Spain · 400 years Don Quijote

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) was a Spanish writer and soldier. He took part in the naval Battle of Lepanto, was later captured by corsairs and spent several years in Algiers. After his return, he worked, among other things, as a procurement officer and tax collector. In addition to plays and shorter stories, he wrote the novel about Don Quijote. Its first part was published in 1605, and the second in 1615.

The main character is an impoverished member of the rural nobility, a so-called hidalgo. Through intensive reading of chivalric romances, he increasingly loses touch with reality and decides to present himself as a knight-errant. He calls himself Don Quijote, appoints the peasant woman Dulcinea as his idealized lady, and travels through Spain with his neighbor Sancho Panza as his squire. In doing so, he reinterprets ordinary people, objects and situations according to the patterns of chivalric literature.

The windmills refer to an episode at the beginning of the novel. Don Quijote mistakes them for hostile giants and attacks them. Sancho Panza unsuccessfully tries to explain his mistake to him. When a windmill sail hurls Don Quijote to the ground, he explains the outcome as the work of an enchanter. The scene condenses one of the novel’s central motifs: the contrast between an imagined world shaped by books and experienced reality.

With the work, Cervantes parodied the chivalric romances that were widespread at the time. At the same time, it addresses questions of identity, social rank, truth and the impact of narratives. Shifting narrative levels and the engagement with authorship and transmission are part of its distinctive form. Don Quijote and Sancho Panza developed beyond the novel into established figures of European literature, theatre and visual art.

The choice of this anniversary for a Spanish circulation coin thus referred to a work of Spanish-language literature whose characters are easy to recognize even without knowledge of the entire novel. The windmill motif also makes it possible to summarize the content of the book in a single, clearly legible scene.