By JAMES MONTI
Each year July 6 arrives in early summer as a day sanctified by the blood of two of the Church’s most renowned and beloved martyrs, St. Maria Goretti (+1902) and St. Thomas More (+1535). Both died on this day, albeit 367 years apart. Their shared death anniversary is a most fitting occasion to reflect upon the eternal splendor of sacrificing oneself for the cause of God and of truth as seen through the lens of an epic movie and epic legend about one of Spain’s most renowned national heroes.
We have all heard the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” and indeed it often is. But fictional literature and drama can just as strangely elucidate great truths. The realm of legend straddles the border between truth and fiction — a story or account passed down for generations, often enough about a real person, object or event, but affirming a seemingly fabulous claim of something totally out of the ordinary.
El Cid is the name that history has for almost a millennium bestowed upon a real warrior of Spain’s battle to free herself from the oppressive grip of her Islamic conquerors, the Castilian knight and warlord Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (c. 1043-1099). He was married to Jimena Diaz, and they had three children, Diego, Cristina, and Maria Rodriguez. Historians have debated the various details of El Cid’s military career, a rather checkered one if the more negative accounts are to be believed, which cast him as somewhat of a “soldier of fortune,” but there is a consensus that he died in 1099, and that in the end he emerged as a hero in the cause of the Spanish Reconquista.
It was less than two hundred years later, in the Primera Cronica General, a chronicle of Spanish history authored in large part by the Spanish king Alphonso X of Castile (1221-1284) that a new story of the death of Rodriguez Diaz de Vivar first appears in a surviving text, having been transcribed into the chronicle from a lost work known as the Estoria del Cid, based perhaps upon a preceding oral tradition. According to the Primera Cronica General, about a month before his death, El Cid is said to have experienced a vision of St. Peter in which the Apostle foretells the warrior’s approaching end but promises him that, because God loves him so much, He will bestow upon him a posthumous victory on the battlefield against an invading Moslem commander named Bucar.
Moreover, the Apostle St. James the Greater will come to join El Cid and his men in the battle. Peter adds, “And all this Jesus Christ has granted you, for love of me and for the reverence that you have always shown in my church of the monastery of San Pedro de Cardena” (Kings Alfonso X and Sancho IV, Primera Cronica General: Estoria de Espana: Tomo I: Texto, ed. Ramon Menendez Pidal, Madrid, Bailly-Bailliere e Hijos, 1906, chapter 952, pp. 633-634).
San Pedro Cardena is a Benedictine monastery near Burgos where El Cid would subsequently be buried. A month later, following the death of El Cid, on the prophesied day of battle, the warrior’s body, suited in armor, is propped up on his horse to lead the fight against Bucar (ibid, chapter 956, pp. 636-637).
Over the centuries that followed, this story was retold time and again in Spanish prose and verse, with additional details. In our own time, this legendary account of the heroic death of El Cid was brought to life on screen in the 1961 epic movie El Cid, directed by Anthony Mann, with Charlton Heston in the title role, and with Sophia Loren as El Cid’s wife Jimena, her name rendered as Chimene in the film.
Our appreciation of the value of this tale of El Cid ought not to be undone by the reality that the historical Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar fell considerably short of the unsullied heroism of the legendary El Cid and that the earliest historical records of the date and circumstances of the death of the real El Cid would seem to preclude the account of his battle death so powerfully presented in the movie. For the El Cid of legend is a captivating and deeply inspiring metaphor of what it means to fight and suffer and die for the truth, to fight and suffer and die for the cause of Christ.
Ruthless Evil
To get to the heart of the matter in this story, we need to fast-forward past the various twists and turns in the life of El Cid covered in the first two hours of this epic film. Indeed, the director himself, from the beginning of this movie project, had his mind focused on the amazing end of the story, going so far as to film the ending before doing the rest of the film.
Toward the end of the eleventh century, the Muslims were looking to consulate their control over most of Spain, led in this effort by the fierce Islamist military commander Yusuf ibn Tashfin (1106). In the movie El Cid, his name is rendered as Ben Yussuf, and he is depicted as the very incarnation of ruthless evil. The real Yussuf is known to have employed drummers in his advancing armies for the psychological intimidation of their enemies, and this detail is portrayed with considerable effect in the film, creating a powerful sense of the imminent threat that Yusuf and his armies posed to Christendom.
