El Cid: The Making of a Legend, page 5
Abd al-Rahman I began the Mezquita, the Great Mosque, in 784. It cost him a reputed 80,000 gold pieces, looted from all over Visigothic Spain. Its first phase was completed by his son Hisham from the spoils taken from the sacked city of Narbonne in modern France in 793. Today, the mosque is a museum with an entrance fee. Inside it was built a comparatively nasty little cathedral, a visible symbol of the Reconquista as it had developed by 1236 when the Christian army of Alfonso X reconquered the city. In its heyday, the Mosque had nineteen marble arcades east to west and thirty one from north to south. There were twenty one doors, all faced with polished brass, and the roof was supported by 1,293 columns, inlaid with lapis lazuli. The pulpit was carved of ivory and exotic timber, made of 36,000 panels, some encrusted with precious stones and nailed with gold. Four fountains played continuously in the cool, dark interior for the faithful to wash before prayer. At night it was lit by hundreds of brass lanterns, made from the looted bells of Christian churches and during Ramadan a huge wax candle weighing 50lbs burned day and night. Ambergris and aloes burned in the censers. And all to the glory of Allah.
More impressive still was the palace called Madinet al-Zahra, built by Abd al-Rahman III on the Hill of the Bride overlooking the city. Work began on this magnificent symbol of Islamic power in 936. An estimated 12,000 builders worked on it, using 15,000 mules and 4,000 camels (the Arabs did not use wheeled transport) to carry the dressed stone, lime, bricks and gravel. Architects and craftsmen from as far away as Byzantium came to add their particular skills. Recent archaeological work has revealed that the palace was built on three levels; at the bottom was a mosque, with above it exotic gardens and finally the palace itself. This ‘City of the Fairest’ was designed to overawe. An estimated 13,000 male slaves worked within its walls and legendary accounts still exist of how much it cost to feed them all. The palace’s female complement, including Abd al-Rahman’s wives and the handmaidens of the harem, added up to a further 6,500 people. According to various eye-witnesses of the tenth-century, this slave/attendant army received a daily menu of fish, roast fowl, partridges, loaves of bread and black pulses.
One such visitor was the mystic Ibn al-Arabi who noted with astonishment the three miles of crimson carpet that stretched from the palace to the gates of Cordoba. A double ranked guard of Berber soldiers lined the route, their scimitars crossed in an arc of shining steel over the heads of important guests. Ibn al-Arabi described what he saw:
‘The Caliph [Abd al-Rahman] had the ground [inside] covered with brocades. At regular intervals he placed dignitaries whom [visitors] took for kings, for they were seated on splendid chairs and arrayed in brocades and silk. Each time the ambassadors saw one of these … they prostrated themselves before him, imagining him to be the Caliph, whereupon they were told, “Raise up your heads! This is but a slave of his slaves.” At last they entered a courtyard strewn with sand. At the centre was the Caliph. His clothes were coarse and short – what he was wearing was not worth four dirhams. He was seated on the ground, his head bent. In front of him was the Koran, a sword and fire. “Behold the ruler.”’22
Like all great empires, the Caliphate of Cordoba acted as a magnet for astonishing culture and learning and much of it found its expression in the appearance of the city itself. Abd al-Rahman I had sent his people all over the known world in search of exotic plants, fruits and flowers. He imported a date tree from Syria to remind him of his home. Pomegranates (which were to become one of the many heraldic symbols of Spain’s golden century), followed later, as did watermelons, spinach, artichokes, aubergines, sugar cane, oranges, lemons, limes and rice. By the time of the Cid, figs grown in Malaga were being exported to Baghdad, from where fig seedlings had been stolen in the first place!
