Great Names in History

The Carthaginians were right: it took time to train sailors and oarsmen and Rome didn’t have time. But that wasn’t the first problem Rome ever had. Rome had been having problems for five hundred years. They believed problems could all be solved with a little thought and a little trial and error. This one was chickenfeed. “While the ships are being built, take the men out on that field and teach them rowing,” ordered the general.

“On the ground, sir?”

“Sure.”

“But we don’t have any oars, sir.”

The general didn’t like that kind of objection—one with such an obvious solution. “What is an oar? An oar is a long pole. Get a bunch of long poles—what’s the difference?”

“Yes, sir.”

Soon the fields were full of men sitting in rows of five, pushing and pulling on long poles. A pacer pounded on a drum to give them the rhythm.

As soon as the ships were in the water—in only sixty days, if you can believe Polybius—, the oarsmen went aboard, hopped onto their benches, and started rowing with real oars. There was no time to lose. They rowed right out to meet the Carthaginian ships.

What about tactics? The Romans had never thought about what sailors did out there on the sea when enemy ships met. They didn’t know or care about fleet tactics and ramming. Their objective, once they came up to an enemy, was to jump on his ship and kill him. There was nothing like the good old sword and shield.

Most oarsmen on those Carthaginian ships weren’t used to hand-to-hand combat. They thought their job was done once their ship had rammed the enemy ship. A few troops on the deck above them took care of the surrender and reduced any of the enemy sailors that resisted.

The oarsmen on the new Roman quinqueremes were all experienced soldiers. They saw themselves not as sailors but as soldiers doing the temporary but necessary duty of marching over the sea to meet the enemy—marching in a strange way: marching by sitting still and rowing: but marching.

“I’ve been wondering how we’re going to board their ships when we get out there?” one of the more imaginative Roman oarsmen asked the others on their way out to meet the enemy.

It’s true: try to jump from one ship to another, even on a calm sea, even without the confusion of battle and arrows and stones flying through the air. The two ships, even with their gunwales side-by-side, don’t go up and down on the waves at the same time; and when you try to jump, the harder you push with your feet to lift yourself off, the farther down you go into your own boat. And the ships don’t stay together for long either.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” somebody said. And they did. It wasn’t a bridge but a gangplank.

Now came the kind of practical solution to a problem the Romans were famous for. It wasn’t really an invention. The Romans never invented much. It wasn’t some genius’s brainstorm. And it didn’t occur out of the blue. It came to several men at once probably, because their experience in combat brought them all to the same conclusion. “What we need is some kind of gangplank to carry on our ships,” said the generals. “One we can throw across their deck as soon as we bang up against them. Then our men can run right onto their ship.” A portable gangway was nothing novel. A lot of ships must have carried them and still do. But how do you heave such a heavy thing onto the enemy’s deck from your side, without help? The answer was the “Crow”.

Reader: Thank God.

The Romans built a nice long gangplank, four feet by thirty-six, with wooden guardrails. They cut a slot in it at one end and stuck a long pole through the slot. The pole they stood up on deck and fixed solidly like a mast. At the top of the pole they attached a pulley and ran a rope through it down to the other end of the gangplank. By means of that rope they could raise and lower the gangplank. It swiveled around easily because of the loose slot at the base of the pole or mast.

“That is fine as a way of getting our men across,” said the general after he was shown one of these experimental gangplanks. “The hitch I see is that the enemy isn’t going to let the thing lie there on their deck. They’re going to keep pushing it off. We need a way of keeping it in place and also of locking those two boats together. Why don’t you put a big spike on the end of the gangway? When we lower it, the weight will drive the spike right through their deck.”

Soon all the Roman ships were equipped with one of these gangplanks. They were stood up more or less vertically until they were needed. The enemy saw them and at first didn’t know what they were for. Nor did they care. They knew that the Romans were lousy sailors and all you had to do was ram their ships or drive them aground. Even to the Romans the gangways looked odd. They looked like a big bird—the spike was its beak. They started calling them “crows”. “Get the old crow [corvus in Latin] ready,” the captain would shout as they headed for an enemy quinquereme .

