C, SAINT (1170-1221), founder of the Dominican Order of Preaching
Friars, was born in 1170 at Calaroga in Old Castile. He spent ten or
twelve years in study, chiefly theological, at Palencia, and then, about
1195, he was ordained and became a canon in the cathedral chapter of
Osma, his native diocese. The bishop induced his canons to follow the
Rule of St Augustine and thus make themselves Augustinian Canons (q.v.);
and so Dominic became a canon regular and soon the prior or provost of
the cathedral community. The years from 1195 to 1203 have been filled up
with fabulous stories of missions to the Moors; but Dominic stayed at
Osma, preaching much in the cathedral, until 1203, when he accompanied
the bishop on an embassy in behalf of the king of Castile to "The
Marches." This has commonly been taken as Denmark, but more probably it
was the French or Italian Marches. When the embassy was over, the bishop
and Dominic repaired to Rome, and Innocent III. charged them to preach
among the Albigensian heretics in Languedoc. For ten years (1205-1215)
this mission in Languedoc was the work of Dominic's life.

The Albigenses (q.v.) have received much sympathy, as being a kind of
pre-Reformation Protestants; but it is now recognized that their tenets
were an extreme form of Manichaeism. They believed in the existence of
two gods, a good (whose son was Christ) and an evil (whose son was
Satan); matter is the creation of the evil principle, and therefore
essentially evil, and the greatest of all sins is sexual intercourse,
even in marriage; sinful also is the possession of material goods, and
the eating of flesh meat, and many other things. So great was the
abhorrence of matter that some even thought it an act of religion to
commit suicide by voluntary starvation, or to starve children to death
(see article "Neu-Manichaer" by Otto Zockler in ed. 3 of Herzog's
_Realencyklopadie fur protestantische Theologie_ (1903); or c. iii. of
Paul Sabatier's _Life of St Francis_). Such tenets were destructive not
only of Catholicism but of Christianity of any kind and of civil society
itself; and for this reason so unecclesiastical a person as the emperor
Frederick II. tried to suppress the kindred sects in Italy. In 1208,
after the murder of a papal legate, Innocent III. called on the
Christian princes to suppress the Albigensian heresy by force of arms,
and for seven years the south of France was devastated by one of the
most bloodthirsty wars in