Chapter 5 APPOINTMENT AT CYPRUS

HIS NAME WAS Iñigo de Loyola. He was born in 1491 to a rich family, youngest of eight boys, one of thirteen children. His older brother had sailed to the New World with Christopher Columbus.

Iñigo served as a page in the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. He became friends with Ferdinand’s Belgian grandson, Charles Habsburg, whose other grandfather was Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. (The Holy Roman Emperor was a kind of secular pope who presided over the Christian kingdoms of the western world.) Charles was propelled to great authority before his twenty-first birthday by the deaths of his two grandfathers within a space of two years. From Ferdinand, Charles inherited Spain. From Maximilian, he inherited the Holy Roman Empire. Charles Habsburg was King Charles I of Spain, Emperor Charles V of Rome. He was the most powerful secular figure in Europe. And he was Iñigo’s friend.

In 1518, Iñigo was part of a legation negotiating for Charles with Spain’s traditional rival, France, at the court of the Duke of Najera in Valladolid. While the summit was in session, Catherina, the Emperor’s sister, was presented to the Najera court. Iñigo fell in love with her. He was twenty-seven and she was eleven. (The Emperor was eighteen.) The match, however, was not to be.

On Monday, May 20, 1521, while commanding a garrison at the Duke’s fortress in Pamplona, Iñigo was struck by a French cannonball. His right leg was shattered, and with it – since a well- shaped leg was among a courtier’s most prized assets – the prospects for a romantic life with Catherina, or any other woman. An honor guard of French soldiers bore the wounded champion on a stretcher to his family’s castle in the Spanish Pyrenees. Surgeons butchered his leg and reset the bones. He lost appetite and was told he might die. He made confession and was given last rites. But a few days after the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, he was pronounced out of death’s immediate grasp. He credited this recovery to his devotion to St. Peter.

Iñigo remained bedridden for nearly a year. Under the concerned if distant eye of the youthful Emperor, he spent his time “searching for substitutes for the shattered ideals, ambitions, and values that had been so central to his sense of himself.”² He gazed obsessively at a small icon of Saint Catherine, a gift from Queen Isabella to his sister-in-law. The icon sparked dreams of Catherina, which only throttled his heart with desolation. He turned to books, Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ and Voragine’s Lives of the Saints – the only two volumes in the family library despite the fact that a Spanish Bible had been available for forty years.

The icon and the books gave him visions. The visions, in turn, led him to develop a process of “preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all inordinate attachments, and, after their removal, of seeking and finding the will of God.”³ Iñigo called this process “the Spiritual Exercises.”

In the Exercises, a Director leads a Retreatant through Four Weeks of intense prayer, meditation, and dialogue with the Blessed Virgin Mary, Jesus, and God the Father. Frequent repetition of “Anima Christi,” Loyola’s own habitual prayer for disorientation and sensory deprivation (“Blood of Christ, inebriate me”), is advised. The First Week is spent considering and contemplating sins, creating vivid mental pictures of “hell in all its depth and breadth, putting your five senses at the service of your imagination.” The Second Week explores the life of Christ up to Palm Sunday inclusively; the Third Week undertakes the Crucifixion, in which the Retreatant is directed to “imagine Christ our Lord present before you on the Cross, and begin to speak with him … and ask ‘What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What ought I to do for Christ?’”4 The Fourth Week is occupied with the Resurrection and Ascension, after which the Retreatant prays “for a knowledge of the deceits of the rebel chief and help to guard myself against them; and also to ask for a knowledge of the true life exemplified in the sovereign and true Commander, and the grace to imitate him.”

By the time the Exercises have run their course, the Retreatant’s purified imagination is totally dominated by mental pictures of Jesus resurrected, Jesus the King Militant. One can now answer the King’s call to conquer Protestantism and its rebel chief (“the enemy of human nature”) with the selfless fidelity of a chivalrous knight. One’s consciousness has been altered. One’s soul and brain have been washed. One’s liberty has been sacrificed to authority. One’s individuality has been surrendered to the Christ of Rome. One no longer has a will of one’s own. One volunteers for any assigned task no matter how adverse.

Martin Luther spent Loyola’s year of recovery imprisoned at Wartburg Castle for insulting the papacy with his Ninety-Five Theses. Remarkably, while one prisoner experienced mystical visions that urged him to defend the Church’s honor in the romantically chivalrous manner of the Knights Templar, the other was translating (with the miraculous permission of his keepers) the New Testament into German so that ordinary people might learn the will of God directly. These parallel, simultaneous quests for holiness would define modern life’s underlying conflict: Which Master Do I Serve, Rome or the Word of God?

PURIFIED by the Spiritual Exercises, Iñigo’s sensual attachment to Princess Catherina was transformed through Saint Catherine into a higher, spiritual attachment to a higher femininity – to Mary, the Queen of Heaven. An apparition of the Virgin appeared to him one night and validated that he was free of fleshly lusts and was now worthy of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In Martin Luther’s opinion, “as far as God is concerned, Jerusalem and all the Holy Land are not one whit more, or less, interesting than the cows in Switzerland.”5 But to a spiritual warrior preparing to lead the Church to war against Scripture, a touchdown in Jerusalem was absolutely necessary. Jerusalem was the domain of King Solomon’s Temple, the geo-spiritual center of the Knights Templar. If Iñigo was to revive the Templars, as the Emperor desired, it was liturgically imperative that his newly-washed spirit present itself in the Sacred City for initiation into the mysteries of holy warfare.

