Francis of Assisi's early thirteenth-century movement, beginning around 1209 with a small band of followers committed to radical poverty and itinerant preaching, and Dominic de Guzman's roughly contemporary founding of the Order of Preachers, focused specifically on combating heresy through educated preaching, arose from similar concerns about a Church some reformers saw as too closely tied to landed wealth and insufficiently engaged with a rapidly urbanizing, increasingly literate medieval population that older monasticism reached poorly. Both orders received papal approval within the same decade, Franciscans in 1209 to 1210 and Dominicans in 1216, and both split, in the Franciscan case repeatedly and often contentiously, over how strictly the founder's original vision of poverty should be maintained as the orders grew rapidly and inevitably accumulated institutional needs, a tension the Franciscan movement in particular never fully resolved, producing distinct branches, Observant, Conventual and Capuchin among them, that persist today.
Mendicant friars became closely associated with the medieval universities, particularly Paris and Oxford, where Dominican and Franciscan scholars, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure foremost among them, held influential teaching positions and produced theological work that shaped Catholic thought for centuries, an intellectual role that sat alongside, and sometimes in tension with, the orders' original emphasis on simplicity and popular preaching to the poor.