In Spain and Portugal the Reconquista continued at pace. In 1147 a band of English and Frisian crusaders traveling by ship to join the French and Germans on the Second Crusade had stopped during their long journey to conquer Lisbon from its Muslim rulers—a major milestone on the conquest of western Iberia and the creation of a kingdom of Portugal. What was more, the Almoravids who had swept through al-Andalus in the eleventh century were now in a state of protracted collapse; they were deposed in a revolution in Morocco and replaced by an even more puritanical Muslim sect known as the
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