May 14, 2025 • 49 mins
In the centuries since his death, the famous El Cid has been the star of plays, romances, feature films, and even propaganda campaigns. But how does history compare to the hype? This week, Danièle speaks with Nora Berend about the real Rodrigo Díaz, the astonishing way his legend grew and changed over time, and how El Cid is still being used as a political tool in the modern world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety
of the Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sebalski, also known as
the five Minute Medievalist. A few weeks ago, we talked
about a legendary figure from the Holy Roman Empire, and
now it's time to set our sights on one of
Spain's most dashing and heroic figures, El Sid. In the
(00:36):
century since his death, Rodrigo Diaz has been the star
of histories, romances, feature films, and even propaganda campaigns. What
is it that people find so compelling about El Sid
and how much does Rodrigo's real life hold up to
the hype. This week I spoke with doctor Nora Brend
about the legendary El Sid. Nora is a professor of
(00:58):
European history at Cambridge University and the author and editor
of many works on a wide variety of medieval topics
from Eastern and Central Europe to religious minorities, including the
award winning at the Gate of Christendom, Jews, Muslims and
Pagans in medieval Hungary circa one thousand to circa thirteen hundred.
Her new book is El Sid, The Life and after
(01:21):
Life of a medieval Mercenary. Our conversation on what the
life of the real Rodrigo Diaz looked like, how his
legend grew and changed over time, and how Elcid is
still being used as a tool for propaganda is coming
up right after this. Well, welcome Nora to talk about
(01:41):
El Sid. This is very exciting because I haven't spent
any time talking about him so far on this podcast,
and he is a massive figure in Spanish history. So
welcome to talk about Elcid today.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
So you've just put out a very comprehensive book on him,
and it really starts to pull apart the ways in
which there is a real guy and then there is
a legendary guy. And so in order to understand the
real guy, I think we need to set this up
for people. So when we're talking about the historical Elsid,
first of all, he's got a real name. What time
and place are we talking about?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Oh, yes, so he was called Rodrigo Diaz, and we
were talking about the second half of the eleventh century
on the Iberian Peninsula, which at that point was divided
between a southern part Muslim part called all Andolus and
the northern part with Christian kingdoms.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
And what was it like at this time? Was it peaceful?
Because we have these ideas, I think some of us
have ideas of convivencia. Right, everyone is getting along fine,
What does it look like on the ground?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
On the ground, there was actually quite a lot of fighting,
but it was not a clash of civilizations. So basically
the part Alando Luce had been the stronger part of
the peninsula for quite a long time until just before
Rodrigo's birth. So ten thirty one, Alando LUs fragmented politically
(03:13):
into separate small states, and these were all fighting against
each other, also trying to have alliances with other powers,
including Christian powers, against their neighbors. And the Christians from
the north started to realize that there was a real
opportunity here to raid, because these raids were very destructive
(03:37):
for the Muslim states, and they took plunder, they took riches,
and in order to avoid these raids, they started basically
paying tribute. This has been called a protection racket, and
indeed it looked very much like that in some ways.
And so there was a lot of violence, but there
was also a lot of collaboration across the religious divide,
(04:01):
so it doesn't quite fit our ideas of either Comiventhia
or this idea of clash of civilizations. It really was
a different kind of setup from both.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Well, I think that's so important to point out, especially
when we talk about later legends and they have this
weekondquista idea of this is between Christians and Muslims, and
really everything is shifting depending on who's in power and
who wants power.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Right, Absolutely, so this idea that since the early eighth
century when there was this a Bear Bear conquest after
which most of the peninsula was under Muslim rule, that
since this period the Christians had this plan to reconquer
their lands. This was an idea that was formulated early on,
(04:47):
and there are still people who clink to this, but
it's quite clearly erroneous in terms of the historical processes. So, yes,
there was fighting, but Christians were also very I could
fight against each other and take each other's territories, and
in fact, in this period, in the lifetime of Rodrigo,
Christian rulers had a larger chance of being killed by
(05:12):
other Christians then dying in battle against Muslims, and very often,
in fact, it was relatives who were fighting against each
other and sort of trying to dispossess their siblings and
so on and gain more territory. So while there of
course was some fighting by Christians against Muslims, and although
(05:33):
in the end Christians conquered or reconquered whatever world one
prefers the peninsula, this was not reconquista as envisaged by
earlier scholarship.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yes, earlier scholarship. That is important to mention as well,
in that this was an idea that didn't just come
out of nowhere. People were really committed to it for
a very long time. And so if this is an
idea that people at home have had about what things
were like in the Iberian Peninsula, it's not coming from nowhere.
But it's important for us to correct this, which is
something that you're doing in your work, making sure that
(06:09):
we see the complex picture. Okay, so this is the picture,
the image the situation that Rodrigo is born into. So
let's got into his life. So he's born into this
sort of perilous time or at least chaotic time. How
does it go from here?
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yes, and we actually don't know when he was born exactly,
but sort of mid late ten forties probably, and we
know about him as an important military leader at the
royal court, so when we have the first sources about him,
he's already someone who's well known as a military leader.
And he initially served Sancho, the king of Castile, who
(06:50):
was then assassinated. One of these people who, as I
mentioned before, were kind of fighting with their siblings, so
his brother often saw the sixth then took over Castile
as well as eleven, and Rodrigo started to serve him
at the royal court. He married a relative of King
Alfonso Quimena, and he clearly in the service of the
(07:16):
king engaged in all kinds of activities, not just warfare.
He also with other nobles adjudicated cases. This was normal
at the time. He witnessed some charters, but he very
quickly also fell out with the king. It seems that
he was trying to build his independent power and he
(07:41):
raided one of these Muslim principalities that was nominally under
the protection of Alfonso, so he was exiled, and in
exile he ended up going to the Muslim ruler of Zaragoza,
serving him and for five years serving a variety of
rulers there obviously fighting against Christian and Muslim enemies of
(08:04):
the rulers. Then Alfonso was in a very difficult position Moroccans.
The all Morovids invaded at the request of the Muslims
of the peninsula, and Alfonso suffered a big defeat. So
there was a brief reconciliation. He recalled Rodrigo, but very
quickly within a few years they fell out again. So
(08:26):
Rodrigo again showed that he wasn't quite loyal. He failed
to join the royal army on an expedition. He was
exiled again, and by this time he really built up
his own warrior following and various fortified places where he
could stay with these people. So he was gathering tribute
(08:47):
for himself and plunder as well, and eventually he conquered Valencia,
which at that point was a Muslim principality. He conquered
this for himself, not for King Alfonso, and held it
on his death in ten ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
So this is a really interesting story in and of itself,
so stripped of all the legends, we have this guy
who is fighting for his king, which we kind of expect,
and then he switches sides fights for a Muslim ruler,
then he goes back to fight for his king. Then
he just starts to fight for himself. And so he
does not seem motivated by things like religion. He seems
(09:24):
very motivated by things that are definitely earthly, like power,
like money, like building a reputation.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Right, absolutely, and of course, very quickly sort of the
legendary sid started to be rewritten as a loyal subject,
conquering Valancia for the king and so on. But this
is all later legend, and I have to say, in
the period when he lived, what he did was not exceptional.
(09:54):
So he clearly was very, very successful. But there were
plenty of other warriors in his lifetime and even in
the twelfth century who changed sides, some of them several times.
And it's of course impossible to know what his own
religious faith was like. And we do know he was
a Christian. Once he conquered Valencia, he refounded the bishopric
(10:18):
and gave a donation to the cathedral and the bishop.
But what he actually felt, how devoted he was, or
what that meant to him, we don't have any sources
for that.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yes, well, it looks like from some of the things
that you've pulled out that he is looking at the
time of his death, he's looking towards building a dynasty,
building this sort of consolidated power for himself around Valencia, right,
because he marries his daughters into high, high ranking families.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yes, he probably would have liked to transform Valencia, maybe
even into a kingdom. And we know that, for example,
Portugual emerged as a kingdom in this way that its
rulers sort of just started to use the royal title
and eventually that was just accepted and so Portugal became
a separate kingdom. So there were other areas in medieval
(11:13):
Europe where successful warriors, successful conquerors were able to just
create a new kingdom. So it is quite likely that
he would have liked to do that. His own son
probably died before Rodrigo. It's very strange because we have
just a very brief mention of this son. But in
(11:35):
any case, yes, as you said, his two daughters married
into the Navarrees royal family and into the family of
the Count of Barcelona, and indeed their descendants eventually became kings.
But Valencia itself was at that time in the lifetime
of Rodrigo, quite deep in Muslim territory, and when he died,
(11:59):
his widow Jimena held for three years. She held Valencia,
and she governed Valencia, but ultimately she called on the
help of Alphones of the sixth from Castile to hold
Valente against the Muslims, and he decided that it was
just not feasible, so they evacuated the city and went
(12:20):
north to Castile. So Valente itself was not reconquered until
the thirteenth century, and not of course by the descendants
of Rodrigo. So if he had such plans, then he failed.
