Miguel de Cervantes: From Life to Myth

How many autographs by Cervantes – that is, documents written in his handwriting – still survive? Only eleven. And nearly all of them are linked to his professional life as a tax collector in various Andalusian towns. They have nothing to do with his literary life and, less still, with personal details.

An example is this autograph, the only one held by the Biblioteca Nacional de España. One of the major problems of tax collection – which led Cervantes to serve a spell in prison – was the financial guarantees he had to provide, and treasurers’ constant demands for further guarantees.

Cervantes pledges his reputation and the fact he was married in the town: “I have no more guarantees and four thousand ducats is enough, and I am well-known, reliable and wed in this place”.

Cervantes spent nearly five years serving in the Italian regiments, climbing the ranks in a promising military career. The constant reminders in his oeuvre of his involvement in the Battle of Lepanto (1571) as a raw recruit have overshadowed his subsequent military career.

7 October 1571 was the date of the Battle of Lepanto, “the most memorable and lofty occasion that past centuries have beheld or which future ages hope to see”, as Cervantes glowingly describes it in the prologue to the second part of Don Quixote. This colossal battle was progressively magnified in propagandistic literature such as this magnificent manuscript codex containing an epic poem dedicated to Philip II.
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When the coast of Catalonia was in sight, the galley El Sol in which Miguel de Cervantes was travelling with his brother Rodrigo was captured by Barbary pirates.

Cervantes spent five years in Algiers, a city totally unlike the Europe with which the author was familiar. The thousand adventures he experienced during these five years are known in detail through a document which some critics hold to have been written by Cervantes himself – the Información de Argel (1580) – and through scattered information provided in the verses of the Epístola a Mateo Vázquez (1577) (Letter to Mateo Vázquez). These are the foundations on which the life story of Cervantes the character was progressively built.

The more than 47 indications in the lower part (written in Italian) specifying the city’s most important buildings, constructions and streets give an idea of the complexity of Algiers when Cervantes arrived there as a captive. At the time Algiers was much larger than Rome or Palermo and had an estimated population of 120,000 inhabitants, more than half of whom were renegades. A land of opportunities. A land of possibilities.
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"Don Quixote", which came on sale at the beginning of 1605 in Francisco de Robles’s bookshop – in both Madrid and Valladolid, the seat of court since the previous year – was Miguel de Cervantes’s major publishing success. It was the triumph he was able to enjoy the most and on which he pinned new hopes for a different life, which were only realised on paper by his characters. "Don Quixote" is one of the best chivalric novels ever written.

"The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha" was destined to become a bestseller. This was the dream of the bookseller Francisco de Robles, who applied for the licence and privilege, signed by Cervantes, to print the work. It was granted, and the second edition of "Don Quixote" began to be printed in April 1605, extending the privilege to Aragón and Portugal. Its success was only relative: copies of this second edition still lay unsold in Francisco de Robles’s bookshop when a later edition came out in 1608.
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Would we still remember Miguel de Cervantes, 400 years later, if his literary career had ended at this point? A pastoral novel, a chivalric novel, several plays and hundreds of poems is a paltry record for an author in a period known as the Golden Age. It was the snippets of life he published eight years after the triumph of the first "Don Quixote" that raised him above other writers of the day and laid the foundations for Miguel de Cervantes the legend.

It took Miguel de Cervantes eight years to publish his next work following the success of the first part of "Don Quixote". This is one of many mysteries surrounding Cervantes’s life. Would it not have been more usual to have taken advantage of how well the Ingenious Gentleman had sold to bring out a sequel soon afterwards? Would it not have been logical for Cervantes to have done so bearing in mind that the adventures recounted in the second part begin only a month after the character arrives back in his village? Cervantes returned to the printing press with a singular work: a collection of “novellas” without a narrative framework, beginning with "La gitanilla" (trans. The Little Gypsy Girl), one of his most fascinating and surprising works.
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"The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha" of 1605 is a special kind of chivalric novel in which humour is central to the tale. However, the second part, which came out in 1615, is “something more” – a something more that establishes a dialogue with the first part (and its readers) but also with Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s spurious "Don Quixote" of 1614.

