Texts in Context:
The Apostolic Poverty Movement

By Gabriel Blanchard

One of the most potent forces throughout medieval society was the apostolic poverty movement, heretical and orthodox by turns; but what was it?

The Evangelical Counsels

To answer the question we left off with last week, the salient difference between a friar and a monk proper¹ is that monks are cloistered, meaning they normally have very limited contact with the outside world, whereas societies of friars have some type of active ministry among the laity. The Dominican Order are friars; and at the time Thomas becomes a friar, it is actually a rather shocking thing for a member of the aristocracy to do. Taking holy orders isn’t shocking; younger sons of nobles take up careers in the Church all the time. St. Thomas’ family actually tried to get him to accept a position as a Benedictine at Monte Cassino, a respectable and even grandiose position; becoming specifically a Dominican friar was the whole trouble.

First, a little background is needed. Monks, nuns, and friars make up what Catholics call the “consecrated life” or the “religious life” (or sometimes, a little confusingly, “religion”). Descending from the Christian ascetic movement that began in fourth- and fifth-century Egypt, the religious life is defined by three practices known as the evangelical counsels,² which religious are usually sworn to. The evangelical counsels are: poverty (the renunciation of personal property); celibacy (the renunciation of marriage and its, ahem, “due benevolence“); and obedience (the renunciation of autonomy). These practices were all held to characterize the lives of the Apostles themselves. The thematic alignment of poverty, celibacy, and obedience against the three great tempters, “the World, the Flesh, and the Devil,” is doubtless no coincidence.

The Apostolic Poverty Movement

So wait. If friars made the same commitments as monks, why are the latter respectable and the former disreputable? A mixture of reasons. The Dominicans and Franciscans are the newest orders on the scene (earning recognition only in the early thirteenth century), which always makes for controversy. Unluckily, they also bear a superficial resemblance to what St. Benedict called gyrovagues.³ Friars are among a collection of movements, known to history as the mendicant orders—i.e., supported solely by alms—and the mendicants are themselves just the officially-approved expression of a broad impulse in High Medieval Christendom; we might call this phenomenon the apostolic poverty movement, advocating the voluntary adoption of poverty for religious reasons. Religious of all kinds were sworn to poverty—but only to personal poverty; the splendor of the gem-studded crucifixes and chalices of many a monastery tells us plainly that a lot of religious houses were really only poor on paper, allegedly, “in Minecraft.” The idea of apostolic poverty was that religious really ought to be poor outside of Minecraft.

The movement took many forms. The Dominican and Franciscan Orders are the most familiar to us, and perhaps the Carmelite as well, all of which survive to this day. Other forms of the apostolic poverty movement were more historically circumscribed. In the Archdiocese of Milan, there was a popular movement in the mid-eleventh century called the Pataria, which supported the reforms to the clergy instituted by St. Gregory VII; these included a stern rejection of simony and the enforcement of clerical celibacy—both because it was felt that he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, and because of the tendency for sons to follow fathers into the same “job” (whether they were good candidates for the priesthood or not) and the concomitant danger of nepotism. The sentiment for apostolic poverty affected the Crusades, too: Fascinated by their purported ties to Freemasonry and their lurid extermination by the French crown, many people don’t realize that the Knights Templar (founded in 1118) were a monastic order—one of their recurring emblems was of two Templars riding a single horse, the idea being that they were too poor to afford another. Nor was the apostolic poverty movement confined to houses of religion. For instance, concentrated in the Low Countries, there were communities of laywomen who committed themselves to something like a religious life (save that they did not withdraw to a cloister and were, in fact, free to leave at will), known as Beguines,⁴ who were soon joined by male counterpart communities called Beghards⁴—but with the Beghards, we enter more uncertain territory.

Anathema

Both the Beghards and their earlier “kin” from the north of Italy, a fellowship called the Umiliati, were widely suspected of heterodox views, and occasionally examined for them.⁵ Further off the beaten track, we do find definitely heretical sects in the poverty movement; council after council issued condemnation after condemnation for heterodox views. The Arnoldists, who seem to have endorsed an extremist version of the Pataria. The iconoclastic and egalitarian Henricians, Petrobrusians, and Waldenses, the last of whom are often considered proto-Protestants. The mystical disciples of Joachim of Fiore (who, like Origen, seems to have wanted nothing but to be faithfully Catholic, the poor guy—and both at least died in the peace of the Church).

