The Iberian Peninsula is the most common location for medievalists to look toward a multicultural, multilinguistic, and multi-confessional society in the premodern period. It is where the Golden Age of Arab culture in the Ummayyad and Abbasid periods met the early European culture emerging from the Germanic migrations and invasions of southern Europe.  

The various Arab Muslim kingdoms in al-Andalus, and the Christian kingdoms in the north, such as Aragon, Castile, Leon, and Portugal, formed hybrid cultures such as Mozarabs (Spanish Christians living under Arab-Muslim rule) and Mudejars (Arab Christians and Muslims who lived under Christian rule) who produced art, architecture, and literatures that brought together many different cultural influences. The Arabs made an incalculable impact in every way on the Spanish nation that later emerged—and in a larger sense, all of Europe.  

El Poema de Mio Cid

The 13th-century heroic narrative, El Poema de Mio Cid, was set in this culturally diverse landscape. It takes place in the late 11th century, during the southward expansion of the Kingdom of Castile. The poem is often referred to as El Poema de Mio Cid, or The Song of the Cid, or sometimes just The Cid.

The titular character, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar or “The Cid,” was a historical figure of the late 11th century. He was a retainer of Sancho II of Leon and Castile, leading military campaigns against Alfonso VI of Leon as well as against Muslim kingdoms in al-Andalus. He was appointed Alférez, “a knight,” in Alfonso’s court and remained in that position until after his exile in 1081, when he moved to work for the emir of Zaragoza, Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud.

The epic poem, El Cantar de Mio Cid, was written down more than a hundred years after his death, and is an incomplete text, starting in medias res. It recounts only the last part of his life, starting with his exile from the court at Burgos, the capital of the Kingdom of Castile. It features historical figures, like King Yucef of Zaragoza and the Count of Barcelona, Berenguer Ramon II.  

Muslims and crusading

The Song of Roland and El Cantar de Mio Cid are often taught together as exemplar medieval epics, and comparisons are often made between the two poems. It is important to show students the differences in representations of interactions between Christians and Muslims. Whereas, in The Song of Roland, Muslims are a villainized, pagan enemy, in The Cid, they have more complicated representations.

In The Cid, Muslims are represented as both enemy and friend. Like The Song of Roland, which features the character of Archbishop Turpin, the influence of crusading clergy is found in this poem as the character Bishop Jeronimo. 

A priest newly arrived from France—
Named Bishop Don Jerónimo,
Well-educated, sensible, and knowing, 
An accomplished fighter, on foot or on a horse—
Was trying to learn as much as he could
Of my Cid’s great deeds, yearning to fight with the Moors, 
Saying he’d be more than satisfied to die in such warfare, 
And no one would ever need to mourn him.

Also from France, Bishop Jeronimo desires to become a Christian martyr and represents the crusading ideology, but this desire is much more subdued than in The Song of Roland, which by contrast looks fanatical. Like Turpin, Jeronimo blesses the soldiers before a battle, but soon, he moderates and becomes one of the Cid’s retainers.  

The Cid’s men, who are Christian, are tasked with gathering men from a local Muslim ruler, which likely was the historical reality of Iberian relations in the 12th and 13th centuries. Not only are they to join with Muslim soldiers, the Cid entrusts his wife and daughters to the Muslim ruler, Abengalbón:

Then Albengalbón came, and as soon as he saw Minaya 
Embraced him, smiling broadly and,
According to his custom, kissed him on the shoulder:
“How good to see you, Minaya Alvar Fáñez!
This is a great honor for us, your bringing
Warrior Cid’s wife and his daughters,
To whom we show honor, one and all, as his fortune 
Deserves—for no one can harm him; in peace or war
He is destined for triumph, whatever we do.

This scene is indicative of what some scholars call "convivencia,” or the co-existence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula before the 15th century. Without romanticizing it too much, The Song of the Cid offers a less black-and-white view of Muslim-Christian relations than texts like The Song of Roland, written more than a century earlier. Abengalbón is represented as trustworthy, generous, and hospitable to the Cid and his retinue:

And then they reached Molina, that fine, rich town, 
Where the Moor Abengalbón took very good care of them,
And everything they wanted he gave them—
Even paying for their horses’ new shoes!
As for Minaya and the ladies, God! how warmly he honored them! 
The next morning they rode on again,
But Abengalbón stayed at their side all the way
To Valencia, and whatever was spent was always by him. 
And in such joy and pledges of mutual friendship
They came within half a dozen miles of Valencia. 

In paying to shoe their horses, taking care of the women, escorting them the entire way, and the pledging of mutual friendship, Abengalbón is viewed as one of the closest comrades of the Cid. Even though this poem is still told from a European Christian perspective and bias, it provides a much more evenhanded representation of Muslims than other European texts of its time.

Fascism and Orientalism

The early 20th-century scholarship about The Song of the Cid by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the Spanish philologist, solidified The Cid in the canon of medieval Castilian literature. Later, it was used by the fascist dictator Francisco Franco to buttress a Spanish national identity based on Catholicism, despite Pidal’s opposition to Franco. The ultra-nationalist, fascist dictatorship of Franco attempted to erase all traces of Muslim and Jewish history in the country but also attempted to subdue the non-Castilian communities (such as the Basques, Galician, and Catalan) and to impose Castilian language and cultural norms throughout Spain.

María Rosa Menocal, in her introduction to the bilingual edition of The Cid, challenges these nationalist readings of the poem, instead opting to focus on how the Arab-Muslim tradition shaped the storytelling of the text and reframing the character of the Cid as a Christian knight that shares many similarities with Muslim knights, such as being married and having children.  

Karla Mallette, in her book European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism, and many other postcolonial studies scholars have demonstrated the ways in which Orientalist readings of the Muslim past are deployed and weaponized in Europe throughout the premodern past and into modernity.