El Cid and Saint James

If El Cid represents the secular aspects of heroism and military conquest during the Reconquista the spiritual hero representing the religious justification and the Christian ethos of the crusade against the Muslims was Santiago, St James the Apostle, and the patron Saint of Spain.

In ‘Don Quixote’ Cervantes wrote ‘St. James the Moorslayer, one of the most valiant saints and knights the world ever had … has been given by God to Spain for its patron and protection.’  Since the reconquest ‘Santiago y cierra España’, which means St James and strike for Spain has been the traditional battle cry of Spanish armies.

Santiago was one of the twelve disciples and a devout disciple of Christ but in 44 A.D. he became the first of Apostles to suffer martyrdom when Herod Agrippa I arrested and personally beheaded him in Jerusalem.   According to legend Santiago had preached for a while in Iberia prior to his execution and after his death his own disciples returned his body back to the peninsula. On the way they were caught in a storm and almost certainly doomed when a ship miraculously appeared, led by an angel, to guide them to land and safety.  They buried the saint near Compostela, ‘field of stars,’ where Santiago lay forgotten for nearly eight hundred years.

This is all pure fantasy of course because scholars generally agree that James had never before set foot in Iberia and there was no good reason why his body should have been transported to Galicia, he had never been a soldier, rode a horse or wielded a sword, he died several years before the concept of Islam and he certainly never slew an infidel!

The supposed tomb was conveniently rediscovered in the ninth century in a time of great need when Christian political and military fortunes in Spain were at their lowest ebb after they had suffered defeat time and again at the hands of the Muslims, until that is God revealed the Saint’s remains, and inspired them with the confidence that he was on their side, fighting in the battlefield with them through the heroic figure of Santiago.

The truth was that as the Northern Kingdoms began to assert themselves they needed spiritual assistance and justification and in this era of crusading reconquest there was a need for the living presence of a religious-national figure as an emblem of Christian strength and supremacy that was capable of rallying around themselves the Spanish Christian forces.   This was to be Santiago whose image fulfilled the desire of the Iberian Christians for heroes to emulate, and unite them in their struggle for political and religious independence from Muslim rule.

An important manifestation of the crusading mentality during this time was the creation of an iconic patriotic creation of Santiago  and the mythical military contribution of St James to the Reconquista was the inspirational presence of the Saint on the battlefields of the peninsula.  The most famous of these was the legend surrounding the battle of Clavijo in 844, where the vastly outnumbered and demoralised Christian forces were inspired by the appearance of St James in a full suit of armour riding on a galloping white horse with a sword in the right hand and the banner of victory in the left.

Modern historians dispute that there ever was such a battle but the story goes that the night before the encounter, Santiago appeared in a dream to the leader of the Spanish forces, King Ramirez of Castile, and promised him a victory over the Muslims.  The following day, at the height of battle, the warrior-saint appeared on the battlefield, leaving behind him the defeated infidels that he has slaughtered and crushed to the ground and in front of him what remained of the terrified enemy promptly surrendered.  Thus was born the legend of Santiago Matamoros, the Moorslayer.

According to legend, the Saint came to the assistance of the Christians at least forty times in earthly warfare during the campaign and this became embodied in the assertion of faith in St. James and the patron saint’s pastoral care for Spain.  The Christian defenders created and developed the story of Santiago as the embodiment of God’s support who would sustain their courage and this strong faith identified Santiago with the religious element of the reconquest and the revival of Spanish fortunes.

By the end of the eleventh century (a period corresponding to the military contribution of El Cid) a decisively religious element had entered the issue of the Reconquista.   Santiago de Compostela became a place of great pilgrimage and after Jerusalem and Rome the third most holy city in Christendom.   The Cathedral of St James (which is depicted on Spanish eurocent coins) is the destination today, as it has been thoughout subsequent history, of the important ninth century medieval pilgrimage route, the Way of St. James.

By the twelfth century Santiago and El Cid became increasingly identified with one another as Christian heroes and the myths became inextricably intertwined as the story of the battle of Clavijo was first written down and recorded and the El Poema del Cid was composed.   The Christians attributed identical symbols to them and their images merged in the artistic depictions of them both in the eleventh through to the thirteenth centuries.   This imagery was even recreated in the final scene of the film El Cid where shortly before he died he allegedly saw a vision of St. Peter, who told him that he should gain a victory over the Saracens after his death.   So he was clothed in a coat of mail and mounted upon his favourite white horse, Babieca, fastened into the saddle and went into battle accompanied by a thousand knights holding in his left hand a banner representing reconquest and in the other a fiercesome sword.

Through this process Santiago practically becomes El Cid, a heroic figure riding upon a horse, leading the Christians to victory.   The similarities in the depictions of these national religious heroes revolve around the use of four primary symbols: the sword, the banner of victory, the white horse, and the Muslims who lay dead at the feet of the victorious crusader.   The banner of victory, like the horse, is usually white because this colour symbolizes the spiritual purity of the Christians who will spill the red blood of the Muslim infidels.   The most important of these symbols is the instrument of death, the sword, generally attributed to gods, heroes of unconquerable might, and Christian martyrs and it signifies military might, power, authority, and justice.

The Cross of St. James includes the lower part  fashioned as a sword blade making this a cross of a warrior and in crusading terms the symbol of taking up the sword in the name of Christ.   Most notably, it was the emblem of the twelfth-century military Order of Santiago, named after Saint James the Great.

These days we are a bit more sensitive about religious wars and killing each other in the name of God or Allah and in 2004 a statue in Santiago Cathedral showing St James slicing the heads off Moorish invaders was removed and replaced with a more benign image of him as a pilgrim to avoid causing offence to Muslims.

A Cathedral spokesman in a classic understatement said that the Baroque image of a sword-wielding St James cutting the heads off Moors was not a very sensitive or evangelical image that can be easily reconciled to the teachings of Christ.

