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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
From the author of the beloved novel The Towers of Trebizond, a book about Portugal that is part travelogue, part history and wholly personal. Rose Macaulay first travelled to Lisbon in March 1943 to escape the misery of London following the death of her lover and loss of her bombed flat. Turning to letters, diaries and travelogues, she brought together the reactions of some of the many Britons who had travelled to Portugal over the centuries, looking to understand why they journeyed there. Henry Fielding sailed to Portugal with his household in search of a cure for dropsy, jaundice and asthma. The rather more alluring promise of orange-scented and wine-soaked afternoons was what drew fellow novelist William Beckford to its shores. Byron meanwhile was sent into a black rage and wrote vehemently of the country in his poetry. Rich in detail, ambitious in scope, They Went to Portugal rambles down the centuries, bringing us the voices and experiences of a fascinating cast of characters. From pirate crusaders to ambassadors, from clergymen of all denominations to the port-wine trading pioneers, all are animated by lay's humour and astute eye.
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‘Her compilation of history, literature and anecdote turns out to be a travel book in the best possible sense: it is a comic, intimate companion to visiting Portugal.’ Literary Review
‘One of the few authors of whom it may be said she adorns our century.’ Elizabeth Bowen
Also by Rose Macaulay
fiction
What Not: A Prophetic Comedy
Potterism
Told By an Idiot
Dangerous Ages
Orphan Island
Crewe Train
Keeping Up Appearances
Staying With Relations
They Were Defeated
I Would Be Private
No Man’s Wit
The World My Wilderness
The Towers of Trebizond
non-fiction
Personal Pleasures
Pleasure of Ruins
Non-Combatants and Others: Writings Against War, 1916–1945
Contents
ixPortugalers with us have trouth in hand:
Whose Marchandy commeth much into England.
They bene our frendes wyth there commoditez,
And we English passen into there Countrees.
Lybelle of English Policye (1436)
How often, contrasting my present situation with the horrid disturbed state of almost every part of the Continent, did I bless the hour when my steps were directed to Portugal!
William Beckford (1794)
Em Inglaterra não ha nenhum tolo que não o faça um livro de tourist nenhum architolo que não o faça sobre Portugal.
Alexandre Herculano (1854)
(In England there is no foolish person who does not write a tourist book, no one extremely foolish who does not write it about Portugal.)x
INTRODUCTION
Caroline Eden
Starting with the pirate crusaders of the twelfth century and ending with the aristocracy of the nineteenth, this is a book about why the British journeyed to Portugal and what they found there. With wildly different motives, it is the destination that this disparate group, both famous and obscure, had in common. What could have been, in other hands, a pedestrian anthology is brilliantly illuminated by Rose Macaulay’s connecting prose and scholarly research. The result is a symphonic and buoyant book, a zig-zagging feast of sailors, consumptives and clergymen, with all of their ambitions, ignorance and romanticism brought to life, which in turn documents Portugal through the ages.
They Went to Portugal was first published in 1946, just after World War Two, when neutral Portugal made bases in the Azores available to the Allies. The rationale for doing so was the Treaty of Windsor of 1386, signed by King John of Portugal and Richard II of England, a binding alliance between the two crowns. Peculiar inspiration for a travel book but shrewd, too, given its timing. For a British readership, this book, filled with sunshine, wine and high adventure, was a transporting delight in the dour grey years following the war. And it proved immensely popular. So much so, xiithat a newspaper advertisement, placed by the publisher in December 1947, assured readers that the book had been reprinted and would be available for those who had ‘so far been unsuccessful in securing a copy’ in time for Christmas.
Macaulay’s grouping, which she admits ‘may seem capricious, as selections always must’, is not chronological but rather by character and occupation headed ‘royalty’, ‘writers’, ‘tourists’ and so on. Then there are individual subtitles: poet Tennyson is ‘The Laureate in the Heat’ while author and Bible Society agent William Borrow (‘a repellent figure among travellers’) is ‘A Very Rum Chap’. It is hard to select favourites from such a rich gallery, but, for me, the book really gets going when in the eighteenth century the focus switches from religion and politics to tourism and recreation. One of Macaulay’s stand-out sketches is on William Beckford, who, born in Soho Square in 1760, was heir to the vast slave-sustained fortune of his family – among the very wealthiest of their generation – who owned several sugar plantations in Jamaica. Arriving to Portugal as a show-off millionaire beset by scandal in 1787, he benefitted from much hospitality though he could not conquer all of Lisbon’s high society. Aware of Beckford’s reputation as a vain and ruthless corruptor of youth, the British ambassador, Robert Walpole, refused to invite him to suppers or balls, on strict instruction of his government. Macaulay acknowledges Beckford’s malevolent personality yet she also notes his ability as a writer, somewhat breathlessly, ‘In any case, to write like Beckford is a rare gift … He wrote of Portugal and life among the Portuguese elegantly, wittily, ironically, beautifully. The fact that when he himself came into the picture he was faking, falsifying, mystifying, concealing and showing off much of the xiiitime sometimes confuses or baffles us, but does not cramp his style or our pleasure.’ His entry is one of the longer ones and it is as page-turningly gossipy as it is horrifying.
In the preface to the 1946 edition, much space is devoted to discussion of who was left out, namely Wellington and his army and certain compelling consuls who tended to display ‘less urbanity, manners and discretion’, and who penned spicier letters, than the ambassadors above them. Her selections, she admits, were halved, which both tantalises the reader for more while proving the depths of her research. Simply too many, all with intriguing life stories, made the journey. ‘They are too many: they have gone too much.’
Macaulay deliberated detailing the ‘magnificent story’ of the Oporto wine-shippers, whose history spans three centuries or more, but she concluded that the tale is so great that it ought only to be told ‘by an Oporto pen’ and she considered the matter modestly, ‘having been myself only a tourist in that enchanting country, and for how brief a time, I am filled with abashment at my temerity in attempting such a theme, which had been better tackled by a long-term resident.’ When her manuscript was finally complete, at a time of severe rationing and paper shortages, it was still twice over the word count. Later the dropped chapters were gathered from Trinity College, Cambridge, and They Went to Portugal Too was published in 1990.
