Soldier, Captive, Tax Man: What Did Cervantes Do Before Don Quixote?

A duel, Rome and the Spanish navy

In 1569 a warrant was issued for his arrest, dated 15 September, for wounding a man named Antonio de Sigura in a duel. Cervantes left Spain for Rome, where he worked in the household of Giulio Acquaviva. He was barely in his twenties, and his travels were only beginning.

In 1570 he moved to Naples and enlisted in a Spanish Navy infantry regiment. For a young man without money or connections, the army was one of the few ways to rise.

Lepanto: the hand he lost "for the glory of the right"

On 7 October 1571 Cervantes fought at the Battle of Lepanto, a sea battle against the Ottoman fleet. He was hit three times, twice in the chest and once in the left arm, which was left useless for the rest of his life. He was on board the galley Marquesa and had been ill before the fighting began.

The injury earned him the nickname El manco de Lepanto, "the one-handed man of Lepanto". Cervantes was proud of it rather than ashamed. Years later, in Journey to Parnassus, he wrote that he had lost the movement of the left hand for the glory of the right. It is a typical Cervantes line: modest, a little ironic, and unforgettable.

Five years as a captive in Algiers

On 26 September 1575, while Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo were sailing home on the galley Sol, Ottoman corsairs captured the ship near Barcelona and took the brothers to Algiers. Rodrigo was ransomed in 1577, but the family could not pay for Miguel. His captors asked for 500 gold escudos, a huge sum for a family of modest means.

He tried to escape four times. Each attempt failed, and he took responsibility himself to protect his companions. Finally, after almost five years, the Trinitarians, a religious order that raised money to free captives, paid his ransom in 1580. The friar who gathered the money was Juan Gil, and Cervantes was freed on 19 September 1580. Those five years of waiting, plotting and failing gave him a lifetime of material about freedom, courage and patience.

Wheat, oil and taxes: the unglamorous years

Back in Spain, Cervantes tried to live by writing. His first book, La Galatea, a pastoral romance, appeared in 1585 and received little notice at the time. In December 1584 he married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios; the previous month a daughter, Isabel, had been born to him and Ana Franca outside marriage.

Writing did not pay, so he took government work. From 1587 he was a purchasing agent in Seville, collecting wheat and oil for the Spanish Armada. In 1592 he became a tax collector, and he was briefly jailed for "irregularities" in his accounts before being released. These years took him along the dusty roads of Andalusia and La Mancha, through inns full of muleteers, priests, soldiers and travellers, exactly the world his knight would later ride through.

1605: the knight from La Mancha

The first part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha came out in January 1605. Its hero, Alonso Quixano, is a minor nobleman who reads so many books of chivalry that he decides to become a knight-errant himself. He rides an old workhorse, Rocinante, takes a poor farm labourer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, and devotes himself to Dulcinea del Toboso, who is really a local woman named Aldonza Lorenzo.

The most famous scene is the one in which he charges at windmills because he believes they are giants, and the English phrase "tilting at windmills" comes from it. Cervantes also plays games with the reader: the narrator claims the story was written by a Moorish historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, and that most of it is translated from Arabic. The book was published by Francisco de Robles and printed by Juan de la Cuesta, and Thomas Shelton's English translation of the first part appeared in 1612, while Cervantes was still alive.

A fake sequel and a real one

In 1614 an unauthorised second part appeared under the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. Cervantes answered in the best possible way: he published his own second part in 1615, and inside the novel Don Quixote comes across Avellaneda's book being printed and meets one of its characters. At the end, the knight gives up his adventures, apologises for the harm he has caused and dies as plain Alonso Quixano, and the author makes clear that any further books about him would be false.

The same late years were astonishingly productive. The twelve stories of the Novelas ejemplares appeared in 1613, and his last novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, was published in 1617, after his death.

Death, a lost grave and "the language of Cervantes"

Cervantes died in Madrid on 22 April 1616, aged 68; the symptoms described, including intense thirst, are consistent with diabetes. The date often quoted, 23 April, is now understood to be the day of his burial, and it is also World Book Day. He was buried in the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians in Madrid, his remains were lost when the convent was rebuilt in 1673, and in March 2015 researchers confirmed that bones found there included his.

Today Don Quixote is considered a founding work of Western literature and the first modern novel, and the word "quixotic", meaning impractically idealistic, has passed into many languages. Spanish itself is often called "the language of Cervantes".

Learn with Cervantes: English expressions

Expression	Meaning	Example
quixotic	idealistic in an unrealistic way	Her plan to fix the city's traffic alone was quixotic.
to tilt at windmills	to fight imaginary or hopeless enemies	Arguing with the algorithm is tilting at windmills.
a late bloomer	someone who succeeds later in life	Cervantes was a late bloomer: his hit came in his fifties.
to pay a ransom	to pay money to free a prisoner	The family could not pay the ransom.
a fake sequel	an unauthorised continuation	He answered the fake sequel with a better one.

Try this: Write three sentences about someone you know who was "a late bloomer". Use before, then and finally to show the steps of their road, just as Cervantes went from soldier to captive to novelist.