Probably the worst of all the poverty heresies were the “Apostolic Brethren,” founded by Gerard Segharelli, an aspirant turned away from the Franciscans but who essentially tried to be one anyway. His followers formed one version or sect of what opponents called the Fraticelli—a word meaning everything and nothing, mostly applied to dissident Franciscans or Franciscan-adjacent persons, with little consistency from one group to the next. (Actual, vowed Franciscans who reputedly sympathized with the Fraticelli, and who certainly wanted to maintain a rigorous interpretation of the Franciscan Rule which the papacy had relaxed, were known as the Spirituals, and their opponents as the Conventuals.) Unusually for “Fraticelli,” the Apostolic Brethren had a certain group cohesion; little good it did them. Segharelli’s successor as the movement’s head, Fra Dulcino, transfigured an erstwhile pacifist group of would-be religious into what we’d now call a classic millenarian cult, complete with (cough) undue benevolence among its members and a long, repetitive list of unfulfilled prophecies. The Dulcinians waged a terroristic guerilla campaign of robbery, arson, and murder in the northwest of Italy for over six years, until Fra Dulcino was caught and burnt.

Tantum Religio

This is not to say that intellectual dissent in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries sprang exclusively from the apostolic poverty movement; far from it. Leaving aside groups whose beliefs are unclear, like the Paulicians or the Bosnian Church, the most famous medieval heresy is probably Catharism, whose most significant center was Albi in Languedoc⁶; from this they were referred to in French as “Albigenses.” The origins of the Cathars are obscure, though they are often associated with the equally-obscure Bogomils who originated in the Balkans (probably). Rightly or wrongly, the Cathars were linked with the Manichees of St. Augustine’s day—the same dualism of evil matter and good spirit, the same concentration upon sex as the source of evil, the same admiration for fasting and celibacy and vegetarianism.

Bear in mind, we have only hostile accounts to get this information from: No writings by self-professed members of the sect are known to survive. But by the early years of the thirteenth century, a substantial fraction of Languedoc, particularly the nobility, had converted to Catharism or were sympathetic to it—notably the leading aristocrat of the region, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. Pope Innocent III made some attempts to come to an understanding with Raymond, but in 1209—having already gone as far as absolving Raymond of (as Innocent believed) complicity in the murder of a papal legate sent to preach against Catharism—the pope proclaimed an Albigensian Crusade. It lasted twenty years, and resulted in at least two hundred thousand dead, possibly tens or even hundreds of thousands more.

Brotherly love for brotherly love, but cheese for money.

(Alleged) Albanian proverb

That first year of the Albigensian Crusade saw the massacre of Béziers, which remains infamous to this day. The Viscount of Béziers had fled the city (to his credit, taking its Jewish population with him, and to his discredit, promising reinforcements he apparently did not mean to send, and certainly didn’t send), but the Catholic populace would neither leave their city, nor hand over its Cathars for what was certain to be execution. Arnaud Amalric, the abbot in command of the Crusaders, probably did not actually say “Cædite eōs. Nōvit enim Dominus quī sunt ejus“; and he almost certainly exaggerated in claiming, as he did by letter to His Holiness Innocent, that they put twenty thousand people to death, when the place could hardly have supported more than around fourteen thousand. The city continued to function after 1209, so it seems unlikely that the Crusaders killed everyone in it. But they did not spare the women, or the old, or even the children of Béziers; and it is generally agreed that, while the exact words may have originated with later chroniclers, the outlook of the Crusaders was exactly, Kill them all—God shall know his own.

It is easier to see secular than spiritual causes in the Albigensian Crusade, or in the later Bosnian, Livonian, Prussian, and Wendish Crusades in Eastern Europe; their obvious beneficiaries were the Catholic kings of France, Hungary, Sweden, Denmark, and Poland. But what about the poverty heresies? Forgive the pun, but even allowing for religious fanaticism, apostolic poverty surely hasn’t got the selling power of the prosperity gospel. Has it?

(Long After) The Origin of Inequality Among Men

Throughout the Middle Ages, and all known history, inequality abounds. There were haves, and there were haven’ts; most people fell closer to the latter end of the spectrum, as usual. But in the Early Middle Ages this had, perhaps, been less important. It’s remarkable how much socio-economic inequality you’ll postpone thinking about, while some unpronounceable new variety of Goth is waving a spear in your face. This was, in theory, part of the reason the nobility existed: Lord Holzkopf or whoever was a member of a warrior class whose social function was to fight Goths and Goth-alikes (and who was often of Gothic descent himself, so there was felt to be hope he’d be good at it).