In 1958, Macaulay was made a Dame for services to literature. She died that same year aged seventy-seven. Yet despite achieving status as a bestselling novelist and successful travel writer, being associated with the Bloomsbury group and, in 1945, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she xivisn’t the household name that other travelling writers of her generation are, writers such as Lawrence Durrell, with whom she lazed about in Cyprus’s Bellapais, for example. And while several biographers have scrutinised her she remains a mysterious figure.
Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1881, when she was six years old her upper-middle-class family emigrated en masse to Varazze, on the coast near Genoa, their English servants carrying along over a hundred pots of jam to help cure homesickness. And it was there, where she spent sunny days playing along the shore, that her love for the sea and adventure began. ‘One foot on earth, one on misty seas’, was how she once described her young and free-wheeling existence. Perhaps this out-of-doors start to life contributed to her hatred of domesticity as an adult. In a series entitled ‘Some Problems of a Woman’s Life’, ironically published in Good Housekeeping, she offers a stringent prescription against drudgery: ‘Do not keep house. Let the house, or flat, go unkept. Let it go to the devil, and see what actually happens when it has gone there. At the worst, a house unkept cannot be nearly so distressing as a life unlived’ she wrote this humorous plea in the 1920s when her literary celebrity was sharply on the ascent, with her celebrated novels Told by an Idiot, Crewe Train and They Were Defeated all published in the 1920s and ’30s.
When her flat was destroyed in the Blitz, fans sent books to replace her lost collection and there is a poignant tale of her life during that grim period on the London Library website, on a page entitled ‘The Library at Wartime’: ‘On 23rd February 1944 the London Library came within a few feet of being totally destroyed … Celebrated writers including James xvLees-Milne and John Pope Hennessy helped in the rescue operation, at one stage reportedly holding the novelist Rose Macaulay out of the building by her ankles so she could rescue books.’ She retains a nook in the library today, marked by a plaque that reads ‘Rose Macaulay: This corner of the Reading Room has been furnished in her memory by her friends.’
Her social set was comprised of many illustrious writers including E. M. Forster, who she’d taught to use crutches (and who later was the subject of a scholarly book she published in 1938, The Writings of E. M. Forster), and Christmases were occasionally celebrated with Vita Sackville-West. Yet some of her peers were less congenial. Freya Stark was particularly sharp-tongued in her book of correspondence, Over the Rim of the World (1988), edited by Caroline Moorehead and with a foreword by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Writing to Stewart Perowne in 1949, two years after they married, Stark described a gathering at Sackville-West’s gardens at Sissinghurst, ‘The visit was rather spoilt by Rose Macaulay being there. She is rather old, virginal, and embittered, until she smiles, very sweetly. She has strange goat’s eyes and pale suffering lips, and I was quite surprised to see how self-centred authors can be for she kept the whole party discussing her review for about twenty minutes.’
Prolific, understated yet confident, and hard to pigeonhole – both as a woman and a writer – Macaulay was inevitably going to draw resentments, perhaps even jealousies. There is something reassuringly honest, stoic and sober about her writing, her literariness is worn refreshingly lightly, and perhaps she simply didn’t care too much about impressing others. After all, she was not just a great writer and observer of xvilife, she was also a fine satirist, who in her own words, referred to her prose style as rambling and ‘rather goofy.’
‘The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?’ She asked of going overseas in the opening paragraph of her book Personal Pleasures – a whimsical collection through A–Z of things to be enjoyed – a book that only a writer who doesn’t take themselves too seriously could write. And the very question of going overseas, an enquiry that is both simple and yet deeply thought-provoking, suggests a philosophical and practical outlook, one fitting of a graduate from Somerville College, Oxford, whose alumnae includes Iris Murdoch, Indira Gandhi and Hilary Spurling.
But Macaulay was famously an untiring journeywoman, and travel is a central theme in her novels. Her best known and most celebrated is The Towers of Trebizond, examining female emancipation, religion and Turkey’s ancient ruins, with its famous opening line, so often quoted, ‘“Take my camel, dear,” said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.’ To my delight, I recently read in the London Review of Books that she worked on this distinguished book, for a short while, at one of the UK’s best-known holiday camps, Butlin’s in Skegness.
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
This book was originally published in 1946. It is a historical text and for this reason we have not made any changes to its use of language.xviii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have received so much help and kindness while writing this book that it is difficult to know where to begin or end thanks. First, while in Lisbon I owed a great deal to the Lisbon branch of the Historical Association, and in particular to its president, Mrs Jayne, who, with her unrivalled knowledge of Lisbon Anglo-Portuguese life, put material in my way, allowed me to read in her library, and gave me much information which she had collected, including an admirable unpublished article on English merchants in Lisbon, a highly interesting narrative (to be published soon), of a Jacobean prisoner of the Inquisition, and several delightful articles in the Association’s Reports.
To Dr West and the British Institute in Lisbon I am indebted for permission to read at the Institute, and for the loan of books and periodicals; and to my friend Mr C. D. Ley in particular for much help, both in Lisbon and since; I owe him many pointers and suggestions, and a great deal of interesting and entertaining information. One cannot reach the end of the hospitality and helpfulness of the English (and Portuguese) in Portugal to stray visitors and enquirers; from the Portuguese Propaganda Ministry, to those who so hospitably entertained me in Lisbon, Sintra, and Oporto; here I would thank in particular my friends Susan and Luiz Marques. The British Association in Oporto allowed me to read in the library of their Factory House, and very many other Lisbon xxand Oporto residents gave me news of their respective cities. Mr Fulford Williams gave me interesting information about chaplains and St George’s Church and cemetery, and let me read his own account of these. Mr A. R. Walford presented me with his history of the English Factory, an invaluable source of information.
