Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is the author of one of the world's most famous novels, Don Quixote de la Mancha. This is the story of a country gentleman who decides to become a knight after reading many romantic tales about knights in armor and highborn ladies. This gentleman takes the name Don Quixote, and he and his down-to-earth squire, Sancho Panza, go on quests to find adventure and fight injustice. This simple story changed literature forever.
Cervantes was born in 1547 outside of Madrid, Spain, in the city of Alcalá de Henares. He was one of seven children. Not much is known of his early childhood, but one thing is certain—he was an eager reader of books. In the fall of 1569, young Cervantes went to Rome to work for the Catholic Church. Some claim he really went to Rome to escape arrest for having wounded another man in a duel. Whatever the reason, being in Rome allowed him to study art, philosophy, and literature and to experience the many changes happening in society during the transition from medieval times to the early Renaissance. Scientific thinking was on the rise and traditional knowledge was being challenged. Cosmopolitan areas, where people with different beliefs and experiences tended to come together, were expanding.
In 1570, when he was 24, Cervantes joined the Spanish army. At that time, the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire were fighting European Christians for control of the Mediterranean, and Cervantes wanted to be a part of the fight. He joined the Holy League, a mighty armada of three hundred ships and the Catholic armies of Pope Pius V, Venice, and Spain, which totaled about eighty thousand men. In 1571, Cervantes was on a ship near Greece when he was shot three times in the Battle of Lepanto. One bullet hit him in the left hand, crippling it. He was never able to use that hand again. The battle was a huge victory for the Holy League, and Cervantes later wrote, "On that day, Ottoman pride and arrogance were broken."
Cervantes served for four more years, fighting in several more military campaigns against the Turks. He was promoted and was now receiving a high salary; nevertheless, tired of war, Cervantes decided to return to Spain in 1575. That September, he boarded a galley named El Sol in Naples, Italy. The ship was attacked by Turkish pirates, and Cervantes and the other survivors of the attack were taken to Algiers as captives. A city on the coast of North Africa, Algiers was the center of Turkish piracy, where supplies, stolen merchandise, and slaves were freely bought and sold. Prisoners were treated like slaves, forced to work all day and night with little food, water, or rest. Many died in captivity. If a slave was wealthy, pirates would attempt to get a ransom from the person’s family. Because Cervantes had letters of recommendation from important people in the Spanish army, the Turks thought he must be a valuable captive. Even though Cervantes told them he had no money, the Turks did not believe him. They decided to ransom him for five hundred gold coins, a sum his family could hardly hope to raise. Cervantes made four escape attempts but was captured every time. After five years in captivity, Cervantes' ransom was finally paid by a group of friars. Cervantes returned home to Spain in 1580, but his long imprisonment had left an enduring mark on him as a man and as a writer.
As soon as he reached home, Cervantes started his writing career in earnest. In 1585, a few months after getting married, Cervantes published the romantic novel La Galatea. Some of his plays were being performed in theaters in Madrid as well, but they did not provide Cervantes with much money to take care of his household. So, in 1587, Cervantes accepted a government position requisitioning grain and other supplies for the Spanish Armada, a fleet of over one hundred ships being prepared to battle England. After the armada was destroyed in 1588 by Elizabeth I and her navy—a horrible embarrassment for Spain—Cervantes became a tax collector, going from town to town and collecting rents and taxes for the government. Suspicion that he was falsifying his accounts got him in trouble with the government, and he wound up in jail twice over the course of six years for financial impropriety. Many scholars, however, believe that he was honest but simply a bad businessman. Cervantes later said that part of his masterpiece Don Quixote was written in prison.
In 1605, at the age of 58, Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote. The novel was a huge success, one he badly needed after years of intense hardship and financial insecurity. Ten years later, he published the second part, which some critics think surpasses the first.
Cervantes had lost much of his idealism about the Spanish Empire and the romance of battle, and in Don Quixote, he makes fun of everyone—nobility and commoners. His main character, Don Quixote, bases his life's purpose on upholding the "truth" that he has read about in romantic stories. Don Quixote does battle with windmills, thinking they are giants, and mistakes a farm girl for a wellborn lady needing his protection. When he comes to a small inn, the knight thinks it is the castle of a great lord. Sancho Panza constantly tries to get his master to see things as they really are, but Don Quixote insists on seeing the world in magical ways.
Readers everywhere were touched by both the humor and the sadness of Cervantes' depiction of the human experience. The story is a comedy that makes fun of idealistic and impractical people. But at the same time, it is a tragedy about a troubled man struggling with self-delusion and social change. It remains up to the reader to decide whether Don Quixote is a hero or a fool.
Cervantes wrote many poems, novels, short stories, and plays, but none became as famous as Don Quixote. The book about the wayward knight is thought by many scholars to be the basis of the modern novel. Before Cervantes, most stories were written to convey unchanging moral "truths." Cervantes broke that tradition and created a completely new type of literature, which questions what is real and what is not through characters who are themselves undecided about reality. Not only did Cervantes help invent a new kind of story, but he also inspired a new word. We use this word today to sum up a person or plan that is idealistic, impulsive, and romantic: quixotic.