The Epic of the Cid

The Epic of the Cid (Cantar de Mio Cid) is the only medieval Spanish epic to come down to us in more or less complete form. Composed in Old Castilian, possibly some time in the latter part of the twelfth century, it was probably put into written form in the first decade of the thirteenth. It is known to us through a single manuscript, dating from the fourteenth century and housed in the Spanish National Library. The first page of the manuscript, and two others in the middle of the text, are missing. The text gives no indication of any title. English translations have called it the Song (Cantar), Poem (Poema), or Lay of the Cid. Only one of these terms is justified by evidence from the work itself: cantar, “song,” is used by the narrator to refer to the work. I have decided on “epic” for reasons that will be explained presently.

Invaded by Muslim troops from North Africa in 711, Visigothic Spain was soon conquered and subdued by the invaders. Only a zone along the northern coast remained in the hands of Christians. Al-Andalus, as the Muslims called it, was an independent emirate from 756 to 912, then a caliphate in its own right from 912 to 1031, and during its heyday was the most prosperous and advanced civilization in Europe. Its great cities—Toledo, Cordoba, Seville, Malaga, Saragossa, and Valencia—were famous throughout the Muslim and Christian worlds. Its economy, agriculture, science, military organization, and urban sophistication were the envy of medieval Christendom.¹

At the collapse of the Cordoban Caliphate in 1031, Al-Andalus broke up into independent city states called taifas. These remained relatively more advanced and prosperous than the Christian kingdoms to the north, but at the same time became more vulnerable to attack. This ushered in the era that came to be known as the Reconquest. Throughout most of the earlier years of this period, from the mid-eleventh to the early thirteenth century, the relationship between the two Peninsular civilizations was one of intermittent conflict rather than constant and systematic warfare. Raiding, pillaging, and extorting tribute were the preferred modes of Christian aggression, with outright conquest the exception (as in the case of Toledo, conquered in 1085 by Alfonso VI, the king of the Cid’s epic). In order to slow the Christian advance, two Berber dynasties came from across the Strait of Gibraltar to the ostensible aid of the imperiled Spanish Muslims, but stayed on to become de facto invaders and rulers of Muslim Spain. These were the Almoravids (1086–1147) and the Almohads (c. 1160–1248). The Cid confronted the first of these Berber dynasties, while the second was eventually overthrown during the culminating phase of the Reconquest. Notable episodes in that final chapter were the victory of Alfonso VIII and his Christian coalition at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), and the campaigns of his grandson Fernando III, conqueror of Cordoba (1236), Seville (1248), and many other Muslim kingdoms of Al-Andalus. Only the mountain kingdom of Granada remained independent, persisting as a tributary state of Castile until its conquest by the Catholic Kings in 1492.

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known to history and legend as the Cid, was born in the town of Vivar, near Burgos, in the early 1040s, into a family of infanzones, or barons of the lesser nobility. Orphaned in 1058, he was taken into the household of Sancho, the eldest son of King Fernando I. Fernando, on his death in 1064, had divided his domains among his five children. To Alfonso, the second son, he left León, at that time the principal kingdom. Sancho received Castile, and García, the youngest son, was given Galicia. Fernando’s younger daughter, Elvira, was given the town of Toro, while the eldest of the five siblings, Urraca, was given the city of Zamora.

After the death of their father, Sancho proved unwilling to abide by his father’s division of the kingdom. With Alfonso’s help, he took over Galicia from their brother García. Then, turning on Alfonso, Sancho defeated him at the battle of Golpejera in 1072. After annexing León and driving Alfonso into exile, Sancho then turned his attention to the domain assigned to his elder sister, Urraca. When she defied him from within her stronghold in Zamora, Sancho laid siege to the city. During the siege, according to some accounts, a Zamoran noble named Vellid Adolfo, pretending to be a deserter, assassinated Sancho. Returning from exile after the murder, Alfonso succeeded to the various realms once controlled by his slain brother.