In this country I have to thank Dr Prestage, the greatest English authority on Portuguese history, for lending me books unobtainable elsewhere, and for supplying me with information. Dr Armando Cortesão also gave me much help, including the use of his library and the elucidation of some linguistic difficulties. Sir Claud Russell was most kind in giving me information about Lord and Lady William Russell, and lending me their portraits for reproduction, Lord Ilchester and Sir John Murray in allowing me to read and quote from Lord Ilchester’s still unpublished Letters from Lady Holland to her Son. In the matter of port wine, M. André Simon and Mr Gerard Sandeman generously lent me books, brochures and pamphlets not otherwise to be come by, and Mr Max Graham of Oporto and Major Gerard Graham answered enquiries with admirable fulness, kindness and patience. Mr Arthur Bourke, of Harper’s Wine and Spirit Gazette, was most helpful in putting me on the track of Baron de Forrester’s picture of Oporto wine-shippers, Mr L. E. De Rouet, of Messrs. Offley Forrester, Oporto, not only lent me this picture for reproduction, but presented me with a print of an old Oporto bar for my frontispiece. I am grateful, too, to Miss Marion Jennings and to Colonel C. P. Hawkes for information about Oporto life. And to the late Lady Abbess of Syon Abbey, and the Sister who so skilfully and kindly copied for me the manuscript xxiletter of Sister Catherine Witham, and furnished me, as did also Canon Fletcher, with much information about the Bridgettine nuns (whose romantic story, due to lack of space in the end, is excluded from this volume). Also excluded, for the same reason, is a chapter on the Lisbon English during the Peninsular war, for which Mr Arthur Bryant supplied me with many useful references. Mr S. Jacomb-Hood kindly lent me the earthquake letter of his ancestor Thomas Jacomb; Bishop David Mathew called my attention to the adventures of Sir Thomas Stukely, about whom he has so admirably written himself; Mr Guy Chapman was a helpful and essential guide through the tangled web woven by the Beckford papers. I am grateful to the Hamilton Trustees for permission to look at and quote from these papers, and to the curator and staff of the Edinburgh Register House for making this task so easy and pleasant, and to Sir Herbert Grierson and Mr Charles Bell for their friendly help. I have to thank Lord Bearsted for permission to reproduce his Romney portrait of Beckford, and Mr Roger Senhouse for lending me his print of this. Miss Jaqueline Hope-Wallace kindly lent me her print of the British Museum engraving of Prince Rupert, and the Hudson Bay Co. a photograph of the portrait in their possession.
As always, the officials of the British Museum and the Public Record Office and the staff of the London Library maintained their traditions of helpfulness in difficult times; I should in particular like to thank Mr F. G. Rendall and Mr A. I. Ellis of the British Museum for their frequent help in difficulties, and the officials of the Record Office Search Room who kindly reclaimed evacuated State Papers for me, and even gave me access to some of these in their country lairs. xxiiMiss L. Drucker’s skilful copying of some of the letters of our earlier and less legible Lisbon consuls has saved me much time and probably many errors.
Finally, Mr Daniel George has, by his patient reading, criticisms and suggestions, rid this book of some, at least, of its flaws.
Early Visitors
Going to Portugal was, no doubt, a common enough habit among British Islanders many centuries before they left any records of it, and many centuries before either Britain or Portugal was a nation. The Phoenicians had their trade routes between Iberia and Britain; as Ezekiel remarked in the sixth century BC, apostrophising the fallen Tyre, ‘Tarshish [i.e. Tartessius in south-west Spain] was thy merchant by reason of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin and lead they traded in thy fairs’; and from Tarshish the Tyrian ships crept up the Peninsula coasts to get tin and wine from the north-west, braved the gales of the Bay of Biscay, seeking the tin mines of the questionable Cassiterides, and put into Cornish ports, to barter merchandise with those ‘shy traffickers, the dark Iberians’ of Britain, who could supply pearls and jet, copper and tin and gold and furs, in exchange for amber, silver, embroidriees, 4coral, spices, purple and precious stones. Lured by such rich merchandise from overseas, it would be natural for the shy traffickers to voyage in their turn to the trading ports of the western continent, where small dark men like themselves spoke a variant of the tongue they both knew. Later, when both Britain and the continent were reinforced by the vigour of the adventurous Celts, who never failed to get about, such visits would be more frequent; later still, the trafficking Britons of the Roman Empire were probably quite well acquainted with the ports of Felicitas Julia, and would put into the mouths of the Douro, the Lima, the Mondego and the Tagus, to trade metals, furs and wolf dogs for cargoes of oranges, oil and wine. Some Britons, less fortunate than these sailors and merchants, were themselves shipped, cargoes of captured slaves, by their Roman masters for sale in the markets of these gay, staring and chattering ports, where, however, they are said to have not fetched much. One may imagine that they did not compare favourably with Circassians and other eastern barbarians; indeed, they probably looked sulky, disobliging and arrogant, and as if they considered themselves insulted by being auctioned to Portuguese.
That British-Iberian traffic had always been common enough seems assumed by a twelfth-century reference to the Tower of Hercules on the Corunna peninsula as having been built by Julius Caesar (perhaps during his governorship of north-west Spain) ‘as a centre through which the revenues of Britain and Ireland and Spain might pass to and fro. For it is so situated that it offers the first landing place for travellers coming directly over from Britain’. In one way and another there must have been in Roman Britain a fair knowledge of 5that fruitful peninsula south-west of Gaul, where the olive, the vine and the orange tree so agreeably flourished, where great-horned oxen drew cargoes down to the quays in creaking carts, and long-capped Phoenicians went fishing for tunnies, and dragged in heavy nets of sardines from the rich sea.
