Free Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky Page A

their King as good vassals.” No other Basque titles exist. It was the Spanish who conferred titles of nobility and the right to a coat of arms to wealthy citizens. The Loyolas of Azpeitia, in central Guipúzcoa, were a notable example of a Basque family that had served the Castilians in exchange for wealth and titles. In 1331, Alfonso XII, king of Castile, presented the family with a coat of arms.
    The Basques have a reputation of being warlike in the service of Basques. But the Loyola family exemplified another Basque tradition, known to both the Carthaginians and Romans, of being warriors for profit. Loyolas had been honored for battles they had fought against not only the Moors and the French but also fellow Basques. The family had played a critical role in making Guipúzcoa part of Castile. In September 1321, an army from Guipúzcoa joined forces with the Castilians to defeat the French and the Navarrese in the Battle of Beotibar. The exploits of seven Loyola brothers during this fight are still recounted in Euskera once a year in the little Guipúzcoan village of Iguerondo.
    Beltran, a son of one of the brothers, fought the Moors for the king of Castile and was rewarded with land. In the Reconquista, as land was gained, a warlord would build a castle and encourage settlement under his protection. This was a Castilian concept, not a Basque one. Beltran not only built such a castle on his Castilian-granted land but also used his castle in Azpeitia as a base from which to raid and pillage weaker warlords and even the Church. Eventually he was excommunicated by the bishop of Pamplona.
    In 1491, Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola was born. A direct descendant of Beltran, he was destined to be the most famous Basque in history. Each generation of Loyolas had continued the family tradition. Iñigo’s grandfather had attacked the two neighboring towns and lost. As punishment, the family castle was torn down and he was sentenced to fight the Moors in Andalusia. Allowed to return after four years, he rebuilt the family home out of brick in a Moorish style, and that house still stands. His son, Iñigo’s father, Bertrand de Loyola, pledged himself to Ferdinand and Isabella, fighting the French for Castile in 1476 in Toro and Fuenterrabía.
    A sixteenth-century Basque contemporary of Iñigo wrote, “The Loyolas were one of the most disastrous families our country had to endure, one of those Basque families with a coat of arms over the door, in order to justify the misdeeds that were the tissue and pattern of their lives.”
    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)
    F ERDINAND WAS CALLED “the Catholic,” but a more accurate