The Friars

The Impact of the Mendicant Orders on Medieval Society

C.H. Lawrence

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857732989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The mendicant friars of the Franciscan and Dominican orders played a unique and important role in medieval society. In the early thirteenth century, the Church was being challenged by a confident new secular culture, associated with the growth of towns, the rise of literature and articulate laity, the development of new sciences and the creation of the first universities. The mendicant orders which developed around the charismatic figures of Saint Francis of Assisi (founder of the Franciscans) and Saint Dominic of Osma (founder of the Dominicans) confronted this challenge by encouraging preachers to go out into the world to do God's work, rather than retiring into enclosed monasteries. C.H. Lawrence here analyses the origins and growth of these orders, as well as the impact which they had upon the medieval world - in the areas of politics and education as well as religion. His study is essential reading for all scholars and students of medieval history.

Chapter 1

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH IN CRISIS

The orders of mendicant friars which appeared early in the thirteenth century represented a new and revolutionary version of the religious life. To the more perceptive leaders of the Church, like Pope Innocent III, they seemed to be a providential response to a spiritual crisis that was afflicting western Christendom. Reduced to its essentials, this crisis was a confrontation between traditional assumptions about the nature of the Christian life and the religious needs of a newly arisen urban and secular culture. Even the heresies which had taken root in parts of southern Europe were in some sense a by-product of this culture. It seemed that these needs could not be met by the established forms of religious organisation.

. . .
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE

The confrontation had been engendered by profound economic and social changes that had transformed Western Europe in the course of the twelfth century. The economic process underlying these changes is well known, if not easily explained. Beginning in the eleventh century, the West entered upon a phase of extraordinary economic and demographic expansion which was to continue with gathering momentum for the next two hundred years. Whatever the ultimate causes of this phenomenon – medieval Europe’s economic miracle – its most conspicuous features were the rapid growth of international trade and commerce, the revival of urban life in the old lands of the Western Empire, and a sustained rise in population. Everywhere areas of unpopulated waste and primeval forest were cleared, brought under the plough and colonised. In the wake of cultivation new villages sprang up, and new towns were founded by princes and enterprising landlords.

This development did not stop at the frontiers of Christen-dom. In the Mediterranean lands, expansion took an aggressive military form with the Norman conquest of Sicily from the Moslems and culminated in the planting of Frankish principalities in Syria and Palestine by Crusaders from northern Europe. Both these advances of the Latin frontier brought great wealth to the Italian maritime republics, whose fleets now dominated the eastern Mediterranean. East of the Elbe, which had marked the frontier of the kingdom of Germany in the early middle ages, in the wake of conquering princes a growing influx of German peasant settlers gave their names to innumerable villages in the sparsely populated Slav lands, and colonies of German merchants crept eastward along the shores of the Baltic.

It was in the life of cities that the greatest transformation occurred. Intensified commercial activity and booming industries enhanced the wealth of towns and attracted to them increasing numbers of entrepreneurs and artisans. Ancient towns outgrew their original boundaries and overflowed into new suburbs. The most spectacular growth was to be seen in the cities of north Italy, Flanders and the Rhineland – areas that were centres of a thriving textile industry and the terminals of trade with the east Mediterranean and the Baltic. Here several cities had by the end of the twelfth century attained the size and population of a modern town. A new world was emerging, one in which money, capital and credit played an ever increasing role. Its needs and aspirations found expression in such novel institutions as the city communes – self-governing city republics owning no lordship below that of king or emperor – and the nascent universities, and its religious sensibility was reflected in the naturalism of Gothic art.

Leadership of this urban society was in the hands of a bourgeoisie that derived its wealth from commercial profit. The rich merchant families which dominated the political life of the city-republics constituted a new civic aristocracy, which imitated, and in some areas superseded the old landed nobility in its patronage of the Church, learning and the arts. They formed the upper layer of a heterogeneous society which included professional men such as notaries and physicians, self-employed craftsmen and shop-keepers, and a large proletariat of artisans and wage-earners. It was a society more mobile and, at the upper levels, more affluent than before; one that was receptive to new ideas and ready to challenge the established authorities of church and state. Many of its values – especially the pursuit of commercial profit and the acceptance of market forces – were abhorrent to conservative churchmen; and communal autonomy had often to be won in the teeth of opposition from prince or bishop. To this day, the audacity of that challenge can be seen dramatically symbolised in the centre of the imperial city of Trent, where the campanile of the medieval commune still stands where it was erected, like a sore appendix, on the end of the episcopal palace.

It is a truism that city populations provided the most fertile seed-bed for religious dissent and anti-clerical agitation. Some recent studies have suggested that in the thirteenth century scepticism about some of the fundamental dogmas of faith was commoner among the rural peasantry than was once believed. Nevertheless, the closely regulated society of the rural manor and the inescapable intimacy of the rural parish exerted upon the individual an almost irresistible pressure to conform; whereas town living, with its relative freedom from customary bonds, its shifting population, its political self-consciousness and turbulence, and the constant stimulus of competition, fostered a more critical and individualistic mentality and provided readier opportunities for the dissemination of new ideas. The literate laity who formed the upper strata of the new urban society, dissatisfied with the passive role of a spiritual proletariat assigned them by traditional ecclesiology and aware of the educational and moral shortcomings of the secular clergy, were a natural forcing-ground both for orthodox criticism of the Church and for radical dissent.