The crow was set up near the bow of the Roman ship and it could be swung around left, right, or forward, depending on the point of contact. It fell with a heavy slam and stapled the two ships together very firmly. As soon as it was down the Roman sailor-soldiers ran across: the first two holding up their shields to protect the men coming behind them. They took every ship they could board. The result was that soon the Carthaginians got very leery of Roman ships with crows and wouldn’t go near them. Their old ramming tactic was obsolete.

Return to The Crow:or the First Punic War (Part 1)

The Crow: or the First Punic War (Part 2)

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It wasn’t the Carthaginians that seized Messana. It was a bunch of silly mercenaries.

Messana is in Sicily. And just down the island is the city of Syracuse, which was an old Greek colony run by a king or what the Greeks called a tyrant.
Not long after the Romans had eliminated their last enemy on the peninsula, a band of mercenaries who had been working for that tyrant of Syracuse got the bright idea to take Messana on their own, for themselves. They massacred a lot of people and set themselves up in the citadel. The tyrant immediately tried to get Messana free and laid siege. The mercenaries, who hadn’t planned too far ahead, now realized they couldn’t hold out and called for help. Some called to Rome and some called to Carthage.

Both Rome and Carthage showed up with forces; Carthage, because it didn’t want Rome in Sicily; and Rome, because it didn’t want Carthage to grab any more of Sicily than it already had, which was about half. Carthage already ruled Africa and the best part of Spain and all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian Seas. If they got hold of Messana they would soon take the rest of the island. And once they had Sicily, they would strangle Rome. They could close the whole Mediterranean to Roman shipping.

At one moment there were three armies parked out in front of Messana. Seeing the trouble that was ahead, the Syracusan tyrant decided to let the giants slug it out and took his troops home. That left Carthage and Rome facing each other. That is how the First Punic War began. The fight was about Sicily.

The First Roman Fleet

The first thing a Roman commander always did was to get his troops off the water as fast as he could. He was helpless against those Carthaginian ships, which came on with great speed and rammed a Roman transport and sank it with all its soldiers. The Romans didn’t have a single warship. They didn’t even know how to build one. They had never paid attention to ships. A ship was just a floating container, wasn’t it?
But now if they were going to fight Carthage they needed warships. “So let’s build a fleet of warships and go out there and get those bastards.”

“This fact illustrates better than any other the extraordinary spirit and audacity of the Romans,” says Polybius, the Greek historian who went to see Rome just after the wars with Carthage. “It was not a question of having adequate resources for the enterprise, for they had in fact none whatsoever, nor had they ever given a thought to the sea before this. But once they had conceived the idea they embarked on it so boldly that without waiting to gain any experience in naval warfare they immediately engaged the Carthaginians, who had for generations enjoyed an unchallenged supremacy at sea.”

How do you make a warship? “See if you can’t get hold of one of those Carthaginian quinqueremes,” the Roman consuls told their engineers, “and discover how the darned things are constructed.”

What is a quinquereme? Warships couldn’t depend on the wind so they had oarsmen to make them go. The bigger the ship and the faster you wanted it to go, the more oarsmen. Carthaginian ships liked to ram an enemy; so they needed a lot of oarsmen to get up speed. And they were outfitted with a brass beak just under water-level to pierce the enemy hulls. Quinqueremes had long rows of oars with five [quinque=five] men to an oar. This gave them the strong motor they needed.

Lucky Rome. One day a Carthaginian quinquereme ran aground while trying to sink a Roman transport and the Roman soldiers captured it and called their engineers to come and study it. Now they had a model. Right away they set about building one hundred quinqueremes on this model.

Next problem: Rome was going to have a fleet of quinqueremes but where would it get all the sailors to row them?
The Carthaginians heard about Rome’s shipbuilding fantasies and scoffed.
“In the first place,” they said, “we’d be awfully surprised if their ships were as good as ours. And even if they were, it isn’t ships that make a fleet, but sailors. We’ve been sailors all our lives and for generations. You don’t become a sailor overnight. And what about oarsmen? Do they think they can learn to row a quinquereme in a month or two? It’s going to be fun to see that fleet of theirs on parade—we can hardly wait.”

Reader: I don’t think I can wait either. I have been waiting too long for the crow and there is no crow. I started to read this post because of your title and now I feel tricked.

Thank you for staying. The crow will appear in Part Three. When you see it you will be glad you held out through the history lesson.

Reader: I wonder.

