El Cid and the Capture of Valencia (1094): Spain's Hero

The capture of Valencia in June 1094 was the high point of the career of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the Castilian warrior known as El Cid. After a siege of nearly a year he took one of the richest cities of Muslim al-Andalus and ruled it as his own lordship until his death in 1099. Few medieval soldiers have had such a long afterlife: within a century he was the hero of an epic poem, and he became a symbol of Spanish identity.

Background: a divided peninsula

In the eleventh century the Iberian Peninsula was split between Christian kingdoms in the north and Muslim states in the south. The Caliphate of Córdoba had collapsed in the 1030s into more than twenty small kingdoms known as taifas, among them Seville, Toledo, Zaragoza and Valencia. Militarily weak but wealthy, many of them paid regular tribute, called parias, to Christian kings in exchange for protection.

The most powerful of those kings was Alfonso VI of León-Castile. His capture of Toledo in 1085 alarmed the remaining taifa rulers, who invited the Almoravids, a Berber movement from North Africa, into the peninsula. Their leader Yusuf ibn Tashfin crushed Alfonso at the Battle of Sagrajas in 1086. From then on the Almoravids steadily absorbed the taifas, and the struggle for Valencia became a contest between them and the Christian powers.

Rodrigo Díaz: from royal commander to exile

Rodrigo was born around 1043 at Vivar, a village near Burgos, into the lesser nobility of Castile. As a young man he served King Sancho II of Castile as a leading military commander. When Sancho was killed at the siege of Zamora in 1072, his brother Alfonso VI inherited his lands, and Rodrigo passed into Alfonso’s service. Around 1074 he married Jimena Díaz, a noblewoman related to the king.

His relationship with Alfonso was uneasy. In 1079, sent to collect tribute from Seville, he defeated a rival Castilian noble, García Ordóñez, in a clash near Cabra and made powerful enemies at court. In 1081 he led an unauthorised raid into the territory of the taifa of Toledo, then under Alfonso’s protection, and the king exiled him.

Rodrigo then did what many landless knights did: he sold his sword. For about five years he served the Muslim rulers of Zaragoza, al-Muqtadir and his son al-Mutamin. In their service he defeated and captured Count Berenguer Ramon II of Barcelona at Almenar in 1082 and beat King Sancho Ramírez of Aragon near Morella in 1084. It was probably in these years that he acquired the Arabic-derived title “Cid”, from sayyidi, “my lord”.

Lord of the Levant

After the disaster at Sagrajas, Alfonso recalled Rodrigo in about 1087. The reconciliation did not last. In 1089 Rodrigo failed to join the king at the relief of the fortress of Aledo, and Alfonso exiled him a second time and confiscated his property. From then on Rodrigo acted essentially as an independent warlord with a private army.

He made the eastern coast, the region known as the Levant, his field of operations. In 1090 he again defeated Berenguer Ramon II, at Tévar, and imposed tribute on the Muslim towns of the region. Valencia itself was ruled by al-Qadir, a former king of Toledo whom Alfonso had installed there as a client, and Rodrigo became his protector in return for heavy payments.

The siege and capture of Valencia

In October 1092, while Rodrigo was away, a revolt broke out inside Valencia. Al-Qadir was killed and power passed to the city’s chief judge (qadi), Ibn Jahhaf, who looked to the Almoravids for support. Rodrigo returned, took the nearby fortress of Cebolla (modern El Puig) and began to tighten a blockade around the city.

By the summer of 1093 Valencia was under close siege. Rodrigo’s men devastated the surrounding farmland, cutting off supplies. An Almoravid relief army approached late in 1093 but withdrew without fighting. Inside the walls, according to Arabic and Latin accounts, food prices soared and people were reduced to eating animals they would normally never touch. Some who tried to escape were killed or enslaved.

With no help coming, Ibn Jahhaf negotiated a surrender. Valencia opened its gates in mid-June 1094, traditionally on 15 June, and Rodrigo entered the city soon afterwards. He initially left Ibn Jahhaf in place, but later had him arrested and, according to Arabic sources, executed by burning, accused of hiding the murdered al-Qadir’s treasure.

