Years ago, in Damascus, a Spanish colleague told me she’d been named after the Battle of Covadonga in northern Spain, where the Moors had tasted defeat around 720. The Arabs had never penetrated Asturias and Galicia, and the battle is often seen as the symbolic beginning of the Christian Reconquista — a centuries-long campaign by Christian kingdoms to wrest the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule, which lasted from 711 to 1492.
What struck me about her offhand comment was the enduring weight of Spain’s medieval past in shaping its modern identity. It wasn’t just pride in the ruggedness of her people but rather — in spite of her dark eyes and curly brown hair, which could easily make her pass for a Syrian — the fact that she beamed as she told me that her region was the only place the Arabs had not conquered. It was as if blood purity was a thing to her, and I remember wondering why it should matter that Moorish blood should “taint” her ancestry.
At the center of Spain’s medieval past stands Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid, an 11th-century knight, mercenary and national hero, who still intrudes on the present. But probe him too deeply and you’ll feel the ire of many a Spaniard, as the Cambridge historian Nora Berend recently found out when she published “El Cid: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary.” To anyone familiar with the Reconquista or the Crusades, Berend’s thesis should be uncontroversial. Yet the book has stirred up controversy in Spain. Why does an 11th-century warlord continue to inflame debate in 21st-century Spain?
El Cid was a Castilian nobleman born in the mid-11th century. Shortly before his birth, Umayyad Andalusia had collapsed in 1031 and been replaced by petty Muslim principalities or so-called Taifa states, vulnerable to Christian raids. Little is known of his early life, but he first appears as an accomplished warrior serving the Castilian and Navarrese monarchs. For a time, he enforced tribute and protected Muslim clients from both Christian and Muslim rivals on behalf of Alfonso VI (c. 1040-1109), but El Cid’s growing independence led to banishment and exile. He then served the Muslim rulers of Zaragoza for five years, showing little regard for religious divisions in his alliances, as Berend notes.
Afterward, he oscillated between service and conflict with Alfonso VI, leading a mixed band of Christian and Muslim warriors. Eventually, he carved out a principality in Valencia, defending it against two Almoravid sieges in 1094 and 1097 — military feats that earned him the title “El Campeador” (“The Champion”), for the Almoravids, a North African dynasty, were beating all Christian armies at the time. He died in 1099, the same year the Crusaders took Jerusalem.
You would have thought that this knight would have remained a relic of the past in Europe, studied by medieval scholars in dusty libraries alongside Old French epic poems like “La Chanson de Roland.” Indeed, this is how we studied him in our undergraduate years. But in Spain, El Cid is not merely a medieval relic but a symbol of national identity.
El Cid has etched himself into the lives of millions of Spaniards, whether through childhood cartoons or bingeworthy streaming series like “The Legend of El Cid” on Amazon. And so he has become a lightning rod for today’s political battles over identity, immigration and belonging. Whether seen as a Christian warrior or mercenary, the version of El Cid Spaniards embrace reflects the kind of Spain they want: exclusive or inclusive, monocultural or plural. This is why, when the former center-right People’s Party Prime Minister José María Aznar López decided to dress up like the Cid, he was essentially promoting a vision of a unified and pure Christian Spain. The prime minister’s hobby was another example of how the country’s medieval past has such relevance in modern Spain.
By deconstructing the romanticized Cid legend, Berend inadvertently challenges the imagined Spanish past that sustains him. When she argues that the warlord who served both Muslim and Christian masters was motivated by serving not a Christian deity but rather himself, she takes a sledgehammer to the vision of El Cid promulgated by Spain’s most influential nationalist historian, Ramón Menéndez Pidal.
It was Pidal who reimagined El Cid to forge a unifying myth — one that bolstered Spain’s modern identity and many conservatives hold dear. Pidal repurposed the Reconquista to restore Spain’s confidence after it lost its empire to the United States. This new iteration of the Cid served Gen. Francisco Franco’s agenda in Spain during his 39-year rule from 1936 to 1975. And although, in many ways, Berend’s interpretation is not new, it is being made at a time when Spain is wrestling with identity and mass immigration.
It is therefore unsurprising that her book, along with its sales, has provoked a notable backlash in Spain. This is not just coming from some Spanish academics, like José Luis Corral or Albert Montaner — the latter calling her study “not really biographical, but ideological” — but also from ordinary conservatives. For instance, the cultural association of Héroes de Cavite, which promotes Hispanic heritage, objected to Berend’s characterization of the Cid and felt it necessary to publish a long rebuttal defending Pidal while detailing the central importance of the Cid long before Franco came along.
