Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  What Rodrigo thought of his master’s predatory and unfraternal attacks on his brother-kings, history does not relate. In the stories preserved in the medieval ballads and chronicles his character varies startlingly. Sometimes he is a wily trickster, sometimes he is savage and proud. But there are several stories in which he appears as a wise arbiter, a latter-day Cato, the guardian of moral and legal rectitude. Legend has it that when old King Ferdinand was dying he demanded that each of his children swear to abide by the judgment of the Cid—then in his very early twenties—in any dispute which might arise between them. In several romances he acts impeccably, at least according to the feudal code which decreed that a vassal’s loyalty to his lord must take precedence over the dictates of his own conscience. In one of the ballads King Sancho calls together his knights to tell them that he is rightfully the sole heir to all his father’s realms. The knights, aghast at the lie and at a loss how to respond, turn to the foremost among them for a lead: “All eyes were fixed upon the Cid.” He speaks out boldly. He reminds Sancho of the solemn vow he made to his father on his deathbed to honor the terms of his will. He warns him that if he breaks that oath he will have neither the protection of the law nor the blessing of God, but he concludes that, come what may, Sancho can count on his support: “As vassals true, we’re bound to do / Whate’er thou dost require.” The Rodrigo Díaz of the historical record was repeatedly to challenge his master, but the Cid of this story is obeying the rules of his caste, subordinating himself and his superb talents to the service of his king, taking fealty, the vassal’s duty of loyal obedience to his liege lord, as his guiding principle.

  Nine months after he had made himself ruler of his brother’s kingdoms King Sancho was killed. Some form of treachery was involved in his death. Within weeks Alfonso was back in León, restored to his throne by his brother’s death and king now of Castile as well. A month later Rodrigo Díaz reenters the historical record as a trusted and privileged servant of King Alfonso. He had transferred his allegiance to the prince who could not then and cannot now be cleared of the suspicion that he had contrived the murder of his brother, the Cid’s former lord.

  King Alfonso is the most important subsidiary character in the story of the Cid. He is Agamemnon to Rodrigo’s Achilles, Caesar to his Cato—or viewed another way, Cato to his Caesar. Any estimation of the Cid’s claims to virtue hinges on an interpretation of the relationship between the two of them.

  Over the coming years Alfonso was to banish Rodrigo, and then twice recall him only to banish him again. The Cid, remembered as the quintessence of Castilian (and latterly—by extension, Spanish) virtue, spent nearly half of his adult life in exile from Castile. He offended his monarch so grievously that his property was confiscated, his wife put in chains, and he himself threatened with imprisonment and driven from the land. Only if the king was grossly at fault in casting him out can the Cid be entitled to his position as national hero.

  The Cid’s apologists ascribe these repeated fallings-out to Alfonso’s reprehensible, even pathological, envy of his vassal’s great talents and dazzling successes. The Poema de Mío Cid, which was first written down in the century after Díaz’s death, represents him as a nobly selfless servant of his royal master, patiently enduring Alfonso’s ingratitude and never for a moment thinking to challenge the authority of the inferior being whom God’s will had made his overlord. This vision of him as the scrupulously loyal and forbearing vassal was taken up and developed by subsequent romance writers and historians. In the fifteenth century, when Spain was finally united under Ferdinand and Isabella, chroniclers began to ascribe to the Cid a prescient vision of a centralized monarchy holding sway over all the numerous states which, in his lifetime, shared the Iberian Peninsula. He was acclaimed as the true instigator of the Reconquest. The devoted loyalty the poet had ascribed to him qualified him to become the totemic hero of a nation-state—Spain—which first came into existence nearly four hundred years after his death.

  There is, however, a contrary tradition, given poetic expression in some of the numerous ballads first collected in the sixteenth century but in many cases probably dating back to his lifetime, in which Rodrigo Díaz appears as a defiant outlaw, a ferocious taunter of established authority, a rebellious individualist who went gladly into exile to conquer other lands, not for his king’s sake but for his own. The one reliable account of his life, the Historia Roderici, a precious brief biography written in Latin not long after his death by a monk who may have been an eyewitness to, or even a participant in, some of his campaigns, suggests that this latter tradition is closer to the truth. Rodrigo Díaz probably provoked, may even have desired, the repeated quarrels between himself and his king.

