Although The Poem of The Cid was written during the Spanish crusades, The Cid could not be further from the heroic crusader ideal, as established, for example, in The Song of Roland. Roland was so passionate, so convinced of the rightness of his beliefs that he was willing to demonstrate all of his heroic qualities in the pursuit of achieving martyrdom as posthumous evidence of his devotion and courage. Charlemagne and God himself bless Roland’s mission to kill as many heathens as he can.
The Cid, on the other hand, begins the narrative exiled by his king, and he fights to make money and a living for himself and his family, not s part of a “holy war” to overtake Muslim lands for Christendom. The Cid cannot be labeled an example of the crusader heroic ideal, but The Poem of the Cid still portrays him as a hero for the very pragmatism and family loyalty that the crusader ethos would have disdained. The Cid demonstrates a willingness to work with Jews and Muslims that goes against the condescension and blind hatred that the “true” crusader hero should hold towards those people groups.
The opening scene of the narrative depicts The Cid making a deal with the Jewish moneylenders Raquel and Vidas, offering them the opportunity o secure and profit from his coffers in return for a monetary loan so that he can sustain himself in exile. The moneylenders give him “six hundred marks for the two coffers, which they agree to keep until the year is past” and Cid promises that if he fails to repay the loan, “you may take its value from the coffers” (10-11).
Not only was loaning money with interest frowned upon by the Church, but to do so with Jews, who were stereotyped for their greed and despised for their participation by association in the death of Christ, would have been unthinkable for a good Christian, let alone a pious crusader. A rue crusader, according to the eastern ethos, would have perhaps demanded the Jewish moneylenders convert, or simply killed them without hesitation, just as many crusaders slaughtered hundreds of Jews along the Rhine river valley on their way to the Holy Land. Yet The Cid does not attempt to convert or kill Raquel and Vidas.
He does trick them – giving them ornately adorned coffers that he fills only with sand to make the containers feel convincingly laden with riches – but in the end, he does pay back the loan (58). Assuming that the ideal crusader hero would have even initiated this transaction, which s highly unlikely, he certainly would not have honored the deal. The Cid’s practical relationships with conquered Muslims would appear just as perplexing to the ideal crusader. After being exiled, The Cid conquers Moor cities, but not because of any righteous zeal to prove the might of Christendom over the barbarians.
Instead, he fights to gain wealth for himself and to pay his vassals and their knights. The Cid says outright, “We are exiles in a foreign land. Let us see now who earns his wages” (48), and the knights “willingly obey him” (21) – a statement followed closely by The Cid always promising them uch “booty. ” The narrative repeatedly emphasizes that that The Cid only takes a fifth of the spoils of each city and divides the rest fairly among his knights (24, 35), suggesting that his men’s loyalty is in direct proportion to their sense of fair recompense from each adventure.
The Cid’s knights are no crusader army, bound by noble ideals and a sense of kinship; they do not fight for any particular cause besides their own profit. One by one, the Moor towns fall easily to The Cid’s army, but he “does not wish to keep the captives, men and women, in his company” (24). If the crusader hero even saw this situation s a dilemma, he would quickly solve it by killing all the Muslims. In direct contrast to that course of action, The Cid declares, “I will set free two hundred of these Moors, lest they speak ill of me for what I have seized of theirs” (24).
Not only do the Moors love him for it, they “fall to weeping” when he leaves, tearfully expressing their gratitude (35), presumably for, as the narrator implies, selling the town back to them. The very concept of caring about the opinions of Muslims and selling back conquered land would have appalled the crusader hero, who had been taught that Muslims were barbarians who had no ight to life, let alone to land, in the eyes of God.
Selling the land back implies that the victory was for no greater cause and was only worth the money it earned – a most likely sacrilegious sentiment in the eyes of the eastern crusaders, but one with which The Cid would have agreed. Moreover, The Cid handles conquered Christians, such as Count Ramon, with the same pragmatism with which he handles captured Muslims. Count Ramon marches on The Cid upon hearing that The Cid has been conquering Moor towns in his protectorate, and after warning Ramon to turn aside, The Cid soundly defeats Ramon’s army.
The Cid promises to set the count free like he set the Muslim townspeople free, despite Ramon’s childish hunger strike in captivity, but maintains that “of what you have lost in battle, and I have now, know that you will not receive a cursed pennyworth, for I have need of it to pay those who have suffered with me. We earn our bread by taking it from you and the rest” (43). The Cid refuses to go easier on Ramon because he is Christian, viewing the spoils he won from the count as property he has fought and earned.
The crusading ethos, as established by the pope, dictated that all differences within Christendom should be ut aside to take up the cross, but in this narrative, it is the Moors and the Christians who are putting aside their differences to fight side by side in both The Cid’s army and Count Ramon’s army (40, 41). (It should be noted that the narrator states this fact as a sidenote, as if a Moorish-Christian army is commonplace. ) Presumably, neither leader has any difficulty with a mixed army, and The Cid divides up the rewards equally among all his knights.
