Ki de sus cors feïst tantes proeces.
The Cid came out of his trenches to rout the Almoravides at Quarte and in the valley of Alcoy; he extended his conquests to Murviedro, and formed an independent alliance with the King of Aragón. And, if the report of Ibn-Bassam, the Arab chronicler, be true, he had more vaulting ambitions: in a gust of exaltation, the Cid—so we are told—was heard to say that, as the first Roderick had lost Spain, a second Roderick might be destined to win it back. Ibn-Bassam writes in good faith, but he is a rhetorician, and moreover, in this case, he gives the story at second-hand. It is difficult to believe that a clear-headed, practical man like the Cid, who had recently found it hard enough to [9]seize a single province, can have talked in this wild way about winning back all Spain. If he did, his judgment was greatly at fault: the Reconquest was not completed till four centuries later, and little more was done towards furthering it during the Cid’s last days. His lieutenant, Alvar Fáñez, was beaten at Cuenca: the Almoravides, flushed with victory, again defeated the Cid’s picked troops at Alcira. The Cid was not present on the field, but the mortification was too much for him: he died—‘of grief and fury,’ so the Arab historians state—in July 1099. Supported by Alvar Fáñez and Bishop Jerónimo, Jimena held out for another two years: then she retreated northwards, after setting fire to the city. Valencia—the real ‘Valencia del Cid’—ceased to exist. The Christians marched out by the light of the flaming walls; the Cid’s embalmed body was mounted for the last time on Babieca (a horse as famous as Roland’s Veillantif), and was taken to San Pedro de Cardeña. There you may still see what was his tomb, with this inscription on it:—
Belliger, invictus, famosus marte triumphis,
Clauditur hoc tumulo magnus Didaci Rodericus.
But his body, after many vicissitudes, now rests in the unimposing town hall of Burgos.
This is the Cid Campeador as he appears in Ibn-Bassam’s Dhakira, written ten years after the Cid’s death, and in the anonymous Gesta Ruderici Campidocti which dates from between 1140 and 1170. The authors write from opposite points of view, and are not critical, but they are trustworthy in essentials, and a statement made by both may usually be taken as a fact, or as a close approximation to fact. The Cid, as you perceive, is far from being irreproachable. He has all the qualities, and therefore all the defects, of a mediæval soldier of fortune: he was brave, mercenary, perfidious and cruel. How, then, are we to account for his position as a national hero? In the first place, we must avoid the error of judging him by modern standards, and in the second place, we must bear in mind that almost all we learn of his later years—the best known period of his life—comes to us from enemies whose prejudices may have led them unconsciously to darken the shadows in the portrait. It is a shock to discover that the man who symbolises the spirit of Spanish patriotism was a border chief in the pay of the highest bidder; it is a greater shock to find that the man who figures as the type of knightly orthodoxy fought for the Mohammedans against the Christians. We must part with our simple-minded illusions, and admit that Pius V. was right in turning a deaf ear when Philip II. suggested (so it is said) the canonisation of the Cid. All heroes are apt to lose their glamour when dragged from the twilight of tradition and poetry into the fierce blaze of fact and history. The Cid is no exception. Renan sums up against him with gay severity. ‘Tout ce qu’il fut, il le dut aux ennemis de sa patrie, même le nom sous lequel il est resté dans l’histoire. Le représentant idéal de l’honneur espagnol était un condottiere, combattant tantôt pour le Christ, tantôt pour Mahomet. Le représentant idéal de l’amour n’a peut-être jamais aimé. Encore une idole qui tombe sous les coups de l’impitoyable critique!’
Yet, if it were worth while, a case might be made for the Cid without recourse to sophistry. It is enough to say that he acted as all other leaders acted in his age and for long afterwards. He was anything but a saint: if he had been a saint, he would never have become the idol of a nation. It has been thought that he had some consciousness of a providential mission, but this is perhaps a hasty generalisation based upon Ibn-Bassam’s story of his having said that a second Roderick might reconquer Spain. This theory ascribes to him more elevation of character and more political foresight than we can suppose him to have possessed. The supremacy of Castile was not an accepted political ideal till it was on the point of establishment, and this takes us forward, nearly a century and a half, to the reign of St. Ferdinand. The Cid was no idealist: he lived wholly in the present. The land of visions was never thrown open to him; he had no touch of Jeanne d’Arc’s mystical temperament; his aims were immediate, concrete, personal. His popularity was due, first of all, to his conspicuous and inspiring valour; due to the fact that the last and most celebrated of his expeditions, though undertaken primarily for his own profit, incidentally helped the cause of national unity by wresting a province from the Mohammedans; due to the instinctive feeling that he represented more or less faithfully the interests of Castile as against those of León—a feeling which found frank expression five centuries later in the Romancero general:—
Soy Rodrigo de Vivar,
castellano á las derechas.
And, no doubt, the man bore a stamp of self-confident greatness which awed his foes and fired the imagination of his countrymen. As posterity is apt to condone the crimes by which it gains, it is not surprising that later generations should minimise the Cid’s misdeeds, and should end by transforming his story almost out of recognition. But these capricious and often grotesque travesties are relatively modern.