Nicholas Bobadilla was boirn in Spain in about 1509 and was educated at Alcalá de Henares where in 1529 he earned a bachelor's degree.
Two years later, the group, minus Ignatius who had returned temporarily to Spain, went to Venice, hoping to embark for the Holy Land.
[3] When Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Tagliacozzo, left her husband, Ascanio Colonna, and took their six children to Ischia, given the rank of the parties involved, the matter stirred up controversy among the Italo-Spanish nobility and in the papal court.
[4] Nonetheless, she donated to the Jesuits land on the Quirinal Hill to build their first seminary; now the site of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale.
He preferred the role of itinerant preacher to that of establishing colleges as pastoral centers, which sometimes caused a degree of friction with his colleagues.
He was for a time attached to the papal nunciature in Germany, serving among the armies of the Emperor Charles V. In 1540, while tending the sick in the camp about Ratisbon, he himself caught the plague, but recovered.
[1] Bobadilla spent most of his long career in Germany and Italy, using his formidable intellectual and rhetorical prowess against the spread of Protestantism.
Bobadilla opposed it in speech and in writing, and so vigorously, that though he was highly esteemed in the imperial court, he was obliged, by the Emperor's order to leave Germany.