El Cid: The Making of a Legend Read online

  El Cid

  The Making of a

  Legend

  M. J. Trow

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © M. J. Trow 2007, 2015

  First published 2007 by The History Press

  This edition published in 2015 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  www.thistlepublishing.co.uk

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to express my thanks to all who have contributed to the making of this book. First and foremost to my agent Andrew Lownie for all the years of friendship and unflagging support. To David Haviland of Thistle. To all who have allowed me to quote from their works; if, in spite of my best efforts, I was unable to contact you, please be assured that this omission will be corrected in future editions. To Ann Reed, who has worked tirelessly to create this digital edition. But most of all, as always, to my wife Carol, johanna factotum, without whom this book would not have been possible.

  And a special word of thanks to Charlton Heston, who in a cinema in Southport long, long ago, introduced a small boy to the magic of the Campeador, El Cid.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE: OUT OF THE GATES OF HISTORY

  CHAPTER TWO: CASTLES IN SPAIN

  CHAPTER THREE: AL-ANDALUS

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE HOUSE OF THE SEED

  CHAPTER FIVE: SONG OF THE CAMPEADOR

  CHAPTER SIX: THE STORY OF RODRIGO

  CHAPTER SEVEN: EXILE

  CHAPTER EIGHT: OUT OF AFRIQUIYA

  CHAPTER NINE: VALENCIA THE SHINING

  CHAPTER TEN: THE POEM OF THE CID

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: …AND INTO LEGEND

  CHAPTER TWELVE: WHAT SORT OF CID?

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  CHAPTER ONE

  OUT OF THE GATES OF HISTORY

  The troops, Moor and Christian, wait in the dawn’s rays to fight, shoulder to shoulder, in the battle that is to come, the sun gilding their weapons in the outer courtyard in Valencia. The shadows are sharp from crenellations and buttresses, throwing dark angles onto the ancient stones. One by one, the Christian counts kiss the tall cross that Bishop Jeronimo brings to them; the Moorish amirs nod in respect. Alfonso VI, king of Léon, of Castile and of Asturias, is watching the great gates of the inner curtain wall at the top of the hill. His great helm is tucked into the crook of his arm and both he and his horse are bright with the lions and castles of his kingdom. There is no sound among those thousands of waiting men, except the jingle of bits and the snort of horses, high-saddled Andalusians, pawing the ground in the morning, scenting battle.

  Alfonso straightens in his stirrups. It is Rodrigo the Cid, emerging from the shadows as the Gate of the Snake in the curtain wall swings slowly open; he is rigid and erect astride the great war horse Babieca, his white cloak around his shoulders and his white banner floating wide above his head. Beside him ride his cousin, his right arm, Alvar Fañez on his right and the amir Moutamin on the left, watching the Cid closely. Only they, Alfonso and a handful of others, know that the Cid is dead. As Rodrigo nears him, the king draws his sword and yells the battle cry so that all can hear it, ‘For God, the Cid and Spain’; and the roar is taken up along the lines, banners dancing, lances piercing the blue of the Andalusian sky.

  The huge Moorish gates of the outer curtain wall of the city swing open and a shaft of sunlight bursts over the head of the Cid, framed in that moment like the icon he has become. Then we hear the organ thunder and gravel voice-over, ‘And thus the Cid rode out of the gates of history, into legend.’

  For this is the Cid of Hollywood, of producer Samuel Bronston, screenplay writers Philip Yordan and Frederic Frank, director Anthony Mann and actor Charlton Heston. ‘No one, ever,’ wrote historian Harold Lamb in the introduction to the film’s souvenir brochure in 1961, ‘was quite like him.’1 And that is precisely the problem for historians in search of the truth.

  ‘He came out of the rugged lands beneath the Pyrenees nine hundred years ago to become the invincible champion of his people … Spain, the nation he helped create, made him into its hero. Europe wove into a deathless legend the story of this man, Rodrigo de Bivar.’2 Rodrigo, like so many heroes of history, has become all things to all men. Such was his complexity that he was able to serve both Moorish amirs and Christian kings and go on to become the national hero of Spain. In fact, in contrast to the Hollywood version, Alfonso VI was not there when the Cid died. Neither was Alvar Fañez. And Moutamin, the amir of Zaragoza, had himself died years before.