See: The Crow: or the First Punic War (Part 3)

What if you are a great army but your enemy is a great navy?

You know how to march with fine discipline over hill and dale. You pitch a dandy camp, a real fortress with high walls and a ditch, that nobody is fool enough to attack. On the field, man to man, with your spear, your sword and your shield, you can beat any enemy that is brave enough to stand up to you. But your enemy is out there on the sea, floating on big ships, and just laughing at your predicament. You don’t have any warships, only a few barges and ferries. You can’t go out there and get him—you don’t even know how to swim.

That happened to Rome. The enemy out there calling him a landlubber was Carthage; and if anybody was a sailor, it was a Carthaginian. Those fellows had been sailing around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. They had even been brave enough to push on past the Pillars of Hercules into an unknown ocean, and south down the coast of Africa. They loved the mist and the smell of the salt-sea . At night when they lay down on the rolling deck, they felt as cosy as the Roman soldier in his square camp and pup-tent. They looked up at the same sky, though the Carthaginian liked to imagine the old heroes and figures he saw in the constellations, and the Roman wondered how he could organize that mess of stars a little.

Rome had been fighting its neighbors for five hundred years and chasing them around the peninsula. Rome was busy with the Gauls, the Etruscans, the Latins, the Sabines, the Samnites, and the occasional Greek. She worked her way south on the Boot and finally came to its toe. When the soldiers lifted their heads after the last battle, they saw the sea. No more Italy, no more neighbors to fight—they had conquered them all. They saw the sea and of course those grinning Carthaginian ships.

They knew Carthage controlled the Mediterranean but up till then they didn’t care about the Mediterranean. “You stay out of my hair and I’ll stay out of yours,” the Romans had told the Carthaginians, who signed a treaty or two with them about staying out of waters where Carthage had no intention of going anyway. “When we feel like it, we’ll go anywhere we want to,” the Carthaginians said to themselves, even while they signed the treaties and shook hands with those rude Romans who didn’t seem to understand the world.

The Romans weren’t sailors but they had always done some trade along the coast with the Greek colonies in the sole and the heel of their Boot and with Greece itself. Roman ships were barely sea-worthy—just barges and transport vessels like wooden boxes; but they were good enough to haul the goods as long as they watched for storms and hugged the coast and went slowly. The boats left Ostia, the port nearest Rome, sailed down the west side of the Boot, slipped between the toe and Sicily, which it kicks, and then headed east for the heel, Tarentum, or right on to Greece. And back.

That route, if it can be called a route, was the one Rome had taken for centuries. It was a very low-profile route: no one had ever tried to block it. Rome knew there was one very vulnerable point—just the place somebody COULD cause trouble if he wanted to. That was Messana—or rather, the Straits of Messana—the narrow sea between the tip of the Boot and Sicily. Block that and all trade would stop. No ship would get by. Life in Rome could get hard if the Straits were blocked for long. Every time the Romans looked out to sea and saw those cocky Carthaginian ships jumping up and down, they worried a little. “If we ever get into war with Carthage and Carthage blocks those straits, we’re going to have big trouble,” they warned each other. “What kind of sacrifices do you make to Pluto? Have to check up on those.” They knew what to do to make Mars happy; but, to be honest, they had neglected Pluto, who was the sea-god.

Reader: Where is the crow? I keep waiting for the crow to appear.

The crow will appear in a minute. First you need background. You saw that the Straits of Messana were the Achilles’ Toe of the Boot of Italy, if you will; and that the worst thing that could happen to Rome was a war with Carthage, who controlled the seas. Guess what is going to happen.

See The Crow (Part Two)

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(This monster is not by Leonardo but by Michelangelo)

One day Leonardo da Vinci’s dad knocked on his door. “Haven’t you finished that shield yet? The guy’s been waiting for it for over two months?”

Leonardo called from deep inside his room. “Just a minute!” Not even his dad had ever entered. It was a wizard’s workshop and contained secrets. “All right! Come in.”

“Ugh!” said his dad, wincing as he walked in. “Stinks like the devil in here. Don’t you smell…..?”

And then he let go a howl of fear. “What is THAT?” His eyes were fixed on a strange monster wriggling in a corner of the room. It looked like no animal on earth—in fact, it looked like a dragon.

