El Cid: Spain's Medieval Mercenary

Rodrigo Díaz - known as el Cid - lived a violently colourful life in 11th Century Spain. By turns an ambitious military leader, exile and brutal mercenary, after changing allegiances several times he carved out an independent principality. Join Dr. Eleanor Janega and Professor Nora Berend uncover the complexities behind El Cid's legacy, from his military prowess and strategic mind to his contested historical and mythological persona. They explore why el Cid is today considered a superhero; a quasi-saint and the 'spirit of Spain', according to military dictator Franco. Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega, edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign upHERE https://historyhit.com/subscription for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscription https://historyhit.com/subscribe You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 2:35Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

• 3:07Eleanor Janega?

  El Cid is one of those superstars of the medieval period. Just saying the name conjures up romantic ideas of a dashing military man on a white horse. All of that romance has been useful over the years, as Rodrigo Diaz was used as a sort of shibboleth for people who sought to apply their desired narrative to the medieval Iberian Peninsula. In the hands of those like the dictator Franco, he became a symbol of the inevitable and glorious mythical Reconquista. Others have seen his flexibility in employment as evidence of so-called convivancia and a sense of equality between religious groups in Hispania. But what we can learn from his life and the evidence available to us

• 3:50Eleanor Janega?

  is, as always, more complex and way more interesting than these simplifications can ever offer. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'm speaking with Nora Berend, professor of European history at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, and author of El Cid: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary, about mythmaking and the most famous mercenary in medieval Iberia.

• 4:19Eleanor Janega?

  Nora, thank you so much for joining us on Gone Medieval.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 4:24Eleanor Janega?

  I am absolutely over the moon to have you today because we are going to talk about one of my favorite characters from the medieval period. And I think this is a household name. But if I said to people Rodrigo Diaz, I don't think that would necessarily have the recognition that I would be expecting out of it. So instead, I will ask you a nice, open-ended question to start us off, which is, who is Il Cid?

• 4:53Speaker 05

  Okay, so as you said, he probably wasn't actually called to that while he was alive, although this is debated. But his name was definitely Rodrigo Diaz, or Rui Diaz. He was born probably in the 1040s. We don't know his birth date in an aristocratic family. He rose to prominence at the royal court. He became a very successful warrior. And this term Il Cid, according to some, the more traditional idea is that this was given him in kind of a recognition of his status by his Muslim subjects at some point, or maybe even his Muslim enemies. Cid comes from the Arabic Sayyid lord. So this is a

• 5:36Speaker 05

  kind of compound from vernacular and a term derived from Arabic. However, there's new research which suggests that actually this term was not directly from the Arabic, but it was already used in vernacular Castilian for nobles in the region. So actually, ironically, if it was a title that was used in his lifetime, then it was not unique. It was not as a recognition for his warrior quality, but it was a kind of designation for nobles. But whether this is the case or not is still kind of an open question.

• 6:11Eleanor Janega?

  Well, that's a very interesting open question, which sort of leads to my next one. So what kind of sources do we have to tell us about this character that, you know, we're not even sure about who's being called what? So how do we know about this guy?

• 6:25Speaker 05

  Yes, well, this is one of the problems for historians. There are a number of sources, but many of them are much later. So one of the most famous one, the Quama de Miostid, this big epic poem from the 13th century, was written way after his death, although some people try to claim that it was based on reliable oral evidence from his lifetime, but I think this is pretty much discounted. But there are some contemporary sources, a few charters. Fascinatingly, there is even a charter which bears his autograph signature, which is a donation to the bishopric of Valencia. And there's a charter from his wife, Herido Jimena, after he died.

• 7:08Speaker 05

  He is mentioned in all sorts of sources, including Arabic sources, during his lifetime or shortly after his death. There's also a very long chronicle, although it was written after his death, it's still closer to his lifetime and probably conserves kind of more authentic material about him. So in a sense, it's hard to reconstruct some aspects of his life. So for example, we don't know when he was born because we don't have any sources about that. So it's just guesswork. You know, when he appears in the sources, he must have been at least, you know, such and such an age and therefore he must have been born calculating backwards. So there are even some very basic facts we don't know. But then there are aspects of his life

• 7:51Speaker 05

  where we have even contradictory evidence from different sources.

• 7:56Eleanor Janega?

  I think that some of these sources, though, that come to us when we get them, the Valencia ones are pretty alright though, right? Because this is the area that he ends up ruling himself independently, no?