Rodrigo Díaz had served as Sancho’s alférez or constable (a post combining the functions of standard-bearer and captain of the royal guard) at Golpejera. One of Sancho’s staunchest supporters, Rodrigo was not at first favored by Alfonso. The latter, however, sought to win Rodrigo over, granting him honors and arranging an excellent marriage with Jimena Díaz, a woman of an aristocratic Asturian lineage. But increasing tension between Alfonso and his brother’s one-time henchman led to Rodrigo’s banishment in 1081. The exiled Rodrigo served the Muslim ruler of Saragossa, Yusuf al-Mu’tamin, under whose banner he obtained victories against Christian Barcelona and the Muslim kingdoms of Lérida, Tortosa, and Denia.

Meanwhile, Alfonso had carried out the conquest of Muslim Toledo (1085). The Almoravids, the Berber dynasty controlling northwestern Africa, invaded Spain and defeated Alfonso at the Battle of Sagrajas (1086). Alfonso then reconciled with the Cid, after which the latter went to assist the Muslim ruler of Valencia, an ally and protégé of Alfonso, in defending that city against attacks from the Muslim towns of Denia, Tortosa, and Lérida. After managing to gain control of Albarracín, Valencia, and other towns, the Cid marched to the aid of Alfonso, who was advancing into Al-Andalus.

Another quarrel between the two men provoked Alfonso’s wrath and led him to take the Cid’s wife prisoner. In the meantime, a coalition was organized against the Cid, which consisted of the Muslim kingdoms of Saragossa and Lérida, as well as Christian Barcelona. The ensuing Battle of Tévar was won by the Cid, who took as prisoner Berenguer, the Count of Barcelona.

In 1091, as the Almoravids threatened another invasion, the Cid marched into Al-Andalus, intending to come to Alfonso’s aid. After another falling out with the king, the Cid remained in Al-Andalus as Alfonso returned to Castile. The Cid retired to Valencia, where he fortified the city’s defenses and formed an alliance with the emir of Saragossa and the Christian king of Aragon. While defending Valencia, the Cid declined to make outright war against Alfonso, even when the latter, allied with Genoa and Pisa, advanced against him. However, the Cid invaded the territories of his Castilian enemies, a number of whom were favored members of Alfonso’s court. The king then decided to reconcile with his famous vassal.

In the Cid’s absence, meanwhile, the Almoravid party came to power in Valencia. The Cid laid siege to the city and took it in the summer of 1093. As the Almoravids sent reinforcements, their allies within the city again seized power. When the Almoravid forces withdrew, the Cid undertook a second siege, reentering the city in 1094. While granting very favorable conditions of capitulation, the Cid and his Christian forces remained in the city. The Cid moved his family there and welcomed many more Christian knights who came to join him. Another Almoravid force was sent against the city, but, with the help of Castilian reinforcements, the Cid defeated it in December of 1094. He then became the ruler of Valencia, while continuing to acknowledge Alfonso as his liege lord.

Of the Cid’s two daughters, Christina married Ramiro, the crown prince of Navarre, and María married Ramón Berenguer, the Count of Barcelona. After the Cid’s death by natural causes in 1099, his wife Jimena remained in Valencia until 1103. In that year she returned to Castile with her husband’s remains, which she buried in the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña.²

Although the historical Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar had enemies and rivals among the Spanish Christians, the profile of him that emerges from reading Christian authors is mostly a positive one. He is portrayed as a supremely brave warrior, consummate in his martial ability; a clever tactician and astute strategist; a staunch vassal and wise counselor; a shrewd diplomat and inspirational leader of men.

Medieval Muslim historians paint a different portrait. Their perspective with regard to this Christian champion is paradoxically exemplified by the name they apply to him. His Christian nickname, El Cid, derived from the Hispano-Arabic dialectal sid, and ultimately from the classical Arabic sayyid, “lord,” is not used by Arab-speaking authors. Their accounts, as the great Arabist Reinhart Dozy (Le Cid d’après de nouveaux documents, 62–63; see TES in Related Texts) points out, refer to Rodrigo by the term Campeador, the term also used by Christian biographers and chroniclers writing in the vernacular (those writing in Latin call him Campidoctor, “master of the field”). El Cid is apparently used mainly by Christians. The name literally means “lord,” but it also may have meant, as Richard Fletcher suggests (The Quest for El Cid, 3), something like “The Boss.” The seeming Arabism of the epithet El Cid may, in other words, have originally expressed a slangy admiration, among Peninsular Christians, for the resolute man of action who gets things done, for the inspiring leader of men in battle and siege, for the equitable redistributor of plunder who gives poor men the chance to escape poverty.

