The Cid: Lord and Master of War

A man gets exiled by his own king, abandoned by allies, surrounded by enemies, and still becomes the most feared and respected warrior on the battlefield. That’s the story of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid, and we use it to ask a blunt question: what do you do when you’re the only one left standing? We walk through the Reconquista setting of medieval Spain, why the conflict mattered, and why Raymond Ibrahim’s Defenders of the West is a valuable guide for reading this era with ...