Atlantis and the Silver City (8 page)

“I
n the morning the Pagans were led away from the gates of the city in a more disciplined manner; and thereupon, we first saw their enfeebled condition, for instance they were extremely thin and barely walking. Many were crawling, some were held upright by our men, others were lying in the streets either dead or half alive.”

This quote is from the hand of an anonymous Crusader from Bremen, Germany, who, together with his own countrymen and others from Britain and all over northern Europe, helped the Portuguese king lay siege to the occupying Moors in the Algarve city of Silves. These Crusaders were on their way to reclaim Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Moors in
A.D.
1189. The fascinating account furnished by the crusader from Bremen is published in a book written by Jonathan Wilson titled
The Siege and Conquest of Silves in 1189
.
¹⁷

While investigating the area’s history, this was the first book I turned to in the hope of finding anything that hinted of an earlier civilization. My intention was to explore chronologically back in time as far as possible, emulating archaeologists who have to dig ever deeper in search of remains.

Muslim forces had first arrived in the Algarve, as well as across the border in Spain, in
A
.
D
. 711. They called their kingdom al-Andaluz and
occupied it for more than five hundred years. The grand capital, Córdoba, soon became the largest in Europe. A hundred thousand citizens thronged the city’s streets, alleys, and bazaars, taking advantage of three hundred public bathhouses and seventy libraries, as well as roads and street lights. Private dwellings had running water and enclosed sewers, while cities like London and Paris were mainly impoverished settlements, consisting mostly of thatched wooden houses, with open sewers.

By
A
.
D
. 1110, another Muslim dynasty, the Almovarids, had invaded and taken over al-Andaluz. From North Africa, this was a fundamentalist federation of Berber tribes from the Sahara. It was eventually overthrown by yet another group of Berbers, the Almohads, mainly from the high Atlas Mountains. By this time, Muslim Portugal was ruled from Seville, in Spain. The capital of the western region, Algarve—called Al Garb by the Moors—was Silves. By all accounts, it was a fine city of tinkling water gardens, well-stocked bazaars, and attractive buildings, with a well-mannered and eloquent populace, many of whom were particularly fond of writing poetry.

The Crusaders brought this utopia to a savage end. Paradise became purgatory. They may have undertaken the Crusade in God’s name, but for the most part they were a bloodthirsty, unprincipled lot with a passion for plunder. Many of them had joined because they had been told that they would be absolved of their taxes back home and they could strike it rich in the Holy Land.

Portugal’s geographical position inevitably meant that passing Crusaders from the north put into the country’s ports for provisions or when seeking shelter from Atlantic storms. In 1189 the fleet, including our man from Bremen, docked in Lisbon. The king of Portugal, Dom Sancho I, seized the moment and convinced them that one set of Muslims was just as bad as another and persuaded them to help him oust the Moors from Silves and help unify Portugal. No doubt a promised share of the loot appealed to their lofty Christian principles.

Silves’ mighty fortress was practically impregnable, and the Portuguese, along with some of the Crusaders, had to be persuaded several times to persevere rather than abort during the six-week siege. They tried everything: ladders to scale the walls, siege catapults lobbing lethal stones inside,
fiery missiles, and tunnels under the walls to destabilize them. The Moors reacted by pouring boiling or flaming oil on the attackers, firing the missiles back, and breaking through from inside the fortress into the Crusaders’ tunnels to repel them.

A friend who owns a house overlooking the river a short way downstream from Silves recently unearthed a cache of roughly formed stone missiles, ready for the siege catapults but, in the event, obviously not needed.

The end came when the Christians succeeded in cutting off the town’s water supply. The Muslim defenders were dying from thirst and finally offered to surrender. The quote at the beginning of this chapter is the anonymous Crusader’s description of their pitiful state when they were finally allowed to leave.

