The History of the Siege of Lisbon

There was rejoicing in the five encampments, and even on the Monte da Graça all fears were dispelled when, the troops having gathered on parade, the heralds arrived to announce that in his bounty the king had decided that all the soldiers, no matter their rank or seniority, would have the same right to plunder the city, in keeping with the customs of the day and excepting the booty reserved for the crown and that promised to the crusaders. There was so much cheering and at such length, that the Moors genuinely feared that the moment had come for the final assault, although there had been no earlier preparations to warn them. No such assault, in fact, took place, but from the walls above they could see that the encampments were in a ferment of activity, the men like ants excited at the sudden discovery of a table laden with food at the side of a road where hitherto they had carried off nothing except dry awns of wheat and the odd crumb. Within an hour the master-carpenters had reached an agreement, within two hours the joiners were hard at work on the rot that had slowly been corroding the towers under construction, a figurative expression, since hylotrupes and anobia are not endowed with cutting and perforating instruments capable of coping with green wood and devouring it, and within three hours someone had the idea that by digging a deep tunnel under the wall and then filling it up with wood and setting it alight, the heat of this furnace would expand the stones and cause the joints to crumble, whereby, with a little assistance from God as well, the entire wall would come tumbling down before you could say amen. Here the sceptics will murmur and those who are always denigrating human nature that these men, formerly insensitive to any love for the fatherland and indifferent to the future of generations to come, out of their love for filthy lucre were now revealing themselves, not only by their hard physical labour, but also in the invisible and superior operations of soul and mind, but it has to be said that they are much deceived, because what moved wills and generated happiness there stemmed infinitely more from the spiritual satisfaction of forging equal justice for everyone as an integral and unassailable right.