It was in Alcalá de Henares where Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, known as the prince of ingenuity, was born.The ingenious nobleman Don Quixote de la Mancha is considered the first modern novel, and the greatest work of Spanish literature and one of the best in world history.
Cervantes, though eager to write poetry, never considered himself a good poet, and even lamented it. Here are some of his own verses on the subject:
I always work and wake up
for seeming to be a poet.
the grace that heaven didn't want to give me
Cervantes lost the mobility of his left hand in the battle of Lepanto, when a piece of lead severed a nerve. Hence the nickname of the Lepanto´s one-armed.
Both the wound on his hand and his participation in the battle of Lepanto was a source of great pride for Cervantes. In the prologue of the second part of Don Quixote he wrote: the highest occasion that the past centuries saw, the present ones, nor do they expect to see the future ones.
Cervantes suffered 5 years of captivity in Algiers; during that time he tried to escape unsuccessfully on 4 occasions from prison. In 1580, Friar Juan Gil, a Trinitarian father, paid the five hundred gold escudos they were asking for the ransom of Cervantes.
In 1597 Cervantes was imprisoned in the Royal Prison of Seville for alleged mishandling as a tax collector. In the solitude of the prison Cervantes conceives his Quixote.
In 1605 Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of the Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, the first edition of which was soon sold out.
Don Quixote was conceived by Cervantes as a parody of the books of chivalry.
The second part of Don Quixote was published in 1615, one year before Cervantes' death.
The great English writer William Shakespeare came to read the first part of Don Quixote de la Mancha.
There is a common place, that both Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same date (April 23, 1616); however Cervantes died on April 22, being buried on April 23, while Shakespeare's England then governed the Julian calendar, so in reality Shakespeare's death occurred on May 3.
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