The knight who blocked a closing gate with his body

A soldier died wedged in a closing castle gate

The Moors inside São Jorge castle were losing the city. Christian forces under Afonso Henriques had been camped outside since July. By October the walls were failing. As the attackers pushed toward the gate, the defenders tried to slam it shut.

One man would not let them. Martim Moniz was a Portuguese soldier. He threw himself into the gap before the gate could close. He had no weapon that could stop a door. He had only his own body, wedged into the frame.

He died there, crushed in the gateway he refused to give up. But the gate stayed open long enough for the attackers to pour through behind him. Lisbon fell on 25 October 1147. The siege had lasted nearly four months. The Muslim garrison surrendered the city to the new Christian kingdom of Portugal.

The Painel de Azulejos "Conquista de Lisboa" on the wall ten steps from where you stand shows what the tiles say. In Portuguese: "Qvando os movros fechavam a porta do castello precipitadamente, Martim Moniz, portvgvez destemido, atravessov-se n'ella para dar passagem, morrendo gloriosamente". In English: when the Moors were shutting the castle gate in a rush, Martim Moniz, a fearless Portuguese, threw himself into it to force a passage. He died gloriously. The panel was made in the twentieth century. It was made centuries after the event. But it marks the spot where people have chosen to remember him. You stand on this terrace. You can look straight up at the castle walls. The gate once stood there.

A king built a monastery on his own siege camp

Once the gate gave way and the city fell, the new king did not wait to mark the ground. Afonso Henriques had camped outside the walls for four months, watching them fail. When it was over, he founded an Augustinian monastery on the exact spot of his siege camp. It sat on a short rise from the castle you can see from here. It became the Monastery of São Vicente de Fora — Saint Vincent Outside the Walls. The name came from ground that was outside the city until the siege redrew the line. Conquest, then immediately, a building. The pattern starts here.

An earthquake toppled the monastery and erased another church

On the first of November, the ground under Lisbon shook apart. At São Vicente de Fora, the dome and roof came down while people were inside. The building Afonso Henriques had raised on his own campsite folded onto its own congregation. It was rebuilt afterward, the way the city itself was rebuilt, in pieces, over years.

Not everything came back. Down the hill stood the Igreja de São Pedro de Alfama. It was built in 1344 by King Afonso IV. It stood on what is now Rua Norberto de Araújo. The earthquake destroyed it outright. Nobody rebuilt it there. The parish was simply moved to Alcântara, and the ground let go of its church for good. Some of what this hill takes, it gives back in tile and stone. Some of it, it just takes.

A church rose on a fort, fell, then rose again

The Igreja de Santa Luzia (Lisbon) beside you carries all of it stacked in one footprint. It went up during the reign of Afonso Henriques. It stood on ground that had carried a Moorish fortification before the siege took the hill. Christian church built directly over what the conquest replaced. Then 1755 came for this building too. It had to be rebuilt, this time by the architect Mateus Vicente de Oliveira. The walls that stand around you now, at this terrace), are his work, not the twelfth century's.

On those walls, tile panels carry the memory back to where it started. They show the taking of the city, the old royal square at Terreiro do Paço. A fort became a church. An earthquake broke the church. What was rebuilt still tells the story of the conquest that cleared the ground for it.