It might also be a case of political correctness.  In 1990 there were one hundred thousand Muslims living in Spain but by 2010 this had risen to over one million.  Saint James is in danger of becoming a bit of a Nigel Farage!

This is St James in the Cathedral of Burgos…

Here he is again in the Cathedral of Granada…

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More posts about El Cid:

El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista

El Cid and his Horse, Babieca

El Cid and his Wife, Ximena

El Cid and his sword. La Tizona

El Cid and Saint James

El Cid and Alfonso VI

El Cid and the City of Burgos

El Cid and the Castle of Belmonte

El Cid – The Film Fact and Fiction

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El Cid and his Sword, La Tizona

The other dropped the lance and the sword he took in hand;
when Ferrán González saw it, he recognized Tizona,
rather than wait for the blow he said, I am defeated!

Shortly before he died from his unlucky arrow wound El Cid allegedly saw a vision of St. Peter, who told him that he should gain a victory over the Saracens after his death.  So he was clothed in a coat of mail and was mounted upon his horse Babieca, fastened into the saddle and at midnight was borne out of the gate of Valencia accompanied by a thousand brave and valiant knights.

They marched to where the Moorish king and his army were camped, and at daylight made a bold and sudden attack. The Moors awoke and it seemed to them that there were as many as seventy thousand knights, all dressed in robes of pure white and at their head was El Cid holding in his left hand a banner representing reconquest and in the other a fiercesome sword – La Tizona.

Legend says El Cid snatched the Tizona from King Búcar, a defeated Moorish opponent during a fight.  Some time after his death it passed on to the grandfather of Ferdinand II of Aragon, known as the Catholic, and the king who finally defeated the Moors and sent Christopher Columbus to the Americas and his daughter Catherine to England to marry King Henry VIII.

Traditionally Spain is famous for its production of high quality swords and for soldiers and adventurers a blade made of Spanish steel was a must have item because the quality of the steel and the skill of the blacksmiths combined to make an exceptionally strong and perfect lethal weapon.

The manufacturing process was kept a carefully guarded secret and to make such an exceptional weapon they had to select the very best raw materials and then follow a complicated technical process to achieve the right balance between hard and soft steel forged at a temperature of 1454º Fahrenheit for exactly the right length of time and followed by a critical cooling and shaping process.  So complicated was this whole procedure and so perfect was the finished weapon that to achieve this level of precision a master craftsman would typically only be able to make two or three blades in a year.

In 1516, King Ferdinand is believed to have given the sword to the newly titled Marquis of Falces for services performed for the crown. The story says the marquis could have chosen land or palaces, but preferred instead the sword of El Cid.

La Tizona then allegedly passed on in the Falces family, which allowed the Military Museum in Madrid to exhibit it from 1944 onwards.  In 1999, a small sample of the blade underwent metallurgical analysis which confirmed that the blade was made in Moorish Córdoba in the eleventh century and contained amounts of Damascus steel, which was purposely forged to create some of the sharpest and strongest swords ever created in history.  An inscription on the blade says that it was forged in 1040 (1002 in the modern Gregorian calendar) so this analysis may well have confirmed the sword as genuine.

 La Tizona is a solid, seventy-five centimetre long sword with a black handle and has become as important to Spanish heritage as King Arthur’s Excalibur in England or Charlemagne’s Joyeuse in Germany.  In 2007 the Autonomous Community of Castille y León bought the sword for 1.6 million Euros from the present Marquis, Jose Ramon Suarez del Otero y Velluti, because it was felt appropriate that the sword of Spain’s biggest hero and the iconic symbol of national pride should be displayed in El Cid’s own city and it is currently on display at the Museum of Burgos.

El Cid also had a sword called Colada, which wasn’t a rather pleasant pineapple and coconut cocktail but rather a lethal killing weapon.  La Tizona was a one-handed sword but the Colada was longer in length and was a two-handed blade.  The Colada sword is now part of the Royal collection and on display at the Royal Palace of Madrid but its authenticity is disputed.

There is controversy too concerning La Tizona and although until now, nobody doubted that the sword, which was on display at the Military Museum for more than sixty years, once belonged to the country’s national hero, when the northern region of Castilla y Leon purchased the sword the museum suddenly declared that it was a fake.  Currently this is just seen to be a very bad case of sour grapes but we shall see…

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More posts about El Cid:

El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista

El Cid and his Horse, Babieca

El Cid and his Wife, Ximena

El Cid and his sword. La Tizona

El Cid and Saint James

El Cid and Alfonso VI

El Cid and the City of Burgos

El Cid and the Castle of Belmonte

El Cid – The Film Fact and Fiction

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El Cid and his Wife, Doña Ximena Díaz

A hero needed a wife and El Cid was married in either in1074 or 1075 to Doña Ximena of Oviedo, a city in the modern day Principality of Asturias in the north of Spain but in the eleventh century part of Alfonso VI’s Kingdom of Leon and Castile.

The anonymous Latin prose history of the life of El Cid, the’ Historia Roderici’ identifies Ximena as the daughter of a Count Diego of Oviedo, but there is no evidence to confirm this and the later Poema de Mio Cid names her father as an equally unknown Count Gomez de Gormaz and some historians have laterly concluded that this is one and the same person.  Tradition states that when the Cid laid eyes on her for the first time he was overcome by her great beauty and fell in love with her on sight.

El Cid and Ximena had three children. Their two daughters Cristina and María both married high nobility; Cristina to Ramiro, Lord of Monzón, grandson of García Sánchez III of Navarre and María, first to a prince of Aragon and second to Ramón Berenguer III, count of Barcelona. El Cid’s son Diego Rodríguez was tragically killed while fighting against the invading Muslim Almoravids from North Africa at the Battle of Consuegra in 1097.