  Such insubordination doesn’t fit with the saintly role posthumously assigned to him. Nor does his switching allegiance with such alacrity to the man who had probably murdered his liege lord. A story evolved to deal with this awkwardness. The romances relate that Rodrigo refused to pay homage to Alfonso until the new king had sworn, publicly and solemnly, that he was innocent of Sancho’s death. The scene is dramatic. The king and twelve of his gentlemen assemble in the church of San Gadea in Burgos. There Rodrigo orders Alfonso to lay his hand upon an iron door bolt, symbol of inviolability (a bolt purporting to be the very one is still proudly displayed in the church). The king submits but he is pale with anger, and he warns Rodrigo that he will not forget this public humiliation. “Thou swearest me, where doubt is none, / Rodrigo to thy sorrow; / The hand that takes the oath today / Thou hast to kiss tomorrow!”

  The story fits with the conception of Alfonso as a relatively unimpressive figure, one who allowed himself to be coerced and humiliated by his superb subject and whose resentment of the other’s dominance and anxiety about his own guilt was to poison the entire course of their subsequent relationship—a conception which is the necessary complement to that of Díaz as unjustly persecuted patriot, but which is hard to reconcile with Alfonso’s strikingly successful record as ruler. It presents the Cid as a sage judge of unimpeachable probity and such natural personal authority that he could bend a king to his will. It casts him as the custodian of his culture’s moral values, as the hero who challenges the illegal authority of a presumptuous lord, as Achilles challenged Agamemnon, or as Cato challenged Caesar. It cannot, however, be substantiated. The Historia Roderici tells a simpler story: “After the death of his lord King Sancho, who had maintained and loved him well, King Alfonso received him with honour as his vassal and kept him in his entourage with very respectful attention.” In other words, Rodrigo, whose subsequent career can be most easily understood as that of an opportunist ready to serve any master who would reward him, transferred his allegiance without any apparent qualms of conscience to his dead lord’s brother and enemy.

  He served Alfonso for nine years, no longer commander in chief but still a man of high standing and steadily increasing wealth. He married Jimena, daughter of the count of Oviedo. His position seemed secure and promising. Alfonso’s power was expanding and Rodrigo could look forward to sharing in the wealth flowing into the court. But something went wrong. In 1081, at the age of thirty-eight, Rodrigo Díaz was banished from Castile.

  The Greeks who followed Agamemnon to Troy, as Homer tells it, left behind homes which, though prosperous enough, were austere by comparison with the city to which they laid siege. So the knights of eleventh-century Spain’s comparatively penurious Christian principalities regarded with predatory envy the Islamic states of Moorish Spain. Like Troy, the great cities of Al-Andalus—Zaragoza, Valencia, Seville, Granada, Toledo—were famously, ostentatiously wealthy. Their sumptuous palaces, their inhabitants’ gorgeous silks, their gold were irresistible to their northern neighbors. And though the Islamic kings were far from pacific, they were less wholeheartedly bellicose than their Christian rivals. The Trojan Prince Paris refused to be ashamed of preferring his chamber, with its scented furniture and rich hangings, its promise of erotic bliss, to the battlefield. So kings
like al-Muqtadir of Zaragoza, who was described by a contemporary as “a real prodigy of nature in astrology, geometry and natural philosophy,” who built two famously beautiful palaces, one named “the Abode of Pleasure,” and extemporized verses in praise of them, had other values, other priorities, than those of the Christian noblemen whose entire education and social conditioning were designed to make fighters of them. The warriors of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre sensed that softness, that fatal lack of attention to the essential business of self-defense in a violent world, and exploited it ruthlessly, repeatedly, and with awful success.

  The numerous aggressive raids by Christian against Muslim which form the background to Rodrigo Díaz’s early life were not part of a crusade, or even of a reconquest: they were a protracted series of robberies by extortion. A city might be besieged, land ravaged, crops and buildings destroyed, storehouses plundered. In order to get rid of the invaders and end the destruction the victims would agree to the payment of vast sums in “tribute,” in exchange for which they would be assured of their attackers’ “protection” against any other aggressors.