This was the milieu out of which arose the most formidable challenge to its spiritual authority that the medieval Church had to face until the Reformation. It had been occasionally troubled in the eleventh century by groups of radical dissidents who expressed heretical opinions. By the middle of the twelfth century, it was confronted by dualist heresies which had won the spiritual allegiance of a significant part of the population over large areas of southern Europe. Heretical opinions travelled in the train of merchants and free-lance preachers along the arteries of commerce and found their audience in the inns and market-places. It was thus in Cologne, the greatest of the Rhineland cities, that the heresy of the Cathars first broke historical cover in the year 1143, when some of the sectaries were put on trial; and it was in the towns of Lombardy, the Veneto, Tuscany and the Languedoc, the emporia of trade with the east Mediterranean, that it struck its deepest roots.

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THE HERESY OF THE CATHARS

The doctrine of the Cathars in its fully developed form was nourished by missionaries and refugees from the Bulgarian sect of the Bogomils – latter day Manichees, who had found their way to the West in order to escape persecution by the Greek Orthodox Church and the government of Byzantium. The Cathars, known in France as Albigenses – a name derived from the town of Albi, one of their major centres – were dualists. They believed that the universe emanated from two conflicting principles, one good and one evil. God was a spirit, and the world he created was a world of spiritual beings. The visible and material world, on the other hand, was the work of an evil power or demiurge, and it was irredeemably evil. The flesh was an evil integument in which the human soul was imprisoned. It followed that most of the apparatus of Catholic Christianity, notably the sacraments, which used material things – water, bread and wine – as vehicles of supernatural grace, was to be rejected.

The sectaries, in fact, repudiated the Roman Church in its entirety. But they claimed to be Christians in the authentic apostolic tradition. Thus they appropriated to themselves much of the New Testament. But the Christ of their system was not the Christ of orthodox theology. He was a pure spirit. His bodily incarnation was illusory and so, necessarily, was his bodily resurrection. Not all the Catharist groups were of one mind on such questions. The evidence suggests that the elaborate cosmography of the dualist universe was imported into the system from the East at a later stage. But hatred of the body expressed through a cult of negative asceticism seems to have been common to all the Cathar sects. For the individual soul, trapped in a physical body, salvation had to be sought through deliverance from the flesh, signified by a form of spiritual baptism called the consolamentum. This rite, which involved the laying-on of hands by the élite of the sect, the perfecti, promised the remission of sins and initiated the believer into complete membership of the Cathar church.

Those who received the consolamentum were required to live a penitential life of rigorous asceticism. They renounced personal property, marriage and sexual relationships, and followed a strict dietary regime which, besides fasting, involved permanent abstinence from all animal foods, including eggs, milk and cheese – from anything in fact that was the product of coition. The outward sign of their commitment to a life of penance and prayer was a black robe they wore.

The consolamentum initiated the recipient into the ranks of the elect, the perfecti. Women who received it normally retired to live a monastic life in one of the houses maintained by the sectaries. The men either lived in small communities or embarked upon a ministry of itinerant preaching and teaching. Having embraced voluntary poverty, they depended for their support upon the alms and hospitality offered by the faithful of the sect, in this respect anticipating the life-style of the mendicant friars. Obviously the obligations associated with the rite of solemn initiation were not to be undertaken lightly. The majority of believers understandably preferred to subscribe to vicarious holiness rather than embracing a life of such chilling asceticism, and it was common practice to postpone reception of the consolamentum until death was imminent.

The Cathars won adherents in many parts of Europe, but their most conspicuous success was in the cities of northern and central Italy and in the Languedoc. Here they were numerous enough to establish a hierarchy of their own, parallel to that of the Catholic Church. They had bishops in charge of territorial dioceses, assemblies, and deacons responsible for subordinate areas. But the Cathar churches displayed the fissiparous tendencies that are a feature of most dissident bodies. A visit from a Greek heresiarch, the bishop Nicetas, in the year 1166, seems to have led to theological dissensions which thereafter continued to divide the sectaries. Before the end of the century, the believers of Lombardy, Tuscany and the March of Treviso were the spiritual subjects of six Cathar dioceses which were in conflict with one another, each of which in effect excommunicated its rivals.¹

The Cathar faith was not confined to the towns; it had adherents among the rural peasantry. In the relatively tolerant society of the Languedoc, where the sectaries enjoyed the open approval and protection of the aristocracy, Catholics and Cathars lived side by side, even under the same family roof. ‘It has penetrated everywhere,’ wrote Count Raymond V of Toulouse, ‘it has thrown discord into every home, dividing husband and wife, father and son, daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. Even the priests have succumbed to the disease’². Raymond’s impassioned plea for help was written in 1178. Such few statistics as are available suggest that he had overstated the scale of the problem if not the social penetration achieved by the sect.³ But his lament is a symptom of the panic evoked in the rulers of church and state by the increasingly public face of the Cathar religion.

