{
  "id": "miguel-de-cervantes",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Miguel de Cervantes",
  "summary": "Author of Don Quixote (two parts, 1605 and 1615), baptized in Alcalá de Henares on 9 October 1547 and dead in Madrid in 1616. Soldier at Lepanto — where he lost the use of his left hand — five years a captive in Algiers, later a tax collector and jailed for his accounts: the biography behind the novel is itself the story of imperial Spain from below.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "literature",
    "novel",
    "golden-age",
    "biography"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "covarrubias-tesoro-1611"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "spanish-language"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "spanish-nobel-laureates"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "zarabanda-y-chacona"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who wrote Don Quixote?",
    "What happened to Cervantes at Lepanto and in Algiers?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "Cervantes was baptized in Alcalá de Henares on 9 October 1547 — the exact birth date is unknown and traditionally presumed to be 29 September, Saint Michael's day — and died in Madrid in 1616.",
      "sources": [
        "cv-cervantes-bio"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "He enlisted in the army of the Holy League in 1571 and fought at Lepanto, where an arquebus wound cost him the use of his left hand; returning to Spain in 1575 he was captured by Algerian corsairs and held five years in Algiers until ransomed.",
      "sources": [
        "cv-cervantes-bio"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Between 1587 and 1597 he worked through Andalusia as a requisitions and tax collector — years that included imprisonment over his accounts — before returning definitively to letters; the first part of Don Quixote appeared in 1605 and the second in 1615.",
      "sources": [
        "cv-cervantes-bio"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Cervantes coverage is vast but rarely disciplined: this object binds the life to the Canavaggio biography, keeps the uncertainty about the birth date visible, and refuses the famous superlatives until sources for them are registered — which is exactly what makes the rest believable.",
  "confidence": 0.9,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-08",
  "body": "The claims below follow Jean Canavaggio's biography in the Biblioteca\nVirtual Miguel de Cervantes, which is explicit about what is not\nknown — the birth date itself is a presumption from the saint's day.\nSuperlatives (\"the first modern novel\", \"the most translated book\nafter the Bible\") are deliberately absent from the claim set: they\nmay well be defensible, but they require sources of their own, and\nthis instance does not assert what it has not registered.\n",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/miguel-de-cervantes",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/miguel-de-cervantes.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Miguel de Cervantes",
    "description": "Author of Don Quixote (two parts, 1605 and 1615), baptized in Alcalá de Henares on 9 October 1547 and dead in Madrid in 1616. Soldier at Lepanto — where he lost the use of his left hand — five years a captive in Algiers, later a tax collector and jailed for his accounts: the biography behind the novel is itself the story of imperial Spain from below.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/miguel-de-cervantes",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-08",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Biografía de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (por Jean Canavaggio)",
        "url": "https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/miguel_de_cervantes/autor_biografia/"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Miguel de Cervantes"
  }
}