ration: FIG. 21.

EVORA.

SE. FROM CLOISTERS.

SHEWING CENTRAL LANTERN.]

The large cloister to the south must once have been one of the best in
the country. Here the main arches alone survive, having lost whatever
subsidiary arches or tracery they may once have contained, but higher up
under the corbel table are large open circles, not as everywhere else
enclosed under the large arch, but quite independent of it. Many of
these circles are still filled with thin slabs of granite all pierced
with most beautiful patterns, some quite Gothic, but the majority almost
Moorish in design, not unlike the slabs in the circles over the cloister
arcades at Alcobaca, but though this is probably only a coincidence,
still more like those at Tarragona in Cataluna. (Fig. 22.)

[Sidenote: Templar Church, Thomar.]

Like the cathedral at Evora, some of the arches in the Templar Church at
Thomar are pointed, yet like it again, it is entirely romanesque both in
construction and in detail.

The Knights Templars were already established in Portugal in 1126. With
their headquarters at Soure, a little to the south of Coimbra, they had
been foremost in helping Affonso Henriques in his attacks on the Moors,
and when Santerem was taken in 1147 they were given the ecclesiastical
superiority of the town. This led to a quarrel with Dom Gilberto, the
English bishop of Lisbon, which was settled in 1150, when Dom Gualdim
Paes, the most famous member the order ever produced in Portugal, was
chosen to be Grand Master. He at once gave up all Santarem to the
bishop, except the church of Sao Thiago, and received instead the
territory of Ceras some forty or fifty miles to the north-east. There on
the banks of the river Nabao, on a site famous for the martyrdom under
Roman rule of Sant' Iria or Irene, Dom Gualdim built a church, and began
a castle which was soon abandoned for a far stronger position on a steep
hill some few hundred yards to the west across the river. This second
castle, begun in 1160, still survives in part but in a very ruinous
condition; the walls and the keep alike have lost their battlements and
their original openings, though a little further west, and once forming
part of the fortified enclosure, the church, begun in 1162, still
remains as a high tower-like bastion crowned with battlements. Dom
Gualdim had the laudable habit of carving inscriptions telling of any
striking event, so that we may still read, not only how the castle w