“Part of the reason,” Berend told me, “has to do with current political issues, the rise of the right, the fight to keep them out of power, the revival of some of the ideas of the Francoist period. But there are also people who probably don’t want to see a book by someone from outside Spain, who may be unhappy that someone treads on ‘their’ territory. Some have a vested interest in El Cid the hero.”
Spain remains one of the few European countries not to swing hard-right, with its left-wing government and pro-European sentiment holding the far right at bay. However, over the last decade, economic inequality, migration concerns, the Catalan independence movement and the rise of the far right in Europe have paved the way for far-right parties like Vox. In 2018, Vox, led by Santiago Abascal, had electoral success in Andalusia, with its focus on Spanish national identity and traditional values.
It’s no surprise that the liberal outlet El Confidencial noted Berend’s vision would not sit well with Abascal. The Cid’s world — known as the Taifa period — was fractured, multiconfessional and politically fluid. As Berend puts it, “eleventh-century Christian rulers of the peninsula were more likely to die as a result of hostilities with fellow Christians than fighting against Muslims.” She argues that the Cid was essentially a practical man, who fought at times for monarchs out of loyalty, at times for faith and at times for whoever paid him. Later, he ruled over a multireligious principality of Valencia, which he had carved out through conquest. In fact, the very name El Cid betrays the world from which he came, for it means “The Master” in Arabic. In this regard, the Cid was far from unique — other figures, like Álvar Fáñez (d. 1114), also moved with ease in this world.
However, Berend’s sin, it seems, is not just likening the Cid to a mercenary but focusing on his many iterations and transformations. She traces the process of how the Cid legend was created in his own lifetime, partly due to his donations to the Cluniac monks, who had monasteries all over Western Europe, and partly because European Christendom needed heroes. Pope Urban II, the architect of the Crusades, recognized that Spain was another front against Islam and that the Cid’s success against the Muslims could be transformed into an instrument of divine providence. By the mid-12th century, as another North African dynasty, the Almohads, invaded, the Cid had become a model of Christian virtue. In poems and songs, he performed miracles, pledged loyalty to king and faith, and slew Moors beyond reckoning. He joined the pantheon of icons like St. James “Matamoros” — “the Moor-killer” — or the medieval epic of Roland, who fought for King Charlemagne against the Saracen invaders.
By the time Granada fell in 1492, the process of conquering, converting and eventually eliminating Spanish Muslims was well underway. By then, the Cid had been transformed into what Berend calls “a progenitor of kings.” His bloodline could be found in Ferdinand, the conqueror of Granada, and other European monarchs. However, as Spain ventured into the New World with increasing confidence, the Cid became less holy, less needed. The Renaissance saw him occupy both sublime and ridiculous roles: He appears in literature at times as a kingmaker, at others as a buffoon. It was only when Spain began to lose its empire in the 19th century that the Cid became relevant again.
It was Spain’s most influential historian, Pidal, who reimagined the Cid as an emblem of Spanish unity. In an effort to save Spain from the malaise of losing its colonies to the U.S. in the 19th century, he recast the knight as a symbol of national redemption. Pidal wasn’t merely a historian — he was a cultural architect, even helping to develop the 1961 Hollywood epic “The Cid,” starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. It was this Cid that Franco called on to reshape Spain into a right-wing, conservative country, getting the Catholic Church on his side. It was during the Franco era that statues of the Cid were erected everywhere. The message was clear: The Cid was the forerunner to Franco.
Yet this Francoist vision of El Cid at worst erased and at best oversimplified 700 years of Muslim history. It saw Islam as an alien presence, even though it was present in Iberian place names, such as Almeida and Guadalquivir, in Spain’s national dish, paella — a meal of rice with meat and seafood — and even in the resting place of Spain’s greatest saint, St. James, in Compostela. As Diana Darke writes in her new book “Islamesque,” the latter cathedral is embellished with “many Islamic techniques and decorative elements.”
But Spain’s left and, indeed, its liberals countered this vision with their own simplistic interpretation of the Cid. After the Napoleonic wars, Spanish liberals tried to shape the country along European liberal and Enlightenment values, turning the Cid, as Berend says, into “a liberal and republican Cid.” This Cid limited the powerful and dutifully fulfilled his office. To Spanish liberals enamored of the Orient to contrast the narrow-mindedness of the Occident, the Cid’s ability to live side-by-side among Christians, Jews and Muslims — known as “convivencia” (“coexistence”) — chimed with their liberal values.
