Nowhere did the Visigoths wreak greater vengeance or harm on the Iberians who had hindered their entry into the peninsula than in Palencia. It was entirely wrecked and ruined, not one stone remaining to tell the tale of the city that had been. Slowly it emerged from the wreck, a village rather than a town; once in awhile its bishops[{221}] are mentioned, living rather in Toledo than in their humble see.
The Arab invasion devastated a second time the growing town; perhaps it was Alfonso I. himself who completely wrecked it, for the Moorish frontier was to the north of the city, and it was the sovereign's tactics to raze to the ground all cities he could not keep, when he made a risky incursion into hostile country.
So Palencia was forgotten until the eleventh century, when Sancho el Mayor, King of Navarra, who had conquered this part of Castile, reëstablished the long-ignored see. He was hunting among the weeds that covered the ruins of what had once been a Roman fortress, when a boar sprang out of cover in front of him and escaped. Being light of foot, the king followed the animal until it disappeared in a cave, or what appeared to be such, though it really was a subterranean chapel dedicated to the martyrs, or to the patron saint of old Pallantia, namely, San Antolin.
The hunted beast cowered down in front of the altar; the king lifted his arm to spear it, when lo, his arm was detained in mid-air by an invisible hand! Immediately the[{222}] monarch prostrated himself before the miraculous effigy of the saint; he acknowledged his sacrilegious sin, and prayed for forgiveness; the boar escaped, the monarch's arm fell to his side, and a few days later the see was reëstablished, a church was erected above the subterranean chapel, and Bernardo was appointed the first bishop (1035). After Sancho's death, his son Ferdinand, who, as we have seen, managed to unite for the first time all Northern Spain beneath his sceptre, made it a point of honour to favour the see his father had erected a few months before his death, an example followed by all later monarchs until the times of Isabel the Catholic.
A surprising number of houses were soon built around the cathedral, and the city's future was most promising. Its bishops were among the noble-blooded of the land, and enjoyed such exceptional privileges as gave them power and wealth rarely equalled in the history of the middle ages. But then, the city had been built for the church and not the church for the city, and it is not to be marvelled at that the prelates bore the title of "hecho un rey y un papa"—king and pope. The greater part of these princes, it is true,[{223}] lived at court rather than in their episcopal see, which is, perhaps, one of the reasons why Palencia failed to emulate with Burgos and Valladolid, though at one time it was the residence of some of the kings of Castile.
Moreover, being only second in importance to the two last named cities, Palencia was continually the seat of dissident noblemen and thwarted heirs to the throne; because these latter, being unable to conquer the capital, or Valladolid, invariably sought to establish themselves in Palencia, sometimes successfully, at others being obliged to retreat from the city walls. The story of the town is consequently one of the most adventurous and varied to be read in Spanish history, and it is due to the side it took in the rebellion against Charles-Quint, in the time of the Comuneros, that it was finally obliged to cede its place definitely to Valladolid, and lost its importance as one of the three cities of Castilla la Vieja.
It remains to be mentioned that Palencia was the seat of the first Spanish university (Christian, not Moorish), previous to either that of Salamanca or Alcalá. In 1208 this educational institution was founded by Alfonso VIII.; professors were procured[{224}] from Italy and France, and a building was erected beside the cathedral and under its protecting wing. It did not survive the monarch's death, however, for the reign of the latter's son left but little spare time for science and letters, and in 1248 it was closed, though twenty years later Pope Urbano IV. futilely endeavoured to reëstablish it. According to a popular tradition, it owed its definite death to the inhabitants of the town, who, bent upon venging an outrage committed by one of the students upon a daughter of the city, fell upon them one night at a given signal and killed them to the last man.
In the fourteenth century, the cathedral, which had suffered enormously from sieges and from the hands of enemies, was entirely pulled down and a new one built on the same spot (June, 1321). The subterranean chapel, which had been the cause of the city's resurrection, was still the central attraction and relic of the cathedral, and, according to another legend, no less marvellous than that of Toribio, its genuineness has been placed definitely (?) without the pale of skeptic doubts. It appears that one Pedro, Bishop of Osma (St. Peter of Osma?), was praying before the effigy of San Antolin when the[{225}] lights went out. The pious yet doubting prelate prayed to God to give him a proof of the relic's authenticity by lighting the candles. To his surprise (?) and glee, the candles lit by themselves!
Let us approach the city by rail. The train leaves Venta de Baños, a junction station with a village about two miles away possessing a seventh-century Visigothic church which offers the great peculiarity of horseshoe arches in its structure, dating from before the Arab invasion.
Immediately upon emerging from the station, the train enters an immense rolling plain of a ruddy, sandy appearance, with here and there an isolated sand-hill crowned by the forgotten ruins of a mediæval castle.