• 8:07Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. So after he became this successful warrior in the service of the king, first Sancho the Second and Alfonso the Sixth of Castile, he had kind of repeated run-ins with the king. He was exiled. He then returned, he was exiled again. So eventually, with a warrior band, so with loyal warriors, ended up conquering Valencia, which when he conquered, it was still deep in Muslim lands. And he held this until he died. And after that, still his widow, Jimena, also ruled Valencia for a few years before she had to evacuate. So these charters, both his and hers, come from this period when they ruled Valencia.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  So of course, after the fall of Valencia to Muslims, none of those sources remained in Valencia itself. But the bishop, Jerome Heronimo, ended up being given a different C in Salamanca. And so it's in the archives there that these charters survived. So the idea, which I think is, you know, seems to be convincing to me, is that he took charters with him, hoping maybe that one day he will be restored to Valencia to make sure that he had these, so that he could prove the claims of the bishop.

• 9:27Eleanor Janega?

  So this sort of moving around from Valencia de Zaragoza and the fact that El cid is able to sort of bounce between places as he gets exiled, tells us a little bit about what the lay of the land is on the Iberian Peninsula in the 11th century. And I, I think that this is difficult for people to get our heads around now because there's a sort of modern tendency to say, oh, you know, Spain, as though this was a one contiguous whole or that indeed that area has one culture even now, which it certainly doesn't. But I suppose for the benefit of our listeners, it's a good idea to sort of talk about what is happening in the 11th century on the Iberian Peninsula.

• 10:10Speaker 05

  Sure, and Spain, as we know, it did not exist, although Hispania, the geographical term from classical antiquity, did designate the, the whole area. But there was not one political unit. So after the Roman Empire fell, the Visigoths, one of these kind of people who settled in the Roman Empire, created a kingdom. So there was a Visigothic kingdom, which however, was conquered at the beginning of the 8th century, 711. It's often called a Muslim Congress, but it wasn't really. It was a Muslim-led Congress, but the population of the peninsula, well, these are of course just calculations by scholars, that we don't have statistics, but some things that even almost a century after the Congress,

• 10:54Speaker 05

  only about 8% of the population were Muslim. So the point is, this was politically Muslim-led, but the people who settled were not necessarily Muslims. But in any case, they created what is called Al-Andalus, which initially basically comprised most of the Iberian Peninsula. By the 11th century, this Al-Andalus, which had initially been part of a much larger empire, the Umayyad Empire, the center of which was in Syria, but then eventually it became sort of independent. The Umayyad Empire disintegrated and the Umayyads managed to create an independent first emirate, then caliphate in Al-Andalus. But then, in the early 11th century, so 1031,

• 11:38Speaker 05

  this Al-Andalus fragmented, fell apart into separate parts. Now, these parts are called the Taifas, so party kings. We can think of them more or less as city-states. So there was a city as a center and some territory around it. Initially, there were as many as 33 of these Taifas, but their rulers tried to extend their power to conquer neighboring Taifas. So the situation was extremely volatile and everyone was sort of trying to conquer whatever they could. Borders changed very, very frequently. And in the northern part of the peninsula, so the very north is very mountainous,

• 12:22Speaker 05

  and the conquerors in the 8th century very quickly withdrew from these areas because it had no importance to them. So that's where the first sort of Christian political unit, Christian Kingdom, emerged. And then, these Christian kingdoms also kind of multiplied. So what's probably very confusing for modern people is that we don't have any kind of stability of any states. So even if I talk about these Christian states, such as Leon or Castile, for example. Their borders kept changing. Sometimes two of these kingdoms could be united by the same ruler through marriage or inheritance.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  They could be divided again when a ruler died and left different parts of his kingdom to different sons. We might think that everyone wanted to create more centralized power, but that was not the case at all. So rulers were quite happy to actually divide their kingdoms between sons. So there was endless warfare and, as I say, just everything was changing all the time.

• 13:30Eleanor Janega?

  I think that this is such an important point because there is a tendency now to speak about this era and when we start to see these numbering Christian kingdoms come into view, to speak about the reconquista, which is a term that a lot of scholars have a problem with in terms of this because, you know, well, in the first place, Franco was a big fan of it. So therefore I don't like it. This is a matter of being stubborn. But I think it makes it too simple to a certain extent. You know, this idea that there was an easy way of looking at history as though, oh, yes, everyone simply pined for the Visigoths and we're waiting to take this area back when

• 14:13Eleanor Janega?

  really the reality is so much more complex than all of that.

