"Como a señor natural": Interpretaciones polí­ticas del Cantar de Mio Cid

Abstract

The article restates, from a new perspective, the closeness of the Can-tar de mio Cid to some historical facts of its time, taking into account a central political concept in the text, which somehow emerges in relation to the twelfth-century bourgeois revolts: the concept of señor natural, which appears five times in the poem. What suggests the appearance of the term, in some early twelfth-century documents, is that the concept of señor natural was developed within the framework of the bourgeois revolts (with which Catalan and Molho link the space of the Cantar, although it exactly represents a political position opposite to that of bourgeois and caballeros pardos ["brown knights"]), as a mechanism to defend the king's legitimacy and to disown the insurgents' ambitions. Throughout the Cantar, the function of the idea of señor natural aims at the substitution of a previous order, exclusively ruled by vassallage, by a new one in which such idea equals the one of naturaleza ("nature"), and fosters a greater social justice. Nature, now seen as the foundations of political organization, allows the Cid to recover his position in the court, and avoids his mere existence as an independent prince.