  ‘Dead lies that good Cid

  Rodrigo of Vivar.

  Gil Diaz, his good servant,

  Will do as he was bidden.

  He will embalm his body,

  And rigid and stiff it was left;

  Its face is beautiful,

  Of great beauty and well coloured,

  Its two eyes equally open,

  Its beard dressed with great care;

  It does not appear to be dead,

  But seems to be still alive,

  And to make it stay upright

  Gil Diaz used this cunning:

  He set it in a saddle

  With a board between its shoulders

  And at its breast another,

  And at the sides these joined together;

  They went under the arms

  And covered the back of the head.

  This was behind and another

  Came up as far as the beard,

  Holding the body upright,

  So that it leaned to no side.

  Twelve days have passed

  Since the Cid’s life ended.

  His followers armed themselves

  To ride out to battle

  Against that Moorish king Bucar

  And the rabble he led.

  When it was midnight

  The body, thus as it was,

  They placed upon Babieca

  And onto the horse tied it.

  Erect and upright it sits,

  It looked as though it were living,

  With breeches on its legs

  Embroidered black and white,

  Resembling the hose that he had worn

  When he was alive.

  They dressed it in garments

  Displaying needlework,

  And his shield, at the neck,

  Swung with its device.

  A helmet on its head

  Of painted parchment

  Looks as though it were iron,

  So well was it fashioned.

  In the right hand the sword Tizona

  Was cunningly tied,

  It is a wonder to watch it

  Go forward in a raised hand.

  On one side rode his bishop,

  The famous Don Jerome,

  On his other Gil Diaz,

  Who guided Babieca.

  Don Pedro Bermudez rode forth

  With the Cid’s banner raised.

  With four hundred nobles

  In his company:

  Then went forth the main file

  With as many again for escort;

  The Cid’s corpse rode forth

  With a brave company.’3

  This is the English poet Robert Southey’s translation from the Cid ballads of the late Middle Ages, the fictionalized version copied closely by Hollywood, but written four centuries earlier, yet focusing on the grisly mechanics of making a corpse appear alive so that a dead man could still win a battle. There is no Gil Diaz in the film version. There is no Pedro Bermudez. These verses are the fanciful creations of the myth-makers, the chroniclers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they are further from the truth in their
own way than the twentieth-century celluloid version.

  ‘Rodrigo died in Valencia in the month of July in the Era 1137.4 After his death, his sorrowing wife remained in Valencia with a great company of knights and footsoldiers. When news of his death spread all the Saracens who lived across the seas mustered a considerable army and marched against Valencia.’5

  This is the version closest to the Cid’s passing in terms of chronology. It comes from an untitled, fragmentary document known today as the Historia Roderici (the story of Rodrigo) written perhaps forty years after the man’s death, and distinctly lacks the drama of the first two accounts we have read. There is no Alfonso, no Moutamin, no Alvar Fañez or Gil Diaz. Above all, there is no corpse strapped upright in the saddle, no apocalyptic battle won by a dead man. Instead, there is the grieving heroism of an unnamed wife.

  This book examines the man who was Rodrigo Diaz of Vivar, called the Cid Campeador, placing him in the tangled context of the politics of eleventh-century Spain and attempting to understand how it is that some men become heroes. As the anonymous author of the Historia Roderici wrote, ‘the flux of the years is vast and ceaseless’6 and it is our job to stop that flow, if only for a moment and, Hollywood-like, to freeze a frame for long enough for us to see him clearly.

  George Macdonald Fraser has categorized films that explore the Middle Ages as ‘Hollywood’s Second Age … a vague period in which history and legend co-exist and frequently mingle’7 admitting that recreators of this period are less at home with it than they are with the ‘sword and sandal’ epics of ancient Rome, perhaps because of the vividness of Roman writers in contrast to the wooden, overly-pious chronicles of the Middle Ages which constitutes their source material. The Romans, too, are more like us. We understand their greed, their jealousy, their ambitions and their failures. The bloodless, good characters of the chronicles –‘born in a happy hour’ – are altogether more infuriating, because they are so one-dimensional.