But in all other respects he was very, very successful.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yes, well, again, we need to put this in context
because we're going to get into the legends in just
a second, so we need to know where we're starting from.
So you actually spent some time in the book digging
into Jimena. What was important to you about figuring out
what's going on with Elsid's wife.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Several things, actually, Well, first of all, I think she
was important in her own own right, but later stories
really transformed her into this sort of dough eyed, passive
figure who kept waiting for Rodrigo in the monastery and afterwards.
So it was important to replace her in her own
(13:16):
context when aristocratic women took part in governing, issuing charters,
giving donations, and we have some evidence. There isn't a
lot left, but for example, we do have one of
her donation charters after she became a video, and it's
clear she was ordering her vassals around. She also demanded
(13:39):
that her sons in law respect the donations that she
made to the church, and she envisaged. So in the
tact she talks about future conquests, so at least in theory,
she was hoping to not just hold on to Palanthia,
but enlarge its territory. We also have the marriage contract
(14:00):
that she had had with Rodrigo, and there too it's
clear she's getting significant properties, as was the custom at
the time. So one of the reasons I wanted to
spend time writing about this is to show how different
this aristocratic woman was from the later legend. But the
other reason is that I think she was instrumental in
(14:25):
the legend of Rodrigo. And here it's more hypothetical because
we don't really have evidence about her role in this.
But what we do know for certain is that when
she had to evacuate, she actually took Rodrigo's remains. He
had been buried in Valentia, and she took these remains
with her and had him reburied in a monastery, San
(14:48):
Pedro de Cardena, and this monastery then became really the
cradle of legends about Rodrigo, and one can hypothesize her
role in starting or kind of contributing to this process.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
So he gets reburied in Castile and then the legends
start to grow. So you were saying, like, we need
to hypothesize, We can't really point to why these legends
might have grown in the way that they did, in
the form that they did. But this is the moment
you feel, as ever, if I have this right from
your book, that the legends start to begin really soon afterwards.
(15:25):
So he has been dead for about three years when
he's translated and brought to Castile, and then the legends
begin pretty soon afterwards. So what's happening in this context.
We have some monks in this monastery, they have this
new important person's body in the monastery. What's going on
from there?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yes, I should add that they the monks were already
to some extent the building on some president at the
end of his life. When Rodrigo gave this donation to
the Bishopric of Valencia. The charter that was drawn up,
so the written document that would be proof of this donation,
which of course was by ecclesiastics. It was not written
(16:03):
or dictated by Rodrigo himself. So these ecclesiastics already cast
him as this Christian savior. There's a very interesting prologue
to the donation charter where they described the history as
a kind of divine punishment for Christians. So the Muslim
conquest is depicted there as divine punishment because Christians were
(16:24):
turning away from God, and that finally, after centuries God
raised up Rodrigo as this divine savior. So there was
already the kernel of this myth in a sense, in
this document. And then the monks of San Pedro de
Cardena contributed to a number of tacks over different centuries
(16:44):
to elaborate the legends. They also probably had some kind
of a role, we don't know exactly what in the
creation of the first epic poem in the vernacular, So
it's important from a literary point of view as well,
an epic pom about Rodrigo. The Poema or cantar demo
sid because in this poem the monastery appears as a
(17:07):
very important place already in the lifetime of Rodrigo, and
that was actually not the case, so this already is
kind of posthumous myth. And then the legends that were
developed at the monastery itself, which were eventually included in
a history of Spain that the king had commissioned of
Funse of the tenth, So in this thirteenth century history
(17:29):
these legends are conserved really developed an idea of Rodrigo
as some kind of a saint. It's quite bizarre for
modern readers. He has a vision of Saint Peter before
he dies, and Saint Peter tells him when he will die,
but also instructs him to basically embalm himself before he
even dies. So he stops eating and he's only eating
(17:52):
and drinking merk and balsam, and is kind of embalming
himself from the inside, if I can say so. And
then after this process is finalized and his incre body
then defeats the Muslim so he has a final victory
in battle. He's affixed to his horse and of course
disappears in the film where Charlton Heston starred as Rodrigo,
(18:15):
and then the body is taken to San Pedro de Cardena,
so here it's not three years after death, but it's
his own will to be buried in San Pedro, and
his dead body is immediately sort of taken their own horseback.
And then because the body is so perfect, he Mana
doesn't want him to be buried, So basically the body
(18:37):
sitting above ground at the monastery in the monastery church
and produces a miracle, and only after ten years do
they finally bury the body after the tip of his
nose falls off, So the monks are kind of creating
a saint, and indeed, later on they try to have
him canonize, so recognized by the papacy as a saint,
(19:00):
which sort petered out for political reasons, so there was
too much upheaval going on at the time in Italy
when they tried this in the sixteenth century. But at
the monastery itself they clearly treated him more or less
like a saint already centuries before, and this was to
both attract pilgrims Christian pilgrims who would come and pray
(19:21):
at his tomb and royal patronage having a kind of
significant otherworldly patron to show the importance of the monastery
again in periods when there was quite a lot of
upheople in Spain and a lot of competition for royal
patronage and privileges.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yes, it's an incredible story because of how rapidly this
legend builds up and then how entrenched it becomes when
it's only a couple generations since the actual man has died.
So it's almost something that you could say for sure
in having your grandparents would know, but that's not how
it goes. And as you say in the legend, you know,
(20:01):
he's this corpse, he's put on the saddle, he's sentenced about.
His eyes are meant to be open. No one can
tell that he's dead, and that makes it so that
they have a victory. And it is just it's just
a spectacular legend in the form as you're saying, of
a lot of the saints' lives that we see elsewhere
in the Middle Ages, where you have this corpse that
(20:21):
is miraculously smelling, amazing and performing miracles, and it's just
an incredible thing for this to happen so rapidly, especially
for someone who had switched religious sides. You know, if
you're going to take that view as him being a
Christian hero, well, it's a hard case to make. At times.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Well, it seems to have been a surprisingly easy case
to make, at least from the information that we have now,
because these texts very quickly started to simply whitewash his
service in Muslim Viergothe.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
It was just not mentioned anymore. Now with her people
at the time who heard these stories, you know, objected
and said, oh, but you know, I remember otherwise we
don't know. But clearly at the level of the text
this worked perfectly because more and more texts were produced
about him, turning him into a loyal vassal, a Castilian patriot,
(21:20):
a great Christian hero, not just a great warrior, but
really this kind of paragone. So it seems that the
Tacks just proliferated and accepted this change, this whitewashing. It's
only much more modern scholarships that then started to look
(21:41):
at these Tacks more critically and also find Arabic sources
about him, which of course depict him in a very
different way. But you know, for centuries it seems that
this rewriting was completely accepted, and of course, we can
see that so many different people in groups had a
vested interest in that. So presumably his own family descendants,
(22:05):
eventually the kings whose ancestor he was, and obviously, you know,
a thirteenth century Christian king would prefer this Christian hero
as a grandfather, even if they knew that it was
not quite true. The monks, and eventually, even if I
can say that a sort of more abstract reason, presenting
(22:28):
him as a kind of ideal of Christian warriors at
a time we were talking about the very early thirteenth
century when the papacy was doing its very best to
have all the Christian kings of the Iberian Peninsula stopped
fighting against each other and cooperate to fight against the Muslims.
And this resulted in the victory of losn AVOs Betalosa,
(22:53):
after which in a few decades, so about forty years
or so, most of the peninsula changed to has under
Christian rule only Granada, so the very tip of the
peninsula remained in Muslim hands. So in this kind of
propaganda war, if you like to convince all these Christian
(23:14):
rulers to cooperate, Elsid became a very useful hero in
this whitewashed forum who fought for the faith and was
very successful in that.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yes, and it's not strange in context to see people
making fan fiction about their favorite heroes. We see this
all over the place, Like in fourteenth century people are
writing stuff about Richard the Lion art which is just
completely bizarre. So this isn't strange in and of itself.
But like I said, the thing that is fun for
me to look at is just how quickly this happened.
(23:48):
One thing that I did want to mention is that
you've traced this, this legend of else did and it
is spreading throughout Europe. So there is a really consolidated
idea of him as a sort of romantic hero beyond
just the borders of Castile, so that he is becoming
somebody that people are looking up to, beyond the borders
of Liberia.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yes, and this happens in the early modern period and
via literary texts in Spain. These taxx really proliferate, so
there are many many texts about him as this warrior
hero and this gets picked up outside as well. And
of course the most famous of these texts is Cornets
(24:30):
from the early seventeenth century who ended up writing a play,
but in this play, the outfit of the play is
almost a kind of Hamlet like figures, So he is
torn between love and duty, as is Humana. Actually, so
both the hero and the heroin have the same kind
of problems that on the one hand, duty points to
(24:53):
revenging family members, in both cases their father. So initially
jimenez father insults Rodrigo's father and that's why he has
to avenge this, and he ends up in a duel
killing Jimana's father, at which point, although they're very much
in love, she is now duty bound to exact revenge
(25:14):
and seek Rodrigo's death. So you have this amazing kind
of rewriting of the whole story which is very persistent.
