9 October 1547

9 October 1547 is the recorded baptismal date of Miguel de Cervantes, who was born at Alcalá de Henares. The distinction matters: the account gives the date for his baptism in the church of Santa Maria Mayor, not an independently established day of birth. It is the clearest precise marker offered here for the beginning of his life, before the surviving account turns to his family background and the formative influences on his writing.

The Record and Its Setting

Cervantes was baptized in the church of Santa Maria Mayor on 9 October 1547. The biographical record places his birth in Alcalá de Henares and identifies the church as the site of the baptism. The date therefore anchors his early biography to a particular town and religious institution, while leaving the exact date of birth unspecified.

Family Background

The date stands at the start of a family history that the account connects to Cervantes’s literary concerns. His ancestry included people who had served Church and State, and the family’s branches had once been distinguished before declining in circumstance. The biographer argues that this inheritance helps explain Cervantes’s interest in genuine chivalric ancestry and in families whose former standing dwindles over generations. The date thus opens a life framed not only by a birthplace but also by an inherited past against which his writing would look critically at the chivalric ideals of romance.

A Spain in Transition

Cervantes’s birth fell in a period the account describes as transitional for Spain: the old chivalrous order had passed, while the new monarchy had become exceptionally powerful. Political authority was concentrated in the sovereign, and the Church and Inquisition were described as helping sustain that arrangement. This broader setting does not make the baptismal date a turning point in itself, but it locates Cervantes’s beginnings within the historical change that would give his later scrutiny of chivalric culture its context.