28

1146. COIMBRA. AT HOME WITH AFONSO AND HIS NEW BRIDE . . .

Afonso Henriques must have paused for breath because he suddenly became aware he was thirty-seven years of age and single. Maybe he was finally letting down his guard after the pope’s emissary convinced him that to engage in further hostilities with his brutish northern neighbor Affonso VII of Castilla e León—whom Afonso defeated in Guimarães but who’d since regained his fighting spunk—only benefited their common enemy, the Moors. And so the two sparring cousins, Afonso and Affonso, finally shook hands in peace, ironically back in the holy city of Zamora, where the Portuguese king was knighted.

Now here he was, in the prime of his life, monarch, Templar brother, creator of Europe’s first independent nation-state, surely a magnet for any number of eligible noble women wandering the European circuit seeking good aristocratic stock. His lineage from the dukes of Burgundy probably had some part to play in his decision to stiffen his resolve and propose to Mafalda, a cousin of the Duke of Burgundy, who gladly accepted, and the two distant blood relatives were joined in matrimony.

The newlyweds enjoyed a relatively brief moment of conjugal bliss because on March 10, 1147, upon receiving a letter from Clairvaux, Afonso marched his troops out of Coimbra without giving them the vaguest idea where they were headed. They stopped in Souré to pick up its resident Templar militia, and four days later, in the middle of the night, a select group of 120 knights sneaked into the Moorish-held city of Santarém.¹ By sunrise, the well-fortified city was taken with the minimum of resistance.² Removing Santarém from the hands of the Moors was sweet recompense for the Templars’ defeat at Souré three years earlier at the hands of Santarém’s Arab governor, Abu-Zakaria, who leveled the town and brought half its population back with him as slaves.

 

On the charter issued to the city, Afonso made a solemn promise to the Templars.

When I began that journey to that castle which is called Santarém, I made a proposition in my heart, and I took a vow, that if God in his mercy should permit me, I would give all the ecclesiastical possessions to God and to the military brothers of the Temple of Solomon, established in Jerusalem for the defense of the Holy Sepulcher, part of which [Order] was established with me in the same country. And since God made such honor to me and well fulfilled my wish, I Afonso, above-named king, together with wife, Mafalda, make the charter to the above-mentioned knights of Christ for every church in Santa Irene [Santarém], that they and all their successors might have and possess in perpetual right, so that no cleric or layman can question this. But if by chance it happens that at any time God, in his mercy, gives to me that city which is called Lisbon, they are to agree with the bishop on my advice. Should anyone attempt to annul my gift, he may not do so on any condition, and should anyone want to contest it may he be removed from the fellowship of the Holy Church, and may he not share the joys of Jerusalem.³

The document was corroborated and accepted by the current Templar Master of Portugal, Hugh Martin (Hugo Martiniens, as the Portuguese knew him),⁴ and with Santarém secured, the Templars moved their base of operations out of Braga.

Oddly, despite Santarém being of prime strategic importance—the bulwark of the frontier of the burgeoning Portuguese kingdom and the doorstep to the great city of Lisbon—the Templars showed little interest in guarding their new ecclesiastical seat against retaliation by the Moors. Their singular focus centered on the city’s ecclesiastical holdings, specifically the main church the king granted them. They moved into the mosque, dedicated it to John the Baptist,⁵ then put the greatest effort into building a new temple in the form of the church of Our Lady of Alcaçova, founded by no lesser a figure than the mysterious Arnaldo da Rocha.⁶ A dedication stone above the main door of the church reads, “This church was founded in honor of the Virgin Mary . . . by the soldiers of the Temple of Jerusalem, by order of Master Ugonis, this edifice under the care of Petrus Arnaldo.”^*167 It would have been a fitting tribute to Prior Arnaldo given that this city was his birthplace.⁸

It is strikingly odd that Afonso Henriques, new king of a new nation, having expended resources and personal effort in both conquering and defending it from the Moors, should persistently and effortlessly donate enormous tracts of land, churches, and strategic castles to the Templars. Such actions only make sense when one considers he was the administrator of the Templar Order in Portugal and without doubt the leader of its military arm.⁹ Still, it makes one wonder why the Templars should require so much territory. The inheritances were vast and certainly beyond their capacity to both administer or protect. Writing in the eighteenth century, the chronicler Bernardo da Costa described the enormous quantity of donations made to the Knights Templar in Portugal at this time and how “copying all of them down would make this story too large.” Obviously, he had access to far more contemporary documents than are now available, because a devastating fire in Viseu destroyed the Cistercian central archive in 1841.

Even more bizarre, the Templars showed extraordinary indifference to the rights they were awarded, nor did they take advantage of the exceptional property they were given, as though they were executing a preconceived plan or pursuing something of far greater value, something intangible and nonmaterial.