Later, the pirate hordes of barbarians on the move did not cease to ravage and raid the coasts and mainlands of Europe from their new island home; but until the ninth century records are few, and such adventures are swallowed up in the engulfing darkness of their age. After the exciting and remarkable discovery of the corpse of St James the Apostle in Galicia, about the year 800, religion reinforced cupidity, and devout pilgrims and pirates from Britain made the Santiago trip in great numbers; many of them thus heard for the first time the accents of Galicia, which were also those of Portugal. Some proceeded from the Groyne down the Lusitanian coast, to trade with or plunder the people in the ports of Viana, Lima and Portus Cale. Venturing further, they put into the great mouth of the Tagus and trafficked with the wealthy infidels who held Lisbon and the south, and in whose hands commerce, art, science and literature had formed a civilization far richer, more learned and more refined than any European Christian culture was for centuries to be. With it the Saxon and Norman visitors could make few intellectual contacts; to them the Moors were infidels, resplendent in luxury and given over to vice; but traders and pirates made their own crude contacts, and the merchant ports of Lusitania were pillaged continually by Norse and English seafarers, zealous against the infidel and avid for his possessions. Such raids and excursions were probably the first experiments made by the English 6in the crusading technique in which they were later to become experts. History does not relate whether English adventurers assisted the Christian Visigoth princes in their winning of the Minho and Douro districts and the capturing of Oporto from the Moors in the tenth and eleventh centuries, nor whether Portugal, by that time partly redeemed from Moslem, received any of the Saxon exiles who fled their country after Hastings.
It is not until the Crusades that we have detailed accounts of those English irruptions into Portugal which have continued, under one mode and another, ever since.
Crusaders
[1140–1217]
It was permissible, even laudable, the pope said, and might easily be profitable, the crusaders hoped, to break an expedition to the Holy Land in Spain or Portugal, where Moors were almost as obnoxious to God as in Palestine, and a good deal more obnoxious to the Christian princes of those lands. So, when crusading fleets put in to Oporto for rest and refreshment after the buffeting of the Biscay seas (called by the Moors ‘the Sea of the English’) on the way to Palestine, some emissary was not unlikely to meet them there and persuade them to such Iberian diversion. Whether any large number of the personnel (mostly Frankish) of the first crusade was thus diverted is uncertain; what is apparent is that when a band of English pirate crusaders stopped off in Galicia in 1112 to give their services (running true to form in the matter of English intervention in Iberian civil war) in a rebellion against 8the Bishop of Santiago de Compostella, their kind was already well known, and they were recognised as English a great way off. All along the Iberian coast, and even inland till expelled by the bishop and by his patron St James, they pillaged and plundered, murdered and violated churches, keeping up their shocking reputation as a people ‘not seasoned with the honey of piety’, a reputation not new, and well sustained throughout the crusading period.
The affair of 1140 took much the same pattern as that of seven years later; except that the English contingent was very small compared with that of the Franks; but English they were, and they remembered the expedition unfavourably when their help was asked against Lisbon again. As in 1147, the crusading fleet put in at Oporto, and was persuaded to sail to the Tagus and help Affonso I to capture Lisbon from the Moors. The siege was unsuccessful; the crusaders were happy in being able to ravage and lay waste the districts round the Tagus, but departed finally without having achieved their object, and with a disillusioned distaste for besieging Lisbon, for the Portuguese, and for their king, who had, in their view, and in some of the many ways customary between allies, let them badly down. This rankled; and particularly in the resentful breasts of those two enterprising and egotistic pirates, the Veal brothers, whose isolationist attitude with regard to the Moorish problem in Portugal in 1147 nearly crashed the whole Lisbon affair.
There must have been more crusading attempts on Lisbon than find mention in the chroniclers. ‘How many times within our memory’, the beleaguered Moorish alcayde bitterly cried from the Lisbon castle walls during the siege of 1147 to the 9Archbishop of Braga who parleyed with him for the king, ‘Have you come hither with pilgrims and barbarians to drive us hence!’ And the pilgrims and barbarians were to come to Portugal against them again, though they broke them in Lisbon by that bitter four months’ siege in the summer of 1147.
It was the second crusade. A fleet of Flemish and Rhineland crusaders, under the Counts Arnulf of Areschot and Christian of Gistel, called at Dartmouth to collect the Anglo-Norman contingent for the Holy Land. These were four groups – the men of Suffolk and Norfolk, under Hervey of Glanville, the men of Kent under Simon of Dover, the men of London under Andrew, the west countrymen (very difficult, especially those from Bristol, and much influenced by professional pirates), and a few Scots and Bretons. They were, as has been pointed out, an essentially lower-class crowd, hardy sailors and adventurers, both Saxon and Norman by race. Before setting forth on their holy enterprise (says the priestly English reporter of the expedition, traditionally, but probably wrongly, known as Osbern) the company drew up regulations and ordinances for their conduct abroad; laws of retribution, such as eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth, and so on; rules for weekly confession and communion, for the division of spoils, for the behaviour of the women they were taking, who were on no account to walk out in public. (Precisely what services were to be rendered to the army by these women the writer does not mention. Richard I, forty-five years later, ordered that no women were to accompany the crusading army out of Acre ‘except the washerwomen, who would not be an occasion of sin’; possibly these also were washerwomen.) Anyhow, such as they were, the miscellaneous fleet set sail for Palestine on a day 10in May, a hundred and ninety ships in all, and a pretty tough crowd, including the squadron of west countrymen under the brothers Veal.
They met, of course, with rough weather in the Bay, and were also annoyed by sirens, who made a horrible noise of wailing, laughter and jeering, like the clamour of insolent men in a camp. Alarmed by these and beaten by storms, the crusaders became penitent, and ‘atoning with a flow of tears’ for their misdeeds, they were rewarded by so many divine visions and miracles that ‘it would be tedious to enumerate them in detail’. They called at Whitsuntide at Santiago, to make the usual pilgrimage to St James of Compostella, and then sailed down to the Douro, where, on 16 June, they put in to Oporto for refreshment.
