"The Quest For El Cid" by Richard Fletcher

Posted by J

http://www.amazon.com/Quest-El-Cid-Richard-Fletcher/dp/0195069552/sr=8-1/qid=1162088667/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-1762748-7350520?ie=UTF8&s=books

First to save the descriptive part, let me give this summary from an Amazon editorial review then after that a paragraph of my own thoughts:

*****

From Library JournalBeginning students, sophisticated scholars, and the general reader interested in Spanish medieval history will benefit from this provocative, learned, and elegantly written study of Rodrigo Diaz (c.1043-99)--El Cid--the 11th-century soldier of fortune who became the Spanish national hero. Fletcher begins by sketching the historical scene in Spain and Europe. After an imaginative discussion of the complicated sources of El Cid's life, he describes his aristocratic family background, knightly education, early military campaigns, service at the court of king Sancho II, exile spent as a mercenary soldier in Muslim service, and ultimate triumph as Prince of Valencia. The concluding chapter, as exciting as a murder mystery, explains the growth of the El Cid legend. As an important story fascinatingly told, and as a rich mine of information about many facets of Spanish and Muslim medieval cultures, this book is highly recommended.- Bennett D. Hill, Georgetown Univ., Washington

*****

I've been reading up lately on the history of Islamic Spain (we're planning a trip to southern Spain shortly) and a scholar friend of mine highly recommended this book. I was not disappointed by the recommendation. Other books I've read to date have focused on the Islamic regions (Al-Andalus), or the cultural interactions between Islamic and Christian regions in the Middle Ages with a healthy dose of the Jewish communities. This is squarely focused on those aspects of Spanish history (Christian and Islamic) which shed light on the Christian soldier Rodrigo Diaz who became El Cid in fact and legend. In so doing it definitely focuses on the Christian Spanish point of view. Some have said this book shatters the myth of El Cid to the degree that he comes off as pure unprincipled mercenary. While it definitely does not allow the Spanish national myth to survive (but then, Fletcher is hardly the first author to discredit it), I think it rather gives a more complex view of a man and a world where co-existence and enmity managed to live side by side, both between communities and in the person of El Cid. He comes across to me as a man who lived a typical aristocratic warrior's life of the era, trading loyalties between masters Christian and Muslim in ways that would have largely been considered honorable (even if not always so) and also self-interested. He was respected if also despised by some Muslims for his pillaging, but then those traits crossed both ways along the Muslim-Christian divide of the time.

Above all, what this book did for me was to remind me of the nature of pre-nationalism Europe where loyalties were of a very different nature but the raw elements of what were to become Spanish nationalism were taking form. And of the nature of the unique place Spain was 1000 years ago at the frontier of Islam and Christianity.