Two ladders and a broken gate: Afonso Henriques takes Santarém, 1147

The men came through a valley below the town, between a hill called Iraz and a spring the Arabs named for its bitter water. They had left their baggage at the last camp and dismounted for the final stretch. Mem Ramires, the king's scout, walked in front because he knew the paths. King Afonso Henriques of Portugal walked at the back.2 sources2 sources

At the spot they had picked, where they expected no guard, two sentries were keeping each other awake. The attackers lay down in a field of young wheat and waited. When both watchmen had dozed off, Mem led his men up through the Alcudia, perhaps a small quarter outside the wall, and a potter's house built against it.2 sources2 sources

He lifted a ladder on the tip of a spear and tried to hook it to the top of the wall. It would not hold. It slid down and hit the ground with a crash, and Mem feared the noise would wake the sentries. He bent over and let a young man called Mogueime climb onto his back. Mogueime reached the battlements and tied the ladder to them, and a second man went up with the king's banner and raised it.2 sources2 sources

Three men were on the wall when the sentries woke and saw the banner beside them. “Manhu?”, they called: who are you? Then they understood and shouted “Annachara!”, an ambush of Christians. Mem called on Saint James and King Afonso for help, and from below the king shouted back: “Saint James and most blessed Virgin Mary, help us! Here is King Afonso. Cut them down, and let not one escape the sword.”1 source1 source

This is how the Latin account called De expugnatione Scalabis, “On the capture of Santarém”, tells it, in the king's own voice. It says the city was taken on the Ides of March, 15 March, “as Saturday was dawning”, in the Spanish Era 1185, which is AD 1147.1 source1 source

Santarém, the Roman Scallabis and the Arabs' Shantarin, sits on a plateau high above the River Tagus, about 75 kilometres north-east of Lisbon and upstream from it. Arab geographers praised its farmland, flooded and fertilised by the river like the Nile, and its position, which several of them called impossible to take by force. The Latin account adds that the plain below was so full of marshes and islands that it could only be crossed by boat.3 sources3 sources

The town had changed hands before. In 1093 the Muslim king of Badajoz handed Santarém, Lisbon and Sintra to Alfonso VI of León and Castile in return for protection. The Almoravids, Berber rulers from North Africa who had crossed into Iberia in 1086, retook Lisbon and Sintra soon after and Santarém in 1111. Annals kept at Santa Cruz in Coimbra date its capture by “King Cyrus” to May of that year; the Latin account calls him king of the Moabites, its word for the Almoravids.3 sources3 sources

For the next 36 years Santarém was a threat to Coimbra, the Christian frontier city on the Mondego. The Latin account calls it a city “always warlike, lying in wait for Coimbra”. Its governor, Abzecri, who according to the account ruled it for some 34 years, built walls, an outer wall and towers on its western side, the area called Alplan, and had captives carry earth on their shoulders to build up the old slopes. In 1144 the vizier of Santarém attacked the Templar castle of Soure, south of Coimbra, and carried off many prisoners.3 sources3 sources

By the 1140s the Almoravid empire was breaking up. A new North African movement, the Almohads, was taking its cities, and in Muslim Iberia local lords set themselves up as rulers, the period historians call the second taifas. The Latin account says that in the year Santarém fell the Almohads crossed into Spain and took Seville.3 sources3 sources

Whose authority Santarém recognised in 1147 is not clear. Abzecri had governed it since the early Almoravid years, and in 1144 its vizier was still part of their command. But the historian Inês Lourinho argues that much of its garrison, like others in the Muslim west, had gone south to help the Almohads take Seville in January 1147, stayed there through the fast of Ramadan, and had not come back by March.2 sources2 sources

As elsewhere on the middle Tagus, the townspeople were mixed: Muslims descended from local converts and from Arab and Berber settlers, and Mozarabs, Christians living under Muslim rule who had kept their lands and their religion by agreement. Some historians think the Mozarabs were the majority in Santarém until the Almoravids came.1 source1 source

