Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  There were, besides, indeed “many and various things” of which Alfonso might accuse him. In demanding tribute from al-Qadir, previously Alfonso’s client, he was trespassing on his king’s claims. Some of the chronicles and ballads suggest that in the last years of his life the Cid was still working on Alfonso’s behalf, albeit building an independent principality for himself in Muslim territory (as Alfonso, desperately wooing him after the battle of Sagrajas, had specifically decreed he might). He is reported to have annexed cities in the king’s name and to have dutifully shared all his takings with his royal master. So he is exonerated; even Alvaro Pelayo, the acerbic critic of knights-errant, was ready to forgive their acts of violence and robbery so long as they were undertaken in the service of a superior lord. The historical Rodrigo Díaz sometimes helped, sometimes hindered Alfonso in the enlargement of his kingdom, but the legendary Cid was remembered as his right-hand man, a subordinate as loyal as he was effective, the instrument whereby the monarch consolidated his rule. Even as late as 1992 a Spanish historian could write about “the Cid’s mission to put an end to the fragmentation of feudal power in mediaeval Spanish society and make wars for the establishment of a centralised monarchy.” The man three times banished for failing to abase himself as a subject, whose personal power was such a menace to his king’s that the monarchical state could only preserve itself by ejecting him, is remembered as the creator of the very institution he threatened to destroy from within.

  Perhaps Rodrigo Díaz did send Alfonso gifts, but if he did so his motives were not exactly those of a loyal servant. The Poema reports that he sent Alfonso the king of Morocco’s richly decorated tent supported on two golden poles “so the King may believe the rumours he hears of the Cid’s great wealth”: the offering is not a token of obeisance but a display of his own independent grandeur. At Ubeda neither king nor Campeador acted towards each other in a way proper to allies, let alone to those bound to each other as lord and vassal. Alfonso, furious, ordered Rodrigo’s arrest. Before the order could be carried out the Cid had marched away. The two were never to meet again.

  At the center of Rodrigo Díaz’s chosen field of operations in eastern Spain was the Muslim kingdom of Valencia. A seaport set in a fertile plain, Valencia was a rich prize. Alfonso had installed al-Qadir, the former king of Toledo, as its ruler, and extorted punitive levels of tribute from him in exchange for the favor, but the year after his quarrel with Rodrigo at Ubeda Alfonso set out to conquer it for himself, thus challenging Rodrigo on his own territory. Rodrigo responded promptly and with shocking ferocity.

  In the ballads and legends the image of the Cid as a wise arbiter alternates with another, that of a man capable of extreme violence. There is a story about his early life which forms the theme of numerous medieval ballads. In it the aged Diego Laínez quarrels with a neighboring nobleman, the count of Gormaz. Laínez is too infirm to fight for himself. He needs a champion. Calling his sons, he puts them each to the test. According to one version of the story he bites their fingers until they scream with pain; according to another he ties their hands and pulls the cords so cruelly tight it causes them agony. One by one his elder sons beg him to release them but the youngest, Rodrigo, reacts with the ferocity of a tiger. His eyes burn and fill with blood. His cheeks flush. If Diego were not his father, he says, he would use his finger as a dagger to rip the old man’s belly open and tear out his entrails with his bare hands. Diego Laínez weeps with joy to find his child so savage. Rodrigo kills the count of Gormaz and brings his father, who is sitting down to dinner, the count’s severed head, brandishing it before him with the words “the bitter herb will make thy banquet sweet.”

  Rodrigo Díaz had at least some of the cruelty and the capacity for ruthless destruction ascribed to him by the balladeers; the count of Barcelona, who frequently encountered him as an enemy, accused him of gross brutality. After Alfonso’s attempt on Valencia he invaded Castile as a reprisal, choosing as his point of entry territory belonging to his old enemy García Ordóñez. The Historia Roderici describes his raid. At the head of a “very great and innumerable army, most savagely and mercilessly throughout these regions did he lay waste with relentless, destructive, irreligious fire. He took huge booty, yet it was saddening even to tears. With harsh and impious devastation did he lay waste and destroy all the land aforesaid. He altogether stripped it of all its goods and wealth and riches, and took these for himself.” This is the man who is credited with having, with saintly forbearance and loyalty, refused all his life long to make war on Castile or Castile’s king.