  It was as the leader of such a predatory raid that in 1067 Rodrigo Díaz confronted the king of Zaragoza, the man who was subsequently to be his master. And it was in the course of another that he was first to find himself fighting against the forces of his own king. In 1079 Alfonso dispatched two parties of knights, one to Granada and one, led by Rodrigo, to Seville, to collect tribute. Both groups became embroiled in an ongoing petty war between the two Muslim kings. Rodrigo, according to the Historia Roderici, wrote to those of his compatriots who had gone to Granada, imploring them to abstain “for the love of their lord King Alfonso” from taking up arms against the king of Seville. The other Castilians, of whom the most prominent was Alfonso’s commander in chief Count García Ordóñez, took no notice, and advanced into Sevillian territory, laying waste to the countryside. Rodrigo led out an army to confront them at Cabra, where he won a decisive victory. He captured Count García Ordóñez and many other knights, appropriated their arms and their other baggage, and held them for three days before releasing them against promises of ransom.

  His triumph, in which he had humiliated and impoverished the subjects of his own king, was the indirect cause of his downfall. Count García Ordóñez would remain his sworn enemy. In the Poema de Mío Cid Rodrigo boasts that at Cabra he had plucked the count’s beard, which, if it were true, would constitute an unforgivable insult. Even if the phrase is to be understood metaphorically García Ordóñez had been grievously offended. He had lost face and he had probably also lost a lot of money. García Ordóñez was one of the king’s favorites; he was married to Urraca, the king’s sister. He was not a good man to antagonize.

  Back at King Alfonso’s court “many men,” García Ordóñez surely among them, “became jealous and accused [Rodrigo] before the King of many false and untrue things.” It was alleged that he had appropriated some of the tribute from Seville. His position at court was becoming precarious. Then in the following year he took it upon himself to launch reprisals against a troop of bandits who came over the border from the Muslim kingdom of Toledo. Alfonso had lent his assistance, at a fantastically high price, to the ineffectual king of Toledo, al-Qadir, who was now under his protection. Ignoring or perhaps not realizing this, Rodrigo undertook an ostensibly punitive but actually rapacious raid deep into Toledan territory. “He pillaged and laid waste the land of the Saracens” and took a vast number of captives (the Historia Roderici says seven thousand) “ruthlessly laying hold of all their wealth and possessions, and brought them back home with him.”

  This unauthorized assault on an ally, apparently undertaken primarily for Rodrigo’s personal gain, was a grave offense. If the king’s complex and delicate relations with the numerous neighboring rulers were not to be disrupted, such maverick actions could not be tolerated. In 1081 the Cid was banished from Castile.

  There are two ways of reading the story of his banishment. The legends say that the blameless Cid lost the king’s favor only because Alfonso listened to his enemies’ malicious lies. The Poema de Mío Cid describes the people of Burgos standing at their windows to watch the exiled Rodrigo ride away. With one accord they weep and exclaim, “What a good vassal. If only he had a good lord!” Like Cato, the Cid of this version of his story is one whose loyalty to the institutions and laws of his homeland is unfailing, one who in exile more truly represents its values than does corrupt authority. He is betrayed, but never a betrayer. Like Cato, he abjures hairdressing as a token of his mourning, allowing his prodigious beard to grow unchecked. He is the nobly uncomplaining victim of an unworthy master. “The Cid though exiled, remained true to his King.”

  The contrary tradition, though, presents a Rodrigo who more closely resembles Achilles than Cato, a proud aristocrat who values his own dignity higher than that of any king, one whose violent rejection of any curb on his will makes him dangerous and, in the eyes of the poets who celebrate him, superb. There is a ballad in which the young Rodrigo and his father ride to the court of old King Ferdinand in order to ask pardon for killing another nobleman. Diego Laínez and the knights accompanying them are all peaceably disposed, but Rodrigo is “proud and free.” Arriving before the king, old Don Diego kneels to kiss the royal hand. Rodrigo draws back. His father calls him to make his obeisance in turn. Abruptly furious, he draws his sword and threatens the king, who cries out: “Avaunt! Thou devil’s child! / Thou hast the face and form of man, / the glare of lion wild.” Still glaring Rodrigo leaps on his horse and cries out, “To kiss a kingly hand at all / Doth not beseem my race,” before galloping away. In another ballad King Alfonso and the Cid quarrel violently after the oath-taking in San Gadea. Alfonso, incensed by his new subject’s overweening behavior, banishes him (thus erasing eight years of history) and Rodrigo, jeering and outrageous, takes his leave declaring that he is glad to go. Neither of these stories has any known historical basis, but the facts of Rodrigo Díaz’s career suggest that he may have resembled this turbulent, touchily proud fictional hero rather more closely than he did the alternative image of a servant impeccably obedient to a master right or wrong.