The Cid demonstrates no fanaticism towards any particular group and instead collaborates with whomever – Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike – in order to ccomplish his mercenary goals. Despite the Cid’s lack of fanaticism, he does demonstrate some religious piety, but he calculates even the benefits of his piety. He tells his knights to “strike. in the name of God and St. James” (32, 66) and gives “thanks to God in heaven and all his saints” (27, 34, 39) after his battles, which in itself proves little, since thanking God was ingrained in the religiously saturated medieval culture.
However, the more common phrasing The Cid uses is “with the help of God” – as in, “with God’s help this will bring us honor,” and “with the help of God things have gone well with us” (48). Notwithstanding the occasional phrasing in which The Cid tells the knights to fight in God’s name, the nonchalance of The Cid’s religious piety suggests that The Cid views his relationship with God as quid-pro-quo: he invokes and honors God, at least in name, and God gives him divine assistance.
Even when Gabriel visits El Cid, like he visited Roland and Charlemagne in The Song of Roland, he does not deliver the holy blessing given to Roland’s crusade: ” ‘Ride, O Cid, my good Campeador, for never did knight ride so luckily. Things will go well with you so long as you shall live!.. [My Cid] commended himself to God, well leased with his dream” (21). The Cid does not need a holy calling to conquer towns for his own gain, so he is “well pleased” with Gabriel’s message that simply guarantees success if he stays alive.
He wants the assurance of divine backing, not to be appointed to fight and kill for God and Christendom. To further demonstrate this, when The Cid decides to settle in Valencia, Bishop Jerome arrives, presented as the typical eastern crusader. Jerome, who came from “the east” (France) and “longed to face the Moors on the field of battle and urged My Cid to undertake further adventures against them” (53), is resumably disappointed when The Cid instead gifts him a bishopric in Valencia, “where he would be rich” (54).
That decision, of course, makes sense with what the narrative has established of The Cid’s characterization. The Cid now “has goods and lands and gold and honor too” and so has no more desire to seek out Muslims to fight (97). He is offering Jerome what he sees as a great gift; after all, the only reason The Cid fights is for the spoils, and by giving the spoils without making him fight, The Cid believes he is doing Jerome a favor. But Jerome has the crusading fervor, and he wants to fight Muslims ecause that is what a crusader does for God and Christendom.
The Cid grants him his wish in allowing Jerome to strike the first blow in a few subsequent battles, but the contrast is clear: The Cid fights for an end goal, while Jerome, a “true” crusader, fights Muslims for the honor of fighting Muslims. The Cid is no crusader hero according to the standards of the Holy Land crusaders, but the narrative applauds his family values. After settling in Valencia, The Cid finally decides he has earned enough to petition King Alfonso, who banished him, to “let his [The Cid’s] wife and children be brought to these lands which we ave won in foreign parts” (53).
The king gives his permission, and The Cid’s household travels to the castle of Abengalbon, a Moor king who calls The Cid “a dear friend” – an statement, coupled with the fact that The Cid clearly trusts Abengalbon enough to entrust his wife and children to his protection, that would have Roland rolling in his grave. When The Cid’s family arrives, he lovingly invites “Dona Ximena, my well-loved and honest wife, and you, the daughter of my heart and soul, come with me into Valencia, that city, into the patrimony I have won for you” (64). When the king of Morocco marches on Valencia,
The Cid is delighted – “Behold now this good fortune that comes to me beyond the seas.. My daughters and my wife shall see me fight. with their own eyes they shall see me earn my bread! ” (65) – and tells his wife and daughters to watch the battlefield from atop the citadel. Although he did not want to march into Morocco to go to war, now that the king has come to him, he can show off his battle prowess. In an undoubtedly gruesome but endearing way, The Cid’s enthusiasm illustrates that he takes pride in providing for his family. His method of providing for them simply happens to involve more bloodshed.
While the crusading ethos would tell crusaders to cut ties with their estate and their family in order to take up the cross, and heroic narratives encouraging crusading would intentionally only briefly mention the family waiting back home, The Cid goes out of his way to ensure that his family can stay with him. For him, fighting is a job, and he wants to go home at the end of the day. He has no intention of fighting to die, like the crusader knights who were promised higher heavenly rewards if they fought to the last man, and he is not fighting for money itself. He fights to live well with his family.
Regardless of all of the differences between the ideal crusader hero and the hero of The Poem of The Cid, the narrator depicts The Cid as heroic and honorable, just like the narrator of The Song of Roland depicted Roland, and this difference may reflect the different values in midtwelfth-century Spain. Like the narrator here, the Spanish did not condemn the Frankish crusading fervor per se, but neither did they share it. When the caliphate of Cordova fragmented into Moorish states in 1031, the Christian kingdoms were content to simply take those states as vassals and demand tribute.
Ramon had several vassal towns, and The Cid does not seem like an exception to the rule in light of the mercenary rationality of the Christian kingdoms. Yes, the “reconquista” of Spain did lead to the Spanish crusades as history defines them, but the Franks who came to aid the Spanish brought over the ferocity of crusading zeal; The Poem of The Cid suggests that the Spanish soldiers’ priority was the acquisition of more land and more gold. Unlike the ideal crusader, who fought and died for a heavenly reward, The Cid shrewdly fought for an earthly reward: wealth and a comfortable life with his family.
