The Conquest of Santarém and Goswin's Song of the Conquest of Alcácer do Sal

Editions and Translations of De expugnatione Scalabis and Gosuini de expugnatione Salaciae carmen

Jonathan Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000384673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Achieved at the height of the Crusades, the Christian conquests of Santarém in 1147 by King Afonso I, and of Alcácer do Sal in 1217 by Portuguese forces and northern European warriors on their way by sea to Palestine, were crucial events in the creation of the independent kingdom of Portugal. The two texts presented here survive in their unique, thirteenth-century manuscript copies appended to a codex belonging to one of Europe's most important monastic library collections accumulated in the Cistercian abbey of Alcobaça, founded c. 1153 by Bernard of Clairvaux. Accompanied by comprehensive introductions and here translated into English for the first time, these extraordinary texts are based on eyewitness testimony of the conquests. They contain much detail for the military historian, including data on operational tactics and the ideology of Christian holy war in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Literary historians too will be delighted by the astonishing styles deployed, demonstrating considerable authorial flamboyance, flair and innovation. While they are likely written by Goswin of Bossut, the search for authorship yields an impressive array of literary friends and associates, including James of Vitry, Thomas of Cantimpré, Oliver of Paderborn and Caesarius of Heisterbach.

Part I
De expugnatione Scalabis

The Scalabis narrates the pivotal moment in the Portuguese Reconquista¹ that was the daring nocturnal conquest of the fortress the Muslims called Shantariyn, but which the Christians called Sanctaren,² (modern Santarém) on 15 March 1147 by King Afonso Henriques in command of a hand-picked soldiery. Described by Herculano as a sort of ‘poem in prose’,³ the Scalabis is important to historians on a number of levels, not least because it is the earliest and most detailed account of the definitive Portuguese conquest of this key Muslim fortress which protected the northern apex of the Tagus estuary, some 70 km upstream from the port city of Luxbuna, Muslim-held Lisbon.

1 For a definition of the term Reconquista (or ‘Reconquest’) as used herein, see Derek Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 1–4. See also, Manuel González Jiménez, ‘Reconquista? Un estado de la cuestión’, in Tópicos y Realidades de la Edad Media (I), coord. by Eloy Benito Ruano (Madrid: Real Academia de la História, 2000), pp. 175–8, esp. pp. 157. Cf., more generally, José-Luis Martín, ‘Reconquista y Cruzada’, Studia Zamorensia, 3 (1996), 215–41; Julio Valdeón Baruque, La Reconquista. El Concepto de España, Unidad e Diversidad (Madrid: Espasa, 2006); Francisco Garcia Fitz, ‘La Reconquista un estado de la cuestión’, Clio & Crimen, 6 (2009), 142–215.

2 Roman name; Escalabis or Scalabis; see generally, Carlos Fabião, ‘A romanização do actual território português’, in História de Portugal, 8 vols. dir. by José Mattoso (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1994), vol. 1 pp. 203–99.

3 espécie de poema em prosa, Alexandre Herculano, História de Portugal, Desde o começo da monarquia até o fim do reinado de Afonso III, ed. by José Mattoso (Lisbon: Betrand Editora, 2007), vol. 1, p. 313; Aires Augusto Nascimento, ‘O Júbilo da Vitória: Celebração da Tomada de Santarém aos Mouros (AD 1147)’, in Actes del X Congrés de l’Associación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Alacant: Instituí Interuniversitari de Filología Valenciana, 2005), pp. 1217–32, p. 1217.

An intriguing aspect of the principal narrative, and a facet that makes it unique in all Portuguese historiography, is that it is recounted in the first person purportedly by King Afonso himself.⁴ Whilst this is almost certainly a device adopted by the true author who, amongst other things, might have schemed to boost the authority of his work, the text is nevertheless extraordinarily precise in its condescension to particulars, including the specification of geographical locations, the names of certain Christian and Muslim participants, and details of tactics and operational planning. The consistency with which many of the events and individuals described may be corroborated in other independent contemporary sources confers added probity, as does the presence of specialised cultural knowledge manifest in the precise citation of several Arabic words and expressions. In combination, these features lend the work a cogency which, along with a marked vitality of style, suggests the text before us has been elaborated from some currently unknown underlying source redacted by someone who was personally involved in the action or by someone who gathered testimony directly from such a participant. Since it contains no mention whatsoever of Afonso Henriques’s signal conquest of Lisbon in October of that same year of 1147, just a few months after the Santarém triumph, the weight of scholarly opinion has placed authorship of the Scalabis in the central months of that same year, fresh in the euphoria of victory.⁵

4 Cf., José Mattoso, D. Afonso Henriques (Rio de Mouro: Círculo de Leitores, 2006), p. 171.

5 Armando de Sousa Pereira, ‘A conquista de Santarém na tradição historiográfica portuguesa’, in Actas do 2° Congresso Histórico de Guimarães. Actas do Congresso … (Guimarães: Câmara Municipal de Guimarães – Universidade do Minho, 1996), vol. 5, pp. 297–324; Nascimento, ‘O Júbilo da Vitória’, pp. 1226, 1231; Pierre David, ‘Au sujet du “De expugnatione Scalabis” ’, Revista Portuguesea de História, Coimbra, 6 (1995), 45–47.

