The Song of the Cid (2 page)

Also unspoken in the poem is the cardinal political event of the Cid's lifetime: In 1085, Alfonso—for over a decade now the powerful Alfonso VI of the unified kingdoms of León and Castile—took Toledo outright, suddenly making this glorious old Taifa city no longer part of the Islamic orbit but the new center of Castilian life. Here was a city far larger and vastly more cosmopolitan than any of the older capitals to the north, a brilliant new jewel in the crown of this ambitious and increasingly powerful king. But it was not just Toledo's prosperity that made it of incomparable value, and its conquest a palpable turning point. This was no less a place of profound historical and symbolic importance: Toledo had once been the ancient capital of the Visigoths, the Christian rulers overrun by invading Muslim armies centuries before, and the capital of the church in Spain.

Very little of this escaped the Taifa kings. Although for several generations they had bitter relations among themselves, and many had been militarily dependent on Christians, paying them
parias
, the various Muslim monarchs of the peninsula grasped that the outright loss of Toledo was a defeat of a different order. In a rare moment of something resembling unity among themselves, the Taifa kings, led by their most prominent, al-Mutamid of Seville—who may well be the historical figure loosely summoned up in the poem's “lord of Seville” in the second canto—decided to ask for military assistance against Alfonso, who, emboldened by the ease with which he had taken Toledo, clearly had further expansion in mind. For this they turned, with considerable trepidation, to the Islamic state in power just across the Strait of Gibraltar, a recently ensconced Berber regime called the Almoravids. Led by the imperious Yusuf Ibn Tashufin—the basis for the Yusuf of the poem, against whom the Cid fights the memorable battle to defend Valencia—the Almoravids crossed over to Spain in 1086, just one year after Alfonso had taken Toledo, and helped the Andalusians deal Alfonso a decisive defeat at Zallaqa, one of the most famous battles of the age. They headed back home, but before long the Almoravids were back on the Iberian peninsula, this time to wage war on their erstwhile allies, the hapless Taifa kings, whose kingdoms they now coveted, and who ended up appealing to Alfonso himself for help in what turned out to be their ultimately unsuccessful struggle against these invaders.

Heady times, these, for a warrior, and especially for one like Rodrigo Díaz, who was at odds with Alfonso after the murder of his own king, Sancho, and more often than not was very much his own man. The historical Cid was exiled not once but several times, for reasons that, on at least one occasion, clearly had to do with what Alfonso felt was egregious lack of loyalty—the virtue the poem is devoted to establishing and repeatedly praising—and for embezzling the
parias
he had gone to collect for the Castilian king from al-Mutamid of Seville. And in history, the great Castilian warrior fought at the head of virtually any army that he could muster (and frequently these were “mixed” armies, with both Christian and Muslim soldiers) or that would hire him, including that of the Muslim Taifa of Saragossa.

These details are but the tip of the iceberg of differences between what history records and what the poem narrates. The poem is a work of historical fiction, a literary masterpiece that paints its original stories on a vivid historical canvas. Some events in the poem are wholly imaginary, such as the marriages of the Cid's daughters to two fictitious noblemen and the sequence of events that follow from that dramatic plot turn, but even these are saturated with historical allusions and truths, spun out of a dense fabric of historical concerns, including those of the moment at which the poem crystallizes, a century after the events narrated. Some would say that, as with most other historical fiction, it is really the political and social dramas, the anxieties and preoccupations, of the poet's time, rather than those of the events narrated, that lie just beneath the surface.

Arguably the most notable historical concerns that have long colored readings of the poem are not from the eleventh century, or even from the twelfth or the thirteenth, but from much later centuries, when Spain no longer had Muslims living on the peninsula, and when implacable religious enmity between the two peoples was believed to have always driven encounters between them. Popular beliefs about the poem deeply affect readings of it, as well as of the history it may reflect. Because this is a text long perceived as central to understanding the national character, there are distinctive claims made as to what it is about—the Reconquest, the ideologically charged struggle of the Christians against the Moors—that are difficult to find in the poem itself, a poem, it is vital to note, that contains a single character—a Frankish churchman, to boot, rather than any Castilian—who speaks and behaves as a wild-eyed Moorslayer, as the later mythology tells us all Christians did.

