Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcalá de Henares, a university town northeast of Madrid, and was baptized on October 9, 1547; his birth is traditionally placed on September 29, the feast of Saint Michael ^[1]. He was the fourth of seven children of Rodrigo de Cervantes, an itinerant barber-surgeon of modest means, and Leonor de Cortinas. The family moved repeatedly during Miguel's childhood, following Rodrigo's search for work through Valladolid, Cordoba, and Seville, and at one point the father was briefly imprisoned for debt ^[1].

Because of this unsettled childhood, the details of Cervantes's education remain patchy. There is no record that he attended a university, a fact that later rivals used against him. He is known to have studied in Madrid under Juan Lopez de Hoyos, a humanist schoolmaster with Erasmian sympathies, who in 1569 published a memorial volume for Queen Isabel de Valois that included verses by Cervantes, described there as his dear and beloved pupil ^[2]. These poems are the earliest surviving writings from his hand.

Late in 1569 a warrant was issued in Madrid for the arrest of a Miguel de Cervantes accused of wounding a man named Antonio de Sigura in a duel; the penalty specified included the loss of his right hand and ten years of exile ^[2]. Most biographers connect this document to the writer, and it may explain why the young man appears in Rome by the end of that year, working in the household of Giulio Acquaviva, who became a cardinal in 1570. Whatever the cause of his departure, the Italian sojourn exposed him to Renaissance poetry and prose that would mark his work for the rest of his life ^[3].

In 1570 Cervantes enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish infantry regiment stationed in Naples, then a possession of the Spanish crown. On October 7, 1571, he served aboard the galley Marquesa in the fleet of the Holy League commanded by Don Juan de Austria at the Battle of Lepanto, the great naval victory over the Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Patras ^[1]. Although ill with fever, he insisted on fighting and received three gunshot wounds, two in the chest and one that permanently maimed his left hand. He wore the injury proudly, and he later wrote that he had lost the movement of his left hand for the glory of the right ^[3]. The nickname el manco de Lepanto, the one-handed man of Lepanto, followed him ever after.

After months of recovery in Messina, he returned to service and took part in further campaigns, including operations at Navarino, Corfu, and Tunis. In September 1575 he sailed for Spain aboard the galley Sol, carrying letters of commendation from Don Juan de Austria intended to support a request for promotion. Off the Catalan coast the ship was attacked by Barbary corsairs, and Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo were taken to Algiers as captives ^[1]. The letters he carried convinced his captors that he was a person of importance, which raised his ransom price and prolonged his captivity.

Cervantes spent five years as a slave in Algiers, from 1575 to 1580. He organized four escape attempts, all of which failed, and each time he took responsibility on himself to shield his fellow captives; remarkably, he escaped execution and mutilation, perhaps because his owners still hoped for a high ransom ^[4]. Trinitarian friars finally ransomed him in September 1580, with money gathered by his family and by the religious order, just as he was about to be shipped to Constantinople. The Algerian years supplied material he reworked throughout his career, most directly in the captive's tale inserted into the first part of Don Quixote and in plays such as El trato de Argel ^[4].

The returning veteran found neither the promotion nor the reward he had hoped for. During the early 1580s Cervantes sought government employment, undertook at least one minor mission to Oran, and turned to writing for the Madrid stage, where he later claimed to have composed twenty or thirty plays; only two full-length dramas from this period survive, El trato de Argel and La Numancia, a tragedy about the ancient siege of the Celtiberian town by Rome ^[3]. His theatrical career was soon eclipsed by the phenomenal rise of Lope de Vega, whose new style of comedy dominated the Spanish playhouses.

In 1585 Cervantes published his first book, La Galatea, a pastoral romance in prose and verse. The book earned him some standing among poets but little money, and the promised second part never appeared, though he continued to mention it until the end of his life ^[2]. That same decade he married and then, needing steady income, accepted work far removed from literature.

From 1587 he served as a commissary requisitioning wheat, barley, and olive oil in Andalusia for the fleet being prepared against England, the Armada of 1588, and afterward he worked as a tax collector ^[1]. Both posts brought him grief. Disputes over requisitions from church property led to his excommunication on more than one occasion, and irregularities in his accounts, including the failure of a banker with whom he had deposited funds, landed him in the royal prison of Seville in 1597 ^[5]. In the prologue to Don Quixote he hinted that the story was engendered in a prison, and many readers have connected that remark to the Seville confinement ^[5].

In January 1605 the Madrid printer Juan de la Cuesta issued El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, the story of an aging country gentleman who, his wits dried up by reading chivalric romances, renames himself Don Quixote and rides out to revive knight errantry, accompanied by the peasant Sancho Panza as his squire ^[1]. The book was an immediate popular success. Editions and pirated printings multiplied in Spain, Lisbon, and the Americas within the year, and translations followed quickly: Thomas Shelton's English version appeared in 1612 and a French translation in 1614 ^[3].

The novel's originality lay less in its parody of chivalric fiction than in its method. Cervantes set a deluded idealist and a shrewd realist in constant conversation, filtered the narrative through an invented Arab historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, and allowed his characters to grow and answer back. Critics from the Romantics onward have treated the book as the founding work of the modern novel, and writers as different as Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Borges acknowledged its shaping influence ^[6].

