El Cid: The Making of a Legend, page 23
When France invaded Portugal in 1807 and the flamboyant cavalry commander Joachim Murat thundered into Madrid months later, Spain was transformed from a weak ally into yet another victim of ‘la bête noire’, Napoleon Bonaparte, now Emperor of the French. The king was deposed and Bonaparte’s brother Joseph (much to Murat’s fury) took his place on the Spanish throne. ‘My position here is unique,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘I have not a single supporter here.’25
On 2 May 1808, led by local peasantry in Asturias, Spanish guerrillas began the War of Independence. It was bloody from the beginning, characterized by Francisco Goya’s etchings of deaths by firing squads and limbs impaled on thorn bushes. French troops knew that if they straggled too far behind their marching columns, their likely fate was a slit throat from a Basque mountaineer and the final ignominious end; their penises cut off and stuffed into their mouths.
The reality of Spanish politics in this year was highly complicated, with local rivalries, traditionalists versus reformers and myriad shades of opinion on revolution and France and the state of the nation. In Southey’s England, however, the guerrillas were portrayed as heroes, united in the same cause as Englishmen against a tyrant (Bonaparte) who had no right to be there. The result, from the British viewpoint, was to send to Spain a contingent of troops led by a relatively unknown general Arthur Wellesley, who had won his only laurels in India. If Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, had nothing but contempt for Spanish regular troops and even less respect for the guerrillas, this was not how it was perceived in The Times. Spain was filling everyone’s conversation – Spanish customs, Spanish politics, Spanish dress – and of course, Spanish heroes like El Cid.
It was while the French army was besieging Burgos that a regiment of dragoons broke into the monastery of San Pedro de Cardena in search of gold and jewels. When they found the tomb of Rodrigo Diaz, they realized the symbolic significance of the place and all but destroyed it. The French governor of Castile, a little more civilized than the hard-riding grognards who were used to despoiling churches, was appalled at the sacrilege and had the scattered relics of the Cid collected and re-buried in a new monument.
This dispersal of memorabilia has meant that invaluable information was lost. We would love to know if Rodrigo was indeed seated on his ivory chair with his sword in his hand as Gil Diaz reputedly placed him. Some relics certainly left Spain and were found in Sigmaringen in Germany in 1921. Their tortuous journey from a regiment of French Dragoons in 1808 is unknown, but the clue might lie with the Egyptologist Dominique-Vivant Denon. A remarkable Renaissance man who was a painter, illustrator, author and diplomat, he travelled with the more famous Champollion to Egypt as part of Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition there in 1798. He was subsequently made organizer of salon exhibitions in Paris and was given carte blanche in what art works he included. He had a personal collection of relics of the famous, including the bones of Peter Abelard, the French philosopher who was a contemporary of the Cid; hairs from the moustache of the warrior king Henri IV, stabbed to death by an assassin in 1610; and a tooth of the philosopher-cynic Voltaire. Denon was given the task of reassembling the Cid’s bones and although he may have replaced some at the monastery, it is certain that he kept the rest for the remainder of his life. His protégé, Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard, produced a painting of Denon reburying the Cid about 1811.
The half century that followed Southey saw the birth of the modern historian. The French Enlightenment and the English Age of Reason, despite various false starts and sudden darts in the wrong direction, created an atmosphere in which a critical, honest, warts-and-all scholarship based on hard evidence could prevail. In the context of Rodrigo Diaz, it came in the form of a Dutch scholar of Arabic, Reinhart Dozy. Dozy came from a French Huguenot family, settling in the Netherlands in 1647. Born in February 1820, by which time English interest in Spain had waned, he attended the university of Leiden and became Professor of History by 1857.