The Moors did not take the loss of what they regarded as an earthly paradise lightly, and the following year a fleet arrived from Seville to reclaim the city. The famous English monarch Richard the Lionheart was passing through on his crusade to the Holy Land at the same time and dispatched a contingent of men who helped to send the Moors scuttling back to Spain.

During the subsequent summer, however, while Richard was otherwise occupied in Palestine, the Moors returned and, after a month, the castle capitulated. It remained in their hands until, some forty years later, the Portuguese were strong enough to retake it—along with the rest of the Algarve’s Muslim strongholds—on their own.

So goes the most recent saga of Silves. No one has invaded the Algarve since—apart, that is, from thousands of north Europeans—English and Irish in particular—who over the last thirty years have bought homes there, from which to enjoy the peaceful countryside as well as three hundred annual days of azure skies.

Not much meat, then, to support my developing theory that an ancient civilization once existed in the Algarve, except for the revelation that the Moors had a port and a shipyard nine kilometers upriver at Silves. This confirms other reports that the rivers of the region were navigable far deeper into the hinterland than they are today, and were used to transport goods and people.

The Moors had originally come to power in the Algarve at the expense of the Visigoths and local tribes. In truth, the Visigoths do not seem to
have ever made the same headway in the south of Portugal as they did in the rest of the country and across the border in Spain.

I obviously needed to dig deeper; perhaps the Roman era would prove more fruitful. The Romans first invaded with the intention of blocking Carthaginian reinforcements in southern Iberia from reaching and helping their famous general, Hannibal, who was fighting the Romans on the Italian peninsula. It was, however, some time later, early in the second century
B.C.
, that the Romans, having realized that the area had vast precious metal resources, set about conquering it and quelling all resistance from disparate tribal groups in Iberia.
¹⁸
The Lusitanians, who hailed from central Portugal, put up the stiffest resistance. One leader, who appeared out of the ranks when his tribe was encircled by Roman legionaries and led his fellow tribesmen out of the trap, became the biggest thorn in the side of the invaders—and one of Portugal’s greatest heroes. Viriato to the Portuguese and Viriathus to the Romans, he took over leadership of the various tribal groups and embarked on a guerrilla campaign of harassment. He later defeated one Roman general after another in pitched battles, to the extent that he was the most successful general ever to fight against them.
¹⁹
Rome found that it had a serious crisis on its hands—morale was affected, and legion recruitment rates dropped.

Eventually, the Romans typically reverted to treachery and bribed three of the hero’s peace emissaries to murder him in his sleep—then refused to cough up the promised reward with the weasel words “Rome doesn’t reward traitors.”

The Lusitanians turned against the local tribe in the Algarve (variously referred to as the Conii, Konii, or Cynetes), who had decided it was preferable to bend the knee to the Romans and pay their taxes rather than face slavery or oblivion. The Lusitanians regarded them as turncoats and swept down from central Portugal when the Romans were occupied elsewhere, gave them a fearful beating, and reportedly razed the Conii royal capital, Conistorgis, to the ground. The site of this city has never been found but, according to a Roman map, it was not far to the north of Faro, the current capital of the Algarve. We will return to it in a later chapter. Intriguingly, they also had a city where modern-day Silves stands; its name was Cilbes.

Julius Caesar, arguably the most famous Roman ever, set up his western Iberian base, Pax Julia, near Beja in Portugal’s Alentejo province, just north
of the Algarve. There was a huge gold and copper mine close by at São Domingos, and Caesar used the wealth of the area to finance the maintenance of his legion and his initial grab for power as a consul in Rome. If it had not been for this, he would merely be a passing mention on the pages of history today rather than bestriding them.
²⁰
Unfortunately, apart from a few records about the Conii and the mines, I could find no evidence that the Romans inherited or discovered anything from any great earlier civilization.

