Episode Details

No authenticated portrait of Miguel de Cervantes exists, so this episode reconstructs his face from the historical record instead. Born in 1547 near Madrid to a debt-ridden barber-surgeon father and a resourceful mother who kept the family afloat, he fled Spain in 1569 after an arrest warrant for wounding Antonio de Sigura in a duel, joined a Spanish infantry regiment in Naples, and at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 refused orders to stay below deck despite malaria, took three musket balls and lost the use of his left hand.

We follow the 1575 capture by Barbary corsairs off Barcelona, where letters of commendation backfired by inflating his ransom, five years of captivity in Algiers with four failed escape attempts, and his 1580 release bought by the Trinitarians. Back in Spain he wrote La Galatea to silence, requisitioned wheat and olive oil for the Armada, was jailed for accounting irregularities, and published nothing for twenty years before Don Quixote appeared in 1605. The episode covers the pirated editions that denied him profit, the fake sequel by Avellaneda that mocked his crippled hand and spurred the metafictional Part Two of 1615, his death in 1616, burial in a pauper's grave at the Trinitarian convent, and the 2015 identification of his bones by their Lepanto wounds.

• Why a wounded, feverish soldier demanded command of a twelve-man skiff in a near-suicidal assault
• How captivity in Algiers stripped away the illusions of chivalric heroism
• Two decades of bureaucratic misery on the roads of La Mancha as field research for the novel
• Peasant slang and everyday speech as a cultural shock to elevated literature
• Characters who discover people are reading a book about them, and travel routes rewritten out of spite