For these pioneering horticultural works to have succeeded, irrigation was vital and the Moorish conquest provided scientists and engineers well up to the challenge. Using a system of water-wheels and baskets known as a noria, an idea known for centuries in Syria, the gardens of Cordoba were watered into magnificence. Along the banks of the Guadalquivir an estimated 5,000 water-wheels were in use by the end of the tenth-century, creating the Garden of the Waterwheel and the Meadow of Murmuring Waters at Madinat al-Zhara. Cordoba at its height boasted more than 50,000 lavish houses (munya) of the aristocracy and bureaucracy, a chancery, mint, barracks and a prison, not to mention the markets, bazaars and workshops, and it was also home to an estimated 900 public baths. Stanley Lane-Poole overstated the case in 1886 – ‘While the medieval Christians forbade washing as a heathen custom and the monks and nuns boasted of their filthiness, inasmuch that a lady saint recorded with pride the fact that up to the age of sixty she had never washed any part of her body … the Moslems were careful in the most minute particulars of cleanliness and dared not approach their God until their bodies were purified.’23 – but the essence is true and the baths were an important feature of Cordoba’s magnificence.
One of the most famous acolytes at the court of Cordoba was the Persian musician Ziryab, who, legend tells us, knew more than a thousand songs by heart and introduced a new lute to Spain with a fifth string. He would entertain the Caliph for hours and had rather bizarre ways of putting would-be singers through their paces, by tying straps round their diaphragms or forcing wooden blocks into their mouths to stretch their jaws! He established himself as an arbiter of fashion, drinking from glass goblets rather than pewter, directing the court’s dress sense and even using a type of toothpaste. Neither the Cid’s Burgos, to the far north, nor king Alfonso’s court at Léon had nothing like this.
Scholarship in the Arab world was far advanced. The love poems written by Arabs at the time of the Cid were the forerunners of the troubadour tradition of Western Europe and its extraordinary culmination in the ‘Court of Love’ of the fourteenth century.24 Arab translators in the two centuries before Rodrigo was born were busy copying ancient Greek texts into Arabic, continuing the philosophical, architectural and above all, medical traditions of the ancient world into the new. Chief among the physicians at Cordoba was Hasday ibn Shaprut, who worked on important botanical treatises of the Greek scholar Dioscorides.25 Not only did this man bridge the cultural and religious divide by treating the Christian king Sancho the Great of Léon for obesity, he was widely respected throughout Europe as a key figure in the Jewish community, as a patron of poets and a political adviser to the caliph himself.
Al-Hakem, Abd al-Rahman’s son, though a competent ruler, was never happier than when surrounded by the estimated 400,000 volumes in his library. The catalogue for these alone ran to forty-four volumes. Al-Hakem employed a personal staff of copyists, including a female poetess, Lubna, whose sole job was to reproduce books for others. Lesser mortals in their munya, built up more modest libraries a century before the time of the Cid.
By the tenth century, Cordoba had acquired an awesome reputation for learning. The principal astronomer of his day was Maslama al-Madjriti, from the then tiny town of Madrid to the south, who wrote technical books on the astrolabe26, a device which would revolutionise navigation in the years to come. He also translated the geographer Ptolemy’s27 works on the planets and wrote what is probably the first mathematical treatise in the world intended for everyday commerce. But it would be wrong to assume that the enlightenment of tenth-century al-Andalus was confined to Cordoba only. The metallurgy of the Muslims revived the mines of the Roman period and the introduction of new crops and irrigation systems to water them meant a longer life and a healthier one for all the area’s inhabitants. It says a great deal for the rule from Cordoba that the Muslim conquest took a bare two years to achieve, but the reconquest by Christian Spain nearly seven hundred. Large numbers of people must have seen the advantages of living under Moorish domination, not just because of improved technology and material comforts, but the relatively tolerant approach of the conquerors to manners, customs and religion. This is even apparent in architecture, where the horseshoe arch of the Visigoths was perfected by the Muslims and became the dominant feature of mosque and palace alike. Religious conversion did take place, after the first wave of terrified Christians fled north in the early eighth century, but it is difficult to quantify. Historian Richard W. Bulliet has tracked the conversion by meticulous cross-referencing the family trees compiled by Cordoban scholars in the tenth century. By plotting the change of name from Christian/Visigothic to Muslim/Moorish, he is able to chart a steady, but steep curve towards Islam from the middle of the eighth century to the end of the thirteenth, when the process could be said to be complete (and by which time, al-Andalus was shrinking to the kingdoms of Seville and Granada as the Reconquista reached its zenith). At the time of the Cid, Bulliet estimates that between 70 and 80 per cent of the inhabitants of Spain were Muslim.