The Spanish Muslims, while recognizing Rodrigo’s bravery, energy, and military talents, saw him as a pitiless mercenary, a cunning opportunist, a shameless trickster, a ruthless extortionist, a dangerous terrorist. In the accounts of the Valencian Ibn Alqama (b. 1036–1037) and Ibn Bassam (born in what is now Portugal, latter half of the eleventh and first decades of the twelfth centuries; see Related Texts A, Treasury of the Excellencies of the Spaniards), Rodrigo is the scourge of Spanish Islam, a self-interested rogue who wars against Christian and Muslim alike. Crossing religious frontiers as needed, he serves now Christian masters, now Muslim. A man dominated by material greed and lust for power, he is not above the cruelest methods of torture when interrogating or meting out exemplary punishment.

This alternative view of the protagonist must be born in mind as we read the tale of a hero who is shown by the poet to be an exemplary father, vassal, and warlord, but who also leads his men into fierce battle, conducts lightening raids in search of plunder, storms fortresses, besieges towns, levies tribute, and extorts ransom. The narrator does not hide these ugly facts about his hero. He approves of them, even glorifies them, because for him and his audience Rodrigo is their leader, their patriarch, their Cid against the world.

This historical personage—a virtuosic warrior, a daring tactician, a formidable strategist, and a charismatic leader—deeply impressed his contemporaries, both Christian and Muslim. Already, in the Cid’s lifetime, legends, stories, and chronicles were devoted to his exploits. The Epic of the Cid, composed about a century after the real Cid’s death, shows a detailed awareness of that tradition. The Cid continued to be a character in subsequent Hispanic poetry, balladry, and theater, and has become a Hispanic cultural icon, as evidenced—to mention only two of many possible examples—by Corneille’s 1636 play Le Cid and the 1963 film El Cid, starring Charleton Heston as Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar and Sophia Loren as Jimena.

The Epic of the Cid is a historical narrative, but it is not a work of historiography. It is a poetic narrative that uses historical detail, or embellishes its yarn with details that sound historical, for the purposes of storytelling. Those purposes may not agree with our preconceptions about the Middle Ages. A striking fact about this epic, for instance, is that despite being composed in its present form around the time of the Third Crusade (1187–1192), a famous instance of conflict between civilizations, it shows no sign of a systematic crusading spirit. One of the Cid’s best friends is a Muslim; his worst enemies are Christians.

In determining the poet’s intentions, and the sympathies and antipathies he wants to elicit in his audience, the text is our main source of information. Despite the essential mystery of the work’s original circumstances of composition and performance, the narrative gives clues in many places as to the poet’s attitudes regarding ethical, social, and economic questions. Kinship and marriage, money and politics, law and order, status and prestige, honor and dishonor, are all on the mind of the poet and his audience.

An especially important clue is the poem’s obsession with the law. The poet uses many legal terms and phrases. The plot of this epic turns on legal issues. The Cid, estranged from his rightful lord, unjustly outlawed and exiled, and separated from his beloved wife and daughters, must make his way in a hostile frontier world. His adventures and vicissitudes culminate in a court case that utterly vindicates him while utterly humiliating his enemies.

This emphasis on legal issues and the poet’s frequent use of legal terms and concepts have been cited in arguing that the poet was not only conversant with the law, but may in fact have been a lawyer. Scholars have demonstrated parallels with specific Peninsular charters and law codes. Others have countered that in the era when the poem as we know it was composed, probably in the last decade or two of the twelfth century, law had not been professionalized in the Peninsula. The first Spanish degree-granting universities, Palencia and Salamanca, were not founded until the second decade of the thirteenth century.