His own marriage, and that of his daughters, increased his status by connecting El Cid to royalty and even today, it is said that all European monarchies descend in some way from El Cid, through his daughter Cristina’s son, king García Ramírez of Navarre and the royal blood lines of Navarre in northern Spain and Foix, a medieval fiefdom in southern France.

Ximena is an old Spanish form of the name Simone, a female version of Simon which is a Hebrew name that means listener.  It may also be a form of Xenia, a Greek name meaning guest or stranger from the same root as the term xenophobia. In the film ‘El Cid’ Ximena is played by the actress Sophia Loren and the Rank Organisation used the alternative spelling for her name, Jimena.  Whichever way it is spelt, Ximena or Jimena, has become the modern Spanish surname of Jimenez so it might well be possible that the golfer Miguel Angel is a descendent as well.

Aged only 56, El Cid was shot by a stray arrow in a battle on July 10^th 1099 and he died shortly afterwards. After his death Ximena ruled in his place for three years until the Almoravids once again besieged the city. Unable to hold it, she abandoned the city and organised the evacuation of the Christians. King Alfonso ordered the city to be destroyed to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Almoravids and what was left of Valencia was captured by Masdali on May 5^th 1102 and would not become a Christian city again for over one hundred and twenty five years. Ximena fled north with the Cid’s body to Burgos where he was originally  buried in the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña but his body now lies at the centre of the Burgos Cathedral.

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More posts about El Cid:

El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista

El Cid and his Horse, Babieca

El Cid and his Wife, Ximena

El Cid and his sword. La Tizona

El Cid and Saint James

El Cid and Alfonso VI

El Cid and the City of Burgos

El Cid and the Castle of Belmonte

El Cid – The Film Fact and Fiction

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El Cid and his horse, Babieca

A great cavalry soldier needed a great noble steed and El Cid’s warhorse was a white stallion called Babieca who was his faithful companion throughout his many campaigns, battles and military victories.

When the young Rodrigo Díaz de Bivar came of age, his godfather, a Carthusian monk called Pedro El Grande, granted him as a gift the pick of a herd of stately Andalusian horses. Rodrigo entered the corral and on impulse choose a white foal that immediately caught his eye.  But the horse was by no means the best in the herd and the horse expert was disappointed by the poor choice and chastised the boy for choosing such a frail and poorly formed specimen. Ever determined, Rodrigo defended his choice and named him Babieca, which means my stupid one, the name that he himself had been called for being, in the eyes of his godfather, such a poor judge of horses.

The Andalusian horse originates from the rugged hilly areas of the Iberian Peninsula and is one of the most ancient horse breeds.  Spanish horses were famous for their use as cavalry mounts by the Ancient Greeks and the Romans and from ancient times onward there are many references to the Iberian or Celtiberian horses and riders of the peninsula by Greek and Roman chroniclers. Homer referred to them in the Iliad and the celebrated Greek cavalry officer Xenophon was full of praise for the gifted Spanish horses and horsemen and greatly admired the equestrian war techniques of Iberian mercenaries who were influential in the victory of Sparta against Athens in the Peloponnesian wars. The Andalusian became the standard by which all warhorses were measured and were prized for their agility, temperament, endurance and strength of character.

 

 They continued to be highly regarded as a cavalry horse due to their agility and courage but they became less favoured as a warhorse when knights later became more heavily armoured and required heavier horses to carry them.  Amongst cavalries they regained their popularity again with the introduction of firearms when a fast, agile horse was needed again.

The development of the Andalusian breed owed a great deal to the Carthusian monks who began breeding them in the late middle Ages. The monks were superb horse breeders and trainers and through careful selective breeding kept the blood of their horses exceptionally pure.

It turned out that El Cid was not such a poor judge of horses after all and from a not too promising start Babieca grew into an imposing and exceptional example of the Andalusian breed, obedient and nimble, noble and with great personal courage.  He was an outstanding example of a pure bred that has great stamina coupled with its stance, power and the rhythm and grace of its movements. The horse was the perfect companion for El Cid.  He soon grew into a formidable charger and a frightening machine of war. He carried his master courageously into all of his battles for thirty years, each time towards victory.  His name was legendary as his masters and he was spoken of with awe, reverence and great respect.

The Andalusian has a reputation for a proud but cooperative temperament, sensitive and intelligent, able to learn quickly and easily when treated with respect and care.  They are strongly-built, compact horses, generally standing 15.2-16.2 hands high and usually white or light grey in colour. They have a lean, medium-length head with a convex profile and large eyes, a long but broad and powerful neck,  a long, sloping shoulder, clean legs with good bone, short, strong cannons, and a thick, long, flowing mane and tail and they move with a lofty, elegant action which carries the rider high in the saddle.

During the Renaissance grand riding academies were formed across Europe where dressage and high school riding evolved and Andalusian horses were popular due to their agility, impulsion and natural balance. In Spain, these horses were also the mounts of bullfighters

Sadly, the purity of the breed was compromised during the War of Spanish Independence when the French invaders stole the stocks and cross-bred them with other breeds but they survived and stocks of the breed, which are known as the Pure Spanish Horse or PRE (Pura Raza Española) are once again highly valued and are now once more in good supply.

After the death of El Cid, Babieca was never mounted again and died two years later at the incredible age of forty.  El Cid gave instructions that the steed should be buried alongside him and his wife Ximena at the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña.  The request was initially complied with but later their remains were removed after the War of Independence and taken to the Cathedral in Burgos where they were finally interred and where they currently rest today.

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More posts about El Cid:

El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista

El Cid and his Horse, Babieca

El Cid and his Wife, Ximena

El Cid and his sword. La Tizona

El Cid and Saint James

El Cid and Alfonso VI

El Cid and the City of Burgos

El Cid and the Castle of Belmonte

El Cid – The Film Fact and Fiction

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El Cid and Minaya Alvar Fáñez

The story of the Spanish Reconquest and the defeat and expulsion of the Moors is a classic case of history being written by the winning side and has become a highly romanticised version of early medieval Spanish history.

