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 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,
reestablished 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 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 reestablished, 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