Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The Poema de Mío Cid describes their meeting (albeit placing it, in defiance of the historical record, some six years later). Rodrigo has sent Alfonso a rich present, two hundred horses, each equipped with a saddle and a sword. Alfonso, well pleased, accepts them and sends word that he is ready to take Rodrigo back into his favor. A rendezvous is arranged on neutral territory—an honor to the Cid, it being usual for a vassal to attend the king wherever he was holding his court. Each of the principals arrives attended by a great retinue. “Many were the sturdy mules, fine palfreys and swift chargers. Great was the display of splendid armour, rich capes and fur tunics; all men high and low were dressed in gay colours.” When the Cid approaches, the king rides out to meet him, but Rodrigo orders his men to halt and then, dismounting, “he knelt down on his hands and knees on the ground and with his teeth he pulled up a mouthful of grass. With tears of joy streaming from his eyes he showed in this way his complete submission to his liege lord.”

  The ancient gesture of self-abasement, the ecstatic tears: this is the blissful reunion of a devoted servant with his master. The Rodrigo of the

  Poema de Mío Cid repeatedly sends Alfonso a share of his captured booty, assures him that “he would always serve him as long as he lived,” and declares, “I should not like to fight against my lord King Alfonso.” Those interpreters who have chosen to see him as unswervingly loyal to Castile and his king have believed the poet, representing the Cid as accepting Alfonso’s overtures after Sagrajas with rapturous relief. But there is a ballad which tells a different story about their reunion. Rodrigo, to Alfonso’s fury, agrees to serve him, but only for a handsome fee: “whose vassal I consent to be / Must pay me like the rest.” Once again the tough-talking ballad comes closer to the historical facts than the idealizing epic. Rodrigo persuaded his old master to reward him handsomely and in advance for the services he would be rendering. His sentence of banishment was lifted. He was granted overlordship of half a dozen castles with their lands and inhabitants, and according to the Historia Roderici Alfonso made the extraordinary concession that “all the lands or castles which he might acquire from the Saracens in the land of the Saracens should be absolutely his in full ownership.” Normally one-fifth of any plundered property was due to the king, and he would rule as overlord over any territory his vassals might annex in his name. Not so for Rodrigo Díaz. Under the deal he struck with Alfonso he was to have the right to conquer a kingdom for himself.

  For three years after their reconciliation Rodrigo served his king well enough for there to have been no further recorded fallings-out between them. In 1089 he was in the Levant, the east of Spain, collecting tribute and clashing once more with the coalition of al-Hayib and the count of Barcelona, when he received an urgent message from Alfonso: the Almoravids had returned to Spain and laid siege to Alfonso’s southern outpost at Aledo. Alfonso himself was on the march with all the troops he could muster. Rodrigo was to join him with all speed. Rodrigo duly set off southward with his army, heading, so he afterwards claimed, for the place where Alfonso had proposed they should join forces. Their meeting never took place.

  Rodrigo claimed that Alfonso had altered his route without informing him, that he had been waiting obediently at the appointed rendezvous while the king’s army passed by, unknown to him, miles to the west. But García Ordóñez, the grandee whom he had humiliated ten years before, and others accused him of treacherously and deliberately contriving that the king should go into battle undermanned. Alfonso was convinced. Rodrigo offered to swear to his innocence, drafting four versions of the oath that he would take. In case that was not enough he offered to submit to the judicial process of trial by combat, declaring himself ready “to do battle in your court against any man of all those who have accused Rodrigo of some treachery or guile, alleging that he would thereby have the Moors slay you and your army … These charges are lies, wicked, and false, and utterly untrue.” The king was not persuaded. Rodrigo’s property was confiscated, his wife and children imprisoned and kept for a while in chains, and he himself was banished once more.

  This time he did not seek a new master. In the Levant, during the previous year, he had exacted tribute on Alfonso’s behalf. Now, as an independent warlord owing allegiance to no one, he returned to the same territory, intent this time on making a fortune not for his master but for himself. With his estates once more forfeit, he urgently needed money to buy the loyalty of the fighting men on whom his personal power depended.

