Miguel de Cervantes
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.
Why this wins its question: 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.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
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.
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.
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.
The claims below follow Jean Canavaggio's biography in the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, which is explicit about what is not known — the birth date itself is a presumption from the saint's day. Superlatives ("the first modern novel", "the most translated book after the Bible") are deliberately absent from the claim set: they may well be defensible, but they require sources of their own, and this instance does not assert what it has not registered.