Sexual improprieties and rows between religious orders -- not 1990s scandal sheet headlines about the Catholic Church, but a tale from 13th-century Spain unravelled here by Peter Linehan.

On a dry day it takes less than fifteen minutes to walk from the cathedral which stands at the highest point of the city of Zamora in western Spain, to cross the bridge over the Duero, and reach the gates of the convent of Las Duenas, just to the south of it. Once the enchanting mist has lifted from the swirling river, the abode of the Dominican nuns is clearly visible from the hilltop. Indeed, from this vantage point all the areas of the city of Zamora with which this story is concerned are clearly visible. In the year 1279 that was part of the trouble.

That, and uproar and rumour:

Uproar and rumour of certain of the said

nuns as well as of the local people having

drawn to our attention the many quarrels

and the discord dividing the said nuns, in

accordance with the duty of our office.

In July 1279 the Bishop of Zamora paid the convent of Las Duenas a visit which not all its inmates altogether welcomed.

One evening shortly before this there had been a disturbance at the great gate of the convent. Cervantes mentions Zamora for the sound of its bagpipes. But it was not the skirl of the pipes that was heard now, it was not even the sound of music that had roused the neighbourhood on that thirteenth-century evening. What had done so was later reported to the bishop by one of the nuns, who claimed to have witness the scene. `In defiance of the bishop's instructions', according to Sol Martinez:

Dona Xemena, Dona Stefania, Dona

Perona and various other nuns opened the

great gate to the friars and spoke with them

there. Brother Juan Yuanez surveyed the

convent and said: "This would make a fine

love-nest for brother Nicolas'. And then

and there he [Nicholas] and Ines

Dominguez made love. Meanwhile brother

Pedro Gutierrez was on the loose. For fear

of him the girls hid themselves in the oven.

Also, brother Juan de Aviancos was

roaming the convent looking for nuns. All

this was the cause of the scandal.

The `Zamora scandal' had not been long in the making. But the consequences of this provincial contretemps were to cast a long and sombre shadow and soon bring to a juddering halt the hitherto inexorable advance of the Dominican Order, not only in St Dominic's own land, but also in the Western Church at large.

Before looking forward from the year 1279, however, it is necessary to look back half a century, to the years immediately following Dominic's death in 1221, and in particular to the subject of women.

Just as women had flocked to Francis of Assisi, so too did they to Dominic. Unlike Francis, however, Dominic lacked a St Clare-figure whom he could refer them to. Yet still they flocked, to him and to his Order of Preachers, as they were known. So what was to be done about them? Should anything be done about them? In the 1220s and 1230s many in the Order thought not. The mendicant order saw its role as preaching and teaching, learning and long-range travel. None of these being women's work, women had no place either in the Order or attached to it. True, in 1220 Dominic himself had approved the establishment of a community of women in Madrid, and thereafter scores of female communities claiming affiliation had established themselves all over Europe. In 1235, however the General Chapter of the Order had divested itself of responsibility, and four years later Pope Gregory IX had confirmed this decision and instructed bishops to desist forthwith from clothing women in the Dominican habit.

But by 1259 the climate of opinion had changed. In June of that year the Dominican Master General, Humbert de Romans, promulgated a uniform rule addressed to `all the sisters committed to the care of the friars of the Order of Preachers'. In view of Humbert's suspicion of women in general it is not remarkable that his rule for Dominican women in particular should have included pregnancy tests on entry, bed-searches for bits of private property retained contrary to the rule, compulsory bleedings, organised hair-washing, bare-breasted flagellation as required, absolutely no privacy, of course, and above all, strict enclosure at all times.

It was six months earlier, in January 1259, that Pope Alexander IV had licensed the sisters, Dona Jimena and Dona Elvira Rodriguez, to found a convent of women at Zamora `under the order of St Augustine and according to the Dominican rule' -- the one unspecific, the other as yet undefined. And it was over the next twenty years that the incompatibility between the lifestyles to which the Rodriguez sisters and the other ladies of Zamora who joined them in their new abode were accustomed and the stringent requirements of Humbert's rule gradually revealed itself.

Apart from the fact that Dona Elvira had quite recently cast off a husband, nothing is known about the founding mothers of Las Duenas other than that they were rich. In 1264 they purchased from the Bishop of Zamora a site near the suburb of San Frontis recently relinquished by the local Franciscans, where they established their convent, pledging `obedience, subjection and reverence' to the bishop and his successors, and acknowledging his right to exercise discipline over them.

For the bishop, Don Suero Perez, the 3,300 maravedis which the sisters paid for the place came as a welcome windfall, being well in excess of the sum spent by his predecessor, Don Pedro I, on diocesan improvements in all his sixteen years as bishop. And Don Suero Perez was a great improver. A model civil servant and a seasoned practitioner of those arts of high-level collusion upon which the government of church and state in thirteenth-century Europe depended, when Alfonso X appointed him to Zamora in 1254 he had found his new church wholly dilapidated. Arriving in style, accompanied by almost forty horses (as he would later recall) he had discovered there just one lame mule and not so much as a bed fit to sleep in.

From his chancery background the Bishop of Zamora brought with him a reverence for written agreements which bordered on the credulous. A son of the south he also possessed a volcanic temper. So when the nuns across the river revealed that they were not as good as their word, a clash was inevitable.

In St Dominic's own country, as elsewhere throughout the West, the mendicant orders' arrival on the scene at the beginning of the thirteenth century had imperilled society's delicate ecological balance. The diversion to the friars of bequests and the ordinary income of the churches dealt the economic interests of the ecclesiastical establishment a severe blow. Thus, in 1258 whitewash-wielding monks and secular clergy were reported to be touring the countryside intent on obliterating the stigmata from statues of St Francis. While in 1262, the burial of a Burgos archdeacon in that city's Dominican convent set the scene for the trial of strength which over the next forty years was to involve hooded men sent by the cathedral chapter to steal the friars' privileges and to tip their building materials, as well as papal emissaries, into the river Arlanzon.

In 1264, therefore, the situation was tense -- though not yet so tense as to prevent the Bishop of Zamora from giving the local ladies his blessing. What brought it to breaking-point was Affectu sincero, Pope Clement IV's privilege of February 1267, which entrusted responsibility for the `diverse monasteries of nuns or sisters of the Order of St Augustine' to the care of the Dominican friars.

The effect of Affectu sincero was to transform the hitherto uncontentious -- because loose -- `Augustinian' affiliation of such communities into one capable of transferring control of them from the local bishop to the local friars. At Zamora its consequences were more or less instantaneous. With a contingent within the community intent on incorporating themselves in the Order of Preachers, the next twelve years were marked by a series of simulated truces with Don Suero and renewed breaches of the undertakings they had given him in 1264. As one of the pro-episcopal ladies recalled in 1279, `the pro-mendicant nuns were intent on liberating themselves from the bishop's jurisdiction'. Moreover, they were intent on doing so by direct action. `Miorovida and Maria de Sevilla, wielding clubs, and Perona were intent on battering the lord bishop', she stated. Others remembered the Te Deum which was struck up when letters from the friars were thrown into the choir announcing receipt of the news that their wishes had been granted.

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