St. Dominic, Founder of the Preaching Friars, and Persecutor of Heretics, was born in the town of Calaroga, now Calahorra, in Old Castile, in the year 1170, and died in Bologna in 1221. He was of the illustrious family of the Guzmans; in his youth he studied ten years at the University of Palencia; was devout, abstemious, charitable; sold his clothes to feed the poor, and even offered to sell himself to the Moors, to ransom the brother of a poor woman who sought his aid. In his twenty-fifth year he became a canon under the Bishop of Osma, preaching in the various churches of the province for nine years, and at times teaching theology at Palencia. In 1203 he accompanied his Bishop on a diplomatic mission to Denmark; and on his return stopped in Languedoc, to help root out the Albigensian heresy; but how far he authorized or justified the religious crusades against these persecuted people, and what part he took in them, is a contested point⁠—enough it would seem to obtain for him, from the Inquisition of Toulouse, the title of the Persecutor of Heretics.