SOCIAL RANK IN THE "POEMA DE MIO CID"

Abstract

There was an old and perhaps rather simplistic view about the Poema de mio Cid that its hero was 'bourgeois', and that the spirit of the poem might be called 'democratic'. Both terms, to be sure, are in different ways anachronistic when one is talking about the early Middle Ages in Castile and Leon. Before examining the supposed presence of some sort of 'democratic' ethos in the poem, it will be best to dispose of the idea that the hero is 'bourgeois'. It seems to arise from some aspects of his behaviour which were seen by critics of a past age as 'nonheroic'. In part this is a question of the poet's eye for telling detail which we might call realistic: the Qd takes care to provide materially for his men; horses are fed and watered (and on one notoriously bathetic occasion, tied up so that they don't go wandering off at a high dramatic point in the action: line 2779); there is a constant preoccupation - non-epic in some comparative contexts - with money, and with legalities over quite small matters. This, however, has more to do with narrative mode than with the hero's character or social position.I have written on the legalism of the poem on two occasions: first on the specific instance of the relationship between the hero and the king, and more recently in a wider context of Old Spanish epic poetry's apparent concern with legal matters,1 and I don't propose to go into any more detail here on matters covered in those essays. Instead, I shall look at those terms used in the Poema to define social rank and relationships, and see what we can deduce from these terms about the thematic points the poet is making.At the top of the social scale comes the king, rey, about which little need be said. The king who is near the centre of the action is Alfonso VI, King of Castile and Leon; at a late stage in the work there is mention of the kings of two other peninsular kingdoms, Navarre and Aragon, to which I shall return. Alfonso is the Cid's lord, the one who exiles him, who gradually accepts the loyal vassal back into his favour, who promotes the unfortunate marriage of the Cid's daughters to members of his own court, and who is subsequently called on to dispense justice and restore the hero's honour when those same marriages collapse in such a spectacular manner.The next term to be discussed is a relatively complex one, that is, infante. Its complexity comes from the fact that it is used in three separate senses in the Poema. First, as in the cognate English term 'infant', it can mean 'small child': in at least one of the two instances in which it is applied to the Cid's daughters it clearly has this sense:ifantes son e de dias chicas; (1. i69b)2the same is certainly an acceptable interpretation of the second case:la mugier de mio Cid e sus fijas las infantes, (L 1279)though maybe one should not be quite so categorical about its meaning in the latter case in the light of what follows about the third sense of the word.Second, it can have its modern Spanish meaning, the particular one of 'prince', but specifically a prince who is the son of a king. An interesting medieval example is provided by the important fourteenth-century figure don Juan Manuel. He was the nephew of one king and the uncle of another, but although he played an important part in the royal politics of his day and was in fact regent during the minority of his nephew, his father was not king, and so Juan Manuel was not an infante: something which seems to have irked him considerably; but he was a stickler for protocol in these matters and accepted his lot. In the poem, the royal infantes mentioned are the crown princes of Navarre and Aragon, who become the second husbands of the Cid's daughters at the end of the poem. It is explicitly stated that in the fullness of time the women will become the queens of those countries:[the royal envoys] piden sus fijas a mio Cid el Campeador por ser reinas de Navarra e de Aragon, (lines 3398f. …