(Brill's Companions To Mediaeval Philology) Irene Zaderenko, Alberto Montaner (Eds.) - A Companion To The Poema de Mio Cid (2018, Brill Academic Pub) PDF

i
A Companion to the Poema de mio Cid
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363755_001

ii
Brill’s Companions to
Mediaeval Philology
VOLUME 1
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bmcp

iii
A Companion to the
Poema de mio Cid
Edited by
Irene Zaderenko
Alberto Montaner
In collaboration with
Peter Mahoney
LEIDEN | BOSTON
iv
Translators: Peter Mahoney (chapters 2, 9, 11, 12, 14, and 15) Javier Pueyo (chapter 4).
Ottavio Di Camillo also contributed to the development of the project and to the edition of the text.
This book has benefited from funds granted by the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness
to the Research Project FFI2012-32331: Formas de la Épica Hispánica: Tradiciones y Contextos Históricos II,
and to the Project FFI2015-64050: Magia, Épica e Historiografía Hispánicas: Relaciones Literarias y
Nomológicas.
Cover illustration: First folio of the extant manuscript of the Poema de mio Cid (Madrid,ms. Vitr/7/17,
fol. 1r. With kind permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018008146
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 2405-903X
isbn 978-90-04-36000-6 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-36375-5 (e-book)
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Contents
Contents v
Contents
Prologue ix
Irene Zaderenko and Alberto Montaner
List of Figures xii
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction 1
Part 1
The Codex and the Author
1 The Poema de mio Cid as Text: Manuscript Transmission and Editorial

Politics 43
Alberto Montaner
2 The Question of Authorship 89

Irene Zaderenko
Part 2
Linguistic Aspects
3 Why was the Poema de mio Cid Written Down the Way It was? 119
Roger Wright
4 A Closer Look at the Poema de mio Cid’s Language 137

Javier Rodríguez Molina
5 On the Arabic Loanwords in the Poema de mio Cid 169

Federico Corriente
Part 3
Poetic Aspects and Structure
6 On the Poetic Technique of the Poema de mio Cid 183

Juan Carlos Bayo Julve
vi Contents
7 “Mio Cid Ruy Díaz odredes lo que dixo”: The Voice of the Narrator, the
Voice of the Characters 207
Salvatore Luongo
8 Oral Expression in the Poema de mio Cid 247

Matthew Bailey
9 Episodic Logic and the Structure of the Poema de mio Cid 271

Leonardo Funes
Part 4
Historical Aspects
10 The Historical Context of the Poema de mio Cid 297

Simon Barton
11 Social Structures and Values in the Poema de mio Cid 322

Georges Martin
12 Legal Aspects of the Poema de mio Cid 347

Eukene Lacarra Lanz
Part 5
The Poema de mio Cid in the Cultural History of Spain
13 The Poema de mio Cid and the Canon of the Spanish Epic
Revisited 379
Mercedes Vaquero
14 The Poema de mio Cid in 13th- and 14th-Century Romance

Historiography 412
Francisco Bautista
15 The Cidian Matter in the 15th Century 463

Fernando Gómez Redondo
Contents vii
16 The Canonization of the Poema de mio Cid from the 18th to the 20th
Century 497
Luis Galván
Select Bibliography 523
Index 527
viii Contents
Zaderenko and Montaner
Prologue ix
Prologue
The Poema de mio Cid (PMC) has long been regarded as one of the major works
of Spanish medieval literature due to its linguistic and literary value, its histori-
cal influence, and its foundational role in Castilian epic poetry. It stands side
by side with Homeric poems, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Old French Chanson
de Roland, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and other such contributions from the epic
genre to the Weltliteratur pantheon.
It is significant that the PMC is the only Spanish epic text that has survived
almost in its entirety in a manuscript devoted solely to the poem. Though the
extant manuscript was produced sometime in the first decades of the 14th cen-
tury, the poem was previously copied in 1207 as indicated in the colophon.
Regarding the relatively late date of the surviving manuscript, it can best be
explained by the growing interest in its hero. In fact, by the end of the 13th
century the poem began to be utilized as a historical document in several ver-
nacular chronicles, a historiographical practice that continued uninterrupted
until the end of the 15th century. During this period, alongside its acceptance
as part of the official history of Spain, the work underwent a series of rewrit-
ings, revisions, and amplifications, generating new fictional narratives as it
moved into other literary genres.
Until today, students and scholars who wanted to embark on a critical read-
ing of the poem were faced with a massive collection of scholarly works
without the guide of a reliable and up-to-date handbook on the PMC. Such an
aid simply did not exist either in English or in any other language. In order to
meet this need, our volume brings together the critical knowledge of a number
of distinguished scholars, whose undisputed contributions to the field of PMC
studies have been widely recognized.
Our aim is to provide an informed introduction to key literary aspects of the
poem (codicological and textual problems, authorship, reception, language,
rhyme and versification, formulaic style, themes, narrative devices, structure),
as well as presenting essential aspects and issues for a more comprehensive
understanding of the work (historical context, ideological motivations, prosifi-
cation in medieval chronicles, the poem’s place in the canon of Spanish
literature). Equally important is to present new critical interpretations that
have been put forward since the 1970s, when scholars started to challenge
Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s theories that had dominated the philological
x Zaderenko And Montaner
discourse since the beginning of the last century. Despite the shortcomings of
Menéndez Pidal’s assumptions, some of his contributions are still valid and
have rightfully been integrated in the latest analytical approaches.
The volume starts with a synoptic introduction that offers an overview of
the poem’s key aspects such as its plot, structure and sources, authorship and
dating, historical context, prosodic features, language and style, performative
traits, and the poem’s place within the discursive spectrum of oral and written
literature. This prelude gives way to sixteen chapters that analyze crucial fea-
tures of the poem, including a critical overview of the most significant studies
on the subject. The essays are organized around five areas of inquiry: the codex
and its author, the poem’s language, poetic features, historical dimensions, and
the poem’s reception from the late Middle Ages through the present. In the
first chapter, Alberto Montaner offers a description of the sole manuscript and
an overview of competing editorial criteria. In the second, Irene Zaderenko
makes a synoptic review of the authorship debate. The chapters by Roger
Wright, Federico Corriente, and Javier Rodríguez Molina present an up-to-date
overview of the linguistic features of the poem: where and why was it written,
a diachronic and synchronic analysis of its distinctive linguistic traits, and the
role of the Andalusian Arabic linguistic and cultural background. Juan Carlos
Bayo, Salvatore Luongo, Matthew Bailey, and Leonardo Funes review the cen-
tral problems in the literary appreciation of the poem as a work of art: poetic
technique, narrative voice, oral aesthetic, and structure. Simon Barton, Georges
Martin, and Eukene Lacarra build upon the massive body of historical scholar-
ship on the Cid and his times to provide an overview of the poem’s historical
background, social values, and legal aspects. The final four chapters by Mer-
cedes Vaquero, Francisco Bautista, Fernando Gómez Redondo, and Luis Galván
give a detailed account of the poem’s fate as documented by the historiograph-
ical treatment of the Cid’s legend in Old Spanish chronicles, reelaborations of
Cidian texts (including the 14th-century poem Mocedades de Rodrigo), the
poem’s echoes in 15th-century literature, and the ideological interpretations
inspired by its 18th-century rediscovery at the dawn of modern Hispanic
studies.
Given the diversity of views presented in this body of work, the reader will
discover very soon that there are conflicting opinions on almost every aspect
of Cidian scholarship. We, as editors, did not want to create the false sense of
a consensus that does not exist and have allowed each author to expose his
or her own point of view. This does not mean that we believe that anything
goes, but ultimately it is the reader who must evaluate the data and reason-
ing of each author and decide who offers the most appropriate solution. Thus,
the volume presents competing views on the prosodic features of the poem
Prologue xi
and how such assumptions guide the way the poem is edited (Bayo’s and
Montaner’s chapters); debates about the balance between oral and written
traditions in the composition and performance of the poem as the work of a
learned author versus a popular jongleur (Zaderenko’s chapter on authorship
versus Bailey’s and Vaquero’s); or how linguistic arguments stand out vis-a-vis
other criteria to ascertain questions of authorship, geographic provenance,
etc. (for example, Rodríguez Molina’s argument – in line with Menéndez
Pidal, Rafael Lapesa, and Diego Catalán – that the language of the author is
more likely from Castilian Extremadura than from Burgos, which contravenes
Zaderenko’s argument about the author as a Benedictine monk from Cardeña).
As a matter of fact, the authors often challenge each other on specific issues
in explicit cross-references to the pertinent chapters: for example, Montaner
challenges Bayo’s concept of deictic dissonance; Rodríguez Molina disagrees
with Wright as to where the copyist of the Cid manuscript was trained and
with Zaderenko on the region of Burgos as the place of origin of the author;
Corriente ends his essay distancing himself from the characterization of the
poem as a “frontier song”, which happens to be advocated by Montaner; and
so on. Such a range of opinions can be confusing at first, but we considered it
necessary to bring together the leading scholars in the field who may agree on
some aspects, yet have discrepant views that embody major trends in modern
Cidian scholarship.
A final remark about the quotations of the PMC. Since the edition to be
quoted is often decided by a particular critical interpretation, we decided that
all citations – with minor changes in punctuation and resolution of abbrevia-
tions – should adhere to the manuscript itself, which is available in facsimile
editions and diplomatic transcriptions, as recorded in the final bibliography.
Given the wide range of issues that are presented, we believe this volume
will be a useful guide for both scholars and students who are interested in the
PMC, and a helpful tool for making this Castilian poem better known by an
international readership of medievalists and literature students eager to
embark on a critical reading of this classic of European belles lettres.
xii List of Figures and Tables List Of Figures And Tables
List of Figures
0.1 First folio of the extant manuscript of the Poema de mio Cid (Madrid, Biblioteca
Nacional de España, ms. Vitr/7/17, fol. 1r) 40
1.1 The complete alphabet employed by the scribe of the extant manuscript of the
Poema de mio Cid 86
1.2 Recovering of the Poema de mio Cid, vv. 1121-24 87
1.3 Spectral curves for the various inks used by the hands involved in fol. 3v of the
Poema de mio Cid codex 88
2.1 The Cid’s tomb in Cardeña. Beginning of the epitaph written under King
Alfonso X’s order c.1272 114
2.2 Historia Roderici (Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, ms. 9/4922, olim A-189,
fol. 77v) 115
3.1 Poema de mio Cid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, ms. Vitr/7/17, fol. 39r 136
7.1 Singular combat (David and Goliath) and open-field battle (the Israelites
against the Philistines) 246
8.1 A juglar (jongleur, singer of tales) acting with a musical instrument 270
9.1 The Cid’s route in exile (from Vivar to Valencia) and the affront route (from
Valencia to Corpes), according to the Poema de mio Cid 293
10.1 Map of the Iberian Peninsula in 1091 320
10.2 Stages of the Reconquest 321
11.1 The king bids farewell to his army that departs for war 346
12.1 Conquest of a city (Jericho). Miniature of the Biblia románica (1162) 376
14.1 Incipit of the Corónica del Çid Ruy Díaz Canpeador, el qual nunca fue vençido,
mas siempre vençedor, manuscript S of the Crónica de Castilla 462
16.1 Title page of the first edition of the Poema de mio Cid, edited by Tomás Antonio
Sánchez 522
Notes
Notes on on Contributors
Contributors xiii
Notes on Contributors
Matthew Bailey
is Professor of Romance Languages at Washington and Lee University. His
publications include The Poetics of Speech in the Medieval Spanish Epic (2010).
Simon Barton (d. 2017)

was Professor of Medieval History at the University of Central Florida. His
recent publications include Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith
Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (2015).
Francisco Bautista (d. 2017)

was a professor in the Department of Spanish Literature at the University of
Salamanca. He is the author of La materia de Francia en la literatura española
medieval (2008) as well as other works on Medieval and Renaissance
literature.

currently is Visiting Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. His
publications on medieval Hispanic literature include editions of the Cantar
de Mio Cid and Gonzalo de Berceo.
Federico Corriente
is Professor Emeritus of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of
Zaragoza. His publications include Poesía dialectal árabe y romance en
Alandalús (1997) and Dictionary of Arabic and Allied Loanwords: Spanish,
Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and Kindred Dialects (2008).
Leonardo Funes
is Professor of Medieval Spanish Literature at the Universidad de Buenos
Aires and specializes in historiography, epic poetry, and early medieval
Castilian narrative. He has published editions of both the PMC and
Mocedades de Rodrigo.
Luis Galván
is Associate Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Navarra. His
recent publications include contributions in El sabio y el ocio, Rewriting the
Middle Ages II, and El “Cantar de mio Cid” y el mundo de la épica.
xiv Notes On Contributors

is Professor of Literary Theory at the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain) and
specializes in medieval literature. His most recent studies are the four-volume
Historia de la prosa castellana (1998-2007) and the two-volume Historia de la
prosa de los Reyes Católicos (2012).
Eukene Lacarra Lanz

is Professor of Medieval Romance Literatures at the Universidad del País
Vasco (Spain). Her most recent publications include “El linaje de Rodrigo
Díaz” (2005) and an edition of the Poema de mio Cid (2002).
Salvatore Luongo
is Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”.
His research focuses on Castilian and Old French epic poems, and narration
brevis. His publications include: Le redazioni C e D del “Charroi de Nîmes”
(1992); and “En manera de un grand señor que fablava con un su consegero”: il
“Conde Lucanor” di Juan Manuel (2006).
Georges Martin
is a professor at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. His area of expertise is
medieval historiography and women’s history. His most recent publications
include Chansons de geste espagnoles (2005) and Mujeres y poderes en la
España medieval (2011).
Alberto Montaner
is Professor of Spanish Literature and chair of the department of Spanish
Philology at the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain). His edition of the Cantar de
mio Cid is considered a landmark of epic studies.

is Associate Professor of Spanish at the Universidad de Granada, Spain. His
main research topic is Old Spanish syntax; he has also written several articles
on the Poema de mio Cid.
Mercedes Vaquero
is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University. Her works include:
El “Poema de Fernán González” en un “Memorial de Historias” (2008), and La
mujer en la épica castellano-leonesa (2005).
Notes on Contributors xv
Roger Wright
Emeritus Professor of Spanish at the University of Liverpool, England,
researched and taught courses on the language, history, and oral literature of
medieval Spain, from 1972 to 2008.
Irene Zaderenko
is Professor of Spanish Literature at Boston University. She specializes in
Spanish epic poetry, and her recent publications include Problemas de
autoría, de estructura y de fuentes en el “Poema de mio Cid” (1998) and El
monasterio de Cardeña y el inicio de la épica cidiana (2013).
xvi Notes On Contributors
Introduction Zaderenko and Montaner
Introduction 1
Introduction
The anonymous Poema de mio Cid (c.1200) recounts the deeds of Rodrigo “Ruy”
Díaz de Vivar, known as El Campeador (the Battler) and as El Cid (from the
Andalusi Arabic Sídi, “My Lord”). The poem is comprised of more than 3,700
lines and, based on internal evidence, is usually divided into three parts called
cantares (songs).
1 The Plot
First Cantar
King Alfonso has banished the Cid from Castile after being persuaded by envi-
ous courtiers, led by Count García Ordóñez, that the Cid had kept for himself a
portion of the tribute he was sent to collect from a Moorish vassal. As the poem
opens, the Cid sadly glances around his home in the town of Vivar, which has
been quickly stripped for his unplanned departure. With a few followers, he
rides to the neighboring town of Burgos, where the adults cower behind closed
shutters and doors, while a nine-year-old girl tells him that as per royal com-
mand nobody can offer him shelter or provisions. She asks him to move along
in peace and with their blessing.
The Cid sets up camp on the bank of a nearby river. There he is joined by a
knight from Burgos, Martín Antolínez, who pawns a set of chests purportedly
containing Moorish gold but are actually filled with sand to the Jewish mon-
eylenders, Raquel and Vidas. The Cid then goes to the Monastery of San Pedro
de Cardeña, where he has arranged to shelter his wife, Doña Jimena, and their
two daughters. The following night he has a dream in which the Archangel
Gabriel assures him that all will turn out well. The next day he crosses the
frontier between Castile and the Muslim kingdom of Toledo and begins the
life of a warrior in exile. He launches his first campaign in the Henares River
Valley. While he takes the town of Castejón, whose defeated residents praise
his moderation and fairness, his chief lieutenant, Álvar Fáñez, carries out raids
downstream. Both operations pay off handsomely, and the Cid advances to a
second campaign in the Jalón River Basin. He extracts tribute from a succes-
sion of villages and takes the strategic town of Alcocer. The Moors seek the aid
of King Tamín of Valencia, who sends his two finest generals, Fáriz and Galve,
to fight the Cid, yet they are routed. Rodrigo asks Álvar Fáñez to take a portion

2 zaderenko And Montaner
of the spoils to King Alfonso as a gift in a first attempt toward winning his par-
don. He proceeds down the valley of the Jiloca River and then to the region of
the Maestrazgo, which is under the protection of the count of Barcelona. The
count confronts him with a large but rather effete army. Once again, the Cid
emerges triumphant thanks to his hearty men and shrewd battle tactics. The
spoils include the sword Colada, which is worth one thousand marks of silver.
The count is taken captive and goes on a hunger strike, but he is cajoled by his
jovial host into joining the celebration of his own defeat. Rodrigo releases him
unharmed and generously outfits him for his return home.
Second Cantar
The Cid begins his campaign in the eastern marches. He is no longer interested
in pillaging and the temporary occupation of strongholds; rather, his sights are
set on conquering the entire region of Valencia, which he wishes to make a
homestead and family possession. After Rodrigo takes Murviedro (modern
Sagunto), Moors from Valencia try to halt his advance but the Cid’s troops
defeat them resoundingly. After three years, the Cid and his band have taken
the provincial seaboard as far as the coast, leaving the city of Valencia cut off.
At last, the city is starved into surrendering. When the news reaches Seville, the
Moorish king unsuccessfully attempts to retake Valencia.
The Cid appoints Jerónimo, a French bishop who is also a skilled swords-
man, to administer Valencia. Once again, Rodrigo sends Álvar Fáñez to present
King Alfonso with gifts and to request permission to allow his family to join
him in Valencia. The mission is a success, but it provokes the envy and greed of
some members of the court, including the young Infantes of Carrión, Diego
and Fernando. Later, they propose marriage to the Cid’s daughters, hoping to
gain a portion of Rodrigo’s wealth.
Under the protection of Álvar Fáñez, the Cid’s wife and daughters arrive in
Valencia to great rejoicing. The interlude of calm and celebration is shattered
by an assault led by King Yúcef of Morocco, which unleashes the greatest battle
described in the Poema de mio Cid. At the hero’s request, Jimena and the girls
watch the bloody engagement from the city battlements so they can see
“cómmo se gana el pan” (v. 1643). After employing a clever tactic, the Cid wins
the battle. He presents himself to the women with courtly gestures, showing
them his bloodied sword and sweating horse. He modestly gives thanks to God
for the victory.
The massive booty taken from the king of Morocco allows the Cid to send a
third and even greater gift to King Alfonso, who grants his pardon and takes
personal responsibility for arranging the marriage between the Infantes of
Carrión and the Cid’s daughters. The reconciliation of the monarch and
Introduction 3
Rodrigo takes place in a solemn assembly of the court on the bank of the Tagus
River, where feudal ties are restored and magnificent gifts are exchanged.
Afterward, the Cid and his men return to Valencia with the Infantes and many
Castilian noblemen. Over a two-week span, the joint weddings are celebrated
with sumptuous feasting and games.
Third Cantar
One day, the Cid’s lion escapes from its cage. The Infantes’ frantic scramble for
safety provokes laughter and derision among Rodrigo’s men, who form a
human shield between the beast and their sleeping lord. The Cid awakes,
calmly leads the lion by the mane back to its cage, and orders those who wit-
nessed the Infantes’ pitiful display to remain silent. Their cowardice is soon
reaffirmed, however, when King Bucar’s forces arrive from Morocco in an effort
to retake the city. During the battle, the Cid’s men perform admirably, but
Diego and Fernando flee from the enemy. The spoils include the sword Tizón,
worth 1,000 marks of gold.
The Infantes leave Valencia under the pretext of taking their wives to see
their new landholdings in Carrión, but they actually plan to dishonor them
along the way. After spending a final night in the Corpes Oak Grove, they beat
their wives savagely. The Cid’s daughters plead for martyrdom, but the Infantes
first whip them until they lose consciousness and then abandon them in the
wilderness.
Fortunately, the girls’ cousin, Félez Muñoz, has been trailing the party. He
arrives on the scene, assists the young women, and sends word of the attack
back to their father. Rodrigo sends Muño Gustioz to King Alfonso to demand
justice. The monarch convenes a royal judicial court in Toledo where the Cid
asks the Infantes to return the swords Colada and Tizón, which he had given
them when they left Valencia. Thinking that they have gotten off lightly, the
Infantes return the swords. Next, the Cid demands repayment of the dowry he
had bestowed upon the young men upon departing from Valencia. The money
has already been spent, and the Infantes are forced to draw on the resources of
their extended family and lands. Finally, Rodrigo demands satisfaction in the
form of judicial duels, pitting three of his knights against the Infantes and their
blustering brother, Asur González. The brothers balk because their opponents
will be armed with the famous blades that the Cid has just repossessed, but
after having conceded their faults, they are unable to back out. Three weeks
later, a public trial by combat takes place in Carrión. The Cid’s champions
emerge victorious and, although the vanquished are allowed to live, they are
disgraced. Envoys dispatched by the princes of Navarre and Aragon arrive
seeking the hands of the Cid’s abandoned daughters. Thus, the Cid recovers his
honor and grafts his family line onto those of Spain’s principal rising dynasties.
Nothing is left to tell, the poet concludes, except that Rodrigo died peacefully
at home on the solemn feast of Pentecost.
2 The Historical Rodrigo Díaz1
The poem is based on the real-life adventures of Rodrigo Díaz, who was born
between 1045 and 1049 in Vivar and raised in the court of Fernando I of Castile
and León. In his youth, he was a member of the schola regis (royal squad) and
was part of the inner circle of Sancho II, who became king in 1065. King Sancho
died in 1072, and his brother succeeded him to the throne as Alfonso VI. King
Alfonso continued to show favor to Rodrigo, marrying him to a member of the
royal family, Doña Jimena, and sending him as the king’s ambassador to the
Moorish kingdom of Seville in 1079. The following year, however, the Cid car-
ried out an unauthorized military operation in the kingdom of Toledo, and
Alfonso banished him in 1081. Rodrigo placed himself in the service of the
Moorish king of Zaragoza and achieved renown as a military leader.
He finally made peace with Alfonso and returned to Castile in 1086. The king
sent him on expeditions to the realm of Valencia, but in 1089 a new falling out
resulted in the Cid’s second and permanent exile. He then decided to establish
a protectorate over Eastern Iberia and ultimately conquer it in his own name,
attacking the Moorish kingdom of Valencia and seizing its capital in 1094. He
was given the honorific Arabic appellation Sídi or “My Lord”, origin of his
Castilian surname Mio Cid. Consequently, he became an autonomous feudal
lord, who adopted the title of Prince. As such, he was able to marry his daugh-
ter María to Ramiro, lord of Monzón, a member of the royal house of Navarre,
and his other daughter, Cristina, to Ramón Berenguer III, the count of
Barcelona. After conquering more lands, Rodrigo died of natural causes in
1099. His wife Jimena maintained control of Valencia until 1102, when a
renewed onslaught of the Almoravids – a Moroccan tribe that invaded the
Iberian Peninsula in 1090 – forced the Christians to abandon the city. Jimena
1 Menéndez Pidal’s La España del Cid is still an essential work in order to establish the biography
of Rodrigo Díaz because of both the information the scholar garners and the sources he edits.
However, it is necessary to take into consideration the clarifications provided by Horrent,
Historia y poesía; Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid; Martínez Diez, El Cid histórico, and Peña Pérez,
El Cid Campeador, as well as the fundamental studies by Reilly, The kingdom of Leon-Castilla,
and Gambra, Alfonso VI, on the reign of King Alfonso VI of Castile and León. Cf. also Barton
and Fletcher, The World of El Cid.
Introduction 5
took her husband’s remains to the Benedictine Monastery of San Pedro de

Cardeña near Burgos, where he was buried.
The Poema de mio Cid takes Rodrigo Díaz’s first exile as its starting point,
and, at first glance, it seems that it follows Rodrigo’s career rather faithfully
from 1089 onward, with the exception of some colorful details. Nevertheless,
there is much fiction in the poem. There were probably some fictional details
already in its sources, but others were undoubtedly the poet’s invention.
Although the story takes place in the locations of his first exile, all the political
and military actions that occur prior to the campaign of Valencia are highly
fictionalized. The events that transpire between the battle of Tévar and the
conquest of Valencia are the closest to history, but almost everything after that
lacks historical foundation. The plot that develops after the Cid’s daughters
marry the Infantes of Carrión is merely the product of poetical imagination.
3 Authorship and Date of Composition
The relationship between truth and fiction in the Poema de mio Cid has played
a central role in the debate over the poem’s authorship and date of composi-
tion. Ramón Menéndez Pidal first regarded the poem as the work of a juglar
(jongleur, minstrel, singer of tales) from Medinaceli – a Castilian town on the
border of Muslim-held Spain – who composed the poem around 1140, less than
half a century after the Cid’s death, and who was faithful to historical events.2
Many years later, to account for shifts in style and content, Menéndez Pidal
posited the existence of two juglares: the first one, who was associated with
San Esteban de Gormaz, a town not far from Medinaceli, composed the more
historical sections of the poem around 1110; the second one, the Medinaceli
juglar, added the more fictional features around 1140.3 Menéndez Pidal’s the-
ory about the type of person the author was and his geographical origin has
been embraced by oralists such as Joseph Duggan, who maintain that the
poem was improvised by a juglar and copied down from dictation.4
At the other pole was the British scholar Colin Smith,5 who defended the
authority of the colophon of the extant manuscript:
2 Menéndez Pidal, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, vol. 1, pp. 71-72.

3 Menéndez Pidal, En torno, pp. 153-54.
4 Duggan, The “Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 124-42. He proposes a more nuanced approach in “The
interface”.
5 Smith, The Making.
Quien escrivió este libro, dél’ Dios paraíso, ¡amén!

Per Abbat le escrivió en el mes de mayo
en era de mill e CC e XLV años. (3731-33)
The “Spanish Era” is dated from 38 bc; thus, the year 1245 in the colophon is
equivalent to 1207 ad. According to Smith, Per Abbat was the author of the
Poema de mio Cid and a legal expert who knew of Rodrigo Díaz’s life from archi-
val documents. He was an educated man, and his poem was modeled on
French chansons de geste as well as on classical and medieval Latin precursors.
In his final publications on this matter, Smith conceded that Per Abbat was
probably the copyist and not the author of the poem. He insisted, however,
that the author, whoever he was, must have been an educated man familiar
with the law who composed the poem around 1207.6 Although contemporary
critics no longer attempt to name the author, they usually accept the later dat-
ing of the poem and the notion of a more or less learned poet who composed
his verses in writing rather than orally.
Until now, none of the proposals for placing the author in a specific locale
has been supported by solid arguments. Menéndez Pidal’s theories were based
on the belief that the geographic details describing the regions of San Esteban
de Gormaz and Medinaceli were the product of an author or authors who orig-
inated from those towns. But a poet could know those details from hearing or
even reading about them, and there is just as much precision about other areas
like the region around Calatayud and the basin of the Jiloca River.
According to Alberto Montaner,7 the element that most clearly points to a
specific geographical area is the persistent awareness of the laws governing
frontier life, in particular, the regulations established in the Fuero de Cuenca
(c.1189-93). This is consistent with the presence of a strong “frontier spirit”,
which allowed the individuals to change their social position beyond the nar-
row limits of the estate into which they were born (as shown in vv. 1213-15). This
suggests that the author may have been an inhabitant (perhaps a lawyer) of the
southeast borderlands of Castile, that is to say, somewhere from Toledo in the
south to Cuenca in the east.8 The place names of this area are recorded with
unusual precision, and it is where the Cid wages his first campaigns after going
into exile. While these events are apparently fictitious, they might echo memo-
ries of the historical role played by Álvar Fáñez in this frontier region.
6 Smith, “Towards a Reconciliation”.

7 Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 304-09 (but see, in general, pp. 258-367).
8 This hypothesis is consistent with the linguistic data; see Rodríguez Molina’s and Corriente’s
chapters in this volume.
Introduction 7
On the other hand, Irene Zaderenko emphasizes the learned aspects of the
author and his use of Latin and French sources. According to her, if we also
consider the important role that Cardeña plays in the Poema de mio Cid, it can
be argued that the text was composed in the Castilian monastery, the place
where the Cid’s remains were venerated and where his cult was kept alive by
the monks even beyond the Middle Ages.9
Scholars such as Jules Horrent defended Menéndez Pidal’s notion of succes-
sive reworkings of the poem. This stance presupposes a gradual evolution of
the narrative from an early oral version – which was shorter and closer to the
historical events – that was later retold many times until it reached the written
version that exists today. However, the extant poem does not give the impres-
sion of a work cobbled together over time by singers of tales from preexisting
texts. On the contrary, it displays an essential unity of plot, style, and purpose.
It is probably the work of an author familiar with traditional Spanish epic, the
new French style, and the law, as well as someone who also had certain knowl-
edge of Latin letters.
The only substantial argument for the 1140 date is the reference to the Cid in
the Prefatio de Almaria (also known as the Poema de Almería), a poem com-
posed c.1150 about the siege of Almería by the troops of the Leonese emperor
Alfonso VII in 1147. This poem hails the hero as “Ipse Rodericus, Meo Cidi sepe
vocatus, / de quo cantatur quod ab hostibus haud superatur” (The very Rodrigo,
often called My Cid, / of whom it is sung that he was never defeated by his
enemies). This mention of a song about the Cid has led several scholars to
believe that the Poema de mio Cid was sung by the late 1140s. Although in
Medieval Latin these verses could simply mean “it is well known that he was
never defeated”,10 they provide some evidence to argue that there was an epic
poem on the Cid at that time. Nevertheless, since internal evidence leads to a
later dating of the Poema de mio Cid, the reference in the Prefatio de Almaria
could be to some earlier tribute to the Cid.
This view seems the most plausible, since there is strong evidence suggest-
ing that the Poema de mio Cid was composed toward the end of the 12th
century: neither the sobregonel (open skirt) worn by the knights nor the cuber-
turas (drapery) covering their horses are documented in the Iberian Peninsula
before 1186. Likewise, armas de señal (heraldic devices) were not known in
Spanish lands until that time. The same holds true for two key terms that
describe social relations: fijodalgo (knight of hereditary rank, literally “son of
property”) and rico omne (lord, literally “man of wealth”), which first appeared
9 Zaderenko, El monasterio de Cardeña. See also her chapter in this volume.

10 See Montaner and Escobar, eds., Carmen Campidoctoris, pp. 102-06.
in documents dating to 1177 and c.1200, respectively. During this same period,
monarchs acquired the title of señor natural (lord by birth), meaning that the
king was the immediate and common sovereign of all natives of his kingdom,
independent of bonds of vassalage. This notion justifies the Cid’s loyalty to the
monarch even during his exile when he was not King Alfonso’s vassal.
An important aspect of the hero’s character is his treatment of the Moors he
defeats: in the Poema de mio Cid, there is no ethos of “crusade” with its abso-
lutes of conversion or death. Muslims are targets of opportunity for practical
reasons, such as simple survival and, in the long run, because they are a source
of wealth. Religious confrontation is present in the poem only as an incidental
factor, and two Muslim groups are clearly differentiated: the residents of
Andalusia and the North Africans who invaded the peninsula in the 11th and
12th centuries. Andalusian Moors were allowed to live as neighbors of the
Christians and were labeled moros de paz – Muslims who fell under the terms
of capitulations or peace treaties. This social label emerged in the 11th century,
but invasions by fundamentalist Moroccan tribes – the Almoravids in 1093 and
the Almohades in 1146 – led to the expulsion of Muslim populations from
newly conquered territories. Only at the end of the 12th century was the atti-
tude of tolerance reflected in the poem reinstated, and communities of
mudéjares (Muslims living under the authority of Christian overlords) folded
back into the social landscape.
This change in attitude toward the Moors coincides with an important
renewal of Castilian law culminating in the fueros de extremadura (Law Codes
of the Frontier), as in the aforementioned Fuero de Cuenca, which were pro-
mulgated from 1185 onward, and the compilation of privileges for the nobility
known as the Fuero Viejo de Castilla, the first draft of which was redacted at the
beginning of the 13th century. The Poema de mio Cid alludes to these new laws
in matters central to its plot, such as the rights and duties of knights, the orga-
nization of war bands, the fair distribution of booty, judicial challenges
between nobles, etc. These features are not casual additions to the poem, but
thematic and structural building blocks independent of any inherited narra-
tive tradition. Altogether, they make it possible to date the Poema de mio Cid to
c.1200.11
11 See Barton’s chapter in this volume.

Introduction 9
4 The Poet’s Sources
It is difficult to ascertain where the poet obtained the historical data about the
hero a century after Rodrigo Díaz died. Scholars have pointed to several possi-
ble sources: now-lost poems about the Cid’s exploits informed by eyewitness
testimonies that were composed during or shortly after his lifetime; legal docu-
ments, such as those now held at the Cathedral of Burgos and the Diocesan
Museum of Salamanca; and the Historia Roderici, a fairly complete Latin biog-
raphy of the hero written between 1185 and 1190. To those usually alleged
sources, oral history or oral historic traditions available at that time must be
added.
The hypothesis of primitive now-lost poems is weakened by the lack of evi-
dence proving such cantares noticieros or news-bearing songs existed. This
idea, long defended by Menéndez Pidal,12 was supported by the alleged histo-
ricity of most of the Castilian epics recorded in later historiographical works,
especially the archaic Cycle of the Counts of Castile that referred to the period
between 942 and 1037. Since those texts were written down in the 13th century,
the only way to explain their historicity was to trace their origin back to early
poems contemporary to the events they narrate. Nevertheless, their alleged
accuracy has been proven wrong.13 In short, there is no direct or indirect proof
that such poems existed.14
Despite the absence of cantos noticieros, it is probable that there were epic
poems about the Cid prior to the extant Poema de mio Cid. As we have seen, the
Prefatio de Almaria offers sufficient, if not conclusive, evidence to argue that
there was an epic song about the Cid around 1150. On the other hand, the
Chronica Naiarensis, a Latin chronicle from about 1190, offers an account of the
siege of Zamora and the murder of King Sancho II that is epic in tone in which
the Cid plays an important role. It is probable, then, that this narration was
based on an epic poem that was at least as old as our Poema de mio Cid.15 In any
12 Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid, II, pp. 570-71; Poesía juglaresca y juglares, pp. 328-29;
En torno al “Poema del Cid”, p. 225; La épica medieval española, pp. 123-26 and 169-71.
According to him, the canto noticiero was a short epic poem contemporaneous of the
events narrated and episodic in character.
13 See Martínez Diez, “Historia y ficción en la épica medieval castellana” and “El Cantar de
los siete infantes de Lara: la historia y la leyenda”; Escalona, “Épica, crónicas y genealogías:
En torno a la historicidad de la Leyenda de los infantes de Lara”.
14 See Higashi, “Una nota a propósito de los cantos noticieros en el ciclo cidiano”, and Cata-
lán, La épica española, p. 445.
15 This was proposed by Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca, p. 327, and La épica medieval
española, pp. 532-39. See now Bautista “Sancho II y Rodrigo Campeador en la Chronica
case, those sources prove that there was already a legendary tradition, whether
poetic or not, which had turned the Cid into an epic hero.
Medieval documents generally do not offer much grist for narratives of epic
proportions. The known documents related to the Cid himself, especially his
marriage contract with Jimena and the donations to the cathedral of Valencia
made by both spouses,16 can hardly provide more than the name of some char-
acters, most of which do not coincide with those offered by the Poema de mio
Cid. Due to this and other differences, it is unlikely that the poet knew those
documents.17 If he had access to the Cid’s personal archive, which seems to still
have been preserved at the end of 12th century,18 he could have found more
useful data related to the battles of Morella (1084) and Tévar (1090), or to the
failed military operation in Aledo, which caused the Cid’s second banishment
(1089). The Poema de mio Cid, however, does not show the slightest evidence of
such knowledge. Still, the inclusion of historical characters who had nothing to
do with the Cid yet were his near contemporaries suggests a familiarity with
documents of that time, since their names could not have been remembered
in the tradition related to the Castilian hero.
The third possibility is highly promising given the similarities between the
Historia Roderici and the Poema de mio Cid, particularly regarding the conquest
of Valencia.19 The principal objection to such a connection is the poem’s
silence about the Cid’s career as a hired sword under the orders of the king of
Zaragoza, a topic that the Historia Roderici covers at length. However, the same
selectivity is seen in two texts that most certainly derive from the Latin bio-
graphy: the Linage de Rodric Díaz, a Navarrese genealogy accompanied by a
biographical sketch of the hero; and the Carmen Campidoctoris, a Latin pane-
gyric recounting some of the Cid’s battles. Since both compositions can be
naierensis”, and Montaner, “Lo épico y lo historiográfico en el relato alfonsí del Cerco de
Zamora”, who postulates that the poem known through Alfonso X’s Estoria de España is a
reworking of the subject made c.1200-20 influenced by the Poema de mio Cid.
16 Archivo de la Catedral de Burgos, vol. 77, no. 947, and Archivo de la Catedral de Sala-
manca, caja 43, legajo 2, no. 71 (1101) and 72 (1098); there are available facsimile editions
with transcriptions and studies by José Luis Martín Martín, Documentos del Cid y Dña.
Gimena, and García Gil and Molinero Hernando, Carta de Arras del Cid: Siglo XI. An edi-
tion of other documents and a valuable study of the whole documentation related to the
Cid is offered by Panizo Santos, Documentos del Cid en el Archivo Histórico Nacional.
17 For a different view on the poetic use of the marriage contract, see Zaderenko, “¿El autor
del Poema de mio Cid conocía la ‘Carta de arras’?”.
18 About the constitution and fate of the Cid’s personal archive, see Montaner, “La Historia
Roderici y el archivo cidiano”.
19 See Luongo’s recent analysis, “El discutido influjo de la Historia Roderici”.
Introduction 11
dated to c.1200, it was likely during the final years of the 12th century when the
Cid became the Christian military leader par excellence in the collective mem-
ory, a fact that would encourage the suppression of any reference to his services
to a Muslim king.
Finally, we must consider oral history, that is, the verbal transmission of
more or less ample details about an episode or an individual preserved through
several generations. There were still oral references about events that occurred
during Rodrigo Díaz’s lifetime that circulated during the reign of King Alfonso
X, whose team of scholars were collecting materials around 1270 for the Estoria
de España where several details informed by “los que cuentan de lo muy anci-
ano” are recorded.20 Some seventy years earlier, the author of the Poema de mio
Cid could have gathered with even more ease this sort of oral history that com-
bined bits of historical fact with anecdotes about the hero’s deeds. It is probable
that by the end of the 12th century this oral history had largely merged with the
aforementioned epic tradition about the Cid.
We may conclude that the poet used, in a masterful way, materials from
the Historia Roderici as well as oral history. He surely knew some earlier epic
legend or poem about the Cid’s exploits, but probably took advantage of con-
temporary documents as well. These sources not only provided him with the
few accurate historical data which the Poema de mio Cid offers, but, more
interestingly, a certain model of the Cid as a hero. He appears as a loyal and
judicious vassal (in contrast with the foolish behavior of King Sancho II in the
Chronica Naiarensis).21 He is also loyal to King Alfonso VI, although the mon-
arch banishes him due to slanderous accusations (Historia Roderici, Carmen
Campidoctoris, Linage de Rodric Diaz). Despite being exiled, the Cid does not
react against his king, but becomes a border hero who defeats both Christian
counts and Muslim kings (Prefatio de Almaria, Carmen Campidoctoris, Linage
de Rodric Diaz), and an outstanding general who overcomes the dreaded
Almoravids (Historia Roderici, Linage de Rodric Diaz) and conquers such an
important city as Valencia (Prefatio de Almaria, Historia Roderici, Linage de
Rodric Diaz). Not only these facts, but also the combination of sapientia et for-
titudo, that is to say, prudence and bravery, is typical of the Cid in these works
as well as in the poem.22
20 Menéndez Pidal, ed., Primera crónica general de España, vol. II, p. 876.
21 He is also portrayed as King Alfonso VI’s wise counsellor in the collection of apocrypha
that form the Corpus Licinanum, near 1220; cf. Montaner, “El apócrifo del abad Lecenio”.
22 In her chapter of this volume, Mercedes Vaquero hypothesizes that the Poema de mio Cid
breaks with a previous Cidian tradition in which he was portrayed as a rebellious vassal,
which we find in later sources like the 14th-century epic poem Mocedades de Rodrigo and
5 A Twofold Plot23
The Poema de mio Cid could have ended satisfactorily after the conquest of
Valencia once the Cid receives the royal pardon. But the poet prolonged the
work with fictitious episodes that enhance the hero’s stature and conclude
with his daughters’ second marriage – this time to royal figures –, which is a
legendary version of their actual fate. This well-crafted fusion of history and
fiction resulted in a finely plotted narrative with two thematic axes: the Cid’s
recuperation of his position in Castilian society after reconciling with King
Alfonso, and the restoration of his familial honor after the Infantes of Carrión
beat his daughters. This twofold plot describes a W-shaped trajectory.24 In each
case, a dramatic conflict – first, the exile, and then the affront to his daughters
– breaks a state of equilibrium that results in the abasement of the hero, who
not only recovers lost ground but achieves an even higher position. From the
loss of the king’s favor and the forfeiture of his lands and property, the Cid
winds his way through a series of adventures and becomes lord of Valencia, so
powerful that he can treat his king nearly as an equal. Later, after his daughters
are attacked and abandoned, the Cid attains an even higher status when the
young women marry the crown princes of Navarre and Aragon.
especially the 15th-century romances or ballads. However, the aforementioned 12th- or

early 13th-century sources congruently present a character that is very similar to the hero
of the Poema de mio Cid. In his recent book Rodrigo Díaz, del hombre al mito, Óscar Martín
reaches an analogous conclusion and points out that the Cid’s representation in the poem
is similar to the one in earlier sources. He also believes the break with previous traditions
occurs more in the “second plot”, which is centered on the Cid’s recently acquired social
standing and the new legal procedures for administering justice. Furthermore, Martín
shows that in the more traditional plot there is an increased downplay of the king’s emo-
tional hostility towards Rodrigo. He points out that the representation of both king and
vassal is shaped by new military models as well as the changing atmosphere brought
about by the war between Muslims and Christians at the beginning of the 13th century.
23 See Funes’ chapter in this volume for a more detailed account of the narrative structure
of the poem.
24 This is the most accepted opinion since Deyermond published “Structural and Stylistic
Patterns in the Cantar de Mio Cid”, a landmark in the internal analysis of the Poema de mio
Cid. Funes thinks that an N-shaped trajectory better reflects the poem’s bipartite struc-
ture, since there is not an initial positive situation (Poema de mio Cid, p. xxxviii, and his
chapter in this volume). This is true as far as the poem starts in medias res. However, as the
very poem makes clear, before his banishment the Cid enjoyed an elevated social posi-
tion, for he had a manor house and vassals, and had served King Alfonso as ambassador
to the Moorish King of Seville. Since he is not an “unpromising hero” or a “Cinderella man”
at the beginning, the full plot can be diagrammed as a W.
Introduction 13
These two sequences are not merely juxtaposed: the second flows directly
from the first. In effect, the Cid’s triumphs make his reconciliation with the
king possible and incite the Infantes to marry his daughters; the king pardons
the Cid after learning of the Infantes’ intentions, perhaps because the proposal
reassures him that the court would welcome the reconciliation.25 In any case,
the king pursues the arrangement because he thinks that betrothals to high-
born grooms show favor to the Cid. On the other hand, the Cid is keenly aware
from the outset that his banishment will make it difficult to arrange appropri-
ate marriages for his daughters. After the Infantes’ proposal is made, he has
misgivings about such a union and agrees only to comply with the request of
his lord. At the end, the two narratives are brought together when those who
defamed the Cid and caused his exile join with the Infantes of Carrión and
their family together united by the slanderers’ leader, Count García Ordóñez,
who acts as an advocate for Diego and Fernando in court. Thus, they all suffer
a defeat before the royal magistrate and in the judicial battle.
6 Society and Ideology26
In addition to the interconnection of the plots, the two narratives display an

unusual ideological cohesion. During this period, the higher nobility of the
heartland, the region where the Cid’s enemies held sway, lived off retainers’
payments and based their privileged position on their families’ prestige and
hereditary rights. The colonizers of the frontier lands, in contrast, owed an
important part of their wealth to the looting of the Muslim territories. In rec-
ognition of the dangerous situation in which they lived and the losses they
suffered, these low-ranking squires and peasants could be elevated to the status
of knight, thus securing some entitlements enjoyed by the nobility: exemption
from taxes, some privileges related to law procedures, and, in particular, the
honor inherent to knighthood. Men of the frontier wanted their merit recog-
nized since their wealth was earned through hard work, not inherited as was
the case among the northern aristocracy of landlords.
The historical Cid was not a man of the frontier in this way, but his life’s
upheavals and triumphs turned into literature could exemplify the virtues
needed to fight the Moors and the possibility of shining on one’s own, not
merely reflecting the glory of ancient exploits and bloodline. However, it would
be anachronistic to speak of a democratic spirit in the Poema de mio Cid since
25 In their respective chapters, Funes and Martin offer different views of this storyline.
26 On these aspects, see Barton’s and Martin’s chapters in this volume.
the poet does not reject the notion of inherited nobility. What is exalted is the
limited social mobility that allows a peasant to become a knight, and a knight
to join the highest circles of the nobility by virtue of his own achievements.
These ideas are evident in the exile narrative. When the Cid leaves Castile,
he is determined to win the king’s pardon with the booty he gains in a series of
bellicose adventures. The monarch is thereby put on notice that the former
vassal has not been neutralized: he is powerful and on the move, and it would
be a good idea to count on him again. Furthermore, even though the Cid is no
longer bound by the rules of vassalage, he sends King Alfonso a share of the
spoils as required by feudal law. This action carries two implications: whoever
behaves in this way never would have embezzled the king as his accusers claim,
and despite the unjust treatment he has received, he remains loyal to the mon-
arch. The Cid’s offerings become larger and larger, proof of his steady climb,
and they successfully sway King Alfonso and eventually win his pardon. The
Cid’s men also earn tangible benefits from their efforts:
Los que fueron de pie cavalleros se fazen;

el oro e la plata ¿quién vos lo podrié contar?
Todos eran ricos quantos que allí ha. (1213-15)
The way in which the hero reestablishes himself in the king’s eyes is a perfect
expression of the aforementioned “frontier spirit”. This ethos is, perhaps, less
apparent in the second part of the poem, but it still underlies the motivations
of the characters. For example, the Infantes are cast as scions of the court who
are very proud of their lineage, yet they look forward to marrying the Cid’s
daughters as the means of tapping into the Cid’s wealth; in return, Rodrigo and
his family will receive the honor of being related to members of the king’s
inner circle. The Infantes’ proposal awakens the distrust of the hero, who none-
theless deals with his sons-in-law in good faith. But the pretentious Infantes
soil their expensive clothing while seeking cover from the escaped lion. Their
cowardice is evidenced again in the battle against King Bucar, and it is finally
confirmed when they seek vengeance on helpless victims – the Cid’s daughters
– instead of challenging Rodrigo and his lieutenants. The opposition between
the two brothers and the Cid’s knights heightens the difference between the
lofty nobles who cling to the past but cannot prove themselves on the battle-
field, and the warriors of the frontier whose swordsmanship has been proved
time and again. This contrast also extends to their personal finances: the
Infantes are proud of their lands in Carrión but are cash poor, while the Cid
and his followers, who endured the confiscation of their estates in Castile, owe
their abundant money and possessions to their efforts in the war against the
Moors.
Introduction 15
The confrontation between the two groups and the different ideologies they
represent reaches its climax at the end of the poem when those who had
maligned the Cid and the perpetrators of the abuse against his daughters
gather in a single faction at the royal court, where the hero, with the king’s sup-
port, defeats his foes and, symbolically, the social order they represent. In the
first part of the story, the Cid proved he could recover his public honor by fight-
ing the Moors; he now shows he is equally capable of vindicating his private
honor by virtue of his command of legal procedures. By defeating his slander-
ous foes, he demonstrates that in times of both war and peace his core values
are preferable to those of a jealous and cowardly aristocracy. That stagnant
caste, sheltered too long behind the battlements of pride and lordly privilege,
is incapable of accomplishing anything on its own and is ultimately debased
before the Cid and his band, who are humbler in origin but morally and mar-
tially superior to the aristocrats.
7 Legal Aspects27
The outcome of the story makes it clear that the poem’s author relies on judi-
cial principles of a specific period of time for both his ideology and his aesthetic
principles. The initial conflict is expressed in legal terms since the Cid is ban-
ished as a penalty for incurring the ira regis (royal wrath). This “wrath” was not
just the monarch’s personal feeling, but it was chiefly a legal status. It implied
the rupture of the bond of vassalage between the king and his subject, and the
forced departure of the latter from the king’s lands. It was a sentence without
appeal, since the condemned party had no higher authority to whom he might
plead his case. Although it was applied in cases of crimes committed against
the monarch or the kingdom, such as rebellion or defiance of a royal mandate,
in the poem it arises from false accusations made by mestureros (slanderers)
against someone who can do nothing to reverse the king’s decision.
To make matters worse, the poem describes unusually harsh conditions of
banishment. First, the Cid’s property is confiscated. Historically, this happened
only in cases of treason, which is not the case here. Second, the exiled typically
had thirty days to set out with his mesnada (military retinue); in the poem, the
Cid is given only nine days. Third, the inhabitants of Burgos are forbidden to
provision the Cid and his companions. All these details show a vengeful appli-
cation of the law in its fullest rigor, which stresses the obstacles the hero must
overcome and heightens his stature in the process. The severity of the sentence
27 See Lacarra’s chapter in this volume for more details.

serves a dark judgment on this medieval institution, depicting the royal wrath
as a biased maneuver used by unworthy courtiers against enemies who cannot
defend themselves. This negative presentation does not amount to an outright
condemnation of the practice, but does resonate with the sentiment of the
cortes (advisory assembly) of the kingdom of León, where Alfonso IX swore in
1188 that anyone accused by mestureros would have the right to be heard in his
own defense.
Faced with the injustice committed against him, the Cid could have risen up
against the king like the rebel vassals who frequently appear in French epic
poems of the same period. Instead, the Castilian hero accepts the royal pre-
rogatives and is determined to regain the king’s favor. According to the Fuero
Viejo de Castilla, if the exiled and his knights were to attack the king’s lands
while serving another lord, they were obliged to provide the monarch with a
portion of the booty. Despite the absence of such an obligation since the Cid
never attacks the king’s lands, Rodrigo still sends a share of his winnings to
Alfonso. Given his beleaguered circumstances, this practice underscores the
hero’s loyalty and brings about the eventual reconciliation with the monarch.
Legal practices in force at the time of the poem’s composition also surface in
the management of the Cid’s growing army. A case in point is the distribution
of booty, the prime motivation of the municipal militias fighting on the fron-
tier. Pre-established portions of the booty were allotted to each rank; the leader
took a fifth of the total and the remainder was divided in such a way that one
part went to each peón (foot soldier) and two parts to each cavallero (horse-
man, but also knight). Promotion in rank was also formalized: a man who
could afford the expenses of a horse and equipment for war could rise from
peón to cavallero (villano), thereby gaining some of the entitlements of a
hidalgo.
The reconciliation between King Alfonso and the Cid, as well as the mar-
riage of his daughters to the Infantes of Carrión, are also depicted in accordance
with established procedures and with special attention paid to legal formal-
isms. A good example is the besamanos, the ritualized kissing of the lord’s
hands by a vassal upon accepting an enfeoffment. In the eyes of medieval wit-
nesses, it was not enough that the two parts agreed upon the terms of their
arrangement; this ritual had to be staged in order for the feudal pact to take
effect. In the Poema de mio Cid, legal formalities become a dramatic imperative
in the climatic confrontation at the court in Toledo. The epic genre generally
propels the offended party to take rather different measures: after an affront
like the one suffered by the Cid’s daughters, one would expect the father to
seek private vengeance, marshaling his knights and hurling all the might he
could assemble into an assault on the Infantes of Carrión and their entire clan.
Introduction 17
The Cid, however, chooses to avail himself of legal procedures dictating how
members of the upper nobility could challenge their equals.
In order to deflect cycles of vengeance and reprisal, two institutionalized
procedures were established during the second half of the 12th century: there
was a pact of mutual loyalty and presumed convergence of interests among all
those of noble blood; thus, one could not accuse another member of the nobil-
ity without a prior declaration of enmity. Furthermore, a noble who wished to
accuse another of wrongdoing was required to make a formal denunciation
and a demand for satisfaction, which was commonly settled by a judicial duel
between the accuser and the accused. If the accuser won, the charge was justi-
fied and the accused sank into permanent infamy. The Poema de mio Cid
follows the formal requirements for challenges of this sort with exacting care:
the cortes are convoked, Rodrigo presents his charges against the Infantes,
three of his lieutenants challenge the Infantes and their brother, the king vali-
dates the challenges, and it all concludes with the judicial duels.
8 The Hero’s Characterization28
The integration of legal detail into the story is equally important in the first
part of the narrative when the hero, instead of assuming the role of an outlaw,
behaves as a loyal subject. This choice reflects a key aspect of the Cid’s moral
character: his restraint. Another obvious characteristic of the hero is his mili-
tary prowess. As we have already seen, the Cid has the classical attributes of
sapientia et fortitudo, in general, “prudence and strength”, but here more accu-
rately “judiciousness and bravery”. He possesses worldly wisdom, not erudition,
and he displays a sense of proportion, foresight, and, above all, shrewdness. As
for his strength, it is not just brute force: it is his characteristic courage, his
decisive action, his ability to lead, and his commanding attitude both in war as
well as when upholding what is right.
The Cid’s sapientia is, above all, mesura (moderation), which, depending on
the circumstances, expresses itself as reflectiveness, sagacity, or even resigna-
tion. In the opening lines of the poem, the Cid thanks God for the tests to
which he is subjected. After that, Rodrigo and his men will have to rise or fall
on their own. That is their fate, but it also opens up a future filled with oppor-
tunity. The Cid recognizes this when he exclaims to his lieutenant, “¡Albricia,
Álbar Fáñez, ca echados somos de tierra!” (v. 14). The banishment marks the
beginning of a new chapter in the Cid’s life, and he makes the most of it. His
28 See Luongo’s chapter in this volume for more details.

success is the result of the measured self-possession that carries him through
life as well as his ability to act without haste or desperation. In the second part
of the narrative, that same inner balance allows him to regain his honor
through legal maneuverings rather than the slaughter of his foes.
The Cid’s fortitudo manifests itself in his mighty arm, his endurance in
battle, his capacity for focused engagement, and, above all, the force of his
will. It allows him to work through the bitter moments of his departure – for
instance, when he separates from his family – and to embark upon an unstop-
pable march that leads to his lordship of Valencia, the desired reunion with his
family, and, ultimately, the royal pardon. In the second part of the poem, his
fortitudo allows him to punish the outrage perpetrated by the Infantes without
blood-soaked reprisals. Like his sapientia, the Cid’s fortitudo is as effective in
peace as it is in war.
This model of heroism may be rooted in classical times and in the incipient
chivalric model, but it took a unique form in the Poema de mio Cid. Most poems
belonging to the epic tradition describe heroes who are far more disposed to
excessive violence than the restrained Cid; paradoxically, those heroes are
more concerned with internecine struggles of the Christian kingdoms than
with military threats their Muslim enemies pose. This new attitude is linked to
two different manifestations of the epic. The renunciation of rebellion occurs
in the subgenre of the chansons d’aventure, or songs of adventures, already
influenced by the Arthurian romance of the late 12th century.29 The transfer of
the conflict from the interior of the kingdom to the outside is typical of the
borderland epic, whose ethos, as we have seen, pervades the entire Poema de
mio Cid.
9 Formal Aspects: the Metrics30
Formally, the Poema de mio Cid seems to be a combination of traditional and

new trends in epic poetry, but it is difficult to say for sure since the heroic nar-
rations supposedly composed earlier – with the exception of the prose versions
embedded in the 13th- and 14th -century chronicles – have not survived. How-
ever, it is likely that the Poema de mio Cid represents a renovation of the Spanish
epic tradition, partly influenced by elements deriving from French epic poems
and contemporary Latin histories.
29 Boix, El “Cantar de Mio Cid”: adscripción genérica y estructura tripartita, pp. 28-50.
30 For more details, see Montaner’s chapter in this volume. Other proposals about the Castil-
ian epic metrics can be found in Bayo’s and Corriente’s chapters in this volume.
Introduction 19
The aspect of the Poema de mio Cid that seems closest to the generic con-
ventions of medieval Castilian epic is its meter, which is based on an end pause
that marks the break between verses and a caesura that divides each verse into
two hemistichs. The hemistichs range between three and eleven syllables, the
most common of which contain between six and eight. So, in theory, full lines
should have between six and twenty-two syllables, but the tendency is to com-
pensate a short hemistich with a longer one; therefore, line lengths range from
nine to twenty syllables, the majority of which are comprised of fourteen to
sixteen. This variability indicates that medieval epic metrics was not directly
based on syllable count, so important in modern Spanish verse, but on accen-
tual cadence, which was achieved by a certain ratio of rhythmic relevant
accents per line according to their syllabic length. In the Poema de mio Cid,
with the exception of hemistichs of less than five syllables, there are generally
two stresses per hemistich – three if the hemistich contains nine or more syl-
lables. Nevertheless, we still do not entirely understand this accentual and
anisosyllabic meter.
The other essential element of the metrical system is assonance, which is
based on the equivalence of the last tonic vowel of the line: á, é (along with
monophonemic diphthong ié), í, or ó (which can rhyme with either ú or mono-
phonemic diphthong ué).31 Thus, mál, Bivár, picár, fár, and casár all rhyme. If
the stressed vowel is followed by an unstressed one, both vowels count for the
rhyme unless the unstressed vowel is an e; therefore, pinár and mensáje func-
tion as a rhyme.32 The stressed vowel ó ~ú ~ ué can be followed by an unstressed
31 See here the chapters by Bayo, Montaner, and Rodríguez Molina.

32 This feature can be explained in two ways. The first is related to the apocopation or loss of
final –e in Castilian during the 12th and 13th centuries. Due to this phenomenon, monte
was usually apocopated in mont, nueve in nuef, and so on. Thus, the –e and null (Ø) end-
ings worked as allomorphs and, since they were not grammatically distinctive, they were
neither pertinent to the rhyme. The other explanation (here endorsed by Bayo) is linked
to the so-called paragogic -e, added to oxytonic words at the end of verses, a metrical
device found, for example, in the Navarrese Roncesvalles fragment dated around 1270; see,
for example, vv. 7-9: “Aquí clamó a sus escuderos Carlos el enperante: / ‘Sacat al arçobispo
d’esta mortaldade. / Levémosle a su terra, a Flánderes la ciudade’” (ed. Riquer, p. 398),
where the normal forms of the second and third rhyme words would be mortaldad and
cibdad. Since the sole codex of the Poema de mio Cid lacks any trace of paragogic -e, and
due to the much later documentation of that device (from the end of the 13th century
onwards), the first hypothesis seems to be the best (see Sánchez-Prieto, “¿Rimas anóma-
las…?”, and Rodríguez Molina’s chapter in this volume). See Bayo’s chapter for further
bibliography on this topic.
e, a, or o, so that Campeadór, nómbre, Alfónso, señóras, fuért, and súyo could be

acceptable rhymes.33
A series of verses sharing the same rhyme constitutes a tirada or copla (stro-
phe, laisse), which can be comprised of any given number of lines. The poet
was perfectly aware of that feature, since, at the end of the second section of
the poem, he states that “Las coplas deste cantar aquís van acabando” (v. 2276).
Tiradas tend to display a unity of sense and generally can stand alone; how-
ever, there are “run-on strophes” in which one or two verses take up the theme
or story line of the previous strophe. There are even cases in which a phrase is
split between two consecutive tiradas, and occasionally there is a tirada with
no discernable unifying theme.
Generally, an episode spans several tiradas. Therefore, a change in rhyme
pattern, which signals the start of a new strophe, is not a guarantee that the
content of the poem is taking a new direction. The poet seems to start a new
strophe when he considers some aspect of his narrative to be concluded. For
example, the first tirada tells of the Cid’s departure from Vivar; the second, the
trip from Vivar to Burgos. Up to this point, each strophe refers to a discrete unit
of action. The stopover in Burgos, however, is a unit with two scenes, each with
its own tirada and internal drama: the third strophe narrates the troubled
reception of the Cid by the townsfolk, and the fourth tells how the citizens,
despite their sympathy for his plight, dare not disobey the royal mandate for-
bidding them to shelter the hero.
New strophes are also triggered by shifts in the action, such as the prelude to
a battle, the engagement between enemies, and its aftermath. A strophe can
also introduce a new character or an extended monologue. Other times, the
poet starts a new tirada to set off part of the narrative. This has the effect of
suspending the linear progress of events, a practice that can disorient the mod-
ern reader. Such is the case with the so-called series gemelas (twin strophes), in
which a tirada recapitulates in a more detailed way or from another perspec-
tive what was reported in the previous one. There are also parallel strophes,
which recount events that occur at the same time in successive tiradas.34 For
33 Strange as it may seem to the modern speaker of Spanish, this is the simplest way to
explain the actual distribution of ending vowels of verses in the Poema de mio Cid (see
Montaner “Revisión textual del Cantar de mio Cid”, pp. 162-77, and his chapter in this vol-
ume). There are two more theories about this point: the traditional one (endorsed in their
chapters by Bayo and Bailey) is that all ending vowels (except for –e and –i) are pertinent
for the rhyme; a more recent proposal (adopted by Rodríguez Molina in his chapter) is
that the unstressed final vowel always lacks distinctive capacity.
34 This seems to be irrefutable evidence of the functionality of the strophes or laisses,
denied by some scholars, as well as proof of the French origin of this technique; cf.
Introduction 21
example, near the end of the poem the three judicial duels take place simulta-
neously, but the poet reports them one at a time and gives each its own tirada.
The strophes are clustered into three cantares (songs), even though the sur-
viving manuscript does not formally indicate these divisions. In the 19th
century, some critics posited two cantares, with a transition after vv. 2776–77:
“¡Las coplas d’este cantar, aquís’ van acabando, / el Criador vos vala con todos
los sos santos!”. Menéndez Pidal argued for a division into three cantares, with
the second beginning with v. 1085: “Aquís’ compieça la gesta de mio Cid el de
Bivar”. He called the three parts “Cantar del Destierro” (vv. 1- 1084), “Cantar de
las Bodas” (vv. 1085-2277), and “Cantar de la Afrenta de Corpes” (vv. 2278-3730).
Although the two-part division better accommodates the thematic structure of
the poem, the three-part division breaks the narrative into units of similar
length roughly matching what a singer could deliver in a single performance of
about three hours. Thus, even though the division marked by v. 1085 is much
less important than the one at v. 2777, segmentation into three parts seems to
be the best option and is now accepted by most scholars.
10 Formulas
Another distinctive feature of the Poema de mio Cid is its reliance on formulaic
diction.35 This rhetorical device systematically reworks familiar epic phrases to
place them in different metrical contexts. Many formulas in the Poema de mio
Cid are related to 12th-century French epic poems. They could not have come
from earlier Spanish poems since those formulas show innovations in content
and themes belonging to their own historical period. An obvious example is
the description of battles, which is highly stylized and reflects ways of han-
dling the lance that emerged during the late 11th and early 12th century. By the
middle of the 12th century, these descriptions had already settled into estab-
lished formulas, which are incompatible with poems supposedly composed in
the 10th or 11th century.36 This does not mean that all these formulas were
adopted by the Cid’s poet, since it is quite certain that Castilian epic poems
Rychner, La chanson de geste, pp. 89-93 (for laisses parallèles) and 93-107 (for laisses simi-
laires).
35 See De Chasca, El arte juglaresco; Chaplin, “Oral-formulaic style”; Miletich, “The quest for
the ‘formula’”; Waltman, “Formulaic expression”; and especially Justel, El sistema formu-
lar.
36 Justel, “La carga de choque”. See also Herslund, “Le Cantar de Mio Cid et la chanson de
geste”; Smith, The Making, pp. 155-66; Hook, “The Poema de Mio Cid and the Old French
epic”; Adams, “All the Cid men”; and Justel, Técnica y estética.
based on French materials were already circulating.37 Nevertheless, it is proof

that the Poema de mio Cid was in the poetical avant-garde of its time.
A formula is a phrase expressing a single idea that is employed two or more
times in a poetic text under similar metric conditions. It is used to fill out a
hemistich and, if it is placed in the second half of the line, it provides the
rhyme, for example, in v. 2901, “¿Ó eres, Muño Gustioz, mio vassallo de pro?”,
and in v. 3193, “Martín Antolínez, mio vassallo de pro”. A “variant formula”
occurs when a phrase is repeated but with a slight modulation, like in v. 402,
“a la Figueruela mio Cid iva posar”, and in v. 415, “a la sierra de Miedes ellos ivan
posar”. A third mode of formulaic composition consists of phrases whose inter-
nal elements are rearranged. This option is the most versatile as seen in v. 500,
“que empleye la lança e al espada meta mano”, v. 2387, “el astil á quebrado e
metió mano al espada”, and v. 3648, “Martín Antolínez mano metió al espada”.
Three kinds of formulas can be distinguished according to their rhetorical
function. The first, delimiting formulas, mark a turning point in the action or a
shift in the mode of presentation. Sometimes they include a direct address to
the audience. Delimiting formulas can be divided into elocution formulas,
which function as a formal prelude to a speech: “Essora dixo Minaya: ‘De buena
voluntad’” (v. 1282), “Essora dixo el rey: ‘Plazme de coraçón’” (v. 1355); transi-
tional formulas, which mark changes in theme or focus: “Direvos de los
cavalleros que llevaron el mensaje” (v. 1453), “Los dos han arrancado, dirévos de
Muño Gustioz” (v. 3671); and presentation formulas, which call the listeners’
attention: “Afevos doña Ximena, con sus fijas dó va llegando” (v. 262), “Afevos
los dozientos e tres en el algara” (v. 476).
The second kind, descriptive formulas, characterize some element intro-
duced in the narrative. They generally associate an adjective and a noun, as in
“buen cavallo” and “buenos cavallos”, with more elaborate variations such as
“cavallos gruessos e corredores”. They also may consist of a qualifying phrase
like “e Peña Cadiella, que es una peña fuert” (v. 1330) and “A siniestro dexan
Atienza, una peña muy fuert” (v. 2691). Instead of being qualitative, they can be
quantitative, like “grandes son las ganancias” (v. 548) or “gentes son / trae sobe-
janas” (vv. 657, 988).
A device related to descriptive formulas is the epic epithet, which consists of
fixed expressions – although they can be modified according to the needs of
the line – used to designate or characterize a figure in the narrative, always in
a positive way. The usual arrangement is a noun in apposition with a charac-
ter’s name or a name with a modifying phrase or adjective that singles out the
character from everyone else. The hero receives the greatest variety of epithets,
37 See Rico, “Çorraquín Sancho, Roldán y Oliveros”.

Introduction 23
such as “el Campeador contado” and “la barba vellida”. Some epithets are astro-
logical, alluding to propitious influences at the moment of the Cid’s birth or
when he was dubbed a knight: “el que en buen ora nasco” and “el que en buen
ora cinxo espada”. Almost all the characters within the Cid’s inner circle receive
epithets, including Jimena, “muger ondrada”, and Álvar Fáñez, “el bueno de
Minaya” and “mio diestro braço”. The king is “el buen rey don Alfonso” or “rey
ondrado”.
The third kind, narrative formulas, encompass a remarkable diversity of
expressive needs, such as spatiotemporal references, the expression of emo-
tions, some gestures, allusions to divinity, displacements, the mere mention of
a character, or combat in particular. They can refer to the passage of time: “otro
día mañana”, “cuando saliesse el sol”; physical gestures: “la cara se santiguó”,
“prisos’ a la barba”, “las manos le besó”; expressions of emotion: “grandes son
los gozos”, “grandes son los pesares”, “alegre era”, “pesó a”; or physical move-
ments: “aguijan a espolón”, “luego cavalgava”. The open-field combat is often
narrated in a flowing succession of formulas. Battles are divided into eight dis-
tinct phases:38 first, general references: “a menos de batalla”, “pora huebos de
lidiar”; second, references to arming and outfitting: “metedos en las armas”, “de
todas guarnizones”; third, battle cries: “¡feridlos, cavalleros!”, “¡yo só Ruy Díaz!”;
fourth, descriptions of the charge: “embraçan los escudos delant los coraçones”,
“abaxan las lanzas a bueltas de los pendones”; fifth, descriptions of the clash:
“fiérense en los escudos”, “da(va)nle grandes colpes”; sixth, the pursuit of ene-
mies: “de los que alcançava”, “duró el segudar”; seventh, the battle’s outcome:
“arrancólos del campo”, “oviéronlos de arrancar”; and eighth, the aftermath of
the violence: “por el cobdo ayuso la sangre destellando”.
There are also combined narrative-descriptive formulas. Each of these for-
mulas is closer to one class than the other, depending on the component that
predominates in it, but this does not prevent the formula from having a hybrid
nature. Thus, if the narrative aspects come from the verb, which has a lexical
meaning, the descriptive component results from an adjective, as in the fol-
lowing examples: “danle grandes colpes” (vv. 713 and 2391), “grandes tuertos me
tiene” (vv. 961 and 3134) or “irán buenos mandados” (vv. 783 and 2445). Some
elocution formulas can be hybrid too, since they include actions which only
come before direct speech, as “alçó la (su) mano (diestra)” or several formulas
with the verb sonrisar(se) (to smile).
38 Justel, “La carga de choque” and Técnica y estética, § 1.1, offers a somewhat different divi-
sion; he describes the mêlée, or combat proper, while we refer to the battle as a whole.
11 Narrative Techniques39
Despite lacking the first folio, it is quite certain that the Poema de mio Cid
started in medias res, that is to say, in the middle of the plot when the banish-
ment decree is delivered to the Cid and his entourage. Nevertheless, for most of
the poem the story is narrated in chronological order. But there are times, as in
the case with twin and parallel tiradas, when the poem departs from that mold.
Another situation in which the linear flow of the story is broken occurs when
simultaneous events are narrated, for example, when the story follows a char-
acter other than the hero: the Cid sending envoys with gifts to Alfonso, or the
king and Rodrigo traveling to Toledo for their reconciliation. In some cases,
what is happening to the hero is skipped over while the other events transpire;
most of the time, however, both branches of the tale are told in interweaving
and alternating scenes with clear markers of transitions from one plotline to
the other.
Less familiar to modern readers is another technique that is characteristic of
epic poems: double narration, that is, the repetition of the same events in suc-
cessive passages. It takes two forms: in the first, the verses that provide the
transition echo the final verses of the strophe that has just concluded; the sec-
ond has a prospective form in which the poet tells what happens up to a certain
point and then retells the same events in greater detail or from a different
point of view. Twin laisses are employed for this purpose, and the change of
strophe alerts the listener to the shift in narrative flow. It is somewhat more
difficult to identify double narration when it occurs in longer passages and
even more so when it crosses strophic boundaries. This situation arises when
the Cid offers the count of Barcelona his freedom: it happens only once but is
narrated twice, each time with different details and nuances.40
Another aspect of the poem that could be confusing for modern readers is
the shift between verbal tenses.41 One determining factor is the rhyme scheme,
since the verb endings often provide the vowels for the rhyme, although these
temporal leaps do not occur only in rhyming verbs. The verb tense also differ-
entiates actions completed from others in progress: an episode may be reported
mostly in the imperfecto (imperfect past tense), with a shift to the pretérito
(past tense) signaling the completion of the action. Furthermore, verbs whose
39 For more details, see Funes’ and Luongo’s chapters in this volume.
40 See Gornall, “How Many Times Was the Count of Barcelona Offered His Freedom?” and
“Double Narration in the Poema de Mio Cid”.
41 See Gilman, Tiempo y formas temporales en el “Poema del Cid”.
Introduction 25
inherent meaning is one of uncompleted action or state of being tend to be in

the present; those that construe completed events and actions gravitate toward
the pretérito – unless the action is negative, which tends to generate the his-
torical present tense. Scholars have also detected a correlation between the
subject and the verb tense: if the subject is singular, the verb tends to be in the
preterit; if the subject is plural, the verb tends to be in the present, for example,
“espidiós de todos los que sos amigos son” (v. 3531).
Finally, certain events are highlighted by being drawn into the immediate
temporal plane of the listener through the use of the historical present. When
the Cid humbles himself before King Alfonso at their encounter at the Tagus,
the hero’s specific actions are presented in the simple past tense: “los inojos e
las manos en tierra los fincó, / las yerbas del campo a dientes las tomó” (vv. 2021-
22), but the key moment of the scene is narrated in the present tense: “asi sabe
dar omildanç a Alfonso so señor” (v. 2024).
12 The Narrator and His Characters42
The Poema de mio Cid has an omniscient narrator who can offer the listener or
reader more information than the characters possess. Depending on the situa-
tion, this gap in knowledge can provide humor or dramatic tension, usually
tending toward the latter. For example, when the Infantes depart from Valencia
with their wives, the hero is unaware of their intentions yet the audience is
fully informed about their plans. Humor prevails instead when the Cid barters
with the moneylenders of Burgos over the chests filled with sand, or when the
hero teases the distrustful count of Barcelona. In other cases, the irony is pro-
vided by the Cid himself, such as in the persecution of the Moroccan King
Bucar.
The narrator does not assume a neutral position; on the contrary, he is
always on the hero’s side. He has no qualms about dismissing the count of
Barcelona as a follón (blowhard) or labeling the Infantes as malos (evil) after
they devise the plan for avenging themselves on the Cid’s daughters. He
also rejoices with the Christians when they finally have a bishop, “¡Dios, qué
alegre era todo cristianismo, / que en tierras de Valencia señor avié obispo!”
(vv. 1305-06).
Despite being omniscient, the narrator never delves into the minds of his
characters to expose in detail their thoughts and motivations. And while he
makes no pretense of neutrality, he does not indulge in moral stereotyping. In
42 For a detailed analysis, see Luongo’s chapter in this volume.

the poem, personality is reliably displayed through actions and words. This
tends to increase the incidence of direct address, thus making the Poema de
mio Cid one of the texts with the highest ratio of speech to narrative in all of
medieval literature. The poet allows his characters to speak in their own words,
and he also may paraphrase what they said or use a sort of free indirect dis-
course that is similar to reported speech but without the usual syntactic
subordination. The first option is more common: the narrator routinely yields
the floor to the characters by means of rhetorical formulas or by using a verb
that functions in the same way. For example, sonreir (to smile) only occurs as a
prelude to a direct address. Only when a character replies can all transitional
markers be omitted:
mio Cid el Campeador al alcáçar entrava,

recibiólo doña Ximena e sus fijas amas:
“¡Venides, Campeador, en buena ora cinxiestes espada,
muchos días vos veamos con los ojos de las caras!”
“¡Grado al Criador, vengo, mugier ondrada!” (2183-87)
Indirect discourse is introduced by a speech verb or its equivalent, as in “Mandó

mio Cid a los que ha en su casa / que guardassen el alcáçar e las otras torres
altas” (vv. 1570-71), or “Díxoles fuertemientre que andidiessen de día e de
noch, / aduxiessen a sus fijas a Valencia la mayor” (vv. 2839-40). When indirect
discourse records a character’s thoughts, it is introduced by verbs that mean
“to think” or “to ponder”, as in “ya veyé mio Cid que Dios le iva valiendo”
(v. 1096) or “Todos se cuedan que ferido es de muert” (v. 3688). These occa-
sional references hardly counteract the narrator’s predominant tendency to
not peek into his characters’ minds.
In free indirect discourse the verbs that introduce speech are replaced by
transition markers. This technique is generally used in situations that are
somewhat impersonal, such as the reception of messages or the content of a
document: “a aquel rey de Sevilla el mandado llegava / que presa es Valencia,
que no ge la enparan” (vv. 1222-23), “llegaron las nuevas al conde de Barcilona
/ que mio Cid Ruy Díaz quel’ corrié la tierra toda” (vv. 957-58), or “el Poyo de
mio Cid asíl’ dirán por carta” (v. 902).
As for individualized expression, the only significant difference between the
characters and the narrator is that the former are not allowed the same lati-
tude when using verb tenses. This difference can be explained by the narrator’s
need for a more complex repertoire of expressive options than the characters
in his story, who only speak of their immediate circumstances. An exception to
Introduction 27
this similarity of the characters’ speech is that the oath “¡Sant Esidro!” is
reserved for King Alfonso, a reference to his historical devotion to the saint.
The characters are distinguished by what they say, not how they say it. Their
attitudes, intentions, and actions differentiate them. There are good characters
and bad characters, which is determined by whether or not they support the
hero (although from an internal moral value, the right perspective would be
the inverse). Still, their virtues and vices are not assigned mechanically; every-
one gets his own shading. For example, the count of Barcelona, the Infantes of
Carrión, and García Ordóñez share a disdain for the Cid, but each has his
quirks. The count is a braggart but can handle himself in battle; the Infantes
are grasping, deceitful, and cowardly; and García Ordóñez tries to defame the
hero but ends up shaming himself.
Characters are not static either. The Cid’s attitude towards his sons-in-law
changes from distrust to attachment to total rejection. The clearest case show-
ing that the characters in the Poema de mio Cid are allowed to evolve is that of
King Alfonso: he gradually abandons his wrath and comes to feel profound
affection for the Cid, whom he finally admires so much that he declares before
his court, “¡Maguer que [a] algunos pesa, mejor sodes que nós!” (v. 3116). The
characterizations are fairly nuanced, especially that of the Cid, who is capable
of showing grief and joy with his family, vacillation and resolve in his military
campaigns, camaraderie with his men, stateliness at court, and even – an
unexpected quality in an epic hero – an unabashed sense of humor.
The absence of psychological description is matched by the lack of details
describing the characters’ physical appearance. The Cid’s daughters receive the
greatest number of descriptive phrases, but even those are scant. When they
stand with their mother on the battlements in Valencia and gaze out on the
Cid’s vast holdings, the poet tells how their “ojos vellidos catan a todas partes”
(v. 1612), and the Cid himself asserts that his daughters are “tan blancas commo
el sol” (v. 2333).
A physical trait is associated with the Cid from the beginning of the poem: a
flowing beard that grows to an impressive length as a result of his self-imposed
vow not to cut it until he recovers the king’s favor. This aspect of his appear-
ance is so significant that it regularly appears in epic epithets, such as “el de la
luenga barba”, “el de la barba grant”, “barba tan conplida”, and “la barba vellida”.
In contrast, García Ordóñez’s beard is sparse and disfigured since the Cid
ripped a piece out of it. As for the Infantes of Carrión, Pero Vermúez says to one
of them, “e eres fermoso, mas mal varragán” (v. 3327).
13 Other Stylistic Features
The dearth of descriptions in the Poema de mio Cid suggests that the ones
included have a purpose and are not mere ornamental touches. The same is
true for objects: whenever something is mentioned, the intention is to make it
and its owner stand out, for example, the Cid’s spotless tunic, shirt, and hood.
Usually, the poet limits himself to mentioning the quality of the object without
going into specific details. He often speaks of “buenos cavallos”, for example.
Occasionally, however, more particulars are provided: “Saca las espadas e
relumbra toda la cort, / las maçanas e los arriazes todos d’oro son” (vv. 3177-78).
In Toledo, the Cid appears in raiment of the finest sort, whose rich materials
and perfect fit are admired by those present: “en él abrién que ver cuantos que
ý son” (v. 3100).
The use of parallel features and calculated contrasts is one of the stylistic
characteristics of the poem.43 When the Cid meets the king on the banks of the
Tagus River, he prostrates himself and kisses Alfonso’s feet, a conventional ges-
ture of fealty. The king invites the Cid to rise and kiss his hands instead, an act
sufficient to reestablish their bond. The Cid does rise, but he also kisses Alfonso
on the mouth, a sign of friendship. Those three instances recapitulate the Cid’s
career as recounted in the poem: abasement, recovery, and finally, the eleva-
tion that makes him almost equal to his lord. Similar structural principles
inform the beginning of the poem: the Cid leaves the doors of his house in
Vivar open, a mute expression of the abandoned home; the image is repeated
with a darker tone when he finds the doors in Burgos closed to him; finally, the
symbolism is inverted when the doors of the Monastery of Cardeña swing
open in welcome. This play of repetitions and contrasts throughout the poem
contributes to a sense of cohesion and craftsmanship that is one of the author’s
greatest artistic achievements.
Another important aspect of the poem is the majesty of its style. According
to medieval tenets of composition, epic poetry deals with elevated themes
in a dignified and sober style. It has been argued that the poem’s lofty tone
was achieved, in part, through its archaic language, as it was characterized by
Menéndez Pidal. Scholars are no longer sure about this, since we have too few
12th-century vernacular texts to get an idea of what might have felt archaic to
an audience of that time. Traits that do help produce an elevated style include
the use of learned words and expressions adapted from church Latin and
the language of the law, among them criminal (applied specifically to crimi-
nal calumny), monumento (tomb), tus (incense), virtos (army), and vocación
43 For more details, see Funes’ chapter in this volume.

Introduction 29
(dedication of a church). There is also an extensive repertoire of Spanish mili-

tary terms:44 loriga (coat of mail), almófar (hood of mail), belmez (padded
tunic worn under the coat of mail), arrobda (patrol), art (a stratagem used in
battle), az (line or formation of soldiers), compaña (war band, troops), fierro
(iron point of a lance), huesa (horseman’s sturdy boot), etc. This sort of vocab-
ulary is natural in a poem about military exploits, but the many legal terms
used with precision is surprising. The presence of such lexicon is not limited to
the judicial confrontation at Alfonso’s royal court; rather, it is found through-
out the entire poem. Apart from the Latinate terminology, one could point
to the Spanish alcalde (with the meaning “judge”, rather than the modern
“mayor”), entención (an allegation in legal proceedings), juvizio (judgment
or sentence), manfestar (juridical confirmation of an alleged crime), rencura
(civil or criminal suit), and riepto (formal accusation).
There are also pairs of synonyms one would expect to find in a legal instru-
ment where exact terminology is required, not in a poetic text. The pairings
of roughly equivalent terms specify subtle differences in meaning that are not
to be blurred: “a rey e a señor” (to king and liege lord), “pensó e comidió” (he
pondered and weighed), “a ondra e a bendición” (honorable and sanctioned,
referring to a legally contracted matrimony). Other pairs indicate a totality by
listing the constituents: “grandes e chicos” (of high and low status, that is, all
citizens or inhabitants of every class and standing), “moros e cristianos” (Moors
and Christians, that is, all people regardless of their religion), “nin mugier nin
varón” (neither woman nor man), “el oro e la plata” (gold and silver), “en yermo
o en poblado” (in a desert or a town, that is, in the open countryside or in a
district under a code of law), “de noch e de día” (night or day, that is, at any
time). Reduplicative phrasing can also be found in more complex structures
that fill out a verse and use the caesura as their hinge, for example, “grandes
averes priso e mucho sobejanos” (v. 110), “a priessa vos guarnid e metedos en
las armas” (v. 986).45
Also characteristic of the poem is the use of “physical phrases”, which
emphasize an action by specifying the part of the body that performs it: “plo-
rando de los ojos, tanto avién el dolor” (v. 18), “de la su boca compeçó de fablar”
(v. 1456). Although it is possible that these expressions were a form of stage
direction indicating the movements and gestures performed during the reci-
tation of the poem, it is just as likely that their vividness made the gestures
unnecessary. The intonation to be used during the recitation is more obvi-
44 Several of them derive from Arabic, as shown by Corriente in his chapter in this volume.
45 See Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 454-59.
ous. Exclamations, questions, and a declarative voice are all employed by the
narrator as well as the characters.
14 Orality and Literacy in Composition, Performance, and

Transmission
These features potentially related to performance lead us to raise another

question: the relation between orality and literacy in the making and diffusion
of the Poema de mio Cid. As we have previously seen, some authors have advo-
cated for an improvised oral composition, mainly based on the high proportion
of formulas. Although this is an undeniable feature of the Poema de mio Cid’s
style, it is by no means proof that it was an oral production, less still an im-
promptu composition. On the one hand, there are many examples of formulaic
diction in medieval legal and historiographical Latin texts.46 On the other, the
relative frequency of formulas points to the influence of a traditional style
rather than to oral composition.47 Finally, the masterful use of formulas in
order to create contrasts and other esthetic effects based on echoed expres-
sions hardly seems compatible with the mechanical device described by oralist
approaches.48
A more promising approach has been developed by Matthew Bailey.49 As he
states, “juglares are identified in the thirteenth-century Alfonsine Estoria de
España as saying or speaking their narratives, but there is not documental evi-
dence to determine how their narratives were composed or recorded”.50 Thus,
in order to understand their mode of composition to some extent, oral ver-
nacular composition can be equated to oral dictation by a learned author to a
scribe. As a consequence, the expression fixed on parchment retains the flavor
of the original dictated work, which is that of the narrative “spontaneous
speech”, described by Wallace Chafe.
The main feature of such “spontaneous speech” is the production of rela-
tively brief spurts, put forward as intonation units, which are likely to be single
clauses with a simple syntax and interconnected by parataxis. When the
46 See Dutton, “The Popularization of Legal Formulae in Medieval Spanish Literature”, and
Justel, “Estilo reiterativo, fórmulas historiográficas y fórmulas épicas”.
47 Miletich, “Repetition and Aesthetic Function in the Poema de mio Cid and South-Slavic
Oral and Literary Epic”.
48 See Justel, Técnica y estética and El sistema formular.
49 See Bailey, The Poetics of Speech as well as his chapter in this volume.
50 Bailey, The Poetics of Speech, p. 126.
Introduction 31
“spontaneous speech” is rendered by the means of highly stylized and rhythmi-

cally sophisticated verses (like Homeric ones), it becomes “special speech”.
According to Bailey, medieval Spanish epic, which, in his opinion, essentially
lacks metrical properties, is closer to spontaneous speech than to special
speech.
Leaving aside the inaccurate characterization of the Poema de mio Cid’s
metrics (see above), it must be noted that, as Bailey states, in medieval Europe
even texts composed in writing could involve some degree of oral dictation.
On the other hand, he proposes that a clerical work such as the Poema de
Fernán González, which is epic in tone but belongs to another genre (the
learned narrative poetry in monorhymed quatrains), also shows “indicators of
orality”.51 That means that the appearance of those traits is not a clear sign for
ascribing a work to the realm of the purely oral or unlearned composition.
Rather, they show that the medieval literary milieu was dominated by voice
rather than script. As the performer’s colophon at the end of the only extant
medieval manuscript of the Poema de mio Cid makes clear, this codex was
sometimes used to read the poem aloud. Finally, it seems rather dubious that
an elaborate style with restrictions of rhythm, rhyme, and formulism could fit
the conditions of a true spontaneous act of speech. Thus, these traits, when
shown in special speech, are more probably related to the requirements of the
poem’s oral diffusion rather than to proper oral composition.
However, we do not know exactly how the juglares made their texts come
alive. The aforementioned reading aloud seems to have been unusual. In most
occasions, the delivery probably was from memory and sung as a kind of psalm-
ody, whose music some scholars imagine – without much evidence – may
have been a variation of Gregorian chant. The delivery was probably stiff and
formalized, and the use of any instrument requiring two hands to play would
have hobbled the performer’s dramatic style even more. Recitations were done
in the street or town square at the request of passers-by or by commission of
the town council, which contracted performers to enliven local festivals. It was
also common for a juglar to stage his artistry at private events, such as wed-
dings or baptisms. Considering the length of the Poema de mio Cid, it could not
have been performed in its entirety in one session. As noted above, the divi-
sion of the poem into three cantares of similar length matches what a minstrel
could sing in a single performance of about three hours. On the other hand, it
is probable that sometimes only select episodes, according to the taste of those
gathered, were presented. No documentation exists about this, although the
51 Bailey, The Poetics of Speech, pp. 76-104.

popularity of the old ballad “Helo, helo por do viene / el moro por la calzada”
might allow one to guess that the pursuit of King Bucar was a favorite.
Now, one thing is poetic composition (oral, written, or mixed) and another
is the origin of the poem’s written tradition. The former concerns the author
and his circumstances; the latter involves the person who wrote the poem
down on parchment at a time when writing vernacular compositions was still
infrequent.52 The sole codex of the Poema de mio Cid was based on a model
handwritten in May 1207 by a certain Per Abbat. Based on historical circum-
stances, Roger Wright hypothesizes that the recording of the poem may be
somehow connected to the production of vernacular documents by the royal
Castilian chancery between 1206 and 1208. In any case, he shows that the writ-
ing in pure Romance (and not in the previous Latino-Romance form) is more
probably linked to the taste of a modern, big city like Toledo,53 than to a con-
servative Benedictine Castilian monastery. Be that as it may, there is no strong
evidence linking the production of the codex to any concrete place or particu-
lar context.
Since the 1207 manuscript was a formal codex with a colophon, it must have
been an apograph, a clean copy of a previous text, that could have been an
orally dictated copy or a working draft. It is nevertheless impossible to deter-
mine its true nature. The copy made by Per Abbat works as the archetype of
the subsequent tradition, which inherited its scribal errors. At least two copies
derive from this archetype: the extant codex, copied c.1320-30, as well as the
lost manuscript used in Alfonso X’s historiographical workshop to elaborate a
prose version that was included in the Estoria de España and in other medieval
chronicles. The 14th-century manuscript served, in turn, as a model for a 16th-
century copy made by the antiquarian and genealogist Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri, as
well as for several hitherto unknown 18th-century manuscripts.54
52 On this topic, see Wright’s chapter in this volume.

53 Nevertheless, in his chapter in this volume Rodríguez Molina excludes explicitly Toledo as
the place of the Poema de mio Cid’s redaction based on linguistic grounds.
54 For the matters related to the manuscript transmission of the Poema de mio Cid, see Mon-
taner’s chapter in this volume.
Introduction 33
15 The Aftermath of the Poema de mio Cid and the Literary Cid55
It is difficult to know what sort of success the Poema de mio Cid had soon after
it was composed, but we have some evidence. There are several documentary
forgeries dated to the first quarter of the 13th century that show traces of the
poem.56 One of the masters of the mester de clerecía (the cleric’s craft), Gonzalo
de Berceo, shows in his poems clear echoes of epic compositions, especially
the Poema de mio Cid.57 Another indication of its lasting appeal is the extant
manuscript, which was produced more than a century after its model and used
in live performances for a 14th-century audience.
The poem’s importance is also shown by its persistent influence on Castilian
epic poetry as the starting point of the Cid’s Cycle at least as we know it.58 This
epic cycle consists of the following poems (in their internal chronological
order): Mocedades de Rodrigo, which deals with the Cid’s youth; Cantar del rey
don Sancho, which is set during Rodrigo’s early manhood; the Poema de mio
Cid, which treats the mature Cid; and the Epitafio épico del Cid, which tells of
his posthumous fame. The hero’s charisma transformed his legend into one of
the most important epic cycles of the Middle Ages and one of the great myths
of universal literature.
The cycle originated c.1200 when the Poema de mio Cid was composed. The
now lost Cantar del rey don Sancho narrated the civil wars between King
Fernando’s sons who fought to gain control of the entire kingdom. Since this
cantar shows clear influence of the Poema de mio Cid, it was probably com-
posed between c.1200 and 1223, and it is known thanks to Alfonso X’s Estoria de
España.59 As it is frequently the case in European epics, the last of the poems
55 See Rodiek, La recepción internacional del Cid; Montaner, VIII Centenario; Galván, “Las
nuevas del Cid”; and Boix, “Transmisión”. For the critical and social canonization of the
Poema de mio Cid, see Galvan’s chapter in this volume.
56 See Smith, Estudios cidianos, pp. 22-34; Montaner, “Ficción y falsificación en el cartulario
cidiano”, pp. 335-38, and “El apócrifo del abad Lecenio y el auge de la materia cidiana”.
57 Dutton, “Gonzalo de Berceo and the cantares de gesta”; Montaner, “Un posible eco del
Cantar de mio Cid en Gonzalo de Berceo”.
58 As we have already seen, there was perhaps a poem on the Castilian hero before the
Poema de mio Cid (according to the standard interpretation of the Prefatio de Almaria). It
is also quite certain that there was a poem about the siege of Zamora (as witnessed by the
Chronica Naiarensis) that was, if not composed before, at least contemporary to the
Poema de mio Cid.
59 The beginning of the Cantar del rey don Sancho, with the dramatic division of the king-
doms of Fernando I of Castile and Leon between his three sons, is narrated quite differ-
ently in the Versión crítica (1282) of the Estoria de España. Here, the source is identified as
to be composed is devoted to the youthful exploits of its hero. A lost first ver-
sion of Las Mocedades de Rodrigo is known through the Crónica de Castilla, but
there is also a later version which likely dates from 1350 to 1360. Finally, the
Epitafio épico del Cid dates from around 1400 and was engraved next to the Cid’s
tomb at the monastery of Cardeña.
The relevance of the Cid as a Castilian hero obliged the historians working
under the patronage of Alfonso X to use the epic poems, together with Latin
and Arabic chronicles, in order to build a complete biography of Rodrigo Díaz.
The Estoria de España commissioned by Alfonso X, the earliest version of
which was drafted between 1270 and 1274, already included prose versions of
the Poema de mio Cid and the Cantar del rey don Sancho. A rewriting of that
chronicle, the Crónica de Castilla, composed between 1295 and 1312, added
Mocedades de Rodrigo as the beginning of Cid’s biography. Finally, the Epitafio
épico del Cid was included among the appendices that Juan de Velorado, abbot
of Cardeña, added to the first edition of the Crónica particular del Cid (1512).60
Another channel of transmission for subjects of vernacular epics were the
romances (traditional Spanish ballads). These narrative songs were composed
in eight-syllable lines with assonantal rhyme in every other verse. Although
documented from the beginning of the 15th century, they are likely to have
emerged in the late 14th century. Some of these ballads include episodes
derived from, or at least inspired by, epic cantares. The ballads related to the
Cid were mostly inspired by episodes of Mocedades de Rodrigo and the Cantar
del rey don Sancho. Only the aforementioned ballad Romance del rey moro que
perdió Valencia (“Helo, helo por do viene / el moro por la calzada”) is clearly,
but freely, based on an incident narrated in the Poema de mio Cid. After the
Middle Ages, chronicles and ballads maintained the memory of the Cid alive
until the first publication of the poem in 1779 brought renewed attention to it.
Universally considered the foremost work in the Spanish literary canon, the
Poema de mio Cid continues to draw the interest of both specialists and an edu-
cated public. It has been published in many modern editions and is the subject
of an imposing body of scholarship; it also has inspired artists and writers to
a Cantar del rey don Fernando. Since the title does not refer to a song about the siege of
Zamora, the core incident of the Cantar del rey don Sancho, it is probable that the Versión
critica is based on a shorter poem that only referred to the division of the kingdoms of
Fernando I. Even in this text, the Cid has a prominent role as executor of the monarch’s
last will.
60 On the chronicle versions of the Cid’s history and legend, see Bautista’s and Gómez
Redondo’s chapters in this volume.
Introduction 35
produce their own reimagining of the story in works of literature, paintings,

sculptures, motion pictures, comic books, rock songs, and videogames.
16 Afterword
If the Poema de mio Cid so often gives the anachronistic impression of a realis-
tic text, it is not because of its arguable historicism, or because of a supposed
stylistic simplicity or plainness allegedly linked to the popular. On the con-
trary, that effect is due to the technical mastery of a poet who knew how to
intertwine different materials and form an inextricable and coherent whole
with multiple facets of his character: Rodrigo Diaz’s human adventures, his
heroic values, and the ideal of personal progress thanks to the genuine effort
proper of “el que Valencía gañó” (v. 3117).
In short, the Poema de mio Cid is a skillful text, although it may not give that
impression at first glance. It looks sincere, but it is tricky. It pretends to be lin-
ear, but it is complex. It does not pretend to convince, but it persuades. The
acquiescence of the medieval audience was the product of the poet’s ability to
show as true what could not have happened, and to relegate to oblivion part of
what really happened. The same holds true for the modern-day reader who
makes the effort to overcome some linguistic and cultural barriers. For this
kind of reader, medieval Iberian literature and, in particular, the Poema de mio
Cid, is an open door to an aesthetic that was born of the dialectic between
identity and otherness.
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del Hispanismo, [forthcoming].
Luongo, Salvatore, “El discutido influjo de la Historia Roderici en el Cantar de mio Cid”,
e-Spania 15 (June 2013). <http://e-spania.revues.org/22297>.
Martín, Óscar, Rodrigo Díaz, del hombre al mito: textos y contextos de la primera tradición
cidiana (1099-1207), Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2015.
Martín Martín, José Luis, ed., Documentos del Cid y Dña. Gimena, Valencia: Grupo de
Arte y Bibliofilia, 1992.
Martínez Diez, Gonzalo, El Cid histórico, Barcelona: Planeta, 1999.
Martínez Diez, Gonzalo, “Historia y ficción en la épica medieval castellana”, in Alberto
Montaner (ed.), “Sonando van sus nuevas allent parte del mar”: el “Cantar de mio Cid”
y el mundo de la épica, Col. Méridiennes: Études Médiévales Ibériques. Toulouse:
Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 2013, pp. 115-39.
Martínez Diez, Gonzalo, “El Cantar de los siete infantes de Lara: la historia y la leyenda”,
Cahiers d’Études Hispaniques Médiévales 37 (2014), 171-89.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, ed., Cantar de mio Cid. Texto, gramática y vocabulario, 3 vols.,
Madrid: Bailly-Baillière, 1908-11; rev. ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1944-46.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, ed., Primera crónica general de España que mandó componer
Alfonso el Sabio y se continuaba bajo Sancho IV en 1289, 2nd edition, with the collabo-
ration of Antonio G. Solalinde, Manuel Muñoz Cortés, and José Gómez Pérez, 2 vols.,
Madrid: Seminario Menéndez Pidal and Gredos, 1955.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, La España del Cid, 2 vols., Madrid: Plutarco, 1929; 7th rev. ed.,
Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1969.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Poesía juglaresca y juglares: orígenes de las literaturas romá-
nicas, [1st ed. 1957], reissued with a prologue by Rafael Lapesa, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe,
1991.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, En torno al “Poema del Cid”, Barcelona: Edhasa, 1963.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, La épica medieval española desde sus orígenes hasta su disolu-
ción en el romancero, ed. Diego Catalán and María del Mar de Bustos, Madrid: Espasa-
Calpe, 1992.
Miletich, John S., “The Quest for the ‘Formula’: A Comparative Reappraisal”, Modern
Philology 74 (1976-77), 11-23.
Miletich, John S., “Repetition and Aesthetic Function in the Poema de mio Cid and South-
Slavic Oral and Literary Epic”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 58.3 (1981): 189-96.
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rev. ed., Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2011 (corr. reprint, 2016).
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Hispaniques Médiévales 29 (2006), 327-58.
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Signe; [Burgos]: Consorcio “Camino del Cid”, 2006.
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José Manuel Fradejas, Déborah Dietrick, Demetrio Martín Sanz and María Jesús Díez
Garretas (eds.), Actas del XIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de
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2010, vol. II, pp. 1407-26.
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Zamora”, Studia Zamorensia 2.15 (2016): 65-89.
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Campeador, Madrid: Sociedad Estatal España Nuevo Milenio, 2001.
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Millennium Liber, 2007.
Introduction 39
Peña Pérez, F. Javier, El Cid Campeador: historia, leyenda y mito, Burgos: Dossoles, 2000.
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del siglo XII”, in Homenaje a la memoria de Don Antonio Rodríguez Moñino: 1910-1970,
Madrid: Castalia, 1975, pp. 537-64.
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– género, Madrid: Gredos, 1995.
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de Literatura Medieval 16/1 (2003), 149-219.
Smith, Colin C., Estudios cidianos, Madrid: Cupsa, 1977.
Smith, Colin C., The Making of the Poema de mio Cid, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983.
Smith, Colin C., “Towards a Reconciliation of Ideas about Medieval Spanish Epic”,
Modern Languages Review 89 (1994), 622-34.
Waltman, Franklin M., “Formulaic Expression and Unity of Authorship in the Poema de
mio Cid”, Hispania 56 (1973), 569-78.
Zaderenko, Irene, “¿El autor del Poema de mio Cid conocía la ‘Carta de arras’?”, La
Corónica 22 (1993), 66-71.
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Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, 2013.
Figure 0.1 First folio of the extant manuscript of the Poema de mio Cid (Madrid,ms. Vitr/7/17,
fol. 1r. With kind permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Introduction 41
Part 1
The Codex and the Author
∵
The Poema de mio Cid as Text 43
Chapter 1
The Poema de mio Cid as Text: Manuscript

Transmission and Editorial Politics
Alberto Montaner
1 Introduction
Although there are several manuscript copies bearing the text of the Poema
de mio Cid (PMC), all the modern ones derive from a codex unicus, which is the
only extant manuscript copied in the Middle Ages. This situation poses several
problems, both in terms of textual history and editing criteria. As for the textual
history, the main question is to establish the relationship between this single
codex, its model (copied at the beginning of the 13th century) and the missing
copy used by chroniclers of King Alfonso X of Castile to write the Estoria de
España around 1270. Regarding the edition of the text, the scholar does not
have other manuscripts that could help establish the text (recensio). Thus, the
possible correction of the manuscript’s errors (emendatio), if accepted in the
editorial agenda, becomes even more difficult since the codex unicus may be
far removed from the primitive text.
The aim of this chapter is to provide a material analysis of the codex unicus
of the PMC, in order to establish its date and distinguish the textual value of the
different written interventions it has suffered over the centuries. Once this is
done, it is possible to compare the only extant manuscript with the prose text
transmitted by the different versions of the Estoria de España. This comparison
has both historical and textual implications, since it allows us to outline con-
nections between these two testimonies and their common model. In turn,
these connections will allow us to establish the relevance of the use of the
aforementioned set of chronicles when editing the poem.
The next step is to envisage the problems the codex unicus poses to the edi-
tor. Those problems arise in two ways: the most basic is the poor readability of
some pages of the manuscript and the interference of later interventions; the
other is the presence of some scribal deviations from its model, and a fortiori
from the primitive text (the so called “copyist’s mistakes” or “scribal errors”).
Finally, the different criteria used by editors of the PMC will be treated within
the framework of a reflection on the art of editing medieval epic poems.

44 Montaner
2 The Sole Codex of the Poema de mio Cid1
The codex unicus is currently housed in the vault of the Biblioteca Nacional de
España, catalogue number Vitr/7/17.2 It is an in-quarto parchment volume,
whose folios measure 198 × 150 mm, containing around 25 lines per page in a
frame of 174 × 118 mm on average. It comprises 72 sheets, but the first and last
one have been lost, as well as two others in the middle (between fols. 47-48 and
69-70). All the missing sheets had verses written on them, as shown by the
lacunae in the text, except the last one, since the copy ends on fol. 74r. On fol.
74v there are several probationes pennae or texts written to test a newly cut
pen. The script of the manuscript belongs to the variety of semi-formal Gothic
known as cursiva formata or semitextualis,3 and it is written by a single hand,
although there are later interventions by other hands. The original decoration
is limited to some large initials, but three rude drawings were added in the
outer margins by later hands.4 The volume has at present a late 16th-century
binding in tanned sheepskin varnished in black with parchment flyleaves, on
which there are several notes written in Humanist italic script. At the end of
the text there are two colophons. The first one is a typical subscriptio written by
the scribe and seems to give the date of the copy’s completion, but in fact, it
refers to its model (as we will see later):
Qͥ en eſcrıuıo eſte lıbro ∂el ∂ıos parayſo amen

Per aƀƀaꞇ le eſcrıuıo enel mes de mayo
En era de mıỻ 𝔷 .C.C xL.v. años.
1 This section is mainly based on the study of the manuscript included in my edition, Cantar
de mio Cid (2016), pp. 463-524. See also Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. I, pp. 1-18, and
Ruiz Asencio, “El códice del Poema de Mio Cid y su escritura”.
2 See the facsimile editions in the general bibliography of this volume.
3 A more detailed analysis will be provided below. For the nomenclature of Gothic script, see
Derolez, The Paleography of Gothic Manuscript Books; De Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators,
p. 38; Greetham, Textual Scholarship, pp. 196-98; Folsom, The Caligrapher’s Dictionary, p. 55 et
passim. The Spanish classification can be found in Millares Carlo, Tratado de paleografía es-
pañola, vol. I, pp. 207-20; Sánchez Mariana, “La ejecución de los códices en Castilla”, pp. 321-23;
and Sánchez Prieto and Domínguez Aparicio, “Las escrituras góticas”.
4 They probably represent the heads of the Cid’s two daughters (fol. 31r), although the second
head is a mere copy of the first one, and the Moorish leader Avengalvón (fol. 32r). See
Montaner, “La fotografía hiperespectral”, pp. 272-75.
5 PMC 3731-33. As an exception to the general transcription rules for this volume, due to the
scope of this chapter the quotations of the PMC are usually offered in paleographical
transcription.
The second one was added later and refers to the public recitation of the poem,
and for that reason it is known (although inaccurately) as the jongleur’s
colophon:
E el romanz
eſley∂o, ∂at nos del vino ſi non tenedes ∂iños echa∂
Ala vnos peños q̄ bjẽ vos lo ∂araran ſobreloς.6
The rough parchment is probably made from goatskin (carta caprina), as

revealed by its yellowish color and characteristic “morocco” grain on the hair
side.7 Sheets are gathered together in eleven in-quarto quires, mostly quater-
nios (four bifolia, eight leaves). The exact collation formula is: 18 (missing 1),
2-48, 56, 64, 78 (missing 1), 88, 96, 108 (missing 1), 116 (missing 1). The quires have
no signatures nor quire-marks, but they had catchwords (in fact, about half of
the line at the top of the following page). As usual, they were written horizon-
tally in the lower margin of the last page of every quire, but they were so close
to the fold that they have been nearly completely excised due to the successive
trimming by the three binders of the codex. At present, only the eighth and
ninth quires have the catchwords at the bottom of fols. 56v and 62v. The first
reads “Qͣ n∂o ele lo oẏo peſol”, which reproduces most of line 2815: “Qͣ n∂o el lo
oẏo peſol ∂e coꝛaçon”. The second, “q̄ ʀeçiba ∂erecho ∂e”, is the first half of line
3133: “Q̅ reçiba ∂erecho ∂e yfanꞇes de carrion”. At the end of the seventh quire,
fol. 48v, the top of the ascender of a letter, which must be the h of muchos in
the following line can still be seen: “Los moꝛos ſon muchos ∂erre∂oꝛ le çer-
cauan” (v. 2390). The manuscript has no ancient foliation, unless it was
completely trimmed in the binding process. Modern foliation was probably
added during the 19th century, and it was penciled on the lower right corner of
each folio’s recto. Pagination was also added in the first quire, and it reaches to
page 15 (corresponding to fol. 7v), since it starts in the first flyleaf.
6 PMC 3733-35. This colophon starts at the end of the previous one and is written without paying
attention to rhymes. The verse disposition, in regularized transcription, would be: “E el romanz
es leýdo, / dat nos del vino; / si non tenedes dineros, / echad allá unos peños, / que bien [n]os
lo darán sobr’ellos” (I amend the dittography of dararan and the personal pronoun in v. 3735,
that makes no sense in the second-person plural).
7 This “grain” effect is due to the wide hair follicles in goat dermis (cf. Derolez, The Paleography
of Gothic Manuscript Books, p. 31). My direct inspection of the manuscript with a surface ex-
ploring video-microscope revealed a remnant hair that looks like caprine.
46 Montaner
Guidelines, scored with a lead point stylus,8 are present in every page, even
those left blank originally at the end of the last quire. The first one is an excep-
tion, since it displays a hard-point ruling together with a row of 26 prickings,
probably applied with a circinus, or dividers, in both the inner and the outer
margins. Even in this case, the pattern of guidelines is the simplest one: a mere
frame-ruling, reduced to the four lines which delimit the writing area, without
tracing baselines for the text. This was a rather informal layout that makes it
difficult to keep written lines straight, parallel, and evenly spaced.9 As a matter
of fact, there are some pages in which text lines deviate from the orthogonal
up to 5º. In other cases, the lines are bent in the center. For the same reason,
the number of lines per page varies between 22 and 29. Despite these fluctua-
tions, the average distribution is quite regular. The resulting written area is a
bit bigger than the frame, varying between 174 × 121 mm and 163 × 112 mm.
The one-column ruling pattern, with long text lines, is congruent with the in-
quarto format and was more common in manuscripts written in some variety
of cursive script, while the most formal manuscripts in textualis formata often
display a two-column format.10
As stated above, the full epic text was handwritten by a single scribe, whose
script is a semi-formal variety of Gothic book script, a hybrida, that is a late
mixture of textualis and cursiva features (see figure 1.1). The scribe made his
copy in three steps. First, he wrote the text of the entire poem in black ink,
which today has turned brown. During the copy process, he made some correc-
tions along the way. For example, he wrote at the end of v. 46 “caſas”, which was
the rhyme word of the previous line; he then suppressed it with a stroke and
added the right word: “E∂emas los oıos delas caſas caras”. Once he finished the
copy, the scribe made the usual revision (recognitio), writing with a more angu-
lar ductus and darker ink, and corrected several mistakes, such as the omission
of two words at the beginning of v. 11: “⟨Ala⟩ Exı∂a ∂e bıuar ouıerõ la coꝛneȷa
∂ıeſtra”. Later, he carried out a second and less extensive recognitio, writing
with a finer pen and paler ink, which now looks orange. Thus, in v. 2341 he
added the possessive over the line: “Plogo a mẏo çi∂ 𝔷 aꞇo∂os ⟨ſos⟩ vaſſallos”.
The first recognitio was done, in part, by rechecking the manuscript model, but
8 Lead ruling was the usual procedure for Gothic manuscripts until the late Middle Ages,
leaving a soft grey score on the surface of the parchment page. Some modern scholars
have erroneously thought they were scored with a graphite pencil. See Derolez, The Paleo-
graphy of Gothic Manuscript Books, p. 35.
9 Derolez, The Paleography of Gothic Manuscript Books, p. 37.
not the second one, based on the inconsistencies introduced at that time (see
examples below).
The letter forms are, in many cases, those typical of the cursiva or nottula
when used as book script (libraria, formata). For instance, there is a single
compartment triangular a, traced in two strokes and found in two variants, one
with a pointed top, and another in which the second stroke is higher than the
bowl and ends in a small ear to the left; an angular c with a horizontal head-
stroke, which allows the letter to be linked to the next one; a round e, traced in
three strokes, the third one being biased up to the right, and allowing the link-
ing to the next letter, for example e͜a, e͜n or e͜r; a two-stroke p, in which one
stroke forms the descender and the other one the lobe, which crosses the first
one stretching slightly to the left; and a round r shaped as figure 2, which is an
allograph or graphic variant used after o and y.11 The predilection for using a
(small) capital R at the beginning of a word is also a characteristic feature of
cursiva and hybrida, yet our scribe sometimes employs it in the middle of a
word to represent the “strong” alveolar trip /r/, as in v. 244: “coʀal”, pronounced
/koˈral/.12 Another allograph of r that was typical of the Iberian hybrida was
the long r, whose stem extends below the baseline, just as the descenders of p
or q. This variety only appears in a marginal addition by the scribe, which cor-
rects the text of v. 73: “poꝛ lo q̄ vos he ſeɼvı∂o”. The use of this allograph is due
to the more informal style of that kind of marginal nottulae. The high frequency
of i longa with respect to i brevis, here most often undotted ⟨ı, ȷ⟩, is also typical
of the Iberian kind of hybrida. “This does not mean that it was constantly used
(short i is in fact the more common form), but there was a strong tendency to
write j in specific positions: after or before m, n, u, after l, or at the opening of
words”.13 In the extant codex of the PMC, the proportion is about 96 per cent ı
vs. 4 per cent ȷ. The main use of ȷ is in the pair ⟨ıȷ⟩, for example in such common
words as fıȷas ‘daughters’ or aguıȷo ‘spurred’. It sometimes appears in the groups
eȷ, mȷ, nȷ and vȷ (the last one only in Roman numerals), but always in a minority
of cases versus eı, mı, nı, and vı. The i longa is scarcely used in an initial position
(6 per cent of its occurrences): ȷonas (v. 339), ȷeronımo (v. 1501), ȷu(u)ızıo
(vv. 3239, 3259, and 3484), ȷuego (v. 3258), ȷugara (v. 3319), ȷuro (v. 3509),
ȷunꞇaron (v. 3546), ȷunꞇa∂os (v. 3621), ȷunꞇo (v. 3625). Noteworthy is the spelling
11 This is an idiosyncratic use of the PMC scribe; usually, the round r is employed after any
letter ending in a bow. The hammer-shaped and round allographs of r are displayed in
v. 388: “Sı vıere∂es yentes venır poꝛ connuſco yꝛ”.
12 The three allographs of r are used, for example, in v. 635: “Qͣ n∂o lo oyo el ʀey ꞇamın poꝛ
cuer le peſo mal”.
48 Montaner
“ſȷn”, which appears three times (vv. 523, 786, and 1968), instead of the most
common form “ſın”.
On the other hand, the two-stroke hammer-shaped r is an allograph intro-
duced from textualis or littera textura in the realm of cursiva or nottula. The
same applies to round loopless d ⟨∂⟩, but its proportions are longer than those
of d in littera textualis or textura.14 Just as the loopless ascenders of b, h, and l,
it is one of the distinctive features of the semihybrida and hybrida. Typical of
the Iberian hybrida is the v allograph of u whose first arm is made of a long,
bold, and fusiform diagonal stroke. Also characteristic of this script is the g
with a circular bowl and long ear, whose tail has two allographs. One of them
displays a typical cursiva loop, while the other “has an almost horizontal tail-
stroke, located rather high and stretching far to the left”15.
By contrast, the f and the straight s ⟨ſ⟩ do not have the remarkably fat and
pointed form typical of the cursiva nor do they extend below the baseline; on
the other hand, they are far more rounded than the textualis variants, not being
similar to the later semihybrida forms which are characteristic of Spanish letra
de albalaes. In the c caudata, the cedilla is placed quite below the baseline, as
is usual in the semihybrida, but it is connected to the c, like in the (semi)textua-
lis. The round allograph of s (used in final position) does not have the beta or
sigma shapes of s ⟨ϐ, σ / ϛ⟩ found in the letra de albalaes. There is a third allo-
graph of s, which derives from the so-called trailing s used in textualis to occupy
less space on the line, but it is written as superscript ⟨s⟩, for graphic economy
as well as for correcting oversights. Both cases can be exemplified by the long
v. 2479: “Q͂ lidiaran comıgo en campo myo⟨s⟩ yernos amos a ∂os”, where the first
superscript s is an addition of the same scribe, while the other two were writ-
ten at the same time as the full verse in order to avoid dividing it into two lines.
Finally, there are two letters with a very idiosyncratic ductus. One is t, which,
as usual in cursiva, is a two-stroke letter but with a very curved shaft and long
headstroke, which makes it clearly distinguishable from c (unlike what hap-
pens in other variants of Iberian textualis or hybrida). Thus, the t has a very
characteristic tau shape ⟨ꞇ⟩, except in the ligature ﬅ ⟨ſt⟩. The other idiosyn-
cratic letter is z, which has two allographs, both descending below the baseline.
One of them takes the common cursiva shape of figure 3 ⟨ꝫ⟩, but the other
takes a shape similar to figure 5 ⟨Ƽ⟩, closest to the Spanish textualis z.
14 In Iberian hybrida, “[t]he letter d is mostly marked by a rather long, bold, and cub-shaped
shaft traced on the diagonal” (Derolez, The Paleography of Gothic Manuscript Books,
p. 172), typical of the so-called letra de albalaes, but in the PMC codex the top of the
ascender is straight or slightly acute.
Graphic economy is attained through fusions, ligatures, and abbreviations.

The manuscript lacks proper fusions, like those of d͜d, b͜b or p͡p, and the typical
Gothic fusion or overlapping of round strokes, such as b͜e, b͜o, d͜e, d͜o, p͡e, p͡o, are
not frequent.16 It also lacks the ligatures typical of Iberian (semi)hybrida dur-
ing the 14th and 15th centuries, like t͜o and o͜σ. The letters are very often linked
(as already explained for e), but the ligatures are very few: ⟨ff, fi, ſſ, ﬅ⟩. There is
also a ligature ct, but without the usual loop ⟨ct⟩, because the upper arm of the
c is linked to the crossbar of the tau shaped t ⟨cˉτ⟩. On the other hand, the
manuscript displays the typical set of Gothic abbreviations. The most common
abbreviation marks are the horizontal stroke ⟨ˉ⟩ and the tilde ⟨˜⟩ above a letter,
which very often indicate the omission of the nasal: “bıẽ” = bien, “cãpo” = canpo.
Thus, “mañana” was actually the abbreviation of mannana, but both ñ and nn
were already alternative spellings for the palatal nasal /ɲ/. All the contractions,
which are quite common, are marked with one of those marks: “nr̃o” = nuestro,
“oƀipo” = obispo, “ſcãs” = sanctas, “ſp̄ al” = spirital, ur̃o = uuestro, “xp̄ s” = christus.
The tilde above a q also stands for que: “aq͂ l” = aquel, “q͂ rıẽ” = querien. In addi-
tion to the use as abbreviation mark, the horizontal stroke can cut across the
ascenders of some double consonants: “aƀƀaꞇ”, “mıỻ”.
Superscript letters a, i, and o are used as r-abbreviations: “conpͣ ” = conpra,
“cͥa∂oꝛ” = criador, “oꞇ̊s” = otros. An odd use of superscript o is found in “eꞇ̊ꝛ” =
entro (where only the nasal is missing). The superscript a or i above a q also
acts as u-abbreviation: “qͣ nꞇo” = quanto, “aqͥ ” = aqui. Nevertheless, when applied
to personal names, they mark full contractions: “gͦ zlez” = gonzalez (vv. 2286 and
2288), “mͣ ” = maria (v. 52), “mͬ ” = martin (v. 102), “ʀͦ ” = Rodrigo (v. 1028); also in
“xͥan-” = christian(o, -a, -os, -as, -ismo).
Special abbreviation signs are also used. The most common is the tironian
et, which has the traditional form similar to figure 7 but rounded, thus resem-
bling a big comma. The antisigma or tironian con takes the form of figure 9 and
appears only twice: “ꝯpͣ ” = conpra (v. 62) and “ꝯde” = conde (v. 972)17 An impor-
tant group is formed by r-abbreviations other than superscript vowels. The
16 Due to this and other features, like the use of hammer-shaped r instead of round r after b
and p, Riaño Rodríguez and Gutiérrez Aja, eds., Cantar de Mío Cid, vol. II, pp. 365-72, and
Riaño Rodríguez, “Paleografía del manuscrito”, have proposed that the extant codex was
written in Pregothic script about 1235. In fact, the lack of fusions are proper of the variety
of Gothic cursive known as nottula separata, while features like the use of br, pr, rather
than bꝛ, pꝛ, are common in Iberian hybrida. For more details, see Ruiz Asencio, “El códice
del Poema de Mio Cid”, p. 36; Bayo, “La datación del Cantar de Mio Cid”; Montaner, ed.,
Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 487-90.
17 On fol. 18r, “9tado” = contado[s] (v. 826) is an addition of the first bookbinder (see below);
the final –s was cut off during the second or third binding.
50 Montaner
most usual one is a small horizontal stroke with a sloping hairline connecting
it with the letter beneath ⟨7⟩, which is a cursive feature abbreviating er or some-
times re: “au̚ res” = aueres, “p̚ ſon” = preson, “v̚tu∂” = vertud; “p̚ ﬅar” = prestar. In a
few cases it is the abbreviation of ier, as in “mug̚ ” = mugier and “ꞇ̚ra” = tierra,
which, however, is often written “ꞇ̚rra”. When this horizontal stroke crosses an
ascender, it loses its hairline: “cauaỻos” = caualleros, “ħe∂a∂es” = heredades.
A horizontal line cutting across the descender of p stands for per: “eſꝑran∂o” =
esperando, “ꝑ∂erie” = perderie. A letter p with a bow to the left of its descender
is the abbreviation of pro: “ꝓuã∂o” = prouando, “ꝓueƼas” = prouezas. A very
idiosyncratic abbreviation is that of ⟨ſꝫ⟩, which usually stands for latin sed, as
abbreviation of ser in v. 116, instead of ⟨ſ̷ ⟩.
Graphic emphasis is provided by a set of Gothic majuscules whose specific
feature is a double vertical hairline inside the bowl or counter (horizontal in
the case of P and H). They appear as opening letters in each line of the text, and
are also used for highlighting León ‘lion’ in vv. 2282-98, and as Roman numer-
als: “Los oꞇ̊s .C.C.C. en oꝛo gelos pagauã” (v. 186), “Delos moꝛıſcos qͣ n∂o ſon
lega∂os ffallarõ ·D·x cauallos” (v. 796). In addition to these majuscules, there
are fourteen initials whose function is rather dubious because they do not cor-
respond to any thematic division of the PMC nor to any physical division of the
codex.18 Three are plain initials: two A’s (fols. 38r and 43r), and one L (fol. 9v).
The other eleven are flourished initials: three A’s (fols. 12v, 37r, and 67r), one B
(fol. 24r), two D’s (fols. 11r and 21r), two E’s (fols. 15r and 46v), one L (fol. 9v) and
two P’s (fols. 6r and 56r). All of them follow the pattern of mixed capitals and
uncials, usually known as Lombard capitals, and are monochrome. However,
they display the typical zigzag or wavy white line used in litterae duplices or
cum spatiis for separating the interlocked red and blue ink.
The punctuation is restricted to a monochrome paragraph mark ⟨¶⟩, which
is used only when a long verse is divided into two lines, as in vv. 89-90:
Poꝛ ʀachel 𝔷 vı∂as uaya∂es me pͥ ua∂o ¶ꝛa∂o

Q͂ n∂o en burgos me ve∂arõ cõpra 𝔷 el ʀeẏ me a ay
The codex was bound three times. The first binding was coeval with the copy,
which we know thanks to the binder’s handwriting. Since several line ends
were trimmed in the binding process, he copied them again over the original
line in a rotunda Gothic script with very dark ink and surrounded by an ellipse.
18 Only the A on fol. 38r matches up with the start of a quire, the eighth one. Another five
initials are drawn in the first line of a folio recto (fols. 6r, 15r, 21r, 24r, and 38r). On this
enigmatic issue, see Higashi, “Notas sobre la diuisio textus”.
Most of these additions were trimmed in turn by later binders, probably the
third one. Thus, a typical intervention by the first binder looks at present like
this:
Si nõ en ꞇo∂os ur̄os ∂ıas non veredes xͥnıſmo ⊂ga

Dixo el con∂e ∂on ʀemonꞇ come∂e ∂õ ʀ̊ 𝔷 penſſe∂es ∂e fol
Since the back of the last folio was left blank, it was used shortly after the codex
binding for probationes pennae, where several hands wrote the following texts:
the beginning of a Castilian version of Epitus or Diálogo de Epicteto y el empera-
dor Adriano,20 a wrong quotation of PMC 3377-80 (probably memorized), the
first words of the Pater Noster, Ps. 110 (109 iuxta LXX):1-3 (text of Latin Vulgate),
a full Pater Noster, and an incomplete Ave Maria. The first two texts were writ-
ten in the so-called letra de albalaes, a variety of Iberian semihybrida typical of
the first half of the 14th century,21 while the other four were written in a textus
rotundus quite similar to that used by the first binder. Perhaps a bit later, during
the second half of the 14th century, the aforementioned “jongleur’s colophon”
was added after the scribal subscriptio at the end of fol. 74r.
It is impossible to determine the date of the second binding. The third one
was carried out in a very simple Renaissance style shortly before 1596, probably
at the time when the codex arrived to the town hall of Vivar (the village were,
according to a well-established tradition, the Cid was born).22 In newly added
flyleaves, several records were written that attest to the codex’s reception by
successive municipal clerks: Martin Blanco (undated, but according to his
Humanistic script that shows no signs of Gothic features, sometime after 1550),
Francisco López (1635), Pedro Alonso (1670?), and Francisco de Abajo (1685).
As for the dating of the codex itself, Menéndez Pidal defended that it was
copied in May 1307, according to the scribe’s colophon: “Per aƀƀaꞇ le eſcrıuıo
enel mes de mayo / En era de mıỻ 𝔷 .C.C xL.v. años”. Since there is a space in
the date between the hundreds and the tens, he thought that a third C had
19 PMC 1027-28. A letter r is missing after ga. Thus, the primitive reading of v. 1028 in the
manuscript would have been “Dixo el con∂e ∂on ʀemonꞇ come∂e ∂õ ʀ̊ 𝔷 penſſe∂es ∂e fol-
gar”.
20 See Bizzarri, “Epitus (Diálogo de Epicteto y el Emperador Adriano)”.
21 Nevertheless, the Epitus seems to display features proper of the letra precortesana, a
Gothic semihybrida developed during the second half of the 14th century.
22 The codex was already in Vivar in that year, which we know through the oldest of the
modern copies, that of the antiquarian Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri (see below).
52 Montaner
been erased in order to age the manuscript.23 Thus, the year of the copy would
be mcccxlv of the Hispanic era, that is, ad 1307.24 Nevertheless, an examina-
tion with a surface exploring video-microscope and a hyperspectral photo
camera demonstrated that nothing had been written in, or expunged from,
that space;25 thus, the scribe’s suscriptio refers to mccxlv of the Hispanic era,
that is, ad 1207. This date is not compatible with the codex script, which is a
variety of Gothic that can be dated between 1280 and 1340. Therefore, it must
be concluded that the colophon is a subscriptio copiata which reproduces the
colophon of its model, a lost manuscript from the beginning of the 13th centu-
ry.26 On the other hand, the presence of this colophon in the 1207 codex means
that it was not a draft or an author’s original, but a formal copy of a previous
model. As for the 14th-century codex itself, since the Gothic majuscules with
inner double hairlines did not survive after the first third of 14th-century, and
the use of monochrome flourished initials drawn cum spatiis started around
1320, the aforementioned interval can be narrowed to the decennial 1320-30.27
This date is also supported by spelling data, which point to the first third of the
14th century:28
1. The codex’s systematic use of ⟨y⟩ as grapheme of vowel /i/ in the initial
position is a usual feature only after Alfonso X of Castile, who died in
1284. In addition, the scribe used ⟨y⟩ after a consonant in rising diph-
thongs twice: “mye∂o” (v. 1079), “ʀyen∂a” (v. 1747).
23 Menéndez Pidal, ed., Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. I, pp. 4-6 and 12-13. This explanation had
already been proposed by the first editor of the PMC, Sánchez, Colección de poetas caste-
llanos, vol. I, pp. 221-22, who offered three possibilities: a) the scribe added a third “C” by
mistake and then erased it, b) the scribe added a tironian et and then erased it since it was
unnecessary, and c) another person erased a third “C” in an attempt to pass the codex off
as being much older, and therefore more valuable. It must be noted that the copy made in
1596 by Ruiz de Ulibarri already read “En Era de mill. ʓ cc xLv. años” (BNE, MSS/6328, fol.
93r), and at that time the third conjecture offered by Sánchez seemed rather anachronis-
tic.
24 The so-called Hispanic era or Caesar era, whose first year is 38 BC, was the preferred dat-
ing system in Iberia beginning in the Visigothic kingdom, and was used in Castile until
1384 when the Anno Domini system was adopted by a decree enacted by the Cortes de
Segovia in 1383.
25 See Montaner, “Ecdótica”, pp. 39-42, and “La fotografía hiperespectral”, pp. 275-77.
26 Michael, “Per Abbat, ¿autor o copista?”, p. 205.
28 I wish to thank Javier Rodríguez Molina for providing me with this information, which he
will justify in detail in a forthcoming book on the PMC’s language. In the meantime, see
his chapter in this volume.
2. The systematic use of grapheme ⟨v⟩ representing an initial /u/ or /v/.

3. The use of initial double consonants ⟨ſſ⟩ and ⟨rr⟩, and the (small) capital
⟨ʀ⟩, as much as the use of ⟨rr⟩ and ⟨ʀ⟩ after nasal, as graphemes of /r/.
4. The graphic reflection as /i/ of the vocalization of a previous implosive
/g/ in “ʀeyna∂o” (v. 211), instead of the older form regnado.
5. The systematic use of ⟨ç⟩ before a palatal vowel: çe, çi.
6. The use of i longa ⟨ȷ⟩ that descends below the baseline instead of its cap-
ital form ⟨J⟩, which is usual in the second half of 14th century.
7. The representation of the group /nasal + p/ by ⟨np⟩ in preference to ⟨mp⟩.
8. The use of ⟨nt⟩ instead of the final /n/ in “algunꞇ” (v. 1744).
As for the codex’s provenance, the available data does not allow us to reach any
well-established conclusion. Menéndez Pidal thought that it was a jongleur’s
manuscript, mainly because of the jongleur’s colophon and its modest appear-
ance.29 Even if one accepts the existence of something so debatable,30 our
in-quarto codex on parchment would be too large and too expensive for that
purpose.31 On the other hand, the aforementioned colophon says that “el
romanz / eſley∂o”, that is, ‘the story is read’, while it is undoubtable that jon-
gleurs performed epic poems by singing, as attested by the French and Spanish
medieval names for the genre: chansons (de geste) and cantares (de gesta).32
Since the codex was kept in Vivar at least since the 16th century, it has also
been argued that it was commissioned two centuries earlier by the town coun-
cil itself.33 Nevertheless, the present binding is almost contemporary to the
first record of the manuscript’s presence at Vivar, and it is consistent with the
29 Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca y juglares, pp. 384-85.

30 There are no verifiable samples of a jongleur’s or minstrel’s manuscript; see Taylor, “The
Myth of the Minstrel Manuscript” (even though his arguments are not always solid); and
Bayo, “La datación del Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 22-25.
31 At a time when the pergamino de paño (cloth parchment), that is to say, paper, had even
been validated for legal records (Sánchez Mariana, “El libro en la Baja Edad Media”, p. 198),
it is hard to believe that a minstrel would have made a libretto copied on parchment. As
Paolo Trovato points out to me, the in-quarto (a very common format before printing)
would ensure greater readability, but this was not the primary role of an aide-mémoire,
which a jongleur’s manuscript is supposed to be. Interestingly, a contemporary manu-
script of the PMC’s sole codex, that of the poem Disputa de Elena y María, which has been
considered a prototypic minstrel’s copy (even if it was probably a pocket book), is a small
volume written on paper (65 × 55 mm).
32 See Rossell, “La épica románica era cantada” and Poesia i Música.
33 Smith, “¿Se escribió en Cardeña el Poema de mio Cid?”, pp. 471-73 (who thinks that the
copy was requested to the scriptorium of San Pedro de Cardeña by the people of Vivar);
Catalán, La épica española, pp. 118 and 433-36.
54 Montaner
receipt formulas written down by the municipal clerks in the modern flyleaves.
This strongly suggests that the volume was bound just as it entered the council
archive at Vivar. This is an important, but still not insurmountable, objection
to the hypothesis that it was requested by the people of Vivar, whereas the
nature of the probationes pennae on fol. 74v poses a major obstacle. On the one
hand, there are no legal expressions, which are usually found in codices pre-
served in municipal clerk’s offices.34 On the other hand, the presence of a
fragment of a didactic work, the Epitus, and a passage from the psalm sung at
Sunday vespers are not easy to explain in a bureaucratic environment. Finally,
there is no proof of any celebration carried out at that time by Vivar’s council
that could explain the “jongleur’s colophon”.
A third conjecture was that the codex originated from a historiographical
workshop.35 Here again, the material features of the manuscript do not sup-
port the hypothesis. Parchment was too expensive a material to be employed
in a purely utilitarian booklet, but at that time its use was not impossible even
if paper was becoming quite common.36 More important is the use of a semi-
formal Gothic script (hybrida, semitextualis), instead of the quick informal
variety (cursiva, nottularis) that would have fit the alleged practical purpose of
the codex. Moreover, the manuscript lacks medieval interventions typical of a
historiographical use: underlinings, marks in the margin (such as bracketing,
crosslets, pointing hands, or paragraphs) and marginal or interlinear remarks
or additions.37 Last but not least, this hypothesis leaves without explanation
the probationes pennae and the “jongleur’s colophon”.
The best, although not undisputable, hypothesis is that the codex was cop-
ied for the Benedictine Abbey of San Pedro de Cardeña,38 where the Cid was
buried after the withdrawal of the Castilian conquerors from Valencia in 1102.

35 Orduna, “El testimonio del códice de Vivar”; Bayo, “La datación del Cantar de Mio Cid”.
36 Cf. Sánchez Mariana, “La ejecución de los códices en Castilla”, p. 318, and “El libro en la
Baja Edad Media”, pp. 202-03. Most probably, the borradores or working drafts of the royal
scriptorium of Alfonso X of Castile were already made of paper (Sánchez Mariana, “El
libro en la Baja Edad Media”, p. 198). One of the few Iberian historical drafts of this period
that has survived, the manuscript B of Juan Fernández de Heredia’s Grant Crónica de
Espanya (Barcelona, Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya, ms. 355), was written on paper,
but it was done in the las quarter of 14th century; see Geijerstam, “Un esbozo de la Grant
Crónica de Espanya”.
37 The few marginal marks present in the codex are of a later date, as revealed by its human-
istic ductus; see Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, p. 500.
38 Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid (2007), pp. cclxxxvii-ccxcvi, and (2011/16), pp. 502-06;
Zaderenko, “Per Abbat en Cardeña” and “Per Abbat en Cardeña. Addenda”.
In this case, the material conditions of the unique manuscript can be explained
because it was made pro memoria, as part of the intangible heritage of the
monastery linked to one of the main characters in its history, but in a period of
crisis in which the Abbey could not afford an expensive luxurious codex.39 On
the other hand, the probationes pennae on fol. 74v (three prayers and the incipit
of a didactical text) are proper of a monastic scriptorium. Finally, the “jon-
gleur’s colophon” can be linked to the devotion to the Cid’s memory and tomb,
well attested in the first half of 14th century,40 and linked to the composition of
an epitaph for the Cid’s tomb in epic style:41
Cid Ruy Díez só que yago aquí encerrado

e vencí al rey Bucar con treinta e seis reyes de paganos.
Estos treinta e seis reyes, los veinte e dos murieron en el campo;
vencilos sobre Valencia desque yo muerto encima de mi cavallo.
Con ésta son setenta e dos batallas que yo vencí en el campo.
Gané a Colada e a Tizona, por ende Dios sea loado.
Amén.
Written as a sole work on resistant parchment when cheaper paper was already
available, and in a clear and quite regular variety of Gothic script – hybrid of
textualis and nottularis (be it characterized as nottula separata, cursiva for-
mata, semitextualis, or textualis currens) – the unique medieval manuscript of
the PMC is a tough and tidy codex, surely not for display but not for work in a
scriptorium either. It was most probably a memorial copy, made c.1325 for the
preservation of the already old poem, and presumably ordered by the Monas-
tery of San Pedro de Cardeña at a time when its monks were deeply interested
in the figure of the heroic warrior whose remains were buried there.
3 Other Witnesses: Modern Manuscript Copies and Prose Versions in

Castilian Chronicles
As I said before, there are other manuscript copies of the PMC, all of them from
a later date and derived from the unique codex then kept in Vivar. Unfortunately,
the missing folios were already lost when these transcriptions were done. Until
39 Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 502-03.

40 Smith, “The diffusion of Cid cult”; Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 502-6; see also the
chapters by Zaderenko and Bautista in this volume.
41 Montaner, “El epitafio épico del Cid”.
56 Montaner
now, only the copy made by Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri had been known, but other
copies have been found very recently in various libraries.42 Therefore, the cur-
rent list of modern manuscripts includes:
1. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS/6328, in-quarto volume on

paper, 211 × 149 mm, 93 fols. + [8] sheets, 1596; fol. 1r “+ | Historia del
ƒamoso Cauallero Rodrigo | de Bibar llamado por otro nombre | Çid
Campeador ~ | ʃacada desu Original por Juan Ruiz de | Vlibarri en Burgos
a 20 de Octubre | De 1596 años”; fol. 93r: “Yo Juan Ruiz de_Vlibarri y_leyba.
saque_eſta | hiſtoria_de_su _original. El_qual que∂a en_el | archibo del_
Concejo de_Bibar – En_burgos | a_Veınte dıas del_mes_∂eoctubre, de
1596 años”, and added later by other hand: “El_Original estaba en_el_lugar
de_Bibar. | Hubole el S.r Sanchez por intercesion_∂el_ S.r | Llaguno, Secre-
tario del_Consejo de Estado. | Emendamos por él esta copia: y asi esta
equi-|vale_al original. Pero por él lo publico el | referido_ S.r Sanchez en
sus Poesias Antiguas | tom. 1 | J. Ant. Pellicer. | Ma∂ri∂, Ag.to 21 de | 1792”.43
2. Madrid, Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Ms. N-34, in-folio
volume on paper, 301 × 207 mm, 391 fols., 16th or early 17th century; facti-
tious collection of document copies mainly dated between 1590 and 1623,
which contains a fragment of PMC 1-197 (fols. 96r-100r); fol. 96r: “Vealos el
Secret.º Gracián /. | Verʃos de_la_Historia del Çi∂ Rui∂iaz Campea∂or / |
sacados de un libro antiguo escripto en pergamino que | El conçejo de_
Viuar tiene en sus Archiuos / faltan muchas | hojas y lo q̑ ʃe halla es desde
el destierro / ~ || Hizieron hacer esta_Hist.ª en_el verʃo q̑ entonçes ʃe_
vʃaba | los Reyes nietos del çi∂ ~”, fol. 100r: “mereçer nos los hedes ca_esto
es aguiʃa∂o / | Solo_ʃe_ʃaco haﬅa_aqui”.
3. Oviedo, Biblioteca Universitaria de Oviedo, Ms. M-290, in-folio volume
on paper, 330 × 230 mm, [89] unnumbered fols., 18th century; fol. [3]r: “De
los sos oios tan fuere mientre lorando”, fol. [87]r: “En Era de mill e C.C …..
XLV. años”.
4. Sevilla, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, Ms. 58-4-26, in-quarto volume
on paper, 209 × 152 mm, 164 fols., c.1760; factitious volume of works and
notes by Cándido María Trigueros (1736-98) which contains a fragment of
PMC 1-197 (fols. 53r-58r); fol. 53r: “Este es un traslado del Historia del Cid
Ruy Días Campeador, sacada de un libro antiguo escrito en pergamino,
42 I wish to thank Francisco Bautista for providing me with information on these manu-
scripts he recently discovered.
43 Available on line at <http://tinyurl.com/BNE-MSS-3628>. On the particular circumstances
of this copy, see Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 508-09.
que el Conzejo de Vibar tiene en sus archivos”, fol. 58r: “merecer nos los
edes ca esto es aguesado”.
5. Sevilla, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, Ms. 59-2-13, in-folio volume on
paper, 301 × 205 mm, [146] unnumbered fols., 18th century; a compilation
of medieval epic legends written down by a single hand, which comprises
the Estoria del conde Fernán González (fols. [1]r-[88]v), the Estoria de los
siete ynfantes de Lara (fols. [89]r-[138]v) and a fragment of PMC 1-197 (fols.
[141]r-[146]r); fol. [141]r: “Este es un tratado de la Histo- | ria del Çid Rui
Diaz Campeador, sacado | de un libro antiguo escripto en pergamino, |
que el Conçejo de Bibar tiene en sus archi- | vos el tenor del es el siguiente”,
fol. [146]r. “mereçer no los hedes ca esto es aguisado”.
The first and second manuscripts are direct copies of the 14th-century codex.
The fourth and fifth manuscripts are copies of the second one.44 The third
manuscript is very similar, although not identical, to the first edition published
by Sánchez in the first volume of his Colección de poesías castellanas (1779). It
could be a copy akin to the original de imprenta or printer’s copy, but it could
also be a handwritten copy of the printed text. From a textual point of view, all
these copies are codices descripti; therefore, they are not useful for a recensio
that could help establish the text (constitutio textus), even if they offer interest-
ing data about the modern knowledge of the PMC before Sánchez’s edition.
There is also an indirect tradition related to the PMC through the so-called
Alfonsine chronicles,45 that is, the historiographical texts that ultimately derive
from the Estoria de España composed under the direction of King Alfonso X
44 Trigueros referred to the present-day BRAH Ms. N-34 (which he dated to c.1500) in his
unpublished Disertación sobre el verso suelto y la rima (1766) that is preserved in the same
Colombina Ms. 58-4-26, fols. 1r-52v; cf. Aguilar Piña, “Cándido María Trigueros y el Poema
del Cid”; and Galván, El Poema del Cid en España, 1779-1936, pp. 34-35.
45 The importance of indirect tradition for an accurate edition is out of discussion in textual
scholarship, unless based on the “scribal version” criterion (see below). The exceptional
value of relying on Alfonsine chronicles to establish the text of the Poema de mio Cid was
first noticed by Menéndez Pidal, “El Poema del Cid y las Crónicas Generales de España”,
and developed in his edition, Cantar de mio Cid, vol. I, pp. 124-36, and vol. III, pp. 1185-91.
More recently, it has been emphasized by Armistead, “The Initial Verses of the Cantar de
Mio Cid”, “From Epic to Chronicle: An Individualist Appraisal”, and “Cantares de gesta y
crónicas alfonsíes”; Orduna, “La edición crítica y el codex unicus: El texto del Poema de Mio
Cid”, and Catalán, La épica española, 441-42. Nevertheless, the textual use of those prose
versions has its limits, cf. Montaner, “Cave carmen! De huellas de asonancia a ‘prosa
rimada’ en las prosificaciones épicas cronísticas” and “El uso textual de la tradición indi-
recta (Historia Roderici, § 13 y Cantar de mio Cid, v. 14b)”.
58 Montaner
of Castile. The chronicles relevant to the textuality of the PMC are the Versión
crítica, composed at the end of Alfonso X’s reign (1282-84); the Versión ampli-
ficada or sanchina compiled at the court of Sancho IV in 1289; and the Crónica
manuelina and the Crónica de Castilla (both composed c.1300).46 As far as the
PMC is concerned, none of them directly used the Poema, but rather a prose
version elaborated in the historiographical workshop of Alfonso X.47 This is
true even of the so-called “Interpolación cidiana” (the Cid’s Interpolation)
incorporated into the recension of the Versión amplificada represented by
manuscript F, later inherited and reelaborated by the Crónica manuelina and
the Crónica de Castilla.48 The only exception is the passage of the Crónica de
Castilla corresponding to the missing beginning of the PMC, which probably is
based on memories from a recited version, and not on a written text. Such an
origin could explain the isolated use of the oral source.49 Thanks to this pas-
sage, about forty per cent of the missing lines can be recovered.50
The aforementioned Alfonsine prosification of the PMC was based on a
poetic text that very closely resembles the version that has reached us.51 It was
a complete text since it did not have the textual gaps of the extant manuscript.52
The close relationship between the Alfonsine manuscript and the sole codex is
proved by some common readings.53 The clearest cases are those related to
place names. For example, in v. 545, the manuscript reads “Paſſaron las aguas
enꞇraron al campo ∂e toꝛançıo”; this place name appears as Taranç(i)o in the
Versión crítica, p. 471, and Taraçon in the Versión amplificada, p. 526.
Neverheless, the laisse rhyme is á-(e) and requires the use of the form Toranç
~Toranz (like in v. 1492). In vv. 571, 585, 625, 632, 773, and 842, all the sources
46 See Francisco Bautista’s chapter in this volume. In the pages ahead, I will quote the Ver-
sión crítica using Campa’s edition, La “Estoria de España” de Alfonso X, and the Versión
amplificada (including the “Interpolación cidiana”) using Menéndez Pidal’s edition, Pri-
mera crónica general, indicating the page number in both cases only when necessary.
47 Smith, “The First Prose Redaction of the Poema de mio Cid”.
48 For more details, see the aforementioned chapter by Bautista.
49 This is the hypothesis proposed by Bautista in his chapter, with whom I agree.
50 Armistead, “The Initial Verses of the Cantar de Mio Cid”; Montaner, “De nuevo sobre los
versos iniciales”; D’Agostino, “Cantar de Mio Cid, vv. 1-99”, pp. 15 and 24-30.
51 For a comparison of the poetic text and the chronicle versions, see Dyer, El “Mio Cid” del
taller alfonsí; and Montiel, Estudio comparativo.
52 Several scholars have thought that the model of the prose version had the same internal
lacunae as the extant codex, but Hook, “Verbal economy”, pp. 105-06, has proved that the
historiographical text corresponding to the first missing folio has a poetic origin.
53 On the conjunctive and disjunctive variations of the missing Alfonsine manuscript with
respect to the unique codex, see Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 533-36.
read Teruel, a clear lectio facilior instead of the lesser-known place name Terrer
preserved in v. 860 and partially in v. 585 of the manuscript – both of which are
cases of a correction made by the scribe himself.54 A similar substitution with
a lectio facilior is found in vv. 952 and 1089, where Huesca substitutes Huesa,
required by the context. As a sample of other common errors, let us take a look
at v. 1029, which appears in the manuscript as “Q͂ yo ∂exar me moꝛır q̄ non qͥ ero
comer”; while the chronicles read “que yo non comere, mas dexar me he morir”
(Versión crítica, p. 480) and “ca yo non combre nin fare al si non dexarme morir”
(Versión amplificada, p. 533-34). The three sources use forms of the verb comer,
while the laisse rhyme is á-(e), which requires the line to end with yantar, as in
vv. 285, 304, and 3051 (but in this case the error could be polygenetic).
On the other hand, the Alfonsine prosification has better readings than the
extant codex in several places. Here again, the place names are a good test case.
Thus, in v. 1475 the Versión crítica reads Fronchales instead of the meaningless
frontael.55 In v. 1493, the manuscript reads “Poꝛ el val ∂e arbuxe∂o pıenſſan a ∂e
prunar”, where the unknown “arbuxe∂o” was written over a previous illegible
form. The “Interpolación cidiana” reads “por el val de Arbuxuelo aiuso” (Versión
amplificada, p. 595),56 which is the correct place name. There are also better
readings of common nouns, as in v. 1012, “Prıſo lo al con∂e poꝛa ſu ꞇ̚rra lo
leuaua”, where the chronicle reads: “E el Çid leuo al conde preso para su tienda”
(Versión crítica, p. 479; Versión amplificada, p. 533, which omits “el Cid”), with
tienda instead of tierra, as required by the context.
The presence of both conjunctive and disjunctive variations means that the
14th-century codex did not copy the Alfonsine manuscript, but both descend
from the same archetypus, Per Abbats’s lost codex of 1207, unless that same
codex was the direct source of the Alfonsine prosification.57 In turn, the arche-
typus copied by Per Abbat had a previous model, a codex vetus that started the
known textual tradition of the PMC. In light of the available evidence, the most
54 See Montaner, “Revisión textual”, pp. 142-43.