• 14:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think when we talk about the reconquista, there are a couple of points, separate points in a way to make. So as you said, yes, indeed, the term is tainted by the use of Franco and sort of right wing and now extreme right wing political groups. The word itself is modern. So reconquista is a noun was never used in the medieval period. On the other hand, medieval charters, medieval chronicles do talk about recovering land, retaking land. So very similar idea. So the content in a sense is similar of some kind of religious warfare against Muslims to take land.

• 14:56Speaker 05

  We have these charters after various conquests of different cities or different areas when the victorious Christian ruler issues some kind Kind of privilege for the cathedral, for example. And repeatedly we find these kinds of terms of this area, this town was in the hands of these blasphemers for so many hundreds of years. And now I have recovered it and, you know, rededicated to the glory of God. So definitely the idea of retaking land was there. But it was a rhetoric that was used in, of course, ecclesiastical texts, written by ecclesiastical authors. But it was not the reality.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  So what I find very interesting is that there's a coexistence between this kind of rhetoric of religious war of Christians fighting against Muslims for religious reasons. But then on the ground, a much more complicated reality of Christians fighting against Christians, Muslims fighting against Muslims, Christians allying with Muslims and of course Muslims allying with Christians against other kind of combinations of Muslim-Christian alliances. So very often these wars and even battles that had been called a battle of the reconquista, in fact, pitted Muslims and Christians against each other on both sides. And obviously were not fought for religious reasons.

• 16:25Speaker 05

  And I think in the 11th century, a Christian ruler actually had more chance of dying in battle against other Christians, including relatives, than dying in battle against just Muslims. So I think it's kind of the combination of these things. Reconquista is a politicized, modern term used, you know, by the right wing. And like you, I don't like it. The medieval charters, which do talk about retaking land and do talk about religious war against Muslims. And then the 11th century realities, which combine the religious rhetoric and the much more free-for-all, in a sense, warfare of anybody against anybody else.

• 17:06Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I mean, I suppose that one doesn't necessarily even need a religious fig leaf in these circumstances. If you want to go to war with your brother, you can go ahead and go to war with your brother.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  Of course. And they did, and then they didn't use any religious justification, of course. So, yes, religious justification happened to be used by ecclesiastical authors writing about certain conquests and certain wars.

• 17:29Eleanor Janega?

  Unsurprising, I suppose, from, you know, if it's coming from the church, it's coming from the church, right? They're going to have to put that on. But when we look at El cid's life, though, you know, this is a real example, to a certain extent, of what this flux could be, because, so he's, I don't know, kicking off his military career sometime around the mid 11th century, some people say about 1065 or so, and he starts off very specifically being attached to Castile, is that right?

• 17:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, so he first features at the court of Sancho the Second of Castile. Sancho is then assassinated. Later legend kind of linked his brother Alfonso VI to this assassination. Certainly Alfonso benefited from the death of his brother. They had been fighting before, so actually Sancho had defeated Alfonso and Alfonso had to go into exile in Muslim Toledo. With Sancho's death, he returned and he united Leon and Castile. So Rodrigo de Aziz the Third's career was mostly kind of tied to Castile and then Leon Castile under these two rulers. And he certainly rose to prominence as a warrior.

• 18:42Speaker 05

  There, he also married Jimena, who was a relative of Alfonso VI. There are different reconstructions of her lineage, maybe she was his niece. So, yes, I mean, the start of Rodrigo's spectacular career can really be tied to Castile. And of course, he was born somewhere near Burgos. I mean, it's only a 13th century source that says he comes from Viva, so we don't know whether that's actually true or part of the myth, but certainly his family had lands around the Burgos region, so he was born somewhere there.

• 19:15Eleanor Janega?

  And how does he end up getting a reputation at this court as a warrior and a bit of a tactician as well?

• 19:23Speaker 05

  So what's really frustrating is that the first time we hear about him, he already kind of clearly has a prominent military status because he leads the personal military guard of the ruler, of the king. I mean, you wouldn't have somebody You don't trust and you know who's not a good warrior in that kind of position. So he must have already had successes, but we know nothing about them. And then there are these poems that attribute to him all kinds of victories, real or imagined. I mean, there are later stories where, you know, he single-handedly defeats fifteen warriors. But what we do know is that he was successful, probably not simply because of being a good warrior,

