Miguel de Cervantes

Born on September 29, 1547 (the assumed date, based on his baptism), in Alcalá de Henares, a university town east of Madrid, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was the fourth of seven children of a barber-surgeon of modest means who moved the family frequently to escape creditors. His formal education was sporadic, though he studied briefly under the humanist Juan López de Hoyos in Madrid. In 1569 he left Spain for Italy , possibly fleeing a warrant for wounding a man in a duel , and in 1570 enlisted as a soldier in the Spanish Navy. At the Battle of Lepanto in October 1571, he fought bravely despite a fever, sustaining gunshot wounds that permanently maimed his left hand, an injury he bore with pride for the rest of his life. In 1575, while sailing home, he was captured by Barbary corsairs and spent five years in captivity in Algiers, making four daring escape attempts. Ransomed in 1580, he returned to Spain and struggled for decades in obscurity and poverty, working as a tax collector and suffering two imprisonments for financial irregularities. At fifty-seven he published the first part of Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 1605), and the novel’s success was immediate and extraordinary , widely regarded as the first modern novel, it transformed European literature by blending irony, realism, and metafictional play into a single narrative. The second part followed in 1615, partly spurred by an unauthorized sequel by an unknown author writing as Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. He died on April 22, 1616, in Madrid, one day before Shakespeare’s reported death, though by different calendars.

In 1577, Cervantes hid a dozen fellow captives in a cave above the Algiers shore, plotting an escape by sea. An informer betrayed them first. Marched before his captor, he alone claimed responsibility. Hassan Pasha, oddly moved by his defiance, spared him, said to have remarked that so long as he held the maimed Spaniard, his ships and city were secure.