It would also be wrong to believe that al-Andalus was a place of peace and enlightenment between 720 and the end of the tenth century. The very fact that Abd al-Rahman III kept a huge bowl of quicksilver (mercury) in his new palace hall was testimony to his love of theatricality and his dazzling sense of interior décor, but he used it as a device to terrify potential enemies and insubordinates. At a signal from him, a slave would rock the huge bowl and the sun’s rays glancing off the mercury’s surface sent shafts of light whizzing around the room like lightning bolts. Not even the prophet Moses could perform miracles like this.
Abd al-Rahman crossed the Pyrenees in 732 and was trounced by Charles Martel, the Hammer, between Tours and Poitiers. Although the battle itself and the Frankish nobleman’s role in it, have been exaggerated, this was the last Christian-Muslim battle on French soil and marked a check to Islamic expansion. Both Martel and Charlemagne who followed him were ranked with the Cid as Christian heroes fighting against what was seen in the later Middle Ages as a tidal wave of havoc, slaughter and invasion.
Nor was the Christian/Frankish presence to the north the only worry to befall al-Andalus. The racial tensions between the Arab overlords and the Moorish Berbers of the Maghrib boiled over in 739-40, causing a situation of in-house fighting, cattle-rustling and raiding that often lapsed into total anarchy. By the year 800, when Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the West, al-Andalus had retreated to the east-west axis parallel to but north of the river Duero, skirting Pamplona in Navarre and Barcelona on the Frankish-held Spanish March. To the south of this, the tierras desplobadas, the disputed territories where tensions were at their height, extended to the Duero itself in the west but climbed significantly north of Zaragoza and the Elno to the east. A century later the frontiers began to change significantly. In the east there was little difference, but the Christian kingdoms had fought their way to the Duero and the tierras desplobadas extended as far south-east as the river Tagus.
If Visigothic Spain was rendered a soft target for Muslim invasion by its very centralization, then al-Andalus fell into a similar trap for the beginnings of the Reconquista. In the early years, the Moors were nomadic, tribal warriors on the move and many of them are likely to have been inspired by the Koran and the fundamentalism associated with jihad, holy war. By the years before the birth of the Cid, they had become settled, urban, soft. They were content with their lot, smug that Cordoba had broken so successfully with Baghdad, to the extent that although only Christians made and sold alcohol in al-Andalus, it was widely drunk by Muslims at all levels of society. And that society, preferring a life of peace and prosperity, increasingly hired mercenaries to stem the rising tide of reconquest from the north. It was a pattern which would repeat itself in the days of Rodrigo Diaz.
There was, before the Cid’s time, one last Islamic warrior-hero in Spain – Abu Amir Mohammed ibn Abi Amir al-Ma’afari, known as Al-Mansur, the Victorious. An ambitious politician, al-Mansur made himself indispensable at Cordoba by becoming vizier to the caliph (the unimpressive Hisham, grandson of Abd al-Rahman III) and controlling the royal mint. In a bitter civil war against Ghalib, Hisham’s ancient commander, al-Mansur earned his sobriquet ‘the Victorious’. The old man died in battle at San Vincente in July 981 and his head and right hand were brought to al-Mansur on the battlefield. Until his death twenty years later, al-Mansur was de facto caliph, with Hisham effectively a prisoner in his own palace at Madinat. A soldier by inclination, he led an astonishing fifty-seven campaigns against the Christian north, capturing at various times Barcelona, Coimbra, Zamora and Léon. He crowned it all in 997 by sailing in his impressive fleet to Oporto and sacking the very heart of Christian Spain, the shrine of St James at Compostela. Christian captives stumbled back by the overland route, chained together and dragging the giant doors of the cathedral and its huge bells to decorate the great mosque at Cordoba. Only the shrine itself remained intact: al-Mansur was only victor bi’allah, with God’s help. He was not a barbarian.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE HOUSE OF THE SEED
‘At that moment a frail little thing came forth, looking almost like an aborted foetus, except that it was born at term. It looked like a most miserable being and the only reason for rejoicing was that the mother had been saved.’1
The French monk Guibert de Nogent was a contemporary of Rodrigo Diaz, born some twenty years after the man who was to become Spain’s national hero. He is describing his own birth and it was a difficult one, because de Nogent ‘turned round in [his mother’s] womb, with my head upwards’. Breech births like this were always difficult and often led to the deaths of both mother and child, even if a panicky Caesarean operation was carried out.
