by Richard Fletcher
Recommended by Paul Graham
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Recommended by 2 sources and appears in Books Recommended by Paul Graham, Most Recommended Books, and History.
Rodrigo Diaz, the legendary warriorknight of eleventhcentury Castile known as El Cid, is remembered today as the Christian hero of the Spanish crusade who waged wars of reconquest for the triumph of the Cross over the Crescent. He is still honored in Spain as a national hero for liberating the fatherland from the occupying Moors. Yet, as Richard...
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Why recommended
Recommended by 2 sources and appears in Books Recommended by Paul Graham, Most Recommended Books, and History.
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.

Paul Graham
Co-founder of Y Combinator; essayist
“Bartlett's Making of Europe, White's Medieval Technology, and Social Change, Fletcher's Quest for El Cid to start with.”
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Consider Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen. Recommended by 10 sources.
“Accidental Presidents offers eight narrative portraits of men who succeeded to the U.S. presidency without election, using anecdote-rich scenes and readable context to show how personality and circumstance interact with office power. It’s strongest as a set of self-contained stories that make succession stakes concrete for non-specialist readers; it does not prioritize dense archival argument or exhaustive methodology, so expect some interpretive generalizations and repeated themes across cases. Use it for fast historical orientation rather than scholarly deep-dives.”
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.