“Fine,” said Leonardo, who had been watching his father’s reaction. He walked over to the monster, picked it up, and handed it to his dad. “You can take it now—I see that it works,” he told him.
It was a monster he had painted on the buckler, snarling and threatening, looking so real his father had been frightened. “Incredible!” his dad said, beginning to smile. “How did you make it?”

Leonardo opened the shutters of the only window in the room and let light fill the room. There on his work-table were the bodies and parts of bodies of a dozen animals. “I make my own monsters,” Leonardo explained. “I took the scales from this carp and the wings and teeth from this huge bat and the crest from this rooster and I glued them onto the body of the lizard here. I thought he needed a longer tail too, so I used this snake. When he was all assembled and propped up, I painted him on the shield. Before you came in here I set it up in the half-light to see if you would think it was real, and you did, so I’m satisfied. I hope your friend who ordered the buckler will like it.”

Leonardo was sorry his dragon wasn’t really alive, of course. One day a caretaker working in the Medici gardens found an enormous and strange-looking lizard and brought it to him. “This reminds me of one of your painted dragons,” he told him.
It reminded Leonardo too, and he started thinking how he could spruce up this real dragon a bit–improve on nature. First he made some wings for it, covered them with real scales, and glued them on its back. When the lizard moved the wings wagged. Then he gave the dragon a beard and horns and bigger eyes. He kept it in a box and “used to show it to his friends and frighten the life out of them,” says Vasari, his first biographer.

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In old Rome buildings collapsed all the time.  They were too tall for their base and the walls were too thin.  Hear that distant rumble?  That’s another rickety building going down somewhere in the City.

According to a census of buildings made at the time of Septimius Severus the usual city block (insula) was around 300 square meters—hardly broad enough to carry a structure twenty meters high, which was a typical height by then—three or four stories of shaky construction.   Greedy builders found ways of thinning the walls by adding rows of bricks to strengthen the concrete or the adobe; and they kept pushing skyward.

The poet Juvenal lived in a tipsy third-floor apartment but he had neighbors who had to climb higher to reach home. “Who at cool Praeneste, or at Volsinii amid its leafy hills,” he whined,” was ever afraid of his house tumbling down?….But here we inhabit a city propped up for the most part by slats: for that is how the landlord patches up the crack in the old wall, asking the boarders to sleep peacefully under the ruin that hangs above their heads.”

Augustus was so alarmed by the frequent collapse of buildings that he issued an edict forbidding private citizens to construct an edifice higher than twenty meters.  But buildings kept growing tall and keeling over.  A hundred year later Trajan in desperation tried reducing the legal height to eighteen meters but he could not buck the greedy builders or the need for more housing.

By the fourth century Rome was world-famous for her tall buildings—many were five and six stories high.

And one skyscraper towered above them all: the legendary INSULA OF FECULA. That monstrosity was an apartment building so tall that it became a  tourist attraction, like Trajan’s Column and the Pantheon.  No one knows just how tall it was or how it met its end.  Maybe a storming Visigoth toppled it with a swat of his sword.

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It was the middle of March, 85 BC—the Ides, in fact. The whole family turned up at the not-very-big house in the Subura district—hardly an aristocratic one. Julius, still in his toga praetexta, his boy’s toga, went to meet them one by one at the door as they arrived. It was his big day: the day he would become a Roman citizen and put on the toga virilis. He kept adjusting his toga and brushing his hair with his hands. He was handsome and had spent time at the mirror studying what he thought were penetrating glances. But then while he spoke to the guests and followed a thought, he forgot about how he looked.

His family collecting in the atrium were old Roman patricians except for Uncle Marius. Uncle Marius had been a plough-boy. He was a short man with big hands and a peasant’s loud way of talking. Now he was retired but seven-times he had been consul. He had saved Rome at least twice. He had defeated the proud African king Jugurtha in battle and brought him to Rome in chains; he had reformed the army in time to save the Republic from a massive barbarian invasion of Teutons and Cimbri in the north. Marius was insensitive to the fineries Caesar was used to; but Caesar was able to overcome his distaste for Marius’ manners while they talked and to learn from him. And Marius was able to overcome his distaste for Caesar’s foppish manners because he saw that the boy had a mind.

