By 1521, a French invasion of the kingdom of Navarre in north-eastern Spain was imminent. King Francis I of France wanted to restore Henri d’Albret to his hereditary kingdom of Navarre, but the king’s true motive was to bring the war against King Charles V of Spain into Spain itself.10 After taking the city of Pamplona, Francis planned to advance into Castile. Pamplona was key to the conquest of the province. An army of some 12,000 French infantry and 800 lancers assembled with twenty-nine pieces of artillery. To meet this force, the Duke of Nájera could put into the field of battle only 3,000 infantry and 700 horse. When the invasion began, two elder brothers of a young Navarese, Francis Xavier, left home to join the French army. This historical enmity between Ignatius and the Xavier family in Pamplona may partly explain Ignatius’s early difficulties in winning over Francis Xavier during their years studying together in Paris.
The city of Pamplona fell without a fight. Only the citadel remained to be taken. While his fellow officers were for surrender, Ignatius held out for defence. He was able to persuade the garrison commander to fight on in the hope of holding out until reinforcements arrived. Ignatius judged it disreputable to retreat or surrender. Honour was everything to him. To prepare himself for possible death, and in the absence of a priest, Ignatius made his confession to a companion soldier, a practice recommended in manuals of confession of the time.
The bombardment of the citadel continued for six hours. The walls were finally breached. Ignatius was struck by a shot that passed between his legs, shattering the right leg and leaving a gaping flesh wound in the left. The French were victorious, but they were chivalrous in victory. In a field operation, they set Ignatius’s right leg and dressed his wounds. He had fallen on 23 or 24 May 1521. Some nine days later, he left Pamplona on a litter and was carried back home to Loyola, probably by his own men.
It was Ignatius’s sister-in-law, Magdalena de Aroaz, formerly lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabella, who welcomed the badly wounded fighter home to the Castle of Loyola where he was to lie on his sickbed for nine months, from June 1521 until February 1522. His bedroom was in the upper storey of the Loyola castle. It contained a painting of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary given to Magdalena as a wedding gift by Queen Isabella. The painting still hangs in what is called the Room of the Conversion in the Castle of Loyola.
Initially, Ignatius’s medical condition deteriorated. The physicians and surgeons agreed that his right leg should be broken again and the bones reset. During this operation, Ignatius did not utter a single word and gave no indication that he was in agony, except for a clenching of his fist. He was being the perfect knight, for the clenched fist was the only manifestation of pain permitted by the code of chivalry.
The strain of the operation brought Ignatius close to death. On 24 June, he was advised to make his final confession. On the vigil of the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, 28 June, Ignatius had an extraordinary experience. He thought he saw St. Peter assisting him and nursing him back to health. He began to pray fervently to St. Peter, to whom he promised to devote his life as a knight should he recover. Within three hours he was judged to be out of danger.
This second operation, however, was not fully successful. As the bones knitted, it was found that a stump had been left protruding from the damaged leg. Ignatius had “a vain and overweening desire to win renown” in the exercise of arms, and not only would this protuberance be instantly observed, but it would prevent him from wearing the elegant, close-fitting knee boots of the hidalgo.11 Something had to be done to avoid such a humiliation. In desperation, Ignatius insisted on a third operation. The offending bone would have to be sawn off. While the surgeons did their horrific work, Ignatius was once again silent. In the end, the operation was successful and the disfigurement was hardly noticeable, although Ignatius was left with a slight limp until the end of his days.
During his recovery, when he felt well enough, Ignatius suffered from extreme boredom, so he asked for some romantic tales of the kind he had already read so avidly. There were none to be had in the Castle of Loyola. Instead, he was given a copy of the Life of Christ by the Carthusian monk Ludolph of Saxony (c.1295–1378), which had been translated into Spanish and printed in Alcalà in four volumes in 1502–3. The Christ that Ludolph presents is the summit of the ideals of the medieval knight. Ludolph writes of the pilgrimages to Jerusalem that already formed part of the traditional devotions of the people of Guipùzcoa, and this idea of pilgrimage to Jerusalem would soon become important for Ignatius.
