Portugal in European and World History

Malyn Newitt

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781861897015
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Despite its modest size, Portugal has played a major part in the development of Europe and the modern world. In Portugal in European and World History Malyn Newitt offers a fresh appraisal of Portuguese history and its role in the world—from early Moorish times to the English Alliance of 1650–1900 and through the country's liberal revolution in 1974.

Newitt specifically examines episodes where Portugal was a key player or innovator in history. Chapters focus on such topics as Moorish Portugal, describing the cultural impact of contact with the Moors—one of the oldest points of contact between Western Europe and Islam; the opening up of trade with western Africa; and the explorations of Vasco de Gama and the evolution of Portugal as the first commercial empire of modern times. Newitt also examines Portugal's role in the Counter-reformation, in Spain's wars in Europe, and in the Anglo-Portuguese alliance. Finally, Newitt analyzes the fall of fascism and the Portuguese decolonization within the context of larger global empires and movements.

This new account of a country with a rich historyshows how Portugal has moved from being the last colonial power to one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the modern European ideal.

1
The Second Crusade
and the
Capture of Lisbon

The Crusades

In 1099 an army raised in the feudal territories of western Europe invaded the Middle East and, taking advantage of divisions which existed within the Islamic world, captured Jerusalem and established four Frankish states stretching along the whole coast from Edessa in modern Turkey to the borders of Egypt. The crusades were an assertion of the power and influence of the Papacy and the term itself, originally used to describe wars to win control of the holy places of Christendom, came to be used for any war specifically sanctioned by the Papacy as a holy war, whether aimed exclusively at the recapture of the holy places, or more generally against Islam in the Iberian peninsula, the pagans on the eastern frontier of Germany or Christian heretics in the south of France. A crusade was often preached by Popes against their political enemies in the convoluted politics of the Italian city states and in 1135 was employed as a way of dealing with the problem of an anti-Pope. The Christian ideology of holy war fills contemporary accounts of these crusades, whether they are direct narratives of the expeditions and wars or indirect documentation to be found in wills and charters. In the same way a later generation of chroniclers was to invoke the ideology of the crusades to justify the actions of those who carried their conquests to the Americas and the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century. This ideology served to sanctify almost any action undertaken in the name of a crusade and became deeply embedded in the psychology of the Christian west which, over the centuries, always represented its insatiable appetite for expansion as the march of religion and progress.

The crusades have to be seen, over the longue durée, as part of the process by which the societies of western Europe constantly sought to expand their wealth and their control of territory through conquest. This was not a story of unbroken success. The spectacular early conquests of Sicily (between 1060 and 1091) and the fall of Toledo to Christian forces in 1085 were followed by the conquests in the Middle East at the end of the century. However, the settlement of the Holy Land proved unsustainable and the last Frankish outposts there were eliminated in 1291. The thirteenth century also saw Poland, Germany and Russia thrown onto the defensive by the invasions of the Mongols. In the fourteenth century the Black Death severely curtailed western Europe’s expansionist drive, while in the fifteenth century Christendom actually contracted as the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean fell under the control of the Ottoman Turks. During these centuries it sometimes seemed as if western Europe itself would be absorbed by one or other of the powerful military empires of Asia.

Nevertheless the territorial expansion of western Christendom continued even in the most unpropitious circumstances. In the thirteenth century Frankish kingdoms were established in Greece at the expense of the Byzantines and permanent conquests were made on the eastern frontiers of Germany. The expansion of Christian territory in the Iberian peninsula continued, although at an uneven pace, and acquired the character of a crusade in the reflected glory of Christian triumphs in the Middle East. In fact it was only after the First Crusade that fighting the Moors in the Iberian peninsula came to be considered a form of crusading.¹ The Norman military aristocracy also engaged in almost continuous warfare on its Celtic frontier, conquering first southern Wales and then crossing to begin the conquest of Ireland and launching a series of attempts to conquer Scotland and northern Wales as well. While these wars were not crusades sanctioned by the Pope, they nevertheless shared many of the characteristics of the expeditions undertaken against the declared enemies of Christendom and such enterprises continued to appeal to men whose status was derived from their military prowess and whose fortunes were made from the spoils of war. A vow to ‘take the cross’ continued to earn public approval well into the fifteenth century and was frequently the way in which the most outrageous criminal behaviour could be expiated. Throughout these centuries, however, the fundamental motivation remained constant, the establishment of lordships which allowed the levying of feudal rent on subject populations, or simply plunder.