Date of redaction

Nevertheless, the text exhibits several important indicators of a later date of redaction. In the first place it contains a feature that would be most out of place in a text produced in mid-twelfth-century Portugal. This is the passage in a speech delivered by Afonso Henriques immediately prior to the attack on Santarém in which he urges his warriors to kill the entirety of the inhabitants of the city. Taking inspiration from the Book of Joshua, the king instructs his men:

But this you shall observe diligently, ‘you may spare no one on account of age or sex; may the infant hanging at the breast die and the old man full of days, the youthful woman and the decrepit hag’ [Joshua 6.21]. May your hands be comforted, the Lord is indeed with us, for [just] one of you will be able to strike down one hundred of them.⁶

6 Scalabis, pp. 63, 68. All English translations herein from other languages are my own save where otherwise indicated.

It is an exhortation severely at odds with the reasonably well-documented Portuguese royal policy of encouraging conquered Muslim populations to remain in their homes in peace with their new Christian overlords who would proceed to benefit from their continued presence through the concomitant maintenance of infrastructure (crucial for the attraction of new settlers), through reaping the profits of their productivity (e.g., manufacturing skills, agricultural labour, established mercantile networks) and by the levying of taxes.⁷ Indeed, such preoccupations likely explain why the paraphernalia of the crusades, a novel type of holy war that had shown an early tendency towards what in modern par-lance could be termed ‘total war’, that is to say the complete annihilation of the enemy, is not manifest in operation inside Portugal until 1217 in the campaign to capture Alcácer, the subject of the Carmen.⁸ Indeed, it is likely the famous near-contemporary account of the 1147 conquest of Lisbon known as the De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, is an attempt by those close to Afonso Henriques to filter the ideology of crusading, as they perceived it, in order to eradicate the parts they found unacceptable.⁹

7 Jonathan Wilson, ‘Dispatches from the Western Frontier; Portugal and the Crusades’, in Entre Deus e o Rei, O mundo das ordens Militares, coord. by Isabel Cristina Ferreira Fernandes (Palmela: Município de Palmela – GESOS, 2018), pp. 209–44.

8 See, inter alia, Trutz von Trotha, ‘ “The Fellows Can Just Starve”: On Wars of “Pacification” in the African Colonies of Imperial Germany and the Concept of “Total War” ’, in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1941, ed. by Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 415–36.

9 Jonathan Wilson, ‘Enigma of the De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 9:1 (2017), 99–129.

A second indication of later authorship is the manner in which the date of the conquest of Santarém is appointed.

[Santarém] was captured on the Ides of March as the day of Saturday began to dawn in the era of 1185 [1147], that year the Moors, who are called Almohads in Arabic, entered Spain destroying the city of Seville. At that time I had completed nearly thirty-seven years of age, and nineteen of my reign, a year had not yet unrolled that I had married my wife named Mafalda the daughter of Count Amadeus of whom my firstborn son Henrique was born on the third of Nones [5th] of that same month in which the city was captured.¹⁰

10 Capta est Idus Martii illucescente die sabbati in era Ma centesima Lxxx V, quo anno Mauri qui arabice Mozamida vocantur, ingressi Yspaniam destruxerunt Yspalim civitatem, me tunc agente tricesimum ferme ac septimum etatis annum, et regni X. VIIII., anno nondum evoluto quo duxeram uxorem Mahaldam nomine comitis Amedei filiam, ex qua primogenitus est natus Henricus filius meus III Nonas eiusdem mensis quo civitas capta est; Scalabis, pp. 62, 67.

In the chronological placement of the event, carefully orientated within the context of other well-known ‘historical’ events, the passage retains the flavour of looking back from a distance, being concerned with a conquest that took place perhaps a generation or more in the past and certainly not just a few days or weeks before the time of writing. Rather, the passage is served to the reader as a carefully crafted preamble to the celebration of an event amplified and increasingly mythicised over the passage of time.¹¹

11 Cf., Abel Estefânio, ‘A data de nascimento de Afonso I’, in Medievalista [online]. dir. by José Mattoso (Lisbon: Instituto de Estudos Medievais, July 2010), No. 8, pp. 1–48, p. 29, who finds a parallel in the development of the reports of Afonso Henriques’s victory at Ourique in 1139; see Mattoso, D. Afonso Henriques, pp. 114–15. Reilly considered the Scalabis ‘much later in origin and literary nature [than the Annais de D. Afonso, c. 1185]’ and stated that it ‘draws on popular accounts of what clearly had become a folk epic of sorts’, although he adduced no evidence in support of his opinion; Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VII, 1126–1157 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), No. 20, p. 96.

At this juncture it is appropriate to note that, although there has been a strong tendency to place authorship of the Scalabis in the central months of 1147, several important commentators, notably Lindley Cintra,¹² Luís Krus¹³ and most recently Abel Estefânio,¹⁴ have preferred a later date of composition, attributing its redaction to the mid-1180s. For these authors, the production of the Scalabis would have been associated with crises in the kingdom precipitated by the military threat presented by the Almohads, conspicuously the great Caliphal campaign culminating in the siege of Santarém in 1184, and by the death of Afonso Henriques in the following year; it would also have been associated with the production shortly thereafter of the so-called Anais de Santa Cruz II,¹⁵ edited by Monica Blöcker Walter under the title Annales domni Alfonsi Portugallensium regis,¹⁶ comprising twenty-six entries covering the period 1125–84 lauding the deeds of Afonso Henriques in a moment when Portuguese spirits might have needed fortifying with rousing tales, festooned with providential even messianic rhetoric, of past royal heroic deeds.

12 Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344, ed. by Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra, 4 vols (Lisbon: Casa da Moeda, 1953–1990), vol. i, CCCXCII–CCCX...