Few readers are likely to have heard of the Conii, but evidence is accruing that this was a very old race indeed, one that had occupied the area since way back in the mists of time. It would appear that they had developed a script but, sadly, it was out of general use long before 1000
B.C.
It seems to have only been kept alive for the next few hundred years by priests to somewhat crudely incise memorials to the dead on funerary stones. That broken slab with letters on it, in the museum mentioned in Chapter One, is an example. This script does hint at an earlier, more sophisticated civilization having originally developed it, but historians and academics do not generally agree. They have been quick to pigeonhole it under the name of the “Southwest Script” and assert that it could only have developed from Phoenician around 900
B.C.
, then died out a few centuries later. I quickly discovered that this was nonsense. It stemmed, I suppose, from a desire to quickly shoehorn it into existing historical dogma, as it possessed the potential to warrant a complete reappraisal of the origins of our Western alphabet. Chapter Eighteen will deal with this mysterious script and will agree with the opinions of a few other dedicated researchers that it is extraordinarily ancient and that Phoenician and Greek developed from it.

Some historians believe that during the first millennium
B.C.
, the Conii were infused with a migration of Celtic people. The academically approved view is that they came from north of the Pyrenees. Principally pastoral people, these Celts were also skilled in working with metals. Exactly who the Celts were, however, is nowadays exciting conflicting theories. It seems there were two completely different groups, both called Celts by historians. Hitherto, the classic textbook claim has been that they originated in the Hallstatt region of Austria and migrated from there. Yet toward the end of the last century, research into blood groups generated a whimsical headline in a highbrow English national newspaper …“Taffy Gaddafi.” “Taffy” is,
of course, the nickname given by English people to the Welsh, indisputably a proud Celtic nation. The research proved that their principal blood group was of Middle Eastern origin. Unlikely as that may seem, ancient tradition in south Wales and England claims that the Welsh ancestors were Trojans (of wooden horse fame). As they fled from persecution in Troy under their leader, Brutus, southern Portugal would have been on their route as their boats hugged the coast all the way up to Brittany in France and, eventually, to Britain. Anyone interested in exploring their story further should read the excellent book
The Holy Kingdom
by Adrian Gilbert, Alan Wilson, and Baram Blackett.
²¹
As my research developed, it became apparent that the Conii and the Celts may well have been one and the same—originating in southwest Iberia and migrating in several directions from there. See Chapter Seventeen and the latest research from the University of Wales.

The so-called Celts who it is thought migrated down from Hallstatt principally occupied the central area of Portugal and Spain, around the Guadiana River but well north of the Algarve.

Apart from the alphabet, other research threw up yet more startling information. I referred earlier to the mining wealth exploited by the Romans; but they were not the first to do so. It may surprise readers to learn that southern Iberia was the largest producer of metals in the Western world during at least the last three millennia
B.C.
Much copper, as well as silver and gold, was mined in southern Portugal, but the real El Dorado was over the current border in the Spanish Sierra Morena mountain range north of Huelva, a large Spanish port. There, the Rio Tinto mines alone produced slag heaps comprising many millions of tons.
²²
Even the Romans were taken aback by the obscene wealth that awaited them there.

Accepted history has it that this metal trade had first been exploited by the Semitic Phoenicians from the eastern Mediterranean, who exchanged it for goods with the locals, then traded it back into the Mediterranean. They were followed by the Carthaginians, the last invaders before the Romans. So important was this trade to them that they imposed an embargo on any ship trying to muscle in by sailing out of the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar. They enforced this restriction by permanently stationing forty war galleys in the straits. Any passing sea traffic from another nation was unceremoniously rammed and sunk, no questions asked.

The Carthaginians were more ambitious, ruthless, and cruel. They were the heirs to the Phoenicians, formed largely from the remnants of their broken and defeated state. Their ambitions went far beyond mere trade. They wanted to control the entire area and, with it, the metal production. They swept through the territory from Cádiz to Cape St. Vincent, cruelly wasting any cities that opposed them. Surviving nobility fled to the hills, while the hoi polloi were enslaved to work the mines.
²³