Northern Spain – The City of Burgos

It was late afternoon when we arrived in Burgos and we located the hotel without too much difficulty and checked in.  I had chosen the Meson Del Cid because of its location and because the hotel web site boasted about the panoramic views of the Cathedral.

Unfortunately our room didn’t have a panoramic view of the Cathedral as we were allocated a room at the rear with a view of a tiny courtyard and the back door of an adjacent church and I immediately decided (perhaps unfairly) that this was most likely going to adversely affect my customer review scoring.

I was especially keen to visit Burgos because the first time I was there in 1985 I dashed through with indecent haste on a road trip from the Algarve to the English Channel and at that point we were seriously behind our schedule and didn’t have time to stop but mostly because this is the spiritual home of my Spanish hero Rodrigo Díaz de Bivar, better known as El Cid.

There was time for a brief excursion into the city but with a full day ahead in Burgos we ignored the sights and looked instead for a likely restaurant for later.  The one that we selected served a nice evening meal, but not the best that we had had this week and our mistake was not to have the menu del dia which was being served up by the plateful to the pilgrims who made their way inside.

My way of getting our own back on the hotel for the disappointing room was to boycott their expensive breakfast at €11 each and instead found a good alternative at only €4 each just around the corner in a place with the tempting aromas of the first meal of the day, pungent coffee, sizzling eggs, newly fried churros and the faint hint of charred toast.

It was a rather cold morning and stubborn grey clouds filled the morning sky, the walkers were all wearing their warmest clothes and most people on the street were taking the sensible precaution of carrying an umbrella.  We walked first to the Plaza Mayor which isn’t going to get into my favourites list because although it was large and colourful the place was spoilt by the inappropriate placement of recycling containers where, in my opinion, there should have been pavement tables.

From the Plaza we walked to the river through one of the original city gates, the Arco de Santa Maria, and then along a boulevard, Paseo del Espolón, lined with trees like lines of Greek dancers each with their hands on their partners shoulders and from there towards the Plaza del Cid.

Once over the river we crossed a bridge lined with statues depicting the heroes of the Reconquesta and then, there he was – El Cid, looking fearsome with his grizzled beard, wild cloak flowing madly, his sword La Tizona, too big for an ordinary mortal extended menacingly ahead of him, his eyes fixed ferociously on an enemy army as he led a charge against the Moors sat on his magnificent famous white horse Babieca.

Only one other statue is the equal of this one in all of Spain – that of Francisco Pizarro more than five hundred kilometres away in the Plaza Mayor in the city of Trujillo  in Extremadura.

It was time now to visit the Cathedral, the third largest in Spain after Seville and Toledo and we walked to the great Gothic construction with its balustraded turrets, needle-pointed pinnacles, statues of the Saints and steel grey filigree lace towers soaring above us, went inside and grudgingly paid the €7 entrance fee.

Actually this turned out to be very good value for money because I would agree with the travel writer Jan Morris that this is perhaps the finest Cathedral that I have visited in Spain, better than both Seville and Toledo and with an audio guide thrown in.  It took some time to visit all of the chapels on both sides and eventually reach the centre of the building with its huge grey columns reaching up above us supporting a magnificent ribbed central dome where underneath in pride of place was the resting place and tomb of El Cid and his equally famous wife Doña Ximena Díaz  Actually I was expecting something a bit grander but the great National hero of Spain is buried under a rather simple marble gravestone.

Through the magnificent stained glass windows we could see that there were occasional shafts of sunlight so with the weather improving Kim began to get restless so we hurried our pace for the remainder of the visit but I did manage to slow her down long enough to visit the Cathedral museum where amongst the exhibits were the travel chest of El Cid, which I am fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to use as Ryanair cabin baggage and a blood thirsty statue of Saint James the Moor slayer.

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 similar 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 explained 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.

Burgos Cathedral on the other hand, for the time being anyway, appears not to be so sensitive.

With the sun now shining we returned to the streets and walked along a steep path through pleasant woodland towards the castle of Burgos.  There was once a medieval castle on the site but the current fort was built by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808, was the only castle that the Duke of Wellington failed to capture and which was destroyed again by the French when they retreated and left in 1813.  It has been restored again now but opening hours seem to be very limited and today the iron gates were firmly closed and locked so we walked back to the city and returned to the river and walked in both directions before selecting a pavement bar on the Paseo del Espolón  and sat in the hot sunshine with a San Miguel.