Heresy is not a symptom of apathy but of religious fervour. In the twelfth century it was one aspect of the spiritual and intellectual awakening that gave birth to new religious orders, new forms of pious association and new scholastic institutions. Recent students of the phenomenon have stressed the contribution of indigenous orthodox piety, as opposed to eastern influence, in preparing the soil for the seeds of dualist teaching. The doctrine of the sectaries succeeded because it met an eager response from growing numbers of lay people whose religious aspirations the orthodox clergy seemed unable to satisfy.

The appeal of the Cathar system for people in search of a personal spiritual life is easy to understand. A cosmology that derived the material world of the senses from a demonic source offered a plausible explanation for the miseries of the human condition and the waywardness of the flesh that everybody experiences. It solved the eternal conundrum posed by the existence of evil in a world created by a good and omnipotent God. Moreover, it touched a responsive chord in orthodox Christianity, which contained a strong ascetical tradition that was all too easily tilted into dualism by preachers and writers of ascetical theology. Had not the author of the Epistle to the Galatians said ‘the flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other’? (Gal.v.17). The sinful proclivities of the flesh, the virtue of sexual abstinence, the heroic acts of asceticism practised by the saints in order to subdue the body, and the omnipresence of demons – evil spirits roving the world to lure souls to their destruction – were the commonplaces of sermons and didactic literature. Unsubtle minds must have found it hard to distinguish the message of the dualists from the moral teaching of the orthodox Church. It is significant that in some towns of the Midi Catholics and Cathars shared the use of the same church.

The negative factor that helped the spread of heresy was the failure of many of the orthodox clergy to meet the spiritual needs of the laity. Paradoxically, the Gregorian Reform had aggravated this problem. In their efforts to eradicate the abuses of lay patronage, to exalt the sacerdotal office and raise the standards of pastoral care, the reformers had drawn the attention of the laity to the shortcomings of the clergy. Gregory VII had, in fact, invoked the assistance of lay people in opposing unworthy candidates for bishoprics and in bringing public opinion to bear upon priests who flouted the rule of celibacy. The Gregorian papacy thus helped to create a climate of opinion that stimulated spiritual aspiration and was critical of the failings of the secular clergy.

In the south of France, the reform movement had not made much headway before the end of the twelfth century. The spiritual head of the ecclesiastical province covering the Languedoc, archbishop Berengar of Narbonne, whose worldli-ness and negligence were the subject of an angry denunciation by Pope Innocent III, was one of those mitred aristocrats whose chief preoccupation was with enlarging the wealth and power of his see. His suffragans were hardly more impressive. By 1213 several of them had been deposed or suspended on account of incapacity, scandalous conduct or their failure to take action against the heretics. The lower clergy – the vicars and chaplains who served the parishes in place of their absentee rectors or monastic proprietors – were no different from their colleagues elsewhere. The differences were not in themselves but in their environment – the fact that they were surrounded by devotees of a rival religious system, including some members of the higher aristocracy. Recruited largely from the peasantry, given to regular or occasional concubinage, and short on formal education, most of them compared unfavourably with the élite of the Albigenses. They lacked the intellectual equipment even to instruct their own flock, much less to meet the sectaries in argument. By contrast, the austere life of the perfect provided an inspiring example, which commended their teaching to people disillusioned with the performance of their own clergy.

Faced with the manifest inability of the local clergy to check the spread of Catharism in the Languedoc, Innocent III called upon the Cistercians to conduct a mission to the territory, and appointed the bellicose Arnald-Amaury, abbot of Cîteaux, to oversee the effort. The Cistercians failed, however, to make any impression on the problem. This, and the evident unwillingness of the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI, to move against the heretics, finally persuaded the papacy to invoke the aid of the secular power in a policy of violent repression. At the end of 1207 Innocent appealed to the king and baronage of France to undertake a crusade to the Midi and confiscate the lands of the heretics. His call led in 1209 to the descent of the northern feudality upon the Languedoc under the command of Simon de Montfort and a war of expropriation, made hideous by the atrocities committed against the townspeople of the area, which lasted with intervals until 1229. I...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations used in the footnotes
• Preface to the New Edition
• CHAPTER 1   The Medieval Church in Crisis
• CHAPTER 2   St Francis of Assisi and the Origins of the Friars Minor
• CHAPTER 3   The Growth of the Friars Minor, Crisis and Change
• CHAPTER 4   St Dominic and the Order of Friars Preachers
• CHAPTER 5   New Brethren
• CHAPTER 6   The Mission to the Towns
• CHAPTER 7   The Capture of the Schools
• CHAPTER 8   The Complaint of the Clergy
• CHAPTER 9   In the Houses of Kings
• CHAPTER 10  In the Service of the Papacy
• CHAPTER 11  Afar unto the Gentiles
• Epilogue: Loss and Gain
• A Selective Bibliography
• Back Cover