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Just as a portrait discloses the artist’s opinion of his sitter, so the choice of a hero is an involuntary piece of self-revelation. As man fashions his idols in his own image, we are in a fair way to understand him, if we know what he admires: and, as it is with individual units, so is it with races. National heroes symbolise the ambitions, the foibles, the general temper and radical qualities of those who have set them up as exemplars. But there are two sides to every character, and Spain has two national heroes known all the world over: the practical Cid and the idealistic Don Quixote, one of them an historical figure, and the other the child of a great man’s fancy. Perhaps to the majority of mankind the offspring of Cervantes’s poetic imagination is more vividly present than the authentic warrior who headed many a desperate charge. It is the singular privilege of genius to substitute its own intense conceptions for the unromantic facts, and to create out of nothing beings that seem more vital than men of flesh and blood. Don Quixote has become a part of the visible universe, while most of us behold the Cid, not as he really was, but as Corneille portrayed him more than five centuries after his death. It may not be amiss to bring him back to earth by recalling the ascertainable incidents in his adventurous career.

So marked are the differences between the Cid of history and the Cid of legend that, early in the nineteenth century his very existence was called in question by the sceptical Jesuit Masdeu, an historian who delighted in paradox. Masdeu’s doubts were reiterated by Samuel Dunham in his History of Spain and Portugal, and by Dunham’s translator, Antonio María de Alcalá Galiano, a writer of repute in his own day. Alcalá Galiano’s incredulity caused him some personal inconvenience, for—as his kinsman, the celebrated novelist Juan Valera, records—he was threatened with an action at law by a Spanish gentleman who piqued himself on his descent from the Cid, and was not disposed to see his alleged ancestor put aside as a fabulous creature like the Phœnix. These negations, more or less sophistical, are the follies of the learned, and they have their match in the assertions of another school that sought to reconcile divergent views by assuming the existence of two Cids, each with a wife called Jimena, and each with a war-horse called Babieca. This generous process of duplicating everybody and everything has not found favour. Cervantes expresses his view through the canon in Don Quixote:—‘That there was a Cid, as well as a Bernardo del Carpio, is beyond doubt; but that they did the deeds which they are said to have done, I take to be very doubtful.’ Few of us would care to be so affirmative as the canon with respect to Bernardo del Carpio, but he is perfectly right as regards the Cid.

It is certain that the Cid existed in the flesh. He was the son of Diego Lainez, a soldier who fought in the Navarrese campaign. Pérez de Guzmán, in the Loores de los claros varones de España, says that the Cid was born at Río de Ovierna:—

Este varón tan notable

en Río de Ovierna1 nasció.

3But the usual version is that the Cid was born at Bivar near Burgos, about the year 1040, and thence took his territorial designation. To contemporaries he was first of all known simply as Rodrigo (or Ruy) Díaz de Bivar—Roderick, son of James, of Bivar; and later, from his prowess in single combat, as the Campeador (the Champion or Challenger). What was probably his earliest feat of this kind, the overthrow of a Navarrese knight, is recorded in a copy of rudely rhymed Latin verses, apparently the most ancient of the poems which were to commemorate the Cid’s exploits:—

Eia! laetando, populi catervae,

Campi-doctoris hoc carmen audite!

Magis qui eius freti estis ope,

Cuncti venite!

Nobiliori de genere ortus,

Quod in Castella non est illo maius:

Hispalis novit et Iberum litus

Quis Rodericus.

Hoc fuit primum singulare bellum,

Cum adolescens devicit Navarrum:

Hinc Campi-doctor dictus est maiorum

Ore virorum.

