descendants of Otto-William (d. 1026), count of Mâcon and claimant to the duchy of
Burgundy.
The independence of the county was such that the German emperors felt compelled to
reassert their control over it in the 12th century. When Count Raynald III of Burgundy
died without sons, the county went to his daughter Beatrix, whom the emperor Frederick
Barbarossa married in 1156, thus claiming trans-Saône Burgundy for himself and his
descendants.
Although within the empire, the county continued to have closer cultural ties to France
than to Germany. In 1384, Philip the Bold, the Valois duke of French Burgundy, also
obtained the county of Burgundy via his wife’s inheritance. The duchy and county
remained united for a century, the period of Burgundy’s greatest glory. After the death of
Duke Charles the Bold in 1477, his inheritance was claimed both by the French king and
by Maximilian, the imperial heir, who married Charles’s daughter. In the ultimate
division of the legacy, in 1493, the duchy and county were again divided, the Franche-
Comté being subjected to imperial Habsburg rule.
Constance B.Bouchard
[See also: BURGUNDY]
Bligny, Bernard. L’église et les ordres religieux dans le royaume de Bourgogne aux XIe et XIIe
siècles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960.
Bouchard, Constance Brittain. Sword, Miter, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy,
980–1198. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Mariotte, Jean-Yves. Le comté de Bourgogne sous les Hohenstaufen. Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
1963.
Vaughan, Richard. Philip the Bold: The Formation of the Burgundian State. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1962.
FRANCISCAN ORDER
. One of the two major mendicant religious groups, the Franciscan order (officially the
Fratres minores, “little,” or “lesser,” brothers) was founded in Italy in the early 13th
century by Francis of Assisi and had spread by the 1220s to France and especially Paris,
where over the course of time Franciscan masters and students became major forces in
the lives of the university and the French church.
An ecstatic mystic, Francis of Assisi (ca. 1181–1226) as a young man experienced a
radical conversion in which he embraced a life of total poverty, wandering preaching,
service to others, humility, and prayer. From 1209, others were attracted to this life, and
Francis formed them into a group committed to his ideals. The first rule (Regula
primitiva) of 1209 is lost, but Pope Innocent III gave his approval to Francis’s way of life
and to the role of Francis and his followers as public preachers in 1210. At the Fourth
Lateran Council (1215), he declared that they formed an already-existing religious order
and thus were not affected by the ban on new religious orders passed by the council. The
Rule of 1221 (Regula secunda) and the Rule officially approved by Honorius III in 1223
(Regula bullata) are the fundamental rules. In forming his ideal of the religious life,
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