These crusaders behaved in a wanton manner, looting Muslims and Mozarabs indiscriminately, debauching virgins and even cutting the throat of the elderly Mozarab bishop. Afterwards, an epidemic of the plague killed thousands among the Mozarabic and the Muslim populations. Afonso I officially took possession of the city on 1 November, when the Great Mosque in the Moorish Aljama was dedicated to St. Mary in a religious ceremony converting it to a Cathedral. He appointed Gilberto of Hastings, an English crusader, the first Catholic bishop of the city, and granted lands and titles to many of the most prominent crusaders in the region. After conquering the city, Afonso I received information that the relics of Saint Vincent of Saragossa were buried in the Algarve. He made his way southward to reclaim the martyr's remains. but when he arrived at the village it had been totally destroyed and there was no sign of the burial site. A flock of crows was seen flying over the place when the remains were finally found in 1176, and according to legend, two crows accompanied the boat that was carrying them all the way to Lisbon. In commemoration of this story, the crow was chosen to adorn the city's coat of arms as a symbol of its faithful guardians; but the fearless birds are no longer found in the area. Three years later, in 1150, Afonso I built a cathedral on the site of the Great Mosque, now the Sé. The original Christian edifice built on the site had been converted into a mosque by the Moors, but when Afonso took the city, the building was already decrepit. He had the structure rebuilt and enlarged under the name of the first cathedral of Lisbon, "Santa María", and all the privileges of Mérida, the ancient ecclesiastical capital of the former Roman province of Lusitania, passed to the new diocese. Afonso I granted Lisbon a "Foral" in 1179, and tried to restore the city's commercial connections by inaugurating a major new fair or market. Consequently, the Portuguese merchants, Christian and Jewish, not only reestablished some of the old trade links of al-Us̲h̲būna with Seville and Cádiz, and in the Mediterranean with Constantinople, but also opened up new trade routes to the ports of northern Europe that the Muslims rarely visited because of religious differences. Lisbon became a conduit for maritime trade between the North Sea and the Mediterranean, and thanks to advances in navigation, the volume of ocean shipping increased.