I liked Burgos, probably most out of all the cities that we had visited this week and I was glad that we had chosen to spend a couple of nights here.  Later we found an alternative restaurant for evening meal where the food was excellent and we were in the good company of some Camino walkers and at the end of the day there was a walk back to the hotel through the quiet streets under the waxy glow of the iron street lamps casting their curious shadows into the corners of the Plazas and streets and overhead there was a clear sky which made us optimistic about the next day.

 

Central Spain – The Ruta de Don Quixote

Don Quixote is the national glory of Spain.  No one who does not know that has the right to call himself a Spaniard.  There is a monument to him in Madrid…he was our first revolutionary.”  –  Gerald Brenan – South from Granada

My previous post described a short encounter with the Ruta de Don Quixote on a drive between the neighbouring towns of Sigüenza and Atienza but this was not the first time that we had followed other parts of the route…

In 2009 we were staying in Belmonte, further south than Sigüenza and it was going to be a long day so we rose early ready for a quick start and as usual my first job was to check the weather.  The air felt fresher and from the hotel window I could see cloud to the east, which was a bit of a worry, but the lady on Spanish breakfast television seemed confident that it was going to be fine and out to the west it was clear blue and that was the direction in which we were heading. 

After breakfast and check out we packed the car and started on the one hundred and fifty kilometre drive to Toledo.   I instinctively knew that it was going to be a good day.

In the hotel there had been pictures of a castle and a row of windmills at the next town of Consuegra so as it came into view we left the main road and headed towards the top of the hill where they stood like watching sentinels overlooking the town.  From below, the castle looked magnificent but on close inspection it was in a bit of a sorry state of disrepair but from here there were terrific views over the great plain of Castile and it was easy to see why this was once a very important military place as it guarded the direct route from the south to Toledo and Madrid.  The castle was once a stronghold of the Knights of San Juan, the Spanish branch of the Knight’s Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.

Now we were on the ‘Ruta de Don Quixote’ which is the golden thread that binds the Castilian tourist industry together in a ribbon of sometimes restored and sometimes neglected castles and sometimes restored and sometimes neglected windmills stretching all the way from Cuenca to Toledo.

As well as the castle, Consuegra is famous for its windmills which remained in use until the beginning of the 1980s.  They were originally built by the Knights and were used to grind the grain that was grown on the plain and they were passed down through the generations of millers from fathers to sons.  

The eleven Consuegra windmills are some of the best examples of Spanish windmills in Castilla-La Mancha and although it was a little cool at the top of the hill it was a good time to see them because there were very few visitors this early in the morning.

Don Quixote is a novel written by the seventeenth century Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and is regarded as the most influential work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age.  It is the story of a man who believes that he is a knight, and recounts his adventures as he rights wrongs, mistakes peasants for princesses, and  “tilts at windmills,” mistakenly believing them to be evil giants.  As one of the earliest works of modern western literature, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.

In 2002 a panel of one hundred leading world authors declared Don Quixote to be the best work of fiction ever written, ahead even of works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  Cervantes has also been credited with shaping modern literary style, and Don Quixote has been acclaimed as “the first great novel of world literature”. 

Since publication in 1605 it is reputed to be the most widely read and translated book on the planet after the Bible. I tried to read it once but found it rather heavy going so gave up quite quickly but as we drove along I resolved to have another attempt upon returning home.

Spain, Manzanares El Real

The roads were clear and we made uninterrupted progress around the M40 ring road and then turned north towards our first destination of Manzanares El Real and as we began to steadily climb into the mountains towards the Regional Park Cuenca Alta de Manzanares the cloud began to thin and fairly soon we had driven through it and the sky was clear and the temperature leapt several degrees to something closer to what we were expecting.  We climbed to one thousand three hundred metres and the mountain tops ahead and to the east had a dusting of snow, the harbinger of the winter which can see several metres fall here with villages and towns regularly being cut off.

Eventually we arrived in Manzanares and parked in a dusty car park directly below the huge medieval castle sat on an outcrop of rock that we had driven here to see.  But it was lunchtime now and time for a drink so before tackling the steps to the fortress we walked into town and found a pavement bar with outside tables in the warm sunshine and we stopped for a while to enjoy the winter sun.  The last trip away was to Marrakech in Morocco where it was almost impossible to buy a beer because of the strict Muslim rules on alcohol so it was good to be back in Spain where there are no such problems and I enjoyed a cool refreshing cerveza!

