II ANTIQUITY

I have very little interest in pre-history, which it seems to me is too far away and too uneventful, being concerned more or less only with brutish existence, to be comprehensible. For those who do and wish to make what they can of them, the local museum has a dusty room full of stone bits and pieces collected by archaeologists and purporting to reveal something of the crude lives of the people who populated the area before more significant things happened; there are also one of two standing stones or dolmens here and there in the district and some archaeological excavations barely noticed by unseeing motorists. The indefatigable Romans extended their empire, and their permanent cultural and linguistic influence, as far west as Lusitania, but who they had to conquer there is not very clear – perhaps amongst the indigenous population the original Lusos, said to be blond and blue eyed and who retreated under the onslaught to the heights of Serra da Estrela. The Romans established present-day Braga, in the north of Portugal, as a fairly major provincial city, and linked it by road to Evóra and to the more important city of Merida in western Spain; a bridge across a stream in a neglected valley a little to the north of Sintra is all that remains of that; though excavations in Lisbon have revealed earthworks of the first centuries. Archaeological explorations in the Sintra region have unearthed some rather dubious Roman relics; the most significant site for that sort of thing in Portugal is further up near Coimbra. It’s appropriate to mention here also a curious circular chapel in a pine-forest near an otherwise uneventful village called Janas, a short distance away from Sintra proper. It used to be popularly supposed that it had been adapted from an Arab mosque, but more recent research claims that the present structure, from somewhere in the sixteenth century, was raised over the site of a temple to Diana. Whatever the truth, by all accounts it still serves as a centre for harmless rustic fertility rituals of a distinctly pagan origin.

The Romans, of course, would not have penetrated entirely without some fore-knowledge. The original name of Lisbon, Olissipo, has sometimes been conjectured as deriving from Ulysses, though it barely seems plausible, considering the un-seaman-ship meanderings of Homer’s incompetent hero around the Mediterranean, that he ever got there himself. But certainly the Phoenicians and Greeks had known and explored the present-day Portuguese coasts in search of metals The windows and doors of many ordinary houses in this region, and especially in a near-by village on the coast called Almoçageme, were traditionally painted in a dark red which could possibly recall the Roman Imperial purple, a dye made from shell-fish and in fact a shade more like burgundy than ‘purple’. The ancients appeared not to have a very accurate sense of colour, or else their words translate badly – Homer’s “wine dark seas” are still perplexing to the visually-sensitive. Be that as it may, and parenthetically, the commercial paint has disappeared in the course even of my brief duration. Initially it could be found in the local hardware shop, but then suddenly what was sold under the same name turned out to be a horrid deep scarlet which had to be carefully mixed with ultramarine to make it acceptable. Nowadays this pleasant decoration has more or less disappeared altogether … what I was saying was that after the fall of Carthage, or perhaps before, it was put about that beyond the Pillars of Hercules the sea was populated by monsters and, worse, descended into a maelstrom over the end the world, so that for centuries no-one dared pass them and the Romans had to arrive on foot. There are still parts, around Cabo da Roca, where it is easy to imagine, if one blinkers one’s eyes a little, that nothing has changed for four thousand years, and that the landscape now is much the same as that gazed on by those daring sailors. From the fourth or fifth century, all of Iberia was exposed to the depredations of successive waves of Germanic races moving westwards overland – Vandals, Swabians, Alans and Visigoths, the latter already more or less Christianised and setting up administrations and kingdoms in the Roman mould and continuing the Roman traditions, but of their activities in this area of the western extremity nothing definite can be said. It was not until the era of the Prophet that local history starts to be palpable.

