The Autonomous University of Mexico and the relatives of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Abstract

It is difficult to talk about the history of the University of Mexico without mentioning Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, the man of letters who delivered his inaugural lecture in Latin on June 3, 1553. His arrival in Mexico, his early years in the country, and his work in the creation of the University of Mexico, as well as his participation in the founding of the University of Osuna in 1548, remain a mystery. Cervantes de Salazar appears as the familiar link that connects the Cervantes families of Toledo, Alcalá de Henares, Trujillo, Seville, the Canary Islands, and Mexico. He was a friend and distant relative of Hernán Cortés, a friend and distant relative of Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain, and a friend of the Archbishop of Mexico and President of the Council of the Indies, Pedro Moya. One cannot speak of Cervantes de Salazar in Mexico without linking his story to Cardinal Cisneros and his role in the discovery of America, his support for Christopher Columbus—the Genoese, born in the small Italian town of Cugureto—as Nicolás de Ovando recounted to Cisneros on Hispaniola while the latter sought to extend the Franciscan model of the University of Alcalá de Henares to the New World. Cervantes de Salazar emerges as a faithful servant of the Cisnerian and Erasmian ideal, a promoter of the universities of Osuna and Mexico, and a supporter of the creation of the University of Tarragona, a work of his relative, Cardinal Gaspar Cervantes de Gaeta, a native of Trujillo and a relative of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro. Upon Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’s death in 1575 in Mexico, among the books of his impressive library was Relación de la Guerra de Chipre y sucesso de la batalla naual de Lepanto by the Sevillian poet Fernando de Herrera, published in Seville in 1572, narrating the military exploits of his nephews Miguel and Rodrigo de Cervantes in the Battle of Lepanto. Cervantes de Salazar died freeing his black slaves in Mexico, unaware that his nephew Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra would be subjected to the chains of slavery in Algiers as a “good war slave.”