Cervantes

Soldier, captive, tax-collector, genius. The life behind the laughter.

The record

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547 (baptized October 9; the birth date itself is not recorded — the baptism is the documented fact) and died in Madrid on April 22, 1616 (the burial date, April 23, is sometimes cited as the death date; the record shows burial on the 23rd). What follows is the documented outline; disputed points are labeled.

Soldier and captive

• In 1571 he fought at the Battle of Lepanto, where he was wounded — the famous "manco," the maimed hand. He was proud of the wound all his life, calling it "for the greater glory of the right hand."
• In 1575, sailing home, he was captured by Barbary corsairs and spent five years as a captive in Algiers (1575–1580), attempting escape repeatedly, before his family and the Trinitarian friars ransomed him.
• Back in Spain he served as a commissary requisitioning supplies for the Armada and later as a tax-gatherer in Andalusia — posts that brought him excommunications, lawsuits, and at least two spells in prison (Castro del Río; Seville, 1597–1602, dates debated).

The writer

Don Quixote Part I appeared in Madrid in 1605, when Cervantes was 57; Part II in 1615. Between and around them came the Exemplary Novels (1613), the verse Voyage to Parnassus (1614), and the plays and interludes. He died in 1616, days after completing Persiles — the same year, by the old calendar's coincidence, as Shakespeare.

The man in the margins

Cervantes writes himself into the book as the harried "second author" who finds the manuscript, argues with his sources, and begs the reader's patience. The prologues are autobiography in miniature: the maimed soldier apologizing for a book without sonnets or Latin tags, the old man answering a plagiarist with a smile. He never grew rich from Quixote; the book's triumph belonged to the knight, not the author.

A note on images

This page carries no portrait and no generated likeness. Cervantes was a real person; per this site's standing rule, no AI-generated imagery is used to depict real people, and no historical portrait is reproduced here. See methodology.

Source notes

• Biographical outline: standard scholarly consensus; see sources.
• Baptism October 9, 1547 (Alcalá de Henares); death April 22, 1616, burial April 23 (Madrid): parish records.
• Lepanto wound, Algiers captivity (1575–1580), commissary and tax-gatherer posts, imprisonments: documented in Cervantes' own writings and archival records.
• Persiles (Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda) published posthumously 1617.