He never ceased fighting. The poet Ibn Khafaja voiced the people’s unhappiness under their conqueror’s rule in his lament for Valencia:
Swords have brought ruin on you, oh dwellings …
One’s thoughts are stirred, one weeps and weeps.
Rodrigo ruled not by the consent of his new subjects but by constant vigilance and the frequent employment of force. He was never secure. ‘Abd Allah of Granada, writing his memoirs shortly after the Cid’s great victory at Cuarte, left a gap in the text for recording the Muslim reconquest of Valencia that he was confident could not be far off.
Repeatedly Rodrigo succeeded in postponing it. In 1097 he once again confronted a Almoravid army led against him by Muhammad and once again he was victorious. Ibn Bassam paid furious tribute: “Victory always followed the banner of Rodrigo (God curse him!).” Later in that year he besieged and captured Almenara. In the spring of 1098 he laid siege to the grimly magnificent mountain fortress of Murviedro. Desperate, the inhabitants appealed for help to a number of grandees (including Alfonso, Rodrigo’s erstwhile king), but no help came. By this time the Cid’s reputation was so formidable that it did his fighting for him. Al-Musta’in of Zaragoza, his one-time employer, told the envoys from Murviedro, “Rodrigo is full of guile and a most mighty and invincible warrior,” and refused to take him on. The count of Barcelona sent a similar message but offered to cause a diversion by besieging Oropesa. But as soon as the count heard a report (unfounded) that the Cid was marching towards him he lifted his siege and withdrew. A reputation for invincibility is often self-fulfilling. Not only could no one defeat the Cid, by this stage in his life no one wished to try. The people of Murviedro surrendered. Rodrigo ordered them to evacuate the citadel. They did so trusting, foolishly, to his clemency. Ruthless and rapacious as ever, he entered the city, celebrated a mass, and then rounded up the citizens, confiscated all of their possessions, and sent them back to Valencia in chains.
It was his last victory. In 1099 he died at Valencia. He was in his late fifties. “While he lived in this world,” wrote the author of the Historia Roderici, “he always won a noble triumph over his enemies: never was he defeated by any man.” Three years later his wife Jimena, who had assumed command of his troops and held out against a besieging Almoravid army for nearly a year, abandoned Valencia, taking with her the Cid’s treasure, the spoils of so many battles, and the Cid’s corpse. According to one of the chronicles the Almoravids did not dare to take possession of the undefended city until they found an inscription confirming that the invincible Rodrigo Díaz was truly dead.
When they did they were appalled by what they found. On leaving, Jimena had set fire to the city. “The plight in which they have left Valencia is enough to daze all who have set eyes on her, and plunge them into silent and gloomy thought,” wrote Ibn Tahir. “She is still clad in the dark mourning in which they left her. A veil still shrouds her face. Her heart yet beats beneath the burning embers, and it is shaken with sobs.”
Rodrigo’s body was taken back to Castile and buried at the monastery of Cardeña. There it spawned stories. When, nearly two centuries later, King Alfonso X paid a visit to Cardeña he was presented with a book in which the monks summarized for their royal master the pious legends which had grown up around the corpse of Rodrigo Díaz. The Cid, they related, was forewarned of his death by St. Peter, who appeared to him in a dream. When he had only seven more days to live he renounced all food, taking nothing each day but a spoonful each of some myrrh and balm which had been given him by the shah of Persia “until his flesh became fair and fresh as his strength slowly ebbed.” Thus embalmed premortem, he died. Following his directions Jimena and his lieutenants kept his death secret so that no word might reach the Almoravids to embolden them, and so that his body might safely be taken back to Castile. They strapped the Cid’s embalmed body, dressed as though for battle in full armor, helmet, and boots, upright in the saddle of his marvelous horse Babieca. His eyes were open, as though in life. Escorted by Jimena and a troop of a hundred knights, the dead Cid made his last ride back to Castile, the country from which he was three times exiled but which claimed him, once he was no longer alive to assert his independence, as its national hero, and back, semipagan that he was, into the keeping of the Church.
