If the great Spanish novelist and poet Miguel de Cervantes [1547-1616] had lived 400 years later, his path might have crossed with the Turks again. He would probably have written his monumental work, Don Quixote, not on Spain’s La Mancha plains but in Turkey.

Cervantes first crossed paths with the Turks when he was 24 years old, long before he wrote his novel. Cervantes participated in the fateful Battle of Lepanto in the Gulf of Patras, which saw the defeat of the Ottoman fleet. It is in the annals of history that he fought bravely on board a vessel against the Turks and received three gunshot wounds. One rendered his left arm useless. 

We know that when, in Journey to Parnassus, he said that he "had lost the movement of the left hand for the glory of the right," he was thinking of the success of the first part of Don Quixote.

Don Quixote is his magnum opus and is considered to be the first modern European novel — a foundation of Western literature and regarded among the best works of fiction ever written. As fictional characters, Don Quixote and his servant Sancho Panza have found esteemed places in the memories of people in all corners of the world.