CHAPTER XVIII

THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE FRIARS[38]

The _Regnum_, the _Sacerdotium_, and the _Studium_—The Beginnings of the Universities—Their Organisation and their Spirit—Their Relations to the Church—The Introduction of Aristotle—Intellectual and Popular Heresy—St. Francis and the Minorites—St. Dominic and the Order of Preachers—Other Mendicant Orders—The Work of the Mendicants—Preaching and Pastoral Care—The Religious Revival—The Mendicants and the Universities—The Triumph of the Mendicants—The Great Scholastics of the Thirteenth Century and the Results of their Influence.

[Sidenote: Regnum, Sacerdotium, and Studium.]

From the unorganised schools of the twelfth century proceeded the corporate universities of the thirteenth century. The same age that witnessed the culmination of the idea of the ‘regnum’ under Barbarossa and Henry VI. and the triumph of the ‘sacerdotium’ under Innocent III., saw the establishment of the ‘studium’ as a new bond of unity and authority, worthy to be set up side by side with the Empire and the Papacy themselves. The strong instinct for association that about the same period led to the organisation of the Lombard League and the French Communes, that united England under the Angevins and South Italy under Frederick II., that set up merchant guilds in every urban centre and gave fresh life to both the old and the new ecclesiastical societies, brought about the organisation of the masters and scholars into the universities which still remain as the most abiding product of the genius of the Middle Ages. Just as the institution of knighthood had set up a new cosmopolitan principle of union that bound together men of different lands, wealth, and social station, in a common brotherhood of arms, so did the establishment of the corporations of doctors and scholars unite the subtlest brains of diverse countries and ranks in a common professional and social life.

[Sidenote: The earliest universities.]

The earliest universities were, like Paris, associations of teachers, or, like Bologna, clubs of foreign students. They had no founders, and based their rights on no charters of king or pope, but grew up gradually as a natural outcome of the wide spread of intellectual pursuits that had followed upon the twelfth-century Renascence. The accident of the abiding presence of a series of great teachers had made Paris the centre of theological and philosophical study north of the Alps, and had given the schools of Bologna a prestige that attracted to them students of the civil and canon laws from every country in Europe. [Sidenote: Paris and Bologna.] It was inevitable that sooner or later the accidental and spasmodic character of the earlier schools should give way to systematic organisation. The numerous teachers of arts and theology at Paris gradually became a definite college or guild of doctors and masters, with power to admit and to exclude new members of their profession, and with an increasingly strong corporate spirit and tradition. Before the death of Louis VII. a university, that is to say a corporation, of masters, had replaced the individual schools of the age of Abelard. Before the century was out Philip Augustus had given the infant university its earliest privileges of exemption from the ordinary municipal organisation. Before the middle of the thirteenth century, the Faculties had been organised, the Four Nations and the Rectorate set up, the authority of the Episcopal Chancellor reduced to a minimum, and the universal acceptation of the teaching rights of the masters secured. Kings and popes vied with each other in showering privileges on a society that controlled with such absolute authority educated public opinion. Moreover, the simple expedient of suspension of lectures or of secession wrung by force the privileges not to be obtained by favour, while a more permanent result of these academic secessions was the creation of other universities, whose rivalry wholesomely stimulated the energies of the teachers of the ancient centre. Bologna did for Italy almost all that Paris did for the North, though the difference of the circumstances of a free municipality and those of a great capital of a national state affected both the organisation of the institution and the character of the studies. Not the teaching masters but the well-to-do and mature students themselves formed the corporations that were the earliest form of the university of Bologna. The supreme importance of legal studies was the outcome of the social, political, and intellectual condition of Italy. [Sidenote: The multiplication of universities.] The constant secessions that set up flourishing schools at Padua and Pisa, and covered Italy with smaller universities, were helped by the centrifugal tendency that had already become a marked feature of Italian politics. Yet no mediæval university was in any sense a purely national institution. It was the home of the Latinised, cosmopolitan, clerkly culture that made the wandering scholar as much at home in a distant city of a foreign land as in the schools of his native town. The Studium, like the Regnum and the Sacerdotium, belonged to the old cosmopolitan Roman order that knew nothing of the modern ideas of national life and local states. Yet no local state that aspired to civilised life could dispense with a ‘studium generale’ or university. The great position of Angevin England made the English school at Oxford the chief northern rival of Paris, from which perhaps it was the most important secession. Thirteenth-century Spain celebrated its deliverance from the Moor and its entrance into the Christian commonwealth by the setting up of new learned corporations. It was a sign of the dethronement of Germany from her ancient predominance that she had no university till long after our period was over. So great were the benefits of an organised general school that kings and popes began to institute, deliberately, imitations of what had earlier grown up spontaneously. Gregory IX. established the first university of papal foundation at Toulouse, and Frederick II. the first university of royal foundation at Naples. Alfonso VIII. of Castile not only conquered at Las Navas de Tolosa, but strove, though to little purpose, to found the first Spanish university at Palencia.