Afonso was equally kind to his uncle Bernard de Clairvaux, with whom he maintained a healthy correspondence.¹⁰ The Cistercians received extensive donations of land from the Portuguese king, such as the forty-four thousand hectares on the mountain of Candeeiros;¹¹ the hermit João Cirita (who had once petitioned a young Afonso, along with the group of monks from Clairvaux) visited the now grown-up king to request another monastery, at Alafões, for which Afonso gladly issued a new charter in 1146; and when the See of Porto once again became vacant, it was offered to a Cistercian monk named Pedro.¹² Thanks to these and further donations in the area around the king’s birthplace of Viseu,¹³ the Cistercians thrived in his new Portugal and contributed to the profound change in agricultural and educational fortunes, the two central tenets of Cistercian philosophy.¹⁴

Perhaps the biggest surprise to Bernard de Clairvaux was the day when a messenger arrived at his abbey with a letter from Afonso requesting the aging abbot send monks to take charge of a present to which Bernard replied, “May you in perpetuity receive infallible signs from heaven for the use of your kingdom,” and thanking him for the gift of land for a new monastery.¹⁵ He immediately dispatched five monks from Clairvaux to Portugal armed with lengths of rope marking the measurements of various rooms, so they could reproduce on the virgin parcel of land an accurate outline of said abbey. Located at the confluence of two rivers, the land was thickly wooded and impenetrable and horrible. Just the way the Cistercians liked it. But it would herald one of Europe’s most magnificent Cistercian monasteries, the elegance of its architecture surpassing even that of the Order’s mother abbey at Fontenay.¹⁶

Named after Al Cobaxa, the Arabic name describing the shape of the surrounding hills, the monastery of Alcobaça would be Afonso’s greatest gift of affection to his uncle, not to mention the late Count Dom Henrique, because in choosing the site beside the old hermitage of Saint Julian, Afonso honored the monk who once lived there and accompanied his father on his first voyage to Jerusalem.

Alcobaça was founded on February 2, the pagan and Celtic feast day of Imbolc (the Christianized Candlemas), symbolizing light emerging from the dark of midwinter, when fertility is once more restored to the land. One of the first people to join the monastery was Afonso’s brother, Dom Pedro.¹⁷

The architecture of the building mirrors the Cistercian Rule. It is stone stripped, shaped, and arranged to the bare essentials of balance, rhythm, light, and shade, creating an environment where God is sought and the ego denied. This small insistence was sufficient to restore stability to the life of a mortal individual. Bernard was not keen on opulent churches and championed the importance of focusing on divine things without distraction, as he once reminded the lavish Benedictines, “I say naught of the vast height of your churches, their immoderate length, their superfluous width, the costly polishings, the curious carvings and paintings which attract the worshipper’s gaze and hinder his attention to God.”¹⁸

Monastery of Alcobaça.

Like the association between the Knights Templar and the founding of Portugal, the relationship between Portugal and the Cistercians runs even deeper, occurring as it does with the arrival of Count Dom Henrique, as one Cistercian chronicler clearly states:

The beginning of the reign of Portugal and the Cistercian Order occurred at the same time. . . . [To the Cistercian Order] the reign of Portugal is greatly obligated because, besides being gifted with the holiness of its monks, as recorded in its beginning years . . . [the Order] reached out to it with spiritual and material assistance, such as the conquests of Santarém, Lisbon . . . and other successes, for which assistance was provided by the intervention of Bernard and his contacts: this is proof of the material assistance . . . [Bernard] placed within reach of Afonso Henriques in the instigation of his reign, for which the king placed his reign under the [Rules] of Clairvaux.¹⁹

Thus, the Cistercian Order and the Portuguese shire were temporally and spiritually intertwined, born as they were simultaneously, as Bernard de Clairvaux himself declared. “And so we have here presented a mystery, for heaven ordered that the reign of Portugal and our Cistercian Order should be born at the same time. In 1098 Robert [de Molesme, one of the founders] instituted the sacred reformation of Cister, and in the same year . . . Count D. Henrique was given the state of Portugale as a dowry.”²⁰ The connection becomes even clearer on account of the family relationship between Bernard de Clairvaux and Dom Henrique.²¹

That the relationship proved advantageous in the development of the Cistercian ideal is an understatement. The Order made its greatest impression in Portugal by raising the largest concentration of monasteries anywhere in Europe.²² Within a few years of settling at Alcobaça, the monks were already trading a surplus with Lisbon. In half a decade their extensive knowledge of plant varieties and agronomy made a formerly destitute region bloom. They organized mining, the smelting of iron, planted extensive orchards, organized boat building and fisheries and the drying and salting of cod (creating that most national of Portuguese dishes, bacalhau). Their recipes for preserves and cured hams and sausages would not only become staples of the Portuguese diet, they also would survive into the twenty-first century, along with their hand-blown Atlantis crystal, still to this day a product of international repute.

Cistercian monks.

Panel in Alcobaça showing monks arriving from Clairvaux, marking the site with rope, in the shape of the constellation of Virgo, the divine virgin.

The foundation of the Cistercians’ success was firmly supported on a humane platform that must have seemed totally alien in medieval Europe. They outlawed slavery, paid fair wages to laborers and toiled beside them in the fields, opened free schools, fed the hungry, sheltered the dispossessed, educated the young, and cared for the elderly. They also honored the divine feminine and granted equality to women. The Muslim theologian and mystic Al Ghazahli compares the doctrine of the Cistercians to that of Islam’s own esoteric brotherhood, the Sufi: “Their science has for its object the uprooting from the soul of all passions, the extirpation from it of vicious desires and evil qualities, so that the heart may be detached from all that is not God, and give itself for its only occupation, meditation on the Divine Being.”²³

But the story of how the Cistercians and the Knights Templar came to be so instrumental in the foundation of Europe’s first independent nation-state is not complete without highlighting the involvement of the third part in this holy trinity—the Ordre de Sion, particularly the figure who was perhaps the most influential in carrying out this great work, a man whose footprint is so large yet paradoxically so little is written of him, possibly because he preferred it that way and probably because his involvement in something as sensitive as nation-building was designed to remain low-key: the mysterious Prior Arnaldo da Rocha.