All pilgrims to the Holy Land were required by law to apply to the pope at Easter for permission to proceed. In early March 1522, more than a year in advance, Iñigo set out for Rome in all his aristocratic finery, riding on the back of a mule. The corrupt Leo X had died suddenly of malaria in December 1521, and on January 9, 1522, Charles Habsburg (King and Emperor) had engineered the nearly unanimous election of his former tutor, Adrian Dedal, to succeed Leo as Adrian VI. Iñigo headed for Rome coincidentally with Adrian’s journey across Spain to Barcelona, the point of embarcation for voyages to Italy. The new pope stopped in Navarre, in northern Spain, for an official reception by the Duke of Najera’s successor. Iñigo, too, stopped at Navarre to do some undescribed business at the Duke’s residence at Navarette. Perhaps Adrian gave him a discreet audience.

Further on, the pilgrim kept an all-night vigil at a chapel of the Virgin of Aranzazu, Protectress of the Basques, vowing his chastity to her small, dark statue. He continued on to Montserrat, where he lodged in a Benedictine abbey. There, he rededicated himself to God’s service before another statue of the Virgin, the Black Madonna of Montserrat, Protectress of Catalonia, Patroness of Christian Conquest. The spiritual exercise here must have been intense, for in the late afternoon of the third day, Iñigo traded clothes with a beggar, hung his sword and dagger on the Madonna’s shrine, and gave his mule to the abbey.

While Adrian VI proceeded on to Barcelona, Iñigo detoured on foot to the village of Manresa for ten months of penances, spiritual preparation, and note-taking. Stripped of everything but sackcloth, a gourd for drinking, and a pilgrim’s staff, he adopted the lifestyle of the early Knights Templar, begging food and alms. He was initiated into the Illuminati, the “Enlightened Ones,” a secret society of gnostic fundamentalists who preached that all matter is absolutely and eternally evil.

The gnostics taught that humanity itself is of Satanic origin. Adam and Eve were the offspring of devils. Humanity can achieve salvation from death and eternal punishment, however, by freeing soul from body for absorption into the pure light of Godliness. This is done by withdrawing from sensual pleasure and intuitively discovering hidden truths as conveyed by the cabalah. (The gnostics’ contempt for anything having to do with the physical side of existence translated into wildly ironic behavior. Some practiced radical celibacy because they believed the result of sexual intercourse, conception, would only imprison more souls in physical bodies. Others practiced unbridled sexual libertinism in order to prove they were completely free from all physical inhibition. Still others combined the two, pursuing hypocritical lives of celibate fornication, of which “safe sex” is the modern institution. Loyola’s particular cult apparently chose the asceticism of self-flagellation, for Iñigo wandered many nights about the Manresa countryside whipping himself with a scourge studded with iron barbs. Later in life, he would decide that the whips and barbs “sapped one’s strength,” that the Godhead could as adequately be sought by the more humane self-mortification of the Spiritual Exercises.)

While Iñigo was outlining the Exercises in Manresa, Luther’s translation of the New Testament was introducing readers and listeners in Germany, Switzerland, France, Bohemia, and England to a different form of spiritual exercise, one in which God’s will, ancient and immutable, was expressed not within the private imagination but publicly, in the printed Word, for all to see. People devoured the New Testament even before it reached the bindery. In one contemporary’s words, “The sheet, yet wet, was brought from the press under someone’s cloak, and passed from shop to shop.”⁶

THE pilgrim sailed from Barcelona to the Italian port city of Gaeta, and walked the remaining distance to Rome, arriving there on Palm Sunday, March 29, 1523. Two days later, according to Vatican archives, “Iñigo de Loyola, cleric of the diocese of Pamplona” received permission from Pope Adrian VI to visit Jerusalem. From Rome, Iñigo proceeded to Venice, where one of Charles Habsburg’s agents received him graciously and introduced him to the Doge, Andrea Gritti, the highest official in Venetian civil government. A famed diplomat and linguist, Gritti arranged free passage for Iñigo aboard a small ship whose name – the “Negrona” – was appropriate for an evangelist dedicated to the Black Virgin of Christian Conquest.

On July 14, 1523, the Negrona left Venice, arriving a month later at the island of Cyprus. At Cyprus, one Diego Manes and his servant, along with several Cypriot officials, boarded ship for the rest of the voyage to Haifa. Diego Manes was a Commander of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem.7 Since 1312, the Hospitallers had held title to the vast wealth of the Knights Templar. They had been drawing upon these assets to defend the Roman economy against Islamic marauders in the east. But when the Turks attacked the Hospitallers’ headquarters on the Island of Rhodes, the assets were frozen by the pope and his former pupil, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles. No assistance in any form was forthcoming from either party. Consequently, in December 1522, the Hospitallers had no choice but to surrender Rhodes and retreat to what would become their final domicile, Malta. The message was clear. Now that Luther’s German-language New Testament was in print, Protestantism loomed a greater menace to Rome than Islam ever did.

It is possible that in a Jerusalem-bound ship named Negrona, Commander Diego Manes turned over the litanies, lists, secret codes, formulae, cabalah, and other portable assets comprising the Knights Templar resources to Iñigo. If this indeed happened, the western world’s secret infrastructure was now Loyola’s to populate and manipulate in the cause of learning against learning. That is my hypothesis. What is not hypothesis is that as soon as the pilgrim returned from Jerusalem he began vesting himself with Medici learning.

The idea of uniting the Templars with the Hospitallers was first argued publicly in a book published in 1305 by Raimon Llull, a renowned illuminatus from Majorca. Llull’s book, Libre de Fine, (“Free At Last”) appeared in the midst of a raging controversy between the French monarchy and the Roman papacy over who held jurisdiction over the Templars. That is the subject of our next chapter.

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