. One of the two major mendicant religious groups, the Franciscan order (officially the Fratres minores, “little,” or “lesser,” brothers) was founded in Italy in the early 13th century by Francis of Assisi and had spread by the 1220s to France and especially Paris, where over the course of time Franciscan masters and students became major forces in the lives of the university and the French church.
An ecstatic mystic, Francis of Assisi (ca. 1181–1226) as a young man experienced a radical conversion in which he embraced a life of total poverty, wandering preaching, service to others, humility, and prayer. From 1209, others were attracted to this life, and Francis formed them into a group committed to his ideals. The first rule (Regula primitiva) of 1209 is lost, but Pope Innocent III gave his approval to Francis’s way of life and to the role of Francis and his followers as public preachers in 1210. At the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), he declared that they formed an already-existing religious order and thus were not affected by the ban on new religious orders passed by the council. The Rule of 1221 (Regula secunda) and the Rule officially approved by Honorius III in 1223 (Regula bullata) are the fundamental rules. In forming his ideal of the religious life, Francis focused on complete poverty, simplicity and humility, and preaching, characteristics that were identified with the “apostolic life” modeled on the lives of Jesus and his disciples. The characteristic that most distinguishes Franciscans from other orders is the insistence from the very founding of the order on complete poverty, not only personal (which was true of monastic orders) but also corporate (which was not true of monastic orders). They were to support themselves by manual labor or by begging, to live in whatever simple lodgings they might find, and to possess neither property nor money. This insistence, fundamental to Francis’s vision, later became a point of intense and tragic dispute in the order and the church.
The chapter of 1217, meeting in Assisi, decided to send friars on preaching missions outside Italy and divided the potential mission field into provinces: six in Italy, two (north and south) in France, and one each for Germany, Spain, and the Holy Land. Each province had a provincial minister to supervise the friars, and after the death of Francis a minister general supervised the order. The Rule of 1223 called for a meeting of the general chapter every three years, but not until 1239 was this firmly fixed.
Work in the province of southern France went slowly, but by ca. 1220 there were settlements at Mirepoix, Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier, and Périgueux. In 1222, houses were founded in Draguignan, Nîmes, and Apt. The year 1224 saw foundations in Limoges and Brive, then later at Nice, Bordeaux, La Réole, Saint-Jean-d’Angely, and Le Puy.
The northern province advanced steadily under the leadership of Pacifico, a poet and one of Francis’s early converts. By 1218 or 1219, Franciscans were at Paris, and by 1223 there were thirty friars and a convent was being built. After the Paris foundation, houses were started at Le Mans, Bayeux, Vézelay, Chartres, Arras, and Vendôme. Houses were later founded in Nantes, Tours, Rouen, Sézanne (1223–24); Compiègne, Beauvais, and Auxerre (1225); Samur, Angers, and Mirebeau (1226); and Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres (1227). At Francis’s death, France was divided into three provinces (France/Paris, Provence, and Aquitaine), with two others soon following, Burgundy and Touraine. In addition to Paris as a major center for study, there were schools for friars in Rouen, Reims, Metz, Bruges, Marseille, Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux.
Francis’s death produced a crisis of definition, for in his last writing, the Testament, he had unambiguously insisted yet again on absolute poverty and simplicity for the friars personally and communally. One of Francis’s strong supporters, Pope Gregory IX, finally declared the Testament nonbinding in its insistence on literal poverty and allowed, in the bull Quo elongati of 1230, communities to have buildings, books, furniture, and the like, arguing that they were merely using what others (i.e., ecclesiastics appointed for the purpose or even the pope) owned/ possessed “for” them. Rigorists in the order rejected this “compromise” and looked for leadership to John of Parma (minister general 1247–57), while those who favored Gregory IX’s move, the so-called Conventuals, found a leader in Bonaventure, the theologian and mystical writer who was minister general 1257–74. Bonaventure, selected to write the official vita of Francis, not only defended the theory of the “use” of possessions, arguing that the friars needed large convents, books, vestments, and the like to carry out their ministry; he also defended the mendicants in their conflict with the secular clergy, led by William of Saint-Amour, over the right of the mendicant orders to preach and hear confessions without regard to parish and diocesan boundaries, arguing that the friars were a new order that combined monastic virtue, contemplative prayer, and pastoral care of individuals through preaching and hearing confessions. Conflict with local clergy is regrettable, stated Bonaventure, but the friars make up for the defects of poorly prepared clerics. Increased emphasis upon university studies at the expense of manual labor, and thus full participation as masters and students in university life, was justified by Bonaventure as the necessary preparation for preaching. Unlike Dominicans, who from the beginning had been a clerical order dedicated to doctrinal preaching against heresy, the Franciscans began with a model of lay exhortation to moral conversion, not doctrinal preaching in a clerical mode. Recruiting from the university student body and the conversion of university masters like Alexander of Hales to the Franciscan way ensured the increasing place of studies, and of a clerical elite, in the order.
