Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar was a Castilian knight and warlord in medieval Spain. Fighting with both Christian and Muslim armies during his lifetime, he earned the Arabic honorific as-Sayyid, which would evolve into El Cid, and the Spanish honorific El Campeador. He was born in Vivar, a village near the city of Burgos. As the head of his loyal knights, he came to dominate the Levante of the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 11th century. He reclaimed the Taifa of Valencia from Moorish control for a brief period during the Reconquista, ruling the principality as its Prince from 17 June 1094 until his death in 1099. His wife, Jimena Díaz, inherited the city and maintained it until 1102 when it was reconquered by the Moors.
The chanson de geste is a medieval narrative, a type of epic poem that appears at the dawn of French literature. The earliest known poems of this genre date from the late 11th and early 12th centuries, shortly before the emergence of the lyric poetry of the troubadours and trouvères, and the earliest verse romances. They reached their highest point of acceptance in the period 1150–1250.
El Cantar de mio Cid, or El Poema de mio Cid, also known in English as The Poem of the Cid, is the oldest preserved Castilian epic poem. Based on a true story, it tells of the deeds of the Castilian hero Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar—known as El Cid—and takes place during the eleventh century, an era of conflicts in the Iberian Peninsula between the Kingdom of Castile and various Taifa principalities of Al-Andalus. It is considered a national epic of Spain.
Mester de juglaría is a Spanish literature genre from the 12th and 13th centuries, transmitted orally by "juglares" who made their living by telling and singing these stories in public places and palaces while performing short theatrical scenes, acrobatics or other amusements.
Tizona is the name of one of the swords carried by Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, according to the Cantar de Mio Cid. The name of the second sword of El Cid is Colada.
This article concerns poetry in Spain.
Carrión de los Condes is a municipality in the province of Palencia, part of the Autonomous Community of Castile and León, Spain.
The Mocedades de Rodrigo is the name given to a late, anonymous Castilian cantar de gesta, composed around 1360, that relates the origins and exploits of the youth of the legendary hero El Cid.
The Poema de Fernán González is a Castilian epic poem, specifically, a cantar de gesta of the Mester de Clerecía. Composed in a metre called the cuaderna vía, it narrates the deeds of the historical Count of Castile, Fernán González. It was written between 1250 and 1266 by a monk of San Pedro de Arlanza. In 1960 a fourteenth-century Arab roofing tile was discovered in Merindad de Sotoscueva north of Burgos that had some verses of the poem scrawled on it in Old Spanish. It is the oldest copy of the work.
Urraca of Zamora was a Leonese infanta, one of the five children of Ferdinand I the Great, who received the city of Zamora as her inheritance and exercised palatine authority in it. Her story was romanticized in the cantar de gesta called the Cantar de Mio Cid, and Robert Southey's Chronicle of the Cid.
The Estoria de España, also known in the 1906 edition of Ramón Menéndez Pidal as the Primera Crónica General, is a history book written on the initiative of Alfonso X of Castile "El Sabio", who was actively involved in the editing. It is believed to be the first extended history of Spain in Old Spanish, a West Iberian Romance language that forms part of the lineage from Vulgar Latin to modern Spanish. Many prior works were consulted in constructing this history.
The romance is a metrical form used in Spanish poetry. It consists of an indefinite series (tirada) of verses, in which the even-numbered lines have a near-rhyme (assonance) and the odd lines are unrhymed. The lines are octosyllabic ; a similar but far less common form is hexasyllabic and is known in Spanish as romancillo ; that, or any other form of less than eight syllables may also be referred to as romance corto. A similar form in alexandrines also exists, but was traditionally used in Spanish only for learned poetry.
The Poem of Almería is a medieval Latin epic poem in 3851⁄2 leonine hexameters. It was appended to the end of the Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris, an account of the reign of Alfonso VII of León and Castile, and narrates the victorious military campaign of 1147 that culminated in the conquest of the port of Almería. The poem, as it survives, is unfinished, abruptly ending mid-line before recounting the actual siege of Almería itself. Of its surviving lines, 293 consist of "dénombrement épique, a stirring roll-call of the chief members and contingents of the army".
A romancero is a collection of Spanish romances, a type of folk ballad. The romancero is the entire corpus of such ballads. As a distinct body of literature they borrow themes such as war, honour, aristocracy and heroism from epic poetry, especially the medieval cantar de gesta and chivalric romance, and they often have a pretense of historicity.
Medieval Spanish literature consists of the corpus of literary works written in medieval Spanish between the beginning of the 13th and the end of the 15th century. Traditionally, the first and last works of this period are taken to be respectively the Cantar de Mio Cid, an epic poem whose manuscript dates from 1207, and La Celestina (1499), a work commonly described as transitional between the medieval period and the Renaissance.
The Cantar de los Siete Infantes de Lara is a legend, perhaps derived from a lost cantar de gesta, that relates a tale of family feuding and revenge, centering on the murder of the eponymous seven infantes (princes) of Lara or Salas. The legend survives in prose form in medieval chronicles, the oldest being in the extended version of the Estoria de España compiled during the reign of Sancho IV of Castile before 1289.
The Banu Gómez were a powerful but fractious noble family living on the Castilian marches of the Kingdom of León from the 10th to the 12th centuries. They rose to prominence in the 10th century as counts in Saldaña, Carrión and Liébana, and reached their apogee when, allied with Córdoba warlord, Almanzor, their head, García Gómez, expelled king Vermudo II of León and briefly ruled there. He would reconcile with the royal family, but launched two subsequent rebellions. On his death, the senior line of the family was eclipsed, but a younger branch would return to prominence, producing Pedro Ansúrez, one of the premier noblemen under king Alfonso VI and queen Urraca in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. The family would be portrayed in the Cantar de Mio Cid as rivals and antagonists of the hero, El Cid, and their rebellions would serve as a basis for the legend of Bernardo del Carpio.
The cantar is a form of classical Spanish canción, song or poem.
The castle of Alcocer was a fortified Muslim village located in the archaeological site of La Mora Encantada in the Aragonese municipality of Ateca, Zaragoza, Spain.
Cristina Rodríguez was a daughter of Rodrigo Díaz also known as El Cid and Jimena Díaz.
