It is undoubtedly exciting to search for knowledge on the subject that concerns us. Although we have very powerful tools for accessing large databases of information on medieval history, I have missed a good manual on the history of the mendicant orders. Although we have very interesting works like José María Miura Andrades, this one is limited to the community of Andalusia. The manual by Jose María Moliner is also very useful but has the problem of being quite old (1974). There are many works that summarize the work of the mendicants, but they have the disadvantage of being summaries. What does work is the isolated search for each of the orders; there is a lot of bibliography on Franciscans or Dominicans. But finding a manual on mendicant orders was a bit complicated, and even more so was finding information about their work in the Middle Ages, and very little has been published about their development, expansion, and settlement in the Iberian Peninsula. Perhaps it is due to my own lack of experience as a historian, but it is true that I have had many problems finding rigorous information on this work.
The encyclopedias of Church History are more about the apostolic and evangelizing work than about historical rigor. Without the intention of being irreverent, I will say that readings on mendicant orders have developed in me the strong intuition that although these orders belonged to the bosom and hierarchies of the traditional Church, they wanted little to do with it, especially considering that some of them were born in response to heretical movements. The truth is that although people like H. C. Lawrence have published something, we are always limited to the European context. A medieval Europe that understood little of nations and with a Church that aspired to universality, to the union without borders of all its Christians. It was a space where it is worth remembering that two currents of thought about power were struggling: The temporal, and the spiritual. In this context, the mendicant orders developed their work with a very local day-to-day but based on some premises, on a rule, which undoubtedly had universal validity among all members of each order. I mean to say that the principles of growth and development of all the mendicant orders followed very similar parameters. A Franciscan convent in Lombardy differed little from another of the same order located in Seville. It is true that probably the problems faced day by day by each convent would always be different, but their alternatives to solve them would be more or less the same.
A fact that is very curious when looking for sources on mendicant orders is that we will find vast amounts of documentation on other types of monastic institutions. It is impressive the number of books and articles published about the Cluniac order or the Cistercians or the number of pages we can find on the web about the Order of Calatrava or the Templars. The mendicant orders have seemed to me in this context a kind of ugly duckling compared to other regular forms of ecclesiastical life. The cause of this neglect is probably in the very genesis of thought of these orders. They are born with the ideal of absolute poverty, with the disinterest in wealth, with the search for a good culture for a good apostolate; so one might think that any historian approaching primary sources on mendicant orders will have it a bit complicated because they possessed nothing and therefore it was difficult for that nothing to be recorded in sources such as notarial ones.
Another issue is that most of these orders had their time of "splendor" during the Modern Age. There are many documents referring to the spiritual conquest of Ibero-America or to the pastoral work carried out in those places. In fact, it is not surprising that today the mendicant orders that survive (almost all) have almost more buildings in Latin America than in old Europe.
In this work I have tried to summarize two ideas; on one hand to distinguish the mendicant orders from the rest of the monastic orders and on the other hand, to find out what some keys were for their historical knowledge.
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- The mendicant orders
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Definition: religious orders whose rule imposes poverty not only on individuals but also on the convents, and that obtain what is necessary for their maintenance from the alms of the faithful. They were born in the 13th century as an expression of the evangelical ideal. The first were those of the Carmelites, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians. Later, the Mercedarians, Trinitarians, Servites, Jeronimites, Brothers of Saint John of God, and Minims were added. The Council of Trent allowed mendicant orders to possess income but prohibited them from possessing ecclesiastical benefits.
In other words, in the 12th century a new type of religious order is born, different from the monastic ones; these new orders responded to the needs of the Church and society at the time, which is why they move away from some of the conceptions of traditional monastic life.
First of all, monastic life sought isolation. In contrast, the mendicants established themselves in the heart of the cities to spiritually attend to a constantly growing urban population.
Secondly, they are characterized by the adoption of absolute poverty, both individual and collective, responding to the aspiration of the moment to return to a poor Church, like that of the early times, like that of the gospels. By refusing to own property, they resorted to begging to obtain the essentials for living. Hence the name. Although over time, and due to the need to ensure spiritual permanence, this poverty was mitigated by accepting collective poverty and the use of income.
Finally, they responded to the urgent need to preach as a means of countering the influence of heretics. And so that preaching would always be within orthodoxy and be able to effectively respond to these, it was considered that the mendicants should have a good religious and intellectual formation. This will be one of their great defining traits: the concern for culture and education.