They had been anxiously awaited. The sight of that storm-battered fleet entering Foz to anchor off the quays of Oporto and Gaia while an international crowd of tough armed men disembarked, with an air of being ready for anything, from piracy to Moor killing, cheered the expectant eyes of the Bishop of Oporto, charged by his king to receive and welcome the fleet. His job was to divert them from going after Moors in the Holy Land to going after Moors in Portugal: their assistance was essential to the king’s plan of taking Lisbon. As an earnest of the pleasures of Lusitania, the bishop had them served with ‘good cheap wine and other delights’, which enabled them to listen, when herded into the cathedral cemetery, to a long and persuasive address from him, delivered in Latin and translated by interpreters into the several tongues of the different contingents. He addressed them as repentant pirates who had now turned to God (no doubt he was familiar with 11their plundering expeditions on the Spanish coasts). Praising their sacrifice in undertaking this crusade, he urged them to switch their anti-infidel fervour from Palestine to Portugal, told them of the king’s dire need and generous offers, and begged them to embark forthwith for the Tagus to meet and treat with the king. ‘Do not be seduced’, he begged them, ‘by the desire to press on with your journey, for the praiseworthy thing is not to have been to Jerusalem, but to have lived a good life while on the way.’ Thinking there was something in this, the crusaders decided that Portugal, King Affonso and his proposals were worth their cautious attention; they presently set sail for the Tagus, carrying with them the bishop and his colleague the Archbishop of Braga.
Osbern (or whoever he was) was an appreciative, even an enthusiastic, traveller, though too well read, for he adorned his descriptions of the country with chunks from Solinus and other geographical scribes. He was a little fanciful too, and sometimes threw up a palace or castle where there were none. But he gave a good account of the country between Oporto and Lisbon, and when the fleet entered the Tagus his admiration overflowed, and he struck the authentic note of British tourism, which so many sailing up the same river were to follow. This noble river, said he, was most abundantly fishy, and there was gold on its banks. To English eyes, used to nothing better than apple, pear, plum or cherry orchards, the vines, pomegranates and figs were most agreeable. The country round was admirable; corn, honey and hunting abounded; mares conceived, with great fecundity, by the west wind; all was opulent, all cultivated, all fertile. There was salt, oil, wine, game in profusion. At Sintra, which seemed to him 12to be only eight miles off, there was a spring of water in the Moorish castle that cured consumption and coughs. In the rich and populous city of Lisbon, there were gold and silver and hot baths, as was usual with Moors. As was equally usual with Moors, there was also every lust and abomination; the city was, in his opinion, a breeding ground of these. It was also steep; it had ‘steep defiles instead of ordinary streets’. It had magnificent walls, and, rising high above the labyrinth of narrow, crowded and climbing streets, a castle that looked impregnable. Certainly a city worth sacking, if it could be taken. The crusaders looked at it with wary and covetous eyes from the hill west of the town where they were encamped to await the arrival of the king, whom the two bishops had gone north of the city to fetch. King Affonso arrived and made his proposals, flattering and bribing them. He was heard with attentive caution. Most of the English contingent voted for staying. Not, however, those who had been to Lisbon before and had seen through besieging it; these took the king’s promises for treachery. Some were swayed by the Veal pirates, practical men to whom crusades were not only partly, as with most crusaders, but exclusively, plundering expeditions, a legitimate and industrious means of laying up capital against old age. They and their followers were for going pirating along the Spanish and African coasts, and making Jerusalem while weather and winds were good. About eight of the English ships were for doing this. Noisy disputings broke out; Hervey of Glanville addressed the pirate group, entreating them for their honour’s sake to stay with their comrades; even the Scots, said he, who were universally agreed to be barbarians, had not failed in the duty of friendship. Finally the pirates agreed; still 13strictly businesslike, they would remain as long as they were fed and paid, and not a day longer.
A firm agreement with the king was drawn up and sworn to, though there were crusaders of experience who believed that it made little difference what Affonso swore. However, the agreement looked good; if Lisbon were taken, the crusaders were to keep all enemy property, and to possess the city until it had been searched and spoiled, after which it was to be handed over to the king. Afterwards the city and lands would be shared out among them, according to rank. Also the ships and goods of the besiegers would be freed for ever from goods and tolls (possibly the first Anglo-Portuguese trade agreement, possibly not). These terms having been accepted, the bishops and some of the crusading leaders went to parley with the Moors. The alcayde and others stood on the city walls to hear them. The Archbishop of Braga addressed the enemy, telling them they had no right there and should go back to the land of the Moors without causing bloodshed. The alcayde replied with a bitter tirade. ‘How many times within your memory have you come hither with pilgrims and barbarians to drive us hence? Do your possessions give you no pleasure, or have you got into trouble at home, that you are so often on the move? Surely your frequent coming and going proves your mental instability, for he who cannot control the flight of the body cannot control the mind. This city did, I believe, once belong to your people, but now it is ours. It may be yours in some future time, but this will be decided by the will of God. While God willed, we have held it; when he wills otherwise, we shall no longer hold it. Go away, for you shall not enter the city but by the sword. 14Why should I delay you longer? Do what you can. We will do what God’s will determines.’
The Bishop of Oporto replied tartly, ‘What end awaits you, you will learn by experience’, and they parted with no mutual salutations to make them ready for battle, which began at once. The Moors shut themselves up in the Mouraria and threw stones at the Christians from the roofs. Fierce skirmishes went on day after day. Mutual insults were bandied; the Moors alternated the time-honoured gibe about the probable conduct of the crusaders’ wives at home and the number of bastards being born by them, with odious remarks about the Trinity. The Christian repartees are not recorded, but no doubt they thought up equally good insults to the wives in Moorish harems and to the Prophet. After a fortnight they began to construct engines of assault, such as movable towers. Meanwhile some of the English crusaders went fishing on the Almada coast, and were captured there by Moors; in revenge, their comrades made a brilliant commando raid on Almada, returning with two hundred captives and eighty Moorish heads: this exploit greatly sent up Anglo-Norman stock in the army, and henceforth fishing expeditions to Almada were unimpeded.
The Lisbon garrison meanwhile were starving, and the worse for pestilence (they had nowhere to bury their dead) and sent fruitless appeals for help to their comrades in Évora. From time to time starving infidels would creep out of the city and give themselves up to the enemy, who would baptise them and were then apt to cut off their hands and pelt them to death with stones. The desperate garrison must have known it was only a question of time before the end came. The 15Germans and Flemings sapped terrible breaches in the eastern walls; when the Anglo-Normans came over to see how they were getting on, they were repulsed with anger and bidden to go back to their own engines; for international jealousies raged, and the allies got on together in the manner usual with allies on the battlefield. The crusaders thought the Portuguese inclined to retire at crucial moments, and that the king sent away forces and equipment to Santarem. Portuguese historians regard this as unlikely.