The Epic of the Cid shows evidence that its composer knew something of the law and was possibly familiar with some law codes, but to say that he was a man of the law seems unverifiable. If the poet were a secular student of the law, he would presumably have “practiced” it in the generalized, nonadvocating, nonprofessional way of several characters in the poem, including the Cid himself. The laws known to the poet might well have been oral lore written down by scribes, many or most of them clerics. But this common law consisted of phraseologies and precedents accessible to all knowledgeable men in the arguing of cases before judges and peers.

The hero of the Cidian epic and his friends express hatred of those who manipulate the law, written or otherwise. Whether or not the historical Cid and his followers felt that way about such issues is difficult to verify. The epic narrator, however, clearly wants us to side with the Cid and his men. Pedro Bermúdez, the Cid’s nephew and one of his most intimate vassals, insults one of the villains by calling him a “blow-hard” (l.3328). In the original manuscript, Pedro calls his despicable adversary “a tongue without hands” (lengua sin manos). Actions, not words, define manhood. An honorable man may have to argue his case before the law, may argue it without compromising his integrity, but only if regrettably obliged to do so by makers of idle promises, poltroons who hide behind the letter of the law.

The Cid is a skillful and learned litigant, but he is not defined by his words. He is above all a charismatic patriarch. From this status spring all his other roles: father, husband, uncle, father-in-law, comrade, warrior, lord. No matter where he is or what he does, in peace or in war, he lives up to the expectations incumbent on patriarchy.

As the leader of a merry band of loyal vassals, a cheerful besieger of cities and fair-and-square redistributor of wealth, the epic Cid (as opposed to the historical Cid) is a benevolent warlord. He is like his historical counterpart, but the harsher elements of the historical warlord’s profile are played down. The epic Cid is mostly truthful, generous, and fair. He is a father to his people. His paternal altruism, however, is reserved for his clansmen, vassals, and subjects; everyone else is fair game. This is why he guiltlessly manipulates the money lenders Raquel and Vidas, slyly engaging to repay an enormous loan using a chest full of sand as collateral. The Cid makes his false assurances to the moneylenders with ethical impunity because they are not his people. The crime of the Scions of Carrión is that they treat their wives, the Cid’s daughters, like outsiders. These young men, in other words, behave like greedy moneylenders. Indifferent to all standards of decency, they ignore the ties established by marriage, which make them and the Cid kinsmen.

Like Robin Hood and other robbers and rebels of folklore, figures defined by the historian Eric Hobsbawm as social bandits, the Cid is an Everyman.³ He personifies the folkloric motif of the unjustly disgraced nobleman who rebels against an unfair regime. In ways specific to the time and place, he is a protector of the common people. The conqueror of Valencia and many other towns, the epic Cid patriarchically nurtures the impoverished, predatory hordes who follow him. The story sides, in other words, with besiegers and invaders in the same way that stories of Robin Hood side with bandits and highway robbers.

Although not exactly the same kind of outlaw as the legendary Robin Hood, the epic Cid is, like the English folk hero, an outsider. Backstabbing courtiers have estranged him from his rightful lord and procured his exile. The plot of the poem is channeled toward the ultimate moral and social vindication of the hero and his family. The outrage committed by wastrel nobles who marry the Cid’s daughters for money affords the hero the moral leverage and material opportunity to ensure that his socially superior but morally inferior enemies get their comeuppance. As in much bandit folklore, the eventual chastisement of the effete upper-class miscreants—in this case taking the form of a judicial combat that they lose in shameful fashion—was probably understood as ruggedly humorous. The audience of this epic tale would have consisted of all those who might identify with the hero’s vindictive project and cheer for his champions as they teach these miscreants a lesson. This audience might well have included, in addition to commoners, lesser nobles like the Cid and even some of higher status. As with sports figures, movie stars, and politicians, audience identification is not based on actual analogy between literary characters and readers, listeners, and spectators, but on the suitability of bigger-than-life personalities for vicarious projection.

