Great was the fear through Burgos town of King Alfonso’s ire.
Sealed with his royal seal hath come his letter to forbid
All men to offer harbourage or succour to my Cid.
And he that dared to disobey, well did he know the cost—
His goods, his eyes, stood forfeited, his soul and body lost.
A hard and grievous word was that to men of Christian race;
And since they might not greet my Cid, they hid them from his face.
He rode to his own mansion gates; shut firm and fast they were,
Such the King’s rigour, save by force, he might not enter there.
We cannot tell how the poem began in its complete state. Some scholars think that what is missing was merely a short unimportant prelude; others believe that the Poema del Cid, as we have it, is but the ending of a vast epic. It must have been vast indeed, for the fragment that survives amounts to 3735 lines; the Chanson de Roland consists of 4001 lines, and it seems improbable that the Poema was much longer. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine a more spirited opening than that which chance has given us. The Cid is introduced at a critical moment, misjudged, calumniated, a loyal subject driven from his own Castilian home by an ungrateful Leonese king. There is something spacious in the atmosphere, there is a stately simplicity even in the deliberate repetition of conventional epithet—‘the Castilian,’ ‘he who was born in a good hour,’ ‘the good one of Bivar,’ ‘my Cid,’ and rarely—very rarely—‘the Cid.’ The poet lauds his hero, as he should, but does not degrade him by fulsome eulogy; he is in touch with realities. He seems to feel that the Cid is great enough to afford to have the truth told about him; with engaging simplicity the Poema relates how the crafty chief imposed on the two Jews, Raquel and Vidas, by depositing with them two chests purporting to be full of gold (but really containing sand), and how he fraudulently borrowed six hundred marks on this worthless security. In the Crónica general, a passage founded on a re-cast of the Poema represents the Cid as refunding the money, and in the Romancero general of 1602 an anonymous ballad-writer excused the trickery on the plea that the chests contained the gold of the Cid’s truth:—