Fast forward to the 1930s, and leftist liberals like the Andalucian poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca viewed the fall of Granada in 1492 as a tragedy — “un momento malisimo” (“a terrible moment”). Lorca’s poetry was inspired by the likes of Abu Tammam, a prominent 9th-century Arab poet celebrated for his eloquent verse, and others. Franco’s Nationalists, however, despised everything Lorca stood for and murdered him during Spain’s brutal civil war in the late 1930s, when Francoist forces clashed with left-leaning Republicans.
Lorca’s fate was emblematic of what was to come. After the war, Franco’s vision of the Cid — and of Spanish history itself — would dominate classrooms and public memory alike. Even now, the average Spaniard studies little of Spain’s Muslim past, even though it existed for longer than modern Spain itself. As a Spanish Muslim, Imam Abdelkader Harkassi, told me, “I remember studying the topic. It consisted of two pages. The Arab conquest of al-Andalus, the Almoravids, Almohads, the Taifa period and the Reconquista, and that’s it. Then it goes on to [Christopher] Columbus and the Americas.” It’s as if Islamic Spain ended with the fall of Granada, and the “discovery” of America heralded the triumph of Christian Spain, all in the same year.
Harkassi told me how a group of Spanish Muslim converts thought they would highlight Spain’s Muslim heritage by going on an epic horseback pilgrimage to Mecca, as the Spanish pilgrims had done in the past. The story was covered by all the major media outlets of the countries they passed through, whether an Orthodox Christian country like Serbia or a Muslim one like Saudi Arabia. However, the story was barely covered in Spain itself. And it wasn’t hard to see why: “If you look at the Instagram posts,” Harkassi says, “the hateful comments at the bottom will tell you why.”
Harkassi entered the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus with the Spanish flag, accompanied by the Spanish ambassador to Syria, but his own compatriots didn’t quite see it as a triumph, on account of his religion. They didn’t see him and his fellow pilgrims as Spanish. The only way to be fully Spanish, he tells me, is to be “cristiano viejo” — “old Christian” — a term used to denote those with neither Jewish nor Muslim ancestry after Spain’s forced conversions. “But how many of them,” laughs Harkassi, “are really from ancient Christian families?”
The legacy of Franco’s vision and the battle for the heart of Spain, the struggles over memory and identity, continue to play out in modern Spain today, and Berend’s book has hit a nerve. The Cid has become a symbolic refuge for conservatives — a medieval shield against modern pluralism. The knight represents a Spanish identity rooted in its Christian past. This identity is anti-Islamic and rests on the foundation myth of the Reconquista. In this vision of Spain, the Cid sits alongside the likes of St. James, both figures emblematic of Spain’s fight against Muslim forces. It includes “true” Christians and excludes non-Christians — immigrants of the North African variety.
But that exclusionary vision of Spain is beginning to crack. The reality is that Spain is no longer a transit country for migrants but fast becoming a destination of choice. According to Spain’s National Statistics Institute, nearly 20% of the population is foreign-born in 2025. Half of those were from outside of Europe, including Morocco and South America. This is in stark contrast to the early 2000s, when the foreign-born population numbered just above 2%. Such stark figures give fuel to the far right: In 2019, Vox invoked the Cid to establish its far-right credentials and railed against Muslims and towns they branded as “multicultural shitholes.” The problem was, it was from these very communities that talents like the soccer star Lamine Yamal emerged. Vox’s leader, Abascal, cheered when the 17-year-old winger of Moroccan-Guinean heritage helped secure Spain’s place in the Euro 2024 final. Yamal made it abundantly clear, through pointed hand gestures, that he came from those selfsame multicultural enclaves Vox had vilified. With one kick, Yamal had unraveled the vision of Spain that Vox was pushing.
Similarly, when Berend exposes a historical Cid stripped of legend, she unravels the nationalist fantasy built around him. By showing us that medieval Spain was a place of fluid allegiances and hybrid identities, where Islam was very much part of the Iberian Peninsula, she makes it very hard for Spanish conservatives to maintain the fiction of the Cid as a Spanish Christian warrior.
Given the deep rifts the country is experiencing, the Cid will likely ride again into the fray. As recently as July 14, far-right groups clashed with North Africans for days in the old stomping grounds of the Cid in southern Spain. The country is simmering with racial tensions, and the Cid, far from fading into legend, is buckling up and readying his lance.
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