Afonso had a bigger prize in mind. In 1146 or early 1147 word came that a fleet of crusaders would stop on its way to the Holy Land and could help him take Lisbon. João Carvalho, in a 2022 study of the attack, argues that Santarém had to fall first: it was Lisbon's main support on the Tagus, and an army besieging Lisbon could not leave it behind its back.1 source1 source

Afonso could not besiege Santarém. He had no siege engines and too few men. An attack on Lisbon in 1142 had failed, and some historians think he may have tried Santarém around the same time. A churchman's life of Saint Teotónio, prior of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, recalls the king attacking the town with “a new kind of combat”, by stealth “as if by theft”, because he had never managed it with other weapons of war.1 source1 source

So he made a truce with Santarém and sent Mem Ramires to study it. In the account the king says he asked Mem to find out “by what path or what part of the wall we could more safely enter by night”. Mem came back sure it would be easy and promised to go in front, to raise the king's banner on the wall and to break the bars of the gates.2 sources2 sources

Almost nothing else is known about him. Historians usually take him for a Mozarab who spoke Arabic, which would explain how he moved about the town unnoticed; later tradition says he went disguised as a pedlar. The Portuguese chronicle of 1344 and those that copied it call him Mem Moniz instead. The historian José Mattoso thought he died young, because the king gave his lands near Penela to another man before 1157.1 source1 source

The king told almost no one. He left Coimbra on a Monday, 10 March by the calendar, with men of Coimbra, Fernando Peres and a few others of his own. Each day's halt is named. On the second day he sent a man called Martim Moab and two others ahead to tell the people of Santarém that the truce would end in three days.2 sources2 sources

Why warn the enemy? Alexandre Herculano, the leading nineteenth-century historian of medieval Portugal, thought it was a trick: the town would stand guard for three days, then relax. Mattoso, Pedro Gomes Barbosa and Miguel Gomes Martins read it as a signal to Santarém's Christians, who may have helped from inside. Carvalho finds that more likely, but no source says so outright.1 source1 source

On the heights of Pernes, Afonso finally told his men where they were going. He reminded them of the harm the town had done to Coimbra and gave his orders. A hundred and twenty men were to make ten ladders, one for each group of twelve, so that ten men would reach the wall at once. They were to raise his banner first and then break the bars of the gates, while the people inside were still asleep.2 sources2 sources

He also told them that some of the watchmen would let them in. In the next sentence the narrator admits it was untrue: “May God pardon me this sin of a lie, for I lied knowingly, so that their spirits would be made firmer.” When he said he would be one of them, and the first, his knights begged him to stay back. He refused. As they rode off at nightfall, a great star like a torch fell across the sky towards the sea, and they took it as a sign.2 sources2 sources

The plan went wrong almost at once, and worked anyway. Only two of the ten ladders were ever raised. “As those who were there say”, only about 25 men climbed them. Once the sentries had raised the alarm, the king split his men. He took the right, towards Alplan, and sent Gonçalo Gonçalves to hold the path on the left that came up from Seserigo, the riverside quarter, so that the defenders could not reach the gate first and trap the men inside.2 sources2 sources

Inside, the climbers ran to the gate and hammered at its leaves with stones. From outside, an iron hammer broke the bolts and bars. The gate swung open, and the king was received “with great joy”. He knelt in the gateway to pray. What the fighting was like he will not say: “let those who were there tell it, for it is not mine”. The account ends there.2 sources2 sources

Which gate it was is still argued over. Tradition since the sixteenth century says the king entered by the Porta de Atamarma, whose name echoes the bitter spring of the Latin account. Excavations have shown the gate already existed in the Islamic period. But no medieval account of the attack names it, and the historians Maria Ângela Beirante and Mário Viana reject the tradition; Beirante points out that the spring marked the attackers' path, not the place they climbed.1 source1 source

Later writers filled the gaps. The chronicle of 1344 has Mem Moniz answer the sentry in Arabic and cut off his head. The chronicle of 1419 alone says the Templars took part, under their master Gualdim Pais, and were given three of the ladders. Mattoso and the military historians Miguel Gomes Martins and João Gouveia Monteiro accept that a few Templar knights came; Carvalho notes that the king's grant to the Templars soon afterwards speaks only of a promise made before the attack, not of any fighting. The numbers vary too.1 source1 source

