Siege of Lisbon
| date | June 28th to October 24th 1147 |
|---|---|
| place | Lisbon , Portugal |
| output | Victory of the Crusaders |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
| Commander | |
|
unknown |
unknown |
| Troop strength | |
| 164 ships; 13,000 men (including approx. 6,000 English, Normans and Scots, 5,000 Germans and Frisians, 2,000 Flemings) |
about 7,000 |
| losses | |
|
1,000 dead and wounded |
3,000–4,000 dead, unknown number of wounded |
The successful siege of Lisbon in 1147 by a crusader army of the Second Crusade secured Alfonso Henrique I the basis for rule over all of Portugal .
background
The victory in the Battle of Ourique in 1139 made Alfonso Henrique the first king of Portugal. In March 1147 he had conquered Santarém from the Almoravid Moors with a small group of soldiers . The strategically important city of Lisbon was still in Moorish hands, and the king himself could not provide any troops to conquer it.
Also in 1147 the Second Crusade to the Holy Land broke out in Central Europe . While powerful main armies marched over the Balkans by land, some of the crusaders traveled by sea. On April 27, the men from Flanders , Friesland , Normandy and Germans from Cologne set out for England, where they took other crusaders from England and Scotland on board. On May 19, 1147, this fleet left Dartmouth for Palestine . Unlike most crusader armies, this one was not led by a nobleman. On June 16, the crusaders reached Porto with 164 ships , where they were received by the local bishop on behalf of Alfonso Henrique. The bishop explained to them that when Alfonso Henrique heard of the arrival of the crusaders, he and his few men had left for the siege of Lisbon and were waiting for their support. Some crusaders hesitated at first, not wanting to delay their crusade to the Holy Land, but were eventually convinced of the prospect of being able to supplement their travel budget with rich booty.
The crusaders landed outside the city on June 28 and agreed with Alfonso Henrique that they would have the right to sack Lisbon and that they would then cede the city to Alfonso Henrique.
siege
On July 1, the first skirmishes began as the Crusaders occupied the outskirts of the city and began the siege. At first the siege was rather unfortunate for the crusaders: five catapults were destroyed and one siege tower got stuck in the morass. However, the Moorish defenders also had difficulties. The food supply was completely inadequate and the neighboring Moorish princes did not send any support. The German troops reached the undermining of the city wall with Flemish help by October 16 , so a breach was struck. But the attack that followed was not coordinated. Instead, the Flemings attacked while the Germans were still rallying their troops. Since the Flemings alone were inferior to the Moors, this attack failed. On October 19, the English had completed a second siege tower. When he was rolled against the wall, the defenders' position became critical. When at the same time the Flemings damaged the city gate by fire and the Germans took the old breach and inflicted the first major losses on the defenders, the Moors gave up and consented to the surrender.
losses
In the case of the crusaders, apart from the initial skirmishes outside the city, in which no more than 500 men were probably killed or wounded, only significant casualties were incurred in the unsuccessful attack by the Flemish people on the breach. Overall, the losses on the Crusader side amounted to around 1,000 dead and wounded.
The Moors initially had about 5,000 troops in the city. Outside another 2,000, about half of which fell in the skirmishes in the area while the rest retreated into town. The only casualties worth mentioning were the unsuccessful attack by the Flemings and the last successful attack by the Germans on the breach. A total of about 2,000-3,000 men died here. All in all, the Moors lost about half of their original 7,000 men.
consequences
With the occupation of Lisbon, the crusaders' hopes for rich booty were fulfilled. They then conquered the Moorish castles of Sintra and Palmela for Alfonso Henrique. An Englishman named Gilbert von Hastings was appointed the new bishop of Lisbon and some crusaders settled in Portugal. Most of them only waited the winter until they continued their crusade to the Holy Land on February 1, 1148. The venture later ended in failure and the conquest of Lisbon would remain one of the few countable successes of the Second Crusade.
Alfonso Henrique's successors continued the conquest of Portugal from the Moors and were able to complete it by 1251. Subsequently, Lisbon became the new capital of the Kingdom of Portugal in 1256.
reception
The future Nobel laureate José Saramago (1922-2010) told in a 1989 published novel as a proofreader in a historical account of events the word no inserts, their help making the Crusaders the Portuguese did not grant. Instead of firing him, his supervisor demands a counterfactual account of how Alfonso Henrique's troops still manage to take possession of the city and begins a love affair with him.
swell
- De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, ed. Aires A. Nascimento, in: Ders. (Ed.): A conquista de Lisboa aos mouros: relato de um cruzado, Lisbon 2001.
- De expugnatione Lyxbonensi. The conquest of Lisbon, ed. Charles W. David, New York 1936 (reprint with a foreword by Jonathan Phillips New York 2001).
literature
- Marshall W. Baldwin: A History of the Crusades. Vol. I. The first hundred years . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1969, pp. 481-483.
- Steven Runciman: A History of the Crusades. Vol. II. The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100-1187. Cambridge University Press, New York 1952.
- James Brundage: The Crusades. A Documentary History. Marquette University Press, Milwaukee 1962.
- Jonathan Riley-Smith: The Atlas of the Crusades. Facts on File, New York 1990, ISBN 0816021864 .
- Jonathan Phillips: The Second Crusade. Extending the Frontiers of Christendom. Yale University Press, New Haven 2007, ISBN 9780300112740 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ José Saramago: História do Cerco de Lisboa. Ed. Caminho, Lisbon 1989; German: history of the siege of Lisbon . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1992, ISBN 3-498-06249-2 .