For Miguel Angel Ladero, the origin and birth of the mendicant orders is linked to the way of life of Franciscans and Dominicans. Both groups arise in response to a new type of more urban society,… We will take a slightly deeper look at their founders.
Origin of the mendicant movement: Saint Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzmán
Saint Francis of Assisi (1182 – 1226) began to write around 1206, when he abandoned his previous way of life, destined to have an education and social status within the chivalric order. He converted to the evangelical ideal of absolute poverty. After a time as a hermit, he formed a small community of brothers, without a fixed residence, dedicated to preaching. This was much more moral than theological. The Franciscans aimed for the evangelical reconquest of urban environments, and they never considered themselves a movement of protest against the established ecclesiastical order. Francis of Assisi did not intend to create an order in the traditional way; his message aspired to reach secular religiosity. That is to say, that which resides outside the monastery and is characteristic of the majority of the inhabitants of the Middle Ages. His ideals were: aspirations of the secular religiosity of his time: evangelism and peaceful mission among both locals and strangers through preaching, a radically poor individual and collective way of life, pure itinerant based on almsgiving and work compensated at will, and never with money, a sense of brotherhood and love for all of nature, as God's work, which the founder himself expressed in some works such as "Canticle of the Sun."
Innocent III in 1210 grants them the Ordo Fratrum Minorum which authorizes their particular way of preaching.
Currently, there is talk of a naturalism in his texts that borders on ecological thought.
San Francisco faced a problem shortly after creating the order: the need for a hierarchy. It should not be forgotten that around 1215 in some places in Germany, they were compared to heretical movements, such was their level of poverty and uprootedness in an increasingly bourgeois society. Pressed by the new situation, he first drafted a rule called "Regula Prima" (1221), and a little later he drafted a second one called "Bullata". Thus, he approached other more regular orders like that of the Dominicans. When Saint Francis passed away, his testament continued to emphasize the original ideas of the congregation, but in the long run, they would undoubtedly clash with the impressive growth of the order.
However, the measures regarding poverty provoked a fierce controversy within the order, starting from 1245. While the majority of the conventuals accepted the papal provisions, the more rigorous groups, the Zelanti, refused to acknowledge their validity. For them, Saint Francis would be the evangelical leader announced by Joachim of Fiore, and they themselves the spiritual men of the new age. The tensions between both groups grew significantly, and only the accession to the generalate of a person as prestigious as Saint Bonaventure prevented the dispute from continuing and a possible schism.
However, the construction of a Franciscan history is not possible in isolation, even though there is a "relative autonomy" socially and politically. The Franciscan movement began in Latin-German Christianity. It is one among many spiritual currents with a great prophetic mission. With the growing institutionalization within the Order, the movement, constantly on the rise, moves away from its primitive intuition. The "discovery" by Columbus of the "New World" offers the reformed Franciscans of Spain the wonderful possibility of beginning in Latin America, far from bourgeois Europe, the construction of an apostolic and poor Church, like that of the early times, whose ideal coincides with the original goals of the Order of Saint Francis. In this sense, Toribio de Mogrovejo, the first archbishop of Lima, speaks when he points out the "New Christianity of the countries of the West Indies."
At the same time, Domingo de Guzmán (1170 – 1221), Domingo de Guzmán (Caleruela, Burgos, 1170-Bologna 1221). Descendant of the ancient Castilian family of the Guzmán, he was a regular canon of Osma, and in 1203 he had to accompany his bishop, Diego de Acevedo, on an embassy through northern Europe. In 1206, when they were returning from the trip - after having diverted to visit the Vatican - they met in Montpellier with the legates of Pope Innocent III: Peter of Castelnau and Raúl de Fontfreda, discouraged for not having been able to stop the advance of heresy. He tried to convince them to adopt a more direct way of living the preaching against the heretics, more like men of the Gospel than as representatives of a power, even if it were spiritual: "They present themselves humbly, with bare feet, without gold and without silver ... In a way, they imitate in everything the model of the apostles..." He obtained scant results, despite the fact that during the winter of 1206-1207, he founded the monastery of Prouille, near Fanjaus. A house intended for the Cathar women who were converting by listening to his preaching. In 1209, he did not want to associate himself with the crusade decided by Innocent III, but insisted on his peaceful preaching against the heretics. In 1215, he met in Toulouse with some companions, who under his direction, had begun the religious life, hoping to be preachers like him. After an initial effort made in Rome, during the III Lateran Council in 1215, he obtained from Honorius III, the confirmation of the foundation of the order of the preaching brothers.
