ABSTRACT
On Fernando III's reconquest of Jaen in 1246 there was a bishop in waiting in the person of D. Domingo, bishop of Baeza since 1232 and, as a Dominican friar an altogether suitable prelate for that frontier place, it might be thought. For with the accession of Fernando III control of the Castilian chancery passed from the archbishop to the as yet unepiscopal Don Juan de Soria, abbot until mid-1219 of Santander and thereafter of Valladolid. Moreover, throughout the twenty-one year period between then and the death of the chancellor D. Juan it was not with Osma that the staff of the nascent royal chancery were particularly associated, but rather, as Millares Carlo noticed as long ago as 1926, with Soria. Thus, by 1267 Soria was a principal seminary of Castile's civil service, the location of its Ecole normale supérieure.
