Tizona

weapon · Spain · Mediterranean

Tizona is the sword the Cantar de Mio Cid names as El Cid's great blade, 'worth a thousand marks of gold', which the poem says he won from King Yucef of Valencia and later demanded back from the Infantes de Carrión after they had disgraced it. The sword kept at the Museo de Burgos has a straight double-edged blade of the 11th century, of high-carbon steel with a fuller, whose metal was studied by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in the 1990s and confirmed as forged in the hero's era, from iron probably of Sierra Morena or northern Morocco; the Gothic hilt and the acid-etched inscriptions,

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