  When Alcibiades, like Rodrigo Díaz, was exiled for a second time, Plutarch relates that he “recruited a force of mercenaries and campaigned on his own account against the Thracian tribes…. He collected plenty of money from the prisoners he captured.” In the same way Rodrigo, denied the possibility of further advancement within the hierarchy of the community into which he had been born, fought thenceforward for no cause but his own gain and personal aggrandizement, using means that in later periods would brand him a land pirate, an armed robber, a gangster chief. Historians anxious to protect his reputation have performed extraordinary feats of intellectual contortionism in their attempts to defend him against the charge of cupidity; to his contemporaries no defense would have seemed necessary. The Rodrigo of the Poema de Mío Cid succinctly explains his way of life to the count of Barcelona:

  We keep alive by taking from you and from others:

  And while it pleases our Heavenly Father we shall continue thus.

  In the Poema he attacks towns full of noncombatants without any kind of provocation, solely for the sake of enriching himself and his followers. He appropriates gold and silver and rich garments. He rounds up and drives off sheep and cattle. He captures people and exchanges them for money, making “a great gain” sometimes by taking ransom from their relatives, sometimes by selling them to slave traders. At Alcocer he slaughters so many of the inhabitants that not enough are left alive and at liberty to ransom those captured, and since cutting off the prisoners’ heads would be unprofitable he simply appropriates their houses and uses them as household slaves. He is not a crusader, not a chivalrous knight. He is a bandit, one who makes no pretense that his actions are in any way sanctioned by association with some higher good, be it the propagation of Christianity or the expansion of Castile. When the people of a city he is besieging march out against him he frankly recognizes that he has given them provocation. “We have settled in their land and are doing them all kinds of harm, drinking their wine and eating their bread, and they have every right to come and attack us. This cannot be decided without a fight.”

  Legends relate that he practiced fraud as well as robbery with violence. Like Odysseus, he is trickster and marauder at once. At the battle of Golpejera he had won a great victory for King Sancho by subterfuge and by violating the terms of an agreement. A story which appears in the Poema de Mío Cid and in several ballads tells how, on going into exile, he provides himself with cash with which to equip and feed his vassals by cheating a pair of Jewish moneylenders. He asks for a huge loan, offering as surety two chests which he claims contain golden treasure too heavy and too precious to be taken with him; in reality they are filled with nothing but sand. The moneylenders agree, and swear not to look into the chests for at least a year. The money is handed over. The man who acts as go-between in the deal accepts an agent’s fee of thirty silver coins (the traditional price of treachery), enough to buy a rich fur coat and a good cloak. Later in the poem the moneylenders reappear, asking rather plaintively when they are to be repaid. The Cid’s representative breezily promises them that they will be satisfied, but the poet does not bother to tell us whether they ever were. An iron-bound chest purporting to be one of the ones used in the scam is still shown to tourists in the Burgos cathedral. The story identifies the Cid as one of the cheating heroes of folklore. According to Ibn Bassam his favorites among the Arabic tales in which he delighted were those featuring Mohallab the Liar.

  The fourteenth-century monk Alvaro Pelayo inveighed against knights “becau
se they fight not for God but for booty, for their private interest and not for the common one,” but for those who sang of the Cid’s exploits in his lifetime his lack of concern for the “common interest” seemed normal and acceptable, while his growing wealth, regardless of the violent and dishonest means whereby he had got it, constituted his glory. Largesse, the generosity with which a great lord shared his booty with his followers, was the virtue to be cultivated above all others. And since largesse is practicable only for the rich man, and riches, for the knight, were to be acquired only by force, it is no wonder that, as a twelfth-century Provençal troubadour noted, “Now honour lies in stealing cattle, sheep and oxen, or pillaging churches and travellers.”