So you kind of have this also in the film
that I mentioned already, which has no basis in the
medieval stories. This is really kind of a new early
modern version. And then from that, basically everywhere in Germany,
(25:40):
in England, in the United States, various authors pick up
on the story, change it even further and write new
books about him. So very quickly, yes, he becomes truly
internationally famous, but in slightly different guys is, so he
can be seen as a kind of courtier. He can
(26:00):
be a guaranteur of legitimate rulership, and so on and
so forth. So there were new layers added to the legend.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yes, well, I do want to get into the way
that this legend and this figure got to be used,
because I was hoping we would have time for this,
and I think that we will. So before we got
to that, maybe we should take a second too, mention
when does he start becoming called el said and self
rogio and where does this come from?
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yes, that's a great question, And for a long time
it was thought that because the meaning of the term
is basically the Spanish el the joint to a term
that comes from Arabic meaning lord, So the lord, my
lord miothid that this was the way in which his
(26:51):
Muslim subjects, or perhaps muslims who revered him, looked up
to him, addressed him. However, the first time we have
this in the sources is posthumous. So the term that
we know for sure was used in his lifetime was
compeador campi doctor. So then the question became is al
(27:13):
did simply a posthumous term. Most recently there was this
argument that actually in the area of Burgos, where his
family came from, already probably in his lifetime. But again
it's a little bit if he the very first mention
is just after his death that we have for certain
(27:33):
others were also called Did in this region. And so
one hypothesis now has it that this was actually not
directly from the Arabic but it was already earlier adopted
into the Romance vernacular as an expression and was applied
to nobles in the region of Burgos. Well, if that
(27:54):
is the case, then maybe he was already called this
during his lifetime. But in that case this was not
a sign of being unique, but just because this was
a way in which nobles were called. But it's also
possible that it's just a posthumous term that was finally
kind of added to his name.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Yes, well, even if we accept this argument that people
are calling leaders at this point, calling them sid, there's
a big difference between meo Sid my lord, and el
Sid the lord. So it's interesting in itself that he
becomes the lord. There's one, there's only one, and this
is the guy.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yes, and that actually is kind of very much part
of his posthumous triumph, if you like, because in his
lifetime and soon after his death there were quite a
lot of other warriors who were famous and about whom
poems were written and so on. But as time went by,
his fame grew and the fame of the others dissipated,
(28:56):
and for the white public, he became the only one.
So yes, as you say, he becomes the lord and
kind of signaling this unique status which is very far
from what he had been in his lifetime.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
M okay. So we've come up through the early modern period,
we're looking at the twentieth century, and just at the
end of the nineteenth century there's a historian that picks
up Elsid and he just makes this legend blow up
for the modern world. So why did you want to
spend some time thinking about this historian's work when it
(29:31):
comes to Elsid.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Yes, So this is Ramon Menendez Pidal, And for me
he was interesting for two reasons. Really. One is that
he was instrumental both in scholarship but even beyond in
really cementing the legend as some kind of historical truth.
So he was a philologist who worked most of his
(29:56):
life on editing and interpreting the So about Rodrigo diav.
But he sort of fell in love with his subject matter,
so he really tried to prove that the legend was true.
So the thirteenth century poem, vernacular poem for him, was
much earlier, went back to oral tradition which was more
(30:19):
or less contemporary and included true information. So he wanted
to rehabilitate Rodria, and he even said very explicitly that
Rodrigo was a model for people in his own time.
And we are of course talking about a period which
was a difficult period in Spanish history, just after the
loss of the Spanish Empire, and very very different ideas
(30:43):
by different factions, different political parties about what should be done.
So he tried to offer this model that for him
was the most positive character from Spanish history. So he
was very influential through his scholarship. But then he was
also the historical ed advisor for the film with Childhood Heston,
so his views really spread all over the world, not
(31:06):
just in Spain. So that's kind of one of the reasons.
And the second reason is that for me as a historian,
I guess he's a really tragic figure. So the figure
of the scholar who really sets out to write scholarship
and invests most of his life in this and ends
up providing fodder for a dictatorship. I cannot really imagine
(31:28):
a worse fate in some way than this. So Menendezvidel
was not a Francoist. He even left Spain for a while,
so going into voluntary exile, but he returned and for
quite a few years he was suspect he could not
regain his earlier academic position, so he was not a
(31:49):
supporter of Franco. But the Francoist started to use his
work very early on, and even made his book on
the FID and Obligatory reading the Military Academy and ended
up sort of modeling Franco on the SID, so kind
of taking Franco as a new SID and using Menandespidal's
work for this purpose. And he clearly didn't wholeheartedly participate
(32:15):
in this, but he also didn't quite distance himself. So
a very good example is when in Burgos there was
a big festivity where Franco himself was present personally to
unveil this big statue for the thid and Bridge, which
was created with the statues of people who supposedly were
(32:37):
associated to him. The local paper put on a whole
issue about this, and they asked Mendespidal to write something
for this and he sort of said, well, I'm sorry,
I'm too busy. I cannot, but you can use some
of my existing work. I think that pretty much encapsulates
how he dealt as this use of his work while
(32:58):
not quite and doors seeing the francoist us also being
fairly cautious, which of course is understandable, but as I
said to me, quite tragic.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Yes, well, it's something that I think is allto relevant
when we're looking at politics, right, so for people who
are not really familiar with the Spanish civil where we're
talking about the thirties and there is a rise to
power of this dictator and he uses things like let's
go back to the traditional values that are encapsulated in
this vision of medieval history. So we've had people on
(33:29):
the podcast talking about that. I'm thinking especially about the
episode we did call The Devil's Historians, where people are
taking someone from the Middle Ages, rewriting it, making this
person look like everything they want him to be, and
then holding him up as a figure for whom you
just use it as a propaganda machine. And you have
examples in the book of Franco, who's the dictator at
(33:50):
the time, takes power in Spain, ruthless, ruthless person, and
he's actually portraying himself as a sid. So you're talking
about just now talking about him sort of being referred
to as the next great sort of medieval leader, and
you actually have pictures in here of him being painted
as Els did right.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yes, absolutely ironically. In the end, that painting was not installed.
It was supposed to be in what used to be
called the Via Deelu Squidos. So this horrible Francoist monument
that was built with the slave labor basically of imprisoned Republicans.
Franco himself had been buried there then for decades there
was a big controversy before finally his body was removed.
(34:33):
Recently the whole place was renamed. But so it was
for this gigantic Francoist monument that this painting was created,
and it portrays Franco as the thid. In the middle.
There's a kind of white horseman coming from heavens, So
Santiago Matamoros, probably the Saint James, the more Slayer, the
(34:56):
Apostle James, who is supposedly buried in Santia with a compostela,
and from the medieval period there were all these legends
about him coming and helping Christian warriors. And then you
have all kinds of Francoist military personnel, religious people, workers
and so on Spanish society as imagined by the nationalists
(35:19):
around franco And ironically this was never installed because the
artist was South American and so not nationalist enough finally
to have his work in the Via delas Catus. But
it wasn't just this image. There were a lot of texts,
a lot of comparisons made, and the whole cause, of
(35:39):
the whole nationalist cause, the Francoist cause, was represented as
some kind of continuation of Rodrigo Dias's cause. So Rodrigo
was presented as some sort of a leader of a
raconquista who wanted to reunify Spain, who was fighting against
evil enemies, and Francoist represented as continuing this recon cistern
(36:03):
unification and fighting against Republicans and communists. So, yeah, these
parallels were in many ways constantly evoked.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, and we see this sort of thing happening again
with Richard and Lineheart, with Charlemagne. People are pulling these
people out and popping them up and using them for
whatever purpose they want. And what you're seeing is so
that eventually the dictatorship fell in Spain. But now you're
seeing el Sid being weaponized again. Can you tell us
a little bit about what's happening currently that you're seeing
(36:34):
the way that Elsid is being used in Spain.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Yes, it's fascinating in a way because now two opposing
political sides are using him. So on the one hand,
with the resurgence of the far right, you have again
this idea of the Thid as a sort of killer
of Muslims, white nationalists in a way before the term
was coined, who wanted to get rid of foreigners in
(37:00):
whose name people can be mobilized again. But on the
other hand, he also became a kind of figurehead for multiculturalists,
who emphasized that he lived together peacefully with Muslims and
learned from Muslims. There's a novel about him, And of
course there are all sorts of uses that are not
(37:21):
really political. There are for the purposes of tourism, for example,
a whole root of all the places that are mentioned
in the thirteenth century poem about him and the website
and more and more statues put up to him on
this route, and so on and so forth. So things also,
of course can take on a life of their own
without political meaning. But I think what's most interesting in
(37:45):
a way is this use by really opposing political factions
and both kind of trying to remodel, as said, in
their own image.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
It's amazing the way that human beings can work with stories, especially,
we can make them mean anything we want to. And
there are all those little kernels that you could elevate
and blow up and turn them into something else from
Rodrigo's life. But it's really kind of interesting that this
is not certainly was not his intent, I think, ever,
(38:18):
to become a saint, because considering there are so many
people who are living at the same time that did
not become these figures, it's very interesting to me that
Rodrigo has become el sid Yes.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Indeed, and as I say, in his lifetime there was
quite a lot of competition in a way, so there
were quite a lot of people in somewhat similar positions,
but both probably because of the immediate descendants who really
pushed his case and because of these early texts that
proliferated so quickly and made him so famous. I think
(38:56):
that's why eventually his fames or eclipsed those of others.