• 20:07Speaker 05

  but also because of being a good strategist. And he was successful against enemies who at the time were seen as almost invincible. So again, just briefly to explain how we get to this point. After these typhus emerged in Al-Andalus, the power relations changed. Up until then, Al-Andalus was much stronger than these very small Christian kingdoms in the north. But now Christians could very easily raid against these typhus. And of course, although Al-Andalus was fragmented politically, it was very, very rich. And a place that was seen by the Christians of the north as a good place to raid

• 20:50Speaker 05

  and sort of take booty and captives and so on. And in order to avoid these very, very disruptive and destructive raids, the rulers of the typhus started to pay tribute, the so-called parras, to the northern rulers. And one historian Angus McKay called this a protection racket, because that's really how it worked. So they paid to avoid this. And Rodrigo played a role in going to collect this tribute for Alfonso VI. But Alfonso VI, after a while, was not satisfied with just taking this tribute, but wanted to attach some territory as well, and notably Toledo.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  Toledo was important because it had been the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom. So symbolically, it had this great kind of value. So Alfonso, in the end, first kind of protecting, so to speak, the local Muslim ruler.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  Had to pay more and more tribute, so his subjects were increasingly unhappy with him. So he needed more protection, so Al-Fonsa could station some troops in Toledo. And so then finally, he took this Muslim ruler and just replaced him. So kind of gave him a different Typho principality, moved him to Valencia, and attached Toledo to his own kingdom. Now, this was a huge shock. So the Typho rulers or the other Typho rulers turned to a Moroccan dynasty, the Al-Moharids, and they invaded in 1086. And from 1086 onwards, there were many, many battles,

• 22:29Speaker 05

  both against the Christians and then against those Typhos who sort of started to resist. So the point is, there were many battles that the Christians lost. Whereas Rodrigo managed to actually either defeat them a few times or somehow avoid confrontation. So that was kind of important in creating these stories about an invincible warrior who is so much better than other warriors at the time.

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• 27:05Eleanor Janega?

  I wanted to talk about one of my silly favorite legends, though, about creating this wonderful figure of the warrior. And I like all of the things about Babika Elseed's horse. And it's funny, because this horse comes up all the time. It's not just me saying this. There are just constant horse references, which I think is possibly testament to the fact that people just like animals. But also, it says something, I think, about connection to horsemanship on the peninsula as well. But I'm wondering if you can fill our listeners in on this sweet little stories.

• 27:38Speaker 05

  Okay, so initially, we're just told that Rodrigo had a horse that was very fast, and it was a very good horse. And of course, we know that warriors at the time needed good horses, and these horses could be very, very valuable. So we have some records of gifts of horses, and we know that they could cost a lot. But then, this name, Babika, emerges again in later sources. So it's after his death. It comes up in slightly different versions in different texts, but the origin of the name, the most likely explanation for the origin of the name, is that it's actually a kind of translation of the name of a horse in French romance, Yon de Orange.

• 28:22Speaker 05

  So it's actually a literary borrowing. And then, the story is elaborated further, because, of course, when Rodrigo dies, he was buried in Valencia. But when Jimena, his widow, had to evacuate Valencia, she took his body with her and had it reburied at the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña. And the monks of San Pedro were quite active in creating all sorts of myths, turning the Sida into basically a saint. And so in these stories that were created at the monastery, we find the story that Rodrigo was foretold, so he, a heavenly apparition foretold his death

• 29:05Speaker 05

  and told him that he will have a victory after death. And so he basically orders his entourage to tie his body on his horse after he's dead and he leads the troops to victory against this Amorabid attack. These legends also then have another story about how Rodrigo had converted a Muslim to Christianity, who then became a very faithful servant. And so after the Sida's death, this former Muslim convert takes care of the horse until the horse dies and has the horse buried in front of the monastery of San Pedro,

• 29:50Speaker 05

  so close to the Sida's body in a sense. In the middle of the 20th century, somebody actually tried to excavate to find Babiaka's grave and they couldn't find any bones, but they nonetheless put up a kind of headstone. So if you go to San Pedro today, there is a grave for Babiaka in front of the monastery.

• 30:12Eleanor Janega?

  So I've taken us all pieced into the sort of sillier parts of the legend of El Sida. But I think that it is interesting to kind of talk about these things because it shows how embellished everything truly is. And we are doing this, you know, in this process of editorial work and this sort of desire to create a person, right? And so we certainly know that he is an important warrior. He's a good tactician or he wouldn't have got to this level. We know that he is hanging out with Sancho the Second and then Alfonso the Sixth comes along. And then this is when things start to get a bit shaky, no?

