ABSTRACT
The western religious orders which were to be found in the Frankish Aegean may be summarily listed. They were the Cistercians, the two new mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, the three great international military orders and two groups of canons regular, the Premonstratensians and the Augustinians. They represented the full spectrum of the religious life of the contemporary medieval west and embraced both male and female religious. Their particular ministry, contemplative or pastoral, conditioned the time and place of their first establishment, but all were present in the Aegean by the 1230s. The inspiration for their spread along with the necessary endowments to support it came equally from lay rulers and from Latin metropolitans. The Cistercians and the Templars were present from the start and had received endowments soon after 1204, primarily in rural areas. The canons regular appeared in 1210 – the Augustinians of St Ruff who came to serve the cathedral chapter of Patras and the Premonstratensians who received lands at Thespiae in Boeotia. The mendicant orders established themselves first in Constantinople in the 1220s and 1230s, and thereafter spread out into the urban centres of the Aegean.
