The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [29]
Iñigo and the commander, holding nothing with which to bargain but the castle they were ill-equipped to defend, emerged to meet with the French commander. To Iñigo, all compromise was cowardly, and, refusing to surrender, he walked back into the fortress. As he awaited the bombardment, no priest being present, he said his confession, presumably a lengthy and colorful list of transgressions, to a fellow defender. He was ready to die.
The castle held for several days until the heavy artillery could be moved into place. Six hours of bombardment opened a breach in a wall. Iñigo, sword drawn, was about to fight to the death when a cannonball struck him in the legs.
The castle fell, and the French had Navarra. Then, repeating Charlemagne’s mistake, they needlessly antagonized the Basques on their way into Castile by pillaging the Navarrese town of Los Arcos for several days. The Castilians, desperately trying to recruit an army to meet the French, were suddenly awash with Basque volunteers. Navarra was quickly retaken, never again to be regarded as a nation.
IÑIGO WAS TAKEN prisoner by the French, who performed surgery on his legs, administered last rites, and sent him home to Guipúzcoa by litter over mountain paths, covering the thirty miles from Pamplona to Azpeitia in ten agonizing days. There Spanish doctors operated on him again. In Iñigo’s own words, “Again he went through this butchery.” His condition continued to worsen, and he was again given last rites. Eventually, he healed, but his leg had not been set right and was misshapen, with a bone sticking out in a grizzly manner. Despite being warned that it would cause excruciating pain, he insisted on having the protuberance cut off because, longing to resume his life as a handsome young courtier, he could not accept the idea of a disfiguring injury. After this horrid third operation, he was trussed up and told he could not move for months. Unable to sleep at night from pain, he stared at the ceiling and began reflecting on his life.
At first he read tales of knights, popular books of the period. But then he began reading about the lives of saints. He was especially moved by Saint Francis. He began having visions, one night seeing the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. The next morning, no longer the knight of Doña María or the infanta Catalina, he decided to be a knight of the Virgin.
His legs healed, though his right leg remained inches shorter than his left and he was to have a permanent limp. He became a restless religious pilgrim and, for a time, a hermit He went to Rome and even was able to get an audience with Pope Adrian VI. But back in Spain he was arrested by the Inquisition. It was now the late 1520s, and the Spanish Inquisition was vigilant of heretical practices. Iñigo had shown far too much interest in various occult practices and worse, the Kabala and other magical teachings of Jews and Arabs. Released after three weeks of interrogation, he was barred from preaching.
Silenced in Spain, he decided to put aside preaching and went to Paris, where his Basque ways and hybrid beliefs would have little chance of a following, to study at the famous theological faculty. He so overloaded his donkey with books that he had to walk alongside on his damaged leg for two months to reach the capital. There, although a battle-scarred veteran of almost forty, he lived a student life, studying Latin, making his home in a shack on Rue St. Jacques, a main thoroughfare past the university area, the Latin Quarter. It was there that he received a degree in Latin as Ignatius and kept the Latin name.
The sixteenth-century Latin Quarter attracted other restless religious men from around Europe, and Ignatius gathered around him a small group of Spanish, French, and