In 1578 Moroccan troops defeated a Portuguese army on Moroccan soil  Accounts written by Portuguese contemporaries report the defeat but omit mention of the fact that King Sebastian of Portugal was killed in the battle  Such omissions cannot simply be the result of ignorance of Sebastian' s death  Sebastian' s death is not even mentioned in the battle accounts written by two captured Portuguese officers while waiting to be ransomed from a Moroccan prison  These two officers actually shared their cells with the Portuguese soldiers who identified the king' s body to Moroccan officials
The omissions ttherefore had to have had a psychological cause: the Portuguese evidently found Sebastian' s death so humiliating that they could not bring themselves to write about it
offering grounds for doubting the reliability of historical reports that conflict with the argument's main conclusion