The family of Cervantes was originally Galician, and, at the time of his birth, not only numbered five hundred years of nobility and public service, but was spread throughout Spain, and had been extended to Mexico and other parts of America.[80] The Castilian branch, which, in the fifteenth century, became connected by marriage with the Saavedras, seems, early in the sixteenth, to have fallen off in its fortunes; and we know that the parents of Miguel, who has given to the race a splendor which has saved its old nobility from oblivion, were poor inhabitants of Alcalá de Henares, a small, but nourishing city, about twenty miles from Madrid. There he was born, the youngest of four children, on one of the early days of October, 1547.[81]
No doubt, he received his early education in the place of his nativity, then in the flush of its prosperity and fame from the success of the University founded there by Cardinal Ximenes, about fifty years before. At any rate, like many other generous spirits, he has taken an obvious delight in recalling the days of his childhood in different parts of his works; as in his Don Quixote, where he alludes to the burial and enchantments of the famous Moor Muzaraque on the great hill of Zulema,[82] just as he had probably heard them in some nursery story; and in his prose pastoral, “Galatea,” where he arranges the scene of some of its most graceful adventures “on the banks,” as he fondly calls it, “of the famous Henares.”[83] But concerning his youth we know only what he incidentally tells us himself;—that he took great pleasure in attending the theatrical representations of Lope de Rueda;[84] that he wrote verses when very young;[85] and that he always read every thing within his reach, even, as it should seem, the torn scraps of paper he picked up in the public streets.[86]
It has been conjectured that he pursued his studies in part at Madrid, and there is some probability, notwithstanding the poverty of his family, that he passed two years at the University of Salamanca. But what is certain is, that he obtained a public and decisive mark of respect, before he was twenty-two years old, from one of his teachers; for, in 1569, Lope de Hoyos published, by authority, on the death of the unhappy Isabelle de Valois, wife of Philip the Second, a volume of verse, in which, among other contributions of his pupils, are six short poems by Cervantes, whom he calls his “dear and well-beloved disciple.” This was, no doubt, Cervantes’s first appearance in print as an author; and though he gives in it little proof of poetical talent, yet the affectionate words of his master by which his verses were accompanied, and the circumstance, that one of his elegies was written in the name of the whole school, show that he enjoyed the respect of his teacher and the good-will of his fellow-students.[87]
The next year, 1570, we find him, without any notice of the cause, removed from all his early connections, and serving at Rome as chamberlain in the household of Monsignor Aquaviva, soon afterwards a cardinal; the same person who had been sent, in 1568, on a special mission from the Pope to Philip the Second, and who, as he seems to have had a regard for literature and for men of letters, may, on his return to Italy, have taken Cervantes with him from interest in his talents. The term of service of the young man must, however, have been short. Perhaps he was too much of a Spaniard, and had too proud a spirit, to remain long in a position at best very equivocal, and that, too, at a period when the world was full of solicitations to adventure and military glory.
But whatever may have been his motive, he soon left Rome and its court. In 1571, the Pope, Philip the Second, and the state of Venice, concluded what was called a “Holy League” against the Turks, and set on foot a joint armament, commanded by the chivalrous Don John of Austria, a natural son of Charles the Fifth. The temptations of such a romantic, as well as imposing, expedition against the ancient oppressor of whatever was Spanish, and the formidable enemy of all Christendom, were more than Cervantes, at the age of twenty-three, could resist; and the next thing we hear of him is, that he had volunteered in it as a common soldier. For, as he says in a work written just before his death, he had always observed “that none make better soldiers than those who are transplanted from the region of letters to the fields of war, and that never scholar became soldier that was not a good and brave one.”[88] Animated with this spirit, he entered the service of his country among the troops with which Spain then filled a large part of Italy, and continued in it till he was honorably discharged in 1575.
