Among medieval heroes, El Cid has proved the most durable. There is no doubt that he, unlike King Arthur, existed; it is certain that he gained control of Muslim Valencia at the end of the eleventh century. Nor is there any doubt that he was a member of the Castilian lesser nobility and had a wife named Jimena. Much of the rest of his reputation, however, has been invented since his death in 1099, an event that was not, in fact, followed by his corpse riding victoriously into battle against the Muslim Almoravids strapped to his loyal horse. That is how he is commonly imagined thanks to a memorable scene in the film El Cid (1961), starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, and featuring the magnificent castle at Peñíscola, built a few centuries after his death and now a popular draw for tourists, who imagine that they are following the trail of El Cid.

El Cid has been remade time and again to match the cultural and political priorities of different ages. Nora Berend shows in her lively, original and fascinating book that El Cid’s reputation was largely constructed out of imaginative inventions. Her concern is much less with the historical El Cid than with what she calls his afterlife. But she also calls him a ‘medieval mercenary’, and even doing that is to risk the ire of some of his defenders. There have been many of these, not least the eminent academic historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who, until he died at the age of ninety-nine in 1968, devoted decades of study to El Cid. Half a century ago, his books were the first port of call for anyone who wanted to explore the life of El Cid. He was prepared to make use of what are now recognised as legendary accretions to fill out his picture of a national hero whose career, in his view, symbolised the dynamism of medieval Castile and its God-given destiny to unite Spain. Although Menéndez Pidal carefully avoided overt political statements, this was just the sort of message that Franco loved to hear.

Menéndez Pidal was not happy with the view that El Cid was a mercenary. The argument that he was one was pressed by the late Richard Fletcher in his excellent book The Quest for El Cid (1989), which won the Wolfson History Prize. It is no disrespect to Berend to say that Fletcher’s book remains the best modern study of El Cid, with its portrayal of the Castilian hero alongside contemporary mercenaries such as the Norman knights who conquered southern Italy and Sicily and even carved out short-lived principalities on the edges of the Byzantine Empire. Their methods had many similarities to those adopted by El Cid: they learned to work with the local population and they lacked fixed loyalties, shifting between opposing sides with great agility. In the process they alienated potential overlords. In the case of El Cid, this resulted in a very difficult relationship with King Alfonso VI of Castile.

Berend is not, though, trying to compete with Fletcher. She does survey the complex situation in Spain during the eleventh century, and she outlines the life of El Cid as far as it can be recovered from sources close to his time. Amid the fast-changing jumble of Christian statelets and Muslim ones (the so-called taifa kingdoms), warlords formed alliances across religious boundaries. The history of Spain in this period is complicated, with important people called Ramon Berenguer and other important people called Berenguer Ramon, but Berend neatly brings out the increasing power of the Christian kingdoms, which (led by Castile) began to demand parias (tribute payments) from their Muslim neighbours. Yet in spite of these advances, Christian rulers’ preference for dividing inheritances meant that small realms continued to come and go. 

The conquest of Toledo by Alfonso VI in 1085 marked not just the acquisition of a once-powerful taifa kingdom but also the imposition of Christian rule deep in the heart of Iberia, a good distance from the birthplace of Castile. Even Granada and Seville experienced Christian raids in this period. But, as Berend shows, this was not part of a coherent programme of Christian reconquest. The fact that the ideology of Christian conquest was so weak made it easy for both Christian and Muslim mercenaries to switch employers without a sense that they were traitors to their faiths. The injection of holy war ideology into local conflicts was a gradual process, stimulated by the papacy and in particular by the launching of the First Crusade in 1095. Berend does, however, underestimate the extent to which the Almoravids, newly arrived from Morocco, were committed to a radical, expansionist vision of Islam. Their own sense that they were fighting a jihad helped stimulate ideas of holy war among their Christian opponents. The Almoravids had been invited into Spain by taifa kings, who realised that they lacked the power to resist Christian incursions (these rulers’ own sometimes bibulous style of life and easy attitude to Jews and Christians met with fierce disapproval in Almoravid circles). 

From El Cid’s life and times, Berend turns to his posthumous legacy. Her account of his growing reputation in early modern Spain, which encompasses prominent writers such as Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina, is something of a catalogue. But her discussion opens out with her cogent analysis of Corneille’s great play Le Cid (1637), very little of which can be described as historical. Corneille was accused of depending too heavily on earlier writers, but the dramatic power of his portrayal of Chimène’s love for El Cid makes this one of his most memorable plays.

In her final chapters, Berend places El Cid in the political and cultural history of 19th- and 20th-century Spain. In 1955 Franco travelled to Burgos to unveil a massive statue of El Cid. The Caudillo proclaimed that ‘El Cid is the spirit of Spain’, and he saw the hero’s career as justification for the suppression of regional identities within Spain, whose beating heart was the Castile that El Cid had helped to create. Franco cast El Cid as a model military leader who commanded unquestioning loyalty from his followers. Berend is, though, so keen to emphasise the undoubted horrors perpetrated by Franco and his allies that she fails to mention the horrors unleashed by violent elements among the Republicans.

Franco understood that the making of a blockbuster film about El Cid would help win Spain a place among the family of nations, as well as draw in tourists. But, Berend argues, the 1961 film had a message for Spaniards too: Franco was the new El Cid. ‘The film whitewashed Franco’s deeds and pretended that his cause was just and noble,’ Berend argues. And yet, by presenting El Cid as a tolerant figure who could make friends with his Muslim neighbours, the film challenged the version of El Cid that the Caudillo had previously promoted. Constantly mutating, El Cid has remained alive, notwithstanding Charlton Heston’s death ride into the sunset.