• 30:50Speaker 05

  Basically, he seems to have started becoming more independent. So although he was collecting tribute for Alfonso VI, he also witnessed charters, he adjudicated some legal cases. So we have evidence that, you know, he was active in the service of the king. But he clearly wasn't just serving the king. And so, basically, the first issue, the serious issue, was that there was a Muslim raid and Rodrigo decided to retaliate against Toledo. At this point, Toledo was under the protection of Alfonso VI. So obviously, as a king, you cannot have one of your own military leaders without any kind of permission raid into the territory

• 31:34Speaker 05

  that you're supposed to be protecting because they're paying you. So Rodrigo is exiled at this point. And exile in the Middle Ages was a punishment because it sort of cut you off from your family, from your social networks. And depending on where you were, of course, this could be a more or less terrible sort of punishment. But on the Iberian Peninsula, because there were so many different political units, it was possible for people to move. And so Rodrigo ended up going to Zaragoza, which was one of these Muslim Taifa principalities. And he offered his services to the ruler there, who was quite happy to accept his services. When this ruler died, one of his sons continued to employ Rodrigo

• 32:19Speaker 05

  and then he went on to serve a third ruler. So clearly, they valued his services. And he fought against Christians. I mean, he fought against the enemies of the Muslim Taifa rulers. So sometimes against other Muslims, including siblings of the second one, Al Mutamin, but also against Christians who tried to attack or who somehow threatened this principality. And it's quite clear that he didn't have any kind of... Problem because of religious allegiances. So he was a Christian, that's also clear. But he was not the only one who kind of went across this supposed religious divide. So, you know, there were other Christians in the service of Muslim rulers before and after him.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  And he returned to serve Alfonso VI because of this disastrous battle at Sagradas. So this is after the Typhus call in the Almorvits. And Alfonso is defeated and he kind of needs warriors. And we don't know who initiated. So whether Alfonso recalled Rodrigo or Rodrigo offered to go back, we don't have any evidence. But certainly he went back. And then, of course, he regained his lands. He also, by that time, had a family. So not just his wife, Jimena, he had children. And they had remained behind. So when he went into exile, they did not go with him. So returning, going back, obviously must have been important for these personal reasons as well.

• 33:48Speaker 05

  But things didn't go well. And again, very clearly, he did not place kind of loyalty to the king above his self-interest. And so we have a story. And of course, it's very hard to tell what exactly the truth is behind the story. Because the story, which is in a text, which is of course favorable to Rodrigo, says that the king was going with his army to relieve the siege of the city Aledo. And he asked Rodrigo to come and join him with his troops. So the Almorvits were besieging this town. And according to this story, Rodrigo went some ways and then stopped in a town

• 34:27Speaker 05

  and sort of sent out scouts to tell him when the royal army would come so that he would join them. And then somehow they missed the royal army. And so he found out too late. And so by the time he was trying to get there, the Almorvits actually decided to give up the siege, retreated, and so Alfonso sort of turned back. And Rodrigo claimed that this was, you know, a very kind of unhappy set of circumstances. And he wanted to join the king. But his enemies at the royal court... And he made many enemies because he had captured some of these nobles before, asked them to pay ransom, humiliated them. So yeah, that definitely didn't help his cause.

• 35:11Speaker 05

  His enemies at court said that this was a premeditated act and actually Rodrigo was hoping that the king and, you know, many of his men would be killed by the Muslims and that's why he didn't want to go. So obviously, the interpretation of what happened is widely diverging. But, you know, I think, I tend to kind of think that he was not that keen to join the king. I'm not saying he wanted them to be massacred or anything like that, but, you know, the story of somehow these scouts kind of missing the royal army and finding out is a very suspicious one. In any case, there was this other sort of falling out with the king and then there was eventually

• 35:50Speaker 05

  yet another kind of clash when he set up his camp sort of in front of the royal camp before a battle and he was accused of not honoring the king. He claimed that he was trying to protect the king. So again, different interpretations are possible. But it's quite clear that Alfonso the Sixth had enough of him and sort of exiled him again. And it's also clear that Rodrigo was building up some kind of a base. So it wasn't just serving the king and then suddenly finding himself exiled the second time. He already had been collecting tribute from various typhus and small areas. He had a band of warriors who followed him.

