El Cid Campeador, a hero little known outside of Spain
Monument to Sid Campeador, Buenos Aires, sculptor - Anna Hayat-Huntington. Copies of this sculpture can be seen in Seville, Valencia, New York and San Francisco
It must be admitted that medieval Spain was very unlucky with its image. Tommaso Torquemada alone is worth something with him with the "sadistic inquisitors." In Germany, over a comparable period of time, more people were burned at the stake than under the "Grand Inquisitor" in Spain. But who now remembers the names of the bishops there?
And Cortez? He was able to conquer Mexico only with the help of numerous local tribes, whose people were already unable to climb tens of thousands of the terrible pyramids of the Aztecs and irrigate them with their blood. And they cannot forgive him in any way for the destruction of this bloody civilization.
Or the "iron duke" Alba ", who"drowned in blood the Netherlands". This was stated by the Dutch Protestants who were never suspected of Christian charity by their contemporaries. They themselves drowned everyone they could get in blood with the greatest pleasure. On both sides in the "Lowlands" then people fought, completely unlike the angels. But what do you know about the atrocities of the goodies in Charles de Coster's novel? A fair bastard, by the way, the main character there is Till Ulenspiegel. And this despite the fact that the Bonfire ennobled this character with all his might. The real Til of folk legends, by our standards, is some kind of animal that accidentally took on a human form.
Gloomy and haughty Don Juan? Also a very unpleasant character. Giacomo Casanova, the jovial and upbeat Venetian playboy, looks much prettier. Because I was not too lazy to imagine myself in this way in my memoirs that have become famous.
And now Christopher Columbus was found guilty of all the sins of the future European colonists. Mad BLM activists race to knock down and disfigure the statues of the great navigator.
And even the knights of Spain were not lucky. In other countries, the "frontmen" of the chivalrous era are heroes like Arthur, Parzifal, Tristan, Siegfried, Roland, Bayard and others. And in Spain - a pitiful parody Don Quixote. Meanwhile, there was a real knight in medieval Spain, an epic hero, whose life and deeds are described in the poem Cantar de mío Cid. And what do you think? Very serious attempts were made (and are still being made) to belittle his image, to declare him only a petty dishonest adventurer, an unprincipled condottieri, most of all thinking about his own benefit.
Outside of Spain, this man is not well known. Some consider him a literary character - like Merlin and Lancelot. Meanwhile, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as Cid, is a completely historical... And even the heroic poem dedicated to him compares favorably with other works of this genre by the high historical accuracy of the content. The authoritative Spanish researcher Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Director of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language) considered this poem
"A necessary source for any work on the history of Spain in the eleventh century."
There is no fantasy in it, as in the novels of the Breton cycle. And, unlike the fictional exploits of Roland, who died in a minor skirmish with the Basques (and not with the Saracens), the achievements of our hero are quite real.
Let us first say a few words about this source - Cantar de mío Cid ("Song of my Side").
Sing of my Cid
It is believed that the first verses of this poem were written during the life of the hero. And the full version, according to Pidal, was created in the 40s. XII century somewhere near the border Castilian fortress Medina (now - the city of Medinasem). The oldest surviving manuscript dates back to 1307. It was found in 1775 in one of the Franciscan monasteries by a certain Thomas Antonio Sánchez.
Page of the first copy of "Song of my Side"
Three leaves of this manuscript (the first and two in the middle of the poem) have been lost, but their content was possible to restore from the Spanish chronicles of the XIII-XIV centuries, which give a prosaic retelling of the "Song of Side".
Title page from the sixteenth-century Cronica del muy cauallero el Cid Campeador
Due to the loss of the first sheet of the manuscript, the original title of the poem is unknown to us. The first words of the second sheet are as follows:
"Hic incipiunt gesta Roderici Campi Docti"
("This is where the business of Rodrigo Campeador begins")
("This is where the business of Rodrigo Campeador begins")
The existing and now generally accepted name was proposed in the XNUMXth century by the aforementioned R. M. Pidal.
Spanish postage stamp with a portrait of R. M. Pidal
Another, less well-known version is El Poema del Cid (Poem of Side). The proponents of this name point out that this work is not one "Song" (cantar), but a collection of three separate ones.
The stylistic features of the work make it possible to assert that the Song was written by one author who knew the laws of Castile well in those years. This man clearly sympathized with the caballeros - ordinary nobles, whose honesty and justice he opposes to the treachery and greed of the representatives of the upper strata of the nobility of Castile. Some consider the "Song" to be a work of scholarly monastic poetry. The oldest extant text of the poem even ends with an indication of a certain abbot:
"Written in May by Pedro Abbot."
