Cervantes and Warfare

Miguel de Cervantes travelled the Mediterranean as a professional soldier, fought in the battle of Lepanto in 1571, and endured five years in captivity in Algiers before he published his first literary work in 1585. References to warfare appear throughout Cervantes’s literary production, serving as a metaphor, background, or interpolation, even in texts that concern themselves primarily with civilian life. Though Cervantes celebrates his personal career as a soldier, he subjects the theme of warfare more generally to the irony and distance with which he treats other cultural phenomena of early modern Spain. In all his texts, Cervantes expresses a concern for justice in military action. For the individual soldier, citizen, or knight-errant, personal heroism and correct behaviour appear to be possible, but on the scale of the nation, warfare leads inevitably to financial opportunism and human suffering.