The Quest for El Cid

Spain still honours El Cid, Rodrigo Diaz of eleventh-century Castile, as a national hero of the Christian reconquest, and Richard Fletcher sets out how that legend contradicts the reality of his time. Fletcher presents him as a soldier of fortune, one of several cids, meaning bosses, active in Spain then, who sold his martial skills to Christian and Muslim rulers alike. His very title derives from the Arabic sayyid, meaning lord or master. At his death in Valencia in 1099, Rodrigo was ruler of an independent principality in eastern Spain. After his death the epic Poema de Mio Cid and other works celebrated him, and Fletcher shows how legend made him into something he was not in life.

Paul Graham included it in a list of books he posted on X.