[Sidenote: The spirit of the universities.]

From the remotest parts of Europe eager students of every rank and condition, from highest to lowest, from wealthiest to poorest, flocked to the universities of repute. If many were chiefly eager for a career and professional advancement, there were not wanting a few touched with a higher spirit. The free life, the democratic equality of the teachers, the unrestrained licence of the taught, if leading to constant disorders, brought about a spirit of independence within the academic band such as Europe had not witnessed since the fall of the Roman Empire. This was the more important since the universities of the thirteenth century were no mere abodes of recluse scholars, but exercised a profound influence on every side of human activity. They affected politics and statecraft nearly as much as they affected thought and religion. It is with their influence on the State and the Church that we are mainly concerned now.

[Sidenote: Relation of the universities to the Church.]

It was an all-important question what would be the relations of the Studium to the Sacerdotium. The universities were in the long-run bound to be either the friends or the foes of the existing order, which was so intimately bound up with the ascendency of the Church. At first there seemed to be little danger of rivalry. The reconciliation of orthodoxy and free speculation, which had put the limited but safe activity of a Peter Lombard in the place of the antagonistic ideas of a Bernard or an Abelard, still continued during the period that saw the crystallisation of the European schools into systematic corporations. If the Civilians upheld a Barbarossa, the Canonists were equally strenuous in upholding the universal bishopric of the Roman pontiff. North of the Alps every scholar was a clerk with the privileges of clergy, and the Church alone provided both the materials of thought and the worldly careers that were open to scholars. If the Italian scholars were commonly laymen, the spirit of the Italian schools was too averse to abstract speculation to be likely to lead to formal heresy, and law was still, even in Italy, the study through which churchmen rose to greatness. Yet it was by no means clear, at the beginning of the century, that the intellectual ferment which the universities had perpetuated would permit the reconciliation of philosophy with theology, and of law with the ecclesiastical order. [Sidenote: The introduction of Aristotle.] The tradition of Greek thought had been revived before the twelfth century was over, and the full knowledge of the ethical, physical and metaphysical teachings of Aristotle did not come in a more Christian shape when it was filtered through the imperfect translations and free paraphrases through which Arabs and Jews had kept alive a perverted yet stimulating version of the doctrines of the great Greek philosopher. [Sidenote: Arab and Jewish influence.] The glories of the Arab and the Jewish schools of Spain had already culminated in Averroes (_d._ 1198), and Moses Maimonides (_d._ 1204), when they were made public to the Latin world by scholars like the translators employed by Archbishop Raymond of Toledo, and Frederick II.’s protégé, Michael Scot. The increased intercourse between East and West, which resulted in the Latin conquest of Constantinople, led before long to a better acquaintance with Aristotelian texts and to Latin versions based upon the Greek itself.

[Sidenote: Intellectual and popular heresy.]

The Moorish and Jewish doctors of Spain had endured persecution from the orthodox Mohammedans for the boldness and freedom of their speculations. The materialistic pantheism of Averroes was as famous as his commentaries on Aristotle, and the introduction of the latter was soon followed by the spread of the former. The doctrines of the Averroists stimulated anew the popular heresies of the Cathari, who were now fighting desperately against orthodoxy in Languedoc, and who still filled Lombardy with enemies of the Church. The union of the popular with the scientific heretics might well have led to a violent revolution, especially since the changes involved in the rapid progress of the age threatened social and economic disturbances that imperilled the whole order of society. The ever-increasing wealth and political power of the Church were blighting the best interests of religion. The new orders of the twelfth century had lost their early fervour, and proved almost as susceptible of corruption as their older brethren. The dangers of an earlier age were renewed, and the schools that had long been ‘secular’ in the mediæval sense bade fair to become secular in a more modern signification of the term. A famous Paris master, Simon of Tournai, boasted to those who had applauded his vindication of the orthodox faith that he could demolish it with equal ease and plausibility. In the early years of the thirteenth century Amalric of Bena taught undisguised pantheism at Paris, and had a following of enthusiastic and outspoken heretics, whose views were as wild and revolutionary as those of any of the Albigenses. The false teaching of Amalric was attributed to the influence of Aristotle and Averroes, and in 1215 the papal legate Courçon drew up a body of statutes for the Paris masters which prohibited the study of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle—a prohibition renewed later by Gregory IX.—‘until they have been examined and purged from all heresy.’ In Italy, if there were less speculative theology than in Paris, there was more popular heresy, and more political opposition to the church that was also a state. The dangerous mysticism of the abbot Joachim might well become a new source of danger to the hierarchy. Despite all that Innocent III. had done his successors still saw themselves face to face with imminent danger. But the source from which salvation was to arise had already been revealed. From the obscure labours of Francis and Dominic was soon to come not only the reconciliation of the new philosophy with the old orthodoxy, but a revival of spiritual religion, from which asceticism became mighty to do good works, and in which the Church of the Middle Ages attained its loftiest and purest ideals.

