Magazine Publications: El Cid

As noted in other places, I've published nearly 100 articles in history magazines. The plurality of these came in Strategy & Tactics Magazine and its sister pubs, Modern War and WWII. For time 90 percent of my articles were there. When I realized this I scrambled to get in some other magazines.

This is a piece on did on El Cid, the 11th century Spanish  warlord. Its the first article I got into Military Heritage and I was very excited to do so. They pay and edit better than anyone else, also one's articles don't languish in their hopper for years on end.

I like writing medieval stuff off the primary sources. In this case the primary sources on El Cid are a couple of contemporary chronicles + the Poem of El Cid. Traditional scholars, those stodgy mid-20th century types, would scoff at using the PEC as a source, but fiction often tells us much about a real subject. Wanna learn about life in say, Victorian Londom? Then read some Dickens; life in 20th century Mississippi, read some Faulkner. I like to use secondary sources, by all those fancy-dancy scholars with the expensive degrees to fill in details.

Basically,  two thirds of Medieval Spain was run by Muslims, the northern third was Christian. El Cid's war for Valencia marks the beginning of the 400 year Spanish Reconquista which ended with Grenada in 1491 after which Ferdinand and Isabella needed to raise some cash so in 1492...see how history works that way?

In any event, here's my piece on El Cid:

Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, a Castilian mercenary who served Christian kings and Muslim emirs alike in late 11th-century Spain, was born in 1043 in the village of Vivar, about six miles north of the city of Burgos. His father was a respected soldier, taking several castles and winning at least one pitched battle in a war against Navarre in the 1050s. With his father’s military pedigree....continue at Warfare History Network