Review by Michael Eaude
Exposing Fake History – FRANCO’S MURDEROUS FANTASIES
El Cid is a legendary hero, a fearsome warrior who decisively defeated the Moors in the fight for a Christian Spain a thousand years ago. Or so runs the story. But the story’s not history. Nora Berend shows in her lively and original study that El Cid’s reputation bore and bears little relation to reality. At different historical periods, towns, regimes, monarchs and monasteries used his name to spin a story that fitted their own interests. In particular, she explains how the name of an eleventh-century mercenary was exploited to justify Franco’s twentieth-century ‘crusade’ against communists, liberals and separatists.
The first half of Nora Berend’s book carefully separates the documented facts about Rodrigo Díaz ‘El Cid’ (the nickname is derived from sidi, Arabic for lord) from the myths surrounding him. The second half, the ‘afterlife’ of the book’s sub-title and much more interesting to anyone like me who is not a mediaeval historian, explains how numerous stories about Rodrigo were invented and exploited to glorify the idea of a monolithic Catholic Spain whose centre is Castile. Berend tells this grotesque story well, with a lightness of touch not too often found in an academic – she is Professor of European History at Cambridge. Her sentences are clear. Subtle arguments can be followed. And occasional, humorous remarks show her keen intelligence. We should note too that she is Hungarian and writes absolutely perfect English.
The real Rodrigo (c.1047-1099) was a minor noble who, at this time of warring city-states, fought for both Muslim taifas (small kingdoms) and Christian statelets. The frontiers were unstable, as the Christian kingdoms began to make inroads into the taifas of Muslim Al-Andalus, which covered most of the Iberian peninsula. Many kingdoms were in conflict with their neighbours, the stronger ones forcing the weaker to pay tributes (protection money, basically) or otherwise be invaded, with the fire, looting, rape and slaughter this entailed. In the 1070s, in a brief period of peace, Rodrigo married Jimena, who later succeeded him as the ruler of Valencia. Most of the time he was fighting, at first for Sancho II of Castile against his brother Alfonso. When Sancho died in 1076 and Alfonso VI then united Castile and León, Rodrigo transferred his support to Alfonso. There was little problem in transferring loyalty from one kingdom to another, just as a footballer today might move to another club if there’s a better offer. Rodrigo led successful battles for Alfonso, but started to act independently and in 1081 was exiled by him. For the next five years Rodrigo’s military skill served the Muslim King of Saragossa, before he returned to fight for Alfonso after the latter’s defeat by the Muslim Almoravids at Sagrajas in 1086. In 1089 he fell out again with Alfonso. In 1094 he captured the rich, fertile taifa of Valencia, where he died in 1099 – not in battle, but of illness.
Those are the facts of his life. There are three main distortions of Rodrigo in his afterlife: that he was a fervent Christian, a Castilian patriot and a man of peace, forced into battle only by the violence of the times. Soon after his death, Castilian monarchs and the monasteries competing to be associated with him began to invent a Rodrigo who fought for the Christian faith in loyal service to the Castilian king as part of the ‘Reconquest’ of the peninsula from the Moors. Nora Berend’s detailed research makes clear that Rodrigo fought for several monarchs, both Moorish and Christian, and most of all for himself. This, of course, gives the lie to claims that Rodrigo’s battles were to further Christianity and Castile. Plunder and power were his watchwords.
Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968) was a renowned mediaeval historian. Surprisingly, despite his erudition, he believed many of the stories told about El Cid in chronicles and poems (like the famous El cantar de mio Cid – The Song of My Cid). These were written many decades or centuries after Rodrigo’s death, stories that have no basis in documentary evidence. Menéndez Pidal was one of the ‘Generation of 1898’, intellectuals struggling to grasp why Spain had declined from a great empire to the loss of its last major colonies, Cuba and the Philippines, in 1898. His historical objectivity collapsed before his desire for an idealised El Cid. For Menéndez Pidal, El Cid was an expert in arms and law, a Castilian (read ‘Spanish’) patriot and Christian paragon of virtue, whose example could resuscitate a moribund Spain.
This fake history took on brutal meaning when Francisco Franco (winner of the Civil War and dictator from 1939 to 1975) identified himself with El Cid. Menéndez Pidal’s version of Rodrigo gave intellectual legitimacy to the dictator’s fantasies. The ‘Reconquest’ against the Moors ‘was turned into a liberation akin to Franco’s endeavours to ‘liberate’ Spain from Bolsheviks’. In Paul Preston’s eloquent words:
Franco had long seen himself as a warrior hero analogous to El Cid, as a man who had revived the sleeping beauty of Spain from its long centuries of slumber in mediocrity.
There was in this delirium, of course, no space for the various nations of the Spanish state, such as Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, whose autonomy was crushed by Franco’s victory in 1939. To its ruling class’s chagrin, the Spanish state has never been able to centralise, dominate and integrate its diverse nationalities, as the French state has. El Cid, who existed before Spain existed, was exhumed to support Franco’s vision of a united, highly centralised Spanish state, ‘one, great and free’.
Franco glorified El Cid in several speeches, most notably in 1955 in the city of Burgos, when the city council celebrated the nine-hundredth anniversary of his birth. In fact, no evidence connects the warrior with Burgos. Nor is his birth-date known. This did not hinder regime propaganda. To this day Burgos boasts a huge statue of Rodrigo riding his horse Babieca and waving his sword Tizona. Franco was portrayed as El Cid on a mural for the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen, now called Cuelgamuros), the huge megalomaniac cemetery built by slave labour where Franco himself was buried. Berend’s book contains a photo of the mural, but it was never put in place because it was found that the artist did not have pure Spanish blood: he was Bolivian! Under Franco, El Cid featured on stamps, playing cards and matchboxes; his deeds were taught in school history classes; plays and radio programmes brought his name to every Spaniard. ‘The Cid became the paradigm of the Spanish nobility of race and patriotic values; he was also the perfect family man’, Berend summarises.
Curiously, there are leftists who try to reclaim El Cid as one of their own. The Himno de Riego, unofficial anthem of Spain’s first and second republics, calls fighters for freedom ‘the children of El Cid’. The communist María Teresa León, in exile from Franco, wrote a book arguing that Rodrigo was a forerunner of constitutional rule (based on a famous meeting when he obliged Alfonso VI to swear an oath) and claiming that Rodrigo wanted to unite Spain in peace. There is little purpose to this line of argument, which falsifies Rodrigo as greatly as Menéndez Pidal and Franco did.
To round off the story, the propaganda masterpiece: the 1961 film! Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren starred in El Cid. Billed as ‘The Greatest Romance and Adventure in a Thousand Years, it was basically a Western played out in mediaeval Spain. Franco was thrilled with the legend now spread worldwide. Curiously, among all this fake history, there is one aspect of the dictator’s identification with El Cid that is absolutely true: both cruelly crushed their enemies and enriched themselves by murder and looting. This, though, is not a historical truth that Francisco Franco was eager to embrace.
Michael Eaude has lived between Barcelona and the hills of Valencia for thirty years. He is the author of several books including Catalonia: A Cultural History and Triumph at Midnight in the Century: A Critical Biography of Arturo Barea. He has written for the Guardian, Literary Review and Socialist Review. His website can be found here: www.michaeleaude.com.
Nora Berend, El Cid: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary (Sceptre, 2024). 978-1399709620, 236 pp., hardback.
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