In 1182 was born at Assisi John Bernardone, more often known by the nickname Francis, that is the Frenchman, which was given him by his father, a wandering cloth merchant, who had travelled much in France and loved its people. [Sidenote: St. Francis of Assisi, 1182–1226.] The father was well-to-do, and ambitious that his gifted and attractive son should play a great part in the world. But an overmastering religious enthusiasm soon drew Francis from the revels and sports of the wealthy youth of Perugia. He renounced friends, fortune, kinsfolk, and declared that he had wedded the Lady Poverty, the fairest, richest, and purest of brides. His glowing imagination and earnest spiritual longings saw all things through the medium of a divine and ecstatic love. His single-minded devotion to the poor and afflicted, his loving care for the despised and neglected lepers, his holiness, pureness, and goodness soon attracted round him a little band of followers. One day he took them into a church, opened the gospels on the altar and read them the words in which Christ bade His disciples sell all that they have and give to the poor, and take no care of staff nor scrip, nor gold or silver, nor bread nor clothes, but leave all and follow Him. [Sidenote: Beginnings of the Ordo Minorum.] In these words, he told his followers, lay all their life and rule. His one endeavour now became the literal imitation of Christ’s life on earth. The doings of Francis and his penitents excited lively opposition as well as unbounded admiration. But in 1210 Francis and eleven companions travelled on foot to Rome, where Innocent III., stranger though he was to their spirit, received them kindly and permitted them to continue to uphold their simple rule of absolute poverty and devotion to good works. The brotherhood grew in numbers, and soon spread beyond the limits of Assisi and central Italy. Francis himself went on missions to the heathen, and pleaded for Christianity before the Sultan of Egypt. Francis called himself and followers the Poor Men of Assisi, or the Order of Lesser Brethren (Ordo Minorum); but the rope-girt grey frock that they wore caused the people to call them the Grey Friars, while the prestige of the founder frequently gave them the name of Franciscans. For years the fraternity in no wise departed from its primitive simplicity. The simple mysticism of Francis, his frank joyousness and cheerfulness, despite his constant perils and rigid asceticism, his strange and forcible preaching, and his utter indifference to all worldly power and influence, won an absolute mastery over men’s hearts. He was not a man of learning: he was a simple deacon, who never aspired to the priesthood: he was no organiser, and had an absolute horror of the political forces that kept the Church so absorbed in worldly cares. [Sidenote: The Rule of 1223.] The growing support of great churchmen, the powerful favour of the zealous Cardinal Ugolino, the future Gregory IX., the establishment of a fixed rule for the order by Honorius III. in 1223, were evidence of the spread of the founder’s ideas. Yet they gave Francis as much anxiety as satisfaction. They involved the danger lest the simple gospel of love should be overshadowed by formalism and officialism, lest the doctrine of absolute poverty should be interpreted so as to become a snare to the brethren as it had been to the older orders of monks. [Sidenote: Antagonistic tendencies within the Franciscan Order.] The gentle saint retired to his favourite chapels and shrines near Assisi, leaving to the energetic and strenuous Elias of Cortona the uncongenial but necessary task of organising the new society. Francis died in 1226, full of trouble as to the future, and solemnly warning the brethren to add no glosses or amplifications to the absolute simplicity of the rule which he had prescribed for them. Two years later Gregory IX. made him a saint, and laid the foundation of the great church at Assisi, where the art of Giotto was later to commemorate his glories. But the absorption of the Franciscan spirit to the service of the hierarchy had robbed it of much that was most beautiful and characteristic. Later divisions within the order long bore witness that the literal doctrines of the Testament of St. Francis were still cherished by his more faithful followers. But a great world-wide order could not be controlled by a few pious aspirations and general exhortations to poverty. The work of Gregory and of Elias was as necessary as the life and character of the founder himself, if the Franciscan order were to maintain the place which it had begun to fill in the life of the thirteenth century.