From that moment until his death, he dedicated himself body and soul to preaching and organizing his order throughout France and Spain. He was canonized in 1234 by Gregory IX, and his body rests in Bologna.
Establish a new type of preaching and create communities that adapt to it. Based in convents where novices were formed and friars spent periods of study, itinerant and poor in the apostolic manner, to ensure their personal sanctification and show an example comparable to that of the perfect Cathars who were their main rival. In 1215, Innocent III recognized that ordo predicatorum and, the following year, they adopted the rule of Saint Augustine. Their organization took shape in the years to come.
Just like the Franciscans, the Dominicans immediately placed themselves under the dependency of the pope, thus clearly defining their absolute adherence to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Their ideals were the creation of a body of followers of Christ subject to a rule and monastic discipline. Giving special importance to theological training and the capacity for moral development. Therefore, the organization of the order and the development of the principle of authority were achieved from the very beginning, based on the combination of three levels: the chapter of each convent, that of the province, and the general of the order. The superiors were collective and temporary, except for the master general, elected by the general chapter, who held a lifetime position. Each chapter delegated ordinary administration to a small committee endowed with full powers, and something similar occurred among the members of the general chapter, who were elected every two years. They taught the "trivium" and philosophy. Due to their pedagogical interests and quest for knowledge, they came into conflict with the University of Paris.
The development of these two orders was spectacular, with the Dominicans being far superior, reaching nearly 600 houses by the mid-14th century.
At the same time, communities of hermits that were sometimes established earlier were reorganized based on the model of the mendicant orders. This happened with the Carmelites, established since 1185, with convents in Italy, Spain, and, more numerous, in England. Their great century would be the XIV, at the end of which a female branch of the order was organized. A similar case is that of the Augustinian hermits, organized as a mendicant order by Innocent IV and Alexander IV, in 1256. The influence of the mendicant order was also felt in the field of orders specialized in the redemption of captives. This is the case of the Mercedarians and Trinitarians, and in other groups of lesser importance in the general ecclesiastical history, such as the Servites at the twilight of the Middle Ages (15th century).
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- The mendicant orders, some considerations
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Mary of Egypt: A Paradigm for the Mendicant Life
In the history of mendicant orders, as in almost all examples of eremitic life, it is filled with stories of salvation for those who profess the denial of all kinds of material good. The life of Mary of Egypt serves as an example of the vision of voluntary poverty that existed in the Middle Ages.
Translated from French ("La Vie de Sainte Marie l´Egyptienne"), Mary of Egypt represents Mary Magdalene, the quintessential sinner. In the medieval poem, she leaves her home and heads to Alexandria, where she leads a life of public scandal and immorality. Later, she tries to reach the Holy Land, but on the way, she encounters pilgrims who, unable to resist, succumb to her charms. When she is not far from Jerusalem, some angels bar her entry to the temple. Then, Mary converts. Her conscience stirs, and she heads to the desert, where she will lead a life of penance and absolute solitude until her death; she will only take three loaves of bread with her, which she will eat as long as they last. Her food will later be the same as that of the animals: the herbs of the field. The same will happen with her dress, which, worn out over time, will be replaced by a long and dirty white hair. Even the pilgrims she met along the way will not be able to recognize her. Thus, when she dies, Mary goes directly to paradise, thereby marking the path to be followed by those who desire the same reward.
Poverty is not rewarded in itself since Mary was already poor before departing for Jerusalem, but poverty is chosen as a way of salvation, as a guide towards God.
Although we should consider what the real origin is of all the hermit people who choose this type of life. What interests us, as apprentice historians, is to know to what extent these theoretical denials of the material corresponded with the life of the beggars.
Monastery and Convent
To begin to unravel the fundamental characteristics of the mendicant orders, it has seemed appropriate to distinguish between these two terms that are commonly used incorrectly. Monastery and convent. Both, in normal use, and even scientific, are usually employed with the same meaning as synonyms. However, their meaning is clearly different. Legally, a convent would be a community with a number greater than twelve members. All those communities that are below that number, except for exceptions to the rule in some cases authorized by religious hierarchies, are not convents, but are called domus, eremitory, house, vicaha... But we draw attention to the fact that the convent is the community, not the building. The building where the conventual community resides is the monastery. And this point is not, as one might think, a nominalist issue, but representative of the deep sense of mendicant life. Firstly, the mendicants form convents and not monasteries since what is important, what is essential, is not the real estate but the human, the important thing is the community and not the building, since the tasks to be carried out are not completed within an enclosure but outside of it. Secondly, the mendicants do not belong to a space or a physical institution present in the territory and embedded in the landscape, social, urban or rural..., but their characteristic is uprooting, non-belonging. Therefore, the monastery cannot define, being the stable and permanent, the mendicant members. The monastic term remains destined for the second mendicant communities, those that neither perform functions, or at least not evidently, outside the physical framework of the construction nor are linked to the order more than by residing in a certain physical area, which is elevated to legal category at the moment it decrees its closure.