55 The “Interpolación cidiana” included in the Version amplificada abbreviates the passage
and therefore omits this place name.
56 In this case, the Versión crítica abbreviates the passage and suppresses the place name.
57 This would be the more economical, and thus, the preferable hypothesis; however, there
are a few cases in which the Alfonsine manuscript offered worse readings than the 14th-
century codex. Therefore, one could argue that there was an intermediate copy between
Per Abbat’s manuscript and the Alfonsine prosification. See Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio
Cid, p. 536.
60 Montaner
likely filiation of direct and indirect witnesses of the PMC textual tradition can
be represented by the following stemma:58
[PMC codex vetus]

Before 1207
[Per Abbat’s
archetypus]
May 1207
[*Alphonsine
manuscript]
Between 1207 and 1270
[Alphonsine
prosification]
About 1270
Alphonsine
chronicles
1270 onwards
codex unicus
(BNE VITR/7/17)
About 1320-30
Copy by Juan Ruiz Fragmentary copy

de Ulibarri (Ms. BRAH N-34)
(BNE MSS/6328)
About 1600
1596
[Printer’s copy]
Near 1779
Trigueros’ copy Anonymous copy

(Ms. Colomb. 58-4-26) [?]
(Ms. Colomb. 59-2-13)
Near 1760 18th century
Full copy Poema del Cid
(Ms.BUO M-290) 1st edition
18th century by T. A. Sánchez
1779
58 The names between square brackets are those of lost sources. The asterisk marks a dubi-
ous item. See Bautista’s chapter for more details about the Alfonsine chronicles.
4 Reading Challenges and Editing Problems
It is clear by now that any edition of the PMC must rely almost exclusively on
its codex unicus, the copy of Per Abbat’s archetypus made c.1320-30. This could
be a minor problem if the manuscript had not been damaged over time. The
most severe damage is the aforementioned loss of three folios, that is, about
135/150 lines of text. Another important problem is the poor readability of
parts of the manuscript. Less serious is the loss of some letters and even words
trimmed out by the binders (vv. 466, 826b, 1028, 1033b, and 1690).
Although the text’s illegibility is at times caused by faded ink, it is more
often due to the utilization of chemical reagents by previous readers and edi-
tors from at least the late 16th century to the beginning of the 20th. The
reactants enhanced the faded ink, rendering it easier to read only for a short
time. Later, however, a black stain appeared where the chemical product was
applied. As a result, there are now several passages in the manuscript that are
nearly or wholly illegible. Because of that, all recent editors (except Michael
and myself) have had to follow those passages in the paleographic edition pre-
pared by Menéndez Pidal, who was the last editor to use reactants that were as
strong as ammonium hydrosulfide and hydrochloric acid. In an attempt to
overcome this difficulty, Michael studied the manuscript under a Wood’s lamp,
which produces ultraviolet light (at a wavelength of approximately 365 nano-
meters).59 Since this procedure enhances the contrast between the faded ink
and the writing surface, it is a useful way to read some passages hardly readable
by the naked eye. Unfortunately, it is not effective on the areas affected by
reagents, which leave a stain that acts the same way as ink, and makes it impos-
sible to distinguish one from the other.
I have had the opportunity to directly examine the codex four times (on
2 and 31 July 1992, 20 April 1993, and 9 to 11 May 2007). On the first occasion,
I used a Wood’s lamp and an infrared reflectography camera. The latter
is commonly used on paintings to reveal underlying layers, in particular,
underdrawings, underpaintings, and pentimenti. It is also useful on written
documents when carbon black was used in the ink; this, however, is not the
case of the PMC’s extant codex, whose ink has a metal base that, when oxidized,
gives it its current brown tone. Thus, this ink becomes virtually transparent to
an infrared sensitive camera. It was useful, however, to determine that there
was no abrasion on the space of the scribal colophon and, therefore, no era-
sure of a third C or any other sign.60 On the second and third occasion, I had
59 Michael, ed., Poema de Mio Cid, p. 54.

60 Montaner, “Ecdótica”, pp. 23 and 40-41.
62 Montaner
the chance to use a surface exploring video-microscope, whose shots could

be later edited in an image laboratory. This proved to be a very useful, though
still limited, tool. It allowed me to verify doubtful readings caused by faded ink
(for example, vv. 338, 1438, or 2341), as well as to (partially) recover erased text
(vv. 75-76, 440, and the scribal colophon) and, in a few cases, the text affected
by the application of reagents (for example, vv. 260, 1124, or 1921).61
On the fourth occasion, I had the opportunity to use a more powerful tool,
the hyperspectral camera.62 Hyperspectral imaging collects and processes
information from across the electromagnetic spectrum. It not only enables the
capturing of images in several narrow spectral bands in a wide spectral range,
but it also records a full spectrum per image pixel. The goal of hyperspectral
imaging is to obtain the spectrum for each pixel in the image of a scene, with
the purpose of finding objects, identifying materials, or detecting processes.63
For any picture taken of a given manuscript sample, the hyperspectral camera
shoots thirty photographs, each one sensitive only to a specific wavelength,
from ultraviolet to infrared. Such a procedure allows us to see at a distinct spec-
tral point specific kinds of elements while not others. In general, the shots
sensitive to ultraviolet light allow for the enhancement of faded ink, while
those sensitive to infrared light are usually more useful for studying the writing
surface. The text hidden by the action of reactants usually can be seen in the
shot made at a specific spectral point, but further digital enhancement of the
image is often required in order to achieve the appropriate differentiation
between its distinct strata (see figure 1.2). This method allows us to confront
the same problems treated with the infrared camera and get much better
results.64
In addition to the capability of text recuperation, hyperspectral imaging
produces a spectral signature for each pixel point in the image, providing the
information required for an accurate material identification. This gives the
possibility of distinguishing between several written interventions in the
61 Montaner, “Ecdótica”, p. 23 onward.

62 I used a MuSIS hyperspectral camera produced by Forth Photonics, which is sensitive in
the spectral range from 365 nm (ultraviolet) to 1550 nm (near infrared). It is affiliated with
the Resolve Program, a specific Manuscript Image Analysis Utility also powered by Forth
Photonics, which helps with the recovery of hidden text.
63 See Grahn and Geladi, eds., Techniques and Applications of Hyperspectral Image Analysis,
pp. 1-15.
64 See Montaner, “La fotografía hiperespectral”, pp. 262-77, and “The Medievalist’s Gadget”,
pp. 359-64.
manuscript,65 which is one of the problems that editors of the PMC face. For
example, on fol. 3v, several written interventions of the same scribe are found
along with other entirely different hands. The paleographic analysis can deter-
mine which letters are the work of the scribe and those that are not, but it is
scarcely helpful when both have fairly similar strokes. On the other hand, it
does not provide useful tools for distinguishing between the various interven-
tions of a single hand. The hyperspectral analysis does not allow the scholar to
identify hands, but it is extremely accurate for identifying inks. Thus, the com-
bination of both paleographic and hyperspectral variables proves to be very
enlightening. Figure 1.3 shows the difference between spectral reflection curves
of the original text of the copyist, with more (A, A′, and A″) and less ink in the
pen (A‴, A′v), and his interventions in the first (B) and in the second (C) recog-
nitiones, besides the additions of the other hand (D).66
Thus, in addition to the scribe’s handwriting, several other hands can be
identified, but the exact number is still unknown. The easiest to recognize is
that of the first binder, who writes in textus rotundus only at the end of the
lines that he trimmed out. There is also another Medieval hand that writes in
Gothic cursiva or nottula with a very thin pen, adding some isolated letters, like
a beta-shaped s ⟨ϐ⟩ above a dubious correction made by the copyist in v. 1078
(see below) or the “∂e” above the adverb “∂en” in order to adopt the full and
more usual form dende.67 Of greater importance is another intervention, quite
massive, by someone who read the entire manuscript, or most of it, and went
over many lines where the ink was faded with another blacker ink. He tried to
accommodate his trace to the original form of the letters, but often reveals his
own Gothic cursive ductus.68 He also made several linguistic changes that are
generally modernizations to the spelling.69
There are also several interventions in Humanist cursive script, most of
which are very difficult to identify. Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri, the author of the copy
made in 1596, also intervened. Sometimes he went over faded letters; other
65 See Montaner, “La fotografía hiperespectral”, pp. 277-80, and “The Medievalist’s Gadget”,
pp. 364-65.
66 Since the analysis of the different handwritings is extremely slow, a new paleographical
edition based on the hyperspectral imaging is still in process. Meanwhile, the principal
findings have been incorporated to Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid (2011/16).
67 This addition has aroused some critical commentary; see Montaner, “Revisión textual”,
pp. 143-44.
68 His script displays features of the Gothic semihybrida, known as letra precortesana, used
during the second half of the 14th century and early-15th century.
69 On these and other minor interventions in different varieties of Gothic script, see Mon-
taner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 481-82, and “The Medievalist’s Gadget”, pp. 364-65.
64 Montaner
times, he wrote notes above the line in order to clarify words difficult to read.
To do this, he applied a reagent, gallic acid (3,4,5-trihydroxybenzoic acid),
which caused the effects I described above. Another hand, written with a wider
pen nib and with blacker ink, probably corresponds to the municipal clerk
Francisco López, who, in 1632, signed one of the receipts left on the flyleaves.
This hand modernized several spellings of the codex and added superscript
letters, for example, “Tornauasͤ” (v. 232) or “naſcoͥ » (vv. 663 and 787).70
Besides the material problems of readability and handwriting identifica-
tion, the codex also poses several textual problems.71 They are basically the
common kind of scribal deviations from his model that are present in any
manuscript transmission. Some of them seem to have been introduced by the
14th-century scribe, but it is often impossible to know if they existed in his
model, except for those instances when a comparison with the Alfonsine
chronicles is possible. In many cases there is an alteration of a word produced
by a partial substitution, omission, or addition. For example, we find suelta
instead of suelto (v. 496), la instead of las (v. 1802), and rogand instead of rogad
(v. 1754). That happens frequently due to dittography (as minguaua instead of
mingua in v. 821) or haplography (as mando instead of mandado in v. 494).
Another typical alteration is caused by graphical equivalence, for example,
between ⟨c⟩ and ⟨t⟩, which causes the appearance of arch instead of arth in
v. 690.
This phenomenon can be appreciated whenever the scribe himself detected
and corrected an error, either while he was writing or during his two recognitio-
nes. For example, in v. 1078 he wrote “caꞇa∂oꝛ”, but immediately retouched it in
“caꞇã∂os”.72 The problem here is that not all the scribal corrections were accu-
rate, especially those of the second revision, which were mostly conjectural.73
Verse 2482 provides a good example. Its actual reading is “Sobeıanas ſon las
ganançıas q͂ ꞇo∂as an gana∂as”. Nevertheless, the referent of “ꞇo∂as” (retouched
upon “ꞇo∂os”) are the Cid and his men, so it must be in masculine, and the
laisse rhyme is á-o, not á-a, so the final word must be ganado. What seemingly
happened here was that the scribe suffered from the well-known phenomenon
of assimilation to context; because of this, he made the participle agree with
70 On these and other minor interventions in varieties of Humanist script, see Montaner,
ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 484-85, and “La fotografía hiperespectral”, p. 279-80.
71 See the classifications proposed by Smith, ed., Poema de mio Cid, pp. 114-15; and Funes,
“Cuestiones de ecdótica”, pp. 45-46.
72 A later hand added a small and very thin beta-shaped s ⟨ϐ⟩ over the scribal –s in cursive
Gothic script.
73 This, by the way, can only be noticed if one has a theory of how the PMC works as a literary
artifact, unless the copyist produces pure ungrammatical alterations (see below).
ganancias, which is in femenine plural –as, instead of keeping the unmarked

form–o. In an unsuccessful attempt to fix the problem he had caused himself,
the scribe then changed todos to todas. The result increased the incoherence of
the passage.
Another source of textual disturbance is the substitution of a given word for
a lectio facilior. Several examples have arisen in the comparison between the
extant manuscript and Alfonsine chronicles. Verse 182 provides a conspicuous
example, reading almofalla, i.e. ‘(Muslim) military camp’, where the sense
requires the rare and archaic almoçalla, meaning ‘quilt, blanket’.74
Sometimes the scribe mistakenly separated verses due to an error of reading
or retention. For example, vv. 221-22 are divided like this: “Vr͂a uertu∂ me uala
głıoſa en my exı∂a 𝔷 me aıu∂e / El me acorra ∂e noch 𝔷 ∂e ∂ıa”, instead of “Vr͂a
uertu∂ me uala głıoſa en my exı∂a / E me aıu∂e 𝔷 me acorra ∂e noch 𝔷 ∂e ∂ıa”
(whose assonance pattern is í-a).75 Sometimes the complete fusion of two lines
into one occurs, as in v. 16: “En ſu cõpaña .Lx. pen∂ones ⟨leuaua⟩ exıẽ louer
mugıeres 𝔷 uarones”, where “leuaua” is an improper addition above the line
made by the scribe himself during his second recognitio.76 Such fusion often
causes part of the text to be lost, especially the second hemistich of the first
verse involved, as in v. 477: “E fin ∂ub∂a corren faſta alcala lego la ſeña ðe
mınaẏa”. Here, some text required by sense, meter, and rhyme between corren
and fasta is missing.
All these textual problems seemingly make the task of editing the PMC quite
difficult, but in fact, it is not. The analysis delineated above makes it clear that
the alterations of the early poetic text, which are few in number, are quite
localized and do not transform its internal system beyond recognition.
5 Editorial Politics and Systemic Features
Textual scholars tend to adopt one of two positions already established in

the Alexandrian philology, and consequently, they are either “anomalists” or
74 See Corriente, “Arabismos en el Cantar de Mío Cid”, p. 104; cf. his chapter in this volume.
75 In this case, it is possible that the error already existed in Per Abbat’s codex, as suggested
by the secondary error of converting the conjunction E in the pronoun El. This error is
easier to make if the conjunction E was already in the opening position, where the tiro-
nian et is never used.
76 In his chapter in this volume, Bayo casts a doubt on the attribution of the intervention to
the scribe himself, but it is well supported by both paleographical and spectrographic
analysis; see Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 474-75; “La fotografía hiperespectral”,
p. 279, and “The Medievalist’s Gadget”, pp. 364-65; see also here figure 3.
66 Montaner
“analogists”, that is, they are either defenders of textual singularities, even if
they seem at first glance anomalous, or they are prone to establish textual reg-
ularity according to the principle of analogy. In recent times, the supporters of
these opposing positions have been called “conservatives” and “conjectural-
ists” respectively, because the former aims to preserve the fidelity of the codex
chosen as the base for the edition, while the latter makes conjectures to cor-
rect the deficiencies of the source(s) of the edited work.77 This polarity, in its
extreme manifestation, has been typical of the editors of the PMC since the
1970’s, as we will see.
When several textual witnesses have survived, the textual scholar could
become an “optimist” if he relies upon a basic codex, usually the most satisfac-
tory one that is then called codex optimus, or he could become a “recensionist”
if he makes a complete recensio or review of all the extant witnesses, for he “is
convinced that he can disengage and pry loose this common text from these
manuscripts”.78 When applied to a single witness tradition, these different
attitudes become similar to the aforementioned anomalist = conservative
against analogist = conjecturalist positions. In general, “the Optimist method is
more popular with editors of vernacular texts”,79 and the PMC is not an excep-
tion, at least in recent years. This position has been strengthened by the
so-called New Philology, which has defended the value of every single copy
as a personal reinterpretation of the work, which becomes then a “scribal
version”.80
Even if one accepts this rather questionable concept,81 it is not easily applied
to the PMC’s extant codex. If the editor equates manuscript text and scribal
version, he must transcribe everything that is written on each folio, including
the various subsequent interventions mentioned above, which could produce
textual pandemonium. If rigorously endorsed, that principle means accepting
only the final version produced by the copyist after his second revision. Any
other solution would be inconsistent with the idea of a scribal version, but this
77 Greetham, Textual Scholarship, pp. 3 and 298-300.

78 Boyle, Integral Paleography, p. 35. On the recensionist method, also called “stemmatic” or
“stemmatological”, see Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s
Method.
79 Boyle, Integral Paleography, p. 33; see also Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know
about Lachmann’s Method, p. 78.
80 See the seminal paper by Nichols, “Philology in a Manuscript Culture”.
81 Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method, pp. 43-45. I
justify my own reluctance in Montaner, “El criterio frente al dogma”, pp. 161-65, and “The
Medievalist’s Gadget”, pp. 365-66.
implies conferring the rights denied to the author onto the scribe.82 This is a
contradiction from a theoretical point of view and is a bad decision from a
practical one, since it means accepting such incongruities as those found in
the aforementioned v. 2482, among others. In fact, even the most conservative
editors of the PMC have chosen between the different scribal interventions and
have made other emendations as well. Thus, the already cited v. 16: “En ſu
cõpaña .Lx. pen∂ones ⟨leuaua⟩ exıẽ louer mugıeres 𝔷 uarones”, is edited by
Martin, Lacarra, and Bayo and Michael as two verses, 16 and 16b, without the
addition of leuaua: “En su conpanna LX pendones, / exienlo ver mugieres e
varones”.83
Certainly, there are not unconditioned readings of a text, and the direct
consultation of the manuscript – as opposed to the supposed fake editions
(especially the critical ones) – is by no means a guarantee of “authenticity”. On
the other hand, carrying out a naive reading that disregards the complexity of
the phenomenon and not employing available tools, such as the hyperspectral
camera, is, at the very least, useless. However, if the editor can resort to new
techniques and use experimental methods to help himself, it is assumed that
there is a criterion allowing textual scholars to arrange the interventions in a
hierarchical order. If such a criterion exists at the material level, why not admit
that it can also exist at a conceptual one?
In my opinion, we should admit that the text has coherence in itself, and
that we can use criteria of inner cohesion when making judgments about vari-
ants and possible emendations. I am not speaking about unattainable authorial
preferences, but about the mechanisms of a literary artifact with its own inner
consistency that can be measured in terms of entropy.84 From a complemen-
82 This position lacks any basis in the vast majority of cases, although Canfora, Il copista
come autore, tries to demonstrate the opposite. In fact, what he really shows is that some
copyists (although by no means all of them) acted not like authors, but like editors. Nev-
ertheless, they differed from textual scholars since they usually lacked the theoretical
framework that could help them see beyond their artisanal and often routine task. This
has already been observed by Kennedy, “The Scribe as Editor”, in a comparison that has
become a cliché, paradoxically at the service of the “scribal version”, although, in fact,
Kennedy downplays the scribe’s role. In any case, if the author’s sovereignty is not
accepted, the copyist’s should not be either. What is at stake here is not properly the indi-
vidual will, but the internal consistency of a given literary artifact and its coherence with
the context of production and reception.
83 Martin, ed., Chanson de Mon Cid, p. 56; Lacarra, ed., Poema de Mio Cid, p. 60 (who tran-
scribes “conpaña”); Bayo and Michael, eds., Cantar de Mio Cid, p. 54 (who edit the number
spelt out as “sessaenta”). I shall return later to this case.
84 See Montaner, “Emendatio”; cf. also Rodríguez-Velasco, “La urgente presencia”, pp. 111-15;
and Panateri, “Tradición manuscrita” (with a more metaphorical bias).
68 Montaner
tary perspective, we can describe the literary work as a textual stimulus that
produces a cognitive reaction in the form of a mental object provided with an
internal coherence, as a reader’s response.85 Accordingly, it is possible to dis-
tinguish its own components from the progressive variations caused by
transmission in the same way that we can distinguish the different hands and
inks on the surface of the written page by virtue of hyperspectral analysis.
Of course, it is always legitimate to faithfully reproduce a particular witness,
but it is unfair to assume that this is the only right way of doing it, or even the
way that is most respectful to the literary work transmitted in that particular
source. Since we deal with texts and not with mere sets of letters, we are fully
entitled to not limiting ourselves to transcribing isolated witnesses, but to edit-
ing the work as a whole. In the case of a codex unicus, that means paying equal
attention to the different interventions in the manuscript as to the indirect
tradition (if available), as well as emending the received text through an analy-
sis of its internal operating mechanism.86
In my view, the task of editing must reach a balance between the principles
of anomaly and analogy. This is especially necessary when the editor only has
one witness, the codex unicus, which lacks an external control element. This
balance occurs not only at the theoretical level (determining how far the
anomaly can reach and where the analogy starts), but also at the pragmatic
level. The textual scholar needs to establish those passages in the damaged sec-
tion of the text that may be emended (by analogy or otherwise), and must
identify what passages can be marked as faulty since the data necessary to
intervene is lacking. In any case, it is one thing to accept certain limits to text
emendation, and quite another to argue that deviant features are part of the
internal system of the work. Although both approaches advocate preserving
the transmitted text, they are different when it comes to studying its internal
mechanism or its transmission problems.
The proper balance between these two principles of anomaly and analogy
requires disentangling the internal organization of each text and determining
its own degree of consistency, that is to say, its level of entropy. Therefore, con-
cordances, lexical indexes, and catalogs of formulas are the editor’s best
instruments to decide in which case the text requires respecting certain unique
features or standardizing these features by comparing them with other parallel
passages. At this point, the knowledge of the copyist’s usus scribendi and the
internal logic of the poem supplement the lack of other direct witnesses and
allow us to achieve what, in a more populated textual tradition, would depend
85 Cf. Burke, “The Neuroaesthetics of Prose Fiction”.

86 Cf. Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method, pp. 266-74.
on the recension. As a result, one can retrogressively trace the path of the tex-
tual variations and arrive at the end at the source after which these variations
were made.87 Achieving this goal is justified by the fact that the text in its earli-
est available form (be it called “original” or otherwise) is the only one that
allows us to properly discern its textual constitution as well as analyze its con-
textual insertion (including the author’s role) and, accordingly, explain the
literary work in itself and within its social and cultural environment.
Thus, the editor of the PMC, just as the editor of any other text, “must have a
rationale for types and levels of emendation”.88 This rationale depends on the
knowledge of systemic features. The study of these features allows the editor to
pose the best hypothesis about the text’s internal organization, that is, the
hypothesis that provides an explanation for a maximum amount of textual
data with a minimum description length. With this hypothesis, the editor can
establish the text and therefore construct the edition, which should be the best
tentative text that can be offered with the available data.89 Since the inclusion
in a genre implies, on one hand, a series of possible contents, and on the other,
87 I adapt here a quote from Boyle, Integral Paleography, p. 39

88 Greetham, Textual Scholarship, p. 4.
89 Of course, any establishment of a text is a tentative one (that is, potentially subject to
improvement, reassessment, or change), even in a paleographic edition, because further
research sometimes can prove that the previous editing principles or the adopted solu-
tions were wrong. Since Contini, this approach is usually formulated by saying that the
critical edition is a working hypothesis (ipotesi di lavoro) about the author’s text:
“un’edizione critica è, come ogni atto scientifico, una mera ipotesi di lavoro, la piú soddis-
facente (ossia economica) che colleghi in sistema i dati” (“Ricordo di Joseph Bédier”,
p. 130; see also Breviario di ecdotica, p. 74). Although this formulation has enjoyed a good
deal of support (see Altschul, “L’espagnol castillan”, pp. 85-86 and 89), it is based on an
incorrect conceptualization because “hypothetical” has very different epistemological
and methodological implications than “tentative” or “provisional” or “subject to future
falsation”. Since a “hypothesis” is a sub-positio (“under-position”), it only can be the basis
for a “scientific act”, not the act itself: “A working hypothesis is a tentative assumption
made in order to draw out and test its logical or empirical consequences. […] The role of
the hypothesis is to guide the researcher by delimiting the area of research and to keep
him on the right track” (Kothari, Research Methodology, p. 13). Therefore, the edition can
be better described as the result of a textual research during which one or more editing
hypotheses can be tested. Especially since the edition, even never being ultimate or con-
clusive, offers a real not a supposed text. So, the hypothetical issue cannot be the edition,
but the theory about the textuality of a work on which the edition is based (cf. Contini
himself, Breviario, p. 23).
70 Montaner
a series of discursive techniques,90 those systemic features mainly affect for-

mal aspects. In the case of the PMC, they basically consist of a meter based on
accentual rhythm, syllabic number irregularity, and assonance, which results
in the grouping of laisses having the same rhyme throughout, and a formulaic
system used non-mechanically. All these traits are clear enough in the pre-
served witness as to deduce which were the original internal mechanisms of
the poem and, therefore, to use them as a criterion for editing. Nevertheless,
some of these features have been brought into question and, therefore, it
seems necessary to briefly justify them once more.91
In the Spanish metric system, the rhythmic unit is not the foot but the verse,
whose rhythmic frame consists of syllables and accents. The more formal and,
usually, learned verses have a regular number of syllables, but the key element
is always the accentual rhythm.92 Unlike this syllabic-accentual meter, the
Spanish traditional meter can be characterized as accentual-syllabic, since the
number of syllables is subordinate to the accentual cadence, provided by ictus
or beats, that is, rhythmic relevant accents.93 The Castilian medieval epic
meter belongs to the latter group, but its cadence pattern is currently unknown.
Better said, we have not discovered the rules governing the distribution of
beats throughout the verse.94 Thus, it is impossible for modern readers to
determine if an epic line was thought to be rhythmically right by a medieval
audience. It is therefore unfounded to introduce emendations metris causa,
with a single exception related to the bipartite verse construction, because, on
the one hand, every epic line has a caesura that divides it into two hemistichs
and, on the other, any Spanish meter unit longer than the hendecasyllable
90 See Segre, Avviamento all’analisi, p. 259. The conjunction of those two series, established
by the current literary system at a given time, is a code or guideline for both the composi-
tion and reception of literary works.
91 See my previous and more extensive explanations in Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (1993),
pp. 30-56 and 93-94 (expanded in the revised edition of 2007, pp. clxiv-ccvii, ccxliv-
ccxlix, ccciii-cccxiv, and cccxxviii-cccxlvi; see now 2011/16, pp. 374-417, 454-59, 514-
24, and 538-56), “Emendatio”, “Entre Procusto y Proteo”, “El uso textual de la tradición
indirecta”, “Revisión textual”, and Montaner and Montaner, “Letters on ‘Manuscript Cul-
ture’”.
92 Torre, El ritmo del verso (see especially pp. 102-04), Métrica española comparada, pp. 14-18
and 48-55, and “Sílabas y acentos”.
93 Cf. Gončarenko, Stilističeskij analiz, pp. 29-33.
94 See the Introduction to this volume as well as Bayo’s chapter. This author seems to dismiss
any function of stress and confers the main role on the intonational phrase; however,
intonation alone does not provide a metric rhythm. If this were so, verse would be indis-
tinguishable from prose. See Torre, El ritmo del verso, pp. 42-50, and Blecua, ed., Fonética y
fonología, pp. 428-30 and 444-45.
requires a caesura.95 Consequently, an epic verse cannot have less than eleven
syllables in order to have a caesura, and a single hemistich cannot have more;
otherwise, the verse would have three instead of two caesurae, a nonexistent
division in the traditional Castilian meter.96 The common caesura is a minori,
that is, the second hemistich is usually longer than the first one. If the first
hemistich is shorter (six syllables or less), it is likely that the second one is
quite long (nine to eleven syllables).97 This allows us to suspect that when both
hemistichs are very long (nine syllables or more), there is an anomaly.98
The total number of hypermetric hemistichs in the extant manuscript is
very small, just 35 (i.e., an irrelevant 0.46 per cent). While most of them (20) are
the result of the incorrect division of two verses, the other hypermetric hemis-
tichs are produced by the addition of a spurious element, usually an onomastic
component. An example of the most frequent case is provided by vv. 3258-59:
“DeƼı∂ q͂ uos mereçı yfanꞇes en ȷuego o en vero / O en alguna ʀaƼõ aqͥ lo
meıoꝛare a ȷuuıƼẏo ∂ela coꝛꞇ”.99 Since the caesura of v. 2358 should be placed
95 See Quilis, Métrica española, pp. 63-69; Paraíso, La métrica española, pp. 111-12; Torre, El
ritmo del verso, p. 103. This fact is consistent with the behavior of the melodic unit in Span-
ish; see Blecua, ed., Fonética y fonología, p. 440.
96 See Torre, Métrica española, pp. 88-90 and 96-99. This assertion, already advanced in
Montaner, “Emendatio”, p. 688, has been questioned by D’Agostino, “La teoría de Chiarini”,
p. 626, and Bayo in his chapter of this volume. D’Agostino doubts that this constraint was
followed by the poet of the PMC. Bayo argues that “This is certainly true, but only as far as
syllable-counting versification is concerned. Therefore, this cannot be applied to the PMC,
in which longer second hemistichs occasionally occur, e.g.: 853 ‘¿Vaste, mio Çid? ¡Nuestras
oraçiones vayante delante!’”. It must be remembered that the epic meter is not just accen-
tual, but accentual-syllabic, since the cadence is based on the distribution of accents on a
syllabic sequence. In other words, the accent always falls on syllables, and inter-tonic
spaces can only be composed of syllables; therefore, syllabic and accentual levels are
inextricably linked (Montaner, “Revisión textual”, pp. 157-58). On the other hand, there is
no evidence suggesting that the phonological basis of Spanish prosody has changed since
the Middle Ages, and thus, there is no reason to reject that principle. Finally, it must be
noted that the alleged counterexample adduced by Bayo is very problematic; see Funes,
“Cuestiones de ecdótica”, p. 47.
97 Thus, the first hemistichs with six syllables or less are 32 per cent, as opposed to 7 per cent
of second ones, while the second hemistichs with 10 syllables or more are 23 per cent,
with only 9 per cent of first ones. See Pellen, “Le vers du Cid”, pp. 67-68; and Duffell, Syl-
lable and accent, p. 106, who offers slightly different figures due to his assumption “that
hiatus was the correct adjacent vowel treatment in the period concerned”, that is, the 13th
century (p. 72). This is true for the learned cuaderna vía, but surely not for the traditional
meters; see Montaner, “Emendatio”, p. 688, and Cantar de mio Cid, p. 385.
98 Cf. D’Agostino, “La teoría de Chiarini”, pp. 626-27.
99 In the manuscript, “ȷuuıƼẏo” is the form corrected by the scribe himself upon “ȷuuıƼo”.
72 Montaner
after yfantes,100 the first hemistich would have ten syllables and the second one
would have either six or seven (depending on the extent of synalepha). As for
v. 3259, it seems that the caesura should be place after razón.101 If so, the first
hemistich would have seven syllables and the second one would have fifteen,
being hypermetric. Since the probability of finding razón as a rhyme word is 93
per cent (see note 97), it looks as if the scribe divided two lines in the wrong
place, and they must be read as “Dezid que vos mereçí, yfantes, en juego o en
vero o en alguna razón, / aquí lo mejoraré a juvizio de la cort”. The resulting
v. 3259 can be divided by a caesura after mejoraré, because adverbial phrases
usually fill the hemistich. Hence, each hemistich has eight syllables. However,
the resulting v. 3258 has a hypermetric second hemistich of thirteen syllables.
So, what has really happened here? The clue lies in the set phrase “en juego o
en vero”, because this kind of binomial tends to fill the hemistich. This shows
that not two, but three verses were merged here:
Dezid que vos mereçí, yfantes,

en juego o en vero o en alguna razón,
aquí lo mejoraré a juvizio de la cort
Nevertheless, the resulting first verse is hypometric since it has less than ten
syllables. On the other hand, it lacks the rhyme word, which should match the
ó assonance. The solution to this problem is to reinstate “de Carrión”, which is
the usual way to refer to the young noblemen in the PMC.102 Finally, the verses
can be restored as:
Dezid que vos mereçí, yfantes [de Carrión],

en juego o en vero o en alguna razón,
aquí lo mejoraré a juvizio de la cort
This emendation raises the question of rhyme. Nobody disputes that the cen-
ter of the rhyme is the last stressed vowel, which can be á, é, í, or ó ~ ú, but there
100 See vv. 2221, 2271, 2611, 2775, 2697, 3247, 3420, 3448, and 3557.
101 This word (which occurs thirty times throughout the poem) never appears in a first
hemistich, but only in the second and almost always at the end, except in vv. 2071 and
3072.
102 The noun yfantes referring to them occurs 107 times in the PMC, and only 13 times without
the modifier “de Carrión”, most often (9 times) in the first hemistich. Thus, the probability
of finding yfantes followed by de Carrión in the second hemistich rises to 88 per cent. If we
set the additional condition of being in a laisse whose rhyme is ó, the probability reaches
100 per cent.
are differences about the relevance of the following vowel, if there is any. The
assumption that post-tonic vowels are irrelevant103 presupposes that chance
alone is responsible for the result. If the post-tonic vowel is irrelevant for the
rhyme, its distribution basically will be random, even if the frequency with
which a particular final vowel appears is conditioned by the presence (in our
case, in Old Castilian) of certain final vowels that occur in the last syllable
more frequently than others.
However, the distribution of final vowels after a tonic vowel other than -ó- in
the PMC manuscript is not normal, because there is 98.12 per cent of agree-
ment with the laisse rhyme as opposed to 1.42 per cent of divergence in verses
whose rhyme word only matches the tonic vowel. Even if isolated verses that
do not match the tonic vowel and couplets are taken into account, the percent-
age of divergence is just 3 per cent.104 Therefore, if one takes a verse at random
and knows the rhyme of the laisse, he has every chance of succeeding in pre-
dicting which assonance this verse will match, and one must conclude that the
alternative hypothesis, i.e. that the final vowel is relevant, is true.105 Thus, the
decisive factor in determining valid oppositions between different post-tonic
vowels is their ability to differentiate successive laisses.106 This implies that,
in principle, distinctive rhymes may not be mixed inside one laisse,107 since
this would involve the existence of assonance patterns that are both distinctive
103 See Marcos Marín, ed., Cantar de Mio Cid, pp. 234, 236, 261, 305, and 424; Gómez-Bravo, “La
naturaleza de las asonancias”; Rodríguez Molina, “In dubio pro codice”, and cf. his chapter
in this volume.
104 See Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid (2007), pp. clxxx-clxxxi = (2011/16), pp. 390-91; and
Funes, “Cuestiones de ecdótica”, p. 43. In his chapter in this volume, Bayo states that
“There is variation in calculating the number of corrections needed to produce a recon-
struction in laisses (according to Menéndez Pidal [Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. I, p. 86], they
amounted to 6.5 per cent)”. Nevertheless, the data both Funes and I put forward is taken
from the text of the extant codex, and is not based on a conjecture about how the text of
the PMC should be. This difference in figures, therefore, is not relevant at all.
105 In his chapter in this volume, Bayo argues against this argument stating that “at any rate
statistics without structural analysis can be worthless or misleading”. This logic is faulty,
since a working hypothesis must be supported in some measure by observed facts, so that
the subsequent research may lead to a tenable theory which should reveal the underlying
structure, even if the working hypothesis ultimately fails. Although I do not offer an a
priori explanatory theory, I have developed a previous theoretical framework in which the
available data makes sense (see the bibliography referred to in note 91).
106 For that reason, it can be inductively deduced that the post-tonic vowel lacks distinctive
capacity when the center of the rhyme is a stressed ó.
107 This does not necessarily include the case in which the post-tonic vowel is irrelevant to
distinguish laisses. For example, the word nadi (vv. 34 and 433) can occur as a rhyme word
74 Montaner
and indistinct at the same time. This ambivalence would remove the very
basis of the epic meter, since it only holds in changing assonance. For the same
reasons, a textual deviation is to be presumed in any element that alters
the homogeneity of laisse rhyme, i.e. isolated verses and perhaps also the
couplets.
The only possibility of accepting a deviation that threatens the basis of the
PMC’s metrics would be to establish a sufficiently clear set of conditions that
allows us to at least guess where a divergent verse may appear in the context of
a given assonance, even disregarding their heterogeneous nature. This is what
Bayo has attempted with his proposal of a “deictic dissonance”, which is defined
as the contrast produced between the endings of two successive verses not
connected by rhyme, signalling a narrative transition.108 The idea is, in itself,
quite interesting; however, the proposal fails to determine any specific and pre-
dictable conditions of use, unlike what happens with the hexasyllabic isolated
verse (verse orphelin or petit verse) typical of some French chansons de geste,
which only appears at the end of a laisse.109 Therefore, the proposal leads to a
set of ad hoc hypotheses. In my opinion, a clear counterexample is offered in
vv. 542-49:
Vanse Fenares arriba quanto pueden andar,

troçen las Alcarrias e ivan adelant,
por las cuevas d’Anquita ellos passando van.
Passaron las aguas, entraron al campo de Torançio,
por essas tierras ayuso quanto pueden andar.
Entre Fariza e Çetina mio Çid yva albergar,
grandes son las ganancias que priso por la tierra do va;
non lo saben los moros el ardiment que an.
in the 4th laisse, whose assonance pattern is á-a, and the 22nd, whose assonance pattern
is á-(e), since there is no laisse rhyming in á-i. It is a kind of wild rhyme, so to speak.
108 See Bayo, “Poetic discourse”, and his chapter in this volume. Bayo is right in pointing out
the possible function of couplets, since they by themselves do not undermine the rhyme
system. This is a matter to be explored further.
109 See Heinemann, L’art métrique, pp. 201-03. The analogy is fully relevant both on method-
ological and historical grounds. On the one hand, it shows that a poetical device has its
inner logic and does not work at random (contrary to the supposed deictic dissonance).
On the other hand, the stylistic constitution of the PMC is undeniably akin to that of the
French epics (see Justel, Técnica y estética: el Cantar de mio Cid y la épica francesa).
One wonders what function highlighting Torançio could have had in such an
itinerary report, especially when the same place name occurs in a similar con-
text in v. 1492, yet regularly matching the á-(e) assonance pattern:
Passan las montañas, que son fieras e grandes,

passaron Mata de Toranz
de tal guisa que ningún miedo non han,110
por el val de Arbux[uel]o111 piensan a deprunar.
E en Medina todo el recabdo está. (1491-94)
There are many other verses in which a discontinuity with the laisse rhyme has
not any discernible function (v.gr., 737, 1045, 1508-09, 1524, 1547, 1581, or 1766).
Thus, the deictic dissonance fails to explain the presence of all 97 verses (from
a total of 3730) that do not match the rhyme. It is, indeed, difficult to find a
systemic explanation for a feature which is clearly not systematic. Instead,
most of the verses that do not rhyme can be explained by the well-known tex-
tual phenomena of syntactical lectio facilior, contextual attraction, and
cascading errors.112
Finally, I must stress that Bayo’s tightly woven argument on verse 708, “los
que el debdo avedes veremos cómmo la acorredes”, does not provide a gen-
eral demonstration of the effectiveness of deictic dissonance. Nevertheless,
this raises another issue that Rodríguez Molina stresses in his chapter of this
volume: the problem of the very rare verses that do not match assonance
and seem to be justified by grammar. It is a very complex problem that I can
scarcely outline here. In my view, given the fragmentary knowledge of Iberian
Romance languages for the period between 1200 and 1250, our grammar is basi-
cally a diasystem reconstructed from partially known dialectal systems, when
not ideolectical ones (consider, for example, the peculiar Fuero de Madrid).
Our knowledge of grammar is thus, by definition, incomplete. However, the
meter of a given poem has to be self-consistent by definition (that is, the poem
abides by a meter or not), therefore, the description of the metrical system
actually is complete in itself. This is what brings us to accept phenomena like
110 These two lines are merged in the manuscript as: “Paſſaron maꞇa ∂e toꝛãꝫ ∂e tal guıſa q͂
nıngũ mıe∂o nõ han”. The first verse resulting from the division seems to be hypometric
(it has only nine syllables), yet there is no evident emendation.
111 On this emendation, supported by the Alfonsine chronicles, see above.
112 See Formisano, “Errori di assonanza”; Montaner, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 391-92; Funes,
“Cuestiones de ecdótica”.
76 Montaner
the monophonemic character of diphthong [we], because, despite what our

perception of the language dictates, it is the only way to explain why in the
PMC “aderredor” (v. 2699) and “fuent” (v. 2700) match the same rhyme. In terms
of the relationship between grammar and relevance of the post-tonic vowel for
assonance, there are two options: a) the contradiction is only apparent and is
due to our incomplete knowledge of grammar, which does not gather and con-
sider all cases, in particular, the exceptional ones; or b) the contradiction is real,
but admissible metris causa, a known phenomenon in all poetic traditions. In
both cases, the rarity of the phenomenon would easily explain the alteration
of the rhyme of the PMC by lectio facilior. Of course, I am not advocating the
introduction of ungrammatical emendations. In such cases one must apply
the caveat expressed above about the difference between the theoretical and
pragmatic levels of textual scholarship.
After the meter and the rhyme, the third systemic feature with clear impli-
cations for the editing task are the formulas.113 It has already been noted that,
on the one hand, the tendency of formulas occupying a certain hemistich is a
valuable aid to determine the position of the caesura. On the other hand, the
presence of formulaic allomorphs completing rhymes with the same tonic
vowel but different final post-tonic vowels corroborates the analysis of the rel-
evance of the final vowel in the assonance pattern. But the formulas also can
be by themselves a source of textual deviation due to internal lectiones facilio-
res. To understand this, one must be aware that, from a paradigmatic point of
view, formulas do not work as a set of different words, but as a single lexical
item. Therefore, the substitution of formulas is basically the equivalent to that
of single words. Conversely, the high level of redundancy that involves the use
of formulas allows the editor to restore the text under certain conditions, as
already seen in the case of v. 3258.
Let us consider the Cid’s astrological epithet, which has several variants to
fit the different contextual conditions related both to the rhyme and to its use
in direct speech, as delineated in the following table:
113 About the formulaic system of the PMC, see the Introduction to this volume and, to a
lesser extent, Bayo’s chapter.
Formulaic Formulaic desinence Rhyme Narrative Thematic

stem context focus
(el) que en + nasco Ø / á-o Narration Birth

buen ora + nació ó
+ fue nado á-o
+ fuestes nado á-o Direct speech
+ fuestes nacido í-o
+ nasquiestes vós ó
+ nasquiestes de madre á-e
+ cinxo espada á-a Narration Knighting
+ cinxiestes espada á-a Direct speech
The unmarked variant of this epithet is “el que en buen ora nasco”, which is the
only one that occurs in the first hemistich.114 When the formula occurs in the
second, the stem adopts a desinence in accordance with rhyme and narrative
context (the thematic focus being a direct result of the application of both
conditions). However, since it is most probable that “(el) que en buen ora” will
be followed by “nasco” (51 per cent), it is easy for the copyist to include that
ending automatically. This can be verified by v. 899, “Qͥ ero uoſ ∂eƼır ∂el q͂ en
buẽ oꝛa naſco𝔷çınxo eſpa∂a”. Here, it seems that the copyist thoughtlessly
completed the formula with “naſco”. However, when he returned to his model,
he noticed the ending çinxo espada, which he added without retouching the
verse. Finally, he introduced the tironian et in the blank originally left between
“naſco” and “çınxo” as a hypercorrection to fix the inconsistency of the result-
ing text.115
At this stage, let us return to the case of verse 16 “En ſu cõpaña .Lx. pen∂ones
⟨leuaua⟩ exıẽ louer mugıeres 𝔷 uarones” to check the various editorial decisions.
As we have already seen, editors agree that this line of the manuscript needs to
be emended. However, the verse makes perfect sense. Therefore, the only rea-
son to divide the manuscript line into two verses is the admission that it is
hypermetric.116 Such an assumption can only be based upon a characterization
114 As noted by Pellen, “Le modèle du vers épique espagnol” (1986), p. 10.
115 This makes it very dubious that v. 719, “A grandes vozes lama el que en buen ora nasco”, in
a laisse whose rhyme pattern is ó, offers a case of deictic dissonance and is not a substitu-
tion with a lectio facilior of “el que en buen ora [naçió]”.
116 If the scribe’s addition is rejected, a reason for the division could be the internal rhyme.
Nevertheless, leonine verses, which sometimes reveal the existence of a textual problem,
are not alien to the internal system of the PMC.
78 Montaner
of the epic metrics that specifies the admissible interval of syllables per hemis-
tich. Moreover, only the need to accommodate the verse to the laisse rhyme in
ó justifies the omission of leuaua,117 since the copyist’s interventions during his
second recensio are, in many cases, preferable to his original text and are
adopted by the same editors who reject it here.118 Hence, if these emendations
are carried out, as all conservative editors do, there is no reason not to act simi-
larly in other cases where the anomalies of the transmitted text are manifest.
The conservative editorial position, as commonly practiced, reveals its
incongruities in the case of the aforementioned vv. 3258-59. While they do not
pose any semantic problem, several conservative editors have chosen to divide
them into three lines but without adding the modifer “de Carrión”, except
Lacarra.119 However, if one accepts the resulting line 3258, which does not
match the rhyme, I do not see why it is necessary to emend the transmitted
verse, which does not match it either. Enjambment could be argued, but this
also would be questionable. In any case, it would have been enough to put the
first hemistich of verse 3259 as the second hemistich of the previous verse.
Instead, the adopted tripartite division is only consistent with a theory of the
PMC metrics similar to the one outlined above.
The issues analyzed so far correspond to systemic features subject to a quan-
titative approach that facilitates the detection of divergences and the proposal
of emendations. However, where emendation becomes more necessary, that is,
at the level of sense or semantic congruity, there are not always the kinds of
tools that help in the case of meter, rhyme, or formulas. Therefore, it is neces-
sary to resort to conjectures (emendatio ope ingenii), with the consequent risk
of acting subjectively. To avoid that, it is necessary that the proposal is extremely
well founded from a paleographic and philological point of view. In this area,
one can never be too careful and, in principle, one must be always in favor of
the transmitted text,120 exhausting all possibilities of interpretation before
considering a passage to be damaged. However, one cannot look for convo-
luted interpretations to justify the transmitted text at all costs or simply ignore
these kinds of problems. Thus, it is unacceptable to edit almofalla in v. 182 –
117 This addition is an undue attraction of “entraua”, also irregular, at the end of the previous
verse; it is the phenomenon called rimaneggiamento di copertura by Formisano, “Errori di
assonanza”. As a secondary criterion for emendation, lectio difficilior can be applied here,
since the insertion of the verb destroys the rare absolute construction of the clause.
118 For example, in the aforementioned v. 2341. In my opinion, the editorial interventions
made in this case by Bayo and Michael reveal that deictic dissonance is basically a set of
ad hoc hypotheses, and these cases are better explained as textual phenomena.
119 Martin, ed., Chanson de Mon Cid, p. 274; Lacarra, ed., Poema de Mio Cid, p. 213; Bayo and
Michael, eds., Cantar de Mio Cid, p. 312.
120 In dubio pro codice, as states Rodríguez Molina in his homonym paper.
keeping the reading offered by the sole codex and annotating its meaning as
‘carpet’ or ‘blanket’121 – since neither its etymology nor known sources suggest
it ever had that meaning, when in reality it corresponds to almoçalla.122
As I noted above, the option to faithfully adhere to a textual witness is
always valid. However, it is also legitimate to transcend the horizon of a wit-
ness to try to reach the broader meaning of the poetic work. All in all, this is
precisely the objective of editing. This task requires a set of priorities regarding
the virtuality of the text transmitted by the witnesses, as well as the choice of
those features that best suit its internal consistency and the coherence with its
context, in order to reach the reality of the work through the critical edition.
Thus, faced with the choice of fidelity to a concrete witness, desirable and even
indispensable in certain circumstances, the problem of the work’s readability
and the impossibility of it being understood arises. Editing is not transcribing
(a task that fulfills its own specific function), but mediating. Thus, the editor
tries to understand the text of a work, in both the synchronic dimension (its
internal constitution) as well as its diachronic one (its genesis and transmis-
sion), and based on this he tries to make it accessible to the reader through a
concrete textual proposal, that is, the edition.
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86 Montaner
Figure 1.1 The complete alphabet employed by the scribe of the extant manuscript of the
Poema de mio Cid. With kind permission of Alberto Montaner.
Figure 1.2 Recovering of the Poema de mio Cid, vv. 1121-24. With kind permission of
Alberto Montaner.
88 Montaner
Figure 1.3 Spectral curves for the various inks used by the hands involved in fol. 3v of the Poema
de mio Cid codex. With kind permission of Alberto Montaner.
The Question of Authorship 89
Chapter 2
The Question of Authorship*

Irene Zaderenko
Translated by Peter Mahoney
Identifying the author of an anonymous medieval text is not just a simple task
of choosing the most likely name among possible candidates. As evidenced in
the Poema de mio Cid (PMC), the search for authorship has always been based
on a complex series of theories regarding its genesis and how these specula-
tions relate to the interpretation of the text: how did the poem come about;
were there one or more authors; could he/they have been influenced by mod-
els of Latin literature or the French epic; could he/they have been just another
poet in a long Spanish epic tradition that existed well before the 13th century.
Despite the many studies that have been carried out since the poem was redis-
covered at the end of the 16th century,1 the ongoing debate over the work’s
possible author or authors is still far from a satisfactory conclusion.
A necessary step toward a better understanding of the conflicting theories
about the composition of the poem and the premises on which they were pos-
tulated is an analytical review of these contrasting hypotheses. Such an analysis
must look closely at the arguments that have led scholars to specific conclu-
sions, considering both their strengths and their shortcomings.
At the beginning of the 17th century, Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, the first
scholar who studied the PMC after its rediscovery, described the poem as made
up of “versos bárbaros notables”.2 With these words, he initiated a character-
ization of the poem as a primitive, uncultured, and unpolished composition
due to its irregular versification and rhymes, which added to the difficulty of
reading the manuscript text.3 Yet at the same time, he also deemed the poem
worthy of attention, recognizing its value as one of the first manifestations of
the Castilian language.
* This chapter is based on two of my studies, Problemas de autoría, de estructura y de fuentes en

el Poema de mio Cid (1998) and El monasterio de Cardeña y el inicio de la épica cidiana (2013).
1 In January 1596, the genealogist Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri made a copy of the only extant manu-
script of the PMC in Vivar, the Cid’s alleged birth place. It was noted at the time that some
pages were missing, a condition that has remained unchanged four centuries later.
2 Sandoval, Primera parte de las fundaciones, p. 41.
3 About the reception of the poem from the 18th to the 20th century, see Luis Galván’s chapter
in this volume.

90 Zaderenko
One of the first commentaries on the work and its author appeared in the
mid-18th century in the Memorias para la historia de la poesía y poetas espa-
ñoles by Father Martín Sarmiento, who placed the PMC within the genre of
“poesía que tiene por asunto celebrar las hazañas de los antepasados”.4
According to Sarmiento, no other Castilian heroic figure had received as much
attention as Rodrigo Díaz, either in writing or in oral tales. He cautioned, how-
ever, that the fabulous events incorporated into the romances about the Cid led
some critics to erroneously interpret as fiction what were actually historical
facts.
In Father Sarmiento’s critical observations one finds the earliest attempt at
constructing a theory that would explain the genesis of the PMC. Since he
believed that it was historically impossible for such a long poem to have been
written in a Romance language at the end of the 11th century or the beginning
of the 12th, he hypothesized that soon after the Cid’s exploits, when his deeds
were still fresh in the memory of his contemporaries, primitive and unknown
juglares (minstrels, jongleurs) composed oral songs celebrating the Castilian
hero. These songs were transmitted through oral recitation, and although sub-
ject to all sorts of modification and amplification with every recital, each new
composition preserved certain stylistic archaisms from previous narrations.
Some of these songs were later written down by other juglares who, by that
time, had become literate poets, having joined the ranks of clerics like Gonzalo
de Berceo.5
Sarmiento’s account positing singers of tales at the beginning of a national
literary tradition would become a crucial tenet among romantic literary histo-
rians a century later. Though much has been written about their role in
medieval epics’ transmission during the last two hundred years, we still hardly
know anything about such juglares, besides being mentioned in chronicles of
the time, legal documents, and in some later writings.6
The study of the poem advanced significantly thanks to its first printed edi-
tion in 1779. It was edited by Tomás Antonio Sánchez and included in the
anthology entitled Poetas castellanos anteriores al siglo XV. Sánchez began his
introduction by referring to the text as “[e]ste poema histórico”.7 Such an
emphatic affirmation of the poem’s historicity was related to matters of date,
style, and authorship, which Sánchez went on to analyze in some detail.
4 Sarmiento, Memorias para la historia de la poesía, p. 238 (the manuscript is dated 1745).
5 Sarmiento, Memorias para la historia de la poesía, pp. 242-43.
6 Ramón Menéndez Pidal acknowledged this when he wrote about “juglares épicos” (Poesía
juglaresca, pp. 240, 243; I quote him later in this chapter).
7 Sánchez, Poetas castellanos, p. XV.
Regarding Per Abbat, the name that appears in the colophon of the manu-
script, Sánchez believed that it belonged to a Benedictine abbot, unless “Abbat”
was his last name. More significantly, in view of future critical evaluations, he
considered the Per Abbat of the subscription not the author, but rather the
copyist of the work, since in those days “escribir” typically meant “to copy”,
while “fer” or “facer” meant “to compose”.8 Moreover, Sánchez was the first to
observe that the space within the colophon’s date where it is mentioned that
the manuscript was copied “En era de mill ꞇ.C.C. xL.v.años”9 (v. 3732) was
most probably caused by the erasure of a letter. His explanation was that there
might have been another “C” between the centuries and decades which had
been erased, perhaps, in an attempt to pass the codex off as being much older,
and therefore more valuable. However, Sánchez neither questioned the antiq-
uity of the manuscript nor the age of the poem, whose linguistic aspects
indicated that it was older than Gonzalo de Berceo’s poetry (first half of the
13th century).
Sánchez’s critical observations about the PMC responded to the aesthetic
and literary criteria of the time that were based on the concept of a progressive
evolution of history. According to these beliefs, the poem’s irregular versifica-
tion, its lack of rhetorical devices, and the absence of erudite allusions in the
text were clear indicators of its primitive form. For these same reasons, Sánchez
judged the poem older yet inferior to Berceo’s poetic production in cuaderna
vía, an early metric system based on rhyme and syllabic uniformity. But despite
lacking literary sophistication, its great antiquity was for Sánchez an unques-
tionable proof of its fidelity to historical facts. With respect to the problem of
authorship, it should be noted that he was the first to attribute to Per Abbat the
function of copyist and not that of author. Although Rafael Floranes, another
learned literary historian of the time, almost immediately questioned Sanchez’s
conclusions, Sánchez’s judgment was widely accepted.
Shortly after the publication of Sánchez’s edition, Rafael Floranes wrote sev-
eral comments in the margins of the first volume of Poetas castellanos anteriores
al siglo XV that he owned. At Sánchez’s request, Floranes’ notes were further
elaborated and circulated among the intellectuals of the time. More than a
century later, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo published Floranes’ comments and
8 Sánchez, Poetas castellanos, p. XV. The verb “escribir” is used in the colophon: “Quien escrivió
este libro del Dios parayso amén/ Per Abbat le escrivió en el mes de mayo/ En era de mill
ꞇ.C.C. xL.v. años” (vv. 3731-33).
9 The year 1245 of the Spanish Era equates to 1207 ad (38 years are subtracted from the Spanish
Era).
92 Zaderenko
Sánchez’s response,10 making available to the general public the exceptional

erudition of these early historians of Spanish literature.
Floranes rejected the date that Sánchez had proposed for the composition
of the poem (mid-12th century). According to his historical and philological
analysis, the work could not have been composed before 1245,11 and the Per
Abbat of the colophon was not the copyist but the author of the text. He also
rejected the possibility that the author was a Benedictine monk given that his
name did not carry the typical “don”, the title with which abbots often signed
their names. He relied on internal evidence to prove that the poem had been
composed at a much later date, well into the 13th century and, more spe-
cifically, sometime after 1221. Based on the verse “Oy los reyes d’España sos
parientes son” (v. 3724), he argued that in order for the Spanish kings to be the
Cid’s blood relatives – as a result of his daughters’ marriage – the first instance
would be the year 1221, that is to say, the year in which the Infanta Leonor of
Castile, the daughter of King Alfonso VIII and a descendant of the Cid, married
King Jaime of Aragon.
Floranes’ glosses, which were an elaborate reply to Sánchez’s hypotheses,
left some issues unresolved. If the poem had been composed a century and a
half after the Castilian hero’s death, it was necessary to determine where the
author had obtained the information required to write a work based on accu-
rate historical events. Sánchez responded to this question arguing that the
poem was composed soon after the Cid’s death, when contemporaries of
Rodrigo Díaz still had fresh in their minds the heroic deeds he had accom-
plished. Floranes’ explanation took into account his understanding of the
origins of Castilian poetry and its early transmission. According to him, it
would not have been difficult to reconcile the temporal distance between the
moment in which a poem was composed and the historical events it set out to
narrate, since generations of juglares kept the most memorable exploits of the
past alive in the collective memory. With respect to the juglares and their
socio-cultural functions, Floranes’ view was that they participated in celebra-
tions by reciting poems that were composed for the occasion. His concept of
juglar also seems to include learned poets who wrote in Latin, like the author
of the Poema de Almería, who continued a poetic tradition that originated
prior to the 13th century.
Despite the unorganized and fragmentary way in which Floranes presented
his ideas, in his critical observations we find hypotheses about several aspects
10 Menéndez Pelayo, “Dos opúsculos inéditos”.

11 Floranes speculated that there was much confusion in the use of the Spanish and Chris-
tian Era at the time that the manuscript was copied.
of the poem that continue to provoke serious discussions among scholars

today. He was first to assign a later date to the PMC and to advance the idea of
a learned secular author, namely, Per Abbat, whose last name should not be
understood as an ecclesiastical title.
The fidelity of the PMC to historical facts, an idea firmly established at the
end of the 18th century, began to be questioned by the mid-19th century. In
History of Spanish Literature, an American Hispanist, George Ticknor, wrote
that the episodes about the siege of Alcocer and the Cortes in Toledo, as well as
the inclusion of the Infantes of Carrión, were fictitious creations, products of
the author’s poetic license.12
Years later, Andrés Bello used the poem’s fictional material to date its com-
position. In the prologue to his edition of the PMC, Bello asserted that the
presence of poetic inventions and historical errors revealed a lapse of at least a
century between the Cid’s life and the composition of the poem.13 In effect, he
called attention to the fact that the marriage of the Cid’s daughters to the
Infantes of Carrión, as well as the episodes that follow the unfortunate wed-
dings – that is to say, the narrative plot that makes up the third cantar – had no
historical basis. More important still was his pointing out the author’s unaware-
ness that Jimena belonged to the upper nobility and his total ignorance of the
real names of Rodrigo’s daughters.
Bello elaborated a particular explanation regarding the origin of the PMC,
which he considered to be the earliest poem ever written in Castilian that has
come down to us. He theorized that around 1150 there was already an epic song
or story about the Cid’s deeds in many ways similar in style to the extant text.
This early version – written with a historical purpose in mind but meant to be
sung – probably did not deviate much from the truth, given its temporal prox-
imity to the heroic feats it narrated. With the passing of time, the poem
underwent continuous modifications and interpolations, the usual changes
that happened to unrecorded popular tales and songs of ordinary people. Each
generation of juglares would retell the story in its own way, recasting the poem
in different forms according to the narrator’s ability and the taste and expecta-
tions of his public.
Toward the middle of the 19th century, a distinguished historian of medieval
Spanish literature, José Amador de los Ríos, began to engage in a long debate
with critics who had raised doubts about the historicity of the PMC.14 In his
opinion, the literary representation of the Cid, which had been shaped and
12 Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, p. 15.

13 Bello, Poema del Cid, p. 15.
14 Amador de los Ríos, Historia crítica, pp. 119-20, n. 1.
94 Zaderenko
ennobled by the imagination of the people, could not be attributed to the sole
creation of an accomplished poet; it originated, rather, in the beliefs and cul-
tural values of an emerging national state. At a time when Castile was in the
midst of a persistent struggle against Islam, the Cid was made to embody the
unswerving religious faith and the territorial attachment to king and home-
land that characterized Castilian society at that particular moment. Yet despite
this manifestation of romantic patriotism, Amador de los Ríos excluded any
possibility that the PMC was the creation of the people. When it came to nar-
rating the complicated exploits of the hero, the skill of a poet was necessary. At
that moment, the poet appeared to embellish the story and eliminate the many
inconsistencies infiltrated into the narrative through a long oral tradition. The
uniqueness of the poem in the refined artistic form that has survived was not
the product of many poets or juglares, but the masterful product of a talented
man whose composition should not be confused with the existing popular
songs with epic tones that circulated among the people.15 According to
Amador de los Ríos, the poem does not give an accurate representation of the
Cid as a historical figure. It offers, instead, a faithful rendition of Castilian soci-
ety as it existed at the end of the 11th century.
A decade later, Manuel Milá y Fontanals published the first work dedicated
entirely to the study of Castilian epic poetry. He began his prologue by declar-
ing, “la poesía llamada popular no fue en su origen patrimonio exclusivo de las
clases más humildes”, and went on to review the different theories about the
origins of epic poetry that had been formulated until that time. He recognized
a degree of French influence in this genre and emphasized that the Chanson de
Roland had a significant influence on the Spanish epic.16
With respect to the PMC, Milá noted that despite its irregular and unpol-
ished language, its imperfect versification, and its lack of artistic devices, the
poem could still be described as a masterpiece, a precious legacy from a heroic
time rich in poetic themes and yet far, in many ways, from the ideals of a
Christian society.17 A major subject of the poem – the episodes related to the
Infantes of Carrión – was, in his opinion, fictitious, together with other aspects
that were not supported by historical documentation. Nonetheless, he found
that characters, places, and a good number of details had a historical founda-
tion, leading him to conclude that the author was well informed on local
15 Amador de los Ríos, Historia crítica, p. 124.

16 Milá y Fontanals, De la poesía, pp. 137-38.
17 Milá y Fontanals, De la poesía, p. 241.
traditions. As to the date of the poem, he relied on its language which sug-
gested that it had been written in the mid-12th century.18
A few years later, Menéndez Pelayo assigned a later date to the poem. He
assumed that it was composed in the second half of the 12th century, arguing
that more than a half-century must have passed in order for the story to be
transformed into poetry, “modificándose las circunstancias de hechos muy
capitales, introduciéndose otros enteramente fabulosos, y depurándose el
carácter del héroe hasta un grado de idealidad moral rarísimo en la poesía
heroica”.19 He was also convinced that even though the PMC was not entirely
historical, its fictitious aspects were not a determining factor for making it
anti-historical, since the profound moral truth of the work offset any fictional
transgressions committed by the author. He explained the non-historical epi-
sodes as resulting from the people’s inability to discern history from legend, an
inextricable blend that had already taken hold of the poet’s mind as well as
that of his contemporaries. Many historical details that the poem preserved,
such as the Cid’s raids in Alcocer, or the episode of the Jewish moneylenders
– which had, in his opinion, all the characteristics of a true story – could not be
disregarded simply because they were not mentioned in the Historia Roderici20
or in other documents of the time. In addition to a wealth of historical ele-
ments that are present in the poem, he also called attention to the significance
of the geographic accuracy and the verisimilitude of the story, which should
also be taken into account in dealing with historical realism. Though recogniz-
ing that the marriage of the Cid’s daughters to the Infantes of Carrión was
completely legendary, he did remind other critics that the poem as a whole, all
things considered, was made up of far more historical elements than fictitious
ones.21 Regarding the style of the poem, he was not concerned with the
coarseness of the linguistic and metrical forms, since its aesthetic beauty
derived precisely from being the kind of meaningful poetry that was lived and
not sung.22 It was for this reason that the author remained anonymous in this
type of poetry, which, in order to be fully appreciated, does not require the
historical figure of the poet or juglar.
18 Milá y Fontanals, De la poesía, pp. 247-48.

19 Menéndez Pelayo, Tratado de los romances viejos, p. 271.
20 The Historia Roderici, a well-documented biography of Rodrigo Díaz written in Latin, was
composed towards the end of the 12th century. The anonymous author must have been a
cleric given his knowledge of Latin. About its date and author, see Zaderenko, “El proced-
imiento judicial de riepto”.
21 Menéndez Pelayo, Tratado de los romances viejos, pp. 271-72.
22 Menéndez Pelayo, Tratado de los romances viejos, p. 274.
96 Zaderenko
Menéndez Pelayo developed in extenso his ideas about the origins of the
epic in the first part of his Antología de poetas líricos castellanos. In accordance
with Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) and later romantic historians who espoused
an idealistic explanation of national literary evolution, he was convinced that
in the history of Castilian literature, lyrical forms appeared after a period in
which epic songs were the dominant mode of literary expression. In his opin-
ion, the epic – characterized by its impersonal and objective nature – was the
artistic form that prevailed in periods of spontaneous creation among spirits
that were more open to the greatness of action than to the refinements of feel-
ing and thought. This heroic ethos, associated with the infancy of national
culture, prevented the individual inner voice from being heard.23 The art he
perceived in the PMC did not lie in specific formal aspects of the work, but
rather, it belonged to a more sublime category, that of the artistic form that
ignores itself and, drawing on the divine unconsciousness of natural forces,
gives us a complete view of reality.
Menéndez Pelayo emphasized that in Spain the epic was exclusively Cas-
tilian. With the sole exception of the legend of Bernardo del Carpio, all the
heroes of this literary genre – Fernán González and the counts that succeeded
him, the Infantes of Lara, and the Cid – were from the regions of Burgos or La
Bureba. For the most part, they represented the independent spirit of the small
county that eventually annexed the kingdom of León and spearheaded the
Reconquista. Menéndez Pelayo attributed the origin of the Spanish epic to the
long-standing political conflicts between Castile and León: “Creemos firme-
mente que la epopeya castellana nació al calor de la antigua rivalidad entre
León y Castilla (rivalidad que ocultaba otra más profunda, la del elemento
gallego y el elemento castellano), y que éste es su sentido histórico primordial”.24
According to Menéndez Pelayo, the influence of the French epic on Castilian
poems was unquestionable, since France was the center of European literary
life in the Middle Ages: “ni siquiera en el tan maltratado siglo XVIII vivimos
tanto de imitación y de reflejo como en aquellos otros tiempos que, por ser tan
remotos, se nos presentan con un falso aspecto de primitivos y espontáneos”.25
Nevertheless, he admitted French heroic poetry’s influence on Castilian epic
only in occasional cases. Given that French culture enjoyed a favorable recep-
tion in the court of Alfonso VI, it would seem natural that the chansons de geste
would somehow condition Castilian epic poetry to express congenial senti-
ments toward the court or the Church. In its Castilian development, however,
23 Menéndez Pelayo, Antología de poetas líricos castellanos, p. 121.

epic poems seem to have preferred glorifying rebels like Fernán González or
vassals who were banished from Christendom like Bernardo del Carpio and
the Cid. The guiding motives of these poems could not have been more differ-
ent than those underlying the French epic.26
At the beginning of the 20th century, Romantic theories about the popular
origins of epic poetry began to be seriously questioned. The major challenge
to the existing interpretations came between 1908 and 1914, when the four
volumes of Joseph Bédier’s Les légendes épiques were published. In his compre-
hensive analysis, he approached the French poems as literary texts – that is to
say, as intellectual works produced by the conscious efforts of a well-informed,
educated poet who found inspiration in 11th- and 12th-century life, in the spirit
of pilgrimages and crusades, as well as in the artistic monuments that pre-
served memories of the Carolingian age.
In response to Bédier’s individualist theory, which was gaining recognition
among the philologists of the time, Ramón Menéndez Pidal published a study
in 1924 in which he offered a defense of epic poetry composed by anonymous
juglares in Spain.27 Years later, in the prologue to the 1957 edition, he reiterated
the necessity to find rational bases that would clarify the vagueness and confu-
sion that surrounded valid Romantic ideas. His aim was to explain how people
of a specific society, such as medieval Castilians, could have collaborated in the
making of an epic work without the intervention of supernatural or uncon-
scious forces. For him, an epic poem was not the sudden result of some poet’s
natural inspiration, but rather the slow outcome of a collective poetic tradition
whose style had been slowly elaborated over the course of many years. It was,
in short, the joint product of many acts of will, resulting from an active partici-
pation of various poets and their public.
Menéndez Pidal’s alternative notion to Bédier’s individualism was based on
his deep conviction that epic poems had not been written by learned authors
in a given historical moment or place. They were, instead, the logical outcome
of a traditional oral poetry that at one point happened to have been written
down. Composed by juglares, they were meant to be shared by the entire popu-
lation; their memorized themes were retold and constantly reworked as they
passed from one generation to the next over the course of many centuries.
Learned men of the time relegated this type of oral poetry – because of its
ephemeral performance – to the latent popular state which rarely surfaced in
the higher level of the written culture. These views, reiterated by Menéndez
26 Menéndez Pelayo seems to be thinking about the Chanson de Roland, since later French
poems also glorified rebels and banished vassals.
27 Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca.
98 Zaderenko
Pidal over many decades, are at the heart of the neotraditionalist theory of
epic poetry, a critical approach that is still followed by many scholars today. It
is curious to note that despite his lifelong conviction of the theoretical prem-
ises on which he based his vast scholarship, at the beginning of the chapter in
which he deals with epic poetry composed by juglares he did confess the elu-
sive presence of the singer of epic tales:
De los juglares épicos […] no conservamos ni un solo nombre propio, ni

una sola anécdota que nos revele una fisonomía o nos ayude a compren-
der una obra; siempre esos juglares serán para nosotros figuras anónimas,
de cuya vida y carácter apenas nada llegaremos a conocer a través de sus
obras de tono objetivo e impersonal; siempre quedarán para nuestra
curiosidad como un grupo borroso de sombras quietas y taciturnas.28
Menéndez Pidal explored how the most memorable epic poems composed by
juglares were often included in chronicles without the slightest reference to
their authors. He attributed the chroniclers’ silence about the author’s name to
the juglar’s working habits and attitudes. The reason a name is never men-
tioned is because the paternity of an epic poem is impossible to define; it is
always a reworking of a much older poem that other juglares similarly inher-
ited and modified.29 This is why, according to Menéndez Pidal, one cannot
speak of juglares as individual authors of epic poetry, but of poetic works
recited by juglares belonging to a clearly traditional style that were perhaps
composed by learned men:
A los autores de éstas [poesías narrativas] llamaremos juglares, sin tener

seguridad de que lo fuesen, es decir, sin saber si hacían de la recitación de
los poemas un oficio o modo de vivir, o si eran hombres de otra posición
social, que escribían para abastecer la recitación pública de los que a ese
oficio se dedicaban.30
Regarding the PMC, Menéndez Pidal maintained throughout most of his life
that one author had composed the poem soon after Rodrigo Díaz’s death. This
apparent individualistic allusion made it difficult to reconcile the poet’s role
with the collective authorship he assigned to the tradition of Castilian epic
28 Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca, p. 240.

29 As proof, Menéndez Pidal provided many examples from the Estoria de España in which
epic legends are cited in an impersonal way by using verbs in the plural form.
30 Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca, p. 243.
poetry. Similarly, in his study and edition of the poem, he mentions that the
text was copied a few times but that none of these copies showed the slightest
attempt at a poetic reworking.31 When it came to the episodes that are not sup-
ported by historical evidence – such as the marriage of the Cid’s daughters to
the Infantes of Carrión, their violent repudiation at Corpes, or Rodrigo Díaz’s
revenge – he justified their insertion into the poem as having originated from
local traditions of San Esteban de Gormaz that were familiar to the author.
Those were events that only had a local resonance, without any real impor-
tance in the Cid’s life given that there were not weddings, just betrothals to the
Infantes of Carrión. The local interest they held would explain why there was
no historic memory of the betrothals or of the Infantes of Carrión.32 Despite
the doubts about the veracity of these episodes, Menéndez Pidal considered
the overall historical nature of the poem unquestionable.
In one of his final studies, En torno al “Poema del Cid”, Menéndez Pidal at-
tempted to redefine the historicity of Castilian epic poetry in response to some
of the objections that had been made to his earlier works. In the chapter dedi-
cated to “La épica medieval en España y en Francia”, he highlighted the
differences between the Spanish “verista” school, which pursued in its literary
creations a combination of history and poetry, and the “verosimilista” school
deriving from Italian Renaissance poetics, whose precepts tended to exclude
history from poetry. After examining the PMC under the lens of these diverging
theoretical concepts, he put forward a new hypothesis that proposed the exis-
tence of two authors – one from San Esteban de Gormaz and the other from
Medinaceli – as a way to resolve the apparent disparity between fiction and
history in the poem. The first author (c.1110) from San Esteban de Gormaz
wrote his poem soon after the hero’s death, and to him we owe both the origi-
nal idea of the work and the accurate topographical references of the region
surrounding San Esteban. He was likely inspired by the historical weddings of
the Cid’s daughters, which took place in the final years of the hero’s life. Such
an upward move in the family’s social position contrasted with the frustrated
betrothals to the Infantes of Carrión, which were well remembered in San
Esteban, since Corpes, the oak grove where the Infantes abandoned the Cid’s
daughters, was relatively close to the town. These moving events were proba-
bly disseminated in news-bearing songs that the first author used in his plot
development. Around 1140, a second author from Medinaceli reworked the
poem, which by that time had substantially deviated from the historical events
previously narrated. It was through these likely additions, omissions, and
31 Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de mio Cid, vol. 1, p. 33.

32 Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de mio Cid, vol. 1, pp. 71-72.
100 Zaderenko
novelistic modifications affecting the original narration of actual facts that

both history and fiction contributed to the composition of the poem, which in
spite of these changes was still grounded in history.33
Although Menendez Pidal’s studies kept alive the discussion about the
PMC’s adherence to history and the Cid’s representation as a faithful portrayal
of the historical figure, the neotraditionalist principles and methods proved to
be inadequate when it came to resolving the many issues the poem presents.
Questions about the author (or authors), the degree of his erudition or school-
ing, as well as the sources that were used continue to generate heated debates.
Since the mid-20th century, many of Menéndez Pidal’s views have been
increasingly challenged and subjected to serious scrutiny.34 Critics have ques-
tioned the premises on which he argued the genesis and evolution of Castilian
epic poems: the origin of epic poetry in news-bearing songs contemporary to or
composed soon after a historic event; their early date of composition, in many
cases earlier than the French chansons de geste; the historicity of the Castilian
poems, in contrast to the fictitious nature of the French epic; the realistic ten-
dency and the geographical accuracy of Spanish poems; the independence of
Spanish epic tradition from both the French epic and Latin ecclesiastical cul-
ture; and the constant rewriting of epic poems in different versions, traces of
which he found in chronicles and ballads of the time.
As Alan Deyermond, among other scholars, has argued, Menendez Pidal’s
theories about the genesis of the PMC, which until recently were accepted
almost unanimously by literary historians, are no longer sustainable. Based on
the cumulative results of recent findings, Deyermond has pointed out that the
PMC “fue compuesto hacia fines del siglo XII, tal vez a comienzos del XIII, por
un único autor, un poeta culto, que muy bien pudo ser clérigo y ciertamente
versado en cuestiones notariales y jurídicas”.35 As for epic poems rewritten in
prose in contemporary or later chronicles, he noted that these narratives are
frequently related to tomb cults, although it is difficult to determine whether
the cult inspired the legend or vice-versa. Of the extant texts, the Poema de
Fernán González is, without a doubt, monastic propaganda;36 the PMC is the
work of a learned poet, even though it is more difficult, in his opinion, to prove
its ecclesiastical inspiration; and the Mocedades de Rodrigo, whose secular
33 Menéndez Pidal, En torno, pp. 153-54.

34 Nevertheless, his ideas about juglares as authors of epic poems have been embraced by
oralists such as Joseph Duggan (The “Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 124-42).
35 Deyermond, Historia, p. 91.
36 On the use of epic poems as propaganda, see Montaner’s caveats in “Épica, historicidad,
historificación”.
character and popular nature was defended time and time again by the neotra-
ditionalist school, is actually the work of an educated author whose objective
was to serve the immediate interests of the dioceses of Palencia.37
Similarly, research carried out in the last several decades by Peter Russell,
Colin Smith, Ian Michael, María Eugenia Lacarra (Eukene Lacarra Lanz), and
Alberto Montaner, among others, points to an author of the PMC who most
likely had legal knowledge, was cognizant of French epic poems – especially
the Chanson de Roland –, made use of the Historia Roderici as a source of his-
torical information for the Cid’s campaign in the Eastern region of the Iberian
Peninsula, and employed learned words and Latinisms from legal and ecclesi-
astical Latin writings, not just from the Bible, but also from liturgical texts. This
author probably knew the “Carta de arras” that Rodrigo granted to Jimena, the
only historical document that mentions the Cid’s relationship with Álvar
Fáñez,38 was familiar with the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña and the
Benedictine Rule observed by its monks, and had a precise understanding of
how a medieval abbey was run. In view of these intellectual attributes ascribed
to the author, the question that comes to mind is who might have possessed
such an extensive knowledge and how did he acquire it at the end of the 12th
or the beginning of the 13th century. The hypotheses of a learned author, or of
a poet who was an expert in law, do not satisfactorily respond to this question,
and leave many problems unresolved.
As I mentioned before, a number of studies have independently substanti-
ated the author’s use of Latin sources, his legal knowledge, and his use of words
and expressions adapted from Church Latin and the language of the law.39 At
the end of the 12th century, anyone exhibiting such a relatively vast knowledge
could only be associated with a religious institution, either in training or by
profession. The author most likely belonged to the clergy, but what sort of cler-
gyman was he? Where was he from? In my opinion, the question can be
answered if one takes into account the important role that the poet assigns to
the Monastery of Cardeña – the place where Rodrigo Díaz and his wife were
buried and where a true cult of the Cid was forged. To be sure, some scholars
who have studied Spanish epic poetry have rejected the possibility that the
37 Deyermond, Historia, p. 98. Although Deyermond gives greater nuance to these opinions
in his later studies, he did not substantially change his views.
38 About the author’s possible familiarity with the “Carta de arras”, see Zaderenko, “¿El autor
del Poema de mio Cid conocía la ‘Carta de arras’?”.
39 For more details about his knowledge, see the Introduction to this volume, especially sec-
tion 4, “The Poet’s Sources”; section 7, “Legal Aspects”; and section 13, “Other Stylistic Fea-
tures”.
102 Zaderenko
poem was composed in Cardeña.40 Nevertheless, they have not offered any fea-
sible alternative, while the hypothesis of the poem’s monastic origin continues
to gain credibility as new information comes to light regarding the history of
Cardeña and its special relationship with the Cid and the members of the
Abbat family.
The idea that medieval epic poetry was composed in a religious milieu – like
churches or monasteries – has illustrious precedents in the field of French lit-
erature. Joseph Bédier’s seminal work, Les légendes épiques, rich in information
about ecclesiastical legends, as well as ensuing investigations into French and
Italian monastic cults related to epic heroes have revealed an important con-
nection between clerical culture and the heroic traditions that are found in
epic poems. Bédier’s explanation of this special linkage was that medieval
poets found both the inspiration and the necessary written material for com-
posing their works in religious houses. In fact, the scriptoria of religious
establishments, where the tombs of heroic personages were located, offered
the material means (parchment, ink, time) for writing literary works as well as
written records and other historical sources. The French philologist rejected
the supposed historicity of the epic texts, arguing that poets relied more on
poetic motifs than on historical facts, even though historical sources were not
entirely excluded from their work. In the epic poems he studied, Bédier iden-
tified a good deal of information relating to churches that preserved and
disseminated many of these legends. These also happened to be places where
relics were kept and tombs of important historic and fictitious characters were
found. Bédier arrived at the conclusion that those legends which had given rise
to epic poems originated in churches visited by pilgrims who admired the
tombs of famous figures; this attraction, in turn, was exploited by local church-
men for the purpose of obtaining donations, endowments, and all sorts of
privileges that benefited their institutions. In Bédier’s succinct proclamation,
in questions of epic poetry and its early origins and development, “Au com-
mencement était la route, jalonnée de sanctuaires”.41
More recent studies supporting the clerical origin of epic poetry have been
published. Andrew Taylor’s examination of the Oxford manuscript of the
Chanson de Roland, Digby 23, confirms that the codex never left a monastic
environment.42 In fact, the manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, bound
together with Plato’s Timaeus, offers clues about how it may have been read in
the Middle Ages: “It suggests that the Oxford Roland was never far from clerical
40 Among them, Menéndez Pidal and Colin Smith.

41 Bédier, La Chanson de Roland, p. 30.
42 Taylor, “Was There”; Textual Situations, pp. 26-75.
hands, and that it may have had something of the status of a saint’s life, serving
as an inspirational moral poem to read aloud, or possibly even to chant, to the
canons and their guests at the refectory”.43 As far as the role of juglares as
authors of epic poems is concerned, his exhaustive analysis of the extant docu-
mentation in which these minstrels appear reveals that the chansons de geste
were essentially clerical creations. According to Taylor, “the extended versions
of the chansons de geste, the ones that come down to us, were essentially cleri-
cal creations, […] they were not just copied, but compiled and delivered by
clerics, since only if it took the form of a written text would a poem have the
prestige or authority to command a listener’s attention for four thousand
lines”.44 Information about the juglares’ performance is scarce, but based on
what is known, “minstrel recitation was common, both at chivalric feasts
and in the marketplace, but that, at least on most occasions, it was short and
subject to extreme duress. Under these conditions, the sustained recitation
necessary to give a 4000-line poem voice as song would scarcely have been
possible”.45 Taylor concludes: “[t]his poem, the one that survives in the Oxford
manuscript, might better be termed the legend of Roland, a bellicose Christian
poem, suitable for reading aloud in the refectory or the hall”.46
A similar conclusion has been reached by Keith Busby in his extensive study
on verse narratives composed in Old French: both the nature of the extant
texts and the physical appearance of the manuscripts unequivocally point to
monasteries and religious centers as their place of origin.47 Actually, they
were the only locations where the necessary knowledge, writing facilities, and
desire to commit texts to the page could be found. The vast majority of French
texts dating from these early centuries were produced in monasteries or in
some other clerical setting. The fact that secular texts were elaborated in such
places is quite understandable, since learned members of religious orders con-
sidered themselves guardians of history. This also explains their remarkable
production of vernacular and Latin chronicles.
Taylor’s and Busby’s studies show that epic poems, like historical writ-
ings, were considered morally edifying works. Therefore, there was no more
appropriate place than a monastery for elaborating secular narrations in the
vernacular to reach a wider audience. While it is true that some clergymen
criticized secular literature – considering it harmful to one’s salvation –, there
43 Taylor, “Was There”, pp. 51-52.

44 Taylor, “Was There”, p. 63.
45 Taylor, “Was There”, p. 65.
46 Taylor, “Was There”, p. 65
47 Busby, Codex and Context, vol. 1, 8-9; vol. 2, 736-53.
104 Zaderenko
were also many learned clerics residing in religious houses who enjoyed,
whether secretly or in the open, this kind of literature. As centers of teaching
and learning, monasteries were the ideal places to preserve all kinds of texts;
there is ample evidence of this practice in inventories, wills, and ex-libris made
by book owners.
In her investigation of medieval and Renaissance sermons, property titles,
and treatises on music that happen to mention epic poetry, Paula Leverage has
found that the diffusion of chansons de geste was closely connected to monas-
teries and other religious institutions.48 A well-known passage of De musica
(c.1300), a treatise on secular music by Johannes de Grocheio (Jean de Grouchy),
deals specifically with epic songs. According to Leverage, Grocheio saw a direct
connection linking the life of an epic hero to the life of a saint, since both are
figures determined to defend truth and faith. As emblematic models meant to
elevate the spirit of the community, they constituted a perfect example by sat-
isfying the simple taste or by meeting the narrative expectations of an audience
made up of people of all ages, laborers, villagers, and city dwellers who were
captivated by the dramatic lives novelized in these stories. We know that sec-
tions of Grocheio’s treatise were written in collaboration with a certain
Clement, who has recently been identified as a Benedictine monk from the
Lessay Abbey in Normandy. Given what is known about medieval music mas-
ters and their professional environment, Grocheio may have also been a cleric,
which once again goes to confirm the connection between epic poetry and
clerical culture.
The possible monastic origin of epic poetry has not received the attention it
deserves in Spain, since most scholars accepted the dominant neotraditional-
ist theory which, by emphasizing the popular and secular nature of epic poetry,
has tended to exclude any possibility of clerical origins or the single authorship
of a learned poet, for that matter. Nevertheless, one of Menéndez Pidal’s most
renowned students, Dámaso Alonso, accepted some of Bédier’s ideas:
Hay puntos […] en que las ideas de Bédier me parecen irrebatibles. Lo

mismo el Poema del Cid que la Chanson de Roland son obra de poeta
único y genial. Las refundiciones de poemas épicos hay que considerar-
las, me parece, a la misma luz. Distinto es el caso de los romances;
creación también de poeta individual, estas piezas han rodado en la
memoria de muchos, sufriendo alteraciones a veces embellecedoras. El
concepto de tradicionalidad no puede ser el mismo para el poema largo
y el romance breve. Otra idea que creo acertada, si se la limita, es la de la
48 Leverage, “The Reception”.

participación de antecedentes cultos. Bédier piensa que los influjos liter-

arios en las Chansons (y lo que puede justificar su repentina aparición en
cuajada forma) son la Biblia, Virgilio, las vidas de Santos. La participación
limitada de estos influjos la creo indudable, aunque mucho mayor en el
Roland que en nuestro Poema del Cid.49
It should be noted that even though Alonso’s study was reprinted several
times,50 Bédier’s views on epic poetry continued to be ignored in Spain. This,
however, was not the case among British Hispanists. As early as 1969, Alan
Deyermond, for example, published an important study that revealed a con-
nection between Spanish churches and monasteries with tombs of famous
heroes on their premises, and the diffusion of epic legends narrating their
exploits.51 Later, Ian Michael was one of the first scholars to make a case for
clergymen as authors of Spanish epic poems. To this end, he pointed out how
themes from the Carolingian epic poetry were brought into the Iberian
Peninsula from France, thus establishing the conditions for the creation of a
local epic genre composed by clerics:
Parece seguro que la epopeya nativa floreció tarde en España – como tan-
tos otros géneros literarios – y que el impulso creador de esta nueva
epopeya clerical española – la única asequible a nosotros, aunque frag-
mentariamente – provino en esa época de fines del siglo XII desde más
allá de los Pirineos, donde se había desarrollado más pronto el género
épico en una sociedad económicamente más fuerte, que estaba en pleno
proceso de inventar para sí un pasado guerrero y heroico.52
Research carried out by Peter Russell and Alan Deyermond, among others, has
shown that legends linking the lives of historic figures with medieval churches
and monasteries are, for the most part, fabrications aimed at exploiting the
relationships – as tenuous as they were at the beginning – between religious
institutions and well-known historical figures. It became normal for churches
and monasteries to foster foundational legends with heroic themes, at times
going as far as fabricating false documents attesting to relics, tombs, and pro-
prietary rights. But the burial monuments of important figures were the most
49 Alonso, De los siglos oscuros, p. 69, n. 29.

50 His article was first published in 1947 in Revista de Estudios Políticos. It was later included
in De los siglos oscuros as well as in Obras completas, vol. 2, pp. 145-61.
51 Deyermond, Epic Poetry.
52 Michael, “Orígenes de la epopeya”, p. 83 (emphasis is mine).
106 Zaderenko
effective incentive that attracted the nobility of the time to be entombed

within a monastery’s sacred confines and leave large endowments to their cho-
sen religious resting place. In short, the presence of learned elements and
religious motifs in Castilian epic texts is a reminder that the origin of this par-
ticular type of narrative poem is closely linked to the churches and monasteries
that housed, and in some cases venerated, the remains of important heroic
figures.53
As in other epic legends, there is sufficient internal and external evidence in
the PMC to link the protagonist’s heroic narrative with a religious house,
namely, the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña. In the poem, Rodrigo Díaz’s
helpless family receiving comfort and shelter in the monastery can be read as
a typological example that prefigures the sanctuary’s promise of fulfilling its
obligation to protect those in their custody by assuring not only their earthly
well-being but also their religious care after death.54 It should not come as a
surprise if, decades after their burial, new generations of monks gave rise to
legends such as the Cid’s long family affiliation with the monastery in order to
attract pilgrims and donations, as well as to bolster the fame of their religious
house. In effect, there is evidence that San Pedro de Cardeña became the cen-
ter of a cult where the Cid was venerated during the Middle Ages. Not only did
the monks proudly assert that the Castilian hero and his wife Jimena were bur-
ied in Cardeña, together with many of the Cid’s relatives and vassals, but even
his horse Babieca found a resting place in the garden of the monastery. With
time, the veneration of the Cid turned into religious worship, even to the point
of initiating an unsuccessful process of canonization in the 16th century.55 In
the words of one of the most distinguished scholars of the PMC, Colin Smith,
“[t]he Cid as national hero owes less to his own lifetime or to the Poema and
ballads than he does to Cardeña”.56
Most of the benefices and endowments this monastery received during the
Middle Ages came from the local nobility, as recorded in the Libro de memorias
53 For more details about the relationship between religious houses and heroic legends, see
chapter one of my study El monasterio de Cardeña.
54 Just as persons and events of the Old Testament were seen as prefiguring those of the New
Testament, so too can the earthly refuge of Rodrigo’s family in the monastery be read as a
predictive event that finds its Christian fulfillment in their life after death in the same
sacred ground. This suggestion, which was made by Ottavio Di Camillo at the meeting of
Medievalists of New England (6 December 2014) devoted to the PMC authorship, is plau-
sible in my view.
55 The proceedings for Rodrigo’s beatification were initiated in 1554 at the request of King
Felipe II, but his canonization was never approved.
56 Smith, “The Diffusion of the Cid Cult”, 47a-b.
y aniversarios kept by the monks at Cardeña.57 The generosity of the local

nobles may have been incentivized by the Cid’s example, since he was an
infanzón (a member of the lower nobility) from Vivar (a town close to Cardeña)
who was able to improve his social and economic status thanks to the monks’
help, and did not forget to send splendid gifts to the monastery when he
became lord of Valencia, as the poem tells it.
Beginning in the 12th century, Cardeña successfully disseminated informa-
tion about the Cid that was later incorporated into different kinds of narrative
works. It should also be pointed out that the earliest texts dealing extensively
with the story of the Cid were not composed in Cardeña. In fact, the Historia
Roderici and the Linage de Rodric Diaz58 do not mention the Cid’s family tak-
ing refuge in the monastery, although they remember that Rodrigo was buried
there. In the century following the Cid’s death, details of his exploits and news
of his demise appeared in Latin and vernacular literature, both in chronicles
and poetic texts, and his fame soon crossed the frontiers of the Iberian
Peninsula. Taking into consideration that by the end of the 12th century the
first works dedicated to extolling the figure of the Cid began to circulate, it was
probably at this time when the monks of Cardeña began to claim the monas-
tery’s prominent role in the life of Rodrigo, the hero who, after all, was buried
in their church. This could explain why the PMC was the first text linking the
hero’s biographical events to the religious house.
Clues pointing to the author’s considerable erudition as well as to the prom-
inent role of Cardeña in the poem have occasionally led critics to place its
composition in the Castilian monastery. As Ian Michael has pointed out, many
details suggest that the poem was composed by a cleric:
57 The only manuscript of Cardeña’s Libro de memorias y aniversarios (HC: NS7/1) belongs to
the collection of medieval codices housed at the Hispanic Society of America. The His-
panic Society acquired the codex in 1914 from a bookseller in Leipzig, and it is one of the
few extant documents from the Castilian monastery founded by count Garci Fernández
at the end of the 10th century. The Libro de memorias contains two entries in the month of
June about the anniversaries of the Cid’s and Doña Jimena’s deaths, which have attracted
some scholars’ attention. In my studies on the Libro de memorias, I have called attention
to other entries referring to Don Per Abbad from Támara and Per Abbad from Orbaneja,
who might be related to the Per Abbat that appears in the poem’s colophon (Zaderenko,
“Per Abbat en Cardeña”; “Per Abbat en Cardeña. Addenda”).
58 At the end of the 12th century, the Linage de Rodric Diaz, the first work written in Romance
and dedicated to the Cid, was composed. It is a text from Navarre that includes the hero’s
genealogy and information about his descendants, as well as a brief biography based on
the Historia Roderici and the Chronica Naierensis.
108 Zaderenko
[…] los conocimientos del poeta en materia de clerecía invitan a pensar

que el monasterio fue el lugar de composición. Podríamos imaginar que el
poeta era clérigo; que fue educado por los benedictinos; que acaso llegara
a ser notario del abad y a familiarizarse con documentos y disputas lega-
les, teniendo libre acceso a crónicas y adquiriendo conocimientos acerca
de asuntos políticos y del comportamiento de los monarcas, nobles y
caballeros que habrían visitado el monasterio de vez en cuando.59
Michael compares the author of the PMC to Gonzalo de Berceo, a “poeta que
escribió, quizá, bajo condiciones semejantes” in the Monastery of San Millán
de la Cogolla.60 According to Michael, the author of the PMC had far more
talent than a mere juglar, evidenced by the way he interwove historical infor-
mation into fictional narrative.
Cardeña’s relationship with the Cid and his wife may have begun when
Jimena transferred her husband’s remains to the monastery soon after she was
forced to abandon Valencia in 1102. It is difficult to ascertain precisely when the
monks began to display objects mentioned in the poem as relics: the sword
Tizón; the bench that Rodrigo used in the Cortes of Toledo; one of the famous
chests used to deceive the Jews; the tomb of the horse Babieca, supposedly
buried in the monastery’s garden; as well as other articles testifying to his “his-
torical” existence. In their efforts to keep the Cid’s memory alive, the monks
composed a now-lost Estoria caradignense del Cid which ended with a legend-
ary explanation – almost a hagiography – of Rodrigo’s death in Valencia and
the transfer of his incorruptible remains to Cardeña. The Estoria caradignense
del Cid, as well as other information that originated in the monastery, were
later included in King Alfonso X’s Estoria de España.
As previously indicated, Rodrigo Díaz’s body was moved to Cardeña when
the Christians were forced to evacuate Valencia three years after his death. The
earliest account documenting the transfer of the Cid’s remains to the monas-
tery appeared in the Historia Roderici, which dates to the end of the 12th
century.61 The Linage de Rodric Díaz, which was composed c.1200, also men-
tions the conquest of Valencia, the Cid’s death, and the transfer of his remains
to Cardeña: “Et lidió meo Çid con eyllos [los moros], et venciolos todos, et
59 Michael, Poema de mio Cid, pp. 50-51.

60 Michael, Poema de mio Cid, p. 51.
61 “Vxor autem Roderici, una cum multibus uiri sui, corpus eiusdem Roderici ad monaste-
rium Sanci Petri Caradigne detulit, ibique, non modicis muneribus pro eius anima mo-
nasterio collatis, honorifice sepeliuit” (Ruiz Asencio and Ruiz Albi, Historia latina de
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, p. 99).
presó Valencia. Dios aya su alma. Era Mª.Cª.XXXª.IIª. en el mes de mayo. Et

leuaronlo sus caveros de Valencia a soterrar a Sanct Per de Cadeyna, prob de
Burgos”.62 Although the Linage depends, to a great extent, on the Historia
Roderici, this passage seems to be based on another source since it gives a dif-
ferent date, the month of May, for the Cid’s death, whereas the Historia Roderici
states that the Cid died in July. The Linage, which includes the honorific title
“meo Çid”, most probably is using a source from Cardeña since the epithet,
absent in the Latin biography, was utilized in the monastery.63 When Jimena
died years later, she was buried next to her husband. The earliest testimony of
a tomb cult of the Cid and Jimena appeared in Cardeña’s Libro de memorias, in
the month of Junius:
Myo Çid Roy Diaz yaze ante’l altar de señor Sant Peydro et fázenle aniver-
sario por mucho bien que fizo en este monesterio, et nos ganó algunas
cosas que avemos que por el su ruego nos las dieron los reyes.
Doña Ximena muger de myo Çid yaze commo noble dueña en par de
myo Çid, su marido. Et esta doña Ximena non avía aniversario ninguno
mas por ondra del dicho myo Çid establecieron los omnes buenos que
gele feçiessen. (fº 14r)
The first entry emphasizes the important benefices that Cardeña received by
Castilian kings in honor of the Cid. But there are also the large donations made
by Jimena to Cardeña when she chose the monastery for her husband’s resting
place, as mentioned in the Historia Roderici. Her generous gifts could have well
been extraordinary in conformity to the Cid’s status as lord of Valencia, one of
the richest kingdoms of the time. There are also indications that Jimena and
part of her entourage resettled near Cardeña after leaving Valencia, given that
the majority of Rodrigo’s ancestral properties were located in that area. As
Montaner and Escobar suggest, “[e]sto, unido a la curiosidad de los pasajeros
interesados por la tumba de un héroe ya célebre en vida, produciría un semi-
llero de recuerdos, historias y aun historietas” in the monastery.64 Since there
is nothing in the extant documentation from Cardeña that points to a relation-
ship between the Cid and the monastery prior to his actual burial, it seems
most likely that the monks fabricated the stories linking Rodrigo’s heroic
exploits to their religious house that appeared for the first time in the PMC.
62 Ubieto Arteta, Corónicas navarras, p. 34.

63 The Libro de memorias repeatedly uses the title “myo Çid” in the two entries dedicated to
Rodrigo and his wife Jimena (fº 14r).
64 Montaner and Escobar, Carmen Campidoctoris, p. 115.
110 Zaderenko
The cult of the Cid’s tomb in Cardeña is not unique; precedents involving
similar cults can be found in many monasteries and churches throughout
Europe. All we need to remember is what happened at the nearby Monastery
of San Salvador de Oña – where the Castilian Count Sancho García, his son the
Infante García, and King Sancho II were interred – or at the Monastery of San
Pedro de Arlanza – where Count Fernán González was buried. Like other
European monasteries, the major Benedictine abbeys in Castile looked to
establish ties with the most prominent figures of the kingdom by presenting
themselves as the heroes’ special object of devotion, and by cultivating the
veneration of their tombs regardless of whether they were authentic or not.
A good example of this is the relationship that was forged between the
Monastery of Arlanza and Count Fernán González. The most explicit manifes-
tation of this connection appears in the Poema de Fernán González (c.1250), an
extensive account in verse of the life of the Castilian count attributed to a
monk from Arlanza.65 The monastery in this work, like Cardeña in the PMC,
plays a significant role in the count’s heroic deeds.
Another piece of evidence supporting the argument that the PMC was also
composed by a monk is the author’s familiarity with the Benedictine Rule,
whose regulations regarding hospitality are followed in narrating the Cid’s wel-
coming by the abbot of the monastery. The order’s precept is to see the figure
of Christ in all those who seek shelter or visit Benedictine houses. The Rule
explains in great detail how guests should be received, and how the monks and
the abbot should act in such occasions. The author of the PMC, in fact, follows
very closely the prescribed Benedictine treatment when narrating the Cid’s
reception at the monastery. The abbot’s welcoming words, “Gradéscolo a Dios,
myo Çid […] pues que aquí vos veo, prendet de mí ospedado” (vv. 246-47), the
“grant gozo” (v. 245) with which he is received, and the abbot’s willingness to
help him against the king’s injunction are all manifestations of the Rule’s
precepts.
But the Benedictine spirit may even extend to the representation of Rodrigo
as a hero of exemplary conduct, who is very different from the paradigmatic
hero of the French epic: he is not a warrior who performs impossible feats like
65 The poem has reached us in a 15th-century codex that is preserved in the library of San
Lorenzo del Escorial. It is generally accepted that it was written by a monk from San Pedro
de Arlanza considering the frequent allusions made to the monastery’s traditions; the
details about the donations Fernán González made to the monks; and how the hero, in
moments of tribulation, goes to the sanctuary to seek help and advice. As early as the 19th
century, Amador de los Ríos argued that the poet’s erudition, the many references he
makes to the monastery, and his knowledge of the Bible suggest that he was a monk from
Arlanza (Historia crítica, vol. 3, p. 344).
Roland or Guillaume, nor is he a rebel vassal like Renault or Girart de Roussillon.

Rodrigo acts on a higher plane. His personality is not shaped by a confronta-
tion between good and evil, Christian righteousness against Moorish falsehood.
In effect, the Cid is not fighting the powers of evil; he is a dignified hero con-
fronting mediocrity and vileness. Instead of assuming the role of an outlaw, he
behaves as a loyal subject. This choice reflects a key aspect of the Cid’s moral
character: his restraint. He displays a sense of proportion, foresight, and, above
all, prudence. The Cid possesses mesura (moderation), which expresses itself
as reflectiveness, sagacity, or even resignation. In the opening lines of the
poem, the Cid thanks God for the tests to which he is subjected. Most epic
poems describe heroes who are far more disposed to excessive violence than
the restrained Cid. We see in Rodrigo’s personal ethics many of the teachings
of Saint Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism. Saint Bene-
dict’s Rule, as well as the conduct and spirituality that he promoted, were
examples of moderation and balance. Above all, the saint advised discretion,
the mother of all virtues, and restraint, the ancient concept of temperance
adapted to Christianity in the Rule that he created. These moral and religious
principles define the poetic Cid and allow us to situate the creation of the
poem within the context of Benedictine monasticism. If we also take into con-
sideration the important role that Cardeña plays in the poem, we should
consider the possibility that the text was composed in this Castilian monas-
tery, the place where the Cid’s remains were venerated and where his cult was
kept alive by monks who had a major role in promoting his heroic figure
throughout the Middle Ages.
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Zaderenko, Irene, “¿El autor del Poema de mio Cid conocía la ‘Carta de arras’?”, La
Corónica 22 (1993), 66-71.
Zaderenko, Irene, Problemas de autoría, de estructura y de fuentes en el Poema de mio
Cid, Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, 1998.
Zaderenko, Irene, “El procedimiento judicial de riepto entre nobles y la fecha de com-
posición de la Historia Roderici y el Poema de mio Cid”, Revista de Filología Española
78 (1998), 183-94.
177-90.
(2009), 245-48.
114 Zaderenko
Figure 2.1 The Cid’s tomb in Cardeña. Beginning of the epitaph written under King Alfonso X’s
order c.1272. With kind permission of Alberto Montaner.
Figure 2.2 Historia Roderici (Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, ms. 9/4922, olim A-189, fol.
77v). With kind permission of the Real Academia de la Historia.
116 Zaderenko
Part 2
Linguistic Aspects
∵
118 Zaderenko
Why was the Poema de mio Cid Written Down the Way It was? 119
Chapter 3
Why was the Poema de mio Cid Written Down the

Way It was?
Roger Wright
Written Romance was first developed in France, and by the end of the 12th
century there was already a flourishing written Romance culture there, espe-
cially in Provence. Writers in the Iberian Peninsula managed to cope with
writing according to the ancient norms for longer than the French did; the idea
that their language could be written in a new way, rather than according to
the ancient traditions, came into the Peninsula with visitors from over the
Pyrenees, and the influence of this idea can first be seen in such experiments
as the famous Riojan glosses (now usually dated to the 1070s) and, in Asturias,
the Provençal-inspired Fuero de Avilés (originally prepared in 1155).
In Western Europe, the 12th and 13th centuries were a period of growing
interest in the nature of written language. This was initially most evident in the
12th-century Renaissance’s desire to improve the standard of written and spo-
ken Latin within the Church. This desire spread in gradual and patchwork
fashion through 12th-century Iberia. The decision was taken in many centres to
preserve records from the past in a smarter written state, as evidenced, for
example, in the elaboration of the Becerro Galicano of San Millán de la Cogolla
in c.1190 ad, which gathered together and to some extent revised the earlier
documents concerning the San Millán possessions. The concomitant desire for
better education of the clergy led also to the establishment of what we think of
now as the first universities, and Bishop Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada’s appoint-
ment of some foreign teachers in Palencia around 1204-08 is taken to have
started the movement within Castile. These teachers usually taught in Latin
(as in Rodrigo’s alma mater, Paris), but this did not necessarily involve a down-
grading of the new written Romance; in Iberia, as everywhere else in the
Romance world, the new written Romance modes were developed, elaborated,
and exploited by scholars already skilled in reading and writing in the old-fash-
ioned way, and as a result Palencia became a centre for written work in both
languages. The same years also saw a growth in linguistic interests and educa-
tion in Catalonia, with the establishment of the university in Lleida and the
Homílies d’Organyà, the first known written text in Catalan, now generally
dated to the first decade of the 13th century (Organyà is on the road from
France to Lleida).

120 Wright
Within a more secular context, the period saw an increasing number of

fueros, local law-codes given to newly reconquered towns; these were mainly
prepared to begin with in Latin, such as the lengthy and all-inclusive Fuero de
Cuenca in c.1190, which became the model for many others, but a few shorter
ones emerged from New Castile in the early years of the 13th century, and some
of these are in Romance. Thus it seems probable that, in a number of Iberian
intellectual centres, there had come into existence by the first decade of the
13th century the idea that Latin and Romance were not just two ways of writing
the same language, but separate complete languages, an idea which was to
lead during that century to a great growth of written material of many kinds in
both modes. In this general atmosphere of an increasing desire for written
records, allied to increasing literacy, it is not surprising that this feeling should
have extended to a desire to preserve in written form some of the oral material
circulating in Castile which celebrated the national Castilian hero, at a time
when Castile was aiming to rebound from the disastrous Battle of Alarcos of
1195 (an aim resoundingly achieved at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212). Thus, if the
consensus is right that the surviving manuscript version of the Poema de mio
Cid is a copy of one written down in 1207 ad, as the explicit implies, then that
writing in 1207 occurred during a series of important events in the develop-
ment of the written culture of Castile.1
The Poema may have been performed orally before that date; although
probably, if so, not in exactly the form that it survives in for us now, which,
as has often been pointed out, shows some direct influences from legal and
administrative sources in a number of lines and sections, influences which
are likely to have accrued during the recording process in a scriptorium. The
scribe of our surviving manuscript was, by definition, literate. Although this
does not preclude his being knowledgeable about contemporary oral culture,
it does leave us with a slightly awkward conundrum. If the Poema was origi-
nally oral in inspiration and performance, the first question that needs to be
asked is this: why was it written down at all? For its written existence is unu-
sual; it’s likely that this was the only Castilian epic to be reproduced in written
form during these decades, although the surviving fragment of a Cantar de
1 These overall developments are presented more extensively in Roger Wright, Late Latin and
Early Romance; and A Sociophilological Study; both have extensive bibliography which will not
be repeated here. For the Fuero de Avilés, see Juan Ignacio Ruiz de la Peña Solar, Los fueros de
Avilés y su época. The so-called Documento de infeudación de Alcózar, probably of c.1156, is also
of interest: see Emilio Ridruejo, “Tradición y novedad en la sintaxis del siglo XII”. There is also
now a digital edition of the Becerro Galicano, available at <http://www.ehu.es/galicano>. For
the Fuero of Cuenca, see James Powers, The Code of Cuenca.
Roncesvalles may have been part of a written epic not long afterwards; other
oral epics which have been reconstructed for Castile seem to have left no direct
trace at that early time, although prose reworkings of epics can be glimpsed in
the much later Alfonsine histories. Such reworking happened, indeed, to the
Poema.
The fact that the Poema was written in what was still in 1207 an unusual,
even eccentric, form need not imply the existence at that early time of a large
reading public for written Romance, but it does seem that it necessarily implies
that there was a practised reader who could follow such a text and, probably,
read it aloud with fluency. The written version of 1207 is likely to have been a
prompt text for a subsequent performance by a literate reciter or singer. In
which case, the simplest scenario is that the composer, the scribe, and the per-
former might all have been the same person, and there is no need to deduce
too much from the text about the prevalence of written Romance in the com-
munity as a whole; that is, the text could have been designed in the first place
to be privately intelligible for the performer rather than for the world in gen-
eral, who might not yet have been able to read the new-fangled form but would
have followed the performer’s oral reproduction of the text without any trou-
ble. Such a restricted reading public at the start would explain the otherwise
baffling fact that nobody else, not even Ximénez de Rada in his historical
accounts of the events of the Cid’s lifetime, seems to have known about the
epic, and the stories integral to it such as the adventures of the Cid’s daughters,
during the seventy years or so before the Alfonsine historians adapted it. There
are, for example, many old ballads about different aspects of the life of El Cid,
but those which are directly relatable to the text of the epic can only be dated
to a much later age.
The nature of the language of the Poema appears somewhat rudimentary to
scholars of subsequent centuries who are used to reading the Alfonsine works,
but it cannot be characterized as experimental. Admittedly, the instinct of all
modern editors has been to emend the details into an appearance of greater
consistency than actually exists in the manuscript, and as an unfortunate con-
sequence it is vital in all serious academic work on the Poema to see the
facsimile of the manuscript rather than, or as well as, a printed edition; but
even so, it seems fair to deduce that this talented scribe must already have
acquired before 1207 his expertise in the new written form. The new written
forms would not have been taught to, or learnt by, any aspiring scribe unless he
had previously learnt to read and write Latin; it seems that the ability to read
and write Romance without previously having learnt to read and write Latin
did not exist until the 14th century (when it seems to have been the case with
Juan Manuel). This means that we might be able to locate the scribe of the
122 Wright
surviving Poema, provisionally, with such experts as the chancery professionals

in Palencia and/or Toledo, where it seems that such expertise already existed
to some extent. The Royal chancery, which moved from place to place with the
King, played a highly important role in the establishment of the sociolinguistic
prestige of the new written mode, even before Alfonso X, and it is worth inves-
tigating further what the official attitude was at different times to the new
written Romance mode. The year 1207 turns out to have been a key moment.
On Palm Sunday, 26 March 1206, the Royal Castilian chancery prepared its
first long Romance document, the important Treaty of Cabreros between
Castile and León.2 This wasn’t a relatively trivial matter, like the few short
local Romance fueros of these years; this agreement set, or at least it was
intended to set, a peaceful relationship between the two irritable kingdoms for
the foreseeable future. There survives no direct evidence to this effect, but
there could well have been considerable discussion of the nature of the written
form of the document which was intended to be of such great importance. For
a brief while, indeed, it set a precedent. In January 1207, for example, the
Posturas of the Cortes of Toledo, which dealt with the fixing of prices, were
recorded in Romance, and were intended to be read aloud in the markets; so
Hernández’s suggestion that the initial written version of the Poema was pro-
duced for a reading, recitation, or performance at those same Cortes is
plausible.3 Among other things, this hypothesis helps explain the otherwise
surprising setting of the lengthy dénouement of the epic in fictitious Cortes at
Toledo. Yet rather than being a native of Toledo our hero might have been
invited to travel there from Palencia, where the King, Alfonso VIII, had been
just previously, on 25 November 1206, and where other written Romance texts
of a literary nature had probably already been composed, which the chancery
officials in Palencia must have known about and might even have helped pre-
pare. As explained below, detailed philological analysis shows that the scribes
of the Treaty of Cabreros, the Posturas of Toledo, and the Poema are unlikely to
have been the same person, or even trained in the same centre, which suggests
that this was a time of different elaborations of new written forms in different
cultural centres rather than of any centralized Castile-wide standardization of
2 Much of the ensuing discussion is based on Roger Wright, El Tratado de Cabreros (1206),
Chapter 3; and “Escribir el Poema de mio Cid”; both have further bibliography which will not
be repeated here. The most detailed recent discussion of the use of Romance in the 13th-
century chanceries is the brilliant study by Inés Fernández-Ordóñez, “La lengua de los docu-
mentos del rey”.
3 The Posturas are reproduced in Francisco J. Hernández, “Las Cortes de Toledo de 1207”.
Hernández suggested later that the Poema could have been performed, perhaps for the first
time (estrenado), at these Cortes: “Historia y epopeya”.
the details. Alfonso el Sabio can no longer be seen as the father of written
Romance in Castile, given its existence much earlier in the century, but he was
probably the guiding force behind the rough standardization of previous
unregulated initiatives. It is thus a bit misleading to call the written Romance
of 1207 “Castilian”, or indeed anything more precise than “Romance”, which was
the term first applied to the new experimental writing systems, by, for exam-
ple, Berceo, a generation later. Indeed, at the end of the surviving copy of the
Poema, we see that “el romanz es leido” (3734), where “romanz” is still used to
refer to a text written in the new way.
It’s impossible to reconstruct securely how many of the linguistic decisions
taken in the written text of the Poema were intentional, but we can make sen-
sible guesses. For example, it seems probable that the purpose of writing the
Romance text at all was that it should lead to an oral performance which would
be understood. But the consequent need for our Latin-trained scribe to avoid
Latinate syntax and vocabulary in the written text might never have been con-
sciously formulated in his mind in those terms; it would be simple common
sense to avoid words and constructions which the intended audience wouldn’t
follow, and maybe he just did that automatically. If he, or a colleague, was
indeed performing it at the 1207 Cortes in Toledo (which is only a hypothesis),
the presence of the legal and administrative terminology, which has worried
many modern commentators, would be less of a problem there than it would
be elsewhere, since many of the listeners would have had experience of admin-
istration and the law. The presence of contemporary vocabulary in the Poema
needs no particular comment; the absence of outdated words might have been
harder for our Latin-trained expert to achieve, and it is quite possible that he
did not manage to avoid them entirely. That is, if, for other reasons, a modern
scholar wishes to claim that a word used in the text of the Poema might have
been old-fashioned at the time, this is not in itself an implausible scenario,
given that the scribe knew Latin. We need to be wary, though, over what phe-
nomena we refer to as being “Latinisms”; the word cras, for example, means
“tomorrow” in the Poema, it had meant “tomorrow” a thousand years earlier,
and it’s not used now, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t have existed in the
early 13th-century vernacular and fallen into disuse since then. And we need, if
using the concept of “Latinism”, to be aware of what the Latin actually was; e.g.
Montaner Frutos, in his second edition of the Poema, tells us that the written
form sabēt (for saben) in line 1174 is a “grafía latinizante”, but not only had the
Latin form in fact been sapiunt, it had been used with a different meaning.4
4 Alberto Montaner Frutos, Cantar de mio Cid, p. 75. My analysis of the final letter -t, phoneme
/-t/ and sound [-t] in Romance texts from Castile between 1206 and 1208 forms chapter 20 of
Wright, A Sociophilological Study.
124 Wright
Words would necessarily have been used in the Poema with the meanings they
had at the time, even if those had changed over the years, but achieving this
involved no conscious effort; that usually happened automatically.
Menéndez Pidal’s three-volume Cantar de mio Cid included a whole volume
on the vocabulary, which is still essential to consult. In contrast, the study of
13th-century syntax is an area where Menéndez Pidal only scratched the sur-
face, but his academic descendants, such as Rafael Cano Aguilar, have
developed the field, and we now have a relatively clear idea of what early 13th-
century Castilian syntax was actually like.5 There is a danger here, in that the
main source for our understanding of the grammar of the time is often the
Poema itself, so arguments can be circular; but even so, overall, it seems fair to
say that on the whole the Poema is written with contemporary spoken syntax.
The contrast between spoken and written syntax is even less clear here than
usual, naturally, given that our only evidence is written evidence, and in verse
form at that, but the usual general differences which can be seen between the
two also seem to apply between the spoken Poema and the Alfonsine texts.
Shorter sentences, for example. Fewer subordinate clauses, more parataxis.
These are statistical differences, as usual; we cannot claim that the Poema has
no subordinate clauses, for example, merely that it has fewer than a prose
account probably would. Thus it is quite likely that our scribe had no particular
decisions to make concerning grammar; he wrote with the grammar that he
and most other people used in speech at the time. Fitting the words and the
grammar into the metrical requirements, loose though these were, would have
been more demanding than the strictly linguistic organization, and it seems
fair to say that he was not always fully successful in that.
Our scribe might well, on the other hand, have had conscious decisions to
make in advance concerning the written forms of individual words. We are
hampered in our assessment of his approach by the fact that there are only a
few earlier written texts of any length in Castile, or at least of long texts which
we can be sure were written earlier. Many of the texts which might be used by
us for this purpose are of uncertain date, and sometimes of uncertain geo-
graphical origin as well. There survive many fueros in Romance, for example,
but the earliest of these are generally taken to have French models; and before
the end of the 13th century many of them are romanceamientos, Romance
translations of Latin originals, and it was legally necessary for the dates
included there to be those of the Latin original rather than of the Romance
translation (a fact which has misled some investigators into thinking that some
5 Menéndez Pidal, Documentos lingüísticos, organizes the texts geographically according to

where they were kept; Cano Aguilar, El español a través de los tiempos.
Romance fuero texts date from earlier than they in fact do). Literary works
written in Romance in Castile before 1207 are rare; they probably include the
Auto de los Reyes Magos, from Toledo, of c.1200, but there is much uncertainty
about who wrote that and what geographical variety it can be said to attest; the
Libro de Alexandre might have been written in Palencia in 1204, which could
again be significant if the scribe of the Poema had indeed been trained there,
but it might not have. Many scholars date the Libro de Alexandre to the 1230s.
Legal documents, however, usually have secure dates and places of prepara-
tion given in the text. There are a few such pre-1207 documents from Toledo
included in Menéndez Pidal’s Documentos; and pride of place in this cat-
egory, although Menéndez Pidal did not include it, has to go to the Tratado
de Cabreros (sometimes called Las Paces de Cabreros) mentioned above, the
first official document in written Romance which survives from the Castilian
chancery. It now survives in a contemporary copy to be found in the Archivo de
la Corona de Aragón in Barcelona. It also survives from the Leonese chancery,
as the original document endowed with two royal seals, in the Archive of León
Cathedral (ms 27). In both cases, the notary who wrote the text is identified by
name at the end; they are both practised specialists in the drawing up of docu-
mentation in the traditional Latin form, whose names appear at the end of
Latin documents elsewhere in their chancery documentation. The reason for
this decision, to write in the novel Romance form rather than the traditional
Latin one, seems clear enough; they needed everybody present at Cabreros,
on the Leonese-Castilian border, including the forty distinguished witnesses
mentioned at the end (in the Latin formula) as testes qui presentes fuerunt, to
hear the text read aloud and confirm that they understood exactly what the
stipulations were. This context for the novel written form is thus remarkably
similar to the context of the Strasbourg Oaths of 364 years earlier.
Reading the text of the Treaty aloud on the basis of the written forms would
not have been easy. It might have been particularly difficult, or near impossi-
ble, if the reader wasn’t the same person as the writer; it seems probable, as
Taylor has established, that until well into the century many literate Castilians
found written Latin easier to read and understand than written Romance.6
This is entirely understandable. Even modern specialists in phonetics find it
difficult to read their native language aloud from a text in phonetic script if
they have never seen it before. In this case, we can assume that the reader
aloud was not only already practised to some extent in written Romance, but
also knew in detail what the text contained. The written form was intended
primarily to indicate the lexical item immediately to the reader, who would
6 Barry Taylor, “Raimundus de Biterris’s Liber Kalile et Dimne”.

126 Wright
recognize the word and then pronounce it in his usual manner; this is our
usual procedure when reading a language which we know. Accuracy of pho-
netic transcription is thus a wholly secondary desideratum; we are dealing
here with what Romanists sometimes call a scripta, involving a known corpus
of written forms, rather than a direct phonetic transcription.
This explains why the slight graphical differences that there are between
words in the version drawn up by the Castilian chancery and the same words
in that drawn up by the Leonese chancery do not correspond, on the whole,
with differences in pronunciation between the two sides of any phonetic
isogloss that ran between León and Palencia. They correspond more closely in
the event to what we might expect from a scenario in which two notaries, from
slightly different educational backgrounds, wrote the text at the dictation of
the expert who had drawn up the original borrador (draft) – for there must
have been one, or perhaps several, of these. For example, there’s a regular vari-
ation between, on the one hand, the forms o and a (from haber) in the version
from the Castilian chancery, and, on the other, ho and ha in the version from
the Leonese chancery, although these are words which are pronounced identi-
cally by all participants; and there is also regular variation between heredad
and eredad, where the reverse applies, in that the form from Castile is regularly
the one with the letter h- and the one from León is regularly the one without it.
That is, this surprising contrasting pair of regular differences seems to be based
on previously taken logographic decisions concerning how to write each indi-
vidual word in each chancery, not on a general decision on whether or not to
begin the written form of words beginning with a vowel sound in speech with
the letter h-.
For several reasons, it seems certain that the impetus for this novel initiative
to write the Treaty in the new Romance mode, which must have seemed some-
what eccentric at the time, came from the chancery of Castile rather than that
of León. It is best consistently to continue avoiding the words “Leonese” and
“Castilian” here in any linguistic sense, for there is no sign of a conscious dis-
tinction yet being made between different dialects within Romance; for the
moment the scribes had enough to do getting their heads round the new dis-
tinction between Latin and Romance, without bothering about any regular
diatopic distinctions that existed within their dialect continuum. Such con-
ceptual distinctions, and the language names that depend on them, would
come later in the century.
An important event occurred between the Treaty (March 1206) and the writ-
ing of the Poema (May 1207, according to the explicit). On the first of July 1206,
King Alfonso VIII issued an edict to the effect that the Royal chancery was
henceforth to be run by the Archbishop of Toledo, ex officio, despite the
simultaneous existence of a Chancellor, Diego García (also known as Diego de

Campos). Diego was later to write, in 1218, shortly after being sacked, the
extraordinarily reactionary Latin composition known as Planeta, in which,
among other things, he seems to regard non-traditional spellings as all but
heretical in themselves. Diego’s backgrounding in 1206 seems all the more sig-
nificant when we note that the Archbishop of Toledo who could henceforth
overrule him, Martín López de Pisuerga, had been the first dignitary to sign the
Romance Treaty of Cabreros three months earlier, and had already been
unfazed by the existence of Romance legal documents in Toledo for a decade
or more. The Treaty, and the Posturas of the Cortes of Toledo of the following
January (1207), were both intended to be generally understood when read
aloud; it is possible to deduce from this that, at court and in Toledo, Romance
was becoming preferred to Latin for such public readings, whereas Latin con-
tinued to be used for more private documentation. The changeover might have
seemed to be successfully implemented in the summer of 1207, but unfortu-
nately this incipient development was abruptly cancelled when Martín López
died in August 1208, and was replaced by the Paris-educated Latinist Ximénez
de Rada (Diego García’s hero); but by then the writing of the Poema, in May
1207, had happened, during the brief window of official blessing on written
Romance.
Thus if the written forms of the words in the Poema were consistently the
same as, or even similar to, those in the Tratado de Cabreros of 1206, or to those
in the Posturas de Toledo of January 1207, the case would be on its way to being
solved. But, as indicated above, they are not. The scribe of the Posturas cannot
be the same scribe as that of the epic. The list of thirty-four words which are
consistently spelt differently in the Posturas and in the Poema includes such
contrasts as (in alphabetical order) aia or aya (in the Posturas) as opposed
to haya (in the Poema), bono- (buen- or bueñ-), caualeros (caualleros), garn-
(guarn-), hi (hy or y), -ielo (gelo as a separate word), io (hyo or yo), deless- (dex-),
mie (mi, feminine), quemo (como, coṁo, commo, or cum), regno (reyno), sacca-
(saca-), sex (seyes, seys, seyx, vi), uaia- (uaya-), ueniere (uiniere), uustr- and
uostr- (vř). The consistency of these differences implies that at least in several
of these cases each of the two scribes had not only already decided how words
should be written, but had decided differently in the two contexts. It seems
clear enough from this regular variation that not only were the two scribes not
the same person, they had not been trained in the same centre. The scribe of
the Posturas, who is not identified in the text, is as likely to have been a perma-
nent member of the Toledo personnel as to have been a member of the
itinerant court chancery; but we can absolve him, and probably by extension
his Toledo colleagues, of any regular participation in the written form of the
128 Wright
Poema. This seems to suggest that he was not, although the Poema scribe still
might have been, part of the Palencia crew.
Apart from exemplifying the official desire to present important texts in
written Romance in January 1207, the Posturas are thus a red herring for the
present investigation. The Treaty needs to be considered separately, however.
The comparison between the written forms of words in the Poema and those of
the Tratado is initially complicated by the fact there are the two manuscripts
of the Treaty. But it is noticeable that overall, in those words which are not
spelt identically in all three manuscripts, the form found in the Treaty from the
Castilian chancery coincides more often with that from the Leonese chancery
than with that found in the Poema. We can hardly ascribe this to detailed coop-
eration between the chanceries in the orthographic minutiae, since so much is
different between the two, as the detailed comparison in the recent edition
shows. There are, thus, some 40 words which are consistently written the same
way or ways in both manuscripts of the Treaty, but consistently also differently
from the form or forms found in the Poema. These are (alphabetically, with the
Treaties first and the Poema second); ad before a vowel (always a), aia and aian
(aya and haya), Alfonso (Alffonsso and Alfonsso), ambos (amos and amas),
Bertran (Beltran), bon- (buen-), castella (Castiella) – if unabbreviated –, castello
and castellos (castiellos, castielo, castiello), Crux (cruz), deuia (deuien, deuie-
mos), emēde and emienden (en mend-), ētegrare and entegre (entergedes,
enterguen), estonz (estonces), filia and filio (fij- or ffij-), fora and foras (fueras
and fuera, as adverbs), gonzaluo, gonzaluez, gōzauiz and in the witness list
Gondisalu^, gozaluiz and gonzaluiz (gonçalo, goçalo, gonçalez), Infant, infant
or ĩfant (yfante, yfantes, yffantes), io (hyo or yo), iudeos (iudios), mese (mes, in
the explicit), morte, mort or muerte (muert), nēgun- (nĩguna, ninguna), ome-
nage (omenaies), qnq with an accent on the first letter (V), regno (reyno), Rees
(reyes), Rei or rei (rey), Reina or Raina (reynas), Roi diaz and several other Rois
(roy diaz, ruy diaz, ruydiaz), sex (seyes, seys, seyx, vi), sexanta or sexãta (Lx),
sue, suo, sua and one so (su or so), tenudo and tenudos (tenido), uegada (uezes).
Some of these examples probably concern different ways of representing the
same pronunciation (e.g. Rei and rey); some attest genuine phonetic variation
in the middle of what we know now to have been a phonetic change in progress
(e.g. muerte and muert); they can even attest genuine variation in the middle of
a morphological change (e.g. tenudo and tenido, since during this century the
-udo forms were gradually fading away from use). Some of the differences are
not clear how to classify; did the relevant Gonzalos pronounce their name
differently?
In contrast with these forty-odd cases where the two chanceries coincide
with each other and also differ from the Poema, there are only eight words in
which the two productions from Castile (the Castilian chancery’s Treaty and
the Poema) both coincide with each other and differ from the Treaty written by
the notary from the Leonese chancery: dixiere(n) versus dixere(n), fiziere(n)
versus fizere(n), o meaning ‘or’ versus ho, heredad versus eredad, eglesia versus
egleisa and iglesa, meta (subjunctive of meter) versus mieta, ond versus und,
seran versus seeran and once serant. This final case, with the unnecessary extra
letter -t added after the verbal ending in [-n], is interesting for another reason;
there are two such cases in each Treaty, on different verbs, two more such cases
in the Posturas and two more such cases in the Poema, including the sabēt
mentioned above (1174). What has happened in each case is simply that a scribe
who had been trained in the old way, where he was told strictly to write third
person plural verb forms with a final silent letter -t, in unreformed documenta-
tion, hasn’t managed to forget this ingrained habit on every occasion; the
statistic about there being exactly two in each Romance text of this period is
remarkable but only a coincidence (and a salutary warning against finding sta-
tistics significant; often they’re not).
Considerably more interesting from the point of view of the Poema is the
Ruy Diaz who turns up as a witness to the Treaty. He is the seventh most impor-
tant of the 21 witnesses on the Castilian side, written as Rodic^ diaz by the
Leonese notary Pedro and Rodĩĉus diaz by the Castilian notary Domingo, and
otherwise unidentified; he appears after the Archbishop of Toledo Martín
López de Pisuerga, who was by now the Head of the Chancery; the bishops of
Palencia, Cuenca, Ávila, and Placencia; and “Alvar^ nunij”; but, before “Gon-
disalu^ roiz Regis maiordom^”, so whoever he was, he was an important figure.
As a member of the court circle, he would have been at the least intrigued by a
long poem in honour of his namesake. Not only that, there’s a “Garsia ordoniz”
in position 15 among the Leonese witnesses; he too would be interested, if
none too pleased, when hearing a poem whose main villain was his namesake.
It might be best, however, not to make too much of this coincidence; the names
were not rare, and we’ve probably suffered enough from unreliable deductions
made on the basis of the proliferation of people of the time found to have the
name Per Abbat. The differences in graphical form of the two names, however,
which are not written in the witnesses’ list in the same way as in the Poema,
reinforces the conclusion that the scribe of the Castilian chancery’s Treaty was
not educated in the same milieu as the scribe of the Poema. As mentioned
above, Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo and thus also ex officio
head of the chancery from January 1209, refers in his Latin histories to other
aspects of the life and legend of El Cid, but not to the events of the Poema,
which also strongly suggests that the Poema was not produced, nor even gener-
ally known, in Toledo.
130 Wright
Other aspects can lead to a similar conclusion. Many of the more regular
graphical differences mentioned above between both the Treaties, on the one
hand, and the Poema on the other, involve more conservative forms used in the
chanceries and more novel ones used in the Poema; from the list above, for
example, the forms ad, ambos, bona, castell-, crux, filio, filia, fora, foras, Infant,
iudeos, mort and morte suggest that the chancery scribes were happier than
that of the Poema to retain a traditional graphical detail that didn’t strictly rep-
resent the Romance phonetics. That is, for example, all scribes had been taught
years before, in their initial training, that in formal documents the sound [we]
in a word should be written as a letter o, and the forms bona, fora and morte in
the treaty manuscripts, representing spoken [bwéna], [fwéra] and [mwérte],
show that that lesson was hard to unlearn even by scribes who used the letters
ue quite extensively in the same text for the same spoken diphthong. These
written forms cannot conceivably be used to suggest that the writers’ dialect
had not diphthongized the vowel in these words. The use of the letter o in these
cases was a consequence of their training as much as the letter -t on sabent
was, and the fact that the scribe of the Poema was less atavistic in this respect
than the scribe of the Treaty suggests that even by 1207 he was used to operat-
ing in a less formal context than the Chancery.
The scribe of the Poema must have been trained somewhere, though. The
probability that our scribe was not a member of the chancery team in Toledo,
including the team who went to Cabreros, does not in itself reduce the likeli-
hood of his having been trained in Palencia, or by people who themselves had
been trained there (whether or not he travelled to Toledo in January 1207);
Palencia was the home of the chancery in Old Castile and of the new ground-
breaking university being set up there in the first decade of the century, on the
basis of the pre-existing cathedral school. The presence of French intellectuals
in Palencia is often connected by modern scholars with the elaboration of the
mester de clerecía form used by Gonzalo de Berceo and others, with the Libro
de Alexandre quite likely to have been chronologically the first, modelled
formally on the French use of alexandrines. This seems to have been the back-
ground to the education of Gonzalo de Berceo, for example, who went on to be
both a poet and an administrator, and though Berceo’s own writings begin to
be visible only some years later (he is first attested as the writer of Latin docu-
ments from San Millán in 1221) Berceo and the scribe of the Poema might well
have come from the same milieu, and might even have met. They were not
contemporaries; a detailed comparison of the graphical forms of the Poema
and of Berceo is unnecessary here, for a cursory examination is enough to
show that Berceo and the scribe of the Poema were not in the same student
cohort. It’s fair to see Berceo’s written forms as attesting the language of his
area of the Rioja rather than that of Castile, and he may well have done that
intentionally (it is a mistake to call Berceo “Castilian”, as modern Castilians
sometimes do), but the same general idea of the possible positive value of
Romance writing is likely to have been already in the air for them both. In
Berceo’s case, it seems that he only decided to follow it up for his own composi-
tions at the end of the 1220s, perhaps as a direct consequence of the reforming
Council of Valladolid of 1228 which seems to have acted as a decisive catalyst
in the process of distinguishing Latin and Romance in Castile as conceptually
separate languages.7
Considering the content rather than the form of the poem has tended to
lead modern analysts in a different geographical direction. The impetus for the
elaboration of the whole story of the Poema, whether much of it or only a little
of it derived from oral traditions that had spread since the hero’s death in 1099,
has often been ascribed in modern scholarship to the Burgos area, and more
particularly to the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, where El Cid was bur-
ied, along, it was believed, with his wife and his horse. There was an expert
scriptorium there by the late 12th century, which produced one of the splendid
illuminated manuscripts of the Commentary on the Apocalypse of Beato de
Liébana, and since the early Romance written works seem all to come from
centres of expert Latinity this supports the possibility that the writer was work-
ing from there. Irene Zaderenko has recently made a strong case for the
composition of the Poema to have been undertaken at Cardeña, without con-
sidering in detail the linguistic aspects of its being written down.8 Later in
the 13th century we know that the so-called Leyenda de Cardeña came from
there, but there is no direct surviving evidence to show that the techniques of
the new Romance writing were taught and learnt at Cardeña in the 12th cen-
tury; so there are no contemporary Romance documents from Cardeña to
compare the text of the Poema with. The upshot is that the scribe who wrote
down the Poema might well have been connected with Cardeña, or hired by
the Cardeña monks who were developing the story for their own purposes, but
was probably not a product of their training.
Cardeña was a Benedictine house, a fact which unfortunately makes its
hypothetical role as the home of the scribe of the Poema less likely. Hernández
has recently pointed out that analysing the earliest documentation written in
Romance in the Peninsula in terms of individual intellectual traditions leads to
more coherent results than analysing it in more general geographical terms
(which is what Menéndez Pidal did in his Documentos):
7 Claudio García Turza and Javier García Turza, Una nueva visión de la lengua de Berceo.
8 Irene Zaderenko, El monasterio de Cardeña.
132 Wright
[…] what matters is not where you write, but where you learned to write
[…] written texts do not necessarily reflect the evolution of the spoken
language, but rather the succession of different script codes, and […]
such codes do not arise spontaneously but are the products of different
institutions”.9
This is particularly the case in Burgos, in fact, where the convent of Las Huelgas
was founded in the 1180s by King Alfonso VIII, as part of the Cistercian Order; the
scriptorium of the new convent at Las Huelgas adopted the new writing tech-
niques immediately, while Burgos Cathedral and other local archives waited
till well into the 13th century. That is, we cannot collectively analyse texts from
Burgos coherently as part of the same dialectal phenomenon. Benedictines,
on the whole, waited. San Salvador de Oña and San Millán de la Cogolla, for
example, were not among the initial enthusiasts. Consistently the reason for
the difference, in Hernández’s analysis, is that the newer written Romance
mode, or “script code” in his terms, is associated with religious orders who had
originally been imported from Southern France; he finds “an unequivocal cor-
relation between the new monastic orders (Cistercians, Premonstratensians,
Templars, and Hospitallers) and the flowering of written Romance” (p. 273).
This correlation works well for the Romance documentation in the 1180s from
the Premonstratensian community at Aguilar de Campó, for example, where
many of the earliest writers of Romance texts in Castile were Jewish scribes
who had come from France; and it also works well for the Mozarabic com-
munities in Toledo through their connection with Cistercians of the Order
of Calatrava. In general, a close connection with Southern French culture
favoured the new mode; Navarre, for example, seems to have been an area
where such documentation was commoner than further south. The Linage de
Rodric Diaz, the Romance text concerning the Cid’s genealogy, is from Navarre
and thought to be datable to c.1194. Overall, Fernández-Ordóñez’s study shows
with clarity how Navarre was in the forefront of the changeovers from Latin to
Romance, but Castile was not far behind.
This does not mean that the precise graphical details were taken directly
from written Southern French Romance; what was being imported from over
the Pyrenees was the general idea that writing in a new way was a practical
possibility. The spoken Romance varieties were sufficiently distinct then for
9 Hernández, “The Jews and the origins of Romance script”, pp. 266, 272. This important contri-
bution deserves to be better known than it is. For the dating of the Navarrese Liber Regum (to
1202-07), see now Carmen Martín Vidaller and Roberto Viruete Erdozáin, “Contribución al
estudio”.
new local forms to need to be developed south of the Pyrenees, and, since
within the Peninsula itself there was by then considerable diatopic variation,
different written forms were often invented in different places. This would lead
eventually to the idea, which seems obvious now but appears not to have been
obvious then, that there were different dialects of Iberian Romance in exis-
tence, in addition to the newly established conceptual difference between
Latin and Romance as a whole. (Hernández’s discoveries have recently
inspired, among others, Maria João Branco, whose work on similar develop-
ments in Portugal, occurring a little later, is also impressive).10 The novel
concept of romanz was contrasted at the start with Latin, with no internal con-
ceptual divisions based on geography, even though the actual written forms
could vary from place to place. It took time for the idea of Castilian “Romance”,
as a singular noun, as a single entity to be found in the whole of Castile, to
become established, and that was long after the writing of the Poema. The 13th-
century intellectuals’ outlook here was, from a sociophilological point of view,
more realistic than the common modern misconception that, within a dialect
continuum, distinct dialects existed then, or exist now, with internal consis-
tency inside clear borders on the ground. The crystallisation of the concept of
Castilian came to fruition a couple of generations later than the date of the
writing of the Poema, and can probably be attributed to the intellectual atmos-
phere of the court of Alfonso X.
Conclusion: the practical questions involved in writing down the epic are
separate from the question of how the content came into existence, since
scribes could be hired to work in places other than those in which they had
been trained. The techniques involved came suddenly into sharp focus as a
matter for important debates and decisions in the first decade of the 13th cen-
tury, as evidenced most directly in the manuscripts of the Treaty of Cabreros of
1206, with the consequence that the Poema, once its content had been largely
elaborated, could be physically represented on parchment at that time in a
manner which would be able to lead to a subsequent reading or recitation
aloud. There is still much that we do not fully understand about these develop-
ments, but the questions which need to be asked have become considerably
clearer over the last few years, and further investigations into the texts and
educational ideas and traditions of that fascinating period between 1180 and
1220 are likely in the future to lead to a better understanding of why and how,
and even perhaps where, the Poema came to be written.
10 Maria João Violante Branco, “Revisiting the political uses of vernacular language”.
134 Wright
Works Cited
Cano Aguilar, Rafael, El español a través de los tiempos, Madrid: Arco Libros, 1988.
Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés, “La lengua de los documentos del rey: del latín a las vernácu-
las en las cancillerías regias de la Península Ibérica”, in Pascual Martínez Sopena and
Ana Rodríguez López (eds.), La construcción medieval de la memoria regia, Valencia:
Universitat de València, 2011, pp. 323-61.
García Turza, Claudio, and Javier García Turza, Una nueva visión de la lengua de Berceo
a la luz de la documentación emilianense del siglo XIII, Logroño: Universidad de La
Rioja, 1996.
Hernández, Francisco J., “Las Cortes de Toledo de 1207” in Las Cortes de Castilla y León
en la Edad Media, vol. 1, Valladolid: Cortes de Castilla-León, 1988, pp. 221-63.
Hernández, Francisco J., “Historia y epopeya: el Cantar del Cid entre 1147 y 1207” in María
Isabel Toro Pascua (ed.), Actas del III Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura
Medieval, vol. 1, Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1994, pp. 453-67.
Hernández, Francisco J., “The Jews and the Origins of Romance Script in Castile: A New
Paradigm”, Medieval Encounters 15 (2009), 259-306.
Martín Vidaller, Carmen, and Roberto Viruete Erdozáin, “Contribución al estudio de la
cultura escrita medieval de Navarra: nueva propuesta de datación del Liber regum”,
Príncipe de Viana 253 (2011), 375-86.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Documentos lingüísticos de España, vol. 1, Madrid: CSIC, 1966.
Montaner Frutos, Alberto (ed.), Cantar de mio Cid, 2 ed., Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg,
2007.
Powers, James, The Code of Cuenca: Municipal Law on the Twelfth-Century Castilian
Frontier, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Ridruejo, Emilio, “Tradición y novedad en la sintaxis del siglo XII: el documento de in-
feudación de Alcózar”, in Beatriz Díez Calleja (ed.), El primitivo romance hispánico,
Burgos: Instituto Castellano y Leonés de la Lengua, 2008, pp. 375-96.
Ruiz de la Peña Solar, Juan Ignacio, et al. (eds.), Los fueros de Avilés y su época, Oviedo:
Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, 2012.
Taylor, Barry, “Raimundus de Biterris’s Liber Kalile et Dimne: Notes on the Western
Reception of an Eastern Exemplum-Book”, in David Hook and Barry Taylor (eds.),
Cultures in Contact in Medieval Spain: Historical and Literary Essays Presented to L.P.
Harvey, London: King’s College, 1990, pp. 183-204.
Violante Branco, Maria João, “Revisiting the Political Uses of Vernacular Language in
Portugal During the Thirteenth Century: On Models, Motives and Modes”, in Hannah
Skoda et al. (eds.), Contact and Exchange in Later Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour
of Malcolm Vale, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012, pp. 103-26.
Wright, Roger, Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France, Liverpool:
Francis Cairns, 1982.
Wright, Roger, “Escribir el Poema de mio Cid”, in Brian Powell and Geoffrey West (eds.),
‘Al que en buena ora naçió’: Essays on the Spanish Epic and Ballad in Honour of Colin
Smith, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996, pp. 189-201.
Wright, Roger, El Tratado de Cabreros (1206): estudio sociofilológico de una reforma or-
tográfica, London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, 2000.
Wright, Roger, A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin, Turnhout: Brepols, 2003.
136 Wright
Figure 3.1 Poema de mio Cid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, ms. Vitr/7/17, fol. 39r. With kind
permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
A Closer Look at the Poema de mio Cid’s Language 137
Chapter 4
A Closer Look at the Poema de mio Cid’s Language

Translated by Javier Pueyo
1 Introduction
Specifying the linguistic features of the Poema requires, first of all, setting the
time period of the textual stratum to which to attribute all relevant linguistic
features. The oldest stratum corresponds to the lost original Ω (1140 a quo –
1207 ante quem), a text that was written down in 1207 in a manuscript that has
not been preserved, but whose existence is certified by the colophon of the
copy bearing the name of the scribe, Per Abbat. The 1207 codex was the model
of the only surviving direct testimony of the Poema: the 14th-century codex
preserved at the Biblioteca Nacional de España (hereinafter, BNE). Assuming
the existence of these three strata implies that linguistic features of at least
three individuals overlap in the Poema: those of the author, the scribe of the
1207 manuscript, and the copyist of the 14th century codex, not taking into
account some occasional interventions made by several individuals to the
codex in later centuries. The impression that all editors have come away with
regarding the language of the Poema, and the use of their impression as an
editing tool and critical argument for solving the enigmas hidden in the text –
such as those regarding its origin, authorship, and scope of composition
– depends on the value given to each of these strata, whose delimitation cer-
tainly relies on a single physical testimony: the BNE manuscript.
2 The Archetype of 1207
Overall, the BNE codex reveals some linguistic characteristics that are closer to
those in the 1207 codex than to those of the date in which it was actually copied
– that is, the 14th century. Thanks to the comparative evidence from Romance
texts written between 1180 and 1250 and to the data provided by the BNE codex,
it is possible to reconstruct fairly reliably the state of the language of the 1207
codex.1
1 The reconstruction of the linguistic features of the BNE codex presented here summarizes the
research by Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s edition, with additions, elaborations, and revisions from

138 Rodríguez Molina
2.1 Phonetics and Spelling

2.1.1 Tonic Vowels. Diphthongs
According to Menéndez Pidal, the Poema’s rhyme system should be equivalent
to the system currently used in Spanish, with five vowels, which can be stressed
or unstressed, and in which o and ue do not rhyme. Therefore, Pidal argued for
the need to amend the manuscript so that where -ue is in assonant rhyme posi-
tion with –ó, -ó-e, -ó-a and –ó-o, it is replaced with uo, a pronunciation that he
believed was still common in the mid-12th century. Today, however, critics tend
to reconstruct a vowel system with seven stressed vowels for the 1207 text, add-
ing two mid-open vowels /ɛ/ (< ĕ) and /ɔ/ (< ŏ) to the five canonical ones.
These mid-open vowels could be realized as [ɛ] and [ɔ] respectively, or as the
rising diphthongs [ˈje], [ˈja] for /ɛ/ and [ˈwo], [ˈwa], [ˈwe] for /ɔ/.
At the time when the Poema was written, /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ were equivalent to the
current diphthongs [ˈwe] and [ˈje], but it is important to note that they consti-
tuted different elements, because the early Romance allophone [w͡e] was a
monophonemic element, not exactly identical to [u] + [e]. Thus, the phonetic
realizations of medieval diphthongs were a single phoneme /ɔ/ which could
take various phonetic realizations, such as [ˈw͡e], [ˈw͡o] or [ˈw͡a], whereas mod-
ern Spanish diphthongs are biphonemic elements.2 The monophonemic
nature of the medieval diphthongs facilitated that, in writing, they could often
be represented either as <o> or <e> in the earliest texts, or that different spell-
ing solutions could alternate, such as <ue>, <ua>, or <uo>, and sometimes the
graphical representation of the diphthong was carried out by means of the
most closed vocalic element of the group, as in <cilo> ‘cielo’ or <cum> ‘cuemo’.
Only after 1207 did a biphonemic realization [ˈwe] of the diphthong finally
prevail, and its representation as <ue> was established in writing. This explains
why the Poema can present assonance of forms in <o> with forms in <ue> in
subsequent contributions by Lapesa, “El Cantar de mio Cid. Crítica de críticas”; Martín
Zorraquino, “Problemas lingüísticos”; Marcos Marín, Poema de mio Cid; Catalán, La épica es-
pañola; and Montaner, “Revisión textual” and Cantar. The solid study by Torrens Álvarez,
Edición y estudio lingüístico del Fuero de Alcalá, is the main source of the data I have used to
contrast the language of the BNE codex with contemporary documents dated before 1250,
though Torrens’ work can be complemented with data from Matute and Pato, “Morfología y
sintaxis”. The examples from the text quoted here follow the readings of the manuscript, with
the expansion of abbreviations for readability. For stanza numbering, I have adopted the one
in Montaner’s edition, Cantar.
2 This means that the phonetic realizations [ˈw͡e], [ˈw͡o] or [ˈw͡a], were perceived as a single
vowel /ɔ/ by some speakers, and therefore they were allophones of a single phoneme. Current
diphthongs [ˈje] and [ˈwe] in the words bien and fuego, for example, are perceived, on the
other hand, as two distinct sounds: /i/ + /e/ in the case of bien and /u/ + /e/ in the case of fuego.
the same stanza, as in stanza 128, where fuert rhymes with Carrión and noch
(vv. 2689-91), and that forms with the diphthong <ue> do not assonate with e,
as the diphthong <ie> does, since presumably in the 1207 archetype both
spellings <o> and <ue> represented a single phoneme /ɔ/, which could be pro-
nounced either as [ˈw͡e], [ˈw͡o], or [ˈɔ], or, more dubiously, as [ˈo]. Thus, we do
not need to postulate the existence of spellings in <uo> for the 1207 codex,
spellings that the BNE codex never uses and were always scarce and practically
nonexistent in Castile after the 10th century. It is, however, possible that the
1207 codex had <o> in many of the cases where the BNE codex has <ue> (for
example, in v. 737, where <fue> must rhyme with arzón, lidiador, mandó, and
pro), as proven by some cases of <o> preserved in the codex (fossen, v. 2001,
fosse, v. 2137, and fos, v. 3590). In any case, the main idea here is that both <ue>
and <o> were supposedly different allophones of /ɔ/ at the time the Poema was
written. The codex also presents three examples of a diphthong being repre-
sented by a single grapheme, as in the toponym douirna ‘de Ubierna’ (v. 3379),
the adverb cum ‘cuemo’ (vv. 1753, 2930, 3518), and the possessive uustro ‘vuestro’
(v. 2198), which were frequent spellings in early 13th century texts but are
rather unusual by the end of the century, and certainly foreign to the spelling
system employed during the 14th century.3
A final remark regarding the tonic vowel system of the Poema: there is an
apparent equivalence of stressed o and u in rhyme position, something that
happens only in a few passages in which nues ‘nubes’, Vermuez, and Ansurez
occur in series in –ó or–ó-e (stanzas 128 and 131). We should also mention the
form fue, third-person of the perfect tense with an original hiatus [ˈfu.e], since
this ue does not originate from Latin ŏ (< fuīt), and thus, in stanza 37, we have
to wonder if it is not the u in fue that rhymes with the o in lidiador, mando, and
pro. Pidal adjusted these “anomalous” rhymes to the assonance pattern of their
stanzas (of course, according to his metric criteria), and so, he reinstated the
forms *nuoves, *Vermudoz, *Asuorez and *fo in his critical edition. Current edi-
tors, however, are inclined to keep the readings of the manuscript based on the
undeniable presence of rhymes u:o in other medieval texts, such as the Auto de
los Reyes Magos, where morto : pusto do rhyme.4
3 Pidal’s metric hypotheses are prior to modern advances in phonology, and are reflected in his
edition of the Poema. The vowel system reconstructed here is based on ideas of Marcos Marín,
Poema; and Montaner, “Revisión textual”.
4 On spellings <o> and <uo>, see Montaner, “Revisión textual”; on the metric system in Auto de
los Reyes Magos, the essential reference is Sánchez-Prieto, “¿Rimas anómalas…?”.
2.1.2 Atonic Vowels. Loss of Final –e

Like the rest of the earliest texts, the Poema presents numerous examples of
extreme apocope (much, noch, cort, adux), i.e., loss of an etymological -e or -o
after any consonant and not only after n, r, z, l, d, and s, found in the so-called
standard apocope. Menéndez Pidal had already realized that the loss of final -e
was one of the features that enable us to catalogue the Poema as a very ancient
text, not only because the apocope affects all parts of speech in the text, but
because the Poema, along with the Disputa del alma y el cuerpo, is the only
medieval text which always presents loss of final -e in third person unstressed
pronouns that are enclitic to verbal forms (unless the next word begins with l-,
Besole las manos, v. 894) and because it also shows an unusually high percent-
age of apocope when the pronoun is enclitic to a noun (una feridal daua, v. 38;
la manol va besar, v. 369).
Both the unstressed vowel system of three vowels and the presence of the
apocope illustrate clearly that only the stressed vowel is to be taken into
account for rhyming in the Poema. That is, the final atonic vowels e/o are irrel-
evant and there is no metric irregularity in the assonance of –ó-o with –ó-e or
–ó-(e), so they are to be considered neither imperfect rhymes nor failures to
assonate.5 At the time that the Poema was written, final vowels would have
sounded very weakened and, perhaps, they were dropped, so the spelling phe-
nomenon of the apocope could reflect a pronunciation of either [ø] or [ə],
with a relaxed pronunciation of the final vowel.
2.1.3 Preservation of Final -e

During the first third of the 13th century, it is not difficult to document full
forms with final –e in words that were affected by the loss of final –e before
dental or rhotic consonants, especially in texts from Toledo and Alcarria. In the
BNE codex, only three cases of this phenomenon are recorded: the imperative
verb comede (v. 1028), the infinitive laudare (v. 335), and the noun trinidade
(v. 2370). The last two are particularly interesting because, since they are in
rhyming position, Pidal could build his hypothesis on the presence of a
5 According to Montaner, Cantar, pp. 389-90, the vocalic alternation a/o in series with a stressed
vowel –á– does have discriminatory value. However, this hypothesis requires that we amend
certain assonances which do not concur with Old Spanish grammar, such as those appearing
in stanza 40, where we find the following rhymes: mano : mandado : arancada : ayrado: caua-
llos (vv. 812-16) or in stanza 95, where we find gañado: campo: santos: dada: cauallo (vv. 1748-
52). In these cases, it is doubtful for several reasons that the copyist would have altered past
participle agreement in arrancada and dada in favor of solutions without gender agreement,
since it was more common for copyists to eliminate past participle agreement rather than
restore it (Rodríguez Molina, “A minimis incipe”).
paragogical –e, although it has been suggested that preservation of –e in those

cases may be a Latinism.6
2.1.4 Hiatus and Antihiatic Consonants

There are some examples of words in the codex containing an antihiatic conso-
nant written as <y> (enpleye, alegreya, conloyó). These examples are noteworthy
because the antihiatic trend is very pronounced in the eastern regions of
Castile. Consequently, according to Marcos Marín, documentation of these
words with <y> inserted in the BNE codex would be in keeping with the Old
Castilian dialect of the Extremadura region,7 an area currently characterized
by a marked antihiatic tendency and where there is evidence for the same phe-
nomenon at the time the Poema was written.8
2.1.5 F- and h-
The 14th-century codex spells with <f> all words which descend orally from
Latin words with initial F-, such as fablo, fijos, or falcones, and it always spells
the Arabisms fasta, afe, and Mafomat with an <f>, which suggests that the lost
1207 manuscript did so as well. This feature has been attributed to the conser-
vatism of the epic style, since authors such as Penny believe that the author of
the Poema may have pronounced F- both as [ɸ] or as [h]. This is quite probable
in view of the presence of –f– in those Arabisms exhibiting aspiration in
6 Menéndez Pidal and others argue that the 14th century copyist removed the so-called para-
goge, an archaism proposed for the original text, which consists in maintaining an etymologi-
cal final –e, a reconstruction which would be needed in order to ensure an assonant rhyme
(according to Pidal’s metric theories) in series such as 128 (cf. vv. 2726-54 of his edition with
the actual manuscript). Consistently, Pidal reconstructed the paragogic –e in those cases he
thought it necessary, even in forms such as Tizone, estane, nose, or vose that etymologically
did not have it. However, recent studies on the metrics of the Poema and on the rhyme in
medieval poetry unanimously reject the presence of paragoge in the original text of the Poema
(see Sánchez-Prieto, “¿Rimas anómalas…?”; Bayo, this volume).
7 During the 11th-12th centuries, Extremadura was the name given to the border areas or extre-
mos of the Christian territories with Al-Andalus, which approximately consisted of all the land
between the River Douro and the River Tagus. Castilian Extremadura comprised the Transierra
(the land south of the Sistema Central) up to the Tagus, a region that today includes the pro-
vinces of Ávila, Soria, Segovia, Cuenca, Guadalajara, and Madrid, as well as the enclaves of
Burgos and Valladolid south of the Douro.
8 Marcos Marín, Cantar, p. 66. The Arabisms reyal (v. 2178) and axuuar (v. 1650) have also been
given as examples containing antihiatic consonants; the first one is also found in the Galician-
Portuguese form arraial, with a non-etymological palatal glide [j] (< (ar)ráḥl), while in the
second one, the –v– is, in fact, etymological (< aššuwár) and not epenthetic, as believed by
Menéndez Pidal, Cantar, p. 491.
Andalusian Arabic (fasta < hattà, Alfama < Alḥámma, v. 551). The preservation
of <f> argues against placing the original writing or the copy of the Poema in
Burgos or further north, since in these regions F- was aspirated or lost much
earlier, and this sound could be spelled as <h> or not spelt at all.
2.1.6 Results of –mb–

The regular result of the Latin group -MB- is always graphically represented in
BNE codex as <m>. Thus, the quantifier ambos only presents forms with –m–,
and so does the paradigm of the verb camear (< cambiāre). Therefore, it is
likely that this feature originated in the 1207 codex, a stage of the language in
which the change –MB– > [m] took place. According to Menéndez Pidal, the
region where this change reached greatest intensity was the part of Castile
between the Ebro and Douro rivers, whereas La Rioja tended to preserve –MB–,
and both North Castile and the regions south of the Douro vacillated between
–m– and –mb–.9
2.1.7 Sibilants
In a fairly clear way, the 14th-century codex reflects the sibilant system of Old
Spanish, which sets three pairs of sibilant consonants in opposition, depend-
ing on their point of articulation and the voiced / voiceless parameter. Thus,
the codex distinguishes the apicoalveolar fricative /z/ : /s/, voiced and voice-
less; the dental affricates /ʣ/ : /ʦ/, voiced and voiceless; and, finally, the
pre-palatal fricatives /ʒ/ : /ʃ/, voiced and voiceless. Apicoalveolar fricatives
were opposed between vowels only, whereas /s/ was usually written with <ss>
(diesse, fuesse) and /z/ with <s> (cosa); in all other positions the /s/ was always
voiceless and slightly more fronted than the current Castilian /s/. The spelling
of the voiceless prepalatal fricative is <x> in the manuscript (abaxo, dexar,
exida), while its voiced counterpart could be represented by <g>, <j>, or 
(cogio, agena, oueias, fijos, junto). As for the dental affricates, the codex regu-
larly uses <c>, <ç> for the voiceless (braço, Çid, merçed), and <z> for the voiced
sound (fazer, dezir, vazias), as it is clearly shown by the contrast between dezir
‘decir’ (< dīcere) and deçir ‘bajar’ (< dēscendere). Although the manuscript
faithfully represents sibilants in accordance with the parameters of the so-
called “Alfonsine spelling system”, there are exceptional cases which could be
interpreted as remnants of the spelling system of the 1207 archetype, such as,
for example, the use of <g> + <a, o, u> for /ʒ/ (guegos, consegar, consego) and
the use of s– and –ss– for /ʃ/ (Semenez, Salon, enssienplos), spellings which are
more typical of the earliest texts. The codex provides six examples of <c> for
9 Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes, pp. 287-88.