  Alfonso, diverted by Rodrigo’s assault, retreated from Valencia. Within months another threat appeared. An Almoravid army, commanded by Yusuf’s son Aisa, was advancing steadily northward up the east coast towards Valencia. In October 1092 a small party of them entered the city at the invitation of the chief magistrate, the qadi, Ibn Jahhaf, to lend him support in a coup d’état. With their help he seized power from the wretched King al-Qadir, who attempted to escape disguised as a woman but was captured and decapitated. His head was paraded through the streets on a pole. His body was thrown in a pond. If Rodrigo Díaz could not swiftly make the city his own he was likely to lose control of the region altogether.

  In the summer of 1093, presenting himself as the avenger of King al-Qadir—many of whose followers had joined his army—and the defender of legitimate authority, he began his siege of Valencia. He established strongholds to the north and south of the city and laid waste the surrounding countryside, burning crops and driving off cattle. He sent word to Ibn Jahhaf, demanding the release of a large quantity of grain he had earlier left in storage in the city, and when the qadi replied that the grain was now his and that he answered only to the Almoravid king, Rodrigo wrote again. “He swore by great oaths that he would not move from before Valencia until he had had his rights and had avenged the murder of al-Qadir upon Ibn Jahhaf’s person.” He provisioned his troops by terrorizing the governors of Valencia’s outlying fortresses into handing over all they had. He sent out armed horsemen to raid the suburbs of the town and intimidate the citizens. He burned the ships in the river, the windmills, the surrounding villages.

  The Valencians implored the Almoravids to send an army to relieve them. In the words of Ibn ‘Alqama, who was an eyewitness to the siege, they longed for it to come, “as the sick man longs for health,” but when it arrived “by God’s will,” it withdrew without giving battle, presumably because Yusuf had underestimated the Cid’s strength and sent an insufficient force. When the people of Valencia saw it marching away, according to a chronicle, “they counted themselves as already dead. They were as though drunk. They no longer understood what was said to them. Their faces became as black as pitch.”

  The siege became more rigorous. In the words of Ibn Bassam: “That tyrant Rodrigo, whom God curse … fastened on that city as a creditor fastens on a debtor, he loved it as a lover loves the place where he has tasted the joys of love…. He deprived [Valencia] of the necessities of life, killed its defenders, brought all kinds of evil upon it and rose up against it on every surrounding hill.” No one went in or out. Those who attempted to leave the surrounding villages were captured on Rodrigo Díaz’s orders and they and their families sold to slavers. Within the city, the people slowly starved. The rich ate horsemeat or “foul beasts” when they could get them and when they could not chewed on leather. The poor, according to Ibn ‘Alqama, resorted to cannibalism. “They ate rats, cats and human corpses. They fell upon a Christian who fell in the ditch encircling the city, dragged him up by the arm and shared out his flesh.” Ibn ‘Alqama reports that fugitives were mutilated on Rodrigo’s orders, their eyes put out, their hands cut off, their legs broken. Others were torn to pieces by dogs, or burned to death in sight of those watching from the city wall. At last Ibn Jahhaf, seeing that there was no further help to be hoped for from the Almoravids, capitulated. Nearly a year after Rodrigo Díaz’s army had first sat down before the walls of the city its gates were op
ened and the people of Valencia, those who were left alive, came out, desperate to find food. “By the look of them,” says the chronicler, “one might have thought these wretches were issuing from the grave.”

  Rodrigo’s terms were lenient. Ibn Jahhaf would continue to govern the city. He himself would not enter it, but establish his quarters in a nearby suburb. His Christian followers were under orders to respect the Valencian Muslims and the Valencians were given permission to kill anyone of the conquering force who molested them within the city. The walls would be guarded not by Castilians but by Mozarabic Christians. All estates would be restored to their rightful owners. “The moors,” says the chronicler, “said that they had never seen so excellent or so honourable a man, nor one whose army was better disciplined.”

