Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/174

 158 THE FRATICELLI. Yet the question as to the poverty of Christ, which had been put forward by John and Louis as the ostensible cause of quarrel, and which had been so warmly embraced by a portion at least of the German Franciscans, sank completely out of sight north of the Alps with the death of Louis and the extinction of the Munich colony of refugees. Germany had her own hordes of mendicants, regular and irregular, in the Beguines and Beghards, who seem to have troubled themselves but little about points so purely specu- lative ; and though we occasionally hear of Fraticelli in those regions, it is rather as a convenient name employed by monkish chroniclers than as really representing a distinctive sect. It was otherwise in the South, and especially in Italy, the native home of Franciscanism and of the peculiar influences which moulded the special ascetic development of the Order. There the impulses which had led the earlier Spirituals to endure the ex- tremity of persecution in vindication of the holiness of absolute poverty were still as strong as ever. Under Boniface and Clement and during the earlier years of John its professors had lain in hiding or had sought the friendly refuge of Sicily. In the con- fusion of the Franciscan schism they had emerged and multiplied. With the downfall of the antipope and the triumph of John they were once more proscribed. In the quarrel over the poverty of Christ, that tenet had naturally become the distinguishing mark of the sectaries, and its condemnation by John necessarily entailed the consequence of denying the papal authority and asserting the heresy of the Holy See. Yet there can be no doubt that among the austerer members of the orthodox Order who accepted the defini- tions of the papacy there was much sympathy felt for the rebellious dissidents. Resistance to the imperious will of John XXII. having failed, there were abundant stories of visions and miracles circu- lated from convent to convent, as to the wrath of God and of St. Francis visited upon those who infringed upon the holy vow of poverty. The Liber Conformitatum is manifestly the expression of the aspirations of those who wished to enforce the Rule in all its strictness as the direct revelation of the Holy Spirit. Such men felt that the position of their proscribed brethren was logically cor- rect, and they were unable to reconcile the decrees of Xicholas III. with those of John XXII. One of these, described as a man much beloved of God, applied to St. Birgitta to resolve his doubts, where-