The extremely rapid and extensive spread of the Islamic faith from the Atlantic to India and beyond is an historical phenomenon as astonishing, or even more so, than the similar spread of Christianity five centuries or so earlier. However out-dated some of Gibbon’s details and sources may have since become, his accounts, in magisterial eighteenth-century prose, of these developments remain as fresh and diverting as when they were penned. Gibbon was no friend of Christianity, or at least not of what it became, but he had a great admiration for the “manliness” and purity of the followers of Mohamed. Their success, he says, derived not from the missionary zeal of the disciples of Christ or the superstitious susceptibility of their converts, but rather from the sword. Galloping armies of Arabs offered only two choices: submit or die. This grim dilemma, however, was tempered by the facts that no great concessions were necessary to embrace the relatively straightforward principles of Islam and that the holy warriors were tolerant of other credos existing alongside their own so long as appropriate tributes were rendered and no civil resistance was offered. The first small band of Moorish invaders made the easy crossing to Gebel al Tarik (latter-day Gibralter) in 711, according to Gibbon at the invitation and with the secret connivance of a disgruntled Gothic general. “Their hospitable entertainment, the Christians who joined their standard, their inroad into a fertile and unguarded province, the richness of their spoil, and the safety of their return, announced to their brethren the most favourable omens of victory”. In the next spring, twelve thousand returned and routed the hastily-assembled Christian army, much larger but riddled with internal dissents and jealousies. Córdoba and Granada were almost immediately taken before the startled inhabitants of Toledo realised the Arabs were at their walls. “The most zealous of the Catholics had escaped with the relics of their saints; and if the gates were shut, it was only until the victor had subscribed a fair and reasonable capitulation. The voluntary exiles were allowed to depart with their effects; seven churches were appropriated to the Christian worship; the archbishop and his clergy were at liberty to exercise their function, the monks to practise or neglect their penance, and the Goths and Romans were left in all civil and criminal cases to the subordinate jurisdiction of their own laws and magistrates” (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol II chap LI). By this combination of arms and wise policy, except for the wild Cantabrian mountains in the far north to which had fled a few die-hard Christians, the whole of the Iberian Peninsular was within five years under the standard of the Koran. To quote Gibbon again: “In this revolution many partial calamities were inflicted by the carnal or religious passions of the enthusiasts …. Yet if we compare the invasion of Spain by the Goths, or its recovery by the kings of Castile and Aragon, we must applaud the moderation and discipline of the Arab conquerors.”

In spite of the highest points of Leiria, Sintra, Lisbon and Setúbal (a length of one hundred and fifty miles or so) each being still dramatically crowned with the remains of Moorish fortresses, very little can be learned of what lives were led and under what circumstances during the four hundred-odd years of Muslim occupation – from which it can be concluded, perhaps, that they were relatively peaceful times. Relations between the moçárabes and their Muslim rulers were by all accounts generally cordial, the former having no reason or inclination to offer much religious opposition, maintaining their own local jurisdictions and suffering only an obligatory personal tax while benefitting from those improvements in agriculture, irrigation, commerce and intellectual knowledge in which the Arabs excelled Europeans. A strong Moorish legacy remains in Portugal: apart from the many Arabic words which have entered the language, a fondness for azulejos (decorative tiles) fastidious personal habits and a certain fatalistic turn of mind, there are few Portuguese who do not bear physical traces in the form of refinement of feature and grace of bearing of a more exotic ancestry. A word peculiar to the Lisbon-Sintra area, saloio, sometimes used perjoratively with reference to country people in the sense of peasant or ‘hick’, is also a matter or pride when used self-descriptively by those direct descendents of the Moors.to whom the appelation applies. It was only at the time of the reconquista that relations deteriorated, and that more for reasons of avarice and power-seeking than any others – such is always the way, human affairs would work fairly well were they not upset by individuals who want to be boss.

In the first place, those Muslims who had achieved riches and influence began to carve up the caliphate into independent regional city-states and engage in internecine squabbles which provided the opportunity for the small groups of Visigothic Christians who had taken refuge in the mountainous northwest of the peninsula to go on the offensive against them. These attacks on the part of an emerging Portuguese royal dynasty took place in a wider context of establishing a kingdom independent of Spanish control, finally achieved in 1143 when Afonso Henriques had eradicated his own rivals, after which he turned his attention to extending his territories. In 1147 he took advantage of a series of religious rebellions among the Muslims, and with the help of a passing fleet of English, Flemish, and German crusaders bound for Palestine, captured Lisbon after a seventeen-week siege and then advanced deeper into Muslim Iberia. Sancho I, Afonso Henriques's son and heir, continued to enlarge the realm, taking briefly much of the present-day Algarve. These territories however, were re-gained by the Muslims and remained in continuous dispute until 1249 when Afonso III defeated the last isolated enclave of Muslims at Faro, thus extending Portuguese territory to the sea and establishing the approximate territorial limits Portugal has had ever since.

Descriptions of the crusaders whose aid was enlisted by the Portuguese monarch are not flattering to them. Ignorant equally of theology and geography, and spurred on by the Catholic Church for its own purposes, they were little more than a pack of northern ruffians spoiling for a fight, with anyone. The non-Muslim inhabitants of Lisbon had almost as much reason to regret their presence as did the unfortunate Arabs. It would be pleasing to imagine that some of them met the end they deserved, since the Castelo dos Mouros in Sintra would not have been an easy conquest. On one side, it perches over the edge of a complicated rock-face which used, until it was prohibited, to be a scene of frequent distress for adolescents foolishly attempting to scale it. That some great battle took place over it seems, however, be in the nature of wishful thinking, since according to the information provided in the official inventory of National Monuments Sintra had already passed by mutual agreement into Christian control, so that after the taking of Lisbon the castelo simply reverted voluntarily to D. Afonso Henriques and was left under the supervision of thirty ‘colonists’. That puts paid to another local legend, that the Christians surprised the Moors not by scaling the rocks but by creeping up an underground tunnel from the vicinity of Rio dos Mouros, about five miles away. Some sort of tunnel, or series of grottos, probably exist, however: there is an alarming-looking cave or hole amongst the rocks to the back of the existing walls where tourists never venture, which I’ve never had the courage to attempt to enter and which I’ve never heard anyone else mention.

