The Humiliati brethren who both sought and sustained the rules and their modifications described in earlier chapters are not easy to document in the early thirteenth century. Nothing which they wrote survives from this period and the archives of their houses have been dispersed. Yet the fragmentary survival of material produced by notaries, the ‘sales, exchanges, investitures and pledges of property’ envisaged in the papal privilege for the First order in 1201, do allow us to find traces of their activities. Together with professions of faith and the occasional insights from contemporary narrative sources we can begin to explore the features of this new order: the buildings, the brethren who lived in them and the ties which bound them together. These sources are not without their problems and these will be discussed in the course of what follows. Nor can we expect instant uniformity and unity in a movement born out of diverse groups spread across the landscape of northern Italy, an area where strong forces militated against uniformity for any religious order and political divisions tended to isolate cities and communities from one another. The next three chapters will nonetheless sketch in what can be seen of the development of an ordo Humiliatorum, defined in organisational terms as a network of houses bound by observance of a common rule and centralised administration.