Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), Spanish writer. Author of The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha (1605 / 1615), the first great work of modern literature. See the Wikipedia article.

Don Quixote is not knighted: he proclaims himself a knight-errant and carries with him the proofs of his rank — arms painted on his shield, copied letters patent, a heraldic narrative recited at every encounter. The picaresque story runs on that very mechanism: every interlocutor receives the claim, examines it, holds it as true or as folly. Cervantes invented the fiction of the bearer of a signed identity — a character travelling with his own credentials and demanding that the world verify them.

A JWT is exactly that: a bearer token that presents a signed identity on every HTTP request, and that each service verifies locally, without contacting a central authority. Cervantes the runtime, unlike the windmills of La Mancha, does not take the bearer’s claims at face value: it actually verifies the signature, issuer, audience and expiration, and grants a role only after the check.

Cervantes consumes the ecosystem from the bottom up: Chappe serves the requests, Cassini hosts the auth filter and the @RolesAllowed DynamicFeature, Vauban triggers the BCE that synthesises the @Claim beans, Ravel resolves the mp.jwt.* keys, Champollion parses the JSON payload of the token. Cervantes adds the signed-identity layer — without rewriting anything else.

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