The History of the Siege of Lisbon

With this renewed morale amongst the Christians that even from a distance was much in evidence, the Moors began to feel disheartened, and if in the majority of cases it was in the necessary struggle itself against nascent weakness that they sought new strength, there were some who succumbed to fears real and imagined and who tried to save their body by seeking with a hasty Christian baptism the condemnation of their Islamic soul. At dead of night and using improvised ropes, they descended from the walls and, concealed amidst the surrounding ruins and amongst the bushes, they awaited dawn in order to come out by daylight. With raised arms, and the rope they had used to descend wound round their neck as a sign of surrender and obedience, they walked towards the encampment, shouting all the while, Baptism, baptism, confiding in the saving virtue of a word which hitherto, resolute in their faith, they had found abhorrent. From afar, on seeing those submissive Moors, the Portuguese thought they were coming to negotiate the surrender of the city itself, although they found it strange that the gates had not been opened for them to leave nor the military protocol prescribed on such occasions been observed, and above all, as the presumed emissaries drew closer, it became all too apparent from their filthy and tattered clothes that these were not men of any social standing. But when it finally became clear what they wanted, impossible to describe the fury and demented wrath of the soldiers, suffice it to say that there were enough severed tongues, noses and ears there to fill a butcher's shop, and, as if that were not enough, they chased them back to the walls with blows and insults, some, who knows, hoping in vain for an unlikely pardon from those whom they had betrayed, but it was a sad affair, and all of them ended up there, fatally wounded, stoned and riddled with arrows by their own brethren. After this tragic episode, a heavy silence fell over the city, as if they had to rid themselves of a deeper mourning, perhaps that of an offended religion, perhaps the unbearable remorse of acts of fratricide, and that was the moment when, breaking down the last barriers of dignity and circumspection, famine showed itself at its most obscene in the city, for there is less obscenity in the intimate manifestations of the body than in seeing that body expire from starvation under the indifferent and ironic gaze of the gods who, having stopped feuding with each other, and being immortal, distract themselves from eternal boredom by applauding those who win and those who lose, the former because they have killed, the latter because they have died. In reverse order of ages, lives were extinguished like spent oil-lamps, first the babes in arms who could not suck a single drop of milk from their mothers' withered breasts, their insides rotted by the unsuitable nourishment forced down their throat as a last resort, then the older children who needed more food to survive than that the adults took from their mouths, especially the women, for they deprived themselves so that the men might have enough energy left to defend the walls, nevertheless, the elderly were those who resisted best of all, perhaps because of the scant nourishment required by their bodies which had decided for themselves to enter death as light as possible rather than overload the boat that would transport them across the ultimate river. By then the cats and dogs had already disappeared, the rats were pursued into the fetid darkness where they sought refuge, and now that in patios and gardens plants were stripped to their roots, the memory of feasting on a dog or cat was tantamount to dreaming of an era of abundance when people could still afford the luxury of throwing away bones that had barely been stripped of meat. Scraps were salvaged from rubbish dumps either for immediate consumption or to transform by some means or other into food, and the scavenging became so frenetic that the few remaining rats emerging from the darkness of night, found almost nothing to satisfy their indiscriminate voraciousness. Lisbon groaned in its misery, and it was a grotesque and terrible irony that the Moors had to celebrate Ramadan when hunger had made fasting impossible.