The Quest for El Cid

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the legendary warrior-knight of Castile known as El Cid, is still is honored in Spain as a national hero for liberating the fatherland from the occupying Moors. Yet, as Fletcher reveals, there are many contradictions between eleventh-century reality and the mythology that developed over the ensuing centuries. Rather than the zealous Christian leader many believe him to have been, Rodrigo emerges as a mercenary equally at home in the feudal kingdoms of northern Spain and the exotic Moorish lands of the south, selling his martial skills to both Christian and Muslim. This ground-breaking inquiry disentangles fact from myth to create a portrait of an extraordinary man. Richard Alexander Fletcher (1944 - 2005) was educated at Harrow and Oxford, where he was a star pupil of the medievalist James Campbell, taking a first in history. His first book, published in 1978 and based on his thesis "The Episcopate in the Kingdom of León in the Twelfth Century", pointed to an academic career much of which would focus on medieval Spain. Fletcher was a very learned man but he abhorred the way historians were expected to know more and more about less and less and to communicate their esoteric findings in arcane language. He wanted to be a writer as well as a researcher and teacher and he succeeded brilliantly. His next book, it is true, was not intended for the general reader. Saint James's Catapult was a life of Diego Gelmírez, one of the more remarkable ecclesiastical operators of his age, who, having become Bishop of Santiago de Compostela in 1101, was appointed papal legate and turned his remote Galician town into the destination of pilgrims from across Europe. But the book which took Fletcher into the larger world was The Quest for El Cid. Very much not a "high vulgarization", it was a work of scrupulous source-criticism, but reads almost like a thriller, as it sleuths after its elusive subject to establish how much of his story was historical truth.