Writing about
The Song of the Cid
in
El País Semanal
in 2007, the year of the poem's eight-hundredth anniversary, Javier Marías, one of Spain's most prominent contemporary writers, remarked that it is one of those books that few know but that most believe they have read. Many surprises await those who imagine, before actually reading the
Cid
, that the poem pivots on the epic struggles between Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain, much as the famous Old French
Song of Roland
pivots on its epic struggle between “Christians and Pagans.” Although the Cid is indeed a warrior of epic skills, and although his exploits on the battlefields from Castile to the outskirts of Saragossa and ultimately to Valencia can be seen as the stepping-stones of the plot, the heart of
The Song of the Cid
is not at all in its warfare. And while many, perhaps most, either in Spain or abroad, are likely to say that the Cid is a hero because of his role in reclaiming Christian lands, an attentive reading of the poem reveals that this is scarcely an issue at all, and that while our hero may be a pious Christian he is not driven by anything like religious zeal in his battles and conquests. Both the Cid and his poem have other preoccupations, and other problems to resolve.

 

Exile, as well as the opportunities for triumph and redemption that exile provides, is the poem's principal concern, and that of its surprisingly tenderhearted warrior-hero. The Cid's first stop on his way out of Castile is the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, some half-dozen miles to the southeast of Burgos. His wife, Jimena, and their two small daughters, Elvira and Sol, are already there, and as Rodrigo leaves them in the care of the abbot Don Sancho—for clearly the Cid cannot take them into the rough unknown that his political banishment forces him to face—we witness scenes of unembarrassed familial passion. We also hear the Cid's profound concern not only for their immediate well-being, but just as much for what might seem, at first glance, to lie in a distant and peripheral future: his daughters' eventual marriages.

The question of what will become of Elvira and Sol will turn out to be not distant at all but indeed quite central—the Warrior's enduring concern, from this beginning until the final lines of the poem, which celebrate the extraordinary matches finally and triumphantly made. When we ride with the Cid out of Castile and down those roads he is forced to take, to build a new life for himself after he has been cast out, and his whole universe thus scattered, we grasp that the poem is preoccupied with the ways and means of re-establishing the order and justice in the universe that were lost when the Cid was exiled. Exiled unfairly, as a host of voices in the poem invariably remind us, our hero must display publicly, over and over again, his abundant good qualities in order to make things right. And while some of these good qualities are the virtues one would expect of a legendary warrior—utter fearlessness and great physical prowess—others are those that make him an appropriate hero for a society whose affairs are conducted largely off the battlefield: transparent honesty and dignity; belief that justice prevails; and exceptional generosity to all, including the king who has banished him. The Cid's unflinching loyalty to Alfonso, despite the unfair exile, and his quest for justice, to reclaim his rightful place in society, are perhaps the most vivid and omnipresent strands in the poem, and tightly interwoven.

Once out of Castile, the Cid and his men begin their quest for a new life, which means they will attack and raid one town after another. This war-making is motivated neither by politics of any sort, religious or otherwise, nor by the desire to conquer the lands attacked and make them his own, at least until Valencia is reached in the second canto, some three years after his having been forced to flee from home. It is only then, when the Cid takes one of Spain's greatest cities,
Valencia la clara,
“shining Valencia,” that he feels he has found a new home for his family. Up until then, the goal was far simpler: the accumulation of ever-greater wealth. Some of the material gains come directly off the battlefields, and we quickly learn the very great value of horses, as well as their saddles, and of tents and, of course, of the great swords of kings, two of which he will win in combat: the first, taken from the Christian Count of Barcelona, is named Colada, while Tizón is won from Búcar, the Muslim king of Morocco who first appears at the beginning of the third canto. A great deal of the gain also comes as coin, both silver and gold, the tribute that mimics the
parias
that defined relations between Christian and Muslim kingdoms, here paid outright to the Cid either because he has taken a place or, once his fame begins to precede him, to prevent him from attacking.

