world and many of them perished as martyrs in the cause they had espoused. When St. Francis held his first chapter in 1221 three thousand members[533:1] were present and Provincial Masters had been appointed in all European countries. In 1260 there were thirty-three provinces, one hundred eighty-two guardianships, eight thousand monasteries and two hundred thousand friars. The order has produced five Popes and many cardinals, bishops, theologians, writers, and poets.
A comparison of the two founders and their orders reveals some interesting facts. Both leaders were born about the same time, St. Dominic being the older by twelve years. Both were of Romance origin—one of noble, the other of ignoble birth. The early life of each was wholly dissimilar in disposition, education, and relation to the Church. The causes operating to make them reformers were very different. St. Dominic dreamed of an aggressive, skilfully-trained body of preachers of simple life to convert the heretics and to instruct the orthodox, thus keeping them firm. St. Francis on the other hand made poverty the first Christian grace and sought to lead all men back to Jesus as the great model. One laboured for doctrinal orthodoxy, the other for personal piety. Both applied to Innocent III. about the same time for a permit to found a new order and both were successful. Each order in its purpose was reformatory and in the monastic world revolutionary.[533:2] In organisation the two orders were essentially the same: each had a governor-general at Rome, provincial governors in the provinces, priors or guardians over single cloisters, which were simply "homes" and not convents in the old sense and
demanded a certain type of life for the members. The vows were essentially the same, although the Franciscans originated and the Dominicans adopted that of poverty. Both orders devoted themselves to preaching and to saving souls.
Education, art, morality, and religion of the later Middle Ages were in a large measure moulded by the influence of these two organisations. Both had great scholars, preachers, teachers, higher clergy, and popes.
Whenever in the thirteenth century we find a man towering above his fellows, we are almost sure to trace him to one of the mendicant orders. Raymond of Pennaforte, Alexander Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, and Duns Scotus are names which show how irresistibly the men of highest gifts were glad to seek among the Dominicans or Franciscans their ideal life.[534:1]
The Franciscans were realists and Scottists; the Dominicans, nominalists and Thomists. The Franciscans believed in the immaculate conception; the Dominicans denied it. Both came into conflict with the secular clergy. They could not say mass, but were very popular confessors and thus tended to deprive the clergy of support and revenues and even threatened to supersede the old ecclesiastical system. Women and the pious as a rule upheld the begging orders, while the state, the soldiers, and the men took the part of the clergy. In both, the individual was compelled to remain poor, while the society became dangerously rich. The Dominicans were aristocratic; the Franciscans democratic.
Each order borrowed something from the other: St. Francis took St. Dominic's idea of itinerant preachers; St. Dominic adopted St. Francis's plan of poverty. Both became quickly popular and both had exemptions and privileges showered upon them by Rome.[535:1] Their members could not be excommunicated by any bishop and were exempt from all local jurisdiction save that of their own order.[535:2] They had a right to live freely in excommunicated lands. Being directly responsible to the Pope alone, they were used by him to raise money, to preach crusades, to sell indulgences, to execute excommunications, to serve as spies and secret police, and to act as papal legates on all kinds of missions. In addition to practically usurping and monopolising the functions of preaching and confession and granting absolution, they were finally permitted to celebrate mass on portable altars.[535:3] In return for these privileges each order gave the Pope a vast army which overran Europe in his name. Both orders helped to carry on the work of the Inquisition.[535:4] Both laboured incessantly in the missionary field and from the thirteenth century onward they were the great missionary pioneers in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. Both had a tertiary order of laymen which went far to remove the barrier between the ecclesiastic and the people. From this comparison it will be seen that the Franciscans and Dominicans were much more alike than unlike in their origin, leaders, aims, methods, and results. After the thirteenth century both departed from their original ideals, became corrupt, worldly, and very unpopular.
A third begging order was created in 1243, when Pope Innocent IV. authorised the organisation of a band of Italian monks under the rule of St. Augustine. Lanfranc Septala of Milan was made general of the order and provincial rulers were appointed for Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. Under Alexander IV. in 1256 they assumed the rights and duties of a mendicant order and in 1287 they were taken under the particular protection of the Pope. They soon spread rapidly over western Europe and by the fifteenth century covered forty-two provinces, had two thousand monasteries, and thirty thousand monks. It was this order which young Martin Luther entered in 1505 at Erfurt.
No better summary of the general results of the begging orders has ever been made than that of Lea when he says:
The Mendicants came upon Christendom like a revelation—men who had abandoned all that was enticing in life to imitate the Apostles, to convert the sinner and unbeliever, to arouse the slumbering sense of mankind, to instruct the ignorant, to offer salvation to all; in short to do what the Church was paid so enormously in wealth and privileges and power for neglecting. Wandering on foot over the face of Europe, under burning suns or chilling blasts, rejecting alms in money but receiving thankfully whatever coarse food might be set before the wayfarer, or enduring hunger in silent resignation, taking no thought for the morrow, but busied eternally in the work of snatching souls from Satan, and lifting men up from the sordid cares of daily life, of ministering to their infirmities and of bringing to their darkened souls a glimpse of heavenly light—such was the aspect in which the earliest Dominicans and Franciscans presented themselves to the eyes of men