His first work was History of the Almohades, written ten years earlier, but his main claim to fame rests on Histoire de Musselmans d’Espagne (History of the Muslims in Spain) which spanned four centuries of al-Andalus, culminating in 1110, eleven years after the death of Rodrigo Diaz. Still regarded very highly, Dozy established a level of critical scholarship which went far beyond anything achieved on the history of Spain to this point. He slated the bigotry and bias of the medieval monkish chroniclers and portrayed the Cid as something of a thug. When the British historian and archaeologist Stanley Lane-Poole went to press with his The Story of the Moors in Spain in 1886, he was glowingly supportive of Dozy’s scholarship. He was ‘an historian as well as an Orientalist and his volumes are at once judicious and profound.’26 Even so, Lane-Poole was not prepared to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as Dozy had done:
‘Professor Dozy maintains that the romantic history of the Cid is a tissue of inventions and … he founds his criticisms mainly on the Arabic historians, in whom, despite their national and religious bias, he places as blind a reliance as less learned people have placed in the Chronicle of the Cid.’27
Dozy’s 1849 essay Recherches sur l’Histoire et la Litérature de l’Espagne pendant le moyen age appalled all Spain. In particular the chapter entitled ‘Le Cid d’apres de nouveaux documents’ caused huge controversy. By this time, everyone had forgotten all they ever knew about the real Rodrigo Diaz, the hard and complicated man living in hard and complicated times. He was the crusader, the shining knight without peer, galloping under the banner of Christ on his Babieca. Charlton Heston’s film was still over a century away, but it was the image every Spaniard – and many others besides – had in his head already. To Dozy, the Cid was a pragmatist. He was not chivalrous or generous. He fought for cash and loot – his army was dependent on such things. And Dozy repeated these accusations, despite a slamming from Spanish nationalists and intellectuals, twice more, in 1860 and 1881. Although today few of us would find much fault with Dozy’s reassessment, the means by which he reached his conclusions are decidedly shaky. Lane-Poole was right; the ‘nouveaux documents’ to which the Professor refers were the newly translated work of Ibn Basam – it is the Medieval equivalent of a biography of Nicholas II written by Lenin and just as trustworthy. And Dozy is one hundred percent wrong when he says that the Poema de mio Cid has no historical value. Legends and their place in time are hugely useful to the historian and sometimes myth can be as important as truth. It was just that Professor Dozy was too busy pulling that metaphorical plug. He also seriously miscalculated the Cid’s era. We now know that Rodrigo Diaz was playing the same two-edged game of realpolitik as everyone else; except that he was doing it better. Dozy clearly expected his Medieval warriors to be chivalrous knights after all.
American interest in the Cid predates the Hollywood connection by well over a century. Washington Irving spent three years in Spain in the late 1820s and produced a variety of works – The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus and A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada in particular – that caught the reading public’s imagination. Similar work was being carried out at Harvard in the same decade when George Ticknor became Smith Professor of French and Spanish Literature. No systematic study of Spanish history was available at the time and his History of Spanish Literature, published in the same year as Dozy’s bombshell, became a landmark of Spanish-American studies.
Dwarfing all these scholars of earlier generations, however, was Ramon Menendez Pidal who first published his La España del Cid in 1929. Again, we have to leap forward in Spanish history to understand how the Cid legend fitted the mood of the moment. As historian Henry Kamen puts it: ‘Spain was thrust reluctantly into the nineteenth century and has never quite emerged from it.’28 – and this epithet is probably true of Menendez Pidal’s scholarship and his approach to Rodrigo Diaz. It is important to remember that Pidal was a child of the nineteenth century. Born in Corunna in 1869, he was still a baby when his family met a reversal of fortunes in as a result of the Revolution of the previous year. Queen Isabella was forced to flee to France and a provisional government, essentially set up by the army, rather incongruously brought in democracy, freedom of worship and a Press that was outspokenly free. Pidal’s father lost his position as magistrate for refusing to accept this new liberalism and the family, essentially broke, had moved six times by 1884 when they finally settled in Madrid. Pidal’s father died in 1880, by which time the short-lived Republic was replaced by the Restoration, a painful twenty-year period in which a kind of stability was attained in Spanish politics based on the rule of king and cortes.