The abbot at the end of the poem puts the date 1207, although he himself wrote this manuscript a century later. This can be considered proof that he was not the author of the poem, but a scribe: he copied the text of an older manuscript, automatically transferring the previous date to his version.
Others, on the other hand, believe that the poems of "Song of Side" were created by a talented huglar (Spanish folk singer). And they say that this is precisely why it ends with a call to serve wine to the person who read it:
"Es leido, dadnos del vino."
The first part of this "Song" tells about the expulsion of the hero by King Alfonso VI and his successful war with the Moors. In fact, he was then in the service of the emir of Taifa Zaragoza. He fought with Muslims of other typhoons, and with Christians, in particular, defeating the army of Aragon in 1084. Then he received the nickname "Sid" from the Moors subordinate to him, but more on that later. Many of his associates became so rich that the foot soldiers later became caballeros. This fact is not surprising: the mortality of the nobles in constant wars was high, and therefore a warrior who could afford to buy a war horse and equipment easily received the title of caballero (literally - "horseman") - but nothing more. The further way up was closed for him. There was a saying:
"El infanson nace, el caballero se hace"
("Infancon are born, caballeros become")
("Infancon are born, caballeros become")
The second part tells about the conquest of Valencia by Sid, the conclusion of peace between him and the king, and the wedding of the hero's daughters with the Carrio infants.
And the plot of the third was Sid's revenge on the insidious infants, who insulted, beat and, having tied them up, left the hero's daughters married to them to die on the road.
Ignacio Pinazo. Las hijas del Cid ("Sid's Daughters")
In fact, this is the most fabulous and unreliable plot of the poem. The author just once again shows us the meanness, cowardice and worthlessness of the aristocrats, opposing them to Sid and the warriors loyal to him, who achieved everything thanks to their courage and abilities. And the hero's daughters, abandoned by unworthy husbands, marry the kings of Navarre and Aragon. The names of the hero's daughters in the poem and in life do not coincide. The eldest, Christina, did end up in Navarre, but she did not marry the king, but his grandson. But her son became king. The youngest, Maria, was married to the Count of Barcelona.
But notice what real, and not idealized, bookish "noble" knights lived in Europe in the XNUMXth century. P. Granovsky even wrote once that
"Honesty and truthfulness were not considered in the Iberian Peninsula in the era of Sid the necessary accessories of a feudal warrior."
The contemporaries of these Infants were Vseslav Polotsky, Vladimir Monomakh, Oleg Gorislavich, Harald Hardrada, Wilhelm the Conqueror, Omar Khayyam and Macbeth (the same one).
Time heroes
Let us now digress a little and see what was happening in the world at a time when Sid Campeador lived and heroized on the territory of the Iberian Peninsula.
In the year of his birth (1043), the Russian-Varangian fleet, led by Vladimir Novgorodsky (son of Yaroslav the Wise), voivode Vyshata and Ingvar the Traveler (brother of Yaroslav's wife Ingigerd), was defeated in a naval battle near Constantinople.
In 1044 Novgorod-Seversky was founded, and in 1045 the Cathedral of St. Sophia was built in Veliky Novgorod.
Somewhere between 1041-1048 in China, Pi Sheng invented typesetting for typography.
In 1047, Konstantin Monomakh allowed the Pechenegs to cross the Danube and settle on the territory of the empire.
In 1049 Anna Yaroslavna became Queen of France.
In 1051, the Zenkunen War began in Japan, which ended with the victory of government troops in 1062 and led to the strengthening of positions at the imperial court of the Minamoto samurai family.
In 1053, after the Battle of Civitate, the Normans captured Pope Leo IX and released them only after he recognized their conquests in Calabria and Apulia.
In 1054 Yaroslav the Wise died. And the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius and the papal legate Cardinal Humbert in the same year anathematized each other, which was the beginning of the division of the Churches.
In 1057, King Macbeth of Scotland died in a battle with the British (the Scottish Parliament in 2005 called for the historical rehabilitation of this king, slandered by Shakespeare).
In 1066 in England one after another the Norwegian king Harald the Severe and the Saka king Harold Godwinson perish, and the Norman Wilhelm becomes the master of the country.
In 1068, the emperor Go-Saijo came to the throne in Japan, relying on the Buddhist clergy in his power.
