The death of Sancho I, 1211: the king who settled Portugal's frontier

In October 1210 the king of Portugal had his will written out in Coimbra. Six identical copies were made and sealed. One went to the archbishop of Braga and another to the abbot of Alcobaça, so that, in the will's own words, its terms would be more firmly kept.1 source1 source

Sancho I was probably ill. At the end of December, at Santarém, he added a further text, for the health of his soul, he said, and for the good of his children and of the whole kingdom. The historian Saul António Gomes thinks the illness is what prompted the will.1 source1 source

He died in Coimbra, the city where he was born, at the end of March 1211, with his eldest son, Afonso, at his side. He was 56 and had reigned for more than 25 years, after some 15 years of sharing power with his ageing father.2 sources2 sources

The usual date, 26 March, goes back to the seventeenth-century chronicler António Brandão, who said he took it from the original of the Coimbra chronicle. Alexandre Herculano, the leading nineteenth-century historian of medieval Portugal, accepted it, and a grant by the new king dated 30 June 1211 speaks of three months of his reign.1 source1 source

A short Latin chronicle from the abbey of Alcobaça, printed in the Portugaliae Monumenta Historica, records that he was buried in the monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra with his queen, Dulce of Aragon.1 source1 source

The kingdom he left was smaller than the one he had inherited. The military historian Miguel Gomes Martins describes it as more fragile and less extensive than the kingdom Afonso Henriques had passed on in 1185, split by quarrels among the clergy and the great nobles and pressed by León on one side and the Almohads on the other.1 source1 source

Portugal was barely a generation old. Afonso Henriques had made himself king of a county on the edge of León, and the pope had accepted his title only in 1179. His raids and sieges had carried the frontier south of the Tagus, to Alcácer do Sal and Évora. Beyond lay al-Andalus, Muslim Iberia, then ruled by the Almohads, whose caliph also ruled Morocco.3 sources3 sources

Sancho was born on the night of Saint Martin, 11 November 1154, and baptised Martinho, according to medieval Latin annals; he took the name Sancho later. An elder brother, Henrique, died young and left him as heir. His father knighted him at Coimbra on 15 August 1170, the year after Afonso was captured with a broken leg at Badajoz, and from then on the son signed royal documents alongside the father.3 sources3 sources

In 1174 he married Dulce, a daughter of Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona, and sister of the king of Aragon. In 1178 he led a raid deep into al-Andalus and, the annals say, entered Triana, the suburb of Seville across the river, and broke down its walls.3 sources3 sources

The great chance of the reign came by sea. In 1189 fleets of northern crusaders, heading for the Holy Land, put in at Lisbon. Sancho persuaded some of them to help him attack Silves in the Algarve, which the Portuguese told them was the strongest town in all Spain.2 sources2 sources

One of the crusaders, an anonymous German, kept a Latin diary. It gives the siege from 21 July to 3 September 1189. The crusaders and the Portuguese took the lower town in the first rush, but the crusaders failed to scale the walls of the upper town and dug in for a siege. The king arrived on 29 July with his army, his baggage and knights of three military orders.1 source1 source

The crusaders mined under the walls while the defenders dug counter-mines. On 1 September the besieged called out to the king's men to talk terms. Sancho wanted to let them leave with their goods and offered the crusaders 10,000 gold pieces, then 20,000, to agree. They refused. In the end the inhabitants left with only the clothes they wore, the king took the town and the crusaders took the plunder.1 source1 source

On 3 September the governor rode out alone, his people on foot behind him. Some crusaders robbed and beat them in breach of the agreement, which caused a serious quarrel with the king. Inside, the narrator found people barely able to stand, Christian captives who said they had been given no more than an eggshell of water in four days, and a stench of dead people and animals.1 source1 source

The victory soured quickly. The crusaders, the Flemish especially, sold grain to the Portuguese behind their leaders' backs, the king complained that he would rather not have taken the town than lose it for lack of food, and in the end he kept everything. The fleet sailed on 7 September, its men, the narrator says, less friendly to the king than before.1 source1 source