[Sidenote: St. Dominic, 1170–1221.]

Even before Francis had begun to preach poverty and good works to the scattered towns and villages of central Italy, Dominic de Guzman had begun his parallel but yet strangely different career. The son of a mighty Castilian house, a man of learning, zeal, and fiery orthodoxy, Dominic had become a regular canon of the cathedral chapter of Osma, near which town he was born in 1170. The Premonstratensian ideal of living like a monk and working like a clerk was never more fully realised than by this young Spanish canon. Called almost by accident to Languedoc, he resolved to devote his life to the winning over of the Albigensian heretics to orthodoxy. Protected by the bishop of Toulouse, he settled down in a house in that city, where he soon gathered around himself a band of like-minded followers. He remained there during all the storms of the Albigensian wars, and his little society flourished so much that he sought to obtain for himself and his sixteen companions recognition from the Pope as a new religious order specially devoted to the conversion of heretics. But the decision of the Lateran Council of 1215 against the establishment of new orders stood in their way, and Innocent III., though sympathetic, was contented to recommend them to affiliate themselves to one of the recognised regular fraternities. [Sidenote: The Preaching Brothers of Toulouse, 1216.] Of these, Dominic’s own ‘rule of St. Austin’ best expressed his ideals, and in 1216 Honorius III. confirmed the adoption by the ‘Preaching Brothers of St. Romanus of Toulouse’ of a modification of the Premonstratensian rule. The first four years of the young brotherhood were full of success. Affiliated communities sprang up in Spain, in Italy, and in northern France, where the famous convent of the Jacobins was set up at Paris on the south of the Seine, hard by the Orleans gate. In Rome Dominic found a warm welcome and an establishment within the papal palace, along with the pastoral care of the numerous courtiers and domestics of the pontiff. Cardinal Ugolino was as zealous for Dominic as for the Poor Man of Assisi, and was perhaps the means through which the Spanish canon made the personal acquaintance of St. Francis. The result of this intercourse was that Dominic was strongly impressed with the holiness and beauty of the Franciscan cult of poverty, and resolved that his order also should tread in the footsteps of Christ and the Apostles after the method set forth by the Franciscans. [Sidenote: The Order of Preachers becomes a Mendicant Order, 1220.] In 1220 the Order of Preachers, as it was now called, took its final form by adopting the doctrine of absolute corporate poverty as well as the life of mendicancy which had become usual with the Franciscans. Dominic then went to Bologna, to seek from the doctors there new support against the heretics. In 1221 he died, and was buried at the house of his order in that city. In 1234 Gregory raised him to the list of saints. Long before this his followers were spread all over Europe, rivalling in zeal and energy the Franciscans themselves. The Preaching Friars were called Dominicans from their founder, while their plain but effective garb of a short black cape, over a long white frock, led to their popular name of the Black Friars.

[Sidenote: The Mendicant Ideal.]

The ideals of Francis and Dominic were widely different, but the methods they adopted to secure them were almost identical. The man of inspiration and love had won over the man of authority and order to his ideal of absolute poverty; and Franciscans and Dominicans alike agreed so to interpret the monastic vow of poverty that corporate as well as individual possessions were utterly renounced. The early Franciscans had neither houses nor churches. The Dominicans, faithful to their Augustinian traditions, did not push the principles of St. Francis so far as this, but contented themselves with ordaining that the houses of the order should be simple, modest, and of lowly dimensions, and that all ornaments should be reserved for their churches. Gradually, as the spirit of Elias prevailed over the spirit of Francis, the Minorites also had houses and churches of their own, and with the establishment of a systematic conventual life, the isolated brother, working with his hands for his bread, or depending, in his pious wanderings, on passing charity, was replaced by an ordered band of Mendicant Friars, members of a world wide order, controlled by an almost military discipline that found its expression in the autocracy of the General of the order, and in the annual assembling of a General Chapter, such as the Lateran Council had imposed on all conditions of religious. Thus the Mendicants pushed to further results the great principles of monastic reformation which had already been worked out in the twelfth century. The world-wide organisation and simplicity of life came from the Cistercians, and the vindication of the freedom of the individual as against the excesses of the cœnobitic ideal had belonged to the Carthusians. The combination of the ‘religious’ life and the work of the ministry characterised the Regular Canons. But the doctrine of absolute Poverty was all their own, and calculated to save them from the dangers before which the new orders had succumbed. The mysticism and love of the poor which had characterised Francis left an enduring impression on his followers. No less strong was the spirit of reasoned orthodoxy and the zeal for popular preaching against heresy which adhered to the Order of Preachers long after its founder had passed away. Francis aimed at the heart, while Dominic appealed to the intellect, but the work of both communities was social and evangelistic, and even when they most differed in spirit they constantly overlapped each other in their labours. Their convents were soon established in every part of Christendom, and exercised the profoundest influence on every section of the community.

