Great Names in History

A few days after his wedding Cervantes must already have suspected that he had made a mistake. His wife was pretty and passably wealthy but he couldn’t stand her little town. How was he going to spend the rest of his life on a farm? He had wasted his youth first marching around Italy and then playing cards in an old Turkish bath in Algiers while he was a prisoner of the pirates. Would he waste the next best years being a country gentleman, hunting partridges and rabbits and husbanding vineyards?

Every chance he got he left the farm and went to Madrid to see old friends, including maybe his lover La Franca and their daughter.
But it seemed like it was always time to return to the damned farm.

Wasn’t he glad to see his young wife? No one knows. Perhaps he really loved her, perhaps he had only married her for her money. However that was, after nineteen months he pulled out of Esquivias.
“I’m going down to Seville to look for a job,” he told Catalina.

He had a good friend there, a former comic actor named Tomás. Tomás had decided that making monkey shines on a stage was never going to bring him much money so he left Madrid and went home to Seville, where he ran an inn now. It wasn’t just any inn—it was probably the most luxurious one in Seville. The best people in town stopped in there—nobles, rich empresarios, high government officials. “Come on down south and stay at my place,” Tomás had written to Cervantes. “Good jobs are dealt out here at my tables over drinks. I can introduce you to some very important people. Probably in less than a week you will nail something.” Cervantes had grown up in Seville and loved the booming city. It was the biggest, the busiest city in Spain at the time. “Save me a room,” he wrote Tomás. “I’m coming.”

He stayed at Tomás’s inn for two weeks. What kind of talk did he hear? Spain had just beaten the Portuguese in a decisive naval battle and everyone was euphoric—cocky. “That’s one enemy down,” said the men at the inn. “Now let’s go get those damned English.” They had heard about the execution of the Catholic Queen Mary Stuart and wanted revenge on the Protestants. “And we’re getting sick and tired of those English pirates, who have been getting away with murder for decades. It’s time to hang the whole lot—right boys?” And they would raise glasses of wine and vow to undo the English. King Philip saw that the whole country was in a mood of revenge and heroism and he decided to take advantage of it. “How many ships do you think we can assemble?” he asked the Duke of Alba. “The time is right to win back England for the Church.” For the Crown too.

One day while the inn was crowded with customers Tomás called Cervantes over. “See those two men by the window? The fat one is Antonio de Guevara. The King has just appointed him Head Comissary for a great Armada. That other fellow is Diego de Valdivia, Guevara’s adjutant. I’m going to introduce you to them. They are looking for commissaries to collect provisions for the fleet. The money is very good.”

The two nobles told Cervantes exactly what he would have to do. “The King needs wheat and oil to make the sailors’ biscuits. Of course the Crown cannot afford the huge sums necessary to pay for all that. But His Majesty is sure every Spaniard will want to cooperate in the undertaking, which the Almighty has surely ordained.”

“I see,” said Cervantes. “Requisitioning. The grain and oil will be collected by force.”

“Correct,” said the big Guevara. “Our commissaries will collect from each landowner an amount that we have fixed. You will simply go to his residence and present the official writ. Then at the granary you will supervise the actual transferral of the grain and oil to the King’s siloes. The Crown will pay you twelve reales a day.”

“And if the landowner or farmer refuses to open his bins?”

“As His Majesty’s commissary you will have full powers to oblige him to do so. Should the man refuse to cooperate, you will have him imprisoned.”

Cervantes was back on the farm when his offical appointment came through. What did he tell Catalina as he prepared to go south? Neither knew he would spend the next fifteen years collecting taxes in all the towns and villages of Andalucía. “Your mother wanted me to administer your family fortune, right?” he must have said. “Well, within two years I will double it—or my name is Charlie.”

He did and he didn’t. At one time he had thousands of maravedis in his hands but they disappeared mysteriously. “There are really only two ways he could have lost that money,” says a biographer. “Either he made bad investments or he gambled it away.”

