Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares, Spain in 1547, the son of an impoverished barber-surgeon who may have been a minor noble—or posed as one. Little is known of Cervantes' life until, at 23, he went to Italy—by some accounts, fleeing justice after a duel—to join Spain's war against the Ottoman Empire, losing his left arm in the Battle of Lepanto. Sailing home, he was captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Algiers. Eventually ransomed by his family, he returned home in 1580 deeply in debt to his rescuers. He published an unsuccessful novel, La Galatea, married a woman twenty years his junior and, denied permission to emigrate to the New World, became a tax collector.… Keep Reading