The Thought
The Property
The mendicant orders make the lack of property the foundation of their entire way of life. To analyze what this renunciation consists of, we will refer to the Partidas of Alfonso X "The Wise":
"They must have their own, and if they do not allow it after being admonished according to their rule, if they find it later, they must take it away and put it in favor of the monastery, and cast it out from there and they should not receive more, they would go there if they did penance according to what their rule commands."
This prohibition on owning property must not have been very respected within the monk communities since it is subsequently recounted what would happen to those monks who did not comply with the prescribed rule for their gospel.
Anyway, this is a good point to emphasize the differences between the monastic movements of the High Middle Ages and this new army of followers of Christ. The mendicants arise in response to an increasingly urban society. Therefore, they have a different clientele. They seek different goals. While the former aim to isolate themselves from a contaminating world, the latter aim to enter it to change it. They want to tackle heretical movements and build a new type of relationship both with society and with the laity.
The Work
In relation to the mendicant orders, we find in Berceo a clear vision of the mendicant orders and work. It narrates how Saint Dominic began to work to stop begging, as it was something he could not endure. The mendicants take over from the previous monastic orders, but they will not be so much the defenders of work as when they dress in a type of poverty that closely resembles that which occurs involuntarily.
The classic ora et labora transforms by taking on a new meaning. Work will no longer be in its original sense of working the lands of the monastery but will be more aligned with a spiritual, cerebral type of work. In a work much more in tune with the spirit of the times, a work embodied in the heart of a society that is slowly and revolutionarily moving towards a more urban, more modern society.
The work of the mendicants will be apostolic, evangelizing. Although the most palpable evidence of this will occur in the Modern Age and framed within the colonization of Latin America.
The Dress
In this they will agree with the rest of the monastic orders.
It has always been, even today, the clearest sign that allows us to identify the poor. In the case of the beggar, it defines him much more than any dogma as it equates him to the poor. If entering a monastery meant for a member of the knightly class an acceptance of poverty that had to be manifested by abandoning all signs of power, one of these was undoubtedly the dress. We will see how the hermits hardly differed from the vagabonds and beggars in their way of dressing, and this is true for both Castile and the rest of the European area.
In practically all the descriptions of the poverty in which they find themselves, it can be read that they are "very poor in skirts and cloaks," like those from Silos, not forgetting that all these are obliged to wear shirts made of coarse fabric and in no case linen, which the Partidas emphasize insisting on what is stipulated in the monastic rules; nor was the footwear good, and apart from those "very vile and very torn handkerchiefs" like the poor pilgrims who beg at the doors described to Don Juan Manuel, they will wear broken shoes "and well shod."
Colors are also important: the skirts worn by the poor volunteers are made of coarse fabric and brown in color, the same, I insist, as those worn by the lower class at the same time: a brown cloak, a shirt down to the knees, a mantle over the shoulders, and sandals or large shoes.
"They Will Eat Barley Bread, For They Have No Wheat"
Within the mendicant diet, we must find the middle ground between the herbs of Mary of Egypt and a modern diet rich in meat and fish. It should not be forgotten that fasting is an omnipresent figure in the daily conventual life. Bread and wine are the basic components in the diet of most of feudal society. It will be the Archpriest of Hita who will make a very approximate description:
You eat in the convent sardines, shrimp, Verzuelas, and laseria, and the hard dogfish; Left by the friend you lose, and capons, You lose yourselves with quiet women without men. With the bad food, with the salted sardines, With skirts of stamen you eat poor ones Left by the friend the trout, the hens
The frilled shirts, the Malinnas fabrics.
Food that basically coincides with that consumed by the lower class. The beggars must take this food in moderation, with the behavior of the monks being exemplary. Without forgetting at any moment the importance that fasting has not only as asceticism but also as a symbolic expression of the material stripping of these people.
