CID CAMPEADOR. — With this name (Arabic *sajjid* = lord), given to him by his vanquished enemy, history has consecrated RODRIGO DÍAZ DE BÍVAR, the Castilian hero in whom medieval Christian Spain is embodied. Born around 1043 and died in Valencia in 1099, his memory is intimately tied to the glorious phases of the *Reconquista*. A devoted vassal of SANCHO II of Castile, upon the latter’s death—caused by a plot hatched by his sister Urraca and brother Alfonso—he is banished from the kingdom (1081) by the now-ruling Alfonso, who had become openly hostile to him for unclear reasons. Yet Rodrigo remains a faithful and obedient vassal throughout the turbulent and fortunate events of his long exile, interrupted more than once by fleeting reconciliations with the sovereign. After reclaiming many lands for Christendom that had fallen prey to the invading Arabs, the capture of Valencia—taken from the Moors in 1094—crowns his glorious destiny, which death would end in 1099. For three more years, his widow Ximena would hold the city, but in 1102, under mounting Almoravid pressure, she was forced to abandon it, carrying with her the hero’s remains, which would find burial first in the Castilian convent of San Pedro de Cardeña and later in the Cathedral of Burgos.
Within a few decades of his death, poetry began to flourish around Rodrigo’s figure. Indeed, the *Cantar de Mio Cid*, a poem of eminently historical character, animated by a moving sentiment of patriotic love, was likely composed shortly before 1140. In it, Rodrigo becomes the highest expression of a resurgent Castile, embodying the noblest qualities of the Castilian soul: gravity and affability, nobility unadorned by bombast, piety, tenderness, and loyalty. The poem, which is of absolutely national spirit and character—though not lacking certain technical motifs borrowed from French experience—consists of about 3,700 assonanced verses of varying length and may be divided into three parts: the first recounts the hero’s adventures from the moment of his exile (under the accusation of having appropriated part of the tribute paid by the King of Granada) to the conquest of Valencia; the second revolves around the marriages of Rodrigo’s daughters to the counts of Carrion, Leonese nobles who, in a base calculation, marry Doña Elvira and Doña Sol only to abandon them naked and battered in the Corpes forest. For this affront (and here begins the final part), the Cid obtains from the *Cortes*, convened by the sovereign to whom he had appealed for justice and satisfaction, the annulment of the marriages, allowing his daughters to contract new unions with the Infantes of Navarre and Aragon.
The narrative, strictly realistic and historical with few fantastic elements, yet in which the moral figure of the hero is nobly idealized, presents a series of minor characters who are also historical and perfectly defined (Álvar Fáñez, Martín Muñoz, Nuño Gustioz, etc.); even the Infantes of Carrion belong to historical reality, though it is unknown whether they actually married Rodrigo’s daughters.
Over time, however, the Castilian hero—who in the poem is a faithful mirror of the dignified austerity, democratic and individualist spirit, and love of adventure that are typical and constant traits of the race (and whose epic figure was completed in the lost *cantares* of Fernando I and the siege of Zamora, both relating to the hero’s early years)—would see his features altered into those encountered in the manuscript (from 1307) by the hand of Pero Abbat, the sole source preserving the poem. Yet this transformation only begins in the 14th century. Indeed, in the Latin poem composed for the taking of Almería (between 1147 and 1157), his figure remains intact, as it had in the contemporary Latin poem in verse composed around the struggle against the Count of Barcelona, and in the *Historia Roderici*, written about fifteen years after his death, as well as in the prose accounts of the *Primera Crónica General* (1289) and the chronicle of 1344, in the particular chronicle of the Cid, where the only notable novelty is the greater emphasis placed on the hero’s piety.
At the beginning of the 14th century, in the poem known as the *Cantar* or *Gesta de Rodrigo*, of which the 1344 chronicle offers a prose version, and from which in the second half of the century the rhymed chronicle (also called *El Rodrigo*) derives—
Under the influence and accumulation of new elements, particularly religious ones, the development of the sober initial motif reaches the final stage of its degenerative process: the devoted vassal has become so arrogant and overbearing that he treats the sovereign almost as if he were his own vassal. With this new and unhappy character trait, the Cid continues to live on in poetry: in a fully legendary atmosphere, one encounters the already established theme of the *mocedades*, that is, the youthful deeds in which the triumph of the spirit of adventure, expressed in a piling up of extraordinary and improbable incidents, suffocates the human poetry of the deeds of the 12th century. The Cid’s *romancer*, in turn—a work by various authors from different periods—does not depict the hero in a unified manner. Instead, it presents him now as gentle and submissive, a loving husband and tender father, but more often as obstinate and inflexible, or even as a soldier almost drunk with plunder. For the first time, it places his heroic youth at the center of a romance of love and death: indeed, the *romances* are the first to speak of his hitherto unknown youthful loves with Ximena, only momentarily disrupted by the tragic duel with her father, which Rodrigo offers in place of the duel with her father. Guillén de Castro collected these in *Las mocedades del Cid* (the direct source of Corneille’s masterpiece), the best-known and most widely diffused of all poetic works dedicated to the most glorious of the Spaniards. Yet other dramas may be added, from *Las almenas de Toro* by Lope, to *No está en matar el vencer* by Matos Fragoso, to *La conquista de Valencia*, to *El honrador de su padre* by J. B. Diamante, and so on. In the 18th century, attempts were made to contaminate and adapt the greatest Spanish drama and the French classical creation, until in the Romantic era the legend would interest Hugo, Hérédia, and Leconte de Lisle. It spread in imitations and revivals from Germany to Oceania, only to return to its homeland in the realm of the noblest poetry—in the verses of Rubén Darío and Machado, and in the penetrating drama of Marquina (*Las hijas del Cid*), the first dramatist to draw his inspiration directly from the old *cantar*.