Success did not make Cervantes rich, since he had sold the rights to his publisher, but it did revive his career. In 1613 he published the Novelas ejemplares, twelve shorter fictions including Rinconete y Cortadillo and El coloquio de los perros, in whose prologue he claimed, with justice, to be the first to write original novellas in Castilian rather than translating Italian models ^[2]. The Viaje del Parnaso, a long verse survey of contemporary poets, followed in 1614, and in 1615 he printed Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses, eight plays and eight comic interludes that theater managers had declined to stage; the interludes, brief satirical sketches such as El retablo de las maravillas, are now counted among the gems of Spanish drama ^[3].

In 1614 a rival writing under the name Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda published a spurious continuation of Don Quixote, complete with insults aimed at Cervantes. The provocation spurred him to finish his own second part, published in 1615, in which the knight and squire have become famous because the characters around them have read the 1605 book. Cervantes even sent his hero to Barcelona instead of Zaragoza to contradict the impostor, and at the close of the second part he had Don Quixote recover his sanity and die, so that no further false sequels could raise him again ^[1].

In December 1584 Cervantes married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, a young woman from the small town of Esquivias in La Mancha, nearly two decades his junior ^[1]. The marriage produced no children and involved long separations, especially during his Andalusian years. Shortly before the wedding, a liaison with Ana Franca de Rojas, an actress married to another man, had produced his only child, a daughter named Isabel de Saavedra, whom he later brought into his household ^[2].

His wider family shared his financial precariousness. His sisters Andrea and Magdalena, along with his niece Constanza, lived with him at various addresses in Valladolid and Madrid, supporting themselves partly with needlework. In 1605 the household was drawn into a scandal when a nobleman, Gaspar de Ezpeleta, was fatally wounded outside their Valladolid lodgings; Cervantes and his family were briefly detained during the inquiry and released without charge, an episode that left an unusually detailed documentary record of how they lived ^[5].

Contemporaries describe a modest, good-humored man who bore poverty and disappointment without bitterness. In the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares he sketched his own portrait in words: an aquiline face, chestnut hair, a silver beard that had been gold twenty years earlier, and a maimed left hand earned in the greatest naval occasion that past or present ages had seen ^[2]. In his final years he joined religious confraternities and, in 1616, professed as a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis ^[4].

The last decade of Cervantes's life, spent mainly in Madrid near the literary quarter where Lope de Vega also lived, was his most productive. Supported in part by patrons, above all the Count of Lemos, to whom he dedicated several works, he wrote at remarkable speed despite age and illness ^[3]. He suffered from what his own descriptions and modern retrospective diagnoses suggest was diabetes, and by early 1616 he knew he was dying, most likely of complications now often identified as cirrhosis or diabetic in origin ^[4].

His final work was Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, a Byzantine adventure romance he considered his masterpiece. He signed its dedication to the Count of Lemos on April 19, 1616, writing that he did so with one foot already in the stirrup, and he died in Madrid three days later, on April 22, 1616 ^[1]. He was buried, at his own wish, in the convent of the Discalced Trinitarians in Madrid, the order that had ransomed him from Algiers. The Persiles appeared posthumously in 1617.

His grave was unmarked, and the location of his remains was lost when the convent was rebuilt. In 2015 a team of forensic investigators announced that bone fragments recovered in the convent crypt very probably included those of Cervantes and his wife, and a formal memorial was installed there ^[7]. By coincidence of calendars, William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, one day after Cervantes by date though not by a shared calendar, since England still used the Julian reckoning; UNESCO chose April 23 as World Book Day partly in honor of the two writers ^[7].

Any Miguel de Cervantes biography must reckon with a paradox: a man who considered himself first a poet and dramatist is remembered for prose fiction he turned to almost by accident. Don Quixote has been translated into more than a hundred languages and is routinely described by scholars and novelists alike as the first modern novel, the book in which fiction began to examine its own workings ^[6]. When the Norwegian Book Club polled a hundred prominent authors in 2002 for the most meaningful book of all time, Don Quixote received more votes than any other work ^[8].

For readers asking who was Miguel de Cervantes beyond the novel, his shorter fiction and theater repay attention. The Novelas ejemplares effectively created the short story in Spanish, the entremeses remain in repertory, and episodes from his life and works have fed operas, ballets, films, and the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. Words he set loose in the language, above all quixotic and the image of tilting at windmills, circulate far beyond literature ^[6].

Spain has made him its cultural standard-bearer. The Instituto Cervantes, founded in 1991, promotes Spanish language and culture worldwide under his name, and the Premio Cervantes, awarded annually since 1976, is the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world ^[9]. His birthplace in Alcalá de Henares is preserved as a museum, his likeness appeared on Spanish coins and banknotes, and among the most repeated Miguel de Cervantes facts is that Spanish itself is commonly called the language of Cervantes. Few of Miguel de Cervantes achievements were rewarded in his lifetime; the centuries since have supplied the recognition his own age withheld ^[9].