k, but only the order to which he
belonged, could acquire possessions. For Francis this was not enough: he
put "holy poverty" in place of renunciation of private property, and
allowed neither monk nor monastery to have any possessions whatever; for
only thus is the following of Jesus complete. So mighty was the
impression made by the poverty of the Minorites, that the Dominicans
promptly followed their example and likewise became mendicant.

This alone would serve to indicate the remarkable deepening of the
religious life that had taken place in the Latin countries. Its
beginning may be traced as early as the 11th century (Pietro Damiani,
q.v.), and in the 12th century the most influential exponent of this new
piety was Bernard (q.v.) of Clairvaux, who taught men to find God by
leading them to Christ. Contemporary with him were Hugh (q.v.) of St
Victor and his pupil Richard (q.v.) of St Victor, both monks of the
abbey of St Victor at Paris, the aim of whose teaching, based on that of
the Pseudo-Dionysius, was a mystical absorption of thought in the
Godhead and the surrender of self to the Eternal Love. Under the
influence of these ideas, in part purely Christian and in part
neo-platonic, piety gained in warmth and depth and became more personal;
and though at first it flourished in the monasteries, and in those of
the mendicant orders especially, it penetrated far beyond them and
influenced the laity everywhere.

The new piety did not set itself in opposition either to the hierarchy
or to the institutions of the Church, such as the sacraments and the
discipline of penance, nor did it reject those foreign elements
(asceticism, worship of saints and the like) which had passed of old
time into Christianity from the ancient world. Its temper was not
critical, but aggressively practical. It led the Romance nations to
battle for Christendom. In the 11th and 12th centuries the chivalry of
Spain and southern France took up the struggle with the Moors as a holy
war. In the autumn of 1096 the nobles of France and Italy, joined by the
Norman barons of England and Sicily, set out to wrest the Holy Land from
the unbelievers; and for more than a century the cry, "Christ's land
must be won for Christ," exercised an unparalleled power in Western
Christendom.

All this meant a mighty exaltation of the Church, which ruled the minds
of men as she had hardly ever done before. Nor was it possible that the
position of the bishop of Rome,