Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The Poema de Mío Cid (which conflates the circumstances of Rodrigo’s two banishments) relates that he left his wife and infant daughters in the Castilian monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, parting from Jimena in an agony of grief “as the fingernail from the flesh.” His admirers have liked to dwell on the image of the Cid as the loving husband, the devoted family man. But this is the most explicit reference in all the medieval versions of his story to his love for Jimena, and it shows him leaving her, as Odysseus left Penelope, as Cato serenely gave up Marcia, turning his back on the feminine sphere of sex and family in order to embark upon his great adventure in proper heroic fashion, unencumbered and alone. Most of the ballads ascribe to him a contempt of domesticity fitting to a warrior and homeless hunter after fortune. In one Rodrigo boasts of his own toughness. He is a hard man, one who is always in arms, who sleeps only twice a week and then sleeps rough, who eats not at table but on the cold ground—“[a]nd for dessert I have assaults, / The fruits that please me best!” In another ballad Jimena writes to the king bewailing the fact that her beloved husband has become “a lion wild” who visits her only once a year and then comes to her drenched in gore, “bloodstained down to his horse’s feet, / I cannot look for fright.” The Cid of this vision is as antidomestic as the blood-boltered Achilles was when he rode into battle against the family men of Troy. According to legend the last words he spoke on his deathbed were addressed not to Jimena, but to his horse.

  However regretful Rodrigo Díaz may have been to leave his homeland, his family, and his property (an exile’s estates were automatically confiscated by the crown), his prospects were not bad. He was in his late thirties, a seasoned fighting man with a splendid reputation and a following large enough to constitute a formidable private army. The Latin poem Carmen Campi Doctoris, probably composed two years after his banishment, acclaims him as one who defeated counts and trampled kings beneath his feet. He could embark with some confidence on his second career, that of warlord for hire.

  He traveled first to Barcelona to offer his services to its Christian ruler. He did not stay long: according to the Poema de Mío Cid he quarreled publicly and violently with the count’s nephew. He went on to Zaragoza and there he found employment in the service of the Muslim King al-Muqtadir.

  To Spaniards from the Counter-Reformation onward Spain has seemed to be above all a Christian country, one which owes its very existence to the expulsion of the infidel. The nineteenth-century historian Menéndez y Pelayo apostrophized his country: “Spain, the evangeliser of half the globe: Spain the hammer of the heretics: Spain, the sword of the Pope. This is our greatness and our glory: we have no other.” It was only fitting that the totemic hero of a nation whose self-definition is to such extent a sacred one should be presented as a man not only of God, but of the right variety of god.

  The old ballads told the robustly anticlerical story of the Cid kicking over the Pope’s chair and threatening to use sacred vestments as saddlecloths, but that aspect of his legendary character was rapidly suppressed and he was subsequently idealized as a loyal son of the Church. His exceptional prowess and his unbroken string of successes came to be seen as a sign of divine election. Many stories were told of the miracles associated with him. Straight after his wedding, according to the Romancero, he set off on a pilgrimage to Santiago. Along the way he encountered a leper floundering in a bog. He rescued the wretched man, took him to an inn, gave him food and drink, and even invited him to share his bed. At midnight he was woken by the strangely thrilling sensation of one breathing on his back. The leper had vanished and in his place stood St. Lazarus, who told him, “Rodrigo, God doth love thee well, Thy fame shall aye increase; … thou shalt be victor to the last, And Heaven crown thy life.” In the Poema de Mío Cid the angel Gabriel appears to him in a dream with an equally encouraging message: “Ride out, good Cid Campeador, for no man ever set forth at so fortunate a moment. All your life you will meet with success.” Throughout the Poema he is presented as a Christian warrior, one who triumphed “with God’s help” because “the creator was on his side,” whose battle cry begins “In the name of the Creator and of St. James” and who longs to “besiege Valencia and restore it to the Christians.”

