Born in
Madrigal de las Altas Torres, he studied at the
Colegio de San Salvador de Oviedo of the
University of Salamanca, of which he was later a professor, and the
Colegio Mayor Santa Cruz in
Valladolid. He obtained a
licentiate in canon law in 1537 and a
doctorate in canon law in 1538. He was named
vicar general and a
canon of Toledo. He went to
Rome in 1554 as an auditor of the
Roman Rota. While in Rome he befriended
Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the
Society of Jesus. In 1559, he was sent by King
Philip II as an envoy to
Naples and to the Spanish-administered territories in the Italian peninsula. He was a patron in Toledo of the Greek-Spanish painter
Doménikos Theotokópoulos, usually known as
El Greco (1541–1614). It is claimed that Quiroga portrait is found in the face of Saint Augustine in the famous Greco painting
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. Quiroga liberated from the Inquisition's prisons the mystical poet Fray
Luis de León (1527–91), who had been imprisoned for over 4 years at
Valladolid, from March 1572 until December 1576, for publishing, amongst other things, a Spanish translation of the
Song of Solomon, both of his parents having Jewish ancestry albeit being himself an
Augustinian friar expert in Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Around 1584, Quiroga built at the other side of the River Tagus, in the area known as the "Cigarrales", a summer house now occupied by a hotel. ==Episcopal succession==