When he had collected his army in May, 1139, he determined to do more than make one of the usual expeditions into the ruined and devastated districts of the Belatha, and to force his way to the south of the Tagus, and thus drive the war into the heart of the enemy’s country. He knew that the opposition would not be so serious as it would have been in previous years, because Teshfīn, the last Almoravide caliph, who had succeeded his father in 1137, had in 1138 taken the flower of the Mohammedan chivalry of Spain across the straits to Africa to make a last effort to subdue the growing power of the Almohades or followers of the Mahdi. He knew also that his cousin Alfonso was making his second incursion into the heart of Andalusia, and he therefore boldly crossed the Tagus and entered the province of Al-kasr Ibn Abi Danes, as the western portion of the old Moslem emirate of the Gharb was called. The emīr, Ismar or Omar, tried to collect an army, but Affonso advanced with rapidity and utterly defeated him, with four of his “wālis,” at Orik or Ourique eight leagues south of Beja, on July 25, 1139. This is the famous victory of Ourique, which, until modern investigators examined the facts, has been considered to have laid the foundations of the independence of Portugal. Chroniclers, two centuries after the battle solemnly asserted that five kings were defeated on this occasion, that two hundred thousand Mohammedans were slain, and that after the victory the Portuguese soldiers raised Affonso on their shields and hailed him as king. This story is absolutely without authority from contemporary chronicles, and is quite as much a fiction as the Cortes of Lamego, which has been invented as sitting in 1143 and passing the constitutional laws, on which Vertot and other writers have expended so much eloquence. One ought, perhaps, to speak with more reverence of the legend which tells how Christ crucified appeared to Affonso in his tent, on the evening before the battle, and promised him the victory, even though there is no contemporary tradition referring to it; because it would have been quite in keeping with the mysticism of the Middle Ages for Affonso to assert that he had seen such a vision in order to encourage his soldiers. This tradition was certainly current a century after the battle, and the kings of Portugal to this day bear the five wounds of Christ in a chief upon their coat of arms in memory of it.[3] These legends all deserve record, if only to show how great was the fame of the victory of Affonso, rather from his courage in penetrating so far into the enemy’s country than from his success in the battle itself. That success was a victory over five provincial wālis in a country which hated the Almoravides, at a time when the flower of the Moslem chivalry was fighting in Africa, and it was not by such victories, but by hard struggles with his Christian cousin that Affonso achieved the independence of his country.