  “I hate that man like death itself who says one thing and means another,” says Achilles. It was Cato’s unswerving integrity, his absolute inability to seem anything other than what he was, that made him godlike. Honesty is an heroic virtue, especially honesty of the kind which manifests itself in absolute self-consistency, in a perfect match between what is said and what is done. The Poema de Mío Cid describes Rodrigo as one who would not change his mind for anything in the world, who never in his life went back on his word. But in the words of Ibn Bassam, when Rodrigo took Valencia he did so “using fraud, as was his custom.” The terms of the peace treaty, so generous and conciliatory, were broken, one by one.

  On June 15, 1094, Rodrigo Díaz entered Valencia (as he had promised he would not) and took for his own use its royal palace. According to the fourteenth-century chronicles he summoned the noblemen of the city to a garden and addressed them from a dais adorned with rich rugs in words which made explicit the fact that he had taken their city not for Castile or Christ, but for himself. “I am a man who has never possessed a kingdom, nor has any of my lineage. But from the day I came to this city I set my heart on it, I coveted its possession, and prayed God to grant it to me. See how great is the power of God!” Not great enough, however, to grant the second prayer Rodrigo is said to have uttered on this occasion: “God shield me from doing violence to anyone that I might have that which does not belong to me.”

  It was almost immediately evident that his promise to restore all Valencian property to its previous owners was not compatible with his other promise, that he would make all of his retainers rich men. “When my Cid took Valencia and entered the city,” writes the author of the Poema de Mío Cid, “those who had gone on foot became knights on horses; / and who could count the gold and the silver? / All were rich, as many as were there.” The besiegers made their fortunes only by the city’s inhabitants losing theirs. In order to maintain his own greatness Rodrigo Díaz promptly and shamelessly broke the promises he had made.

  “He began to extort enormous sums in tribute from Muslims, and to raid their estates,” writes Ibn ‘Alqama. He summoned all the richest men in the city to his palace and then held them prisoner there until they paid over vast sums in ransom. He told them: “You are mine to do with as I will… I could take your possessions, your children, wives, everything.” Ibn ‘Alqama reports that Rodrigo appointed Jewish tax gatherers to harass the well-to-do citizens with demands which they dared not deny. “Each Muslim had at his heels a police agent who accompanied him every morning to ensure that he contribute something to the treasure chest of the master of Valencia. If he failed to do this he was killed or tortured.” The Cid seemed determined to make all the wealth of Valencia his.

  Relations between the Muslim inhabitants of Valencia and the Christian conquerors were at best edgily suspicious, at worst downright murderous. Eventually Rodrigo decided, as Cato had at Utica, that he had to get rid of the city’s men of fighting age. One day the citizens were required to hand over all their weapons and metal implements, right down to their needles and nails, and on the next the entire population was ordered down to the waterfront. There they were herded into two groups. Women, children, and the older and weaker men were allowed to return home. Those young men who were physically fit and had a combative air were banished—or perhaps worse. It was rumored they were all killed. More probably Rodrigo sold them to the slave merchants who had gathered like vultures around the troubled city. “If you could see Valencia now,” wrote Ibn Tahir, the former king of Murcia, who was living in retirement in Valencia

  you would lament for her, you would weep at her misfortune,

  For her sufferings have robbed her of her beauty,

  yes, even to the last trace of her moon and stars!

  Rodrigo had yet to lay his hands upon the treasure of the murdered King al-Qadir. That, or so he believed, was in the hands of the qadi, Ibn Jahhaf. Under the terms of the surrender the qadi was to continue as the city’s governor, with the Cid’s assurance that he had nothing to fear: another promise made only to be broken. Within weeks the qadi had been imprisoned, along with all of his family. Rodrigo had him repeatedly interrogated and tortured. According to Ibn Bassam he made him swear, formally and before witnesses, that he had retained none of the treasure, with the penalty that if he were subsequently found to have been concealing any of it the Cid would have the right to spill his blood. Shortly thereafter he found some of the dead king’s valuables in the qadi’s possession. “Or at least,” writes Ibn Bassam, “he claimed he had.” Ibn Jahhaf was tried for the crime of killing his king, and on being declared guilty he was burned alive. According to an eyewitness, he was buried up to his armpits in a ditch and a fire was built around him. “Once the fire had been lit he pulled the burning brands closer to his body, in order to hasten his death and cut short his sufferings.” Rodrigo’s own men were appalled by the cruelty of the execution. One of them succeeded with difficulty in dissuading the Cid from executing Ibn Jahhaf’s women and children by the same method.

