El Cid
The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary
By Nora Berend
Pegasus. 256 pp. RRP £25
Almost every nation has its national epic, usually an account from early in its history of the martial exploits of a warrior-hero. For example, in England, there’s “Beowulf”; in France, “The Song of Roland”; in Germany, “The Nibelungenlied”; in Iran, “The Shahnameh.” In most cases, the hero exhibits superhuman qualities and distinctive virtues that the poem’s listeners or readers are meant to admire and emulate - typically valour, strength, loyalty, self-control and, sometimes, wisdom.
While there is generally a loose historical basis for the characters and events celebrated in all the above works, in the case of the anonymous Spanish national epic, “The Poem of the Cid,” we possess a much higher degree of factual knowledge. Rodrigo (whose full name was Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar) did exist, and we know a fair amount about him and his 11th-century military career. But, as Nora Berend shows in her enthralling study, “El Cid: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary,” this hasn’t prevented an outlaw, freebooter and warlord - as differing scholars describe him - from being romanticised and repurposed as a “parfit gentil knyght,” a candidate for Catholic sainthood, and a poster boy for both right-wing fascism and left-wing multiculturalism.
Berend, a professor of medieval European history at the University of Cambridge, aims to dismantle these various ahistorical distortions and idealizations. Rodrigo, as she calls him throughout, was an easily customisable hero. For the most part, the real Cid - an honorific that derives from the Arabic word “sayyid,” meaning chief - was nothing like the saintly crusader and loyal vassal played by Charlton Heston in the 1961 film “El Cid.” In reality, his was a sword for hire. A shrewd strategist, he studied the political winds and shifted his allegiance accordingly, as he sought to acquire wealth, power and influence by any means possible. Rodrigo and his men might sweep into a town at night, wreak destruction, seize valuables, kidnap notable citizens for ransom and then threaten to return unless the town paid an annual tribute. One scholar calls this modus operandi the medieval equivalent of a protection racket. Such tactics were common in a warrior society, but Rodrigo was particularly good at them, turning his bloodletting and territorial expropriations to political advantage and eventually making himself the ruler of the great city of Valencia, in the heart of what was then Islamic Spain.
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As Berend reminds us, virtually the entire Iberian Peninsula was conquered by North African Berbers, under Arab leadership, in the 8th century, ushering in 250 years of Islamic civilisation, scholarship and religious tolerance. Only a few small northern regions remained wholly Christian. But from these strongholds, various sovereigns gradually began to make incursions into Al-Andalus, as the Muslim territory was called. After Al-Andalus fragmented into rival city-states and mini-kingdoms called taifas, 11th-century Spain became a constantly shifting battlefield as various leaders, both Christian and Muslim, sought to control the whole country.
Rodrigo began his rise to fame by serving King Sancho II of Castile but fell out with his successor, Alfonso VI, who exiled him. For five years, he then worked as the chief military officer for the Muslim city of Zaragoza. Berend views this as less an example of harmonious coexistence between Muslims and Christians than straightforward political expediency. Despite the teachings of priests and imams, what mattered to kings and would-be kings, or to soldiers like Rodrigo, wasn’t religious affiliation but winning battles and taking home plunder. Consequently, armies on each side consisted of both Christians and Muslims. Eventually, Alfonso and Rodrigo would partner with local Islamic leaders to fend off invasion by a common enemy, the more fanatical and jihadistic Almoravids from North Africa.
The actual Rodrigo didn’t die in battle but rather in his own bed, when he was in his 50s. Soon, though, his life and career began to be glorified, even sanctified. In particular, the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, where Rodrigo was said to be buried, actively promoted a hagiographic cult of El Cid, in large part to raise its own status as an ecclesiastical institution. Ballads and poems further promulgated unverifiable events from El Cid’s life. According to one famous legend, the mortally wounded Rodrigo ordered that his corpse should be strapped onto his famous warhorse, Babieca, so that even after death El Cid, holding high his sword La Tizona, could lead his army to one last, glorious victory over the infidels.
During the later Middle Ages, Rodrigo was reconceived as a crusader for what was eventually dubbed the Reconquista, or Reconquest. As Berend writes, more and more “a complicated and shifting pattern of alliances and opportunistic territorial aggrandizement started to be presented in the narrative sources written by Christian ecclesiastics as divinely ordained war, motivated by Christian faith”.
In another of her revisionist chapters, Berend reexamines the women in Rodrigo’s life. While “The Poem of the Cid” presents El Cid’s wife, Doña Jimena, as simply loyal and obedient, there is evidence that she was formidable in her own right, even governing Valencia for three years after her husband’s death. When their two daughters are, according to the poem, abused, stripped and left for dead in a wood by their cowardly, preeningly aristocratic husbands, the immense suffering of the young women is relatively ignored: What matters primarily, shockingly, is the insult to El Cid.
As Berend examines El Cid’s legacy, she lingers, quite rightly, over Pierre Corneille’s great 17th-century play “Le Cid,” in which its hero, now more noble courtier than bloodthirsty soldier, faces a cruel choice: He must either sacrifice his honor or lose the woman he loves. Another exceptionally fascinating chapter focuses on Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968), the highly influential Spanish medievalist who argued for the historicity of various unproven events and promoted El Cid as the supreme model for the Spanish character. Berend respectfully shows that not only did Menéndez Pidal allow his nationalist pride to cloud his scholarly judgment, but also that his idealised vision of El Cid inadvertently became a useful propaganda tool for the fascist regime of Spain’s vicious caudillo, Francisco Franco. As she writes, “The indiscriminate use of terror, coupled with the lofty rhetoric of crusade and Reconquista made The Cid particularly relevant as a heroic precursor to Franco”, who consciously portrayed himself as a 20th-century avatar of Rodrigo destroying so-called modern infidels: the progressive Republicans of the 1930s and afterward.
Being a careful, evidence-based work of scholarship, “El Cid: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary” demonstrates again and again how insidiously political and religious institutions distort history for their own ends. Tangentially, the book also shows that two earlier and highly regarded accounts of Rodrigo’s life - W.S. Merwin’s long introduction to his classic verse translation of “The Poem of the Cid” and Richard Fletcher’s reconstruction of Rodrigo’s career, “The Quest for the Cid” - rely heavily on the often wishful thinking of Menéndez Pidal.
In the end, Berend doesn’t shy away from voicing her own impassioned convictions, forthrightly declaring that “The Cid’s fame is ultimately founded on glorified killing”. “The Poem of the Cid” can still be appreciated as a work of literature, but we really should abandon any heroisation of the man himself. In no manner, Berend writes, is this medieval mercenary “a model, or even someone with whom we should sympathise”. As she ringingly concludes her survey of Cidian mythmaking: “These portrayals simply keep the legend alive. And because, at the root of all the stories, there is the historical epoch of bloody wars, it will not be possible to divorce The Cid from violence. What Spain, and our world, needs is not another blood-spattered hero, but rational consensual government.”
- Washington Post
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and author of the memoir “An Open Book,” the Edgar Award-winning critical study “On Conan Doyle,” and five collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book,” “Classics for Pleasure” and “Browsings.”