• 36:32Speaker 05

  He kind of built up forts, various bases where he could stay with his warriors in the region of Valencia. So the second exile, he was not even trying to sort of go and serve some other ruler. He was then able and content to actually kind of strike out on his own. So he moved around this region. We should remember that this was very sparsely inhabited area with hills and so it's incredibly difficult to protect your lands in this region.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  So he could collect tribute, he basically kind of made himself lord of this region in everything but name. And then when the opportunity arose, he besieged Valencia. Again, we should not imagine some sort of heroic battle, because the siege mostly consisted of encircling the city completely and cutting off their food supply. So we have sources and we have Arabic sources about this, that the reason that Valencia finally sort of opened its gates to him was that the people were dying of hunger. So he conquered in this way Valencia and became the ruler of this city-state. So it's not just the city, today's city of Valencia, but the region around it as well.

• 37:50Eleanor Janega?

  I think this is such an interesting point, because we choose to glamorize characters like this. And you know, it's wonderful to say, oh, what an accomplished warrior, and he did all of these incredible things. But then oftentimes, what warfare and siege warfare comes down to is starving people, which is a lot less heroic, I would argue.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  Yes, well, absolutely. And of course, we don't know, because the Arabic sources can also be biased negatively. So maybe some of these stories are made up. But the worst stories, in any case, are that he actually burned people alive when they tried to go out for food. And then after he took Valencia, he ended up burning the local ruler alive, accusing him of hiding treasure from him. And there's a particularly awful account in one of these Arabic sources. And this is, I mean, it can quite probably be true, because this is actually kind of from the period itself. So anyway, it describes how, you know, as he's being burned alive, Al-Jahaf kind of reaches out from this pit where he was placed,

• 38:54Speaker 05

  and all the burning wood is around him, and kind of draws the burning wood closer, so he would die faster. So, yes, definitely, we should not glorify either Rodrigo or kind of the work that he raged.

• 39:08Eleanor Janega?

  It's very interesting, though, because I think that a lot of the time when we talk about legacy or the way that someone like Rodrigo would be received, we ourselves focus on religious issues. You know, say, oh, isn't it interesting that Alfonso allows him to come back even though he was working with Muslims? But that doesn't seem to be the problem that everyone has with him. They're like, well, he's kind of a jerk, you know, and out for his own self. And it doesn't seem to be that the religious issues have so much of an impact, so much as the you're very clearly in it for yourself and this is supposed to be the king over here.

• 39:46Speaker 05

  Yes, I mean, I think at the time, certainly, it, as you said, very much, it was not kind of the religious issues that predominated. And he was a kind of, I don't know what to call him, you can call him a military adventurer, or, you know, definitely a kind of person who's willing to just make his own fortunes through warfare. But already in his lifetime, at the sort of after his conquest of Valencia, the religious veneer, if you like, started to predominate because in this charter, so this donation charter in which he gives all these goods to the bishop and bishopric of Valencia, which the

• 40:25Speaker 05

  charter, of course, is written again by ecclesiastics, he's presented as this God-sent savior. So it's exactly the same kind of rhetoric we talked about earlier, where, you know, the text says that God, for the sins of the people, allowed Hispania to be conquered by the sons of Hagar, so it's a biblical terminology for Muslims. And for centuries, the Christians who had not wanted to willingly serve God were now punished because they had to serve, as they saw it, the sons of slaves. So in the biblical story, of course,

• 41:05Speaker 05

  Hagar is a kind of concubine slave. And so her children, it's a kind of demeaning terminology. And After these centuries, God finally raised up the Savior Rodrigo to come to the aid of Christians. So, obviously, for the ecclesiastical author of this charter, it was more interesting to present somebody who is sent by God, because if you think of it from that perspective, so you're receiving a lot of land and various treasures for your church. Do you want to really say that here is this adventurer who served as a mercenary of Muslims for a while and happened to conquer Valencia and now gave us all this?

• 41:49Speaker 05

  So, obviously, it's much, much nicer to present him in this way. And of course, there is already a kind of precedent for this kind of rhetoric. It's very much in vogue at the time, in the late 11th century, to present Christian successes as this kind of retaking of land. So, this is a first transformation, in a sense, and it is a religious transformation, which it's impossible to tell if he enjoyed this, the last year of his life, if he agreed with it, if he just ignored it, we don't know. But definitely, before he died, we already have this text, which presents him, recasts him in this religious light.

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• 44:10Eleanor Janega?

  Is it possible for us to really understand what kind of ruler he was after he takes Valencia? Or is it just balancing very pro Rodrigo texts versus these really negative ones that are coming from the conquered?