In 1071, after the defeat at the Battle of Manzikert, Emperor Roman IV was captured by the Seljuks, and the Normans captured Bari, the last Byzantine city in Italy.
In 1076, the Seljuk Sultan Malik Shah conquered Jerusalem.
In the same year, the Chinese organized a campaign against the newly independent North Vietnam (Daviet), but were defeated.
1077 - Kanos humiliation of Emperor Henry IV.
In 1084, Rome was captured by the Normans of Robert Guiscard.
In 1088, the first university in Europe was founded in Bologna.
In 1089, David the Builder came to power in Georgia.
In 1090 the Ismailis built the first citadel of the Assassins in the mountains.
In 1095, Pope Urban II at the Clermont Cathedral in Auvergne called for the release of the Holy Sepulcher, and in the next 1096 Ryazan was mentioned for the first time in documents.
In 1097, a congress of Russian princes was held in Lyubech, the crusaders captured Nicaea and defeated the Seljuks at Doriley.
And finally, the year of El Cid's death - 1099: the crusaders took Jerusalem.
And on the Iberian Peninsula it was the time of the Reconquista. It passed, as they say, neither "wobbly, nor roll" and stretched for more than seven centuries (the time of the beginning of the Reconquista is usually called 711, the end date - January 2, 1492). The fight against the Moors did not prevent the Christian kings from entering into alliances with them, as well as fighting with their fellow believers and even the closest relatives.
Mauritanian typhoons of the Iberian Peninsula, 1080
From 1057 until his death, Sid Campeador fought all the time - both with the Moors and with Christians.
El cid campeador
So, Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, much better known throughout the world as El Cid Campeador. One often reads about the nobility of his family, which supposedly belonged to the highest nobility of Castile. In fact, the nobles were then divided into three categories. Representatives of the highest nobility were called ricos-hombres - "rich people." Those could be considered nobles who had at least the title of count. They were followed by the infansones, who also received the nobility by inheritance and could own estates. The lowest category was the caballeros, many of whom received this title for personal merit.
The Infants of Carrión, who called themselves "counts by birth," mockingly said that the daughters of Rodrigo Diaz, who had already conquered Valencia, was Sid and Campeador, a very rich man, finally, unworthy to be their wives - only concubines. So the nobility of our hero is greatly exaggerated. He was an Infançon, but was not part of the elite of the Castilian kingdom. He achieved success and high position thanks to his personal abilities and courage.
Sid managed to serve both Christian Castile and Moorish Zaragoza, and ended his life as the ruler of Valencia. Where did he get such a sonorous and beautiful-sounding nickname? And what does it mean?
El Cid and Campeador
El Sid (originally Al Sayyid) means "lord" in Arabic. Most likely, this was not the name of the hero by the enemies, but by those Arabs who served in his troops during the period of the hero's stay in the Mauritanian kingdom (typha) of Zaragoza.
The word Campeador in modern Spanish means "winner". It comes from the phrase campi doctor, the literal translation of which is "master (master) of the battlefield." He is often translated into Russian as "fighter". This nickname for our hero appeared earlier - even before the service with the Moors. He received it for his exploits in the service of the Castilian king Sancho II during the battles against his brothers - King Leon Alfonso VI and King Garcia II of Galician. According to one version, the hero got it after defeating the Navarre knight in a duel for the controversial castle. He then fought not for himself, but for Castile.
During the life of Rodrigo Diaz, some called him Sid, others - Campeador. The combined use of these nicknames was first recorded in the Navarro-Aragonese document Linage de Rodric Díaz (circa 1195). And here the hero is already referred to as "My Cid Campeador" (Mio Cid el Campeador).
Sid's constant epithet is "glorious with a beard." And he himself, threatening the offenders of his daughters, threatens unworthy infants:
"I swear by my beard not torn by anyone."
El Cid on a Spanish postage stamp
A beard in Spain of those years, as in pre-Petrine Russia, is a symbol of dignity. To touch someone else's beard with your hands (let alone grab hold of it) was a monstrous insult. And they didn't just swear by their beard.
Another characteristic feature of Sid, constantly mentioned in the "Song" - "blood on the elbows". No, this is not an indication of cruelty: his hands are in the blood of enemies - not executed, but personally slain in a personal duel.
Jaime Lorente as Sid, 2020 Spanish TV Series
Hero's weapon
Like any other respected (and self-respecting) hero, Sid had swords with special properties (in Russian epics, such blades were called kladenets).