During the period from the eleventh to the thirteenth century the expeditions to the Middle East were among the most high profile and prestigious of these expansionist enterprises, and France provided the greatest number of the crusaders. However, the organization of large military expeditions presented formidable problems and the secular lords of western Europe seldom had the capacity for war on this scale. So the military aristocracy organized itself. Orders of knights were created, combining the ideals of the military class with the prevailing values of monasticism. The Templars and the Hospitallers were originally formed between 1113 and 1118 to defend the Latin states in the East, but the idea of independent corporations of knights, forming a standing army, caught on and similar orders were formed to fight on the eastern frontiers of Germany (the Teutonic Knights) and against the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula (the orders of Calatrava founded in 1158 and Santiago in 1170). These military corporations did not owe exclusive allegiance to any single feudal overlord. The knights were organized on an international basis and the loyalty of their members was first and foremost to their Order, whose headquarters, in the case of the Templars and Hospitallers, was in Jerusalem. However, once they were established, no feudal ruler could do without their services. The Latin states in the Middle East depended almost entirely on their arms and on the castles they built and garrisoned; the German and Iberian princes also employed the knights to defend their frontiers, rewarding them with grants of land where they built their castles and extracted revenues and services from their vassals and subject populations. The orders of knights became powerful ‘multinational corporations’ with the capacity to act independently of the secular state.

Once the kingdom of Jerusalem and the other Latin kingdoms had been established, a wide variety of people travelled eastwards to take advantage of the Christian control of the holy places. Many of these were traditional pilgrims but there were also common soldiers, settlers, merchants and ship owners. Pirates and lawless adventurers, coming from the maritime coasts of northern Europe as far away as Norway and Scotland, were also attracted to this frontier zone. They made little secret of the fact that their interests lay in plunder, slaving and ransoms, sanctified of course by the notion that they were going on a crusade. What was true of the crusades was to be repeated, in an almost seamless fashion, when western Europeans began their expansion into Africa, the Americas and the Indian Ocean – the desire of all classes of society to plunder the wealth of the non-European world in the name of the Church, blessed and sanctioned by the Papacy, proved irresistible. It has been maintained that material gain did not feature prominently in the motivation of crusaders. In 2001 Jean Flori wrote of the First Crusade, ‘as the majority of crusaders could hope to win little or nothing, this could not have constituted a motivation for setting out’.² Such a comment could have been written about the majority of those who enlisted with the Spanish and Portuguese expeditions in the sixteenth century or who went to Australia or California in the nineteenth-century gold rushes but it is a logic that again and again has been proved false when men have been faced by the lure of instant riches. Rather more in tune with the mentality of military adventurers, Matthew Bennet countered by writing of the Second Crusade, ‘the crusaders were motivated, not only by religious zeal, but by greed for booty’,³ while Jonathan Riley-Smith, after quoting a number of passages detailing the plundering exploits of the first Crusaders, concluded that ‘all leaders, from the great to the small, had to live with the reality that their followers expected from them at the very least a subsistence level of provisioning: this alone would account for an obsession with loot.’⁴

The Second Crusade

The first major setback for the crusading enterprise in the Middle East was the reconquest in 1144 of most of the County of Edessa by the Seljuk ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, Imad al-Din Zangi. This prompted the preaching of what became known as the Second Crusade. Bernard of Clairvaux led the campaign, touring the lower Rhineland and famously preaching to assembled crusaders at Vézelay. Expeditions set off from various parts of Europe, among them armies led by Conrad of Germany and Louis, king of France, accompanied by his young queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Having marched across Hungary and the Byzantine-controlled Balkans the crusaders were defeated by the Turks in Anatolia before reaching the Holy Land, where they mustered at Jerusalem. A combined assault on the city of Damascus proved a humiliating failure, after which the crusading army broke up and its survivors, including Louis and Conrad, left for home.

However, although the Second Crusade may have failed in the Holy Land it achieved one resounding and lasting success against the forces of Islam – a success which was to have incalculable consequences for the development of western Europe long after the crusader states of the Middle East had disintegrated and Jerusalem had been lost.

While the crusaders from France and Germany, inspired by the teachings of St Bernard, made their way through the heat of summer across Hungary and Anatolia, a large fleet of between 160 and 200 ships (accounts differ) had assembled at Dartmouth on the southwestern coast of England. On board this fleet were contingents from the Low Countries, the Rhineland and Scotland as well as men from Normandy and the coastal English towns of Hastings, Southampton and Bristol. Although this force was led by some minor nobles and knights, it was primarily an expedition of ordinary adventurers who elected their own ‘justices’ to arbitrate disputes and the distribution of loot and who made little secret of the fact that they were bent on piracy and plunder.

