Richard Fletcher
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Richard Fletcher
Rodrigo Diaz, the legendary warrior-knight of eleventh-century Castile known as El Cid, is remembered today as the Christian hero of the Spanish crusade who waged wars of re-conquest for the triumph of the Cross over the Crescent. He is still honored in Spain as a national hero for liberating the fatherland from the occupying Moors. Yet, as Richard Fletcher shows in this award-winning book, there are many contradictions between eleventh-century reality and the mythology that developed with the passing years.
By placing El Cid in a fresh, historical context, Fletcher shows us an adventurous soldier of fortune who was of a type, one of a number of “cids,” or “bosses,” who flourished in eleventh-century Spain. But the El Cid of legend—the national hero—was unique in stature even in his lifetime. Before his death El Cid was already celebrated in a poem written in tribute of the conquest of Almeria; posthumously he was immortalized in the great epic Poema de Mio Cid and became the centerpiece for countless other works of literature. When he died in Valencia in 1099, he was ruler…