‘If it is obvious,’ wrote de Nogent, ‘and irrefutable that one’s merits cannot precede the day of one’s birth, they can, nevertheless, precede the day of one’s death; but if one’s life is spent without doing good, then I think it makes no difference whether the day of one’s birth, or death, was glorious or not.’2
It was not until two hundred years after the birth of the Cid that we find instructions for midwives that have a modern feel to them. Arnold of Villanova, an Italian doctor, in the thirteenth-century De Regimine Sanitatis suggested that the mother’s lying-in chamber (and baby’s birthplace) be as close to conditions in the womb as possible with soft candlelight, blankets and quietness. If the baby was born in the daytime, the shutters of the window must be closed.
Difficult births, such as de Nogent’s, could be speeded up by tying a bunch of herb agrimony to the mother’s thigh to make her sneeze and expel the baby quickly. A whole variety of incantations, some of them originally pagan, were used by midwives and mothers in labour in the eleventh century. Childbirth was exclusively a female matter and Rodrigo’s father would not have been allowed in the chamber, even assuming, as is unlikely, he wanted to be there. Perhaps Rodrigo’s mother wore an amulet or a birth girdle, with an eaglestone around her right leg to ward off the evil eye, both from herself and her child.
Little Rodrigo would have been taken from his mother and bathed in warm water before being wrapped in tight swaddling bands of linen. The end of the umbilical cord, once cut, would be rubbed with saliva, cumin and cicely to aid healing. Possibly, since this appears to have been a Mediterranean custom generally, Rodrigo’s mouth would be rubbed with a mixture of honey and hot water so that he would be able to speak properly in the years ahead. His ears were pressed back against his head and his arms and legs wrapped with swaddling to straighten them. Only when all this as done would little Rodrigo be placed in his mother’s arms. His father would be told the joyous news and the bells of the church of Vivar would ring out their clanging message of welcome.
We do not know the exact year in which Rodrigo Diaz was born, still less the month, but historians today generally agree on 1043. In that year, Edward the Atheling, son of Ethelred Unraed, was crowned king of England; George Maniaces took the famed city of Byzantium by force from the Emperor Constantine IX and the German Emperor Henry III declared a Day of Indulgence on 8 August when all his enemies were pardoned and his subjects urged to love one another in the true Christian tradition. There is no manor house in Vivar now, but Rodrigo was almost certainly born in the heavily fortified dwelling that had sprung up to house the nobility along the frontier line of the tierras despobladas. Later generations would give the family a town house to add to the birthplace, but this seems pointless to a family not engaged in the trade of the market place.
In the various texts that we have from the medieval period on the Cid, the oldest of which is the Song of the Campeador (Carmen Campi Doctoris) written in the 1080s, his lineage is referred to either in disparaging terms or defensively. So the Poema de Mio Cid of the fourteenth century has the villain Assur Gonzalez taunting Rodrigo with his humble origins –
‘Ah, knights, whoever has seen such evil?
Since when might we receive honour from my Cid of Vivar?
Let him be off to the River Ubierna to dress his millstones
And take his miller’s tolls in flour, as he used to do!’3
Traditionally, millers were greedy, uncouth louts – the Miller’s Tale from Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales is pornographic – and Gonzalez clearly was casting a slur on Rodrigo’s family. In the Song of the Campeador, the anonymous author wrote (in Latin) ‘He is sprung from a more noble family, there is none older than it in Castile.’4 as though there was a need to establish the Cid’s pedigree against doubters. This is not snobbery. Status in the Spanish Christian world was everything; it defined the day-to-day rituals of society and reflected God’s plans for the world. The Song of the Campeador was written at a time when Rodrigo had established himself as the foremost general of his age, if not yet Lord of Valencia, and this alone had made him enemies. North of the Pyrenees three centuries later, the ancient aristocratic families of France similarly looked down their noses at Bertrand du Guesclin5 who was scoring important victories against the English when they were not.
