The medieval Crown of Aragon had a long and rich history of harbouring, or at least benignly overlooking, heterodox groups within its borders. In the early fourteenth century Aragon hosted or served as an important travel conduit for a number of heretical Franciscan friars. Their movements are sufficiently well documented to indicate the larger network within which these heretical refugees lived and travelled, and which shaped their worldview. The friars and their sympathizers had been persecuted, then condemned for their promotion of a strict observance of poverty. The issue of how stringently to observe the vow of poverty was a matter of open dispute within the order for several decades, and both sides attracted support from princes, popes, and educated laymen. These friars and their followers are today grouped under the umbrella term ‘Spiritual Franciscans’, which somewhat masks the disparate nature of the poverty enthusiasts – more an assorted hodgepodge of sympathizers than a coherent group. The Spirituals loom large in the narrative of the Franciscan Order, and have been treated by scholars as a bridge between dissidents in the earliest years of the order and the successful reforms of the Observant movement in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century.

These reforming friars and their followers were active across a wide geographical range, with small groups scattered throughout the Western Mediterranean: in central and southern Italy, Sicily, southern France, Aragon, and Majorca. The extant literature on them has developed predominantly along national lines, producing a number of excellent studies that focus on the intellectual output of a specific individual or on Spirituals within a particular geographic area.