While Tirant lo Blanc had no literary followers until Cervantes more than one hundred years later, it does have the honor of being "the earliest existing romance of chivalry printed in the Peninsula."(6) This being so, from where did Joanot Martorell receive his inspiration? Although Professor Henry Thomas notes that "the tracing of sources...(may be only) one degree higher than the hunting of cats,"(7) we feel impelled to relate some of the more important discoveries of literary scholarship. The first section of the book is in imitation of an English romance, "Guy of Warwick", in which England fights off a Danish invasion. When Tirant lo Blanc appears for the first time, asleep on his horse, and stumbles upon the hermit who explains at great length the order of chivalry, the entire section (which this present translation omits) is taken from Ramon Lull's Libre del Orde d'Cauayleria.(8) Tirant himself may be an amalgamation of several historical figures: Roger de Flor, Richard Beauchamp, Louis IX, Peter II of Aragon, Joan Hunyadi lo Blanch of Hungary, etc. Tirant's adventures in Africa closely parallel many people, events and place names from Ramon Muntaner's Chronica.(9) More important than any of these "sources", however, is this question: What did Martorell do with the material that came to him from books, from life, and from his imagination? Cervantes, writing more than one hundred years after Tirant lo Blanc was published, was sufficiently impressed to talk about it in his Don Quixote not once, but on two separate occasions, in fairly glowing terms.(10) Furthermore, some readers have pointed out scenes that appear to be similar in both books: both Philippe and Don Quixote find holes in their stockings, which leads one into great searching for a lost needle, and the other into even deeper depression; there is a cat-howling episode in both books, etc. And there is one other way that Tirant lo Blanc points the way toward the Quixote: in the framework. Cervantes uses a device often found in the novels of chivalry that preceded his work, stating that his book is no more than a "translation" from another language. (While, in fact, the authors of those books are simply advertising the next novels they intend to write in the series, much as the "Hardy Boys" or "Nancy Drew" series advertise in the final pages of each novel.) But in the Quixote the device has a far deeper purpose: Cervantes informs us that Don Quixote is a flesh and blood figure whose real-life adventures appear in several Arabic histories, and one in particular, by a certain Cide Hamete Benengeli. With the aid of a translator, Cervantes says, he is now bringing the story of Don Quixote's life back into the Spanish tongue. What we have here is, of course, a ploy to make the characters seem more real, and Cervantes makes this assertion with a broad wink, for while we are "suspending our disbelief," we also know that it is nothing more than his artistry.