Rodrigo Ruy Diaz, El Cid Campeador, was born near Burgos, in Spain, about
1040. The name Cid was given him by the Moors, and means lord. Campeador
means champion.
Ruy Diaz was the trusty lord of Sancho, King of Castile, who at his death
divided his kingdom among his children. He then espoused the cause of the
eldest son, Sancho, and assisted him in wresting their portion of the
kingdom from his brothers Garcia and Alfonso. Sancho having been
treacherously slain while besieging his sister Urraca's town of Zamora,
the Cid attached himself to Alfonso, humiliating him, however, by making
him and his chief lords swear that they had had no hand in Sancho's death.
For this, Alfonso revenged himself by exiling the Cid on the slightest
pretexts, recalling him only when his services were needed in the defence
of the country.
This much, and the Cid's victories over the Moors, his occupation of
Valencia, and his army's departure therefrom in 1102, led by his corpse
seated on horseback, "clothed in his habit as he lived", are historical
facts.
A great mass of romances, among them the story of his slaying Count Don
Gomez because he had insulted his father, Diego Laynez; of Don Gomez's
daughter Ximena wooing and wedding him; of his assisting the leper and
having his future success foretold by him, and of his embalmed body
sitting many years in the cathedral at Toledo, are related in the
"Chronicle of the Cid" and the "Ballads."
The Poem of the Cid narrates only a portion of his career, and "if it had
been named," says Ormsby, "would have been called 'The Triumph of the
Cid.'"
The Poem of the Cid was written about 1200 A. D. Its authorship is
unknown.
It contains three thousand seven hundred and forty-five lines, and is
divided into two cantares. The versification is careless; when rhyme
hampered the poet he dropped it, and used instead the assonant rhyme.
The Poem of the Cid is of peculiar interest because it belongs to the very
dawn of our modern literature, and because its hero was evidently a real
personage, a portion of whose history was recorded in this epic not long
after the events took place. The Cid is one of the most simple and natural
of the epic heroes; he has all a man's weaknesses, and it is difficult to
repress a smile at the perfectly natural manner in which, while he
slaughters enough Moors to secure himself a place in the heavenly kingdom,
he takes good care to lay up gold for the enjoyment of life on earth. The
poem is told with the greatest simplicity, naturalness, and directness, as
well as with much poetic fire.