Chronicon Lusitanum

The entries in the chronicle, ordered by year and dated by the Spanish Era, get increasingly longer and the majority of the text deals with the reign of Afonso.

As his father the lord Count Henry died while this child [Afonso Henriques] was only two or three years of age, certain undignified foreigners [led by Fernando Pérez de Traba] came to the kingdom of Portugal, with the consent of his mother Queen Dona Teresa, who desired to take the place of her husband and her son in the affairs of the realm.

Since such a dishonorable injury he [Afonso] could never bear (being already grown up and well-formed), he invited his friends and the more noble men of Portugal, who much preferred his rule to that of his mother or of the ignoble foreigners who wished to dispossess him, and he met them to battle in the field of São Mamede, which is beside the castle of Guimarães, and they were fought and defeated by him, and they fled from his face, and he captured them.

On 30 November during the night of Saint Andrew the Apostle the men of the king of Portugal, Dom Afonso, led by Fernão Gonçalves and other cavaleiros vilões invested the city of Pace, that is, Beja at night, and bravely captured it, and the Christians possessed it in the thirty-fifth year of his [Afonso’s] reign.

The city of Évora was captured and devastated and entered at night by Gerald, called ‘without fear’, and his fellow bandits, and he handed it over to the king Dom Afonso.

Shortly after this king seized Moura and Serpa and Alconchel, and he ordered the castle of Coruche rebuilt in the thirty-ninth year of his reign.