According to the English narrator, it was the Anglo-Norman movable tower, an engine eighty feet in height and equipped with a drawbridge that finally broke the spirit of the besieged. The account of the assault on the walls with this strange but powerful erection is Cromwellian in its mixture of violence with prayer. The long exhortation addressed to the manipulators of the machine by the priest who accompanied them might have been spoken by Oliver himself. ‘Brothers, the work grows hot, the enemy presses … Trust in the Lord, and he shall give you the desires of your hearts. Be reconciled again with God, and put on Christ once more … Remember the marvellous work of the Lord which he has wrought in you, how he has brought you unharmed over the vast waters and the violent storms, and how he has brought you here, where through the inspiration of the Spirit we have invaded this suburb … The enemy will not stand against us, because those whom the error of ignorance of the faith degrades will be struck with difficulty of action … Strike your guilty breasts while you await the aid of the Lord. For it will come, it will come … I am persuaded that neither famine nor the sword nor tribulation nor distress shall separate us from Christ. 16Now, being certain of victory, fall upon the enemy … Glory be to our Lord Jesus Christ … Amen.’
At this the engineers fell on their faces with groans and tears. And so, in a loud voice calling on God for aid, they moved the engine forward. After three days of desperate fighting, with heavy losses on both sides, during which the tower was nearly lost, it was placed within four feet of the wall, and the scaling bridge thrown out. That was the end: the heroic but beaten and starving infidels laid down their arms and asked for a truce until morning. This was granted, and Moorish hostages were handed over to the king.
Jealousies and rioting broke out in the army, each nation fearing to be done out of its due spoils. The Portuguese heard a rumour that all the gold and silver in the city would go to the crusaders; the crusaders clamoured to have the hostages. Mutiny raged among ‘fatuous English seamen’, incited by a Bristol clergyman of doubtful morals, who asked why so many brave men should obey a few unworthy leaders. The fatuous seamen saw no reason why; they rushed out of camp, shouting vengeance against Glanville. The Moorish hostages, dignified men who disapproved such unseemly conduct, said firmly that they would negotiate terms with the king and his army, but would have no dealings with those base, disloyal and ferocious men, the crusaders. A council was held with the king; it was agreed that if the alcayde and his son-in-law might keep their property and the other citizens be fed, the city should be surrendered. The English and Normans at once agreed, saying very properly that upright conduct should be preferred to spoil; the Germans and Flemish, however, ‘in whom there is always innate cupidity’, were determined that the city should 17be completely despoiled. It was finally agreed that only the alcayde should be allowed food and his property (except his Arabian mare, on which the Count of Areschot had set his heart). Tumults and clashes continued, and the king, now thoroughly sick of foreign crusaders, remarked that he did not care to associate with such people any more.
It was agreed that a hundred and sixty Germans and Flemings and a hundred and forty Anglo-Normans were to enter the city first, and occupy the upper castle, where the Moors were to bring their money and possessions, after which the city would be searched for what they might have neglected to bring; later the despoiled citizens would be let out through the three gates.
The gates were opened, and, needless to say, the Germans and Flemings cheated, for with the agreed hundred and sixty there rushed in over two hundred more, and proceeded to behave in the most shocking fashion. Of course, says Osbern, no Anglo-Normans beyond the agreed quota presumed to enter; these followed the bishops and watched them plant the banner of the cross on the castle tower, while clergy and people, not without tears, intoned the Te Deum during the ceremony of aspersion which purified the city defiled by unbelievers. These holy doings made small impression on the men of Flanders and Cologne, who, seeing so many temptations to greed all round them, quite succumbed, rushing hither and thither, pillaging, breaking down doors and robbing houses, insulting citizens and maidens. They took for themselves what should have been common property, they cut the throat of the aged Mozarabic bishop, they seized the alcayde and pillaged his house. Count Areschot struggled for the coveted mare so 18roughly that the poor animal had a miscarriage. All Germans and Flemings, in fact, behaved in the most brutal and licentious manner imaginable.
‘But the Normans and English, to whom good faith and scruples of conscience were matters of the greatest import’ (this apparently went for the Veal brothers too) ‘remained quietly at the posts to which they had been assigned, preferring to keep their hands from all rapine rather than violate their promises; an occurrence which greatly shamed Areschot, Christian and their followers, since their unmixed greed now stood openly revealed.’
It should in justice be observed that the Teutonic accounts read rather differently, and that, as a Portuguese historian acidly points out, there is little in the antecedents of the Anglo-Norman crusaders to make it easy to believe that they stood quietly as spectators of these wild scenes, converted suddenly into models of moderation and virtue. As an Anglo-Norman, it would ill become me to take a side in this international squabble. Better to hasten on to Saturday morning, when the despoiled citizens, Moors and Christian Mozarabs in about equal numbers, began to file out through the three city gates; so many were they (as those acquainted with Mouraria and Alfama can readily believe) that the procession lasted till Wednesday. After they had gone out, great quantities of wheat, barley and oil were found stored in their cellars.
It does not appear that there was any organised feeding or sheltering of the dispossessed, whether unbelievers or Christians. Among them pestilence, starvation and conversion raged. ‘Among ruins and vineyards and villages, countless thousands of corpses lay exposed to birds and beasts, and 19living men resembling bloodless beings went about the earth and kissed the cross as suppliants, and declared that Mary, the Mother of God, was good.’ Whether they gained anything by this gesture is not clear. But even the Christians were moved almost to pity, though they ‘thought the prophecy of Isaiah happily fulfilled’. Osbern’s narrative ends with a religious discourse: ‘We are inclined to feel pity for our enemies in their evil fortunes, and to feel sorry that the lashes of divine justice are not yet at an end.’