El Cid wasn’t the only Spanish hero of the ‘Reconquista’ as many other warriors were fighting for the ambitious northern Kingdoms as they moved south in search of new lands and acquisitions.  Another soldier of the crusade against the Moorish invaders was the Castilian nobleman Alvar Fáñez de Minaya who fought for King Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon and has been popularised by his appearance in the ‘Cantar de Mio Cid’ in which he is described as a friend and cousin of El Cid.

In the picture above El Cid stands over a vanquished opponent while Álvar Fáñez appears supportively behind him mounted on his horse. In Burgos there is a statue of Alvaro Fáñez, heavily armed with a massive sword, tall, muscular and with a determined face he looks like just the sort of man you would want to have on your side.

In the epic poem, Alvaro Fáñez is mentioned about thirty times as the lieutenant and military advisor of the Cid and the one who was most trusted in difficult circumstances and in the face of adversity.  Unfortunately although the poem was written around 1140, relatively shortly after the events, the anonymous minstrel who wrote it was not especially concerned with historical accuracy.

Álvar Fáñez appears in the poem as a sort of alter ego of the Cid, who accompanies him in his campaigns of reconquest and in exile, with the crucial role in romantic literature to express their feelings in the more intimate moments. The poem is full of historical inaccuracies and historians have been able to demonstrate that although it places Álvar Fáñez as the inseparable companion of El Cid he was actually most of the time elsewhere in the Peninsula fighting completely different campaigns.

 

The trouble with historians of course is that they can spoil a really good yarn and the Spainish Professor Gonzalo Martinez Diaz, in his work ‘El Cid Historic’ goes further still, asserting that he never at any time belonged to the armies of the Cid at all, may not even have met him, and acted completely independently in the campaigns of Alfonso VI.  This of course is consistent with what we now know to be the truth about the reconquest of Spain, that it wasn’t a great cordinated patriotic crusade but rather the consequence of the expansionist ambitions of the northern Kings.

In his early career Álvar Fáñez fought as a mercenary knight for King Sancho II of Castile, not against the Moors in the south but instead against the rival northern kingdoms of Galicia and Leon in the north.  Once Castile had established supremacy over its rivals and the throne had passed to Alfonso then campaigning turned its attention to acquiring more land in the south and Alvaro Fáñez led succesful campains around Guadalajara in Castile, Cuenca and Murcia and later in and around Toledo.

Like all good warriors he died in battle in 1114 (fifteen years after El Cid) not fighting the Moors but defending Alfonso’s daughter, Queen Urraca, against a rebellion and uprising against her in Segovia.  He is commemorated by a warrior statue in the city of Burgos in Castilla y Leon and there is a hotel Alvaro Fáñez in the city of Ubeda in Andalusia.

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More posts about El Cid:

El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista

El Cid and his Horse, Babieca

El Cid and his Wife, Ximena

El Cid and his sword. La Tizona

El Cid and Saint James

El Cid and Alfonso VI

El Cid and the City of Burgos

El Cid and the Castle of Belmonte

El Cid – The Film Fact and Fiction

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El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista

“When it was night the Cid lay down. In a deep sleep he fell,                                   And to him in a vision came the angel Gabriel:                                                          “Ride, Cid, most noble Campeador, for never yet did knight                                  Ride forth upon an hour whose aspect was so bright.                                             While thou shalt live good fortune shall be with thee and shine. ” ”                            El Cantar del Mio Cid

The seven hundred year period between 722 and 1492 has long been known to historians of Spain as the ‘Reconquista’ and the Spanish have organised their medieval history around the drama of this glorious event which over time has become a cherished feature of the self-image of the Spanish people.

It has become embellished into a sort of organised Catholic national crusade and although there is some truth in this much of it in reality was simply due to the expansionist territorial ambitions of competing northern Spanish kingdoms such as Asturias and León.

In legend the focal point of the story of the Reconquista has been the heroic tale of Rodrigo Díaz de Bivar or El Cid, the National hero of Spain and revered by many as being single handedly responsible for the victory of the Catholic Kingdoms over the North African Moors but whilst El Cid was undoubtedly a great warrior and soldier he was only one of many who contributed to the Crusade.

The explanation for his pre-eminence is the responsibility of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who was the foremost Spanish historian of his age and the author of the standard biography of the Cid, first published in 1929.  Pidal gave substantial credibility to the ‘Poema de Mio Cid’, which was a work written at the height of the crusading age and, crucially, fifty years after the Cid’s death.  Then, his valiant deeds against the Muslims made him a suitable exemplar to inspire a generation of holy warriors fighting the Crusades, and his life quickly moved into the realms of legend.

In the eighth century almost all of the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by hostile Muslim armies from North Africa. Only a number of areas in the mountainous north that roughly correspond to modern Asturias, Cantabria, Navarre and northern Aragon managed to resist the initial invasion and many years before El Cid this was to become the breeding ground of the Reconquista.

Life under Moorish occupation was rather mixed, for many it wasn’t that bad and under Islam, the status of Christians and Jews was recognised, there was great religious and social tolerance and in return for a small tax they were free to practice their own religion but for others there was persecution and intolerance and this forced the disaffected to migrate north to take refuge in the Christian Kingdoms.   Conversion to Islam proceeded at a steadily increasing pace however and by the end of the tenth century Muslims of ethnic Iberian origin are believed to have comprised the majority of the population of Andalusia.

In legend the story of El Cid and the reconquest has acquired a rather simple plot of Christian Spain against Muslim Moors but throughout this period the situation in Iberia was much more  intricate.  As well as fighting against each other Christian and Muslim rulers commonly fought amongst themselves, the Berbers of North Africa, who had provided the bulk of the invading armies, clashed with the fundamentalist Arab leadership from the Middle East and to further complicate matters interfaith alliances were not unusual.  The fighting along the Christian Muslim frontier was punctuated by prolonged periods of peace and truces and distorting the situation even further were the legions of mercenaries who frequently switched sides and fought for cash.

