Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/29

 Rh extinct and its possessions had passed into other families in 1618. 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, Diego 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 Doña Leonor de Cortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, and Miguel, the author of "Don Quixote." It is true that documentary evidence is wanting for the absolute identification of Juan the Corregidor of Osuna, whom we know to have been the grandfather of Cervantes, with Juan the son of Diego, but it is not a question that admits of any reasonable doubt. It is difficult to see who else he could have been if the date and circumstances of the case are taken into consideration, or how, unless he was the issue of the marriage with the daughter of Juan de Saavedra, his grandson could have been Cervantes Saavedra; while his name Juan points to his having been the son of Juana and grandson of the two Juans, Cervantes and Saavedra. 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 Alcalá de Henares, possibly, as his name seems to suggest, on St. Michael's Day, and baptized in the