Basque History of the World (10 page)

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)

F
ERDINAND 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 frontier.

Iñigo de Loyola’s sponsor and protector, Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, was married to the beautiful Doña María, lady-in-waiting to Germana. Iñigo, completely dazzled by María, entered the flighty world of Germana’s court. María would entertain Iñigo by displaying her pearls and jewels, caressing certain glittery pieces and saying, “This one belonged to Queen Isabella.”

Germana ran a court of shallow hedonistic amusements. Young Iñigo was taken by the jewels and the women. He had frequent infatuations and was especially smitten by the infanta Catalina. Catalina was the daughter of Philip the Fair and Juana the Mad. Unfortunately, the Mad triumphed over the Fair, and she spent much of her youth in the custody of her mother, who kept her in rags, locked up in the dark castle of Tordesillas. When she was eleven years old, her older brother, the future king of Spain, rescued her and brought her to court. During her brief stay, Iñigo was overcome with a teenage love for Catalina. But Juana refused to eat until her daughter was returned, and soon Catalina was taken away. She and Iñigo would remain lifelong friends.

Not all his romances were as pretty. Away from queens and princesses, his appetite for women seemed insatiable, and he was often violent and abusive to them, frequently brawling with other men over them. In his later life when he was given to confessions, he also admitted to criminal acts. He once allowed an innocent man to be convicted of a robbery he committed. He and his only religious brother stood trial for an incident involving a killing. They both escaped by pleading clerical immunity, which in Iñigo’s case was a fabrication.

N
AVARRA, THE ONE
missing piece in Ferdinand’s puzzle, remained independent But in spite of its important role in the victorious Reconquista, the 700-year-old Kingdom of Navarra was weak. It had grown in the Middle Ages by shifting with and against the Moors, and in the eleventh century, Navarra had become the dominant kingdom of northern Spain. Under the rule of Sancho III, Sancho the Great, the Basques, for the only time in history, had expanded their rule far beyond their traditional territory. Almost unique in Europe, Basques for most of history had no territorial ambitions. But Sancho doubled Basque territory. Under his reign not only had Navarra ruled Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya and taken Alava from Castile, but Sancho also had crossed the Ebro and taken Burgos and other parts of Castile.

Thirty years after his death, most of this land had been lost. In 1234, ninety-nine years after his death, the ruling Basque family had no more heirs, and the Navarrese turned to the French House of Champagne for a ruling family.

Ferdinand wanted this little Basque kingdom with the French rulers. By then, they had gone through two French families and were now being ruled weakly by the House of Foix, Ferdinand’s new in-laws. In 1512, Ferdinand, who always insisted that the primary enemy was France, persuaded the Navarrese to let him enter their kingdom, claiming to be on his way to invade France. But he never engaged the French. Instead, he drove the ruling de Foix monarchs, Catherine and Jean d’Albret, across the Pyrenees, where they became king and queen of the little splinter kingdom of Basse Navarre.

Ferdinand, by repeatedly pledging to respect the Fueros, was able to take Pamplona without a fight. The rest of Navarra below the Pyrenees, seeing that Ferdinand would respect the rule of the Fueros, accepted him as king. Spain, with the exception of the Portuguese kingdom, was complete.

But the Navarrese were finding it difficult to be a mere province of this new Castilian-constructed peninsula-wide nation. They had been an independent country for seven centuries. Militant new movements pressed for a closer adherence to the ancient Foral laws. Others worked with an independence movement, based in Basse Navarre, whose goal was to reunite the two parts.

Ferdinand feared that after he died, his grandson, Charles, the boy from Flanders who did not even speak Spanish, would start losing the pieces he had so carefully put together. The first to go would be the Basques of Navarra. Navarra needed to be cemented to Spain. And so Ferdinand decided to make it a part of Castile. Attempting to win over the Navarrese to the idea, he made Charles swear to respect the Fueros and granted Navarra administrative autonomy within Castile.

In 1516 Ferdinand was in a deep depression. According to some accounts, Germana fed him “aphrodisiacs” to lift his spirits, though it is not clear what substance that might have been. On January 23, he died. Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, who presided at the reading of Ferdinand’s will, was soon to lose favor in court, and, in August 1517, he too suddenly died.

At the age of twenty-five, lacking a patron, Iñigo left his pretty court and went to serve his cousin, the viceroy of Navarra. He tried to continue his vain, self-indulgent court life, but this was a difficult time in the history of Navarra.

The deposed Catherine and Jean d’Albret, Ferdinand’s inlaws in Basse Navarre, decided that Ferdinand’s death was the moment to retake their kingdom. Jean d’Albret led an army from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port up through the rocky pass to Ibañeta and there, in that historic and deceptively serene pine forest that descends to Roncesvalles, met spectacular defeat.

D’Albret, the last king of Navarra, died that year, like Ferdinand, in deep depression. Catherine, the queen-in-exile, died the following February. The only Basque kingdom in history ceased to exist.

I
N
1517, with great reluctance, Charles came to Spain to ceremoniously tour his kingdom, region by region, as a monarch was expected to do. Before he ever reached Navarra, his other grandfather, Emperor Maximilian, died, and the new King Carlos I was off to Germany to become Emperor Charles V, the new Holy Roman Emperor. In his absence, rebellion broke out in towns throughout Iberia. The Basques of Navarra started to demand their independence.

The king of France, Francis I, was not a Basque sympathizer but a frustrated young man who also had wanted to be the Holy Roman Emperor. Now, to spite Charles, he took on the cause of Henri d’Albret, son of Catherine and Jean. On April 15, 1521, Hernán Perez, the mayor of Behobia, a Guipúzcoan border town on the Bidasoa, reported, “King Jean’s son is raising a mighty army with the help of the King of France to march on Navarra, and he is bringing seven thousand Germans and formidable artillery.”

Germans, Basques, as well as volunteers from neighboring Gascony and Béarn—in all an army of 12,000 men with twenty-six pieces of heavy artillery—overran St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the stone-walled mountain village on a fog-bound crook of the Nive. Once again, a French army climbed through the narrow pass to Roncesvalles and dropped down the piney slopes toward Pamplona.

This time they met no resistance. As they approached, Basque villagers overthrew their towns and joined the invading army. When they reached Pamplona, the townspeople opened the gates for them. Castilians fled the city, while the Navarrese sacked the ducal palace, tearing down the Spanish coat of arms. It was a great day for the Basques—or at least, for some of the Basques.

At this moment, pro-Castilian reinforcements arrived from Guipúzcoa under the command of Martín de Loyola, Iñigo’s brother. Iñigo joined him. They were part of a larger Castilian force that tried to liberate Juana and her daughter, Iñigo’s fantasy princess, Catalina, from their dank Tordesillas castle where local rebels were holding them hostage.

While most of the Navarrese saw the French-led army in Pamplona as liberators, these Guipúzcoans saw them as invaders. Martin was so disgusted with what to him was a betrayal by the townspeople that he refused to enter the city. Iñigo and some of his men entered the fortress, the unfinished castle Ferdinand had ordered before his death. As they went in, others were fleeing. He persuaded the commander to stay and fight. In his autobiography, which he wrote in the third person several decades later, Iñigo noted, “While everyone else clearly saw that they could not defend themselves and thought that they should surrender to save their lives, he offered so many reasons to the fortress’s commander that he talked them into defending it.” Though in the service of a mad cause, this was one of the first indications that Iñigo had an extraordinary ability to lead.

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.

I
ÑIGO 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.