Benedict about the year 525: they were
called therefore Benedictines. (2) The monks who organized crusades,
often bore arms themselves, and tended the holy places connected with
incidents in the life of Christ: such orders were the Knights Templars,
the Knights Hospitalers of St. John and of Malta, and the Teutonic
Knights who subsequently undertook the conversion of the Slavs. (3) The
monks who were called the begging friars or mendicants because they had
no fixed abode but wandered from place to place, preaching to the
common people and dependent for their own living upon alms. These
orders came into prominence in the thirteenth century and included,
among others, the Franciscan, whose lovable founder Saint Francis of
Assisi had urged humility and love of the poor as its distinguishing
characteristics, and the Dominican, or Order of the Preachers, devoted
by the precept of its practical founder, Saint Dominic, to missionary
zeal. All the mendicant orders, as well as the Benedictine monasteries,
became famous in the history of education, and the majority of the
distinguished scholars of the middle ages were monks.
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