Gerald the Fearless

The city of Évora honours Gerald with a place on its coat-of-arms. The central plaza, the Praça do Giraldo, is also named after him.

Geraldo Geraldes or Gerald the Fearless (died prob. 1173), known in Portuguese as Geraldo Sem Pavor ("without fear"), was a Portuguese warrior and folk hero of the Reconquista whose theatre of operations was in the barren Alentejo and Extremadura regions of the lower Guadiana river. The city of Évora was the most lasting of his conquests and was never retaken. His success and independence have suggested parallels with the Castilian hero El Cid and Gerald has been called "the Cid of Portugal".

Around 1162 Gerald assembled a private army (a mesnada) and rapidly developed tactics that proved remarkably successful in seizing Muslim strongholds, though it was not adapted for siege warfare. He "perfected techniques of nocturnal surprise in wintry or stormy weather, stealthy escalading of walls by picked commando-like troops, cutting down of sentries and opening of town gates to the larger force stationed without." Among the primary sources for Gerald's methods the most important is the contemporary Arabic chronicler Ibn Ṣāḥib al-Ṣalā, whose Al-Mann bil-Imāma was incorporated into the history of al-Maqqarī in the seventeenth century. His opinion of Gerald and his tactics is very low:

The dog [Gerald] marched on rainy and very dark nights, with strong wind and snow, towards the cities and, having prepared his wooden instruments of scaling [walls] very large, so that they would surpass the wall of the city, he would apply those ladders to the side of the tower and catch the sentinel [by surprise] and say to him: "Shout, as is your custom," in order that the people would not hear him. When the scaling of the group had been completed on the highest wall in the city, they shouted in their language with an abominable screech, and they entered the city and fought whom they found and robbed them and captured all who were there in [the city, taking] captive and prisoner all who were there.

Of the places Gerald conquered the primary sources are in general agreement, also as to the order of their seizure, but as to the dating of events there is ambiguity. Ibn Ṣāḥib's version goes:

In the second Jumada al-awwal [15 April–13 May] of the anno Hegirae 560 [1165] the city of Trujillo was surprised, and in Dhu al-Qi'dah the notable village of Évora. Also was the population of Cáceres in Safar 561 [1166], and the castle of Montánchez in Jumada al-thani and the strongholds of Serpa and Juromenha.

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