Lepanto and Algiers
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in 1547 at Alcala de Henares, son of a debt-ridden barber-surgeon whose family moved constantly to escape creditors. In 1571 he served aboard a galley at the Battle of Lepanto, where a Holy League fleet shattered the Ottoman navy. Feverish below deck, he insisted on fighting, took two shots in the chest and one in the left hand, and lost the use of it for life. He called the wound the most memorable occasion of his life and signed himself, without embarrassment, the cripple of Lepanto.
Sailing home in 1575 with letters of recommendation from Don Juan of Austria, he was captured by Barbary corsairs. Those very letters convinced his captors he was a valuable nobleman, and the ransom demanded was enormous. He spent five years enslaved in Algiers and organized four escape attempts, each of which failed and any of which could have killed him. Trinitarian friars finally ransomed him in 1580 with money his family had ruined itself to raise. He came back to Spain thirty-three years old and poor.
A Career of Small Failures
Nothing worked for twenty years. His pastoral novel La Galatea sold modestly, and his plays were pushed aside by the effortless popularity of Lope de Vega, whom he praised in public and resented in private. To live, he became a requisitioning agent, seizing grain and oil for the Armada across Andalusia. The work made him hated. He was excommunicated at least once for taking church supplies, and irregularities in his accounts, including money lost when a banker absconded, landed him in the royal prison at Seville around 1597.
He later suggested that Don Quixote was engendered in a prison, and the joke has a bitter accuracy. The first part appeared in 1605, when he was fifty-seven, and became an immediate popular success, reprinted and pirated across Europe within a few years. It made him famous and not rich, because Spanish authors sold their privileges outright and had no share in reprints. He continued to petition for a post in the Indies, which was refused, and lived on patronage until the end.
Two Volumes and a Forger
The book pretends to be a translation of an Arabic manuscript by Cide Hamete Benengeli, argues with itself about what really happened, and lets its characters read the story they are in. That layered playfulness, more than the windmills, is why later novelists from Sterne to Flaubert to Borges treated Cervantes as a starting point. The knight who has read too many chivalric romances and the illiterate farmer who follows him keep changing places, so the mockery of illusion becomes, by degrees, a defense of it.
In 1614 an unknown writer using the name Avellaneda published a coarse sequel and insulted Cervantes in its preface. Furious, Cervantes finished his own second part in 1615, folded the rival book into his plot as a fake, and killed his hero so that no one could resurrect him again. He died in Madrid in April 1616 and was buried at a Trinitarian convent, in gratitude to the order that had bought his freedom. A search of the crypt in 2015 produced bones that could not be identified with certainty.