Ramon Pidal was hugely successful at university in Madrid, winning prizes from the Royal Spanish Academy for his work on the Poema de mio Cid, the only known copy of which Pidal’s uncle had bought in 1863. By the 1890s, he held the post of Professor of Romance Philology at Madrid University and he and his wife spent their honeymoon on horseback, riding as far as possible the countryside crossed by the Cid as described in the first cantar of the Poema. It was at university that Pidal first came across the work of Dozy and he was furious that the great national hero should be dismissed with such contempt by a foreigner. When he came to write his own biography, he accused Dozy of ‘Cidophobia’ and refuted his attack point by point.
In this he was echoing the attitudes of Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, a historian so brilliant that he made Professor at the age of 21, before most students have attained their first degree. Pelayo’s line, however, was stark and uncompromising: ‘Spain,’ he wrote, ‘the evangeliser of half the globe; Spain, the hammer of heretics; Spain, the sword of the Pope. This is our greatness and our glory: we have no other.’29 Once again, we are looking at motivation and once again, Rodrigo of Vivar filled a niche. The last vestige of Spanish Imperialism vanished with the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rica and the Philippines to America in 1898. That year, a group of intellectuals calling themselves ‘the generation of ’98’ began a systematic search for what had gone wrong. The poets Antonio Machado and Ortega y Gasset, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, the novelist Pio Baroja, all set out to find examples of the greatness in Spain’s past to make a point about the present and the future. The fierce regionalism which was the legacy of the taifa states and the endlessly warring kingdoms of Castile, Léon, Navarre and Aragon re-emerged in the years that Pidal was writing his book on the Cid. And this was coupled with a working class agitation to be found elsewhere in Europe; Winston Churchill sent troops into the mining community of Tonypandy in South Wales; Nicholas II’s panicky guard opened fire on unarmed peasants outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. In Spain itself, the ‘Tragic Week’ in July 1909 saw over fifty churches burned in Barcelona alone.
Laurie Lee found himself in a village near Segovia as the violence spread. The streets ‘were black with priests and its taverns full of seething atheists. Some stood in a doorway heaving stones at the church, others sang obscenities about the bishop.’30 There were horror stories of nuns being raped, graves being smashed open and corpses strewn about. All this was ended by the military dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera. He delighted the generation of ’98 and their adherents by settling the earlier Spanish attempt to colonize Morocco. Improvements were made in transport and farming. Even so, that great leveller, the Wall Street crash, destroyed him and his king, Alfonso XIII, who crept out of his palace in Madrid on 14 April 1931 and never came back.
La España del Cid (The Spain of the Cid) was published in 1929, just before the Republican balloon went up. And Pidal’s scholarship was impressive. While dismissing the later Cid legends, rightly, as rubbish, he bent the earlier efforts, the Poema de mio Cid, the Primera Cronica General and the Estoria del Cardena, as far as possible to underscore the greatness of Rodrigo Diaz and to restore him to pride of place as a sort of national saint of Spain. The historical Santiago of Compostela may have been a bit ‘iffy’ in terms of his actual links with Spain, but Rodrigo of Vivar was real, Castilian and a dyed-in-the-wool hero. And within five years of Pidal’s second edition (1934) Spain was plunged into a civil war in which the propaganda of the Cid was at the forefront.
