Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1043 – 10 July 1099), better known by the moniker of "El Cid Campeador" or simply "El Cid", was a Castilian knight, mercenary and warlord of medieval Spain. Undefeated and held as a living legend among Christians and Muslims alike through his life, he is considered a Spanish national hero and one of the most renowned military figures of their history, as well as a representative, especially in more modern lectures, of the cultural environment of the Spanish Reconquista.
The figure of El Cid reached modernity through a long series of legends, myths and revisions that started back in his own time. In modern-day Spain, people are still familiar with the conservative Cidian image promoted by The Franco Regime, drawing from the Cantar del mio Cid and other centenary Christian sources that had already tried to make El Cid more palatable to their own readers: a saintly Christian knight who rose in the times of Moorish Spain and fought to liberate the Spaniards from the clutches of their Muslim oppressors. The falsehood of this image, however, can be only comprehended by learning that the real history is almost its complete opposite. In reality, El Cid was a man from an era where "Christian" and "Moor" were just secondary factors in the confusion of kingdoms, states and taifas that formed the political organization of the Iberian Peninsula, which often warred and allied to each other without regard for culture or religion - and within this chaos, El Cid served none but himself for the greatest part of his career, becoming a literal mercenary after his banishment(s) from his birth kingdom. and ultimately founding his own domain, like a Castilian Conan or a Nietzschean Übermensch misplaced in time.
Due to all the similarities about his career and his further adoption as a political figure, you could consider El Cid a successor to Viriathus, another ancient Iberian warlord that waged a mostly personal conquest yet ironically became a nationalist icon through generations. El Cid's mythologizing reaches a much greater extent, though - he even has a folk legend that he killed a dragon in the lands of Basconcillos del Tozo.
Now, about his life, it's very little what we know for sure about Díaz's origin. Classical sources are unclear about his birth year, place, family, nobiliary status and kingdom, meaning that those are all still hotly discussed and it's unlikely the discussion will ever end. In any case, it's more or less clear that he belonged to a certainly powerful family, possibly tied to the kingdom of León, and that he started his knightly career as a page to prince Sancho II of Castile. He soon excelled, not only with the weapons, but also with the pen, as he was literate and eventually gained at least enough knowledge of law to serve as a lawman at some points of his life. Nonetheless, when Sancho became king, he went to war against his brothers Alfonso VI of León and García of Galicia, as all the three wanted to absorb the other two's domains, and Rodrigo proved his military worth as one of his knights. By this point, although it's unknown for what feats exactly, he had earned his nickname of Campeador (meaning something like "Battlefielder").note
Díaz's career suffered a plot twist shortly after, as Sancho would die murdered during a siege against rebels in Zamora, and was succeeded as King of Castile by no other than Alfonso VI of León, their former enemy. Initially, Alfonso seemed to see Rodrigo as a Worthy Opponent and had him in high esteem, even arranging for him a marriage with a relative to the Leonese royal family named Jimena, but relationships fell apart after Díaz was involved in a couple of complicated incidents. In the first of them, he was sent to collect taxes from a Moor vassal, Al-Mutamid, but the latter suffered the attack of another Moor vassal backed by his own Christian tax collector, García Ordóñez, to which Díaz answered helping Al-Mutamid and ultimately capturing Ordóñez himself in humiliating fashion. In the second, Alfonso sent Rodrigo to repeal a Muslim invasion in Soria, where he went a bit overboard and delivered an apparently unauthorized punishment action on the vassal domain of Toledo. Unnerved by those excesses of initiative, already in 1080, Alfonso banished Rodrigo from Castile and León.
From this point, Díaz and his followers became Private Military Contractors. Rejected in the County of Barcelona, they turned towards the Muslim kingdoms and entered the service of king Al-Mutaman of Zaragoza, who ironically first deployed Díaz to crush an enemy coalition that included the Count of Barcelona himself. Díaz might have also had a brief diplomatic reunion with Alfonso VI, who had approached to capture a Zaragozan fortress and ended up battered by a string of bad luck, but nothing came from it. Rodrigo then conquered Morella in 1084 to secure a port city for Zaragoza, defeating the local Muslim forces and their Aragonese allies, and entered the city under proclamations of "Sidi" (the Andalusian version of the Arabian term sayyid, "lord"), which became his second nickname, El Cid. The following year, Alfonso repeated his invasion of Zaragoza, but he had to hurry back home by the emergence of a new threat, the Almoravids, essentially Muslim fundamentalists in the vein of the modern Daesh, whose threat also drove the king of Zaragoza to fire Díaz and his Christian mercenaries on the fear of becoming a target. With Alfonso desperate for help and Rodrigo free to serve him again, the former pardoned the latter back into his kingdom.
