REPLACED BY OBSER V ANTINES. 179 The Observantine movement may be credited with the destruc- tion of the Fraticelli, not so much by furnishing the men and the zeal required for their violent suppression as by supplying an or- ganization in which ascetic longings could be safely gratified, and by attracting to themselves the popular veneration which had so long served as a safeguard to the heretics. When we read of Capistrano's reputation among his countrymen — how in Yicenza, in 1451, the authorities had to shut the city gates to keep out the influx of surging crowds, and when he walked the streets he had to be accompanied by a guard of Frati to keep off the people seek- ing to touch him with sticks or to secure a fragment of his gar- ment as a relic ; how in Florence, in 1456, an armed guard was requisite to prevent his suffocation — we can realize the tremendous influence exercised by him and his fellows in diverting the current of public opinion to the Church which they represented. Like the Mendicants of the thirteenth century, they restored to it much of the reverence which it had forfeited, in spite of the relaxation and self-indulgence to which, if Poggio is to be believed, many of them speedily degenerated.* 'Not less effective was the refuge which the Observantines af- forded to those whose morbid tendencies led them to seek super- human austerity. The Church having at last recognized the ne- cessity of furnishing an outlet for these tendencies, as the old Fraticelli died or were burned there were none to take their place, and the sect disappears from view without leaving a trace behind it. Ascetic zeal must indeed have been intense when it could not be satiated by such a life as that of Lorenzo da Fermo, who died in 1481 at the age of one hundred and ten, after passing ninety years with the Observantines. For forty of these years he lived on Mont Alverno, wearing neither cowl nor sandals — bareheaded and barefooted in the severest weather, and with the thinnest gar- ments. If there were natures which craved more than this, the Church had learned either to utilize or to control them. Thus was organized the Order of the Strict Observance, better known as the Platinse Vit. Pauli II. (Ed. 1574, p. 308).— Rod. Santii Hist. Hispan. P. in. c. 40 (R. Beli Rer. Hisp. Scriptt. I. 433).— Wadding, aim. 1371, No. 14.^-Ripoll IV. 22.
- Barbarano de' Mironi, Hist, di Vicenza, II. 164-5.— Poggii Bracciol. Dial,
contra Hypocrisim.
