Mercenaries and Capuchins in Southern France in the Late Twelfth Century 1

The complicated and stimulating context that Roger Bacon thought about the future of the Church and its apostolic mission. Against this lovingly-imagined picture of the towering learning and moral probity of their ancestors, contemporary Greeks were unlikely to impress Bacon. More effective in the long run than either of these activities was the routine presence of friars in mainland Greece and the Aegean islands, which proved essential to the preservation of orthodoxy among the Latins who had settled in the region. Within the Latin West, the belief in the power of reason to expose and demonstrate the truths of Christianity did much to justify the desire for learning that characterized both mendicant orders. It may have heightened the attraction of their best scholars to the Greek and Arabic texts that were changing the nature of Latin scholasticism.