Guerra en Šara Al’Andalus: Las batallas cidianas de Morella (1084) and Cuarte (1099).
Few figures of the early Middle Ages have attained the prominence in both epic and troubadour verse as well as in chronicle and local history as has Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (1043-1099), nicknamed “The Lord” (El Cid). Apparently destined for the life and minimal impact of a marcher lord on the fluid frontier between the Caliphate of Cordova and the emerging Christian polities of Castile, León, Aragón, and Catalonia, the Cid’s conquest of Valencia and other swaths of the Spanish Levante in 1094 propelled him into the status of larger-than-life prototype of the Spanish reconquista, and indeed of general Iberian history. In modern times, academic involvement with the Cid has provided an industry of sorts for historians, military experts, literature specialists, and even film makers. In the midst of this motley intellectual and quasi-intellectual cavalcade, academic works on the prototypical Spanish conqueror can hope for little more than a limited readership. This book, the production of two Spanish scholars at different phases of their careers, seeks to expand the Cidian military canon by casting a minute focus on two battles which led to and preserved Diaz’s conquest of Valencia.
The first half of this work, penned by the young scholar, Alfonso Boix Jovani takes as its subject an all-but accidental campaign of 1084 which evolved from the Cid’s break with the Leonese-Castilian king, Alfonso VI (1072-1109) and his steady movement into the political orbit of the ruling house of the small Muslim principality of Zaragoza. Looking to establish his own power base along the Mediterranean littoral below Tortosa, Diaz moved into the northern ranges of the Muslim taifa state of Valencia where he refitted a demolished castle and, from this base, launched a winter raid on the nearby Muslim outpost of Morella. To supplement the scant details provided by the principal non-fiction source on the Cid, the Historia Roderici, Boix Jovani de-constructs the story and attempts to place it in a much more detailed context. In this regard, the problem which immediately presents itself is the precise location of the new castle base which the Historia Roderici identifies as Alolala. After assessing in excruciating detail the various theories concerning the castle’s location posited by such luminaries of Cid studies as Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Antonio Ubieto, the author turns to a full discussion of the Arabic, romance, and Latin sources to narrow his search of the elusive Cidian fortress. Utilizing archeological and demographic markers, Boix Jovani places the Cid’s new stronghold in the small village of Pobleta d’Alcolea, north of Morella and near the old Aragonese-Valencian border. Locating the 1084 campaign’s starting point, the author then proceeds to fix the likely scene of the conflict as outside the Muslim stronghold of Morella. To come to this solution, he largely discounts the confusing accounts of several Christian chronicles which located the battlefield on the banks of the Ebro River (many miles north of Morella) and that of at least one modern scholar who set the site of the conflict near the Ebron River (many miles to the south of Morella). Despite these mixed geographical messages, Boix Jovani, taking into account the geopolitical aims of the Cid’s ally, the ruler of Zaragoza, who was anxious to carve out a great zone of Mediterranean coast and hinterland from his fellow Muslim princelings of Valencia and Tortosa, feels that the central location of the city of Morella makes it the most likely site of the 1084 struggle.
The second half of this volume is the work of one the most important Cid scholars of the last two decades, Alberto Montaner Frutos, and concentrates on the battle of Cuarte (October 14, 1094) which consolidated the Cid’s hold on Valencia by a total victory over an avenging Almoravid force composed of Berber, West African, and Andalusian units. After his enemies had spent most of Ramadan (late September and early October) investing Valencia and taunting its Christian defenders, the Cid turned the tables on his Muslim adversaries by carrying out a two-pronged attack on the Almoravid camp a short way up the Turia River at Cuarte. Unlike his colleague who chronicles the small scale conflict at Morella, Montaner Frutos’s treatment of the much more significant battle of Cuarte is underpinned by a much wider array of Latin, Castilian, and Arabic works which were contemporary with the events of 1094 or were written within a generation or two of the battle. To fully evaluate this cache of evidence, he spends a number of the opening chapters in working out the textual relationship of the various Christian and Muslim sources. Establishing these lines of transmission, he attempts to delineate the realities, anomalies, and exaggerations imbedded in the evidence. Though not always the case in medieval history writing, the chronicle accounts provided Montaner Frutos with a fairly clear-cut chronology of the Almoaravid invasion, overland march, and siege of Valencia as well as of the Cid’s brilliant counter-stroke. The true size of the opposing forces and the clever and well-executed strategies which led to the Cid’s victory are hardly as clear from the primary evidence. Rejecting out of hand the chronicles’ ludicrously large estimates of the Almoravid army and the equally small numbers they assign to the Christian forces, Montaner Frutos follows the safe path of earlier scholarship to claim that neither side had more than 8,000 troops. His discussion of the various phases of the Almoravid siege and the Cid’s victorious response to it is supported by both chronicle and geographical evidence. After carefully analyzing this material, he presents a number of scenarios, but the most convincing is that Diaz had hidden a small force of his crack troops within the crisscrossing network of irrigation channels that ringed–and still ring– the Valencian capital. When the majority of the Christian force streamed through Valencia’s principal gate, the Cid sprang into action and fell on the enemy camp catching the Muslim army in a lethal pincer movement between himself and the main Christian force. While in the short term this victory seemed an anomaly given the Almoravid’s unblemished record of military victory, Montaner Frutos is right in pointing out that it clearly signaled a downturn in Almoravid power and an undeniable surge of Christian strength within the Iberian Peninsula.
This work is not one, but two books linked by an overarching but loose connection comprised by the military campaigns of Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid. In both halves, the authors skillfully tie together chronicles, epics, geography, and archeology to make some advances for a Cidian canon rendered ever more narrow by the steady contributions of European and American authors over the last century. In some ways, the back matter and appendices of the two halves of the book seem more interesting than the general text itself. Boix Jovani inserts a great deal of archeological material (complete with photographs) concerning his identification the modern village of Pobleta d’Alcolea as the Cid’s castle/base of Alolala. Montaner Frutos includes a number of appendices, the most significant of which gathers together all the sources in Latin, romance, and Arabic which cast light on the battle of Cuarte. For students of medieval military history and literature, this hybrid work contains quite enough primary documentation and informed scholarly interpretation to make it interesting. For the general reader in either Spanish or English, it is far too dense in detail and learned academic discourse for either ready understanding or deep inspiration.