Ignatius was barely twenty when the events happened which determined the future of his life and so powerfully affected the destinies of Catholic Christendom.  The French were invading Navarre; and he was engaged in the defense of its capital, Pampeluna.  On May 20, 1521, a bullet shattered his right leg, while his left foot was injured by a fragment of stone detached from a breach in the bastion.  Transported to his father’s castle, he suffered protracted anguish under the hands of unskilled medical attendants.  The badly set bone in his right leg had twice to be broken; and when at last it joined, the young knight found himself a cripple.  This limb was shorter than the other; the surgeons endeavored to elongate it by machines of iron, which put him to exquisite pain.  After months of torture, he remained lame for life.

During his illness Ignatius read such books as the castle of Loyola contained.  These were a ‘Life of Christ’ and the ‘Flowers of the Saints’ in Spanish.  His mind, prepared by chivalrous romance, and strongly inclined to devotion, felt a special fascination in the tales of Dominic and Francis.  Their heroism suggested new paths which the aspirant after fame might tread with honor.  Military glory and the love of women had to be renounced; for so ambitious a man could not content himself with the successes of a cripple in these spheres of action.  But the legends of saints and martyrs pointed out careers no less noble, no less useful, and even more enticing to the fancy.  He would become the spiritual Knight of Christ and Our Lady.  To S. Peter, his chosen protector, he prayed fervently; and when at length he rose from the bed of sickness, he firmly believed that his life had been saved by the intercession of this patron, and that it must be henceforth consecrated to the service of the faith.  The world should be abandoned.  Instead of warring with the enemies of Christ on earth, he would carry on a crusade against the powers of darkness.  They were first to be met and fought in his own heart.  Afterwards, he would form and lead a militia of like-hearted champions against the strongholds of evil in human nature.

It must not be thought that the scheme of founding a Society had so early entered into the mind of Ignatius.  What we have at the present stage to notice is that he owed his adoption of the religious life to romantic fancy and fervid ambition, combined with a devotion to Peter, the saint of orthodoxy and the Church.  Animated by this new enthusiasm, he managed to escape from home in the spring of 1522.  His friends opposed themselves to his vocation; but he gave them the slip, took vows of chastity and abstinence, and began a pilgrimage to our Lady of Montserrat near Barcelona.  On the road he scourged himself daily.  When he reached the shrine he hung his arms up as a votive offering, and performed the vigil which chivalrous custom exacted from a squire before the morning of his being dubbed a knight.  This ceremony was observed point by point, according to the ritual he had read in Amadis of Gaul.  Next day he gave his raiment to a beggar, and assumed the garb of a mendicant pilgrim.  By self-dedication he had now made himself the Knight of Holy Church.