If any other further proof that the victory was not all that poets and later historians painted it was needed, it might be found in the fact that in the very next year Ismar or Omar, the emīr who was defeated at Ourique, was able to raise a fresh army with which he took the castle of Leiria by storm. [Illustration: ARCH OF THE WESTERN ENTRANCE TO AN OLD CHAPEL AT LEIRIA.] For many years after the recognition of Affonso’s independence the history of his reign is filled by accounts of the wars against the Moors. But the warfare no longer comprised single expeditions, such as that crowned by the victory of Ourique, but steady persevering conquest of the Belatha. The efforts of the Portuguese were at first directed against cities and castles, and the country districts were ravaged and left to lie waste. The whole of the district between Coimbra and the Tagus was one great battle-ground, and Affonso had all he could do to take and hold the cities, and was obliged to leave the villages in a state of desolation. The population of his original kingdom was not large enough to colonize the new conquests, and Affonso therefore confined his efforts to laying waste the fields and garrisoning the cities he took from the Moors with any soldiers he could manage to take into his pay. It must be noted that the war was not one of extermination; the Mohammedan and Christian soldiers fought fiercely enough, but the Celtic inhabitants of the cities, and the large intermixture of Jews, who dwelt amongst them, passed from the dominion of the one race to that of the other quietly enough. The war was a war of soldiers, and Affonso’s difficulty was to get enough of them to make a successful attempt to maintain his conquests. The nobility of Portugal followed him gladly with their vassals, and the religious orders of knights repaid him by their services for the liberality with which Donna Theresa had received them, but neither of these sources of military strength were so valuable to him as the crusaders of northern Europe. He gained their assistance in two ways. Pope Innocent II. had declared it as praiseworthy to fight the infidels in Spain as in the Holy Land, and many crusaders fulfilled their crusading vows by coming to Portugal and taking service there. But most of the warriors of the cross preferred rather to make their way to Palestine, and as those from England, Flanders, and the north of France went round by sea, and invariably touched at Oporto, Affonso was able to persuade many of them to do a little fighting under his command against the Moors before proceeding to attack the Saracens in the Holy Land. This was what he did in 1143, when, with some French crusaders, he ravaged the district around Lisbon.