/ʦ/ (fuerca, corita, coracon, cabecas, bracas, vencremos), which could also be a
remnant of the 1207 codex spelling system.
Moreover, some words like esos, pasar, or asi, which should have been pro-
nounced with /s/ and not with /z/ when the Poema was written, appear
sporadically in the BNE codex with <s> and not <ss>, as one would expect in
the etymology-based “Alfonsine spelling” system. It is possible that these
anomalies were introduced by the copyist, since they are a minority of cases,
however they could also be due to Per Abbat, since it is known that the distri-
bution of <s> and <ss> to /z/ and /s/ was not regularized in spelling until the
mid-13th century, so alternations on this matter might also point to 1207, the
date of the archetype. In the BNE codex, however, we do not find any spelling
alternations between <x> / <g, j, i> or between <z> / <c, ç>, so the reconstruc-
tion of a system with three pairs of sibilants seems to be a safe one for the
archetype of 1207; a fact that, in addition, points to an early date in the 14th
century for the BNE codex copy.
2.1.8 Palatalization
One of the spelling features that enables us to assign an older date to the text
in line with the year 1207 of the explicit lies in the spelling of palatals, which is
very different from what has been found in documents from the second half of
the 13th century. In these latter documents, the digraphs <ch>, <ll>, and <nn>
or <n> with a curved macron above generally correspond to the palatal sounds
/ʧ/, /ʎ/ and /ɲ/. Obviously, these uses are present in the BNE codex in words
like villas, echados, caños, or niña, but this manuscript provides the particular-
ity of using <l> and <n> to represent /ʎ/ and /ɲ/, as shown by lorando, vassalo,
legar, or pequenas, sueno, and montana. The copyist of the BNE codex some-
times falls into the trap of hypercorrecting <ll> and <nn> to <l> and <n>,
respectively, to represent /l/ and /n/ (sañas ‘sanas’, tellas, çiello), a fact that sug-
gests that single letters were used to represent palatal sounds in its antigraph.10
Furthermore, there is a single case in the codex in which /ʎ/ is represented by
<pl> (plorando), a possible remnant of a primitive spelling system which pre-
served the etymological pl- and cl- spellings in words derived from Latin pl- and
cl-, because only in pre-1250 Old Spanish texts <pl> = /ʎ/. In fact, the BNE
codex rarely uses <ll>, and never in initial position. Thus, other than the already
mentioned plorando form in v. 18, the BNE codex regularly used <l> as the
10 It is possible that <l> does not represent a palatal in all these cases. It certainly does not
in the paradigm of the verb levar, which has an etymological <l>. The BNE codex copyist
is prone to forgetting to add the nasal tilde, so some instances of <n> for /ɲ/ could also be
interpreted as cases in which he forgot the tilde above the <n>.
result of the Latin consonantal groups pl- and cl- (lamar, legar, lorar). The
sound /ɲ/ is usually represented by <n> or <ñ> (<n> with a tilde above it)
because the BNE codex only uses <nn> for /ɲ/ once (susanna). To summarize,
the use of <l> and <n> to transcribe /ʎ/ and /ɲ/ is common in pre-1250 docu-
ments and rare after that time, so it must be assumed that the BNE codex
inherited this graphical feature from its 1207 model.
Furthermore, according to Diego Catalán, some of the spellings found in the
manuscript could be interpreted as remnants of a primitive spelling system
where could represent /ʧ/ (Oiarra) and where the results of ly may have
reflected a non-Castilian /ʎ/ pronunciation, as the apparent hypercorrections
of some toponyms seem to suggest: casteion, which is used both for Castejón
de Henares and for Castellón de la Plana (v. 1329), and guiera, hypercorrection
for Cullera (vv. 1160, 1165, 1727).11 Because of these particular spellings, Catalán
has argued that the result of ly in the 1207 archetype may have represented
either the voiced palatal lateral /ʎ/, written with <ll>, or the voiced prepalatal
fricative /ʒ/, written with < i, j, g>. Such an interpretation is compatible with
the preference in the codex for <l> instead of <ll> for /ʎ/. Thus, Catalán
defended the possibility that words which appear as <muger> and <fijas> in
the BNE codex should appear in the archetype written as *muller or *fillas. The
copyist of the BNE codex would have thus altered them, making them conform
to his own 14th century spelling system in which these words were written as
<muger> and <fijas>. Consequently, faced with two toponyms unknown to
him, *castellon and *gullera, the copyist would have adopted the same graphi-
cal equivalence used in similar words, and would have written them as
<casteion> and <guiera>. Other primitive spelling features preserved in the
BNE codex are the use of <c> for /ʧ/ (Yncamos), and <ch> for both /ʒ/ (Rachel,
Jewish name possibly read as /raˈʒel/) and /k/ (archas, marchos, minchal ‘me
incale’).
All these graphical usages make sense only for a manuscript written around
1207, but are unthinkable in an original manuscript of the 14th century or even
from the second half of the 13th century. Thus, it is possible that in many of the
cases where the BNE codex has ll- or l-, the 1207 manuscript actually had pl- or
cl-, as in *plora, *clamar, *plena, and that where the BNE codex presents the
digraph <ch>, the 1207 manuscript could have used or <g>, as in *eiados,
11 On this point, Catalán, La épica española, pp. 437-38, departs from the opinion of Menén-
dez Pidal, who, in his edition, interpreted <casteion> as an adaptation of the toponym
(which in the 12th century was part of Andalusian territory, and so pronounced [kaʃtiˈljon]
or [kaʃteˈljon]) to the normal Castilian form (Montaner, Cantar, p. 87). The same applies
to <Guiera>.
*conduio, *nog. These reconstructions have all been defended by Catalán and
Lapesa, given the spelling clues provided by the BNE codex and taking into
account the spelling system found in Romance documents earlier than 1230.
2.1.9 Final Consonants

The manuscript shows numerous examples of graphic alternations between
final –t / –d, a phenomenon that reflects a voicing neutralization in this posi-
tion in favor of an archiphoneme /D/ (with possible phonetic realizations as
[ð̞ ], [t], [ʦ]), linked to the loss of final -e, to the dissimilation of dental conso-
nants within the same syllable, and to articulatory tension. First of all, the BNE
codex shows a preference for spellings that represent final voiceless sounds in
words that have suffered loss of final -e, such as nuef ‘nueve’, grant ‘grande’,
sabet ‘sabed’, or dont ‘donde’. Moreover, the codex not only exhibits alterna-
tions between –t / –d, which where common until the 15th century, but also
two other optional spellings that alternated with –t / –d, namely, <th> (Cala-
tauth ‘Calatayud’, corth ‘corte’, arth ‘arte’) and <z>. Although the neutralization
of /ʣ/ and /ʦ/ in final position is usually reflected in the BNE codex with <z>
(estoz, prez, solaz), there are also some cases of <t> for this neutralization
(Pelayet), <s> for /D/ (amistas), and <z> for /D/ (acayaz), but no <ç>, unlike in
scriptae from Navarre and Aragon. These graphical uses of <th> for /t/-/d/
(which might be indicative of a fricative pronunciation [ʦ]) and <t> for /ʣ/-/
ʦ/ are not found any later than the first third of the 13th century.
The codex also presents four cases of possible final dental preservation in
verbal conjugations (always with the sixth person, never the third, and always
in the present indicative): puedent, sabent, and prendend; a graphic preserva-
tion that would most likely not be phonetic. This might be a primitive feature
of the text, which is compatible with manuscripts of the late-12th century or
early-13th century, since after 1220 the preservation of –t, as in Latin, is excep-
tional, and its preservation as –d, with Romance voicing, is still more rare.
However, González Ollé has proposed that these final –t/–d should not be
interpreted as Latinate or archaic spellings since, in his opinion, they are best
interpreted as haplographies of the corresponding verb followed by the adverb
end(e) ‘de ello’, whose final consonant, after the loss of final -e, was affected by
the usual tendency of the BNE codex to resolve the alternation of /t/ – /d/ with
<t>. This hypothesis was accepted by Marcos Marín and Sánchez-Prieto yet has
been questioned by Montaner.12
12 See González Ollé, “Cuestiones”, and Montaner’s response, “Revisión textual”, pp. 180-82,
and Cantar, p. 735. The examples can be found in vv. 555, 610, 656, and 1174.
2.1.10 Spelling of Pronominal Clusters

The BNE codex has retained some specific pronominal clusters that could be
interpreted as evidence of a language state before 1230, since they are virtually
only documented in the BNE codex: nimbla ‘ni me la’ (there is a similar case in
the Versión primitiva of King Alfonso’s Estoria de España, quemblo ‘que me lo’),
toueldo ‘tuve te lo’, with apocope, voicing, and metathesis of tove te lo > toveldo,
a form which is not found in any other text, or Hyollo ‘yo te lo’ (vv. 3286, 3322,
and 3367). As a result of the loss of final –e, –m and –t are treated as final con-
sonants and can appear as –n and –d (sin salve ‘sí me salve’, quen ‘que me’,
tengon ‘tengo me’, non ‘no me’, quin ‘qui me’, did ‘di te’). Consistent with pre-
15th century texts, the BNE codex does not record any case of selo, and always
writes gelo /ʒelo/ for the combination of unstressed dative and accusative pro-
nouns (<ĭllī + ĭllŭm). It is possible, however, that the 1207 archetype contained
some cases of jo (< ĭllī + ĭllŭm), a form attested in texts dated before 1250 but
of which there is only one case in the codex (que no io ventasse nadi, v. 433); it
has gone unnoticed because io was corrected as lo by the first corrector.13
2.2 Morphology and Syntax

2.2.1 Gender and Number
Some words of the Poema present gender differences from those of modern
Spanish. The following nouns are always feminine: az, puente, orden, yantar,
honor, and deshonor. The noun amor appears both as masculine and feminine
in the Poema, something that has been seen by some as a feature of Eastern
regions,14 since this word is feminine in Aragonese and is always used with that
gender in Berceo’s poems. However, in Castilian texts it appears as masculine,
as in the Biblia prealfonsí, c.1250, contained in the Escorial I.I.6 codex. The
Poema also varies in gender assignment for the words pro, az, mar, and sabor.
Adjectives ending in –dor are identical for masculine and feminine forms in
the Poema (espadas dulçes e tajadores) and, therefore, they always form the
plural in –es, and never in –as, even when they accompany a feminine noun.
Thus, it is possible that the form señoras in vv. 3450 and 3723 was introduced by
the copyist, and it would be appropriate to restore *señores, a form that fits bet-
ter within the assonance of the series in –ó-e where v. 3450 is inserted (however,
the only case of señores in the BNE codex refers to an inclusive masculine,
v. 1178, so we cannot rule out an original alternation señor / señora).
13 Rodríguez Molina, “A minimis incipe”, pp. 113-14.

14 Ariza Viguera, “El Poema”, p. 199.
2.2.2 Comparison of Adjectives

The Poema never uses -ísimo to construct the superlative, opting instead for
the forms muy and mucho derived from mŭltum. Thus, in v. 6, Sospiro myo çid
ca mucho auie grandes cuydados, the form mucho must be interpreted as a
superlative accompanying the adjective grandes, which then acquires the
meaning of ‘grandísimos’. The use of derivatives of tantum > tan, tanto as
superlatives (Ffablo myo çid bien e tan mesurado ‘habló con muchísima mesura’,
v. 7) is also common. As in other documents from the 12th century, the mor-
phological comparatives mayor and mejor can take a superlative value, and,
thus, mayor in an expression such as Valençia la mayor (v. 2105) must be under-
stood as an elative superlative equivalent to ‘Valencia la muy grande’. This
construction does not compare the city of Valencia with other cities with the
same name such as Valencia de don Juan or Valencia de Alcántara (an interpre-
tation defended by Menéndez Pidal), but rather elevates it above all other
cities in the world.15 For the same reason, in v. 2023 (tanto auie el gozo mayor),
the adjective mayor is not a comparative but a superlative equivalent to
‘incomparable, supremo’, just as mejor is also a superlative in v. 1993 (El obispo
don ieronimo coranado meior).
2.2.3 Articles and Demonstratives

The codex offers typical Castilian solutions (el, la, los, las, lo) along with some
minor examples of solutions with –ll (only 5 cases, ellos iffantes; ir alla cort;
allas fijas) which supposedly reflect remnants of the full Latin forms ĭllōs,
ĭllās, where <ll> has been interpreted as being pronounced as the palatal /ʎ/,
although it is also possible that <ll> could indicate a geminate consonant pro-
nunciation when the article was preceded by a vowel.16 When the following
feminine noun begins with a consonant the manuscript always uses la, while
feminine nouns with vocalic onset are always preceded by the feminine allo-
morph el < ĭlla < el(a) if the first vowel is an a (el algara, el albergada, el agua,
el az, el alma). Other nouns beginning with a vowel other than a are accompa-
nied by the article el (el estribera, el esquila, el ora), or they alternate la ~ el (el
espada, la espada). Menéndez Pidal believed that some verses of the BNE
codex (elas exidas elas entradas, v. 1572), presented traces of the primitive form
of the article (elo, ela), but since in all of these cases the initial e can also be
understood as a coordinating conjunction, no other editor has accepted his
hypothesis.
15 Montaner, Cantar, p. 913.

16 Torrens, Edición y estudio lingüístico del Fuero de Alcalá, p. 171.
From a formal point of view, the Poema presents the same three-place sys-
tem in demonstratives as in modern Spanish, that is, este / esse / aquel, which
express varying degrees of closeness to the first person. Along with este and
esse, the long forms aqueste and aquese are also documented. These are derived
from *accu ĭste and *accu ĭpse but they did not have the same emphatic
value in Old Spanish that they must have had in Late Latin. However, the use of
demonstratives in the Poema departs from current usage and is organized
according to the parameters governing the use of Latin deictics. It thus pres-
ents some important differences between the Poema’s demonstratives and
those of modern Spanish. One major difference from modern Spanish is that
este and aquel seem to work in the Poema as true demonstratives with a deictic
function. Ese, on the other hand, in many verses maintains the original value of
the Latin forms as an emphatic identifier, equivalent to ‘el mismo’, ‘ese mismo’
(v. 56), and functions as a simple anaphora or has a vague reference that seems
to indicate distance rather than proximity, as in vv. 484, 3018, 3044 (Pora tolledo
el Rey tornada da / Essa noch myo çid taio non quiso passar), cases in which
modern Spanish would use aquella instead. This also explains why the Poema
barely uses mismo (there is one single case, in v. 847). Another difference lies in
the preservation of the Latin heritage of este, since this form is used in some
cases as the equivalent of the modern ese and does not indicate proximity to
the speaker, in line with its etymology (La missa nos dira esta sera de sancta
trinidad, v. 319). As in the case of este, aquel also retains its Latin etymological
value, and it can be interpreted in some verses as a proximity deictic, as in
vv. 255-57, where aquellas must be a proximity deictic, since it refers to El Cid’s
own daughters, mentioned immediately afterwards with the pronoun ellas:
Dues fijas dexo niñas […] Aquellas uos acomiendo auos abbat […] De ellas & de
mi mujer fagades todo Recabdo (more examples in vv. 3452 and 3435), preserv-
ing the original value of accum + ĭlle in Latin, which was originally a mere
emphatic reinforcement. Finally, following Menéndez Pidal, some critics have
argued that the definite article in the Poema preserves the vestiges of an early
variation between ĭlle and ĭpse; so, in examples such as es dia (v. 1699), essos
christianos (v. 797), or aquel dia de cras (v. 676), the forms es, essos, and aquel
should not be interpreted as demonstratives, but rather, as definite articles
equivalent to the modern el and los, although this hypothesis is questionable
according to Lapesa.
2.2.4 Possessives
The system of possessives found in the codex does not reflect 14th century
usage. Rather, the system must be much earlier, since it still shows many
examples of gender agreement with the nouns possessives specified. Thus,
possessives in prenominal position had different forms for masculine (mio / to

/ so) and feminine (mi / tu / su). In v. 1, Delos sos oios tan fuertemientre lorando,
the possessive sos agrees with oios as it was a masculine singular noun. For
feminine plural referents, the form sus was used (de las sus bocas, v. 19, ver-
sus sos caualleros, v. 312). Medieval possessive adjectives were stressed, which
explains the presence of mio, mia in prenominal position; the forms [ˈmjo],
[ˈmja] probably were read with a diphthong, which is the reason why they are
not accented in most editions of the Poema (for example, in v. 2568, where myo
would rhyme in assonance with onores, nós, and partiçión; and mios in v. 3119,
with nós, gañó, and señor). The stress on the possessives also explains the suc-
cess of the article + possessive construction (de los sos oios, el mio fiel vassalo,
todos los myos dias), prevalent in the Poema but not in other texts dated earlier
than the first third of the 13th century. Thus, it is difficult to establish whether
the profusion of this structure in the Poema is due to the epic style or to the
author’s dialect.
Despite the preservation of possessive gender agreement in the 14th century
codex, examples of so + masculine nouns coexist with many other examples of
masculine nouns preceded by su.17 Perhaps the 1207 archetype presented a
greater percentage of so + masculine nouns than the codex does (although it is
unlikely that this would have been 100 per cent of the cases). These forms
would have been progressively replaced by su + masculine nouns during the
course of textual transmission. On the other hand, with the exception of a sin-
gle example (mi coraçon), the BNE codex observes a strict split between mio +
masculine noun and mia + feminine noun.
The Eastern form lur, lures (< illōrum), for the third person possessive and
the plural, is not documented in the BNE codex, although it is in the Fuero de
Alcalá and the Fuero de Valfermoso de las Monjas. We also do not find examples
of the article + noun + possessive structure, like la petición suya, which had
barely begun to be documented in the Poema de Alexandre and in the works of
Berceo. For the pronominal function, the BNE codex uses lo to for the second
person and never the form tuyo, whereas for the third person, lo so and lo suyo
alternate with a preference for the first form, as opposed to other codices, such
17 I find it hard to believe that in the late-13th century, feminine forms substituted masculine
ones, so it seems preferable to adopt Espinosa Elorza’s hypothesis, “¿Alguna vez triunfó el
femenino?”, which establishes the existence of a dual paradigm in prenominal posses-
sives, which, as stated above, were all stressed. The popular subsystem would thus have
monosyllabic forms (mió / tó / só for the masculine, miá / tuá / suá for the feminine),
whereas the learned system would have retained the Latin hiatus and would have lost the
final vowel (mi / tu / su for the masculine, derived from mío / túo / súo; mi(e) / tu(e) / su(e)
for the feminine).
as the Fuero de Alcalá (c.1235) or the Fazienda de ultramar, which only present
suyo. Thus, this is another feature revealing the antiquity of the text.
2.2.5 Quantifiers
Regarding cardinal numerals, the BNE codex retains a vestige of the earlier gen-
der inflection for the numeral dos, which was common until the mid-13th
century. There is only one case of the feminine form dues < duas, with the clos-
ing of a to e, under the influence of the close vowel u (Dues fijas, v. 255), versus
sixty other examples of the masculine form dos, without gender distinction,
despite the fact that sometimes this dos accompanies a feminine noun.
Among the distributives, we could highlight the form seños < singŭlos
(always with a palatal in the BNE codex), which is used in the Poema with its
etymological distributive value, with the numeral being equivalent to a single
unit (v. 724, Seños moros mataron todos de seños colpes ‘cada uno de ellos mató
un moro de un golpe’). We also find the form quis cada uno, which Menéndez
Pidal suggested was typical of Navarre, as well as the expression Della e della
part ‘por aquella y aquella otra parte’. However, the most common distributive
particle in the text is cada, always followed by uno (Cada vno por si sos dones
auien dados, v. 2259). The Poema does not have examples of reduplication of
numerals with distributive value (dos dos ovejas ‘cada uno con dos ovejas’),
which was a widely-used structure in the early dialect of León and in other
texts from the 13th century, yet unknown in Aragon and Navarre.
Although the numeral uno seems to be grammaticalized in the Poema as an
indefinite quantifier with pronominal function (unos dexan casas e otros
onores, v. 289), it is not clear that this form was completely grammaticalized as
an indefinite article in the language of the archetype. Whereas in some exam-
ples this form seems to carry out this function, in many other cases it seems to
retain its etymological value as a cardinal number. Thus, in Delas sus bocas
todos dizian una Razon (v. 19), the numeral means ‘una única razón’, whereas in
v. 38 (Saco el pie del estribera una feridal daua), it is very likely that una was not
used as an indefinite article, but as a numeral opposed to dos, tres, etc. The
feminine form una may lose its final –a before a vowel (un hora).
A feature reveling the antiquity of the Poema’s language is the possibility of
placing the universal quantifier todo after some demonstratives (sobre aquesto
todo, v. 890), as well as the possibility of combining todo with a numeral (todos
tres se acuerdan, v. 3551), constructions that are rather unusual after 1250. Also
common in the text is the use of the dual indefinite universal quantifier amos
(< ambō), usually in the expression amos a dos, ‘conjuntamente’ (together).
This is a quantifier that, like todos, could be placed after the NP (Noun Phrase)
it quantifies (los ynoios amos, v. 264), an unusual structure in the Middle Ages
that points to a very early state of the language. Among the non-universal exis-
tential indefinite quantifiers in the Poema, we should mention algo as a
pronoun and alguno and its variants (algunt, algun, alguno) not only as adjec-
tives (algunt año) but also as pronouns, for the Poema does not display the
form alguien.
Regarding the quantifiers used in the Poema to indicate greater and smaller
amounts, we should note the use of mucho at the top of the scale and poco at
the bottom. Between the two we find other quantifiers for an undetermined
amount: (a)tan(to) and bien (upward entailing), and yaquanto, algo, and pocos
(updown entailing). Unlike modern Spanish, mucho could appear in prenomi-
nal position, with or without apocope, a position where muy can also be found
(compare muy bien to much estrana). The full form is found particularly when
mucho functions as an adverb that modifies the verb (Mucho era pagado del
sueño que soñado a, v. 412). Very common in the Poema is the use of tanto and
its variant atanto, not only within correlative structures, as in modern Spanish
(Tantas cabeças con yelmos que por el campo caen), but also as a quantifier
equivalent to mucho (Metios sol escanno tanto ouo el pauor), especially in enu-
merations, a feature that, on the one hand, reveals the age of the text, and on
the other, has been identified as a characteristic of epic style, since this is also
very common in Old French epic poetry. Along with poco (poco aver, pocos
dias), yaquanto ‘algún tanto’ (vv. 2437 and 3433) is also used, inheriting the
functions of aliquantum.
The Poema displays little use of indefinite compounds combining a relative
pronoun with derivatives of quaero > quiere, quiera, quisiere, be they Latin or
Romance. Another trait of the linguistic antiquity of the Poema is the lack of
the indefinite cualquiera or its variants, since the Poema uses the simple cual
(v. 2364) or el que (v. 3140) instead. Also evident is the absence of quienquiera
and its variants, although we find one example of quiquier (v. 2357) and one of
quesquier (v. 504, written <ques quier>), with an embedded reflexive pronoun.
This latter form must be classified as one of the oldest forms of the Poema’s
language, as it was already disappearing in Castile at the beginning of the 13th
century.18 The low frequency of compound indefinites in the BNE codex con-
trasts with their usage in texts of the mester de clerecía, where forms such as
quiquiera and quequiera can be found in abundance.
18 Besides this example, I only have found this form in the Fuero de Béjar and in Old Portu-
guese (quexiquer), along with the thirteen examples of quisquier in the Libro de Alexan-
dre, and qual se quisier in the Fuero General de Navarra and the Fuero de Brihuega
(Menéndez Pidal, Cantar, p. 260).
2.2.6 Relative Pronouns

The Poema presents the following relative and interrogative forms derived
from their Latin counterparts: qui < quī, quien < quĕm, que < quid, qual
< qualem, and cuanto < quantum. Qui is always used in the text for human
referents without explicit antecedents, and always as a subject or following a
preposition, the same functions we also find for quien, used for both singular
and plural referents, and the relative que, used for both inanimate and human
referents in any syntactic function. The qual and quanto relatives are also used
for any syntactic function and always appear without an article (a qual dizen
medina, v. 2879; Vedada lan conpra dentro en burgos la casa / De todas cosas
quantas son de uianda, vv. 62-63). Regarding compound relatives, the Poema
only has el que and el qui, which are always in subject position. This fact can be
important, since el qui has been said to be a linguistic feature of Eastern dia-
lects.19 One of the features that reveals the antiquity of the Poema is that it
lacks any example of the relative el cual, which is already frequent in Berceo.
Instead, the Poema uses the simple relative qual (Con .CC. caualleros quales
myo çid mando, v. 2838). The Poema also lacks examples of the possessive rela-
tive cuyo, using que followed by a possessive instead (marauilla es del Çid que
su ondra creçe tanto, v. 1861).
2.2.7 Personal Pronouns. Forms of Address

Like other medieval texts, the Poema uses the stressed forms nós and vós for the
first and second persons in the plural, in subject position or after a preposition,
instead of the modern nosotros and vosotros, which have been documented
since the 13th century, but which are not used at all in the BNE codex. The
Poema also documents connusco ‘con nosotros’ and convusco ‘con vosotros’,
forms created by analogy with conmigo and contigo that predominate in the
text, since the BNE codex does not show a single case of either con {nos ~ vos}
or con {nosotros ~ vosotros}. This fondness for connusco and convusco could be
interpreted as a dialectal or older feature of the Poema, since other texts from
the first half of the 13th century, as the Fazienda de ultramar or the Biblia preal-
fonsí do use the analytical forms con nos, con vos. Another old feature of the
text is the use of the form elle < ĭlle for the third person pronoun (Saldrien del
monesterio do elle las dexo, v. 1353, where the referent of elle is ‘Cid’), instead of
the variant él (also documented in the Poema), since the form elle is barely
found after the 13th century and is extremely rare after 1250.
The general form of address in the text is vos for both singular and plural;
this is the form of address noblemen use with each other, and it is employed by
19 Fernández-Ordóñez, “Alfonso X”, p. 405.

everybody to address the king. The Cid and his wife address each other with
vos, and so do their daughters. Vos is also used to address the Jews, but the form
reserved for the Moors is always tú. This group uses mainly tú, both to address
each other (even when they are addressing their kings) and when they speak
to Christian characters (the Cid and the Moorish King Bucar address each
other with tú). This distribution of pronouns may be intended to reflect the
fact that Arabic only has one form of address, although the Moors, on occasion,
also use vos, such as when Abengalvón speaks with Minaya in v. 1521: Traedes
estas duenas por o valdremos mas. Tú is reserved for asymmetrical relations; for
example, the Cid addresses his nephews Félez Muñoz and Muño Gustioz as tú.
He uses both forms with Pero Vermúez, addressing him alternatively as vos and
tú, but he always addresses his noblemen and knights as vos. The Infantes de
Carrión and their brother, Asur González, are always addressed as tú, perhaps
because they are young men, thus implying that tú was not, or not exclusively,
a pejorative form, or one that expressed less respect or social inferiority, but
rather, was also a form used to mark differences in age at the time the Poema
was written. Regarding the form of address used with heavenly powers, God is
always addressed as tú, and so are the Heavens and the Virgin Mary, who is
alternatively addressed as tú or vos, combining uses of solidarity (tú) with
those of respect and reverence (vos), although we cannot rule out that this fol-
lows some Latin usage.20 Finally, although the king generally refers himself as
yo, he sometimes uses the majestic plural nós (v. 3116).
2.2.8 Unstressed Pronouns: Enclisis, Interpolation, and Leísmo

Unstressed pronouns in the Poema do not behave like modern Spanish clitic
object pronouns, whose position depends on the verb, but as true pronouns or
second position clitics; in other words, their position is always enclitic to a pre-
vious element to which they are right-attached (plazme, Bien lo aguisa, Taiaua
les las huertas). Therefore, unstressed pronouns can never start a verse or a
sentence in the text. Enclitic pronouns may thus be attached to constituents
other than the verb, such as conjunctions (quel siruen a so sabor), negative par-
ticles (nol osan) or noun phrases (una feridal daua). Proof of this is the presence
of apocope and univerbation, resulting sometimes in the phenomenon known
as interpolation (Que gelo non ventanssen, v. 151). When combined with the
infinitive and the imperative, these pronouns may undergo different processes
of assimilation (prendellas, tornasse, adobasse, vengalo, tomalo, acogello, ave-
llas, avello, forms with a possible palatal or geminate phonetic realization) and
20 Latin prayers, including the Pater Noster, use the second person singular; see Montaner,
Cantar, p. 706.
metathesis (indos, dandos, prestalde, Tenendos). It is difficult to interpret three

examples of the reduced form os < vos found in the BNE codex, which always
occur after a consonant (metedos, leuaros, leuantados), since they could either
be considered cases of reduction vos > os (which could be attributed to the
author or to the copyist), or they could be interpreted as mere instances of
graphical assimilation, since all three cases appear in enclitic position with
non-personal forms, although in other cases the BNE codex maintains vos after
the infinitive (guarniruos) or the imperative (veniduos).
The codex shows some cases of leísmo, most of them with either human
referents (21 cases versus 39 examples of etymological lo), or animate objects
(5 cases, versus 4 examples of lo), with only one case of non-personal leísmo
(este casamiento otorgo uos le yo, v. 3418).21 The manuscript shows no cases of
plural leísmo or laísmo. It is not possible to determine whether the pronominal
system reflected in the codex corresponds to the 14th-century copyist, to the
copyist of the lost 1207 manuscript, to the author of the Poema, or to a combi-
nation of all three. If the cases of leísmo came from the original text of the
Poema, the pronominal system reflected in the codex would match the current
linguistic situation in Western Soria (or other areas further south towards
Alcarria and Cuenca), which is a transitional region between the Castilian ref-
erential system and the etymological system used in Aragon, a region where it
is common to find singular leísmo with human referents, but not laísmo or
inanimate leísmo.
2.2.9 Verb Paradigms: Present Indicative

Regarding the present indicative paradigm, the absence of solutions with –y
should be noted in the first person of some verbs, such as ser (só), ir (vó), estar
(estó), or dar (dó), as was the norm in the 13th century. The velar increment
–g– in some forms of the present, due to the voicing of the Latin –k–, remains
where required by the phonetic context, as shown in the present tense of the
verb decir, digo < dīco, or aducir, adugo < ad-dūco. Although this velar incre-
ment spread from a very early date on, due to an analogical process with other
verbs, as evidenced in the present tense of verbs such as tengo < teneō, or
21 Lapesa, relying solely upon the argument of frequency, attributed the inanimate leísmo to
the copyist, but argued that the personal leísmo of the Poema was to be attributed to its
author; however, there is no evidence to sustain this hypothesis, as pointed out by Fernán-
dez-Ordoñez, “Hacia una dialectología”, who provides information on the possible pro-
nominal system used in the original Poema. The inanimate leísmo of the colophon (Quien
escriuio este libro del dios parayso amen / Per abbat le escriuio enel mes de mayo) must be
undoubtedly attributed to the copyist.
remanga < remaneat, the Poema reflects an early linguistic stage in which the
present tense of verbs such as traer, retraer, valer, oír, or caer lack this velar-
insertion and maintain their regular phonetic solutions with the insertion of a
palatal glide [j] (trayo < trahō, caya < cadō, retrayan). The present tense of
the following verbs is irregular: exir, both the indicative exco (< ex + eō, with
/k/ insertion) and the subjunctive yscamos (both of them analogically formed
following the pattern of inchoative verbs); some forms of the present subjunc-
tive of the verb haber, such as evad, euades (vv. 253, 820, 2123, alternating with
regular forms such as haya), and the verb ir, which in the Poema, unlike mod-
ern Spanish, does not conjugate its entire paradigm with derivatives of Latin
vado, but preserves forms of the īre paradigm in the 4th and 5th persons,
displaying the forms ymos (< īmus) and ydes (< ītis), and not the more modern
vamos or vades. The remaining grammatical persons follow the pattern of
vādō: vo, vas, va, van. In the Poema, the verb fazer preserves vestiges of forms
with etymological stress on the root, as in forms 4 and 5 of the present femos
(< facĭmus) and feches (< facĭtis), the imperative fed (< facite) along with
fazed, or the allomorphs far / fer (< facere) in the infinitive. The latter alter-
nated with fazer with the stress on the verb ending (however, the BNE codex
never uses the forms fazemos and fazedes with accentual displacement).
2.2.10 Verb Paradigms: The Preterite

The Poema is characterized by the profusion of strong or rhizotonic preterits
and past participles such as nasco, that is, preterits with stress on the root
/ˈnasko/ and not on the ending, as in the weak or arrhizotonic preterites such as
nació /naˈʦjo/. Among the strong preterits and participle forms, it is worth
mentioning the following: the already mentioned nasco, andidiste, adux, cinxo,
tanxo, raxo, adelinecho, aducho, plogo, repiso, crouo, yogo, pris, sopo, souo,
respuso, ouo, sopo, conuuo, nado, fitos, espeso, tanxo, aduchas, sueltas, con-
quista, çintas, or preso, corresponding respectively to the following verbs:
nacer, andar, aducir, ceñir, tañer, raer, adeliñar, aducir, placer, repentir(se),
creer, yacer, prender, saber, seer, exir, responder, haber, saber, conocer, nacer,
fincar, espender, tañer, aducir, soltar, conquerir, ceñir, and prender. Preterite
forms of –ar verbs, without exception, form the second person with the ana-
logical desinence -este < -astī (saqueste, saluest), whereas the 4th and 5th
persons of verbs ending in –ir and –er always take the analogical endings with
a diphthong –iemos < -īmus (partiemos, vençiemos, pudiemos, viniemos, fizie-
mos) and –iestes < -īĭstis (descubriestes, valiestes, aduxiestes, cinxiestes,
fiziestes), solutions that are consistent with the general usage of the 13th
century.
In the BNE codex, we find four examples of participles ending in –udo for
verbs of the second conjugation (metudo, vençudo), of which there may have
been a few more in the 1207 archetype, since these forms went into decline in
the late-13th century. The preterit of the verb ser retains vestiges of a Latin ŭ /
ū vowel alternation, which explains the presence of the monosyllabic form fue
for the first person in v. 1062 (Del dia que fue conde non iante tan de buen grado)
along with the original hiatic accentuation of the form fui, which should be
read [ˈfu.i] (< fūi); otherwise, it is not possible to explain all three examples of
fu used as forms of the first person (Echado fu de tierra, v. 1934).
2.2.11 Verbal Paradigms: The Imperfect

For the 1207 archetype, we can reconstruct an –ié paradigm common to both
the imperfect and the pluperfect había + participle, for all grammatical persons
in the second and third conjugations, except for the first person which always
maintained the –ía ending in all regions (in the BNE codex (yo) quería always
ends in –ía, never in -ié). Traditionally, all editions of the Poema have made an
editorial change to –ié, with an accent mark over e, although, at the time the
Poema was written, both pronunciations [ˈje] and [ˈi.e] were possible. However,
the fact that verbs of the –ir conjugation preferred a high root vowel when the
ending was -ié (durmie, firiensse, dizien, reçibien, vinie) suggests that the i of the
verbal ending was pronounced as a glide rather than as a vowel, otherwise it
would have not affected the root vowel. Therefore, it seems preferable to place
the stress on the entire diphthong [ˈje] as a whole, and not over one of its ele-
ments. In the BNE codex, some imperfect verbs in –ía also show a high vowel
in the root (dizian, sirvia, vinia, comidia), a fact that may be interpreted in one
of two ways: they reflect either an analogy with the –ié paradigm or a replace-
ment by the copyist of the old –ié for –ía, which seems more likely. Although
the BNE codex presents cases of the imperfect –ía in persons other than the
first (auya, fazian), some of which may correspond to the 1207 antigraph rather
than to the 14th century copyist, the greater frequency of –ié over –ía in the
entire codex gives weight to the reconstruction of an –ié paradigm for the orig-
inal text. However, there are two examples of –ía in one of the rhyming –í-a
series (vv. 275-76) that must be original to the 1207 archetype, unless we are
willing to posit a primitive –íe form with stress on the –i.
2.2.12 Verbal Paradigms: The Future

A distinctive feature of the Poema is the use of the indicative future tense
for the present or the future subjunctive in embedded clauses, be they com-
pletive (que myo çid se Repintra, v. 1079), or temporal (quando los gallos cantaran,
v. 316). This feature is particularly frequent in Navarre and Aragonese docu-
ments, but it is also present in Castile, especially on its Eastern fringe. This
particular use of the future indicative brings the Poema closer to Eastern
documents and texts from the first half of the 13th century (Razón de amor,
Fazienda), and to documents and texts copied by Aragonese scribes (Apolonio,
Santa María Egipciaca), than to Alfonsine texts, which barely make use of this
feature.22
2.2.13 Negative Polarity

The expression of negation in the Poema follows the usual medieval pattern of
negative concord, where negative polarity items must be accompanied by the
negative adverb no ~ non, even when they are in preverbal position (que nadi
non raste, que nada dezir non pueden, ninguno non osaua), with the sole excep-
tion of nunca, which does not occur with no, but does with other negative
adverbs such as alguandre or iamas. The negative polarity items used in the
text are, on the one hand, the universal quantifiers nadi < natī, a possible ety-
mological plural used for human referents (the BNE codex never uses nadie)
and nada < (rem) natam, and, on the other hand, the indefinite quantifiers
ningun(o) < nec ūnus (always with a human referent, and never appearing as
the plural ningunos, as it does in other texts), and nul, a ‘ninguno, a’< nūllus,
which is used in all cases with inanimate referents, and always in the feminine
form nulla. Regarding the use of nullo, it may represent an Eastern feature of
the language of the Poema, since it is the most frequent indefinite quantifier in
the Fazienda de Ultramar, in Berceo, and in Santa María Egipciaca. It is also
used in the Fuero de Alcalá and the Biblia prealfonsí, but it is not found in other
Castilian texts, such as the Fuero Real or the works from the Alfonsine scripto-
rium. The form nunquas is worth noting, since the variant with adverbial –s is
a typical Navarre solution, one not found in Western and Central Castile,
although it was used in the Auto de los Reyes Magos. Nevertheless, the form
nunquas is only recorded once in the BNE codex, in coexistence with more
frequent forms such as nunqua without –s (five examples, plus one nuqua,
with the tilde above possibly forgotten) and nunca (one example). The adverb
nunca may appear reinforced by other negative polarity items, such as jamás or
alguandre < aliquando (Longinos era çiego que nunquas vio alguandre, v. 352).
This last form is used twice in the text, making the Poema the only medieval
text, along with the Glosas Silenses and the Auto de los Reyes Magos, where this
adverb appears.
22 Regarding this feature of the Poema’s syntax, see the well-documented study by Lapesa,
“Sobre el uso de modos y tiempos”.
2.2.14 Adverbs and Prepositions

Manner adverbs are always formed in the Poema with an adjective accom-
panied by the ending –mientre, with diphthong and epenthetic –r– (fuerte
mientre, firme mientre). The BNE codex does not present either the modern
form –mente or the variant –miente. Regarding temporal adverbs, worthy of
note is the alternation of cras ‘the next day’ (Cras ala mañana pensemos de
caualgar, v. 537) and man ~ mañana ‘in the morning, at sunrise’ (the Poema
prefers the form mañana to man). These forms retain the adverbial meaning of
Latin mane, as v. 394 shows: Otro dia mañana pienssa de caualgar, where
mañana means ‘in the morning’ rather than ‘tomorrow’, as revealed by its con-
trast with otro día. The Poema does use hoy, but it does not have any examples
of the adverb ayer (< hĕri), using instead the collocation antes de la noche or
the single word anoche (vv. 42, 2048).
The Poema uses deictic locative adverbs, aquí ~ acá and allí ~ allá, to express
two different degrees of distance from the speaker (proximity aquí ~ acá, dis-
tance allí ~ allá). Therefore, spatial deixis is conveyed by using a binary system,
since the adverb ahí, a form only documented after the third decade of the 13th
century, is not found in the BNE codex. The difference between aquí ~ allí and
acá ~ allá lies in the locative value of the first pair, whereas the second pair is
directional (acá and allá are most often combined with verbs of motion and, in
general, they denote a more vague and imprecise reference than aquí and allí),
although there may be semantic interference between the two meanings
(v. 2499, Ala dentro en marruecos o las mezquitas son, with a clear stative mean-
ing of ‘in that place’).
As for anaphoric locative adverbs, the two most noteworthy ones are ý ‘allí’
< ībi ‘there’, possibly influenced by hic ‘here’, written as <hy> or <y> in the BNE
codex (Hy ganno a colada ‘there he won Colada’, v. 1010), and ende ‘from there’
< inde, with a number of variants: en, dend, dende (Bien salieron den çiento ‘At
least one hundred (knights) left from there’, v. 1507). It is unclear whether ý was
a stressed or an unstressed element (which seems more likely), but, in any
case, critical editions of the Poema usually provide a diacritical accent mark to
differentiate it from the coordinating conjunction y. Turning our attention
now to the adverb ende, which may appear either in its full form (ende), apoco-
pated (end, en) or reinforced with de (dende), it expresses origin, and thus
competes for this function with desi ‘from there’, desde allí, and de allá. Ende is
used preferably as an anaphoric particle rather than a deictic one, much like
the Latin adverb inde from which it derives.
The Poema displays the preservation of the etymological adverbs o ‘donde /
adonde’ (< ŭbi) and onde ‘de donde’ (< ŭnde), the first one (o) with a static and
directional meaning, and the other (onde) indicating origin. Both adverbs
alternate with the innovative, reinforced forms do and donde, which were, in
origin, mere morphological reinforcements (de + o, de + onde), which, in pre-
literary times, had the values of ŭbi and ŭnde. In the BNE codex, the reinforced
forms are used more frequently than the etymological ones. The Poema some-
times uses the form somo ‘the highest place’, but never the form (en)cima,
typical of Western dialects. Regarding prepositional usage, it is interesting to
note the presence of sines, a form typically found in Aragon and León, but also
documented in the Fuero de Madrid and in the Auto de los Reyes Magos,
although it disappeared from Castilian documents after the first decades of the
13th century. In the Poema, sines is much less frequent than sin, since we find
only three examples of the former versus 42 of the latter. The preposition con-
tra ‘toward’, which competes with faza < facie ad, never has a diphthong nor
any of its variants, escuantra or escontra, which are found in other texts from
the first half of the 13th century, but not in the Poema.23
2.2.15 Clausal Relations: Subordination

The syntax of the Poema is not very complex, since juxtaposition and coordi-
nation prevail over subordination due to the mold imposed by the strophic
structure, the limits of the verse as syntactic unit, and the constraints of oral
recitation. This preference for coordination and juxtaposition cannot be clas-
sified as an archaic or primitive feature of the language of the Poema, which at
times has been proposed, but rather, it obeys discursive and stylistic constraints.
The Poema’s sentence cohesion is achieved not so much by subordination, but
by anaphoric and cataphoric references, repetition of lexical items, the use of
correlative structures, and parallelisms and juxtaposition.
Absolute gerundial and participial constructions are frequent in the Poema
(todos se alegrando, las archas aduchas). The high frequency of the latter in the
text has been claimed as evidence that its author was a learned writer, since
these structures constitute a syntactic remnant of the Latin ablative case.
However, we should not forget that these constructions were part of the medi-
eval vernacular language since they appear in literary texts and medieval
documents.
The coordinating conjunction is always written as <e, E> (188 examples),
<he> (v. 2163), or abbreviated as an ampersand <&> (853 examples) in the
manuscript. It is never written as , although the BNE codex does present
some isolated examples of <y> (v. 2087) and <hy> (4 examples). For negative
23 On ende, see Coello Mesa, “Ende en el Poema de mio Cid”. The western origin of the form
cima has been confirmed once and for all by Octavio de Toledo, Los relacionantes locati-
vos.
coordinating structures, nin is preferred, alternating with ni, and o < aut is
always used to express disjunction, sometimes equivalent to a simple copula
(Si conuusco escapo sano o biuo, v. 75, ‘si escapo con vos sano y vivo’), a struc-
ture that has Latin precedents, cf., the use of aut for et, something rather
unusual after 1230. No other disjunctive expressions are used in the BNE codex,
such as siquier or quier, frequent from 1220 onwards, nor do we find other forms
such as ni siquiera, whose meaning is conveyed in the text by sol(o) non (de
venir uos buscar sol non sera pensado, v. 1076). The only adversative conjunc-
tions used in the Poema are mas and si no(n), and the conjunction pero, only
documented after 1220, is never used.
A notable feature of the text’s subordination system is the multiple func-
tions of the most frequent syntactic connectors: que may not only introduce
completive and relative clauses, but it can also be interpreted as a concessive,
causal, or final connector. Apart from its canonical temporal meaning, quando
can also be interpreted as a conditional or concessive-consecutive connector.
Finally, the modal como may also have a causal, temporal, final, or conditional
meaning. Among the connectors hardest to recognize by the modern reader,
we find the concessive conjunction maguer (que) ‘although’, the causal con-
junction ca ‘because’ (< quia), and optative structures with sí + subjunctive
(the controversy over the interpretation of v. 20 is quite famous). All these can
be seen as features revealing the antiquity of the text, since the Poema not only
never uses ojalá in these contexts, but rather, displays in them a primitive form
of the adverb sí, sometimes with pronominal apocope sin < sí me (Aiudar le a
derecho sin salue el criador, v. 2960), a form that alternates either with así or
with si quier in all other texts from the 13th century. Perhaps more striking than
the presence of the connectors documented in the Poema, which are few, is the
fact that some connectors frequently used during the 13th century are absent.
Thus, the BNE codex never uses desque ~ deque; ‘cuando’ as temporal conjunc-
tions; aunque as a concessive conjunction; the temporal conjunctions luego
que, which was extremely frequent during the 13th century; or abés or apenas.
Also absent is según, whose meaning is expressed with así como or with the
simple form como. Finally, the Poema also lacks the final conjunctions para ~
pora que.
3 The 14th-Century Manuscript
Paradoxically, the only surviving physical evidence of the Poema is the one we
are least familiar with in textual terms, since we cannot be sure which linguis-
tic features of the BNE codex should be attributed to spelling alterations made
to the 1207 text by the 14th-century copyist. Gaps in our understanding of the
BNE codex are due, on the one hand, to the fact that identifying the linguistic
features of the 1207 archetype has been a priority and, on the other hand, to the
paucity of specific studies on the language of the 14th century, an essential
prerequisite for a thorough analysis of the language of the copyist who pro-
duced the BNE codex. The most complete and up-to-date information on the
language features of the BNE codex’s copyist is provided by Juan Antonio Frago.
Based on the 14th century copyist’s spelling, Frago has argued that the BNE
codex was copied in a Southern scriptorium in Toledo or Seville, a hypothesis
that is difficult to accept, since, according to him, the codex contains examples
of sibilant merger and devoicing, aspiration of implosive –s, confusion between
–l and –r, and loss of intervocalic –d–. Frago categorizes as possible sibilant
confusion the use of <ç> for <s> (çeruicio, çaluador, and perhaps quiçab); the
merging –s– and –ss– (Asur ~ Assúrez); the alternation of s- and x- (Siménez,
Ximénez); and the replacement of <s> with <g> (eclegia, tigera, three cases of
ge for se, all of them found in the phrase falssoge la guarnizon). The codex dis-
plays a wide range of corrections of –s, such as lo que uos he seuido (v. 73) or los
myos amigos caros (v. 103); some examples of lapsus calami in the usage of –r
and –l, such as cauagar, cuepo, or Fenando; and finally, the loss of –d– as shown
in the example tos sos fijosdalgo (the codex displays tos with dos added above
the line by the copyist himself) and the patronymic Vermuéz, amended twice
as Vermúdez by a later hand.24
At the morphosyntactic level, the leísmo we find might be partially due to
the copyist, since this phenomenon was more widespread in the 14th century
than in the 13th. It is also possible to attribute to the copyist the interference
found in the etymological system of the possessives (although they may have
been there already in the original), as well as two cases of the possessive suyo
in rhyme position in a series in –ó (vv. 3098 and 3248, where the archetype
presumably would have had so, but there is also one example of suyo and two
of suyos in non-rhyming position). Presumably, the copyist also would be
responsible for the loss of –d– in fueres vençidos, a form of fuéredes, and for the
only case of para in the text (compared to 65 examples of pora). The nasal
epenthesis in the paradigm of the verb ficar < *fīgĭcare, probably can be
24 Frago’s hypothesis (“Cronología y geografía lingüística”) draws excessively from his own
theory on the readjustment of medieval sibilants (and its problematic chronology), and it
is burdened by some errors in his analysis of the manuscript’s spelling system. However,
it opens new paths to be explored in the future, which will necessarily involve the system-
atic comparison of the BNE codex’s linguistic features with a reliable corpus of 14th-cen-
tury texts and documents.
ascribed to the copyist as well, since there is one case in the BNE codex without
–n–, ficarán (v. 455), revealing the etymological form, which could probably be
found more frequently in the archetype of 1207, as well as some of the imper-
fect forms ending in –ía (particularly those with a high vowel root). Additionally,
we can probably attribute to him the pronominal metathesis in imperative
forms such as prestalde, dandos, levaldas, contalda, and dezildes, since this fea-
ture is not found in original manuscripts before the last quarter of the 13th
century. As for the lexicon, it has been pointed out that the alternation of exir
~ salir is only documented in the first two cantares, whereas in the third can-
tar, only salir was used, a feature that may also be attributed to the copyist of
the BNE codex.
4 The Text’s Authorship and Geographical Location
We shall not be discussing the specific authorship of the Poema, since none of
the individuals proposed in the bibliography, be it a monk, a notary or a min-
strel, has the right credentials to be its author. Regarding the geographical area
in which the Poema could have been composed, three main specific locations
have been proposed: Burgos and its surroundings (San Pedro de Cardeña and
the city of Burgos itself), Aragon, and, finally, the old Eastern Castilian
Extremadura region (both Medinaceli and San Esteban de Gormaz have been
argued to be the author’s homeland) and Transierra (an area between the
mountains of the Sistema Central and the Tagus River). In general, the hypoth-
esis linking the authorship of the Poema to Burgos and Aragon have been
formulated either providing no linguistic evidence to support it or using very
questionable evidence, making both hypotheses weak.
The Aragonese hypothesis, defended by Ubieto and Pellen, was refuted
point by point by Rafael Lapesa in the most brilliant article on the language of
the Poema that has ever been written.25 Lapesa has shown that the forms foz,
axuvar, cosso, abueltas con / de, sines, plorando, or ser huebos, all identified as
Aragonese by Ubieto and Pellen, are also documented in Castile during the
12th and 13th centuries. Lapesa was also able to prove that the use of fo, fossem,
forem as diphthong forms in the BNE codex is consistent with their use in other
Castilian documents. In his work Historia de la lengua española, Lapesa revised
other lexical items that had been classified as Aragonese, such as nues ‘nubes’,
alegreya, or firgades, and, providing solid arguments, reclassified them as gen-
25 See Ubieto, El Cantar de mio Cid, and its review by Pellen, whose arguments were thor-
oughly refuted by Lapesa, “Sobre el Cantar de Mio Cid”.
eral Eastern forms. Many other linguistic features of the text rule out the
Aragonese hypothesis: the Poema does not display the Aragonese possessive
lur; the morphology of the imperfect takes the –ié endings and not the –ía
ones, as Aragonese does; unlike in Aragonese, the text does not diphthongize
before a palatal glide, nor do the coordinating conjunction or the verb ser
diphthongize; the text also displays cases of pronominal interpolation, and,
finally, the evolution of Latin –CT– is always the expected Castilian sound /ʧ/,
which is always written with <ch> (except, perhaps, the example Oiarra, with
an for the voiceless palatal affricate) and never with the Aragonese reflex of
this sound, namely <it> /it/.
Regarding the hypothesis that the Poema originated in Burgos, whether in
the city of Burgos itself or in the monastery of Cardeña, which is located just
eight kilometers away, not one of its supporters has been able to provide a
single linguistic feature of the codex that pertains exclusively to Burgos.26
Furthermore, the BNE codex does not display the ennas < en las amalgam,
which have been recorded, albeit infrequently, in documents from Burgos from
the early 13th century, a feature only common in documents from the northern
region of Burgos. Also, the BNE codex does not reduce the diphthong /ie/ to /i/
before /ʎ/ or certain alveolar phonemes (the BNE codex always has Castiella,
sieglo, castiello, siella), compared to 11th and 12th-century documents from
Burgos, which display numerous examples of – ĕllu > illo, since Burgos is the
focus from which this phenomenon spreads, whereas in regions further south
from Burgos there were no cases of –illo in the 13th century. Finally, in the
Poema, we find neither the variant quano of the conjunction cuanto nor the
loss of –y- in mayor (maor), both common phenomena in documents from the
first half of the 13th century originating in the region of Burgos. Moreover, the
entire text is riddled with linguistic features from Eastern regions that make it
very difficult to assign the text to the Burgos dialectal variety.27
From a linguistic perspective, the most plausible hypothesis is the one out-
lined by Menéndez Pidal in 1908: many clues indicate that the Poema was
26 That the original was written in Burgos has been argued by Torreblanca, “Sobre la fecha y
el lugar”, and Penny, “Dialect Contact, Koineization”, among others. Zaderenko, El monas-
terio de Cardeña, places the composition of the Poema in Cardeña, but she does not dis-
cuss the linguistic features of the original text.
27 The most comprehensive information on the language of the Burgos region in the early-
13th century is still Menéndez Pidal’s Orígenes, p. 338 (on enna) and pp. 152-54 (on –illo).
Since this study was originally published in 1926, more comparative studies are needed in
order to fully refute the Burgos hypothesis. Any attempt to attribute the forms with /ie/ to
the 14th-century copyist must be rejected, since the solution –iello, the most frequent one
in the 13th century, was replaced by –illo forms during the 14th century.
composed in the Castilian Extremadura region, south of the Douro River,

within an area roughly bordered by a triangle whose points would be San
Esteban de Gormaz, Medinaceli, and Calatayud.28 In 1908, Pidal supported his
hypothesis mainly with historical arguments, but in 1944 he compared the lan-
guage of the Poema with that of a famous document from Soria about the
enfeoffment of the Alcozar castle dating to c.1155, along with the Fuero de
Valfermoso de las Monjas of 1189. He argued that the presence of common ele-
ments between these two documents and the BNE codex pointed to Eastern
Castile as the area where the Poema was composed and written down. Rafael
Lapesa, Francisco Marcos Marín, and Diego Catalán also have argued that the
BNE codex’s linguistic features conform more to the state of language revealed
by the documents from Castilian Extremadura than to that of documents writ-
ten between 1180-1250 in Burgos or in central Castile. Finally, Alberto Montaner,
in his 2011 edition, also adheres to the Castilian Extremadura hypothesis,
although he proposes to shift the focus of the Poema’s version to Castile’s
Southeastern limit and, more specifically, to the Eastern Transierra or the
Alcarria-Cuenca region. This is a plausible hypothesis which only a linguistic
comparison of the BNE codex with medieval contemporary documents from
that area could confirm.
Penny, however, rejects Soria’s candidacy based on the low degree of varia-
tion found in the text’s language, which would be greater had the text come
from a border area, according to the theory of koineization he used. His rejec-
tion is also based on the absence of leísmo in the contemporary speech of
Soria, and, finally, on the scarcity of Eastern regional features in the text, since
the Aragonese features suggested by Menéndez Pidal for some words seem
dubious to him. Thus, Penny considers reyal to be a regular derivative from rey,
rather than a form with a glide; he interprets the –g– in firgades as a velar
insertion typical of many –er and –ir verbs (dīcātis > digades, extended by
analogy to other verbs) rather than as an Aragonesism; and, finally, he consid-
ers that the form nues (< nūbēs) constitutes a case of assimilation of [ß] before
a labial vowel (rīvu > río), if not mere haplography for nuues.29 Penny’s argu-
ments, however, do not take into account that the Western area of Soria does
indeed come within the referential pronominal system, and the region of
28 In his initial proposal, Pidal argued that the Poema was written by a single minstrel from
Medinaceli, who would have composed the text around the year 1140. As it is well known,
Pidal later rectified his initial hypothesis, proposing a double authorship for the Poema,
suggesting that it was originally composed c.1110 in San Esteban de Gormaz, and later re-
casted and lengthened by a minstrel from Medinaceli around the year 1140.
29 Montaner, “Revisión”, p. 176.
Medinaceli also may have been leísta during the 13th century30. Furthermore,
although he is right in rejecting the Eastern origin for words such as reyal (an
Arabism), firgades, or nues, he does not consider the fact that the Poema
abounds in Eastern linguistic features that point more to Castilian Extremadura
than to Burgos. Many of these Eastern features had already been identified by
Menéndez Pidal, who pointed out that Soria’s repopulation was undertaken by
the Aragonese troops of Alfonso I the Battler, a fact that could explain their
presence in the Poema’s language.31
According to Menéndez Pidal, Lapesa, Marcos Marín, and Diego Catalán,
the linguistic features linking the Poema’s language to Castile’s Eastern border
and place the author’s geographic origin in Castile’s Extremadura are the fol-
lowing: (a) the absence of regular diphthongization of /ɔ/ as [ˈwe], as evidenced
by the use of <o>, and suggested by the rhyme;32 (b) the use of the future
indicative for future subjunctive (§ 2.2.12); (c) the presence of antihiatic conso-
nants in some words, such as alegreya or empleye (§ 2.1.4); (d) the use of <pl>
to spell PL- (§ 2.1.8); and (e) the use of to spell /ʎ/ (Casteion, Guiera), an
hypercorrection that could reveal an /ʎ/ outcome for LY and C’L (§ 2.1.8). Taken
together, these features show more similarities with documentation from
Navarre, Soria, Segovia, Alcarria, and Cuenca than with documents from
Burgos, Cantabria, or Palencia, since they display solutions that diverge from
the Northern and/or Central Castilian pattern.33 Nevertheless, the spelling fea-
tures of the BNE codex may be due, not to the author of the text, but to the
30 Matute, Los sistemas, pp. 71 and 105, accurately describes the pronominal system of East-
ern Soria and indicates the impossibility of assessing the medieval linguistic situation of
the area due to the lack of documentation from Soria.
31 See Penny, “Dialect Contact, Koineization”, and compare his remarks on leísmo with those
of Fernández-Ordóñez, “Hacia una dialectología histórica”.
32 Early 13th-century documents from Burgos, however, are very consistent in the represen-
tation of the diphthong with <ue>, whose phonetic realization in this area was probably
[ˈwe], whereas examples with <o> abound in the Castilian Extremadura for the same
period. Thus, it seems advisable to reconstruct a [ˈw͡e] pronunciation for the diphthong.
33 Not every feature has the same weight as evidence for the Eastern provenance of the origi-
nal, nor do all of them show the same kind of regularity. The use of the future indicative
for the subjunctive and the presence of antihiatic consonants seem to be, in my opinion,
the ones that can be classified, without a doubt, as Eastern features, while diphthon-
gization of /ɔ/ and the spelling <pl> for PL- reflect phenomena that, while not typically
from Burgos, cannot be considered exclusive features of the Soria’s Extremadura, since
they also appear in texts from the Transierra area. Finally, the most dubious feature in this
regard is the hypercorrection of for /ʎ/, since it is only found in some toponyms. The
hypothesis claiming an Eastern origin for the original text, to me, seems to be the most
plausible, but it will need to be improved and reinforced with more data and analysis.
copyist of the 1207 manuscript; so, once again, any phonetic interpretation
given to them may reflect the pronunciation of the copyist or his writing pat-
terns. We do not know where the copyist of the 1207 manuscript was trained,
although it seems unlikely that it was in the scriptorium where the 1206 Tratado
de Cabreros or the 1207 Posturas of the Cortes were drawn up (as Wright points
out in this volume). Years ago, Hernández suggested Toledo as a possible origin
for the archetype (not the preserved codex), a proposal now supported by
Wright with new and better arguments; it is a suggestive and plausible hypoth-
esis that would, however, need further linguistic evidence.34
Summing up, the hypothesis that links the genesis of the Poema to Castilian
Extremadura seems to be the most likely one, or at least the one that has been
most skillfully argued from a linguistic standpoint. Also, considering that the
Aragonese hypothesis has been definitively refuted, and that there are consid-
erable flaws in the evidence in favour of the Burgos hypothesis, it is also the
hypothesis most consistent with the geographical knowledge of the author,
whose familiarity with the lands surrounding Gormaz and Medinaceli has
already been pointed out by Menéndez Pidal.35 Only a systematic comparison
of the language of the Poema (and not just those aspects mentioned by
Menéndez Pidal) with original and critically edited pre-1250 documentation
from these regions will enable us to assess this hypothesis in order to establish
more accurately a dialectal affiliation for the text, and to identify, as far as pos-
sible, the spelling tradition to which the 1207 copyist belonged, a tradition that
may or may not coincide with that of the antigraph he copied in the month of
May of that same year, an antigraph whose linguistic features we can only indi-
rectly glimpse by reconstructing the 1207 codex from the only physical evidence
remaining, the 14th-century manuscript held at the Biblioteca Nacional de
Madrid.
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semántica”, Revista de Filología Española 83.3-4 (2003), 249-60.
34 Hernández, “Historia y epopeya”; Montaner, Cantar, p. 278.

35 See, however, Montaner, Cantar, p. 306-07.
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389-464.
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Poema e Historia (12-16 de Julio 1999), Burgos: Ayuntamiento de Burgos, 2000,
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González Ollé, Fernando, “Cuestiones cidianas: 1. La falsa terminación –NT de algunas
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Madrid: Paraninfo, 1985, pp. 11-31).
Lapesa, Rafael, “Sobre el uso de modos y tiempos en suboraciones de acción futura o
contingente: futuro de indicativo por presente o futuro de subjuntivo”, in Luis Miche-
lena and José L. Melena (eds.), Symbolae Ludovico Mitxelena septuagenario oblatae,
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Marcos Marín, Francisco A., Cantar de Mio Cid, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1997.
Martín Zorraquino, María Antonia, “Problemas lingüísticos en el Cantar de mio Cid”,
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Matute Martínez, Cristina, Los sistemas pronominales en español antiguo. Problemas y
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Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Cantar de Mio Cid. Texto, gramática y vocabulario, 5th ed.,
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On the Arabic Loanwords in the Poema de mio Cid 169
Chapter 5
On the Arabic Loanwords in the Poema de mio Cid

Federico Corriente
Having been invited to participate in this Companion with a contribution

on presumable traces of the Arabic heritage in the Poema de mio Cid (PMC),
I accepted the challenge, re-read the almost forgotten text under consideration
as well as some comments on its contents,1 and reached several conclusions,
mostly expected, but also some rather surprising ones that are worthy of being
offered to readers who might feel inclined to at least discuss them, even if they
come from the pen of an outsider, more familiar with Semitics than with
Romance studies.2 However, since the entire output of my endeavour turned
out to be rather lengthy and, in some points, perhaps unfit for the intended
purposes of this collective work, I have sought another more appropriate out-
let in order to publish the entire work3 and extracted the more adequate core
for inclusion in this volume.
As for Arabic loanwords, strictly speaking and from the very start, nobody
could reasonably expect many novelties, nor did I find them, in spite of using
improved methodological tools, such as a deeper knowledge of Arabic dialec-
tology and Andalusi Arabic (henceforth abridged as AA) developed in the last
decades, which has prevented the frequent mistakes made by pioneers in these
studies who, for instance, sometimes suggested etyma just culled from Classical
Arabic dictionaries, very unlikely to have ever been used in Neo-Arabic or, at
least, in AA, and therefore not suitable for borrowing by the Romance lan-
guages of the Iberian Peninsula through bilingual speakers.4
1 I have used Montaner’s recent edition, Cantar de mio Cid (2011), an extended version of his
earlier edition of the same title (1993).
2 For some decades, I have spent considerable time surveying the presence of Arabic loanwords
in Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula in books as well as articles; see my Diccionario
de arabismos (1999, 2nd ed. expanded with a supplement in 2003) and its revised English ver-
sion, Dictionary of Arabic and Allied Loanwords (henceforth abridged as DAAL), both with
updated bibliographies.
3 See Corriente, “Arabismos en el Cantar de Mío Cid: lexemas, remas y sistemas”.
4 See my corrections to the proposals put forward by the bright etymologist Joan Coromines in
“Apostillas de lexicografía hispanoárabe” as well as “Nuevas apostillas de lexicografía his-
panoárabe”, not to mention those produced by less knowledgeable scholars in this field, like
M. Asín Palacios, despite being included for decades in the dictionaries of the Real Academia

170 Corriente
An exhaustive alphabetical list of the not too many true Arabic loanwords in
the PMC would include the following items, of which only a few will deserve
further detailed annotation in this essay: abés (PMC v. 582, “hardly” < AA la bás,
see DAAL, p. 10), adágara (v. 727, “shield” < AA dárk/qa, see DAAL pp. 28-29), (a)
fe and pronominal extensions (vv. 476, 485, 1316, 1335, 1597, 2038, 2175, 2947
“here it is” < AA ahá, see DAAL p. 327, s. v. “he”), aguazil (v. 749 “officer” < AA
wazír, see DAAL p. 39), albricia (v. 14 “reward for good news” < AA albíšra, see
DAAL p. 65), alcácer (v. 1220 “castle” < AA qáṣr, see DAAL p. 70), alcalde (v. 3135
“judge” < AA qáḍi, see DAAL p. 71), alcándara (v. 4 “falcon perch; rack” < AA
kándara, see DAAL p. 76), alcáyaz (v. 1503 “commander” < AA qáyid, see DAAL
pp. 72-73), alevoso (v. 3362 “treacherous” < AA ʿáyb, see DAAL p. 95, s.v. “aleive”),
alfaya (v. 2116 “precious object” < AA háyya, see DAAL p. 106), algara (v. 442
“raid” < AA ġára, see DAAL p. 117), almoçalla (v. 182 “tapestry” < AA muṣálla, see
DAAL p. 153), almofalla (v. 1124 “army camp” < AA muḥálla, see DAAL p. 139),
alvorozes (v. 2649 “joy” < AA burúz, see DAAL p. 67), arriazes (v. 3178 “hilt of a
sword” < AA riyás, see DAAL p. 195), arrobdas (v. 658) and arrobdando (v. 1261
“guard duty” < AA rútba, see DAAL p. 196), atalaya (v. 1673 “watchman” < AA
ṭaláya‘ “high view-point”, see DAAL p. 204), atamores (v. 698 “drums” < AA
ṭanbúr, see DAAL p. 448), axuvar (v. 1650 “trousseau” < AA šuwár, see DAAL p. 42,
s.v. “aixovar”), azémilas (v. 2705 “beasts of burden” < AA zámila, see DAAL p. 18,
s.v. “acémila”), belmezes (v. 3073 “jacket beneath armor” < AA malbás, see DAAL
p. 463, s.v. “velmez”), çaga (v. 452 “rearguard” < AA sáqa, see DAAL p. 470, s.v.
“zaga”), ciclaton (v. 3090 “silken fabric” < AA siqlaṭún, see DAAL p. 265), escarín
(vv. 3094 and 3493, < AA iškaríyah “luxurious fabric”), evad(es) (vv. 253, 2124,
2326 “here you have” < AA hahúwwa, see DAAL p. 327, s.v. “he”), guadalmeci or
guadameci (vv. 87, 88 “embossed tanned leather” < AA ġadama/isí, see DAAL
pp. 317-18), fata (vv. 498, 1148, 1227, 1380, 1485, 1679, 2416, 2620, 2823) and fasta
(vv. 1732, 2770, and 3336 “until” < AA ḥattá, see DAAL p. 201, s.v. “ata”), maquila
(v. 3380 “grain given as payment to the miller” < AA makíla, see DAAL pp. 365-
66), mesquino (v. 849 “pauper” < AA miskín, see DAAL p. 378), moncluras
(v. 3652),5 rebata (vv. 468 and 2295) and arrebata (v. 562, “surprise attack” < AA
ribáṭ, see DAAL p. 416, s.v. “ravata”), reyal (v. 2178 “camp” < AA raḥál, see DAAL
Española; regarding this, see my article, prepared at the request of this very institution, “Hacia
una revisión de los arabismos y otras voces con étimos del romance andalusí” and “Algunas
‘palabras fantasma’ o mal transmitidas entre los arabismos”. See also my comparative study,
“Las etimologías árabes en la obra de Joan Coromines”, reprinted as “Los arabismos del ibero-
rromance entre Asín y Coromines”.
5 This is the name of the helm strap. This unusual item, which had never been etymologized
until now, might reflect an AA minqál “base”, to which the frequent instrumental Romance
suffix {+úra} would have been attached.
pp. 192-93, s.v. “arraial”), xamed (v. 2208 “a fabric of silk and gold” < AA šamíṭ, see
DAAL p. 337, s.v. “jamete”), ya (vv. 7, 41, 155, 175, 330, 1528, 2026, 2780, 3045, 3263,
3377 “o” < AA yá, see DAAL p. 467). To this list we could add some place names
of Arabic origin, namely, Albarrazín (v. 2645, < AA abán razín “Razin’s son”),
Alcalá (v. 4464 < AA alqaláʿa “the fortress”), Alcocer (v. 554 < AA alquṣáyyar “the
small castle”), Alfama (v. 551 < AA alḥámma “the thermal spring”), Alucant
(v. 950 < AA alʿuqáb “the hill”), Calataut (v. 572 < AA qaláʿat ayyúb “Ayyub’s
fortress”), Guadalfajara (v. 479 < AA wád alḥaǧára “boulder river”), and Me-
dina(celi) (vv. 1382, 1391, 1451, 1453, 1494, 1542, 1547, 1824, 2535, 2640, 2645, 2654,
and 2877 < AA madínat sálim “Salim’s town fortress”). We could also add pre-
Roman items transmitted through Arabic or masked as if they were Arabic, like
Fariza (v. 573 < AA ḥaríza) and Ateca (v. 553 < AA ʿatíqa), as well as the personal
names Mafómat (v. 730 < AA ma/uḥámmad), Abengalvón (v. 1529 < AA abán
ġalibún), Bucar (v. 2314 < AA abu bakár), and Vanigómez (v. 3444 < AA bani
qúmis “the count’s sons”).6
On the other hand, there is probably no need to reject again the infelicitous
proposal deriving the hero’s most renowned epithet of Cid (<AA sid “lord”)
from Classical Arabic sīd “lion; wolf”,7 as such an item never occurred in AA,
thus violating the just mentioned elementary rule requiring coincidence in
time, place, and register for any etymological proposal to be viable. But some
comments might be in place about several other items, like, in PMC v. 41, the
analytical and optional vocative mark ya, which appears not only in front of
Cid (vv. 268, 439, 2027, and 2361b ) and his epithets (for example, Campeador in
6 For further etymological information, consult the aforementioned Diccionario de arabismos,

and its English version, Dictionary of Arabic and Allied Loanwords. However, in the case of the
place name Amor, it should be explained that it is a corrupted form from the Arabic personal
name Ḥammūd, according to Terés, “Antroponimia hispanoárabe”, p. 168. As for Celfa (= Cella),
this place name is a mere metathesis of *Cefla, a normal Castilian reflex, not an Aragonese
form from AA assáhla, a well-known designation of the planes around Albarracín.
7 This proposal was put forward by Epalza, “El Cid = el león: ¿Epíteto árabe del Campeador?”,
as a sequel to Ṭ A. Makki, Malḥamatu ssīd: awwalu malḥamatin andalusiyyatin kutibat fi lluġati
lqaštāliyyah [The epic poem of the Cid, first Andalusi epic poem written in Castilian]. Since
neither author was a linguist, let alone an etymologist, it is only natural that they took mere
phonetic and semantic likeness for an etymon and forged a case for the likelihood that Rodrigo
Díaz was occasionally called “the lion” by his troops, with total disregard for historical and dia-
lectological evidence. Curiously enough, the Cid was indeed labeled as sab‘ “beast of prey”
and asad “lion” in the “Elegy for Valencia” by Alwaqqašī (see my paper “De nuevo sobre la
elegía árabe de Valencia”, pp. 335 and 337; and also Montaner, “De don Rodrigo Díaz al Cid: el
surgimiento de un mito literario”, pp. 94 and 97). But nothing suggests that this would have
been more than a raging outburst by the rather learned Muslim author of this curious and
much discussed poem, which neither Ṭ A. Makki nor Epalza knew.
172 Corriente
v. 41, 71, and 175), but also in an ordinary, apparently functionalized manner in
v. 3045: ya rey “o king”, v. 330: ya Señor “My lord”, v. 155 and v. 189: ya don Rachel
e Vidas, v. 1528: ya Abengalvón, v. 2780: ya primas “o female cousins”, v. 3377: ya
varones “o men”, v. 3263: ya canes “you, dogs”, which suggests the full-fledged
status of this borrowed morphological item, even at the lowest structural level
of introductors and fragments, and this in spite of the fact, pointed out by
Coromines,8 that its presence in some medieval Castilian texts usually
responds to the aesthetic purpose of suggesting a Moorish atmosphere, never
having become a standard Castilian word.
To finish with Eastern loanwords in the PMC, upon carefully perusing the
poem, I was struck by the fact that no previous scholar appears to have com-
mented on the peculiar fizieras barnax in v. 3325, simply stating that it meant
“to perform a feat”, as is clear from the context. In my view, this hapax can only
contain a reflex of Hebrew barnāš “someone, somebody”, of Aramaic origin
and ultimately a calque from Pahlavi, as I explain in the extended version of
this paper.9 At some point, possibly in connection with the reception in a
Jewish milieu of the Christian interpretation of that idiom as an epithet applied
to Christ (the Man’s Son), it acquired the negative connotation of “braggart”,10
betrayed by its borrowing in Moroccan Arabic as bǝrnǝš ʿala “to brag”, likely to
have been introduced there by the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal at
the end of the 15th century. The rarity of such an item, as well as other clues
that point in the same direction,11 can hardly be construed but as proof that
8 Corominas and Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, vol. VI, p. 9.
9 Corriente, “Arabismos en el Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 106-08. As noted by my colleague
Alberto Montaner, Menéndez Pidal, in his editio maior’s glossary, related barnax with the
forms barnaga/e ~ bernage found in other 13th-century documents, which clearly derived
from French (from barun “varón”). The word had, among others, the meaning “hazaña”
(exploit), that fits in the poem’s context. At the same time, the voiceless form of
-g(e) becoming –x would be an effect of apocope, well documented in the PMC:
of < ove, nuef < nueve, etc. (Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de mio Cid, vol. II, p. 499). However,
the rarity of the term, the problematic phonetic evolution of the word with loss of the
pretonic – which did not occur in baronía, for example –, and the Hebrew and Moroccan
Arabic data – languages unknown to Menéndez Pidal –, could indicate that the Semitic
hypothesis is correct.
10 Possibly through idioms similar to those in English like “being somebody”, “believing to be
somebody”, etc.
11 For example, the strange replacement of the historical names of Rodrigo’s daughters,
Cristina and María, with Elvira and Sol, both common among the Toledan Mozarabs, con-
sidering that Christ and Christine might have displeased a Jew’s ears, even in the case of a
convert from Judaism to Christianity, a frequent process that often was not sincere
throughout the ages. Incidentally, the presence of Jewish jongleurs at the time and in
the author of the text we have was or had been a Jew, or at least was conversant
with a Jewish idiolect of Castilian commonly used at the time in the Iberian
Peninsula containing occasional loanwords from Hebrew, as was usual in all
Judaeo-languages.
As for other obvious traces of the Arabic and Islamic heritage – historically
so frequent in every aspect of Hispanic culture and everyday life,12 despite fre-
those areas is proven by witnesses, such as the case studied by J.R. Magdalena, “Delitos y
‘calònies’ de los judíos valencianos en la segunda mitad del siglo XIV (1351-1384)”, in which
Johana the jongleur must pay a fine for bigamy. The Spanish historian and theologian José
Hernando Pérez has just published a book, Pedro Abad – Mair Yahya ben Gâlib: El cantor
del “Mio Cid”, defending with strong arguments, if not definitively proving, that the author
of the PMC was a Toledan Mozarab who bore both Romance and Arabic names. This man
appears to have had a long and brilliant career serving the Castilian King Alfonso VIII and
the Toledan archbishop, in circumstances that make him the most likely candidate to
having authored the poem. Concerning the geographical background, I could not agree
more with the proposal of this very skilled scholar; however, in his research there are
some hints of Pero Abad’s Jewish origin that have been overlooked. For instance, the total
absence of available information about his parents and forbears (p. 36); the rarity of the
family name Mair among the Toledan Mozarabs (only two instances in Ferrando’s El dia-
lecto andalusí de la Marca Media, pp. 226 >mayr< and 209 >aban mayūrī<, likely distor-
tions of Latin maior, but more likely masking the Hebrew Meʾir); and finally, the curious
fact that his services were never acknowledged with a bishopric he deserved but was
never granted to him, probably because of his origin, which was not unknown to the
hierarchy. Such peculiar features of his personality suggest that he was one of the many
Jews who converted to Christianity in those days and lands, and often even entered the
ranks of priesthood in the Catholic Church, in order to improve their status and prospects
of a better life. This required the disguising of their ancestry through the adoption of
Christian names, especially those that were less unpleasant to Jewish ears, such as Peter,
Mark, John, etc. This had been a common practice several centuries earlier under Islamic
rule; Mair Yaḥya Ibn Ġālib might have been a former entirely Hebrew name Meʾir
Yoḥanan, before requiring a complete change to Pero Abad when the city fell into Castil-
ian hands. It is no less significant the scarce mention of Christ and Mary in the PMC,
compared with the frequency of appearances of the name of God, usually referred to as
the Creator, which complied with the Jewish prohibition of the direct utterance of God’s
name. Pero Abad’s case is parallel to those of Diego de Guadix and Pedro de Alcalá in the
16th century, both of whom were priests of unknown origin serving the church efficiently
and reaching only relatively high offices. See my comments on Alcalá’s Hebrew entries in
El léxico árabe andalusí según P. de Alcalá, p. ii; in the case of Guadix, see my review of the
edition of his materials in “Notas lingüísticas acerca de la Recopilación de algunos nom-
bres arábigos de Diego de Guadix”, p. 101, with some testimonies of his unexpected famil-
iarity with Hebrew.
12 I have published some research on this subject, including folk songs, lullabies, and foul
language; see “Expresiones bajo tabú social en árabe andalusí y sus relaciones con el
romance” and “Arabismos en la cultura popular española”.
174 Corriente
quent and passionate denials by nationalists, both educated and laymen –,

there are many, although they are often downed in the garb of Romance words
and phrases that have caught the attention of scholars in many instances. Such
is the case of allusions to the belief in auguries (vv. 11-12);13 the mention of gifts
at the conclusion of some deals, like the loan Rodrigo fraudulently obtained
from the Jews Rachel and Vidas (vv. 175 and 190);14 the assignation of one fifth
of the war booty to the army commander (vv. 492, 805, 1806, and 2487-89); the
battle strategy of feigned flight (v. 575);15 the hero’s battle cry (v. 720); the pres-
ence of women in battle who encourage the warriors from afar (v. 1641); the
promise of Paradise to those killed in Holy War (vv. 1704-05); and the praise of
honor acquired by one’s deeds and not by mere inheritance (v. 3720).16 In other
instances, such influences have not been detected so far, to the best of my
knowledge, for example, giving thanks to God even, and particularly, when one
is struck by misfortune (vv. 8 and 2839); the usual payment for safe-conduct
through foreign lands (v. 1480); the epithet “house” attached to some town
names, like “Valencia […] la casa” (v. 1232), “Deyna la casa” (v. 1161), and “Terrer
la casa” (v. 571);17 the marriage broker (v. 2080), the dowry (vv. 2564-65), and
other characteristically Islamic traditions surrounding the betrothal, the wed-
ding, and their celebration.
However, the most significant finding of my exploration of this old Castilian
poem has been the detection of a metrical structure akin to that of Berceo’s
poetry, the Libro de Buen Amor, and Galician and Portuguese Cantigas, with
recurrence of hemistich partition in octosyllabic or heptasyllabic verses, and
more or less rudimentary rhymes and stanzaic schemes. These traits are not
found in Classical Latin verse nor could they have derived from its models, but
it is common in AA stanzaic poems (muwaššaḥāt and azǧāl), which are in turn
the final result of the evolution of Eastern Arabic prosody through the devel-
opment of tasmīṭ – the internal rhyming of an otherwise one-rhyme poem
13 This matter has been recently reconsidered by Montaner in “Tal es la su auze: El héroe
afortunado del Cantar de mio Cid”, suggesting a functional relationship between Old Cas-
tilian auze (“good luck”, lit. “bird”) and Islamic barakah, because of their association with
God’s will. In both cases, and perhaps as an isomorphism, pagan beliefs in omens might
have survived thanks to a re-adaptation to the concept of divine providence.
14 See albaroque and alifara in my etymological dictionaries.
15 Called tornafuye in Castilian, a makeshift translation of Arabic karr(un) wafarr.
16 See ʿAbdalbadīʿ, La épica árabe y su influencia en la épica castellana; Galmés, Épica árabe y
épica castellana and La épica románica y la tradición árabe; Marcos Marín, Poesía narra-
tiva árabe y épica hispánica and his edition of Cantar de Mio Cid, pp. 20, 44-45, 46, etc.
17 Cf. the Arabic Dāru ssalām, first said of Baghdad, and later on applied to the well-known
coastal city in East Africa, Dāru lbayḍāʾ “Casablanca” in Morocco, etc.
– and the conversion of quantitative to accentual rhythm in Al-Andalus, as

I have demonstrated in my editions of the local production of Andalusi poets.18
Aware that such a conclusion is not going to be easily accepted by tradi-
tionally-minded Romanists, even after a perusal of the additional evidence
provided in the extended version of this article,19 I cannot refrain from expres-
sing my conviction that the oldest poetry of the Iberian Peninsula, like a sizable
part of its entire cultural frame during the High Middle Ages, did not develop
in the minds of creative clerks merely inspired by Latin models, who were
totally alien to the strong and bright cultural irradiation from Al-Andalus
between the 10th and 12th centuries. Instead, I am inclined to believe that the
strophic and metrical models used by Muslims and Jews in Al-Andalus, as
reflected in their poems in Classical Arabic (muwaššaḥāt) and AA (azǧāl), in
Hebrew (Sephardic verse, strophic or not), and partially in the Romance por-
tions of some ḫaraǧāt, were carried Northward over the border by minstrels of
either of the three religions. It first took the rather rudimentary shape reflected
in the frequent syllabic miscounts of PMC, and some time later in the perfect
azǧāl composed by the Arcipreste de Hita and the authors of the cantigas.
Berceo, however, remained perhaps a more faithful imitator of those earlier
minstrels whose compositions were closer to the structures of the qaṣāʾid
zaǧaliyyah, even incorporating their shortcomings.20
The first quatrain of PMC reads,
De – los – sos – ó-jos tan / fuér-te-mién-tre-llo-ran-do = xxxó xó / óxóx xóx

tor-ná-vala- ca-bé-ça / e+es-tá-va-los- ca-tán-do = xóxx xóx / xóxx xóx
Ví-o- puér-tas- a-biér-tas / e- ú-ços- sin- ca-ñá-dos = óxóx xóx / xóxx xóx
al-cán-da-ras- va-zí-as / sin- pié-lles- e- sin- mán-tos = xóxx xóx / xóxx xóx
(vv. 1-4)
18 See Corriente, Poesía dialectal árabe y romance en Alandalús. This metrical proposal has
obscure aspects that I do not deny, for example, the effect of the so-called muġālaṭah or
“cumplimiento óptico” (visual compliance), invariably observed in classical Neo-Persian
and Turkish poetry, although both languages did not have a quantitative rhythm. This
suggests that classical Andalusi poets worked in this form, like late-Latin poets, and that
common people started to ignore it, since it was not pertinent phonologically. These
could allow us to distinguish between educated poets who followed the muġālaṭah, and
more popular ones who only took into consideration the syllabic-accentual cadence. I do
not have any reason to doubt that the second version was the one that reached the North
of the Iberian Peninsula.
19 Corriente, “Arabismos en el Cantar de Mío Cid”, pp. 130-41.
20 Regarding this technical term, see my article “Textos andalusíes de casidas dialectales
(impropiamente llamadas cejelescas)”.
176 Corriente
Is it a coincidence that it looks so much like a variant of a dimetrical raǧaz, in

Arabic notation mustafʿilun faʿū(lun), with optional substitution of fāʿilātun
for the first foot, and reduction of the second one in other parts of the poem to
two syllables?21
No less striking is its unsuspected similarity to the model of Hebrew imi-
tations of AA muwaššaḥ, like Ṭodros Abulʿāfiyah’s poem in raǧaz metre
(mustafʿilun ma[ f ]ʿūlun / ma[ f ]ʿūlun):
éš- no-dǝ-kém- do-dáy- bi / qa-daḥ-tém = óxxó xóx xxó

ub-nas-‘ă-kém- et- lib-bí- la-qaḥ-tém, = xxxó xxó xxó
ak- hay-yǝ-qód- tok- lib-bí / hin-naḥ-tém. = xxxó xxó xxó
moq-dé- qǝ-ra-báy- kab-bú / ki- hin-né = xóxx óxó xxó
éš- han-nǝ-du-dím- tu-qád / wat-tib-ʿár = óxxx óxó xxó22
The situation is the same in Berceo’s poetry produced in the 13th century, since
the very first stanza of his Vida de San Millán de la Cogolla, which can be
scanned without any trouble as mustafʿilun or fāʿilātu + faʿū(lun) or faʿilun, i.e.,
raǧaz, madid, or a combination of both, without any need of “Mussafia’s law”,
as follows:
Quí- la- ví-da- qui-sié-re / de- sánt- Mi-llán- sa-bér = óxóx xóx / xóxó xó
e- de- la- sú- his-tó-ria / bien- cer-tá-no se-ér = xxxó xóx / óxóx xó
Mé-ta- mién-tes- e-n+ és-to / que- yo- quié-ro le-ér: = óxóx xóx / xxóx xó
Ve-rá- a-dó- em-bí-an / los- pué-blos- só- a-vér = xóxó xóx / xóxó xó
Up to the last stanza, Berceo is closer to the dimetric raǧaz (mustafʿilun

faʿūlun):
Gon-zál-vo- fué- so- nóm-ne / que- fí-zo éstʾ- tra-tá-do. = xóxó xóx / xóxó
xóx
En- Sant- Mi-llán- de- Sú-so / fué- de- ni-ñéz- crï-á-do, = xxxó xóx / óxxó
xóx
na-tu-rál- de- Ver-cé-o / óndʾ- sant- Mi-llán- fue- ná-do, = xxóx xóx / óxxó
xóx
21 In connection, perhaps, with the so-called Mussafia’s law.

22 “My friends, you lit in me the fire of your absence: / with your departure you took away my
heart, / and set fire inside my heart: / put it out, you who have burnt my entrails, for / the
flames of absence are ablaze and burning”.
Dios- guár-de- la- su- ál-ma / del- po-dér- del- pecádo. = xóxx xóx / xxóx
xóx
If we turn now, in order to diversify the samples, to the 14th-century Libro de

Buen Amor, which was described as predominantly using the “cuaderna vía
alejandrina” by such a thorough scholar like Coromines, upon scanning its first
quatrain, we find a metrical sequence of mustafʿilun or fāʿilātu + faʿūlun or
faʿilun: “Se-ñor – Diós – que a – los – ju-diós, – pué – blo – de – per-di-ci-ón” (=
xxóx xxó / óxxx xxó). However, in quatrain 47 (“the dispute between Greeks
and Romans”, p. 93 of Coromines’ edition), the octosyllables are sequences of
two feet, mustafʿilun or fāʿilātun: “as-sí – fue- que – los – romá-nos / nin-gú-nas
– lé-yes a-ví-en” (= xóxx xxóx / xóxó xxóx), which holds good for the rest of the
work, in lines of one or two hemistichs and in single-rhymed or stanzaic
structures.
The same applies to the 13th and 14th-century “cantigas de amigo”,23 as we
can see in composition number one by Fernán Rodríguez de Calheiros, which
is a rather correct trimetric raǧaz (mustafʿilun mustafʿilun faʿūlun):
Per-du-d’ ei, – ma-dre, cui-d’ eu, – meu – a-mi-go (= xóxó xóxx xóx)
ma-car- m’el – viu, sol – non- quis – fa-lar- mi-go (= xóxó xxóx xóx)
e – mha – so-ber-vha- mho- to-lheu (= xxxó xxxó)
que- fiz- o- que- m’el- de-fen-deu (= xóxx xxxó)24
The comparison of these metrical structures with those of Ibn Quzmān’s azǧāl,
for example number 17, a dimetrical raǧaz = mustafʿilun faʿū(lun):
ya- ǧáw-ha-r al-ǧa-lá-la / ya- fáḫ-r a-lan-da-lús = xóxx xóx / xóxx xó

ṭúl- manu-kún bi-ǧá-hak / las- naš-ta-kí- bi-bús = óxxó xóx / xxxó xó25
or with the trimetrical raǧaz (mustafʿilun mustafʿilunfaʿūlun, with alternancy

in the last foot of mustafʿilun with faʿūlun or mafʿūlun), used in the 9th century
by Ḥafṣ b. Albar Alqūṭī in his translation of the Psalms, for example line 1: bismi
23 See Cohen (ed.), 500 Cantigas d’amigo. These poems have a zajal-like structure with a
single hemistich in meters of two or three feet.
24 “Poor me, mother, I have lost my friend: / he would not talk to me, though he saw me; / my
haughtiness sent him away from me, / as I did what he had forbidden me”.
25 “Essence of majesty, glory of Al-Andalus! / As long I stay under your aegis, I shall not decry
any evil”.
178 Corriente
l’ilāhi ḫāliqi lǧamīʿī / alwāḥidi lmuqtadiri lbadīʿī,26 makes it difficult to deny the
existence of a chronological link between Arabic meters adapted in Al-Andalus
as early as the 9th century and reflected by those rudimentary raǧaz poems,
the proto-azǧāl, Andalusi stanzaic poetry, and the oldest samples of Castilian
and Galician-Portuguese poetry – whether lyric or epic – probably borrowed
from Andalusi minstrels of any of the three religions, whose presence in the
entire Iberian Peninsula is quite well documented.
In my view, Nykl was quite right when he wrote: “If the Franks of Spain and
of France could imitate the Muslims in warfare, dress and other habits, it is idle
to deny that they imitated them in music and singing”.27 Therefore, nobody
can be surprised by the adoption in the Christian West – which, at the time,
was quite below the cultural level of the Islamic World – of the metrical system
accepted by the most cultivated segments of contemporary Jewry and Iranians,
thus swallowing large chunks of religious or nationalistic pride.28 As matters
stand, I would not define the PMC as a “frontier song”, as some scholars have
done, but as a Castilian tip of a huge sunken iceberg in which Eastern materials
were much more abundant than what is usually admitted.
Works Cited
ʿAbdalbadīʿ, Luṭfīʿ, La épica árabe y su influencia en la épica castellana, Santiago de Chile:

Instituto Chileno-Árabe de Cultura, 1964.
Cohen, Rip, ed., 500 cantigas d’amigo, Porto: Campo das Letras, 2003.
Corominas, Joan (Joan Coromines), ed., Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, Madrid: Gredos,
1967.
Corominas, Joan (Joan Coromines), and José Antonio Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimo-
lógico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, 1980-91.
26 “In the name of God, Creator of everything / Unique, powerful, and sublime”.
27 The quote is from his trend-setting Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its relations with the Old
Provençal troubadours, p. 381. The list, however, could readily be expanded to include the
decimal numeral system, the compass, paper making, bills of exchange and paper money,
gunpowder, etc., which the West would in turn carry to perfection and take advantage of
in order to subdue the rest of the world in the following centuries.
28 In the parallel case of Italian poetry, our colleague J.C. Vegliante has followed a mental
path quite akin to mine; he has exchanged some ideas with me about this subject and has
published his interesting conclusions in “Quasimodo (et Cielo d’Alcamo), hypothèse
andalouse”, which he kindly shared with me before publication.
Corriente, Federico, “Nuevas apostillas de lexicografía hispanoárabe (al margen del

Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana de Joan Coromines)”,
Sharq al-Andalus 1 (1984), 7-14.
Corriente, Federico, “Apostillas de lexicografía hispanoárabe”, in Actas de las II Jornadas
de cultura árabe e islámica (1980), Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura, 1985,
pp. 119-62.
Corriente, Federico, “Nuevas apostillas de lexicografía hispanoárabe (al margen del
Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana de Joan Coromines)”,
Sharq al-Andalus 3 (1986), 163-65.
Corriente, Federico, “De nuevo sobre la elegía árabe de Valencia”, Al-Qanṭara 8 (1987),
331-46.
Corriente, Federico, El léxico árabe andalusí según P. de Alcalá: (ordenado por raíces,
corregido, anotado y fonémicamente interpretado), Madrid: Departamento de Estudios
Árabes e Islámicos, Universidad Complutense, 1988.
Corriente, Federico, “Expresiones bajo tabú social en árabe andalusí y sus relaciones
con el romance”, Vox Romanica 52 (1993), 282-91.
Corriente, Federico, “Hacia una revisión de los arabismos y otras voces con étimos del
romance andalusí o lenguas medio-orientales en el Diccionario de la Real Academia
Española”, Boletín de la Real Academia Española 76-267 (1995), 53-118; 76-268 (1996),
153-95; and 76-269 (1996), 371-415.
Corriente, Federico, “Textos andalusíes de casidas dialectales (impropiamente llamadas
cejelescas)”, Al-Andalus-Magreb 4 (1996), 11-26.
Corriente, Federico, Poesía dialectal árabe y romance en Alandalús, Madrid: Gredos, 1997.
Corriente, Federico, “Algunas ‘palabras fantasma’ o mal transmitidas entre los arabismos
y voces de origen oriental del DRAE”, in Estudios árabes dedicados a D. Luis Seco de
Lucena, Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1999, pp. 93-100.
Corriente, Federico, “Las etimologías árabes en la obra de Joan Coromines”, in L’obra de
Joan Coromines, Sabadell: Caixa de Sabadell, 1999, pp. 67-87 (repr. as “Los arabismos
del iberorromance entre Asín y Coromines”, in Antoni M. Badia i Margarit and Joan
Solà (eds.), Joan Coromines, vida y obra, Madrid: Gredos, 2008, pp. 436-81).
Corriente, Federico, Diccionario de arabismos y voces afines en iberorromance, Madrid:
Gredos, 1999; 2nd ed., enlarged with a supplement, 2003.
Corriente, Federico, “Notas lingüísticas acerca de la Recopilación de algunos nombres
arábigos de Diego de Guadix”, Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí 9
(2005), 93-114.
Corriente, Federico, Dictionary of Arabic and Allied Loanwords: Spanish, Portuguese,
Catalan, Galician and Kindred Dialects, Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2008.
Corriente, Federico, “Arabismos en la cultura popular española”, in Fundación de Cultura
Islámica: Artículos, 2011, <https://funci.org/arabismos-en-la-cultura-popular-espa
nola/>.
180 Corriente
Corriente, Federico, “Arabismos en el Cantar de Mío Cid: lexemas, remas y sistemas”, Voz
y Letra 24.2 (2013), 99-145.
Epalza, Mikel de, “El Cid = el león: ¿Epíteto árabe del Campeador?”, Hispanic Review 45.1
(1977), 67-75.
Ferrando, Ignacio, El dialecto andalusí de la Marca Media: los documentos mozárabes
toledanos de los siglos XII y XIII, Zaragoza: Área de Estudios Árabes e Islámicos, Uni-
versidad de Zaragoza, 1995.
Galmés de Fuentes, Álvaro, Épica árabe y épica castellana, Barcelona: Ariel, 1978.
Galmés de Fuentes, La épica románica y la tradición árabe, Madrid: Gredos, 2002.
Hernando Pérez, José, Pedro Abad – Mair Yahya ben Gâlib: el cantor del “Mio Cid”, Burgos:
Facultad de Teología del Norte de España, 2014.
Magdalena, J.R., “Delitos y ‘calònies’ de los judíos valencianos en la segunda mitad del
siglo XIV (1351-1384)”, Anuario de Filología (Barcelona) 2 (1976), 181-225.
Makkī, Ṭāhir Aḥmad, Malḥamatu ssīd: awwalu malḥamatin andalusiyyatin kutibat fī
lluġati lqaštāliyyah [The epic poem of the Cid, first Andalusi epic poem written in
Castilian], Cairo: Dār Almaʿārif, 1970.
Marcos Marín, Francisco, Poesía narrativa árabe y épica hispánica, Madrid: Gredos, 1971.
Marcos Marín, Francisco, ed., Cantar de Mio Cid, Madrid: Alhambra, 1985.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, ed., Cantar de mio Cid. Texto, gramática y vocabulario, re-
vised ed., 3 vols., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1944-46.
Montaner, Alberto, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, Barcelona: Crítica, 1993; revised ed., Madrid:
Real Academia Española, 2011.
Montaner, Alberto, “De don Rodrigo Díaz al Cid: el surgimiento de un mito literario”, in
Gonzalo Santonja, El Cid: historia, literatura y leyenda, Madrid: Sociedad Estatal
España Nuevo Milenio, 2001, pp. 83-105.
Montaner, Alberto, “Tal es la su auze. El héroe afortunado del Cantar de mio Cid”, Olivar
10 (2007), 89-105.
Nykl, Alois Richard, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and Its Relations with the Old Provençal
Troubadours, Baltimore: J.H. Furst Co., 1946
Terés, Elías, “Antroponimia hispanoárabe (reflejada por las fuentes latino-romances)
(I)”, Anaquel de Estudios Árabes 1 (1990), 129-86.
Vegliante, Jean-Charles, “Quasimodo (et Cielo d’Alcamo), hypothèse andalouse”, L’ospite
integrato: rivista online del Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerca Franco Fortini
(November 1, 2013), <http://www.ospiteingrato.org/quasimodo-et-cielo-dalcamo-
hypothese-andalouse/>.
Part 3
Poetic Aspects and Structure
∵
182 Corriente
On the Poetic Technique of the Poema de mio Cid 183
Chapter 6
On the Poetic Technique of the Poema de mio Cid

The principles of composition followed by the author of the Poema de mio

Cid (PMC) constitute one of the most debated and controversial topics regard-
ing this masterwork. There are several circumstances that make the task of
explaining its versification especially difficult and prone to polemics. To begin
with, the PMC has survived in a codex unicus, kept in the town hall of Vivar in
the 16th century (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Vitr. 7-17); accord-
ing to its own explicit, it is a copy of an earlier manuscript written down by
someone called Per Abbat in May 1207. There are no other direct witnesses to
help scholars when they face difficult readings. In addition, we do not have
any contemporary treatise dealing with rules for Castilian versification, if it
really existed one at the time. Furthermore, there is the problem of finding
similar texts for comparison. The corpus of cantares de gesta preserved in verse
form is exceedingly small. We have only two other samples of what must have
been the versification of vernacular epics in the Iberian Peninsula during this
period: the Roncesvalles fragment and the Mocedades de Rodrigo.
The extant Roncesvalles fragment consists of a bifolio containing a hundred
lines (Pamplona, Archivo Real y General de Navarra, ms. 212). It tells of Emperor
Charlemagne, who finds, after a search, Roland’s corpse following the Battle of
Roncevaux, and mourns bitterly over his nephew’s body. This manuscript
offers not only evidence of a Carolingian epic in the Iberian Peninsula, but also
a glimpse that an entire cycle had already gained widespread diffusion. Charle-
magne’s allusion in his speech to his youthful adventures in Spain points to a
now lost epic poem narrating such deeds, the Mainete, the existence of which
is supported by other sources. The bifolio’s thick parchment was evidently
sewn on two sides to make a folder or purse-like container, and its borders’
excessive material was later trimmed. This trimming may have well eliminated
any pre-existing numeration, which would have been a valuable clue about the
original length of the manuscript. The poem was most likely copied in Navarre,
probably around 1310, but it is difficult to pinpoint the date of its composition
beyond an adscription to the 13th century, more tentatively to its first half.
The other preserved epic poem is the Mocedades de Rodrigo, which recounts
the legendary deeds of the young Cid. The extant text is much longer, about
1160 lines, but it is an incomplete copy in a manuscript written on paper around

184 Bayo Julve
1400 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Espagnol 12, fols. 188r-201v), in

which it is preceded by the Crónica de Castilla. The poem’s composition is usu-
ally dated to the mid-14th century, but most scholars agree that it is a late
reworking of an earlier cantar de gesta. Although the Mocedades de Rodrigo is
an invaluable document for tracing the development of the Cid legend, the
Roncesvalles is far more significant for a comparison with the PMC as a witness
of early epic versification.1
It should be added that several lost cantares de gesta must have circulated
during this period, since some of them were used as historical sources in ver-
nacular chronicles that began to be compiled during the reign of Alfonso X the
Learned (1252-84). However, such prose renderings, the so-called prosifica-
ciones cronísticas, must be approached with caution, as they transformed the
materials that they incorporated. As far as the PMC is concerned, they are espe-
cially useful to elaborate well-informed hypotheses about the content of the
Vivar codex’s missing leaves, but their utility is rather limited for a study of its
versification.2
The remnants of Spanish epic poetry are in sharp contrast with the wealth
of the French corpus, consisting of 297 manuscripts that have preserved some
120 chansons de geste. A closer look at both epic traditions reveals not only a
difference in quantity, but also in quality. The codex of the PMC has lines of
unequal length, and a rigorous examination reveals that syllabic regularity is
not a feature of its verses, a trait that also applies to the fragment of Roncesvalles
and the Mocedades de Rodrigo. This particular aspect stands out against
the chansons de geste, composed in isosyllabic meters such as the décasyllabe
or the alexandrin. In addition, French manuscripts typically offer their epic
poems as texts composed by neatly divided laisses, i.e. closed series of verses of
varying length bound together by the same assonance or rhyme. Such a divi-
sion cannot be found in the Vivar codex nor does it appear in the manuscripts
which have preserved the Roncesvalles fragment and the Mocedades de Rodrigo.
When Tomás Antonio Sánchez, the first editor of the PMC and still one of
the most perceptive critics of Spanish medieval literature, committed this epic
to print in 1779 – about half a century before the Chanson de Roland (Oxford,
1 Editions of the Roncesvalles fragment, with preliminary studies, have been prepared by
Menéndez Pidal, Jules Horrent, and Ian Michael in “Orígenes de la epopeya en España”.
2 The extant manuscript is wanting three leaves: one at the very beginning, and the other two
between fols. 47-48 and 69-70. Recently, David Hook, “Verbal Economy”, pp. 105-07, has once
again demonstrated the importance of the chronicles in this respect by showing that most
probably they used a manuscript of the poem without the lacuna between fols. 47-48, contrary
to the hypothesis that the passages corresponding to the two internal missing leaves of the
Vivar codex were made up in a historiographical workshop.
Bodleian Library, Digby 23, Part 2) attracted the attention of scholars and mer-
ited its first printed edition in the 1830s –, he had no trouble whatsoever in
appreciating the text as it had been transmitted in the Vivar codex, and it never
entered his mind to alter the length of the verses or introduce divisions in the
text as a matter of principle.3 This, however, turned out to be the auspicious
beginning of a tortuous path. The PMC does not follow versification principles
that soon would be canonized in the literary poetry of medieval Iberian
Romances. French studies achieved pre-eminence in Romance philology dur-
ing the second half of the 19th century, and the corpus of chansons de geste
exercised a great influence on the views of scholars approaching the Castilian
poem. The outcome was a combination of assumptions that led the editors of
the PMC to produce reconstructions in double octosyllabes and/or laisses
against the evidence provided by the only manuscript. The matter was further
complicated in the 20th century with theories that saw the alleged flaws of the
preserved text as symptoms of a faulty transcription of an oral composition.
All this means that there are large discrepancies among the theories that
have been formulated to explain Old Spanish epic versification. On close
examination they often reveal a different understanding of how poetic lan-
guage works (or a complete lack thereof). In this essay, I will attempt to sketch
a theory of the versification system of the PMC focusing closely on the text as it
has been transmitted by the codex unicus. As a rule, I will not give a crucial role
to the assumption that textual corruption has caused extensive damage to its
poetic form, but I will take into account the opinions of scholars who think
otherwise.
1 The Verse and Its Composition
The verse of the PMC consists of two hemistichs divided by a caesura. This
metrical structure can be represented as follows:
[V [α …] [β …] ]
3 “Pero en el poema del Cid no se guarda numero fixo y determinado de silabas, ni regla cierta
de asonantes ni consonantes […]. El poeta baxo un asonante solia hacer mas de cien versos
seguidos, sin desechar los consonantes que le ocurrian; y muchas veces admitia versos que ni
asonaban ni consonaban” (Poema del Cid, ed. Tomás Antonio Sánchez, p. 222).
186 Bayo Julve
The most basic principle of the PMC’s versification is that each metrical pause
(caesura, line end) is matched by a prosodic pause.4 While it is not unusual in
literature to refer to its verse structure in syntactic, or even in semantic terms,
it is preferable to approach it in prosodic terms. Although prosodic parsing
incorporates information from other linguistic components, especially from
the syntactic structure, aspects such as constituent length play a more relevant
role in prosody than in syntax, often producing different outcomes. Compare
the syntactic and prosodic structures of line 2162:
[[Seremos] [a las bodas [de los ifantes [de Carrión]]]]

[[Seremos] [a las bodas]] [[de los ifantes] [de Carrión]]
The caesura falls between bodas and de, not between seremos and a, that is to
say, it is assigned according to the binary division of the verse in prosodic con-
stituents, not in syntactic ones. The highest degree of correspondence between
the metrical structure and the prosodic structure appears when the verse is
formed by an utterance composed by two intonational phrases, each of them
constituting a hemistich.5 From a cognitive perspective, it has been proposed
that intonation units correspond to idea units, i.e. the amount of information
on which focus can be kept in actual speech.6 Although a characterization
of the PMC’s verse in prosodic terms remains preferable, this is evidence for
a relationship between the prosodic and semantic structures that cannot be
overlooked in a poem that was clearly conceived for oral delivery.
This binary division according to prosodic principles is accompanied by an
overall tendency for the prosodic constituents composing the two hemistichs
of a given verse to be roughly equivalent in length. When they have different
lengths, there is a tendency for the second to be longer than the first. This
occurrence corresponds to a general linguistic principle governing the rela-
tionship between length and order, sometimes called the “law of increasing
constituents” after a term proposed by Otto Behaghel (Gesetz der wachsenden
4 In order to avoid misunderstandings, I will reserve the terms prosody and prosodic to refer to
the patterns of stress and intonation in a spoken language (i.e. to refer to its suprasegmental
phonological features), while I will use metrics and metrical to refer to the structures of verse
form.
5 Prosodic terminology varies depending on linguistic theories. Here, I follow one proposed by
Nespor and Vogel in Prosodic phonology that is widely used.
6 See Matthew Bailey’s contribution to this volume.
Glieder): given two constituents, all other aspects being equal, the shorter pre-
cedes the longer.7
The fundamental principle of the PMC’s versification stated above, namely,
that a metrical pause is always matched by a prosodic pause, precludes the
occurrence of enjambment (the absence of a prosodic pause at the end of a
verse). In addition, in the PMC there is a strong tendency not to reverse the
hierarchy in the matching between metrical and prosodic pauses; in other
words, the prosodic pause that appears in the caesura is not superior to the
prosodic pause appearing at the line end. There are, however, occasional
exceptions. Consider the following example:
Sed buenos menssageros e ruego vos lo yo

Que gelo digades al buen Campeador (1903-04)
In line 1903, the prosodic pause appearing at the caesura is greater than the
one at the line end, so its second hemistich forms part of a larger grammatical
structure with the following verse. In this way, a higher tension than expected
is introduced in the poetic discourse. This occurrence cannot be qualified
as enjambment, since a prosodic pause does occur between the two lines
involved. A suitable Spanish term for such a phenomenon is acoplamiento,
since it causes a tighter linkage of both lines. Regarding the oral performance
for which the PMC was intended, it means that a cadence cannot occur natu-
rally at the end of the verse. Consequently, the effect of acoplamiento must
have been far greater for a medieval audience than for modern readers.
Beyond this, it can be asked whether constraints at lower prosodic levels
operate within the verse, that is to say, whether it obeys to some kind of stress
or syllabic count. Investigations into these levels have not yielded a convincing
explanation of the versification of the PMC. This lack of results has puzzled
scholars, since syllabic count is the more common type of metrical principle in
the poetry of the Ibero-Romance languages. It is already attested in the Libro
de Alexandre, a learned poem on the legend of Alexander the Great, which,
though difficult to date, is roughly contemporary to the epic inspired by the
Castilian hero. Unsurprisingly, it has been proposed that the PMC also was orig-
inally composed according to syllabic count. There are, however, strong
objections against such a hypothesis. To begin with, there is the evidence of
7 It is also referred to as the fourth of Otto Behaghel’s laws, though its effects at some levels in
Sanskrit grammar had already been studied in the 4th century bc by Pāṇini; see Otto Behaghel,
“Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern”, and Deutsche Syntax, vol.
IV, pp. 3-9.
188 Bayo Julve
the extant text. Menéndez Pidal calculated 987 lines that did not offer vowel
contacts, with no doubtful cases of synaloepha and related phenomena, and
found a great variety of combinations, the most frequent being 7+7 (15.19 per
cent), 6+7 (12.15 per cent), 7+8 (11.34 per cent), 6+8 (9.32 per cent), 8+7 (8.20 per
cent), and 8+8 (5.68 per cent).8 These figures mean that the PMC can only be
made isosyllabic if a staggering number of unsupported emendations are
introduced.9 In fact, even outside of the epic form (including the above-men-
tioned Roncesvalles fragment and the Mocedades de Rodrigo), there is a sizable
corpus of contemporary poems featuring anisosyllabic versification, such as
the Disputa del alma y el cuerpo, the Razón de amor, the Debate de Elena y
María, or the Vida de Santa María Egipciaca.
It has also been proposed as a criterion for emendation that no hemistich
can have more than eleven syllables according to the rules usually applied in
Spanish metrics, since a longer sequence would require a caesura.10 This is
certainly true, but only as far as syllable-counting versification is concerned.
Therefore, this cannot be applied to the PMC, in which longer second hemis-
tichs occasionally occur, e.g., “¿Vaste, mio Çid? ¡Nuestras oraçiones vayante
delante!” (v. 853). Although verses with final hemistichs of more than eleven
syllables are few, there is no reason to assert that they correspond to corrupt
readings unless further proof is provided. There are no grounds within articu-
latory phonetics to prevent enunciation of such hemistichs: sequences of
seventeen syllables, with no pause in between, have been documented in the
Spanish pregón.11 In fact, even the short fragment of Roncesvalles provides evi-
dence of long final hemistichs (“que yazía esmorteçido el Emperante”, v. 95β),
proving that there were no direct constraints on the number of syllables in Old
Spanish epic versification.
The evidence that the PMC’s verse is not based on syllabic regularity has
pushed scholars to formulate other theories to explain its constitution. The
obvious step that has been taken is to look for a system based on stress princi-
ples. To this end, several models have been advanced, the most detailed of
which have proposed metrical structures of 2+2 or 4+4 stresses.12 As the mere
disagreement about the number of stresses indicates, the objection against
8 See Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. I, pp. 92-103.

9 The reader feeling intrigued about such a reconstruction is directed to Cantar de Mio Cid,
ed. Juan Victorio, the last endeavour following a path already trodden by Jules Cornu and
Henry R. Lang.
10 See Cantar de Mio Cid, ed. Alberto Montaner, pp. 385-86, for this argument.
11 See Antoni Rossell, “Le pregón”, p. 169.
12 See René Pellen, “Le modèle du vers épique espagnol”, and William E. Leonard, “The
Recovery of the Meter of the Cid”, for these attempts at 2+2 and 4+4 patterns, respectively.
such models is that they cannot be applied to the preserved text of the PMC
without assuming an inordinate amount of textual corruption or a delivery
style which makes much of the text incomprehensible.
In fact, the Vivar codex presents a poem in which each verse has a variable
number of natural stresses. My own calculations based on a sample of three
hundred lines yield the following results: 2+2 (36.33 per cent), 2+3 (24.66 per
cent), 3+2 (14.33 per cent), 3+3 (12.33 per cent), 1+3 (3.66 per cent), 2+4 (2.66 per
cent), and 1+2 (2.33 per cent). A more exhaustive investigation would give a
more accurate picture, and perhaps some appreciable differences. It suffices,
however, to give us an idea about the great degree of flexibility offered by the
versification of the PMC. Its verses offer less variation in the number of stresses
than in the number of syllables, but this is only an effect of moving higher in
the prosodic hierarchy. The already stated fact that each hemistich corre-
sponds to an intonational phrase means that at least two primary stresses
appear in each verse, the first immediately preceding the caesura and the sec-
ond at the line end, the former being no more prominent than the latter except
in cases of acoplamiento. Beyond this prosodic structure, the number of
stresses is determined by the linguistic material, not by the metrical pattern.
Other stresses can appear as well, and as a matter of course they do, but there
is no evidence of any metrical constraint on them.
To sum up, the two hemistichs within each verse usually contain the same
or a similar number of stresses and syllables; in case of difference, there is a
tendency for the second hemistich to be longer than the first. A calculation of
the number of stresses per line shows 2+2 being the most common pattern,
followed by 2+3; if syllables are counted, it is 7+7, followed by 6+7 and 7+8.
Nevertheless, other combinations can be found. It must be emphasized that
those figures are the result of the verse’s binary division into prosodic constitu-
ents, with both hemistichs being of the same hierarchical level. Such patterns
are not determined by a metrical system of stress or syllabic count in the strict
sense of the terms.
The PMC poet had a large store of resources to draw from in order to imple-
ment such a metrical structure. The best known is the formula, a device widely
used in heroic poetry traditions. It was defined by Milman Parry in his path-
breaking studies on Homeric versification of the late 1920s and early 1930s as “a
group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical condi-
tions to express a given essential idea”;13 when such phrases appear with
variations regarding one or several words, they are referred to as “formulaic
13 Milman Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique”, p. 80 (p. 272 in repr.). See the Introduction
to this volume for more details about the formulaic system in the PMC.
190 Bayo Julve
expressions”. In the PMC, formulae and formulaic expressions often fill a hemis-
tich, sometimes a whole line. However, its verse is very far from being a highly
constrained structure such as the Greek dactylic hexameter, and the Castilian
author does not resort to them to such an extent as the Homeric poems.14 In
his work the proportion of formulae, or “formular density”, is also far below the
usual in living oral traditions such as the Serbian singers of tales. The PMC was
composed to be performed before an audience, hence its oral condition, but
there is no proof that it was orally composed or improvised.15
The epic epithet, one of the most characteristic kinds of formulae used in
heroic poetry, provides a good illustration of the complexity of the poem’s
composition. This device can be defined as a descriptive or qualifying word or
phrase which stands in apposition to or occurs in place of the name of an indi-
vidual or a unique entity, reserved exclusively to a specific person or object as
a rule. In the PMC, they are applied first and foremost to the hero, but also to his
wife, his vassals and other characters, his horse, his swords, and places related
to him. The Cid is often called el que en buen ora nasco (vv. 202, 245, 437, etc.) or
el que en buen ora çinxo espada (vv. 875, 1574, 1961, etc.), but also Mio Çid el de
Bivar (vv. 295, 550, 855, etc.) or la barva velida (with striking metonymy in
v. 930). In the PMC such epic epithets are not used mechanically, for they are
made to serve different functions in order to produce a variety of effects.
Indeed, it has been convincingly argued that they are used in a more creative
and refined way than in a learned work such as the abovementioned Libro de
Alexandre.16
This phenomenon can also be observed in other kinds of formula, such as
the so-called physical phrases, in which the part of the body performing an
action is explicitly indicated, despite being logically redundant, e.g. lorar de los
ojos or dezir de la su boca. Although apparently pleonastic, they are used to
convey different shades of meaning. Thus, lorar de los ojos is crying with
restraint, i.e. the character is deeply moved rather than trying to make a great
show of grief, while dezir de la boca involves the idea that an unpalatable truth
is reluctantly admitted.
Equally characteristic of the PMC’s style is the use of binomials or word
pairs with strong semantic links to build hemistichs and whole verses. Both
14 Formulae have played a role in the discussions about the original anisosyllabism of the
PMC. Kenneth Adams, “The Metrical Irregularity”, observed that even formulaic lines offer
a great variability in syllabic count; it can be added that they also show a great variability
of stress patterns.
15 See Juan Carlos Bayo, “On the Nature of the Cantar de Mio Cid”.
16 See Ian Michael, “A Comparison of the Use of Epic Epithets”.
terms involved are linked either by synonymy and semantic similarity, or by

antonymy and semantic contrast. In the first case, we find pairs linked by
synonymy or near synonymy (e.g. grandes – sobejanos, v. 2541), hyperonymy
(e.g. malos – traidores, v. 2681), or co-hyponymy (e.g. oro – plata, v. 473). Even
more common are word pairs linked by antonymy or opposite meaning: they
can be complementary pairs, formed by mutually exclusive or contradictory
terms (e.g. mugieres – varones, v. 16b); relational opposites, or terms sharing the
same semantic features but in converse relation (e.g. vassallo – señor, v. 2938),
and gradable antonyms or scalar adjectives (e.g. ricos – menguados, v. 108). In
addition, there are collocations, i.e. pairs of words expected to co-occur or go
together (e.g. pan – vino, v. 66). Most important, the poet can switch between
synonyms and antonyms by resorting to litotes (e.g. pesa – non plaze, v. 625).
By combining these possibilities, he builds up a poetic discourse which is
extremely close-knit from a semantic perspective. It allows him both to detain
and to further the action, as can be seen in the two following examples:
Venido es a moros, exido es de christianos (566)

Él dexó la lança e al espada metió mano (3642)
While many of those binomials or word pairs are attested in other texts and
can be termed traditional, it is obvious that the author has internalized their
connecting principles as to use them as a composition technique. In many
cases it is difficult to determine which ones are inherited, and which are of his
own making; any effort to draw a distinction between the two can become a
futile exercise. We are facing, in short, an excellent example of a poet’s creation
within a well-established tradition.
2 The Assonance and the Patterning of Poetic Discourse
The PMC follows an assonance system built on twelve basic options, resulting
from the combination between four stressed vowels (ó, á, í, é) and three
unstressed vowels that can follow them (-e, -o, -a), as shown in the following
table:
í é (≃ié) á ó (≃ué)
(-e) í(-e) é(-e) á(-e) ó(-e)
-o í-o é-o á-o ó-o
-a í-a é-a á-a ó-a
192 Bayo Julve
These combinations are found in different proportions within the poem. The
most common four, in decreasing order of frequency, are: ó(-e), -á(-e), á-o, and
á-a, with ó(-e) appearing through long stretches accounting for more than one
thousand lines. Combinations í-a, í-o, í(-e), é-a, é-o, ó-a, ó-o are less present,
whereas é(-e) is found only in a small number of leonines (verses with rhyme
or assonance within their own initial hemistich rather than with the contigu-
ous lines, as in vv. 708, 2635, 3422) and of couplets (pairs of successive verses
with the same rhyme or assonance, as in vv. 1071-72). It must be added that
there is a noticeable tendency in the poem to resort to fewer combinations as
it progresses.
Parentheses have been used in the table above to indicate some alternations
with a phonological foundation which can be found in the assonance. Diph-
thongs ué (< ŏ) and ié (< ĕ) co-occur with ó and é respectively (e.g. ençerró:
aluén, vv. 2695-96; Peña Cadiella : Gujera, vv. 1164-65). This correlation is made
possible by the fact that it corresponds to a diphthongization process that was
productive at the time. There is also a less frequent correlation of ú with ó (e.g.
Corpes : núes, vv. 2697-98).17 Regarding unstressed vowels, high vowels corre-
spond to mid vowels, i.e. -i co-occurs with -e (e.g. plaze : nadi, vv. 1480-81). All
these correlations appear only occasionally, which means that their accom-
modation, though possible, comes at a cost for the versification system.
Nevertheless, similar cases are also documented sporadically in other early
poetic works of Hispanic medieval literature, such as the Disputa del alma y el
cuerpo, the Razón de amor, the Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, or the Debate de
Elena y María.
A far more common alternation to be found in the text transmitted by the
Vivar codex is that paroxytonic words ending in -e can be in assonance with
oxytonic words if they share the same stressed vowel. This is a phenomenon
for which a phonological basis can be advanced, since /e/ is the unmarked (or
underspecified) element in the vowel system of Castilian. A possible expla-
nation for this alternation is that the PMC was originally conceived with a
traditional device called paragogic -e, namely an unstressed -e added to oxy-
tonic words at the end of the verses in order to adjust them to the singing
cadence. This hypothesis rests on inference rather than evidence. Only two
cases have been pointed out as possible survivals: laudare or alaudare (v. 335),
17 Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. I, pp. 142-46 and 244-47, tried to explain some of
these assonances with the reconstruction of a diphthong *uó and some patronymics in
-óz (e.g. *Vermudoz for Vermúez), which he introduced as emendations in his critical text.
The outcome, however, was a number of linguistic forms undocumented in Castile during
this period.
and Trinidade (v. 2370). The former also happens to be a Latinism, and this
could account for the presence of -e; such an explanation does not work as
well for the latter, which can be qualified as a semi-learned word at most.
Last but not least, paragogic –e is well-documented not only in Spanish bal-
lads (romancero viejo) and traditional lyric (cancionero tradicional), but also
in the cantares de gesta, appearing most clearly in the Roncesvalles fragment.
Its transmission in this epic lends support to the hypothesis that it was also
present in the PMC, which is the most satisfactory explanation for the above-
mentioned alternation thus far advanced.18 However, this does not constitute
a ground for the reconstruction of paragogic -e in a critical edition, a daunting
task sometimes posing insurmountable problems and often yielding doubtful
results.19
The patterning of the poetic discourse in the PMC has also been a matter of
debate. As it has already been pointed out, it has often been assumed that the
poem was structured in laisses as the chansons de geste. There are, however,
a number of objections against such a hypothesis. To begin with, a division
in laisses is displayed neither in the Vivar codex nor in the other witnesses
preserving cantares de gesta, in stark contrast with French epic manuscripts.
The PMC is composed in a typical cumulative or additive style, with parataxis
18 It was first developed by Amador de los Ríos (Historia crítica, vol. II, pp. 609-11). His ideas
were initially adopted by Menéndez Pidal (Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. I, pp. 120-22), who later
elaborated a new theory: beyond the function of paragogic -e as a singing license, he gave
it an etymological origin and a slow spread by hypercorrection (Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. III,
pp. 1177-84). Such an explanation, however, is highly improbable: even the earliest wit-
nesses offer many non-etymological examples; it appears only at the end of the verses;
and is a productive device typically found in popular poetry transmitted by singing, being
conspicuously absent from learned compositions. The view that the -e at the end of lines
335 and 2370 is due to learned influence was elaborated by Horrent (Historia y poesía,
pp. 227-31), and the hypothesis of the original presence of paragogic -e in the PMC was
later criticized at length by Valentín García Yebra and Ana M. Gómez-Bravo. However,
their alternative explanations are not so convincing. García Yebra suggests that final e in
paroxytonic words at the end of the verse was either mute or weakened; the former, how-
ever, would result in syllabic structures that are ungrammatical in medieval Castilian,
such as **colps or **partn, while the latter would presuppose the existence of an
unstressed schwa [ə] or similar sound for which there is no evidence in medieval Castil-
ian (by contrast, vacillations are found in manuscripts written in some Catalan dialects in
which such a sound does exist, e.g. home / homa, or jove / jova). Gómez-Bravo argues that
only the stressed vowel is determinant, thus enabling á(-e) to be in assonance with á-o
and á-a; however, these operate as independent assonances in the PMC, and such an
equivalence is unsupported by other examples within the corpus of Spanish poetry.
19 See Ian Michael, “‘A cada uno lo suyo’”, on the problems involved by reconstruction.
194 Bayo Julve
as a dominant feature. Its author, in fact, does not show much concern for
introducing changes of assonance at approximately regular intervals. It should
be added that applying the laisse as a criterion for emendation has proved to be
inadequate. Editors resorting to such a notion not only introduce corrections
in passages where there is no clear evidence of scribal error, but unneces-
sarily mend the preserved text with interventions which at times can even
be ungrammatical. In order to overcome these shortcomings, an alternative
explanation has been advanced, namely, deictic dissonance, a new concept
that will contribute to a better understanding of the transmitted text.20
Deictic dissonance is defined as the contrast produced between the endings
of two successive verses that are not connected by rhyme, with the function of
pointing out a narrative transition. It can originate a succession of verses
linked by the same assonance (i.e. the configuration usually termed a laisse),
but it can also generate other patterns causing the original versification of the
PMC to encompass couplets and versos sueltos (independent verses, often leo-
nines), both of which frequently appear in the extant text as stand-alone units,
making complete sense on their own.
As an index, deictic dissonance can signal several kinds of shifts within the
story: (1) the beginning of a new narrative sequence; (2) a change of focus; (3)
the switch between narration and direct speech; (4) a change of speaker or
hearer; (5) the inner articulation of a character’s discourse; and (6) non-
sequential story-telling. There are other elements operating as indices in the
PMC, which makes deictic dissonance appear often but not necessarily always
in such contexts. However, its meaning becomes especially relevant in the
absence of more explicit markers such as narrator indications, which were
introduced occasionally when the epic poem was rendered into prose in the
chronicles. Let us see an example. The Cid’s troops meet the Moorish army of
Fáriz and Galve outside Alcocer (punctuation has been added, but no emenda-
tions have been introduced):
Aquel Pero Vermúez non lo pudo endurar;

la seña tiene en mano, conpeçó de espolonar:
– ¡El Criador vos vala, Çid, Campeador leal!
Vo meter la vuestra seña en aquella mayor az.
¡Los que el debdo avedes veremos cómmo la acorredes!
Dixo el Campeador: – ¡Non sea, por caridad! (704-09)
20 See Juan Carlos Bayo, “Poetic Discourse Patterning”.