This is a prose translation. All that is rhythmically poetic in the original—irregular line length, loose stanzaic structure, and assonant rhyme scheme—is lost. I make no attempt to emulate the admirable work of translators like Richard Lattimore and Robert Fagles, whose verse renderings of Homer enable readers to experience something aesthetically analogous to the metrical glory of the original works. On the other hand, I try to convey something like the easy flow and colloquial accessibility of the original. This will enable readers, I hope, to focus on the characters, the setting, the social and psychological tensions, and the episodic buildup of the narrative.

Other translators have called this work the Poem or the Song of the Cid. By calling it The Epic of the Cid, I emphasize its similarities to other works that are also generally called epics, such as the Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, or The Song of Roland. Common features defining this genre include the following: a narrative that begins in medias res (“in the middle of things”); a beginning that includes an invocation to a muse or a statement of the central theme; a narrative that focuses on the destiny and exploits of an exemplary hero; heroic actions taking place in the past from the perspective of the poet and his audience; a society and economy dominated by warfare, clan confrontation, and economic predation; the backdrop of a greater world encompassing peoples, nations, far-reaching travels, opposing peoples and civilizations; the use of recurrent epithets and other sorts of formulaic language; simple, even stereotypical characterizations; an emphasis on action rather than introspection, involving intensely dramatic scenes of intimate emotion, alternating with violent, man-to-man confrontations; the tendency of characters to speechify in formal-sounding language; the tendency of narrators to list things, such as names of personages or places; and, of course, divine intervention in the affairs of men.

If we regard scenes in which God could be seen as disposed to intervene on behalf of the hero and his cause (the Cid’s dream, Jimena’s prayer), the only epic traits omitted by the Cid poet are the invocation to the muse (or its medieval equivalent) and the initial thematic statement. One or both of these features, however, might have been present in the missing first folio of the extant manuscript. Given the poem’s inclusion of all the other epic features, it seems generically accurate, then, to call the work The Epic of the Cid.

The honor of membership in this august genre, however, comes with several problems of interpretation. To begin with, how do we explain the apparently shared features of works composed in places and eras far removed from one another in space and time, including works from the literary traditions of India, Japan, Germany, and Africa? Some similarities might be explained by assuming that later works imitate earlier works. However, this notion can only be taken so far. It is hard to imagine, for example, how the Cid poet, composing probably in the latter half of the twelfth century, could know anything of ancient Indian epic, or even of the Homeric epics, the texts of which were probably not directly known to western European readers until much later.

The Cid poet might have known Virgil’s Aeneid, which was well known throughout the Middle Ages. However, despite some suggestive similarities, there is no irrefutable evidence of such direct knowledge or imitation. Some scholars have thought that this epic imitates the Old French Song of Roland, probably composed a century or so before. There are many suggestive similarities between the two works, and between the Cid epic and other French chansons de geste. These similarities, on the other hand, might reflect not the Spanish poem’s direct imitation of French epic but rather the participation of both French and Spanish epics in a primordial and enduring Romance folksinging tradition that predates by centuries the earliest epic manuscripts.

From an even broader perspective, the analogies that justify our perception of an epic genre could derive, in some cases, from composition in an earlier—that is, more tribal, clanish, and patriarchal—phase in the history of the respective histories of the peoples and nations that have produced epics. According to this concept, so-called folk or primitive epics, such as Homer’s works, are called primary. Works that self-consciously imitate them, such as Virgil’s Aeneid or Milton’s Paradise Lost, are called secondary.

Such questions have been debated for many years. The issues, including the validity of the primary/secondary classification, remain controversial. The debate intensified in the 1920s, and 1930s, when a new theory of epic composition emerged. Developed by Milman Parry and his then-assistant Albert Lord (who would later write The Singer of Tales, the most influential book ever written on the subject), this oral-formulaic theory of epic demonstrated stylistic parallels between the Homeric works and poems composed within a living tradition of oral epic poetry in Yugoslavia. Parry and Lord sought to show how poets trained in a traditional, and very possibly illiterate, singing tradition, and employing extensive repertoires of recombinant, contextually variable metrical formulas along with extensive thematic narrative schemes, could indeed produce lengthy narrative songs that seemed strikingly analogous to the Homeric epics.⁴