Ignatius was also given the Lives of the Saints, consisting of selected biographies of saints by the Italian Dominican Jacopo de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, who died in 1298.12 The book, known in the original as the Legenda Aurea—The Golden Legend—had been translated into Spanish as early as 1480. The saints, especially the founders of religious orders, were presented as cabelleros de Dios, knights in the service of the eternal prince, Jesus Christ.
Slowly, certain saints began to appeal to Ignatius. Saints Francis and Dominic were already vaguely familiar to him: a relative on his father’s side, Doña Maria de Emparan y Loyola, had founded the convent of Franciscan Tertiaries in Azpeitia and, on his mother’s side, a more distant relative, Maria de Guevara, had set up the Poor Clares in the convent of Arévalo, which Juan Velásquez de Cuéllar later endowed.
Another saint who took hold of Ignatius’s imagination was St. Honofrio, or Humphrey, who was either Persian or Ethiopian. A dishevelled solitary from the fourth century, he had become widely popular in Europe thanks to the Crusaders.
As well as reading and pondering on these spiritual books, Ignatius also spent time fantasising about the knightly exploits and amorous trysts he might accomplish as a hidalgo. But he now began to notice the various mood swings that accompanied these times of reflection. It is worth pausing here to quote directly from The Autobiography:
Reading through these [books] often, he was becoming rather attached to what he found written there. But, on ceasing to read them, he would stop to think: sometimes about the things he had read, at other times about the things of the world he had been accustomed to think about before. And, out of the many vain things which had previously presented themselves to him, one held his heart in such deep possession that he was subsequently absorbed in thought about it for two or three and four hours without noticing it, imagining what he would do in the service of a certain lady: the means he would take so as to be able to reach the country where she was, the witty love poems, the words he would say to her, the deeds of arms he would do in her service. He was so carried away by all this that he had no consideration of how impossible it was to be able to attain it. For the lady was not of the ordinary nobility, nor a countess or a duchess, rather her state was higher than any of these. Still Our Lord was helping him, causing some other thoughts, which were born of the things he was reading, to follow these. For while reading the lives of Our Lord and the saints, he would stop to think, reasoning with himself, “How would it be, if I did this which St. Francis did, and this which St. Dominic did?” And thus he used to think over many things which he was finding good, always proposing to himself difficult and laborious things. And as he was proposing these, it seemed to him he was finding in himself an ease as regards putting them into practice . . .
This succession of such different thoughts lasted a considerable time for him . . . Still, there was this difference: that when he was thinking about the worldly stuff he would take much delight, but when he left it aside after getting tired, he would find himself dry and discontented. But when he thought about going to Jerusalem barefoot . . . and about doing all the rigours he was seeing the other saints had done, not only would he be consoled while in such thoughts, but he would remain content and happy even after laying them aside. But he wasn’t investigating this, not stopping to ponder this difference, until one time when his eyes were opened a little, and he began to marvel at this difference in kind and to reflect on it, picking up from experience that from some thoughts he would be left sad and from others happy, and little by little coming to know the difference in kind of spirits that were stirring: the one from the devil, and the other from God.13
The identity of the lady of Ignatius’s reveries has never been established. Several ladies of royal rank whom Ignatius may have known personally have been proposed. It is more than likely that he was dreaming about some royal princess. However, this is of secondary importance. What is of real importance in the quotation above is that this is the first mention of Ignatius’s making a distinction between the contrasting moods which would arise in him as a result of his reflecting on the things of God and, for want of a better phrase, on worldly matters. Recognising this distinction would become vitally important in Ignatius’s teaching of what he later termed “the discernment of spirits.”
One night during his recuperation, unable to sleep, Ignatius felt that he saw clearly before him the likeness of Our Lady with the Child Jesus, and he was filled with sheer happiness, which lasted many hours. His emphasis on the positive feelings that endured from this vision is noticeable. He also became conscious of some mysterious presence that gave him a total revulsion from his previous, dissolute life.
