Yet it is hardly probable that this impression was shared by contemporary spectators. To them the struggle must have seemed to involve questions of vital importance. No previous contest between the rival heads of Christendom had produced so much literature, or literature of such merit and significance. Michael of Cesena, the general of the Franciscan Order, John of Jandun, and William of Ockham, ‘The Invincible Doctor,’ exhausted the subtleties of the scholastic philosophy in their championship of the imperial position against papal pretensions. Above all, Marsiglio of Padua, in his great work the _Defensor Pacis_, examined with equal acuteness and insight the fundamental relations of the spiritual and secular powers, and laid down principles which were destined to find at any rate partial expression in the Reformation.[7] This outburst of literary and philosophical activity was due in great part to the fact that for the first time in the long strife between Papacy and Empire, the struggle involved doctrinal differences. Hitherto the contest had been between Church and State, and the Church had been for the most part united. But, on the present occasion, the Church was profoundly divided. The great Franciscan Order had been founded by the professed advocate of clerical poverty. In course of time this original principle [Sidenote: The Franciscans and the Pope.] had been departed from, and the Order had amassed considerable wealth, though it had been found desirable to conceal the change by making the Pope the trustee, and giving the Order the mere usufruct of its property. This lapse from the strictness of the original rules had given rise to a schism within the Order. The Spiritual Franciscans, or Fraticelli, maintained that Christ and the Apostles held no individual or corporate property, and that the Church was bound to copy the examples of its founders. This doctrine, which was accepted by a chapter of the Order in 1322, was not likely to find favour with a Pope who was accused, with good reason, of avarice. John XXII., urged on by the Dominicans, denounced the doctrine as heretical, and thereby alienated the Franciscans, who could plead in their favour a bull of Nicolas III., and appealed from the authority of the Pope to a General Council of the Church. In common hostility to John XXII., the Franciscans espoused the cause of Lewis the Bavarian, and it was among them that he found his most enthusiastic champions, and his most influential advisers.