ment. Under Innocent IV ( 1243-54) the fiscal apparatus of the Church was reformed and a larger number of benefices were reserved to the appointees of the pope and the Roman curia. The volume of business handled by the central offices of the Church, such as the Camera Apostolica, had increased substantially by the end of the thirteenth century and the hearing of appeals, the conduct of diplomacy, the reviewing of financial accounts, the appointment to benefices (often to kinsmen), and award of arbitrations represented a large part of the popes' and cardinals' activity.
It was thus hardly surprising that a reaction against the institutional Church set in. The way had to some extent been prepared by the establishment of a Cathar Church, organized into dioceses, in southern France in the later twelfth century. Catharism, or Albigensianism, was a dualist heresy of eastern origin, claiming that the Roman Church was a product of the forces of evil and that the 'true' faithful were holy men and women Whom they called perfecti (parfaits) marked off from the rest of the world by their ascetic and holy lives. This was one of the first manifestations of a notion which took poverty as its doctrinal basis and which spread in different forms throughout western Christendom. To be poor was an attribute of true sanctity. Christ's Church, it was argued, should tread the road taken by the apostles, preferably barefooted, and mendicancy became one of the highest Christian virtues. To this was added evangelism. The recognition by Pope Honorius III of the order of Friars Minor, created by St Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226), was an acknowledgement by the Church that the age of monastic withdrawal from the world had passed away and that a body was needed within the Church which would be both mendicant and evangelical. The needs of the laity, especially the urban laity, greatly increased by demographic expansion, were to be met by the new order of Franciscans. Unlike earlier orders of monks such as the Cistercians, the friars lived in houses set up in or very close to towns, addressing themselves to works of charity and preaching the Gospel, often in the open air. It was less easy to be a true mendicant in the streets of Bruges, or York, or Prague than
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