The vulgar tongue was absolutely prohibited in the Dominican houses, Latin alone being used for conversation. The principal European languages were, however, taught for preaching purposes: including the southern idioms, familiar to St. Dominic and St. Raymond, whose eloquence had so deep an effect in Languedoc and Provence, as well as in a part of Spain (1175–1275); and the northern idioms of the Sclaves and the Tartars, which a preaching brother of Breslau, St. Hyacinthus (1183–1257), used to some purpose in a successful mission that ended in the establishment of two monasteries, at Cracow and at Kiew. In these still barbarous regions, St. Hedwige, the wife of a duke of Poland, who died in 1243, founded at Trebnitz a convent of the Cistercian order, and at about the same period a queen of Castille created one at Valladolid (Fig. 259). At this epoch, also, the Sisterhood of St. Clare, founded in 1218 by St. Clare, at the suggestion of St. Francis of Assisi, failed in its attempts to extend the order beyond Italy. [Illustration: Fig. 259.--Maria de Molina, Queen of Castille (1284–1321), handing to the Cistercian Nuns the Charter of Foundation for their convent.--Bas-relief from her Tomb at Valladolid.--From an Engraving in the “Iconografia Española” of M. Carderera.] [Illustration: Fig. 260.--St. Thomas in a Council of Prelates and Doctors held at Anagni in 1256, and presided over by Pope Alexander IV., defending the attack made upon the monastic orders by the University of Paris, and successfully refuting the assertions of William of St. Amour. The saint, of whom the back only is seen, is in the foreground, with St. Bonaventura at his right. Near the Pope are seated the Cardinals Hugh de Saint-Cher and Jean des Ursins, and next to them the Bishop of Messina, the famous Albert the Great, the heads of orders, the deputies of King Louis IX., &c.--From a Painting in the Louvre, by Benozzo Gozzoli (Fourteenth Century), termed the “Triumph of St. Thomas of Aquinas.”]