El Cid

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as El Cid, was a Castilian nobleman and soldier of the eleventh century who fought for both Christian and Muslim rulers and ended his life as the independent lord of Valencia. After his death he became the hero of the greatest medieval Spanish epic, the Cantar de mio Cid, and later a national symbol of Spain and of the Christian Reconquista. The real man was a professional commander of great skill whose loyalties were more complicated than the legend allows.

The historical Rodrigo is better documented than most warriors of his age. A Latin life, the Historia Roderici, was written in the twelfth century, possibly within a few decades of his death, and is generally regarded as reliable. Arabic writers, including one who lived through his rule in Valencia, describe him with a mixture of horror and grudging admiration, and charters survive bearing his signature. The epic poem, by contrast, was probably composed around 1200 and survives in a single manuscript copied later; it is literature, not history, though it preserves some real names and places.

His two nicknames reflect his two worlds. Campeador, "master of the battlefield", was used in his lifetime, and he signed documents with it. Cid comes from the Arabic sayyid, "lord", and was probably first used by Muslims, perhaps by soldiers who served under him; no Christian document from his lifetime calls him by it.

Rodrigo was born around 1043 at Vivar, a village about ten kilometres north of Burgos, into a family of the lesser nobility. His father, Diego Laínez, had fought for the king of Castile. Rodrigo grew up in the household of Prince Sancho, son of Ferdinand I of León and Castile.

The Iberian peninsula was then divided between Christian kingdoms in the north and the taifas, the small states of Muslim al-Andalus into which the caliphate of Córdoba had broken up after about 1031. The Christian kings rarely tried to conquer the taifas outright; instead they forced them to pay heavy annual tribute, called parias, in return for protection. Fighting was often as much between Christians, or between Muslims, as across the religious line.

When Ferdinand died in 1065 his lands were divided among his sons, and Sancho, now king of Castile, made Rodrigo a leading commander. Rodrigo fought in Sancho's wars against his brothers, Alfonso of León and García of Galicia, and Sancho briefly united their kingdoms. In 1072, however, Sancho was murdered while besieging Zamora, and Alfonso, whom Rodrigo had helped to depose, inherited everything. A famous scene in later legend, in which Rodrigo forces Alfonso to swear publicly in a church in Burgos that he had no part in his brother's death, is not mentioned in the early sources and is probably invented.

Alfonso VI kept Rodrigo at court and around 1074 arranged his marriage to Jimena Díaz, a noblewoman related to the king. In 1079, sent to collect tribute from the ruler of Seville, Rodrigo defeated an army from Granada that included the Castilian noble García Ordóñez, making a powerful enemy at court. In 1081, after leading an unauthorised raid into the taifa of Toledo, which was under Alfonso's protection, he was exiled.

Rodrigo then offered his services to the Muslim ruler of Zaragoza, al-Muqtadir's son al-Mu'tamin, and for about five years commanded Zaragoza's army against its enemies, Muslim and Christian alike. In 1082 he defeated the ruler of Lérida and the count of Barcelona, and in 1084 he beat a Christian army under King Sancho Ramírez of Aragon.

In 1085 Alfonso captured Toledo, a major advance into Muslim territory. Alarmed, the taifa kings called on the Almoravid dynasty, a militant Berber movement from North Africa, and in 1086 its leader Yusuf ibn Tashfin crushed Alfonso at Sagrajas. Alfonso recalled Rodrigo, but in 1089 the two quarrelled again, after Rodrigo failed to join the king at the siege of Aledo, and he was exiled a second time and his property confiscated.

From then on he acted largely for himself. With a private army of followers he extracted tribute from the small Muslim states of the east coast, defeated and captured the count of Barcelona, Berenguer Ramon II, at Tévar in 1090, and turned the rich city of Valencia into his protectorate. When an Almoravid-backed faction seized Valencia in 1092 and killed its ruler, Rodrigo besieged the city for many months. Starving, it surrendered in June 1094. He had the leader of the revolt, the judge Ibn Jahhaf, burned alive.

Rodrigo ruled Valencia as a principality of his own, nominally acknowledging Alfonso but in practice independent. He defeated an Almoravid army sent to retake it at Cuarte in late 1094, one of the first serious defeats the Almoravids suffered in the peninsula, and won again at Bairén in 1097. That same year his only son, Diego, was killed fighting for Alfonso against the Almoravids at Consuegra. Rodrigo converted Valencia's main mosque into a cathedral and installed a French bishop, Jérôme of Périgord. His daughters married into the ruling houses of Navarre and Barcelona, and through them he became an ancestor of later kings of Spain.

Rodrigo died in Valencia on 10 July 1099, five days before the armies of the First Crusade took Jerusalem. Jimena held the city for almost three years, but under renewed Almoravid pressure Alfonso decided it could not be defended. In 1102 the Christians evacuated Valencia and set it on fire, and Jimena took Rodrigo's body to the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña near Burgos. Since 1921 the couple's remains have lain in Burgos Cathedral.

Within about a century the Cantar de mio Cid had turned the exile into a model of the loyal vassal, unjustly banished, who wins back his king's favour and his family's honour. Later chronicles and ballads added the swords Tizona and Colada, the horse Babieca, and the story that his dead body, strapped into the saddle, led one last charge against the Muslims; none of this has any basis in early evidence. In the twentieth century the scholar Ramón Menéndez Pidal portrayed him as an embodiment of Spanish national character and a crusader for Christian Spain, an image taken up by the Franco regime and by the 1961 Hollywood film. Modern historians, notably Richard Fletcher, stress instead a frontier mercenary of the taifa age, brilliant in war, ruthless and pragmatic, who served Muslim and Christian masters as his interests required.