  Hollywood, says Fraser, ‘has not been helped by the fact that men in armour are difficult to take seriously. They not only look clumsy and overdressed, clanking about and inviting ribaldries about spanners and tin openers, they seldom sound right either.’8 In fact, Bronston’s El Cid, though visually superb, told an eleventh-century tale with protagonists in thirteenth-century armour, brandishing two-handed swords that were unknown before the sixteenth-century! Fraser accurately points out that Rodrigo of Vivar was virtually unknown outside his native Spain before the film’s release in 1961, so the celluloid version is as important to our understanding of the legend as any of the written chronicles and personal relics that pre-date it.

  In July 1960, Charlton Heston, one of Hollywood’s most respected actors and on his way to becoming ‘Mr Epic’ was wrestling with a script on El Cid and he was not happy about it: ‘There’s a hell of a lot more in the man than there is in the script, more than the bloodless ideal of medieval chivalry that the legend leaves us with. He seems … to have been nearly as often a bad man as a good one … I wish I could find more material on him. For one of the most outstanding men of the twelfth [sic] century, there’s damn little contemporary comment.’9

  What fascinated Heston, as it fascinates all of us, is that the image of the Cid has lasted for a thousand years and that takes some explaining. It was in the Spanish medieval epic poem of the fourteenth-century El Cantar de Mio Cid (The Song of the Cid) that the actor found the soul of the man he was to play:

  ‘Some modern historians, trying to clear the cloud of Arthurian legend that obscures him, have cast the Cid simply as a ruthless mercenary … However politically correct that may be, I don’t think it’s a realistic view … Even if we strip away a thousand years of mythic excess, history still gives us a battered, striving man, stubbornly loyal to the king who exiled him and imprisoned his wife and daughters. I came to see Rodrigo as a biblical Job figure, defiant and enduring.’10

  Between filming on location in Spain, working with Italian actress Sophia Loren as his love and later wife Jimena, riding temperamental horses and exhausting himself with bone-crushing sword-play, Heston found time to meet Ramon Menendez Pidal, Spain’s foremost Cid scholar of the twentieth century. He commented, ‘Dr Pidal was exactly what I would have wished him to be. A trimmed white beard, clear black eyes and a blazingly vigorous mind.’11

  Pidal was as impressed by Heston as the actor was by the historian. Heston was, Pidal said, ‘a grand figure of our Cid’12 although, as we shall see, Pidal had his own agenda in this context.

  With Philip Yordan’s screenplay and Anthony Mann’s direction, Heston and the rest of Samuel Bronston’s team spent months in Spain, finding the best location shots they could. Madrid’s three central film studios – Chamartin, Sevilla and Cea – were co-opted to work on the project, rebuilding the eleventh century church of St Gadea of Burgos, doubling the walled city of Peniscola for Valencia and spending staggering sums on costumes, armour, weapons and household objects ranging from crowns to crucifixes. The result? Nearly 900 years after El Cid rode in triumph, Samuel Bronston, Anthony Mann, Philip Yordan and their associates were ready to bring his epic portrait to the world.13

  And so are we: ‘Here begin the deeds of Rodrigo the Campeador.’14

  CHAPTER TWO

  CASTLES IN SPAIN

  Rodrigo Diaz, the Cid Campeador or Lord Champion, was born in the little village of Vivar, six miles to the north of Burgos, probably in the year 1043. Today, in a land heavily reliant on tourism, it is Vivar del Cid and Burgos itself has capitalised on him, claiming to know the exact location of his town house and even the spot on the banks of the river Arlanzon where he camped on the way to his first exile.

  ‘They have very good houses [in Burgos] and live very comfortably,’ wrote the Venetian traveller Andres Navagero in 1526, ‘and they are the most courteous people I have come across in Spain.’ He might also have mentioned the biting wind that whistles down from the mighty, snow-capped range of the Cordillera Cantabrica giving substance to the famous local summation on the weather, ‘neuve meses de invernio, tres meses de inferno’ - ‘nine months of winter, three months of hell’.

