20-06-2025
Who was El Cid? Historian's biography starts debate in Spain
Lionised by Cervantes and Franco as well as by figures on the political left, the medieval Spanish knight El Cid was immortalised in epic poetry and a film featuring Charlton Heston.
But now the 11th-century warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar is engulfed in battle once more. A new biography by a Cambridge academic has ruffled Spanish feathers for calling him a 'mercenary' and a 'turncoat'.
El Cid: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary, written by Nora Berend, a professor of European history, starts with an account of de Vivar massacring fellow Christians in 1092 near the northern city of Logrono.
The book emphasises El Cid's changes of allegiance. Having fought first for his king, then in exile for a Muslim ruler and finally as an independent warlord, de Vivar was dubbed El Cid — from the Andalusian Arabic for 'chief' — after the conquest of Valencia in 1091.
'From a modern perspective,' Berend writes, 'one could easily characterise Rodrigo as a turncoat.' The work has incensed a host of Spanish academics who have branded it an inaccurate hatchet job on a national hero.
'The term 'mercenary' traditionally has clearly negative connotations, so Berend chose it with the clear intention of presenting a negative image of El Cid to the contemporary reader,' said Alberto Montaner, a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Zaragoza. 'This represents a completely useless value judgment and, above all, an anachronistic distortion.'
Montaner stated that the relationship that united El Cid with the Muslim kings of the Taifa of Zaragoza 'only lasted from 1081 to 1086, that is, five years, when El Cid lived for about 50'. He added: 'The choice of mercenary is, therefore, not really biographical, but ideological.'
José Luis Corral, a history professor at the same university, said: 'Judging El Cid through the eyes of the 21st century is a monumental mistake.' He pointed to the importance of contextualising El Cid in his era. 'War was a profession,' he added. 'Working for a Muslim king was not being a mercenary in the modern sense, but simply earning a living as a knight.'
Speaking to The Times, Berend said that she was 'thrilled' by how much attention her work had received in Spain, where El Pais, for example, has published a favourable review of her attempt to explain the 'chasm between the history and myth' of El Cid.
Seeking to 'recover him from the myths of left and right, the whitewashing by both', she said, her book describes how the myth-making began even during his lifetime. 'Monks, who benefited from his donations, started to transform their benefactor into a hero sent by divine providence,' she writes.
Addressing her Spanish critics, she said they had 'misrepresented her work and did not want to properly engage with it'. She added: 'I have contextualised him as a man of his time but this does not mean we should take him as a model'.
Her work describes how the dictator Francisco Franco took him as the perfect example of the Catholic knight, seeing him as 'the 'spirit of Spain' and himself as a modern-day Cid'.
'Franco turned the Cid into an exemplar, part of compulsory education in schools and at the military academy,' she writes. Her work has also drawn criticism for its 'woke' concern about the lack of agency accorded by the old poets and playwrights to Jimena, El Cid's wife, and her partisan description of the civil war which brought Franco to power in 1939.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a British history professor, does not believe that Berend explains why the El Cid myth survives. 'Despite his dodgy loyalties he became the 'good vassal' of the Cantar de Mio Cid, the great 12th-century poem in which a monkish admirer elevated him to imperishable heroism,' he said. 'Reputations for piety, largesse, gallantry and courtliness were part of the harvest. Clearly, in spreading the renown of medieval mercenaries, the spin is mightier than the sword.'
