North Sea and English Channel. Without kings or great counts, the organizational impetus suggests largely hidden processes of rural and urban local self-awareness and communal action, if only in hiring and equipping ships and raising money. It may be no chance that many of the leading figures came from the prominent trading centres or some of the most densely populated areas of north-west Europe, where the ease of transmission of news and ideas was matched by a sense of community and a tradition of corporate action. Some members of the fleet were veterans of the attack on Lisbon in 1142; some may have previously been crusaders to the east. Others had felt the power of Bernard’s oratory or, like Christian of Gistel, who met the abbot in August 1146, his conversation. Among the Anglo-Normans, many may have seized the opportunity to escape the conflicts and compromises of civil war; the Veils of Southampton, heavily involved in the Channel ferry and cargo business, were partisans for Matilda. Like others, they also had ready access to shipping.10
Some in the leadership may have anticipated fighting the Moors of Iberia. Afonso Henriques (1128–85), who was carving out an independent principality of Portugal along the Atlantic seaboard south from the rivers Mino and Duero, had maintained close links with the papacy in his as yet unsuccessful attempts to receive recognition as king. His designs on Lisbon were no secret; the crusader fleet included veterans of his failed attack on the city in 1142. In April he had captured the strategically vital stronghold of Santarem, the key to the lower Tagus valley, its investment providing an essential prerequisite for an assault on Lisbon downstream. The arrival of the crusade fleet had been anticipated by the Portuguese; an advance flotilla of five ships sailed directly from Dartmouth to Lisbon, apparently in five days, where it awaited the main fleet after its leisurely and laborious progress of more than a month. While Peter Pitoes, the bishop of Oporto, expended much eloquence and hard bargaining to attract the support of the Anglo-Normans and Rhinelanders after they arrived at the mouth of the Duero on 16 June, the Flemings under Christian of Gistel and the others from the Low Countries under the count of Arschot were still at sea. However, less than a fortnight later immediately on arrival at Lisbon the Flemings agreed to Afonso’s terms to join his attack on Lisbon whereas contingents from the Anglo-Norman realms needed much persuasion. It is possible that some of those recruited from areas and by lords associated with Bernard during his Flanders tour of late summer and autumn 1146 may have agreed to cooperate with the Portuguese before setting out, although a letter from Bernard to Afonso that exists is probably not genuine.11 The rest of the force gathered at Dartmouth came round to the idea only gradually. The idea of such action cannot have appeared entirely alien. The thrust of such action fitted the prevailing general justification for the holy war as proclaimed in 1146–7 by the pope, Bernard and, in his awkward way, Radulf. Although Eugenius III seems not to have specifically authorized the Lisbon enterprise, in April 1147 he had extended his approval to other Iberian battles against the Moors. As recorded by a member of his audience, the bishop of Oporto echoed the rhetoric of his northern European colleagues by calling for vengeance on the infidels oppressing Christians and occupying their land: ‘shall it be permitted to the adversaries of the cross to insult you with impunity?… the praiseworthy thing is not to have been to Jerusalem, but to have lived a good life while on the way’, a criterion fulfilled by expelling the Muslims from Lisbon.12 However, this ‘just war’ did not replace the vows of the Holy Sepulchre. Jerusalem remained the ultimate objective; seizing Lisbon merely a righteous act of meritorious obedience to the will of God fully in keeping, declared one of the army chaplains, with the crusaders’ ‘new baptism of repentance’.13
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
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 Leon-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