  Besieged and starving, the Valencians had watched in vain for an Almoravid army. At last, in October 1094, four months after the city had capitulated to the Cid, that army arrived and the besieger found himself besieged. The Almoravid force far outnumbered Rodrigo’s troops. Yusuf had dispatched troops from Morocco as well as levying reinforcements from the conquered kingdoms of southern Spain. His nephew Muhammad was in command and had orders to take the Cid alive and bring him back in chains. The Mozarabic Christians of Valencia, convinced that an Almoravid victory was imminent, hastened to befriend their Muslim neighbors. For ten days the Almoravids circled the city, firing arrows over the walls, “shrieking and shouting with a motley clamour of voices, filling the air with their bellowing” and beating their terrible drums.

  It is at this moment in his career that the Cid appeared to posterity to be at his grandest and most tragic. He is surrounded on all sides by his enemies. He has no allies to call upon. Like Cato in Utica he prepares to hold out alone against an aggressor who threatens not only to kill him and all his followers but also to destroy the culture he is fighting to protect. “He stands out in majestic isolation before the immense Almoravide empire,” writes Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the hugely influential early twentieth century nationalist historian who was largely responsible for synthesizing the legend of the Cid as the champion of Christendom and of the Spanish monarchy. Superbly alone, the Cid takes his place in the legendary pantheon of Christian warriors alongside Roland, whose opponents at Roncesvalles were actually Christian Basque separatists but whose legend tells how he was outnumbered and cut down with all his companions by a vast and ferocious army of alien, godless Moors. Christian Westerners tend to narrate this part of his story as though the Cid and his men stand in a small circle of light surrounded by a vast darkness which threatens at any moment to engulf them. Like numerous sacrificial heroes of imperialism, from Cato’s contemporary Crassus, who was slaughtered with all his legions in the Parthian desert, to the nineteenth-century hero-victims, America’s Colonel Custer and Britain’s General Gordon, he prepares for a last stand against forces terrifying in their unfamiliarity. He is set to become a hero like Cato, one whose claim to g
reatness rests on the sorrow and the pity of his failure. In the 1961 film El Cid, from which most people nowadays derive their knowledge of him (on which Menéndez Pidal, by then in his nineties, was a consultant), he appears in the melancholy but exalted character of one who holds a beleaguered outpost of Christian civilization against the frightful hordes of the infidel, and who dies a noble and pathetic death in defense of his culture and in the service of his God.

  To Rodrigo Díaz’s contemporaries, though, his opponents were not aliens or savages but neighbors and competitors familiar from centuries of coexistence, and his story was not one of sacrifice and tragic failure but of splendid success. He was not killed in battle. He held Valencia against all comers until he died in his bed. In 1094 he led his troops out of the city and fell upon the Almoravids on the plain of Cuarte. “By God’s clemency” (according to the Historia Roderici), or thanks to the Cid’s wily tactics of splitting his forces and using one half as decoy while falling upon the enemy’s rear with the other, he won a resounding victory. The Almoravids retreated in panic, leaving behind a fabulous quantity of plunder, “much gold and silver, most precious textiles, chargers, palfreys and mules and various sorts of weaponry … provisions and treasures untold.” Rodrigo’s own share of the spoils included the fabulous sword called Tizon, Muhammad’s tent complete with golden tent posts, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners, whom he sold off as slaves. The Christians, avid for this glittering loot, neglected to pursue the retreating enemy, but there was no need. The enemy—that part of it which had not been captured—was gone. It was the first time an Almoravid army had been defeated: it was a famous victory. In Aragon a scribe dated a charter “the year when the Almoravides came to Valencia and Rodrigo Díaz defeated them and took captive all their troops.” Amid the ceaseless petty wars of the period, the Cid’s victory at Cuarte marked an epoch.