PART IV
Western Castile
I
PALENCIA
The history of Palencia can be divided into two distinct parts, separated from each other by a lapse of about five hundred years, during which the city was entirely blotted out from the map of Spain.
The first period reaches from before the Roman Conquest to the Visigothic domination.
Originally inhabited by the Vacceos, a Celtiberian tribe, it was one of the last fortresses to succumb to Roman arms, having joined Numantia in the terrible war waged by Spaniards and which has become both legendary and universal.
Under Roman rule the broad belt of land, of which Palencia, a military town on the road from Astorga to Tarragon, was the capital, flourished as it had never done before. Consequently it is but natural that one of the first sees should have been established[{220}] there as soon as Christianity invaded the peninsula. No records are, however, at hand as regards the names of the first bishops and of the martyr saints, as thick here as elsewhere and as numerous in Spain as in Rome itself. At any rate, contemporary documents mention a Bishop Toribio, not the first to occupy the see nor the same prelate who worked miracles in Orense and Astorga. The Palencian Toribio fought also against the Priscilian heresy, and was one of the impediments which stopped its spread further southward. Of this man it is said that, disgusted with the heresy practised at large in his Pallantia, he mounted on a hill, and, stretching his arms heavenwards, caused the waters of the river to leave their bed and inundate the city, a most efficacious means of bringing loitering sheep to the fold.