Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Among the mixed motives which took the Greeks to Troy was the alluring prospect of looting the city’s famous wealth. The Homeric warriors are shameless in their appetite for the spoils of war. In the Iliad, whenever a warrior falls where his friends cannot protect him, his valuable armor is immediately stripped from his corpse. The tales that Nestor tells of the glorious exploits of exemplary heroes describe the rustling of cattle and the plundering of settlements. One of Odysseus’ laudatory epithets is “Sacker of Cities.” He describes without the least compunction his unprovoked attack on a coastal city of inoffensive strangers, which he sacked, killing all its male inhabitants, abducting and enslaving its women, and dragging off all its portable treasure, and his son proudly boasts of the wealth that he “won by force.” Homeric hosts inquire of strangers appearing on their shores whether they are “roving the waves like pirates, / sea wolves raiding at will, who risk their lives / to plunder other men.” The inquiry is morally neutral: no insult is intended. As Thucydides noted, “This occupation was held to be honourable rather than disgraceful.” Combat and robbery were closely allied, and both were fit occupations for the best of men. Production was work for peasants or slaves; men of the warrior caste helped themselves to the fruits of others’ labors. In conservative Sparta boys were still in Alcibiades’ lifetime half starved to ensure they would learn not to balk at theft, which was inseparable from warfare. “It is according to nature,” wrote Aristotle, “that the art of war … should in a sense be a way of acquiring property.”

  But though it might be according to nature it was diametrically opposed to the code of aristocratic honor which had already, by the time Aristotle was writing, begun to complicate people’s relationship with money. To the later ancients the greed for gold seemed a sordid thing. Plato sternly repudiated Odysseus’ advice to Achilles, that he should accept Agamemnon’s gifts, on the grounds that a true hero should have no desire for payment. When it was muttered in Athens that Alcibiades’ enthusiasm for the Sicilian expedition arose from his hope of profiting financially by it, the suggestion was intentionally pejorative. By the time Cato lived an indifference to the profit motive had come to be the defining characteristic of a superior person. No one who was seen to busy himself in making money could sit in the Roman Senate, Sallust considered freedom from mercenary motives to be the defining characteristic of a noble mind, and Virgil despised Achilles on the ground that he had sold Hector’s corpse for gold. The true aristocrat had no interest in accumulating wealth (not least because he already had plenty). It is a code which has persisted down to the present: few modern heads of state would dare acknowledge that a wish to seize another nation’s oil revenues might be a motive for war. But it has coexisted, in most periods, with its antithesis. Beowulf, hero of the Anglo-Saxon epic of which the earliest surviving manuscript dates from the century before Rodrigo Díaz’s lifetime, measures the glory he wins by the quantity of gold he gains. “I hope you will amass a shining hoard of treasure,” says the Swedish Queen Wealtheow kindly to him as he sets out on his adventures. Sallust would have thought shameful, but Homer and the Beowulf poet would both readily have recognized and applauded, the robustly candid greed for gain which the poets and balladeers ascribe to the Cid.

  To an eleventh-century knight the acquisition of wealth seemed in itself praiseworthy, in no way incompatible with honor or even with piety. It was a lord’s duty to provide for his vassals. They risked their lives on his orders in exchange for a share in his plunder. The greater the plunder, the more his vassals loved him, the more highly he was honored for his largesse. In the Poema de Mío Cid Rodrigo Díaz leads his wife, Jimena, and daughters to the top of a high tower to show them the terrifying hordes of the invading Almoravids. Jimena is aghast: “In Heaven’s name, Cid, what is this?” Her husband reassures her: “Be not alarmed. This is great and wonderful wealth that is coming to us.” To Rodrigo Díaz, and to most of his contemporaries, a hostile army was not only a menace, a trial of strength, and an opportunity to prove one’s honor by displaying one’s courage; it was also, and this was paramount, an opportunity to make one’s fortune.

