When Sancho II. fought against his sister locked up in Zamora, he offered her Vallisoletum in exchange for the powerful fortress she had inherited from her father. In vain, and the town seated on the Pisuerga is not mentioned again in historical documents until 1074, when Alfonso VI. handed it over, with several other villages, to Pedro Ansurez, who made it his capital, raised the church (Santa Maria la Mayor) to a suffragan of Palencia, and laid the first foundations of its future greatness. In 1208 the family of Ansurez died out, and the _villa_ reverted to the crown; from then until the reign of Philip IV. Valladolid was doubtless one of the most important cities in Castile, and the capital of all the Spains, from the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel to that of Philip III. Consequently, the history of Valladolid from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century is that of Spain. In Valladolid, Peter the Cruel, after three days' marriage, forsook his bride, Doña Blanca de Bourbon, and returned to the arms of his mistress Maria; several years later he committed most of his terrible crimes within the limits of the town. Here Maria de Molina upheld her son's right to the throne during his minority, and in Valladolid also, after her son's death, the same widow fought for her grandson against the intrigues of uncles and cousins. Isabel and Alfonso fought in Valladolid against the proclamation of their niece, Juana, the illegitimate daughter of Henry IV., as heiress to the throne; the citizens upheld the Catholic princess's claims, and it is not surprising that when the princess became queen--the greatest Spain ever had--she made Valladolid her capital, in gratitude to the loyalty of its inhabitants. In Valladolid, Columbus obtained the royal permission to sail westwards in 1492, and, upon his last return from America, he died in the selfsame city in 1506; here also Berruguete, the sculptor, created many of his _chefs-d'œuvres_ and the immortal Cervantes appeared before the law courts and wrote the second part of his "Quixote." Unlucky Juana _la Loca_ (Jane the Mad) and her husband Felipe _el Hermoso_ (Philip the Handsome) reigned here after the death of Isabel the Catholic, and fifty years later, when Philip II. returned from England to ascend the Spanish throne, he settled in Valladolid, until his religious fanaticism or craze obliged him to move to a city nearer the Escorial. Then he fixed upon Madrid as his court. Being a religious man, nevertheless, and conscious of a certain love for Valladolid, his natal town, he had the suffragan church erected to a cathedral in 1595, appointing Don Bartolomé de la Plaza to be its first bishop. At the same time, he ordered Juan de Herrero, the severe architect of the Escorial, to draw the plans and commence the building of the new edifice.