Cervantes, Maimed at Lepanto and Five Years a Slave, Wrote the First Modern Novel at Fifty-Seven

He fought through fever at the battle of Lepanto and lost the use of his left hand, spent five years as a slave in Algiers leading escape attempts that always failed, came home to closed doors and a prison cell for his tax accounts, and at fifty-seven published a book whose own prologue admitted it was "begotten in a prison." It became the work the world calls the first modern novel.

The wound that became a name

On the morning of October 7, 1571, aboard the galley Marquesa, a twenty-four-year-old soldier named Miguel de Cervantes had a fever and an order. The Holy League fleet was about to meet the Ottoman navy in the Gulf of Lepanto. His captain and his friends told him to go below to the hold and sit out the fight. He refused. In the testimony he gathered nine years later to prove his conduct, a fellow soldier recalled his answer: it was, he said, "more worth fighting in the service of God and His Majesty, and dying for them, than going below deck." He asked to be posted where the fighting was worst. His captain gave him command of a twelve-man skiff, one of the most exposed positions in the battle.

He came out of Lepanto with three harquebus wounds, two in the chest and one in the left hand. The chest wounds healed. The hand never did, and for the rest of his life he was known by a nickname that reduced the whole man to the one injury: El manco de Lepanto, the one-armed man of Lepanto.

Most men would have let a maiming sink them. Cervantes turned it into a credential, and spent it for four decades. In the self-portrait he printed in the prologue to his Exemplary Novels in 1613, he described himself in the third person: a man "of aquiline face, brown hair, a smooth and unembarrassed forehead, cheerful eyes and a crooked nose, although well-proportioned; silver beards that not twenty years ago were of gold; large moustaches, a small mouth, teeth neither small nor large, since he has only six, and those badly conditioned and worse placed." Then: he "was a soldier for many years, and five and a half years a captive, where he learned to have patience in adversity. He lost the use of his left hand at the naval battle of Lepanto from a harquebus shot, a wound which, although it seems ugly, he holds as beautiful, because he received it in the most memorable and high occasion that past centuries have seen, nor do future ones hope to see." The ugly hand was the beautiful hand. The wound was the résumé. (Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes)

He never stopped saying so. In his long poem Journey to Parnassus, published in 1614, he compressed the whole battle into one line about his own part in it: "I had, although humble, a part in the victory." The humility is real, and so is the insistence on having been there.

Five years in the bagnio

In September 1575, Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo sailed for Spain carrying letters of recommendation from Don John of Austria, the victorious commander of Lepanto. Off the Catalan coast, Barbary corsairs took their ship. The brothers were carried to Algiers to be sold, or, since the letters made the older one look important, held for a ransom that would fetch more than his sale price. The letters that should have opened doors in Madrid instead lengthened his chains. Rodrigo was ransomed in 1577. Miguel was not. He stayed for five years.

What he did in those five years is the part of his life that the scholars now call the making of him. The historian Américo Castro called the captivity "the most transcendental event in his spiritual career." The cervantist Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce called it "the hinge which forcefully organises the entire life of Cervantes." The detail they point at is this: Cervantes organized four escape attempts, led every one, and when each failed he took the blame on himself, knowing the penalty for a captured Christian trying to flee was death. The viceroy of Algiers, Hassan Pasha, had him chained and threatened, then spared him, according to the witnesses, because he believed a man with such letters and such nerve must be worth keeping alive for a higher ransom. The slave who could not stop trying to escape became, by the logic of the slave market, too valuable to kill. (BBC Culture)

When the Trinitarian friars finally paid his ransom in September 1580, Cervantes did not slip away quietly. Before he left Algiers he assembled a formal deposition, his Información, collecting the sworn testimony of fellow captives to prove what he had done in those five years. He knew, even at twenty-nine, that no one would take a maimed, destitute soldier's word for it. He needed witnesses. The document survives.

