The economic history of the mendicant orders presents specific difficulties because the members of these orders had adopted an ideal of poverty which demanded the individual as well as the collective renunciation of all material goods and valuables. Rather than existing and working in a state of economic security their members wanted to be associated with the Apostles who followed Christ in evangelical poverty and with the destitute who had to rely on alms for their survival. Even if this is seen as an unattainable ideal, it implies an absence from the normal processes of economic exchange in which the secular Church as well as the older religious orders participated with such vigour. Among the four great mendicant orders the Franciscans were the most radical in their rejection of individual as well as collective property, and the order's medieval history is commonly seen as dominated by the tensions between those who wanted to follow the founder's original ideal and those who were prepared to be pragmatic when it became clear that the initially small group of men who had followed Francis of Assisi, their charismatic leader, was becoming an institution.