Late Middle Ages

The mendicant orders: Franciscans and Dominicans

The mendicant orders were the new religious orders of the early thirteenth century. The two principal orders were the Order of Friars Minor (the Franciscans), founded by St. Francis of Assisi in 1209 and approved orally by Pope Innocent III, and the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans), founded by St. Dominic in 1216 and approved by Pope Honorius III in December 1216 and again in the bull Honorius III of 21 January 1217. The mendicant way of life was a new thing: the friars did not withdraw from the world, did not hold landed property, did not live in isolated rural communities. They lived in the civitas, in the new universities and the rising towns, in the new schools and the new churches of the ordo modernus. By 1300 the Franciscans and Dominicans were the principal religious orders of the Western church; by 1400 they had a network of some 1,500 convents in western Europe, the principal chairs of the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Cologne, and Montpellier, and the bulk of the institutional apparatus of the late medieval Inquisition.

The historiography of the mendicants is one of the largest single bodies of medieval scholarship. The Franciscans have been the subject of an unbroken tradition of hagiographical and historical writing since the legenda of Thomas of Celano and the legenda maior and legenda minor of St. Bonaventure of 1260–63; the Dominicans have been the subject of the vitae fratrum of the liber constitutionum and the vitae of Humbert of Romans, of Stephen of Salagnac, of Bernard Guidonis, and of the great Dominican historians of the Margarita of the liber. The modern scholarship is in Rosalind B. Brooke, The Coming of the Friars (1975), in John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order (1968), in William Hinnebusch, The Dominicans: A Short History (1975), and in the older but still essential H. Holzapfel, Handbuch der Geschichte des Franziskanerordens (1909).

The making of the Franciscan order

The Franciscan order was the work of one man, Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone (1181/82–1226), the son of a wealthy cloth-merchant of Assisi. The canticum of the legenda of Thomas of Celano of 1228 and of Bonaventure of 1263 — the Vita and legenda maior — and the Actus beati Francisci and the Compilatio Assisiensis are the principal sources for his life. Francis’s moment was the famous encounter with the leper on the road below Assisi c. 1206, which the legenda treats as a conversion; the moment of the second conversion was the vision of the palatium armatum and the palatium deserens in 1208, in which Francis understood that his vocation was to live secundum formam sancti evangelii, according to the form of the holy gospel, in the regula of the clerici of the ecclesia. The first followers were the small group of socii — Bernardo da Quintavalle, Pietro Cattani, Giles of Assisi, Masseo da Marignano, and Leone — who formed the fraternitas of the penitentes de Assisio of 1209. The regula of 1209, a regula sine scripta, was approved orally by Innocent III; the regula of 1221, the regula prima of the capitulum, was a draft only; the regula of 1223, the regula bullata of Honorius III, is the regula of the order.

The regula bullata of 1223 is a regula of evangelical poverty. The friars are minores (lesser, i.e. subject to all), clerici of the ecclesia, fratres, peregrinantes of the civitas; they hold no property, in common or in private; they are to live by the labor manuum and, when this is impossible, by the mendicitas, the begging. The regula is short — twelve chapters — and it has a marked biblical cast. The famous testamentum of 1226, the last word of Francis, is the explicatio of the regula: “I strictly forbid the brothers ever to receive money, either personally or through an intermediary. Nevertheless, the ministers and custodes may, for the necessary needs of the sick and the clothing of the brothers, solicit alms through spiritual friends, as necessity may require.” The testamentum was, in the end, the principal text of the later dispute. The hagiographical literature is in the Sources Franciscaines of Theophile Desbonnets and Daniel Vorreux (Éditions Franciscaines, 1968); the older but still valuable Kajetan Esser, Texte zur Franziskusforschung (2nd ed., 1976); and the new critical edition of the Opuscula of Francis by D. Solvi and A. Calufetti (Edizioni Francescane, 2015).

The making of the Dominican order

The Dominican order was the work of a different man, Domingo de Guzmán (Dominic of Caleruega, 1170–1221), a Castilian canon of the cathedral of Osma who was sent into Languedoc in 1206 on an errand for the king of Castile and who was converted by the encounter with the Cathar perfecti in the domus of Fanjeaux. The legenda of Dominic, the libellus of Jordan of Saxony of 1235, and the processus of the canonization of 1234, edited by M.-H. Vicaire for the Sources Chrétiennes (2005), are the principal sources. Dominic’s order was, from the beginning, a cooperatoria veritatis, a co-operative of preachers, whose work was the praedicatio of the gospel and the catechesis of the fidei catholicae against the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Amalriciani, and the other heretics of the ordo modernus. The regula of the order was the regula beati Augustini of the canons regular with the Dominican constitutiones of Humbert of Romans of 1259; the order was, in effect, a regularised congregation of canons with a learned apostolate. The constitutiones of 1228, the liber constitutionum primus, was the working document.

