Basque History of the World (11 page)

His legs healed, though his right leg remained inches shorter than his left and he was to have a permanent limp. He became a restless religious pilgrim and, for a time, a hermit He went to Rome and even was able to get an audience with Pope Adrian VI. But back in Spain he was arrested by the Inquisition. It was now the late 1520s, and the Spanish Inquisition was vigilant of heretical practices. Iñigo had shown far too much interest in various occult practices and worse, the Kabala and other magical teachings of Jews and Arabs. Released after three weeks of interrogation, he was barred from preaching.

Silenced in Spain, he decided to put aside preaching and went to Paris, where his Basque ways and hybrid beliefs would have little chance of a following, to study at the famous theological faculty. He so overloaded his donkey with books that he had to walk alongside on his damaged leg for two months to reach the capital. There, although a battle-scarred veteran of almost forty, he lived a student life, studying Latin, making his home in a shack on Rue St. Jacques, a main thoroughfare past the university area, the Latin Quarter. It was there that he received a degree in Latin as Ignatius and kept the Latin name.

The sixteenth-century Latin Quarter attracted other restless religious men from around Europe, and Ignatius gathered around him a small group of Spanish, French, and Basque students. Among them was Francisco de Jassu y Javier, a tall young Basque and champion high jumper who excelled at sports and was regularly seen playing by Notre Dame on the Ile de Cité. A seemingly lighthearted man, his craving for athletic excellence belied the trauma of a difficult childhood. He was a political exile from Navarra whose family had been loyal to the d’Albrets. His father had died fighting the Spanish, and his brothers had been imprisoned. Now he was rooming with Iñigo, a fellow Basque who had fought against their people.

When Iñigo, a natural leader who was consumed with his new religion, formed the small Latin Quarter group, Francisco laughed at him, found his sayings trite and his vows of poverty ridiculous. The once vain Iñigo, now lame and aging, showed a new tolerance for this tall young athlete whose family had been his enemies in war. Two decades later, Iñigo’s secretary would write that Iñigo referred to Francisco as “the roughest clay he ever had to knead.” According to legend, after two years of intellectual jousting, with Francisco mocking the less educated Iñigo’s attempts to preach, and Iñigo flattering the younger man’s vanity, Iñigo finally won him over.

On August 15, 1534, Iñigo and his group of seven founded their new order, the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuits. The founding ceremony, typically Jesuit and, perhaps, typically Basque, took place by a crypt in Montmartre, a subterranean site beneath the hill north of Paris, said to be of pagan significance. The Jesuits, whose vows were simply chastity, poverty, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, would become known for a tendency toward the occult but also for their strict discipline. They shunned the wearing of habits and renounced loyalty to local Church hierarchy. But they were fiercely loyal to the pope, leading the orthodox Counter-Reformation that tried to reclaim Protestant populations. True to the traditions of the Loyola family, the head of the order bears the title of general.

Ignatius was one of the Catholic Church’s great mystics, given to visions and trances. His eyes would run with tears for hours as he tried to recite prayers. The Jesuits became the first worldwide order, accomplishing more than Queen Isabella’s knights ever had to carry out her dream of spreading Catholicism to the new global Spanish Empire. In his battle against the Reformation, Ignatius made Jesuits in the tradition of medieval romance, knights who went forth in the world to conquer lands for the Church. Francisco, known as Francis Xavier, was his leading knight. Once the handsome and gregarious Francis, still only thirty-four, sailed from Lisbon for Asia in 1541, Ignatius would never see him again. Francis was a missionary in Japan, the Molucca Islands, and Malaysia, and died in 1552 en route to China. He is remembered as the patron saint of missionaries. After his death, other Jesuits went to Africa, to the Caribbean, and to the Americas.

In 1556 Ignatius fell ill, this time deteriorating so quickly that he died without receiving last rites. At the time there were 1,000 Jesuits.

The infanta Catalina, who had become the queen of Portugal, continued to support the Jesuits after Ignatius’s death. In 1622, Loyola was canonized Saint Ignatius and his fellow Basque, Francis Xavier, was canonized alongside him.

Controversy has always accompanied the order. Known in Latin America as the preachers of revolution, they traveled up the unknown rivers of South America and tried to establish a model Christian society based on collectivism among the indigenous people they found there. In Europe they became, like Iñigo de Loyola, conservative-leaning and friendly to monarchs, although the Spanish Bourbon monarchs distrusted them. The French Bourbon monarchs, however, enlisted them as confessors to the royal house. Many progressive movements were vehemently anti-Jesuit, and their reputation in France was so reactionary that when Emile Zola wrote his famous 1898 defense of Alfred Dreyfus, “J’accuse,” he called the military establishment that had persecuted Dreyfus “This band of Jesuits.”

Today, with some 25,000 Jesuits in the world, they are the largest Catholic order. They are known throughout the world as builders of schools and promoters of education. Jesuit education has produced revolutionaries and archconservatives. It might have surprised Iñigo that the Jesuits also educated some of the most determined voices of Basque independence.

Cuba’s Fidel Castro was once asked by a Dominican what he thought of his Jesuit education. “Everything was very dogmatic,” he complained.

5: The Basque Billy Goat

In ancient times and during the Middle Ages, Basques were famous for their skills in the practice of fortune telling; today it can be stated, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, that no one in France is more superstitious than the Basques, except maybe the Bretons.