  Few perceived any contradiction between cupidity and Christianity, the faith which exalts the poor in heart. In 1097, two years before the Cid’s death, when the forces of the First Crusade met the Turks at Dorylaeum, the watchword passed along the Christian lines ended with the ringing promise “Today you will all (God willing) be made rich men.” When in the Poema de Mío Cid Rodrigo calls for reinforcements he is joined by thousands of recruits motivated, like the crusaders, by devoutness and rapacity at once. “All who scented plunder … crowds of good Christians” join his forces. After his victory he rejoices with them “God and His Holy Mother be praised! … We are rich now and in the future we shall be richer still.” The Carmen Campi Doctoris, a poem written in praise of him in his lifetime, celebrates his marvelous exploits, and exultantly proclaims (no shred of criticism is intended), “He captures with his sword the wealth of kings.”

  The eleventh century in Spain was a fine time for soldiers of fortune. The Umayyad caliphate, which had ruled all Islamic Spain from Córdoba since 756, collapsed at the beginning of the century and its dominions split up into over a dozen petty kingdoms collectively known as Al-Andalus. At the courts of these Muslim kings the arts of poetry, of architecture, of gardening and textile design reached dazzling heights. Creative talent and scientific learning were equally honored. A poet was likely to be rewarded for his gift with high political office. Astronomers and mathematicians, who drew on ancient knowledge entirely lost in northern Europe at this period, were honored by rulers who were, in an impressively large number of cases, scholars themselves. The atmosphere was sophisticated, luxurious, intellectually and aesthetically refined, but it was not peaceful. In the words of ‘Abd Allah, who was king of Granada and the Cid’s contemporary, after the fall of the caliphate “every commander rose up in his own town and entrenched himself behind the walls of his own fortress…. These persons vied with one another for worldly power, and each sought to subdue the other.” Their rivalrous wars provided a plethora of jobs for those whose stock in trade was their fighting skills.

  When Rodrigo Díaz was born, around 1043, the Christians were confined to a relatively small area in the north of the peninsula. During the eighth century the Arab invaders had swept northwards as far as the Bay of Biscay, the Christians retreating before them, but gradually, over the next three hundred years, they withdrew again, allowing a handful of independent Christian principalities to emerge in their wake. These were frequently at odds with one another as well as with their Moorish neighbors. It was a literally fratricidal war of Christian with Christian which formed the background to Rodrigo Díaz’s childhood. He was born at Vivar, in northern Castile, near the border with Navarre. The two kingdoms, ruled by brothers, were at war until, in 1054, the king of Navarre died in a pitched battle against King Ferdinand of Castile. Ferdinand, who had already conquered the neighboring states of León and Galicia, thus became the ruler of the largest Christian kingdom in Spain since the Arab invasion.

  Castile was a raw new country, a pioneer state with the insecure, exhilarating character of a place where danger and opportunity were equally abundant. It was a land of wild beasts and outlaws, of cattle raids and blood feuds and summary justice. The landscape was harsh, the climate unforgiving. The people were a polyglot assortment of incomers from elsewhere: Basques from the north, Mozarabic Christians from the Muslim kingdoms to the south, settlers from other Christian territories. There was plenty of land for the taking, and any landowner who could afford a horse counted in Castile as a nobleman, exempt from taxation, but bound to serve the king in his wars.

  Rodrigo Díaz was one such. In several of the poems and ballads about him he is described as being a common man, the son of a miller like Robin Hood’s companion Much. In the Poema de Mío Cid he is presented as a plainspeaking man of action who has made his own way. His toughness, his self-reliance, and
his independence are sharply contrasted with the decadence and pusillanimity of lordlings stupidly vain of their pedigrees. This is pure fantasy, an attempt to make of his disputes with king and court a politicized class conflict and to recast him in the mold of the populist heroes of folklore. In fact he was a well-connected member of the Castilian nobility. His father, Diego Laínez, was a knight who did King Ferdinand good service in the war with Navarre, winning at least one battle and capturing for Castile three settlements along the border. His standing was sufficiently high to ensure that when he died his son should be taken into the household of Ferdinand’s heir, Sancho.

  The boys of ancient Sparta were taken from their parents to be trained for their future careers as dedicated killers. Similarly all over feudal Europe the sons of the warrior caste, the knights, were sent as soon as they were judged old enough to live with their fellows in the households of their liege lords. Rodrigo was about fourteen when he entered the household of Prince Sancho. There he was prepared for his knightly career.