However, the Christianization of Europe’s north and east has caused things like Viking raids and Magyar attacks to grow rarer and eventually vanish. Long-time readers may also recall that the early twelfth century is smack in the middle of the Medieval Warm Period, which means not only a favorable climate but a fairly stable one. Harvests are good. The roads are (relatively) safe. The Plague of Justinian has been gone for hundreds of years now, and definitely won’t come back.⁷ Suddenly, an inequality that was quite bearable when it was the price-tag on Being (Maybe) Safe From Pirates, feels less fair and sensible as the price-tag on Being (Definitely) Taxed. Your job and income are the same as before, but Lord Holzkopf’s income is climbing, and at the same time he’s less and less obliged to do anything. Which is not to say the aristocracy don’t do anything. They have a hobby—which everyone else hates so much, they’ve done a whole Peace and Truce of God movement about it. At any rate, the social contract of the Early Middle Ages is beginning to fracture: Its basis was the social conditions of the Early Middle Ages, which have changed.

This sense of dislocation was expressed politically, e.g. via the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; but, as the year there suggests, those occur more in the Late Middle Ages than in the High. Perhaps the intellectual fermentation of the twelfth century renaissance, with its promise of new imagination and new energy, prompted people to try reform first.

That impulse would naturally point everyone toward the great moral authority of their civilization, the Catholic Church. We do in fact find the Church giving voice and shape to substantial efforts at both internal and society-wide reform in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. The apostolic poverty movement, in some of its forms at least, was just such an effort, aimed at disentangling the Church from the economic and political interests she had been knotted into. But the reason the Church needed internal reform was that, like all periods, this was a period when a notable fraction of her ministers did not follow the Church’s own policies; indeed, in some cases they violated not only the ostensibly divine laws of the Church, but the theoretically easier-to-keep laws of basic human decency. For we have not finished with the history of violence being placed at the putative service of the Catholic Church, or even with her multiform response to heresy. We have still to deal with an institution that is at once grossly misunderstood in almost every respect, and yet correctly detested in modern society: the Inquisition.

A Timeline of Schism and Heresy in the High Middle Ages

Western European individuals and movements have been labeled thus:
blue type—Catholic; purple type—mixed/unclear; red type—heretical.

1022—First known use of execution by burning as punishment for heresy, in Orléans, France.
ca. 1050-1080—Controversies of Berengar of Tours, who repeatedly reversed his stance on whether he accepted the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
1054—Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople.
1057-1075—Pataria reform movement in Milan, supporting enforcement of canon laws imposing clerical celibacy, condemning simony.
1073-1085—Pontificate of St. Gregory VII, initiator of Gregorian Reforms.
1096—First Crusade reaches Holy Land: communion between Roman, Maronite Churches re-established.
ca. 1100?-1134—Umiliati form.
ca. 1110?-1155—Career of Arnold of Brescia, founder of Arnoldists.
1116-1148—Career of Henry of Lausanne, founder of Henricians.
ca. 1117-1131—Career of Peter of Bruys, founder of Petrobrusians.
1118—Founding of Knights Templar.
1139—Second Lateran Council: Arnoldists, Henricians, Petrobrusians anathematized.
1159-1202—Career of Joachim of Fiore, (unintentional) founder of Joachimites.
ca. 1170?-ca. 1205—Career of Peter Waldo, founder of Waldenses.
ca. 1175-1200?—Beguines and Beghards form.
1179—Third Lateran Council: Cathars, Waldenses anathematized.
1184—Pope Lucius III issues bull Ad Abolendam, establishing episcopal phase of medieval Inquisition: specially targets Cathars.
1198-1216—Pontificate of Innocent III.
ca. 1204-1221—Career of St. Dominic de Guzmán, founder of Order of Preachers (a.k.a. Dominicans, Blackfriars).
ca. 1206-1226—Career of St. Francis of Assisi, founder of Order of Friars Minor (a.k.a. Franciscans, Minorites, Little Brethren).
1209—Franciscans recognized by Innocent III.
1209-1229—Albigensian Crusade waged in Languedoc.
1215—Fourth Lateran Council: Joachimites anathematized; main concerns are reform of clergy, fixing proper boundaries between secular, ecclesiastical spheres of authority.
1216—Dominicans recognized by Pope Honorius III.
1231—Pope Gregory IX inaugurates papal phase of medieval Inquisition.
1235-1241—Bosnian Crusade.
1244-1274—Career of St. Thomas Aquinas.
1252—Formal schism between papacy, Bosnian Church (lasts until ca. 1500).
1260-1300—Career of Gerard Segharelli, founder of Apostolic Brethren.
1277—Bishop Étienne Tempier of Paris issues 219 condemnations of Aristotelian ideas, posthumously damaging St. Thomas Aquinas for some years.
ca. 1280-ca.1340—Main phase of conflict between Conventual, Spiritual Franciscans.
1290-1331—Career of Bernard Gui, Dominican friar and inquisitor.
1296—Pope Boniface VIII issues bull Clericis Laicos, forbidding state taxation of church property without papal consent; conflict between papacy, King Philip IV of France opens.
1300-1307—Career of Br. Dolcino, leader of libertine, violent sect of Apostolic Brethren.
1303—Boniface VIII kidnapped by Philip IV, rescued days later; dies after approx. one month.
1309—Pope Clement V moves papal seat from Rome to Avignon in southeastern France: beginning of Avignon Papacy (a.k.a. “Babylonian captivity” of papacy).
1312—Knights Templar in France accused en masse of heresy by Philip IV; with reluctant cooperation from Clement V, Templar order dissolved, many knights burnt at stake for heresy.
1321-1347—Career of William of Ockham, Spiritual Franciscan.
1323—St. Thomas Aquinas canonized.
ca. 1324—Bernard Gui publishes Practica Inquisitionis Heretice Pravitatis [“The Practice of Examination for Heretical Perversion”], influential handbook on trying suspected heretics.
1326—Pope John XXII issues bull Super Illius Specula, placing witchcraft cases under Inquisitorial jurisdiction.
1331-1334—Beatific Vision controversy, culminating in John XXII recanting personal theory about Beatific Vision.
1347-1351—Black Death (Yersinia pestis) epidemic throughout Europe.

