The Franciscan Order — Spirituals Crisis to the Great Division

By 1300 the Franciscans were an enormous international order with universities, libraries and buildings, and a founder who had told them to own nothing. The strain broke in the 1310s and 20s. The Spirituals, who wanted the Rule kept to the letter, were ordered to conform; four were burned at Marseille in 1318 for refusing. And in 1323 John XXII declared it heretical to teach that Christ and the apostles had owned nothing at all, which put the order's own official self-understanding on the wrong side of the law. The minister general Michael of Cesena fled the papal court with William of Ockham rather than accept it. The argument did not end so much as change shape, into a long polarization between Conventuals, who accepted the order's endowments and urban convents, and Observants, who from 1368 built up reformed houses keeping the Rule strictly. Leo X ended the pretence of a single order on 29 May 1517, dividing the family formally in two.