& tu desciñe como de cabo
[fol 196rb] e tu te sey el padrino
et tu te sey el afijado
Et llamate cauallero del padron de santiago
E seryas tu mj señor
Et mandarias el tu Reynado.
[And when Rodrigo heard this,
He rode off as fast as he could.
In one single night he arrived at Zamora;
He knelt down, but he did not kiss the king’s hand.
He said, “My king, this greatly pleases me,
Because I am not your vassal.
My king, until you are knighted,
You shall not have a kingdom.
Do not receive a hand from Muslim
Or Christian,
But go observe the vigil of arms in honor of Saint James.
When you have heard mass,
Knight yourself with your own hand,
And gird on your sword
In the same manner, and then
Ungird it afterward.
You will be your own godfather,
And you will be your own godchild;
Call yourself a knight of Saint James,
And you will be my lord,
And you will rule your kingdom.]31
The enormous littera notabilior (in red, with a height of four lines, in the Paris ms) punctuates a verbal formula that is simultaneously imperative and reflexive. The ármate [“knight yourself”] formula is the maximum expression of independence and at the core of King Ferdinand I’s dual acquisition. On one hand, by knighting himself following the ritual described in this text, Ferdinand acquires all the legitimacy of monarchic sovereignty, given that the ritual does not require him to form any bonds with an investor or patron who would ungird his sword. The second acquisition, the vassalage of the Cid, functions as a mythological reinforcement. In this act, the Cid, supreme figure of nobiliary independence from the monarchy, also becomes a vassal of a monarch who recognizes his version of power. By securing the vassalage of the Cid, who has previously refused to kiss the royal hand, he in turn secures that of all the high nobility and adds it to the increasing sphere of monarchic jurisdictional power.32
The ceremony that the Cid describes has its foundation in the political issue raised in the corresponding section of Partidas 2.21. As declared by the Cid, chivalric investiture cannot be avoided; it is compulsory. This notion echoes the institutional rigor of the Partidas, which stipulates that the king’s coronation should follow his investiture. The compulsory nature of the ritual allows the monarch to construct the ordo, since he is the source and origin of this social class. The ordo descends from the king; it is an extension of his own body.
In Fernando’s case, however, it is necessary to modify the ritual to prevent the king from demanding fealty in ways that limit his independence. As the passage demonstrates, the ceremonial process of debt acquisition (in summary, girding on the sword, receiving a symbolic blow on the neck, and ungirding the sword) is decisive for the Cid. He wants to accept the good ritual, the legal ritual. Contrary to Don Juan Manuel, he is not interested in eliminating or deconstructing the ritual; he accepts its order and its political and juridical consequences. All he proposes is a substitution of subjects, or better yet a multiplication of the subject: it is the king who must adopt all the political personae who participate in the ceremonial process of investiture and accept as primary his natural bond with the apostle Saint James, patron of Spain.
Although Leonardo Funes and Felipe Tenenbaum have attempted to date the composition of the Song of Rodrigo to a period prior to 1300, it is difficult to disengage it from the chivalric project of Alfonso XI, at least on this aspect.33 On the other hand, the determined influence of the Partidas could even lead us to date this part of the work (if not the primitive poem in its entirety) to around 1340 or later. Even the date of initial redaction proposed by Alan Deyermond—around 1360—seems perfectly plausible (Epic Poetry and the Clergy).34
The specific date of the poem’s composition is not as important as how historical poetry engages political theory, and how an awareness of the two genres is constructed through the ceremonies. It is, ultimately, a language game—the linguistic and logical context where a particular semantics makes sense and is performed by the instances before whom an utterance has been produced. We can, therefore, keep in mind that the ceremony—the ideation and development of the apparatus—is in essence a semiotic investigation of the constituents that order themselves for its functioning. In this sense, the Song of Rodrigo constitutes an unusual epic text in which theories and forms of political independence are articulated according to legal documents whose vigor is either recent or soon to be enforced.35
Within Alfonso XI’s literary circle, and in his knighting ceremony, the value of ritual is called into question, or at least submitted to very different theses. We find the most salient example in the Libro del cavallero Zifar.
The Libro del cavallero Zifar is a prose narrative first redacted sometime around 1330.36 It narrates Zifar’s recovery of the monarchic state from which he descends. This loss and recovery mirrors the loss and recovery of his own family—his wife, Grima, and his two sons, Garfín and Roboán.37 Once he has accomplished this recovery, through anagnorisis, the narrative focuses on the moral education that he provides his two sons, achieving a connection between the chivalric and pedagogical fable, the two genres that together form the theoretical structure for chivalry in the Zifar. The book also narrates the double knighting of Roboán, which poses political questions meriting further examination.
Roboán’s first knighting takes place as the result of the acknowledgment between Zifar (now recognized as the “Knight of God”) and his two sons. The ceremony is not explicitly described: “el rey los resçibio por sus vasallos, e fizolos caualleros con muy grandes alegrias segund el uso de la tierra” [“the king received them as his vassals, and he very happily made them knights according to the usages of the land”] (BNF Esp. MS 36, f. 72v). One of the manuscripts of this work, which may be dated near 1468 and currently found in the French national library (BNF Esp. MS 36), has close to three hundred miniatures in addition to the text. One of them, located on folio 72v, provides a graphic representation of the knighting ceremony, but the image does not correspond to any textual description of knightly investiture in Castilian. In this image, Roboán and Garfín are kneeling before their father, while he taps their shoulders with the tip of his sword. It is likely that the miniaturists—who were not part of any Peninsular workshop—did not have access to any textual version of the ceremony and depicted a popular image from their country of origin (likely somewhere in central Europe).
It is in the second knighting ceremony, when the emperor of Trygrida (also known as the “Emperor Who Does Not Smile”) knights Roboán, that the latter offers an explanation of the ritual by which his father has transformed him into a knight:
Preguntole el enperador de commo le fezieron cauallero, e el dixo que touo vigilia en la eglesia de Santa Maria