¹By way of contrast, the etymological difference between them—monk comes from the Greek μοναχός [monachos], “alone, solitary”; friar descends from the Latin frāter, “brother”—may be interesting, but is not salient.
²Some terms here are open to misunderstanding. First, “evangelical” has nothing to do with modern Protestant evangelicalism: In the Middle Ages, “evangelical” meant something more like “apostolic” (as in apostolic succession). The evangelical counsels were so named in contrast with the commandments: Commandments, e.g. the famous Ten, bind everyone, whereas counsels are recommendations, without the force of duty (unless a person creates that force for themselves by vowing to practice a counsel). At a more nuts-and-bolts level, the vow of celibacy (often misleadingly called a “vow of chastity“) was a vow about one’s future behavior, not a claim of any kind about one’s past. Even married people, with the consent of the other spouse, could vow themselves to celibacy, whether entering the religious life or not—there is a tradition that this is why St. Edward the Confessor had no children. Again, the vow of obedience did not mean the abbot or mother superior now controlled your every move; the idea was one of submission in the concrete, readiness to forsake one’s own preferences if called upon to do so.
³Gyrovagues—literally “those who wander around in circles”—as described by St. Benedict, were both mendicant and itinerant, allowing them to evade any fixed authority that displeased them. In the beginning of the Benedictine Order, in fact, the counsels of chastity and poverty were included under a single vow of conversātiō mōrum or “leading a monkish way of life,” and the Benedictines’ third vow was of stability, i.e. a commitment to remain part of the community for life.
⁴Pronounced bĕ-gēn and bĕ-gäŕd.
⁵The Beghards specifically, for some reason—the Beguines never seem to have attracted the same degree of suspicion.
⁶Languedoc (langue d’oc, or “tongue of oc,” the Provençal word for “yes”) more or less equates with the southern third of modern France. However, at the time, the ties of Languedoc to France were of the vaguest and the Counts of Toulouse (the chief power in Languedoc) were for all intents and purposes independent. By language and culture, they were far closer to Catalonia than the French; by fealty, Toulouse was in theory connected with Aquitaine, a fief belonging to the House of Anjou that by this point reigned over England (later named the Plantagenets). What His Most Christian Majesty might think of anything that happened in Languedoc was, to its inhabitants, primarily his own problem.
⁷This is true, right? … RIGHT? (It’s not.)

Gabriel Blanchard holds a degree in Classics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and works as CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.

If you enjoyed this piece, consider seeking absolution for your sins and professing the Catholic faith; or, if the priest is out, you might while away the time by reading some selections from our series on the Great Conversation—both an introduction to the concept and a table of contents for our posts on it can be found here. Thanks for reading.

Published on 31st March, 2025. Page image of a 1516 depiction of Joachim of Fiore.

Texts in Context:The Apostolic Poverty Movement