Puberty

In October of 1147, 10 years after the first attempt to breach the city walls of Al-Ushbuna, the Christian army of King Alfonso I reinforced by the army of the crusaders of the Second Crusade manages to take the city after four months of siege. Although the terms of surrender agreed by the two parts left a window for the Muslims to keep their lives & possessions, the terms were broken as soon as the Christians entered the city.

The Muslim population was converted to Roman Catholicism by force or expelled by the city while the Great Mosque, now the Sé Cathedral, was transformed in the Catholic Cathedral of the city with the English crusader Gilberto of Hastings appointed by King Alfonso I as the first Catholic Bishop of the Christian city of Lisbona. All the mosques are either destroyed or turned into Christian churches like the Great Mosque that by 1150 was already consecrated as the Cathedral of Santa María (Sé de Lisboa). Arabic lose their place as the official language & gradually their use in every life.

In 1179 the city receives its first Carta de Foral, making its city council free from feudal control & the Kingdom of Portugal its first Papal bull, a Manifestis Probatum that recognised Afonso Henriques or Alfonso I of Portugal as the first sovereign King of Portugal, now an independent crown. One year before the end of his long reign (1184) he would successfully defend Lisbon against the army of  Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the second Almohad caliph of al-Andalus. In 1249 the southernmost region of Algarve is finally reconquered & taken from the hands of the Almohad Moors. In 1255 Lisbon becomes the capital of the Kingdom of Portugal after Coimbra as a result of the city’s growing importance and population growth.