The epithet gained at this early period clung to him through life: it is applied to him even by his enemies. It is curious to find that the Arab chroniclers constantly speak of him as Al-kambeyator, but never as the Cid—a word which is usually said to derive from the Arabic Sidi (= My Lord). This circumstance makes it doubtful whether he was widely known as the Cid during his own lifetime. There is, indeed, a pleasing legend to the effect that the King of Castile, on hearing Ruy Díaz de Bivar addressed as Sidi by Arab prisoners of war, decreed that the successful soldier should henceforth be known by that name. But there is no evidence to support this story, and it is rather too picturesque to be plausible. It seems more likely that Ruy Díaz de Bivar was first addressed as Sidi by Arabs who served under him or by the Arab population of Valencia which he conquered towards the end of his career, that the phrase was taken up by his Christian troops, and that it was not generally current among Spaniards till after his death. That he soon afterwards became widely known as ‘the Cid’ or ‘my Cid’ is apparent from a line in the rhymed Latin chronicle of the siege of Almería, written some fifty years later:—

Ipse Rodericus, mio Cid semper vocatus.

But we need not discuss these minutiæ further. Let us record the fact that Ruy Díaz de Bivar is known as the Cid Campeador, and pass on to his historical achievements. At the age of twenty-five he was appointed alférez (standard-bearer) to Sancho II. of Castile, a predatory monarch who drove his brother Alfonso from León and his brother García from Galicia, and annexed their kingdoms. Both campaigns gave the Cid opportunities of distinction, and he became the most conspicuous personage in Castile after the murder of Sancho II. by Bellido Dolfos at Zamora in 1072:—

¡Rey don Sancho, rey don Sancho, no digas que no te aviso

que de dentro de Zamora un alevoso ha salido!

llámase Vellido Dolfos, hijo de Dolfos Vellido,

cuatro traiciones ha hecho, y con esta serán cinco.

Si gran traidor fue el padre, mayor traidor es el hijo.—

Gritos dan en el real: ¡A don Sancho han mal herido:

muerto le ha Vellido Dolfos, gran traición ha cometido!

The Castilians were in a difficult position: the assassination of Sancho II. left them without a candidate for the vacant thrones of Castile and León. The Cid was not eligible; for, though of good family, he was not of royal—nor even of illustrious—descent. The sole legitimate claimant was the dethroned Alfonso, and there was nothing for it but to offer him both crowns. It is alleged that the exasperated Castilians found a salve for their wounded pride by inflicting a signal humiliation on the Leonese prince whom they invited to rule over them. According to tradition, Alfonso was compelled to swear that he had no complicity in Sancho’s death, and this oath was publicly administered to him by the Cid and eleven other Castilian representatives in the church of Santa Gadea at Burgos. This story reaches us in ancient romances, and Hartzenbusch has given it a further lease of life by dramatising it in La Jura en Santa Gadea. There may be some basis for it, and any one may believe it who can. There is, however, no positive proof that any such incident took place, and the tale reads rather like a later invention, fabricated to account for the bad blood made subsequently between the king and his formidable subject. Picturesque stories concerning historical personages are always ‘suspect,’ and are generally untrue. As there was no pretender in the field, why should Alfonso submit to insulting conditions? Is it not simpler to suppose that he regarded the Cid with natural suspicion as the man mainly responsible for his expulsion from León, and that the Leonese nobles were careful to keep this resentful memory alive? Now, as in the time of Fernán González:—

Castellanos y leoneses tienen malas intenciones.

Is it not intrinsically probable that the Cid, like a true Castilian, smarted under the Leonese supremacy; that his allegiance was from the outset reluctant and half-hearted; and that he scarcely troubled to conceal his ultimate design 6of carving out for himself a semi-independent principality with the help of his famous sword Colada? However this may be, king and subject were, for the moment, mutually indispensable. Neither could afford an absolute breach at this stage; both were deep dissemblers; and on July 19, 1074, Alfonso VI. gave his cousin Jimena in marriage to the Cid. The wedding contract has been preserved—a prosaic document providing for the due disposition of property on the death of one of the contracting parties.