  Not far away to the East at Atapuerca, remains have been found of some of the oldest human remains in Spain, the hominids known as Heidelberg Man, the cave-dwelling ancestors of the Neanderthals who hunted elk, bear and mammoth some 60,000 years before the Cid. From eighteen millennia before his time, the same caves of Cantabria and Asturias have yielded tools and weapons carved from bone and the primitive, haunting art that reached its apogee across the Pyrenees mountains in Lascaux. Similar paintings in Altamira, north towards the port of Santander, have been called ‘the Sistine Chapel of the Quaternary Era,’ with wild horses, boar and deer painted in manganese oxide and iron carbonate mixed with charcoal and animal fat. Many centuries later an English traveller in Castillo, much further south was treated to a snippet of wisdom he probably only partially appreciated when a local asked him, ‘Do you know how long we have lived in these hills? Since the very sun was made. Since before kings and altars, or the Virgin herself was a mother. Since there were leopards in the caves …’1

  Northern Spain, a narrow frontier strip of Christianity in the days of Rodrigo, was home over the centuries to a bewildering and shadowy mix of races. Since the Romans called the area Iberia, most historians and ethnographers today give the generic term Iberians to these people, but their origins are obscure. Their language was not common to other early civilizations yet it still survives among the fiercely independent Basques who today occupy the central foothills of the Pyrenees. It may well be that they are derived from the oldest race of people in Spain, echoing one of their favourite sayings, that God made Adam from bones he found in a Basque graveyard! The Iberian settlements can still be traced today in the labyrinthine stone walls called castros, circular buildings huddled together like plasma cells under a microscope, like those near Oviedo.

  But if the Basque influence is unique in Northern Spain, that of
the Celts was more universal. This Indo-European people, warriors, hunters, artists and poets, spread throughout modern Europe in the thousand years before Christ, stamping their colourful culture wherever they went. It is no accident that one of the most popular musical instruments of Asturias and Galicia is the gaita, a simple bagpipe made of goatskin. The mountainous nature of the area, from the Pyrenees to the Cordillera Cantabrica, meant that pockets of people developed, settlements now Basque, now Celtiberian. Archaeologists have uncovered whole villages, like that at Monte Santa Tecla in Galicia, with typical round houses made of stone. On the coast to the east, where the county of Barcelona would flourish at the time of the Cid, Phoenician traders manned their bright-sailed ships, loading and unloading their fabulous cargoes, and men spoke Greek as they bartered at the quaysides. The Phoenicians imported tin at La Corunna and the Greeks had a trading post at Emporion on the Bay of Roses.

  The rise of the great North African state of Carthage saw a colony established at Cartegena in the south. The Romans landed there in 211 BC and when the legions marched into Iberia, they found a culture already well established and very far from primitive. To the Romans, however, anyone not from the city of the seven hills was a barbarian. Pliny gives us the motivation for the Romanization of the peninsula: ‘Nearly the whole of Spain abounds in mines of lead, iron, copper, silver and gold … while in Baetica [the far south] there is cinnabar.’2

  Carthage, Rome’s great rival, had already discovered this mineral wealth. In the century before Christ, a single mine in Cartagena produced some 300lb of silver a day and the region employed a staggering 40,000 miners.3 In the north and north west, the homeland of the Cid a thousand years later, gold, tin and copper were extensive. And long before the days of Toledo, Spanish swords were prized above all others. Justin4 wrote ‘nor was any weapon held in esteem by them [the Roman army] which has not been dipped either in Bilbilis or the Chalybs.’5

  In the early years of Roman occupation, trouble arose at every hand. The North was particularly difficult, with revolts by the tribes of the Turdentani, Lusitani and Celtiberi all over what is now Portugal and Castile. In high summer the warlike and nomadic Cimbri swarmed through the Pyrenees passes from Gaul to add to Roman unrest and when Roman politics played itself out in the growing Empire, the rival factions of generals Marius6 and Sulla7 fought each other everywhere in the peninsula. There was to be an action replay of this in the years shortly before Christ between Julius Caesar8 and Gnaeus Pompeius9 and as a result Spain, like Gaul, was divided into three, with Lusitania in the west, Baetria in the south and Tarraconensis sprawling over the centre and north of what today is Cervantes’10 plain of La Mancha. Most Romans referred to these areas as Further and Hither [nearer] Spain.