ABSTRACT
When the Minors and the Preachers first received papal approval they were small groups; only a handful of individuals controlled by a dedicated and enthusiastic leader was involved in each case. When Francis and his companions approached Innocent III in 1210 they numbered twelve in all; in 1216, a year after Dominic made his request, there were some sixteen Preachers. 1 At this stage they must have seemed little different from numerous other groups that were proliferating about the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some determinedly orthodox, others as determinedly heretical, others still of doubtful allegiance. They were part and parcel of a widespread upsurge of religious sentiment which, in varying degrees and contexts, emphasised the spiritual value of voluntary poverty and manifested an imperative need to preach. They arose in the same milieu as the Waldensians and the Humiliati, and that they were associated with such in the minds of some who came across them in the early days is shown, for example, by the account of them given in the chronicle of Burchard of Ursberg (Doc. 23). When the Minors undertook their first missions to France and Germany they were asked if they were heretics, a natural confusion, since the reputation of the Albigensians, or Cathars, and the Waldensians had preceded them (Doc. 25, cc. 4, 5).