“Cervantes must have been quite a card-shark,” says another of his biographers, “after all those years in the army and in the Turkish bath. In his stories he shows familiarity with all the games of the time.”
Perhaps at the gaming table they called him Charlie.

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Cervantes had had enough of soldiering. He had seen some famous action in Lepanto but much more inaction on marches and in barracks. He was in the best years of his life and now he had made up his mind to go home and become a writer in Madrid.
He and his younger brother both resigned from the army and got on a ship in Naples.

Not long after they set out a storm came up and separated their ship from the others. Pirates spotted it, chased and captured it, and carried the passengers to Algeria to be sold as slaves or ransomed.

Algiers was one of the most prosperous cities in the world then because of the pirates and the slave-trade.  It was as populous as Naples or Rome. Cervantes must have despaired as he was led in chains through the city on his way to an abandoned Turkish bath, where there were dozens of other captured Christians. Most were waiting to be auctioned off to Moorish kings or Turkish pashas; a few, the most important men, would be kept for ransom. Cervantes happened to be carrying letters of recommendation which made his captors believe he was a personage of some importance. That saved him and his brother from the auction block. A high ransom was fixed for them and they were treated less harshly.

For the next five years Cervantes lived as a prisoner in Algiers, waiting to be ransomed. His mother and father were not able to come up with the high ransom for him and his brother. Three times Trinitarian friars travelled to Algiers to negotiate with his owner Dalí Mamí, but he would not lower his price. Finally, for all the money the friars offered, Mamí agreed to let Miguel’s brother go—but not Miguel.

He meanwhile tried to escape. One way was to secretly arrange to be picked up by a Spanish ship. The problem, besides the difficulty of contacting a captain who was willing to take the risk, was in getting to the coast. Cervantes actually pulled off a great escape from the baths, along with fourteen other captives. They hid in a cave above the coast for five months (or so a witness claimed ) until they were discovered. The gardener who had aided them and who probably fed them was hanged. Cervantes was put in chains but not for long. No one knows why he wasn’t punished more severely. Perhaps it had to do with his new owner. About this time Dalí Mamí sold him for 500 gold escudos to a pirate-lord named Hassan. Why did Hassan buy him? What did Cervantes have to offer? In any case he kept trying to escape; and every time Hassan re-captured him, though he punished the others “barbarously”, he always seemed to go soft when it came to passing sentence on Miguel.

After moving heaven but not earth Cervantes’ family finally managed to scrape together three hundred of the five hundred escudos Hassan had fixed for his ransom and they pleaded with the Trinitarian friars to try one more time to get him freed. “It won’t work,” said the friars. “Three hundred is not enough. Hassan won’t come down even one maravedí.” But they added on forty-five escudos from a donation and made the trip to Algiers. Cervantes wasn’t the only man they were going to try to free. Hassan wanted five hundred escudos each for two other Spaniards and a thousand for someone named Palafox. There was no way to deal with Hassan—he could see the friars were loaded with cash and he supposed there was more where that came from.
So the friars decided to pay his price, the full five hundred escudos, and rescue at least one man: Miguel de Cervantes.

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When you first see the windmills on the great hill of Consuegra you will remember Don Quijote.
He thought they weren’t windmills but evil giants standing haughtily in front of him; and he bravely tilted his lance and charged, the world’s champion.
They do look very strange.

Spanish windmills are nothing like the ones you see in Holland or France. They don’t look like houses or sheds: there is no more architecture to them than there is to a child’s sandcastle made with his pail. Simple cylinders of mud and stone, with a cap on. And of course the propellers or blades, without their sails now because no one makes flour with a windmill anymore.

Spaniards whitewash them, the same as they do their houses. There is usually the slightest window halfway up to the top, for light, and a few more square holes near the top. Spanish houses never liked big windows either. Along with the light the terrible heat comes in.

There are normally two floors inside. The first is used for storage. The grinding takes place on the second floor, just under the hood, where the propellers turn a huge flat stone.

