A geographical sketch

By the late 1250s there were four main provinces in the order: France, Germany, Spain and Italy, but the last of these was probably already subdivided. The home of the order always remained central and northern Italy, where the number of houses far outnumbered those established elsewhere. Its relative importance is clearly underlined by a list of provinces from the end of the century, ten of which were in the peninsula: Ancona, Fermo, Lombardy, Naples, Pisa, Romagna, Rome, Siena, Spoleto and Treviso. Those outside covered France, Germany, Hungary, Provence, Spain and England. Rapid expansion continued in the 1300s, so that by 1329 there were twenty-four provinces: southern Italy was divided into Naples, Apulia and Sicily, Germany had been separated into Bavaria-Bohemia (including Austria and further east), Cologne (including the Netherlands), Rhineland-Swabia (including the German-speaking Swiss cantons and Alsace) and Saxony-Thuringia (including north Germany). New provinces were created in Toulouse and Narbonne, whilst in the eastern Mediterranean a province of the Holy Land – Cyprus had houses in Crete, Corfu, Cyprus and Rhodes. In Spain, which encompassed Portugal, separate provinces were established in Aragon and Catalonia. Only one, Fermo, seems to have disappeared. By the mid-fourteenth century there were perhaps six thousand friars, of whom seventy-five per cent were clerics. Although any figure is simply an educated guess, there were clearly far fewer Augustinians than either Franciscans or Dominicans.