The writer Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra was baptized in Alcalá de Henares near Madrid on 9 October, 1547. His father was the surgeon Rodrigo de Cervantes and his mother Leonor de Cortinas. Cervantes studied theology in Salamanca and Madrid. In 1569 he fled from the Spanish judiciary to Rome. Cervantes was wounded in the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and lost his left hand. He was captured by Algerian pirates in June, 1575 and was taken to Algiers as a slave. The poet was ransomed by the Trinitarian Order in 1580 and returned to Spain on 19 September, 1580. Cervantes's first novel "La Galatea" was published in 1584. He married the same year, leaving his wife before the end of the 1580s. Around 1602 he started to write the first part of his highly significant novel "Don Quixote" which he published in 1605. Miguel de Cervantes died poor in Madrid on 23 April, 1616.