And his fame does begin to grow immediately, from his first raid (dangerously made inside Alfonso's Castilian territories, as they are on their way out) onward, and with that renown, and with the wealth that increases with every raid and conquest, more and more men will flock to his side. Within a few years, the warrior we first glimpsed as he was leaving Burgos, weeping, with a handful of loyalists at his side, finds himself at the head of a real army, all volunteers, all happy to join what has become a profitable adventure. Our poem is always careful to have us understand that this juggernaut of success is rooted in the virtue of generosity, in the giving away much more than in the taking: The Cid is from the outset a veritable river to his men. Never, while he is traveling the roads that lead from the near despair of losing everything to the triumph of great wealth and possession of a major city, do we sense that our hero is craven, or bloodthirsty, or anything other than a man whose unjust exile is what has transformed him into this legendary warrior (“Castile's great exile had become a serious danger”) and forced him to make such a life for himself and his men. In stanza 62, the Cid tells the vanquished Count of Barcelona that he will release him but not return any of the hoard he has taken from him “Because I need it for these men of mine, / Who have, like me, no other way to find it. / We stay alive by taking from others, as we have with you. / And this will be our life for as long as God desires, / Living as men must, when their king has thrown them into exile.” And a considerable part of the fortune won this way also serves the vital purpose of re-establishing the Cid's standing with King Alfonso, to whom he begins to send always greater gifts from the bounty he takes with each battle, each victory.

The king, in turn, begins to see the worth of the warrior he has exiled, taking the measure of his utter fearlessness, which enables him to move easily from one conquest to the next, even when he and his men are seriously outnumbered. The monarch also sees the warrior's worth in terms of the considerable wealth he amasses, a substantial part of which then becomes his own. Although he cannot pardon the Cid with undue haste, Alfonso appears to understand his error from early on—an error, it would appear, rooted in poor counsel, the corrupt advice of jealous nobles close to him. The king does almost immediately pardon those close to the Cid and, each time he receives his always greater gifts, encourages others to band with him: “Rejoin my Cid and seek more treasure.”

Predictably, however, our hero's ability to transform the original desolation of his exile into a triumph of might and growing wealth, of great fame and near-universal admiration, of personal dignity and worth in the face of injustice and duress, provokes even greater envy and covetousness among some of those in King Alfonso's court. And so it is that less than halfway through the poem its core dramas begin, when two young noblemen (who we can see in a minute are far from noble of character) persuade Alfonso to betroth them to the Cid's daughters. The rest of this animated, fast-moving, and often surprising narrative poem plays out the story of these obviously ill-fated marriages to the nobles of Carrión, and the trials of every sort that follow from them.

Virtually all of the events of the dramatic dénouement are starkly literary: the opening scene of the third canto, when a lion escapes while the Cid is sleeping, and in an instant lays bare the cowardice of the sons-in-law; the heartbreaking beating of the Cid's daughters, in a distant and dark woods, and the poignant sorrow of the father when he is told, revealing a warrior determined to seek social justice for the outrage, rather than the physical vengeance he could easily have had; the pageantry-filled court that Alfonso calls in Toledo, where every noble in the land is summoned to witness the charges and countercharges; and then the dramatic confrontation between the Cid and those among the nobility who have long sought to discredit and banish him, a show-down, we realize, that has been coming all along. The Cid, our Warrior, emerges the victor in all of these trials without once lifting his own sword.

 

The
Cantar de Mio Cid
has long enjoyed a seminal place in the Spanish consciousness of its notoriously complex medieval past and, thanks in some measure to the popular 1961 big-screen extravaganza
El Cid
—with international stars Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in the leading roles—a certain place in the popular imagination beyond Spain, a kind of window into this unusual chapter in medieval European history. The text of the poem survives in a unique and incomplete manuscript that is a fourteenth-century copy of an earlier and lost one, probably from the early thirteenth century. Today considered one of the greatest treasures of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, it was acquired only in 1960, after circulating for several hundred years among private collectors and interested scholars. Although the manuscript was discovered in 1596—in Vivar, appropriately enough, the legendary birthplace of the Cid—the existence of the work was not revealed to a broader public until the publication of a scholarly edition by Tomás Antonio Sánchez in 1779, an edition clearly a part of the universe of Romantic discovery and study of the medieval world. From that moment on, this narrative poem has remained indissolubly linked to very broad intellectual and scholarly disputes, and especially so to arguments, both direct and indirect, over the national origins and character of Spain, and about the qualities of its culture, arguments scarcely resolved to this day.