After this diplomatic marriage the Cid vanishes for some time into the dense obscurity of domestic bliss, emerging again into the light of history as defeating the Emir of Granada, and then as being charged with malversation. The details are by no means clear. What is clear is that the Cid was exiled about 1081, that he entered the service of Al-muktadir, Emir of Saragossa, and that he continued in the pay of the Emir’s successors—his son Al-mutamen, and his grandson Al-mustain. Henceforward we have a relatively full account of the Cid’s exploits. He defeated the combined forces of the King of Aragón, the Count of Barcelona and their Mohammedan allies at Almenara near Lérida; he routed the King of Aragón once more, this second battle being fought on the banks of the Ebro; he played fast-and-loose with Alfonso VI., was reconciled to his former master, quarrelled, and was again banished. His possessions were confiscated. But confiscation is a game at which subjects can play as well as kings, and the Cid was in a position to recoup his losses. By this time he had gathered round him a motley host of raiders, men of diverse creeds eager for any enterprise that offered chances of plunder. Fortune was now about to furnish him with a great opportunity. On the surrender of Toledo to Alfonso VI. in 1085 it was agreed that Yahya Al-kadir, the defeated Emir, should receive Valencia by way of compensation; and he was imposed on the restive inhabitants by a force under the Cid’s nephew, Alvar Fáñez Minaya. In ordinary circumstances the intruder might have held his own; but the incursion of the African Almoravides, the Jansenists of Mohammedanism, abruptly changed the political aspect. It soon became clear that the gains of the Reconquest were in jeopardy, and that Alfonso VI. must concentrate his army for a momentous struggle.

He might fairly plead that he had kept his bargain by installing the ex-Emir of Toledo at Valencia, and that his own kingdom was now at stake. He had no sooner recalled Alvar Fáñez and his troops than the Valencians revolted, and Al-kadir besought Al-mustain to come over and help him. The inducements offered were considerable. But Al-mustain was a mere figurehead at Saragossa; effective aid could come only from his lieutenant, the Cid: the two feigned acceptance of Al-kadir’s proposals, but secretly agreed to oust him and to divide the spoil. The relief expedition was commanded by the Cid in Al-mustain’s name. It was a post after his own heart. Valencia was then, as it is now, ‘the orchard of Spain,’ and the Cid was in no hurry to reach the capital. He ravaged the outlying districts of the fertile province, levied forced contributions, or induced the inhabitants to pay blackmail to escape his forays. He advanced cautiously, fortifying his position, and scattering delusive promises as he went along. He assured Alfonso VI. that he was working in the interest of Castile, and he assured Al-mustain that he was working in the interest of Saragossa; he encouraged Al-kadir to put down the Valencian rebels, and he encouraged the rebels to throw off Al-kadir’s authority. A master of dissimulation, resolved to make Valencia his own, he successfully deceived all parties till the murder of Al-kadir by Ibn-Jehaf, and the threatened advance of the Almoravides, forced him to drop the mask. Failing to carry the city of Valencia by storm, the Cid reduced it by starvation, and in June 1094 the Valencians surrendered on generous conditions. These conditions were flagrantly violated. Ibn-Jehaf was tortured till he revealed where his treasure was hidden; he was finally burned alive, his chief supporters shared his fate, and the Mohammedan population was given its choice between banishment and something like slavery.

In all but name the Cid was now a king, and he was careful to strengthen his hold on his prize. By taking a census of Christians, and by forbidding them to leave the city, he kept his most trustworthy troops together; and he promoted military efficiency as well as religion by founding a bishopric to which he nominated Jerónimo, the French prelate mentioned in the Poema del Cid, and as valiant a fighter as Archbishop Turpin in the Chanson de Roland:—

Tels curunez ne cantat unkes messe,

Ki de sus cors feïst tantes proeces.

