These two horses were war heroes.
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid (“the Lord”), was an 11th-century Spanish military hero who always led his armies from the back of his white Andalusian horse, Babieca. There are two legends offering theories for how El Cid got Babieca:
•El Cid’s godfather gave the young man the pick of any horse in his herd, and El Cid chose a white stallion whom his godfather thought was the weakest of the bunch. In response, the godfather muttered, “Babieca, babieca,” which means “stupid” in Spanish.
•The second story paints Babieca as one of the Spanish king’s best horses. When a mounted knight challenged El Cid to a duel, the king gave him the white stallion to ensure that the fight was fair.
Either way, El Cid and Babieca were inseparable. They were already legendary when the warrior led his army into one last battle against the Moors for control of Valencia in southern Spain. El Cid actually died before the battle—he’d been wounded in a skirmish outside the city’s walls and passed away just before the siege at Valencia. But his followers tied his corpse upright in his saddle and put a sword in his hand, and Babieca carried El Cid into the fray, inspiring the Spaniards and panicking the Moors, who believed El Cid has risen from the dead. Thus, the Spanish kingdom was saved.
In 1864, Confederates attacked Union general Phillip Sheridan’s troops in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Sheridan was about 12 miles away at the time, attending a meeting in the town of Winchester. But when he got word that his men were under siege, he jumped on his horse Rienzi, who galloped across the war-torn countryside and delivered Sheridan to the battlefield. Once there, the general orchestrated a successful Union counterattack against Confederate troops, a victory considered by many historians to be a crucial turning point in the war.
Shenandoah was his most famous effort, but in all, Rienzi saw service in 19 battles and sustained several wounds. His efforts earned him a lasting tribute when he died in 1878: Rienzi was stuffed and put on display—first at a U.S. Army museum in New York City (it burned down in 1922) and then at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hall of Armed Forces History, where he remains today. Reinzi also got a name change. After the horse’s heroics at Shenandoah, Sheridan renamed him Winchester.
More military mounts on page 202.