El Cid lived at this confusing time and he too at various times had Muslim allies and at other times worked for Muslim paymasters against Christians because he was, in short, a warrior for hire, a mercenary, who spent much of his career fighting for whoever paid him the most.

In popular culture the reconquest has been raised to the status of a crusade and the expulsion of the Moors as liberation from an occupying army but again this is not strictly the case.  At this time Córdoba became the largest, richest and most sophisticated city in Western Europe.  Mediterranean trade and cultural exchange flourished.  Muslims imported a rich intellectual tradition from the Middle East and North Africa and Muslim and Jewish scholars played an important part in reviving and expanding classical Greek learning in Western Europe.

The indigenous cultures interacted with Muslim and Jewish cultures in complex ways, thus giving the region a distinctive culture.  Outside the cities, the land ownership system from Roman times remained largely intact as Muslim leaders rarely dispossessed landowners, and the introduction of new crops and techniques led to an improvement and expansion of agriculture.

However, by the eleventh century, Muslim lands had fractured into rival kingdoms and this encouraged the northern Christian kingdoms to expand southwards with the opportunity to greatly enlarge their territories and consolidate their positions.

As early as 739 Muslim forces were driven from Asturias and a little later Frankish forces established Christian counties south of the Pyrenees and these areas were to develop into the Kingdoms of Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia.  The capture of Toledo in 1085 was soon followed by the completion of the Christian powers reconquest of all the northern territories.  El Cid’s greatest contribution to the Reconquesta came during this phase of the war and his finest victory was the capture of Valencia in 1094, which he later died defending in 1099.

After a period of Muslim resurgence in the twelfth century the great Moorish strongholds in the south fell to Christian Spain in the thirteenth, Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248 leaving only Granada in the south, which since 1238 was a dependent vassal of the King of Castile.

In 1469, the crowns of the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united by the marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon.  In 1478 the Moors were driven from the Canary Islands and in 1492 the Christians captured Granada, ending seven hundred and eighty-one years of Islamic rule in Iberia. The Treaty of Granada guaranteed religious tolerance toward Muslims but the new state of Spain was beginning to flex its muscles and the year 1492 marked the arrival in the New World of Christopher Columbus and a law requiring Jews to convert to Catholicism under the Spanish Inquisition or face expulsion from Spanish territories.  The Catholic Monarchy instigated a policy of unrestrained ethnic cleansing and not long after, Muslims too became subject to the same requirement.

 

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More posts about El Cid:

El Cid and Alvar Fáñez – another hero of the Reconquest

El Cid and his horse Babieca

El Cid and his Wife Ximena

El Cid and La Tizona

El Cid and Saint James

El Cid and Alfonso VI

El Cid and the City of Burgos

El Cid and the Castle of Belmonte

El Cid – The Film Fact and Fiction

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Town Twinning, Evreux, France and Speyer, Germany

“I’ve never approved of the idea of twinning, because places are inevitably matched with places like them.  So if you live, say, in a stunningly beautiful medieval town… then you’ll be twinned with your exquisite European equivalent.  If you live in Warrington or St Helens then you’ll be twinned with another industrial casualty.” – Pete McCarthy, ‘McCarthy’s Bar’

Town Twinning became a big thing after the Second World War as people sought to repair relationships with their neighbours and I have often wondered what the process was for getting a twin town.

Perhaps it was like the draw for the third round of the FA cup when all the names go into a hat to be drawn out with each other, or perhaps it was like the UCAS University clearing house system where towns made their preferred selections and waited for performance results to see if they were successful; or perhaps it was a sort of dating service and introductory agency.

Anyway, the city of Coventry started it all off and was the first ever to twin when it made links with Stalingrad in the Soviet Union in 1944 and is now so addicted to twinning that it has easily the most of any English town or city with a massive twenty-six twins.  That is a lot of civic receptions and a lot of travelling expenses for the Mayor of Coventry.  Perhaps even more surprising is that Sherborne in Dorset, a town of only ten thousand residents has fifteen twin towns.

From 1975 to 1980 I worked at Rugby Borough Council and there was a strong Town Twinning Association with a regular group of Council bigwigs rotating biannually between visiting the twin town of Evreux in Normandy, France and then entertaining French visitors the following year.  In 1977 Rugby twinned with a second town, this time Russelheim in Germany, and this meant new people were required to fill the coaches and provide accommodation for visitors.  We expressed an interest in the Gallic option and in 1979 joined the twinners.

1979 was a year when the French visited the UK so we joined in the fund raising and the planning meetings in preparation.  We were excited about this cleaned the house from top to bottom, manicured the garden and prepared appropriate menus.  In 1979 I had only been to Europe twice, Italy in 1976 and Spain in 1977 and this hadn’t involved a lot of getting familiar with the locals so to have visitors from France staying in our house was a bit of an adventure.

The visitors from Evreux arrived one evening in September and we were introduced to our guests for the weekend Charles and Marie Rose Freret and we had a interesting first evening of  ‘getting to know each other’.  Luckily Charles and especially Marie Rose spoke good English so this happily meant that we didn’t have to communicate through embarrassing nods, pointing gestures and shouting at each other but this was nevertheless an occasion when I wished that I had paid more attention to Pluto Thompson in school French lessons.

To be honest there wasn’t a lot of time for awkward or uncomfortable moments because the weekend was well planned with a civic reception, a garden party, an evening out and the inevitable visit to Stratford-upon-Avon.  The only clumsy time was when I produced a bottle of Piat D’or white wine.  I thought that this would be a winner because the adverts at the time confidently said ‘The French adore le Piat D’or’ but it turned out that they didn’t actually and Charles had never even heard of it.

I showed him the bottle to prove my claims and he drank it but I don’t think he was especially impressed!