During these four or five years he learned many of the hardest lessons of life. He was present in the sea-fight of Lepanto, October 7, 1571, and, though suffering at the time under a fever, insisted on bearing his part in that great battle, which first decisively arrested the intrusion of the Turks into the West of Europe. The galley in which he served was in the thickest of the contest, and that he did his duty to his country and to Christendom he carried proud and painful proof to his grave; for, besides two other wounds, he received one which deprived him of the use of his left hand and arm during the rest of his life. With the other sufferers in the fight, he was taken to the hospital at Messina, where he remained till April, 1572; and then, under Mark Antonio Colonna, went on the expedition to the Levant, to which he alludes with so much satisfaction in his dedication of the “Galatea,” and which he has so well described in the story of the Captive, in Don Quixote.
The next year, 1573, he was in the affair of the Goleta at Tunis, under Don John of Austria, and afterwards, with the regiment to which he was attached,[89] returned to Sicily and Italy, many parts of which, in different journeys or expeditions, he seems to have visited, remaining at one time in Naples above a year.[90] This period of his life, however, though marked with much suffering, seems never to have been regarded by him with regret. On the contrary, above forty years afterwards, with a generous pride in what he had undergone, he declared, that, if the alternative were again offered him, he should account his wounds a cheap exchange for the glory of having been present in that great enterprise.[91]
When he was discharged, in 1575, he took with him letters from the Duke of Sessa and Don John, commending him earnestly to the king, and embarked for Spain. But on the 26th of September he was captured and carried into Algiers, where he passed five years yet more disastrous and more full of adventure than the five preceding. He served successively three cruel masters,—a Greek and a Venetian, both renegadoes, and the Dey, or King, himself; the first two tormenting him with that peculiar hatred against Christians which naturally belonged to persons who, from unworthy motives, had joined themselves to the enemies of all Christendom; and the last, the Dey, claiming him for his slave, and treating him with great severity, because he had fled from his master and become formidable by a series of efforts to obtain liberty for himself and his fellow-captives.
Indeed, it is plain that the spirit of Cervantes, so far from having been broken by his cruel captivity, had been only raised and strengthened by it. On one occasion he attempted to escape by land to Oran, a Spanish settlement on the coast, but was deserted by his guide and compelled to return. On another, he secreted thirteen fellow-sufferers in a cave on the sea-shore, where, at the constant risk of his own life, he provided during many weeks for their daily wants, while waiting for rescue by sea; but at last, after he had joined them, was basely betrayed, and then nobly took the whole punishment of the conspiracy on himself. Once he sent for help to break forth by violence, and his letter was intercepted; and once he had matured a scheme for being rescued, with sixty of his countrymen,—a scheme of which, when it was defeated by treachery, he again announced himself as the only author and the willing victim. And finally, he had a grand project for the insurrection of all the Christian slaves in Algiers, which was, perhaps, not unlikely to succeed, as their number was full twenty-five thousand, and which was certainly so alarming to the Dey, that he declared, that, “if he could but keep that lame Spaniard well guarded, he should consider his capital, his slaves, and his galleys safe.”[92] On each of these occasions, severe, but not degrading,[93] punishments were inflicted upon him. Four times he expected instant death in the awful form of impalement or of fire; and the last time a rope was absolutely put about his neck, in the vain hope of extorting from a spirit so lofty the names of his accomplices.
At last, the moment of release came. His elder brother, who was captured with him, had been ransomed three years before; and now his widowed mother was obliged to sacrifice, for her younger son’s freedom, all the pittance that remained to her in the world, including the dowry of her daughters. But even this was not enough; and the remainder of the poor five hundred crowns that were demanded as the price of his liberty was made up partly by small borrowings, and partly by the contributions of religious charity.[94] In this way he was ransomed on the 19th of September, 1580, just at the moment when he had embarked with his master, the Dey, for Constantinople, whence his rescue would have been all but hopeless. A short time afterwards he left Algiers, where we have abundant proof, that, by his disinterestedness, his courage, and his fidelity, he had, to an extraordinary degree, gained the affection and respect of the multitude of Christian captives with which that city of anathemas was then crowded.[95]