El Cid

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1043 – 10 July 1099)) was a Castilian nobleman and military leader in medieval Spain. The Moors called him El Cid, which meant the Lord (probably from the original Arabic al-Sayyid, السیِّد), and the Christians, El Campeador, which st

Attributed

 * Sir, I am not in your land, but in my own.
 * El Cid's answer to the king when ordered to quit his land; in Chronicle of the Cid, from the Spanish by Robert Southey (1808), Book III, §18, p. 96

Quotes about El Cid


De quo cantatur quod ab hostibus haud superatur, Qui domuit Mauros, comites domuit quoque nostros.'' Of whom it is sung that he was not defeated by enemies, Who dominated Moors, also dominated our counts.
 * ''Ipse Rodericus, Meo cidi saepe vocatus,
 * Rodrigo himself, often called Mio Cid,
 * Poema de Almería (c. 1150), lines 220–222, as quoted and translated in Matthew Bailey's The Poetics of Speech in the Medieval Spanish Epic (University of Toronto Press, 2010), p. 45


 * He asked nothing but justice of Heaven, and of man he asked only a fair field.
 * Chronicle of the Cid, trans. Robert Southey (1808), Book I, §3, p. 4


 * [Don Quijote] se enfrascó tanto en su lectura, que se le pasaban las noches leyendo de claro en claro, y los días de turbio en turbio; y así, del poco dormir y del mucho leer, se le secó el celebro, de manera que vino a perder el juicio. Llenósele la fantasía de todo aquello que leía en los libros, así de encantamentos como de pendencias, batallas, desafíos, heridas, requiebros, amores, tormentas y disparates imposibles; y asentósele de tal modo en la imaginación que era verdad toda aquella máquina de aquellas sonadas soñadas invenciones que leía, que para él no había otra historia más cierta en el mundo. Decía él que el Cid Ruy Díaz había sido muy buen caballero, pero que no tenía que ver con el Caballero de la Ardiente Espada, que de sólo un revés había partido por medio dos fieros y descomunales gigantes.
 * [Don Quixote] became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it. He used to say the Cid Ruy Diaz was a very good knight, but that he was not to be compared with the Knight of the Burning Sword who with one back-stroke cut in half two fierce and monstrous giants.
 * Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part One (1605), trans. John Ormsby (1885), ch. 1