Few medieval figures have been remade as completely as Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar. The history gives an exile who carved out a principality for himself. The legend gives an undefeated champion of Christendom who beat his enemies even after death.
The Horror
Rodrigo was born around 1043 at Vivar, near Burgos. He rose as a commander under King Sancho II of Castile, and after Sancho was killed in 1072 he lost his standing under Alfonso VI and was exiled in 1081. He then served the Muslim rulers of the Taifa of Zaragoza and won battles for them. Alfonso recalled him after the Almoravid victory at Sagrajas in 1086.
His great project was Valencia. He besieged it from 1092, took it in 1094 and ruled it as a principality. In October 1094 he beat the Almoravids at Cuarte. His name comes from the Arabic sayyid, meaning lord, and the form “Cid” first appears in a source of the 1140s.
He died in Valencia on July 10, 1099. His wife, Jimena, held the city for nearly three more years. In 1102 it passed to the Almoravids. Wikipedia’s account of Jimena has Alfonso VI choosing to burn and abandon the city instead of defending it, and escorting Jimena back to Castile. The principality did not outlive its founder by much.
The Legend
The tale told in films and popular retellings is that, as the Almoravids closed in, the dead Cid was strapped to his horse Babieca and rode out of Valencia, so that the enemy fled at the sight of him. This is legend. It probably grew from Jimena’s procession into Burgos, and no sober contemporary record supports a corpse leading a charge.
The oath at Santa Gadea, where Rodrigo is said to have made Alfonso VI swear that he had no part in Sancho’s death, is also a literary story. It appears in the Cantar de mio Cid but not in the more reliable Historia Roderici. How he came by the title Campeador, and where his horse came from, are likewise tradition and not record.
The 1961 film El Cid, directed by Anthony Mann and starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, gave the corpse-on-horseback scene its best-known form. In the film the Almoravid army panics and its leader is trampled.
The Modern Relic
El Cid was first buried at the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña. Jimena was buried there as well. Their tombs were ransacked during the Napoleonic Wars, and the couple now rest in the crossing of Burgos Cathedral.
The Museo de Burgos displays a sword called Tizona alongside other presumed relics of El Cid. Its attribution is uncertain. The Spanish scholar Menéndez Pidal judged the whole sword a sixteenth-century forgery, a 2001 study suggested the blade may be eleventh-century, and there is no firm evidence that it ever belonged to him. Castile and León bought it in 2007 or 2008 for a reported €1.6 million.
