the means of vindication and, be it said, of support. When he is
restored to favor, the marriage of his daughters to the Heirs of
Carrion under Alphonso's auspices is the royal acknowledgment. The
treachery of the heirs is the pretext for the Parliament of Toledo
where the Cid shall appear in all the glory of triumphant
vindication. The interest in the hecatombs of Moors and even in
the fall of Valencia is a secondary one. What really matters is
that the Cid's fair name be cleared of all stain of disloyalty and
the dona Elvira and dona Sol wed worthy husbands.

This unity of plan is consistently preserved by a rearrangement of
the true chronology of events and by the introduction of purely
traditional episodes. The shifting of historical values may be due
to the fact that when the poem was composed, about 1150, the power
of the Moor had really been broken by the conquests of Ferdinand
I, Alphonso VI, Alphonso VII and Alphonso VIII of Castile and
alphonso I, the Battler, of Aragon. The menace was no longer felt
with the keenness of an hundred years before. until the end of the
tenth century the Moors had dominated the Peninsula. The growth of
the Christian states from the heroic nucleus in northern Asturias
was confined to the territory bordering the Bay of Biscay,
Asturias, Santander, part of the province of Burgos, Leon, and
Galicia. In the East other centers of resistance had sprung up in
Navarre, Aragon and the County of Barcelona. At the beginning of
the eleventh century the tide turned. The progress of the
reconquest was due as much to the disruption of Moorish unity as
to the greater aggressiveness and closer cooeperation of the
Christian kingdoms. The end of the Caliphate of Cordova was the
signal for the rise of a great number of mutually independent
Moorish states. Sixty years later there were no less than twenty-