Pero Vermúez speaks in lines 706-08, but while in lines 706-07 he is talking to
the Cid, in line 708 he addresses the Christian army. This shift is pointed out by
a deictic dissonance in line 708: a leonine with grammatical rhyme -edes,
implying an é(-e) assonance. Some editors emend acorredes into acorrades,
but the outcome is an ungrammatical construction. Such an alteration involves
a change of verbal mood to subjunctive, while in this clause only the indicative
is possible (a very similar example can be found in line 2382). This is how the
passage was rendered into prose in manuscript F of the Estoria de España:21
Mas a Pero Bermudes non gelo pudo adurar el coraçón, e aguijó adelante
con la seña et dixo contra el Çid: “Mio Çid, Nuestro Señor Dios ayude a la
vuestra lealtad, ca yo non puedo ý ál fazer e bo meter a la vuestra seña en
aquella mayor haz e el más fuerte lugar que yo allí beo. Et dixo a todos así:
“Amigos, los que devdo abedes en bien, agora veré cómmo acorredes a la
seña”.
Then, the Christian standard-bearer charges, and the Moors fight him to seize
the banner. The Cid orders his soldiers to help him. The poet introduces a
change of assonance in lines 715-18, in ó(-e), and gives a formulaic depiction of
the charge (cf. vv. 3615-18). From this general perspective, a shift of focus to the
hero ensues in line 719:
A grandes vozes lama el que en buen ora nasco:

– ¡Ferid los, cavalleros, por amor de caridad!
¡Yo só Ruy Díaz, el Çid Campeador de Bivar! (719-21)
As it has been explained, line 719, in á-o, is a shift of focus, one of the typical
contexts for the occurrence of deictic dissonance; thus, there is a change to
direct speech so that lines 720-21 form a couplet in á(-e). After the quoted
extract, the narrative voice takes over again with the general description of the
battle, with lines 722-25 reverting to the assonance ó(-e).
Deictic dissonance becomes especially significant in scenes of fast-paced
dialogue. The PMC offers a comparatively low use of verba dicendi, sometimes
a cumbersome device in an oral performance. Dialogues can appear only
21 Salamanca, Biblioteca Universitaria, ms. 2638, fol. 37v b. The ms. E (El Escorial, X-i-4, fol.
168r b) offers a slightly more elaborated version, whose most interesting variants are las
compañas rather than todos (a more precise specification of the addressees) and aco-
rreredes rather than acorredes (using the future indicative rather than the present indica-
tive). See El “Mio Cid” del taller alfonsí, ed. Nancy Joe Dyer, p. 76 (cf. pp. 55-56 and 67).
196 Bayo Julve
punctuated by deictic dissonances, turning it into a staged text. In the follow-

ing passage, Martín Antolínez, one of the Cid’s vassals, offers the moneylenders
Rachel and Vidas chests filled with sand, pretending that they are full of gold:
– Prended las archas e meted las en vuestro salvo;

con grand jura meted ý las fes amos
que non las catedes en todo aqueste año.
(Rachel e Vidas seyen se consejando:
– Nós huebos avemos en todo de ganar algo.
– Bien lo sabemos que él algo gañó
quando a tierra de moros entró, que grant aver sacó.
– Non duerme sin sospecha qui aver trae monedado.
– Estas archas prendamos las amas,
en logar las metamos que non sean ventadas.)
– Mas dezid nos del Çid, ¿de qué será pagado,
o qué ganançia nos dará por todo aqueste año?
Respuso Martín Antolínez a guisa de menbrado:
– Mio Çid querrá lo que ssea aguisado,
pedir vos á poco por dexar so aver en salvo;
acogen sele omnes de todas partes me[n]guados,
á menester seis çientos marcos. (vv. 119-35)
Punctuation has been added taking into account the explanations above, but
no emendations other than the addition of n in me[n]guados have been intro-
duced. Parentheses have been used to indicate an aside between Rachel and
Vidas, the beginning of which is explicitly marked by the narrator’s indication
(v. 122). Then we have the two moneylenders’ deliberating dialogue, in which
the replies are marked by shifts at the line end (v. 123 in á-o; vv. 124-25 in ó(-e);
v. 126 in á-o; vv. 127-28 in á-a). Once finished the aside, the assonance changes
to á-o (v. 129). In this way, the concept of deictic dissonance reveals poetic val-
ues in passages previously considered defective or corrupt. In their efforts at
reconstructing this passage in the form of a laisse, some editors have resorted
to an inordinate introduction of emendations and deleted the dialogue struc-
ture of the aside in the process. An assonance theory according to which only
the last stressed vowel is relevant would avoid such an extensive intervention,
but it would be useless for the interpretation of the passage: the dialogue struc-
ture would be equally lost, given that the contrast between á-a and á-o would
have no signification.
Another context in which deictic dissonance can appear is when there is a
break in the sequence of events, marking the end of a narrative segment just
before returning to the initial moment. An apposite example is found in the

depiction of the reaction in the Cid’s camp to Álvar Fáñez’s arrival from his
mission to Castile:
¡Dios, cómmo fue alegre todo aquel fonssado

que Minaya Albarfáñez assí era legado,
diziendo les saludes de primos e de hermanos
e de sus compañas, aquelas que avién dexadas!
¡Dios, cómmo es alegre la barba velida
que Albarfáñez pagó las mill missas
e quel dixo saludes de su mugier e de sus fijas! (926-32)
The poet first describes the joy among the exiled and then, having marked the
end of the sequence with a leonine in line 929, turns his attention to the hero.
Non-sequential story telling is not always marked so clearly as it is here, with
a deictic dissonance followed by a verse that begins by repeating a previous
one, thus marking a return to an earlier moment in the story. This can cause
some problems to the modern reader, who is generally unaware that medieval
epics do not necessarily follow our narrative conventions regarding the tempo-
ral or logical progress of a story. A good example occurs in the Corpes episode,
beginning in line 2712. The audience is told in detail up to line 2748 how the
infantes of Carrión, Diego and Ferrán González, batter their young wives, the
Cid’s daughters. The assonance ó(-e) is sustained during the whole passage
except for a leonine in á-o in line 2725 marking the beginning of Doña Sol’s
plea. Even the narrator’s intervention recalling the figure of the hero in lines
2741-42 retains ó(-e). But the assonance switches to í-a in lines 2749-52 for a
compassionate depiction of their vulnerability after having been abandoned
in the wood. The story is punctuated again by the narrator’s comment in line
2753 in ó(-e), a variation on lines 2741-42, expressing the same wishful thinking
and recalling in this time of great need the protective figure of their father.
Lines 2749-53 do not further the action, being an instance of double narration,
a narrative variation on the preceding material but with more details.22 The
assonance switches to á-o in lines 2754-62, a passage that shows the infantes de
Carrión bragging about their misdeed. A new change to ó(-e) marks the begin-
ning of a new narrative sequence: Félez Muñoz, the Cid’s nephew who is
travelling with the retinue, acting on a suspicion, decides to backtrack and res-
cues his badly wounded cousins.
22 See John Gornall, “‘A New Scene or a Complementary Treatment of the First?’”, for more
examples, some of them debatable.
198 Bayo Julve
The poet’s non-linear approach to storytelling can produce very complex

structures when he is confronted with technical problems such as the repre-
sentation of simultaneous events. The most elaborate structure of this kind,
involving a complete, detailed breakdown, is the triple judicial combat at
Carrión in lines 3533-97. Its composition, building up to the denouement of the
poem, is remarkable in many respects. The episode shows the author’s prefer-
ence for ternary patterning that is also discernible in other parts of his work,
such as when the Cid’s dispatches three embassies to King Alfonso, or even in
the tripartite division of the poem. Nevertheless, this principle of construction
involves a compositional problem here, since the imposition of a narrative ter-
nary pattern clashes with the binary tendency with regard to characters and
objects. After all, these were two infantes who abused and abandoned their
respective wives, the Cid’s daughters, and these were the two swords the hero
won and presented to his sons-in-law. The poet’s skill is all the more striking as
he uses the introduction of a third element to build a climax for his narrative by
bringing in Asur González, the eldest brother of the infantes, as the last of the
trio of opponents. The shaming of the House of Carrión is sealed once and for
all with the defeat of their firstborn, whose life is saved by his father, the head
of the lineage, at the expense of the family’s honour. Significantly, the weapon
that attains the victory is a lance with the Cid’s pennant, eventually stained
with the foe’s blood. Nobody dies during the triple combat, a choice not with-
out its logic, and rather remarkable within the epic genre. Although the three
duels are fought simultaneously, the author recounts them one after another.
Lines 3604-22 serve to present the entire picture in which the poet introduces
the three pairs of duellists and describes their charge in formulaic style (cf.
vv. 3615-17 with vv. 715-17). Then he begins with the depiction of each duel,
adopting the order in which the respective challenges were issued at the court
at Toledo: in lines 3633-45, in ó(-e), Pero Vermúez beats Ferrán González, who
has to admit his treachery in order for his life to be spared; in lines 3646-70, in
á-a, Martín Antolínez defeats Diego González, who runs out of the designated
field of combat; in lines 3671-97, in ó(-e), Muño Gustioz crushes Asur González,
who is saved by the intervention of his father Gonzalo Asúrez. The first and
third duels include instances of double narration, since blows introduced as
simultaneous are explained consecutively. It is also noteworthy to stress how
the poet felt the need to differentiate the second fight resorting to á-a, while
neither the beginning of the first nor the end of the last of the three duels is
marked by assonance changes (that is to say, the limits of the entire episode of
the triple combat with respect to the contiguous narrative sequences are not
indicated by any discontinuity in the assonance).23
23 See Ian Michael, “Tres duelos”, for a more detailed analysis of this episode.
To sum up, the PMC was composed according to a concept of narrative art
whose temporal conventions regarding chronological order are different from
ours, and the modern reader should be aware of such variations. In this respect,
it could be compared to the representation of space in medieval paintings,
unconcerned about principles of perspective, which would be later developed
and disseminated. Medieval art, however, can be still the object of aesthetic
appreciation in its own right to anyone who cares to understand its nature and
the meanings that the people who produced it intended to convey.
3 Further Remarks on the Adequacy of the Deictic Dissonance

Hypothesis
A clear example of deictic dissonance that appears in the Roncesvalles frag-

ment provides proof that it was a feature of Old Spanish epic versification.24
This new explanation, however, has not won over proponents of the laisse the-
ory. Their replies, however, are based on arguments of dubious validity and, of
all the textual support offered in the presentation of the concept of deictic dis-
sonance, only the case of line 708 has been subjected to discussion.25 None of
the objections raised against the new hypothesis is sufficiently convincing to
justify retaining the laisse theory and its use as a criterion for emendation.
The main counterargument, that the concept of deictic dissonance only
applies to particular cases and leaves the versification system of the PMC unex-
plained, is a misrepresentation that tries to invert the level of adequacy
achieved by deictic dissonance with respect to the laisse theory. It should be
noted that deictic dissonance not only provides a basic principle of explana-
tion for independent verses and couplets, but also encompasses the possibility
of sustaining the assonance for longer passages producing the same configura-
tion as what is usually known as laisse. This new approach, in fact, provides a
far more exhaustive principle of explanation than the previous theory.
Another objection which has been advanced is that the text transmitted by
the Vivar codex contains an irrelevant proportion, between 1.8 and 3 per cent,
of lines left unaccounted by the laisse theory, and that such a minimal quantity
24 See Bayo, “Poetic discourse patterning”, pp. 90-91.

25 A summary is provided below, but see Montaner, Cantar de Mio Cid, pp. 391-92 and 534,
for the objections, and his attempt at an explanation, resorting to the concepts of contex-
tual attraction and cascading errors; Funes, “Cuestiones de ecdótica”, p. 43, for the statisti-
cal argument; and Sánchez Jiménez, “Apuntes sobre la lengua”, pp. 82-90, for an overall
assessment.
200 Bayo Julve
does not call for doubting its legitimacy as a criterion for emendation. There is
variation in calculating the number of corrections needed to produce a recon-
struction in laisses (according to Menéndez Pidal, they amounted to 6.5 per
cent),26 but, at any rate, statistics without structural analysis can be worthless
or misleading. If critics find anomalies, it is necessary that they ask themselves
what the reasons for such deviations are. A good start, in my opinion, is to
inquire about the occurrence and modality of their distribution. Why are the
so-called assonance irregularities especially frequent in passages with direct
speech featuring pairs of characters (i.e. Rachel and Vidas, Doña Elvira and
Doña Sol, Diego and Ferrán González)? For a philologist, no line is irrelevant in
the text written down by the copyist of the Vivar codex.
It has also been argued that deictic dissonance presupposes that transcrip-
tion errors have an impact on the semantic level, but not on the formal level, in
spite of the well-known fact that textual corruption has an effect on both levels
as evidenced not only in the PMC, but in the transmission of texts in general.
This objection is based on a confusion or false inference. Deictic dissonance
does not preclude the possibility that transcription errors can affect the poetic
form of the PMC, though obviously the new concept implies that textual cor-
ruption appears in a significantly lesser degree than the laisse theory does.
There are lines in the text transmitted in the Vivar codex in which a disconti-
nuity with the assonance of the preceding verses is not accompanied by any
kind of deictic function; in such cases, the possibility of an error in the manu-
script should be considered. Here is an example by way of illustration:
levar las hemos a nuestras tierras de Carrión,

meter las hemos en las villas | que les diemos por arras e por onores;
(2563-65)
In the manuscript, the second verse occupies two lines, and yet no deictic
function can be discerned. Taking into account that leaving line 2564 alone
would result in an abnormally short final hemistich, editing lines 2564-65 as
one verse becomes a reasonable emendation. In general terms, the idea that
textual corruption can affect only the semantic but not the formal level is
inconceivable within the theoretical framework underpinning the very con-
cept of deictic dissonance: the weird corollary immediately follows from such
26 Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. I, p. 86.

a radical separation between the two that rhyme is necessarily a meaningless

element.27
Another objection is that couplets in the preserved text can be explained by
scribal intervention, and more specifically by contextual attraction (as in v. 16)
and cascading errors (as in vv. 719-21). Such notions are misused in the textual
analysis of the PMC. The first instance in line 16 introduces a misleading ele-
ment in the discussion. Shortly after the poem was copied, a number of minor
emendations, none of them deriving evidently from another witness, were
introduced in the manuscript with slightly different strokes in an ink of lighter
colour. In this manner, levava was added over pendones in line 16 with the appar-
ent intent of making a complete sentence. Although most of these corrections
are clearly ope ingenii, they have been the object of special attention on the
part of modern editors, since their introduction dates back to the time of the
copyist, unlike later interventions by different hands dispersed throughout the
manuscript. From Menéndez Pidal’s time it has been customary to refer to this
hand as that of the first corrector. Recently, however, Montaner has argued that
it is the copyist’s.28 Even if his identification were correct, the process of con-
jectural correction cannot be put at the same level as the process of copying.
In this particular case, it can be remarked that it is doubtful that the primary
concern of the person who wrote levava over pendones in line 16 had to do with
versification, since the obvious outcome of this addition is a smoother syntac-
tic structure, and a couplet becomes visible only after editorial intervention.
The other instance, lines 719-21, is completely different. Here we are dealing
only with the text as initially copied, with no further corrections, in the Vivar
codex. Suggested emendations are at least arbitrary and highly problematic;
for example, reordering the words of line 721 to leave Campeador at verse end
produces an abnormal construction, but omitting de Bivar in the same verse
cannot be considered a more satisfactory intervention, since the hero’s battle
cry involves a reference to his ancestral house (cf. v. 1140). Indeed, there is no
evidence of scribal error in this passage, which has been used above to show
how deictic dissonance works. There is no reason whatsoever to sustain that
the couplet of lines 720-21 does not belong to the poet.
Proponents of the laisse theory have argued against deictic dissonance,
believing that emendations resorting to verbal endings fitting the assonance
27 The best elucidation of such issues remains the classical discussion of the concepts of
form and material in the first section of the initial essay of Jurij N. Tynjanov, Problema
stixotvornogo jazyka.
28 See Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. I, pp. 7-9; and Montaner, Cantar de Mio Cid,
p. 474, and his chapter in this volume.
202 Bayo Julve
are fully justified; in their view, rhyme is an element determining the occur-
rence of tenses, the poet’s use of which would often be hardly explainable
otherwise. This is an oversimplification of a complex issue. The occurrence of
a word at the end of a verse can be viewed both as an effect and a cause of the
assonance. The suggestion that the author fell into grammatical anomaly
forced by poetic form implies the untenable idea that he was incompetent as a
poet. Indeed, the tense shifts referred to in the objection’s argument are far
from being exclusively linked to the PMC’s assonance. They feature promi-
nently in medieval vernacular works for oral delivery, and can also be found in
prose texts as well as inside the verses of the PMC.29 Such tense usage should
not be employed as an excuse for ungrammatical emendations.
As previously noted, line 708 has received particular attention. Opponents
of the concept of deictic dissonance have asserted that retaining a reading
such as acorredes involves assuming the existence of imperfect assonances in
the PMC. This inference, mixing two different issues, is an inaccurate non
sequitur, as can be gathered from elements already explained. Suffice it to say
that there is nothing imperfect about that verse, and many others that cannot
be explained by the laisse theory. Line 708 is a leonine with a grammatical
rhyme in -edes that stands in sharp dissonance with the contiguous verses.
Imperfect assonances do not play any role in such a passage.
A further objection claims that judgements based on grammaticality, such
as that the substitution of acorrades for acorredes in line 708 generates an ill-
formed structure, are subjective and unreliable. There is, however, massive
evidence demonstrating how such an emendation is ungrammatical. Line 2382
provides the best comparison, since it is closest in syntax, meaning, and con-
text. It can be added that there are at least ten verses in the PMC that prove that
ver expressing perception in the indicative future as the main verb of an affirm-
ative sentence requires the use of the indicative in the subordinate clause it
governs (cf. vv. 998, 1642, 1643, 1666, 2642, 2565, 2621, 2858). Lines such as 384,
1359, 2965, and 2966 cannot be used to justify an emendation, since here the
subjunctive is necessary because it appears within clauses depending on voli-
tive verbs, expressing a request, command, or order. It should be noted that the
only editor who emended line 708 in order to achieve uniformity of assonance
while maintaining an unshakeable sense of grammar was Andrés Bello, who
rephrased the whole second hemistich into veed que la acorrades, changing the
meaning of ver from a verb of perception to a verb of command. Such an edito-
rial interference, however, is not acceptable according to a more rigorous
29 For the most complete treatment, with many analyses of early Romance texts, see
Suzanne Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity.
approach to textual criticism. In short, in the entire history of the Spanish lan-
guage there is not a single documented case of ver as a perception verb in the
indicative in an affirmative sentence governing a subordinate clause in the
subjunctive. The reason for this absence is that it would violate the distinction
between infinitive and subjunctive, which is fundamental to the operation of
the verbal system of Castilian grammar.
It has also been argued that the occurrence of acorredes both in line 708 of
the PMC and in the above-quoted passage of the Estoria de España does not
prove that it is the correct reading, but only that both derive from a common
source. This line of argument leads the laisse theory to a cul-de-sac. It clings to
the supposition that the transmitted reading is erroneous by placing it in an
archetype, presumably Per Abbat’s manuscript of 1207. This effectively means
that versification patterns such as leonines must be contemporary to the
poem’s composition, which must be dated around 1200 according to the evi-
dence gathered over the last decades. In any case, all the textual and linguistic
evidence supports acorredes over acorrades in the analysed passage, where the
former is both correct and documented, while the latter is undocumented and
ungrammatical in this kind of construction.
Another reason that has been put forward in favour of the emendation of
acorredes in acorrades in line 708 is that it is authorized by the flexibility of the
consecutio temporum characteristic of the PMC. Actually, this type of interven-
tion comes into conflict with the poem’s style. Tense shifting occurs in the text
within several areas of the verbal system, most notably with indicative tenses
in past narration. However, this phenomenon never crosses the boundary
between indicative and subjunctive, something that would produce ungram-
maticality, as it has already been explained. Indeed, there is not a single case of
such an alternation to be found within the whole corpus of epic and ballad
poetry in the medieval and early modern Iberian tradition. Such an emenda-
tion would also go against the PMC’s style in the sense that tense shifts ordinarily
appear in the narrative voice rather than in passages of direct speech, which is
obviously the case of line 708. The contextuality of this phenomenon in the
PMC was first observed in 1953 by Manfred Sandmann.30 It is the rule in early
Romance works composed for oral performance, and the author of the PMC
typically adheres to it. Occasional exceptions can be found when a character
reports something, i.e. acts as a narrator, as can be seen when Álvar Fáñez
informs King Alfonso about the Cid’s deeds: “Ganada á [a] Xérica e a Onda por
nombre, / priso a Almenar e a Murviedro que es miyor” (vv. 1327-28), or when
Muño Gustioz advises Avengalvón that the Cid requires an escort for his wife
30 Manfred Sandmann, “Narrative tenses of the past”; see also Peter Russell’s review, p. 241.
204 Bayo Julve
and daughters: “Mio Çid vos saludava e mandólo recabdar” (v. 1482). Even in
such exceptions, tense shifting always remains firmly anchored in the indica-
tive. A very clear case also appears in the Roncesvalles fragment, namely, in
Charlemagne’s lament over Roland’s body (ll. 36-41). The Emperor recalls the
campaigns they both carried out together: “Con vós conquís Truquía e Roma
apriessa dava” (v. 72).
Such an instance of tense alternation is made possible by the narrative char-
acter of the passage in which it occurs, a lengthy account including the winning
of Durandal, the exploits of Roland, and the wars he fought with Charlemagne
(vv. 54-76). The contextual restriction no longer operates in Spanish ballads, in
which verses such as King Juan’s “Altos son y relucían” of the Romance de
Abenámar have become usual. But tense shifting within direct speech is highly
constrained in the text preserved by the Vivar codex, and this stylistic feature
of the PMC should be respected. In short, the concept of deictic dissonance
cannot be blamed for disregarding such elements; it is the laisse theory that
often shows a complete lack of concern for the language and style of the PMC.31
As explained above, the versification of Hispanic medieval epic poetry is
still the subject of debate and controversy among scholars. The reader is likely
to encounter editions offering a text divided and reconstructed into laisses.
Therefore, it is for them to consider the different options, thinking straight
without ever losing sight of the textual evidence, and decide for themselves
which theory throws more light on the poet’s original intentions.32
Works Cited
Adams, Kenneth, “The Metrical Irregularity of the Cantar de Mio Cid: A Restatement
Based on the Evidence of Names, Epithets and Some Other Aspects of Formulaic
Diction”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 49 (1972), 109-19.
Amador de los Ríos, José, Historia crítica de la literatura española, 7 vols., Madrid: José
Rodríguez, 1861-65.
Bayo Julve, Juan Carlos, “Poetic Discourse Patterning in the Cantar de Mio Cid”, Modern
Language Review 96.1 (2001), 82-91 (repr., with correction of misprints in the original,
31 Montaner’s chapter in this volume holds a different view, which I do not share since it
insists on favouring statistics over grammatical and stylistic analysis, and drawing a ques-
tionable analogy with the Old French epic tradition, rather than considering Old Spanish
heroic poetry according to its preserved witnesses and on its own terms.
32 This article has been written with financial support from the Ramón y Cajal programme
of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.
in Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, vol. 109, Chicago: Cengage Learning,
2009, pp. 286-92).
Bayo Julve, Juan Carlos, “La datación del Cantar de Mio Cid y el problema de su tradición
manuscrita”, in Alan D. Deyermond et al. (eds.), “Mio Cid” Studies: “Some Problems of
Diplomatic” Fifty Years On, London: Queen Mary, 2002, pp. 15-35.
Bayo Julve, Juan Carlos, “On the Nature of the Cantar de Mio Cid and Its Place in Hispanic
Medieval Epic”, La Corónica, 33.2 (2005), 13-27.
Behaghel, Otto, “Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern”,
Indogermanische Forschungen 25 (1909), 110-42.
Behaghel, Otto, Deutsche Syntax. Eine geschichtliche Darstellung, 4 vols., Heidelberg:
Carl Winter, 1923-32.
Bello, Andrés (ed.), “Poema del Cid”, in Andrés Bello, Obras completas, 2 ed., 26 vols.,
Caracas: La Casa de Bello, 1981-86, vol. VII, pp. 3-314.
Dyer, Nancy Joe (ed.), El “Mio Cid” del taller alfonsí: versión en prosa en la “Primera Crónica
General” y en la “Crónica de veinte reyes”, Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1995.
Fleischman, Suzanne, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern
Fiction, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
Funes, Leonardo, “Cuestiones de ecdótica en torno al Mio Cid”, Olivar 10 (2007), 37-52.
García Yebra, Valentín, “Sobre las asonancias en a y en o en el Cantar de Mio Cid”, Revista
de Filología Española 74 (1994), 5-21.
Gómez-Bravo, Ana M., “La naturaleza de las asonancias del Cantar de mio Cid. Notas
sobre la -e paragógica”, Hispania 81 (1998), 501-08.
Gornall, John, “‘A New Scene or a Complementary Treatment of the First’? A Checklist
of Masked Double Narrations in the Poema de mio Cid”, in Barry Taylor and Geoffrey
West (eds.), Historicist Essays on Hispano-Medieval Narrative in Memory of Roger M.
Walker, London: MHRA, 2005, pp. 102-14.
Corónica, 33.2 (2005), 97-109.
Horrent, Jules (ed.), “Roncesvalles”. Étude sur le fragment de cantar de gesta conservé à
l’Archivo de Navarra (Pampelune), Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1951.
Horrent, Jules, Historia y poesía en torno al “Cantar del Cid”, Barcelona: Ariel, 1973.
Leonard, William E., “The Recovery of the Meter of the Cid”, Publications of the Modern
Language Association of America 46 (1931), 289-306.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón (ed.), Cantar de Mio Cid. Texto, gramática y vocabulario, 2 ed.,
3 vols., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1944-46.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón (ed.), “Roncesvalles. Un nuevo cantar de gesta español del siglo
xiii”, Revista de Filología Española 4 (1917), 105-204.
Michael, Ian, “A Comparison of the Use of Epic Epithets in the Poema de mio Cid and
the Libro de Alexandre”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 38 (1961), 32-41.
206 Bayo Julve
Michael, Ian, “Tres duelos en el Poema de mio Cid”, in Manuel Alvar et al., El comentario
de textos, 4. La poesía medieval, Madrid: Castalia, 1983, pp. 85-104.
Michael, Ian, “Orígenes de la epopeya en España: reflexiones sobre las últimas teorías”,
in José Manuel Lucía Megías et al., Actas del II Congreso Internacional de la Asociación
Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Segovia, del 15 al 19 de octubre de 1987), 2 vols.,
Madrid: Universidad de Alcalá, 1992, vol. I, pp. 71-88.
Michael, Ian, “‘A cada uno lo suyo’: el problema de la edición crítica”, in Manuel Criado
de Val (ed.), Los orígenes del español y los grandes textos medievales: “Mio Cid”, “Buen
Amor” y “Celestina”, Madrid: CSIC, pp. 133-41.
Montaner, Alberto (ed.), Cantar de Mio Cid, 3 ed., Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2011.
Nespor, Marina, and Irene Vogel, Prosodic Phonology, Dordrecht: Foris, 1986 (repr. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 2007).
Parry, Milman, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I: Homer and
Homeric Style”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 41 (1930), 70-137 (repr. in The
Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry,
Oxford: Clarendon, 1971, pp. 266-324).
Pellen, René, “Le modèle du vers épique espagnol à partir de la formule cidienne [el que
en buen hora…] (Exploitation des concordances pour l’analyse des structures tex-
tuelles)”, Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médiévale 10 (1985), 5-37, and 11 (1986),
5-132.
Rossell, Antoni, “Le pregón. Survivence du système de transmission oral et musical de
l’épopée espagnole”, Cahiers de Littérature Orale 32 (1992), 159-77.
Russell, Peter, Review of Studies in Romance Philology and French Literature Presented
to John Orr, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 31 (1954), 240-41.
Sánchez, Tomás Antonio (ed.), Poema del Cid (Colección de poesías castellanas ante-
riores al siglo xv, 1), Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1779.
Sánchez Jiménez, Santiago U., “Apuntes sobre la lengua del Mio Cid”, in Jesús Gómez
(ed.), Ochocientos años del “Mio Cid”: una visión interdisciplinar, Madrid: Ministerio
de Educación, Política Social y Deporte, 2008, pp. 63-94.
Sandmann, Manfred, “Narrative Tenses of the Past in the Cantar de Mio Cid”, in Ian
W. Alexander et al., Studies in Romance Philology and French Literature Presented to
John Orr, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953, pp. 258-81.
Tynjanov, Jurij N., Problema stixotvornogo jazyka, Leningrad: Academia, 1924 (repr.
Letchworth: Prideaux, 1979).
Victorio, Juan (ed.), Cantar de Mio Cid, Madrid: UNED, 2002.
“Mio Cid Ruy Díaz odredes lo que dixo” 207
Chapter 7
“Mio Cid Ruy Díaz odredes lo que dixo”: The Voice

of the Narrator, the Voice of the Characters
Salvatore Luongo
1 The Voice of the Narrator
De los sos ojos tan fuertemientre llorando,

tornava la cabeça e estávalos catando.
Vio puertas abiertas e uços sin cañados,
alcándaras vazías, sin pielles e sin mantos,
e sin falcones e sin adtores mudados.
Sospiró mio Cid, ca mucho avié grandes cuidados,
fabló mio Cid bien e tan mesurado:
− ¡Grado a ti, Señor, Padre que estás en alto!
¡Esto me an buelto mios enemigos malos! −
Allí piensan de aguijar, allí sueltan las riendas.

A la exida de Bivar ovieron la corneja diestra
e entrando a Burgos oviéronla siniestra.
Meció mio Cid los ombros e engrameó la tiesta:
− ¡Albricia, Álbar Fáñez, ca echados somos de tierra! (1-14)
From the very first verses of the only surviving manuscript,1 the narrator of
the Poema de mio Cid displays a wise use of the prerogatives deriving from
his position; he is extradiegetic, situated on the same level of the addressee;
heterodiegetic, absent from the story; simultaneous, there is not a clear dis-
tinction between the time of narration and the time in which the story takes
place; omniscient, taking full responsibility for the narration and its regula-
tion, independently from what each character knows or says; compromising,
he provides more or less information than is necessary; intrusive, he comments
on what he recounts, often openly revealing his presence; and uses formal arti-
fices that the tradition has placed at his disposal.2 From the close-up of the
1 As is well known, the manuscript is acephalous: the initial page is lost; see Alberto Montaner’s
chapter in this volume.
2 Regarding these categories, Genette, Figures III and Noveau discours, as well as Segre,
Avviamento all’analisi, are obvious references that should be complemented with the new

208 Luongo
Campeador, who turns around in tears (vv. 1-2), the narrator, adopting for a
moment (and in an exceptional manner) the perspective of the character (“Vio
[…]”), gazes back towards the house and its desolate interior (vv. 3-5), turning
again to focus on the grieving hero and give him voice (vv. 6-9), but not before
letting us know his own voice, namely, his positive comment that accompanies
the elocution formula (“fabló […] bien e tan mesurado”). Having marked the
passage from motionless to movement through the substitution of the perfect
tense with the present as if he were directly observing the action (“Allí piensan
[…], allí sueltan”, v. 10), the narrator hints at a double wish (negative and posi-
tive, vv. 11-12),3 prompting the protagonist’s reaction (vv. 13-14) and creating a
series of expectations in the audience.
The narrator often plays with the audience’s expectations by balancing the
(scarce or excessive)4 quantity and quality of information. For instance,
when the Infantes of Carrión enter the scene, we are immediately informed
(vv. 1372-77) about the true motivation lying behind their plan to marry the
Cid’s daughters despite their inferior rank. Having learned the most recent
“nuevas” from Valencia, Diego and Fernando reaffirm their unspeakable
motives during a second “aside”, before asking King Alfonso to intercede with
the hero:
De los ifantes de Carrión yo vos quiero contar,

fablando en su consejo, aviendo su poridad:
− Las nuevas del Cid mucho van adelant,
demandemos sus fijas pora con ellas casar,
creçremos en nuestra ondra e iremos adelant. (1879-83)
The foreboding nature of the proposal is confirmed by the suspicion expressed

by an emotional formula in both cases,5 with which the King (although later
Alfonso is their guarantor) and Rodrigo accept the Infantes’ pledge:
multivariate analysis of the narrative voice developed by Montaner Frutos, “Íñigo Balboa o la
voz del narrador” and “Juan Ruiz, Lǐ Yú y las maqāmāt”, pp. 303-06.
3 The interpretation of the omens is a much debated issue; the first could be auspicious and
the second inauspicious (Cantar de Mio Cid, ed. Menéndez Pidal, vol. II, pp. 596, 643-44); both
positive (Galmés de Fuentes, Épica árabe y épica castellana, pp. 126-29; Marcos Marín, Poesía
narrativa árabe, pp. 294-302; Molho, “Inversión y engaste de inversión”, p. 196); the first adverse
and the second propitious (García Montoro, “Good or Bad Fortune on Entering Burgos?”;
Garci-Gómez, “Mio Cid”. Estudios de endocrítica, pp. 45-61).
4 Genette, Figures III, pp. 211-12.
5 The formula is employed in the Poema to signal the arrival of bad news; see Cantar de Mio Cid,
ed. Montaner Frutos, p. 898.
Una grant ora el rey pensó e comidió:

− Yo eché de tierra al buen Campeador,
e faziendo yo a él mal e él a mí grand pro,
del casamiento non sé si s’abrá sabor;
mas, pues bós lo queredes, entremos en la razón. (1889-93)
Cuando lo oyó mio Cid el buen Campeador,

una grand ora pensó e comidió:
− ¡Esto gradesco a Christus el mio señor!
Echado fu de tierra e, tollida la onor,
con grand afán gané lo que he yo.
A Dios lo gradesco, que del rey he su gracia
e pídenme mis fijas pora los ifantes de Carrión.
Ellos son mucho urgullosos e an part en la cort;
d’este casamiento non avría sabor,
mas, pues lo conseja el que más vale que nós,
fablemos en ello, en la poridad seamos nós.
¡Afé Dios del cielo, que nos acuerde en lo mijor! (1931-42)
The premonition is skillfully projected by the Campeador himself, who agrees

to the marriage, but wisely avoids taking legal responsibility for it (vv. 2082-89,
2109-10, 2131-34, 2197-204), and by the direct intervention of the narrator’s voice
after the wedding celebration:
¡Plega a Santa María e al Padre Santo

que·s’ pague d’es casamiento mio Cid o el que lo [ovo a algo]! (2274-75)
Whereas paralipses serve to generate a contrast between the narrator, who

knows more, and the audience, who knows less, by creating a tension effect (as
in the aforementioned example where the evil consequences of the marriage
are not revealed until later), the use of paralepses works to create comical or
dramatic effects by establishing a contrast between the audience which, being
informed by the narrator, knows more, and the diegetic actors, who know less.
For example, in the episode in which Rachel and Vidas are deceived, the infor-
mation gap is used to ridicule the pair of usurers (the audience is aware that
the “arcas” pawned by the Cid, with the help of the loyal Martín Antolínez,
contain sand and not King Alfonso’s gold, while Rachel and Vidas are astutely
led to believe that the “enemigos malos” accusation about the stolen gold is
true). Rachel and Vidas’ credulity also functions in condemning a mental uni-
verse “other”, the one of the negotium, whose logic the Campeador, in economic
210 Luongo
difficulties, is compelled to confront, even if it is a pure fiction.6 The negotia-

tion culminates, with a wink directed at the audience, in two exhilarating final
quips. As the Campeador takes his leave, Rachel requests a gift upon his return
from the military expedition in the land of the Saracens, that is, a Moorish fur-
coat; Rodrigo accepts with ambiguous enthusiasm and, although we know that
they are worthless, he adds that if he cannot keep his promise, Rachel can
deduct its value from the gold in the chests:7
‒ Plazme ‒ dixo el Cid ‒, d’aquí sea mandada,

si vos la aduxier d’allá, si non, contalda sobre las arcas. (180-81)
For his part, Martín Antolínez, having arranged the deal, demands a reward
that is willingly granted to him. Thus, it is impossible not to laugh given the
characters’ credulity:
‒ Ya don Rachel e Vidas, en vuestras manos son las arcas;

yo que esto vos gané bien merecía calças.
Entre Rachel e Vidas, aparte ixieron amos:

‒ Démosle buen don, ca él nos lo ha buscado.
Martín Antolínez, un burgalés contado,
[…]
Merecérnoslos hedes, ca esto es aguisado. (189-93, 197)
Unsurprisingly, examples of paralepses that create dramatic effects are more

frequent. They are particularly effective when staging the conflict between the
hero and his daughters’ husbands, a clash brought about by the Corpes’ afrenta,
which is slyly orchestrated by the two Infantes. In the first part of the cantar
tercero, the helpless audience is made to witness the conspiracy against the Cid
who is totally unaware of their abhorrent machination, so deplorable that the
narrator’s reaction is to explicitly keep his distance:8
6 See Gargano, “L’universo sociale della Castiglia”, pp. 221-32; and Luongo, “Facciata comica e
contenuto serio nell’episodio di Rachel e Vidas”, particularly pp. 595-99.
7 According to Montaner Frutos (Cantar de Mio Cid, p. 689), the second hemistich means “que
lo añada a lo que debe cobrar para la restitución del empeño y no que lo descuente del con-
tenido de las arcas, aunque, al parecer, Rachel habría podido tomarlo de allí, al contar con el
permiso del dueño”; both interpretations seem possible.
8 Some editors assign v. 2539 to the Infantes, which entails an evident semantic
inconsistency.
Amos salieron apart, ¡veramientre son hermanos!

d’esto qu’ellos fablaron nós parte non ayamos:
− Vayamos pora Carrión, aquí mucho detardamos.
Los averes que tenemos grandes son e sobejanos,
mientra que visquiéremos despender no lo[s] podremos.
Pidamos nuestras mugieres al Cid Campeador,

digamos que las levaremos a tierras de Carrión,
enseñarlas hemos dó las heredades son.
Sacarlas hemos de Valencia, de poder del Campeador;
después en la carrera feremos nuestro sabor,
ante que nos retrayan lo que cuntió del león.
Nós de natura somos de condes de Carrión,
averes levaremos grandes que valen grant valor,
escarniremos las fijas del Canpeador.
D’aquestos averes sienpre seremos ricos omnes,
podremos casar con fijas de reyes o de enperadores,
ca de natura somos de condes de Carrión.
Assí las escarniremos a las fijas del Campeador
antes que nos retrayan lo que fue del león. (2538-56)
The Campeador, “que no·s’ curiava de assí ser afontado” (v. 2569), consents to
his sons-in-law’s request to leave, handing over not only his daughters (that is,
his family honra), but a rich dowry: mounts, garments, and the swords Colada
and Tizón (symbols of his military honra):
dixo el Campeador: − Darvos he mis fijas e algo de lo mio.

[…]
Vós les diestes villas e tierras por arras en tierras de Carrión,
yo quiéroles dar axuvar III mill marcos de plata,
darvos é mulas e palafrés muy gruessos de sazón,
cavallos pora en diestro, fuertes e corredores,
e muchas vestiduras de paños e de ciclatones.
Darvos he dos espadas, a Colada e a Tizón;
bien lo sabedes vós que las gané a guisa de varón.
Mios fijos sodes amos, cuando mis fijas vos dó,
allá me levades las telas del coraçón.
Que lo sepan en Gallizia e en Castiella e en León,
con qué riqueza enbío mios yernos amos a dos.
A mis fijas sirvades que vuestras mugieres son;
si bien las servides, yo vos rendré buen galardón. (2568, 2570-82)
212 Luongo
Preparations are made in a trustworthy and moving atmosphere, which clearly

clashes with what the audience has just heard about the Infantes’ intentions.
Only at the moment of their farewell, the apparition of ill omens troubles the
hero (“Violo en los avueros el que en buen ora cinxo espada / que estos casa-
mientos non serién sin alguna tacha”, vv. 2615-16). Heeding this premonition,
he asks his nephew Félez Muñoz to follow his cousins, but only because he
fears that the value of the “arras” which awaits them in Carrión may be inade-
quate for their status.9 However, shortly after, the reader also becomes involved
in the dynamic of these clashing conjectures. The description of the “robredo
de Corpes”, where the Infantes and their wives spend the night, is topically
sinister:10
Entrados son los ifantes al robredo de Corpes,

los montes son altos, las ramas pujan con las núes,
e las bestias fieras que andan aderredor. (2697-99)
Yet, the inhospitable and threatening locus horroris, where the violence against
Elvira and Sol is expected to take place, surprisingly gives way to another
canonical space, the locus amoenus,11 traditionally reserved for love scenes.
Diego and Fernando actually lie with their wives, leading the audience to
believe that they may have changed their mind:
Fallaron un vergel con una linpia fuent,

mandan fincar la tienda ifantes de Carrión,
con cuantos que ellos traen ý yazen essa noch,
con sus mugieres en braços demuéstranles amor. (2700-03)
Nevertheless, the voice of the narrator immediately warns us that the danger
has not been averted: “¡mal ge lo cunplieron cuando salié el sol!” (v. 2704).
However, the following verses (2710-11) seem to suggest the opposite: the
Infantes ask their retinue to leave them alone with the women in the “vergel”
so that they can take pleasure “con ellas a todo su sabor” (v. 2711). It is there
9 As observed, for example, by Pavlović and Walker, “Money, Marriage and Law”, p. 211.
10 It draws upon the literary tradition according to which the representation of places and
sceneries is conventional, typified, and strictly connected to the kind of action in which
they take place; see Gurevič, Le categorie, pp. 29 onward; and particularly, Montaner Fru-
tos, “Geografía y paisaje”, “Un canto de frontera”, and Cantar de Mio Cid, pp. 426-35.
11 Skillfully studied by Curtius, Europäische Literatur, cap. X, §§ 6-7.
that, contrary to all premonitions, the two brothers torture their wives with
belts and spurs leaving them more dead than alive (vv. 2712 onward).12
As it may be noted, in the aforementioned passages the protagonist is not
always placed at the center of the stage. Even though Rodrigo Díaz remains the
main subject of the narration, focalization on diverse actors is frequent in the
Poema (which is not to be confused with matters of perspectivism, that is,
the adoption of the point of view of a character, which is usually absent).13 The
poem goes from movements of short distance and duration that, for instance,
animate the battle scenes, to longer movements, like the afrenta of Corpes, the
three embassies of Minaya Álvar Fáñez to Castile, or the challenge between the
Cid’s champions and the Infantes. As a skillful director, the narrator pairs
the most abrupt “movements” of the camera with transitional metanarrative
formulae. Thus, as the image of the Campeador and his men in Valencia fades
out, the narrator introduces the counter-offensive preparations for the immi-
nent attack of the King of Morocco, Yúcef:
Mio Cid e sus compañas tan a gran sabor están.

El ivierno es exido, que el março quiere entrar.
Dezirvos quiero nuevas de allent partes del mar,
de aquel rey Yúcef que en Marruecos está. (1618-21)
12 The scene has been analyzed, among others, by Casalduero, Estudios de literatura espa-
ñola, pp. 24-25; Deyermond, El “Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 32-33; Pérez, “La naturaleza”,
pp. 282-83; Cacho Blecua, “El espacio en el Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 40-41; Montaner Frutos,
“El Cid: mito y símbolo”, pp. 253-54.
13 According to Montaner Frutos, “Lo realmente pertinente es distinguir entre la sujeción o
no a un punto de vista en particular (perspectivismo), entre la capacidad o no de cambiar
el foco de atención (focalización fija o variable) y entre la posibilidad o la imposibilidad
de transmitir los pensamientos de los personajes (introspección), así como a sus posibles
combinaciones” (“Íñigo Balboa o la voz del narrador”, p. 300). “Según se desprende de las
glosas ya realizadas a las diversas propuestas narratológicas, puede diferenciarse entre un
narrador […] que adopta una perspectiva particular (identificándose con alguno de los
personajes, al margen de que se encarne o no en él) y el que adopta una perspectiva
general (como la del clásico narrador omnisciente); entre aquel que adopta una foca-
lización fija y el que la adopta variable (según se centre en un sólo personaje o en varios,
independientemente de que asuma o no su perspectiva concreta al narrar la historia)”
(“Íñigo Balboa o la voz del narrador”, pp. 307-08). Regarding these categories, see also
Friedman, “Point of View in Fiction”; Lintvelt, Essai de typologie narrative; and Frauenrath,
“Perspectivismo, focalización”, pp. 234a-235b.
214 Luongo
Similarly, once the “lides” of Carrión are finished, the narrator abandons the
defeated and fallen Diego and Fernando to their destiny and returns to Rodrigo
to celebrate his final apotheosis:
Dexémosnos de pleitos de ifantes de Carrión,

de lo que an preso mucho an mal sabor;
fablemos nós d’aqueste que en buen ora nació. (3708-10)
Cases of entrelazamiento are extremely interesting, as they recount the

intertwined actions of both secondary characters and those of the hero simul-
taneously (or, more rarely, those of another secondary character).14 It is the
case of what happens in the first campaign of the destierro in the Henares val-
ley. When he arrives at the doors of Castejón during the night, the Cid stays
“en celada” (in ambush) until the dawn of the next day and, by taking advan-
tage of the inhabitants’ opening of the city doors, he launches an attack on
the undefended city and plunders it (vv. 435-75). The lens then moves to focus
on Minaya, who in the meantime is raiding the south-west reaching as far
as Alcalá (vv. 476-83). The vanguard then reunites with the rear-guard in the
newly occupied fortification, and they proceed to divide the spoils (vv. 484-
515). The passage from the first report to the second is fixed by a demarcating
verse: “Afevos los CCIII en el algara” (v. 476), while their synchronous endings
are marked by a recapitulating verse that signals the end of the branching off:
“felos en Castejón, o el Campeador estava” (v. 485). Far more complex is the
interweaving between the parallel narrations of Álvar Fáñez’s first mission, dur-
ing which Rodrigo entrusts him with part of the spoils of the battle against Fáriz
and Galve to be given as gifts to Alfonso, and the manoeuvers that will lead the
hero to engage with Count Ramón Berenguer. Upon his nephew’s departure,
the story informs us of the Cid’s actions (“Ya es aguisado, mañana·s’ fue Minaya
/ e el Campeador [fincó ý] con su mesnada”, vv. 836-37); he sells Alcocer to the
Moors, camps on the hill of San Esteban, and subjugates the Jiloca basin (vv. 838-
69). Meanwhile, Minaya arrives in Castilla (“Ido es a Castiella Álbar Fáñez
Minaya”, v. 871). This verse is preceded by a farewell formula, which marks the
shift in the narration (“¡Mio Cid Ruy Díaz de Dios aya su gracia!”, v. 870). Álvar
Fáñez delivers the gift and obtains the king’s pardon for himself and for those
who would like to join the Campeador (vv. 873-98). Through another transi-
tional formula (“Quiérovos dezir del que en buen ora nasco e cinxo espada”,
v. 899) the narration turns to the deeds of the Cid: after subjugating the Martín
14 On the use of this narrative technique in the Poema, see Cacho Blecua, “El espacio en el
Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 36-37.
and Aguavivas River Valleys, he abandons the “poyo” after fifteen weeks and
reaches the pinewoods of Tévar, where, after another three weeks, Álvar Fáñez
finally joins Rodrigo with new reinforcements (vv. 900-18).
With the narrator’s perspective remaining the same, similar repetitions,
double or triple accounts of the same event,15 which are typical procedures of
epic discourse,16 may be interpreted as variations of the point of view (distant,
close, or from a diverse angle), as for instance the repetition of the final verses
(1187-91) of laisse 72 in laisse 73. The first verses tell, in third-person, the dis-
patch of messengers to Christian lands and, in reported speech, the content of
the announcement:
Por Aragón e por Navarra pregón mandó echar,

a tierras de Castiella enbió sus mensajes:
quien quiere perder cueta e venir a ritad,
viniesse a mio Cid, que á sabor de cavalgar,
cercar quiere a Valencia por a cristianos la dar. (1187-91)
The second time, the narrator repeats the call through the voice of Rodrigo, so
to speak “live”, adding the detail of the meeting place:
− Quien quiere ir comigo cercar a Valencia

(todos vengan de grado, ninguno non ha premia),
tres días le speraré en Canal de Celfa. (1192-94)
The final encounter between Alfonso and the Cid on the bank of the Tagus
River is presented, instead, through three different versions. The “original”
report occupies vv. 2094-120 and is articulated in two sequences: a) the sym-
bolic handing over of Elvira and Sol to the Infantes, the first constitutive act of
their wedding (vv. 2094-110); and b) the farewell of the hero, accompanied by
the donation of gifts (2111-20). The repetition in vv. 2121-30 extrapolates from
the sequence a) the moment in which the king entrusts Diego and Fernando to
the parental authority of their future father-in-law through a close-up (vv. 2121-
26 = vv. 2101-10); cuts out of the sequence b) the image of the Campeador
leaving on his horse Babieca (v. 2127 = vv. 2119-20); and adds the invitation to
the wedding (vv. 2128-30). The last reiteration (vv. 2131-65) comes back to the
15 These instances are examined in detail by Michael, “Tres duelos en el Poema de mio Cid”;
and Gornall, “How Many Times”, “Double Narration”, “Two More Cases of Double Narra-
tion”, and “A New Scene or a Complementary Treatment of the First?”.
16 See Rychner, La chanson de geste, for the French tradition.
216 Luongo
prenuptial agreements, restricting the focus to the designation of Álvar Fáñez

as the legal representative of Alfonso (vv. 2131-41), closing-up on Rodrigo’s
offering of a gift to the king (vv. 2142-50) and their farewell (vv. 2151-65). Double
narration and simultaneity are finally intertwined in the staging of the judicial
duels in Carrión. First, we see a synchronous “long shot” depicting the clash
among the six warriors (vv. 3612-22); thereafter, beginning with v. 3623, the
three “lides” are recounted separately, in parallel laisses (the final part of 150,
151, and the beginning of 152). This procedure is repeated on a reduced scale
with the description of the battles between Pero Vermúdez and Fernando
González, and between Muño Gustioz and Asur González. Each pair of com-
batants exchanges a blow that is first represented as occurring simultaneously
(vv. 3625 and 3673); then, each blow is described again in detail as if they were
consecutive (vv. 3626-28, 3629-40 and 3674-77, 3678-88).
At times, the flexible use of verbal tenses also contributes to creating the
effect of multiple points of view (a flexibility, as is well known, that has mul-
tiple aspectual, aesthetic, marking, axiological, emotional, and prosodic
implications).17 In particular, the passage from narrative tense (imperfect,
simple past, past perfect, and conditional) to a commentative tense (simple
present, present perfect, and future) determines the place of the action that is
moved from background to close-up, initiating an actualization/dramatization
process of what is being narrated with further involvement of the audience.18
Suffice the example of the scene in the Corpes oak grove, in which the Infantes
ferociously attack their defenseless wives (I omit the passages in direct speech,
which do not properly pertain to the narrator’s voice).19 Here, the past perfect
and perfect tenses of the first two verses, which are already interspersed by a
rhyming son, give way to a long series of occurrences (13) of the simple present,
to which a future tense is added (dará, v. 2746). The series is interrupted only
by two simple pasts (vieron, v. 2724, majaron, v. 2743), three imperfects (one
of which is a verbum dicendi: fablava, v. 2724, ronpién, v. 2738, salié, v. 2739),
17 The phenomenon has been studied from diverse perspectives; see Sandamann, “Narrative
Tenses of the Past”; Gilman, Tiempo y formas temporales; De Chasca, El arte juglaresco,
pp. 282-310; Myers, “Assonance and Tense”; Lapesa, De la Edad Media a nuestros días,
pp. 16-22; Montgomery, “Narrative Tenses Preference”; Aguirre, “Poema de Mio Cid: Rima y
oralidad”; and Soler Bistué, “Historia y ficción”. The extreme variability of verbal tenses
depends on the interweaving of numerous reasons, as noted by Montgomery, “Interaction
of Factors”.
18 See Segre, Avviamento all’analisi, p. 28.
19 The characters’ speeches do not present the same freedom of use. See Sandmann, “Narra-
tive Tenses of the Past”; Gilmann, Tiempo y formas temporales, pp. 33-34; and Montgom-
ery, “Interaction of Factors”, pp. 355-57.
and by a gerund (ensayándos’, v. 2746). The conditional and the two imperfect
subjunctives in vv. 2741-42, which temporarily suspend the narration, naturally
need to be referred to the level of enunciation. A past form (dexaron, v. 2748)
closes the sequence and forms a kind of frame with the initial forms:
Todos eran idos, ellos IIII solos son,

tanto mal comidieron los ifantes de Carrión:
[…]
Allí les tuellen los mantos e los pelliçones,
páranlas en cuerpos e en camisas e en ciclatones.
Espuelas tienen calçadas los malos traidores,
en mano prenden la cinchas fuertes e duradores.
Cuando esto vieron las dueñas, fablava doña Sol:
[…]
Lo que ruegan las dueñas non les ha ningún pro,
essora les conpieçan a dar los ifantes de Carrión,
con las cinchas corredizas májanlas tan sin sabor;
con las espuelas agudas, don ellas an mal sabor,
ronpién las camisas e las carnes a ellas amas a dos.
Linpia salié la sangre sobre los ciclatones,
ya lo sienten ellas en los sos coraçones.
¡Cuál ventura serié ésta, sí ploguiesse al Criador,
que assomasse essora el Cid Campeador!
Tanto las majaron que sin cosimente son,
sangrientas an las camisas e todos los ciclatones.
Cansados son de ferir ellos amos a dos,
ensayándos’ amos cuál dará mejores colpes.
Ya non pueden fablar don Elvira e doña Sol,
por muertas las dexaron en el robredo de Corpes. (2712-13, 2720-24,
2734-48)
Verses 2741-42 further confirm the active role of the narrator, which will now
be illustrated more analytically. To begin with, we can distinguish between the
actual intrusions of the narrator’s voice and the mere display of the “conven-
tional” narrator’s voice (in the words of John L. Grigsby).20 In the Poema, these
voices correspond in most cases21 to an explicit or implicit insistence “sull’io”,
20 Grigsby, “Narrative Voices in Chrétien de Troyes”, p. 263.

21 Exceptions may be found in the occurrences in which “I” addressing “you” simply signals
a shift between different narrative levels (as in the transition formulae already mentioned
218 Luongo
namely, on the narrator’s individuality who asserts himself as judge and inter-
preter of facts and behavior, and to an implicit or explicit insistence “sul tu”,
that is on the allocutions to the receptor or public.22 To this second voice is
delegated, as mentioned above, the function of directing (we can add, as an
example, the incipit of v. 1085, “Aquí·s’ conpieça la gesta de mio Cid el de Bivar”,
as well as the explicit of vv. 2276-77, “¡Las coplas d’este cantar aquí·s’ van aca-
bando, / el Criador vos vala con todos los sos santos!”, and vv. 3729-30: “Éstas
son las nuevas de mio Cid el Campeador, / en este logar se acaba esta razón”,
which mark the internal articulation between the second and third cantares
and the Poema’s conclusion). The same voice, which, even though it follows
the tradition, is not completely neuter, is made to utter announcements and
exhortations23 to emphasize direct speech (“Fablava mio Cid commo odre-
des contar”, v. 684; “Mio Cid Ruy Díaz odredes lo que dixo”, v. 1024; “Oíd qué
dixo Minaya Álbar Fáñez”, v. 1127; “ Oíd lo que dixo el que en buen ora nasco”,
v. 1603), to single out an action (“de los otros quinientos dezirvos he qué faze”,
v. 1423) or a description (“Quiérovos dezir lo que es más granado”, v. 1776), to
underscore perceptive presentations with an ironic intent (“Al cargar de las
arcas veriedes gozo tanto”, v. 170), to arouse admiration (“Tanta cuerda de
tienda ý veriedes quebrar / arrancarse las estacas e acostarse a todas partes
los tendales”, vv. 1141-42; “Veriedes cavalleros que bien andantes son / besar las
manos [e] espedirse del rey Alfonso”, vv. 2158-59; “Veriedes aduzir tanto cavallo
corredor, / tanta gruessa mula, tanto palafré de sazón, / tanta buena espada
con toda guarnizón”, vv. 3242-44), to arouse admiration in the form of a ques-
tion (“D’ella part e d’ella pora las vistas se adobavan: / ¿quién vio por Castiella
tanta mula preciada / e tanto palafré que bien anda, / cavallos gruessos e corre-
dores sin falla, / tanto buen pendón meter en buenas astas, / escudos boclados
con oro o con plata, / mantos e pielles e buenos cendales d’Andria?”, vv. 1965-
71), to signal deixis (“Afevos doña Ximena, con sus fijas dó va llegando”, v. 262;
“afevos Rachel e Vidas a los pies le caen”, v. 1431; “Fevos de la otra part los ifantes
de Carrión”, v. 3591), to introduce hyperboles (“Llorando de los ojos, que non
viestes atal”, v. 374; “Alegre fue el rey, non viestes atanto”, v. 1831; “non viestes tal
juego commo iva por la cort”, v. 2307), to make emphatic declarations (“es día
in vv. 899, 1620, 3708, and v. 1453, “Dirévos de los cavalleros que levaron el mensaje”;
v. 2764, “mas yo vos diré d’aquel Félez Muñoz”; v. 3671, “Los dos han arrancado, dirévos de
Muño Gustioz”), and viceversa, in those occurrences in which, although formally address-
ing the “you”, the “I” expresses a personal opinion (it is the case of the admiration for the
lavish nuptial celebration in v. 2208, “sabor abriedes de ser e de comer en el palacio”).
22 Segre, Avviamento all’analisi, p. 20.
23 I refer the reader to Mathew Bailey’s chapter in this volume, and in particular to the “prin-
ciple of performance-enhanced speech” which he discusses.
á de plazo, sepades que non más”, v. 414; “más le vienen a mio Cid, sabet, que
no·s’ le van”, v. 1207; “Sabet bien que, si ellos le viessen, non escapara de muert”,
v. 2774), to pose rhetorical questions (“e fizieron dos azes de pe[nd]ones mez-
clados, ¿quí los podrié contar?”, v. 699; “el oro e la plata ¿quién vos lo podrié
contar?”, v. 1214; “e los otros averes ¿quién los podrié contar?”, v. 1218), and to
express reticence (“dexarévos las posadas, non las quiero contar”, v. 1310).24
This second voice punctuates the entire text intensifying its presence at the
crucial moments of the story. As it has become evident, we are dealing with
interventions aimed at keeping the spectators’ attention (phatic function), and
making them participate in the events being narrated by transforming them
into eye- or ear-witnesses of their unfolding (conative function).25
Instead, the “I” of the narrator is almost always revealed indirectly, through
exclamations, general assertions, evaluations. Two isolated references to the
time of enunciation are highly meaningful: the post factum prophecy, “mientra
que sea el pueblo de moros e de la yente cristiana, / el Poyo de mio Cid así·l’
dirán por carta” (vv. 901-02),26 with an implied reference to a “fuero municipal”
that guarantees the official status and the survival of the toponym,27 and the
allusion to the hero’s royal descendants with which the narrator ends the
Poema, “Oy los reyes d’España sos parientes son, / a todos alcança ondra por el
que en buen ora nació” (vv. 3724-25), which links the time of the narrator and
his spectators (“oy”, “son”) with the time of narration (“el que en buen ora
nació”).28 Very frequent, instead, are exclamative expressions which, as in the
cases thus-far treated, are used in various ways: to demarcate (in an auspicious
manner, v. 870), to admonish (vv. 2274-75), to anticipate (v. 2704), and to evo-
cate (vv. 2741-42). However, the majority are intended as a celebration of the
Cid and/or his companions, or to introduce, accompany, or conclude their ven-
tures, actions, or gestures:29 “¡Cuál lidia bien sobre exorado arzón / mio Cid
Ruy Díaz, el buen lidiador!”, vv. 733-34; “¡Dios, que bien pagó a todos sus vassal-
los, / a los peones e a los encavalgados!”, vv. 806-07; “¡Dios, cómmo fue alegre
24 They are analyzed by Schrott, “¿Quí los podríé contar? Interrogative Acts”.
25 The reference is to the schema of oral communication and to the functions Jakobson con-
nected to it in his study “Linguistics and Poetics”.
26 See Russell, Temas de la “Celestina”, pp. 176-77.
27 According to Montaner Frutos, “Seguramente tal denominación (históricamente docu-
mentada) no debe nada a las andanzas del héroe, pero el poeta (o quizá las tradiciones
locales en las que se basó) no podían dejar de relacionar el nombre de dicho monte con
el del célebre guerrero castellano” (Cantar de Mio Cid, p. 302).
28 As indicated by Soler Bistué, “Historia y ficción”, p. 201.
29 This way of expressing accord with the characters is also due to the Poema’s oral diffusion,
sung or recited, as noted by De Chasca, El arte juglaresco, pp. 217-18.
220 Luongo
todo aquél fonsado / que Minaya Álbar Fáñez assí era llegado, / diziéndoles
saludes de primos e de hermanos, / e de sus compañas, aquellas que avién
dexadas! / ¡Dios, cómmo es alegre la barba vellida / que Álbar Fáñez pagó las
mill missas / e que·l’ dixo saludes de su mugier e de sus fijas! / ¡Dios, cómmo fue
el Cid pagado e fizo grant alegría!”, vv. 926-33; “¡Dios, qué alegre era todo cris-
tianismo, / que en tierras de Valencia señor avié obispo!”, vv. 1305-06; “¡tan
grand fue el gozo cuando·l’ vieron assomar!”, v. 1393; “fizo una corrida, ¡ésta fue
tan estraña!”, v. 1588; “¡Dios, qué bien tovieron armas el Cid e sus vassallos!”,
v. 2243; “Ensayávas’ el obispo, ¡Dios qué bien lidiava!”, v. 2388; “¡Dios, qué bien
los sirvió a todo so sabor!”, v. 2650; “¡Ved cuál ondra crece al que en buen ora
nació / cuando señoras son sus fijas de Navarra e de Aragón!”, vv. 3722-23. They
are also used, though in a reduced number, to sanction the enemies’ conduct:
the boastfulness of the Moors (“Veyénlo los de Alcocer, ¡Dios, cómmo se alaba-
van!”, v. 580); the voracity of the count of Barcelona (“comiendo va el conde,
¡Dios, qué de buen grado!”, v. 1052); the affectation of the Infantes (“de pie e a
sabor, ¡Dios, qué quedos entraron!”, v. 2213); their wickedness in the aforemen-
tioned v. 2538, which is followed by the narrator’s dissociation from their plan.
This confirms the partisanship of the narrator (i.e., ideological function) that,
as demonstrated above, also uses other means such as dramatization and
comicality.30
Except for one occurrence (vv. 1178-79, “¡Mala cueta es, señores, aver mingua
de pan, / fijos e mugieres verlo[s] murir de fanbre!”, meant to evoke empathy in
the audience towards the Moors who are besieged in Valencia), the less fre-
quent use of comparisons as well as aphoristic and proverbial expressions has
the same aim as exclamatory expressions: to express Rodrigo’s pain upon sepa-
rating from his wife and daughters (“así·s’ parten unos d’otros, commo la uña
de la carne”, v. 375), to increase the value of his prodigality (“qui a buen señor
sirve siempre bive en delicio”, v. 850), to sanction the dishonorable defeat of
Diego and Fernando on moral terms (“qui buena dueña escarnece e la dexa
después / atal le contesca o siquier peor”, vv. 3706-07). The ample and recurrent
use of formulaic epithets (the positive ones used to reference the hero cannot
be counted) as well as qualifying adjectives and leit motiv-adverbs (mal/
malo(s), referring to the Cid’s slanderers and, following the planning of the
afrenta, to the Infantes and their actions), obviously concur in defining a clear
axiology of the actants (see infra). Yet, the narrator does not avoid judgment
(as in the aforementioned v. 7) in a less stereotypical way, by presenting the
30 Tones which could easily be reflected in the inflections of the minstrel who performed
the poem, as observed by C.C. Smith, “Tone of Voice”; Walsh, “Performance”; and Fernán-
dez Rodríguez-Escalona and del Brío Carretero, “Sobre la métrica”, pp. 14-15.
Count of Barcelona as a blusterer, who is brave only with his words (“El conde
es muy follón e dixo una vanidat”, v. 960); by describing how once freed, the
count constantly looks back while walking away, afraid that the Cid will change
his mind, “lo que non ferié el caboso por cuanto en el mundo ha, / una deslea[l]-
tança, ca non la fizo alguandre” (vv. 1080-81); regarding Pero Vermúdez and
Muño Gustioz, he points out that “en casa de mio Cid non ha dos mejores”
(v. 2170), a comment that is in stark contrast with the subsequent one made
about the third of the Vanigómez brothers: “E va ý Asur Gonçález, que era
bullidor, / que es largo de lengua, mas en lo ál non es tan pro” (vv. 2172-73); he
condemns Diego and Fernando who are planning to kill the Moor Avengalvón,
who is “mucho […] buen barragán” (v. 2671), and steal from him, “entramos
hermanos consejaron tración” (v. 2660), “Cuando esta falsedad dizién los de
Carrión” (v. 2666).
Moreover, the narrator often relies on the intervention of a choir, internal in
the narration, to ensure the audience’s solidarity with the hero. I will limit my
considerations to some examples taken from the first part of the poem. When
the exiled Cid arrives in Burgos, the inhabitants of the city observe him from
their homes and share in his pain:
Exiénlo ver mugieres e varones,

burgeses e burgesas por las finiestras son,
plorando de los ojos, tanto avién el dolor,
de las sus bocas todos dizían una razón:
− ¡Dios, qué buen vassallo, si oviesse buen señor! (16b-20)
They would willingly offer him their hospitality if King Alfonso’s menacing
orders did not weigh over them:
Conbidarle ien de grado, mas ninguno non osava:

el rey don Alfonso tanto avié la grand saña.
Antes de la noche, en Burgos d’él entró su carta
con grand recabdo e fuertemientre sellada:
que a mio Cid Ruy Díaz que nadi no·l diessen posada,
e aquel que ge la diesse sopiesse vera palabra,
que perderié los averes e más los ojos de la cara,
e aun demás los cuerpos e las almas. (21-28)
Therefore, they can only be sorry for his fate:
Grande duelo avién las yentes cristianas,

ascóndense de mio Cid, ca no l’osan dezir nada. (29-30)
222 Luongo
Faced with Rodrigo’s insistence as he tries to kick down the door to “su posada”,
the voice of the inhabitants of Burgos materializes, and their powerlessness
against temporal injustice is personified in a “niña de nuef años”, who entrusts
the Cid to the superior divine justice:31
Cid, en el nuestro mal vós non ganades nada,

mas el Criador vos vala con todas sus vertudes santas. (47-48)
In this way, the accusation towards the Campeador is represented as false from
the very beginning, “con l’effetto di sospingere, da una parte, i suoi agenti” (the
mestureros), “e coloro che la favoriscono” (the monarch, who momentarily
believes the slanders), “nella sfera del Male, e dall’altra nell’individuare nell’in-
nocente Cid il campione del Bene”.32 With an opposite tone, yet with the
analogous goal of having the audience participate, the scene of the hero’s
arrival at San Pedro de Cardeña is announced through a beautiful example of
“pathetic fallacy”33 by the breaking of a beaming dawn (“Apriessa cantan los
gallos e quieren quebrar albores”, v. 235). The cheerfulness of the abbot and his
monks running to welcome Rodrigo and opening their doors to his “mesnada”
substitutes the “duelo” of the “burgeses” and “burgesas”:
Llamavan a la puerta, ý sopieron el mandado.

¡Dios, qué alegre fue el abbat don Sancho!
Con lunbres e con candelas al corral dieron salto,
con tan grant gozo reciben al que en buen ora nasco. (242-45)
Later, when the Campeador abandons Alcocer after selling it back to its inhab-
itants, the same Moors recognize his valor and appreciate his moderation and
fairness:34
31 The prophecy of the archangel Gabriel, who appears to him during the last day he spends
in Castile, confirms that the hero is favored by God (vv. 407-09).
32 Gargano, “L’universo sociale della Castiglia”, p. 239.
33 Its use in the Poema has been studied by, among others, Pérez, “La naturaleza”, pp. 275-76;
and Rico, Breve biblioteca, pp. 298-99.
34 The Poema arguably reflects tolerance towards Andalusian Muslims, which culminated in
instituting the juridical status of the mudéjar, as noted by Richthofen, Nuevos estudios,
pp. 84-88; Horrent, Historia y poesía, pp. 338-39; Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid, pp. 37-39;
C.C. Smith, The Making, pp. 102-03; Montaner Frutos, “El Cid: mito y símbolo”, pp. 206, 211;
and Piñero Valverde, “Nuevas de alent partes del mar”, pp. 2-5.
Cuando mio Cid el castiello quiso quitar,

moros e moras tomáronse a quexar:
− ¡Vaste, mio Cid! ¡Nuestras oraciones váyante delante!
Nós pagados fincamos, señor, de la tu part. –
Cuando quitó a Alcocer mio Cid el de Bivar,
moros e moras compeçaron de llorar. (851-56)
The sympathy, in the etymological sense, expressed by these and other choirs,
causes a greater external resonance,35 uniting the narrator, the audience, the
story, and the protagonist in one circle.36
2 The Voice of the Characters
We now shift our attention to the characters, their portrayal, and their
voice. Excluding information regarding social status and kinship – all ideo-
logically functional elements – we find that epic epithets37 (which indicate
the virtues of the hero,38 his wife,39 his trusted companions,40 and King
35 Varvaro, Letterature romanze, p. 272.

36 See Hempel, “Kollektivrede”; and Girón Alconchel, Las formas del discurso referido,
pp. 191-97.
37 A detailed description is offered by Montaner Frutos, Cantar de Mio Cid, pp. 409-11; also
see Michael, “A Comparison of the Use of Epic Epithets”; Hamilton, “Epic Epithets”; Web-
ber, “Un aspecto estilístico”; De Chasca, El arte juglaresco, pp. 175-95; Hathaway, “The Art
of the Epic Epithets”; Garci-Gómez, “Mio Cid”. Estudios de endocrítica, pp. 278-93; Hook,
“The Epic Epithet and Real Life”; and Ranz Yubero, “La relación entre el uso del epíteto”.
38 According to Montaner, “Especial rendimiento ofrece el epíteto astrológico […], que se
refiere al favorable influjo estelar bajo el que el Cid había nacido o bajo el que había sido
armado caballero. Las formas básicas de cada versión son (el) que en buen ora nasco y (el)
que en buen ora cinxo espada, pero existen variedades que permiten emplear esta expre-
sión tan laudatoria con diversas rimas (á, á-a, á-o, ó, e í-o) y tanto en pasajes narrativos
como en estilo directo” (Cantar de Mio Cid, p. 410); see also Pellen, “Le modéle du vers
épique espagnol”.
39 For example, “mugier ondrada” (vv. 284, 1647, 2187), “querida e ondrada mugier” (v. 1604),
“mugier de pro” (v. 2519), “dueña […] de pro” (v. 3039).
40 Martín Antolínez: “el burgalés de pro” (vv. 736, 1992b, 2837, 3066, 3191), “el burgalés con-
plido” (v. 65), “un burgalés contado” (v. 193), “un burgalés leal” (v. 1459), “el burgalés natu-
ral” (v. 1500); Álvar Fáñez: “cavallero de prestar” (vv. 671, 1432), “el (al) bueno de Minaya”
(vv. 1426, 1430, 1583); don Jerónimo: “coronado de prestar” (v. 1460), “coronado leal”
(v. 1501), “caboso coronado” (v. 1793).
224 Luongo
Alfonso41), connotative and symbolic traits (for instance, the Cid’s beard42),
and some brief comments (mentioned above), in the Poema both prosopog-
raphy (the physical, exterior description of characters) and etopeia (the moral
and psychological portrait) are generally absent.43 There are a few excep-
tions, such as the conventional representation of don Jerónimo:44 “el obispo
don Jerónimo so nombre es llamado, / bien entendido es de letras e mucho
acordado, / de pie e de cavallo mucho era arreziado”, vv. 1289-91; the emphasis
on the taciturn nature of Pero Vermúdez: “Pero Vermúez conpeçó de fablar; /
detiénes’le la lengua, non puede delibrar, / mas cuando enpieça, sabed, no·l’ da
vagar”, vv. 3306-08; or the buffonish depiction of Asur González, a prelude to
his intervention at the cortes: “Asur Gonçález entrava por el palacio, / manto
armiño e un brial rastrando, / vermejo viene, ca era almorzado, / en lo que fabló
avié poco recabdo”, vv. 3373-76. The narrator does not employ introspection
either, i.e., he does not reveal the conscience or mental processes of his char-
acters, limiting his narration to the episodic communication of impressions
or emotions, usually simple verifications on the effects of some events (“ya vie
mio Cid que Dios le iva valiendo”, v. 1096; “cuédanse que essora cadrán muer-
tos los que están aderredor”, v. 3622).45 Therefore, the creatures he crafts, as in
41 For example, “rey ondrado” (vv. 878, 1959, 2980), “Alfonso el castellano” (vv. 1790, 2976),
“Alfonso el de Léon” (vv. 1927, 3536, 3543, 3718), “el (al) buen rey don Alfonso” (vv. 2825,
3001, 3024, 3108, 3127). Significantly, epithets associated to the sovereign are more fre-
quent as the narration proceeds, and as he gradually distances himself from “enemigos
malos” of the hero, who thus transforms the king in a positive character.
42 About the functions of the Cid’s beard, which are also structural, see Bly, “Beards in the
Poema de Mio Cid”; Burt, “Honor and the Cid’s Beard”; and Conde López, “Construcción de
sentido y dinamismo textual”.
43 This is part of the more general “economía verbal del poema”, which is highlighted by,
among others, Miletich, “Medieval Spanish Epic”, “Repetition and Aesthetic Function”;
and Hook, “Verbal Economy and Structural Ecology”. I do not consider here elements
which are broadly descriptive, such as clothing, arms, mounts, metonymical objects, etc.,
that in the Poema are never purely ornamental or digressive but always have an emblem-
atic function. Clothing “permite distinguir e identificar a su portador como miembro de
una determinada colectividad y […] complementariamente puede expresar una posición
social, una cualidad o una función concretas” (García López, “La indumenteria emble-
mática”, p. 368).
44 The bishop embodies the figure of the clerical warrior who brings together sapientia and
fortitudo; the “ojos vellidos” (v. 1612) and white complexion (“tan blancas commo el sol”)
of the hero’s daughters are also extremely conventional.
45 These few occurrences are analyzed by Girón Alconchel, Las formas del discurso referido,
pp. 86-88, 197-200.
most medieval romance narratives,46 are simply characterized by their actions

(the pragmatic sphere in which they operate) and, even before they act or dur-
ing their actions, by what they say (the speech acts they enunciate). “Las almas
se desnudan hablando”, wrote Damaso Alonso.47 The attitudes and peculiari-
ties of the characters, “l’indole e la volontà” that motivate their behavior,48 the
relationships they establish, the “system” in which they function are primarily
defined by their own discourse.49 Compared with the traditionally high stan-
dards of epic poetry, eminently mimetic in form, the discourse in the Poema,
mostly made up of direct speech,50 but also of reported and free indirect
speech, assumes great importance.51
The most important discourse is obviously that of the protagonist. His initial
words, as already seen (vv. 6-9 cited at the beginning of the present chapter),
are characterized by moderation and equilibrium. In the same way in which
he resigns himself to his unfair banishment – that initiates the first part of the
plot – the hero accepts, as God’s test for which he must give thanks, the news
of the outrage suffered by his daughters in Corpes – which initiates the second
part – with an analogous opening formula, characteristic of the hero, and the
gesture of touching his beard to which the Poema attributes a clear oratorical
value:52
una grand ora pensó e comidió,

alçó la su mano, a la barba se tomó:
− ¡Grado a Christus, que del mundo es señor,
46 On this topic, Varvaro’s essay, “La costruzione del personaggio”, is essential.

47 Alonso, Ensayos sobre poesía española, p. 89.
48 Segre, Le strutture e il tempo, pp. 45-46.
49 More precisely, by the content and tone of their discourse. Features pertaining to an “idio-
lect” are rare, as in the case of swearing to Esidro, which is exclusive to King Alfonso, who
historically has been identified as his devout follower; or the use of tu instead of vos,
which except for the case of Avengalvón, is a characteristic of the discourse of Muslims,
reflecting the Romance used by Andalusians.
50 It may be introduced by a verbum dicendi, a “narrative clue” (constituted not by a diction
verb, for example sonrisarse, or by a formula, such as en pie se levantó, which preludes to
words enunciated by the character); Girón Alconchel’s study, Las formas del dicurso refe-
rido, is central to this discussion, and may be read alongside Alonso, “El anuncio del estilo
directo”; Geary, Formulaic Diction, pp. 34-56, 119-22; and Montgomery, “Marking Voices
and Places”.
51 Multi-layer utterances, which combine different types of reported speech, are also pres-
ent. Therefore, the same speech can be made in part in direct style and in part in reported
speech fusing words and facts (for example, vv. 574-610, 1787-91, and 1819-20).
52 Caldera, “L’oratoria”, p. 7.
226 Luongo
cuando tal ondra me an dada los ifantes de Carrión!

¡Par aquesta barba que nadi non messó,
non la lograrán los ifantes de Carrión,
que a mis fijas bien las casaré yo! (2828-34)
Mesura – that is, self-control, control over situations, and control over impulses
(rebellion in one case and revenge in the other) – is the trait of the Cid’s char-
acter53 that cements a series of complementary qualities (shrewdness, humor,
commitment to his family, caution, far-sightedness, being a good tactician,
comradeship, leadership, eloquence, bravery, loyalty, generosity, authority,
etc.)54 that can ultimately be ascribed to the topical pair sapientia and fortitu-
do.55 Some of these qualities are expressed through cunning irony as when the
Cid welcomes Rachel and Vidas56 (the episode is introduced by “Sonirisós’”,
which in all other instances connotes a friendly and positive disposition):
Sonrisós’ mio Cid, estávalos fablando:

− ¡Ya don Rachel e Vidas, avédesme olbidado!
Ya me exco de tierra, ca del rey só airado;
a lo que·m’ semeja, de lo mio avredes algo,
mientra que vivades non seredes menguados. (154-58)
Or by the witty remarks directed at Count Ramón when the Cid leans over him
and urges him to eat as if he were a baby:57
53 Critics of the Poema have unanimously recognized this; see Menéndez Pidal, En torno al
“Poema del Cid”, pp. 226-31; Galmés de Fuentes; “Épica árabe y épica castellana”, pp. 157-59;
López Estrada, Panorama crítico, pp. 115-17; C.C. Smith, The Making of the Poema de mio
Cid, pp. 93-94; Gargano, “Tra difetto ed eccesso di prodezza”, pp. 315 onward; Deyermond,
El “Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 23-26; and Moreno Castillo, “El Cantar del Cid”, pp. 33-38.
Regarding this quality of the medieval hero, see Huppé, “The Concept of the Hero”; Pick-
ering, “Historical Thought and Moral Codes”; and Zotz, “El mundo caballeresco”.
54 They are highlighted by, among others, Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid, vol. II, pp. 593-
624; De Chasca, El arte juglaresco, pp. 125-46; López Estrada, Panorama crítico, pp. 62-68,
111-31; and Mallorquí Ruscalleda, “La configuración del protagonista”.
55 The reference to Curtius, Europäische Literatur, cap. IX, §§ 2-4, is fundamental here. Also
see Schafler, “Sapientia et fortitudo”; Hart, “Characterization and Plot Structure”, pp. 64-68;
Murray, Razón y sociedad, pp. 144-57; Misrahi and Hendrickson, “Roland and Oliver”; and
Montaner Frutos, “El Cid: mito y símbolo”, pp. 266-69.
56 Connected to the hilaritas and curialis facecia studied by Le Goff, “Laughter in the Middle
Ages”; and Zotz, “El mundo caballeresco”, in particular pp. 180, 185, and 187.
57 Regarding this episode, see Moon, “Humor in the Poema del Cid”, pp. 702-03; Oleza, “Análi-
sis estructural del humorismo”, pp. 197-207; West, “A Proposed Literary Context”; Corfis,
Sobr’él sedié el que en buen ora nasco:

− Si bien non comedes, conde, don yo sea pagado,
aquí feremos la morada, no nos partiremos amos. (1053-55)
During the farewell, the Cid plays on the double meaning of the term “franco”
(‘Catalan’ and ‘free man’ – but in this context it also takes on the meaning of
‘boastful, self-conscious’), which contrasts with “castellano” in the previous
verse:
fata cabo del albergada escurriólos el castellano:

− ¡Ya vos ides, conde, a guisa de muy franco!
¡En grado vos lo tengo lo que me avedes dexado!
Si vos viniere emiente que quisiéredes vengallo,
si me viniéredes buscar, fallarme podredes,
e si non, mandedes buscar, o me dexaredes
de lo vuestro o de lo mio levaredes algo. (1067-73)
The Cid reveals his worries and displays affection for his wife and daughters,58
who are lovingly addressed:
llora de los ojos, tan fuertemientre sospira:

− ¡Ya doña Ximena, la mi mugier tan conplida,
commo a la mi alma yo tanto vos quería!
Ya lo vedes, que partirnos emos en vida,
yo iré, e vós fincaredes remanida.
¡Plega a Dios e a Santa María
que aún con mis manos case estas mis fijas,
o qué dé ventura e algunos días vida,
e vós, mugier ondrada, de mí seades servida! (277-84)
Oíd lo que dixo el que en buen ora nasco:

− Vós querida e ondrada mugier, e amas mis fijas,
mi coraçón e mi alma,
entrad comigo en Valencia la casa,
en esta heredad que vos yo he ganada. (1603-07)
“The Count of Barcelona Episode”; Esposito, “Comed, comde”; C.C. Smith, “Tone of Voice”,
pp. 9-12; Ryan, “Del día que fue conde”; and Bautista, “Comed, conde”.
58 These feelings are especially emphasized by A. González, “Los sentimientos del Cid”.
228 Luongo
The Campeador shows caution and makes shared and wise decisions (as in the
efficacy, among others, of his words in the third example below, where, accord-
ing to the laws of rhetoric, a solemn announcement always follows a maxim):
− Moros en paz, ca escripta es la carta,

buscarnos ie el rey Alfonso con toda su mesnada.
Quitar quiero Castejón; oíd, escuelas e Minaya,
lo que yo dixier non lo tengades a mal:
en Casejón non podriemos fincar,
cerca es el rey Alfonso e buscarnos verná,
mas el castiello non lo quiero hermar,
ciento moros e ciento moras quiérolas quitar,
porque lo pris d’ellos, que de mí non digan mal.
Todos sodes pagados e ninguno por pagar,
cras a la mañana pensemos de cavalgar;
con Alfonso mio señor non querría lidiar. (527-38)
mio Cid con los sos tornós’ a acordar:

− El agua nos an vedada, exirnos ha el pan.
Que nos queramos ir de noch no nos lo consintrán;
grandes son los poderes por con ellos lidiar.
Dezidme, cavalleros, cómmo vos plaze de far. (666-70)
Sonrisós’ el caboso, que non lo pudo endurar:

− ¡Ya cavalleros! Dezirvos he la verdad:
qui en un logar mora siempre lo so puede menguar.
Cras a la mañana pensemos de cavalgar,
dexat estas posadas e iremos adelant. (946-50)
His ability to lead is revealed by the firmness with which Rodrigo gives orders:
− ¡Ya cavalleros, apart fazed la ganancia,

apriessa vos guarnid e metedos en las armas!
El conde don Remont darnos ha grant batalla,
de moros e de cristianos gentes trae sobejanas,
a menos de batalla non nos dexarié por nada.
Pues adelant irán tras nós, aquí sea la batalla;
apretad los cavallos e bistades las armas.
Ellos vienen cuesta yuso e todos traen calças,
e las siellas coceras e las cinchas amojadas;
nós cavalgaremos siellas gallegas e huesas sobre calças,

ciento cavalleros devemos vencer [a] aquellas mesnadas.
Antes que ellos lleguen al llano presentémosles las lanças:
por uno que firgades tres siellas irán vazias.
Verá Remont Verenguel tras quién vino en alcança,
oy en este pinar de Tévar por tollerme la ganancia. (985-99)
alegre es mio Cid por cuanto fecho han:

− ¡Oídme, cavalleros, non rastará por ál:
oy es día bueno e mejor será cras!
Por la mañana prieta todos armados seades.
Dezirnos ha la missa e pensad de cabalgar,
el obispo do[n] Jéronimo soltura nos dará.
Irlos hemos ferir en el nombre del Criador e del apóstol Santi Yagüe.
¡Más vale que nós lo vezcamos que ellos cojan el pan! (1684-91)
When he addresses his companions, the Cid speaks with dignity:
el que en buena ora nasco compeçó de fablar:

− ¡Oíd, mesnadas, sí el Criador vos salve!
Después que nos partiemos de la linpia cristiandad
(non fue a nuestro grado ni nós non pudiemos más),
grado a Dios, lo nuestro fue adelant.
Los de Valencia cercados nos han;
si en estas tierras quisiéremos durar,
firmemientre son éstos a escarmentar.
Passe la noche e venga la mañana,

aparejados me sed a cavallos e armas;
iremos ver aquella su almofalla.
Commo omnes exidos de tierra estraña,
allí pareçrá el que merece la soldada. (1114-26)
The hero is bold in battle:
¡En el nombre del Criador e del apóstol Santi Yagüe,

feridlos, cavalleros, d’amor e de grado e de grand voluntad,
ca yo só Ruy Díaz, mio Cid el de Bivar! (1138-40)
230 Luongo
He proves his loyalty in the declarations of fealty to the king who has banished
him:59
alégras’le el coraçón e tornós’ a sonrisar:

− ¡Grado a Dios, Minaya, e a Santa María madre,
con más pocos ixiemos de la casa de Bivar!
Agora avemos riqueza, más avremos adelant.
Si a vós ploguiere, Minaya, e non vos caya en pesar,
enbiarvos quiero a Castiella, do avemos heredades,
al rey Alfonso, mio señor natural;
d’estas mis ganancias que avemos fechas acá
darle quiero C cavallos e vós idgelos levar.
Desí, por mí besalde la mano e firme ge lo rogad
por mi mugier e mis fijas, si fuere su merced,
que·m’ las dexe sacar. (1266-77)
Rodrigo always keeps his promises of rich rewards and lavish donations:
Fabló mio Cid de toda voluntad:

− Yo ruego a Dios e al Padre spirital,
vós que por mí dexades casas e heredades,
enantes que yo muera, algún bien vos pueda far,
lo que perdedes, doblado vos lo cobrar. (299-303)
Sobre el so cavallo Bavieca mio Cid salto dava:

− Aquí lo digo ante mio señor el rey Alfonso:
qui quiere ir comigo a las bodas o recebir mi don,
d’aquend vaya comigo, cuedo que l’avrá pro (2127-30)
The hero is calm and expresses himself with gravity and juridical rigor at the
cortes of Toledo:60
59 The relationship between the Cid and King Alfonso has been studied in detail by De
Chasca, “The King-Vassal Relationship” (also in El arte juglaresco, pp. 63-82); Hart, “Hier-
archical Patterns”; Pollmann, La épica en las literaturas románicas, pp. 72 onward; Clarke,
Crucial Line 20; Walker, “The Role of the King”; West, “King and Vassal”, “Mediaeval Histo-
riography Misconstrued”, and “The Cid and Alfonso VI”; Pardo, “La imagen del rey”; Dug-
gan, The “Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 33-35; C. González, “El conflicto entre el héroe y el rey”;
and Pedrosa, “El Cid donador”.
60 See Pavlović and Walker, “Roman Forensic Procedure” and “A Reappraisal of the Closing
Scenes”.
Mio Cid la mano besó al rey e en pie se levantó:

− Mucho vos lo gradesco, commo a rey e a señor,
por cuanto esta cort fiziestes por mi amor.
Esto les demando a ifantes de Carrión:
por mis fijas que·m’ dexaron yo non he desonor,
ca vós las casastes, rey, sabredes qué fer oy;
mas cuando sacaron mis fijas de Valencia la mayor,
yo bien los quería d’alma e de coraçón,
diles dos espadas, a Colada e a Tizón
(éstas yo las gané a guisa de varón),
que s’ondrassen con ellas e sirviessen a vós.
Cuando dexaron mis fijas en el robredo de Corpes,
comigo non quisieron aver nada e perdieron mi amor:
¡denme mis espadas cuando mios yernos non son! (3145-58)
− ¡Merced, [ya] rey señor, por amor de caridad!

La rencura mayor non se me puede olbidar;
oídme toda la cort e pésevos de mio mal;
de los ifantes de Carrión, que·m’ desondraron tan mal,
a menos de riebtos no los puedo dexar.
Dezid, ¿qué vos merecí, ifantes, en juego o en vero

o en alguna razón? Aquí lo mejoraré a juvizio de la cort.
¿A qué·m’ descubriestes las telas del coraçón?
A la salida de Valencia mis fijas vos di yo
con muy grand ondra e averes a nombre.
Cuando las non queriedes, ya canes traidores,
¿por qué las sacávades de Valencia, sus honores?
¿A qué las firiestes a cinchas e a espolones?
Solas las dexastes en el robredo de Corpes,
a las bestias fieras e a las aves del mont.
¡Por cuanto les fiziestes, menos valedes vós !
Si non recudedes, véalo esta cort. (3253-69)
Different tones and registers also are skillfully used to characterize the speech
of other characters.61 Thus, Jimena62 stands out because of the religious devo-
61 For a description of the main characters of the Poema, see C.C. Smith, Poema de mio Cid,
pp. 341-60; and Montaner Frutos, “El Cid: mito y símbolo”, pp. 260-74.
62 For a study of her character, I refer the reader to Ratcliffe, Jimena, pp. 25-62.
232 Luongo
tion of her prayers (the longest one takes up vv. 330-65) and the passive nature
of her replies:
Ant’el Campeador, doña Ximena fincó los inojos amos,

llorava de los ojos, quísol’ besar las manos:
− ¡Merced, Canpeador, en ora buena fuestes nado!
Por malos mestureros de tierra sodes echado.
¡Merced, ya Cid, barba tan conplida!

Fem’ ante vós yo e vuestras fijas, ifantes son e de días chicas,
con aquesteas mis dueñas, de quien só yo servida.
Yo lo veo, que estades vós en ida,
e nós de vós partirnos hemos en vida:
¡dadnos consejo, por amor de Santa María! (264-73)
Álvar Fáñez distinguishes himself for frequently making recommendations to

the Campeador, and for his declarations of unshakable loyalty – which make
him, in the words of the protagonist, his “diestro braço” (vv. 753, 810), a sort of
double (“Dixo el Campeador: − A mi guisa fablastes, / ondrástevos, Minaya, ca
avérvoslo iedes de far. −”, vv. 677-78) –, and for his diplomatic skills shown in
the three embassies to King Alfonso.63 According to Ermanno Caldera,64 the
second mission is a small masterpiece of eloquence (“fabló tan apuesto”, as the
narrator remarks):
− ¡Merced, señor Alfonso, por amor del Criador!

Besávavos las manos mio Cid lidiador,
los pies e las manos, commo a tan buen señor,
que l’ayades merced, sí vos vala el Criador.
Echástesle de tierra, non ha la vuestra amor;
maguer en tierra agena, él bien faze lo so:
ganada á [a] Xérica e a Onda por nombre,
priso a Almenar e a Murviedro, que es miyor,
assí fizo Cebolla e adelant Castejón
63 The role of the Cid’s “diestro braço” is analyzed in detail by Menéndez Pidal, En torno al
“Poema del Cid”, pp. 167-70; Varvaro, “Dalla storia alla poesia”; Garci-Gómez, “Mio Cid”.
Estudios de endocrítica, pp. 68-83; Martínez, El “Poema de Almería”, pp. 375-88; Montaner
Frutos, “El Cid: mito y símbolo”, pp. 262-63; Pavlović and Walker, “Asil creçe la ondra”;
R.R. Smith, “Álvar Fáñez: el alter-ego”; and Kaplan, “Friend ‘of’ Foe”.
64 Caldera, “L’oratoria”, pp. 8-10.
e Peña Cadiella, que es una peña fuert;

con aquestas todas de Valencia es señor.
Obispo fizo de su mano el buen Campeador
e fizo cinco lides campales e todas las arrancó.
Grandes son las ganancias que·l’ dio el Criador,
fevos aquí las señas, verdad vos digo yo:
cient cavallos gruessos e corredores,
de siellas e de frenos todos guarnidos son,
bésavos las manos que los prendades vós ;
razónas’ por vuestro vassallo e a vós tiene por señor. (1321-39)
The principal divisions recommended by rhetoricians are easily recognized in

this speech: the exordium (vv. 1321-23), with the address to the king and the
obsequious greeting; the narratio (vv. 1324-26), the request of forgiveness and
exposition of the case: the Cid, even if exiled, conducts himself as a faithful
vassal; the argumentatio (vv. 1327-38), the longest part of the speech, in which
Rodrigo’s loyalty is demonstrated, consisting in a long list of his conquests and
in the reasons which should persuade the king to grant his pardon: the heroism
of the Campeador, the actual power he has acquired, and, lastly, the gifts he has
sent whose value is detailed; the conclusio, condensed in a single verse, notably
charged and expressive (1339).65
Martín Antolínez should also be mentioned not only because of the way he
shrewdly outwits the moneylenders in Burgos, but because of his planning,
lucidity, and the choices that he makes:66
65 According to Caldera, “Se poi se ne osserva l’intima struttura, non è difficile scorgervi
sapienti rispondenze fra le varie parti. Tale l’espressione ‘besavavos las manos’ del sec-
ondo verso, che ritorna, con perfetta simmetria, nel ‘besavos las manos’ del penultimo;
tali, nella parte centrale, i quattro versi dedicati all’elenco delle conquiste, cui fanno ris-
contro altrettanti nei quali viene descritto il bottino radunato. Occorrerà pure rilevare
l’iterazione nel primo emistichio dei vv. 1322 e 1323 […], o il parallelismo chiastico fra i
primi emistichi dei vv. 1325 e 1326 […], in cui l’aggettivo del secondo verso richiama il
verbo del primo (per non rilevare la troppo evidente contrapposizione fra i due secondi
emistichi). E si dovrà ancora sottolineare l’amplificazione retorica – la quale non solo
risponde a un’esigenza formale, ma giova a imprimere una particolare forza al contenuto
– che compare, oltre che nel […] verso finale, anche nel v. 1330” (“L’oratoria”, pp. 9-10).
66 By serving his lord and sharing his destiny, he is counting on the hope that one day he will
be able to regain the king’s friendship once the fracture between Rodrigo and the king is
overcome –also thanks to his support – and the order is re-established; see Gargano,
“L’universo sociale della Castiglia”, pp. 205-08.
234 Luongo
Fabló Martín A[n]tolínez, odredes lo que á dicho:

− ¡Ya Canpeador, en buen ora fuestes nacido!
Esta noch y[a]gamos e váimosnos al matino,
ca acusado seré por lo que vos he servido,
en ira del rey Alfonso yo seré metido.
Si convusco escapo sano o bivo,
aun cerca o tarde el rey quererm’á por amigo;
si non, cuanto dexo no lo precio un figo. (70-77)
Dixo Martín Antolínez, − Veré a la mugier a todo mio solaz;

castigarlos he cómmo abrán a far.
Si el rey me lo quisiere tomar, a mí non m’incal.
Antes seré convusco que el sol quiera rayar. (228-31)
As expected, King Alfonso distinguishes himself for the formal nature of his
declarations, often introduced with appeals and calls for attention which are
typical of a public allocution:67
− ¡Oídme, las escuelas, cuendes e ifançones!

Cometer quiero un ruego a mio Cid el Campeador,
assí lo mande Christus que sea a so pro:
vuestras fijas vos pido, don Elvira e doña Sol,
que las dedes por mugieres a los ifantes de Carrión.
Seméjam’ el casamiento ondrado e con grant pro,
ellos vos las piden e mándovoslo yo.
D’ella e d’ella parte cuantos que aquí son,
Los míos e los vuestros, que sean rogadores :
¡dándoslas, mio Cid, sí vos vala el Criador! (2072-81)
Yet, the king is a unique case: he is the only character who evolves. If at the
beginning of the Poema he is associated with the agents of evil, the “enemigos
malos”, and is responsible for the injustices towards the hero, he progressively
distances himself from the initial posture until finally recognizing his mistake
(vv. 1890-91).68 The “saña” that results in the Cid’s exile is transformed into
friendship in a process marked by the three “presentajas” (gifts) sent by the
Campeador, who receives larger and larger concessions from King Alfonso. As
an example of this progression, it suffices to compare the reaction to Álvar
68 The process is analyzed in detail by Lacarra, “La representación del rey Alfonso”.
Fáñez’s first and second embassies; in the first case, without formalities and
not devoid of irony, commencing with the apostrophe of v. 874, not to mention
the deriding vulgarity of v. 881:69
− ¿Quí·n’ los dio éstos, sí vos vala Dios, Minaya? –

[…]
Dixo el rey: − Mucho es mañana
omne airado, que de señor non ha gracia,
por acogello a cabo de tres semanas.
Mas, después que de moros fue, prendo esta presentaja;
aún me plaze de mio Cid, que fizo tal ganancia.
Sobr’esto todo, a vos quito, Minaya;
honores e tierras avellas condonadas.
Id e venit, d’aquí vos dó mi gracia,
mas del Cid Campeador yo non vos digo nada. (874, 881-89)
Compare this reaction with the majestic tone of King Alfonso’s response to the
second plea:
Alçó la mano diestra, el rey se santigó:

− De tan fieras ganancias commo á fechas el Campeador,
sí me vala Sant Esidro, plazme de coraçón
e plázem’ de las nuevas que faze el Campeador;
recibo estos cavallos que m’enbía de don. −
[…]
¡Oídme, escuelas e toda la mi cort!
Non quiero que nada pierda el Campeador:
a todas las escuelas que a él dizen señor
porque los deseredé, todo ge lo suelto yo;
sírvanle[s] sus heredades do fuere el Campeador,
atrégoles los cuerpos de mal e de ocasión,
por tal fago aquesto que sirvan a so señor. (1340-44, 1360-66)
The Campeador’s immutable rivals are instead identified by the axiological

distinction between “good” and “evil” typically found in epic poetry.70 The
clash with the Cid – which is only a possibility during the first part, since
the enemies are the main cause of Rodrigo’s misfortune – becomes effective in
70 See Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, pp. 325-26.
236 Luongo
the second part through the personification of evil in the Infantes of Carrión.71
The trait that distinguishes, and at the same time associates, the brothers’
voices (at times literally, since the two speak in unison) is the duplicity, the
mendacious and deceptive nature of their conversations. This is what Pero
Vermúdez openly brings up against Fernando at the cortes: “¡Lengua sin manos,
cuémo osas fablar!” (v. 3328), and what Martín Antolínez ascribes to Diego:
“¡Calla, alevoso, boca sin verdad!” (v. 3362). According to Caldera, “All’uno e
all’altro s’impone di tacere in nome di quella verità che la loro lingua e la loro
bocca hanno violata”.72 As I mentioned earlier, the Infantes often confabulate
among themselves on the side declaring in private what they would never pub-
licly confess. When King Bucar’s army surrounds Valencia:
Amos hermanos apart salidos son:

− Catamos la ganancia e la pérdida no.
Ya en esta batalla a entrar abremos nós,
esto es aguisado por non ver Carrión,
bibdas remandrán fijas del Campeador. (2319-23)
Fernando misrepresents their vile behavior during the battle, a brag that
arouses sarcasm among the Cid’s men:
Venciemos moros en campo e matamos

a aquel rey Bucar, traidor provado.
[…]
A estas palabras fabló Ferrán Gonçález:
− Grado al Criador e a vós, Cid ondrado,
tantos avemos de averes que no son contados.
Por vós avemos ondra e avemos lidiado.
Pensad de lo otro, que lo nuestro tenémoslo en salvo. (2522-23, 2527-31)
71 Numerous studies have been dedicated to the Infantes – who are represented as greedy,
mean, and cowardly from the first episode in which they appear – as well as to their antag-
onistic relationship with Rodrigo, whom they challenge by means of their rank. For more
on this matter, see Alonso, Ensayos sobre poesía española, pp. 84-90; Hart, “The Infantes de
Carrión” and “Hierarchical Patterns”, pp. 169-72; De Chasca, El arte juglaresco, pp. 100-03,
192-94, 305-08; López Estrada, Panorama crítico, pp. 157-61; Montaner Frutos, “El Cid: mito
y símbolo”, pp. 234-35, 271-72; Montgomery, “The Rethoric of Solidarity”, pp. 201-04; Dug-
gan, The “Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 36-41; Sears, “Echado de tierra”, pp. 59-89; and Alberro,
“Las tres funciones”.
The two brothers harbor resentment, plot revenge (vv. 2540-56), and justify
their departure by lying:
Con aqueste consejo amos tornados son,

fabló Ferrán Gonçález e fizo callar la cort:
− ¡Sí vos vala el Criador, Cid Campeador!
Que plega a doña Ximena e primero a vós,
e a Minaya Álvar Fáñez e a cuantos aquí son:
dadnos nuestras mugieres que avemos a bendiciones,
levarlas hemos a nuestras tierras de Carrión,
meterlas hemos en las villas
que les diemos por arras e por onores.
Verán vuestras fijas lo que avemos nós,
los fijos que oviéremos en qué avrán partición. (2557-67)
Opposite to their false words − which reflect their mean, disloyal, shifty, and
premeditated behavior, which also violates the feudal and familial bond that
connects them to the hero − stands Rodrigo’s wise and measured eloquence,
reflected in his cautious, noble, loyal, transparent, and unpremeditated behav-
ior. The moral distinction73 between the Cid and the values he represents, and
those of the rival camp personified by the Infantes of Carrión who do not share
the same beliefs, underscores the clear-cut differentiation centered around
the correspondence/discordance separating intentions, utterances, and their
ensuing actions.
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242 Luongo
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Nausícaä, 2003, pp. 287-315.
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Fernando Castillo Cáceres (ed.), Literatura, imágenes y milicia en la tercera salida de
Don Quijote, Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 2005, pp. 65-100.
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Philology 22 (1968), 253-74.
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Language Notes 102 (1987), 191-205.
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Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 68 (1991), 355-69.
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246 Luongo
Figure 7.1 Singular combat (David and Goliath) and open-field battle (the Israelites
against the Philistines). Miniatures of the Biblia románica (1162) (León,
Colegiata de San Isidoro, codex 2). With kind permission of the
MUSEO DE LA REAL COLEGIATA de San Isidoro.
Oral Expression in the Poema de mio Cid 247
Chapter 8
Oral Expression in the Poema de mio Cid

Matthew Bailey
The extent to which oral expression shapes the Poema de mio Cid has been a
lively issue among scholars, who for some time understood oral composition
and writing as mutually exclusive endeavors, representative of two distinct
worlds, the unlettered and the learned. More recently, the polemical ques-
tion of the Cid’s oral composition has been effectively shelved in favor of an
approach that recognizes varying degrees of literate and oral influences. The
learned influences in the Cid have led specialists to conclude that the poem
was composed in writing, while the expressive features identified as char-
acteristic of oral poetry are considered echoes of narratives that a learned
author assimilated and reproduced as part of his written composition.1 Yet,
this compositional model is not consistent with findings in related fields of
study. Historians and linguists maintain that the European Middle Ages were
essentially oral, in that writing was dictated and reading was done “viva voce”.2
In fact, the most distinguishing characteristic of this period may well be its
unique mix of orality and writing, a circumstance memorably encapsulated in
1 Thomas Montgomery brings to our attention an archaic formal language preserved in the Cid
that points to a “habit of oral composition latent in the poem’s background” (Montgomery,
Medieval Spanish Epic, p. 111). However, “tradition-based epic texts such as the Poema del Cid
stand at the juncture of orality – language heard – and literacy – language seen and accord-
ingly preserved”, and Montgomery sees the possible influence of writing in the bold measures
the poet has taken “to bend his story to convey messages that are of his time rather than in-
herited with the tradition”, but does not attempt to answer “whether the Cid has undergone
such [writing influenced] revisions with the aid of the tool of writing” (p. 150). Alan Deyermond
assumes a long period of oral composition for the Spanish epic, and the probable memoriza-
tion of much of the Cid in its extant form (Deyermond, La literatura perdida, p. 52). John S.
Miletich distinguishes “hemistichs in which a similar idea recurs from those in which there
is no such recurrence” (Miletich, “Repetition and Aesthetic Function”, p. 189), as a tool for
determining the degree of oral or literate composition of a text, which leads him to conclude
that “[…] the Poema de mio Cid is a text composed in writing in which oral tradition has to
some extent played a part, and that it was destined for oral diffusion” (p. 194). Irene Zaderenko
postulates that the entire poem was composed in writing, although some sources may have
been oral (Zaderenko, Problemas de autoría, pp. 88, 126, 153, 170, 188, 191-92).
2 Fleischmann, Tense and Narrativity, p. 20.

248 Bailey
Zumthor’s notion of “mixed orality where the influence of the written remains
external to it, as well as partial or retarded”.3
In an effort to delve deeper and to clarify our understanding of the compo-
sitional process employed in medieval Spain, and in particular in the creation
of the Cid, this essay will review pertinent findings in related fields of study,
especially in medieval history and linguistics, and in that process provide a
foundation for the subsequent analysis of the expressive characteristics of the
Cid. Some of the material in this essay reflects previous efforts on my part to
incorporate the findings of scholars from a variety of fields into Spanish epic
studies, but the organization and emphasis are new, along with the promising
venue in which it appears.
In medieval Europe illitteratus was the term used to denote someone
who knew no Latin, while litteratus meant that a person knew Latin, or was
“learned”. A parallel antithesis is that of clericus and laicus, although none of
these terms may be used in a strictly modern sense. A monk or cleric might
well be illitteratus while a knight might in turn be referred to as clericus, in the
sense of being learned.4 Reading and writing did not go hand in hand as they
do today. Literary works were intended for reading aloud, whether in Latin or
the vernacular, a practice referred to as oratio. Traditional monastic reading,
lectio, was more a process of savoring the divine wisdom in a book than of
finding new ideas or novel information. The ability to put pen to parchment
was a specialized skill because it was difficult. This was the practice of scribes,
who themselves may not have been litteratus. Writing in the modern sense of
composition usually was referred to as dictitare (literally “to dictate”). The use
of “writing” (scriptitare) is confined to making fair copy on parchment.5
Thomas Aquinas, one of the most celebrated learned men of the Middle
Ages, redacted his texts with varying degrees of oral composition. According to
the portrayal offered by Mary Carruthers, Thomas transcribed his early works
in a littera inintelligibilis (an unintelligible script), writing ostensibly designed
not to be read by anyone but the author himself. He would then call his scribes
to take down the text in a legible hand while he read his own autograph aloud.
When one scribe tired another would take his place. His later works, however,
seem to have been dictated completely from memory. This does not mean that
Thomas did not consult texts; he did, sometimes asking his scribes to make
copies for his use. But the process of composition seems to have occurred once
these texts were committed to memory. As one of his scribes attests, his dicta-
3 Zumthor, Oral Poetry, p. 25.

4 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 177-82.
5 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 216-18.
tion would flow and it “ran so clearly that it was as if the master were reading
aloud from a book under his eyes”.6
Other testimonies of medieval composition describe it as an oral process,
although revisions followed oral delivery. The 12th-century preacher Bernard
de Clairvaux assumed that his sermons would be easily recalled from one day
to the next, but he had them recorded for good measure. His words “were writ-
ten down [scripta] as they were spoken [dicta], that is, recorded by pen [excepta
stylo]”. Bernard’s literary production also could occur in “three phases, compo-
sition (dictare), transcription (transcribi), and publication [edidi]”, or might
include “oral presentation in small groups [conferre], writing out [scribere],
revisions for correction [recogitare, corrigere], and the putting out of an anthol-
ogy [legendum praebere]”.7 Eadmer of Canterbury, who wished to conceal
from St. Anselm the redaction of his biography, was well along in the process of
composing on wax tablets and transcribing onto parchment when Anselm
asked what it was he [“I”] was composing and copying (quid dictitarem, quid
scriptitarem).8 In the redaction of the miracles of St. Foy, Bernard of Angers
took accounts from eyewitnesses he interviewed. He hastily scribbled notes
that he took with him to Angers “not to add superfluous information, but to
prune repetitions and to rework the whole into a concise, organized literary
product”.9 As required by canonical procedure there were two texts, the ver-
bal transcript of the testimonies and the later version (lectio) composed in
Angers.
As these examples demonstrate, in medieval Europe even texts composed
in writing often involved some degree of oral dictation. In the monastic com-
munities where texts were produced, new compositions were based on texts
that were familiar to the entire community, and yet their composition did not
require the physical presence of a source manuscript. Medievalists have
focused a lot of attention on the processes involved in the memorization and
subsequent retrieval of texts. Reading a text in order to understand its mean-
ing, the modern day notion of studying, in the medieval period is known as
lectio, but to read and assimilate a text, making its meaning one’s own, is
referred to as meditatio.10 One of the most frequent and longest-lived images
for this process is ruminatio (chewing the cud), based on the movement of the
mouth, murmur, that accompanies memorization of a text. Composition is
6 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 6.

7 Stock, The Implications of Literacy, p. 409.
8 Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 218.
9 Stock, The Implications of Literacy, p. 65.
10 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 162.
250 Bailey
also spoken of as ruminatio, in the sense of regurgitation, or in that the read-

ings are collected through meditatio and then recollected through ruminatio.11
In this imagery there is a dialogue between two minds made possible through
the medium of the text. The teachings are read and understood (lectio), then
assimilated by the reader through meditatio, continued rumination later forms
the basis for their recollection and, when deemed fruitful, they later form the
basis of a new composition.
The techniques involved in producing a new composition constituted a
craft that was learned through the imitation of a master’s methods and experi-
ence, a craft referred to recently as “monastic rhetoric”.12 It was designed to
lead the most adept practitioners to vision, which is understood as “the activity
of composing”, as it “results in the writing down of an entirely new composition”.13
As Carruthers outlines the practice, it begins with inventive memory work, the
reading or recitation of a familiar text. This is followed by fear or dread, a nec-
essary “compunction” that leads the practitioner into intense meditation or
prayer, communion with the divine (a vision or visitation), and finally a return
to the everyday world with new knowledge or confidence.
Medieval Spanish literature provides some interesting examples of this rhe-
torical orthopraxis and its role in the creation of narratives. Among these are
Berceo’s Poema de Santa Oria, a vernacular narrative poem on the life of the
virgin recluse Oria (Saint Aurea); the description of the retrieval and convey-
ance of the remains of Saint Isidore from the Muslim city of Seville to León
during the reign of Fernando I of Castile and León, known as the Translatio
Sancti Isidori; an episode from the Liber de Miraculi Sancti Isidori, attributed to
Lucas de Tuy, involving Saint Martin of León; and of course the Latin texts
relating the deeds of Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid.14
These examples confirm that writing was the manner in which learned texts
were conveyed, and yet even these involved varying degrees of oral composi-
tion. Epic narrative poems would also have been dictated orally as part of the
process of placing them onto parchment, yet there was probably little concern
on the part of the scribes to alter the stylized vernacular expression of the
poets, since they would have had no training to help them with that task.
Nevertheless, the very process of transferring the poem to parchment required
the participation of clerics and scribes, and their presence surely served to
expose it to some degree of learned tendencies. It seems reasonable to assume
11 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 165-68.

12 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, pp. 2-3.
13 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, p. 183.
14 Bailey, The Poetics of Speech, pp. 26-46.
that seeing the act of preserving the Cid on parchment as anything but a con-
tinuum involving speech and writing is inappropriate for the period.15
The modern understanding of the Spanish epic begins with the work of
Ramón Menéndez Pidal who published extensively throughout the first half of
the 20th century.16 The exceptional quality of his work is manifested by its
continued relevance among scholars, and by the fact that many of the current
assumptions about the Cid can be traced directly to him. For Menéndez Pidal
epic poetry is inspired in the emotional and poetic narration of contemporary
events.17 It is written poetry, composed in a style appropriate for oral perfor-
mance before expectant audiences.18 The metrical style is kept simple as an
15 Sharp distinctions between oral and written modes of expression are also inappropriate
for the modern period, and modern scholars have long questioned absolute distinctions
between them. Ruth Finnegan, an anthropologist, provides evidence of a wide array of
oral poetry, some of it composed orally but much of it memorized with or without the aid
of written texts (Finnegan, Oral Poetry).
16 For Menéndez Pidal’s work, see Luis Galván’s chapter in this volume.
17 Menéndez Pidal, En torno al Poema de mio Cid, p. 189.
18 Menéndez Pidal, En torno al Poema de mio Cid, pp. 200-02. There is no serious questioning
of the genesis of the Spanish epic by Menéndez Pidal and therefore no clear statement on
epic composition. He simply assumes that the poem is written and makes a number of
indirect statements to that effect. In these statements he seems to be simply stating what
for him is obvious. For instance, the proof that the story of the Moorish Princess Zaida is
a written epic narrative lies in the many details proffered, these are “pormenores profusos
que las tradiciones orales son incapaces de conservar”, such detail “tenía que conservarse
en un relato escrito” (Menéndez Pidal, De primitiva lírica española, pp. 55-56). Menéndez
Pidal refers to the written epic in the context of its recitation by juglares, specifying that
we cannot speak of minstrels, because we don’t know the names of any of them, we must
speak of “obras de carácter juglaresco”: “A los autores de éstas llamaremos juglares, sin
tener seguridad de que lo fuesen, es decir, sin saber si hacían de la recitación de los poe-
mas un oficio o modo de vivir, o si eran hombres de otra posición social, que escribían
para abastecer la recitación pública de los que a esta profesión se dedicaban” (Poesía jug-
laresca, p. 190 [1924, p. 313]). In a clarification of what he means by juglares, Menéndez
Pidal states “al hablar de ‘juglares’ en el siglo XII, no quiero decir sino ‘poetas que escriben
para legos’, pero no ‘poetas indoctos’, desconocedores de la literatura latina”. Also, “El jug-
lar del Cid (entiéndase juglar docto y altísimo poeta) escribe para gentes que saben […]”
(Poesía juglaresca, p. 80, p. 92). In his later work, Menéndez Pidal continues to assume a
written text for the Cid, and even goes so far as to distinguish two distinct styles and
emphases in the first and second halves of the poem. Here again, the fact that the poem
is written is not emphasized, the emphasis is on clarifying its date of composition: “La
fecha en que escribió este poeta de Gormaz debió ser a raíz de la muerte del héroe”, and
again: “Cuando el poeta de Gormaz escribe […]” (En torno al Poema de mio Cid, p. 146).
Finally, while speaking of the poem’s swift success, and in reference to the two poets he
252 Bailey
aid to memorization of the poem and to facilitate its reconstruction when

memory fails during performance.19 In the ballad tradition that he under-
stood as emerging nearly simultaneously with the disappearance of the epic,
Menéndez Pidal distinguished two forms of transmission, one oral and the
other written, although he saw both as originating in writing. In his view, the
folk ballads (romances tradicionales) were originally based on episodes from
the medieval epic but were transformed aesthetically as they passed orally
from one generation to another among the uncultured populace “de gente
inculta”.20 The second tradition was of ballads written by professional poets
who followed in the tradition of those who had once dedicated themselves
to composing the longer epic narratives. He termed these written ballads
romances juglarescos (minstrel ballads, or ballads of the professional poets), in
order to distinguish them from the romances tradicionales. By the end of the
15th century, ballads were wildly popular among all social classes,21 but in
neither of the two ballad traditions he outlined did Menéndez Pidal imagine a
process of oral composition taking place.
It may be worth noting that Menéndez Pidal did not know the work of
Milman Parry, probably because Parry’s work was directed to Homeric schol-
ars. Parry had envisioned comparing his initial findings from Homeric poetry
and his subsequent observations of South-Slavic poetry with the medieval
European epics,22 but his untimely death prevented him from completing
this project. Both Parry and Menéndez Pidal recognized the use of formulas as
an element of the poetics of epic expression, although Menéndez Pidal under-
stood them as either expressions common to all (tópicos vulgares), or as unique
expressions attributable to a particular poet (tópicos literarios), and not in rela-
tion to epic meter, syntax or, therefore, as an indicator of oral composition.23
Parry’s first two publications, theses that he published in 1928 as part of his
doctoral program at the University of Paris, focused on the abundant noun-
epithet formulas in Homer. He explained them as part of a poetic grammar
related to the structure of the verse, traditional and independent of a poet’s
believed composed what he had come to understand as two parts of the work, he states
that “escribían fuera de la Vieja Castilla” (En torno al Poema de mio Cid, p. 218).
19 Menéndez Pidal, En torno al Poema de mio Cid, p. 203.
20 Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca y juglares [1924], p. 416.
21 Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca y juglares [1924], p. 420.
22 Adam Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, p. 377, pp. 392-93; Lord, “Homer, Parry, and
Huso”, p. 37.
23 Menéndez Pidal, En torno al Poema de mio Cid, pp. 97-105, pp. 201-02.
free will.24 His conclusion, stated briefly at the outset of his thesis, was that
“the use of the fixed epithet […] is entirely dependent on its convenience in
versification”,25 thus emphasizing the irrelevance of a modern aesthetic appre-
ciation for the fixed epithet as something associated with the poet’s artistry.
But Parry soon came to view what he termed the Homeric style, meaning the
peculiar abundance of ready-made formulaic expressions developed over gen-
erations of poets, as a response to the demands of a metrically complex verse
form composed orally in performance. By the time he had returned to the
United States and published his first article in English,26 Parry had confirmed
that what he had initially understood as traditionality, the abundance of
expressions that were used repeatedly to comply with a specific metrical
requirement, was in reality a consequence or function of the constraints on
the poet who composed orally before an expectant audience.27
Parry’s work had found no echo in the study of Spanish epic poetry until
Albert B. Lord published The Singer of Tales in 1960, some twenty-five years
after Parry’s untimely death. Lord had served Parry as a graduate assistant,
accompanying him in his fieldwork recording the oral epics of the Yugoslav
guslari. Lord eventually completed the program of fieldwork Parry had laid out
and published their findings with the more comparative focus that Parry had
suggested. Lord had crossed over into the medievalist camp by including a
short chapter entitled “Some Notes on Medieval Epic” in which he applied the
findings from his study of the Homeric and Yugoslav poetry to elucidate the
oral characteristics of the Chanson de Roland, Beowulf, and a medieval Greek
metrical narrative known as the Digenis Akritas. Lord also identified the fre-
quent use of formulas, absence of enjambment, and composition by theme as
indicators of oral composition,28 and medievalists soon took note.
In Spanish epic studies the first responses to Lord’s work were enthusiastic,
coming from British scholars who found in Lord’s work an avenue for question-
ing some of Menéndez Pidal’s prevailing assumptions about the Cid, including
24 Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, esp. pp. 21-23, pp. 189-90. Adam Parry, the son of Mil-
man Parry, collected, edited, translated into English when necessary, and published all of
his father’s writings, including the two theses published in fulfillment of the requirements
of his doctoral program at the University of Paris in 1928. All citations of Milman Parry’s
work are from Adam Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse.
25 Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, esp. p. 22.
26 Milman Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique”.
27 Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, esp. pp. 269-70 and pp. 322-24).
28 Lord, The Singer of Tales, pp. 130-31.
254 Bailey
studies by L.P. Harvey29 and Alan Deyermond.30 Later scholars continued to

explore the applicability of Lord’s findings to the Cid, displaying a wide variety
of approaches and providing invaluable insights into the expression and cul-
tural milieu of the Cid. Nonetheless, the prevailing consensus today is that the
Yugoslav model of oral composition is irrelevant to the compositional process
of the Spanish epic. The artistry of the Spanish poem is considered superior to
the Yugoslav narratives produced through composition by stock formulas and
themes,31 even though Miletich, working with the original-language text, found
similarly complex patterning in the orally composed Boanovic Strahinja, lead-
ing him to conclude that it is not safe to argue for written composition of a
particular work on the basis of a highly organized aesthetic structure.32 Mile-
tich’s findings reveal a critical flaw in the argument for written composition of
the Cid based on its artistic superiority over the South Slavic poems recorded
by Parry and Lord, made explicit by John Miles Foley in relation to the same
critical stance adopted by scholars of the Homeric poems: “Virtually all schol-
ars who have rendered this vague but summary judgment have consulted the
South Slavic works in translation, with little or no experience in the original-
language text, never mind of the performances from which those texts derive”.33
In Foley’s estimation, this “fundamental shortcoming” disqualifies judgments
on the quality of the South Slavic poems, which at best are references to the
“clarity or literary appeal of the English rendering”.34
The relatively low frequency of formulas in the Spanish epic is another rea-
son used by scholars to reject the oral compositional model. Yet, the virtual
absence of metrical requirements in Spanish epic verse makes the use of for-
mulas less economical than in the Yugoslav and Homeric epics studied by
Parry and Lord, in which the strict metrical requirements of the verse necessi-
tated the creation of stock formulas and themes in order to facilitate rapid
composition before an expectant audience. From this perspective, the lower
29 Harvey, “The Metrical Irregularity”.

30 Deyermond, “The Singer of Tales”.
31 Deyermond, “Structural and Stylistic Patterns”, pp. 70-71; Montaner, Cantar de mio
Cid (ed. 1993), pp. 13-14.
32 Miletich, “Repetition and Aesthetic Function”, p. 192.
33 Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 41.
34 Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 41. The criticism continues, as Foley points out the “tau-
tology entailed in prescribing ‘quality’ [in Deyermond’s formulation “wealth of patterns”]
as equivalent to what one perceives as the (literary) merit of Homeric poems. Such a
parochial concept simply leaves no room for other kinds of excellence, just as it unnatu-
rally restricts the possible range of Homer’s own excellence” (Foley, Homer’s Traditional
Art, p. 41).
frequency of formulas in the Spanish epic does not negate its possible oral
composition, it simply means that formulas were not as necessary to its
oral composition as in the Yugoslav and Homeric epics. We know that not all
oral traditions show the universal features of Oral Theory,35 the Parry-Lord
model of composition in performance utilizing a storehouse of interchange-
able fixed expressions, and so we should not discount oral composition as a
possibility in the Spanish epic simply because it does not reflect one or another
of the expressive features of the South Slavic poems. Menéndez Pidal was right
on this score, Homer and the guslari do represent two starkly distinct worlds,36
but from that fact it does not follow that their compositions cannot both have
been orally composed. As we pursue our inquiry into the compositional pro-
cess of the Spanish epic, we need to acknowledge that oral traditions are
exceedingly heterogeneous, and when we focus on a single tradition, some of
its features will be unique to it, while others will be shared.37
It is clear enough from a reading of the Cid that knights were the power
brokers of society. They lived in a predominantly oral world, even those among
them who were considered experts on legal matters, los sabidores (v. 3005) or
coñoscedores (v. 3137), are depicted practicing their craft orally. They had to be
adept at expressing themselves in speech in order to rule over their fellow men,
and there can be no doubt that status is reflected in speech and that good
speech coupled with high status sustain power and authority. There are spe-
cific indicators of the importance given to good speech in the poem, such as
when the Cid congratulates Minaya on speaking well in counsel over the next
course of action to take in the defense of Alcocer: “A mi guisa fablastes, /
ondrásteisvos, Minaya, ca avérvoslo iedes de far” (vv. 677b-78). The first time
the Cid speaks in the poem he does so “bien e tan mesurado” (v. 7). Likewise,
when Asur González, the older brother of the malicious Infantes de Carrión,
enters the king’s court in Toledo, it is not only his drunken appearance that
exemplifies the decadence of his family, but his speech as well: “Asur Gonçález
entrava por el palaçio, / manto armiño e un brial rastrando, / vermejo viene, ca
era almorçado, / en lo que fabló avié poco recabdo” (vv. 3373-76). Additional
35 Foley, Homer’s Traditional Art, p. 45.

36 Menéndez Pidal, “Los cantores yugoeslavos y los occidentales” pp. 200-01.
37 Even within the South Slavic tradition of orally composed epic poetry, performance
modes varied. Parry and Lord’s fieldwork led them to note briefly the existence of oral
poets who had memorized written narratives and presented them orally (Lord, The Singer
of Tales, p. 109). Interestingly, these are not the best poets, but they are practitioners. They
also offer the example of a father and son, both literate, who learn and sing their songs
orally (pp. 109-12).
256 Bailey
and more nuanced indicators of the esteem attached to good speaking in the
Cid are the subtle hierarchies of speech employed in the hortatory modes.38
We know that in the monasteries and in the royal courts writing was taking
place. The poem is available to us today because it was put into writing, prob-
ably at the Castilian monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña.39 There are two
well-known references to writing in the poem: “Antes de la noche, en Burgos
d’él entró su carta” (v. 23); “Meterlos he en escripto e todos sean contados”
(v. 1259), although overall the poem is clearly attuned to a speech-centered
world. In order to better understand the oral basis of the expression of the
poem, we will turn our attention to a field of linguistics that has made good use
of the findings of cognitive psychology and discourse analysis to distinguish
between oral and written expression. The work of Wallace Chafe, in particular,
has proven to be especially pertinent in this regard and has shed light on the
cognitive basis for the highly stylized expression of Homeric discourse,40 and
has provided insights into the oral foundation of Spanish epic expression.41
Chafe and his collaborators are best known for a study they conducted that
was designed to probe the way people talk about things they have experienced
and later recall. They first produced a short film, which they subsequently
showed to different groups of people. They then conducted individual inter-
views in which the subjects were asked to narrate through recall the action in
the film. The recording and transcription of those interviews, in which every-
one produced a “spontaneous and reasonable description of what the film
contained”,42 constitute the data on which their subsequent studies are based.
Chafe used the data to probe the link between consciousness and the expres-
sive characteristics of the spontaneous speech of his subjects as they narrated
the action of the film. Chafe found that among the most salient characteristics
of this spontaneous speech is its production in relatively brief spurts. He ini-
tially refers to these spurts of speech as “idea units”, a term already in use that
highlights their resemblance to single clauses.43 In his subsequent work Chafe
prefers to call them “intonation units”, a reflection of the importance he attri-
butes to their single intonation contour.44
38 Montgomery, Medieval Spanish Epic, pp. 97-112.

39 Bailey, “Oral Composition”, p. 266; Zaderenko, “Per Abbat en Cardeña” and “Per Abbat en
Cardeña. Addenda”; Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (ed. 2011), pp. 496-508.
40 Bakker, Poetry in Speech, pp. 35-53.
41 Bailey, “Oral Composition”.
42 Chafe, The Pear Stories, p. xv.
43 Chafe, The Pear Stories, p. 13.
44 Chafe and Danielwicz, Properties of Spoken and Written Language, p. 10.
In cognitive terms, these units “express what is in the speaker’s short-term

memory or ‘focus of consciousness,’ at the time [they are] produced”.45 The
prototypical intonation unit has the following properties: 1) it is spoken with a
single, coherent intonation contour, 2) it is followed by a pause, and 3) it is
likely to be a single clause. Chafe studies some properties of intonation units,
and finds that “a speaker does not, or cannot, focus on more information than
can be expressed in about six words”, while their syntax “must be kept simple”.46
He concludes that intonation units are the natural unit of speech while sen-
tences have become the major unit of writing. This distinction comes about
“presumably because writers have the leisure to perfect complex and coherent
sentence structures which speakers are moving too fast to produce”.47
Egbert Bakker has associated the cognitive concept of the intonation unit
with the highly stylized and rhythmically sophisticated Homeric verse. He
finds that, just as in ordinary speech, the basic metrical unit of Homeric verse
is not the sentence but the intonation unit. The intonational and prosodic
properties of this unit of speech are stylized into metrical properties, their cog-
nitively determined length making them the ideal basis for formulas as the
basic ingredients of epic discourse. The metrical requirements of Homeric
verse would not exclude it from being considered a form of speech. In Bakker’s
terminology it is “special speech”.48 In the Spanish epic, where there are essen-
tially no metrical properties, the cognitive relation between narrative discourse
and Chafe’s concept of the intonation unit should be even more evident than
in Homeric poetry.
Initially, the similarities between Chafe’s intonation units and epic verse
may not be immediately apparent to readers of modern editions of the Cid.
Following the lead of the manuscript text, modern editors represent the poem
as a series of verses whose length is determined by their end-line assonance.
This rhyme pattern is based on the repetition of the same stressed or tonic
vowel in the final word of each verse, as in lines 1077-81, cited in context below
(andar, atrás, repintrá, ha, alguandre). When the stress falls on the penulti-
mate vowel, as in the first five lines of the poem (llorando, catando, cañados,
mantos, mudados), the final unstressed vowels of the series (in this case o)
almost always match as well.49 Editors also divide each verse into two half-
lines or hemistichs, by inserting additional spaces between what they judge to

48 Bakker, “How Oral?”, pp. 37-39.
49 Montaner, “Revisión textual”, pp. 165-67.
258 Bailey
be two clauses. This action is based on the assumption that the narrator would
pause after each clause, even though in the manuscript there is no indication
of any such pause. The number of syllables in Spanish epic verse is not regular,
as in alexandrine verse, nor are the verses measured in feet, as in Homeric
verse. There is essentially no uniform length to the verses, although it has been
observed that no hemistich can contain more than eleven syllables, because
this would require an additional caesura, the term used to designate the pause
between half lines or hemistichs.50 Modern editors also take the liberty of
identifying sequences of verses with the same assonance, referred to as a laisse
(French) or tirada (Spanish), and assigning them a number. In the Spanish epic
these tiradas vary greatly in length, from a minimum of two verses to over two
hundred. Changes in assonance are attributed to transitions in the narration,
with a sub-category of non-starters (versos sueltos) brought about by some-
thing called “deictic dissonance”.51
Even though the lines of the poem are counted in verses, the hemistich is
considered the basic component of epic verse.52 It corresponds closely to
Chafe’s intonation unit, which he considers the basic unit of speech, normally
consisting of four to six words each, followed by a pause, and likely to be a
single clause.53 Let’s look at a specific passage from the Cid for confirmation of
this similarity, presented here as in the manuscript text:
Aguijava el conde e pensava de andar,

tornando va la cabeça e catándos’ atrás,
miedo iva aviendo que Mio Çid se repintrá,
lo que non ferié el caboso por cuanto en el mundo ha,
una deslealtança ca non la fizo alguandre. (1077-81)54
As noted above, modern editors separate what they assume are two clauses in
each line with a space that is meant to represent a natural pause (reminiscent
of Chafe’s intonation units), as opposed to a metrical pause, or caesura, as
follows,
Aguijava el conde e pensava de andar,

tornando va la cabeça e catándos’ atrás,
50 Montaner, “Revisión textual”, p. 157.

51 Bayo, “Poetic Discourse Patterning”, pp. 86-87.
52 Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (ed. 1993), p. 37.
54 The manuscript transcription is taken from my Web site (miocid.wlu.edu).
miedo iva aviendo que Mio Çid se repintrá,

lo que non ferié el caboso por cuanto en el mundo ha,
una deslealtança, ca non la fizo alguandre.55
In cognitive terms, these hemistichs “express what is in the speaker’s short-

term memory or ‘focus of consciousness,’ at the time [they are] produced”.56
The poem progresses through the use of what has come to be known as the
string-along or additive style, also known grammatically as parataxis, which
typically produces repetitions as the narrator expands on statements he has
just made. This is common in speech because in speaking there is little possi-
bility of synthesis, just the continuous production of brief spurts of speech
focused on conveying single acts and thoughts that in time add up to a scene,
an episode, and eventually a story. In this process, when a clarification needs to
be made, the speaker must return to his original thought by repeating it, and
then offer his clarification or expansion.
Following Chafe’s transcriptions of spontaneous speech,57 we can also rep-
resent these hemistichs (intonation units) in the following way,
1 Aguijava el conde
2 e pensava de andar,
3 tornando va la cabeça
4 e catándos’ atrás,
5 miedo iva aviendo
6 que Mio Çid se repintrá,
7 lo que non ferié el caboso
8 por cuanto en el mundo ha,
9 una deslealtança,
10 ca non la fizo alguandre.
In this representation of the lines we can better appreciate the relationship

between Chafe’s concept of “brief spurts of speech” and the clausal structure,
seeing them both as formed by the cognitive limitations of the oral narrative
process. Unable to focus on more than one thought or image at a time, the nar-
rator must first describe the count’s physical actions (vv. 1-4), then proceed to
inform us of what the count was thinking while he was acting in that fashion
(vv. 5-6). The narrator then changes his plane of thought from what the count
55 Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (ed. 1993), p. 165.

57 Chafe, “How Consciousness Shapes Language”, pp. 40-41.
260 Bailey
is thinking to his own response to it. In doing so he offers a characterization of

the Cid, and of the count, by telling us that the Cid (unlike the count) would
never do such a thing (v. 7), and qualifies that affirmation (v. 8). The narrator
then must restate what he is talking about (“una deslealtança”, v. 9), presum-
ably because the third-person neuter pronoun (“lo que non ferié el caboso”,
v. 7) is not especially clear, but also as an aid to shifting his thoughts from the
hypothetical realm (“non ferié”) to the real (“ca non la fizo alguandre”), and to
finally affirm the Cid’s moral character through his actions (v. 10). Modern
readers of the poem know that this final progression is needed because deeds
must confirm words, and in this particular instance, the Cid can’t perform a
disloyal act, he can only not have done it, ever.
If this passage were written and then memorized for oral performance, as
some scholars of the Spanish epic believe, there would be a synthesis of expres-
sion equivalent to written discourse. This is not the case, and instead of
synthesis, the poet first tells us of the count’s actions and then narrates sepa-
rately the thinking behind those actions. The poet first states that the Cid
would never do that (“lo que” is the equivalent of a relative pronoun), referring
back to the count’s fear that the Cid might change his mind (“que Mio Çid se
repintrá”), before specifying what he meant (“una deslealtança”), and then in a
separate statement affirming that he never did it, maybe as a kind of concrete
proof of his previous assertion that he would never do it. As we listen to the
poem, and generally as we read it as well, there is the sense that the language
flows smoothly. But when we examine it closely we see that the language
comes in short spurts, giving it an intermittent quality, and that the poet is
simultaneously narrating and clarifying, moving back and forth from thought
to action as the narrative progresses.
This expressive feature might be attributed to the binary structure of two
hemistichs per verse, with assonance lending a finality to each verse, especially
the closely related reiterations of actions that at first blush seem to serve more
to complete the verse than to add anything new (“Aguijava el conde e pensava
de andar, / tornando va la cabeça e catándos’ atrás”). But actions and thoughts
are intimately related in the poem, and the actions and thoughts of the count
reflect on the Cid, whose actions (and the thoughts of the poet about the Cid’s
actions) also reflect on the count. The progression is slow but deliberate, the
narrative must move forward for the audience, but at the same time the narra-
tor is limited in what he can say in each one of his brief spurts of speech. Chafe
found something similar in his data, “very few if any cases in which there are
two or more separately activated new ideas within the same intonation unit”,
which to him suggests the hypothesis that “an intonation unit can express no
more than one new idea”, and that thought “proceeds in terms of one such
activation at a time, and each activation applies to a single referent, event, or

state, but not to more than one”.58 Equally meaningful for our understanding
of oral poetry is Chafe’s sense that this limitation on what the speaker can say
may also be assumed for the listener, that neither one can “handle more than
one idea at a time”.59
Another unique feature of epic verse is its string-along style, or parataxis.
This has long been considered a marker of orally composed poetry,60 and lin-
guists have affirmed that paratactic syntax is indeed characteristic of spoken
discourse, and that spontaneous or novel speech is typically delivered “one
clause at a time”.61 Furthermore, the one-clause-at-a-time processing of spon-
taneous or novel discourse is not a style at all, but a constraint on speakers in
which “the largest unit of novel discourse that can be fully encoded in one
encoding operation is a single clause of eight to ten words”.62 When a speaker
begins to narrate a stretch of novel discourse over several clauses, only the first
few words are known. By generating one clause at a time, as opposed to inte-
grating or subordinating clauses, a speaker “can maintain grammaticality and
semantic continuity because his clauses can be planned more or less inde-
pendently, and each major semantic unit, being only a single clause, can be
encoded and uttered without internal breaks”.63
In addition to understanding hemistichs as a cognitively constrained speech
unit, the use of assonance in oral poetry, while aesthetically pleasing to us
today, actually performs a constraining function. David C. Rubin, a cognitive
psychologist whose work focuses on memory, has found that rhyme is a con-
straint used in oral composition as an aid to memorization. Rubin cites a
number of studies that show how end-rhyme facilitates recall, and is especially
helpful in recalling the order of verses. In the experiments he cites, rhyme cues
work best when they are similar but not identical to the ones used at learning.64
Assonance, a fairly flexible form of rhyme, more flexible than perfect rhyme,
may be especially suited to the needs of the poet of the Spanish epic, who may
not be recalling verses verbatim, but is most likely re-composing a narrative
he has heard or has sung before. The small number of fixed formulas and the
relative flexibility of assonance in the Spanish epic suggest a high degree of
58 Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness, and Time, p. 109.

59 Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness, and Time, p. 109.
60 Duggan, “The Interface between Oral and Written”, p. 62.
62 Pawley and Syder, “Two Puzzles for Linguistic Theory”, p. 202.
63 Pawley and Syder, “Two Puzzles for Linguistic Theory”, p. 203.
64 Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, pp. 83-84.
262 Bailey
variability that is unlike the fixed phrases of the Homeric and Yugoslav poems.
Later learned poetry in Spain increasingly exhibits the more demanding syl-
labic rhyme (matching tonic vowels and subsequent syllables) that we may
think of as even more aesthetically pleasing. Novel rhyme, considered by mod-
erns to signify good poetry, is probably only an option in written verse, since
Rubin has found that in oral verse “expected rhymes are more likely to be
reproduced” than novel rhymes.65
In the Cid the adjoining of hemistichs is carried out sequentially, which is a
reflection in speech of the cognitive devices deployed in the processing of
information. The narrator employs the simple paratactic syntax preferred by
spontaneous speakers, with clause-final pauses evidenced throughout. Modern
editors of the poem have traditionally identified the hemistichs as a kind of
unit in the text by separating the same-verse hemistichs with a space or a space
and a comma, and by placing at the end of each verse a comma or a period.
These decisions are based on the syntax of the written poem, granting to each
hemistich the status of a clause or phrase of one sort or another. Similarly, in
the Pear Film narratives recorded by Chafe the brief intonation units and the
somewhat larger units evidence distinctive intonation contours, and are tran-
scribed as ending in commas and periods respectively. Chafe notes that even in
unfamiliar languages a listener can detect every so often a falling intonation
contour that we naturally associate with the end of a sentence. The change in
intonation suggests that the speaker has determined that some kind of closure
or completeness has been achieved. Sentence-final intonation generally coin-
cides with what a grammarian would consider syntactic closure, essentially
the completion of a sentence.66 On average, sentence-final (intonational) clo-
sure occurs after every three idea units.67 Exceptions do occur, such as narrating
exclusively with single idea units and giving them sentence-final closure, and
the production of fairly long narratives with only one or two sentence-final
closures.
Although we can readily agree that the poet is narrating in hemistichs com-
posed of one new idea at a time, it must be observed that these brief units also
comprise much longer narrative segments. This suggests that we seem to be
able to remember stories as wholes, while we focus on small pieces of these
memories in recalling them. The entire memory can be narrated as a whole, or
it can be produced in a series of brief intonation units.68 Generally, however,
65 Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, p. 85.

in the narration of a story there are sequences of focuses of consciousness of

an intermediate length that receive sentence-final intonation to signal their
closure. It seems that as an organism we can best express a single focus of
consciousness at a time, yet there is a need within us for more information
than can be supplied by the limited capacity of a single focus of conscious-
ness. When this need arises the information is scanned by a series of focuses
of consciousness in order to comprehend and act upon it. The same process
occurs when the information is relayed, a speaker deploys the focuses of con-
sciousness sequentially until communication of the whole is complete. Chafe
refers to the deployment of such a sequence of focuses of consciousness as a
“center of interest”, and the data from the Pear Film stories indicate that these
sequences “convey a single mental image about which several things are simul-
taneously true”.69 When the speaker determines that adequate communication
of an image has been achieved, sentence-final intonation is employed.
Chafe assumes that the information processing capabilities of the human
organism lag behind its needs, which is why speakers do not express a series of
centers of interest without some difficulty, which Chafe calls “perturbations”.
He divides these perturbations into five categories: 1) abandonment, 2) post-
ponement, 3) pursuit of a side interest, with subsequent return to the main
track, 4) insertion of a center of interest on a different level of interest, and 5)
supplementation of a center of interest after preliminary closure has been
reached.70 As speakers switch from one center of interest to another these
perturbations are generally accompanied by corrections, pauses, repetitions,
false starts, backtracking, and other manifestations of uncertainty in their
speech.
The episodes that comprise the Cid certainly seem to be narrated sequen-
tially,71 but when analyzed in the light of Chafe’s findings on centers of interest,
we find the same indicators of uncertainty identified by Chafe. The “niña de
nuef años” episode may be the best-known passage in the Cid (vv. 15-34), and
to my knowledge no readers of the poem have noted any disruptions in its
narration. However, in point of fact, it actually alternates between what might
be called background and foreground narration. It begins with an initial “cen-
ter of interest”, or foreground action, the entrance of the Cid into Burgos and
his reception by the residents, who are grieving over the Cid’s predicament
(vv. 15-20). From this initial center of interest, the narrator then switches to a
“side interest”, or background action (vv. 21-28). Here the narrator explains the

71 About the poem’s narrative techniques, see Luongo’s chapter in this volume.
264 Bailey
despair of the citizens of Burgos, already described as grieving, as a conse-

quence of the prohibition by the king against aiding the Cid. The narration
of the main action of the passage resumes (vv. 29-32), but the narrator again
interrupts the flow of action to pursue another side interest (vv. 33-34), this
time to explain why the door to the Cid’s customary lodging was not opened.
The paratactic structure of the poem gives little sense of the scanning of
centers of interest by the narrator. This may be a consequence of presenting
the protagonist in action and the circumstances in which he acts without the
use of subordinating conjunctions. The narrator presents first the foreground
action, followed by some background information as explanation, returns to
the main action, and so forth. This narrative process produces something akin
to the third of Chafe’s five categories of perturbations: pursuit of a side interest
with subsequent return to the main track. What Chafe found in his samples of
spontaneous speech is that when the narrator returns to the main image, it is
“reverbalized” before proceeding with the narration.72 This occurs in this pas-
sage as well, where lines 18-20 are reverbalized in lines 29-30, as the narrator’s
focus returns to the initial center of interest after explaining the reasons why
the people of Burgos turned their backs on the Cid (vv. 21-28). Beginning at line
35 the narrator returns to the original center of interest and presents the
remainder of the Cid’s encounter with the people of Burgos (vv. 35-51).
The girl who appears in the episode is a poetic device through whom the
people of Burgos finally speak to the Cid (vv. 40-49). In rapid succession she
conveys their admiration for him (v. 41), the king’s prohibition (vv. 42-43), their
current dilemma (vv. 44-46), a subtle plea for mercy (v. 47), and an expression
of their hope for his future success (v. 48). Once she has greeted him (v. 41), the
statements are narrated in a sequence of past, present, and future. Paratactic
verse seems particularly well suited to the narration of events in this fashion.
The focus is intense and the narration moves forward effectively. Although the
girl does recapitulate lines 23-28 (vv. 42-46), here the information is communi-
cated directly to the Cid, who can then understand why his customary lodgings
are closed to him. Her speech has a pleasing aesthetic effect and exemplifies
the skilled speaking that characterizes the verbal exchanges in the poem.73 In
this passage the poet seems to be concentrating his cognitive energies on pro-
ducing a speech that is memorable and powerfully persuasive, nothing at all
like the speech of a nine-year-old child.
The principle of performance-enhanced speech may recall a similar con-
cept in classical rhetorical prose, especially in the way it is subservient to
72 Chafe, The Pear Stories, pp. 34-35.

73 Montgomery, Medieval Spanish Epic, pp. 98-100.
natural constraints. In the case of oral delivery, the natural constraint is the
need for the speaker to pause for breath. Breath pauses during performance
result in short units of expression, identified and labeled by Cicero and
Quintilian as essentially smaller parts of a whole. These are the “limbs” of a
“body”, connected by “joints”, which we recognize as the clauses of a sentence
or period joined by conjunctions. The clause can be rhythmically complete but
semantically meaningless, membrum, or both semantically and rhythmically
incomplete incisum or articulus.74
Both classical rhetorical prose and epic verse are understood as constrained
by nature in a fundamental way. In recognition of these constraints, the classi-
cal rhetors adapt their public speeches so as to create a pleasant and memorable
experience for orator and audience alike. This experience is enhanced by the
manipulation of breath units in a way that blends their syntax and rhythm of
delivery, for audiences respond best to speech governed by nature. But the
units of Latin rhetorical discourse (membra) are ultimately subservient to syn-
tactic periodicity, in that “they either create syntactic expectations or give
‘what is due’ in fulfilling them”.75 Epic discourse looks ahead as well, but not
to the completion of a sentence or grammatical construct. Instead it projects
toward the completion of the verse, to the simple assonance that marks the
end of one verse and the beginning of another.
As the passage from the Cid confirms, a speaker does not process informa-
tion quickly enough to be able to subordinate different centers of interest.
Consequently, these are adjoined sequentially, as in parataxis, or in some cases
coordinated with conjunctions, mostly “and”, less often “then”, “but” or “so”.
Speakers seldom use subordination because it can easily lead to confusion.76
As writers, we are familiar with the struggle to subordinate ideas and images
into coherent prose. But this process of integration was not evidenced in the
speech of Chafe’s subjects in the late seventies, and neither is it found in the
Cid. The distinction between the use of parataxis as a marker of speech and of
subordination as a marker of written discourse can be exemplified in the prose
rendition of the Cid passage in Alfonso X’s Estoria de España, also from the thir-
teenth century (c.1289). Subordinating conjunctions have been highlighted.
Et pues que entró en Burgos fuesse pora la posada do solié posar; mas non
le quisieron y acoger; ca el rey lo enuiara defender quel non acogiessen en
74 Bakker, Poetry in Speech, pp. 138-46.