Sancho now styled himself king of Portugal and of the Algarve. The crusader's 1844 editor, João Baptista da Silva Lopes, found no earlier document with that title than a gift of the castle of Alvor to Santa Cruz de Coimbra in October 1189.2 sources2 sources

The Almohad caliph, al-Mansur, answered with two campaigns, in 1190 and 1191. His armies reached Leiria and Alcobaça and came near Coimbra. In 1191 Silves fell back into Muslim hands, along with Alcácer do Sal, Palmela and Almada, across the river from Lisbon.2 sources2 sources

The frontier was pushed back to the Tagus. South of the river only Évora and its lands stayed Christian. A five-year truce signed in 1191 ended the immediate danger.2 sources2 sources

The other enemy was León. Sancho's daughter Teresa had married its king, Alfonso IX, but the marriage was undone, and the two kingdoms fought over their border for the rest of the decade. Sancho invaded Galicia and took Tui in 1197. His army was beaten at Ervas Tenras, near Pinhel, in 1198 or 1199, and in 1199 the Leonese took Bragança and threw back his offensive against Ciudad Rodrigo, where the master of the Templars, Lopo Fernandes, was killed. The Coimbra annals date his death to February 1198.3 sources3 sources

Later generations called him o Povoador, the Populator. The name is not from his lifetime: Herculano wrote in 1846 that posterity gave it to Sancho for his constant efforts to settle the emptiest districts with foreigners and natives and to found or restore towns.1 source1 source

Both Portugal and León tried to fill their border lands while they fought. Sancho granted a large number of charters to towns on the frontier, drew foreign settlers who took up much land in the Ribatejo, and endowed the military orders.1 source1 source

Penamacor, a frontier town facing León, shows how it worked. Its Latin charter names among its witnesses an official, an archdeacon and a doorkeeper, each of whom “began to settle”. A killer paid 30 morabitinos to the victim's side, and a knight who stayed away from the king's yearly campaign paid 10 soldos.1 source1 source

Even the dates are slippery. The Torre do Tombo holds two copies of the Penamacor charter, dated 1189 and 1209. Modern historians generally give 1209; the 2020 municipal edition argues that 1209 is a revision of a charter of 1189; and Alexandre Herculano, in the nineteenth century, proposed 1199.2 sources2 sources

The military orders received whole districts to hold and defend. The chronicle tradition summarised by Silva Lopes lists Idanha for the Templars, Valhelhas, Alcanede and Juromenha for the knights of Évora (later Avis), and Alcácer do Sal, Palmela and Almada for the order of Santiago. The Hospitallers held the castle of Belver, where the king kept part of his money.1 source1 source

The last decade was hard. Between 1199 and 1208 famine and epidemics struck, and the kingdom filled with disputes: townsmen against royal officials in Lisbon, knights against craftsmen in Penamacor, nobles against the king, and the king against the bishops of Coimbra and Porto.1 source1 source

In Porto the bishop, Martinho Rodrigues, refused at the end of 1208 to attend the wedding of the king's heir, Afonso, to Urraca of Castile, because the couple were distantly related. The townsmen, egged on by royal officials, plundered the property of canons loyal to him. He laid an interdict on the city, made a settlement with the king and fled to Rome. Royal officials then seized his estates.2 sources2 sources

In Coimbra a quarrel over the dues owed to the king from one of the bishop's estates ended with royal officials attacking the houses of the bishop and his canons. The bishop, Pedro Soares, laid an interdict on the city. Fearing he would follow his colleague to Rome, the king had him arrested.3 sources3 sources

Herculano told the story more darkly. In his account the king ordered priests to ignore the interdict, seized the property of those who refused and, it was said, had some of them blinded in front of their families. When Innocent III wrote in the bishop's defence, Sancho replied that the clergy's wealth would be better given to his sons and to the kingdom's defenders. The pope's answer warned that such talk smacked of heresy.1 source1 source

In May 1210 Innocent III appointed judges to look into the Porto affair and ordered the excommunication of the 20 townsmen who had led the attack on the bishop. That winter the king, afraid to die out of communion with the Church, backed down. He returned the bishop of Porto's property, made the citizens pay their lordship dues to the bishop again, and ordered the bishop of Coimbra freed.1 source1 source

