A study of the origins, growth and influence of the mendicant preaching orders that arose in the early thirteenth century around the charismatic figures of St Francis and St Dominic, to help the medieval Church confront the challenge of an increasingly confident, secular and independent-minded age. Lawrence's approach is primarily social and political: he shows how papal patronage turned the armies of holy beggars into a disciplined force for orthodoxy, and he analyses the extraordinary impact they had on Western society in their first hundred years of existence.