He also turned the captivity into fiction, again and again. The scholar María Antonia Garcés puts it precisely: "Cervantes's works seem haunted by the re-enactments of trauma, possessed by the continual images and dreams that assault the survivor." He wrote two plays about Algiers, and he made the disorientation of captivity, the gap between what is real and what the mind insists is real, the engine of his greatest characters. In Part One of Don Quixote he sets a long autobiographical episode inside the comic plot, the story a wounded soldier tells at an inn about his years as a captive and a Moorish woman named Zoraida who pays for his freedom. The soldier's life is not Cervantes's exact biography (the fictional captive is taken in a different engagement), but the texture is unmistakable. The captive recalls that "I alone was miserable; for, instead of some naval crown that I might have expected had it been in Roman times, on the night that followed that famous day I found myself with fetters on my feet and manacles on my hands." The man who had actually worn the fetters knew how to put them on a character. (Project Gutenberg)

The doors that closed, and the prison that opened

A hero's homecoming, in the stories, ends with reward. Cervantes came back to Spain a one-armed veteran of Lepanto and a celebrated escapee of Algiers, and asked the Crown for a posting in the Americas. The Council of the Indies refused him. The letters from Don John were worth nothing against a bureaucracy that had no slot for a maimed, untitled soldier with no patron. He married Catalina de Salazar in 1584, published a pastoral romance called La Galatea in 1585 that made no money, and drifted into the only work the state would give a man who could no longer fight: purchasing agent for the Invincible Armada, then tax collector, riding the Andalusian roads for years gathering grain and coin from reluctant villages.

It went about as well as a job can go for a man whose gift is fiction and whose task is arithmetic. In 1597 he was thrown into a prison in Seville for irregularities in his accounts. The exact relation between that prison and the book that came after it is one of the oldest debates in cervantist scholarship, and Cervantes himself handed the debate its best line. When he sat down in 1605 to write the preface to the book he was about to publish, he could not get started. He describes himself sitting stuck, pen behind his ear, cheek in his hand, until an imaginary friend walks in and tells him to stop worrying about the scholarly apparatus his book lacks. The preface that resulted opens with one of the most famous addresses in literature: "Idle reader, thou mayest believe me without any oath that I would this book, as it is the child of my brain, were the fairest, gayest, and cleverest that could be imagined." And then, in the same breath, the admission that ties the whole life to the page: what could his "sterile, ill-tilled wit" beget, he asks, "but the story of a dry, shrivelled, whimsical offspring, full of thoughts of all sorts and such as never came into any other imagination, just what might be begotten in a prison, where every misery is lodged and every doleful sound makes its dwelling?" (Wikisource, Ormsby translation/Volume_1/The_Author%27s_Preface))

He was fifty-seven, and had published almost nothing for twenty years. He called himself the stepfather of his own hero, "for though I pass for the father, I am but the stepfather to Don Quixote," and disclaimed the usual decorations. The book he was apologizing for was El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, published in Madrid in January 1605, the story of a poor gentleman who reads so many chivalric romances he loses his mind and rides out to be a knight, taking a practical peasant named Sancho Panza as his squire. The imaginary friend in the prologue had told him what the book was for: "keep your aim fixed on the destruction of that ill-founded edifice of the books of chivalry." He was demolishing the bestselling genre of his century by writing a better one. Don Quixote was an instant success, reprinted within a year in Madrid, Lisbon, and Valencia, and never out of print in the four centuries since. The world's first bestseller, and the work now conventionally called the first modern novel. (Encyclopædia Britannica)

The thief who forced the masterpiece

Success brought him fame and almost no money; he had sold the rights outright. But the book's popularity created a demand for a sequel, and in 1613, in the prologue to his Exemplary Novels, Cervantes promised one. He was slow. In 1614, before his own second part was finished, a sequel appeared in Tarragona under the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, a man whose real identity has never been established. His prologue, though, was a personal attack: he mocked Cervantes for being old, for being friendless, and, with a cruelty that hit the one nerve Cervantes never stopped guarding, for being one-handed.