  The monks at Cardeña, where the Cid and Jimena were eventually buried, wrote a chronicle of his life in which St. Peter appears to him when he is mortally ill and says, “God so loves you that He will grant you victory in battle even after your death.” The Cid rejoices and prepares himself to meet his end. Once he is dead his lieutenant Alvar Fanes (an historical figure, but one who was not present at Valencia at the time of Rodrigo Díaz’s death) leads an assault on the Almoravid army which is besieging the city. “At that moment the prophecy of St. Peter was accomplished.” The Christian forces, in reality few in number, are mysteriously augmented until they are “full seventy thousand strong,” all clad in white and commanded by a spectral warrior of gigantic size “riding a white charger and carrying in one hand a standard of the same colour and in the other a flaming sword.” The two hundred female warriors with shaven heads in the Almoravid vanguard are slaughtered, and the rest of the Moorish army is driven back into the sea, where ten thousand of them are drowned. The ballads and romances repeat the story.

  Rodrigo Díaz became the focus of a religious cult, the first hero of the Christian Reconquest. His relics were venerated. In the fourteenth century King Alfonso XI borrowed from Cardeña a crucifix which was said to have been his and carried it with him into battle in an attempt to annex to himself the divinely sanctioned good fortune of the Cid Campeador. When Jaime I of Aragon reconquered Valencia he carried with him the marvelous sword Tizon, which, according to legend, the Cid had taken from the Moroccan king. In 1541 his coffin was opened in the course of being moved to a new and more grandiose tomb. A marvelous fragrance reportedly filled the church and the drought from which Castile had been suffering was relieved by a miraculous fall of rain. In 1554 King Philip II sought to have the Cid canonized; the Pope (a better, or anyway less partial, historian than the king of Spain) refused his request.

  Rodrigo Díaz was certainly a Christian born and bred, but his piety is highly questionable. Like Homer’s warriors, he looked for omens in the natural world. Ibn ‘Alqama wrote that “he took auguries from the flight of birds and placed faith in these stories and other lies.” In Valencia and in Murviedro he converted mosques into churches—perhaps in a spirit of pious dedication, perhaps as a way of humiliating the defeated while advertising his victory—but he was also plausibly accused of sacking and looting churches. He probably killed as many Christians as Muslims in his time, and he appears to have served his employers impartially, regardless of their faith. In the words of Reinhart Dozy: “It is remarkable that it should have been the gloomy, ferocious Philip II who demanded that the Cid should be placed in the catalogue of saints; the Cid who was more Muslim than catholic … the Cid, whom Philip, had he lived in his reign, would have had burned alive by his inquisitors as a heretic and a blasphemer.” It is also remarkable that in none of the numerous ballads celebrating his exploits, in neither of the epic poems narrating his career, is any mention made of the fact that for five years, years when he was in his prime and which saw some of his most notable victories, the Cid was the faithful servant of a Muslim ruler.

  The arts of war, so assiduously cultivated by the Christian knights of northern Europe, were less highly regarded by the Islamic kings of Al-Andalus, whose people were as exquisitely appreciative of beauty and the more delicate luxuries as their contemporaries, the courtiers of Heian Japan. King al-Ma’mun of Toledo commissioned a noted astronomer to construct a wonderful water-clock, celebrated throughout Al-Andalus. Al-Muzaffar, who was king of Badajoz during Rodrigo Díaz’s childhood, wrote a fifty-volume book of “universal knowledge.” His successor, al-Mutawakkil, was a poet and patron of poets. At his parties guests reclined by a stream of running water sunk in the floor along which dishes of fine food came floating by. In these kings�
�� palaces, whose few surviving remains are still breathtaking for the intricacy and grace of their decoration and the splendor of their proportions, the grandees of Islamic Spain led a life which made their Christian contemporaries’ ceaseless round of military exercises and aggressive campaigns seem boorish and primitive. They did not abjure warfare, but they delegated most of the gross and ugly work of fighting to others. They swelled their armies by buying troops of slaves from eastern Europe and promoting the ablest among them to positions of high command, or they hired Christian knights. The counts of Barcelona, who figured largely in Rodrigo Díaz’s life, were among the many Christian noblemen who owed their positions to gold earned fighting for Muslim masters. Another was the Cid himself.