And then of course you can see indeed how you
can twist parts of the story to make him into
someone else, and how many different stories could be built
around him because of that.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
So I have to ask you, as somebody who's been
looking at all of these different iterations of elsaid, is
there one that you particularly love that you come back
to and your like in your off time when you're resting,
you're like, this is the story that I really like?
Is there one that sticks out for you? Do you
watch the Charlton Hustin film.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Of course I watched it in order to sort of
really know how he's represented in the film, because I
have a chapter on that. But no, I must say
that I really prefer trying to figure out as much
as possible what actually the real Rodrigo was. And of
course we cannot know everything, we don't have enough sources,
(39:54):
we are in the dark, or we kind of hypothesize
about many things. But nonetheless I still prefer understanding the
complexities of the historical period where a lot of people
lived off of fighting and plunder, how this worked at
the time, why that society was like that. But I'm
(40:15):
not trying to create some kind of idealized image based
on this, And in fact, I find it very very
very important to keep repeating that we should not idealize
historical figures. I think it's very very dangerous. So in
a way, I don't have a favorite Rodrigo because I
just have this thirst for knowing what in fact he
(40:39):
did when he was alive.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I very much relate to that. There's a point at
which sometimes you just want to relax into a story,
but most of the time I just want to find
out what actually happened. And for people who are interested,
they can find all sorts of answers about what we
know about Rodrigo in your book. So thank you for
coming on and telling us all about el Sid.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Thank you very much for the invitation.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
To find out more about Nora's work, you can check
out her faculty page at Cambridge University. Her new book
is el Sid, The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary.
Before we go, here's Peter from Medievalist dot Net to
tell us what's on the website. And Peter, you are
still babysitting kittens. So we've got some kitten activity in
(41:26):
the background today, don't we.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
Hey hey, well right now, it's the two parents that
are causing trouble behind me. The three little ones are doing.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Well, good, good, and being a kitten parent is what
kept you from Kalamazoo this weekend?
Speaker 4 (41:42):
Right, Yeah, that's my excuse you. But you attended online?
Speaker 2 (41:46):
I did?
Speaker 4 (41:46):
What was it?
Speaker 1 (41:48):
It was good? I mean I would have liked to
have seen more online sessions because, as you know, there
are dozens and dozens of sessions for every time slot,
and relatively speaking, few of them were online, and so
you had to go with what was offered online. This
is the price of deciding not to go in person,
(42:08):
I suppose. But there were things I would have liked
to have seen if I could have. But I got
to go to sessions on graffiti, on the expulsion of Jews.
That's always a really interesting and important topic when we're
talking about history proverbs. Christine de Pisan got to see
friend of the podcast We're Not a Bluenfeld Kasinski there,
(42:28):
which was nice. It's nice to catch up with people,
even virtually, because that was always one of the best
things about Kalamazoo. I also went to the Deray Militari lecture,
which is an association very dear to your heart, where
Peter Larde was talking about what the Chinese would have
thought of the Hundred Years War. I mean, the short
(42:50):
answer is not much also, so they wouldn't have thought
it was really that big a deeal. I also attended
the plenary by Haruko MoMA or hal MoMA, and this
was about naming place names, and that was just so interesting.
I really love etymology, so that's interesting and thinking about
reclaiming old names based on like older versions of names.
(43:14):
She was talking about the case of the mountain Snowden
and how we should be returning to its original Welsh name,
which I have not put in my notes. That's on me.
And then another one I thought was really interesting was
right at the end of Kalamazoo, and it was by
a scholar called Katarzino Grochowska. I think that's how you
say it about some female scribes and Poland, and if
(43:37):
you've never looked at the way in which people figure
out which scribe is which, it's just so interesting to
see that. And so watching her sort of make her
case for these are scribes who are being taught, and
these are the master scribes. And this is how the
same person evolved over the course of about thirty years,
a none who was doing musical notation. Just such interesting stuff.
(44:00):
So I always have a good time at Kalamazoo. And
those were just some of the sessions that I went to.
Speaker 4 (44:05):
Oh it sounds like, guys, some fascinating topics. It's good
to see you. Plethora of medieval research going on.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah, And I think the more times you go to Kalamazoo,
the more that you spread out your interests. Right, I'm
not going to the same sessions that I did go
to and I was just out of my undergraduate research.
So yeah, it's always a good time.
Speaker 4 (44:24):
Sounds like some sweet fine.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, So what's up with you?
Speaker 4 (44:28):
Well, I've been putting research on medievals dot net relate.
That includes a little fascinating thing where we found out
that alchemists were right after all, you can turn lead
into gold.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
I mean, there are so many cheers happening from beyond
the grave right now, I think right.
Speaker 4 (44:44):
Indeed, indeed, and I took the researchers at discerns large
hadron colliders, so if you know your physics. This is
that big facility buried under Switzerland, whether you do experiments
you know, with light and photons and electro magnets and
getting things to the speed of light. And so they've
observed how the atom of lead can get hit and
(45:07):
bashed it turns into gold when it loses three protons.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yes, that's fascinating, and what they realized was it's hard
to keep that up right indeed.
Speaker 4 (45:19):
Indeed, well it's they've been producing a lot. They've you know,
formed eighty six billion gold nuclei so far. However, that's
far short of actually enough to create one gold coin.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
So more work to be done, is what we're saying.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
Yes, more work to be done, but ay, I want
to get my own collider.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
I think you have some kitten stories first.
Speaker 4 (45:42):
So we have that. Plus we have this interesting piece
of research on the go map. So that's that fifteenth
century map of Great Britain if you look at it
on its side, but it's really quite detailed, and if
you look really closely, you can see all these little
red loins running over the manuscript page. And so what
research just looked at and found was that a third
of these actually correspond to the old Roman road network. Wow,
(46:07):
indeed they kind of realize that. It shows that these
Roman roads are still being used well into the later
Middle Ages and offers a lot of little nuggets about
traveling in medieval England.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Yeah, if there's one thing we can say about Romans
is they could build a road and they built them
to last.
Speaker 4 (46:24):
Indeed, indeed, so we have that. Plus we have the
pieces on nuns who battled a pope over the building
of a cathedral. It was a violent one. Do they
took out the heavy artillery for that, and the parallels
between the Vikings and nineteen nineties American rap culture.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Beyond, like hairstyles and tattoos right, indeed.
Speaker 4 (46:46):
Indeed, so a big piece, fun.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Piece too awesome. Thanks Peter for telling us what's on
the website.
Speaker 4 (46:53):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
I mentioned that I attended some great sessions at Kalamazoo
this year, but I wanted to take an extra to
congratulate some friends of the podcast on their extra success
at the conference. One of these success stories is that
of Anthony Caldellis, the host of Byzantium and Friends, who
was on the podcast well a few years ago now
talking about Byzantium. Congratulations go out to Anthony for being
(47:17):
chosen to give one of the plenary lectures this year,
which is always a great honor. The talk was called
East Rome and the Shaping of the Greek Classical Canon.
And if you were signed up for the conference and
like me, you missed Anthony's talk the first time around,
it's still available to watch until the end of May.
And then my.
Speaker 5 (47:33):
Podcast guests swept the book prizes as well, with Sarah
ift Decker, the host of Media Evil, winning the Lakoronica
International Book Award for her book The Fruit of Her Hands,
Jewish and Christian.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Women's work in medieval Catalan cities, and Rory Nie Smith
winning the Auto Griddler Book Prize with his book Making
Money in the Early Middle Ages. These are the two
big awards in medieval studies, so big congratulations to both
Rory and Sarah. I'm so pleased to have been able
to host both of them here to talk about their research,
(48:07):
and I really encourage you to check out their episodes
to find out why everyone's talking about these two incredible books.
As you can see, I really do have some stellar
researchers at the top of their powers on the Medieval Podcast.
So a shout out to you, my listeners, for making
it all possible. Thank you for spreading the word, for
letting the ads play, and especially for becoming patrons on
(48:29):
patreon dot com. To find out how to become a
patron and keep the medieval goodness coming, please visit patreon
dot com slash medievalists for everything from Elcid to Theabbosids.
Follow Medievalist dot Net on Instagram at medievalist net or
blue sky at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sabowski
(48:50):
across social media at five min Medievalist or five minute Medievalist,
and you can find my books at all your favorite bookstores.