75 Bakker, Poetry in Speech, p. 145.
266 Bailey
ninguna posada en toda la uilla, nin le diessen uianda ninguna. Quando

aquello uio el Çid, saliosse de la uilla et fue posar en la glera.77
Most striking is the absence from this passage of the moving encounter with
the nine-year-old girl. Her breaking of the enforced silence implies solidarity
between the Cid and the people of Burgos that the Alfonsine chroniclers could
not abide.78 With her removal, the tension disappears from the passage alto-
gether. The use of subordinating conjunctions integrates the various centers of
interest into a briefer yet syntactically more complex single focus. The process
of transforming oral verse into prose produced the equivalent of a modern-day
paragraph, with none of the repetition of the poem. Along with the repeti-
tions, the different points of view are lost, resulting in the single point of view
of the omniscient chronicler. The punctuation, determined by its modern edi-
tor Menéndez Pidal, now seems essential to it and underscores its literate
essence.79
The parallels between the cognitive characteristics of the spontaneous
speech of Chafe’s subjects and the expression of the Cid are striking. Chafe’s
analysis of recorded speech allowed him to identify the cognitive processes
involved in the narration of the events portrayed in the Pear Film, and of other
events brought up in casual conversation as stories worth telling. His examples
are all from late 20th-century America. The Cid is a vernacular epic narrative
put to parchment in the kingdom of Castile in 1207, yet it exhibits cognitive
processes and organization of discourse topics similar to those of Chafe’s sub-
jects. The Spanish epic follows conventions specific to a medieval narrative
genre and a culture very distant from 20th-century America, which makes the
parallels in their expression even more striking. These parallels most likely
stem from the fact that they are all being produced before an audience, with
decisions about expression, emphasis, and effectiveness being made in real
time.
In sum, the field of Spanish epic studies can learn a great deal from the find-
ings of scholars in related fields, such as Homeric Studies, medieval history,
and linguistics. The debate that began with the publication of Albert Lord’s
The Singer of Tales in 1960 encouraged an informed reassessment of the
77 Alfonso X, Estoria de España; I quote Menéndez Pidal’s edition, Primera crónica general,
p. 523 (chap. 851, 2nd column, lines 27-34).
78 These observations regarding the editing of the poem by the Alfonsine chroniclers reflect
the work of Nancy Joe Dyer and specific findings of Brian Powell, Epic and Chronicle,
pp. 87, 91, 97-98).
79 Fleischmann, Tense and Narrativity, pp. 186-88.
expression and mode of composition of the Cid, the iconic text of medieval
Spanish literature, but was truncated by an unwillingness to look beyond this
seminal work for further insights. Many of the scholars who began their careers
through engagement in the vibrant dialog engendered by the Parry-Lord find-
ings are no longer with us, yet their findings should serve as a reminder of the
rich exchange of ideas that takes place when the work of specialists in related
fields are incorporated into our research endeavors. In the present case, the
work of linguists such as Wallace Chafe, prominent medieval historians, psy-
chologists, Homeric scholars, scholars of the French chanson de geste and the
Old English Beowulf have contributed to a deeper understanding of the link
between the compositional process and the expression of the Cid, and to the
realization that in reading the poem today we are tantalizingly close to the
author and his audience in the very act of its creation.
Works Cited
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Modern Language Association 118.2 (2003), 254-69.
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Bakker, Egbert, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.
Bakker, Egbert, “How Oral is Oral Composition?”, in E. Anne Mackay (ed.), Signs of
Orality, Leiden: Brill, 1999, pp. 29-48.
Bayo, Juan Carlos, “Poetic Discourse Patterning in the Cantar de Mio Cid”, Modern
Language Review 96.1 (2001), 82-91.
Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cam-
bridge: UP, 1990.
Carruthers, Mary, The Craft of Thought, Cambridge: UP, 1998.
Chafe, Wallace L., ed., The Pear Stories. Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of
Narrative Production, Norwood: Ablex, 1980.
Chafe, Wallace L., Discourse, Consciousness, and Time, Chicago: UP. 1994.
Chafe, Wallace L., “How Consciousness Shapes Language”, Pragmatics and Cognition 4.1
(1996), 35-54.
Chafe, Wallace and Jane Danielwicz, Properties of Spoken and Written Language,
Berkeley: UP, 1987.
Clanchy, M.T., From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1979.
Deyermond, Alan, “The Singer of Tales and the Mediaeval Spanish Epic”, Bulletin of
Hispanic Studies 42 (1965), 1-8.
268 Bailey
Deyermond, Alan, “Structural and Stylistic patterns in the Cantar de Mio Cid”, in Brian
Dutton (ed.), Medieval Studies in Honor of Robert White Linker, Madrid: Castalia, 1973,
pp. 55-71.
Deyermond, Alan, La literatura perdida de la Edad Media. Catálogo y estudio, I: épica y
romances, Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad, 1995.
de Mio Cid”, La Corónica 33.2 (2005), 51-63.
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Fleischman, Suzanne, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern
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Foley, John Miles, Homer’s Traditional Art, University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1999.
Harvey, L.P., “The Metrical Irregularity of the Cantar de Mio Cid”, Bulletin of Hispanic
Studies 40 (1963), 137-43.
Lord, Albert Bates, “Homer, Parry, and Huso”, American Journal of Archaeology 52 (1948),
34-44.
Lord, Albert Bates, The Singer of Tales, Revised ed., Introduction by Stephen Mitchell
and Gregory Nagy, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Poesía juglaresca y juglares, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Histó-
ricos, 1924.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Poesía juglaresca y juglares: aspectos de la historia literaria y
cultural de España, 2 ed., Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1945.
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Espasa-Calpe, 1951.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, ed., Primera crónica general, Madrid: Gredos, 1955.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, En torno al Poema de mio Cid, Barcelona: EDHASA, 1963.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, “Los cantores yugoeslavos y los occidentales: el Mio Cid y dos
refundidores primitivos”, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona
36 (1965-66), 195-225.
Miletich John S., “Repetition and Aesthetic Function in the Poema de mio Cid and South-
Slavic Oral and Literary Epic”, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 58 (1981), 189-96.
Montaner, Alberto, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, Barcelona: Crítica, 1993; rev. ed., Madrid: Real
Academia Española, 2011.
Montaner, Alberto, “Revisión textual del Cantar de mio Cid”, La Corónica 33.2 (2005),
137-93.
Montgomery, Thomas, Medieval Spanish Epic: Mythic Roots and Ritual Language,
University Park: Penn State UP, 1998.
Parry, Adam, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
Parry, Milman, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making”, Harvard Studies
in Classical Philology 41 (1930), 73-147.
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W. Schmidt (eds.), Language and Communication, London: Longman, 1983,
pp. 191-225.
Powell, Brian, Epic and Chronicle: The “Poema de mio Cid” and the “Crónica de veinte reyes”,
London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1983.
Rubin, David C., Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads,
and Counting-out Rhymes, New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
Stock, Brian, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Modes of Interpretation
in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Princeton: UP, 1983.
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Cid”, Alcalá de Henares: UP, 1998.
177-90.
(2009), 245-48.
Zumthor, Paul, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy, Introduction
by Walter Ong, Minneapolis: UP, 1990.
270 Bailey
Figure 8.1 A juglar ( jongleur, singer of tales) acting with a musical instrument.
©Photo: Antonio García Omedes.
Episodic Logic and the Structure of the Poema de mio Cid 271
Chapter 9
Episodic Logic and the Structure of the Poema de

mio Cid
Leonardo Funes
1 The Double Plot Structure
The text of the PMC is preserved in a single manuscript, which is often referred
to as the “Vivar codex” because it was discovered in the archive of Vivar’s town
hall in the 16th century. The poem was copied as an uninterrupted series of
verses without divisions or epigraphs to separate the text. However, there are
some signs marking internal divisions: in verse 1085 we read “Aquís conpieça la
gesta de myo Çid el de Biuar”, an odd statement considering that the epic song
begins more than a thousand lines earlier.1 Likewise, in verses 2276-77 we
read “Las coplas deste cantar aquís van acabando. / El Criador vos valla con
todos los sos santos”, a clear indication of the poem’s closure and the authorial
farewell, also strange since there are more than fifteen hundred verses until the
conclusion of the poem. The most plausible explanation is that these verses
signal the beginning and end of a cantar.2 Thus, it can be inferred that the
poem is comprised of three cantares, each one similar in length, that probably
corresponded to a performance by a juglar (minstrel) lasting 3 or 4 hours. The
titles Menéndez Pidal gave them – “Cantar del Destierro” (Song of the Exile),
“Cantar de las Bodas” (Song of the Weddings), and “Cantar de la Afrenta de
Corpes” (Song of the Affront at Corpes) – were accepted by most scholars and
1 Some scholars argue that in this verse “gesta” refers to the conquest of Valencia, thought to be
the hero’s greatest exploit, which is about to be narrated. According to Montaner (Cantar de
mio Cid, p. 398), in medieval Spanish “gesta” only meant “hazaña, proeza”, at most “historia o
relato de una hazaña”, but not “cantar de gesta” or “parte de un cantar”. Regardless of how we
understand this word, if the verse alludes to a moment in the narration, it clearly establishes
a demarcation and creates an implicit (as well as figurative) meaning meant to announce the
beginning of a new part of the epic song.
2 Since we do not have the first folio of the codex, it is impossible to know what the initial words
of the enunciation were; at the end of the poem we read: “Estas son las nuevas de myo Çid el
Canpeador. / En este logar se acaba esta razón” (vv. 3730-31), but given the problematic nature
of the Vivar codex’s explicit, it is not clear if these were the concluding words of the poem.

272 Funes
were used especially in studies and editions prepared for a wide-reaching audi-
ence. Since it is questionable if these titles reflect their main content, like most
contemporary critics, I prefer to speak of the first, second, and third cantar.3
Regarding its poetic enunciation, although the poem is divided into three
cantares the plot’s structure is bipartite: it narrates a double process of loss and
restoration of the hero’s honor. The first plot begins with the exile of the hero,
unjustly punished by King Alfonso who believes the false accusations made by
the Cid’s enemies in the court (the loss of the first folio of the only extant man-
uscript precludes us from knowing with absolute certainty what these charges
were). Once in Moorish territory, Rodrigo Díaz accomplishes a series of victo-
ries, which increase his wealth and inspire more warriors to join his military
campaigns in order to share his glory. These military operations culminate in
his greatest triumph: the conquest of Valencia. After sending three gift-bearing
embassies to King Alfonso, the Cid reunites with his family in Valencia and
eventually reconciles with the monarch on the shores of the Tagus River. As we
can see, the central theme of this plot is the relationship between lord and vas-
sal: the Cid shows himself to be a good vassal and the king becomes a good
lord.
The second plot begins precisely on the Tagus River with the marriage
arrangement of the hero’s daughters to the Infantes of Carrión, sons of the
Count of Carrión and members of the highest circle of court nobility, who are
hostile towards the Cid, an infanzón belonging to the low rural nobility. The
Infantes of Carrión reveal their cowardice both in the Cid’s home (the lion’s
episode) as well as in combat (the episode of the pitched battle against King
Bucar). When faced with such a self-inflicted dishonor, the Infantes plan to
avenge themselves by beating and torturing their wives. The revenge is carried
out in the Corpes oak-forest. The Cid demands justice from the king, who con-
venes a court trial in Toledo. The judicial proceedings conclude with duels in
which the Infantes are defeated and dishonored, whereas the Cid’s daughters
contract a more advantageous marriage with the crown princes of Navarre and
Aragon. The central theme of this plot, as set within the domestic framework
of the hero’s family, is the conflict between the upper and lower nobility.
3 Very few critics have rejected the division of the poem into three cantares, an idea first put
forward by Lidforss (Los cantares de myo Cid) and later by Menéndez Pidal (Cantar de mio
Cid). Since the three cantares do not have the same function, some scholars disregard the divi-
sion of the second cantar (Garci Gómez, Cantar de mio Cid), while others reject any division
at all (Horrent, Cantar de Mio Cid; Pattison, “How many cantares are there in the Poema de
Mio Cid?”). It is important to point out these disagreements because they reveal the difficulty
of reconciling story and discourse (or enunciated and enunciation).
The most important scholars who have studied the problem of the poem’s
structure concur that it has a bipartite organization. Alan Deyermond’s study
of 1973 (“Structural and Stylistic Patterns in the Cantar de Mio Cid”) and Ruth
H. Webber’s analysis published that same year (“Narrative Organization of the
Cantar de mio Cid”), which includes a schema of how the episodes of the poem
are organized, are the first in a series of publications that have led to significant
developments on this topic: Ian Michael’s The Poem of the Cid; Sofía Kantor’s
“Estructura narrativa del Cantar de Mio Cid”, perhaps the most noteworthy nar-
ratological contribution; Alberto Montaner’s “El Cid: mito y símbolo”; as well
as other studies by Deyermond (“La estructura del Cantar de Mio Cid, com-
parada con la de otros poemas épicos medievales”) and Webber (“Towards the
Morphology of the Romance Epic” and “The Spanish Epic in the Context of the
Medieval European Epic”). They all confirm the prevalence of bipartite struc-
tures in medieval Spanish epic through a comparative analysis with Romance,
Germanic, and Byzantine epic traditions. In our case, the PMC has a narrative
structure consisting of a double process of loss and restoration of honor that
can be viewed as variation on the same theme, but would be more accurate to
analyze it in terms of intensification. Honor, therefore, is the element that
unites both parts of the story.4 Following Pavlović’s intelligent analysis (“The
Three Aspects of Honour”), we should take into consideration the three mean-
ings of “honor”, all present in the Latin word honor-honoris: 1) el honor refers to
the public realm and is connected to the social prestige of a person; 2) in medi-
eval Spanish, a person’s property was typically referred to as las onores or la
onor; and 3) private honor, which is related to a personal moral dimension, was
generally called la honra. Although the use of vocabulary is not systematic in
the Poema, it is evident that el honor and las onores are the subject of the first
part of the story, while the second part is about recuperating la honra.5
The storyline can be illustrated by the following diagram:6
4 Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid, p. 375.

5 As noted by Pavlović (“The Three Aspects of Honour”, pp. 104-05), the mix of terminology
found in the Poema does not imply conceptual confusion; the poet knew what dimension of
honor he was dealing with in each episode.
6 I would like to make two clarifications about this diagram: 1) it is meant to serve as an abstract
illustration of how the most decisive moments of the storyline are articulated; for that reason,
it does not show that the poem’s dénouement is, in fact, a higher point in the story than the
Cid being granted the royal pardon at the conclusion of the second cantar; and 2) it is more
accurate than what is often called the “W-plot structure”, since there is not an initial segment
of the story presenting a positive situation, later degraded by the dishonor of exile (there was
not sufficient space for such a development in the verses of the now-lost first folio; the text
likely started with the motif of the disgraced hero).
274 Funes
Pardon Final Reparation
Banishment Affront
As pointed out by Deyermond,7 it is interesting that each of these critical

points is the result of failed intentions that lead to opposite outcomes. Thus,
by banishing the Cid, King Alfonso presumes to punish the hero and, there-
fore, subject him to very unfavorable conditions. However, by virtue of his
exile, the Cid is granted a freedom he would not have enjoyed in the royal
court; this allows him to undertake an ambitious military enterprise on his
own that would elevate him to become lord of Valencia, thereby favoring him
unintendedly.
A similar result occurs with the opposite intention. After their reconcilia-
tion, the monarch’s desire to favor the Campeador by marrying his daughters to
the Infantes of Carrión, which would assure a social promotion for the Cid’s
descendants, produces the opposite result, the hero’s dishonor, when his
daughters are beaten and abandoned by their husbands at Corpes. But against
the Infantes’ expectation to avenge themselves by dishonoring the Cid through
defaming his daughters, their actions would make it possible for Doña Elvira
and Doña Sol to regain and increase their marriage possibilities. In the end,
they attain even more honorable matches with the royal heirs of Navarre and
Aragon, and the dishonorable repudiation and abandonment will ultimately
benefit the hero and his descendants. As Deyermond rightly concludes, “la
ironía llega a ser un principio estructural del Cantar”.8
The existence of these two plots related to the Cid’s exile and his daughters’
affront, which are so dissimilar, could lead to an erroneous understanding of
the poem’s overall structure in at least two ways. On the one hand, it could be
argued that there is a weak articulation joining the two parts, which would
take us back to the long-debated issue concerning the presence of more than
one author. On the other hand, it can be explained in terms of symmetrical,
mirrored, or inverted relationships between the two parts, which would con-
vert the poem into some sort of narrative diptych of a highly sophisticated
7 Deyermond, El “Cantar de Mio Cid” y la épica española, pp. 30-31.

8 Deyermond, El “Cantar de Mio Cid” y la épica española, p. 31.
complexity. This idea was put forward by Webber and has inspired Boix Jovaní’s
more extreme interpretation.9
Many scholars have put forward different arguments defending the strong
structural cohesiveness between the two narrative developments. The story-
lines are interwoven from the very beginning: when the Cid bids his family
farewell in Cardeña, he exclaims, “Plega a Dios e a Santa María / que aún con
mis manos case estas mis fijas” (vv. 282-82b). Thus, the theme of the weddings
has already been introduced before Rodrigo leaves for exile. Similarly, the
Infantes of Carrión appear at the time of the second embassy (vv. 1372-77),
much earlier than the episode of the vistas on the shore of the Tagus River that
concludes the first part of the story, a point to which I shall return in the pages
ahead. Another interesting example of structural cohesiveness is provided by
Doña Sol’s speech just before the Infantes carry out their punishment at Corpes
(vv. 2725-32). Her mentioning of the swords Colada and Tizón evokes previous
episodes in which the Cid’s heroic exploits are narrated, and the allusion to the
“cortes” prefigures the final process of restoring the Cid’s lost honor through
legal channels. Montaner also sees a causal relationship between the two parts
of the poem, insofar as the hero’s deeds will give rise not only to his reconcilia-
tion with the monarch but also to Alfonso’s plan to marry Rodrigo’s daughters
to the Infantes. He attributes, in fact, a particular motive to the early appear-
ance of the heirs of Carrión. In Montaner’s view, the king’s decision to forgive
the Cid only comes after learning of the Infantes’ plans, which indicate that his
change of heart towards the hero was shared by the court nobility.10 His argu-
ment is perceptive, but he perhaps overanalyzes the intentions of literary
characters never explicitly made by the poet. Even more debatable is Georges
Martin’s interpretation of the passage in which King Alfonso expresses his will-
ingness to reconcile with the hero and relay the request to ask for the hand of
the Cid’s daughters on the Infantes’ behalf.11 According to Martin, it is the
Infantes’ request to marry the Cid’s daughters that prompts the royal pardon.
We have, in his view, a kind of extortion on the part of King Alfonso: Rodrigo
will be pardoned only if he were to consent to give his daughters in matrimony.
This would mean that the royal act is insincere, being the result of calculated
interests, and is motivated by the desire to favor the Infantes, who are mem-
bers of the upper nobility and the king’s entourage. Based on this reading, a
9 Webber, “The Spanish Epic in the Context”, p. 334; Boix Jovaní, El “Cantar de Mio Cid:
adscripción genérica y estructura tripartita.
11 The hypothesis was presented in his edition of the poem (Chanson de Mon Cid, pp. 41-42)
and reiterated in his chapter of this volume.
276 Funes
true change of heart towards the Cid on the part of King Alfonso would only
occur after the “Afrenta de Corpes”. It is unnecessary to reiterate here the dan-
gers of speculating about literary characters’ intentions that are never made
explicit by the poet. In keeping with the general characteristics of heroic
poetry, the PMC lacks psychological introspection; that is why the characters’
emotions, passions, and intentions are externally manifested mainly in words,
deeds, and only occasionally in a narrator’s explicit commentary. It is evident
that the silent word of the text that has survived has left us with passages dif-
ficult to interpret (is any given speech an affirmative, ironic, sardonic, or
threatening expression?). This problem would not have existed for a medieval
public, because such ambiguities would have been clarified in the minstrel’s
performance with all its predictable variations that are unrecoverable today.
But even so, we are not dealing with a hazy locus of interpretation regarding
King Alfonso’s motivation for granting a royal pardon. The monarch’s favorable
disposition towards the Cid has been gradually revealed by his reactions to the
embassies sent by the hero. These envoys emphasize not only the magnitude of
the Cid’s exploits and his ensuing wealth, but also his unwavering vasallatic
fidelity to the king even if the hero is not legally obliged to him, a striking atti-
tude as impressive as the enormity of the spoils. What can be inferred from
King Alfonso’s words is that his decision to reconcile with the Cid is motivated
by the warrior’s wealth as well as his fidelity (“en todas guisas mijor me sirve”,
v. 1349; “aun vea el ora que de mi sea pagado”, v. 1857; “faziendo yo a él mal e él
a mí grand pro”, v. 1891; “andarle quiero a mio Cid en toda pro”, v. 1913). These
assertions already establish a sharp contrast between the monarch’s motiva-
tions and those driving the Infantes of Carrión. Therefore, there is neither
deceit nor second thoughts when it comes to granting the royal pardon. When
King Alfonso is faced with the Infantes’ request, he thinks about it for a good
while – the poet uses on two occasions the expression “una grant ora […] pensó
e comidió” (vv. 1889 and 1932), a device employed to call attention to a charac-
ter’s reaction when faced with a displeasing request. The king’s response
(vv. 1890-93) indicates that he would prefer not getting involved in order to
avoid upsetting the Cid again, and that he ultimately consents because he has
to favor his closest vassals. Limiting ourselves to the poem’s structure, what we
can understand is that the Infantes’ request is used to incorporate the motif of
the ill-fated wedding in the complex articulation of the two plots, which is
done in a masterful way: the Infantes provide the seed of the new conflict,
which is planted by the very characters affected by it, King Alfonso and the Cid,
because of their binding vasallatic obligations that are stronger than their
desires. According to Martin’s reading, however, the link connecting the two
storylines of the poem is seen as the transition from an imperfect royal pardon
in the first plot to a sincere and complete reconciliation at the end of the story.
I believe, instead, that it is more pertinent to view the articulation of both
plots – and the ascending gradation of the hero’s triumph at the end of each
one – in accordance with Montaner’s interpretation, who points out that “los
calumniadores del Cid, que no habían sido castigados al resolverse el primer
conflicto, reciben al final su merecido en la figura de su cabecilla, el conde
Garcí Ordóñez […]. Así, de un modo u otro, todos los oponentes del Cid, viejos
y nuevos, reciben su merecido”.12 I would add the following to Montaner’s
argument: contrary to the notion that the poem would arrive at its normal con-
clusion with the reconciliation between King Alfonso and the Cid, and that the
second part of the Poema would be a collateral plot complication – which
would lead us to hypothesize about the existence of an oral Cantar de mio Cid
sung by juglares that had a simple plot later reworked (most likely) in writing
as in its current form with a more complex storyline, it is important to empha-
size the significance of verses 3724-25 (“Oy los reyes d’España sos parientes son
/ a todos alcança ondra por el que en buen ora naçió”). With the word “oy”
(today), which fuses the time of the narrated with the time of the narration,13
the entire poem arrives at its true conclusion: the hero, who has been on a
continuous quest to recover an honor he had been deprived of,14 becomes
himself the fountainhead of honor that would shower the kingdoms of Spain
through its monarchs. For this reason, the Cid’s reconciliation with King
Alfonso is not enough; it is necessary for him to guarantee the posterity of his
heroic virtue and honor by becoming related to Spain’s future kings. Here we
have, in addition to the successful punishment of the Cid’s enemies, the true
denouement of the entire story.
2 Patterns of the Episodic Structure
Within this general scheme, we see the recurrence of binary structural pat-
terns (the pairing of characters: Rachel and Vidas, the Infantes of Carrión,
Doña Elvira and Doña Sol, and stylistic pairings: twin and linked series of
verses), as well as ternary patterns: prevalence of the number three and its
multiples in the utilization of numbers; predominance of the Law of Three

13 See Soler Bistué, “Historia y ficción en el Poema de Mio Cid”, pp. 200-01.
14 We should remember Bowra’s long-established notion that heroic activity is the pursuit of
honor through risk (Heroic Poetry, p. 5).
278 Funes
– common in folktales – detectable in several episodes, such as the three

embassies sent to King Alfonso and the three judicial duels. To this, it is neces-
sary to add the contrasting structural patterns pointed out by Deyermond,15
such as the closed doors in Burgos and the open ones at Cardeña; the cordiality
and loyalty with which Abengalbon treats the Infantes of Carrión despite not
having any legal ties to them, which contrasts with the duplicity of the Infantes,
who are legally obliged to their father-in-law; the Cid’s journey from Castile to
Valencia (from dishonor to restoration of honor), unlike that of the Infantes’
from Valencia to Castile (beginning with honor, ending in both deshonra and
deshonor).
It is possible to detect influences from oral practices of discourse, typical of
the singer of tales, in the composition of the story, either because a significant
portion of its current configuration was already present in previous oral recita-
tions of the Cid’s epic cycle, or because the learned author who composed the
extant poem was imbued with constructive patterns that had been forged in
the dynamic of the oral tradition. The broadest and most basic of these pro-
cesses is the construction of the story resulting from the articulation of major,
relatively predictable episodes. In all epic narratives it is normal to expect
departures, voyages, battles, duels, assemblies, weddings, and trials. Obviously,
not all of them are included in every epic text, nor are they presented in any
particular order. The poet, in fact, functions as operating through a combinato-
rial process. The next process affects the construction of each of these major
episodes by means of interweaving narrative and descriptive minor units, such
as mounted shock combat,16 the enumeration of warriors, the clanging of
swords in combat, the ritual gestures demonstrating the hero’s obedience to
his king, etc.; in other words, what scholars who study folktales call motifs.
This structuring modality of the poetic narrative is what enables the “epi-
sodic logic” to have a considerable impact on the overall configuration of the
poem. The following schema attempts to provide a more detailed explanation
of how the episodes are organized:17
15 Deyermond, “Structural and Stylistic Patterns in the Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 59-61.
16 On this matter, see Justel Vicente, “La carga de choque”.
17 The number in parenthesis indicates the tirada (the poem’s irregular series of verses), not
the lines of the poem.
First cantar
Departure from Vivar and I. Burgos (1-11) Hero’s departure

arrival to Burgos (1-5) (1-22)
Rachel and Vidas episode

(6-11)
Rodrigo Díaz’s reunion with II. San Pedro de Cardeña

his family in Cardeña (12-17) (12-18)
Doña Jimena’s prayer (18)
Vision of the Angel Gabriel III. Departure from Castile

(19) (19-22)
Journey into exile (20-22)

Episode of Castejón (23-25) IV. First victories (23-40) Hero’s qualifying
tests (23-63)
Episode of Alcocer (26-31)

Battle with Fáriz and Galbe
(32-40)
First embassy sent to King V. First attempt to reconcile

Alfonso (41-43 / 47-51) with King Alfonso (41-54)
Sale of Alcocer (44-46)
The Cid’s military activity in

Zaragoza (52-54)
Battle of Tévar (55-58) VI. Count of Barcelona episode

(55-63)
The Count of Barcelona’s

hunger strike (59-63)
280 Funes
Second cantar
Campaign in the area sur- VII. Conquest of Valencia Main test (64-79)
rounding Valencia (64-71) (64-79)
Conquest of Valencia and its

defense from the king of
Seville (72-79)
Second embassy to King VIII. Second attempt to First glorification of

Alfonso (80-82) reconcile with King Alfonso the hero (80-111)
(80-87)
The Cid’s family reunites with
the hero (83-85)
The Cid’s welcoming (86-87)
Battle with the king of IX. Third attempt to reconcile

Morocco (88-95) with King Alfonso (88-102)
Third embassy to King Alfonso

(96-102)
Vistas on the shore of the X. Reconciliation (103-11)

Tagus River (103-04)
Weddings of the Cid’s

daughters (105-11)
Third cantar
The lion episode (112) XI. “Afrenta de Corpes” Honra affronted (112-32)
(112-32)
Battle with Bucar (113-22)
“Afrenta de Corpes” (123-32)
King Alfonso convokes the XII. “Cortes de Toledo” Reparation of the hero’s
Cortes (133-34) (133-49) honra: glorifying test (133-
49)
Preparations (135-36)
Judicial trial (137-49)
Judicial duels in Carrión XIII. Judicial duels in Final glorification of the
(150-52) Carrión (150-52) hero (150-52)
Second weddings (152)
This schema is only meant to give an idea of how the episodes are organized
and to grasp, at the same time, the dynamic articulation behind the entire nar-
ration. Each column attempts to bring together significant narrative units that
are similar in nature, but as many previous attempts have demonstrated –
those of Michael, Webber, and Kantor, among others –, any pretension of
achieving a perfect design with harmonious symmetries is either met with fail-
ure or yields dubious conclusions. For instance, interest in showing ternary
patterns in the episodes’ order compelled Michael to organize a series of units
based on historical and geographic criteria for the first part of the story
(“Campaña del Henares”, “Campaña del Jalón”, “Campaña del Jiloca”, “Iniciación
de la campaña levantina”), units that are better suited for compartmentalizing
chronistic material than for explaining the narrative dynamic of a poetic dis-
course.18 In his analysis, the narrative sequences constituting each episode
vary significantly in nature: while some are simply the itinerary’s segments
(II.1. “Vision in Figueruela”, IV.1 “El Poyo”), others constitute entire episodes in
of themselves (IV.3 “Count of Barcelona”). But this same lack of balance is
18 I do not mean to impugn the importance of geography in the PMC (we only have to
consider the extent to which scholars have studied the Cid’s itineraries). I merely wish to
point out that it is not an appropriate criterion for episodic division. For a broader study
on the geographic dimension of the PMC – although it has no bearing on how episodes are
organized – see Montaner, “Un canto de frontera (geopolítica y geopoética del Cantar de
mio Cid)”.
282 Funes
found in every schema that has been proposed until now, including mine,
because different patterns of organization are underscored in each case. What
can be concluded from these schemas is that those patterns function as ten-
dencies rather than formal criteria that must be strictly obeyed: we are not
dealing with Dante’s Commedia.
It is likely that this is due to what I call “episodic logic”, that is to say, forms
of articulating major narrative units with a relative autonomy in ways that, to
our eyes, which are shaped by modern scopic regimes, they appear as fissures,
incoherencies, or flaws that a medieval audience evidently did not perceive or
did not take into account when judging the merits and appeal of an epic text.
Keeping this in mind, I will now comment on the schema presented above. As
it can be observed, the major episodes articulating the story development are
indicated in the middle column; each one is made up of sub-episodes – some
of which with considerable narrative autonomy, such as the lion episode – that
appear in the left-hand column. The right-hand column makes clear how the
narrative structure depends on traditional patterns of universal character as
analyzed by A.J. Greimas (“Eléments pour une théorie de l’interprétation”),
based on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ research on the myth (Mythologiques. I). The
hero’s departure, in this case, not as an emissary but as a man expelled from his
community, initiates a journey marked by tests he must overcome in order to
recuperate his lost honor. First, the qualifying tests through which the hero
obtains the talisman that will enable him to prevail over the main test, the
objective of his heroic mission. In the case of the PMC, these qualifying tests
have a modest beginning with the Rachel and Vidas episode, which serves to
provide the economic support necessary for the hero’s journey. The tests are
fully manifested, however, in the series of initial victories – beginning with
Castejón and ending with the Battle of Tévar. These qualifying tests provide the
Cid with the opportunity to increase his fortune and attract more warriors,
which he will ultimately need to win his most important trial, the conquest of
Valencia, which in the Poema functions as the main test.
When we consider the economy of the text, it may not seem immediately
apparent that the conquest of Valencia – an episode some scholars have judged
to be relatively brief when compared to other secondary battles – is the main
test. There are, however, two weighty arguments to support this claim. The first
one, extratextual, has to do with the public to whom the poem was addressed
and the consensus among them that this conquest was the Cid’s greatest
exploit. The second, intratextual, is related to the fundamental structural
change that occurs in the poem beginning with this episode. The mobility,
which governs the conduct of the hero and his men after their departure from
Castile – keeping in mind that it was impossible for them to remain
indefinitely in one place –, is replaced by the hero’s stability, who is now forced
to remain in Valencia except for when he goes to the vistas on the shore of the
Tagus River and to the Cortes in Toledo.19 This important change in the impact
of spatiality is related, up to a point, to the phenomenon of transmitting the
condition of heroism to a new generation of men, by which the Cid relin-
quishes to others the mobility and direct action. This is first seen in the
sequence of his daughters’ rescue; it is also symbolized by conferring the
swords Colada and Tizón to Martín Antolínez and Pero Bermúdez; and it is
clearly manifested in the judicial duels in Carrión.
According to traditional models of narrative configuration I mentioned ear-
lier, once the hero’s mission is successfully completed, he undergoes some kind
of transformation – either positive or negative, internal or external – that
makes him unrecognizable to the community to which he belongs. In the stage
corresponding to the hero’s return, this fact compels him to carry out one last
type of test – the one that glorifies him – whose objective is to make his com-
munity recognize either his identity or his status as a hero. I have identified the
“Cortes de Toledo” as the Cid’s glorifying test based on the following argu-
ments: it is a heroic exploit that is at the same level of importance as his
previous victories and conquests – that is, the qualifying tests and the main
test – except that it does not take place in a military sphere. Consequently, the
hero is put to the test in two ways. On the one hand, the Cid’s first test is to
control the urge to violently avenge himself by not taking justice into his own
hands and seeking, instead, legal reparation through a trial. This has very
important ideological repercussions on the overall meaning of the poem, inso-
far as it makes legal conflicts the main subject of the story and that the poet
resolves them by favoring a more “civilized” way of settling disputes, a most
remarkable aspect that distinguishes the PMC from all other poems of the
medieval epic tradition. Bringing this argument to the logical conclusion,
I want to stress that this test can also be understood in terms of the victorious
hero’s reintegration into the norms of his community in order to gain recogni-
tion of his heroic identity. Another aspect of this episode is to test the Cid to
determine if he can directly defeat his internal enemies, the Beni Gómez clan,
on a field that does not require the use of arms and that would seem to favor, a
priori, the ricos omnes of the court who were more accustomed to law books
and the chancellery norms regarding legal disputes. Here, another of the hero’s
virtues is manifested – his intellectual superiority –, since the Cid defeats his
enemies in their own sphere. At the same time, we should also keep in mind
that in the first test of the hero’s glorification (the vistas on the shore of the
19 See Boix Jovaní, “Rodrigo Díaz, de señor de la guerra a señor de Valencia”.

284 Funes
Tagus River), the Cid’s enemies do not participate – nor are they forced to take
part – despite being present, as we learn from the poet’s brief mention of their
displeasure when the hero finally reconciles with the king: “pesó a Álbar Díaz
e a Garçi Ordóñez” (v. 2042). But with the acknowledgement of their defeat
after the duels in Carrión, the entire Beni Gómez clan recognizes, through the
Infantes, the Cid’s supremacy. Thus, the test glorifying the hero is complete.
As we can see, the PMC meets the basic schema of heroic stories found in
medieval epic and in heroic poetry in general. This schema (hero’s departure,
tests, return, and acknowledgement) along with the even more basic patterns
of narratological development (deprivation caused by dispossession → cessa-
tion of deprivation; rupture of the initial harmony or balance → restoration of
harmony or balance; damage → reparation) constitute not only a constructive
pattern found in both popular and learned spheres of oral and written discur-
sive practices, but also a frame of reference for the public that makes up the
same textual community that, for that reason, shares the same codes.
3 Episodic Logic
With respect to the process of the episodes’ articulation and the sequential
syntax that organizes them, I will only focus on episodic logic as not to repeat
here the long description of elements that scholars of narratology have been
formulating in their analysis of traditional fictional tales over the last one hun-
dred years.
I should clarify that my notion of episodic logic is different from how
Deyermond defines it.20 In my view, episodic logic is a compositional modality
achieved by combining large narrative blocks pre-fabricated in the oral tradi-
tion through a process of draft and adjustment, as proposed by Hart, where
major narrative sequences, in perfect temporal-causal articulation within the
general plan of the story, possess a certain degree of autonomy in their con-
figuration.21 This is demonstrated, for example, in the Rachel and Vidas episode
or the one with the lion. It can also be seen in a more nuanced manner in epi-
sodes relating to battles, which, in formal terms, function almost as short
20 According to Deyermond, “un episodio sucede a otro, sin más hilo conductor que uno o
más protagonistas. La causalidad funciona dentro del episodio, pero no hay relación
causal entre episodios” (“La estructura del Cantar de Mio Cid”, p. 25).
21 This process was described by Hart in “Characterization and Plot Structure in the Poema
de Mio Cid”.
independent stories. This, however, is most evident in the function and repre-
sentation of characters.
For this reason, we cannot strictly speak about “character development”
with regard to King Alfonso change of attitude when confronting the legal dis-
putes in the first and third cantares. Clearly, there is a causal relationship
between the embassies sent by the Cid to the king, and the monarch’s gradual
decision to grant the royal pardon and reconcile with Rodrigo. This is a narra-
tive dynamic that exceeds the confines of one particular episode. However, in
the very configuration and functionality of a character within specific epi-
sodes, there is another model – another logic – at work that in a decisive
manner makes the episode comprehensible. The “Hero’s exile” section – indi-
cated in the schema as part of the “Burgos”, “Cardeña”, and “Departure from
Castile” episodes – requires the role of an “unjust king”. Although we cannot
provide an unequivocal assessment since we do not have the first folio of the
manuscript, everything seems to suggest that the king’s function is actually
heightened by removing him from the scene – condensing his presence to the
“carta fuertemientre sellada” – and by leaving judgement of him to the com-
ments uttered by the people of Burgos. Accordingly, an imperative of the
internal logic of the “Hero’s exile” episode is fulfilled, since such an exile is
always unjust or a consequence of a monarch’s misguided action, which is his
fault or the fault of someone else. As for the “trial or legal assembly” episode –
seen here embodied in the “Cortes de Toledo” and the “Judicial duels in Carrión”
–, it requires the function of “arbitrator king, fair judge” who is placed above
the opposing factions, and yet, who still favors the hero, not arbitrarily, but
rather as an act of pure justice.22 The characterization of the Infantes of
Carrión manifests this case even more clearly: we know that they are negative
characters from their first appearance, but their cowardice is fully manifested
in the lion’s episode and later in the battle against King Bucar. With these ante-
cedents, their conduct in the episode of the judicial duels in Carrión appears
incongruent, for our expectations would be that they are unable to even mount
their horses or that they would throw themselves to the ground pleading for
mercy. Instead, the Infantes have sufficient will to confront the Cid’s champi-
ons and exchange blows with lances and swords – unsuccessful blows of poor
quality, but blows nevertheless. This incongruity is explained by the internal
logic of the “judicial duels” episode, which requires relative equality between
the combatants in order to preserve its relevance and the principle of narrative
22 For more information on this subject, see Geoffrey West’s article, “The Cid and Alfonso VI
Re-visited”.
286 Funes
interest: a judicial duel between two poorly matched combatants lacks appeal,
especially when it is essential for the episode.23
The aforementioned study by Hart (“Characterization and Plot Structure”),
which brings together the matters of narrative structure and character repre-
sentation, is an interesting contribution to this line of study. He relies on
Gombrich’s notion of pictorial representation as a process of “draft and adjust-
ment” to describe the process of constructing characters as a projection and
correction of the fortitudo-sapientia model, which has its origins in a long-
established epic tradition both learned and popular. Just as the Cid incarnates
these two virtues, all the men of his retinue – Álvar Fáñez, Martín Antolínez,
Pedro Bermúdez, Muño Gustioz – embody these qualities in varying degrees.
On the other hand, Rodrigo’s enemies are characterized by different deficien-
cies of these virtues. By conceiving the plot structure as a draft and adjustment
of the narrative matrix on which the myth of the hero’s quest and tests are
based, Hart points out that the most significant difference detected in the PMC
is the lack of an educational and transformational process undergone by the
hero, in which the heroic experience allows him to learn and mature, changing
him in an irreversible way. We do not find this type of evolution in the case of
the Cid. Of course, the action narrated in the poem is irreversible, but “not
because the Cid has been changed by his contact with the world but because
by his own actions he has changed that world”.24
Towards the end of “Structural and Stylistic Patterns” (pp. 69-71), Deyermond
raised questions and anticipated conclusions that are still discussed in current
scholarly debates about these matters as well as others of broader repercus-
sions connected to them. First of all, he questions whether these structural
designs are really found in the text, or if they exist only in the critics’ minds.
And second, he asks what the repercussions of these different approaches have
on the long-debated question of the work’s unity and the learned versus popu-
lar nature of its composition. With respect to the first question, it suffices to
look at the high number of similarities found among all the proposed explana-
tions of the PMC’s episodic nature to conclude that such a form of narrative
structuring is indeed found in the text and is not the result of how scholars
have been reading the work. In any case, it should be a warning to be taken
seriously when dealing with a text like the PMC, especially whenever it is pro-
posed that the poet was influenced by Latin literature.
23 Although there is no doubt about how the confrontations narrated in the “Judicial duels
in Carrión” will conclude, the poet nevertheless relies upon an added feature: the ongoing
threat that the Beni Gómez clan will cheat (vv. 3540-41, 3574-80, 3593-94, 3600-02).
24 Hart, “Characterization and Plot Structure”, p. 70.
4 Binary Storyline, Ternary Enunciation
Before considering the conclusions about the PMC’s unity and form of com-
position that can be drawn from this description of the narrative structure, it
is necessary to address a problem I mentioned at the beginning of this study:
the discrepancy between the binary disposition of the narrated matter and
the ternary organization of the poetic enunciation. This also brings us to the
problematic relationship between episodic articulation and the division into
tiradas of the poem’s verses, in addition to the inherent question about the cri-
teria governing the change in assonance that determines the end of one tirada
and the beginning of another.
At this inferior organizational level of the poetic enunciation, there have
been attempts to find correspondences between the episodic series of the
story and the tiradas of the poem,25 as a consequence, in the majority of cases,
of attempts to elucidate the criteria for the change in assonance. In this regard,
Montaner offers a detailed summary of all the hypotheses formulated by dif-
ferent scholars in addition to making an inventory of the criteria employed,
which need not be repeated here.26 However, I would like to underscore two
conclusions that can be drawn from his summary: 1) these criteria do not con-
stitute poetic rules that must be followed to the letter; rather, like everything
else we have discussed throughout this study, they are merely tendencies; and
2) there are no possible correlations between episode and tirada, but there are
evident connections linking narrative sequences and the poem’s division into
tiradas.
That those relationships do not conform to rules of equivalence indicates
that there are other factors at work in the elaboration of the discourse: if, at the
level of the story, we found the “interest factor” operating, at the level of dis-
course we can detect aesthetic factors such as the “principle of variation”.
Matters related to the purely formal dimension of verse – and, for that reason,
unrelated to the thematic and the strictly narrative – have a bearing on their
ultimate configuration and contribute to an aesthetic effect on a public able to
appreciate the poet’s “buen decir” and skill.
Keeping all these considerations in mind, we can address the broader mat-
ter of the relationship between the plotlines and the cantares. I began this
study alluding to verses that were likely meant to have a demarcating function
on which the arguments by those scholars who believe that the poem is divided
into three cantares are based. There are two questions that must be considered
25 For example, see Robert M. Johnston, “The Function of Laisse”.

26 Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 394-97.
288 Funes
here: 1) were these verses interpolated into the text or do they correspond to
the very creative impulse that led to the poem’s overall composition?; and 2)
what is their impact on the structure of the poem? In “El ‘Cantar de las bodas’”,
Germán Orduna asserts that they are interpolations because “parecen ajenos a
la andadura propia del poema en la versión que conocemos”.27 Other schol-
ars, from Damas-Hinard (Poème du Cid) to Pattison (“How Many Cantares”),
maintain the same hypothesis. However, the majority of critics is more inclined
to believe that they originated with the poet, regardless of whether or not they
believe that the verses were meant to divide the poem. According to Michael,
they are necessary adjustments made for the sake of representation, which
weakened the artistic structure crafted by the poet. Michael’s opinion brings us
to the second question: the impact of these verses on the poem’s structure.
If we accept the notion that these divisions are an intrinsic part of the poem
and were not interpolated by users of the text for the purpose of oral recitation,
we are faced with the following options: either we have a case in which the
formal criteria of enunciation (arranged for a minstrel’s performance) have
prevailed to the detriment of the plot structure or, on the contrary, the charac-
teristics of its own narrative structure have led to this enunciation’s tripartite
arrangement as the most efficient way to make the story more intelligible.
In a recent study I mentioned earlier (El “Cantar de Mio Cid”: adscripción
genérica y estructura tripartita), Boix Jovaní offers a solution to this problem,
proposing that there are not two, but three storylines. By disregarding the
notion of the plot as a double process of loss and recuperation of honor, he
proposes a ternary model instead. His argument is that there are two symmet-
rical plots, which he calls “destierro” and “antidestierro”. In the first, the Cid is
the protagonist – the journey from Castile to Valencia –, and in the second, the
Infantes of Carrión are the protagonists – the journey from Valencia to Corpes.
Between the two plots, he posits an intermediary plot he dubs “Cuento de los
Infantes de Carrión”, which would reach its climax with the weddings in
Valencia. It is impossible to summarize here the complex argumentation Boix
Jovaní offers in support of this hypothesis. Suffice to say that he piles up new
and bold hypotheses, such as proposing that the PMC belongs to a sub-genre of
the French epic called “cantar de aventuras”, a type of narration more akin to
the roman than to epic poems. Again, it would be impossible to discuss his
arguments here with the attention they deserve, which is why I leave the task
of evaluating his hypotheses to the readers. Nonetheless, I will be so bold as to
express my disagreement by calling attention to one point I consider crucial:
there is not one moment in the poem when the Cid ceases to be the prota-
27 Orduna, “El ‘Cantar de las Bodas’”, p. 414.

gonist of the story – even in those passages in which he is not present –, since
the perspective of the narrator remains invariably on his side. Boix Jovaní
acknowledges this in his conclusions: “Se trata [el enfoque desde la perspectiva
de los infantes] de una operación metodológica, puesto que los protagonistas
de la trama no son realmente los infantes, sino el Cid, como en el resto del
poema, siendo los de Carrión antagonistas del Campeador”.28
In order to take on this problem, if we were to accept the plot’s binary model,
it is necessary to bring into our discussion one final aspect regarding the struc-
turing of the heroic narration: the storylines do not follow a strict succession
– that is to say, as soon as one storyline ends, the second one immediately
begins. Instead, the two storylines overlap: the second storyline begins before
the first one has ended. Therefore, there is a segment in the poem where a
double plot starts to evolve. It begins with the second embassy – precisely
when the Infantes of Carrión make their first appearance discussing among
themselves the advantages and disadvantages of marring the Cid’s daughters
– and concludes with the vistas at the Tagus River, where the betrothal cere-
mony of Doña Elvira and Doña Sol to the Infantes of Carrión takes place. It is a
segment consisting of nearly eight hundred verses (vv. 1372-2155) in which the
poet’s narrative mastery is put to the test in order to make sure that the listen-
ing public will grasp the story’s meaning in its oral delivery.
If, as Deyermond supposed, irony is the structuring principle in the poem –
an accurate judgment in my opinion –, then it is in this segment where this
principle is fully manifested: it is a question of explaining how a terrible mis-
fortune can come from something good, despite the good intentions of most of
the characters involved. Here, it becomes clear that the second plot is not a
mere “complication” – it is not comparable, for example, to the narrative situ-
ation so common in stories of chivalric adventures in which a messenger
appears during the celebration of a hard-fought victory bringing a disastrous
news that reignites the conflict. The interwoven plots highlight that the double
process of loss and recuperation of honor forms part of one and only one
heroic story that will only reach its culmination when he who was on the quest
for honor throughout the entire story becomes the very source of honor for an
entire people and their descendants (“a todos alcança ondra por el que en
buen ora naçió”, v. 3725).
The way to ensure such an understanding is precisely by specifying this
complex transition in a different cantar that is preceded by the narration of
the main test which changes the hero’s status and justifies the new derivative
of the heroic adventure. This is, as I understand it, the explanation for the
28 Boix Jovaní, El “Cantar de Mio Cid”: adscripción genérica, p. 153.

290 Funes
apparent incongruity that exists between the binary storyline and the ternary
enunciation of the epic poem.
5 Concluding Remarks
As a way of closing, the only thing left to say is that the conclusions of my
analysis regarding the poem’s structure as it relates to its unity are quite obvi-
ous: regardless of the nature of earlier materials with which the poet worked
(an already well-developed oral epic song; a story or group of stories based on
oral history; stories or data taken from different kinds of written sources), it is
evident that the extant poem is the fruit of a single creative effort by a learned
poet.
At the same time, it seems necessary to me to call attention to the following
observation: the presence of patterns of narrative organization deriving from
traditional storytelling in the poem, the relevance of what I call episodic logic
in the sequential syntax and characterization of protagonists, the adoption of
popular forms of poetic enunciation (tiradas of irregular length comprised of
anisosyllabic assonated verses), all these elements suggest that the text arose
from the confluence of both oral and written discursive practices.29 The
author also is a participant in that confluence, since he was a learned man
evidently attracted to popular culture, who, beyond his formal education in
the high culture of the time, had training in oral and minstrelesque forms of
composing and performing. This is what the poem indicates; he must have
possessed a profound knowledge of, and a great capacity for, imitating the
internal logic of that kind of verbal art. In addition to the written composition
and the mastery with which the poet interweaves the storylines, his formal
education is undoubtedly manifested in other aspects and details of the poem.
However, it is necessary to insist on the minstrel’s imprint on the work, for it is
from that world that derives the poem’s fundamental constructive principles.
That was his choice, that was the aesthetic program of this learned poet enam-
ored with popular art when it came to poeticizing the deeds of the greatest
Castilian hero.
29 For more on these matters, see Matthew Bailey’s chapter in this volume.
Works Cited
Boix Jovaní, Alfonso, “Rodrigo Díaz, de señor de la guerra a señor de Valencia”, Olivar 10
(2007), 185-92.
Boix Jovaní, Alfonso, El “Cantar de Mio Cid”: adscripción genérica y estructura tripartita,
Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2012.
Bowra, Cecil M., Heroic Poetry, London: MacMillan, 1952.
Damas-Hinard, Jean, ed., Poème du Cid. Texte espagnol accompagné d’une traduction
française, Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1858.
Deyermond, Alan, “Structural and Stylistic Patterns in the Cantar de Mio Cid”, in Medieval
Studies in Honor of Robert White Linker, Madrid: Castalia, 1973, pp. 55-71.
Deyermond, Alan, El “Cantar de Mio Cid” y la épica española, Barcelona: Sirmio, 1987.
Deyermond, Alan, “La estructura del Cantar de Mio Cid, comparada con la de otros
poemas épicos medievales”, in C. Hernández Alonso (ed.), Actas del Congreso
Internacional El Cid, poema e historia (12-16 de julio 1999), Burgos: Ayuntamiento de
Burgos, 2000, pp. 25-39.
Garci-Gómez, Miguel, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, Madrid: Cupsa, 1977.
Greimas, Algirdas J., “Eléments pour une théorie de l’interprétation du récit mythique”,
Communications 8 (1966), 29-52.
Hart, Thomas, “Characterization and Plot Structure in the Poema de Mio Cid”, in Alan
Deyermond (ed.), Mio Cid Studies, London: Tamesis, 1977, pp. 63-72.
Horrent, Jules, ed., Cantar de Mio Cid = Chanson de Mon Cid, 2 vols., Gante: Story-
Scientia, 1982.
Johnston, Robert M., “The Function of Laisse Divisions in the Poema de Mio Cid”, Journal
of Hispanic Philology 8 (1984), 185-208.
Justel Vicente, Pablo, “La carga de choque en la épica francesa y castellana”, Revista de
Poética Medieval 25 (2011), 175-98.
Kantor, Sofía, “Estructura narrativa del Cantar de Mio Cid”, Anuario de Letras 22 (1984),
79-110.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Mythologiques I. Le cru et le cuit, Paris: Plon, 1964.
Lidforss, Eduardo, ed., Los cantares de myo Cid, 2 vols., Lund: E. Malmströn, 1895.
Martin, Georges, ed. and trans., Chanson de Mon Cid. Cantar de Mio Cid. Paris: Aubier,
1996.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, ed., Cantar de mio Cid. Texto, gramática, vocabulario, 3 vols.,
Madrid: Bailly-Baillière, 1908-11.
Michael, Ian, ed., The Poem of the Cid, Manchester: University Press, 1975.
Montaner, Alberto, “El Cid: mito y símbolo”, Boletín del Museo e Instituto “Camón Aznar”
27 (1987), 121-340.
Montaner, Alberto, “Un canto de frontera (geopolítica y geopoética del Cantar de mio
Cid)”, Ínsula 731 (2007), 8-11.
292 Funes
Montaner, Alberto, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, Madrid-Barcelona: Real Academia Española-
Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011.
Orduna, Germán, “El ‘Cantar de las Bodas’: las técnicas de estructura y la intervención
de los dos juglares en el Poema de Mio Cid”, in Studia Hispanica in honorem R. Lapesa,
vol. 2, Madrid: Gredos, 1974, pp. 411-31.
Pattison, D. G., “How Many Cantares Are There in the Poema de Mio Cid?”, Modern
Language Review 88 (1993), 337-42.
Pavlović, Milija, “The Three Aspects of Honour in the Poema de mio Cid”, in David G.
Pattison (ed.), Textos épicos castellanos: problemas de edición y crítica, London:
Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 2000,
pp. 99-116.
Soler Bistué, Maximiliano, “Historia y ficción en el Poema de Mio Cid. Hacia un concepto
de tiempo en la épica española”, Olivar 10 (2007), 193-202.
Webber, Ruth House, “Narrative Organization of the Cantar de Mio Cid”, Olifant 1.2 (1973),
21-34.
Webber, Ruth House, “Towards the Morphology of the Romance Epic”, in Hans-Eric
Keller (ed.), Romance Epic. Essays on a Medieval Literary Genre, Kalamazoo: Western
Michigan University-Medieval Institute, 1987, pp. 1-9.
Webber, Ruth House, “The Spanish Epic in the Context of the Medieval European Epic”,
in Studia in Honorem Prof. M. de Riquer, vol. 4, Barcelona: Quaderns Cremà, 1991,
pp. 333-44.
West, Geoffrey, “The Cid and Alfonso VI Re-visited: Characterization in the Poema de
mio Cid”, in Brian Powell, Dorothy S. Severin, and Geoffrey West (eds.), “Al que en
buen hora naçio”: Essays on the Spanish Epic and Ballad in Honour of Colin Smith,
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press-Modern Humanities Research Association,
1996, pp. 161-69.
Figure 9.1 The exile rout ( from Vivar to Valencia) and the affront rout ( from Valencia to
Corpes), according to the Poema de mio Cid. © Dani Guixà Couderc & Alberto
Montaner.
294 Funes
Part 4
Historical Aspects
∵
296 Funes
The Historical Context of the Poema de mio Cid 297
Chapter 10
The Historical Context of the Poema de mio Cid

Simon Barton
As the present volume amply bears witness, the Poema de mio Cid is hedged
about on all sides with doubts and uncertainties. The fundamental questions
of how, when, where, and by whom the poem was composed–to name only a
few of the main controversies–have all given rise to extensive scholarly debate
and very little unanimity. The question of the historical context in which the
Poema was composed presents its own particular challenges. As is well known,
Ramón Menéndez Pidal attributed the Poema to juglares active during the
reign of Alfonso VII of León-Castile (1126-57), and to be more precise to some-
time between 1140 (the date of the betrothal of Sancho III of Castile and Blanca
of Navarre, great-granddaughter of Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid) and the emperor’s
death in 1157.1 Menéndez Pidal regarded the poem as a precious source for the
career of the historical Rodrigo Díaz (c.1043-99) and believed that it relayed
numerous essential truths about his life: in particular, his staunch loyalty to his
liege lord King Alfonso VI of León-Castile (1065-1109), despite the long period
of time he spent in exile from Castile; his part in propelling Castile to hege-
monic status at the expense of León; and his starring role as a champion of a
national project of Reconquista.2 The Cid was nothing less than the archetypal
Spaniard, whose heroic conduct encapsulated the essential spirit of the
Hispanic nation.3 Not only did Menéndez Pidal regard the Poema as a privi-
leged witness to the remarkable life of the Cid, but he also saw key episodes in
its narrative, such as “la afrenta de Corpes”, when the Cid’s daughters were
assaulted by the Infantes de Carrión and left for dead, as events thoroughly
grounded in fact.
While Menéndez Pidal’s position has had its fair share of supporters in the
past, most scholars today would concur that the Poema is a heady mixture of
fact and fiction.4 Its historical framework may be broadly recognisable–inso-
far as the Cid did exist, he was exiled by Alfonso VI, he did defeat the count of
Barcelona, and he did conquer Valencia in the course of his remarkable career–
1 Cantar de mio Cid, Menéndez Pidal (ed.), I, pp. 21-28.

2 These ideas are explored extensively in Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid.
3 García Isasti, La España metafísica, p. 117.
4 None the less, there are clear Pidalian echoes in Martínez Díez, El Cid histórico.

298 Barton
and many of the characters are historically attested, but for the most part
artistic licence takes precedence over historical accuracy.5 The period that the
Cid spent in the military service of al-Mu’tamīn of the Muslim taifa kingdom
of Zaragoza between 1081 and 1086 is carefully airbrushed out of the picture;
the two separate exiles recorded by the Cid’s biographer in the Historia Roderici
– in 1081 and 1088-89 – are compressed into one; and the names the poet
ascribed to the Cid’s daughters are incorrect, to list only a few of the most glar-
ing discrepancies.6 Moreover, the fiercely independent Rodrigo Díaz, who was
presented in a charter he issued in 1098 as “the most invincible prince Rodrigo
the Campeador […] the enlarger of the Christian faith”, who six years earlier
had subjected the Rioja to a devastating attack in response to Alfonso VI’s
attempted conquest of Valencia, and who may even have harboured ambitions
to found a royal dynasty of his own, has seemingly little in common with the
hyper-loyal Cid of the Poema.7 The majority view now – based on a wide range
of legal, linguistic, and other evidence – is that the Poema was composed dur-
ing the latter part of the reign of Alfonso VIII of Castile (1158-1214), if not
necessarily in 1207, as the famous colophon to the poem declares.8 Accord-
ingly, the Poema can be said to provide us with a window into the attitudes and
mores of late 12th-century Castilian society; it is most certainly not a faithful
portrait of the world in which the historical Rodrigo Díaz operated. Attempts
to set the Poema in its historical context have seen it portrayed variously as a
piece of anti-Leonese propaganda, an anti-aristocratic diatribe, a “recruiting-
poster” designed to inspire the fighting men of Castile to redouble their military
efforts against the Muslim south, and a celebration of the values of frontier
society, as well as of the importance of the king-vassal relationship. In this
chapter, these diverse critical viewpoints, and the broader historical context of
the Poema, will be subjected to scrutiny.
5 Montaner Frutos, “Historicidad medieval y protomoderna: lo auténtico sobre lo verídico” and

“Épica, historia, historificación”.
6 See also, Duggan, The “Cantar de mio Cid”, pp. 58-61. For the Historia Roderici, see Historia
Roderici, Falque Rey (ed.); translation by Barton and Fletcher, The World of El Cid, pp. 90-147.
See further the collected papers in La “Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris” y la “Historia Roderici”.
7 For the charter, see Documentos de los Archivos Catedralicio y Diocesano de Salamanca, Martín
Martín et al. (eds.), pp. 79-81. On the historical context of the document, including the Cid’s
possible dynastic ambitions, see Martin, “Le premier témoignage chrétien”; Montaner Frutos,
“Rodrigo el Campeador como princeps”; Barton, “El Cid, Cluny and the Spanish Reconquista”.
For the attack on the Rioja, see Historia Roderici, pp. 82-83.
8 For an overview of the debate, see the chapter by Irene Zaderenko in this volume.
1 Castile and León: The Legacy of Partition
When Alfonso VII of León-Castile died on 21 August 1157 his sprawling impe-
rium was divided into two. His eldest son, Sancho III (1157-58), inherited the
throne of Castile and Toledo, while Fernando II (1157-88) was crowned king of
León and Galicia. According to Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez of Toledo, the
frontier between their two realms ran south from the Cantabrian coast – via
Sahagún and Medina del Campo (among other places) – as far as Ávila, and
thence along the road that led towards Mérida.9 Such a division was entirely in
accordance with customary practice and had been planned for the best part of
a decade beforehand, although later chroniclers, writing with the benefit of
hindsight, came to regard the partition as an act of the upmost folly.10 On
31 August 1158 Alfonso VII’s carefully planned dynastic arrangements unrav-
elled when Sancho followed his father to the grave, leaving his infant son,
Alfonso VIII (1158-1214), not yet three years old, as his successor.11 The ensuing
regency, which lasted until 1169, was marked by a protracted struggle for ascen-
dancy between rival Castilian aristocratic houses – the Laras and the Castros
– who vied with one another to secure custody of the child king. At the same
time, Castile’s Christian neighbours León and Navarre did not hesitate to fish
in these troubled waters and even to profit territorially from them. For exam-
ple, in around 1159-60 Sancho VI of Navarre captured Logroño and a handful of
other towns on the frontier with Castile.12 Meanwhile, in 1162 Fernando II
brought Segovia and Toledo under his authority and was formally recognised
as Alfonso’s tutor, but his attempts to take the boy king into his charge were
thwarted.13
That Castile did not go under at this time was thanks in part to the efforts of
the local nobility – and in particular to Count Manrique and Nuño Pérez de
Lara – who led the defence of the realm against León, but also to the Castilian
clergy.14 At the Synod of Segovia in March 1166 the assembled clerics sought
to galvanise support for Alfonso VIII by threatening to excommunicate those
9 Rodrigo Jiménez, Historia de rebus Hispanie, Fernández Valverde (ed.), p. 229.

10 Rodrigo Jiménez, Historia de rebus Hispanie, p. 229; Chronica latina regum Castellae,
Charlo Brea (ed.), p. 41.
11 The pioneering work on the reign of Alfonso VIII was González, El Reino de Castilla. This
may be supplemented by Martínez Díez, Alfonso VIII; Estepa Díez, Álvarez Borge and San-
tamarta Luengos, Poder real y sociedad. See also Nuño González (ed.), Seminario, Alfonso
VIII y su época.
12 González, El Reino de Castilla, I, pp. 788-89.
13 Rodrigo Jiménez, Historia de rebus Hispanie, pp. 238-39.
14 On the Lara brothers, see Doubleday, The Lara family, pp. 28-43.
300 Barton
who failed to do homage to him for their fiefs, to defend the kingdom against
invaders, or who continued to wage war.15 The clerics further declared that
anyone who took up arms on behalf of the king would enjoy remission of sins
as if he had undertaken a crusade to Jerusalem. The recovery of Toledo from
the hands of Fernando Rodríguez de Castro, who held the city on behalf of
Fernando II, only a few months later set a seal on these efforts to stem the
Leonese advance.
Alfonso VIII attained his majority in November 1169 and began to rule in his
own right as Dei gratia Toleti, Castelle et Extremature rex et dominus.16 The rest
of his long reign played out along two principal geopolitical axes. The first of
these, running west to east was the protracted territorial dispute over Castile’s
borders with her neighbours León and Navarre, during the course of which
regular outbreaks of cross-border warfare – notably in 1172, 1173, 1178, 1181, 1188,
1196, 1197, and 1199 – were punctuated by frenetic, but mostly unsuccessful
attempts to achieve a durable diplomatic solution.17 In 1170, in an effort to
bolster Castile’s position vis-à-vis its rivals, Alfonso married Eleanor of Aqui-
taine, the ten-year-old daughter of Henry II of England, and received Gascony
by way of dowry. Although this particular territorial acquisition was to prove
something of a millstone around Alfonso’s neck and ultimately led him to
renounce his claim in 1205-06, Alfonso used the English alliance to exert pres-
sure on Navarre and recover his territories in the Basque regions of Álava and
Guipúzcoa.18 In 1177, he even enlisted the help of Henry II to arbitrate in the
long-running territorial quarrel, which later led the Castilians and Navarrese to
agree a truce.19 The English alliance was followed by a treaty of friendship with
Alfonso II of Aragon (1164-96) at Zaragoza in July 1170, which marked the begin-
ning of a long-term collaboration between the two and which would culminate
in their joint conquest of Cuenca seven years later.20 For the next two decades,
however, cross-border tensions between the Leonese, Castilians, and Navarrese
would continue to simmer. In 1179, Castilian-Navarrese tensions were tempo-
rarily defused by the treaty of Nájera-Logroño.21 A further treaty delimiting the
frontier with León was brokered at Medina de Ríoseco in 1181, but trust soon
15 Linehan, “The Synod of Segovia (1166)”.

16 González, El Reino de Castilla, II, pp. 211-13.
17 For an overview, see González, El Reino de Castilla, I, pp. 685ff.
18 Linehan, Spain, 1157-1300, p. 32.
19 González, El Reino de Castilla, I, pp. 802-11, and II, pp. 456-61; Luis Corral, “Alfonso VIII of
Castile’s judicial process”.
broke down again and a new agreement had to be brokered at the villages of
Fresno and Lavandera two years later.22
On the face of things, the death of Fernando II in 1188 offered the opportu-
nity for a new beginning. However, Leonese-Castilian relations hit rock bottom
when Alfonso VIII led fresh attacks into the Tierra de Campos and captured
Coyanza (modern Valencia de Don Juan) near the city of León itself. Moreover,
he forced Alfonso IX (1188-1230) to come to terms and at a meeting of the
Castilian curia at Carrión in June 1188, he knighted his cousin and required him
to kiss his hand in a sign of vassalage.23 This naked assertion of Castilian
power not only deepened Leonese hostility towards Castile, but it also caused
a major realignment of forces in the north of the Peninsula. In 1191, by the Pact
of Huesca, Aragon abandoned its long-term policy of friendship towards Cas-
tile and entered into a triple alliance with León and Portugal against Alfonso
VIII.24 Three years later, the papal legate Cardinal Gregory de Sant’ Angelo –
anxious to bring an end to Christian infighting so that a common crusading
front could be presented against the Almohad threat to the south – brokered a
new peace deal between Castile and León at Tordehumos. It was agreed that if
Alfonso IX died without a son his kingdom would revert to Castile; in return
Alfonso VIII undertook to return the various Leonese strongpoints that he had
conquered.25 However, the arrival in the Peninsula of an Almohad army led by
the caliph Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb al-Manṣūr in the summer of 1195 was to change
everything. Alfonso VIII raced to confront him, “like a lion roaring and rampag-
ing before his prey”, as one chronicler put it, only to suffer a shattering defeat
at Alarcos near Calatrava on 19 July.26 Alfonso II of Aragon vainly tried to rally
a coalition against the Almohads, but realpolitik proved more powerful than
religious solidarity or crusading fervour. Alfonso IX of León and the newly-
crowned Sancho VII of Navarre (1194-1234), recognising that the defeat of the
Castilians presented an unprecedented opportunity to settle their long-run-
ning border disputes with Castile in their favour, entered into an alliance with
the Almohads. In 1196 and 1197, Castile was subjected to a co-ordinated assault
by its enemies, which according to Bishop Juan of Osma “seemed to have con-
spired for the ruination of the king of Castile”.27 However, Castile survived,
22 González, El Reino de Castilla, II, pp. 614-23, 701-08.

23 Chronica latina regum Castellae, p. 44; Rodrigo Jiménez, Historia de rebus Hispanie,
pp. 246-47.
24 González, Alfonso IX, II, pp. 70-71.
25 González, Alfonso IX, II, pp. 116-19; González, El Reino de Castilla, III, pp. 105-08.
26 Chronica Latina regum Castellae, pp. 44-47; trans. O’Callaghan, The Latin Chronicle, p. 25.
See further below n. 64.
27 Chronica Latina regum Castellae, p. 48; O’Callaghan (trans.), The Latin Chronicle, p. 29.
302 Barton
helped by reinforcements from the newly-crowned Peter II of Aragon (1196-

1213), whose troops twice attacked León, and the decisive intervention of Pope
Celestine III, who threatened Alfonso IX with excommunication and promised
that anyone who waged war on the Leonese king would enjoy the same remis-
sion of sins as crusaders to the Holy Land did.28 In 1197, Leonese-Castilian
tensions seemed to have been defused when Alfonso IX married Alfonso VIII’s
daughter Berenguela. Pope Innocent III denounced the alliance as incestuous
and the couple were forced to separate in 1204, but not before Berenguela had
borne the king four children. The latter included the future Fernando III (1217-
52), who by the Treaty of Cabreros in 1206 was declared heir to the Leonese
throne. It was Fernando who was ultimately to reunite the realms of León and
Castile in 1230, on the death of Alfonso IX.29 As for Alfonso VIII, by the time he
passed away on 6 October 1214, the king had cemented his position as the pre-
eminent ruler in Christian Iberia and his passing was widely mourned. For
Bishop Juan of Osma:
He was the flower of the kingdom, the adornment of the world, conspicu-
ous for every probity of morals, just, prudent, brave, generous; in no way
had he stained his glory […] For as long as this world will last, Castile has
reason for perpetual sorrow, losing at one and the same time such a great
lord and king and such a great man and such a very renowned vassal […]
All the glory of Castile was suddenly changed as in the blink of an eye.30
A number of scholars have argued that the Poema de mio Cid was composed in
this febrile atmosphere of competitive dynastic politics which convulsed the
northern kingdoms in the decades after 1157, and indeed drew inspiration from
it. In 1980, with striking synchronicity, no fewer than three new hypotheses
attempted to establish the exact circumstances that led to the composition of
the poem. First, Antonio Ubieto Arteta speculated that the anti-Leonese atti-
tudes that he and others had detected in the Poema – exemplified by the wholly
negative portrayal of the Infantes de Carrión and their allies – was related to
the events of those turbulent years. He further ventured that the poet might
have been an Aragonese soldier, who had participated in the war in the Tierra
de Campos region in 1196-97.31 For Colin Smith, meanwhile, the hostility of the
28 Fita, “Bulas históricas”, 423-24; O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, pp. 62-63.
29 González, Alfonso IX, II, pp. 284-91; González, El Reino de Castilla, III, pp. 365-74. On the
prominent part played by Berenguela in these events, see Bianchini, The Queen’s Hand.
30 Chronica Latina regum Castellae, p. 68; trans. O’Callaghan, The Latin Chronicle, pp. 60-61.
31 Ubieto Arteta, “El sentimiento antileonés”.
poet towards the town of Carrión stemmed from a long running dispute
between the monks of San Pedro de Cardeña near Burgos and those of the
Cluniac priory of San Zoilo de Carrión – which had been founded by the pow-
erful Beni-Gómez family, to which the Infantes de Carrión supposedly belonged
– who had violently taken over and despoiled Cardeña in 1144.32 For her part,
María Eugenia Lacarra suggested that the portrayal of the bitter dispute
between El Cid and his family on the one hand and the Infantes de Carrión on
the other, which lies at the heart of the Poema, was consciously meant to echo
the protracted struggle for power that had taken place between their descen-
dants, the Laras and the Castros, during the minority of Alfonso VIII.33 More to
the point, the poem was explicitly intended to act as a work of escarnho e de
mal dezir, by attacking the Castro family itself, which since its ejection from
Castile by the Laras in 1161 had aligned its interests firmly with those of the
crown of León. The principal target of the poet’s ire, Lacarra argued, was prob-
ably Pedro Fernández de Castro (d. 1214), who had won notoriety (and papal
excommunication) for having fought on the Almohad side against Alfonso VIII
of Castile at Alarcos in 1195 and for having instigated the subsequent alliance
between the caliph and the monarchs of León and Navarre.34 The fact that
earlier, in or before 1165, Count Pedro Manrique de Lara had married a great-
granddaughter of the Cid, the Infanta Sancha Garcés of Navarre, makes it
further conceivable that the poet enjoyed the patronage of a member of the
Lara clan.35 This suggestion has been supported by Duggan, who names Count
Pedro’s sons García and Gonzalo Pérez – the latter lord of Molina, where some
of the action of the poem takes place – as other potential patrons of the poet.36
According to Lacarra, the bad blood between the Laras and Castros inspired
the poet to create a work of overt propaganda, which through its denunciation
of the Beni-Gómez was in turn intended to traduce the reputation of the
Castros.37
In fact, Lacarra’s hypothesis could be taken a stage further. It so happens
that in 1204 Pedro Fernández was reconciled with Alfonso VIII and had his
32 Smith, “The choice of the Infantes de Carrión”; cf. Cantar de mio Cid, Montaner Frutos
(ed.), pp. 845-51.
33 Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid, pp. 131-59.
34 Lucas de Tuy, Chronicon Mundi, Falque (ed.), p. 322; González, El Reino de Castilla, I,
pp. 330-36, 720; Calderón Medina, Cum magnatibus, pp. 182-86. In 1199 Pedro still owed
loyalty to the Almohad caliph: Calderón Medina, Cum magnatibus, pp. 520-21. For the
papal excommunication of Pedro, see Fita, “Bulas históricas”, no. 3.
35 Barton, The Aristocracy, pp. 282-83, nn. 3, 30.
36 Duggan, The “Cantar de mio Cid”, pp. 98-99, 107.
37 Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid, p. 159.
304 Barton
properties restored to him, only for relations to break down again three years
later.38 The magnate subsequently spent periods in Urgel and León, before
again seeking asylum with the Almohads late in 1213, because the peace terms
that had been agreed between León and Castile had led to his exclusion from
both courts.39 He died in Morocco in 1214, “pursued as his principal enemy” by
his former lord, Alfonso VIII, as Bishop Juan of Osma put it.40 Was it mere
coincidence, then, that it was in 1207, the very year when the Poema may (or
may not!) have been composed, that Pedro Fernández had broken with the
Castilian monarch and set off into exile again, winning the enmity of the king
and his supporters in the process? It is an intriguing hypothesis, but ultimately
unprovable, in common with the other theories outlined above. Just as we
cannot assume that the poet’s audience would have grasped all the tangled
genealogical connections that existed between the dramatis personae of the
poem and the key political players of the present, there is also the problem that
Álvar Fáñez, who is portrayed in the Poema as the Cid’s trusted right-hand
man, was himself an ancestor of the Castros.41
The chequered relationship between the Cid and his liege lord Alfonso VI is,
of course, one of the central themes of the Poema. As has already been noted,
the Rodrigo Díaz of history was an avowedly independent figure, who after his
conquest of Valencia may even have harboured royal ambitions for his dynasty.
In the Poema, by contrast, the Cid is transformed into an uber-loyal vassal, who
accepts his unjust exile with resignation and attempts to prove his unswerving
loyalty to the king, his señor natural, by showering him with lavish gifts. He
restates this loyalty after his conquest of Valencia, culminating in a moving
reconciliation between the two by the Tagus, at which the Cid’s subordinate
status is underlined:
De un dia es legado antes el rey don Alfonso;

cuando vieron que vinié el buen Campeador,
recebirlo salen con tan grand onor.
Don lo ovo a ojo el que en buen ora nasco,
a todos los sos estar los mandó,
sinon a estos cavalleros que querié de coraçón.
Con unos XV a tierra·s’ firio;
38 González, El Reino de Castilla, III, p. 342.

39 Chronica latina de regum Castellae, p.65; Calderón Medina, Cum magnatibus, pp. 185-86.
40 Chronica latina de regum Castellae, p. 68.
41 Smith, The Making, pp. 177-78; Rico, “Del Cantar de mio Cid a la Eneida”, p. 207; Cantar de
mio Cid, Montaner Frutos (ed.), pp. 849-51, 853, 863.
commo lo comidía el que en buen ora nació,

los inojos e las manos en tierra los fincó,
las yerbas del campo a dientes las tomó.
Lorando de los ojos, tanto avié el gozo mayor,
así sabe dar omildança a Alfonsso so señor (2013-24)
As Richard Fletcher put it, “the independent, insubordinate, arrogant Rodrigo

Díaz of history has been wrapped in a cloak of royalist pieties”.42 Yet at the
same time, the poet is keen to emphasise the king’s own responsibilities
towards his vassal. Just as the Cid’s loyalty is being tested during the first part
of the Poema, as he suffers unjust treatment and his daughters suffer humilia-
tion, in the second half it is the monarch who is required to demonstrate his
credentials as a lord by bringing the Cid’s complaint against the Infantes de
Carrión before his cort. By the end of the poem, Roger Walker has observed,
“both the vassal and the lord have been tested and both have passed the test;
against great odds each has justified the other’s faith in him”.43
It is not inconceivable that the Poema’s exemplary portrait of the king-vassal
dynamic was coloured by Alfonso VIII’s own difficult relationship with the
secular magnates of his realm. The fact of the matter was that the readiness of
some among the Castilian nobility to seek patronage at the Leonese court was
by no means the particular preserve of the Castros. It is striking, rather, that
during the course of his long reign Alfonso VIII’s authority was regularly called
into question by a series of high-profile political defections by some of his
magnates. Even the Laras, the putative patrons of the Poema, were no less cul-
pable in this respect. The marriage of Fernando II to Teresa Fernández de
Traba, widow of Count Nuño Pérez de Lara, in 1179, ensured that her family
would maintain close ties to the Leonese court for decades to come. Thus, her
eldest son, Count Fernando Núñez de Lara (d.1219), can be traced at the court
of Alfonso IX between 1191 and 1194, between 1199 and 1200, and for shorter
periods thereafter.44 Even more influential was Fernando’s brother, Count
Gonzalo Núñez (d. 1225), who is known to have been resident in León in 1185-
86, 1191, 1195-99, 1204-06, 1210-11, and 1219-21, and was awarded a series of
42 Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid, p. 194.

43 Walker, “The Role of the King”, p. 265.
44 González, El Reino de Castilla, I, pp. 286-88; Barton, The Aristocracy, pp. 239-40; Double-
day, The Lara Family, pp. 46-48, 50-51, 58, 185-87; Calderón Medina, Cum magnatibus,
pp. 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 256-57, 309-10, 322, 327-29, 454, 468.
306 Barton
prestigious tenencias (lordships) by the king.45 Meanwhile, their cousin, Count

Pedro Manrique de Lara (fl.1157-1202), lord of Molina, Osma, and Toledo, among
other places, briefly joined the court of Fernando II in 1185-86 and was also
awarded a string of key lordships.46 Another influential Castilian family that
particularly impacted on the Leonese political scene was the Riojan Haro clan.
The relationship between Fernando II and Urraca López de Haro in around
1181, which was cemented by marriage in 1187, prompted her brothers Rodrigo,
García, and Diego to follow in their sister’s footsteps to the Leonese court.47
Diego, lord of Nájera and Vizcaya, later sought exile in Navarre in 1201 and
waged war on Alfonso VIII, before switching allegiance to the court of Alfonso
IX of León, where he remained until 1206.48 The list could go on.49
The alacrity with which such magnates were willing to relinquish their ties
of vassalage to Alfonso VIII and seek alternative sources of patronage speaks
volumes for the transient nature of the loyalty that many nobles owed to their
king.50 We should recognise the artificiality of the frontier that had been
drawn between León and Castile after the death of Alfonso VII in 1157. Even
though the magnates had gravitated towards one court or another, depending
upon where their chief power base lay, the fact remained that a good many of
them had family ties and property interests on either side of the Leonese-
Castilian frontier. In this vassal’s market, the magnates of Castile were evidently
willing to exploit the longstanding tensions that existed between Castile and
León to further their own interests. It was a similar story on León’s western
frontier, where several Portuguese nobles pledged allegiance to the Leonese
monarchy during the reigns of Fernando II and Alfonso IX.51 By contrast, it is
striking that comparatively few Leonese nobles crossed the frontier into
Castile, or Portugal for that matter, in search of patronage during the same
period. This may have had something to do with the generosity with which
45 González, El Reino de Castilla, I, pp. 290-92; Doubleday, The Lara Family, pp. 45-46, 50, 52,
58, 187-88; Calderón Medina, Cum magnatibus, pp. 188-93, 316-18, 325-29, 332-34, 454, 468,
469, 515.
46 Barton, The Aristocracy, pp. 282-3; Calderón Medina, Cum magnatibus, pp. 281, 500.
47 González, El Reino de Castilla, I, pp. 304-10; Calderón Medina, Cum magnatibus, pp. 194-
97.
48 Rodrigo Jiménez, Historia de rebus Hispanie, p. 255; González, El Reino de Castilla, I,
pp. 303-06; Barton, “Reinventing the Hero”, pp. 73-74.
49 See further Barton, “Reinventing the Hero”, pp. 72-77.
50 Pascua Echegaray, “El papel de la nobleza”, p. 322, and Guerra y pacto, pp. 179-94. On the
relationship between the Leonese monarchs and their nobles, see Calderón Medina, Cum
magnatibus; Barton, “Alfonso IX y la nobleza”.
51 Calderón Medina, Cum magnatibus, pp. 200-44.
Fernando II rewarded those who were loyal to him, so much so that when
Alfonso IX succeeded him to the throne he found the royal treasury empty.52
To return to the Poema, and in the light of the above, it is not beyond the
realms of possibility that rather than target a particular family or individual,
the poet’s exemplary presentation of the king-vassal relationship was in part
designed to remind the secular elite of its responsibilities to the Castilian
crown. This suggestion is reinforced if we bear in mind that the poet might well
have been trained in the procedures of Roman public law, which privileged the
supreme authority of the monarch over that of the hereditary nobility as a
means to achieve social harmony.53 A similar drive towards the centralisation
of royal power can be seen in many other regions of the Latin West from the
late 12th century onwards.54 The legal practices enunciated in the Poema
would undoubtedly have resonated with Alfonso VIII, who demonstrated his
own clear commitment towards public law in the municipal fueros that he
issued and in territorial codes such as the Ordenamiento de Nájera (1185).55
Thus, in the prologue to the Forum Conche, or Fuero of Cuenca, issued c.1190,
Alfonso served clear notice of his priorities as ruler and lawgiver:
I, Alfonso […] the guide of those who take pride in the Hispanic king-
doms, codified the summation of judicial institutions in behalf of
safeguarding peace and the rights of justice between clergy and laity,
between townsmen and peasants, among the needy and the poor […]
Happy is that marriage certainly when Law and Justice join in uniform
alliance, so that when the Law instructs that one should be cleared, he is
cleared by the Law, and that which it determines should be condemned,
is condemned by Justice, which sufficiently favours definition by both.
Thus Law is that which permits the honest and prohibits the opposite;
Justice, on the other hand, is the virtue that concedes each one his rights,
punishes the culprit, and acquits the innocent.56
Such sentiments are amply echoed in the Poema de mio Cid.
52 González, Alfonso IX, II, pp. 12-15.

53 On the legal aspects of the Poema, see further the article by Eukene Lacarra in this volume
and references therein.
54 León under Alfonso IX was a case in point, see Barton, “Alfonso IX y la nobleza”, pp. 83-87.
55 González, “Sobre las fechas”; Grassotti, “El recuerdo”; Zaderenko, “El procedimiento judi-
cial”.
56 English translation by Powers, The Code of Cuenca, pp. 28-29.
308 Barton
The Poema is far from being an anti-noble diatribe, as various authors have
contended, but what we do see is a tension between the lesser nobility of the
frontier, who the Cid and his supporters are made to represent, and the fami-
lies of the highest wealth, status and power, the ricos omes, whose interests and
outlook are characterised in the poem by the Infantes de Carrión. As Richard
Fletcher has noted, “this does not make the Poema de mio Cid a ‘political poem’
in any crude sense of that phrase. However, one can understand how the
Castilian ‘establishment’ could approve the figure of the Cid which the poet
held out”.57 Such matters of social hierarchy are explored in much greater
depth by Georges Martin elsewhere in this volume.
2 A Society Organised for War
The second key geopolitical axis that defined and shaped royal policy through-
out Alfonso VIII’s reign ran north to south and was related to his attempts to
keep Muslim power in the south of the Peninsula in check. The military
advance of the Berber Almohads at the very end of Alfonso VII’s life had seen
the fall of a series of major strongpoints, which had previously been conquered
by the king-emperor, notably Almería, Andújar, Baeza, and Úbeda. During the
minority of Alfonso VIII, with Castile convulsed by dynastic war, responsibility
for the defence of the southern frontier of Castile fell chiefly to the militias of
the municipalities that lay between the Duero and the Tagus valleys, as well as
to the recently founded Military Orders of Calatrava (1158) and Santiago (1170),
both of which were granted castles, lands, and privileges by the king.58 The
decades that followed were characterised by thrust and counter-thrust on
either side. The Almohads launched a number of major campaigns against
Christian positions, but the frequent need to quell uprisings in the Balearics
and Tunisia meant that they were unable to maintain any momentum and ter-
ritorial gains were limited.59 In 1174, Alfonso VIII sought to strengthen his
defences in the upper Tagus valley, granting the castle at Uclés to the Order of
Santiago and at Zorita to that of Calatrava.60 Three years later, the king tight-
ened his grip over the region when he and his Aragonese allies captured
Cuenca east of Toledo and made the city the centre of his subsequent coloniz-
57 Fletcher, The Quest, p. 195.

58 Ayala Martínez, Las órdenes militares; Forey, “The military orders”.
59 For an overview, see Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, pp. 216ff.
60 González, El Reino de Castilla, II, pp. 323-24, 329-30.
ing efforts in the region of La Mancha.61 In a sign of his growing confidence,

the Castilian monarch was also beginning to think to the long-term. In 1179, at
Cazola, Alfonso VIII and Alfonso II of Aragon swore a treaty of friendship and
demarcated their respective spheres of influence in the Peninsula, with Denia,
Játiva, and Valencia earmarked as future areas of Aragonese expansion,
although their king would no longer be required to owe homage to Castile.62 In
1186, in the western sector towards Cáceres, a new Castilian forward position
on the frontier with al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) was established at Plasencia.63
Alfonso VIII’s relations with the Almohads came to be defined above all by
two major pitched battles. The first was the king’s disastrous defeat at Alarcos
in 1195, the reverberations of which were heard far to the north of Europe.64
Coming as it did only seven years after the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, it
appeared to contemporaries that the frontiers of Christendom were in danger
of being overrun. Meanwhile, the Almohad caliph Ya‘qūb I (1184-99) kept up
the military pressure, over-running Plasencia and Trujillo in 1196, and ravaging
far and wide across the Tagus valley the following year. Alfonso VIII gratefully
agreed to a truce and renewed it at regular intervals thereafter. A peninsular
crusade was hardly a priority, whatever the papacy might have preferred.
However, hostilities broke out again in 1210 and Pope Innocent III offered cru-
sading privileges to those who took up arms against the Muslims. When the
new caliph Muḥammad al-Nāṣir (1199-1213) captured the headquarters of the
Order of Calatrava at Salvatierra the following year it spurred Alfonso VIII into
action.65 With further papal encouragement and thanks to an enthusiastic
propaganda campaign, a large crusading army assembled at Toledo in May
1212. On 16 July, despite the desertion of the majority of the French arms-bear-
ers who had come south, Alfonso VIII and his Aragonese and Navarrese allies
won an overwhelming victory over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa on the
southern slopes of the Sierra Morena.66 Historians today tend to downplay
the long-term strategic significance of Las Navas, but for contemporaries the
61 Rodrigo Jiménez, Historia de rebus Hispanie, pp. 248-49; Chronica latina regum Castellae,
p. 42.
62 Alfonso II Rey de Aragón, Sánchez Casabón (ed.), pp. 376-80.
63 González, El Reino de Castilla, I, pp. 942-43.
64 Linehan, Spain, 1157-1300, p. 40. On the Alarcos campaign, see further Huici Miranda, Las
grandes batallas, pp. 137-216; Izquierdo Benito and Ruiz Gómez (eds.), Alarcos, 1195.
65 Rodrigo Jiménez, Historia de rebus Hispanie, p. 257.
66 On the campaign of Las Navas, see Huici Miranda, Las grandes batallas, pp. 219-327; Vara
Thorbeck, El lunes de las Navas; García Fitz, Las Navas de Tolosa; Alvira Cabrer, Las Navas
de Tolosa, 1212.
310 Barton
victory was an unparalleled achievement, vindicating Alfonso’s claim to be the

“defender of Christendom” and winning him plaudits across Europe.67
One might expect the Poema de mio Cid to reflect the upsurge of crusading
enthusiasm that gradually took root in the Peninsula during the course of the
12th century, but in truth it does so only to a limited degree.68 The Cid is cer-
tainly portrayed as a good Christian, who demonstrates his piety by making
gifts to the abbey of San Pedro de Cardeña and the cathedral of Burgos, by
installing the Frenchman Jerónimo as bishop in Valencia, and by taking the
fight to the infidel. For his part, the bishop is depicted pardoning the Castilians’
sins before they head into battle:
A los mediados gallos, antes de la mañana,

el obispo don Jherónimo la missa les cantava;
la missa dicha, grant sultura les dava:
– El que aquí muriere lidiando de cara,
préndol’ yo los pecados e Dios le abrá el alma. (1701-05)
However, there is no indication that the author believed that through the Cid’s
military efforts against the Muslims a new “Spanish way” to Jerusalem was
being opened up, as some Iberian crusaders of the period most assuredly did.69
Instead, the values that emerge most strongly in the poem in the context of
Christian-Muslim conflict are those of the Castilian frontier with al-Andalus.
During the century and a half that had elapsed between the accession of
Alfonso VI and the death of Alfonso VIII, the Leonese-Castilian realms had
experienced an unprecedented period of territorial expansion into the region
that lay between the Duero and Tagus valleys. Successive monarchs, mindful
that their hold on these territories was by no means secure, put in train a legal
framework – which included tax exemptions and immunity from prosecution
for criminals on the run in some cases – with which to encourage settlers to
take up residence on the southern frontier. When Alfonso VII granted a charter
of liberties to the settlers of Oreja near Toledo in 1139, for example, he candidly
declared that he did so “in order to prevent the Moors from retaking it”.70
67 See, for example, García Fitz, “Was Las Navas a decisive battle?”; Linehan, History and the
historians, pp. 292-95.
68 See the discussion in Cantar de mio Cid, Montaner Frutos (ed.), pp. 810-11. Cf. Riva, “‘Vues-
tra vertud’”. On the Iberian crusading movement more broadly, see O’Callaghan, Recon-
quest and Crusade.
69 Purkis, Crusading Spirituality, pp. 129-37.
70 Martín Rodríguez, Orígenes, pp. 178-80.
Collections of customary law (fueros) – like the extensive and emblematic

code which Alfonso VIII granted to the settlers of Cuenca, and which was later
adopted, either partially or wholly, by dozens of other municipalities across
the centre of the Peninsula – demonstrate the primacy of warfare to the life
and economy of such frontier settlements.71 The law-codes are replete with
regulations concerning military service, the organisation of both offensive and
defensive operations, the compensation to be paid to those who were wounded
on campaign, the procedure to be followed when sharing out plunder, and so
on. Cuenca and other strategically-situated fortified towns along the frontier,
like Sepúlveda (founded 1076), Ávila (1087), and Segovia (c.1088), were designed
to act as strategic military bases and were dominated by hardy groups of war-
rior-shepherds, who when they were not caring for their livestock were
expected to defend the frontier and conduct raids deep into Muslim territory
in search of plunder.72 They might even take part in the campaigns of con-
quest that were periodically launched against al-Andalus by the king or one of
his magnates. This was the quasi-noble military class known as the caballeros
villanos, whose privileged status was determined by their possession of a horse
and the accoutrements of war.73 It is no exaggeration to say that for such men
the acquisition of plunder through warfare was their very lifeblood, a means to
boost their economic and social standing. Like the Cid of the Poema, their loy-
alty as subjects was towards their “natural lord”, the king, rather than through
ties of vassalage to one or other of the territorial magnates.74
The Poema de mio Cid breathes this “frontier spirit” of enterprise, ambition,
and resilience.75 Rather than view the Cid’s battles with his Muslim foes
through the prism of holy war, the poet consistently echoes the preoccupa-
tions of the municipal law-codes, recording in detail the plunder that the Cid
captured and distributed among his followers, warning of the severe penalties
that would be meted out to deserters, and emphasising the opportunities for
71 Fuero de Cuenca, Ureña y Smenjaud (ed.); Powers (trans.), The Code of Cuenca. On the
relationship between the Cuenca code and the equally influential Aragonese fuero of
Teruel, see García Ulecia, Los factores de diferenciación, pp. 355-452; Barrero García, El
Fuero de Teruel, pp. 53-137; Powers, A Society Organized for War, pp. 219-29.
72 Lourie, “A Society Organized for War”; Powers, A Society Organized for War.
73 The classic study is Pescador, “La caballería popular”.
74 Cantar de mio Cid, Montaner Frutos (ed.), pp. 328, 333-34, and 772-77; see also Bautista,
“Como a señor natural”.
75 Cantar de mio Cid, Montaner Frutos (ed.), pp. 311-19, 333-40, 343-44, 348-49, 353, 362, 366,
378-79, 682, 695, 765, 810-11, 816-17, 822, 864-65, 997. See also Molho, “El Cantar de Mio Cid”;
Ubieto Arteta, “La creación de la frontera”; Montaner Frutos, “Un canto de frontera”.
312 Barton
social mobility that success in war brought with it.76 This is exemplified by the
case of the Cid himself, who begins the poem as a humble infanzón (a member
of the lesser nobility) and ends it as lord of Valencia, whose daughters he mar-
ries off to the royal houses of Aragon and Navarre. As the Cid is famously made
to pronounce: “qui en un logar mora siempre lo so puede menguar” (v. 948).
The ringing declaration that is made in the wake of the conquest of Valencia
fittingly sums up the prevailing mood:
Grandes son los gozos que van por es logar,

quando mio Cid gañó a Valencia e entró en la cibdad.
Los que fueron de pie cavalleros se fazen;
el oro e la plata ¿quién vos lo podrié contar?
Todos eran ricos quantos que allí ha. (1211-15)
Colin Smith has described the Poema as a “recruiting-poster” for the struggle
against Islam, but that is true only in the sense that it reminded the arms-bear-
ing class of the financial rewards that warfare against Muslims could bring.77
As already noted, there is only a limited connection with the broader ideologi-
cal concerns of crusade and, tellingly, the only character who is made to
articulate strong anti-Islamic feelings is the Frenchman, Bishop Jerónimo:
– Oy vos dix la missa de Santa Trinidade.

Por esso salí de mi tierra e vinvos buscar,
por sabor que avía de algún moro matar.
Mi orden e mis manos querríalas ondrar
e a estas feridas yo quiero ir delant. (2370-74)
For the most part, however, the poem reflects the essential pragmatism that
often characterised Christian dealings with the Islamic world at this time.
Although in the 1130s and 1140s, at the height of Christian-Almoravid conflict,
military victory had sometimes been followed by the mass slaughter of the
defeated population, this was by no means standard practice.78 The author of
the Poema conveys what Israel Burshatin has called a “dichotomous vision” of
the Islamic world, in which Muslims tended to be portrayed as dehumanized
76 Guglielmi, “Cambio y movilidad social”; Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid, pp. 116-17, 161-62,
202-03.
77 Smith, The Making, p. 97.
78 See, for example, Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, Maya Sánchez (ed.), pp. 208, 213, and 222.
enemies–particularly the Berber Almoravids–or as hyper-noble friends.79

Thus, Avengalvón, the Muslim ruler of Molina and a steadfast ally of the Cid, is
praised in the poem for his constancy and generosity towards the Campeador,
albeit in large part because he was no longer seen to pose a threat to the
Christians.80 That same pragmatism is reflected elsewhere in the Poema, where
conquered Andalusi Muslims are allowed to remain in submission to their
Christian conquerors rather than being sold into slavery or, worse still, facing
execution:
los moros e las moras vender non los podremos,

que los descabecemos nada non ganaremos,
cojámoslos de dentro, ca el señorío tenemos,
posaremos en sus casas e d’ellos nos serviremos (619-22)
Here, once again, crusading zeal is firmly subordinated to the practicalities of

government.
3 Conclusion
It has been suggested by some scholars that the Poema de mio Cid was commis-
sioned to coincide with a signal event in the life of the court of Alfonso VIII.
Duggan, for one, has posited that the poem was performed for the first time in
front of the Castilian court at the Cistercian abbey of Santa María de Huerta in
April 1199, or in September 1200, at the same place or at nearby Ariza, at the
time of a meeting between Alfonso VIII and Pedro II of Aragon.81 Alternatively,
I have tentatively suggested elsewhere that it might have been the reconcilia-
tion of Alfonso VIII and his former vassal Diego López de Haro after the Treaty
of Cabreros in 1206 and the return of the magnate to the Castilian court from
exile that provided an appropriate inspiration for the composition of the
Poema.82 Another scenario, put forward by Francisco Hernández, sees the
Poema being recited and written down by the shadowy Per Abbat at a meeting
79 Israel Burshatin, “The Docile Image”, pp. 269, 271. For another, earlier example of a “good
Moor”, see Barton, “Islam and the West”, pp. 171-73.
80 Burshatin, “The Docile Image”, pp. 273-74; Smith, The Making, pp. 101-02.
81 Duggan, The “Cantar de mio Cid”, pp. 84ff.
82 Barton, “Reinventing the Hero”, p. 78, n. 4. On Diego López and his subsequent literary
reputation, see Baury, “Los ricohombres y el rey en Castilla”, pp. 60-62, and “Diego López
‘le bon’ et Diego López ‘le mauvais’”.
314 Barton
of the Cortes celebrated by Alfonso VIII at Toledo in January 1207.83 According

to this interpretation, the poem’s scene of Alfonso VI’s meeting of his Cortes at
Toledo, where the Cid’s cause triumphs over that of his enemies, would thus
have had a particular resonance.
All of these scenarios are plausible enough and others could and doubtless
will be advanced in the future. Ultimately, however, we must recognise that
any attempt to pinpoint the exact moment in time when the Poema de mio Cid
was composed (or indeed the place where it was performed) is doomed to fail-
ure. The poem simply does not provide us with sufficient clues to prove
definitively the circumstances under which it was produced. One man’s care-
fully reasoned argument is another’s educated guesswork. Likewise, the idea
that the poem was an epic written in code, designed to connect with precise
historical circumstances – such as the Castro-Lara enmity – at the turn of the
13th century is difficult to sustain. What is abundantly clear, by contrast, is that
the career of the Cid, as it was remembered and reinvented by the Poema,
acted as a vehicle through which the author sought to convey to his audience
certain key messages and values. Epic poetry aimed to entertain, but it was also
a means for authors to articulate their own community’s sense of identity and
legitimacy.84 The Poema was the product of a society that had undergone
enormous structural change during the previous century and a half. It reflected
the concerns of a specific sector of that society – the lesser nobility of the fron-
tier towns – while simultaneously emphasising the need for equilibrium in
relations between monarchy and nobility by upholding the rule of law. By
looking back to the past and reworking it in the way that he did, the author was
seeking to remind his audience of the need to cultivate social harmony in the
present.
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Alfonso II Rey de Aragón, Conde de Barcelona y Marqués de Provenza. Documentos (1162-
1196), Ana Isabel Sánchez Casabón (ed.), Zaragoza: Institución “Fernando el Católico”,
1995.
Cantar de mio Cid. Texto, gramática y vocabulario, Ramón Menéndez Pida (ed.), 3 vols.,
2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1944-46.
Cantar de mio Cid, Alberto Montaner (ed.), Barcelona: Real Academia Española, 2011.
83 Francisco Hernández, “Las Cortes de Toledo de 1207”, esp. p. 223.

84 Duggan, “Medieval epic as popular historiography”, p. 311.
Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, Antonio Maya Sánchez (ed.), in Chronica Hispana saeculi
XII. Pars I (Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaeualis, 71), Turnhout: Brepols,
1990, pp. 109-248.
Chronica latina regum Castellae, Luis Charlo Brea (ed.), in Chronica Hispana saeculi XIII,
(Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaeualis 73), Turnhout: Brepols, 1997,
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320
Barton
Figure 10.1 Map of the Iberian Peninsula in 1085, after the conquest of Toledo by King Alfonso VI. © Dani
Guixà Couderc & Alberto Montaner.
Santiago
Pamplona
León
Burgos
Zaragoza
Toledo
Valencia
Radajoz
Lisbon
Murcia
The Historical Context of the Poema de mio Cid
Córdoba
Sevilla RECONQUERED AREA

Granada
Before 914
After 1480
0 30 60 90 km
321
Figure 10.2 Principal stages of the Reconquest. © Dani Guixà Couderc & Alberto Montaner.
322 Martin
Chapter 11
Social Structures and Values in the Poema de mio

Cid*
Georges Martin
Like all literary works, the Poema de mio Cid (PMC, Poema) unknowingly and
unintentionally reflects the society in which it was created. It mirrors it inas-
much as it is itself a social product and, therefore, a social form. Yet with
respect to the image of society it offers, it is better to speak in terms of repre-
sentation and even expression, since the social categories that it deals with
– economic systems, social structures, ethical values, public models, etc. – are
organized toward obtaining a particular meaning and are subordinated to an
interpretation of reality. Myriad factors, particularly generic ones, intervene in
this process, yet the work’s fundamental orientation is set by the intention of
the author or authors. For that reason, an analysis of the sociological content
of the Poema cannot be limited to a description or explanation of the social
institutions alluded to in the text, but rather, should take into account the
dynamic of meaning that polarizes them in a significant way. Similarly, one
should be very cautious when accepting what critics know – or presume to
know – about the real – historical, extratextual – condition of one character or
another, and, without ignoring what has been said, one must be especially
attentive to the way characters are portrayed in the Poema.
1 Sociological Outlook
Considering the scope and limitations imposed by the epic genre, the PMC
offers a rather broad view of the society in which it was composed. The Church
– one of the groups constituting the tripartite social model that prevailed on
the other side of the Pyrenees1 and fully emerged in Castile by the mid-13th
* Poema de mio Cid is the tittle chosen by the editors of this volume. I would prefer Cantar de
Mio Cid since “cantar” is the term employed in the poem itself and in 13th-century chronicles
for this kind of text (for part of it or for the whole text). The capital in the possessive “Mio” is
justified because it forms with the word “Cid” a fixed nominal syntagm used as a name, as we
can see not only in the poem but also in contemporary Navarrese chronicles.
1 See Georges Duby’s Les trois ordres, which is still the most authoritative work on this matter.

Social Structures and Values in the Poema de mio Cid 323
century,2 and whose members were referred to as oratores (in Spanish, “ora-
dores”; in English, the clergy) – is typified by two chief prelates of its hierarchy:
the abbot and the bishop. The abbot of San Pedro de Cardeña, Don Sancho, is
shown as performing the three principal activities that were embodied in his
role and pertained to the mission of abbeys and monasteries: praying (v. 238),
celebrating mass (v. 319), and providing refuge to those in need – in our case,
the Cid’s wife and daughters cruelly bereft of any protection as a consequence
of the hero’s banishment (vv. 255-57). With respect to Don Jerónimo, although
his intelligence and knowledge are recognized – “Bien entendido es de letras e
mucho acordado” (v. 1290) –, and despite the fact that he is often depicted cele-
brating mass3 or performing ceremonies according to protocol (vv. 1579-83), he
is portrayed chiefly as a “clergyman of the Reconquest” through whom the pro-
cess of restoring the cathedral,4 a certain spirit of the Crusade,5 and, above all,
combative zeal are exalted.6 His characterization is similar to that of literary
figures like Turpin; but he is much more similar to historical 12th-century
Castilian bishops such as Bernardo de Sedirac, Raimundo de Toledo, Pedro de
Palencia, Bernardo de Sigüenza, Gutierre de Segovia, and Juan de Ávila,7 as
well as to Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the Archbishop of Toledo in the early 13th
century.8
The lay aristocracy or group of knights – milites in Latin, “caballeros” in
Spanish, and in the aforementioned tripartite model bellatores (“defensores”
2 According to the heading of Title XXI of the second Partida: “Defensores son vno de los tres
estados por que dios quiso que se mantuuiesse el mundo, ca bien assi como los que ruegan a
dios por el pueblo son dichos oradores e otrosi los que labran la tierra e fazen en ella aquellas
cosas por que los omes han de biuir e de mantener se son dichos labradores, otrosi los que
han a defender a todos son dichos defensores” (Alfonso X el Sabio, Las siete partidas.
Punctuation is mine).
3 See vv. 1702, 2069, 2238-40.
4 “¡Dios, qué alegre era todo christianismo / Que en tierras de Valençia señor avié obispo!”
(vv. 1305-06); also see vv. 1297-300 and 1664-69.
5 As per pontifical order for Christians who died during the crusade, Don Jerónimo promises
the Cid’s knights the “soltura” (absolution) of their sins: “El obispo do Iherónimo soltura nos
dará” (v. 1689); “El obispo don Iherónimo la missa les cantava. / La missa dicha, grant sultura
les dava” (vv.1702-03); “¡El que aquí muriere lidiando de cara, / Préndol’ yo los pecados e Dios
le abrá el alma!” (vv. 1704-05).
6 “De pie e de cavallo mucho era areziado. / Las provezas de Myo Çid andávalas demandan-
do; / Sospirando el obispo que.s’ viesse con moros en el campo, / ¡Que si.s’ fartás’ lidiando e
firiendo con sus manos, / A los días del sieglo non le lorassen christianos!’ (vv. 1291-95); also
vv. 1460-61, 1706-11, 1793-98, 2368-91.
7 Many of these figures are mentioned in Carlos de Ayala Martínez, “Alfonso VII y la Cruzada”.
8 For more on the 13th century (although only the reign of Sancho IV is discussed), see José
Manuel Nieto Soria, Iglesia y poder real en Castilla. This typology of the warrior bishop con-
tinued into the 14th century; see Ana Arranz Guzmán, “Cuando el clérigo va a la guerra”.
324 Martin
in Spanish; warriors in English)9 – appears under a number of components in

which each one has been established by natural and hierarchical distinctions.
In the Poema, the high nobility is represented by the “condes” – that is to say,
those noblemen who occupied the highest level of early medieval Castilian
society. This social group includes a sovereign count or prince who is not from
Castile, the Count of Barcelona (v. 957); close companions – in accordance
with the meaning of its Latin etymon, comes – or lay advisors of the king such
as Count García Ordóñez (v. 1348) and Counts Fruela and Beltrán (v. 3004); a
lineage of magnates (the Counts of Carrión, v. 1376; Count Gonzalo, v. 2268);
or a collective social entity wielding considerable local power (the “condes
gallizanos”, v. 2926). Within this group, two men stand out who are closely
connected to the monarchy for being at the origin of royal dynasties in the
Peninsula: Count Anrrich and Count Remond (Enrique and Ramón de Borgoña,
vv. 3002-03). The poem says nothing of Enrique, the father of Portugal’s first
king, Alfonso Enríquez; however, he does indicate that Ramón “fue padre del
buen enperador” (v. 3003) – that is to say, Alfonso VII, grandson of Alfonso VI,
the king who plays a central role in the Poema, and grandfather of Alfonso
VIII, the monarch under whose reign the PMC was composed. The term that
could have expanded the representation of the upper nobility – “ricos omnes”10
– appears only once in the Poema (v. 3546) to designate, very generically and
only at the end of the work, members of the royal court who attend the judicial
duels. As for the high nobility, the Poema provides only a rather limited picture,
one in which social position, power, and birth dominate, but it is silent about
the more operative and functional characteristics of this social group.
“Ynfançones”11 (“infanzones”) – a term that designated the intermediate
social stratum between counts (and “ricos hombres”) and knights12 in the sec-
ond half of the 13th century and in the 14th century – complete the graduated
or hierarchical representation of the nobility in the poem. The same is true
9 Cf. note 2.
10 For this sociological category, see Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. 2,
pp. 826-29, and Georges Martin, Les Juges de Castille, pp. 364-65. For an overview of Me-
dieval Spanish “nobilities”, consult (with caution) Marie-Claude Gerbet, Les noblesses
espagnoles.
11 Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. 2, pp. 718-20. María del Carmen Carlé published
a study dedicated exclusively to this matter, “Infanzones e hidalgos”; however, I must con-
fess my disagreement with some of her conclusions, particularly her “hierarchical” inter-
pretation of the word “fijo dalgo”, a term that is also used in the Poema (see Martin, Les
Juges de Castille, pp. 363-64).
12 Several documentary examples are presented in Martin, Les Juges de Castille, pp. 412-13
(n. 177). See also Don Juan Manuel’s Libro de los estados (I, XC), pp. 388-89.
with other Leonese and Castilian texts dating to the 11th, 12th, and early decades
of the 13th century.13 King Alfonso’s entourage is frequently described as being
comprised exclusively of counts and “infanzones”: “¡Oydme, las escuellas,
condes e yfançones!” (v. 2072), “Que allá me vayan cuendes e yfançones”
(v. 2964), “que no prendan fuerça de conde ni de yfançón” (v. 3480). Never-
theless, there is a considerable distance – at least according to the Infantes of
Carrión – separating the counts and their close relatives from infanzones, a
group they treat with marked contempt: “De natura somos de condes de
Carrión; / Deviemos casar con fijas de reyes o de enperadores, / Ca non perte-
neçién fijas de yfançones” (vv. 3296-98). These words are directed at Ruy Díaz,
the only protagonist of the entire Poema to whom such a social label is applied.
“Cavallero”14 (“caballero” in Spanish; in English, knight) is the most fre-
quently used term in the Poema. It does not have any hierarchical connotation,
although it could have, since it does designate the lowest level of the lay aris-
tocracy. Its meaning is strictly functional and, therefore, can be applied to
members of the king’s court (v. 2158); to emissaries sent by the Infantes of
Navarre and Aragon (v. 3393); to prominent men forming part of the Cid’s reti-
nue (Álvar Fáñez, vv. 671, 1432, 2513; Muño Gustioz, v. 1995; Galín García,
v. 444b) – some of whom, according to critics, belonged to powerful families
(Álvar Salvadórez,15 v. 444b), although the Poema says nothing about this – ; to
a representative of Burgos’ municipal chivalry, Martín Antolínez, a plebeian
who rises to become the Cid’s champion in the judicial duels along with Pero
Bermúdez and Muño Gustioz (vv. 3476 and 3598); to indiscriminate groups of
mounted warriors;16 and, finally, to the very Ruy Díaz (“Las nuevas del cava-
llero, ¡ya vedes dó legavan!”, v. 1235). Because of its strictly functional meaning,
“cavallero” is the only social designation valid on both sides of the ethno-reli-
gious line, and it is used to refer to Abengalbón’s men (v. 1483). Without
exception, knights are binarialy distinguished from “peones”: “Sos cavalleros y
an arribança: / A cada uno d’ellos caen C marchos de plata / E a los peones la
13 For documentary examples, see José María Lacarra, “En torno a la propagación de la voz
‘hidalgo’”, and Carlé, “Infanzones e hidalgos”.
14 Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. 2, pp. 566-69; Martin, Les Juges de Castille, pp. 365-
68, and La chevalerie en Castille. See also Rodríguez Velasco’s recent and very interesting
studies, El debate sobre la caballería and Ciudadanía.
15 A certain Álvar Salvadórez, brother of Count Gonzalo Salvadórez of the Lara family, was
a contemporary of Ruy Díaz. His signature appears on a Cidian diploma – more con-
cretely, the document stipulating the arras promised to Jimena. See Menéndez Pidal,
Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. 2, p. 442; Alberto Montaner, Cantar de Mio Cid, pp. 437-38 (comple-
mentary note to verse 443), and Margarita Torres Sevilla, Linajes nobiliarios, p. 396.
16 See vv. 234, 291, 312, 474, 512, 597, 616, 670, passim.
326 Martin
meatad sin falla” (vv. 512-14); “A cavalleros e a peones fechos los ha ricos”
(v. 848). Thus, the meaning of “cavallero” does not differ greatly from “encaval-
gado” – “¡Dios, qué bien pagó a todos sus vassallos, / A los peones e a los
encavalgados!” (vv. 806-07) –, manifesting an implicit social mentality in which
peasants are afforded opportunities and the divide due to social status, whether
natural or hierarchical, is not insurmountable, as seen in the case of Martín
Antolínez and after the conquest of Valencia, when many “peones” are pro-
moted to “cavalleros” (“Los que fueron de pie cavalleros se fazen”, v. 1213).
The third major group representing the vast majority of medieval society,
the laboratores (labradores in Spanish, laborers in English), hardly appears in
the PMC. The existence of working peasants is only attested by one very generic
reference and is made to those who work in Moorish lands: “En Castejón todos
se levantavan. / Abren las puertas, de fuera salto davan / Por ver sus lavores e
todas sus heredades” (vv. 458-60). On the other hand, the presence of city labo-
ratores is more visibly noted without saying much about their role. The new
group of “burgueses” (v. 17) – the word “burgés”, which first appeared in the
Fuero de Jaca (1063), meant “inhabitant of a burg” – still too recent as a social
power at the beginning of the 13th century, must not be confused with the
“burgaleses” (“inhabitants of Burgos”, as applied to Martín Antolínez).17 Within
this group there are two moneylenders – very likely Jews – named Raquel and
Vidas (vv. 89-212 and 1430-38). It should be noted that all members of this
group favor the Cid. Despite the fact that the people of Burgos are forbidden to
help the Cid as per the king’s written decree (vv. 21-29), they all openly sympa-
thize with him:
Burgeses e burguesas por las finiestras son,

Plorando de los ojos tanto avyén el dolor;
De las sus bocas todos dizían una razón:
“¡Dios, qué buen vassalo, sí oviesse buen señor!” (17-20)
Although there are traces of anti-Semitism in the episode in which the

Campeador deceives Raquel and Vidas in order to obtain a loan,18 the money-
lenders ultimately help the Cid by providing him with the funds necessary to
17 See vv. 65, 193, 736, 1459, 1500, 1992, 2837, 3066, 3191.
18 See vv. 78-95, 100-01, 123.
finance his troops19 and pay for his wife and daughters’ stay at the safe haven
of San Pedro de Cardeña.20
Under sociological markers, the diegesis of the Poema distributes, orders,
and polarizes these social actors by opposing and evaluating two social forma-
tions that constitute antagonistic models.
2 The Inland Nobility
On the one hand, there is the social group formed by the Infantes of Carrión,
their relatives, and their allies – that is to say, those who are the Cid’s enemies
either from the beginning of the story or as it progresses. This group consists of,
or is headed by, representatives of the upper nobility: counts (García Ordóñez,
v. 1836; Gonzalo Ansúrez, v. 2441) and sons of counts (Diego and Fernando
González, v. 2267-68, and possibly Asur González).21 They should appear, espe-
cially the counts, as high-level royal officials charged with the administration
of broad territories – and, in effect, García Ordóñez, Count of Nájera (and later
of Grañón), governed La Rioja on the king’s behalf.22 The Poema, however, nei-
ther mentions nor values their services in such roles. One senses, instead, that
both counts and their sons, by “[habiendo] part en la cort” (v. 1938) and enjoy-
ing the king’s favor and his trust,23 benefit from their sovereign’s generosity and
support. Moreover, they possess their own patrimonial wealth: rural estates
(“heredades”) and the rents from which they profit.24
For these men, the value or “preçio” of a person (v. 3300) is bound, first and
foremost, to birth and lineage: “la natura”.25 Based on these criteria, they look
down on the “ynfançones”; in their opinion, the social divide separating them
from infanzones is so vast that the law is not – or should not be – the same for
counts and infanzones:
19 See vv. 82-83, 313-14.

20 See vv. 242-60. For a favorable interpretation of Raquel and Vidas’ role, see Georges
Martin, “Las arcas de arena”, and Gisela Roitman, “El episodio de Rachel y Vidas”.
21 Critics generally believe that Asur González is the older brother of Diego and Fernando.
However, since the rules governing name giving were not as rigorous in the Spanish Mid-
dle Ages as it is sometimes claimed, it is also possible that Asur González is their uncle.
22 Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, vol. 2, pp. 702-07; Montaner, Cantar de Mio Cid,
pp. 533-34; Torres Sevilla, Linajes nobiliarios, pp. 104-05.
23 See vv. 1884-88, 1900-02, 2988-89.
24 See vv. 2545, 2605, 2621, 3223, 3715.
25 See vv. 2549, 3275, 3296, 3354.
328 Martin
De natura somos de condes de Carrión;

Deviemos casar con fijas de reyes o de enperadores,
Ca non perteneçién fijas de yfançones.
Por que las dexamos derecho fiziemos nós.
¡Más nos preçiamos, sabet, que menos no! (3296-300)
This declaration is pronounced by the Infante Fernando, and in a statement

alluding to the ill-fated union between the Infantes and the Cid’s daughters,
Count García Ordóñez proclaims:
Los de Carrión son de natura tal,

Non ge las devién querer sus fijas por varraganas,
O ¿quién ge las diera por parejas o por veladas?
Derecho fizieron por que las han dexadas;
¡Quanto él dize non ge lo preçiamos nada! (3275-79)
In practice, “natura” generates solidarity among “parientes” (relatives). Except

for the single allusion made to the Cid’s posthumous royal descendants
(v. 3724), the term is used only in reference to the Infantes of Carrión and to
their ally and protector, Count García Ordóñez.26 The “parientes” are usually
described as a generic group without further definition; in those cases in which
they are specified, they do not go beyond the Infantes, their older brother, or
their father.27 Despite this, however, the “parientes” intervene in conflictive
situations either as a deliberative body:
Dixo el conde don Garçía: ‘A esto nós fablemos.’

Essora salién aparte yffantes de Carrión
Con todos sus parientes e el vando que y son;
Apriessa lo yuan trayendo e acuerdan la razón (3160-63)
or as an armed force:
Dos días atendieron a yfantes de Carrión.

Mucho vienen bien adobados de cavallos e de guarnizones,
E todos sus parientes con ellos son;
Que si los pudiessen apartar a los del Campeador,
Que los matassen en campo por desondra de so señor (3537-41)
26 Infantes: vv. 2988, 3162, 3539, 3592; García Ordóñez: v. 1860.

27 “Fueron y de su reyno […] / El conde don Garçía con yfantes de Carrión / E Asur Gonçález
e Gonçalo Assúrez; / E Diego e Ferrando y son amos a dos” (vv. 3005-09). For Ansur
González, see note 21.
In the public sphere, “parientes” find help and support in a more extensive
group, the “bando”, which is comprised of “parientes” and their political allies;
in the case of the Infantes, their chief ally is Count García Ordóñez. In the
Poema, the term “bando” is used exclusively for the Beni-Gómez’s “parientes”
and their associates.28 The role assumed by the “bando” is analogous to that of
“parientes” – that is to say, it advises:
Dixo el conde don Garçía: ‘A esto nós fablemos.’

Essora salién aparte yffantes de Carrión
Con todos sus parientes e el vando que y son;
Apriessa lo yuan trayendo e acuerdan la razón (3160-63)29
or intimidates:
El conde don Garçía con yfantes de Carrión

E Asur Gonçález e Gonçalo Assúrez;
E Diego e Ferrando y son amos a dos,
E con ellos grand bando que aduxieron a la cort;
E[n]bayrle cuydan a Myo Çid el Campeador (3007-11)
Kinship was a strong and operative structure of the feudal elite; “bandos”30
were at times wide reaching and long-lasting alliances. In order to express the
threat posed by the Cid’s enemies, the Poema sometimes emphasizes the
breadth and strength of both their “bando” and their kinship.31 We have seen,
however, that the clan extension upon which the Beni-Gómez’s power rests is
very limited. Equally limited (and fortuitous as well) is the solidarity estab-
lished upon their integreation into a “bando” of which the only member
mentioned is García Ordóñez, whose intervention is restricted to the royal
28 See vv. 3010, 3113, 3136, 3162, and 3577. The Cid uses the word “bando” only once in the
sense of “help” or “assistance”: “¡Cavalgad, Mynaya, vós sodes el myo diestro braço; / Oy en
este día de vós abré grand bando!” (vv. 753-54).
29 Another example is found earlier in the text: “Hya lo vieron que es a fer los yfantes de
Carrión. / Prenden conssejo parientes commo son; / El conde don Garçía en estas nuevas
fue, / Enemigo de Mio Çid, que siempre.l’ buscó mal; / Aqueste conssejó los yfantes de
Carrión” (vv. 2995-99).
30 The bibliography about this social entity, although extensive, is disjointed. See José
Ramón Díaz de Durana’s recent critical synthesis, “Las luchas de bandos”.
31 For the term bando, see the verses cited above (vv. 3009-10); for kinship, in addition to the
verses quoted earlier (vv. 3537-41), see also: “Fevos de la otra part los yfantes de Carrión, /
Muy bien aconpañados ca muchos parientes son” (vv. 3591-92).
330 Martin
court, and whose intrigues and machinations are focused on benefiting only a
handful of men.
It is clear that the words, deeds, and gestures of those who represent this
social group are devoid of any public dimension. They do not defend any con-
cept of supremacy or dependence, nor do they practice any sort of rite. Against
the backdrop of this tenuous and distant concept of “señorío natural” (natural
lordship) hardly mentioned or used by them – the only time the Infantes
invoke this very important political bond32 is to obtain private favors such as
persuading the king to arrange a marriage with the Cid’s daughters33 – the
Beni-Gómez’s position is simply predicated on their proximity to the king, a
privilege inherited from their ancestors.
The “bando” does not value any ethical principles either. On the contrary,
Count García Ordóñez is moved by “invidia”:
Pesó al conde don Garçía e mal era yrado.

Con X de sus parientes aparte davan salto :
‘¡Maravilla es del Çid que su ondra creçe tanto!
En la ondra que él ha nós seremos abiltados
Por tan biltadamientre vençer reyes del campo,
Commo si los falasse muertos aduzirse los cavallos.
¡Por esto que él faze nós abremos enbargo!’ (1859-65)
The Infantes, for their part, are driven by cupiditas:
De los yffantes de Carrión yo vos quiero contar,

Fablando en su conssejo, aviendo su poridad:
‘Las nuevas del Çid mucho van adelant.
Demandemos sus fijas pora con ellas casar.
Creçremos en nuestra ondra e yremos adelant’. (1879-83)
The Poema places these men and the social group and values (or lack thereof)
they represent in a particular geographical area. They are rooted within the
borders of Castile, along with other Christian lands – Carrión to the West,
32 For the concepts of “naturaleza” and “señorío natural”, see Martin, “Estrategias discursi-
vas”. For this matter before the composition of Las siete partidas and how it is treated in
historiography, see Martin, Les Juges de Castille, pp. 260-70.
33 “Vinién al rey Alfonsso con esta poridad: / ‘¡Merçed vos pidimos commo a rey e a señor
natural! / Con vuestro conssejo lo queremos fer nós / Que nos demandedes fijas del
Campeador; / Casar queremos con ellas a su ondra e a nuestra pro’” (vv. 1884-88).
Grañón to the East,34 that is, in the interior. Count García’s speeches frequently
reveal that he and his men seldom have set foot on “tierra de moros” and have
fought the Muslim enemy even less:
Mager plogo al rey mucho pesó a Garçí Ordónez:

‘¡Semeja que en tierra de moros non á bivo omne,
Quando assí faze a su guisa el Çid Campeador!’
Dixo el rey al conde : ‘¡Dexad essa razón;
Que en todas guisas mijor me sirve que vós!’ (1345-49)
They serve King Alfonso who, for as much as he exerts his authority over the
people of Castile,35 and who the Castilians accept “naturalmente” as their
lord,36 swears to “Sant Esidro (el de León)”37 and is repeatedly and exclusively
linked to that kingdom.38
3 The Borderland Knightly Society of War and Conquest
“Heredades” (inheritance) and “casas” (houses), structural characteristics of

the feudal economy, are not alien to the values of the group of warriors that
forms around the Infanzón Ruy Díaz. They are, in fact, representative of a world
they leave behind in sorrow and by force, as is the case of Rodrigo Díaz: “Ya lo
vedes que el rey le á ayrado; / Dexado ha heredades e casas e palaçios” (vv. 114-
15), or, more positively, like the knights who join the Cid in exile because they
aspire to a more rewarding life:
¡Yo ruego a Dios e al Padre spirital,

Vós que por mi dexades casas e heredades,
Enantes que yo muera algún bien vos pueda far;
Lo que perdedes doblado vos lo cobrar! (300-03)39
34 There is, on one occasion, a connection established between García Ordóñez and what
was previously his tenancy: “Nos quiso levantar el Crespo de Grañón / Nin todos los del
bando de yfantes de Carrión” (vv. 3112-13).
35 See vv. 2923, 2979.
36 See vv. 495, 1790, 2900, 2903.
37 See vv. 1866-67, 3140, 3509.
38 “Alfonsso el de León” (vv. 1927, 3536, 3543, 3718).
39 For the Cid’s accumulation of wealth and the economic context of the Poema, see Joseph
J. Duggan, The “Cantar de Mio Cid”.
332 Martin
Nevertheless, “casas” and “heredades” create a horizon of hope for the Cid’s fol-
lowers, which is what they ultimately achieve with the conquest of Valencia:
Los que exieron de tierra de ritad son abondados;

A todos les dio en Valençia casas e heredades
De que son pagados (1245-47)
At this point in the poem, however, their significance shifts; through the pro-
cess of conquest, “casas” and “heredades” now become possessions imbued
with an ethical value:
Vós, querida e ondrada mugier e amas mis fijas,

My coraçón e mi alma,
Entrad comigo en Valençia la casa,
En esta heredad que vos yo he ganada (1604-07)
and the criterion of their value is emphatically declared:
Todo el bien que yo he, todo lo tengo delant;

Con afán gané a Valençia e éla por heredad;
A menos de muert, no la puedo dexar (1634-36)
During the process of loss and recuperation of “casas” and “heredades”, some-
thing new emerges around the Campeador, something quite different from
what had previously existed: a society ready for war, first a frontier society and
then one of conquest.
In this warring society, birth, rank, and social standing are no longer valued,
and social discrimination has become purely functional: there are “cavalleros”
and “peones”,40 those who lead and those who “accompany” and “serve”.41
Everyone’s wealth is based on spoils won from the Moors (the “ganançia”,
vv. 480, 506, 548, passim) and the hierarchical system by which they are allo-
cated; for the most part, booty is divided very scrupulously in accordance with
tradition or the fuero42 (“de las cabalgadas”):
40 See vv. 418-19, 806-07, 847-48, 917-18.

41 See vv. 442-44b, 916-17, 1127-33, 1284-84b, 2836-38.
42 For this matter, see María Eugenia Lacarra’s El Poema de mio Cid: realidad histórica e ide-
ología, pp. 32-50 and 238. The principal fueros studied by Lacarra concerning how spoils
are divided in the Poema are the Fuero de Molina de Aragón (1152), the Fuero de Teruel
(1176) and the Fuero de Cuenca (1190). The Fuero sobre el fecho de las cabalgadas is a
Mandó partir tod aqueste aver;

Sos quiñoneros que ge los diessen por carta.
Sos cavalleros y an arribança:
A cada uno d’ellos caen C marchos de plata
E a los peones la meatad sin falla.
Toda la quinta a Myo Çid fincava (510-15)
At times, it is the lord who selectively compensates the knight with whatever
he deems appropriate:
¿Venides, Álbar Fánez, una fardida lança?

¡Do yo vos enbiás bien abría tal esperança!
Esso con esto sea aiuntado;
Dovos la quinta, si la quisiéredes, Minaya (489-92)
Unlike the wealth of inland nobles, the riches of these initially itinerant fron-
tier warriors, acquired from spoils won in battle, chiefly consist of personal
and monetary property: arms43 and horses44 used in combat as well as to gain
favor45 or to prosper (v. 1213); money (“dineros”, v. 804; “averes monedados”,
v. 1217); and objects of precious metal (“oro e plata”46). Even after the conquest
of Valencia and their recovery of “casas e heredades”, these “averes” are what
arouse in the Cid’s men a sense of wealth: this is what they value, at times in
contrast to “villas e tierras”;47 what they like to flaunt,48 and to which they feel
compilation deriving from the Fuero de Cuenca (in Memorial Histórico Español, vol. 2,
pp. 438-506); it stipulates how spoils were to be divided in a way that is similar to how it is
carried out in the Poema (Lacarra, p. 238).
43 See vv. 1010, 2426.
44 See vv. 794-97, 1010, 1781-82, 1799-800, 2426, 2499.
45 For example, the embassies sent to King Alfonso and the other “presentajas” (vv. 815-18,
1272-77, 2251-55).
46 See vv. 473, 799, 1214, 1737, 1970, 1978, 2495.
47 “Vos les diestes villas e tierras por arras en tierras de Carrión; / Hyo quiéroles dar axuvar
III mill marcos de plata; / Darvos e mulas e palafrés muy gruessos de sazón, / Cavallos
pora en diestro, fuertes e corredores, / E muchas vestiduras de paños de çiclatones; / Dar-
vos he dos espadas, a Colada e a Tizón; / ¡Bien lo sabedes vós que las gané a guisa de
varón!” (vv. 2570-76).
48 Following the verses quoted in the previous note, the Poema continues: “¡Que lo sepan en
Gallizia e en Castiella e en León / Con qué riqueza enbío mios yernos amos a dos!”
(vv. 2579-80). See also verses 1764-67, 1985-90, and 2253-59.
334 Martin
a strong attachment; they are the same “averes” that the Cid implacably
reclaims in the “Cortes de Toledo”.49
The division of “ganançias” (booty), which is so frequently staged in the
Poema, gives rise to a meticulous system of accounting through written docu-
mentation carried out by ad hoc officials – “[Mio Cid] mandó partir tod aqueste
aver; / Sos quiñoneros que ge los diessen por carta” (vv. 510-11) – and overseen
by the lord’s chief deputy: “Mynaya Albar Fánez fuera era en el campo / con
todas estas yentes escriviendo e contando” (vv. 1772-73). In order to avoid the
temptation of personal enrichment at the expense of the group’s order and
survival, repressive measures are put into place:
Véelo Myo Çid que con los averes que avién tomados,

Que si.s’ pudiessen yr, fer lo yen de grado;
Esto mandó Myo Çid, Minaya lo ovo conssejado,
‘Que ningún omne de los sos que.s’ le non spidiés o no.l’ besás la mano,
Si.l’ pudiessen prender o fuesse alcançado,
Tomássenle el aver e pusiéssenle en un palo’ (1249-54)
In this type of borderland seigniorial fiscal institution, accounting practices

and penal jurisdiction help suppress economic infractions:
Con Minaya Albar Fánez él se va consegar:

‘Si vós quisiéredes, Minaya, quiero saber recabdo
De los que son aquí e comigo ganaron algo;
Meterlos he en escripto, e todos sean contados;
Que si alguno.s’ furtare o menos le fallaren,
el aver me avrá a tornar [a] aquestos myos vassalos
que curian a Valençia e andan arobdando.’
Alí dixo Minaya: ‘[Consejo] es aguisado’ (1256-62)
49 “Otra rencura he de yfantes de Carrión: / Quando sacaron de Valençia mis fijas amas a dos,
/ En oro e en plata tres mill marcos de plata les [di io]; / Hyo faziendo esto, ellos acabaron
lo so. / ¡Denme mis averes, quando myos yernos non son!” (vv. 3202-06). This demand
provokes the Infantes’ anguished reaction (“¡Aquí veriedes quexarse yfantes de Carrión!”,
v. 3207), since they have spent “averes monedados” (vv. 3217-18, 3236-38). Faced with the
proposal of compensating the Cid with “heredades” (v. 3223), both the “alcaldes” and the
king seem inflexible. The Cid, who is treated with subtle respect (“Si esso ploguiere al Çid
non ge lo vedamos nós…”, v. 3225), remains silent and allows for everything to fall into
place. The Infantes compensate the Cid for the “aver monedado” they squandered with
other types of wealth originating from the frontier zone that they received: arms, horses,
and accouterments (vv. 3241-45).
Well administered, on the other hand, the warriors’ economy of spoils help
cement a powerful social structure: it contributes to the group’s successful
cohesion;50 it confirms hierarchies dependent on arms and militaristic power,
as well as the ability to strategize – knights earn twice as much as a foot soldier,
and the lord retains one-fifth of the spoils51 – ; it offers possibilities of upward
mobility – foot soldiers can become knights52 – ; it tempers relations with
the enemy – returning them in exchange for money, their freedom, and prop-
erty53 – ; and it promotes a favorable relationship with the crown by arousing
King Alfonso’s self-interested benevolence.54 Moreover, the proper division of
spoils imbues the personal enrichment of a knight with an ethical value. Álvar
Fáñez exemplifies this sublimation in the Poema, when, on principle, he refuses
to accept a fifth of the booty offered to him by the Cid after the fall of Castejón,
claiming that he did not earn it, thus predicating the acquisition of riches upon
one’s military effort:
Mucho vos lo gradesco, Campeador contado.

D’aquesta quinta que me avedes man[da]do
Pagarse ya d’ella Alfonsso el Castellano.
Yo vos la suelt[o], e avello quitado.
A Dios lo prometo, a Aquel que está en alto:
Fata que yo me page, sobre mio buen cavallo,
Lidiando con moros en el campo,
Que enpleye la lança e al espada meta mano
50 “Myo Çid Ruy Díaz a Alcoçer es venido. / ¡Qué bien pagó a sus vassalos mismos! / A cava-
lleros e a peones fechos los ha ricos; / En todos los sos non fallariedes un mesquino. / ¡Qui
a buen señor sirve siempre bive en deliçio!” (vv. 846-50).
51 “Sos cavalleros y an arribança: / A cada uno d’ellos caen C marchos de plata / E a los peo-
nes la meatad sin falla. / Toda la quinta a Myo Çid fincava” (vv. 512-15).
52 “Los que fueron de pie cavalleros se fazen” (v. 1213).
53 After Castejón is conquered and sold back to its inhabitants: “Del castiello que prisieron
todos ricos se parten; / Los moros e las moras bendiziéndol’ están” (vv. 540-41). The same
occurs with Alcocer: “Quando Myo Çid el castiello quiso quitar, / Moros e moras tomá-
ronse a quexar: / ‘¿Vaste, Myo Çid? ¡Nuestras oraçiones váyante delante! / Nós pagados
finca[m]os, señor, de la tu part.’ / Quando quitó a Alcoçer Myo Çid el de Bivar, / Moros e
moras compeçaron de lorar” (vv. 851-56).
54 This is the chief objective of all the Cid’s embassies to Alfonso: “Ydo es a Castiella Albar
Fánez Minaya; / Treynta cavallos al rey los enpresentava. / Violos el rey, fermoso sonrri-
sava:/ ‘¿Quí.n’ los dio éstos, sí vos vala Dios, Mynaya?’ / ‘Myo Çid Ruy Díaz, que en buen
ora cinxo espada. / Vençió dos reyes de moros en aquesta batalla; / Sobejana es, señor, la
su ganaçia. / A vós, rey ondrado, enbía esta presentaja’ (vv. 871-78). The same is observed
in vv. 1826-54.
336 Martin
E por el cobdo ayuso la sangre destelando

Ante Ruy Díaz, el lidiador contado,
Non prendré de vós quanto vale un dinero malo. (493-503)
Within the context of the warrior’s economic ethic, the “preçio” (value) of a
person depends on his dedication and efficiency – that is to say, on his “afán”
(his eagerness to succeed).55 Thus, in accordance with the careful administra-
tion of goods and how such wealth is earned, the Infantes of Carrión, once
integrated into the Cid’s group, are quickly condemned and ultimately rejected
by the social body of frontier warriors. With subtle irony, the poet censures the
Infantes’ cold self-interest and their unwise financial conduct while on the way
to their weddings:
Los yffantes de Carrión mucho alegres andan;

Lo uno adebdan e lo otro pagavan;
Commo ellos tenién, creçer les ya la ganaçia,
Quantos quisiessen averes d’oro o de plata.” (1975-78)
In similarly dreadful economic terms, the poet has the Infantes pronounce
their fearful account balance just before entering battle: “¡Catamos la ganançia
e la pérdida no!” (v. 2320).
If “casas” and “heredades” are not foreign to the economic mindset of the
Cid’s men, the notion of kinship is not alien to their social conceptions and
practices either. The hero loves his wife and daughters56 and cares for them.57
He also has nephews who help and advise him: Álvar Fáñez, Pero Bermúdez,
and Félez Muñoz.58 However, nothing is ever said of parents or ancestors.
While the Beni-Gómez view kinship in a vertical way that essentially values
55 See vv. 1635, 1935, 3507.

56 In this regard, some of the verses from the farewell at San Pedro de Cardeña have become
famous: “A las sus fijas en braço las prendía, / Lególas al coraçón, ca mucho las quería, /
Lora de los ojos, tan fuertemientre sospira: / ‘¡Ya, doña Ximena, la mi mugier tan com-
plida, / Commo a la mi alma yo tanto vos quería!’” (vv. 275-79); also, “Lorando de los ojos
que non viestes atal, / Así.s’ parten unos d’otros commo la uña de la carne” (vv. 374-75).
57 Speaking to the abbot Don Sancho, the Cid says: “‘Evades aquí, pora doña Ximena dovos
C marchos; / A ella e a sus fijas e a sus duenas sirvádeslas est año. / Dues fijas dexo niñas,
e prendetlas en los braços; / Aquéllas vos acomiendo a vós, abbat don Sancho. / D’ellas e
de mi mugier fagades todo recabdo’” (vv. 253-57). As the narration progresses, marrying
Doña Elvira and Doña Sol becomes one of the Cid’s chief concerns (vv. 1754-55, 1768, etc.).
58 See respectively verses 2846 and 3438; 2351 and 3189; 741, 2618, 2634, 2765, 2770, 2777-80,
and 3069.
filiation (“natura”), for the Cid, the “exercise of family relations”59 is experi-
enced exclusively in the present, it is a synchronic and horizontal mindset put
into practice. He places great importance on alliances: relationships between
husband and wife, uncle and nephews, father-in-law and sons-in-law. Although
the Poema alludes to Jimena’s noble ancestry (“menbrada fija dalgo”, v. 210) and
recalls Doña Elvira and Doña Sol’s nobility – their “hidalguía” – (vv. 1565 and
2232), probably to put them on equal footing with other members of the aris-
tocracy such as the counts, there is a disregard, if not entirely for parentage
(the relationship between father-daughters), most certainly for ancestry.
Kinship ties as represented among, and perceived by, members of the Cid’s
group are thus more extensive, varied, practical, and loaded with greater emo-
tional depth than among the members of the Beni-Gómez clan. Since the Cid’s
men grant the utmost importance to alliances, kinship is an open structure
and essentially political in nature.
In effect, this is the type of relationship that strengthens the Cid’s group and
provides the framework of a social construct that, like the “bando” in the case
of the Beni-Gómez, channels his public intervention: the “mesnada”,60 which
is essentially a seigniorial body of warriors comprised of relatives and vassals
led by a feudal lord who is advised and supported by completely trustworthy
nephew-deputies. Unlike the “bando”, in the Cid’s “mesnada” what is consis-
tently valued is a kind of public bond that gives rise to an important ritualism
and in which both internal relations as well as those with the king are strength-
ened. The Cid’s group does not ignore the concept of “señor natural” (natural
lord); actually, in practice, it makes more use of it than the Carrión clan does.61
This, however, comes to an end with the first weddings of Doña Elvira and
Doña Sol. What dominates throughout the rest of the work – and what distin-
guishes the social group of the frontier warriors – is the vindication not of
“naturaleza”, but of another type of relationship – one that was freely and per-
sonally entered into – that could govern relations of dependence in the
medieval Castile: vassalage.62 In the Poema, the word “vasallo”, referring either
59 This expression is borrowed from Françoise Héritier, L’exercice de la parenté.

60 See vv. 487, 662, 702, 745, 837, 1083, 1115, 1601, 1736, and 2294.
61 “¡Grado e graçias, rey, commo a señor natural!” (Álvar Fañez to King Alfonso, v. 895); “Al
rey Alfonsso, myo señor natural, / D’estas mis ganançias que avemos fechas acá/ Darle
quiero C cavallos; e vós ydgelos levar” (the Cid to Álvar Fáñez, vv. 1272-74); “Merçed vos
pido a vós, myo natural señor” (the Cid to King Alfonso, v. 2031); and “Yo vos pido merçed
a vós, rey natural” (the Cid to King Alfonso, v. 2131).
62 According to Partidas II,XVIII,XXXII, “Naturaleza e vassallaje son los mayores debdos que
ome puede auer con su señor”. For more on this, see my study mentioned in note 32. Fran-
cisco Bautista, whose argument is partially based on a study published years ago about
338 Martin
to “naturaleza” or vassalage, is applied in the majority of cases and in a com-

pletely personal way to the relationship the Cid’s men maintain with their
“señor”,63 or to the one the Cid hopes, and finally is able, to establish with King
Alfonso.64 The same can be said of a gesture only employed by members of the
Cid’s group that, although it had gained a widespread protocolary use, was
unmistakably incorporated into the ritual of offering vassallatic homage: the
“besamanos”.65 Kissing the lord’s hand is the gesture by which the Cid’s follow-
ers show their formal integration into the “mesnada” (v. 298b). It is also used in
other key moments: when taking leave (v. 1252) and giving thanks (vv. 692,
1769, 2092, 2235, 3198). Use of the “besamanos” goes beyond the realm of the
Cid’s warriors, for it also extends to members of his family – Jimena and her
daughters also kiss the Cid’s hand –,66 at times associating both groups with
each other, as in the case of Pedro Bermúdez, who is both the Campeador’s
nephew and vassal.67 Outside the Cid’s group, in situations of dependence in
which the lord and his “mesnada” confront a superior authority, the “besama-
nos” frequently characterizes the relationship between the Cid’s group and
King Alfonso like during the first embassies (vv. 1275, 1818), in the episode of
the reconciliation between the Cid and the monarch (v. 2039), and, with excep-
tional frequency, during the presentation of the Cid’s claims at the judicial
court (vv. 2936, 2948, 3017, 3512). With respect to the relationship between the
Cid and King Alfonso – one must grant exceptional importance to this reitera-
this topic that I no longer support, simplifies and misinterprets my position on this point
in his “Como a señor natural”. The historic context to which I refer is not the rebellions by
“burgueses” that took place in the early decades of the 12th century, but rather the reign
of Alfonso VIII. Moreover, I do not argue that there is a clear opposition between “natura-
leza” and “vasallaje” in the Poema, but rather that there is an articulation of both models
in which the inherent natural connection is invigorated and made more flexible by the
free and personal commitment of vassalage (in 1996, I wrote: “une naturalité tempérée et
régénérée par le vasselage”, Chanson de Mon Cid, p. 46).
63 See vv. 204, 249, 376, 430, 568, 604, 803, 806, 847, 1044, 1261, 1479, 1729, 1739, 1765, 1784, 1853,
2243, 2258, 2265, 2273, 2278, 2341, 2455, 2459, 2473, 2506, 2532, 2901, 2969, 3193, 3341.
64 See vv. 20, 1339, 1847, 2905, 2938, 2948. Only once does the term “vasallo” refer to the king’s
“señorío” over other men: v. 2982 (“¡Qui non viniesse a la cort non se toviesse por su vas-
sallo!”).
65 The ritual consisted in a verbal formula (“Vos sodes mi señor, yo só vuestro vasallo”), fol-
lowed by a gesture (the “besamanos”). See Hilda Grassotti, Las instituciones feudo-vasa-
lláticas, vol. 1, pp. 141-62. See also Jacques Le Goff’s analysis and commentaries, “Le rituel
symbolique”, pp. 355-56.
66 See vv. 264-65, 369, 1608, 2190, 2607, 2895.
67 See v. 692. About the similarity between family relations valued by the Cid’s group and the
vassallatic model of dependency, see my study "Structures de parenté”.
tion as preserved in the littera of the Poema – the “besamanos” is usually

accompanied by the verbal declaration of vassalage, thereby completing the
ritual of rendering homage virtually, in posse, during the first embassies:
“Bésavos las manos […] / Razonas’ por vuestro vassallo e a vós tiene por señor”
(vv. 1338-39); “¡Merçed, rey Alfonsso, sodes tan ondrado! / Por Myo Çid el
Campeador todo esto vos besamos. / A vós lama por señor e tienes’ por vuestro
vassallo” (vv. 1845-47). It occurs virtually in the first embassies and, indeed,
with greater frequency after the (alleged) reconciliation, when the Cid pres-
ents his demand to King Alfonso after the “Afrenta de Corpes” and during the
ensuing judicial procedures. In this final segment, Alfonso’s sovereignty over
his vassal is decidedly and systematically invoked by the Cid, by his emissaries,
and even by the narrator: “Por mí bésale la mano d’alma e de coraçón; / Cuemo
yo so su vassallo e el es myo señor […]” (vv. 2904-05); “Los pies e las manos vos
besa el Campeador; / Ele es vuestro vassallo e vós sodes so señor” (vv. 2936-37);
“Por esto vos besa las manos commo vassallo a señor” (v. 2948); “[A] Álvar
Fánez adelant enbió / Que besasse las manos al rey so señor” (vv. 3016-17); “Myo
Çid en el cavallo adelant se legó; / Fue besar la mano a so señor Alfonsso”
(vv. 3511-12).
In addition to these political values, marked with strong ritualism, the
Poema imbues the Cidian social formation with a rich ethic that is both secular
and spiritual in nature: generic goodness,68 valor (v. 418), merit (vv. 194, 1126),
strength (vv. 718, 757), moderation (v. 7), honesty (vv. 3351, 3362, 3386), faith
and devotion (passim), charity (vv. 709, 720, 2355), hope based on strength and
faith,69 etc. Exalted for the laudable goal of carrying out the Christian con-
quest, greed is no longer censured.70 The codified regulation of the warriors’
economy becomes more flexible and is exalted through the moral dialectic of
service and compensation71 as well as through a key element of bonding:
“debdo”.72 On this reciprocity – seen from both an economic and ethical per-
68 See vv. 430, 444b, 655, 690, 740, 969, 1426, 1430, 1583, 1729, 1803, 2293, 2343, 2463, passim.
69 Álvar Fáñez says, “Çid, ¿dó son vestros esfuerços? ¡en buen ora nasquiestes de madre! /
Pensemos de yr nuestra vía, esto sea de vagar; / Aún todos estos duelos en gozo se tor-
narán; / Dios, que nos dio las almas, consejo nos dará” (vv. 379-82).
70 “Amaneçió a Myo Çid en tierras de Monreal. / Por Aragón e por Navarra pregón mandó
echar; / A tierras de Castiella enbió sus mensajes: / Quien quiere perder cueta e venir a
rritad, / Viniesse a Myo Çid que a sabor de cavalgar; / Çercar quiere a Valençia por a chris-
tianos la dar. […] Al sabor de la ganançia non lo quiere detardar. / Grandes yentes se le
acojen de la buena christiandad” (vv. 1186-91 y 1198-99).
71 See vv. 489-92, 810-12, 1245-47b, 1764-67, 1793-98, 1804-08, 2641, 2797.
72 “El Criador vos vala, Çid Campeador leal! / Vo meter la vestra seña en aquela mayor az; /
Los que el debdo avedes veremos cómmo la acorredes” (vv. 706-08); “¡Oyd, ya, Çid
340 Martin
spective – in the fulfillment of one’s “debdo” rests the great public affection
that shapes and consolidates the Cid’s retinue: “amor”,73 mainly the lord’s love
for his vassals – “A todos les dio en Valençia casas e heredades \ De que son
pagados /¡el amor de Myo Çid ya lo yvan provando!” (vv. 1246-47b) – but also
the vassals’ love for their lord (v. 1692) and similarly, the love that is shared
among “amigos”, or friends.74
Thus, the Cidian retinue is a strongly hierarchical yet unified structure; it
produces wealth that is administered with fairness and good judgment; it is
strengthened by the public ritualism associated with vassalage; it is guided by
a rich and demanding ethos; and it is imbued with love. Despite its circumstan-
tial beginnings, it quickly achieves lofty ambitions: it fights the Moors and
carries out the Christian reconquest (vv. 1189-91, 1296-301). After the capture of
Valencia, the “mesnada” as a social organization characterizing the Cid’s group
becomes obsolete or, perhaps, dominated by a more sedentary and govern-
mental organization: the “cort”.75 However, even under the power of the “cort”,
which is comprised of the leaders of the “mesnada” as well as the lord’s wife
and daughters (vv. 2511-20), the primitive social structure, its mechanisms of
command, its values, and its rituals remain in force. For more on these catego-
ries, see the references before and after verse 1210 noted above.
The world of the frontier warriors – the type of economy, society, depen-
dency, and ethic cultivated and valued within it – also has a geographical
center: it is not Valencia, the fortunate end of these men’s adventures, but
Castile, “Castiella la gentil”,76 the homeland for which they always yearn,77
their everlasting roots78 that never leaves their sight and to whom they boast
Canpeador leal! / Esta batalla, el Criador la ferá; / E vós, tan diño que con Él avedes part, /
Mandádno’los ferir de quál part vos semejar. / El debdo que á cada uno a conplir será”
(vv. 2361b-65); see also vv. 2598, 3528, 3535, 3703.
73 For more on this affection and its semantic effectiveness in the Poema, see my study,
“Amour (une notion politique)”.
74 Consider the case of Rodrigo Díaz and the Moor Abengalbón: “¡Oyas, sobrino, tú, Félez
Munoz! / Por Molina yredes; una noch y iazredes; / Saludad a myo amigo, el moro Avén
Galvón; / Reçiba a myos yernos commo él pudier mejor. / Dil’ que enbío mis fijas a tierras
de Carrión; / De lo que ovieren huebos sírvanlas a so sabor; / Desí escúrralas fasta Medina
por la mi amor. / De quanto él fiziere yo.l’ dar[é] por ello buen galardón” (vv. 2634-41); see
also vv. 2658 and 2883.
75 See vv. 1263, 2283, 2303, 2307, 2474, 2511, 2558, 2835.
76 See vv. 672, 829.
77 See vv. 176, 219-20, 287-88.
78 Although they are pleased with the wealth and beauty of Valencia, the Cid and his vassals
do not forget their Castilian “heredades” (“Si a vós ploguiere, Minaya, e non vos caya en
pesar, / Enbiarvos quiero a Castiella, do avemos heredades”, vv. 1270-71).
their merits and prosperity.79 The heroic adventure narrated in the Poema and
its social connotations acquire their full meaning only when Castile’s destiny
and the challenges it faces are kept in mind.
More than any other indicator, a more profound trait that marks the superi-
ority of the social formation headed by the Campeador over that of the Infantes
of Carrión is its analogies to the prescribed order (although not always prac-
ticed) in the royal court. Like the Cid, King Alfonso also has “mesnadas” at his
disposal80 and values the dialectic of service81 and compensation.82 He often
invokes “amor” as public affection83 and handles it like nobody else. Goodness
(v. 2095), merit (v. 1898b), and honesty (vv. 2139, 2954-55) are part of his ethical
values. All this, for sure, has to do with structures, logic, and shared notions
that are general characteristics of the nobility in the early Middle Ages. Yet it
is precisely for not cultivating nor adhering to these qualities that the Beni-
Gómez’s clan and its allies are discredited. Despite the fact that the king and
his “cort” – that is to say, the men belonging to his innermost circle: Counts
Don Enrique and Don Ramón, the other counts, and the “omnes buenos de
la cort”84 – share the same values exalted by the Cid and his “mesnada”, the
diegesis of the Poema results in mutual support only after a long process. The
dynamic of the Poema’s socio-political meaning delineates the shifting evolu-
tion of a king who goes from supporting the representatives of the first of the
two social formations we have studied to backing those of the second. Despite
how much the Cid proves his fidelity and manifests the success of his organi-
zation, his practices, and his values through the embassies he sends to Castile,
King Alfonso seems reluctant to be on the Cid’s side before the “Afrenta de
Corpes”. Even after the Campeador’s conquest of Valencia, his victory over
King Bucar, and the three envoys he sends to Castile, King Alfonso is still unde-
cided: “Assí commo semeja, e la veluntad me lo diz, / Todas estas nuevas a bien
abrán de venir” (vv. 1875-76). The reconciliation on the shore of the Tagus River,
which has been accepted at face value by scholars, is based on faulty premises.
The motives driving the king, who has decided to forgive the Cid, is primar-
ily to provide the Infantes of Carrión with a marriage that will benefit them
economically:
79 “Dize Mynaya: ‘¡Agora só pagado, / Que a Castiella yrán buenos mandados / Que Myo Çid
Ruy Díaz lid campal á vençida’” (vv. 782-84); see also vv. 813-14, 829-31, 1301, 1505-12, 1767.
80 See vv. 509, 528, 1980, 1982, 2038, 3128.
81 See vv. 1348-49, 1869.
82 See vv. 1855-57, 1898-99, 2151-53.
83 See vv. 1923-24, 1945, 2029, 2034, 2640, 2658, 2971, 3132, 3141.
84 See vv. 3001-04, 3035-37, 3108-10, 3179.
342 Martin
De los yffantes de Carrión yo vos quiero contar,

Fablando en su conssejo, aviendo su poridad:
‘Las nuevas del Çid mucho van adelant.
Demandemos sus fijas pora con ellas casar.
Creçremos en nuestra ondra e yremos adelant’.
Vinién al rey Alfonsso con esta poridad:
‘¡Merçed vos pidimos commo a rey e a señor natural!’
‘Con vuestro conssejo lo queremos fer nós

Que nos demandedes fijas del Campeador;
Casar queremos con ellas a su ondra e a nuestra pro’.
Una grant ora el rey penssó e comidió:
‘Hyo eché de tierra al buen Campeador,
E faziendo yo ha él mal, e él a mí grand pro,
Del casamiento non sé si.s’ abrá sabor.
¡Mas pues bós lo queredes, entremos en la razón!’
A Mynaya Albar Fánez e a Pero Vermúez
El rey don Alfonsso essora los lamó;
A una quadra ele los apartó:
‘¡Oydme, Mynaya, e vós, Per Vermúez!
Sírvem’ Myo Çid el Campeador;
él lo mereçe E de mí abrá perdón.
Viniéssem’ a vistas si oviesse dent sabor.
Otros mandados ha en esta mi cort.
Diego e Ferrando, los yffantes de Carrión,
Sabor han de casar con sus fijas amas a dos.
Sed buenos menssageros, e ruego vos lo yo
Que ge lo digades al buen Campeador (vv. 1879-904)
Who would dare reject the monarch’s request? In fact, King Alfonso is only
willing to grant his forgiveness on the condition that Ruy Díaz consent to the
Infantes’ self-interested request to marry his daughters. Only as a consequence
of the “Afrenta de Corpes” and the ensuing legal claim does the Cid receive just
acknowledgement and due support by virtue of the vassallatic bond re-estab-
lished on the shore of the Tagus River, a pact of which the Cid vociferously and
continuously reminds King Alfonso, forcing the monarch to accept responsi-
bility for having caused such a disgrace to one of his vassals.85 To a large extent,
85 For a more thorough analysis of this meeting, its development, and its impact, see Martin,
Chanson de Mon Cid, pp. 41-45. For a different reading of this episode, see Funes’ chapter
in this volume.
the Cid’s trajectory ultimately consists in the materialization – only after heart-
breaking vicissitudes – of a far reaching observation implicitly formulated at
the beginning of the poem by the people of Burgos, whose words must be
understood in their fullest feudo-vassallatic meaning: “¡Dios, qué buen vassalo,
sí oviesse buen señor!” (v. 20). In the Poema, this slow and troublesome evolu-
tion emphasizes the need for, and the benefits of, both Castile and its king
embracing the social formation represented by the Cid: a disparate yet dedi-
cated chivalry combining mid to low-level groups of noble warriors hungry for
riches and conquests, competent and eager to serve the king and Christianity,
and whose loyalty can be earned by the monarch through vassallatic bonds
that would create the conditions allowing those men and groups to have a
closer relationship with the king and would place limits on the hegemony of
the hereditary nobility.
Within the historic context in which Castile was affirming its preeminence
over the other kingdoms of the Peninsula, while at the same time arousing
resentment and suspicion from members of former Leonese tutelage, this
message is directed at the grandson of the “buen enperador” who moved the
seat of the Spanish Empire from León to Toledo. More specifically, this mes-
sage is meant for Alfonso VIII, the representative of a new Castilian monarchy
who looked for and created his governmental foundations; who went to great
lengths to consolidate his legitimacy by commissioning the first royal Castilian
chronicle, the Najerense;86 and who strived to consecrate his dynastic con-
tinuity by founding the royal mausoleum at Santa María la Real in Burgos.87
While contributing to the configuration of the new Castilian monarchy, the
Poema’s aim is to remind its public of the heroic deeds of conquest achieved
by the monarch’s relative and ancestor, along with all due social and political
connotations.
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Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV. La tratadística ca-
balleresca en su marco europeo, Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1996.
Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús, Ciudadanía, soberanía monárquica y caballería, Madrid: Akal,
2009 (English translation: Order and Chivalry: Knighthood and Citizenship in Late
Medieval Castile, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Roitman, Gisela, “El episodio de Rachel y Vidas, polifónico y al mismo tiempo velado”,
Revista de Literatura Medieval 23 (2011), 237-59.
Torres Sevilla, Margarita, Linajes nobiliarios de León y Castilla (siglos IX-XIII), Salamanca:
Junta de Castilla y León, 1998.
346 Martin
Figure 11.1 The king bids farewell to his army that departs for war. Miniature of the Biblia de
San Millán de la Cogolla (La Rioja, Spain), beginning of the 13th century (Biblioteca
de la Real Academia de la Historia, Cod. 2, f. 181v). Published By Kind Permis-
sion Of The Real Academia De La Historia.
Legal Aspects of the Poema de mio Cid 347
Chapter 12
Legal Aspects of the Poema de mio Cid

Eukene Lacarra Lanz
1 Introduction1
To understand and analyze literary texts written more than eight hundred
years ago, one must investigate the society in which they were created through
the analysis of diplomatic and historical documents. When studying epic lit-
erature, it is particularly interesting to know the customs and laws that shaped
the society in which epic authors lived. Their poetic texts reveal the power rela-
tions that, to a great extent, were rooted in the laws governing their society. The
language of the Poema de mio Cid (PMC, Poema), which proceeds from both
common speech as well as military and legal terminology, reveals the author’s
erudition and his familiarity with the law.
Three legal acts of King Alfonso dominate the critical highpoints of the
Poema and the king’s relationship with Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar: the ira regia
(royal wrath), the royal pardon, and the convening of the Cortes of Toledo. Royal
wrath and royal pardon were manifestations of the king’s authority by which
he granted or revoked his love in a voluntary and arbitrary way. Naturally, leg-
islation provided that certain crimes could give rise to the royal wrath, but the
king enjoyed full freedom to direct his rage at his ricos hombres merely because
of ill will he harbored against them. The consequences of the ira regia described
in the PMC correspond with those stipulated in existing legislation: banish-
ment, confiscation of all property, loss of lands granted by the king, dishonor,
and loss of patria potestas. On the other hand, granting royal pardon was not
precisely an act of justice, but rather, it was a manifestation of royal grace.
Although convening the cortes was the sole prerogative of the king, it per-
tained to the realm of justice and governance of the kingdom. Noblemen had
the right to file lawsuits in the ordinary royal court, while the extraordinary
court usually treated judicial, political, or economic matters concerning the
general welfare of the kingdom.
1 I have relied on two of my earlier studies for the preparation of this chapter: El Poema de mio
Cid: realidad histórica e ideología and “La representación del rey Alfonso en el Poema de mio
Cid desde la ira regia hasta el perdón real”.