  On going into exile, the Cid of historical fact was anyway less concerned with brooding on his relationship with his old master than he was with finding a new one. He had to eat, and so did his followers. Idealized heroes tend to have no bodily needs. To Homer the biological necessity of eating reduced a man’s status at the same time as it proclaimed him a full member of the human race. Achilles on his rampage abjures all food. The moment in the Iliad when he urges Priam to eat is the turning point in his story, the demonstration that he has become once more fully human. In the later chivalric tradition, a true knight displayed his aristocratic calling by living like a lily of the field, taking no thought for food and drink. When, in Thomas Malory’s version of the Arthurian legends, Sir Gareth comes disguised to King Arthur’s court and asks to be fed for a year, he incurs the contempt of the whole Round Table. Such sordidly carnal matters were the business of lesser, ignoble folk. In Cervantes’s brilliantly knowing send-up of the medieval romances an innkeeper asks Don Quixote for money. “Don Quixote replied that he had not a penny, since he had never read in histories concerning knights errant of any knight that had.” It is for the plebeian Sancho Panza to negotiate for lodgings and put supper on the table, not for the likes of him.

  But Rodrigo Díaz was neither a demigod nor a romantic hero. Rather he was an adventurer like the down-to-earth hero of the Welsh epic the Mabinogion, the object of whose quest is a highly useful object, a supernatural cauldron capable of magically generating enough food to feed an army. To Díaz and his followers, and to the early medieval poets and minstrels who first told his story, food was all-important, and their need of it nothing of which to be ashamed. It was a sufficient motive for warfare. “How can we earn our bread save by warring against the Moors?” he asks in the Poema de Mío Cid. Thrust out from Castile, he urgently needed
to find a new master in whose service he and his men could fill their bellies.

  In the fifth century BC a man who, like Alcibiades, had transgressed against the laws of his country simply went elsewhere for employment. So in the eleventh century AD Rodrigo Díaz was one of many who, having offended their lords, were sent into exile, and thus virtually compelled, since a nobleman’s only business was warfare, to fight for another.

  “Strong men / Should seek fame in far-off lands,” wrote the Beowulf poet. In legends from all over Europe youthful heroes leave home to make their name fighting dragons and monsters. In the warrior societies described in epic literature a community’s stock of wealth could only be increased by those who went outside it in order to win rewards for their prowess. Jason brought home the Golden Fleece. Beowulf sailed home after slaying two monsters, his ship laden with armor, horses, and jewelry. In reality as well young men went abroad to replenish the wealth of their homelands by earning fortunes fighting not monsters, but other people’s enemies.

  The armies of early medieval Europe were full of mercenaries, of knights-errant whose pursuit of adventure, of fame and fortune carried them from one end of the continent to the other. Harald Sigurdsson, who was king of Norway in the Cid’s lifetime, had fought against the Poles for Russia and against the Bulgarians and the Muslims of Sicily for Byzantium before returning home laden, according to the saga, with “an immense hoard of money,” enough to finance the coup which made him king. There were Norman knights fighting for pay and plunder everywhere from Barcelona to Constantinople even before the First Crusade took them into the Near East in their thousands. There were Italian condottieri fighting for England against France and vice versa, while Italy was overrun with soldiers of fortune from Germany and England. In 1849 the great Dutch Orientalist Reinhart Dozy, the first European historian to draw on Arabic sources in writing about Rodrigo Díaz, shocked Spaniards by describing their national hero as “a man without faith or law … who fought as a mercenary now for Christ, now for Mahomet, solely concerned with the money he could earn and the loot he could capture.” Dozy’s facts were right, but his disapproving tone was anachronistic. To a nineteenth-century scholar it seemed proper to slaughter one’s fellow men in the service of king, country, or Christ, but not otherwise. But to Rodrigo Díaz and his contemporaries fighting was an intrinsically honorable occupation, one which did not need to be justified by reference to a good cause. “Those who are not noble by lineage,” wrote the French knight Jean de Breuil, “are so by the exercise and profession of arms, which is noble in itself.” A vassal fought for his lord, but if his lord cast him off he would seek his livelihood elsewhere, fighting for anyone who would requite his services well.