After the break we walked through the languid square where little groups of men in flat caps and berets were congregating and debating the big issues of the day and women were shopping in the small stores around the perimeter.  They don’t get many English tourists here, especially in November, so I think one or two of them were surprised to see us as they went about their daily routine.

We found the entrance to the castle and paid our €4 fee (€2 for Christine because she is of a certain age) and then made our way inside through the main gate.  The castle has been restored of course, most recently by the Comunidad de Madrid in the 1970s, because only a few years ago it wasn’t in very good shape at all and I guessed that what we were seeing was what Belmonte castle will look like when it too has been restored.  I mention this because last year we were in Belmonte  in Castilla La-Mancha where some scenes from the film El Cid  were shot but the castle was closed at the time and there were some claims here in Manzanares that this too was a location for some of the filming.

Inside the main building we followed a route through a succession of restored rooms with displays of armour and medieval bric-a-brac of dubious originality and then out onto the battlements and turrets at the very top of the building.  To the north there were the snowy peaks of the mountains and to the south a stunning view over the Embalse de Santillana which is a recent addition to the landscape of course so wouldn’t have been there in the middle-ages for the occupants of the castle to enjoy at that time.  Santillana reservoir, also known as the reservoir of Manzanares el Real, has an area of over a thousand hectares when full, is thirty kilometres long and is a stunning man made compliment to the natural landscape.  The first dam was built in 1907 but this was replaced by a new one in 1969 which at forty metres high doubled the storage capacity of the reservoir.

When we had finished with the castle we left Manzanares and headed for our next stop on the itinerary, the Royal Palace and Monastery at El Escorial, a journey of about twenty kilometres.  It was about now that we began to regret the BMW upgrade because this turned out to be a dubious benefit on account of the fact that it was so darned uncomfortable.  The bucket seats were narrow, there was little leg or head room and getting in and out was a serious challenge.  The suspension was as hard as iron and the driving position was cramped and difficult.  In the back the three girls were squashed together because this car is really not designed for five people and we all agreed that we wished we had the Volkswagen.  I know it sounds ungrateful but next time I will specify no upgrade to a BMW thank you very much!

Andalusia, The Castillo de Almodóvar

It was a glorious morning and although it was slightly chilly there wasn’t a cloud to be seen in the perfect blue sky and we interpreted this as a really promising sign and dressed appropriately in summer linens and short-sleeved shirts.

Together with a lot of local people we had a traditional breakfast at the Goya and this made a nice change from the usual hotel buffet arrangement that we usually have.  It was a simple affair with a choice of toasted bread drizzled with olive oil and a thin tomato puree and topped off with thin slices of cured ham or alternatively, for those who didn’t care for the ham, toast and marmalade made from finest Seville oranges.

After breakfast we prepared for a drive to the city of Córdoba about a hundred and twenty kilometres to the east along the River Guadalquivir.  Córdoba is a moderately sized place today but once it was the largest Roman city in Spain and later became the thriving capital of the Caliphate of Córdoba that once governed almost all of the Iberian Peninsula.  It has been estimated that in the tenth century it was the largest city in Western Europe and, perhaps, in the world with up to half a million inhabitants.

We didn’t take the direct motorway route because we thought the alternative may be more scenic and anyway we were worried about paying unnecessary road tolls.  This proved to be unnecessary on both counts because it wasn’t especially picturesque and there weren’t any tolls either.  First we drove to the town of Lora Del Rio along a road that took us through an agricultural landscape with fields all freshly ploughed and waiting for next years grain crops.  Although the highest mountains on the Spanish mainland are in Andalusia most of the Province, which stretches from the deserts of Almeria in the east to the Portuguese border in the west is a flat plain in the valley of the Guadalquivir, which at six hundred and fifty-seven kilometers is the fifth longest river in Spain and is one of the country’s most important because it irrigates a fertile valley, and creates a rich agricultural area.

Lora del Rio was an unexceptional working town and there was nothing to stop for so we continued along the road through the similar towns of Palma del Rio and Posadas.  On our left, to the north, was the Sierra Morena mountain range that separates Andalusia from the central plain of Castilla-La Mancha and there were some worrying accumulations of cloud that looked a little to close for comfort.  Eventually we came to Almodóvar del Rio where a large castle was perched strategically on the top of a hill and this looked well worth stopping for.

