Atlantis and the Silver City by Peter Daughtrey Read Free Book Online

the Moors—was Silves. By all accounts, it was a fine city of tinkling water gardens, well-stocked bazaars, and attractive buildings, with a well-mannered and eloquent populace, many of whom were particularly fond of writing poetry.
    The Crusaders brought this utopia to a savage end. Paradise became purgatory. They may have undertaken the Crusade in God’s name, but for the most part they were a bloodthirsty, unprincipled lot with a passion for plunder. Many of them had joined because they had been told that they would be absolved of their taxes back home and they could strike it rich in the Holy Land.
    Portugal’s geographical position inevitably meant that passing Crusaders from the north put into the country’s ports for provisions or when seeking shelter from Atlantic storms. In 1189 the fleet, including our man from Bremen, docked in Lisbon. The king of Portugal, Dom Sancho I, seized the moment and convinced them that one set of Muslims was just as bad as another and persuaded them to help him oust the Moors from Silves and help unify Portugal. No doubt a promised share of the loot appealed to their lofty Christian principles.
    Silves’ mighty fortress was practically impregnable, and the Portuguese, along with some of the Crusaders, had to be persuaded several times to persevere rather than abort during the six-week siege. They tried everything: ladders to scale the walls, siege catapults lobbing lethal stones inside,fiery missiles, and tunnels under the walls to destabilize them. The Moors reacted by pouring boiling or flaming oil on the attackers, firing the missiles back, and breaking through from inside the fortress into the Crusaders’ tunnels to repel them.
    A friend who owns a house overlooking the river a short way downstream from Silves recently unearthed a cache of roughly formed stone missiles, ready for the siege catapults but, in the event, obviously not needed.
    The end came when the Christians succeeded in cutting off the town’s water supply. The Muslim defenders were dying from thirst and finally offered to surrender. The quote at the beginning of this chapter is the anonymous Crusader’s description of their pitiful state when they were finally allowed to leave.
    The Moors did not take the loss of what they regarded as an earthly paradise lightly, and the following year a fleet arrived from Seville to reclaim the city. The famous English monarch Richard the Lionheart was passing through on his crusade to the Holy Land at the same time and dispatched a contingent of men who helped to send the Moors scuttling back to Spain.
    During the subsequent summer, however, while Richard was otherwise occupied in Palestine, the Moors returned and, after a month, the castle capitulated. It remained in their hands until, some forty years later, the Portuguese were strong enough to retake it—along with the rest of the Algarve’s Muslim strongholds—on their own.
    So goes the most recent saga of Silves. No one has invaded the Algarve since—apart, that is, from thousands of north Europeans—English and Irish in particular—who over the last thirty years have bought homes there, from which to enjoy the peaceful countryside as well as three hundred annual days of azure skies.
    Not much meat, then, to support my developing theory that an ancient civilization once existed in the Algarve, except for the revelation that the Moors had a port and a shipyard nine kilometers upriver at Silves. This confirms other reports that the rivers of the region were navigable far deeper into the hinterland than they are today, and were used to transport goods and people.
    The Moors had originally come to power in the Algarve at the expense of the Visigoths and local tribes. In truth, the Visigoths do not seem tohave ever made the same headway in the south of Portugal as they did in the rest of the country and across the border in Spain.
    I obviously needed to dig deeper; perhaps the Roman era would prove more fruitful. The