In their first joint operation, in 1088, Alfonso and El Cid relieved their Muslim allies of Valencia from the harassment of Lérida and the new Count of Barcelona. Díaz retreated to dodge a superior Leridan army and went back to ask for the appropriate reinforcements, but upon returning, either by opportunism or because his return to Castile had been a Xanatos Gambit all along, he instead signed a peace treaty and used his forces to establish his own protectorate around Valencia. Meanwhile, Alfonso attacked the Almoravid kingdoms, and when those asked their Emir Yusuf ibn Tashfin for help, the king did the same with El Cid. However, Rodrigo failed to join him for unclear reasons, apparently by a genuine miscommunication, and Alfonso, who might be under the impression that Díaz was attempting to sabotage Castile so it and the Almoravids wore each other down (we cannot discard that possibility either), banished him again as a traitor. By this point, however, this formality could do little to bother El Cid, who broke his truce with Lérida and Barcelona and defeated them to become basically the private ruler of all the Spanish Levante, only rivaled by the local forces of the Almoravids themselves.
In 1092, the enraged Alfonso armed a Multi National Team with Aragón, Barcelona, Genoa and Pisa to dispose of the pesky Cid, but the whole enterprise crashed and burned by the combo of their miscoordination, a costly failure to conquer the Cidian city of Tortosa, and a quick punishing action by Díaz against Castilian lands. The Christian kingdoms decided that just leaving El Cid alone was the safest course of action, and the man himself used the lapse to focus on the Almoravids, who now were waging rebellion against him in his domains to prepare an invasion. The Muslims equally failed at toppling the Cidian state, however, as Rodrigo strangled the rebellion and ultimately conquered the whole city of Valencia by a lengthy siege, turning it into his personal capital and proclaiming himself prince of the lands. The Almoravids attacked again several times, but El Cid duly defeated them, progressively expanding his domains and drawing alliances, among them by marrying his daughters Cristina and María with Christian nobles. His only setback would be the death of his son Diego, who he had sent to fight alongside Alfonso as a proof of good will and was killed in battle.
El Cid's dream died with him when Rodrigo himself passed away in 1099. His wife Jimena was left as lady of Valencia, but without the man's leadership and skill, defending the city against the delighted Almoravids was not possible anymore, so they burned it down and abandoned it for the safety of the Christian kingdoms. As you can read in the trope of El Cid Ploy, folklore says he still won one more time as a recent corpse by being placed on his horse to scare the Almoravids away, an apocryphal embellishment that still works as a metaphor to how his fame lives on through history.
In fiction:
Film - Animated:
- The 2003 El Cid: The Legend movie adapts, well, El Cid's legend.
Film - Live Action:
- The 1961 epic film El Cid had Charlton Heston playing a similarly loose version of El Cid.
Live-Action TV:
- The Ministry of Time dedicated an episode to El Cid, sensibly enough to address the reality behind the legendary character (though a bit mean-spirited at that). It has a twist or two.
- El Cid adapts the early life of El Cid, though not very accurately either.
Literature:
- Arturo Pérez-Reverte wrote Sidi, a deliberately extremely loose adaptation of a chapter of his life.
Theatre:
- Le Cid, a 1637 French stage play mixing Tragedy and Farce by Pierre Corneille. The tragedy parts served as blueprint for the script of the 1961 Charlton Heston film.
Video Games:
- Age of Empires II's The Conquerors expansion introduced the El Cid campaign for the then-new Spanish civilization, the last scenario involving the El Cid Ploy where the player must keep the body intact to maintain morale.
- In Crusader Kings II, El Cid appears as a courtier in the court of King Sancho II of Castille as excellent martial character in the 1066 start. He is a selectable playable character as the ruler of Valencia as Count from 1094 to 1099.
- In Crusader Kings III, El Cid is still present but cannot be played as (unless by granting him a landed title as King Sancho then switching to him). There is an achievement consisting in creating and ruling the Kingdom of Valencia as a descendant of El Cid.
