EL CID RUY DIAZ.

Unrecorded and possibly pirated edition of this Spanish chronicle of El Cid, the medieval knight and a popular hero in romances of the period, with a charming woodcut illustration. This edition follows the text of the 1578 chronicle printed in Seville by Alonso de la Barrera, though with different type and woodcut. El Cid, or ‘Lord,’ was a mercenary in Islamic Iberia during the C11th, whose legend – despite fighting on both the Christian and Muslim sides he was considered a divinely sent Christian saviour – quickly became associated with the romance genre, especially the C13th Poema or Cantar de Mio Cid. Our chronicle is more of a fictionalised historical account, beginning with the fraternal wars of the heirs of King Fernando I, paving the way for the rise of El Cid under Alfonso VI, his conquest of Valencia, the noble marriages of his daughters, his death and his effective canonisation.   

An identical imprint to that found in our edition appears in two Lisbon editions of a different Spanish chronicle of El Cid by Juan de Escobar, under the title of Hystoria del muy noble y valeroso cavallero, el Cid Ruy Diaz de Bivar, one dated 1601 (Palau 81016) and another 1605 (Palha 766). Palha called his edition ‘rarissime’ and ‘absolument inconnue aux bibliographes.’ Palau noted that the 1601 edition bore a license dated 1610 and inferred that the 1601 and 1605 imprints must therefore have been fraudulent and with invented dates (‘son fraudulentas, y las fechas … son pura invenciόn’). However, he appears not to have examined the 1605 edition, which does in fact bear a license dated that year, and appears to exist in only a single copy (see Christie’s sale 3 April 1996, lot 89); it is therefore possible that 1601 was a misprint for 1610. This corroborates the dating and location of our edition, which might simply have been a separate and equally rare production of Alvarez’s press, or may have been a pirated edition copying a readily available text and printed using Alvarez’s imprint (and therefore his inquisitorial license). Indeed, since the majority of Alvarez’s output was theological, the latter might also have been the case with the Escobars.