgence of Christian power which gathered pace during the following century becoming a coordinated and determined effort to dislodge the Moors from the penisula completely. This culminated in the conquest of Grenada in 1492.


Osbernus, who was an eye-witness and active participant with the Anglo-Norman party, wrote a brief but gripping account of the taking of the city. I thought this was a particularly choice snippet:
The Moors, meanwhile, made frequent sorties against our men by day because they held three gates against us. With two of these gates on the side of the city and one on the sea, they had an easy way to get in and out. On the other hand, it was difficult for our men to organize themselves. The sorties caused casualties on both sides, but theirs were always greater than ours. While we kept watch, meanwhile, under their walls through the days and nights, they heaped derision and many insults upon us. They considered us worthy of a thousand deaths, especially since they thought that we spurned our own things as vile and lusted after others' goods as precious. Nor did they recall doing us any injury, save that if they had anything of the best quality in their possession we might consider them unworthy of having it and judge it worthy of our possession. They taunted us with the many children who were going to be born at home while we were gone and said that our wives would not be anxious about our deaths, since home was well supplied with little bastards. They promised that any of us who survived would go home miserable and poverty-stricken and they mocked us and gnashed their teeth at us. They also continuously attacked Blessed Mary, the mother of God, with insults and with vile and abusive words, which infuriated us. They said that we venerated the son of a poor woman with a worship equal to that due to God, for we held that he was a God and the Son of God, when it is apparent that there is only one God who began all things that have begun and that he has no one coeval with him and no partaker in his divinity.... They attacked us with these and similar calumnies. They showed to us, moreover, with much derision the symbol of the cross. They spat upon it and wiped the feces from their posteriors with it. At last they urinated on it, as on some despicable thing, and threw our cross at us....

The whole thing can be read here. It's also worth remembering that at the time of the fall of Lisbon, the Moors had lived in and ruled the city for more than 430 years.


The Castelo de São Jorge (top-right) was built in the eight century by the Moors on the site of a former Visigothic fortress. After its conquest by Afonso's forces it became the royal residence until the sixteenth century.