The propellers are fixed to the hood, which can revolve. Hanging down at the back is a long pole. The miller pushes it to make the propellers face the wind. When the windmill was in use, the miller had to dress the propellers with canvas, as though they were the sails of a ship. The guides who show you the windmills nowadays love to fascinate with the old jargon. There were names for all the parts of the great “ship” and the millers were experts in wind and weather, like real sailors.

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Cervantes had a useless left hand—a war wound. Nowadays we would call him a disabled veteran.

The man who had the cheek to write a second part of Don Quijote called Cervantes an “old one-armed guy.” That really burned him. “If my wounds don’t shine so brightly in the eyes of one [Avellaneda] who sees them, at least they are esteemed in the eyes of those who know where they came from.”

They came from the Battle of Lepanto. He was hit twice in the chest and once in the left hand by arquebus bullets.

Compared to many, he got off easy. Forty of the soldiers packed into his little skiff died, including the captain, and a hundred were wounded. Cervantes fought heroically. And he had insisted on going into battle though he had a high fever and had been vomiting all night and might have retired honorably behind the lines.

There are many accounts of that famous battle by soldiers who took part, writers many of them. They had all marched to war with romantic visions of glory.
The Battle of Lepanto was no parade. You wonder how any of the soldier-sailors survived at all—on either side. Nearly 600 ships and 180,000 men clashed in a hellish confusion of cannon-fire and desperate no-quarter fighting. Cannon, arquebus, and musket fire came from all sides, the boats had no room to manuever, there was constant ramming and hand-to-hand combats after boarding. Everywhere ships were on fire. In the middle of the battle the Turks’ slave-oarsmen revolted (understandably). There was no way to stop the slaughter. No one could hear above the cannons and the shouting or breathe in the gunsmoke. The sea was full of dead and dying men, and red with their blood. Thousands drowned or were scorched by the flames.

Cervantes’ chest wounds were serious and he was taken back to a hospital in Italy. His younger brother, who had also fought at Lepanto, probably helped care for him until he was out of danger. His hand never did become normal. Yet the disability was not serious enough for him to give up soldiering. He took part in another expedition and stayed in the army for another year before calling it quits. He finally decided to go home and become a writer.

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Don Quijote read so many novels about knights and dragons and fair damsels in distress that it unsettled his mind.  In his famous book Cervantes shows great familiarity with those libros de caballerías, as they were called: he had fallen for them too.  He wasn’t the only Spaniard in sixteenth-century Spain that got hooked on them.  Another was Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. And another was Teresa of Avila, the great mystic.

Teresa was afterwards very sorry she had wasted so much time on them. Her mother read them too but was able to put them down when it was time to work.  Not so Teresa:  “I fell into the habit of reading them…and it didn’t seem at all bad to spend many hours of the day and night on such a frivolous activity, without my father’s knowing it.  This love became so extreme that if I didn’t have a new book I didn’t feel happy…”

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Miguel de Cervantes is considered the greatest Spanish author—the Shakespeare of Spanish letters.
People who go to England make the excursion, the pilgrimage, to Stratford-on-Avon, to see Shakespeare’s house. Who goes to see Cervantes’? Few.
Where is it?
Not far from Madrid, in a little town called Esquivias. It is an old farmhouse, with a pretty patio recently made into a theater, and a stable for a dozen mules that has been turned into an exhibition hall.
Shakespeare’s place was the fruit of a prosperous career. He bought it after retirement and settled down to enjoy himself. Cervantes didn’t build this old farmhouse or even buy it. It belonged to his wife’s parents. At the time of his marriage, Cervantes was broke. He had recently come back to Spain after five years of captivity in Northern Africa, with a left arm that made him useless for manual work. He had been a soldier and the maimed arm was a battle wound. Now he was trying to make a living as a writer in Madrid, and he wasn’t doing very well.

In the “office” of his wife’s house, now conditioned with furniture from his time to look just as it must have looked in 1584, he wrote a novel, now unreadable, and some plays, now never staged. He didn’t stay long in Catalina’s comfortable house. Seeing that he wasn’t going to become a famous playwright, he decided to go south and look for work as a tax collector.
It would be twenty years before he wrote the first part of his great Don Quijote.

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