As he prepares to advance upon Valencia, and is about to slay the captured Catholic nobleman Ordonez, Yussuf declares, “This will be more than a battle; it will be our God against yours.”
There is a mysterious predawn silence as El Cid and his men watch from the ramparts of Valencia for the first signs of Ben Yussuf’s forces. Finally, their dark silhouettes appear on the horizon, their soldiers and cavalry approaching by land and their armada of ships by sea. The dreaded drumbeat of the invaders begins, relentless and growing ever louder, as the camera shots switch back and forth from scenes of Ben Yussuf’s army robed in black carrying their black battle banners to close-ups of the face of El Cid’s wife Chimene, her eyes growing steadily more terrified with each drumbeat. El Cid tries to comfort her by promising her, “This is the battle we’ve waited for so long, the last battle. When we’ve won it, we’ll have peace.”
At the very height of the battle that follows, El Cid is struck and pierced by what will prove to be a lethal arrow. Reeling from his wound, he manages to ride back into the city before his strength fails, and he is carried in to receive the medical care he desperately needs. But after learning that the removal of the arrow from his chest would preclude his ability to lead the battle against Ben Yussuf the next day, he decides to refuse the procedure, even though postponing the removal of the arrow would almost certainly lead to his death within a few days.
El Cid is utterly resolute in his decision: Christendom and Spain must be saved from the evil of Ben Yussuf, come what may. He extracts from his wife Chimene a promise that no matter what happens she must see to it that he be suited in his armor and mounted on his horse the next day — even if he is dead; his men need to see him leading them into battle, that they make take courage and defeat Ben Yussuf.
As his death draws near, even faster than his physician expected, El Cid is startled by the arrival of King Alfonso VI, a very changed man, converted by El Cid’s unflinching loyalty to him as his king. Earlier in the film, King Alfonso is depicted as selfish, immature, and vindictive, going so far as to imprison El Cid’s wife and children. But now the contrite Alfonso attempts to kneel to El Cid, asking his forgiveness. El Cid refuses to let him do so; instead, he praises him for his remorse, telling him, “It’s not easy for a man to conquer himself.” As he draws his last breaths, El Cid tells Alfonso, “Tomorrow we will fight side by side, my king and I. We will ride out together.”
Moments later, El Cid dies. In the morning, the fallen warrior’s wishes are carried out, as his lifeless body, clothed in armor, is mounted upon his own horse.
Precisely The Right Moment
The movie’s director Anthony Mann recounted in vivid detail how divine Providence intervened to make the most dramatic and moving moment of the entire epic a moment of heavenly glory:
“God . . . makes such magnificent things that it’s difficult not to capture what He has if you go out on location. I’ll never forget how I woke up one morning and there was a misty fog over the whole of Valencia . . . ..the moment when El Cid came out strapped on his horse with his shining armour and his white horse — I was lying on the sand looking up . . . and a rider passed, it wasn’t even Heston, it was . . . just an extra. Well, he passed in his armour and as he came out of the shadow into the light his armour shone. I yelled to Bob Krasker [the cinematographer], ‘Look at it, that’s what we want, that’s God, that’s the sun, we have to get the sun on us’” (quoted in Martin Winkler, “Mythic and Cinematic Traditions in Anthony Mann’s El Cid,” Mosaic, volume 26, n. 3, Summer 1993, p. 102).
So, the movie crew quickly prepared to film the moment when Charlton Heston himself was to emerge from the city gates riding a white horse as the dead Cid in his shining armor; and as Divine Providence would have it, at precisely the right moment the sun’s rays made El Cid’s armor gleam “so white it was electrifying” (ibid.).
The site of the lifeless El Cid leading the charge side by side with King Alfonso sends terror into Ben Jussef’s soldiers, and Ben Jussef is trampled down by El Cid upon his horse as his forces are routed.
The movie concludes with King Alfonso praying on the beach of Valencia that God may receive “the soul of one who lived and died the purest knight of all.” It in the Romanesque cloister of the monastery of San Pedro de Cardena, where El Cid was later buried, that almost 150 years earlier, in 953, two hundred monks were martyred by the forces of the Muslim ruler Abd al-Rahman (890-961).
What the legend of El Cid and the martyrs of San Pedro de Cardena teach us is that never is a man a more formidable and unconquerable knight of Jesus Christ than when he has suffered and died on the battlefield of life for the cause of God and of truth.
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