Now, when the family and household of Loyola came to visit him in his sickroom, they found a different Ignatius from the worldly hidalgo they had previously known. Much to their surprise, Ignatius began to speak to them of the things of God. This was the beginning of what would be a central work or ministry for Ignatius in the future: having spiritual conversations with people. From this time, he began to realise that such conversations “helped souls,” to use his own expression. He also drew comfort from looking out the window of the castle in Loyola and gazing up at the sky and the stars. As soon as he was able to move about the room, Ignatius began noting in a book passages from the New Testament, marking Christ’s words in red and Our Lady’s in blue; then he would stop and pray. He began to feel in himself “a great impetus towards serving our Lord.”14
Ignatius eventually recovered from his long illness. Martín, witnessing the gradual interior change that had come over his brother, feared that Ignatius would do something foolish and throw away his future prospects. One day, he brought him around the Castle of Loyola, pointing out to him all the material possessions that had been amassed there and begging him to act sensibly and to do nothing rash.
But Ignatius had made up his mind to leave it all behind. To avoid his brother’s wrath, he hinted to Martín that he intended to go to Navarette, where the Duke of Nájara lived. Riding on a mule, Ignatius left Loyola in February 1522, accompanied by two servants, Andrés de Marbaitz and Juan de Landeta, who were sent along to make sure that he arrived at his destination. His brother Pedro, the priest, was also part of the group. They stopped off at the wayside chapel of Aránzazu, a favoured Basque shrine to Our Lady. There, Ignatius kept an all-night vigil in front of the small, dark statue of the Madonna set on a carved thorn bush. This statue is still to be seen over the high altar in what is now a large basilica and place of pilgrimage.
The next day, Ignatius and Pedro paid a visit to their sister Magdalena in nearby Oñate, accompanied by the two servants. Here, the two brothers bade farewell to one another. They would never see each other again. Still accompanied by the two servants, Ignatius continued on his journey to Navarette, where he intended to collect some money that the Duke of Nájera owed him. We do not know if Ignatius met the duke on that occasion, but he did request the duke’s treasurer to give him the money that was his due. Ignatius took the money, asking that part of it be paid to unspecified persons to whom he was still in debt; the rest of it was to be used to refurbish a statue of the Blessed Virgin that was in poor condition.
Ignatius now parted company with the two servants, who could truthfully report to Martín that he had indeed gone to the duke’s palace, and set off alone on the road to Saragossa. Along the way, he came across a Muslim riding in the same direction. They got into conversation. Strangely, perhaps, their talk turned to the subject of Our Lady’s virginity. The Moor agreed that Mary had conceived unaided by man but would not accept at all that she remained a virgin after childbirth. Ignatius and the Moor argued heatedly about this matter. When they parted, Ignatius, still the knight, thought that he had allowed the honour of Our Lady to be besmirched and wondered if he was bound to ride after the Moor and strike him dead with his dagger. Uncertain if such drastic action would be the proper thing to do, Ignatius allowed the mule on which he rode to decide the matter for him. When they came to a fork in the road, Ignatius gave the mule free rein. The mule took a different road from that taken by the Moor, so the poor man was saved from Ignatius’s intentions that day! This amusing yet potentially disastrous episode shows how naive Ignatius’s outwardly enthusiastic faith was at this early stage.
Along the road, Ignatius stopped off at the great Benedictine monastery of Our Lady of Montserrat. At the time, the community of Benedictine monks numbered about fifty. Ignatius reached the monastery on 21 March 1522. It was twelve years since the death of the Montserrat’s most famous abbot, Garcia Jiménez de Cisneros (1455–1510), whose name Ignatius would have heard at Arévalo. Cisneros had first reformed the Benedictine monastery in Valladolid and then introduced his reform in Montserrat, where he built the cloister, established a school, set up a printing press, and wrote a popular book entitled Exercitatorio de la Vida Espiritual, a manual of the spiritual life printed on the premises in 1500. This book was given to Ignatius by one of the monks, a Frenchman, Jean Chanon, to whom Ignatius made his general confession. This confession, according to Ignatius himself, took him three full days. The monastery of Montserrat still exists to this day, magnificently situated high above the valley and surrounded by dramatic mountain peaks. With its thriving Benedictine community and world-renowned choir school, it remains a very popular pilgrimage spot.
On the evening of his third day at the monastery, Ignatius sought out a beggar, gave him the fine clothes he was wearing, and put on the loose sackcloth of a pilgrim. He then went to kneel before the statue of the Black Madonna of Montserrat, where he spent the whole night in prayer. He hung up his sword and dagger at the shrine, gave his mule to the monastery, and left. It was 25 March 1522, and he was thirty-one years old.