So striking was the attraction of the Mendicant ideal that many other attempts were made, besides those of Francis and Dominic, to embody its principles. Even in the lifetime of the Poor Man of Assisi, his influence had gone beyond his own immediate band of followers. [Sidenote: Other Mendicant Orders.] So far back as 1212 the spirit of Francis had driven Clara Scifi, a knight’s daughter in Assisi, to settle down by the little chapel of St. Damian with a band of followers, pledged to a poverty as absolute and a self-renunciation as complete as that of the Minorites themselves. [Sidenote: St. Clare and the Claresses.] If Cardinal Ugolino for a time imposed on these ‘poor ladies’ a rigid form of the rule of Benedictine nuns, the earnest wish of Francis himself procured from Honorius III., in 1224, the approval of a plan of life by which the community was to adopt the principle of absolute poverty (save in respect to cloister and garden), depend for support upon freewill offerings, and promise special obedience to the Pope, brother Francis, and their successors. The ‘Claresses’ or ‘Poor Clares’ soon became numerous and did for the religious life of women what St. Francis did for regular communities of men. A more sweeping innovation was the establishment by St. Francis himself of lay brotherhoods of penitents, affiliated to the Mendicant orders, and living ordered and religious lives, yet untrammelled by vows and, unlike the _conversi_ of earlier reforms, continuing in the exercise of their worldly professions. [Sidenote: The Tertiaries.] In 1230 Gregory IX. formally founded these communities as ‘brethren of the third order of St. Francis.’ Similar societies of ‘Tertiaries’ were also affiliated to the Dominicans. By their means the Mendicant ideal was still further spread, and the great framework of affiliated societies established which so closely connected the new orders with the religious life of the time, and broke down the ancient breach between ‘religion’ and the ‘world.’ [Sidenote: The Carmelites.] Moreover, after the triumph of the Franciscans and Dominicans, other Mendicant Orders were set up, and some older brotherhoods brought into the Mendicant fold. Among the latter were the communities of hermits on Mount Carmel, which in 1219 were constituted by the Patriarch of Jerusalem as the Hermit Friars of Mount Carmel, and received from Innocent IV. the stamp of a Mendicant order. The white garb of the Carmelites gave them the popular name of the White Friars. [Sidenote: The Austin Friars.] In 1250 Alexander IV. created the Austin Friars out of several societies of Italian hermits, to whom he prescribed a common rule and the Mendicant ideal. Carmelites and Austin Friars took up a strong position all over Europe, almost vying with Minorites and Preachers, and constituting with them the Four Orders of Friars. Other mendicant societies, such as that of the Friars of the Sack, were also set up, but in 1274 the second Council of Lyons abolished all but the four recognised orders and forbade the formation of new ones. [Sidenote: The Servites.] Nevertheless, the Servite Friars, an offshoot of the rule of St. Augustine, received a separate establishment before the end of the century.

[Sidenote: The Work of the Mendicants.]

