During France's siege of the fortress of Pamplona, a cannonball struck and badly wounded a young Basque soldier named Íñigo López de Loyola, shattering one leg and injuring the other. Months of painful convalescence and religious reading transformed him; he abandoned his military ambitions and would go on to found the Society of Jesus in 1540, becoming known to history as Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
Before he was a saint, Íñigo López de Loyola was a vain, ambitious courtier and soldier with dreams of glory and romance. Fighting to defend the fortress of Pamplona against a French assault on May 20, 1521 (some accounts place related events around mid-March as French forces advanced), he was struck by a cannonball that broke his right leg and grazed his left, ending any hope of the dashing military career he had envisioned.
Surgeons botched the initial repair, forcing Loyola to endure multiple rebreakings and resettings of the bone without anesthesia, procedures so agonizing that witnesses said he nearly died from the pain alone. Confined to bed for months, he asked for chivalric romance novels to pass the time; when none were available, he was given a life of Christ and a book on the saints instead.
Those books changed him. Loyola emerged from his convalescence with a limp he carried the rest of his life and a new ambition: spiritual rather than military conquest. He eventually made his way to Paris, gathered companions, and in 1540 founded the Society of Jesus, an order whose missionaries and scholars would shape Catholic education and global missionary work for the next five centuries.