This prodigious story is, without a doubt, the finest of his literary works. It enabled him to explore more deeply the limits of fiction and laid the foundations for the modern novel.
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“Written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes” is how Henry Fielding highlights the strong dependence of his novel Joseph Andrews on the style of fiction devised by Cervantes. It was in England where admiration for Cervantes’s manner of writing prevailed over the overwhelming appeal of the character of Don Quixote, who triumphed in the rest of Europe. It was England that hailed Cervantes as a masterly writer.

Don Quixote is the most widely translated literary work: into 146 languages since 1612 to the present day. English was the first foreign language in which Don Quixote’s adventures could be read: in Thomas Shelton’s translation published in London in 1612. If we are to believe what is stated in the prologue, the translation was made in 1606 or 1607, and the translator took 40 days “Being thereunto more than halfe enforced, through the importunity of a very dear friend, that was desirous to understand the subject.”
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In January 1773, when the Real Academia Española embarked on its project for a standard edition of Don Quixote, Colonel Vicente de los Ríos read out to the institution an “Elogio de Cervantes” (Eulogy to Cervantes) that was the basis of his future biography of Cervantes published in 1780, a year after his death. The project for a biography of Cervantes began a few years earlier, as is stated in this autograph letter, where Vicente de los Ríos establishes with the publisher Antonio de Sancha the terms and conditions for publishing the "Memorias de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, sacadas de sus escritos originales, de documentos auténticos y de autores contemporáneos" (Memoirs of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, taken from his original writings, authentic documents and contemporary authors).

In contrast to the model of annotated edition, which was followed by Reverend John Bowle in his 1781 edition of "Don Quixote" and subsequently by Juan Antonio Pellicer in his own edition of 1797–98, the Real Academia Española decided to take as a basis the London luxury edition of 1738, and accordingly included a new biography at the start of the book, accompanied by a thorough literary analysis of "Don Quixote". Vicente de los Ríos’s biography was one of the most widely followed and respected until Martín Fernández de Navarrete’s was published in 1819.
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The search for new documents on Cervantes following the publication of Martín Fernández de Navarrete’s biography became an obsession. Collections of records such as those compiled by José María Asensio (11 documents), Cristóbal Pérez Pastor (161) Francisco Rodríguez Marín (more than 122) and José de la Torre y del Cerro (40)… form the basis of a good many of today’s biographies. Jerónimo Morán incorporated 17 new documents into his biography of Cervantes, nearly all of them from the Archivo General de Simancas.

They include the"Provisión de los alcaldes de Casa y Corte mandando prender a Miguel Cervantes condenado en rebeldía por haber herido a Antonio Segura datado en Madrid el 15 de septiembre de 1569, que había sido enviado a la Real Academia de la Historia en 1840, que no lo tuvo en cuenta porque consideraban que un duelo podía “manchar” el honor de Cervantes" (Provision of the royal judges ordering the arrest of Miguel Cervantes convicted in absentia of wounding Antonio Segura in Madrid on 15 September 1569, which had been sent to the Royal Academy of History in 1840 and which was not taken into account because it was considered that a duel could “tarnish” Cervantes’s honour).
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Miguel de Cervantes, who died and was buried practically alone in the convent of Trinitarian nuns, lives on through his works and his characters – especially Don Quixote, who has become almost a mirror image of Cervantes himself. Both lie dead. One recovered from the madness caused by his constant reading of chivalric novels. The other driven to distraction by words – all those he was never able to write, all those that life dealt him.

Miguel de Cervantes spent his last years in Madrid in a rented house in Calle León, at the corner of Calle Francos (now Calle Cervantes).

On 23 April 1833 Mesonero Romanos complained of the haste with this this house, the last trace of Cervantes’s presence in Madrid, was demolished:
“Cervantes’s house…! […] How can it be?!” he exclaimed resolutely. “And who dares to profane the dwelling of the joyful writer, the muses’ delight?
“Interest, sir, no doubt interest”.
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