170 THE FRATICELLI. original documents of the process, which till then had reposed quietly among the records of the parish church.* The violent measures of John XXII., followed up by his suc- cessors, for a while effectually repressed the spiritual asceticism of the Franciscans. Yet it was impossible that impulses which were so marked a characteristic of the age should be wholly oblit- erated in an Order in which they had become traditional. AVe see this in the kindness manifested by the Franciscans to the Fra- ticelli when it could be done without too much risk, and we cannot doubt that there were many who aspired to imitate the founder without daring to overleap the bounds of obedience. Such men could not but look with alarm and disgust at the growing world- liness of the Order under the new dispensation of John. ^Vhen the Provincial of Tuscany could lav aside five hundred florins out of the alms given to his brethren, and then lend this sum to the Hospital of S. Maria of Siena at ten per cent, per annum, although so flagrant a violation of his vows and of the canons against usurv brought upon him the penalty of degradation, it required a divine visitation to impress his sin upon the minds of his fellows, and he died in 1373 in great agony and without the sacraments. Various other manfestations about the same time indicate the magnitude of the evil and the impossibility of suppressing it by human means. Under Boniface IX., Franciscans, we are told, were in the habit of seeking dispensations to enable them to hold benefices and even pluralities ; and the pope decreed that any Mendicant desiring to be transferred to a non-Mendicant Order should, as a preliminary, pay a hundred gold florins to the papal camera. Under such a system there could be scarce a pretence of maintaining the holy poverty which had been the ideal of Francis and his followers. t Yet the ardent thirst of poverty and the belief that in it lay the only assured path to salvation were too widely diffused to be repressed. Giovanni Colombini, a rich and ambitious citizen
- Garibay, Comp. Historial de Espana, Lib. xyi. c. 31. — La Puente, Epit. de
la Cronica de Juan II., Lib. rv. c. i. — Pelayo, Heterodoxos Espafioles, I. 546-7. — Mariana, Lib. xxi. c. 18. — Rodrigo, Inquisicion, II. 11-12. — Paramo, p. 131. t Wadding, ann. 1383, No. 2. — Gobelins Persons Cosinodrom. Mt. v. c. 84 (Meibom. Rer. German. I. 317).
