be born when the long dream, not only of Spain, but of all Christendom, was about to be fulfilled and the banner of the Cross would float triumphantly above the turrets of the fabulous Alhambra. During that hushed, thrilling time the baby was baptized and given the names Inigo López at the church of San Sebastián in Azpeitia.1 The old and finely wrought font in which the ceremony took place is still in service and bears a little statue of the person principally concerned, with an inscription in Basque: Emenche batayatua naiz, I was baptized here. López was a very common name in the Loyola family, but this appears to have been the first time that Inigo was given to one of its children, though the records of Azpeitia show it to have been highly popular, as indeed it was in many other parts of Spain.2 It is an attractive name, and in some ways one could regret that, more than fifty years later, its owner quietly dropped it altogether in favour of Ignatius or Ignacio.3 The childhood of Inigo is wrapped in such a silver mist as sometimes clothes his green valley in mysteries. His mother who had brought a tang of the sea to his blood appears to have died while he was still a baby, for he was put out to nurse with the young wife of a blacksmith, María de Garín, whose modest cottage, Eguíbar, still stands close to the

1 Inigo, without accent or tilde, is the Basque way of writing this name, and will be retained in this book because St. Ignatius himself invariably so wrote it. The reasons why he adopted the name by which he is known to history will be discussed later on.

2 The original St. Inigo was a Vizcayan Basque who became a monk in the eleventh century at St. Juan de la Peña near Jaca, the first Cluniac foundation south of the Pyrenees. Sancho the Great, King of Navarre, who achieved the ambition of dominating the whole of non-Moorish Spain, was an ardent champion of the Cluniac reform. Completely uninterested in Moors, what he aspired to do was to Europeanize Christian Spain, and for that purpose believed no better agents could be employed than the Cluniac monks. He brought a contingent of them from St. Juan de la Peña to the monastery of San Salvador at Oña near Burgos, and himself went personally to persuade Inigo, who had taken to an eremitical life in the mountains of Aragon, to be the first abbot. Under him, the monastery flourished marvellously, and it is said that when he died in A.D. 1057 even the Jews and Saracens wept. His subsequent popularity was largely due to his power of bringing rain. By a pleasant contingency of history, San Inigo's monastery at Oña, long abandoned, is now a house of studies for the sons of the other Inigo, baptized at Azpeitia in 1491. 3 See below, pp. 284-7.

banks of the Urola, less than half a mile from Casa Loyola. She is quite a person in the story of her nursling, not only because she taught him his first prayers in the only language she knew, Guipúzcoan Basque, and gently insinuated into his soul by her love and example the seeds of faith, tender devotion, and loyalty, which have ever been the insignia of such nannies', but because in extreme old age, at the time of her former charge's death in 1556, she became the principal witness for the year of his birth.1 Naturally enough, very little is known of the boyhood of Inigo at Loyola. Nobody had the slightest idea that he would become a famous man and leave his mark permanently on his country and on Christendom, so nobody took much notice of him. He is said on one occasion to have robbed a garden, a prank of which his friend and first biographer Ribadeneyra makes rather heavy weather. The love of music was in his blood, for all Basque children sing as naturally as birds. It has been said

1 No trace of the birth or baptismal certificate of St. Ignatius has ever come to light. He himself was very uncertain about his precise age, as have been many other celebrated men about their ages. From one remark of Ignatius, he would appear to have been born as late as 1495, but another of his casual remarks would make the year 1493. That year was suggested to his old nurse in 1556, but she answered with complete assurance that he was two years older, making the year of his birth 1491. That was the year accepted by his first and most admirable biographer, Pedro Ribadeneyra, in 1572, after much balancing of pros and cons. It became the accepted date until comparatively recent times, when it was questioned in Germany and France. Paul Dudon, in his Saint Ignace de Loyola (Paris, 1934), opted with misgivings for 1493, but Pedro Leturia, S.J., by far the most learned of modern Ignatian scholars, discovered in a huge mass of unpublished documents copied from archives by the indefatigable Père Leonard Cros, S.J., of Toulouse, who died half a century ago, a legal deed drawn up by the official notary of Azpeitia, and witnessed in due form on October 23, 1505. The subject was a thoroughly rural one, the sale of a rocín, a hack (from which word comes Don Quixote's Rocinante), and the witnesses to the transaction were a priest and two laymen, Don Inigo de Goyas and Inigo de Loyola. No other Inigo de Loyola except the man who became St. Ignatius Loyola was known at that time. Now, in Roman law, canon law, Castilian law and Basque law no male person could be cited as a juridical witness until he had passed his fourteenth birthday. Inigo de Loyola must therefore have kept that anniversary before October 23, 1505, which again points to 1491 as the year of his birth (Leturia, El Gentilhombre Iñigo López de Loyola, pp. 43-5; MHSJ, Fontes Narrativi de Sancto Ignatio de Loyola, I, Rome, 1943, pp. 14-24).

