Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/788

Rh 774 C I D Christian states of Aragon and Barcelona, and harrying even the border lands of Castile. Among the enterprizes of the Cid the most famous was that against Valencia, then the richest and most flourishing city of the Peninsula, and an object of cupidity to both Christian and Moslem. The Cid appeared before the place at the head of an army of 7000 men, for the greater part Mahometans. In vain did the Valencians implore succour from the emir of Cordova, and from their co-religionists in other parts of the Penin sula. In defiance of an army which marched to the relief of the beleaguered city under Yussuf the Almoravide, the Cid took Valencia after a siege of nine months, on the 15th of June 1094 the richest prize which up to that time had been recovered from the Moors. The condi tions of the surrender were all violated the cadi Ibn Djahhaff burnt alive, avast number of the citizens who had escaped death by famine slaughtered, and the possessions divided among the Campeador s companions. In other respects the Cid appears to have used his victory mildly, ruling his kingdom, which now embraced nearly the whole of Valencia and Murcia, for four years with vigour and justice. At length the Almoravides, whom he had several times beaten, marched against him in great force, inflict ing a crushing defeat at Cuen9a upon the Cid s army, under his favourite lieutenant, Alvar Faiiez. The blow was a fatal one to the aged and war-worn Campeador, who died of anger and grief in July 1099. His widow main tained Valencia for three years longer against the Moors, but was at last compelled to evacuate the city, taking with her the body of the Cid to be buried in the monastery of San Pedro at Cardefia, in the neighbourhood of Burgos. Here, in the centre of a small chapel, surrounded by his chief companions in arms, by Alvar Faiiez Minaya, Pero Bermudez, Martin Antolinez, and Pelaez the Asturian, rest, after frequent disturbances from friend and foe, the bones of the mighty warrior, the truest of Spanish heroes, the embodiment of all the national virtues and most of the national vices. Philip II. tried to get him canonized, but Rome objected, and not without reason. Whatever were his qualities as a fighter, the Cid was but indifferent material out of which to make a saint, a man who battled against Christian and against Moslem with equal zeal, who burnt churches and mosques with equal zest, who ravaged, plundered, and slew as much for a livelihood as for any patriotic or religious purpose, and was in truth almost as much of a Mussulman as a Christian in his habits and his character. His true place in history is that of the greatest of the guerrilleros the perfect type of that sort of warrior in which, from the days of Sertorius to those of El Empecinado, the soil of Spain has been most productive. The Cid of romance, the Cid of a thousand battles, legends, and dramas, the Cid as apotheosized in literature, the Cid invoked by good Spaniards in every national crisis, whose name is a perpetual and ever-present inspira tion to Spanish patriotism, is a very different character from the historical Rodrigo Diaz the freebooter, the rebel, the consorter with the infidels and the enemies of Spain. He is the Perfect One, the Born in a Happy Hour, &quot; My Cid,&quot; the invincible, the magnanimous, the all-powerful. He is the type of knightly virtue, the mirror of patriotic duty, the flower of all Christian grace. He is Roland and Bayard in one. In the popular literature of Spain he holds a place such as has no parallel in other countries. From an almost contemporary period he has been the subject of song ; and he who was chanted by wandering minstrels in the 12th century has survived to be hymned in revo lutionary odes of the 19th. In a barbarous Latin poem, written in celebration of the conquest of Almeria by Al- pho::so VII. in the year 1147, we have the bard testifying to the supereminencc of the Cid among his country s heroes : &quot; Ipse Rodericus Mio Cid semper vocatus, I)e quo a tatur quod ab liostibus haud superatus, Qui domuit Mauros, comites domuit quoque nostros.&quot; Within a hundred years of his death the Cid had become the centre of a whole system of myths. The Poema del Cid, written in the latter half of the 12th century, has scarcely any trace of a historical character. Already the Cid had reached his apotheosis, and Castilian loyalty could not consent to degrade him when banished by his sove reign : &quot; Dios, que buen vassalo si oviese buen sefior ! &quot; cry the weeping citizens of Burgos, as they speed the exile on his way. The Poem of the Cid is but a fragment of 3744 lines, written in a barbarous style, in rugged assonant rhymes, and a rude Alexandrine measure, but it glows with the pure fire of poetry, and is full of a noble simplicity and a true epical grandeur, invaluable as a living picture of the age. The ballads relating to the Cid, of which nearly two hundred are extant, are greatly inferior in merit, though some of them are not unworthy to be ranked with the best in this kind. Duran believes the greater part of them to have been written in the 16th century. A few betray, not more by the antiquity of their language than by their natural and simple tone, traces of an earlier age and a freer national life. They all take great liberties with history, thus belying the opinion of Sancho Panza that &quot; the ballads are too old to tell lies.&quot; Such of them as are not genuine relics of the 12th century are either poetical versions of the leading episodes in the hero s life as con tained in the Chronicle, that Chronicle itself having been doubtless composed out of still earlier legends as sung by the wandering juglares, or pure inventions of a later time, owing their inspiration to the romances of chivalry. In these last the ballad-mongers, not to let their native hero be outdone by the Amadises, the Esplandians, and the Felix- martes, engage him in the most extravagant adventures making war upon the king of France and upon the emperor, receiving embassies from the Soldan of Persia, bearding the Pope at Rome, and performing other feats not mentioned even in the Poem or the Chronicle. The last and the worst of the Cid ballads are those which betray by their frigid conceits and feeble mimicry of the antique the false taste and essentially unheroic spirit of the age of Philip II. As for the innumerable other poems, dramas, and tales which have been founded on the legend of the Cid, from the days of Guillen de Castro and Diamante to those of Quintana and Trueba, they serve merely to prove the abiding popularity of the national hero in his native land. The chief sources from -which the story of the Cid is to be gathered are, first, the Latin chronicle discovered by Riseo in the convent of San Isidro at Leon, proved by internal evidence to have been written before 1258 ; the Cronica General, composed by Al- phonso X. in the second half of the 13th century, partly (so far as relates to the Cid) from the above, partly from contemporary Arabic histories, and partly from tradition ; the Cronica del Cid, first published in 1512, by Juan de Velorado, abbot of the monas tery of San Pedro at Cardeha, which is a compilation from the last, interlarded with new fictions due to the piety of the compiler ; lastly, various Arabic manuscripts, some of contemporary date, which are examined and their claims weighed in the second volume of Professor Dozy s Historic de la litterature de I Espagne au moyen Age. Huber, Muller, and Ferdinand Wolf are among the leading authorities in the history and literature of the Cid. M. Damas Hinard has published the poem, with a literal French translation and notes, and John Hookham Frere has rendered it into English with extraordinaiy spirit and fidelity. Tha largest collection of the Cid ballads is that of Duran, in the Romanccro General, in two volumes, forming part of Rivadeneyra s Bibliotcca de stutores Espanoles. (H. E. W.)