In the earliest memories of the Order of Preachers, Spain, the very homeland of their sainted founder, was a remarkably – and surprisingly – uninteresting place. If Dominic's intention for his followers was, as Jordan of Saxony, the order's earliest historian put it, to ‘send them all, though few in number, throughout the world’ as Christian preachers, then Spain – with its tens, even hundreds of thousands of Muslims living under Christian rule – should have been a prime destination. Yet, according to Jordan's telling, the early Dominicans were ever turning away from Spain and its non-Christian population. Bishop Diego de Osma, Dominic's esteemed mentor, travelled to the papal Curia, Jordan tells us, seeking to be relieved of his episcopal responsibilities – not in order to devote himself to preaching to the Jews and Muslims of his homeland, but to evangelize the Turkic Cumans who were then invading Hungary. Four early Dominican friars were sent, Jordan relates, to the ‘regions of Spain’ (partes Hispaniae), but two of them soon returned to Dominic in Rome since they ‘had not been able to achieve anything fruitful in Spain’ (neque enim […] fructificare in Hispania potuerunt). Dominic directly packed them off to Bologna. Dominic himself made his way back to Spain on one occasion to visit Dominican foundations in Madrid and Segovia, but was in Paris again by the end of Jordan's sentence. While Jordan describes an elaborate disputation between Albigensian heretics and Dominic's friars in Fanjeaux in which ‘many of the [Dominican] faithful wrote their treatises containing arguments and authoritative [scriptural] passages as confirmation of the [Christian] faith’, we read nothing of preaching to Jews or Muslims in Iberia, let alone writing tracts against them.