The Mendicants of the thirteenth century worked out to the fullest result the ideal of St. Augustine of combining the life of a monk with the work of a clerk, and thus stand in the strongest contrast to the older contemplative orders, who sought seclusion from the world and eschewed even the care of souls as a worldly occupation. If, despite this self-imposed limitation, the earlier orders had been enabled to play so large a part in the religious life of the times of their foundation and early fervour, it is easy to see how much more complete and permanent was the influence of bodies of self-devoted men pledged to redeem their own souls by working out the salvation of others. Through their labours the ascetic and hierarchic ideals of the Church penetrated, as they had never penetrated before, into every rank and every region of the Christian commonwealth. [Sidenote: Preaching.] Popular preaching assumed a new importance now that specialists trained to devote their lives to pulpit oratory supplemented the rude and occasional efforts of the ill-educated parish priests, and the still more occasional appearances of the dignified clergy as teachers of the people. Preaching was naturally the first care of the followers of Dominic, whose official name was the Order of Preachers, and among whose doctors one at least maintained that preaching was more important for the people than the Mass itself. But, even from the beginning, the Minorites were almost as much devoted to this work as the Black Friars themselves. [Sidenote: Contrast between Franciscan and Dominican Preaching.] While Dominican preaching tended to be grave, learned, and argumentative, the Grey Friars rather affected the simple, straightforward, emotional methods of address, through which St. Francis himself had gone straight to the hearts of his hearers. These qualities were strongly illustrated by the career of St. Anthony of Padua (_d._ 1231), a native of Lisbon and an Austin canon, who, like St. Dominic, preached with great effect in Languedoc, and, attaching himself to St. Francis and Poverty, became the most popular of the early Minorite orators, and died in 1231 at Padua, in the enjoyment of a unique reputation for his eloquence and miraculous powers. The best side of the Mendicant gospel was impressed on Germany and the East by the wonderful preaching of another Minorite, Berthold of Ratisbon (_d._ 1272), whose still surviving German sermons are striking illustrations of the depth and force of the new teaching. Nor did the Order of Preachers neglect the more popular side of its special work. Its greatest intellect, St. Thomas of Aquino, was not only the famous doctor of the schools but a practical preacher to the people in the Italian vernacular. [Sidenote: Religious Poetry.] Not less effective and more permanent than their sermons was the religious poetry inspired by the Mendicants, and especially by the Franciscans, both in the vulgar tongues and in Latin. St. Francis’ own famous Song of the Sun struck a chord that was re-echoed in the hearts of his followers. To his biographer, Thomas of Celano, is commonly ascribed the most majestic of mediæval Latin hymns, the _Dies Iræ_. The pathetic _Stabat Mater Dolorosa_ is, with less certainty, attributed to Jacopone da Todi, a Grey Friar of the latter part of the century, whose vernacular poems express not only the mystic piety of St. Francis but the fierce glow of indignation of the Fraticelli against the worldliness of the hierarchy.

[Sidenote: Pastoral care.]

The pastoral work of the Mendicants among the people was the chief means by which they established that profound hold over the mind of Europe that, despite many corruptions, they retained until the Reformation. The parish clergy were ignorant and lax, and tended in too many cases to limit themselves to the perfunctory discharge of the routine duties of their office. A new state of things began when the zeal of Gregory IX. assured for both Franciscans and Dominicans the right to preach and hear confessions over all Christendom. Despite the natural but violent opposition which both the seculars and the older orders offered to their pushing rivals, the Friars soon won by their devotion, their skill, and their sympathy a unique place among the religious teachers of Europe. They chose as their favourite abodes the noisome suburbs where the poorest were huddled together outside the bounds of municipal authority or care. They lived among the sick, the suffering, and the lepers. Poorer than the poorest, they inspired no envy, but shared the lot of those among whom they lived and worked. They set no rigid limits to their activity. Their care for the sick led them to the study of medicine, while their sympathy with the oppressed made them the natural spokesmen of the cause of popular rights. A nameless Franciscan formulated the English baronial policy in the Song of Lewes. Yet kings like St. Louis or Edward I. chose Friars as their confessors, and their power was as great among the highest as the lowest. Great churches grew up in every city of Europe for each of the four orders of Friars, and were thronged by earnest and zealous congregations. It became a cherished privilege to be allowed burial within their precincts. The extraordinary popularity of the Mendicants soon brought dangers in its train. Their churches became more splendid and adorned with the fairest works of art. [Sidenote: The extent of Mendicant influence.] Wealth flowed towards them, and this, though at first they held it in trust for the poor, they soon began to regard as virtually their own, with the result that, particularly among the Franciscans, there was a continued feud as to whether the rule of absolute poverty was to be rigidly or laxly interpreted. Long before the danger of wealth had begun, the more subtle temptations of power had exercised their sway. In direct contradiction to the teachings of St. Francis, Mendicants accepted high places in the Church, and became bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and popes. Flushed with the pride of their devotion, they laid their hands on all that they could reach. They called the Benedictines proud epicureans, the Canons little better than laymen, and the Cistercians rude rustics. ‘None of the faithful,’ lamented the Benedictine Matthew Paris, ‘now believe that they can be saved unless they are under the direction of the Preachers or the Minorites.’ Innocent IV. sought to withstand their growing influence by refusing to allow them to exercise the cure of souls in parishes without the permission of the parish priest, and directed that they should hand over to the same authority a share of the gifts made to them by the faithful who had bought the right of burial in the friars’ churches. But on Innocent’s death—hastened, as it was believed, by the prayers of the Mendicants—Alexander IV. reversed his legislation and left the new orders triumphant. With all their feverish grasping after power, they used it with more sense of responsibility than most of their rivals. A real revival of religion followed everywhere upon their work, and was manifested not only in formal acts, in heaping wealth upon ecclesiastics, and in an extension of the power of the Church, but in works of piety and justice, generosity and mercy, that were all too few in the rude Middle Ages.

