Note 12 — Chapter II

It is amusing to compare the Moorish accounts of the Cid with the Christian. In the work of Conde on the Arabs of Spain, which is little more than a translation from Arabic chronicles, the Cid appears first, I think, in the year 1087, when he is called “the Cambitur [Campeador] who infested the frontiers of Valencia.” (Tom. II. p. 155.) When he had taken Valencia, in 1094, we are told, “Then the Cambitur—may he be accursed of Allah!—entered in with all his people and allies.” (Tom. II. p. 183.) In other places he is called “Roderic the Cambitur,”—“Roderic, Chief of the Christians, known as the Cambitur,”—and “the Accursed”;—all proving how thoroughly he was hated and feared by his enemies. He is nowhere, I think, called Cid or Seid by Arab writers; and the reason why he appears in Conde’s work so little is, probably, that the manuscripts used by that writer relate chiefly to the history of events in Andalusia and Granada, where the Cid did not figure at all. The tone in Gayangos’s more learned and accurate work on the Mohammedan Dynasties is the same. When the Cid dies, the Arab chronicler (Vol. II. App., p. xliii.) adds, “May God not show him mercy!”