The Cid came out of his trenches to rout the Almoravides at Quarte and in the valley of Alcoy; he extended his conquests to Murviedro, and formed an independent alliance with the King of Aragón. And, if the report of Ibn-Bassam, the Arab chronicler, be true, he had more vaulting ambitions: in a gust of exaltation, the Cid—so we are told—was heard to say that, as the first Roderick had lost Spain, a second Roderick might be destined to win it back. Ibn-Bassam writes in good faith, but he is a rhetorician, and moreover, in this case, he gives the story at second-hand. It is difficult to believe that a clear-headed, practical man like the Cid, who had recently found it hard enough to 9seize a single province, can have talked in this wild way about winning back all Spain. If he did, his judgment was greatly at fault: the Reconquest was not completed till four centuries later, and little more was done towards furthering it during the Cid’s last days. His lieutenant, Alvar Fáñez, was beaten at Cuenca: the Almoravides, flushed with victory, again defeated the Cid’s picked troops at Alcira. The Cid was not present on the field, but the mortification was too much for him: he died—‘of grief and fury,’ so the Arab historians state—in July 1099. Supported by Alvar Fáñez and Bishop Jerónimo, Jimena held out for another two years: then she retreated northwards, after setting fire to the city. Valencia—the real ‘Valencia del Cid’—ceased to exist. The Christians marched out by the light of the flaming walls; the Cid’s embalmed body was mounted for the last time on Babieca (a horse as famous as Roland’s Veillantif), and was taken to San Pedro de Cardeña. There you may still see what was his tomb, with this inscription on it:—

Belliger, invictus, famosus marte triumphis,

Clauditur hoc tumulo magnus Didaci Rodericus.

But his body, after many vicissitudes, now rests in the unimposing town hall of Burgos.

This is the Cid Campeador as he appears in Ibn-Bassam’s Dhakira, written ten years after the Cid’s death, and in the anonymous Gesta Ruderici Campidocti which dates from between 1140 and 1170. The authors write from opposite points of view, and are not critical, but they are trustworthy in essentials, and a statement made by both may usually be taken as a fact, or as a close approximation to fact. The Cid, as you perceive, is far from being irreproachable. He has all the qualities, and therefore all the defects, of a mediæval soldier of fortune: he was brave, mercenary, perfidious and cruel. How, then, are we to account for his position as a national hero? In the first place, we must avoid the error of judging him by modern standards, and in the second place, we must bear in mind that almost all we learn of his later years—the best known period of his life—comes to us from enemies whose prejudices may have led them unconsciously to darken the shadows in the portrait. It is a shock to discover that the man who symbolises the spirit of Spanish patriotism was a border chief in the pay of the highest bidder; it is a greater shock to find that the man who figures as the type of knightly orthodoxy fought for the Mohammedans against the Christians. We must part with our simple-minded illusions, and admit that Pius V. was right in turning a deaf ear when Philip II. suggested (so it is said) the canonisation of the Cid. All heroes are apt to lose their glamour when dragged from the twilight of tradition and poetry into the fierce blaze of fact and history. The Cid is no exception. Renan sums up against him with gay severity. ‘Tout ce qu’il fut, il le dut aux ennemis de sa patrie, même le nom sous lequel il est resté dans l’histoire. Le représentant idéal de l’honneur espagnol était un condottiere, combattant tantôt pour le Christ, tantôt pour Mahomet. Le représentant idéal de l’amour n’a peut-être jamais aimé. Encore une idole qui tombe sous les coups de l’impitoyable critique!’

Yet, if it were worth while, a case might be made for the Cid without recourse to sophistry. It is enough to say that he acted as all other leaders acted in his age and for long afterwards. He was anything but a saint: if he had been a saint, he would never have become the idol of a nation. It has been thought that he had some consciousness of a providential mission, but this is perhaps a hasty generalisation based upon Ibn-Bassam’s story of his having said that a second Roderick might reconquer Spain. This theory ascribes to him more elevation of character and more political foresight than we can suppose him to have possessed. The supremacy of Castile was not an accepted political ideal till it was on the point of establishment, and this takes us forward, nearly a century and a half, to the reign of St. Ferdinand. The Cid was no idealist: he lived wholly in the present. The land of visions was never thrown open to him; he had no touch of Jeanne d’Arc’s mystical temperament; his aims were immediate, concrete, personal. His popularity was due, first of all, to his conspicuous and inspiring valour; due to the fact that the last and most celebrated of his expeditions, though undertaken primarily for his own profit, incidentally helped the cause of national unity by wresting a province from the Mohammedans; due to the instinctive feeling that he represented more or less faithfully the interests of Castile as against those of León—a feeling which found frank expression five centuries later in the Romancero general:—

Soy Rodrigo de Vivar,

castellano á las derechas.

