We have seen in the preceding chapters how Spain became dominant in Italy, superseding the rivalry of confederate states by the monotony of servitude, and lending its weight to Papal Rome. The internal changes effected in the Church by the Tridentine Council, and the external power conferred on it, were due in no small measure to Spanish influence or sanction. A Spanish institution, the Inquisition, modified to suit Italian requirements, lent revived Catholicism weapons of repression and attack. We have now to learn by what means a partial vigor was communicated to the failing body of Catholic beliefs, how the Tridentine creed was propagated, the spiritual realm of the Roman Pontiff policed, and his secular authority augmented. A Spanish Order rose at the right moment to supply that intellectual and moral element of vitality without which the Catholic Revival might have remained as inert as a stillborn child. The devotion of the Jesuits to the Papacy, was in reality the masterful Spanish spirit of that epoch, masking its world-grasping ambition under the guise of obedience to Rome. This does not mean that the founders and first organizers of the Company of Jesus consciously pursued one object while they pretended to have another in view. The impulse which moved Loyola was spontaneous and romantic. The world has seen few examples of disinterested self-devotion equal to that of Xavier. Yet the fact remains that Jesuitry, taking its germ and root in the Spanish character, persisting as an organism within the Church, but separate from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, devised the doctrine of Papal absolutism, and became the prime agent of that Catholic policy in Europe which passed for Papal during the Counter-Reformation. The indissoluble connection between Rome, Spain, and the Jesuits, was apparent to all unprejudiced observers. For this triad of reactionary and belligerent forces Sarpi invented the name of the Diacatholicon, alluding, under the metaphor of a drug, to the virus which was being instilled in his days into all the States of Europe.[157] 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.