“This cantiga tells how King Alfonso of Castile suffered in Vitoria and had a pain so great that they thought he would die from it. They put upon him a book of the Cantigas de Santa Maria to cure him. [The King recounts :] … I didn't scream nor did I feel any pain at all, but felt well instantly…”. -Cantiga 209, Muito faz grand'erro. Thus King Alfonso X, el Sabio, tells in the first person how he was miraculously cured of a mysterious illness (now thought to have been caused by a tumour of the maxillary antrum) when the Book of Cantigas de Santa Maria made by his scribes was placed upon his frail, ailing body. In this, as in all the cantigas in the Book, Alfonso wished to make it clear to all his subjects, at every level of society, in an accessible language (the poetic Galician-Portuguese vernacular) and a persuasive medium, that divine grace was an everyday reality.