The Castillo de Almodóvar is a grandiose Caliphal fortress erected on a high mound along the Guadalquivir.  Square towers flank its towering walls and the entire castle is surrounded by a large moat.  During the years of occupation it was a Moorish stronghold and after the reconquest it became the medieval home for members of the Spanish nobility.  It gradually fell into disrepair and much of it was plundered for convenient building material by the people of the town but the Count of Torralba rebuilt it a hundred years ago restoring the external appearance of the original Arab fortification.

At its elevated position there was a spectacular view of the plains to the south and the mountains to the north and although the sun was shining it was getting cold and the clouds were getting closer.  We visited the castle in the company of a children’s school outing who were enjoying an interactive history lesson which must have been highly entertaining judging by all of the laughter and giggles.  It was a good castle and well worth the €5 entrance fee and we climbed the towers and walked the ramparts and when we had seen all there was to see we left and continued the drive to Córdoba.

Consuegra, Windmills and Castles

It was going to be a long day so we rose early ready for a quick start and as usual my first job was to check the weather.

The air felt fresher and from the hotel window I could see cloud to the east, which was a bit of a worry, but the lady on Spanish breakfast television seemed confident that it was going to be fine and out to the west it was clear blue and that was the direction in which we were heading.  After breakfast and check out we packed the car and started on the one hundred and fifty kilometre drive to Toledo.

We drove first to the town of Alcázar de San Juan but this wasn’t because of any sort of research just an instinct that it would be interesting based on what seemed to be a promising name.  I should have carried out some research because it didn’t seem very appealing at all, there wasn’t a castle to be seen and the clouds had caught up and overtaken us and there was a bleached out sort of chalky whiteness to the sky so we rather rudely carried on without stopping.  Somewhere just west of the town we crossed the old A4 highway and that reminded me of the mad drive through Spain with my brother and two friends in 1984 when we drove from southern Portugal to the French border in thirty-six hours in a ten year old clapped out Ford Escort.

Back in the hotel there had been pictures of a castle and a row of windmills at the next town of Consuegra so as it came into view we left the main road and headed towards the top of the hill where they stood like regimental sentinels overlooking the town.   Across the crest of the hill, they march like giants.  No wonder the delusional Don Quixote pulled his sword  and charged in combat to fight these windmills.

Originally, there were thirteen whitewashed windmills lining this hilltop. Now only eleven remain of which four still retain their working mechanisms. Known as “molinos” in Spain, the windmills are each named — Sancho, Bolero, Espartero, Mambrino, Rucio, Cardeno, Alcancia, Chispas, Callabero del Verde Gaban, Clavileno and Vista Alegre.

The windmills are tall cylindrical towers capped with dark cones and four big “sails” that move with the wind.  In days gone by, farmers would haul their grain to these windmills where the structures harnessed the power of the wind to grind grain. The windmills and the skill to operate them were passed down from fathers to sons. Windows placed around the tower of the windmill provide great views today. But that was not their original use. From these windows, the miller could keep watch on the shifting winds. When the winds changed, the miller would have to move the tiller beam to turn the mill. If he didn’t a sudden strong wind could strip the sails, rip off the top and the whole building could be destroyed by a gusty wind.

From below, the castle looked magnificent but on close inspection it too was in a bit of a sorry state of disrepair but from here there were terrific views over the great plain of Castile and it was easy to see why this was once a very important military place as it guarded the direct route from the south to Toledo and Madrid.  The castle was once a stronghold of the Knights of San Juan, the Spanish branch of the Knight’s Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.

As well as the castle Consuegra is famous for its windmills which remained in use until the beginning of the 1980s.  They were originally built by the Knights and were used to grind the grain that was grown on the plain and they were passed down through the generations of millers from fathers to sons. The eleven Consuegra windmills are some of the best examples of Spanish windmills in Castilla-La Mancha and although it was a little cool at the top of the hill it was a good time to see them because there were very few visitors this early in the morning.

After leaving Consuegra we rejoined the road and headed north to Toledo and on the way the clouds evaporated and the sun poured through and we passed more castles at Mora and at Almonacid but we didn’t stop again.  The scenery began to change too as it became more untidy and scrubby as we left the chequerboard fields and their delightful colours behind.