The Parry-Lord model, while provoking extensive and ongoing debates among scholars of Greek epic, has been applied, also with much controversy, to other epic traditions, including those of medieval France and Spain. Two orientations, roughly speaking, have emerged from this discussion. The oral-traditionalists envision a popular, and possibly illiterate, singer of tales, a folkloric bard who composed his text for performance before a live audience in baronial halls, monastic refectories, taverns, marketplaces, or street corners. An extreme version of this model postulates an illiterate poet who composed not for performance but during performance. Defenders of this notion point to the remarkable memory and agile improvisation of the folk poet working within an oral-formulaic tradition. Each performance in such a tradition is a variation on the same basic song; no two performances will be exactly alike. The text of a work like The Epic of the Cid will thus most likely be the transcription of such a performance.

The other orientation assumes a learned writer, possibly a cleric, who composed in writing. This approach emphasizes the deliberate narrative and metrical artistry of poetic production. More subtle presentations of this concept allow that traditional folk poetry exists, and that the poet might well have imitated certain aspects of that poetry, such as narrative formulas, epithets, stereotypical characterization, and so on. However, although he may adapt or imitate originally oral or folkloric works, the literate poet, according to the individualist model, is like any other author, ancient, medieval, or modern. Even if he imitates oral style, and wants to lend his work a folksy air and archaic setting, he composes in writing. This implies methodical choices as to diction, rhyme scheme, metrical structure, stanza length, and other literary features. Oral folksingers within a formulaic tradition perhaps make similar choices. But their choices are severely limited by the narrative and metrical constraints of the tradition. The literate poet, in contrast, has a far broader range of stylistic and thematic possibilities. Even if intended for eventual recitation, or even if influenced by oral tradition, the literate poem, according to the individualist theory, results from the singular labor of an author rather than from the improvisational, public domain give-and-take of an interactive singing performance.

This controversy cannot be rehearsed in any detail here. Many students of the problem decline to align themselves with one side or the other of the issue, pointing to the lack of corroborating documentary evidence as to the practical details of poetic training, methods of composition, and styles and venues of recitation. Lacking such external evidence, debate tends to focus on technical issues of versification, stanzaic structure, rhythm, diction, and so on. Such topics are difficult to discuss in the context of a translation.

We can point out, however, that a nuanced model of the medieval epic singer has to allow for the coexistence of literacy and illiteracy. Reading and writing were probably not conveniently separable regimes in the Middle Ages. A poet could be both bardic and scribal, and be moved by all kinds of motives and influences. Although we cannot definitely confirm the exact circumstances or methods of composition—and thus cannot say for sure whether The Epic of the Cid is a primary or a secondary epic—we can point to several features of the poem that suggest it was meant to be performed, and probably was performed, before an audience. These features include the following:

1. Indications that singing and music were involved. The narrator, for example, several times calls the tale a cantar (“song”).

2. Consistently repetitious language. This makes the work sound like a song, which repeats itself with refrains and catchphrases. This repetitive tendency is especially apparent in the work’s use of epithets, a trait with which readers of Homer will be familiar. The Epic of the Cid is fond of formulaic repetitions. Thus, Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn,” “grey-eyed Athena,” and “wily Odysseus” are matched by the Cidian poet’s “Campeador” and “man born in a lucky hour.” But the repetition is not always exact. Rather, the poet paraphrases with slight variation. This seems to suggest the almost-but-not-quite-exact repetition of semi-improvisational oral performance, whose dynamics have been studied by present-day folklorists and linguists.

3. Direct address. Throughout the poem, the narrator speaks to his audience. “You see,” “You know,” and similar phrases are repeated numerous times. This gives the impression of a singer-poet maintaining eye contact, engaging his listeners, working his audience.

4. Disregard of the concordance of verbal tenses. The poet continuously alternates between present and past tenses. This could result from metrical constraints (different syllable counts required for different metrical environments). It could also result from dramatic immediacy. The singer is a storyteller, not a grammarian. He is, in the parlance of method acting, “in the moment”—he tells it like he feels it.

All these factors suggest that this poet was a singer of tales who earned his daily bread by performance. This would probably involve a rowdy and very possibly interactive audience. Two recurring themes confirm the image of a poet performing before a popular audience: one involves kinship, the other social status.