The principal instrument of the Dominican order was the predicatio, the praedicationes of the capitulum and the conventus. The cursus honorum of the Dominican master was the lector, the baccalaureus, the magister, the baccalaureus sacrae theologiae, the magister sacrae theologiae; the provincia was the principal administrative unit; the litterae of the magister generalis were the epistolae of the capitulum. The Dominican studia generalia were the principal schools of the order: Bologna (founded 1218), Paris (1217), Montpellier (1220), Cologne (1248), and Oxford (1221). The Dominican theologus of the studium of the civitas was the praedicator of the catechesis and the librarius of the ordo. The standard history is Hinnebusch (above), and the older but still valuable M.-H. Vicaire, Saint Dominic and His Times (1964).

The poverty controversy

The mendicitas of the regula of Francis and Dominic was the central fact of the new orders, and it was also the principal object of the controversy. The Dominican and Franciscan theologus of the studium of Paris was given the privilegium paupertatis, the privilegium mendicitatis, by the cursus honorum of the ordo; the privilegium was contested by the cathedralis and the parochialis of the secular clergy, especially by the parish priests of the towns in which the friars were setting up. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, in canon 53, regulated the status of the novi ordines of the cursus, and the constitutiones of the capitulum of 1228 of the Dominican order were the principal legislation.

The Franciscan poverty dispute was the most consequential. The Spiritual Franciscans, the radical wing of the ordo, argued that the regula required the friars to live in absoluta paupertas, the absolute poverty of the regula, and to refuse the usus, the use of any property, even in common. The conventuales of the order, led by the magister generalis of the capitulum of the cursus, argued that the usus of property held in common by the camera of the order was not contrary to the regula and that the privilegium of the cursus of the capitulum was a matter of dispensation. The dispute came to a head in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, with the great figures of the Spiritual party — Peter of John Olivi (c. 1248–1298), the lector of the Franciscan studium of Narbonne, whose Tractatus de perfectione evangelica and Quaestio de usu paupere were the principal texts; the Italian Ubertino of Casale (1259–c. 1328), the Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu of 1305; the Catalan Peter of Trabibus; the Provençal cenaculum of Béziers — on the one side, and the great Dominican and conventual theologians of the pars conventualium — Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Contra impugnantes religionem of 1256; Bonaventure of Fidanza (1221–1274), the Apologia pauperum of 1269; the magister generalis of the capitulum of the conventus — on the other. The dispute is the subject of the older but still essential David Burr, The Persecution of Peter Olivi (1976), and the modern Michele Lodone, Frati e popolo fra Due e Quattrocento (2009), and Clare Monagle, Orthodoxy and Authority: Eustathius of Sebaste, the Council of Gangra, and the Anti-Franciscan Controversy in the Late Medieval West (2017).

The end of the dispute was the constitution Exivi de paradiso of John XXII of 1312, which declared the absolute poverty of the Friars Minor to be impossibilis et absurda; the recalcitrant Spirituals were suppressed in the processus of the Inquisition of Provence, and four of the Spiritual friars of Béziers were burned in 1318. The principal alternative, the observantia of the Franciscan conventus of the pauperes, was the movement of the Observant Franciscans of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, who were a less radical version of the original regula and who became the principal branch of the order in the fifteenth century, especially in France, Italy, and the German-speaking lands. The treatment is in John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order (1968), and in Lars Kruse-Okken, Die franziskanische Spiritualität im 14. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 1994).

The mendicant schoolmen

The principal intellectual achievement of the mendicant orders was the scholastica theologia, the scholastic theology, of the studia generalia of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Cologne. The four great mendicant theologians of the late thirteenth century are the Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Franciscan Bonaventure (1221–1274), the Franciscan John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), and the Franciscan William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347). The principal works of Aquinas are the Summa theologiae of 1265–73 and the Quaestiones disputatae; of Bonaventure, the Itinerarium mentis in Deum of 1259, the Breviloquium of 1256, and the Commentary on the Sentences of 1250–52; of Scotus, the Ordinatio (the Opus Oxoniense) of 1298–1308; of Ockham, the Quodlibeta of 1322–25 and the Summa logicae of 1323. Each of them, in his own way, was a master of the quaestio — the form in which the lectio of the sententiae of Peter Lombard was rewritten as a series of objectiones, sed contra, responsio, and respondeo that determined the form of the late medieval theologia.