In 1095, four years before Rodrigo Díaz’s death, Pope Urban had called upon all Christendom to join the First Crusade, using terms which made plain that he, at least, was under no illusions about the nature of the medieval knight: “You oppressors of orphans, you robbers of widows. You hope for the rewards of brigands for the shedding of Christian blood. As vultures nose out corpses you watch and follow wars.” He was offering them the opportunity to redeem themselves. “Let those who have been robbers now be soldiers of Christ. … Let those who have been hirelings for a few pieces of silver now attain an eternal reward.”
The crusade was, among other things, a way of sending into voluntary exile thousands of fighting men. The mercenaries—warriors who in supplying a demand created it, generating an endless sequence of petty wars between lords rich enough to hire them—and the knightly robbers who lived like Rodrigo Díaz by “taking from others what we need to live,” were alike intolerably disruptive of civil society. “In our own time,” wrote Guibert de Nogent, “God has instituted a Holy War, so that the order of knights and the unstable multitude who used to engage in mutual slaughter in the manner of ancient paganism may find a new way of winning salvation, so that now they may seek God’s grace in their wonted habit.” The “habit” of violence, so long as it was directed towards the enemies of Christendom, could be redeemed and valorized. The caste of warriors, long looked at askance by the clergy of an essentially pacifist religion, were at last to be allowed to have it both ways. “Behold,” wrote the crusader poet Aymer de Pegulham, jubilantly celebrating the new militant theology of the crusader, “[w]ithout renouncing our rich garments, our station in life, all that pleases and charms, we can obtain both honour down here and joy in paradise.” The Cid’s posthumous transformation from mercenary warlord into the legendary champion of the Christian faith parallels the reclamation of the thousands of knightserrant throughout Europe who were, in actual fact and in their own lifetimes, being appropriated for the services of the Church. It was not only Rodrigo Díaz whose reputation was laundered and whose life reinterpreted in the generation after his death, but the whole of his caste.
The Spanish settlement of Santiago, Cuba, November 1518, nearly half a millennium after the lifetime of the Cid. Hernán Cortés, aged thirty-three, was assembling men, ships, and provisions for an expedition to the unexplored American mainland. At the same time he was preparing himself for the role of leader. “He began to polish and adorn his person,” writes Bernal Díaz, who was one of his recruits. “He donned a plumed hat with a gold medal and chain, and a coat of velvet sown all over with gold knots.” The governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, had instructed him to explore the coast, to make contact with the natives, and, if possible, to barter with them. Cortés had more ambitious plans. He had it defiantly proclaimed to the sound of drums and trumpets that he was seeking men to come with him to discover, conquer, and settle new lands. Governor Velázquez kept a jester named Mad Cervantes, who was at least sane enough to see what was observable by all: “Have a care, master Velázquez,” he taunted his master, “or we shall have to go a-hunting; some day or other, after this same captain of ours.” Cortés learned that the governor was about to revoke his commission. He resolved to leave first. His fleet was not yet properly provisioned but he bribed the official in charge of the town’s meat supply to hand over his entire stock and he ordered his men aboard. They sailed under cover of darkness. Next morning, when the ships were well out to sea, Cortés had himself rowed back in a boat full of heavily armed men to within shouting distance of the shore. Velázquez was on the waterfront. Cortés yelled, “Forgive me sir, but such things must be done rather than thought.” Then he was rowed away, leaving Velázqu
ez to issue futile orders for his arrest. The history of the conquest of Mexico begins with an act of revolt.
For the next four years Cortés was repeatedly obliged to fight, buy off, or suborn parties of Spaniards sent out in pursuit of him in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. When the conquistador and his men invaded the empire of the Aztecs they were (although Cortés took care that not many of them should fully comprehend it) outcasts from their own community, operating outside the law. For a few months after Cortés marched into the city of Mexico, leveling its houses and killing its people until the silence hanging over the ruins was so sinister and so absolute that his men felt as if they had all suddenly gone deaf, he lorded it over all the vast territories he had conquered. But within months he had lost the character of master, in which he had been so successful, and reacquired that of vassal against which he had so audaciously rebelled. Ships began to arrive from Spain, carrying His Majesty’s notaries, His Majesty’s Treasurer and Accountant, His Majesty’s Factor and Overseer.