Just before midday we reached the outskirts of Toledo and at the top of the city we could see the Alcázar and the Cathedral and we followed the signs to the historical centre and found a very large and convenient car park right on the edge of the city and in my league table of Spanish city car parks Toledo went straight to the top.

At the bottom by the way remains Seville!

It might have been right on the edge of the City but to get there involved a rather strenuous climb to reach it because Toledo is built on the top of a craggy outcrop of rock that in the middle ages made it impregnable to hostile forces.

The whole city is a sort of natural castle with a moat, the Tagus River, running in a looping gorge around three sides of it. The only way an enemy could take it was to attack the north side and that was difficult because not surprisingly that was the most strongly fortified part of the city walls.  The Tagus, by the way,  is the fourth longest river in Western Europe and the most important in Iberia and from Toledo it flows all the way to the Atlantic Ocean at Lisbon in Portugal.

Belmonte and El Cid’s Castle

“I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than most countries.  How easy it is to make friends in Spain!” – George Orwell – ‘Homage to Catalonia’

It was another excellent morning and behind the dark shutters the early morning sun was waiting to pounce as soon as they were opened.  The sky was clear and it was blissful, serene and tranquil with absolute silence but for the merry chirruping of the house martins nesting in the garden and already well into their days work.

The breakfast room was busier this morning as a few families had checked in the previous afternoon so while we waited to use the toasting machine I had a look around the room and the pictures on the wall.  At the far end there were photographs of the actor Charlton Heston in the film El Cid and the man on duty behind the bar tried to explain to me in a combination of Spanish and English (mostly Spanish) that some of the movie was filmed right here in Belmonte at the fifteenth century castle that overlooks the town.  That was something interesting that I didn’t know and good news too because today we planned a leisurely exploration of the town and a visit to the fortress and after breakfast we set out to do just that.

Although the sun was shining it was quite cool in the shade so we kept to the sunny side of the street and made for the castle.  On the way we stopped to ask directions and a lady showed us the route but explained in sign language that it wasn’t open at the moment (several times).  This didn’t come as a complete surprise I have to say because there was an enormous crane sticking out of the top of it and even from a distance it was obvious that the builders were in.

Despite this it looked well worth an external visit anyway so we left by a town gate and began to walk up an unmade path towards the castle.  The walk involved quite an arduous climb, especially as I insisted on trying to reach the highest point for the best view and this meant negotiating an almost vertical ascent up a loose shale path that crumbled away under our feet at every step.

But we were rewarded with great views over the town and from here we could clearly see its military footprint because Belmonte is a fortified town at the foot of the magnificently sturdy castle which was part of the ring of fortifications that marked the front line in the medieval power struggle between the Spanish Christians and the African Moors.  On the way back down to the castle we crossed the exact spot where Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren filmed the closing scenes of El Cid.

El Cid is the national hero of Spain, a bit like our Queen Elizabeth I or Winston Churchill.  He was a warrior, a nobleman, a knight, and a champion.  He became a legend within only a few years of his death and most Spaniards know about him because at school they read an epic poem called El Cantar de Mío Cid.  It is the first great poem in the Spanish language and was written about 1140, only fifty years or so after he died.  Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar known as El Cid Campeador, was a Castilian nobleman, a gifted military leader and a diplomat who fought for and then fell out with Alfonso VI, was exiled but later returned, and in the fight against the Moors conquered and governed the city of Valencia. It’s a good story but the film takes a few historical liberties so it’s best not to rely upon it as a source document for serious study.

The castle is a declared national monument and it was closed for some serious renovation and no one seems to know with any degree of certainty when it will open again.  It was a shame not to be able to visit but we walked around the outside underneath its imposing towers and told ourselves it was a good excuse to come back sometime.   From here there were uninterrupted views over the Meseta, the massive central plateau of Spain laid out like a patchwork quilt in front of us.  It was obvious why they built the castle her because no one was going to sneak up on them, that’s for sure!

From the castle we took the road back into town which took us through lazy whitewashed streets where old ladies in black dresses sat gossiping in the doorways and men folk sat on benches discussing the weekend football results and important matters of state.  In the centre of town there were a few shops, a mini market, butcher, grocer and a fishmonger, an electrical shop that didn’t look as if it had sold anything for years, a florist and a photographer.  What we really wanted was a bar with outside tables but there were none and I formed the impression that the town was really only just waking up to spring and after a longer than normal winter wasn’t yet quite certain enough that it was here to have the confidence to put the tables and chairs outside.