Our music is Beyond the Warriors by Geefrog. Thanks for listening,
and have yourself a wonderful day.
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and ninety
of the Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sebalski, also known as
the five Minute Medievalist. A few weeks ago, we talked
about a legendary figure from the Holy Roman Empire, and
now it's time to set our sights on one of
Spain's most dashing and heroic figures, El Sid. In the
(00:36):
century since his death, Rodrigo Diaz has been the star
of histories, romances, feature films, and even propaganda campaigns. What
is it that people find so compelling about El Sid
and how much does Rodrigo's real life hold up to
the hype. This week I spoke with doctor Nora Brend
about the legendary El Sid. Nora is a professor of
(00:58):
European history at Cambridge University and the author and editor
of many works on a wide variety of medieval topics
from Eastern and Central Europe to religious minorities, including the
award winning at the Gate of Christendom, Jews, Muslims and
Pagans in medieval Hungary circa one thousand to circa thirteen hundred.
Her new book is El Sid, The Life and after
(01:21):
Life of a medieval Mercenary. Our conversation on what the
life of the real Rodrigo Diaz looked like, how his
legend grew and changed over time, and how Elcid is
still being used as a tool for propaganda is coming
up right after this. Well, welcome Nora to talk about
(01:41):
El Sid. This is very exciting because I haven't spent
any time talking about him so far on this podcast,
and he is a massive figure in Spanish history. So
welcome to talk about Elcid today.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
So you've just put out a very comprehensive book on him,
and it really starts to pull apart the ways in
which there is a real guy and then there is
a legendary guy. And so in order to understand the
real guy, I think we need to set this up
for people. So when we're talking about the historical Elsid,
first of all, he's got a real name. What time
and place are we talking about?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Oh, yes, so he was called Rodrigo Diaz, and we
were talking about the second half of the eleventh century
on the Iberian Peninsula, which at that point was divided
between a southern part Muslim part called all Andolus and
the northern part with Christian kingdoms.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
And what was it like at this time? Was it peaceful?
Because we have these ideas, I think some of us
have ideas of convivencia. Right, everyone is getting along fine,
What does it look like on the ground?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
On the ground, there was actually quite a lot of fighting,
but it was not a clash of civilizations. So basically
the part Alando Luce had been the stronger part of
the peninsula for quite a long time until just before
Rodrigo's birth. So ten thirty one, Alando LUs fragmented politically
(03:13):
into separate small states, and these were all fighting against
each other, also trying to have alliances with other powers,
including Christian powers, against their neighbors. And the Christians from
the north started to realize that there was a real
opportunity here to raid, because these raids were very destructive
(03:37):
for the Muslim states, and they took plunder, they took riches,
and in order to avoid these raids, they started basically
paying tribute. This has been called a protection racket, and
indeed it looked very much like that in some ways.
And so there was a lot of violence, but there
was also a lot of collaboration across the religious divide,
(04:01):
so it doesn't quite fit our ideas of either Comiventhia
or this idea of clash of civilizations. It really was
a different kind of setup from both.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Well, I think that's so important to point out, especially
when we talk about later legends and they have this
weekondquista idea of this is between Christians and Muslims, and
really everything is shifting depending on who's in power and
who wants power.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Right, Absolutely, so this idea that since the early eighth
century when there was this a Bear Bear conquest after
which most of the peninsula was under Muslim rule, that
since this period the Christians had this plan to reconquer
their lands. This was an idea that was formulated early on,
(04:47):
and there are still people who clink to this, but
it's quite clearly erroneous in terms of the historical processes. So, yes,
there was fighting, but Christians were also very I could
fight against each other and take each other's territories, and
in fact, in this period, in the lifetime of Rodrigo,
Christian rulers had a larger chance of being killed by
(05:12):
other Christians then dying in battle against Muslims, and very often,
in fact, it was relatives who were fighting against each
other and sort of trying to dispossess their siblings and
so on and gain more territory. So while there of
course was some fighting by Christians against Muslims, and although
(05:33):
in the end Christians conquered or reconquered whatever world one
prefers the peninsula, this was not reconquista as envisaged by
earlier scholarship.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yes, earlier scholarship. That is important to mention as well,
in that this was an idea that didn't just come
out of nowhere. People were really committed to it for
a very long time. And so if this is an
idea that people at home have had about what things
were like in the Iberian Peninsula, it's not coming from nowhere.
But it's important for us to correct this, which is
something that you're doing in your work, making sure that
(06:09):
we see the complex picture. Okay, so this is the picture,
the image the situation that Rodrigo is born into. So
let's got into his life. So he's born into this
sort of perilous time or at least chaotic time. How
does it go from here?
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yes, and we actually don't know when he was born exactly,
but sort of mid late ten forties probably, and we
know about him as an important military leader at the
royal court, so when we have the first sources about him,
he's already someone who's well known as a military leader.
And he initially served Sancho, the king of Castile, who
(06:50):
was then assassinated. One of these people who, as I
mentioned before, were kind of fighting with their siblings, so
his brother often saw the sixth then took over Castile
as well as eleven, and Rodrigo started to serve him
at the royal court. He married a relative of King
Alfonso Quimena, and he clearly in the service of the
(07:16):
king engaged in all kinds of activities, not just warfare.
He also with other nobles adjudicated cases. This was normal
at the time. He witnessed some charters, but he very
quickly also fell out with the king. It seems that
he was trying to build his independent power and he
(07:41):
raided one of these Muslim principalities that was nominally under
the protection of Alfonso, so he was exiled, and in
exile he ended up going to the Muslim ruler of Zaragoza,
serving him and for five years serving a variety of
rulers there obviously fighting against Christian and Muslim enemies of
(08:04):
the rulers. Then Alfonso was in a very difficult position Moroccans.
The all Morovids invaded at the request of the Muslims
of the peninsula, and Alfonso suffered a big defeat. So
there was a brief reconciliation. He recalled Rodrigo, but very
quickly within a few years they fell out again. So
(08:26):
Rodrigo again showed that he wasn't quite loyal. He failed
to join the royal army on an expedition. He was
exiled again, and by this time he really built up
his own warrior following and various fortified places where he
could stay with these people. So he was gathering tribute
(08:47):
for himself and plunder as well, and eventually he conquered Valencia,
which at that point was a Muslim principality. He conquered
this for himself, not for King Alfonso, and held it
on his death in ten ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
So this is a really interesting story in and of itself,
so stripped of all the legends, we have this guy
who is fighting for his king, which we kind of expect,
and then he switches sides fights for a Muslim ruler,
then he goes back to fight for his king. Then
he just starts to fight for himself. And so he
does not seem motivated by things like religion. He seems
(09:24):
very motivated by things that are definitely earthly, like power,
like money, like building a reputation.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Right, absolutely, and of course, very quickly sort of the
legendary sid started to be rewritten as a loyal subject,
conquering Valancia for the king and so on. But this
is all later legend, and I have to say, in
the period when he lived, what he did was not exceptional.
(09:54):
So he clearly was very, very successful. But there were
plenty of other warriors in his lifetime and even in
the twelfth century who changed sides, some of them several times.
And it's of course impossible to know what his own
religious faith was like. And we do know he was
a Christian. Once he conquered Valencia, he refounded the bishopric
(10:18):
and gave a donation to the cathedral and the bishop.
But what he actually felt, how devoted he was, or
what that meant to him, we don't have any sources
for that.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yes, well, it looks like from some of the things
that you've pulled out that he is looking at the
time of his death, he's looking towards building a dynasty,
building this sort of consolidated power for himself around Valencia, right,
because he marries his daughters into high, high ranking families.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yes, he probably would have liked to transform Valencia, maybe
even into a kingdom. And we know that, for example,
Portugual emerged as a kingdom in this way that its
rulers sort of just started to use the royal title
and eventually that was just accepted and so Portugal became
a separate kingdom. So there were other areas in medieval
(11:13):
Europe where successful warriors, successful conquerors were able to just
create a new kingdom. So it is quite likely that
he would have liked to do that. His own son
probably died before Rodrigo. It's very strange because we have
just a very brief mention of this son. But in
(11:35):
any case, yes, as you said, his two daughters married
into the Navarrees royal family and into the family of
the Count of Barcelona, and indeed their descendants eventually became kings.
But Valencia itself was at that time in the lifetime
of Rodrigo, quite deep in Muslim territory, and when he died,
(11:59):
his widow Jimena held for three years. She held Valencia,
and she governed Valencia, but ultimately she called on the
help of Alphones of the sixth from Castile to hold
Valente against the Muslims, and he decided that it was
just not feasible, so they evacuated the city and went
(12:20):
north to Castile. So Valente itself was not reconquered until
the thirteenth century, and not of course by the descendants
of Rodrigo. So if he had such plans, then he failed.
But in all other respects he was very, very successful.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yes, well, again, we need to put this in context
because we're going to get into the legends in just
a second, so we need to know where we're starting from.
