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Updated: May 11, 2025
The best-known of these places, now called Citania from a name of a native town mentioned by ancient writers occupies the summit of a hill about nine hundred feet above the road and nearly half-way between Guimarães and Braga. The top of this hill is covered with a number of structures, some round from fifteen to twenty feet across, and some square, carefully built of well-cut blocks of granite.
Among the ruins there long lay a huge thin slab of granite, now in the museum of Guimarães, which certainly has the appearance of having been a sacrificial stone. It is a rough pentagon with each side measuring about five feet.
Except the tragedy of Inez de Castro, there is no story in Portuguese history more popular or more often represented in the engravings which adorn a country inn dining-room than that of the surrender of Egas Moniz to Alfonso VII. of Castile and Leon, when his pupil Affonso Henriques, beginning to govern for himself, refused to fulfil the agreement whereby Egas had induced Alfonso to raise the siege of the castle of Guimarães.
Besides this, he had promised if victorious to rebuild the church at Guimarães and to found where the victory had been won a monastery as a thankoffering for his success. This vow was fulfilled two years later in 1387 by building the great convent of Sta.
and São Torquato, near Guimarães, rather larger, having once had transepts of which one survives, with square chancel and square chapels to the east; one of the simplest of all having no ornament beyond the corbel table and the small slitlike windows. South of the Douro, but still built of granite, are a group of three or four small churches at Trancoso.
Then took place the famous submission of Egas Moniz, Affonso's governor, who induced the king to retire from the siege of Guimarães by promising that his pupil would agree to the terms forced on his mother.
Except for the buttresses and the vault the cloister differs in no marked way from those at Guimarães and elsewhere whose continuous pointed arcades show so little advance from the usual romanesque manner of cloister-building. Above is a second story of later date, in which the tiled roof rests on short columns placed rather far apart, and with no regard to the spacing of the bays below.
Yet a good deal has survived, either because it was hidden away as at Guimarães or at Coimbra where it is said to have been only found lately or because, as at Evora, it lay apart from the course of this famous plunderer. The richest treasuries at the present day are those of Nossa Senhora da Oliveira at Guimarães, and of the Sés at Braga, at Coimbra, and at Evora.
The side aisles are but little lower than the central aisle or than the transepts, and are all crowned with battlements very like those on the castle of Guimarães. The buttresses are only shallow strips, which in the transepts are united by round arches, but in the aisles end among the battlements in a larger merlon. The west front is the most striking and original part of the whole church.
Although Braga was the ecclesiastical capital of their fief, Count Henry and his wife lived usually at Guimarães, a small town some fifteen miles to the south. Towards the beginning of the tenth century there died D. Hermengildo Gonçalves Mendes, count of Tuy and Porto, who by his will left Vimaranes, as it was then called, to his widow, Mumadona.
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