ABSTRACT

Some interesting light is thrown on the conquest of Lisbon in 1147 by the three surviving accounts of the translation of the relics of St Vincent, although they are all relatively late and to some extent fabulous.1 The first, and least important, is the

1 The principal source on the conquest of Lisbon in 1147 is the De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, of which the edition and translation by Charles Wendell David ([Columbia] Records of Civilization; New York 1936) was reprinted with a foreword and bibliography by Jonathan Phillips (New York, 2001) = De exp. Lyx.. Other editions will be found in José Augusto de Oliveira, Conquista de Lisboa aos Mouros (1147) (Complemento ao volume II da ‘Lisboa Antiga’ de Júlio de Castilho, 2 ed., Lisbon 1936) and Alfredo Pimenta, Fontes medievais da história de Portugal, I. Anais e crónicas (Lisbon 1948). Account was not taken in the reprint of the textual errors in David’s and Oliviera’s editions listed in Rui Pinto de Azevedo, A carta ou memória do cruzado inglês R. para Osberto de Bawdsey sobre a conquista de Lisboa em 1147 (Faculdade de letras da Universidade de Coimbra. Instituto de estudos históricos douter António de Vasconcelos; Coimbra 1962), 29-31, which is cited here from a separately paginated offprint from Revista portuguesa de História 7, but which was also published (apparently in a shortened version, which I had not seen) in the Actos do Congreso histórico de Portugal. Medioevo, I (Bracara Augusta 14-15; 1963), 45-66, cited by Rudolf Hiestand, ‘Reconquista, Kreuzzug und heiliges Grab. Die Eroberung von Tortosa 1148 im Lichte eines neuen Zeugnisses’, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 31 (1984), 138 n.13. Pierre David, ‘Sur la relation de la prise de Lisbonne (1147) rédigée par un clerc anglo-normand’, Bulletin des études portugaises et de l’Institut français au Portugal NS 11 (1947), 241-54, cited some evidence that the manuscript may be an autograph. Phillips lists other articles on the conquest of Lisbon, especially those by Livermore (n. 9), showing that the author was the priest Raol; Edgington (n. 10) on the so-called Lisbon letter; and himself (nn. 18 and 22) on the Lisbon letter and the ideas of crusade and holy war. Two further articles on the conquest of Lisbon, by Susan B. Edgington, ‘Albert of Aachen, St Bernard and the Second Crusade’, and Matthew Bennett, ‘Military Aspects of the Conquest of Lisbon, 1147’, are in The Second Crusade: Scope and Consequences, ed. Jonathan Phillips, Martin Hoch (Manchester-New York 2001), 5470, 71-89. There is a brief bibliography in Nikolas Jaspert, ‘ “Pro nobis, qui pro vobis oramus, orate”. Die Kathedralkapitel von Compostela und Jerusalem in der ersten Hälfte des 12. Jahrhunderts’, in Santiago, Roma, Jerusalén. Actas del III Congresso internacional

has been dated about 1150 but which its most recent editors date simply before 1185.2 According to this source Vincent’s relics were taken in the second half of the eight century, at the time of the Muslim invasions, from Valencia to cape St Vincent in the region known as the Algarve. When king Alfonso of Portugal looked for them, in order to take them to Braga or Coimbra, he was unable to find them because St Vincent wanted ‘to be venerated by the people of Lisbon’, which was still in the hands of the Muslims. Only after the land had been freed ‘from the servitude of the unfaithful’ and peace established between the king and the Muslims was the body found and taken to Lisbon.3