Tilting at windmills Cervantes wrote and published "Don Quixote" during the Eighty Years' War, or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), a revolt by the Habsburg Netherlands to end Spanish rule. In "Don Quixote", the eponymous protagonist consistently misinterprets the motives and actions of his adversaries and allies, and struggles to even understand his own at times — a conundrum regularly resulting in apparently unjustified violent actions and consequences. One way of interpreting Don Quixote's tilting at windmills could be allegorically, thereby promoting critical, skeptical, or satirical evaluation of either a hero's motives, rationales and actions, or the ultimate aims of a nation's foreign
Marcus Corvinus (fictional character) Marcus Corvinus (fictional character) Marcus Valerius Messala Corvinus is a fictional character in a series of historical detective novels by the Scottish author David Wishart. Corvinus (he goes by his "cognomen") is of a noble Roman family, living in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. He has turned his back on the "cursus honorum", preferring a quiet private life with his wife, Rufia Perilla, the scholarly, beautiful stepdaughter of the poet Ovid. Corvinus' main activity is solving mysteries and crimes. He met his wife when she contacted him to investigate the circumstances surrounding the exile and death of her stepfather,