The Unlikely Life Story of the Heroic Cervantes

A detail from "Miguel de Cervantes imagining Don Quixote," 1858, by Mariano de la Roca y Delgado. Oil on canvas. The Prado Museum, Madrid. Public Domain

Poet, prisoner, and playwright, sailor, soldier, and novelist, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra lived a life of extraordinary exploits and achievements, his colorful deeds and character rivaling the exuberance of his stories.

Cervantes is a giant striding through the literary landscape—many call his “Don Quixote” the first modern novel—but his accomplishments extend beyond the triumphs of the pen. Who was the man from whose multifaceted mind sprung a novel wide enough to enfold the whole world, and what experiences shaped this colossal, cosmic work?

A Drifter

Portrait of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, circa 1877, by Eduardo Balaca. Oil on canvas. The Prado Musuem, Madrid. Public Domain

Cervantes was born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, near Madrid, to a family of minor gentry with declining fortunes. The family moved from town to town, his father looking for work, dodging creditors, and struggling to stave off destitution.

Rodrigo de Cervantes, the novelist’s father, was a barber-surgeon. He set bones, let blood, dressed wounds, and addressed lesser medical needs that didn’t require university training. He spent time in debtor’s prison from 1552 to 1553. Cervantes’s mother, Leonor de Cortinas, came from a line of landowners in Old Castile.

Scholars believe that Cervantes studied at a Jesuit school where his literary interests bloomed.  Like Shakespeare, he never attended university. Cervantes picked up a love for the picaresque style of novel—a genre centering around a roguish but lovable hero who travels about, living by his wits. Later in life, it influenced his masterpiece, “Don Quixote.”

"The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha" by Miguel de Cervantes with an illustration by Ricardo Balaca, 1880–1883. Public Domain

In the late 1560s, Cervantes published his first set of poems, occasioned by the death of Elizabeth of Valois, the Queen of Spain. According to the Academy of American Poets, “The poems established Cervantes’s early reputation as an extraordinary and precocious poet.”

The young drifter moved to Rome, possibly because he was wanted for wounding someone in a duel. There, he served in the household of Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva before enlisting in 1570 with a Spanish infantry regiment in Naples.

An Eventful Epoch

"The Battle of Lepanto," 1572, by Giorgio Vasari. Fresco. The Regia Hall in the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican, Rome. Sailko/CC BY 3.0

At this time, the Ottoman Empire under Selim II was expanding aggressively toward Christian Europe, taking Cyprus the same year Cervantes came to Naples. After unsuccessful attempts to forestall the Muslim conquest, the Venetians appealed to Pope Pius V, who had long sought to draw Europe’s Christian princes out of their own preoccupations and into an alliance for Christendom’s defense.

Few nations responded to the call, but among them were Spain, Venice, and a little allied fleet of papal forces and small Italian states. These gathered at Messina in Sicily, under Don Juan of Austria, and Cervantes was among the soldiers on board. From there, they sailed out to meet the Ottoman fleet that threatened Europe.

The battle that followed on Oct. 7, 1571, has become known as the Battle of Lepanto, and historian Warren Carroll described it as having an “apocalyptic quality.“ The gates of time stood open, exposing two radically divergent fates. The future of the Mediterranean, and possibly the entire West, was determined that day.

Multiple independent accounts attest to Cervantes’s courageous conduct in the battle. He refused to stay below deck even though he was suffering from a fever. In the conflagration of battle, he received two gunshot wounds in the chest and a third that permanently disabled his left hand. Though outnumbered, the Christian fleet won a massive victory that day.

"Naval Battle of Lepanto (October 7, 1571)," 1887, by Juan Luna. Oil on canvas. Palace of the Senate, Madrid, Spain. Public Domain

A detail of Miguel de Cervantes, with a wounded left hand, from "Naval Battle of Lepanto (October 7, 1571)," 1887, by Juan Luna. Public Domain

G.K. Chesterton imagined the genesis of “Don Quixote” in this moment, picturing Cervantes standing astride the deck, bloodstained amid the ragged rigging of the ship, beaming in the moment of triumph. In his poem “Lepanto,” Chesterton wrote:

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath (Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.) And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain, Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain, And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade ... (But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

It’s unlikely that the image of a knight trying haphazardly to maintain chivalry in a changing world sprung to Cervantes’ mind in that instant, though it makes for a great scene. We do know that Cervantes looked back on that day and his role in the battle with pride. He said, as Carroll quotes him, that it was “the greatest day’s work in centuries.”

After the Battle of Lepanto, Cervantes returned to Naples and continued soldiering for a few more years, seeing more action in Tunis, Tunisia. In 1575, he set sail for Spain with letters of recommendation in hand from various notable figures.

Many Ups and Downs

Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes, circa 1800, by a 19th-century artist. Oil on canvas. The Cervantes' House, Valladolid, Spain. Public Domain

Cervantes’s fortunes should have been on the upswing. With a distinguished military record and nobles’ approval, his future looked bright, and he hoped to enter the king’s service. But all his plans were brought to ruin when Barbary pirates attacked his ship, and he and his brother Rodrigo were sold into slavery. They were taken to Algiers, the central hub of the Muslim slave traffic of Christians. Here, the letters of recommendation backfired because the Muslims understood him to be of high rank and raised his ransom.