• 44:27Speaker 05

  It's even worse in a sense because there isn't that much on how he ruled. So the Christian chronicles just basically ignore the fact that he ruled. So they just focus on his military victories as if there was nothing else. That, you know, as a ruler, you do nothing but wage war and, you know, these victories that he was never defeated. There are some mentions in later sources, but it's very hard to, again, know, you know, whether these are just inventions or not. So it seems that he actually had some sort of Muslim involvement, at least initially, so that he allowed the local inhabitants to be under their own judges

• 45:11Speaker 05

  and, you know, following Muslim law. Again, this is not extraordinary at the time. So very often in the Iberian Peninsula, there were even treaties, surrender treaties between Muslim towns or Muslim areas and Christian kings. And very often, these treaties laid down the conditions that they could kind of practice Islam and so on. So we don't have that for Rodrigo, but that he would have allowed something similar is not at all surprising. He also seems to have been very keen to collect tax. Again, some tax sort of go to extremes, presenting his rule as having these people working for him follow every Muslim

• 45:52Speaker 05

  until every day they paid something, which again is not historically accurate, I'm certain. But there's very little, unfortunately, in terms of, you know, what else he did or how else he ruled. Of course, it also wasn't a very long period. We're only talking about a few years. There are stories about how he basically engineered or sort of prompted the exodus, the emigration of a lot of people. So we don't even know how much of the original population remained. If these are true, that there were waves of emigration. So yeah, unfortunately, this is the part of his life we know the least about.

• 46:34Eleanor Janega?

  It's so ironic, isn't it? You know, you think that finally, when someone is in government, we could see a little bit more, but no, it's the exact opposite in this case. He dies in 1099. Yes, and so here he's reached, I suppose, the height of his career. And then suddenly Rodrigo is dead. How does he die?

• 46:54Speaker 05

  Well, he actually just dies of natural causes as far as we can tell. People at the time who lived this kind of life did not necessarily have very long lives, fighting in these battles with this kind of arms, very heavy kind of arms. So it's a physically kind of exhausting life. And, you know, you're camping out in the cold or the heat. So, I mean, many, many people just sort of died of, you know, natural causes, even in their 50s already. But later legend, of course, turned his death into something much more interesting. And already, as I mentioned, the legends created at San Pedro de Cardenya. And so these are sort of 13th century legends and then later elaborated,

• 47:39Speaker 05

  created this idea that his death was foretold and that he had this victory over the Muslims after he died. But even more interestingly, that his body remained intact. So there are very gruesome stories about how Jimena does not want him to be buried because he looks so alive. And so they actually end up putting him not in a grave, but just sitting in the church. And There's a miracle supposedly where a Jew who has heard of his fame wants to pull his beard and then Rodrigo's body actually moves and starts to draw his sword out of his cupboard.

• 48:21Speaker 05

  Of course, according to the story, the Jew converts to Christianity because of this miracle. So obviously, the story is totally made up, but it uses elements of earlier legends. So according to this, then the body kind of stays in place for 10 years and then the tip of his nose falls off and they bury him. And this actually comes from a legend of Charlemagne. So the writer kind of used earlier texts to create the story of a kind of saintly Rodrigo. So the whole point, of course, is to somehow suggest that he's more than a mere human. And then there's a further kind of elaboration of his mythical death because I'm sure many of the listeners have seen the film with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren.

• 49:07Speaker 05

  And of course, in that film, it's an even more heroic death and sort of self-sacrifice because he's wounded by an arrow when the Almorvites are besieging Valencia and he's told that if the doctor can remove the arrow and he will be cured, but then he would not be able to fight for a while. And so he refuses to undergo this procedure and chooses death and then kind of has this posthumous victory tied to his horse. And it's this legendary death, I think, in various ways, that became sort of famous and I think most people are shocked if they realize that actually he just died, you know, probably in bed.

• 49:48Eleanor Janega?

  I think that this is such an interesting and important point, though, right? Because it's very easy for us as historians to say, here are the people who are involved in the myth-making about Rodrigo. Here are these people that we see actively attempting to establish a cult behind him. But we're still doing this. You know, Charlton Heston is as much a part of this as ecclesiastical authors from the 13th century are.

• 50:13Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. And there were so many people, so many groups. Who kind of contributed to this myth. I'm fairly convinced that his wife, his widow Jimena, and his daughters, because he had two daughters, Maria and Cristina, were also active. We don't have any sources really, but we know that through his daughters, actually, his descendants became kings in the Iberian Peninsula. So I'm sure that a kind of family memory through the women fostered the cult of this great warrior. Literary authors like Corneille, for example, created this sort of Hamlet-like Thid, who was worried about the conflict between love and duty, love and honor.

