Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet and playwright, the author of Don Quixote, often called the first modern novel. Before he turned to writing he was a soldier wounded at the battle of Lepanto and spent five years as a captive in Algiers, and much of his life was a struggle against poverty and debt. His story of an elderly gentleman driven mad by reading romances of chivalry became the most celebrated book in the Spanish language and one of the most influential works of fiction ever written.

Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, a university town near Madrid, and baptised there on 9 October 1547; he may have been born on 29 September, the feast of Saint Michael, after whom he was named. He was one of seven children of Rodrigo de Cervantes, an itinerant barber-surgeon who was often in debt, and Leonor de Cortinas. The family moved between Valladolid, Córdoba and Seville, and whether some of his ancestors were converts from Judaism has long been debated without firm evidence. Nothing certain is known of his schooling. By 1566 the family was in Madrid, which Philip II had recently made his capital, and in 1569 a Madrid schoolmaster, Juan López de Hoyos, published some of Cervantes's first poems and called him his "dear and beloved pupil".

Late in 1569 Cervantes was in Italy, perhaps having left Spain after a warrant was issued for the arrest of a Miguel de Cervantes for wounding a man in a duel. In Rome he served briefly in the household of Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva, then enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish infantry regiment based in Naples, then ruled by Spain. Italy gave him a lasting love of its literature.

On 7 October 1571 he fought aboard the galley Marquesa at Lepanto, off western Greece, where the fleet of the Holy League, led by Spain, Venice and the papacy, destroyed the navy of the Ottoman Empire. Though ill with fever, he insisted on fighting and was shot twice in the chest and once in the left hand, which he never used again. He was proud of the battle all his life, calling it the greatest occasion the centuries had seen. He recovered and took part in further campaigns, including expeditions to Navarino and Tunis.

In September 1575, sailing home to Spain with his brother Rodrigo, Cervantes was captured by Barbary corsairs and taken to Algiers, a base of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers and a centre of the trade in Christian captives held for ransom. Letters of recommendation he carried made his captors believe he was important, and they set a high price on him. He spent five years there and led four escape attempts, each betrayed or failing; according to the testimony of fellow captives, he took the blame on himself each time and was spared the execution that others suffered. His family raised what they could, and in September 1580 he was finally ransomed by Trinitarian friars, just as he was about to be shipped to Constantinople. Captivity and the frontier between Christian and Muslim worlds appear repeatedly in his later writing.

Back in Spain, Cervantes sought a royal post without success. He wrote some twenty to thirty plays for the Madrid stage, of which only a few survive, including The Siege of Numantia and a play about life in Algiers, and in 1585 he published a pastoral romance, La Galatea. In 1584 he married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, from the village of Esquivias; they had no children, though he had an illegitimate daughter, Isabel, born around the same time.

From 1587 he worked in Andalusia as a commissary requisitioning grain and oil for the fleet of the Spanish Empire being prepared against England, and later as a tax collector. The work was thankless: he was excommunicated for seizing church property and, after a banker holding government funds went bankrupt, he was jailed in Seville in 1597 over shortfalls in his accounts. In the prologue to Don Quixote he hints that the book was conceived in a prison.

The first part of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in Madrid in January 1605. Its hero, a minor gentleman named Alonso Quixano, has read so many tales of knights errant that he loses his wits, renames himself Don Quixote, takes up rusty armour and an old horse, Rocinante, and sets out to right wrongs, with a shrewd peasant, Sancho Panza, as his squire. He mistakes windmills for giants and inns for castles, and the two are beaten, mocked and deceived across the roads of Spain.

The book was an immediate success and was soon translated into English and French. What began as a parody of chivalric romances became something richer: a study of how people shape reality through stories, of the friendship between a dreamer and a realist, and of Spanish society from nobles to galley slaves. Cervantes plays constantly with the act of storytelling, claiming that the book is translated from an Arabic manuscript by a historian called Cide Hamete Benengeli.

In 1614 an unknown writer using the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda published a spurious sequel. Cervantes answered with his own Part Two in 1615, in which the characters have read Part One, meet people who know them from it, and denounce the false sequel. This self-awareness is one reason later novelists saw the book as the origin of their form.

In his last years Cervantes, living in Madrid, published at a remarkable rate: the Exemplary Novels of 1613, twelve short stories that helped create the genre in Spanish; a long poem, Journey to Parnassus, in 1614; and a collection of eight plays and eight comic interludes in 1615. He finished a long adventure romance, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, days before he died, and it appeared in 1617. He died in Madrid on 22 April 1616, probably of diabetes, and was buried the next day in the convent of the Trinitarian nuns; remains believed to include his were identified there in 2015. He died within days of William Shakespeare, but not on the same day, since Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar and England had not.

Don Quixote has been translated into more languages than almost any book except the Bible, and its influence runs through Fielding, Sterne, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and many others. The word "quixotic" entered English for idealism detached from reality. Spanish is often called "the language of Cervantes", the Instituto Cervantes promotes it worldwide, and the Cervantes Prize is the highest honour in Spanish-language literature. He is a central figure of Spain's Golden Age, the late Renaissance flowering of art and letters in the history of Spain.