Cortés once compared himself, with some justice, to Julius Caesar, but he neither could nor would cross the Rubicon and defy established authority. Instead, in an abject attempt to reinsert himself into the hierarchy from which he had broken away, he strove to present himself as one fit not to command, but to serve; one who would never, like Rodrigo Díaz, pitch his camp where it seemed to take precedence over his sovereign’s, or like Alcibiades parade his personal splendor in such a way as to make the state to which he was subject appear shabby by comparison. “What I have desired above all else in the world is to make my fidelity and obedience known to your Majesty,” he wrote. His professed meekness did him little good. He found himself demoted from conqueror to civil servant. He lost his authority, his army, even eventually his house, and ended his life wretchedly, tagging around Europe after the emperor pleading for money and honors, and above all for the recognition that Mexico was his. Cruelly but consistently, Charles withheld that recognition.
It was customary among the sixteenth-century Spanish colonists to mark their first arrival in the Americas by dedicating a mass to the memory of the Cid. As they made their way into the brand-new American world, Cortés’s men used to hearten themselves at night by singing or reciting snatches from the ballads celebrating the exploits of that other outcast, Rodrigo Díaz, who, half a millennium before had defied his monarch and ridden off into the badlands to conquer a country for himself. But the world had changed and shrunk in those five hundred years. Even a newly discovered continent was not far enough from the Hapsburg emperor’s court to permit a subject to grow into a king. No conquest undertaken for him would ever belong to the conquistador, not in the sense that Valencia had belonged to the Cid.
Rodrigo Díaz has been remembered in many ways—quintessential Spaniard, Christian champion, battle-winning corpse—but the nub of his legendary story is always the brightness of his wonderful luck. Born in a happy hour, he is blessed with all the attributes he needs to achieve—as Cortés could not—the fulfillment of his every ambition. The Poema de Mío Cid describes him sleeping one day on a couch at the center of his great hall when a caged lion gets loose. Two princes panic and hide, one behind a winepress or in the latrine, the other under the Cid’s couch. The Cid wakes, rises coolly, and “with his cloak on his shoulders” (a sign of his courage this—everyone else present has wrapped his cloak about his arm to make a shield) walks over to the lion, who immediately acknowledges his mastery. The implication is clear. In one of the ballads the watching people cry out, “We see two lions here … and the bravest is the Cid.” The Cid is by nature a king among men as the lion is a king among animals. Torrentially bearded, savage and haughty as a predatory beast, outcast from his homeland, he is as free of social constraints as a human can be, as free as Achilles on his rampage. He is beholden to no patron. He defers to no master. He kicks over the Pope’s chair. He plucks the proud count’s beard. He quarrels with his king. He drives his enemies before him. He is unrestrained by law or morality. Born in a happy hour, he epitomizes the felicity of perfect freedom. “Franchise,” exemption from any form of servitude or obligation, was, according to the feudal and later the chivalric code, one of the attributes of the nobleman, but in a world where almost everyone owed allegiance to someone else the independence without which it was unattainable was a rare and wonderful thing. The Cid, self-created lord of his own city, achieved it, escaping the constraints of the normal human condition to become a godlike beast. “Oh God!” exclaims one of the ballads. “How the hearts of the lion and the eagle are united in this beautiful man!”
V
FRANCIS DRAKE
In 1581 Queen Elizabeth of England went down to Deptford and boarded Francis Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, recently returned from sailing all around the world. After a banquet described by one of the guests as “finer than has ever been seen in England since the time of King Henry,” the queen produced a gilded sword. She had brought it, she told Drake, “to strike off his head.”
It was a joke—the sword was used instead to dub Drake knight—but it was a deliberately menacing one. Drake had come home with a shipload of stolen treasure. Queen and sea captain were equally well aware that she might have, could have, and in many influential people’s opinion should have had him put to death. The man who had just become, and has remained, one of England’s favorite heroes was a barefaced criminal. Rodrigo Díaz robbed others in accordance with a code of conduct accepted in his time and place. Drake’s thefts were more outrageous, unsanctioned, even in his own day, either by international law or conventional morality. Yet not only did he get away with them, they won him the admiration of all Europe.