• 50:54Speaker 05

  We talked about Franco, of course, and how both Franco himself and the nationalists kind of had this cult of the Reconquista and therefore of the Thid as this early leader of the Reconquista as they saw him. But it continues. And actually, so I should maybe say that the film itself was part of the Francoist sort of legend-making. The historical advisor for the film was Ramon Menendez Pidal, who was this scholar who dedicated most of his life to editing texts and writing about the Thid, but he basically sort of fell in love with the Thid. And so he believed the myths to be reality. And so a lot of the film is kind of reflecting that.

• 51:39Speaker 05

  And the film, of course, was made in Spain. And it was in a way, an attempt both to sort of legitimize the late Franco regime and also to draw tourists to Spain for economic reasons. So, but since then, others kind of took up this role of continuing to create the myth to the point where now you have children's books, TV series, rock bands, kind of made songs about him. There's a novel called Sid by Arturo Perez Rapperta, which tries to reclaim him for a more left-wing agenda. And sort of politically speaking, now both the extreme right wing

• 52:24Speaker 05

  use him in similar ways as Franco as a kind of forerunner of white supremacists, you know, protecting Christian nationalism in Spain.

• 52:35Speaker 05

  But also, more surprisingly perhaps, multiculturalists who see his sort of coexistence with Muslims and turn that into a kind of myth, because obviously the coexistence that is historically true is not the same kind of coexistence that multiculturalists today sort of see as a model, because obviously he wasn't kind of a person who thought that Islam was equally kind of good as Christianity and Muslims should be honored as Muslims. He collaborated with them, cooperated with them whenever his interests dictated, but he was equally willing to take tribute from them, to kill them.

• 53:17Speaker 05

  So, I mean, definitely, I think we have to remember this is not sort of multiculturalism. But obviously, one can see how things can be distorted, in a sense, to say, well, he coexisted with Muslims and, you know, wasn't that nice. We can learn from him.

• 53:31Eleanor Janega?

  I think that it's so important to talk about, though, this historiography of it and all of these different ways of discussing him. Because I think, to an extent, you know, when I'm asked about him and people say, well, you know, is he a hero? I think that my answer is, I'm not sure that we should be looking around in the 11th century, poking about for heroes, you know? I don't think that Al Thied is going to be the guy who comes to show us how to live our lives. You know, he's a complex person, living in a really much different time, and he's got a very different way of looking at the world. And I'm not sure that I need to hold him up as a model.

• 54:06Speaker 05

  Uh, yes, well, I definitely would not. I also agree that I don't think we should be kind of going back in time, try to find our heroes in historical figures. I think Justice Rodrigo was a complex figure. You know, everyone is a complex person. So obviously, when these historical figures are turned into heroes, it's through a process of simplification, distortion, forgetting about some aspects that, you know, we don't like. I actually think it's dangerous, because the historical truth can always peek through in a way, so.

• 54:42Speaker 05

  That's what happened with Rodrigo, that even if you try to sanitize him in a way for, you know, a multicultural age, other people can always kind of go back to the warrior, the person who was killing Muslims and use that kind of a hero. So I actually think that it's not just unnecessary. I think it's kind of dangerous to turn these historical figures into heroes. So I think if we want to have some kind of comfort food equivalent of, you know, comfort heroes, I think it's much better to just use literary figures. I'd go for Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings. And yes, I think it's dangerous to turn real

• 55:26Speaker 05

  historical figures into supposed heroes.

• 55:30Eleanor Janega?

  Nora, what an incredible joy it has been to talk to you about what is a really thorny and endlessly fascinating conception of a person.

• 55:41Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.

• 55:43Eleanor Janega?

  Thanks so much again to Nora for joining me, and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you're interested in learning more about medieval Iberia, why not check out our past episode on the Vikings in Spain? Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. And we're offering 50% off your first three months when you use the code MEDIEVAL. If you want more from me over the next week, and who could blame you, you can check out my recent series, Meet the Normans, where we also discuss myth-making and historical personalities. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can review the show and leave us comments on episodes, or requests

• 56:27Eleanor Janega?

  for future ones. You can also drop us a review or rate us everywhere you listen to podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. As always, my co-host Matt Lewis will be back on the Gone Medieval throne on Friday, and I'll be back once again next Tuesday. Until next time.

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