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- The Foundation
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We now enter into the legal aspects of the mendicant orders by relating their most important characteristics.
Probably within the vital development of a begging community, it is historically of special interest to highlight the phenomenon of foundation since this legal and social act provides us with an extramural view of the evolution of begging life.
The difficulties in defining the date of foundation of a convent stem, on one hand, from the value that it acquires, by endowing the institution with a veteran status, which must be transformed into legal and hierarchical advantages. Therefore, authors tend, by definition, to push back in time as much as possible these foundations in an attempt to obtain, through this means, a better place in the provincial chapter, in the processions, in public acts... But, alongside this historiographical masking, it must be noted that it is possible due to the complexity presented to us by the foundational processes. For this reason, it is difficult to reduce to exact figures what is presented to us as a succession of events, as a complex process that takes us from the desire to found to the legal erection of the institute. In order to clarify what we are going to consider foundation, we will attempt to analyze and decompose the process.
The process.
Legal definitions.
H. Vicaire has studied this process for the case of the Dominican foundations in Provence during the 13th century. The analysis he provides is legal, referring to a single order and limited to a specific spatial and chronological scope. It cannot be established as generic but can serve as a framework for situating and cataloging events. For Vicaire, there are three major stages in any foundational process:
- the "inceptio", which are its various interventions, internal or external to the order, official or private, to initiate the process. - after it would come the "receptio loci", when the order receives the interventions and makes them its own, an action that is usually accompanied by the "promotio loci", that is, the sending of the religious and the elevation of the institute to "domus", with a vicar at its head.
- finally, the "emissio, positio, assignatio conventus" is carried out, establishing a convent, which is present in the provincial chapter in the hierarchical place that corresponds to it.
We ourselves have tried on some occasion to make clarifications and complete the phases of the paradigmatic process described by Vicaire, establishing the following subdivisions in the process:
The "inceptio" would thus appear subdivided into: "will to found", hardly appreciable in the sources as it is a desire; and "embodiment of the will to found", which would be the first action leading to the desire becoming reality (the most common is that it is a material donation that serves as support for religious life), and is usually confused, documentarily, with the information we have about the will to found. It is also common that until the moment of the "receptio", new donations are made that only complicate the process.
The "receptio", accompanied by the "promotio", must follow almost immediately after the expression of the will to found. The information about it should be provided to us by the Acts of the respective Provincial Chapters, but this is extremely difficult for us to know, as the majority of the mentioned Acts have been lost.
the "assignatio", the elevation to the category of convent of the establishment, requires some prior requirements:
a. From the papacy of Boniface VIII of the bull authorizing the foundation of the same. b. Of the competent number of religious for the establishment of a priory, with the right to speak and vote in the provincial chapters, which not only applied from one order to another but, even, within the same order over time and from which female institutes are exempt, which never acquire such rank.
c. Occasionally, also from the authorization of the institution that exercises ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the place.
Conclusions.
Thus, we could establish the following moments to create a list, subject to quantitative analysis, resulting from the reduction of the process, which we know is not of a stable temporal length but rather, on the contrary, tremendously variable, to a single data point:
- Willingness to establish, even with the difficulty of concretizing it temporarily, normally resorting to a date "before".
- Endowment of the convent. Above all, the initial endowment or the sufficient one so that an embryonic conventual community can be established.
- Acceptance of the foundation by the Provincial Chapter.
- Issuance of the founding bull by the pontiff (for convents after the 13th century).
Elevation to priory (for male institutes).
Y, all of this, assuming that the foundational processes we face are canonical and follow the paradigmatic development. On numerous occasions, the normal does not always coincide with the legal, much less in the temporal stages in which the spontaneous becomes characteristic of the foundational movement, both male and female.
Of these five moments, we will be fundamentally interested in the first one, the will to found. What interests us are the repercussions that the foundational act has on collective religiosity or what it reveals about the religiosity of the moment itself, even though it is legally recorded decades later. Furthermore, in any case, even when there are investments in the legal steps of the foundational processes (existence of prior papal authorization to the actual recruitment of the order, material endowment, or its documentary recording at least, after the presence of religious, etc.), the truth is that the first step, essential and necessary, in any foundation is: the desire to found, even when the manifestation of it is clouded by other causes and processes.
In that sense, we are also interested in the acceptance of the institute, since it is linked to the establishment of religious individuals in the locality, and it speaks to us of their presence, with the possibility of acting on behaviors, even when legally it is not "possible".