And, no doubt, the man bore a stamp of self-confident greatness which awed his foes and fired the imagination of his countrymen. As posterity is apt to condone the crimes by which it gains, it is not surprising that later generations should minimise the Cid’s misdeeds, and should end by transforming his story almost out of recognition. But these capricious and often grotesque travesties are relatively modern.

They are not found to any excess in the work of the earliest poets who sang the Cid’s feats-of-arms. They do not occur in the Latin poem, already quoted, which speaks enthusiastically of his exploits as being numerous enough to tax the resources of Homer’s genius:—

Tanti victoris nam si retexere,

Coeperim cuncta, non haec libri mille

Capere possent, Homero canente,

Summo labore.

This cannot have been written much later than 1120, about a score of years after the Cid’s death. The theme, like many another theme of the same kind, was too alluring to be left to monks who wrote in a learned language for a small circle, and it was soon treated in the speech of the people by juglares—not necessarily laymen—who recited their compositions in palaces, castles, monasteries, public squares, markets, or any other place where an audience could be got together. In this way a body of epical poems came into existence. You may say that this is late, and so it is if you are thinking of Beowulf and Waldhere which, in their actual shapes, certainly existed before the reign of Alfred, and have even been assigned to the sixth century. But we must make a radical distinction. Beowulf and Waldhere are, we may say, sagas in verse, and have no immediate relation to England, so far as subject goes: the French and Spanish epics are conspicuously national in theme and sentiment. We know that Spain possessed many epics which have not survived: epics on Roderick, on Bernardo del Carpio, on Fernán González, on Garci-Fernández, on Sancho García, perhaps on Alvar Fáñez Minaya, the Cid’s lieutenant. Only three of these ancient cantares de gesta have been saved, and among them is the epic known as the Poema del Cid, Possibly it was not the first vernacular poem on the subject, though it was composed about the middle of the twelfth century, some fifty years after the Cid’s time; but, as we shall see presently, there is a long interval between the 13date of composition and the date of transcription. As to the author of the Poema nothing is known. On the ground that some two hundred lines relate to events occurring at the monastery of Cardeña near Burgos, it has been conjectured that the author was a monk attached to this monastery. It has also been thought, owing to his warlike spirit, that he was a layman, and that he came from the Valle de Arbujuelo: this is inferred from his minute knowledge of the country between Molina and San Esteban de Gormaz, and from the relative vagueness of such knowledge as the itinerary extends to Burgos and Saragossa. These, however, are but surmises. It is further surmised that the substance of the Poema del Cid may be derived from earlier epic poems. That may be: but, as it stands, it has a unity of its own.

The Gesta Ruderici Campidocti survives in a unique manuscript which was stolen during the last century from the Monastery of St. Isidore at León, was bought in Lisbon by Gotthold Heyne two years before he died on the Berlin barricades of 1848, and is now, after many wanderings, in the Academy of History at Madrid. The Poema del Cid also reaches us in a unique manuscript, the work of a certain Per Abbat who in 1307 wrote out the text from a pre-existing copy; this manuscript is not known to have passed through any such adventures as the Gesta, but it has evidently had some narrow escapes from destruction: the beginning of the Poema del Cid is missing, a page is wanting after verse 2337, and another page is wanting after verse 3307. Had Per Abbat not taken the trouble to write out the Poema, or had his manuscript disappeared before October 1596 (when it was transcribed by Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri), the epic on the Cid would be as unknown to us as the epics on Roderick, Bernardo del Carpio, and the rest. Per Abbat seems to have followed an unfaithful copy in an uncritical fashion, but the defects in the existing text cannot all be laid at his door. There are passages in the Poema del Cid which are almost universally regarded as interpolations, and for these Per Abbat is not likely to be responsible. It is more probable that he continued in the bad way of his predecessors, who apparently took it upon themselves to abridge the poem. This desire for greater brevity is answerable for transpositions and corruptions which are the despair of editors and translators; but, mutilated as it is, the Poema del Cid is a primitive masterpiece, the merits of which have been increasingly recognised since the text was first published by Tomás Antonio Sánchez in 1779.