  For five years Rodrigo served the kings of Zaragoza, first al-Muqtadir then, after his death, his son al-Mu’tamin and, when he died in his turn, his son al-Musta’in. In Sparta and at the Persian Tissaphernes’ court, Alcibiades adapted his manners to the culture of his hosts. Rodrigo Díaz must have done the same. Ibn Bassam records that he liked to have the tales of Arab heroes read aloud to him—presumably in Arabic—while he ate. When his tomb was opened in 1541 he was found to have been buried wrapped in a piece of silk of Moorish design, and with a finely figured scimitar alongside him.

  For the bulk of his time in the service of Zaragoza he was engaged once more in a dispute between rival siblings. Al-Muqtadir, like King Ferdinand, divided his kingdoms between his sons. Rodrigo’s master, al-Mu’tamin, was at war throughout most of his reign with his brother al-Hayib, king of Denia, and al-Hayib’s Christian allies the king of Aragon and the count of Barcelona. In this protracted and ignoble war Rodrigo did splendid service. His reputation had already stood high among his fellow Castilians before his banishment, but to Ibn Bassam, a Moor from Seville, it was the rulers of Zaragoza “who brought him out of his obscurity.” During his years in their service his fame spread throughout Spain. In 1082 he won a series of battles, culminating in one near Almenar. With a small force he took on the much larger united army of his opponents and won a decisive victory, capturing the enemy’s valuable baggage train and, better still, making prisoners of the count of Barcelona and all his retinue of knights. The sum demanded in ransom for such illustrious prisoners would have been enormous. The grateful king “showered him with innumerable rich presents and many gifts of gold and silver.” Two years later he won another great victory, again taking captive a large number of ransomable opponents, including sixteen noblemen of Aragon. When he returned to Zaragoza with his plunder, al-Mu’tamin and his sons did him the signal honor of riding out to meet him “accompanied by a crowd of men and women who made the air ring with their cries of joy.”

  His position was now a splendid one, and when the king died and was succeeded by his son al-Musta’in, Rodrigo retained his high place, being treated by the new ruler with “the greatest honour and respect.” The warrior who was to be remembered for centuries as the scourge of the paynim looked set to enjoy a protracted and glorious career as the first servant of a Muslim king.

  In 1086 his past life and his new one came into dramatic confrontation. King Alfonso, who had been steadily extending the number of his tributaries and the area of his “protectorate,” arrived before the walls of Zaragoza at the head of a large army, and settled down to besiege the city. The Cid’s apologists have asserted that he would never have taken up arms on behalf of the infidel against the Castilian king, that he must have been elsewhere at the time, but there is no real reason to doubt that, as the king of Zaragoza’s chief commander, he would have been responsible for the defense of the city against his former master’s aggression. In any case the confrontation never became a conflict. Alfonso received news so alarming that he immediately lifted the siege and marched his army southward. The Almoravids from Africa had invaded Spain.

  Half a century earlier the Almoravids had been a tiny sect of fundamentalist Muslims based near the mouth of the river Senegal on the west coast of Africa. Devout, ascetic, and ferociously militant, by 1079 they had overthrown the venerable kingdom of Ghana and conquered for themselves and for Islam a vast empire, extending from Africa’s Atlantic coast halfway cross the Sahara and from the Niger all the way northwards to the Straits of Gibraltar. Their armies, at once disciplined and fanatical, seemed unstoppable. Their leader, Abu Bakr, had delegated control of the northern part of their territory to his cousin Yusuf, who had based himself in Marrakesh. Throughout the 1080s, as Alfonso’s Castile became ever more menacingly aggressive, and ever more successful, the rulers of Islamic Spain repeatedly asked Yusuf, their co-religionist, to cross the straits from Africa and help them to defend themselves. In 1086 he at last complied.

