The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [26]
By the time of Iñigo’s birth, the family, though culturally still Basque, had amassed great wealth from royal favors. In the family tradition, his brothers were soldiers and adventurers. It was a new age of adventure, and the oldest shipped out on Columbus’s second voyage and later died in a naval engagement against the French. Another died in battle in Naples. Another served Castile in the Lowlands. Another sailed to America in 1510 and died in a fight with angry tribesmen.
They were the knights of their age who, with no more Moors to defeat, looked to new lands in which to do combat. Only one brother, Pedro López, was different, turning to religion and becoming the rector of the local church.
Iñigo, too, was initially trained for the priesthood. His mother had died when he was very young, and, raised in a nearby cottage by a blacksmith’s wife, he grew up praying in the local dialect of Euskera. But, realizing that, like his older brothers, he was more suited for action and worldly pleasures than a spiritual life, the family found him a position in the Castilian court as a page to Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, treasurer general of Castile.
Portrait of Ignatius Loyola by Jacopino del Conte, a follower who painted it from the death mask on the day Loyola died. The portrait hangs in the Jesuit Headquarters in Rome. (Society of Jesus, Rome)
FERDINAND WAS CALLED “the Catholic,” but a more accurate description was offered by Machiavelli. In The Prince he referred to Ferdinand as “the first king in Christendom.” Ferdinand was a man who understood all of the tools for nation building. He could be a brilliant negotiator who wisely offered concessions, but he also knew when and how to use force. He took the bands of adventurers who had been crusading against the Moors and turned them into the best disciplined and most effective army in Europe.
Isabella was the real Catholic. Fanatically devoted to the Church, she personally completed the Reconquista. In 1492, dressed in white armor with the red cross of Castile, she led an army on Granada and drove the last of the Moors off the Iberian peninsula. Then she unleashed the Inquisition to purge Spain of heresy and impurity. Convert, die, or leave were the only choices she offered. She was Columbus’s patron, and as new worlds were discovered, she charged the men of the Reconquista with spreading Catholicism.
In 1504, at the age of fifty-three, Isabella lay on her deathbed. She extracted two promises from Ferdinand: to bury her without ceremony in a homespun Franciscan robe and never to remarry. Ferdinand kept the first promise.
Germaine de Foix, Ferdinand’s new bride, arrived from France with thirty shiploads of personal effects, including unimaginable quantities of cosmetics, perfume, and jewelry. A relative of the ruling family of Navarra, Germana, as the Spanish called her, was plump, alcoholic, approaching middle age, with, perhaps literally, a ton of makeup—the perfect embodiment of the Spanish stereotype of the frivolous and vain French.
Ferdinand, only a year younger than his late wife, was not in search of an autumn romance. Mortality was on his mind, and he wanted a son. His union with Isabella had given him, in addition to most of Spain, only a daughter, who was known as Juana La Loca—Juana the Mad. Now, sensing his time near its end, he had forged a magnificent birthright to pass on, and he wanted an heir who would know how to hold it together.
But Germana produced no heir, and Ferdinand was increasingly resigned to turning over his new European superpower to Juana’s son, his grandson, Charles, whom the Spanish would call Carlos I. Charles was a teenager, born and raised in Flanders. He didn’t even want to visit Spain to see his inheritance because to him, and many northern Europeans, Spain was a primitive and uncomfortable