IT WAS AUTUMN of the year 1190, and a blistering heat hung low over northern Spain like a breath from Hell. Throughout the kingdoms of Castile and Leon the crops failed. Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid—these and other cities were in the grip of the worst famine in years. People were dropping in the streets like flies, and there was rumor that soon the plague would strike.
“Mother of God, have pity on us!” was the anguished cry that went up from every heart. “Send us bread …”
But there was bread only for those who had money to buy it, and day after day the funeral bells sent out an almost constant dirge as mounds of sunbaked clay were heaped upon the bodies of still more victims of the famine in Palencia things were especially serious, and finally one young man knew that he could stand it no longer. He, twenty-year-old Dominic de Guzman, a student for the priesthood, must do something to help the starving.
“But what can you do?” asked friends and teachers anxiously. “Why, you are little more than a boy …”
“I know,” admitted Dominic. “But I have some money. It will help to buy bread for at least one family.”
Undaunted by the argument that he might as well keep what he had, since it was so little, Dominic went down into the poor section of Palencia and gave away all that he owned—his money, clothes, furniture from his room at school, and finally his books. It was a real sacrifice to part with the books, for they were sheets of precious parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, and of more than ordinary worth because of the many notes which were written in the margins.
“The lad must be a fool!” Dominic’s friends told one another. “How can he keep at his studies without books?”
“That’s right. How can he?”
But Dominic only smiled when such remarks reached his ears. “Who could prize dead skins when the flesh of the living is perishing from want?” he asked. “I’ll manage somehow.”