So ended the seventeen weeks’ siege. Lisbon was won for the King of Portugal, and it was the only lasting gain of all that the crusaders attempted in Portugal on their various incursions. They had been promised half the city in reward; but they did not feel inclined for Lisbon, and renounced their claims on it; a large number requested instead grants of land, and settled in colonies up the Tagus valley and elsewhere. The fifteenth-century historian Galvão, a man of pleasing fancies, mentions various places thus settled; he puts the English particularly in Villa Franca, which he says they called Cornogoa, after Cornwall. The name was said to have been changed to Villa Franca because of the freedoms and franchises it enjoyed, and because, said the English chaplain in Lisbon, the learned Dr Colbatch, writing in 1700, well-bred and delicate-minded Portuguese did not care to say ‘corn’. Like the alleged English derivation of the name Almada, (‘all made it’) the story is not inherently probable. All the tales of crusaders’ settlements are difficult to prove, and seem to have a mythological element. Still, Affonso I and his successors, do seem to have wanted for military reasons an infiltration of northern blood in Portugal. Affonso did not care for the crusaders’ manners and habits, nor 20did his subjects; but no one could deny that they were tough fighting men and useful against Moors and Spaniards, and he was probably glad that they should settle about the country. ‘Factaque est illic cristicolarum colonia usque in presentem diem’, says Helmold. There are families in Portugal now which trace their descent from those crusading colonists. How many stayed is not known. The majority, after wintering in Lisbon (many of them in the monastery of S. Vicente de Fora), appear to have departed for Palestine in February.
Among those who stayed in Portugal was the new Bishop of Lisbon, Gilbert of Hastings, an English priest, who was selected for the office by his countrymen, approved by the king, council and bishops, and consecrated immediately after the city’s fall by the Archbishop of Braga. That he was chosen for the first bishop of the restored Christian See shows high qualities in himself and the intention of the king to keep in with England. Of his past little is known; it has been suggested that he must have been of good birth, since, in a snobbish age, his countrymen treated him with respect and chose him from among all the crusading priests for the episcopacy. Whatever his birth, he was esteemed as a high-minded and learned prelate. ‘There was chosen,’ says a Portuguese historian, ‘a virtuous man who was called Gilbert, of very good life and habits, and learnt in degrees.’ He proved also an able administrator. He is said to have induced many of the crusading chaplains to stay and work under him; the king gave him thirty-two houses for his canons, with lands, vineyards and olive groves, which must have been a pleasant change for these northern clergymen. The king further recognised the Anglo-Norman crusaders’ help by dedicating to them the 21church, St Mary of the Martyrs, built during the siege on the burial ground of their slain. Over the altar was placed a Madonna who had travelled with the English fleet, and the church became a crusaders’ centre.
Gilbert, an energetic bishop, set to work to organise his enormous diocese that stretched north and south from Leiria to Alcacer do Sol and east to Évora. He helped in building the cathedral, established the Use of Sarum (which was continued in Lisbon until 1536), and endeavoured (in the end successfully) to subjugate the Templars, those proud and difficult men, who had their own jurisdiction round Santarem, claiming independence of the Portuguese primacy and direct dealings with Rome. It took Gilbert ten years of argument to get these arrogant transmontanes down. He also had a pacifying and Christianising effect on Moors. In 1151 he undertook a mission to England to enlist crusaders for an attack on the Saracen stronghold of Alcacer do Sol; he induced an English fleet to sail to Portugal and assist, but the Saracens were stubborn and the attack failed. The English military continued, however, to be in and out of the peninsula, both in Portugal and Spain; they would stop off en route for Jerusalem, casually destroy a castle or two, and proceed on their way refreshed.
But the next time there is specific mention of English incursion was at the siege of Silves in 1189, where they and the other crusaders behaved with the utmost ferocity. King Affonso was dead; his son Sancho inherited the task of clearing Portugal of infidels and the habit of roping in warlike foreign crusaders to assist him in doing it. The crusaders, for their part, had acquired the habit of regarding the peninsula ports as richly rewarding stages on their journeyings to the Holy Sepulchre; many of 22them got no further, but returned home with their pockets full of the spoils and wages of the Christian war in Iberia. Their habit was to call at ports along the northern Spanish coast, stopping for religious reasons in the river Tambre in Galicia to make their way to St James of Compostella, then sailing south down the Portugal coast, looking in on Oporto and Lisbon to refresh themselves and see if anyone had a job for them. The sight of these large and odious armed men (for large and odious they seemed both to the Moors and the Portuguese) sailing in fleets up the rivers and disembarking with barbarian northern cries, only too ready for anything, became familiar to the Galicians and the Portuguese. So familiar and so disconcerting that the crusaders who landed to perform their Lenten duties at Santiago in 1189 were driven off by an exasperated populace that too well knew their habits, and had to retreat with their duties unfulfilled. Many of this particular band were Danes, even larger and more odious than the Germans, Dutch and English who formed the rest of the armada. Somewhat annoyed with the obstructive Gallegos, they sailed down to the Tagus. There, according to precedent, they met King Sancho, set on conquering Algarve. The crusaders took a favourable view of this enterprise, and, joined by a Portuguese fleet, sailed south, rounded Cape St Vincent, and entered the pleasant bay of Portimão. Landing, they found themselves in a rich, fertile, semi-tropical land, lovely with almond and orange blossom, strangely, to northern eyes, grown with dark, glossy carobs and sticky-leaved figs. But an empty land, for the evil news ‘the Christians are in the bay’ had sent the Arab peasantry fleeing for shelter into the walled stronghold of Alvor; all in vain, for the Christians followed them there and made short work of 23them and their castle, scaling the walls, sacking, destroying and looting, and massacring nearly six thousand persons. One raid by northern barbarians is very like another; the Saracens of Algarve experienced now what the Britons had suffered from the invading Saxon hordes long ago, what the Saxons had endured from Norse vikings, what Roman Europe had from Goths, Visigoths and Huns. Satiated for the moment with infidel blood and loot, the crusaders tarried no more, but continued their voyage to the Holy Land.