His stealing was done openly and with a swagger. The English authorities seldom censured him for it (although Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley, refused to shake his hand), and the majority of his fellow countrymen enjoyed it lustily, acclaiming him “the master-thief of the unknown world.” Versions of his story written when England was again under threat of invasion, first by Napoleon and later by Hitler, have redefined him against the grain of historical fact as his country’s protector, saving England, liberty, true religion, and good Queen Bess by repelling the Armada, but to his contemporaries he was not a guardian but a predator, one celebrated for outrages against other people’s property rights.
Another joke. A hatch door from the Golden Hind has been preserved in London’s Inns of Court. All British lawyers, on being admitted to the bar, make their oaths over it. In treating a piece of salvage from his ship as a secular relic the upholders of legality are honoring a hostage taker and slave trader, a contrabandist, a burner of towns and kidnapper of persons, a hijacker of ships and stealer of bullion, one who in his later years served his country as a naval commander but who won his fame and made his fortune in his first, and generally more successful, career as a self-employed pirate. This time the joker is not Drake himself but time, which has distorted and prettified his image until the legal profession is ready to accept as a saint a man who once said, “I have not to do with you crafty lawyers—neither care I for the law, but I know what I will do.” What he did on that occasion was to put to death a man who had once been his closest friend. What he went on to do was to steal enough gold, jewels, silks, and silver to pay off the national debt, equip an army, and make himself rich.
He was not interested in death and destruction. Achilles’ glamour is at its most intense when it is most lethal, when he is vaunting his tally of victims, howling out his war cry as he drives his chariot over the bloody corpses of his prey. Drake would not have wasted his time so unprofitably. He was responsible for the death of thousands of men, but they were nearly all of them men under his command, the wretched soldiers and sailors who succumbed to disease on his voyages. His enemies he seldom killed. Why should he? A corpse was valueless; a ransomable prisoner was a source of income. Nor did he have much appetite for the wholesale destruction commonplace in warfare. He might set a ship adrift
; he would certainly strip it of every movable and salable object it carried, but he seldom and only reluctantly destroyed one, even when his queen had expressly commanded him to do so, even when his country’s security depended on the disabling of an enemy fleet. He was adopted retrospectively as a patriotic hero, but repeatedly, throughout his career, he neglected or deliberately turned away from actions which would have been of benefit to his country in order to pursue a profit. He was neither an ancient warrior avid for glory, nor a munificent liege lord like the Cid. He was a commercial adventurer, fit hero for a nation of shopkeepers.
“Drake is a man of medium stature, blonde, rather heavy than slender, merry, careful… He punishes resolutely. Sharp, restless, well-spoken, inclined to liberality and to ambition, vainglorious, boastful, not very cruel.” So he was described by a Spanish official in Santo Domingo who had abundant opportunity to observe him in the course of their protracted haggling over the sum of money (what Rodrigo Díaz would have called “tribute”) Drake had demanded for doing the Spanish colonists the favor of refraining from demolishing their town. The annalist John Stow, who also knew him personally, confirms several points of the description, notably the merriment: “He was low of stature, of strong limbs, broad breasted, round headed … fair and of a cheerful countenance.” Drake’s special brand of humor is the keynote of his legendary character and his most seductive characteristic. Cato was admired for his impassivity and rigid self-control. In Drake’s famous jokes the godlike imperturbability of the Stoic hero is employed as a teasing strategy. He is one of the prime exemplars of a personal style which has seldom been out of fashion from his day to ours. Four centuries later Charles Baudelaire dubbed it dandyism and described it: “It is the delight in causing astonishment, and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished. A dandy may be indifferent, or he may be unhappy; but in the latter case he will smile like the Spartan under the teeth of the fox.” That was Drake’s way. Jocular, laconic, bragging by understatement, never letting on to being intimidated by his enemy’s might or astonished by his own good fortune, Francis Drake was cool.
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