Playing host was good fun but it was even better of course to travel to France and be entertained in Evreux and in the following year we joined the coach outside the Town Hall and set off for the English Channel.

Charles and Marie Rose lived in a middle class suburb just outside the city and the house and the ambiance confirmed what we already knew – that Charles was a traditional Frenchman through and through, proud of the culture and the French way of life.  He knew about wine and had different bottles for each course of evening meal (and he didn’t feel obliged to drink the bottle all in one go, which I thought was strange because doesn’t wine go off once the cork has been removed?), Marie Rose knew about French cuisine and prepared an excellent meal and Charles turned out to be an expert on cheese (French of course) and the order in which it should be eaten.

The itinerary of visits was tremendous and we visited Paris (my first time) and did the main sights including to trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower on a disappointingly misty day.  On the second day we toured the pretty town centre of Evreux, visited Monet’s delightful house and garden at Giverney and finished the day with a trip to the Palace of Versailles where in the evening there was the most spectacular fireworks and water fountains display accompanied by Handel’s Water Music.

 

The final civic reception was held in the countryside at a Chateaux some way out the town and there was a sumptuous buffet of dining treats including caviar on wafer thin savoury biscuits.  Now, this was sill at a time when my gastronomic experience could best be described as limited and I had never had caviar before, so I took two.

How I wished I hadn’t because to me it tasted awful and with my fist bite I had a mouthful of slimy fish eggs that was beginning to make me gag and it looked certain I was about to make a show of myself.  I tried to wash it down with a generous swig of champagne and somehow managed to get it past the point of no return without serious incident but this left the problem of the one and a half biscuits still on my plate.  I thought about the toilets but it would have looked odd taking my food to the gents but fortunately there was an unnecessary log fire at one end of the room so I casually made my way across to it and discreetly disposed of it in the flames.

In the following year I changed jobs and moved away to Rugby and that put an end to Town Twinning for a while until over twenty years later in 2002.

Now I had moved to Spalding in Lincolnshire whose twin town is Speyer in Germany and responding to a crisis of too few hosts for an imminent visit I decided that it was time to start twinning again.  At this time I was sharing a rented house with a male friend and work colleague and the organizer thought it would be amusing to allocate a female visitor to stay with us.  Her name was Helga and I thought this all sounded rather promising…

The coach arrived at about six o’clock and I optimistically looked out for a stunning blonde getting off the coach.  Well, the coach emptied and there was no sign of my guest and as people stared to drift away I wondered if she bothered to come.  Finally the coach pulled away and there she was standing on the other side of the bus.  Oh My God!  My optimistic vision of a Bavarian stunner was cruelly dashed because Helga had more the look of an East German shot putter of dubious gender than a Black Forest beauty queen so I hurried her to the car and if I’d had one I would have put a blanket over her head to get her inside the house in case she scared the neighbours.

We got over the first night but in the morning she didn’t appear for breakfast so I had to leave her and go to work and return at lunch time to deliver her to the coach for an organized trip.  At tea time I took her back to the house to get ready for the civic reception but without warning she packed her bags and demanded to be taken into town to be closer to her friends.

It turned out that she was ragingly homophobic and she had jumped to hasty conclusions about the domestic arrangements.  There was no convincing her otherwise and unable to dissuade her I had to make alternative arrangements for her, which brought my attempts at improving international relations to a shuddering halt.  So traumatic was this experience that I haven’t twinned again since.

Getting Stoned and Getting Laid – The Grand Tour of Europe

People have always travelled to other parts of the world to see great buildings and works of art, to learn new languages, to experience new cultures, to enjoy different food and drink and if lucky, to get laid…

… I mention this because in 2008 I flew to Athens and in the departure lounge queue behind us was a couple of young girls and one announced to the other that ‘I only go on holiday for three things, to get drunk, get stoned and get laid’, I had to see who this person was and when I turned round she turned out to be so unattractive that I was tempted to say ‘Don’t build your hopes up, if I were you I would concentrate on the first two!’ 

As long ago as the time of the Roman Empire, there were popular coastal resorts such as Sorrento and Capri for the rich. In 1936 the League of Nations defined a foreign tourist as someone travelling abroad for at least twenty-four hours and its successor, the United Nations amended this definition in 1945 by including a maximum stay of six months.

In 2020 the United Kingdom foolishly left the European Union.  One of the so called Brexit Benefits (there are none by the way) was to limit the amount of time a UK citizen can spend in Europe to ninety days in any six month period.  What a spectacular example of self-harm.

Young English elites of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries  often spent two to four years travelling around Europe in an effort to broaden their horizons and learn about language, architecture, geography and culture in an experience known as the Grand Tour.

In fact the word tourist has its origins in what used to be more correctly called the Grand Tour of Europe, which was a term first used by Richard Lessels in his 1670 book ‘Voyage to Italy’ and after that it came into general usage to describe the travels in Europe of wealthy and privileged young men and women in the years of the Enlightenment where it was quite normal to take a gap year, or four, in the quest for a broader education.

While the general objective of the Grand Tour was essentially educational (and this was probably what mum and dad thought that they were forking out for) they were notorious for more frivolous pursuits such as getting hammered, partying heavily and sleeping with as many continental lovelies as possible.  J

When young men on the Grand Tour weren’t misbehaving like people on a stag weekend to Amsterdam they were mostly interested in visiting those cities that were considered the major centres of culture at the time, primarily Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence and also Naples were popular destinations. The Grand Tourist would travel from city to city and usually spend some time in smaller towns and up to several months in the three main cities on the itinerary.  Paris was usually first en route and tourists would rent apartments for several weeks at a time and would make occasional visits to the countryside and adjacent towns.

From Paris, they travelled south either across the Alps or by a ship on the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and then they would pass on to Rome or Venice.  Rome was initially the southernmost point they would travel to but when excavations began at Herculaneum and Pompeii the two sites also became additional major destinations on the Grand Tour.   There were no airlines or railways of course so all of their travel was by carriage or by sea.  These days it is easier with a much greater range of transport options.

