It can easily be understood that the taint of Joachitism among the Spirituals gave a splendid opportunity to their adversaries, which the latter were not slow to take. The Pope, Alexander IV, was appealed to; John of Parma was forced to resign, and his successor, Bonaventura, who belonged to neither party, was made, however unwillingly, to take action against John himself and his most outstanding adherents. Already evidence was accumulating of heretical dangers which might accrue from the wedding together of Franciscan ideas of poverty with Joachitic mysticism, and Spirituals began to be looked upon askance. Already Languedoc, abundant source of all manner of onslaughts upon the faith, was beginning to welcome the ideas of Joachim, and it was possible for the Conventuals to argue that their opponents were no better than a heretical sect, another form of Cathari. Later on there came successors to the author of ‘The Everlasting Gospel,’ in the Franciscan Pierre Jean Olivi in France, in Italy Arnaldo da Villanova, who pronounced the vices of the clergy to be eloquent signs of the presence of Antichrist. To begin with the Spirituals were in the ascendant. Bonaventura, in controversy with William of Saint Amour, a virulent enemy of the whole Franciscan order, maintained that poverty was an essential feature of Christianity and that neither Christ Himself nor His disciples owned property of any kind. Pope Nicholas III by the bull _Exiit qui seminat_ gave the sanction of the Holy See to the view that St. Francis had been inspired in his creation of the Rule by the Holy Ghost; that Christ had completely renounced the ownership of property and that such renunciation was most laudable and Christian. At the same time he drew a distinction—no new one, because it had already been put into practice by Innocent IV and Alexander IV—between ownership and use, and laid down as a rule always to be followed that the ownership of Franciscan property was vested in the Holy See, the Franciscans themselves simply having the usufruct. This bull did not, as might have been anticipated, settle the dispute between the two Franciscan factions. Laxity increased among the Conventuals, and Joachite tendencies still subsisted among their opponents. The pontificate of Boniface VIII, which began in 1294, brought upon the scene a man most eminently practical, essentially worldly. To the Pope, who had designs on the temporal power and eventually announced categorically, ‘I am Caesar, I am Emperor,’ the ascetic ideal of the Spirituals was a ridiculous fanaticism, which was also a positive nuisance. The mendicant orders had been especially the servants of the papacy; the Spirituals were apt to refer to it as Antichrist. Moreover, the existence of wandering friars, actually beggars, under no proper discipline and supervision—as some of the Spirituals had become—outraged his sense of order and decency. Boniface decided that these lawless bands must be hunted