After a visit to a pharmacy to purchase sticking plaster for blisters (picked up on my climb to the top of the shale path, so entirely my fault) we returned to the hotel we had visited last evening and had a drink and another plate of olives.  Afterwards we walked to the other side of the town to some more windmills, made a visit to the collegiate church which was absurdly overpriced at €2 each and took about ten minutes to look around (and that was dawdling) and that was it and after only three hours that was Belmonte visited, seen and finished.

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More stories about El Cid…

El Cid and the Spanish Reconquista

El Cid and Alvar Fáñez de Minaya, another hero of the Reconquest

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

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El Cid, the Film, Fact and Fiction

In March 2009 I visited the town of Belmonte in Castilla-la Mancha and visited the castle were some of the scenes for the film El Cid were shot.  On the way back down after visiting the castle I crossed the exact spot where Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren filmed the closing scenes of El Cid.

El Cid is the national hero of Spain, rather like  Queen Elizabeth I or Winston Churchill in the United Kingdom or Abraham Lincoln in the USA.  He was a warrior, a nobleman, a knight, and a champion.  He became a legend within only a few years of his death and most Spaniards know about him because at school they read an epic poem called El Cantar de Mío Cid.  It is the first great poem in the Spanish language and was written about 1140, only fifty years or so after he died.

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar known as El Cid Campeador, was a Castilian nobleman, a gifted military leader and a diplomat who fought for and then fell out with Alfonso VI, was exiled but later returned, and in the fight against the Moors conquered and governed the city of Valencia on the eastern Mediterranean coast.

It’s a good story but the film takes a few historical liberties so, in truth it is best not to rely upon it as a source document for serious study.

The film is a Hollywood historical epic starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren and tells the story of the heroic warrior as he sets about (seemingly single-handedly) recovering Spain from the Moors.  With its charismatic stars, a cast of thousands (wearing real armour and using real swords) and its grand themes of love, loyalty and justice, it perpetuates a glowing image of the greatest hero in Spanish history.

Cid is a towering and talismanic figure, the perfect chivalric knight, devoted to his wife and children, a magnificent warrior, unerringly true to his word and merciful to his opponents.  Most of all, he is sworn to the service of God and dedicated to saving Spain from the fearsome invaders from North Africa.

The reality of course is that this wasn’t a completely accurate portrayal of the great warrior and the life of  ‘El Cid’, from the Arabic sayyid, ‘lord’, differed from the film version in many crucial respects.

One aspect of the film that is somewhat confusing is the relationship between the Cid and some of the Spanish Muslims who he holds in high regard and treats with respect and here we begin with an aspect of the film, which is, broadly speaking, accurate.  The Cid’s generosity to some of his Muslim opponents and his alliances with local Muslims against other, more fundamentalist, Islamic armies are based on fact because El Cid was a mercenary who would, in fact, fight for either side if the money on offer was right.

Three centuries before El Cid lived, the Muslims of North Africa had conquered Iberia but slowly the Christians had regained control of the northern half of the peninsula and the two faiths established a practical live and let live arrangement.  Relations between the two faiths in Spain had yet to be sharpened by the inflammatory and inflexible rhetoric of crusade and jihad and furthermore, it was quite common for local groups of Christians and Muslims to make alliances to fight other Christians and Muslims.  But things were changing and El Cid lived just as the age when the Crusades was beginning and the Christians probably had their eye on the bits of the peninsula with the very best beaches.

El Cid lived at this time and the film shows him having Muslim allies, even though it carefully omits the numerous occasions when he acted 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 and the  film accurately pays tribute to his formidable military prowess for which others were prepared to pay.

His finest victory was the capture of Valencia in 1094, which is shown in the film on a grand Hollywood epic scale, complete with siege towers, cavalry charges, thousands of movie extras provided by General Franco and the full clash of medieval arms.

So there is at least some truth in the film and its plot, but it on the whole it is a highly romaticised version of the story.  The explanation for this lies in the identity of its historical consultant: 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.

The portrait of the Cid Pidal promoted to the movie makers was flawed in two ways.  First, in the evidence he used because he gave substantial credibility to the ‘Poema de Mio Cid’, a work written at the height of the crusading age and, most crucially, fifty years after after the Cid’s death.  Then, his valiant deeds against 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 fantasy and legend.