The interest in the literary monuments of the Middle Ages was not then what it is now. We are talking of a period more than half a century before any French chanson de geste was printed, and the taste for mediævalism had still to be created. The Spanish poet, Quintana, who died only fifty years ago, and was a lad when the Poema del Cid was published, could see nothing to admire in it; and yet Quintana’s taste in literature was far more catholic than that of most of his contemporaries. Still the Poema slowly made its way in the world of letters. One illustration will suffice to show that it was closely studied within a few years of its appearance in print. John Hookham Frere, the British Minister at Madrid, read the Poema del Cid on the recommendation of the Marqués de la Romana, who had praised it as ‘the most animated and highly poetical as well as the most ancient and curious poem in the language.’ In verse 2348 of the Poema:—

Aun vea el hora que vos merezca dos tanto—

the curt reply of Pero Bermuez to the Infantes of Carrión—Frere 15proposed to read merezcades for merezca dos, and his conjectural emendation was approved by Romana to whom alone he mentioned it. Some years later Romana was destined to hear it again in striking circumstances. He was then serving with the French in Denmark, and it became necessary for Frere to communicate with him confidentially. It was indispensable that Frere’s messenger should be fully accredited; it was of the utmost importance that, in case of arrest, he should not be found in possession of any paper which might suggest his mission. The emended verse of the Poema del Cid, easily remembered, formed his sole credentials. Romana at once knew that the agent must come from Frere, who—apart from his fragmentary translation of the Poema, now superseded by Ormsby’s version—thus began in a small amateurish way the work of critical reconstitution which has been continued by Damas-Hinard and Bello, by Cornu and Restori, by Vollmöller and Lidforss, by Sr. D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Mr. Archer Milton Huntington.

Thanks to these and other scholars whose labours cannot be adequately acknowledged by any formal compliment, the text of the Poema del Cid has been purged of many corruptions, and made vastly more intelligible. But there are still problems to be solved in connection with it. What, for instance, is the relation of the Spanish epic to the French? The ‘patriotic bias’ should have no place in historical or literary judgments, but this is a counsel of perfection. Scholars are extremely human, and experience shows that the ‘patriotic bias’ often intrudes itself unseasonably in their work. In writing of the French chansons de geste, Gaston Paris says:—‘L’Espagne s’en inspirait dès le milieu du XII^e siècle pour chanter le Cid, et composait, même sur les sujets carolingiens des cantares de gesta dont quelques débris se retrouvent dans les romances du XV^e siècle.’ Rightly interpreted, this is a fair statement of the case. But earlier French scholars inclined to exaggerate the amount of Spain’s indebtedness to France in this respect, and—by a not unnatural reaction—there is a tendency among the younger generation of Spanish scholars to minimise it. We are not called upon to take part in this contention of wits: we are not concerned here to-day with ingenious special pleas, but with facts.

It is a fact that the earliest extant French chanson de geste was in existence a century before the earliest extant Spanish cantar de gesta: it is also a fact that the French version of Roland’s story was widely diffused in Spain at an early date. It was there recorded in the forged chronicle ascribed to Archbishop Turpin, and it filtered down to the masses who heard it from French pilgrims on the road to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela. Among these pilgrims were French trouvères, and through them the Spaniards became acquainted with the Chanson de Roland. It was natural that suggestion should operate in Spain as it operated in Germany, where Konrad produced his Rolandslied about the year 1130. There is at least a strong presumption that the author of the Poema del Cid had heard the Chanson de Roland. Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, whose patriotism and fine literary sense make him a witness above suspicion, admits that there is a marked resemblance between the battle-scenes in the two poems, and further allows that there are cases of verbal coincidence which cannot be accidental. We may therefore agree with Gaston Paris that the author of the Poema del Cid found his inspiration in the Chanson de Roland: that is to say, the Chanson probably suggested to him the idea of composing a similar work on a Spanish theme, and gave him a few secondary details. We cannot say less, nor more: except that in subject and sentiment the Poema is intensely local.