348 Lacarra Lanz
2 The Ira Regia
Kings were not the only ones who could discharge their wrath: nobles, clergy-
men, and especially God could also. Rage originating from anger, envy, or fury
was considered one of the twelve mortal sins.2 An irate king – such as King
Alfonso in the Historia Roderici – could be considered a rex iniquus. However,
the royal wrath did not necessarily imply that the monarch harbored hostile
and malicious sentiments.3 Kings needed to be prudent, pious, clement, mer-
ciful, and fair; but they also had to be feared, respected, and obeyed by their
knights. In order to be respected and feared, at times it was necessary to resort
to the use of a form of terror referred to as ira regia. The king could employ his
wrath through a system of unwritten laws, and although the legislation estab-
lished that certain crimes could give rise to the ira regia, the monarch enjoyed
absolute freedom to use his anger against his ricos hombres because of mere
malquerencia.4 Whenever the king’s wrath was appropriate, it needed to be
represented and manifested, since it did not necessarily have negative conno-
tations nor did it imply irrational conduct.5 Nevertheless, there is an important
change in the 12th century: the king was praised when he used his rage fairly
because it was believed that justice was more important than clemency.6
3 Origins of the Ira Regia in Castile and León
The ira regia, whose origins date back to the 7th and 8th centuries, is related to
the breach of the Visigothic pax regis in the laws of Chindaswinth (II,I,VIII)
and Recceswinth (II,I,VI) of the Liber iudiciorum. In documents dated in the
10th century the king threatens to use his rage against anyone who disobeys his
orders by declaring “iram regis habeat”, or “regis amorem perdat”, since the
indignatio regis entailed the loss of royal love.7 The use of these phrases
became widespread during the second decade of the 10th century. An example
is the case of Bishop Frunimio of León, who suffered the wrath of King Fruela
II in 924.8
2 Althoff, “Ira regis: Prolegomena to a History of Royal Anger”, p. 61.

3 Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid: realidad histórica e ideología, p. 23.
4 Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid: realidad histórica e ideología, pp. 8-12; Grassotti, “La ira regia en
León y Castilla”.
5 White, “The Politics of Anger”, p. 137.
6 Althoff, “Ira regis: Prolegomena to a History of Royal Anger”, p. 70.
7 Grassotti, “La ira regia en León y Castilla”, pp. 11 and 14.
8 Ibid, p. 13.
The indignatio regis carried “el destierro, la pérdida de honores y tenencias

y la ruptura del vínculo vasallático”.9 Noblemen most frequently incurred
the royal wrath because of treason, rebellion, or conspiracy. Alfonso VI relied
on Recceswinth’s law (II,I,VI) to direct his rage against Count Rodrigo Ovéquiz,
who was accused of rebellion. A diploma registering a donation made to the
see of Lugo attests that the count was punished with exile, and all his personal
property and landed estates were confiscated. The offender, however, was not
sentenced to death or punished with blindness, as the penalty prescribed in
Chindaswinth’s law (II,I,VIII) would have directed.10 The use of royal rage was
not always related to crimes and there are no testimonies of any trials.11
4 Legal Sources of the Ira Regia in the Poema de mio Cid
The major obstacle hindering the study of juridical aspects in the PMC is iden-
tifying the legal sources that were used. We know that the Fuero Juzgo was used
in León to a certain extent, whereas consuetudinary laws, which varied from
one municipality to another, were employed in Castile.12 Although the Fuero
Viejo de Castilla, the Fuero Real, and Alfonso X’s Siete Partidas were compiled
after the Poema was composed, the laws included in these legal codes predate
the PMC. Nevertheless, fueros municipales and royal documents partly com-
pensate, in my opinion, for the lack of general codes of law, and they are better
evidence of how the law was practiced and applied in both the penal and pro-
cedural systems.
The anonymous author of the PMC was undoubtedly familiar with the law.
This has been pointed out by many scholars who have studied the poem, among
others, Eduardo de Hinojosa, Nilda Gugielmi, Luis García de Valdeavellano,
Hilda Grassotti, Pedro Corominas, and more recently, Montaner Frutos.13
9 Ibid, p. 32.
10 Ibid, pp. 29-31.
11 Ibid, p. 32.
12 Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid: realidad histórica e ideología, pp. 4-8 and n. 12.
13 Ibid, pp. 4-5; Montaner Frutos, “Acusar y defender en la Edad Media”, pp. 261-66.
350 Lacarra Lanz
5 Representation of the Ira Regia in the Poema de mio Cid
By the time the PMC was written (around 1207),14 two texts about Rodrigo Díaz
were already in existence: the Historia Roderici and the Carmen Campidoctoris.15
Today, there is a general consensus that these works not only predate the PMC,
but that they were also used to compose the Poema. The most recent research
dates these texts to the final years of the 12th century (around 1190).16 Peña
Pérez believes that they were produced after the Liber Regum;17 if this hypo-
thesis is correct, the PMC must be dated to sometime after 1200, which is,
according to Bautista, when the Liber was composed.18
It is evident that the author of the PMC made substantial modifications to
the Cid’s characterization, since he is not the same rebellious vassal depicted
in the Historia Roderici.19 Likewise, Alfonso VI is no longer portrayed as the
angry, envious, and unfair king we find in this Latin text, nor is he like the mon-
arch who plots Rodrigo’s death in the Carmen Campidoctoris. On the contrary,
in the PMC Alfonso is shown to be a magnanimous, magnificent, generous, fair,
prudent, and humble king. He directs his royal rage at the Cid, giving credence
to the false accusation made by García Ordóñez and other ricos hombres in his
court, yet nobody accuses the monarch of iniquity. The Cid exonerates King
Alfonso and blames his enemies: “¡Esto me an buelto mios enemigos malos!”
(v. 9); similarly, Jimena holds those seeking to make trouble for the Cid respon-
sible: “Por malos mestureros de tierra sodes echado” (v. 265).
King Alfonso directs his wrath against his vassal with all the consequences
it carries: he banishes the Cid from his kingdom sine die, confiscates Rodrigo’s
property, and gives the hero nine days to leave the kingdom under pain of
death. This single period of time differs from the three periods that are speci-
fied in the Fuero Viejo de Castilla, yet it corresponds to the timeframe stipulated
in several fueros municipales such as the Fuero de León and the Fuero de
Calatayud.20
14 Ibid, p. 262.
15 Falque, ed., Historia Roderici, pp. 1-98
16 Montaner and Escobar, eds., Carmen Campidoctoris, pp. 86-93 and 135; Figueras i Capdev-
ila, “Carmen Campi Doctoris. Estat de la qüestió”, pp. 11-41; Montaner, “La construcción
biográfica de la Historia Roderici”; Montaner, “La Historia Roderici y el archivo cidiano”,
pp. 1-62; Escobar, “La lengua del Carmen Campidoctoris”.
17 Peña Pérez, “Gesta Roderici. El Cid en la historiografía latina”, paragraphs 70-72.
18 Bautista, “Original, versiones e influencia del Liber regum”, paragraph 6.
19 Barton, “Reinventing the Hero”, pp. 65-78.
20 Orlandis, “La paz de la casa en el derecho español”, p. 120.
The legal consequences of the ira regia presented in the Poema are banish-
ment sine die, loss of patria potestas, confiscation of property, loss of lands
granted by the king, and dishonor. The prologue to Partida IV,XVIII, which is
entitled “De las razones por que se tuelle el poder que han los padres sobre los
fijos”, states that a person is subject to civil death “por juicio que sea dado en
razon de desterramiento para siempre, á que llaman en latin mors civilis”. Law
II of title XVIII states:
Civil muerte es dicha una manera que hi ha de pena, que fue establescida
en las leyes contra aquellos que facen tal yerro por que merescen seer
judgados ó dapnados para haberla. Et esta muerte atal que es llamada
civil se departe en dos maneras: la una dellas es como si diesen juicio
contra alguno para siempre que labrase las obras del rey, […] et este atal
es llamado siervo de pena. La otra manera es quando destierran alguno
para siempre […] et le toman demas todos sus bienes: et este atal es lla-
mado en latin deportatus. Et por qualquier destas maneras sobredichas
que es alguno judgado ó dapnado á esta muerte que es llamada civil,
desátase por ella el poder que habie este atal sobre sus fijos, et salen por
ende de su poder. Et como quier que el que es deportado non sea muerto
naturalmiente, tienen las leyes que lo es quanto á la honra, et á la nobleza
et á los fechos deste mundo: et por ende non puede facer testamento; et
aun si lo hobiese ante fecho, non valdrie.21
The gravity of mors civilis – the penalty imposed upon the deportatus – be-
comes even more evident when compared to the punishment inflicted upon
the relegatus and the banniti. Concerning the relegatus, the law states:
Et este atal que es asi llamado, maguer semeja como desterrado, por todo
eso non pierde el poder que ha sobre sus fijos nin sobre los otros sus
bienes, nin pierde su nobleza nin su libertad, nin se le embarga por esta
razon que non pueda facer testamento, nin debe haber otra pena por
razon de tal desterramiento, fueras ende si quel que da la sentencia con-
tra él le manda perder alguna cosa señaladamiente […] porque como
quierque es judgado á esta pena, non es muerto civilmente, asi como
deximos de los otros. (Partida IV,XVIII,III)
21 This is repeated in the laws pertaining to wills (Partida VI,I,XV and XVIII, and Partida
VI,III,IV). These regulations are also found in the Fuero Real (III,V,VII,X) and in the Fuero
Viejo, (V,IV,XIII).
352 Lacarra Lanz
According to the law, the relegatus retains his patria potestas since he is not
stripped of his nobiliary privileges, property, or right to dictate a will. This
becomes even more evident in the case of the banniti. According to the
Partidas, banniti are those accused of a crime who do not appear before the
court at the established time, or those who refuse to make amends for the
wrong they committed. In general, judges punish banniti by temporarily ban-
ishing them from the city in which they reside; however, if all their property is
confiscated and they are permanently exiled from the kingdom, banniti then
lose the patria potestas over their children:
Et á las vegadas son contados entre los deportados, et á las vegadas entre
los relegados; ca si son echados para siempre et les toman lo que han, son
contados entre los deportados; et si son echados á tiempo et non para
siempre, et non les toman lo que han, son contados entre los relegados.
(Partida IV,XVIII,IV)
The seriousness of the crime committed by the deportatus is evidenced by the

fact that only the king or emperor have jurisdiction over it, whereas a crime
committed by a relegatus, even if it is grave, could be adjudicated by a judge
with jurisdiction to hear crimes punishable by death or amputation of a limb
(Partida IV,XVIII,V). Crimes committed by a deportatus, which were already
regulated in the Fuero Juzgo (X,II,VII), were punished with indefinite banish-
ment and confiscation of property.22 This type of crime is also found in the
fueros municipales wherein the criminal is referred to as encartado; in territo-
rial codes such as the Fuero Viejo, however, the convict is referred to as echado
de tierra, salido, or airado.23 Banishment was always the punishment for seri-
ous crimes that disturbed the peace of the city or the kingdom.24 In both cases,
the penalties had personal and patrimonial consequences. Chief among the
personal repercussions was infamy, which implied the loss of both civil and
legal rights, and it placed the offender in a state of legal defenselessness: other
members of the community were prohibited from helping him in any way, and
they could even kill him with impunity if he was found in the kingdom after
the established time of his departure.25 Permanent banishment from the city
or the kingdom meant the loss of one’s family. Partida VI,I,XVIII, pertaining to
22 In the Latin version, Forum Iudicum, this law corresponds to XII,2,6 and the term deporta-
tus is used.
23 Orlandis, “Las consecuencias del delito”, pp. 61-165, especially pp. 125-39.
24 Ibid, pp. 123-39.
25 Ibid, pp. 126, 133-34.
wills, is very clear in this regard: it indicates that anyone who is exiled auto-
matically loses his family, and, for that reason, any will that had previously
been dictated would be declared null and void:
quando alguno es desterrado para siempre […] quier le sean tomados

todos sus bienes o non. E a este dizen en latin media capitis diminutio,
que quier tanto dezir en romance, como mediado mudamiento del
estado del ome. Ca por este pierde el ome la cibdad e la familia.
The consequences of banishment on one’s patrimony were also very serious.

Lands granted by the king and, in general, all the exile’s possessions – both
moveable property and lands – were confiscated. According to Orlandis, “la
responsabilidad debía recaer sin duda sobre los demás componentes de
aquel grupo, esto es, la mujer y los hijos”. The Fuero Viejo (V,I,13) makes it clear
that the exile’s wife shared joint financial responsibility. Heath Dillard points
out the serious economic hardship faced by wives whose husbands were pun-
ished with total or partial banishment, and Orlandis concludes that total
confiscation of property was the more frequent punishment.26 A common
penalty for disturbing the peace was the demolition of one’s dwelling.27 To
fully understand this punishment, one must keep in mind that the home had a
special juridical meaning: owning a house not only was the foundation of civic
privileges, but it also served as a personal safe haven. For that reason, the raid
or razing of an offender’s home left him unprotected and at the mercy of
attacks.
The enfamamiento that Rodrigo Díaz suffers is a form of dishonor estab-
lished by law and imposed through an explicit verdict (Partida VII,VI,V). This
dishonor could be reversed “quando el Emperador, o el Rey perdonasse a
alguno el yerro que oviesse fecho de que era enfamado: ca pierde por ende la
mala fama” (Partida VII,VI,VI). Unlike the cases of dishonor established by law,
dishonor brought on by one’s actions – nombradía mala – was independent
from legislation and even from the good or bad conduct of a person. Since this
form of dishonor was rooted in public opinion, it was irreparable: “despues
que las lenguas de los omes han puesto mala nombradia sobre alguno non
la pierde jamas maguer non la meresciesse” (Partida VII,VI,VI). Rodríguez
Flores indicates that ill repute was so grave that the king even issued letters
of pardon attempting to extinguish its effects, which were prolonged and
26 Orlandis, “Las consecuencias del delito”, pp. 127, 136-39, and 160; Dillard, Daughters of the
Reconquest, pp. 86-90.
27 Orlandis, “Las consecuencias del delito”, pp. 127-29 and notes 208-14.
354 Lacarra Lanz
suffered by later generations.28 Of course, there was always the paradoxical

case in which someone was dishonored in the eyes of the law, yet managed to
preserve his good name and reputation among his fellow men. Such is the case
of Rodrigo Díaz in the PMC.
In effect, the Cid is legally dishonored as a result of the punishment he
receives, yet his honor remains unscathed. In fact, his good name is reaffirmed
in the famous exclamation collectively declared by the people of Burgos:
“¡Dios, qué buen vassallo! ¡Si oviesse buen señor!” (v. 20). Their admiration for
the Cid, however, does not imply any criticism of the monarch. On the con-
trary, the townsfolk’s conduct is irreproachable and consistent with the fear
and obedience they were required to show their king according to the regula-
tions in title XIII of Partida II: “Qual deue el pueblo ser en conoscer e en
honrrar e en guardar al Rey”. According to these laws, fear and obedience are
signs of amor, that is to say, the respect for the king that was expected of every
vassal:
Temor es cosa que se tiene con el amor que es verdadero, ca ningun ome
non puede amar si non teme […] e le deuen temer como vassallos a señor,
auiendo miedo de fazer tal yerro, porque ayan a perder su amor, e caer en
pena. (Partida II,XIII,XV)
Obediencia es cosa de que viene mucho bien, ca ella faze a los omes
obedescer a sus Señores en todas cosas, assi como vasallos leales […] [ca]
mostrarian que le conoscian, e le amauan, e le temían verdaderamente,
porque merescen ser mucho amados e honrados. (Partida II,XIII,XVI)
Returning to the PMC, the Cid’s legal status of deportatus is evident: he has
been legally stripped of his honor, has been permanently exiled, his property
has been confiscated, and he has lost the rights over his family.29 It is signifi-
cant that the Cid’s weeping “de los ojos” underscores two moments at the start
of his exile in which the punishment of mors civilis is manifested in its fullest
intensity: first, when he verifies the expropriation and raid of his house (vv. 1-5),
and second, after losing his family, when he bids farewell to his wife and
28 Rodríguez Flores, El perdón real en Castilla, Appendix of Documents, II, p. 243.

29 Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid: realidad histórica e ideología, pp. 8-32, and “La represen-
tación del rey Alfonso”, pp. 183-95, as well as Orlandis, “Las consecuencias del delito”,
pp. 135-36 and note 230, argue that confiscation of the Cid’s property is in keeping with
what customarily occurred in such cases when someone had been stripped of the patria
potestas; Morros, “Problemas del Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 530-32, and Montaner, Cantar de
mio Cid, p. 387, reject this idea.
daughters (vv. 227, 373). The accusation of disturbing the peace is evidenced by
the king’s orders that forbid the people of Burgos from sheltering or aiding the
Cid (vv. 22-25, 43-44, 62-64); also by his state of legal defenselessness that
endangers his life if he does not leave Castile within the established period
(vv. 308-10). Both Rodrigo and Jimena understand the legal consequences of
his civil death, that is to say, they are both aware that the Cid’s banishment is
indefinite, and it may endure as long as he lives. The hero alludes to his uncer-
tain future as he leaves Burgos – “D’aquí quito Castiella pues que el rey he en
ira / non sé si entraré ý mas en todos los mios días” (vv. 219- 20) – and he and
his wife later reiterate this reality at Cardeña. First, Jimena says, “Yo lo veo que
estades vós en ida/ e nós de vós partir nos hemos en vida” (vv. 271-72), and
Rodrigo then utters, “Ya lo vedes que partir nos emos en vida, / yo iré e vós
fincaredes remanida” (vv. 280-81). Within this context, Jimena’s prayer takes on
a special meaning. It contains elements of the Ordo infirmorum and the Ordo
commendationis animae – both of which are particular to the liturgy of the
dying and of the sacrament of extreme unction, and thus serve to underscore
the gravity of the Cid’s mors civilis.30
Nevertheless, in the profound sadness that pervades the scene in which
the Cid separates from his family lays the foundation for his final vindication,
that is to say, what could be called Rodrigo’s resurrection to civilian life. The
Cid’s civil death – the punishment for disturbing the peace –, the subsequent
“resurrection” that occurs after the hero recuperates the king’s love, the final
apotheosis of his lineage, and his natural death on Pentecost may reinforce
Burke’s arguments.31 In effect, the Cid’s initial optimism when faced with the
implications of his punishment – “¡Albriçia, Albar Fáñez, ca echados somos de
tierra!” (v. 14) – establishes a connection between this verse and the notion of
the felix culpa in the Paschal liturgy, wherein the expulsion from Paradise pro-
duces the benefit of resurrection, an idea that is reiterated in the Cid’s promise
to serve his wife and personally arrange the marriages of his daughters.32
Naturally, this hope is predicated on the mutual trust between the Cid and
King Alfonso; only with the monarch’s forgiveness can the hero recuperate the
royal love, that is to say, to be forgiven and have all his rights, privileges, and
possessions, including his patria potestas, reinstated. It is impossible for the
Cid to keep his promise and personally arrange the marriages of his daughters
without having regained the authority over his family. His words, therefore,
30 Russell, Temas de "La Celestina" y otros estudios, pp. 115-58; Smith, La creación, pp. 206-07;
Gimeno Casalduero, El misterio, pp. 135-49.
31 Burke, Structures from the Trivium, pp. 123, 135, 164-65.
32 Ibid, pp. 96-100.
356 Lacarra Lanz
must not be interpreted only as a sign of his paternal love, which indeed they
are, but also within a legal context. At the same time, the famous line “así’s
parten unos d’otros commo la uña de la carne” (v. 375) seems to have a rather
profound meaning and is not merely an expression of the pain of separation.33
A nail coming away from flesh conveys the idea of division, alludes to the
forced dissolution of the family unity, and suggests the rupture of the bond
uniting Rodrigo and Jimena. As husband and wife, they are one flesh according
to Genesis (2:24) – “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be
joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” – a notion repeated in
Matthew (19:5-6), and Paul (Ephesians: 5:31), which later was integrated into
the liturgy of marriage. I believe this allusion is meaningful: the objective of
Rodrigo and Jimena’s encounter at the Monastery of Cardeña is to show that
despite the adverse circumstances and unavoidable separation in life, Rodrigo
and Jimena remain united by marital bonds, even in this extreme case in which
living together – a defining element of marriage – is no longer possible.34 When
Jimena reenacts the marriage rite by kneeling before Rodrigo and kissing his
hands (vv. 264-65), she manifests the loyalty and respect that, as a wife, she
owed her husband. Rodrigo, in turn, reveals his affection and loyalty to Jimena
by expressing his strong desire to recuperate his rights so he can fulfill his
paternal and familial duties.35
Rodrigo and Jimena’s words and gestures reaffirm their mutual consent,
the affectio maritalis, and, as a result, the indissolubility of their union.36 In
the Middle Ages – as in Roman law – the expression of affectio maritalis had
become interchangeable with consensus.37 Through these signs of affection,
the author of the PMC makes it clear that the marital bond uniting Rodrigo and
Jimena continues to be strong. These expressions are found in cartas de arras,
such as a document dated in 1075 originating from Asturias: “Ut te in coniugio
copularem sociam […] obinde propter amorem, honorem dulcedinis tuae et
33 Smith, “Further French Analogues and Sources for the Poema de mio Cid”, notes the simi-
larity between this farewell and Parise’s separation from her husband in Parise la duchesse,
vv. 773 and following.
34 Gaudemet, Le mariage en Occident, p. 165, points out that according to Gratian (De matri-
monio, C. 27, q.2), living together is the essence of marital union.
35 Duby, El caballero, la mujer y el cura, pp. 129-30 and 180-81.
36 Núñez Paz, Consentimiento matrimonial, pp. 55-82; Noonan, “Marital Affection in the
Canonists”, pp. 479-510; and Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe,
pp. 297-98. These scholars indicate that the presence of affection, according to the decre-
tists, distinguished marital union from fornication.
37 Rudolf Weigand, “Liebe und Ehe bei den Dekretisten des 12. Jahrhunderts”, p. 42.
pro coniugalis gratiam et pro feder conligando dono in hunc dotis titulum”.38
For these reasons, the Cid’s manifestations to Jimena (vv. 278-84) should not
be reduced to a mere sign of courtly gallantry.39 Another key aspect of this
episode is that it serves as a counterpoint to the Afrenta de Corpes, where the
Infantes of Carrión revoke – through their vile and violent acts – the consent
and affectio maritalis they had previously given to their wives at their weddings.
6 The Royal Pardon
The royal pardon was not exactly an act of justice, but rather a manifestation
of the king’s grace.40 The law clearly establishes three reasons why the king
could grant his pardon: mercy, compassion, or favor:
Se mueue con piedad de si mismo a perdonar a alguno la pena que deuia

auer, doliendose del, viendole cuytado, o mal andante: o por piedad que
ha de sus fijos, e de su compaña. Merced es perdón que el Rey faze a
otro por merescimiento de seruicio que le fizo aquel a quien perdona
[…] e es como manera de gualardon; por gracia: es don que faze el Rey
a algunos que con derecho se puede escusar de lo fazer, si quisiere.
(Partida VII,XXXII,III)
Granting royal pardon was an arbitrary act exercised by the monarch that
depended on the king’s will, not on the conduct of the offender. However, both
the legislation and legal practices indicate that the convict’s merits could make
him worthy of the king’s grace – even if it was not decisive – especially in those
cases wherein the offender had rendered considerable services to the crown.
Partidas III,XVIII,XLIX and III,XVIII,LI stipulate that the king could grant his
grace “por merecimiento de seruicio que aya alguno fecho, o por bondad que
aya en si”, except in the case of someone convicted of treason (against the king
or the kingdom) or alevosía (treason against a member of the nobility) (Partida
III,XXIV,IV). The king could also forgive:
algunos yrados por recebir dellos grandes seruicios, que sean a pro del,
e del Reyno por ruego de algund perlado o de rico ome, o […] por seruicio
38 Leclercq, Monks on Marriage. A Twelfth Century View, p. 115, note 23. For additional exam-
ples, see pp. 3-6, and Duby, El caballero, la mujer y el cura, p. 85.
39 With respect to this matter, I disagree with Gimeno Casalduero, El misterio, pp. 179-80.
40 Rodríguez Flores, El perdón real en Castilla, pp. 11-17 and 191-201.
358 Lacarra Lanz
que oviessese fecho a él […] o por grand esfuerço que oviessen en el, de
que pudiesse a la tierra venir algund bien, o por alguna razón semejante
destas: e por atales perdones como estos non ha otro poder de los fazer
sinon el rey. (Partida III,XVIII,XLIX)
Regarding the actual petition for the king’s forgiveness, the Partidas stipulate
that “omildosamente fincados los ynojos e con pocas palabras deuen pedir
merced al Rey los que la han menester” (Partida III,XXIV,III). When an airado
incurred the king’s malquerencia (ill will), he had to beg the monarch for
mercy:
Apartadamente en poridad […] e si non gelo quisiesse caber, deuel

pedir merced la segunda vez ante vno, o ante dos de la compaña del
Rey. E si acaesciesse que non gelo quisiesse otorgar, puedele pedir mer-
ced la tercera vegada por corte. (Partida IV,XXV,X)
Once the airado was in exile, others could intercede on his behalf and beseech
the king for forgiveness (Partida VII,XXXII,I).
7 The Royal Pardon in the Poema de mio Cid
Rodrigo regains King Alfonso’s love in accordance with the stipulations detailed
in the Partidas. During the first embassy, Álvar Fáñez kisses the king’s hands
and feet on behalf of his lord, and he begs him to show mercy on the Cid:
¡Mio Çid Ruy Díaz de Dios aya su graçia! (870)
A vós rey ondrado enbía esta presentaja,

bésavos los pies e las manos amas,
quel’ay[a]des merçed si el Criador vos vala. (878-80)
During the second embassy, Álvar Fáñez beseeches King Alfonso to forgive the
Cid with great humility:
Afé Minaya Álbar Fáñez, dó llega tan apuesto,

fincó sos inojos ante tod’ el pueblo,
a los pies del rey Alfonsso cayó con grand duelo,
besávale las manos e fabló tan apuesto:
“¡Merçed, señor Alfonsso, por amor del Criador!
Besávavos las manos mío Çid lidiador,

los pies e las manos como a tan buen señor,
quel’ ayades merçed, si vos vala el Criador.
Echástesle de tierra, non ha la vuestra amor,
mager en tierra agena, él bien faze lo so”. (1317-26)
Grandes son las ganançias que’l dio el Criador,

fevos aquí las señas, verdad vos digo yo:
çient cavallos gruessos e corredores,
de siellas e de frenos todos guarnidos son,
bésavos las manos e que los prendades vós;
razonas’ por vuestro vassallo e a vós tiene por señor. (1334-39)
Álvar Fáñez and Pero Vermúdez make the third and final plea for forgiveness
before the king and his entire court:
Minaya e Per Vermúez adelante son llegados,

firiéronse a tierra deçendieron de los cavallos,
ante’l rey Alfonsso los inojos fincados,
besan la tierra e los pies amos:
“¡Merçed rey Alfonsso, sodes tan ondrado!
Por mio Çid el Campeador todo esto vos besamos
a vós llama por señor, e tiénes’ por vuestro vassallo,
mucho preçia la ondra el Çid quel’avedes dado.
Pocos días ha, rey, que una lid á arrancado
a aquel rey de Marruecos, Yuçef por nombrado,
con çinquaenta mill arrancólos del campo;
las ganançias que fizo mucho son sobejanas,
ricos son venidos todos los sos vassallos,
e embíavos dozientos cavallos e bésavos las manos”. (1841-54)
Each embassy is comprised of three parts: the offering of gifts, the enumera-
tion of military victories, and the request for the king’s favor, accompanied by
the ritualistic kissing of the king’s hands and feet as required by law (Partida
III,XXIV,III). The gradual reconciliation between the king and Rodrigo becomes
apparent in the intensity of the proof of loyalty. King Alfonso’s responses are
similarly structured around three elements: acceptance of the Cid’s gifts,
acknowledgement of his accomplishments, and offering the service of men to
360 Lacarra Lanz
help the Cid conquer Valencia.41 King Alfonso underscores the delight with
which he accepts the Cid’s gifts considering they are spoils won from the
Moors; he shows his admiration of, and satisfaction with, the Cid for having
won the plunder; and immediately manifests that he is willing to grant favors
only he can bestow. During the first embassy, Alfonso grants the royal pardon
to those who left Castile with Rodrigo and allows his own vassals to join the
Cid’s retinue if they wish. By providing this military aid, the king contributes to
Rodrigo’s conquests, which he evidently considers to be important services to
the crown. During the second embassy, King Alfonso grants the Cid’s request
and allows his wife and daughters to join him in Valencia. It is significant that
the king allows the family to be reunited because it signals the restoration of
the Cid’s patria potestas and augurs his forthcoming pardon. In effect, the king
decides to forgive Rodrigo after the third embassy (vv. 1897-99).
King Alfonso notifies Álvar Fáñez and Pero Vermúdez in private of his deci-
sion to forgive the Cid, who is now deserving of the royal love because of his
merits and the services he has performed on behalf of the crown (vv. 1897-99).
To honor Rodrigo, the king allows him to choose where the vistas will take
place (vv. 1910-12). The Cid decides that this solemn meeting should be held on
the shore of the Tagus River, and soon, King Alfonso and the Cid – along with
their respective retinues – make their way to the meeting place. Their encoun-
ter is extraordinary, and Rodrigo requests the king’s forgiveness with great
humility:
De un día es llegado antes el rey don Alfonsso.

Quando vieron que vinié el buen Campeador
reçebirlo salen con tan grand onor.
Dón lo ovo a ojo el que en buen ora nasco,
a todos los sos estar los mandó,
si non a estos cavalleros que querié de coraçón;
con unos XV a tierras’ firió,
como lo comidía el que en buen ora naçió,
los inojos e las manos en tierra los fincó,
las yerbas del campo a dientes las tomó,
llorando de los ojos tanto avié el gozo mayor,
así sabe dar omildança a Alfonsso so señor.
De aquesta guisa a los pies le cayó.
41 Joseph Duggan has written skillfully about the exchange of gifts in the PMC; however, I do
not agree with his conclusions. The gifts the Cid sends to King Alfonso follow what was
established by law. The king accepts them and responds to Rodrigo very generously.
Tan grand pesar ovo el rey don Alfonsso:

“¡Levantados en pie, ya Çid Campeador!
besad las manos, ca los pies no;
si esto non feches, non avredes mi amor”.
Hinojos fitos sedié el Campeador:
“¡Merçed vos pido a vós, mio natural señor,42
assí estando dédesme vuestra amor,
Que lo oyan quantos aquí son!”
Dixo el rey: “Esto feré d’alma e de coraçón!
Aquí vos perdono e dovos mi amor,
En todo mio reino parte desde oy”.
Fabló mio Çid e dixo merçed:
“Yo lo reçibo, Alfonsso mio señor;
gradéscolo a Dios del çielo e después a vós,
e a estas mesnadas que están a derredor”.
Hinojos fitos las manos le besó,
Levós’ en pie e en la bocal’ saludó. (2013-40)
The royal pardon is granted with great ceremony. The retinues of both King
Alfonso and the Cid wear their finery. Forming part of the king’s entourage are
the most prominent ricos hombres from Castile, León, and Galicia, as well as
their respective retinues. They wear cloaks and furs, and have gold and silver-
plated shields; they also flaunt silk pennants and ride their best horses. The
Cid’s retinue is every bit their equal. Rodrigo leaves Valencia with Bishop Jeró-
nimo and the ricos hombres who accompanied him throughout his exile. They,
too, are dressed in their best cloaks and furs, and ride the best chargers and
palfreys. They are wearing colored clothing. As prescribed by law, the Cid man-
ifests his humility by kneeling while he is forgiven by the king, and in the
presence of the entire court King Alfonso restores Rodrigo’s honor and grants
him his royal love.
8 Extraordinary Cortes
It was an exclusive royal privilege to convoke the cortes, an institution that

attended to matters of justice and governance of the kingdom.43 The extra-
42 I disagree with Bautista’s political interpretation in “Como a señor natural: Interpretacio-

nes políticas”.
43 Guglielmi, “La curia regia en León y Castilla” II, p. 66.
362 Lacarra Lanz
ordinary cortes were comprised of noblemen – whose attendance was manda-

tory on pain of incurring the ira regia – as well as members of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy. Disputes among members of the nobility were generally settled in
ordinary cortes; however, as we can see in the PMC, extraordinary cortes were
occasionally convoked on behalf of a rico hombre the king wanted to help or
honor.44
9 Extraordinary Cortes in the Poema de mio Cid
The Cortes of Toledo deals with the Cid’s dispute with the Infantes of Carrión
at two levels: civil and penal. Everything related to the return of the Cid’s prop-
erty is part of the civil case, whereas the Afrenta de Corpes pertains to the
sphere of penal law. The Cid, who has been affronted by the Infantes of Carrión,
sends Muño Gústioz to the king’s court to request that King Alfonso administer
justice and convoke vistas, juntas, or cortes. The king, who is distressed over the
news (“Verdad te digo yo, que me pesa de coraçón”, v. 2954), resolves to convene
extraordinary cortes in Toledo:45 “Por el amor de myo Çid el que en buen ora
naçió / que reçiba derecho de ifantes de Carrión” (vv. 3132-33). In keeping with
the law, the king establishes the time and place where the cortes shall take
place, and he dispatches his porteros (royal messengers) to León and Santiago,
as well as to the Portuguese, the Galicians, the people of Carrión, and the
Castilians, who are all advised to be in Toledo for the cortes that will be held in
seven weeks’ time (vv. 2962-84).
In attendance at the cortes of Toledo are nobles, iurisperitos or sabidores
(legal experts) from both camps – including the Cid’s legal expert, Malanda,
(v. 3070) –, and Bishop Jerónimo. King Alfonso is seated on the bench of honor
and he invites the Cid to sit next to him, but Rodrigo humbly declines the
honor and takes a seat among his men. The other nobles sit in hierarchical
order and divided into two groups. The king designates an indeterminate num-
ber of judges and instructs them to render a judgment in accordance with the
law; he also warns all those present to keep the peace if they wish to avoid his
wrath and be banished from the kingdom:
Todos meted í mientes, ca sodes coñosçedores,

Por escoger el derecho, ca tuerto non mando yo.
44 Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid: realidad histórica e ideología, pp. 65-77.

45 Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, II, p. 600, points out that it is only an extraordinary
cortes in part since the ecclesiastical hierarchy is not present.
D’ella e d’ella part en paz seamos oy.

Juro par Sant Esidro, el que bolviere mi cort
quitarme á el reino, perderá mi amor.
Con el que toviere derecho, yo dessa parte me só. (3137-42)
10 The Civil Suit in the Poema de mio Cid
The civil suit begins when King Alfonso gives the floor to the Cid, who rises
from his seat and thanks the monarch who, out of love for him, convened an
extraordinary curia. In this case, the Cid focuses his claim exclusively on the
gifts he gave to the Infantes, since their return was a matter in dispute. Rodrigo
accuses the Infantes of abandoning his daughters and dissolving their mar-
riage. Consequently, he argues that they are no longer his sons-in-law and
demands that the Infantes return the swords he had given them. The Infantes
concede to this demand, the judges rule in favor of the Cid, and the king con-
firms the sentence. Rodrigo stands up again and, using the same line of
reasoning, presents a second claim: since the Infantes are no longer his sons-
in-law, they are to give back the three thousand marks of gold and silver they
had been given. The Infantes claim that Rodrigo has committed an error in
procedure, arguing that he should have presented one claim for both demands
and, therefore, refuse to return the money. The judges advise the king to reject
this argument, which he does. The Infantes lose the case and are obliged to
repay the three thousand marks in kind, since they had already spent them.
This lawsuit presented by the Cid coincides with the provisions included in
the Fuero Juzgo stipulating how property is to be divided in cases of divorce:
é si el marido lexa la moyér con tuerto, debe la moyer haber las arras quel’
diera: e el non debe haber nada de las cosas de la moyér. É si alguna cosa
le había tornado, o levado, todo lo entregue à la moyér. (Fuero Juzgo,
III,VI,I)
Rodrigo does not broach the return of the arras, reasoning that since King
Alfonso was the one who married his daughters to the Infantes, he is respon-
sible for requesting them.
364 Lacarra Lanz
11 The Penal Suit and the Riepto
The legal nature of the riepto has been heavily debated. Whereas Cabral de
Moncada considered it a vindicatory legal process,46 Menéndez Pidal asserted
that it was a trial by ordeal or a trial by God.47 Otero Varela observed that there
was a change in the original vindicatory nature of the riepto between nobles,
since it evolved from private vengeance.48 López Ortiz, however, pointed out
that it derived from the concord among nobles manifested in the Riepto de los
Hidalgos as a legal solution to the cases of treason and aleve, and that it was
regulated by territorial, not municipal laws.49 Colmeiro was one of the earliest,
if not the first, legal historian to have considered the Ordenamiento de Nájera
as the origin of the knight’s riepto; believing that King Alfonso VII convoked
the Cortes of Nájera, he dated the Ordenamiento to 1138.50 Today, we know that
it was Alfonso VIII, not Alfonso VII, who convoked the Cortes of Nájera in 1184
or 1185, and it was he who enacted the regulations of the Ordenamiento de
Nájera establishing the concord or peace among nobles.51 In the same cortes,
the king also ordered “que ningún eredamiento de rey que non corra a los fidal-
gos nin a monesterio ninguno, nin lo dellos al rey”.52 Both decrees point to the
reception of Roman law as well as to the start of a policy of centralization,
detectable in legal concepts related to rieptos and royal properties. Despite not
knowing with certainty the date of the Cortes of Nájera, López Ortiz recog-
nized more than sixty years ago that the distinction between civil and penal
law by King Alfonso VIII at the Cortes of Nájera and in the Fuero de Cuenca was
an important intervention of royal power.53 Regarding the provisions pertain-
ing to the riepto in municipal fueros, Montaner Frutos provides an excellent
analysis in “Acusar y defender en la Edad Media”.54
46 In “O duelo na vida do direito”, Cabral de Moncada associates the duel with the riepto and
considers it as a primitive form of private justice (pp. 214-15).
47 Menéndez Pidal, En torno al “Poema del Cid”, pp. 85-90.
48 Otero Varela, “El riepto de los fueros municipales”, p. 157, and Dos estudios histórico-jurídi-
cos, pp. 79-80.
49 López Ortiz, “El proceso en los reinos cristianos”, pp. 88-89.
50 Colmeiro, El derecho político de León y de Castilla, p. 355.
51 González, “Sobre las fechas de las Cortes de Nájera”; Grassotti, “El recuerdo de las Cortes
de Nájera”, p. 255; Zaderenko, “El procedimiento judicial de riepto”.
52 González, “Sobre las fechas de las Cortes de Nájera”, p. 357.
53 López Ortiz, “El proceso en los reinos cristianos”, pp. 189-90.
54 Montaner Frutos also analyzes matters related to slander and infamy in legislation and
the PMC (“Acusar y defender en la Edad Media”, pp. 266-71).
The riepto was established as a legal solution to the problems of treason and
aleve among nobles who attacked each other’s honra and honor; some form of
verbal or physical slander was at the heart of the attack. In the Fuero Real
(IV,XXI,VI), the provisions pertaining to the riepto stipulate that the challenge
must take place before the king and in the presence of at least twelve knights.55
The challenging party must appear before the king and state the reasons why
he wants to issue his challenge:
Diga el fecho porque le riepta, é dígale que es ende alevoso, é que gelo
fara decir, ó le matará, o le porná fuera del plazo: é si gelo quisiere probar
por testigos ó por carta ó por pesquisa del Rey, digagelo, y el reptado
digale que miente; é si quisiera combatir dígalo, é si no quisiere combatir,
diga que fará quanto el Rey mandare, é su corte.
If the challenged party believes that his actions do not constitute alevosía, he
can refute the accusation, request justice from the king, and refuse to accept
the challenge (Fuero Real, IV,XXI,VII), since the accused decides if he wishes to
participate in the judicial duel and the king cannot oblige him to do it (Fuero
Real, IV,XXI,VIII). The king establishes the conditions of the duel, decides the
time and place of the combat, and determines the weapons with which the
contenders will fight. In the event that both parties agree to participate in the
judicial duel, they must observe the established truce (Fuero Real, IV,XXI,XVIII).
Once the date has been determined, the fieles or judges delineate the field
while ensuring that the glare of the sun does not blind either of the combat-
ants, verify that the contenders are using proper weapons, mark the boundaries
of the field with stones, and explain the rules of combat to both participants
(Fuero Real, IV,XXI,IX).
A rico hombre can also designate a substitute equal in rank to the reptado. In
such a case, there are several concrete rules:
Quando un home poderoso ficiere á otro de menor poder ó de menos

guisa caso que caiga en aleve, puedagelo decir; y el poderoso si quisiere
embargargelo, puedalo facer, ó darle su par; mas el que riepta no puede
55 There is some discussion about the date of the Fuero Real. Iglesia Ferreirós, “Fuero Real y
Espéculo”, p. 156, indicates that Alfonso X put the code into effect in Sahagún and Aguilar
De Campóo in early 1255; therefore, he argues that it may have been compiled around
1249, when Alfonso was still an Infante. Martínez Díez, “Análisis crítico del Fuero Real”,
p. 103, believes that it dates to sometime before 1252, the year in which Alfonso took the
throne.
366 Lacarra Lanz
dar par al reptado, si el reptado no quisiere: é quando par fuere a dar debe
ser partido bien el linage que sea par en él, tambien como en bondad, y
en casamiento y en señorio y en fuerza; ca no es igualdad un home muy
valiente combatirse con home de pequeña fuerza; y é si el que ha de dar
par diere home que vala mas por linaje, ó por otras cosas, en tal que no
sea mas valiente, que se quiera facer par del otro, no le puede desechar
(Fuero Real, IV,XXI,XXI).
Alfonso X included this statute in Title IV of Partida VII, although some clarifi-
cations are occasionally incorporated. For example, this occurs in Law III of
the same Partida, which corresponds to Law XXI of the Fuero Real. King Alfonso
X eliminates the requirement that the substitute and the challenging party
must be equal “en casamiento”, and adds that both men, in addition to being
equal in lineage and character, must be of the same social rank. The monarch
also specifies that if the substitute “vale más por linaje o por otras cosas, en tal
que no sea más valiente […] non lo puede desechar”.
Partida VII also adds several laws concerning menos valer that are not
included in the Fuero Real and are of interest when analyzing the Poema. The
Proemio of title V designates the person accused of menos valer as profazado –
that is to say, enfamado:
por quantas maneras pueden caer en este profaçamiento. E quien gelo

puede decir, después que lo fizieren. E en que lugares y ante de quien. E
que escarmiento deue ser fecho después que fuere prouado.
The first law, which is entitled “Que cosa es menos valer”, explains that menos
valer means that someone “non es par de otro en corte de señor nin en juyzio”.
This same law details the consequences of incurring menos valer, namely, no
longer being considered equal to others in a judicial combat, and being
deprived of the ability to make a formal accusation or to bear witness. The
second statute makes it clear that nobles are liable to menos valer for retracting
an oath or homage, and it indicates that although these nobles are not pun-
ished as in cases of treason or aleve, the law considers them to be similar to
those who incur enfamamiento because they are stripped of their honor and
are like enfamados. The third law deals with who can make accusations against
them, where this can take place, and the nature of the punishments imposed.
The law stipulates that anyone who does not incur menos valer or not declared
enfamado in a riepto can make an accusation before the king or the judges of
his court. The punishments imposed on someone who incurs menos valer are
“no biuir entre los omes, e ser desechados e non auer parte en las honrras, e en
los oficios que han los otros comunalmente”.
12 The Riepto in the Poema de mio Cid
Once the civil suit has concluded, the Cid addresses the king and everyone
gathered in the court, and he presents the criminal suit:
¡Merçed, [ya] rey señor, por amor de caridad!

La rencura mayor non se me puede olbidar,
oídme toda la cort e pésevevos de mio mal:
de los ifantes de Carrión quem’desondraron tan mal,
a menos de riebtos no los puedo dexar. (3253-57)
The reasons prompting the Infantes of Carrión to take private vengeance – car-
ried out in the Corpes oak forest – are rooted in the episode of the lion: terrified,
the Infantes act with cowardice; one hides beneath the Cid’s bench and the
other takes cover behind a wine press. After everyone is out of danger, the Cid
asks for his sons-in-law; they reappear pale and dirty, and soon become the
butt of the knights’ derision and laughter. Although the Cid prohibits his men
from mocking the Infantes, they are nevertheless offended:56
Muchos’ tovieron por enbaídos los ifantes de Carrión;

Fiera cosa les pesa d’esto que les cuntió. (2309-10)
Legally, the Infantes could have demanded reparation for the insult through a
legal challenge,57 but they do not. When the Cid’s knights mock the Infantes’
cowardice in the battle with Bucar a second time, the brothers resort to private
vengeance. The Infantes surely feared that the Cid would discover not only the
truth about their cowardice but that Fernando had fled from battle, since any-
one who dodged battle or abandoned the battlefield could be punished by the
law:
Vassallos de mio Çid seyénse sonrisando,

quién lidiara mejor o quién fuera en alcanço,
mas non fallavan ý a Diego ni a Ferrando.
56 Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid: realidad histórica e ideología, pp. 84-85.

57 Menéndez Pidal, Cantar de Mio Cid, II, pp. 637-38; Lacarra de Miguel, “Documento para la
historia de las instituciones navarras”, pp. 496-97.
368 Lacarra Lanz
Por aquestos guegos que ivan levantando,

e las noches e los días tan mal los escarmentando,
tan mal se consejaron estos ifantes amos. (2532-37)
The formal accusation made before the king, which leads to the riepto in the
Cortes of Toledo, is the breach of peace. The Cid denounces the Infantes
because they had not previously declared themselves as his enemies – a
requirement of the concord among knights – and they covertly planned their
vengeance:
“Pidamos nuestras mugieres al Çid Campeador,

digamos que las levaremos a tierras de Carrión,
enseñar las hemos dó las heredades son,
sacarlas hemos de Valençia de poder del Campeador;
después en la carrera feremos nuestro sabor,
ante que nos retrayan lo que cuntió del león.
¡Nos de natura somos de condes de Carrión!
Averes levaremos grandes que valen grant valor,
escarniremos las fijas del Canpeador.
D’aquestos averes sienpre seremos ricos omnes,
Podremos casar con fijas de reyes o de enperadores,
Ca de natura somos de condes de Carrión.
Assí las escarniremos a las fijas del Campeador,
Antes que nos retrayan lo que fue del león”.
Con aqueste conssejo amos tornados son. (2543-56)
These verses contain the characteristic elements of premeditated deceit: ani-

mus iniurandi, superbia, and dolo.58 The Infantes, who are characterized by
their cowardice, take vengeance on the Cid by verbally and physically dishonor-
ing his daughters. The crimes they commit are enumerated in full detail in the
Fuero de Cuenca: acts that are considered injuria include plaga (open-handed
slapping), vulnera (the causing of scars, sores, or wounds), staining one’s face or
58 Hinojosa, Documentos para la historia de las instituciones de León y Castilla, pp 35-36,

never says that insulting someone cum superbia meant that the insult had to occur in the
presence of a noble or important person, as Pavlović argues in “A reappraisal of the clos-
ing scenes of the Poema de Mio Cid”, p. 15. Pavlović quotes Serra Ruiz, p. 37 (the correct
page is 84), who quotes Hinojosa, yet neither of them reaches that conclusion. Serra Ruiz,
in Honor, honra e injuria, p. 81, points out that “se habla de ‘iniuriis’ en general y se matiza
algo el elemento subjetivo, explicando someramente el móvil personal del agente (iniu-
riare ‘cum superbia’)”.
head, despoiling clothing, pulling one’s hair, grabbing one’s person, shoving, or
stomping on a person. After the promulgation of the Fuero de Cuenca, women
became a legal entity and, for the first time, dishonorable acts committed
against them – pulling them by the hair, stripping them of their clothing, throw-
ing them to the floor, shoving them, etc. – were punished.59 Sticks, stones, riding
whips, spurs, and any weapon made of iron, among others, were declared illicit
arms.60
The most common expression to describe the animus iniurandi is the com-
mission of a crime cum superbia. The terms most frequently accompanying this
type of dishonorable conduct are: iniustamente, per sanna, per superbia, per
menosprez o per escarnio.61
In the PMC, the Infantes dishonor their wives: first, they strip the women of
their clothes and then hit them with saddle straps and spurs. The aggravating
circumstance of this attack is the fact that the weapons they use were prohib-
ited by law.62 The shedding of blood qualifies this act as injuria and lesión.63
The coldness with which the Infantes plan and carry out this affront under-
mines the mitigating element of rage, which would have been required for the
crime to be considered an unpremeditated act of vengeance. At the conclusion
of their terror spree, the Infantes abandon their wives in Corpes and leave
them for dead.
The Cid bases his legal challenge on the menos valer of the Infantes: “Por
quanto les faziestes menos valedes vos”.64 García Ordóñez initiates the Infan-
tes’ defense by arguing the inequality of the marriages and alleging that the
brothers never should have wed the Cid’s daughters.65 Rodrigo refuses to stoop
to their level in order to challenge these allegations; rather, his tactic is to dis-
credit García Ordóñez’s testimony by demonstrating to the court that he is a
dishonorable man who lacks authority and, since he is enfamado, he is unable
to bear witness. In the presence of the entire court, the Cid remembers that,
upon taking Cabra, he was never challenged for pulling the Count’s beard,
which has ceased to grow ever since. Pulling a man’s beard was one of the most
59 Fuero de Cuenca, II.I, pp. 20-28.

60 Fuero de Cuenca, II,II, p. 18; Serra Ruiz, Honor, honra e injuria, pp. 243 and 254.
61 Serra Ruiz, Honor, honra e injuria, p. 249; he quotes the fueros of Fresno and Cetina.
62 Fuero de Cuenca, II,II, p. 18.
63 Fuero de Cuenca, II,I, pp. 19-42.
64 Hinojosa, “El derecho en el Poema del Cid” p. 203, believes that although the Cid presents
the charges before the king and the court, he does not pronounce the essential formulas
of the riepto, since he never refers to the Infantes as traidores or alevosos.
65 Sanz analyzes how García Ordóñez and the Infantes conduct themselves during the
defense (“La voz del defensor”, pp. 373-78).
370 Lacarra Lanz
severely punished offenses in the fueros, and its punishment was comparable
to the penalty imposed in cases of castration.66 García Ordóñez should have
challenged the Cid in order to preserve his honor, and because he did not dare
to do so, he is dishonored and his arguments are rejected. The Infantes then
initiate their own defense by reiterating what García Ordóñez had previously
alleged with respect to their marriages. They declare that they dishonored
their wives a derecho (according to the law), arguing that they are superior in
rank to the Cid’s daughters. Neither Pero Vermúdez nor Martín Antolínez
waste time responding to their assertions. Pero Vermúdez accuses Fernando of
cowardice, reminding him of how scared he was when the lion escaped from
its cage. He denounces his flight from battle, accuses him of menos valer, and
challenges him as malo and traidor:
¿Miémbrat’ quando lidiamos çerca Valençia la grand?

Pedist’ las feridas primeras al Campeador leal,
vist’ un moro, fustel’ ensayar;
antes fuxiste que a [é]l te allegasses
si yo non uvias el moro te jugara mal. (3316-19)
riebtot’ el cuerpo por malo e por traidor,

Esto t’ lidiaré aquí ant’ el rey don Alfonsso,
por fijas del Çid, don Elvira e doña Sol.
Por quanto las dexastes menos valedes vos (3343-46)
Quando fuere la lid si plogiere al Criador,

tú lo otorgarás a guisa de traidor. (3349-50)
The Infante Diego then intervenes; his argument is similar to his brother’s, only
adding that he is willing to fight to defend his assertions. Martín Antolínez
responds accusing Diego of being alevoso and a traidor, and he reminds him of
his conduct during the episode with the lion. He also alleges that the Cid’s
daughters are, in fact, better than the Infantes, which will be proven in the
judicial duel since Diego is a traitor and a liar. The Infantes’ older brother, Asur
66 Forum Conche, Chapter XII, Law XVI stipulates: “Quicumque alium hominem castrauerit,
pectet ducentos aureos, et exeat inimicus. Si negauerit salvet se cum duodecim uicines,
uel pugnet.” Chapter XII, Law XVIII indicates: “Quicumque alicui barbam depilauerit:
pectet ducentos aureos, et exeat inimicus, si querelosus firmare potuerit: sin autem, sal-
uet se cum duodecim uicines, et si creditus, vel respondeat suo pari”.
González, stands up and insults the Cid. Muño Gústioz responds and accuses
him of being alevoso and traidor.
Once the allegations have been made, the king declares that the three pairs
of contenders are to participate in the judicial combats and warns that who-
ever does not arrive within the established timeframe will be declared
vanquished and a traitor. The judicial duels take place at the agreed upon time.
The boundaries of the field are marked and the king names the field judges,
instructing them to issue the verdict in accordance with the law. There are
three simultaneous duels. First, Fernando declares himself defeated. Diego
leaves the boundaries of the field; the king then declares Martín Antolínez the
victor and the judges concur with his ruling. Muño Gústioz fatally wounds
Asur González, and at the request of the Infantes’ father the judicial duel is
halted with the judges’ consent. The Infantes are defeated and dishonored:
“Grant es la biltança de ifantes de Carrión” (v. 3705). Thus, the poet undermines
the assertions made by the Infantes’ bando, while underscoring that the Cid’s
daughters are, in fact, better than the Infantes. Moreover, since Doña Elvira
and Doña Sol were married by law, they have a right to the arras: “¡Agora las
ayan quitas heredades de Carrión!” (v. 3715).
13 Conclusions
This study has shown that the poet who composed the PMC had a profound
knowledge of the law. By presenting the fundamental conflict between private
law – which is defended by the Infantes of Carrión – and public law – sup-
ported by the Cid – the poet shows the supreme power of the crown represented
by King Alfonso. The poem, which is in line with the new concept of public law,
favors the king’s authority over the power wielded by the nobility. It under-
scores that public law administered by the monarch is the best way to preserve
justice, peace among the nobility, and social and political harmony. This notion
was first affirmed in the final third of the 12th century, when European monar-
chies, influenced by Roman law, attempted to centralize legislation as the
means to lay the foundation for their royal authority.
In Castile, this influence is manifested in both municipal and territorial leg-
islation. King Alfonso VIII and his legal experts promoted both forms of
legislation through new municipal fueros, such as the Fuero de Cuenca (1189-
90), and through territorial legislation like the Ordenamiento de Nájera (1185).
This influence also can be observed in the increased bureaucratization of royal
offices, in the presence of legal experts able to elucidate new regulations, and
in the growing importance of the cortes led by the king, who is seen as the
372 Lacarra Lanz
supreme arbiter. In keeping with these new ideas, the author of the PMC under-
scores the king’s centralizing power and his role as the ultimate administrator
of justice.
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376 Lacarra Lanz
Figure 12.1 Conquest of a city ( Jericho). Miniature of the Biblia románica (1162). (León,
Colegiata de San Isidoro, codex 2). With kind permission of the MUSEO DE LA
REAL COLEGIATA de San Isidoro.
Part 5
The Poema de mio Cid
in the Cultural History of Spain
∵
378 Lacarra Lanz
The Poema de mio Cid and the Canon of the Spanish Epic Revisited 379
Chapter 13
The Poema de mio Cid and the Canon of the Spanish

Epic Revisited
Mercedes Vaquero
Years of teaching medieval Romance epics (Chanson de Roland, Poema de mio

Cid, Siete infantes de Lara, Partición de los reinos de Fernando I, Mainete,
Mocedades de Rodrigo, Roncesvalles, etc.) to graduate and undergraduate stu-
dents has made me wonder how representative the Poema de mio Cid (PMC) is
of the Spanish epic genre. In a previous work in which I first addressed this
question,1 I reached – through a different analysis – the same conclusion that
William J. Entwistle had drawn many years earlier:
The Cid is undoubtedly the most impressive monument of the Spanish

Middle Ages, and may well have been the best of all cantares de gesta. By
the mere fact of survival in verse form it has had a most powerful influ-
ence upon later Spanish literature, whereas other cantares de gesta are
influential only in their shape as chronicles, ballads or drama. In this way
the Cid has gained a kind of priority over the other works of the juglares.
Yet it is commonly admitted that the author’s mature art implies a long
previous elaboration in other works, and belongs to the apogee, not the
dawn of a style.2
Since Tomás Antonio Sánchez published the PMC for the first time in 1779, this
venerable text has defined the canon of the Spanish medieval epic. For years I
have questioned – contrary to the belief of modern readers and critics – the
canonicity of the poem. Undoubtedly it is a great cantar de gesta and, there-
fore, not surprisingly, it has dominated the syllabi in American and European
schools, colleges, and universities. However, as I will try to explain again, the
PMC does not represent the “mainstream” medieval Spanish epic tradition as
most readers, historians, and literary critics have generally assumed, a miscon-
ception that has distorted the view not only of medieval Spanish epic, but also
of medieval Spanish history.
Regarding medieval Spanish epic, it is clear that there are other far less stud-
ied works that are as extraordinary as the PMC and happened to be even better
1 Vaquero, “The Poema de Mio Cid”.

2 Entwistle, “Remarks Concerning”.

380 Vaquero
known in the Middle Ages. The PMC is unusual within the epic genre for sev-
eral reasons: first, besides its metrical characteristics and a few topoi, it shows
little relation to other epics; and second, its singing tradition only lasted a brief
period.3
Since its first edition in the 18th century, the PMC has always had and contin-
ues to have a very good reception; in the last decades, nearly every year a new
edition has been printed, and there is no need here to remind the reader about
the numerous studies dedicated regularly to the poem.4 The old queries, in my
previous article, had to do with its reception throughout the Middle Ages, que-
ries that bring us to a very important problem, in my opinion. If the PMC has
become the national epic because it has long been regarded as the greatest of
the medieval Spanish cantares de gesta by most scholars, its anomalies, instead
of being considered deviations from the epic genre, have been taken as the
paradigm against which all other Spanish epic poems are measured. In fact,
the rest of the cantares are deemed epic according to how they measure up
with the now-venerable poem. By not addressing this problem, many critics,
unwittingly, have shown a bias against a supposed inadequacy of other Spanish
medieval epics. My aim, as I will argue in the second part of this chapter, is to
discuss how modern critics and historians have been affected by the canonic-
ity of the PMC as to give both a distorted view of the epic and of the historical
Cid.
I believe, and I am sure I am not alone, that the version we have today of the
PMC (preserved in a single manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid) is
a rifacimento of one or more previous cantar(es) de gesta. As many critics have
pointed out, whoever reworked it had a good knowledge of law, or at least was
very interested in legal issues.5 In order to carry out such a rewriting, he had
3 Undoubtedly, this text was sung in the 13th century. Line 2276, which closes the second cantar,
the second part of the poem, confirms it: “Las coplas deste cantar aquís’ van acabando”.
According to Irene Zaderenko, “Un examen cuidadoso del PMC revela que el segundo cantar
es el más propiamente épico de los tres. No es casualidad que esta parte del poema sea la única
que es llamada gesta (v. 1085) y cantar (v. 2276), términos que indican una mayor conciencia
por parte de su autor del género y de los modelos literarios en que se inspiraba su obra”
(Problemas de autoría, p. 175).
4 On the canonicity of the PMC from its first publication in 1779 to the early 20th century, see
Luis Galván, El “Poema del Cid” en España; see also Luis Galván and Enrique Banús, El “Poema
del Cid” en Europa.
5 See, among others, Peter Russell, “Some Problems of Diplomatic”; Colin C. Smith, Estudios
cidianos and The Making; María Eugenia Lacarra, El Poema de mio Cid; Alberto Montaner
Frutos, Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. xciv-xcix.
to be a learned person. However, “the idea that the Cid is a learned imitation of
traditional oral epics is wholly off the mark”.6
In my previous study, I attempted to compare the PMC with other Castilian-
Leonese epics. To this end, I asked how popular were the PMC, Partición de los
reinos de Fernando I (Partición),7 and Siete infantes de Lara or Salas (SIL) in the
Middle Ages. To measure the diffusion of these epic poems I used the following
four parameters:
1. The manuscripts themselves: How much were they used and read, by
whom, and under what circumstances? In particular, how were now-lost
manuscripts used by historians, mainly by the team of Alfonso X in the
last third of the 13th century, when composing the Estoria de España?
How did these historians refer to the text they prosified or copied in their
chronicles?
2. The refundiciones or reworkings of epic poems. In Romance epic, as crit-
ics have noted, reworkings are a clue to a lost realm of medieval orality
and memory. Are refundiciones profoundly different works?
3. The ballads (romances viejos tradicionales) that have survived belonging
to the oral epic traditions from the 14th and 15th centuries onwards: Is
there a direct and genetic connection between epics and ballads?
4. The use of motifs: The linking or associative type of composition is
another strategy to detect the popularity of an epic. Have these motifs
traveled from one tradition to another?
The PMC in metric form has survived in a single manuscript, the so-called
“Vivar manuscript”, preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. This
manuscript includes a (now-famous) explicit (“E el romanz es leído”), in a
14th-century hand, different from that of the main copyist. For this reason,
the explicit has attracted much scholarly attention. According to Guillermo
Fernández Rodríguez-Escalona and Clara del Brío Carretero, “el CMC [PMC] del
manuscrito de Vivar ya no es, como antes lo había sido, un cantar de gesta”.8
Obviously, the explicit in the only surviving manuscript reveals that in the 14th
6 Juan Carlos Bayo, “On the Nature”, p. 24. We cannot forget Duggan’s admonition, in a volume
on the PMC: “Whether the Cantar de Mio Cid is a poem deeply imbedded in oral tradition […]
or the product of an author educated in book learning is still, and will not doubt continue to
be, a subject of dispute among those who study the poem” (“The Interface”, p. 56).
7 Partición de los reinos de Fernando I has not survived in metric form, but probably included
three parts or cantares: Cantar del rey don Ferrando, Cantar de Sancho II, and Cerco de Zamora.
8 Fernández Rodríguez-Escalona and del Brío Carretero, “Sobre la métrica del Cantar de Mio
Cid”, p. 30.
382 Vaquero
century this text was not sung, but rather read or recited. As I commented in
my previous work, I do not think that this text was sung during the reign of
Alfonso X (from 1252 until 1284), and I doubt even more that it was sung at all
after 1284. While the Estoria de España was being elaborated from around 1270
until 1284, the chroniclers that used the PMC story never referred to it as a can-
tar, a gesta, or “the story according to the minstrels”.9 The text they were using
was usually referred to as estoria.
In contrast, Partición, although only a small part of it has survived in poetic
form (in ballads), was probably sung during the reign of Alfonso X. Alfonsine
historians refer to it as “el cantar que dizen del rey don Ferrando”,10 “Algunos
dizen en sus cantares que avía el rey don Ferrando un fijo de ganançia”,11
“dizen en los cantares de las gestas”,12 “Mas comoquier que en el cantar del rey
don Sancho diga”,13 “la estoria del rey don Sancho assi como la cuentan los
joglares”,14 “Mas esto, comoquier que lo cuentan asi los joglares, no fue asi
verdad”,15 etc.
It is evident that Alfonsine historians had heard cantares de gesta of the
Partición’s tradition, i.e. the Cantar del rey don Ferrando – the testament and
death of King Fernando I –, the Cantar de Sancho II – the fratricidal wars
among the heirs of King Fernando –, and the siege of Zamora.
The character of the Cid has a prominent role in the 13th-century Partición,
and some critics argue that this character was borrowed from the PMC.16
Others believe that the author of the PMC and the author of Partición could be
9 See Brian Powell, Epic and Chronicle, p. 168, n. 21, and “The Cantar del rey don Sancho”,
p. 151.
10 Menéndez Pidal, Reliquias, p. 243.
11 Menéndez Pidal, Reliquias, p. 242; Powell, Epic and Chronicle, p. 62.
12 Powell, Epic and Chronicle, p. 62.
13 Powell, Epic and Chronicle, p. 168, n. 21.
14 Powell, Epic and Chronicle, p. 168, n. 21.
15 Powell, Epic and Chronicle, p. 168, n. 21. Comparing the popularity of the PMC with Par-
tición, Diego Catalán affirms: “En contraste, de la gesta de Las particiones del rey don Fer-
nando no sabemos que fuera puesta por escrito en forma métrica, y, en cambio, nos
consta que ya a fines del s. XII circulaba con variantes narrativas de importancia y que en
el último tercio del s. XIII era cantada por los juglares en una versión que, si bien con-
servaba con gran fidelidad no sólo la trama sino muchas de las escenas de la primitiva
versión anterior a c. 1185/90, en otros episodios innovaba la herencia tradicional” (La
épica española, p. 500).
16 Entwistle, “Remarks Concerning”, p. 121. On this issue, Catalán comments: “Desde media-
dos del s. XII a los tiempos alfonsíes, la gesta de Las particiones del rey don Fernando alteró
substancialmente el papel que en ella tenía Rodrigo Díaz” (La épica española, p. 500).
the same person.17 Colin Smith, in 1983, did not discard entirely the hypothesis
that the Partición in vernacular epic form could predate the PMC.18 In 1986,
reviewing his 1983 suggestion that Per Abbat – for him, the author of the PMC
– was the first to create a system of Spanish epic meter, Smith says: “If a substan-
tial fragment, or better, a complete text of the Cantar de Sancho II [=Partición]
should appear, of a date manifestly earlier than that of the Poema de mio Cid,
and showing total metrical perfection, I will naturally eat my words”.19 Powell,
exploring whether the 13th-century Partición had been influenced by the PMC,
concludes that neither poem is directly influenced by the other: “it is not
possible to identify direct influences of one work upon another”.20 Catalán,
however, reaches another conclusion:
Toda esta indudable ampliación del ya notable componente cidiano exis-

tente desde antiguo en Las particiones del rey don Fernando no puede
deberse sino a la coexistencia en los repertorios de juglares de la gesta de
Las particiones con la del Mio Cid, en la cual Rodrigo no era solamente el
mejor de los mejores caballeros sino el más grande de los vasallos.21
Regarding the refundiciones or reworkings of epic poems in the Romance epic,

critics have pointed out that such reworkings are clues that remind us of the
medieval oral tradition. Although refundiciones at times are obviously pro-
foundly different works, their relationship, though distant and indirect, is
nonetheless an essential clue to trace and understand their origin as oral
compositions.
Concerning the existence of refundiciones of the PMC, David Pattison,22
Colin Smith,23 and Alberto Montaner,24 among others, reject such a possibility.
Along a similar line, Francisco Rico argues that the PMC was very stable, to the
point that it was highly unusual. According to him, it is an oddity because it is
the only case in Romance epic where a chanson de geste has been transmitted
orally for centuries (from 1140 until the beginning of the 14th century) almost
17 Salvador Martínez, “Tres leyendas heroicas”, p. 169.

18 Smith, The Making, p. 165.
19 Smith, “On Editing the Poema de mio Cid”, p. 9.
20 Powell, “The Cantar del rey don Sancho”, p. 157.
21 Catalán, La épica española, p. 503.
22 Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle, pp. 124-25.
23 Smith, The Making, pp. 415-16; “The First Prose Redaction”, pp. 874-75, n. 10.
24 Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (a), pp. 81-83; Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. cccxix-cccxxvii,
includes a good summary of critics’ opinions regarding the PMC’s refundiciones.
384 Vaquero
without alterations.25 Why was it so stable? Neither Rico nor those who agree
with him give a definite answer.26 Montaner, and other critics with a similar
view, believe that whatever transformation the PMC underwent in the course
of being prosified is due to the chroniclers’ intervention and a process of “nov-
elización”, i.e. the typical evolutionary process of the epic becoming romance,
or epic becoming romanticized.27
The PMC in its only surviving manuscript copy is a very unusual epic text.
Some critics believe that the PMC is unique because it “is indeed a learned
work, but of the quasi-folk style type, that is close or next to an authentic folk
narrative tradition”.28 Others assert that the text reveals several compositional
and ideological layers which may belong to a single author or to multiple ones.29
At this point, a clarification is needed regarding scholars’ views of refundicio-
nes: first, there are some, and I am one of them, who believe that the PMC is a
refundición, probably the last link in a chain; second, there are those who think
that this particular Cidian tradition started and ended with the PMC; and third,
there are still others who believe that this text is the original which had its own
refundiciones. As the reader can gather, the spectrum is not that limited nor is
25 See Rico, “Un canto de frontera”, pp. xxxvi-xxxvii. This critic concludes: “En una amplia
perspectiva de la epopeya, sin embargo, la vida tradicional del Cantar del Cid, aun si nos
limitamos al período atestiguado por las prosificaciones, llama la atención por la estabili-
dad. Es, también, porque nos las habemos con una gesta tardía y anómala” (p. xxxvii).
26 “Podríamos pensar que la persistencia de la trama central en las prosificaciones se debe
a que para ellas se emplearon meras copias del códice de 1207, pero esa eventualidad
sería tan insólita, que hemos de descartarla sin reparos: en todo el aludido corpus épico
de la Romania, no se conoce ningún caso en que un manuscrito derive de otro; en cam-
bio, las prosificaciones introducen nuevos episodios, nuevos personajes llegados clara-
mente de refundiciones del Cantar, que, por tanto, aun acicalándolos y acrecentándolos,
respetaban los grandes datos argumentales del prototipo” (Rico, “Un canto de frontera”,
p. xxxvi).
27 See Montaner’s stemma in Cantar de mio Cid (b), p. cccxxvii. For the transformation that
the PMC’s materials underwent during successive rewritings of the Estoria de España from
the 13th to the 15th century, see Francisco Bautista’s and Fernando Gómez Redondo’s
chapters in this volume.
28 This is a quote from the oralist John Miletich, used by Colin Smith to support his own
arguments in “Toward a Reconciliation”, p. 633. For Smith, the PMC can be situated
between folk narrative traditions and works such as those of Camoens and Ercilla.
29 Regarding the composition of the PMC, after years of attributing it to a single author, the
old Pidalian theory of two authors (Menéndez Pidal, En torno) has been revived in the last
decades. See Garci-Gómez, “Mio Cid”, pp. 155-71, and Dos autores; Catalán, La épica espa-
ñola, pp. 393, 444; Gómez Redondo, “Recitación y recepción”; Zaderenko suggests the
hypothesis of three authors, one for each cantar (Problemas de autoría; El monasterio de
Cardeña, pp. 160-61).
it clearly delineated, i.e. those compartments are not mutually exclusive. I, for
instance, accept the first statement and the second part of the second one
(that the Cidian tradition ended with the PMC).
Regardless of the refundiciones question, most critics agree today that the
PMC was composed c.1200, and immediately or very soon after, in 1207, a cer-
tain “Per Abbat” copied that text, which was copied again around 1320-30 (the
one that is now in the Biblioteca Nacional or “Vivar manuscript”).
Gómez Redondo, after examining the ideology and the expressions in the
PMC, offers a new picture of the reception of the text:
Se podría pensar, y de hecho es ya una sólida corriente de pensamiento,

que el texto que entra en el códice de Vivar es copia literal del de 1207 y
sin embargo yo no lo creo así […] Resulta, así, que hay cambios muy lla-
mativos en estos procedimientos de recitación, ya por olvido o abandono
de unas fórmulas, ya por incorporación de nuevas expresiones, como
para pensar que, línea a línea, ese copista del s. XIV, bien para un taller
historiográfico, bien para el concejo de Vivar, estuviera reproduciendo
3.730 versos escritos en 1207. Ni mucho menos. No sólo lo demuestran las
varias contradicciones de sentido que menudean a lo largo del poema,
sino, sobre todo, la espectacular combinación de procedimientos narrati-
vos que se dan cita en el Cantar. Detrás de ellos hay varios niveles de
sentido, porque como es evidente el poema ha cruzado círculos de recep-
ción muy diferentes.30
Gómez Redondo concludes:
Creo, en resumen, que hay razones suficientes para señalar que uno era el
Cantar de 1207, impulsado como una corrección de otro anterior, y que
otro es el texto que se fija por escrito a mediados del s. XIV. Se conserva la
primera de las tramas narrativas, puramente épica, como apoyo de la
segunda de corte caballeresco.31
30 Gómez Redondo, “Recitación y recepción”, p. 182.

31 Gómez Redondo, “Recitación y recepción”, p. 204. I believe this hypothesis corresponds to
that of Garci-Gómez, who divides the poem into two parts (“Mio Cid”, pp. 156-57). I also
think that the PMC is “una corrección de otro anterior”, where the hero was presented as a
rebellious vassal (Vaquero, “El Cantar de la jura”). The second part or plot is totally foreign
to the Cid’s biography: “los supuestos infantes de Carrión nunca existieron”; see Mon-
taner, Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. lx-lxi.
386 Vaquero
It is clear that the poem has an overlapping bipartite structure, or two clear
plots well interwoven: the Cid’s moral and political dishonor with his gradual
rehabilitation after the conquest of Valencia, and the family dishonor com-
mitted by the Infantes of Carrión after marrying the hero’s daughters.32
Garci-Gómez clearly makes a division between the “epic” part, i.e. the first plot,
and the second plot, which has lots of elements of a medieval “romance”. He
calls the first one “gesta”, and the second, “razón”, as the explicit verses refer to
the entire text in the 14th-century manuscript.33 Alfonso Boix Jovaní also sees
a clear mix of epic (the “destierro”, i.e. the exile part) and elements of the
chivalrique romance (the “antidestierro”) in the PMC.34 Both parts, according
to Boix Jovaní, are united by the “Cuento de los Infantes de Carrión”, which is
closely related to the number 300 of Aarne-Thompson’s folktale index.
It seems that the proper epic parts of the PMC are those related to the hero’s
unjust exile and his siege and conquest of Valencia. The second plot, that is, the
events related to the marriage of his daughters to the Infantes of Carrión,
appears to be a later addition by an author interested in romance and folktales,
and it may derive from a different work with a distinct textual transmission.
The story of the Cid’s exile (Cantar del exilio) has, in my view, the necessary
elements of being “traditional” or “popular”. The hero is presented as a rebel-
lious vassal, but the rendition of his rebellion is mitigated in the PMC through
a “correction”, making him a very respectful vassal of the monarchy.35 That is
why I believe that the first cantar, in particular, derives from a song narrating
the exile of the Cid, quite different in tone and the hero’s characterization from
the version that is given in the extant manuscript. I base my hypothesis on
contradictions between the PMC and the Cantar de la jura de Santa Gadea, and
on the different portrayal of the Cid’s exile in the late 13th-century Crónica de
Castilla, where one even finds remnants of its poetic form, as well as in a ballad
recorded in a 15th-century manuscript which is now in the British Library.36
32 See Michael, The Poem of the Cid, pp. 9-10.

33 Garci-Gómez, “Mio Cid”, pp. 156-57.
34 Boix Jovaní, El Cantar de mio Cid. The PMC is so unusual within the Spanish medieval epic
that Rico regards it as “una nueva epopeya” (“Un canto de frontera”, pp. xxxii-xliii). Mon-
taner (Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. cxxxix, clii) agrees with Rico: the mixture of “epic” and
“chivalric romance” is a “new epic”, and concludes, quoting Jeremy Lawrence: “El peculiar
ethos del Cantar de Mio Cid lo sitúa en un punto intermedio entre la épica heroica y el
romance caballeresco” (“Chivalry in the Cantar de Mio Cid”, p. 57). Montaner adds: “el Can-
tar no constituye en absoluto un mero epígono de una tradición preestablecida, sino una
creación original que ofrece soluciones peculiares” (Cantar de mio Cid (b), p. cliv).
35 Vaquero, “El Cantar de la jura”.
The rebellious aspect of the Cid, most appealing to popular taste, also appears
in the Partición and in the Mocedades tradition.37
The two passages of the poem that have received most attention in evaluat-
ing the reworkings of the PMC are the beginning of the story, that is, the
preparations before going into exile, and the King Bucar episode. Regarding
the second, Smith38 and many others, including Louis Chalon,39 believe the
outcome introduced in the chronicles, where Bucar escapes alive, is a change
made by the historians. As chroniclers with a better knowledge of history than
the author who composed the PMC, it is very likely that they revised Bucar’s
fate, managing to have him flee Valencia alive.
The other most commented passage, the initial verses of the Cid’s departure
for exile, was preserved in the Crónica de Castilla and in a ballad recorded in a
15th-century manuscript of the British Library. Armistead is convinced that it
is a refundición of the PMC.40 Smith admits that those lines could well have
come from a variant version of the start of the PMC without necessarily indi-
cating a refundición of the complete poem.41 But taking into consideration the
popular poetic traditions of the Cid’s exile as attested in chronicles of the late
13th and early-14th centuries, and in ballads dating back to the 15th century,
I still maintain, as I argued in 1990, that it was probably the learned author of
the PMC who altered the characterization of the hero, changing him from a
defiant and very disrespectful vassal into an obedient subject who revered his
king.42 It is remarkable that among all the epic poems of the Cidian cycle (PMC,
second version of Partición, Jura de Santa Gadea, Mocedades de Rodrigo, and
the Song of the Exile of the Cid) the only one that presents the hero as a truly
loyal vassal, and not as a defiant character, is precisely the PMC.43 My hypoth-
37 Bayo makes an interesting point about dates assigned to poems by critics: “When study-
ing the relationship between epics and chronicles, therefore, we should be aware of cer-
tain apparent paradoxes. One is the following: the more recent the dating assigned to a
poem, the more likely that it was to have had a ‘popular’ and not a ‘learned’ character, or
more accurately, to have been composed outside of courtly circles and for a wider audi-
ence” (“On the Nature”, p. 23; my emphasis).
38 Smith, “Sobre la difusión”, p. 418.
39 Chalon, L’Histoire et l’epopée, p. 234.
40 Armistead, “The Initial Verses”.
41 Smith, “The First Prose Redaction”, p. 875, n. 10.
43 I disagree with Catalán when he argues that the character of Rodrigo Díaz in the PMC and
in Partición are similar (La épica española, pp. 516, 631). It suffices to look at the behavior
of the Cid when King Fernando is dying in the first cantar of Partición to realize how dif-
ferent it is. Analyzing the Crónica de Castilla’s passage that narrates the encounter
388 Vaquero
esis, therefore, is that it was the author of the PMC who changed the pattern of
the popular epic, and not the other way around, particularly if it was com-
posed, as Duggan suspects, for Alfonso VIII of Castile and his court.44 Critics, in
general, tend to believe that all other Cidian songs are atypical and thus anom-
alous of the Cidian epic tradition; some even call them “decadent”.45
Evidence shows that, with the exception of the PMC, all epic material related
to the Cid – the 13th-century Partición, the different versions of Mocedades de
Rodrigo (= MR),46 the Cantar de la jura de Santa Gadea, the different ballads,
between King Alfonso and the Cid outside of Burgos when the king orders Rodrigo to
leave his territories, Catalán affirms: “No cabe duda de que este Cid es temperamental-
mente distinto, no ya al del Mio Cid, sino al de Las particiones [=Partición] en sus versio-
nes viejas, es “el soberbio castellano” de las Mocedades de Rodrigo, pero es muy posible
que la evolución del carácter del Cid hubiera ya afectado a las refundiciones tardías de los
poemas épicos de más antigua solera” (La épica española, p. 631). Gómez Redondo (“La
otra épica”) and I (“El Cantar de la jura”) believe in an opposite evolution: chronologically,
first we had a rebellious Cid, and then, as a correction to such a characterization, came
the “obedient” or compliant Cid. Gómez Redondo says: “[el] primer C[antar de] M[io]
C[id] tenía que construir un modelo de héroe con la suficiente rebeldía como para esti-
mular, de nuevo, los valores esenciales de la conciencia castellana (y aquí es donde tiene
pleno sentido la escena de la jura de Santa Gadea), y a la vez debía de poseer un repertorio
de méritos y de virtudes que lo convirtiera en un adalid merecedor de consumar hazañas
como la conquista de Valencia” (“La otra épica”, p. 717). I believe that the first *Cantar de
mio Cid was probably a Cantar del exilio.
44 Duggan, The “Cantar de Mio Cid”, p. 143. Regardless of the objections that Lacarra raises
concerning Duggan’s hypothesis in view of the date of Fernando III’s birth, his under-
standing is still valid (see Lacarra, “Reflexiones sobre economía y linaje”, p. 312). Roger
Wright’s chapter in this volume also seems to suggest a restricted audience for the PMC.
45 It is not clear how “decadent” Catalán thinks this characterization of the Castilian hero is:
“El carácter altanero, siempre desafiante, de ‘Rodrigo el Castellano’, capaz de someter a su
voluntad a un rey pusilánime, después de humillar a los condes del reino, no es, como se
ha creído, una invención tardía del s. XV, sino la razón de ser de la gesta. Sin ese personaje
así diseñado, las enfances de Rodrigo carecerían de sentido. Es esta profunda distorsión de
la caracterización hasta entonces dominante del héroe (creada conjuntamente por el Mio
Cid y Las particiones del rey don Fernando) la gran aportación al ciclo cidiano de este
poeta de la ‘decadencia’ de la epopeya perteneciente al tránsito del s. XIII al s. XIV” (La
épica española, pp. 515-16).
46 For Armistead (La tradición épica) there is no doubt the MR underwent refundiciones.
Catalán, however, is not so sure: “[A]l comparar el testimonio de la Crónica de Castilla con
el del Rodrigo [= MR], el correctísimo comportamiento ante el rey del joven Rodrigo,
siempre obediente y bien mandado, que en la crónica se nos cuenta, en modo alguno
refleja otra redacción de la gesta de las Mocedades, como la crítica, desde Menéndez
Pidal, ha venido suponiendo, ya que sólo tiene origen en un modelo ideal de relaciones
as well as some chronicle prosifications regarding his exile – they all portray
him as a defiant vassal.
Returning to the problem of the PMC’s canonicity within the Spanish epic,
those epic texts of the Cidian cycle that do not present the protagonist as a
submissive vassal are to be considered a departure from the norm; they repre-
sent, according to a large number of critics, a decline, a degeneration, or
corruption of the epic hero. As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, the
anomalies of the PMC, instead of being considered deviations within the epic
genre, are considered the paradigm against which almost all other Spanish
epic is measured. Undoubtedly, there is an implicit bias against the rest of the
Spanish medieval texts present.
In view of this contrasting evaluation, it seems fair to question how repre-
sentative the PMC is of the epic canon. By presenting the poem as belonging to
the “popular” genre, the general agreement is that it originated in the popular
oral tradition, and that the written form in which it survives still bears the
traces of oral performances. In dealing with cantares de gesta, as Bayo points
out, the fundamental point that must be taken into account is that their form
is completely dependent on oral performance: their authors were completely
familiar with the techniques of the jongleurs and their poems were composed
with minstrel performances in mind.47
There is no reason to think that any of the epic texts prosified in the Alfon-
sine chronicles did not belong to the same genre as those that have survived in
their original poetic form (PMC, MR, and the Roncesvalles fragment). In the
cases of Partición and SIL, the marks they left on ballads is a clear indication of
its success among a low-brow public.48
An analysis of the surviving traditional ballads that derive from these epics
seem to be a good parameter to measure the popularity of the texts.49 In this
regard, Per Abbat’s PMC has a very precarious – if not uncertain – tradition. Of
possible ballads descending from this text, Di Stefano, one of the leading schol-
ars in Spanish balladry, asks: “Los triunfos del Cid: ¿qué se hizo de ellos en el
vasalláticas que el historiador predica a sus lectores utilizando las figuras del Cid y del rey
don Fernando y que nada tenía que ver con el ideario del poema épico que le sirvió de
fuente” (La épica española, p. 592).
47 Bayo, “On the Nature”, pp. 26-27.
48 See Bayo’s comments on SIL (“On the Nature”, p. 23).
49 Although I am not examining the Carolingian tradition in this article, we should not for-
get that “El Romancero referente a personajes que proceden de la Epopeya carolingia fue,
en el Siglo de Oro, tanto o más famoso que el que tomó sus temas y personajes de la épica
típicamente hispana. En la tradición moderna el componente ‘carolingio’ tiene un peso
mayor que el ‘nacional’” (Catalán, La épica española, p. 786).
390 Vaquero
viejo romancero?”.50 Since it was considered virtually impossible that such a

venerable poem would not generate new ballads, three romances have been
traditionally ascribed to it: “Tres cortes armara el rey”, “Yo me estando en
Valencia”, and “Helo, helo por do viene”. According to Smith, with whom most
critics agree, these three ballads “tienen origen remoto en el Poema, pero no
podemos precisar su filiación ni sabemos si hay por medio algún texto
cronístico”.51 Smith concludes: “Estos romances nos sirven en cierto modo para
dar una prueba negativa acerca de la difusión del Poema: mientras de Los
Infantes de Lara, Sancho II [=Partición], Mocedades de Rodrigo, etcétera, tene-
mos romances que son a todas luces auténticos fragmentos de épicas, con
retoques y espíritu nuevo, del Poema no nos quedan en el romancero sino
recuerdos ya muy deformados”.52
Thomas Montgomery, in a detailed study on the ballad “Helo, helo por do
viene”, discards the remote relationship between this romance and the Cid’s
pursuit of the Moorish King Bucar as found in the PMC; instead, he finds that
“Helo, helo” descends from Partición, from the episode of the Cid’s pursuit of
Vellido Dolfos, the murderer of King Sancho.53 Catalán, in disagreement with
Montgomery, finds it hard, if not impossible, to connect directly “Helo, helo”
– and “Yo me estando en Valencia” – to the PMC. He concedes that “[e]n favor
de la existencia de una tradición épica ininterrumpida del Mio Cid que enlace
con el Romancero el más importante testimonio lo constituye el romance viejo
(o romances) relativo a las Cortes de Toledo”.54 Indeed, there is a slight con-
nection between this ballad and lines 3129-31 of the PMC, but the disparities
between both texts are such that Di Stefano affirms: “[e]l R[omance] pudo
formarse inspirándose a puntos varios del Cantar según una versión tardía”.55
As Armistead and other critics have pointed out on different occasions:
The exact relationship of medieval epic poetry to the Hispanic Romancero

is one of the most vexed questions of Hispano-Medievalism. For revision-
ist neo-individualist criticism, the relationship, if indeed it exists, is
argued to be dubious and ill-defined. For neo-traditionalists, on the other
hand, there can be no doubt whatsoever about the direct, genetic con-
50 Di Stefano, “Siluetas cidianas”, p. 560.

52 Smith, “Sobre la difusión”, p. 421. Zaderenko has reached a similar conclusion, see “El Cid
en el romancero viejo” and “Épica y romancero del Cid”.
53 Montgomery, “A Ballad and Two Epics”.
55 Di Stefano, Romancero, p. 375, n.1.
nection between epic and ballad in an oral traditional continuum that

stretches from the high Middle Ages up to modern times.56
Epic ballads are difficult to study, not only because of their sheer number, but
also due to their many textual variants. Although some of these versions have
been accessible to scholars, some are not yet available. As any scholar who has
studied ballads knows, “there will always be more work to be done before cer-
tainty can be attained”.57 Even if we tried to make an inventory of the relevant
ballads and their available texts, the limitations and dangers of such a method
to prove the traditional life of an epic poem are obvious. However, Siete infan-
tes de Lara, Partición, and Mocedades de Rodrigo seem to be the epics from
which more traditional ballads have survived.58 According to Catalán, Partición
has one of the richest ballad traditions in the Spanish epic:
La activa reelaboración de la gesta de Las particiones del rey don Fernando

[=Partición] que hemos podido detectar en la documentación cronística
durante los siglos XII y XIII hace bastante probable que el tema siguiera
siendo cantado por profesionales tardo-medievales del canto épico.
A favor de esa hipótesis hablan las huellas que la gesta dejó en el canto
romancístico, que son de las más abundantes.59
Although there is no exact method to verify this, it seems that Partición is the
epic text with the largest number of surviving traditional ballads. The material
is vast, but scholars are providing us with new tools to study it. Manuel da
Costa Fontes, an expert in the field of Portuguese ballads, argues that “Afuera,
afuera Rodrigo”, which traditionally has been recorded as descending from
Mocedades de Rodrigo, ultimately derives from Partición.60 Fontes has studied
the similarities between the Azorean and the Madeiran version of “Afuera,
56 Armistead and Silverman, “Almerique de Narbona”, p. 133.

57 Deyermond, Point of View in the Ballad, p. 62.
58 Regarding the surviving traditional ballads of Partición, if we just make a quick count of
the ballads that modern editors include in their anthologies and compare them with the
ones descending from the SIL and the MR traditions, this is what we find: Paloma Díaz-
Mas (Romancero) includes: four for SIL, three for MR, and six for Partición; Di Stefano
(Romancero) includes: four for SIL, three for MR, twelve for Partición; Mercedes Díaz Roig
(El romancero viejo) includes: four for SIL, three for MR, and eight for Partición. I have
excluded from my count the ballads “Jura de Santa Gadea” and “Helo, helo” because it is
not totally clear they belong to the Partición tradition.
60 Fontes, “The Ballad”.
392 Vaquero
afuera”, and concludes that at one time “A morte do rei D. Fernando”, that is, the
Portuguese version of the first cantar of Partición, consisted of “Silvana y
Delgadina”, “Doliente se siente el rey”, “Morir vos queredes padre”, and “Afuera,
afuera Rodrigo” in both archipelagos. The discovery of these combined insular
versions, according to Fontes, suggests that a similar poem also may have been
traditional in the Algarve.61
Of the hundreds of Hispanic ballads, more are being made accessible each
year. In 1991, for example, Alan Soons published two romances and three lines
from the beginning of another ballad deriving from Partición. They are found
in the Cancionero de Peraza (Cancionero de Wolfenbüttel) dating from the last
third of the 16th century.62 Alan Deyermond, in his first volume of La literatura
perdida de la Edad Media castellana, includes the first lines of three more bal-
lads that could derive from Partición: “En el adarve de Çamora grandes alaridos
se dan” (B10, p. 165), “Por el cerco de Samora andavan los castellanos” (B27,
p. 176), and “Que aunque duermen en Çamora R[odri]go estava belando” (B28,
p. 176).63
Let us review the stock material of these epics and some of their motifs. As it
has been noted by many scholars, the indelible mark that the cantares de gesta
have left on ballads and the use of shared folkloric motifs are clear indication
of their origin in the oral tradition.64 Deyermond,65 Smith,66 and Gornall67
have asserted that the author of Mocedades de Rodrigo knew the PMC. Smith
states, “El que compuso la perdida Gesta de las Mocedades tenía delante de sí,
o conocía al dedillo, el viejo poema, hecho que en Burgos o en su región no es
sorprendente”.68 These critics argue that not only some of the characters are
61 Fontes, “The Ballad”. Regarding this ballad tradition, Deyermond remarks: “Joanne B. Pur-
cell (1976) demuestra que del Fernando [first part of Partición] desciende una vigorosa
tradición de romances, que rastrea en los romanceros impresos del siglo XVI, en los
romances orales recogidos en la primera mitad del siglo XX y conservados en el Archivo
Menéndez Pidal, y en romances de Madeira y los Azores, de su propia cosecha. Sus inves-
tigaciones vienen confirmadas por la recogida en Madeira en 1990, por Maria-João
Câmara Fontes, de un romance sobre la muerte de Fernando I que combina tres romances
antiguos, y que corresponde a pasajes del Cantar de Sancho II prosificado en la Crónica de
veinte reyes y la Crónica de 1344 (Costa Fontes 1992)” (La literatura perdida, p. 98). See Cata-
lán (La épica española, p. 616, n. 80) for his objections to Fontes’ hypothesis.
62 Soons, “The Romances”.
63 Deyermond, La literatura perdida, pp. 165 and 176.
64 In the case of Siete infantes de Lara, see Bayo (“On the Nature”, p. 23).
65 Deyermond, Epic Poetry, pp. 156-76.
66 Smith, “Sobre la difusión”.
67 Gornall, “One Way to Invent Youthful Deeds”.
identical in Mocedades de Rodrigo and the PMC, but that certain characters and
events that are not identical still bear similarities. Some descriptions and enu-
merations found in MR are believed to have been borrowed from the PMC. One
example is the enumeration of territories over which Alfonso VI ruled accord-
ing to the PMC, which is very similar to MR’s enumeration of territories over
which Fernando I reigned. A comparison of this list with the description in the
ballad reveals the use of the same expressions.69 In the romance, the deeds of
Fernando I from the MR’s tradition have been reassigned to his son Sancho.70
In preparing an edition and study of Partición, I have found that many of the
verbal correspondences and parallel motifs put forward by scholars in order to
establish similarities between the PMC and MR also appear in Partición as well
as in other epic texts, an evident sign that they are not exclusive to the Cidian
material; they seem to belong to the stock material of the epic style.
In a previous work, I included a list of shared motifs found in SIL, Partición,
Infant García, PMC, and MR.71 These motifs suggest that there was a continued
borrowing from one tradition to another. How does this work for my purpose
here? It works like this: when a motif is used coherently in one text and the
same motif is used infelicitously in another, it is likely that the second text bor-
rowed the motif from the first. This is the case, for example, of several motifs
I have analyzed in detail elsewhere,72 which prove that SIL borrowed motifs
from Partición.
But these motifs are not the only ones to be studied. It has been pointed out
by Deyermond73 and Armistead74 that the structure of the gesta of MR is
determined by a vow the young hero, Rodrigo, makes: before living with Jimena,
he will fight five pitched battles. Deyermond believes the origin of this motif
may be found in Partición.75 In the final duels of the story, the Castilian Diego
Ordóñez is supposed to fight against five Zamorans, five of Urraca’s vassals,
although he only fights three. Deyermond has argued that if the author of
Partición stressed the need for five duels while describing only three, it is
because he felt compelled to include an inherited epic motif. Both Deyermond76
and Michael77 think that such a motif may have affected the text of the PMC,

70 Di Stefano, Romancero, p. 350, nn. 1, 5.
72 Vaquero, “El episodio del cohombro”; this is the famous bloody cucumber incident of SIL.
73 Deyermond, Epic Poetry, p. 13.
74 Armistead, La tradición épica, pp. 60-62.
75 Deyermond, Epic Poetry, pp. 161-63.
76 Deyermond, Epic Poetry, p. 162.
77 Michael, Poema de mio Cid, pp. 172-73.
394 Vaquero
since, when speaking of the Cid, Álvar Fáñez says: “e fizo çinco lides campales
e todas las arrancó” (v. 1333), although only two pitched battles have been nar-
rated in the story when this line appears. Is this a poetic lapse? More plausible
is Deyermond’s hypothesis, with which I agree, that the PMC was influenced by
this motif, probably deriving from Partición.
In a later study on the ending of the PMC, Deyermond analyzed the motif
of the final duels reaching a similar conclusion: a possible direct influence of
Partición on the PMC.78 The appearance of Asur González, the oldest brother
of the Infantes, in the court, and his participation in the final duels are not
required by the plot or character development in the PMC. As Deyermond
has demonstrated, Asur González seems to be introduced merely to provide a
third duel because three is a favorite number for narrative units in a traditional
tale. And most probably, it was borrowed from the very popular Partición by
the author of the PMC.79
In a 2005 article, I pointed out how the canonicity of the PMC, transmitted
in a single manuscript, has led us to believe erroneously that any medieval
Spanish epic is based on parameters exclusive to this text and not shared by
other medieval cantares de gesta. The PMC is very different in many aspects
from other Castilian-Leonese epics, except for a few topoi and its system of
versification, as I mentioned earlier. Bayo has studied at length the PMC’s com-
position and its relation to other epics. The PMC is not the first epic which gave
rise to a Castilian tradition; rather, it is one among many deriving from the
same tradition to which the fragment of Roncesvalles belongs. He concludes:
its form is quintessentially oral, with its versification based on into-

national phrases excluding enjambement and its poetic discourse
punctuated by deictic dissonances which make it a staged text. Such fea-
tures evidence an author completely familiar with the technique of the
jongleurs and composing with minstrel performance in his mind, who
created within the same tradition to which the Roncesvalles fragment
belongs.80
78 Deyermond, “The Close”.

79 This motif ultimately derives from the Chanson de Roland, as has been pointed out by
critics, and as I have demonstrated in my study of Partición (Vaquero, “The Tradition”).
80 Bayo, “On the Nature”, p. 27.
Most scholars agree that in the 12th century – and perhaps by the end of the
11th century – cantares de gesta were being performed in the Iberian Peninsula.81
The Latin Chronica naierensis (c.1180-94) has been taken, in fact, as a good
source for lost epic songs,82 e.g. Cantar de Fernán González83 and Partición.84
Regarding the PMC, as some have suspected, it seems that the text, while in
dialogue with a preexisting popular epic tradition, is at the same time a reac-
tion to it.85 The famous Nota emilianense (late 11th century), the Carmen de
expugnatione Almariae urbis (Poema de Almería), a Latin poem which closes
the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris (c.1148), and the Zorraquín Sancho lyric song
(c.1158) quoted in the Crónica de la población de Ávila, all contain allusions to
epic heroes (“Roldane”, “Olibero”, “Meo Cidi”, “Alvarus”, etc.). As many critics
have pointed out, the Carolingian heroes Roland and Olivier are compared to
the Cid and his best man, Álvar Fáñez, in the Poema de Almería. This text and
the others listed above reveal the existence of vernacular epic songs possibly
from as early as the last quarter of the 11th century, but most certainly from the
12th century.86
The issue of the PMC’s canonicity is still fraught with problems. Óscar
Martín, who has studied the representation of wrath in the PMC, relates the ira
regia (royal wrath) to the medieval theory on emotions. In his examination of
the political dimension of wrath in the PMC and in the previous Cidian tradi-
tion, he has noted that the poem’s hero is presented as a warrior characterized
by his humanity, humility, and fidelity towards the king.87 However, this char-
acterization is new:
la tradición cidiana anterior que conocemos principalmente a través de

la Historia Roderici (HR) [y] el Carmen Campidoctoris (CC) no presenta
81 Neotraditionalists and oralists believe that they already were sung in the first third of the
11th century, and perhaps as early as the last quarter of the 10th century. See, among oth-
ers, Martín de Riquer, Chanson de Roland, p. 27; Catalán, La épica española, p. 398; and
Duggan, “The Interface”, p. 51.
82 See Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (b), p. clii.
83 See Gómez Redondo, Poesía Española, p. 384; and Vaquero, “¿Qué sabemos?”.
84 See Bautista, “Sancho II y Rodrigo Campeador”.
85 See Vaquero, “El Cantar de la jura”; Bayo, “On the Nature”; and Óscar Martín, “La ira”, p. 123.
86 See, among others, Rico, “Çorraquin Sancho”; Riquer, Chanson de Roland, p. 27; Bayo, “On
the Nature”, pp. 23-24; and Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. lxxviii-lxxix. Germán
Orduna (“El texto del Poema de Mio Cid”), Matthew Bailey (“Oral Composition”), and
Óscar Martín (“El Cantar de mio Cid”) also believe in the existence of an oral Cidian epic
tradition before the PMC.
87 Martín, “La ira”, p.120.
396 Vaquero
tal armonía entre rey y vasallo, pues no siempre el Cid es representado

de una manera tan sumisa ni se mantienen de una manera nítida las
jerarquías sociales; incluso la ira regia no se soluciona en los testimo-
nios anteriores por medio de una reintegración vasallática, o, de hacerse,
ésta no se plantea de manera tan explícita. La ira regia en el poema pre-
senta, por lo tanto, una notable discordancia respecto a los testimonios
anteriores.88
When we compare the PMC with earlier and later Cidian traditions we can see
that the history of the Cid is very pliable. The character of the Cid, his literary
persona, is very flexible; like folk or legendary figures, he can easily be shaped
into different representations. Obviously, the PMC is not a point of departure in
his biographical, historical, or epic development, but rather the culmination of
a process. By “culmination” I mean that its development is the result of a long
traditional process; it later continued with the Alfonsine chroniclers and some
of their successors, after which it no longer had “traditional” or “popular”
repercussion.
Óscar Martín’s work helps us understand how the hero’s epic version of the
PMC is both mediated by and, at the same time, a reaction to a previous tradi-
tion, which, in my opinion, is not the historiographical Latin tradition, but the
popular tradition which was mainly vernacular and oral. It could be an oral
epic tradition because, as Bayo points out, the PMC “presupposes the existence
of an epic genre […] a genre aimed primarily at a wide audience […] [W]hen
the Cid was composed, a reading public in the vernacular did not yet exist”.89
Perhaps, as Duggan explained, it was meant to be performed in front of King
Alfonso VIII.90 Duggan’s hypothesis does not seem to be off the mark: “the
extant poem [PMC] was modified by a juglar to appeal to the listeners at a loca-
tion in the valley of the Jalón on one or two occasions in either 1199 or 1200”.91
My belief is that the PMC had a very short traditional life. It was performed only
on a few occasions, probably at the itinerant court of Alfonso VIII, which could
have included an audience similar to the one envisaged by Bayo: “people with
different backgrounds and expectations”.92 Literate and illiterate people
88 Martín, “La ira”, pp. 120-21.

89 Bayo, “On the Nature”, pp. 24-25. Montaner also thinks that the PMC was aimed at a diverse
audience, not only to knights and infanzones (members of the lower nobility) of the Cas-
tilian Extremadura (Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. cxxxviii, clxii-clxiii).
90 Duggan, The “Cantar de Mio Cid”, pp. 82-107.
91 Duggan, “The Interface”, p. 62 (my emphasis).
accompanying Alfonso VIII probably heard and watched those few perfor-
mances. As Bayo puts it:
Both groups were far from uniform: illiterate audiences included people
from almost every walk of life (from the knights that listened to heroic
songs according to historical sources to the peasants) […] More impor-
tantly, neither group formed a separate entity; there was an overlap which
cannot be neglected. Literate people could understand perfectly the oral
poetry composed in the vernacular of their own area and, although no
doubt some of them despised it, others must have shown some sympathy
towards it.93
The bibliography on the PMC is immense, but, unfortunately, not all the ques-
tions posed by the poem have been addressed or solved. There are still many
enigmatic points that may never be satisfactorily explained. One of these
points that has been widely debated is the date of its composition. “Neotra-
ditionalists” (and some “oralists”) date the poem to the mid-12th century
(c.1140), whereas “individualists” postpone it to the early 13th century (c.1200).
Though the later date is the one accepted by the majority of critics today, what
is at issue is a span of about fifty years. Why is the exact date so important? It
is due to the PMC’s chronological relationship with the Historia Roderici (HR),
the anonymous Latin biography of the Cid most likely composed around 1185,
although some historians assign an earlier date to it.94 If the PMC was com-
posed before HR, the vernacular text would be the source of both the Castilian
hero’s Latin biography and of the Poema de Almería. If, on the other hand, the
PMC was composed after HR, then the epic poem derived from the learned
Latin text.
Regarding the contention of roughly a fifty-year difference in dating the
PMC, Inés Fernández-Ordóñez makes a very important point. With such a
short period of time (1150-1200), we could have a similar case like when we date
a medieval document:
no se debe confundir primera documentación de una estructura lin-

güística o de una palabra con su aparición o primera existencia […] [El
Mio Cid] [c]omo texto sujeto a un proceso de transmisión oral (o manus-
crita en la Edad Media), esa gesta puede haber evolucionado con el
tiempo y haber sido actualizada al presente de cada “transmisor”, de

94 See Fletcher, in Barton and Fletcher, The World of El Cid, pp. 95-96.
398 Vaquero
modo que es imposible saber si todos los aspectos del Poema conservado
en el manuscrito reflejan el texto original.95
Though agreeing with Fernández-Ordóñez, I do wonder if there ever was “an

original text”. When dealing with works from the oral tradition, I am inclined
to think that there were rather “cantares” (songs), as historians call them. As
I previously mentioned, chroniclers refer to cantares de gesta: “Algunos dizen
en sus cantares”, “dizen en los cantares de las gestas”, “la estoria del rey don
Sancho assi como la cuentan los joglares”, “Mas esto, comoquier que lo cuentan
asi los joglares, no fue asi verdad”, etc. Obviously, they are referring to songs
transmitted orally by juglares (minstrels), songs that most probably existed
before the PMC.
Montaner, in his attempts to delineate the possible sources of the PMC, attri-
butes the work to a single author, for it does not seem that the text was made
up of different parts, or by cutting and pasting together several previous texts
in a more or less skillful way. He concludes, “En suma, parece que el poeta
épico se basó probablemente en la Historia Roderici y en otros datos de diversa
procedencia, sobre todo de la historia oral, pero también en documentos y
quizá en algún cantar de gesta anterior sobre el mismo héroe”.96 Óscar Martín
agrees with Montaner about the previous traditions of the PMC: “esta tradición
englobaría por una parte unas ‘creaciones literarias orales sobre el héroe’, es
decir, una ‘tradición estructurada, a la que se puede llamar realmente literaria
aunque sea oral’”.97
It is hard to decipher the relationship between oral history and the cantares
de gesta. Undoubtedly, epic songs in medieval Iberia and beyond were reposi-
tories of national history. Bayo persuasively addresses this thorny issue:
In Castile the cantares de gesta provided the people with a past. When in
the second half of the thirteenth century the Alphonsine chroniclers set
out to write a history in the vernacular for the first time, they had to come
to grips with this version of the past elaborated by the epic poets, which
most people had heard of and a few had also read about. The mythical
past shaped and proposed by the cantares de gesta had been easily and
95 Fernández-Ordóñez, “El Mio Cid a través de las crónicas”, pp. 157-58 (my emphasis). Mon-
taner (Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. xcvii-xcviii) also comments about the fifty-year differ-
ence in dating the PMC.
96 Montaner, “Aspectos literarios” (my emphasis). See also Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (b),
pp. xcviii-xcix.
97 Martín, “La ira”, p. 121.
widely accepted, because they drew heavily on pre-existing traditions,

and there were a host of local institutions ready to substantiate their
inventions with the discovery of relics.98
How the cantares de gesta came to be songs performed by minstrels we do not

know for sure. However, I am inclined to agree with Bayo that the juglares used
pre-existing traditions. Were these pre-existing traditions what we call “oral
history”? We do not know. What is clear is that “there were a host of local insti-
tutions ready to substantiate their inventions with the discovery of relics” or
the establishment of tomb cults.
Regarding the PMC, Montaner and others believe that, together with the
“pre-existing traditions”, there could have been an amorphous or unclassifi-
able tradition that transmitted a series of unorganized events that could be
related to San Pedro de Cardeña.99 Zaderenko, in her recent book El mo-
nasterio de Cardeña y el inicio de la épica cidiana, analyzes different sources
linking the PMC to the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña (where the Cid
was buried), and concludes that the extant manuscript of the poem not only
was copied in this monastery but was also composed in its scriptorium.100 We
do know that throughout the Middle Ages there was an important tomb cult
in Cardeña, and the monks were actively promoting visits to the Cid’s grave.101
However, I disagree with Zaderenko on one key point: the Cid’s epic cycle did
not start in Cardeña. This monastery was one among other local institutions
that took the opportunity to promote the tomb cult of Castilian epic heroes,
availing themselves of the burials in their sacred grounds to substantiate ever-
growing legendary inventions. Stories concerning the Cid and other heroes,
including Fernán González and the seven knights of Lara, were simultane-
ously created in Old Castile and were later appropriated by various churches
and monasteries. Fernán González was buried in San Pedro de Arlanza, and
his story was closely associated with this old Castilian monastery; the bod-
ies of the seven knights of Lara were claimed by San Pedro de Arlanza, San
Millán de la Cogolla, and the parish church of Salas. It seems evident that all
these institutions were competing for the same audience. Were the cantares
de gesta sung to the tombs’ visitors? It is possible, but I doubt it. We do know
that these monasteries produced other types of literature to attract visitors: the

99 Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (a), p. 11, and Cantar de mio Cid (b), p. lxvi; Martín, “La ira”,
p. 121.
100 See Roger Wright’s review of Zaderenko, El monasterio de Cardeña, pp. 191-92.
101 See Bautista, “Cardeña, Pedro de Barcelos”.
400 Vaquero
Leyenda cardeñense in Cardeña, and the Poema de Fernán González in Arlanza.

The monks or clerics who composed these pieces undoubtedly knew cantares
de gesta about Castilian and Carolingian heroes. The monk of Arlanza prob-
ably knew the now-lost Cantar de Fernán González, the song of Bernardo de
Carpio, the Roncesvals traditions, and the songs about the Siete infantes de
Lara.102 Similarly, at Cardeña they were familiar with the epic stories about
the Cid, but I doubt that the PMC was composed there.103 As other critics have
pointed out, even though the Castilian monastery is important in the PMC, the
lack of connection between the hero’s tomb and his story is rather surprising.
Zaderenko’s study is very valuable; it reveals, for instance, the influence of the
Benedictine rule on the poem.104 Yet, here we have one more case of the domi-
nance ascribed to the poem. Years ago, Smith argued that the PMC, composed
in or shortly before 1207 by a lawyer from Burgos, was the first epic to be com-
posed in Castilian.105 In his view, it was an innovative and experimental work
of a learned cleric, and therefore did not depend on an existing epic tradition
in Castilian. Eleven years later, Smith was more cautious: the author did not
create the Castilian epic genre, but he transformed it dramatically.106 In her
latest study, Zaderenko, who centers her analysis on the PMC, argues that the
beginning of the Cidian epic cycle is to be found in Cardeña. Contrary to her
assertion, my own view is that the PMC does not mark the beginning of the
genre, but is rather the depository of several epic traditions.
Another epic poem, Mocedades de Rodrigo, which also has survived in a
single manuscript (National Library of Paris), seems to have been composed
(or re-worked) by a cleric from Palencia (Old Castile) who was promoting the
tomb of Saint Antolín located in his city. Like Deyermond in his investigations
on the author of MR, Zaderenko also assumes that the author of the PMC is
a cleric. The MR is another example of a rewritten text; most scholars agree
that the poem reworked by the Palentine author was a gesta belonging to the
popular tradition. Leonardo Funes, who has studied MR, calls its composition
102 See Vaquero, “¿Qué sabemos?”.

103 Montaner believes that Cardeña’s traditions shaped the “Leyenda del Cid”, which will cul-
minate in the Estoria del Cid in the 13th century (Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. lxxxvii-viii,
348-50), and he concludes: “Se ha de advertir, no obstante, que aunque dicho monasterio
fue sin duda un lugar privilegiado para la difusión de determinados relatos, más o menos
verídicos, sobre el Campeador, no parece haber desempeñado inicialmente un papel
especialmente notable en el surgimiento de la materia cidiana, ni en lo relativo a su desa-
rrollo legendario ni a su conformación literaria” (Cantar de mio Cid (b), p. lxxxviii).
104 See Wright’s review of Zaderenko’s El monasterio de Cardeña.
105 Smith, The Making.
106 Smith, “Toward a Reconciliation”.
“aluvional”, having been formed by sediments.107 The same can be said of the
PMC. I believe it is made up of layers, of “sediments” that have undergone a
process of weathering and erosion. It has been transported, mainly by juglares,
as materials of sediment are transported by wind, water, or ice.
Another way of approaching the PMC is to determine how many sediments
or layers can be identified. As usual, critics are divided into those who see a
single author108 and those who believe in two (or more) authors, which is the
second thesis of Menéndez Pidal, the hypothesis of Zaderenko, and others
I mentioned above.
In reading the text, it is easy to consider that it was written by a single
learned author: everything is tied up like clockwork. But its coherence, how-
ever, is sprinkled with a few contradictions which, in my opinion, reveal layers
of previous works.109 As mentioned earlier, Montaner does not believe that the
PMC was composed by piecing together works of different origins.110 But I am
still convinced that a case can be made that the poem was composed from
“recyclable” pieces, particularly in the first plot, the epic plot. With regard to
the second plot, pertaining more to the romance genre, it is likely the work of
an erudite author interested in this literary genre. I agree with Deyermond: “El
poeta pudo muy bien haberse valido de varias fuentes poéticas, cronísticas o
folclóricas, pero el empleo de varias fuentes es muy distinto de una multiplici-
dad de poetas”.111
Another reason attesting to this form of composition is, in my opinion, the
fact that the PMC has so many important messages that it is impossible to sup-
pose they were conceived or planned by a single author who had one specific
audience in mind in a particular historical moment. To summarize all the
underlying layers in terms of the poem’s geography and audience, these are
some of the possibilities that critics have suggested and supported their
assumptions with sound arguments:
1. Burgos (Russell, “San Pedro de Cardeña”; Smith, The Making; Deyermond,

El “Cantar de Mio Cid”; Óscar Martín, “El Cantar”; etc.)
107 See Funes, “Gesta, refundición”, “Versiones cronísticas”, and Mocedades de Rodrigo. Cf.
Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. xcviii-xcix.
108 That was the first opinion of Menéndez Pidal, and the opinion of Smith, Montaner, and
others. For a good review of the authorship problem, see Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (b),
pp. lxvi-lxxi.
109 Vaquero, “El Cantar”.
110 Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (b), p. lxxxii.
111 Deyermond, El “Cantar de Mio Cid”, p. 20.
402 Vaquero
2. Extremadura soriana (Ménendez Pidal, En torno; Riaño Rodríguez, “Del

autor”; Duggan, The “Cantar”; Marcos Marín, Cantar; Riaño y Gutiérrez,
Cantar; Catalán, La épica española, pp. 468-71; and others)
3. Aragon (Ubieto Arteta, “Observaciones”, El “Cantar”, pp. 189-90, and “El
sentimiento”, p. 573; Pellen, Review of Ubieto Arteta’s El “Cantar”)
4. Cuenca (Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. xcvi-xcvii)
5. Toledo (Hernández, “Historia y epopeya”, pp. 464-67)
6. Navarra (Georges Martin, “¿Fue Mio Cid?”)
This list is only a sample, but it gives an idea of various important opinions on
the subject.
The study of the objectives or the principal ideological / political goals of
the PMC yields similar variety:
1. It served as a recruiting song and was addressed to the urban militias in

preparation for the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), right after the
Alarcos debacle (a battle between Alfonso VIII of Castile and the Almo-
hads in 1195) (Fradejas Lebrero, Estudios épicos and “Intento”; Powers,
A Society, pp. 50-52; Hernández, “Historia y epopeya”).
2. It was a poem exalting the lower nobility in their struggle against the
higher nobility, justifying their climb to honor and higher society by their
exemplary military deeds (Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (b), pp. cxxix-
cxxx).
3. It was a poem aimed at the settlers of the frontier (“hombres de frontera”)
to instill in their minds the possibility of social mobility (Lacarra, El
“Poema”, pp. 116-17, 161-62, 202; Catalán, “El Mio Cid” and El Cid en la histo-
ria, pp. 123-78; Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (a), pp. 511-12).
4. It was a poem favoring a change in the exercise of old laws benefiting the
nobility (i.e., private vengeance) to new laws giving more power to the
monarch (Lacarra, El “Poema”).
5. It was a song designed to please Alfonso VIII after his daughter Beren-
guela had been forced to divorce King Alfonso IX of León, which put his
heirs in jeopardy and made it impossible to unite the kingdoms of Castile
and León (Duggan, The “Cantar”).
6. It was a tool to educate knights (Georges Martin, chapter in this volume).
7. It was an important piece of propaganda for the monastery of San Pedro
de Cardeña and its interests (Zaderenko, El monasterio de Cardeña).
This list is only a small but representative sample of the different explanations
advanced thus far. It justifies the “aluvional” or sedimentary condition of the
PMC. One last example of textual intervention that adds another layer to the
final composition is the already mentioned connection of the text with
Cardeña. Somebody has purposely erased the most important nexus of the
hero’s cult in Cardeña: his burial place. Again, the omission of the Cid’s burial
in the Castilian monastery is very surprising.
Finally, let’s examine one more problem that the canonicity of the PMC has
created: the poem’s supposed historicity. It is my belief that our view of the
historical Cid has been distorted by the poem. Powell points out that the author
of the PMC knew that Rodrigo’s wife, Jimena, was of royal birth (she was the
great-granddaughter of Alfonso V of León), but the poet glossed over it: “The
lack of this consciousness of status in the characters in the poem is useful
artistically”.112 According to Montaner, it seems that the poet devalued the role
of Jimena due to his artistic objectives.113 And yet, at the end of the PMC
(v. 3742), the author alludes to the fact that the royal families of Navarre and
Aragon now can claim the Cid as one of their ancestors since his daughters
married princes from both royal houses. However, as Rico has pointed out, in
the PMC “el parentesco regio es el punto de llegada y proporciona al Cid lo
único que le falta”,114 that is, the Cid’s connection to the royal houses gives the
hero the social status he justly deserves. As many critics have pointed out and
Montaner summarizes: “el Cantar se basa justamente en la exaltación de la
honra ganada por el Campeador gracias a su esfuerzo personal, frente a la
meramente heredada, propia de la alta nobleza”.115
The fact that the Cid does not belong to the high nobility in the PMC is pecu-
liar to this text, but not to the rest of the Cidian cycle. The Cid in the song about
his exile preserved in the Crónica de Castilla (c.1300), the hero of the Jura de
Santa Gadea preserved in that same chronicle and in ballads, and the Rodrigo
Díaz of many romances, treat King Alfonso as an equal and at times with disre-
spect. The Cid of the first part of Partición and of Mocedades de Rodrigo is also
very discourteous towards King Fernando. In Partición the hero is raised with
Urraca, King Fernando’s daughter, at the home of Arias Gonzalo, the princess’
tutor. In Mocedades de Rodrigo (vv. 235-37), the hero’s mother is the daughter of
a Count.
It is clear, therefore, that the fact that the Cid does not belong to the high
nobility in the PMC has distorted the view not only of the epic Cid, but also of
112 Powell, Epic and Chronicle, pp. 26-27.

113 Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (a), pp. 420-22.
114 Rico, “Un canto de frontera,” p. xxxi.
115 Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid (a), pp. 421-22.
404 Vaquero
the historical figure, and it is due undoubtedly to the canonicity of the vener-
able old text.
Recent works by historians who have studied the early Castilian and Leonese
nobility have shown that not only Jimena, but also the Cid, belonged to the
higher nobility of both kingdoms.116 Lacarra, based on those recent studies,
has published two articles analyzing the implications of those findings on our
reading of the PMC.117 In one of these articles, she emphasized that the histori-
cal Cid was not a member of the lower nobility (infanzón), but that he belonged
to the high nobility like his wife Jimena. Lacarra concludes,
Rodrigo, lejos de ser un simple infanzón, estaba excelentemente emparen-

tado con todas las monarquías hispanas. Era primo segundo del rey
Fernando I de Castilla y de Ramiro de Aragón, y tío de Sancho II de
Castilla, de Alfonso VI, de García de Galicia y de las infantes Urraca y
Elvira.118
In her second provocative essay, “Rodrigo Díaz re-visitado”, she argues, against
the unanimous opinion, that even in the PMC Rodrigo belonged to the upper
nobility by implication. Her reading distorts many lines of the PMC (vv. 1373-76,
1881-88, 1901-06, 2082-85, 3275-79, 3296-300, 3377-81, etc.), where it is stated
and/or implied that the Cid is an infanzón, i.e. a member of the lower nobility.
It is clear that the canonicity of the PMC must be questioned since the Cid’s
representation in this work has little to do with the epic Cid and other Castilian-
Leonese epic heroes or with the historical Rodrigo Díaz. Some historians of the
Spanish Middle Ages, who have taken the figure of the epic Cid as historically
accurate, have emphasized the status of Rodrigo Díaz as a lesser noble. Even
the entry for “El Cid” in Wikipedia states: “Born a member of the minor nobility,
El Cid was brought up at the court of King Ferdinand the Great”.119
116 Martínez Díez, El Cid histórico; Torres Sevilla-Quiñones de León, Linajes nobiliarios, El Cid
y otros señores, and “El linaje del Cid”.
117 Lacarra, “El linaje” and “Rodrigo Díaz re-visitado”.
118 Lacarra, “El linaje”, p. 124 (my emphasis).
119 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Cid> (Web. September 23, 2014). Lacarra (“El linaje”,
p. 124) quotes Moreta Velayos: “¿Cómo se explica que Rodrigo Díaz, un simple infanzón
que vivió en la segunda mitad del siglo XI, fuera elegido protagonista del principal cantar
de gesta de la literatura española? ¿Por qué los historiadores del medievo inventaron para
él una genealogía y una biografía legendarias?” (Moreta Velayos, Myo Çid el Campeador;
my emphasis). The examples are abundant: “Jamás, por mucho que nos empecinemos,
sabremos lo que pensó y sintió realmente Ruy Díaz el infanzón de Bivar” (Moreta Velayos,
“Entre la historia y la literatura: El Cid”, p. 380; my emphasis). Another example: Senra
In the article in which I first questioned the canonicity of the poem, I con-
cluded that a masterpiece like the PMC should not be left out of our syllabi;
however, its canonicity must be questioned. In my opinion, and in the opinion
of other Hispano-medievalists, Partición is as much a masterpiece as the PMC,
and it is not only for this reason that it should be studied more. I also believe
that, of the Cidian cycle, Partición and MR were the best-known epic texts in
Medieval Iberia and were the ones that probably had a greater impact on other
Cidian texts.
After reviewing some of the distortions that the PMC has caused both in lit-
erary appreciation and in historical accuracy, the question of how to approach
it still remains. Montaner has a very good answer: “al acercarse a una obra
como el Cantar de mio Cid [PMC] [hay que tener en cuenta] que no se trata de
un documento histórico, ni siquiera de una biografía más o menos fantaseada,
sino de un texto plenamente literario, de un poema épico de primera magni-
tud, y como tal hay que entenderlo y, sobre todo, disfrutarlo”.120
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Vaquero, Mercedes, “The Tradition of the Cantar de Sancho II in Fifteenth-Century
Historiography”, Hispanic Review 57 (1989), 137-54.
Vaquero, Mercedes, “El Cantar de la jura de Santa Gadea y la tradición del Cid como
vasallo rebelde”, Olifant 15 (1990), 47-84.
Vaquero, Mercedes, “El episodio del cohombro de los Siete infantes de Lara en el marco
de la épica española”, in José Manuel Lucía Megías (ed.), Actas del VI Congreso
Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Alcalá de Henares,

12-16 de septiembre de 1995), Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares,
1997, pp. 1543-53.
Vaquero, Mercedes, “The Poema de Mio Cid and the Canon of the Spanish Epic”, La
Corónica 33.2 (2005), 209-30.
Vaquero, Mercedes, “¿Qué sabemos del Cantar de Fernán González?”, Romance Quarterly
61.3 (2014), 202-14.
Wright, Roger, review of Irene Zaderenko, El monasterio de Cardeña y el inicio de la épica
cidiana, La Corónica 42.2 (2014), 191-92.
Zaderenko, Irene, Problemas de autoría, de estructura y de fuentes en el “Poema de mio
Cid”, Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 1998.
Zaderenko, Irene, “El Cid en el romancero viejo”, paper read at the 38th International
Congress on Medieval Studies, Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University,
Kalamazoo, 2003.
Zaderenko, Irene, “Épica y romancero del Cid”, La Corónica 33.2 (2005): 231-45.
412 Bautista
Chapter 14
The Poema de mio Cid in 13th- and 14th-Century

Romance Historiography
Francisco Bautista
1 Introduction
The shift from Latin to Romance in a general history of Spain propelled and
guided by Alfonso X (1252-84), as well as the encyclopedic nature of his histo-
riographical projects – such as the General estoria (1270-84) – gave rise to a new
form of historical narrative that was broader and more inclusive. It made use
of sources written in Latin, Arabic, and Romance that were not exclusively his-
torical in nature but also literary. Just as Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses
were fundamental sources for the General estoria, the compilers of the Estoria
de España, in addition to many historiographical texts, exploited poetic works
connected to Spain’s past. While some of these writings are now lost, others
have survived, such as the Poema de Fernán González (c.1250) and the Poema de
mio Cid (PMC), that were used extensively in the Estoria. Through the creative
and complex use of these literary works, heroic figures and deeds straddling
both history and poetry were integrated for the first time in a very original his-
torical text, the Estoria de España, which appealed to a much wider audience
than that of the earlier Latin chronicles, thus reaching such a diffusion and
influence as to endure well into the Siglo de Oro.
Excluding royal figures, the Cid is by far the only character to occupy such
large number of pages in the Estoria de España. It is possibly an indication of
the special inclination Alfonso X or members of his court felt towards Rodrigo
Díaz as a paradigmatic or especially attractive figure. Their high esteem for
the Campeador is also the result of a series of literary works that had been
written about him as well as a vast and diverse body of writings narrating
his exploits. With the exception of the Carmen Campidoctoris, which can be
dated between the end of the 11th century and the end of the 12th century, the
Alfonsine compilers were acquainted and worked with the major texts about
the Cid composed before 1270: a history in Arabic, which has only survived in
fragments, written soon after the event it describes, the conquest of Valencia;
the Historia Roderici (12th century); the Liber regum (c.1207); the PMC; the

Poema de mio Cid in 13th- and 14th-Century Romance Historiography 413
now-lost *Cantar de Sancho II (or *Cantar de las particiones), and other general
historiographical works that specifically mention Rodrigo, such as the Latin
chronicles by Lucas de Tuy (c.1236) and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (c.1243). The
very abundance of material, which often provided detailed and accurate nar-
rations, must have posed a serious challenge to the Alfonsine historians and
perhaps was one of the problems they faced while compiling the chronicle, an
issue I will consider later in this chapter.
In the following pages, I will explore how the figure of Rodrigo Díaz, and
more specifically, the contents of the PMC, were integrated into the major
Romance chronicles produced in the period spanning from the reign of Alfonso
X through the first half of the 14th century. It is a topic that has been heavily
explored from multiple perspectives: from ecdotic considerations – providing
an essential basis for the critical edition of the Poema – to ideological interpre-
tations that take the Cid’s memory as an opportunity for political discussions. It
has been, moreover, the object of many controversies, fundamentally between
those who see in the chronistic variations traces of poetic reworkings, and
those who interpret them as the result of historiographical writing (and rewrit-
ing). Today, thanks to a better understanding of Romance chronicles’ evolution
and the structural guidelines that govern each text, it is possible to evaluate
more accurately this corpus despite the many uncertainties that still exist; on
the other hand, more diverse analytical perspectives have been developed. It is
fair to say that this is a rich and productive field of study, with many promising
lines of research and numerous questions that need to be answered.1
2 Texts and Titles
The redaction of the Estoria de España – whose beginning is usually dated to

the year 1270 – generated an authentic literary tradition that led to the rewrit-
ing of the entire or a part of King Alfonso’s planned history at different
moments in time. It was more common to rewrite only sections of the chroni-
cle, which resulted in the production of a series of texts generally known as
“crónicas generales de España”. Almost invariably, the most widely dissemi-
nated and reelaborated section was the one beginning with King Fernando I
1 In the scholarship on this topic, the most important study is Catalán’s “Crónicas generales y
cantares de gesta: el Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, published in 1963 (which I cite as “El Mio Cid de
Alfonso X” as it was reprinted in Catalán, El Cid en la historia y sus inventores, pp. 179-224). This
work renewed critical interest in chronistic texts, initiated a new era in the study of this
problem, and laid the groundwork for future research.
414 Bautista
(1037-65), which coincides with the Cid’s biography distributed between the
reigns of Fernando I as well as those of his sons, Sancho II and Alfonso VI. The
reworkings of the Estoria de España, which had already begun during the reign
of Alfonso X, had a particularly intense and creative moment between the end
of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th century, when the most
important texts that circulated in the years to follow were produced. Although
they are not completely independent works – they are textually related to one
another –, each one of them either incorporated new materials to varying
degrees or reelaborated inherited materials from a new perspective.
When we speak of the Estoria de España, we are referring to a complex tex-
tual matter.2 There are three known versions of this work: two of them were
produced in different historical moments in King Alfonso X’s court, and the
third was elaborated during the reign of his son Sancho IV (1284-95). The first
one, called Versión primitiva, was written between 1270 and 1274 and is the
immediate and direct result of the Alfonsine project; it is, therefore, the one
that best represents the initial concept that governed the first composition of
the Estoria. The second version, known as Versión crítica and composed at the
end of Alfonso X’s reign (1282-84), is an attempt at resuming and completing a
compilation that had remained unfinished, and it was thus composed at a dis-
tinct historical moment and not always with the same poetic or ideological
premises. Finally, the third redaction, the Versión amplificada compiled at the
court of Sancho IV in 1289, represents a new attempt at bringing the incom-
plete project to a close, and here we also have a notable distancing from the
original Alfonsine propositions. Neither one of the last two redactions are
directly related to each other, nor are they based on the definitive text of the
Versión primitiva. Rather, both can be traced to different drafts within the elab-
oration’s process of the Estoria. In the case of the Versión amplificada, it draws
on a draft that was in an advanced state, whereas the Versión crítica depends
on one less developed. All of this should be kept in mind in order to properly
assess the variations between these two texts. In addition to these versions, we
also have various chronicles dealing with the history of the kings of Castile,
which I discuss in the pages ahead.
A major difficulty for analyzing the section containing data about the Cid is
the lack of any testimony of the Versión primitiva beginning with Fernando I’s
reign. From this point on, we have no manuscript of the first redaction of the
2 The outline that follows is based on Catalan’s De Alfonso X al Conde de Barcelos and De la silva
textual al taller historiográfico alfonsí; Fernández-Ordóñez, “Versión crítica” de la “Estoria de
España”; and Bautista, La “Estoria de España” en época de Sancho IV and “Para la tradición
textual de la Estoria de España”.
Estoria de España, which most likely never reached a definitive stage, remain-
ing perhaps at the level of draft. Based on the extant texts, we can establish two
distinct branches representing the characteristic way in which the Alfonsine
compilation was reworked in general, and sources pertaining to the Cid in par-
ticular. On the one hand, we have the Versión crítica, which offers a consistent
and uniform account of Castile’s history and the deeds having to do with
Rodrigo Díaz. On this text depends the so-called Crónica de veinte reyes, which
can best be defined as a copy of the Versión crítica, limited to the section begin-
ning with Fruela II (924-25) and ending with Fernando II (1157-88), and which
is brought to completion with other historical works covering up to the reign of
Fernando III (1217-52). The Crónica de veinte reyes, whose archetype can prob-
ably be dated in the first half of the 14th century when it circulated widely,
introduced very few changes to the text of the Versión crítica, to such an insig-
nificant extent as to be considered a mere testimony of it. For this reason,
when dealing with this text I will simply refer to it as Versión crítica.3
The second branch of the manuscript tradition consists of the Versión
amplificada and a group of post-Alfonsine texts and chronicles whose dates of
composition are not always ascertainable: manuscript F (Biblioteca Univer-
sitaria de Salamanca, ms. 2628, 15th century), which transmits a text some
critics have called Versión mixta; the Crónica manuelina, summarized by Don
Juan Manuel in his Crónica abreviada (c.1320-25); the Crónica de Castilla; the
Crónica de 1344; and the Crónica ocampiana. All of these texts either reflect or
inherit a factitious narrative about Alfonso VI’s reign that totally affects the
Cid’s biography. This narration is divided into two parts. Each was based on a
different textual model and redacted at a different time, and their respective
poetics do not always coincide. The split can be accurately identified thanks to
the royal codex transmitting the Versión amplificada (E2 = Escorial, ms. X-I-4,
late-13th century), where originally there was a considerable material lacuna
spanning from the siege of Aledo to the final years of Alfonso VI’s reign and the
Cid’s death. Between the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th
century, the lacuna in codex E2 was completed with a text typically referred to
as the “Interpolación cidiana” (the Cid’s Interpolation), which is the title I will
3 We should keep in mind that this affects radically the studies on the Crónica de veinte reyes
carried out before Inés Fernández-Ordóñez’s critical discovery published in 1993,“Versión
crítica” de la “Estoria de España”; those works are, in fact, about the second Alfonsine redaction
of the Estoria de España – that is to say, the Versión crítica. I have in mind the important studies
by Powell, Epic and Chronicle; and Dyer, El “Mio Cid” del taller alfonsí; as well as more general
studies by Chalon, L’histoire et l’épopée castillane; and Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle. In
the pages ahead, I will quote from this section of the Versión crítica using Campa’s edition, La
“Estoria de España” de Alfonso X, indicating only the page number.
416 Bautista
use throughout this chapter.4 Although they do not directly derive from E2, all
the other representatives of this branch show a similar factitious composition,
indicating, thus, a common model that also joined these two parts together:
one that included the reigns of Fernando I, Sancho II, and the first part of
Alfonso VI’s, similar to the Versión amplificada, while the other, covering the
remaining years of Alfonso VI’s reign until the Cid’s death, reproduced or
reelaborated the “Interpolación”.
Analyzing this corpus allows us to deduce a chronology of the process by
which the Cid’s image was constructed in Romance historiography and isolate
three important moments. The first one concerns how King Alfonso’s chroni-
clers integrated the Cid’s biography into Spain’s history. The Versión crítica
belongs to this phase; however, the accounts about Fernando I, Sancho II, and
the first part of Alfonso VI’s reign – included in the Versión amplificada as well
as in other works based on the same model – also offer indispensable data for
studying this phase. A second moment corresponds to the elaboration of the
“Interpolación cidiana”, which probably took place soon after 1289 when the
oldest sections of codex E2 were copied (probably during the reign of Sancho
IV). Although this text was based on Alfonsine materials, it also included epi-
sodes and information originating from new sources that resulted in a narration
very different from the Versión crítica. A third moment can be assigned to the
historiographical rewritings of the factitious model I mentioned earlier, the
most important being those that are produced in the Crónica manuelina –
likely redacted at the end of the 13th century – and in the Crónica de Castilla,
pertaining to the times of Fernando IV (1295-1312). In the next few pages, I will
study the representation of the Cid in Romance historiography while focusing
on these three phases.
3 The Poema de mio Cid in Alfonso X’s Historiographical Workshop
For an analysis of the historiographical image of the Cid created by Alfonso X’s
collaborators, we have at our disposal two groups of texts that offer a contrast-
ing testimony of the compilation process, thus providing the opportunity for a
more profound and dynamic understanding of how it was carried out. On the
one hand, we have the Versión crítica, which was produced during the final
4 See Catalán’s analysis of E2 in De Alfonso X al Conde de Barcelos, pp. 64-69. E2 is the codex
Menéndez Pidal used for his edition of the second volume of the Estoria de España, which he
called Primera crónica general. In the pages ahead, I will cite this work as PCG, indicating page
number, column (a, b), and lines.
years of Alfonso X’s life. This work presents a continuous and consistent narra-
tion that uses the same sources for the Cid’s entire biography and employs
similar criteria throughout, underscoring, in particular, the tendency to abbre-
viate and reduce the accounts to their most basic elements. The Cidian sources
include the *Cantar de Sancho II, the Historia Roderici, an Arabic history about
the conquest of Valencia, and the PMC.5 The second group of texts is made up
of the Versión amplificada and a number of works closely related sharing the
same narrative until the chapter about the siege of Aledo (PCG, chapter 896).6
Up to this point, the model for all these texts was a compilation produced in
Alfonso X’s court that was based on the same sources as the Versión crítica and
was relatively close to what the Versión primitiva would have been had it been
completed.
The most faithful witness of this model is manuscript F, which coincides in
great part with the Versión amplificada transmitted by E2, yet it lacks some sup-
plementary amplifications characteristic of this codex and the texts that derive
from it. At times, the text of manuscript F has been called Versión mixta, indi-
cating that it may be a combination of both a testimony of the Versión primitiva
and the Versión amplificada. However, a close examination of manuscript F
shows only very few significant differences with E2 – the most important ones
are found in the first chapters dealing with Fernando I – none of which are
related to the poetic sources. Therefore, I am inclined to believe that F trans-
mits an early stage of the Versión amplificada, although it is a matter that still
remains unresolved.7 The importance of the text transmitted in F rests also on
the influence it later wielded, since it was used as the base text for the Crónica
5 For the sources that were used, see Catalán, “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, pp. 191-204. For the
Arabic history, traditionally attributed to Ibn ‘Alqamah, see Montaner Frutos and Boix Jovaní,
Guerra en Sarq Al’andalus, pp. 215-16, where it is suggested that there were actually two Arabic
histories and the one used in the Alfonsine workshop was by Ibn Alfarağ. Nevertheless, the
narrative coherence of both the Versión crítica and the post-Alfonsine texts suggests that the
Alfonsine workshop used for this section a single Arabic source (which probably included the
elegy about Valencia). For the inclusion of the *Cantar de Sancho II in the Estoria de España,
see Reig, El Cantar de Sancho II; Fradejas Lebrero, Estudios Épicos: “El Cerco de Zamora”;
Chalon, L’histoire et l’épopée castillane, pp. 277-368; Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle, pp. 93-
114; Catalán, La épica española, pp. 38-51; Montaner Frutos, “La huida de Vellido”; and Lacomba,
Au-delà du “Cantar de mio Cid”.
6 About its sources, see Menéndez Pidal, Primera crónica general, vol. II, pp. clxxiv-clxxxiii,
along with Catalán’s revisions in “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, pp. 191-95.
7 This is also the position taken by Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid, p. 528 (with references to his
earlier studies). For the Versión mixta, see, among others, Catalán, La épica española, p. 38;
Campa, “Los reyes de Castilla en la Estoria de España”; and Hijano Villegas, “La materia cidiana
en las crónicas generales”, which includes a useful bibliography.
418 Bautista
manuelina and this chronicle, in turn, was later used for the Crónica de Castilla
where it was heavily reelaborated. Because there are hardly any substantial
variations in this section that can be dated back to the Alfonsine compilation,
I will only refer in what follows to Menéndez Pidal’s edition of the Versión
amplificada.8
In the first part of the Versión amplificada, which includes the first cantar of
the PMC and a few verses of the second cantar (approximately through vv. 1094-
98), all the recensions – from the Versión crítica to the Versión amplificada and
the texts related to it – not only derive from an identical translation or prosifi-
cation of its sources, but also from the same compilation in which these
sources had already been interwoven and subjected to an annalistic structure.
This same relationship between both versions is detected in the earlier sec-
tions of the Estoria de España, and like those sections, this one is probably
related to slightly different stages of the compilation: somewhat more archaic
in the case of the Versión crítica, and more elaborated in the case of the Versión
amplificada. This explains why, although the Versión crítica tends to abbreviate
the earlier compilation, it has preserved certain details from its sources –
namely the PMC as well as other texts – that would have been eliminated later
in the process of redacting the Estoria.9 Nevertheless, though it is possible
that some variations could be attributed to occasional suppressions in the
Versión amplificada, aware of the difficulty to prove this observation without
the text of the Versión primitiva, one can only attempt to justify it through indi-
rect rational deductions.
The first cantar of the PMC to be incorporated in both the Versión crítica
(pp. 467-81) and the Versión amplificada (PCG, chapters 851-62) takes place
between the fourth and the seventh year of Alfonso VI’s reign.10 All this mate-
8 It is worth noting that Menéndez Pidal included the main variants of F in his edition of
the Estoria de España. The text of manuscript F, which corresponds to chapters 850-62 of
the PCG, has been edited by Dyer, El “Mio Cid” del taller alfonsí, pp. 68-87.
9 This phenomenon was correctly explained by Catalán in “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, pp. 219-
21. Given the relationship between the texts and the propensity for abbreviation in the
Versión crítica, it is less likely that the inclusion of some details was the result of its
author’s “memoria auditiva”, as Dyer proposed in “El “Mio Cid” del taller alfonsí, p. 210.
10 We can be sure that the chroniclers began to borrow from the poem when explaining
Alfonso VI’s decision to banish the Cid (Versión crítica, p. 467; PCG, cap. 850, p. 523a48-53),
although this section corresponds to a lacuna in the Poema that resulted from the loss of
the first folio of the only extant codex. For this matter, see Montaner Frutos, “De nuevo
sobre los versos iniciales perdidos” and Cantar de Mio Cid, pp. 561-63, 631-32; also see
Fernández-Ordóñez, “El Mio Cid a través de las crónicas medievales”, pp. 164-65. Although
it is difficult to know for sure – since the Alfonsine compilers skillfully intertwined the
rial is integrated into the history in a similar way – after narrating King Alfonso’s
motives for ordering the Cid to leave his kingdom that derives from the Historia
Roderici (§11) – and is subjected to the same treatment: identical division into
chapters; similar annalistic structure; and the same use of other sources, as
when it relates the succession in the Sevillian taifa – borrowed from Jiménez
de Rada’s Historia arabum – after the account of Álvar Fáñez’s embassy to King
Alfonso (Versión crítica, p. 476; PCG, p. 531b21-25). Since they are based on the
same compilation, both works reflect the very same treatment of the PMC,
which explains why they share the same additions and suppressions, and have
such a textual conformity.11 A comparison of the two versions of the Estoria de
España with the PMC reveals that the Alfonsine compilers used a text similar to
the extant one transmitted by a manuscript very close to that of the Vivar
codex (dating to the beginning of the 14th century), but older.12
I will next examine how the poem was utilized in the Alfonsine scriptorium
– holding off on compilatory issues, such as chronology and the integration of
sources I have already mentioned – in order to succinctly describe some pecu-
liarities characterizing each version. Finally, I will discuss how the rest of the
Poema was used in a section of the Versión crítica that corresponds to the
“Interpolación cidiana” in other texts. The “Interpolación” reveals a different
relationship with the archetype of the Estoria de España and presents an
account so different from the one in the Versión crítica as to require a separate
study.
When integrating the Poema into the structure of the Estoria, the Alfonsine
chroniclers preserved the essential aspects of the narrative plot, yet they
consciously transformed its language, abbreviating certain episodes and sup-
pressing some details. There is an overall desire to modify the vocabulary in
order to eliminate any trace of assonance, although it still can be detected in
some parts of the text. In adapting epic style to historiographical discourse,
narration about Alfonso VI’s decree to banish the Cid narrated in the Historia Roderici
(§11) with the opening verses of the Poema – it is likely that the chroniclers began to use
the poetic text with the phrase “et enbio luego dezir al Çid por sus cartas” (Versión crítica,
p. 467; PCG, p. 523a48), since the king’s letters are not mentioned in the Latin history.
11 Catalán, “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, p. 218; Smith, “The First Prose Redaction”; Dyer, El “Mio
Cid” del taller alfonsí, p. 197.
12 This is one of Catalán’s most important conclusions, later confirmed and further devel-
oped by other scholars. Catalán’s findings contradicted earlier hypotheses defended by
Menéndez Pidal, who argued that Romance historiographical accounts were based on
poetic reworkings of the Poema (“El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, p. 218). See Gómez Redondo,
“La materia cidiana en la crónica general alfonsí”, for a more complex approach along the
line of Menéndez Pidal.
420 Bautista
even the formulaic system became blurred. Allusive verses or emotional excla-
mations either disappear or are elaborated in an expository style.13 Irony and
humor disappear, resulting in a flatter discourse that can be observed, for
example, in the episode with the Count of Barcelona. The use of the Poema is
never passive; rather, it is determined by the will or need to interpret or avail
oneself of the text as a source of information, adapting it to the language of the
historiographical prose. The discursive element in the poetic text, which was
altered at times only slightly by the compilers, corresponds to the characters’
speeches that were reproduced more faithfully, often preserving poetic char-
acteristics such as epithets or assonance.14 It is fair to say that, in general, the
style of the Poema has undergone the most profound transformation, so much
so that had the poetic text ever been lost, it would be impossible to recover its
verses using the historiographical prose.15
With respect to the narrative plan, the Alfonsine chroniclers seem to adhere
to the Poema’s storyline, reproducing it without adding sweeping modifica-
tions to the sequence of events. Although they preserve the major characters of
their source, the names of some secondary ones are eliminated while at the
same time suppressing some of the toponyms, especially in the most abbrevi-
ated sections of the chronicle. The compilers clearly judged the Cid’s military
exploits narrated in the first part of the Poema to be more important than the
episodes depicting him with his family. For that reason, the first part of the
poem (until v. 424), which describes the Cid’s journey to Burgos and Cardeña
as well as his farewell to Jimena and his daughters, was radically summarized;
on the other hand, the battles with the Moors or with the Count of Barcelona
more closely follow the poetic text. As they do with the exploitation of other
sources, especially if they were markedly literary, the compilers did not hesi-
tate to interpolate glosses or briefly elaborate upon a particular point in order
to make the narration more comprehensible or true-to-life.16 As first pointed
out by Diego Catalán – whose view was generally accepted by later scholars –
these brief additions should not be considered traces of poetic variants, but
rather the result of the compilation process; they should be use to characterize
13 For example, “Veyénlo los de Alcocer, ¡Dios, cómmo se alabavan!” (v. 580) as compared to
“Los moros quando los vieron yr, començaronse de alabar commo fueran esforçados, e se
touieran bien” (Versión crítica, p. 471; similarly in Versión amplificada, PCG, p. 526b9-11).
14 Powell, Epic and Chronicle, pp. 72-74; Rochwert-Zuili, “Du Poème à l’Histoire”, pp. 137-52.
15 Powell, Epic and Chronicle, p. 88. Also see Badía Margarit’s detailed analysis, “Dos tipos de
lengua, cara a cara”, and Montaner Frutos, “Cave carmen!”.
16 Catalán, “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, pp. 212-16; Dyer, El “Mio Cid” del taller alfonsí, pp. 202-04;
and Rochwert-Zuili, “Du Poème à l’Histoire”, pp. 87-130.
the poetics and objectives of the Alfonsine project, and not to document the
existence of reworkings carried out by juglares (minstrels).17
A comparative analysis reveals that the Versión amplificada is far more
faithful to its poetic source than the Versión crítica. This is not because the
chroniclers consulted the Poema again, but because the Versión amplificada
more closely resembles the Alfonsine compilation elaborated between 1270
and 1274 that was destined to be used for the composition of the Versión primi-
tiva which remained unfinished. In effect, such a greater degree of fidelity to the
Poema is also generally found in the rest of the chronicle, especially in the sec-
tion spanning from Ramiro I (842-50) to the siege of Aledo, where the Versión
amplificada is usually closer to its sources and less innovative than the Versión
crítica. In this regard, the Versión crítica simplifies the details and episodes of
the poem; for example, it eliminates the names of the Jewish moneylenders; it
suppresses the characters’ speeches, especially when someone other than the
Cid is speaking; it reduces the elaboration of battle scenes, focusing more on
their outcomes; and it abbreviates the story as a whole.18 At times, the Versión
crítica modifies its source like when, for example, it attributes the ruse of fill-
ing the chests with sand exclusively to Martín Antolínez, which was surely
done in order not to diminish Rodrigo’s character.19 It also softens the tensions
between the Cid and King Alfonso by omitting some references to the ira regia
(royal wrath).20 In all those cases in which the Versión amplificada shows to
be closer to the Poema, one can safely attribute them to the fact that it has
inherited, and more faithfully reflects, the original compilation produced in
the Alfonsine workshop, and with it, the contents of its source.
The Versión amplificada is nevertheless a rewriting of the primitive compila-
tion, even though without the text of the Versión primitiva it would be difficult
to identify its particular interventions. Analyzed as a whole, the redaction of
the Estoria de España elaborated under Sancho IV is characterized by a verbal
amplification and the sporadic interpolation of glosses based either on con-
clusions as can be gathered from some details or on rationalizations of its
17 Catalán, “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, pp. 216-18.

