ABSTRACT
Dominic was born at Caleruega, in Old Castile, between 1171 and 1173, and died at Bologna in 1221, when he was about fifty years old. In those fifty years the saint and the Church he served had gone a long pilgrimage. When he was born, the Cathar missionaries were actively at work in the south of France and north of Italy, and were soon to spread into the regions close to Dominic’s birthplace. Peter of Bruis was dead; Waldo in his prime, not yet a heretic; St. Bernard of Clairvaux was dead, but his influence was still powerful; the prestige of the Cistercian monks and the Premonstratensian canons was very high among those who admired both Mary and Martha. When Dominic died, the machinery of the Inquisition was beginning to be planned, and his devout friends included Cardinal Hugolino, who as Pope Gregory IX was to canonise him in 1234 and in the early 1230s to confirm the formal structure of the Inquisition and to harness his Order to its service. But Hugolino also counted Francis of Assisi among his friends; the Inquisition was perhaps only an unlooked for byproduct of Dominic’s work, and the formation of the two Orders of friars, Dominic’s and Francis’s, like and yet unlike, was well under way by 1221.
