Both brothers founded families. The Cervantes branch had more tenacity;

it sent offshoots in various directions, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia,

and Portugal, and produced a goodly line of men distinguished in the

service of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son of

his, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gave

Cordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the Moors in the

kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of the

noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers,

magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two

cardinal-archbishops.

Of the line that settled in Andalusia, Deigo de Cervantes, Commander of

the Order of Santiago, married Juana Avellaneda, daughter of Juan Arias

de Saavedra, and had several sons, of whom one was Gonzalo Gomez,

Corregidor of Jerez and ancestor of the Mexican and Columbian branches of

the family; and another, Juan, whose son Rodrigo married Dona Leonor de

Cortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, and

Miguel, our author.

The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A

man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant

extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was

likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of

the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one

place about families that have once been great and have tapered away

until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of his

own.

He was born at Alcala de Henares and baptised in the church of Santa

Maria Mayor on the 9th of October, 1547. Of his boyhood and youth we know

nothing, unless it be from the glimpse he gives us in the preface to his

"Comedies" of himself as a boy looking on with delight while Lope de

Rueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the plaza and

acted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took as the model of

his interludes. This first glimpse, however, is a significant one, for it

shows the early development of that love of the drama which exercised

such an influence on his life and seems to have grown stronger as he grew

older, and of which this very preface, written only a few months before

his death, is such a striking proof. He gives us to understand, too, that

he was a great reader in his youth; but of this no assurance was needed,

for the First Part of "Don Quixote" alone proves a vast amount of

miscellaneous reading, romances of chivalry, ballads, popular poetry,

chronicles, for which he had no time or opportunity except in the first

twenty years of his life; and his misquotations and mistakes in matters

of detail are always, it may be noticed, those of a man recalling the

reading of his boyhood.




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