After serving its purpose as a military stronghold, the castelo gradually fell into disuse and by the middle of the fifteenth century had been abandoned altogether. It suffered damage during the earthquake of 1755, and thereafter lay in ruins until it was ‘restored’ in the 1840’s as a picturesque addition to the gardens of Pena. It’s that restoration, how accurate to the original it cannot be said, that now attracts a constant march of tourist feet, the braver among them sweating up from down below, the feebler from the road which lies between it and Pena itself, but I’ll come back to that later.

The Castelo dos Mouros occupies, of course, an important place in the ‘romance’ of Sintra, contributing the spice of morbidity and superstition to the allure of past glory. There is some nonsense, for instance, of twelve ghostly Arabs carrying lanterns descending from it on certain unspecified nights; I’ve never been fortunate enough to glimpse them, though there is a certain place between Santa Maria and São Pedro where, I’d have admit, it is always unnaturally chilly even in the height of summer. I was told by one or two people, when I lived in Santa Maria, never to set foot outside the house after dark. That advice was impossible to heed, even if I’d taken it seriously. All the same, I wouldn’t have been anxious to ascend too far up the track after the sun had gone down; I tried once as an experiment but didn’t make it, partly because of fear of twisting an ankle or breaking a leg on the very uneven surface, but also because of a quite unexpected amount of mysterious but natural noise and movement in the undergrowth and encroaching forest. The warnings, I think, were directed less against spirits than the living who might patronise them, and there was a sharp reminder of that soon after I started to live there. Just inside the walls there is a small chapel, the origins of which appear to be confusing: on the one hand, it is suggested that it existed before the Arabs and therefore presumably incorporated within their walls; another suggestion is that is was built on the site of a mosque; and there is also a vague speculation that it served as the centre of a mozarabic ‘cult’ presumably after the Arabs had retired. It’s not altogether a cheerful edifice, and it appeared much less so when I discovered one morning on a walk that the solid stone lid of large ‘box’, decorated with a finely carved skull and crossbones, had been split asunder with what seemed like one blow, revealing inside a jumble of skeletons. These bones, I’ve since learned, were given a hasty incarceration at the time of the restoration of the castelo; could they have just been lying around before that, and from when, or were they disturbed in the course of re-building excavations? The next day, when I went back to check, the split lid had been cemented up, and there the ‘coffin’ still sits, un-remarked even by those weary excursionists who rest on it. There is reason to believe that certain activities take place, or took place (the castelo is much more closely supervised these days), which it would be wiser not to investigate; I don’t believe in ‘ghosts’, but I am rather nervous of those who do.

Although there remain indications that the castelo was inhabited, it must have been primarily a defensive retreat, and of the surrounding town, if such there was, no original edifices any longer exist, or have been merged invisibly into later constructions. There is a house in Santa Maria with a garden tucked into the rocks behind where some stonework could conceivably be of Arabic workmanship but one can’t be sure of the date and it could just as well be a later imitation. However, the Palaçio Nacional, that extraordinary pile dominating the town, is popularly imagined to have risen over several centuries over and around an Arab palace of some sort, and indeed there is a reference by the tenth-century geographer Al-Bacr to a residential alcácer or castle in Sintra. After his conquest of Lisbon, D Afonso Henriques included this residence amongst goods of the Crown (I’m quoting from the Inventory of National Monuments already mentioned above) and subsequently handed it over to the Order of the Knights Templar. In 1281 a complete ‘re-structuring’ was undertaken, to which subsequently many other structures were added, including the Sala dos Arabes in the fifteenth century, so that a detailed examination of this building belongs in a later chapter. Buried in the interior of this maze there is a small open courtyard with a pool and a tinkling fountain, now rather grubby and neglected but reminiscent in a minor way of the Alhambra in Grenada; it’s a permissible poetic licence, perhaps, to picture this secret retreat with images of it’s long-gone loungers.

The passage of history is not, of course, to be viewed as a series of changing tableaux, rather as the interminable progression of one era, one year, one day, to the next. The ‘expulsion’ of the Arabs from Iberia, though there were some migrations back to Africa, did not mean that the majority, and their descendents, moved anywhere, they simply merged with a continuously changing population and adapted their ways naturally to whatever superficial political powers and changing customs prevailed. There are times when not too much imagination is necessary to envisage Sintra as something like an over-leafy and excessively decorated fantasy from the Arabian Nights. Or “like a fairy-tale”, to use the conventional tourist cliché …..