So you actually spent some time in the book digging
into Jimena. What was important to you about figuring out
what's going on with Elsid's wife.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Several things, actually, Well, first of all, I think she
was important in her own own right, but later stories
really transformed her into this sort of dough eyed, passive
figure who kept waiting for Rodrigo in the monastery and afterwards.
So it was important to replace her in her own
(13:16):
context when aristocratic women took part in governing, issuing charters,
giving donations, and we have some evidence. There isn't a
lot left, but for example, we do have one of
her donation charters after she became a video, and it's
clear she was ordering her vassals around. She also demanded
(13:39):
that her sons in law respect the donations that she
made to the church, and she envisaged. So in the
tact she talks about future conquests, so at least in theory,
she was hoping to not just hold on to Palanthia,
but enlarge its territory. We also have the marriage contract
(14:00):
that she had had with Rodrigo, and there too it's
clear she's getting significant properties, as was the custom at
the time. So one of the reasons I wanted to
spend time writing about this is to show how different
this aristocratic woman was from the later legend. But the
other reason is that I think she was instrumental in
(14:25):
the legend of Rodrigo. And here it's more hypothetical because
we don't really have evidence about her role in this.
But what we do know for certain is that when
she had to evacuate, she actually took Rodrigo's remains. He
had been buried in Valentia, and she took these remains
with her and had him reburied in a monastery, San
(14:48):
Pedro de Cardena, and this monastery then became really the
cradle of legends about Rodrigo, and one can hypothesize her
role in starting or kind of contributing to this process.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
So he gets reburied in Castile and then the legends
start to grow. So you were saying, like, we need
to hypothesize, We can't really point to why these legends
might have grown in the way that they did, in
the form that they did. But this is the moment
you feel, as ever, if I have this right from
your book, that the legends start to begin really soon afterwards.
(15:25):
So he has been dead for about three years when
he's translated and brought to Castile, and then the legends
begin pretty soon afterwards. So what's happening in this context.
We have some monks in this monastery, they have this
new important person's body in the monastery. What's going on
from there?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yes, I should add that they the monks were already
to some extent the building on some president at the
end of his life. When Rodrigo gave this donation to
the Bishopric of Valencia. The charter that was drawn up,
so the written document that would be proof of this donation,
which of course was by ecclesiastics. It was not written
(16:03):
or dictated by Rodrigo himself. So these ecclesiastics already cast
him as this Christian savior. There's a very interesting prologue
to the donation charter where they described the history as
a kind of divine punishment for Christians. So the Muslim
conquest is depicted there as divine punishment because Christians were
(16:24):
turning away from God, and that finally, after centuries God
raised up Rodrigo as this divine savior. So there was
already the kernel of this myth in a sense, in
this document. And then the monks of San Pedro de
Cardena contributed to a number of tacks over different centuries
(16:44):
to elaborate the legends. They also probably had some kind
of a role, we don't know exactly what in the
creation of the first epic poem in the vernacular, So
it's important from a literary point of view as well,
an epic pom about Rodrigo. The Poema or cantar demo
sid because in this poem the monastery appears as a
(17:07):
very important place already in the lifetime of Rodrigo, and
that was actually not the case, so this already is
kind of posthumous myth. And then the legends that were
developed at the monastery itself, which were eventually included in
a history of Spain that the king had commissioned of
Funse of the tenth, So in this thirteenth century history
(17:29):
these legends are conserved really developed an idea of Rodrigo
as some kind of a saint. It's quite bizarre for
modern readers. He has a vision of Saint Peter before
he dies, and Saint Peter tells him when he will die,
but also instructs him to basically embalm himself before he
even dies. So he stops eating and he's only eating
(17:52):
and drinking merk and balsam, and is kind of embalming
himself from the inside, if I can say so. And
then after this process is finalized and his incre body
then defeats the Muslim so he has a final victory
in battle. He's affixed to his horse and of course
disappears in the film where Charlton Heston starred as Rodrigo,
(18:15):
and then the body is taken to San Pedro de Cardena,
so here it's not three years after death, but it's
his own will to be buried in San Pedro, and
his dead body is immediately sort of taken their own horseback.
And then because the body is so perfect, he Mana
doesn't want him to be buried, So basically the body
(18:37):
sitting above ground at the monastery in the monastery church
and produces a miracle, and only after ten years do
they finally bury the body after the tip of his
nose falls off, So the monks are kind of creating
a saint, and indeed, later on they try to have
him canonize, so recognized by the papacy as a saint,
(19:00):
which sort petered out for political reasons, so there was
too much upheaval going on at the time in Italy
when they tried this in the sixteenth century. But at
the monastery itself they clearly treated him more or less
like a saint already centuries before, and this was to
both attract pilgrims Christian pilgrims who would come and pray
(19:21):
at his tomb and royal patronage having a kind of
significant otherworldly patron to show the importance of the monastery
again in periods when there was quite a lot of
upheople in Spain and a lot of competition for royal
patronage and privileges.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yes, it's an incredible story because of how rapidly this
legend builds up and then how entrenched it becomes when
it's only a couple generations since the actual man has died.
So it's almost something that you could say for sure
in having your grandparents would know, but that's not how
it goes. And as you say in the legend, you know,
(20:01):
he's this corpse, he's put on the saddle, he's sentenced about.
His eyes are meant to be open. No one can
tell that he's dead, and that makes it so that
they have a victory. And it is just it's just
a spectacular legend in the form as you're saying, of
a lot of the saints' lives that we see elsewhere
in the Middle Ages, where you have this corpse that
(20:21):
is miraculously smelling, amazing and performing miracles, and it's just
an incredible thing for this to happen so rapidly, especially
for someone who had switched religious sides. You know, if
you're going to take that view as him being a
Christian hero, well, it's a hard case to make. At times.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Well, it seems to have been a surprisingly easy case
to make, at least from the information that we have now,
because these texts very quickly started to simply whitewash his
service in Muslim Viergothe.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
It was just not mentioned anymore. Now with her people
at the time who heard these stories, you know, objected
and said, oh, but you know, I remember otherwise we
don't know. But clearly at the level of the text
this worked perfectly because more and more texts were produced
about him, turning him into a loyal vassal, a Castilian patriot,
(21:20):
a great Christian hero, not just a great warrior, but
really this kind of paragone. So it seems that the
Tacks just proliferated and accepted this change, this whitewashing. It's
only much more modern scholarships that then started to look
(21:41):
at these Tacks more critically and also find Arabic sources
about him, which of course depict him in a very
different way. But you know, for centuries it seems that
this rewriting was completely accepted, and of course, we can
see that so many different people in groups had a
vested interest in that. So presumably his own family descendants,
(22:05):
eventually the kings whose ancestor he was, and obviously, you know,
a thirteenth century Christian king would prefer this Christian hero
as a grandfather, even if they knew that it was
not quite true. The monks, and eventually, even if I
can say that a sort of more abstract reason, presenting
(22:28):
him as a kind of ideal of Christian warriors at
a time we were talking about the very early thirteenth
century when the papacy was doing its very best to
have all the Christian kings of the Iberian Peninsula stopped
fighting against each other and cooperate to fight against the Muslims.
And this resulted in the victory of losn AVOs Betalosa,
(22:53):
after which in a few decades, so about forty years
or so, most of the peninsula changed to has under
Christian rule only Granada, so the very tip of the
peninsula remained in Muslim hands. So in this kind of
propaganda war, if you like to convince all these Christian
(23:14):
rulers to cooperate, Elsid became a very useful hero in
this whitewashed forum who fought for the faith and was
very successful in that.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yes, and it's not strange in context to see people
making fan fiction about their favorite heroes. We see this
all over the place, Like in fourteenth century people are
writing stuff about Richard the Lion art which is just
completely bizarre. So this isn't strange in and of itself.
But like I said, the thing that is fun for
me to look at is just how quickly this happened.
(23:48):
One thing that I did want to mention is that
you've traced this, this legend of else did and it
is spreading throughout Europe. So there is a really consolidated
idea of him as a sort of romantic hero beyond
just the borders of Castile, so that he is becoming
somebody that people are looking up to, beyond the borders
of Liberia.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yes, and this happens in the early modern period and
via literary texts in Spain. These taxx really proliferate, so
there are many many texts about him as this warrior
hero and this gets picked up outside as well. And
of course the most famous of these texts is Cornets
(24:30):
from the early seventeenth century who ended up writing a play,
but in this play, the outfit of the play is
almost a kind of Hamlet like figures, So he is
torn between love and duty, as is Humana. Actually, so
both the hero and the heroin have the same kind
of problems that on the one hand, duty points to
(24:53):
revenging family members, in both cases their father. So initially
jimenez father insults Rodrigo's father and that's why he has
to avenge this, and he ends up in a duel
killing Jimana's father, at which point, although they're very much
in love, she is now duty bound to exact revenge
(25:14):
and seek Rodrigo's death. So you have this amazing kind
of rewriting of the whole story which is very persistent.
