Stripping the Legend of El Cid : THE QUEST FOR EL CID <i> By Richard Fletcher (Alfred A. Knopf: $24.95; 240 pp., illustrated; 0-394-57447-8</i> )

This is a book about the relation between myth and history. The author aims to show how “the independent, insubordinate, arrogant Rodrigo Diaz of history” has been hidden in the colorful cloaks of the legend of El Cid.

The fabled Christian liberator of the Spanish nation was in fact a professional soldier who once hired himself out to a local Muslim ruler to fight his fellow Christians. Even after reconciling with his Christian king, he pursued his own course, took the territories he conquered for his own, and never flinched at using torture and execution to get his way and his money.

The history of El Cid is surprisingly relevant now because it shows how confused the relations between Christians and Muslims have been since at least the 11th Century. The political border between Muslims and Christians in Spain, as elsewhere, always was shifting, and religion was only one factor in a morass of conflicting demands and opportunities. Muslims fought in the pay of Christians against other Muslims; Christian warriors like El Cid hired out to Muslim rulers, and they all frequently changed sides.

The Jews, as might be expected, often were caught in the middle. They served as tax collectors for Christian rulers and rose to high positions at the courts of the Muslims. As such, they were the source of continual resentment, which sometimes boiled over into anti-Jewish riots. Everyone learned to defend his own interests in these confusing times; loyalty to king, country, or religion necessarily took a back seat.

Most of us know only the Cid of myth, or at least of the movies. The Cid played by Charlton Heston in 1961 made a vivid impression on me as a teen-ager. Needless to say, the Muslims appeared to me only as a faceless mass of infidels. Fletcher (nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History) understands the grip of the heroic image of El Cid; he even tracked down Charlton Heston to the dressing room of a provincial English theater in order to ask him about the making of the movie.

The making of the myth of El Cid by later chroniclers and historians provides some of the most fascinating pages of this book. Among the more fanciful of the embellishers were the monks of the monastery where El Cid was buried.

In a history prepared nearly a century after the death of El Cid, the monks told the story of his preparation for death. During the last week of his life, the Cid supposedly ingested only myrrh and balsam in order to ensure the preservation of his body after death. When he died, his body was clothed and booted and he was mounted on his horse and led off by a bishop to his final resting place. (In the movie, the dead body of the Cid actually leads the troops into battle.) Once at the monastery, the body was seated on an ivory stool that the hero himself had captured from the Muslims. After 10 years, the end of the Cid’s nose dropped off, and the monks finally interred the body. Or at least so that particular story goes.

History writing might be said to have basically two modes: myth-making and demystifying. Fletcher is a relentless demystifier. He takes on the entire train of poets, writers and historians who through the centuries have contributed to the myth of El Cid as national hero and shows how they have twisted the historical record.

The term El Cid itself comes from the Arabic word for lord or master and meant something like Il Duce or Fuhrer--”the leader.” It was not an official title and only became common in poems written to celebrate the hero’s exploits after his death.

Fletcher carefully takes apart not only the myth that El Cid was a crusading warrior motivated by religious and patriotic fervor but also the bigger myths: that there was a sense of nationhood, a crusade or desire for reconquest in the volatile 11th-Century Christian kingdoms of Spain; even that the Arabs had conquered Spain in the 8th Century (the rank and file of the invaders were Berbers).

The author’s aim goes beyond the usual academic putting-the-record-straight. He obviously thinks that the “real” story of El Cid is at least as exciting and wonderful as all of the subsequent embroidering upon it.

Diaz was a military boss in an age of great political and religious turbulence. He lived at a time (probably 1043-1099) when the fate of Western Europe was very much in the balance. In both the Muslim and Christian worlds, political and religious authority had fragmented, leaving considerable space to those who were adventurous, ruthless, imaginative and talented enough to push their own interests forward.

Because El Cid’s greatness rested on his ability to negotiate the perils of this world, Fletcher devotes the first half of his book to the social context of medieval Spain. By the middle of the 11th Century, the Muslims were firmly entrenched in the whole southern half of Spain, known as al-Andalus. Central authority disintegrated early in the century, however, and power passed to a series of local principalities known as taifas , where infighting was the rule rather than the exception.

Despite the violence and uncertainty of nearly constant political upheaval, the Muslim rulers of the taifas soon gained an enviable reputation for their encouragement of the arts, poetry and every manner of scientific and philosophical learning. Fletcher thus demonstrates that the Muslims of southern Spain were if anything more “civilized” than their Christian neighbors, but also much less unified in their purposes than legend would have it.

The Christians of northern Spain were similarly divided into a series of principalities that were continually rocked by family quarrels, assassinations and murders, and fighting with neighbors. The Christians had as yet little sense of mission against the Muslims; they made no attempt at conversion; the Koran was not even translated into Latin until the 12th Century. By then, Christians had come to understand the attractions of Muslim learning, but in the 11th Century, the allure was the prospect of wealth. The tiny taifa kingdoms looked ripe for the picking. Christian rulers from the north either invaded to conquer bits of territory or established virtual protection rackets. The king of Leon-Castile, for example, exacted tribute from at least five different taifa kingdoms in exchange for his protection, “whether against Christians or against Muslims,” as one treaty put it.

El Cid, then, had much in common with his aristocratic contemporaries who saw the chance for personal gain in a confusing world. Indeed, he stayed relatively close to home in a century that saw a Norwegian prince getting rich in the service of the Byzantine emperor and Norman aristocratic adventurers conquering Sicily and southern Italy. Yet El Cid became more famous than any one of the others. Was this simply due to the success of later myth-makers, or was there something unique about El Cid’s case?

If Fletcher’s account has any weakness, it is the author’s inability to answer this question. His relentless effort to demystify in the end has this one disadvantage: It is hard to imagine Diaz as something other than a creature of his time, as anything other than a greedy aristocratic warrior who happens to be in the right place at the right time. His battles are won by luck, and crucial reconciliations seem almost haphazard. El Cid’s forces win a victory, for example, even though he is wounded and lying on the ground, and only because “the advantage of the slope gradually told in their favor.”

The problem with the demystifying mode is that it makes all myth, and with it all sense of greatness, crumble to dust. Fletcher insists on sticking very closely to contemporary documentation, but because these documents say nothing about Diaz’s personality or appearance, the author refuses even to speculate about them, even where the sources are suggestive.

He claims that the reticence of medieval documentation makes it impossible to search for the “real” man, but it is hard to imagine how a “real” story can be compelling without a “real” man as its central protagonist.

We are left consequently with a Cid who has no religious feelings, no ordinary emotions, and who seems driven only by those social and political motives that can be readily discerned in the documents.

Yet, even so, this is a Cid from whom we have much to learn. Like him, we have to confront an uncertain world of shifting allegiances in which self-styled great warriors are ready to grab territories and exact tributes from weaker states.