ABSTRACT
In 1147, King Afonso Henriques (r. 1143–85), aided by English, Scottish, Norman, Flemish and Lotharingian Crusaders, marched into Lisbon and defeated the Muslim overlords of the city. Shortly after the Christian victory, one of the English crusaders wrote an impressive account about the place he was seeing for the first time ever:
The city of Lisbon at the time of our arrival consisted of sixty thousand families paying taxes – this figure includes the suburbs round about, except the free ones, which pay taxes to no one. A circular wall there surrounds the top of the hill and, at the left and right, the city walls descend to the banks of the Tagus River. The suburbs, down below the city wall, are cut into the banks of the river in such a way that each of them has a superbly fortified citadel. The place is girded with pitfalls. The city was populous beyond belief . . . [and the] city’s buildings were jammed so closely together that it was scarcely possible, save in the merchants’ quarters, to find a street more than eight feet wide. 1