Another fleet of them, this time with more English, mostly Londoners, on board, arrived in July of the same year. Their goal was the Algarve capital, the rich, beautiful and strong city of Silves, whose loot King Sancho promised to the foreigners. A Portuguese army joined them; they encamped up the river Drade outside Silves. Again the fertile countryside was emptied of its people; this time they had sought shelter inside the strong walls of their capital, and Silves was a much tougher proposition than Alvor had been.
Algarve lay in oppressive African heat; the figs were ripe and bursting on the sticky trees, the largest and sweetest figs in Europe. As they ate them, the men from the north looked up at the proud and rich Saracen city, dazzlingly white, surrounded by gardens and orchards in luxuriant leaf, flower and fruit, built about with arcaded and mosqued dwellings and churches, crowned with a castle that seemed impregnable. There was a high city, a lower city, a suburb, and each was guarded by moats and by stubborn, watch-towered walls. Silves looked, in fact, as hard to take as it proved. The Portuguese regarded it dubiously; but the foreign crusaders, indomitable and avaricious men, were undaunted. 24
They besieged it through August. On 1 September the garrison, perishing from thirst, surrendered, asking to be allowed to leave the city with such of their goods as they could carry. The king was for consenting; the crusaders however insisted on their last pound of flesh, and would allow the infidels nothing but their lives.
So the starving and bereft procession filed out through the gates. Seeing the Moors thus at their mercy proved too much for the crusaders, who fell on them with blows and insults and stripped them even of their clothing, which angered the king and the Portuguese army greatly. The Portuguese occupied the city that night, which they and their allies spent largely in torturing the remaining inhabitants to make them reveal the whereabouts of their treasures. Next day the crusaders sacked the city. The king, by now thoroughly disgusted with his assistants, turned them out, and resentfully they returned to their ships with their spoils; failing to extract more loot from the perfidious king, as they indignantly called him, they refused to remain and assist in an attack on Faro, but sailed away, some to Palestine, some to spend the rewards of their labour in their own lands. The affair had ended, like so many allied campaigns, with the greatest mutual ill feeling; the Portuguese accused the northerners of rapacity and turbulence, and were accused in their turn of having been defaulting in battle and stingy in reward.
But next year, like migratory sea birds, a fleet of these turbulent beings, en route to join Richard Coeur de Lion in the Mediterranean, swam into Portuguese seas once more. The fleet had been scattered by storms, and each vessel sought shelter where it could. One shipful, driven into 25the Bay of Silves, acceded to the bishop’s request that they should help to defend Silves against an infidel attack; the rest of the fleet arrived in the Tagus, and proceeded to behave very strangely. By now accustomed to attacking and sacking Portuguese towns, and doubtless having indulged too freely in Portuguese wines, the crusaders landed in Lisbon and began to treat it as if they were come to capture it. Some of them may have had old scores to pay off; some may have mistaken the situation, and, seeing Moors and Jews about, and remembering their fathers’ tales of forty years ago, may have supposed it their task to wrest the city once more from the infidel; or all may have been moved, quite simply, by the ruling crusading passion for destruction, blood and loot. Anyhow they fell on Lisbon, as a Portuguese historian puts it, like a pack of wild beasts got loose, running through the city and attacking the citizens with violence, more particularly the Saracens and Jews, but not sparing the Portuguese, their persons, their property, or their female relations. For several days the violence, sacking and burning went on in the city, the suburbs, and the country round. The king, hearing of these distressing scenes, hurried down from Santarem to stop them; a tactful man, he did not return violence in kind, but requested the commanders of the marauders to make them desist and observe the rules made for crusaders by King Richard, who knew their temptations and habits. The commanders failed to confine the unruly mob to their ships; violent Anglo-Portuguese fighting broke out; the king sent his troops to arrest and endungeon all the seven hundred English in the town. They were locked up until pledges had been given for their good conduct and the restitution of 26plunder; this arranged, the English fleet, to Portuguese relief, sailed off to the Mediterranean.
They were back in the Tagus in 1217. Some Portuguese historians eliminate the English from this adventure, disguising the Earls of Wight and of Holland, their leaders, under the names of Count de Wythe and the Count of Holland from Flanders; but this seems to be merely the pardonable confusion customary among the Portuguese when it comes to distinguishing the nationalities of northern crusaders. The expedition consisted of the mixture as before – Rhinelanders, Flemings, Frisians and English, all set for the Holy Land, and it took the usual course – storms at sea, arrival, after six weeks of tossing and straying, in the Tagus, appeals for help from the local clergy, who nobly entertained the arrivals and told them that it was too late in the summer for Palestine, that God had sent them to Lisbon to besiege Alcacer do Sol, and that its spoils when captured would be great. A hundred ships decided to stay, including the two English earls and their fleet.
A two months’ fierce siege followed. A Saracen army joined furious battle with the Christians. These, when drawn up for battle in the early morning against their tremendously outnumbering foes, saw among the brilliant stars a great cross, and perceived that they would win. Indeed, God seemed with them, for when the sun rose they also observed in the sky an army of Templars engaged in aerial combat with Mussalmen. So every augury was with them, and three days of fierce mutual slaughter ended with the rout of the infidels. The garrison of Alcacer, however, held out till mid-October, when at last surrender was forced. 27
It is a relief not to have to record subsequent excesses on the part of our ancestors and their colleagues, who seem on this occaion to have behaved with no more impropriety than the situation warranted. The Portuguese prelates, anxious to keep them for further operations against the Saracens, wrote to ask the Pope if they might stay in Lisbon for another year, earning thereby the same indulgences as if they had proceeded to Palestine. The Pope said this would not do; he was beginning to think Palestine neglected for Portugal. So the crusaders had to proceed to the Holy Land in the spring; they wintered, however, in Lisbon, and apparently enjoyed themselves greatly. The English taste for wintering in Portugal was now well launched.
This was, so far as we know, the last irruption of English crusaders (as such) into Portugal. It was a habit perhaps better broken. Fine fighters as the Anglo-Norman adventurers were, they were too covetous, too tipsy, and too rough. Inglês bêbado