The Spanish Civil War was never simply a confrontation between Left and Right, although these groups had been squaring up to each other all over Europe after the armistice that ended the First World War in November 1918. Laurie Lee, who was there, wrote –
‘The “Communist” label … was too rough and ready, a clumsy reach-me-down which properly fitted no one. The farm labourer, fisherman and handful of industrial workers all had local but separate interests. Each considered his struggle to be far older than Communism, to be something exclusively Spanish, part of a social perversion which he alone could put right by reason of his roots in this particular landscape.’31
The Republic of 1931 became increasingly right wing, using police and the army to put down local insurgencies. In Andalusia, a village called Casas Viejas saw the slaughter of twenty five locals. Peasants, whose financial lot had been grim for generations, threw in their lot with industrial workers hit by the World Slump. In October 1933, as Hitler’s Nazi party took up the reins of government in Berlin, workers attempted coups all over Spain. In an act with eerie echoes of the days of the Cid, Moorish troops were rushed over from Africa to quell the trouble. Two thousand civilians died. A local said to Laurie Lee at this point: ‘It’s true … the rebels [are] steadily building up their forces from Africa … The Catholic kings were the first to drive the Moors from Spain. Now the Catholic generals are bringing them back.’32
By the early months of 1936, what was happening in the cortes and in general elections was irrelevant. The country was slipping into chaos as the right wing Falangists clashed with the Popular Front on the Left, burning churches and murdering civil guards. On 18 July, the ‘Generals’ Rising’ took the form of a plot spearheaded by Mola, Groded and Franco and for three years Spaniard killed Spaniard to iron out their country’s differences. The results were horrendous. Well over half a million died, with a further two million languishing in government prisons in the years that followed. The arrival of the International Brigades gave the war a dimension beyond the confines and problems of Spain. As Laurie lee put it: ‘To Spain, so backward and so long ignored, the nations of Europe were quietly gathering.’33
Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the Condor Legion bombed the Republican port of Guernica – practice, cynics said, for the Blitzkreig that would terrify all Europe three years later. But it was Francisco Franco who called up the shade of Rodrigo Diaz. With his thinning hair, high voice and plump figure, Franco was hardly the stuff of which heroes were made. He was not a great general, so he identified with a man who was. Deliberately moving his government during the war to Burgos, he daily crossed the square of St Gadea where the Cid of legend had forced a showdown with Alfonso VI. He directed operations from within six miles of the sotopalacios where legend said the Cid had been born at Vivar and less than a mile from the banks of the Arlanzon where he had begun his first exile in 1081. Others linked Franco with different heroes – Philip II, Charles V, Charlemagne, Alexander the Great, even the Archangel Gabriel, while the artist Salvador Dali thought him a saint - but time and again, it was with Rodrigo of Vivar, the legendary Cid, that his contemporaries compared him in Spain. Even the title he took for himself – El Caudillo, the leader – was a reference to the grans capitan or warlords of medieval Spain, the Cid among them.
On 18 May 1939, Franco entered Toledo at the head of a sixteen-mile long victory parade comprising 200,000 troops, more soldiers than Rodrigo Diaz would ever have seen in his life. The press release from his office in Burgos promised that ‘General Franco’s entry into Madrid will follow the ritual observed when Alfonso VI, accompanied by the Cid, captured Toledo in the Middle Ages.’34 Marvellous. Except, of course, that the Cid did not accompany Alfonso. He was in exile in Zaragoza at the time and the king took the city by himself.
On Sunday 1 October 1939 Franco established a national holiday, the Dia del Caudillo, and two weeks later, the alcalde of Burgos made a flowery speech as Franco left for Madrid: ‘The city says with all its heart, as it did to the Caballero de Vivar, “Caudillo, here is Burgos: glory to God on high and all praise to you, saviour of Spain.’35 Nor did these links end with the close of the civil war. After Charlton Heston’s film had given Rodrigo Diaz world-wide coverage, Franco was still riding the white gelding Zegri, a Babieca for our own times.
Perhaps the zenith of the propaganda of the Cid, however, occurred in July 1955, when the huge equestrian statue of the Campeador was unveiled in the square at Burgos. Joaquin Costa had once suggested that modern Spain was only a liberal shadow of its aggressive, imperialist past and that we should ‘lock the tomb of El Cid with seven keys.’36 As the stamping bronze Babieca, swirling cloak and uplifted Tizona of the Cid came into view, Franco said of Rodrigo, ‘in him is enshrined all the mystery of the great Spanish epics: service in noble undertakings; duty as reason; struggle in the service of the true God.’37