The first of these was a sword called Colada, which he inherited after defeating the Count of Barcelona, Berenguer Ramon II. Sebastian de Covarrubias suggested that the name of this sword comes from the phrase "acero colado" ("cast steel"). The Song of Sid states that Colada, raised by a brave warrior, frightened his opponents and cut any armor. Now this sword is kept in the royal palace of Madrid, but its authenticity is in doubt due to the hilt. Some argue that the blade itself is real, just the hilt was replaced in the XNUMXth century. However, most researchers still believe that this sword was forged in the XNUMXth century.
The second sword was called Tizona. Most likely, this name comes from the word tizon - "cutting off the head." But there is also a version according to which the name of the sword may originate from the word τύχη (happiness, fortuna). Sometimes its name is translated as "fire smut". But this is not true: the word tyzon at a later time began to be used in the meaning of "sword" (any - that is, it became a kind of kenning).
According to legend, this blade (Tizona) previously belonged to the Moorish ruler of Valencia Yusuf, who was defeated by Sid. According to another version, he was taken in a battle with the Moroccan emir Boucard - after the conquest of Valencia by Sid. The sword is 93,5 cm long and weighs 1,15 kg. Ephesus, again, was replaced during the reigns of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. On the blade itself there are two inscriptions on both sides. First: "Yo soy la Tizona fue hecha en la era de mil e quarenta" ("I am Tizona, created in 1040"). Second: “Ave Maria gratia plena; dominus mecum "(" Hail Mary, blessed; may the Lord be with me ").
In 1999, analysis of a fragment of its blade by metallurgists proved that it was made in the 2001th century, probably in Cordoba, which belonged to the Moors. A XNUMX examination carried out by researchers at the University of Madrid also showed that the manufacture of the blade can be dated to the XNUMXth century.
The strength of both Tison and Colada depended on the owner: they did not reveal their properties to the weak and did not help. And therefore the cowardly and insidious Carrio Infants, who received these blades from Sid as a wedding gift, returned them to him without regret. And only when they saw Tizona and Colada in the hands of their rivals in a duel, they were horrified and hastened to admit defeat.
An ancient legend claims that after his death, El Cid's body, fully armed, was placed in the tomb of the convent church of San Pedro de Cardena. When a Jew tried to rip out the dead hero's beard, Tysona struck him to death. The monks revived the Jew, he was baptized and became a servant at this monastery.
The alleged Tizona for a long time belonged to the family of the Marquis Falses and was kept in their family castle. An ancient tradition says that one of the members of this family chose a sword as a reward from Ferdinand of Aragon.
In 2007, the authorities of the Autonomous Community of Castile and Leon managed to buy the blade for 1,6 million euros. Today it can be seen in the museum of the city of Burgos.
We see Tysona's replica with an inauthentic hilt (like in a museum) in the hands of Charles Heston, who played Sid in the 1961 film:
El Cid's Warhorse
Sid's horse bore the name Babieca (Bavieca), and, according to the most common version, it meant ... "Silly" (!). According to legend, the godfather of the hero, Pedro El Grande, decided to give him an Andalusian stallion for his majority. He did not like the choice of the godson, and he shouted to him: "Babieka!" (stupid!). According to another version, it was King Sanchez II who gave the hero a stallion from his stable - for a duel with the best Aragonese knight. And this horse got its name from the province of Babia in Leon, where it was bought. The poem "Carmen Campidoktoris" states that Babek is a gift to Sid from a certain Moor. That is, his real name is "Barbeka": "Barbarian" or "Horse of the Barbarian". And in "Song of my Side" it is said that Babek is the horse of the former Moorish ruler of Valencia, found in his stable after the conquest of the city: again "The Horse of the Barbarian". These versions are better and more logical than the first, but less well known. It is simply amazing how readily all sorts of "popularizers" grab any nonsense, sometimes choosing the most ridiculous version of all possible.
In folk songs, it is said about Sid's love for his horse and the fear that this stallion instilled in his enemies.
Babek, by the way, is mentioned not only in songs and fairy tales, but also in some historical documents.
The following fact speaks eloquently about the relationship between the horse and the owner: El Cid ordered the burial of his "comrade in arms" on the territory of the San Pedro de Cardena monastery, in which he studied in his youth, and which he himself chose as a place for his tomb.
Tomb of Babeka in the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardena
In the next article, we will continue the story about Side and talk about his life and exploits.
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