of Basques that two of them together inevitably means a game of pelota and three, a choir. Many years later, when often gravely ill and in great pain in Rome, Inigo would receive more solace from someone singing to him or playing the guitar than from any of the doctors' nostrums, though he did not often allow himself the indulgence. He also learned the strenuous Basque dances, and gave proof of his proficiency in them nearly thirty years later when he was a poor student living on alms at the University of Paris. One of the many people who used to come to him for spiritual and temporal assistance fell into a great melancholy, and astonished him one day by saying: 'If you would sing a little for me and dance the way they do in your native Basqueland, I think it would cheer me up and console me.' Inigo at once both sang and danced, though he was slightly lamed, to such good effect that his melancholy friend began there and then to get rid of the depression that gnawed at his heart, until within a few days he was completely cured of it '.1 Another detail, utterly trivial though it may seem, was Inigo's addiction as a boy and man to roasted chestnuts. One very close to him in Rome recounted that in the years immediately preceding his death he had completely lost his appetite: The treat which we occasionally prepared for him was to give him four roasted chestnuts, which he seemed to appreciate, as being the fruit of his own country and the food on which he grew up.'2

On October 12, 1492, when Inigo was about a year old and being introduced to the chestnuts, a sailor on the little ship Pinta, one of the three under the command of Christopher Columbus, sighted land three thousand miles from Spain, across the unknown Atlantic, and so was turned over a new chapter in the history of

1 That charming story was told to Ribadeneyra by the melancholy man himself, and Ribadeneyra duly related it in the original manuscript of his life of St. Ignatius. But that work was held up for fourteen years by the censors appointed to deal with it, and when at last it appeared in 1583, to become and remain a classic of Spanish literature, the story had disappeared (Enrique Portillo, S.J., El original manuscrito de la primera edición castellana de la Vida de San Ignacio por el P. Ribadeneira, in Razón y Fe, 42 (1915), pp. 295-6. A large selection of the censors' criticisms is given in MHSJ, Scripta de Sancto Ignatio de Loyola, I, Madrid, 1904, pp. 712-44, and highly interesting reading they make. 2 MHSJ, Fontes narrativi de S. Ignatio de Loyola, I, 641-2.

mankind. That event, coming immediately on top of the conquest of Granada, caused an extraordinary upsurge of energy and exaltation in all Spanish hearts. Both conquest and discovery were principally due to the genius of Queen Isabella, who was worth an army in herself under the walls of Granada, and who backed the crochety dreamer from Genoa with a million maravedís she could ill afford.1 How the pen of the sturdily Protestant and condescending Prescott suddenly glows when he comes to speak of her:

The attachment to Isabella seemed to be a pervading principle, which animated the whole nation by one common impulse, impressing a unity of design on all its movements. This attachment was imputable to her sex as well as character. The sympathy and tender care with which she regarded her people naturally raised 2 reciprocal sentiment in their bosoms. But, when they beheld her directing their counsels, sharing their fatigues and dangers, and displaying all the comprehensive intellectual powers of the other sex, they looked up to her as to some superior being, with feelings far more exalted than those of mere loyalty. The chivalrous heart of the Spaniard did homage to her as to his tutelar saint; and she held a control over her people such as no man could have acquired in any age-and probably no woman, in an age and country less romantic.2

Worn out by her labours and responsibilities, the great Queen died at Medina del Campo in 1504, aged fifty-three, but the transformation of Spain which she had begun so brilliantly went on under her husband Ferdinand, not only a most able and gallant soldier but a master in the cunning and the treachery that were the stock-in-trade of the statesmen of his day '.3 While the Queen

1 Through her four daughters she became the mother-in-law of three kings, including the King of England, and the grandmother of Emperor Charles V.

2 History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, 3rd ed., London, 1841, I, pp. 463-4.

3 Rafael Altamira, in The Cambridge Medieval History, VIII (1936), p. 495.

and the mighty minister Cardinal Cisneros looked to the newly discovered America and to North Africa in their foreign policy, Ferdinand, as King of Aragon and Catalonia, pursued traditional ambitions in the Mediterranean, and thus came up against the similar ambitions of France, Spain's predestined foe. So began the Wars of Italy, the common battleground of the two powers. That was the hour of 'El Gran Capitán', Gonzalo de Córdoba, the most splendid soldier of his age. In his campaigns, fought and died two brothers of Inigo de Loyola, the eldest and heir to the Casa, Juan Pérez, and another who may have been Beltrán, the fifth of the line.1 Juan Pérez provides a very good example of the division in the souls of fine men at that tremendous turning-point in their country's history. He gave up everything, marriage, inheritance, his life, for his King. Before going to the wars, he made a pilgrimage to a popular shrine of our Lady in Guipúzcoa and wrote of her in the following strain:

I have always taken the most glorious Virgin, Holy Mary, Mother of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, for my Lady and helper and advocate in all my doings, and now with a far greater devotion I offer myself from a true heart to serve her and be her servant. I offer her my body and my soul, and I beg her in her mercy as devoutly as I know how to protect me from all danger and all sin, to guide me and counsel me, and to obtain for me from my Lord Jesus Christ grace and blessing, so that I may live in security and die in penitence.2

In the will which poor, brave Juan dictated just before his death at Naples in 1498, he provided for two illegitimate children and their mothers, whom he named.3 That was the way of things in those days. Another elder brother of Inigo sailed for the Americas just when the conquest and colonization were getting into their stride, and died or was killed in the wars with the Indians. A third brother, not identified, joined the crusade in Hungary

1 So says Henao in his Averiguaciones de las Antiguedades de Cantabria. 2 Cited by Pedro Leturia from Père Cros's collection of documents, El Gentilhombre Iñigo López de Loyola, p. 39.

3 Dudon, Saint Ignace de Loyola, p. 613.