Alfonso listened humbly, and professed entire willingness to repent, but for the difficulty that he had always been taught that penitence was fruitless without restitution, and restitution he was unable and unwilling to make. Diego then suggested that he should meet the chapter and discuss the case, to which he graciously assented. In the assembly which followed, Diego proposed that the king should follow the example of his father, Raymond of Gallicia, in commending himself to the peculiar patronage of Santiago, and in bequeathing his body to be buried in their church, promising, moreover, that if he should do so they would pray specially for him, which, from the promise of his youth, bade fair to be no easy task. Alfonso was delighted to escape so easily: he eagerly accepted the proposition, and added that he would like to become a canon of their church, in order to enjoy the fullest possible share in the Masses of such holy men. To this the chapter assented at once; he was forthwith duly installed as a canon of the church which he had just despoiled, and his conscience was set at rest, while the church felt that it had acquired a moral supremacy over the spoiler.[762] In thus formally becoming a canon, there could have been no assumption of celibacy, expressed or implied. Alfonso was but twenty-one years of age, and in the following year he married Berengaria, daughter of the Count of Barcelona.[763] In fact, in the absence of urgency on the part of Rome, the question of sacerdotal celibacy seems to have been virtually ignored in Spain. How little importance was attached to the preëminent sanctity of asceticism becomes evident when we are told that in the whole of Gallicia there was no convent of nuns until Diego, in 1129, founded the house of S. Maria of Conjo.[764] Equal indifference is manifested in the legislative assemblies of the church. The council of Leon and Compostella, in 1114, only prohibited the residence of such women as were forbidden by the canons,[765] which, in the existing discipline of the Spanish church, may safely be presumed to offer no impediment to the marriage relation; and a synod held at Palencia in 1129 is even more significant in its reticence, for it merely provides that notorious concubines of the clergy shall be ejected, without apparently venturing to threaten any punishment on the reverend offenders.[766]