  The Almoravids’ arrival in Spain coincided with a radical alteration in relations between Christians and Muslims in the peninsula. In 1085 Alfonso had conquered Toledo after a long siege. According to ‘Abd Allah of Granada the city’s fall “sent a great tremor through all Al-Andalus and filled the inhabitants with fear and despair.” Alfonso was no mere marauder: he wanted kingdoms, not just kings’ ransoms. And there were signs that he wished to impose his culture and his religion on those whose territories he annexed. In Toledo, in contravention of the terms of surrender and to the dismay of the inhabitants, the principal mosque was desecrated (or consecrated, depending on the observer’s religious viewpoint) by its conversion into a Christian church. The Christians, once only a nuisance—frightening and expensive but bearable—to the Muslim states, had become a threat to their continued existence.

  In Yusuf, with his revivalist fervor and his already immense new African empire, Alfonso faced a formidable rival. The cultured, luxury-loving kings of Al-Andalus initially patronized their new ally. They lived in exquisite palaces at the heart of stone-built cities. Yusuf’s Marrakesh was a camp surrounded by a stockade of thorn. They sent him verses in classical Arabic which he did not understand. They laughed at his lack of refinement, but, though it took them some time to appreciate it, he had assets they lacked and desperately needed, assets which, in the crude scales of history would prove to weigh more than all the loveliness of their gardens or the erudition of their scholars. He had a huge, well-trained army which had never yet been defeated, he had empire-building ambition, and he had the charisma of the single-minded. ‘Abd Allah, the king of Granada whom he was later to deprive of his kingdom, was to write of him, “Had I been able to give him my flesh and blood, I would have done so.”

  The confrontation between the Almoravids and Alfonso’s newly expansionist Castile was profoundly different in kind from the venally motivated, easily resolved Christian-Muslim disputes of previous decades. It was a conflict not between rival communities within a heterodox society, but between two diverse and mutually intolerant cultures. Over the next decade both parties were accused of acts of savage cruelty. The Almoravids were said to decapitate the corpses of the Christians slain in battle and heap them into towers upon which the muezzin stood to call the faithful to morning prayers. The Christians (Rodrigo Díaz among them) were accused of burning their prisoners alive and of having them torn to pieces by dogs. Whether or not these stories are true (and they may be), the very fact they were told demonstrates the fear and horror in which each party was beginning to hold the other. Rodrigo Díaz had grown up in a more inclusive Spain and had fought alongside Muslims against Christians as well as vice versa. But the polarization of the two Spains which was to lead eventually to the Christian Reconquest, in the mythology of which he was to become—however incongruously—the first hero, had its beginning in his lifetime.

  Alfonso’s armies met Yusuf’s at Sagrajas. The Christian knights fought as a loose association of individuals; the battles to which they were accustomed were agglomerations of numerous single combats. For the first time, facing the Almoravids, they encountered an army fighting with a single purpose and trained to maneuver as a unified force. The Africans were well disciplined and well equipped. They carried long shields of hippopotamus hide
and, most terrible of all, they marched to the beat of huge drums, whose appalling reverberations were being heard for the first time ever in Europe. They were terrifying, and soon victorious. Alfonso was comprehensively, humiliatingly defeated.

  Yusuf returned to Africa, but his intervention in Spanish affairs had redrawn the political map of Spain. He had urged the Islamic kings to “co-operate with one another and close ranks.” Alfonso and the lesser Christian rulers were facing the possibility that their Muslim rivals might once again overrun the entire peninsula as they had done three centuries before. It was a moment of crisis as grave as that in which the Athenians had welcomed back Alcibiades. In his hour of need Alfonso turned to the man whose splendid reputation made him look, as Alcibiades had, like “the only man alive” who could save from calamity the state which had rejected him. He called upon the Cid. A month or two after the battle at Sagrajas the king and his celebrated former vassal were reconciled.