The second reason for Pidal’s inaccurate characterisation of El Cid lies in the blurring between the historian’s version of medieval Iberia and many of his own perceptions about the Spain of his own lifetime. To him, the notion of a patriotic hero uniting his troubled country was highly attractive and one that fitted the nationalist mood of Spain in the 1930s.  Hence Heston’s El Cid repeatedly demands a victory ‘for Spain’, when in fact Spain as a national entity was of little relevance in the eleventh century and ‘for Castile’ would have been a much more likely rallying cry.

The end of the film is based entirely on legend.  Shortly before he died in 1099 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 was mounted upon his favourite horse, Babieca,  fastened into the saddle and at midnight was borne out of the gate of Valencia accompanied by an army of a thousand knights.

They marched to where the Moorish king and his army was camped, and at daylight made a 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 El Cid holding in his left hand a banner representing Reconquesta and in the other a fiercesome sword, La Tizona.

So afraid were the Moors that they fled to the sea, and twenty thousand of them are said to have drowned as they tried to reach their ships in panic.

Click on an image to scroll through the gallery…

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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 King Alfonso VI

Alfonso VI, known as the Brave or the Valiant, was King of León from 1065, king of King of Castile and de facto King of Galicia from 1072, and the self-proclaimed ‘Emperor of all Spain’.  This was a bit of an exaggeration because he only effectively had power over about a third of the peninsular which meant that he had a lot of work to do to turn this aspiration into reality and under the leadership of Alfonso an earnest program of crusading reconquest began.

During his reign, Alfonso adopted a policy of an alliance with the great French Benedictine monastery of Cluny and by cooperating with the church and instituting Cluniac reform, Alfonso played a pre-eminent role in the Christianisation of the reconquest.  His determination to create a unified Christian kingdom of Spain in the eleventh century created the need for religious and national figures under which Christians could unite to defeat the infidel.

The King’s objective was to unite all of Spain under one crown and one religion because tolerance and coexistence with the Muslims were no longer options if Alfonso sought to create a truly unified Spanish Christian State.  The determined King of León called upon people of the northern Kingdoms to fight against the Muslims and establish the supremacy of the Catholic Church.

To assist him in this ambitious quest Alfonso recruited two important allies; he fostered the legend of St James to provide spiritual support and justification and in the practical area of secular supremacy and military muscle El Cid represented the lay element of the Christian reconquista.  As Alfonso’s military chief El Cid united the Spaniards in their struggle to oust the Muslims and reclaim the peninsula for the Spanish Christian monarch.

In 1072, El Cid became the vassal of Alfonso VI and to further secure his loyalty the King arranged for El Cid to marry his niece Ximena Díaz. These were calculated moves by the King to secure El Cid’s support for the national-religious warfare against the Moors.  El Cid was a mercenary and not entirely reliable as an ally and this was a well thought out strategy to achieve a significant measure of control over the military commander that restricted his opportunity to take military action without the king’s knowledge.  Alfonso had a well defined political-religious agenda, in which El Cid played an integral role.

In support of Alfonso’s expansionist plans El Cid participated in the unification of the religious and political spheres during the latter part of the eleventh century. One of the most important roles he played as a Christian war hero and patriot of the reconquest was the victory of his siege in Valencia and the Muslims defeat in 1094.

“Great is the rejoicing in that place                                                                                    when My Cid took Valencia . . .                                                                                                My Cid rejoiced, and all who were with him,                                                              when his flag flew from the top of the Moorish palace.” 

In his role as a loyal Christian ruler in 1098 El Cid converted Valencia’s Great Mosque into a Christian church, St. Mary’s Cathedral.  Furthermore, he proclaimed the Cluniac cleric Jerome of Périgord the bishop of Valencia and these acts indicated his solidarity with Alfonso and Cluniac reform, and his participation in the crusading mentality of the century.

After El Cid’s premature death in 1099 and without his inspirational leadership Valencia fell again to Muslim forces in 1102.  Alfonso died in 1109 leaving behind his legacy to the Reconquista of the two principle nationalist heroes of modern Spain, the Patron Saint James and the Warrior Knight El Cid.

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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 Castle of Belmonte

El Cid – The Film Fact and Fiction

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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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