The Latin account stops at the gate, so the killing is known from other texts. The Coimbra annals say the king took the castle “with the Saracens who lived in it killed or driven out”. The chronicle of 1419 says the defenders made a stand at the gate and that women and small boys were killed, with so much blood in the streets that it looked as if a great herd of cattle had been slaughtered. Three rich knights were spared for ransom.2 sources2 sources

How far the king's order to spare no one was meant literally is unclear. Mattoso suggested it might be a literary device covering a different reality. If Santarém's Christians had helped the attackers, they too were in danger in the dark streets. Later chronicles add that the governor slipped out by a postern and rode for Seville.1 source1 source

Some of the inhabitants got away. In June the crusaders reached Lisbon, and a priest in the Anglo-Norman contingent later wrote that the city was crowded with refugees, among them “the citizens of Santarem, who had this year been expelled from their castle”. During the siege that followed, Afonso sold his provisions or sent them to Santarém.1 source1 source

According to the later chronicles, Afonso repaired the defences, left a governor and went back to Coimbra. In April 1147 he gave the Knights Templar the church revenues of Santarém, keeping a promise made before the attack; Paula Pinto Costa and Joana Lencart read the grant as a reward for their part in it. The new bishop of Lisbon, the Englishman Gilbert of Hastings, contested the grant. In 1159 the Templars gave it up and the king gave them the castle of Ceras instead, where they built Tomar, their headquarters in Portugal.3 sources3 sources

The Templars left their mark on Santarém all the same. An inscription in the church of Santa Maria da Alcáçova, in the old citadel, records its foundation in 1154 by the Templar master Hugo Martónio.2 sources2 sources

Lisbon fell that October after a siege of about four months, with the help of the crusader fleet; the story has its own article. Afonso also took Sintra, Almada and Palmela, and the lower Tagus was his.4 sources4 sources

De expugnatione Scalabis survives in a single thirteenth-century copy, added to a manuscript from the library of the Cistercian monastery of Alcobaça. Its own title is “How the city of Santarém was taken by King Afonso, son of Count Henry”. Frei António Brandão printed it in 1632; the Latin name it is known by is the heading it was given in Portugaliae Monumenta Historica in 1856, whose editors thought it was written at the time of the events or soon after.2 sources2 sources

It opens with a hymn and then hands the story to the king. Mattoso thought the writer used the king's voice to give the text more authority; who that writer was is uncertain. Jonathan Wilson, whose English translation appeared in 2021, argues that it and a poem on the conquest of Alcácer do Sal in 1217 were probably written by the same man, a Cistercian monk called Goswin of Bossut. If so, the text as we have it was written some 70 years after the attack, which is worth remembering when reading the king's speeches. Quotations from it here are our own translations from the Latin of the 1856 edition.3 sources3 sources

The annals disagree on the day. The Chronica Gothorum, a set of annals from Santa Cruz in Coimbra, gives 11 May “at cockcrow, as Saturday was dawning”, and one copy of the annals gives a date in May as well. But in the Julian calendar then in use, 11 May 1147 was a Sunday, while 15 March, the Latin account's date, was a Saturday, and the account's days of the week fit the march from Coimbra exactly.1 source1 source

Santarém brought Portugal's frontier down to the Tagus in a single night, and Lisbon followed in the autumn. From then on, Santarém was the base for war further south: Geraldo the Fearless set out from there against Évora in 1166, and the town's knights fought at Alcácer, Beja and Triana, outside Seville.2 sources2 sources

The Muslim powers knew what they had lost. When the Almohads struck back, they went for Santarém rather than Lisbon. In June 1184 their caliph besieged the town for five weeks and was driven off.2 sources2 sources

The night attack itself became a model. Carvalho calls it a change in the way war was waged in Portugal: small teams with ladders, surprise and a gate opened from inside. Portuguese raiders took Beja by night in 1162, and Geraldo made the method his own.2 sources2 sources