  A Christian nobleman’s education was not aimed primarily at developing his intellect, but at priming his body as a lethal weapon. Rodrigo Díaz may have been literate. His autograph has survived to prove that he could at least sign his name. He probably studied the law: as an adult he was several times employed to adjudicate in disputes over property rights. But most of his time and energy would have been absorbed by arduous physical training. Like any young man who aspired to knighthood he had to master the highly demanding skills of swordsmanship, of fighting on horseback, and of charging with couched lance—the technique, new at the period, which transformed metal-clad man and galloping horse together into a missile terrible in its velocity and the weight of its impact. He was soon an adept. The legends describe the adult Rodrigo as a marvelous horseman, a wily tactician, and a fighting man of great prowess. The historical records confirm that he was a skilled and successful warrior. When Rodrigo attained adulthood Prince Sancho himself, according to the contemporary Historia Roderici, “girded him with the belt of knighthood.” (Other versions of his story have Sancho’s sister, Princess Urraca, performing the ceremony while gazing yearningly at the handsome new knight.) From that time on Sancho was his liege lord, and he was Sancho’s vassal.

  A great lord in feudal Europe provided for his vassals. Those closest to him slept under his roof and were fed and armed at his expense. Others lived on his land and followed in his train when he went campaigning. He distributed among them all a proportion of his wealth and of the spoils of war. His patronage was expected to be generous but its price was steep. According to the Song of Roland, which achieved the form in which we know it in Rodrigo Díaz’s lifetime, “Men must endure much hardship for their liege … Suffer sharp wounds and let their bodies bleed.” A knight was obliged to fight for his lord, whether in wars arising from affairs of state or in private disputes with rival grandees, and to bring to battle a retinue of those who in their turn owed allegiance to him, for the vassals of a prince like Sancho might themselves be great men, each with a train of vassals of his own. The relationship between vassal and lord was not indissoluble, as the Cid’s story repeatedly demonstrates, but while it lasted its requirements were absolute. A vassal who failed to discharge his duties to his lord was dishonored and destitute. A lord who failed to provide for his vassals would lose them, and along with them all the power and status they conferred on him. “Without my men,” the Cid was to tell the people of Valencia, “I am like a man who has lost his right arm, a bird with but a single wing or a warrior without lance or sword.” In the late Middle Ages a knight’s loyalty to his lord, his fealty, was idealized as a virtue equivalent to a Christian’s devotion to his God, but to Rodrigo Díaz and his contemporaries the relationship was one based on urgent mutual need. To honor it was to keep one’s place in the world. To betray it was not so much sin as folly.

  In 1065 King Ferdinand died, splitting the domain he had fought so hard to unify by leaving a kingdom to each of his three sons. Rodrigo’s master became King Sancho II of Castile, and promptly appointed his young vassal chief of his military staff.

  According to legend Rodrigo Díaz was already, though still in his early twenties, known as the Cid. From fourteenth-century chronicles, from a long poem, the Mocedades de Rodrigo, probably also composed in the fourteenth century, and from the ballads come a wealth of stories about his youthful exploits. He is said to have defeated a French army on the other side of the Pyrenees, to have traveled to Rome and defied the Pope, kicking over a chair in the Vatican and threatening to use the Holy Father’s robe as a saddlecloth. These stories are certainly untrue. Only slightly less fantastic is the legend that he captured five Moorish kings who agreed to pay him tribute and who were so impressed by his prowess and his courtesy that they gave him the name “al Sayeed” (the Lord), by which he was subsequently always known. But other exploits ascribed to him are perfectly credible. This was a time when there were plenty of opportunities for a young man to prove himself by fighting. The feudal system, whereby a lord was obliged to support a body of fighting men who could only contribute to their own keep by fighting for it, ensured that conflict was perpetual and endemic.

  Rodrigo Díaz rose splendidly to the opportunities that came his way. He defeated and killed a “Saracen.” He was victor in single combat with a celebrated Christian champion from Navarre. A song probably written about five years later celebrates the victory: “Then Rodrigo was acclaimed el Campeador [the Champion] and his exploit blazoned as an omen of the triumphs he was to achieve, of how he would lay low the counts and trample underfoot the power of Kings.”

