ABSTRACT
On 15 March 1147, the forces of King Afonso I Henriques of Portugal scaled the walls of Almoravid Santarém. According to De expugnatione Scalabis (The Conquest of Santarém), a narrative account of the Santarém campaign allegedly recounted to an anonymous author in the monastery of Santa Cruz de Coimbra by Afonso himself, the conquest of that city was miraculous. In that victory, De expugnatione explains, God had surpassed ‘ancient marvels with new wonders’, and divine intervention was the only explanation for Afonso’s victory against such astounding odds. While such appeals to divine agency had been a hallmark of narratives of the crusades since c. 1099, there is no compelling evidence that Afonso’s Santarém campaign was a crusade. Rather, it was an episode in the expansion and consolidation of Afonso’s nascent kingdom. Consequently, De expugnatione reveals the narrative techniques used by Latin Christians seeking to narrate non-crusading military campaigns against Muslims in mid-twelfth-century Iberia and the influence of crusade narrative therein. This chapter examines two contemporary Latin accounts of Afonso’s Santarém campaign produced at the scriptorium of Santa Cruz de Coimbra to explore how and why authors drew on miraculous themes to convey divine agency in their narratives of Christian-Muslim warfare.
