War In The Lay Of The Cid Analysis

The article “War in the Lay of the Cid” by Francisco Garcia Fitz argues how the epic poem Lay of the Cid is best used as a historical document illustrating “the art of war”, as Fitz calls it on page 62, in the middle ages. The author argues that the poem can best be used as a primary source of military life in the Middle Ages, more specifically from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the poem is believed to have originated. The argument continues that while the poet loosely based his poem on the actual Cid Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, many of the battles in the poem have not been historically linked to the Cid. Fitz believes that the battles the poem contains are still historically and militarily accurate for the time the poem was written. …show more content…
As mentioned earlier, Fitz broke down the strategies so that the reader could understand what was not told in the poem. He also suggested within his writing, that the poem was originally written as a means for entertaining and educating people in the medieval era. This is similar to the aim of the Chronicle of the Czechs by Cosmas of Prague. In which Cosmas broke down the history of the Czech and used it as a teaching tool for future rulers. While Fitz did an excellent job breaking down the military tactics into how they were performed and why, he brought up the idea of frontier lifestyle and then hardly addressed it. This leaves the reader with questions pertaining to that lifestyle. The most important being whether or not the main feature of frontier life was the military aspects. His argument could have been strengthened if he used more medieval sources to support his findings. The ability to have more historical support relies on there being other medieval sources on the subject available for his use. This would allow the reader to better believe the argument that the battles are factual in