§ 98.7. =The Dominican or Preaching Order.=--=St. Dominic=, to whom this order owes its origin, was born, in A.D. 1170, at Calaruega, in Old Castile, of a distinguished family (De Guzman?). As a learned Augustinian canon at Osma, he had already wrought zealously for the conversion of Mohammedans and heretics, when Bishop Diego of Osma, entrusted in A.D. 1204, by King Alphonso VIII. with obtaining a bride for his son Ferdinand, took him as one of his travelling retinue. The sudden death of the bride, a Danish princess, rendered the undertaking nugatory. On their homeward journey they met at Montpellier with the Cistercian mission, sent out for the conversion of the Albigensians (§ 109, 1), the utter failure of which had become already quite apparent. Dominic, inflamed with holy zeal, prevailed upon his bishop to enter along with himself upon the work already almost abandoned in despair; and after the bishop’s early death, in A.D. 1206, he carried on the enterprise at his own hand. For Albigensian women, converted by him, he founded a sort of conventual asylum at Prouille, and a house at Toulouse, which was soon afterwards gifted to him, became the first centre where his disciples gathered around him, whence by-and-by they removed into the cloister of St. Romanus, assigned to them by Bishop Fulco. During the Albigensian crusade, the thought ripened in his mind that he might secure a firmer basis and more powerful support for his enterprise by founding a new, independent order, whose proper and exclusive task should be the combating and preventing of heresy by instruction, preaching, and disputation. In order to obtain for this proposal ecclesiastical sanction, he accompanied his patron, Bishop Fulco of Toulouse, in A.D. 1215, to the Fourth Lateran Council at Rome. But pope and council seemed little disposed to favour his idea. The former, indeed, sought rather to persuade him to join some existing ecclesiastical institution, and carry out his scheme under its organization. Consequently Dominic, with his sixteen companions, resolved to adopt the rule of St. Augustine, augmented by several Præmonstratensian articles. When, however, Honorius III. had ascended the papal chair, Dominic hastened again to Rome, and in A.D. 1216 obtained from this pope without difficulty what Innocent III. had refused him, namely, permission to found a new, independent order, with the privilege of preaching and hearing confession everywhere. Then, and also subsequently, he preached frequently with great acceptance to those living in the papal palace, and thus an opportunity was afforded of establishing the office of a _magister sacri palatii_, or papal court preacher, which was immediately occupied, and has ever since continued to be held, by a Dominican. At a later period the supreme censorship of books was also assigned to this same official. The first