[Sidenote: The Mendicants and the Inquisition.]

The Mendicant Orders were everywhere the champions of papal authority, rigid hierarchical pretensions, and uncompromising orthodoxy. Both Franciscans and Dominicans were intrusted with the administration of the Papal Inquisition which Gregory IX. had established, and did not scruple to hand over to the secular arm the relapsed or unrepentant heretic. But they were not merely persecutors. They were unwearied in their missions to the heretic as well as in those to the heathen and the infidel, and it was now an easier task to deal with popular heresy, since it yielded even more readily to the preaching of the Friars than to the terrors of the Inquisition. The intellectual heresies of the schools, and the vaguer unrestfulness that saw no permanent satisfaction in the traditional teachings, were harder to deal with. Yet even against these the Mendicants waged a long contest, which did not end until they had wrested scholastic philosophy and the new Aristotle to serve as chief buttresses to the authority of the Church.

[Sidenote: The Friars and the Universities.]

The special mission of the Order of Preachers made it from the first a great centre of theological study. St. Dominic settled down in Bologna because of its schools, and his death and burial there gave the place an enduring sanctity to his faithful followers. In 1221, the year of the founders death, the Dominican Convent of St. James was established at Paris, and very soon made itself a separate and exclusive school of rigidly orthodox theology, without any great care being taken to co-ordinate its teaching and system with those of the public regents of the university. Doctors of great reputation attached themselves to the order, and before long a regular succession of friar-doctors, trained within the convent, set up a definite type of Mendicant theological teaching. The Franciscans were not slow in following the example of the Preachers. Though Francis himself had no learning and few speculative interests, his teaching had never been more effective than among the proud doctors of Bologna, and the spirit of Elias and Ugolino, no less than the necessities of the time and the desire to rival the Preachers, turned even the earlier followers of the saint to theological study. With the establishment of St. Anthony, Francis’ close friend, at Padua, where a great university was just being formed by a secession from Bologna, the Minorites enter eagerly on the course marked out by St. Dominic. If Francis inspired Dominic with the worship of poverty, Dominic supplied the followers of Francis with his zeal for theology. Within a year of the foundation of the Jacobin convent, four years before St. Francis’ death, the English theologian, Alexander of Hales, who was then teaching with great applause at Paris, entered the Minorite fold, and was celebrated as the ‘first Paris doctor of the Franciscan religion.’ Before long he resumed his teaching, and henceforth the Parisian convent of the Franciscans was only second to the Dominican cloister in its intellectual activity. [Sidenote: The struggle between Mendicants and Seculars at Paris.] Within thirty years the Mendicant schools of theology had taken up so overwhelming a position in Paris, and so ostentatiously kept aloof from all the ordinary regulations and traditions of the university, that a vigorous attack was made upon them by the secular masters. In 1252 the university required the Friars to take an oath of obedience to its statutes, and, on their refusal, expelled them from its fellowship. A fierce and long struggle followed, in which the chief secular champion, William of Saint-Amour, wrote a book called _The Perils of the Last Times_, which violently attacked the Mendicants and their ideals. The seculars availed themselves of the notorious splits within their enemies’ ranks, and regarding the orders as a whole as responsible for the extremer members of one society, signalled out for attack as heretical an ‘Introduction to the Eternal Gospel,’ in which an Italian Franciscan gave currency to the apocalyptic ideas of the abbot Joachim. The disfavour of Innocent IV. to the Friars increased their difficulties, though they had strong supporters in St. Louis and his brothers. At last Alexander IV. cleared the way for their return, and condemned William’s book as scandalous though not heretical. Restored to their chairs in 1255, the Mendicant doctors were contented to abate some of their extreme pretensions. Finally, they decided to accept the oath to the statutes and recognise their responsibilities as members of the corporation of masters. Their doctors were now in so commanding a position that they had no longer reason to desire such exceptional privileges as in the days of their weakness. [Sidenote: The Mendicants’ victory.] South of the Alps the Mendicant theologians acquired what there was no chance of their ever getting in the northern universities, a practical monopoly of the teaching of theology. Everywhere the tone of the theological schools was attuned to their teaching. Philosophy was made orthodox, and the most brilliant and fruitful period of scholasticism followed when the ranks of the Friars produced the greatest of the mediæval philosophers and theologians.

