Dominican Order (1216): Saint Dominic and the Order of Preachers

The Dominican Order, officially the Order of Preachers, was founded by the Castilian priest Dominic de Guzmán and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216. Created to answer heresy with educated, well-prepared preaching, the order quickly spread across Europe, became a leading force in the new universities and supplied many of the inquisitors of the later Middle Ages.

Background: preaching against heresy

Dominic was born around 1170 at Caleruega in Castile and studied at Palencia before becoming a canon of the cathedral of Osma. In 1203 and again in 1205 he travelled north with his bishop, Diego of Osma, on royal missions, and they passed through Languedoc in southern France.

There they saw the strength of the Cathars, a dualist movement condemned by the Church, and the failure of papal legates who travelled with great pomp. Diego and Dominic argued that preachers should live in poverty like the apostles and debate the heretics on their own terms. Around 1206-1207 Dominic founded a community of women at Prouille, many of them converts from Catharism.

Founding the order

The Albigensian Crusade began in 1209, but Dominic continued to preach. In 1215 Bishop Fulk of Toulouse gave him and a small band of companions official status as diocesan preachers, and a wealthy citizen, Peter Seila, gave them a house in Toulouse.

Dominic travelled to Rome during the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 to seek approval for an order with a wider mission. Because the council had forbidden new religious rules, the brothers adopted the Rule of Saint Augustine, adding their own customs. Pope Honorius III confirmed the community on 22 December 1216, and a papal letter of 21 January 1217 described its members as “preachers”.

On 15 August 1217 Dominic made a bold decision: he dispersed his small group of about 16 friars, sending them to Paris, Spain and Bologna, the great centres of learning, rather than keeping them together in Toulouse.

Growth and organisation

The strategy worked. Students and masters joined in large numbers at Paris and Bologna. At general chapters held in Bologna in 1220 and 1221, the order adopted full mendicant poverty, living by begging, and a representative system of government in which priors and provincial leaders were elected for fixed terms. This structure was unusually flexible for its time.

Dominic died in Bologna on 6 August 1221 and was canonised by Pope Gregory IX in 1234. Under his successor Jordan of Saxony the order grew rapidly; Dominicans reached Oxford in 1221. Every priory had a teacher of theology, and the order built a network of schools.

Its greatest scholars, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, taught at Paris and shaped Catholic theology for centuries. Dominicans, like the Franciscans, also became confessors, preachers and missionaries far beyond Europe.

Dominican sisters and lay members

From the beginning the order included women. The community at Prouille, founded before the order itself, was followed by convents in Rome and Madrid, and Dominic took a personal interest in them. The nuns lived an enclosed life of prayer, supporting the preaching of the friars. Dominican convents multiplied in Germany and Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries and became centres of mystical writing.

Lay men and women could also attach themselves to the order while living in the world, an arrangement later formalised as the Dominican Third Order. Its best-known member was Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), who became an influential adviser to popes and was later declared a Doctor of the Church.

How the friars differed from monks

Earlier monks, such as the Benedictines and the Cistercians, vowed to stay in one monastery and lived from the income of their lands. The Dominicans, like the Franciscans, were mendicants: they owned little, lived largely from alms and settled in towns so that they could preach to large urban populations. Their houses were called priories or convents, and friars could be moved wherever they were needed. Prayer and study were arranged to serve preaching, and friars could be excused from parts of the communal routine in order to study.

The Dominicans and the Inquisition

From the early 1230s Pope Gregory IX appointed special judges to investigate heresy, especially in southern France, and many of them were Dominicans, chosen for their training in theology. Bernard Gui, author of a well-known inquisitors’ manual, was a Dominican. So was Tomás de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition founded in 1478.

A popular pun called the friars Domini canes, “the hounds of the Lord”. It plays on their Latin name and was sometimes used by the order itself in praise of its zeal.

Myths and facts

• Dominic founded the Inquisition: false. He died about ten years before the papal Inquisition began.
• Dominic received the rosary from the Virgin Mary: this story was spread mainly by the Dominican Alan de la Roche in the 15th century and is not supported by earlier sources.

Timeline

• c. 1170: Dominic is born at Caleruega, Castile.
• c. 1206-1207: He founds a community of women at Prouille.
• 1215: Dominic’s preachers are recognised in Toulouse.
• 1216, 22 December: Honorius III approves the order.
• 1217, 15 August: Dominic sends friars to Paris, Spain and Bologna.
• 1221, 6 August: Dominic dies in Bologna.
• 1234: Dominic is canonised.

Why it matters

The Dominicans created a new model of religious life built around study and preaching. They helped make the universities centres of theology, trained generations of preachers and scholars, and, through their role in the Inquisition, also became closely tied to the medieval Church’s campaign against dissent.