  Jesus Christ and Cato may each have taken pride in their poverty (genuine in Jesus’ case, assumed in Cato’s), but there’s a commoner kind of greatness which is made manifest by the wealth the grandee squanders. In fifth-century BC Athens Alcibiades demonstrated his standing and made his bid for power by spending lavishly on horse breeding and choruses. In Cato’s lifetime Pompey and Caesar vied with each other as to which could be seen to spend the most on the entertainment of the people; Crassus spent a tenth of his enormous fortune on a feast for the entire population of Rome, and Cato’s brother-in-law Lucullus gave another which made “Lucullan” a byword for extravagance two millennia later. In the Poema de Mío Cid Rodrigo Díaz is similarly munificent. He gives a great banquet: “one and all declared that for fully three years they had had no such meal.” His followers and friends, even the guests at his daughters’ wedding, all become rich men thanks to his fabulous generosity. He gives gold away almost as fast and in as tremendous quantities as he gets it. Even his appearance speaks eloquently of money. Warfare in the eleventh century was seriously bloody, but it was also spectacular. A knight advertised his prowess and his resulting wealth by equipping himself with the most glittering armor, the most gorgeous harness he could afford. A Latin song describes the Cid arming before a battle: his matchless coat of mail, his sword inlaid with gold, his shield worked with a golden dragon, his African charger, the fabulous warhorse Babieca, who flew like the wind and leapt like a deer. In the Poema de Mío Cid he wears wonderful clothes: fine stockings, elaborately worked shoes, a shirt as bright as the sun with clasps of silver and gold, cuff links of precious metal made to his own design, a brocade tunic worked with gold, a fur-lined crimson coat with gold buckles.

  In feudal society, material wealth—gold, silver, silks, horses, slaves, fine armor and weaponry—were not just the outward show of power. They were, or at least were capable of generating, the thing itself. The more a man got, the more he was seen to have, the greater he became. Beowulf, having slain two monsters and been appropriately rewarded, returns to his ships “proudly adorned in gold” and “exulting in his treasure,” not because of any ignoble greed but because a “treasure-giver” and “gold-guardian” could attract other adventurous young men to his following, and provided that he dispensed his gold hoard liberally he would be well served. For men’s loyalty had to be bought, their services in battle paid for. A man’s perceived stature depended on the number of his followers, and the size of his following depended on his ability to dispense gold.

  Besides, money could be used to buy everlasting life. Rodrigo’s contemporary Gonzalo Salvadórez bequeathed land to the monastery at Oña “in order that I may be remembered there for evermore.” In the Poema the Cid sends a boot full of gold to the monastery of Cardeña to pay for masses for the saving of his soul. Immortality, for which Achilles had had to lay down his life, could, in early medieval Europe, be bought for cash.

  Banished once more, with no liege lord to provide for him, Rodrigo Díaz urgently needed to demonstrate his ability to acquire riches. “Certain of his knights whom he had brought with him from Castile … returned to their homes,” notes the Historia Roderici. They must have doubted his ability to continue dispensing largesse. He soon proved their doubts ill founded. In the spring of 1090 he led his war band into the territory of King al-Hayib of Denia. He besieged and took a castle which was also al-Hayib’s treasury. In a cave within the walls Rodrigo found “much gold and silver and silk and innumerable precious stuffs.” His funds thus replenished, he moved on to settle menacingly close to Denia itself. Cowed, the king “agreed a peace” with him, presumably by paying him to leave. He then marched into the district of Valencia, demanding tribute from King al-Qadir, but also accepting “many and innumerable tributes and gifts” from other dignitaries. He was proving as efficient at intimidating his prey on his own account as he had been when acting on behalf of Castile or Zaragoza.

  In demanding tribute from other men’s tributaries, though, he had challenged his victims’ established overlords. Al-Hayib turned for help to his “protector,” Count Berenguer of Barcelona. Once again the Cid, whose campaign in the east has been represented as an attempt to Christianize the area and make it impregnable to Almoravid attack, found himself confronting a Christian opponent.