Other locations included as part of some Grand Tours included Spain and Portugal, Germany, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Baltic.  However, these other spots lacked the cultural and historical appeal of Paris and Italy and the substandard roads made travel much more difficult so they were not always the most popular.  Some of them didn’t have vineyards either so I suppose that might have reduced their appeal somewhat.

The British it seems have always been rather keen on travelling abroad and we have left our mark all over Europe (and not just through football violence either) in Nice one of the first and most established holiday resorts on the French Riviera, the long esplanade along the seafront is known to this day as the Promenade des Anglais and in many other historic resorts in continental Europe, old well-established palace hotels have names like the Hotel Bristol, the Hotel Carlton or the Hotel Majestic, reflecting the predominance of English customers.

This sort of thing really appeals to me; both the finding out about things and having a really good knees up at the same time and I have become determined to travel as much in Europe as I possibly can.  There are forty-six countries in Europe and I have only so far been to twenty-three so I am half way towards my objective of visiting them all.

Ryanair was Europe’s original low fares airline and is my favourite which is lucky for me because the airline has eight hundred and thirty low fare routes to one hundred and forty-three destinations in Europe and North Africa.  In the last three years I have flown thirty times at a very reasonable average cost of £40 return all inclusive.  Not all of these flights were with Ryanair of course and I have been forced to use others but I generally find that these work out more expensive.  A return flight to Athens with Easyjet for example costs £120 and my biggest bargain so far was with Ryanair to Santander in Cantabria, Spain at just £10.02 return.  To put things into some sort of perspective it costs over £80 to go to London on the train from Peterborough with National Express and for that you are not even guaranteed a seat.  That is about .90p a mile and on that basis it would cost approximately £1,800 to go to Santander and back by train!

In 2008 the most visited country in Europe was France, followed by Spain, Italy, United Kingdom and Germany.  Spain made the most money out or tourist revenues and on average the Germans spent most while away from home.  The most visited city was London (although as usual France disputes the official figures) and the most visited place was Trafalgar Square, followed by the Eiffel Tower and then the Vatican.    The United Nations World Tourism Organisation, which has its headquarters in Madrid, produces the World Tourism Rankings and is a United Nations agency dealing with questions relating to tourism.  For the record I visited Trafalgar Square in 2008, the Eiffel Tower in 2005 and the Vatican in 2003.

Click on an image to scroll through the gallery…

World Heritage Sites

In 1954, the government of Egypt announced that it was to build the Aswan Dam, a project that proposed to flood a valley containing priceless treasures of ancient civilizations.  Despite opposition from Egypt and Sudan, UNESCO launched a worldwide safeguarding campaign, over fifty countries contributed and the Abu Simbel and Philae temples were taken apart, moved to a higher location, and put back together piece by piece.  At last the World was collectively protecting its treasures and hopefully never again will something magnificent like the Colosseum of Rome or the Parthenon of Athens be torn down and destroyed by following generations of rebuilders.

Building on this international success the United States then came up with the idea of combining cultural conservation with nature conservation and a White House conference in 1965 called for a World Heritage Trust to preserve ‘the world’s superb natural and scenic areas and historic sites for the present and the future of the entire world citizenry.’ The International Union for Conservation of Nature developed similar proposals in 1968 and they were presented in 1972 to the United Nations conference on Human Environment in Stockholm.  A single text was agreed and the ‘Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage’ was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO on 16^th November 1972.

Today there are eight hundred and seventy-eight listed sites and it isn’t easy to get on the list and to do so a nomination must satisfy impressively difficult criteria which in summary consist of culutral criteria:

to represent a masterpiece of human creative genius; to exhibit an important interchange of human values; to bear a unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition; to be an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural or landscape; to be an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement; to be directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance,

and natural criteria:

to contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance; to be outstanding examples representing major stages of Earth’s history, to be outstanding examples representing significant ecological and biological processes; to contain the most important and significant natural habitats for in-site conservation of biological diversity.

It is hardly surprising that with forty-seven listed sites Italy has the most but for those who think of Spain as nothing more than a country of over developed costas with concrete condominiums, marinas and golf courses it might be a shock to learn that Spain has forty-three sites and is second highest in the exclusive list.

On every visit to Spain I seem to be visiting a World Heritage Site so when I counted them up I was interested to discover that I have been to twenty and that is nearly half of them.  In 2005 I visited Barcelona in Catalonia and saw the works of Antoni Gaudi and Palau de la Música Catalana and the Hospital de Sant Pau. Then in 2008 I saw the Historic Centre of Córdoba,  the  Caves of Altamira in Cantabria, the Old Town of Santiago de Compostela and the Cathedral, Alcázar and Archivo de Indias in Seville.  In 2009 in the motoring holiday around Castilian cities I visited the Old Town of Segovia and its Aqueduct,  the Historic Walled Town of Cuenca, the Historic City of Toledo and the Old Town of Ávila.

Even before I knew anything about World Heritage Sites it turns out that I have visited two more in the days of my beach type holidays, although when I went to these places neither of them were yet on the list.  In 1988 I holidayed on the island of Ibiza which was accepted onto the list in 1999 in recognition of its biodiversity and culture.  The following year I went to Tenerife and took a cable car ride to the top of Mount Tiede, a national park that was accepted to the list in 2007.  I have also visited Benidorm but for some reason that doesn’t yet seem to have made the list.

Even though they weren’t World Heritage Sites at the time I visited them I am still going to count them but the final two might be a bit dubious but anyway here goes.  In 1984 while driving back through Spain from Portugal I drove with friends through the city of Burgos which was accepted in that year because of its Cathedral and in Galicia in 2008 while visiting Santiago de Compostella I managed to drive over parts of the Pilgrim Route, which exists on the list separately from the old city itself.

