Sancho I had become the second king…

Sancho I had become the second king of Portugal at the death of Afonso I in 1185.

Coimbra is the center of his kingdom; Sancho has terminated the exhausting and generally pointless wars against his neighbors for control of the Galician borderlands.

Instead, he turns all his attentions to the south, towards the Moorish small kingdoms (called taifas) that still thrive.

With help from Northern European Crusaders in 1189, he takes Silves, an important city of the south, an administrative and commercial town with a population estimated to be around twenty thousand people.

Sancho orders the fortification of the city and builds a castle that is today an important monument of Portuguese heritage.

However, military attention soon has to be turned again to the North, where León and Castile again threaten the Portuguese borders.

Silves will in 1191 again be lost to Almohad control.