Marius was married to Caesar’s Aunt Julia. Julia and her sister Aurelia, Caesar’s mother, were the kind of educated, intelligent women Rome was famous for. They were from noble old families and ones in which the girls received the same instruction as the boys and joined in the talk on every subject from war and politics to literature and art. They were married to the best men their dad could find. For Aurelia he managed a match with the Julius family—one of the oldest patrician gentilitates in Italy. And for her sister he won a marriage with Marius, now champion of the popular faction and one of the most influential men in Rome.
When they saw each other the two women hugged with tears in their eyes. They were always elegantly dressed but today their ornatrices had been particularly punctilious. “My God you look beautiful,” Julia told her younger sister. “Anyone would say you are Julius’ sister.”

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Who was the last to see Alexander, the greatest man of ancient times?
The Emperor Augustus, according to the Roman biographer Suetonius.
But how could that be? Augustus lived three hundred years later.

This way:
Augustus was in Egypt. He had just won the last battle, Accio, in his war against Mark Anthony and had chased and caught up with him in Alexandria. Cornered, Anthony told Augustus: “I think we could come to an understanding.”
“I don’t,” said Augustus. And he told Anthony to make his exit like a good Roman.

Anthony’s lover Cleopatra knew that Augustus wanted her very badly too. As yet another lover? No; as the star in chains of the triumph parade he was planning for Rome. So she decided to avoid that humiliation by making her exit like a good Cleopatra: with a snake—the famous asp. Augustus discovered her still warm and called in specialists to try to extract the poison and save her. But they were too late.

While he was in Alexandria, putting things in order, making Egypt into a better supplier of grain for Rome, the locals asked him if he’d like to see Alexander the Great.
This is how Suetonius puts it:

“…having placed before him the sarcophagus and the body of Alexander the Great, which was taken out of its tomb, [Augustus] honored him with a golden crown which he placed on his head and covered him with flowers….” (Suetonius, Life of Augustus, chapter XVIII)

“Do you want to see Ptolomeo, too?” the Egyptians asked. “We can show you him.”
“That’s enough,” said Augustus “I came to Egypt to see a king, not the dead.”

..

The crypt was chilly and musty. He remembered waiting for the oracle at Delphi, which was fragrant with bay leaves and barley.
His mind began to drift. He began thinking about the march that would begin that same afternoon and he wished he had brought along something to write with or could begin dictating orders to a scribe. A shame to be wasting time like this.

Finally the voice came. “Pilgrim, come forth!” This time it was a girl’s voice. It was cheerful, not lugubrious or trance-like as he had suspected it would be. Pilgrim, eh? So the old priest hadn’t forgotten that one and was directing the oracle. Damn!

Caesar walked forward a few paces and saw an open niche on the wall. A cloth like a curtain hung on the other side and blocked his view of the oracle.
“Blessed is the man who comes to the god,” she said. “Welcome!”

The girl spoke very slowly and clearly in faultless Greek. She had been chosen to be an oracle as a child and educated by other, older oracles in a school for priestesses. They all spoke Greek and their model was the Delphic Pythia or perhaps the oracles at the Temple of Apollo in Athens. Hearing such competent Greek charmed Caesar, who loved language and good diction. He had expected to hear an ignorant girl talk clumsily. This oracle spoke classical Greek better than he himself. That was the way a god would speak, all right. Now that was a start!

He reached up and moved the curtain aside to see the girl. A woman of about his own age sat on a tripod, so high her head nearly touched the ceiling. She wore a simple tunic and her blonde hair was cut short. She looked intelligent. She didn’t notice Caesar. He looked around the room where she sat and was relieved to see she was alone: the High Priest had gone. Caesar quietly closed the curtain again.

“Child of the gods,” began the oracle. “Caesar!” She had learned his name. “Do not be troubled. Fortune has favored you above all other men. She will assist you and protect you until your work is accomplished here above. You must have faith—She will not abandon you, though now it seems that you have been cast aside. Do not complain, as you did yesterday after seeing the statue of Alexander. Yes—by your age he had conquered the world. But his place in Fortune’s plan was less important than yours.”

