Published in New Approaches in the Research on the Crown of Aragon

Keywords: City of Brass, Conquest, Giraldo sem Pavor, Literary topos, Reconquest, Storming the walls, Transtextuality.

This article brings together and compares different historical literary texts belonging to the chronicle traditions of both Arabic and Islamic writers and to Latin and Christian chroniclers on the Iberian Peninsula. All of them narrate the surprise conquest of a city using the method of storming and climbing its walls. The continuance of that literary topos through time and space appears to indicate that it was carried from the Arab world to the Latin peninsular Romance across the border between the Almohad empire and the emerging Portuguese empire in the 13th Century. That’s why it appears in Portuguese and Castilian Chronicles, but not in those from Catalonia.