RISE OF THE OBSERVANTINES. 173 Nicholas of Cusa, as legate, forced all the houses in the diocese of Bamberg to adopt the Observantine discipline, under threat of forfeiting their privileges. In 1431 the holy house on Mt. Al- verno, the Franciscan Mecca, was made over to them, and in 1434 the guardianship of the Holy Places in Jerusalem. In 1460 we hear of their penetrating to distant Ireland. It is not to be sup- posed that the Conventuals submitted quietly to the encroach- ments and triumphs of the hated ascetics whom for a century and a half they had successfully baffled and persecuted. Quarrels, sharper and bitterer even than those with the Dominicans, were of constant occurrence, and were beyond the power of the popes to allay. A promising effort at reunion attempted by Capistrano in 1430, under the auspices of Martin V., was defeated by the in- curable laxity of the Conventuals, and there was nothing left for both sides but to continue the war. In 1435 the strife rose to such a pitch in France that Charles YIL was obliged to appeal to the Council of Basle, which responded with a decree in favor of the Observantines. The struggle was hopeless. The corrup- tion of the Conventuals was so universally recognized that even Pius II. does not hesitate to say that, though they generally excel as theologians, virtue is the last thing about which most of them concern themselves. In contrast with this the holiness of the new organization won for it the veneration of the people, while the un- flagging zeal with which it served the Holy See secured for it the favor of the popes precisely as the Mendicant Orders had done in the thirteenth century. At first merely a branch of the Francis- cans, then placed under a virtually independent vicar-general, at length Leo X., after vainly striving to heal the differences, gave the Observantines a general minister and reduced the Conventuals to a subordinate position under a general master.*
- Wadding, ann. 1375, No. 44; aim. 1390, No. 1-10; ami. 1403, No. 1 ; ann.
1405, No. 3 ; ann. 1415, No. 6-7; ann. 1431, No. 8; ann. 1434, No. 7; ann. 1435, No. 12-13; ann. 1453, No. 18-26; ann. 1454, No. 22-3 ; ann. 1455, No. 43-7 ; ann. 1456, No. 129; ann. 1498, No. 7-8 ; ann. 1499, No. 18-20. — Chron. Glassberger ann. 1426, 1430, 1501, 1517.— Theiner Monument. Hibern. et Scotor. No. 801, p. 425, No. 844, p. 460. — ^En. Sylvii Opp. inedd. (Atti della Accadeinia dei Lincei. 1883, p. 546). — Chron. Anon. (Analecta Franciscana I. 291-2). The bitterness of the strife between the two branches of the Order is illus- trated by the fact that the Franciscan Church of Palma, in Majorca, when struck