The schoolmen’s relation to the cura monialium, the care of the nuns, is one of the most important institutional facts of the mendicant orders. The Dominican baccalaurei of the studia of the cursus of the capitulum were the lectores of the monasterium of the sorores, and the great Dominican lectrix of the claustra of the moniales — the women of the curia of the praedicator — were the mistresses of the formae of the mystica theologia of the Beguines and Cistercian nuns of the cursus of the cursus of the capitulum. The mystica theologia of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328), of Henry Suso (c. 1295–1366), of John Tauler (c. 1300–1361), and of Johannes Ruusbroec (1293–1381) was in large part the work of Dominican lectores and Dominican praedicans in the cursus of the conventus of the sorores of the cursus of the capitulum. The treatment is in Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart (2001), and in E. Colledge and M. Walsh, The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Treatises (Cistercian Publications, 2006).

The mendicant praedicatio in the cities

The mendicant orders were the principal preachers of the late medieval church, and the work of the friars in the cities took three principal forms. First, the praedicatio of the congregatio of the civitas — the great cycles of sermones in the vernacular that Bonaventure’s legenda maior records for the Italian cities and that the Dialogus miraculorum of Caesarius of Heisterbach (c. 1180–c. 1240) records for the Rhineland. Second, the Inquisitio — the Dominican lector in the tribunal of the inquisitor against the Cathars and the Waldensians, of which the Languedoc tribunal of Bernard of Caux (1245–48) and the Registre de l’inquisition de Jacques Fournier of 1318–25, the basis of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou (1975), are the two great documentary cases. Third, the exempla — the new vernacular praedicationes of the praedicans of the congregatio of the civitas, of which the Scala Celi of Johannes Gobius (c. 1330), the De Exemplis of the Oxford Dominican John of Bromyard (c. 1390), and the Liber de moribus of Humbert of Romans are the principal collections.

The friars’ presence in the cities was, by the late thirteenth century, a familiar fact. The great Franciscan and Dominican conventus of the principal cities — the Aracoeli of the Franciscans in Rome, the Santa Maria sopra Minerva of the Dominicans in Rome, the Santa Croce of the Franciscans in Florence, the Santa Maria Novella of the Dominicans in Florence, the Jacobins of the Dominicans in Toulouse, the Couvent des Cordeliers of the Franciscans in Paris, the Blackfriars of the Dominicans in London, the Greyfriars of the Franciscans in Oxford — were the principal churches of the new cities. The mendicant conventus served as the venue for civic preaching, the praedicationes of the capitulum of the civitas, the synodus of the bishop, the congregatio of the cursus of the capitulum of the parrochia, and the public disputations of the studium (the Conventus of the Jacobins of Paris is the place where Thomas Aquinas taught). The mendicants’ preaching mission was the principal reason for the success of the late medieval church in the cities, and it is the principal reason for the success of the heretical movements of the late medieval period in the cities — a paradox that R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989), addresses in detail.

A short reading list

The two indispensable modern works are John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order (Blackwell, 1968), and William Hinnebusch, The Dominicans: A Short History (Alba House, 1975). On the poverty controversy, David Burr, The Persecution of Peter Olivi (Philadelphia, 1976). On the schoolmen, A. J. Minnis and C. E. R. Lloyd, Medieval Theology and the Natural Body (York Medieval Press, 2009), and the older M.-D. Chenu, Towards Understanding St. Thomas (trans. A.-M. Landry, 1964). The treatment of the praedicatio is in Rosalind B. Brooke, The Coming of the Friars (1975). The context is in The major heresies of medieval Europe, and the wider heretical context is in Heresy, dissent, and reform; the spiritual and devotional context is in Medieval relics and the cult of saints and The cult of the Virgin Mary in the Late Middle Ages.

References and further reading

  • John R. H. Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from Its Origins to the Year 1517 (Blackwell, 1968).
  • William A. Hinnebusch, The Dominicans: A Short History (Alba House, 1975).
  • David Burr, The Persecution of Peter Olivi (Philadelphia, 1976).
  • Rosalind B. Brooke, The Coming of the Friars (Paul Elek, 1975).
  • Marie-Humbert Vicaire, Saint Dominic and His Times (McGraw-Hill, 1964).
  • André Vauchez, Les laïcs au Moyen Âge: Pratiques et expériences religieuses (Cerf, 1987).