—
Francisque Michel
, L
E
P
AYS
B
ASQUE
,
1857

A
S A SYMBOL OF
their new order, the Jesuits chose not a cross but a sun with its rays stretching toward a circular border. The symbol is ubiquitous in Basqueland, although in modern times the number of curved spokes filling the circle has been reduced to four, giving the appearance of a cross—a concession Ignatius de Loyola did not find necessary. This “Basque cross,” as it is frequently called, predates Christianity and is not a cross at all.

The Basque cross appears to be related to sun worship. The original Basque religion was directly associated with nature— sun gods, moon gods, rock gods, tree gods, mountain gods. Such spirits were often animal-like but sometimes took human form and often were a combination. Residents of different valleys worshiped different spirits. In many valleys, the sun,
eguzki
, was the eye of God,
jainkoaren begi
.

Grave markers that pay homage to the sun have been found in Basqueland dating from the first century B.C. well into medieval times. These rough, thick stones tell the story of Basque conversion, displaying every conceivable variation on the sun from concentric circles to starlike bursts. In time, they more and more resembled crosses, and some stones even have a sun on one side and a cross on the other. Traditional rural Basque houses are still built with the doorway facing east, the direction of the rising sun. This is especially true in Labourd, where the winds and rains are westerly, making the east the sheltered part of the house. Even in contemporary abstract art, the two leading Basque sculptors, Eduardo Chillida and Jorge de Oteiza, both use the circle as a central motif. Oteiza, who first came to international prominence in 1958 by winning a sculpture prize in São Paulo for a steel ring with a strip curving through it, explains, “In the circle we have a tie to the sacred form, the solar circle and especially full moons, and such a primitive religious frame-of-mind, which is realized in these little circles, serves to regenerate our moral conscience.”

The image in the lower right-hand corner is a fresco of the Jesuit seal, circa 1600, from Ignatius Loyola’s room in Rome. The remaining five images are ancient Basque gravestones, the dates of which range from 100 B.C. to A.D. 200 (top row) to after A.D. 833 (lower left-hand corner). The center images are opposite sides of the same stone. (Stones used by permission of Euskal Arkeologia, Etnografia eta Kondaira Museoa, Bilbao)

But for centuries before contemporary abstract Basque art, these circular sun images, Basque crosses, were carved over the doorways of homes. Carvings of roosters were sometimes added to further greet the rising sun. “Sun, sacred and blessed, rejoin your mother” are the ancient words still repeated in modern times as a bedtime prayer.

Once the Basques turned to Christianity, they became, and have remained, the most devout Catholics in Europe. But because Basques keep their traditions, these devout Catholics have many strange practices, symbols, and beliefs. Basques have had a persistent belief in the existence of
jentillak
, gentiles, non-Christians who wander the woods and remote rural areas with terrifying pre-Christian magical powers. Some rural Basques still believe that an ax stored in the house with the blade up protects the house from lightning. Bread blessed on Saint Agatha Day is believed to protect against fire, and bread from Saint Blaise Day guards against floods. If this bread or blessed salt is fed to animals, these creatures will protect the house.

I
N THE EARLY YEARS
of Christianity, hermitism was a common phenomenon, not only in the Basque region but throughout northern Iberia. Devout men lived harsh, ascetic existences alone in mountain huts. In the year 800, one such hermit in the northwestern Galicia region of Iberia saw a shaft of brilliant light. Following this beam, he came upon a Roman cemetery. Under the shaft of light he found a small mausoleum concealed by overgrown vines, weeds, and shrubs. Since beams of celestial light don’t lead to just anyone’s grave, he concluded that this must have been the burial place of Saint James, Santiago, brother of John the Divine. The cemetery became known as Campus Stellae, the star field, and later Compostela.

Silkscreen with relief by Eduardo Chillida for Amnesty International. Note the use of a circle with a line through it, a reference to the ancient Basque symbol.

According to legend, James, one of the first disciples chosen by Jesus, after the crucifixion went off to a distant land, sometimes specified as Iberia, to find converts. Having failed, he returned to Jerusalem, where he was beheaded by Herod, who refused to allow his burial. Christians gathered up his remains at night, placing them in a marble sepulchre, which they sent to sea aboard an unmanned boat. According to early Christian legend, the ship was guided by an angel to the kingdom of the Asturians, which is an area between Basqueland and Galicia.

The Church confirmed the hermit’s finding in Galicia and had a church built over the spot. As the legend grew, an outbreak of miracles and visions was reported from Compostela. Sometimes Saint James was portrayed as a pilgrim and sometimes as a Moor-slaying knight. It was the age of Moor slaying, and many of the miracles and legends had to do with the triumph of Christianity over Islam. Much evidence even suggests that the French had fabricated the legends about Santiago, or his body, going off to Galicia, because they wanted to rally Christendom to defend northern Spain. One legend from the time claimed that Charlemagne himself, the great anti-Moorish warrior who died in 814, had found the body of Santiago in Galicia.

Just as it had become a fashion to demonstrate faith by making the journey to Jerusalem, thereby asserting that it was a Christian and not a Muslim place, it became a fashion to make a pilgrimage to Christian-held Galicia in Moorish Iberia and to pray at the tomb of Saint James. After the Muslims seized the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the late eleventh century and pilgrims stopped going to the Middle East, Santiago de Compostela became the leading Christian pilgrimage.