  The Cid in his prime is an imposing character, a hero of a different stripe from the youthful, mother-dependent Achilles or from Alcibiades, the self-absorbed seducer. He more nearly resembles Odysseus, the captain who wished to protect his crew and bring them home. He is a father to his people, a commander who can be depended upon to lead them to victory, no flashy boy but a model of adult virility. In visual representations he appears most frequently in weighty armor, a figure of massive consequence mounted upon a warhorse, more thunderbolt than lightning. The historians of the eleventh century were frustratingly uninterested in physical description, so we know little of what he looked like, but from the poets at least we learn one thing: that he had a marvelous beard. According to the Poema de Mío Cid the king, on meeting with him after a long separation, could not take his eyes off the torrent of hair flowing down his chest. This wonderful growth is indicative of the Cid’s manly vigor, his mature sagacity, his sexual potency, and his status as one on whom fortune always smiled. When he parleys with his enemies his awe-inspiring beard is cunningly plaited and knotted and sheathed in a sort of snood to save him from the intolerable insult of a tweaking. But when he rides out to war, then his beard is displayed in all its astonishing splendor, advertising that, being as lionhearted as he is lion-chinned, he is and will remain invincible. “Oh God!” exclaims the poet. “See what a beard he had!”

  As Sancho’s chief commander he played a leading part in a sequence of small wars. From 1068 until 1072 he was occupied in a power struggle between King Sancho and his two brothers—García, who had inherited the kingdom of Galicia, and Alfonso, to whom Ferdinand had bequeathed the largest and grandest of his dominions, León. García was driven out of his inheritance and went into exile in Seville. Alfonso was defeated first at Llantada and then again at the battle of Golpejera in the summer of 1072. In the latter engagement, according to legend, the Cid signally distinguished himself. King Sancho was captured and was being led from the field guarded by fourteen knights of León. The dauntless Rodrigo challenged them, slew thirteen, put the last one to flight, and rescued his king.

  The Cid’s story belongs to a period when poets, unhampered by the guilt or the horror which the subject evokes in the modern mind, wrote candidly about the intense happiness men could find in battle. The Song of Roland describes its young hero riding jubilantly out to the fight: “W
ell it becomes him to go equipped in arms / Bravely he goes and tosses up his lance … Nobly he bears him, with open face he laughs.” The same zestful enthusiasm glows out of the Poema de Mío Cid. “My God, how great was the joy they felt that morning,” exclaims the poet as he describes a battle during which the Cid and his men killed three hundred adversaries with “pitiless blows.” For Rodrigo Díaz and his peers a battle was the setting in which they could experience the most absolute personal fulfilment. All their years of arduous training, all the pain and exhaustion they had suffered to perfect themselves, all the emotional sacrifices involved in making of themselves single-minded warriors were rewarded with this ecstatic moment, when, like the long-haired Spartan youths who beautified and ornamented themselves for battle and, horselike, “pranced and neighed for the contest,” they rode out, high on adrenaline and self-love, to kill their fellow men. The Rodrigo Díaz of reality may have taken a soberer view of the grim business of warfare, but the Rodrigo Díaz of legend, the debonair Campeador galloping into battle on his marvelous war-horse and effortlessly disposing of fourteen opponents, vividly embodies the terrifying gaiety of the easy-conscienced killer.

  The old stories tell that at Golpejera he also gave evidence of his subtlety as a tactician, or, depending on the interpreter’s point of view, his treacherous cunning. The chronicles relate that the two kings agreed before the battle that whoever was victorious would win the other’s kingdom outright. In the first day’s fighting Alfonso’s troops drove Sancho’s from the field. Alfonso, believing himself the clear victor and wishing to avoid unnecessary slaughter of the men who would henceforth be his vassals, called off the pursuit and ordered his army back to camp, where they celebrated far into the night. At dawn the next day, on the Cid’s advice, Sancho fell on them while they still slept and routed them. Alfonso took refuge in the sanctuary of a nearby church, from which he was ruthlessly and impiously dragged. As the nineteenth-century historian Reinhart Dozy sternly remarks: “That which Rodrigo advised his prince to do was nothing but treachery.” Be that as it may, Sancho, the Cid’s master, was briefly king of all his father’s lands. He made a triumphal tour of León, parading his defeated and captive brother Alfonso through the cities of what had once been his own kingdom.