So you kind of have this also in the film
that I mentioned already, which has no basis in the
medieval stories. This is really kind of a new early
modern version. And then from that, basically everywhere in Germany,
(25:40):
in England, in the United States, various authors pick up
on the story, change it even further and write new
books about him. So very quickly, yes, he becomes truly
internationally famous, but in slightly different guys is, so he
can be seen as a kind of courtier. He can
(26:00):
be a guaranteur of legitimate rulership, and so on and
so forth. So there were new layers added to the legend.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yes, well, I do want to get into the way
that this legend and this figure got to be used,
because I was hoping we would have time for this,
and I think that we will. So before we got
to that, maybe we should take a second too, mention
when does he start becoming called el said and self
rogio and where does this come from?
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yes, that's a great question, And for a long time
it was thought that because the meaning of the term
is basically the Spanish el the joint to a term
that comes from Arabic meaning lord, So the lord, my
lord miothid that this was the way in which his
(26:51):
Muslim subjects, or perhaps muslims who revered him, looked up
to him, addressed him. However, the first time we have
this in the sources is posthumous. So the term that
we know for sure was used in his lifetime was
compeador campi doctor. So then the question became is al
(27:13):
did simply a posthumous term. Most recently there was this
argument that actually in the area of Burgos, where his
family came from, already probably in his lifetime. But again
it's a little bit if he the very first mention
is just after his death that we have for certain
(27:33):
others were also called Did in this region. And so
one hypothesis now has it that this was actually not
directly from the Arabic but it was already earlier adopted
into the Romance vernacular as an expression and was applied
to nobles in the region of Burgos. Well, if that
(27:54):
is the case, then maybe he was already called this
during his lifetime. But in that case this was not
a sign of being unique, but just because this was
a way in which nobles were called. But it's also
possible that it's just a posthumous term that was finally
kind of added to his name.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Yes, well, even if we accept this argument that people
are calling leaders at this point, calling them sid, there's
a big difference between meo Sid my lord, and el
Sid the lord. So it's interesting in itself that he
becomes the lord. There's one, there's only one, and this
is the guy.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yes, and that actually is kind of very much part
of his posthumous triumph, if you like, because in his
lifetime and soon after his death there were quite a
lot of other warriors who were famous and about whom
poems were written and so on. But as time went by,
his fame grew and the fame of the others dissipated,
(28:56):
and for the white public, he became the only one.
So yes, as you say, he becomes the lord and
kind of signaling this unique status which is very far
from what he had been in his lifetime.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
M okay. So we've come up through the early modern period,
we're looking at the twentieth century, and just at the
end of the nineteenth century there's a historian that picks
up Elsid and he just makes this legend blow up
for the modern world. So why did you want to
spend some time thinking about this historian's work when it
(29:31):
comes to Elsid.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Yes, So this is Ramon Menendez Pidal, And for me
he was interesting for two reasons. Really. One is that
he was instrumental both in scholarship but even beyond in
really cementing the legend as some kind of historical truth.
So he was a philologist who worked most of his
(29:56):
life on editing and interpreting the So about Rodrigo diav.
But he sort of fell in love with his subject matter,
so he really tried to prove that the legend was true.
So the thirteenth century poem, vernacular poem for him, was
much earlier, went back to oral tradition which was more
(30:19):
or less contemporary and included true information. So he wanted
to rehabilitate Rodria, and he even said very explicitly that
Rodrigo was a model for people in his own time.
And we are of course talking about a period which
was a difficult period in Spanish history, just after the
loss of the Spanish Empire, and very very different ideas
(30:43):
by different factions, different political parties about what should be done.
So he tried to offer this model that for him
was the most positive character from Spanish history. So he
was very influential through his scholarship. But then he was
also the historical ed advisor for the film with Childhood Heston,
so his views really spread all over the world, not
(31:06):
just in Spain. So that's kind of one of the reasons.
And the second reason is that for me as a historian,
I guess he's a really tragic figure. So the figure
of the scholar who really sets out to write scholarship
and invests most of his life in this and ends
up providing fodder for a dictatorship. I cannot really imagine
(31:28):
a worse fate in some way than this. So Menendezvidel
was not a Francoist. He even left Spain for a while,
so going into voluntary exile, but he returned and for
quite a few years he was suspect he could not
regain his earlier academic position, so he was not a
(31:49):
supporter of Franco. But the Francoist started to use his
work very early on, and even made his book on
the FID and Obligatory reading the Military Academy and ended
up sort of modeling Franco on the SID, so kind
of taking Franco as a new SID and using Menandespidal's
work for this purpose. And he clearly didn't wholeheartedly participate
(32:15):
in this, but he also didn't quite distance himself. So
a very good example is when in Burgos there was
a big festivity where Franco himself was present personally to
unveil this big statue for the thid and Bridge, which
was created with the statues of people who supposedly were
(32:37):
associated to him. The local paper put on a whole
issue about this, and they asked Mendespidal to write something
for this and he sort of said, well, I'm sorry,
I'm too busy. I cannot, but you can use some
of my existing work. I think that pretty much encapsulates
how he dealt as this use of his work while
(32:58):
not quite and doors seeing the francoist us also being
fairly cautious, which of course is understandable, but as I
said to me, quite tragic.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Yes, well, it's something that I think is allto relevant
when we're looking at politics, right, so for people who
are not really familiar with the Spanish civil where we're
talking about the thirties and there is a rise to
power of this dictator and he uses things like let's
go back to the traditional values that are encapsulated in
this vision of medieval history. So we've had people on
(33:29):
the podcast talking about that. I'm thinking especially about the
episode we did call The Devil's Historians, where people are
taking someone from the Middle Ages, rewriting it, making this
person look like everything they want him to be, and
then holding him up as a figure for whom you
just use it as a propaganda machine. And you have
examples in the book of Franco, who's the dictator at
(33:50):
the time, takes power in Spain, ruthless, ruthless person, and
he's actually portraying himself as a sid. So you're talking
about just now talking about him sort of being referred
to as the next great sort of medieval leader, and
you actually have pictures in here of him being painted
as Els did right.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yes, absolutely ironically. In the end, that painting was not installed.
It was supposed to be in what used to be
called the Via Deelu Squidos. So this horrible Francoist monument
that was built with the slave labor basically of imprisoned Republicans.
Franco himself had been buried there then for decades there
was a big controversy before finally his body was removed.
(34:33):
Recently the whole place was renamed. But so it was
for this gigantic Francoist monument that this painting was created,
and it portrays Franco as the thid. In the middle.
There's a kind of white horseman coming from heavens, So
Santiago Matamoros, probably the Saint James, the more Slayer, the
(34:56):
Apostle James, who is supposedly buried in Santia with a compostela,
and from the medieval period there were all these legends
about him coming and helping Christian warriors. And then you
have all kinds of Francoist military personnel, religious people, workers
and so on Spanish society as imagined by the nationalists
(35:19):
around franco And ironically this was never installed because the
artist was South American and so not nationalist enough finally
to have his work in the Via delas Catus. But
it wasn't just this image. There were a lot of texts,
a lot of comparisons made, and the whole cause, of
(35:39):
the whole nationalist cause, the Francoist cause, was represented as
some kind of continuation of Rodrigo Dias's cause. So Rodrigo
was presented as some sort of a leader of a
raconquista who wanted to reunify Spain, who was fighting against
evil enemies, and Francoist represented as continuing this recon cistern
(36:03):
unification and fighting against Republicans and communists. So, yeah, these
parallels were in many ways constantly evoked.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah, and we see this sort of thing happening again
with Richard and Lineheart, with Charlemagne. People are pulling these
people out and popping them up and using them for
whatever purpose they want. And what you're seeing is so
that eventually the dictatorship fell in Spain. But now you're
seeing el Sid being weaponized again. Can you tell us
a little bit about what's happening currently that you're seeing
(36:34):
the way that Elsid is being used in Spain.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Yes, it's fascinating in a way because now two opposing
political sides are using him. So on the one hand,
with the resurgence of the far right, you have again
this idea of the Thid as a sort of killer
of Muslims, white nationalists in a way before the term
was coined, who wanted to get rid of foreigners in
(37:00):
whose name people can be mobilized again. But on the
other hand, he also became a kind of figurehead for multiculturalists,
who emphasized that he lived together peacefully with Muslims and
learned from Muslims. There's a novel about him, And of
course there are all sorts of uses that are not
(37:21):
really political. There are for the purposes of tourism, for example,
a whole root of all the places that are mentioned
in the thirteenth century poem about him and the website
and more and more statues put up to him on
this route, and so on and so forth. So things also,
of course can take on a life of their own
without political meaning. But I think what's most interesting in
(37:45):
a way is this use by really opposing political factions
and both kind of trying to remodel, as said, in
their own image.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
It's amazing the way that human beings can work with stories, especially,
we can make them mean anything we want to. And
there are all those little kernels that you could elevate
and blow up and turn them into something else from
Rodrigo's life. But it's really kind of interesting that this
is not certainly was not his intent, I think, ever,
(38:18):
to become a saint, because considering there are so many
people who are living at the same time that did
not become these figures, it's very interesting to me that
Rodrigo has become el sid Yes.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Indeed, and as I say, in his lifetime there was
quite a lot of competition in a way, so there
were quite a lot of people in somewhat similar positions,
but both probably because of the immediate descendants who really
pushed his case and because of these early texts that
proliferated so quickly and made him so famous. I think
(38:56):
that's why eventually his fames or eclipsed those of others.
