For thirty years the castle on the hill above the Nabão had never been tested. It had been built, garrisoned and expanded on the assumption that one day an army would come to take it back. In July 1190, one finally did — and for six days, the survival of the Templars’ most important stronghold in Portugal hung on how well Gualdim Pais had built.
A kingdom pushed to the Tagus
By the late 1180s, the frontier that Gualdim Pais had spent his life fortifying was under real pressure. In September 1189, King Sancho I captured the major southern city of Silves with help from crusader fleets passing through on their way to the Holy Land — a serious blow to Almohad power in Iberia. The Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur, whose own father had died fighting in Portugal, took the loss personally. He spent months preparing a retaliation, and in the spring of 1190 he crossed from North Africa to lead it himself.
The campaign that followed moved fast and hit hard. Almohad forces swept up the Atlantic coast, taking Alcácer do Sal, Palmela and Almada in quick succession. They crossed the Tagus, laid siege to Santarém, and destroyed Torres Novas and Abrantes as they pushed north. By midsummer, the army that had rolled through half of southern Portugal was closing in on Tomar — the fortified headquarters Pais had built specifically to withstand exactly this kind of assault. As we covered in part 1, the castle’s angled walls and sloped stone base weren’t decorative. They were about to be tested for the first time.
July 13, 1190: the army at the gates
On 13 July, an Almohad force — Portuguese chroniclers put the number at around nine hundred warriors — surrounded the castle of Tomar, with al-Mansur commanding in person. Inside the walls, the defenders were vastly outnumbered: a small garrison led by Gualdim Pais himself, by then in his seventies and decades removed from the campaigns in the Holy Land that had shaped him as a young knight. He hadn’t stepped back from the front line, even at that age. He commanded the defence directly.
Six days inside the walls
What followed was six days of repeated assault. The Almohads tried the walls again and again, and at one point broke through the Almedina gate on the fortress’s southern flank, fighting their way into the outer enclosure in combat so violent that the gate never went back to its old name. Pais answered with a sally of some 300 knights, riding out to meet the attackers directly rather than waiting behind the walls. According to tradition, a smaller group of Templars slipped out of the castle entirely through a hidden underground passage, striking at the Almohad camp from behind while the main assault was still under way at the gate.
Neither side could land a decisive blow. The walls held. The garrison held. And with every failed assault, the campaign al-Mansur had built around speed and momentum started running out of both.
The gate that remembers
The Almedina gate — the point where the fighting was fiercest and the losses heaviest — became known afterwards as the Porta do Sangue, the Blood Gate. The name has stuck for over eight hundred years, and the gate itself still stands within Tomar’s castle walls today, one of the few places in the city where you can put your hand on the exact stone that was fought over in July 1190.
Why the Almohads withdrew
Tomar wasn’t al-Mansur’s only target that summer — his forces were simultaneously pressing Santarém, and had recently taken Silves back from Portuguese control further south. Stretched across three fronts, with reinforcements reaching Sancho I from crusader ships that had put in at Lisbon, the caliph offered peace terms centred on Portugal giving up Silves. Sancho refused and marched to relieve Santarém instead. Facing stiffer resistance than the campaign’s early momentum had promised, al-Mansur ordered a general withdrawal. His army never took Tomar’s castle — the most his troops managed was pillaging the unwalled outskirts below the hill before pulling back.
It wasn’t a clean, final victory for Portugal. The following year, 1191, al-Mansur returned south and recaptured Silves, reversing some of what Sancho had won. But Tomar itself never fell — not in 1190, and not afterwards.
What the siege proved
Every decision Pais had made thirty years earlier — the hilltop site, the angled walls, the alambor at their base, the decision to build a headquarters rather than just another border fort — stopped being theory on 13 July 1190 and became a tested fact. The castle designed to survive a siege survived one, against a force that had just rolled through half the southern frontier without slowing down. From that summer on, Tomar’s reputation as the most secure Templar position in Portugal wasn’t a claim the Order made about itself. It was something an Almohad caliph had tried, and failed, to disprove.
Visiting the battlefield today
The Porta do Sangue still stands inside the castle walls, and the ramparts Pais built and the garrison defended are part of the same route visitors walk today through the Convento de Cristo complex. For opening hours, ticket prices and how to plan your visit, see our complete visiting guide to the Convento de Cristo.
Continue the series:
- The Founding of Tomar
- Inside the Charola: Tomar’s Round Templar Church, Explained
- The Siege of Tomar (1190): The Six Days That Saved the Town (this article)
- From Templars to the Order of Christ
- Henry the Navigator in Tomar
- King Manuel I and the Manueline Rebirth
- The Jewish Community of Tomar
- Tomar After the Templars: Becoming a UNESCO Site
