of appropriating these status-giving religious activities for themselves. The
rival movements of friars—frères, brotherhoods of religious participation—
were organizationally similar because they were halfway between laymen and
monks: living under monastic vows and commitments, giving up family life
and private property, but residing in the public world, where they exemplified
the religious life of good works.
Within less than a generation the friars had arrived at the universities, and
were soon bidding to dominate them. This was not at all their original inten-
tion. The Dominicans were on an ideological campaign to stamp out unbeliev-
ers within a doctrinally unified Christendom; the Franciscans were on a mission
of charity among the poor. But their rapid organizational growth, their success
in sheer numbers, brought a rapid rationalization in the Weberian sense. The
Franciscans were particularly successful, mushrooming to some 28,000 by
1300, against the Dominicans’ 12,000.^6 The new universities, awarding recog-
nized degrees, were laying out formal credentials that rapidly permeated church
bureaucracy, legal practice, and the monopoly over teaching. The Dominicans,
whose explicit mission was to preach orthodoxy, easily gravitated toward
formally organized teaching. At first they organized their own training schools,
but these quickly became residential adjuncts to universities or (as at Cologne)
the nucleus of future universities. In the 1230s established and aspiring uni-
versity teachers themselves joined the orders in droves, thereby bringing the
center of gravity of the friars’ own training into the university world.
There was a material advantage favoring the friars over the secular stu-
dents. Most students had to struggle for patronage to support their studies,
spending a good deal of time applying for prebends, and usually interrupting
their studies between their M.A. (taken around age 25) and their doctorate in
theology or law (taken around 40) to serve their patron in ecclesiastical or
governmental administration (Southern, 1970: 292–295). The friars’ houses
underwrote the expense of student life; for their teachers, the orders provided
endowed positions. The orders separated studies from the political scramble
for preferment, thus clearing a space in which intellectual life could be pursued
uninterruptedly and on its own terms.^7
For the preaching-oriented Dominicans, the move into the universities was
less of an ideological contradiction than for the Franciscans, with their empha-
sis on poverty, charity, and the mission to the poor. Nevertheless, organiza-
tional rivalry pulled them along the same path, where their very success made
entanglements permanent. The connection of the orders with the papacy at the
time when it was bidding for theocratic power within Europe brought them
into the inner corridors of church politics. Friars were pressed into service as
bishops and even archbishops and cardinals. The success of the Franciscans
pulled them all the more rapidly into the establishment.
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^473