Sancho made two wills that survive. The first is undated; its editors put it in 1188, and the historian Maria João Branco links it to the preparations for the Algarve campaign of July to September 1189. The second is the one he made in October 1210, with its addition of 29 December.1 source1 source

In the last one he left his daughters lordships. Teresa, the eldest, received Montemor-o-Velho and Esgueira, Sancha received Alenquer, and Mafalda the monasteries of Bouças, Arouca and Tuias. His sons Pedro and Fernando received large sums of money but no land. Martins notes that the old king seems to have done this against the wishes of his eldest son.1 source1 source

Rui de Pina's royal chronicle, written some three centuries later and summarised by Silva Lopes, also lists pious legacies: 10,000 gold maravedis to the Templars and 10,000 to the Hospital of Jerusalem, 15,000 for ransoming captives, 3,000 to the cathedral of Tui and 100 marks of gold to Pope Innocent III; Herculano also records the gift to the pope.2 sources2 sources

Two silver-gilt chalices now in Lisbon's national museum of ancient art are thought to come from his legacy to Alcobaça, which paid for chalices of silver rather than gold, as Saint Bernard had wanted.1 source1 source

There were many children. Dulce, who died in Coimbra on 26 August 1198, bore him eleven. After her death he had two more with Maria Aires de Fornelos and six with Maria Pais Ribeiro, remembered as a Ribeirinha. Several of them went far.2 sources2 sources

One short poem has given Sancho a second reputation, as a troubadour. It is a cantiga de amigo, a song in a woman's voice for her absent lover, in Galician-Portuguese, the shared literary language of the western Iberian courts. It is preserved in the songbook known as the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional.2 sources2 sources

In English: “Ah, poor me, in what great worry I live for my beloved, who is far away. He is long in coming, my beloved in Guarda.” Guarda was the frontier town Sancho chartered in 1199, which fits a soldier's absence on the border.2 sources2 sources

Modern composers have set it to music, and one setting, by Cláudio Carneyro, is called A Ribeirinha, after the king's mistress.2 sources2 sources

Afonso II took over in March 1211. He was ill, perhaps with leprosy, and he would not accept that his sisters should rule their lordships free of royal authority. The princesses asked Rome to confirm their inheritance as soon as their father died, and Innocent III did so in two bulls in October 1211.1 source1 source

Rome had been slow. Letters from Innocent III dated 26 and 27 May 1211 confirmed the will and urged Sancho to pay his pious legacies while he was still alive. By the time they reached Portugal, Herculano notes, the king had been dead for months.1 source1 source

The October bulls made little difference. The quarrel over Montemor-o-Velho and Alenquer became the first armed conflict of the new reign, with parts of the nobility backing the sisters. Pedro went into exile in León and Fernando to France. Afonso refused to send troops when his father-in-law, Alfonso VIII of Castile, gathered the army that won at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.1 source1 source

Fernando did well abroad: he married into the county of Flanders in 1212. The Danish encyclopedia Lex says Afonso II tried to keep all his siblings from a share of their father's inheritance, which would have divided Portugal, so their young sister Berengária followed Fernando to Flanders. In 1214 she married Valdemar II of Denmark as part of his alliances against France. The alliance ended badly, with Fernando a prisoner after the battle of Bouvines that same year.1 source1 source

Some Portuguese towns still date their municipal history from a charter of Sancho's reign. Penamacor's council reprinted its charters in 2020, calling the town more than eight centuries old. Herculano called such charters standards of popular liberty.1 source1 source

His troubles outlived him too. Alcácer do Sal, lost in 1191, was still the main Muslim base in the west of the peninsula when his son came to the throne. The quarrels between kings and bishops over land and jurisdiction went on until the concordats of the late thirteenth century.2 sources2 sources

In 1502 Manuel I found the graves of the first two kings unworthy of them and had new tombs made. Sancho's, carved between 1518 and 1522, describes him in Latin as the father of his country, who reigned in very difficult times and died in 1211 at the age of 57, a year more than his true age.3 sources3 sources

The remains of Queen Dulce and of his daughter Constança Sanches were put in it too, and a canon of the monastery later wrote that it held the bones of several more of his children.1 source1 source