great estates on military tenure, who united the influence of their sacred rank to their temporal power. The metropolitan of these Portuguese bishops was the Archbishop of Braga, and it was naturally his policy to support the independence of the county of Portugal, for it was better for him to be the head of the Church of an important county than to be merely one of the archbishops of the kingdom of Gallicia. This was the attitude taken up by the first great Archbishop of Braga, Mauricio Burdino, a Frenchman, and the companion in Palestine of Count Henry, who had promoted him from the bishopric of Coimbra to the metropolitan see. In it he was supported by Hugh, Bishop of Oporto, the most wealthy of his suffragans, and the history of the ensuing century gives many instances of the patriotism of the Portuguese bishops, and of their efforts to promote and maintain the independence of the new state. [Illustration: COIMBRA. (PRESENT STATE.) (_After a Photograph._)] The regency of Donna Theresa was marked by many struggles, the history of which it is now difficult to trace, but throughout them all, the growing unity of Portugal can be perceived. She took a keen interest in the politics of Gallicia, for she hoped to extend her frontiers to the north, and in 1116 she led her forces in person to the assistance of Diogo Gelmires, Bishop of Santiago da Campostella, and the Count de Trava, who had headed a rising, intended to depose Queen Urraca, and to place her young son Alfonso Raimundes at once upon the throne of Gallicia. In this war Theresa took the towns of Tuy and Orense, and the warrior countess met, in the course of it for the first time, the young hidalgo, Don Fernando Peres de Trava, with whom she fell passionately in love, and whose history was for the future to be linked with hers. In 1117 the Moors, under their caliph Ali in person, invaded her dominions, and besieged her in Coimbra, but she succeeded in beating them off, and spent the following years in peace and quiet, in the constant company of her lover, whom she made governor of Coimbra and Oporto, and Count of Trastamare; while to his elder brother, Bermudo Peres de Trava, she gave the hand of her second daughter by Count Henry, the Donna Urraca, and the governorship of Viseu.