And then of course you can see indeed how you
can twist parts of the story to make him into
someone else, and how many different stories could be built
around him because of that.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
So I have to ask you, as somebody who's been
looking at all of these different iterations of elsaid, is
there one that you particularly love that you come back
to and your like in your off time when you're resting,
you're like, this is the story that I really like?
Is there one that sticks out for you? Do you
watch the Charlton Hustin film.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Of course I watched it in order to sort of
really know how he's represented in the film, because I
have a chapter on that. But no, I must say
that I really prefer trying to figure out as much
as possible what actually the real Rodrigo was. And of
course we cannot know everything, we don't have enough sources,
(39:54):
we are in the dark, or we kind of hypothesize
about many things. But nonetheless I still prefer understanding the
complexities of the historical period where a lot of people
lived off of fighting and plunder, how this worked at
the time, why that society was like that. But I'm
(40:15):
not trying to create some kind of idealized image based
on this, And in fact, I find it very very
very important to keep repeating that we should not idealize
historical figures. I think it's very very dangerous. So in
a way, I don't have a favorite Rodrigo because I
just have this thirst for knowing what in fact he
(40:39):
did when he was alive.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I very much relate to that. There's a point at
which sometimes you just want to relax into a story,
but most of the time I just want to find
out what actually happened. And for people who are interested,
they can find all sorts of answers about what we
know about Rodrigo in your book. So thank you for
coming on and telling us all about el Sid.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Thank you very much for the invitation.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
To find out more about Nora's work, you can check
out her faculty page at Cambridge University. Her new book
is el Sid, The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary.
Before we go, here's Peter from Medievalist dot Net to
tell us what's on the website. And Peter, you are
still babysitting kittens. So we've got some kitten activity in
(41:26):
the background today, don't we.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
Hey hey, well right now, it's the two parents that
are causing trouble behind me. The three little ones are doing.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Well, good, good, and being a kitten parent is what
kept you from Kalamazoo this weekend?
Speaker 4 (41:42):
Right, Yeah, that's my excuse you. But you attended online?
Speaker 2 (41:46):
I did?
Speaker 4 (41:46):
What was it?
Speaker 1 (41:48):
It was good? I mean I would have liked to
have seen more online sessions because, as you know, there
are dozens and dozens of sessions for every time slot,
and relatively speaking, few of them were online, and so
you had to go with what was offered online. This
is the price of deciding not to go in person,
(42:08):
I suppose. But there were things I would have liked
to have seen if I could have. But I got
to go to sessions on graffiti, on the expulsion of Jews.
That's always a really interesting and important topic when we're
talking about history proverbs. Christine de Pisan got to see
friend of the podcast We're Not a Bluenfeld Kasinski there,
(42:28):
which was nice. It's nice to catch up with people,
even virtually, because that was always one of the best
things about Kalamazoo. I also went to the Deray Militari lecture,
which is an association very dear to your heart, where
Peter Larde was talking about what the Chinese would have
thought of the Hundred Years War. I mean, the short
(42:50):
answer is not much also, so they wouldn't have thought
it was really that big a deeal. I also attended
the plenary by Haruko MoMA or hal MoMA, and this
was about naming place names, and that was just so interesting.
I really love etymology, so that's interesting and thinking about
reclaiming old names based on like older versions of names.
(43:14):
She was talking about the case of the mountain Snowden
and how we should be returning to its original Welsh name,
which I have not put in my notes. That's on me.
And then another one I thought was really interesting was
right at the end of Kalamazoo, and it was by
a scholar called Katarzino Grochowska. I think that's how you
say it about some female scribes and Poland, and if
(43:37):
you've never looked at the way in which people figure
out which scribe is which, it's just so interesting to
see that. And so watching her sort of make her
case for these are scribes who are being taught, and
these are the master scribes. And this is how the
same person evolved over the course of about thirty years,
a none who was doing musical notation. Just such interesting stuff.
(44:00):
So I always have a good time at Kalamazoo. And
those were just some of the sessions that I went to.
Speaker 4 (44:05):
Oh it sounds like, guys, some fascinating topics. It's good
to see you. Plethora of medieval research going on.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah, And I think the more times you go to Kalamazoo,
the more that you spread out your interests. Right, I'm
not going to the same sessions that I did go
to and I was just out of my undergraduate research.
So yeah, it's always a good time.
Speaker 4 (44:24):
Sounds like some sweet fine.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, So what's up with you?
Speaker 4 (44:28):
Well, I've been putting research on medievals dot net relate.
That includes a little fascinating thing where we found out
that alchemists were right after all, you can turn lead
into gold.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
I mean, there are so many cheers happening from beyond
the grave right now, I think right.
Speaker 4 (44:44):
Indeed, indeed, and I took the researchers at discerns large
hadron colliders, so if you know your physics. This is
that big facility buried under Switzerland, whether you do experiments
you know, with light and photons and electro magnets and
getting things to the speed of light. And so they've
observed how the atom of lead can get hit and
(45:07):
bashed it turns into gold when it loses three protons.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Yes, that's fascinating, and what they realized was it's hard
to keep that up right indeed.
Speaker 4 (45:19):
Indeed, well it's they've been producing a lot. They've you know,
formed eighty six billion gold nuclei so far. However, that's
far short of actually enough to create one gold coin.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
So more work to be done, is what we're saying.
Speaker 4 (45:34):
Yes, more work to be done, but ay, I want
to get my own collider.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
I think you have some kitten stories first.
Speaker 4 (45:42):
So we have that. Plus we have this interesting piece
of research on the go map. So that's that fifteenth
century map of Great Britain if you look at it
on its side, but it's really quite detailed, and if
you look really closely, you can see all these little
red loins running over the manuscript page. And so what
research just looked at and found was that a third
of these actually correspond to the old Roman road network. Wow,
(46:07):
indeed they kind of realize that. It shows that these
Roman roads are still being used well into the later
Middle Ages and offers a lot of little nuggets about
traveling in medieval England.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Yeah, if there's one thing we can say about Romans
is they could build a road and they built them
to last.
Speaker 4 (46:24):
Indeed, indeed, so we have that. Plus we have the
pieces on nuns who battled a pope over the building
of a cathedral. It was a violent one. Do they
took out the heavy artillery for that, and the parallels
between the Vikings and nineteen nineties American rap culture.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Beyond, like hairstyles and tattoos right, indeed.
Speaker 4 (46:46):
Indeed, so a big piece, fun.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Piece too awesome. Thanks Peter for telling us what's on
the website.
Speaker 4 (46:53):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
I mentioned that I attended some great sessions at Kalamazoo
this year, but I wanted to take an extra to
congratulate some friends of the podcast on their extra success
at the conference. One of these success stories is that
of Anthony Caldellis, the host of Byzantium and Friends, who
was on the podcast well a few years ago now
talking about Byzantium. Congratulations go out to Anthony for being
(47:17):
chosen to give one of the plenary lectures this year,
which is always a great honor. The talk was called
East Rome and the Shaping of the Greek Classical Canon.
And if you were signed up for the conference and
like me, you missed Anthony's talk the first time around,
it's still available to watch until the end of May.
And then my.
Speaker 5 (47:33):
Podcast guests swept the book prizes as well, with Sarah
ift Decker, the host of Media Evil, winning the Lakoronica
International Book Award for her book The Fruit of Her Hands,
Jewish and Christian.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Women's work in medieval Catalan cities, and Rory Nie Smith
winning the Auto Griddler Book Prize with his book Making
Money in the Early Middle Ages. These are the two
big awards in medieval studies, so big congratulations to both
Rory and Sarah. I'm so pleased to have been able
to host both of them here to talk about their research,
(48:07):
and I really encourage you to check out their episodes
to find out why everyone's talking about these two incredible books.
As you can see, I really do have some stellar
researchers at the top of their powers on the Medieval Podcast.
So a shout out to you, my listeners, for making
it all possible. Thank you for spreading the word, for
letting the ads play, and especially for becoming patrons on
(48:29):
patreon dot com. To find out how to become a
patron and keep the medieval goodness coming, please visit patreon
dot com slash medievalists for everything from Elcid to Theabbosids.
Follow Medievalist dot Net on Instagram at medievalist net or
blue sky at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sabowski
(48:50):
across social media at five min Medievalist or five minute Medievalist,
and you can find my books at all your favorite bookstores.
Our music is Beyond the Warriors by Geefrog. Thanks for listening,
and have yourself a wonderful day.
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