The theft did what Cervantes's own discipline had not. It goaded him to finish. His authentic Part Two came out in late 1615, and its prologue is the reply of a man insulted on the subject of his own body. "What I cannot help taking amiss is that he charges me with being old and one-handed," he wrote, "as if it had been in my power to keep time from passing over me, or as if the loss of my hand had been brought about in some tavern, and not on the grandest occasion the past or present has seen, or the future can hope to see. If my wounds have no beauty to the beholder's eye, they are, at least, honourable in the estimation of those who know where they were received; for the soldier shows to greater advantage dead in battle than alive in flight." And the line that turns the insult inside out: "it is not with grey hairs that one writes, but with the understanding, and that commonly improves with years." The man who had been nothing at twenty-seven came into his inheritance at sixty-eight. Avellaneda, whoever he was, made Cervantes angry enough to write the book that, many readers now think, is better than the first. (Wikisource, Ormsby translation/Volume_2/The_Author%27s_Preface))

Part Two is where Don Quixote and Sancho stop being types and become people. The knight learns that a false sequel of his life is circulating, and the knowledge changes him. Cervantes works the forgery into the fiction: Don Quixote meets a character from Avellaneda's book and makes him swear that the "other" Quixote is an impostor, one of the earliest instances in literature of a novel knowing that it is a novel. His prologue to the Exemplary Novels had already boasted of it: "I am the first who has written novels in the Castilian tongue," he had written, and then, with a pride that is also a boast about honesty, "these are my own, not imitated or stolen; my wit engendered them, and my pen gave them birth." The man who could not keep his own rights had nonetheless invented a form, and wanted the record to show whose pen had done the begetting.

The friars who ransomed him, and buried him

He worked to the end. In his last months he finished Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, a romance he had been promising for years. On April 18, 1616, in his house on the Calle del León in Madrid, he received the last rites. The next day, dropsied and dying, he wrote the dedication of the Persiles to his patron the Count of Lemos. "Yesterday they gave me extreme unction and today I write this," it begins. "Time is brief, anxieties grow, hopes diminish, and yet I carry on living with the desire I have to live." And the closing line: "Goodbye, graces; goodbye, charms; goodbye, rejoicing friends; for I am dying, and longing to see you soon happy in the other life!" The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica called it "the most moving and gallant of farewells." (1911 Encyclopædia Britannica)

He died on April 22, 1616, and was buried the next day, by his own wish, in the church of the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians in Madrid. The choice was not casual. The Trinitarians were the order whose friars had walked into Algiers thirty-six years earlier and paid the ransom that bought him out of slavery. He went back to the people who had bought his body. (Wikipedia)

A legend attached itself to his death almost at once: that he died on the same day as Shakespeare. He did not. England was still on the Julian calendar, Spain on the Gregorian, and the two dates that look identical are ten days apart. Shakespeare died on what England called April 23, 1616, which was May 3 in Madrid. The coincidence is a calendar accident, though a fitting one, and it is why the world marks World Book Day on April 23. The two writers never knew of each other. (Yale University Press)

His grave then did the thing his life had done: it disappeared. When the convent was rebuilt in 1673 his remains were moved, and at some point the location was lost for more than three centuries. In 2015, a team digging quietly under the convent, so as not to disturb the cloistered nuns above, came upon a splintered coffin marked with the letters MC, holding the bones of an older man with a maimed left arm. The one-armed man of Lepanto, found at last by his rib. (BBC Culture)

He left behind a shelf of work and almost no portrait. No authenticated image of Cervantes exists. The face we think we know is the one he wrote, in words, in his own prologue. The novelist who practiced what his biographer Jean Canavaggio calls "autobiographisme," the habit of pouring his own life into his fiction, became his own portraitist. (Collège de France)

He was a soldier who could not stop fighting, a captive who could not stop escaping, a tax collector who could not balance his books, and a man who could not get anyone to give him a job, and the book that all of that produced is the one a thousand authors have since called the best ever written.

Read the full life: Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes (Mazarine, 1986; Prix Goncourt de la Biographie; English translation by J. R. Jones, W. W. Norton, 1990), the standard modern biography and the most important since Fitzmaurice-Kelly's 1913 life. Also worth seeking out: William Byron's Cervantes (Cassell, 1978), Andrés Trapiello's Las vidas de Cervantes (Destino, 2nd ed. 2002), and the Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (2002).