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1147. SINTRA. A FUNNY THING HAPPENS ON THE WAY TO THE CASTLE . . .

While the Crusaders were preparing to ransack the city of Lisbon, Afonso Henriques quietly marched his knights into the village of Sintra, fourteen miles to the west, taking back what had once marked the southernmost limit of his late father’s land until the Moors captured it once more.

Afonso and his knights took the meandering path up the vertiginous hill toward the castle where the Moors were camped. Using the gigantic boulders and lush vegetation as cover, they overran the fortification with absolutely no resistance; in fact, its inhabitants were nowhere to be seen. Even the mosque was stripped of relics.

Sintra was of immense strategic importance, and yet the Arabs left without a fight. How could an entire garrison just vaporize?

Stories say they escaped via underground tunnels and galleries leading from the watchtower, some emerging by the sea to the west, others three miles east, where Moorish men were witnessed emerging from within the mountain: “Heading to the first tower was a granary that was five feet in diameter, through which it is said there was a hidden road that went to Rio Mouro [River of the Moors], and it is called that for on the right side was seen a doorway through which they say was the actual entry.”¹

Even Moorish chroniclers stated categorically that Xentra (as the Arabs called it) is a hollow mountain, with one of its hilltops connected by a honeycomb of underground galleries to another hill thirty-five miles away, so much so that even the sea is able to penetrate these inland caverns.² Although a good number of cavities are of natural volcanic origin, the rest were purposefully carved out with both defensive and ceremonial purposes in mind. According to a caretaker of the Moorish castle, the hill is one big subterranean city with miles of underground tunnels, one linking the castle with a Capuchin monastery three miles away.³ When the Templars arrived—or returned—they made good use of such features and added a few of their own. At Penha Verde, on the northern slope of Sintra, they built a round church upon a dilapidated lunar temple from circa 5000 BC and dedicated it to Mary of Sion. Beneath the foundations were discovered various underground galleries once used for the practice of chthonic mysteries. These galleries connected to other passageways extending for two miles before emerging by a river.⁴ Similar chambers exist nearby at the monastery of Penha Longa, “a cave that was once closed by crystallization, which was discovered by a monk in the Convent. . . . Descent into this cave is by a door (which once served to protect it) which is seven or eight feet high . . . there is a gap through which the sun, its rays penetrating with a wonderful effect, makes this a house of shining crystal.”⁵

This bewitching sacredness of Sintra had a particular effect on one of the king of Portugal’s knights, Pêro Pais, who upon arrival was so overwhelmed that he retired from secular soldiery and moved to one of its peaks to continue life as a penitent. There he founded a chapel dedicated to Saturn (the god representing the rational evaluation of life, particularly negative forces) to better gain mastery of himself.^*426

Coincidentally, Saturn’s mythological father, Jupiter, built a Golden Age, not unlike what the Templars and the Cistercians were attempting to fashion in Portugal.

Inside one of Sintra’s narrow passageways carved out of solid granite bedrock.

Five years later (in 1152) Afonso issued a charter in which the village of Sintra and thirteen of its properties are donated,⁷ with exceptional privileges, “to Gualdino Paes, Templar Master General of Portugal, we give you the aforesaid houses, with their estates cultivated and uncultivated, so that you may have and possess all the days of your life.”⁸ A later document is more explicit about the details of the property.⁹ It identifies the houses as those 618defining the village square and its public right of way, and states that in addition to “a few good houses in the village” the Templars were awarded “two vineyards, a water mill, several homesteads on the coast . . . and an orchard in almosquer,” that is to say, in Arabic, a suburb, which was then a mere ten minutes walk from the center of the village.¹⁰

The charter also provides for the town’s residents, putting everyone on equal footing, “both the highest class as the inferior,” be they Christian, Jew, or Moor, and the responsibility for upholding this equitable justice was entrusted to the Templars alone.

At face value such a donation from the king to the Templars seems typical enough, and yet unconventional insofar as it is awarded to Gualdino while he is away in the Holy Land experiencing the sacred places, and the manner in which he is addressed as “Templar Master,” a full five years before he is officially awarded the title, appears as though the knight’s promotion upon his expected return was a foregone conclusion.

Meanwhile, the “orchard in almosquer” provides a big clue in understanding the nature of this donation. A surviving document states that more than two hundred years later, in 1371, the Templars still owned rights to this “forest of Almosquer,”¹¹ which by then comprised a wood called the Forest of Angels, and below it, a truly bewitching place called the Estate of the Tower. It is this piece of property that reveals much about the spiritual/esoteric motives the core brotherhood was pursuing in Portugal.