The Second Crusade in the Iberian peninsula

The crusader fleet that gathered at Dartmouth in May 1147 was almost certainly the result of Bernard of Clairvaux’s preaching tour in the Rhineland. Although its ultimate destination was the Middle East it seems likely that St Bernard had encouraged the idea that the crusaders should mount a campaign against the Muslims in the Iberian peninsula while en route to the Holy Land, even though such an enterprise had not specifically been declared a crusade by the Pope.⁵ The political and military situation in the Iberian peninsula was very unstable. While Alfonso of Leon was trying to assert his supremacy throughout the peninsula by declaring himself emperor and receiving homage from Christian and Muslim lords, Afonso Henriques, described at the time as princeps or dux portugalensium, was attempting to establish undisputed control over the lands on both sides of the Minho and in the process to escape from dependence on Leon, whose vassal he was in both religious and secular matters.

South of the Douro was an open frontier where raid and counterraid took place between Christian and Muslim forces and in 1135 Afonso Henriques had moved the centre of his operations to Coimbra, which at that time was a frontier town, and round which he began the construction of a line of fortified castles, the most important of which was Leiria built in 1135. The adoption of Coimbra as the capital of his state has been described by José Mattoso as ‘the most transcendant of all his decisions for the survival of Portugal as an independent nation’.⁶ Key to Afonso Henriques’s strategy of breaking away from Leon was an alliance with the Papacy, to which in 1143 he offered to do homage.

Confusion also existed among the Muslims, where the Almoravid garrisons of southern Portugal and Spain were facing hostility from the local population as well as increasingly severe threats from Almohad nomads in their rear.

It was in this confused situation that an alliance with a powerful crusading army offered Afonso Henriques a decisive advantage against both his Christian and Muslim enemies. An alliance with the crusaders fitted into an already established pattern of military adventuring. Some contingents recruited for the First Crusade had campaigned in the Iberian peninsula and it seems that in 1140 (or 1142) a force of mercenaries from northern Europe had joined Afonso Henriques in an attack on Lisbon. This attack had failed and the Muslims had successfully driven a wedge between Afonso and the ‘crusaders’ by offering to pay tribute to the former. As a result the Portuguese had signed a truce which was seen by some of the crusaders as a betrayal.

It seems likely that in 1147 Afonso Henriques knew of the imminent arrival of the crusading army and intended once again to profit from its presence, while the crusaders for their part had come prepared to undertake siege operations, which suggests they had some specific objective in mind. Afono Henriques appointed the bishop of Porto to meet the crusaders and provide them with refreshment, while he himself set off on a preliminary raid against the Muslims in the Tagus valley. With the help of forces supplied by the Templars, he launched a surprise raid on Santarém that resulted in a brilliant and opportunistic seizure of the city in March 1147, sending its Muslim inhabitants fleeing downriver towards Lisbon. Lisbon could now be cut off by a combination of an advance down the river valley and an assault from the sea.

The crusader fleet set sail from Dartmouth in May, and from this time till the termination of the siege the expedition is the subject of two detailed narratives almost certainly contemporary with the events they describe.⁷ After enduring the storms of the Bay of Biscay, the fleet made a landfall in northern Spain and then continued down the coast to Porto. There the leaders of the expedition coordinated the plans for an attack on Lisbon with the bishop, who offered them an alliance on behalf of Afonso Henriques, who since 1140 had been calling himself ‘king’ of Portugal.⁸ Although Afonso Henriques was in a position to advance on Lisbon he had neither the manpower nor the military expertise to capture the city without mercenary aid⁹ and the bishop was authorized to ‘promise money to your forces so far as the resources of the royal treasury will permit’,¹⁰ in other words to pay the expenses of the army. The crusaders clearly did not trust the word of the bishop and it was agreed that he would come with them to Lisbon, where a meeting could be held with Afonso Henriques himself.

At the end of June the fleet entered the Tagus and effected a landing west of the city. There they found Afonso Henriques waiting for them ‘for he had heard in advance of our coming’. ‘As the king approached we almost all went out to meet him, rich and poor mixed up together’, and there was some difficulty in determining who could speak for the crusaders. Afonso Henriques then addressed the assembled crusaders with an irony that comes through clearly in the account that was sent back to England. He said he did not believe ‘that our promise to enrich you with gifts would suffice to induce men as wealthy as you are, and as numerous as you are, to remain with us at the siege of this city.’ Nevertheless, he assured the crusaders that the promises of reward that had been made to them would be kept. The crusaders now became deeply divided between those who trusted the king and those who remembered that in 1140 similar promises had been broken. The English, in particular, wanted ‘to sail quickly past the coast of Spain and then extort much easy money from the merchant vessels of Africa and Spain.’¹¹ The crusading army split up and retreated to different locations.

Eventually the dissidents gave in and agreed to stay on condition that ‘sufficient provisions were in store for them, but not a day longer unless they should be retained as st...