This paper purports to deal with a non-existent subject in holding that there was no Dominican hagiography before the canonization of St. Dominic nor for some time afterwards.

Dominic Guzman died and his obsequies were presided over by his friend and patron Cardinal Ugolino on 6th August 1221. The same Ugolino, having ascended the papal throne as Gregory IX, issued a bull on 3rd July 1234 ordering annual celebration of the feast of St Dominic and likening the Order of Preachers he founded to those of St Benedict and Citeaux as an historic achievement for the faith. The first life of St. Dominic written by a Dominican (or by anyone) is the Legenda S. Dominici of Peter of Ferrand composed between 1235 and 1239 for liturgical use in the new office of St. Dominic which was established throughout the Order in the latter year.

It is at first sight astonishing that no earlier Dominican life exists and that none was produced specifically for submission in the canonization proceedings as had become standard practise at this time: these facts this paper seeks to explain. To do so will involve answering two questions: 1. What was the procedure which had become established for the canonization of saints by 1234 and what factors affected its operation in the case of St. Dominic? 2. What material had in fact been produced from Dominican sources about Dominic up until his canonization and why did this not include a life of the saint?

The saint we are honouring today would have found the theme of this lecture all too familiar. St Thomas Aquinas was personally involved in the lively, indeed fierce, medieval debates that surrounded the first appearance of the Franciscan and Dominican friars in the life of the Church. Then, as before and since, religious did not always fit in immediately or obviously into the established patterns of diocese and parish. At the time of St Thomas some argued that all the attributes of the antichrist and his ministers were to be found in the new Mendicant Orders. In Cambridge there survives a medieval manuscript with an illumination showing Archbishop FitzRalph, its author and a critic of the friars, faced by Mendicant friars mingled with devils. At about the time St Thomas was writing his first polemical work, soldiers had to be sent to protect the Paris Dominicans at Saint-Jacques from riots and demonstrations. Troops had to patrol his inaugural lecture, and on Palm Sunday 1259, as he preached, St Thomas was heckled by someone trying to get a hearing for the seculars’ case. No wonder that he went into the matter of when and by what means religious can defend themselves.

St Thomas’s own experience as a Dominican friar was gained in different dioceses, indeed in different countries. He dealt repeatedly with the position of religious in the Church, especially in three polemical works, in Quodlibetal disputations and in the Summa Theologiae, going well beyond the controversy over the organisation of university teaching in Paris. To guide our own exploration, we might do well to start with how St Thomas approached the task. Some problems have a way of recurring. In particular, he had to fight against two errors, the kind of mistakes still made today.

At the beginning of the 13th century, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) sanctioned a number of fresh efforts at evangelization. Among the major pastoral concerns that the conciliar decrees addressed, the sacrament of penance figures in a prominent way. Having established the requirement of annual confession as a fixed element of Christian life, the conciliar Fathers at the same time recognized the need to supply qualified priests who could competently exercise the ministry of reconciliation.

With Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, St Dominic was present at the Fourth Lateran Council, after which he obtained official approbation for his newly-begun work of preaching and hearing confessions. In 1221, Pope Honorius III granted universal faculties to Dominic’s band of preachers-confessors. The international character of Dominic’s mission in the Church meant of course that his fiiars would hear the confessions of persons caught up in the displacement that marked the beginning of European cosmopolitanism. This circumstance explains the advice that, according to Paul of Hungary, St Dominic himself gave to his brother priests, namely, that they should discreetly enquire during the course of the confession from where the penitent came, so that their spiritual counsel could take account of certain regional differences, such as local fasting customs. Of course, such advice would be hardly necessary for a parish priest who heard the confessions only of those under his permanent pastoral care.

Recent scholarship suggests that we should not underestimate the importance that hearing confessions played in the pastoral ministry of the early Dominican friars.

Although the Dominican Order was not in existence when the Crusades began, during the thirteenth century the Dominicans developed a strong presence in the Holy Land and found themselves laying the new network of Church administration, as they took over many of the newly created Latin sees, and establishing links with the Greek and Oriental Churches they encountered. Great travellers and great critics, they bequeathed to the Church a closer understanding of what kind of religion Islam really was, what the Eastern churches were really like, and insights into the whole nature of the Crusades just as the Crusader States were finally collapsing. Their findings and opinions may be found in such works as: Burchard’s “Descriptio Terrae Sanctae”; the “Itinerarium” of Riccoldo de Monte Croce, and the “Opus Tripartitum” of Humbert of Romans.

In 1221 St. Dominic died at Bologna, having seen his Order approved by the Holy See and established in Provence, Paris, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary and England. One of the ambitions of his life remained unfulfilled, however: he had always wanted to go to the East to convert the Saracens. Innocent III encouraged him instead to devote his attention to the Albigensian heretics in the South of France and to similar sects in Lombardy. It was left to his spiritual descendants to fulfill his dream of evangelising the East.

The first approach of the Dominicans to the Holy Land came in 1226 when Alice of Champagne, widow of King Hugh I of Cyprus, founded the monastery of St. Dominic at Nicosia in Cyprus, later to become the burial place of the Kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem after the loss of the mainland.