CID. — By this name (Arabic sajjid = lord), bestowed upon him by the vanquished enemy, history consecrates Rodrigo Díaz de Bivar, the Castilian hero in whom medieval Christian Spain is embodied. Born around 1026 and dying at Valencia in 1099, his memory is intimately bound up with the glorious phases of the «reconquista». A devout vassal of Sancho II of Castile, upon the latter’s death, brought about by the deception plotted by his sister Urraca and his brother Alfonso, he is banished from the kingdom (1081) by the latter, now sovereign of Castile and León and, for reasons that are unclear, decisively hostile to him. Yet he remains a faithful and obedient vassal throughout the hazardous and successful events of his long exile, interrupted more than once by a fleeting reconciliation with the sovereign. After reconquering for Christianity many lands that had fallen prey to the invading Arabs, the capture of Valencia, wrested from the Moors in 1094, crowns his glorious destiny, which his death will bring to an end in 1099. For another three years the widow Ximena is able to govern the city, but in 1102, under the mounting Almoravid pressure, she is forced to leave it, carrying with her the hero’s corpse, which will find burial in the Castilian convent of St Peter of Cardeña and subsequently in Burgos Cathedral.
Only a few decades after his disappearance, poetry is already flourishing around the figure of Rodrigo. Indeed, the Cantare de Mio C., a poem of an eminently historical character, animated by a deeply felt patriotic sentiment that permeates and enlivens it, very probably predates 1157 by only a short time; in it Rodrigo becomes the highest expression of the now-renascent Castile, the noblest qualities of the Castilian soul being fused in him: gravity and affability, nobility unaware of emphasis, religiosity, tenderness, and loyalty. The cantar, which is wholly national in spirit and character, although it does not lack certain technical motifs borrowed from French epic, consists of approximately 3,700 verses linked by assonance and of varying length, and may be divided into three parts: the first describes the hero’s fortunes from the moment when he is driven into exile (under the accusation of having appropriated part of the tribute paid by the king of Granada) to the conquest of Valencia; the second develops around the marriage of Rodrigo’s daughters to the counts of Carrión, Leonese nobles who, having married d. Elvira and d. Sol out of base calculation, subsequently abandon them naked and battered in the forest of Corpes. For this affront (and here the final part begins), the C. obtains from the «Cortes» convened by the sovereign, to whom he has appealed for justice and satisfaction, the annulment of the marriages: his daughters can thus celebrate new marriages with the infante of Navarre and that of Aragon.
The strictly realistic and historical narrative, poor in fantastic elements, but in which, at the same time, the hero’s moral figure remains nobly idealized, presents an entire 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 only unknown whether they married Rodrigo’s daughters.
With time, however, the Castilian hero, who in the cantar is a faithful mirror of the dignified austerity, democratic and individualistic spirit, and love of adventure that are typical and constant traits of the race (and whose epic figure was completed in the lost cantari of Fernando I and of the siege of Zamora, both concerning the hero’s earliest years), will see his features altered into those with which he appears in the manuscript (of 1307) written by Pero Abbat, which alone preserves the cantar: but this occurs only from the fourteenth century onward. Indeed, in the Latin poem composed for the capture of Almería (between 1147 and 1157) his figure remains intact, as had already happened in the contemporary Latin poem in Sapphic verse, composed around the struggle waged against the count of Barcelona, and in the Historia Roderici, written approximately fifteen years after his death, as well as in the prose narratives of the Primera Crónica general (1289) and of the chronicle of 1344, or in the particular chronicle of the C., where the almost sole innovation is the greater prominence given to the hero’s religiosity.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century, in the poem called Cantare or Deeds of Rodrigo, of which the chronicle of 1344 offers a prose version, and from which in the second half of the century the rhymed chronicle (also called El Rodrigo) developed—a work of wide influence and crowded with new, particularly religious elements—the elaboration of the sober initial motif reaches the final stage of its degenerative process: the devout vassal has become so arrogant and overbearing as to treat the sovereign almost as his own vassal. With this new and unfortunate character, the C. continues to live on in poetry: in a fully legendary atmosphere we encounter the already established theme of the mocedades, that is, the youthful exploits, in which the triumph of the spirit of adventure, expressed in a piling-up of extraordinary and improbable incidents, will suffocate the human poetry of the twelfth-century gesta. The «romancero» of the C., in turn, the work of various authors and periods, does not portray the hero in a unified manner, but now presents him as gentle and submissive, an affectionate husband and tender father, more often obstinate and inflexible or even a soldier almost intoxicated by plunder; and for the first time it places his heroic youth at the centre of a romance of love and death. Indeed, the «romancero» are the first to speak to us of his youthful loves, hitherto unknown, with Ximena, only temporarily troubled by the tragic duel with her father, who had offended Rodrigo’s father; these Guillén de Castro would gather in the Mocedades del C. (the direct source of Corneille’s masterpiece), the best known and most widely circulated of all the poetic works devoted to the most glorious of the Spaniards. 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 eighteenth century attempts would be made at contaminations and adaptations of the greatest Spanish drama and of the French classical creation, until, in the Romantic era, the legend attracted Hugo, Hérédia, and Leconte de Lale; it would spread through imitations and evocations from Germany to Oceania, only to return in its homeland to the realm of the noblest poetry, to the verses of Rubén Darío and Machado, and to Marquina’s penetrating drama (Las hijas del C.), the first dramatist to draw his inspiration directly from the old cantar.