Some Franciscans, known as “Spirituals,” found in the eschatological ideas of the Italian monastic Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1132–1202) a prediction that Francis was the harbinger of a new world order of radical spirituality. Peter John Olivi (1248–1298), a friar from Provence who was trained at Paris and taught at Montpellier and Narbonne, was one of the most forceful of these Spirituals. In his writings, which included a commentary on the Book of Revelation, Olivi joined an intense apocalyptic spirituality, foreseeing a cosmic struggle in which a corrupt church would be replaced by a spiritual church, with an acceptance of the doctrine of the “use” of goods, provided that “use” was in all simplicity and only of necessities.
Dissension and debate over the issue of ownership and property continued within and without the order. The Inquisition sought out and punished Spirituals in southern France. In the early 14th century, Pope Clement V sought to balance acceptance of the Spirituals’ criticism of laxity in the order with a need for reconciliation and unity. Soon, however, Pope John XXII turned the doctrinal and coercive power of the papacy against the Spirituals and attacked their central beliefs and practices in a series of condemnations that led to the isolation and decline of the Spiritual Franciscans, a struggle that cost each side dearly. In addition, John declared heretical the fundamental doctrine agreed to by all Franciscans, that Christ and his disciples had no possessions. Moreover, he forced the Conventuals to accept full ownership of all they possessed, thus reversing previous papal distinctions between “use” and “ownership.” At the Council of Constance (1415), the Observants, a group drawing on Spiritualist traditions of austerity, were granted a certain level of independence within the order, with a separate vicar in each province and a vicar general for all provinces, all serving under the minister general of the order. Pope Martin V reinstated in 1428 the distinction between “use” and “ownership” made by Gregory IX. In 1517, the Franciscans were divided into two independent branches, Observants and Conventuals, each with its own minister general, a division that continues to this day.
Several years after Francis attracted his first converts, Clare (ca. 1194–1253), a young woman from a wealthy Assisi family, sought to join Francis’s group. In 1212, she was accepted by Francis as a convert and placed for the moment in a Benedictine nunnery. Clare and another young woman were soon living in the church of San Damiano at Assisi as enclosed female religious, dedicated to asceticism and prayer of the strictest kind. Clare was denied the apostolate to the world that Francis found and that she desired; hers was to be an intense dedication to denial and prayer in a strictly enclosed life. This female branch of the Franciscans became known as the “Poor Ladies of San Damiano,” later the “Poor Clares” or “Clarisses.” At San Damiano, they lived by manual labor or alms, fasted, prayed, accepted the rule of perpetual silence, and refused to accept the usual kind of endowments that supported female religious houses. Later, other houses were forced to accept endowments and property for support, but Clare steadfastly refused what she saw as a compromise with wealth. The first house of Poor Clares in France was established in Reims in 1220 by a group of nuns sent by Clare. Another group went to Béziers in 1240, with the support of Louis IX.
Francis also began what became known as the “Third Order,” or Tertiaries, for individuals who were drawn to a new spirituality but did not wish to join either the male or female branches of the Franciscans. These people continued to live in the world, might be married with families, but adopted moderate asceticism and sought to live more virtuously and simply, to be regular in prayer and the sacraments, to aid others, to refuse to bear arms or swear oaths, and to promote peace. Tertiaries were formed into local groups with officers and regulations.
Armstrong, Regis J., and Ignatius C.Brady, trans. Francis and Clare: The Complete Works. New York: Paulist, 1982.
Burr, David. The Persecution of Peter Olivi. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976.
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Lambert, Malcolm D. Franciscan Poverty: The Doctrine of the Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order, 1210–1323. London: SPCK, 1961.
Little, Lester K. Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Moorman, John. A History of the Franciscan Order from Its Origins to the Year 1517. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968.
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