Second Crusade - Reconquista and The Fall of Lisbon

Reconquista and The Fall of Lisbon

In the spring of 1147, the Pope authorized the expansion of the crusade into the Iberian peninsula, in the context of the Reconquista. He also authorized Alfonso VII of León and Castile to equate his campaigns against the Moors with the rest of the Second Crusade. In May 1147, the first contingents of crusaders left from Dartmouth in England for the Holy Land. Bad weather forced the ships to stop on the Portuguese coast, at the northern city of Porto on 16 June 1147. There they were convinced to meet with King Afonso I of Portugal.

The crusaders agreed to help the King attack Lisbon, with a solemn agreement that offered to them the pillage of the city's goods and the ransom money for expected prisoners. The Siege of Lisbon lasted from 1 July to 25 October 1147 when, after four months, the Moorish rulers agreed to surrender, primarily due to hunger within the city. Most of the crusaders settled in the newly captured city, but some of them set sail and continued to the Holy Land. Some of them, who had departed earlier, helped capture Santarém earlier in the same year. Later they also helped to conquer Sintra, Almada, Palmela and Setúbal, and they were allowed to stay in the conquered lands, where they settled down and had offspring.

Elsewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, almost at the same time, Alfonso VII of León, Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, and others led a mixed army of Catalan and French crusaders against the rich port city of Almería. With support from a Genoese–Pisan navy, the city was occupied in October 1147. Ramon Berenger then invaded the lands of the Almoravid taifa kingdom of Valencia and Murcia. In December 1148, he captured Tortosa after a five-month siege again with the help of French, Anglo-Normans, and Genoese crusaders. The next year, Fraga, Lleida and Mequinenza in the confluence of the Segre and Ebro rivers fell to his army.