As regards its substance, the Poema is intermediate between history and fable. There is no respect for chronology; one personage is mistaken for a namesake; the Cid’s daughters, whose real names were Cristina and María, are called Elvira and Sol, and are provided with husbands to whom they were never married in fact, but who may have been maliciously introduced (as Dozy surmised) to exhibit the Leonese in an odious light. It is the office of an epic poet to exalt his hero, and to belittle that hero’s enemies; you might as reasonably look for perfect execution in the Poema del Cid as for judicial impartiality. Apart from freaks which may be due to bad copying, we accept the fact that the metre is capricious, fluctuating between lines of fourteen and sixteen syllables: we must also accept the fact that history fares no better than metre, and often fares worse. Yet the spirit of the poet is not consciously unhistorical; he conveys the impression of believing in the truth of his own story. There is an accent of deep sincerity from the outset, in what—owing to mutilation—is now the beginning of the Poema, a passage recording the exile of the Cid:—

With tearful eyes he turned to gaze upon the wreck behind:

His rifled coffers, bursten gates, all open to the wind:

No mantle left, nor robe of fur: stript bare his castle hall:

Nor hawk nor falcon in the mew, the perches empty all.

Then forth in sorrow went my Cid, and a deep sigh sighed he;

Yet with a measured voice, and calm, my Cid spake loftily—

‘I thank thee, God our Father, thou that dwellest upon high,

I suffer cruel wrong to-day, but of mine enemy.’

As they came riding from Bivar the crow was on the right,

By Burgos gate, upon the left, the crow was there in sight.

My Cid he shrugged his shoulders, and he lifted up his head:

‘Good tidings, Alvar Fáñez! we are banished men!’ he said.

18With sixty lances in his train my Cid rode up the town,

The burghers and their dames from all the windows looking down;

And there were tears in every eye, and on each lip one word:

‘A worthy vassal—would to God he served a worthy Lord!’

Fain would they shelter him, but none dared yield to his desire.

Great was the fear through Burgos town of King Alfonso’s ire.

Sealed with his royal seal hath come his letter to forbid

All men to offer harbourage or succour to my Cid.

And he that dared to disobey, well did he know the cost—

His goods, his eyes, stood forfeited, his soul and body lost.

A hard and grievous word was that to men of Christian race;

And since they might not greet my Cid, they hid them from his face.

He rode to his own mansion gates; shut firm and fast they were,

Such the King’s rigour, save by force, he might not enter there.

We cannot tell how the poem began in its complete state. Some scholars think that what is missing was merely a short unimportant prelude; others believe that the Poema del Cid, as we have it, is but the ending of a vast epic. It must have been vast indeed, for the fragment that survives amounts to 3735 lines; the Chanson de Roland consists of 4001 lines, and it seems improbable that the Poema was much longer. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine a more spirited opening than that which chance has given us. The Cid is introduced at a critical moment, misjudged, calumniated, a loyal subject driven from his own Castilian home by an ungrateful Leonese king. There is something spacious in the atmosphere, there is a stately simplicity even in the deliberate repetition of conventional epithet—‘the Castilian,’ ‘he who was born in a good hour,’ ‘the good one of Bivar,’ ‘my Cid,’ and rarely—very rarely—‘the Cid.’ The poet lauds his hero, as he should, but does not degrade him by fulsome eulogy; he is in touch with realities. He seems to feel that the Cid is great enough to afford to have the truth told about him; with engaging simplicity the Poema relates how the crafty chief imposed on the two Jews, Raquel and Vidas, by depositing with them two chests purporting to be full of gold (but really containing sand), and how he fraudulently borrowed six hundred marks on this worthless security. In the Crónica general, a passage founded on a re-cast of the Poema represents the Cid as refunding the money, and in the Romancero general of 1602 an anonymous ballad-writer excused the trickery on the plea that the chests contained the gold of the Cid’s truth:—