Cid

CID. - With this name (Arabic sajjid = lord) given to him by the defeated enemy, Rodrigo Díaz de Bivar is consecrated by history, the Castilian hero in whom medieval Christian Spain is incarnated. Born around 1026 and died at Valencia in 1099, his memory is intimately linked to the glorious phases of the "reconquista." A devoted vassal of Sancho II of Castile, at the latter's death — brought about by the treachery plotted against him by his sister Urraca and his brother Alfonso — he is banished from the kingdom (1081) by the latter, by then sovereign of Castile and León, who had for unclear reasons become decidedly hostile to him. But he remains a faithful and obedient vassal through the eventful and fortunate vicissitudes of his long exile, more than once interrupted by a fleeting reconciliation with the sovereign. After having reconquered for Christendom many lands by then prey to the invading Arabs, the capture of Valencia, wrested from the Moors in 1094, crowns his glorious destiny, which death would end in 1099. For another three years his widow Ximena was able to govern the city, but in 1102, under growing Almoravid pressure, she was compelled to withdraw from it, carrying with her the body of the hero, which would find burial in the Castilian convent of St. Peter of Cardeña and subsequently in the Cathedral of Burgos.

A few decades after his disappearance, poetry was already flourishing around the figure of Rodrigo. Indeed, the Cantar de Mio Cid very probably dates from shortly before 1157, a poem of eminently historical character, animated by a deeply felt sentiment of love of country that pervades and quickens it, and in which Rodrigo becomes the highest expression of the now resurgent Castile, the noblest qualities of the Castilian soul being fused in him: gravity and affability, nobility unacquainted with emphasis, religiosity, tenderness and loyalty. The cantar, which is absolutely national in spirit and character, although not lacking certain technical motifs borrowed from the French epic, consists of about 3,700 verses linked by assonance and of varying length, and can be divided into three parts: the first describes the vicissitudes of the hero from the moment he is driven into exile (under the accusation of having appropriated a part of the tribute paid by the king of Granada) up to the conquest of Valencia; the second unfolds around the motif of the marriages of Rodrigo's daughters to the counts of Carrión, Leonese nobles who, having married Doña Elvira and Doña Sol out of base calculation, then abandon them naked and battered in the forest of Corpes. For this affront (and here the last part begins) the Cid obtains from the "Cortes" convened by the sovereign, to whom he has appealed for justice and satisfaction, that the marriages be annulled: his daughters can thus celebrate new marriages with the infante of Navarre and that of Aragon.

The narration, strictly realistic and historical and scant in fantastic elements, but in which, at the same time, the moral figure of the hero remains nobly idealized, presents a whole series of minor characters who are likewise historical and perfectly defined (Alvar Fáñez, Martín Muñoz, Nuño Gustioz, etc.): the infantes of Carrión themselves belong to historical reality, and it is merely unknown whether they contracted marriage with Rodrigo's daughters.

In time, however, the Castilian hero, who in the cantar is a faithful mirror of the dignified austerity, the democratic and individualist spirit and the love of adventure that are typical and constant notes of the race (and whose epic figure was completed in the lost cantares of Ferdinand I and of the siege of Zamora, both referring to the hero's earliest years), would see his features altered into those with which he comes down to us from that manuscript (of 1307) owed to the pen of Pero Abbat, which alone preserves the cantar for us: but this occurs only from the 14th century onward. In fact, in the Latin poem composed for the capture of Almería (between 1147 and 1157) his figure remains intact, as had already happened in the Latin carmen in Sapphic verses contemporary with him, composed around the struggle waged against the count of Barcelona, and in the Historia Roderici written about 15 years after his death, as well as in the prose accounts of the Primera Crónica general (1289) and of the chronicle of 1344 or in the particular chronicle of the Cid, where almost the only novelty is the greater prominence given to the hero's religiosity.

At the beginning of the 14th century, in the poem known as Cantar or Gesta de Rodrigo, of which the chronicle of 1344 offers a prose redaction, and from which in the second half of the century there develops the rhymed chronicle (also called El Rodrigo) of wide influence and teeming with new and particularly religious elements, the elaboration of the sober initial motif reaches the final stage of its degenerative process: the devoted vassal has become so arrogant and overbearing as to treat the sovereign almost as a vassal of his own. With this new and unfortunate character the Cid continues to live in poetry: in a full atmosphere of legend one finds oneself faced with the already constituted theme of the mocedades, that is, of the youthful exploits, in which the triumph of the spirit of adventure, translated into a piling up of extraordinary and improbable incidents, will stifle the human poetry of the gesta of the 12th century. The "romancero" of the Cid, in turn, the work of various authors and of various epochs, does not describe the hero in a unitary form, but now presents him gentle and submissive, an affectionate husband and tender father, more often obstinate and inflexible or indeed a soldier almost drunk with plunder, and for the first time places his heroic youth at the center of a novel of love and death: in fact, the "romancero" first speaks to us of his youthful loves, until then unknown, with Ximena, only momentarily disturbed by the tragic duel with her father, the offender of Rodrigo's father, and which Guillén de Castro would gather in the Mocedades del Cid (the direct source of Corneille's masterpiece), the best known and most widespread among all the works of poetry consecrated to the most glorious among Spaniards. But other dramas may be added, from Lope's Las almenas de Toro, to Matos Fragoso's No está en matar el vencer, to La conquista de Valencia, to J. B. Diamante's Honrador de su padre, etc.; in the 18th century contaminations and adaptations of the greatest Spanish drama and of the French classical creation would be attempted, until in the Romantic era the legend would interest Hugo, Hérédia, Leconte de Lisle; it would spread in imitations and evocations from Germany to Oceania, only to return in its own land to the realm of the noblest poetry, to the verses of Rubén Darío and of Machado, to the penetrating drama of Marquina (Las hijas del Cid), the first playwright to have drawn his inspiration directly from the old cantar.

Jole Scudieri Ruggieri