Holding Valencia, 1094–1102

The Almoravids did not accept the loss. In October 1094 an army under Yusuf’s nephew Muhammad ibn Tashfin camped at Cuarte, just west of the city. Rodrigo sallied out and routed it, one of the first defeats of an Almoravid field army in Iberia. In 1097 he defeated another Almoravid force at Bairén, south of Valencia, with the help of King Peter I of Aragon.

Rodrigo ruled Valencia as a Christian lordship, nominally loyal to Alfonso but in practice independent. He took Almenara and Murviedro (modern Sagunto) in 1098. The city’s main mosque was consecrated as a cathedral, and a French cleric, Jerome of Périgord, was installed as bishop. The period also brought personal loss: Rodrigo’s only son, Diego, was killed in 1097 fighting for Alfonso against the Almoravids at Consuegra.

Rodrigo died in Valencia on 10 July 1099. His widow Jimena held the city for almost three more years, but in 1102 Alfonso VI judged it indefensible. The Castilians evacuated Valencia, set fire to it and carried Rodrigo’s body back to Castile. The Almoravids occupied the city in May 1102, and it stayed in Muslim hands until James I of Aragon took it in 1238.

Key people

• Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1043–1099): the Cid, a skilled commander who fought for whoever paid or allowed him to win land, Christian or Muslim.
• Alfonso VI (r. 1065/1072–1109): king of León and Castile, conqueror of Toledo, who twice exiled Rodrigo and twice relied on him.
• Jimena Díaz (died c. 1115): Rodrigo’s wife, who governed Valencia after his death and organised its evacuation.
• Ibn Jahhaf (died 1095): the qadi who led Valencia after the killing of al-Qadir and surrendered the city.
• Yusuf ibn Tashfin (died 1106): Almoravid ruler whose armies tried, and finally managed, to recover Valencia.

From warlord to legend

Rodrigo’s fame grew quickly. A Latin poem, the Carmen Campi Doctoris, praised him while he was still alive, and a Latin biography, the Historia Roderici, was written in the twelfth century. Arabic writers such as Ibn Bassam, who described him as a scourge but also a remarkable soldier, give a hostile but valuable view.

The most influential work was the Cantar de mio Cid, an epic poem in Old Spanish composed around 1200 and preserved in a single manuscript copied by a scribe named Per Abbat. It turns Rodrigo into a loyal vassal unjustly exiled, a devoted husband and father, and a model of moderation. It is a literary creation, not a chronicle, and it invents or rearranges many episodes, including the marriages of his daughters.

Later chronicles, ballads and plays added still more. Guillén de Castro’s play and Pierre Corneille’s tragicomedy Le Cid (1637) carried him into European literature. In the twentieth century the 1961 film El Cid, starring Charlton Heston, fixed the image of a crusading Christian hero, and Franco’s regime presented him as a symbol of national unity.

Myths and facts

Timeline

• c. 1043: Rodrigo Díaz is born at Vivar, near Burgos.
• 1072: Sancho II is killed at Zamora; Rodrigo enters the service of Alfonso VI.
• 1081: First exile; Rodrigo begins serving the taifa rulers of Zaragoza.
• 1085, May: Alfonso VI captures Toledo.
• 1086, October: The Almoravids defeat Alfonso at Sagrajas.
• 1089: Second exile; Rodrigo operates as an independent lord in the Levant.
• 1092, October: Revolt in Valencia; al-Qadir is killed and Ibn Jahhaf takes power.
• 1094, June: Valencia surrenders to Rodrigo after a long siege.
• 1099, 10 July: Rodrigo dies in Valencia.
• 1102, May: After the Castilian evacuation, the Almoravids occupy Valencia.

Why it matters

The capture of Valencia showed how fluid the frontier between Christian and Muslim Iberia was in the eleventh century, when a talented commander could build a state of his own between rival powers. It also marked one of the few serious checks to Almoravid expansion. Above all, it gave Spain a hero whose story, retold from the Cantar de mio Cid to Hollywood, shaped how later generations imagined the long conflict that culminated centuries later in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa and the end of Muslim rule in the peninsula.