New Unpublished Documents on Miguel de Cervantes and his Presence in Carmona as Royal Commissar of Supplies

Abstract

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was in the Sevillian town of Carmona in 1590, and perhaps also in 1593, when he was serving King Philip II and his general suppliers as royal commissioner of supplies, in order to obtain olive oil, wheat and other provisions for the supply of the Royal Armies. At the end of the nineteenth-century, Jorge Bonsor, an English archaeologist and historian, found in the Municipal Archives of Carmona an autograph letter from Cervantes dated 12 February 1590. In it, the commissioner requested the collaboration of the city council in obtaining 4,000 arrobas of olive oil. In the mid-twentiethcentury, Luis Astrana Marín discovered around twenty previously unpublished documents related to this commission in the notarial records of Carmona. Now, seventy years after Astrana, we have been able to locate another twelve unpublished notarial documents related to Cervantes and Carmona in the Provincial Historical Archive of Seville, which provide us with more details about the olive oil collection of 1590, and which are published in this journal for the first time.