The dates and some of the other details are hopelessly uncertain, but the story’s essential elements appear to be beyond dispute:
One day the bishop of Calahorra paid an official visit to the church of Saint Mary of the Assumption in the little city of Viana, in what was by then northern Spain but had long been part of the kingdom of Navarre. If the visit happened in 1527 as some of the accounts have it, or in 1537 as is also said, the church was already more than two centuries old, its origins as distant for the bishop as those of the White House, say, are for us. It was a tall, gauntly cavernous specimen of Gothic stonework, with pointed arches everywhere and ceilings so high as to be shrouded in gloom even on the brightest days.
If as is commonly said the visit didn’t take place in the 1500s at all but in the closing years of the seventeenth century, it may have happened in connection with the renovations the church is known to have been undergoing at that time. A high tower was being erected above the main entrance, its design baroque rather than Gothic. Inside, the original altars and alcoves were disappearing under extravagant carvings in the newer, more fashionable rococo style. It would have been natural for the bishop, whose diocese included Viana, to make a tour of inspection while all this work was in process.
Whenever it happened, what happened is that His Excellency the bishop was shocked to come upon, just in front of the high altar and therefore in a position that could hardly have been more conspicuous, the bulkily ornate tomb of one of the most famous sons of one of Spain’s most famous families. And to find displayed upon it an epitaph, written in regional dialect, that translates as follows:
Here in a little earth
Lies one whom all did fear,
One whose hands dispensed both peace and war.
Oh, you that go in search of things deserving praise,
If you would praise the worthiest,
Then let your journey end here,
Nor tremble to go farther.
The body inside the tomb was that of a young man, and if intact it bore the signs of a horrifically violent death. In life it had worn the red hat of a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, made its home in the papal palace in Rome, ridden into proud cities as their conqueror, been joined in marriage to a princess, and had honors heaped upon it by kings of France and Spain. Not once but twice it had held in its hands the power to decide who would be elected pope. For thirty years it had been inhabited by a spirit of such force and originality as to inspire one of the immortal classics of world literature.
Perhaps most remarkably, all these things had been done by the time the man was twenty-eight years old. By that age he had become one of the legendary figures of European history, as feared and admired—as his epitaph attested—as anyone living in his time.
The bishop of Calahorra, however, was offended to find such a man memorialized not only in this way, not only in a church, but in a church for which he, as prelate, was responsible. It seemed to him a scandal. And so he ordered the tomb demolished—literally eradicated, broken into bits with heavy hammers—and the body removed. Even that was not enough. Declaring the exhumed remains to be unfit for interment in consecrated ground, the bishop had a hole dug at the foot of the stone staircase leading down from the church to the busy road below. He then had the body deposited in the hole and paved over. So that, he is supposed to have said, it would be “trampled on by man and beasts forever.”
Whose body was this? What kind of man, having risen to eminence in so many ways in the course of such a short life, would leave behind a name capable of provoking such a powerful reaction from a churchman who could never have known him—and doing so decades, possibly generations, after his obscure and rather mysterious death?
To answer that question is one of the purposes of the story that follows. In order to answer it, we must look first at the world, and the family, out of which the young man rose.