“Less important?” said Caesar. “Less important than being a tax-collecting quaestor in Spain, two thousand miles from Rome? Less important than collecting debts from Pompey’s clients here? It is Pompey whom Fortune has favored, not Caesar.
Caesar is nobody. My military career went nowhere. Sure, at Mytilene I won the the civic crown but so have half the centurions in the army. Compare that to my Uncle Marius’s record. He beat King Jugurtha and saved the country. Then he beat the Cimbri and the Teutons and saved it again. He was consul seven times. Even my father was praetor.
And as a lawyer I did no better. I showed promise—promise! They told me I spoke as well as Cicero—very helpful! But that didn’t help me win my first case against Dolabella. I had to leave Rome to protect myself afterwards. Between Sulla’s people and the oppositon of the Optimates, I simply can’t get anywhere. Or rather, I get to Hispania Ulterior.”

“You were sent here by the gods.”

“Then they must have no use for me either,” whined Caesar.

“Man of little faith! You are not to presume to know more than they, Caesar.
Don’t you even believe the words that you yourself pronounced at your Aunt Julia’s funeral last year—that you are descended from a hero-king and a goddess? Do you dare to be cynical even here, in the presence of the god?”

Caesar accepted her scolding. For the last time in his life he became the serious child his mother and his Aunt Julia had brought up.
“I was so moved at Julia’s funeral because I was ashamed of myself. She had so much faith in me. I spent half my boyhood at Aunt Julia’s. My Uncle Marius was the consul. They loved me and believed they were bringing up a future consul. I sat at table with them and listened to all the great men of Rome—all the great men who were not Optimates, of course, and whom Marius had forced out of Rome. Sulla was in Asia with his army and we all knew that there would be trouble, probably a civil war, when he came home. But during those years Rome belonged to us, to the people. I was sure I was going to have a brilliant future. Then Sulla came back, he took terrible vengeance and the Optimates got back into power. Since then they have been foiling every plan I ever had. Aunt Julia’s education was not enough. All my talents are not enough. It was only with much bribing that I was able to become quaestor.”

“You speak as though your life were through,” said the oracle. “The best you are meant to do lies ahead. What was the dream the gods sent you?”

“A nightmare, Oracle, a dream full of troubled, unnatural, vicious acts.”

“Don’t be afraid,” said the girl. “Perhaps the vicious acts were not so at all.”

“In the dream I slept with my mother,” said Caesar.

“And you possessed her?”

“I raped her.”

The oracle never hesitated. “That wasn’t your mother but the very Earth, Gea. You possessed the earth itself, the common parent of all mankind. The name of Caesar will live for thousands of years, long after those of Marius and Pompey have been forgotten. You are the man who has been chosen to save your nation from destruction. Because of you, Rome will continue to rule and to civilize the earth until it is ready for another kind of empire and a greater design of the heavenly Creator.”

I wish I could believe that, thought Caesar.
In fact, he did believe it. He had always felt his own superiority to the men around him. He took it for granted. He could never simply watch or suffer the circumstances of his life: his clear vision of them made him intervene. Wherever he went it seemed to him that men needed the direction apparently only he could give them. That was what he could never understand. Most men seemed so helpless—was he the only one who saw the obvious? Why was it his duty to stop and take the world by the hand?
“I can’t possess the world from this end of it,” said Caesar.
“You can possess the world wherever it pleases the gods to give it to you. Go back to Rome,” said the oracle. “Speak to the propraetor and ask for a discharge. Your work here as quaestor is finished. Today—now—your mission has begun.”
“And today’s march north? I can’t simply leave. I am so deeply in debt, I…”
“In Rome you will find help. There is a wealthy man there who will aid you. Go now. The god is with you.”

Caesar walked up the dark stairs of the cellar and out into the open courtyard of the Herakleion. It had stopped raining. The cloud cover had torn open in places and let the sunlight through. His lictors were waiting with the horses. He liked the oracle’s order to ask for a discharge and return to Rome and he was already planning what he would say to the propraetor. He was impatient to begin. Caesar never did learn patience—maybe the gods who had made him impatient, never meant to correct the fault.

Before leaving for Rome he bribed one of the priests to allow a sculptor to make a mold of the temple door reliefs. They were cast in bronze and packed on a ship out of sight of the Herakleion. They would have been a wonderful and surprising—a unique—adornment to his house in Rome. Unfortunately, it was not part of the gods’ plans to allow the reliefs to reach Ostia, the Roman port. They sent a storm to sink the ship.

Return to Caesar’s Troubling Dream (Part One)

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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.

..

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.

..