Thomas Aquinas's corpse became the target of admiration and veneration— but also dispute—in Late Middle Ages. When Thomas died in Fossanova, his corpse did not find eternal rest and peace there. We have seen that this holds true of both the physical resting place, and the more abstract aspects of stability, such as the definition, authentication, identification, and valuation of the body during the period when the casket with Thomas's remains was moved inside and outside the Monastery of Fossanova several times, and the corpse was divided and distributed as relics to various places in Southern Italy. The transportation of the holy dust from Italy to France in 1369—and from the Cistercians to the Dominicans—ended almost a hundred years of dispute between Fossanova and the friars, as well as ending one episode in the history of Thomas Aquinas's corpse.

A description which was intended to stabilize Thomas's material presence in its new home in the Dominican (Jacobin) Church of Toulouse crystallizes the idea of the mobility of Thomas's dust. It was Raymundus Hugonis who described the sumptuous festivities that were organized to honour the arrival of Thomas's corpse in 1369. The text shows that there was something very special happening in the City; in the reception committee were Duke Louis of Anjou, the brother of King Charles V of France, and a great number of nobles and ecclesiastics who carried relics of other saints. The author himself was present, and he claimed that there were some 150,000 religious and laypeople in Toulouse that day. There were many prelates, such as the archbishops of Toulouse and Narbonne, the bishops of Lavaur, Bezier, and Andorra, and the abbots of Saint Saturin and Symorra, all of them dressed in the vestments and regalia that marked their status. Many more prelates would have come had it not been for the widespread insecurity and destruction of the ongoing war in France; they wrote and regretted their absence. The Archbishop of Narbonne preached. There may have been 10,000 torches. Together with other noblemen, Duke Louis carried the baldachin that he had donated, constructed from three golden cloths patterned in the golden arms of the King, and the standards of Thomas's family, the Pope, and the City of Toulouse. The Duke donated fifty golden francs, and promised to give one thousand more for a reliquary of Thomas's head.