Next time I go to Spain I am going to pay more attention and see how many more I can visit.

Turning for a moment to Greece it will surprise no one that the Acropolis and the island of Delos are both on the list but due to mistakes made in submitting the application form by the Greek Ministry of Culture in 2005 then for the time being Knossos is not there.    Everyone is accusing everyone else for this mistake and the Prefect of Iraklion blamed both the Ministry and UNESCO for leaving Knossos off the updated list of World Heritage Sites in 2006.  I am surprised that a site that important even has to bother with an application.

Crete – The Palace of Knossos and the Minotaur

King Minos and the Palace of Knossos…

In 2001 I visited the Greek island of Crete with my son Jonathan and while we were there visited the ancient site of the Palace of Knossos.  This is the largest archaeological site on the island and was the ceremonial and political centre of the ancient Minoan civilization.

According to Greek mythology, the palace was designed with such cunning complexity that no one placed in it could ever find the way out again and King Minos who commissioned the place to imprison the hideous Minotaur kept the architect prisoner to ensure that he could not reveal the palace plan to anyone. 

The architect was Daedalus who was a great inventor and he built two sets of wings so he and his son Icarus could fly off the island and escape.  He warned his son not to fly too close to the sun because the wax that held the wings together would melt but Icarus was young and impulsive and flew higher and higher until the heat melted the wax and he fell to his death in the Aegean sea.

Daedalus escaped and gave the palace plans to the Athenian King Theseus who travelled to Crete and found and killed the Minotaur.

The ruins at Knossos were first discovered in 1878  by a local man, Minos Kalokairinos, and the earliest excavations were made.  After that several Cretans attempted to continue the dig but it was not until 1900 that the English archeologist Arthur Evans purchased the entire site and carried out massive excavations and reconstructions. 

Arthur Evans and the Palace of Knossos…

These days archaeology is carefully regulated and supervised by academics who apply scientific rigour (except for Tony Robinson and the Time Team of course) to make sure that history isn’t compromised but it was very different a hundred years ago when wealthy amateurs could pretty much do as they pleased and went around digging up anything that they could find of interest and aggressively reinterpreting it.

Evans employed a large staff of local labourers as excavators and within a few months had uncovered a substantial portion of what he named the Palace of Minos, at the same time applying the description Minoan to the people who lived there.  No one really knows what they called themselves four thousand years ago when the Palace was constructed of course. In the Odyssey which was composed centuries after the destruction of Knossos, the poet Homer called the natives of Crete Eteocretans, which means true Cretans and it is possible that they may have been descendants of the Minoans.

There is much disagreement over the value of Evans’ work because some experts argue that some of his reconstructions are inaccurate, not thoroughly researched and constructed from unsuitable material, including concrete.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the scholars arguments I have to say that it does make the site a whole lot more interesting than just a few old walls and foundations and some of the experts have been forced to agree that in some places the concrete has actually helped preserve the original building, especially on steps that would otherwise have been worn away by thousands of visitors over the last one hundred years.

After considering the issue I think I agree with Henry Miller who wrote in the Colossus of Rhodes: “There has been much controversy about the aesthetics of Sir Arthur Evans’s work of restoration.  I find myself unable to come to any conclusion about it; I accepted it as a fact.  However Knossos may have looked in the past, however it may look in the future, this one which Evans has created is the only one I shall ever know.  I am grateful to him for what he did…”

Walking Tour of the Palace of Knossos…

We left the holiday village of Agios Nikólaos early in the morning and arrived in Knossos an hour or so later and paid our entrance fees.  Once inside we were approached by a local guide who looked as though he was stuck in a 1960s hippie culture time warp and somehow he persuaded me to part with €10 to join his guided tour.

This isn’t something that I would normally do but on this occasion I was pleased that I did because he provided an informative and amusing tour and we learned that the Palace had one thousand interlocking rooms and enjoyed the comforts of an elaborate system of water supply and drainage systems as well as flushing toilets, air conditioning and paved roads. 

The Palace was not the home of one privileged individual but housed a complete community and included artisan workrooms, shops and food processing centres and it served as a central storage point, and a religious and administrative centre for the north of the island.

Even at fourteen, Jonathan was cultivating an impressive mean streak and he became very concerned when two non-payers joined the guided tour and tagged along, he kept trying to draw this to the attention of the guide who eventually responded to the hints and asked them to pay up, much to his satisfaction.  Actually I think freeloading in this way is quite good fun so long as there isn’t a spoil sport like Jonathan around!

The Destruction of the Palace of Knossos…

The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age culture that flourished from approximately 2700 to 1450 BC but it came to a dramatic end sometime between 1550 and 1630 BC as a result of the eruption on the island of Santorini which is about one sixty miles north of Crete.

This eruption was among the largest volcanic explosions in the history of civilization.  It measured six on the Volcanic Explosivity Index which may not sound that much but is just about as big as you can get.  The Yellowstone eruption, six hundred and forty thousand years ago, was the biggest ever and measured eight.  So this would have been a fairly big bang and when it went off you would probably want to be standing well back because it ejected an estimated forty cubic miles of material or about roughly 10,000,000,000 tonnes as it blew the devastated island apart.

To get a sense of perspective try to imagine the county of Essex rising forty miles into the air into the earth’s mesosphere (a terrible thought I agree) and you can get a sense of just how much material that is.  Actually it probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Essex blew up in this way, except we would lose Stansted airport I suppose.

As it happened, sixty miles was not far back enough and the eruption devastated the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri on Santorini which was entombed in a layer of pumice and created a huge tsunami that engulfed the island of Crete and destroyed the Palace of Knossos and many other Minoan coastal settlements.  Archaeologists believe that the eruption created a crisis in Minoan society (well I rather imagine that it would) and with trade and agriculture seriously disrupted they were easily conquered by the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece who took their place on the island of Crete.

Athens and Ancient Greece

The Acropolis Museum in Athens