Reddit reviews The Quest for El Cid

I'm going to give you some ideas that are a little off the wall, but maybe fun. These are some of the books I really enjoyed in college. They're history, but not exactly. Instead of being the actual events of what happened, they're the larger than life tales that may also give some perspective.

The story of El Cid - the premier knight in Spanish history. It's a very fun story, and grains of truth reside in it.

This book is a historians attempt to find those grains of truth.

Civil Wars of Granada I did not read all of, but what I did read was very interesting. It's the tale of the Spanish defeating the last bastion of the Moors.

I couldn't find it in English, but if you read Spanish, El Abencerraje is a tale of Moorish chivalry. There's a theme of conversion of the "good" Moors that's also rather interesting, also found in Civil Wars of Granada. As an aside, all the books I've listed are translations and I have not found the best translations - just the titles on Amazon. If you can read Spanish, read the originals.

My final recommendation is not entirely germane to your interests, but a tangent to them. Shipwrecked or, in the original Spanish, Naufragios, is the biographical story of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish conquistador who was shipwrecked and spent years living amongst the natives before returning to a Spanish colony. This one is actually, I believe, an autobiography.