The founder of the Jesuit order was the thirteenth child of a Spanish noble, born in 1491 at his father’s castle of Loyola in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa.[158] His full name was Inigo Lopez de Recalde; but he is better known to history as Saint Ignatius Loyola.  Ignatius spent his boyhood as page in the service of King Ferdinand the Catholic, whence he passed into that of the Duke of Najara, who was the hereditary friend and patron of his family.  At this time he thought of nothing but feats of arms, military glory, and romantic adventures.

[Footnote 157:  For Sarpi’s use of this phrase see his Lettere, vol. ii. pp. 72, 80, 92.  He clearly recognized the solidarity between the Jesuits and Spain.  ’The Jesuit is no more separable from the Spaniard than the accident from the substance.’  ’The Spaniard without the Jesuit is not worth more than lettuce without oil.’  ’For the Jesuits to deceive Spain, would be tantamount to deceiving themselves.’ Ibid. vol. i. pp. 203, 384, vol. ii. p. 48.  Compare passages in vol. i. pp. 184, 189.  He only perceived a difference in the degrees of their noxiousness to Europe.  Thus, ’the worst Spaniard is better than the least bad of the Jesuits’ (vol. i. p. 212).]

[Footnote 158:  Study of the Jesuits must be founded on Institutum Societatis Jesu, 7 vols.  Avenione; Orlandino, Hist.  Soc.  Jesu; Cretineau-Joly, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jesus; Ribadaneira, Vita Ignatii; Genelli’s Life of Ignatius in German, or the French translation; the Jesuit work, Imago Primi Saeculi; Ranke’s account in his History of the Popes, and the three chapters assigned to this subject in Philippson’s La Contre-Revolution Religieuse.  The latter will be found a most valuable summary.]

He could boast but little education; and his favorite reading was in Amadis of Gaul.  That romance appeared during the boy’s earliest childhood, and Spain was now devouring its high-flown rhapsodies with rapture.  The peculiar admixture of mystical piety, Catholic enthusiasm, and chivalrous passion, which distinguishes Amadis, exactly corresponded to the spirit of the Spaniards at an epoch when they had terminated their age-long struggle with the Moors, and were combining propagandist zeal with martial fervor in the conquest of the New World.  Its pages inflamed the imagination of Ignatius.  He began to compose a romance in honor of S. Peter, and chose a princess of blood royal for his Oriana.  Thus, in the first days of youth, while his heart was still set on love and warfare, he revealed the three leading features of his character—­soaring ambition, the piety of a devotee, and the tendency to view religion from the point of fiction.