Miguel de Cervantes
(1547–1616)

Miguel de Cervantes never experienced the rewards of his achievements during his lifetime. The disabled war hero returned home to poverty and unemployment. He wrote plays, poetry, and romances, but had to eke out a meager living as a tax collector.

Cervantes was nearly 60 when Don Quixote appeared in print. It was an immediate popular success, but it brought him neither a literary reputation nor financial security, and Cervantes died in poverty. Nevertheless, for nearly 400 years Don Quixote has remained the most popular book in Spain, and, after the Bible, the most frequently published book in the world.

Miguel de Cervantes, one of seven children of a poor barber-surgeon, was born September 29, 1547, in Alcalá de Henares, a small university town in the center of Spain. Cervantes did not receive much formal schooling, but he managed to acquire a good education in classical and Spanish literatures. When he was 21, his verses commemorating the death of the queen, Isabel de Valois, were included in a book by the educator Lopez de Hoyos.

A duel forced Cervantes to leave Spain in 1569. He went to Italy, where he joined a Spanish army regiment. (The Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire had become a threat to the Christian countries in Eastern Europe.)

In 1571, a fleet of ships sailed from Sicily to the Gulf of Patrai in Greece. There, in the naval battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, the forces of Christian Europe fought and defeated the Turks, preventing the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe. Cervantes was wounded three times and permanently disabled his left arm, but he remained in the army for four more years. On his voyage home to Spain in 1575, Barbary pirates captured his ship and he was held as an enemy prisoner in Algiers for five years until finally he was ransomed.

When Cervantes returned to Spain in 1580 at the age of 33, the heroic soldier and defiant prisoner-of-war found his family poorer than before and himself unemployed. He scrambled for a living writing for the theater in Madrid. During this time he had an affair with an actress by whom he had his only child, a daughter named Isabel. In 1584, he married Catalina de Salazar from Esquivias in La Mancha.

In 1585, Cervantes' first book, Galatea, was published. A pastoral romance told in elegant prose and verse of refined countryfolk. this literary success did not greatly improve his financial status. Cervantes took a civil service job and traveled throughout Spain as a purchasing officer for the Spanish Armada, the huge fleet the Spanish were assembling to attack England.

The Armada was defeated in 1588, and Cervantes then became a tax collector. State employment did not necessarily mean regular pay. By 1590, Cervantes had not been paid for two years. He was so poor that he tried to get a job in the Spanish territories in the Americas, but failed. In 1597, irregularities in his tax records landed Cervantes in jail in Seville for four months. It is believed Cervantes began his masterpiece, Don Quixote, during this time.

The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605 and was an immediate success all over Spain and across the Atlantic as well. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza became famous, but their creator did not profit from their popularity. In 1606 Cervantes abandoned itinerant life and moved back to Madrid.

Cervantes continued to write. In 1613, Exemplary Novels, a collection of a dozen long short stories, and Eight Plays and Eight Interludes appeared. Every year brought forth a new work. Cervantes' comic verses were successful. Voyage to Parnassus, published in 1614, relates the misfortunes and sufferings of poets, which Cervantes knew firsthand.

For ten years, since the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes had been working on a sequel. So had Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, who published his own version a few months before Cervantes finished his. Cervantes's fury drove him to finish and publish part two of Don Quixote in 1615.

Cervantes was 69 and suffered from dropsy, a disease of the lymphatic system. In April of 1616, religious rites were performed and Cervantes died on April 23. Too poor to afford a headstone, Cervantes was buried in an unmarked grave in the Trinitarian convent on Lope de Vega Street in Madrid.

The unification of Spain and the retaking of the Muslim kingdom of Granada was accomplished by King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile in 1492—the same year Columbus discovered America for them. The marriage of their daughter Joanna to Archduke Philip of Austria eventually made their grandson Charles King of Spain and its territories in Italy, the Netherlands, and the New World, and Holy Roman Emperor in Eastern Europe. Spain was constantly at war to defend this empire, and the enormous treasure in silver that poured into Spain from America gushed out to pay for soldiers and warfare in Europe. Inflation climbed in Spain, and money lost three-quarters of its value between 1500 and 1600. The Spanish crown declared bankruptcy twice. Poverty created beggars, vagrants, and crime.

The literature of the Golden Age, like that of the contemporary Elizabethan period in England, boasted a profusion of lyric poets, both secular and religious. Theater, too, flourished along with prose fiction of various genres—the pastoral novel and the picaresque novel. All were surpassed by Cervantes's incomparable comedy Don Quixote, the crowning achievement of Spanish literature.

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