  They met in the mountains. Rodrigo was encamped high up. Berenguer took some of his troops even higher and attacked him from both sides at once. A desperate battle ensued. Rodrigo fell from his horse and was badly wounded, but he fought on and by the end of the day he had won what the Historia Roderici calls “a victory ever to be extolled and remembered.” The enemy’s camp was plundered and Count Berenguer taken captive, along with “many other most noble men,” all of whom were ransomed. Al-Musta’in of Zaragoza, Rodrigo’s former employer, who had remained neutral in this dispute, negotiated a settlement which resulted in Berenguer not only paying a vast sum of money to Rodrigo but also ceding to him the “protection” of the Muslim territories of the Levant over which he had previously considered himself overlord. It was less than a year since Rodrigo had been cast out from Alfonso’s favor. Already he had not only made himself a fabulously rich man, he had established a power base for himself which assured him further enormous revenues in tribute. “I am Ruy Díaz de Vivar, the Cid Campeador!” cries Rodrigo as he hurtles into battle in the Poema de Mío Cid. His war cry proudly calls attention to himself, not as commander of an army, certainly not as a citizen of a state or the subject of a monarch, but as a superb and self-sufficient individual. By 1091 he had no further need of a king.

  A king, however, had need of him. The Almoravids were becoming increasingly aggressive and expansionist. They had entered Spain initially to defend the Islamic kingdoms in the south from Christian intimidation. Now they began to devour those very kingdoms. As Yusuf’s devoted admirer Ibn Bassam records, he “drove those petty kings off their thrones as the sun drives off the stars.” One after another Granada, Seville, Córdoba, Málaga, and Almería fell to him. Their kings were imprisoned or sent into exile in Morocco, their treasures were plundered, their people subjected to the African conquerors. This invasion, presented both by its perpetrators and their opponents as a kind of holy war, had as its first victims the invaders’ co-religionists.

  In 1091 Alfonso resolved to halt Yusuf’s advance. Rodrigo’s remaining friends in Castile urged him to join forces with his former king. The queen herself wrote to him—although it appears that the king did not. Like Alcibiades the Cid was twice-banished, and like Alcibiades he was still, all the same, the man his compatriots looked to to save them and secure them victory. Rodrigo allowed himself to be persuaded. He joined Alfonso near Granada. Almost at once there was trouble between the king and his supposed subject. Their combined armies encamped within sight of the city, Rodrigo taking his troops further forward than the king’s in order, according to his apologists, to protect his royal master from a surprise attack. To Alfonso it appeared that in positioning himself in advance Rodrigo was claiming precedence over his former lord. The chronicles describe his calling on his courtiers to “see how Rodrigo insults and affronts us!” The Almoravids refused to come out and fight. After a few days the Christian armies withdrew and marched north. They stopped en route at Ubeda. Rodrigo’s choice of camp
site again seemed like a mute assertion of superiority. This time the king could not, or rather had no further need to, contain his anger. When Rodrigo came to visit his tent he abused him violently and accused him, in the words of the Historia Roderici, of “many and various things.”

  Rodrigo Díaz and the king of Castile could no longer meet without challenging each other. As Agamemnon is infuriated by Achilles’ assertion that he, the charismatic warrior, is as great as or greater than the acknowledged king, so Alfonso was provoked by the magnificence of this former vassal, whose standing as a self-made grandee called into question the inviolability of his own inherited supremacy. Alcibiades, even before his first banishment, had grown too great to be easily and safely accommodated within the state of which he was supposed to form part. By the time he returned to Athens in 406 BC the grandeur of his reputation threatened the stability of the democracy. It was against similarly outsize individuals that Cato had spoken so passionately, foreseeing any state obliged to include them would inevitably capsize under the weight of their inordinate greatness. The author of the Historia Roderici alleges that King Alfonso was so envious of the Cid’s prestige that he lost control of his senses. That “envy” must have been reinforced by an awareness that Rodrigo, by now effective overlord of much of eastern Spain and backed, as Caesar and Pompey had each been, by a large army flushed with its successes and owing loyalty only to him, was a force too volatile and too potent to be readmitted to Castile. The Cid was a useful ally in extremity. The crisis past, he was best kept at arm’s length.