Once again, contemporary accounts portray Cervantes as a courageous leader amongst the captives. He made four unsuccessful attempts to escape. Cervantes later drew from these experiences in writing “The Captive’s Tale” in “Don Quixote” and the plays “The Traffic of Algiers” and “The Bagnios of Algiers.”

The unlucky writer was ransomed at last in 1580, and he set foot again on Spanish soil. He found himself jilted of the expected advantage of his military record, however, because the excitement surrounding Lepanto had dissipated during his years of captivity. The statement, “I fought at Lepanto” no longer carried the weight it once had.

Cervantes spent the next several years scraping by with what he earned from dull, administrative work. Maybe it was his ill-fortune and the drudgery of his work—such a contrast to the adventures of prior years—that led him to have an affair with Ana Franca de Rojas, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Isabel. After this, Cervantes married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios.

Serving in various posts such as tax collector, commissary of provisions, and messenger, Cervantes labored at his literary craft on the side, releasing his first book of fiction in 1585, a pastoral romance called “Galatea,” for which he received a decent payment from the publisher Blas de Robles. He followed up the book with several plays, but none brought sufficient success to make writing his sole means of support.

A bid for a government post in South America met with similar failure. He spent a brief time in prison in 1592 for alleged accounting inconsistencies in his commissary work, and then again in 1597 when a banker went bankrupt while in possession of state funds Cervantes had deposited with him. Taking into account a remark made in the prologue of “Don Quixote,” it was while in prison that he first had the idea for the work.

"Miguel de Cervantes imagining Don Quixote," 1858, by Mariano de la Roca y Delgado. Oil on canvas. The Prado Museum, Madrid. Public Domain

We don’t know much about what came next in Cervantes’s life, but he must have been at work on his magnum opus, the first part of which was published in 1605. The aging war veteran’s literary genius was recognized at last: Part I of “Don Quixote” instantly catapulted to best-seller status. As the Academy of American Poets relates, the novel became well-known in every major Western European nation quite quickly. But the trials were not yet over for Cervantes.

Once again, his rightful glory was snatched from him—first because he had sold the publishing rights for Part I before it was clear how successful it would be, and second because a spurious, unauthorized version of Part II was written and published by Fernandez Avellaneda, who hoped to capitalize on the acclaim of Part I. This prompted Cervantes to write his own, authentic Part II and release it in 1615. In Cervantes’s Part II, Don Quixote and Sancho make reference to “that other Don Quixote,” the imposter of Avellaneda’s copycat edition. In brilliant fashion, Cervantes allowed real-life events to enhance his fiction, incorporating them in a metanarrative.

Then, Cervantes got himself arrested yet again, this time for the fact that a stabbing occurred outside his house in Valladolid. The hapless author continued to suffer from litigation and money shortages. However, his final years were among the most productive of his writing career, and they included the publication of his long, allegorical poem “Journey to Parnassus.”

A few years before his death, Cervantes, perhaps reflecting on Christian teaching on the afterlife, became a Third Order Franciscan. This Catholic group closely followed St. Francis’s teachings on prayer, humility, and charity. It wasn’t a monastery, so it was open to married men and women, unlike the more stringent First and Second Orders.

A Glimpse at the Maker of a Masterpiece

A detail from "Last Moments of Miguel de Cervantes," 1856, by Víctor Manzano y Mejorada. Oil on canvas. The Prado Museum, Madrid. Public Domain

Here is Cervantes’s own self-portrait in words, written as an old man, that helps us glimpse his appearance and character.

“This man you see here, with aquiline face, chestnut hair, smooth, unwrinkled brow, joyful eyes and curved though well-proportioned nose; silvery beard which not twenty years ago was golden, large moustache, small mouth, teeth neither small nor large, since he has only six, and those are in poor condition ... of middling height, neither tall nor short, fresh-faced, rather fair than dark ... this I say is the likeness of the author of ‘La Galatea’ and ‘Don Quixote de la Mancha.'... He was many years a soldier, five and a half a prisoner, when he learned patience in adversity. He lost this left hand in the naval battle of Lepanto, from a blunderbuss wound, which, although it looks ugly, he considers beautiful, since he collected in the greatest and most memorable event that past centuries have ever seen.”

Cervantes died in Madrid in 1616 on the same day as William Shakespeare. He had, indeed, learned “patience in adversity.” The repeated disappointments, failures, and humiliations of Cervantes’s later life may offer some explanation for the constant blunders of the hero of “Don Quixote,” who, as Chesterton said, is ever “riding in vain.” Still, like the knight of la Mancha, Cervantes seemed to maintain an unquenchable spirit in the face of hardship. The enduring power and truth of his masterpiece “Don Quixote” proves that his life’s work was not in vain after all.

Would you like to see other kinds of arts and culture articles? Please email us your story ideas or feedback at [email protected]