[Sidenote: The Great Mendicant Scholastics.]

Alexander of Hales (_d._ 1245), the first Franciscan doctor at Paris, began in his _Summa Theologiæ_, which weighed, said an enemy, as much as a horse, the series of the systematic Mendicant scholastics, and was celebrated as the monarch of theologians and the irrefragable doctor. The first of the great Dominicans was Albertus Magnus (_d._ 1280), a German, who as doctor at Paris, chief of the Dominican school at Cologne, Provincial of his order in Germany, and bishop of Ratisbon, exercised a profound influence and became known as the universal doctor. [Sidenote: Albertus Magnus.] Albert’s pupil, Thomas of Aquino (1225–1274), represents the culminating point of scholastic theology. [Sidenote: Thomas Aquinas.] A son of an illustrious Neapolitan house, Thomas renounced the brilliant worldly career promised by his influence and abilities, and entered a Dominican convent. He studied under Albert at Paris, where he acquired a unique reputation. Called back to Italy by Urban IV., he gave a momentary lustre to the struggling university at Naples, which Charles of Anjou had restored. He died in 1274, on his way to the Council of Lyons. Short as was his life, he was not only the most authoritative but the most voluminous of the schoolmen. His _Summa Theologiæ_ represents the most complete accommodation of Aristotelian doctrine with Catholic orthodoxy, and has profoundly influenced all later ecclesiastical teaching. His political and ethical writings no less faithfully represent the Peripatetic tradition. [Sidenote: Bonaventura.] His friend, the Italian Franciscan Bonaventura (_d._ 1274), a pupil of Alexander of Hales, gave a scholarly form to the mysticism of the Minorites. Other paths of learning were trodden by writers such as Hugh of Saint-Cher, the chief of the mediæval expositors of Scripture, while the physical speculations and the advocacy of experimental methods by the English Franciscan, Roger Bacon (_d._ 1294), were the most promising results of that contact with nature to which the pursuit of medicine had led the Minorite order. [Sidenote: Roger Bacon.] Even in their studies the distinct individual impression of the two rival communities was preserved, but they so far worked in common that they had won for the Church the absolute command of the whole field of learning. With the death of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura in 1274 the most fruitful period of their activity came to an end.

[Sidenote: The triumph of the Schoolmen.]

Thus the Studium, which might have rivalled the Sacerdotium, became its most strenuous ally, and the little band of mediæval scholars, who had enough faith and character to tear themselves away from bread-winning studies and all-engrossing professions found their highest satisfaction in justifying the ways of the Church. Before the end of the century the Empire had fallen from its ancient dignity, and within a generation the Papacy itself succumbed to the rough measures of a royal conqueror. But though the Empire might decline and the Papacy itself wane, the command which the Church had acquired of the world of thought and learning remained but little broken until the dawn of the Renascence, and kept alive the papal idea when the popes were captive in a foreign land, and when, through a still more lamentable decline, rival pontiffs at Rome and Avignon disputed the allegiance of Europe and prostituted their dignity by the violence of their brawls. The Studium survived the Regnum, and sustained with its authority the declining might of the Sacerdotium, thus allowing mediæval ideas to remain longer in currency, even when the political and hierarchical system which had engendered them was no longer supreme and triumphant. It is significant that the chief seat of this newly-won power of the mind was at Paris, the one great national capital of the strongest of the national states that had arisen on the ruins of Feudalism and the Empire. But the national principles of the king and his knights and clerks in the Cité were in strange contrast to the fundamental ideas of the cosmopolitan doctors of the university. [Sidenote: Paris and France.] Yet both the physical forces which kings can wield and the intellectual influence of teachers and thinkers united to show that France had become the centre of all the chief European movements. In her vernacular literature, more strenuous, copious, robust and varied than that of any other nation, France was showing how in due course a new national culture might supersede the international universal culture of the mediæval schools. No less permanent was her influence on social ideas, on manners, on art, on knightly action and on civic life. It is significant that Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, wrote his chief work in French, because ‘the French tongue is the most delectable and the most common to all peoples.’ Even in a land like England, at a time when the national sentiment was becoming strongly anti-French, the French tongue, art, manners and ideals became more profoundly influential than at the time when the island was the province of a French duke. So thorough an Englishman as Matthew Paris called the French monarch the king of earthly kings.[39]