Throughout the poem, characters’ motivation in helping or cooperating is expressed by the phrase por amor de. Literally this means “for love of.” It seems to be used in most cases in the way we use the phrase “for the sake of,” and I have translated accordingly when a literal rendering might seem overstated. But a bardic reading assumes boisterous traditionalism, vehement suspicion of outsiders and newfangled ways, and old-fashioned commitment to kith and kin. In some situations, rendering “for love of” as “for the sake of” attenuates the emotional intensity of the characters’ declarations. The literal reading in such cases therefore seems best. People do things for each other from love, backed by readiness to risk life and limb in defense of their loved ones and of the group’s collective honor.

Another much-repeated term is cavallero. This is often translated as “knight.” But the epic Cid is not very chivalric, if by that term we mean the amalgam of martial prowess and courtly gallantry that emerged as a literary and social ideal in subsequent centuries. Knighthood as an ethos, order, and lifestyle may have already made its presence felt in some sectors of society in the time of the poet. But this poem scarcely recognizes or understands such developments. Most of the time it uses the word cavallero in the rough-and-ready macho sense of “mounted warrior.” Only occasionally, when the poet uses cavallero to refer to the ancillary functions that later came to define the concept (such as attending a lord at council meetings), or when there is some slight implication that the status of cavallero is more privileged and desirable than that of, say, the peón (“foot soldier”), does rendering cavallero as “knight” seem justified.

A great many place names are mentioned in the narrative. I have tried to use modern-day forms that match, as much as possible, the corresponding entries in present-day atlases and geographical dictionaries. Standard English-language versions of Spanish place names are preferred to Spanish forms (e.g., Saragossa instead of Zaragoza). Where there is no standard English form, names are rendered in the modern Spanish spelling. Names of persons with equivalents in modern Spanish have been rendered in the modern forms.

The epithet most frequently applied to the Cid is Campeador. The meaning and etymology of this formulaic descriptor have elicited debate. Some derive it from the Latin campidoctor, meaning literally “drill instructor,” “master of the military arts,” and by metaphorical extension, “champion.” Another plausible derivation is from the verb campear, “to do battle.” “Battler” has thus been used by other translators to render this epithet. If we translate the word simply as “he who does battle,” the best rendering might be “the Warrior.” The Cid is the Warrior, in the same way that Shakespeare is the Bard.

But the epic Cid is more than just a warrior among warriors. He is a charismatic leader of predatory hordes, a strategist and diplomat, a frontier legalist and dispenser of rough justice, a distributor of stolen wealth, a sacker of cities and a conqueror of kingdoms. Campeador connotes all these things in the poem.

The most accurate translation is probably “warlord,” based on an analogy that could be drawn between the Cid of the poem and similar personages of the modern world. Examples might be found in late-imperial China, revolutionary Mexico, or contemporary Africa. The epic Cid is certainly no friend to the bourgeois city-dwellers who are the closet match in the poem to most of the work’s modern readers. But “warlord” is weighed down by a certain political baggage. It might remind the reader of ugly historical realities (predatory violence, poverty and starvation, lawlessness and corruption) that this medieval story overlooks or plays down, realities not too different from those of present-day dystopias in the developing world and elsewhere—the environments that give rise to the politics and economy of warlords.

In short, there may not be a term in contemporary English that exactly conveys what Campeador seems to mean in the poem. Accordingly, I have retained the Spanish word, as have other translators before me.

1. All proper nouns and references to historical figures are identified and explained in the Compendium of Proper Names.

2. A famous Benedictine monastery, situated 8 kilometers southeast of Burgos (see Compendium of Proper Names). Historically associated with the Cid, it was a significant shrine in the most important period of the Camino de Santiago (Way of Saint James) and figures prominently in this epic.

3. For discussion of the populism of bandits, see Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, 20–28; and Bandits, 41–56.

4. The performance and training of the oral singer are discussed in the second chapter of Lord’s The Singer of Tales. Lord’s third and fourth chapters analyze the narrative and metrical intricacies of composition in performance. His sixth chapter describes the complex interaction of oral and written traditions.