18 Catalán, “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, p. 219; Dyer, El “Mio Cid” del taller alfonsí, pp. 207-10.
19 According to the Versión crítica, “Et Martyn Antolines dixo commo non le podrie man-
leuar todo quanto el auie menester, mas que mandase fenchir dos arcas de arena e çerrar
las muy bien, e el las leuarie de su parte a dos mercadores muy rricos que avie y en la
çibdat” (p. 468). The narration of this episode in the Versión amplificada is more faithful
to the Poema (PCG, p. 523b).
20 Dyer, El “Mio Cid” del taller alfonsí, p. 209.
422 Bautista
development.21 For the most part, this work was carried out without consult-
ing the sources again, which led Catalán to characterize it as essentially
“retórico”. Although this term may be ambiguous and place an excessive limit
to the extent to which the chronicle was rewritten in King Sancho’s court, what
is certain is that there are no significant modifications in the way in which the
Poema was used.22 It is possible, nevertheless, that there are some minor
glosses specific to this version. For instance, in the narration of the conquest of
Alcocer, after the Cid entrusts his standard to Pero Vermúdez, the inference
that the hero advises and encourages his men may be attributed to the Versión
amplificada (PCG, p. 528a29-34; cf. Versión crítica, p. 473).23 Minor additions
such as this one, which underscore the hero’s role as a military leader, seem to
characterize this version.
The rest of the material from the PMC – from v. 1098 onward – is incorpo-
rated later on interwoven into the storyline or after the narration of the siege
and conquest of Valencia, which is based on historical sources. The Versión
crítica takes up the PMC again in the 28th year of Alfonso VI’s reign, and the
story continues to unfold into the 33rd year of this monarch’s rule (pp. 525-48).
In the other chronicles, this entire section corresponds to the “Interpolación
cidiana”. This text, as I have indicated, presents a different relationship with
the archetype of the Estoria de España as found in earlier sections of the
Versión amplificada. Moreover, it shows such differences from the Versión
crítica that do not allow us to conceive that it derives from the same compila-
tion. For that reason, to study how the Poema was used in Alfonso X’s court, the
most reliable witness is the one preserved in the Versión crítica. Considering
the lacuna in the text of the Versión amplificada, which was later filled with
the “Interpolación cidiana”, one might wonder if this gap already existed in
the primitive Alfonsine compilation elaborated between 1270 and 1274, or if it
21 Catalán, De Alfonso X al Conde de Barcelos, pp.124-48; Bautista, La “Estoria de España” en

época de Sancho IV, pp. 37-38.
22 However, these modifications exist in other parts of the text, especially those providing
details about Rodrigo that do not derive from poetic sources. For instance, due to a misin-
terpretation of the Historia Roderici (§4), when the Alfonsine chroniclers were describing
the battle in Graus, they changed what was merely a reference to Zaragoza into its subju-
gation (Versión crítica, p. 428). The author of the Versión amplificada, believing the narra-
tion of this event was too brief, fabricated an extensive chapter (PCG, chapter 815) in
which he extensively elaborated upon it.
23 The gloss explaining why the Cid does not bring the Moors with him after abandoning
Castejón also could be unique to the Versión amplificada (PCG, p. 525b48-526a4), although
it is worth considering that its absence in the Versión crítica may be due to the drastic way
this chronicle abbreviates the episode (pp. 470-71).
is unique to this amplified redaction. The first hypothesis would require us to

accept that the author of the Versión crítica had to resume working on this sec-
tion of the compilation from the beginning and completed what had been left
unfinished years earlier.24 The second hypothesis would imply that while the
Estoria de España was being reelaborated in Sancho IV’s court, the reproduc-
tion of this fragment was suspended for some reason, and when it was later
resumed it acquired such a unique character. Although it is an open question,
this second option is more plausible in my view, for it allows us to assume that
the author of the Versión crítica could well have used the original compilation
of the Estoria de España produced between 1270 and 1274.25
In this regard, the sources employed for this section of the Versión crítica are
the same as those used for the first part of the Cid’s biography, and the text has
the same features that characterize the Alfonsine compilation (annalistic
structure, synchronization with the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, and
the integration of supplementary sources).26 Thus, when incorporating the
rest of the PMC, the chroniclers relied upon a text similar to the extant one
through a manuscript closely connected to the Vivar codex, just as they did in
the first part.27 Besides, the propensities already noted in the way in which
the Poema was used in the Versión crítica also govern its utilization after the
siege of Valencia: details are minimized, the narration focuses on Rodrigo’s
character, and there is a marked abbreviation of the story. It could be argued
that in this section, attention is primarily drawn to the representation of the
Cid and Alfonso VI – both of whom are portrayed as irreproachable figures – as
well as to the relationship between king and vassal, seen here as an exemplary
model.28 Some episodes, such as the “Afrenta de Corpes” or the final judicial
duels between the Cid’s champions and the Infantes of Carrión, have been
24 This is how Catalán understands it in “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, pp. 199 and 204, and even
more specifically in “Rodericus” romanzado, p. 139.
25 See Fernández-Ordóñez’s brilliant reasoning in “Versión crítica” de la “Estoria de España”,
pp. 245-55.
26 Catalán, “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, pp. 199-203.
27 It is obvious that the manuscript used in the Alfonsine workshop did not have the same
material lacunae as the Vivar codex – which is the result of the loss of two folios (between
47-48 and 69-70) – as some scholars have suggested. Although the summary of the events
included in the Versión crítica does not allow us to recover the details preserved in both
folios, it sheds light on its basic narrative elements. See Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid,
pp. 532-33, who accurately recognizes the existence of both lacunae; and his notes to
vv. 2337 and 3507. See also Fernández-Ordóñez, “El Mio Cid a través de las crónicas me-
dievales”, pp. 169-71, and note 49 of this chapter.
28 Rochwert-Zuili, “Du Poème à l’Histoire”, pp. 188-93.
424 Bautista
notably abbreviated. The abbreviation of the “Afrenta de Corpes”, which has

been reduced to its most basic elements, could have been caused by the chron-
iclers, who did not want to dedicate much space to the Infantes’ reprehensible
conduct. It should also be noted that this treatment is consistent with the
scarce importance attributed to feminine characters in the Versión crítica.29
Regarding the judicial duels, it is possible that they were abbreviated because
the Cid does not participate in them. Both examples conspicuously manifest
how the author of the Versión crítica adapted his sources conferring to the text
a paradoxical aspect, since it is the only representative of the Alfonsine histo-
riographical rendering of the Poema, but its innovative character undoubtedly
distances it from what the original compilation of the Estoria de España must
have been.
To conclude, we can say that the Alfonsine chroniclers’ use of the PMC was
marked, on the linguistic level, by its adaptation to the canons of historio-
graphic discourse, whereas on the level of the content, it was defined by a
particular remodeling of the text that led to paying more attention to Rodrigo’s
military deeds as well as to his relationship with King Alfonso. Regarding this
last point, one can observe a certain idealization of their feudal ties, with the
Cid always respecting his lord’s authority, as to convert the bond between
Rodrigo Díaz and Alfonso VI into a paradigmatic harmony between the mon-
archy and the knightly estate. With respect to the Versión crítica, the author
stripped the PMC’s narration of many of its details, thus providing a succinct
and general summary. There is also in this text an intentional desire to focus on
the Cid while relegating to a secondary role other characters who, often times,
are not even given a name. Lastly, some episodes were modified in order to
eliminate any details that did not contribute to creating an ideal image of the
Cid, who is portrayed in this text as a paragon of military and knightly virtues,
and as an exemplary vassal.
4 Cardeña and the “Interpolación cidiana”
Whereas the Versión crítica offers a unified account, in the rest of the chroni-
cles – as I mentioned earlier – there is an interruption in the text that can be
precisely identified in the narration of Rodrigo’s subjugation of Denia and
Tortosa, and the subsequent siege of Aledo. From this point until the end of the
Cid’s presence in the historical account, one finds a peculiar text known as the
“Interpolación cidiana”. Its relationship with the archetype of the Estoria de
29 Powell, Epic and Chronicle, p. 97-98.

España is different from the one reproduced before and after in the Versión
amplificada (and other texts of the same family). It draws on other sources that
are quite distinct, and shows signs of a more active rewriting process. Among
the new episodes it incorporates, the ones that stand out are related to the nar-
ration of the PMC (in particular, the “Afrenta de Corpes” and the “Cortes de
Toledo”), while others not connected to the poem concern the final moments
of the Cid’s life, his death, and the transferral of his body to the Monastery of
Cardeña, the site where Rodrigo was buried and, according to some scholars,
where these episodes originated. Although the Versión crítica can be a useful
point of comparison, the considerable differences between the texts, as well as
the absence of the new literary source used by the author of the “Interpolación”
– whose text we do not directly know – make it difficult to interpret the differ-
ences. The limits of the “Interpolación” can be established accurately thanks to
codex E2, where this section corresponds to a material addition dating to the
years between the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th cen-
tury. According to Menéndez Pidal’s edition, which is based on this manuscript,
it spans from chapters 896 to 962 (PCG, pp. 565a-643b).30 Though we cannot be
sure when this section was copied, there are other testimonies of the text sug-
gesting that it was most likely redacted at the end of the 13th century. We rely
on manuscript F, which transmits a text very similar to the one in manuscript
E2, as well as two chronicles composed between the end of the 13th century
and the beginning of the 14th century, the Crónica manuelina and the Crónica
de Castilla, both of which were based on the text of the “Interpolación”. Since
many additions and innovations were incorporated into these last two works,
I will base my analysis exclusively on the edition of E2 prepared by Menéndez
Pidal.31
We do not know what caused the interruption in the text common to both
the Versión amplificada and the works related to it. Considering the innova-
tions that are present in the “Interpolación”, one could safely argue that the
lacuna resulted from a desire to incorporate new contents and expand the
entire section. Although we cannot rule out such a possibility, the abrupt
30 See Catalán’s study, pp. 64-69. Manuscripts E2 and F both contain a lacuna in the first
chapter (PCG, chapter 896) that is accurately transmitted by the Crónica manuelina and
the Crónica de Castilla. This matter was correctly observed by Catalán, De Alfonso X al
Conde de Barcelos, pp. 66-67, and explained by Hijano Villegas, “La materia cidiana en las
crónicas generales”, who offers a synoptic edition of this chapter based on the principal
texts (pp. 163-68).
31 Menéndez Pidal also included corrections and variants deriving from manuscript F, as
well as from two testimonies of the Crónica ocampiana, which are based on a text similar
to E2 and F in this section.
426 Bautista
change in the relationship between the “Interpolación” and the archetype of

the Estoria de España also suggests that the draft on which the Versión amplifi-
cada was based presented a material problem, perhaps due to a lost quire,
which forced the chroniclers to resume working on the compilation of these
episodes nearly from the beginning, taking this opportunity to undertake an
intense rewriting of this section while taking advantage of the new sources.
Together with the causes that prompted the interruption in these texts, we still
have many unanswered questions about the “Interpolación”. For example, we
do not know where or when it was written. Considering the relationship
between the final episodes and the Monastery of Cardeña, as well as some ele-
ments’ connection of this last section with other parts of the “Interpolación”,
some scholars have suggested that the entire fragment was possibly redacted
in Cardeña, perhaps as early as during Alfonso X’s reign.32 Others, however, are
inclined to situate its composition in a historiographic workshop that used and
adapted a source from Cardeña, thus dating it to the end of the 13th century.33
In my view, there are many arguments supporting this second hypothesis,
which must be explained in greater detail. Although there is a change in the
relationship between the “Interpolación” and the archetype of the Estoria
de España, this does not necessarily mean that the interpolation is totally
unrelated to the texts produced by the Alfonsine chroniclers. In fact, the inter-
polation uses one of the sources employed in Alfonso X’s workshop, and it was
done through a similar adaptation, as a comparison with the Versión crítica
shows. More specifically, we are referring to the Arabic history that recounts
the conquest of Valencia, which derives with absolute certainty from the same
translation in spite of the different usage that was made of it in the Versión
crítica, where it was extracted and summarized, and in the “Interpolación”,
where it was more faithfully reproduced, though possibly undergoing some
32 This explanation was first offered by Entwistle, “La estoria del noble varón el Çid”, which
was later accepted by, among others, Russell, “San Pedro de Cardeña y la historia heroica
del Cid”, and Catalán, La épica española, pp. 256-59, who also included a helpful bibliogra-
phy.
33 Montaner Frutos and Boix Jovaní, Guerra en Sarq Al’andalus, pp. 109-14; Lacomba, Au-delà
du “Cantar de mio Cid”, pp. 85-89; Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 530-31; and especially
Hijano Villegas, “La materia cidiana en las crónicas generales”, pp. 154-57. Previously,
Rochwert-Zuili, “Du Poème à l’Histoire”, pp. 278-99, put forward the idea that it was a his-
toriographical construct and suggested that it originated in the same environment as the
Crónica de Castilla. Nevertheless, as shown by Catalán, La épica española, pp. 277, n. 19,
and 283, the texts of mss. E2 and F are undoubtedly earlier than that of the Crónica de
Castilla. This opinion is shared by Hijano Villegas, “La Crónica de Castilla”.
amplifications.34 Even though it is possible that the translation of this Arabic

source made its way to Cardeña where it may have been used to prepare what
was to become the “Interpolación”, it seems more likely that it was utilized and
reelaborated in a historiographical workshop affiliated with Alfonso X’s court,
where the materials prepared by his chroniclers should have been kept.
An analysis of how the PMC was used also supports this hypothesis. Although
the “Interpolación” includes episodes that are far removed from the poetic
text, Catalán clairvoyantly observed that a good part of the account is based on
a poem similar to the extant one, and preserved in a manuscript closely related
to the Vivar codex.35 In effect, the entire second part of the Poema – which
centers on the defense of Valencia and the marriage of the Cid’s daughters to
the Infantes of Carrión, as well as the embassy from Navarre and Aragon and
the judicial duels at the end of the poem – derives in the “Interpolación” from
a poetic text identical to the one that has reached us. In fact, it can even be
argued that the “Interpolación” did not directly use the Poema, but rather a
prosification on which the Versión crítica also depends, that was prepared,
therefore, in the Alfonsine workshop. The relationship between the Versión
crítica and the “Interpolación” is obscured by the different ways in which both
texts treat the material deriving from the Poema. As we have seen, the Versión
crítica abbreviates the content – and at times radically – whereas the “Inter-
polación” tends to expand it with greater intensity than the Versión amplificada
by rationalizing actions, incorporating glosses, and even deducing some
scenes. In the case of the “Interpolación”, a narration unlike the one preserved
in the extant poem is added to the material about the “Afrenta de Corpes” and
the “Cortes de Toledo”. However, in the rest of the narration, the very different
treatment has not eliminated some minor innovations to the Poema that are
common to both the “Interpolación” and the Versión crítica.36
34 Catalán, “El Mio Cid de Alfonso X”, p. 224, n. 129, and “Rodericus” romanzado, pp. 93-94 and
138-39; Hijano Villegas, “La materia cidiana en las crónicas generales”, p. 146 and n. 13.
I have compared the texts again and concluded that they are undoubtedly based on the
same translation. See also Montaner Frutos and Boix Jovaní, Guerra en Sarq Al’andalus,
pp. 113-14.
35 Catalán, La épica española, pp. 260-71; see also Rochwert-Zuili, “Du Poème à l’Histoire”,
pp. 277-78, who explains this matter less clearly.
36 In addition to the different treatment, it also must be remembered that these texts were
genealogically related at an earlier moment in time. They were not derived from the
Alfonsine compilation, but rather from the prosification carried out in the royal work-
shop; therefore, in the case of the Versión crítica, the narration likely underwent modifica-
tions while it was being integrated along with other sources, coupled with the changes
particular to this version.
428 Bautista
Let’s examine some examples. After the conquest of Valencia, the Cid
entrusts Álvar Fáñez with another embassy to Alfonso VI in order to present
the king with more gifts and beg him to allow the Cid’s wife and daughters to
reunite with the hero (vv. 1267-81). Both the Versión crítica and the “Inter-
polación” incorporate the direct discourse rather faithfully, and by doing so,
some commonalities are detected. In both texts, the Cid refers to Alfonso as
“mi señor” instead of “mi señor natural” (v. 1272), and there is also a gloss
describing the horses sent to the king as “ensellados e enfrenados” (Versión
crítica, p. 530; PCG, p. 583a38-42). At their meeting, Álvar Fáñez says that the
Cid has sent him to kiss King Alfonso’s hands and feet “commo a tan buen
señor” (v. 1323), to which both prose texts add “señor natural” (Versión crítica,
p. 531; PCG, p. 593b35). In the description of the booty the Cid won upon van-
quishing the king of Morocco, among the details provided in the poem, both
prose texts underscore the enemies’ tents: “e las mas rricas tiendas que omne
nunca vio” (Versión crítica, p. 534; cf. v. 1782); “fue fallada vna tienda del rey de
Marruecos, la mayor e la mas noble que nunca omne vio” (PCG, p. 598a37-39; cf.
v. 1785). The king of Morocco’s tent is included among the gifts the Cid sends to
Alfonso, whereas in the Poema, the present is limited to two hundred horses
(vv. 1813 and 1854): “e la tyenda que fuera del rrey Yuçef” (Versión crítica, p. 534);
“et la noble tienda que fue de Iunes rey de Marruecos” (PCG, p. 598b15-16).37 In
the description of the meeting between the Cid and Alfonso further ahead,
both texts incorporate the verse “los inojos e las manos en tierra los fincó”
(v. 2021), adding to it “por le besar los pies” (Versión crítica, p. 535; PCG,
p. 600b25). Although some of these cases could be coincidental, their sheer
number and the significance of some of them – like the one about the king of
Morocco’s tent – suggest that the “Interpolación” relied upon the same prosifi-
cation of the Poema produced in the Alfonsine workshop which is ultimately
at the origin of the Versión crítica.38
37 It is true that in vv. 1785-90 of the Poema the Cid declares his intention to send the tent to
King Alfonso: “La tienda del rey de Marruecos, que de las otras es cabo, / dos tendales la
sufren, con oro son labrados; / mandó myo Cid Ruy Díaz, que fita soviesse la tienda / e non
la tolliesse dent cristiano: / – Tal tienda commo esta, que de Marruecos es passada, / enbi-
arla quiero a Alfonso el castellano”. However, the tent is not mentioned when the Cid
entrusts Álvar Fáñez with the embassy to Alfonso or when the hero’s friend meets with
the king. In my view, this is clearly an innovation common to both the Versión crítica and
the “Interpolación”, possibly to make the episode more coherent.
38 For a different opinion, see Catalán, La épica española, p. 263. Referring to the Versión
crítica and the “Interpolación”, Catalán also points out that it would be impossible to
reconstruct “un hipotético texto en prosa del que pudieran depender” (La épica española,
p. 267), although the same could also be said of the translation of the Arabic history about
In spite of this, it is clear to me that the author of the “Interpolación” did not
use an Alfonsine compilation in which these materials had already been com-
bined. This is proven by its near complete lack of information originating from
the Historia Roderici whose text, instead, was utilized in the Versión crítica.39
The same is true if we consider that in this work the information about the
conquest of Murviedro and Valencia deriving from the Arabic history and the
Poema are found intertwined, whereas in the “Interpolación” these events
exclusively follow the Arabic history (Versión crítica, p. 525-29; PCG, caps. 907-
20). Therefore, even though the author of the “Interpolación” may have had at
his disposal some Alfonsine materials – that is to say, the translation of the
Arabic history about the conquest of Valencia and the prosification of the
Poema – he did not rely on a compilation of them, which may have been acces-
sible to the author of the Versión crítica. This would explain, for example, the
absence of chronologies in the “Interpolación” as well as the lack of references
to the Papacy or the Holy Roman Empire, typical features of the Estoria de
España also found in the Versión crítica. Perhaps the need to create, from the
beginning, a historical account for this section also brought about the defining
traits of the “Interpolación”: a broader and more faithful reproduction of its
sources, particularly of the Arabic history; less integration of materials that
were juxtaposed rather than combined; and a more extensive opening to this
section, that was rewritten with greater freedom and to which legendary epi-
sodes unknown to the author of the Versión crítica were added.
the conquest of Valencia, which does not preclude us from acknowledging that both the
Versión crítica and the “Interpolación” relied upon the same translation of it.
39 The passages in the Versión crítica originating from the Latin history are not included in
the “Interpolación”, although it is possible that it occasionally relied on the Historia Ro-
derici; see the case pointed out by Lacomba, Au-delà du “Cantar de mio Cid”, p. 83. We
could argue that the detail about where the confrontation between the king of Seville and
the Cid takes place – “cerca de la huerta que dizen de Villa Nueua” (PCG, p. 592b14-15) – is
borrowed from the Historia Roderici (§55); however, considering the number of times this
geographical place is mentioned before and after this point in the text, this is not the only
possibility (see note 61). Montaner Frutos and Boix Jovaní suggest in Guerra en Sarq
Al’andalus, p. 220, that possibly two borradores were simultaneously created: one that
combined the Poema and the Historia Roderici with information from the Arabic source
used in the Versión crítica, and another that integrated the Poema with the Arabic source
used in the “Interpolación”. Nevertheless, this hypothesis seems less plausible, among
other reasons, because of the lack of evidence proving that the Alfonsine workshop pre-
pared alternative drafts for the same section, not even for those sections in which there
are important variations in the extant texts. For this matter, see Bautista, “Para la tradición
textual de la Estoria de España”.
430 Bautista
The use of Alfonsine materials supports the hypothesis that the “Inter-
polación” was elaborated in a historiographical workshop affiliated with the
royal court. This is not to say that a work produced in Cardeña about the final
moments of the Cid’s life, which has come to be known as the *Estoria del Cid
or *Leyenda de Cardeña, did not exist.40 The presence of a number of origi-
nal episodes that are obviously connected to the Monastery of Cardeña and
are unknown to the Versión crítica, not only point to Burgos’ monastery as the
place of composition of such a story, but also to the fact that it was known and
utilized by the interpolation’s author. Similar to other sources, the *Leyenda
de Cardeña would have been extensively rewritten in the course of adapta-
tion to the proper elements of historiographical discourse. This explains, in
my view, the interrelationship that exists between some characters from the
Arabic history about the conquest of Valencia and others found in episodes
that seemingly derive from the monastic text. If we also keep in mind that the
author of the “Interpolación” seems to be more innovative than what can gen-
erally be perceived in the previous section of the story related to the Versión
amplificada that I analyzed before, then it becomes clear why it is so difficult to
accurately distinguish – beyond basic or general aspects – the characteristics
of the source elaborated in Cardeña from those of the “Interpolación”.41
From this perspective, it is possible to date the composition of this text with
relative certainty. As I have pointed out, the “Interpolación” was also included
in the textual model used by the Crónica manuelina and the Crónica de Castilla,
where it underwent new additions that are addressed in the next section. Since
these works date either to the end of the 13th century or the beginning of the
14th century, it is obvious that the “Interpolación” – in its more primitive stage
as transmitted in manuscripts E2 and F – had to exist earlier, probably during
the reign of Sancho IV. Moreover, keeping in mind the evident complementary
relationship between the “Interpolación” and the material lacuna in the royal
codex E2, everything seems to indicate that this section is related to problems
that arose during the composition of the Versión amplificada. The “Inter-
polación”, which was still unavailable when the royal manuscript was produced
in 1289, was likely finished soon after, perhaps around 1290, although it was
materially integrated into E2 sometime later, between the end of the 13th cen-
40 Entwistle, Russell, and Catalán prefered to call it Estoria del Cid. On the other hand, the
title Leyenda de Cardeña was used by Menéndez Pidal in his appendix of the sources used
for the PCG, as well as by Montaner, Hijano, and others. Throughout this study, I will also
use this title.
41 Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle, p. 139.
tury and the beginning of the 14th century.42 In any event, the difference in
date of composition and relationship to the archetype of the Estoria de España
implies that the “Interpolación”, despite its sharing many of the same charac-
teristics of the Versión amplificada both before and after the textual lacuna
– such as the tendency to expand the narration and the inclusion of glosses
and commentaries – had already undergone a certain separation from the
Versión amplificada, having emphasized the innovative nature of the rewriting
of Alfonsine materials.43
Leaving aside for the moment an analysis of the episodes related to the
*Leyenda de Cardeña, we shall first look at how this characteristic is manifested
in the material originating from the Poema. If we use Menéndez Pidal’s edition
– which is based on codex E2 – as a point of reference, the narration related to
the Poema in the “Interpolación” extends from chapter 922, with the battle
between the Cid and the king of Seville (vv. 1221 and following), to the begin-
ning of chapter 946, in which the news about the judicial duels reaches
Valencia (v. 3716).44 As I have already pointed out, in a good part of this sec-
tion – that is, the entire “Cantar de las Bodas” and the final episode of the
judicial combats – the “Interpolación” is based on a poem similar to the extant
one but most likely on a prosification that had been carried out in the Alfonsine
workshop. However, all of this material is significantly different from what we
find in the Versión crítica. Not only is the narration abbreviated in this latter
text, but diverse innovations also have been incorporated into the “Inter-
polación” through which the redaction is amplified: scenes are deduced, plot
development is rationalized, and the content is accompanied by glosses.45
After battling the king of Seville, the Cid sends gift-bearing envoys to Alfonso
VI, who beseech the monarch to allow Rodrigo’s family to join him in Valencia.
According to the interpolation, the Cid entrusts the mission to Álvar Fáñez and
Martín Antolínez, providing them with money for both his wife and the abbot
42 Bautista, La “Estoria de España” en época de Sancho IV, pp. 48-56. This is the same date
proposed by Hijano Villegas, “La materia cidiana en las crónicas generales”, pp. 154-57.
43 If we had to situate the “Interpolación” within the scope of a particular project or historio-
graphical text, I would be inclined to place it within the scope of the Versión amplificada
where the lacuna completed with this fragment appears. However, the differences
detected in the textual models used throughout, the different time of composition, as
well as the intensification of the rewriting, justify the distinction of this part of the text
and its particular treatment.
44 It is also possible that the chapters about the second marriage of the Cid’s daughters and
their later departure from Valencia (PCG, 949-50) are an amplification of the Poema
(vv. 3717-23), since this is a rather clichéd narrative.
45 Catalán, La épica española, pp. 260-71.
432 Bautista
of Cardeña, as well as to repay the Jewish moneylenders (PCG, pp. 592-94), thus
closing a sequence that had remained unresolved from the onset of the Cid’s
banishment.46 Similarly, a brief story is sometimes elaborated, as in the case
of Álvar Salvadórez, a character only mentioned in the Poema when he is
imprisoned (v. 1681). The author of the “Interpolación” fabricates several details
about him and even recounts Salvadórez’s liberation after the Cid defeats the
king of Morocco (PCG, p. 598a39-43). In addition to the deduction of these
types of episodes, the Poema’s narrative is amplified by the inclusion of pas-
sages about war preparations or ceremonial acts like welcoming the Infantes of
Carrión to Valencia (PCG, pp. 601b-02a). By virtue of these interventions, the
Cid’s character and his actions are magnified, thus resulting in a certain ritual-
ization of the account replete with formulas about the excellence of everything
related to the hero (see, for example, PCG, p. 629b).
Along with this amplified and glossed version of a poem similar to the
extant one, there are other episodes in the “Interpolación” so unique and so far
removed from the Poema that, in essence, it seems impossible to attribute
them to the author’s inventiveness. The use of a source other than the Poema
is, in my view, the most likely explanation for the story narrated in the “Inter-
polación” from the “Afrenta de Corpes” to the “Cortes de Toledo” (PCG, chapters
932-43).47 Although we cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that the extant
poem was used to compose this section, almost everything narrated in it is
profoundly different from the Poema.48 It is also possible, I should add, that
this source was partially used in the preceding sections to narrate the episode
of the lion and the battle with Bucar (PCG, chapters 929-31), although its differ-
ence from the Poema is not so conspicuous.49
46 For Montaner’s commentary on the corresponding passage in the Poema, see Cantar de
mio Cid, pp. 858-60.
47 For a different perspective, see Rochwert-Zuili, “Du Poème à l’Histoire”, pp. 279 and 284;
see also Montaner’s discussion, Cantar de mio Cid, p. 529, with bibliography.
48 Beyond some general aspects – for example, the division of the Cid’s lawsuit presented
against the Infantes of Carrión at the Cortes of Toledo into three parts – it does not seem
possible to establish clear connections between the chapters narrating the “Afrenta de
Corpes” and the “Cortes de Toledo” in the “Interpolación” and the Poema.
49 Passages completely unrelated to the Poema include the Infantes’ conversation after the
episode of the lion and the discussion with their uncle, Suero González (PCG, pp. 603b-
04a); the presence of Ordoño at the battle against Bucar and some of his military deeds
(PCG, p. 606a); and finally, the conclusion of the battle, in which Bucar does not die. The
first two cases are connected to the narration of the “Afrenta de Corpes” and the “Cortes
de Toledo”. I will speak more about the third example in the pages ahead. In these sections
the author of the “Interpolación” added details from another source to an account based
The plot’s organization, the characters that intervene, the presence of new
dialogues, and the creation of new scenes in the sequence comprising every-
thing from the “Afrenta de Corpes” to the “Cortes de Toledo” separate the
“Interpolación” from the Poema. All of these variations radically alter the story,
at times giving rise not to a ritualized narration, but to turbulent situations
that cannot be explained as part of the adaptation of the material to the histo-
riographical discourse. Let’s look at an example. The brief mention of the
bench on which the Cid sits during the Cortes in Toledo (vv. 3115 and 3121)
becomes an extensive episode in the “Interpolación”; it includes new charac-
ters and takes on a very distinct orientation from how it is narrated in the
poetic text. While in the Poema it is simply a gift to the king, who then offers it
to the hero during the trial at the Cortes in Toledo, it is now described as a luxu-
rious bench “muy sotil de lauor […] cubierto con muy ricos pannos de seda
labrados de oro” (PCG, p. 616a23-28). The hero orders Fernán Alfonso, a charac-
ter who is never mentioned in the Poema, to place the bench in the palace and
keep watch over it. One day, when the king, escorted by a few counts and ricos
hombres, passes by it, Count García Ordóñez utters sarcastic and insulting
remarks, asking the king to which bride that bed belonged and requesting that
either he take it for himself or have it removed. Fernán Alfonso aggressively
responds to García Ordóñez’s impertinent remarks, and when the count
attempts to attack the young man, the monarch prevents a brawl by recount-
ing how the Cid won that bench. This entire episode – replete with aggressive
attitudes and sarcasm – supports the notion of a literary recreation of the
Poema that, in my view, cannot be attributed to the compiler responsible for
the “Interpolación cidiana”.50
The bench is mentioned again during the debates in the “Cortes de Toledo”
when Count García Ordóñez addresses the Infantes of Carrión and says, “dexar
on the Poema. The rest is closely related to the extant poem and, at times, is very close to
the Versión crítica (for example, compare the Versión crítica, p. 539, with the PCG,
p. 606a26-30). This final observation affects the discussion about the contents of the two
lacunae detected in the Vivar codex resulting from two lost folios (see note 27). In my
view, the narration preserved in the “Interpolación” (PCG, pp. 604b-05a and 624a) derives
from a poetic text, similar to the extant one, prosified in the Alfonsine workshop, where it
was glossed and modified. For that reason, it is definitive proof that the lacunae of the
Vivar codex were not present in the manuscript used in the Alfonsine workshop. This
must be taken into account when discussing the contents of the lacunae, and yet it should
be treated with caution considering the liberties taken by the author of the “Interpo-
lación” and his use of another literary source dealing with the material included in the
final part of the Poema.
50 For a different opinion, see Rochwert-Zuili, “Du Poème à l’Histoire”, pp. 297-99.
434 Bautista
estar el Cid asentado en su escanno como nouio” (PCG, p. 621b2-3). His words
incite Pero Vermúdez to react violently, and spurred on by the Cid, he rushes
over to Count García Ordóñez and punches him: “çerro el punno et diol vna tal
ferida que dio con el en tierra” (PCG, p. 621b36-38). With this, the trial in the
Cortes is about to be transformed into a spontaneous brawl that the king is
forced to halt with “muy grandes vozes”. This entire scene is unlike the careful
representation of the Cortes described by the author of the Poema, nor does it
seem possible to explain it as the deduction of a compiler trying to integrate
the material within a historiographical discourse. There are other additions
that are equally incompatible with the type of work that we can attribute to
the compiler of the “Interpolación cidiana”. The importance given to Ordoño,
one of the Cid’s knights, is another example. Although he is never mentioned
in the PMC, in the “Interpolación” he carries out some feats that in the Poema
are accomplished by Pero Vermúdez. He is also found at the center of new
episodes, such as the one narrating his investiture as a knight (at the beginning
of chapter 943). Similarly, there is a transformation of many details related to
the “Afrenta de Corpes”: the particulars about how the Cid’s daughters are dis-
covered after being beaten, their remaining in the woods attended by Ordoño
for seven days, their subsequent stay at a peasant’s house, and all the embas-
sies related to these events, with itineraries and other details totally distinct
from what is narrated in the Poema.51
As Catalán accurately pointed out, the utilization of two sources narrating
in different ways the content of the last part of the PMC is somehow related to
the presence of various contradictions in the “Interpolación”.52 During the
“Cortes de Toledo”, the rieptos pit characters against one another in a way that
is totally distinct from the manner in which it is narrated in the Poema, whereas
in the judicial duels, the characters’ actions are in total agreement with the
ones described in the poem. In the “Cortes de Toledo”, the Cid gives Álvar Fáñez
the sword Colada, but later in the episode of the judicial duels it appears in the
hands of Martín Antolínez, just like in the Poema. At different times in the
“Interpolación”, specifically in the episodes of the “Afrenta de Corpes” and the
“Cortes de Toledo”, Álvar Fáñez is referred to as the Cid’s cousin, but in other
occasions, when it follows the Poema (vv. 2858, 3438, and 3448), its details are
reproduced and the author refers to Álvar Fáñez as the cousin of the Cid’s
51 For a description of how the narration of this episode in the “Interpolación” differs from
the one in the Poema, see Cirot, “L’épisode des infants de Carrion”; and Pattison, “The
‘Afrenta de Corpes’”.
52 Catalán, La épica española, pp. 273-75.
daughters.53 In my view, it is clear that the author of the “Interpolación”, whose

task was to balance and unify these particulars, did not create such incon-
sistencies.
Such an alternative source to the Poema would have surely included an
account quite similar to the “Afrenta de Corpes” and the “Cortes de Toledo” in
the “Interpolación”; perhaps it may also have recounted the episode of the lion
and the battle with Bucar, although for this part of the story it would have only
partially used it (see note 49). It is also possible that this other source would
have included the judicial duels, although the author of the “Interpolación”
exclusively relied upon the extant poetic text in this section. What kind of
work could this other source have been? Everything suggests that it was a liter-
ary reworking of the Poema – surely based on the extant text – which treated
the material with some degree of sensationalism by developing and exploiting
the existing antagonism between the Cid and the Infantes of Carrión’s camp.
Through the “Interpolación”, one can perceive that the characterization of the
Infantes in such a text must have been even more negative than their portrayal
in the Poema, and the clash between the two factions must have been carried
out in a more insulting and chaotic way. At the same time, this other text would
allow for the inclusion of many new characters that were possibly linked to
ancestral interests or lineage favoritism.54 In this sense, it is striking that the
Cid is, at times, surrounded by diverse and turbulent characters, as in the case
of the knights who accompany him to the Cortes in Toledo who are remem-
bered in a long list (PCG, chapter 939). Although this unknown source could
have been the reworking of an epic poem circumscribed to the final part of the
PMC, it could be argued that it was a different kind of reelaboration. If we bear
in mind that many chapters of the “Interpolación” are dedicated to the final
moments of the Cid’s life and that they ultimately have their origins in a
*Leyenda de Cardeña, it is possible that the episodes of the “Afrenta de Corpes”
and the “Cortes de Toledo” – as well as other details that contrast with those
found in the Poema – could have formed part of the same monastic narration.
Let’s first examine the basic episodes that most likely could be connected to
such a monastic source. After the Cid has taken vengeance on the Infantes of
53 Álvar Fáñez is referred to as the Cid’s cousin also in the Mocedades de Rodrigo; see Deyer-
mond’s edition, Epic poetry and the Clergy, p. 235 (vv. 258-59).
54 See, for example, what is said about the six judges presiding over the Cortes (PCG, p. 617b):
three of them are the heads of noble families, among them, the Villalobos, the Osorios,
the Girones, and the Laras. It is difficult to know if their inclusion responds to real ances-
tral interests or to a desire to symbolically include a considerable portion of the Castilian
nobility and knightly estate in the Cidian universe. See Rochwert-Zuili’s commentary, “Du
Poème à l’Histoire”, pp. 310-15, and “El Cantar de Mio Cid y la Crónica de Castilla”.
436 Bautista
Carrión and is back in Valencia, a messenger arrives from the Soldán de Persia,
who has heard all about Rodrigo’s exploits. Since the objective is to establish an
alliance with the Cid, the Soldán sends Rodrigo many gifts, among them, a
chessboard “que aun oy en dia es en el monesterio de Sant Pedro de Cardenna”
(PCG, p. 628a24-25). A Moor at the service of the Cid decides to convert to
Christianity and takes the name Gil Díaz (PCG, chapter 951). When news arrives
that Bucar has returned to attack Valencia, Saint Peter appears to the hero and
announces his upcoming death; he tells Rodrigo that, after his death, he will
ride his horse and together with his knights he will vanquish his enemy (PCG,
chapter 952).55 The Cid makes the last confession; prepares everything so that
once he has died, his body can be mounted on his horse; organizes the evacu-
ation of Valencia; and dictates a will (PCG, chapters 953-54). After the Cid dies,
Bucar reaches the city’s doors and begins the assault; however, the Moor is
defeated by the Cid’s retinue, led by the now-dead Rodrigo Díaz, whose body is
propped on his horse with the sword Tizón in hand (PCG, chapter 956). This
enables the Christians to abandon the city without danger, and it is only later
when Bucar and his men discover that Valencia is deserted that they enter the
city (PCG, chapter 957). On the road to Cardeña, to where his remains are being
transported, Rodrigo’s daughters and their husbands pay respect to his body
(PCG, chapter 958), and once in the monastery, Alfonso VI visits his tomb (PCG,
chapter 959). When Babieca dies, Gil Díaz has the horse buried at the entrance
to the monastery, and four years later, when Jimena passes away, she too is
entombed in Cardeña (PCG, chapter 960). The annual commemorations in
honor of the Cid are then described, and how in one of them, owing to the fact
that the abbot was forced to preach outside of the monastery due to the large
number of people congregated, a lone Jew entered the church to contemplate
the Cid, whose embalmed body was in the same state as when it left Valencia.
When the Jew attempted to pull the Cid’s beard, Rodrigo’s hand took hold of
his sword and slightly unsheathed it. The Jew, frightened, converted to
55 In this chapter, manuscripts E2 and F lack the dialogue between the Cid and Saint Peter;
however, Menéndez Pidal borrowed it from two testimonies of the Crónica ocampiana (it
is also included in the Crónica manuelina and the Crónica de Castilla) and incorporated
the passage into his critical text (PCG, p. 633b20-34a17). This could be either an error or a
deliberate suppression originating from the common source of E2 and F, especially if we
consider that the apparition of Saint Peter appears in the title of the chapter and is men-
tioned later in the narration by the Cid himself (PCG, p. 634a46-b4). However, in order to
more accurately assess this point, it would be necessary to have a better understanding of
the models used by the Crónica ocampiana. See Hijano Villegas, “La materia cidiana en las
crónicas generales”, pp. 152-53.
Christianity, took the name Diego Gil, and remained affiliated with the monas-
tery until he died shortly after Gil Díaz (PCG, chapters 961-62).56
In this account – whose source is still unknown to us – the Cidian cult at the
Monastery of Cardeña plays a central role, thus making it logical to situate its
composition there. Also, the Cid’s posthumous victory over Bucar must have
originated in Cardeña, since this is the major exploit recorded in an epitaph
written in Romance, likely dating to the 14th century, preserved at the religious
house.57 As I have mentioned before, without the text of the *Leyenda de
Cardeña it is difficult to assess the extent to which the author of the “Inter-
polación” modified this text upon integrating it into his work. One of the more
remarkable traits of the “Interpolación” is its tendency to justify the most
implausible actions in rational or historical terms. Taking this into consider-
ation, its author may be responsible for explaining how the Cid’s body was
preserved for many years by virtue of the balsams and ointments he had
received among the gifts sent by the Soldán de Persia, or the elaborate inven-
tion of props and supports that kept Rodrigo’s body mounted on his horse in
order to participate in the battle against Bucar after his death. In effect, all
these precise details seem more characteristic of a historiographical work than
a monastic legend, and they may be interpreted as an effort to adapt this fan-
tastic account into a historical narrative.58
To the author of the “Interpolación” one must attribute the establishment of
several connections linking this final section to characters mentioned earlier
in the text. Thus, to him belongs the invention of an apocryphal source, which
is supposedly at the base of these final episodes, attributing its authorship to
“Abenalfarax”, who had been mentioned earlier as the author of an Arab his-
tory about the conquest of Valencia.59 This is clearly an expedient to legitimize
56 About this episodes, in addition to the studies cited in note 32, see Henriet, “¿Santo u
hombre ilustre?”, who provides a complete bibliography.
57 For this brief text, see Montaner Frutos, “El epitafio épico del Cid”. Although the epitaph
most likely borrowed information from the Crónica de Castilla, we can also assume that it
reflects the special relevance of this episode in Cardeña’s Cidian imaginary.
58 The tendency to rationalize was first pointed out by Russell, “San Pedro de Cardeña”,
pp. 78-81, although he attributed this characteristic to the monastic text. The view about
this matter fundamentally affects how the Cidian text is understood.
59 “Segunt cuenta la estoria que conpuso Abenalfarax, sobrino de Gil Diaz” (PCG, p. 633a24-
25); “Segunt cuenta Abenalfarax que fizo esta estoria en arauigo” (p. 638a50-51). The
author of the “Interpolación” even includes “Abenalfarax” as a character in the story (PCG,
chapter 957). The invention of this apocryphal source was inspired by a reference in the
previous section about the Cid’s conquest of Valencia: “diz Abenfarax en su arauigo, onde
esta estoria fue sacada” (PCG, p. 578b30-31). However, in this case it could be an authentic
438 Bautista
these contents that, often times, verge on being implausible. In my opinion,

the author of the “Interpolación” is also responsible for identifying the Moor
who converts to Christianity with the historical figure Alwaqqašī (“Alhuacaxi”),
who had been mentioned before during the conquest of Valencia as both
alfaquí and author of an elegy directed to the people of the city. In this case,
the identification is rather careless, since Alhuacaxi is described as the Moor
the Cid had made alcalde years earlier, when in fact this detail actually refers to
Albenalfarax.60 Other traits pretending to superficially link the section
depending on the *Leyenda de Cardeña with the previous narration also may
be attributed to the author of the “Interpolación”.61
Nevertheless, certain connections that exist between the part deriving from
the monastic source and the episodes linked to the Cid’s gesta – found in minor
details and not necessary for historiographical ends – point to the possibility
that the narration about the “Afrenta de Corpes” and the “Cortes de Toledo” as
it is recounted in the “Interpolación” formed part of the *Leyenda de Cardeña.
After applying ointments to the hero’s body, his men bring it to “la eglesia de
Santa Maria de las Uirtudes” (PCG, p. 636a31). This same church is mentioned
in passing and only once in the text, in a speech by Álvar Fáñez during a ses-
sion at the “Cortes de Toledo”, in reference to the church of the Cid’s daughters’
marriage to the infantes (PCG, p. 618b32-33).62 Rodrigo Díaz’s polemical bench,
that was mentioned earlier, happens to be one of the Cidian relics preserved at
Cardeña (PCG, p. 604b27-34). Furthermore, the second battle with Bucar is
inextricably linked to the first battle as recounted in the “Interpolación” with
significant differences from the Poema’s narration. In the interpolation, unlike
the narration in the Poema, Bucar does not die, but rather he boards “sus naues”
and manages to escape even though the Cid succeeds in reaching the Moorish
king by hurling the sword at him and hitting him “en las espaldas” (PCG,
p. 606b27-28).63 The novelties of that first battle with Bucar cannot be attrib-
reference, as Montaner Frutos and Boix Jovaní have argued, Guerra en Sarq Al’andalus,
pp. 214-16.
60 Compare PCG, p. 632a50-b9 with PCG, chapters 909-10. The inspiration for describing Abe-
nalfarax as Gil Díaz-Alhuacaxi’s nephew may be found at the beginning of chapter 911.
61 The many references to the “huerta de Villanueva” (PCG, pp. 629a47, 631a23-24, and
638a41) seem to be an echo of earlier references made to this same place (PCG, pp. 570b32-
33, 580b36-37, and 592b15).
62 However, when narrating the nuptials (PCG, chapter 928), the “Interpolación” faithfully
adheres to the Poema, which does not reference the church either.
63 The transformation of this episode is also connected to the story about the sword Tizón,
which is slightly different from the information provided in the Poema, where the Cid
wins it upon killing Bucar (v. 2426). In the “Interpolación”, just before entering battle with
uted to the author of the “Interpolación” since they are found in an earlier text
that has no direct relationship with it: the Castilian translation of Jiménez de
Rada’s Historia gothica, also known as Estoria de los godos (c.1252-53).64
Therefore, it is most likely that this peculiar narration about the “Afrenta de
Corpes” and the “Cortes de Toledo” – as well as other details I have mentioned
– could have been part of the *Leyenda de Cardeña, which perhaps recorded
the Cid’s biography after his conquest of Valencia.65
The creation of the *Leyenda de Cardeña has generally been dated to the
times of Alfonso X – more specifically, to the years leading up to the renovation
of the Cid’s sepulcher commissioned by the Wise King (probably sometime
between 1272 and 1281), since the “Interpolación” describes the old location of
the tomb and does not mention the monarch’s intervention.66 However, taking
into consideration the references to Cardeña’s traditions preserved in the
Estoria de los godos, we can date it a few years earlier, around 1250. If this date
is correct, it is probable that Alfonso X was familiar with this text, especially
the Moorish king, Rodrigo Díaz explains that he gave Colada and Tizón to the Infantes of
Carrión when they married his daughters (PCG, p. 603b37-45). Although the “Interpo-
lación” later mentions that the Cid won the sword Tizón in the battle against Bucar (PCG,
p. 606b29-31), I believe this detail was taken from the Poema and awkwardly incorporated
into the text by its author, not taking into consideration the denouement of the episode.
64 “Depues Ruy Diaz priso Ualençia e uino sobrel Bucar con grandes poderes […] e uençie-
ron a Bucar, y el escapo a pies de cauallo fasta el mar, que se puso en una galea; los otros
fueron todos muertos e presos e fue muy grand la ganançia del canpo” (Ward, Estoria de
los godos, p. 148). Note the similar way in which both texts describe how Bucar is chased
to the sea and flees by ship. The importance of this passage was pointed out by Catalán in
“Rodericus” romanzado, pp. 83-85 and 94. It is quite possible that this tradition originated
in Cardeña since the Estoria de los godos includes an episode about King Sancho of
Navarre that is also connected to the monastery (Catalán, “Rodericus” romanzado, pp. 165-
66), which I address in the pages ahead. It is also worth noting that memories of the
conflict between the Cid and Bucar seems to have had an early and special influence in
Cardeña, as Montaner has pointed out, Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 933-34.
65 It may be possible to establish connections between Cardeña and the list of knights
accompanying the Cid to the Cortes in Toledo (PCG, chapter 939), as proposed by Smith,
“The Diffusion of the Cid Cult”, pp. 42-43. These and other knights are among those
entombed in the monastery, and despite the fact that the earliest lists recording their
names date to the 15th century, there is evidence that they originated from the Crónica de
Castilla. For the use of the Cidian myth in Cardeña in the 14th and 15th centuries, see
Bautista, “Cardeña, Pedro de Barcelos y la Genealogía del Cid”.
66 Smith is inclined to accept this date, “The Cid as Charlemagne”, pp. 525-31. For the date of
the Alfonsine intervention, which is mentioned in the Crónica de Castilla, see Catalán,
“Rodericus” romanzado, p. 93, and Hijano Villegas, “La materia cidiana en las crónicas
generales”, p. 158, with bibliography.
440 Bautista
considering his connection to the monastery and his interest in the Cid’s
remains. If the *Leyenda de Cardeña never got to be incorporated into the
archetype of the Estoria de España, this was possibly not due to an act of cen-
sorship, but rather to the incompleteness of this section and because the draft
used for the Versión crítica had not yet integrated this source.67 Similar to what
happened with the Arabic history about the conquest of Valencia, the inclu-
sion of the *Leyenda de Cardeña in the “Interpolación” was far less selective
than in the Versión crítica, which to a certain degree compensates for its loss
and allows us at least to know its fundamental characteristics.
On the other hand, if the episodes of the “Afrenta de Corpes” and the “Cortes
de Toledo” as narrated in the “Interpolación” were part of the *Leyenda, its
source would have been close to a poem very similar to the extant one that was
reelaborated to provide a more dramatic narration in which some scenes were
more complex, such as the ones related to the diffusion of the news about the
violent abuse of the Cid’s daughters, while others, such as the episodes of the
“Cortes de Toledo”, were given a more sensational spin. It is possible that the
increased number of people in the hero’s entourage was meant to establish
connections with certain noble families, and thus help disseminate the legend
and increase the renown of the monastery. In the last part, the Cid is portrayed
as a flawless individual whose death is worthy of a saint, and whose embalmed
body, now in Cardeña, played a fundamental role in the miracle that resulted
in the conversion of a Jew to Christianity.
The “Interpolación cidiana” is a challenging palimpsest that, for many rea-
sons, has not been studied sufficiently. Employing Alfonsine materials such
as the translation of the Arabic source about the conquest of Valencia or the
prosification of the PMC, the author created an entirely new story destined to
complete a material lacuna in the compilatory draft of the Estoria de España
that had been used to compose the Versión amplificada. In this process, it seems
that the author preserved the essential contents of his sources. Showing no
inclination to abbreviate his narration like the author of the Versión crítica, he
tended instead to amplify and even deduce some of the contents. In his treat-
ment of the prosification of the PMC, the author is more prone to magnify the
figure of the Cid, portraying him as an example of the perfect vassal. However,
not all innovations are the product of his inventiveness: just as he did not cre-
ate the episodes about the final moments of the Cid’s life or his entombment
67 See Hijano Villegas, “La materia cidiana en las crónicas generales”, p. 159. For another leg-
endary story originating from Cardeña that was later integrated into the Estoria de España
yet absent from the Versión crítica, see Bautista, “Pseudo-historia y leyenda”. It is probable
that both texts arrived to the Alfonsine workshop at the same time.
in Cardeña, which must derive from a work now lost that was redacted at that
monastery, so one cannot ascribe to him the version of the “Afrenta de Corpes”,
the “Cortes de Toledo”, and some of the details incorporated into the episode
of the lion and the battle with Bucar. Given the evident connections between
this section and the episodes about the hero’s death, it is very likely that this
new version – clearly literary in nature – was part of the *Leyenda de Cardeña.
In short, with the incorporation of this narration, the author not only was com-
pleting the Cid’s history with details relative to his final days – amidst devotion
and miracles – but he was also introducing a more tumultuous and stirring
representation of the clash between the Cid’s camp and that of the Infantes
of Carrión, thus accentuating the tension between two models of nobility and
promoting the one that favored royal service and valor. As Fernán Alfonso says
to Count García Ordóñez: “aquel que se a de asentar en este escanno, mas val
que uos nin que todo el uuestro linage” (PCG, p. 616b2-4).
5 The Cid and the Chronicles of Castile
From the end of the 13th century, the diffusion and reworkings of the Estoria de
España, based on its various redactions, began to be circumscribed to specific
sections rather than focus on the entire work. As expected, the part that gar-
nered most attention was the history of Castile. As for the models utilized, only
in one case the Versión crítica was used as the base text, while the rest is con-
nected to a factitious archetype similar to that of E2 and F, which juxtaposes the
“Interpolación cidiana” and the Versión amplificada. With respect to the sec-
ond Alfonsine redaction, the Versión crítica, a section was isolated beginning
with Fruela II that contains the story about the Jueces de Castilla. This gave rise
to a family of manuscripts commonly known as the Crónica de veinte reyes that
enjoyed a wide diffusion.68 Although in this case the textual base was hardly
modified, in others, the separation of Castile’s history prompted the introduc-
tion of several innovations. The first of these reworkings, which comprises the
reigns from Fernando I through Fernando III, was the Crónica manuelina. It
was based on a text very similar to the one transmitted by manuscript F and
presents several novelties, some pertaining to the Cid.69 Even though hardly
68 Fernández-Ordóñez, “Versión crítica” de la “Estoria de España”; Campa, La “Estoria de

España” de Alfonso X.
69 The Crónica manuelina, which Catalán believed to be lost as of 2005 (“Rodericus” roman-
zado, p. 86), has reached us in a contaminated and factitious manuscript (British Library,
Egerton 289, 15th-16th century), partially identified by Pattison (“Ms Egerton 289”). Hijano
442 Bautista
any testimonies of this work have survived, it coincides with the text summa-
rized by Don Juan Manuel in his Crónica abreviada (c.1320-25) – meant as a
history of Spain beginning with King Fernando I’s reign – which gives it the
name by which it is known.70 The second and most important reworking is the
Crónica de Castilla, which also spans the reigns of Fernando I to Fernando III
and grants special attention to all information related to Rodrigo Díaz.71 For
the reins of Fernando I, Sancho II, and Alfonso VI, this work probably relied on
the archetype of the Crónica manuelina, reproducing all the innovations of this
text, but it was systematically revised, eliminating internal contradictions and
using new sources, among others, the Mocedades de Rodrigo.
The texts produced later are less original and newsworthy in the way they
present the Cid. Pedro de Barcelos’ Crónica de 1344, based on the Galician
translation of the Crónica de Castilla, does not contain significant changes or
additions.72 Finally, for the reigns of Fernando I, Sancho II, and Alfonso VI, the
Crónica ocampiana, which was probably compiled throughout the 14th century,
follows a text that is very similar to the one preserved in manuscript F, with
textual contaminations from both the Crónica de Castilla (especially the sec-
tion about Fernando I’s reign) and the Crónica manuelina, hardly presents any
distinctive characteristics of its own.73 Although these two chronicles played
a very important role in the diffusion of the Cidian legend – since both had
a wide circulation during the 15th century and the Crónica ocampiana is the
base text for Florián de Ocampo’s 1541 edition of the section after Fernando I –
their contribution to the historiographical construction of the Cid is less signif-
icant, a reason why I will not dwell on them. Instead, I will focus my attention
Villegas has written an important study about it, “A Sixteenth-Century Compiler of the
Estoria de España”, with an exhaustive bibliography. There is a second manuscript – more
complete, uncontaminated, and hitherto unknown –, which I have studied recently (Bau-
tista, “Juan de Pineda”). With both testimonies in hand, we will be able to study this text,
which is crucial for better understanding post-Alfonsine chronicles. The quotations that
follow are based on the Egerton Manuscript that, like Hijano, I refer with the abbreviation
Br.
70 See Catalán’s fundamental study, “Don Juan Manuel ante el modelo alfonsí”, and Pattison,
“Juan Manuel’s Crónica abreviada”.
71 We have now an edition of the Crónica de Castilla prepared by Rochwert-Zuili.
72 Cintra, Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344. The Galician translation was edited by Lorenzo,
La traducción gallega de la “Crónica general” y de la “Crónica de Castilla”.
73 See Bustos, “Crónica ocampiana”, with accompanying bibliography. This text corresponds
to the “cuarta parte” of Florián de Ocampo’s edition, Las quatro partes enteras de la Cro-
nica de España. We still do not have a comprehensive study about the composition of this
text and its principal characteristics, although Hijano Villegas’ analysis of this matter is
rather advanced.
on those particular characteristics that are proper to the Crónica manuelina

and the Crónica de Castilla, and make a brief comment on Pedro de Barcelos’
work.
The Crónica manuelina, which likely was written in the final years of the 13th
century, introduced diverse minor glosses about the Cid in sections originating
from literary and historical sources, and it also contains two important epi-
sodes related to Rodrigo Díaz. Although one of them is included in a section
deriving, at least in part, from the PMC, such a new episode is totally extrane-
ous to both the Poema as well as the epic tradition. Therefore, we can say that
one considerable difference between the Crónica manuelina and the other
chronicles examined thus far is that its author did not resort to the Poema
again, nor did he incorporate any information pertaining to epic texts. If at
times the Crónica manuelina is closer to the PMC, it happens because it reflects
the archetype from which all these texts originate more precisely than E2 or F.
It seems that the glosses in the Crónica manuelina are meant to clarify some
information or round off episodes.74 For example, the author indicates that
the vistas (audience) between Alfonso VI and the Cid – where Rodrigo is
granted the royal pardon and the marriage between his daughters and the
Infantes of Carrión is arranged – occurs in Requena (Br, fol. 105v; cf. PCG, cap.
927). When narrating the first battle with Bucar, it is said that fifteen kings died
(Br, fol. 109v; cf. PCG, cap. 931). In the text of the “Interpolación” transmitted by
manuscripts E2 and F (PCG, p. 620b25-27), the Infantes of Carrión’s speeches
justifying their vile conduct on the basis that they are of a nobler lineage than
the Cid remain unrefuted. Instead, the Crónica manuelina adds a speech pro-
nounced by the King in which he expounds on the Cid’s lineage (Br, fols.
118v-119r) in accordance with data contained in the same Estoria de España
(PCG, p. 387b26-40).75 At the conclusion of the judicial duels, when the mon-
arch orders for the field to be cleared, the author says that King Alfonso “dio
aquel dia por alevosos a los Infantes” (Br, fol. 123v; cf. PCG, p. 627a36). Other
details were added to the section about the Cid’s death and burial. For instance,
it is pointed out that on the bench on which his body rested “las armas del rey
don Alfonso de Castilla et de Leon, et del rey de Navarra, et del Ynfante de
Aragon, et las del Çid Canpeador” were painted (Br, fol. 132v; cf. PCG, p. 640b34),
74 The majority of the characteristics mentioned here were identified by Catalán, “Don Juan
Manuel ante el modelo alfonsí”, pp. 219-20. See also, Hijano Villegas, “La Crónica de Cas-
tilla”.
75 This addition is included and modified in the Crónica de Castilla; see Hijano Villegas’
comparison of these texts, “La Crónica de Castilla”, pp. 649-50.
444 Bautista
and the Cid’s burial ten years after his body arrived to Cardeña is briefly
described (Br, fol. 134r; cf. PCG, p. 643a20-22).76
The two most important episodes added to the text constitute unified,
almost autonomous narrations. The first has Martín Peláez of Asturias as pro-
tagonist and follows the chapter dealing with the battle against the king of
Seville (corresponding to chapter 922 of the PCG).77 It narrates how this knight
became part of the Cid’s retinue and, despite his corpulence, was “de covarde
coraçon”. One day, when he attempts to eat at the same table as Álvar Fáñez
and other brave knights, the Cid takes him by the hand, has him sit by his side,
and says to him, “Non sodes vos tal que merezcades asentarvos con esos”. The
next day, Martín Peláez does not immediately flee from a battle with the Moors,
and later on at dinner, the Cid tells him that he deserves to eat out of his own
“escudilla” (bowl) because he fought better than before. At that moment,
Martín Peláez realizes that Rodrigo Díaz is aware of his conduct and, ashamed,
he fights as one of the bravest knights from that day forward and deserves to sit
with Álvar Fáñez and the others. This episode is almost an exemplum, originat-
ing perhaps from the oral tradition; it emphasizes the superiority of bravery
over physical qualities and the importance of shame in knightly ethics, while
portraying the Cid as both a military leader and educator of knights who
rewards his men in accordance with their respective actions.78
The second episode is related to the Cidian cult at Cardeña. After the final
chapter deriving from the *Leyenda de Cardeña about the conversion of the
Jew who takes the name Diego Gil and of his death together with that of Gil
Díaz, the Crónica manuelina adds a chapter set at a much later time, in 1185, in
which Sancho VI of Navarre is the protagonist (Br, fols. 134v-135r). In his con-
flict with Alfonso VIII, he raids Castile several times and during one of the
incursions, he pillages a large number of “ganados et bestias et bueyes”. When
the abbot of Cardeña had knowledge of this, he and other monks carrying the
Cid’s banner rode out to meet King Sancho who was passing by the monastery.
76 There are other innovations in this section that do not require us to assume another
source was used (Catalán, “Rodericus” romanzado, pp. 89-92).
77 Pattison has edited this chapter, “Ms Egerton 289”, pp. 22-25; it also appears in the Crónica
de Castilla (Rochwert Zuili, Crónica de Castilla, pp. 179-81).
78 Chalon, L’histoire et l’épopée castillane, p. 275; Rochwert-Zuili, “Du Poème à l’Histoire”,
pp. 329-32; and Lacomba, Au-delà du “Cantar de mio Cid”, pp. 123-25, identify the earliest
documentation of this story in the Crónica de Castilla and put forward the idea that the
author of the chronicle created it. However, considering that this account is found in the
Crónica manuelina, whose author seems less inclined to invent episodes, this explanation
seems less convincing. Moreover, there is nothing to suggest that it originated in the epic
tradition. See Drury’s study, “Martin Pelaez, aquel timido asturiano”.
During their encounter, the king of Navarre acknowledged his relationship

with Rodrigo Díaz, and handed over his spoils to the abbot, stayed at the
Monastery of Cardeña for several days, and upon his departure “ofrecio bien
dozientas doblas de oro por el alma del Çid su visabuelo”.79 Based on all avail-
able evidence, this episode, which first appeared in an independent form in
the Estoria de los godos (c.1252-53), most likely originated from the *Leyenda de
Cardeña, which had been used before for the “Interpolación cidiana”.80 Its
absence in the manuscripts E2 and F is due to the timeframe of this episode –
that is to say, because it did not occur during the reign of Alfonso VI, but rather
a century later, during the reign of Alfonso VIII. By integrating it into its text,
the Crónica manuelina gives greater priority to information about the Cid than
to chronological order.81
A last innovation is particularly interesting for being a symptom of a new
historiographical trend already present in the Versión amplificada and the
“Interpolación”: it is more inclusive, less faithful to its sources, and increasingly
distant from the Alfonsine parameters. After narrating the Cid’s victory over
“Iunes” (which corresponds to the PCG, chapter 925), the Crónica manuelina
adds that the Moorish king – saddened from his defeat – returns to Morocco,
becomes ill, and dies (Br, fol. 104r). Before he expires, however, he makes his
brother Bucar swear that he will battle with Rodrigo Díaz and get vengeance
from him. This oath is later recorded in a brief additional chapter in which
Bucar’s preparations for war are described and where it is said that these
details were taken from an Estoria de los reyes moros que reynaron en el señorio
de Africa (Br, fol. 107r). In my judgment, this source, which was added to justify,
79 About this episode, see Montaner Frutos, “La enseña del Cid”; Catalán, “Rodericus” roman-
zado, pp. 83-85, and Solera López, “El manuscrito D de la Crónica de Castilla”, pp. 93-98.
80 “Estonz seyendo y los reyes corrio el rey de Navarra fasta Burgos e por señal dio de la
espada en un olmo; e traya grand presa e pasaua por Sant Pedro de Cardeña e oyo dezir
que ali iazie Ruy Diaz, e por hondra del dexo la presa que traye” (Ward, Estoria de los
godos, pp. 165-66). The text of the Crónica de Castilla incorporates more details from its
source than manusript Br, such as a description of the elm tree: “E con grand brío dyo vn
espadada en el olmo, que está ante la iglesia de Sant Johan de Burgos” (Rochwert Zuili,
Crónica de Castilla, p. 249). In the Estoria de los godos, Sancho VII is the protagonist of this
episode, which takes place during his wars with Castile, and, therefore, it more accurately
corresponds to the political situation.
81 In my opinion, this episode does not directly originate from the *Leyenda de Cardeña, but
rather from an adaptation of it produced in the historiographical workshop before the
Crónica manuelina was redacted, as indicated by the detailed chronology at the beginning
of the chapter. I do not find evidence that could indicate that either this work or the
Crónica de Castilla made direct use of the *Leyenda.
446 Bautista
among other fictitious data, the relationship between the brothers as well as
Bucar’s promise to avenge Iunes, is clearly an obvious fabrication.82 However,
the invention of an apocryphal source is in tune with the creation of the “esto-
ria” about Abenalfarax in the “Interpolación” mentioned earlier; it reveals the
desire to justify extraordinary episodes or purely invented information by
means of a fictional authority.83
All the innovations I have mentioned reappear in the Crónica de Castilla.
Although it would seem logical to conclude that this work was based on the
Crónica manuelina, their relationship is not that simple. As Catalán and Hijano
Villegas have shown, some of the innovations are sporadically incorporated
into the Crónica de Castilla in a slightly different way, as in the case of the story
about Martín Peláez.84 However, I am inclined to believe that all the features
analyzed thus far are typical of the Crónica manuelina and define the project
that characterizes this text. If the order in which they appear in the Crónica de
Castilla is slightly different, it may be due to the fact that this text knew the
original Crónica manuelina where some innovations were still marginal addi-
tions or were written on folios inserted into the text.85 This is an important
consideration because it places the Crónica manuelina as the forerunner of the
works limited to narrating the history of Castile, and it reveals that some of the
innovations attributed to the Crónica de Castilla actually originated with the
Crónica manuelina.
In any case, if all this helps to explain some of the characteristics by bet-
ter identifying the traits of the textual model used to compose the Crónica de
Castilla, it does not take away from its fundamental importance. Redacted dur-
ing the times of Fernando IV – between 1295 and 1310 – the Crónica de Castilla
represents an ideological turning point within the general chronicles written
in Romance; it also implies a radicalization or culmination of some literary
characteristics already found in the Versión amplificada. Regarding its ideology,
it is a text that concedes greater importance to the aristocracy and offers a read-
ing of the Cidian legend from the nobility’s perspective. For instance, it affirms
Rodrigo Díaz’s ancient and noble lineage and cites his family’s long-established
82 For this new information, see Chalon, L’histoire et l’épopée castillane, pp. 249-50.
83 Bautista, La materia de Francia, pp. 21-23; see also Montaner Frutos, “Historicidad medieval
y protomoderna”.
84 Catalán, “Don Juan Manuel ante el modelo alfonsí”, pp. 219-20; Hijano Villegas, “La Crónica
de Castilla”, pp. 650-51
85 In the articles cited in the previous note, Catalán and Hijano Villegas propose that both
chronicles derive from a single prototype that shared these characteristics. However, in
my view, this creates an unnecessary intermediary text and trivializes the importance of
the Crónica manuelina.
tutelary relationship with Kings Fernando I, Sancho II, and Alfonso VI. During
these three reigns, it is the Cid who gives an authentic continuity to the his-
tory. Among its literary characteristics, there is a greater tendency to invent
scenes and even entire episodes, and, in general, a pronounced freedom to
manipulate the textual model used as its basis. While the interventions in the
Crónica manuelina seem to be concentrated in specific places, the Crónica de
Castilla undertakes a total revision of its model, eliminating contradictions,
incorporating details or glosses, inventing fragments, giving it a uniform style,
updating information, and revisiting the epic tradition.86
In effect, not all the innovations are the fruit of the author’s creativity.
Rather, he relied upon a poem that, until that time, had not been utilized in
historiographical writings – the Mocedades de Rodrigo – but it is also possible
that he garnered information from other works, among them, the PMC. But
before examining the relationship between the Crónica de Castilla and the can-
tares de gesta (epic songs), it is worth reviewing some of the author’s deductions
and inventions in order to briefly illustrate the poetics of his text.87 This work
shows a considerable interest in genealogical matters linked to the Cidian leg-
end. Because of this, it reproduces the Cid’s lineage that appears in the
Mocedades de Rodrigo and systematizes all references to his family, clarifying,
for example, that Martín Antonlínez, Fernán Alfonso, and Ordoño are the
hero’s nephews. Similarly, it standardizes all the allusions to Álvar Fáñez as the
Cid’s cousin, while in both the “Interpolación” and the Crónica manuelina, he
is sometimes referred to as the Cid’s cousin in the passages that originate from
the *Leyenda de Cardeña, and at other times as his daughters’ cousin, in accor-
dance with the Poema.
Besides the task of giving uniformity to the information included in the text,
the author also invented scenes and episodes with a literary objective, among
others, in order to produce a closed and meaningful narrative. And thus, while
the Estoria de España, following the Historia Roderici (§18), briefly narrates the
betrayal at Rueda (PCG, p. 356a) – relating the disaster as well as the reconcili-
ation between Alfonso VI and Rodrigo – the author of the Crónica de Castilla
invents a fictional act of revenge for what happened. First, it is the king who
86 For the Crónica de Castilla, see the studies by Martin, Les Juges de Castille, pp. 433-541;
Rochwert-Zuili, “Du Poème à l’Histoire”; Catalán, La épica española, pp. 278-314; and
Lacomba, Au-delà du “Cantar de mio Cid”. In the pages ahead, I quote Rochwert Zuili’s
edition of the Crónica de Castilla, indicating only the page number.
87 I have in mind the observations Catalán made in “Poesía y novela”, which was reprinted in
La “Estoria de España” de Alfonso X (I quote this edition), pp. 139-56; see also by the same
author, La épica española, pp. 279-83.
448 Bautista
asks the Cid to go to where the treason occurred, and Rodrigo uses this oppor-
tunity to obtain a series of privileges for the “fijosdalgo”. After that, instead of
returning to Castile with the king, the Cid lays siege to the Moors who remain
in Rueda, engages in a long battle with them until he takes the castle, and kills
or captures all of them (p. 131-32). The author of the Crónica de Castilla could
not have imagined that the disaster at Rueda would go unpunished; therefore,
he invented the entire episode in which the Cid also acquired nobiliary privi-
leges.88 Other similar cases could be cited that, taken as a whole, reveal a
process of elaboration primarily oriented by aesthetic and ideological criteria
which placed greater emphasis on invention than had been seen in the pro-
duction of earlier historiographical texts.
The most important innovation is the adaption of the story of the Mocedades
de Rodrigo (dated at the end of the 13th century), that takes up eleven chapters
in the first part of the chronicle and is also the cause of other modifications in
the text.89 Although a comparison of the chronicle and the Mocedades de
Rodrigo is complicated due to the late date of the extant poetic text that,
among other things, contains passages that could not have been included in
the version known by the author of the Crónica de Castilla, it is certain that he
used this new epic text with the same degree of freedom he exercised else-
where in his work. He preserved the essential elements of the story, yet he
tended to suppress or reduce the space dedicated to the conflicts between the
Cid and other Castilian nobles. If the extant poetic text reproduces the same
temperament the hero had in the version known by the chronicler, then he
must have minimized Rodrigo’s pride and insolence. The Cid’s role as a knight
is centered on defending the realm either by fighting the Moors or by combat-
ing the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of France, who threaten to impose
a tribute on Castile. In this sense, facing a weak king like Fernando I, an overly
ambitious or proud one such as Sancho II, and even Alfonso VI, it is the Cid
who fights the wars against their enemies for decades. However, the Mocedades
de Rodrigo is not only adapted to the chronicler’s interests but also made to
agree with other information about the hero provided by the text, which
results, for example, in the shift of his investiture as a knight to the conquest of
Coimbra, an episode of historiographical origin.
There are other additions in the chronicle related to the *Cantar de Sancho
II. The Crónica de Castilla reproduces a text similar to the one in the Versión
88 See Catalán, “Poesía y novela”, pp. 151-53.

89 Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle, pp. 81-91; Montaner Frutos, “La *Gesta de las Moce-
dades de Rodrigo”; Martin, Les Juges de Castille, pp. 435-98; and Catalán, La épica española,
pp. 283-300.
amplificada (via the Crónica manuelina) that includes only some of the epic
text’s motifs when narrating the death of Fernando I. To this textual base, the
author of the Crónica de Castilla adds some details from the epic tradition, like
situating the final days of the king in Cabezón or the presence of Cardinal
Fernando, the king’s illegitimate son, to whom he entrusts his kingdom (p. 86).
Further ahead, after the Battle of Golpejera, near Carrión, in which Alfonso VI
is taken prisoner by his brother, there is also an episode in which doña Urraca
kneels before Sancho II and pleads for Alfonso’s liberation. After consulting
the Cid, the king of Castile concedes only on the condition that Alfonso be-
comes a monk (p. 94). Without modifying the narrative contents of his model,
the author of the Crónica de Castilla seems to echo the epic tradition in some
discourses in which series of assonances are detected: for example, in the
advice the people of Zamora give to Urraca when her brother proposes to
exchange the city for other towns, in the warning to Sancho about the traitor
Bellido Dolfos that is uttered by a voice emanating from Zamora, and in both
the challenge issued to the people of Zamora and Arias Gonzalo’s response
(pp. 100, 103, and 107).90
The most noteworthy and best-known example involving an epic text is the
episode of the “Jura de Santa Gadea”, which the Crónica de Castilla presents
with an undeniable poetic character – so much so, in fact, that a fragment
of more than twenty verses can be recuperated without distorting the text
(p. 113).91 Even though, as Montaner has noted, the author of the Crónica de
Castilla sometimes may create a rhymed prose, all of these passages are clearly
related to the epic tradition and seem to transmit traces of stanzas in verses.92
As such, it would be fair to ask if the author of the Crónica de Castilla was
familiar with an epic work by means of a manuscript or through the oral tradi-
tion – that is to say, based on memories from recited epic poetry. This second
possibility could explain, on the one hand, why he relied on the epic tradition
only in specific cases and, on the other, why there is a correlation between new
information of epic origin – in general, in direct discourse and rather dramatic
episodes – and segments that seemingly reveal traces of assonance. Whatever
the case, the *Cantar de Sancho II that was known to the author of the Crónica
de Castilla does not seem to be different from the text used years earlier in
Alfonso X’s workshop, considering that the innovations I already mentioned
do not stand in contradiction with it.
90 Catalán, La épica española, pp. 300-05. Also see Montaner’s prudent warnings in “Cave
carmen!” and in “Revisión textual del Cantar de mio Cid”, p. 150.
91 Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle, pp. 105-07; Catalán, La épica española, pp. 305-06.
92 Montaner, “Cave carmen!”.
450 Bautista
Finally, some of the traits that are proper to the Crónica de Castilla have
something to do with the narration of the PMC, in particular, its initial scenes.
Certain modifications can surely be attributed to the author, as when he places
the conversation between the hero and Martín Antolínez in which both of
them devise the scheme to deceive the Jewish moneylenders immediately
before the Cid’s departure from Vivar (p. 118), a modification perhaps related to
the fact that Martín Antolínez is now, in accordance with the Mocedades, the
Cid’s nephew. In light of the compiler’s creative spirit, neither is necessary to
suppose an oral tradition derivation to the Cid’s discourse upon leaving Vivar
in which he begs the Virgin to grant him the ability to destroy “todos los paga-
nos” (p. 119). As we have already seen – and as it can be observed throughout
the entire text – the war against the infidels is the principal obligation of every
knight, and all other duties – including vasallatic service – are subordinate to
it.93 In other cases, it is more difficult to determine the origin of some innova-
tions such as the detail about the animals that the Cid pillaged as he was
leaving Burgos, which he later freed once he realized that nobody was follow-
ing him (p. 119). In the same scene, however, the reference to an elderly woman
who says to Rodrigo as he leaves Vivar, “Ve en tal punto que todo astragues
quanto fallares e quisieres” (p. 119), may have a traditional origin.94 The same
can be said of another passage also related to the Cid’s exile, namely, his meet-
ing with Alfonso VI that takes place between Burgos and Vivar. When the king
does not allow Rodrigo to kiss his hand and then banishes him from the king-
dom, the knight mocks the monarch in return and says, while standing on the
lands of his estate, “No estó en la vuestra tierra” (p. 118). It is rather surprising
that these innovations are found in the episode in which the Cid is exiled, and
that its irreverent and destructive tone is more similar to that of the Mocedades
de Rodrigo than to that of the PMC or the *Cantar de Sancho II. This makes it
difficult to situate the possible textual echoes within the panorama of the
Cidian epic.95
93 Compare this with the Cid’s confession at his time of death added by the author of the
Crónica de Castilla: “Otrosý, Señor, non desanpares estos reynos de Castilla e de León, que
fincara en tan grand desanparo por mengua de señor, nin quieras dar lugar a los enemigos
de la santa fe catholical, que querrán follar los tus santos altares en que se consagra cada
día el tu santo cuerpo” (p. 253).
94 This passage is incorporated along with a reference that seems to attest to its traditional
origins: “E dizen que demandó la bestia para caualgar, e entonçe que dixo vna vieja a la su
puerta” (119).
95 For the many different interpretations of this complicated series of problems, see
Armistead, “The Initial Verses”; Powell, “The Opening Lines”; Smith, “The Variant Version”;
It is within this context that we find the most important innovation related
to the tradition of the PMC; it affects the initial verses of the poem, now lost
due to the disappearance of the first folio of the Vivar codex. It is a well-known
passage because it has been edited often with the poetic text since the times of
Menéndez Pidal.96 The author of the Crónica de Castilla reelaborated the tex-
tual model he was using and added a few lines containing the dialogue in
which Álvar Fáñez promises fidelity and service to the Cid before they leave
Vivar (p. 118).97 Similar to the examples from the *Cantar de Sancho II men-
tioned earlier, we can detect several verses whose assonance is reproduced in
the prose text. Although there are no doubts about its relationship with the
material originating from the PMC, scholars have questioned if it is related to
the extant poetic text or to a reworking rendered from a cyclical perspective.
This question arises when we consider other innovations that are present in
the Crónica de Castilla, regarding the hero’s banishment but also in the refer-
ence to Álvar Fáñez as the Cid’s “primo cormano”, similar to the *Leyenda de
Cardeña and the Mocedades, and in contrast to the Poema, where he is Rodrigo’s
nephew. The fact that this relationship appears in a rhyming position suggests
that the passage does not derive directly from the extant poem, but rather from
a reworking produced after the texts I have mentioned.98 However, it could
also be explained as a clarifying detail incorporated by the author of the
Crónica de Castilla who, as I have already said, standardized the Cid’s relation-
ship with Minaya throughout the text, thus contradicting the Poema’s version.99
Another matter is if the source of this addition was a poetic manuscript or the
author’s memory. Since it is the only narrative or prosodic trace of the PMC
epic tradition, I am more inclined to believe – as I did with other cases related
to the *Cantar de Sancho II – that they are the product of the author’s memory,
which would better explain those occasional, peculiar echoes of the epic
tradition.100
Montaner Frutos, “De nuevo sobre los versos iniciales perdidos”; and Catalán, La épica
española, pp. 306-13.
96 See Montaner, Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 3-4, 561-63, and 631-32.
97 See a comparison of the texts in Montaner Frutos, “De nuevo sobre los versos iniciales
perdidos”, pp. 342-43.
98 This is the view of Armistead, “The Initial Verses”; Powell, “The Opening Lines”; and Cata-
lán, La épica española, pp. 306-13.
99 This is the opinion of Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle, p. 124, and Montaner, Cantar de
mio Cid, pp. 561-63 and 631-32; Smith’s conclusion is less clear in “The Variant Version”.
100 Another trace of the PMC tradition is the inclusion of the names of the envoys from
Navarre and Aragon: “Et los mensajeros avían nonbres, el de Aragón Yñego Ximénez, et el
de Nauarra Ochoa Peres” (p. 225); in the Poema their names are Oiarra and Yéñego Sime-
noz, mentioned several times (vv. 3394, 3417, and 3422).
452 Bautista
The Crónica de Castilla is the most important post-Alfonsine work in the

historiographical configuration and diffusion of the Cidian myth; it is, indeed,
a true summa of Cidian information for it collects and systematizes levels of
sedimentation of successive interventions, integrating the entire narration of
the Mocedades de Rodrigo as well as other details. Along with the gestation
of an authentic biography of the Cid, the Crónica de Castilla also presented a
calculated image of the hero, portrayed as a noble knight, whose fundamental
vocation was battling the infidels. The work not only enjoyed a wide circulation
throughout the Middle Ages, but limited in some manuscripts to the reigns of
Fernando I, Sancho II, and Alfonso VI, it also became known as the Crónica
del Cid.101 This is the form in which it was widely known during the Siglo de
Oro thanks to an edition prepared by Juan de Velorado, abbot of Cardeña, first
printed in 1512 and reprinted two more times in the 16th century.102
Its influence on other texts was also relevant. The most conspicuous case is
its use as the textual model for the history of Castile beginning with Fernando
I’s reign in Pedro de Barcelos’ Crónica de 1344. Although the author faithfully
adheres to the Crónica de Castilla, he occasionally intervenes in certain points
revealing his interest in the Cid as a historical figure. To this end, Pedro de
Barcelos shifts the presentation of the Cid’s lineage to the reign of Fruela II,
where the narrative deals with the Jueces de Castilla, and introduces certain
modifications taken, as he indicates, from a Corónica de Sant Pedro de Cardeña.
This chronicle, now lost, seems to correspond to a first version of the text
edited and updated in 1512 by Juan de Velorado with the title Genealogía del
Cid, and included among the appendices to the Crónica particular.103 There
could be also some new traces from the Mocedades de Rodrigo, such as the
detail of how King Fernando found the ten-year-old Cid as the king was pass-
ing through Vivar and brought the boy back to the royal court, where he was
educated.104 Finally, the author completed King Fernando’s death scene thanks
to a copy of the Versión crítica, which provided a more detailed narration of
this episode deriving from the epic tradition.105 Count Pedro de Barcelos con-
101 Some manuscripts of the Crónica de Castilla reference the Cid in their title even though
they transmit the entire text; see Solera López, “El manuscrito D de la Crónica de Castilla”.
102 For the 1512 printing, see Bautista, “Cardeña, Pedro de Barcelos y la Genealogía del Cid”,
with bibliography.
103 Cintra, Crónica de 1344, II, 480; Bautista, “Cardeña, Pedro de Barcelos y la Genealogía del
Cid”. Since the publication of this last study, I have found other traces of the Genealogía in
15th-century Castilian texts that reaffirm my hypothesis.
104 Cintra, Crónica de 1344, III, p. 298; Pattison, From Legend to Chronicle, p. 87.
105 Cintra, Crónica de 1344, I, pp. ccxciv-ccxcviii, and III, pp. 335-47; the medieval Castilian
version of this section was edited by Menéndez Pidal, Reliquias de la poesía épica espa-
ñola, pp. 240-56.
solidated the story from the Crónica de Castilla – minimally rounding it off
– and his text became yet another means of diffusion not only in Portugal but
also in Castile, where it had an influence on the historical works of many 15th-
century authors, including Pablo de Santa María, Alfonso de Cartagena, Diego
Rodríguez de Almela, and Lope García de Salazar.
6 Conclusions
In light of the earlier tradition of the general chronicles, one of the most origi-
nal characteristics of the Estoria de España was its inclusion of extensive stories
originating from literary sources. As a result of this guiding principle, the leg-
ends about the Infantes de Lara or Fernán González, as well as the material
linked to the *Cantar de Sancho II and the PMC became integrated into the
historiographical discourse. The decision to use these poetic works is surely
related to the all-encompassing and courtly nature of the Estoria bound to its
condition as a Romance composition, but also to a conception of historical
account that combines paying attention to royal successions with interest in
the most noteworthy events that happened in the Iberian Peninsula. Thus, the
Estoria de España not only is concerned with monarchs but also with los natu-
rales (the people of their reigns), which fostered the inclusion of poems about
Bernardo del Carpio, the Infantes de Lara, and the Cid. Although in the canon
of Alfonso X’s chroniclers these sources may have been placed on an inferior
level than the Latin histories written by Lucas de Tuy and Jiménez de Rada, it
is undeniable that they used these poetic sources extensively and rather faith-
fully, reproducing their narrative plot – at times literally, as can be proven by a
comparison with those poetic texts that have reached us. Granting historic
authority to these poems seems to have gone hand in hand with their under-
standing of them as letradura, in the sense that the Alfonsine workshop did
not rely mainly on the oral tradition, but rather on poetic manuscripts whose
texts were prosified and later combined with information or stories borrowed
from other sources.
The Estoria de España represents a foundational and, in every sense of the
word, an exceptional project. It is foundational because it is at the root of a
historiographical current in which Latin histories and heroic poems, among
other sources composed in Romance, converge. If such a current sometimes
increased the information taken from oral traditions, it was dependent at the
same time on the Alfonsine texts that always constituted the base of later
works. And it is exceptional because, while the Alfonsine workshop directly
used poetic texts, it is common that later we find historiographical rewritings
454 Bautista
or echoes of the oral tradition. Only on two occasions were literary sources
about the Cid not previously used by the Alfonsine workshop employed exten-
sively. Such is the case of the “Interpolación cidiana”, which made use of the
*Leyenda de Cardeña that transmitted abundant information about the hero’s
final days and also most likely contained a singular story related to the final
part of the PMC that had been subjected to a profound reelaboration. Later, the
Crónica de Castilla would add to its textual base the material related to the
Mocedades de Rodrigo, completing and consolidating a biography about the
Cid that straddles history and poetry.
Despite its importance, the study of how the PMC was used in Alfonsine and
post-Alfonsine historiography is made difficult due to the unavailability of the
first redaction of the Estoria de España that probably was never completed,
according to all available data. This is further aggravated by a lacuna in the
draft employed by the author of the Versión amplificada, that could have com-
promised the completion of this text and which happens to correspond to one
of the sections in which the Poema had to be used. This lacuna was completed
with the “Interpolación cidiana”, which was redacted using some Alfonsine
materials, but not a compilation similar to the one used for the Versión crítica,
which explains why the results of a comparison with this work are less clear
and relevant than in other sections. Another difficulty has to do with the loss
of some sources. Just as the Arabic history about the conquest of Valencia has
not survived (except for some elusive fragments which have reached us indi-
rectly), we also have lost other literary works about the Cid such as the *Leyenda
de Cardeña. Although when analyzing a chronicle it is necessary to try to dis-
tinguish the material deriving from a source from that of the compiler, the
possibility of reaching any definitive conclusion is rather remote, and, there-
fore, we can only work with hypotheses that are more or less substantiated.
This not only affects the description of the compilers’ work, but the identifica-
tion of possible literary reelaborations of the Poema as well. Although there is
no doubt that Alfonso X’s collaborators used a poem similar to the extant one,
and that the modifications in later chronicles generally can be attributed to the
historians themselves, this explanation is nevertheless not always satisfactory.
This is the case of the “Interpolación cidiana”, which, despite using an Alfonsine
prosification in a significant portion of the text – the same prosification that is
ultimately at the heart of the Versión crítica – it also used a different story
deriving from a literary reworking of the old epic poem that probably formed
part of the *Leyenda de Cardeña, as I said before. Whether or not the author of
the Crónica de Castilla used a reworking of the beginning part of the PMC is
another unresolved question, but there is less evidence to substantiate an
answer in this particular case.
One consequence of this chronistic tradition was the growing accumula-

tion of information and stories about the Cid, to the point of generating the
narration included in the Crónica de Castilla in which Rodrigo became the
true protagonist during the reigns of Fernando I and Alfonso VI. Disseminated
independently during the Middle Ages, it took the title of Crónica del Cid.
Regarding this, one can clearly establish two branches in the tradition depend-
ing on the point or stage of the Alfonsine project on which they are based. On
the one hand, we have the Versión crítica – that is to say, the only redaction of
the history of Castile after Fernando I that was concluded during the final years
of Alfonso X’s reign. This version, which used a PMC similar to the extant one,
is characterized by its austerity and coherence, and offers a unified account
of the Cid’s biography. Although it was the least influential textual tradition,
it gave rise to the Crónica de veinte reyes – which reproduces its text begin-
ning with the reign of Fruela II – and through it achieved greater diffusion.
The other branch, richer and more complex, fuses two segments created in
the times of Sancho IV that are based on different texts: the Versión amplifi-
cada, which relied on an Alfonsine compilation close to the one used by the
author of the Versión crítica, and the “Interpolación cidiana”, which began with
Alfonsine materials – although probably not from a compilation – and made
use of new sources such as the *Leyenda de Cardeña. Such a model is at the
base of later works linked to Castile’s history that progressively enrich the Cid’s
biography: in particular, the Crónica manuelina and, above all, the Crónica de
Castilla, which is, in turn, the model for other important works like the Crónica
de 1344. Manuscripts of this last work attained very broad diffusion, thus mak-
ing their narration about the Cid’s life the most widespread and influential
version.
Lastly, the importance of the chronicles does not end with the study of their
sources, with the possibility of discerning and confirming stories or informa-
tion originating from now-lost works, or with the analysis of the literary
evolution of Romance chronicles and their relationship with the recreation
and diffusion of the Cidian legend. Historiographical texts offer a reading of
the Poema – conditioned by the filter of each chronistic project – that can be
used to contrast and enrich our own understanding of the poem. They also
provide exceptional material for researching how the Cid’s character was used
for ideological and political ends. From the monarchist Cid described in the
Versión crítica, who reveres the king’s authority and shows himself to be an
exemplar vassal, to the aristocratic Cid in the Crónica de Castilla who becomes
the protagonist of the historic narration, there is a wide range of nuances and
inflections that offer fertile ground for studying Castile’s political tensions dur-
ing the period between the reigns of Alfonso X and Alfonso XI. This perspective
456 Bautista
is essential for understanding the vitality of the Cidian legend from the end of
the 13th century onward, and the centrality of historiography as an instrument
of the legend’s transformation and renovation. In effect, for a considerable
period of time, chronicles were the ever-changing and privileged textual stage
for the words and deeds of Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid.106
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Montaner Frutos, Alberto, “Historicidad medieval y protomoderna: lo auténtico sobre
lo verídico”, e-Spania, 19 (October 2014) <http://e-spania.revues.org/24054>.
Montaner Frutos, Alberto, and Alfonso Boix Jovaní, Guerra en Sarq Al’andalus: las bata-
llas cidianas de Morella (1084) y Cuarte (1094), Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios
Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo, 2005.
Ocampo, Florián de, Las quatro partes enteras de la Cronica de España que mando com-
poner el Serenissimo rey don Alonso llamado el Sabio, Zamora: Augustín de Paz y Juan
Picardo, 1541.
Pattison, D.G., “The ‘Afrenta de Corpes’ in Fourteenth-Century Historiography”, in Alan
D. Deyermond (ed.), “Mio Cid” Studies, London: Tamesis, 1977, pp. 129-40.
460 Bautista
Pattison, D.G., From Legend to Chronicle: The Treatment of Epic Material in Alphonsine
Historiography, Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature,
1983.
Pattison, D.G., “Juan Manuel’s Crónica abreviada and Alphonsine Historiography”,
Medium Aevum 61 (1992), 242-49.
Pattison, D.G., “Ms Egerton 289: A Glimpse of the Crónica Manuelina”, La Corónica 21.1
(1992), 15-30.
Powell, Brian, Epic and Chronicle: The “Poema de mio Cid” and the “Crónica de veinte
reyes”, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1983.
Powell, Brian, “The Opening Lines of the Poema de Mio Cid and the Crónica de Castilla”,
Reig, Carola, El Cantar de Sancho II y Cerco de Zamora, Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 1947.
Rochwert-Zuili, Patricia, “Du Poème à l’Histoire: la geste cidienne dans l’historiographie
alphonsine et néo-alphonsine (xiiième-xivème siécles)”, Doctoral thesis, Université
Paris XIII, 1998.
Rochwert-Zuili, Patricia, “El Cantar de Mio Cid y la Crónica de Castilla: emergencia y
valoración de los ‘nuevos linajes’ en la historiografía neoalfonsí”, in Carlos Alvar,
Fernando Gómez Redondo, and Georges Martin (eds.), El Cid: de la materia épica a
las crónicas caballerescas. Actas del Congreso Internacional “IX Centenario de la
Muerte del Cid”, celebrado en la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares los días 19 y 20 de
noviembre de 1999, Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, 2002, pp. 269-83.
Rochwert-Zuili, Patricia, ed., Crónica de Castilla, Paris: SEMH-Sorbonne, 2010, accessible
at <http://e-spanialivres.revues.org/137>.
Russell, Peter, “San Pedro de Cardeña y la historia heroica del Cid”, in Temas de “La
Celestina” y otros estudios: Del “Cid” al “Quijote”, Barcelona: Ariel, 1978, pp. 71-112.
Smith, Colin, “The Cid as Charlemagne in the *Leyenda de Cardeña”, Romania 97 (1976),
509-31.
Smith, Colin, “The Diffusion of the Cid Cult: A Survey and a Little-Known Document”,
Smith, Colin, “The First Prose Redaction of the Poema de mio Cid”, Modern Language
Review 82 (1987), 869-86.
Smith, Colin, “The Variant Version of the Start of the Poema de mio Cid”, La Corónica
20.2 (1992), 32-41.
Solera López, Rus, “El manuscrito D de la Crónica de Castilla: texto y representaciones
emblemáticas”, Emblemata 9 (2003), 17-126.
Ward, Aengus, ed., Estoria de los godos, Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval
Languages and Literature, 2006.
Appendix
Tentative Genealogical Trees of the Different Versions of the Castilian Chronicles

in the Sections Concerning El Cid’s biography
[1]
Stemma of the Estoria de España from Fernando I to the 24th Year of Alfonso VI’s Reign
(Versión crítica, pp. 400-513; PCG, chapters 802-895)
* Alfonsine compilation of the Estoria de España
Versión crítica
(1282-1284)
Versión amplificada
(1289)
E2
F
Crónica manuelina
Crónica de Castilla
Crónica ocampiana
[2]
Stemma of the Estoria de España from the Conquest of Denia and Tortosa, and the Siege of
Aledo until the Cid’s Death
(Versión crítica, pp. 514-549; PCG, chapters 896-962)
Alfonsine Alfonsine translation
Minor Historia prosification of the Arabic account *Leyenda
Sources Roderici of the about the conquest of de Cardeña
PMC Valencia
*Compilation
of the Estoria de España
Versión crítica
Interpolation of the
Cid’s story
E2, F
Crónica manuelina
Crónica de Castilla
462 Bautista
Figure 14.1 Incipit of the Corónica del Çid Ruy Díaz Canpeador, el qual
nunca fue vençido, mas siempre vençedor, manuscript S
of the Crónica de Castilla. With kind permission of
the Biblioteca Nacional de España.
The Cidian Matter in the 15th Century 463
Chapter 15
The Cidian Matter in the 15th Century

The development of the Cidian matter in the 15th century rests on an interest-
ing paradox. The principal text about Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the Poema de mio
Cid, faded into gradual obscurity, yet its storyline continued to be known due
to the prosifications of the poem included in later chronicles. On the other
hand, two fictional and rather marginal texts acquired singular predominance:
the Mocedades de Rodrigo and the Estoria del Cid, whose hagiographic materi-
als known as the *Leyenda de Cardeña were incorporated into the amplified
version of the Alfonsine Estoria de España. It is possible that the Mocedades de
Rodrigo was transmitted orally; this may explain why the Refundición carried
out in Palencia (c.1365) was copied in manuscript P of the Crónica de Castilla
(Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Esp. 36) at the beginning of the 15th
century, while at the end of the same century the only manuscript of the Poema
de mio Cid was brought from the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña to the
town hall of Vivar.
Of the three heroic ages that make up Rodrigo’s literary life, the ones that
were of interest in this period correspond to the adulescens (“young knight”),
and the senex (“old knight”) because of the lessons taught by the Cid in his
court in Valencia, disregarding that of the vir strenuus – the strong warrior who
endures the loss of his social and familial dishonor, as narrated in the diptych
woven into the Poema de mio Cid. It does not mean that this part of the Cid’s
legendary biography was forgotten; rather, it was conditioned by the different
renderings with which those events had been absorbed into prose accounts by
chroniclers during the second half of the 13th century. From then on, they were
molded to fit opposing ideologies, depending on whether the text tried to
strengthen royal authority or protect the rights of magnates who were always
hostile towards the crown. This tension between the monarchy and the aris-
tocracy intensified throughout the 15th century, particularly during the reign of
Juan II (1406-54). In this learned milieu, the representation of the Cid under-
went a remarkable ideological revision as to create a paradigm of heroism with
which to promote a renovation of the military order sponsored by Álvaro de
Luna, aiming at strengthening the image of a weak monarch. The noblemen,
for their part, made sure that their genealogical origins were linked to Rodrigo

464 Gómez Redondo
Díaz, believing he represented the values of the very Castilian identity that was
undermined by the pressure of the neighboring kingdoms.
It was only during the joint reign of the Catholic Monarchs when the con-
flict between royalty and aristocracy was resolved through the promotion of a
new chivalric order that once again relied on the image of Rodrigo Díaz. The
Cid served as an example for the cavalry of young knights who bore the heavi-
est weight of the war with Granada. He also inspired a military doctrine meant
to limit the danger posed by the Turks as well as political stances based on his
heroic conduct.
The transformation that the Cidian material underwent was not based on
the old epic songs from the 13th and 14th centuries, but on historical memory
that had been shaped by contrasting chronicles. It is to these that 15th-century
biographers, compendia’s authors, and historians turn to find the most suit-
able episodes for the audience of their compilations. Therefore, it is necessary
to begin with the images of the Cid found in these older chronicles showing
two determining models of heroic conduct that were to be influential in the
15th century.1
All the storylines about the Cid are well integrated in the Crónica de Castilla,
a compilation of the Alfonsine material put together at the end of the 13th
century – a crucial time when Castile’s identity as a kingdom was at stake. The
compiler granted extraordinary value to the material related to the Cid and
consolidated the motley and contradictory details about Rodrigo’s life that
were circulating at the end of the 13th century. Among them were epic poems
(at least the Poema de mio Cid and the primitive *Gesta about his youthful
deeds), as well as the different versions of King Alfonso X’s Estoria de España in
which at least two epic poems had been intercalated: the Cantar de Sancho II2
and the Poema de mio Cid.
These different storylines give rise to two opposing heroic portraits of
Rodrigo that are nevertheless complementary in some of their political impli-
cations: on the one hand, there is a rebellious Cid, and on the other, there is the
Cid who formed part of the royal court. An example of this ambivalence is the
Jura de Santa Gadea (the Oath of Santa Gadea), an episode that is difficult to
1 This chapter is based on my article “El Cid humanístico”. However, in this work the analytical
perspectives and texts under consideration are different. For a complete study of the develop-
ment of the Cidian material in the 15th century, see my article. For the Cidian matter in 13th
and 14th-century chronicles, see Francisco Bautista’s chapter in this volume.
2 The Cantar de Sancho II (or Cantar de las particiones) narrates the division of the kingdom by
Fernando I, and the fratricidal wars that concluded with the death of Sancho II and Alfonso
VI’s return to power over the unified realm of Castile and León.
situate within the framework of 13th-century epic poems since it is signifi-

cantly different from the initial sequence of the Poema de mio Cid and the
values of its hero. In any case, rather than affirming the paradigm of the rebel-
lious or obstinate hero, the compiler of the Crónica de Castilla wanted to
amend the defects of the upper nobility and promote a new chivalric and mili-
tary order represented by Rodrigo and his retinue, who were taken to be
guarantors of royal authority. Furthermore, the Crónica de Castilla, like the
Versión amplificada of the Estoria de España, transmitted the *Leyenda de
Cardeña, a kind of hagiographic story that recounted Rodrigo’s final exploits in
Valencia and the miracles that occurred at his tomb in San Pedro de Cardeña.
All the episodes constituting Rodrigo’s legendary biography were woven
together in the Crónica de Castilla. The consolidation of these references is to
be found in the Cid’s popular image as it developed throughout the 15th cen-
tury directly or indirectly through Count Pedro de Barcelos’ Crónica geral de
Espanha de 1344 – another historiographical text essential for analyzing the
aristocratization of the past.
1 King Juan II’s Reign: The Affirmation of Royal Authority
Much of the information about the Cid included in the general chronicles that
were produced in the 15th century derived from the Crónica de Castilla or from
the Crónica de 1344, which circulated both in Portuguese and Spanish in two
complementary redactions. It is a revealing detail in light of the fact that after
1420, when Álvaro de Luna freed Juan II – who was held hostage in Tordesillas
by his cousin Enrique of Aragon – Castile promoted an ongoing alliance with
Portugal in order to keep the Infantes of Aragon from interfering in Castilian
affairs.
One of the earliest historiographical texts of the 15th century is Las siete
edades del mundo, a historical treatise written in verse between 1418 and 1426
by Pablo de Santa María (Burgos, 1350-1435). It is a synthesis of world history
beginning with the creation, and it was meant for the education of Juan II,
who, still too young for the throne, was under the guardianship of Pablo de
Santa María. It contains the essential historical information on which the
future king should establish the government of his kingdom. The construction
of Castile’s identity begins in stanza 323, and like the Crónica de Castilla, it
intertwines the deeds of King Fernando I with those of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar.
When writing about the monarch, the author included details about the first
fratricidal war and the expansion of the kingdom of Castile that faced alleged
aggressions from León and Navarre. As for the Cid, he recounted how King
466 Gómez Redondo
Fernando dubbed the Castilian warrior a knight after Rodrigo defeated the
monarch’s brother-in-law, King Bermudo of León, in the battle of Tamarón in
1037:
Aqueste con quien ovo el reino quedado

fue aquel noble rey don Fernando el primero,
que al buen Çid Ruy Díaz armó cavallero3
From this point forward and following the storyline of the Crónica de Castilla,
the alliance between the king and the hero results in the liberation of the
recently established kingdom from the control of external powers – the
emperor, the king of France, and the Pope. This is summarized in the emper-
or’s defeat and the Pope’s surrender:
e ovo a Castilla otrosí libertado

cuando con sus huestes ovo caminado
fasta Tolosa contra el enperador,
el cual con el papa juntos con temor
le dieron cuanto les ovo demandado.4
It was important to remember this spirited defense of Castilian identity at the

time when Juan II came of age. King Fernando became “par de emperador”
thanks to the knightly virtues of a hero who was capable of leading the Castilian
army against the powerful alliance of the empire and the papacy. It was a feat
that proclaimed Castilian hegemony over the rest of the peninsular kingdoms,
while keeping an intentional silence about their monarchs.5 This version of
history built upon the echoes of epic songs was confirmed by the Refundición
de 1460 of Pablo de Santa María’s chronicle. In the prose commentary, refer-
ences deriving from epic songs were justified through their inclusion in
chronicles linked to the defense of Castilian ideology:
[…] y por su grant nobleza fue dicho don Fernando par de enperador y
después que vençió al rey don Bermudo su cuñado ovo otra batalla con el
3 I quote Conde’s edition, La creación de un discurso historiográfico, stanza 323. The episode is
taken from the Alfonsine chronicles, which situate it during the capture of Coimbra (1064)
following an allusion from the lost Cantar de Sancho II.
4 Conde, La creación de un discurso historiográfico, stanza 323.
5 Conde explains that, “De hecho, en las Siete edades la linna del relato ya no será sino la de los
reyes de Castilla” (La creación de un discurso historiográfico, p. 98).
rey don Garçía de Navarra su hermano, en la cual fue vençido y muerto

don Garçía y por eso ovo asimesmo el reino de Navarra. Este tobo çercada
a Coinbra siete años y el día que se le entregó armó cavallero al Çid Ruy
Díaz de Bivar.6
The selection of materials relative to the Mocedades de Rodrigo responds to

clear criteria: the youthful exploits that only contribute to the construction of
Rodrigo’s heroic identity are disregarded, while everything related to the
greater glory of the kingdom is preserved. The same can be said about the sec-
ond part, which deals with the imposition of the imperial tribute: it avoids
mentioning the weakness of the monarch who must be availed by his principal
vassal to better highlight the outcome of the campaigns that depended as
much on Rodrigo’s military abilities as on the king’s leadership:
este Enrique enperador se quexó al papa qu’el dicho rey don Fernando no
le quería reconoçer señorío como los otros reyes christianos y el papa
gelo requirió, si no que enviaría cruzada sobre él. Estonçe el rey don
Fernando aparejó sus huestes y desafió al enperador y pasó los puertos de
Aspa y con el Çid Ruy Díaz en la reguarda y peleó con el poder del enpera-
dor que venían con don Remón conde de Saboya a le resistir y vençiólos
y fue preso el conde y otros muchos cavalleros, y con este temor el papa y
el enperador otorgaron al dicho don Fernando cuanto quiso pedir por sus
mensajeros a favor y libertad d’España.7
To be sure, the gloss, written in 1460, does reflect the first decade of King Enri-
que IV’s reign – a prosperous time for the monarch according to his chronicler
Diego Enríquez del Castillo. The Refundición also contains one of the few refer-
ences to the Cid’s exploits during the reign of Alfonso VI. It relates to the
ongoing confrontation between royalty and aristocracy: “Éste desterró al Çid
Ruy Díaz y prendió a su hermano don Garçía que murió en fierros. Este rey
ganó a Toledo y a otras villas y castillos de moros”.8 The chronicler also records
correctly that it was Alfonso, not his brother Sancho, who held García I of
Galicia in prison until his death. It is a very brief note from the time of the
second fratricidal war that ignited tensions that lead Rodrigo to leave the king-
dom. However, this information is not recorded by Pablo de Santa María, but
rather by his commentator in another context. Juan II’s chancellor, as we have
6 Pablo de Santa María, Las siete edades del mundo: Refundición de 1460, p. 405.
468 Gómez Redondo
seen, was only interested in highlighting the unity that bound Fernando I and
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, and the latter’s special place at the heart of Castile’s
military expansion.
2 Álvaro de Luna’s Definition of the Chivalric Model
Rodrigo Díaz’s inclusion in the canon of famous men can be explained by the
actions taken by Juan II’s favorite, Álvaro de Luna, to create a chivalric atmo-
sphere around the monarch. A new chivalric code may be seen in many
historical works: the corrections to the Segunda parte of the Crónica de Juan II;
the encomiastic first section of the Historia written by Álvaro de Luna himself;
the Corónica sarracina; and El Victorial – the biography of Pero Niño, first count
of Buelna (1431), composed by Gutierre Díaz de Games. In the last work, one
finds a chivalric doctrine that deals with a rigorous analysis regarding the
appropriate values of an estate dedicated to defending the kingdom and keep-
ing its distance from the splendor of the court. To this end, Díaz de Games
reconstructed the group of “los Nueve de la Fama” (the Nine Worthies) in order
to include three Spanish heroes who distinguished themselves for their victo-
ries against the Moors:
E tomen enxemplo del conde Fernán Gonçález, amigo de Dios, que pele-
ando con grand esfuerço e fee, venció el grand poder de Almançor. E del
Cid Ruy Díaz: seyendo un pequeño cavallero, peleando por la fee, e por la
verdad, e por la honra de su rey e reino, venció muchas batallas, e le fizo
Dios grande e honrado, e fue muy tenido de sus comarcanos. Otrosí,
tomen enxemplo del muy noble rey don Fernando el Casto, que peleando
por la fee ganó a Córdova e a Sevilla, donde es santo non calonizado9.
The Cid prefigured Pero Niño’s conduct in battle; he was another “buen caval-
lero” that “nunca fue vencido de sus enemigos, él ni gente suya.”10 This
characteristic had already appeared in the *Gesta de las mocedades de Rodrigo
prosified in the Crónica de Castilla, where Rodrigo is blessed by Saint Lazarus
who, disguised as a leper, blows a puff or breathes on him a “ressollo” or “bafo”
by which the Saint grants Rodrigo everlasting victory over his enemies: “ca tú
9 Díaz de Games, El Victorial, pp. 50-51. For more information about this passage, see Gómez
Redondo, “El Cid humanístico”, pp. 329-30.
10 Díaz de Games, El Victorial, pp. 61-62.
nunca serás vençido, mas antes serás vençedor siempre”.11 In his knightly code,
Díaz de Games described the harshness and rigors that a warrior must face
during war, always uncertain, confronting situations with no easy solution, and
all far-removed from the showy ostentation of the court. Similar ideas were
expressed by Pero Ferruz in one of his well-known poems addressed to the
chancellor Pero López de Ayala, who complained about the discomfort of
camping in the mountains. Throughout the poem, memories of epic and chi-
valric heroes are evoked – such as Amadís de Gaula and the famous “ventiscas”
(blizzards) that he survived – as an exemple of the efforts that warriors must
make when faced with the most adverse circumstances, including the weath-
er’s extreme bitterness. Rodrigo’s efforts were testimony of this:
E si el muy loado Cid

temiera los aguaduchos,
non vençiera él tan muchos
reyes e condes en lid,
nin enguerreara a Valençia,
do le dan con reverençia
mayores parias que a Olid12.
It must be noted how he takes the opportunity to evoke the Cid’s victory over
rival counts – always the faction of Christian enemies – and over kings who
can only be Moors. In verses with a similar rhyme scheme composed by Juan
de Mena, who was always on the side of Álvaro de Luna, the image of Rodrigo
Díaz that the poet recreates in the fourth stanza of the Laberinto is again
intended to exalt the exploits of the Spanish knights while comparing them to
the deeds carried out by heroes of antiquity:
Como non creo que fuesen menores

que los de Africano los fechos del Çid,
nin que feroçes menos en la lid
entrasen los nuestros que los agenores,
las grandes fazañas de nuestros señores,
la mucha constançia de quien los más ama
11 Rochwert-Zuili, Crónica de Castilla, p. 69b. About this episode, see Montaner Frutos,
“Rodrigo y el gafo”, pp. 122-37.
12 Cancionero de Juan Alfonso de Baena, p. 541, stanza 12 of “Dezir de Pero Ferruz a Pero
López de Ayala”.
470 Gómez Redondo
yaze en tiniebras, dormida su fama,

dañada de olvido por falta de actores.13
Ignorance of Castile’s past is blamed either on the negligence of the chroni-

clers or on the lack of authors capable of articulating a heroic memory of those
“grandes fazañas” that could be presented to contemporaries in an exemplary
fashion. It is not surprising that this same notion appeared in the Crónica de
don Álvaro de Luna linked to the geographical area where the Maestre’s bravery
in battle was proved. In effect, it is not a coincidence that when in 1446 Álvaro
de Luna laid siege to the town of Atienza, which was controlled by the Infante
Juan’s faction, he referred to the exemplary exploits of the Cid:
Aquel çerro llaman los de la tierra las Peñas de Ruy Díaz, que algunos
dizen que le llaman assí porque el Cid Ruy Díaz, viniendo a çercar aquella
villa e castillo, ovo tenido real en aquel çerro. E allí pareçió al Maestre que
quedaría bien asentada aquella gente con aquellos caballeros, fasta en
tanto que el Rey viniese.14
An entry in the Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres, written by Álvaro de

Luna himself, confirms this model of chivalric behavior. In reference to the
seven famous knights – not nine – appeared the figure of the Cid alongside
that of Count Fernán González, the liberator of Castile:
E comoquier que mucho sean de loar Éctor, el troyano, e Arquiles, el

griego, e el grande Josué e el fuerte Sansón, e el religioso cavallero Judas
Macabeo, e el conde don Fernand Gonçález, e el Çid Ruy Díaz, e otros
muchos cavalleros que fueron muy valientes e esforçados e esmerados en
el fecho de las armas […]15
2 Memory of Lineage Among the Nobility: The Connection with the

Mendoza Family
In the first half of the 15th century, two ideological orientations built upon the
image of Rodrigo Díaz took hold among the nobility: the followers of Álvaro
de Luna used the Cid – who had been elevated to the canon of famous knights
– to reinforce royal authority; whereas the opposing faction that sought to
13 Juana de Mena, Laberinto de Fortuna y poemas.

14 Crónica de don Álvaro de Luna, p. 185.
15 Álvaro de Luna, Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres, p. 295.
dispossess the king’s favorite of his excessive power looked at the Cid to uphold
their inherited privileges they were unwilling to relinquish. One of the most
active groups in the confrontation with Álvaro de Luna rallied around Bishop
Gutierre Álvarez de Toledo, who went from Palencia to Seville, to be finally
promoted to the see of Toledo in 1442. The prelate found support in his nephew
Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the first count of Alba de Tormes, who was related
to Íñigo López de Mendoza and also to Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, the lord of
Batres.
In this active circle of aristocratic power, Pérez de Guzmán carried out one
of the most important reconfigurations of Rodrigo Díaz’s image in his Loores
de los claros varones de España, a work dedicated to his nephew of the same
name and comendador mayor of Calatrava. Written in verse, it was meant to be
a kind of treatise on doctrinal and military conduct, and it was based on a
review of different political trends of the Castilian past. Its thematic choice has
its beginning in the Crónica de Castilla, as can be seen in the part dedicated to
Fernando the Great and the fratricidal wars.16 This rundown of the first
Castilian kings ended with five stanzas dedicated to the Cid. His life story was
set within the span of time that goes from the reigns of Fernando I to that of
Alfonso VI, “padre e fijo” (217b),17 in order to emphasize his triumph over
Moorish and Christian adversaries: “venció / tantas lides de paganos / con
algunas de christianos” (217c-e), to the point that his heroic exploits merited to
be compared to heroes of Antiquity: “que de laurel coronado, / pudiera aver
trïunfado / en tiempo de los romanos” (217f-h). The lord of Batres aimed at
presenting a model warrior who was capable of overcoming unavoidable
adversities. For that reason, he only included information about the conquest
of Valencia. Without narrating the reasons behind the Cid’s exile, the author
emphasized the scarcity of resources available to him when he was forced to
leave Castile:
Asaz con poca potencia

e andando desterrado,
ganó con su principado
la gran çibdad de Valencia. (218a-d)
16 According to Fernández Gallardo, “Cabría añadir el posible uso del Liber illustrium perso-
narum de Gil de Zamora, pues la consideración de las series de los Alfonso regios podría
estar inspirada en las series alfabéticas de esta obra” (“La biografía como memoria esta-
mental”, p. 479).
17 I quote the edition included in volume I of Foulché-Delbosc, Cancionero castellano del
siglo XV.
472 Gómez Redondo
Thus, the author outlined an image of the Cid that served as an example of the
tenacity and effort with which a warrior can overcome any adversity that might
impede his upward mobility in the ranks of the aristocracy. Pérez de Guzmán
reluctantly compressed the actions Rodrigo took for governing and defending
Valencia, which he claimed to know: “mi mano non escribió, / los reyes que allí
venció” (218fg). He preferred to dedicate an octave to the first of the sequences
from the *Estoria del Cid included in the Crónica de Castilla and attributed to
“Gil Díaz su escribano” (219b) because in these Loores – like in the Mar de his-
torias – religious and military references are interwoven. Even so, in accordance
with the preface to his Generaciones, he points to its possible verisimilitude: “Si
la istoria no mïente” (219a). In any case, the best indication of the majestic
power achieved by this great warrior is confirmed by the embassy sent by the
Persian sultan (219c), an event utilized to elevate the Cid to the category of
ancient heroes:
le envió un su pariente
con tantas joyas e tales,
que Roma en los sus anales
registrara tal presente. (219e-h)
As with other figures in the Generaciones, the last two stanzas of the Loores
give an account of Rodrigo’s origins (220) and the genealogical lines that
descend from him (221), linking them to the various lineages connected to the
Cid as they had been elaborated in the chronicle tradition. Pérez de Guzmán
describes the place and circumstances in which the Cid was born in order to
better contrast his humble beginnings in Burgos with the court he established
in Valencia where he died: “Este varón tan notable / en río de Nierva nasció, / e
en Valencia fenesció” (230a-c). This enabled him to call attention to the glori-
ous passing from being famous in life – always a fleeting condition (230g) – to
the truly eternal life (“perdurable”) (230h), expressing the same ideas that Jorge
Manrique elaborated in the coplas to his father years later. To culminate this
small sample of Rodrigo’s famous deeds, the lord of Batres – always prone to
furnish genealogical information – evoked the marriages of the Cid’s daughters
to the Infantes “de Navarra e de Aragón” (231f), noting that both became “reinas
coronadas” (231e), according to the tradition originating from the Poema de
mio Cid. The author concluded his description of the hero’s deeds on a positive
note with a reference to the paradigm of the illustrious Romans: “fueron las
d’este varón / fortunas muy prosperadas” (231g-h).
It is significant that the kings of Castile’s historical account would end with
this biographical sketch of Rodrigo Díaz, considering that what followed dealt
with the kings of Aragon. The handling of sources available to Pérez de Guzmán
is complex and can only be reconstructed using the list of works of his per-
sonal library. In the inventory of the Toledo manuscript appears a “libro del Cid
Ruy Díaz”, which probably refers to a testimony of the Crónica de Castilla.18 It is
to this work that the author refers when in the Generaciones he establishes the
ancestral origins of the Mendoza family in the biographical sketch dedicated
to Admiral Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Íñigo López de Mendoza’s father:
El solar de Mendoça es en Álava, antiguo e grande linaje. A algunos oí

dizir que vienen del Çid Ruy Díaz, mas yo non lo leí. Acuérdome enpero
aver leído en aquella corónica de Castilla que fabla de los fechos del Çid
que la reina doña Urraca, fija del rey don Alfonso que ganó a Toledo, fue
casada con el conde don Remón de Tolosa, del cual ovo fijo al enperador
don Alonso […]19
According to oral tradition, a story that circulated toward the middle of the
15th century had the Mendoza family descend from the Cid. Pérez de Guzmán
mentions this as a possibility in contrast with the historiographical informa-
tion included in the Crónica de Castilla where, as it has already been noted,
episodes about Fernando I are interwoven with those of the Cid throughout
the prosification of the *Gesta de las Mocedades. Although doubtful, the genea-
logical reference was essential in order to defend ancestral rights that were
being challenged by the royal curia.20 The evocation of this genealogical rela-
tionship acquired its full understanding in two elegies dedicated to Íñigo López
de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana. The first was composed by Diego de Burgos
around 1458, and the second by Gómez Manrique, the Marquis of Santillana’s
18 See Vaquero, Cultura nobiliaria, p. 28. Vaquero points out “la existencia de este libro en
1463, si es que se trata de una crónica del Cid desgajada de la Crónica de Castilla – como la
llamada Crónica particular del Cid, que publicó fray Juan de Velorado a cargo del monas-
terio de San Pedro de Cardeña en 1512 –, indica que el héroe épico retorna a ser un modelo
importante en la conciencia nobiliaria castellana ya probablemente desde mediados del
siglo xv, cuando el señor de Batres vivía retirado de la vida política y dedicado de pleno al
estudio” (p. 44). The “libro del Cid Ruy Díaz” is not necessarily a section taken from the
Crónica de Castilla given that the complete work also went by the title of Crónica o
Romanz del Cid e de los reyes de Castilla; see Solera López, “El manuscrito D de la Crónica
de Castilla”.
19 Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones y semblanzas, pp. 99-100. Regarding this passage, see
Montaner, “La enseña del Cid”, p. 48.
20 For more information about this process, see Beceiro Pita, “La conciencia de los antepasa-
dos”.
474 Gómez Redondo
nephew. Diego de Burgos, who was the Marquis’ secretary, wrote an extensive
poem of 228 stanzas of arte mayor entitled Triunfo del Marqués.21 It is an alle-
gorical vision that brings together the memory of heroes from different genres
and traditions. Dante guides the poet, describing the figures of the past and
present that appear before them. What is remarkable is the joint presentation
of Fernán González and the Cid. The poet points out that Fernán González had
not been rendered sufficient honor “por falta de pluma latina elocuente” (89d),
and recalls the Cid’s victories in battle as well as his heroic nature:
El ínclito Cid, jamás no vencido,

gran ánimo noble do son los mejores,
verás cual está con gozo infinido
por ver al Marqués tan dino de onores. (90a-d)
Diego de Burgos then reveals the genealogical relationship between the Cid
and the Marquis of Santillana, and how pleased Rodrigo is on seeing that his
descendant incarnate his values. The author concludes by alluding to a now-
lost poem written by the Marquis that praised his illustrious ancestor:22
ca viene sin duda con los sus mayores

del mismo linaje qu’el Çid deçendía,
por esto el Marqués en metro escrivía
su estoria muy llena de altos loores. (90e-h)
Another illustrious ancestor of the Marquis of Santillana – and in this case a

real one – was Gonzalo Ruiz de la Vega, to whom the victory in the Battle of the
River Salado (1340) was attributed. The introduction of these two warriors
seems appropriate, for both are made to appear praising Íñigo López de Men-
doza in the two successive octaves. In any case, this attempt to provide a heroic
figure connected to Castile with a voice so he can describe how the Marquis of
21 See the study and edition prepared by Moreno Hernández, Retórica y humanismo: El
Triunfo del Marqués de Santillana (1458).
22 It is not possible to identify the poem that Íñigo López de Mendoza dedicated to his
alleged ancestor. However, the compositional process is described in stanza 156 of the
Triunfo: “La çítara dulçe que Orfeo tañía / […] / el dino marqués la puso encordada / en
tenple süave cual era primero / cantava con ella del buen cavallero / por quien fue Valen-
çia de moros ganada”.
Santillana achieved knightly perfection – in line with the Cid’s heroic model –
is crucial. In stanza 203, the Cid confirms this:
Triunfo de toda la cavallería,

insigne Marqués, a quien mucho devo,
muy bien por pariente loar te podría,
pero en otra cosa más justa me atrevo.
Tus altas proezas por donde me muevo
dan a Castilla muy gran resplandor;
quitóse contienda de quién fue mejor,
después que naçiste con todos lo pruevo.
Rodrigo himself recognizes that his glory is remembered thanks to the exploits
achieved by such a famous successor, thus preserving the prestige of his lin-
eage and resolving any conflict that may have been sparked when comparing
the heroic conduct of both of them. The intertwined images of these encomi-
astic poems are intimately connected to chivalric narratives when considering
the deeds of ancient heroes, whether from chivalric novels or from the Castilian
epic. These images converged in the biographies that were printed at the end
of the century, which will be discussed in the pages ahead.
Gómez Manrique bids his dead uncle farewell with more complex allegori-
cal images in the “Planto de las Virtudes e Poesía por el magnífico señor don
Íñigo López de Mendoça” (1458). This poem is of special interest because it was
sent to one of the Marquis’ sons, Pedro González de Mendoza. At that time, he
was bishop of Calahorra and a soon-to-be intermediary of a well-intentioned
legend of the Cid, as we shall soon see. Imitating the Marquis’ Comedieta de
Ponza, Gómez Manrique describes how he enters a valley where a fortress had
been built. Inside, he finds seated in a hall the seven virtues surrounding the
Marquis’ coffin. They are holding shields whose arms the poet describes as rep-
resenting “los cuatro costados” – that is to say, the genealogical lines of his
paternal and maternal grandparents –, and he begins with the one that estab-
lishes the Marquis’ parentage with the Cid:
La primera bien pintada

de verde me pareçía,
por esquina travesada
una vanda colorada
según el Çid la traía.23
23 Gómez Manrique, “El planto de las Virtudes”, in Cancionero, p. 384.

476 Gómez Redondo
This heraldic description corresponds to the earliest arms of the Mendoza

family: on a green field, a red bend. His retrospective attribution to the Cid’s
coat of arms from that moment took hold on people’s imaginations.24 In the
last decade of the 15th century, it is reproduced by Diego Hernández de
Mendoza in his Libro de armerías. Following the *Gesta de las Mocedades that
was prosified at the beginning of the Crónica de Castilla, he included a chapter
where he speaks about the ancestral connections linking the Mendoza’s, not to
the Cid himself, but to one of his uncles:
Del linaje del buen Çid Ruy Díaz vienen los de Mendoça, lo qual, segund
escrive el coronista del rey don Hernando, que juntó los reynos de Castilla
y León, que fue d’esta manera: Laín Calvo, que fue uno de los dos juezes
de Castilla que los castellanos hizieron entre sí, casó con doña Elvira
Núñez, hija de Nuño Rasuera, que era el otro juez, do deçendieron los
condes de Castilla. Ovo d’ella quatro hijos: al mayor dixeron Fraín Laínez,
el que desuso es dicho; al segundo dixeron Laín Laínez, y d’este desçen-
dieron los de Mendoça, y al terçero dixeron Ruy Laínez, y al quarto dixe-
ron Nuño Laínez. Éste ovo un hijo que dixeron Diego Laínez, que fue
padre del Çid Ruy Díaz.25
After describing the Cid’s genealogical connection to the Mendoza family, he

elaborated upon their arms:
Éstos de Mendoça traen tres maneras de armas tan diferentes las unas
de las otras, que en nada no se pareçen, de las cuales escriviré lo que
d’ello pude deprender. Si por ventura no llevare la vía derecha, aquel que
d’ello más sabe tome la pluma en la mano y tieste o emiende lo que fuese
errado. Los Mendoças que agora poseen la casa de Mendoça, que es en la
montaña en tierra de Álava, traen las derechas armas del Çid, que es una
vanda colorada con unos bordes de oro enderredor de la vanda. Lo cual se
toma d’esta manera: qu’el Çid derramava la sangre de los moros bermeja
24 See Montaner, “La enseña del Cid”, pp. 48-51, and Cantar de mio Cid, pp. 725-26; Solera, “El
manuscrito D”, pp. 86-93; García López and Montaner, “El estandarte cidiano de Vivar”,
pp. 521-26.
25 Hernández de Mendoza, Libro de armería, in Valverde Ogallar, Manuscritos y heráldica en
el tránsito a la modernidad, pp. 968-69. The editor erroneously identifies the source of this
passage as the Crónica del rey Fernando III (ibid., note 1697), where such information is
not included. It is clearly an allusion to Fernando I and the Crónica de Castilla, whose text
Hernández de Mendoza followed nearly to the letter (see Rochwert-Zuili, Crónica de Cas-
tilla, p. 66a).
en el canpo que era verde. La cual casa es por derecha subçesión en poder
del duque del Infantadgo y marqués de Santillana y conde del Real.26
Unlike the description that Gómez Manrique offered, Hernández de Mendoza

described the arms of the house of his time: in order to avoid putting color on
color, to the red bend he adds a trim of gold. In addition, he made use of an
etiological legend that, like this heraldic attribution, proved to be successful in
later historiography. Thus, the genealogy of the Mendoza family constructed in
the mid-15th century and disseminated in two elegies – composed after Íñigo
López de Mendoza’s death – acquires authenticity in the Libro de armerías,
once again supported by the narrative in the Crónica de Castilla which, as
usual, strengthened the argument for the affirmation of the principal Castilian
lineages thanks to its skillful integration of epic materials.27
4 The Reign of Enrique IV: Heroic Ambiguities
From the very beginning, Enrique IV’s reign saw a worsening of tensions
between the court and factions of the nobility, who were subjected to the will
of Juan II’s favorite, Juan Pacheco, the first Marquis of Villena, and the king’s
regent, Alonso Carrillo, archbishop of Toledo. Under these circumstances, the
image of the Cid continued to be crucial in the defense of both the crown and
the rights of the aristocracy. Enrique IV showed little interest in learned mat-
ters, preferring music and hunting, as well as constructing palaces and
sumptuous chambers. It is to this king that one must attribute the decision to
include statues of Fernán González and the Cid in the gallery of royal figures
that he commissioned to decorate the salón de reyes at the alcázar in Segovia.
Diego de Valera, in his Memorial de diversas hazañas, points to this initiative to
show the king’s patronage of artistic activity:
E fortificó maravillosamente el alcáçar, e hizo ençima de la puerta d’él

una muy alta torre, labrada de maçonería y, en el corredor que se llama
en aquel alcáçar «de los cordones», mandó poner todos los reyes que en
Castilla y en León han seído después de la destruiçión de España, comen-
çando de don Pelayo fasta él; e mandó poner con ellos al Cid e al conde
26 Hernández de Mendoza, Libro de armería, in Valverde Ogallar, Manuscritos y heráldica en

el tránsito a la modernidad, p. 969. Regarding the differences on how these arms are rep-
resented, see Faustino Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, “Las armas de los Mendoza”.
27 See Nieto Soria, “Conflicto político e invención histórica”.
478 Gómez Redondo
Fernán Gonçález, por ser caballeros tan nobles e que tan grandes cosas
hizieron. Todos en grandes estatuas, labradas muy sutilmente, de made-
ras cubiertas de oro e plata. (p. 294)
The genealogical foundation of the Jueces de Castilla was made to support

Castile’s royal successions framed within the heroism of these two warriors
who put their virtues at the service of the royal power’s consolidation, an
objective too difficult to achieve during the controversial reign of Enrique IV,
as shown by the contrasting views of the summaries of two chronicles.
4.1 Harmony between Royal Authority and Power of the Nobility

Given his loyalty to the crown, the story about the Cid that Pedro de Escavias
incorporated into his Repertorio de Príncipes reveals the tension between his
desire to protect nobiliary privileges without harming the royal authority.
Escavias retained the materials from the Crónica de Castilla, as found in the
Crónica de 1344, and complementary information from Juan Gil de Zamora’s De
preconiis Hispaniae. These sources were combined between 1467 and 1470 dur-
ing the second decade of King Enrique IV’s reign, corresponding to the period
of his “adversidades”. In this context, Rodrigo’s military actions took on a new
meaning, most significantly, the way he helped his monarch liberate Castile
from the imperial tribute:
Después d’esto, ovo el Çid otra batalla con todo el mayor poder de Françia
e vençióles, sin que ninguna d’estas batallas el rey don Fernando ni sus
gentes llegasen. E como todos ivan fuyendo delante del Çid, e llegaron las
nuevas al conçilio, e suplicaron al papa que enbiase a mandar al rey don
Fernando que se tornase, ca non quería su tributo. E cuando el rey don
Fernando lo oyó, con consejo del Çid, enbió al papa al conde don Rodrigo
e a don Álvar Áñez e algunos letrados, con los cuales le escrivió que le
enbiase un cardenal con su poder bastante el enperador y rey de Françia
y los otros reyes, para que podiesen otorgar e afirmar que nunca jamás tal
demanda fuese a España movida so muy grandes penas e, si no lo quisie-
sen fazer, que él los iría todavía a buscar, e que no se partería de allende
de Tolosa fasta saber su respuesta.28
Rodrigo’s assistance to a king is seen again during the second fratricidal war,
when Sancho II is rescued thanks to the Cid’s bravery (chap. 122). It is an epi-
sode that contrasts with the Cid’s exile ordered by Alfonso VI as a result of the
28 Pedro de Escavias, Repertorio de Príncipes, p. 191.

slander of counts and ricoshombres surrounding the king (chap. 123). The cli-
mate of hostility towards Juan II of Aragon may explain why the Cid’s campaign
in Aragonese territory and the Count of Barcelona’s defeats – for example, in
the battle of Tévar – are described with such harshness:
E porque el Çid llevaba una gran cavalgada de tierra del rey Albenalfange,
el conde don Reimondo y él, e con muy grande gente de cristianos e
moros, çerca de Tovar de Pinar, ovieron una batalla en la cual el Çid topó
con el conde. E tan gran ferida con su lança le dio, que lo derribó medio
muerto en tierra donde fue luego preso, e todos los suyos e los moros
vençidos e desbaratados. E el Çid e los suyos fueron en alcançe tras ellos
çinco o seis leguas do mataron e prendieron muchos moros e cristianos
asaz. E tornaron al canpo e cogiéronlo, do avía tantas y tan grandes rique-
zas que no es cosa de poderse creer. El Çid ganó estonçes la su espada
Colada que el conde traía.29
In the mid-15th century, Rodrigo is also transformed into a champion of ances-

tral rights. To this end, the origin of royal dynasties descended from the Cid are
recalled at the beginning of Sancho IiI’s reign: “Este rey don Sancho, en vida de
su padre, casó con doña Blanca, fija del rey don Garçía de Navarra, nieto del buen
Çid, ansí que ella era viznieta, en la cual ovo un fijo que don Alfonso llamaron”.30
This same connection will acquire its full meaning in a vindicatory historio-
graphical text, the Crónica de los reyes de Navarra, written by Prince Carlos de
Viana. The author refuted an erroneous Castilian tradition by affirming that
Pedro I of Aragon and Navarre was not the Cid’s enemy, but rather, helped him
conquer Peña Cadiella:
No solamente fue valiente caballero ni se contentó de sola su virtud mas,

assí como fue por ella amado, amó a los que posseían aquella mesma
virtud; e por ende, recebió al Cid Ruy Díez en su comienda, e le prometió
de ayudar cuando lo hubiesse menester, ca, en aquel tiempo, el Cid hera
airado del rey don Alfonso de Castilla porque tomó el juramento cuoal
ninguno de Castilla no osó tomar del dicho rey por saber si avía seído en
consejo de la muerte de su hermano el rey don Sancho, el cuoal mató
Adolsi en Çamora.31
29 Pedro de Escavias, Repertorio de Príncipes, pp. 201-02.

