Nearly 400 years after he died bankrupt and almost unknown, archaeologists claim to have discovered the remains of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.
Using ground-penetrating radar in the crypt of a Madrid convent, the experts said that they had found bones believed to belong to the father of the modern novel.
Cervantes died aged 69 in 1616, the same year as Shakespeare, and asked to be buried within the Trinitarias convent. The religious order had helped to pay a ransom to release him from slavery after he was captured by Moorish pirates and held prisoner for five years in Algiers.
Investigators found remains in a niche in the convent. They were in a casket bearing the novelist’s initials, MC, and were said to be in a bad condition.
Mass spectrometry tests have enabled the research team, led by Francisco Etxeberria, to analyse the bone composition and determine the age at which the body perished. The remains may reveal if Cervantes drank himself to death, as rivals claimed.
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The convent in the Barrio de Las Letras, the literary quarter of the Spanish capital, was known to be the burial place of Cervantes but the exact location of his remains had been lost over the centuries.
Madrid city council, which has financed the project in the hope that finding the author’s remains may boost tourism, said that the final results would be announced next week.
Researchers believe that the injuries Cervantes suffered when he served as a soldier will help to confirm the identification.
He fled Spain for Italy after a duel when he was 21 and fought as a soldier in the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, when a Spanish-led fleet defeated Ottoman invaders off western Greece. During the battle, Cervantes was shot in the chest and in the left arm, which left him with a withered hand for the rest of his life.
“The atrophy of his left hand and the marks that would have been left on his rib cage makes his remains easily identifiable,” Fernando Prado, a historian, said.
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“We also know from a painting of the author that he had a hooked nose and, what’s more, he wrote shortly before his death that he only had six teeth left in his mouth.”