Almeida, Portugal the current name was first used, in the form of the Arabic "al-Ma'ida" ('the plateau'). The village of Almeida was captured from the Moors by the second king of Portugal, Sancho I in the 12th century because of its strategic position on the new country of Portugal's border with Spain. So important to the security of the country, Sancho had the village heavily fortified. The castle was refortified on three further occasions by King Dinis, King Manuel I and by King João VI. The present 12 pointed star fortification was constructed in 1641 to a Vaubanesque plan on which the
A land without a people for a people without a land a people without a land". John Lawson Stoddard, a popular speaker and author of travel books, published an 1897 travelogue in which he exhorts the Jews, "You are a people without a country; there is a country without a people. Be united. Fulfil the dreams of your old poets and patriarchs. Go back, go back to the land of Abraham". According to Adam Garfinkle what Keith, Shaftesbury, Blackstone, Stoddard and the other nineteenth century Christians who used this phrase were saying was that the Holy Land was not the seat of a nation in the way that Japan is the