30 Pedro de Escavias, Repertorio de Príncipes, p. 222.
31 Carlos de Viana, Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, p. 131.
480 Gómez Redondo
In addition to establishing Rodrigo Díaz’s alliance with Pedro I,32 Carlos de

Viana also underscored the role that Navarre and Aragon played in the cam-
paigns that the Cid carried out during his exile and, in particular, in the
conquest of Valencia: “con ayuda del dicho rey don Pedro de Nabarra e de
Aragón e de don Pero Ruyz de Açagra, señor de Albarracín, el dicho Cid prendió
a Valencia”.33 He made clear, of course, that it was Pedro I who helped Rodrigo
in the Battle of Bairén in 1097 – historically documented – against “Avobucar”
(Bucar in the Poema de mio Cid), whom the Cid killed in addition to another
fifty thousand enemies. In Carlos de Viana’s compilation, the alliance forged
between the crown – in this case represented by Pedro I – and the military
order, which is represented by Rodrigo’s heroic performance in battle, contin-
ues to be effective.
4.2 Defense of Aristocratic Rights

Between 1471 and 1476, Lope García de Salazar – who was imprisoned by his
son in a tower in San Martín de Muñatones – gave the Cidian material a new
slant. During his lifetime, this contentious nobleman from Biscay was involved
in several litigations – either with other noble families from the area or with
the monarch – culminating in disputes with members of his own family. He
passed his time in prison by compiling an extensive Historia de las bienandan-
zas e fortunas in which he included all types of stories. When writing about the
“fechos de España”, he resorted to the Cidian materials from the Crónica de
Castilla and the Crónica de 1344, even though some have assumed that certain
conflicting details may have derived from an oral version of the Mocedades de
Rodrigo that was still circulating at the time.34
The Cid’s story was fully elaborated in Book XV, where García de Salazar
utilized all the available references about Rodrigo to justify the prominence he
granted him: “E agora dexa el cuento d’esto e torna a contar de los fechos del
noble cavallero Ruy Díaz, el Çid, de Vibar, porque perteneçe entrar en el reina-
miento d’estos dichos reyes e reinos”.35 García de Salazar views the Cid’s figure
32 In fact, the author notes that after the Cid was banished from Castile, he went to Pedro I’s
court: “e por esto lo airó e vénose poner so amparo del rey don Pedro” (Carlos de Viana,
Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, p. 131).
33 Carlos de Viana, Crónica de los Reyes de Navarra, p. 131
34 See Armistead, “Las Mocedades de Rodrigo según Lope García de Salazar”, who believes
that the historian relied on a reelaborated version of the Mocedades. Diego Catalán’s opin-
ion is more nuanced; see La épica española, pp. 358-65. Another possibility is that García
de Salazar knew a manuscript like BnF Esp. 36 (cited above), which includes both the
Crónica de Castilla and the reelaborated version of the Mocedades.
35 García de Salazar, Bienandanzas e fortunas, fol. 259v.
as a key to understanding what was happening to him, placing special value on

Rodrigo’s status as a nobleman, as demonstrated by the fact that he assigns to
the hero a specific title when referring to his “linaje e grandes fechos”. García de
Salazar returns to the legend of the Jueces de Castilla to begin once again the
Cid’s lineage with Laín Calvo and assert the relationship of his blood line to the
king, recalling that Rodrigo’s mother, Doña Teresa, “era nieta del rey de León,
fija de su fija vastarda” (fol. 260r). When Rodrigo was still a “grande mançebo”
(fol. 260r), he began his long heroic career, which García de Salazar must
abbreviate in a special section of his work:
fizo los grandes fechos que se cuentan por todos los reinos, que no se falla
omne que tantas batallas vençiese en canpo como él. E por eso fue lla-
mado Çid Canpeador e dezirlas he aquí en breve por no alargar escritura,
e así mesmo sus nobles fechos sumariamente. (fol. 260r)
This statement was followed by the section “Título de las vatallas que vençió
el buen Çid e de sus causas”, written as a treatise on military doctrine similar
to that of a later historian, Diego Rodríguez de Almela, who recorded four-
teen of the Cid’s battles in his Batallas campales.36 García de Salazar, however,
recounted twenty-one of Rodrigo’s battles, beginning with the first one when
he was twenty years old near the “río de Ovierna” against Count Gómez de
Gormaz, until the twenty-first, the “batalla del Quarto” or Cuarte, in which
the Cid defended Valencia from Bucar’s forces. After narrating the “Afrenta de
Corpes” and the outcome of the “Cortes de Toledo”, the list culminated in the
famous post mortem victory of Rodrigo over Bucar during his second attack on
Valencia, followed by the miracles associated with his tomb at the Monastery
of Cardeña. The details of the Cid’s life were based on “las sus istorias e de los
reyes don Ferrando e don Sancho e don Alonso, sus fijos” (fol. 268r), that is
to say, on the Crónica de Castilla that García de Salazar summarized except
for one remarkable detail: the embassy of the soldán, or sultan from Persia,
sent to Valencia to dissuade the Cid from participating in the military actions
that were being organized overseas. García de Salazar added the following
explanation:
E ésta era la verdad. Pero çiertamente el Çid fuera de buenamente en

aquella cruzada, sino que tenía asaz guerra con toda la morería de
Granada e de allende la mar e yazía en aquella çibdad de Valençia, que
estava metida en medio d’ellos; e por esto no fue ninguno d’España, que
36 The battles are 121-23, 125, 127-28, 130-32, 137-41 (fols. C4v-C6r).
482 Gómez Redondo
tenían asaz que fazer en las continas guerras que cada día les recreçían.
(fol. 263v)
Once again, what becomes evident is the dualistic interpretation derived from
the Crónica de Castilla, mirroring the tensions that were sparked throughout
the reign of Enrique IV, even though García de Salazar underscored the final
alliance between King Alfonso and his best vassal brought about by Rodrigo’s
military enterprises – thus the meticulous enumeration of his battles – but
also by the cowardice of his enemies.
5 The Reign of the Catholic Monarchs: A New Chivalric Order
From the War of Castilian Succession (1475-79) emerged a new chivalric order
that would unfold in the military operations that, over the course of a decade,
led to the conquest of Granada. In both conflicts, two famous warriors and an
illustrious bastard will be compared to the Cid, whose heroic image would
prompt imitation, first in the defense of Isabel’s rights and then again during
the campaigns against the Moors.
5.1 The Image of the “Segundo Cid”: 15th-Century Rodrigos

After the death of Juan Pacheco in 1474, the Count of Paredes de Nava and
Maestre of Santiago, Rodrigo Manrique, was the first nobleman whose values
were likened to those of the Cid. It was Rodrigo Manrique’s brother, Gómez
Manrique, who coined the expression “segundo Cid” in his “Defunsión del
noble cavallero Garçía Laso de la Vega”, a poem dedicated to the Marquis of
Santillana’s nephew. In the series of elegiac poems we have already analyzed,
the Marquis of Santillana was believed to be a descendent of the Cid; this
ancestral reference, associated with the Álvarez de Toledo and the Mendoza
families, is now made to extend to the Manrique line. Having the same first
name favored the assimilation of both knights as seen in the description of
Garçía Laso de la Vega’s investiture by Rodrigo Manrique:
En aqueste mesmo lugar dond’está

lo armó cavallero en una gran lid
Rodrigo Manrique, el segundo Çid,
a quien de su muerte mucho pesará. (69-72)37
37 Gómez Manrique, “Defunsión del noble cavallero Garçía Laso de la Vega”, in Cancionero,
p. 352.
This image must have seemed appropriate to Gómez Manrique since he used
it again in an encomiastic poem comprised of nine verses that he sent to his
brother:
Devos el Señor del mundo,

tantos bienes tenporales,
cuantos á dado de males
e trabajos desiguales
a vós, el buen Çid segundo.
E depués dé larga vida,
bien e con plazer gastada,
Él vos dé la fin onrada
e con sus santos cabida. (10-18)38
In a work that should be included in this group of occasional poems, Gómez

Manrique compares his brother to the most important warriors from antiquity
– both Trojans and Romans – as well as to a hero from his homeland, Rodrigo
Díaz:
Para Castilla Camilo,

otro Çid contra Granada,
en la cual es vuestra espada
tanto temida e loada
e más que la de Troïlo. (21-25)39
Besides referencing the war with Granada that occurred during the reign of
Juan II – notably, the capture of Huéscar in 1434 – Gómez Manrique antici-
pated here a gallery of paradigms from antiquity that his nephew Jorge
Manrique later developed in stanzas 27 and 28 of the poem dedicated to his
father, Rodrigo Manrique, upon his death in 1476.
Although the Count of Paredes would not live to participate in the cam-
paigns against Granada that began in 1482, he had been one of the early
supporters of Princess Isabel after the unexpected death of Prince Alfonso in
July 1468, who had been recognized to succeed Enrique IV by many aristocrats
and prelates of the kingdom. This is the opposite of what happened to the
38 Gómez Manrique, “Estrenas al señor conde de Paredes, su hermano”, in Cancionero,

p. 300.
39 Gómez Manrique, “Aguilando al señor conde de Paredes, su hermano”, in Cancionero,
p. 308.
484 Gómez Redondo
Marquis of Cádiz Rodrigo Ponce de León, who was also called “segundo Cid”.
During the Castilian War of Succession, Ponce de León, being a relative of Juan
Pacheco, was a supporter of Princess Juana and Alfonso V of Portugal. Years
later, he would receive Isabel’s pardon and distinguish himself for his singular
exploits during the long conflict with Granada, such as the conquest of Alhama
in 1482. Related to this nobleman, many authors of the time elaborated a calcu-
lated image of the Cid, beginning with Diego de Valera, who saw in Ponce de
León the achievements peculiar to epic heroes:
Pues de vós, señor, ¿qué se espera salvo que seréis otro Cid en nuestros
tienpos nacido? Que si aquel tan estrenuo y escogido varón ganó a
Valencia, cobróla después de averla tenido cercada por espacio de diez
meses […] e vós, señor, apenas vos eran las barbas nascidas, cuando todo
temor olvidado sin tal certidunbre tener […] tomastes la famosa cibdad
de Alhama, siendo tan lexos de vuestra tierra e metida en medio de sus
defensores e tanto cercana a la muy poderosa cibdad de Granada.40
Similarly, in a funerary eulogy included in his Memorias, Andrés Bernáldez

compared Ponce de León – who died soon after the capture of Granada in 1492
– both to the greatest heroes from the Trojan legend and to the Cid.41 However,
it is in the Marquis of Cádiz’s anonymous biography where references to the
Cid’s image reached its apogee.42 It began in the prologue with a new catalogue
of worthy men and continued with a series of exploits seemingly modeled on
those achieved by epic heroes. Specific episodes were evoked to reinforce the
military spirit the Catholic Monarchs were fostering among the new cavalry
that emerged from the war with the Moors. The religious spirit that guided
Rodrigo Díaz during his most important military campaigns is also present in
the representation of the Marquis of Cádiz, resulting in his canonization by a
process similar to the one the Cid underwent in the Leyenda de Cardeña.43 The
following passage is only a sample of this religious fervor:
Y sus grandes y famosas virtudes me dieron cabsa aver de dezir y recon-

tar de los fechos virtuosos d’este tan noble y tan esforçado cavallero,
40 Diego de Valera, Tratado de las epístolas, XVII, p. 22b.

41 Andrés Bernáldez, Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Católicos, p. 238.
42 See MacKay, “Un Cid Ruy Díaz en el siglo XV”, who argues that the Poema de mio Cid
inspired this series of images. However, as we have already seen, it derives from the
Crónica de Castilla, which was a source of the Crónica de 1344.
43 For more details, see Gómez Redondo, “El Cid humanístico”, pp. 332-35.
segund más largamente por su estoria adelante pareçerá. Y así podemos

bien dezir por el marqués de Cádiz, el segundo y buen conde Fernand
Gonçález, y segundo y santísimo cavallero Çid Ruy Díaz, pues que averi-
guadamente y fablando toda la verdad, tan nobles y tan esforçadas cosas
d’él podemos contar, de sus grandes victorias y vençimientos que en los
moros fizo, favoreçiendo y ensalçando la santa fe católica.44
5.2 Legitimization of a Lineage: The Cidian Imaginary

There were not only “Segundos cides” on the battlefield, like Rodrigo Manrique
or Rodrigo Ponce de León, favored by onomastic similarities. The same imagi-
nary made up of heroic references that was so closely linked to the Mendoza
family also prompted the conceptualization of a “primer Cid” (first Cid). Its
objective was to legitimize the sacrilegious line of the bastard Rodrigo Díaz de
Vivar y Mendoza,45 born in 1468 from the love relation that the prelate Pedro
González de Mendoza had with Doña Mencía de Lemos, one of the ten
Portuguese ladies who traveled to Castile in Juana of Portugal’s entourage on
the occasion of her marriage to Enrique IV in 1455.
Pedro González de Mendoza – who was, at the time, bishop of Sigüenza
and who was later named gran cardenal of Spain in 1474 – had learned the
value of establishing genealogical connections with vindicatory purposes, as
we have seen around the Álvarez de Toledo family. In 1442, the first Marquis of
Santillana, Pedro González de Mendoza’s father, sent him to complete his edu-
cation with Archbishop Gutierre Díaz de Toledo, with whom he remained until
1445. It was possibly during that time when he first heard of the oral traditions
that Pérez de Guzmán was gathering to incorporate into his Generaciones,
which spoke of the family’s origin dating back to the Cid. At best, it was a pos-
sibility that, as we have seen, Gómez Manrique’s assertion transformed into a
fact in his “Planto” (1458) for the death of the Marquis of Santillana, which was
sent to his son, Pedro González de Mendoza. Therefore, it is not coincidental
that he named his eldest son Rodrigo. By 1488, he had assembled a large landed
estate in order to establish a mayorazgo (an entailed estate) for his son Rodrigo.
As of November 1489, it included the town of Jadraque and its castle that is
44 Historia de los hechos del marqués de Cádiz, p. 145.

45 The best study about Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar y Mendoza is included in Gómez Lorente, El
marquesado de Cenete (1490-1523), pp. 50-135; for his date of birth, see p. 87. About his leg-
acy, see Nader, Los Mendoza y el Renacimiento español, p. 152; and Fernández Madrid,
“Una familia de mecenas”, p. 117.
486 Gómez Redondo
known today as “del Cid”.46 This is how Pedro González de Mendoza began
to create the heroic model that his son would emulate, precisely at the time
when a new cavalry that would carry the weight of Granada’s war against the
Moors began to take shape. As early as 1489, Hernando de Pulgar recorded the
presence of this young knight, accompanied by his uncle, leading his father’s
men: “de los cuales ivan por capitanes don Rodrigo de Mendoça, señor del Çid,
e don Furtado de Mendoça, adelantado de Caçorla”.47 By distinguishing him
in this campaign, the cardinal’s son underwent the same process of glorifi-
cation bestowed earlier on the Marquis of Cádiz: the chronicler emphasized
specific aspects of his knightly conduct to configure a new heroic archetype
that would best define the new cavalry that had emerged from the Castilian
War of Succession.
The court supported these novice knights and tried to join them in a bond
with similar ancestral clans in order to weave a web of nobiliary relationships
that was in tune with the interests of the monarchy. This is what happened
with Rodrigo de Mendoza’s first marriage, although not with his second.
A record of these events is registered by Pedro González de Mendoza’s gene-
alogists and biographers in the second half of the 16th century. In his Suma de
la vida del cardenal don Pedro Gonçález de Mendoza, Francisco Medina de
Mendoza enumerated the military exploits Rodrigo de Mendoza achieved dur-
ing the war with Granada that were later rewarded with a brilliant career at the
court. In his Batallas, Fernández de Oviedo also gave an account of these
ancestral connections in an epigraph whose title is undeniably connected to
the Cid: “El muy illustre don Rodrigo de Bivar e Mendoça, Marqués del Zenete
e Marqués de Ayora e Conde del Çid”.48
The man who was simply known as Rodrigo de Mendoza49 became Rodrigo
de Vivar y Mendoza in legal documents pertaining to a case that surely bene-
fited from such a heroic association.50 Somewhat later he evolved into Rodrigo
46 For more information about this mayorazgo and the donations that were used to found it,
see Villalba Ruiz de Toledo, El Cardenal Mendoza (1428), pp. 222-28; and Gómez Lorente,
El marquesado de Cenete (1490-1523), pp. 136-222.
47 Hernando de Pulgar, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, vol. 2, p. 364.
48 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Batallas y quinquagenas, ed. Avalle-Arce, p. 396.
49 See Pulgar’s Crónica, Medina’s Suma, and Santa Cruz’s Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, X and
XLV, ed. Mata Carriazo, pp. 76 and 194, as well as his Crónica del Emperador Carlos V. In
Bernáldez’s Memorias there is not one allusion to Rodrigo de Mendoza.
50 See, for example, “Provisión real recaída en el pleito entre el duque de Nájera, Pedro Man-
rique y el marqués del Cenete, Rodrigo de Vivar de Mendoza sobre el derecho a Ayora”
dated 3 October 1500 (Archivo Histórico Nacional, Sección Nobleza, Osuna, C. 1932, D.4)
or the “Ejecutoria del pleito litigado por Bernardino Juárez de Mendoza, conde de Coruña,
Díaz de Vivar y Mendoza, but only in the biography that his great-great-grand-
son Pedro de Salazar y de Mendoza dedicated to him, which explains why his
Crónica of 1625 is addressed to the “Duque del Infantado, don Rodrigo Díaz de
Vivar, de Mendoça, de la Vega, y de Luna, conde del Cid”. Regarding the origin
of the lineage, the author stated that it was believed that he descended from
“los juezes de Castilla Nuño Núñez Rasuera, y Laín Calvo, de quien procedió el
Cid Ruy Díaz de Vibar”, a conviction that “siguió el Cardenal, y assí en memoria
del Cid, llamó Rodrigo de Vibar al Marqués de el Cenete y el Castillo del Cid, al
de Jadraque”.51 The progressive acquisition of the epic hero’s last names,52 and
with them his heroic attributes, forged an identity that the heirs of the
Infantado received after their union with the House of Cenete.53
In sum, the deeply rooted connection between the Mendoza family and the
figure of the Cid that Pérez de Guzmán portrayed in his Generaciones from
sources transmitted by the oral tradition is taken in elegies dedicated to the
Marquis of Santillana as proof of his lineage’s nobility, since in one of the
poems, as we have seen, the Cid himself identifies the Marquis as his most
con Rodrigo de Bivar, marqués de Cenete, sobre devolución de ciertas alhahas”, dated 30
January 1502 (Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, Registro de Ejecutorias, Caja
166,19). However, in the Portal de Archivos Españoles (URL: <http://pares.mcu.es/>), the
name Rodrigo de Mendoza predominates from 1480 to 1550, even in an announcement for
a joust by Diego de Paredes dated 1517. Regarding the chronicle, the epic last name is only
mentioned in Continuación anónima de la Crónica de Pulgar – compiled possibly before
1515 – whose manuscripts are dated after that year. For example, ms. BNE 10240 mentions
the handing over to “don Rodrigo de Mendoza e de Bivar, hijo del cardenal don Pero
González de Mendoza, de las villas de Zenete e Guadix, que son siete, con título de mar-
qués de Zenete” (Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla, ed. Rosell, vol. 3, p. 513a). The epic last
name is not found in Galíndez de Carvajal’s Anales breves – “hicieron los reyes merced del
Cenete a D. Rodrigo de Mendoza” (ibid., p. 546b) – nor is it found when the author refers
to his two marriages (ibid., pp. 549b-550a).
51 Pedro de Salazar y de Mendoza, Crónica de el Gran Cardenal de España, vol.1.2, p. 24a.
52 It cannot be assumed that Rodrigo was given the last name “de Vivar” at birth, as Gómez
Lorente states without proof: “El primogénito de todos ellos era don Rodrigo de Vivar y
Mendoza, como a su padre le gustaba llamar” (El marquesado de Cenete, p. 82). Francisco
Layna Serrano also states: “El hijo mayor se llamó Rodrigo de Vivar y Mendoza, añadién-
dole su padre el sobrenombre Vivar pues pretendía descender por línea derecha del Cid
Ruy Díaz” (Historia de Guadalajara y sus Mendozas, vol. 2, p. 245).
53 Nader underscores the importance of this marriage: “De este modo, volvieron a unirse las
dos ramas de la familia, y desde entonces han formado una sola casa. Los Cenete, rama de
los Mendoza instalada en Granada, desempeñaron un papel espectacular, pero errático
en la vida política y artística durante el reinado de los Monarcas Católicos. Cenete no dejó
herederos varones; sus sucesores pasaron a incorporarse a los dominios y títulos de la
casa del Infantado” (Los Mendoza, p. 152).
488 Gómez Redondo
important successor. At the end of the century, this supposed relationship

became crucial evidence in the process of legitimization and inheritance that
Pedro González de Mendoza prepared for the sons he had with Doña Mencía
de Lemos. With these genealogical connections, his eldest son, Rodrigo, will be
transformed into a “primer Cid” or a Cid reborn, with proven exploits in the
war against Granada and two advantageous marriages, the second of which
was turbulent. These weddings enabled the Cidian myth that Rodrigo inher-
ited to be passed on to the Infantado through the succession of his second
daughter, Doña María. In turn, the union of the Infantado with the House of
Cenete reinforced this fabulous connection that was based on epic legends
and the affirmation of the lineage’s nobility.54 In his Historia parthenopea, the
Sevillian canon Alfonso Fernández compared the second son of the Cardinal,
Diego Hurtado de Mendoza – who would become the Count of Mélito and
who fought in the second campaign of Naples under the command of the
Great Captain – to the Cid in his narration of the capture of the Castillo de San
Jorge.55 In this way, Fernández confirms his parentage to the Cid and, there-
fore, legitimizes the descendants of Pedro González de Mendoza.
5.3 Military Virtues and Knightly Biographies

The new understanding of the military order – which was first articulated in
the code that Gutierre Díaz de Games incorporated into the biography of Pero
Niño, El Victorial – was outlined in treatises like the Doctrinal de cavallería by
Alfonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos. The bishop will deal specifically with
the Cid in Anaçefaleosis and in Memorial de virtudes in such a way that “los
cambios que se operan en la materia cidiana, puestos de manifiesto en estas
dos obras de Alonso de Cartagena, serán recogidos y ampliados por cronistas y
autores de tratados políticos que florecerán durante el reinado de los Reyes
54 In the first half of the 16th century, the lineage of the Velasco family underwent a process
similar to that of the Mendoza family. It must be remembered that the second count of
Haro married Doña Mencía de Mendoza, Cardinal Mendoza’s sister. In the unpublished
Historia de los Reyes de España desde Pelayo hasta Enrique iii, attributed to Pedro Fernán-
dez de Velasco (d. 1559), the lineage of this family was based on the epic figures linked to
the origins of Castile in a trajectory that goes from the Jueces de Castilla to Fernán
González and to the Cid. See Jular Pérez-Alfaro, “La importancia de ser antiguo: Los
Velasco y su construcción genealógica”, especially pp. 214-20.
55 The author regrets that the deeds of Díaz de Vivar were not recorded by a better historian:
“Allí resucita su clara simiente / que contra paganos ha tanto hiziera / aquel Çid famoso el
cual meresçiera / istoria muy clara, notable, excelente, / en no ser las letras y ornado flo-
rente, / en gentes d’España cual ya ser devían / sus muy claros hechos sepultos dormían /
por mengua de autor esperto y prudente” (Fernández, Historia parthenopea, c. 190).
Católicos”.56 As a result of this process, by the end of the century Rodrigo Díaz
de Vivar became a paragon of virtue:
Así, a fines del medievo, la identidad nacional que se afirma vigorosa y

agresivamente en el exterior, sea en concilios o en misiones diplomáticas,
y cuyos portavoces son conspicuos letrados, recibe una significativa
impronta popular, la derivada de tradiciones épicas.57
This is evident in the many compilations written by Diego Rodríguez de

Almela, one of the learned men in Alfonso de Cartagena’s circle. As it has
already been noted, this historian included in his Batallas campales the most
important exploits of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar’s life. Moreover, his line of argu-
ments allow him to transform the Cid into the basis of moral inquiries about
history that he carried out both in Valerio de las estorias escolásticas e de
España, printed in 1487, as well as in the Compilación de los Milagros de San-
tiago.58 Rodrigo Díaz’s efforts in battle could be used as a paradigm in all kinds
of treatises, whether concerning matters of war or designed to frame the devel-
opment of different military campaigns.59 One of these paradigmatic situations
reappeared in the Panegírico a la reina doña Isabel de Diego Guillén de Ávila60,
as well as in Juan Núñez de Toledo’s Tratado sobre la guerra de Francia (printed
in 1504), in whose prologue he utilized the story of Castile’s exemption from
the tribute the French and other enemies wanted to impose on Fernando I.
During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, two knightly biographies imbued
with values deriving from the Cid’s military trajectory were printed: on the one
hand, the Crónica popular del Cid, published in Seville in 1498, whose content
was borrowed from chapters XXXVIII-CIV of the fourth section of Diego de
Valera’s Crónica abreviada;61 on the other, the Crónica del famoso cavallero Cid
56 Díez Garretas, “El Çid Ruy Díaz como exemplum”, p. 333.

57 Fernández Gallardo, “Tradiciones épicas en el siglo XV”, p. 718.
58 For an analysis of the Cidian material in these works, see Gómez Redondo, “El Cid
humanístico”, pp. 335-41.
59 Gómez Redondo, “El Cid humanístico”, pp. 341-42.
60 The work was finished in 1499 and printed in 1509; it is a chronistic summary in which
Rodrigo is presented using materials from the Mocedades, the Poema, and the *Estoria de
Cardeña: “Y aquel cavallero que allí ves armado, / de armas tan claras, febridas, fulgentes,
/ el Cid es Ruy Dias aquel esforçado, / que reyes venció tan grandes potentes, / por éste
Valencia si pones bien mientes, / de los Africanos fue bien defendida, / aquéste en la
muerte venció y en la vida, / ý hizo más cosas que saben las gentes”, stanza 71; I quote the
facsimile reprinting: Madrid, 1951.
61 See Moya García, “Anonimia y omisión de autor en la Crónica popular del Cid”.
490 Gómez Redondo
Ruy Díez Campeador, more commonly known as the Crónica particular del Cid,
published in Burgos by Fadrique Alemán de Basilea in 1512. Its text derives
from the first section of the Crónica de Castilla and was prepared – together
with some interesting appendices – by Juan de Velorado, the abbot of San
Pedro de Cardeña. It resembles a treatise on military art – thus confirming the
expectations that had been gradually created throughout the 15th century –
supplemented by hagiographic references more attuned to the monastic
milieu where the work was compiled. It ends with invaluable appendices con-
taining the Cid’s genealogy62 and two epitaphs, one in Latin and the other that
is epic in nature.63
This compilation seems to be related to the Infante Fernando, who was born
in 1503.64 Keeping in mind that King Fernando the Catholic preferred the line
of succession represented by this grandson, it is safe to think that this collec-
tion of the Cid’s exploits may have been composed for his education. In fact, in
the prologue it is stated that the compilation was prompted by the Infante’s
visit to the monastery:
Estando en el monesterio e casa de Sant Pedro de Cardeña, adonde está

enterrado el cuerpo del muy noble e valiente cavallero vencedor de bata-
llas el Cid Ruy Díez de Vivar, e otros muchos cavalleros que al tiempo con
él se hallaron, vista allí su Crónica original, que en el tiempo de su vida se
hizo e ordenó, e los muy señalados hechos que en su tiempo hizo e los
muchos miraglos que en acrescentamiento de nuestra santa fee católica
en aquellos tiempos subcedieron, que de no se haver publicado ni tresla-
dada la dicha Crónica estavan ya tan olvidados que si en ello no se pusiese
remedio, según la Crónica estava caduca muy presto no se pudiera reme-
diar y en breve se perdería.65
6 Conclusions
This analysis of how Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar is represented in 15th-century

learned works – especially in chronicles, as well as in moral and encomiastic
poems – can be synthesized by three ideas:
62 See Bautista Pérez, “Cardeña, Pedro de Barcelos y la Genealogía del Cid”.

63 See Montaner, “El epitafio épico del Cid”.
64 See Gómez Redondo, “El Cid humanístico”, pp. 342-43.
65 Crónica particular del Cid, fol. A2r-v.
1) The development of the Cidian matter over the course of the 15th century
depends on epic and historical materials contained in the Crónica de Castilla
at the beginning of the 14th century. The same materials were reproduced in
both redactions of Pedro de Barcelos’ Crónica geral de Espanha de 1344. From
this work it will be later appropriated by the Crónica de 1404 and the Estoria
del fecho de los godos until it reached Diego de Valera – who used the Count
of Barcelos’ compilation to recount the Cid’s life in the fourth section of his
Crónica abreviada – and what has come to be known as Crónica popular del Cid.
Therefore, it is important to connect these two textual circumstances, which
converge and contribute to the affirmation of the royal power at the begin-
ning of the 14th century – perhaps prompted by the queen regent, María de
Molina – and in the early years of Queen Isabel’s reign. In both cases, the Cid’s
ideological reconstruction is used to promote Castilian hegemony in moments
of crisis when there was a need for support through heroic deeds and military
power. These ideals were used to uphold the lineage of Sancho IV and María de
Molina (especially between 1295 and 1304), as well as to promote the chivalric
order that emerged from the Castilian War of Succession (1475-79). These new
ideas that took shape in 1481 – thanks to the printing of the Valeriana – were
soon to be put into practice in the conquest of Granada.
2) Throughout the 15th century, the dichotomy of the Cid’s performance
and the conduct attributed to him that started to take shape at the end of the
13th century continued to be useful. The somewhat rebellious Cid that ap-
peared in the Jura de Santa Gadea and the Mocedades de Rodrigo was used to
support the privileges of the aristocratic class, as seen in his genealogical adop-
tion by the Álvarez de Toledo clan and later by the Mendoza’s and Manrique’s.
On the other hand, a remake of a faithful Rodrigo who loved his king and skill-
fully ruled the city of Valencia – which derived from the Poema de mio Cid
– was used to construct a chivalric imaginary designed to support King Juan II,
who was continuously attacked by his cousins, the Infantes of Aragon.
3) The 15th-century treatment of Rodrigo Díaz’s image was linked to the
projects of renovating the military orders that were promoted over the course
of three reigns – Juan II, Enrique IV, and the joint reign of Isabel and Fernando
– but most particularly by Álvaro de Luna and the military and royal power
surrounding the Catholic Monarchs. The Cid’s first appearances occur in the
catalogue of worthy men in El Victorial and, as an exemplary figure, in the
Libro de las claras e virtuosas mugeres; the second appearance is when he is
made to provide a famous ancestor to three singular 15th-century Rodrigos: the
Marquis of Cádiz and the Count of Paredes de Nava, both presented as “segun-
dos Cides”, and the son of Pedro González de Mendoza, who was called the
“primer Cid” – that is to say, a kind of Cid reborn. This new Rodrigo de Vivar
492 Gómez Redondo
progressively took on the identity of his alleged ancestor, not only by means of
the genealogical networks created by the Mendoza family, but also because of
the creation of a landed estate (“el señorío del Cid”) that was later transformed
into a condado (possession of a Count), and would enable his legitimization. In
this way, the man who began to be called Rodrigo de Vivar y Mendoza at the
beginning of the 16th century bequeathed to his descendants – along with the
title of Marquis of Cenete – the most complete Cidian imaginary, which was
recreated and reconstructed by his biographers, in order to pass it on to the
seventh duke of the Infantado, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar Sandoval Hurtado de
Mendoza, in the first half of the 17th century.
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Bernáldez, Andrés, Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Católicos, que escribía el bachiller
Andrés Bernáldez, cura de Los Palacios, ed. Manuel Gómez-Moreno and Juan de Mata
Carriazo, Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1962.
Burgos, Diego de, El triunfo del Marqués de Santillana (1458), ed. Carlos Moreno
Hernández, Parnaseo: Textos Lemir, Valencia: Universitat de València, 2008. URL:
<http://ꝑarnaseo.uv.es/Lemir/Textos/Carlos_Moreno/Carlos_Moreno.pdf>.
Cancionero de Juan Alfonso de Baena, ed. Brian Dutton and Joaquín González Cuenca,
Madrid: Visor, 1993.
Carlos de Viana, La crónica de los Reyes de Navarra del Príncipe de Viana, ed. Carmen
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Crónica de Don Álvaro de Luna, Condestable de Castilla, Maestre de Santiago, ed. Juan
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Real Academia Española-Galaxia Gutenberg, 2014.
Escavias, Pedro de, Repertorio de Príncipes de España y obra poética del Alcaide Pedro de
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Fernández de Velasco, Pedro, Historia de los Reyes de España desde Pelayo hasta Enrique
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Parnaseo: Textos Lemir, Valencia: Universitat de València, 1992. URL: <http://par
naseo.uv.es/Lemir/Textos/bienandanzas/Menu.htm>.
Guillén de Ávila, Diego, Panegírico a la reina doña Isabel (Valladolid, 1509), Madrid, 1951.
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Hispánicas, 647, Madrid: Cátedra, 2009.
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Madrid: Cátedra, 2003.
Medina de Mendoza, Francisco, Suma de la vida del cardenal don Pedro Gonçález de
Mendoza, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS/9848.
Mena, Juan de, Laberinto de Fortuna y otros poemas, ed. Carla de Nigris, preliminary
study by Guillermo Serés, Biblioteca Clásica, 14, Barcelona: Crítica, 1994.
Pablo de Santa María, Las siete edades del mundo: refundición de 1460, ed. Juan Carlos
Conde, Lemir 1 (1996-97), URL: <http://parnaseo.uv.es/Lemir/Textos/Conde/Conde.
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Pablo de Santa María, Las siete edades del mundo, ed. Juan Carlos Conde, in La creación
de un discurso historiográfico en el Cuatrocientos castellano: “Las siete edades del
mundo” de Pablo de Santa María, Salamanca: Ediciones de la Universidad de
Salamanca, 1999.
Pérez de Guzmán, Fernán, Generaciones y semblanzas, ed. José Antonio Barrio Sánchez,
Letras Hispánicas, 456, Madrid: Cátedra, 1998.
Pulgar, Hernando de, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, 2 vols.,
Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1943 (reprinted with preliminary study by Gonzalo Pontón,
Granada- Sevilla: Universidad de Granada-Universidad de Sevilla, 2008).
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Roca, 1487.
Salazar y de Mendoza, Pedro de, Crónica de el Gran Cardenal de España, don Pedro
Gonçález de Mendoça, Toledo: María Ortiz de Saravia, 1625.
Santa Cruz, Alonso de, Crónica del Emperador Carlos V, ed. Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide
and Antonio Blázquez y Delgado-Aguilera, 5 vols., Madrid: Real Academia de la
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Santa Cruz, Alonso de, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, Sevilla:
Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1951.
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Valera, Diego de, Memorial de diversas hazañas: crónicas de Enrique IV, ed. Juan de Mata
Carriazo, Colección de Crónicas Españolas, 4, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1941.
Valera, Diego de, Tratado de las epístolas, ed. Mario Penna, in Prosistas castellanos del
siglo XV, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 116, vol. I, Madrid: Atlas, 1959, pp. 3-46.
Viana: see Carlos de Viana
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Armistead, Samuel G., “Las Mocedades de Rodrigo según Lope García de Salazar”,
Romania 94 (1973), pp. 303-20 (reedited in La tradición épica de las “Mocedades de
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Madrid: Dirección de los Archivos Estatales, 1993, pp. 277-95.
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caballerescas, C. Alvar, G. Martin, and F. Gómez Redondo (eds.), Alcalá de Henares:
Universidad de Alcalá, 2002, pp. 121-79.
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Parrilla (eds.), Actas del IX Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de
Literatura Medieval, vol. III, A Coruña: Universidade de A Coruña, 2005, pp. 193-
203.
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(1458), Textos Lemir, Valencia: Universitat, 2008.
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Maud Le Guellec (ed.), El autor oculto en la literatura española: siglos xiv a xviii,
Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2014, pp. 53-62.
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de Cultura “Marqués de Santillana”, 1986.
496 Gómez Redondo
Nieto Soria, José Manuel, “Conflicto político e invención histórica en algunos libros de
blasón castellanos en tiempos de los Reyes Católicos”, Cahier d’Études Hispaniques
Médiévales 29 (2006), 301-16.
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The Canonization of the Poema de mio Cid 497
Chapter 16
The Canonization of the Poema de mio Cid from the

18th to the 20th Century
Luis Galván
Since a Companion such as this has been completed, the canonical status of
the Poema de mio Cid (PMC) may be taken for granted. Indeed, this status has
been in place for over one hundred years. It was 1913 when Ramón Menéndez
Pidal first published a pocket edition with a prologue that praised the PMC for
its artistic and national worth, and displayed the accolades bestowed to it by
literary historians and critics in the preceding century. Some fifty years before,
however, Antonio de Trueba, Juan Valera, and Florencio Janer had declared it
hardly readable; they were echoing Manuel José Quintana’s verdict at the end
of the 18th century. As a matter of fact, the Colección de poesías castellanas
anteriores al siglo XV edited by Tomás Antonio Sánchez, where the PMC was
printed for the first time (1779), was hailed a landmark in antiquarian scholar-
ship and a particular service to the nation, but it resulted in a commercial
failure, and its publisher had to stop the series shortly afterwards. Juan Pablo
Forner mocked Sánchez as being a fool devoted to annotating old parchments
in praise of the Cid’s breeches. Therefore, the canonization of the PMC was far
from being an automatic response to its publication, and it is worth examining
how it was brought about.1
With such a slow-paced rise from obscurity to conspicuousness, the case of
the PMC comes as close as one could reasonably wish to laboratory conditions
for a study on the process of canonizing a text.2 Let me begin by summarizing
some basic ideas about canonicity. First, canonicity, being a matter of particular
1 In order to keep this chapter and especially the list of Works Cited to a manageable size, the
reader is directed, for a fuller discussion, quotations, and bibliography, to Banús and Galván
“De como mio Cid”; Galván and Banús, “Seco y latoso / Viejo y venerable”; Galván, El Poema
del Cid en España; Galván and Banús, El Poema del Cid en Europa. See also Magnotta, Historia
y bibliografía; Rodiek, La recepción internacional del Cid. Further bibliographical references
for specific points will be given with economy in subsequent notes.
2 For a similar case, see Ehrismann, Das Nibelungenlied; Heinzle and Waldschmidt, Die
Nibelungen.

498 Galván
historical facts, not of universal aesthetic values, can be assessed empirically.3

Second, canons vary in space and time, and in kind as well: scholarly interest
usually concentrates on few authors and works, which constitute the critical
canon; there are selective canons, chosen for specific curricula by means of
syllabi, reading lists, and anthologies, some of which may coincide and may
be endorsed by institutions; the accessible canon is made up of books easy
to reach because they were recently issued or reissued; when many of these
canons and processes converge, they amount to a cumulative canonicity.4
Also, a shift in function, captured with the motto “from canon to classic”, has
taken place between the Enlightenment and the Romanticism. The canon, in
this stricter sense, used to be a set of authors or works proposed as exemplary
for social interaction and literary expression, and it supposedly lends itself to
inductive scrutiny in search of universal poetic rules, whereas the classics are
texts – often the same as the canonical ones – that the reader is invited to delve
into in a singular, subjective aesthetic experience.5 As a consequence, interpre-
tation, instead of imitation, is now the main activity concerning the canonical
(classical) works, and canonicity involves not only what texts deserve to be
interpreted, but also how interpretation is to be accomplished. Interpretive
paradigms, traditions, or communities rally and occasionally fight one another
about certain texts and methods.6 Thus, “one of the main functions of canon
formation […] is to insure the stability and adaptability of a given community”,
and this easily blurs the distinction between observing the literary system
from a descriptive, “epistemic” stance and participating in it from a prescrip-
tive or programmatic one, defined by personal aesthetic, ethical or political
commitments.7
These preliminary reflections entail consequences for the scope of this
chapter. First, the critical canon is more or less international and, consequently,
interpretations published in several countries must be considered. On the
3 Pozuelo and Aradra, Teoría del canon, pp. 9-10; Montaner, “Factores empíricos”. See, however,
Brown, “Constructing Our Pedagogical Canons”.
4 Fowler, Kinds of Literature, pp. 214-16. For the theory of “cumulative canon formation”, see
Tötösy de Zepetnek, Comparative Literature, pp. 46-48. Talk about a supposedly “official”
canon is widespread, but probably inexact; for instance, Mignolo usually writes “official” be-
tween scare quotes (“Canons A(nd)cross-cultural boundaries”).
5 See Gumbrecht, “Phoenix from the Ashes”.
6 Kermode, “Institutional Control”; Fish, Is There A Text in This Class?, pp. 303-71.
7 Mignolo, “Canons A(nd)cross-cultural boundaries” (quotation from p. 1). I have substituted
“programmatic” for Mignolo’s term (“vocational”). On the other hand, the distinction observ-
ing/participating, however important for systems theory, is not necessarily linked to it; see,
for instance, Frye, The Critical Path, and Montaner, “En defensa del sentido literal”.
other hand, the accessibility and official endorsement of canons depend on

editions, translations, institutions, and authorities usually restricted to a
national level at most. Therefore, it makes more sense to focus the canoniza-
tion of the PMC in Spain rather than elsewhere.8 Finally, I hope that a chapter
on canonization, though coming at the end of this volume, will not be seen as
an ornament or appendix to the thing itself. Canonicity being part of the tradi-
tion and situation in which readers and scholars approach the PMC today, it
shapes their experience and research, and this should happen in a conscious,
controlled way.9
1 The First Edition: Context and Consequences
The PMC was hardly available, let alone canonical, in the early centuries of the
Modern Era, even though its narrative content was conveyed to readers by
other means, as previous chapters have shown. The only extant medieval man-
uscript, kept in Vivar, was copied in 1596 by a certain Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri, who
was sent by the oidor Gil Remírez de Arellano to research ancient legal docu-
ments.10 It was also quoted by two historians, Prudencio de Sandoval in his
Historia de las fundaciones of Benedictine monasteries (1601), and Francisco de
Berganza in his Antigüedades de España (1719). Later in the 18th century, a
growing interest in the history of the Spanish language and poetry led other
people to the oldest texts. Although the first survey on the matter, Luis José
Velázquez’s Orígenes de la poesía castellana (1754), ignored the PMC, two metic-
ulous scholars scrutinized it: Martín Sarmiento, in Memorias para la historia de
la poesía y poetas españoles (redacted in 1745, published in 1775), who copied
from the manuscript many “voces y frases [...] purísimas castellanas”; and
Cándido María Trigueros, in Disertación sobre el verso suelto y la rima (1766,
unpublished) and in Poesías filosóficas (1775), who found the oldest examples
of meter and rhyme in the Spanish vernacular in the PMC.
In this atmosphere of learned approaches to medieval texts, it was deemed
not only desirable but also feasible to print them. Thus, Francisco Cerdá and
8 For the institutional, epistemological, and ideological context in Spain, see Aradra, De la
Retórica a la Teoría de la Literatura; Baasner, Literaturgeschichtsschreibung in Spanien;
Fox, La invención de España; Gumbrecht and Sánchez, “Geschichte als Trauma”; Portolés,
Medio siglo de filología española; Pozuelo and Aradra, Teoría del canon.
9 See Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, pp. 304-10.
10 There were several other manuscript copies in the 17th and 18th centuries; see Montaner’s
contribution to this Companion.
500 Galván
Eugenio de Llaguno persuaded Tomás Antonio Sánchez, who was preparing an

annotated edition of the Marqués de Santillana’s Proemio al condestable de
Portugal, to form a full-fledged Colección de poesías castellanas anteriores al
siglo XV to be printed at the expense of Antonio de Sancha. This project
involved and attracted some other scholars, such as Gregorio Mayans, Manuel
Ulibarri, Juan Antonio Pellicer, and Rafael Floranes, who wrote letters and
notes on the subject or just discussed it with Sánchez. The first volume of the
Colección, published in 1779, contained the text of the PMC. It was then when
the verses received the title Poema del Cid, since Ruiz de Ulibarri and others
had called it Historia del Cid. Three more volumes followed, containing the
works of Gonzalo de Berceo, the Poema de Alexandro and the Libro del Arci-
preste de Hita – now Libro de buen amor. Sánchez’s comprehensiveness and
careful editing deserved the praise given by reviewers and bibliographers, and
it set high standards for subsequent work in Spanish philology.11
The main interest of Sánchez and his contemporaries was not poetry or
literary criticism but philology, bibliography, and history – or rather, anti-
quarianism (palaeography, epigraphy, diplomatic, numismatics). Within such
a frame, the PMC was approached chiefly as a document about the history of
the Castilian language, historical toponymy, the history of manners, and even
as a more or less truthful record of the facts of Rodrigo Díaz’s life. Consequently,
Sánchez ventured little from a literary point of view: he commented that the
PMC lacks poetical imagery, mythology, and brilliant thoughts, but instead it
offers some ironical, acute, or proverbial sayings. Furthermore, if due atten-
tion is given to its meter, the hero, and the exploits narrated, “no le falta su
mérito para graduarse de poema épico […] conforme a las condiciones que
pide Horacio para el verso heroico en su Arte poética: Res gestae Regumque,
Ducumque & tristia bella”.12
Sánchez sets, thus, the literary reception of the PMC into a frame of genre
theory and criticism. As it happens, such a frame is decisively linked with cano-
nicity, since “not only are certain genres regarded prima facie as more canonical
than others, but individual works or passages may be valued more or less
according to their generic height”.13 In fact, literary pursuits in 16th-century
11 See Deyermond, “Sánchez’s Colección and Percy’s Reliques”. There is an exception to his
careful editing: Sánchez had misgivings about the obscenity of the Libro del Arcipreste,
and asked the Real Academia de la Historia for advice. The report by Jovellanos concluded
that the book could be edited without changes, for it was incomprehensible to the com-
mon reader. However, Sánchez went on to bowdlerize it.
12 Sánchez, Colección, pp. 229-30. He is quoting Horace’s rendering of the subject matter of
the Homeric poems (Ad Pisones, v. 73).
13 Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 216.
Spain and later were devoted to what has been aptly called “the quest for the
epic poem”.14 This included a variety of concerns, ranging from polemics about
Góngora’s Soledades to literary contests announced by the Real Academia
Española for poems about Hernán Cortés (in 1778) and the Siege of Zamora (in
1833). To put it simply, epic poetry as a genre held the highest esteem, and the
Iliad and the Aeneid were the most canonical works of all. The Spaniards – tac-
itly or in declared rivalry with the Italians – sorely felt the lack of a poem that
could satisfy the high generic standards and enter the canon. In this context,
Sánchez’s classification of the PMC entailed a favourable appreciation that had
few prospects of being accepted by many.
Juan Andrés’ stance in his influential Origen, progresos y estado actual de
toda la literatura is very symptomatic. In the second volume, which deals with
the beginnings of Castilian poetry, he shows an interest in the PMC’s dating in
order to assess the poem as a linguistic and cultural document. On the other
hand, in the third volume, concerning the development of epic poetry, Andrés
states that this genre decayed after Virgil and did not recover until Boiardo and
Ariosto. The works written in the intermediate period may attract scholarly
attention, but should not be the object of poetic imitation. Specifically, says
Andrés, the sacred name of “epic poem” would be defiled if applied to formless
compositions such as the PMC and the Poema de Alexandro – Dante’s Commedia
didn’t escape a similar verdict.
Considering these circumstances, writers with an interest in poetry and lit-
erary criticism found little motivation for dealing with the PMC. The few writers
who felt compelled to do so – in surveys or anthologies, for instance – pro-
duced summaries and included quotations of the poem in their historical
introductions with warnings about its poor literary value. So did Juan Bautista
Conti in Colección de poesías castellanas (1782), Antonio de Capmany in Teatro
histórico crítico de la elocuencia española (1786), and Manuel José Quintana in
Poesías escogidas (1796) and in Poesías selectas (1807). Quintana showed, how-
ever, a growing tolerance toward non-classical poetry. At first, he disapproved
of the oldest poems as unimaginative and uncouth; in 1807, he acknowledged
some vividness and sensibility in the PMC, although he disdained it as a whole
because of its ridiculous style, which lacked elegance and imagination.
According to Biblioteca selecta (1819), by Pablo Mendíbil and Manuel Silvela, it
was unnecessary to warn the reader that the PMC was not an epic poem; should
such an old work deserve that label, it would be justly renowned – at the cost
of the Italians. In other works about poetry and its rules, there was simply no
14 Blanco, Góngora heroico, p. 11; see also Nerlich, Untersuchungen; and, for the European
context, Vega Ramos and Vilà, La teoría de la épica.
502 Galván
mention of the PMC. Occasionally, a dismissive remark was made (in the trans-
lation of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; in Martínez de la
Rosa’s Poética). In broader terms, there was a clear-cut separation between the
epistemic and the programmatic stances: the former accepted the PMC for
scrutiny, but the latter disdained it.
Although literary history was an ill-suited context for appreciation, as
Andrés’ case shows, two exceptions are worth considering. José Vargas Ponce
in Disertación sobre la lengua castellana (1793) highlighted the decorum and
vividness of some sections of the PMC, and praised a certain Homeric and
Virgilian flavour in the use of epithets. This case reveals that both detractors
and defenders of the PMC shared the same canon; it must be borne in mind
that they had no alternatives at their disposal, since it was not until well into
the 19th century when other medieval epics in the Romance languages were
printed. In conclusion, having as a paradigm a set of neo-classical rules, sup-
posedly exemplified by Homer, Virgil, and Ariosto, the PMC could not possibly
become part of the canon. The only exception to this stance is found in Xavier
Lampillas’ argument in Ensayo histórico-apologético de la literatura española
(1782) defending the dignity of the PMC and the veneration it deserves as the
earliest vernacular epic poem in Spain. According to him, it could be com-
pared to Ennius’ Annales, and is both older and better than the earliest Italian
work, Morgante by Pulci. Lampillas’ position is interesting given his attempt to
historicize the canon in favour of the PMC. He compared not the best, but
rather the oldest examples of epic poetry in different languages. In any case,
neither Lampillas nor Vargas Ponce was an authority who could compete with
Andrés, Capmany, and Quintana. Lampillas and Vargas Ponce worked in a
polemical, shallow context, and their opinions did not have consequences,
whereas the judgment expressed by Andrés, Capmany, and Quintana found
echoes in the second quarter of the 19th century in works by Antonio Alcalá
Galiano, Alberto Lista, and Ángel de Saavedra, among others.15
2 Out of Spain, Into the Critical Canon
In 1755, a manuscript of the Nibelungenlied was discovered. Johann Jakob

Bodmer published some fragments in 1757, and Christoph Heinrich Myller pro-
duced the first full edition in 1782. The poem would soon be praised as a
15 This did not preclude further antiquarian work on the PMC – for instance, Diego Clemen-
cín’s report for the Real Academia de la Historia in 1827 (see Solera’s review of Galván, El
Poema del Cid, p. 161).
German Iliad, as a Homeric, sublime expression of the German national char-

acter. Moreover, the possibility of reaching a wider readership by means of a
modern rendering was considered.16 Thus, the path for the canonization of a
medieval epic was not impeded everywhere. Could the PMC, under conditions
different from those in Spain, enjoy similar success as that of the Nibelungenlied?
Such conditions, which existed at that moment in the German speaking coun-
tries, and soon in others as well, had two dimensions, one institutional and
another ideological. The modern philologies – first the Germanic, then the
Romance – were being established as academic disciplines; this happened
within an idealist and romantic frame of mind that privileged historicist
approaches to literary texts, focusing on the medieval period, national differ-
ences, and popular expressions.17 This search for national, popular principles
in literature against French neoclassicism was later equated – not without a
certain bias – with the wars of liberation against Napoleon.18
Surprisingly, the PMC was overlooked in the earliest sustained effort to pro-
vide a complete survey of the history of Spanish literature, carried out in the
University of Göttingen in the last decades of the 18th century. The books by
Dieze, Buchholz, and Eichhorn passed over it. It was Friedrich Bouterwek who
first mentioned the PMC in his Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit (vol. 3,
1804) with little praise. In his opinion, it was a mere rhymed chronicle com-
posed without any imagination and does not deserve to be called a poem.
Matters would change dramatically within a few years. Herder borrowed a
copy of Sánchez’s Colección from the University Library at Göttingen and read
the PMC with enthusiasm while he was writing his Cid ballads. A reworking of
Sánchez’s first volume by a certain Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert was printed in
1804, and, in spite of negative reviews, again in 1809. The historian Johannes
von Müller found the PMC attractive and important. Then came Friedrich
Schlegel’s Wiener Vorlesungen (1812), printed in 1815 as Geschichte der alten und
neuen Literatur. This work is well known as a landmark of romantic literary
historiography, which praises especially the medieval period and Spanish lit-
erature. About the PMC in particular, Friedrich Schlegel says something that
would have shocked not only Andrés, Capmany, and Quintana, but probably
16 Ehrismann, Nibelungenlied, pp. 14-18.

17 See Gumbrecht, “Un souffle d’Allemagne”. The most conspicuous products of academic
Philology at the time were works of comparative and historical linguistics, but they were
preceded by work on literary texts; for instance, Friedrich Diez published two small vol-
umes on the Spanish “romances” (1818, 1821) before his Grammatik and Etymologisches
Wörterbuch.
18 Wolf, Ueber die Romanzen-Poesie der Spanier, p. 2.
504 Galván
Tomás Antonio Sánchez as well: it is the only great national heroic poem of the
Spaniards, full of the pure, loyal old Castilian spirit, worth more than a com-
plete library of works of wit.
In the following decades, the PMC became the focus of academic commen-
tary and research. Friedrich Diez, the founding father of Romance Philology,
expanded a collection of Altspanische Romanzen (1821) with some excerpts
from it – in the original and in translation – with praise of its heroic content
and the truth of its style. Victor Aimé Huber, after writing a Geschichte des Cid
Ruy Diaz (1829), compared in his Habilitation – the earliest one for Medieval
Romance Literature – the Spanish ballads and the PMC. In Austria, the imperial
librarian and founder of the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Ferdinand Joseph
Wolf, devoted pages in several works from 1831 onward to medieval Spanish
poetry and, particularly, to the PMC. A German translation of the PMC by Otis
Wolff, professor at Jena, was published in 1850. Outside the field of Philology, it
must be noted that Hegel mentioned both the Cid ballads and the PMC in his
Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (published posthumously in 1835-38), as exam-
ples of the national spirit in the medieval epic. Moreover, he established a
parallel between the Cid texts and the Iliad and the Odyssey, and he down-
graded the Nibelungenlied. However positive these particular judgments are,
Hegel’s main influence in the reception of the PMC consisted in the frame pro-
vided by his idealist explanation of literary genres and themes, and their
relation to periods and nations, as we will see later.
In Britain and in the United States, the success of the PMC was immediate,
but less sustained. The poet Robert Southey wrote a Chronicle of the Cid based
on several sources, among them, the PMC. He singled out this text in his enthu-
siastic commentary: “it is unquestionably the oldest poem in the Spanish
language. In my judgement, it is as decidedly and beyond all comparison the
finest”; “this poet […] is the Homer of Spain”.19 Southey’s work was known to
S.T. Coleridge, who praised the Cid matter – in general – in letters, lectures, and
in a passing remark in his Biographia literaria. Later commentaries would
come from historians (Hallam, Prescott, and Dunham). Probably the greatest
impulse that the canonization of the PMC received from this tradition has to be
credited to George Ticknor’s lengthy exposition and laudatory remarks in his
History of Spanish Literature (1849). His views about the PMC were unoriginal
and did not reflect the state of the question at the time of their publication, but
Ticknor’s History became a reference book for decades.
The most thorough and original scrutiny of the PMC in Britain in those years
was conducted by Andrés Bello, who, having moved from Caracas to London as
19 Southey, Chronicle of the Cid, pp. ix, xi.

a diplomat in order to procure support for American Independence, found

time to do research at the British Museum.20 Bello’s first publication on the
topic (1823) displays already a remarkable early acquaintance with French
romances and gestes, which had been discovered recently and still awaited
publication. Bello ascribed the PMC to that genre because of its meter and sub-
ject matter. This enabled him to historicize value judgments and genre theory,
placing the PMC alongside a particular, historically situated set of texts, rather
than into the universal, timeless category of epic poetry. In other respects,
Bello shared the antiquarian approach of his Spanish predecessors, and also a
somewhat neoclassical taste that, in his case, allowed a more balanced assess-
ment of the “mérito poético” of the PMC: despite lacking wonders, amenities,
love-affairs, and similes, it is as good as such a primitive work could be on
account of its truthful rendering of characters and manners, appropriate dia-
logues, and bursts of energy. Bello went on to make a critical edition of the
PMC, which was published posthumously. For some time, his contributions did
not have much resonance; his insights would be developed by others decades
later with the advancement of academic philology.
The reception of the PMC by the French into the canon was cast in the
German mould. The Histoire de la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813) by the
Swiss Simonde de Sismondi – a friend of Madame de Staël and the Schlegel
brothers – described the PMC as the infancy of poetry and language, and as the
maturity of nationhood and heroism. Characters and facts are rendered,
Sismondi says, with the most natural vividness. Subsequent literary historians
and critics echoed these views (Villemain, Viardot, and others). Some Spanish
exiles started to express more favourable opinions about the PMC (Maury,
Florán), even though others were still reluctant (Silvela, Martínez de la Rosa).
Later, French scholars began to show interest in the PMC (Rosseeuw-Saint
Hilaire, 1838), and monographs began to appear (Jubinal, 1841). Damas-Hinard,
private secretary of Empress Eugenia, published an impressive hardcover
translation of the poem (1858).
As I mentioned before, the PMC would be compared to French chansons de
geste and other contemporary texts once they began to be printed. This was
done in France in the 1830s: after the publication of Fierabras, Garin le Loherain,
and Berthe aus grans pies, in 1837 came the Chanson de Roland, which was
hailed as an important national poem within less than a decade.21 In 1863,
Gaston Paris published a remarkable exercise in canonization, a study in which
20 See Grases, “Los estudios de Andrés Bello”; Smith, “Los trabajos de Bello”; Altschul, Geog-
raphies of Philological Knowledge.
21 See Bédier, Les Legendes épiques, pp. 230-49; also Gumbrecht, “Un souffle de l’Allemagne”.
506 Galván
he contrasted the universal human value of the Nibelungenlied with the

national inspiration of the Chanson de Roland. Things being so, the Chanson
happened to be superior as an example of the epic genre, because, according
to German idealist poetics, a true epic poem had to be national. Paris gave the
Iliad the highest poetic rank for being both human and national.22 In the same
vein, comparing the PMC with the Chanson de Roland would become common-
place (Génin, Baret, Damas-Hinard, Puymaigre, etc.). It didn’t matter much in
the long run whether the Castilian poem was deemed inferior, superior, or as
good as the French one. What did matter was that it would no longer be pos-
sible to judge the PMC according to abstract standards; its characteristics and
values would be assessed specifically by comparing it with similar medieval
texts. However, the notion of a certain belatedness, and perhaps imitation,
with respect to the Chanson de Roland robbed the PMC part of the praise its
supposed naivety had earned it at the beginning of the century. Several schol-
ars, also outside France – Ferdinand Wolf, for one – came to see the PMC as a
contrived piece of literature, as Kunstpoesie, not Natur- or Volkpoesie. A corol-
lary of this is that the PMC was no longer thought of as composed immediately
after the facts reported; it was not a trustworthy source of information about
Rodrigo Díaz. Such scepticism, already held by some in Spain and Germany in
the first half of the 19th century, would be supported later chiefly by the Dutch
scholar Reinhart Dozy.23
By the mid-19th century, the PMC was entrenched in the critical canon. Here,
a methodological remark is in order. As I said at the beginning, the idea of
canon and canon formation is related to specific communities, and the canoni-
cal texts are supposed to provide them with stabilization and adaptation. Such
communities are often thought of as political, cultural, ethnic, or related to
some other kind of entity; but, what here comes to the forefront is a profes-
sional community that has to adapt itself to a changing environment, namely,
to the institutionalization of Philology as an academic discipline. As Karl
Popper put it, a discipline consists primarily of a set of problems that await a
solution.24 Since the PMC was no minor source of problems – date, author-
ship, historical accuracy, language, meter, relationship to chronicles and to
22 Paris, “La Chanson de Roland et les Nibelungen”, pp. 300-02.

23 Reinhart Dozy was a scholar of Arabic studies. He did research on Arabic sources about
Rodrigo Díaz, and, considering the discrepancies between these works – together with
the Historia Roderici – and the PMC, he concluded that the poem was largely fictional.
Dozy’s Recherches were reissued and translated several times in the 19th century. The
Spaniard Manuel Malo de Molina shared his views (Rodrigo el Campeador, 1857). Menén-
dez Pidal disagreed with Dozy and Malo in La España del Cid.
24 Popper, “Die Logik der Sozialwissenschaften”, p. 108.
other poems, and so on –, it was naturally welcomed by scholars who not only
wanted, but had to do research in order to justify their posts. In such a scenario,
nobody could safely ignore the PMC any more when providing a survey of
medieval literature, as it happened at the end of the 18th century. What is
worth noting in this period is that the epistemic and the programmatic stances
tend to coalesce: for most scholars, the PMC was not only an interesting sample
for philological analysis but also a valuable piece of literature. Finally, it may be
observed that once the PMC no longer elicited discussion on its literary value,
philological work continued to be done throughout the second half of the 19th
century in European universities by Vollmöller, Cornu, Restori, Lidforss, and
Koerbs.25
3 Cumulative Canonization in Spain
Given that the critical canon is, to a large extent, international, Spanish schol-
ars joined their colleagues abroad in due course, starting in the 1840s, with the
spread of romantic and historicist tenets in literary studies. Some features of
Spanish criticism on the PMC must be laid out before attention is given to its
cumulative canonization, resulting also from institutional endorsement and
editorial practices.
The new assessment of the PMC’s literary value began in 1840 with two
minor but significant writings: a prologue by Joaquín Rubió to the text of the
PMC, which he appended to a collection of ballads, Tesoro de los romanceros,
and an article by Pedro Pidal in Revista de Madrid. Their position was sup-
ported immediately afterwards by the translation of literary histories that
praised the PMC: Simonde de Sismondi’s and Viardot’s in 1841, Schlegel’s in
1843, Ticknor’s in 1851. Both Rubió and Pidal expressed enthusiasm about the
PMC because of its national spirit manifested in its religiosity, chivalry, and roy-
alism. Other traits soon added to the national character purportedly expressed
in the PMC were individual independence (in Modesto Lafuente’s Historia de
España, 1851) and democratic spirit (in Agustín Durán’s appendix to Romancero
General, 1851). These would be catch phrases for synthesizing the content of
the PMC approvingly during the rest of the century and beyond. José Amador
de los Ríos expanded these views and completed them with an analysis of the
action and characters in the third volume of his Historia crítica de la literatura
española (1863), whose two chapters on the PMC add up to over one hundred
25 I owe this point to Juan Carlos Bayo’s review of Galván and Banús, El Poema del Cid en
Europa.
508 Galván
pages – nothing short of a monograph. Manuel Milà’s inaugural lecture for the
year 1865-66 at the University of Barcelona called the PMC a Homeric master-
piece and an expression of the national spirit. Among the many critics who
wrote about the PMC in those decades, some were classicists or eclectics, but
even they were inclined to dwell more on the rules the poem purportedly satis-
fied – goodness of characters and unity of action, for instance26 – than on its
faults. However, until the 1860s some scholars were still reluctant to praise it
(Figueroa, Tapia, Alcalá Galiano, Trueba, Valera). Later, such attitudes would
be kept in a private sphere: Unamuno said in his letters that the PMC was a true
bore, worth nothing to him, but he restrained himself in En torno al casticismo
and called it old and sober, a fossil that was once alive (I mention below other
aspects of Unamuno’s ideas about the PMC).
In the preceding section we saw that the development of Romance
Philology, while providing a more specific context for the PMC, deprived it of
its uniqueness. Furthermore, it seemed that its prominence was rather acci-
dental; it happened to be the earliest literary text in Castilian and the earliest
romance epic in print, but things could have been different. Most literary his-
torians thought that the truly original beginning of popular Castilian poetry
lay in the traditional ballads, although these were copied much later. In such a
context, the PMC came to be perceived by some as a mere artistic composition
based on the ballads, perhaps inspired by a French model. The consequences
of the relative appreciation of these works can be seen in Agustín Durán’s edi-
tion of the ballads (1832). He extolls them for their natural, plain style, and
for their Homeric candor that vividly represents manners and virtues. In
comparison, the PMC is neither the first vernacular poem nor a popular one,
but rather it is a piece of artificial, contrived literature that turned out badly,
and uncouth in meter and diction, though not wholly deprived of dignity and
interest. However, Durán himself lessened this contrast in his later edition of
the Romancero in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (1849-51). He appended
Mocedades de Rodrigo, first edited a few years earlier by Francisque Michel and
Ferdinand Wolf. Wolf had found Mocedades to be as primitive as the ballads,
and concluded that the PMC was the result of a later, more refined stage of civi-
lization and art. Durán, on the contrary, saw in Mocedades a degenerate piece
26 The praise of the “unity of action” may surprise modern readers who are familiar with the
PMC’s double plot; 19th-century critics construed that unity either by underscoring only
one of the plots – first, the conquest of Valencia was preferred; later, after Wolf and Milà,
the wedding of the Cid’s daughters, their affront and vengeance –, or, in spite of Aristotle
(Poetics, VIII), by saying that the poem deals with only one hero.
of work, and associated the PMC to the ballads, that is, to genuinely popular
poetry.
A new, decisive step was taken by Manuel Milà, whose De la poesía heroico-
popular castellana (1874) was a landmark in the development of Spanish
Philology according to European standards. Milà reshaped the history of
Castilian epic poetry by showing that the original poems were long ones, such
as the PMC, Mocedades, and others that left vestiges in medieval chronicles:
Infantes de Salas, Cerco de Zamora, etc. He called this tradition cantares de
gesta, using an expression found in Alfonsine historiography, which bore a par-
allel to the term already naturalized in French Philology. Milà argued that the
cantares were broken down into shorter independent ballads centuries later.
Thus, the fact that the PMC was the earliest extant poem was more than mere
contingency; it was essentially a genuine token of aboriginal popular poetry.
Milà’s research bears two corollaries. First, since the tradition of the cantares
de gesta was native to Spain, French models could not be deemed decisive,
although some restricted influence might be admitted. Second, if the poems
were composed soon after the deeds they narrate, they were likely to be rather
accurate historical records. As a consequence of this, Milà found it necessary to
propose an explanation for the PMC section about the wedding of the Cid’s
daughters to the infantes de Carrión and the subsequent feud, for he could not
admit that it was entirely fictional.
The supposed truthfulness of the epic became more significant in the fol-
lowing years, as the realist novel prevailed in Spain. Some novelists found
themselves urged to justify their literary tenets by recurring to a Spanish tradi-
tion of realism – thereby inventing or shaping it. It was only natural to choose
the PMC as the starting point of such a tradition, as did Emilia Pardo Bazán (“La
cuestión palpitante”, 1882-83). Forty-odd years later, the idea that realism was
essential to Spanish art and was the highest art form had become so common-
place that Ortega y Gasset denounced it as an arbitrary belief.27 Be that as it
may, the conditions were favorable for the PMC to be considered the quintes-
sence of Spanish poetry in form as well as in content, and therefore for it to be
called the national poem – the national epic the Neo-classicists had longed for.
These views were adopted and expatiated upon by the two most influential
literary scholars at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century,
Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and Ramón Menéndez Pidal. From the many
pages they devoted to the PMC, only some paragraphs by Menéndez Pidal will
be commented on here (I shall return later to other aspects of his research
on the PMC). Contrasting the PMC with the Chanson de Roland and the
27 Ortega y Gasset, “Orígenes del español” (1926), in Obras completas, p. 519.

510 Galván
Nibelungenlied, Menéndez Pidal says that the Spanish poem is both national,
like the Chanson de Roland, and human, like the Nibelungenlied. He acknowl-
edges that he is exploiting Gaston Paris’ article that I mentioned above, which
had been reissued a few years earlier in Poèmes et légendes du Moyen Age. What
is noticeable is that Menéndez Pidal substitutes the PMC for the Iliad, which
Paris saw as a synthesis of national and human worth as well as a paragon of
epic poetry. With regard to realism, Menéndez Pidal stops nothing short of say-
ing that the technique of the PMC is essentially the same as that of Velázquez:
“arte supremo que se esconde á los ojos que lo contemplan, para dejar abso-
lutamente clara la visión de la realidad”. The PMC was thus “destinado á ser
el poema nacional de España”. He also maps the features of the Chanson de
Roland, the Nibelungenlied, and the PMC across centuries, languages, and gen-
res, up to the French classical tragedy, Shakespeare, and the Spanish comedia.
Thus, he finds in the medieval epics the germ of the most canonical works.28
When did such a singular status of the PMC reach a wider public, and how?
It took a long time to build the channels and make the vehicles to do it. For
decades, literary education remained close to the neo-classical prescriptive
tradition that it had in the 18th century. The first scattered attempts to intro-
duce notions of literary history either ignored the PMC or were dismissive of it
– as far as we can surmise taking into account the textbooks used at the time.
Since the 1820s, laws were issued that established literary history as a subject in
secondary education, yet there were hardly any textbooks available. Things
changed in 1845 with the establishment of schools of Philosophy and Letters as
preparatory studies for university degrees. State Secretary of Education
Antonio Gil y Zárate authored a textbook that was soon, to nobody’s surprise,
widely used and often reprinted. This Manual de literatura praised the tender-
ness and Homeric naturalness of the PMC, and quoted over twenty verses from
the family’s farewell at San Pedro de Cardeña. However, the global assessment
was rather negative and denied it the name “poem”. Even though other text-
books appeared in the 1850s that were more favorable to the PMC, it was not
until the 1870s when a positive stance prevailed.29 It is worth noting that sev-
eral literary histories used in schools included summaries and excerpts – most
often from the aforesaid farewell and the battle at Alcocer – which confirmed
28 For the PMC and Velázquez, see Menéndez Pidal, “El Poema del Cid”, pp. 279-82 (quota-
tions from pp. 281-82); for the connection with early modern plays, see his “Introducción”,
pp. 81-82.
29 At the university level, the canonization must have begun earlier, given that several liter-
ary historians and critics who had praised the PMC were appointed as professors in the
1840s (Rubió y Ors, Amador de los Ríos, Milà, Fernández Espino).
the traits of religion, individualism, and chivalry most often associated with
the PMC. Another significant change in literary education in the 1870s was that
prescriptive poetics – and more specifically, genre theory – underwent an ide-
alist and historicist revision and began to consider varieties of epic poetry
other than Greek, Roman, and Renaissance. Some went as far as to accommo-
date the genre or sub-genre of the cantares de gesta, and the PMC became a
prototype worth mentioning instead of being a mere aberration, as was the
case in earlier studies.
Finally, I shall mention other, more contingent forms of institutional sup-
port, or lack thereof. If the PMC was to be the Spanish national poem, one might
expect that a certain amount of fetishism about its unique manuscript would
not be completely out of order. The fuss about the remains of the Cid himself
proves sufficiently that such fetishism was indeed possible. The French army
sacked the Cid’s tomb in Cardeña in 1808; three diplomats robbed some of his
bones, and the rest were transferred to Burgos. The abbot of Cardeña claimed
them in 1826 and had them sent back, but after the monastery was dissolved
they returned to Burgos to be kept at the town hall, which caused political
uneasiness in some circles. Later, one of the French diplomats gave the bones
he had to a German prince, who first displayed them in a museum and then
decided to return them to Spain. In 1883, the bones were received by the King
and Queen of Spain at the Royal Palace; they were taken to Burgos and were
carried in a solemn procession to the cathedral and the town hall.30 In contrast,
the manuscript of the PMC did not stir such official concerns. After Eugenio de
Llaguno managed to obtain it from Vivar around 1779, he handed it down to his
heirs, who sold it to Pascual de Gayangos. In 1851, the British Museum made an
offer on the manuscript. Gayangos preferred to cash in without the manuscript
leaving Spain, so he tried to sell it to the Spanish Government through Pedro
Pidal. Since the Government would not spend money on such a trifle, Pidal
did; thus, he and his heirs kept the manuscript in their possession until 1960.31
Leaving aside the material object, the text copied on the manuscript was of
interest to the Real Academia Española until the end of the century. In the years
1838-1849, a new edition of Tomás Antonio Sánchez’s Colección was planned.
Around 1863, the focus had shifted: a group of academics were working on
an up-to-date philological edition of the PMC with a thorough introduction
30 This bathetic story was told by Nicomedes Pastor Díaz, in El Heraldo (25 August 1842), and
by F. M. Tubino in several instalments of La Ilustración Española y Americana, vol. 27
(1883), numbers 8, 9, 11.
31 In 1960, the Juan March Foundation bought the manuscript for the National Library of
Spain, which had not been able to afford the asked price.
512 Galván
and annotations. Andrés Bello was willing to contribute his materials, still
unpublished, but the Academia had the intention of carrying out its own
work. José Joaquín de Mora, head of the team, said that they were advanced in
their work and it was unlikely that the Academia would ignore their findings.
Unfortunately, he was mistaken; the edition did not appear and was not even
mentioned in the Academia’s subsequent yearbook. Among other reasons,
there were financial problems; the most cherished project of the Academia, an
edition of the Quijote which had to be the most ostentatious until that time,
was also a failure because of insufficient funds.32 Thus, the readers of the PMC,
if there were any, had to resort to a reworking of Sánchez’s edition in volume
57 of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles prepared by Florencio Janer (1864),33
or perhaps some could access Bello’s edition, printed posthumously in 1881. In
those years, there were lectures and discourses that dealt briefly with literary
aspects of the PMC in the Real Academia and in the Ateneo de Madrid by José de
la Revilla, F. Gonzalo Morón, José Caveda, Pedro J. Pidal, Juan Valera, Francisco
de P. Canalejas, and Menéndez Pelayo. In 1895, the Academia announced a
prize for a grammar and glossary of the PMC. Its subject, without any allusion
to literary issues, shows that the academics wanted to fill a gap with positiv-
istic philological research, so as to stand on the same footing with what was
being done in European universities at the time, as I mentioned in the pre-
ceding section.34 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Miguel de Unamuno, and two other
scholars took part in the contest, and Menéndez Pidal won. Although the prize
included the publication of his work, Menéndez Pidal delayed doing so until
he could prepare a critical edition of the text as well. His palaeographic edi-
tion appeared in 1898. He continued his research on the relationship between
the PMC and medieval chronicles, and finally published the three volumes
of Cantar de mio Cid: texto, gramática y vocabulario (1908-11). Thus, the Real
Academia prize resulted in a text of the PMC – with significant corrections and
additions – that remained authoritative for decades, together with Menéndez
Pidal’s conclusions and opinions.35
32 Zamora Vicente, Historia de la Real Academia Española, p. 384. It is worth noting that the
Real Academia Española was still searching for the Spanish epic poem; its collection Bi-
blioteca selecta de clásicos españoles starts with a two-volume edition of Ercilla’s Araucana
(1866).
33 Janer’s was a new edition, not a mere reissue; he corrected Sánchez’s text by doing a new
collation of the manuscript, even if it fell short of the philological standards the Real
Academia Española was aiming at in those years.
34 See Montaner, “Un texto para dos filologías”.
35 Even the new title, Cantar de mio Cid – based on Milà’s name for the epic genre –, was
widely adopted and is still preferred by many today, not necessarily because they agree
Before drawing some conclusions, it is worth considering that this was also
the period when the PMC entered, to a certain degree, the living literary tradi-
tion, i.e., it was expressly adopted as intertext or hypotext by several writers
dealing with the Cid theme. Antonio de Trueba quoted and paraphrased the
PMC in his novel Las hijas del Cid (1859), and so did Vicente Huidobro in his Mio
Cid Campeador (1929). Two poems by Manuel Machado are based on the PMC:
the well-known “Castilla” (1902) recasts in modernista fashion an episode of
the poem’s beginning, and “Alvar Fañez” (1904) summarizes the traits of this
character. Eduardo Marquina declared that he decided to write his drama Las
hijas del Cid (1908) because of the emotion he felt while reading the PMC, and
three pages with excerpts of the poem were appended to the drama in its book
format. These works are not unrelated to scholarship. Had Andrés Bello’s edi-
tion prevailed – if it had been printed earlier and perhaps in Spain, endorsed
by the Real Academia –, it would had barred the way for Machado’s “Castilla”,
since Bello substituted a sixty-year-old woman for the nine-year-old girl of the
manuscript of the PMC.36 Huidobro acknowledged that he relied on Menéndez
Pidal’s edition, even though he modified part of the traditional plot according
to his own vision of the Cid’s character.
The canonization of the PMC during the second half of the 19th century
shows some significant traits. On the one hand, there is a critical canonization
similar to what had happened in other countries in the preceding decades. The
development of academic philology needed the PMC as raw material; also, the
professional and the programmatic stances coalesced: scholars did research on
the PMC and praised it as worth reading. Their encomiastic, sometimes bom-
bastic criticism relied partly on belated neo-classicism – unity of action,
goodness of characters –, partly on romantic ideas – national spirit, naivety of
popular poetry –, and finally on a taste for realism. On the other hand, certain
conclusions of Spanish scholars gave the PMC a special place within the canon:
it was seen not merely as a good literary work among others, but as the earliest
and the only almost complete specimen of the genre that expressed the popu-
with Menéndez Pidal’s views. It is noteworthy that the critical editions carried out in the
1970s by Colin Smith and Ian Michael (only the latter had access to the manuscript) were
both more conservative than Menéndez Pidal’s and called the text Poema de mio Cid.
About medieval labels for literature, see Higashi’s study “Edad Media y genología”.
36 Bello preferred the reading “naña”, found in a medieval chronicle, to “niña” in Sánchez’s
edition (he did not see the manuscript). The correction relied explicitly in his taste for
verisimilitude: “el razonamiento que sigue se atribuye a una vieja en la Crónica, cap. 91; lo
cual es infinitamente mas natural i propio, no habiendo nada en él que no desdiga de una
niña” (Bello, Obras completas, p. 205).
514 Galván
lar poetic tradition. This prepared the way for its canonization in institutional
circles.
A canon can only be endowed with an official aura if there is an institutional
basis, which in Spain was provided by the educational reforms that introduced
Spanish literature as a subject in the 1840s. But it was only decades later, coin-
ciding with the novelties in scholarship mentioned before, that the educational
system started to praise and convey a good deal of information about the PMC.
From that moment on, one can ask about the functional aspect of the canoni-
zation at a broader level. The poem provided stabilization and adaptation not
only for scholars but also for the political community at large. However, it is
not easy to identify what function the PMC possibly had. The question first has
to be rephrased, given that such a text does not function by itself in society, but
rather it is an element in the functional subsystem of literature and literary
education. Moreover, it is unlikely that we would be able to find evidence for
its role, since “literature can only realize its primary function of mediation and
compensation under the condition that this function is concealed from
society”.37 It has been argued that what makes literature socially perceptible is
not its function but precisely the canon – or rather “the classics” in Gumbrecht’s
sense. In any case, it is possible to see a particular work appearing synecdochi-
cally in a broader context. The PMC was not the most obvious candidate – the
Quijote was –, but it did play its part, beginning with Joaquín Costa’s characteri-
zation of the Cid – based on the PMC – as a champion for the rule of law (1878),38
followed by Unamuno’s interpretation in En torno al casticismo and Menéndez
Pidal’s works culminating in La España del Cid (1929). There were also scat-
tered references in the 1930s: Unamuno used it again in support of a land
reform; José Antonio Primo de Rivera quoted a line in the speech for the foun-
dation of the fascist party Falange Española; Valle-Inclán used it to endorse his
proposal of a federalist and anarchist constitution for Spain; Antonio Machado
interpreted typologically the feud between the Cid and the Infantes de Carrión
as foreshadowing the Civil War between workers and señoritos.39 In a final
analysis, what matters is not any particular interpretation of the PMC, but the
37 Gumbrecht, “Phoenix from the Ashes”, p. 158.

38 The fate of Costa’s view of the Cid and the PMC is worth pondering. He wrote at length, for
decades, about the Cid as a model for the rule of law. However, he chose once to deprecate
the Cid as a symbol of Spanish mystification of national military glory, and said that his
tomb should be closed with two keys (Crisis política de España, 1901). As a result, this slo-
gan eclipsed the rest of his work on the Cid.
39 References to Unamuno, Primo de Rivera, Machado, and others are given in Galván, El
Poema del Cid en España, pp. 246-49. Valle-Inclán was omitted there; see his Entrevistas,
pp. 629-32. Also see Lacarra, “La utilización del Cid”, for its use under Franco’s regime.
fact that people from very different backgrounds refer to it as evidence for a
characteristic or a spirit that could bind the nation in its contemporary cir-
cumstances. Such was the common ground provided by the PMC and the
literary system.
4 The Search for Readers
By the end of the 19th century, educated Spaniards ought to have had some
notions about the PMC and reasons to appreciate it; yet, if they had set out to
read the text, they would not have had an easy time. Tomás Antonio Sánchez’s
edition did not make it more available, but rather less unavailable, and it was
rarely reprinted in the following hundred years. It may be observed that in this
period there were as many editions in Germany – by Schubert, printed twice,
and Vollmöller, plus one translation – as in Spain – by Sánchez, Rubió, and
Janer. Even Janer’s edition in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (vol. 57, in
1864), which had a wide circulation and had received government support, had
a preface declaring that volume to be a philological work unlikely to please
readers with good taste.40 Menéndez Pidal’s palaeographic edition (1898,
reprinted in 1900) did not change essentially this state of affairs. There were
some attempts to rewrite it according to contemporary standards. Trueba pub-
lished a prose rendering of the second half in Semanario pintoresco español
(1854); José Vicente Fillol declared in 1861 that he had made a version in ottava
rima (!), but refrained from printing it because he liked the original better.
Thus, the earliest modernization was published in Chile in the wake of Andrés
Bello: Eduardo de la Barra’s El Poema del Cid (1900) – in fact, a full account of
the Cid theme – which found no echo in Spain.
It was Menéndez Pidal who, after completing the critical edition, went on to
prepare a pocket edition of the PMC for the lay public. It was published in the
Clásicos Castellanos collection (1913) and was remarkably well designed: the
critical text was presented with many explanatory notes and was preceded by
an introduction of over 100 pages. It displayed the critical success of the PMC
– a selective history of the criticism was included – and it affirmed its artistic
and national value. There is no doubt that it was well received, for it was
reprinted in 1923, 1929, and later. The next step in the diffusion of the PMC was
its modernization – after De la Barra’s attempt – beginning with Alfonso Reyes’
prose rendering that accompanied the ancient text in the Calpe edition of 1919.
A version in octosyllabic meter by Pedro Salinas for Revista de Occidente
40 On the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, see Lara Garrido, “La perversión del canon”.
516 Galván
followed in 1926. These works also enjoyed some success and were soon
reprinted (Reyes in 1930, 1932; Salinas in 1934; both were frequently printed in
the 20th century, and Reyes’ is currently in print). There were also at least three
additional editions of the ancient text in those years, but they were not
reprinted. One can surmise that the readers wanted either the authoritative
one by Menéndez Pidal, or an easier one to read. Furthermore, three different
versions for children appeared: by M.ª Luz Morales, Hazañas del Cid Campeador
relatadas a los niños (1927); by Ángel Cruz Rueda in his Las gestas heroicas cas-
tellanas contadas a los niños (1931); and by Alejandro Casona in his Flor de
leyendas (1933, still in print). The PMC finally entered the accessible canon.
5 Concluding Remarks
The account given suggests that a certain kind of interpretation was necessary
for the PMC to reach recognition beyond the academic sphere. It had to be
viewed as relying on a native popular tradition, as expressing the national
spirit, and as a realistic and truthful poem. These traits defined somewhat of
an “orthodoxy”, as Colin Smith termed it, that persisted for decades, even
though the limits between the orthodoxy and the “dissonant voices” are not
easy to find.41 Literary criticism based on Menéndez Pidal’s critical text – by
far the most available until the 1970s – would even unconsciously adopt his
corrections and the assumptions that supported them.42 Some innovative
commentaries may be seen as rephrasing or developing the orthodoxy in new
theoretical and methodological frames, such as Américo Castro within idealist
aesthetics and Dámaso Alonso within stylistics.43 Julián Ribera’s hypothesis
that the PMC might have relied on a tradition of Arabic epic poetry sounds
disruptive, but it is another way of supporting its autochthonous nature, since
Ribera argues that Arabic epics existed only in the Iberian Peninsula and had
41 See Smith, “Dissonant voices” (I owe this reference to Rus Solera’s review of Galván, El
Poema del Cid).
42 For example, a line that Menénez Pidal took from the Estoria de España and added to the
critical text, namely “mas a grand ondra tornaremos a Castiella” (l. 15), was quoted by
several critics as evidence for the key function of honra in the PMC (see Galván, “A todos
alcança ondra”).
43 The case of stylistic criticism applied to the PMC gives a glimpse of the role of the pur-
ported orthodoxy, probably related to national boundaries or traditions. Dámaso Alonso
(“Estilo y creación”) focused on what he called “realism” in the PMC, in the sense of life-
likeness, whereas Leo Spitzer (“Sobre el carácter histórico”) emphasized its deviance from
reality, i.e., its fictionality.
pre-Arabic origins. Attempts to debunk the PMC, such as Julio Cejador’s (in
Revue Hispanique, 1920), were quite unusual. Not that everybody liked it, but
dismissal was better expressed in an offhand way, like Borges does:
Así como en los juegos de azar las cifras pares y las cifras impares tienden
al equilibrio, así también se anulan y se corrigen el ingenio y la estolidez,
y acaso el rústico poema del Cid es el contrapeso exigido por un solo
epíteto de las Églogas o por una sentencia de Heráclito.44
As for the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, the
PMC’s canonicity does not seem to depend on a definite interpretation like the
one I mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Scholars who have made a case
for French influence, learned authorship, or imaginative and mythical patterns
were certainly not working to dislodge the PMC from the canon;45 neither are
those who have recently published interpretations that address gender equal-
ity and environmental concerns.46 In fact, it is arguably interpretive activity
that allows texts to hold the stage through shifting fashions and significant cul-
tural changes, even if it is not a goal of each and every interpreter.47 It would
not be easy to devise a thought experiment as to what might cause the PMC’s
demotion from the canon of Spanish and Western literature.48 Perhaps it
would be necessary to invoke multiculturalism, political correctness, or other
avowedly ideological demands. Or one should go beyond the possible and
imagine the PMC proven to be a forgery, Tomás Antonio Sánchez being, after
all, a contemporary of James Macpherson. In conclusion, canonicity lies at the
intersection of a set of literary facts with academic states of affairs, and it is
likely to remain the crux for any neat distinction between the programmatic
44 Borges, “El inmortal” (orig. 1947), in El Aleph, p. 21.

45 See, among others, Fradejas, “Intento de comprensión”; Montaner, “El Cid”; Riquer,
“Babieca”; Smith, The Making; Zaderenko, Problemas de autoría.
46 See Hernando, Poesía y violencia, pp. 106-23; Scarborough, Inscribing the Environment,
pp. 11-24, 79-89.
47 See Starobinski, “Sur les gestes”; Kermode, “Institutional control”; and, in general, Barthes,
Critique et vérité.
48 A different issue is raised by Mercedes Vaquero’s claim that the PMC is not prototypical of
Castilian epic material (see Vaquero, “The Poema de mio Cid” and her contribution to this
volume). In her view, if we are interested in, and want to teach, epic poetry and the epic
tradition, Sancho II (Partición de los reinos) and Mocedades de Rodrigo are preferable. Also
see Boix, El Cantar de mio Cid.
518 Galván
stances of those participating in the literary system and the epistemic stance of
those who observe and describe it.49
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522 Galván
Figure 16.1 Title page of the first edition of the Poema de mio Cid, edited by Tomás Antonio
Sánchez (Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1779). By Kind Permission of
Biblioteca Universitaria De Zaragoza.
select bibliography
Select Bibliography
Manuscripts
The Poema de mio Cid is preserved in a unique manuscript from the 14th century, a
parchment codex which is comprised of 74 folios and missing three additional ones:
the initial folio and two others between folios 47-48 and 69-70. There are several
modern handwritten copies of the 14th-century codex (mostly fragmentary), but
unfortunately the missing folios were already lost when the transcriptions were
done.
Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Vitr/7/17, in-quarto volume on parchment, 198
× 150 mm, 74 fols. (originally 77), c.1320-30.
Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS/6328, in-quarto volume on paper, 211 × 149
mm, 93 fols., 1596, full text transcribed by Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri.
Madrid, Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Ms. N-34, in-quarto volume on
paper, 391 fols., c.1600, transcription of PMC, vv. 1-197.
Oviedo, Biblioteca Universitaria de Oviedo, Ms. M-290, in-folio volume on paper, 330 ×
230 mm, [89] fols., 18th century, full text.
Sevilla, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, Ms. 58-4-26, in-quarto volume on paper, 209
× 152 mm, 164 fols., c.1760, transcription of PMC, vv. 1-197.
Sevilla, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, Ms. 59-2-13, in-folio volume on paper, 301 ×
205 mm, [146] fols., 18th century, transcription of PMC, vv. 1-197.
Facsimile Editions
Poema de Mio Cid, 2 vols., with a paleographic transcription by Ramón Menéndez

Pidal, Madrid: Dirección General de Archivos y Bibliotecas, 1961.
Poema de Mio Cid, 2 vols., with transcription and studies coordinated by Hipólito
Escolar, Burgos: Ayuntamiento de Burgos, 1982.
Cantar de Mio Cid: Manuscrito de Per Abbat, multimedia edition with cd-rom, edited
by Lourdes Sanz (Tesoros de la Biblioteca Nacional, 1), Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional,
1998.
Poema de mio Cid: Edición conmemorativa del VIII Centenario, with a prologue by
Alberto Montaner, Madrid: Círculo Científico, 2007.
Poema del Cid (Biblioteca Digital Hispánica), Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional de España,
[n. d.] <http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000036451>.

524 Select Bibliography
First Publication
Poema del Cid, in Colección de poesías castellanas anteriores al siglo XV, vol. 1, edited by
Tomás Antonio Sánchez, Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1779, pp. 220-404.
Critical Editions
Cantar de mio Cid: Texto, gramática y vocabulario, edited by Ramón Menéndez Pidal,
3 vols., Madrid: Bailly-Baillière, 1908-11; revised edition, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe,
1944-46.
Poema de mio Cid, edited by Colin Smith, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972; Spanish ver-
sion, Madrid: Cátedra, 1976; revised editions, 1985 and 1994.
The Poem of the Cid: A New Critical Edition of the Spanish Text, edited by Ian Michael,
translated by Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry, Manchester, U.K.: Manchester
University Press, 1975; reprint, New York: Viking Penguin, 1984; Spanish version,
Madrid: Castalia, 1976; revised edition, 1978.
Cantar de mio Cid, edited and translated by Jules Horrent, 2 vols., Gand: Story-Scientia,
1982.
Chanson de Mon Cid = Cantar de Mio Cid, edited and translated by Georges Martin,
Paris: Aubier, 1996.
Cantar de Mio Cid, edited by Francisco Marcos Marín, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1997.
Poema de Mio Cid, edited by Leonardo Funes, Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2007.
Cantar de mio Cid, edited by Alberto Montaner, preliminary study by Francisco Rico,
Barcelona: Crítica, 1993; revised editions, Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2007, and
Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2011; corrected reprint with bibliographical addi-
tions, 2016.
Online Editions
Cantar de mio Cid, edited by Matthew Bailey, Austin: University of Texas, 2002, <http://
miocid.wlu.edu/>.
Cantar de Mio Cid, edited by María del Carmen Gutiérrez Aja and Timoteo Riaño
Rodríguez, Madrid: Fundación Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, [n. d.].
<http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/cantar_de_mio_cid/>.
Translations into Modern Spanish
Poema del Cid, prose translation by Alfonso Reyes, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1919.
Poema de Mio Cid, verse translation by Pedro Salinas, Madrid: Revista de Occidente,
1926.
Poema del Cid, verse translation by Francisco López Estrada, New York: Eliseo Torres,
1955; Valencia: Castalia, 1955.
Poema de mio Cid, prose translation by Cedomil Goic, Santiago: Universidad de
Santiago de Chile, 1955.
Poema de mio Cid, verse translation by A. Manent, Barcelona: Juventud, 1968.
Cantar de Mio Cid, verse translation by Francisco Marcos Marín, Madrid: Alhambra,
1985.
Cantar de mio Cid, verse translation by Alberto Montaner Frutos, prologue by Ramón
Menéndez Pidal (Biblioteca Universal-Clásicos Españoles), Barcelona: Círculo de
Lectores, 1999.
English Translations
Poem of the Cid, translated by J. Ormsby, London: Langmans, 1879.

Poem of the Cid, 3 vols., translated by Archer M. Huntington, New York: Putnam,
1897-1903.
Poem of the Cid, translated by Lesley B. Simpson, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1957.
The Poem of the Cid, translated by W.S. Merwin, London: Dent, 1959; reprint, New York:
New American Library, 1962.
The Epic of the Cid, translated by J. Gerald Markley, Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1961.
The Poem of the Cid: A New Critical Edition of the Spanish Text, edited by Ian Michael,
translated by Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry, Manchester, U.K.: Manchester
University Press, 1975; reprint, New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.
The Poem of My Cid (Poema de Mio Cid), translated by Peter Such and John Hodgkinson,
Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1987.
Poem of the Cid, translated by Paul Blackburn, New York: American R.D.M. Corporation,
1966; reprinted with a foreword by George Economou and an introduction by Luis
Cortest, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
The Song of the Cid: A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text, translated by Burton
Raffel, introduction and notes by María Rosa Menocal, New York: Penguin, 2009.
526 Select Bibliography
The Epic of The Cid: With Related Texts, translated by Michael Harney, with selections
from a wide variety of other contemporary texts, Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing, 2011.
Index Index 527
Index
Abajo, Francisco de (municipal clerk of Vivar) Andrés, Juan 501-03

51 Angers, Bernard of (see Bernard of Angers)
ʿAbdalbadīʿ, Luṭfīʿ 174n16, 178 Anselm, St. 249
Adams, Kenneth 21n36, 35, 190n14, 204 Aquinas, St. Thomas 248
Aguilar Piñal, Francisco 79 Aradra Sánchez, Rosa María 498n3, 499n8,
Aguirre, José María 216n77, 237 518, 520
Alberro, Manuel 236n71, 238 Arcipreste de Hita (see Juan Ruiz)
Alcalá, Pedro de 173n11 Ariosto, Ludovico 502
Alcalá Galiano, Antonio 502, 508 Ariza Viguera, Manuel 146n14, 166
Alemany, Rafael 459, 494 Armistead, Samuel G. 57n45, 58n50, 79, 387,
Alfonso II of Aragon 300-01, 309, 314 388n46, 390, 393, 405, 450n95, 451n98, 456,
Alfonso V of León 403 480n33, 494
Alfonso V of Portugal 484 Arranz Guzmán, Ana 323n8, 343
Alfonso VI of Castile and León 4, 11, 96, Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista 486n48, 493
297-98, 309-10, 314, 320, 324, 349-50, 393, Ayala Martínez, Carlos de 308n58, 315,
404, 414-19, 422-24, 428, 431, 436, 442-43, 323n7, 344
445, 447-52, 455, 461, 464n2, 467, 471,
478-79, 481-82 Baasner, Frank 499n8, 518
Alfonso VII of Castile and León 7, 297, 299, Badía Margarit, Antonio M. 179, 420n15, 456
306, 308, 310, 324, 364, 473 Bailey, Matthew 20n33, 30-31, 35, 186n6,
Alfonso VIII of Castile 92, 122, 126, 132, 218n23, 250n14, 256n39 and 41, 267,
173n11, 298-314, 324, 338, 343, 364, 371, 388,
290n29, 395n86, 405, 524
396-397, 402, 444-445, 479
Bakker, Egbert 256n40, 257, 265n74 and 75,
Alfonso X of Castile and León 10, 11, 32-34,
267
43-44, 52, 54n36, 57-58, 108, 114, 122, 133,
Banús, Enrique 380n4, 407, 498n1, 507n25,
184, 265-66, 323, 343, 349, 365n55, 366, 372,
518-19
381-82, 412-27, 439, 449, 453-55, 464,
Barcelos, Pedro de (Count) 442-43, 452, 465,
Alfonso XI of León 455
Alfonso de Cartagena 453, 488-89 491
Alfonso de Castilla (Prince) 483 Baret, Eugène 506
Almanzor (Almanṣūr billāh) 468 Barra, Eduardo de la 515
Alonso, Dámaso 104-05, 111, 225, 236n71, 238, Barrero García, Ana María 311n72, 315
516, 518 Barrio Sánchez, José Antonio 493
Alonso, Pedro (municipal clerk of Vivar) 51 Barthes, Roland 517n47, 518
Althoff, Gerd 348n, 372 Barton, Simon 4n2, 8n11, 13n26, 35, 298n6
Altschul, Nadia R. 69n89, 79, 505n20, 518 and 7, 303n35, 305n44, 306n46 and 48-50,
Alvar, Carlos 36, 80, 238, 243, 407, 456, 458, 307n54, 313n79 and 82, 315-16, 350n19, 372,
460, 495 397n94, 405
Alvar, Manuel 206 Baury, Ghislain 313n82, 316
Álvarez Borge, Ignacio 299, 316 Bautista Pérez, Francisco 9n15, 34n60, 36,
Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando 471 55n40, 56n42, 58n46 and 48-49, 60n58,
Álvarez de Toledo, Gutierre 471 227n57, 238, 311n74, 316, 337n62, 344, 350,
Álvaro de Luna (see Luna, Álvaro de) 361n42, 372, 384n27, 395n84, 399n101, 405,
Alvira Cabrer, Martín 309n66, 315 414n2, 422n21, 429n39, 431n42, 439n65,
Amador de los Ríos, José 93-94, 110n65, 111, 440n67, 442n69, 446n83, 452n102 and 103,
193n18, 204, 507, 510n29 456, 464n1, 490n62, 494

528 Index
Bayo Julve, Juan Carlos 18n30, 19n31 and 32, Boyle, Leónard E. 66n78 and 79, 69n87, 80
20n33, 49n16, 53n30, 54n35, 65n76, 67, Bremer, Jean 241
70n94, 71n96, 104n73, 73n104 and 105, Brío Carretero, Clara del 220n30, 239, 381,
74-76, 78n118 and 119, 78n121, 80, 141n6, 407
190n15, 194n20, 199n24, 205, 258n51, 267, Brown, Joan L. 498n3, 518
381n6, 387n37, 389, 392n64, 394-398, 406, Brundage, James A. 356n36, 372
507n25, 518 Buchholz, Friedrich 503
Beceiro Pita, Isabel 473n20, 494 Burke, James F 355, 373
Bédier, Joseph 69n89, 97, 102, 104-05, 111, Burke, Michael 68n85, 80
505n21, 518 Burns, Norman T. 240
Behaghel, Otto 186, 187n7, 205 Burshatin, Israel 312, 313n79 and 80, 316
Bellini, Giuseppe 240 Burt, John R. 224n42, 238
Bello, Andrés 93, 111, 202, 205, 504-05, 512-13, Busby, Keith 103, 111
515, 518 Bustos, María del Mar de 38, 442n73, 456
Belmonte Serrano, José 241
Beltrán, Rafael 492 Cabral de Moncada, Luis 364, 373
Beltrán y Rózpide, Ricardo 493 Cacho Blecua, Juan Manuel 213n12, 214n14,
Berceo, Gonzalo de (see Gonzalo de Berceo) 238
Berganza, Francisco de 499 Caldera, Ermanno 225n52, 232, 233n65,
Bermudo III of León 466 234n67, 235n69, 236, 238
Bernáldez, Andrés 484, 486n49, 492 Calderón Medina, Inés 303n34, 304n39,
Bernard d’Angers 249 305n44, 306n45-47 and 50-51, 316
Bernard de Clairvaux, St. 249 Campa, Mariano de la 58n46, 80, 415n3,
Bernardo de Sédirac (Archbishop of Toledo) 417n7, 441n68, 456-57
323 Canalejas, Francisco de Paula 512
Bernardo de Sigüenza (Bishop) 323 Canfora, Luciano 67n82, 80
Bianchini, Janna 302n29, 316 Cano Aguilar, Rafael 124, 134, 167
Bianciotto, Gabriel 241 Canterbury, Eadmer of (see Eadmer of
Bizzarri, Hugo Oscar 51n20, 80 Canterbury)
Blackburn, Paul 525 Carcereri, Luciano 244
Blair, Hugh 502 Carlé, María del Carmen 324n11, 325n13, 344
Blanca Garcés de Navarra 479 Carlos de Viana 479-80, 492
Blanco, Martín (municipal clerk of Vivar) 51 Carriazo Rubio, Juan Luis 493
Blanco, Mercedes 501n14, 518 Carrillo, Alonso (Archbishop of Toledo) 477
Blázquez y Delgado-Aguilera, Antonio 493 Carruthers, Mary 248, 249n6 and 10, 250, 267
Blecua, José Manuel 344 Casalduero, Joaquín 213n12, 238
Blecua Perdices, José Manuel 70n94, 71n95, Casona, Alejandro 516
80 Castelli, Clara 240
Bly, Peter A. 224n42, 238 Castillo Cáceres, Fernando 242
Bodmer, Johann Jakob 502 Castro, Américo 516
Boix Jovaní, Alfonso 18n29, 33n55, 36, 275, Catalán, Diego 9n13, 36, 38, 53n33, 57n45,
283n19, 288-89, 291, 386, 406, 417n5, 80, 138n1, 144-45, 164-66, 382n15 and 16,
426n33, 427n34, 429n39, 438n59, 459, 383, 384n29, 387n43, 388n45 and 46,
517n48, 518 389n49, 390-91, 392n61, 395n81, 402, 406,
Boni, Marco 244 408, 413n1, 414n2, 416n4, 417n5-7, 418n9,
Borges, Jorge Luis 517, 518 419n11-12, 420, 421n17-18, 422, 423n24 and
Bouterwek, Friedrich 503 26, 425n30, 426n32-33, 427, 428n38,
Bowra, Cecil M. 277n14, 291 430n40, 431n45, 434, 439n64 and 66,
Index 529
441n69, 442n70, 443n74, 444n76, 445n79, Damas-Hinard, Jean-Joseph S.A. 288, 291,
446, 447n86-87, 448n88-89, 449n90-91, 505-06
451n95 and 98, 457, 459, 480n34, 494 Danielwicz, Jane 256n44, 257n45-47,
Cátedra, Pedro M. 83-84 258n53, 259n56, 267
Catholic Kings (see Fernando V and Isabel I) Dante Alighieri 282, 474, 501
Caveda, José 512 De Chasca, Edmund 21n35, 36, 216n17,
Cejador, Julio 517 219n29, 223n37, 226n54, 230n59, 236n71,
Cerdá, Francisco 499 238
Chafe, Wallace L. 30, 256-67 De Hamel, Christopher 44n3, 80
Chalon, Louis 387, 406, 415n3, 417n5, De Nigris, Carla 493
444n78, 446n82, 457 Derolez, Albert 44n3, 45n7, 46n8-10, 47n13,
Chaplin, Margaret 21n35, 36 48n14-15, 81
Charlo Brea, Luis 299n10, 315 Dethier, Fred 238
Chiarini, Giorgio 71n96 Deyermond, Alan D. 213, 226, 238, 239, 240,
Cintra, Luís Filipe Lindley 442n72, 244
452n103-05, 457 Di Camillo, Ottavio 106n54
Cirot, Georges 434n51, 457 Di Stefano, Giuseppe 389-90, 391n58,
Clairvaux, Bernard de (see Bernard de 393n70, 406
Clairvaux, St.) Díaz de Durana, José Ramón 329n30, 344,
Clanchy, M.T. 248n4-5, 249n8, 267 495
Clarke, Dorothy C. 230n59, 238 Díaz de Games, Gutierre 468-69, 488, 492
Clemencín, Diego 502n15 Díaz de Toledo, Gutierre 485
Clement (Benedictine monk from the Lessay Díaz de Vivar Sandoval Hurtado de Mendoza,
Rodrigo (VII Duke of the Infantado) 487,
Abbey) 104
492
Coello Mesa, María Antonia 159n23, 166
Díaz de Vivar y Mendoza, Rodrigo (I Marquis
Cohen, Rip 177n23, 178
of Cenete) 485-87, 491-92
Coleridge, Samuel T. 504
Díaz-Mas, Paloma 391n58, 406
Colmeiro, Manuel 364, 373
Díaz-Regañón, José María 239
Company, Concepción 37
Díaz Roig, Mercedes 391n58, 406
Conde López, Juan Carlos 168, 224n42, 238,
Diego de Burgos 473-74
318, 466n3-5, 493-94
Diego García / de Campos 127
Conti, Juan Bautista 501
Diego López de Haro 313
Contini, Gianfranco 69n89, 80 Dietrick, Déborah 38
Corfis, Ivy A. 226n57, 238 Diez, Friedrich 503n17, 504
Cornu, Jules 188, 507 Díez Calleja, Beatriz 134
Corominas / Coromines, Joan 169n4, 172, Díez Garretas, María Jesús 38, 489n56, 494
177, 178 Dieze, Johann Andreas 503
Corominas, Pedro 349 Dillard, Heath 353, 373
Corriente, Federico 6n8, 18n30, 29n44, Domínguez Aparicio, Jesús 44n3, 84
65n74, 79n122, 80, 170n3, 172n9, 175n18-19, Doubleday, Simon 299n14, 305n44, 306n45,
179-80 316
Cortest, Luis 525 Dozy, Reinhart 506
Costa, Joaquín 514 Drury, Tom 444n78, 457
Criado de Val, Manuel 84, 206 Duby, Georges 322n1, 344, 356n35, 357n38,
Cruz Rueda, Ángel 516 373
Curtius, Ernst Robert 212n11, 226n55, 238 Duffell, Martin J. 71n97, 81
Duggan, Joseph J. 5, 36, 100n34, 112, 230n59,
D’Agostino, Alfonso 58n50, 71n96 and 98, 80 236n71, 238, 261n60, 268, 298n6, 303, 313,
530 Index
Duggan, Joseph J. (cont.) Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés 122n2, 132, 134,

314n84, 316, 331n39, 344, 360n41, 373, 152n19, 154n21, 165n31, 167, 397-98, 406,
381n6, 388, 395n81, 396, 402, 406 414n2, 415n3, 418n10, 423n25 and 27,
Dunham, Samuel 504 441n68, 458
Durán, Agustín 507-08 Fernández Rodríguez, Natalia 458
Durán López, Fernando 520 Fernández Rodríguez-Escalona, Guillermo
Dutton, Brian 30n46, 33n57, 36, 268, 492 220n30, 239, 381, 407
Dyer, Nancy Joe 58n51, 81, 195n21, 205, Fernández Valverde, Juan 299n9, 315
266n78, 415n3, 418n8, 419n11, 420n16, Fernando I of Austria 490
421n18 and 20, 457 Fernando I of Castile and León 4, 33n59,
250, 382, 392n61, 393, 404, 413-14, 416-17,
Eadmer of Canterbury 249 441-42, 447-49, 452, 455, 461, 464n2,
Economou, George 525 465-66, 468, 471, 473, 476, 478, 481, 489
Ehrismann, Otfrid 497n2, 503n16, 518 Fernando II of León 299-301, 305-07, 415
Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried 503 Fernando III of Castile and León 302,
Enrique IV of Castile and León 467, 477-83, 388n44, 415, 441-42, 468
485, 491 Fernando IV of Castile and León 416, 446
Enrique of Aragón (Prince) 465 Fernando V of Castile and León, and
Enrique-Arias, Andrés 167 Fernando II of Aragón 490-91
Enríquez del Castillo, Diego 467 Fernando Núñez de Lara 305
Entwistle, William J. 379, 382n16, 406, Fernando Rodríguez de Castro 300
426n32, 430n40, 458 Ferrando, Ignacio 173n11, 180
Epalza, Mikel de 171n6-7, 180 Ferruz, Pero 469
Escalona Monge, Julio 9n13, 36 Figueras i Capdevila, Narcis 350n16, 373
Escavias, Pedro de 478-79, 492 Figueroa, José Lorenzo 508
Escobar, Ángel 7n10, 38, 109, 112, 350n16, Fillol, José Vicente 515
373-74 Finnegan, Ruth 251n15, 268
Escolar Sobrino, Hipólito 84, 407, 523 Fiorentino, Francesco 244
Espinosa Elorza, Rosa 149n17, 167 Fish, Stanley 498n6, 519
Esposito, Anthony P. 227n57, 239 Fita, Fidel 302n28, 303n34, 316
Estepa Díez, Carlos 299n11, 316 Fleckenstein, Josef 245
Fleischman, Suzanne 202n29, 205, 247n2,
Falque Rey, Emma 298n6, 303n34, 315, 266n79, 268
360n15, 372 Fletcher, Richard 4n1, 35-36, 298n6, 305,
Fernán González (Count of Castile) 96-97, 308, 315-16, 397n34, 405
110, 399, 453, 468, 470, 474, 477-78, 485 Florán, Juan 505
Fernández Bernaldo de Quirós, Joaquín 242 Floranes, Rafael 91-92, 112, 500
Fernández de Benadeva, Alfonso 488 Foley, John Miles 254, 255n35, 268
Fernández de Córdoba, Gonzalo (El Gran Folsom, Rose 44n3, 81
Capitán) 488 Fontes, Manuel da Costa 391-92, 407
Fernández de Heredia, Juan (see Juan Forey, Alan J. 308n58, 316
Fernández de Heredia) Formisano, Luciano 75n112, 78n117, 81
Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo 486, 493 Forner, Juan Pablo 497
Fernández Ferreiro, María 458 Foulché-Delbosc, Raymond 471n17, 494
Fernández Gallardo, Luis 471n16, 489n57, Fowler, Alastair 498n4, 500n13, 519
494 Fox, E. Inman 499n8, 519
Fernández Madrid, María Teresa 485n45, Fradejas Lebrero, José 402, 407, 417n5, 458,
494 517n45, 519
Index 531
Fradejas Rueda, José Manuel 38, 80 Gerbet, Marie-Claude 324n10, 344

Frago Gracia, Juan Antonio 161, 167 Gil Aristu, José Luis 245
Franco, Francisco 514n39 Gil de Zamora, fray Juan 471n16, 478
Frauenrath, Mireille 213n13, 239 Gil y Zárate, Antonio 510
Friedman, Norman 213n13, 239 Gilman, Stephen 24n41, 36, 216n17 and 19,
Fruela II of Asturias 348, 415, 441, 452, 455 239
Frye, Northrop 498n7, 519 Gimeno Casalduero, Joaquín 355n30,
Funes, Leonardo 12n23-24, 13n25, 24n39, 357n39, 373
28n43, 36, 64n71, 71n96, 73n104, 75n112, 81, Girón Alconchel, José Luis 223n36, 224n45,
83, 199n25, 205, 342n85, 400, 401n107, 407, 225n50, 239
524 Godinas, Laurette 242
Goic, Cedomil 525
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 499n9, 519 Gombrich, Ernst 286
Galderisi, Claudio 241 Gómez, Jesús 206, 406, 458
Galmés de Fuentes, Álvaro 174n16, 180, Gómez-Bravo, Ana M. 73n103, 81, 193n18, 205
208n3, 226n53, 239 Gómez Lorente, Manuel 485n45, 486n46,
Galván, Luis 33n55, 36, 57n44, 81, 90n3, 487n52, 495
251n16, 380n4, 407, 498n1, 502n15, 507n25, Gómez-Moreno, Manuel 492
514n39, 516n41-42, 518-19 Gómez Pérez, José 485n45, 486n46, 487n52,
Gambra, Andrés 4n1, 36 495
García I of Galicia 467 Gómez Redondo, Fernando 34n60, 238, 243,
Garcia, Michel 84, 492 384n27 and 29, 385, 388n43, 395n83, 407,
García de Salazar, Lope 453, 480-82, 493 419n12, 458, 460, 468n9, 484n43, 489n58-
García Fitz, Francisco 309n66, 310n67, 317 59, 490n64, 495
García Gil, Juan José 10n16, 36 Gončarenko, S.F. 70n93, 81
García Isasti, Prudencio 297n3, 317 González, Aurelio 37, 227n58, 239
García López, María Cruz 224n43, 239, González, Cristina 230n59, 239
476n24, 495 González, Julio 299n11-12, 300n16-21,
García Montoro, Adrián 208n3, 239 301n22-25, 302n29, 303n34, 304n38,
García Ramírez of Navarre 479 305n44, 307n45-48, 307n52 and 55, 308n60,
García Sánchez III of Pamplona 467 309n63, 317, 364n51-52, 373
García Turza, Claudio 131n7, 134 González Cuenca, Joaquín 492
García Turza, Javier 131n7, 134 González de Mendoza, Pedro (El Gran
García Ulecia, Alberto 311n71, 317 Cardenal) 475, 485-86, 488, 491
García Yebra, Valentín 193n18, 205 González Ollé, Fernando 145, 167
Garci-Gómez, Miguel 208n3, 223n37, Gonzalo de Berceo 33, 90-91, 108, 123, 130-31,
232n63, 239, 272n3, 291, 384n29, 385n31, 146, 149, 152, 157, 174-76, 250, 500
386, 407 Gonzalo Morón, Fermín 512
Gargano, Antonio 210n6, 222n32, 226n53, Gonzalo Núñez de Lara 305
233n66, 239 Gornall, John 24n40, 36-37, 197n22, 205,
Gaudemet, Jean 356n34, 373 215n15, 239, 392, 408
Gaviño Rodríguez, Victoriano 520 Gracia Alonso, Paloma 112
Gayangos, Pascual de 511 Grahn, Hans 62n63, 81
Geary, John S. 225n50, 239 Gran Capitán (see Fernández de Córdoba,
Geijerstam, Regina af 54n36, 81 Gonzalo)
Geladi, Paul 62n63, 81 Grases, Pedro 505n20, 519
Genette, Gérard 207, 208, 239 Grassotti, Hilda 307n55, 317, 338n64, 344,
Génin, François 506 348n4 and 7, 349, 364n51, 373,
532 Index
Greetham, D.C. 44n3, 66n77, 69n88, 81 Hodgkinson, John 525

Greimas, Algirdas J. 282, 291 Homer 252, 255, 502
Grigsby, John L. 217, 240 Hook, David 21n36, 37, 58n52, 81, 134, 184n2,
Grocheio, Johannes de (see Jean de Grouchy) 205, 223n37, 224n43, 240
Guadix, Diego de 173 Horace (Horatius) 500n12
Guglielmi, Nilda 312n76, 317, 361n43, 373 Horrent, Jules 222, 240, 524
Guillén de Ávila, Diego 489, 493 Huber, Victor Aimé 504
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 498n5, 499n8, Huici Miranda, Ambrosio 309n64 and 66,
503n17, 505n21, 514, 519 317
Gurevič, Aron Ja. 212n10, 240 Huidobro, Vicente 513
Gutierre de Segovia (Bishop) 323 Huntington, Archer M. 525
Gutiérrez Aja, María del Carmen 49n16, 84, Huppé, Bernard F. 226n53, 240
409, 524 Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego (I Count of
Mélito) 488
Ḥafṣ b. Albar Alqūṭī 177 Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego (I Duke of the
Hallam, Henry 504 Infantado) 473, 477
Hamilton, Rita 223n37, 240, 408, 524-25 Hurtado de Mendoza, Pedro 486
Harney, Michael 526
Hart, Thomas R. 226n55, 230n59, 236n71, Ibn Quzmān, Abū Bakr Muḥammad 177
240, 284, 286, 291 Iglesia Duarte, José Ignacio de la 344, 409
Harvey, L.P. 254, 268 Iglesia Ferreirós, Aquilino 365n55, 373
Hathaway, Robert L. 223n37, 240 Innocent III (Pope) 302, 309
Hegel, Georg W. F. 504 Isabel I of Castile and León 482-84, 491
Heinemann, Edward A. 74n109, 81 Isidore, St. 250
Heinzle, Joachim 497n2, 519 Izquierdo Benito, Ricardo 309n64, 317
Hempel, Wido 223n36, 240
Hendrickson, William L. 226n55, 241 Jakobson, Roman 219n25, 240
Henriet, Patrick 437n56, 458 Janer, Florencio 497, 512, 515
Herder, Johann Gottfried 503 Jean de Grouchy (Johannes de Grocheio) 104
Heredia, Juan Fernández de (see Juan Jerez, Enrique 457
Fernández de Heredia) Johnston, Robert M. 288n25, 291
Héritier, Françoise 337n59, 344 Jones, J.R. 36
Hernández, Francisco J. 122, 131-34, 166-67, Juan II of Aragon 470, 479
313, 314n83, 317, 402, 408 Juan II of Castile and León 463, 465-66, 468,
Hernández Alonso, César 167, 291, 374, 494 477, 483, 491
Hernández de Mendoza, Diego 476-77 Juan de Ávila (Bishop) 323
Hernando, Julio 517n46, 519 Juan Fernández de Heredia 54n36
Hernando Pérez, José 173n11, 180 Juan Manuel 121, 324n12, 344, 415, 442,
Herslund, Michael 21n36, 37 Juan of Osma (Bishop) 304
Hess, Rainer 239 Juan Ruiz (Archpriest of Hita) 175, 178, 500
Higashi, Alejandro 9n14, 37, 50n18, 81, Juana of Castile 484
513n35, 519 Juana of Portugal 485
Hijano Villegas, Manuel 417n7, 425n30, Jubinal, Achille 505
426n33, 427n34, 430n40, 431n42, 437n55, Jular Pérez-Alfaro, Cristina 488n54, 495
439n66, 440n67, 441n69, 442n73, Justel Vicente, Pablo 21n35-36, 25n38, 30n46
443n74-75, 446, 456n106, 458 and 48, 37, 74n109, 81, 278n16, 291
Hinojosa, Eduardo de 349, 368n58, 369n64,
372-73 Kantor, Sofía 273, 281, 291
Index 533
Kaplan, Gregory B. 232n63, 240 López Estrada, Francisco 226n53-54, 236n71,

Keller, Hans-Erich 242, 292 241, 525
Kennedy, Elspeth 67n82, 81 López Ortiz, J. 364, 374
Kennedy, Hugh 308n59, 317 López-Vidriero, María Luisa 84
Kermode, Frank 498n6, 517n47, 519 Lord, Albert Bates 252n22, 253-55, 266-68
Koerbs, Ferdinand 507 Lorenzo, Ramón 442n72, 458
Kothari, C.R. 69n89, 81 Lourie, Elena 311, 317
Lucas de Tuy 250, 303n34, 315, 413, 453
Labère, Nelly 238 Lucía Megías, José Manuel 80, 112, 206, 410,
Lacarra, María Eugenia (Eukene Lacarra 456
Lanz) 15n27, 67, 78, 79n121, 81, 101, Luis Corral, Fernando 300n19, 317
222n34, 234n68, 240, 303, 307n53, 312n76, Luna, Álvaro de 463, 465, 468-71, 491
317, 332n42, 344, 348n3, 349n12, 354n29, Luongo, Salvatore 10n19, 17n28, 24n39,
362n44, 367n56, 373-74, 380n5, 388n44, 25n42, 37, 210n6, 241, 263n71
402, 404, 408, 514n39, 520
Lacarra de Miguel, José María 325n13, 344, Machado, Antonio 514
367n57, 374 Machado, Manuel 513
Lacomba, Marta 417n5, 426n33, 429n39, MacKay, Angus 484n42, 495
444n78, 447n86, 458 Macpherson, James 517
Lafuente, Modesto 507 Magdalena, J.R. 173n11, 180
Lampillas, Xavier 502 Magnotta, Miguel 497n1, 520
Lang, Henry R. 188n9 Mair Yaḥya ibn Ġālib 173n11
Lapesa, Rafael 38, 82, 138n1, 145, 148, 154n21, Makkī, Ṭāhir Aḥmad 171n7, 180
158n22, 162, 164-65, 167, 216n17, 241 Mallorquí Ruscalleda, Enric 226n54, 241
Lara Garrido, José 515n40, 520 Manent, A. 525
Laso de la Vega, García 482 Manrique, Gómez 473, 475, 477, 482-83, 485
Lawrance, Jeremy 386n34, 408, Manrique, Jorge 472, 483
Layna Serrano, Francisco 487n52, 495 Manrique, Rodrigo 482-83, 485, 491
Le Goff, Jacques 226n56, 241, 338n65, 344 Manṣūr billāh, Abū ʿAmīr Muḥammad b. Abī
Le Guellec, Maud 495 ʿAmir, Al- (see Almanzor)
Leclercq, Jean 357n38, 374 Manuel, Juan (see Juan Manuel)
Lemos, Mencía de 485, 488 Manzanaro, Josep Miquel 459, 494
Leonard, William E. 188n12, 205 Marcos Marín, Francisco A. 103n73, 81,
Leverage, Paula 104, 112 138n2, 139n3, 141, 145, 164-65, 167, 174n16,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 282, 291 180, 208n3, 241, 402, 408, 524-25
Lidforss, Eduardo / Edvard 272n3, 291, 507 María de Molina 491
Linares, Julio 243 Marín Sanchez, Ana María 493
Linehan, Peter 300n15 and 18, 309n64, Markley, J. Gerald 525
310n67, 316-17 Marquina, Eduardo 513
Lintvelt, Jaap 213n13, 241 Martin, Georges 13n25, 67, 78n119, 79n121, 82,
Lista, Alberto 502 84, 238, 243, 275, 291, 298n7, 308, 318,
Llaguno, Eugenio de 56, 500, 511 324n10-12, 325n14, 327n20, 330n32, 342n85,
López, Francisco (municipal clerk of Vivar) 343n87, 345-46, 399n99, 401, 402, 407-08,
51 447n86, 448n89, 458, 460, 495, 524
López de Abiada, José Manuel 241 Martín, Óscar 12n22, 37, 395-96, 398, 408
López de Ayala, Pero 469 Martín Daza, Carmen 112
López de Mendoza, Íñigo 471, 473-75, 482, Martín López de Pisuerga (Archbishop of
485, 487 Toledo) 127, 129
534 Index
Martín Martín, José Luis 10n16, 37, 298n7, 281, 288, 291, 386n32, 393n77, 408, 513n35,
315 524-25
Martin of León, St. 250 Michel, Francisque 508
Martín Rodríguez, José Luis 310n70, 318, 409 Mignolo, Walter D. 498n4 and 7, 520
Martín Sanz, Demetrio 38 Milá y Fontanals, Manuel 94-95, 112, 508n26,
Martín Vidaller, Carmen 132n9, 134 509, 510n29
Martín Zorraquino, María Antonia 138n1, Miletich, John S. 21n35, 30n47, 38, 224n43,
165 241, 247n1, 254, 268, 384n28
Martínez, Salvador H. 232n63, 241, 383n17, Millares Carlo, Agustín 2n3, 82
408 Misrahi, Jean 226n55, 241
Martínez Alcubilla, Marcelo 372 Molho, Maurice 208n3, 241, 311n75, 318
Martínez de la Rosa, Francisco 505 Molinero Hernando, Pablo 10n16, 36
Martínez Diez, Gonzalo 4n1, 9n13, 37, 112, Montaner, Fernando 70n91, 83
297n4, 299n11, 318, 365n55, 374, 404n116, Montaner Frutos, Alberto 6, 7n10, 10n15 and
408 18, 11n21, 18n30, 19n31, 20n33, 29n45, 32n54,
Martínez Sopena, Pascual 134, 344 33n55-57, 37-38, 44n4, 49n16, 52n25 and 27,
Martos, Josep Lluís 459, 494 54n34 and 37-38, 55n39-41, 56n43, 57n45,
Mata Carriazo, Juan de 486n49, 492-494 58n50 and 53, 59n54 and 57, 61n60, 62n61
Matute, Cristina 138n1, 165n30, 167 and 64, 63n65-69, 64n70, 65n76, 66n81,
Maury, Juan María 505 67n84, 70n91, 71n96-97, 73n104, 75n112,
Maya Sánchez, Antonio 312n78, 315 79n122, 82-83, 86-88, 100n36, 101, 109, 112,
Mayans, Gregorio 500 114, 123, 134, 138n1, 139n3-4, 140n5, 144n11,
Medina de Mendoza, Francisco 486, 493 145, 147n15, 155n20, 164, 166n34-35, 168,
Mejía, Alma 81 169n1, 171n7, 172n9, 174n13, 180, 188n10,
Mena, Juan de 469, 470n13, 493 199n25, 201, 204n31, 206, 207n1, 208n2 and
Mendíbil, Pablo 501 5, 210n7, 212n10, 213n12-13, 219n27, 222n34,
Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino 91, 92n10, 95-97, 223n37-38, 226n55, 231n61, 232n63, 236n71,
112, 509, 512 237, 241-42 , 254n31, 256n39, 257n49,
Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, Faustino 258n50 and 52, 259n55, 268, 272n1, 273,
477n26, 495 275, 277, 281n18, 287, 291-93, 298n5 and 7,
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 5, 9, 11n20, 21, 28, 303n32, 305n41, 310n68, 311n74-75, 314, 318,
37-38, 44n1, 51-53, 57n45, 61, 73n104, 82, 320-21, 325n15, 327n22, 349, 350n16,
90n6, 97-100, 102n40, 112, 124-25, 131, 134, 354n29, 364, 374, 380n5, 383-84, 385n31,
138, 140-42, 144n11, 147-48, 150, 151n18, 386n34, 395n82 and 86, 396n89, 398-99,
163-67, 172n9, 180, 184n1, 188, 192n17, 400n103, 401-03, 405, 408-09, 417n5 and 7,
193n18, 200, 201n28, 205, 208n3, 226n53-54, 418n10, 420n15, 423n27, 426n33, 427n34,
232n63, 237, 241, 251-52, 255, 266, 268, 271, 429n39, 430n40, 432n46-47, 437n57,
272n3, 291, 298, 318, 324n10-11, 324n14-15, 438n59, 439n64, 445n79, 446n83, 448n89,
327n22, 345, 362n45, 364, 367n57, 374, 449, 451n95-97 and 99, 456n106, 458-59,
382n10-11, 384n29, 388n46, 392n61, 401-02, 469n11, 573n19, 476n24, 490n63, 495, 498n3
408, 416n4, 417n6, 418n8, 419n12, 425, and 7, 499n10, 512n34, 517n45, 518n49, 519,
430n40, 436n55, 451, 452n105, 458-59, 497, 520, 523-25
506n23, 509-10, 512, 515-16, 520, 523, 524-25 Montgomery, Thomas 216n17 and 19,
Menocal, María Rosa 525 225n50, 236n71, 242, 247n1, 256n38,
Merwin, W.S. 525 264n73, 268, 390, 409
Michael, Ian 52n26, 61, 67, 78n118-19, 79n121, Montiel, José Luis 58n51, 83
80, 82, 101, 105, 107-08, 112, 184n1, 190n16, Moon, Harold 226n56, 242
193n19, 198n23, 206, 215n15, 223n37, 241, Mora, José Joaquín de 512
Index 535
Morales, María Luz 516 Pacheco, Juan 477, 482, 484

Moreno Castillo, Enrique 226n53, 242 Pampín Barral, Mercedes 83, 456, 459, 495
Moreno Hernández, Carlos 474n21, 492, 495 Panateri, Daniel 67n84, 83
Moreta Velayos, Salustiano 404n119, 409 Pāṇini 187n7
Morros, Bienvenido 354n29, 374 Panizo Santos, Ignacio 10n16, 38
Moure, José Luis 83 Paraíso, Isabel 71n95, 83
Moya García, Cristina 489n61, 495 Pardo, Aristóbulo 230n59, 242
Muḥammad al-Nāṣir 309 Pardo Bazán, Emilia 509
Müller, Johannes von 503 Paredes, Diego de 487
Muñoz Cortés, Manuel 37, 82, 459 Paredes, Juan 82, 459
Muñoz Machado, Santiago 374, 375 Paris, Gaston 505-06, 510, 520
Murray, Alexander 226n55, 242 Parrilla García, Carmen 83, 456, 459, 495
Mussafia, Adolf 176 Parry, Adam 206, 253n24, 268
Myers, Oliver T. 216n17, 242 Parry, Milman 189, 206, 252-55, 267, 269
Myller, Christoph Heinrich 502 Pascua Echegaray, Esther 306n49, 318
Pascual, José Antonio 172n8, 178
Nader, Helen 486n45, 487n53, 495 Pastor de Togneri, Reyna 494
Nascimiento, Aires A. 82 Pastor Díaz, Nicomedes 511
Nerlich, Michael 501n14, 520 Pato, Enrique 138n1, 167
Nespor, Marina 186n5, 206 Pattison, David G. 80, 82, 168, 240, 272n3, 288,
Nichols, Stephen G. 66n80, 83 292, 315, 372, 383, 408-09, 415n3, 417n5,
Nieto Soria, José Manuel 323n8, 345, 430n41, 434n51, 441n69, 442n70, 444n77,
477n27, 494, 496 448n89, 449n51, 451n99, 452n104, 459-60
Niño, Pero (Count) 468, 488 Pavlović, Milija N. 212n9, 230n60, 232n63,
Noonan, John T. 356n36, 374
242, 273, 292, 368n58, 375
Núñez de Toledo, Juan 489
Pawley, Andrew 261n62-63, 269
Núñez Paz, María Isabel 356n36, 374
Pedro I of Aragon 479-80
Nuño González, Jaime 299n11, 318
Pedro II of Aragon 302, 313
Nuño Pérez de Lara 305
Pedro Fernández de Castro 303-04
Nykl, Alois Richard 178, 180
Pedrosa, José Manuel 230n59, 243
Pellen, René 71n97, 77n114, 83-84, 162, 168,
O’Callaghan, Joseph 301n26-27, 302n28 and
187n12, 206, 223n38, 243, 402, 409
30, 310n68, 315, 318
Pellicer, Juan Antonio 56, 500
Ocampo, Florián de 442, 459
Penna, Mario 494
Octavio de Toledo y Huerta, Álvaro S.
159n23, 168 Penny, Ralph 141, 163n26, 164-65, 168
Oleza, Juan de 226n57, 242 Peña Pérez, Francisco Javier 4n1, 39, 350, 375
Orcástegui Gros, Carmen 492 Per Abbat 6, 32, 59-61, 65n75, 91-93, 107n57,
Orduna, Germán 54n35, 57n45, 83, 288, 292, 129, 137, 143, 184, 203, 313, 383, 385, 389
395n86, 409 Pérez de Guzmán, Fernán 471-73, 485, 487,
Orlandis Rovira, José 350n20, 352n23, 353, 493
354n29, 374 Pérez Vidal, Alejandro 243
Ormsby, J. 525 Pérez, Roberto 213n12, 243
Ortega y Gasset, José 509, 520 Pero (or Pedro) Abad 173
Otero Varela, Alfonso 364, 374 Perry, Janet 524-25
Ovid 412 Pescador, Carmela 311n73, 318
Peter II of Aragon (see Pedro II of Aragon)
Pablo de Santa María (see Santa María, Pablo Pickering, Frederick P. 226n53, 243
de) Pidal, Pedro José 512
536 Index
Piñero Valverde, María de la Concepción Rico, Francisco 22n37, 39, 222n33, 237, 243,
222n34, 243 304n41, 319, 383-84, 386n34, 395n86, 403,
Pollmann, Leo 230n59, 243 408-09, 495, 524
Ponce de León, Rodrigo (Marquis of Cádiz) Ridruejo, Emilio 120n1, 134
484-85, 491 Riesco Terrero, Ángel 84
Pontón, Gonzalo 493 Riquer, Martín de 19n32, 395n81 and 86, 410,
Popper, Karl 506, 520 517n45, 520
Portolés, José 499n8, 520 Riva, Fernando 310n68, 319
Powell, Brian 135, 242, 244, 266n78, 269, 292, Robinson, Cynthia 240
382n9-15, 383, 403, 409, 415n3, 420n14-15, Rochwert-Zuili, Patricia 420n14 and 16,
424n29, 450n95, 452n98, 460 423n28, 426n33, 427n35, 432n47, 433n50,
Powers, James F. 120n1, 134, 307n56, 435n54, 442n71, 444n77-78, 445n80,
311n71-72, 315, 318, 402, 409 447n86, 460, 469n11, 476n25, 492
Pozuelo Yvancos, José María 498n3, 499n8, Rodiek, Christoph 33n55, 39, 497n1, 521
520 Rodilla, María José 81
Prescott, William H. 504 Rodrigo Ximénez / Jiménez de Rada 119, 121,
Primo de Rivera, José Antonio 514 127, 129, 323, 413, 419, 439, 453
Pulgar, Hernando de 486, 493 Rodríguez de Almela, Diego 453, 481, 489, 493
Purkis, William 310n69, 318 Rodríguez de Calheiros, Fernán 177
Puymaigre, Théodore de 506 Rodríguez Flores, María Inmaculada 353-54,
357n40, 375
Quilis, Antonio 71n95, 84 Rodríguez López, Ana 134
Quintana, Manuel José 497, 501-03 Rodríguez Molina, Javier 6n8, 19n31-32,
20n33, 32n53, 52n28, 73n103, 75, 78b120, 84,
Rábade Obradó, María del Pilar 343 140n5, 146n13, 168
Rada, Rodrigo Ximénez de (see Rodrigo Rodríguez-Velasco, Jesús D. 67n84, 84,
Ximénez / Jiménez de Rada) 325n14, 345
Raffel, Burton 525 Rohui, Leyla 240
Raimundo de Tolosa (Count of Toulouse) Roitman, Gisela 327n20, 345
473 Roodenburg, Herman 241
Ramiro I of Aragon 404 Rosell, Cayetano 487, 492
Ramiro I of Asturias 421 Rosseeuw-Saint Hilaire, Eugène F. A. 505
Ramiro of Monzón 4 Rossell, Antoni 53n32, 84, 188n11, 206
Ramón Berenguer (Count of Barcelona) 4, Rubin, David C. 261-62, 269
214, 479 Rubio Flores, A. 84
Ranz Yubero, José Antonio 223n37, 243 Rubió y Ors, Joaquín 507, 510n29, 515
Ratcliffe, Marjorie 232n62, 243 Ruiz Albi, Irene 108n61, 112
Reagan, Christopher J. 240 Ruiz Asencio, José Manuel 44n1, 49n16, 82,
Reig, Carola 417n5, 460 84, 108n61, 112, 374
Reilly, Bernard F. 4n1, 39 Ruiz de Azagra, Pero 480
Restori, Antonio 507 Ruiz de la Peña Solar, Juan Ignacio 120n1, 134
Revilla, José de la 512 Ruiz de la Vega, Gonzalo 474
Reyes, Alfonso 515-516, 525 Ruiz de Ulibarri, Juan 32, 51n22, 52n23, 56,
Riaño Rodríguez, Timoteo 49n16, 84, 402, 60, 63, 89n1, 499-500, 523
409, 524 Ruiz Gómez, Francisco 309n64, 317
Ribera, Julián 516 Russell, Peter E. 101, 105, 203n30, 206,
Ribero, C. Almeida 82 219n26, 243, 355n30, 375, 380n5, 401, 410,
Richthofen, Erich von 222n34, 243 426n32, 430n40, 437n58, 460
Index 537
Ryan, Giles D. 227n57, 243 Silvela, Manuel 501, 505

Rychner, Jean 21n34, 39, 215n16, 243 Simpson, Lesley B. 525
Sismondi, Jean Claude Léonard Simonde de
Saavedra, Ángel de (Duke of Rivas) 502 505
Sáez, Carlos 243 Smith, Colin C. 5-6, 21n36, 33n56, 39, 53n33,
Saguar, Amaranta 168, 318 55n40, 58n47, 64n71, 84-85, 101, 102n40,
Salazar y Mendoza, Pedro de 487, 493 106, 113, 220n30, 222n34, 226n53, 227n58,
Salinas, Pedro 515-16, 525 231n61, 237, 244, 302-03, 304n41, 312,
Sancha, Antonio de 500 313n80, 319, 355n30, 356n33, 375, 380n5,
Sánchez, Tomás Antonio 90, 112, 184, 185n3, 383, 384n28, 387, 390, 392, 400-01, 410,
379, 497, 500, 504, 511, 515, 517, 522, 524 419n11, 439n65-66, 450n95, 460, 505n20,
Sánchez Casabón, Ana Isabel 309n62, 314, 513n35, 516, 517n45, 521, 524
Sánchez Jiménez, Santiago U. 199n25, 206 Smith, Roger R. 232 n63, 244
Sánchez Mariana, Manuel 44n3, 53n31, Solà, Joan 179
54n36, 84 Solalinde, Antonio G. 37, 82, 459
Sánchez Prieto, Ana Belén 44n3, 84, 184, Soler Bistué, Maximiliano 216, 219, 244
185n3, 379, 497, 500, 504, 511, 515, 517 Solera López, Rus 445n79, 452n101, 460,
Sánchez-Prieto Borja, Pedro 19n32, 39, 473n18, 476n24, 496, 521
139n4, 141n6, 145, 168 Soons, Alan 392, 410
Sancho II of Castile 4, 9, 11, 110, 414, 416, 442, Southey, Robert 504, 521
447-49, 452, 464n, 467, 478-79, 481 Southworth, Eric 80, 168, 408
Sancho III of Castile 297, 299, 479 Spitzer, Leo 516n43, 521
Sancho IV of Castile and León 58, 323n8, Stock, Brian 249, 269
404, 414, 416, 421, 423, 430, 455, 491 Suárez Fernández, Mercedes 167
Sancho VI of Navarre 299, 444, 445n80 Such, Peter 525
Sancho VII of Navarre 301 Syder, Frances Hodgetts 261n62-63, 269
Sandamann, Manfred 216n17, 243
Sandoval, Prudencio de 89, 112, 499 Tapia, Eugenio de 508
Santa Cruz, Alonso de 486n49, 493 Taylor, Andrew 53n30, 85, 102n42, 103, 113
Santa María, Pablo de 465-67 Taylor, Barry 125n6, 134, 205, 239, 458
Santamarta Luengos, José María 299n11, 316 Terés, Elías 171n6, 180
Sanz, Lourdes 524 Ticknor, George 93, 113
Sanz, Omar 369n65, 375 Ṭodros Abulʿāfiyah 176
Sarmiento, Martín 90, 113, 499 Toro, Francisco 242
Scarborough, Connie 517n46, 521 Toro Pascua, María Isabel 82, 134
Schafler, Norman 226n54, 243 Torre, Esteban 70n92 and 94, 71n95-96, 85
Schlegel, Friedrich 503, 505, 507 Torreblanca, Máximo 163n26, 168
Scholler, Harald 243 Torrens Álvarez, María Jesús 138n1, 147n16,
Schrott, Angela 219n24, 244 168
Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich 503, 515 Torres Sevilla-Quiñones de León, Margarita C.
Sears, Theresa Ann 236n71, 244 325n15, 327n22, 345, 404n116, 410
Sebeok, Thomas A. 240 Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven 498n4, 521
Segre, Cesare 70n90, 84, 207n2, 216n18, Trigueros, Cándido María 56, 57n44, 60, 499
218n22, 225n48, 244 Troncarelli, F. 80
Senra Gabriel y Galán, José Luis 405n119, Trotter, David 79
410 Trovato, Paolo 53n31, 66n78-81, 68n86, 85
Serés, Guillermo 493 Trueba, Antonio de 497, 508, 513, 515
Serra Ruiz, Rafael 368n58, 369n60-61, 375 Tubino, Francisco María 511
538 Index
Tynjanov, Jurij N. 201n27, 206 Villarroel González, Óscar 344

Villemain, Abel-François 505
Ubieto Arteta, Antonio 109n62, 113, 162, 168, Violante Branco, Maria João 133n10, 134
302, 311n75, 319, 402, 410 Virgil 105, 501-02
Ulibarri, Juan Ruiz de (see Ruiz de Ulibarri, Viruete Erdozáin, Roberto 132n9, 134
Juan) Vogel, Irene 186n5, 206
Ulibarri, Manuel 500 Vollmöller, Karl 507, 515
Unamuno, Miguel de 508, 512, 514
Ureña y Smenjaud, Rafael de 311n71, 315, 372 Walde Moheno, Lillian von der 37, 519
Urraca I of Castile and León 473 Waldschmidt, Anneliese 497n2, 519
Urraca López de Haro 306 Walker, Roger M. 212n9, 230n59-60, 232n63,
242, 244, 305, 319
Val Valdivieso, María Isabel del 344 Walsh, John K. 220n30, 244
Valera, Diego de 477, 484, 489, 491, 494 Waltman, Franklin M. 21n35, 39
Valera, Juan 497, 508, 512 Ward, Aengus 439n64, 445n80, 458, 460
Valle-Inclán, Ramón del 514, 521 Webber, Ruth House 223n37, 244, 273, 275,
Valverde Ogallar, Pedro 476n25, 477n26, 496 281, 292
Vaquero, Mercedes 11n22, 239-40, 374, 379n1, Weigand, Rudolf 356n37, 375
385n31, 386n35-36, 387n42, 393n69 and West, Geoffrey 135, 205, 226n57, 230n59,
71-72, 394n79, 395n83 and 85, 400n102, 239-40, 242, 244, 285n22, 292, 409, 458
401n109, 410-11, 473n18, 496 Whetnall, Jane 458
Vara Thorbeck, Carlos 309n66, 319 White, Stephen D. 348n5, 375
Vargas Ponce, José 502 Wolf, Ferdinand Joseph 503n18, 506, 508, 521
Varvaro, Alberto 223n35, 225n46, 232n63, Wolff, Otis 504
237n73, 244 Wright, Roger 32, 120n1, 122n2, 123n4, 134-35,
Vega Ramos, María José 501n14, 521 166, 388n44, 399n100, 400n104, 411
Vegliante, Jean-Charles 178n28, 180
Veiga Rodríguez, Alexandre 167 Yarza Luaces, Joaquín 494
Velázquez, Luis José 499, 510
Vélez-Sainz, Julio 493 Zaderenko, Irene 7, 10n17, 39, 54n38, 55n40,
Velorado, fray Juan de 34, 452, 473n18, 490, 85, 95n20, 101n38, 107n57, 113, 131, 135,
492 163n26, 168, 247n1, 256n39, 269, 298n8,
Viana, Carlos de (see Carlos de Viana) 307n55, 319, 364n51, 375, 380n3, 384n29,
Viardot, Louis 505, 507 390n52, 399-402, 411, 517n45, 518n49, 521
Vico, Giambattista 96 Zamora Vicente, Alonso 512n32, 521
Victorio Martínez, Juan 188n9, 206, 240 Zapf, Hermann 81
Vidal González, Francisco 493 Zotz, Thomas 226n53, 245
Vilà, Lara 501n14, 521 Zumthor, Paul 235n70, 245, 248, 269
Villalba Ruiz de Toledo, Francisco Javier
486n46, 496

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A Companion to the Poema de mio Cid

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363755_001

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bmcp

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

1 The Poema de mio Cid as Text: Manuscript Transmission and Editorial

2 The Question of Authorship 89

4 A Closer Look at the Poema de mio Cid’s Language 137

5 On the Arabic Loanwords in the Poema de mio Cid 169

6 On the Poetic Technique of the Poema de mio Cid 183

8 Oral Expression in the Poema de mio Cid 247

9 Episodic Logic and the Structure of the Poema de mio Cid 271

10 The Historical Context of the Poema de mio Cid 297

11 Social Structures and Values in the Poema de mio Cid 322

12 Legal Aspects of the Poema de mio Cid 347

14 The Poema de mio Cid in 13th- and 14th-Century Romance

15 The Cidian Matter in the 15th Century 463

Simon Barton (d. 2017)

Francisco Bautista (d. 2017)

Juan Carlos Bayo Julve

Fernando Gómez Redondo

Eukene Lacarra Lanz

Javier Rodríguez Molina

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363755_002

2 The Historical Rodrigo Díaz1

took her husband’s remains to the Benedictine Monastery of San Pedro de

3 Authorship and Date of Composition

2 Menéndez Pidal, ed., Cantar de mio Cid, vol. 1, pp. 71-72.

Quien escrivió este libro, dél’ Dios paraíso, ¡amén!

6 Smith, “Towards a Reconciliation”.

9 Zaderenko, El monasterio de Cardeña. See also her chapter in this volume.

11 See Barton’s chapter in this volume.

4 The Poet’s Sources

especially the 15th-century romances or ballads. However, the aforementioned 12th- or

6 Society and Ideology26

In addition to the interconnection of the plots, the two narratives display an

Los que fueron de pie cavalleros se fazen;

27 See Lacarra’s chapter in this volume for more details.

8 The Hero’s Characterization28

28 See Luongo’s chapter in this volume for more details.

9 Formal Aspects: the Metrics30

Formally, the Poema de mio Cid seems to be a combination of traditional and

31 See here the chapters by Bayo, Montaner, and Rodríguez Molina.

e, a, or o, so that Campeadór, nómbre, Alfónso, señóras, fuért, and súyo could be

based on French materials were already circulating.37 Nevertheless, it is proof

37 See Rico, “Çorraquín Sancho, Roldán y Oliveros”.

inherent meaning is one of uncompleted action or state of being tend to be in

12 The Narrator and His Characters42

42 For a detailed analysis, see Luongo’s chapter in this volume.

mio Cid el Campeador al alcáçar entrava,

Indirect discourse is introduced by a speech verb or its equivalent, as in “Mandó

13 Other Stylistic Features

43 For more details, see Funes’ chapter in this volume.

(dedication of a church). There is also an extensive repertoire of Spanish mili-

14 Orality and Literacy in Composition, Performance, and

These features potentially related to performance lead us to raise another

“spontaneous speech” is rendered by the means of highly stylized and rhythmi-

51 Bailey, The Poetics of Speech, pp. 76-104.

52 On this topic, see Wright’s chapter in this volume.

produce their own reimagining of the story in works of literature, paintings,

Bautista, Francisco, “Sancho II y Rodrigo Campeador en la Chronica Naierensis”, e-Spania